Real Life with Ryuei

Dungeons and Dragons: Ethnic Cleansing 101 or Thought Experiments in Living?

So I am pretty tired of writing about Buddhism for the moment. So instead I am going to ruminate some more about playing Dungeons and Dragons with my daughter - it is becoming a real learning experience for both of us.

One thing is that, as I mentioned before, D&D is primarily set up for imaginative adolescent boys so that they can kill things and take their stuff. Not that D&D needs to be confined to that kind of mentality. Not at all. But, if you look at the way characters are made and how they advance in skills and ability it is obvious what the game is primarily about.

All of the character classes with the possible exception of the thief (now more open endedly called the Rogue) are all about kicking ass and taking names. The fighters are your hand to hand combat guys, the wizards are your heavy artillery (esp. as they advance), the clerics are the medics but also the go-to guys for clearing away the undead and perhaps otherworldly beings like demons. Even the thieves are good for backstabbing and setting traps.

Characters get more powerful by advancing in levels and they advance in levels depending on how many experience points they get. Originally, D&D experience points (or XPs) were garnered by killing monsters and collecting loot. Each monster was worth a certain amount of points (kind of like shooting deer) and each gold piece worth of treasure was worth one XP. So naturally the game centred around killing and looting. Now the characters might nominally be the good guys, and the monsters might nominally be evil, but really it was all just a big search and destroy mission. So it is no wonder that a lot of Vietnam era (or maybe earlier) combat slogans would figure into the game like "Do unto others before they do unto you" (this is now national policy and is called "anticipatory self-defence).

At the age of 39 I now feel a little uncomfortable about some of the implications of the game, and the parody versions of old D&D adventures that I have been reading and trying to adapt make this even more obvious. To wit: Even though they are called orcs or goblins or whatever, these humanoid monsters are basically stand-ins for "indians" as in the old game of "cowboys and indians." They are basically savage demonized indigenous tribes that need to be cleared out if civilization is to prevail. So basically the game is all about a war of mutual genocide with the good civilized races like elves, humans, and dwarves and the evil savage races like goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs fighting to see who can wipe each other out and take their land and stuff. It's basically the same story you find in the Book of Joshua in the Bible - kill the Caananites (including women and children), take their land, take their stuff.

On the other hand one could say that the monsters represent exotic forms of evil bandits or outlaws. But even then, this makes the so-called heroes violent vigilantes because generally they are working on their own and not for any government (though occasionally a scenario might have them working for a king or duke or local baron or high priest). They are basically setting themselves up as judge, jury, and executioner of anyone they run across who doesn't look right or has done wrong in the eyes of the characters (if not the players). In fact, one character, the paladin, is a holy knight with the ability to detect evil. This has often been interpreted to mean that the paladin and his collegues can kill someone or something just for having a certain mindset even if they had not done anything. Kind of a cross between a 1984ish psychic thought police and rough and ready frontier justice.

Currently the D&D rules only give experience points for overcoming challenges and not just for killing things or getting gold. Still the challenges are primarily organized around how powerful the monsters and/or traps are which are between the characters and their goal. This is a little more open ended and one does not necessarily need to kill something or someone to achieve the goal and get XPs. But it is still primarily about conflict and violence. Fair enough, since D&D is an adventure game, but still too close to having the morality of those shoot em up video games.

Oh, one other thing I should point out. I don't at all think that D&D was created by or for moral reprobates. The simple fact is that D&D emerged out of tabletop wargaming and it originally was meant to reproduce the heroic fantasy novels of Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock and the even earlier literature that they based their stories on like Beowulf, the Norse Eddas, El Cid, La Morte De Arthur, and other such epics. But now that I am older I can see the deeper and disturbing implications of even those stories just as I do of the Bible. Again and again I see how these stories are about the demonization of the "other" and revolve around mutual attempts at ethnic cleansing and/or cultural imperialism. The current sectarian/ethnic warfare in Iraq and between Israel and its neighbors and in Afghanistan, and the goings on in North Korea don't make these kinds of conflicts seem like so much light hearted heroic fun anymore (well, not that the Battle of Helm's Deep or the Pellinor Fields in Tolkien's books were light hearted romps).

My point is that in trying to play D&D with my 9 year old daughter whose idea of elves comes from "The Elves and the Shoemaker" and not the grand bloody and tragic epic of Tolkien's "Silmarillion" and whose idea of dragons is from the cartoon Dragon Tales and not from Wagnerian operas, and who should not be learning Vietnam era slogans like "Kill them all and let God sort them out" (which was actually coined by a Catholic bishop during the Albigensian crusade in southern France during the middle ages) I have had to think of a different sensibility.

