The Advantages of Being First

There are much better systems than D&D in the world. In fact, D&D is rather incoherent and riddled with irregularities, despite its charm. Yet from a certain perspective, D&D is the best game there is, simply because it is the first and most popular.

This is no circular argument: what I mean to say is, because D&D was the first role playing game and has hence secured the Top Dog space for itself and ruled the roost ever since (to mix my metaphors just slightly), there are vastly more people playing it and hence vastly more people creating things for it. To put it in fashionable terminology, the D&D brain trust is massive in comparison with that for any other RPG. The OSR blogosphere is only one small example of this. From house rules to new monsters to campaign settings to alternative classes to whatever else you can think of, there are dozens of times more people creating things for D&D than any other system, and thus there is a greater vat of accumulated knowledge from which any given D&D player can draw inspiration and edification than there is for game X, Y, or Z. Or even A, B or C.

But it doesn't stop there. I would suggest that D&D's pre-eminent position at the forefront of the hobby has a more profound and subtle impact on D&D players than just providing them with loads and loads of ideas, new rules, and customisations. The boon is far greater, if slightly more difficult to access: it comes in the idea that D&D is not a fixed thing but is ever changing. The fact that every month there is (was, once) a new Dragon magazine packed with different rules, that there are blogs and forums and websites out there dedicated solely to the creation of new material, that a never-ending sequence of splatbooks was being farted out by TSR at its height...all of this creates a self-perpetuating, virtuous cycle, in which any individual DM or player is being constantly reminded, almost as if he can't escape the notion, that D&D is ever evolving, ever-changing, ever-ready to be kitbashed and mangled and beaten into something new and different and better. This creates a special D&D mindset. The pressure to think about evolution. Other games may have a certain feeling that the rules and content can change, but D&D is impossible to imagine without the constant pressure of change, improvement, expansion. And this D&D mindset is a precious gift to the player of that particular game. It means that anybody playing D&D is always confronted with the question: what can be done to make this better?

Cthulhu Works With Everything

I've often thought that, if you wanted incontrovertible proof that the Cthulhu mythos is true, it's that you can put it into any setting and it will instantly improve it.

Way back at the start of this blog, in 2008 (it seems like only yesterday, but it is getting on for six bloody years ago), I was talking about OzCthulhu, my idea for a setting inspired by Aboriginal Australians with a heavy dose of the Cthulhu mythos on top. One of the commenters on that early entry postulated the idea of a setting mixing L. Frank Baum's Oz with the Cthulhu mythos, which works too. But other options will suggest themselves, because CTHULHU WORKS WITH EVERYTHING. Ancient Greece, but with added Cthulhu mythos. Icelandic sagas, but with added Cthulhu mythos. The Many Coloured-Land, but with added Cthulhu mythos. Star Wars, but with added Cthulhu mythos. The Incan Empire, but with added Cthulhu mythos. A Song of Ice and Fire, but with added Cthulhu mythos. Middle Earth, but with added Cthulhu mythos. The Nazis, but with added Cthulhu mythos. 1920s America, but with added C...no, hang on.

Creative Constraint and Beekeeping

An intermittent theme on my blog down the years (see e.g. here) has been creative constraint: how providing strict boundaries in terms of what the DM and players can create (particularly during the setting up of a new campaign) can actually allow imaginations and inspiration to flourish.

Take beekeeping. The latest Econtalk podcast is all about the economics of beekeeping. While it is wide-ranging and covers everything from how to transport bees to CCD (which means Colony Collapse Disorder - don't you know anything?) to externalities to the almond-growing industry of California, the most interesting section by far in my mind is where the conversation moves onto the idea of migratory beekeepers. This may not be the case in other countries, but apparently in the US many beekeepers spend their working lives travelling around: based in the South, say, and moving to California for the early almond pollination season, then travelling up the West coast through Oregon and Washington for apples, berries, cherries and so on, and then pitching up in the Dakotas to allow the bees to spend summer gorging on sunflowers. Then it's back down South for winter. Similar migratory patterns go up and down the East coast from Florida to Maine and so on.

Saying that you are going to run a beekeeping campaign and you would be characterised as some sort of dangerous eccentric in most RPG circles; not because of the subject matter but because it seems so very limiting. The PCs really have to start off as beekeepers and nothing else? And all they're going to do is travel round with, and manage, bees?

But once the limits are set, the mind starts to whir with possibilities. How about, rather than just having honey bees, the world is full of many different kinds of bee, all with different characteristics, tastes, and vulnerabilities? And how about a d100 table of random bee pests and diseases that might strike at a given moment? What about all the possibilities for hexcrawling: where do you stop for the night with your hives? Where do you migrate to - do you follow the spring as it heads Northwards, or strike off on a different, less travelled path where there are fewer competitors? What kind of monsters and bandits lie in ambush on the well-journeyed routes? What kind of monsters does honey attract in general? There would need to be a set of tables for generating competitor beekeepers, their hives, and helpers, of course. Each would have their own agenda, their own rivalries and alliances, their hidden ancestral knowledge. The same goes for the farmers. There would need to be a system for determining costs based on the presence of competition, weather, crop type...and rudimentary rules for trade in general.

And of course, there would need to be complicated procedures for what happens when bees make honey from the nectar of poisonous plants, or whatever kind of weird fantasy flora you happen to come up with.

I'm not suggesting that the beekeeping campaign is the one we should all be running, you understand. The point is simply this: once constraints are set in place, creativity starts to flourish. Envisage human creativity like water: without barriers it floods endlessly in a very thin and ever-spreading sheen. With constraint it bursts upwards like a fountain. And I give you metaphors like that free of charge.

