Morality I	Morality II	-	Morality III	Morality IV
Dragon	-	-	-	Dragon 36

“The room is illuminated by light of a provocative, scarlet hue. The
air is musky, smoky, honey-sweet. A luxurious carpet of thick, black fur
covers the floor and in the center of it is a pedestal which has a golden
bowl affixed to it. The four walls are adorned with lurid reliefs of men,
women and other creatures locked in all manner of sensuous embrace.
An unseen voice speaks as the party of adventurers enters. ‘Seek Ye
Fulfillment?’, it asks . . . ”

This room is one of thirteen which constitute the first level of a
dungeon adventure I call The Inn of Ootah. The purpose of it should be
clear to even a hobbit-sized imagination. Once a party enters, the
unseen voice offers them a choice of delicacies and if the heroes and
heroines care to view these, then shimmering, colored forceportals
open in the walls. Behind these portals exotic women and men (The
E.R.A. already passed in my world) beckon seductively. If a character is
interested, he or she renders payment to the golden bowl, there is a
spurt of obscuring gas and in place of gold is a heart-shaped talisman
that permits a single party member entry through the forceportal opted
for. Once through, the portal closes and the hardy soul is left quite alone
with the delicacy of his choice. What occurs then is strictly between me
and the character who has entered, though of course he or she has the
option to kiss and tell, IF and when he/she returns.

I originally constructed the Inn of Ootah as a personal campaign
game. The participants in my campaign are all adults, well past the age
of consent and fairly sophisticated in their approach to play. The room I
have just described would cause them no shock or embarrassment,
they’d simply take it as it was and “seek fulfillment” according to their
mood.

Recently, however, I carted the Inn along on a trip to GrimCon, a
fresh addition to the West Coast fantasy-gaming scene. I intended to run
it for three friends who moved north from L.A. to San Francisco and
who are all devoted D&Ders without a campaign to play in. My idea was
to use my friends’ campaign characters as a core group and recruit other
players from those attending the con. This was easy enough to accom

plish, but the resultant play left me with some rather heady food for
thought, and this nourishment prompted me to share some conclusions
with some of you older DMs out there.

As we all know, a large percentage of those who enjoy fantasy
gaming are youngsters between the age of 12 and 16. They appear in
gargantuan hordes at every con, madly seeking games in a fashion that
is best described as True Chaotic. DMs in their 20s 30s and 40s often
shun these kids as players, or patronize them contemptuously, attitudes
I find distasteful to say the least.

Younger dungeon-delvers bring a fresh, uncynical viewpoint to the
game that augments the fun of it, and if in their exuberance they tend to
talk all at once this is understandable. Any adult DM who can’t control 5
or 6 prepubescent lads by means other than the Instant Balrog Gambit
should check out his own means of relating to people. Besides, there are
plenty of players out of their teens who can be just as obnoxious (or
even more so). By the same token, there are certain stumbling blocks
inherent in DMing for younger players, particularly if you are as fond of
role-play as I am.

Take, for example, that scarlet-hued room with the black carpet.
When the party entered, my friends were instantly delighted, but the
players I had “picked up” sat there with mouths agape. There were five
of them, the oldest about 14, and it was painfully apparent that not one
of them had ever encountered a dungeon room where outright sensual
activity was offered. Ferocious monsters they could deal with, traps that
sliced off limbs they could face jauntily, but painted ladies beckoning
absolutely stunned them. There were a few nervous giggles and one kid,
playing a Paladin, reacted with extravagantly Paladinish shock, covering his eyes to blot out the “filth” on the walls.

Nevertheless, a few moments later when a mage and a fighter (both
played by my adult pals) essayed the shimmering portals to glean what,
uh, “information” they could from the ladies within, this same Paladin
grew extremely interested. I could see a struggle taking place within the
lad, and sure enough, after a while he inquired if partaking of the
“delicacies” would be against his alignment. His pals giggled some
more, but the question floored me. I suddenly realized that here I was,
31 years old, the product of a, shall we say, “liberated” New York City
youth, and this 14 year-old was asking me if an act of sex was evil.

For one frightening moment I was in a situation of responsibility that
related to more than just a game of D&D.

Think about it, you adult DMs. Think how your fantasy activity
touches your real life, then consider yourself at 14 when everything you
did loomed large in the way you continued to live. If you’d been a D&D
fanatic at the time, I would guess many of your attitudes toward right
and wrong would have been molded by your game experience, even if
only subconsciously. It flashed through my mind that in some way my
answer would have an influence on this youthful Paladin and his friends
as well, not in their game lives but in their actual growing up. Gad, save
vs. responsibility!

