People Are Self-Entitled Whinge-Bags

Whenever I get depressed about people in the RPG hobby whingeing and complaining about things (from edition warring to supposedly bad DMing to failure to provide orgasms to badwrongfun to rape culture to lack of political correctness) I remind myself that this is not so much a failure of RPG nerds as it is a failure of many human beings. People are self-entitled whinge-bags. They want things to be perfect for them, and when they're not they think they have been personally slighted. This is especially so when it comes to goings-on within their hobby or pastime.

I was reminded of this reading the comments to the "as it happened" stream on the BBC website for the coverage of England's latest cricketing disaster against Australia. Have a look at some of them:

From Sue and Keith, disgruntled in Sydney: Having paid a lot to come out to watch the Melbourne and Sydney tests, it was bad enough knowing that the Ashes were lost. But can we sue the ECB under the Trades Description Act as we haven't seen what could be described as a cricket match at either game. Pathetic.

From Iain: The most pathetic display by any sporting team leaving these shores to represent England. Only Broad and Stokes deserve the right to wear the Three Lions again. Pathetic.

Jack B: Cook should hand his resignation in within the next 24 hours. What an embarrassing, pathetic leader he has been.

Paul R: Make no mistake the English cricket team are a national disgrace. Gutless and clueless. Are they hurting? Not enough.

Lewis C: Not one to knock an England side, but the tour has been a shambles. Not even a victory for pride's sake. Given fans nothing. 

Matt Jones: Can I suggest that the whole pampered squad donate their first-class tickets home to the poor suffering fans that spent thousands on the trip down under. They're not fit to wear the shirt. A total and utter shambles. 

Mark: Awful. Simply awful from England. Resignations/changes please. Just not good enough aside from Stokes in the whole series.

See what I mean? THE ENGLAND TEAM HAVE GIVEN THE FANS NOTHING. We demand reprisals! Punishment! We want people to lose their jobs! Bring back hanging! We wanted the England team to win and they were so fucking inconsiderate they went and lost! PATHETIC.

It's not enough that the England cricket team went and tried their best and happened to get beaten by a better side. They didn't do what we, the fans, wanted, and therefore they are a disgrace. It's not enough that RPG designer Y created a game that wasn't perfect for every individual fan in the entire universe: the fact that he wasn't specifically tailoring it to my needs and outlook on the world is a bloody scandal.

People are self-entitled whinge-bags.

Anthropology of Gamers Through Reading Threads About Girls

One day, I plan to write an academic paper categorising RPG nerds into separate categories based on their responses to threads about "Girls and Gaming".

We'll start with this one.

The Earnest Worrier

This topic evolved from a conversation with a woman in my gaming group, who obviously games, and with my wife, who doesn't. The gamer girl population increases every year. In many avenues, females can actually outnumber males. While this is good news, the bad news is how little this is actually changing the games themselves. At a BlizzCon panel discussion an female querist was booed for suggesting that maybe the female characters should be able to wear clothes.  

But the problem goes way deeper than that. Even within RPGs where female gamers are not only accepted but delightfully encouraged, the roles they prefer are often within healer, support, or diplomatic archetypes (again, major generalization, but largely true nonetheless). Wish fulfillment seems to be the more desired form of escapism as opposed to power fantasy or strategic simulation.

This gamer likes girls. And he's a nice guy. Look - he's even married! That proves that he likes girls and is a nice guy! Being a nice guy, he is concerned about what we, as earnest, concerned, nice guys, can do to make gaming a friendlier place for girls to be. To further boost his nice guy credentials, he describes fretting about a poor female querist being booed by horrid chauvinists - his brow, it was furrowed; his arms, they were folded; his head, it was shaken; the tuts, they were tutted. "What can we do," he asked himself, "to make female gamers more delightfully encouraged?"

[I googled "querist". Apparently it's somebody who "makes inquiries".]

No Seriously, Some of My Best Friends Are Women

Monsterhearts is another good example or a game that has evolved far outside the war-game vein; there is /violence/, but not /combat/. It also handles emotion and melodrama VERY well. And it appeals to a bunch of fringe-gamer and even non-gamer women I know. 

