D&D was invented in 1974 by one Gary Gygax, whose father was a violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. (This strikes me as significant, somehow.) Gary moved at an early age to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where he founded TSR Hobbies, the maker of D&D.
Although Gygax left the company in the mid-1980s, TSR today continues to crank out D&D rule books, D&D miniature playing pieces, and all sorts of other D&D paraphernalia in quantities that make one wonder about the nation’s mental health. By means of a cunning stratagem (I asked somebody at the office), I managed to get my hands on a couple of those sacred rule books, and let me tell you, R. buddy, this game is weird.
The basic idea in your run-of-the-mill Go Fish-type game is to get all your opponent’s cards or all his checkers or some other readily grasped commodity. Not so with D&D. Here is a quote from Mr. Gygax on the subject: “The ultimate aim of the game is to gain sufficient esteem as a good player to retire your character — he becomes a kind of mythical, historical figure, someone for others to look up to and admire”. If what you’ve been playing up till now is Parcheesi you ain’t ready for this.
To play D&D you need at least two acolytes, who play under the guidance of a vaguely Mansonesque personage called the Dungeon Master (DM). By means of various murky protocols involving the use of charts and dice, each player establishes the persona of the “character” he or she will manipulate in the game, who typically ends up (if male) being an antisocial cutthroat of some sort, or (if female) possessed of large, grapefruit-like breasts. I deduce the latter from studying the illustrations in the book. Admittedly I was looking at a very old edition. Perhaps the newer ones are more PC. It’s always the way. Apart from predictable characteristics like strength and intelligence, players also have to determine such baffling minutiae as their likelihood of contracting communicable diseases or becoming infested by parasites. Why these things are important I have no clue. I’m just telling you what the rule book says.
The preliminaries having been dealt with, the players are led through an imaginary dungeon devised by the DM in search of treasure or some such. On the way, they will encounter various obstacles and evil creatures, which they will have to defeat or evade.
The concept seems simple enough. It’s the application that throws me. There are two main problems: (1) there are one billion rules, and (2) the game requires nonstop mathematical finagling that would constipate Einstein. The rule book is laden with such mystifying pronouncements as the following: “An ancient spell-using red dragon of huge size with 88 hits points has a BXPV of 1300, XP/HP total of 1408, SAXPB of 2800 (armor class plus special defense plus high intelligence plus saving throw bonus due to h.p./die), and an EAXPA of 2550 (major breath weapon plus spell use plus attack damage of 3-30/bite) — totalling 7758 h.p.” 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.
If you want to know more about Dungeons & Dragons, you can find D&D paraphernalia at many hobby and game stores. For the location of the outlet nearest you call 1-800-384-4TSR. Contrary to what you might think, all calls to this number are NOT immediately reported to the police.
Cecil Adams, “What’s the deal with Dungeons and Dragons?”, The Straight Dope, 1980-09-26.
November 17, 2024
June 13, 2024
Fun new family game – Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper presents the rulebook for an exciting new family game literally “ripped from the headlines” – Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
“To simulate what it’s like to go to work in a national parliament secretly housing foreign agents, the National Post presents a tongue-in-cheek instruction manual to play this group game: Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
Photo by Brice Hall”
WHAT YOU NEED TO PLAY:
- One large writing surface, such as a chalkboard, whiteboard or flip chart (THE ORDER PAPER)
- 20-70 note cards
- A timer
SETTING UP PLAY:
Gather at least five of your closest friends and have them sit in a line facing the ORDER PAPER. They will be divided into two categories: The WITTING AGENTS and the CREDULOUS NAIFS.To choose who among them will be the WITTING AGENTS, prepare a stack of IDENTITY CARDS equal to the number of players. On every fifth card, mark the symbol for the Chinese yuan (¥). In the case of five players, mark a single card, for 10 players, mark two, etc.
Shuffle the IDENTITY CARDS and distribute them among the players. Anyone receiving a “¥” is now a WITTING AGENT.
Set aside another stack of note cards to serve as MANDATE LETTERS. The text for each card is below. Shuffle the MANDATE LETTERS and place them face down.
RULES OF THE GAME:
Each round begins with a CANADA IS NOT BROKEN phase in which all players close their eyes, put their thumbs in their ears and bury their face for two minutes (the elapsed time to be marked with a timer). During this phase, the WITTING AGENTS open their eyes, stride over to the ORDER PAPER and write down a piece of binding public policy that damages Canada to the advantage of a hostile government (suggestions below).Once this act of treachery is done, the WITTING AGENTS return to their seats will pretend to wake up alongside them as if nothing happened.
Now begins the CONCERNED FOLLOW-UP phase. First, players must pull a MANDATE LETTER card that will determine conditions of discussion. Now, the parliamentarians must decide who among them is the foreign cat’s paw who has defaced their ORDER PAPER with disloyal policy. Uncomfortable questions are asked, accusations are made, and at the end of the round the players vote on who among them will be ejected as a traitor.
Only after the accused traitor is exiled will they show their IDENTITY CARD, revealing whether the accusations have been true, or whether they have been unjustly maligned.