The answer I finally gave wasn’t profound but it was honest. I told
him if he considered sex evil it was, though in my opinion it wasn’t. He
thought about it, still a tad nervous. He asked if perhaps he could go into
one of the portals and not do anything. I allowed as he could, if he
wanted to blow 40 gold pieces.

At about this time the fighter and mage appeared back in the room,
both professing to feel “weaker” though both had had a “real good”
time. The Paladin begged off and not one of the other kids had even
dared to consider such goings-on, so the party left the room. The
encounter, however, roamed around my greymatter for the remainder
of the convention. I was having thoughts about D&D that had never
occurred to me previously.

In the same game another incident occurred, again with that same
Paladin player. This one involved a mysterious monk smoking a substance from a hookah which he offered to certain party members. My
friends accepted somewhat overeagerly, while the Paladin again asked
me that question. Was smoking a drug against his alignment? Now, I’m
not a junkie, nor do I think drugs are of any benefit to teen-agers (no
high is as good as your own natural openness to things at that age), but I
have had a good deal of experience with a whole gamut of consciousness-altering substances and would be hard pressed to declare them
categorically evil.

I therefore opted for the same answer regarding drugs as I had given
regarding sex, namely, if he thought they were evil then they were. I
myself did not consider them so. He obviously feared drug use less than
he did sex (natural for a 14-year-old), because he took the toke offered.
The result was a three-turn zombieized state during which he enjoyed
some vivid, though not unpleasant, hallucinations regarding holy symbols and the like. Of course, he had to be walked around during this time
and wasn’t of much help when the party was attacked by two doombats
shortly after.

“That’ll teach you to get stoned on an expedition,” said one of his
friends self-righteously, but it didn’t faze him. I think he actually enjoyed
his pseudo-high, and this fact really set my brain machinery in gear. I
had begun with a nice, amiable kid who seemed to hold the belief that
sex and drug use were inherently evil things and in the course of our
mutual gaming I opened his head to the POSSIBILITY that this was not
always so. My personal moral viewpoint had been passed on in an
unthreatening manner to a boy who might very well be influenced by it
at such time as those areas crossed his life.

I fully realize that my Paladin friend is intelligent enough to make his
own decisions in these matters; nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that our
role-playing interaction will have an effect on those decisions. In D&D
we PLAY a character, but invariably that character contains elements of
our own selves. For adults, those selves are already firmly fixed; for
younger players those selves are still being shaped by EVERY experience they have, INCLUDING D&D. The game becomes not only a
leisure activity, it becomes a teaching instrument as well.

A young man or woman running through an adventure charted by
an adult is open to picking up attitudes of that adult in regard to certain
activities. The most evident of such activities is killing. Every melee
involves killing, generally in a black-and-white manner, i.e. those orcs
are evil and deserve to die and besides, they’ll slay us if we don’t slay
them. Fine, no problem. Most young players will never have to face a
need to kill in real life, assuming that the powers that be are not insane
enough to start another major war. Despite this, a DM should stress that
killing is the least preferable solution to conflict, avoiding the tendency to
glorify life-taking.

On the other hand, these young players will in real life face sexual
encounters, drug use, racial prejudice, religious crisis, political corruption and numerous meetings with other human beings who may very
well be of “evil” alignment. At the moment of such confrontations, all
their experiences will carry weight, fantasy experiences as well as real.
The more open-minded a DM is in providing such real-life simulations in
a dungeon, the more his players will pick up reasonable attitudes toward
the very real evils of life. Role-playing is meant to do this and D&D is a
legitimate arena for espousing the good.

I don’t mean you should forego the thrill of fang, talon, claw and
sword, I only suggest you balance it with good role-play of a SIGNIFICANT nature. One good-aligned helpful character who happens to be
gay can change a passel of bigoted attitudes that have no basis. Adding
racial strains that are not lily-white to your world goes a long way in
telling an impressionable youngster that black, brown, yellow, red and
even blue-skinned people are not all that different and shouldn’t be
feared or hated. (If you think I emphasize this too much, take a gander
around you at the next convention and see how many races other than
Caucasian are present.).

Having the belief in a God or Goddess be the key factor in sustaining
a player’s life goes a long way in showing that religious faith can be of
real value in the world. Use of a drug that addicts a character with
horrible consequences says more than any dry lecture about the real
dangers of drug abuse.

I am not saying you should go heavy-handed on this. Nobody’s
looking for a message in every dungeon room. The point is, a message
can be delivered, light-heartedly and subtly, and it can HELP a person
who has yet to go through what you already have faced.

We older DMs didn’t have D&D when we were that age, but the
generation following us does. They will learn from us, if we dare to
teach. The result will be better, more imaginative gaming for all of us,
and just possibly we might even build a real world where dice are the
only means of killing and hatred is only vented on Evil High Priests. The
power to promote weal exists. I intend to use it and have fun in doing so.