I met Dave a couple years ago and somewhat recently discovered that he played D&D back in the AD&D days so I was curious to get together to have a conversation. I brought a few 5/5.5e books so he could see what the current player’s handbook looks like, the DMG, as well as the Old Gods of Appalachia sourcebook to give him an idea of where the game is at today.

The following is a lightly edited transcript with some footnotes for corrections because sometimes we make mistakes in the moment.

Kyle: Hey Dave, how’s it going?

Dave: Good, Kyle — thanks for doing this.

Kyle: What I wanted to get into today is more of a conversation than an interview. We just opened up the 2024 Player’s Handbook, so we were talking about classes and how they’ve changed — what we currently have available.

How Dave got started

Dave: When I first started playing, it was Dungeons & Dragons, second edition. I think they went straight to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons after that — pretty sure that’s how I remember it. In second edition and the beginning of AD&D, the classes were super simple: fighter, druid, cleric, wizard, and paladin. Then AD&D added barbarian, which was almost like the rogue — not too many people played them at the time, since they were new. Eventually they added ranger, and bard might have been an original too. So looking at these classes now, I’d say monk, warlock, and sorcerer are the new ones — going back in the day, which is fuzzy.

Kyle: Fair — this was like 20-30 years ago.

Dave: And I’m talking original stuff — second edition. I had the box set of the original first-edition beginner’s box. Got that when I was like 11.

Kyle: That’s wild — so you actually started as a kid.

Dave: Yeah, I was a kid.

Kyle: And I’m assuming this is before Satanic Panic was a thing?

Dave: Satanic Panic came a little after that, but not far behind — the really weirded-out people got recognized around ‘86, ‘87. I probably got my first D&D thing around ‘83, ‘84.

Kyle: Before I was even a thought, huh?

Dave: Something like that. And man, that box was so simple — I think I got two dice, maybe three, plus this little booklet.

Kyle: That’s what’s referred to nowadays as the Red Box I believe.

Dave: Yeah, the red one — I got the Red Box when I was a kid. It was all TSR back then. I think I also had that basic set — maybe that’s the box it came in, or the second box I got. That was the first thing I ever got.

Kyle: And I think that’s first edition.

Dave: It was first edition, and then—

Kyle: Second edition was AD&D?

Dave: No — second edition was second edition, then came AD&D.1Pretty confident, but I could be wrong. We all had that basic set and it was just so basic. Then they started coming out with the bigger books — the Player’s Handbook and all that — and that’s when it made the big conversion into AD&D. But second edition had all the modules — those thin little modules.

Kyle: How many pages-ish, if you had to guess?

Dave: Twenty-ish — thin, 8½ x 11, just quick little adventures. And your modules had skill-level ratings. Then AD&D came out and the modules changed — there was one that was the biggest at the time, thick, called—

Kyle: Tomb of Horrors?

Dave: Temple of Elemental Evil.2 It was one of the first super-massive modules — took months to get through. Basically a video game.

Kyle: Temple of Elemental — sounds rad, honestly.

Dave: At the time it was unbelievable. Greyhawk, you remember?

Kyle: Yeah, I’m aware of Greyhawk.

Settings, lore, and Gary Gygax

Kyle: So my understanding — there are a few historical settings for D&D. There’s Greyhawk. There’s Faerûn [Forgotten Realms], the most prevalent. Now there’s Spelljammer, which is basically adventures in space — I don’t know when it got introduced, but I think it’s rad. And there’s Dragonlance.

Dave: Right — I think it went Dragonlance, then Greyhawk. And Greyhawk was all about Gary Gygax — that was his world. Dragonlance was like the first attempt; by the time Greyhawk came out, novels were starting to be written.

Kyle: And my understanding is a lot of the figures in today’s D&D — if something has a spell named after it, something significant happened for that to be the case. They had to have been a really high-level wizard doing crazy stuff — and I’m gonna fact-check this so the internet doesn’t roast me—

Dave: (joking) “Roast me” — dude, I don’t even know what you’re talking about half the time.

Kyle: Hey, at least you’ve got the excuse of “I haven’t played this in 20-30 years.”

Dave: That’s right — and I got the original box, people.

Kyle: Versus me — I’ve been playing for about the last 10 years, so these are things I probably should know. But I believe Mordenkainen was Gary Gygax’s original wizard character in the game he ran — so his whole original party became built into the lore of D&D. Essentially his party became these mythical figures in the setting.

Dave: Which is where Greyhawk came from — it was all through him. And the story I got is that [Gary] got run out because he wasn’t a business guy — he was a gamer.

