The Keepers of the Realm : Fantasy Fans Still Game for Dungeons & Dragons

By day, Rami Silverman of Chatsworth is a gas station attendant. By night he is Kerron, a brave knight exploring an evil temple in search of a magical artifact that can see the future.

Joining his nocturnal quest are Centurion and Sgt. Pepper, both skilled woodsmen and expert archers. During the day they are Mark Doty, a quality-control worker for the Navy, and his twin brother, James, who builds aircraft power supplies and radar systems.

This night finds these noble adventurers grappling with a Frankensteinian monster--horribly scarred from where its limbs were stitched together by a wizard--in a torture chamber. The creature cracks several of Kerron’s ribs and stuffs him into a spike-lined, iron casket. One of Centurion’s shoulders is dislocated as well.

By the end of the evening, however, goodness prevails. The threesome kills the golem with an enchanted dagger and continues the search for the artifact.

They will meet again next Friday. For these men, the adventure never ends. They have no complaints. It’s only a game.

And a way of life.

It’s Dungeons & Dragons, the original fantasy role-playing game that recently passed its 20th birthday and is now played by 12 million adherents worldwide.

“It lets you do things you couldn’t do in real life,” said Daniel Cole, 27, explaining why he has played D & D for more than half his life. “I would dearly love to be a wizard, but I can’t.”

Along the way, D & D has weathered attacks more treacherous than any imaginary monster--from religious groups, anti-violence organizations, fearful parents and newfound competition from computer games.

It has been implicated in murders, a missing-person case and other all-too-real-life situations. But D & D, like its resourceful knights, wizards, thieves and clerics, has survived.

Players such as Silverman and the Dotys are approaching middle age, yet they have no plans to give up the quest. Silverman, 31, and the Doty twins, 40, meet weekly in the back room of a Chatsworth store called the Game Zone.

“These guys have been in countless dungeons, but it’s never the same,” said Walter Johnson, who owns the Game Zone. “They never know what is going to be behind the next door.”

D & D is so engrossing that players say they can practically hear the ringing clash of swords during a heated battle. Old-style board games, and even the latest computer games, can’t compare.

“It’s unplanned compared to a CD-ROM game,” said Derek Hiemforth, 27, a computer technician and devoted D & D gamer. “It combines the best elements of playing Monopoly and reading a book.”

Role-playing games are an adult version of “let’s pretend,” allowing players to be heroes in adventures of their own making. Each game has rules that conjure a genre, allowing wizards to cast spells, super-heroes to be more powerful than a locomotive or starships to eclipse the speed of light.

In the back room of the Game Zone, a large table is blanketed with rule books and pages of handwritten maps and notes. Metal figurines, two inches high and in some cases painstakingly painted, are placed on a large map to represent characters. Coke cans occupy the few clear spaces on the table.

To play D&D;, a participant creates a fictional persona, rolling dice to determine characteristics such as strength and intelligence. D & D has no game board, but hexagon-covered graph paper and vinyl maps are sometimes used to indicate a character’s position on a battlefield or within a maze.

Play begins with the referee, called the dungeon master, describing the setting and situation. Adventures come pre-made or are created by the dungeon master--sometimes including meticulous details such as the kingdom’s political structure, weather patterns and indigenous monsters. Working from these notes, the referee--in this instance, Johnson--tells the players what they see, hear or encounter as they explore.

No winner per se is ever declared. As the game session progresses, players obtain valuable items such as enchanted swords or magic potions and are rewarded with “experience points” for accomplishing goals. The points make them more powerful for the next round--wizards gain additional spells, thieves become more proficient and so forth.

“It’s not just dice and pencils and paper,” said Andy Schnegg, 13, of Woodland Hills. “It’s your imagination.”

A session ends at an agreed-upon time, or when the players are ready to drop from fatigue. Eight-hour gaming sessions are common, 20-hour stints are not unknown. Cole once played for 48 consecutive hours, pausing only to eat.

“As near as I can tell, someone’s interest in gaming is largely determined by their imagination,” Cole said. “My mom’s husband is a perfect example. He thinks it’s an utter waste of time.”

“Some people just don’t understand how to do it, so they say it’s stupid,” said Wilson Goss, 12, of Woodland Hills. He plays D & D on Sundays at Gym for the Mind, a Valley-based recreation center that promotes cerebral activities. “Everyone should try it just once. And then they can say what they want to about it.”

