Conservatism is at an extremely low ebb in Britain, as in most Western societies since the rise of Thatcher. Those who call themselves conservatives are just as, if not more, likely than progressives to look at the way things are and announce themselves as being clever enough to change it. All modern politicians are architects of a society they want to bring into being. No politician nowadays ever takes the genuine conservative position: "Maybe we should just leave things be."
And British society in general is the same way: if you say that you believe that old things deserve respect simply because they are old, people look at you like you need your head examined. Our society values progress and progress means constantly demanding that every action, policy or behaviour justifies itself against the aims that we want to achieve. If traditions or customs can't do this, then they are superstitious nonsense or quaint and foolish ideas which will be consigned to the dustbin of history. We care about data, facts, statistics, efficiency; hence the complete, dominating ubiquity of the phrase which rules all political, economic and sociological debate in the land: "The evidence shows....", and its red-headed step-brother, "Studies show...." To the modern mind, there is no greater anathema than valuing traditions for their own sake. Prove that something is worth doing through robust empirical research or a monograph with plenty of footnotes. Otherwise, fuhgeddaboudit. Weber's entzauberung is at its apex.
This means that a liking for tradition is seen as eccentric at best and pernicious at worst. And people who like traditional things feel as though they have to give other reasons than just, "I'm a traditionalist." They get defensive and a little embarrassed, and find themselves coming up with rational-sounding explanations. The best example for this I can think of is the arguments from people who think Latin should still be taught in schools. (I couldn't give a monkey's either way, for what it's worth.) Deep down inside, those people like the tradition of learning Latin and value it for its own sake. But, aware that they live in the era of entzauberung, they feel compelled to come up with justifications: "It provides a grounding in modern Romance languages!" "It helps with legal phrases!" "It's good training for the mind to learn the complexities of conjugating Latin verbs, and that can only be helpful when pupils study STEM subjects!" The teaching of history in schools is defended on the same grounds: it's all about learning the lessons of the past. There has to be an instrumentalist goal. Viewing the past as worthy of study in its own right, because it is to be respected as where we come from, would not hold sway.
Those of us who play older editions of D&D find ourselves in a similar predicament, I think. Without wanting to speak for everyone, I suspect that the reason why a lot of people reading this blog play OD&D and its variants is because they like being in touch with their pasts and having a link to the way things used to be. They may be able to come up with plenty of rational arguments as to why B/X D&D is better than 4e, or whatever, and those arguments may be convincing, but I'm not sure whether, at root, that's just because of the pervasive entzauberung that surrounds us. Isn't the real reason we like TSR-era editions of the game just that they've been around for a long time and provide us with links to our childhood and to people who were playing RPGs in the past? Don't we feel an emotional connection to older variants of D&D just because they're venerable?
Edmund Burke was probably the last philosopher who is viewed with any credence who put forward a strong argument in favour of tradition. (The only others I can think of are MacIntyre and Oakeshott, both of whom I like, but who I don't think were arguing quite the same thing as Burke.) His view was, really, that the only thing that separates human beings from, as he put it, "the flies of a summer", was that humans can inherit and bequeath things. Flies' lives are self-contained: they are born, they live, they breed, they die. Their children do the same thing. Over and over again. None of it is ultimately of any consequence and nothing any one fly does will affect anything to come, except in the sense that the next generation of flies is produced. And human beings, and the human species, would be subject to the same fate - are in fact subject to the same fate - except for the existence of culture and tradition.
Our culture and our traditions both come before us and outlast us. When we are born, we are born into a pre-existing world of cultural artefacts which were there, slowly developing, for aeons before us. During our lives we participate in some small sense in their propagation and their evolution. And after we die, they continue onwards. We are born into and perpetuate a human-created world composed of a vast and complex social order that is the cumulative creation of generation upon generation of our ancestors stretching back to prehistory. The great difference between humans and flies is that we can participate in projects that are bigger than us, longer than us, better than us. The project of British society was there before I was born and will be around for longer than I am alive, but for my three-score and ten I will contribute to it.
Burke's argument was therefore simply this: culture and tradition are not unchanging, and should not be viewed as set in stone, but at the very least have to be viewed with profound respect - for they are what makes us human. They bring us out of the biological, metabolic sphere of the fly (birth, life, breeding, death: rinse and repeat from now until the end of time) and into something greater - the human world, with its unique capacity to create things which transcend the individual. That means that tradition - the way things have always been done - is something that takes on great significance, even if ultimately it is abandoned.