Kyle: That’s my understanding too.

Dave: And then I think Hasbro bought it — Hasbro, right?3

Kyle: Who still owns it.

Dave: They do. As soon as all that happened, the Moral Majority types — Christian-youth groups, the whole “everybody’s Satanic” thing — went after it too.

Kyle: Cast the whole hobby as evil witchcraft type thing…

Dave: Yeah — and I’m like, I listen to heavy metal too, and that doesn’t make me evil.

Kyle: It just makes you a nerd.

Dave: That’s right, man. I’m a dork.

Kyle: Look — if you use odd sounding jargon and you’re doing things people don’t understand, especially in this area, being in the Bible Belt—

Dave: I can imagine.

Kyle: It was still around when I was a kid, to an extent. When the Harry Potter books came out — Sorcerer’s Stone came out when I was in third or fourth grade — we’d read books in class, and the teacher asked for student recommendations. Somebody wanted Harry Potter because it was huge, and one of the parents went to the school like, “You can’t be teaching our kids about witchcraft” and it worked — they did not allow it, because they made a big deal out of it.

Dave: Well — not to be all “back in my day,” but I am from that generation, I am Gen X. That’s who the original players were — this group of teenage kids. The thing that makes Gen X different is our parents all took the hands-off approach.

Kyle: “Go outside and play!”

Dave: Very anti-helicopter. Go out and play, and when the streetlights come on, you’d better come home.

Kyle: That was kind of my deal too.

Dave: There you go — that’s why you’re cool. We’d go do all these things, and to the parents it was just a secret, because they didn’t ask. Really we were just sitting around using our imagination. And we were boys, so our imagination was crude — sometimes our characters were evil, and we raided and pillaged. Rarely were we playing paladins — paladins had no place in my world. Too goody-goody.

Kyle: That’s something I’m curious about — because I love paladins. If I get to play, there’s a high likelihood I’m playing a charisma-based character — paladin, bard, sorcerer, or warlock. I had the best paladin once — a space pirate.

Dave: Wait — paladin and pirate, those two words can’t coexist, man.

Kyle: Right — so my understanding is, in original D&D, paladins were supposed to always be lawful good.

Dave: 100% — you cannot deviate, they were so restrictive. Chaotic neutral was your thief type — barely tolerated in the company of a paladin, if at all. And if there was any evil in another character, they weren’t allowed—

Kyle: They just couldn’t be in the same party together.

Dave: It’s like, “well, it’s my holy mission to destroy you.”

Kyle: Right — paladins were a pain in the ass, always in your business, so they got picked on.

Alignment rules, class by class

Kyle: So before we get into what I think is a nice transition — did fighters, clerics, and the rest have general alignments they fell into, or was it mostly rogues are bad guys, and paladins as the good guys?

Dave: No — paladins were forced to be lawful good, and barbarians were forced to be chaotic, whether good or evil.

Kyle: That makes sense.

Dave: Rogues were rogues — I can’t remember if there was a restriction on them, but your thief wasn’t forced into anything.

Kyle: Like a Robin Hood type maybe?

Dave: Yeah — those were the only two classes I remember where you had to be chaotic (barbarian) or lawful (paladin).

Kyle: So it wasn’t like a cleric has to be—

Dave: A cleric has to be the alignment of its god, or within the realm of alignments that god allows.

Kyle: Gotcha.

Dave: And that’s another thing — just a bit of research I’ve done since we started talking about this — holy crap, the lore behind clerics and their gods is unbelievable.

Kyle: That was one of the things I used most from the DMG — building out a pantheon, or finding one to use. The pantheon in the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide was the Dawn War deities. That’s the one I chose, because they went into the most detail — though I haven’t done a huge deep-dive on pantheons myself yet. But that wasn’t the original Gygax pantheon, was it?

Dave: No. Very basic set — I had that book too. Deities & Demigods, I think it was called.

Making up your own lore

Dave: It was super big — basically a paragraph describing a particular god, for whatever cleric you wanted to be. I played cleric a lot, and a dwarf for a long time too — just a dwarf fighter sort of thing. Sometimes human, sometimes dwarf, back and forth. They’d give you a page or so describing the god, and the rest of the lore you made up yourself. So I’d have all this stuff I knew about my god that nobody else knew, because I just made it up.

Kyle: To be fair, I kind of did the same thing.

Dave: Right?

