http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_309b.html
wow. this is an OLD article i know that. but why… WHY must everyone BASH on RPG’s?
Whats wrong with them?
They’re just a game. maybe its one you dont personaly enjoy… but i dont like football, you dont see me telling everyone that football is evil and sucks and should be banned by all right thinking people!!
This just depresses me.
There’s nothing wrong with RPG’s, and Cecil didn’t say there was. He just says that he doesn’t understand D&D, and he doesn’t care to devote the time to understand it.
Don’t worry about Cecil’s column. It is far from the worst condemnation RPG’s have recieved.
By the way, welcome to the SDMB.
You obviously haven’t read too many of Cecil’s columns. He’s an equal-opportunity basher. There are an awful lot of things he’s not too fond of, and he’s never afraid to say so… Which is, of course, one of the things we love about him.
Besides, he was basing his opinion on first edition, and you’ve got to admit, with 1st Ed, you didn’t have enough room on the table for pizza and cheez puffs, after all the charts and tables were set up.
While the article may not bash D&D all that badly (though “Mansonesque” is hardly a favorable word), Cecil does make a certifiable mistake, albeit a common one: D&D was NOT invented by Gary Gygax. It was invented by Dave Arneson (sp?) in Minneapolis as an extension of historical gaming (“hmm… what if Napoleon’s soldiers were fighting Sauron’s soldiers?”). Arneson beta tested his fantasy gaming for a year before going to Gygax, who wrote/edited the rule books and published the game. Gygax deserves much credit, but not as inventor.
If my interview with Arneson from the 80s still exists and I find it I’ll digitize it and put it on my audio site http://www.romm.org/audio . Don’t hold your breath.
Well, yes, but Gygax wrote most, if not all of the original Greyhawk setting, based on details of his own campaign. Arguably, D&D wasn’t really a “complete” system until this material existed - it was just an extension of Chainmail. You’re right, however, that Arneson rarely gets anything near the credit he deserves in this regard.
I suppose that depends a lot on what you mean by “complete”. I’ve gamed in Arneson’s dungeon, and done similar “Minneapolis Dungeoning” with others. It was a pretty complete system, but very GM dependent. If the guy/gal running the dungeon was good, the game was fun. If they weren’t, it wasn’t. Heavy on the creative end.
The anal-retentive “rules for every situation” that Gygax wrote were clever and made D&D playable for people who hadn’t thought about it, which was most. Whereas D&D might encounter a situation that, once you looked it up and determined which chart applied, involve rolling a 12 sider and an 8 sider; Mpls gaming might have the GM say “roll two ten siders”, the GM would roll as well, and if you matched his number (not that he’d tell you) the result would be good… but not necessarily for your character.
Arneson made the big conceptual leap, and Gygax enumerated the dice throw. Both are important, but Edison wouldn’t have gotten far without Tesla and co…
As someone with experience (XP), I find that some of Cecil’s comments are spot-on when you compare D&D to other role-playing games – not that I think Cecil intended that.
Examples: “…players also have to determine such baffling minutiae as their likelihood of contracting communicable diseases or becoming infested by parasites…”
“…the game requires nonstop mathematical finagling that would constipate Einstein…”
“…such mystifying pronouncements as the following: ‘An ancient spell-using red dragon of huge size with 88 hits points has a BXPV of 1300 [etc etc etc]…’”
D&D was a crucial step in the development of the game as a social concept, but it was a crude prototype. It’s a shame that more recent editions have not see fit to expunge all the stupidity. There are other role-playing games out there that actually present a flexible and logical system of situational outcome-determination without getting in the way of character and plot too much.
LMAO
Guess i’m just sensative. But i do hear ALOT of RPG bashing and the like. I was just hopeing that Cecil would be a popular media member who would see the many benefits of the game.
Ah well.
Ive always thought of D&D as being a grown up way of playing the old preschool game of “Make Belive”. The only difference is that it is structured and follows MANY rules.
the only reason really that D&D is so often attacked by critics is the religious elements.
The clerics all worship different gods and demigods and the very existance of these other “gods” is apparantly threatening to a lot of christians. I think if the whole cleric genre of D&D were to be disposed with or at least changed so that all these worshipers of other gods were all of an evil nature in the game that there would be a whole lot less concern over the game.
Didn’t several people kill themselves “because” of D&D? I vaguely remember something to that effect, but I was just a kid at the time.
BuzzKill: That’s exactly what it is. The rules exist because adults usually get more entertainment from “accomplishment” than from arguing about rules all day. This is not true for pre-schoolers, who enjoy free-flowing meta-games (a la Calvinball from Calvin & Hobbes). Rules help to resolve disputes between adults who would otherwise argue all day and night and not do any actual playing. Pretty much every role-playing book is guaranteed to say two things: 1) you can break or change any of the rules if you like, because the game-designers aren’t in your living room; 2) don’t take the game too seriously, as it is not real and it is not some kind of occult initiation.
Virtuosity: In addition to polytheism, there are demons and devils in the game. The players are usually “good guys” and so they go out slaying the demons and devils, but the existence of such creatures in the D&D setting nonetheless upsets certain individuals and groups.
Spit: Quite a few suicides and murders have been blamed on D&D. Search around the 'net and you’ll find plenty of Christian sites with stories of grisly scenarios “caused” by D&D.
Many deaths have been blamed on D&D, but in each case the argument is pretty shaky. The usual situation is that you have a person with a laundry list of mental health problems, and ends up killing himself or others because of those problems. But that person just happened to also play D&D, and someone decides that that must have been the cause.
Of course, broken romances are responsible for a far larger number of deaths, and nobody ever claims that we should ban romance.
That sort of thing happens witha wide variety of entertainments though. People blamed Marylon Manson for the columbine shootings. And now, some kid with ADD and behavioral, and other mental health problems commits suicide and mommy yells that its all Everquests fault. (Not that i like Everquest…)
If Cecil couldn’t understand the rules of D&D he’s not really as smart as he thinks he is. After all, the game’s “six million devotees” could do it.
I’m not a journalist, but IMHO “the noble principles of journalism” don’t demand passing personal opinions as facts or judging something you don’t understand.:mad:
But since I don’t really understand Cecil’s obviously superior consception of the principles of journalism, I shouldn’t really judge his divine words of wisdom, either.
It’s not that Cecil couldn’t understand the rules, it’s that he didn’t want to. He looked at it long enough to figure out and describe it. He just doesn’t get its appeal.
As for the “passing personal opinions as facts or judging something you don’t understand,” that comes gratis with every column. Don’t feel bad just because your ox got gored with all the others.
It’s not really my “ox”, as I don’t play RPG:s myself. But I do understand their appeal, and I know a lot of role players who would be offended if they saw that article.
As for the “passing personal opinions as facts or judging something you don’t understand”, I mainly brought it up because Cecil uses the “noble priciples of journalism” as an excuse. Is he also uninterested in understanding these principles or does he just fail to understand their appeal?
Besides, blindly joining the public opinion in slagging something you don’t even understand doesn’t seem like something a smart man or a highly principled journalist would do. Furthermore, as I recall, the rules of D&D are nothing compared to, say, the rules of Twilight 2000, C’thulhu or AD&D in terms of complexity. In my opinion, it’s a quite simple RPG, something the “world’s smartest person” should understand just by looking through the manual. But I guess he might have been distracted by the illustrations of female characters “possessed of large, grapefruit-like breasts” he felt compelled to mention.
And BTW, don’t worry, I don’t really feel all that bad who’s ever the “ox” might have been.
