Well, this one kinda sux...

[Trajan]

What's the deal with Dungeons and Dragons?

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_309b.html

Actually wanted some info on this and instead got a lot of hot air.

Cecil, you can be very funny but sometimes your responses seem a little too self-indulgent. The Straight Dope then becomes the useless dope.

All yer recent ones I've read have been great. Ty and keep up the good work!

[andros]

Not like it matters. Anyone who plays that game will be burning eternally in the fiery lake of Hell soon enough.

[JimOfAllTrades]

Not like it matters. Anyone who plays that game will be burning eternally in the fiery lake of Hell soon enough.

Yeah, but only if they roll a six and a twenty, and have strength and magic over 200.

Ugly

[Irishman]

Trajan, what didn't you like? Cecil was doing a summary of the game, how it works and what is the point. He wasn't out to describe strategy, or give insight into how to make a truly kick-ass character, or whether it's better to be a cleric over a druid. Those are way to detailed for the column - and the point of the question. I think he answered the question asked pretty well - and with some great wit. If you notice, his final paragraph does tell the person where to find more information - game and hobby stores. He even gave a phone number.

What he didn't describe are the newer types of games using card decks, like Magic: The Gathering. But I don't know when the column was written, and it could be arguable if those should be included.

andros, you left off your smiley.

[Duck Duck Goose]

Well, I'm kinda with Trajan on this one. My youngest brother played D & D endlessly while he was in high school, and the rest of us were never able to understand what was going on. I clicked on the link and read the column with high anticipation, only to be rather let down at the end. Details, Cecil, we want details. We want to have the murky protocols and baffling minutiae and mystifying pronouncements, if not fully explained, at least basically delineated.

However, I do understand that it probably isn't humanly possible to explain D & D in the space of a Straight Dope column, so I will shelve my complaint.

[bungie_us]

Okay, I'll throw my two cents in, as someone who once played Dungeons & Dragons with considerable vigor. This was during my high school days, some 20 years past now, and my primary role was as the Mansonesque Dungeon Master. (I.E., Satan Incarnate, according to some people.)

What was the attraction to me and my cohorts in this role-playing weirdness? Looking back, I think it was a combination of factors. Creative outlet was the big one. In spite of the vast, arcane game rules, most of the game could best be described as interactive story-telling. Buncha guys collaborating to tell a tale. Most of the rules we ignored as being unnecessarily complex. We concentrated on what essentially amounted to fits of imagination. Strange? Sure, but relatively harmless when you think about it. We weren't out drinking and driving, egging houses, playing mailbox baseball, or harassing the teenage girls. Mostly we were sitting around someone's dining room table talking and drinking too many caffeinated soft drinks. Could we have been doing something else as a creative outlet? Sure, but we were having fun and nobody was getting hurt. (And, frankly, most of us moved on to other creative endeavors -- one of my screwball game cohorts is now a fairly successful mystery novelist.)

Another factor, I think, was a quest for a sense of control. Let's face it, me and my buddies were low on the social ladder, which in high school is pretty important. We weren't particularly attractive or athletic, and our sense of where we belonged was fairly fragile. Role-playing games provided the chance to move, even temporarily, in a state of mind where we were powerful and respected. Once again, strange? Yes, but also, for the most part, fairly harmless. As we grew up, we grew out of D&D, and it was because we found other outlets for feeling successful. Whether it was school or art or work or whatever. Some people never grow out of it, I suppose, but D&D isn't the problem here -- it's simply the symption.

A lot of fuss got made when I was in high school that D&D made you insane. My mom was constantly in a dither about it. There was a guy from my home town that flipped out and ran away and was last seen alive at a Dungeons & Dragons convention. Supposedly he wanted to play "real life" D&D. Eventually he committed suicide and the news was awash with the brainwashing power of D&D. All I can say to that is, "Hogwash." D&D can certainly be the expression of mental or emotional distress, but so can drinking, smoking, scrubbing the floor all night, etc. People escape reality in all sorts of ways, and D&D just happens to be a way that got especially bad press. The guy I mentioned above turned out to have been sexually abused by his father. But that wasn't nearly as exciting for the TV news as "D&D is brainwashing our children." If this kid just watched a lot of TV and molested his sister, it never would have made the news.

