Brock the barbarian is a 2-metre (6ft 6in) tall loveable gruff. “He’s an idiot, but he wants to do well,” explains 25-year-old Zach Anderson, who is 12cm (5in) shorter than Brock. “He’s very extroverted and I’m very introverted.”
Via Brock, Anderson has broken out of his shy nature to go on all manner of adventures. Once, he slew a dragon.
Brock is not real, of course. He is a character Anderson – who lives in Sydney – made up six months ago to roleplay in the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons. “It’s been a way to think … if I could be this character, how would I act? And by doing that, it’s weird, I’ve noticed I’m a lot more outgoing than I used to be. I’m a lot more confident.”
Dungeons & Dragons – affectionately known as D&D – is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024. Dragged through the mud in the 1980s, when critics argued it was a gateway to devil worshipping and the media connected it to murders and suicides, the game has surged back into popularity and popular culture in recent years.
Its appeal is perhaps best captured by one of its creators, Gary Gygax , who once said: “All of us at times feel a little inadequate at dealing with the modern world – it would feel much better if we knew we were a superhero or a mighty wizard.”
Freeform creativity
American game designers Gygax and David Arneson released the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. But its life began earlier, in 1970, when Gygax lost his insurance job and began creating war games based on famous battles to play with friends. That evolved into the medieval game D&D, which drew on Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
The aim of the role-playing game is not necessarily to win, but rather for players to immerse themselves in an imagined fantasy world with their friends and work together to solve quests. The storyteller, referred to as the dungeon master (DM), sets the loose parameters of the adventure, choosing from an already set adventure or making up their own.
Unlike a video game, where rules dictate a limited range of choices from a set of options, each player contributes to the flow and shape of the game based on a character they create or choose – from a sneak thief, a sorcerer or, in Anderson’s case, a barbarian. Players essentially act as their characters, speaking as them, making decisions, all while referring to their “character sheet” – a set of attributes and statistics that informs how the character will respond to the situations laid out before them. The roll of a dice – modified by those stats – determines the success of that choice.
“It is very freeform and really encourages people to be creative,” says Luke Breen, who began playing D&D in 2014 on a whim and four years later started a business connecting groups of players to professional DMs. “Playing together, sitting around a table and just having fun, allows you to escape for a couple of hours.”
D&D’s reach over the past 50 years is immense. American games publisher Wizards of the Coast, which acquired the game in 1997, estimates 50 million people have played worldwide.
The game is usually played in private homes but the number of public events for D&D fans has been growing. In Australia last year, 5,000 people attended an event listed on Eventbrite – five times more than in 2019.
On a recent Sunday in Sydney, 60 people spend the day inside a mock medieval tavern, with iron chandeliers hanging overhead and melodic lutes playing on speakers. The game is run at gaming centre Fortress in Chippendale which has held weekly D&D sessions since April 2023 that are growing in popularity.
Nearly every week one of the many D&D tables has been overseen by dungeon master Rose Herden, 34, who began playing during lockdown in 2020 and found it was the perfect way to connect socially during the pandemic. It also stretches creative muscles that often aren’t exercised in her job as a cyber security expert.
Herden works with an artist who creates figurines using 3D printing. She then paints them herself to fit each new storyline.
“Every week my husband and I are up late hand-painting everything ready for the game,” she says. “It’s collaborative escapism, so the world I’ve built goes where the characters want to take it.”
In the middle of the table is a miniature set depicting a medieval tavern (a tavern within a tavern). Today’s story revolves around a magical mariachi band that makes people fall in love, performing a sold-out show on Valentine’s Day.
“I’m an elk hunter-ranger,” says one player at Herden’s table, introducing their D&D character. “I’m a sucker for myths and legends and trying to divulge whether they’re true or not, and I’ve heard a rumour about this band making people fall in love so I’ve come to find out if it’s true or not.”
Will DM for rent
The first release of Dungeons & Dragons was a cardboard box with three stapled pamphlets and some reference sheets. It was developed on a US$2,000 budget but has since grown into a global empire. More sophisticated and intricate editions have been released over the decades.
