Who had a better DM style in this episode? Dexter, or Dee Dee?
sub-question: how experienced were you in TTGs when you first saw this episode? did it inspire you to pick up D&D?
The D&D Episode of Dexters Laboratory
Who had a better DM style in this episode? Dexter, or Dee Dee?
sub-question: how experienced were you in TTGs when you first saw this episode? did it inspire you to pick up D&D?
I thought it was cool as frick, but had no idea what was going on, so I just made my own shitty board games trying to mimic it
Same here, I even made my own Monsters & Mazes screen.
Same here, except without making my own thing. I also saw the DnD scene in E.T., and I spent my first 15 years of life confused and wondering how in the hell you actually play these games. Thank god for the internet.
Same, but mine was more inspired from Yu-gi-oh.
Always bothered me how it showed the goblins simply getting pinned to trees with arrows or whatever.
They're fairytale monsters, and it's all taking place in the kids' imaginations anyway. Would American parents complain if the cartoon showed 'actual violence'? How do they adapt actual fairy stories for younger kids?
>How do they adapt actual fairy stories for younger kids?
Look at AtLA, some guy might get hit with a sword or a giant boulder but they would just get thrown around fall on their back or into a lake
>Look at AtLA, some guy might get hit with a sword or a giant boulder but they would just get thrown around fall on their back or into a lake
The one time we see someone get hit square with a pointy rock he fricking dies though
And then in the sequel series everyone who does die dies exclusively by explosion
>The one time we see someone get hit square with a pointy rock he fricking dies though
It was just a rock, if you mean Jet
And it was left so overly ambiguous due to censorship that even the creators made fun of it
Most of Atla's deaths are easy to beat around and nonviolent
and then sokka takes combustion man out with his boomerang
only protagonist with a reasonably confirmed kill from directly hitting them onscreen, although we can say a lot of people almost certainly died in those fricking airships
that said, katara almost fricking killed several people a few times with those sharp-ass ice bits that took bits of people's hair off
if she left the south pole for any reason except the avatar suddenly existing again she'd be a straight up murderer
>only protagonist with a reasonably confirmed kill from directly hitting them onscreen
Does Zhao count? Aang racked up a pretty big body count at the north pole all things considered but Zhao's the only one where it's 100% confirmed the dude died on-screen.
It's hard to say whether ATLA or Samurai Jack is more annoying with their "totally no killing" crap
eh, it's a kids' show, I don't mind it too much
I would argue this was the spirit rather than Aang but I won't deny there's a case for it being Aang
That said, if you count LoK, Zhao could totally have left the fog of lost souls and potentially even the spirit world entirely if he had his shit together enough - and Iroh is known to have visited the spirit world at the time of ATLA so I think it's reasonable to count it
Awful excuse for bad writing
Big difference between bad writing on the part of the creators and "they literally won't let us do it the good way no matter what"
At a certain point you have to accept it as part of child-focused cartoons or watch something else
I guess you could write angry letters to the networks but I don't think you'll change their mind. Post results if you do.
The bad writing is turning it into a contrived plot point when even children are smart enough to realize that killing happens even if it's not explicitly shown on screen.
>I would argue this was the spirit rather than Aang
>Kyoshi: b***h move over, I'm taking the reigns, frick this pussy-ass no kill bullshit. Dealing with this kind of pansy homosexualry for months is why I hated learning air. Enough dicking around. It's Kaiju Time.
Yes. Go back and watch any show from the late 80s to 90s. No one with a bladed weapon or arrows actually hurt anything humanoid.
Leonardo and Rapheal never actually cut someone with their weapons
Wolverine never cut anyone with his claws
Even the kid from Pirates of Dark Water never cut a human with his broken sword.
If the arrows had been made of magic they could have hit the goblin, but he would have had to have poofed out of existence with a magical flash. The literal selling point of anime in the states at first was that people could get hurt and bleed for real.
>Leonardo and Rapheal never actually cut someone with their weapons
Unless they were robots. You can kill robots.
Nah that's internet ebonics if I ever saw it.
>The literal selling point of anime in the states at first was that people could get hurt and bleed for real.
This was true as frick
I remember being a little kid watching anime like "Whoa, the three eyed guy just got his arm ripped off, anything can happen in this show."
I saw Heavy Metal on HBO when I was like 9 so...
Heavy Metal and most Bakshi movies are practically considered outsider cinema. They were always in the "special interest" section of video stores and only aired dead in the middle of the night on HBO and Cinemax. Meanwhile, commericals like this ran in prime-time on cable.
my dad played it for me when I was a kid and my mom made fun of him for getting turned on by a cartoon
I wanted to top the stuttering blonde kid
I was DMing probably the most popular campaign I ever ran when this episode originally aired. At the time I had total contempt for Deedee's game and thought the guys were only so into it because they were thirsty but I have grown somewhat more appreciative of her easygoing confidence. That shit where she just picks Dexter up and sets him aside then sliiiiides in there and oh so confidently sets the DM screen upside down in front of herself, "So who's what?" fricking slays me. Her game is still fundamentally lacking structure though.
>so into it because they were thirsty
Over a little girl...?
They're all kids, Anon. Mandark certainly wants to jump her bones.
dee dee is older than most of them
She's older than them you fricking moron.
Do you remember Mandark?
All the characters in Dexter’s Lab are children dumbass.
You probably think highschool teenagers fricking other teenagers is “pedophilia” LMAO
Why not? they were little boys. Or are all children pedophiles now?