I don't want to sound like I'm being unduly defensive of D&D. It's weird, no doubt, as an avid former player who still remembers my D&D days with mild fondness, I nonetheless found Cecil's description to be essentially accurate and pretty funny. But I can also tell you that weird as it is, it essentially boils down to just one more thing that some people like to do.

I mean, you think D&D is weird -- think about how some people are about golf.

[Loren Pechtel]

Originally posted by Trajan
What's the deal with Dungeons and Dragons?

Actually wanted some info on this and instead got a lot of hot air.

I'll certainly agree that this reply of his is useless. Instead of trying to understand the game by looking at the books, he should have talked to a few players. The standard books are reference material, not instructions in the usual sense.
There are some introduction accessories out these days, they get you used to the system without being bogged down with the stuff that a beginner doesn't need to deal with.

He's also bashing it for the level of math involved, something I find strange. Virtually all the math is addition or subtraction of small numbers without decimals. Role-playing games are an intellectual pursuit, those who don't enjoy thinking aren't going to enjoy them anyway, and for those that do, the math is trivial.

Furthermore, most of the rules are not relevant to beginners, anyway--something that should be obvious as one book is labelled as being for the players, another for the dungeon master. The guy running the game has to have a reasonable knowledge of the rules, but he should be an experienced player anyway.

[JillGat]

But it's just a game.

[Chronos]

The rules of D&D are, in fact, extremely complex, as is inevitable for a game that attempts to simulate an entire world and everything that can happen in it. However, just as in the real world, you only need a very limited knowledge of the rules in order to play. At least one player (the Dungeon Master, or DM) needs to either know the rules well or be able to fake it, but the rest of the players don't need to know a thing. If I say that my player is fighting goblins using his sword, do I need to know about attack rolls, armor classes, and hit points? No. All I need to know is that sometime my character hits one of them, injuring it, and sometimes one of them hits him, injuring him, and that something that gets injured too badly, dies.

Of course, things like dragons (which he quotes) are rather more complex than goblins (dragons can fly, breath fire, cast spells, and do various other nasty things in addition to normal attacks), but then again, you're not going to be encountering dragons until you've got a lot more experience and familiarity with the game.

By the way, that quote concerning the ancient, huge red dragon appears to be from a first-edition rulebook. The third edition (current) rules are generally considered to be a bit simpler, but what I said above still applies.

[evilbeth]

Originally posted by JillGat
But it's just a game.

And this is just a posting board, and it's just a movie, and someone's pet was just a dog, and it was just a relationship--different people get excited over different things, that is what makes the world an interesting place.
Much more interesting than a bunch of cynics and pessimists sitting around proclaiming that none of this is real and it's all an illusion.

Shit happens and then you die but it is up to you to make the most of that shit first.

[sea snake]

I was a D&D player for years growing up. I think my experience with it was pretty much like bungie_us' post.

It's been years since I had anythig to do with RPG's, and I really don't want to play them again, but I don't regret having played it. It was good for my imagination and general mental exercise (the column wasn't exagerating about the enormous number of tedious calculations).

When someone with no background in the games asks me how it works, I try to describe it as briefly as possible:

[tiny]The Dungeon Master sets up a virtual reality full of scenarios through which players journey. There's no board, but occasionally there are a few props that helps everyone envision the reality. The players all work together doing anything they can think of to accomplish some designated goal or quest. A lot of the time is spent fighting mosters, exploring dungeons, and gathering info on towns. Basically, it's like acting out a standard Sword 'n Sorcery story.