While playing D&D is a very small and very ridiculous part of our human, cultural world, it is still a part of it. So why shouldn't one say openly, "I play Basic D&D because people were playing it before I was born, and I want to be in touch with what it is to be human, rather than being a fly!"? Say it once and you'll sound like a nutjob. Say it a few times and it'll grow on you. I dare you.
NOPE.
ReplyDeleteBiggest nope in history.
If I wanted to connect to old things for its own sake there's a bazillion other games I could play or things I could indulge in.
I like old D&D because it actually works better for my (mostly young, mostly totally D&D-ignorant) players and because the community makes totally fucking new things compatible with it like Yoon-Suin rather than totally old totally old-media imitating things like _____ World games.
Translation into decent-human-ese:
Delete"I disagree. 'Tradition' alone doesn't justify choosing older versions of D&D. I like them because of their accessibility and support in the community. Also have an irrelevant comment about my personal dislike for other game system X that I make based on my dislike of certain people I associate with it."
You are incorrect, Confanity, and you didn't fact check.
Delete____ World games explicitly imitate older media.
For example, if you ask one of the authors, Adam Koebel, he'll tell you Dungeon World was designed to imitate "pop fantasy" and other authors (including Vincent Baker, who did, Apocalpse World) will say that movies ( and their 2 hour story structure were often an explicit model for their games.
Don't ever do that again, Confanity.
My apologies; it's just that my major memory is of you trashing ideas based on the people you associate with them. In this case, that impression combined with your unclear phrasing to confuse me. I'll surely stop just as soon as you develop a civil enough attitude to start communicating clearly. ^_^
DeleteTo put it another way: What on Earth do you actually mean by "the community makes totally fucking new things compatible with [old D&D] ...rather than totally old totally old-media imitating things like _____ World games"?
DeleteWhat are you contrasting with what? Are you contrasting ~World with "old D&D," or with other things "the community makes"? Are you saying that "the community" makes new products that are old-D&D compatible but does not make things that are compatible with ~World games? Are you trying to imply that this is because ~World games mimic "totally old totally old media"?
Do you mean to imply that old D&D didn't "imitate old media" the way ~World games do? Then you've clearly never heard of Appendix N in the DMG or, for that matter, the bibliographies in Immortals. I hear tell that books are even "totally old totally older" than movies even, pop or otherwise. That said, you completely failed to make it clear what you meant by "old media" at all. I would never have guessed, in this context of Basic D&D versus newer editions, that you were talking about movies.
So let me rephrase myself: if you feel you've been misunderstood, then again you have my apologies, but the only way to stop it from happening isn't to get all imperious; it's learning how to write.
In any internet conversation you must always assume good faith (unless you can prove otherwise).
DeleteAlso: you are not allowed to choose the most insulting interpretation of some words that could mean more than one thing and then assume that is the correct interpretation and attack someone.
What you do if the meaning is unclear is _ask questions_ . Not accuse the person of writing poorly.
So you should apologize now.
Once you demonstrate that good faith, then I will address the other sources of your confusion and answer your questions.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Delete[Edit]
DeleteFunny that, you lecturing people about assuming good faith. Case in point: when your writing is so unclear that a reader is forced to guess at your intent, then jumping immediately to accusing them of "assumptions" is exactly the opposite of what you should do. You could (or should I say "should"?) try assuming a good faith attempt at interpretation on their part, apologize for your mistake that you made by writing poorly, and rephrase your own poor statement to dispel any misunderstandings that you caused.
As for question: could you please re-write your original statement so that it communicates what you actually intended to say? That would be very helpful, thank you. It would help you with this problem where, instead of clarifying your meaning, you simply dodge the question entirely while making hypocritical accusations.
But seriously, please drop the attitude. This demanding attitude, whereby when you misunderstand someone they are wrong and must apologize, but if they misunderstand you then they are still wrong and must apologize, is a huge part of why you lost the privilege of the benefit of the doubt in the first place.
Having already apologized for my part in this thread (that's what the words "my apologies" mean above, in case you didn't catch it the first two times), I eagerly await your own apology for having written hurriedly (or whatever the cause was; I don't want to assume) and causing the whole misunderstanding in the first place.
DeleteIt would certainly be a major step toward making you seem like less of a hypocrite, and would be much appreciated. ^_^
"when your writing is so unclear that a reader is forced to guess at your intent"
DeleteWe've already been over this:
You are _not_ forced to guess, there is no torture comitee demanding you get it right the first time or lose an eye. Simply ask.
It costs you nothing to do so.
Please do not write insane things on the internet.
