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

in a battle is represented by a different miniature figurine, or “mini.” We don’t use it all the time in the game, but it’s helpful during combat because it allows us to track each other’s location and movement.
    “The guards see you, and now it’s time for initiative order,” says Morgan. Any time players enter combat, they roll a die to determinethe order in which they’ll take their turns. This time, Alex comes up first.
    “Okay, I charge in, and I’m attacking with Bloodlust,” he says. He moves his mini—a crouching figure in a brown cloak, holding two swords—across the mat, picks up a d20, and rolls it to determine the success of his attack. It comes up 12. “I get plus two for charging, and plus eight for my melee attack bonus, so my attack roll is a twenty-two.”
    Jhaden rushes forward, and Bloodlust slashes through the pirate’s scales, penetrating deep into its chest. As he pulls the sword from his victim, Jhaden looks back at us and shouts, “Tonight we’re eating sushi!”
    A Dungeons & Dragons campaign almost always includes a wizard. Abel was our first. He was an “evoker,” which denotes a specialization in spells that create something from nothing—like fireballs and lightning bolts. But he was killed just a few weeks ago, when his consciousness was merged with that of an ancient dragon. 3 Since wizards are so critical to an adventuring party’s success, we quickly recruited a new one, Babeal.
    Both characters are played by Brandon Bryant. It would be simple to typecast Brandon as a D&D player—he’s a big guy with unruly hair who works as an IT manager. But the easy stereotypes end there. At thirty-four, he’s on his second marriage, to a recent art school graduate. He’s studied karate since he was a kid and regularly travels to competitions around the Northeast. He’s also an expert fire dancer—on warm summer nights in Brooklyn, you can sometimesfind him on the roof of his apartment building, tossing and catching flaming batons.
    Brandon’s happy to draw a direct line from his fire dancing to spell casting. “I like the idea of having control over an elemental force,” he says. “Here’s this primal thing and I’m bending it to my will . . . it’s magical but mundane, like having tea with a god.”
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    “The pirate has been badly wounded by Jhaden’s attack but is still standing,” says Morgan. “Babeal, it’s your turn.”
    The mini representing Babeal is at the far end of the battle mat, where Morgan has drawn a box with a brown dry-erase marker, indicating the walls of the ship’s wheelhouse. It’s a figure of a man in a forest-green robe, holding a long staff and wearing a bucket-shaped helmet with long antlers curving upward on each side. This mini has always reminded me of the leader of the “Knights who say Ni” from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I have never made this observation aloud. Making a Python reference in a room full of geeks is like bringing brownies to a Weight Watchers meeting. It could take hours to restore order.
    Jhaden is across the grid, in a square next to the wounded pirate. The three other fish-men are a few squares away.
    “Suck on this, fishies,” says Brandon. “Fireball.”
    Morgan nods. A fireball is a ranged attack spell, so Babeal can cast it from a distance. And since it has a distinct area of effect—a circle forty feet in diameter, or eight squares on the grid—Babeal can target it so as to immolate the pirates but miss his allies.
    Morgan draws a red circle on the mat. “You cast and the deck explodes in flame, engulfing the pirates. Roll for damage.”
    A fireball spell causes worlds of hurt, so Babeal needs to roll ten six-sided dice (in geekspeak, “10d6”) to find out how many hit points each pirate loses.
    He doesn’t have enough dice, though. So he picks 5d6 off the table—three of his own, and two of Alex’s—tosses them on the table, scoops them up, and tosses them again. Each