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30 Years Of Dungeons And Dragons
vasqzr writes "CNN has a story about Dungeons and Dragons celebrating its 30th birthday. 'An estimated 25,000 fans in 1,200 stores celebrated the anniversary Saturday, said Charles Ryan, brand manager for role-playing games at Wizards of the Coast, a Renton, Washington, company that owns Dungeons & Dragons.'"
Countries with D&D have seen their birthrates decrease for the past 30 years.
THIRTY years of Dungeons&Dragons!
It's a ...
/me rolls 1d6
...HAPPY birthday!
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Wow. I am very -- *rolls dice* -- surprised that it's already so long.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
..for telling me a day late.
Just kidding, happy big 30 D&D! :)
D&D is such a great game. I would like to thank Ed Greenwood for his wonderful contributions to the game in the form of the Forgotten Realms. Truly inspirational work this stuff is, or at least was. But sadly TSR has gone downhill since being eaten by the WoSC group, who used to just make a bunch of playing cards. Before you all pipe in and tell me to shut the hell up (because 3rd gen r00lz), I'll have you know that any time a module presents NINE 10th level fighters together as a battle, like in the Ravenloft adventures in and around Bluetspur, you have to ask if the depth of the game has been replaced by the stats that go with it. The answer has to be that the game has indeed shifted from a game of detailed and rich storytelling, such as with Ed Greenwood's additions, to a game of character advancement by hacking and slashing monsters, and people.
I'm sorry but TSR jumped the shark with Ravenloft, not to mention Spell Jamming.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...that it looks like the A.P. has poorly educated High School Students writing their articles now?
I mean, this thing looks like its target at about a 4th grade reading level.
Happy B-Day to D&D anyway.
s'wut i sed.
... and it still hasn't moved out of it's parents' basement!
I wonder if the D20 system will last that long.
I blew my saving throw and had to rta!
Can I have some Mountain Dew?
Will they get into the Guinness Book for all-time largest gathering of virgins?
In the beginning there was the fighter, and he was without wisdom and void of intellect. So he was named sponge. And there was evening and there was morning, the first character.
"An estimated 25,000 fans in 1,200 stores celebrated the anniversary Saturday". Wow, A vacuum of virginity only rivaled by that of a Star Trek convention. I kid! I kid!
This story hit a few months ago, and was covered on Slashdot.
Here and
Here.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1 chubby girl that shouldn't have worn a chainmail bikini.
I've seen sailors in the USN play D&D, lawyers play D&D, children play D&D with their parents. I've seen sysadmins play, financial advisors play, even a high school teacher or two.
D&D has left the basement rec room geek nirvana of the early '80s and gone elsewhere, as the article (barely) alluded to.
Back in the Middle Ages (the 1980s) I had a group of about ten people, male and female playing regularly. We played one dungeon for about four months and it was then that I started allowing everyone to keep their characters and started reading history in order to accomodate their increasing character strengths and abilities.
We were also playing games on Apple ][ computers...
Sadly, I moved out of the area we were playing in to accept a job where I have now lived for 20 years. Last I heard the group still met, though once monthly. One of the girls in our group married one of the boys (they were well-suited for each other even though I always thought their characters took out their relationship frustrations on each other) and they now have two children.
"So, Daddy, how did you meet mommy?"
"Actually, she cast a spell that felled an orc that was just about to kill me."
Another one of the girls married, then divorced one of the boys -- then married another boy from the group. They have no children, which is probably a good thing if my memory about their temperment serves me
"So how did you two meet, anyway?"
"I was married to one knight when he came in and swept me off my feet and onto his white charger, while fighting off an underworld demon. I cast a spell of enchantment on him and the rest is history."
Funny thing is, I'm still unmarried.
"Sincere, erudite dungeonmaster seeks....
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
.... 90% of the responses from players in game is still "I roll to attack."
I love hack n slash.
