By Dylan Miracle

Thursday night, Dungeons and Dragons fans gathered at Dragon's Lair on North Burnet for the midnight release of the fourth-edition Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks. In case you don't know, Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game where players make characters and play in a heroic fantasy world invented and maintained by the Dungeon Master, usually the most megalomaniacal of your friends. The players decide the actions of their characters. The success or failure of the actions are determined by a roll of a die - often a 20-sided die rolled to see if your long sword cleaves the head off a goblin.

"D&D fourth edition is a very big deal," Dragon's Lair employee Alison King said. "I haven't been following the updates for the past couple of months the way some of my friends have. One has been measuring time by the D&D release."

The release of fourth edition is the first major D&D release since version 3.5 in 2003. The 40 or 50 gamers gathered at Dragon's Lair, Austin's headquarters for all things role-playing, milled around the store chatting about games and what they expected from the new edition.

"It should be more of a 'sit down and play' game now as opposed to 'sit down with six books and build your character and remember what three books you need to cross reference throughout the game,'" said veteran gamer Matt McKee.

"Veteran gamer" is a title that could apply to everyone waiting for the book release. The average gamer at the midnight release had probably been playing D&D nearly 10 years.

People weighed in on their favorite types of characters, and as midnight approached, the throng tightened around the cash registers.

"They better not have nerfed the spiked chain," muttered someone in line (nerf: vt. 1. to cover in foam, 2. to weaken, esp. weapons or spells).

C. Robert Cargill, who play-tested the fourth edition, said that much of the changes deal with the ease of setting up large-scale combat situations and speeding up game-play. His favorite creation in the new edition is the minions: easily killed but dangerous foes used by the Dungeon Master to attack players en masse.

Just like any detailed avocation, D&D has its own vocabulary.

"If you dropped a fireball on a group of minions and missed on some of your attack rolls, even though they would normally take half damage, they don't die," Cargill said.

Want to know what that means? Better get the fourth-edition rulebooks.