The Lynchian Paladin

Regular readers will know that I harbour a long-simmering ambition to write up rules for running explicitly heroic campaigns oriented around the idea either that all PCs are of the paladin class or that all PCs are conceptually 'paladins' in the sense of fighting against evil.

A long series of irregular posts, which I really ought to assemble under their own tag, lays this out:

• Into the Abyss: More on Being the Good Guys
  
• Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case
  
• The Incursion Generator Expanded
  
• The Single Class Paladin Campaign
  
• Single Class Paladin Campaign Book - First Glimpse
  
• The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants
  
• Feel like my soul is beginning to expand - look into my heart and you will sort of understand
  
• Space Paladins in the Demonic Future
  

As you will see if you carefully read these posts (as all true disciples of the Order of Noisms must do, and indeed must already have done dozens of times) I've suggested a variety of models of such campaigns, which ideally I would like to write up as a series of volumes the, if I have my druthers, would come out in a posh slip-case finely decorated:

• The traditional D&D paladin, a paragon of lawful good, who attempts to 'do good' within a typical TSRan type setting
• A more Arthurian, Pendragon-inspired 'knight of the round table' fighting for Christian order within a world imbued with ancient magical forces
• A pseudo-Japan in which mighty heroic samurai do battle against demons and evil spirits 
• A pseudo-Ancient Mesopotamia or Levant where Gilgameshian heroes or 'Book of Judges' style judges fight against primordial chaos embodied in monsters and devils
• A vaguely Iberian class of holy knights who do battle againts evil infidels
• A somewhat Warhammerian set of 'demon hunters' in a reformation-era Old World (with the serial numbers filed off)
• A group of dwarven warrior-priests in Lanthanum Chromate
• Space Paladines in the demonic future
• A Beowulf-inspired 'Clan of Cain' scenario

The main idea here is that each of these scenarios involves some systematised way (on which notes can be found in the pieces linked to above) through which incursions of evil find their way into the human world and have to be rooted out, uncovered, battled, etc., by said paladins.

A friend of mine recently raised the issue of David Lynch and his sad (fairly) recent death, and I immediately started to see a connection between this type of campaign and Lynch's approach to what we could call 'worldbuilding'. I am obviously here talking about Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me most of all, but I think across most of Lynch's ouevre we see a similar concern playing out - the idea that, lurking around every corner, behind every closed door, reflected in every mirror, hiding at the foot of each bed, waiting at the bottom of every car park, there might be something supernaturally and unspeakably awful. This is I think most readily 'gameable' in Twin Peaks, which in a way almost reads like the Actual Play Report to the world's greatest Unknown Armies campaign: evil entities from interdimensional 'lodges' come to the human world to do dastardly things and law enforcement tries to cope with the fallout. But in its own way Blue Velvet follows a similar pattern - and even A Straight Story has a very mild hint of that flavour, with the main character taking on the quality of a roving wizard casting spells to solve people's slightly otherworldly problems (like the woman who keeps mysteriously killing deer by accident). 

In this paradigm the PCs could take on something of a Kyle McLachlanian aspect as straight-jawed Philip Marlowe-investigator types, but this is by no means a pre-requisite and one could paint with a much broader brush than that. What is chiefly needed - and as I have begun to lay out - is a means by which to systematise the crucial mechanism of intrusion: how evil manifests itself in the setting through some at least partially random method, and how it is that the PCs encounter it. 

The Rule of Dice and the Resort to Chaos

'I've sometimes thought,' said the Head Man, 'it might be interesting if we didn't let chance decide the moves but thought them out for ourselves.'

'What an odd game,' said Great House. 'It wouldn't have any rules at all.'

-from The Scorpion God, by W. Golding

The connection between rules and dice is an unusual one.

Think of most of the situations you know which are governed heavily by rules: a sport, say, or a trial, or driving on the roads. What you will notice is that the rules are specifically designed to try to eliminate randomness. We would think there to be something deeply wrong with a trial process whose outcome was decided on the basis of rock, paper, scissors. (Though this would perhaps reduce costs.) And we would think it even worse if, say, drivers determined which side of the road to drive on through a coin toss.

The reason for this is, obviously, that rules are deliberately non-random - randomness and rules are indeed, in a way, opposites. The point about a rule is that you apply it as it is stated. If its effect is random it is not really a rule in any meaningful sense. It lacks the basic things a rule requires in order to possess 'ruliness' - i.e. being clear, being knowable in advance, being non-retrospective, being non-contradictory with other rules, and so forth. To enter the world of randomness is to be governed by chaos. 

Yet some board games and RPGs (#notallboardgamesandRPGs) are different - the rules do not just tolerate randomness but deliberately introduce it. The rules act as the confines within which randomness is controlled and directed. They, if you like, instrumentalise chaos. They tame it for useful purposes.

The reason they do this would seem to be to do with contentiousness and the presence of neutral arbitrators. In a trial, the two parties each make a separate argument as to how the rules should apply to the facts to achieve a particular result; a neutral arbitrator (the judge or jury) makes a determination. In a football match, it's the referee and his assistants who makes rulings on the fly. In the case of driving, there is no contention at all: if you are driving the wrong way, or driving faster than the speed limit, then you are breaking the rules and that is that. 

When it comes to an RPG, however, there is no neutral arbitrator. The DM is not 'objective' vis-a-vis whatever the players says the PCs do. Rather the opposite. When the PCs are fighting a band of orcs, he's the orcs. When they are trying to get past an obstacle, he is the one who placed it there. When they are trying to find secret doors, said secret doors are on his map. RPGs, in such circumstances, often make resort to chaos - in the form of dice - to resolve potentially otherwise irresolvable disputes. There is nobody to just apply 'the rules' and give 'the right' outcome. There is only the God of the small plastic or polyhedrals and what he will say about the matter.

This actually puts RPGs (at least insofar as they use dice) among very strange, unexpected bed fellows. The child's board game is the closest comparator. Think of Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders needs  dice because it's contentious - who wins, and who loses, being unpredictable in advance (or even during play) and being, more importantly, irresolvable by the participants themselves or a neutral umpire. If Snakes and Ladders did not resort to chaos through dice in order to determine how far the players can move each turn, each game would rapidly devolve into an argument over who gets to travel so far and at what speeds (because how else would it be determined?). And, importantly, this would be governed typically by 'might makes right' or superior abilities in persuasion - i.e. not rules at all - because it is through 'might makes right' and superior abilities in persuasion that people tend to win arguments.  RPGs are a bit like that: the dice help to decide the course of events simply by providing a means through which potential conflict is resolved in advance. If they did not exist there would only be argument and persuasion determining how a particular rule applies in a given circumstance - and that would be tantamount to saying there would be no rules at all. There would be only discussion and debate.

Chaos then, if you like, is a necessary element in the way RPGs work - because it is, almost literally, what makes rules themselves useful within that context.