Its all the goodness of goofing around with a bunch of friends and then some.
It’s more fun than sitting together watching TV, since you’re not concentrating on the TV, you’re doing stuff together. It’s like playing a board game with your buddies, except the game is much more tolerant of goofiness and lateral ideas and tangents. Plus the game itself is fun.
I look forward to your thread: "How come none of you bastards told me how much fun D&D is?".
There you go. It’s a framework to let you play imagination games without the endless “I shot you!” “No you didn’t!” arguments.
Personally, I was never a big D&D fan, although I played it some in college because that’s what other people were playing. My RPG’s of choice were Traveller and GURPS (I was old school Metagaming pre-GURPS).
The appeal of RPGs is that, if you have a good GM and a good group, you can, as a team, come up with better stories than most TV shows or movies. You have to think quickly, and stay one or more steps ahead of your opponents. You have to know how the game world works, and how it doesn’t work.
Playing with a bad group and/or GM, though, is excruciating.
Most pen and paper RPGs require the players to be pretty damn smart, and fairly good at math, and have a broad knowledge base. While it’s POSSIBLE for a stupid, innumerate, narrowminded person to play the game, the other players are generally carrying him/her.
The characters, by the way, can be stupid, and stupid characters can be fun to play.
As for treachery…if you backstab other player characters repeatedly, then you’d better have a damn good reason for doing so, and the proper alignment. If YOU as a player are making the other players in the group unhappy on a consistent basis, then you can expect to be expelled from the group. It’s normal for the players to be unhappy now and then at each others’ actions, but if one person is consistently spoiling the game for everyone, then that player won’t be part of the group for long. On the other hand, you might like the Munchkin card game very, very much. Backstabbing is an expected part of the game in Munchkin.
You didn’t listen to us about Doctor Who, so why would you listen to us about D&D?
What I mean to say is, give it a try sometime, and also Munchkin would be right up your alley.
Given that Munchkin is, indeed, geared towards “the opportunity to win through treachery, deceit, and misrepresentation, and once the game is over to viciously mock my opponents until they are either infuriated to the point of violence and/or weeping?”, I would concur. 
Mostly to me it’s an opportunity to shoot the shit and be idiots with your friends in a safe setting.
Rather than, say, get drunk and drive on the opposite side of the freeway, you get drunk and pretend you’re driving on the opposite side of the freeway (roll driving, difficulty 15). It’s a little less intense, but you also get in fewer flaming crashes (or rather, you do - substract 10 from your hitpoint total, Reflex save to avoid additional burns).
Far as I can tell, that’s pretty much the point of playing Vampire:The Masquerade. That and scoring hot goth chicks. Well, it’s not so much “winning” as in “pulling the devious shit my character wanted to pull all along, and none of you mopes had idea one about what I was doing behind your backs”. Enjoy torpor, suckers (pun intended) !
So, um, yeah, Vampire can be a little less cooperative than other RPGs, is what I’m trying to say
But that’s winning against other players, which is sort of the exception. Most of the time you “win” simply by having a good time fucking up dragons and saving the world(s).
Paranoiais good for this too!!
How did I not listen to y’all about Doctor Who? I just didn’t enter DW threads because I’d never watched an episode, so all I could possibly have done is threadshit.
Most of the main points have been hit in this thread, but I wanted to stress how much the social element matters for a lot of this. There’s dozens of excellent things about tabletop games AS games, but I think they’re popular almost entirely because of the social nature.
Tabletop RPGs are a way for people who aren’t necessarily the most socially outgoing or elegant people to have a “night out with friends” in a way that’s comfortable, entertaining, and repeatable.
In college, I was an awkward, shy, nervous person – not dissimilar to the guy I am now. I didn’t make many friends, and those I did make tended to be a little bit arms’ length and hard to relate to. I just wasn’t good at meeting people and was even worse at maintaining connections.
