"After 40 Years, Dungeons & Dragons Still Brings Players To The Table"

[Lili Birchflower]

OCTOBER 27, 2015, NPR

If you play today's massively multiplayer online role-playing games — World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy, for example — you have a 1970s tabletop game to thank, says author Michael Witwer.

Witwer has just written a biography of Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons.

"Even first-person shooters like Call of Duty have some of the roots at least in tabletop role-playing games," he tells NPR's Ari Shapiro.

From both a gaming — and nongaming — standpoint, D&D had far-reaching effects. Comedian Stephen Colbert, journalist Anderson Cooper and writer Junot Díaz all cite Dungeons & Dragons as an influence.

"It really became this workshop of imagination for people who played the game," Witwer says. "I think Junot Díaz himself called the game itself an apprenticeship in storytelling. A lot of writers, a lot of artists, a lot of actors, have talked about how this game was so influential teaching them to imagine."

Gygax died in 2008. Witwer talks with Shapiro about his new book, Empire of Imagination, and how the game remains popular today.

(Interview at link)

Interview Highlights

On what the game is

Dungeons & Dragons is a game that's played first of all on the tabletop — at least originally it was. It's a game where you all get together. The game is refereed by someone called the Dungeon Master who kind of describes what the rest of the gamers see and hear. So the rest of the participants who work together cooperatively make these various characters like fighters and wizards and thieves and whatnot, and you kind of react to what the Dungeon Master lays out before you.

On the 1982 film Mazes and Monsters, and the way the media talk about Dungeons & Dragons

Mazes and Monsters was a thinly veiled retelling of the James Dallas Egbert III story. What happened basically was, in 1979 a young Michigan State student disappeared mysteriously. He had a lot of issues that he was struggling with. And he also happened to play Dungeons & Dragons.

So the kid disappears, and a private detective shows up named William Dear who theorizes — once he sees this kid has been playing this game — that perhaps the human mind can't quite deal with the idea of pretending you're a character and all this stuff, and it really kind of fuzzies the border between the real and the imaginary.

So this particular theory gets picked up by the media and it becomes an absolute media circus. The funny thing is that Egbert himself was discovered a couple of weeks later, and his disappearance had nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons.

On the draw of the tabletop game in an era of virtual gaming

The game itself — the tabletop version, the original — is still alive and well. Now it's in its fifth edition and it's selling like crazy. ...

Many of the derivative games — and maybe it's all of the derivative games we've talked about — whether it be computer role-playing games or whatnot, they actually lack most of the most important fundamental elements of a role-playing game. ... That is, sitting around with your friends and participating in this kind of group storytelling exercise: actually being in a room physically sitting at a table with nothing but pencils and paper and dice. There's something very special about that, and it's kind of a social experience that's pretty hard to frankly re-create over any type of electronic media.

Audio interview at:  http://www.npr.org/2015/10/27/450881148/after-40-years-dungeons-dragons-still-brings-players-to-the-table

[Lili Birchflower]

What are some of your favorite (or at least most memorable) experiences in D&D?

[Remi]

*amused* billions, but the one that stands out was DMing a session, players had been various types of moron (firing arrows into a tight melee with allies and such) trying to foil a kidnapping attempt.  Eventually got annoyed and told them they failed, the (beloved Cormyrian) Princess they were trying to save just died in a fireball.


Cue television in background announcing Princess Di had a car crash...

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"You dare think you and your puny god can stand against my forces?"
*real life lightening blasts the lawn outside the window
".... On second thought, I have urgent business at home.  You win this day human."

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Then there was a run of Temple of Elemental Planes (my variant) where the monk announced he was jumping into the water (out of that crab sub thing) to retrieve something.  
"The water filled with Megladon sharks?"
*nods*
"The what's your hp?"
*rattles off some low number of higher number*
"So you, wounded and bleeding freely, are jumping into the water infested with 20m long sharks?"
"I get a free parry"
"Fine.  Now for the other 1000 teeth."


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Same monk, facing Tiamat, with dragon eyeballs adorning his helmet, as party attempts diplomacy
"And you should have heard them scream when I cut them out"
"Roll to save vs breath weapon"
"Made it"
"Take 120 damage"
"I'm alive"
"That was fire.  Now for the other four heads..."

ranger:"noooo...he has my sword"


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Same monk, bridge over a volcano's caldera, fails a save
"Ah...I'm negative 6 hp"
Rogue:  pickpockets to empty his pockets
Fighter:  disarm check to strip his weapon
Mage: strength check to throw him over the side
Cleric: willpower check to look the other way
Deus Ex NPC:  My blessing to have them succeed in their rolls

And thus ended the many lives of that particular player's monk.


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The cold war between the LG Solmanic Knight, his minotaur fighter sidekick (can i dual wield two two handed swords?) and their pet kender kleptomanic sociopath...   vs the OBVIOUSLY evil black mage and the ranger (mine).  Last person was a Jester just 'for the lulz'

Amusingly? Also ToEE, but 'Krynned'.  Between amping up existing traps to screw each other over without being obvious (sooo many notes passed to the DM), Solmanic Knight get to dive into the pool of acid (what? has a compulsion to make you jump in? Not enough! Add illusion of a trapped struggling triton at the bottom!), and well... if they were going to 'but he cannot help it' every time that kender stole from a party member (or pushed them into a room of mobs then closed the door saying it was just a joke....    Contingency Spell, Teleport Spell, Bottom of the Blood Sea, shiny ring obviously put in pocket.  Say hello to the ruins of Ishtar you kleptorat.