Fortunately D&D is an extremely flexible game with lots of options and alternative rules both official and available in gaming magazines and on the net. One option I found was to scrap the usual advancement system and to instead use a system whereby the players decide what types of activities will allow their characters to advance. So they could opt for killing things and taking stuff, or they could get points for different activities like protecting one's friends, or solving mysteries and so on. The system I found (called the Sweet20 Experience Point System or something like that) even provided a list of optional ways of garnering points and how many points could be gained from different activities. This was the perfect fix - a way to steer the game away from killing things and taking their stuff.

So I read Julie some of the things on the list (the one's appropriate for 9 year old girls anyway) to let her decide what her elf-princess would gain experience for. She chose to gain points for helping people who are in need and also to gain points for eventually finding, befriending, training, and then riding a pegasus (those are the winged horses from Greek mythology for those who haven't been reading Edith Wharton or who missed the movie "Clash of the Titans").

With that problem fixed, I then asked her to choose whether she wanted to stay in the wilderness hunting for monsters who are raiding caravans or to return to her character Ruby's elvish homeland to see what they are like and to search for pegasi (I think that is the plural) in the forests and hills. She chose the latter. So now I am going to set aside the old style gaming and try to come up with little vignettes and stories whereby I will test Julie's sense of what the right thing to do would be in different circumstances. I still have to brainstorm some situations and personalities and beings to confront her with. And thankfully some game supplements have given me lots of ideas about what more peaceful and friendly communties would be like. I even found a random generator online that will tell you the demographics of medieval communities based on actual research by medieval history buffs. With the generator I can find out if a village is big enough to have an inn or if you have to find a friendly farmer to stay with, or how many bakers a town might have, and so on.

I am also going to use the game to teach Julie about how life was different in the past. She already has some familiarity with medieval Japan from watching the bloody tragic samurai history epics with Yumi and I on Saturday nights (ch. 26 plays NHK history dramas), and she has gone to a couple Renaissance Fairs. In talking to her, however, I realized that she needs a little help imagining what it would be like to live in a world with no cars, or t.v.s, or computers, or electricity, or hospitals, or schools, or trains, or planes, or flush toilets, or baths/showers, or newspapers, or restaurants, or grocery stores. I have been trying to explain to her that people had to make up their own stories and play their own music. They had to walk everywhere or ride a horse. There were no hospitals or medicine so people often got sick and died. People were dirty a lot of the time and almost everyone was literally dirt poor. They could only shop at farmers markets and most people had to grow their own food. And so on and so forth. She then wondered why people didn't have any electricity or medicine and I had to explain how these things were invented over time. And so on and so forth.

So all of this is by way of saying that I am really happy to have discovered that D&D may have started out as primarily a way for adolescent boys (and escapist adults) to imagine how much fun it would be to band together and kill things and take their stuff but that it can also be about so much more. It can be a way of teaching kids what the past was like and trying to imagine what it would be like to not have the things we take for granted. It can be a way of introducing the idea of dealing with different cultures and how there can be conflict but also peace and understanding. It can be a way of presenting ethical situations and playing out the consequences of one's actions in a safe imaginative environment.

And then of course there are the thought experiments embedded in the game that those only looking for violent adventure don't normally take up. For instance, in the case of an "elvish civiliation", what would it be like if one could live for hundreds of years and never visibly age past 25 and if one's whole existence was just dancing and partying and doing arts and crafts and basically living like some kind of near-immortal medieval hippy in some tree-house ecologically perfect commune with no real responsibilities? Would that be one's idea of heaven? Or would it come to seem empty and hollow and frivolous? Would you give anything to live with them? Or would you want to cut down their trees and burn them out of spite? What kind of mindset would such people have? And would you want to have that kind of outlook or not? This is like the Buddhist teaching of the ten worlds - ten different perspectives on life and living, but in the game it takes a multiplicity of narrative forms that one can imagine oneself being in, playing out the implications.

So all in all in playing D&D with my 9 year old daughter I am also coming to see more adult ways of using the imagination and this material (which has its roots in medieval cultures and mythologies and folklores from around the world) as a way of appreciating, exploring, and thinking about life and how to teach a deeper appreciation of life, culture, diversity ethics, and alternate perspectives on living to discover their meaning and implications.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei

Posted by Ryuei at August 25, 2006 12:37 PM