Inside the 40 Year-Long Dungeons & Dragons Game | Obsessed | WIRED

Remember that DND

game

you started when you were 11. What if it never ended? My name is Robert Wordoff. I am a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario. I'm a dungeon master for a campaign that's been going on for 40

year

s. What began in secret with a few friends has become a

game

that occupies much of Robert's life and most of his home. Robert has around 30,000 hand-painted figures, countless custom-made terrain, and dozens of devoted players participating in his campaign. If you're going to keep a game going for 40

year

s it's going to have to be a good game, if you're going to have people who want to play and who want to fly, you're going to have to offer a product that's going to be better than all the other alternatives out there.

I can certainly say with confidence that this is the best

dungeons

and

dragons

game in the world, so if I play 10 hours a week. at 52 weeks in a year, that means I'm doing that multiplied by 40, that would be 20,800 hours, how many minutes is that? So if I calculated it in minutes, it would end up being 1.24 million minutes, I think when you get to the top of the ridge there. There seems to be a big commotion. You estimate it could be about two dozen goblins. You surprise them as much as they have surprised you. I need a surprise role that's really just the beginning.

Almost all the important decisions in Robert's life are designed to maintain. The game was going when he was buying a house, the most important part for me was getting a play space that I could use. My entire basement is my play area. If he doesn't slow down, he'll need a bigger house. I have many figs. i have orcs i have elves i have dwarves i have all the basic things you would expect but i also have very different and unique figs i have vampires i have undead i have zombies i have werewolf beholders tiamat, the mother of all

dragons

, all the great demon lords of the demogorgon, but also heroes, all the great kings and queens of the countries, the high level magicians, all these things, my goal is to have it all, but what is the point of having so many figures?

If you don't have any amazing land to put them on, Robert has no shortage of those apartments. I need to be able to adapt to wherever the group goes. That means I need to have my land green. I need to have a mountain. terrain I need to have all my winter terrain my desert sky trains my water trains if they are going to go to a city now I need a city okay are they in a Roman city are they in an Anglo-Saxon city are they in an African city is high medieval is low medieval like this Now I'm trying to be able to place a town or a city for each of these historical settings.

I can't put figures on the table unless they are painted to a certain level that means someone has to paint a lot and that ends up being me, if you found me on a normal day working on the game you would probably see me in my painting room and I'm I'm going to spend two three four hours painting figs and people take the figs home. No, no one can take their figurines home, no one can touch the figs on the table, so that would also be different for a person who played. Dungeons and Dragons would probably come to my table and immediately reach out to grab their figs.

I'll probably growl at them and tell them not to touch the figs because I have to move everything, I'm sure my critics would. Let's say there is a god complex about this here being the figure of the demon lord orcas, he is well known by dennis and dragons and in my campaign a hundred years ago, which would be a real time, maybe like 1989, the group banished this demon so they thought it was okay recently last year, actually the demon has returned, they don't know where he is, they are desperately trying to find him and he is definitely up to no good, while fantasy role playing games and nerd culture often are celebrated today.

Robert's campaign began during a time when people felt they needed to play secretly in the 80s and 90s, it was certainly harder to try to talk or explain the game to people. I grew up in a very small town and it was a pretty conservative town. and then the city inevitably found out that we were playing and they didn't know what the hell we were doing and Dungeons and Dragons had a very bad press at the time. Tonight we begin with a story about imaginary adventures and real-life violence. and what some critics fear is a connection between the two in a game called

dungeons

and dragons, a movie came out while we were playing called mazes and monsters and it's a story of how they play this game and then try to act it out in real life.

In life and basically bad things happen, can you tell me about the giant dragon in my travels here? I heard it, what is now called, satanic panic was happening at that time, why does my son want to play this game all the time? Why is he

obsessed

? Regarding this, what are you doing to him? you're a cult leader they called me a communist cult leader like all these all these crazy labels when i saw stranger things obviously i realized it's almost here what is it and if it's a demogorgon oh god we're so screwed if it's the demogorgon is not the demogorgon the whole concept matched exactly what we were doing in the early 1980s over the next few decades robert continued to build a campaign of unparalleled complexity one of the things that makes my game unique is the story and the depth of the campaign.