The game was adapted for the big screen in 2023, with John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, with the Guardian calling the film a “riotously enjoyable fantasy adventure”. An earlier 2000 movie was less well received, while the 80s D&D animated series was also, well, of its era.
In the game’s early days, the average D&D player was a “young white man of a certain age”, says Prof Lisa Given, an RMIT expert in information science. But the realm of D&D fans has now expanded.
Part of the pull, Given says, has been the fantasy genre expanding its audiences through tentpole releases like the Lord of the Rings movies or HBO’s Game of Thrones adaption. D&D is also front and centre in Netflix’s Stranger Things, where fan-favourite characters use monsters and theories from the game to understand mysterious forces at play in their hometown.
Given says D&D’s increasing popularity is also linked to the mainstream now viewing previously outcast nerds as cool. “We’ve got so many in the younger generations who are embracing different ways of being and neurodivergency,” she says.
“I think there’s a real inclusiveness in this where people are free to express themselves in a whole range of ways,” the academic adds, pointing at the game’s communal nature. “Escaping is so often escaping into our own heads – reading a book, watching a movie, playing a video game – so this is different.”
As the game has grown, so has professional dungeon mastering. Matt Brown, who lives in Melbourne, started playing D&D a decade ago with a group of friends when he was 21. Later he discovered the allure of being a DM, drawn in by the ability to create worlds and narratives.
Brown now works full-time as a DM – both online and table-top – after making D&D content on YouTube and Twitch since 2017. Brown says there was a shift to playing online during Covid when dedicated progams like Forge and Roll20 emerged to facilitate virtual tabletops.
His DM work started snowballing and it is “paying the rent now,” Brown says. “It is very surreal.”
Therapy with orcs
The game hasn’t avoided controversy. In 1982, US woman Patricia Pulling failed in an attempt to sue D&D’s makers after her son, a D&D player, killed himself. She later formed the campaign group Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD), believing the game was connected to suicides and devil worshipping.
Nick Issa, who started playing D&D when he was 10 and is now a high school English teacher in Australia’s capital, Canberra, recalls the moral panic in the 1990s when he used to play the game for entire weekends.
“I remember we were planning to have this session, and one guy called me and said ‘My mum won’t let me go … she thinks it’s a form of devil worshiping.”
In reality, research suggests there are many benefits to tabletop role-playing games. Research released last year by James Cook University suggested D&D significantly decreased depression, stress and anxiety and improved self-esteem among players.
Issa says from the age of 10 it boosted his confidence and fuelled his love of poetry and writing. In 2017, he created an in-person D&D program for young people with autism, which was held up to four times a week due to its popularity.
“For a lot of these kids this was their social life, they weren’t very comfortable and had anxiety getting out and about, so it was their way of getting to meet new people,” Issa says. Players began connecting outside the program.
“They just came out of their shell, they could just play a role and bring out their personalities. Everyone loves being a half-elf princess assassin. It’s that alter-ego that everyone has and they just lapped it up.”
Issa, who later introduced D&D as a part of a role-playing game elective at the high school where he works, has also seen the game help students re-engage at school. The feedback he received from one parent, he says, was the highlight of his career.
“She was in tears as she was talking on the phone. She has not seen her son devour books like he does when he’s reading through the player’s handbook. He was just someone who was device-driven; if it wasn’t on his laptop, he wasn’t interested. [His mum] hadn’t see that side of him ever.”
Anderson (and his barbarian, Brock) has been visiting Fortress in Sydney every week over the past six months since he discovered Dungeons & Dragons.
“I used to play rugby and soccer,” he says. “It broke me down because I wasn’t that great a player and my teammates would say ‘Oh you missed a shot, what are you doing? You’re failing’.”
But when he plays D&D “it’s the opposite”, Anderson says.
“Even if I mess up one thing they’d say: ‘That was a great story-building moment. That was a great character development moment’. It builds you up rather than breaking you down.”