The sharp-eyed reader may have noticed that I already asked, but I guess nobody ever really expected you to do anything but dodge the question and get all imperious anyway. Thanks for confirming our assumptions. :p
DeleteNo, you don't ask AFTER attacking someone, you ask BEFORE attacking them.
DeleteThen when your mistake is pointed out, you simply apologize, and do not pile on more attacks.
Dodge count: 3
DeleteClarifications: 0
Apologies: 0
You're not addressing the problem you created.
DeleteWhy did you attack instead of asking a question?
Why, when your mistake was pointed out, did you then make another attack?
Also, of course, I have nothing to apologize for: you did bad things and I did the only responsible thing: I called you out so that other people can be made aware that you are a bad person who does bad things.
Good god you two are ridiculous.
DeleteYou're not the only one who thinks this is ridiculous, Ivan. Thanks for your feedback. [wry]
DeleteDodging-the-question count: 4.
You're not addressing the problem you created.
DeleteWhy did you attack instead of asking a question?
Why, when your mistake was pointed out, did you then make another attack?
Dodging-the-question count: 5.
DeleteQuestion's been answered:
Delete"You are incorrect, Confanity, and you didn't fact check.
____ World games explicitly imitate older media.
For example, if you ask one of the authors, Adam Koebel, he'll tell you Dungeon World was designed to imitate "pop fantasy" and other authors (including Vincent Baker, who did, Apocalpse World) will say that movies ( and their 2 hour story structure were often an explicit model for their games."
Yoon Suin and the DIY D&D community that created doesn't exclusively do that.
Anyway:
You're not addressing the problem you created.
Why did you attack instead of asking a question?
Why, when your mistake was pointed out, did you then make another attack?
Dodging-the-question count: 6
DeleteFor the record, just in case anyone needs help, the question was "Could you please re-write your original statement so that it communicates what you actually intended to say?"
Yes, it helps a bit to clarify that "old media" refers only to movies. No, that doesn't fully explain the original comment.
"I like old D&D... because the community makes totally fucking new things compatible with it like Yoon-Suin rather than totally old totally [movie]-imitating things like _____ World games." To put it bluntly: what is the actual assertion being made here? If you don't want us to guess that you're just throwing out a negative-sounding comment about a game you don't like - a practice we have been led to expect due to your past behavior - then you have to make your actual purpose clear. In case you're having trouble expressing it, here are some key points to address:
1. You seem to assert that Yoon-Suin and other products of “the community” are compatible with old D&D but not compatible with, say, Dungeon World.
1a. Do you mean to say that the Yoon-Suin setting is somehow incompatible with certain game systems? (In that case, you'll need to back up the assertion.)
1b. Do you mean to say that mechanical elements in Yoon-Suin demand a certain amount of GM work before they can be adapted to the _World system? (In that case, explain why this is different from the shift in rules between OD&D and those specific to Yoon-Suin.)
1c. Or are you referring to some other factor that makes Yooin-Suin, or a Dyson Logos map, or an I'll see it when I believe it (blog) module, or any other representative community product uniquely compatible with OD&D but incompatible with _World? (If so, please explain what it is and what makes it that way.)
1.5. It is possible, given your unclear grammar, that instead of compatibility of products with OD&D vs. with _W, you instead are talking about the compatibility of _W with OD&D. IF this is the case, explain why the “compatibility” of a game system with another game system would be relevant at all.
2. Are there any other aspects of _W, besides an intended two-hour session length, that are relevant to noisms' discussion of OD&D versus newer game systems? If so, can you explain what they are? In either case, can you explain how any of these aspects relate to the “compatibility” with community products you mentioned?
3. Given that the implicit contrast in the original blog post was between OD&D and newer forms of D&D, why did you feel it necessary to single out _W as a contrasting system?
4. What is the purpose of the confusing and repetitious phrasing “totally old totally old-media”? Are you trying to imply that _W is “totally old”? (If that's the case, you're contradicting yourself, since it's younger than OD&D.) Are you trying to imply that movies are “totally old totally”? (In that case, your grammar is bad and needs to be fixed. Also explain how the totally-old-ness of movies is being contrasted with the age of books as a medium.) If neither of these, then what do you mean?
5. If by “old media” you only meant movies and not books (which would be logical, since you yourself cribbed ideas out of Alice in Wonderland, which is a book), then why use the vaguely pejorative term “old media” instead of a more neutral term like “cinematic” or “movies”?
If you can keep those in mind and rephrase your original comment, then you may have finally stopped dodging the question and answered it properly.
Anyway, you're not addressing the problem you created.