Kyle: I made a dwarf cleric whose god was more about — dwarves value strength, mining metal, so he was a Forge domain. The whole thing was building weapons to protect the people I cared about — but everything about the inner workings of that pantheon, I made up to fit my own story.

Dave: Right — but now you don’t have to.

Kyle: More fun for me, honestly.

Dave: Yeah — when you talk about using your imagination, that’s the best part.

Kyle: I think that’s the core of what D&D is: imagination, story time with friends. That’s what makes the game really fun, and why it’s as popular as it is.

Dave: It really is amazing how popular it’s gotten. Just cracking this open to the first art page — this is immense. I can never imagine a big table like that with that level of detail. Nine times out of ten we just played with nothing — no wax board, no miniatures. We’d do simple battle setups with dice or whatever we had on hand to show where things were, and everything else was purely imagined.

Game stores, then and now

Kyle: For the most part, I think the majority of the player base is in the same boat — whatever budget we have, we make it work. And then there are some people with crazy amazing budgets — people who do D&D shows with set designers and art teams, which is insane.

Dave: You’re like, “what do you do for a living?” Well — like when I went to that game store out in Concord. That was the first time I’d been in a game store in 20-plus years, and they had all these dice types and resources, and a back room where everybody was playing. I thought, if they had something dedicated just to D&D, I could imagine multiple tables with completely different setups going at once.

Kyle: Oh yeah — some stores now, you basically pay five bucks and run a table for however long you’re there. They’ve got drinks and snacks, plus a small collection of set pieces you can use as props.

Dave: That’s awesome.

Kyle: Still, that’s the advancement compared to where I was. There were a couple gaming-dedicated stores, but it wasn’t role-playing-dedicated — you had your board games, and then a D&D or role-playing section. Or I’d have to go to a Magic shop and they’d have dice — just random places to find dice. But to get actual books and things—

Dave: You had to find a gaming store that had a role-playing section. Not at all like what they have today.

Kyle: Yeah — the hardest thing now is finding a store that carries this. Like, this isn’t the regular art for the official book, this is an alternate cover — you can only really get that at a local game store.

Dave: That’s pretty cool.

Kyle: So if you want the different alternate/foil covers, you have to go get it from a game store. Which again, gets people out meeting other folks.

Dave: Maybe it’s cooler because they’re glossy — compared to ours, which were so matte, no gloss at all. But this is neat — even neater now that you’ve explained it.

Drizzt, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft

Kyle: Right here you’ve got Lolth [looking at 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide], tying up a little goblin or something — I don’t know if you know anything about the Spider Queen. You know how drow, dark elves—

Dave: Oh yeah — read the whole series.

Kyle: She’s the god most of them worship if they’re evil, and she rules the Underdark.

Dave: For sure — we haven’t even mentioned Forgotten Realms yet. Greyhawk sort of faded out and Forgotten Realms became the go-to. That’s where all the books came from — I devoured a whole series on one particular dark elf. Can’t remember the name, but it was cool — a two-sword-wielding guy. A whole book series, just on him.

Kyle: Well, they probably do have stuff like that at this point — I’ve got three Ravenloft books.

Dave: Yeah, okay — maybe I’ve got Ravenloft backwards. It never really stuck for me. I did get into Forgotten Realms, though — that was way more accessible for some reason.

Kyle: Let me see — when Strahd was introduced, because he’s so big at this point. The Baron, Strahd von Zarovich.

Dave: Is that a real person?

Kyle: No — he first appeared in the 1983 module I6, Ravenloft. 4Assuming Google search can be trusted.

Dave: He’s [R.A.] Salvatore5— you ever heard of him? The author who did the Dark Elf trilogy — pretty sure there was more after that.

Kyle: The Dark Elf trilogy — no, that one I don’t know.

Dave: That was my introduction to dark elves — and then all of a sudden all my characters wanted to be dark elves.

Kyle: Understandably — they’re very cool, they’ve got a dope aesthetic. Typically for elves I end up going — high elves are really snooty, kind of insular, and wood elves are a lot more nature-focused. I lean back on Tolkien pretty hard.

Dave: When it comes to elves, yeah — and dwarves too, honestly, because he started that whole thing, or at least made it a lot more accessible.

Kyle: For sure — this whole genre wouldn’t be a thing without Lord of the Rings, and to an extent the Silmarillion. So, going back — since we’re talking about classes—

Walking through the 2024 species

Kyle: Let’s see — Chapter 4, past Backgrounds. Okay, here are Species, since I know you were asking about that earlier.

Dave: My daughter, she plays every Tuesday night, heads to her buddy’s house, and they’ll play for like 4 to 10 hours.

