Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006)

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The Postmodern Hoard: Rates of Exchange in Role-Playing Games / Carlos Hernandez

Abstract: What makes Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) unique among games is the way it merges storytelling with game mechanics. Before the invention of D&D, both acting/narrative-based games and strategy-based war games that made use of fantasy-genre elements existed, but the way D&D integrates both elements invented a whole new category of game, one in which the immersive draw of a plot proves just as important as good tactics or luck of the dice. This chapter explores the relationship between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of D&D. Specifically, it argues that the rules of the game provide quantitative corollaries to aspects of storytelling that we traditionally think of as qualitative: character, morality, personal development, etc. These quantitative components, however, serve a far greater function than merely providing a measurable foundation on which to base dice rolls: More than the fantastic creatures and the magic spells in the game, quantification is perhaps the D&D's greatest fantasy. Through such quantification, the game is able to provide its players with an unshakeable moral order, a numerical measure of normally intangible personal attributes (such as intelligence), and a running total of a character's growth and success as a "person." The purpose of all of this accountancy is to satisfy the very deep desire for a world of known quantities and calculable success, which in turn allows for a sense of achievement that is difficult to match in a complex, qualitative world. With such foci, the author of this chapter raises questions about the influence of Dungeons and Dragons on its successors while also providing insight into its continued popularity. With online games' (Asheron's Call, EverQuest) obvious debt to Dungeons and Dragons, such a study is especially timely.

<1> After the battle is finally over and the dragon slain, Beowulf, burnt, poisoned, chewed, and, in a word, dying, turns to his loyal henchman Wiglaf and asks him for a favor: not to find his wife or his friends, nor to relay a final message to the people he has ruled for 50 years, but to go and fetch him some of the dragon's treasure, so that he can spend his last moments running his fingers through the gold he will not be around long enough to enjoy. "I want to examine" says Beowulf, "that ancient gold, gaze my fill/ on those garnered jewels; my going will be easier/ for having seen the treasure. . . "[1 ] Can it really be greed, as blunt and unapologetic as this, that lies at the heart of this ideal of doughty Old English heroism? Well, perhaps partially: granted, the dragon had been ravishing the countryside after a thief made off with a cup from its hoard — thereby necessitating heroic action worthy of the king of the Weather-Geats — but it is not as if Beowulf made any gesture toward the much more sensible solution of finding the thief and returning the stolen cup. Getting that treasure, in spite of the ancient curse that guarded it, made much more sense to the Geatish way of life: and, in this case, the Geatish way of death, since part of the poet's mission here is to show the right way to die. You should be king, you should be fearless, and even at the age of 90 you should fight dragons and seek treasure.

<2> And that is because, in Beowulf, treasure is not simply the means by which one purchases goods and services. Treasure is the visible outward measure of a person's inner worth. Consider: the way we first learn that Hrothgar is a good king is through the description of Heorot, the fabulous, incomparable mead-hall he builds — it has cobbled roads leading to it and is lined with gold and is bigger and better than anything that has come before or likely will follow after. Indeed, one of the key ways we know that Grendel is far and away the most abominable fiend imaginable is precisely because he comes to Heorot, perhaps the greatest place in the civilized world, to work his evil, eating 30 loyal thanes at a time and eventually setting up permanent residence there: the ultimate in defilement. Furthermore, all one has to do to understand the character of Unferth is to take a look at his sword, Hrunting. It is a famous sword of good lineage, but those permanently poisoned bands on the blade speak to a cowardice that is not hard to locate in its owner: no wonder Hrunting, leant to Beowulf to battle Grendal's grief-stricken mother, fails spectacularly in battle. Nonetheless, Beowulf emerges as victor from his battle with Grendel's mother, and from all of his battles for that matter; after each of Beowulf's successes he is rewarded with a king's ransom in treasure, all minutely described by the poet. Hrothgar the "ring-giver" piles gold and weapons and armor on Beowulf in a way meant to display the greatness of them both. And, at poem's end, Beowulf, perched on death's door after fighting the dragon, thinks happily of the dragon's treasure, because through it he presents his people with a great, final gift: "'For the gold and treasure, to God my thanks,/ . . . for what I behold, to Heaven's Lord,/ for the grace that I give such gifts to my folk. . . .'"[2 ] But not to be outdone, his people bury the dragon's great and valuable hoard in Beowulf's funeral mound, where it lies "as useless to men now as it ever was" [3 ]; the poem's final display of Beowulf's greatness comes through the fact that the king of the Weather-Geats actually does take it with him.

<3> There is a dream of order presented through this world-view, an ardent, if impossible, wish for a world whose politics and economics conform to a moral law: the braver you are, the more treasure you receive; the bravest man becomes king; honor and courage can be measured with great accuracy, simply by counting a person's gold and by examining his (never "her," of course) collection of armaments and heirlooms won in the keenest, most perilous battles. The simplicity and speciousness of that wish has been repeatedly satirized in Western literature (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, and Don Quixote provide three famous examples). But that fact in and of itself — the very need for such satires — speaks to the persistence of that dream for an externalized, sensible, easily-understood morality, one in which people's inner worth and their ledger books align perfectly. Furthermore, even the satires tend to honor the motivations of their subjects, even while they point out their foibles and failings when they try to live by this "morality = economy" principle — Sir Gawain, Chaucer's Knight and Squire, and Don Quixote are all treated sympathetically by their respective authors, and Sir Gawain and Don Quixote even achieve some level of redemption at the end of their respective tales (the stakes are not quite so high for the storytellers in Chaucer's poem). Whatever we think of the viability of that dream of an externalized morality, we must recognize that it is a persistent one in Western culture.

