Dungeons

I woke up this morning having dreamt a wonderful dream.  I was hanging out with a childhood friend.  Our age was some nebulous number between perhaps eight and 18, but it would ruin the dream to give us an age, I think, so I'll just tell it like I dreamt it.

In the dream, we decided, as kids often do, to bust into some vacant lot just to see what was there and maybe kick some junk around.  It was fenced off with an old wooden fence, which we quickly jumped.  It was full of the most wonderful junk to kick across the patchy grass that grew up through the packed earth of the old lot.

"What do you want to do?" my friend asked.
"Let's play Dungeons and Dragons," I answered.
"But, we don't have the rulebooks, dice or character sheets," he pointed out.
"I mean, like we used to," I said.  "Let's just walk and play."

He agreed, and as we walked past the back edge of the vacant lot, we found a beautiful forest beyond.

Waking, I remembered that, back when I was a kid, my friends and I used to play a game that was, at some superficial level, Dungeons and Dragons, but, on another level, not any definable game by any rules that any corporation owned or published.

It had all started when my friend Sean came back from summer camp one year.  From kids he had met there, he had learned a game, which, in hindsight, I'm now absolutely sure was Dungeons and Dragons.  However, he called the game "Dungeons".  Whether that's what they had called it or that's what he changed the name to (sort of his own little kid trademark, if you will), I doubt we'll ever know.

There were no rules.  You just started out in a place called "Town", as in, "okay... you're in town."  You had a certain number of gold pieces to buy weapons, armor and equipment and, when you were done with that, you went to "the Dungeon", typically by way of some natural environment, such as wandering through a forest, slogging through a swamp, bushwhacking through a jungle, or crossing a desert.

"Dungeon" as a Dungeons and Dragons term (and later a computer/console RPG term) seems to mean a generic fantasy setting where the bad guys are.  It could be a haunted castle, a human-abandoned but monster-infested mine, some ancient ruins or even a wizard's palace in the sky.

For those of you who never played Dungeons and Dragons, the official game requires numerous character statistics, abilities and scores to be written down on a piece of paper called a "character sheet".  It also involves throwing dice to determine the outcome of any of a number of things heroes (or villains) might do on an adventure: fight monsters, find and disarm traps, sneak into an evil prince's castle, etc. 

It is typically played in a living room (or sometimes around a dining room table, since that's an easy place to gather around and put all your rulebooks, dice and character sheets).  As you can imagine, it's impossible to play the game on, say, a hike in the hills or walk through town and difficult to play on a road trip or the school bus.  There'd be no place to throw dice or spread out with your many rule books and character sheets.

It is typically played in a group of perhaps about four to nine.  It could be played with more, but, beyond a certain size, one reaches the point of diminishing returns.  If there are too many people, there are simply too many heroes for the game to be tenable.  In the other direction, below a certain size, it would be pointless, as the game is designed for multiple heroes with different abilities to cooperate to accomplish goals.

Dungeons and Dragons is a prime example of a class of games that are now called "tabletop role playing games", or tabletop RPG's for short (tabletop to distinguish them from computer or console RPG's, which were originally inspired by the tabletop variety).

The basic concept behind RPG's is simple and elegant.  One person, generically called the game master (or GM for short), is responsible for creating fictional scenarios and settings and for running any characters in them not played by the other players.  The other players (typically just called "players" in RPG parlance, as distinct from the GM) portray protagonists in the GM's scenarios. 

These scenarios typically involve fighting monsters, getting past traps, finding treasure, and, ultimately, achieving some sort of goal at the end, such as saving a princess from a dragon or slaying the giant who's been eating the kingdom's cattle.

However, as, I've said, this simple yet elegant premise is quickly bogged down when one gets to the details of the Dungeons and Dragons rules.  The rules are extensive and, to be honest, never end.  This is because Wizards of the Coast (the current owners of the game), and, before them, TSR (the original game company that created it) want to keep coming out with new rulebooks, so that players  keep spending money.  Throwing a few dice around doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of the rules.  These rules account for all manner of combat, the use of magic, use of abilities (like hiding in shadows and disarming traps) and, well, just about anything you can think of for heroes to do in a fantasy setting.

There are numerous character classes (and the list grows longer as new rulebooks get published) for various versions of the warriors, wizards and so forth that fantasy characters usually are.  There's also an extensive list of races from human to elf, dwarf and any of a variety of non-human but humanoid being that you can imagine in a typical fantasy world.

