shadowdark.com

ShadowDark

“Bringing a light to the dark side of gaming.”

Welcome future readers to my first blog.  The inspiration for this blog came from what is known in Psychology as the shadow.  The term shadow was first used by the late Swiss psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung to describe that part of a person’s psyche that resides in the unconscious, consisting of everything that is repressed, undeveloped and denied.  It is commonly associated with negative traits but can easily consist of positive attributes that the person does not recognize as belonging to themselves.

While the shadow can show up in all areas of our lives, I will be focusing on how it shows up in regards to role-playing games from my personal perspective.  However, I will be looking at issues that I believe affect most if not all gamers, at one time in their gaming life. 

My own fascination with the shadow begin in high school when I took my first Psychology class and was introduced to the term.  The idea of a part of my consciousness that I was unaware of whose revelation could lead to personal growth was utterly fascinating to me.  I was particularly drawn to the idea that while my personal shadow was unknown to me it had the possibility of being much more obvious to others. 

Now, if only I could find a way to have others share their experience of my shadow side, how much quicker could be my evolution!  I will leave this thought here as it strays too far from the purpose of this blog, but if you ever want to get a reaction out of someone, just ask them what they say about you behind your back.

Currently I am mainly playing D&D 4^th edition and most of my experiences will be referencing that as well as my experiences playing D&D 3.5, but these incidents could have occurred during any type of game or system.

There’s a lot of talk about DM’s fudging dice rolls.  Generally this occurs when the players are having a challenging encounter and it is done in their favor.  I have also heard, though I believe it is more rare, that there are DM’s who might increase a dice roll if the players are having too easy of a time.  If the DM has the best interests of the players in mind and is striving to provide an entertaining experience, then I believe that some fudging here or there does not have a negative impact on the game.

However, when players fudge their dice rolls it is not a good situation.  The sanctity of the random chance factor involved in the game is something I consider sacrosanct.   There are so many good gaming moments I’ve had because of a crucial hit, or critical hit or sometimes even a natural “1”.  The game is already geared towards giving players the edge in that adding to their dice rolls, to me, means they might as well not play.

If a player is going to “make-up” the numbers on their dice, why bother rolling at all?  My personal experience with this came up around initiative.  I was playing with someone who I hadn’t known for long but had joined a home campaign that I was also a player in.  At first, I didn’t pay too much attention, but after a couple of game sessions I noticed that this player always seemed to be going first and usually their initiative was 20+.

I’m not very comfortable with confrontation and I didn’t know this person very well and didn’t have any actual proof, so I decided to start tracking his initiative rolls to gather evidence.  I tried to be circumspect about the process but during the second session that I had started tracking his rolls he noticed what I was doing.  I didn’t deny what I was doing but I also didn’t outright accuse him of cheating.  It didn’t seem he was making up numbers as much as he had a habit of rolling his d20s when there was no call from the DM to do so.  It was more making “practice” rolls and the good roll became his initiative roll.  I’m not claiming this is any better or worse than just making up a number for initiative, but I believe that he was more dissembling about cheating than consciously doing it.  Anyway, after that second session it seemed his initiative rolls started to even out into a more consistent pattern that could be expected from random dice rolls.

Have you ever had to deal with someone making up dice rolls?  Were you a player or DM?  How did you deal with it?  Ever had the urge to do it yourself?  I’d like to hear any other comments or feedback or stories around this issue.  Do you feel as strongly as I do about the sanctity of the random dice rolls?

Cendragon