Of Dice & Men: forthcoming book on D&D

[jmccann]

Poking around looking for more stuff to read like Jon Peterson's Playing at the World I came across this:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451640501/

Has anyone heard of this guy? I have never heard of him. The book could be interesting.

[Deleted]

It's the greatest book on the subject ever written. Everyone should buy at least a hundred copies.




....yes, I **WAS** interviewed for it, why do you ask?

[kesher]

Never heard of him. However, IMO, the more books written about the history and cultural impact of this hobby, the better.

Accuracy, though, has had the bar set high by PatW...

[aldarron]

Yep. That book was announced several years ago. The author is a journalist who is known to the NYC Redboxers. Tavis knows him pretty well I think.

[The Semi-Retired Gamer]

Aug 3, 2013 21:02:29 GMT -6 jmccann said:

Poking around looking for more stuff to read like Jon Peterson's Playing at the World I came across this:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/1451640501/

Has anyone heard of this guy? I have never heard of him. The book could be interesting.

This is the first I've heard of it but now I need it.

[Deleted]

I've heard of this as well. It received some fairly extensive coverage.

[increment]

I'm really not the right person to review this book as such (in fact, I might be the absolute worst person to do it), but I have read it and can perhaps satisfy some of the curiosity here. Maybe a little more than half is a memoir of the author's experiences rediscovering D&D as an adult with a local gaming group, mixed with some investigative trips to conventions. The other half is on the history of D&D, and aimed at a mainstream audience rather than at hardcore gamers or historians: the book is pretty clear about its scope, so yes, it's not something to hold to the same "accuracy bar" as PatW. It does point readers interested in more historical detail to PatW, cites PatW in endnotes, and so on.

I definitely agree that raising the visibility of the hobby is important, and this books reaches an audience that would otherwise be completely ignorant of the ongoing cultural significance of RPGs.

[Zenopus]

Quite a few pages can be read via the preview on Amazon. I was able to read the entire section covering J. Eric Holmes & The Basic Set (pg 132-134). It reads nicely, but no new information for me.

I noted one very minor factual error: on page 134, he refers to the original Basic Set as containing "two staple bound booklets - a rulebook and a compilation of lists of monster and treasure", but as far as I know the original M&TA Set 1 was never sold as a stapled booklet. It was always a collection of loose cardstock sheets.

[oakesspalding]

I'm getting it for my birthday (I think), but I've browsed it in the bookstore. It's definitely on the more "popular" side than Jon's, with a "name" journalist author, blurbs from celebrities on the back and lots of first person anecdotal padding, etc. It annoys that it might sell more than Playing at the World, which I think is obviously the gold standard. Perhaps only half of Playing at the World directly deals with D&D (though the other half is fascinating in its own right), yet as long as the book is, every page is dense (in a good way) with information. When I first read it, it struck me as incredible that Jon had been able to zoom around, tracking down all the old zines and so on, but then I heard him say (on the Save or Die Podcast?) that he had been a collector of that material for many years. Still, it seems a momentous accomplishment.

[jmccann]

From these descriptions it sounds like this will go to the "buy ebook if cheap" list rather than the "buy it! read it!" list.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

[Finarvyn]

I bought a copy because I had a 20% off coupon at B&N, plus a gift card, so it cost me zero.

A couple of thoughts:

1. As has been mentioned, a lot of the book is the author remembering his own gaming experiences. Some neat ideas, but a couple of chapters into the book I'm already thinking about starting to skip over those parts.

2. Apparently, he's a 3E guy. He references rules from his 3.5 rulebooks. He seems to have had an earlier AD&D experience, as he mentions selling his hardback rulebooks in college for beer money, but I don't think he played AD&D nearly as much as 3E. That's not a bad thing, but it does put a different perspective on the book (in my opinion) since he's more explaining today's game and less delving into real history.

3. There are some chapters on the good old days, and he does mention Jon's book. I haven't read those parts yet and can't say whether or not anything will be new or not. My guess is "not" because the author seems to reference other works more than doing new research.

4. The book clearly is written for a "general" audience, not a person who has played a lot of RPGs. For example, he spends some time talking about types of dice and what stats would be rolled. I'm not sure how much value an old-timer will get out of the book -- but to be honest I had the same problem with Holmes' FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING GAMES book from 1981, and others find great value in that one.

5. So far (only a couple of chapters in) it's a decent enough read, but I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it. If I wanted one book about the history of D&D, I'd still go for Jon's PLAYING AT THE WORLD book.

[oakesspalding]

Well, I'm halfway through and if one skips the padding (I really couldn't care less that one of the author's D&D buddies is a professional clown who plays Lizard Men because he likes lizards), there's a breezy discussion of the early history of TSR that serves as reinforcement for what many of us perhaps already know.

I don't think the author read the OD&D books very carefully. For example, he claims that the Greyhawk supplement did something new in that "It...taught...how to create your own adventures...Instead of just explaining how to play a game, Greyhawk showed its readers how to make a world." But the short list of sort of quick dungeon ideas in Greyhawk-the Fountain of Snakes, etc.-was also present in The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures-the Bowling Alley for Giants, etc. Actually, Greyhawk was almost all simply character creation and combat rules expansions and additional monsters, spells and magic items. (I'm not of course suggesting there's anything wrong with that, per se.) And so it certainly disappoints if one is looking for a description of Gygax's Greyhawk or serious or detailed advice on how to create a world.

The DMG of course has TONS of that sort of stuff, though perversely, there's so much of it that the reader is almost numbed by it.

I did like the suggestion that the success of Greyhawk indicated the revolutionary possibility of SUPPLEMENTS- that unlike, say, Monopoly, or Africa Korp, you could could just, so to speak, keep going and going with the thing. Though I'm not sure Gygax had completely understood it at the time. It would be another few years before TSR was on board with adventure modules, for example.

[scalydemon]

Of Dice and Men the play www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/film/2013/09/05/dungeons-dragons-play-of-dice-and-men-chases-screen-dreams/

Which apparently is un-related to this book, but shares the same name and is about people playing D&D

[Finarvyn]

Sept 8, 2013 22:22:01 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

I don't think the author read the OD&D books very carefully. For example, he claims that the Greyhawk supplement did something new in that "It...taught...how to create your own adventures...Instead of just explaining how to play a game, Greyhawk showed its readers how to make a world."

I'm not more than a couple of chapters into the book, but I noticed he mentioned selling his hardback rulebooks so I wonder if he played OD&D at all. It could be that he played AD&D, thought it was "the original" and got "Greyhawk folio" confused with "Greyhawk supplement." Taken in that context, his description makes sense because Greyhawk did show folks how to create a world.

[oakesspalding]

No. The author is quite clear that he's talking about the 1975 supplement. A few pages later he somewhat misdescribes the contents of the AD&D Monster Manual. Oh, I guess these are just niggles that most readers won't really know or care about, but I still find it annoying.

[Zenopus]

The author has posted over at the Acaeum, and seems responsive to making corrections for the paperback version of the book. I'll point him over to this thread.

[Finarvyn]

Finished the book. It was a decent enough read, but I tended to skip over much of the personal gamelog parts. I was wrong that he only referenced 3.5 edition; he does quote rules from various editions along the way.

I did enjoy the end, however, where he talks about going to GaryCon and walking the streets of Lake Geneva. It reminded me that I'm only a couple hours away and haven't been to LG since the late 70's or early 80's and I keep meaning to go back. I even told my wife that this year I would finally make GaryCon. We'll see....