-Valiss
D&D really was one of those rare cases of something "new". Before the net was popular, it was a great tool for social networking for geeks. Every tech job I've ever had came not from my experience or my education, but from contacts made over the years around gaming tables.
Alas, it's a also a good example of how success is measured differently between sellers and consumers. D&D never really went into decline around here, but once you own the main rule books and some dice, you don't _need_ anything else and so game stores moved more heavily into card games where the profits were.
The d20 licensing scheme is very, very cool, although I have to admit that I still don't quite trust TSR/Wizards/Hasbro (their first reaction to the net was similar to the RIAA but then after an initial fan-relations-disaster they changed their tune and actually made an effort to reach out to the fans and address legitimate need to be able to share).
It's interesting watching a second generation of gamers start to grow up (and yes, there is a large and healthy population of them). They don't have to be saddled with as much of the "it's evil!" baggage (it's still out there, but weakened as the geek have inherited the earth)
But you know what happens to townspeople and peasants - sacrifaced to their Dragon master, killed off by a strange plague or senselessly killed by wandering adventurers.
you should clarify, you know 4 people out of at least 2000 who _admit_ to having every played D&D.
Bluff check, DC 15.
ED: You see a well-groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo.
ERIC: A gazebo? What color is it?
ED: (Pause) It's white, Eric.
ERIC: How far away is it?
ED: About 50 yards.
ERIC: How big is it?
ED: (Pause) It's about 30 feet across, 15 feet high, with a pointed top.
ERIC: I use my sword to detect whether it's good.
ED: It's not good, Eric. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Pause) I call out to it.
ED: It won't answer. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Pause) I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way?
ED: No, Eric. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: I shoot it with my bow (rolls to hit). What happened?
ED: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it.
ERIC: (Pause) Wasn't it wounded?
ED: Of course not, Eric! It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Whimper) But that was a plus-three arrow!
ED: It's a gazebo, Eric, a gazebo! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don't know why anybody would even try. It's a @#%$*& gazebo!
ERIC: (Long pause - he has no axe or fire spells) I run away.
ED: (Thoroughly frustrated) It's too late. You've awakened the gazebo, and it catches you and eats you.
ERIC: (Reaching for his dice) Maybe I'll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my paladin...
Our AD&D sessions were always fun, back when we had too much time and no girlfriends.
Somewhere along the line we grew up and got a life, although we all fondly remember being half drunk and playing AD&D.
... some unseen force is controlling all actions in the world, determining fate by the roll of a die - an all-knowing, all-powerful being who enjoys pizza and pepsi ...
An estimated 25,000 fans in 1,200 stores celebrated the anniversary Saturday
And only 2 women were pissed at their husbands cuz of the event....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Once you've had wickedly nubile Finnish goddess of pain Loviatar (1st Edition Deities & Demigods p. 55), who can be ever be satisfied by mere mortal women again?
oh the pain...
I can remember getting up from the gaming table and finding that missing d4 with my bare left foot.
Those damn dice were small enough to hide in a shag rug and hurt like a bastard when stepped on, (especially the early ones, cuz the corners weren't blunted)
http://request-header.info
here
I have never had any problem finding players, so I guess I'm different in that regard.
My problem is finding players that don't utterly piss me off. You know, the guys that waste 30 minutes in the middle of initiative rolls reading passages from the PHB to the DM when the result is inevitably going to be what the damned DM said in the first place.
Another group that really annoys me are guys that aren't necessarily "power gamers", but don't realize that flaws in a character, well... add character. I find that most of these people have never played in a game of GURPS, where choices like this are required and a good GM will enforce that you RP them.
Oh well. To be honest, my favorite RPG has and always will be Vampire. However, especially nowadays I can't stand that group in general, to a point where a D&D game with the players I described above sounds like a joyous session in comparison. And LARP is like ripping your imagination out and replacing it with really bad acting and replacing any tactical action with a large chance of success, regardless of challenge. (as most LARP actions are decided by Rock, Paper, Scissors) And of course, LARP DM's (if you can find them) don't care about any of this.
