Slashdot Mirror
Dungeons & Dragons' Influence and Legacy
An anonymous reader writes: This year is the 40th anniversary of the launch of Dungeons & Dragons, and it's getting a lot of mainstream attention. Long-time and former players are examining the game's influence and its legacy, even as it's being introduced to yet another generation of kids. "For countless players, Dungeons & Dragons redirected teen-age miseries and energies that might have been put to more destructive uses. How many depressed and lonely kids turned away from suicide because they found community and escape in role-playing games? How many acts of bullying or vandalism were sublimated into dice-driven combat? ... How many underage D.U.I.s never came to pass because spell tables were being consulted late into the night?" Meanwhile, as people who played the game long ago have grown into adults producing their own works, our culture has reaped the benefits of D&D's influence. "The league of ex-gamer writers also includes the 'weird fiction' author China Miéville (The City & the City); Brent Hartinger (author of Geography Club, a novel about gay and bisexual teenagers); the sci-fi and young adult author Cory Doctorow; the poet and fiction writer Sherman Alexie; the comedian Stephen Colbert; George R. R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (who still enjoys role-playing games). Others who have been influenced are television and film storytellers and entertainers like Robin Williams, Matt Groening (The Simpsons), Dan Harmon (Community) and Chris Weitz (American Pie)."
There's a whole lot of that era of culture that's now re-emerging for nostalgia value, too. There are even novels based on the idea, almost a meta-culture of a sort (see "Ready Player One," or "Geekomancy.")
Is the article trying to imply that d&d somehow made these people successful?
I'm in middle management and make at least half of my decisions with a d20. Better than any MBA.
Bringing the DM screen into meetings is still not very well accepted, however.
To say that is essentially to say that Extroverted people usually don't get Introverted people and vice verse.
The gaming community really doesn't need this old stereotype of gamers as uptight nerds who are scared to step outside the bounds of adult-imposed propriety. I played D&D in high school in the 1980s, but I found plenty of time for illin' like any other teenager. I bought a lot of weed, sold some, and I also did a lot of grafitti tagging in my neighborhood. In these activities, I was often joined by peers who I would also meet for D&D.
And software process methodologies as hokey as that game.
"For countless players, Dungeons & Dragons redirected teen-age miseries and energies that might have been put to more destructive uses. How many depressed and lonely kids turned away from suicide because they found community and escape in role-playing games?"
On the flip side, how many hours were wasted the could have been put to better use? Studying Maths or computers or foreign languages or Music or Science or Drama, or even spent at football or wrestling practice? How many trebuchets were not built because the teen-agers were busy playing games? How many young men were not Eagle Scouts? How many snow forts or tree houses were left empty, or even not built in the first place?
No, you didn't... nor did you get it right the second time... and for that matter, I can't imagine you adding anything to what you've said above that would indicate you are ever liable to "get it"
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Tunnels and Trolls and Traveller had more of an influence on me than D&D.
D&D did teach me to take the parts I liked and screw the rest.
METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA IS 40 YEARS OLD WHERE IS THEIR PARTY???
Been meeting with the same group for more than 30 years now on Saturday night. I started playing the when the 1st red-book with crayons came out, I was like in 6th grade, and yes I still have the boxed set and nearly EVERY other book, module, and accessory. I'm 46 now and NO other form of RPG online or other can compare to the fun and comradeship of a face to face pen and paper RPG. More imagination, more interaction, and for those of you who doubt it is family fun, our group consists of 2 single ladies, 3 single guys, 2 married couples all my relative age (mid 40's) and 3 much younger players in their mid 20's ( 2 guys and a girl. We have 3 players who rotate as Game Master and we play in a long standing organically customized world. We have been at several Gen-Cons and we ran a full tourney game that was very successful several years ago.
Long live D&D
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Quit playing D&D and finish the Ice and Fire already.
