Interference

Steven ShumwayFollow

Date Collected

Fall 11-25-2018

Informant

Brock Grimshaw

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Brock Grimshaw is 25 and has played Dungeons and Dragons for 9 years. He is married and currently a teacher at Stansbury Park Elementary School.

Context

Brock and I have been good friends for the better part of 5 years and have been playing Dungeons and Dragons together for most of that time. When we first started playing everyone in the group besides Brock was around 16 and had only played minimally before. I was usually the Dungeon Master, but often Brock would often take over. This conversation was held on Brock’s couch in his house when I came over to hang out as his kitten tried to attack my foot.

Text

With our group when we are playing Dungeons and Dragons and we roll the dice and something bad happens, we lots of time look for any excuse to negate that bad happening. So we roll the dice and there’s a low number when we wanted a high number but it kinda hit a notebook S: *snickers*

B: and we say “Okay that was interference, something got in the way” and you reroll the dice. But we will never ever do that if the roll is high. Strictly us trying to get out of a sticky situation.

S: Can you give me specific examples of what counted and didn’t?

B: *chuckle* Well towards the end you started to put a big kabosh on “okay no where the dice lands, the dice lands,” but it would tend to be if um it hit something on the table that wasn’t normally there or if we didn’t roll the dice fully and it kinda slipped out of our hands. Sometimes we’d count that as interference. Usually it had to do with hitting something on the table or. And in some cases if the dice isn’t rolled if it just plopped down and just landed right down on the table without any rolling we’d go “Oh clearly that was interference.”

S: *laugh*

B: But yeah towards the end we started to uh, we got a little crazy with interference so uh

S: Why do you think that is why do you think we stopped it?

B: Um I would say it’s, I don’t know. Because I guess we viewed having the random chance as more *air quotes* “correct” right? Like the point of the dice in the game is to add some suspense to make it so you don’t know what is or isn’t gonna happen. So I think we got rid of the interference because we wanted to keep the odds more pure.

Texture

This was told in a somewhat embarrassed tone. I think he thought of the idea as sort of juvenile and something almost shameful. Even though I already knew all this stuff he explained it to me as though I had never heard it before. However he was still very relaxed and he told the story in his pajamas.

Course

ENGL 2210

Instructor

Dr. Lynne McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G6: Socializing Games

EAD Number

3.5.2.5

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