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The Dungeon Masters

Instead, this film was a travesty.

Allow me to explain.

When I was handed a copy of The Dungeon Masters to review, I was really excited to watch it. A documentary about my peeps? Hell yes, let me at it! And then I started to read the brief synopsis on the back of the box; alarm bells began to sound soon after.

“…their baroque fantasies are at odds with their mundane real lives, and they find it increasingly difficult to gain satisfaction from the imaginary triumphs provided by Dungeons and Dragons.”

I can already sense that this subsection of our subculture is going to be unfairly represented by people whose lives are ruled by the game instead of being supplemented by it. But I figured, whatever, let’s watch it anyway. My husband and I hunkered down on the couch after a rather lengthy marathon of How I Met Your Mother to watch The Dungeon Masters.

My optimistic mood died almost as quickly as the opening credits reeled. I watched in silent horror as my fellow role-players came across as a bunch of nutjobs with one foot firmly planted in the psych ward. I blinked back tears as I watched Dungeon Master after Dungeon Master at GenCon 2006; I was suddenly watching my people through a stranger’s eyes and not really sure what I was looking at.

It only got worse as the focus shifted from GenCon to Scott, to Richard, and finally to Elizabeth. Perhaps it’s because I’m not from America. Perhaps it’s because I grew up around role-players, Dungeons and Dragons, and an exorbitant amount of gamers. Or perhaps it’s because this film was made by someone who has never played a game of D&D in his life. In any case, The Dungeon Masters missed the point of role-playing: telling stories and having a ridiculous amount of fun in the process.

Sadly, the film has done little more than cement the mass-media myth that role-playing games are for freaks that dress up and play pretend with a rulebook. It perpetuates the stereotype of geek that should have died with Revenge of the Nerds. We don’t wear suspenders with our pants pulled all the way up to our armpits; we’re the new geek chic.

Role-playing games are much more than playing pretend, as we gamers are well aware of. Pen & Paper RPGs provide us a chance to tell stories collaboratively as we sit around with our friends, drink beer, and shoot the breeze in between encounters. Or, in my case, D&D allows me to sit around my apartment on a Friday morning on Skype with my friends as we shoot the breeze while sipping on coffee and laughing about our Halfling Paladin needing an alignment change again.

We are as varied in our social backgrounds as we are in our character sheets. We will not be defined by the sweeping glance of a film-maker as he attempts to put role-players into a box labeled “Social Outcasts, Freaks, and Pathetic Nerds”. We role-players are your neighbours, your cubicle mates; the entrepreneur down the street; the pretty blonde girl with the big green eyes. We are families. We are groups of friends that get together once a week to catch-up and enjoy each other’s company — we’ve probably been doing this once a week since tenth grade. Some of us were afraid of D&D to begin with — we originally bought into the stereotype — and now we’re casting our D20 into the dice pool, determined to make it through the next encounter to see what happens next.

If you want an accurate (and entertaining) subsection of D&D culture, watch Of Dice and Men. If you want to understand the passionate storytelling and comradeship involved in role-playing games, listen to the Penny Arcade D&D Podcasts with Wizards of the Coast. Hell, even going down to your local hobby store and hanging out with some of the RPG slinging folks there will give you more of a sense of who role-players are and why we do what we do.

Just please, for the love of Pelor, don’t watch The Dungeon Masters.

Release Date: 07/10/2009
Languages: English
Genre: Comedy
Runtime: 120.0 mins

You may remember Tripod. They appeared at the Microsoft Keynote during CES 2009. Apparently they didn’t go down the way it was hoped when it came to entertaining the audience – which our own Angels Trina and Cherith were part of. If you don’t know of Tripod, let me introduce you.

Tripod are a group of 3 men who formed while they were in university. After a bit of busking at malls, they appeared in a TV variety show competition where they got their big break. They soon performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and began to appear on radio. Their popularity has since seen them produce many a CD and DVD.

