NeoGrognard

Let me give you some background. I was excited about the digital tools in development 4e. I was disappointed they were running late, but progress was more promising than any I had seen for Dungeons & Dragons throughout its history. I’ve seen pleanty of computer tools over the years made for the fan, the player, sometimes both. I hung out on old TSR Online on AOL (where you could play the original Neverwinter Nights, the first graphical MMORPG, and you paid for the privilege of playing it by the hour), had seen the various incarnations of the TSR website, the Wizards of the Coast website, and owned all of the character building and digital tools released for D&D from both companies. The ones being developed for 4e were finally ones I could see myself using on a regular basis. Better still, they would stay relevant via frequent updates.

When I told him all of this, my friend just snorted.

“It’s not D&D, hell it’s not roleplaying if you gotta use a computer.”

“Wh…what?” I said.

“You’re making D&D into a computer game. I have to make my character on the computer; you’re making some World of Warcraft clone.”

I was stunned. Sure, I had read the posts and blogs of the disgruntled for months, but I didn’t know these people. I saw them as a society of contrarians motivated by interest in the old d20 System a model that bubbled and at this point, outside of Paizo, barely simmered. My friend was not one of those fellas. He was just a long-time fan of D&D and RPGs.

“It’s nothing like WoW,” I said. “It’s D&D, the way it’s been played with the start, just better balanced and…”

He cut me off. “You don’t need a computer to play D&D.”

“You don’t need it to play 4e, it just makes character building…”

“You don’t need a computer to play D&D.” He cut me off again, and that’s where we ended the conversation. He said his piece and counted to three.

I had an incredible urge to tell him to shut the fuck up, and I would have if I weren’t just a tad sympathetic and had some practice (believe it or not) keeping my id in check. See, I’ve always been open to trying out new tools for D&D. I used a grid and miniatures in 1e. I bought my first Battlemat and character building software during 2e. I used websites and discussion groups to help organize my games during my 3e days, and used a digital game table to run games in 3e and 4e. Now I have a computer at the table at every game session. At the same time there are things I would have a hard time “upgrading” and calling it D&D. Dice, minis, character sheets. These while not essential to the game, I consider essential to the experience. Obviously my friend had stricter measures for his experiences.

But the more I began to think about, the more I realized that with the advent of digital game tables, dice rollers, and character builders, I had played plenty of games without dice, character sheet, or miniatures, in the strictest sense, and the games I played were definitely D&D. I had just as much fun, and with a virtual game table the after-game cleanup was faster. (It’s just so easy putting pixels and bytes away). I began to question my own assumptions about what makes D&D, well, D&D, or in a more general way, what makes an RPG and RPG.

It wasn’t quite a year after I played my first game of D&D that I first used a computer (an Apple II) and played my first game that attempted to replicate the experience of D&D in some way (Zork). I joined some of my friends to take an early computer programming course. Within a week of the first class, we all knew you could program a computer to act like a 20-sided die or 100 20-sided dice, or even a d10,0000. It seemed pretty clear that one day you would be able to see naked people doing grunty things on a computer and accomplish other, more productive things. We also knew that a computer was precise but ponderous; it couldn’t be a Dungeon Master (except in that grunty-things sort of way…but we didn’t want to think about that) and if it was forced to, it would be one of the crappiest DMs on the planet.

That didn’t stop people from trying to fuse or replace D&D with computers. Mattel tried twice in the 80s, both games were diversions, but only fractionally fulfilling as their book-based namesake, and too annoying or strange to catch on outside the D&D market. Computer game clones have be released with rapid succession since Zork, WoW being the latest and greatest to try to replace D&D, It is one of the first MMORPGs to overshadow the game in both players and money (but other types of games came out of the RPG revolution and accomplished that) , and it’s a good game, with solid design and development, but it’s not D&D. It’s what fast food is to food, it’s what Bud is to beer. Filling, fatty, addicted but ultimately falling short.

But not all computer products wanted to replace D&D and RPGs, other wanted to inhance it. One of the first was the dice wand “Dragonbone”.

(That was its name, I kid you not. Those were more innocent times, when Metal ruled the earth.)

If I remember correctly, Dragonbone was an array of LED lights, with that simple randomizing program we all learned in our first programming classes, and a hardware switch to tell the program which one to use. It was an interesting idea borne on the hot curses of those who lost their 8-sided yet again. Polyhedral dice were a little hard to come by back then and cats have always loved to thwap them across the room and under the fridge. And it feels strangely natural to replace a sack o’ dice with…a…bone. Oh my.  Maybe it didn’t.

The Dragonbone seemed to have sold for a number of years. At least they had advertisements in Dragon magazine for a number of years. I have no idea what actual sales were like. I think I saw a person use it once, at Wizard Con, at Columbia University back when Reagan was president. The ads seemed to disappear around the time you could buy dice in such bulk, you never again suffered nightmares that you could not find your last 20-sider (shiver!). Come to think of it, that Wizard Con was the first time I bought a bunch of dice at a dealer’s booth, the Complete Strategist booth, I believe. It was like I had found buried treasure. It was hard to find dice in bulk back then.

These days a good number of us have the new equivalent of Dragonbone (smart phones have a bunch of dice roller apps), but most people still use dice. A friend of mine (and professional game designer) actually banned a player from using a digital dice roller. While I that’s a tad absurd, it goes to show you how much people love dice or at least cling to them. As for myself, I’ve experimented with a dice roller, but it never sticks. I always go running back to dice. I even make my pre-game rolls (like monster initiatives) with dice. It just feels right. And, more importantly, it often feels quicker.

I have a similar love affair with miniatures. I just love them, be they prepainted or ones I paint myself. I have a ton of them. I even build 3D terrain for some special sessions of my Days of Long Shadows campaign. I’m working on some right now. I’m a big minis nerd.

But I realize I’m being downright conservative. There have been diceless RPGs and miniatureless games of D&D. Hell, I’ve run D&D games without minis. I’ve fallen into the trap of confusing the tools with the activity. When I say I want miniatures, I mean I want a turn based positioning system with pleasing graphical elements (I wouldn’t mind the ability to paint or design them, but that’s secondary. Not everyone will spend time on that). With dice, I want my probably to work a certain way, and I want a tactile and familiar interface. I want the ability to play D&D without the need for a computer, but I want the computer to expand my play venues and my tool set. I want it to enhance the way I play D&D rather than to change it.

Out of that frustrating conversation I learned I was a lot like my friend. I was more inclusive when it came to tools and venues for my RPGs, but I still had these hard boundaries, some of which were arbitrary, or to be charitable, creatures of custom.

It’s easy to fall into this trap with a genre like RPGs and a game like D&D. There is much arcana orbiting these games, each shiny, distracting us from the core. Don’t get me wrong, those shiny little satellites are fun and interesting, but many of them are not essential to the play experience, but are often treated as thought they are by the folks who have latched on to them. If you are an RPG fan, you are most likely guilty of having at least one shiny. It’s up to you to figure out what they are and question their true worth.

My friend helped me find a few of mine.

MTF