Inside the 40 Year-Long Dungeons & Dragons Game | Obsessed | WIRED

remember that game of dnd you started when you were 11 what if it never stopped my name is robert wordoff i'm a history professor at the university of western ontario i am a dungeon master for a campaign that has been going on for 40 years what began in secret with a few friends has turned into a game that takes up much of robert's life and most of his house robert has around 30 000 hand-painted figurines countless custom-made pieces of terrain and dozens of devoted players taking part in his campaign if you're going to keep a game going for 40 years it's going to have to be a good game if you're going to have people who are going to want to play that are going to want to fly in you're going to have to offer a product that is going to be better than all the other alternatives they're out there i can certainly say with confidence that this is the best dungeons and dragons game in the world so if i'm playing for 10 hours a week at 52 weeks in a year that means i'm doing that times 40 that would be 20 800 hours how many minutes is that so if i figured that out in minutes that would end up being 1.24 million minutes i think as you crest the ridge there seems to be quite a commotion you estimate it could be as many as two dozen or so goblins you surprise them as much as they have surprised you i need a surprise role that's really just the start almost every major decision in robert's life is designed to keep the game going when i was buying a house the most important part for me was getting a gaming space that i could use my entire basement is my gaming area if he doesn't slow down he's gonna need a bigger house [Music] i have a lot of figs i've got orcs i've got elves i've got dwarves i've got all the basic things that you'd expect but i also have very distinct and unique figs i have vampires i have undead i have zombies i have werewolves beholders tiamat the mother of all dragons all the big demonic lords from the demogorgon but also heroes so all the great kings and queens of countries the high-level wizards all of these things my goal is to have everything but what's the point of having so many figurines if you don't have any amazing terrain to place them on robert has no shortage in that department either i need to be able to adapt to wherever the party's going to go that means that i need to have my green terrains i need to have mountain terrain i need to have all of my winter terrain my air desert trains my water trains if they're going to go into a town now i need a town okay are they in a roman town are they in an anglo-saxon town are they in an african town is it high medieval is it low medieval so now i'm trying to be able to put out a village or a town for every one of these historical settings i can't put figurines on the table unless they are painted up to a certain level that means that someone's got to do a heck of a lot of painting and so that ends up being me if you found me on an average day working on the game you'd probably see me in my painting room and i'm going to be spending two three four hours painting figs and do people take their figs home no no nobody is allowed to take their figurines home nobody is actually allowed to touch the figs on the table so that's also something that would be different a person who played dungeons and dragons would probably come to my table and they would immediately reach over to grab their fig i'm probably going to growl at them and tell them don't touch the figs because i have to move everything i'm sure my critics would say that there's a god complex going on about that this here is the figurine of the demon lord orcas it's well known to dennis and dragons and in my campaign a hundred years ago which would be an actual time something like maybe 1989 the group banished this demon so they thought that's fine only recently last year actually the demon's back they don't know where he is they're desperately trying to find him and he's definitely up to no good while fantasy role-playing and nerd culture are often celebrated today robert's campaign started during a time when people felt like they needed to play in secret in the 80s and 90s it was certainly more difficult to try to talk about or explain the game to people i grew up in a very small town and it was quite a conservative town and so the town inevitably found out that we were playing and they didn't know what the heck we were doing and dungeons and dragons had very bad press at the time tonight we begin with a story about make-believe adventure and real-life violence and what some critics fear is a connection between the two in a game called dungeons and dragons a movie came out while we were playing called mazes and monsters and it's a story of how they play this game and then they try to act it out in real life and basically bad things certainly happen can you tell me of the giant dragon on my travels here i heard him what's now called the satanic panic was going on at the time why does my son want to play this game all the time why is he obsessed about it what are you doing to him are you a cult leader i got called a cult leader a communist like all these all these crazy labels when i watched stranger things it obviously hit home for me it is almost here what is it what if it's a demogorgon oh jesus we're so screwed if it's the demogorgon it's not the demogorgon the whole concept matched exactly what we were doing in the early 1980s over the following decades robert went on to build a campaign of unrivaled complexity one of the things that makes my game unique is the story and the depth of the campaign my world is an alternative fantasy version of historical earth within other historical aspects added to it so if somebody comes in and they want to go to athens i can now bring in that history philosophy religion at the end of the game i'm able to create what i need to create come up with totally new races totally new nations totally new cultures totally new mythologies but also to use what the world already has a typical dungeon master curates the quest for a handful of players over the course of a few months robert meanwhile is tracking the adventures of more than 50 players with story arcs that often span decades since the beginning there's probably been about 500 characters that have been made and played within the game when a new player comes in i'm inviting them to play a game that they're going to be welcome to keep playing until i die so you could start a character nine generations later that family could take over let's say the roman empire on one level you're playing that individual character on a macro level you're also controlling the roman empire so there are numerous story arcs that are going on many of those last for generations there's love stories romances there's quests there's vengeance all these things are happening so even though there is this large campaign quest this large ultimate goal you've got literally thousands of subplots and some campaigns going on from the beginning robert quickly learned which rules could be bent and which rules could be broken when we started playing there was probably a short period of time when i played according to the actual rules but after that i had to fill in holes and so i developed my own rule system and i've never really gone back so i have what gamers would call a homebrew rule system and actually that's how the game was intended when the game first came out one of the lines in the dungeon master guide told you that these are a set of rules but to apply these loosely and within my game and my world there are all kinds of different aspects that you wouldn't see in an ordinary dungeons dragon's rule system my rules are fast they're quick flowing people don't have to stop and check things and that speed of gameplay is something that i find so different in my game from ordinary dungeons and dragons robert strives to keep the stakes as high as possible for his players especially when it comes to life and death consequences for their characters i want death to mean something i don't want this to be like a video game that you simply hit the reset button and you're just going to start a new character so when your character dies if you don't have any other characters then you're out of the game the game's over for you and so when characters die or bad things happen i have seen growing men weep at the table and that's something also people who don't play are a bit disturbed if they hear that somebody who's been playing a character for a long time weeps at the table but i'm trying to create emotion i'm trying to create excitement people are scared and knowing that if you die you could be out of the game or that character that you put so much time in is now dead obviously people's heart rates are up there's emotion going on so i can't be shocked and surprised when that character dies that there's a show of emotion okay i have one daughter and ever since she was a baby she's been around this i think maybe when she was six or seven was the first time when she asked whether she could play so she created a character as a fairy and she still plays now she's 20 years old i mean obviously there's other stuff going on in her life but she's been playing all the way through the interesting thing happens when she starts dating and then her boyfriend wants to play and of course i have to tell her straight off they go now this relationship may not last forever but the game's gonna last forever so get ready because i'm anticipating a situation when you break up with him i can't break up with him so once i allow somebody to come into the game i'm never ever going to stop them from playing the game so sure enough that situation happened so it can be a little bit awkward at times but it means a lot to be able to have my daughter play the game and to have her interested in the game and she obviously knows what the game means to me uh for sure i think there's an assumption that at some point we're all going to grow up and we're going to stop playing games and so people will say how does your game end how's it going to end and it's like well my answer is always how does the world end how is your world gonna end well it's probably gonna end when i die well for you it is right and so the answer is largely the same it's much like life more than anything else the game represents friendship and i find that friendship is based on planks you need something to hold it together so we may have gone to high school together but as we go through our lives unless we have a plank we're not gonna get together we're not gonna fly to see each other so as long as i can keep doing it hopefully for all of my life i won't lose my friends my basement's my sanctuary it's a place that i can come and i can almost as soon as i walk down here i am in a different world and it opens up all the doors of creativity i don't ever intend on stopping playing on stopping painting on stopping building and on stopping bringing my friends together to play the game i don't ever intend on quitting