The rules assign various statistics and odds of doing anything and everything successfully. The dice are used to randomly determine in each action whether a player succeeded. Different players are tailored with unique biographies so each has different chances of success at various things.[/tiny]

There's really not much more detail to actually explain, unless you want to know the actual rules, which really isn't realistic to explain here.

Some people think the rules are too cumbersome, so they trim it down to their liking. Whatever works is best, because the point of the game is enjoyment.

[Clairmont]

Originally posted by Duck Duck Goose


However, I do understand that it probably isn't humanly possible to explain D & D in the space of a Straight Dope column, so I will shelve my complaint.

When you click Submit, it's too late to shelve your complaint.

[Duck Duck Goose]

Thank you, Sea Snake. That was pretty much my kid brother's explanation, but you expressed it better, and without using "um" and "you know?" and "like".

The biggest thing that none of us could understand was the heavy emphasis laid on the Dungeon Master. The DM makes up his own layout, and he's the only one that knows what's down that tunnel, or what's behind that door. So we would ask, "How do you know he's not changing it, or making it up as he goes along?" My brother and his buddies would turn their bewildered little faces to us and protest, "But he WOULDN'T!"

"Yes, but how do you know?"
"Well--well--just BECAUSE. He wouldn't, that's all." This was an item of unshakeable faith. We finally figured that it must be a Male Bonding Thing and let it go at that.

I was interested to discover, 20 years later, that my brother's Dungeon Master had grown up to be the music teacher at my daughter's high school.

The other tiny thing we didn't really get was the lack of a glossy game board, like with Candy Land or Monopoly. Graph paper? How bizarre.

[Irishman]

Duck Duck, your devious mind hits an interesting point - why wouldn't the DM make it up as he goes, or change things on the fly?

Part of the answer is that the fun of the game is that you can win, if you do things right. A DM who alters things on the fly for his own malicious amusement would very quickly run out of people to play with. If there's a DM who can make things up on the fly and keep it honest, that's one brilliant dude.

Then there's the pride thing. There's different ways to enjoy the game. As a regular player, you don't know what's coming. And with the dice, you don't know the outcome. You have to take what's thrown at you, make decisions, and hope for the best. And when 12 giant rats kill your party off in the first room you enter, that's the breaks. However, the DM is in a different situation. He isn't just along for the ride, he's the one directing the show. It is up to him to make the game fun, exciting, surprising, involving, and remain fair, and aimed at the appropriate level for the characters involved (i.e. don't make it too tough). A good DM is worshipped by his friends for keeping it entertaining. A DM who arbitrarily changed things or maliciously attacked the characters is going to get his ass kicked by his nerd friends. It would be like a referree at a football game making up new fouls as he goes along. "Foul - team A is wearing red on their uniforms, 20 yard penalty, first down." He won't be referree for long.

[bungie_us]

Originally posted by Irishman
Part of the answer is that the fun of the game is that you can win, if you do things right. A DM who alters things on the fly for his own malicious amusement would very quickly run out of people to play with. If there's a DM who can make things up on the fly and keep it honest, that's one brilliant dude.

I don't want to suggest that I was "one brilliant dude," either as a pimply high school student or as a pimply middle-aged guy, but back in the days when I was a Dungeon Master, sometimes the only way to make a session enjoyable to was to change things on the fly. Consider a variation on Irishman's example. Room one has 12 giant rats, but let's say the group just barely kills them off. Well, if my map and notes tell me that room two has 15 giant rats, well, I better do something fast or we're going to be done for the evening, with a mountain of Doritos un-munched and a half-dozen 2-liter bottles of Coke un-drunk.

The sense of fun for me as DM was the creative aspect -- and let me tell you, there were relentless hours of map-making and notes that prefaced each week's gathering. But there were also half a dozen guys making their own decisions about how to react to what I threw at them. I couldn't count on them to follow a script, so I had to be ready to shift gears quickly. If I was successful, it was when I adjusted to the choices of the players and kept a game moving and fresh. At the same time, there was an unspoken agreement that players wouldn't make choices that were too drastically out of whack with what I'd prepared. If I spent a week skipping my homework to create a castle on the moor outside of town, then set up a reason for the players to go, they went. Technically, they might have decided to stay in town, hang out at the tavern, and ogle wenches. Nothing to stop them (except maybe a horde of bandits I could make up on the fly to chase them outa town).

