‘Theatre of the mind’: celebrating 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons

Everyone remembers their first Dungeons & Dragons character. For Sam Gyseman, it was a dwarf called Sven Olafson. “For some reason I thought dwarves were all Scandinavian,” says Gyseman, who lives in the Midlands and works for the local city council. “He had a long beard and a huge, double-headed axe.”

For Erik Olsen, his character in his first game was a cleric called Maxis. “We played an adventure called The Lichway,” says Olsen, a university professor. “He died from a spider bite in that dungeon. Because it was the first adventure I played, it has always had a special place in my heart.”

Dungeons & Dragons is 50 years old, launched on to the market in 1974 by a company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, created by the game’s creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson when they couldn’t find a publisher for their creation.

Even if you’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons – or D&D as it’s more commonly known – you’ll probably be aware of it. A film franchise began in 2000, starring Thora Birch and Jeremy Irons, which spawned two sequels. A reboot happened last year, subtitled Honor Among Thieves, with Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez. Those of an older vintage might remember the mid-1980s cartoon, or that the kids were playing D&D at the beginning of the movie ET the Extra Terrestrial (and, in a more recent homage to that scene, at the beginning of the first episode of Stranger Things).

Anyone used to “normal” games might be expecting a board, and pieces, and dice. While D&D does indeed have dice – many-sided ones for various interactions – and an industry has built up providing metal miniatures of the denizens of the fantasy world, D&D is a game powered by imagination and, most importantly, a willingness to role-play.

Characters are created on the rolls of dice which give them scores for certain attributes, such as strength or intelligence. The results will define what “class” of character you have: a high dexterity score is suitable to being a thief. Intelligence helps with the book-learning needed to be a wizard or cleric. Lots of brawn but no brain might suggest a fighter-class character who will cheerfully heft a broadsword and run heedless into a phalanx of orcs.

Game sessions are presided over by a Dungeon Master, who will verbally guide the team of players through an adventure. These are detailed descriptions of location and plot, sometimes released by publishers, such as the all-time classic The Keep on the Borderlands, or published in magazines such as White Dwarf, as was Olsen’s first adventure, The Lichway. Often, the Dungeon Master will create their own adventure, intricately mapping out a castle or temple, populating it with monsters and non-player characters.

A game will generally involve the Dungeon Master telling the players where they are and what they can see – “You turn a corner and are faced with two doors. What do you do?” – while the players work as a team to decide on their next move. Opening one door might lead to treasure, the other might be home to a marauding monster which they then have to fight, using dice to determine the outcome.

That’s the imagination side of it, and the role-playing comes in because, although you might be a 56-year-old female local authority worker from the Midlands, like Sam Gyseman, you have to play the game as though you are indeed a male dwarf with a double-headed axe.

Or a fighter called Ricca, who has aspirations to become a bard, or a thief assassin named Ellana the Raven, both characters Gyseman plays in different campaigns today.

She says: “I was first invited to join a game in about 1986 by some friends in Leicester. I went to a comic shop, bought some dice and took myself along to the meeting, not knowing what to expect.

“Apart from a bit of a gap between university and divorce, I have played D&D in some form ever since. Role-playing is the part I like the most – just talking in character, being another person and making the story as we go along.”

Since 1997, D&D has been published by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of toy and game giant Hasbro. “D&D has a rich history, an exciting present, and a great future,” says Kyle Brink, executive producer of the team making D&D at Wizards of the Coast. “This year we’ll be celebrating all three with the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Dungeons & Dragons. We’ve been building up to this for a while now. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Erik Olsen has worked at the universities of Amsterdam and Groningen, and his last post was at the Russian State University for the Humanities, which he left when the war in Ukraine started. He is now back home in the Netherlands.

He grew up in Long Island, New York, and came across the game in 1981. He says: “The books had been out for a few years already but the popularity popped at the point I found it. I never knew this sort of thing even existed before that.

“When I went to uni, I found the sci-fi group and joined a weekly campaign where we did the classic ‘all nighters’, starting on Saturdays sometime around noon and then playing until early Sunday morning when people had began to drop off.”

For Olsen, the game is best played with pure imagination – or in the “theatre of the mind”, as he likes to call it. “I know some people play with 3D or printed maps, figures, etc. I never did this – to my mind it detracted from the players’ imagination.”

Olsen and Gyseman are members of the Dungeons & Dragons UK group on Facebook, which has almost 23,000 members, as is Rob Driver, who acts as Dungeon Master to a group of players in the east Midlands. The internet has given D&D an extra dimension, allowing players to adventure together online on Zoom calls as well as in person – which was a huge boost during Covid – and make resources available.

Driver says: “D&D has a big presence online with many Facebook groups dedicated to the game and related role-playing games. The internet is a very useful tool to share ideas, pictures, homemade adventures, find players locally.

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“The company that owns D&D have an online forum and catch-all website where you can buy all sorts of products digitally. YouTube has brought D&D to the fore, with groups such as Critical Role and Dungeon Dudes streaming their games live for people to watch and comment on.”

Half a century old it might be, and facing a lot of competition from increasingly sophisticated video games you can play on your phone, but Dungeons & Dragons is actually increasing in popularity. Wizards of the Coast said that 50 million people worldwide have played D&D, and that 2020 saw a huge upswing in interest in the game, boosted by people looking for things to do with their families during lockdowns.

Gyseman says: “TV shows like The Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things have brought so many people to gaming. It has been very noticeable in the last few years how fast the hobby is growing, and I’m gratified that it’s popular with younger people, particularly those who feel marginalised or different from their peers.

“In fantasy role-playing they can be who they want, meet people like themselves and live out their best life, albeit for just a few hours a week.”