How Dungeons and Dragons Works

good move. Is two things one caveat if you're a big D and D person. We're not gonna get everything right. We'll get what we what we can write, obviously, but when it's not gonna be as comprehensive as you want, I'm going to go over the basic indition and too, I think we should both relate our own experience. So people just knew I played a little little bit because this is right in my wheelhouse. Dude, I was. I'm really surprised that you're community. Let you play the Baptist community.

Uh yeah, I didn't hear it talked about much in church, but um, in school, there were some of my friends started to play, and I played. I started to a little bit, but it was always way too complicated and involved for me. Um I played a little Top Secret. That's another role playing game that was like the espionage James Bond, D and D. So I played a little bit of that, but I never got into it man

like other people did. And I think it's because I was so active, and I was I would always rather be out riding my bikes, my bike and playing at the creek near my house and building forts and zip lines and setting things on fire and putting fireworks and bottle rockets and model planes and flying them off my roof. So I was doing stuff like that. I wasn't so much inside playing D and D or I was early. I was an early gamer, so I'd be like, screw dn D. Let's play adventure on Mataria and be a

block with an arrow right exactly. That's the real cutting stuff. Yeah, So that that was that was my deal. Mine was. UM. I did all that stuff, like I had a four in the woods and I had I could make a pretty good machine gun sound, and um, I did all that kind of stuff. But I also played D n

D fairly extensively. Several summers like that were just basically spent, you know, in a friends basement playing Dungeon D. I think it depends on who your friends, said is, unless you're the initiator, like you'll just fall in and do whatever your friends are doing. Um, and here's the deal. I think this affected it too. I grew up on a street in the woods with like six houses. I didn't grow up in one of those big, sprawling neighborhoods

like all my other friends. So they would walk down the street and play D and D. In the basement, it was just me and my bro out. Like in the woods. I would walk across the street for one group and there was another one where I had arrived I by distance I was. I was secluded. I was sequestered out in the in the forest, and I got made fun of because of that until later on when all my friends were like, dude, you live on two acres in the woods. That's rad. Let's have a bonfire exactly,

and we did so. So we both played D and D. Uh, And we both are not experts in any way, shape or form. Like from the time I last played D and D until we started researching for this episode. I forgot everything basically over those three months. So it was like a pretty cool trip down memory lane, like going

back and researching that. Yeah, me too, some because I didn't I don't think I remembered how much I had played it, And it was a little bit more than I had remembered because a lot of stuff was like oh yeah, I remember that, Yeah, I remember that cover, I remember that box. But there was, like I tell you exactly, there was a ton of new stuff that I didn't know that I learned in researching this, Like, um, like Gary guyas gas oh Man, have a bunch of people just put the ropes on, put the hoods on

their heads, like, um, Gary Guy GaX. Let's call him Gary g from now on. He He is the co creator, along with Dave Arnison, of Dungeons and Dragons UM. And he started out as a war gaming fanatic, so much so that he started gen Con at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, his hometown, UM, which is this huge gaming convention still um. But he started out as a war gaming convention. And that's basically where you rolled dice move little men. It's like risk. Risk is a war game. It's like that

and Access and Allies are like quintessential war games. It's a great game. But Guy GaX and and his buddies were doing this before there was ever any risk, Like they were making their own boards, they were reenacting battles or doing alternate universe battles of them. Um. And then along came Dave Arnison, who I kind of had this idea for something a little less stilted, a little more free form UM, and he didn't quite have a conception

of it yet, but Guy GaX did. He was working on something called chain Mail, and they got together and that ultimately became kind of the first dry run of Dungeons and Dragons. Uh, And they liked what they were doing and they kind of took it from there and then ultimately made Dungeons and Dragons in nineteen seventy four. Yeah, I didn't find out a whole lot about UM. About Arnisson, it seems like Guy gas is always the I guess because he was the original, like the originator of the idea.

