I meant to get to this topic last year, the year Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) had turned fifty, but I am here now. D&D is a game, more specifically a role-playing game. It has been described as a conversation, but really it is a blend of bad writing, bad acting, and more than a little paperwork. In 1974, I was a student at Michigan State, the same university that just a few years later made the national news on this subject, when another student, James Dallas Egbert III, went missing while playing a “bizarre intellectual game.” Cops suspected his involvement in a cult, but it was only D&D. This only made it worse with the game’s association to the occult. All of State is heated by a central plant that distributes warmth throughout the campus via a network of underground steam tunnels that belch forth “smoke” in the form of water vapor. The police were convinced that Egbert had ventured into these tunnels and become lost. As it turned out, he was later found alive and well, back in Texas. Less than a year later, this unfortunate soul committed suicide. I’m sure D&D was to blame.

My introduction to D&D actually occurred in Ann Arbor. There, my high school wargaming buddies had already discovered the game and in turn they taught it to me. Still away at school at the time, my long-distance relationship with the game proved to be somewhat frustrating. At the time that I was getting into the game, my friend’s ardor for it was cooling, but I was bitten. Fast-forward many years, when I had given up on trying to locate D&D playmates, I discovered that I could clone them instead. My two sons both became avid devotees. Dan in particular has become quite the D&D rules lawyer and is quite adept at munchkin like manufacturing his role-playing characters.

Elements of the game have entered the popular lexicon. Game mechanics like taking hit points and rolling to save have become mainstream. Monsters like the Shambling Mound are now used to describe piles of laundry lying about. The 2023 decent Chirs Pine movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a boon. I am proud to have been part of something that has both endured for so long and prospered so well.