Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game that has consumed years of the lives of awkward basement-dwelling adolescents, is in trouble. For some time now, the game has been losing players—teenage boys and young men with sick-making amounts of disposable income—to World of Warcraft and other online fantasy video games. Besides the basic appeal of video, D&D's bookishness had become a major flaw. Every player needs one basic rule book, but then each person can play as a type of humanoid—elf, dwarf, human—and each of those types have their own explanatory volume. Further, each character can be a fighter, cleric, wizard, or thief—and each of those occupations requires another volume. Learning how to play a video game is a much faster, and more intuitive, process.

The setup of Dungeons & Dragons is familiar to most: One person, a referee called the Dungeon Master, builds a dungeon and as the players fight their way through subterranean monsters, they gain treasure and experience. But this month, D&D is releasing a brand-new fourth edition intended to fight the online competitors by cleaning up a lot of the rules—it now takes a matter of minutes to create a new character, rather than a few hours—and D&D itself now has an online component.

Players can create avatars of their characters—selecting clothing, skin color, build, and weapons in a setup not that different from Second Life. For $14.95 a month, people can start pickup games of D&D with players around the world online and play in virtual tabletop environments. There are other changes to the fourth edition, too: Apparently, due to pressure from Lord of the Rings fans, they have split elves into two different classes, one a woodsy, whimsical creature and the other an aloof, magical fairy type. But these rule changes for the hardcore players are clearly secondary to the glitzy new online qualities of the game.

Many old-school players insist that the pleasure of D&D is in flipping through volumes of books trying to find and utilize arcane information. A legion of modern sci-fi authors got their start around a card table with friends, killing imaginary dragons with rolls of dodecahedrons. Much of what made the game so satisfying—using their imaginations to sketch the impossible—is actually more difficult in the new edition.

It's a bookish hobby losing ground to the shiny, the fast, and the pornographic. None of the new online segments of D&D are necessary to play—in theory, you still just need a set of books, some dice, and four friends to play—but in many ways, this feels like a publisher's surrender to the modern. recommended

Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day, marking the release of the new fourth edition with sample D&D games, Sat June 7, Neumo's, 9 am–5 pm, free, all ages.