<4> If we think in terms of literature, it becomes easier to recognize that this line of inquiry is not exactly revolutionary: the definition of a symbol is precisely an externalized materialization of an abstract concept. Here, for instance, "treasure" symbolizes courage and character. Therefore, when someone unworthy of treasure — like the cup-stealing thief in Beowulf — acquires wealth, dire consequences follow. So then morality becomes the problem of determining who deserves more treasure, who needs to have their treasures stripped from them, and just how much treasure is enough. Beowulf's grasp may have exceeded his reach when he sought the dragon's treasure, since "That huge cache, gold inherited,/ from an ancient race, was under a spell —/ which meant that no one was ever permitted/ to enter the ring hall unless God Himself,/ mankind's Keeper, True King of Triumphs,/ allowed some person pleasing to Him —/ and in his eyes worthy — to open the hoard" [4 ]. If the great Beowulf was not in God's opinion worthy of that hoard, could anyone on Earth be?

<5> Were Beowulf more dedicated to the work of wish-fulfillment, rather than presenting a case-study of a life well-lived, the hero might have slain the dragon and kept the treasure, and, if he needed to die at all, would have died peacefully, "off-stage," after having secured the continuance and prosperity of his people. Instead Beowulf dies and his people are pretty much doomed. The ending is a prime example of the exact opposite of wish-fulfillment. It is wish-denial, perhaps even wish-negation: if this is what happens to the near-perfect Beowulf, so much the worse for the rest of us. And, because Beowulf is art with a capital A, that is fine — the sobriety and solemnity of the ending have a cathartic appeal we often associate with "high" art.

<6> But when it comes to our personal battles with dragons and the acquisition of treasure, we want to win. It is one thing to read about a dream denied, quite another to have to live it. In our fantasies, at least, we should have the option of having our wishes fulfilled.

<7> And so when people started fighting dragons in 1974, with enough training, understanding of the rules, and some good dice rolls, a good many of them did win, and got to keep the spoils to boot: no need for sober death-soliloquies or funereal dénouements. If any of these treasures happened to carry some ancient curse, the party's cleric could cast a "Remove Curse" spell, and then things boiled down to how you were going to haul thousands of pounds of gold and jewels out of the dragon's lair and into the coffers: it would take a lot of "Bags of Holding" and "Portable Holes" to transport that much loot. And if you didn't make quite enough to finance that whole island nation you'd been dreaming of starting, well, unlike Beowulf, there were plenty of dragons, and therefore plenty of dragon hoards, out there for the taking.

<8> I am speaking of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which debuted in 1974 and has since become a worldwide phenomenon. In Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), people create "heroic" fictional characters who then band together and seek adventure. Those adventures are provided by the Dungeon Master, the mastermind behind the game. The Dungeon Master (DM) creates the "script" of the game: that is, the situations the characters must overcome in order to triumph. That script usually comes in the form of maps of the areas characters can explore, detailed descriptions of the people and creatures the characters might run into in these areas (including, of course, what money and valuables they have), and a "mission" which might be exceedingly simple (kill all the orcs) or extremely intricate and complex (rescue the princess, whom the players come to find is actually nothing more than a polymorphed house cat, so then acquire a phoenix feather, which the Oracle you have to visit requires as payment for any questioned answered, ask the Oracle where transmogrified princess is, find out that the real princess is actually the dragon you just slew in order to acquire the phoenix feather, then go back to the dead dragon and resurrect it with the Staff of Life you got after battling the demon Ghr'ras'stral, and then try and figure out how to restore the newly revived dragon to her original princessy self.) The game runs as a sort of extemporaneous play, where the players act "in character" and the DM functions as the director, orchestrating the mood and pace of the game, and adjudicating, as they arise, unexpected situations not covered in the rules.

<9> The point? The game can be played as merely an evening's distraction — the participants assume the role of a heroic character on a one-time basis, complete (or fail to complete) the adventure, and then never play the same characters again. This method of play sometimes follows "tournament-style" rules, where players use pregenerated characters specific designed for the given adventure and are rewarded for problem-solving and good role playing. They then compare their results with other players: the player with the highest score wins. But Dungeons & Dragons was, from its creation, designed with a longer view in mind. The job of the Dungeon Master need not be limited to "director." Often, in fact, the term "World-Builder" is used synonymously with "Dungeon Master," since the DM is the person responsible for building what the game calls a "campaign": a series of interrelated adventures that take place in a fantastic world that the DM customizes, or perhaps even creates from the ground up. In this case, the work the DM does to create the world players live in and the adventures they have greatly resembles the work fantasy novelists must invest in generating the mythologies, geography, and cultural histories of their imagined worlds.

<10> In a campaign, the characters players create begin weak and grow powerful. They start the game with minimal money, equipment, and training in their "class" (which is like a profession). As characters have adventures, they gain experience (measured in the game as "experience points") akin to a team or player's score in sports; after they gain enough experience, they gain power (measured in "levels"). And after gaining enough levels, characters slowly evolve from 1st-level characters that are at great risk of dying before they can become heroes, to nigh-invulnerable, one-person armies capable of decimating legions of foes. Except, of course, that the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons are stuffed to overflowing with magical monsters, each deadlier than the last — and anyway, any DM worth his or her salt knows how to keep players in check. The stronger the characters, the greater the challenges: Dungeons and Dragons is about the acquisition of power, which, though it never ends, rewards players handsomely along the way.

<11> Especially in its earlier incarnations, but still quite true today, the quickest way to gain levels and grow in power in D&D is to "defeat" "monsters" — "defeat" almost always means kill, and "monster" means literally anything defeated in battle, as long as it has (or had at the beginning of the encounter) the ability to fight back: you will not gain any experience from using your war hammer to knock the head off of a normal statue, but use it on a "Living Statue" who is just pretending to be a normal statue in order to ambush you, and just watch the experience points roll in.