Medieval England Did Not Have Dragons

What's new, Monsters & Manuals? How's the world been treating you? You haven't changed a bit. Lovely as ever, I must admit.

Apologies for the hiatus. This has been the busiest summer for me ever - my PhD thesis is finished, I have a flash new job in a flash new city (well, Newcastle), and things are very much looking up, but it has been a time-sapping experience and I have done very little gaming and very little thinking about gaming. I've missed the blog, though, and it is good to be back.

Today, my topic for discussion is history. On a forum I frequent there was recently a little to-and-fro-ing about true population figures in medieval England, the number of manors and parishes in the Domesday Book, and so forth, and it made me think, with a strange clarity, what a bizarre pursuit historical research is when it comes to fantasy gaming. Why, as a DM creating a D&D setting, would you care what the population density of medieval England was as something relevant for your game, when medieval England did not have dragons, orcs, elves and magic in it? How can we possibly believe that the existence of such factors would not make a D&D world very, very different from medieval England in almost every respect?

The need for historical accuracy is one that I understand, but like almost everything else in gaming, it is an odd impulse when you think about it. If you are running a fantasy game, it actually makes more sense not to think about historical accuracy at all - the furniture of high fantasy requires a pseudo-medieval society which superficially resembles our own, but that resemblance must by necessity be entirely superficial. The moment you start thinking about accurate population figures and densities, trade routes and pricing, natural resources and so forth, you immediately have to consider: How would the existence of dragons affect this? What about magic? What about orcs? And suddenly you are not so much creating a fantasy setting as you are considering speculative, academic questions which lead to interesting pub or forum discussions but not much in the way of game-able content if you take it seriously.

To illustrate, think about what farms would look like if there were giant flying predators like dragons, griffins, hippogriffs and so on in the world. Nobody would keep cows or sheep, because they would be being eaten all the time. No cows or sheep means no leather or wool. Good luck trying to extrapolate a setting from that which you could base a game on. It's an interesting thing to think about while you're staring out of the window of the train on your daily commute, but it isn't something you could really play D&D with.

Fantasy gaming rests on a fiction: that you could have a society like England in 1200 AD which also has supernatural beings, magic, and active deities. That fiction, in turn, rests on the understanding that nobody thinks about it too hard.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Do you have a strange, special snowflake campaign setting that steers away from D&D tropes? Would it make more sense for the PCs to be "strangers in a strange land" than natives, given that the players aren't going to get to know the setting well enough to behave like they're indigenous? There is plenty of historical precedent for groups of adventurers stranded in foreign lands of which they know nothing, with no way to get home. For instance:

The Russian Expeditionary Force in France was a brigade-strength unit sent from Russia to the Western Front to fight alongside France in the First World War. A considerable portion were Estonians. In one of those bizarre twists of globalization in which the First and Second World War abounded, a group of them ended up serving with the 1st Moroccan Division: Russians and Estonians in France, fighting with North Africans against Germans.

The Czech Legion was formed from Czech and Slovak volunteers and served with the Imperial Russian Army; after the revolution in 1917 they began to trek Eastwards through Siberia all the way to Vladivostok to get on board ships bound for France. On the way they tangled with the Bolsheviks and became involved in the Siberian Intervention, when Japanese, American, French, Canadian, British and Italian troops landed in Vladivostok to support the Whites against the Reds in the Russian Civil War. It is also said that, on the way, the Legion ended up in possession of 8 train carriages of gold bullion from the Imperial Reserve. It is also said that some of the Czechs remained in Siberia into the 1920s, and helped the Koreans defeat the Japanese at the Battle of Qingshanli.

After the surrender of the Emperor in September 1945, thousands of Japanese troops remained in China fighting alongside the nationalists against warlords and communists. Some were there for years afterwards.

The Blue Division were Spanish volunteers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. In total 286 of them were held captive after the way until 1954, when they were repatriated to Spain.

Basques from Northern Spain were fishing cod off Newfoundland from the beginning of the 16th Century; some even argue the Basques may have discovered North America before Columbus (though after the Vikings, obviously). Some of the earliest trade jargons in the New World were mixtures of Basque and local Native American tongues.

The notion of a bunch of rubes fumbling their way around a weird place they know nothing about, then, is remarkably common in human history. There isn't much of a better excuse to set players loose on a hex crawl than "you are stranded here for reason x, now what?"

D&D, Star Trek, Christianity and Cricket all walk into a bar...

On the way home from work I've been listening to some old Make It So - A Star Trek Podcast episodes (from before the half-way point, when it became progressively shitter). The hosts, who are around my age, discuss how they loved Star Trek: TNG as kids growing up, gradually stopped watched during their late teenage years and so missed out on some of DS9 and all of Voyager, stopped watching Trek entirely, and then around their late 20s suddenly rediscovered TNG and fell in love with it all over again.

It got me thinking: I went through pretty much exactly the same experience with Trek and rediscovered it a couple of years ago at the age of about 28 when I was bored and decided to order a season of it on DVD. Suddenly my interest in it was rekindled (though, thankfully, not enough to get interested in Voyager or Enterprise).

And I also went through the same experience with role playing games. I stopped playing those around the age of 16 or 17, I think, and then got back into them at age 25 or so. It happened too with cricket - I was a good player for my local team, then went away to university and drifted away from the game, to come back to it later.

It mirrors what happens to a lot of people with church, as well, I think. They drift away once they hit late teenage-hood, and often come back to it in later life (though that hasn't happened to me so far).

So I wonder: is the tendency to lose interest in the things you enjoyed as an adolescent a universal feature of growing up - a necessary element of the process of becoming an adult - and, if so, is a rediscovery of the things you used to love also a necessary element of maturity and confidence in yourself as an adult? It seems that way.

