Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > If you've never heard of D&D, I'm going to have to side with Warp and
> > ask that you hand in your nerd card.

> I've /heard of/ D&D. I just don't get why anybody would bother playing 
> it. It sounds incredibly boring.

  Tabletop role-playing games can be real fun, with a competent game master.

  While the overall story is more or less predetermined, the details are
determined by the players themselves. Players choose what they do, and the
game master has to adapt the events and the storyline to suit (which is not
always trivial, as you have to keep the balance between avoiding the story
from derailing too much, and avoiding the players feeling that they are just
playing a prewritten script and are not free to do whatever they want).

  How much a playing session can deviate from the script outline (which
the game master usually has on paper, either purchased/copied from
somewhere, or in some cases written by himself) depends on how much the
players ignore the GM's hints and do what they want instead, and how much
the GM is willing to bend. Sometimes the GM has to refuse to accept some
action (eg. if someone wanted to suddenly kill a very plot-relevant NPC,
the GM could say "your character wouldn't do that").

  Which of course means that a good game not only requires a good GM, but
also good *players*. The players have to act and react according to the
personality of their characters. A good-tempered librarian would not
suddenly kill someone in cold blood for no reason whatsoever. A player
seriously wanting for this character to do that, completely destroying
the mood, is not a good player.

  One of the great things about this dynamicity is that players can come
up with new things that were not in the original script. It can sometimes
become quite imaginative. There's much more freedom to do things than with
a computer game, which is by necessity very limited. (Just from the top of
my head, a player could come up with something like "I'll stack these chairs
in front of the door so that if someone attempts to come in, the pile will
fall, alerting us", or something along those lines.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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