Dungeons and Dragons

[The Gregorian]

I've heard some interesting opinions on this game. Popular in the 70's among the quintessencial nerds... (I can say "nerd" I am one)

What does everyone think? Is it evil and demonic? Or is it just a game?

 

[Dark_Lite]

It's a game.

 

[fragmentsofdreams]

Just a game.

 

[seebs]

Calling D&D "just a game" is perhaps selling it a little short.

I play D&D a lot. I have most of the books. What I have found, time and time again, is that attacks on it come eventually back to Pat Pulling, a woman whose son committed suicide. Distraught, she looked for something to blame it on, and she picked D&D. Everything else seems to come back to that. It's somewhere between horrifying, tragic, and scary. But... There's no indication that it has anything to do with reality.

Here's a summary:
http://www.rpg.net/sites/252/quellen/stackpole/pulling_report.html

D&D does have the capacity to be rather more involving than, say, a game of Monopoly. But... That doesn't make it "evil". With players who want to tell heroic stories, it can make it very good indeed.

 

[JCDenton]

It's a game.

 

[The Gregorian]

I'm surprised everyone agrees. I keep hearing about how "D&D is EVIL" and stuff... but the fact is, it's ONLY as evil as the one's playing it already are.

I play D&D a few times a week and I know (from experience) you can spend weeks... trying to find a little girl's cat. Not hurting anything. I'm in a campeign right now where someoen's playing a saint (this guy's so lawful good he refuses to tend to the fire for fear of burning a moth... if he ever did ANYTHING to arm a living being he would be smote).

Then again, if you're the kind of person you can play as a demon. Then again... in D&D demons aren't things that try to get you to sin... they're usually evil... but I've played campeigns where another character summoned a Demon... and it was nothing but nice... even protected us from a bear.

 

[JCBeliever]

What exactly is Dungeons and Dragons? How does the game work?

 

[seebs]

What exactly is Dungeons and Dragons? How does the game work?

Dungeons & Dragons (henceforth, "D&D") is a role-playing game. This means it's a game in which players play roles.

This is a very confusing point, for many people who have never seen it. A lot of the language used ("assume the role of...") may lead people to think that players somehow think they "are" the characters; a couple of badly done TV movies in the 80s helped contribute to this theory.

D&D is rooted in a tactical wargame, and still has a strong tactical component. Characters in most games spend a great deal of their time trying to defeat enemies on the battlefield. However, this is not always the case; some games revolve entirely around politics or social affairs, or exploration, or archeology.

Many attempts at playing "make-believe" bog down in arguments. "I shot you!" "Did not!" "Did so!" "Well, you missed!" "No, I'm a really good shot!" D&D, and most other roleplaying games, resolve these by adding game mechanics. Just as Monopoly has rules for how to move tokens, and when you can buy a house, D&D has rules for how effectively a character swings a sword or tries to pick a lock.

So. The way D&D generally works is that one player is the "dungeon master" (early D&D revolved mostly around adventures set in underground locations with lots of monsters, often now referred to as "dungeon crawls"). The Dungeon Master creates a setting, much like the setting for a book or a play. (In fact, many of the games I've been in have been set in worlds taken from my wife's fantasy novels.) The Dungeon Master will take on the roles of almost everyone in this setting. The players create characters - people who are in the setting.

Then, the characters take actions, and the setting reacts. Or, to put it another way, the game master tells the players what happens, and the players say what they do about it.

That's it.

You'll notice I don't mention magic. Magic is a part of most D&D settings, but not a part of D&D games. In other words, no one playing D&D is "casting spells" or studying occult texts. They may describe the actions of characters who do these things, but they don't do any such things themselves, nor do most of them believe such things possible.

There are no "real spells", there is no hidden secret occultism in the game, there is no basis in real-world magical systems, etcetera. That's all stuff made up by people with poor reading comprehension or just outright liars.

 

[Teh Wiccan]

It's a nice game, although for some people it might be a bit complex and time-consuming.

 

[transientlife]

One I don't get, but a game nonetheless.
Those that think it evil and demonic are probably in the same camp as those who think Harry Potter promotes witchcraft and all that hooey.

 

[Logic]

I use to play that Magic the Gathering card game, probably demonic.

 

[Crispie]

People die because of Video Games, that make it denomic? Its just another game...

 

[Dark_Adonis]

I've heard some interesting opinions on this game. Popular in the 70's among the quintessencial nerds... (I can say "nerd" I am one)

What does everyone think? Is it evil and demonic? Or is it just a game?

Obviously the devil
Seriously? It's a fun game

 

[Eudaimonist]

I've heard some interesting opinions on this game. Popular in the 70's among the quintessencial nerds... (I can say "nerd" I am one)

D&D was popular for some time on college campuses with people who weren't "nerdy" at all.

 

[oldrooster]

Its just a game, a fun game, but a game nontheless....

 

[Norseman]

It's just a game. It may be the best game in the entire world, but it's still a game.

 

[MsShinobu]

It's just a game, but some people take it too much to heart. There was this one guy I used to work with, he thought I was an elf -.-; He was into the D&D scene.

 

[Eudaimonist]

There was this one guy I used to work with, he thought I was an elf -.-

Well, are you?

This sort of person is very, very rare, in my experience, and I've known over a hundred gamers.

 

[challenger]

It's just a game, but some people take it too much to heart. There was this one guy I used to work with, he thought I was an elf -.-; He was into the D&D scene.

You get people like that in any scene though, take the goth scene for example, as far as most people who dress goth are concerned, its just a cool, sexy style of dress with a good musical base. Some, on the other hand, claim to be actual, supernatural vampires.

 

[Logic]

I'm a hypernatural vampire, level 9. I have a surpassingly accurate sturdy crossbow of warewolf bane as well.