Coding and Roleplaying - Is There a Connection?

TossCobble asks: "With table-top roleplaying giant Wizards of the Coast (makers of Dungeons & Dragons, for those not in the know) broadcasting an open call for adventure designers and developers (including an entertaining developer test to gauge your own game-design talent and knowledge), I found myself once again considering the odd appeal of gaming for us programming types. It's interesting that something so free-form-ishly creative, socially dynamic, and utterly fantastical be fun for folks so grounded in logical programming. Of course, my theory is that gaming and programming actually have more in common than we might think. Tabletop roleplaying involves coming up with creative solutions to problems set in a clearly-defined ruleset, involve constant data-tracking and minor mathematical equations, and involve working together with small groups of people toward like-minded goals. Conversely, love of roleplaying can illustrate how important creativity is to good programming. What do you think?"

Comments

It's Independant Thinking

[WebHostingGuy]

Whenever you have a set of people who can creatively think outside the box you will get unique solutions to common problems. A lot of the time people are told this is the way you must do something. By reinforcing play at with no constraints except for the effect from the choice you will get different ideas and solutions from the norm.

If you contrast table gaming with no rules for the players versus console gaming in which you must do x to get to y you will alwasy have more creative solutions in the table gaming. This doesn't mean a standard solution will not work or will not be better, but you can't change the boundaries of a console game for a unique solution to a problem so you never challenge the creative juices of a player and reinforce creative ideas; just the opposite you reinforce finding a solution only within the rules. Is this what you are talking about?

Of course

[FidelCatsro]

We like to dream , and we like to make our dreams reality .After all programming is about turning thoughts in to something tangible .Role playing is about turning the dreams of adventure we all have in to some sort of reality .
The only reason some people look down on it , is because they don't have the courage to do it for fear of looking silly.

Re:Umm, poor people skills?

[Raindance]

Yeah, that could be part of it. But it's certainly not the whole story.

I've known people to prefer a MUD PK war to a date with a beautiful woman; a game of capture the flag to sex; Word of Warcraft to their loving SOs. There's something about the gamer/coder personality type that is more than a function of
1. Being good at analytical thinking
2. Poor performance in social situations.

It's more of an attraction to certain modes of thinking and systems of reward than failing at the "real world". In some people, at least.

Re:Umm, poor people skills?

[pilkul]

Bingo. Dorks like tabletop roleplaying for the same reason they like to read pulp science fiction/fantasy, read comic books or watch harem anime: not because they're more "creative" or whatever but because they want to escape into a pleasant fantasy land. They avoid reading mainstream literature, which is too concerned with reality for comfort. (Note: I don't mean this as a putdown of all SF/F, comic books and anime, just most of them.)

This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the story submitter, they tend to make up all sorts of more palatable justifications for why they like their hobby. It's all pretty sad really. Social anxiety problems can be largely resolved given practice, so the sooner they stop the self-denial and start becoming adults, the better.

Re:Umm, poor people skills?

[QuantumG]

Ya know what.. when I hang around with my fiancee and her friends, all they talk about all night is work. And not the technical workflow details.. they spend all night talking about the people at their work. Someone will say a name, someone else will say their opinion of that person, someone else will counter with an anecdote about that person, etc. Basically it's nothing more than gossip. The other alternative is a discussion about religion or politics in which someone will inevitably take someone elses' opinions personally, get all flustered and maybe break down crying. If this is what "normal people" talk about I think I'd rather hang out with geeks.. at least we can have a conversation without backstabbing other people or thinking others are personally attacking us when they express their opinions.

mod parent up...

[ltwally]

Just because the parent's comment wasn't exactly nice to WoTC does not invalidate it... Many, if not most, "serious" dnd players/dm's very much miss TSR -- a company that was full of innovative ideas and actually seemed to want to please its customers.

