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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Lifestyle
Vicky Jessop

From moral panic to big-screen blockbuster: the rise (and rise) of Dungeons & Dragons

When fantasy role-playing first arrived in the UK in the late 1970s with Dungeons & Dragons, not everyone received it with open arms. Ian Livingstone, who brought the game to the UK before co-founding the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, remembers well the response from parts of the religious community.

“When the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks came out, the Evangelical Alliance published an eight-page warning guide about them saying, ‘Because you’re interacting with ghouls and demons, you’re bound to get possessed by the devil.’”

He remembers hearing of a vicar in the West Country who tried to persuade his congregation to burn the books, “because of the effect that it had on kids.”

Some 50 years on, and it seems like those who attempted to stop the rise of role-playing games have comprehensively failed. Since Livingstone released Fighting Fantasy, the tabletop gaming industry has mushroomed to a multi-million pound economy worldwide, and it hasn’t stopped since.

While Fighting Fantasy came to an end in the early 2000s, Dungeons & Dragons remains the top dog. Launched in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson – Livingstone explains how he brought it to the UK a few years later in his book Dice Men – this game is now played around the world by millions of devotees. It even has its own Hollywood adaption (starring Chris Pine and Hugh Grant) coming out in cinemas this month.

(Aidan Monaghan)

D&D is infamously complex. Any person starting out might balk at the sheer number of dice involved (upwards of five different kinds), not to mention differentiating between the character classes and subclasses, monsters and combat rules.

In it, you and your companions take on the role of adventurers travelling across a fantastical realm. It’s a combination of collaborative storytelling - where your decisions affect where you go and how you interact with in-game characters - and combat, rolling the dice to “hit” enemies and deal damage to them.

However, the neverending rules haven’t put off people from giving it a go, especially in the capital. London boasts hundreds of gaming cafés, thousands of players and even its own D&D convention, called Dragonmeet, which takes place every year in Hammersmith. And the number of devotees is still growing.

Garry Harper, a veteran of the UK D&D scene, says, “I think ultimately, geek is cool again. It’s cool to be geek. And the internet’s helped that because it’s allowed people to bring out their personalities, who they are.

“And the Dungeons & Dragons community embraces that. The community does not judge you. You can be who you want to be – not just in the game, but outside. [D&D] is a great way of making friends.”

Harper helped found Role Play Haven, a chain of in-person stores across London which host weekly D&D sessions. Though older fans might look back fondly on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoons of the 1980s, that vanished from screens in 1985. In today’s cultural conversation, D&D’s rampant popularity is down to a few different factors, one of them being Stranger Things.

The game features prominently in the series. The lead characters play a tabletop version and the show’s monsters are named after monsters in the game. “Stranger Things has really helped massively,” Harper says. “It’s helped, because everyone’s gone, ‘what are they doing? I want to try that.’”

In addition to its sudden emergence into the cultural mainstream, the other factor in D&D’s popularity would be the Covid-19 pandemic. Locked at home for months on end, many people turned to online D&D sessions to assuage their boredom and provide some sort of escapism from the real world.

“It’s wonderful. It’s also very good for people’s mental health as well; that’s a huge benefit,” says Robert Bradley, citing the game’s capacity for escapism, creativity and collaboration as hugely beneficial, adding that in a post-Covid world, its lure remains as strong as ever.

Robert Bradley from Rolldark, a D&D roleplaying company (Robert Bradley)

Bradley’s own love of D&D ended up becoming a full-time job when he realised there was a gap in the market for Dungeon Masters (the person who is in charge of the game’s narrative and rules).

His company, RollDark, now rents out professional Dungeon Masters to groups of players keen for a high-quality gaming experience – and during the pandemic, demand for their services mushroomed, especially in London, which he describes as “pretty much where it is”.

As a result, he’s run games at everything from corporate events (Amazon, Deloitte and Sony are fans) to private sessions. “I’ve run a game every month [for a few years] and they’re all stockbrokers and the last people you’d think in a million years that would sit down and put on silly voices and talk about all sorts of crazy fantasy-type things, but no, they absolutely love it.

“I remember when I first rocked up and they were in a big manor house on the edge of Harrow. And had all these Porsches parked up in the driveway and I thought, ‘Oh, God, what’s this?’”

The players attracted to the game are remarkably diverse, he says. Gone are the days of men-only sessions; these days, women are increasingly making their mark, both in online and in-person sessions, while the demographic of attendees is skewing increasingly younger and LGBTQIA+ representation is also on the up.

“We get a lot of people in their early 20s,” Harper adds of his Role Play Haven branches. “We used to be a very male-dominated industry. Now, the girls are screaming up there at the moment, taking control, which is awesome.

“We had girls go into some of our branches, in the really early days, and the guys just stared at them and it was horrible… now [we’re] at a point where we’ve got a good demographic of 50/50.”

D&D has attracted its fair share of celebrity players over the years: Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert and even Game of Thrones’ showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have all spoken about their love for the game. In London, the same applies.

“We do actually have a couple of people who go in anonymously,” Harper says. “We have a couple of big comedians - I don’t want to say their names - but they go to the clubs, blend in a little bit and play their geeky games.”

Most excitingly, this influx of new voices onto the D&D scene is also changing it profoundly. In addition to its evolving demographic, the growth of the internet has spawned a huge number of D&D ‘influencers’ who have brought the game to thousands of new enthusiasts through videos and podcasts while also championing different, more inclusive narratives.

The most famous of these would be Critical Role, the YouTube series that made a star of its Dungeon Master, Matthew Mercer, but smaller shows are also thriving – such as Three Black Halflings, the US/UK based podcast run by friends Jeremy Cobb, Jasper William Cartwright and Olivia Kennedy.

Since they started broadcasting in 2020, they’ve seen the D&D community grow and change. “People are setting up companies to create these games and sell them, and they’re able to actually be self-sustaining. I think that this space is expanding, and all different kinds of people are looking for very different kinds of experiences,” Cobb says.

“I think that is what that’s going to do is allow more people into the space of TTRPG [tabletop role playing game], because these new games cater to a more different person than what you might imagine to be your classic D&D player: that sort of white dude in the basement playing with his college mates.

“It’s a very, very different vibe [to what it used to be] and therefore welcoming new people in which I think will only help to expand the community.”

With the space continuing to open up, one thing is for sure: Dungeons & Dragons isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.

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