{"id":11014,"date":"2008-03-04T17:48:13","date_gmt":"2008-03-04T22:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/04\/11014.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:12","slug":"dee-and-dee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/03\/04\/dee-and-dee\/","title":{"rendered":"Dee and Dee"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I suppose every blogger has to, upon learning of the demise of Gary Gygax<\/a>, post a reminiscence of happy days spent rolling 2d8. I have no such.
\n

Oh, I played a couple of games, but I never enjoyed them, much. I liked the role playing aspect, but I didn\u2019t like the mechanics, and the mechanics were what Gary Gygax (and Dave Arneson) actually contributed.
\n

I wonder, sometimes, to what extent Dungeons & Dragons just happened to hit a moment, or rather a succession of moments, appropriate for the game first becoming a nerd commonality, then a mainstream byword for nerdocity, then a part of mainstream culture. Or to what extent the mechanism, the imposed structure and the vocabulary that they codified were in themselves responsible for creating those moments. There were always other role-playing games; none of them became the name for that type of play. Why D&D?
\n

There were so many dice. They were cheap, but then you had to keep them in a little velvety sack with a drawstring so you wouldn\u2019t suddenly discover you were missing a four-sided die and be unable to do some sort of thing. There were so many books, and they were big, and fairly expensive. It\u2019s true you didn\u2019t have to buy them, but it wasn\u2019t actually easy to run a game without them (I\u2019m told). And the game play, with charts and turns and figuring out who went when, and mapping as you went, or not mapping and having to deal with not having a map, and keeping track of so much crap, all on pieces of paper. Role playing doesn\u2019t require any of that. D&D does. But role playing games, although they did have some currency, particularly those host-a-murder evenings that I quite liked, didn\u2019t become a huge deal, and D&D did.
\n

Now, there are computers, and it\u2019s all much easier and nicer, and the people who liked the combat can find games that feature the combat, and the people who liked the story-telling can find games that feature the story-telling, and the people who liked mapping can find games that feature the mapping, and the computer keeps track of it all. Not that people can\u2019t enjoy the dice and paper, but for people who couldn\u2019t enjoy the game<\/i> because of the dice and paper, there are options.
\n

I suspect that there will be a lot of stuff written this week that gives Mr. Gygax credit for people pretending that they kill dragons. That\u2019s just silly. My Perfect Non-Reader pretends she kills dragons (or that she is a dragon, or that she\u2019s a half-dragon half-knight with a magic hat) because dragon slaying is an important part of our cultural heritage. D&D exploited that, it didn\u2019t invent it. On the other hand, people playing games with complex rules and nearly infinite options, pretending to kill dragons, that\u2019s<\/i> the D&D thing, and there\u2019s a lot of it about.
\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger reveals his nerd shortcomings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18292,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014\/revisions\/18292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}