Why do kids play "let's pretend"? You're not allowed to say "Because it's fun". It seems to me that it's at least partly to do with discovery of the self. You can't have light without darkness, and you can't have a sense of self-hood without knowing what the self is not. Pretending to be other things gives you a feeling for what you are not, and in doing so provides you with the limits of what you are. It helps you map your own contours.
(Let me stress that I think it is partly to do with this - there are plenty of other reasons, too.)
As an adult playing an RPG you can do something similar. Foucault said "freedom is the ontological condition of ethics". For him, ethics was not doing the right thing - it was reflecting on one's own actions and the underlying motives for them, and then cultivating in oneself the sentiments and impulses which one desires to motivate one's future actions. In other words it was a continuous practice of self-critique against self-selected criteria. Ethics is not abiding by the rules - it is the practices by which one brings oneself to align oneself with a particular set of standards or, if you want to get fancy, telos. Free choice is a necessary condition of this.
Michael Oakeshott makes a similar observation in drawing a distinction between moralities of self-disclosure and self-enactment. A morality of self-disclosure is simply abiding by the rules so as to "disclose" oneself as moral. In other words, it requires no exercise of free will - just doing what the rules say. A morality of self-enactment, on the other hand, is reflective. It is a matter of acting, and then reflecting on what motivated one to act. This allows one to gradually choose to emphasise or discard such motivations in future conduct, in on ongoing process of self-realisation. Free agency is a pre-requisite.
(Mindfulness meditation helps in this, though French post-structuralists and High Tory philosophers tend not to get particularly new age.)
As an adult, playing "let's pretend" (i.e., D&D and similar) is in its own way a method of practising self-enactment of Foucauldian ethics - or can be. It is a kind of experimental safe space (I use those words advisedly) in which one can, as one's PC, make choices to act and then reflect, not on one's own motivations exactly, but on those of one's character. It like a dress-rehearsal for the real thing: why did my dwarf kill the prisoner? What were his underlying motivations? And what motivations are best cultivating to guide future conduct? At the same time - what does this say about my underlying motivations for acting?
Which is not to say you shouldn't just kill things and take their stuff. Rather, it's that you can peel away layers of the onion if you'd like to.
So, how would D&Ds alignment system fit in? My impression of D&D back in the early days I played (mid-80s-early 90s) was that it pushes the game firmly to the Disclosure ethics side. Not just that DM's use it that way, it always seemed to be intended to. Nowadays we have pretty much abandoned alignments, and the experience seems to closer to your onion-peeling. Or maybe that's just because we're so much older.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting one - I think you're broadly correct.
DeleteBut I also think that trying to stick to your alignment is an interesting imaginative exercise and also a kind of ethical practice in its own way - almost like a "WWJD" bracelet on your PC's wrist that gives you an insight into other types of morality than your own?
Is alignment proscriptive or descriptive? It is certainly a tangible thing. There are powers, items and classes which depend on alignment fidelity.
DeleteGet a load of this story. It's amazing.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukRzVBoynoY
This is an epic tale and made more epic by the telling.
Two things happened here that can only happen when people really understand what they're doing here.
The first thing is, Jim had one path set up to play. And Steve said, "well, what about this other path?"
And instead of convincing him to try the one Jim had laid out or barring him somehow from trying this audacious mission, Jim said, "Yes. Okay Steve, try it." And he let him try it and he prepped what Steve wanted and he bought into Steve's vision of the campaign rather than the other way around.
That takes guts and trust and not everyone who Refs even knows they don't have what it takes. Some Refs don't know that this is what it takes sometimes (not always but sometimes). Some Refs just can't but Jim can and that is so commendable.
The second thing is that Steve had a vision for his dwarf that he wanted the dwarf to have a beginning, middle and end. His man was not an idealized image prior to the adventures; his man was going through a life story with a life and with a death both with meaning.
His goal was to leave a lesson to the campaign world - to create a myth and legend. This is not something gold can buy; and neither can the attainment of mere amoral glory. Players, keep this in mind. Sometimes it's okay that your goal is not to be the biggest, baddest guy on the block. Sometimes the real meat of a character story lies somewhere other than putting an orc to the sword.
Anyway. Jim allowed Steve to put his man to certain death even though Jim didn't know beforehand Steve was going there.
These guys trusted each other. Jim trusted him when he said to save the nobles, and Steve trusted Jim that Jim would let him play it out.
So that second thing is trust and deep camaraderie and deep friendship. Like a marriage. It's so hard-won that the value of achieving it is bigger than the game.
You and I may never win a Super Bowl together or build a house for ourselves to live in together, but we can achieve this victory together - the victory of friendship truly fought, won, and demonstrated - with our little elf talking and funny dice - and that's a hidden but invaluable part of living well and being human and one which is readily available to be had through RPGs.