As a player, I wanted a DM who was clever, innovative and balanced. Create the castle on the moor, but then give me a real good reason to check it out and I'll bite. Then you get the interactive story telling I mentioned in an earlier post. Sometimes it could be really fun, sometimes not. Depended on the DM and on the players. And I had DMs who admitted afterward that they had to completely change everything they planned because of choices made by the players. The good ones were the ones who changed things transparently.

The best games, when I played, went on for weeks or even months. Any given week might be one small sub-adventure in a much larger story. The DM built the bones of the story, and the players provided the characters, dialog, action and reaction to events created by the DM.

As I mentioned before, it IS just a buncha pretend, and it is weird -- especially to an outsider but even a little bit to an insider. But in the end, it's still just a thing some people like.

[sea snake]

How do you know he's not changing it, or making it up as he goes along

Actually, I did change the scenario around on the fly from time to time. If players were having too much luck with die rolls and guesses, or if they were having too little of it, the game wouldn't be as fun. The DM's job is to make the game fun for the players, not to enforce strict game rules or compete against players.

It didn't matter to the players when I didn't, as long as they couldn't detect the difference when I did. Even if the players would "lose", they'd still have fun because they'd play the character well and have a dramatic death that made an impact on the story. Then they'd just make a new character. You don't need a happy ending to have a fun game.

[JillGat]

Originally posted by evilbeth

And this is just a posting board, and it's just a movie, and someone's pet was just a dog, and it was just a relationship--different people get excited over different things, that is what makes the world an interesting place.
Much more interesting than a bunch of cynics and pessimists sitting around proclaiming that none of this is real and it's all an illusion.

Shit happens and then you die but it is up to you to make the most of that shit first.

No, a relationship is a relationship and D&D is a game. I'm not diminishing recreation, here... far from it. I love games. I'm just sayin'.

[Chronos]

I've only DMed once, so far, but let me tell you, there were very few things in that game that I didn't end up having to change on the fly. Think of it this way: The DM is one person, trying to think of ways to go one particular way. The players are four or five people, all trying to think of ways to make the story go whichever way they happen to want to make it go, which is not necessarily the way the DM thinks that they'll want to make it go. Folks can be remarkably creative (or remarkably lucky) in doing things that you never expected them to be able to do.

[one last glass, dear]

"If there's a DM who can make things up on the fly and keep it honest, that's one brilliant dude. "

My favorite DM was that kinda dude, a Classics major and into beasts and Hell...after awhile it dawned on me that I'd better be a paladin if I wanted to get anywhere in his universe...one of my favorite D&D recollections is my sister's half-orc character named "Buffy". Of course, once Buffy managed to prove herself survivable, we began meeting other DM-introduced characters with names like "Mr. French", etc. That was a different DM...the indignant kind with the Pimples of Fury. Of course, my sister and I never had pimples...

[bungie_us]

Jill said:
[QUOTE[No, a relationship is a relationship and D&D is a game. I'm not diminishing recreation, here... far from it. I love games. I'm just sayin'.[/quote]

Um, what?

For example, are you saying, "it's just a game, so why are we talking about it?" Or, "It's just a game, so what's so baffling about it?"

It's just a game, so why do the people who play it take it so seriously?

It's just a game, so why do the people who DON'T play it fret about it so much?

It's just a game, so what's not to get?

It's just a game, so why would anyone spend eternity in the lake of fire because of it?

It's just a game, so why would a high school boy almost fail trigonometry because he was prepping to play?

No dis intended, but I didn't exactly follow your first post, and then I didn't exactly follow your second post so I thought I'd ask.

