Looking Back At Dungeons & Dragons 189
An anonymous reader sends in a nostalgic piece about Dungeons & Dragons and the influence it's had on games and gamers for the past 36 years. Quoting:
"Maybe there was something in the air during the early '70s. Maybe it was historically inevitable. But it seems way more than convenient coincidence that Gygax and Arneson got their first packet of rules for D&D out the door in 1974, the same year Nolan Bushnell managed to cobble together a little arcade machine called Pong. We've never had fun quite the same way since. Looking back, these two events set today's world of gaming into motion — the Romulus and Remus of modern game civilization. For the rest of forever, we would sit around and argue whether games should let us do more or tell us better stories."
Well, Pong is earlier then 1974 (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong [wikipedia.org]
1972, it seems.
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Which was pre-dated by, get this, a console game, by almost three years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey [wikipedia.org]
Re:Well, Pong is earlier then 1974 (Score:5, Funny)
And all of these are predated by the 0.27.452a Alpha version of D&D, commonly known as Chess.
Chess = roleplaying. Normally. :-) (Score:2)
You engage in roleplaying while playing chess? I guess it could be done. :-)
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This is original research.
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They have to justify their exorbitant tuition costs somehow.
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My friend's wife was taught during a University class for her BS in English that Wikipedia was a valid source as long as you cite the revision specifically. I was boggled that any university professor would be so stupid.
Personally, I'd just vandalize a single revision of several Wiki pages for my essay "Jim Henson's Muppets and the Fall of the Third Reich".
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plagiarism - copy and paste from one source.
research - copy and paste together from multiple sources.
But unfortunately... (Score:4, Funny)
... nobody wants to play D&D with me now that we have video games (THANKS FOR NOTHING, PONG). :( does /. want to play?
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So? Buy some video games and people will want to play with you again. Or are video games merely the scapegoat here? ;)
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Indirectly however, the advent of computing and the internet makes it much simpler to play D&D, not to mention also providing better options for certain facets not possible under normal face-to-face circumstances.
Take for example a chaotic evil character which is partied with other chaotic evil characters. communicating a backstabbing is much more subtle when no one can see you hand that slip of paper to the dungeon master.
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how many 11-year-olds will you find who want to play a text-based game, when they're *online*.
I dunno... call it "MSN Messenger" or "Bebo" and I think you'll do OK...
Re:But unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree. "Pen and Paper" has been replaced with digital character sheets on laptops, an electronic map displayed on a big-screen TV (including FoW) to let players know where they are in relation to objects and creatures, and some still prefer real dice but command-line rolling using macros is much more efficient.
MapTool from RPTools.net is by far the core tool we use. We have custom macros for all the powers each player is using, and it's not that hard to keep them up to date (players only level up about once a month, and don't get new powers every level, and the macros are pretty easy to write). the DM's notebook runs 2 instances of it, one for the DM's view and another on the second screen (TV) for everyone to see. The maps themselves for pregenerated campaigns are available online, though more recently, we've been making our own (from scans mostly).
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Yep - our group recently started disintegrating due to two core members having moved away (the eternal problem with DnD).
We played for a while with a camera (aimed at a table top mat) and Skype for the first player to move off - but given limited cable up-stream bandwidth and general flakey-ness of the video stream, we're now going to give MapTool a shot.
It's very well done for the most part, and there are easy to comprehend video and text tutorials. Recommended to anyone whose DnD is falling apart due to
Re:But unfortunately... (Score:5, Insightful)
(damn, I sound old)
Re:But unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Although our assistant minister joined us for one game as a cleric of atheism.
I don't believe you. Or should that be "I disbelieve you" ?
Re:But unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I am a Jehovah's Witness, you insensitive clod!
And yes, I do play D&D!
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Well, the only friend I've ever lost for specific "belief" reasons was a Jehovah's Witness(we were kids). I'm pretty sure it was because I got this crappy little D&D handheld video game. About the same time I got one of those "Jack Chick" D&D pamplets, he stopped hanging out with me.
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You're a Jehovah's Witness with "666" in your username? Goin' to hell for that one.
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Ahhh, It's the 7-digit /. users. Was I ever that young ?
(and yes, compared to some of you, my ID is massive also...)
-Jar
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Get off my lawn, you damn kids!
~jaraxle
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Old habits die hard.
~jaraxle
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Yes sir.
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Although our assistant minister joined us for one game as a cleric of atheism.
Then I'm going to go ahead and guess that you go to a Unitarian-Universalist church. Well, that or Episcopalian.
