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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Mark Des Cotes, I learnt to drive on a 1980 Chevy Monza coupe, and I believe if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I talk about the consequences of assumptions.
Today’s Fun Fact of the Day: Did you know that Canada is the only country that has two official national sports? In 1994, the government of Canada passed an act recognizing hockey as our winter national sport and lacrosse as our summer national sport. To expand on this theme, did you know that even though baseball is wildly recognized as America’s national pastime, the United States doesn’t actually have a legally recognized national sport? So what do you think? Baseball, Basketball, Football or something else, which should the USA adopt as it’s national sport?
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Here’s What I leaned yesterday.
I’m going to lay my geek card right down in front of you now and tell you that I am a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan. In fact, my resume has Dungeon Master listed under interests and hobbies, I’m not kidding. I actually landed a job interview once because the HR person was curious and wanted to ask me about it. I realized at the interview that the job wasn’t for me and backed out so I don’t know if he would have hired me or not.
I was introduced to the game in the 80s during my early teen years. When I was in grade 10 my high school organized a winter carnival day that included a ski trip for all the grades. For those of us that didn’t ski there were various activities taking place at the school we could partake in. Thinking most of the activities were pretty lame, and not being the athletic type, I decided to stay away from the classrooms and gym, and instead decided to check out a Dungeons & Dragons game taking place in the library. I wasn’t exactly sure what D&D was but anything was better than arts and crafts or playing dodge ball all day. I met a group of four grade 9 students that I had seen in the hallways but didn’t know. They turned out to be a group of friends that played D&D on a regular basis and were using the carnival day as an excuse for their favourite pastime. I joined them at the table and they gave me a quick rundown of how to play.
For those of you who don’t know, here’s a quick Dungeons & Dragons 101. There are several thick rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D as it’s also called, but in the most basic terms it’s a game of the imagination controlled by the Dungeon Master. Think of him as the storyteller/referee. The Dungeon Master, also called the DM tells you a story, but the story changes depending on your actions. It’s a little like those choose your own adventures books you may have read as a kid. The DM could say something like “you’re in a dimly lit room with 3 doors, the one you just walked through and 2 others, one on the left wall and one on the right. You hear a scratching noise from the door on the right. What do you do?” And then it’s left up to the players to decide if we want to investigate the noise behind the right door or play it safe and open the left door. It obviously gets more complicated than just choosing doors but SILY is supposed to be a short podcast so I won’t go into all the details.
As players we control a character. There are different classes of characters we can play in the game. Strong fighters, nimble thieves, Powerful Mages and Devout Clerics just to name a few. We have a sheet of paper that lists everything about our character from how strong and intelligent he is, how much of a beating he can take, what special skills he has and what spells he can cast if he’s a spell caster. Also listed are what supplies he’s carrying and what armour and weapons he has. This character sheet is our guide to what we can and cannot do within the game.
Throughout the story told by the DM, players will encounter simple obstacles like having to decide what door to open as well as more complicated ones. For the latter we have a variety of dice to help us determine our fate. For example, if a locked gate was blocking our way down a hallway. The Dungeon Master would look at my character sheet to see how strong he is and then determine what I need to roll with the dice in order to succeed. Dungeons & Dragons have some pretty nifty dice, starting from 4 sided to the standard 6 sided die followed by 8, 10, 12, and 20 sided dice. To bend or break the gate the DM may say I needed to roll a 15 or higher on a 20 sided die. If I make the roll, I successfully clear our path. If I fail the roll, the gate is too strong and I need backtrack and find a different route.
Of course the main fun in D&D are the battles. It can get very exiting when you’re immersed in the Dungeon Master’s story and all of a sudden you find yourself face to face with a monster. Depending on what creature you’re fighting, the DM will tell you what you need to roll in order to hit. A small goblin may require a 4 or better on a 20 sided die whereas a dragon may require you to roll an actual 20. And so goes the game of Dungeon & Dragons. The DM tells a story that changes depending on the actions the players choose, all along the way having their fate decided by the roll of the dice.
I had a lot of fun that day in high school. I quickly became friends with those four guys and we got together on an almost a weekly basis to play.
Now, if you’re old enough you may remember the controversy over Dungeons & Dragons in the 80s. A few kids who committed suicide also happened to play D&D. The media exaggerated the story like they do with everything else and before long schools and churches were condemning the game. There was even a TV movie made called Mazes and Monsters starring a young Tom Hanks that depicted a roll playing game gone wrong. Now of course we know now that those concerns weren’t merited. But back then a lot of parents wouldn’t let their kids play the game. Luckily my mother supported my gaming 100%. Anything that kept me off the street and out of trouble was OK by her.
Anyway, A couple of years later my friends and I all had jobs and girlfriends, yes Dungeons & Dragons geeks can have girlfriends so erase that stereotype from your mind. We were finding it harder and harder to get together. Around that time I was working at Sears and met a fellow coworker who also played D&D. He invited me to join his group and they welcomed me in. These guys all had girlfriends as well, but they made it a point of meeting once a week for a few hours to play. We got together on a weekly basis throughout college and long into married life and parenthood. At some point life did catch up with us and we stopped meeting for Dungeons & Dragons. Although we still try to have a game at least once a year. Regardless of playing or not, these guys are still my closest friends. In fact I’m having lunch with three of them today.