My world is an alternate fantasy version of historical Earth with other historical aspects added, so if someone comes in and wants to go to Athens, now I can bring that history, philosophy, religion in. At the end of the game I can create what I need to create, create totally new races, totally new nations, totally new cultures, totally new mythologies, but I can also use what the world already has. A typical dungeon master handles quests for a handful. of players over the course of a few months, meanwhile, Robert follows the adventures of over 50 players with story arcs that often span decades from the beginning, probably around 500 in-game characters have been created and played by the time a new one arrives. player.

I invite you to play a game that you can keep playing until I die so that you can start a character nine generations later and that family can take over, say, the Roman Empire in a level you're playing. That individual character on a macro level you are also controlling the Roman empire, so there are numerous story arcs that continue, many of which last for generations, there are love stories, there are romances, there are quests, there is revenge, all these things are happening, so even though there is this big campaign mission, this big end goal, you have literally thousands of subplots and some campaigns from the beginning.

Robert quickly learned which rules could be bent and which rules could be broken when we started playing. There was probably a short period of time where I played by the actual rules, but after that I had to fill in the gaps, so I developed my own system of rules and never went back, so I have what gamers would call a homemade rules system and, in fact, that was the game. It was intended when the game first came out, one of the lines in the Dungeon Master's guide told you that these are a set of rules, but to apply them freely and within my game and my world there are all kinds of different aspects that don't you would see In the rules system of an ordinary dungeon dragon, my rules are fast, they flow quickly, people don't have to stop and check things and that speed of play is something I find very different in my game from ordinary dungeons and dragons , Robert strives to maintain.

The stakes are as high as possible for your players, especially when it comes to life-or-death consequences for your characters. I want death to mean something. I don't want this to be like a video game where you just hit the reset button and you're done. I'm just going to start a new character so when your character dies if you don't have other characters then you're out of the game the game ends for you so when characters die or bad things happen I've seen growing men cry. the table and that's something that also people who don't play get a little upset if they hear that someone who has been playing a character for a

long

time cries at the table but I'm trying to create emotion I'm trying to create emotion people You're scared and you know that if you die you could be out of the game or that character you spent so much time on is now dead, obviously people's heart rates are high, there's emotion, so I can't be surprised when that character dies, there's a sample of emotion.

Well, I have a daughter and since she was a baby she has been in this. I think maybe when she was six or seven was the first time she asked me if she could play, so she created a character as a fairy and she still plays now that she's 20, I mean obviously there's other things going on in her life. , but he's been playing the whole time. The interesting thing happens when she starts dating and then her boyfriend wants to play and of course I have to do it. Tell him right away that they are leaving now.

This relationship may not last forever, but the game will last forever, so be prepared because I'm anticipating a situation where you break up with him. I can't break up with him, so once I allow someone to come. in the game, I'm never going to stop them from stopping playing, so sure enough, that situation happened, so it can be a little awkward at times, but it means a lot to be able to get my daughter to play and have her be interested in the game. and he obviously knows what the game means to me, uh, sure, I think at some point we're all supposed to grow up and stop playing, so people will say how does your game end?

How is it going to end? And it's like, well, my answer is always how does the world end? How will your world end well? It will probably end when I die. Good for you, that's right, so the answer is largely the same. It's a lot like life more than anything else, the game represents friendship and I find that friendship is based on tables, you need something to hold it together, so we may have gone to high school together, but as that we move forward in our lives, unless we have a board, We're not going to hang out, we're not going to fly to see each other, so as

long

as I can keep doing it, hopefully throughout my life, I won't lose my friends, my basement is my sanctuary, it's a place I can go and I can almost as soon as I walk in here I'm in a different world and it opens all the doors of creativity.

I have no intention of stopping playing, stopping painting, stopping building, and stopping getting my friends together to play. Game that I never plan to leave