Typically it's methodical step-by-step combat that turns off the women gamers I know, not the violence itself. When it comes time to get dirty/bloody the female gamers I know are willing to go to levels the guys are sometimes surprised at. Honestly the step-by-step combat thing turns off a lot of new-to-the-hobby guys too; it's really the people who grew up with it that seem to like it.

"The women I know. Keep saying it, and it becomes true. I know some women."

God, My Girlfriend is One Lucky Lady Being in a Relationship With Somebody Who Does Not Assume Things

Anecdote time!

My girlfriend hates "story games bullshit" where we "talk about feelings" and would rather move her dragonborn barbarian 5 squares at a time towards the bloodiest, most granular rules-heavy combat she can find.

Non-ladies should not assume what all ladies like.

[What I know about women you could fit on the back of a postage stamp, but it includes the following: women don't think you're clever or funny if you use the phrase "Anecdote time!"]

Mr Maturity

[N]o group is homogeneous. There are big group of gamers and potential gamers out there that don't like traditional war-gamey games; this group includes both guys (me included) and gals. There is a group of female gamers that feel disfranchised by modern trad games. THESE GROUPS OVERLAP. Stereotypes can be bad, If you refuse to make ANY assumptions about groups (because we are all beautiful and unique snowflakes) you lose the ability to make any decisions about a market.

"God, I'm so mature and sensible it sometimes physically hurts," says Mr Maturity, wincing to prove it as he dispenses another gem of wisdom which nobody has ever even come close to considering before: you can't generalise, silly generaliser! A few weeks of business studies classes at college taught him more than anybody else could ever know about making decisions about markets; it also taught him to use ALL CAPS to make his points clear, succinct, and hard-hitting.

The Marxian

Can I just point out that there's a bit of irony present when hobbies (computer games and RPGs) that, 20 years ago, were viewed as bastions of sad outsider antisocial nerd culture have become socially acceptable to the point where they now represent an element of dominant culture and oppression.

"RPGs are just an outgrowth of masculine bourgeois ideologies, as Althusser would say," the Marxian begins. "Perhaps we should commence our analysis with the realisation that the species-being is only partially a biological construct?"

The Japanese Call this the "Herbivorous Male"

It also stands to reason that there are plenty of males out there that are into more emotional, non-combat oriented games. In my last game of World of Shadows, the two male players didn't fight anyone, despite constant opportunities to bust heads and shoot people. They were most interested in following their character's desires and daily lives. There was action, but no combat.

"They then removed their own testicles, because they no longer needed them."

If Only Everybody Was Norwegian

Those andogynic gender premises exists. We don't need to treat it as a hypothetical question. Lets look at the roleplaying game "markets" or game cultures that got a 50/50 gender mix. Like Larping in the Nordic countries. Hence, my example of Nordic larp. Therw ARE game markets that where the designers, and the costumer have a 50/50 gender balance. It not some hypothetical question. 
Look at the RPG cultures that already exists that have even gender balances. 

That's enough gamer anthropology through reading threads about girl gamers.

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.

Failure of Imagination

Like a lot of BBC Magazine articles, this one is only of the mildest interest and coherence, but I found a certain aspect of it intriguing because it's indicative of a tendency I've sometimes noticed for people to attribute works of highly imaginative fantasy and SF to the author's use of narcotics. Usually, as in the case of Lewis Carroll, this is based on no evidence other than, "Well, he must have been on drugs, because that book is really weird!"

I think that sort of assumption says more about the person making it than it does the author. If you lack a good imagination of your own, I suppose it is natural to assume that everybody is that way, and could only possibly create amazing works of imagination under the influence. It doesn't seem to occur to them that, yes, some people just are that creative.

Not that I'm against trying to be the next Philip K Dick if that's your thing. Just don't diminish the creative power of the human brain by pretending everything weird is down to artificial stimulation.