Except with gaming. The people I played games with became my best friends, and part of that is simply because gaming is an excuse to get together and spend some time talking. The game itself is part of that, but you really keep showing up for the company and conversations.
Tabletop games are sort of like sitting around talking about football for people that don’t like football.
Indeed, it can be be more immediate and immersive than a lot of movies. Even when the story, strictly speaking, is kind of directionless, if you’ve worked up to the point that you feel you and your friends are there and making it happen, it’s pretty compelling.
You know that little scene from The Lord of the Rings movie where the party is silhouetted going over the hill? Here. A lot of people point to that moment as one of their favorites in the movie, one that captures or transports them in a special way, or that somehow “sums up” something about the movie. Yet there’s hardly anything happening here; it doesn’t seem like it should be particularly compelling. But there’s a sense of the reality of the characters and the world here, of camaraderie, and of anticipation. There’s a reason it was used in a lot of promotional material.
Well, about twelve years before anybody saw that frame, we had a D&D game moment with exactly that feeling. Our party had wrapped up some task, re-outfitted, and set out for a new town based on some intriguing rumor. We talked about the riding formation (our group were all mounted), the camping arrangements, the landscape the party passed through. Nobody attacked them on this journey, though they were certainly watching out for the possibility as well as for anything else of interest. This was a year or so into a campaign of almost weekly game sessions, so we were all pretty invested in the characters, and the game setting had grown into something with a life of its own, a sense of a world of things going on, not just for the characters’ benefit but for its own reasons. There might have been something out there. As it was, it was peaceful jaunt over grassy rolling hills in good weather.
And as we talked this out, one of my buddies suddenly rose from his seat, eyes alight and grasping the air, saying something like “oh, can’t you just see it–this is so awesome–can’t you see it?” The rest of us sort of smiled indulgently at each other because he was being goofy… but we knew what he meant. We could see it. We had been there, as thoroughly as any movie has ever taken an audience somewhere, and a lot better than most.
I just love the fact that we were doing it so well, we were so into it, that he could be overcome by this feeling at a completely uneventful moment.
And this was without any pictures or sounds or props. Just five guys talking.
Yeah, this. When I was in college I was quiet, nerdy, not terribly social, and spent most of my free time with my one friend. I joined the gaming club and suddenly I had a bunch of friends who were quiet (well, okay, some of them weren’t quiet :)), nerdy, and not terribly social–except that in our own group, we all were social. We had common interests. We talked and laughed and played Spades all day in the student union…and the RPG we played that first year was one of the most intense and wonderful bonding experiences I’ve ever had in my life and probably ever will again. There’s nothing like spending practically every waking non-school minute with a group of people, eating pizza at three in the morning and trying to accomplish goals and figure out a way to get one up on one of the best and most devious GMs I’ve ever had the pleasure to play with that creates the kind of cohesive group that many people can only dream about being part of.
All these people are still my friends, even though we’re geographically spread out now. I even married one of them. We still stay in touch (Facebook helps with this)–and this game happened in 1984.
So yeah…gaming definitely has its high points, and nerd social bonding is one of the best.
When I was a kid, part of the appeal to me was the dice—aren’t they cool?—and the idea that there were all sorts of things that could possibly happen, but the roll of the dice would determine what actually did happen.
As mentioned, for some people, the appeal is in the role-playing aspect: the opportunity to “be,” for a while, someone other than your normal self, in someplace other than where you normally live.
For some, the appeal is in the game aspect: through skill and luck, to win or succeed by achieving in-game goals, amassing treasure, or racking up experience points.
For some, the appeal is in the exploration. The game master purchases or creates a setting for the players to explore (a castle, a forest, a series of caves, a town), and the players have the pleasure of exploring it.
For some, a lot of the appeal is in the complicated rules and charts and tactics (for combat, for example), while for others, these things only get in the way.
