Inside the World's Greatest Dungeons & Dragons Game
Remember that game of Dungeons & Dragons you started when you were 11? What if it never stopped? Robert Wardhaugh has been the Dungeon Master for a D&D game that's been going on for over 40 years. In his game, once you start playing...you keep playing.
Video Transcript
- Remember that game of D&D you started when you were 11? What if it never stopped?
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: My name is Robert Wardhaugh. 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 and 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 that are out there. I can certainly say with confidence that this is the best Dungeons and Dragons game in the world.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So if I'm playing for 10 hours a week at 52 weeks in a year, that means from doing that times 40, that would be 20,800 hours.
- How many minutes is that?
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: So if I figure that out in minutes, that would end up being 1.24 million minutes, I think.
As you cross, 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 rule.
- That's really just the start. Almost every major decision in Robert's life is designed to keep the game going.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 going to need a bigger house.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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.
- The demogorgon. What the [BLEEP]?
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: I need to be able to adapt to wherever the party is going to go. That means that I need to have my green trains. I need to have mountain terrain. I need to have all of my winter terrain, my air desert terrains, my water terrains. If they're going to go into a town, now I need a town, OK, 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, or four hours painting figs.
- And do people take their figs home?
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 Orcus. It's well-known to Dungeons and Dragons. And in my campaign, 100 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 and nerd culture are often celebrated today, Robert's campaign started during a time when people felt like they needed to play in secret.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 crazy labels.
When I watched "Stranger Things," it obviously hit home for me.
- It is almost here.
- What is it?
- What if it's the demogorgon? Oh, Jesus, we're so screwed if it's the demogorgon.
- It's not the demogorgon.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 into 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 subcampaigns going on.
- From the beginning, Robert quickly learned which rules could be bent and which rules could be broken.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 and Dragons 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.
ROBERT WARDHAUGH: 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 here it's 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 is over for you.
And so when characters die or bad things happen, I have seen grown 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.
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-- [INAUDIBLE]-- this relationship may not last forever, but the game is going to 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, 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 don't say, how does your game end? How is it going to end? In a sling, well, my answer is always, how does the world end? How is your world can end? Well, it's probably an 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 going to get together. We're not going to 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.
