Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

Well, I guess that it all comes down to this. Well, not quite since the authors then went on to write another trilogy that is set after this where Raistin becomes an evil god and Caramon, his twin brother, must take it upon himself to go and defeat him. Now, I really cannot remember if I actually read all of the second trilogy, I suspect I may have only read the last book, but I am not writing about that book now, but about the final book in the Dragonlance Chronicles.

It is interesting that the authors are not afraid to kill of characters, but then there are actually quite a lot of characters in the book. Here they all come together again for the final battle against the Queen of the Dragons. They have found the dragonlances, powerful weapons that one can use to fight dragons, and Raistlin has unlocked the power of the ancient spells. Each of the characters have their own special characteristics, though I suspect that it is difficult, with so many major characters, to keep all of them consistent. However this is probably why there are two authors.

Some suggest that this was how the original table top adventure panned out, but in all my years of playing Dungeons and Dragons I have never met a group of gamers who will actually play the game as if it were a novel. Many play because it enables them to escape the meaninglessness of this world and believe that they are some hero. Personally I believe that we can all be heroes in our own right, however the difference is that the characters in a typical Dungeons and Dragons game generally are powerful, and the insecure players love to attempt to feather their characters to make them invincible. It is not cool for such a player's character to die (or to even have one gold piece stolen from their pocket)

However that does not make for a good game. We play the game for the story and the adventure, and it gets ruined when people do what gamers call Min-Maxing. This is where the player crafts his character to have as many strengths as possible and as few flaws as possible. Granted, we want our characters to be larger than life, but the problem with the game is that we are so disillusioned by our world that we want to escape. However, once the game has ended, we are thrust back into our world. I have known people (and have even been guilty of it myself) who spend their entire time between game sessions crafting their character, and thus they become so attached to the character that if the character dies, they are devastated.

While I do not believe that people commit suicide because their character died (as was the fearmongering in the 1980s – the people probably had much more serious issues) I do know that people put too much time and emotion into their character and nothing into their real world relationships. I consider Dungeons and Dragons to be a great society activity for an afternoon or a night, but we start having problems when we put too much emotion into it.