For over forty years, Dungeons & Dragons has been the world's most famous role playing game. Based on a variant rule set for the classic historical war game Chainmail, Dungeons & Dragons differed from the traditional war games of the time in that it focused on individual characters rather than whole armies. This inspired a more story-focused style of game-play, as well as many imitators who followed in Dungeons and Dragons' footsteps.

Despite this, and a "Satanic Panic" in the 1980s which blamed Dungeons & Dragons for all manner of social ills, the game has endured. While possession of a 20-sided dice and a Player's Handbook might once have been cause for suspicion or expulsion from school, now many public libraries and youth groups sponsor regular RPG events! The teenagers who once hid their hobby are now parents who play Dungeons & Dragons with their kids.

Unsurprisingly, this loyal fanbase of gamers have developed their own unique forms of comedy and in-jokes based around Dungeons & Dragons. Much of this humor has made its way online in the form of memes, crossing over with other interests with the fluidity of a good Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

With that in mind, here are 23 Hilarious Dungeons & Dragons Memes!

Guardians of the Galaxy is The Avengers D&D Campaign

This meme and the related comic present a rather amusing conceit - that The Avengers play D&D and that The Guardians of the Galaxy are their characters. It's not that shocking an idea, given that one of the major benefits of playing D&D is that it promotes group dynamics - definitely something Steve Rogers would want to encourage among his teammates.

It's easy to imagine Tony Stark and Bruce Banner having picked up the game at some point while they were at college. We can also easily imagine Hawkeye complaining about how the archery is handled and how he should get way more than a "+1 Bonus" for shooting at point-blank range, as Black Widow quietly notes that rogues should do far more damage with a sneak attack.

The biggest question is where Bucky picked up the knowledge of the game needed to act as a game master!

 ROGUES LOVE LEATHER

Without the right magical enchantments, there is an inverse relationship between the strength of a piece of armor and the mobility it allows the wearer. To put it plainly, the heavier armor is, the more it hinders movement. This is why rogues, thieves and assassins, whose class abilities are largely governed by dexterity and mobility, favor lighter armors such as leather, over chainmail or full-plate.

If nothing else, it's easier to sneak around when you aren't wearing shiny armor that clanks with every step you take.

This meme takes this basic principal and makes a pun out of it for English speakers, where the word "hide" can refer to both the act of concealing yourself from view, as well as the animal skins that are used to make leather armor.

Big Levels & Small Towns

Beyond a certain point, the biggest challenge an adventuring party in Dungeons & Dragons may face is finding a suitably large city where they can unload the spoils of war after an adventure. Your standard size village may have a pub, a blacksmith, a general store, and that's it.

These modest people will not have the specialized economy needed to cater to adventurers. Your average farmer does not have the gold on hand to pay Sir Cedric Von Chamberpot even half the list rate on a slightly-used Glaive Of Easy Dismemberment +1 and even less inclination to do so. Peasants don't need magic weapons as much as they need a new cow.

The flip side of this, as this meme featuring Jake the Dog from Adventure Time points out, is that evil adventurers of a suitable level can take over a small village quite easily.

Did Anyone Lose A Princess?

As beautifully rendered as it may be, the fantasy themed artwork on many classic Dungeons and Dragons adventure books easily lends itself to a certain degree of good-natured mockery. This can be due to impractical costuming, ridiculous looking monsters or overly dramatic poses, among many other factors.

The covers have led to several clever meme-makers taking these classic module covers and altering their titles to create something more appropriate to the artwork, if wholly inappropriate otherwise.

While many of these modified covers feature adult themes and language that can't be shared here, there are several - like this one featuring an apparently kindly lizard man politely inquiring if someone left an unattended human princess just lying around - that are quite amusing and family friendly.

D&D - It's Everywhere

After playing Dungeons & Dragons for a while, it is easy for players to start drawing parallels between aspects of the game and other elements of popular culture. In the case of this particular meme, the comparison is made between the various superheroes making up The Avengers and what Dungeons & Dragons classes best match their abilities and skill sets.

Some of the comparisons are apt, with the archery-focused Hawkeye labeled as a Ranger and the rage-empowered Hulk defined as a Barbarian. Some might argue that Tony Stark, charismatic as he is, better fits the mold of a Wizard than a Sorcerer given his gift for crafting wondrous items. One could also make a case for Captain America being the quintessential Paladin, despite a lack of divine powers.

Play To Your Strengths

Party dynamics are an important part of Dungeons & Dragons. Different classes have different strengths and weaknesses and the key to victory lies in how characters work together to overcome their weaknesses. Fighters are skilled in combat but can do little against certain kinds of monsters. Wizards and sorcerers can accomplish many things with their magic but are physically weak. Rogues and thieves have a number of skills that can help the part outside of combat but are largely helpless in a one-on-one fight.

