Speaking as someone who’s been playing D&D in it’s various incarnations since the age of ten, and who still plays regularly as an adult, I found the article to be largely accurate, if badly out of date. Certainly, he’s not very nice about it, but anyone who plays Dungeons and Dragons ought to have a pretty thick skin when it comes to how others perceive their hobby. It’s a very weird, hermetic, and highly geeky activity. I can’t see anything he wrote there that was flat out wrong, except maybe for the part where he says players “must” determine their likelihood of contracting parasites or communicable diseases, but even that’s not really inaccurate. I’m sure 1st Ed. had those rules in there somewhere, even if no one I know has ever played with them.
Now, if he had published this article in his regular print column, I’d be a little more alarmed by how out-of-date the column is. But as a daily web-site filler from the archives? Good enough. And pretty funny, if you don’t take it personally.
Cecil said himself in the aritcle… “I don’t get it.” Only rather than doing the professional thing and actually discussing the subject with people who do get it (there must be at least one person in his office that plays D&D) he did the all-too human thing and just scoffs at somethiing he doesn’t understand.
My respect for Cecil just took a major hit, and its sinking fast.
I remember reading this article before I even knew of The Straight Dope website. It was printed in one of the first couple Straight Dope books…without the references to 1996, etc.
It could have very well been published in 1980, with edits added for the updated column.
I’m pretty sure that for the original column, Cecil got hold of the first edition DM’s Guide. This would explain why he thought that players had to determine their own likelihood of diseases and such. Just be glad that he didn’t read one of the REAL first editions…I believe that in the original boxed set of three pamplets of Graymoor, one of the monster statistics is “% liar” instead of “% lair”. Proofreading CAN make a big difference.
For those who haven’t played any flavor of D&D, “% lair” is the chance of finding a random monster in its lair, where it keeps most of its treasure.
And let’s face it, Cecil could hardly help noticing the shoddy artwork in the original books. MAN, those were some bad, tasteless drawings!
I’m absolutely sure of it. That whole paragraph about calculating a huge ancient red dragon’s experiance point value was lifted verbatim from the AD&D 1st Edition DMG. (Except for the h.p. typo, of course.)
Um. Hate to break it to you, but as someone who’s played a dozen or more varieties of D&D and its spinoffs, both on paper and on computer, he’s right: it is a tremendously geeky thing to do. The fact that D&D’s spiritual descendants have been dumbed down and distilled into video-friendly computer games for a new generation of post-literate twitch monkeys hasn’t made the original paper variety any less geeky, either.
It’s Cowboys vs. Indians without the exercise or fresh air and mixed with a dash of campfire storytelling; instead of “bang bang, I got you first” there are formalized conflict resolution rules drafted by a race of Tolkien-reading UV-sensitive lawyer-mushrooms; and the whole thing is marinated in Mountain Dew, breaded in jargon, and played indoors at a speed that can even be slower than baseball.
On the Geekness scale, admitting you play D&D in a public restaurant is two steps below announcing you built your own tricorder and one step above revealing you have a crush on Buffy.
I can say these things about D&D because I play it, I own the rulebooks, and I’ve seen many of the kind of people who play the game regularly. Why is it suddenly bad for Cecil to call it like he sees it, too?
I don’t want him to stop being cantankerous; I won’t censor his personal opinion. He’s a columnist, not an encyclopedia. All I ask is that he get the facts right and when a column is two decades old, perhaps it’s due for an overhaul, especially in this case where there is new information. Here, he’s essentially correct — you can find charts for such minutiae as how long a given cave’s oxygen supply will last, or what languages your porters speak, or how much it costs to hire a blacksmith — but his presentation of these obscure charts as prime movers of the game is not very forgiving to D&D’s fans.
I think Cecil is unfair.
Any activity can be trivialised by a sarcastic commentator e.g. reading books is where people who are too lazy to exercise, stare for ages at symbols which represent an imaginary situation.
