I’ve never heard of a DM who tells the players the life counts of NPCs/monsters. Describing the damage is all they do.
When it comes to the players, I let them keep track of their life. Why wouldn’t I? They’re the ones who role play the damage done to their characters.
I was referring to the HP of a character. A good DM can convey how badly a character is wounded without numbers.
You mean a Player Character?
Again, the players in all the games I’ve heard of can keep track of their own damage because they have access to their character sheets. They role play the damage done to their own characters, not me.
I like that. Sounds like a good idea.
In case anyone was wondering, here’s that rule:
That’s certainly incomprehensible to anyone who knows nothing about baseball, but at least there’s no math. Math scares people.
I’ve been playing D&D on and off for the past couple of years, so I’m far from a devotee. That said, I don’t find the column as bad as others in this thread have. It is funny (“If what you’ve been playing up till now is Parcheesi you ain’t ready for this.”), and it does present a basic and skewed, but essentially accurate, explanation of how the game is played.
Yeah, it’s uninformed. It looks like Cecil basically picked up a rule book and summarized his findings and opinons for his readers. But he clearly wrote the column as a lark rather than as a serious study, and I can forgive that every now and then in the name of entertainment.
I couldn’t play the pen and paper D&D after middle school. Not because I didn’t like the fantasy world concept. I actually read the rulebooks and built dungeons/characters/stories as a passtime. Unfortunately, I simply couldn’t stand the people who played. I won’t get into details. Simply suffice it to say they were whiny and combative.
Once FPS and PC roleplaying games started going mainstream, I ditched all the old pen and paper stuff for a pittance and started enjoying gaming…
I was 10 years at the time of this column, and that was the exact year some friends of mine and I had “heard about this D&D thing.” One of us bought a Basic set and we read it through and gave it a try, none of us having played before. And let me tell you IT WAS EXACTLY AS BAD AS CECIL SAID IT WAS. Compared to “picking up” Monopoly from the rules, we flailed around, rolled some dice, and couldn’t figure out the rules or the damn point of the whole exercise.
Of course, a couple years later, I chanced into a game with an experienced roleplaying DM and got the “oh, that’s what it’s all about” and that was the start of many, many good roleplaying games for me.
It’s all about cultural perceptions. Again, using the baseball analogy, if some friends and I had never seen a game and picked up the rulebook I can only imagine what kind of mess we would have come up with. Nowadays, nerd niche or not, the game is enough a part of our cultural perceptions that this sort of article seems so out of place.
I can see the players not knowing their own hit point totals, but there’s really no way of disguising what level a character is, at least in the case of a spellcaster. A spellcaster has to know what spells he’s capable of casting, and those go up in a very regular way with level. Any wizard worth his salt would know that spells come in tiers, and that, for instance, a wizard capable of casting Fireball is also capable of casting Dispel Magic. From there, it’d be natural to have wizards within the game talking of things like “a wizard capable of casting spells of the third circle”, or whatever. With a little more study, it wouldn’t be too hard to notice that some wizards of the third circle can cast more fireballs each day than others, or that they can hurl their fireballs to a greater difference, and so realize the difference between what we’d call a fifth-level wizard and a sixth-level wizard. A really dedicated researcher might notice that two spellcasters who have gone adventuring together for their entire careers can cast spells at the same power level, and if they bother investigating nonmagical arts at all, might notice that a sword-swinging sort adventuring with those spellcasters gets tougher and more skilled at fighting, as well, and so possibly even deduce the existence of levels for fighters.
Sorry if this was already mentioned, but I think a lot of people are lumping D&D with the RPG’s and MMORPG’s that are hugely popular today. D&D, like many other “niche” games of the time (massive board games that took hundreds of hours to play, for example) were played by very few people, usually only those that had the math skills necessary to do the countless calculations by hand.
RPG’s today, on the other hand, have all the math done behind the scenes, thus allowing other aspects of the game to come to the forefront, such as strategy, team play, advanced graphics, etc.
In defense of Cecil, I believe his article is correct, but the discussion in this thread is talking about something completely different.
Sure there is: just hit the mute button so you won’t hear the “ching”!
Again with the math thing! :smack:
I played D&D (or AD&D) as it existed in the 1980s, with books, paper, and dice. No electronics involved, and again, not much math. We did some basic addition and subtraction.
Most of this has been about the game Cecil was writing about–D&D (or AD&D) as it existed in the 1980s, with books, paper, and dice.