<12> This economics of experience points has its roots in the organic way the game came into existence. The rules that would eventually become the core of Dungeons and Dragons were first developed to stage miniature fantasy wars, where hundreds of combatants were given a short list of statistics that basically described their ability to perform in battle [5 ]. As D&D evolved (into, for instance, Advanced D&D; it has, through the release of 3rd edition rules in 2000, "devolved" back to D&D), the emphasis on problem solving and role playing has grown. This is an emphasis that would carry over into next generation role-playing games, becoming more and more central, until, for games such as Vampire: the Masquerade — where players enact the lives of vampire characters — the role playing aspect is so central that is has led to the development of a subgenre of gaming, known as Live-Action Role Playing (LRPG), where players dress in costume and act out the actions of their characters. Less important in these newer games is level progression and material wealth, since the worlds they depict are so dystopic and sinister that such goals are, at best, ancillary to the performative aspect of these games — the next generation of games has, at least ostensibly, given the wish-fulfillment part of role-playing a postmodern twist.

<13> Even these newer games, however, contain the vestiges of the original, optimistic role-playing impulse, and, even at their darkest, contain within them enough glimmers of hope that, for all of their innovations, they still function within the parameters of the typical role-playing formula: present players with challenges that, through intelligent gameplay and impassioned, in-character role-playing, they can overcome. And if they do so, they will be appropriately, nay, handsomely rewarded. Indeed , perhaps the main difference between the various role-playing games comes precisely through defining what constitutes a reward. Virtually no role-playing game, however, has fully divested itself of the initial, fundamental impulse that originally precipitated the creation of D&D: that is, the creation of highly-individualized character who grow increasingly powerful. For that reason, this article will concentrate on D&D, the progenitor of all role-playing games as we have come to know them.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Quantitative Hero

<14> The 3rd edition of D&D has taken a political middle ground on the issue of role-playing, stating that some campaigns like to emphasize fighting and acquisition of gold and magical items, while others emphasize problem-solving and role playing [6 ]. In gaming communities, a whole vocabulary has emerged around "unsophisticated" players who simply want to kill monsters and grow in wealth and power: they are called "roll players" instead of "role players," since they prefer rolling dice (which is how combat is resolved in the game) to seeking more cerebral solutions to their problems. These players are often "rules lawyers," players who have memorized every last rule of the game and are willing to sacrifice the flow of gameplay to argue the finer, often unimportant decisions the DM has made. And campaigns that cater to roll players, by giving unreasonably lucrative rewards for relatively easy challenges, are derisively called "Monty Haul" campaigns.

<15> But even in the most complex, character-driven campaigns, gaining experience points and power remain central to the gaming experience. In earlier versions of D&D, the "economics" of role-playing were somewhat more transparent, since gold pieces and magic items translated directly into experience points [7 ]. But even without such easy-to-see correlations, D&D's gameplay still depends primarily upon the quantification of attributes that we often think of as extremely difficult, if not impossible, to quantify objectively. That is simply to say that an attribute such as "wisdom," which in the quotidian world we live in proves a hard term to define and an even harder one to measure, becomes in the D&D universe "Wisdom" with a capital W, an attribute that typically has, for a newly-created character, an easy-to-understand range of 3-18, the higher the better.

<16> Furthermore, a character with a Wisdom score of 15 is absolutely wiser than a character with a score of 12. No matter how unwisely the player controlling that character causes her or him to act, that character is wiser than the one with the more modest score, even if the other player — due to experience with role-playing games, for instance — makes wiser decisions and takes wiser actions throughout the course of the game. High scores in the Wisdom attribute translate into more spells for certain types of characters (such as priests), greater resistance to mind-affecting spells, and bonuses to certain skill roles. And so, despite how Wisdom is "enacted" in the game — "But I want to pet the sleeping three-headed dragon. . . ." — only a truly draconian Dungeon Master would change a character's Wisdom score based on in-game actions; for the most part, the scores and the role-playing are mutually independent. The higher the score, the greater the bonuses, no matter how the character was actually played.

<17> Because these attributes will affect the outcomes of battles and the power and influence a character has, "roll players" invests a great deal of time, from the moment they first begin to generate a character, in finding ways of making these scores as inhumanly high as possible: characters who can carry 300 lbs. of equipment, have genius-level I.Q.s, can inspire armies to fight against insurmountable odds, etc. True role players, on the other hand, relish characters who have more "realistic" scores, and will seek the role-playing opportunities having a character with high wisdom, but low intelligence, will offer.

<18> But no matter how a given player treats and responds to attribute scores, it is through them that we can understand the primary way role-playing distinguishes itself from other modes of storytelling: the introduction of randomness. The qualitative aspect of the game — the role playing — has grown to become as increasingly important part of the gaming experience, but both originally and persistently role playing has used dice-rolling as the fundamental way of determining the outcomes of actions characters take in the game. The dice used in D&D are unique to the game: a complete set includes a die each of four sides, six sides, eight sides, twelve sides, and twenty sides, and two dice of ten sides that are sometimes paired for "percentile" dice roles, which can generate results from 1-100 (the dice being rolled together, one die being read as the ones digit, the other the tens). Certainly these dice have added to the fantastic, arcane appeal of the game, invoking through their unusual shapes the fortune-telling tradition [8 ]. But back to practical matters: almost every action of consequence depends on the roll of a die — whether the swing of an axe hits or misses, how much damage a "fireball" spell does, whether a character is turned to stone by the gaze of a medusa, if a character succeeds in convincing a blacksmith to give a good deal on that Masterwork suit of chainmail, if a character spots that secret door hidden in the wall, etc. Often, the dice rolls are compared to the attributes, skills, and abilities of all the parties involved in an encounter, both characters and their opponents alike, and are modified by them. Life and death often hang in the balance, sometimes dependent upon even a single throw of the dice; it is therefore imperative that players seek, whenever they must roll dice, to maximize their chances of achieving the results they want.

