Unique British aspects of D&D in the UK?

[Paul Farquhar]

Of course, if you get into the art, the trees and wildlife stand out. Don't get many moose or wolverines in the UK,

If we are raising this thread from the dead, I just heard four raccoons escaped from a zoo on the Isle of White.

 

[jian]

If we are raising this thread from the dead, I just heard four raccoons escaped from a zoo on the Isle of White.

This story? Yes, I guess that shows that raccoons aren’t common in the U.K. and that’s why people put them in a zoo there.

Isle of Wight: Third racoon found as one remains on the loose

Amazon World Zoo Park on the Isle of Wight confirms it has found another escaped racoon.

www.bbc.com

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This story? Yes, I guess that shows that raccoons aren’t common in the U.K. and that’s why people put them in a zoo there.

Isle of Wight: Third racoon found as one remains on the loose

Amazon World Zoo Park on the Isle of Wight confirms it has found another escaped racoon.

www.bbc.com

They are not native at all. Potentially, they could become a harmful invasive species, competing with urban foxes. Fortunately, the Isle of White is an island (they can't swim can they?)

 

[jian]

They are not native at all. Potentially, they could become a harmful invasive species, competing with urban foxes. Fortunately, the Isle of White is an island (they can't swim can they?)

The Isle of Wight is indeed an island but it’s only 2 miles or so from the mainland so I suspect raccoons could swim it (or ride over on driftwood etc) just fine if they were motivated. That’s how you get raccoons, bears, squirrels, moose etc on North American islands. For instance, Haida Gwaii is about 50 miles from the BC mainland but has a solid population of all of those.

(Apparently you can occasionally see bears swimming determinedly back to the mainland. I don’t blame them, the sushi selection in Daajing Giids is pretty dire.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I do seem to find that UK players/GMs seem to be more willing to try lots of different games rather than just stick with D&D for their whole gaming life, which some US folks seem almost proud of. It's only anecdotal so I can't really back it up, but for example back when we had RPG magazines the UK polls of gamers they did seemed to find Call of Cthulhu top of the charts rather than D&D.

Yeah I get that vibe but it's no more than a vibe. Even in the 1990s it felt like a lot of UK RPGers were playing AD&D one month and Vampire: The Masquerade the next, and perhaps Shadowrun a few months later, and so on. Whereas from US players you heard of a lot more "Oh we'd never play that [insert game] trash! It's dumb and for losers!" and tales of exclusively playing this or that for years and years. But I can't go beyond vibe.

Perhaps there is a certain grim/dark feel to British and European games/culture that US didn't tend to have, but there has been a lot of cross pollination since the 80's and 90's, so I don't think it is necessarily true anymore.

Yeah I think this is largely no longer true too. It definitely used to be though.

Other differences might be a different attitude to feudalism and nobility - the UK still lives with the real-world effects of a landed aristocracy and royalty

I think there is a little bit of this, yeah. That is one of the very few genuine differences I can think of even among players I've played with. Like, in the UK, almost anyone playing an RPG is likely to be broadly doubtful to actively cynical about monarchies and nobles, and almost no-one under 65 romanticizes either. Whereas in the US, there's also plenty of cynicism re: monarchy ("We kicked them out!") and people thinking nobles are all just pedos (not entirely incorrect...) and so on, but there's also this significant starry-eyed segment who absolutely do romanticize the hell out of monarchies and nobility, and think nobles are actually noble, or that'd be really cool if they were (and also somehow handsome not inbred and down-to-earth not haughty, and basically in no way reflective of any historical nobility! I blame Disney primarily).

Also not usually D&D-relevant, but Americans RPGers are way more likely to romanticize the Victorian era than British ones. Plenty of British people do romanticize the Victorian era - but they're basically the exact sort of people who sneer at RPGs (and video games, and in some cases, all fiction books!), and tend to be significantly older (unless politicians, somehow idolizing the Victorians makes you like 50x more likely to become a politician, compared to the general population). That doesn't mean British people are less likely to play Victorian-ish era-set RPGs, necessarily, but it does tend to make the tone different.

The Isle of Wight is indeed an island but it’s only 2 miles or so from the mainland so I suspect raccoons could swim it (or ride over on driftwood etc) just fine if they were motivated. That’s how you get raccoons, bears, squirrels, moose etc on North American islands.

This is possible, but I feel like raccoons would not cope at all well with the sheer numbers and deadliness (they can decapitate a cat in a single bite sometimes, which had lead to a bunch of "cat serial killer" panics) of British foxes, for whom they would be in very direct competition for food, and who are a large and well-established population, particularly in cities, suburbs, and towns (they're also slightly larger and apparently more aggressive to other animals than American foxes).

EDIT - On the other hand, British people are idiots who love cute animals even more than Americans (and I include myself among these idiots), so it's possible people would be so keen to feed the racoons that it might work out for them.