While it is possible for individual characters to break the mold and train themselves beyond the limits of their class, it is usually best for players to play to their strengths, as this meme featuring Xena and Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess reminds us. Unless they are unusually charismatic, fighters should never act as the party diplomat - particularly when your party has a bard.

Bardic Magic and How It Works

Bards are perhaps the most maligned of all the core Dungeons & Dragons classes. While the class was originally meant to evoke the spirit of the warrior poets of Celtic myth, who blended magical mastery and skill with weapons, later editions transformed the bard into a jack-of-all-trades whose magic was based around musical performances rather than druidic lore.

This made the mechanics for how bards utilized their abilities rather ridiculous to picture, as bards were required to sing or play an instrument in order to Inspire Courage in their allies during a fight or Inspire Competence when they were attempting a skill check.

While the above meme of Bart Simpson singing about his greatness and banging a pot is an exaggeration of how 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons bards function, it's far more accurate than most bard players would care to admit.

  Failed Stealth Checks

The party rogue often has the roughest time of any individual member of a Dungeons & Dragons adventuring party. Acting as the team's scout, it is the rogue's job to search the path ahead for traps and ambushes. This adds a certain degree of pressure to the life of the rogue's player, as one botched Hide roll could spell doom for the whole party. This is why any rogue worthy of the name maximizes their ranks in Hide and Move Silently.

Unfortunately, there are certain magics that can thwart even the most canny of thieves. Spells that sense life-energy can pinpoint a rogue no matter where they hide. Even those rogues lucky enough to have a Ring of Invisibility can run afoul of some wizard who has the True Sight spell prepared. When that happens, the response is similar to that of the cat in the above meme.

The Chaotic Neutral Hero's Motivation

The Chaotic Neutral alignment is perhaps the most versatile of the nine moral alignments a Dungeons & Dragons character must choose from.  Uncommitted to either good or evil, the alignment includes those who are committed to letting chance decide every aspect of their life, free spirits unwilling to commit to anything, and thieves who will do whatever to make a quick gold piece.

While Chaotic Neutral characters would logically be among the least likely of heroes, many adventurers choose the alignment because a Chaotic Neutral hero can justify nearly any action to the game master by saying "Eh - this is what they feel like doing right now."

The above meme poster featuring Homer Simpson and a quote from The Simpsons Movie exemplifies this attitude.

Corgi Swarms!

While not as prevalent as they were in the earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons, spell mishaps as a result of a botched casting can cause all manner of interesting things to happen. At the same time,  swarms of animals are one of the most heavily underestimated threats in Dungeons & Dragons. While a swarm of insects may not be immediately lethal, they can prove quite distracting. Then there's the threat posed by a swarm of piranhas while crossing a river...

The two menaces are combined in the meme above, which suggests that a random spell failure effect might spawn a swarm of corgis.

Strangely enough, one popular Dungeons & Dragons site now offers rules for a home-brewed spell to summon a corgi swarm. The spell requires those within range of the swarm to make a Wisdom check or risk being incapacitated by the urge to play with the corgis.

One Party's Dungeon Crawl...

With no fixed address, Dungeons & Dragons' "heroes" wander the land, eliminating anyone who annoys them and taking what they need from their still warm husks. This principle applies whether the "anyone" in question is an ogre living in an out-of-the-way swamp or some rich nobleman with some magical artifact of great importance.

As the above meme points out, there is little practical difference between players going into a goblin village and eliminating everything that moves and the goblin raiders who menace human settlements in the typical low-level Dungeons & Dragons module. It's something to consider the next time you destroy some random creature because it's easier than trying to talk to them.

Figuring Out Encumbrance Rules

While Dungeons & Dragons has become more streamlined and less dependent on complex math in later editions, there is one aspect of the game that continues to annoy both players and game masters to the point that many of them don't bother with it - encumbrance.

Logically, there is a limit to what any person can carry, no matter how strong they are. Even with a magical Bag of Holding, the party fighter can only have so many back-up weapons on their person, ready to draw when a battle starts.

Things get even more complicated when game masters incorporate the rules regarding the penalties to movement and skill-checks when a person is carrying more than a light load. To that end, many game masters will ignore minor things like the accumulated weight of currency (50,000 gold pieces weighs a lot) provided the players don't exploit their good will.

There are No Elves in Fantasy Football

The word "fantasy" has many meanings and you can tell a lot a person about which meaning they take when they hear the word. For some, fantasy means anything that is not based in reality or impossible. Others specifically think of swords and sorcery, high adventure, and realms afar.