Delete* Why do you refuse to take responsibility for making an unclear statement? The world is full of people making statements, and it is normally expected that others will grapple with those statements as they are presented, at which point the original party is responsible for catching and correcting any misunderstandings that they caused. Why do you act like you deserve a special exception to the rules that everyone else has to follow?
* Why, when your words were unclear enough that a reader did not interpret them in the way you intended, do you automatically assume that they are attacking you? If you feel that they are attacking you, then by your own logic, is it not your responsibility to ask whether they intended an attack before you start calling them "bad"? If assumptions are bad, then aren't you bad for assuming the other person is making an attack?
* Why, when your mistake was pointed out, did you then resort to repeated personal abuse instead of apologizing for unclear writing and attempting to restate your point? If an innocent comment on your part was simply misunderstood, why do you feel the need to become so angrily aggressive about it?
* In short, why do you act like a bully who believes that he alone is uniquely exempted from the normal rules of discussion and debate?
* Why do you believe it's okay for you to give imperious commands? What results are you expecting when you adopt that tone? Is it really your goal to clear up a misunderstanding? Or are you simply lashing out at anybody who doesn't do things the way you want them to from the start?
* When you consistently act like a bully who lashes out at people for responding in normal ways to his own mistakes, why would you be surprised that some people would stop giving you the benefit of the doubt about your motives?
"Could you please re-write your original statement so that it communicates what you actually intended to say?"
DeleteI could for an intelligent, sane party acting in good faith if they asked. I am not convinced I need to just to talk to you, because you are evil or stupid or insane so you aren't "an intelligent, sane party acting in good faith".
Here is evidence of that, it is a direct quote form you:
"you consistently act like a bully "
I do not, you are lying or mistaken. A bully exerts coercive force over victims, a bully has more power over the victim than vice versa. I have zero coercive power over you. All I do to you is what you do here: type. I have not compelled any action from you, nor harmed you in any way which you cannot harm me.
The history of this thread is: I wrote a wholly accurate comment. You assumed bad faith and insulted me. You are the aggressor.
So, because you lied and said I was acting like a bully or are so stupid or insane that you made the mistake of saying I was, you do not have the right to demand answers to questions.
You may re-assume that right if you apologize and rescind all of your insulting statements.
Until then you're just a random comment douche.
Dodging-the-question count: 7
DeleteIt is pretty clear at this point what happened. No, this is not 100% certain, but all of the evidence points in this direction:
1. Zak, as he often does, went online and made uncalled-for negative statements. Note how his initial comment begins with imperious attitude and ends with an attack that is completely irrelevant to the topic of the post he's commenting on.
2. When called out on this, he immediately adopted an abusive, imperious tone and began trying to draw attention away from his own bad behavior by attacking his critic. If Zak's initial statement had been innocent, it would have been incredibly simple to just restate it and end the matter. His consistent refusal to do so, even when given clear guidelines, strongly supports the conclusion that his protests of innocence are in fact lies, and that Zak's aggressive response strategy is merely a bullying tactic that he regularly adopts to silence critics.
3. Note a consistent pattern: first he demands that people who disagree with him "assume good faith" and respond with nothing but "questions" (while hypocritcally refusing to follow his own rule!). Then, when presented with a clear and ridiculously thorough list of questions to address, he ignores them. This is not the behavior of someone who debates in good faith.
As far as I'm concerned, this thread is finished. It is plain that Zak's only purpose, from his very first comment on this post to the most recent, was to bully people for not agreeing with him.
Perhaps, in his own heart, he truly believes that nobody could ever possibly misunderstand him except willfully and maliciously. In this case he is naive, and his lashing out with abuse is childish.
Perhaps, in his own heart, he simply believes that he is always right, and that anyone who dares disagree must be a heathen who does not deserve the same treatment that he demands for himself. In this case, he is a bully and a hypocrite.
Perhaps in his own heart he knows that he is wrong, that his writing is unclear, that he consistently says nasty things about others without any reason but to express his personal dislikes and try and make people feel bad, that he never intended to sincerely debate a point or clarify issues. In this case he's not only a bully and hypocrite, but a troll as well.
In any case, this entire thread was me attempting to give him the chance to explain himself and earn back a little of the benefit-of-the-doubt that he has repeatedly squandered with this behavior. And my attempt at charity failed as he showed his ugly true colors yet again. C'est la vie.
"uncalled-for negative statements. "
DeleteCitation needed.
If you thought that my first statements was "uncalled for" or "negative" then you say those words, not insult me in your first comment.
My first comment insults nobody, your first comment insults me. It's pretty clear-cut that you're the bad guy here.