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
Depressed kids can always find outlets. I drew, listened to music, taught myself 68k assembly language for my calculator, read a lot, and lifted weights. I often reflect on how a depression based self education led to a career.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Never played the game, but D&D's effect on my youth was their flood of hack novels that destroyed the fantasy genre. In the mid 80s, there were only a few "fantasy" books in bookstores, usually subsumed under scifi, and most (not all, there was Terry Brooks) were high quality because it was such a quirky genre that not many people wrote in it. Then in the mid to late 80s, TSR started flooding bookstores with the most awful hack novels I have ever seen. I don't think I liked a single one. And they kept pumping them out. That was an epoch right there, a before and after moment. The TSR stuff on the shelf grew and mutated like a cancer, killing off the fantasy genre. I haven't looked at fantasy in ages and ages - I hope they've stopped, but somehow I imagine a lot of those books are still there.
The great thing about D&D (that's often lost on people) is that it was a social thing. All your friends get together, kinda like college poker nights (except you're NOT trying to drain the sucker next to you). Best campaign I ever had we were ten kids in a room (on a rainy day), working together, hashing things out. The DM was really prepared, and we got completely immersed and the hours flew by like they do when you're really having fun. It was great.
The fact is, it's just damn hard to get a good campaign together, get a lot of people interested. Probably much harder now because D&D has that (false) anti-social stigma these days, and who needs a DM when you got a computer? D&D takes a lot more work than just firing up WoW (or, for that matter, Zork) by yourself in the basement. Even in the day, if your friends weren't into it, role-playing games kinda suck. On the flip side, if your friends are stoked, your DM puts in the prep-time, and you're all keen to cooperate and work with each other, D&D can make some of the best memories you'll ever have. 'cause it's with your friends.
Most people I know who shit on D&D either never played it, or had a lame experience in a lame campaign. That's a shame, but that's life. Anything involving people, from drama club to Boy Scouts to playing football can leave a bad taste in your mouth if the people in it don't care or are uncooperative assholes.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
You can solve anything with the d20 system.
Everquest = AD&D 2 E with dice rolls being handled by the server.
If you used to play, and hate that it went to shit after Velious, check out Project1999. Classic Everquest (currently in Kunark, Velious launching soon), tons of work has gone into it, and tons more is still being done.
Mazes and Monsters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I'm from Europe and I didn't learn English in class. Instead I learned it from the AD&D (2nd edition) material. Together with a class mate who also had DM aspirations, we swapped and traded material through BBSes.
We were so far ahead of the class, the teacher would set us apart and just let us do whatever we wanted. As long as we whispered, we could talk and read separate from the rest of the class. Of course that got us nasty looks, but we got to talk for a solid two hours about Planescape or Forgotten Realms.
After class, we'd ask the teacher words that we couldn't find in the dictionary. He couldn't them either. I remember finding out what "to be marooned" meant, ahead of the teacher.
I also remember that me and my gaming buddy got an A- on our final exams. After the verbal part of the exam, the teacher said he was a bit disappointed in my verbal skills. But because he knew I had it in me, he'd give me an A-.
I stopped gaming when college started, I couldn't find a gaming group. After almost twenty years, I found out my current employer has a group of colleagues who regularly play Pathfinder, and I joined them. I'm playing a fifth level thief, and it's an absolute blast.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
They would be wise to get a celebrity D&D campaign. Just imagine an evening with Cory Doctorow, Stephen Colbert, George R. R. Martin, Matt Groening etc, all sitting around a table, trying to lawyer rules and hold off a raid of hobgoblins! That would be a "reality" show that I could watch!
When I die have my ashes made into a life diamond and cut it into a D20.
D&D was loosely based on concepts from "The Lord of the Rings", recently published back then by Ace in paperback format. The American publisher of LOTR had allowed the copyright to lapse because the books just didn't sell. And the people at Ace were explicit after-the-fact -- if the had been required to negotiate royaltie payments the project would never have been done. The consensus at the time was that adult fantasy does not sell.