Cheers.

[Irishman]

Jill, I don't think evilbeth was trying to say that D&D is a relationship. I think she was interpreting your remark to mean "Why is everybody so worked up over it, it's just a game." And her response was meant to show that people get worked up over a lot of things that others around them think are trivial and unimportant. One person's loving companion is another person's vicious fiend they want to drop kick. Same cat, different person, different attitude.

[Irishman]

Originally, I said:

If there's a DM who can make things up on the fly and keep it honest, that's one brilliant dude.

[sheepish] I threw that out on the fly. In restrospect, I was wrong. [/sheepish]

As mentioned, good DMs were willing and able to change things on the fly, if it helped the story, or to adjust to the whims of the players when they failed to do what you expected. However, the DM has to be careful changing things, because he has to keep track of the changes for consistency later. For instance, suppose you return to a room you visited previously. Of course he has to keep track of what you've killed already, any treasure you found, any treasure you missed, any new monsters that came out of hiding, secret doors, etc. That's why it takes lots of planning to set up the adventure beforehand. So if he goes altering things willy nilly, he has a much more difficult task of tracking what's happened. And sorting out later experience points. (Oops, that was 5 giant rats in room 2, not 15. And a ring of rat annihilation.) And yes, DMs are writing this stuff down.

Of course I didn't play that much, and I never DMed.

[JillGat]

Originally posted by Irishman
Jill, I don't think evilbeth was trying to say that D&D is a relationship. I think she was interpreting your remark to mean "Why is everybody so worked up over it, it's just a game." And her response was meant to show that people get worked up over a lot of things that others around them think are trivial and unimportant. One person's loving companion is another person's vicious fiend they want to drop kick. Same cat, different person, different attitude.

Good point and I agree. And I get worked up about all kinds of weird shit, too.

[Demise]

Originally posted by JillGat
But it's just a game.

You should realize that anything that someone spends a lot of time on ceases to be "just a ______". It becomes an investment, an embodiment of the effort that you have put into it. Other games besides pen-and-paper RPGs (Role-Playing Games) suffer from this as well, Magic: The Gathering (card based RPG), and Everquest (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) spring to mind.

An analogy would be a piece of furniture that an amateur carpenter has put many hours into building is going to be more than "just a table". Its importance to the builder is directly related to the time and effort spent creating it.

With this in mind, it's pretty easy to see how an unstable person could begin valuing a game over other things in their lives that should be more important.

[Podkayne]

If you guys (Trajan and Duck Duck Goose, if you have further questions about D&D or just want general information, I'm sure you could post in GQ and have a 10d6 posters tripping all over themselves to help you out!

[Loren Pechtel]

Originally posted by Duck Duck Goose
The biggest thing that none of us could understand was the heavy emphasis laid on the Dungeon Master. The DM makes up his own layout, and he's the only one that knows what's down that tunnel, or what's behind that door. So we would ask, "How do you know he's not changing it, or making it up as he goes along?" My brother and his buddies would turn their bewildered little faces to us and protest, "But he WOULDN'T!"[/b]

Actually, it's a lot easier if you have a complete description of what's there. Making it up as you go is *FAR* harder.

[Loren Pechtel]

Originally posted by Irishman
Part of the answer is that the fun of the game is that you can win, if you do things right. A DM who alters things on the fly for his own malicious amusement would very quickly run out of people to play with. If there's a DM who can make things up on the fly and keep it honest, that's one brilliant dude.
[/b]

Altering things on the fly need not be for malicious amusement. It can perfectly well be done to correct earlier mistakes by the DM. Barring a really major mistake, it should be done with enough subtelty that the players do not realize it happened.

However, the DM is in a different situation. He isn't just along for the ride, he's the one directing the show. It is up to him to make the game fun, exciting, surprising, involving, and remain fair, and aimed at the appropriate level for the characters involved (i.e. don't make it too tough). A good DM is worshipped by his friends

Fair to the players. There is no need to ensure fairness to the monsters.

