A review by jaygabler
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt

informative lighthearted medium-paced

3.0

The cultural imprint of Dungeons & Dragons is so vast, it’s hard to believe there was a time when D&D seemed like a has-been. Circa the turn of the 21st century, it was far from clear that the game would ever regain anything like its pop culture footprint from the 1980s, when — as David M. Ewalt chronicles in Of Dice and Men — D&D co-creator Gary Gygax left Wisconsin and went Hollywood, pursuing ill-fated but not entirely implausible dreams of parlaying his tabletop celebrity into a multimedia empire.

Though Gygax died in 2008, the tide had already turned for D&D by the time the original edition of Ewalt’s book was published in 2013. The company Wizards of the Coast, which bought D&D in 1997, successfully steadied the rollercoaster trajectory the game had followed under Gygax’s company TSR; when Of Dice and Men was first published, Wizards was preparing to launch a new edition that would facilitate rulebook modularity so players could choose their own depth of complexity.

The book has now been reissued for the 1974 game’s 50th anniversary, expanded to track D&D’s remarkable ascent over the past decade. The growth of online networking and the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, neither of which might have been obvious candidates to spur the growth of a traditional tabletop game, facilitated the rise of an avid multigenerational participant group — including young players attuned to the game’s appeal by media like the Netflix hit Stranger Things and streaming play sessions.

Given the game’s current ubiquity, if Ewalt was starting from scratch he might not feel the need to give quite so basic an orientation to the game’s central concept. Much of Dice and Men involves walking the reader (or listener) through sessions of D&D and other games, with narrative texts interpolated to convey the game characters’ perspectives.

While Ewalt covers the bases of the game’s invention and spread from its Upper Midwest cradle, Of Dice and Men is a work of gonzo journalism told from the perspective of a player who’s been embedded in D&D culture for decades.
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