For just having been ”killed,” Helen Dunsmoir was in particularly good spirits.
But then it`s easy to face ”death” when it comes in the form of Titan:
The Monster Slugathon Fantasy Wargame.
Though she survived only 45 minutes of the game, Dunsmoir, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate headed for medical school, had the complexities of Titan down pat.
”You have little piles of monsters,” she explains, ”and you go around recruiting monsters to beat up other little piles of monsters.”
Monsters were abundant here last weekend. So were elves, dwarves, clerics, thieves, assassins, bards and dragons. Not to mention Medieval knights, Napoleonic cavalrymen, Union and Confederate foot soldiers, World War I doughboys, World War II GIs and futuristic fighting robots.
And it was all in the name of fun, courtesy of the Gen Con/Origins Game Fair, a combined effort by gamemakers that brought the world`s largest role-playing game convention and its biggest strategy-game gathering under one roof: the MECCA Convention Center in Milwaukee.
The site is aptly named, considering that both the Gen Con and Origins fair are somewhat of a pilgrimage for the gaming faithful. And this year`s get-together held special signficance because Origins, which changes locations each year, for the first time was held along with Gen Con.
That combination brought more than 10,000 people to both a game seller`s and game buyer`s dream: part trade show, part near-round-the-clock gaming competition. If they weren`t browsing through displays of the 125 exhibiting companies from the United States, Canada and Australia, conventiongoers were indulging in the more than 1,300 events offered, including historical miniatures games, fantasy games, war games, computer games and even an art show and a game auction.
Still, Mike Dudeck of Mokena, near Chicago, had a gripe: ”The problem here is they don`t have the ol` standbys like Scrabble.”
Actually, they did. At the convention`s Games Library, the purists in the crowd could check out not only Scrabble but Life, Sorry!, chess and backgammon. But most visitors, such as Dudeck`s 11-year-old son, Quen, and his two friends, came for games such as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the undisputed king of role-playing games that takes participants in search of treasure through mysterious labyrinths.
The real mystery for Dudeck, though, seemed to be how he allowed his son to persuade him to make the trip. ”We`re spending $80 a night on a hotel room so our kid can play a game,” he said, raising his hands in disbelief.
Dudeck said his son has been playing AD&D, as its aficionados call it, for about a year. ”Vigorously. I mean, that`s all he talks about. . . . (But) he`ll grow out of it.”
”We hope,” his wife, Connie, added.
Don`t count on it, Mrs. Dudeck. Just take a look at Patrick Fitzgerald, a 30-year-old computer programmer from just outside Worcester, Mass.
”My boss thinks I`m at work!” Fitzgerald shouted as he sat down at one of the dozens of gaming tables spread across the floor of MECCA`s Bruce Hall. Settling into a four-hour adventure called Against the Black Rose II:
Scavengers of the King, he took on the character of Filcher Marskell the bard, a guide who can fight and has magical singing powers, he explained.
Fitzgerald later added with pride: ”I`ve got a 12th-level bard at home,” AD&D-speak for a character it has taken Fitzgerald more than four years of playing to develop.
It`s that kind of childlike enthusiasm, spanning all ages, that gives the convention its charm.
”While it seems to appeal to males in their early teens to early 20s, it`s irrespective of age,” said Jean Rabe, coordinator of the Role Playing Game Association Network, which sponsored a record 35 tournaments at this year`s Gen Con. ”You might find teenagers participating in an adventure with middle-aged men.”
She must mean showdowns such as Jason Martin, 12, and teammates versus a crew that included a balding man in a fishing cap who refused to give his name. Their battle, involving robot miniatures, was over a city that looked like a strange mixture of Dickensian England and a ”Star Wars” landscape.
With the speed and smoothness of a combat veteran, Jason yelled to the game`s director: ”I`m firing four medium lasers, two medium machine guns and one SRM 6!” (That last acronym, of course, is short for short-range missile.) The result: two direct hits. Jason`s shot from his BLR-1G Battlemaster had locked the gun turret of an opponent. The balding man with the fishing cap sulked.
For real gaming theater, though, one has to watch the role-playing events. Ask many people what they think of when they hear the words ”role-playing game” and you probably will get something like this: a group of introverted, goofy-looking teenaged boys whiling away their weekends with dice rolls and visions of dragons.
Those people likely haven`t met Don Bingle. A University of Chicago graduate, Bingle, of Naperville, is a partner in the Chicago law firm of Bell Boyd & Lloyd. He deals with corporate securities, mergers and acquisitions.
