Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is in its fourth edition (but fifth incarnation) since 1974. I’ve played three incarnations: 2nd, 3.5, and 4th. I’ve got to say that the fourth edition does one thing very well.

For anyone unfamiliar, a table top role-playing game (RPG), like D&D, uses a pen, character sheet(s), a series of books, and a set of dice. The set of dice consists of: 1 four-sided, 1 six-sided, 2 ten-sided, 1 twelve-sided, and 1 twenty-sided die. Dice are also abbreviated “D” as in D20 for a twenty-sided die. You might laugh at this now, but one day you’ll be in a comic shop on the wrong side of the tracks and knowing what a D20 is might help you make a saving throw against a band of asthmatic angry nerds.

D&D, and similar RGPs, are played with one person running the world and a group of players going through the world. The concept is that the players will have their characters act according to their personalities and shared experiences. For example, a brooding solitary dwarf will warm up and make friends with the plucky tiefling after they save each other’s lives from a nest of giant spiders. Or as is more common with my current D&D 4th edition group, they will buy each other prostitutes once they return to town.

RPGs are as much a part of comic culture as comics themselves because they share space in the same shops. While there are purists, comic readers who hate RPG-ers and vice versa, for the most part anyone into one has at least tried the other. In fact I became interested in comics because I was into Star Wars RPG as a teenager.

The 4th edition D&D is a great miniatures game. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has taken a lot of the ambiguity out of the game by instituting a standard series of measurements. This sound logical, but is a huge shift away from 3.5 D&D where things were vague and left to the discretion of the dungeon master, or DM. (A DM is responsible for making the world around the players.) In 3.5, a player would need to ask the DM if he or she could do something; now the player simply counts squares.

While many old school D&D players and DMs are unhappy with the shift, I happen to love it. Currently, I am the DM for a monthly group of mid-twenty-somethings. Not forcing the DM (me) to make a nit-picky decision every twenty seconds, and not forcing the players to ask a nit-picky question every twenty seconds, allows us to focus on the role-playing aspect of the game.

I would say the band of greedy anti-heroes I’m DM-ing now is the best its ever been strictly because the new rules let them focus. I’ve actually seen players do things that are completely illogical from a tactical standpoint because they’re so focused on their role. It’s a beautiful thing for a DM to watch and makes all those hours spent building dungeons pay off.

So my hat goes off to you, Wizards of the Coast, for a ballsy shift in the RPG paradigm that really paid off.

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