 

[jian]

Yeah, the non-romanticisation of royalty and aristocracy, and non-romanticisation of the Victorian era, may well be different. The Victorian era was when British culture established a whole bunch of historical and cultural misconceptions that we now mostly regard as horse dung (romanticising the Roman Empire and imperialism in general, romanticising Greek resistance against the Persians and Sparta in general, Arthurian myth, romanticising chivalry and aristocracy, Robin Hood, romanticising patriarchy, heteronormativity) but some of that probably filtered uncritically to North America.

Americans romanticising Victoriana is kind of weird since Americans had their own equivalent era - mainly the Gilded Age - and it sucked on ice for most people (everyone who wasn’t a robber baron) in very similar ways. But yeah, pip pip cheerio tea with Queen Vic is kind of baked into steampunk.

 

[The Hierophant]

WFRP, which is originally a home-grown English RPG, has many British tropes that make it different from D&D. That doesn’t mean that many British-run D&D games are more like WFRP - depends what you want from a game and you don’t always want grim peril and leprosy - but the tropes are influential and many groups will have played both. That’s also possibly true of Ars Magica, which was pretty popular here a decade or two ago.

WFRP was a direct decendent of UK D&D being a child of UK TSR’s Pelinore setting.

Another mild difference will be the influential media. Nowadays these will be more similar in the US and U.K. (LotR films, GoT, anime, various fantasy novels and video games, Witcher, etc) but for instance, more older gamers in the UK will have grown up with Robin of Sherwood, a UK TV series that was very influential. Maybe more UK gamers will have read every Discworld book, that sort of thing.

We were a fashionably cynical bunch at the GW Design Studio in the Thatcherite mid-80s, and sick of D&D's "shiny" fantasy with its perfect teeth, chrome-plated armour and Fabio hair. Films like Jabberwocky and Monty Python and the Holy Grail were big influences

Says Graeme Davis.

[WHFRP] Warhammer is Pelinore II? - The Piazza

 

[DragonLancer]

On the subject of pubs and directions, anyone ever play Pub Legs?

I'm in Cambridgeshire and here it's a solo game called Pub Cricket. Pass a pub with an animal in it's name and you score a number of runs (points) on the number of limbs that animal has. Pass a pub with a royal name and you are out and have to start over.

Back on topic though.. things I have noticed though between us Brits and our fellow American players are:

1. Brits seem to prefer role-play over kicking in the door, kill the monster and take it's stuff style play. It happens but there is more in character talk.

2. Humour. I don't really get American humour - it's too cringy, where as British humour is either self-derogatory or just plain odd/surreal (look at the often quoted Monty Python). How that humour translates into games is just as different as well.

3. The tone/look of our D&D is different as well.

This is what American D&D looks like. A weird hodge-podge that doesn't even look medieval.

Whereas, this is what British D&D looks like. Still fantasy but more realistic.

 

[Morrus]

I'm in Cambridgeshire and here it's a solo game called Pub Cricket. Pass a pub with an animal in it's name and you score a number of runs (points) on the number of limbs that animal has. Pass a pub with a royal name and you are out and have to start over.

Back on topic though.. things I have noticed though between us Brits and our fellow American players are:

1. Brits seem to prefer role-play over kicking in the door, kill the monster and take it's stuff style play. It happens but there is more in character talk.

2. Humour. I don't really get American humour - it's too cringy, where as British humour is either self-derogatory or just plain odd/surreal (look at the often quoted Monty Python). How that humour translates into games is just as different as well.

3. The tone/look of our D&D is different as well.

This is what American D&D looks like. A weird hodge-podge that doesn't even look medieval.

View attachment 386294

Whereas, this is what British D&D looks like. Still fantasy but more realistic.

View attachment 386295

I think you're just telling us your own preferences there; which is perfectly valid but I'm not seeing any of the US/UK generalisations you cite in my own experiences. I've played with a LOT of people from around the world over the years. Plenty of Brits love kicking down doors, and plenty of Americans like in-depth roleplay. I don't think there is any national divide there, just individual/group styles.

As for those images of what "American D&D" look like vs "British D&D"; with respect, again that's just not true. The US is the home of OD&D (the visual look of which came out of the minds of Americans in the 1970s) and the OSR movement is bigger there than it is here.

Your experiences and your own preferences are totally valid, but I challenge the assertion that what you have listed is representative of either country.

I suspect that what you are perceiving is a generational gap, not a geographical one; but that is pure conjecture on my part.

 

[DragonLancer]

I think you're just telling us your own preferences there; which is perfectly valid but I'm not seeing any of the US/UK generalisations you cite in my own experiences. I've played with a LOT of people from around the world over the years. Plenty of Brits love kicking down doors, and plenty of Americans like in-depth roleplay. I don't think there is any national divide there, just individual/group styles.

As for those images of what "American D&D" look like vs "British D&D"; with respect, again that's just not true. The US is the home of OD&D (the visual look of which came out of the minds of Americans in the 1970s) and the OSR movement is bigger there than it is here.

Your experiences and your own preferences are totally valid, but I challenge the assertion that what you have listed is representative of either country.

I agree. I'm only saying my experiences which compared to many will be more limited.