Vampire used to be a fun political RPG that had little to do with Vampires and more to do with intrigue. Now everyone paints their face white and for some fucking reason, thinks that Vampire is a Goth RPG. Good god, I wonder if they dress in cherokee headwear for Werewolf games. Oh well.
Well, at least no one has fucked with Shadowrun. Oh, wait, someone actually needs to fuck with Shadowrun. Oh well.
".... reading passages from the PHB to the DM when ...."
I need to get out of my IT career. I read that and was wondering why he was talking about "Pointy Haired Boss" being read to the DM.
??!!??11
Sadly, the article only makes a passing reference to the patriarch of D&D. I guess ownership is everything nowadays. GameBanshee.com has a nice interview with Gygax accompanied by lots of D&D artwork.
D&D was always a wonderful exercise of mentality -- specifically, visual imagination, numerical computing, and social foresight.
... it was just another hobby in life. All those dire predictions during the 1980s about D&D's harm had come to naught ... and in fact, all those worried parents instead did far more damage than D&D ever did by working all the time instead of keeping a presence at home with their children.
Science Fiction and D&D are wonderful jump-starts to young intellects. The downside to them is that they are elitist and promote insular behavior.
Now collected around age 40, the people I knew who played D&D often still do, and on average the game didn't help or harm them
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Back when the D&D-is-evil crap started, I researched news stories about teenagers who committed suicide because they got kicked off the swim team, blew their 4.0 GPA, broke up with girl/boyfriend, parents were assholes, etc. I read that the suicide rate among RPG players was below that of the general population.
That was back in the pre-Internet days when these things took time to find. Here is an article that summarizes some of that info. I used to keep some actual numbers in my head to toss out whenever some cross-waving idiot blamed RPGs for the ills of the world. If the anti-D&D crusaders actually looked up suicide statistics, they would probably be campaigning against report cards, team sports, the senior prom, and a lot of other time-honored institutions. In the real world, fantasy gaming is generally harmless fun.
First, some history.
TSR originally published D&D. In the early to mid 90's TSR was publishing a lot of support material (modules, sourcebooks, settings) to keep sales up. As time went on, the quality and sales of this material went way down. TSR eventually owed $30 million to various debtors, primarily their printers. In 1997, WOTC bought TSR with the profits from Magic: The Gathering. Then Pokemon happened. In 1999, a struggling Hasbro bought WOTC to get the Pokemon cash cow. D&D Third Edition was released in 2000, after a year delay, under the d20 license. In 2003, D&D 3.5 was released.
WOTC had an understanding of RPGs, because the founders actually played them. Hasbro, on the other hand, seems to only understand board games for kids. Pokemon dried up, and they paniced. this is the big reason for 3.5, not "fixing things".
Not long after 3.5 came out, rumors began circulating that work had already begun on 4th Edition, and that it would not inherit the d20 license. If true, this would cripple all the companies that take advantage of the d20 license. The d20 license, by the way, is not granted in perpetuity, and can be altered at will according to the licensor's whim (look up the Book of Erotic Fantasy for proof).
Obviously, what Hasbro doesn't get is that RPG core books have a quite lengthy product cycle, but their scramble for income forces them to ignore it.
When I asked the general manager of my local game store what he though of the 4th edition rumors, the first thing he said was "I'm not going to buy it." (He was already annoyed at the existence of 3.5). Of course, he'd put it on his store shelves, he just won't personally own it.
A friend of mine, who still plays M:TG, has a conspiracy theory based on Hasbro realizing their mistake in buying WOTC and making the best of it. He believes Hasbro is quietly moving all of their debt into WOTC, and eventually plan to spin it off into its own entity or try to sell it. Good for Hasbro, but would be the end of D&D. I don't completely buy it, but the way big business is run nowadays, it wouldn't surprise me.