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March 19, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:23
2933 Dungeons and Dragons - Oh Yes!

After several requests, Stefan Molyneux describes his experience playing Dungeons and Dragons.

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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing very well.
Kiss from the ether.
And I hope your heart is happy and singing with the voices of a thousand dancing birds.
So, over the years, I have maybe occasionally mentioned my history with Dungeons& Dragons.
And yes, coffee-stained character records in homemade calligraphy was all the rage in my brain in my early teens.
And people have asked me, what did I play and how did I play?
So for those of you who don't know, and I guess it's not...
As common now as it was back in the day, this is before you could really get.
I mean, there certainly weren't any online games when I was that age.
I guess this was in the late 70s, early 80s.
So, you couldn't really play.
I mean, I played Ultima 3.
I think.
But I know I played Ultima 3.
And I learned the negatives of cheating.
In Ultima 3, to complete the game, you had to get your ship sunk in a water spout.
And every time my friend and I were playing and the water spout came to sink our ship, we would pop the disc so it couldn't save that we had died.
And then it turns out that we couldn't figure out how to finish the game.
It turns out we had to let ourselves get sucked down by the water spout.
And...
So if on my deathbed I say, pop the disc, pop the disc, you'll know what I'm referring to.
But for those of you who don't know, Dungeons& Dragons is a game played without a board...
In the imagination and in the language of the participants.
So there's one person who's called the Dungeon Master, and he is in charge of the world that you inhabit and adventure through.
And he plays all of the characters who aren't everyone else in the game.
So let's say you have five people.
One person is the dungeon master.
And the other four people would be adventurers.
And those adventurers would obviously go on adventures.
So you might, you know, you'd say...
The dungeon master, if you're just starting a game from scratch, would describe to you where you are.
You're in a town.
It's late afternoon.
Vultures are wheeling over the distant chalk-lined mountains.
And he would try and, you know, evoke a world for you.
The sights, the smells, the sounds...
And you'd say, well, you know, we want to go to the inn.
So I stop and ask someone where the inn is, you walk up the town, you go to the inn, and then you talk to the barkeep and you ask if there's any work that needs to be done, and he might say, oh yeah, there's a group of orcs and kobolds.
Kobolds are like tiny little gremlins or something like that.
That has been plaguing travelers on the road to the north, and then you would go and equip yourself.
You'd maybe start off with 100 gold pieces.
You'd buy your sword, your armor, your potions, or whatever it is.
And then you'd go to the north, and you would start searching through the woods.
You might find other cool stuff in there.
A waterfall with a dryad, or, you know, whatever.
Any kind of fantasy element that you like.
And the dungeon master would...
Describe everything that was going on in a way that would really evoke it in your mind's eye in a very powerful way.
I remember the first time that I played the Caves of Chaos.
We were camping at night and were attacked by some orcs.
They were like sloped-shouldered humanoids with pig-like faces.
It was so vivid that I could see it so clearly in my mind's eye.
So you go through these adventures, and the way that you fight is you have dice, and depending on the weapon and your skill, it takes a certain number to hit an enemy.
So let's say that the enemy...
It has no armor, pretty easy to hit.
Then you maybe only have to roll a 6 or a 7 on a 20-sided dice.
You hit the enemy.
And then you roll, depending on your weapon, if I remember rightly, a longsword was an 8-sided dice, a broadsword was two 4-sided dice, a dagger was a 4-sided dice, and a 2-handed sword was a 12-sided dice.
With a 2-handed sword, of course, you don't get the shield, so...
And so you roll to see if you hit, and then you roll to see if it does damage, and at the same time, the wizards can be casting their spells, which do particular kinds of damage and have particular kinds of effects.
They can cause monsters to attack each other, they can cause monsters to freeze, they can hit monsters with what are called magic missiles, which is one to four points of damage, and magic users start off, of course, pretty weak and get ridiculously strong at the end, and what's called magic user quadratic.
Fighter linear in terms of power acquisition.
You can be a thief.
A thief is good with a bow and arrow, can sneak up behind people and do double damage, and can steal from them and so on, and pick locks, and all that kind of cool stuff.
Although the magic users have a knock spell, which also can open certain kinds of locks.
You can be a straight fighter.
I played for the most part.
Argoth the paladin.
Oh yeah, lawful.
Oh yeah.
So, anyway, we'll get to the alignments in a sec.
And so it's a kind of gambling game in a way, right?
Because it's a gambling strategy game.