Kyle: I wish I could get a group together every week.

Dave: Right? Listen, I could dedicate a day of the week — but she’s a cat person, and I’m just like, what??? Anyway — it was human, elf, all the halves were in there too. Human, elf, halfling. And then orcs — orcs, forever the NPCs of death. You just killed so many. They’re the redshirts of it all — the ones who died. But then you could be a half-orc, which was interesting. I never really knew anybody who successfully played one. Plenty of halflings, though — that was a tough character to play too, since you were so small.

Kyle: So these are the base species for the 2024 game, and there’s more — I don’t think Tabaxi’s in there, which is the cat people you’re mentioning. Let me pull up some of the more expanded stuff on my phone.

Dave: So can you play any one of these — like a Tabaxi?

Kyle: Yeah, these are all playable.

Dave: Or a dragonborn? That’d be pretty badass.

Kyle: Dragonborns are really cool — they all get a once-a-day breath weapon, and it scales. It starts at 3d6 damage and it’s tied to an elemental type, so your dragon lineage dictates what damage you’re doing. Blue dragon, you’re doing lightning damage — there’s metallic, chromatic, and now the newer books added gemstone dragons, so there’s amethyst dragons and just wild stuff.

Dave: Here’s what’s interesting — with dwarf and elf you get the three elves, and that hasn’t changed, but there are subspecies of dwarves too, and there’s nothing here but just “dwarf.” They don’t talk about wood dwarves or duergar or any of that.

Kyle: I know in 2014 they separated it into mountain dwarves and hill dwarves. But then we’ve got gnomes — forest gnomes, rock gnomes.

Dave: A Goliath? I’ve never heard of that one either. Are they all big?

Kyle: Yeah, really, really big guys. And humans, obviously. But 2024 also got rid of the “half” species — so instead of a half-orc, it’s just full orc now.

Dave: So there’s no more leftover baggage from the whole “raiding and pillaging” thing.

Kyle: Yeah — I think they decided that was going to be too problematic. Especially when you could just be a tiefling anyway.

Dave: These guys have to have a certain alignment?

Kyle: No — alignment’s not really a thing anymore, it’s more optional. You could be a lawful-good orc, or — humans in real life run the gamut, you know? Any species could do good or evil. Which I think is a lot truer to the human experience — even in a given moment, somebody can be “true lawful” one minute and not the next.

Dave: Under every set of circumstances, right — there are a lot of complexities, so they moved away from hard-and-fast alignment rules. It’s more of a guide, if you want to use it.

Kyle: So it came into play in-game — if you come across a monster that shares your alignment, you can communicate with it through alignment language, or something?

Dave: Yeah, alignment language. I remember one time my character got a — what do you call it when you get a pet, a companion?

Kyle: A familiar.

Dave: Right — I got a small dragon familiar, and it was because we shared alignment that I could communicate with it that way. More of a spiritual thing — less direct communication, more of a bond.

Kyle: For a familiar, the way I’ve always run it — if you’re bonded to it, your alignments would probably just end up in sync. But it wasn’t specifically through the alignment that you communicated — it was more the familiar bond itself.

Homebrew rules vs. “rule of cool”

Dave: A lot of it too was making up your own rules. So maybe that was just how we played — my community of players.

Kyle: So this is related: when I went on Reddit to get some background — because I don’t know a ton about the older editions, first and second especially, since I came in a couple years after fifth edition first released — one thing that came up was how many rules you guys actually had and used. There was some back-and-forth on whether we have more rules now, or you did back then. So from your experience, was it pretty rules-optional and you made it up as you went, or—

Dave: No, there were specifics, for sure.

Kyle: It was more rule-of-cool?

Dave: There was more rule-of-cool, but we had a lot of rules — you had to play certain aspects a specific way. Melee, all of that was done a specific way — that was the main rule. And alignment rules and things like that. But we didn’t have all the details, like the pantheon of gods — we didn’t have that level of detail. So it was fill-in-the-blank rules.

Kyle: Gotcha — so it was more like, “okay, your alignment says this, so that’s how you should behave” from a roleplaying standpoint, and then combat you run by the book for the most part, and the rest is flavor?

Dave: For the most part, yeah.

Kyle: That’s kind of how I do things at my table too — except alignment, which has always been more fluid to me. There are people with different schools of thought there though.

