- Apr 17, 2022
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- Single
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- US-Libertarian
With due respect towards those who disagree with me--and I know you're out there, and I'm not here to trash talk y'all--I have a little something to speak on, here. I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 1981, off and on (dating myself a bit), and really? If it was such a terrible thing, why am I not a worse person for it?
Sure, there's spell casting involved, but we all know that there is no such thing as sorcery or magic in real life, and I pity those who think otherwise. Sure, there are demons and devils involved, but any DM (Dungeon Master) worth their salt will present them as they're meant to be presented--as the epitome of evil and chaos that the player characters are honor bound to overcome and defeat in the name of all that is good.That's not what I'm here to talk about.
As many out there know already, the creators of D&D, the late Gary Gygax and the late David Arneson, were heavily inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis when creating their game. Inspired by two men of faith who wrote iconic fantasy literature inspired by their faith at least in part. That right there, to me anyway, says much. We also have these two quotes from Gygax himself about it:
"There's a call to adventure. It's something in the inner psyche of humanity, particularly males."
"The idea that a game is anything more than a game... You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard."
Are those the words of a man trying some how to corrupt people? I don't think so. He comes off perfectly sensible to me.
For me? It's a prime outlet for my imagination, my creativity when I DM games. It's the camaraderie with gamers getting together and talking nerdy. It lets me live vicariously for a few hours every week, which enables me to deal with the rest of my week that much better for it. Case in point; the character I am currently playing is a living construct (they're known as Warforged in D&D) with sentience, emotions, and intelligence, a seven foot tall three foot wide 400 lb tank that is big and strong enough to dead lift the Rock with ease and bench press a bull. Obviously, he's nothing like my paltry 5'10"/178 lb self. But it's the thought that goes into creating a character that is totally unlike you but yet uniquely like you in some way that is both the challenge and the reward, for me.
Vormund is like me in that he has difficulty relating to the world of humans due to what he is, and in his case it's because he's a construct (an exceedingly complex machine) that doesn't grok things like human reproduction. The terminal case of outsider's perspective I have always had in life helped me slot everything into place with him from that initial "I don't get why people do things the way they do," outlook I often have. In his back story, he discovered love, that he could love someone and then had it violently taken from him when she was murdered before he could save her. She was a young woman who was a healer in his military camp who, as he says it,"(She) was the first human who talked to me instead of at me," which made a vast difference in his until then simple world of following orders as a soldier. He lay wrecked on the battlefield she was killed on for ten years after her death, still fully aware and obsessing over why he hadn't been able to save his first love, and it's had repercussions on his mind and in his life (intense survivor's guilt, for one thing). He still wears a locket with a portrait of them together around his neck in memory of her.
Why did I go into so much detail? To illustrate my point of how this has nothing to do with blasphemy or evil; it's storytelling above all in the end. There is nothing wrong with storytelling; if humans were not inclined towards storytelling, how else would the story of Christ have survived until now? If you look at it from that angle, D&D is just that, harmless storytelling that enables us to get away from reality for a few hours a week that again, helps us deal with reality that much better. I've never seen any harm in it, and those isolated cases that have involved D&D players doing Very Bad Things? I argue that they were, as Gygax himself said above, inclined to be unbalanced in the first place and that gaming was the least of their problems.
Further? Most everybody in my group with one exception has faith of some kind. Myself and another fellow are non-denominational Christians, our current DM is a lapsed Catholic with a Christian wife, one of our woman players was raised in rural OK in a Southern Baptist household and considers herself a Christian more than that these days (I can't say I blame her!), another one of our woman players is Jewish...None of us are what I'd call bad people, despite our often vast political differences. We get together, we talk nerdy, we make blatant references (guilty of that here) in game, and in general it's a good vacation from reality each week for us all. We took this past weekend off because of Passover and Easter, obviously.
So to wrap this whole ramble up, yes, I have no problem with D&D. Call me too deep into it to see what you think it is all you like. *le shrug* If you don't like it, then don't play it. Simple as that, yes?
Sure, there's spell casting involved, but we all know that there is no such thing as sorcery or magic in real life, and I pity those who think otherwise. Sure, there are demons and devils involved, but any DM (Dungeon Master) worth their salt will present them as they're meant to be presented--as the epitome of evil and chaos that the player characters are honor bound to overcome and defeat in the name of all that is good.That's not what I'm here to talk about.
As many out there know already, the creators of D&D, the late Gary Gygax and the late David Arneson, were heavily inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis when creating their game. Inspired by two men of faith who wrote iconic fantasy literature inspired by their faith at least in part. That right there, to me anyway, says much. We also have these two quotes from Gygax himself about it:
"There's a call to adventure. It's something in the inner psyche of humanity, particularly males."
"The idea that a game is anything more than a game... You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard."
Are those the words of a man trying some how to corrupt people? I don't think so. He comes off perfectly sensible to me.
For me? It's a prime outlet for my imagination, my creativity when I DM games. It's the camaraderie with gamers getting together and talking nerdy. It lets me live vicariously for a few hours every week, which enables me to deal with the rest of my week that much better for it. Case in point; the character I am currently playing is a living construct (they're known as Warforged in D&D) with sentience, emotions, and intelligence, a seven foot tall three foot wide 400 lb tank that is big and strong enough to dead lift the Rock with ease and bench press a bull. Obviously, he's nothing like my paltry 5'10"/178 lb self. But it's the thought that goes into creating a character that is totally unlike you but yet uniquely like you in some way that is both the challenge and the reward, for me.
Vormund is like me in that he has difficulty relating to the world of humans due to what he is, and in his case it's because he's a construct (an exceedingly complex machine) that doesn't grok things like human reproduction. The terminal case of outsider's perspective I have always had in life helped me slot everything into place with him from that initial "I don't get why people do things the way they do," outlook I often have. In his back story, he discovered love, that he could love someone and then had it violently taken from him when she was murdered before he could save her. She was a young woman who was a healer in his military camp who, as he says it,"(She) was the first human who talked to me instead of at me," which made a vast difference in his until then simple world of following orders as a soldier. He lay wrecked on the battlefield she was killed on for ten years after her death, still fully aware and obsessing over why he hadn't been able to save his first love, and it's had repercussions on his mind and in his life (intense survivor's guilt, for one thing). He still wears a locket with a portrait of them together around his neck in memory of her.
Why did I go into so much detail? To illustrate my point of how this has nothing to do with blasphemy or evil; it's storytelling above all in the end. There is nothing wrong with storytelling; if humans were not inclined towards storytelling, how else would the story of Christ have survived until now? If you look at it from that angle, D&D is just that, harmless storytelling that enables us to get away from reality for a few hours a week that again, helps us deal with reality that much better. I've never seen any harm in it, and those isolated cases that have involved D&D players doing Very Bad Things? I argue that they were, as Gygax himself said above, inclined to be unbalanced in the first place and that gaming was the least of their problems.
Further? Most everybody in my group with one exception has faith of some kind. Myself and another fellow are non-denominational Christians, our current DM is a lapsed Catholic with a Christian wife, one of our woman players was raised in rural OK in a Southern Baptist household and considers herself a Christian more than that these days (I can't say I blame her!), another one of our woman players is Jewish...None of us are what I'd call bad people, despite our often vast political differences. We get together, we talk nerdy, we make blatant references (guilty of that here) in game, and in general it's a good vacation from reality each week for us all. We took this past weekend off because of Passover and Easter, obviously.
So to wrap this whole ramble up, yes, I have no problem with D&D. Call me too deep into it to see what you think it is all you like. *le shrug* If you don't like it, then don't play it. Simple as that, yes?