On Bathos

I think what I appreciate most in D&D is bathos: perhaps the overwhelming narrative characteristic of the game, insofar as it has any such characteristics. Random encounter tables, rolling dice in the open, taking results as they come, and resolute avoidance of illusionism or pallete-shifting of any kind - all of these elements of 'old school' D&D play contribute to the development of the bathetic.

People who like "narrative" games and prefer things to make "dramatic sense" usually miss this. 

An example of bathos from last night's game: Eki Ulele had just survived the most difficult and bloody encounter the party had yet had, in which 8 bandits and 2 hireling retainers had died and one of the PCs dying. He had been through, in many ways, his toughest moment. He had faced down the bandit leader and bluffed him into retreat, then survived a nerve-wracking chase through a pitch black forest, with no weapons or magic and only flasks of oil to aid him. He had led the opposition away from his wounded friends, buying them time to escape.

He survived all this, and if I was interested in trying to develop the "plot" of the campaign, as if it was a story, this would have been a defining episode for his character - the making of him. He would have gone on to better things, and grown as a person because of what happened to him at the bandit lair. Or perhaps he would have died bravely in one final showdown with the bandit leader, going out in a blaze of glory, remembered for ever more.

But the dice said otherwise: the next day he got an unlucky result and had a wilderness encounter; he got an unluckier result when it turned out to be giant bees; and an even unluckier result when he failed his surprise roll. He died a meaningless and ignoble death alone in the forest, stung to death by mindless insects. Bathos.

Yet this has its own narrative sense. Bathos and absurdity are proud and important traditions in drama and comedy. They may not be "emotionally satisfying", but they have their own value. The next time somebody makes out that you should fiddle or ignore dice rolls in the name of maintaining some sort of narrative consistency, remind them of this: "I prefer it bathetic, darling".

On Wickedness

The two most recent books I have read are Antony Beevor's The Second World War, and Empire of the Summer Moon. These two books are radically different in scope, one covering the biggest and most intense conflict in human history, the other a series of tiny skirmishes fought over decades in a near-empty wilderness. And yet they have one thing in common: they make you aware, in no uncertain terms, of the absolutely extraordinary extent of "man's inhumanity to man".

In Beevor's book we read of SS men at Treblinka picking young children up by their ankles and swinging them down like mallets to dash their brains out on rocks, Red Army soldiers gang raping and murdering Russian women who were enslaved by Germans and who they had just "liberated" on their invasion of East Prussia, Japanese soldiers from different units abducting each other to cannibalise, Soviet officers who have done nothing wrong being summarily shot by their superiors to instil discipline into others, Allied bombers flattening Dresden just because it was the only city in Germany they hadn't flattened, the USAAF judging the success of its missions in Japan on how many innocent Japanese women and children it had burned to death, citizens of Leningrad abducting and killing their own neighbours' children to eat during the winter of 1941....and so on and so on.

In Gwynne's, we read of Comanche raiders gang raping and scalping pregnant women; slicing off rival tribe members' noses, arms and legs and then burning them alive; cutting off the bottoms of captives' feet and making them walk around for their own amusement; Texan militiamen shooting Cheyenne women and children who surrender to them and then mutilating their corpses in horrific ways; Texas rangers killing thousands of head of horses in cold blood to stop them falling into Comanche hands; Ute women bludgeoning helpless octogenarian Comanches to death with axes...and so on and so on.

It's enough to make one wonder: if this is the kind of thing human beings routinely do to one another in certain circumstances, what kind of stuff would orcs do? And let alone orcs - what would demons and devils do? What, indeed, does "evil" really even mean, given what we know about history?

This is the main reason why I lean increasingly towards humans as the key protagonists and antagonists in my campaign settings. Anything an orc can do, we can do better. And who needs a goblin when the thought of being tortured to death by a fellow human being is so much more plausible and disturbing?

The Exodus to, er, Made Up Worlds

I was listening to an old Econtalk podcast with Edward Castronova today while doing some house keeping, and immediately thought that it was worth blogging about, being both Relevant To My Interests and very educational. The blurb is as follows:

Edward Castronova, of Indiana University and author of Exodus to the Virtual World, talks about his provocative thesis that a growing number of people around the world will be spending more and more time playing multiplayer games in virtual reality both as a form of escape and as a search for meaning. He talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how this trend might affect government, religion, and our happiness.

I'm not an expert on multiplayer online games, because I literally don't play any of them: my only experience with online gaming of any sort is the odd blast of Dominate Game with the guys in my office and long-running PBEM games of Steel Panthers: World at War with 50-something fellow military history freaks in Texas and Virginia. So my comments ought to be taken in that light. It also needs to be said that Castronova was being interviewed here in 2008, and things have obviously moved on since then: they talk quite a bit about Second Life, which seems to have faded away (to my knowledge anyway), and they cite World of Warcraft dollars-for-gold-piece auctions as a $1 billion dollar per year concern, where I suspect today they are even bigger than that.

The most interesting issue they raise is the philosophical one: what are the consequences for society that a sizeable minority of people actually seem to prefer living in a virtual world than to the real one? And what does it say for society? It being Econtalk, which is probably the most cerebral podcast on the internet, they manage to steer clear of stupid pat answers like "blah, capitalism destroys the soul, people want to escape, blah". Instead they offer a number of different thoughts, foremost among them that modern society has to a large extent tried to shed myth, and in doing so it has left a core human need unsatisfied: history and anthropology suggest that myth is something that fulfils some sort of genuinely human requirement. They make the observation that World of Warcraft is like an exercise in myth-making which seems to fill this hole.

