A grenade to the face is about the last thing John Higgins expects. But then, who ever really expects to have grenades thrown at them?

Crouched behind some boxes in Morocco, the LaPorte, Ind., junior waits while a Nazi patrol wanders past his position. As their voices grow more distant, he decides he’s safe to poke his head out. He’s wrong.

Before he can blink, the grenade comes flying, and it’s game over for Higgins. After his death, Higgins sighs in frustration. He is going to have to make up a new character. This month Higgins is playing an Indiana Jones role-playing game, or RPG, set in the 1930s. RPGs are games in which the player assumes a persona and interacts with other players in a fictional world. These games can be computer based, but the classic ones, such as Dungeons and Dragons, are done with pencil, paper, dice and a good imagination. While the players keep track of their progress on paper maps, the game master — the person controlling the game — describes a general story line for them to follow complete with obstacles that players combat with ingenuity and “skill,” as determined by rolling multi-sided dice.“It’s immense fun because it’s basically playing pretend, which everyone does as a kid, but then it adds in rules,” Higgins says.

Not surprisingly, RPG players aren’t hard to find on college campuses such as the University of Kansas. More than 50 people are members of KU Gamers and Role players, or KUGAR, the official RPG club at the University. Its staff adviser, Jeff Lewis, has been involved in the club since 1988. The 39-year-old buyer for the KU Memorial Unions says he doesn’t know how long the club has been around but thinks it was started around the mid-‘70s and is just one of the gaming clubs that has existed on campus over the years.

No one is sure of how many gamers are on campus, and none of the members of KUGAR that I spoke to wanted to hazard a guess. An oft-cited study estimates that there are more than four million gamers nationwide. Many say they started in junior high or high school, adding that they liked the opportunity to relax with friends.

Despite the “nerd” label that has been applied to gamers by pop culture, RPGs are played by all sorts of people. Higgins, the grenade victim, says that at his high school it became a fad that everyone got into. “It started out with me and three other computer geeks playing and by the time I graduated, even the jocks were playing it,” he says.

Higgins’ roommate, Joel Abrahamson, also plays RPGs. Like Higgins, he doesn’t try to justify his enjoyment of the games by touting the social aspect. Rather, he embraces the imaginary side of RPGs that let his mind wander through different worlds. The Grand Forks, N.D., senior came to college two years early and seems to have plenty of extra mind power for such activities. Not that he’s lost sight of the simple pleasures of the game. “I mean, how can you not enjoy visualizing yourself as a big fighter slicing people’s heads open?” he says.

The history of role playing is brief but troubled. Dungeons and Dragons, or D&D; was born out of proto-RPGs in 1973, produced by Gary Gygax’s fledgling company TSR. Gygax declined to comment about the early days of the game in Jayplay, saying only that he has not had anything to do with it since 1986 and that he intensely dislikes the game in its current form.

On June 9, 1982, a D&D; player named Irving Lee “Blink” Pulling shot himself in the chest with his mother’s handgun. His mother, Patricia Pulling, blamed the suicide on a “curse” that had been put on him during a game of D&D.; She then formed Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or BADD, and began a campaign to show a connection between the game and Satanism. If, like me, your mother told you when you were a child that you couldn’t play D&D;, this is probably why.

Mentioning Pulling’s name in a crowd of gamers today evokes a collective groan and a chorus of protestations about the lack of devil-worshiping associated with the game. Since the ‘90s, however, the anti-RPG fervor has quieted down a bit. One possible reason is that the people who started gaming in their youth have had time to grow up, and are now the ones in the media spotlight. One prominent example is Vin Diesel, who wrote a forward to 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of D&D.; As Kimon Pugh, Stuttgart, Germany, freshman says, “The geeks are going to grow up, get famous, and be like, ‘these games rule!’”

Contact writer at: rperkins@kansan.com