Sure. The point wouldn’t be to conceal things from the players, but simply to make it easy for the players to think in the same terms that the characters would. Wizards casting “third circle spells” (or whatever) wouldn’t think of things like how many experience points they need for the next level–that’s not something that actually happens in the game world, but a growing ability to understand more powerful spells, that does.
As I said, my group never actually did this–hide all the numbers–because we immersed ourselves pretty easily in the characters and game world once we got started–but I can see how it might be helpful for some folks, to get everybody thinking “beyond” the mechanics.
You guys needs to lighten up. Seeing what an outsider thought of D&D back in 1980 is very funny.
As for how it’s perceived today, things are undoubtedly better. The concerned parent hysteria has long since passed onto video games. Fantasy books, movies, tv shows, and comics are mainstream, and when it comes to video games, RPGs are an extremely successful genre.
However, the people who gather around a table with thick books of rules and oddly shaped dice are still considered to be somewhat odd and nerdy.
I’m a roleplayer (PnP) and have been for years. I thought the article was funny and fairly accurate!
I tried to get into it back in the day, and I bought the basic rulebook.
What I remember was that I gave up when I used a mace +1 vs undead (+50% damage with blunt weapons vs undead, the +1 made the math ugly and the bonus was something like 4.5 with 12.5 total damage or something) and as zombies release a disease cloud or something on death, I had to make an X% chance saving throw on Y% chance of being poisoned. One fight took like 10 minutes of math, 2-3 dice rolls per swing (5 rolls of the 20 sided die to get a %) and to add insult to injury, I had to keep a running total of experience points. I was playing the solo game that comes with the basic book, and I couldn’t even get through that.
I agree. I just think the question was not particularly worthy of the Straight Dope. I’d much rather hear the answer to questions like “What would happen if a billion Chinese people all jumped at the same time?” than “Can you explain the TV show ‘Lost’ to me in a jocular fashion?”
Somewhere between the empty bags of Doritos, discarded bottles of Mt. Dew, and the errantly placed retainer and used Oxypad, the fanboys and the one token fangirl are completely missing the point of this article. Its funny. It was supposed to be funny, because Cecil was replying to a goofy question. What is the saying, dumb questions get dumb answers?"
Some of them still don’t genuinely role play. We drink - lots of bad beer. Eat pizza Talk about all sorts of things…and sometimes we manage to complete an encounter or two.
But role playing? Once in a while someone will be in character for - a sentence or two… I guess thirty years ago these guys used to role play - before I played with them, but now its an excuse to get away from the wives and hang out.
We enjoy ourselves.
You know, on another site, I might have found it amusing. Here, I found it disappointing.
If, by accurate, you mean “accurately documenting the bewilderment and lack of understanding some people have when confronted with roleplaying games”, then yes, it’s accurate. And clearly, the article was being played for laughs.
However, this is probably the only example in Doper history I can think of in which Cecil candidly admits he doesn’t understand the subject, and never will, and then excuses himself by throwing a particularly arcane and poorly-written piece of rules lawyering at the reader to prove they can’t understand it either.
Not here. Dumb questions get smart, but mocking, answers.
Except in this one case. Here, we got dumb and mocking.
This is mostly true. A wizard character would know that some of the spells he can cast are of a higher order than others. He would also note that wizards of higher orders get more magic missiles per spell, bigger fireballs etc. But as Spark240 said the point isn’t to conceal information but to convey in the sense the characters would think of it. A thief would know that he’s much better at picking locks than he used to be. But, he wouldn’t know he increased by 30%. A wizard would know he’s attained third order spells, but would not know how many XP he needs for the next level.
To illustrate- There’s an episode of Farscape in which Zhan realizes that she’s essentially gone up a level as a psionicist. She knew that as a level 9 she could protect her own mind against telepathic attack. She surprises a villain by shielding the mind of another “I’m a level ten priestess now. I can also protect.”
OR
In Vampire The Masquerade, a basic character can reach the fifth level of a discipline (the various vampiric powers). A character with Obfuscate knows that first comes a limited power to hide yourself, then comes the power to walk around invisible, then comes the Mask Of A Thousand Faces, then comes the ability to vanish, and finally comes the ability to spread your powers over others. Any vampire knows what level they are in a discipline- the powers come in order. But while a character may feel close to achieving the next power in a discipline, they don’t think “I just need a little XP”.