Jill, I don’t think evilbeth was trying to say that D&D is a relationship. I think she was interpreting your remark to mean “Why is everybody so worked up over it, it’s just a game.” And her response was meant to show that people get worked up over a lot of things that others around them think are trivial and unimportant. One person’s loving companion is another person’s vicious fiend they want to drop kick. Same cat, different person, different attitude.
Originally, I said:
[sheepish] I threw that out on the fly. In restrospect, I was wrong. [/sheepish]
As mentioned, good DMs were willing and able to change things on the fly, if it helped the story, or to adjust to the whims of the players when they failed to do what you expected. However, the DM has to be careful changing things, because he has to keep track of the changes for consistency later. For instance, suppose you return to a room you visited previously. Of course he has to keep track of what you’ve killed already, any treasure you found, any treasure you missed, any new monsters that came out of hiding, secret doors, etc. That’s why it takes lots of planning to set up the adventure beforehand. So if he goes altering things willy nilly, he has a much more difficult task of tracking what’s happened. And sorting out later experience points. (Oops, that was 5 giant rats in room 2, not 15. And a ring of rat annihilation.) And yes, DMs are writing this stuff down.
Of course I didn’t play that much, and I never DMed.
Good point and I agree. And I get worked up about all kinds of weird shit, too.
You should realize that anything that someone spends a lot of time on ceases to be “just a ______”. It becomes an investment, an embodiment of the effort that you have put into it. Other games besides pen-and-paper RPGs (Role-Playing Games) suffer from this as well, Magic: The Gathering (card based RPG), and Everquest (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) spring to mind.
An analogy would be a piece of furniture that an amateur carpenter has put many hours into building is going to be more than “just a table”. Its importance to the builder is directly related to the time and effort spent creating it.
With this in mind, it’s pretty easy to see how an unstable person could begin valuing a game over other things in their lives that should be more important.
If you guys (Trajan and Duck Duck Goose, if you have further questions about D&D or just want general information, I’m sure you could post in GQ and have a 10d6 posters tripping all over themselves to help you out!
Actually, it's a lot easier if you have a complete description of what's there. Making it up as you go is *FAR* harder. Altering things on the fly need not be for malicious amusement. It can perfectly well be done to correct earlier mistakes by the DM. Barring a really major mistake, it should be done with enough subtelty that the players do not realize it happened.
Fair to the players. There is no need to ensure fairness to the monsters.Quoth Podkayne:
Let’s see… You apparently play D&D, you have excellent taste in literature, you understand the distinction between centripital and centrifugal, and post references to the AJ to back up your points… If you’re not careful, you’re going to have some nerd proposing to you, at this rate!
As for amusing changes introduced by the DM, I once played an adventure where the DM lost his notes halfway through. We spent the rest of the adventure in the woods outside the city of Blah-blahblah, now a permanent fixture in the geography of that world.
I’ve played this game off-and-on through my teens and twenties and could jump back into it now, but I’m disinclined to spend any more money to pick up the 3rd edition books after I’d invested serious coin in the 2nd.
Talk about drowning in a lake of fire, I’d just as soon not drown in a lake of poverty, especially if it’s Lake Geneva, Wis.
I remember reading Cecil’s original column in the first Stright Dope book and I can understand that the math LOOKS overwhelming, but I’ve never known any DM to sit down calculate every possible experience point on each monster. I certainly never did it myself when I was DM. I was too busy trying to keep the game challenging and interesting. I tried to make the encounters such that the players would only get ‘killed’ if they were very unlucky on the rolls or very very dumb (“Hey, I’m going to try attacking that dragon by rolling Captain-Kirk-style underneath it and stabbing it in the belly”). Of course, the idea that the dragon could just lie down and crush him never occured to him. Moments like this were good for laughs, though.
The worst campaigns I played were with a DM who was fond of psychedelic episodes, as in “A small pink spot appears on the wall, it spreads. If you stab at it nothing happens. None of the doors or windows will open so you can’t escape. Your spells have no effect…” This would continue until the players gave up (it turned out giving up was almost always the key) or we used some magic item we had just picked up.
Whoa. Heavy, dude. Baaad trip.
The idea the “D&D = insanity” was helped along by the 1982 made-for-TV movie “Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters” starring Tom Hanks. Hanks played the guy who loses it completely and very nearly jumps off the World Trade Center. Fortunately, Hanks recovered from this and went on to make his mark with “Bachelor Party” and other triumphs.
I find the very fact that people are puzzled by the interest in the game very odd. Public television spent years training me to use my imagination, so why is it so weird that I do?
What is D&D?
It’s a sophisticated game of Let’s Pretend. As you will probably recall, the clay feet of Let’s Pretend was in that there was no arbitration. Quite often, two kids in the game will insist that their monster is bigger, or their quickdraw is quicker. D&D has codified rules that determine who has what level of ability in which skills. It allows you to weigh the knight’s skill with a sword against the hardness of the dragon’s scales, and determine the knight’s chances of hurting the beast. Then, you roll dice to see if he is successful.
The game can be as complicated as you want it to be, but generally it’s not complicated at all. Football is a lot more complicated, if you take it seriously, and I know a lot of not-bright-niks who understand football. Nearly all the numbers involved in D&D are easily computed using addition or subtraction. The numbers represent ranges of numbers that come up in the role of a die, and all of this is highly intuitive. You can dig up obscure number-crunching rules, such as the one Cecil cites, but these are rare and in fact hardly bothered with anymore. He was building a straw man with that example.
