Fighting Fantasy, D&D for the socially awkward

Back in the day, which is to say back when I was at school, a period after they had done away with slates but before they introduced tablets, there was a certain cultural kudos to be had from following an obscure band.  Remember, this is before Google came along and ruined obscurity for everyone.  If you wanted to get into obscure music, you had to listen to John Peel like millions of others, or subscribe to fanzines.

The thing was, you could say things like ‘Well, Duran Duran are all very well, but you know they stole the baseline from a single by a Belgian jazz funk crossover band I’ve admired for some years’ and only be beaten up for being an utter arse, rather than an outright liar.  This was an age where the smartphone fact check didn’t exist and one showed one’s allegiance to one’s favourite bands by writing their name in blue biro on your schoolbag.

There was, of course, a difference between liking an obscure band ‘think ‘Kraftwerk’, but with a heavy metal influence’ and shit band.

Back at the start of the ‘80s, Dungeons and Dragons was obscure and back in the 80s, Dungeons and Dragons was cooler than ‘Wham!’

Possibly that assertion may have more, or less, relevance depending upon your perspective, particularly in relation to whether or not you were a teenage girl in the 80’s, and indeed whether your loyalties lay with Wham! or Duran Duran, and indeed with Dungeons & Dragons or RuneQuest.

None of that matters now of course because several things happened that ruined Dungeons & Dragons for everyone, and by ‘everyone’ I mean the guys (and they were all guys) that played it before it got popular, the sort of men (as they are now men) who explain that they were into Dungeons & Dragons before it became popular the same way that some other men (and this is a gender specific thing) will make a point of telling you that they were into R.E.M. before they got famous.

For ‘famous’ read ‘commercial’, for ‘commercial’ read ‘good’.

Mysteriously, Dungeons & Dragons went from a hobby that adolescent boys played in bedrooms and classrooms to spawning a huge games franchise of laughably overpriced books and model figures, inspiring an astonishing number of imitators and then a tee vee programme and then a film.  I remember when I was playing a game so misunderstood that tabloid newspapers linked it with devil worship, which now features on ‘The Big Bang Theory’.

Of course, that was before consoles and then computers and finally smartphones came along and rendered dice throwing and imagination obsolete.

Back in the aforementioned day, me any my adolescent chums would spend our lunchtimes avoiding rough kids, and girls (equally terrifying) by battling orcs and goblins.  I was lucky enough to have a group of friends who enjoyed rolling for initiative as much as I did.  However, just as Dungeons & Dragons really, really took off, somebody had the genius idea of producing a game you could play solo, and the Fighting Fantasy books were born.

They were, to put it mildly, quite successful.  Role playing gamers love books, rule books, monster companions, anything, they devour paper like a shredder in a US Embassy with evacuation helicopters waiting on the roof.  So would they buy a book that will let them play a social game without the encumbrance of friends?  Indeed they did!

The idea of Fighting Fantasy was that you made your way through a non-sequential book.  So you find a fork in the road, do you turn left (go to paragraph 41) or right (go to paragraph 52).  Left.  You die!  Shit, shit, no, I meant right, right.  You see a bunny.  Phew, and so on.

The thing is, this is role playing gamers we’re talking about here, they would never flip forward or back, and they would never cheat.  To do so would be to ignore our inner Dungeon Master and also, you could just tell when somebody was lying about completing a Fighting Fantasy book, shame clung to them more tangibly than a cloud of Lynx.

Fighting Fantasy, the adventure app for the analogue age.