From Newsgroup: rec.games.frp.dnd

Source: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/26/nx-s1-5087506/dungeons-and-dragons-50th-anniversary


Dungeons, Dragons and shoulder pads: Why I loved D&D as a closeted teen
August 26, 20246:00 AM ET

Glen Weldon

Dungeons & Dragons turns 50 this year. The tabletop role playing game
(TTRPG) has gone through a slew of revised editions, expansions and hack rCynrCO slay imitators, weathered a Satanic panic or two, seen itself
replaced in the hearts and minds of the nationrCOs nerds by games like
Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon, only to experience a bold popular
resurgence in recent years, thanks in no small part to so-called Actual
Play TTRPG podcasts and web series like Critical Role, Dimension 20 and
The Adventure Zone.

In other words: As a pop culture phenomenon, itrCOs been hacked, but it
still slays.

I played my first game of D&D in 1978, just four years after its launch.
I was 10 years old; it was summer. My friend down the street invited me
over to his house, which usually meant forcing me to play catch with him
in his backyard (read: HerCOd whip a baseball at my face, IrCOd flinch and
let it bounce off me, IrCOd pick it up and toss it back so it landed in
the grass 3 feet in front of him with a woeful thud; repeat until dinner time). On this occasion, to my surprise and delight, we sat on his
screened-in porch as he took out what I have since learned was the box
of rulebooks and polyhedral dice known as the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.

I loved it from the jump, largely because everything about the game was
so deeply indebted to my beloved Tolkien (Wizards! Halflings! Orcs! That titular dragon on the box cover, atop its pile of gold!). But it didnrCOt last; my neighbor started at a new school in the fall, and we lost touch.

I didnrCOt start playing my first real, sustained D&D campaign until three years later. My friend David wanted to try his hand at being a dungeon
master and invited me and three other kids I didnrCOt know to form an adventuring party. When I arrived at that very first session in DavidrCOs bedroom, theyrCOd already created their characters rCo a fighter, a thief
and a ranger. They urged me to play as a cleric, who could hang back and
heal them whenever they got beaten up. I liked the idea of staying out
of the heat of battle and just being the guy who patched my friends up, earning their deep and abiding gratitude. Feeling needed, appreciated.
It was tempting, I admit. But then destiny, in the form of my nascent queerness, intervened.

David invited me to look through a thin paperback D&D supplemental
rulebook called The Rogues Gallery rCo page after page of ready-made characters I could choose from. I flipped through the clerics, but
nothing grabbed me. But then, on page 12, just above the chart of a
class of characters called Illusionists, I saw it. Him.

It was a pencil sketch by illustrator Jeff Dee. A tall, thin male figure stands facing the viewer. In his right hand he holds a staff, while his
left is open, palm up. He holds his arms slightly away from his body,
and sets his shoulders at a rakish tilt rCo the resulting stance is
somewhere between that of an insouciant shrug and a hearty rCLta-DAHHH!rCY
He is surrounded by a thick fog rCo the spell he is presumably casting rCo
out of which leer several monstrous faces.

I liked that. But what I loved, what moved me, what sealed the deal for
my young, closeted, queer self, was his outfit.

Thigh boots, for one thing. I mean, what was I, made of stone?

Plus, scandalously tight pants set off by a belt and dagger. And
clinging to every ridge of his slim, muscular torso, a sleeveless tunic
rCo a tank-top, basically rCo that still somehow managed to boast kicky shoulder pads.

This is the important bit, the part you must understand: IrCOm not just talking thin, epaulet-like shoulder bumps. No, these were dramatic,
flared, Ming the Merciless meets Julia Sugarbaker shoulder pads.

The other stuff rCo the parted-down-the-middle blowout, the cheekbones,
the diadem, the big chunky necklace? Icing on the cake. Superfluous. IrCOm self-aware enough to know that it was that tank top with shoulder pads
that did it.

rCLI want to be an Illusionist,rCY I said, firmly, which caused my fellow players to roll their eyes and mutter the first of what would turn out
to be a sustained pattern of homophobic slurs in my general direction. I didnrCOt, and still donrCOt, care. I was fierce, and I was fabulous.

I fell hard for the game, then. I subscribed to Dragon magazine, and
regularly pestered my mom to schlep me to DragonrCOs Lair, in a sad strip
mall just north of Wilmington, Del., where I dutifully bought more
rulebooks, more dice, more dungeon modules and a steady stream of lead miniatures that I painted very, very, very badly.

It wasnrCOt easy. Just as I was entering my heedless, full-bore devotion
to the game, the Philly paper ran an article in its Sunday magazine
which cited rCLexpertsrCY about the gamerCOs purported Satanic roots. An article that, the following Sunday, caused the sweet, kindly pastor at
our sleepy suburban Grove United Methodist Church to launch into what
was (for him, anyway) a fire-and-brimstone sermon decrying the game.
About the same time, novelist Rona Jaffe published Mazes & Monsters, an extended bout of literary hand-wringing over the gamerCOs supposed
deleterious effect on the youth of America, which was promptly made into
a profoundly cheesy, absolute hoot-and-a-half of a TV movie starring a
young Tom Hanks as a dude who suffers a psychotic break attributed to
the game.

Over the handful of years I played D&D in earnest, back then, I had to
talk my parents off the ledge every time some new magazine article or 60 Minutes segment came out spotlighting the entirely manufactured rCLcontroversyrCY around the game. It was exhausting. But I kept at it; I
had to. I needed to.

Because there was this one time? When my friends and I were being rushed
by a phalanx of orcs, and I cast an illusion of a deep pit on the ground
in front of us, filled with bubbling acid and metal spikes, and the orcs failed their saving throws and believed they fell into said illusory
pit, and impaled themselves on the illusory spikes, and dissolved in the illusory acid and thus died actual deaths?

That? That was cool. And, for just those few fleeting seconds, down
there in the deepest, most tortured throes of my closeted,
excruciatingly awkward puberty, so was I.

Ta-dah.
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