A Prismatic Spray Inside the Brain

I have been thinking for some time about the right metaphor to use to describe the phenomenology of reading an RPG book, and ultimately have decided that it is the phrase 'Prismatic Spray', which has the advantages of approximating what I mean, while also nodding to the right influences - Jack Vance, and true, dyed-in-the-wool D&D basic furniture (imagine a set of core D&D rules in which there was no prismatic spray spell).

So let's go with it: reading an RPG book is like a prismatic spray inside the brain. It produces an array of different trajectories of kaleidoscopic range, in a way in which no other artform can, and it is this which gives it its - I think genuinely unique - appeal. 

What do I mean by this?

Picture yourself reading a D&D module, setting book, bestiary, or splatbook of any quality. What happens as you are reading it? Are you simply imbibing information? No: if you have any sort of imagination at all, you are rather engaging in a different exercise entirely (one which I tried to describe here and which Joseph Manola once described here) - you are imagining what could be. Hence, as I once put it:

[T]he vast bulk of my memories associated with RPG books [from the time I was an adolescent] was paging through them on long car journeys or while on holiday and just, well, imagining what it would be like to use them. "Wouldn't it be great to be in a session where we encountered a morkoth?" I would think as I browsed through the Monstrous Manual. "Wouldn't it be great to have a PC find the Hand of Vecna?" I would think as I read the section of the 2nd edition DMG on 'artifacts'. "Wouldn't it be great to run an all-druid campaign?" I would think as I flicked through the Complete Druid's Handbook. "I'd love to run a campaign set in the Philippines," I would think as I sat reading the Cyberpunk 2020 Pacific Rim Sourcebook. My experience of actual gaming was a pale shadow of the kind of things that my adolescent brain could come up with left to its own devices. 

(Not incidentally, I had a similar relationship, thinking back, to Games Workshop books. My friends and I played a heck of a lot of Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, and Necromunda. But being impoverished 13 year olds, we could barely afford any models. We primarily resorted to using a huge mass of ancient lead figures bequeathed to one of us by an older brother or cousin, and we could only dream about the possibilities of actually being able to buy a Basilisk/Lehman Russ Battle Tank/Dark Angel Dreadnought/Orc Shaman Riding a Wyvern or whatever, while paging through 'Codex' books. With Games Workshop, though, the requirement to just sit around reading books and imagining was more or less a nakedly commercial phenomenon rather than anything else.)

The important thing to emphasise about this, though, is that you are not just imagining one thing in response to what you are reading. You are imagining a whole array of different scenarios that are to a greater or lesser extent inchoate. Reading the description of a room in a dungeon, you are imagining a range of different possible scenarios that might unfold. Reading a description of a monster, a dozen or so different ways in which the monster could appear, or be encountered, are racing through your mind in a jumble. Reading a description of a character class, you are conjuring an array of different potential PCs. And so on and so forth - each little chunk of information (a monster, a room, a hex, an NPC, etc.) is like a concentrated bundle of potential energy which suddenly erupts in a spray of possibile outcomes once it makes contact with the brain. Your mind at first must fight to make sense of all of this, and at times you almost feel like a cat experiencing sensory overload through its whiskers, and have to tune out while your subconscious rediscovers its composure. Importantly, there is never a conclusion - it is not like reading a novel, wherein a narrative gradually coheres and finally you are led to an ending. Instead there is only yet more to imagine, more to create, more to envisage. 

Nothing else in life is really like this (the closest analogy I can think of is the experience of being a sport fan and eagerly anticipating the range of possible outcomes from this weekend's fixtures) and there is something delicious about it. In fact perhaps food and drink is the best metaphor of all: reading a good RPG book and experiencing the prismatic spray of unrealised potential burst through your imagination is something like the first sip of a fine wine or spirit or the first mouthful of a truly great dish - a sudden eruption of many different sensations which, at first, you struggle to process, and must spend time carefully reflecting on as they wash over your palate and recede. Even better, you don't get fat or turn into an alcoholic while reading them - although you might, I suppose, find yourself experiencing an excess of neck hair growth.