Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who by David M. Ewalt Page A

“fighting-man”) named Gronan of Simmerya, an “obvious parody” of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero. 4 Mornard’s memories of the game are a blur, but Gronan lived to fight another day. “At the end of it, I was like, ‘I don’t know what this game is, but that was really freakin’ great,’ ” he says. “It was kind of like a war game, only not . . . it was really different.”
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    Gary Gygax’s early Greyhawk sessions were understandably surprising to players like Mike Mornard, who’d never seen this brand-new thing called a fantasy role-playing game. But they’d also look different to today’s experienced D&D players.
    There was no common gaming table; the players sat together, and Gygax sat alone at his desk. “The way Gary’s study was arranged,he had a desk with a filing cabinet next to it, and he pulled out the drawers on the filing cabinet so we couldn’t see him,” says Mornard. “What you did was listen. You heard his voice. All the action took place entirely inside our heads . . . If you wanted a map, you drew one yourself.”
    There wasn’t much talking. Each party had a “caller” who spoke for the group. Players quietly discussed their actions and then told the caller, who told Gygax. If anyone talked too much, they risked missing an important announcement from behind the filing cabinet. “The tension in the room was palpable,” says Mornard.
    There were no set adventuring parties, nothing like Frodo’s Fellowship of the Ring. During early play-testing, Gygax ran the game for three to five players each time, drawn from a pool of about twenty people. “We were adventurers who occasionally banded together,” says Mornard. “He ran several games at several times during the week, and you got invites for certain times. I was usually on Thursday nights, but not invariably.”
    And there were no piles of rule books—and not just because they hadn’t been written. Gygax wanted his players to learn the game through experience. “For about the first year we played we didn’t see the rules at all,” says Mornard. “That’s an interesting way to play. It requires a certain amount of common sense.” Some players didn’t have it. Mornard recalls one adventure where a younger player opened a door in the depths of a dungeon to find a room where the floor was covered with piles of jewels:
    “He says to Gary, ‘I’m going to run in the room and start scooping them up.’ Gary says, ‘Okay, you’re standing in gems and jewelry up to your ankles.’ And the kid says, ‘I’m going to throw them up in the air and dance around.’ ‘Okay, now you’re standing in jewels halfway up your calves.’ And the kid keeps going on about how he’s dancing and throwing money around, while Gary says, ‘You’re standing injewels up to your knees,’ and then ‘You’re standing in jewels up to your armpits.’ There was three inches of jewelry on top of quicksand. And the kid just didn’t get it. It wasn’t a trap where you take one step in and you’re gone. About the time you’re in to your knees, you’re supposed to start noticing something is going on. You’ve got to pay attention.”
    Because the game was so new, players never knew what to expect from their Dungeon Master, or from their cohorts. Gygax was learning the game alongside his players and changing the rules based on their actions. Night after night, small groups of players pushed the boundaries of what was possible. Their actions shaped Gygax and Arneson’s work, and decades of games that followed.
    Mornard remembers a small action that had a very big effect: When one of Arneson’s players decided he wanted his character to be a vampire, another said he would like to play a vampire hunter. “They had to figure out what a vampire hunter would be like in the game,” says Mornard. “So, to counter the vampire, they gave him healing powers. That sort of became the template for the cleric. It was a counterpoint to