After this post I'll probably have lost any "cool" that I may have acquired, but I'm okay with that. I've mentioned previously that I'm a gamer... but I didn't quite explain to what degree. My name is Brian Williams, and I'm a Dungeons and Dragons player. It's okay, don't run away. Whatever your various notions about D&D are, they're probably wrong. So let's just get the misconceptions out of the way right now.
Things that D&D is not:
- Any form of Satanism, witchcraft, or any other such silly paranoid excuse for evil. D&D does not promote the actual worship of any form of evil, teach you to "cast magic" of any sort, or involve any sort of animal and/or virginal sacrifice.
- A children's game. Not to say that kids can't play it - many do. But D&D is a fairly complex, rules-heavy game that ends up being a fairly expensive hobby as well. Most D&D players are at least 18 or older.
- Against the teaching of the Bible/Torah/Quran/etc. Honestly, unless you're in some strange faith that believes that all forms of creative imagination are sinful, then your religion shouldn't have a problem with D&D. I'll go into more detail about what D&D is later in the post, but really it's just playing pretend at worst and group-storytelling at best.
- A game where you wear costumes and pretend to fight each other. No, no, no. Yes, there are people who dress up in silly costumes and go out into the woods to beat on each with fake weapons. But that game is not D&D. That is called LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) and has absolutely nothing to do with D&D. None of the many many official D&D books gives rules for or suggests LARPing. You know what I wear when I play D+D? Most often it's a pair of jeans and one of my many T-shirts purchased at a rock show. Same thing I wear to do anything else through the day.
- Perverse in nature. D&D is all about whatever you want it to be - it's that open ended. Your games can include giant robots, or pirates on the open sea, or building homes for impoverished people, or even all of the above. Anything you can think. As such, your games can include sex, rape, or any other questionable content that you choose. But the game does not require those things be a part of your game to play, and frankly the books subtly imply recommendation against such topics.
- Something only "nerds" do. Now obviously your definition of what makes a nerd could be very different from the next person's, but let's just work with the typical socially-inept geek here. People from all walks of life play D&D. I've talked to and/or heard of players that are rock stars, actors, college professors, wall street businessmen, farmers, clergymen (honestly), computer repairmen, and literally hundreds of other sorts. Vin Diesel has famously admitted to playing the game. Sure, some traditional "nerds" play the game, but they don't make up the entire demographic. Also, what's so wrong with nerds anyway?
That should cover most of the negative assumptions about the game. A few years back the "D&D is a game of Satan!" concept was fairly popular - led by a massive campaign of paranoid misinformation. Perhaps the most famous anti-D&D propaganda is
Jack Chick's 'Dark Dungeons' tract. It's silly, frankly. You can find hundreds of parodies of this tiny little tract online, all based off on the joke that it's simply so far from reality that it can't possibly be taken seriously. But unfortunately, to somebody who has absolutely no previous knowledge about the game, they don't have much reason not to believe it. Jack Chick certainly makes a compelling case for being afraid of the game... too bad it's all wrong. First off, let's talk about the real "culprit" of this tract - the witches' coven. Even if we take this tract to be factual, it seems that the game is at worst just a tool these "witches" are using to gain familiarity with potential new recruits - thus they are the problem, not the game. But as I mentioned above, D&D is not a game of witchcraft. Many more players (at least in the US) consider themselves Christian than Wiccan, just as more people in the US consider themselves Christian than Wiccan. There are no rules or instructions for actual magic in any of the D&D books - heck, they'd probably be much more popular if there was. 99% of players don't belong to witches' covens, and if there are any actual witches' covens still out there they probably have much better ways to recruit people. Secondly, the players typically don't "become" their characters (unless they're serious method actors) - they simply act as them. If that's wrong, then every single actor through all of history is wrong. Finally, let's talk about the hardest part to dismiss in the tract - the girl named Marcie's suicide. This is hard rumor to diffuse, that X person from X town on X dated killed themselves because their character died. Well, as I said, D&D players are basically just actors, and since actors don't typically commit suicide when the character they're portraying is killed off... there doesn't seem to be much weight to the argument. But honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if once,
maybe twice in the entire history of the game a person has committed suicide because of some negative thing that happened to their character (be it death or something else). The issue there isn't with D&D though, it's with the person being unstable to begin with. The sort of people that would kill themselves over that is just as likely to kill themselves because their favorite character in a book or TV show died off, so the fact that it happened to be D&D that set them off is utterly meaningless. So what does the tract get right? Well, not very much. The only thing worth any merit is that the Bible does say not to practice witchcraft. But we've already discussed how D&D is not witchcraft. So is writing fiction or acting the part of a character who practices magic sinful? Well, according the Bible murder, stealing, and lying are all sin... is it sinful for an actor to play a character that murders, steals, or lies? Is it sinful for an author to write a character that engages in murder, theft, or deception? If that's the case, then basically all works of fiction are evil - and that seems pretty silly to me.