He's always the one that's revered and like, you know, yes, he was also I get the impression UM a lot more of the self promoter than Arniston is UM. But yeah, I mean they were both very much intimately involved in the creation of this game, right um. Guy gags. Also, by the way, slidebar says that he is a descendant of Goliath. Is there a yeah? He well he he didn't let me rephrase that the interview I saw. He wasn't like, I'm a descendant of Goliath. Yeah, he wasn't

like that. He was a cool guy, Yeah, he said. The guy GaX means giant and supposedly, like the family law is that we are descendants of Goliath. So I thought that was sort of interesting, more appropriate than descendant of a biblical giant than to make this fantastical fantasy game right exactly, you know. Um he And there's actually like a really neat Wired article on him that includes a pretty decent amount on artists and too, um called The Dungeon Master. It's about Gary Guy GaX, who died

in two thousand and eight. Say um. But the two of them get together, and this is when when things are really good, and they set up something called TSR, which is a company called Technical Studies Rules, which sounds like the most boring company you could ever think of, But this company is what produced the this what became

the role playing game. Like you said, um, top secret was the James Bond D and D. Yeah, you didn't say, top secret was the James Bond role playing game and D was literally literally become synonymous with role playing games, and for good reason. Like in nineteen seventy four when Dungeons Dragons came out, there was nothing in the entire

world that even remotely resembled it. Yeah, it was super unique, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, people always say it's like a nerd game, and you know, you sit in your basement by yourself, and they did

have adventures. You're going by yourself. But they pointed out in this article it's a very social game because you would get together with your friends and sit around the table and you could play it straight and just sort of play, or you could start acting things out and doing funny voices and make it more like a dramatic like portrayal of this game. It was really kind of up to you. But it may have a nerdy h connotations,

but they're just punch nerds together playing right well. And if you look at some of the recent ads for Dungeons and Dragons, um in some of the gamers magazines. They are still appealing to that, the fact that it's a social game. They're trying to get people who play World Warcraft like start playing D and D again. Um and and they're they're using taglines like, if you're gonna sit in your basement and pretend you're an elf for hours on and you might as well do it with

a group of friends, that's a great so. Um. It has been social from the beginning. And what what guy GaX and Arniston came up with was essentially a book of rules that used dice to advance imaginary characters along. So. And then in seven they released the basic set. That's the red box. That's that's the one that makes us nostalgic, right. And then they also simultaneously released Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which kind of had stricter rules, it was more eeping

in scope. But they both came out in seventy seven, that's right. Uh. And then in seventy nine, the the d M Guide was introduced. And if you play Dungeons and Dragons in a group, you got to have a someone running the game, and that is the Dungeon Master. That is a person that sits behind a little cardboard screen and hides all of their stories, and they're the ones who create these basically kind of right the game.

And like some people will spend hours in days and weeks creating these campaigns in these games for their friends to bring to life as characters. And it's it was definitely unique at the time. So you've got all these additions, right, there's I think ten now they're working on the tenth, depending on who you ask, right, And with every edition of Dungeons and Dragons, there was a m like there's

a change. Sometimes they are really big changes. Like they released the second edition of Advance Dungeons and Dragons and like it did away with a lot of like the evil monsters because like d n D had gotten a bad rap wh we'll talk about later um. And there's like a kind of role that you had to figure out how many hit points you lost or how many

hit points were UM inflicted. It was just different. And so with every addition, it's been different and different and different um and so you get adherence to different sets, different versions, uh, which has kind of led to this weird fracturing in the Dungeon's Dragons community. Apparently. And you know the grabster at Grabowski, one of the writers of many of the articles that we've talked about. He's a bit of a D and D expert, it turns out, Yeah,

and you can go check his stuff out. Agreed. Uh. He writes extensively on I O nine dot com about D and D c check out his stuff. He's basically saying, like, Okay, because a big fractured community of dn D players, everybody has their own edition that's their favorite, but everybody still wants to be able to play together. But it's just incompatible.

So what he's saying is Wizards of the Coast, to people who made um Magic the Gathering and ultimately bought dn D, they have said, Okay, this fifth edition is going to bring everything together. We'll see about that. Well, that's what Grabanowski says. He says, Um, there's no possible way to literally unify the various editions under a single rule set. It would be like trying to build a car that uses parts from a two thousand ten Mustang,

a nineteen fifty packard, and a tractor. So he's incredulous. But they have it in like open gaming testing right now. The fifth edition. I don't see what the big deal is. I think that's one of the cool things about D and D is that depending on who you play with, uh, like, find your people, you know, like they might want to play a certain edition. I know that some players like to play with the little figurines and some people think that's an abomination. You should only use your imagination. Some

people go and make up their own campaigns. Some people stick to campaigns that are in the books. So, like, I think that's a cool thing about it is there's something out there for everybody. Unless you're just not into it. Well, yeah, then there's nothing for you, nothing for me. Um, So let's talk about how to play. Like, we'll just give a brief primer and we since we're nostalgic for the Red Box, which is the basic set, basic rule book that came out first and seventy um that we're just

