Stephen Colbert on D&D
For the past two years, Stephen Colbert has served as correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His career began at the Second City improv troupe in Chicago. There he met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello, with whom he later developed the sketch comedy series, Exit 57. Recently, he reunited with them to create Comedy Central's first-ever live-action narrative series, Strangers With Candy. Below he captures his memories of Dungeons & Dragons, detailing what the game meant to him and how it changed his life.
In the spring of 1976 I was in seventh grade. I had been reading science fiction for two years and had just started bleeding over into fantasy.
One day at lunch I overheard my friend Keith saying, "I listened at the door, and I didn't hear anything, so I went inside and got attacked by a giant rat!"
I said, "What do you mean, you listened at the door? What are you talking about?"
They said, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but in this game called Dungeons & Dragons there's a probability that you'll hear something through a door, and my character's a thief so he can hear better. The game just came out. Come over Friday and we'll play."
I did and was instantly hooked. A whole new kind of game. No board -- just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I'm not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that's how outcast we were.
D&D made quite a little explosion when it first came out. We were close to the Bible Belt, and ministers were preaching on TV against it, saying that it was a cult, telling stories about kids going too far, playing in the sewers and getting swept away when it rained or getting carried away and believing that the games were real and hurting each other with swords or trying to do incantations, demon worship. I remember thinking, "Who'd be stupid enough to believe this was real?" And, while I certainly wished it was real at times, I was sure these were boogyman stories made up by preachers who didn't like the implications of stories like Tolkein's, and by what they believed to be dabbling in the occult.
In the spring of 1976 I was in seventh grade. I had been reading science fiction for two years and had just started bleeding over into fantasy.
One day at lunch I overheard my friend Keith saying, "I listened at the door, and I didn't hear anything, so I went inside and got attacked by a giant rat!"
I said, "What do you mean, you listened at the door? What are you talking about?"
Stephen Colbert
They said, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain, but in this game called Dungeons & Dragons there's a probability that you'll hear something through a door, and my character's a thief so he can hear better. The game just came out. Come over Friday and we'll play."
I did and was instantly hooked. A whole new kind of game. No board -- just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork.
We were all complete outcasts in school -- beyond the fringe, beyond nerds. We were our own sub-dimensional bubble of the school. I'm not even sure we were on the rolls of any of the classes; that's how outcast we were.
D&D made quite a little explosion when it first came out. We were close to the Bible Belt, and ministers were preaching on TV against it, saying that it was a cult, telling stories about kids going too far, playing in the sewers and getting swept away when it rained or getting carried away and believing that the games were real and hurting each other with swords or trying to do incantations, demon worship. I remember thinking, "Who'd be stupid enough to believe this was real?" And, while I certainly wished it was real at times, I was sure these were boogyman stories made up by preachers who didn't like the implications of stories like Tolkein's, and by what they believed to be dabbling in the occult.
We would do huge campaigns where we had multiple characters and would take them through dungeons, one person running multiple characters. I created characters based on the personalities of my eleven brothers and sisters. I included myself and my mother and my father.
I took them through an old Judge's Guild module called The Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor. They were all killed, except my sister, whose name is Lulu. She was a witch, a variant of a magic user that was described in Dragon magazine. She had powers like a dance of seduction and love potions -- stuff like that. She survived quite well, and she ended up being my character for years. All my friends bugged me that my favorite character was female, but I thought it was kind of cool that it didn't matter what sex your character was.
When she was twenty-third level one of the Dungeon Masters (DMs) that I played with all the time just, I guess, got tired of her, and he killed her. She was riding on her dragon's back above the clouds, and he made it rain acid upwards.
Those old "Giants" modules, those were tremendous. Those are some of my favorite memories: working my way through fire giant, frost giant, and storm giant castles. But the best campaign to me was Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, a sci-fi/fantasy mix.
I had an eleventh-level paladin (it took me years to advance those levels) whom I took on Expedition, and he got the Power Armor, which was the big thing to get in that module. But he also went a little power mad. On the next campaign we saw merchant caravans crossing the desert, and my character flew down and landed next to a merchant and tore off the guy's head.
The DM informed me that I was not a paladin anymore.
I said, "Oh, shit, I forgot. I'm lawful good!"
DM: "Yeah, and the gods are angry. So you're not a paladin anymore. You can start again as anything you want, but that character's done."
Eventually, we started to judge each other based on how our characters behaved. One DM seemed to believe we were too greedy. We wanted too much. We wanted our characters to be too strong. But, you know, within the culture of high school we were the weak puppies and were looking for power, albeit imagined. Well this one DM, Haskell, started using his dungeon mastering as a critique of that. He would tempt us with ways to get seemingly unlimited power (say, a poison with no saving throw) and then throw huge roadblocks in the way to keep us from achieving it. I may remembering wrong, but I think by the end we were using the game to express how we felt about each other.