That party never got to the end, though several met theirs /gg

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Then there was the 'i accidentally a country'... where we detrailed a DMs long campaign by... settling.  Save the village?  K...now... with the loot? BUY the village out...  then rent it back to them.  Set up your own lil village-state.  Train up a militia.  Use magecraft to increase production and farming.  Set up a basic 'teaching' system.  Found ruins with gates?  Turn village into a trade hub.  Increase population to a city.  Set up trade with more neighbours. Absorb neighbours.  Evict monster neighbours and liberate their loot.  Make your god the state god.  Accidentally declare war on neighbours (protip: dwarves are NOT bearded halflings).   Spy on other neighbours.  Set neighbours at war with each other.

We went from a party initially meant for hack and slash (what is subtle, precious?) into some political thing.  ... and all because my char wanted to afford some better jewelry.

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'There are no uselesss items'.   Some eberron campaign has you have to stop some army invading from the east.  First you find about it, then you scout about it, then you get allies, then the fight.  Or something.  We'll never know.

See, we found them, we kinda um.. we'll skip that part.  So we take our 'proof' to the elves.  The elves are all "that's a human problem'.  That's fine. I'm a halfling you pointy-eared flake, or did your inbreeding screw with your perception?  

I was also forbidden from diplomacy by this point.

So the elves won't help us.  Tale tells though of some lich to the south.  Um.. well, I'd say no, but I can see the tracks on the railroad here.  South it is!

Random fights. Random loot. You get: Staff of Rez
HA! UBER LOOT!
DM:  One charge.
*description on staff: rez takes two
Party: you bastard

Get to the lich...he's a... druid lich? They can do that?  Eberron, whatever.  
Lich: MWAHAHAHA! I R IMMUNE 2 MAJIK UNDER 4!  U PUNY ELVES! BOW TO ME!
...halfing you dumbass brainrotted... wait
*description on staff:  but heal is only one
MWAHWHAHAHA
*hands staff to best melee "haelp him good"
CRACK!
*lich crumbles from 150 hp positive energy damage

*wiz and sorc both lore it
"THE PHYLACTERY!"
*sorc is about to smash it and end the threat of the lich forever

FLASHBACK:
Lich: MWAHAHAHA! I R IMMUNE 2 MAJIK UNDER 4!  U PUNY ELVES! BOW TO ME!
Lich: U PUNY ELVES! BOW TO ME!
Lich: U PUNY ELVES!
U PUNY ELVES!


"WAIT!  I have a cunning plan...~"


And so we're not sure what happened to the army, but the lich eventually rose up out of the elf cities's cistern and pretty much destroyed them all over the years.  Never really gave a damn about Drooam anyways.  Too many hobgoblins.

That party though was the one that met its end to Tiamat.  Well, no, they made it out.  The halfling just did the "run.  I have a cunning plan" and threw a portable hole into a bag of holding at pointblank and kinda..well...  That was the last time that DM ever DMd with us.  Nothing but derails from the get go~  Pure munchkin synergy~


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Recall losing a cavalier to a black dragon once as well.. it involved a loooooooong stairwell, a towershield coated in grease, a lance and simult initiative with the waking dragon breathing acid.  Same team that learned pulling a dragon corpse DOWN a hill is a bad idea.  Well the ones that were not on the lower part of the hill learned.  They also took up cattle rustling as cheaper, safer and faster.


Then there was the utter sadness of learning baaz draconians crumble to rubble a few minutes after being slain.  And we just FINALLY got one to catch a thrown lantern as it was magic missile'd to death.  Operation Garden Gnome was fail.

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Wild magic is fun: Part 1

So we're at Myth Drannor.  There is a tower that has people in it.  They are evil people.  Evil people with shiny loot.  Okay, just people, but this IS a nasty area, and to be here you have to be with shiny loot to survive, and meaner than the things around you.

DM: THOU SHALT NOT METAGAME

..FINE.  I cast a detect evil to see if they are evil
*DM checks for wild magic surge.  gets a surge.  gets chain missile

"ACH!  We didn't mean to do that"   *detect lie shows we really didn't!
"I can heal her!  *detect lie shows I can
*I cast Heal on her
*DM checks for wild magic surge.  gets a surge.  gets chain lightening, wipes them all out

DM:  just...  just... let's just make dinner

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Fun with Wild Magic Part 2 - now with more tables to roll on!

So an army of giants and such are invading Cormyr.  The party has gone from town to town warning (While Diablos Ex NPC poisons the water supply, the rogue spent a week as a mental midget after wearing a hat of idiocy, and gaining a cult of cavemen worshipping her as a spider goddess), the supermunchkin added a fourth class to his list of classes, the cleric/mage has pretty much proven why 3rd edition was just too bloody munchkin, and the narcoleptic ranger has missed yet another session.

Rather than do it slowish, here is the highlights of a combat that should have been a curbstomp the OTHER WAY

-all foliage in a km are enlarged and growing rapidly
-EVERYTHING gets soaked in beer suds... and inebriated partially (and more as it goes on)
-everything gets sparkly
-and then there was fire
-but wait!  someone tries to put out the fire with pyrotechnics
-techniques spell surges to enhanced effect - the raging grass fire is now a smouldering grass fire with 4 times the normal volume of smoke
-things start to asphyxiate
-'zone of sweet air' spell instead is gates in an asteroid that is falling
-teleport spell casts perfectly
-Tilverton craters perfectly
-party is now 'persona non gratis' kill-on-sight in Cormyr.
-Rogue and Diablus Ex NPC think the world needs more Wild Magic Zones
-Cleric/Mage regrets ever teaching the rogue and npc magic
-Munchkin wonders if he can take a fifth class


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I have zero pity for a DM whose campaign is derailed by their players - mine would try during character creation