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. 
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.