Thursday, March 9, 2023

"Look, It's supposed to be a fantasy game, innit?"

Zhu Bajiee recently pointed me toward a television program called Tucker's Luck, which was broadcast on BBC Two between 1983 and 1985. At the beginning of the episode below (from December 3, 1985), there is a brief scene in which several of the character play what is obviously Dungeons & Dragons, complete with the AD&D Dungeon Masters Screen (Tramp's art is unmistakable). (Also of note is that the referee is played by Charley Boorman, son of John Boorman)
In general, the popular media has – and continues to be – terrible at portraying roleplaying games. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, though the biggest reason is probably that, to outsiders, the whole endeavor appears boring, hence the perceived need to spice up the proceedings with lots of props that very few gamers actually use in real life. What's fascinating in the case of the episode above is that D&D plays only a very small role (no pun intended) in its overall plot and it's presented fairly accurately (albeit simply). I can't help but wonder why it is was included in the episode at all.

23 comments:

  1. Bizarre choice there. Betting the scene came from one of the writer's own games or an anecdote they'd heard. "Nut" as a verb is a whole lot less filthy in the UK than it is in US slang, that's for sure.

    That 80s hair is just painful to look at.

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  2. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 82 and showed D&D being a part of youth life. So for that matter, was Mazes & Monsters. Maybe those films and other events that showed the growth of D&D provided inspiration to include this?

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  3. Tucker was a bit of a 'jack-the-lad' character from a series called Grange Hill set in a secondary school. The show and his character were so popular (I remember the first one...and used to watch it religiously) that he got his own spin-off series. I imagine they included D&D to emphasise the difference between the street-wise working-class Tucker and the nerdy middle-class college kids.

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    1. "emphasise the difference between the street-wise working-class Tucker and the nerdy middle-class college kids" - Yup, I think that's exactly right. Ignoring ofc that D&D in 1980s UK was probably *more* played by nerdy working class boys in Iron Maiden T-shirts than by the middle classes!

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    2. That's my reading of it too. D&D is being used here to create an insider (middle class) and outsider group (working class Tucker) in the way that another parlour game such as Mornington Crescent might be.

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  4. Two peoples separated by a common language.

    In British slang, to "nut" somebody means to headbutt them, i.e. to hit them with your head (nut).

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  5. "Nut" can mean the same in the UK as the US, but it also means your head...so, to "nut" someone is to headbutt them. You don't really hear it in that meaning so much these days but certainly did back in the 80's.

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    1. That's probably the US version being picked up by UK youth. The only way I've ever heard it used is a head-butt.

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  6. Best and most realistic portrayal is Zero Charisma to this day.

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  7. Doesn’t surprise me. When I first heard of the game, there was no ‘stigma’ attached. The kids who were playing it were as likely to be jocks and varsity lettermen as the stereotypical nerd and geek. Same for pop culture. As James M points out, Elliott’s cool football playing older brother is also playing an obvious D&D type game at the beginning of the film. My sons bought my wife and me a DVD set of the old Magnum PI series. There are at least two cases where Magnum is playing D&D. One a computer game that is clearly a D&D knock off. And once his nemesis, Jonathan Higgins, chastises Magnum for wasting time ‘playing Dungeons and Dragons’ (by name no less) instead of tending to the task at hand. And Selleck at the time was the biggest superstar sex symbol in the world. IIRC, it was around 82/83 that the media really turned on the game, and by the mid to late 80s almost all portrayals were a negative, with little apparent concern for accuracy.

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    1. That lying maniac Pulling started BADD in 1983 after all her lawsuits about her son's suicide were thrown out of court. The right-wing Christian media was beating the drum for her daft little crusade within the same year. In 1985 she was on 60 Minutes along with Gary Gygax, although I don't know who "won" that round. Eventually her lies started coming out and she lost her influence by entirely by 1990-ish. Mike Stackpole was particularly effective at ripping her claims to shreds with his research pieces about her and BADD.

