Meanwhile, the Norwegian army is using LARP (live action roleplaying) to practice conflict handling. The article is only in Norwegian, but it describes a LARP where a coalition led by Norway is sent as a peacekeeping force to the warridden Utopia 
<former AD&D gamer checking in>
Do you REALLY want those nutbags with a security clearance? I’m surprised I’m allowed out in public!
… Seems pretty foolish to me.
Then again, they could afford to be taken down a notch or two.
Rashak Mani wrote:
As I understand it, everybody serves in the Israel military for some point in their lives. Am I smoking the crack here? That would mean they can afford to be a lot less tollerant.
With a phrase like, "smoking “the crack” , yes I would say you are. Seriously, who precededs words with the word “the”?
And no, not everyone, there is an exception made for religous scholars.
When I was in the Navy in the mid 80’s I ran a pretty steady game. Things get boring as hell out to sea after a while.
The hard part was trying to direct my Mother over the phone which of the hardcovers to mail to me. There was no way I wanted my Fiend Folio entrusted to the USPS.
Well, the US Army uses what could be described as LARPs. They train their soldiers to deal with crowds but getting people to act like an angry mob. They shout anti-USA slogans and act out.
Marc
They could exempt everyone for all I care… we are just picking on WHY they are being less tolerant with RPGers. There certainly are all sorts of wackos to be excluded…
Grrrrrrrrr.
Grrrrrrrrr.
I’ve been pissed off for days about all this. The Israeli roleplaying community - which growing quickly - is up in arms. We have no idea where the hell this came from.
Understand: you may find this amusing, but I can assure you that the highschool students involved aren’t. Israeli teenagers tend to treat their upcoming military service the same way Americans treat college applications, and for similar rasons. How would you like it if the entire Ivy League declared that it wasn’t accepting D&D players? I bet you’d be the first ones up on the barricades.
Hopefully, this will blow over, or things could get very nasty - even for 30-year-old roleplayers like me (I’ve been playing with the same group since 9th grade - we had to take a 3-year hiatus after high school because we were all in combat units). There was a great op-ed on the subject in last weeks Yediot by revered novelist and columnist Meir Shalev attacking the military’s policy. Basically, he reiterated what some posters said about D&D being a wargaming simulation, and then launched into a complicated Biblical analogy the ultimately stated that the IDF needed people with the imagination, innovation and resourcefullness of roleplayersm to counter the military tendancy towards mental calcification. So maybe something good will come out of all this.
Yeah, I think being in the IDF is about as detached from reality as one can be. Being a warrior for the CHOSEN people of god, fighting against the heathens knocking at the doorstep.
However, philisophically, I must admit that as I’ve grown older I have begun to understand quite well why D&D was reviled by the cultural climate of my youth. The Christian right is somewhat correct, by their definition of devil worship, D&D does encourage devil worship. In my studies of Metaphysics as an adult I have discovered that much of the themes in pagan mysticism, in qabbalah, and in many things have a direct corrolation to the roleplaying games I played as a child. Particularly mage the ascension. Trying to understand the different spheres of magic in Mage introduced me to a lot of new concepts.
Hell living in New York has a lot of similarities to Sigil from Planescape.
So from the point of view of their dogmatic indoctrination in the youth groups of my childhood, I can understand their reservations. That could very well explain why the IDF doesn’t want people playing, it might subvert their indoctrination as it did to me.
Erek
P.S.
My cousin who was an E4 in the Navy played D&D with his shipmates.
Quite the opposite - the IDF is very matter-of-fact about what it does. We just did our job and left all the hoo-ah BS to the Marines. Besides, seperating the military from everyday Israeli life is like trying to take football out of Texas - it’s hard to know where one ends and the other starts.
Probably some end-of-the-line colonel in his 50’s got freaked out by kids running around in aluminum chainmail, and got a bug in his head that D&D is dangerous. The rest is just stupid army beurocracy.
Ouch. You have my sympathy, Alessan. I can see that it’s no joking matter for those who have to suffer the consequences of this idiocy. Would it help, do you think, to compare it with video games? Or would that just give the troglodytes one more target?
There’s a lot to say about IDF, and I’ve said some of it on occasion, but there’s nothing imaginary about the enemy they are fighting.
