When I was a wee lass, green with envy because my GM kept his dice in a Crown Royal pouch and mine were in an old peanut butter jar, games were the province of the nerds. D&D was played by the kinds of people capable of keeping a hundred damage tables in their heads. Computer games were played by people capable of getting the game installed on machines that were not intended to be user friendly unless the user was a genius.

It meant we gamers were… well, dorks. Fringe people. The end of the bell curve. And although no one had ever heard of Asperger back then, let’s just say that now most of us look back at our tabletop campaign group, and go, "Oh. Yeah. That explains a lot about good ol’ Billy, and probably Eric too."

However, some of us weren’t necessarily geniuses when we cracked our first module. We weren’t as smart as the kids who really took to the genre, but we found ourselves at the table anyway, seeking refuge from the savages. It doesn’t take much to be above average, and it doesn’t take much for average children to go all lord of the flies on any deviations from the norm. In that respect, RPGs and their gaming cousins were a blessing and a curse for those of us only slightly ahead of the curve.

See, gaming made us smarter, and ruined any chance at mediocrity.

Crack open a Gary Gygax original and prove it to yourself. I’m holding an AD&D Players Handbook from 1978. What’s in the 100+ pages? Medieval weaponry, most of it obscure. Mathematical progression tables, influenced by multiple variables. Names and places taken from myths and legends. Multisyllabic words, many not used in casual conversation or by the media. Systems of ethics, from both before and after the Christian era. Budgeting. Planning. Spatial awareness, for crying out loud.

Every page of this slim little book could send anyone with the slightest degree of imagination into half a dozen directions of further study and investigation. And this is just the toolkit for the game. The actual game took another degree of imagination, creativity, and dedication.

Now, consider the fact that most of the people who played this thing started around age twelve.

Serious players had a stronger grasp of math, a wider vocabulary, a certain grasp of the breadth and depth of history, a more creative imagination, and all of that at a much earlier age than people who did not play. Well, unless the non-player was an intellectually curious, avid reader at twelve.

But some people were too smart for their own good. And the overlap between the computer kids and the D&D kids made the advent of computer-assisted D&D inevitable. Dice rolling is fun to a point, but it can get tedious. Attacking high level monsters is bloodthumping excitement in the hands of the right GM, but in the hands of most it became round after round of table checking, simple addition, and boredom. Surely the computer could automate some of this drudgery, leaving the players free to do nothing but the good bits.

And at first, that’s all that happened. Most of the people playing were the ones who’d learned the systems, with their lore and vocabulary and historical underpinnings. Not all, but most. With the computer handling the dice, campaigns needed to have a lot more content, since people could blow through a dungeon in a tenth of the time, but that was the point, right?

Only, at that speed, and with the participants no longer huddling around a 1”=10’ map, people began to have trouble remembering where they were in space. Wouldn’t graphics help?

Step by inexorable step, the melding of RPGs and computers brought us to the current state of affairs. Today, the sons and daughters of D&D have spawned a generation of people who type “ne1 help plz” without a shred of irony. Their games are home to every mouth breathing knuckle dragging one handed typist who ever managed to gain access to a stolen credit card. The thoughtful, erudite intellectual who knows a ranseur from a partisan finds himself getting called a faggot by people who gave their female avatars the asses of fifteen year old boys.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Since we can’t turn back the clock, we must take steps to reclaim gaming from the masses. Those of us who can count to twenty without taking off our socks must band together against those who live in places that permit intermarriage between siblings. We must harass anyone who types “u” when they mean “you.” We must kill steal from those who think “If You Seek Amy” is clever wordplay. We must exp leech the people who think Saruman died the way he did in the movie.

Above all, we must enforce the death penalty against people who play assassin characters, but refer to themselves as cosmetics.

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Sanya Weathers

Originally Posted by Deyth I miss D&D.