In any case, it got me thinking about table top RPGs. Are they part of the same process, the so-called "exodus to virtual worlds"?

It's a shame table top RPGs are so niche, because I think they can be productively analysed in relation to issues like this. RPGs are sort of like Second Life and World of Warcraft, because they involve the creation of a fantasy world, they are to a certain extent escapist, they resemble Nozick's Experience Machine to some degree though don't map perfectly. And yet at the same time they are different - because they are social in the "true" sense (you play them face to face) and very rooted in the real world of dice, pens, paper and, perhaps crucially, the written word.

I don't have any particular thoughts on the matter, though this notion of myth-making struck a chord with me. What myths we do have in the modern world - essentially, books, films, comics, etc. - are all passively partaken in. So although I'm prepared to buy the argument that nowadays films fulfil something of the function that mythology did, it isn't really correct to talk about watching films as being involved in myth making because nothing is being made by the audience. This contrasts with religious myth in particular, because religious myths involve an active response - they are supposed to be linked in some way to our behaviour. There is something more of that in table top RPGs: active engagement with issues of right and wrong, good and evil, and so on, and also just acting with some kind of in-game meaning as opposed to being an unengaged observer.

Stream of Consciousness about Morality

Patrick wrote an interesting post about an event that happened in a Cyberpunk 2020 game I was DMing. It's about morality. It's a really well written piece that you should all read. But it got me wondering about things that have gone on in games I've been involved in, and whether those things have had real-world consequences for my own sense of myself as a moral person.

I was brought up by Christian parents (a Christian mother, more accurately - my Dad mostly humoured her), and my mother always tried to instil in me the notion that things that we watch, read, or listen to do actually affect our 'souls'; when you watch a violent film it is actually bad for you in some sense. It is corrupting.

I still think I agree with that, to a certain extent, although I wouldn't frame it in terms of the soul or sinfulness - except perhaps in the illustrative sense. I agree with it insofar as I think that movies, music and books can have a coarsening, hardening, and cheapening effect on the way we view the world: the more violence and badness you absorb in fiction (particularly visual fiction), the less you can empathise with others. It's why I'm in favour of some level of film censorship and why I think that films like the Saw and Human Centipede franchises are actually quite dangerous - not because I worry about copy cat-ism, but because I worry about the cumulative effect of all this cruelty on our collective unconscious. I'm aware this is a controversial view that some people reading this blog will not agree with.

But for whatever reason, the games I run are pretty amoral affairs. (I would use the term 'morally ambiguous' but I always think that is a pretty cowardly euphemism.) And I never, ever find myself sitting there as a DM, or later on that night, or the next week, thinking about what went on in the game - the brutal slayings, the casual theft, the complete lack of compassion demonstrated by everybody involved - and fretting about morality. Until I read Patrick's post it never even occurred to me that anybody really would think that way. The game is just a game.

But then again, Saw is just a movie. I believe I have found myself in a moral contradiction. I suppose I'm okay with that.

Rules and Rulings

All this talk about rules versus rulings and Mother-May-I? and what have you reminds me of the legal realists, particularly Jerome Frank.

Jerome Frank, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, was of the opinion that legal rules are essentially fictional. He was not a postmodernist; his scepticism came from a solid grounding in reality and was based on the premise that no court ever makes a decision based on the "real" facts - the decision often happens months or years after the event, it often relies on suspect eyewitness testimony, and judges and juries are fallible and biased.

Rather than being based on a clear understanding of the facts, then, court decisions are instead merely a manifestation of what individual judges consider to be just and proper in that particular instance, taking into account the impact on society, with the judge paying lip service to the rules after the event. The decision-making process, in fact, is the reverse of what a textbook will tell you, according to Frank. That is, in almost all cases, the judge first makes a decision based on his own idea of what he thinks would be just, and then he searches for a rule to fit it to afterwards.

This was not a problem for Frank, and indeed it was something he thought a mature legal system should embrace. He said:

We want judges who, thus viewing and employing all rules as fictions, will appreciate that, as rules are fictions 'intended for the sake of justice', it is not to be endured that they shall work injustice in any particular case...

In other words, Frank was of the belief that in a mature legal system, the fictional veneer of predictability and robustness that rules provide is valuable, but actually all that really matters is that judges make the just decision in any given case. Applying a rule "correctly" ought never to result in an injustice. Judges, basically, ought to be free to make any decision they deem proper, unconstrained by the need for "legal clarity" or undue respect for rules and principles that have no real basis in reality.

Something similar can be said, in my view, about the role of the GM in a traditional game. I'll use Monte Cook's example as my own:

Say you've got a special weapon (magic or tech, doesn't matter) that makes foes all itchy so they are distracted. In a tightly written ruleset, the designer defines not only the effect, but what (if anything) can counter the effect. Maybe it would state that if the victim suffers a -3 penalty on all actions for the next ten turns unless he spends two consecutive turns and makes a new successful resistance roll, in which case the effect ends. In a GM-logic ruleset, you would write it entirely differently. You would explain what's going on in the situation, and let the GM handle the rest. So it would say that the victim is covered in an itchy and irritating powder and suffers a -3 penalty for the next ten turns while the powder was on his flesh and clothes. Then it would be up to the player to say, "I want to clean the itching powder off." And the GM says, "okay, if you take two turns, and make a new resistance roll, you can get it off." The advantage in the latter case is, the player could also say, "I'm going to jump in this nearby pool of water," and the GM is free to say, "Okay, that washes it off immediately." Or the player might say, "I use the water in my canteen to wash it off," and the GM might say, "Okay, that still takes two turns, but the roll is automatic now." Or the victim's mage friend might conjure a wind to blow the powder off. Or whatever.