>never had a crush on a friend's older sister
Dee dee is older than you.
>Her game is still fundamentally lacking structure though.
dexter planned this shit for weeks, she pick up his slack, and efortlessly ran a campaign that made players happy, without caring about numbers and we. She was a natural
I got the impression that they were into it because they were tired of Dexter's Killer DM antics.
In hindsight I think that probably was the intended message but to be honest we definitely over-sexualized DD back in the day. 1997 was a different time.
We, uh. We did?
My largely female group of 17-22 year olds certainly did
Bullshit.
Guess you didn't hang out in comic shops/game stores in the 90s
When did the episode drop? I think I was playing games for a few years when it came out. But i started playing RPGs in kindergarten.
>Who had a better DM style in this episode?
That's pretty subjective. It's clear that the group, excluding Dexter, enjoyed DeeDee's GMing better.
Do you not remember the part where Dexter hires a prostitute to play DeeDee?
I thought the point was that their styles were two extremes, not that either one was particularly any better than the other.
Also it was the 90's, people were still burning Harry Potter books and wanting to ban violent video games, yes parents would complain
conservatives still want to ban video games and harry potter. t, lives in oklahoma
Hell, Bill Maher's a liberal and he was ranting about action movie and video game violence the other night.
It's just a Boomer thing. One more way to pass the buck about how fricked up they've made society.
Dexter's Lab was pretty rad. I really liked this episode.
Which season + episode is this?
D & DD
Third episode of season 2
Ideally you want something between them. But playing a game I think I'd rather play Dexter's campaign. If he'd scale back on the cheating, it'd be fun to have a DM that's ACTUALLY TRYING to run dangerous combat.
I thought the /tg/ hivemind settled this aeons ago, did a new generation come in or something?
Dexter's desire to "win" rather than be an impartial referee means that no matter how much he understands the game's structure and rules, he is simply not playing as intended and he is acting against the spirit of the game. Deedee on the other hand, instantly understands most of her duties, and in time I'm sure she could understand the dangers of being too generous(Monty Hauling) and become more deliberate at it. Also, watch her in action, dealing with a That Guy:
> Dexter: What happened to the eeeeviiil wizard who was zapping everyone?
> Dee Dee: He's done.
> DX: What you mean, he's done?
> DD: He's done zapping. Move along.
Straight and to the point, nipping that problem player in the bud. And not a minute later, she makes peace with him by both reminding Dexter that she's the DM and accepting lore corrections at the same time, while still hewing to the baseline of "Don't sweat the small stuff".
> DD: So you're walking along the forest...
> DX: Dungeon!
> DD: Dungeon-forest. Whatever.
Honestly, there are only two problems I see with her DMing. One is that she is blatantly under-prepped. I'd say that this is something she'd learn and overcome if she kept on being a DM, but Dee Dee clearly has a bad case of untreated ADHD, and I suspect she'd never develop the habit of game prep, just trusting her skills in winging it for years and years.
The other is that like most other liberals, she can't help but subvert expectations, and I believe her progressive ideology would stop her from creating satisfying campaign ends.
> DD: Surprise! The Dragon is a Piñata!
Mark my hyperbole, with Dee Dee as DM, every Dark Lord would be secretly good, and every noble king would be secretly evil.
>impartial referee
Seen enough of these to know they don't allow any fun at the table. Dexter at least permitted cool things to happen
Maybe if your game sucks or your players are boring.. It's not that hard to get plenty of awesome shit by just sitting back and arbitrating.
Unless you're talking about some kind of "Nuuuu, there's no rules in the game for tying rope to things!" sort of homosexualry.
Just remembered that little animation of the wizard shooing them away with his hand
That shit was gold
autism
dos liberals gonna getchu
You type like a troony.
Dexter was a shit DM who saw his job as 'beating' his players at every turn
I liked the very B/X aesthetic party
Been years since I've seen this, why was Dexter a halfling again?
He wanted to be Gygax, 27th level warrior-mage with a class 18 soul-sucking sword but DD told him to be the furry-footed burrower based on just grabbing a fig and handing it to him.
extremely correct response to a That Guy trying to powergame honestly
They reminded me of Gauntlet as a kid, and by the looks of things that's exactly how Dexter ran his games. That party is probably cracked to survive what he was usually throwing at them.
The DM appealing to a higher DM (Mom) is something every game should have.
>Monster and Mazes
>I call the homebrew ttrpg I've been working on for years Mazes and Monsters
Huh. So that's where I got it from.
I got bad news for you, Anon
I think that's what the Mutants and Masterminds 2e medieval fantasy expansion was called
I'm pretty sure this was my first exposure to the concept of ttrpgs. I imagine it was the same for lots of kids growing up in that period.
Later I learned that both of my parents were actually really into them in their uni days and shared lots of stories with me, my dad even had a bunch of old materials he had shown me. This sucked me right in. But watching Dexter's Lab as a young kid was almost certainly the first time I learned something like that exists as a concept.
When I first saw this episode, I was pretty familiar with RPGs as a kid. Nobody that I knew had the actual books for D&D, but we all played a very rudimentary homebrew game using six sided dice
>Who had a better DM style in this episode? Dexter, or Dee Dee?
Clearly Dee Dee. The player's were having way more fun with her running the game (except for Dexter)
>how experienced were you in TTGs when you first saw this episode?
I had none
>did it inspire you to pick up D&D?
Nope
I still call D&D Monsters and Mazes unironically to people.