Gamers have several reasons to be less-than-satisfied with WoTC, compared to TSR, including:

• Bringing out crappy products just to fill the monthly release cycle, instead of focusing on polishing products to a point where DM's don't have to read through a book to be able to sanction official content.

• Releasing books that seem more focused on pretty artwork than solid material -- and, of course, the artwork costs more to print, so the cost for the book is increased. Go figure

• Refocusing resources into creating entirely new realms (ie. Eberron) instead of updating much-loved and heavily-played pre-existing realms (ie. the Forgotten Realms). (note: I'm not saying Eberron sucks. I'm just saying that FR needs a lot of work before it is updated to d20, still.. and it's been 5 years since 3.0 debuted.)

• "Updating" the ruleset (ie. version 3.5) to the point that half the "current" DnD books are using incompatible rules which require serious work by the DM in order for their material to work with the 3.5 rule-system.

I could go on... but I think I've proven my point: WoTC hasn't always shown consideration to its customers. The parent was perfectly justified for voicing dissatisfaction with WoTC. Mod him up.

Sick of staring at a monitor all day long

[Bohnanza]

I know a lot of folks who play tabletop RPGs, boardgames, tabletop wargames, and other "old-fashioned" types of games. A LOT of these people (and they are not all male) work with computers all day; many of them are programmers or engineers. They get sick of staring at a PC monitor all day and like to hang around with actual people every once in a while.

Re:What do I think?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Jeez, does anyone remember T$R and their hordes of SCO-like lawyers? How fast we forget.

Short Answer: "Yes" with an "If,"...

[sesshomaru]

... Long Answer: "No" with a "But"

Role Playing Games encompass a lot. One big part of role playing games is designing logical systems for determining the outcome of events. Example: You are Jay D'Canton, a Paladin, you are wearing chain mail and carrying a mace. You enter a room with four Orcs. Three of the Orcs are armed with wooden clubs and wearing thick animal furs, the fourth has a short sword and studded leather armor. How does the battle go?

Well, figuring out whether the Orcs get Jay's head for their pointy stick, or whether Jay makes short work of them depend on a lot of factors. Is Jay fresh out of Paladin school, or has he been at this for a while? How much protection does his armor give? Are the furs the Orcs are wearing purely decorative or do they offer cushioning versus Jay's mace?

So, varous systems are created, if Jay has killed x number of Orcs, he'll become a "level two" Paladin who is better at fighting and avoiding attacks. The Orcs will get a damage and "to hit" penalty based on Jay's armor, which will also be represented by a number called an armor class. So too will every aspect be determined, with each step be given a logical number value and with the steps relating logically. You should be able to take a list of numbers, including numbers created by die rolls, run them through your system, and figure out the outcome.

Ah, the systems... the beautiful beautiful systems. Everything from systems for determining the weather to a system determining the random effects of the Wand of Wonder.

This all works until those horrible Players come along and mess up your beautiful system. "I don't think the Orcs should be able to hurt me with wooden clubs. Oh, and," quick edit to Jay's character sheet, "turns out my mace is a magical mace +5 versus Orcs."

Meanwhile, you have some people across the street dressed up as Vampires, but they aren't rolling dice at all. They are treating the game as improvisational Theatre. They may have a system, too, but they seems to see things in terms of "roll playing" versus "Role Playing." (I really don't know much about them, though I have one of their game books, for the collection of course. Still... I got a distinct impression from reading White Wolf magazine while looking for Call of Cthuhlu articles.)

Personally, I prefer board games in the popular genre's to their role playing equivalents. They have a nice, rigid sense of order. Of course, you don't get to create your own systems, or build a big "Dungeon" or "Module" system out of the smaller systems provided in the books. However, what does it matter when your fellow players would rather ignore the rules or shoot the breeze.

Besides, I more likely to get a "non-gamer" to play a game of Dungeon! or Black Morn Manor with me than a game of Dungeons and Dragons (and believe me I've tried!)

