Dungeons & Dragons Editorials
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1930
With Dungeons & Dragons celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and a lot of positive chatter regarding D&D Next/5th Edition making the rounds, I suppose it's not very surprising that a handful of new editorials are online for the venerable tabletop RPG.
The New York Times explains how D&D has influenced an entire generation of writers:
For certain writers, especially those raised in the 1970s and '80s, all that time spent in basements has paid off. D&D helped jump-start their creative lives. As Mr. DÃaz said, (It's been a formative narrative media for all sorts of writers.)
The league of ex-gamer writers also includes the (weird fiction) author China Miéville ((The City & the City)); Brent Hartinger (author of (Geography Club,) a novel about gay and bisexual teenagers); the sci-fi and young adult author Cory Doctorow; the poet and fiction writer Sherman Alexie; the comedian Stephen Colbert; George R. R. Martin, author of the (A Song of Ice and Fire) series (who still enjoys role-playing games). Others who have been influenced are television and film storytellers and entertainers like Robin Williams, Matt Groening ((The Simpsons)), Dan Harmon ((Community)) and Chris Weitz ((American Pie)).
With the release of the rebooted Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set on Tuesday, and more advanced D&D rule books throughout the summer, another generation of once-and-future wordsmiths may find inspiration in the scribbled dungeon map and the secret behind Queen of the Demonweb Pits.
Polygon argues why there will always be a soft spot for 1st Edition AD&D:
First Edition was hard if you followed the Gygax edict. It meant that there were consequences; you were born a certain way and you had to cope with it. Winters was clear about this he maintained Gygax's implicit position in First Edition was you that had to enforce the rules for players so that the game, and the stakes of playing, felt real.
One of the many things that was so great (and so unfair) about is that it was very much grounded in the roll. Even though its systems were a little rickety and the classes unbalanced, it all came down to two basic concepts: the saving throw and the To Hit roll.
Simply put, these were the backbone of most of the mechanics. Do you fall into a pit? Roll a 20 sided die save vs traps. Do you hit that orc wearing platemail? Roll a 14 to hit him. The to hit roll was cross-referenced with your level and class type, so mages pretty much sucked at hitting anything with weapons and fighters pretty much ruled and it was simple but that was how it was.
The New Yorker has an opinion piece where the author explains how D&D "saved their life":
As many writers testified in the Times article, D. & D. is a textual, storytelling, world-creating experience, a great apprenticeship for a budding author. But, more fundamentally, you cannot play D. & D. without reading a lot. Ed Park, in an essay on D. & D. (included in the anthology (Bound to Last)), celebrates the magnificent vocabulary of the game, which introduced young players to words such as (melee,) (portcullis,) (kobold,) (thaumaturge,) (paladin,) (charisma,) (halberd,) (wyvern,) (homunculus,) (scimitar,) (buckler,) (basilisk,) and (cockatrice.) Combined, the player's manual, the Dungeon Master's guide, and the monster manual (the core books of advanced D. & D.) add up to four hundred and sixty-eight pages of small-print, double-column text. I read them with studious devotion and headlong glee. Almost immediately, television all but disappeared from my life. When I wasn't playing D. & D., I was reading about it or reading books set in worlds like the game's. Crucial in this regard was (Deities and Demigods,) my favorite of all the advanced D. & D. books. Along with creatures from Norse, Sumerian, Greek, and Native-American mythologies, (Deities and Demigods) included characters from the novels of H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock. Moorcock, in particular, became a favorite of mine. I tore through the many volumes of his (Eternal Champion) cycle. From Moorcock, it was a short leap to Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Wolfe, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, and, lo and behold, I was a reader. And then, a writer.
Fast-forward thirty-five years. I am now the father of a twelve-year-old boy who has yet to meet a screen he has not liked. It's not Notre Dame football and (The Love Boat) he's watching, but YouTube videos from which he hopes to glean secrets to besting the video games he plays. The arrival of the new starter set from Wizards of the Coast seemed like an opportunity to change his dynamic. My sister mentioned that her sons (aged twelve and nine) had recently been introduced to D. & D. at summer camp. Returning home, they'd unearthed their parents' advanced D. & D. manuals and begun teaching themselves. Not wanting to miss the moment, I called up my brothers and hastily arranged a session: three men in their forties and three adolescent boys.
And then The Guardian writes about how Dungeons & Dragons and other such games "could help to solve some of the greatest technological challenges of our time":
What role-playing games do so beautifully is to provide a structure for non-writers, people who might say they're not very imaginative, to create characters. Those dice rolls, those bare-bones statistics like the two dots and a line that suggest a face start to encourage anyone to imagine a character. If this woman has come out through some random number generation to be physically agile, not very attractive, but skilled at thievery, how did she end up working in this library?If this man's got a lot of money, is quite bright, but is only averagely strong and catastrophically clumsy, what's he doing on an Arctic expedition? So much of storytelling is in the gaps, in allowing the imagination to work.
Tabletop role-playing games translated seamlessly to video almost as soon as they were devised.Microprocessors could deal easily with the maths of deciding who had won a battle and how many hands they had chopped off. The dnd videogame appeared in 1975. Ian Livingstone who with Steve Jackson wrote the role-playing games-with-training-wheels Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, some of which I knew almost by heart as a child later founded Eidos, creators of, among other things, Tomb Raider. Since the 1970s, role-playing games have been among the top-selling videogame genres, including the wildly popular Diablo II (to which I lost four months of my life in 2001-02), and the online mega-hit World of Warcraft.