Within weeks there was a set by Ballentine books (at 95 cents each, vs the Ace 75 cents) as the 'authorized edition'; shortly thereafter, Ace announced they had made royalty arrangements. Then Houghton-Mifflin re-printed the hardbacks. Lancer started issuing paperbacks of the Conan stories and Lord Dunsany's fantasy stories. New fantasy stories started to appear - and Gygax and Arneson came up with D&D.
Look at all the LOTR and D&D spin-offs in books, movies, other FRP games - and most would probably never have come about if the copyrights to LOTR had not been allowed to lapse.
Metaporphosis Alpha was also bt TSR, the creators of D&D and came out 2 years late, 1976. Have a party for it in 2016. Have a party for every unique TSR game, why not?\
Jim Ward wrote Metaporphosis Alpha. Jim was one of the playtesters for Gary Gygax's D&D. It's a direct derivative.
Am I the only one who gets cold chills when thinking of George R.R. Martin as a DM?
His players will have to bring three fresh character sheets to every game session to prepare for the heads that will roll...
...
false idea that all kids that played DnD only played DnD and didn't do anything else.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was raised on Choose your Own adventure books bought at a thrift store. Then I got the Red Box when I was 12. I got all the boxes then. Later I got original AD&D from a friend.
Dungeons and Dragons got some things right, but I argue against some parts of their system such as armor. Their armor means you dodge more, but if you get hit, it is full damage. A better system makes armor reduce damage, and agility+dodge skill avoid attacks. There's no ways to overstate D&D's affects on modern games.
God spoke to me
Hahaha!
I don't think I was unique in spending my early teen years (in the late '70s) convinced that nobody had problems like mine or could possibly understand my problems, and that everybody else fit in and I was the only loner in the whole school. I'm pretty sure the only ways you get over things like that is to talk about them or to realize that they're just not true, and both of those require social interaction. For me that came at a gaming table. Suddenly I understood that there were a lot of people just like me with problems like mine (or different, but we all had something) and that there *was* a group for me, too. One day before gaming, sitting at that table while we were chatting about the teenage horror du jour, I had an epiphany: Probably everybody in school felt just the same as I did at that age, regardless of who they were. The same conversation we were having in the local library's basement was also taking place in frilly pink bedrooms, garages, football locker rooms, the art labs and the data processing room. None of us were really different at all, which meant that none of us were really alone. That thought is what helped me get through being a teenager without ending up in juvie or worse.
the manga expy D&D series and what that big gateway was.. D&D influenced that one for sure, because it was literally a D&D campaign
Just ended a game of AD&D (based off second edition rules but heavily modified in the last 20 years of DM'ing) and opened /. to read this. The game still is a release for creative energy, and I turned 49 this year.....
at 2am for complaints by the neighbors about loud arguing.
We were apparently loudly with the DM's interpretation that a polymorphed ogre into a flower was "as tough as an ogre" -- as in it could still inflict 1d10 damage to us while polymorphed into a flower instead of merely still having 20 hit points.
Ah... good times.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I was at a games con near Oxford in England in 1973 when this lad brought out a small white box he'd bought in the States. Didn't get to play then but it looked fun, so I found a supplier and got a copy. Played a fair amount over the next few years, but to be honest I didn't really get into RPGs until I met a decent GM who was running other systems and was far more interested in telling the story than herding minimaxing egotistic rules lawyers. I've played plenty of D&D since then, but tbh I still don't rate it as a system - my ideal game is one in which the players don't even know the rules, let alone reach for the rulebook every time something interesting happens...
As for the stereotyping, though - I don't think I ever knew a player who was into RPGs to the exclusion of other aspects of life. Nor was a single one of them the stereotypical D&D nerd with no life beyond the game. It was a hobby, like any other - often cinsuming quite a bit of time, but almost never to exclusion of everything else..
You roll a one!
"How many parents' basements would have gone unused for 20-30 years if it hadn't been for D&D?" says the Slashdot troll.
That's because you never read the fucking rules. D&D's concept of hit points is not all real damage. Most of it is skill, avoidance, etc., the stuff you are bitching about. People always think they have a "better system." The more realistic you make the rules, the less fun the games becomes, and the more drawn out and boring combat becomes.
