A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year. The tabletop role-playing game has spawned TV shows, YouTube series, and podcasts. NPR critic Glen Weldon was playing D&D back in its early days. He's here to tell us about how the game has changed. Glen, so I'm one of those people that has heard about D&D for a long time, for decades, but have never actually played. So tell me more about the prem ise.
GLEN WELDON, BYLINE: OK. Well, basically, it's a role-playing game as you say, and that's right there in the name. When you play, you create a character. Maybe you're an elf, a dwarf. You give that character a job - you're a wizard, you're a fighter. Most importantly, you give yourself a backstory which shapes how you play the game, what choices you make. And the world of the game around you is shaped by your dungeon master or DM. That's the person who creates the situations you encounter, the monsters you fight. But the thing that's so great about this game is that everything that happens isn't just dictated to you by your dungeon master. It's created by you and your fellow players and the DM together. You find what happens all at once.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, you wrote an essay for NPR about your very first D&D character. Tell us about that.
WELDON: Well, yeah, I started playing a few years after it came out. And when I was 13, I started playing as a character who I stuck with for years. He was a kind of wizard called an illusionist. And I chose him because I found this one pencil sketch in a D&D rule book by illustrator Jeff D. It was an illusionist casting a gnarly-looking spell, and I dug that, but what I loved, what moved me, and what frankly sealed the deal for my young closeted, queer self was his outfit. And I went back and found this illustration. You can see it in the essay. A, He had thigh boots for one thing. I mean, I'm not made of stone.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).
WELDON: Plus, he had very tight pants, and this form-fitting tunic, a sleeveless tunic - you and I would call it a tank top. But the important thing is that was a tank top with shoulder pads, and I'm not talking like little epaulets. I mean these were some dramatic, flared out, Ming the Merciless meets Julia Sugarbaker shoulder pads. So I'd love to sit here and tell you that it was something profound that hooked me on the game, like the magic of the imagination and the camaraderie with my fellow players, but real talk, it was that muscle shirt with the big swoopy shoulder pads.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah, that makes sense to me. How has D&D changed over the years?
WELDON: Well, the thing is back when I was first playing back in the '70s and '80s, you could not go a month without some newspaper column or TV news segment wondering if the game was a tool of Satan. Now, maybe that made sense for that discussion to take place within the evangelical community, but for some reason, that weird religious panic kept making its way into mainstream media. There was a "60 Minutes" segment about it, for crying out loud. And that had a real chilling effect. Even my family's sweet, very soft-spoken Methodist pastor in our little suburban Philly church - this was a guy who would ever seem to get excited about bake sales and potlucks. All of a sudden, one week, he launches into this fire and brimstone tirade against the game, and I had to talk my parents off the ledge for like the 50th time.
But eventually, of course, that all passed. D&D got supplanted in the minds of the nations' nerds by games like Magic the Gathering and Pokemon. But new additions, new updates keep coming out. We're getting another one this year for the 50th anniversary. And recently, it has experienced a big resurgence, thanks in large part to those podcasts and web series you mentioned, where people record themselves playing the game in real time. They are crawling through dungeons, they are hacking, they're slaying on shows like "Critical Role," "Dimension 20" and "The Adventure Zone." And as I say in the essay, this is a pop culture phenomenon at age 50. So what's remarkable is that, yeah, D&D has been hacked, but it still slays.
MARTÍNEZ: Absolutely. That Satanic scare, Glen - that's the reason why my parents wouldn't let me play it.
WELDON: Exactly right.
MARTÍNEZ: Glen, thank you very much.
WELDON: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF E.VAX'S "THE MULE")
MARTÍNEZ: Glen Weldon hosts NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. You can read Glen's recent essay and see those shoulder pads right there in your face by going to npr.org and clicking on Culture.
(SOUNDBITE OF E.VAX'S "THE MULE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