[Chronos]

Quoth Podkayne:

I'm sure you could post in GQ and have a 10d6 posters tripping all over themselves to help you out!

Let's see... You apparently play D&D, you have excellent taste in literature, you understand the distinction between centripital and centrifugal, and post references to the AJ to back up your points... If you're not careful, you're going to have some nerd proposing to you, at this rate!


As for amusing changes introduced by the DM, I once played an adventure where the DM lost his notes halfway through. We spent the rest of the adventure in the woods outside the city of Blah-blahblah, now a permanent fixture in the geography of that world.

[Bryan Ekers]

I've played this game off-and-on through my teens and twenties and could jump back into it now, but I'm disinclined to spend any more money to pick up the 3rd edition books after I'd invested serious coin in the 2nd.

Talk about drowning in a lake of fire, I'd just as soon not drown in a lake of poverty, especially if it's Lake Geneva, Wis.

I remember reading Cecil's original column in the first Stright Dope book and I can understand that the math LOOKS overwhelming, but I've never known any DM to sit down calculate every possible experience point on each monster. I certainly never did it myself when I was DM. I was too busy trying to keep the game challenging and interesting. I tried to make the encounters such that the players would only get 'killed' if they were very unlucky on the rolls or very very dumb ("Hey, I'm going to try attacking that dragon by rolling Captain-Kirk-style underneath it and stabbing it in the belly"). Of course, the idea that the dragon could just lie down and crush him never occured to him. Moments like this were good for laughs, though.

The worst campaigns I played were with a DM who was fond of psychedelic episodes, as in "A small pink spot appears on the wall, it spreads. If you stab at it nothing happens. None of the doors or windows will open so you can't escape. Your spells have no effect..." This would continue until the players gave up (it turned out giving up was almost always the key) or we used some magic item we had just picked up.

Whoa. Heavy, dude. Baaad trip.

The idea the "D&D = insanity" was helped along by the 1982 made-for-TV movie "Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters" starring Tom Hanks. Hanks played the guy who loses it completely and very nearly jumps off the World Trade Center. Fortunately, Hanks recovered from this and went on to make his mark with "Bachelor Party" and other triumphs.

[Johnny Angel]

I find the very fact that people are puzzled by the interest in the game very odd. Public television spent years training me to use my imagination, so why is it so weird that I do?

What is D&D?

It's a sophisticated game of Let's Pretend. As you will probably recall, the clay feet of Let's Pretend was in that there was no arbitration. Quite often, two kids in the game will insist that their monster is bigger, or their quickdraw is quicker. D&D has codified rules that determine who has what level of ability in which skills. It allows you to weigh the knight's skill with a sword against the hardness of the dragon's scales, and determine the knight's chances of hurting the beast. Then, you roll dice to see if he is successful.

The game can be as complicated as you want it to be, but generally it's not complicated at all. Football is a lot more complicated, if you take it seriously, and I know a lot of not-bright-niks who understand football. Nearly all the numbers involved in D&D are easily computed using addition or subtraction. The numbers represent ranges of numbers that come up in the role of a die, and all of this is highly intuitive. You can dig up obscure number-crunching rules, such as the one Cecil cites, but these are rare and in fact hardly bothered with anymore. He was building a straw man with that example.

Further arbitration is provided by the Dungeon Master, or Game Master. The GM sets up challenges, and rewards players for meeting those challenges. He describes the world to the players and decides how it reacts to their behavior. Another big problem with trying to live out a fantasy in a game of Let's Pretend is that there is no vision, no narrative authority. If neither of these things mattered, we wouldn't ever need to read novels -- we could just make up stories ourselves instead of reading books. But instead, we read books whose authors we trust to deliver a believable world full of interesting details and events. Likewise, players play with a GM whom they trust to use their characters in a story.

Why we play D&D is not hard to understand. We play it for the same reason that we play any game, and for the same reason that we read books or recite lines from movies.