gonna go with that. Don't yell at us, but it's a very basic, good intro to D n D for all the other people who are listening to this one who don't know what is going on. This is a single episode on D n D, and you could have an entire podcast that's about d n D that you did for five years. You know, I'll bet there are and right in let us know, we'll tweet, we'll tweet about it. Okay. So, like we said, it is a role playing game. So the basic concept is by the way,

you can't win. There is know, like endpoint. It's all just about the fun of continuing with these characters you create, right, The only beginning and and really is the creation of a new character and the death of that character. And even still if like that character dies, it sucks depending on how far along your character was, but you can always create another one. So you bother me about it, I think is I was too late, like I would cheat it and just make up characters. Well that's why

I was never invited back, you know. And so you were that guy? Huh No, I mean I don't remember if I was. I just remember not getting it and being like, well, my guy's good at all this stuff. I'm gonna go sit someone on fire, all right. So you create your character, and in the red box and the basic set, you have these different attributes and abilities that will come into play as you play the game,

and they are strength of course, it's pretty easy. How much you can, how much damage you can inflict with a weapon, Wisdom, how intuitive you are, dexterity, which is good if you're nimb um. It could help you with a weapon or getting in that high window on the second floor, especially like a missile weapon like a bow and arrow or something. If you have a high tex you want to pair that with a bow and arrow.

For intelligence, um, how smart they are, how how much they can learn things as a character, constitution which is your stamina, and how much stuff you can carry, how long you can fight. But if you have that bag of holding, you're all set. Uh. And then charisma, which is your likability. So uh, if you want to hook up and make friends or get out of a fight with some bad character, that's when that's going to come into play. And all these are determined by rolls of

the diet. Yeah, Like everything we just talked about is represented by a number UM. And then in addition to the armored class of the character, which is a number that represents ay, how easy it is to inflict damage on that character. Uh. And then the number of hit points, which is I guess the representation of um basically how much life you have left to get your health right exactly.

In a video game, that would be your health par exactly. Um. And you put all these together and you have a character that, so long as it can stay alive, can go out and go forth into the D and D

universe and in adventure indefinitely basically. Uh all right. So there were seven playable characters in the Inn the basic set, and I think I remember being a cleric, but the first one is a fighter, and that's what you think they're They're stronger, and they're better at fighting, and they're probably not as smart or as uh charismatic as like

another character might be. It depends. You can have high curuismen like in the D and D um the Basic sets players Manual, the first character they hook you up with has high curuisma and high strength. But strength is the prime requisite for being a fighter. Yeah, okay, so cleric. I think I was a cleric. Uh. That's sort of a fighter in a in a wizard, so that they have good fighting abilities. But they're all so very dexterous and wise, and you can cast spells, which is very important.

Right with the difference between a cleric and a magic user, which is the next one, is that a cleric received spells through meditation, so they have to sit around and rest sometimes before they can get a new spell. Um. And they also can turn undead, which means literally turn the undead the other way. So if you have a zombie on your trail, you're it's good to have cleric to say, hey, zombies, turn around zombies. Where they called zombie zombies is one? Where is another? Undead skeletons. I

didn't play enough. I don't know any of this stuff. I didn't either until I went back and read the entire players manual again the other day. So magic user can do cool things like their balls of lightning and um, learn other spells, learn new spells without meditation. No, it's learning from book learning, which means you have to have the prime requis is a high intelligent score. It's not a meditative thing, right, it's just from learning books. Uh.

You have the door worf. Of course, what fantasy game would be complete without it? Four feet tall? Got that beard? Males and females have a beard. Yeah, and uh, and just like in like the Lord of the Rings, they're they're kind of ornery and super strong and have great constitution. And of course they're good fighters because they're a little short, mean boogers. Um, you've got the thief, which you would think. Um, and it took me a long time to figure this

one out. To the thief, why would you want to have a thief around the person is going to steal the thief, Well, a thief typically doesn't steal from people they're adventuring with. Um, but they do know how to find secret doors, traps, picklocks, picklocks. Uh. Yeah, and so they have a very high dexterity score. Yeah, but they're they're also going to turn their back on you in a battle because it depends they're not great fighters. Okay, right,

you don't want them near the battle. You want them like kind of off to the side, get out of the way, and let's get the fighter in there. Maybe a dwarf or two as well. But yeah, the thief is just kind of meant to stand back and maybe be like, yeah, get them over there a second to them and just cheer along. Uh, you've got halflings. They are even smaller than the dwarfs. They're only three feet tall, about sixty pounds, and they're demi humans and um, they're

