davywavy | [Gaming] Everything I know, I learned from D&D.

[Gaming] Everything I know, I learned from D&D.

In my post of last week about history students not knowing the words 'despotic' or tyrant', one thing that came out in the comments was the number of people who'd first encountered governmental types in the first edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Concepts like Theocracy, Gerontocracy, and Oligarchy were covered and I certainly learned what they were from obsessively reading it.
The first edition of AD&D was crammed with ideas and facts which weren't really relevant to the game itself but which Gary Gygax plainly thought were interesting and stuck in simply because he could, and I learned a lot from it. From the DMG I learned governmental types and aristocratic titles from around the world, nautical terms and ships rigging, and the names and purposes of different bits of castles. From the Monster Manual and Dieties and Demigods I learned enough about mythology and pantheons from around the world (and even the word pantheon itself) to get me an A in General Studies A-Level. From the Players Handbook I learned basic psychiatric terms like Id and Ego and Nietzschean concepts like the Will to Power, plus more about polearms than I've ever really needed to know. I learned the names of the polyhedra, and from our home-brewed combat systems I learned to multiply fractions in my head.
It wasn't just D&D; from Call of Cthulhu I learned 1920's technology and US social history, plus a heck of a lot of geography (the Andaman islands and Nan Madol on Pohnpei were common hangouts for villainous beasties from beyond). From Traveller and Space Opera I got sun and planet classifications and more social groupings and geographic terms. From Vampire: The Masquerade, I learned the astonishing power of a British accent in the USA.
From all of these sources I learned problem solving and how to think my way through obstacles.

And my parents used to think I was just wasting my time. Tchah!

So, question for the day to all you gamers out there: What have you learned from gaming?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Slightly OT, but in a similar vain, an article about video games (http://www.gamesradar.com/f/dumb-things-your-folks-say-about-games/a-20090722111642322017)

Everything I learned about corporate schmoozing I learned from playing a political Toreador in a vampire larp. When the men in suits appear, I just remind myself that they have way more status than me, and act accordingly.

My first vampire character inspired me to research the history of 19th century Poland in huge detail. I later tried to do something similar for a Vampire Dark Ages character and rapidly learnt that was a mistake. The more one knows about history, the worse the White Wolf historical games were.

Ars Magica, on the other hand, is a brilliant medieval social history source book. Really well researched.

Call of Cthulhu taught me a lot about jazz music for some reason. I blame that 'follow me down' song at the back of the first main rulebook I read.

In Nomine initially taught me a lot about Catholic theology. Then I started dating

pierot and his rants about what was wrong with In Nomine taught me even more.

Writing games is another good source of information; I remember when i was writing Diablerie on teh Orient Express I read around all kinds of subjects, including Pythagoreanism, Dadaism, Albanian History, the First Vatican Council and all kinds of other stuff. It was tremendous fun.

Tht sounds like somebody getting distracted using Wikipedia

This were back in 'tgood old days, before Wikipedia even existed.

Thinking aout this, I can sympathise with him - one of the things which killed Requiem stone dead for me was the intellectual and theological vacuuity of the Lancea Sanctum. I could never get the though "They got a bunch of genius, immortal theologians together and the best they could come up with was this?" Out of my head.

Requiem in general makes very little coherent sense. The Lancea Sanctum are, I agree, especially bad. In general that's the problem with a number of gaming philosophies tho. Real life philosophy gets designed by Plato, or Satre, or Voltaire, who may be mad as toast, or kinda obnoxious but were all really smart men. Gaming philosophy (Sabbat paths of Englightenment, Lancea Sanctum etc) gets designed by blokes in faded t shirts who went to about 30% of the Philosophy 101 lectures before they dropped out to play D&D.

This comes down to my theory of 'game generations', I think.

1st generation games (original D&D, Traveller, CoC, etc): The euthors wrote what they knew and loved. They didn't have much of an idea how to build game systems or working engines, but they poured in a lot of real-world information and background to give depth and ideas.
2nd generation games (Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Paranioa, V:TM etc): the authors took the RP concept and built on it. They created games and wrote engines which were genre specific. A unification of gamers and real-world enthusiasts.
3rd generation games (Requiem, 4th ed D&D): Games written by people whose cultural references are other roleplaying games. External validation against real-world references no longer required.

That said, there was a really enjoyable point in the Followers of Set with people writing rationalisations of the Path of Typhon against real-world philosophies like Buddhism and Existentialism. I really enjoyed that as an intellectual exercise.
However, this was necessitated by the fact that the FoS source material was bobbins and we had to make the best of it.

Similar things to you in terms of terminology but it also helped with my English a lot. For example, I learned translating English ad hoc, i.e. reading out an English text as if it was written in German (most of the games I ran were from English books like Earthdawn and Chill).
This sort of translation was actually later a subject at translator's school and I was really good at it because I'd been practising for years before that. ;o)
One exercise was a newspaper article about the Turin Shroud and one sentence was along the lines of "Some experts believe it to be a medieval forgery." and I just read it without thinking, hearing gasps all around me from those who'd never heard "medieval" or "forgery".

It always impresses me that your command of English is significantly better than that of many people for whom it is a first language.

