Re: Does Dungeons and Dragons make technical writers?

["Trese, Timothy G." <Timothy -dot- G -dot- Trese -at- SAICSeals -dot- com>]

Although I am loathe to admit it to a general audience, I used to be a
D&D weenie. And yes, the handling of structured data about trolls and
magic rings probably honed my tech writing skills.

But maybe this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. Did I enjoy D&D
because the handling of all that data is something I had an aptitude
for, enabling me to enjoy the fantasy and role-playing appeals of the
game while the mechanics of it remained relatively transparent? In the
same way that I can pay attention to content of documents now without
getting hung up on the tools?

And also, at my school, D&D weenies were 12th-level Social Pariahs
afflicted by an unbreakable Not Cool spell. Maybe laboring under that
social stigma armored me for a trade which is regarded as--er, how can I
put this delicately--a bit nerdy perhaps, and not in a cool hacker kinda
way.

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