DeleteI don't think you have to be in a position of power to be a bully. All you need is keenness for humiliation and social aggression, and a degree of persistence that helps you turn normal conversations over a long period into opportunities for your various vendettas.
DeleteThe trick of this kind of bullying, as many people learned at school, is to do it at a low enough level so that no one can really be bothered to call you out on it. It's just "being mean" magnified by obsessional efficiency.
A version for the internet, that is not possible in a school context, is instead of being remotely subtle about it, just push for a scene enough times that people must ignore it or join you as stubborn assholes.
I think I came to the OSR partly for the old, but I didn't stay for the old.
ReplyDeleteI am not adverse to novelty in RPGs; after all, the RPG I play most often [as a player] is HeroQuest, which is fairly recent. But I sincerely do think that older versions of D&D and of RuneQuest are better than the latest ones. I do think that the only reason new versions were published was to make money, not to improve the rules set.
ReplyDeleteInteresting perspective. Personally, I realise I do feel an emotional attachment to my old games, and in general I do prefer simpler rules systems; but many times, like Zak, I am playing with newbies or people who don't really give a shit about rules or whatever (namely: my wife and my sister) so the path of "least resistance" is playing with Mentzer D&D.
ReplyDeleteI didn't care for D&D back when I first encountered it... never played it much and escaped into other games pretty quick. The 'Traditional' game for me would be Traveller or Gamma World. Still, my path has led to a wholly new appreciation of the OSR games and D&D's abstractions and simplicities.
ReplyDeleteThe community is rife with cognitive dissonance.
ReplyDeleteI play TSR D&D because it's the best, most popular and famous RPG in the history of the world. WotC D&D is just a fantasy heartbreaker, a mimic, riding on the coattails of what came before. Also, the earliest DMs: Gygax, Arneson, Hargrave, Barker...are the best DMs I know of, so I look to them for example.
ReplyDelete(Teaching Latin would be...unjust. Wasteful on a scale we can hardly imagine. History is fine in moderation.)
I don't really care what gets taught in schools beyond Reading, Riting and 'Rithmetic. That's the most crucial thing as it's what equips kids to function in society and also access all of the other academic subjects - although it seems the British teaching profession almost universally abandoned any attempt to actually do it long ago.
DeleteValuing tradition for its own sake has been recognized as a logical fallacy for centuries. If anything, the recognition that tradition alone is a lousy reason to keep something is, itself, part of a long tradition, and not at all the newfangled fashion that you try to paint it as. (Not that that, alone, is a good reason to accept the claim! The reason the appeal to tradition is a fallacy is that tradition is obviously unrelated to truth, not that this or that thinker of the past thought so.) And I'm sure I don't need to borderline-Godwin the thread with the standard stock examples of horrible things that have been defended on the grounds that they were "traditional".
ReplyDeleteThis is not, of course, to deny there might be good reasons why some tradition is in place. For example it might have repeatedly proven more efficient or whatever than other alternatives. (In this case, ease of learning, speed of play, and ease of accessing resources are some plausible points that could be made in favour of old-school D&D.) But then you should appeal to those reasons, if you find yourself needing to defend your choices; the observation that a thing is traditional adds nothing to the argument. Even "I'm emotionally attached to this because it's what I grew up with" is a distinct, and far better, reason for sticking to an older version.
I'm not painting it as newfangled - unless you count modernity itself as newfangled. It's not that rationalism is new, it's that rationalism is now at, or heading towards, its apex. Your comment proves precisely that point: what you are interested in is subjecting everything to the test of reason. If tradition is to survive, it must prove its efficiency. I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the point I was trying to make in the first 2/3 of the post. ;)
DeleteIt's true that this poster (and I think quite a few of the posters) missed the point of your initial post. That said, I'm not sure I'd put D&D in the Burkean "tradition" category. As you explain, Burke recognized that traditions that have stood the test of time are worth respecting because they have been organically vetted by society in a way that can't really be replicated by clever intuition or by "studies say...." I don't know if B/X D&D fits there though. It was a runaway commercial success while it was the only thing on the market for a time in the 80s. It's not exactly the monarchy. I think doing something in order to maintain a pleasant connection with the past (nostalgia?) is a different--though perhaps related--concept from normatively justifying something because it is tried and true. Not to say that nostalgia isn't a perfectly good reason to play old D&D. I certainly think it fuels my inclination to play the TSR varieties.
DeleteInterestingly, I'm sure the political conditions in the UK are as you describe, but the Brits I've talked with about the difference between there and here (USA) always seem to have at least some traditionalist bent. Almost invariably they will say something along the lines of "There's nothing old here. You guys tear everything down and rebuild too fast. Why don't you make houses out of stone?"
