Hm.

At this point, do I need to discuss my philosophy with regards to D&D? I don't know -- I know it's a touchy subject for some. (Actually, I thought my dad was going to be horrified. After all, when I brought home some U2 albums one Christmas break, his comment was, "Going through a rebelious phase are we?" This time, his only comment was, "Oh, and ...?" Huh. You never know.)

So let's see if I can do the short version ...
... while at Wheaton, I knew of a group that did play D&D. They had set up a few parameters (don't kill me, math people!): you can't play an evil* character being the big rule.
Then, while dating Michael, I started playing a lot of games: board, card, video and computer games. My favorites have always been the ones that run on a roleplaying mechanic. It's like we're making up a story as a group, each player acting out a character. I love fantasy stories and a formal roleplaying game gives earstwhile grownups a chance to be imaginative and really play.
So after college I was interested in playing more games of the sort I like, and kept running into all these references to D&D. It is, at its core, a fantasy roleplaying game. I was worried about the whole magic/witchcraft thing -- I mean, who raised in an Evangelical home hasn't heard about how D&D will "open" you to all sorts of things? So Michael did a bunch of research. 'Cause that's what we do in our family. Lots of research. We're researching fools.

If anyone actually wants the links, I can get them, but I'll just sum up for now. Back when D&D first started, there was no negative image. It was just this game, you know? Then a couple of kids (seriously, like 2) committed suicide -- their cases weren't related, it was two separate suicides over a period of a couple of years. Questions were asked, like they always are, and the only thing anyone knew about these kids was that they played D&D. One of the moms started this huge campaign against D&D with this "List of 100" -- a list of people who have died as a result of D&D, basically. Well, the list has never broken the double digits.
What I found more telling is that the only thing anyone knew about these kids was the D&D. They had no real friends, other than the D&D groups.

Well, what goes on in a D&D group? You sit around with paper and pencils, the Dungeon Master leads you through an adventure. ("You're at the foot of a mountain. What do you do?" "I'll start up the mountain." "Straight up?" "No, I'll start spiraling up the mountain, going clockwise." [DM consults the map] "After half an hour, you come upon a river." etc.) There are skills checks to Listening, Use Rope, Swimming, and the like. Yes, there's magic. Depending upon what kind of magician you are (arcane or divine, and their subtypes), you pick a spell you want to cast from a list. That "spell" has its own rules, and the success or failure and the damage of that spell is determined by a die roll.

D&D is, at its core, a fantasy roleplaying game. A group adventure storytelling game. You don't even need the spellcasters (but they're fun because they're so unpredictable). The mechanic is a whole lotta rules and die roles and statistics. It's incredibly complicated, which is probably why more people don't play it -- there's a huge learning curve. But the stories are no more evil than the story in the Lord of the Rings. In fact, I'm sure someone out there has even come up with the stats for the whole Fellowship (people are geeky that way).

So to say someone committed suicide as a result of playing a game is, well, really trivializing whatever that person was actually going through. It's similar to saying that the boys at Columbine slaughtered their classmates because they wore black trenchcoats, or were slightly "goth." Um, no. That's ridiculous and insulting.

I hope that clears up any fears that I'm dabbling in the occult. I mean, really. We only sacrifice chickens on a leap year. Everyone knows that.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go look up ways to rain down holy punishment on a couple zombie ogres. My mace didn't do anything (I suspect Bludgeoning damage does nothing on the undead), so I've got to find a Slashing-type weapon and quick.




*A character is set up axes, if you will (since I'm already bugging the math people, I might as well continue): there's the Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic axis, then there's the Good-Neutral-Evil axis. OK, so they're not actually axes, but my brain's not working to come up with anything better and I'm feeling lazy. A character's place along these two "axes" (Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Good, etc.) is his/her "alignment." So seriously, no one could be "Evil."