That's a huge compliment, thank you.
I put that down to being taught by native speakers at translator's school because the English at German schools is abysmal. A friend at that school who went on to train as an English teacher gave up on it because she kept having to correct the lecturers' English...
I also seem to have some kind of natural affinity with English and I hardly needed to memorise vocabulary. Only English, though, I never got the hang of French or Italian.
Obviously, moving to the UK improved my English even further, especially in terms of everyday usage.

Now if only I could get my spoken English to the level of my written English, I'd be happy. Then again, I've never been a good or coherent speaker, not even in German.

I suspect that the teaching of English in Germany is better than the teaching of German in England. I mean, you wouldn't believe that I've got four years of German lessons behind me, would you?

Possibly but German is an intrinsically difficult language to learn. It took me 20 years of school and then the spelling reform came along and I had to almost start from scratch.
English is so much easier in principle because there are fewer and less strict rules in grammar, sentence structure etc. As soon as you've got the basics, all you need to do is improve your vocabulary and usage.

In the last year of my degree we did the Goethe Institute Certificate exam (the highest German certificate for non-native speakers) for a laugh. Now, this was a class of hardcore linguists who had all decided that language was to be their career and everybody struggled with it. I have no idea how non-native speakers who lack the feel for the language are supposed to cope with it.

My old International Relations Prof. Pelczynski, though a true Polish patriot, always used to claim that his native tongue was an ugly one; but that German was a sublimely beautiful language.

I don't recall learning anthing else from him, mostly because us St. Custard's types could always get out of having failed to write the weekly essay (again) by asking him to tell us (again) about the sewer fighting he did during the '44 Warsaw Rising.

D

See, I keep on thinking that most of what I learned from years of roleplaying was a bunch of useless crap. I am never going to need to know, for instance, the sequence of spells that dismantles a prismatic sphere*, but this knowledge is locked permanently in my brain. I can tell you more about the political geography of Faerûn, circa 1371 (The Year of the Unstrung Harp in DaleReckoning) than I can about any non-fictional continent in a time period that actually existed.

Granted, Vampire probably gave me a broader knowledge of History than I would have had if I'd never played it, but it also gave me a series of completely fictionalised annotations along with it, like how Hannibal was a Brujah ghoul, or that no less than three clans claim Rasputin as a member, and interestingly enough they all have Obfuscate as an in-clan discipline. Even areas I know quite a lot about get these completely imaginary footnotes. I've got an interest in the history of computing, and whenever I read about Alan Turing committing suicide because his sexuality undermined his credibility with the authorities, a little voice in the back of my head goes "or, as a pioneering Virtual Adept he actually transferred his consciousness over to the digital web following a Technocracy attempt to murder him".

It's like learning, but none of it is real.

*If you were curious, Cone of cold, Gust of Wind, Disintegrate, Passwall, Magic Missile, Continual Light and Dispel Magic, in that order.

I avoided all that in-canon Cam nonsense by the simple expedient of never reading any of the background material, reasoning that 1) My character wouldn't know it so nor should I, as it's impossible to un-know information, and 2) it was pretty much all crap anyway and I figured I had better things to do with my time than read it.

That said, I reckon I can tell you the AC and Hit Dice of pretty much every monster from the 1st edition Monster Manual, and my mastermind specialist subjects would be The Golden Age of 2000ad, 1981 - 1987, and Big Hair Rock 1981 - 1992, so who am I to criticise others for useless knowledge?

Wait, so that'd be the Setites, the Malkavians, and...?

(deleted comment)

I'm surprised you didn't learn the even greater power of not going in the first place.

We slow lurnaz.

I spent weeks researching the technology and politics in Canada in 1855-1870, although how much I now retain is moot, and I read history for fun anyway.

I learned a better grasp of probability. I learned how to program my graphic calculator to roll polyhedral dice for me. I learned the word 'polyhedral'. I learned about polearms. I read about Tiamat and then on to the Epic of Gilgamesh just because Tiamat was a name I knew from AD&D and reading about one led to reading the other. I've since forgotten all I knew, mind, but at one point I did know about them.

I learned a lot about unambiguous phrasing, just from theoretical use of a 'wish' spell or djinn. I learned how to split hairs into the finest floss, from rules lawyers and munchkins. I learned how to say 'no' and mean it, from those same munchkins.

I learned how to manage the behaviour of and keep the interest of a group of adults, mostly older than me. I learned how to organise complicated paperwork and how to present information verbally. I learned about deadlines through gaming long before I learned about them at work - school homework deadlines are *not* the same. I learned how to think quickly when I failed to do my background work. I could probably do a presentation on any subject at the drop of a hat just by thinking 'this is a scenario' and making up a successful NPC.

I learned about future tech, some of which is now present tech, from Cyberpunk 2020, and how to extrapolate from now to probable-future, even where to look for new developments. I learned a lot about building security, some of which has been applicable to real life since then.

I also use RP skills in business. I can actually demonstrate specific points where I've thought "Okay, the DM has presented me with this problem, how do I get round it?", and come up with answers which have been profitable.

Perhaps the first word in the English language that I ever picked up was "sword", for much similiar reasons.

