Make a Craft Check

This week, the column focuses on role-playing games, or, more specif­i­cally, role –play­ing games that aren’t video games. If you’re not famil­iar with the dis­tinc­tion, then allow me to break it down for you. Role-playing games are, in the truest sense, games like Dungeons & Dragons. They are story games in which (typ­i­cally) one per­son nar­rates and the other play­ers con­trol the main char­ac­ters of the story. A por­tion of this arti­cle is from an old piece that exam­i­nes what D&D does, and why it is impor­tant. Hopefully you will find it use­ful. Make note of this base-line, because it will serve as start­ing point for a lot of my arti­cles to come.

What Makes D&D Different 

Essentially, D&D is a small set of mechan­ics that arbi­trate the out­comes of imag­i­nary sit­u­a­tions. Whether the sit­u­a­tion be as sim­ple as con­vinc­ing a wary man-at-arms of your good inten­tions or as com­plex as fir­ing an arrow weighted down with alchemist’s fire between the plates of a bulette-riding umber hulk’s stony cara­pace, D&D is the set of rules that deter­mi­nes suc­cess, fail­ure, and the sever­ity of those suc­cesses or fail­ures. But it also does more than this. It builds the struc­tures of race and class upon that base mechanic, and fur­ther ham­mers the sys­tem into abil­ity scores, hun­dreds of feats, magic weapons, and abstract lev­els to describe a character’s aver­age level of skill, to men­tion the mer­est tip of the ice­berg. While these provide hard mechan­ics for the cus­tomiza­tion of char­ac­ters, they simul­ta­ne­ously con­tribute to theme and motif. A dwarf’s bonus to Constitution and Wisdom makes them suit­able or excel­lent for cer­tain classes, but it also reflects that the race is tough and has both a deep faith tra­di­tion and plenty of com­mon sense. While these assump­tions don’t gen­er­ate story or plot, they do gen­er­ate theme. A world begins to emerge from those num­bers. D&D man­u­als con­tain, first and fore­most, mechan­ics, but also assem­ble a hulk­ing mass of ideas that is yet help­less and inert, wait­ing for life to be breathed into it. And, thank­fully, the breath of life is given to it in base­ments, game shops and din­ing tables across the world. The sys­tem comes to life when it is played; oth­er­wise, it is pretty, but use­less.

Something unique hap­pens at that stage, too. As Dungeon Masters and, to a lesser extent, play­ers, encoun­ter this mass of ideas, it is inter­preted and mod­i­fied. The orig­i­nal idea, formed by an assem­bly of minds at Wizards of the Coast, has been trans­mit­ted as effec­tively as they know how to the homes of play­ers. However, since we haven’t devel­oped telepa­thy yet, it comes out all mud­dled. This is a good thing. In this way, the game is born anew at the begin­ning of each ses­sion of every game of D&D. It is a con­stantly evolv­ing crea­ture that is only directed by the hive-mind at Wizards of the Coast inso­far as peo­ple con­tinue to find their new releases inter­est­ing. Wizards hap­pens to be pretty good at updat­ing theme and pro­vid­ing inter­est­ing ideas to Dungeon Masters at home, so they con­tinue to be suc­cess­ful. There’s a good rea­son why the com­pany is still around.

More impor­tant to the uni­fied iden­tity of Dungeons and Dragons than fun, or even geek cul­ture, is story. The sys­tem is designed to facil­i­tate sto­ry­telling in a way that every­one, includ­ing the DM, is uncer­tain of the out­come of the sim­plest actions. Indeed, with a good DM, the game becomes an exer­cise in com­mu­nal sto­ry­telling. D&D’s most impor­tant role may be this: it inspires the telling of sto­ries. It is in this aspect that D&D becomes some­thing greater than your aver­age board game, con­nect­ing to the human expe­ri­ence in a way that may be clas­si­fied as art, or even as sacred.

Dungeons and Dragons facil­i­tates the fun­da­men­tal human endeavor of story-telling, which ele­vates it to a higher sta­tus than the word “game” would imply. To an out­sider, there may not seem to be any point in pre­tend­ing to be an elf. But the idea has quite the allure for role-players. In the midst of story, we are weigh­ing what it is to be some­one else. Whether that per­son is a right­eous hero, a mis­er­able jerk, a sadis­tic mad­man, or just a pretty nor­mal guy, we feel empa­thy for that char­ac­ter, exult­ing in his or her suc­cesses and feel­ing frus­tra­tion at the inevitable fail­ures. It is the same thing that human­ity has always done when it encoun­ters a story. It makes us think beyond our­selves. It allows us to expe­ri­ence a new sort of exis­tence. It is exis­ten­tially healthy.

D&D as Art 

Story-telling, writ­ten or oral, is one of the old­est forms of art. By virtue of these older forms, Dungeons and Dragons, and games like it, have the poten­tial to be art as well. While most role-playing ses­sions are not fan­tas­tic art, they still have the poten­tial to be, and the rare game does achieve that poten­tial. The art com­posed in a D&D game is par­tic­u­larly ephemeral, which is a trait shared with any per­for­mance art. After all, the expe­ri­ence is only momen­tary, and since it depends so heav­ily on so many peo­ple work­ing with­out the guide of a script, it really is a unique pro­duct. But D&D is not a per­for­mance art; the game is not built to enter­tain observers. The play­ers and the DM are fully involved in the pro­duc­tion and evo­lu­tion of the story. The col­lab­o­ra­tion between the main sto­ry­teller and the play­ers is essen­tial to the form, and is one of the traits that makes D&D totally unique. In an expe­ri­ence laugh­ably sim­i­lar to Ouija boards, no one per­son has their hands com­pletely on the reins, and the end pro­duct will be some­thing unique, unan­tic­i­pated, and ulti­mately impos­si­ble to repro­duce. (All three of those traits are also ascribed to play­ers of D&D, but that is nei­ther here nor there.)

In gen­eral, I would argue that the DM is more a per­former, or artist, than the play­ers are, since the DM is respon­si­ble for set­ting, sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, mood, and so on, and thus the play­ers who receive these details are mar­gin­ally more audience-like than the DM. But both roles exist on a spec­trum, and each per­son involved in the game is both pro­ducer and receiver of art. It’s a very com­plex and reward­ing exchange that is impos­si­ble to find out­side of role-playing games.