Dungeons & Dragons evolved from strategy war games of the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was during a war-gaming convention that David Arneson decided to take these battles played out with domino-sized figures a step further.

A history major in college, Arneson had participated in role-playing exercises to re-create events surrounding the French Revolution and the signing of the U. S. Constitution. To combine those exercises with the war games, he devised a system in which players would tunnel their troops underground, where they met monsters as well as other soldiers.

“Frankly, the boys in my club were bored,” said Arneson, now 48. “They wanted to try something new. To me, it was a logical extension to go into fantasy. It was less restrictive than history.”

Soon after that convention, Arneson connected with fellow gamer Gary Gygax, and together they created the forerunner to D & D.

“I think we all thought it was goofy,” said Arneson, speaking from his home in St. Paul, Minn. “We thought it was great, but we didn’t think anyone else would.”

The two men went on to found Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in Wisconsin to publish and distribute D & D sets. For four years, the game had steady but moderate sales from a niche audience.

Then came the missing player.

In 1979, a Michigan State University student and avid D & D player, James Dallas Egbert III, disappeared for a month. Reports began to circulate that Egbert had wandered off in a confused daze because he could no longer differentiate the adventures in the game from his real life.

Although Egbert was eventually found unharmed in Texas, with no indication that D & D was involved in his disappearance, the publicity generated by the incident caused a huge boost in sales.

Suddenly D & D was a nationwide phenomenon, and watchdog groups soon emerged. Wasn’t there something unhealthy, they wondered, about teen-agers playing hour after hour a game in which they pretended to kill monsters and pillage for treasure?

Some fundamentalist Christian leaders cD satanic, citing magic spells, demonic creatures and mythological gods depicted in game materials. Concern intensified when Egbert committed suicide a year later--again with speculation but no proof that D & D was a contributing factor.

D & D began appearing in court cases for violent crimes, as attorneys and law enforcement officials blamed it for shootings, conspiracies and even temporary insanity. Headline-grabbing incidents occurred nationwide:

In June, 1983, Ronald Lampasi of Laguna Hills shot each of his adoptive parents in the head. The prosecutor said the attacks may have been related to Lampasi playing D & D.

In November, 1986, a Watertown, N.Y., jury convicted 16-year-old David Ventiquattro of second-degree murder for shooting 11-year-old Martin Howland while they played D & D. Ventiquattro reportedly said he killed his friend because the boy had become evil.

In June, 1988, a Riverhead, N.Y., jury found Daniel Kasten, 20, guilty of murder in the shooting deaths of his parents. Kasten’s attorney unsuccessfully entered an insanity plea, saying Kasten believed his mind was under control of a Mind Flayer monster from D & D.

“There was a real tough time, from about 1983 to 1986,” Gygax said, “when there were some people trying to make hay. From 1986, up until the last few years, people would say, ‘Dungeons & Dragons--isn’t that the game that makes people commit suicide?’ ”

The game’s survival is a testament to its innocence, Gygax said.

“After 20 years, those people who started playing the game are now in positions of responsibility,” he said. “I think it’s a case of ‘Truth will out.’ All of the cases where people tried to use it as a defense, the courts laughed and they went away.”

D & D eventually became mainstream and was even the basis of a Saturday-morning cartoon series from 1983 to 1985. Schools nationwide now use it to promote math, reading and problem-solving skills.

Dozens of role-playing games now exist. Players can adopt roles as Western gunslingers, tentacled aliens or whatever else their imaginations desire. TSR, which publishes materials in 13 languages on D & D and other role-playing games, reported $120 million in sales in 1993.

On this recent Friday night, the warriors known as Kerron, Centurion and Pepper finish the evening gathered around a campfire, resting after the night’s battles.

Silverman and the Dotys wrap up the evening by clearing the table, wearily talking about who has to get up for work the next day. Figures are returned to boxes, notebooks stashed into backpacks, empty Chinese food containers tossed in the trash.

Despite it being nearly 2 a.m., the threesome lingers a while yet, watching a store employee fend off an alien invasion on his computer.

They drift away one by one, disappearing out of the store and into the night.

Next Friday, they’ll be back.