So we've discussed what D&D is not and we've broken down the concept of the game itself being sinful/evil. So now we should quickly tackle what D&D
is.
D&D is:- A game. The point of D&D is the same as any other game - to have fun. And while some people do take it very seriously, it's no different than being very serious about watching football or anything else. It's still a game, and no matter how serious it's treated, the goal is as simple as just having fun.
- Social. D&D is a group game. The average D&D game is typically played in a group of 4 to 8 people, including the Dungeon Master (consider him the main storyteller). The game doesn't exist without the social aspect - a bunch of people spending time together in a group with nothing but their imagination and conversation to fill the time.
- A game of pretend. The "rules" of D&D isn't what makes the game - they're just there to add some structure. When you were a kid, did you ever play cowboys & indians or pretend to sword/gun fight with other kids? It's fun until you get to the "I shot you dead" "No you didn't, I dodged!" part. Well D&D is basically the same thing as those basic games of pretend just with some structure to prevent disagreements. Instead of fighting over whether or not you did in fact shoot your friend, now you roll a dice and do a quick equation and can say for certain whether or not you hit him.
- Group storytelling. For me, this is the most compelling part of the game. It's really not very different from sitting in front of a typewriter working on a fictional novel. Except in D&D you're not the only writer. It becomes a massive group effort to craft your story, with the Dungeon Master being the lead writer in charge of creating the world, and the players getting to be solely responsible for writing the parts of the main characters.
- A good activity for children. Bear with me here for a minute, I'll explain how. First off, the rules of D&D aren't simple. At all. Sure, the basics can be picked up pretty fast, but there is an insane number of rules in the game (don't worry, you don't need to memorize or even use all of them). Playing D&D is like an exercise in critical thinking - you need to apply some serious thought to figuring out some of the more complex rules. D&D is also a pretty math heavy game. The dice are the real key function of D&D, working as the variable for basically every conceivable action. Trying to hit that troll? Roll the dice, add any additional bonus modifiers, subtract any negative modifiers from armor or other circumstances, works out the percentile likelihood of success with the troll in question hiding partly behind a tree, etc etc etc. Want your kid to get a great head-start in math? Get them playing D&D. The level of English in through the books is basically college level, but it's presented in a fashion where kids can work out the meanings of any words they don't know. D&D is like a vocab lesson on steroids. The social aspects of the game are certainly a bonus for children that might otherwise be watching TV or playing video games by themselves as well. Additionally, the very concept of how the game is played is that the players are confronted with a series of problematic situations that they need to figure out solutions for... which is really the very definition of problem solving, a skill anyone would argue is important for everyday life. And as far as I'm concerned, encouraging creativity is one of the best things you can do for your children - the world of D&D that exists only within your own imagination is an amazing tool for expressing and developing creativity.
I think once you're willing to remove your pre-conceived notions about the game (almost all of which come from misinformation) and take a look at the game for yourself, you'll see that it isn't some vile creation of evil or merit badge of complete nerdiness. You'll see that it's just a silly, fun hobby that arguably could even be said to carry some real world benefits to it. Truth be told though, I didn't write all that to convince or convert anyone... I wrote it because I'm going to be posting some D&D related stuff I'm working out for an upcoming game and wanted to defend my playing the game from any unfair prejudice before I did so. Hopefully I've at least succeeded in that. If my post did happen to make the game sound appealing to anyone who hadn't really seen it as such before... well that's even better. As always, thanks for reading.
(side note: for whatever reason it won't let me put an ampersand '&' in the tags, so D&D entries will be listed as "d+d" in the tag section.)
Continuing the tradition I started last month with my post on Lucy Pinder, it's time for the December Hottie of the Month! This month we have one of my favorite actresses from one of my old 'guilty pleasure' TV shows. Best known from the O.C. where she played the complicated and high-strung Taylor Townsend, it's the beautiful Autumn Reeser.
(heavily adapted from a recipe that appeared in Gourmet magazine)
Wow, more than 10 days without an entry... I committed a blog-sin. I apologize to my readers (yup, both of you) for the absence. In my defense, a lot has been going on lately - some of which I'll be writing about today.