That's a big part of what Burke's main arguments were all about, but I think with that "flies of summer" passage he was on to something different - it's really about respecting tradition for its own sake, as something produced by those who came before, lest society become untethered from its past and fall into perpetual repetition of biological cycles. It's a kind of justification of cultural nostalgia, really - inasmuch as somebody can be nostalgic for circumstances which existed before he or she was actually born.
DeleteI think most British people have a traditionalist, "small c" conservative streak, which is why political commentators often say that if the British political parties fight from their default positions, the Tories generally win. But the chattering classes - upper middle class people, mostly, who dominate the established media - are by and large the opposite. Just read The Guardian on any given day (particularly Comment is Free) and you'll get a sense for what the "intelligentsia" tends to think.
I think Burke agrees more with me than he does with you. Even Burke doesn't go so far as to say tradition is *inherently* valuable. He does think that it is sometimes a good indication that a thing has *other* valuable features, and has an explanation for that fact (as Ivan well puts it "because they have been organically vetted by society in a way that can't really be replicated by clever intuition or by "studies say...."") that may be reasonable in some cases. But given the indicator, even Burke or a follower of his should be able to say WHAT that value is without specifically mentioning tradition. If they can't, their argument is very, very suspect.
DeleteI do agree that few modern "conservatives" are Burkeans, even the ones who claim to be and/or use cherry-picked passages from Burke to support their arguments, and their work would be greatly improved by becoming more genuinely Burkean. Burke was a lot more subtle than most people give him credit for.
DeleteYes, I agree, but as I said in the above comment, that's not all that Burke's saying. He's also making an argument that tradition has to be considered as something important simply because it's old, independently of its valuable features, because of the way it separates us from our biology, from the repetition and meaninglessness of life and death. That doesn't mean that traditions have to be blindly followed: as I wrote in the original post, traditions can end up being abandoned. But they are still to be treated as significant; the bias is towards the status quo and the burden of proof is on the innovation.
DeleteIf you like 1e and it still seems fun to you, that is the most powerful reason to play it.
ReplyDeleteThere is no need to speak of traditionalism as your motive. There is no need even to comment on other editions.
Fun is the whole of the law. ;-)
The problem with tradition - and something I think everyone's already getting at - is that it's not transferable. There are literally billions of activities that were invented before I was born, and that have been passed down through generations (or, in this case, a generation) and of course there's no trouble in me individually picking one over another based on vague affinities and random chance, or finding other people who happen to share those same feelings. But if I want to play with one of the vast majority of other people, whose life experiences didn't just happen to leave them with the same tastes as me, I'm going to have to use reason. Or weapons.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's a valid criticism. Another related one is that traditions have often actually disappeared and are not recoverable. I've often thought something similar about MacIntyre, and had the opportunity to put that to Christoper Lutz once: it's all very well for MacIntyre to go on about traditions and goods internal to practices, but what happens after the British/French/Americans/Belgians/Spanish/Portuguese have come along and trashed all the existing communities and their traditions and practices?
DeleteI play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st, with the skills system lifted from RuneQuest, the Avalon Hill version, and background materials lifted from other sources.
ReplyDeleteI don't do it for any political or considerations outside the rules themselves, and how they match up to the campaign I am running. I picked Gary Gygax's version of AD&D, because he offered the most comprehensive system of rules mechanics with the most developed system of spells and bestiary of creatures to use in fantasy world-running. Based on the writing of the rules, Gygax struck me as an author with a definite sense of history and of the rationale behind his rules, which made his version of the rules more appealing, that the subsequent versions hacked by the professional writers hired by the publisher.
In my experience, D&D gaming is a hopelessly suburban middle class phenomenon, with an inherent sensibility, that is not aware of the conservatism and colonialism of Tolkien's LOTR, it's merits put aside for now, which features the master race Elves and sub-human Orcs, which migrated into D&D as long-lived demi-human races, superior to humanity, and short-lived humanoids, inferior to humans in D&D. This is not entirely accidental, and in the beginning of the Second Edition epoch, someone wrote a supplement detailing Goblins as Elizabethan Urban poor. One reviewer even wrote that the squalor of Goblins portrayed in that book is funny, but the setting smacks of Elizabethan England and commented on the sadness of these goblins' hopelessness as to any upward mobility.
