Day 8 of RPGaDay asks what is my favourite appearance of RPGs in the media?
Again, an easy one – in the TV series Community, season 2, episode 14: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
In this episode, the study group plays Dungeons & Dragons with another student to try to make him feel better, but Pierce (Chevy Chase) interferes and tries to wreck the whole game.
This isn’t the first or only representation of tabletop RPGs on TV, but I think it was one of the best. The whole group gets into the game, it has an intensity that feels real and the game isn’t portrayed as silliness, but real fun. I also love how Community does their entire episodes in the theme of the episode, in this case down to the dramatic opening and closing narration.
Best quote of the episode: “I won at Dungeons and Dragons, and it was advanced!”
Community is one of the few shows that gets geek culture. Unlike The Big Bang Theory which gets its laughs at the expense of the geeks, in Community, the laughs are either aimed at the absurdity and cruelty of life.
If you haven’t seen Community or didn’t like it at first, try it again, with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons!
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.