Month: February 2019

Part Two: On Good Characters

The Ludite5 Comments

(This is part of the series ‘D&D: Chasing the Dragon.’ Read more from the home page.)

“Let me tell you about my character.” The seven most dreaded words in the geek lexicon.

When you hear them, you know you’re in for a monologue of context-free adventuring, probably a description of their class and magic items, and possibly an explanation of how they broke the game with this weird combination of feats and class features, as well as what they killed that made their DM super mad. You’ll sit there and nod politely as you try to make sense of their disjointed shenanigans. After all, if you endure this, they might be willing to nod politely when you tell them about your character!

Elsewhere in the world, someone else says to their friend “You’ve gotta hear about this show I’m watching!” This person starts talking about the characters and who they are, what they do. And the other person listens. Interested. They might ask questions about it, compare it to shows they know. If they’re into that kind of story (or sometimes even if they’re not), the conversation might even end with “Yeah, I gotta find time to watch that!”

What’s the difference here? In both cases, they’re both talking about characters in a story that they’re enjoying. But why is it that passing acquaintances can successfully talk about television as a topic of interest, but people in the same community with a common interest in D&D just loathe that conversation? Continue reading →

Part One: Rule Zero is Bullshit

The Ludite11 Comments

(This is part of the series ‘D&D: Chasing the Dragon.’ Read more from the home page.)

Before I talk about D&D itself, we need to talk about Rule Zero. We need to talk about RPG rules in general, as a concept. If you’ve followed my work for awhile, you already know that I often talk about how game rules push players into patterns of behavior. That’s the function of game rules, really: by voluntarily taking on constraints and abiding by rules, players should have a particular experience as envisioned by the designer of those rules. Rules shape the play experience from the ground up or else why do we need them?

This is obviously true for video games where the rules are largely immutable and the play experience is quite supervised. It’s hard to imagine the experience being sourced from anything but the game since the game is in control of just about everything. A tabletop RPG feels like a completely different animal. Much of the moment-to-moment play consists of what amounts to free-form narration. It might initially appear that RPG rules are less important, that they take on a lighter hand as they allow the players to take more control over the experience.

But if anything, that makes the rules of a tabletop RPG even more important. Continue reading →

D&D: Chasing the Dragon

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(This is part of the series ‘D&D: Chasing the Dragon.’ Read more from the home page.)

Darths & Droids is a webcomic where the authors retell the story of the Star Wars films as a tabletop RPG. While there’s no specific system that the players are running, anyone who’s played a popular system like Dungeons & Dragons is sure to recognize what’s going on at the table. Rather than the impassioned, noble heroes you’d expect in a sci-fi/fantasy epic, the main characters are buffoonish, violent, make questionable decisions, and are generally more interested in XP and loot than in furthering or investing in the story of their exasperated DM. While their bizarre antics contrast sharply with an otherwise sincere setting played straight, they bear a certain familiarity to players of popular roleplaying systems, and they have a way of making the story of the Star Wars prequels seem like an amateur D&D campaign gone off the rails. Continue reading →