The "tightly written ruleset" is the kind of approach that Jerome Frank argued was meaningless and self-defeating: maybe in a very limited set of circumstances it is possible to create rules which will always apply in the same way in all situations, but those rules are rare and in the majority of cases the rule will not be directly relatable to the "facts", which do not really exist in any event. It is better to recognise that, generally speaking, in most situations, the GM will make a decision based on what he or she thinks is best or most appropriate, and may then retro-fit a rule to that decision afterwards. The process for making the itching-powder decision would go:

GM thinks about what would happen if the player tried what he was trying -> GM makes a ruling -> a fictional rule is stated. (Fictional in the sense that no rule is really "real".)

The next time itching powder is used, the same process is followed. It may be that the GM makes the same ruling as before, but he shouldn't feel bound to, because the circumstances may be a little different (this time, it's raining, so the powder can be cleaned of automatically in just one turn of action, or something). He should just decide based on what he thinks is appropriate.

Frank would say we should embrace this if we want to have a mature approach to role playing. Unfortunately, not everybody does.

On Gaming with Teenagers and Ageing

The weekly game of LotFP I'm involved in (as a player) has been an interesting experience, as the players are divided between old fogeys and yoof in roughly equal measures. The DM, Patrick, is I think 29 (though he'll correct me on that). Then there's me, 30, and a 31 year-old. On the other side of the adult/child divide are David and Adam, affectionally referred to as the "gruesome twosome", who are 16 or 17-ish; Adam is a nephew of one of the other players, and David is his strange friend. This is a new thing for me, as for my entire gaming life, such as it is, I've gamed with people who are broadly my age or older.

On Wednesday the gruesome twosome brought along two more friends. I viewed this with a little trepidation; I don't get along with anybody below the age of about 25, unless they have breasts and nice dimples, so I wasn't expecting it to be a great deal of fun. This is compounded by the fact that the "gruesome twosome" have a tendency towards the...chaotic. And in real life, not in alignment terms.

Yet, surprisingly, it went very well. One thing I noticed is that the youngsters were actually quite keen to be deferential to us seniors, looking to us for their lead on a number of occasions. But I also noticed that age-old truism in action: the older you get, the more conservative you become. The younger players at the table's approach to the game can be best described as devil-may-care. There's a corridor? Let's charge down it. There's a room full of bats ahead? Let's kill them. There's a load of old crates in the room? Let's search them. On a number of occasions this resulted in extremely awkward and dangerous results, and yet the natural exuberance of youth meant they never really learned their lesson.

By contrast, the oldsters were caution personified. We spent the initial, lengthy encounter essentially hiding in long grass while the others did everything. In the dungeon, I was trying to parlay with the creatures we met, and frightening off bats by yelling and making noise; anything to avoid a fight. Every corridor we came down had pebbles thrown down it to make sure there wasn't a trap. We made clever use of spells to avoid direct confrontation.

Patrick is a much cuddlier DM than I am, and he was also going easy on the newbies a bit, which I think was fair enough and probably the correct way to play it. But I think, in a more rules-as-written version of the game, it wouldn't have been long before the PCs of the youngsters were all dead.

It made me realise something that we all know already: D&D was originally a game for adults. Gary Gygax was 35 or 36 when it was first released. Dave Arneson was a spring chicken at 26ish. These weren't nerdish teenage boys, young, dumb and full of cum. They were nerdish men. The game rewards the kind of caution and conservatism that adults will bring to the table.

This means that in its purest form the game is best enjoyed by grown-ups. And yet it has, throughout most of the past 30 years, been a preserve of adolescents. I believe this may be one of, if not the, major explanation for the gradual kid-gloving of the game over the preceding decades - adolescents, particularly adolescent boys, are idiots. You can't leave them in charge of a game like OD&D without them abusing and misunderstanding it horribly, which in turn leads them to think it is broken and unfair. And thus: 4e.

Big is Beautiful

It's long been my view that TSR-era D&D, taken as a whole, is the most brilliant game there is. No - I don't mean the system is brilliant: it isn't. No sensible person would design a game that way nowadays, knowing what we now know about game design, which has undoubtedly got better since 1974.

D&D's brilliance comes from the fact that, plain and simply, it has the biggest "brain trust" of any game system on the planet. Like Manchester United, who can draw on football playing talent worldwide, or like the USA, which can siphon off the intelligent and talented multitudes from every corner of the globe, D&D has for decades been the biggest game around, and that means that it can draw on more creativity, talent and innovation than any other system.

The perfect example of this is, of course, the OSR and what is going on nowadays on Google+ (mainly, it has to be said, thanks to this guy more than anybody else). There are hundreds of extremely talented, thoughtful, entertaining and clever gamers pooling their ideas daily on teh internets, and the dead giveaway is that almost (though not entirely) all of it feeds into one game - D&D.

Far from seeing this as a bad thing, I embrace it. Perhaps if I wasn't interested in its own peculiar and idosyncratic take on the fantasy genre I would bemoan D&D's dominance. But I love it, so I don't.

D&D, you are the bestest game in the whole wide world.

Do We Need Villains?

On this podcast Zak is asked what his favourite villain is. There is then some discussion of what makes a good villain, and the interviewer postulates that in a game, "the villain is the plot"; or, if I understood him correctly, a game is all about how the players react to what the villain does.

