Dungeons and Dragons
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Dungeons & Dragons (usually abbreviated D&D) is an addictive role-playing game system. In fact, it is in many ways the great role-playing game system, being the first one ever developed and selling better than all other RPGs combined.
There is widespread debate in the role-playing community on whether or not D&D sucks, and to how great a degree, but it's there, and it's impossible to ignore.
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[edit] D&D and the religious right
For some reason, D&D has always been the target of considerable belligerence from conservative Christians. Some of their many absurd claims have included:
- Roleplaying games make the participants more prone to suicide or mental illnesses.
- The inclusion of magic and supernatural creatures such as devils and demons makes roleplaying equal to practicing sorcery and witchcraft, or at least promotes such activities. [1]
- The alleged emphasis on accumulation of wealth and personal power in the game is incompatible with the Christian message. (Huh.)
Now how did Phyllis and Andrew Schlafly become so rich? - The rules books contain "pornographic artwork".[2]
- The inclusion of polytheistic deities worshipped by the game characters is blasphemical.
- And so on and so forth.
The irony of this (or at least part of the irony) is that D&D actually to a considerable extent builds on elements from the western Christian cultural heritage. Besides the obvious elements, such as inclusion of "angels" and "paladins"[3], this is probably most apparent in the game's somewhat naïve world-view, which presents a system of moral absolutes which categorizes a character (or even whole races or societies) as one of nine different 'alignments' by placing them on two different axes of morality: Good/Evil and Lawful/Chaotic.[4] By comparison, most other role-playing games are much more "morally mature", such as White Wolf's various World of Darkness products or Chaosium's Cthulhu RPG, or at least prefer to consider the indvidual personalities and motivations of the characters, rather than placing them in the dualistic good vs. evil moral matrix found in D&D.
Despite this, D&D has always been the favourite target for the "concerned" people, probably due to a combination of the game's status as the archetypical RPG, and ignorance that the other games even exist.
In any case, it is quite clear why the game has attracted the level of hostility that it has. After all, it almost goes without saying that any game that teaches such skills as...
- Improvisation
- Creativity
- Open-mindedness
- Social skills
- Group management and group dynamics
- Empathy
- Self-insight
...must almost by necessity find itself the target of widespread fear and loathing from large parts of the religious right. Why, the young people might start actually thinking for themselves!
[edit] D&D vs. its own players
During its tenure as the flagship product of TSR, Inc., D&D was the undisputed king of the roleplaying world. However, TSR was notoriously *ahem* protective of its trademarks and system, often suing those who dared adapt D&D rules to their own products without TSR's permission with an almost estate-of-Tolkien-ian zeal (rather ironic, since Gygax had lifted massive amounts of the Lord of the Rings mythos wholesale for his settings). After TSR collapsed and Wizards of the Coast bought the smoldering remnants, however, WotC lightened up, creating the Open Gaming License (an application of open source well outside its traditional stomping grounds of software design) and releasing the fundamentals of the rules as the d20 system, essentially the rules from D&D third edition with the serial numbers filed off. [5] The d20 Modern game -- stylistically sort of a cross between D&D and the modern goth-horror games of White Wolf's World of Darkness -- is derived directly from the D&D 3e rules and has its own SRD.
The d20 SRD is a great document to have for the gamer running a campaign on the cheap, or for a game designer who likes D&D rules and wants to create their own setting. Unfortunately there's one thing that is inescapable -- you still need all those goddamned dice, and a d4 by any other name still hurts like hell when you step on it.
[edit] 4th edition
The upcoming 4th edition of D&D is provoking a fair bit of anguish from some of its players over what is seen as a too-restrictive licencing scheme for third-party developers, while others look forward to not being overwhelmed by another massive wave of crap like the one following the 3rd edition, and also for drastically simplifying certain rules to make it easier to implement as a computer game.[6]
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Dungeons and Dragons website
- The WotC d20 System website, including the System Reference Documents for d20 fantasy and d20 Modern
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ See the totally (unintentionally) hilarious "Dark Dungeons" Chick tract
- ↑ Examples include the 1995 edition's female wizard in a yellow platemail bikini and AD&D 1e's scraggly-looking bare-chested succubus with a bad facelift. Penthouse it's not.
- ↑ Modelled on the knights of King Arthur and other parts of the Chanson de geste tradition, especially characters like Parzifal and Lohengrin.
- ↑ See some Wikipedia article on this for a better explanation of this.
- ↑ Oddly enough, the System Reference Document to the d20 system is enough to run a pretty decent D&D campaign all on its own, with maybe a second-hand copy of a second edition Monster Manual to fill in the blanks.
- ↑ Whiners are advised to remember that, thanks to the Open Gaming License, there's nothing stopping them from forking the 3.5 version, and nobody will be coming in to confiscate their old books.
