Confessions of a Rabidly-Hostile Anti-Gamer

I’m excited about the upcoming third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Check that, I’m thrilled about the upcoming third edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Although I must say that I’m not looking forward to it because of the rules changes, the cool artwork, the inclusion of the assassin and monk or the involvement of Jonathan Tweet. I’m excited about D&D the way I’m excited about Diablo II.

I wanna write-up a quick character, load him up with gear and send him off to the nearest dungeon with a couple of other adventurers. I want rip-roaring action, death-defying traps, arcane sorceries and heaps of gold, silver and magick’d items. I want maps and spellbooks and swords and dragon-hide shields. I want adventure. I want fantasy.

I think D&D is the game that’s gonna give it to me.

I think my earlier problems with D&D stem not with the game itself but with the miasma of “nerd-taint” surrounding it. Too-fat or too-skinny teenage kids with bad haircuts sitting down in their parents’ basement drinking Mountain Dew and eating cold pizza. Dungeons & Dragons was something that little kids played before they got social lives.

Now, with the proliferation of multiplayer computer games and first-person shooters, the idea of an old-style hack n’ slash role-playing game sounds charming&like a group of elderly Italian-American gents lawn bowling each Saturday afternoon. D&D is really just Diablo with personality, imagination and social interaction, right?

Yes, I know D&D came first.

But in a hack n’ slash game (which D&D most assuredly and unabashedly is designed to be), the whole purpose is to have fun tromping through a dungeon whacking kobolds and skeletons while you gradually increase your character’s abilities. It is a game, though an open-ended one. The purpose of playing D&D is to take your 98 lb. weakling of a PC through progressively more difficult adventures until he emerges from the other side, scarred and bloodied and 29th level. Why acquire gold and treasure and magical items? To allow your character to take on more powerful challenges. Why do you want to do that? So you can find even MORE treasure and gold and magical items&and so on, and so on.

So how did a die-hard dramatist like myself come to this remarkably gamist conclusion? Simple. I like playing Diablo. I like playing Might & Magic. I like exploring dungeons and ramping up characters from 1st level to nigh-godhood. It’s great fun&especially if you can do it with a bunch of other like-minded individuals while munching pizza and quaffing caffeinated sugar-water.

What has bothered me about D&D is two things. The first is its uneasy marriage of wargaming (ie: slow, drawn out and “realistic” combat) and roleplaying (epic tales of heroism and adventure). The rules get in the way of the experience&and the details of the world (ie: “realistic” armor and weapons, down to the damage they dole out) also limit my imagination. In a game like D&D, you take the sword because it does the best damage, not because your character would wanna take the sword.

The second is its proponents. You know that noting can turn me off a game more the gamers themselves. I’m not talking about poor hygiene or endless iterations of Monty Python quotes (although these do drive me up a wall). I’m talking about the slavish devotion to the game. “It’s not the game, it’s the DM!” I always hear. “I’ve been playing a single D&D campaign for four years now and it’s a really complex story!” Yeah, right&whatever. The problem is that D&D isn’t built for a narrativist style of play. I mean, sure, you can create a story about anything&but where some games focus on this and do it well, others (like D&D) fly in the face of narrativist structure. No setting, emphasis on treasure and combat, character levels, saving throws.

This is a game. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

So now D&D drops some of the weighty and overly-complex rules and presents what looks to be a fun and action-packed hack n’ slash game. That’s great! I don’t want intensive character development. I don’t want a fully-formed society with its own laws and political systems. I want to be dropped in front of big-ass wrought-iron gate with a sign beside it that reads: “This Way to the Dungeon.” I want a role-playing experience with all the realism of the Talisman board-game. Pick a character and GO. Like Feng Shui, the new D&D uses the constraints of the genre as a spring-board rather than a brick wall. Hopefully, the action-oriented style that Feng Shui presents has been adopted by the makers of the Third Edition. I don’t want miniatures and graph paper. I want swinging swords and desperate attacks and devious mechanical traps and bloodthirsty monsters. Sure, throw in an opportunity to roleplay, but dammit&if I wanna play a pirate, or a kobold or whatever then just let me jot down a few notes and send me on my way.

I don’t want to justify my character. Eff you, if I wanna play a Pirate then dammit, I’m a Pirate! I carry a cutlass and I wear studded leather and an eyepatch and cool boots and a flintlock pistol and I have a parrot on my shoulder. And no, I don’t think it’s weird that my adventuring companions are a dwarven barbarian from the Frozen North and a Samurai Elf. That’s not weird at all. And no, thank you&you don’t have to set us up in some generic tavern meeting. Forget about the storyline. Forget about the plot. Just drop us at the mouth of the Caves of Chaos and let us have a go! Fame and fortune await!

Just don’t make it something that it’s not.

Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.

Jared Sorensen is an anti-gamer who, paradoxially enough, has created some cool games. You can find them at www.memento-mori.com/main