Because whether you win or lose a fight, it depends on some skill and some choice of weapons and some choice of strategies.
But it also depends on what you just happen to roll.
And so there's some luck and there's some strategy and it's very compelling.
And what happens is you get more powerful the more you fight.
So every month you kill, you get experience points, and then when you pass a certain number of experience points, you get more hit points, which is the amount of damage you can take before you die.
You get more hit points, you get more spells, it's easy for you to hit other creatures and so on.
There's also alignments.
There's lawful good, lawful neutral, and lawful evil.
So lawful good believes in rules and is virtuous.
Lawful neutral is...
Kind of like believes in rules but isn't particularly committed to virtue, is willing to set up rules to benefit themselves.
Lawful evil would be like Nazi Germany, like a totalitarian but evil regime and so on.
There's neutral good, neutral which the druids were, and then neutral evil.
There's chaotic good, chaotic neutral, and chaotic evil.
I don't know if these are the same.
Maybe they've changed since then.
And you have attributes.
You have strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma.
Oh, I can't believe that.
So strength is for fighters.
Intelligence is for magic users.
Wisdom is for clerics or priests who mostly do healing spells and other things.
Dexterity is for thieves.
It's how nimble you are.
Constitution is for your hit points, how much damage you can take.
And charisma gets you better prices and people want to give you more information because they like you so much.
So you can also get magic weapons, magic everything you can imagine to enhance your attributes and all that.
So it's a really fun and evocative game because, again, it takes place in the imagination.
And you can do anything, go anywhere, anything you can imagine.
Being the dungeon master is fun, and I did that for quite some time, because you get to be someone who's engaging people in your storytelling, and you can be the dungeon master who goes with a pre-prepared, they used to be called modules, probably still are, which is a particular adventure, and you can be the dungeon master who uses somebody else's story, or you can make up your own story, with maybe even slightly different rules and all that, so I did that kind of stuff.
I changed it in one of my adventures that people participated in.
I changed it so that you could cast any spell, but the lower level you were, the weaker you were as a wizard, the less chance the spell had to be of succeeding.
Anyway, so it was a lot of fun.
I originally, at the beginning, played a dwarf named Sareg, who unfortunately was killed by a bugbear.
I had the worst luck.
You roll to get, at least back in the day, you used to roll to figure out how many new hit points you get on each level.
And I started off with 8, and then I rolled a 2, and then I rolled a 1, and instead of having 24 hit points, which was the maximum at the third level, I only had 11.
And I was guarding the party from an attack of bugbears with these sort of big giant...
And unfortunately succumbed to the bugbear.
And since I was eaten, resurrection was impossible.
Well, resurrection is kind of impossible anyway, until you get much higher level.
And resurrection anyway shaves off a constitution point, which lowers your hit points anyway.
So, I played a dwarf for a little while, and I did play a magic user, but, you know, magic users, wizards, they're really boring at the beginning, because you get, like, one spell.
And you basically watch everyone else fight, and then you say, I cast my spell.
Off goes the magic missiles up the nose of an orc, and then you go back to your greasy pizza and RC Cola.
And...
Enjoy the evocative atmosphere, which you really don't participate in.
Now, later on, of course, you get lots of different spells and you can do really cool stuff, but I didn't have the deferral of gratification capacity at that point to wait to get more powerful, so I was a paladin who's like a holy warrior for lawful good and all that, which I enjoyed, as I got some great skills and powers out of it, and it was a lot of fun to play.
So I got lots of fighting, but I also got some spells as well and other cool abilities.
So, to me, it was a very enjoyable game for a number of reasons.
First of all, it's very social.
You're not just sitting alone in a computer.
And because it's imagination rendering, the BPU, the brain processing unit, rather than the GPU, you know, the best dungeon masters...
The ones who are in control of them describing the world.
Describe it well and make interesting characters for you to interact with and all this kind of cool stuff that you can do.
So that was interesting.
And certainly we had a few duds as far as that went.
I had a friend who took us through some Giants module.
And everywhere we went, there was nothing.
You come to another room.
It's empty.
It's like, eh, spice it up a little.
Throw a couple of traps in.
A couple of gelatinous cubes.
Anything.
Anything.
Keep us interested.
It was a challenge.
It certainly developed my storytelling, my language skills, my use of metaphors, because I had a lot of, as you can imagine, quite poetic dragons and demons in my stories.
I liked being able to evoke that.
So it was, I think, very helpful in terms of storytelling.
Because when you're the dungeon master, you are the provider of a service called a fantasy role-playing game, an engaging world that's believable and compelling.