IF THE HAD NOT PLAYED D&D (and similar games)
How many kid might have been more physically active and there for healthier and perhaps have a longer life ?
How many of those shy people who resorted to such games would have been forced to associate with a wider spectrum of people and more fully developed their social skills ?
How many kids attention and effort went into playing when they could have been studying and or developing Ideas which increased societies wealth and solved countless problems still afficting us today.
The sword cuts both ways.
Dungeons and Dragons online and Neverwinter online are fun. Dungeons and Dragons Online is really challenging because I can't afford to buy health potions and the healing shrine doesn't heal all of my health. lol. I play a fighter.. maybe I should roll a cleric instead.
I do like the idea of instanced story zones where only one character or party can enter because I do not need to wait for the mini-boss or main boss to respawn like in some other games. I can also assign points to various skill trees and customize my fighting style.
Switched to HackMaster.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
This variant of the rules is discussed in Unearthed Arcana (pages 111-112) as an option with extensive tables detailing the necessary modifications the base rules and a sidebar noting the effects. Basically, with armor as damage reduction attacks hit more often and do less damage. At lower levels this tends to make combat less dangerous, especially for armored characters. However, at higher levels the advantage shifts back in favor of monsters that deal large amounts of damage per hit. For example, when facing a huge earth elemental in full plate armor a fighter will be hit about 20% more often, due to a 4 point reduction in AC, to compensate for the fact that the base AC bonus values from armor assume the base rules, not the modified armor as damage reduction rules. However, the 4 points of damage reduction now only reduces his opponents average damage by less than 17 percent: advantage, elemental. It gets still worse when encountering monsters with yet higher strength bonuses to damage or added on damage from poisons, acid, disease etc or multiple attacks per round. Basically combat is easier at lower levels but increasingly deadly as characters advance much past about level 12 or so. It also tends to make the game more mundane and less heroic since characters enjoy early success at the expense of heroic high level fights which they are now less likely to survive. On the other hand, this variant also reduces somewhat the advantage that magic users have over fighting characters at high levels since they too are exposed to the more deadly combat and still without benefit of armor. This can make playing a fighting class more attractive in a high level campaign that might otherwise be dominated by spell casters.
Thank you for that:
I made my own RPG influenced off D&D. Intergalactic Bounty Hunter (needs a webpage)
I had a dodge and an armor. Damage reduction is 1/2 your armor plus a roll of 1d(That 1/2 your armor number). Armor stops low damaging things for the most part only takes the edge off harder hitting stuff.
My weapons would be sorted between lots of rapid hitting small damage, or "armor piercing" high damage hits
Sometimes a lot of rapid damage deals a total higher damage than an armor piercer if someone isn't wearing armor.
It modeled pretty well until I did bad approximations for spraying an AK47 full clip at a tank... if the tank rolled low, and the AK47 rolled a high damage, and a high % of bullets hit, the tank style robot would take massive damage. The over all system was really good and the atmosphere was kinda like Futurama before its time... The game was heavily influenced by Spaceballs: What if warp drive did get really cheap all of a sudden and could be strapped onto any vehicle? You'd have stuff like airtight Winnebegos flying around space. Actually I've been thinking of my next step for my game design/programming career... maybe fine tuning this system and releasing it to the public might be good.
God spoke to me
Geeks of the world! Unite!
Table top gaming made its way early into the Internet and computing. Things like MUD, and NetHack (Mines of Moria, etc), Dwarf Fortress. In fact I remember some of my first video games being Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pools of Radiance, which were both officially licenced AD&D products. Later things like Neverwinter nights, etc... even Skyrim.
Not to mention all the writing (some good, others no so much), such as Forgotten Realms, etc... Much of it had an birth with D&D.
Hell I was at a pub last week and was able to answer a crazy trivia question about an evil fiery demons in Islamic mythology being called Djinn because I remember them from the Monsters Compendium.
I attack the darkness!