[Bryan Ekers]

Originally posted by Johnny Angel
It's a sophisticated game of Let's Pretend. As you will probably recall, the clay feet of Let's Pretend was in that there was no arbitration. Quite often, two kids in the game will insist that their monster is bigger, or their quickdraw is quicker.

Hmm, not to cast aspersions, but the only adults who can casually use phrases like "Let's Pretend" without sounding vaguely kinky are Kindergarden teachers and Mister Rogers (and I'm not sure about Rogers).

No matter. The explanation I like to give of roleplaying mechanics, on the few occasions I'm called upon to do so, involve the military games that indirectly inspired it. If I was an experienced military officer trying to teach basic strategy to junior officers, I'd give them a map and a mission and a fictional brigade to play with.

"You have to capture and hold that bridge, hotshot," I'd say in my best 'Speed' style. "What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?!"

At all times, I have to describe results that are plausible and instructive/interesting. If he thinks it would be a good idea to put his artillery on a hill overlooking the bridge, he should "check" first (by asking me) if it's been raining lately. If he's careless enough to put his artillery in a potential mudslide area, he'll 'lose' them. This and other complications hopefully keep the scenario plausible, including details like how he would feed his men, maintain communications with them, evacuate wounded, etc. My role in all this is to control other factors like weather and enemy movements, which will gradually be revealed to him if he is smart enough to ask.

Anyway, if the eyes of the person I'm talking to haven't glazed over yet, I'll segue to the Conan movies and go from there.

[Johnny Angel]

Bryan Ekers wrote:

Hmm, not to cast aspersions, but the only adults who can casually use phrases like "Let's Pretend" without sounding vaguely kinky are Kindergarden teachers and Mister Rogers (and I'm not sure about Rogers).

No matter. The explanation I like to give of roleplaying mechanics, on the few occasions I'm called upon to do so, involve the military games that indirectly inspired it. If I was an experienced military officer trying to teach basic strategy to junior officers, I'd give them a map and a mission and a fictional brigade to play with.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to chaff my fellow gamers by making the game sound unmanly. Thankfully, you were available to assure everbody that gamers are real men.

[JillGat]

[[I find the very fact that people are puzzled by the interest in the game very odd. Public television spent years training me to use my imagination, so why is it so weird that I do?]]

Good point. Though I hope you didn't really have to learn that from television.

[bungie_us]

Originally posted by JillGat
[[I find the very fact that people are puzzled by the interest in the game very odd. Public television spent years training me to use my imagination, so why is it so weird that I do?]]

Good point. Though I hope you didn't really have to learn that from television.

Well, personally, I think NOT having a television (until I was about 10 or so) did more for my imagination than Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers could have. But that could just be me.

[Johnny Angel]

JillCat wrote:

[[I find the very fact that people are puzzled by the interest in the game very odd. Public television spent years training me to use my imagination, so why is it so weird that I do?]]

Good point. Though I hope you didn't really have to learn that from television.

Actually, that's a good subject for a thread in itself. The reason why they push imagination so much on Sesame Street is becaue there's a notion going around that childrens' imaginations are delicate, and unless they're cultivated they don't have any. We're supposed to feel bad when we confront children with facts and logic, because it dashes their creativity. There's a Harry Chapin song that my mother is very fond of where a kid who claims to see a lot more colors in flowers than everyone else does is taught to color them properly, and we are supposed to be horrified to discover that he's turned into a pod person robot.

In my opinion, a child whose creativity needs nurturing is not that creative to begin with. A real imagination is robust. It can't be crushed, and it doesn't need to be coddled. Those people who whine as adults that someone dashed their creativity when they were children, or else they would have been artists, are bullshitting themselves.

It's probably all the people who have fantasized that some adult sapped the creative power out of them who created this phenomenon in which kids are forced to play imagination games, and are all told how wonderfully creative they are. Yet, in spite of how terribly urgent all this imagining is to the adults trying to cram it down the throats of children, people still find it strange that some adults continue to play imagination games. After years of being pressed to daydream harder, at what magic age are we supposed to suddenly stop daydreaming?

