Academic D&D ?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Debates around issues rose organically in lots and lots of folks' Mage: The Ascension games. I think it just depends on the setting and players a lot of time.

My players, who are engaged in what I think is a pretty classical D&D game (there's a mountain, there's a dragon, there's some kobolds, there's feuding dwarf clans, etc.) regularly get into debates about the role of religion in society, since there's a powerful state church and minor demihuman churches. It's done in the context of roleplaying and it doesn't get in the way of, say, kicking kobolds in the ass, but it comes up regularly.

 

[haakon1]

It's done in the context of roleplaying and it doesn't get in the way of, say, kicking kobolds in the ass, but it comes up regularly.

My campaign works about like that too.

 

[Drawmack]

This discussion reminds me of a Poly Sci professor I had while studying for my Undergrade. He taught poly sci through the use of fiction so that people's personal political prejudices wouldn't get in the way of the topic. He was an idiot.

 

[Danyael]

Not actually "academic"... But sometimes, when I just get the visit of a player out of game schedule, it is a good technique to make the player more familiar with the setting. It's like a general discussion, although in the fantasic context. They get to know people, religions, laws, regents, gods, sciences, etc. It is very good if you are looking for ideas, since the players start asking question like hell (so open a beer can and look at the star; a lot of ideas will rain shortly!).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I think it happens every time someone starts a Paladin thread.

No, seriously- the Paladin threads that get the most heated get into all kinds of ethical theories, the nature of religion, what does "good" mean, and so forth because of their Codes of Conduct.

Which is why I insist that anyone who wants to play a paladin IMC talks to me about their PC concept FIRST...and try to do the same when I want to play a Paladin. The game runs best when Player & DM are on the same page when it comes to how their Paladin is supposed to act.

 

[taliesin15]

These kinds of debates tended to come up more often once I was playing D&D with other college kids, particularly when at least one of them was in grad school. And it still comes up, due to the people involved. Can be good.

Questions of morality have been coming up IMC of late--all the PCs are Good alignments, starting at first level, and have been plundering a somewhat standard type dungeon, which includes populations of orcs, goblins, kobolds and hobgoblins at war with each other. They have on occasion found tortured prisoners alive and on the rack. Then, a big debate ensues.

Two years ago I had another party, mostly of neutral characters, encountering the same dungeon. The party entered a chamber where a group of kobolds was raping a goblin boy. One of the good characters rushed in to stop the abomination, while one of the neutral characters mockingly muttered something about "only we are allowed to promulgate genocide on subhuman species!"

In any case, I wanted to have questions of Good vs. Evil (or more specifically, what is the nature of Evil), and Law vs. Chaos in the game, so it doesn't seem like a two-dimensional milieu. Hopefully more of the *velvet* hammer...

 

[The Hound]

I know this isn't what you meant, but its a potential academic use of roleplaying - I've often wondered whether D&D type role playing concepts could be applied to teching things like political science, history, and anthropology. For example, someone could create detailed and historically accurate modules with unique character attributes and backgrounds on the characters, their societies, belief systems, and range of possible actions, that allowed students to sit down and role play things like a session of the Soviet Politburo, a day in the life of an Amazon villiage, or an adventure set in a historically realistic Roman city.

 

[haakon1]

I know this isn't what you meant, but its a potential academic use of roleplaying - I've often wondered whether D&D type role playing concepts could be applied to teching things like political science, history, and anthropology. For example, someone could create detailed and historically accurate modules with unique character attributes and backgrounds on the characters, their societies, belief systems, and range of possible actions, that allowed students to sit down and role play things like a session of the Soviet Politburo, a day in the life of an Amazon villiage, or an adventure set in a historically realistic Roman city.

It's actually fairly common in history and political science. I first roleplayed in about 1975 in an elementary school history class -- we each took different characters in the American Civil War and played them interacting with the others. And in honors European history in 1983, same thing for the French Revolution.

