For our ethnography project, our group has decided to study the culture around tabletop role-playing games. These games, popularized by Dungeons and Dragons during the mid 70s, involve roughly 4 to 8 players, and one organizer, meeting on a semi regular basis to play a gaming session which generally lasts 3 to 4 hours. These sessions offer a unique environment to study people, since the participating players interact not only interact in their normal roles as friends socializing, but also as the character they are representing in the game.
While the majority of our data will be qualitative observations about the behavior of the participants, due to the nature of tabletop gaming we will also have a unique amount of quantitative information in the form of character statistics. For example, in a normal group setting, the leader generally is chosen due to their charisma, leadership qualities, and other similar qualities. However, in Dungeons and Dragons, the players are limited by their character's statistics. If the character of the natural born leader has a low intelligence for example, it would be out of character and not believable for them to lead the players.
This Saturday, Derek and I set in on a classmate's Hackmaster game. Hackmaster is a tabletop game which is a variation on the Dungeon and Dragons 2nd edition rules. The classmate runs a game every Saturday morning, and serves as the leader, or Dungeon Master of the event. He creates the scenario which the other players, known as Player Characters, or PCs for short, play in. He also enforces the rules, and serves as the antagonist by controlling the enemy monsters.
The Player Characters function in an organized group known as a Party, and elect their own leader to make decisions for the group. In the particular encounter Derek and I watched, the party was crossing a narrow canyon, and was ambushed from behind by a large monster. This initially threw the group into chaos, with one of the players immediately falling into a river below the cliff. After the initial confusion, two of the fighter characters blocked the monster's path, allowing the mage and thief to attack with ranged weapons.
Due to the way Dungeons and Dragon is structure, every action the player performs has a certain percentage of failure, the likelihood of the actions succeeding determined by a dice roll. In our particular encounter, it appeared as if 3 character were going to be killed by the end of the session (a fairly standard statistic for a Hackmaster game). However, due to a lucky dice roll, the thief character was able to throw a well placed dagger directly in the enemy's weakpoint, killing it just in time to save a dying character. After healing the character, the remaining party members instantly mounted a rescue effort to save the two characters drowning in the river. Due to a pair of lucky rice rolls, the PCs were once again able to come out unscathed.
The overall atmosphere of the game was lighthearted and friendly. Upon our initial arrival, the group was happy to see newcomers, and were eager to have us join in on their game. While we didn't actually participate in the game, they offered to let us in several times, completely welcoming the idea of letting new people into their group. When in between rounds, or during non-critical decisions, the players would often make jokes, or tell stories of similar sessions they had played in the past. We sat around and made jokes with them when appropriate, and they were eager to explain what was going on when we were lost.
Tabletop gaming has been a staple of Fantasy and Sci-Fi culture since it's popularization, but it also has unfortunately been stigmatized due to objections from mainstream society and religious groups during the 80s. Today's Dungeons and Dragons players generally do not advertise their affinity for the game, so it's popularity has started to slip in recent years. We hope with our study we can show the general nerd culture that Dungeons and Dragons is still relevant, popular, and worth their time.
Due to the scheduled nature of tabletop gaming sessions, finding groups to study is not going to be too difficult for our purposes. In particular, we're going to cooperate with Texas A&M's Fantasy and Sci-Fi organization Cepheid Variable for the purpose of finding Dungeons and Dragon groups to sit on. This is how we found the classmate's group, we've already received permission to sit in on several other groups. Eventually in our project we hope to find a group which will allow us to sit in on a game or two, so we can see how the groups interact first hand.
