Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

by Ben Riggs

My experience growing up as a nerd was that role-playing games were an outsider hobby played by dorks, dweebs, freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked geeks. In other words, my tribe.

My tribe as well.

The AD&D rules reflect the beautiful, noble, if impossible nerd urge to codify and systematize all. The rules bring order. Order brings meaning. That can be a comfort in a real world all too often absent both.

IT IS AN irony of history that the game cocreated by Gary Gygax, whose family was so religious that they were knocking on doors looking for converts and getting slapped by teachers for not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, would be charged with fostering demonism, suicide, occultism, devil worship, and every other sort of dark blasphemy the mind could imagine.

Evangelicals are funny that way.

While it’s not a religion, there are aspects of it that are religious. This idea is expounded on at length in Joseph P. Laycock’s Dangerous Games. Laycock points out that D&D and role-playing games in general can be used to fill a number of human needs often answered by religion. Ritual and myth are obvious examples, but beyond that, role-playing games can fill a need for the sacred, the wondrous, and the numinous that scientific rationalism has stripped from the world. RPGs allow players to step outside of our reality and see it from a different angle. They present a new way of viewing the world.