At 34, he`s also the Role Playing Network`s top-ranked player. His wife, Linda, is No. 2.
Bingle says there is at least one parallel between Wall Street`s M&A and the gamesters` D&D: The best tactical decisions, he says, are made by putting yourself in the other guy`s shoes and understanding why he acts the way he does.
In this particular tournament round, though, Bingle seemed to have set such craftiness aside in favor of some good old-fashioned hamming. His vehicle is one of the new upstart games in the role-playing business: Teenagers from Outer Space, another in a burgeoning number of nonfantasy games.
In this particular scenario, written specifically for Gen Con`s Role Playing Network tournament rounds, ”Star Trek” is twisted into a feature called Star Drek, complete with Captain Jerk, commander of the Booby Prize, Engineer Snotty and the evil Commander Klingfree.
One of the Role Playing Network`s top-ranked judges, Dan Kramarsky, deftly directed the round, jumping back and forth among the six players assigned to his table. In rapid-fire speech, he shifted from a straight narrator`s voice to a flawless impersonation of the real Scotty`s Scottish accent.
Much of effective role playing, veterans will tell you, means effective improvisation; accordingly, Bingle used just that throughout the round in showing how he earned his top-ranked status. At one point, in cursing out a hot-headed Dr. Mcdoggie, he yelled, ”Shut up! Or else the first feature film we do, we make you stand around and say nothing for two hours!”
Teenagers from Outer Space is only one of a growing number of role-playing games that doesn`t take itself as seriously as the older D&D or AD& D. There`s also the just-out Bullwinkle and Rocky, adapted from the cartoon of the same name; Fluffy Quest, a version of AD&D that involves finding a lost dog, including a scenario called Fluffy Goes to Heck; and Paranoia, a game set in a darkly humorous future.
Paranoia`s all-knowing computer, a mixture of Big Brother and Mister Rogers, as Bingle puts it, keeps tabs on all the players. ”The computer is your friend,” the game coaxes. ”Trust no one. Keep your laser handy.”
Such humorous innovations would not have been possible, however, if the standard had not been set. That`s where Gary Gygax comes into the story. Gygax was the cocreator of D&D, the sole creator of its popular successor, AD&D, and the founder of Gen Con.
He held the first Gen Con in 1966 at his home in Lake Geneva (hence the name), with about 13 friends playing, for the most part, board games and military miniatures.
In 1969, Gygax, who grew up on Chicago`s North Side, took the first step in developing D&D as he toyed with Medieval miniatures: The group he`d been playing with was dropping off in numbers, so one day he included a few fantasy cliches such as a troll under the bridge and a fire-breathing dragon just to spice things up.
A few years later, a friend, Dave Arneson, came up with the idea to get rid of the miniatures entirely. The two of them brainstormed for a while, and D&D was born along with its company, what is now called TSR Inc.
It took them the entire year to sell the first 1,000 copies, in 1974. But the product`s popularity soared after they fed it into an informal network of college student playtesters, particularly at University of California at Berkeley, University of Minnesota and University of Illinois-Chicago.
They sold 150,000 copies in 1977, and from 1979 through 1981 ”we couldn`t print them fast enough,” Gygax said.
Ironically, part of that boom can be attributed to the first bad press D& D received. It happened when a computer whiz kid named James Dallas Egbert III, a Michigan State University student, disappeared from campus on Aug. 15, 1979. A flurry of rumors focused on the fact that he played Dungeons & Dragons.
He was found nearly a year later but soon after committed suicide. A psychologist told a New York Times reporter at the time that drug-induced depression led to the suicide, not any involvement with D&D.
”It had very little to do with D&D,” said Harold Johnson, TSR`s director of consumer services and chief coordinator for the Gen Con/Origins Game Fair. ”(But) because of Dallas and the misrepresentation in the case, . . . that attention was brought to us.”
Having survived a bruising period in 1983, Lake Geneva-based TSR now has annual sales of more than $20 million, including its board games, books, magazines and mail-order outlets, Johnson said. And its distribution network stretches throughout Europe and Japan.
For his part, Gygax left TSR in 1986, a year after being voted out as president and chairman of the board ”in an ugly fight over shareholding,” he said. But he is still selling role-playing games, now with his new company, New Infinities Productions Inc. And clearly Gygax still relishes it, especially the feedback from fans.
”They eat, drink and breathe your stuff,” he said, taking a break from autographing copies of his various Dungeons & Dragons handbooks. ”All they ask is that we give them fun.”