Hm. What kind of definition is that? I would assume that to worship a devil you had to – at a minimum – believe in him/her. I’ve played roleplaying games and LARP for almost twenty years, with literally hundreds of different players, and I’ve never met or heard about anyone who gave any sign of believing in the game worlds.
DM: Ooh! You accidentally land right on top of the Ark of the Covenant! Save vs. Death Magic…
Player: Awww…ouch!
DM: Oh, wow! Okay, after your companions sweep up the ashes…
mswas wrote:
To be more explicit, the argument they would make is anything that smacks of the occult is one of the snares the devil sets to lead people to practice of the occult, which serves the devil, no matter what the practitioners actually think they’re doing, because that’s how the devil tricks people. This is a reasonable argument if you believe that the devil is active in the world and is actually trying to recruit others into his service.
Beside the fact that I find this argument unconvincing, I think it’s telling that the people who theoretically would believe D&D was satainic on these grounds also need more proof than this, as evidenced by the fact that those who speak out against the game do so by making up claims about D&D having actual spells in it and leading to suicide, among other falsehoods.
There is also a good deal of Judeo-Christian influence in the game. The prohibition against using bladed weapons that was a feature of the cleric class for a long time came from the Knights Templar, who claimed that the biblical prohibition against killing was really only againt shedding blood, but a knight wielding a mace sheds, well, less blood. That way, they rationalized being both churchmen and warriors. There are spells that are surely inspired by the bible – walk on water, sticks to snakes, control water, tongues, insect plague. Many others are at least biblically relevant – cure wounds, cure blindness/deafness, cure disease, cure poison, bless, raise dead, magic stone, prayer, sanctuary, augury. The creators took influence from wherever they could find it, and the result was arguably as much a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition as anything else. After all, Kaballah was practiced as part of the Jewish religion just as Hermeticism was believed by its practitioners to have been intimitely linked to the Christian faith.
Disclaimer: I’ve played AD&D for over 25 years, and still have some of the same players from back then in the group I DM. We were all in the military when we started, and two of them still are.
That said, I think I agree with the IDF when it comes to people who ‘act out’ the game. Dressing up in capes, with swords and maces, and shouting ‘Lightning Bolt’ while waving your arms at someone, is pretty lame. IMHO, anyway. I think people who go to this extreme are socially, if not mentally, deficient.
Sitting around the table and playing with dice & paper is acceptable, although I’ve had a few deranged players – and ended up asking them to leave.
Here is Aaron Williams (Nodwick) excellent take on the situation.
Danalan wrote:
As much as I enjoy giving the business to players of Live Action Vampire, I don’t think even this is a good reason to permanently marr someone’s millitary service record. Do you feel the same way about actors in movies? Or in school plays, even? If someone does a good job at playing Hamlet, who was himself pretty unstable, does that mean the actor is unsuitable to follow orders or make critical decisions under stressful conditions?
Thanks for that addendum. I didn’t know that about the Knights Templar. As far as mysticism, The Planescape setting is one of the most complete mythos’ I’ve ever seen, and addresses many different facets that often get glossed over in the American pop-culture religion that is passed off as faith in this country.
I never said that they didn’t kill real people in the course of enacting their fantasy. I was more referring to the “Chosen people of G-d” and “Holy Land” aspects. The idea that God chose one kind of people, and that one land is holier than another is what I find to be ridiculous and fantastical. Other than that, they are firing real bullets at real people. Luckily the Palestinians are more than willing to play Mordor to their Gondor, or vice versa.
All I can say is let the “good guys” all kill themselves, and leave the rest of us “evildoers” here on Earth. As long as they don’t send F-16s carrying real “Wrath of God” cards over Syria or anything.
Yes, that is true. I’ve known my fair share of Israelis and was even married to one for 2.5 years. I don’t think that the IDF isn’t matter of fact about what it does. I just think there is a massive amount of cognitive dissonance that is required to prosecute the whole matter. I think that’s why there are so many Israelis living abroad. A lot of the ones I know in New York are trying to escape that shit.
Erek
Yes, but because he’s an actor, not because of his choice of roles. ;p
mswas wrote:
But suppose he starred in a series of movies playing the straight man to a chimpanzee. What security clearance would you let him have then?
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latrines, for such a bozo.
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people who LARP are just fine.