And you have customers.
And if people don't want to come back to your dungeon, they'll say, I didn't really enjoy that adventure.
Let's do something else.
So let's choose a new dungeon master.
So in terms of audience retention, you've got to work it, baby.
You've got to twerk it.
Miley Cyrus, like Miley Cyclops.
There we go.
That's the joke that I was circling the drain for, and I'm afraid it took me down.
I apologize, of course, in hindsight.
So that I enjoyed.
The ethical issues were interesting, and I shouldn't laugh, because we took it very seriously at the time when we were young.
But one of the players had a real hate on for another player.
It was partly in life, but also, you know, to some degree, largely in the game.
And this player was, he played a ranger, and he was chaotic good.
And then he, the other guy was chaotic neutral.
And the ranger hired an assassin to kill the chaotic neutral thief.
And I was the dungeon master at the time.
And you can't do evil things if you're chaotic good.
Because then your alignment changes to chaotic neutral or even chaotic evil if you go way dark.
And this guy had to retain his chaotic good status to retain his powers as a ranger, and rangers are very good against giants in particular, do like double damage and stuff, and we were fighting a lot of giants, and he was really enjoying having all that power.
And so I said, no, you know, after you hire the assassin, the gods or your conscience changes you to chaotic neutral at best.
And so you lost your range of powers and he was very upset by this.
But I stood firm.
I think that hiring an assassin is not a virtuous thing.
Call me crazy.
Call me a cat.
And we ended up going to the basement of the local library to meet an elder.
And, uh, not like Skyrim's Greybeards, but just a guy in an over-tight polyester t-shirt with holes in it and, uh, Flared pants.
And this guy, you know, listened to us sagely and gave us his opinion.
I don't even remember what the opinion was or anything like that, but that just seemed to me...
We couldn't resolve that dispute amongst ourselves.
He didn't want to give up his ranger status, even though he could have reclaimed it by doing a lot of good stuff, and I didn't want to allow that you could be good and still hire an assassin to kill someone you didn't like.
And...
So there were ethical and moral dilemmas involved in the game.
What is good?
What is neutral?
What is evil?
And all those kinds of things were very enjoyable and fun.
It was a great deal of fun to create a world.
I would get like 15 pieces of graph paper together, create a whole island with towns and cities and rivers and mountains and dungeons and all that, and then you have to map out the dungeon itself.
You have to draw how the dungeon goes.
A 10-foot-wide corridor goes 30 feet ahead, then branches into a T, going left and right, and there's a set of stairs going down, and you can smell sulfur at the bottom, and smoke is strangely climbing the stairs, climbing up one set of stairs, going down the other set of stairs.
Eerie.
And so you have to map it all out.
If you do it well, if people are in a dangerous area and you're describing it well, you can get goosebumps.
Your heart rate will elevate if it's really being done well.
I remember people in one of my dungeons disturbed a dragon at the bottom.
And they weren't strong enough.
They were pretty beaten up from everything they'd had to fight through to get through.
And they just grabbed torches from the walls and were sprinting their way out of the dungeon.
And they were consulting their map so they didn't get lost.
And you have movement speeds for the dragon and movement speeds for everyone.
And them trying to get out was really quite a tense 20 minutes.
Is it left?
Is it right?
Dragons are getting closer, guys.
You can smell his breath.
Tongues of fire lick across the craggy, moss-strewn roof of the dungeon.
You see the ruby-red eye beaming its light around a corner.
You know, run!
Just pick a side!
Go!
And it can be really exciting to...
To have a game go like that.
Very interesting, very evocative.
And, of course, the enemies, the AI, is good in these games because it's a person who's playing all the monsters, who makes all the monstrous decisions.
And, of course, artificial intelligence or combat-based choices are kind of tough to do in...
Video games, because there's just so many options, so many choices.
And some games do it fairly well, I think.
But nobody does it as well as a person.
So you can, of course, have the monsters give you a frontal attack while circling around to get you from behind and so on, right?
The monsters can create distractions, throw stones that make you go this way, and then they try and attack you from behind.
All kinds of...
Intelligent things can be done.
So you really are...
It's a battle of wits if you have a good dungeon master who can really play the monsters well and knows their strengths and weaknesses.
So it can be a really exciting battle of wits to play that.
And there is a real sense of achievement.
You get a new level, you get new spells, you get new powers, you get new abilities, and you're kind of eager to go out and test your...
Skills and choices and strategies against the bad guys.