In my high school one of the other geeky guys started up a game. A bunch of us played and became friends. Because we were friends, we started to hang out in school as well. As a group who hung out, we attracted more people, some of who started to play. Then some girls started to play. By the end of senior year, we still played, but we also had barbecues and social lives, and a level of coolness.
I owe that game a lot.
As a player, I enjoy role-playing a wide variety of characters, ranging from a couple of clerics who are selfless and noble and will help virtually anyone to a mage-thief who is one of the most treacherous, sneaky, and conniving SOBs you will ever meet. Acting is fun.
As a DM I like controlling things and setting new challenges for the players. A recent example: A hidden enemy framed the party for murder and they had to deal with the local gendarmes as well as that bitch. I think they got a real kick when they finally killed her.
Also, whether as player or DM, outwitting other people, especially when they are intelligent, is one hell of a lot more fun than beating a computer.
There is also the challenge of doing things in a wild and/or unexpected manner. The mage/thief I mentioned earlier is 9th level as a mage and 11th lelvel as a thief in a 2nd ediction campaign. In his latest exploit, he burgled the home of an archmage for another archmage, thereby getting, as a quid pro quid, the information he needed to steal a dispatch case, thereby preventing a war between two countries. And he did this without casting an offensive spell or lifting his sword. Now I have the dubious pleasure of planning how to deal with an archmage’s counter-attack. Stuff like that is fun to a lot of us because we get to create our own epic quests.
Skald, I agree with Infovore. You would love Shadowrun, a game I’ve got to get back into. There are no good guys.
It’s a LOT of fun to be in a campaign, where the DM clearly has a set of goals in mind, and clearly expects the players to make certain decisions and do certain things…and then do something that changes the whole scenario. I was a (chaotic good) cleric in a group that had just defeated a Fallen Paladin (character who used to be a paladin, but has lost that status). The DM expected our group to loot his stuff, then bury him with dignity. Most of the group was Good, between Lawful and Neutral, and they allowed my CG cleric in because she was an elf. But she was high enough in level to speak with the dead, and to raise the fallen paladin. She thought that doing this would further the cause of Good, and so she talked to the fallen paladin’s shade, and asked if he would accept a geas to return to paladinhood if she raised him. He would, and she did. Now, she had to pay a lot of money to everyone else in the party in order to make up for the lost treasure, but she felt that it was worth it. The DM, instead of resenting me for messing up his plans, decided that my character had acted perfectly, so she got rewarded, not in monetary terms, but her goddess was very pleased with her. She got a couple of powers from her goddess, plus she got a lot of fame, and the ruler of her country allowed her to build a temple for her goddess. Ordinarily, her religion was tolerated in that country, but because of her deeds, her religion got a boost. Which was another reason that her goddess was very pleased with her.
Role-playing games do something I don’t really see in any other form of entertainment: you have a story created by multiple people whose outcome can’t be predicted by any of them.
So you get things like camels flying off cliffs while ghouls rain down on them. You get things like players moved to tears by a story of a (nonplayer character) wife chopping carrots and offering her (player-character) husband an amicable divorce so he can pursue his undisclosed superhero goals. You get cowardice and redemption, self-sacrifice. You get awesome monsters. You get crazy over-the-top solutions to problems that unfold in a manner nobody could have predicted.
At its worst, it can be totally stultifying; but at its best it’s tremendous exhilirating fun.
See, you only think you’re joking. I run a weekly D&D game for a very large (by D&D standards) group of people. After each session, I send out an email to everyone that recaps what happened during the game, to help my players keep the plot straight in their heads, re-enforce significant story hooks, or just keep people up to date if they miss a session - one of the reasons my group is so large is that it guarantees that there’ll be enough people for a game pretty much every week.
Here’s the email I sent out about two months ago. Some spoilers for the Council of Thieves Pathfinder campaign follow:
Is this describing something that took place in the previous session or do you feed players this kind of thing before a session?
It happened in-game.