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Wrong -- pen-and-paper RPGs are selling better today than at any previous point in history (well, actually I think the high point was 2008, but we can probably blame this slump on the economy). And it's not all just nostalgic 30-somethings (my demographic) either. There are a LOT of high-school and middle-school kids getting into the hobby.
Remember, these kids grew up on Pokemon, which is both a CRPG and a collectible card game, and WoW and LotR make them very familiar with the source material. It's not
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DAMN, replied to wrong post! Curse you, threaded comments! The above post should have been for the GP...
Failed my Preview saving throw...
-- 77IM
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S77IM said... Everybody's doing it. It'll make you feel good... Your first hit's free!
Damn you Keep On The Borderlands, damn you to hell!!!
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OK, I need to know where this church is. It sounds like it just might be the church for me...
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You are WRONG (Score:2, Interesting)
What you just said is like claiming that "no one will read books" anymore after TV was invented.
Pen and Paper Roleplaying games offer a completely different kind of experience that you get from books, movies, computer games.
It has it's own advantages and disadvantages and offers a "unique" kind of entertainment - just as all other forms as other "unique" kinds of entertainment do as well. I really do not see why those cannot co-exist. And as we are it I'd also say that LARP will also be around in the years
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If you think that pen-and-paper RPG's are dead, you're sorely out of touch. WoTC has literally lead a resurgence in popularity of D&D w/ their new products, and today's 20yos play as much as they ever did. Want evidence? Go to your local university and look up their gaming club. It'll be packed full of nerddom. Go to your local game store's RPG night and look at the crowd... you'll see
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Re:But unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
The kids of all the members our our active game groups are starting to become interested. The oldest is only 8.
Kids imagine more than you know, and given the wealth of influence from media, movies, stories, and more, they can come up with some pretty hard core stuff.
We didn't "imagine" as much as you think with D&D either, we had pictures of monters to look at, descriptions and detailed accounts to reference, the only one doing any real imagining was the DM and only if he wrote his only story, or more commonly augmented one to better suit tyhe group). The rest of us were simply "role playing" which is what it's all about. Reacting to events and scenarios as someone else might react instead of yourself. The rest was all simply in the rules. It's a scripted session of pretend, not very far different from the choose-your-own-adventure books from the 70's and 80's. The advantage of it was simply that the rules were basically wide open for any conceivable action to be done by a player instead of a strict set of options on your turn.
Today, it's better. We have actual play maps (which were allways optional back in the day, and rarely used because of the massive time investment in making them and expense of miniatures). The TV is a central view of the action, initiative, and quest notes. Players use laptops to manage their character and move them about on the screen by joining the server. They can see what monters look like (currently they're simply icons, scanned from the books, so it's really not all that different) Rolling and to-hit calcuations have been replaced by macros which makes combat MUCH more efficient and lets us "play" more and roll less (though some still prefer real dice). It's easier to get a mental image of what's going on, and there's less "narrative" as the GM simply explains your surroundings and relative position to each other.
We're still huddles in a room over character sheets running through adventures led by a GM pulling the strings of NPCs. The stories now are not much diferent than they used to be. It's quite entertaining, and action happens a lot faster than it used to.
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I disagree that noone born after 1990 wants to play pen and paper D&D. My two boys ages 9 and 13 are hooked. My 4 year-old daughter wants to play SO BAD. There is a whole gaggle of boys at scouts that have been roped in. Of course maybe that's because ipods, cell phones and computers are banned at overnighters! But that's not really the reason.
Why did I show D&D to my boys? The answer will surprise you. My older son was then 8. He was an advanced reader, but he much preferred books on tape, C
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Well not D&D but you're welcome to lurk at our Google Wave Shadowrun game.
If you're actually looking for someone to game with (and there are a whole lot of us out here), check out
http://www.penandpapergames.com/ [penandpapergames.com]
Farcaster has an excellent gamer registry. Assuming you're not in an area with 5 people in it, there's a good chance there are a few folks local to you.
And of course, check out the local game shops. Here in the Denver area there are 11 that I'm aware of.
http://www.yelp.com/list/denver-metro-gamin [yelp.com]
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www.meetup.com
There are many local gaming groups.
I run two D&D games and will probably start a third later this year.
I play a home brew Cyclopedia version. It has about 400 pages of rules, all in Openoffice.
My game has a lot of concepts later added to AD&D. I suppose they had to solve some of the same problems I did.
I've been playing since 1976 after hearing about the "D&D Room" at a convention. I bought a whitebox set and Greyhawk.