<19> In the largest sense, experience points are proof against dice rolling; the two are directly pitted against one another. Enough experience points allow characters to improve existing scores, acquire new skills and abilities, and, all in all, better survival chances in every way. The more experience points characters have, the more levels they gain, and more levels mean better odds against the dice. For instance, every version of the game has featured "saving throws [of the dice]." (Explain exactly what saving throws are – how they act against "definitive" actions like death and paralyzation) Every character begins with an initial set of saving throws, which are written on the character's record sheet for easy reference. A 1st-level (beginning) character's scores are, generally speaking, not very good; they run a great risk of dying from, say, a poisoned arrow if they don't make their saving throw against poison (1st and 2nd editions) or fortitude (3rd edition). As characters grow in power, however, the likelihood of dying due to that same arrow falls precipitously. And these scores are affected even further by the possession of high-powered magic items that even more extensively strengthen their resistances and augment their attacks. Such items are generally only found by killing high-powered enemies, by high-level characters (unless the campaign is of the "Monty Haul" variety).

<20> Putting aside any such items for the moment, however, saving throws serve as a good example of how the game's worldview depends upon the optimistic, unrealistic, and thoroughly unpostmodern tenet that power — even on the level of the body — empirically increases in ways that defy both nature and chance. That is to say, an 80-year-old, 20th level wizard's chance of surviving the aforementioned poisoned arrow is enormously greater than that of a 20-year-old, 1st-level warrior in the prime of his physical prowess. Holding D&D to "realistic" standards would be, of course, ludicrous in the extreme, since the game clearly touts itself as a fantasy game [9 ], but there is a more important point at stake here. Besides the spellcasting and the weird, mythical monsters, through the use of devices such as saving throws, D&D proffers a subtler sort of fantasy. In D&D, the acquisition of wealth and the pursuit of power translate not only into the usual external gains, but even corporeal ones. Through their adventures, characters themselves become more resistant to poison, defying death, nature, and chaos through garnering more and more experience points.

<21> So far, D&D may sound very Beowulfian in its world-view: bodily attributes and external possessions mirror each other and foster each other's growth and advancement. Beowulf, however, goes a step further by suggesting that a hero's material goods also measure his (always his) character: his honor, his prowess, his morality. In fact, one of the primary ways weapons and armor in Beowulf show the mettle of their wielders is precisely by failing them when they are most needed, forcing the heroes to think quickly and find other options in the pitch of battle. No weapons can pierce Grendel's hide, so Beowulf must use his bare hands to rip off the monster's arm; Beowulf's borrowed sword cannot kill Grendel's mother, and he is almost killed by her when she pins him to the ground, her dagger poised for the kill — only her weapon fails her as well, bouncing off of the breastplate Hrothgar gave to Beowulf; Beowulf's shield can't fully protect him from the dragon's breath, and he is subsequently burnt all the way to death's door. It is very rare indeed in Beowulf to see an object accomplish its duty. Quite to the contrary, objects often serve as the cause of woe, as when the thief steals the cup from the dragon's hoard. D&D, by contrast, takes a much more commodity-driven approach to objects, especially martial ones. Part of the fun of the game is besting fell creatures and taking powerful magical items from them, which will aid the player in besting more powerful fell creatures later on. Furthermore, in many campaigns, magical items are bought and sold openly, in ways that keenly resemble free-market economies — middle-class merchants set up shops where adventurers use an amazingly standardized unit of currency known as the "gold piece" to augment their arsenals or acquire rare spell components. In fact, even in 3rd edition rules, which, remember, emphasize role playing more than ever before, all but the most powerful magical items (known as artifacts) are listed with a suggested market price [10 ].

<22> Material goods are somewhat restricted in the game, however. The use of these commodities, especially magically-enchanted items that can in some way prove useful in battle, are delimited in three main ways in D&D: through characters' race, type or occupation (known in the game as "class") and alignment. These three main identifiers create in the game the vestiges of the "moral rightness" of ownership that serves as so prevalent a theme in Beowulf. But the game, precisely because it focuses more on play and wish-fulfillment, resists delving into a complex relationship between material objects and those characters in possession of them, refusing, in essence, to engage the question of morality in all but the simplest, most quantifiable ways. Race and "class" [11 ] (for personality) and alignment (for morality) serve as simplified systems that provide within the game enough of a foundation to allow D&D to get on with the business of satisfying the players' desire for power and glory.

Type Makes Right

<23> A quick look at the sample character record sheet in the 3rd Edition Player's Handbook [12 ] will verify this article's claims of the quantitative hero: the character record sheet is mostly a collection of scores, dice modifiers, known spells and owned equipment, with virtually no space dedicated to the character of the character. Only the "character illustration" box in the lower-right corner of the front of the sheet could be counted as something wholly dedicated to the individuality of this character as a "person" [13 ]. The rest of the "personal" details on the sheet resemble the sort of information that might be collected on a police report: age, gender, height, weight, eyes, hair, etc. This is, of course, only one example of a possible character sheet, and past versions have allowed space to note character biography, inner conflicts, personality quirks, phobias and philias, etc. But even when some space on the sheet had been designated for these purposes, it rarely was adequate in providing more than the scantest hints as to how the character should be role played, since so much space is required on the sheet to record what the character can do. For the expert role player, most of this non-quantifiable data remains in the mind of the player — and thus characters in such a campaign cannot really be swapped. Still, the fact that a character's history and biography must be maintained in the player's memory, while attack rolls and saving throws occupy central positions on the character sheet emphasizes what the game, even at its most rarefied level, more greatly values.

<24> Precisely because of this quantitative aspect, D&D can seem quite daunting to the uninitiated. Oftentimes, the new player's focus when learning to play D&D is, ironically, not role playing; one look at the character sheet will tell you there's a monstrous learning curve involved in simply figuring out the game's rules of engagement. And yet, the whole impetus for creating the role-playing game came from the desire for players to have a more individualized, personal experienced with the heroes they portrayed than could be provided by a miniature war-game experience [14 ]. The role playing game must, by the necessity that fueled its invention, provide some verisimilitude to lived experience, in a way that allows for players to suspend disbelief — both player characters and their enemies must have motivations, and behave in ways that serve those motivations; societies must have cultures that reflect a shared history and the natural (or fantastic) surroundings from which they evolved; magical creatures must function within the parameters of the invented world's ecology, however different that ecology may be from the one our biologists study; magic itself must possess an innate integrity that can withstand the "scientific inquiries" of players developing new spells. All of these various aspects work toward the same end: making the invented world "inhabitable," because only believable worlds are worthy of being mastered.