dexterous and they have a great constitution. They're tough to hit because they're tiny, and so they're good fighters, the very spry. Yeah. Um. They're also like dwarves and elves, capable of sustaining magic attacks. Um, which leads us to elves. It's another demi human character. And they're a cross between fighters and magic users. So they have high strength and high intelligence. And it's not you don't just say with

any of these like, oh I want an elf. So you roll until you have something with high intelligence in high strength. You can you're not supposed to when you're supposed to roll, and come up with your ability scores first and then figure out what you have based on those scores. Yeah, And it is interesting. And one thing I do remember is that it is about the imagination. And even though these these characters exist as a series

of numbers on a chart, is all it is. Um, you create them in your mind and that's the fun part about it. And like, I never started acting things out like I've seen other people do, which can go overboard pretty easy. Um. And I guess that was sort of the precursor to what ended up being LARP. Was just sitting around the kitchen table doing accents and things, and some people thought, hey, let's let's go outside and take these broomsticks and actually do this fight. You got

you got some cardboard. I'm in the move from making some sorts. Yeah, I'm really an active guy. I think you know, sitting around this table is no good, right. Um. So you said that everything is represented numerically, and that's absolutely true. Um, except there's one thing that that kind of lends itself to acting, uh or at the very least,

decision making of a character in this alignment. And there's three kinds of alignment and basic D and D there's lawful, which is what we would equate with good goods, where if you have a lawful character, they're they're probably the hero type. You're gonna put their own skin on the line in order to save the group. They're certainly not going to turn and run without the rest of the group doing the same. Um. Chaotic is the opposite of that. It's what we would equate with evil. Yeah, they just

sort of look out for themselves forget the group. And you'd think that would be the worst one, but apparently the worst is neutral because you can't tell they're just gonna do whatever is best for them no matter what. Well, that's neutral is very it's animalistic um where it's basically

just about the survival of of the the individual. And if you have a neutral person, they might fight with the group if they feel like the group's gonna win and just will protect them, or they may just turn and run with Hey, no hard feelings, they got nothing against you, But I'm just very instinctual. That's what neutral is.

The alignments there are all manner of like shelter and weapons and foods and all these different things you can pick up along the way, uh, and even languages that if you approach a character and they don't speak your language, then you can't communicate and you have to take a different path on your adventure. But everyone can speak at

least two uh universal And then alignment tongue. Alignment tongue allows you to speak to other characters in that same alignment without the other people knowing what's being said, and it's your private little conversation exactly. So, if if both of us were chaotic magic users, right Chuck, yes, and there was a somebody playing and there was a fighter who was lawful, we could say, hey, let's put a charm spell um on this guy and make them do our bidding. Um. And so the player is going to

know what we're doing, but the character wouldn't. Yeah, And the person responsible for keeping all this separate you mentioned earlier, the dungeon master, the head nerd Right, the dungeon master is in charge of saying things like you wouldn't know that when the fighter says, I want to kill um the two magic users who are about to use a charm on me, the dungeon master would say, your character doesn't know that because they just spoke in their alignment

tongue and boy. Dungeon master is a specific kind of person. It takes a lot of work, and you can get as involved as you want to. But no matter which way you slice it, if you're the d M, you're gonna be putting in some time coming up with these things, even stories, even before the beginning, even before you sit down, and it's Uh. I'd be curious to find some correlation between people that were dungeon masters when they were like twelve in the late seventies and early eighties and what

they ended up doing with their life. Yeah, it would be an interesting study because they I would say that a lot of them are probably running companies and running the show wherever they are, because it takes a great deal of initiative and patience and like stamina and creativity and all these things to be a great dungeon master, plus the sense of justice as well. You have to be fair. Oh yeah, I'm sure it doesn't always sit well with the group. Um and yeah, like you were saying,

like they it does take creativity. It takes also a

total and utter awareness of the game. Like while everybody just creating their players, the d M has to show up to that very first game having read the player's manual, having read the Dungeon Master's Guide, understanding all the rules, and then if you're using a game module, which you know TSR published tons of games um, which essentially are maps of an area that the dungeon master has access to, uh, and then running the whole game as a whole, like

