D&D as Self-Authorship: Wizardknighting Praxis

[This is the third in a series of posts. You can read the first one here and the second one here, but neither are essential for understanding this one.]

I generally don't take playing D&D too seriously. 'Proper role playing' tends to make me cringe, and the overall tone of the sessions I run tends to be somewhat arch and detached. Entirely unintentionally, the mood is probably a bit like a Jack Vance novel - what happens to the PCs is more a subject for ironic amusement and enjoyment of derring-do than anything to do with feelings. 

But all sorts of modes of play are possible, of course, and reading The Wizard Knight made me think about the potential for using D&D partly as a kind of self-authorship. 

People who have already read the book may know what I mean already. But let me explain. The basic idea of The Wizard Knight (this is not really a spoiler; it's evident in the first few chapters that this will be the dominant theme of the novel) is that an adolescent boy (Able) decides, after meeting a knight, that he wants to be one. He concludes that this means that he has to act like one, and this in turn means (in the words of Sir Ravd, his model):

'Liv[ing] honourably and d[ying] honourably, because [a knight] cares more for his honour than his life. If his honour requires him to fight, he fights. He doesn't count his foes or measure their strength, because those things don't matter...In the same way, he acts honourably toward others, even when they do not act honourably toward him. His word is good, no matter who he gives it to.'

Able starts off very badly at this: he bullies and brags and throws his weight around, confusing defending his honour with being the top dog in all circumstances. But gradually, over the course of 1000 pages, he comes to figure it out - that honour requires one to fight to defend the weak, not for personal aggrandisement, and also that there is a greater good even than honour (in a wonderful eucatastrophic twist with echoes of my favourite novel about chivalry, The Ill-Made Knight). 

This is, of course, the story of a boy growing into a man in the proper sense of the word - one which has almost totally disappeared from our culture, which we need very desperately, and which Gene Wolfe was clearly deeply concerned about in his old age. There is a lot more to say about the substance of that narrative, and I may do it in a future post. But for the time being, I merely wish to focus on the idea of somebody deciding that they want to be a certain thing or a certain way, and bending their energy to shaping their thoughts and actions in order to get there. 

I am convinced that this idea basically works, within reason (you are not going to turn yourself into a dragon, no matter how much you act like one), because I have seen it happen at least to a certain extent in my own life. Fixing on an idealised image, reflecting on its characteristics, and reflecting on how one's behaviour aligns with those characteristics and what one can do to differently to close the gap does over time produce changes. It is difficult, imperfect, and is never complete. But it is useful. (I put it into effect in my own life when trying to decide what kind of father I wanted to be when I first had children. One of the things I knew was true about myself was that I had a tendency not to take promises I made very seriously. I decided I wanted to be the type of father who his children can totally rely upon. And so I hold myself to a standard: if I ever say to either of my two daughters that I will do something, I make a note of it in my head, remind myself of the type of father I want to be, and make sure I do that thing no matter the inconvenience. This is hard, but I force myself. And it has actually changed my personality; I'm a much more reliable and honest person in general than I was ten years ago - though I'm still nothing like as good at honouring commitments to anyone other than my kids as I should be.) 

Some people on Twitter or Discord will get annoyed at me for once again using the word praxis, and Marxists are not supposed to like self-help, but that's basically what Marx was getting at if you strip away the high-falutin' language: change doesn't come about through reflection alone, but through action aligned with reflection on its purposes. One must actually do it. 

This can happen in the context of D&D, I think, in two ways. The first would be creating PCs who, like Able, have aims in mind (wanting, for example, to be a knight), and having them act accordingly - not as mere avatars for the player but as agents in their own right. The alignment system of AD&D was actually an attempt to achieve this - as was the 2nd edition era's emphasis on 'doing what my character would do' - and while both of these things (alignment and 'role playing rather than roll-playing') are generally treated with suspicion in the OSR, I see no reason why they can't be deployed in rich and interesting ways.

The second would be treating the exercise of playing D&D as itself a kind of mini-exercise in simulated self-authorship. Let's say that you wanted to be a more truthful, or braver, or kinder person. Couldn't creating a PC who you decide possesses that characteristic, and deliberately having him or her act on that basis, be a way of changing one's own habits, one's own reflexes, one's own ingrained ways of thinking? Couldn't this be an initial stage of self-authorship and the kind of praxis that I am talking about? And wouldn't that be an interesting variation on what I think is one of the main reasons that both human beings and animals play - it allows us to envisage ourselves in different circumstances and surroundings and experiment with how we would act? 

I don't wish for a moment to denigrate playing D&D purely for fun (it's what I do). And nor do I suggest it should take on the mood of a therapy session. One can do either of the things I mentioned without even telling anybody, if one so desires it. But, equally, it could be done in a very kumbaya sort of way, with shared goals and post-session reflective debriefs and even crying. Something perhaps to experiment with.