That's all very strange to me, and it got me thinking about villains in my games: in short, there aren't any. It's just not how I set things up. I start off with a big list of NPCs and they have their own motivations, goals and relationships, and some of them are very bad, but none of them are really villains in the narrative sense. They're not opposed to the PCs unless the PCs do something to piss them off or go out of their way to set themselves up in opposition to them. (In fact, in D&D in particular, the notion of a Big Bad Evil Guy never made any sense to me: this is a world where there are 20th level Lawful Good paladins, gold dragons, and kirin running about the place, right? So why would any BBEG even care about what this gang of 1st level no-hopers is doing? And why would those no-hopers have to get involved in the first place?)

But that's just in short; in practice, of course, villains emerge spontaneously through play, because if there's anything players are good at, it's doing things that piss off powerful NPCs. Once the game begins and the PCs are doing what they do, it is more or less inevitable that some NPC or other(s) will end up being "the villain" by default. This is as true of dungeoneering-type fantasy games ("Oh, we just pissed off the evil wizard") as it is of cyberpunk-type games ("Oh, we just pissed off the sinister faceless megacorp") as it is of SF ("Oh, we just pissed off those aliens"). In other words, villainy is something that comes about from the game, not something that is there from the start. It's bottom-up, not top-down.

That got me thinking further: is it, perhaps, inherent in role playing games there has to be a villain somewhere? That if there is not a villain from the start, ultimately the actions of the players will necessitate one emerging, unless they literally sit around doing nothing all day? Can there be any genuine interest without a villain existing at least as a corollary?

D&D: Enabling Amorality Since 1974

I played in Patrick's weekly LOTFP game on Wednesday. (There's an actual play here.) The highlight of the night was probably Patrick's off-the-cuff "Don't you die on me, man!" rule: if you are willing to shout "Don't you die on me, man!" at the top of your voice while stabilising somebody on negative hit points, you automatically succeed. It only works if you play in public, though.

But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was amorality, and how D&D in particular (but role playing games in general) facilitate it. It really was remarkable how, literally within 10 minutes of joining the game, my character had conspired to loot a crypt, burgle a church, and murder an innocent old woman in cold blood for the crime of being a witness to our theft - and that such goings-on were treated as an almost mundane event within the context of the game (although the DM, to his credit, did disapprove of our awful behaviour regarding the old woman). That could almost be a motto for D&D, I think: the mundanity of amorality.

Let me make a few things clear before I proceed: first, I don't think this is a bad thing. Secondly, I'm well aware that D&D doesn't have to be played this way, often isn't, and perhaps shouldn't. And thirdly, I use the term "amorality" advisedly - what I am talking about is not so much evil or badness but merely the absence of ethical thought: a total deliberate abandonment of moral sentiments, almost nihilistic in its scope.

D&D enables amoral behaviour: that is my contention. It allows you to give voice and effect to actions and beliefs that you would never exercise in real life - in other words, to give free reign to your id without that pesky super-ego getting in the way. In this respect it is rather like Grand Theft Auto, or Grand Theft Auto is rather like D&D: it is a sandbox in which being bad has no real consequence, and your inner demons can come out and play.

There are, however, limits. There are behaviours and beliefs that are not even acceptable to air within the context of a game of D&D (probably rightly, in my opinion); there are lines that oughtn't to be crossed. And the laws of the jungle - a kind of quid pro quo altruism - intervenes too: players help each other in the hope and expectation the favour will be returned. So, despite the fact that my character partook in the murder of an old woman without a second thought, he was kind to the lantern-girl he hired to join the party in entering the dungeon, and assigned one of his dogs to protect her. When the idiotic fighter (complete with irritating 17-year-old player) ran off and fell down a pit trap, the rest of us helped him out because he'd sacrificed material gain in order to find us healing earlier that day. There are moral rules, of a kind.

This suggests that morality enters D&D alongside the "real world", when that intervenes. Player-characters tend to behave better towards one another than to NPCs, because what happens to them matters in the real world: they have players who are real people and who are really invested in them. And likewise, player-characters tend to behave well towards in-game children and animals, because cruelty to children and animals is so utterly unacceptable in our society that it cannot be seen as anything other than abhorrent and evil even in the context of make-believe. (Rightly, I might add.) This is also true "at the margins": rape and torture are likewise so unacceptable in our society that they can generally only be seen as evil in-game, again probably rightly.

Otherwise, all bets are usually off. As I said, I don't particularly see this as a bad thing: it is probably a sign of good mental health that you are able to let your id loose and reign it in at will. The capacity to switch off one's own capacity for moral thought is probably an indication that, otherwise, one's moral compass points in the right direction.

If this entry has been somewhat rambling, it is because it's been 3 weeks since I blogged, and my blogging muscles are atrophied. Bear with me: I'm like a footballer returning from a hamstring injury, or a Carlos Tevez-esque lay-off - I can't quite do the full 90 minutes yet, and need a 60th-minute substitution.

Traditional RPGs are Wood

One of my weekly without-fail podcast listens is BBC Five Live's World Football Phone-In. This week somebody called in and asked Tim Vickery, the "football in South America" correspondent, the simple question: why he loved football. He gave a lot of reasons, but one which struck a chord with me was that he said, in the modern age, there is so much interaction with gizmos and gadgets that sometimes it is nice to just go home after a day's work and touch something that is made out of wood.

To him, football is like wood. It is something from an age before computers, before iPads, before mobile phones, and before the internet. To play or watch football is to connect with the past, but also to the world of physicality and physical objects. It is to feel something natural, tangible, ancient. Something that was around before you were born and will be around long afterwards.

