Lego and D&D

My grandson reaches the age of 18 months today, which is the sort of thing that reminds us of our youth and other things in the realm of shoes and ships and sealing-wax.  Across the neighborhood is a quaint little shop I dodged into a few days ago that sells Lego by volume ... and,  as it happens, is a bit of a Lego Mecca in Western Canada.  The owner possesses a few fellows reminscent of Jack Black in the film High Fidelity, only as a Lego nerd rather than with music.  Pleasant, playful, definitely the place where I'll go to build up a suitable Lego pile.  No rush, of course ... I have probably another two years or so, I should think.

My original Lego ended up in my daughter's hands years ago, going out the door with her.  So whether or not I collect another set, the grandson won't grow up bereft of the toy.  But truth, there's no such thing as enough Lego.

It's a small shop, not much room for wandering, but as I took it in I made several connections that are worth discussing on a D&D blog ... since unquestionably Lego was a gateway drug that prepped me for D&D.  I'll explain.

Because I'm very, very old, the bulk of my childhood experiences with Lego consisted of various shaped bricks and nothing else, as "sets" that included plans to make a pre-determined object, like fork lifts, police cars, tractors, helicopters and so on, did not become a thing until after 1975.  I was eleven in '75.  The first really big impressive themed object was the 493 Space Command Center, which emerged in 1978, by which time I'd moved on from Lego to other occupations.  I remember feeling at the time that the Set idea was a bad one ... which suggested that a great many children were far too creatively challenged to make their own stuff.  The outpouring of sets that followed and continues to this day seems to confirm this.  I have images of parents writing to Lego with remarks like, "I bought your product for my children, but they don't know what to do with it.  Can you please send ideas?"

For my friends and I, Lego was a group activity.  My friend Neil had well over 15,000 pieces of Lego and so his basement would draw us in every few weeks, especially in the winter.  We'd sit around building different objects, teaching each other how to follow and repeat our builds.  Redesigning objects and improving on previous designs was a large part, with most of us keeping blueprints for tanks, houses and planes in our heads.

Unlike board games, Lego was a co-operative group activity, which usually included a pre-planning period in the first half hour as we decided what we would make together.  Thus we built space stations and airports, towns, armies, navies and so on, with each person in the group having their preferences.  An agreement would be made on who was to build the con tower or the aircraft carrier — with the usual fights and settlements that nine y.o.'s experience.  Essentially, we were teaching ourselves how to act as designers working towards a common goal ... a goal that didn't exist except to us, as there were no sets to tell us what a spaceport should look like.

These experiences are probably the reason why I am so fucked up as a designer of D&D.  The pattern that enabled Lego to expand its customer base to non-creative children looks quite like the same that eventually crippled D&D.  Given an opportunity to make a world from scratch and have it be whatever we wanted, instead we were given modules ("sets") that told us what the world should look like, severing the creative backbone of thousands of potentially inspired children.  Today, every time I approach the game from the standpoint that it ought to include worldbuilding elements like theatres, universities and other cultural aspects, I'm sure to hear from someone crying out that "traditional D&D" doesn't include these things.  After all, where is the module where the players become world-class performing artists, or transform a village into a town, or become shipping magnates?  The modules don't exist, because such things don't include dungeons and ten-foot-poles.

Of course, there are the rare brilliant psychopaths who recognise the value of Lego for its stop-motion potential, or those who buy the sets to get the special bits and pieces that are only available through the sets, but for every one of these there are 200 Lego Death Stars sitting in corners gathering dust in some kid's room, that asked for just enough effort to put the thing together — and now that it is, why would we ever take it apart?  There's always more money in selling objects to people who want to be told "what to do," than there is in a pile of bricks with no plan.

If there's an underlying message behind the worldbuilding posts I've been churning out for months now it's this: the setting is rich with profound, highly variable opportunities.  Making the whole game about a dungeon and a place to go where we buy stuff for the dungeon is a pathetically narrow perspective on something where, literally, anything can be tried.  All that I'm saying only sounds weird because I'm the only person saying it.  I seem to be the only person willing to run it.  I've never been satisfied with being told how to put my bricks together.  Seems to me, so long as I have bricks, I can make a lot more things than the company remotely imagines.