Members Scod (Scott Edgar), Yon (Simon Hall) and Gatesy (Steven Gates) perform musical numbers that are sometimes parodies of well-known songs or satirical takes on everyday observations and musings. Their material isn’t just based on this however – their antics during numbers can be just as amusing. The boys are also geeks at heart having used subjects such as Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons in their work.

Lately their humour has (to me) been declining, which is evident in the release of “Tripod: Live at Woodford”. Here they perform 12 songs at the Woodford Folk Festival. The audience themselves appeared to mainly consist of young people (many of whom probably weren’t old enough to have been there). It left me feeling a little bored, but not as much as the special features did to be honest.

Speaking of Special Features:

• How to train an attack dog from scratch: a made-up history of the funny song

From left: Gatesy, Scod and Yon

Don’t get me wrong, I love watching Tripod’s performances. In this case however, I didn’t enjoy it as much. If they had chosen a different venue (with a more controlled environment) and used better material, I would have given this a more positive review. Sorry Tripod, but I wasn’t with you on this one!

Review product was provided by Madman Entertainment, and does not affect the outcome of this review.

Images © 2009 Tripod

My first campaign was Earthdawn, in which I played a T’skrang archer, the elfiest T’skrang you’d ever meet – because I was teased that every girl’s first character is an elf. To avoid that stereotype, which is a bit silly, I admit, I picked the T’skrang, the least conventionally attractive (besides the Ork) of the lot. And I was timid during my first campaign, because all these gentlemen had been gaming for years – decades for some – longer than I had. But my timidity coupled with the absolutely ridiculous damage that the archer class deals made me come off as a silent, wandering crusader, a la Clint Eastwood. The problem in this is that Earthdawn Elves are much more like Vulcans than they are the airy-fairy waify Fae creatures that most imagine they are, they are much more stoic and reserved.

I have since, more or less, gotten over that Girls Only Play Elves stigma (which, I suppose, stems from there being no “Pretty Pretty Princess” class), and I try to enforce the silliness of that stereotype to any woman I bring into the gaming fold. If you want to play an elf, you can play an elf and don’t let any boy stop you. In fact, I had an elf in the short-lived D&D 4e campaign back in October. And I quite liked her.

We have started a new Earthdawn campaign, and my boyfriend, who is known as Blur, is running it. The table borders on large, with four players, two of whom are a married couple, Michael and Ashley, a gentleman by the name of Brian, and myself. With the exception of a one-shot session of Lacuna Blur ran for Michael, Ashley, and me, this is Ashley’s first experience in role-playing. I’ve been trying to be her guide and voice of reason, beyond what the GM can provide. I know what she’s going through, and I’m trying to address the problems that I’ve had and still have, character-wise.

So we made characters back in December, but didn’t get to play a session until January. By then, I had lost the feel for my character (which was a human thief loosely based on Parker from TNT’s Leverage), and Ashley had lost the feel for hers as well. Blur, in his infinite GM-saintliness, as also his knowledge of having to live with me, granted that we tweak our characters to our desires, or even remake some. Games have been few and far between, and as I write this in February, we have only had two sessions, and I think it’s fair to let people fiddle around with characters and their development – especially because he runs such a character-driven game.

So during one of our regular evenings together with Netflix, a roaring fire, a beagle and a chihuahua mutt, Blur instructed us to remake our characters, so that they aren’t the same person. That had been a problem – our original characters, her elf troubadour and my human thief, made out of sight and earshot of the other’s, ended up being remarkably similar, names, coloration and everything. And when we had been discussing revamping them, totally separately, we kept coming up with the same ideas. So Blur sat us down with our Player’s Guides and new character sheets and said, “Talk to each other this time. Get out of each other’s heads.”
New result: Ashley has a human scout, who is city-based, and I have an elven beastmaster, who is obviously wilderness-based. The similarities of characters has never been the real problem; it has only been that we haven’t discussed how to cover all the bases between us. We have a backstory that will allow us to integrate really well with each other, and with the storyline.

