September 26, 1980? C’mon, when was the real date? He’s talking about personal computers and Pentium chips in this thing, so it surely isn’t 1980.
Yep, I’m wondering about that 'Pentium" mention too. 1980 is way, way too early to mention this. Heck, we were still using a cassette driven Radio Shack computer at my high school (had an independently wealthy physics teacher).
I will also take a moment to say that Cecil is largely clueless about D&D. It’s much more fun than he indicates and not nearly as difficult. Of course, his opinion comes from not having actually played it and just scanning a book. Unfortunate misinformation coming from someone who I usually respect
Link to the article: What’s the deal with Dungeons and Dragons?
Just looks like the article was updated, doomraisin.
I, too, have some issues with this article. While I don’t play D&D (haven’t touched a rulebook for 10 years), I know enough to understand why the game is fascinating to many people. Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (i.e., EverQuest, Final Fantasy XI, etc.) are a huge seller in the video game market because of your ability to create a persona and watch him or her grow into a powerful person – possibly even a god. The only two differences are that everything you see in D&D is in your imagination, and the world looks only how you to believe it to look, and that you do the calculations (which are much simpler than Cecil made them out to be) yourself instead of a computer doing them.
Escapist? Definitely. An outlet for prepubescent geeks? Perhaps, but not as much you’d think.
D&D has created some of the best video game designers in the world, and has also spawned different offshoots. For example, I belong to the Darkon Wargaming Club which is basically D&D for jocks. 
Instead of sitting at a table and playing, we actually go out to schools, parks, and farms on Sundays to engage in live-action, full-contact, Medieval-style combat. Darkon has a great standing in the community and its members are well-respected in almost every circle in this area. The process of dressing up in armor and beating people with foam weapons might sound a little silly to most people, but consider that our members include police officers, military personnel, and even a Federal Marshal.
Anyway, I digress. D&D playing is not something I personally engage in, but I can see how it’s fun to millions of people.
- Adam
He did say that he was looking at an older edition. He was clearly reading 1st Ed, which is pretty clunky compared to AD&D, or the sleek gaming engine that is D20. (Har har.)
I was a bit disappointed that he focused exclusively on D&D and didn’t follow up on the reader’s request for information about other types of games.
Open invitation: Cecil, or is earthly minion Ed Zotti are welcome to stop by our Amber game any time to get a different perspective on RPGs.
It’s out of date in other ways, too. TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast years ago, and some of the software mentioned in the article was never delivered.
It might also be worth mentioning Open Gaming. Dungeons and Dragons is up to version 3.5, and now includes the interesting feature that about 95% of the rules are expressly permitted to be copied in other games, as long as this includes the specification that the players need a copy of the “Dungeons and Dragons Players Manual” for a critical core section. This d20 System arrangement, named for the 20-sided die that dominates modern play, has become quite successful, being the basis of, for example, Wizards of the Coasts own d20 Modern game of contemporary adventure, and Mongoose Publishing’s new Babylon 5 game.
I always enjoyed AD&D as a creative outlet. It lets the DM create whole new places, from small areas to entire worlds – even to “planes,” if you want to put the effort in. (I didn’t, on accounta I am lazy.) The players, in turn, could come up with some creative solutions to the difficulties they might face.
Regarding Cecil’s article, it is worth pointing out that a particular group of players is not necesarily bound to follow every last rule in the books; we tended to not sweat the small stuff. In particular, when I was DM, I could cut a lot of slack for someone trying something dramatic.
We had a lot of good times back then.
RR
Well, that’s even more confusing. If this article was written in 1980, it’s pretty weird that even Cecil, all-knowing as he is, would have information on the release of software 16 years in the future on a medium that wasn’t available, to consumers anyway, at the time. And I’m pretty sure that even Intel didn’t know anything about a Pentium in 1980.
I’m thinking that the date is just wrong. The column was probably written around 1994, not 1980.
Well, as others have said, I am sure that it was an attempt at an update. It just didn’t update the information, perhaps not wanting to complicate things, by talking about the various editions.