<25> This process of creating a universe worthy of mastering, however, has to be made manageable within the confines of the games bureaucracy of rules; in effect, it must also be "quantified" as much as possible. And some of these aspects are easier to quantify than others. Magic spells, for instance, are separated into levels of power, from one to nine, and the number of spells a character can cast in a day is delimited by experience level. A society can be rendered through demographic tendencies: frost giants, for instance, are "often chaotic evil" in alignment, "live in frigid, arctic lands of glaciers and heavy snowfall," and often live in tribes — run by rulers known as "jarls" — which are composed of 21-30 giants, one giant possessing exceptional spellcasting powers, 12-30 "winter wolves" [15 ], 12-22 ogres, and one to two young white dragons [16 ]. Variations on a theme are possible, of course; in fact, in order to maintain surprise and wonder [17 ] in the game, the more experienced the players become, the more important playing against these expectations becomes. In order to do so, however, those expectations must exist. Those expectations are largely rendered through statistics, standard forms, and demographic tendencies.

<26> And those expectations exist not only for the enemies player characters may encounter. Players themselves are "typed" in two main ways: through their "race" and "class." Neither word carries the same meaning in the game as they do in typical parlance. "Race" does not denote alleged differentiations, however spurious or racist, between members of the same species. Race in D&D marks differences between species: a dwarf character is much more dissimilar to a human character than homo erectus is to homo sapiens. For instance, dwarves, because they live a great deal of their lives underground and have adapted to that environment, have developed "darkvision" [18 ], which means they can see, in black and white, up to 60 feet in total darkness; the 3rd Edition Player's Handbook even goes so far as to illustrate the difference between the human and dwarven skull [19 ]. And so even "racism" in the game is different than how we might think of the term, since it functions on the level of species: in D&D, the "humanoid" races are "racist" toward "goblinoid" races (such as goblins, orcs, and kobolds). This racism is, however, perfectly justified in-game by the fact that the goblinoid races are evil, irredeemably, unequivocally evil, and therefore deserving of racism (see the discussion on "alignment" later in the essay.

<27> Besides phenotypical differences, cultural ones exist as well — ones that, because they are heavily influenced by the magic this world, are themselves "magical." Elves, for example, typically do not farm, since they are so adept at living in harmony with nature they are not required to violate the land in such an extreme way in order to sustain themselves. Furthermore, what we might call "mundane" cultural differences round out the ways in which races gain individual identities in D&D: gnomes usually have no less than half a dozen names, acquiring them from family, clan leaders, and friends as they grow; halflings are nomadic and have no homeland of their own, and do not have much of a written literature to speak of, relying more on storytelling and an oral tradition to maintain their sense of cultural identity [20 ]. These mundane differences aside, however, the cultural and biological differences separate these other character "races" from humans in ways that go far beyond the distinctions the typical use of the word denotes.

<28> The collective names for these typical, non-human character races are either the relatively neutral "common races," or the none-too-flattering "humanoid" or, worst of all, "demihuman," perhaps meant to imply that the physical size of these species — whether because of the slighter builds of elves, or the height of dwarves, halflings ("half-sized"), and gnomes, is typically less than that of humans. It would be difficult, however, to characterize the term "demihuman" as categorically pejorative, given the ways the 3rd Edition Player's Handbook describes human personality: "Others [demihuman races] accuse them of having little respect for history, but it's only natural that humans, with their relatively short life spans and constantly changing cultures, would have a shorter collective memory than dwarves, elves, gnomes, and halflings" [21 ]. Importantly, however, there is a sort of "humanism" at work here, since the human's "relatively short life span" translates into bonus abilities directly tied to race. Humans, for instance, receive four bonus skill points and one bonus "feat" (a more spectacular version of a skill) simply for the fact of being human; they also have no restrictions on choice of class (which, remember, is "occupation") [22 ]. Humans, even in this universe where several species are in possession of language, independent culture, and comparable (if not superior) technology, still form the basis on which all other species are modeled, or, given the diminutive connotation of "demihuman," devolved. Other characters receive modifiers to their ability scores, bonuses and restrictions based on their various ecologies and cultures, and, usually, restrictions regarding what classes they can become without incurring experience point penalties. Humans are the tabula rasa of race, since they can be of any occupation without incurring any experience point penalties, and therefore allow the most transparent representation of a character's "class."

<29> However, if the ugly head of "specism" rears itself in D&D, it must also be tempered with the fact that the depictions of humans is often less than flattering in comparison to the other typical character races. We have already seen how humans have a relatively poor sense of history and a capricious idea of culture. More directly to the point, in the way that morality is rendered in the game, humans do not fair nearly as well as the other common races. Morality in the D&D universe is measured on two appositional continuums: there is, one the one hand, the "law vs. chaos" continuum (lawful/neutral/chaotic), and on the other, the "good vs. evil" continuum (good/neutral/evil). Together, a given character's tendencies on both of these spectrums comprise his or her "alignment" — his or her worldview. For instance, a character who breaks the rules in the name of doing what is right would be "chaotic good" — favoring both a refusal of the law and a tendency toward the good (most protagonists in Hollywood action films are chaotic good). In this system of alignment, then, elves, gnomes, and dwarves all share a tendencies toward goodness, and halflings show a propensity for neutrality — but humans "tend toward no particular alignment, not even neutrality," because, "The best and worst are found among humans" [23 ].