I tried AD&D and the first PHB killed that campaign (it h
Re:But unfortunately... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But unfortunately... (Score:5, Funny)
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Bah. I'll just use shape change to turn into a 200ft ball of lead and deal falling object damage, dealing 1.6 million d6 in damage in a 100ft radius. The troll will die of old age before he manages to regenerate, and just in case someone decides to come along in the next few years, I'll strangle the goo that is left, causing asphyxiation in 3 rounds.
You don't like 4e? There are alternatives you know? D20 Open Gaming Licence forever. Pathfinder is an OGL D&D 3.5 extension by Paizo publishing. Its good st
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"dealing 1.6 million d6 in damage in a 100ft radius." ;).
"I'll strangle the goo that is left."
Optimist.
If i was the DM you'd BE the goo that was left. A small crater containing lead and troll-blood would actually make a nice random encounter, too bad half my players read slashdot
Also, the basic rule is simple: 1d6 points of damage per 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d6.
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That is the basic rule for damage "TO" falling creatures/objects. There is a different rule for damage "FROM" falling objects (at least in 3.0 and 3.5, not sure about Pathfinder yet). The rule for damage "FROM" falling objects is 1d6 per 10ft fallen to a maximum of 20d6. And an additional 1d6 per 200 lbs of the falling object (definition of the 20 dice limit is in the sentence about distance falling. The following sentence defines the damage from weight and contains no such limit). Its about literal reading
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Leading to the infamous Murhpy's Rules observation that the average 13th level fighter
can survive a fall from *any* height ("His top is made out of rubber, his bottom is
made out of springs", as MR observed).
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I use a combination of all the rules, to my liking, salted with logic, and peppered by the critisism of my players. (and by all the rules i mean basic, expert, advanced, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, GURPS, MERPS, Traveller and house-rules!). But my players can also play classes and cast spells etc. from sources as obscure as the Dragon or the White Dwarf if they wish and it's not complete BS.
Hooray for 26 years of gaming!
re "Rules lawyery at its finest"
If a player shows me the above example i'll simply start singing
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Like I said, rule one is that the DM can to change the rules. It all sounds OK to me, even your original interpretation is fine if that is what you want in your game.
I just find it irritating when someone insists their house rule is in the book, both from players and DMs. There are of course exceptions where rules in the book conflict with each other which results in a quantum superposition of rule eigenstates and changes the above rule from "can change the rules" to "should change the rules, or at least pi
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Trolls, regeneration... (Score:2)
just modding him down won't work.
Yeah, it's tough kill-filing something which regenerates 3 KP every story (Karma Points).
Then again, I'd much rather battle trolls than try to kill that which has no life.
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Also, if you roll 1 you caused a memory leak.
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Nuts... (Score:2)
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Why is the half-orc circumsized? Hebrew half orc mayhaps?
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Shouldn't he have at least *half* a foreskin?
And wouldn't an orc, being more bestial anyway, have like, MORE foreskin? Certainly he couldn't have NONE right? Even if orcs don't have any, humans sure do.
I'm going with, it's easier to keep kosher if you yourself are part pig, so that's probably a Jewish half-orc.
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Rogue-like (Score:5, Interesting)
And you have been killed by a troll!
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I think you are exaggerating in how old they are. I doubt computers in 1972 had the ability to locate characters on the screen fast enough to allow simultaneous movement of all the creatures in a dungeon.
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1974 is not 1972 and more importantly that wikipedia article is not cited. So you are asking me to believe it but I don't.
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Cancel that, seems real. I've found this http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1948 [armchairarcade.com]
Interesting.
Nothing more fun? (Score:4, Interesting)
D&D taught a generation of kids that they could make the games they play, and that nothing was more fun than getting together with friends for an evening of games.
Utter bollocks - an evening of games pales in comparison with a day-long pizza-fuelled session at the weekend.
Re:Nothing more fun? (Score:5, Funny)
Just as the players themselves paled in comparison to their peers.
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Hah! Princeton University used to have a group that ran full weekend, 24-7 games all around a central story for a hundred or so players with many GMs. Pale That!
Re:Nothing more fun? (Score:4, Interesting)
Utter bollocks - an evening of games pales in comparison with a day-long pizza-fuelled session at the weekend.
ED: You see a well groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo.
ERIC: A gazebo? What color is it?
ED: (Pause) It's white, Eric.
ERIC: How far away is it?
ED: About fifty yards.
ERIC: How big is it?
ED: (Pause) It's about thirty feet across, fifteen feet high, with a pointed top.