understanding what players can do, what players can't do. Um, you have to understand how much damage a monster can inflict. Let's give an example, like the dungeons Masters's Guide is intimidating. Yeah, so I don't know how these kids at twelve, we're sitting down and figuring this stuff out well, so they a lot of the appearance of omniscience, and any dungeon master kind of cultivates this this idea that they are

all knowing. But like you said, they're hiding behind a cardboard screen, and behind that screen is like the dungeon Master's guy, the game module, which has everything clearly marked and all that. They have everything at their disposal, but there's still a revered person, typically the dungeon Master. They're omniscient. Because I don't know how many twelve year olds have the initiative to take this on. There was I think

it's about right. It's probably about one out of every ten kids as the initiative to beat the dungeon Master, and the rest just wanted to be characters. So that was that was a big problem with the game, was like sometimes you couldn't find somebody to the DM because there was a lot of work. So let's give an

example of of play, if you'll indulge me. Okay, So, okay, we got a group of characters around a campaign in a dungeon and by the way, you know the um the reason why it became Dungeons and Dragons, um why they chose dungeons was because they didn't want players being able to just kind of wander all over the place. They wanted to kind of keep them together in small, confined spaces and a dungeon or a cave system or something like that. It was a pretty good way to

keep everybody. To get catacombs. Man, it's all about the catacombs. So you're your your group of characters are on a campaign, the dungeon, and the d M might say something like this is in the middle of the game. The d M is in charge of telling you what's going on where you are, describing your environment. So they he or she may say, you're in a long dark cord, or you see a faint light at one end. To your right is a ten ft by ten ft door. It

is locked. Do you want to try to pick the lock or continue down the cord or towards the toward the light. And so the players decide to have the thief pick the lock, right, because that's what you do. Now here's what I don't get and I don't know if you know this is it? Do you get together as a group and decide and like take a vote or is it someone's turn? To like say no, it's my turn, and I make the thief go. It depends.

So first of all, before on a campaign, you have a caller, and that's the person who speaks to the d M for the group. But the caller is also in charge of saying, hey, what do you guys want to do and then saying that to the d M. Okay, so they're the just the voice of the group, right. They don't make any decisions. The groups supposed to decide as a whole um, and the d ms are sitting there going little do they know exactly? Uh? And then

there are turns as well, especially in combat. Now, if like you have three fighters and a thief and there's suddenly battling um um uh minotaur um, the thief is gonna be like I'm standing over here, and the d M will leave them out of the turns and then will be the thief in the minotaur, and or the one fighter in the minotaur and the next fighter in the minutear. But blah blah blah, I always just keep going on like that. Okay, that makes sense alright, So

back to our little story. The door is locked. Do you want to pick the lock? We decide let's send our thief in to pick the lock. Okay, So so what happens in the d M, Well, they gotta roll the dice and that's how you figure out if things work. So if you're a thief, that means you're really good at picking locks. So let's say it's a twenty sided die and all you gotta do is roll like a four or higher to successfully pick it. So that just means your chances are really good that you'll be able

to pick the lock. If you don't have a thief, you can send your fighter in to pick the lock, but you may have to roll like a sixty or higher. You would think so, but fighters can't pick locks at all, not at all, Okay, they just like bang on the door. So only certain characters can, like you can't even try if they if they don't have that I believe someone basic D and D like only thieves are definitely not fighters.

So if you don't have a thief in your campaign, the d M wouldn't even say do you want to pick the lock? They may say do you want to try to bust the door down? But the d M might also know in the game module it's unbust downable. It can only be picked. So so um it is because you're rolling for everything and you were saying they rolled to find out the thief was successful, and that that would be based on that low number, like if

you just need to roll a four. That's in relation to the dexterity score, because it takes high dexterity to pick a lock. To the higher dexterity score, the lower you have to roll, which gives you, on a twenty side of die, a lot more of a chance that you're going to be successful at picking the lock. It's

all rolling of the dice and the rumbers. So in this case, the d M knows that on the other side of that door is the gelatinous cube, and that is bad news if you're playing D and D, which if you're an experienced dn D player, that ten ft by ten ft door probably would have given it away because that's the exact dimensions of a gelatinous cube, which is evolved to move through the doors of a dungeon.