With regards to my own Midlands campaign, I wanted to make it human only world at first, to avoid any LOTR style racism, then I realized that it will make my campaign world much poorer, as every described humanoid creature is really another sentient bipedal species competing with humanity, except that in Midlands, Orcs are still pig-faced, but they are descended from boars, where are humans from hominids, and they are accordingly alien, trying to survive in a world that is trying to find its soul. So, regardless its origins, D&D can become anything that the DM breathes into it.
I'm self-reflective to a problematic degree but haven't really dwelled on why I'm a nostalgist.
ReplyDeleteI do know I like picking an idiosyncratic old game with apparently few options and seeing what I can do with it on the back of (increasingly large) envelopes. Voluntary constraints are oddly freeing for one's creativity. (I only recently read Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice but it supplies at least some cognitive-theoretical support for what I've treated for years as a larf.)
Something being "old" often lends it some cachet for me, but I doubt that speaks so much to the thing being better as it does to my personal idiosyncracies and (where artifacts are concerned) to stylistic considerations - there are matters of style in which provenance and patina are important.
(But those considerations are based in traditional associations, which I guess renders that part question-begging.)
Anyway, the resonances make an appeal to tradition a pretty powerful, if not essential, tool in some pursuits. If I've ever done anything worthwhile creatively, it's been firmly grounded in some tradition before being irrevocably tainted by my filter of personality disorder, substance abuse, and head trauma.
Old (particularly the oldest) D&D has a very powerful resonance.
It may just come down to personality type but I'm also somebody who has that kind of mentality. I'm kind of a boring old fuddy-duddy when it comes to music (I basically only listen to classical stuff nowadays) and I'm getting more and more into traditional recipes and cooking and whatnot. I think it's because there is this kind of resonance: I like the fact that if I'm listening to Glenn Gould play Bach, I am very tangentially in touch with people who were once listening to actual Bach playing Bach. I find that amazing.
DeleteJust wrote a reply that was deleted by Blogger, going to laboriously try and remember it all:
DeleteI agree with you about the tangential connection to the original composer, it's a very powerful feeling which to me is at the root of what your original post is about, too. It's a feeling that gives most high quality 'old art' an instant leg-up over high quality 'new art'.
Although:
I used to work in a classical CD shop and play a lot of Gould's recordings of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. A huge amount of older 'traditional' classical enthusiasts would come in and act like they were physically repulsed by his playing, miming spitting and saying stereotypical things like '(Composer X) would be spinning in his grave if he heard this'.
This was in 2008!
Not sure what the point of my reply is except that I found Gould playing Bach an odd example in light of your original post, and it's interesting to me to consider just how objective most tradition is. I got the impression he was divisive and radical as a player even in the 50's...perhaps his original Goldberg variations were the 4e of Bach.
Yes, I think Gould is controversial, but I also know that he made a big thing of trying to get close to what Bach originally intended. If you compare him playing Bach with Daniel Barenboim, say, you can hear the difference. Barenboim plays Back through the lens of what's happened in the past 300 years in music, whereas Gould seems to be trying more to get to the essence of the music. Not that particularly matters - I like Barenboim too, and you get the same feeling of connection to the past.
DeleteYep, essence indeed, Gould's still my favourite for Bach, just for the structural clarity!
DeleteGreat OP even if I'm unsure if I agree - would you mind recommending some reading material about this concept of entzauberung for someone who's never read any philosophy in his life? Seems to be hitting the nail on the head about my feelings in the run up to the General Election.
Entzauberung is, I think, German for "disenchantment". It's Max Weber's way of describing how in modern Western societies people have turned away from the numinous, the mystical, the sacred, etc., towards rationalization and obsession with supposedly scientific justifications for things. But the modern world's preoccupation with facts, figures, and 'evidence' is something that many thinkers have grappled with and offered explanations for. Weber's explanation was that it is all, in short, Calvinism's fault. Giddens would say that modern people have more choice, which leads them to be more reflexive, which means they crave analysis about which choices are right. Beck would say that in modern societies people are increasingly concerned about risk and safety, and that leads them obsess over risk analysis, which revolves around supposed facts and evidence. Oakeshott would put it down to the Enlightenment idea that it was in the power of man to transform the world through reason. Habermas would say....well, actually nobody really understands what on earth Habermas is on about, but they're scared to admit it. ;)
DeleteI am sufficiently young to have no childhood experience of OD&D to look back on. I came to it in search of roleplaying games that weren't cluttered with the abundance of cruft that characterises modern RPGs. Tradition, nostalgia or resonance have nothing to do with it for me; the game is more appropriate to my purposes than its modern iteration and its peers, and that's all there is to it.
