The year was 1981, or maybe 1982, so I would have been about 13 or 14 years old. I know I did not buy it for myself, so it must have been a gift, but I could not tell you from whom or for what occasion. I remember the red and purple box with a green dragon, and some lady holding a weird flaming torch in one hand, and green ball of something in the other. The box said it was a game called Dungeons & Dragons, but I had never heard of it before.
I remember opening the box and finding two softcover books with a plastic baggie containing some weird light blue dice and a white unbranded crayon wrapped in gray paper. There was no game board. Casually flipping through the books failed to reveal the premise of the game. It looked like there was going to be a lot of reading. I hated reading. And what the hell was the crayon for?
Eventually, I tried reading the rule book to figure out how the game worked, but for someone who had never seen anything like this before, it seemed unintelligible.
This game, unlike others, does not use a playing board or
Part 1: Introduction, What the D&D Game Is All About, page B3
actual playing pieces. All that is needed to play are these rules, the
dice included in this set, pencil and paper, graph paper, and
imagination.
Okay, that explained why there was no game board.
The game may be more exciting if miniature lead figures of the characters and monsters are used, but the game can be played without such aids.
Part 1: Introduction, What the D&D Game Is All About, page B3
Unfortunately, I had failed to read the word “lead” as “lead…the soft metallic gray element with an atomic number of 82,” but instead read it as “lead…to guide or show the way by going in advance,” as in “lead a horse to water.” I was already confused. What was I supposed to be leading?
The next several paragraphs simply identified different sections of the book. Fine, but the following paragraph was already talking about some sort of Expert Set of rules even though I still didn’t understand anything about the Basic Set yet.
Read the whole book through…D&D rules all fit together, and rules that seem confusing at first will become more understandable when used with the rest of the game. This is not like any other game you’ve ever played before: it is more important that you understand the ideas in the rules than that you know every detail about the game. When you understand how they work, the rules will become more understandable.
Part 1: Introduction, What the D&D Game Is All About, page B3
“This is not like any other game you’ve ever played before.” Well, you could say that again. At least this was the first bit of information in the rules that made any sense. Alright, so I needed to read all the rules in order to understand how all the parts fit together. Got it.
While the material in this booklet is referred to as rules, that is not really correct. Anything in this booklet…should be thought of as changeable — anything that the Dungeon Master or referee thinks should be changed…The purpose of these “rules” is to provide guidelines that enable you to play and have fun, so don’t feel absolutely bound to them.
Part 1: Introduction, What the D&D Game Is All About, page B3
So I needed to read all of the rules in order to understand any of the rules, but none of the rules matter because all of the rules can be changed. That was my take-a-way until I got to the section titled, How To “Win.”
“Winning” and “losing”…do not apply to D&D games! The DM and the players do not play against each other…The DM is a guide and a referee…Player characters have fun…
Part 1: Introduction, What the D&D Game Is All About, page B4
At this point, all I got was that the DM doesn’t even get to play the game, he’s just the referee. The Players get to play the game, and they get to have fun. But the referee gets to just make up the rules as desired. I was trying to imagine attempting to play this with my little sister and having to explain to her that I simply get to make up whatever rules I want for no reason because the rules said I could. Oh, she would have been pissed off! How was this suppose to be any fun? It was around this time I put everything back in the box and put the box on a shelf in my closet, never to think about it again until fall 1985.
By the start of my senior year in high school, I had all of my graduation requirements figured out and could afford to slough off a little, so I decided to take an art class. I liked art. I especially liked to draw. This would be an easy A.
One of the artistic techniques we studied was pen-and-ink drawing. The assignment was to use pen-and-ink techniques to re-create one drawing from a selection of subjects provided by the teacher, such as old barns, fence posts, stuff like that. We were given a week or so to complete the assignment. I finished mine in a day or two. So, facing the prospect of not really having anything to do in class for the rest of the week, I asked the teacher if I could draw something else of my choice for extra credit. She said yes. (I think I might have freaked her out a little. Me? Asking for extra credit? Was this a joke?)
That night, I was trying to think of something I wanted to draw. That is when I remembered the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) box in my closet. Wasn’t there a bunch of pen-and-ink drawings in that? Flipping through the books, I really liked the drawing of Morgan Ironwolf by Jeff Dee…such a great action pose, but there was just something about her nipple poking through the chain mail that was probably going to get me into trouble at school, so I wisely chose the weapon rack by Erol Otus instead. (I wish I still had my drawing. I’d love to see if it really turned out as cool as I remember. But I’m sure I just gave it to my girlfriend. I gave all of my art pieces to my girlfriend.)
But that was it. The rule book went back into the box, and the box went back on the shelf until spring 1987. By then, my girlfriend and I had broken up, and I was facing the prospect of a lonely summer. That’s when I realized that I had been so wrapped up with her that I had lost touch with all my friends from school. I wondered what they were up to? It turns out, everybody else was just as wrapped up in their own things as I was, and they had all lost touch with each other too. So I came up with an idea…since none of us had to work Sunday evenings, what if we all got together to figure out how to play this game I’ve had sitting on my shelf forever? But first, I broke out the box to re-read the rules, and perhaps this was the first time I had read the Forward.
I was busy rescuing the captured maiden when the dragon showed up. Fifty feet of scaled terror glared down at us with smoldering red eyes. Tendrils of smoke drifted out from between fangs larger than daggers. The dragon blocked the only exit from the cave.
Tom Moldvay
Sometimes I forget that D&D® Fantasy Adventure Game is a game and not a novel I’m reading or a movie I’m watching.
3 December 1980
That’s when it clicked for me. D&D was like an adventure movie, but instead of just watching a movie, the DM is kind of like the director or narrator, and the player characters are all of the actors who get to decide what their characters do in the story. At least that’s how I explained the idea to my friends. That’s also how I overcame some people’s concerns that “D&D was some sort of devil worshiping game, right?” (Yes folks, the Satanic Panic was a real concern for irrational religious groups at the time, and some of us actually had to explain to concerned individuals that the game was safe to play.) Oh, and I also finally deduced the purpose of the white crayon, but I still thought it was weird.
Anyway, thus began our D&D group—me, Keith, Suzanne, and Tony (and I’m pretty sure one or maybe two more players, but time has sadly removed them from my memory). We still didn’t understand all the rules at first, but we hung out, ate some pizza, and had a fun night. Later, Keith said he knew someone else who played (Bill), and wondered if it would be okay to bring him into the group. We all thought it was a great idea. At first, Bill was a bit confused about this boxed thing we were playing, and he suggested we play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) instead. He already had the necessary books and assured us that it wasn’t really harder, per se…it mostly just provided more character options. We quickly fell in love with it, and that is what we played nearly every Sunday for a year and a half or so.