This is the point where I’m supposed to talk about how old it makes me feel that my childhood pastimes are celebrating golden anniversaries. The answer there is that I get enough reminders of my age from my knees, shoulders, sleep, restroom visits, and medications that seeing Dungeons & Dragons turn 50 doesn’t move the needle.
I just read an anniversary special magazine about the phenomenon, and while it was surveying a long period of diverse endeavors (games, cinema, etc.), it didn’t really seem to connect with the major factor that made the game impactful. I think no one who wasn’t alive when it came out is really in a position to recognize it. In that case, let me be of service:
D&D SHATTERED LIMITATIONS ON WHAT IT MEANT TO GAME.
Before D&D you had family games like Monopoly, where there were house rule deviations such as Free Parking, and strategy games like the early Avalon Hill releases in their 1960s heyday. Be they short or long, those games all had rules and offered no provision for bending or breaking them. They might be badly written; in Avalon Hill’s case, they might have large loopholes and unanswered cases; but no one was saying ‘just ignore them.’ Play, in other words, had to conform to rules made by someone else far away. No, no one would come and arrest you for breaking them; the hard part for rule benders was obtaining consensus.
And then, when I was about eleven, along came D&D. The publisher was called Tactical Studies Rules; rules were what they did. But unlike other games with big rulebooks, TSR said in essence: ‘The Dungeon Master is the final authority in all rules questions. Oh, and if you don’t like a rule, change it. Do it however you want.’
It is true that D&D opened up the realm for imagination by inviting players to create their own milieus, handing them books of tools to help them–but that’s what everyone already realizes. What not everyone realizes is how norm-shattering it was to tell people it was fine to bend or break the rules if that’s how they liked to play. In an era where one could be paddled for acting up in school, truant officers still existed and people cared whether you attended school, you could flunk and be held back, and varying other constraints limited the actions of a young person, TSR came as your liberator.
In fact, most people mostly played fairly close to the printed rules–but many of them were moved to develop their own systems. And all of it was storytelling, a form of collaborative fantasy novel writing. We didn’t have nanu-nanu or whatever exactly it’s called, but we did have D&D. A setting well guided by an effective DM, attended by players who let their imaginations run loco, meant that we were all learning the art of storytelling whether or not we knew it.
So really, it was that combination. No one had ever before told us to just do it our own way if we disapproved of our orders. Not only would we tell stories of our own, but we would do it with only the limitations imposed by consensus.
TSR battered down the cell walls that contained our creativity, and told us to be free. And that’s the single biggest impact–one that amplified the other and made it more than it might otherwise ever have become.
The Editorial Maverick 