In any case, the first computer program to help with DND was not released in 1996 but in 1988. I only remember this because it was supposed to help in creating NPCs, monsters and treasure but it was so slow that it was useless to have at the table. I also remember this because I had it for my Commodore 64 but not my Amiga, which I got in 1989.
btw, when I first came across this in the archive, I emailed asking that Cecil update it, and perhaps expand it by including other RPGs (not only by TSR/WotC but by other big companies, at that time, such as White Wolf, FASA, etc.) in a discussion about it. However, the polite reply I got was that others have bugged Cecil about it and it should be updated but it hasn’t. Ah, well.
In the end, I would rather him be right about other topics that he has covered, and I hope he is, rather than getting a few details about my hobby right!
Great discussion!
edg
And then WOTC was eaten by Hasbro, and they are in the midst of closing all the WOTC retail stores.
I’m not sure what Cecil was thinking when he dug that old column up. D&D (and role playing in general) is not only much more mainstream than it was then, it’s even passe. Heck, even the games that followed it are long in the tooth now.
(For the record, I have played D&D 3.0)
I play D&D every day. My character is a married software engineer that goes to work everyday and deals with monster projects and bosses. After ‘working’ I send my character home and he continues to ‘work’ on all sorts of other projects that I think will gain him gold and experience.
That fittness training thing is hard to do, so the character, even though he’s 30-somthing years old, only has about 25 HP.
One of my character’s special skills is that he can exceed the speed limit everyday and hasn’t been pulled over by the police for 5 years now.
His main weapons are a WAVE Leatherman tool, a VISA card and a pen…
Tsk tsk tsk.
Cecil updated the article with info about the 2nd Edition AD&D Core Rules CD-ROM, but he still hasn’t fixed that “7758 h.p.” error.
I would guess that the extraordinary level of good wisecracks, even for Cecil, made it a candidate for recycling. I found it highly amusing.
“Here we have a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping. I don’t get it.”
Undoubtedly the original closer - it looks like two paragraphs were tacked on the end as an update.
Also note that he says that Gygax left TSR “in the mid-80’s.” The article has clearly been updated since 1980.
I saw it as a “blast from the past” kind of article…appropriate on New Year’s Eve, in its way.
Eh. It’s clear that Cecil thinks D&D is stupid, but I’m not sure that and his desire to be funny are good enough reasons to lie to people about it.
Oh, that was supposed to be funny?
After reading this article…I have to say that I’m terribly dissappointed. I had read The Straight Dope daily…and usually felt like they knew what they talked about. Cecil’s uninformed and downright (imho) inflammatory article about D&D and the players of D&D and other games made it clear to me that Cecil is willing to write about a subject without actually knowing anything about the subject. This unfortunately has left me feeling that virtually every other article he has written is likely suspect in that he took 5 minutes to look up some basic details…and never really know what he’s talking about on this topic…why are any other topics that he’s ever written any different?? Alas I guess I just don’t see any further point wasting my time reading stuff from someone who will claim to be informed…but not really bother to get informed.
Wow, good thing he hasn’t had any articles about furries, if this is the kind of reaction he gets from an obviously-old and snarky article about D&D.
Here’s an introduction to Knights of the Dinner Table for Cecil: http://www.hoodyhoo.com/
And here’s a good article about furries just in case: http://houstonpress.com/issues/2003-12-18/feature.html/1/index.html
BTW, I’m a newbie. Hiya everybody!!
Yeah, frankly, I played first edition AD&D in 1981, and may well be playing an RPG tonight, but Cecil mostly knew what he was talking about.
There was the error about ‘hp’ instead of ‘xp’, but since nobody knows what he’s talking about, it doesn’t really matter; the point is still valid. I don’t think I ever saw a DM use those wonky XP rules, they were even worse than he describes. And the rules for communicable diseases and such are real, and deserving of sarcasm. The jab about the size of women’s breasts in the artwork is unfortunately still true. Give it an airbrushed color-job, and Slug’s drawing of the woman being eaten by a dragon would almost fit in a 3e.
The rules are complicated, often over-detailed about trivial matters, frequently lacking in needed detail, occasionally contradictory, and don’t even bother to put the words “Don’t Panic” on the cover.
I do think that the attempt at updating it was lame. It was very haphazard and mostly doesn’t work.
Jerry