There is also a horde of monsters.  Goblins, dragons, giants, ogres, and hundreds if not thousands more monsters are all given their own separate listings, each with their own powers, abilities and statistics.

Dungeons, the game Sean taught us after returning from summer camp, was, by contrast, so much more innocent than that.  There were no rules, no rulebooks, no dice, no monster listings and no character sheets.  It maintained every bit of the elegantly simple premise without the quagmire of rules that would otherwise threaten its foundation.  It was, quite simply, an RPG without rules.

There were some other interesting differences, too.  For example, we kids would typically play Dungeons one on one (one GM and one player).  Occasionally, we'd play it with three of us, but that was the typical maximum. 

We almost never played it in a living room or around a dining room table.  Instead, we very often played it hiking or walking around.  Sometimes, we'd play it in the car or on the school bus, but that was mainly to pass the time during travel.  When we decided to play it at a time when we weren't bound by a seat belt, we'd almost always walk or hike while doing so.  Somehow, without needing a table to roll dice on or on which to pile up rule books, we'd grow antsy just sitting around a living room.  Walking around, particularly through some natural setting, was much more conducive to the sort of dreamy creativity we brought to the game.

This simple act of walking seemed to engage some part of our creativity that remains un-utilized just sitting still.  There was something about the act of aimlessly roaming that brought out a sense of unbound inspiration that would not or could not live within the stuffy confines of a room.

Playing Dungeons was amazing.  Without dice, character sheets or rules, it was so much more vivid and creative than Dungeons and Dragons or any other RPG I've played.  Monsters were not bundles of statistics with defined powers.  They were fantastical beings out of folklore and bedtime stories.  Goblins in Dungeons and Dragons are defined as not having any magical powers, but goblins in Dungeons would be whatever our imaginations pulled out of any fairytales, myths, bedtime stories or fantasy we had been exposed to.  If we thought a given goblin might have magic powers, we'd give it those powers.  If we thought it was big or small, fat or thin, green, brown, yellow or aquamarine, that's what it was.

Dragons were not lists of statistics about how much damage their breath did or the dimensions of the cone that it made.  They did not have armor classes or hit points.  They were dragons: the great and powerful fabulous beasts from fairy tales and epics.

If the hero fought a goblin or a dragon, the results were not determined by throws of the dice.  They were determined by whatever ingenuity the player had in dealing with such monsters.  Without hit points, goblins might perish at the single blow of a sword or arrow, but might make good use of their small size (if we imagined them to be small) to scurry through small cave tunnels or jump out from hiding places.  They might have ingenious traps or use mischievous magic to play pranks on the hero.  A hero's ability to defeat one might not be tied to his or her level or attack bonuses, because no such rules existed, but rather to his or her ingenuity to deal with the goblin's sly games. 

A dragon was a great and fiercesome beast.  Since there were no levels, hit points, armor classes, or attack bonuses, no amount of innate prowess of a hero would allow a hero to beat one at all easily.  If you were in the way when a dragon breathed fire, you'd die, so you'd better have a plan to not be there when the beast breathed.  If you slashed any ordinary sword (or even one that was magical but not in the way you needed it to be) at one, your blade might very well bounce off its nigh impenetrable scales. 

However, if you went on a quest to find a magic sword (or some similar item) specifically made to slay it, you might just stand a chance.  Even then, you'd need all the creativity and ingenuity you could muster to actually beat the vile creature.  If you came up behind it and it happened to swish it's tail, you might well get splattered on the stony wall of its lair.  Even if you dodged its fiery breath and managed to run under it to stab it through the heart, one stomp of one of its enormous feet would crush the life out of you.

Similarly, if you got past a trap, you had to really look for it.  If you were walking through the secret passage in the pyramid and you said you were looking at all the tiles on the floor to see if anything looked out of place, you might notice that some look different from the others or you might notice a tripwire running across them.  Otherwise, you might just trigger a trap and have to deal with the spikes coming out of the wall, the rolling boulder or the crushing ceiling that resulted from triggering it.  There was no "find traps" roll to find them, because there were no dice to roll.

In short, accomplishing goals in Dungeons required actually developing plans, having good ideas and developing sensible solutions to problems.  There were no hit points or armor class to fall back on if these failed.  This was simply because evaluating how clever a player's plan was was quite simply the only way the GM had of determining the outcome.

