D&D General What did D&D teach you?

[The Sigil]

I started with B/X and quickly moved to AD&D. Old High Gygaxian is great for building an archaic vocabulary. So D&D taught me a lot of outdated and mostly useless words.

RPGs also taught me to do basic math quickly. Additive dice pool systems anyone? Grouping dice by tens and adding things up looks like magic to some of the other players at the table who never played WEG Star Wars.

RPGs also taught me an appreciation for percentages and chance. Most other people think of something like a 90% chance as basically a sure thing. I know that’s a damned dirty lie.

Listed in order by the amount I have actually used them in my daily life:

• An enormous vocabulary (yes, some of it is archaic, but I am usually able to select EXACTLY the right shade of meaning in a single word without resorting to "very" or "kind of" etc.) and that makes people THINK I'm erudite!
• Empathy - The ability to quite easily imagine myself in another person's shoes (DMing especially has let me roleplay different ages, races, genders, cultures, and even species - it's not the same as "lived experience" but I've at least tried to get in the heads of other people hundreds of times in my lifetime)
• Instantaneously count groups of objects up to about 15 (pips on old-school six-sided dice) - even about three-tenths of a second glance is enough
• An appreciation for statistics, percentages, and chance
• The lesson that "Tragedy plus time equals comedy"

 

[MockingBird]

I guess I can say it taught me how to lead and manage. Being the forever DM responsible for organizing and managing a bunch of kids.

 

[CharlesWallace]

I guess I can say it taught me how to lead and manage. Being the forever DM responsible for organizing and managing a bunch of kids.

Interestingly, I don’t play enough these days to say I get to work on management skills. For me it’s primarily been empathy and vocabulary.

Kind of cool that everyone can get such different things from the same hobby.

 

[TheLibrarian]

Quixotic. There was a class called the Quixotic Jedi from the old West End Star Wars game.

Also, the names of polearms.

 

[The Sigil]

Quixotic. There was a class called the Quixotic Jedi from the old West End Star Wars game.

Also, the names of polearms.

Yeah, I still remember this...

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

How to read maps.
How to do quick maths (though Cribbage also taught me a lot of maths skills).
How to play nice in a group.
What a Bohemian Earspoon is.

 

[aco175]

I was lucky to ask my dad and not my mom the difference between a slovenly trull and a brazen strumpet.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

On the positive side? That the power of imagination can lead us to truly deep, poignant experiences. That "a game" can be more than idle amusement, can enrich us, and give us practice for making morally upright choices in fictionally dire situations so that we can be better-prepared for making morally upright choices in physically dire situations.

On the negative side? That people can be incredibly tribalistic. That the idolization--indeed, fetishization--of the auteur designer(/DM) is a pernicious cancer on a lot of things. That the best results are, all too often, achieved not by speaking openly and honestly with others and letting them draw their own conclusions, but by using benevolent deceptions and concealing change beneath a just-thin-enough candy coating of fawning traditionalism.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What a Bohemian Earspoon is.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Lots of vocabulary ("carbuncle" as a seventh grader, years before learning it in SAT prep). Improv skills. And always coup de grace a fallen foe, something that Oberyn Martell on Game of Thrones should have known about.