OK, now to the point of my title for this episode. Some time around 1990, Peter, one of those friends and I went to a comic convention in Ottawa, Canada’s Capital. Now I’m sure you’ve heard about Comic-Con and other such conventions, with all the glamour of Hollywood, well back in 1990 comic conventions were actually about comic books. Celebrity guests were comic book writers and artists. The other thing about comic conventions back then was a large part of them was devoted to RPG, or Roll Playing Games of which Dungeons & Dragons is the granddaddy of them all. Pete and I were going that day to play in a D&D tournament. A D&D tournament is where players are divided into small groups and each group is told the same story. If your character dies during the story your are out of the tournament, if he survives you move on to the next round. This keeps going until there is only one survivor.
This was Pete and my first time at a tournament but we were ready. Both of us were experienced players and Dungeon Masters. In fact, Pete is the best DM I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with. By chance we found ourselves in the same group. When our turn arrived we sat down at the table with 4 or 5 other players and the DM quickly explained the rules. We each had a sealed envelope before us with our character sheet inside. We wouldn’t know what type of character we would be playing until the game began. Once we opened the envelope we had 10 minutes to study our character and ask any questions. During this time we could also purchase supplies for our character with the gold coins listed on our sheets.
As luck would have it my character was a cleric, a holy spell caster and healer of the group. In all my years of playing Dungeons & Dragons I had never played a cleric before. It was the one class of character that never interested me. But that was OK, I had watched other players play Clerics before so I was familiar with how to play one.
I quickly looked over my character sheet and saw a few additions I wanted to make. Not knowing what the adventure would be, I asked the DM if I could buy 50 feet of rope and a few torches to carry in case we needed them. I also noticed that the only spells my Cleric had were defensive spells. Now a Cleric’s main purpose in a party is to stay at the back, out of harms way and defend and heal the other players using spells as they take on the big bad foe. This is all well and good but I wanted to be able to help out in a pinch should the need arise. I asked the DM if I could have one more spell, a spell called spiritual hammer. When cast, this spell conjures up a magical hammer that floats in the air and attacks whoever the Cleric directs it to. The DM allowed me to take the spell and asked if there was anything else I wanted. I told him I was good, and once the other players were done we began the game.
Now I wont go into details about the actual game but needless to say these tournament games are made to weed out players fast. In no time at all there were only three characters still alive, my Cleric, Pete’s fighter and another guy playing a thief. The next monster we faced, a giant, quickly disposed of the burglar leaving just Pete and I. Pete’s fighter stood toe to toe with it for a while but soon Pete was hurting bad. I was out of both healing and defensive spells, but I still had my spiritual hammer spell. If I could successfully hit the giant before Pete died, he and I would win this round of the tournament. In an act of desperation I told the DM I was casting my last spell. He looked at me and told me sorry you can’t. I was confused, why couldn’t I cast the spell? He then told me I didn’t buy the necessary components to cast the spell.
You see, spell casting in Dungeons & Dragons requires of the character three things; a verbal component, an abracadabra if you will. A somatic component, the waving of the fingers and a material component, like eye of newt. To cast the Spiritual Hammer spell, a Cleric requires a miniature hammer made of silver. Now, in all my years of playing D&D I have never told a DM that I’m buying a spell component. The assumption was always there that if a spell caster took a certain spell, he also took the necessary spell components. It would be akin to a hunter saying he’s taking his 12 gauge with him. The assumption is that he’s bringing shotgun shells with him wouldn’t you think?
Anyway, The GM said he asked me at the beginning if there was anything else I wanted to buy and I had said no. He then told me that I had lost my turn by attempting and failing the spell, giving the giant the time to kill Pete. I argued that I wouldn’t have tried the spell without having the component and asked for a second chance, however slim, to try attacking the giant with my mace. But he refused. Pete’s character was dead and I was no match for the behemoth. Our game was soon over with no survivors. Peter and I were done with the tournament.
What did I learn?
Maybe you’re thinking “get over it Mark, it was only a game” but I actually learned a valuable lesson that day. I went into that tournament confident and cocky. I had been playing D&D weekly for over 7 years and could practically recite both the player’s and Dungeon Master’s rule books by heart. There wasn’t anything about the game I didn’t know. And yet, I was still outplayed as if I was a rookie. All because of my assumption that everyone interprets the rules the same way I do.
That lesson has helped me in both my business and personal life and has served me well over the years. Whenever I deal with a client, a friend, even a fellow graphic or web designer, I never assume that what I know is the same as what they know. This is very evident when dealing with clients. It didn’t take me long to figure out that most people that hire me don’t have a clue when it comes to good design. After all, that’s why they’re paying me. Now not all clients lack design sense but I start each relationship with the assumption that they are ignorant to what it is I do. It’s a lot easier to gain their trust If I start from that perspective and then figure out what they do know, than it is if I started off thinking they knew everything and had to discover what they didn’t.
And this doesn’t only apply to clients. I don’t make assumptions about my colleagues either. I’ve met some brilliant graphic designers over the years that barely knew how to use Photoshop. Or wonderful web designers that don’t know a single line of code. Just because these are skills I use in my job on a daily basis doesn’t make them any less competent at their job, it just means they have skills in other areas, some of which I may not have.
Wether you meet someone new, go to a new place or are presented with a different situation. You can’t just take for granted that your knowledge and skills will fit the circumstances. You need to examine, explore, open your mind to different possibilities. After all, that’s how you learn. And as we always say at the begging of this podcast. If you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
For those of you gamers out there, my preference has been, and always will be, the 2nd edition Advanced Dungeon & Dragons rules.
I’m Mark Des Cotes and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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