We owe Fallout's existence to an admiral and his officers teaching its designer to play D&D in 1979

In a new video on his YouTube channel, RPG veteran and Fallout Designer Tim Cain talked about the first time he was ever exposed to Dungeons & Dragons, a pivotal influence on the developer: Some of his mother's coworkers showed him the ropes all the way back in the Carter administration. Oh, and they happened to be high-ranking US naval officers.

"If you started playing D&D on a computer, where there's no DM, the computer handles it all, … you don't have to learn how to run the rules," Cain said, contrasting his experience of learning D&D from first principles with how the game now informs so many assumptions about gaming and role playing.

Cain's mother worked at a Judge Advocate General (JAG) office, a division of the US military dedicated to legal affairs. "She came home one day and said, 'The boys at work are playing a game, we've been invited over this weekend to play,'" Cain recalled. The "boys," as Cain's mother put it, "were some captains, I think one admiral in the Navy," according to the developer. "We drove over on a Saturday and spent I think four to five hours at their house."

The seamen were playing sans-miniatures, something which surprised Cain at the time. "A good first two hours were just making a character," said Cain, who had played computer and board games before, but had never encountered anything like 1st Edition Advanced D&D's snarl of classes, rules, and contingencies.

Cain's first character? Unable to decide on just one class, he multiclassed right out of the gate with an elf Fighter/Cleric/Magic User⁠—a little bit of everything. "There wasn't really a limit to what kind of questions I could ask and what actions I could specify I was doing," said Cain. "Stuff was written on my character sheet, and I wanted to do it all.

Discovering D&D In 1979 - YouTube

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"Everything that day was new. I wonder if you've had a day like this too, where you're sitting down, and you're playing this crazy game unlike anything you've ever played … The polyhedral dice were new, I'd never seen anything like that."

Cain said he was "absolutely enthralled" by the new game. "On the way home, I was super-excited. I was talking to my mom all about the game." While she eventually withdrew from the play session itself to trade chili recipes with one of the officers' wives, Cain's mother was supportive of his interest: "My mom just turned to me and said, 'Do you want to stop at the game store on the way home and see what they have?'"

The rest, as they say, was history. Cain got the AD&D Monster Manual and a boxed set⁠—presumably the 1977 version of the Basic Set, given the timing? He and his friends would voraciously play D&D in the coming years. In addition to eventually leading development on one of the great D&D games, The Temple of Elemental Evil, Cain has said that his deep understanding of 2E AD&D's THAC0 system helped secure his job at Interplay.

While it's certainly possible that Cain could have discovered the game somewhere else, it sounds like that fateful afternoon and the tutelage of the DM, who Cain called "Captain Dave," were the perfect introduction to tabletop roleplaying. So I feel pretty good saying a hearty "thank you" to Captain Dave for Fallout, Arcanum, and all the other games Cain has worked on or influenced⁠—there are a lot of them.

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