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Of Dice And Men: The Story Of Dungeons & Dragons And The People Who Play It (2013)

by David M. Ewalt(Favorite Author)

3.61 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1451640501 (ISBN13: 9781451640502)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Scribner

review 1: "Of Dice and Men" is the history of the making of "Dungeons and Dragons", one of the best selling board games of all time. It's also a fairly amusing defense of geekdom. Ewalt, an editor at Forbes, and a long time player of D&D alternates chapters about the rise and fall of TSR (the game's parent company) with ones about his return and reenchantment with D&D. If you're like me and have never played "Dungeona and Dragons", you might have some preconception of gamers as socially inept outcasts on the verge of going on a shooting rampage. "Of Dice and Men" does a lot to dispel those ideas, and show gaming as an act of collaborative art making, along the lines of an exquisite corpse. After the game is created, the story of internal bickering and sordid legal problems at TSR ... morebecomes uninteresting. But Ewalt's buoyant descriptions of gaming nights with his friends (all adults with good jobs) almost made me want to join a D&D group. Almost.
review 2: This was a really good historical, and autobiographical look at D&D. The history of the game is interspersed with transcriptions of an RPG campaign; as the book progresses, the "campaign" becomes more and more intertwined with the non fiction.If I have any criticism, it's that the chapter on LARP seems a bit too long, and ultimately out of place. I personally would have liked to see the author spend less time on LARPing and more time on the fracture that happened after the release of D&D 4th Edition (namely the rise of Pathfinder--which is mentioned only once in passing--as a major competitor.)But that's a small complaint to a generally great book. less

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