I would be dead so soon. So what happens the door opens, there's the gelatinous cube boom, and then you got to do battle. And when you're doing battle. You do it again by rolling dice and you get these hits. You have the hit points that we referenced earlier. And let's say you gotta roll all right, these two four sided dice. Um, you gotta roll each one once and that those will be the the licks that the gins gelatinous cube puts on you. And if it totals seven

or higher than you're dead. Yeah, exactly. And if you had depending on your hit points, if you have seven hit points, yeah, you'd be dead. So that I mean, that's generally the game. And you can get experience points, which are huge, which is this it's interesting to know

experience points. That's what you do to like grow as a character, to get more hit points, to become more invincible, more to kill a monster and you'll get experience points, but you get way more experience points for getting treasure. And the authors of the Basic D and D rule books point out like this is we want you to use your head, right, how do you get around confrontation to go find the loot? Right, which, if you battle a monster you deserve something, sure, but the point isn't killing.

The point is is using your head to get around problems as well. And that's why you get more for treasure. Yeah, we'll look at there. I had a thing I think we made it up because I looked it up and I couldn't find it called a bag of plenty, not a bag of holding. The bag of holding was you could put like anything large in it and still be able to carry it. Like I found like all this food, and I normally wouldn't be able to carry it. But your bag of holding little all that and there? Right?

Did you have to keey stir it? I don't know what that means? Like up the butt? Yeah, you're the first person who's ever said up the butt when somebody said, keyst what he's supposed to say. Did you just know a Keyston would say up the button? Yeah? All right, Um no, I wouldn't that key stir it. But I had something called a bag of plenty, and you guys made that up or I don't remember, man, because I

didn't find it anywhere. The only thing I found was something called a bag of plenty plus one in Balder's Gate, which was a video game I had played once. But I think those Balder's Gate related to D and D somehow, like one of the variations so I didn't know that, but well, maybe what we played was with a bag of Plenty, which is it would double whatever you put in it. So if you have like twenty gold coins, you put in your bag of Plenty and you have,

you know, double that amount. But I think we might have made that up because I can't verify that anywhere. I wonder how many, um how you just inadvertently admitted to playing Baller's Gate, and wonder how many people are just like, well, his credibilities out the window. I think people enjoyed that. No, I don't know, maybe if I vaguely remember it too. It was one of those games that I played on like PS two for three months until I completed it and then I was done with it.

You know. So if if any of that even slightly piqued your interest, I would strongly recommend going and researching and maybe trying out. There's usually, uh, if you go on meetup dot com, you can find him probably just about any even semi major city of D and D group, And apparently Wednesdays are typically days at like comic book shops and gaming shops and stuff like that that have D and D groups where it's just kind of like, uh, anybody who wants to come can can come by and

try their hand in it. I think they're very open community. Yeah, well it depends. Oh sure, Like if you tried to come in and like just PLoP down and like, hey, I want to join this game that you guys have been playing for seven years, and they wouldn't like me, I'd be like, oh, I got a bag of plenty, That's why they'd be like Balther's gate Um. I did try last night to play the online version because I thought,

you know what, I'm gonna give it a whirl. I downloaded this Mac beta version that was like eight gigs. It took a couple of hours to download, and then there was some errandloading and it wouldn't work. I was like, all right, well that sucks. Let me go get my PC laptop, because you know me, I'm rich. I have like eight different kinds of laptops. I know they're like falling out of your pocket. So I went to my PC laptop and tried to sign up and download the

PC version, and it wouldn't recognize me. It wouldn't let me because I'd already signed up with that name, and so it was like midnight, and I said, screw this, but I think I might try and play the online version just to see what it's like. It's called D d O. Yeah, we're not getting into that. It's in a whole other thing. But um, there's a good article by John that's Strickland on Dungeons and Dragons online that you can find on how stuff works. So um, so

I said, go check it out. And if not, if it didn't really pique your interest at the very least, I imagine you would be interested to know that for many, many years there were a lot of people with a lot of voices who considered Dungeons and Dragons to be thoroughly satanic. Yeah, and uh, it didn't help that what was the year that the guy seventy nine, James Egbert,

James Dallas Egbert the third he went by Dallas. Yeah, this was a kid at Michigan State University and he went missing, and they the story out and the one that was later disproven, but the one that really got around in the news was that he disappeared into the tunnel system underneath the school playing D and D and died doing so. Yeah, he was a sixteen year old by the way computer prodigy in seventy nine, so there's like not such a thing as computer prodigies. Then he's

like one of the first. He's at Michigan State and he actually did go in the steam tunnels and he went to go kill himself to take an overdose on barbituous. Yeah, but it didn't work, and he came to in the steam tunnels. Yeah. And it had nothing to do with dungeons and dragons, but it was announced so in the news, and that's sort of what people remembered at the time, and they used that as fuel, of course, to fuel