<30> If human standards were truly meant to dominate the game monlithically, then certainly their civilization would serve as the basis for "goodness." Instead, humanity serves as the basis of character diversity. Practical and reasonable explanations exist for using humans in this manner — for instance, human characters are often the easiest for novice players to play, since the players do not have to always keep in mind the special features and limitations that the demihuman races possess. Besides matters of gameplay, however, D&D, through its reliance on J.R.R. Tolkein's mythology (elves in D&D, for instance, are not the small, mercurial pranksters of folklore, but the stately, patient, nigh-immortal race described in The Lord of the Rings), by extension also borrows Tolkein's complex use of several intelligent species occupying the same world. On the one hand, Tolkein goes to great length to individuate the language and cultures of each of these species; but on another level — the literary level, the level of the interpretive reader — these species serve as reflections, perhaps even caricatures, of what it is to be human [24 ]. Each race in Tolkein's works serves as the embodiment of a certain type of human wish-fulfillment: the immortal elves represent (among many other things) harmonious living with the environment and the absence of dramatic cultural change; the dwarves can be seen to represent fearlessness in battle and a clear sense of purpose and mission in life; if nothing else, hobbits (read "halflings") represent the desire for a pastoral life of leisure and community. And so, insofar as D&D gained inspiration from The Lord of the Rings, it also carries with it the connotations of these embodiments. As time has passed and the game has evolved mythologies of its own, it has made its races much more detailed and complex — there is, for example, a subspecies of elf known as the "Drow," who live underground and are, by and large, evil in alignment — but still, at the core of the game lies a fundamental reliance on using alternate races as a means of serving one primary purpose of playing D&D: wish-fulfillment [25 ].

<31> By comparison, however, the race of a character serves a subtler role in the goal of sating desires than does character class, since it is through class that characters gain a certain proscribed set of abilities that will, by and large, determine how powerful they become and in what ways that power is made manifest. If race is history, culture, and biological determinism, then class is the future, the universe of thought, and the freedom to defy one's roots and become whatever that character wishes. Race often serves to inform class: dwarves make good warriors, halflings first-rate rogues (which is a non-judgmental word for any of several types of thieves, ruffians, spies, etc., who, though they may tend toward chaos on the law vs. chaos continuum, are not necessarily evil), gnomes great spellcasters, elves top-notch rangers (a type of warrior who excels out of doors), etc. These tendencies are just that, however — tendencies. Players often purposefully choose to defy normal expectations in character race for the sake of interesting role playing. More commonly, however, characters can simply mix and match several classes within one race [26 ], in order to augment the abilities of their characters. Either way, as characters gain levels in their class (or classes) and grow in power, race becomes progressively less important, less of a factor in determining the success or failure of any given action. Therefore, the farther characters advance in the game, the more their class or classes "take possession" of their identities — increasingly more game time is spent concentrating on what characters' class abilities allow them to enact in the game than what race allows. Class is tied directly into D&D's economics of heroism; by gaining experience points, a character's level of aptitude in any given class increases. Class becomes the most visible aspect of a character, and therefore the most essential part of character: it is class that serves as the direct link between personality and power.

<32> Class does not merely describe what characters can do, however; to an important degree, class informs who characters are. Using "occupation" as a synonym for class may not be entirely fair; "vocation" might prove more accurate in the case of many characters. In D&D (which takes historical and mythological characters and uses them for its own purposes), "paladins," for instance, are holy warriors who must adhere to a strict code of conduct in order to gain the many benefits of their class; "druids" are devotees to nature, gaining magical powers and heightened communication and communion with flora and fauna of the world; "monks" in the game are martial arts masters. Class often determines tendencies in alignment, character goals and objectives, armament and equipment, and sometimes even personality — paladins, from the description in the Player's Handbook, will not knowingly associate with characters of evil alignment, live by a strict moral and ethical code, and, to a one, have answered a "calling" from destiny to become sword-wielding do-gooders [27 ].

<33> This vocational aspect of class is purposeful, for, when combined with race, a great deal of the "personal" information that is pertinent to gameplay is revealed; one need only say the phrase "dwarf warrior" to envision a certain type of character: a gruff, dour, no-nonsense, bearded, heavily-armored combatant who prefers wading into battle swinging a battle-axe or warhammer over any sort of diplomacy. In fact, in the "Description" section of the Player's Handbook, players are encouraged to leave the details of their characters "sketchy," since, through role-playing, a character's personality might begin to emerge [28 ]. In the meantime, however, race and class are enough to get things started, and allow players to get down to the business of adventuring.

<34> But one thing is still missing. To adventure, the characters must have antagonists to defeat; and to be clear, in D&D "defeat" means "kill" in the vast majority of cases. And so, to the uninitiated, here may arise a problem. How can a paladin, for example, who has taken a vow to uphold everything that is good and preserve the sanctity of life, go around killing sentient creatures in the name of adventure? To keep such a discussion from opening the Pandora's box of what constitutes "the Good," D&D resolves the problem through the two-word description of every living thing's moral position: alignment.

<35> I have touched briefly on alignment already: it is two appositional continuums, the first of law/neutrality/chaos, the second of good/neutrality/evil. Choosing one of the three positions on each continuum provides the two-word descriptor of the nine possible alignments: lawful neutral, neutral good, chaotic evil, etc. (a character who chooses "neutrality" on both continuums is not called "neutral neutral," but rather "true neutral"). The vital point to make about alignment is this: in D&D good and evil are not complex, ambiguous hypotheses that require thought, interpretation, and constant, assiduous review. Good and evils are absolutes: known quantities to accept or reject as the players wish. "Good and evil," states the 3rd edition Player's Handbook, "are not philosophical concepts in the D&D game. They are the forces that define the cosmos" [29 ]. Alignment is not an exploration, a discussion, even an internal struggle: alignment is an essential position. At any given point in time, therefore, it is possible to know whether a creature occupies that position known as "the Good," or chooses not to. Certainly, it is the job of Good to stamp out Evil, in whatever forms it takes, be it a tyrannical king, an army of bloodthirsty goblins, or a marauding blue dragon, who, luckily, also happens to be in possession of a hoard of treasure that will make any heroes courageous enough to slay it rich and powerful beyond measure.

