For more than four decades, I have organized games of Dungeons & Dragons, the famous fantasy role-playing game invented in 1974 near my southeastern Wisconsin birthplace. I began as a 12-year-old “Dungeon Master” for my neighborhood friends, and just two years later, I was writing and running adventures at Gen Con, the biggest D&D convention in North America.
More than a thousand hours would follow, joining with hundreds of players to create shared stories – many detailed on EpicSavingThrow.com.
Like most role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons pairs the idea of the quantified self with each player’s personal fantasy of gaining superpowers. If you could be someone else – anything you can imagine – what would you choose? Would you pick great physical prowess or knowledge to command magic? Would you be human, a creature from myth, or something far more strange? In D&D, every one of those decisions is quantified data: ability scores like Strength and Intelligence, power levels measured in character classes, and more.
Once you have an “imaginary quantified self” written out on a character sheet, you can start playing the game with other players: The characters meet, their shared story begins, and everyone takes turns making decisions and rolling dice to overcome obstacles described by the Dungeon Master (DM).
While I’ve enjoyed D&D on and off since junior high school, there was one question I had not reflected upon: Just how many games have I helped organize, schedule, and manage? How many players had I helped experience this fantasy adventure game? How many hours had I spent behind a Dungeon Master’s screen?
It turns out my DM history of helping people experience D&D looks something the visualization below: at least 266 organized events remembered, each with 4 to 31 players at a time, and averaging about three and a half hours of play every session. By rough estimate, that’s more than 925 hours involving more than a thousand different players.
Click to view on Tableau Public
Source: Convention programs (Gen Con, Chaoticon, Gary Con, PAX Unplugged), event listings on the NYC Dungeons & Dragons Meetup Group, and personal campaign notes on EpicSavingThrow.com.
Let’s break down that cluttered timeline a bit…
There And Back Again: The Wisconsin Era
The mid-1980s suburban Midwest was very much like what was recreated in Stranger Things, minus the constant psychic horrors.
I got my first Dungeons & Dragons boxed set as a birthday gift, soon followed by the hardcover Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. While an anti-D&D girlfriend delayed further games for awhile, D&D proved great at making new friends in the basement of my college dorm. Throughout the 1990s, chasing new career opportunities allowed for only infrequent game conventions, but such events where thousands of players would gather allowed for much bigger games in experimental rules formats – especially tapping into the “live action” role-playing craze of the time.
Click to view on Tableau Public
Journey To The East: The New York City Era
Upon moving to New York City in 2005, I had to find new friends. Answering an online ad, I met a group who happened to work at Google’s brand new headquarters in Chelsea, and soon our secret weekend Dungeons & Dragons was a regular happening (though eventually discovered by Larry Page while he was walking past our game in progress). A few more pick-up games from ads followed, running adventures in others’ homes in Midtown and the Upper West Side.
Realizing there were many isolated former players and curious newcomers out there, I began helping run games and playtest a new rules update at The Brooklyn Strategist in Carroll Gardens and The Compleat Strategist in Midtown Manhattan.
In 2014, to help popularize the new 5th D&D edition, I created FastCharacter.com to get players into the game as quickly as possible. Soon I was organizing games at gaming stores, cafes, and bars across Manhattan and Brooklyn right up until the chilling isolation of the pandemic sent players exclusively online for a time.
Click to view on Tableau Public
Finally, a Peek at D&D ‘Quantified’ Character Sheets
Across these past four decades, I have given life (and suffered death) to many fantastic characters. A few such “imaginary quantified selves” still linger in my memory, especially a few favorite “bad guys” thrown at players to challenge them…
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