the fire of this is an evil game, satanic. They made a movie with Tom Hanks, man, do you remember seeing that when it first came out as a TV movie? Yeah, And and I guess you know, it's just sort of loosely told of slightly fictionalized version of James Egbert's uh you know, the sensationalized version of the real version. Tom Hanks plays the guy who gets so wrapped up in his character that he um, he just has a break

with reality. He disappears because they find him again, but he still thinks that he's uh Pardue the Cleric, and I call him Pardue the cleric who lives with his parents now because they take him back home and he's just some crazy dude. Yeah. Um, I don't think any there was any better reaction to Dungeons and Dragons than Dark Dungeons by Chick Publications. So Chick Publications make religious tracks on everything about um. They're extremely fundamentalist christian um.

And they have tracks on everything from how the new Jesuit Pope is in league with the devil to how if you are a Mason you are become possessed by a heathen god. Um. And they're basically like these easy to read comic books you're not familiar I might have if I saw one, I might recognize it. So and then they publish them and they sell them so you can go hand them out and proselytize the people on

the streets like an ice breaker basically. But Chick Publications came up with the not the creme de la creme of anti D and D material propaganda. Yes, it's called Dark Dungeons and it's a comic strip about a girl who becomes who starts playing D and D and then as were routed into a real life witchcraft COVID by the Dungeon Master, because Dungeons and Dragons is just this front for Satanists to like find the best of the best to come do the real thing. And one girl

who becomes so wrapped up in her character. Once her character dized, she goes and hangs herself in her room. That sounds familiar. I might have been forced to read that at some point. Check it out. And as a matter of fact, I wrote a blog post on these and some other ones about how it's called back when people thought Dungeons and Dragons was satanic k's on our site stuff you should Know dot com and this it was. It's really interesting, like there was this period that coincided

with that whole satanic ritual abuse scare. Yeah, with the heavy metal music. Yeah, that got Judics, priests on Landed the West, Memphis three in prison. Um, it was a real thing. And yes, and Dungeons and Dragons was, if not the originator of this huge part of it. It was in the center of it for a long time. But it came out because thanks in part to the um Doge's and Dragons cartoon. Yeah, I had a cartoon. They had a movie which wasn't very good. Um, I'm

surprised I haven't redone that movie. Yeah, so I bet they will at some point. I wrote a Time magazine article that was saying, like, why is Dungeons and Dragons not like a huge franchise. I didn't really get to the bottom of They kind of settled on, well, it's made a billion dollars for its owners. Um, it's in I think a dozen languages. Um. I think twenty million people have played it, so it does have a huge following. But they were saying like, it's not the Lord of

the Rings and why not? And I think possibly because it's just totally open ended, and it's that's what I think. It's the individual Lord of the Rings. You go read and there's a story and it happens, and yeah, you're kind of imagining it, but you're just imagining what Tolkien has explained to you. And guy gangs by the way, I thought Tolkien sucked. Yeah he was in a conan sure, So um, not O'Brien the barbarian. So Um. With Tolkien, you're told with D and D like you man, you're

totally using your imagination. And even more than that, something as strange as a group imagination, a group of people using their imaginations together and kind of the interlocks like

that's high level stuff. Well, it is high level. And that's exactly why a movie failed and probably wouldn't not succeed, is because for a D and D movie to work, you have to satisfy the D and D fans and no matter who for a movie, you have to create some hero character and that's not going to satisfy all D indeed people, no matter who you create and what story you create, they're gonna be D and D fans

that I think. Now, my what, my guy was way better than this jump right exactly, And you call that a white dragon. White Dragon would never do that because it lived in my imagination as this, So I agree. I don't think it will ever happen. It's a great success. Although the cartoon was pretty well received. I think it is. So it's a classic. Yeah, but that's that's different. It's it was nominated for Greatest Cartoon Shows of All Time

nineteen know by listeners. I I put a list up and said if anybody have any other nominees, and on our website people nominated More and Dungeons and Dragons was one, so it's up there. I think Scooby Doo one. Oh, of course duck Tails was a hard contender. Yeah, I've never watched that. I was surprised. Uh, let's see, you got anything else. No, I mean there are dozens of offshoots in different games and different modules, and like we only covered a very small part of it. Uh, the

