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.'"

Re:Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know either, but completely coincidentally I was playing my first Saturday-night D&D session since 1986 yesterday!

Says something about the bell-curve my life has taken I guess...

Re:Yeah - definately !

[Inn0vate]

you should clarify, you know 4 people out of at least 2000 who _admit_ to having every played D&D.

Re:Nice, Sort Of

[skroz]

you have to ask if the depth of the game has been replaced by the stats that go with it.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

You forget one very important thing about D&D and RPGs in general... the game is what you make of it. The system is incidental. If your GM and players all want a game about hacking and slashing, then the d20 rules will give you a great place to do that. If your group wants action, adventure, character development, intrigue, and all of the "flavor," then you can also do that within the framework that WoTC has provided with third edition. Or you could use another system. Or use no system at all.

Personally, I'm thrilled with the changes made from 2nd edition to 3rd. 3.5 doesn't sit as well, but they really did fix a lot from 3.0. But the books themselves are there as tools to help GMs (sorry, DMs) build worlds, and it's up to the storyteller to create a world in which the players can find adventure. You don't need rules for that... you need rules to keep everyone from arguing with each other when you do need to figure out what happens to the kobold when it gets hit with the +5 axe of vorpal soothing.

Re:Nice, Sort Of

[heptapod]

The biggest flaw with D&D 3.5 is the fact that it still requires people to use obscure polyhedral dice. How many times have you rolled a d12 in a game?
I'm surprised that the folks working on D&D didn't take stock of what kind of dice get rolled most frequently and migrate the system to using one kind of die like other gaming systems.

Re:Although correlation != causation

[John Courtland]

You know, I've found the opposite to be true (although the joke is very well timed and very funny :) )

Most people I know that play D&D (not a great sample size, but I think I meet the requisite 34) are sexual maniacs. But then again, it may be countered by the prudes.

Re:Nice, Sort Of

[muhcashin]

Well, from my experience, rules are useful (and perhaps necessary) to hack-and-slash games. Those games require a lot dice rolling whereas the more-talk-less-fight games generally don't need very detailed rules. Immersive story-telling games need only a reasonable DM. And to those who hate hack-and-slashing, D&D was born from war games, so it only makes sense that violence and killing be part of it.

Re:Nice, Sort Of

[Thangodin]

I am partial to 2nd ed, and I loved the first ed Gygax modules (the Vault of the Drow series and Giants series). And I've got a shelfload of Dragon magazines. But really, the whole point was never the rules, but what you did with them. The nice thing about D&D was the fudge factor--as the DM, you could scale the difficulty level as you went to bring the party to the edge of defeat without wiping them out. More strictly defined rules systems didn't leave this leeway, because players could tell from the dice roll whether they had succeeded or not. In D&D the DM was always the final arbiter. Now you can run online adventures with Neverwinter Nights, so if your old D&D group has split up into different cities, you can still play together, but I'm not sure it gives the same leeway.

I was lucky in that I played in university with a bunch of people with multiple degrees. We had people in history, philosophy, english, political science, psychology, and engineering, all voracious readers, and a couple of hard core gamers. The interesting thing about running in a tabletop game is that the DM plays God, so you really get to see what their idea of justice, politics, economics, and human nature is. This led to a lot of interesting discussions on subjects like the nature of evil or medieval politics. We used to have pitched arguments about the difference between religion in the game world vs. the medieval world. The gods in the game world took active roles, while the God of the medieval church never intervened. This meant that religion in the game world was actually controlled by the gods--a very interesting premise.

Another interesting thing about D&D is that it is intended as a fully cooperative game. A lot of cooperative games were created in the 70's, but D&D is the only one that caught on. The opponents are provided by the DM, who nevertheless is not playing against the players. This was always missed by the hysterical critics, who were obsessed with the violence in the game or the mythical elements (eewwww--the occult!) Media coverage of the game in the early days was pathetic. They were always so intent on looking for a scare story that they couldn't see what was going on right in front of them: players working together in a creative hobby.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

D&D == Mental Exercise

[LaCosaNostradamus]

D&D was always a wonderful exercise of mentality -- specifically, visual imagination, numerical computing, and social foresight.

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 ... 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.

D&D Is Evil!

[serutan]

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 [religioustolerance.org] 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.

Re:GreyHawk

[cwaldrip]

Finally, someone old sk001.

I started playing back in the late 70's and Greyhawk was all there was for pre-made campaign settings. It was a great inspiration for us newbie DM's - and one that I don't think I could ever live up to.

Mystera and Forgotten Realms (majority of 1st and 2nd edition settings, respectfully) were great too.

Sigh, I have fond memories of travelling from kingdom to kingdom. Sometimes running from the authorities, sometimes working for them. But mostly working for myself.

I was never big on the hack-n-slash, although it was fun when needed. I liked the interaction and the exploration. All of that seems missing these days... games like Neverwinter Nights and Dungeon Seige just emphasize hack-n-slash. After a few hours of mowing down kobolds or goblins or the creature de jour it gets really old. Give me a mystery to figure out, or a war to prevent any day.

Re:Old or young?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give the guy a break. At least he didn't say it was ironic.

Re:Nice, Sort Of

[RedWizzard]

You're confused. Ravenloft and Spelljammer are pre WotC, and the power-gaming you seem to be complaining about was around well before 3rd edition, infact most of it predates 2nd edition. Was it really necessary or desirable for TSR to publish statistics for gods (Deities and Demigods)? Was there much storytelling potential in the artifacts presented in 1st edition? Or monsters such as the much loved Tarrasque?

From the economic point of view 2nd edition really felt exploitive with the never ending range of class and race specific handbooks. TSR were known for their heavy handed tactics with website owners and small publishers, and indeed anyone they felt was a threat.

After WotC bought TSR things immediately improved. 3rd edition is a much more consistent and intuitive set of rules. The few badly abused rules in 3rd edition (like critical ranges) have been mostly fixed up in 3.5. The Open Gaming License and free availability of the System Reference Documents make WotC at least appear to be much more friendly, fair, and reasonable with their customers than TSR was in the later years. There is also a huge amount more free content available from WotC than TSR ever provided.