Of course, my brother (call him "Inu Yasha"), who is deathly afraid of computers loves getting together with the guys for an evening of pizza and D&D. I think it is more for the comaradery than enjoying of watching a rigid system designed to determine the effects of an undead invasion in a small medieval hamlet. Trust me, the guy just started using Email, and when he sees some of the things I do with my computer, he's like, "That's horrible, that's like the inventions of that guy from Gremlins. I'll be happy using a DVD player to watch movies rather than that complicated set-up." Actually, he may have said The Goonies, but I think Gremlins is a cooler movie...

What was my point again?

Re:Umm, poor people skills?

[achurch]

This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the story submitter, they tend to make up all sorts of more palatable justifications for why they like their hobby.

Resorting to ad hominem attacks like that really doesn't help your point.

I'll agree that some people use roleplaying (or anime, novels, what have you) as a form of escapism. But I'll bet there are a lot more who use them simply as a form of entertainment, as they are designed to be. Not all of us have this urge to rip on anything that's not a true literary work of art; what is fun, is fun, and doesn't need justification beyond that.

Here's my own definition of a dork, then

[Moraelin]

You know, there's a disturbing trend I'm noticing among a lot of nerds, and your post, complete with name calling (" Dorks like roleplaying") and armchair shrink trolling ("the sooner they stop the self-denial and start becoming adults, the better") is just a prime example of that: the "I'm Mr Perfect, you're all idiots, losers and in denial to boot" kinda mentality. In fact, I'll postulate that that should be _the_ definition of a "nerd" or "dork", and might well be the reason for social ineptness.

I know society as a whole is judgmental, relatively self-centred and "us vs them", but (like many other activities and social rituals they don't understand) nerds take this to an extreme it was never supposed to be taken to. It's like noticing that people use salt and vinegar in their soup, and deciding to make your soup out of _only_ salt and vinegar.

The social "us vs them" theme is supposed to find some common ground for the "us" part in that gossip. It's real purpose, conscious or not, is to find some common grounds to backpat each other in that "us" group. E.g., yeah, we might have other differences of opinion, but we're both fans of the same football club, so we're great. Not to become an "Me vs the rest of you losers" extreme.

Basically you know you're a nerd when your world is made of one Mr Perfect prototype, yourself, and sad losers who fail to measure up to that. And every single tiny difference of interests or difference of opinion is put on a pedestal, as definitive proof that everyone else is an idiot. And hey, it was said by Mr Perfect himself, so it _must_ be true.

Basically you know you're a nerd when you find yourself passing such broad sweeping judgments, like:

- did you study, say, law or medicine while I was learning to optimize assembly? Bah, what a sad loser. I bet you can't even code your own kernel drivers. Is that sad or what?

- ok, so you studied CS too, but do you use the same OS, language or editor that I do? You use another one, huh? (E.g., so we're both on Linux, but you code in C++ while I do Java, or viceversa, and use vi instead of emacs, or viceversa. Or worse yet, you use an IDE.) Ah-ha! I knew it. Idiot. It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.

- and how long is your uptime anyway? Only two weeks? Hah. Loser.

- what hobbies do you have anyway? Is it books or movies while I prefer gaming, or viceversa? What a sad loser you are, then. You're in denial. Grow up, get a life, get the One True Hobby.

- Ok, so if it's the same hobby, what flavour of it is it? E.g., do you prefer SF/fantasy books movies while I prefer murder mysteries, or viceversa? Haha, I knew it, it sucks to be you. You only read those because you don't have a life and are in denial. Or if it's games, do you like story-driven games while I like Mario-style jump puzzles, or viceversa? You guessed, you're a loser again for failing to measure up to my perfection.

Etc, etc, etc.

It's a sort of a sieve that really doesn't let anything through. There is no "us" in a nerd's "us vs them", it's one big case of Mr Perfect vs 7 billion sad losers who fail to measure up.