In Singer v. Raemisch, the Seventh Circuit this month upheld a prison regulation forbidding inmates from playing Dungeons and Dragons, apparently because the game would encourage prisoners to escape.
I’m not sure I follow that reasoning. Is there something about Dungeons and Dragons that reasonable prison officials could believe would lead to increased security risks?
ETA: also mentioned as a rationale was the idea that D&D could foster gang activity because the game emulates gang strcuture. One player, the Dungeon Master, gives absolute guidance and direction to subordinate players, exactly as a gang boss gives direction to his subordinates.
I’ve played D&D since I was a teenager and I feel confident that no prison could hold me.
Honestly though, it’s moronic. D&D or more generally any pencil and paper roleplaying game is a perfect vehicle to pour out an inmate’s excess energy. Prisons should be promoting Pencil and Paper RPGs.
Though I should note that when I was last at the HQ for Catalyst Game Labs, license holders for Shadow Run, we all felt bad for the guy in prison who wrote asking for a donation of gaming materials. However it seemed to be somewhat counter productive to entertain the idea of sending him a game where the player characters tend to be criminals (though often of a noble sort).
They should be required to play lawful-good characters as part of their rebilitation.
I certainly don’t see any harm in allowing prisoners to play D&D. If a game became a focus for some sort of prison gang then closing down that game would seem in order. But I don’t think it would be any more likely to become such a focus as opposed to any other semi-structured social activity.
That said, how often are prison policies challenged in the courts? What grounds do you challenge them on? Certainly being banned from playing D&D isn’t cruel and unusual punishment.
I’ve admittedly never been in a gang, but I think I’d replace “exactly” in this sentence with “pretty much in no way similar to”
This is just silly. The game does not work that way. The DM is not the player’s boss, he’s more of a referee/antagonist. He describes the setting, controls and/or creates the storyline, portrays all non-player characters, makes combat rolls for the monsters, and adjudicates the results of player actions under the rules.
Yah, it’s hard to follow - not least because DMs (good ones, anyway) really don’t give “absolutely guidance and direction” to the other players. DMs don’t give orders, other than purely mechanical instruction - “okay, roll to see if cast magic missile worked …”
I could sort of see an argument that any activity which fosters social interaction between prisoners not mediated by prison staff could foster gang activity - but what of other board games? Sports? Prayer groups? In-prison employment? Good grief, I suspect there are common jobs in prison in which prisoner trustees really will give binding instructions to subordinate prisoners - “hey, you didn’t clean this/assemble this/X properly - fix it!”
Courts have traditionally given a great deal of deference to prisons making decisions about security and correctional needs of the facility, and that’s appropriate. But that shouldn’t be unquestioning deference.
The only issue I see is prisoners could potentially cross the line between in-character and out-of-character, leading to fights caused by some in-character slight. I think the benefits of socialization and problem-solving far outweigh those risks, though.
If prisoners have the desire and means to escape, they don’t need D&D as a catalyst.
Could it just stem from a misunderstanding? The prisoners are already *in *a dungeon of sorts; perhaps the objection was only to the introduction of dragons.
No. Nothing about the game of D&D would give a person any real life guidance about how to escape from prison. A game scenario would be something like this:
Player 1: I try to escape from prison!
(Dungeon Master rolls dice)
DM: You successfully escape!
The Dungeon Master creates the setting of the game, but he’s not supposed to direct players how they act. Whether a player succeeds at a particular action depends upon his character’s statistics and the roll of the dice.
Well, on paper it gives any convict unlimited access to medieval weaponry and armor, possibly enchanted to boot. Vorpal mithril shivs present a real security concern. Jack Chick also warned us direly about the hobby’s potential to unlock magical powers in players.
OK, serious answer : the only way I could see roleplaying as presenting a security risk would be if the DM organizes a “dungeon crawl” using the prison’s floorplan, monsters that would have exactly the guards’ routines, etc…
In that sense, it could be construed as a planning tool. But no more than allowing convicts to doodle in the sand. Or talk.
D&D promotes original thinking, and rewards finding creative solutions to problems. In this case, how to get out of jail.
And do you have any idea just how many spells there are that can be used to escape confinement?
Start with the basic knock spell to open the doors and go from there. Dozens of levitation and flight incantations. Stone to mud. Summon Earth elemental.
Then you add in all the glamours, charms, and illusions.
The prisons would be empty in mere days.
I imagine Dopers could fill pages of this thread with ideas.
Standard caltrops ARE tetrahedral, just like 4 sided dice but with points (obviously).
As a D&Der from WAY back (1974), I can’t imagine what the officials were thinking.
Maybe they were afraid that the inmates would have too much fun.
After all, I can name a couple of folks who would be perfectly happy to spend a few years just playing AD&D. No job, no bills, just pure fantasy role playing day in and day out.
Maybe the escape the officials were worrying about was a mental escape.
Prison is supposed to be unpleasant, right?
For the record, though, the court didn’t agree that D&D fosters gang activity. It said the D&D player (Singer) failed to prove that the prison was acting irrationaly when it decided D&D might lead to gang activity in the future and undermine prison security. He had to do that in order to show the officials were out of bounds and that they had to return his gaming materials. It’s not that much of a difference, but it’s a judicial ruling, so the truth is nitpicky: it’s not enough that this interpretation of prison policy was incredibly moronic, and that not only did the prison officials not prove D&D is linked to gang activity, they straight-up admitted it hasn’t lead to gang activity in the past. Singer also had to prove that the officials didn’t have a rational basis for their belief that it the game could undermine authority in the prison and run counter to the goal of rehabilitation, and the court says he didn’t do that.
