Yes, I do read actual books on occasion. I got this on the same day I finished my years-long quest to find a copy of MAR Barker’s The Man of Gold. (In short, it’s a fantasy novel, but utterly alien in setting and just as in depth as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. This is what you get when language professors make up fantasy stories. I don’t know if you can apply anything in Man of Gold to your fantasy RPG campaign, but it’s inspirational nonetheless.)
I’d heard of this Dice book somewhere and it had a glowing review, so I was thrilled to find it in the RPG section of Coas Bookstore. I started reading it almost immediately and was just as quickly disappointed. If you don’t know anything about the history of D&D’s creation and history, this might be a nice primer, albeit laborious.
You see, it commits the most tone-deaf trope there is about gamers: the author spends way too many pages telling you about his character and his campaign. Forehead slap. Nobody cares about your campaign is an absolute truism when it comes to RPG conversation with strangers. Worse, the author is an elitist snob gamer. He’s an intellectual playing the game correctly and better than you. He’s not like you weirdoes playing the game.
Are there weirdoes playing the game? Sure. Are you better than them? Probably, though it depends on what you’re measuring. Do you want to play with them? Every gaming group discriminates on some basis or another. Regardless, you’re in the same community as these people you look down on. Maybe you should consider a different hobby if you’re embarrassed by the association, because it’s likely elitists are going to quit RPG’s when it’s no longer cool and the weirdoes will never leave it.
Did I learn something? Yeah, there were some little factoids I found interesting. Then the book waves explaining some of the legal wrangling before the dissolution of TSR and refers you to a website for further details. In a 250-page book, where at least a quarter of it describes the author’s home campaign, I expect the details to be in the book.
I’ve read so many articles and watched so many videos on the subject of D&D’s history, I was looking forward to an actual published book on the subject to make my knowledge somehow official. Maybe this was the first published history of D&D and its more prototype than finished product. Maybe it’s just a book for normies, not gamers, who do not need to be told what an RPG is. This is in the opening spiel of any rulebook.
The somewhat tragic part of the book is how well it is researched. The author cites volumes of articles and books. He interviewed many important people in the hobby. (Unfortunately, Gygax and Arneson had passed before this book came about.) He went to conventions and even had an advanced LARP experience.
Perhaps the worst element of the book is at the end, where it becomes a promo for D&D Next (which would become the Fifth Edition). The game designers at WOTC gave the author access to developer conferences and playtest material. For a history of D&D book, discussion of the future of the game should have been epilogue. Instead, it becomes an ad. Discussions about the breakdown of 3e, 3.5e being released as a fix, the failure of 4e, and the rise of the OSR are breezed over. This is what the gamers who bought the book wanted to read about! Oh, and this preview of the future dates a book which should have been timeless in its content as an official history book.
I was not the audience for this RPG book. Hand this book to your normie friends who are curious about D&D. They’ll think they’ve acquired some great knowledge and will likely become insufferable.
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