D&D alignment is both descriptive and proscriptive. The average D&D set up assumes the characters are at worst scoundrels with a heart of gold, not murderous villains preying on the weak. It doesn't encourage evil characters doing bad stuff. In fact the general DM advice is to make sure people behave. Of course you could play differently, but it wouldn't be in the spirit of the official version.
DeleteTrue, but but it's much diminished if sticking to your alignment is enforced through penalties, such as character death or being turned into an NPC if you stray too far from the straight & narrow.
ReplyDeleteNot all DMs I played with really cared about ethics. They shaw enforcing "Good" characters as part of keeping potentially unruly players in check and making sure people stuck to the script. Some did though, and I think Gygax cared about keeping the game on the Light side too.
Rather than penalties, I prefer the use of experience adjustments which favor playing "good" characters. Even simple things like offering XP for refusing monetary rewards (when appropriate) help out, or having treasure favor more heroic characters (i.e. more magical swords are Lawful than not). Of course, the most important thing ends up being NPC reactions: If being a cruel marauder comes with social consequences, while being a hero means having a good reputation and potential allies (up to and including being bailed out after a TPK), that helps.
DeleteThere's a lot of ways to go about it, but I do think having those (appropriate) consequences is the most important part, especially considering that we're talking about role-playing games. They're also more fun, because the benefits or demerits generally manifest much later. Callbacks are great.
I've always felt the Law vs. Chaos axis is the more useful of the two. As you mention it's a lot more important in terms of keeping the game focused, and unlike Good and Evil which can be debated about endlessly, the technical nature of Law/Chaos (you can more quantitatively measure entropy, etc.) makes it inherently less subjective.
DeleteYeah, I am much more in favour of appropriate in-game consequences rather than XP bonuses and whatnot. Apart from the latter not appearing very realistic, I also think you can end up with the DM being the players' policeman.
DeleteIn-game consequences rather than gamist or mechanical rewards are important! The great stories we tell might incidentally include the cool sword but they always include the shenanigans our paper men get up to :)
DeleteAnd if you’re playing an open-ended game, you need at least one player interested in doing a minimum amount of RP in order to get leads on new adventure ideas.
I hate the idea of nudging through XP rewards as much as doing the same via penalties. It's not up to the DM to micromanage characters. Good roleplaying should be its own reward, and its up to the players to decide what their characters are like.
ReplyDeleteAs for social consequences, theoretically it could be interesting & fun, as in the better revenge stories or fairy tales. But in my experience it usually isn't in D&D. The town guard who couldn't handle a bunch of goblins or fight their way out of a wet paper bag, suddenly become highly effective when punishing a mid-level party of adventurers when they molest the local tavern keeper. Shallow and transparent, and utterly lacking in realism. Unless you're playing Dragonraid, possibly the game that applies D&D-style Good vs Evil morality most consistently.
Can you explain how Dragonraid does that?
DeleteIt's very very preachy and very upfront about the need for characters to be good. And being good means being Good, in a straightforward, somewhat naive traditional christian sense. Likewise, being Bad is being plain Bad. There are no shades of grey, trade-offs or dilemma's with only morally questionable outcomes.
ReplyDeleteIt also has morality hardwired into the rules. There are characteristics that represent ethical qualities, such as "faithfulness", "kindness", "goodness", in addition to the traditional more physical & mental ones. They're not just mental descriptors but can impact many actions, even if their no "realistic" connection. For example, your armor partly depends on them, not just on what gear you're wearing. Evil NPCs get to roll a smaller die than characters in combat anyway. It's not that PCs can't be killed, but as long as they're firmly on the side of Good, the odds are stacked in their favor.
If you like murderhoboing your way through fantasyland, Dragonraid is a stupid game. If you want to play an rpg in which black & white good vs evil morality is superimportant, Dragonraid might not be a bad choice, since at least it manages to provide formal rules mechanisms instead of having to rely on arbitrary GM interventions all the time.
That kind of sounds neat actually. If you combined it with the implied Greyhawk world of old-school D&D where Good and Evil were tangible forces with their own planes of existence (and languages!). That and the idea of a few powerful, Good heroes facing off against hordes of weaker but more numerous Evil minions gives off that Saturday-morning cartoon vibe, not in a bad way either.
DeleteI wonder what effect giving mechanical benefit to "kindness" and "goodness" would have, though. I can imagine some groups of highly competitive players where the PCs are literally shoving each other out of the way to be the first ones to rescue people from a burning building.
I wonder what are the underlying motivations of all those that are attacking Jeff Rients today. Are they aonly following a morality of self-disclosure, only attacking him because it's the "moral" thing to do!? And why do they think attacking Jeff and anyone who doesn't want to kill Zak Smith is the right thing to do? What's the underlying motivations in following self-disclosure moral? I wonder because, both Foucault and Freud told us there are underlying motives even when you just play along.
ReplyDeleteOr those who attack you as a nazi friendly liberal, for that matter. I call them the Modern Inquisition or the Neo Patriarchy.
ReplyDelete