Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Read Online Free

them, and yell in alarm.”
    “You don’t speak their language.”
    “I know,” says Phil. “I make a noise like a panicked fish.”
    Morgan chuckles and then grimaces. “Okay,” he says. “Roll against your performance skill.”
    Phil picks up a d20—a glittery blue plastic die, twenty-sided—and rolls it across the table. It stops showing a seven.
    Morgan checks his notes. “The pirates look confused,” he says. “They’re just staring at you.”
    “Okay,” says Phil. “Which fish looks the most gullible?”
    Alex grunts, exasperated. “To hell with this,” he says. “I draw my swords.”
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    Jhaden is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in our adventuring party, a ranger who fights with one sword in each hand on the front line of battle. He does the majority of damage to enemies and serves as a meat shield for other, less hardy characters.
    He’s played by Alex Agius, thirty-three. Alex is a graphic designer, working freelance since he was laid off from a full-time job at Penthouse magazine. It used to be his job to lay out pictorials, Photoshop blemishes off nude models, and select the proper font for each obscene caption. Now he mostly works for a magazine about investment banking.
    Alex was first exposed to D&D when he turned nine years old and a cousin brought the game to his birthday party. “I loved the Conan comic books, so what initially attracted me to D&D was that you could be a barbarian,” he says. “But when I realized that I could play a character that was totally my design, instead of a pre-created character like Conan . . . that was really cool.”
    After his cousin went home, Alex sketched a map of the dungeon they’d explored in the game. When his mom found the drawing, she “thought it was really cool,” so she bought him a set of D&D rule books.
    Unlike Phil, Alex tends to get restless when there’s too much role-playing in a game. He’s much more comfortable when the adventure tends toward action.
    Combat in D&D is handled as a sequence of narrated actions and lots of dice rolling. If a player decides to hit something with his sword, he may announce the attack, but the DM calculates whether it succeeds. In practice, this amounts to calculating an algebraic equation, something like: (strength of the fighter + skill of the fighter) − (agility of the target + armor worn by the target) + an element of randomness introduced by the dice = whether or not the fighter hits.
    Every creature in the game—whether a character controlled by aplayer or a monster controlled by the DM—has a specific amount of “hit points,” a number representing their health. When a fighter hits his target, he rolls dice to see how much it hurts, with higher numbers indicating more damage. The DM subtracts that number from the monster’s pool of hit points, and the process repeats. Player after player takes their shots until the monster hits zero hit points and dies.
    These rules for combat get incredibly complex. There are specific rules for fighting while blinded, while underwater, and while riding a horse. There are rules that describe how to knock a sword out of someone’s hands and how to bash them with a shield. There is even an entire rule book, Weapons of Legacy, listing hundreds of different armaments and describing the effect they have upon the game.
    Jhaden’s sword, Bloodlust, is an epic weapon, magically enchanted to inflict extra damage against vampires and other undead creatures. He wields it in his right hand, and in his left he holds a shorter blade, a foot long and unnaturally sharp. If he comes at you with both, you’re going to get hurt.
    “I’m charging,” Alex says. “This guy.” He points at an inch-high plastic figurine on the table, representing one of the fish. Morgan has set them up on our battle mat, a piece of tan vinyl printed with a twenty-by-twenty grid of one-inch squares. Each square corresponds to five feet of space in the game world, and every participant