Dungeons & Dragons
![[Pencil, paper, dice: the tools of a pnp role-playing game]](http://www.lauppert.ws/images1/pnp.jpg "Pencil, paper, dice: the tools of a pnp role-playing game")
Dungeons & Dragons has been called the grandmother of all pen & paper roleplaying games. While there were two console adaptions of Shadowrun, D&D's influence on video gaming was through the licensing of the basic rules by game producers. There has been a A miniarcade game, a SEGA game, and a rather bad computer game, about which NetDanzr said in a review not online any more:
Even though having a great name, the game itself is nothing much. Featuring rogue-like graphics, this game shows a nice transition from text-based to rogue-like games. It reminds me strongly on Beyond Zork, as the ASCII map is used more as automap and explanation of your location as the real playing field. That playing field remains to be the text on the left side of the screes. This game features several dungeons but not a real story. It is worth owning for one reason only - to brag that you have the Dungeons and Dragons computer game.
All these games are hardly known any more. But D&D has often been licensed for computer RPGs; Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Neverwinter Nights are among the more recent ones. And many others have been influenced by it. According to David H. Thornley, it has also influenced fantasy literature.
But apart from its influences on the gaming and fantasy world, Dungeons & Dragons also caused a controversy, greater than any computer game, including Doom and Postal, ever invoked. This controversy had several sources:
The first argument was sensational and could not withstand closer scrutiny. The second was plausible, if not very grave, and investigation later showed that role players in fact were more stable than the average of their age groups, their suicide and criminality rates lower. The third was plain silly but essential for the whole craze.
I understood the whole thing a bit better when I found some websites
reviewing video games from a Christian
point of view. They were
rarely concerned a lot with the violence in the games—arguments
popped up like There's fighting in the bible, too
—what they
were concerned with was language,
female characters wearing
tight tank tops, and—the use of magic.
The whole controversy started in the USA, had some impact on the English speaking world, but hardly outside. Probably because, for example, here in continental Europe we tend to separate religion and real life and see little danger in occultism.
Here are some sites that give you general information from a historic point of view, or personal statements from people who like it or don't like it. You won't find the whackos who claim that D&D ruins your life or all RPG players are Satan worshippers here, they have their own sections further down.
Quite a lot of online comics have references to Dungeons & Dragons or have their characters play it sooner or later.
The guys at Columbia Internet, the fictitious ISP where the User Friendly comic by Illiad is located, once engage in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, too, of course under the leadership of old timer Sid. It started on 2002-07-29 and went on till mid-August.
Something Positive by R. K. Milholland takes a less friendly view of the game and its players, but of course, it takes a friendly view on hardly anything at all, to put it mildly. There is not one single D&D episode here, instead the topic pops up every now and then:
Dice can be frustrating, the roleplayers in Real Life have to learn, and sometimes not even a skilled DM can help you out. But sometimes a good kick works miracles. Just don't ask too many questions (this one stretches over quite a few strips). Don't forget to do proper shopping, And be sure to meet the system requirements for new versions.
New versions are always problematic for some people.
In Everything Jake, some college guys have a not-so-friendly game of D&D. It is supposed to help a freshman score with co-eds, with very moderate success.
Or look at Flem Comics. Here, one player finally gets into a discussion with the DM whether THAC0 should be pronounced thacko or thayco.
There is also a comic that is set inside a PnP RPG, just like RPG World is set inside a console RPG: Nodwick by Aaron Williams.
Nodwick is a fun comic drawn by an experienced artist. It followed the exploits of an adventuring party made up of a burly fighter, a cynical wizard, a devout cleric, and a very overworked henchman (the title character.) The strip focuses mostly on poor Nodwick. Ostensibly, he was hired to carry the party's loot, but his duties quickly extended beyond this. Since there's no thief in the party, the fighter and mage tend to use Nodwick as a kind of litmus-test: They toss him down a hallway to see if he explodes, falls through a pit, or gets stabbed by spears. If he does, the hallway is trapped. However, since Nodwick's already set the trap off for them, they don't have to worry about it.—The Official Time-Wasters Guide
I was not impressed very much (though the artwork is really very good), but it's probably more fun if you've actually played some sort of fantasy PnP RPG.
Parodies, in-jokes, and humor of all kinds.
Dungeons & Dragons is played with dice. First, there are the standard six-sided dice (d6). They are used to determine weapon damage, because multiple dice make such nice "bell curves". If, for example, a weapon does 3d6 (throw three six-sided dice) damage, this could be anything between 3 and 18. But it's much more likely that it's something around 10 or 11 than one of the extremes.
Six-sided dice are used for character creation too. There are six stats or ability scores, divided into physical traits (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution) and mental traits (Intelligence, Charisma, Wisdom), as far as I know they have remained unchanged through all the rule revisions:
After rolling the stats, the player will choose a race and class that fits the stats well. The original Dungeons & Dragons ruleset had six races (Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Human, Halfling) and four character classes (Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief), but both have significantly increased over time.
Finally the player chooses an alignment. There are two types of alignment: A character can be chaotic or lawful, and good or evil, or, in both cases, neutral, allowing a total of nine combinations. Characters that are neutral in both aspects are called true neutral.
For the resolution of encounters, a variety of other dice are used, most notable the twenty-sided dice (d20). They are actually little tops. They are used to determine hit or miss in accordance to the armor class of the attacked and the THAC0 of the attacker. Here is where it gets a bit weird, for the lower these numbers, the better.
THAC0 stands for To Hit Armor Class 0 (zero). It can be anything between 0 and 20. Armor class (AC) can be anything between –10 and 10. Bare skin is 10. –10 is something like a Sherman tank. Equipment can influence both.
Now if your character has a THAC0 of 12, that means you have to roll 12 or better to score a hit on an enemy with AC 0. The enemy's AC is subtracted from this number. If your enemy has an armor class of 3, rolling 9 would be sufficient. Rolling 20 always means a hit, rolling 1 always a failure. These are the critical hit and the critical error that have made their way into most Computer RPGs. A critical hit does double damage, a critical error might make you drop your weapon or even hurt yourself.
Dungeons & Dragons has been attacked again and again from various sides, mostly religious. The strongest attacks were during the eighties. Here are some pages that give a historical background.
Some lonely voices have also claimed that it is OK for Christians to play this and similar games. I list them first.
Some stupid Televangelist decided to condemn D&D asSatanic. This did two things. It demonstrated (1) the ignorance and (2) the stupidity of the Televangelical Community.
But they are a minority.
All they saw were teens hanging out at home, playing a harmless game rather than smoking, drinking, and getting into trouble. But the reality is, many of us smoked in secret, listened to heavy metal music, and were sexually active. We had no concept we'd willingly opened the door to spiritual wickedness.In the end she burned the D&D stuff like Chick's Debbie, but with less show. And now she knows only Jesus truly satisfies.
incidents showing up on their police blotter.Vagueness does it any time.
With remarkable evangelistic zeal, the advocates of New Age thinking have captured the hearts and minds of thousands of kids through ingenious cartoons and movies, comics and toys, books and music. Featuring monsters, magic, violence, and sensuality, our children's popular culture has been transformed into a kind ofPeter Leithart is also co-author of Reduction of Christianity, George Grant has written several other books all available on the Free Books Site of the Institute of Christian Economics. The HTML versions are not very reader friendly.catechism of the New Age—an introduction to occultism.
An interesting aspect is that all this criticism concentrates on the PnP RPGs. Of course computer games are often under attack, too; but usually because they are violent, not because they are satanic.
