Since I have been writing a lot about old D & D lately, I decided to repost this essay about playing Dungeons and Dragons. It is reworked slightly to help mesh with recent posts. Of course the names of students have been changed to protect the innocent. I don’t expose real people in my blogging. I tend to fictionalize everything. After all, no one should have to suffer the damage to their reputations that Mickian goofishness can cause.
Back in 1982 I first started dungeon mastering for my younger brother and two sisters. We bought a family set with both the red book and blue book. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of storytelling games. You can’t give fanboy dynamite to an Ubernerd and not expect some kind of big old explosion.
The thing that caught me so completely was the way that you could share the development of the characters and story, everybody at the table adding their two cents until you had a whole lot more than six cents… More like priceless. And you never knew for sure how it would turn out, no matter how much you planned the plot and plotted the plan. Events could turn out entirely opposite to what they should have, and inspiration on the spot could alter the essential course of a campaign.
In the beginning it was all about wizards. The original game featured power that left wizards weak and vulnerable in the beginner levels, but fearsome with fire-balling ferocity after only a few levels of experience. My brother’s wizard, LeRoy became powerful enough to make himself the king of all of Balindale and the Southern Kingdom . When the dungeon master raised up armies of undead and ogres and undead ogres to bedevil old LeRoy, the bearded Lord of Balindale could simply summon meteors from the sky and burn them to the ground. If I presented him with rival wizards who had armies and kingdoms of their own, he pulled a fast one and used his diplomatic dipsy-doo to make them into allies… even the evil ones. He convinced them to sign treaties with him and eventually to accept him as their sovereign lord. Thus the Wizard Ganser from mighty Gansdorf was tamed and turned. When the evil Black Wizard refused to cooperate, Ganser and his army helped to invade and destroy the stronghold of Fort Doom.
So stories came to be dominated by wizards and wizard personalities. And then I began recruiting former students to play the game. The personalities changed. Goofy Gomez chose to be the wizard, the typical classroom clown who could never do anything straight. Fernie the Flunkie, a particularly destructive personality, also took up the way of magic with Asduel the Sorcerer. So in some games, Asdok the Bumbling made jokes and got his fellow adventurers into situations where only the last minute appearance of a kindly, all-powerful Titan could keep them from being roasted in a pot with carrots and potatoes. In other games, Asduel the Merciless burned cities and castles, made orphans into servants and slaves, and generally frowned quite a lot when the dungeon master suggested that some Non-player characters needed to be spared or the over-all adventure would be lost for all players.
So, because of the power of wizards, we all learned that stories could be easily unbalanced and abused by the personalities in them. We learned how important it was to learn to work together. When Sir Hogan, the Knight of Tol Arriseah, and Sin Gard, the fighter of the many magic swords got sick of old Asduel, they let the bullywugs and locathah of Eary Marsh first take him prisoner, and then roast and eat him with carrots and potatoes. And when Asdok the Bumbling set fire to the base of the tower in which he was trying to wring the treasure from the top, trapping his little thief friend, Artran the Halfling up there with him in the body of the ugly girl he had turned him into with a polymorph spell, they allowed him to take a ride in the tower-turned-skyrocket into another dimension entirely.
Dungeons and Dragons taught us that the difference between good and evil can be learned. We learned that hitting your problems with a sword or dropping a fireball on top of them did not always solve them. We learned to negotiate, to feel what others feel, and how to become a different person than the one you are. I truly believe that the most important lessons you can learn about life can be learned playing D&D. Morality, camaraderie, and cooperation are not really taught in school, but they can be taught in D&D.
And now I play Dungeons and Dragons with my own children. How better to get to know them and mold their characters? How else can you let them learn why you shouldn’t blow up your neighbors or slay your uncle with an axe except in an imaginary world where the ultimate oops can be fixed with a lawful-good cleric who knows a convenient raise the dead or resurrection spell?
So now I can officially post my Paffooney where Samosett the girl archer and little Prince Robin have murdered Unkel the Magical Ogre to get his chest full of treasure. Oh, I shouldn’t forget Boffin and Bimbur the dwarves. They are the ones that brought the group through the Wilderness of Zekk to find Old Unkel’s tower.
