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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mr. Kaze" data-source="post: 1494575" data-attributes="member: 8848">So this is the sort of thing I'll be emailing in...After a week of working as a computer programmer writing B2B software for the bloated Accounts Payable of a mega-corporation, being able to pretend that we can do amazing things that have global repercussions as part of a relaxing game is really quite enjoyable.  I rather suspect that most D&D players are introverts and the concept of a world small enough for them to have a significant historical impact on it (without becoming president or something) is really quite appealing.  We contribute time and money to charities in real life to try to make the real world a better place too, but there's just plain more reality than we can actually fix or have a historic/epic impact upon -- so we scale it down, spice it up and enjoy the unfolding of the story.My current character is a halfling Shugenja (Oriental Adventures, 6) Fire Elemental Savant (Tome & Blood, 1) called Tso Nao Wut.  Can't say much for the class selection, but I love that name.  But mostly I DM.Every evil party needs to have a troll.  And then be set upon by a single Umber Hulk which liberally uses its Confusion gaze attack.  That fight -- against a single umber hulk -- took an hour and saw... - The fighter sit on the troll. - The troll sit on the fighter. - The cultist fail every single saving throw available to him. - The umber hulk get away when there were enough troll scraps lying on the ground to keep it well fed for the next three years.Session jourals 10 & 12 at <a href="http://www.bardicgrove.org/~kaze/darkstar.xml" target="_blank">http://www.bardicgrove.org/~kaze/darkstar.xml</a> are also classics (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil spoiler warning...) for my group.Because the culturally successful fantasy and sci-fi ventures like The Matrix and Star Wars are ruined by the, quite frankly, defective storytelling readily witnessed in The Matrix: Revolutions and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.  When the target audience could tell a better story by sitting around a table than our dear modern cultural shamans tossing tens of millions of dollars at their epic stories, then there's going to be a market for a storytelling framework (that doesn't cost tens of millions of dollars).  D&D has, since the release of the vastly more flexible d20/3.0 rules, provided a suitable storytelling framework running counterpoint to the tripe we're given in the movie theater.Now that can explain FRPG-ing in general -- but what's so special about sword & sorcery D&D?  After all, the two film examples given were both sci-fi, right?Well there's two things to consider.  First of all, any character-driven story can be put into virtually any setting with any set of actors.  Consider Shakespeare's works and their abject lack of stage directions -- their storylines (and sometimes even their lines, characters, titles, etc) are readily channelled into modern storytelling.  You can see Hamlet's conflict with his stepfather as much in Luke Skywalker denying that Darth Vader is his father as you can potentially see it in a tiefling struggling against their fiendish heritage.  The hero and the villian are blood-relations and the hero has to actively fight against the villian, knowingly putting them into the moral ambiguity of "how am I different from them?"  And it's far more satisfying for a player to be able to answer that for their character than it is to sit through four hours of Hamlet just to watch him die at the end or through Return of the Jedi just to see Darth Vader get the "Turnaround Deadbeat Dad of the Year" award by saving Luke from the emperor.Second of all, we've reached a technical point of boredom.  The wireless broadband internet, cell phones, even space travel used to be awe-inspiring technologies that we could only imagine in movies.  Well we've got all of that now -- and we've got the pop-up ads to show for it.  Probably the best example of a modern sci-fi film is Minority Report -- there's a bit of advanced technology and the like there, but most of what we see of our culture reflected back at us are ubiquitous personalized pop-up ads.  And if that's the best our culture can use technology for, then maybe we were better off when we didn't have to think about technology.  It's been noted that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Asimov, I think) and so -- giving up on actual technology -- the natural regression is back to magic.  Really, if I could subject you to a 10d6 fireball or 10d6 pop-up ads, which would you rather be on the receiving end of?So D&D fills a cultural gap where we want to tell interesting, personalized epic stories that aren't filled with cares, concerns, and banal annoyances of modern life.The game I DM features me, my wife, my brother, my brother's ex-roommate from college, and a couple of guys we picked up off the internet.  I, my brother, his ex-roommate and one of the two guys all work for the same mega-corp in real life.Cheers,::Kaze</blockquote>

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