This not only meant that the game was more visceral and immediate.  It also had other advantages.  It required more thought and creativity for both GM and player to make a good game.  At the same time, a game wouldn't drag on and on just because a combat took several hours of dice rolling and chart consulting to play out.

Moreover, there were no limits on anything except what the GM and player agreed to.  Since there were no character classes, a character was whatever he or she actually was.  Magic items didn't come from a predefined list with predefined stats.  They were simply magic.  Whatever it made sense to us for them to do, they did.  Swords didn't come in +1, +2 or +3 levels of magic, like they do in Dungeons and Dragons.  They had special powers like maybe they could control all spiders (or whatever it was that we kids thought was cool--we liked creepy crawly stuff, at least in theory).

Somewhere along the way, though, I think we all lost the ability to play those games.  Somehow, adult minds are incapable of just knowing, as it were, the outcome of various actions and encounters in that shared fantasy the way our kid minds were.  As kids, we could just know if the hero beat the ogre or the ogre beat the hero.  As adults, somehow we need rules and dice, or at least something that feels objective to us, to make that determination.

For years after I stopped playing Dungeons, I played Dungeons and Dragons and other RPG's as an adult.  I was always frustrated with the rules and always felt bogged down and fenced in by them.  I seldom realized why, but I think one main reason was that Dungeons had been so much better; but I had lost the ability to have my mind "just know" what would happen next.

I used to like table top RPG's because they are, collectively, a relatively non-corporate form of entertainment.  Certainly it's an amateur form of entertainment, in that the GM is not a professional script writer or video game designer, but just a person with some fantastical scenarios.  TSR, in the early days, had a non-corporate feel to it.  It was started by some guys who were aficionados of battle tactics games and invented Dungeons and Dragons originally as an extension of those games.

So, TSR started out as people who loved something, making a living doing what they loved.  However, particularly after Gary Gygax, one of its founders, got pushed further and further out of company until finally he left it, especially when it was bought by Wizards of the Coast, and even more so when WotC was bought by Hasbro, Dungeons and Dragons has become just another commodity from just another corporation.

Moreover, many computer games and console video games were originally meant to model the table top RPG's.  In doing so, they took the amateur entertainment out of the picture.  They also killed all creativity by the participants and put the games onto rigid railroad tracks.  No matter how many switches these tracks may have or how complex the logic to switch tracks may be, they are all, at the end of the day, purely automatic games.  Players play them, sure, and, as such, contribute to some extent to them, but almost all of the creativity that a table top RPG offers is gone from them.  The irony is that computer RPG's would likely not exist if it had not been for table top RPG's.

Table top RPG's, in turn, were also the first step in dismantling creativity, even though they were originally intended, I think, to encourage creativity.  It would be impossible to make a video game out of Dungeons, because it has no rules.  It is a game consisting entirely of human creative consensus.

More and more, I worry that the creativity of children is being crushed by the corporate machine.  Even in my day, anonymous toys (tin soldiers, baby dolls, stuffed animals, etc.) that could be anything you imagine them being were being replaced by action figures from specific movies, TV shows, comic books, or cartoons.  Each Star Wars action figure, for example, represents exactly one character whose identity has already been created for you.  The same became true of G.I. Joe action figures once they became a cartoon.  Ditto for He Man and She Ra action figures.

Now, a further step has been taken.  Entire fantasy worlds, which were once the dreamscape of human imagination, are programmed for us by computers.  Elves and dwarves have long ceased to be figures of fairytales and myth for many people, I think, and instead become sets of statistics for video games.  It is no longer up to us what they're like, it's up to game designers and movie makers.  Worst of all, the people who are best at being creative are the ones whose creativity is being most often stolen: children.

Perhaps it takes something like the dream I had last night to get back to that child's creativity that I had back when I hiked in the hills and played Dungeons.  It occurs to me that the fence may symbolize the limits placed upon our creativity.  The junk may represent the corporate tripe that is made to look like the fantastical world of our collective creative minds, but is, in fact, just the empty shells of leftover and discarded fantasy.  The forest beyond might well be the open wild landscape of the true fantasy that can only come from our own minds.  Perhaps one day, I'll walk those woods again.

I have fond memories of my carefree days as a kid dreaming up fantastical adventures with my friends in our own, unique and special game that no corporation owns: Dungeons.