universe is vast. The D and D universe is vast. It is Go forth and check it out, you say, we, Uh, take up those glasses and check it out. And if you if you want to learn more about Dungeons and Dragons, type those words into the search part how stuff works dot Com and it will bring up some cool stuff. Oh. By the way, it has sort of been known as like a guy's thing, but there's a rabid female community with D and D and I saw I watched the

documentary last night on Dungeons and Dragons. It was pretty good. Um, the Dungeons and Dragons experience. I think you know, there's a there's like a pretty serious other documentary that's being got kickstarted. Really that's in it's in production right now. Yeah, this one was okay, it wasn't great, but it did interview a female, a woman, and she was like, yeah, you know, I think a lot of girls they see it as a guy thing and the guy nerds, so

they're reluctant to get into it. But the girls that I know that I have gotten into it have have found that it. You know, it's really not like a guy sing after all. They have just as much fun and um, it looks I don't know, it's a fun community. It is funny. They showed them playing the at one point, and they definitely get like the dungeon Master is just sort of going on and on and the players will say things in character like I'm not sure what to do after such a long story and stuff like that,

and uh, they're taking like barbed shots in characters. Pretty funny. That's cool. Yeah, that's the way to do it, I guess. So actually, however, you and your group of friends want to do it and have fun doing it, that's the way to do it. Yeah, unless it veeers towards satanism and like real, but it doesn't. That was all made up. I know. Uh, if you want to learn more, didn't I already say this thing? Yeah I don't know, Okay, so I said search part, which means it's time for

message break. And now it's a listener mail, right, Josh, I'm gonna call this D and D listener mail for D and D podcast. That's a really clumsy title. How amazing it is. This is pretty cool. Actually, hey guys, a big fan of the podcast. In the TV show, I worked for the Ford Motor Company at the Kentucky Truck plant in Louisville, and I'm an assembly line worker and you can imagine my job gets pretty monotonous. I put on passenger side doors on trucks night, on specific trucks.

He does. He can't just throw any door under a new truck. No, it's all very specific. But if you own afford super duty and you open your passenger raw or you can thank this dude for it. That's true. You can thank Jeremy Elmore. Um So, anyway, he's been listening for a little while and he's listened to all but five of the shows, and uh, he's getting on his wife's nerves. We hear this a lot when one spouse is sort of annoyed that doesn't listen about the

other one getting smart. And I think everyone just needs to start, you know, taking care of business in the household. What what is that mean? Get the other spouse on board, get them listening. That way you can circumvent this defense mechanism of feeling threatened. So that's what his wife does. She's like, yeah, yeah, I know what you learned from Chuck and Josh. Look just listen. So he goes on to say, the great thing about the show is you two are very relatable to me, a couple of years

younger than Josh. So I love hearing about your childhood stories from g I Joe, adolescent chocolating and Dungeon and Dragons, going to panic shows, watching Seinfeld, and now marriage. I feel like I've grown up with you guys. So I want to send you something. My father is where it gets good is Larry Elmore. He's a freelance artist who used to paint for TSR and D and D. Yeah. So like the blog post that you used, that was

his father's artwork. Yeah, the blog post. I wrote a blog post on it right on DNDB and S can Yeah, and that was like, just by chance, this dude's father. His name is Larry Elmore. Like I said, he um, Dragon con and D and D have been mentioned on your podcast before and it made me want to send you something. So he has a twenty years art of Art book I can't wait to get. I can't either. It came out a decade ago, but it's still really

cool and I want you both to have one. He's a new one coming out in August as well, so consider this a plug. I guess um. He has already personalized them for me for you guys, and I need to know how to get them to you. Is very cool, he asked me. This is even cooler because he asked who they were for. He explained it to Pops and now he is listening to the show in his studio while he's that illustrating. So by the time this comes out, hopefully Larry Elmore is listening to the podcast about D

and D. What's Up Larry Elmore? So all that he was like one of the first or maybe the first artist early on when they did this. He's definitely an early one because the illustration that I used from the Night three edition of the Basic set Um, so he would have Yeah, that's pretty early. Well. I went to his website and looked at his art and like all those iconic images that I remember we're him. That's really

I can't wait to get It's very cool. So thank you Jeremy Elmore in Louisville and Thanky Larry and uh that was it. Yeah, thanks to you both. Um, if you want to send us something, especially if your dad is um an indvertent idol of Chucks in mind agreed, Um, we want to hear from you, So you can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at

Discovery dot com. And then why not just go see if we're sitting in our home on the web, on the couch, maybe watch a little TV. That home is called Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how Stuff Works dot com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Jack Threads dot com.