The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [50]
Given the expectation of a ratio of twenty players to one referee, perhaps this is understandable. Callers in a crowded room of people are much more necessary than over an electronic medium (Mona 2007:28). There are also references to callers in the basic version of Dungeons & Dragons, but the caller was included primarily as a nod to the original game. Eric Holmes, author of the basic version, felt the caller role was extraneous. Everybody usually talked at once, which Holmes felt more realistically represented party dynamics (Holmes and Moldavy 1981). The role was abandoned in later editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
Fine (1983:172) defines player leadership more broadly. Leadership can manifest through a single caller, task specialization, group consensus, or none at all. Leaders, like referees, have a distinct challenge in reconciling the various conflicting interests of the other players. The most effective leaders do so in a way that increases the enjoyment of all. Because there are varying levels of engagement by players, this is no easy task; some players will inevitably dominate the others by virtue of their level of engagement in the game, while other players may choose to “go solo” and conduct their character’s actions according to their own interests rather than those of the group. Leaders, when they clearly exist within the game’s party framework, help reconcile these various interests harmoniously.
Character Roles
One of the defining characteristics of Dungeons &Dragons is alignment, a broad ethos of thinking that provides guidelines as to how a certain character should act (Gygax 1979:23). In earlier editions of the rules there was even a language peculiar to one’s alignment. This ethos was taken wholesale from Michael Moorcock’s Elric series and it has far-reaching implications to the forces of good and evil, heaven and hell.
Gygax explained that the alignment system was for both players and game masters an aid for role-playing. Yet playing an evil character is not necessarily a reflection of the player’s morality:
It is neither wrong nor condemnable to act the part of a character who by the social and cultural standards of our society is bad, evil, or wrong. It makes as much sense to vilify an actor for playing the role of a villain as it does to say that a participant in a game who has a PC whose moral standards cannot be called good is engaging in some form of wrongdoing [1987:34].
Alignment was deemphasized in the fourth edition, further distancing the latest edition of Dungeons &Dragons from some of the inherently noble ideals that defined Tolkien’s heroes. As Logan Bonner explained in Races and Classes, Dungeon Masters now have the “freedom to create storylines with intrigue and deception that can’t be derailed by a detect evil spell” (Carter 2007:75).
Gender
Dungeons & Dragons was particularly noteworthy in that it never distinguished between the sexes. In Role-Playing Mastery, Gygax explained that the player-character gender was not usually an important consideration. He was more concerned about the character’s role in the game universe and the player’s ability to role-play the gender properly (1987:33).
Races
In the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979:21), the “humanocentric” setting was identified as central to the game, with demihumans (other playable non-human races), semi-humans (bestial humanoid monsters) and humanoids (orcs, goblins, and other organized monsters that are more civilized than beast-men) in orbit. Gygax chose a humanocentric game because it provided a sound groundwork for a rules system, a set of usable assumptions about the game world, and an easy means