During her character generation, we talked about stats that were important to the class, racial bonuses she’d be getting, and how to avoid the Jack of All Trades syndrome. Since she is going to be a city-based scout, her dexterity and perception stats are going to be the most important. She also threw a bunch into strength and toughness, and had little left over for willpower and charisma. This all sounds good if you’re going to be a woods/wilderness-based scout, because you’ll have your navigation talents and survival checks, but if you’re spending all your time in the city underworlds, you’re going to need to be able to talk to people, manipulate them, and not get pushed around. Toughness is a great stat to have high, of course, because it gives you more recovery checks after combat, but I told her strength was probably going to play a limited role in what she wanted for her character.

And that’s the point: you pay attention to the stats you NEED for your class, but you have to consider them in light of the PERSON you’ve got forming in your head. Personality is the key part in determining the rest of your stats, unless you’re just looking to twink the hell out of the character and the game, and I suppose everyone goes through that stage.

But the point is if you’re going to play, and play successfully, you need to have someone (or everyone) be willing to fill in some gaps, even if filling them in isn’t precisely what they originally intended their character to do. It is, after all, only a game, and as long as you have fun, you win.

A list of the full update from the press release is below:

New Adventure Pack: Path of Inspiration — When the Inspired from the distant city of Dar Qat offered to renovate Stormreach’s old Harbor they said they were interested only in trade and friendship. But are the Inspired a dream come true or a sinister nightmare? Explore five new high-level dungeons that will take you beneath the Harbor, to a savage island, and into your own mind as you track down the Inspired’s terrible secret. Path of Inspiration will be free to all DDO VIPs and available for purchase in the DDO Store. This pack includes 6 adventures, two large wildernesses (The Vale and the Subterrane) with 95 quests, plus three distinct Raids.

Introducing Veteran Status – Players will be able to achieve Veteran Status by earning 1000 favor in game and unlocking the ability to create characters which enter the game at level four. All new characters they create will immediately be able to level themselves up to level four, and start right in the Marketplace instead of Korthos Island.

New Epic Difficulty Setting! – DDO Unlimited introduces the new Epic difficulty level! Selected dungeons and raids now have an additional difficulty level, which can only be accessed by 20th level characters that have completed the adventures on the Elite difficulty level. Epic quests will let players upgrade and customize their named items to create the most powerful treasure in the game!

DDO Store Catalog Expands – Players can now choose from over 100 new items being added to the new DDO Store including 32-point build characters, a size upgrade to the shared account bank, new hair styles, Reincarnation items and more!

For a MMO that one can essentially play for free this is pretty impressive! Below is also a video highlighting the new Adventure Pack.

This is like a DM’s craziest dream right? I’ve come in contact with a Microsoft Surface table once in Seattle during PAX. For those who haven’t, it’s a table with an interactive surface that can be used via touch. It can show pictures from a device placed on it, display data, and can be used for games. But I didn’t even think of this usage which seems the most practical!

The Surfacescapes team at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University came up with a real Dungeons & Dragons demo. This is a tech work in progress but this is pretty cool to see. The video shows character registration, dm scene setup, and the interactive world map.

While this mode is probably way more expensive than most DMs can afford, the breakdown and ease in the menu system may be what Dungeons & Dragons needs to bring in new gamers.

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.

• Potion of Healing
• Sneak Attack
• Bigby’s Crushing Thirst Destroyer
• Dwarven Draught
• Eldritch Blast
• Illithid Brain Juice

There are two different cases, a case of six for $10.99 or a case of 12 for $18.99. They will also come with a limited edition Drow figurine while supplies last. I’d be interested to see what the flavors of the different sodas are as Jones is great with making some interesting flavor combinations into sodas (like their Thanksgiving set).

via Topless Robot

We extend our condolences to Arneson’s family and loved ones. Dave Arneson was a great man who helped create a world that many gamers enjoyed. His co-creator, Gary Gygax died last year.