Dave: That was a big deal for us. If you stepped outside your alignment — if you were a cleric and you stepped outside your alignment, you’d lose your god, and if you lost your god, you lost all your power. And if you were a paladin and you stepped outside your alignment, the holiness of your paladin-hood was lost — now all of a sudden you’re a failed paladin. You might still be able to stay lawful good, but because you stepped outside that, you’re no longer a paladin — now you’re just a knight, a guy with a lot of armor.

Kyle: One thing in that sense that has carried over is paladin oaths are still very meaningful, but they aren’t directly tied to alignment per se. If you break the sworn paladin oath you took, that’s still a huge deal. Forsaking your deity as a cleric is a similar deal as well. But I think the real differentiator with alignment across the editions is more semantics than mechanics — they’ve separated the mechanics out of the value system almost.

Wrapping up: the game’s core hasn’t changed

Kyle: Last thing, just to wrap up — I feel like the through-line is the game hasn’t really changed that much at its core.

Dave: Yeah, I’m feeling that too. There’s some really specific stuff that’s changed, but for the most part, at the end of the day, it’s a story-driven game — and how you run it is more or less determined by your table, and what’s fun for your table.

Kyle: Is that fair to say?

Dave: It’s fair to say. Even just now, I was skipping around the Player’s Handbook looking at all the big stuff, and then I started looking at these first couple pages — it talks about proficiencies and character creation, beginning character development, and it all sounds essentially the same. Just some more added detail if you want to use it.

Kyle: Do you want to go through more of it?

Dave: No — that’s plenty, man, I’ve got a lot going on. I’m actually trying to finish a Hemingway book right now.

Kyle: What are you reading?

Dave: One of his early short-story collections. Found it kind of randomly — there’s a cool used bookstore down in Charlotte that’s packed with all kinds of old books. You could probably find Forgotten Realms books there too.

Kyle: Oh really? Maybe, who knows.

Dave: Worth checking out.

Kyle: I like books that are more narrative-driven—

Dave: Like the Drizzt books?

Kyle: Yeah.

Dave: That one’s about a particular character. And I would love to get back into a regular game, honestly — the commitment is the hardest part.

Kyle: That is the hardest part.

Why adult gaming groups are hard

Kyle: It’s not just you and I saying “alright, I’m willing to carve out this time” — it’s getting everybody else to do it too, because we all have lives. We all work, we all have different commitments. That’s the real hard part. When you’re starting out, like you said, when you’re 11 — it’s easy to just say “come on over after school.” Now it’s like, we work different schedules, and after that I’ve got to do something with my partner, and then the kids, and so on.

Dave: Right — for me to pick up a new commitment, I have to drop one. And the partner commitment can’t falter.

Kyle: Yeah — everybody I play with is in a committed relationship, so it’s like, you guys take care of that first. My time is more flexible, so I’ll move something if I have to but I’m pretty easy most of the time. The real big bad of every campaign is scheduling.

Dave: And I’m sure it’s tough for the DM too — there’s a lot of work that goes into it, and then all of a sudden everybody’s canceling and it’s two months later.

Kyle: I’ve run into some of that, but canceling — at least with the group I have now — isn’t really a thing. We block it off on our calendars, and at the end of every session we look at everybody’s next few weeks: “okay, I can do this day,” or “my dodgeball’s stopping on this day, and I’m picking up bowling two weeks later,” so your free day moved from Tuesday to Wednesday. This is definitely not a high priority for most people, which is understandable — it’s a game, it’s recreation. I really appreciate you taking the time. We barely scratched the surface in what, an hour-plus?

Dave: I remembered so many different topics through all of it. I’d want to do it again.

Kyle: Yeah, I’ll edit this down considerably to make it coherent, but we can definitely do this again.

Findings

Ultimately, beyond the rule changes, new species, and sheer diversity of settings, the building blocks of the game have not changed. We found that how we actually run the game and how we handle intricacies of rules as written versus rules as intended versus what is the most fun for the table is nearly the same today as it was early editions as well. The thing that we are still drawn to is the opportunity to get together with friends to spend time with people, to tell stories that we are excited to be a part of, to enjoy a certain level of catharsis in roleplaying as a character that is often an extreme exaggeration of an aspect of society.

The new options in recent editions are just additional toppings to the same great pizza we have enjoyed for decades. The great foundation is built from what the people we play with bring to the table as the primary ingredients, our personalities, creativity, and experiences. The mechanics of how the oven operates matter less than the individual ingredients that we all bring to the table.

This definitely won’t be the last conversation between myself and Dave and hopefully we will actually be able to pull off the hardest part of the game and find some time on the collective calendar with a couple other folks to play some D&D!