<36> Through this formulation of alignment, in which good and evil are uncomplicated absolutes, D&D manages to accomplish its greatest and most flamboyant act of wish-fulfillment. In essence, D&D provides a hyper-constructed morality as the primary backdrop to the game that provides in clear and simple terms the justification for the actions of player characters. Now that good and evil are known quantities, good characters can go carry out the important job of exterminating evil in the world and helping those suffering from injustices of every kind. In our world, religion, philosophy, and the arts all seek to explore, define, redefine, and evaluate truth, beauty, human kindness, ethics and morality, but in D&D that work has already been done. Good can finally triumph over evil, because now we know which is which! Now all that remains is to find doughty souls to take on the work of fighting on the side of goodness. It is precisely at that place where the player characters first enter the game.

A Word about Wishes

<37> It seems perfectly appropriate to me, given the emphasis I have placed throughout this article on wish-fulfillment, that within the D&D game itself characters themselves have a means of fulfilling their own in-game wishes: there are magical items such as a "ring of three wishes," creatures, such as the djinn (a type of genie), and wizard spells, all which can grant wishes. In fact, the 9th level wizardry "wish" spell is "the mightiest spell a wizard . . . can cast" [30 ]. In a game so focused on satiating players' desires for power and a transparent moral order, there is no doubt that within the game there would be ways of mirroring these primary motives for playing in the first place. But part of the problem of describing and exploring the wish-fulfillment aspects of the game lies in overcoming the negative connotation that surrounds the phrase. "Wish-fulfillment" unfortunately carries with it the ideas of living in a fantasy world, of being impractical, pleasure-seeking, narcissistic, and lazy. But this isn't necessarily so.

<38> Consider Friedrich Nietzsche's view of the individual's ego, as he presents it in The Will to Power:

There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: these are all fictions that are of no use. There is no question of "subject and object," but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all regularity of its perceptions . . .

In order for a particular species to maintain and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation — not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived — stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge — they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure for the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service. [31 ]

<39> Nietzsche's view of existence could have easily been written for use in the D&D universe. There is no basis, he says, for the assumptions we make in order to live our lives, save for those assumptions that, somehow, enable us to remain alive longer. The store of perception and thought in a living creature — the foundations of Nietzsche's idea of what knowledge is — is fundamentally a collection of "calculable and constant" facts that, as they are acquired, lead to an increasingly fuller understanding of existence that allows animals (especially the human animal) to continue to live. The relation between the living subject and objects is a master/slave relationship: the subject presses objects (either living or non-) into its service, using them to sustain itself and ward off any threat to its life. But vital to the subject is not only a right and true perception that gives it useful knowledge, but "above all regularity of its perceptions" [my italics] [32 ]. That is to say, any unit of knowledge must not only be accurate and useful unto itself, but must collaborate harmoniously with the other acquired units of knowledge in order to allow the human animal to create an idea of existence, and thereby maximize its chances for prolonged survival.

<40> What does all this have to do with role-playing? Everything. What Nietzsche describes as the state of human existence is precisely what D&D presents as a game: what D&D makes into play. D&D's fundamental trope is conflict, and the characters' ability to triumph and gain power in a world that is infinitely more dangerous and frightening than our own. D&D has collected an enormous assortment of terrifying supernatural creatures from every mythology, religion, and folk tale it has heretofore found, and put them together in one ultimately heteroglossic universe of peril. No single culture has in its mythology created the panoply of menaces that have been gathered within the pages of D&D's Monster Manual; indeed, the Monster Manual has borrowed from myriad cultures in order to create this most treacherous of bestiaries. And so, if characters can gain power beyond the realm of our world in this universe, then maybe survival in our world is not so grim a prospect as the naysaying Nietzsches of the world would have us think. Because D&D is a game, it can allow for victories that, in lived experience, would be at least unachievable, and, more to the point, inconceivable. What would a "victory" even look like in the world-view Nietzsche describes? The difficulty of imagining the answer to that question is directly proportional to D&D's ability to satisfy one of humanity's greatest desires: the wish for an ontological, un-phenomenological, a priori, knowable existence. That, in short, is the game of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is a life the player can win.

<41> But there's more. The slippery nature of knowledge and of what is "knowable" collides directly with our concepts of what constitutes reality and fantasy:

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—"There are only facts"— I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact "in itself": perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.

"Everything is subjective," you say; but even this is an interpretation. The "subject" is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. — Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.

In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. [33 ]

Nietzsche's point here is clear and, to a citizen of the 21st century, perhaps not terribly revolutionary: facts are not unchanging nuggets of knowledge that together present a true and finite vision of existence. Even to Nietzsche, this idea of reality could not have seemed to him very novel: from Plato's parable of the cave to Descartes's pairing down of reality to the finally undeniable cogito ergo sum (though certainly not Descartes's later conclusions about God), the illusory nature of reality has been in the forefront of philosophy's thinking since its first iteration and throughout its history. For Nietzsche, as well as for a great number of philosophers before and after him, facts are infinitely interpretable, and so therefore are not facts at all, but interpretations that may (or may not) help a given subject survive longer.

<42> The consequences of this assertion to my argument, however, are vital — because if what we know of existence is limited to how we decide to interpret and use it, then any act of interpretation is as "real" as any other. That is to say, an act of imagination is as real as reality itself; one could also say just as easily that "reality" is just as imagined as any other act of imagination. Nietzsche would then have us measure the usefulness of the knowledge "gained" through the imagined in terms of how helpful that knowledge would be in prolonging the subject's life: interpretation and imagination therefore become almost tantamount in meaning.

<43> And so, if an "imagined" world is just as real as any other vision of existence, what D&D seeks to do for its players is not simply to distract them from the unknowable nature of existence by providing a lackluster imitation, but to provide a viable, believable alternative that, through their imaginative faculties, they can occupy. Whether it succeeds or not for any given individual is a matter for personal taste to decide, as well as the vagaries of genre preferences in art — perhaps others find themselves more readily transported by Fauvist paintings, or John Coltrane, or Rambo movies? — but, in its essence, D&D seeks to serve as a vehicle of the imagination that allows its participants to move from an existence where ambiguity and unknowability reign to an existence where life is ordered down to the last experience point.