I'm often curious as to how old you actually are; for example, your command of English is rather better than many people for whom it is a first language, which is doubly impressive as I get the impression that you're in your early-mid 20's.

Yep, mid twenties. And hey, thanks. Although in the interests of fairness I should say English is a mandatory subject for everyone around here starting from around the age of nine or ten. Turns out it's useful and all.

I think it's a mandatory subject from birth for most people in this country, so it amazes me how bad some people are at it.

We get off easy, though, language-wise. It's all very logical for us. It's one letter, one sound, so if you can speak, it's practically guaranteed you can write.

It's not like that at all if you're growing up as a native English speaker. In fact, I'm half convinced there's a secret cabal of spiteful old Roman and Norman guys still hiding somewhere in Salisbury, periodically foisting words like "pharyngital" upon the world.

I have a friend who does a lot of work with Nokia, which involves him spending a lot of time in Helsinki. They say that the Finns are just that bit...odd...and reckons that it's the language containing concepts which just don't map onto English makes them view the world at a different angle (for want of a better word) to us.

That does happen. I can't really say how pronounced the effect is compared to, say, German or Farsi or Hebrew or whatever, though. Some of it is probably a matter of nuance more than anything.

Once I spent half an hour trying to find a good English word to describe a petrol-station bar room (of the alcohol serving kind). Another time I was jotting down political crap on LiveJournal, and I quoted a guy who happened to use an honorary Finnish title conferred to industry bigshots. It turns out there's no sensible way to translate it whatsoever.

There's also a really mundane thing about "Finnish English" that's universally a little weird for native English-speakers. Finnish lacks almost all melody. A Finn speaking English is liable to drop out all the meaningful ups and downs as well, meaning the words will come out in a kind of a strange, flat monotone. It's a part of why Finnish athletes consistently come off like something out of a John Romero zombie flick in interviews.

Someone once commented that I sometimes write in an oddly germanic fashion - I have a tendency to put verbs at the end of the sentence (such as saying "blah blah blah, I think" rather than "I think blah blah blah"). I wonder if that's a very faint holdover from the days when my bit of the country was run by the vikings.
One of the very many things I like about English is the sheer flexibility of it as a tool, as compared to other languages I've encountered. I like that Wodehousian power the language has which allows me just to pick a word and say "I'm going to put this word here and have it mean so-and-so".

I always thought that Finns spoke in that flat monotone simply in order to unnerve the Russians and make them thing twice about having another go.

I learned how to spell Consitution properly.
I learned how to drop Obfuscate and Alacrity into seemingly normal conversations.
I learned that manning stalls with Dave is somethings a very interesting experience.
I learned a lot of little things that made me go out and learn more about subjects- societies and civilisations.
Above all I learned how to write and run a good game.
And learned that when running a LARGE organisation (national or international sized) ALL those things which run a good game fail and you have to use other things.
I learned that large groups of role-players will ALWAYS fall out with each other all the time... over the same things they fell out with each other over last year.
And will fall out over next year.
I learned that gamers NEED TO USE SHOWERS more often.
I learned more from gaming than I did from Star Trek, but learned more from work than I did from gaming.
I learned that Gaming can be both brilliant and crap- and what makes it is the people you game with.

I have learned far more from games than I care to admit. If nothing else, RPGs have awarded me both an incredible ability to survive the office political environment, and to be perhaps overly paranoid about the slightest rumour. ;-)

But do you get your rumours from the innkeeper?

Of course, but I do make an exception for Fawlty Towers. ;-)

Basil Fawlty would be a great NPC for Call of Cthulhu!

"What? What!? Something in the cellar? Dont be ridiculous, there's nothing in the cellar! That screaming is...it's Manuel. he's from Barcelona, you know. (Opens cellar door to sounds of baying, gibbering and screaming) Manuel! Stop that blasted dago racket!"

"Excuse me, Mr. Fawlty, but my sausages appear to be tentacles! Oh bugger."

Now that's a film I'd pay money to see! ;-)

I am feeling inspired to write "Fawtaghny Towers" as a game for GenCon nest year.

If you do - I'll be there

I'm currently bouncing around several ideas in my head - Reginald Jeeves and the Temple of Doom, Innsmouth Vice, The Shadow over Butlins...

That said, I reckon that The Shadow over Butlins could combine quite neatly with Fawtaghny Towers.

Assuming GenCon even runs next year

I reckon it will; I know some of the people in the group who've taken over the license and they're big hitters. I reckon they'll try to do with it what Horsemen were told to do with it six years ago.

Yes please!

EDIT: Just so long as it doesn't become a case of, "I recommend the self-service here."

Edited 2009-07-29 13:47 (UTC)

That would be Gencon UK, you understand.

A couple of t-shirts you might like:
Cthullu (http://www.offworlddesigns.com/p-63-zz-everything-cthulhu-t-shirt.aspx)
Gaming (http://www.offworlddesigns.com/p-57-everything-gaming-t-shirt.aspx)

Both disappointing given how funny Mr Kovalic can be... but none the less, appropriate to your current post.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Gaming] Everything I know, I learned from D&D.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject