Last night I went to a friend’s house - more properly my brother’s friends’ house - and played Dungeons and Dragons. Now, I have an interesting history with D&D. You might think, based on my other interests, that I would be really into D&D - and you’d be both right and wrong. When I was a kid, Dungeons & Dragons was hot - but for some of the wrong reasons. Much like Marijuana, people were vaguely afraid of D&D. It didn’t seem WASP-approved or wholesome. My parents allowed me to buy the “basic set”, but they kept it high up on a shelf, where I couldn’t get at it, and they had a rule, which was I was only allowed to play if I played with them, which of course was very clever because it instantly made it super not cool. (And my parents - bless their hearts - don’t make very good Dungeon Masters). So despite the fact that I was into theater and into games, I didn’t play D&D until well into adulthood, and by that time, many of my friends that might have played D&D ended up playing basically the computer version: MMOs, most famously World of Warcraft. So I’ve probably only played D&D maybe 10 or 12 times in my life.

Still, I have a fascination with it, and particularly with a certain episode of D&D history; the famous 1983 “red box” release, which is the one I grew up with. It is, by any objective estimation, a fairly terrible set of rules for an actual game. Magic Users start out with 1 to 4 hit points and exactly one spell per gaming session which does basically diddly squat. Imagine sitting and role playing for an entire evening and you only get one moment to be even semi-heroic (and that moment might fizzle based on dice roles). Also if you get hit once you die; and in this world, when you’re dead, you’re pretty much just dead. Yeah, not a ton of fun.

Still, there was something magical (no pun intended) captured in those rules. Something fun. For one, they were simple - even an 8 year old kid could instantly understand. (This is one quibble I have with modern D&D; when we sat down last night we were each confronted with pre-made characters that each had approximately 50-100 different stats. My brother in particular was super confused, and rightly so.) And the focus was, therefore, on the story. It was made clear in the books that the DM - the Playwright, so to speak - should regard the rules as largely just a starting point. When the story was more fun a certain way, feel free to go that way. Don’t like the die rolls because they made a bad story? Ignore them, or change the rules. The story was paramount. And even though the stories were very basic: nearby is a cave, there are bad guys, they have treasure, go get ‘em tiger - it was fun. Basic, shooty-stabby-puzzle solvey fun.

Later, I happened across a different rule set called Hero Quest that I thought captured this zeitgeist even better; it was simpler and more focused. But I never forgot my love for that original red book.