“We were inventing a whole art form at the time.”
“Role-playing games are only 50 years old.
We’re still inventing them every day.
That’s what’s really exciting about it.
We haven’t found the boundaries of it yet, if there are any.
We’re still pushing out.
Perhaps after hearing Lawrence Schick’s story, you will.
Take the term XP, for example.
It’s ubiquitous in gaming and possibly beyond it, and Lawrence Schick created it.
I find it really hard to even conceive of that, given where we are now.
But it’s not all I learn from Lawrence Schick when I do track him down.
Even now, it’s considered one of the greats.
That and a trio of sentient weapons you oughta find and free.
45 years ago when Lawrence Schick wrote it, he had no idea of its future significance.
Now, he wanted to work on it.
White Plume Mountain was his audition piece and, to his delight, it worked.
But he [Gary Gygax] was insistent that EP was for electrum pieces.
It’s a wonderfully mundane story.
“Oh it was just like 20 minutes on a Thursday afternoon.”
But therein lies the charm.
It’s as Schick says: “We were inventing a whole art form at the time.
Levelling-up was another term that stuck.
Even the base concept of character progression was something that didn’t really exist before D&D.
What they were creating was a fundamentally new way for people to play together.
Shrinking wargames down to adventures about individuals, and bringing players' imaginations into it?
It opened everything up.
Suddenly, players were in control of what was going on.
That was incredibly exciting to people like Schick.
But it would be another 40 or so years before he’d really see that potential reached.
Lawrence Schick has had a long career, and not all of it has been spent in games.
Schick would write and produce LARPs for dozens of people.
Sadly, though, he’s trimmed that away, preferring a cropped cut and neat goatee.
“Yeah, it was just time for a change,” he says.
“I had become way too comfortable as loremaster at Elder Scrolls Online,” he tells me.
And it’s here, I like to think, fate starts to play its hand.
“So I went looking for another gig.”
Somehow, Schick had found his way back to D&D.
“We hit it off right away,” Schick says, which doesn’t surprise me.
He and Schick have very similar outlooks.
He was the principal narrative designer on Baldur’s Gate 3.
He named things, sorted terminology, and fielded not an inconsiderable amount of questions about D&D.
It’s unfair to say Wizards was in crisis talks but it wasn’t far off.
In 10 years, so much has changed.
Of course, Baldur’s Gate 3 has played a significant role in all this.
“It has surprised all of us,” Schick tells me.
“It struck a chord.
It’s that crucial part of the term we’ve labelled the genre with.
But very few people are professional storytellers: they don’t have the tools to do that.
“We’re not having them ride along on our story,” he adds.
“We are, to the extent that we can, giving them the ability to tell the stories.
I’m very excited about it, but Larian is leaving D&D behind.
Lawrence Schick’s tenure at Larian doesn’t depend on D&D, though, thankfully.
The challenge going forward is to expand upon that.
That’s the goal.
Can we do that through being smarter?
Can we do that through aspects of machine learning?
Can we do that through involving the player even further in their self-definition?
Where do you go with that?
That’s where we at least are thinking.
It’s ephemeral, right?
It only happens in the now.
It’s like life!
It’s an interesting thought to leave him on.
I don’t think it matters.
What matters is that he’s where, I believe, he was always destined to be.
