YES!!! I love the computer!!!. I’m a GOOD citizen! What are you trying to imply! I need to report you!!! I’m a RED. What the $%#@ did you THINK. I don’t believe you are a “citizen”. You will be reported!!!
Now that’s just not true.
Powers &8^]
Yep, after all the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon was cancelled under concerns about devil worship and such, and that was years after this column was written.
(I still haven’t got over it…)
As for looking down on D&D…people still do. Even though role-playing is immensely popular, those that don’t do it still look down upon those that do.
Apparently, people only play these games because they can’t get laid. If they got laid they’d do normal things like blob out in front of the TV of an evening.
I find it funny that fantasy football is so popular and widely accepted, but fantasy or sci-fi role playing games aren’t. They are the same concept.
As a RPer, a MMO player and a Dope - I’d vote for vanishing this particular column to the cornfield. It’s not funny, it’s not complete, and it’s not correct.
The screenplay for the unmade final episode Redemption is available free online. Reading it gives you a nice sense of closure.
When I discovered Straight Dope about eleven years ago, I stumbled across this and asked it be updated as well. I think CKDH sent me a reply, about the same as he said here.
However, while I can still chuckle at the article, it does need to be updated, or at least tagged with an edition and year, imo. It’s now thirty years later and what a role playing game has evolved into something different and expanded beyond DND. Essentially, there is so much more to say than what is said here.
But that’s just me.
vislor
Yeah. I wouldn’t mind the original article remaining as an artifact, but Cecil really does need to write a postscript in which he dials down the mockery and actually does some ‘splainin’.
At the very least appropriate credit (or blame) should also be given to Dave Arneson for D&D.
Brian
Yes, the article is dated, and yes, it’s obvious that Cecil doesn’t play the game. I still think that, “Here we have a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping” is a great line. If you plunked the average person down and taught them to play the game, this is the way that they’d experience it.
You have to get to the point that the mechanics of the game comes easily before you can start enjoying yourself and really playing. For most people, for average, typical people, dealing with the mechanics is like doing taxes. Actually, for most people, the taxes are easier.
So the overall theme that this isn’t some wild orgy of corruption, it’s a lot of math stands, I think. An actual player would have gone on about the rules-lawyering, but there’s only so much room in an article, so I don’t mind it being left out of this one. “There’s a lot of math” works for me.
Yllaria: I generally agree.
I guess I have described role playing as cops and robbers or cowboys and indians but with rules to figure out who shot first and who hit who.
I think the average person could figure out the rules, easily if they were motivated or came to like it. I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the issue is more that the casual player won’t take time outside of the game to learn the rules. So, for them, it probably seems to take a long time to learn all of the rules because of that.
I could be wrong.
vislor
So who snuck an article from one of the inferior competitors into TSD and pasted Cecil’s byline on it? :smack:
For a publication and organization purporting to fight ignorance, the lack of meaningful research is disappointing. As is giving in to the puerile temptations of witless mockery.
It’s definitely written from the point of view of [del]an uninformed[/del] a barely informed outsider. He grasps that it is different from card and board games that are straight competition to collect things. In this case, it appears that trying to be funny trumped fighting ignorance.
I will grant there are some funny lines. I will grant that writing for the outsider was a necessity. I dispute that he did a good job of clarifying for the outsider what the game is about, how play is accomplished, or why the rules are so complicated. (And I’m a novice who played some games as a teen in the '80s, not someone who partakes today. I don’t have anything against it, just not on my list of things to do.)
Quoting Gygax was perhaps done to show that there is a difference in goal to playing, but it was more puzzling than clarifying.
I will also agree that the paragraph about calculating the dragon’s experience points is jargon laden and thus unintelligible to the non-initiated.
This was the first Straight Dope article I have not enjoyed, in fact I was almost, but not quite, offended by his tone. I am a longtime fan of D&D. Not a player, but I’m related to a few. I’m NOT as big a fan of Cecil thanks to this article.
I popped into the SD forums for the first time to see who else had horror stories of the bad old days of PnP RPGs, and I’m a little saddened to see the somewhat dour tone that the comment here have taken.
I, personally, found the article very funny precisely because it hasn’t stood up well. It’s a window back to the time when D&D monsters were designed by Mad Libs and you had a better chance of understanding the manual to the NORAD launch control computer than deciphering a character sheet. I like my detailed systems as much as the next guy, but there’s something to be said for not requiring a math degree to figure out a single round of combat, and Cecil’s comments were dead on. Nostalgia for games past is one thing, but I think we’d be hard-pressed to make a convincing argument for how the systems of the past were better than the systems of today.
By “today”, surely you mean “Dungeons and Dragons of today”, and by that you mean versions 3.0 and 3.5, rather than any other later versions that may attempt to go by that name?
Sure, whatever floats your boat. 
I try to avoid One True Scotsman debates.
Or No True Scotsman. Those two. Any arguments involving the Scots, really.
Up to, and including, The Scottish Argument. (Don’t call it Macbeth!)
(D’oh!) (Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends! Ow!)
Sure. It’s an incredibly esoteric bit of minutiae which nobody ever needed to know to play the game; if your characters ever took down a dragon, the DM could look it up (if he was even using that kind of experience calculation).
It’s like “explaining” baseball to someone totally unfamiliar with the game, and one of the three things you tell them about the game is the rule about what happens when a pitched ball becomes lodged in the umpire’s mask. Of course it’s going to be incomprehensible.
I guess I don’t get the “Mad Libs” thing you’re pointing to. Those critters were in the Monster Manual, though we never used any of them in our game. So they can be described in a mildly goofy way; is that all?
Anyway, we never had trouble with the game mechanics, or character sheets. Our characters, in fact, comprised whole folders of papers, of which only one sheet had stats, the rest being things like personal histories and relationships, maps, notes on things-known… all kinds of stuff.
There are (or were) RPG combat systems that are vastly more complicated than the d20-and-armor-class system–games where combat actions are broken down to the second, and individual weapon swings calculated. If you think RPGs are “about” sword-fighting, I guess that might work for you. The one-minute combat rounds of AD&D are awfully simplified in contrast.
In AD&D (my group’s long-running campaign began under first edition rules, supplemented with Dragon magazine material, and later amalgamated with some elements of second edition) you really don’t need to do much math during the game, beyond a little simple addition or subtraction of modifiers to dice rolls. All those tables of numbers in the rule books make it seem like there’s math involved, but you rarely have to worry about most of them. Sometimes our game sessions went long stretches with no dice being rolled and no numbers of any kind coming into play–for example, when the adventure involved a mystery, and the characters were spending most of their time exploring a city, talking to people, searching for clues.
In fact, though we never quite did this, we toyed with the idea of eliminating “visible numbers” entirely; turning over all characters’ numerical stats permanently to the DM, leaving only those other written materials in the character folders, letting the DM do all the math and make all dice rolls. The idea was that nobody knows how many “points” of damage it will take to kill him, or what “level” he is; they only know how they feel, and what they can do–and so forth. We kept the stats in the character folders simply because the DM was doing enough work, and we were all good enough at playing the roles that we didn’t get too distracted by handling a little bit of game mechanics.
So my feeling is, anybody who thinks that math is an integral part of the game, has never played it like it could be played.
Like true Scotsmen play it!
I’ve done this a few times. We call it playing blind. It really adds something when you only know “He looks pretty messed up and is bleeding heavily” instead of “He’s at 20 of 42 hp”