[Podkayne]

Originally posted by Chronos
If you're not careful, you're going to have some nerd proposing to you, at this rate!

Too late. I already married my GM.

[Bryan Ekers]

Originally posted by Johnny Angel
We're supposed to feel bad when we confront children with facts and logic, because it dashes their creativity. There's a Harry Chapin song that my mother is very fond of where a kid who claims to see a lot more colors in flowers than everyone else does is taught to color them properly, and we are supposed to be horrified to discover that he's turned into a pod person robot.

In my opinion, a child whose creativity needs nurturing is not that creative to begin with. A real imagination is robust. It can't be crushed, and it doesn't need to be coddled. Those people who whine as adults that someone dashed their creativity when they were children, or else they would have been artists, are bullshitting themselves.

It's probably all the people who have fantasized that some adult sapped the creative power out of them who created this phenomenon in which kids are forced to play imagination games, and are all told how wonderfully creative they are. Yet, in spite of how terribly urgent all this imagining is to the adults trying to cram it down the throats of children, people still find it strange that some adults continue to play imagination games. After years of being pressed to daydream harder, at what magic age are we supposed to suddenly stop daydreaming?

DAMN STRAIGHT! I'm personally getting sick of films and television shows that suggest children possess this starry-eyed wonder which is routinely crushed by uncaring adults, or adults who have good intentions but screw up anyway. It's even worse when the starry-eyed child is played by Robin Williams, which seems to be more and more lately. The only good antidote is to watch a videotape of Williams' early standup comedy, which is filled with profanity and drug references. Then we can jeer cynically at his whole "innocent" bit.

Ever notice that when a movie features an adolescent growing up, the critics call it a "coming of age" if there's a happy ending and a "loss of innocence" if there's a sad ending? I've always been mystified when listening to American pundits (I'm Canadian) talk about their generation in terms of loss of innocence. "We lost our innocence on Omaha Beach", or "Dealey Plaza" or "Viet Nam" or "Watergate". I'm not sure if the Generation X types felt they were EVER innocent, so maybe we'll be spared finding out when they lost theirs.

Hell, Canada lost its innocence, so to speak, in the first World War when we proved we could play a major role in international conflicts and politics. We've been grown-ups ever since.


(edited to fix formatting - whole post was bold)

[Edited by Arnold Winkelried on 01-30-2001 at 09:36 AM]

[bungie_us]

. . . Canada lost its innocence, so to speak, in the first World War . . .

I suppose you're being a smart-aleck, but that comment makes you guilty of what you're accusing Americans of, and as well as of one-up-manship.

So, now, someone from Virginia or Georgia can say, "Oh yeah, we lost our innocence in 1861-65."

On the other hand, I don't dispute the American tendency to sentimentalize just about anything we can. But adults CAN also crush children's imaginations too. The Barney world view may overstate it, but if you'd met some of the kids and parents I've worked with, you'd see what I mean.

Isn't it funny how this thread started out about, what IS D&D anyway?

[Bryan Ekers]

Originally posted by bungie_us

I suppose you're being a smart-aleck, but that comment makes you guilty of what you're accusing Americans of, and as well as of one-up-manship.

Me? A smart-alec? Only in the truest, most absolute sense of the word.

Yank-bashing is almost a bloodsport in some Canadian circles, but it's ultimately just how we relax after being so polite and self-effacing most of the time. I have to admit feeling a stir of pride when I toured a Canadian fort on Lake Ontario.

"Yep, them cannons are facing south. It was 1812 and we kicked ass."

Of course, Canada wasn't a county as such in 1812, but we have to cling to the idea that despite drowning us in your television and movies, we could take you on in a fair fight.

A pipe dream, I know, but it's a natural response to movies like "The Patriot."