ERIC: I use my sword to detect good on it.
ED: It's not good, Eric. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Pause) I call out to it.
ED: It won't answer. It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Pause) I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way?
ED: No, Eric, it's a gazebo!
ERIC: I shoot it with my bow (roll to hit). What happened?
ED: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it.
ERIC: (Pause) Wasn't it wounded?
ED: Of course not, Eric! It's a gazebo!
ERIC: (Whimper) But that was a plus three arrow!
ED: It's a gazebo, Eric, a gazebo! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don't know why anybody would even try. It's a *)@#! gazebo!
ERIC: (Long pause. He has no axe or fire spells.) I run away.
ED: (Thoroughly frustrated) It's too late. You've woken up the gazebo, and it catches you and eats you.
ERIC: (Reaching for his dice) Maybe I'll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my Paladin.
Which? (Score:2)
For the rest of forever, we would sit around and argue whether games should let us do more or tell us better stories.
Uh, which one is Pong supposed to represent? Aren't "can do more" and "have actual story" the two historic strengths of RPGs?
Excellent opportunity to ask Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a DM during the heyday of AD&D 2nd Ed. I ran successful AD&D and Traveler campaigns for several years, until work commitments and the old gang moving away put and end to that. After ten years of my old roleplaying stuff gathering dust I put it in the library book sale.
When I was running campaigns, I quickly realized that the rules were not really workable from a DM's perspective. The roleplaying aspect of the game was too open ended to be practical for this set of rules. That's why the ridiculous "dungeon crawl" campaigns were so popular, because they paid back *all* of the DM's work. If you filled a hundred rooms with treasure and monsters, the players would methodically clean out each level.
In a sense this recaptured the old strategic simulation games from which this kind of thing evolved. If you set up Napolean vs. Wellington at Waterloo, you didn't have to worry about players saying, "I think I'll take my army and move back over Belgian fronteir, then negotiate a treaty which will apparently give Britain what it is looking for, under the cover of which I can build other geopolitical alliances that will undercut her." After you did all the work of researching and setting up the initial conditions for an elaborate battle simulation, the players were jolly well going to play out *your* scenario. But the freedom to do something unexpected is the essence of roleplaying.
That the rules were really not very adequate didn't hurt, because short of simulating the whole world, they couldn't possibly be. The DM makes up rules governing outcomes as he goes along, and if he does it skillfully the players don't even notice. In fact once I got very experienced at this *most* of the campaign, and usually the best parts of the campaign, were improvised on the spot. Instead of spending five hours preparing for a five hour session, I could spend one hour on something that would make a really big difference.
The key insight I got was this: roleplaying games aren't simulation. They're "cops and robbers" or "cowboys and indians" with just enough structure to make them interesting and challenging. It's group story telling, not for the end product but for the experience of being in the story.
Now recently my teenaged daughter expressed interest in learning D&D, so I picked up the latest books. Now before I start yelling at all you kids with your newfangled systems to get off my lawn, let me say that the new rules are impressive. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into them, and they cover contingencies a lot more clearly, and tweak some of the things that were illogical. These are much better *simulation* rules. But they aren't necessarily better roleplaying rules.
Perfect, even *reasonably good* simulation rules for roleplaying are impractical, in my opinion, because such rules would have to be a reasonably good ontology of some world. Well before you'd get to "reasonably good" you'd reach the point where the rules are cumbersome. What rules ought to do (in my opinion) is provide a framework in which players are forced to make decisions that are meaningful to them (e.g., "Am I up to fighting this guy, or should I run away and heal up?"; "If I want to steal the jewel from the idol, how should I prepare my escape?").
It seems to me that roleplaying rules should focus on (a) forcing player decisions, (b) being convenient to use and (c) being easy to learn for both gamemaster and player.
It seems to me the new D&D rules are no better at A, not significantly better at B, and a lot worse at C.
It used to be that you could bring up a new player with about fifteen minutes of explanation and another fifteen minutes of walking him through his character generation. That coincided with the phase of the evening's entertainment that featured pizza and chatting for the other players. If you wanted to bring a whole group up, you took them all through the half hour orientation then treated them to a one evening dungeon crawl, after which they'd know everything th
Family gaming (Score:2)
My wife and I were in college at the time we discovered D&D back in the late 1970's. We found a gaming shop in town and got interested in the miniatures they had, as well as the fact that various games involved science fiction or fantasy. One of our first purchases was the D&D rule set in the blue dragon box. We also picked up a few sets of dice, all of which were single color and many of which had sharp edges.