Ejected players are then exiled to THE SENATE, a separated area of chairs where they are served port, ginger ale and black liquorice. They continue to participate in the CANADA IS NOT BROKEN and the CONCERNED FOLLOW-UP phases, but they no longer have a vote.
October 20, 2018
Don’t waste your time coming up with something original … use this map for your next RPG campaign
The Only Fantasy World Map You’ll Ever Need
by EotBeholder
Thrown together on a whim, yet meeting the needs of busy (or lazy) Dungeon Masters to this day, EotBeholder’s epic “Only Fantasy World Map” has all your role-playing game geography requirements covered.
Here’s something I threw together for the game I’m running with some coworkers. I plotted out where everything was going to go on a world map then decided, yknowwhat, let’s just keep the serial numbers filed off, so now it’s a map good for every RPG setting ever. Starting in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms is traditional but anywhere works. (My players are mostly from Tortuga.)
EDIT: Wow, almost four years later and this thing just exploded. The internet is a thing of mysteries. Thank you all! A lot (well, a number) of people have requested a blank version so they can add their own names… yeah, sure thing. To anyone asking for permission to use this for their own campaigns… I mean it hardly qualifies as “original”, so as long as you’re comfortable stealing from someone who steals from the people who only steal from the best, knock yourselves out 🙂
If I could make some additions (which I suppose I could, but, nah) I’d call out the Boring/Doomed Pastoral Village somewhere in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms or the Land of Poncy Knights, and also add a Giant Wall to Keep the Monsters Out. Giant walls are so hot right now.
H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.
October 19, 2015
December 15, 2014
April 11, 2014
Dungeons and Dragons versus BADD
BBC News Magazine looks back at the moral panic about Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s:
In 1982, high school student Irving Lee Pulling died after shooting himself in the chest. Despite an article in the Washington Post at the time commenting “how [Pulling] had trouble ‘fitting in'”, mother Patricia Pulling believed her son’s suicide was caused by him playing D&D.
Again, it was clear that more complex psychological factors were at play. Victoria Rockecharlie, a classmate of Irving Pulling, commented that “he had a lot of problems anyway that weren’t associated with the game”.
At first, Patricia Pulling attempted to sue her son’s high school principal, claiming the curse placed upon her son’s character during a game run by the principal was real. She also sued TSR Inc, the publishers of D&D. Despite the court dismissing these cases, Pulling continued her campaign by forming Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983.
Pulling described D&D as “a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings”.
Pulling’s pamphlet on the dangers of D&D:
In 1985, Jon Quigley, of the Lakeview Full Gospel Fellowship, spoke for many opponents when he claimed: “The game is an occult tool that opens up young people to influence or possession by demons.”
These fears also found their way into the UK. Fantasy author KT Davies recalls “showing a vicar a gaming figure – he likened D&D to demon worship because there were ‘gods’ in the game”.
Veteran roleplayer Andy Smith found himself in the unusual position of being both a roleplayer and a Christian. “While working for a Christian organisation I was told to remove my roleplaying books from the shared accommodation as they were offensive to some of the other workers and contained references to demon-worship.”
Looking back now, it’s possible to see the tendrils of a classic moral panic, and some elements of the slightly esoteric world of roleplaying did stir the imaginations of panicked outsiders.
March 27, 2014
Remembering “the war on Dungeons and Dragons“
First, the comment that @FakeTSR linked to:
It was never a fair fight between fundamentalist Christianity and D&D. One was a dangerous system full of dark mysticism and threats to warp a young mind beyond repair, and the other was a tabletop RPG.
And then, the article by Annalee Newitz:
Thirty years ago, a war raged between the dorks who played Dungeons & Dragons, and the conservative parent groups who believed that gaming was debauched at best and Satanic at worst. Lives were ruined. People died. And now that war is over. I still can’t believe we won.
[…]
Still, unlike my fantasy of being a hot half-elf, the Christians actually had some control over our lives. My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren’t getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.
Update, 28 March: Techdirt‘s Timothy Geigner sorrowfully points out that even though this particular moral panic eventually came to a happy end, the lessons of each significant outbreak of hysteria are not carried forward and the next professional pants-wetting politician or “concerned parent group” does not get the scrutiny they deserve.
As the article says, looking back from the vantage point of a world where entertainment is strewn with the fantasy genre, it’s stunning to see the propaganda that had been unleashed. Unsurprisingly, said propaganda has since been eviscerated, with all the common tales of kids killing themselves being shown to be completely unrelated to anything having to do with children’s games. Still, this kind of thing propagated like hell-fire. For all the normal, non-Satan-worshipping kids out there that were just trying to have a little fun, it must have seemed like insanity would rule the day. Fortunately, it didn’t.
[…]
Winners who are now all grown up and who have moved on to their next moral panic, be it violent video games, drill gangster rap, or any number of the next thing the younger generations will come up with. The cycle repeats. Every generation was young, became old, and feared the new young again. That’s too bad, but for those of us still reveling in our youth, real or imagined, it’s nice to know that the moral panic over video games, like all those before it, will eventually subside.
