Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons?

The BBC news magazine has a nice enough article on the thirtieth anniversary of D&D . . . Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? Unlike most popular press looks at the roleplaying game industry, this one is actually pretty fair-handed.

I started playing back in 1978 with a bunch of buddies from high school. I was hooked right away and still play . . . albeit not nearly as regularly or as obsessively as my college years – of course, living in a country with less access to players puts a crimp in that, not to mention job and family. When I met Lorraine, I introduced her to the game and we used to play regularly with a group of folks in our home. Now, my daughter, at ten years of age, continues in her dear ol’ dad’s footsteps and plays when she gets the chance (we have both English and Chinese editions of the rulebooks).

Of course, one thing that happened to D&D – and all RPGs descended from it – is that they’ve gone live or online. See Dungeons and Dreamers for one look at the online evolution from tabletop. Personally, I always hated computer RPGs as I missed the reality of tabletop, the intensity of the experience as well as the communal nature of the event, but computer gaming is becoming so much more sophisticated that the downsides are quickly fading away. When virtual reality 3D systems (real 3D not fake 3D that they call 3D nowadays which is really more of a 2 1/2 kind of thing), then we’ll really be able to do some very very interesting things. See my earlier posts on gaming for more on that.