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Players work together to delve into dungeons and defeat baddies, gaining power and abilities as they go. The objective is to quest for loot and fame-or justice and saving the world. In D&D, each player becomes a character with a race (dwarf, say) and class (ranger, cleric) based on classic fantasy tropes. It's the game's unboundedness that has seduced millions of people-children, teenagers, and adults-to sit around tables and essentially take part in highly codified games of make-believe. In the afterword to the original D&D manuals, Gygax encouraged players to resist contacting him for clarification on rules and lore: "Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" 'The Theater of the Mind' The world you play in, and how you shape it, are entirely up to you. It offers a framework of rules, but no victory condition and no end. The same thing that drew the ire of overheated evangelicals and parent groups is leading to the game's newfound popularity today.ĭ&D is a deeply libertarian game-not in a crude political sense or because its currency system is based on precious metals, but in its expansive and generous belief in its players' creative potential. That perpetual inclination to seek out ever more possibilities-"why not?" rather than "why?"-is baked into D&D. He was an individualist at heart who had always chafed against discipline. It's not a surprise the game's creator was a self-declared libertarian or a proud pen pal of prison inmates. The sinister-sounding allegations in Gygax's FBI dossier (obtained by Reason via a Freedom of Information Act request) hint at an explanation.
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What is driving hordes of people to throw down good money to buy a narrative-free tome full of spell descriptions and rules about sleeping in armor?

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The latest supplementary rulebook for the game, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, cracked several bestseller lists when it was published in November. And it remains a refuge, as always, for nerds, theater kids, and other strange birds. The game's strange dice are tossed behind prison walls and used as a learning tool for children on the autism spectrum. One of the most popular podcasts of 2017, The Adventure Zone, features three brothers and their dad playing D&D. The game has moved out of the basement and into game nights at hip bars and pop-up cafés. On Virtual Grounds, a popular online gaming site, the number of D&D games rose 55 percent, from roughly 255,000 in 2016 to 395,000 in 2017. The number of players is increasing, both at the traditional table and on the internet. Today, more than 40 years after its invention, it is experiencing a renaissance.
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The FBI's source could have been any number of professional and personal enemies Gygax made in the turbulent decade between the debut of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 and his eventual ouster from the company-once one of the fastest-growing in the United States-as it foundered under mismanagement.īut D&D survived. The report also claims Gygax set up a Liberian holding company to avoid paying taxes and "is known to be a member of the Libertarian Party." In an FBI field report describing the convoluted history of TSR, one source at the company describes the father of role-playing games as "eccentric and frightening," a "drug abuser" who is "known to carry a weapon and was proud of his record of personally answering any letter coming from a prisoner." He would be extremely uncooperative if the FBI tried to interview him, the source warned. The FBI was apparently looking into a possible tie between the string of then-unsolved bombings and a bitter legal dispute between TSR and a rival gaming company in Fresno, California. The company appears again in FBI reports from 1995, as part of the agency's sprawling investigation into the Unabomber. In 1983, an FBI field report about an investigation into a cocaine trafficking ring in Lake Geneva cryptically references Gygax-but whatever his alleged role was, it has since been heavily redacted by the Bureau. The note turned out to be materials for an upcoming espionage game. In 1980, a note on TSR stationary about an assassination plot drew the FBI's attention, leading to a search of the company's offices in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Between 19, agents compiled a dossier on the gaming company TSR Inc.

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But even if you've never rolled a critical fail on a d20, you have almost certainly consumed some movie, TV show, book, comic, computer game, or music influenced by Gygax's most famous creation: Dungeons & Dragons, the world's first and most popular role-playing game. You might not recognize the name Gary Gygax.