We've continued D&D over the decades, in addition to other role playing systems, in
Re:DND had it's issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly, even just learning to draw nice is a useful skill. Simple things like learning how to correct mistakes or to come up with a drawing style unique to yourself can carry over to other activities than merely drawing. And I fail to come up with useful activities that I would have done in place of role playing. Maybe you could have learned more in a comparative religion or practical art class, but would you have? Methinks, there'd be some other distraction.
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Maybe you could have learned more in a comparative religion or practical art class, but would you have? Methinks, there'd be some other distraction.
Yes, those places have girls. Although I did play DnD when I was 19 in a group with a girl. Once.
Re:DND had it's [sic] issues (Score:2)
There are two girls in our current D&D group. And they aren't hideous trolls either.
In fact there are quite a few women in our university roleplaying society, albeit most of them don't tend to play D&D.
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Yes, those places have girls.
Ah, yes. High school logic. How I miss it.
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There are 4 women between our 3 active games. Every game group I've ever been in aside one in high school has had at least 1 female. Go to a convention sometime, it's about 1/3rd women. More so at Steampunk conventions than role playing, but RPG draws a lot more women than comics and computers (though there are a TON of women online playing games, and usually you'll never know it, some of the most hardcore tweakers I know are chicks).
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Yeah, I knew this hardcore tweaker chick once too, but then she started getting all these holes in her cheeks and really bad teeth.
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It took me a while to learn this.
Brush and floss regularly. Or your teeth will go bad and your mouth will smell like a 3 day old dead animal on the side of the road.
Flossing breaks up the plaque deposits which form like coral on your teeth. Eventually they turn black because they are full of bacteria shit.
You swallow all those toxins (and "bad" bacteria) constantly and they attack your heart in various ways and cut your healthy, fun, lifespan by about 5-7 years.
These days, I have a package of those pre-wi
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Yes, those places have girls. Although I did play DnD when I was 19 in a group with a girl. Once.
Believe it or not, I met my wife through what were essentially D&D friends, and she was a gamer before I met her. She also had a bit of a reputation as a killer DM...
Yeah, of all the ways I could've ended up married, I wouldn't have put my money on that one either.
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I now have a PhD in math, in part due to this game (and subsequent RPGs that I played).
PhD Maths? Hmm, let me think. Rolemaster by any chance? :)
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So obscure. So funny. Roll a few criticals to see how successful your post will be. :)
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Clearly it wasn't D&D that had issues, but you. I know quite a lot of adults who play and yet somehow manage to get along just fine in the real world.
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The same can be said for any recreational activity, not just D&D.
Gambling, alcohol, video games, even sports. All of them can either be used in moderation with no detrimental effects to whomever is participating (and even be cathartic), or can be taken to extremes and take over your life. I could have taken your post and replaced every reference to D&D related activities with either WoW or slot machine references and the context would be exactly the same.
The problem isn't with the activity in ques
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As a successful manager making top 5% income, I have to disagree on the negative impact of D&D (and Everquest).
D&D taught me social skills and I spent 10 relatively happy years with my first wife and spawned as a result of D&D.
EQ taught me the politics and logistics of running groups of 60 people (I was a guildmaster for about 24 months before finding a new one to replace me).
The friends I had who were not gamers are all gone. They all disappeared into "real life" about the time they had their
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I got my start in computers because of D&D and gaming in general (Car Wars and Traveller too). I saw the potential in 1980 or so with using a computer to manage my games, learned to program on my own. Saw that networks would be cool for gaming (I designed a table that used laptops connected to a table network and to the GM; used NetBIOS to send information to the group for notes and such), anyway and learned networking. I created several programs for use with BBS' and even wrote a Usenet Newsreader (Met
Attack of the Retroclones and Simulacra (Score:2)
You'll be happy to hear that there's a lot of great games that aren't driven by the Hasbro/WotC machine and many of them hew faithfully to what made the old games so great - rules-light (compared to today's versions), tool-kit approach, "imagine the hell out of it" attitude. It's been mainly a niche of a niche, but in the last year or so, interest in the "Old School Renaissance" has really taken off.
If you liked AD&D 1e, the books are very easy to get off of Ebay/Craigslist, but OSRIC (http://www.knight
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Oh yeah? I'm running a Shadowrun Google Wave game _while_ I reply to Slashdot.
[John]
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Agreed.
The cyclopedia is superior to D&D.
I'm afraid with AD&D that people are losing track of the roleplaying and focusing on the boardgaming aspects.