Connected Cloud Challenge - IoT Gaming Table - Blog Post 1 - Gameplay
By Brian Childers - April 2020
1. History of Dungeons and Dragons
In reflecting on my childhood experience and how I got started playing Dungeons and Dragons at 9, it is most likely attributed to the fact that I live close to Lake Geneva, WI which is the birthplace of Dungeons and Dragons.
The Dungeons & Dragons game was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1973. [1] They started to characterize large scale fantasy war games with tales of individual characters. This thought led to the concept of the first fantasy role playing game, where the participants are acting as characters in an ongoing saga. This type of gaming has become popular over the years with other brands adopting the RPG (Roll Playing Game) format for their games as well, such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. [2]
In essence D&D is an on going story. With the help of the DM (Dungeon Master) you and your colleagues narrate the story, which includes quests for treasure, objects, battles with foes, rescuing NPCs (non player characters) and much more. You can explore Dungeons and Dragons through resources created by the authors at Wizards of the Coast [3], or come up with your own "homebrew" adventures.
As mentioned, the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game is about storytelling, driven by people's imagination. For example, it's about picturing in your mind arriving at a pub in a sleepy coast side town and thinking about how you may interact with the patrons inside. The D&D gaming engine / rules helps to give structure to the narrative - to determine "what happens next" with a roll of dice. For example, dice are rolled to determine whether an arrow hits an enemy and if so, how much damage. Or if a character is attempting to move in a stealth-like manner around a foe, a dice roll is done to determine if the stealth action was successful.
When you first start playing D&D you will most likely take on the role of an adventurer within a group. You might be a fighter, cleric, rogue or wizard. Use your imagination and creativity when coming up with your character. The character you create is a combination of statistics (generated by rolling dice) and role playing narrative. Usually the first time that your group gets together, will be spent mainly on character generation and development. There are a number of free resources available online to help you with character generation. [4]
The person that is helping the group get organized, the lead story teller, and referee is often called the Dungeon Master, or DM for short. The DM is in charge, running the adventure that is in the story book or home brew content, while the adventurers, through their characters, navigate the story line and decide where to explore next. The DM decides how to take the actions that the adventurers make and narrates the outcome of those actions. Because of this flexibility, each adventure, can be different based on the types of adventurers you have and the DM running the game.
Each adventure or story helps to create an ongoing epic or campaign. Campaigns can run for even months or years, it depends on the type of group you have that gets together - meeting for every week or month, to pick up the story where they last left off.
Ultimately, there's no concept of winning or losing in the D&D adventure, if a group doesn't complete an adventure successfully - but had a good time, ultimately that's the end goal of playing D&D.
The basic rules of D&D are available to be downloaded for free, [5] and with stay at home orders as the result of COVID-19, for a limited time, some resources and adventures are free. [6] In subsequent blog posts we'll explore game play and gaming systems.
Connected Cloud Challenge - IoT Gaming Table - Summary
[1] https://dnd.wizards.com/dungeons-and-dragons/what-dd/history/history-forty-years-adventure
[2] https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/#/universe
[3] https://dnd.wizards.com/products/catalog/tabletop-games
[4] https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/trpg-resources/trpg-resources