I can still remember both characters -- a North Carolina yeoman tobacco farmer -- pro-Confederate and racist but not rich enough to own slaves -- and the Cardinal of Paris. Being a natural, I didn't play them "mundane". The Cardinal cut a deal with the working class Parisians and the peasants to let the revolution go forward, but with the church keeping its lands, Catholicism staying the established church, and all schools being only parochial schools. Liberation theology is good enough for 1970s Latin America, it's good enough for 1780's France -- gotta roll with the punches if you want to keep a church around for 2000 more years, baby.

When I was in grad school TAing comparative politics, I did a role playing session for my class. Typical role playing that poli sci people do is the interest groups and Congress for American politics. I picked a fictional newly-freed Eastern European country (this was 1994), an amalgam of Latvia, Hungary, and Poland, if you must know, and assigned people roles like pensioner, Communist party boss, government-in-exile from the 1940s, manager of the train-car factory, train-car factory workers, billionaire American/former refugee who wants influence in the old country (George Soros), farmers, independence activist/shipbuilders union leader (Lech Walensa), etc. Fun to do once every couple of years.

 

[Dykstrav]

I've never seen anyone engage in D&D specifically with the idea of debate or exploring some real life issue. The people I play with generally want to kill critters and sack dungeons. That's been in almost 20 straight years of playing.

I'm not saying that D&D can't or shouldn't be used for such things, but people that want to discuss issues usually just discuss them instead of divorcing them from their context by placing them in a fantasy paradigm. Sure, there are issues and beliefs and all that in D&D, but they're more basic. Themes might be the cost of war and imperialism, for example, but without setting up a fantasy empire that's a direct analogue to the U.S. and the countries where the troops are. D&D tends to be a very personal experience, and much of this intimacy and flavor is lost when you "zoom out" onto a social level.

It's really terrible when it becomes obvious and forced. Think some episodes of the later Star Trek series when it flip-flopped between zany space adventures and high-ideal futurist soapboxing. I've seen some D&D games like this and they just fall flat. They force the players to confront themselves and the DM when they'd rather just kick back, drink a few cold ones and pretend to hack orcs into stewmeat.

One game I saw involved a new philosophy that all the organized religions of the game outright hated, called the Divinity of Humanity. Essentially, the Divinity of Humanity was a cult of atheists that had managed to train people as clerics while denying the power of every established god in the campaign's pantheon. We as the players assumed it was a hook- maybe an archdevil or some other intellectual evil was trying to seduce people away from religion? Maybe some unknown, newly forming god was emerging and had yet to reveal itself? Boy, were we let down.

Turns out the DM wanted to establish that he personally thinks all religion (in game and out of game) was hogwash and wanted to make sure everybody knew it. There could be clerics in his campaign because the game needs healers, but he didn't want to hear anything about prayers or gods or anything like that. We were all supposed to be enlightened secular humanists, and he strongly discouraged us to take religion seriously if our Intelligence scores were 10 or above. The only people of faith were concretely of below-average Intelligence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the campaign began to see more and more 'demented cultists' and 'bigoted paladins' attacking the Divinity of Humanity. The party wasn't interested in getting involved. We figured the Divinity of Humanity made its choice and had to deal with it. The DM then proceeded to get upset that we weren't interested in "killing stupid fundamentalists instead of orcs, at least the fundamentalists deserve it." (Paraphrased for brevity and content.)

The players didn't want to deal with this stuff. We wanted to kick in some doors and crack some skulls, not listen to a DM lecture us for four hours about his opinions. Our group consisted of some Christians, some atheists and some 'undecided,' nobody really cared about that. I think it spoke volumes when that particular game petered out. Last time I heard from that DM, he was trying to get together a game that was basically the civil war with half-orc slaves. Never heard how that one turned out though.

 

[Crothian]

Has anyone come together for a D&D session just to engage in philosophical or academic debate through D&D as a tool of narrative, social activity and deep immersion 'roleplaying' ?

Not that completely but I have had adventures that has this happen to some degree.