I think role playing games have a similar attraction. There is something about the simplicity of the implements - dice, pencils, paper - that has an actual touchable, holdable charm. They are not the ephemeral, non-corporeal, soul-less products of the computerised age. They are something older and weightier and nicer. There is a trusty, prosaic feel that you get from rolling the dice and scrawling things in pencil that a computer interface can't emulate.

This is why, for me, there is always going to be something unsatisfactory about online gaming, something missing. (Even though it has its obvious advantages.) It's not just the face-to-face interaction: Skype or Google+ hangouts give you that. It's being able to pick up the dice and roll them and let everybody else see the result. It's being able to pick up a piece of scrap paper and pencil out a map. It's being able to decorate your character sheet with doodles of your character. It's being simple in an age of increasingly complex things. I don't know what goes on inside my computer, and I'm fundamentally alienated from it as a result. Dice and pencils are understandable.

Two Themes are a Couple, Three are a Crowd

In the comments on my post on Shadowrun a few days ago, John wrote the following:

Cyberpunk is already a mash-up of hardboiled fiction and science fiction. Fantasy and hardboiled both combine well with science fiction on their own, but trying to combine fantasy with hardboiled without seeming frivolous or banal is a major undertaking in itself. Throw in s.f. as well and you've got a major oversaturation of themes going on.

This got me thinking: perhaps John is right, and mashing up two themes works fine, but adding a third causes the edifice to collapse under its own weight? Are there any famous or successful three-way, or four-way, genre mashups?

An experiment. Roll 3d10 and mashup the genres in this table. What do you get?

2, 7, 3: Noir, gothic horror, hard SF. There's a female vampire disguised on a space ship and gradually killing off the crew, and there's a whiskey-soaked detective on board who is in love with her and trying to solve the crime at the same time; the way he solves the mystery is through application of a clever scientific theory. Yeah, I can see how that wouldn't work - gothic horror and hard SF cancel each other out; if the vampire is really supernatural it isn't hard SF any more, but if there is a scientific solution then it isn't actually really gothic horror. Though both work well with noir.

10, 2, 3: Victoriana, noir, hard SF. A steampunk setting in which the details are meticulously laid out so that every element of the steam-powered world makes perfect sense. A whiskey-soaked detective attempts to solve a murder, but the solution revolves around understanding something specifically to do with steam engines. That kind of works, actually, though I'm taking a very loose definition of "hard SF". You'd have to really like steam engines, and really understand what they're capable of and what the implications would be.

10, 9, 6: Victoriana, literary fiction, western. A steampunk western in which nobody does anything except mope and ponder the imponderables while having ennui-inducing sex and taking mild intoxicants. Could sort of work if the writer made great play of the fact that steam, social conservatism and violence are sort of like the human condition. But would be boring and wasteful of its setting.

Maybe John is onto something.

Know Your Enemy

-C has an interesting post up today, talking about my recent musings on consensus-oriented play. Melan makes a comment that is worth reprinting in full:

I am really frustrated by a lot of game discussion on the net - particularly on RPGNet's d20/D&D forum - where posters assume that typical gamers will be acting in bad faith in situations that depend on human choice. There is, I don't know, a complete lack of generosity towards roleplayers, and some sort of almost paralysing fear about bad experiences.  

As a conclusion to these assumptions, the discussion then shifts to how a game's rules should limit or outright prevent the potential for human error by limiting human choice; moreover, the experiences of posters who come from a different point of view are written off as atypical or downright wrong. I see these assumptions as damaging - used to argue against them for a few years, but I have mostly given up because I just ended up attacked over it.  

So, yeah, sportmanship. A mutual commitment to group enjoyment. That's the point. That's the entire point, and I don't want to play in a game that doesn't give me that.

This absolutely hits the nail on the head. There is something poisonous about discussion of RPGs in online forums - a cynicism, a meanness of spirit, a failure to understand basic human decency in game contexts - which I find genuinely worrying, and it does seem to flow from rpg.net's d20/D&D forum, although you see it elsewhere too. It's not the majority of the forum-goers (many of whom contributed excellently and pleasantly to my Monstrous Manual thread, for example), but a large minority of fevered egos, tainting our collective subconscious.

I don't find it worrying in any sort of WE'RE ALL DOOMED sense; rather, I'm anxious because it seems to me that the Powers That Be in the RPG world take what goes on in forums very seriously. I can't help but feel that a lot of what 4e tried to do in "fixing" D&D was in response to what a large number of the fevered egos in places like rpg.net were saying was wrong with gaming, but that this was ultimately a quixotic goal because it wasn't properly understood that people who are very vocal in forums are not really very representative of the majority, and are pretty much by definition guaranteed to be odd, not to mention socially inept and angry. Their concerns are not the concerns of normal gamers, but the concerns of cynical mean-spirited people who do not understand basic human decency in game contexts, and readily assume bad faith at the drop of a hat.

It's related to the problem that is experienced by TV-show makers, radio broadcasters, and media personalities the length and breadth of the world: you get complaints about something and try to make changes in response, forgetting that people who are bothered enough to complain are by definition rather strange and also tiny in number in comparison to the unoffended masses - so by effecting changes in response you are in fact chasing wild geese.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, I really wish people like Monte Cook and Mike Mearls would lock themselves away from the internet when designed D&D 5th edition and just make a game that they think normal people would enjoy, and play-test it the traditional way by just playing it a lot without input from the "fan base".

Speculating Wildly about Culture

In this post at therpgsite, a lot of people are speculating about why RPGs are apparently not popular in some countries (India, China, etc.) while relatively popular in others (UK, USA, etc.). Seeing as I enjoy speculating wildly about culture, I threw my own hat into the ring, and will now elaborate on to your education and edification (or rejection and dissatisfaction, whichever you prefer).