Further arbitration is provided by the Dungeon Master, or Game Master. The GM sets up challenges, and rewards players for meeting those challenges. He describes the world to the players and decides how it reacts to their behavior. Another big problem with trying to live out a fantasy in a game of Let’s Pretend is that there is no vision, no narrative authority. If neither of these things mattered, we wouldn’t ever need to read novels – we could just make up stories ourselves instead of reading books. But instead, we read books whose authors we trust to deliver a believable world full of interesting details and events. Likewise, players play with a GM whom they trust to use their characters in a story.
Why we play D&D is not hard to understand. We play it for the same reason that we play any game, and for the same reason that we read books or recite lines from movies.
Hmm, not to cast aspersions, but the only adults who can casually use phrases like “Let’s Pretend” without sounding vaguely kinky are Kindergarden teachers and Mister Rogers (and I’m not sure about Rogers).
No matter. The explanation I like to give of roleplaying mechanics, on the few occasions I’m called upon to do so, involve the military games that indirectly inspired it. If I was an experienced military officer trying to teach basic strategy to junior officers, I’d give them a map and a mission and a fictional brigade to play with.
“You have to capture and hold that bridge, hotshot,” I’d say in my best ‘Speed’ style. “What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?!”
At all times, I have to describe results that are plausible and instructive/interesting. If he thinks it would be a good idea to put his artillery on a hill overlooking the bridge, he should “check” first (by asking me) if it’s been raining lately. If he’s careless enough to put his artillery in a potential mudslide area, he’ll ‘lose’ them. This and other complications hopefully keep the scenario plausible, including details like how he would feed his men, maintain communications with them, evacuate wounded, etc. My role in all this is to control other factors like weather and enemy movements, which will gradually be revealed to him if he is smart enough to ask.
Anyway, if the eyes of the person I’m talking to haven’t glazed over yet, I’ll segue to the Conan movies and go from there.
Bryan Ekers wrote:
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to chaff my fellow gamers by making the game sound unmanly. Thankfully, you were available to assure everbody that gamers are real men.
[[I find the very fact that people are puzzled by the interest in the game very odd. Public television spent years training me to use my imagination, so why is it so weird that I do?]]
Good point. Though I hope you didn’t really have to learn that from television.
Well, personally, I think NOT having a television (until I was about 10 or so) did more for my imagination than Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers could have. But that could just be me.
JillCat wrote:
Actually, that’s a good subject for a thread in itself. The reason why they push imagination so much on Sesame Street is becaue there’s a notion going around that childrens’ imaginations are delicate, and unless they’re cultivated they don’t have any. We’re supposed to feel bad when we confront children with facts and logic, because it dashes their creativity. There’s a Harry Chapin song that my mother is very fond of where a kid who claims to see a lot more colors in flowers than everyone else does is taught to color them properly, and we are supposed to be horrified to discover that he’s turned into a pod person robot.
In my opinion, a child whose creativity needs nurturing is not that creative to begin with. A real imagination is robust. It can’t be crushed, and it doesn’t need to be coddled. Those people who whine as adults that someone dashed their creativity when they were children, or else they would have been artists, are bullshitting themselves.
It’s probably all the people who have fantasized that some adult sapped the creative power out of them who created this phenomenon in which kids are forced to play imagination games, and are all told how wonderfully creative they are. Yet, in spite of how terribly urgent all this imagining is to the adults trying to cram it down the throats of children, people still find it strange that some adults continue to play imagination games. After years of being pressed to daydream harder, at what magic age are we supposed to suddenly stop daydreaming?
Too late. I already married my GM. 
DAMN STRAIGHT! I’m personally getting sick of films and television shows that suggest children possess this starry-eyed wonder which is routinely crushed by uncaring adults, or adults who have good intentions but screw up anyway. It’s even worse when the starry-eyed child is played by Robin Williams, which seems to be more and more lately. The only good antidote is to watch a videotape of Williams’ early standup comedy, which is filled with profanity and drug references. Then we can jeer cynically at his whole “innocent” bit.
Ever notice that when a movie features an adolescent growing up, the critics call it a “coming of age” if there’s a happy ending and a “loss of innocence” if there’s a sad ending? I’ve always been mystified when listening to American pundits (I’m Canadian) talk about their generation in terms of loss of innocence. “We lost our innocence on Omaha Beach”, or “Dealey Plaza” or “Viet Nam” or “Watergate”. I’m not sure if the Generation X types felt they were EVER innocent, so maybe we’ll be spared finding out when they lost theirs.
Hell, Canada lost its innocence, so to speak, in the first World War when we proved we could play a major role in international conflicts and politics. We’ve been grown-ups ever since.
(edited to fix formatting - whole post was bold)
[Edited by Arnold Winkelried on 01-30-2001 at 09:36 AM]
I suppose you’re being a smart-aleck, but that comment makes you guilty of what you’re accusing Americans of, and as well as of one-up-manship.
So, now, someone from Virginia or Georgia can say, “Oh yeah, we lost our innocence in 1861-65.”
On the other hand, I don’t dispute the American tendency to sentimentalize just about anything we can. But adults CAN also crush children’s imaginations too. The Barney world view may overstate it, but if you’d met some of the kids and parents I’ve worked with, you’d see what I mean.
Isn’t it funny how this thread started out about, what IS D&D anyway?
Me? A smart-alec? Only in the truest, most absolute sense of the word.
Yank-bashing is almost a bloodsport in some Canadian circles, but it’s ultimately just how we relax after being so polite and self-effacing most of the time. I have to admit feeling a stir of pride when I toured a Canadian fort on Lake Ontario.
“Yep, them cannons are facing south. It was 1812 and we kicked ass.”
Of course, Canada wasn’t a county as such in 1812, but we have to cling to the idea that despite drowning us in your television and movies, we could take you on in a fair fight.
A pipe dream, I know, but it’s a natural response to movies like “The Patriot.”