      She died of lung cancer in 1997 and BADD died with her.

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    2. Fortunately, we didn't have that "satanic panic" in Britain. RPGs were borderline mainstream in the mid-80s at most schools and colleges, and regarded as fairly wholesome.

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    3. Marc and Dick, it wasn't a Satanic Panic, as is so often imagined. Religious figures were certainly quick to jump on the bandwagon, and some had targeted the game early on. But the serious pushback came from a concerted media assault on the game that saw a constant stream of doctors, experts, mental health workers, parent groups, educators, child psychologists, and a host of others warning of the manifold dangers of D&D. When Hollywood followed suit and stopped showing it as just some fad, and began showing it in the worst stereotypes, that's when I remember many of the fellows who played it dropping it like a hot potato. Again, religious critics were certainly there, but they were only a part of the media’s crusade against it.

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    4. Interesting. As I said, David, we had nothing like that over here in Britain, RPGs were regarded as a fairly wholesome activity. And of course no internet back then so news from the US was patchy at best... I think it was a White Dwarf editorial that referred to a "satanic panic" and that was all we knew.

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    5. Marc, yep. It was a mystery why. But somewhere between 1981 and 1983, the press and pop culture definitely turned on the game. And it wasn't just religious types (though I think the greater media was happy to let people pin the hysteria there). It wasn't even some rightwing/leftwing thing. In fact, opposition to D&D is the only time I can remember Tipper Gore and Jerry Falwell agreeing on anything. I just know by the time I entered my senior year, D&D had been attacked and shunned so much that not only did most guys I know who were playing it stop, but some denied they ever heard of the game.

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    6. Your comments are spot on, David. It was not a right wing/left wing issue, and it was not driven by the religious community. It was a media-driven pseudo-cultural war with a million man army on one side and a straw bogey man on the other. The outcome was assured. Thankfully, they couldn't kill the game itself.

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    7. At the time in the UK, the moral panic of choice was about "video nasties", horror films released uncensored on easily available VHS.

      The morality police were too busy with that to go after D&D.

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    8. I grew up in Northern Ireland, and certainly there was a lot of prejudice against D&D among Protestant mothers, I guess influenced by US evangelicals. I've heard of similar in eg East Anglia. But there was never a media crusade against the game.

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    9. This is the coolest celebrity D&D player ever - Magnum PI.

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  8. Not EVERY media portrayal of D&D is bad! I'm sure that you remember GAME OF THE YEAR, James! I hear that there is talk of a sequel...

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  9. It's . . . a game, an endeavor, and at the very outward reaches of perception, maybe - just maybe - a subculture. Any religion on the planet is going to lose the body-count battle against D&D. Crusaders, indeed. Fantasy gaming has to be one of the most misunderstood topics on earth alongside Heavy Metal and NASCAR.

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  10. Hey James, glad to see you posted this! I really like how the different play-styles on display express the characters, as others have mentioned there definately is class tension on display, but I don't think it's D&D itself as the differentiator, but rather the approach to play.

    Natalia's florid sub-Shakespearean performance, almost partaking in an improvised fairy-tale theatre, where she is obviously dominating the game, holding court amongst her suitors highlighting the social dimension - something no amount of 'session zero' will ever solve. When her thief character hits the orc with the dagger - the GM gives the full 4 points of damage (without rolling) in an attempt to impress, is met with a pouting disappointment. His grinning "anyone else?" is as much about who will take a turn at impressing Natalia as it is dealing with the orcs. Tuckers blunt, prosaic and 'gritty' play is as much a signal that he's already 'gone off' Natalia, and is somewhat bored of her pretensions (she is later shown to be the worst kind of bigot) and not interested in playing social role of fairytale suitor as he is the game role of barbarian, as it is a demonstration of the 'dungeon-bashing', orc-nutting playstyle.

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