First, I've been around the world enough to know that cultural differences are real and have an actual impact on the way people think and behave. People are the same in Japan, France, Kazakhstan, Israel and the UK in that they like good food, having fun, having sex, they care about their families, they worry about the future, and so on, as you would expect: the core is the same. But there are differences around the edges. For instance, in Japan there is no real culture of entertaining in the home. When people socialise they tend to do it outside - at bars, restaurants, clubs, whatever - and house parties are pretty rare (although they do happen).

It would be naive to assume that cultural differences like this would not have an effect on how the practice of playing RPGs translates between cultures. Certainly, in the naive sense, in societies like Japan where people tend not to socialise in the home as much as they do in the UK or North America, there is less of a culture of parlour games and hence a correspondingly smaller window for RPGs to enter.

But also, more deep-rooted cultural mores can impact on how RPGs are played and interpreted, I think. I've written quite a bit before on this blog about cultural differences between the UK and the USA, and how it seems perfectly natural when you think about it that one should produce Warhammer and the other should produce D&D. I didn't really do enough gaming in Japan, but I do have a lot of experience dealing with Japanese people in small group contexts and know that all the stereotypes about Japan being a deferential society are stereotypes for a reason: age and seniority are strongly correlated with how much people are willing to listen to you and agree with you. (This is strongly reinforced by the language.) This makes me wonder about how the role of the DM is interpreted in the Japanese context and how my own relaxed and egalitarian style would fit.

I also think it would be naive to assume that the literary and artistic traditions exhibited by certain societies would not be a factor in how readily RPGs are absorbed. For instance, it seems to me (speaking as a lay person and an outsider in a completely extemporaneous way) that there is a strong fantastical tradition in the modern (as opposed to medieval or ancient) art and literature of Spain, Portugal and Latin America, more so than in some other societies - that those countries produce cultural artefacts that seem more readily fantastical and more readily associated with fantasy than others: that, for instance, the steps from Borges to Vance to D&D are tiny, and that Borges is just one person in a heritage of fantastical weirdness that goes back to Picasso, El Greco, Cervantes... And it also seems to me at the same time that RPGs and fantasy literature are pretty popular in Portugal and Spain, at least to my limited knowledge, and that for instance I'm always stumbling across Portuguese translations of fantasy novels on author blogs, and I know George R R Martin goes on book tours in Portugal quite a lot, and I knew this Spanish girl at university who was an even bigger Tolkien geek than I was. And I also know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", but still.

Of course, you wouldn't want to play down the significance of either language, politics or economics. People in China speak Chinese, and comparatively few speak English well enough to read D&D in the original. People in North Korea don't have easy access to DriveThruRPG. Most people in Zambia don't have the disposable income to spend on frivolous RPGs.

And if living in a foreign country for a number of years taught me anything, it's that it takes a long, long time to get to know a society well enough to pontificate on its mores. I feel confident talking about Japanese culture because I lived there for a large chunk of my life, I worked in a Japanese environment, I speak the language, I dated the women, I played football with the men. The same isn't true of Brazil or India or the Philippines, so what the fuck do I know? And I also know that when I hear people who don't know Japan as well as I do talking in a general way about "Japanese culture" I always think they sound as if they're talking out of their arse, so I'm wary of doing the same thing.

And yet I just have, and will continue to do so.

D&D as Straight Man

How do you like your whimsy? I prefer mine leaning towards the slightly melancholic, surreal, sardonic, and cruel. But there is whimsy of a blunter and more prosaic kind in D&D. From the Rules Cyclopedia, page 261, in the "Room Contents" advice section:

Trick Monster: This applies to any variation of a listed monster, such as: A two-headed giant ogre, a carrion crawler that walks upright and has paralyzing tentacles for arms, a wild bore (a shaggy man who tells long, dreary stories), a quartering (half-sized halfling), a Mouth Harpy (who can't sing but plays the harmonica), an Ogre Jelly (looks like an ogre, but . . .), and so forth.

I came across this last night while stocking one of the levels of Sangmenzhang, and it raised a wry smile, but I have to say my kind of D&D doesn't really tolerate this kind of thing. I get the joke, I get that not everything has to be po-faced in any RPG, but still, it's an incredibly unsubtle way of crowbarring humour into a game.

I have two objections. The first is the simple one: every single RPG session I've ever been involved in, as player or GM, has more laughter in it than serious moments at a ration approaching 2:1. This is achieved without anything substantively "funny" in the rules, set-up, or content of the game. It's just because that's the way gaming is - funny things happen, and when they don't, funny things can be said about the things that are happening. So actually, I've never felt any need to insert pre-planned jokes or make any self-conscious attempt at humour in the setup of a game or session. It happens organically anyway.

The second is more philosophical, and is that jokes and puns are a kind of Brechtian alienating device which distance the players from the game world. As soon as a Mouth Harpy makes an appearance, suddenly you're not even remotely inside your character's head - your willing suspension of disbelief has been shattered and you've been wrenched out of the Secondary World which has been created. This is not really conducive to what I enjoy about gaming.

What this boils down to, I think, is that good humour is generally about what the Japanese call the tsukkomi and the boke, or what we call the straight-man and comic: you need a sensible springboard for the jokes to bounce off. For me, whatever the game is you're playing, the game's contents have to take on the role of straight-man - they have to be relatively serious on the face of it for the jokes to riff on. Seriousness of content is the necessary foil for all manner of jokes, sarcasm and piss-taking - and the overall level of humour in fact suffers without it. That is, overt humour built-in to the game world undermines it: to borrow again from theatrical comedy, there is no-one "feeding" the lines, because the lines are all stupid jokes in the first place.