(Or that all reporters wear hats, drink too much and will do anything seedy to get a story…)
It is clear that Cecil has never even watched a roleplaying game, which is pretty unprofessional for a reporter. :rolleyes:
True there were a few complicated and tacky bits in the original manuals. Given that it was a highly original concept, produced by a few enthusiasts, this was always a risk.
But the game has achieved world-wide popularity, so there is clearly something worth finding out about.
I teach Dungeons and Dragons (1st Edition) as an after-School activity.
I do all the tricky calculations beforehand and have removed all sexist references etc.
That leaves me with an activity where I tell 6 pupils a story - but the pupils are characters in the story and can influence what happens.
They learn teamwork, organisation + planning, some history and arithmetic and use their imagination to have an exciting adventure.
We play 2-4 hour weekly sessions with intense concentration throughout; the pupils read the manuals for reference and type up their notes on computer.
Why doesn’t Cecil acknowledge all this?
I wasn’t going to participate, but I failed my Will save…
Yeah, RPG’s are still kinda geeky, but there are more and more people playing the game, so its becoming more mainstream.
Heck, there are even celebs coming out of the “Gaming closet”- Vin Diesel admitted to being a gamer in, if I recall properly, an article in GQ’s August 2002 magazine. In fact, check out this series of Dork Tower cartoons on the subject of Diesel, Robin Williams, Will Wheaton, and Curt Schilling as gamers:
I think we should listen to Fish here, the column is two decades old, there are new rulebooks out today, these books are owned by Wizards of the Coast, an new company, which is itself a subsidiary of Hasbro Corporation. This is the same company that makes monopoly and parcheezy. Wizards of the Coast is chaired by Gary Gygax.
The fact that some version of RPGs are still popular today is no surprise. Hell, if people didn’t want to be in a story, the Choose your Own Adventure books would never have sold.
The point of the column (which was included in Cecil’s first book*, on page 309, and of course does not mention in it things that happened after 1980), and the reason no great energy was expended to cover later developments, is that Cecil’s basic premise still stands.
Whatever your atttraction to the fantasy fiction genre in general, you have to admit that engaging in your average tabletop RPG involves spending most of your time deciphering complex and arcane jargon, looking up things on charts, and doing math. The fact that most people do not regard these activities as being part of anything that could be called “fun” (especially when you do it in the company of a bunch of people with the sort of personalities that DO regard it as fun) has not changed in 2 and a half decades. It is especially inexplicable nowadays with the advent of computer games that do all the drudgery for you.
*In the original, the line after the remark about the Pentagon and bookkeeping was “The lure of this sort of thing is beyond my comprehension.”
Why? He read the rulebook, noted that the rules are confusing, and concluded with a wonderment on how people can enjoy a game that requires more paperwork than taxes. I fail to see the unfairness… unless you wish to contest that the rulebook is NOT as he reported it to be.
Well…as I see it…the article while marginally accurate in theory, in practice it tells the reader nothing about what the game is really like. Never mind that it’s 20 years out of date, his information comes from perhaps one or two (of many many) books, which it is clear he didn’t understand. Prior to reading this article, it had always seemed to me that Cecil had handed an occasional article to a staff writer when (or something of that nature…I don’t know how his business works) when he didn’t know about some subject that was being discussed. But apparently he’s ok with writing without being informed on the subject matter.
Additionally, for those who say D&D (and other rpgs) are the height of geekiness…all I can say is there must be a lot of geeks in the world, given that gaming in general is a multi-billion dollar enterprise…consider all the people who play MMORPGS (just a variant of D&D really…) and all the other pen and paper RPGs (again…just another variant…considering D&D came first) and all the computer and platform (PS2, GC, XB, PS1, and all the older systems) RPGs that have been coming out for years (again…just another variant). Then there are movies and tv shows all based on RPGs (D&D the Movie, Kindred, etc…) plus all the pop culture references in every kind of media. You would think with all that media presence, someone who purportedly knows what he was talking about would bother to do a little actual research and write about it after he understands what he’s talking about or have someone else who understands at least a little do the writing.
