How the Turn Tables
The Dungeon: #9
Surprise!
One of the things that makes D&D so fun is its unpredictability. There’s that saying about how no plan survives contact with the enemy. I believe it’s usually attributed to parents with young children.
D&D players take that truism and flip it on its head. They are the enemy, and the plan is everything the Dungeon Master thought they’d try, and the DM thought they’d thought of everything.
Players often bypass the obvious answers—the logical ones, you might say—in favor of the most bizarre schemes imaginable. I suspect this is a natural extension of a gamer’s desire to find the edge of the simulation. We do it all the time in video games.
Where’s the literal edge of the game world?
What did the programmers code for?
What can I do that they didn’t intend?
Once we have those answers, the clever player can often exploit them, to hilarious effect.
D&D is unlike video games in this regard because there are no edges. Anything you can think of, you can attempt. We’ve coined a phrase around our table for this: “It’s D&D. You can try anything.” The trying is the fun part, where inventiveness meets randomness. And from that coupling: life.
The first time a player reckons with this knowledge, with this power, is a light switch moment. It’s when D&D stops being a funny elf game and starts taking on something with life-like contours. It’s still a simulacrum, but it’s closer to reinventing reality than any other magic humans have dabbled with.
Give me D&D over the Metaverse any and all days.
That new Wizard staff is definitely coming in clutch! 🤣