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,667,016

Keywords: 40 year d and d game, 40 year dungeons and dragons game, d and d, dnd, dnd dungeon master, dnd game, dungeon master wired, dungeons & dragons, dungeons & dragons wired, dungeons and dragons, dungeons and dragons dungeon master, obsessed, obsessed d and d, obsessed dand, ott obsessed, robert wardaugh, robert wardhaugh, the game, the game dnd, the game robert wardhaugh, wired, wired obsessed

Id: nJ-ehbVQYxI

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/GoldXP]

Imagine her ex bf being all like "I'm actually here to see your dad..."

[u/Rungi500]

I only played pen and paper once or twice but I had all the manuals and about 50 paperbacks based on the Dragonlance trilogy. Still love it.

[u/Spinnetti]

I've got friends still playing same folks/game from 1982 or so... Its a good excuse to stay connected. When I heard him speak, all I could think was "Inconceivable!"

[u/denversocialists]

He says it's the best D&D game in the world, but how can that be when he doesn't play at my table?

[u/pizza_tron]

"Don't touch the figs!"

[u/dan-halen]

Seems like he's playing a West Marches variant that allows different groups to come in and out of the world. Almost like a massive multiplayer NOT-online.

[u/BaconReceptacle]

For decades, I hid the fact that I was founder and president of the D&D club in my middle school back in the 80's. Now at least there are people who wont scoff and shout out "nerd" if I mention that.

*edit: I deserve this

[u/Kindly-Jelly8443]

40 years long and if your character dies you're out? That's pretty nuts. Imagine spending 20 years with mostly the same crew then be asked to leave.

[u/EepeesJ1]

This is so freaking cool. I love that this guy found something he enjoyed and dedicated his life to sharing his enjoyment with his players. People who don't play the game don't understand how much discipline and love for the game it takes to collect terrain, figures, and paint, and that doesn't even take into account the creativity and countless hours he must spend crafting the story for his players.

Man I kinda hope he has an adventure log or journal that someone can pick up and turn into an epic fantasy series.

I miss playing D&D. My group just kinda grew out of the game after a couple years and we just started meeting less and less frequently. Wish I could play in a campaign again with some people, but it's hard making time for this hobby with everything else I got going on.