Whatever the case, most people enjoy fantasy in some form or fashion, though the fantasies of some may be more grounded in our world than in alternate universes. This meme drives that point home, depicting a jockish sort who will never know the joys of crushing his enemies and seeing them driven before him, because his fantasies involve a Dallas Cowboy's Superbowl Victory. His fantasies are no more valid than those of a Dungeons & Dragons player.

How The Party Started

Hopes are high whenever a group of Dungeons & Dragons players form a new adventuring party. Even if the players don't take direct inspiration from some favored fantasy hero, they will aspire to be as epic as the Fellowship of the Ring.

The reality is rarely so epic in scope or execution. Between game masters who railroad their players (denying them the ability to act in ways that derail the story the game master wants to tell), players who try to do silly things just for the fun of it (or, more frequently, to spite the railroading game master) and the sort of high-spirited wisecracks that might emerge, your average Dungeons and Dragons adventure is more likely to resemble the anarchy of a scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail than any moment from The Lord of The Rings films.

Futurama Alignment Chart

The moral alignment system of Dungeons & Dragons can be one of the more confusing aspects of the game to explain to laypeople. Characters must have one of nine alignments based along the lines of law vs. chaos and good vs. evil.

Good characters will put the needs of the many over the needs of the few while evil characters put themselves first. Lawful characters are concerned with rules and traditions whereas chaotic characters resist the dictates of others.

In order to better explain this, many meme-making Dungeons & Dragons players have turned to popular culture and used quotes from familiar characters to provide examples of the various alignments. While there are many great posters based on this idea, this Futurama inspired chart laying out the nine alignments is the best.

No One Understands The Grapple Rules

Grappling with an enemy can be one of the more difficult and time-consuming aspects of a combat in Dungeons and Dragons. In theory, the battle is meant to be one of strength against strength alone, with both parties being unable to move while the grapple is underway. Things become complicated, however, when one party wants to leave the grapple. Then the battle becomes one of strength versus dexterity, as one opponent tries to wiggle free of the other's grip.

This is further complicated if the would-be escapee has ranks in the Escape Artist skill, which can be substituted for their Dexterity check. Throw in a series of feats and abilities that offer different classes and creatures bonuses to grappling with an enemy or escaping from being held and you have one combat mechanic that is rarely worth the trouble.

Hit Points - Not The Most Realistic Health System

One of the high points of the movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail is King Arthur's battle with The Black Knight. Empowered by some sort of undefined magic that makes him immortal but not immune to harm, The Black Knight is disarmed by King Arthur and then de-legged, as The Black Knight keeps insisting the battle is not yet over until he literally has no leg to stand on.

As the maker of this meme points out, the health-measurement system in Dungeons and Dragons functions under the exact same principle. As long as a player has one hit point left, they can still act as if they were at full health, not taking any penalties to their abilities while there's still a little bit of life left in them.

First Level Problems

First level Dungeons & Dragons characters have to be careful. Though a first level fighter is still far more powerful and better armed than, say, a first level peasant, they are still at a point where almost everything in the world is capable of taking them out.

Indeed, it was a running joke among classic Dungeons& Dragons players that a common house cat was capable of taking out an entire village single-pawed, thanks to a cat's claws doing enough damage on paper that one idle cat-scratch could slay the average peasant. A first level wizard would not do much better.

While the maker of this meme is exaggerating things slightly, first level players should still be careful early on. A family of chipmunks could easily take down a newbie hero who disturbed their nut horde.

Go Ahead... Pull That Lever...

There is an old truism amongst experienced Dungeons & Dragons players - "Never trust a smiling game master." This is doubly true if you're the party thief.

Roguish sorts have to carefully consider the exact words the dungeon master gives them when describing a situation. Did the game master say that "There are no traps" after you rolled a Search for hidden booby traps on a door?  Or did they say "You don't find any traps," before offering up an evil grin?

Some game masters find joy in encouraging this kind of paranoia but a canny player can learn to detect traps by watching the game master's reaction as they approach certain objectives. While they may not have a tell as overt as the scheming raccoon in the above meme, there may be something that warns you when extra caution is needed.

Safety Necromance!

This term specifically refers to a form of divination that involves speaking with the dearly departed to gather information. Despite this, it has come to mean any sort of evil magic in the common parlance.

In Dungeons & Dragons, necromancy is a specific school of magic which governs the creation, destruction and manipulation of life energy. While the term "necromancer" is most often applied to wizards who specialize in raising the dead as monsters under their control, there are necromancy-focused wizards devoted to using their magic to slay the undead.

There are a number of jokes Dungeons & Dragons players make about the word "necromancy", including several puns involving vampires (i.e. neck romancing.) The above meme makes light of necromancers while paying tribute to the Canadian music group Men Without Hats and their biggest hit, "Safety Dance".