Ethnography Results Week 2

This week we went back to the same DnD group as before, however the group was playing a different system as the week before. We got there early enough and we were able to talk to some of the regulars about how they percieved last weeks game went and the differences between this weeks game and last weeks.

The two are quite vast, on being described as a continual back and forth between the leader (DM or Dungeon Master) and the PC's (Player Characters). The system is designed to where the players are supposed to struggle and there is a lot of interaction between the people, discussions, interactions, and it leaves a lot of time for joking and in general the game is not taken seriously. They also discussed how it was desgined for larger groups and it worked well with groups of 9 or more.

This weeks game was going to be different, it was a more relaxed system with less overall interactions and more room for storytelling and "role playing" (an aspect of DnD where the players embody their character and talk the way they would percieve their character doing so). The system is also less adversarial between the DM and the PCs and a lot of times the DM will do things specifically so that the player will not lose their character or if they want to try a new character make it so that the story will kill them off.

The unfortunate part is we sat and discussed these things for nearly an hour and fifteen minutes and then the leader of the group decided that there was not enough participants and he was not entirely prepared and decided to call the game for the day and go to Denny's. This just goes to show the lack of organizations in these groups and how they are a very friendly community where they are all very invested in their friends lives, but for the most part things are not planned and they simply happen or not. It also plays to the aspect of the culture when they are not able to do their primary task they simply do another group activity and everyone is invited. We were even invited to join in on breakfast!

The meeting did not go as planned but we were able to get some good interviews and see how these people are outside the game. We will be comming back to this group later in the study but next week we are going to a different group that plays, yet another, slightly different system.