You can get involved in political campaigns.
You can negotiate truces.
You can talk people into starting wars.
I mean, so many things that you can do in these games that, you know, the sort of what-do-you-say radial choices of games.
It's fine, you know, it's all right.
Although I don't know why the voice acting is always so bad.
But anyway, it's...
It's fascinating because you are in a story that is being run by a human being rather than a computer.
And that is very...
It can be very exciting.
It can be very interesting because you don't know.
With computers, you kind of know if you play yourself through a bit of Skyrim or whatever and you kind of get the magic users are going to cast a shield spell and then do some lightning and ice spikes and stuff and But with this, you don't know.
And the other thing, too, is that in most games you have a line above the monster telling you how their health is doing, right?
Whether they're doing well or badly.
And that's not how it works in Dungeons& Dragons.
Like, you might...
You know, like, how's the monster looking?
Oh, you know, he's kind of swaying a bit.
He's looking dizzy.
He's shaking some blood out of his eyes.
And that's sort of all you get.
You just get the visual impression.
It's not like if you're in a boxing match.
I mean, you can sort of tell how the guy's doing, but he doesn't come with a line above him.
You know, like, well, one more hit, right?
So that is more exciting, whether you stay in or whether you go.
Whether you try and finish the fight or you retreat is a very challenging question if you're in a really important fight.
I was in a fight once with my paladin where if I won the fight, I would automatically gain a level, which was a big deal because it took a long time to get those levels.
I was down to three hit points left, which basically meant one more hit.
The monster was swaying and all that.
Should I stay or should I go, right?
And, you know, when you've spent a year building up a character, that's a pretty tough decision.
And I stayed and I rolled a 20 and, you know, you jump around and you're excited and I won, I got the new level.
And, you know, so these, you know, it is, of course, a kind of gambling.
If I'd rolled a 1, I don't know, I would have accidentally stabbed myself or something.
So there is all of this very exciting stuff that goes on in the game.
Lots of ethical dilemmas, lots of strategy, lots of conversations.
So it's good for verbal skills, in a way that I don't think video games, even like when you're chatting with other people, in a way that video games aren't quite.
In video games, you're in a very structured environment, and it does not rely much on your imagination, because everything is presented to you.
The world is not described, the world is shown.
It's movies, not...
Not theater.
Theater is very tough to show stuff.
And because of that, I think that computer games, they're very immersive, but they don't have the same sense of companionship.
You're all in the same room.
And you certainly are going through a fairly mechanized and mechanistic universe.
And you kind of know everyone else.
They're not people.
They're bots, you know, and they're on these little train tracks of programmed behavior and all that.
So I think there is something very lively.
And the other thing, too, is it can be an incredibly funny game.
It can be an incredibly funny game.
The aforementioned ranger and thief combat that I was talking about, these people who didn't like each other that much in the game and to some degree in real life, the ranger got himself stuck in a trap, which was filling with oil, and there was a lowering torch of fire that was going to set fire to the oil, and he begged, and there was a lowering torch of fire that was going to set fire to the oil, and he begged, the only person who could help him was the thief, and he begged the thief for help, and the thief tied a rope to an arrow and shot
And he's like, well, I gave you your help, didn't I? And that wasn't particularly funny, but that was kind of, I guess, ironic.
And in hindsight, disturbing.
But there was some stuff that could genuinely be enormously funny.
And so I have no regrets.
I think I got a lot of very good skills.
Out of that, the entrepreneurial aspect of being a dungeon master, the language aspect, the playing lots of different characters.
You play everyone from a king to a serving maid.
And you have to make it something that is...
Believable.
And all your characters can't be the same.
You have to be different kinds of people.
And so playing all these different characters, keeping people engaged in a story, and making it difficult enough to be challenging but not so difficult that it's just annoying, all of that was a real education in many ways, sort of in hindsight.
It had something to do with what I do now.
It certainly had a lot to do with the entrepreneurial life that I lived.
I still do live for a while.
So, I would recommend it.
Plus, last but not least, if you're broke, it's a great way to spend time having lots of fun without having to spend a lot of money.
And given how broke I was in my early teens, how broke my family was, it was well worth it.
I mean, for a couple of books that you could even...
Get from the library if you need a couple of dice.
You could have hours and hours of really engaging and vivid and exciting entertainment.
So, yeah, I'd recommend it.
Plus, you know, it allows you to say Hail Satan with great believability, at least according to some extremists.
So, hope that this helps.
Thank you so much for listening.
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