| Dungeons & Dragons |
[Mar. 5th, 2008|05:02 am] |
It seems like everyone on the blogosphere is taking the death of Gary Gygax as an opportunity to write encomiums to Dungeons & Dragons, and I'm certainly not going to buck the trend. Dungeons & Dragons is freaking awesome.
I first got interested in the game one year at summer camp. D&D was the pastime of a bunch of the cool older campers, and I finally worked up the nerve to ask if I could join them. They let me sit in on a session, which is when I discovered -- as has generally been my experience since -- that most D&D sessions consist of sitting around chatting and flipping through the ruleboks and trying and failing to get organized enough to actually play the game. Still, I was hooked.
There were at the time a dizzying array of supplements, and it was not immediately obvious to me which book to buy first. Many, many supplements were advertised as containing "everything you need" to play in such and such a world or run such and such an adventure, when in fact -- when you got home and started trying to make sense of the rules -- you realized that this book definitely did not contain "everything you need." Note to aspiring RPG developers: If you create a game that has over 50 rulebooks, it might not be a bad idea to put a note on the back cover of each one stating: "Are you new to this game? Buy the Player's Handbook first."
In high school, my friends and I tried to start a regular gaming group. We managed to get together a few times, but since we lived spread out over the length and breadth of Westchester county, and since none of us could drive, it was basically impossible for everyone to reliably meet up. One solution would have been to play at school after class. Some of my friends tried to start an official Dungeons & Dragons club. They browbeat a reluctant teacher into signing on as advisor. I remember one day at school some of my friends came and found me and said, "You have to come with us. The principal wants to see us about the D&D club." I think my friends knew that the principal was going to shoot us down, and my friends wanted me along to lend my modest gravitas to the proceedings, since I was a varsity athlete, a fairly decent student, and vice president of half the clubs on campus, so the principal actually knew and liked me.
So we all trooped into the principal's office. At that time there had been a decade-long smear campaign against Dungeons & Dragons by a bunch of religious nutball parents, and misconceptions about the game were rampant -- like that if your character died in the game you were supposed to kill yourself, or that the rulebooks contained actual, working black magic rituals. (I wish.) The principal said to us, "So what is Dungeons & Dragons anyway? Isn't this that thing that makes kids violent and suicidal?" To which I replied, "No, that's called high school." Okay, not really, but that would've been sweet if I had. We explained that Dungeons & Dragons is just a fun boardgame, like a really complicated version of Monopoly, with a bit of acting and storytelling thrown in. We said, "Look, here are the rulebooks. You can read them and see." The principal thought for a bit, then said, "No." We said, "Why?" and she just shook her head and said, "No. Just ... No." I think I might've said something trite and irrelevant like, "That's not fair." She said she had other business to attend to, and we trudged out of her office.
Of course, I know now that what we should've done is start up a "Monopoly" club or something, and then just used the time to play Dungeons & Dragons. This would qualify as one of the very, very few things I actually learned at high school. (I wonder, do religious fuckwit parents still hurl hysterical imprecations against Dungeons & Dragons, or have they all moved on to Harry Potter?)
Anyway, in the end I realized that writing role-playing scenarios is as much work as writing fiction (I always wrote my own scenarios, since I didn't think any of the store-bought ones were good enough), and I decided that I'd rather spend my time writing fiction, so I drifted away from role-playing games. I probably only actually played Dungeons & Dragons maybe a dozen times, but I spent countless hours perusing and ruminating on the rulebooks, and it was time well spent. I think I probably got as much useful writing advice from role-playing game books as from fiction writing manuals. When you're trying to create a story and your audience is a bunch of teenage boys with short attention spans who might at any moment lose interest and go off to play video games, you think a lot about how you're going to hold your audience's attention, which is something that most fiction writing books (and most fiction writers generally) don't pay enough attention to. |
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