<44> Does such a dream of order in an seemingly chaotic universe constitute, in Nietzsche's formulation, a kind of "knowledge" that will help the individual persist? Every culture in the world has art, an oral and/or written tradition of stories, its own mythologies, its own elaborate interpretations of existence. D&D is one of those, and is (after what you said about facts a minute ago, you might want to remove all the other "in fact"s from the essay), in some telling ways, a culmination of sorts of those traditions. For, unlike Beowulf, which says to its readers "This is a hero," D&D removes the divisions between word and act by positing "You yourself are a hero." The claims of D&D serving the desires of wish-fulfillment, of transport, of escapism are not only justified, but exactly the point: through the construction of its Byzantine rules and simplified view of culture and morality, D&D seeks to provide what is lacking in our other existences. D&D shares this goal with virtually any instance of artistic creation, but, again, closes the remove between artist and audience — between subject and object, if you will — by integrating the two within the player character: creating the possibility for a more streamlined escape. And escapism, rather than being stigmatized, should be seen as a tool for enabling existence that even Nietzsche can get behind — or at least that is what Joe Kavalier, protagonist of the Pulitzer-prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, would have us think as he ponders his long time relationship with "golems" (a great favorite monster in the D&D universe):

In literature and folklore, the significance and fascination of golems — from Rabbi Loew's to Victor von Frankenstein's — lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of the horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these — Faustian hubris, least of all — were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something — one poor, dumb, powerful thing — exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist [the superhero in the novel], free from the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for an instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. [34 ]

Notes

[1] Beowulf. Translation by Seamus Heaney. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. (2000). p. 185. [^]

[2] Ibid. p. 189. [^]

[3] Ibid. p. 213. [^]

[4] Ibid. p. 205.Ibid. Book XLI. [^]

[5] Here are three interviews with Gary Gygax that offer insight into the way D&D developed: http://www.rpg.net/252/news/13/gygax/e.html; http://www.womengamers.com/interviews/garygygax.html; http://www.theonering.net/features/interviews/gary_gygax.html. [^]

[6] See pages 8-9 of the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG). [^]

[7] See, for instance, page 48 of the 2nd edition DMG, where it states that Rogues gain 2 experience points per gold piece of value that they acquire during their adventures, and pages 135-139, to get a good sense of the experience point values associated in those rules with magical items. [^]

[8] "The most likely originator of dice is the witch doctor. Before developing into gambling implements, dice were magical devices which primitive man used to divine the future. Not only dice, but most other modern gaming implements have been traced back to primeval man's practice of divination by arrows (most notably by Stewart Culin, formerly director of the Brooklyn Museum, in his book Chess and Playing Cards, 1897)." http://members.aol.com/dicetalk/history1.htm. "Bone Rolling History." Webmaster: Mitch Klink. Last updated Monday, October 30, 2000. Accessed Sunday, September 7, 2002. [^]

[9] Though consider what Todorov says about the fantastic: "The person who experiences the [fantastic] event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination — and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us."The latter experience, describes, in a nutshell, the pleasure of the magical worlds of D&D: "Todorovian hesitation" happens again and again to players of D&D. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. New York: Cornell UP, 1975. P.25. [^]

[10] Flip through pgs. 180-235 of the 3rd Edition DMG to get the going rate of your favorite items. [^]

[11] Which I put in quotes to distinguish it from its common usage of "wealth and social standing." [^]

[12] An unnumbered page following p.286 in the 3rd Edition Player's Handbook (PH); a few unnumbered pages later, there is a character sheet filled in with the statistics for the sample fighter, Regdar. [^]

[13] And even here, the Wizards of the Coast website (www.wizards.com) offers an array of generic character portraits players may download for their character sheets. [^]

[14] Again, see note 5 for the interviews that discuss the evolution of the game. [^]

[15] In quotes to denote these are not simply mundane wolves living in frigid climates; these wolves speak two languages and can judge the difference between good and evil: they are "always neutral evil" in alignment (p. 184 of the 3rd Edition Monster Manual [MM]). [^]

[16] See pgs. 98, 100-101 of the 3rd Edition MM. [^]

[17] Or, to continue with the idea first introduced in note 9, "hesitation." [^]

[18] Known as "infravison" in earlier versions of the game. Darkvision is an improvement over infravision, since it does not require objects to be seen to radiate heat — undead creatures can no longer elude the gaze of a dwarf. [^]

[19] P.14. [^]

[20] P.17, 20 of the PH. [^]

[21] P.12. [^]

[22] Ibid. p.13-14. [^]

[23] Ibid. p.13-20. Furthermore, the "in-between" races, such as half-elves and half-orcs, provide even more evidence to this claim, since, once a race mixes with humanity, it tends to lose its predispositions — in the case of elves, toward goodness, and in the case of orcs, toward evil. [^]

[24] What Christine Brooke-Rose terms the "reduplicative machinery" of Lord of the Rings: the fact that, major characters aside, the humanoid species in Tolkein's saga are often employed as types, rather than as individuals: elves are healers and providers of succor and support; dwarves are expert warriors and blacksmiths, etc. A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative & Structure, Especially of the Fantastic. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press (1981). P. 250. [^]

[25] In my own experience with the game, I have often noticed players who strongly favor playing characters of a certain race, and, alternately, despiste playing characters of another; almost always, these favored races are of the demihuman variety. I myself have always had a penchant for playing gnome wizards. [^]

[26] Remembering, of course, that for game purposes a "half-elf" counts as one race, and not a complex merger of two races. [^]

[27] P.41. [^]

[28] P.87. [^]

[29] P.87. [^]

[30] PH p. 273. [^]

[31] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage (1967). Pgs. 266, 267. [^]

[32] Ibid. p. 266. [^]

[33] Ibid. p. 267. [^]

[34] Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Random House (2000) P. 582. [^]