ReplyDeleteI am aggravatingly analogue in terms of how I prepare resources and conduct play, admittedly. There may be an element of the traditionalist in that. There is something in me which delights in using actual pencils and paper, and rolling actual dice and shoving actual miniatures around, and gaming through actual face to face conversation (if we were going to play via a computer we might as well play a computer game together, and my current group often does), and putting our mobile devices away for a few hours. I don't know if that's traditionalism or valuing a particular kind of experience for its own sake.
A mixture of liking a certain kind of analogue experience for its own sake, because it's nice to get away from gadgets for a while, and also liking it because it connects you to your childhood and the past. That's my diagnosis.
DeleteThat sounds about right. I'm just about old enough to qualify as a digital immigrant and it took longer than I'd like to admit for me to adopt conveniences like digital rulebooks.
DeleteIf you follow your parents' religion, that's tradition in the sense you're using it.
ReplyDeleteIf you follow your parents' alcoholism, that's equally tradition.
Presumably Burke would say you should do the first, but not the second.
This means you need some way of distinguishing the traditions you should follow from the ones you shouldn't.
But, once you have a set of criteria to decide which ideas to follow and which to reject, you're no longer acting as if "old things deserve respect simply because they are old."
Well, setting aside the proposition that two people being alcoholics can form a 'tradition', there is such a thing as common sense, which always seems to get forgotten in philosophical hypotheticals.
DeleteI don't believe Burke would say that any single person should follow his parents' religion. I like Oakeshott's position, which I'm paraphrasing slightly: the individual should be able to bet as he pleases, but society ought to back the field. In other words it's not really a question of individual liberty, it's a question of change at the communal or societal level.
But... things that are old don't deserve any special consideration for their age. If that were really the case, wouldn't you drop all this fancy new D&D stuff, which was invented within living memory, and go in search of older games? Chess, or Go, perhaps. If you want something that works as a group, then some historical parlor games.
ReplyDeleteNo, if you play "old D&D," it's because it works for you. You, too, are moved by the data - it's just that "I have fun with this game and it hurts nobody for me to play it" is all the data you need to justify "I will play this game."
That is, perhaps, a lesson more people need to remember.
Why does "giving a game special consideration for its age" mean "I have to play that game and nothing else, and never do anything new"?
DeleteDid I say that you could never play anything else? I'm just trying to say that if your only reason for playing a game were really its age, then you wouldn't have chosen anything so modern as D&D. There are other criteria at work.
DeleteTo put it another way: Basic D&D doesn't differentiate you from a fly any better than Snakes & Ladders does. Therefore your choice of Basic D&D is based on factors other than the Burkean-transcendent credo you seem to be pointing toward in the post.
I'd direct you to my earlier comments about common sense. I wasn't suggesting that literally the only reason to play a game was because of its age. If I said to you, "I really like Gladiator because Russell Crowe is such a good actor," would your first response really be "Why don't you just watch Heat if good acting is the only reason why you like a film?"?
DeleteThis post is the "The Lonely Man of Faith" for the OSR. The Modern zeitgeist is so utterly dead and utilitarian. It's like in "That Hideous Strength" where Filostrato praises the moon, reveling over how perfect it's become now that all those yucky people and other organisms have been swept off! Actually, I think C. S. Lewis would relate quite a bit with your argument here...
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is going in a weird direction now. You make a pretty Romantic statement, and I get where you're coming from because exalting a feeling over rational decision-making is an old and natural human impulse. But when you describe positions such as "I play game X because it's fun, regardless of its age" as "dead and utilitarian," then something's very messed up. Support noisms all you want; agree with him all you want, but do you really need to criticize others as "dead" just because they base their enjoyment of a game off of different criteria than what you'd use?
DeleteI don't think he's saying that about the position you set out. He was only referring to the "modern zeitgeist", and I agree with him on that, broadly.
DeleteI still disagree with the language used due to the associations it elicits, but fair enough; I'm not in a position to make broad statements about Zeitgeist.
DeleteGranted, it was a bit of a weird direction to take it in, but I got caught up a bit in noism's Romanto-Conservative swan-song, and I had those two books on my mind.
DeleteThe rationalist/romantic dialectic in modern culture IS one of those topics that I love to no end. I guess that's why i love William Gibson so much. One day, when I win the lottery and retire young, maybe I'll write a "Difference Engine" fanfic where Arthur Machen challenges Arthur Conan Doyle to a good old fashoned game of fisticuffs!
Yes, strongly agree. Particularly agree about traditions being evolved, rather than designed - one reason why the traditional ways tend to be the better ways is that they already gone through natural selection. But that's a rationalist justification; I equally agree about the value of valuing old things for their own sake.
ReplyDelete