How to Get the Players to Stop Being Selfish

I don't normally read the RPG.net columns (I have no idea what qualifies the people who write them to say anything authoritative about anything in the world, ever), but for some reason I decided to read today's. It is called How to Get the Players to Play More In-Character, and it strikes me as the perfect example of something that I've never really been able to understand: the idea that the GM in a gaming group has the responsibility for fiddling around at the margins, trying to come up with ways to incentivise things that should be basic requirements for gaming. Like he is the dad and the players are a gang of 8 year olds who haven't yet developed the rudiments of maturity. This all feeds back to something I've written about before, but why is it that for so many people the basic assumption is that it's the GM's job to cajole the players into just properly participating in the game?

To spin the question another way, why is nobody writing a column entitled "How to stop pissing off your GM and the other players at the table by completely failing to find the shred of human social skills required to realise that you are being a hindrance to the enjoyment of others?" You could call it HSPYGOPTCFCSHSSRRYBHEO, or 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".

D&D as Operant Conditioning Chamber

So Zak S put up this post, which contains this gem of advice from the 4e DMG:

If none of the characters in your 6th level party uses a long bow, don't put a 10th level longbow in your dungeon as treasure. A great way to make sure you give players magic items they'll be excited about is to ask them for wish lists. At the start of each level, have each player write down a list of three to five items that they are intrigued by that are no more than four levels above their own level. You can choose treasure from those lists (making sure to place an item from a different character's list each time), crossing the items off as the characters find them. If characters don't find things on their lists, they can purchase or enchant them when they reach sufficient level. Each set of ten treasure parcels includes one less magic item than there are characters in the party. That's not meant to be unfair, just to make sure that characters gain magic items at a manageable rate. Make sure that over the course of several levels of adventuring, you award items evenly to all the char acters, so that over the course of, say, five levels, every character has acquired four useful and exciting items.

And I thought this was a nice bookend to what I was writing about just 7 days ago.

Having players write down wish lists and then giving them what they want is just one of the many faces of the Give-Your-Players-Orgasms school of GMing. It's precisely the opposite of what should be encouraged: which is players trying to get what they want within the game, facilitated by the GM, and thus being its engine. If one of your players wants some Special Snowflake magic item, he should be trying to find out where one could be obtained, and then going out and obtaining it, in-game. He shouldn't be saying "Pwetty pwease" to the GM and looking at him with wide, innocent brown eyes, and expecting to be rewarded for being a good little boy and going through the motions of beating up some orcs.

I likened the 4e approach to Farmville in the comments on Zak's post. I was mostly being facetious - I recognise that Farmville is infinitely worse in almost every respect. But it attracted this reply [from Zzarchov, who I'm sure won't mind me reprinting it here]:

When I play, if I player says "I would like a box of Arm & Hammer" I think I will strive to ensure they have a 4/5 chance of finding such a thing after an epic and evenly balanced quest.

Which is a joke, but sort of hits the nail on the head. The 4e DMG advice sounds altogether too much like a Skinner box: put the D&D player in the cage; have him perform an "epic and evenly balanced quest"; give him a food pellet. Why do we encourage, and accept, such a reductive approach?

If your player wants "Arm & Hammer", it's his job to go out and get it. He needs to ask the GM if he knows of anywhere that might have Arm & Hammer. He needs to have his PC go out and ask around, and see if he can find somebody who might know. He then needs to get off his arse and go and get it. Isn't it far more fun and interesting that way? Doesn't it engage the player so much more? Doesn't it force him to invest thought and energy into interacting with the game world in an interesting way?

The approach I'm advocating isn't supposed to be some sort of Iron Man, macho response to adolescent wish-fulfillment. That's not my point. My point is that if players are the engine for the game - if they decide on their own goals and then work to achieve them - it makes everything better. It is, frankly, the best way to run D&D. Instead of waiting for the orgasms and food pellets like good little rodents, going through the motions of what the GM has put in place - which is essentially a passive approach, what we surely want is active, proactive players making things easy for the GM, and genuinely getting interested in the setting, by working to achieve their own goals. Isn't it? It's not about being 'hard core'; it's about what works.

I sometimes think that, actually, the real reason why RPGs are in a downward slump is because of the prevalence of the assumption that the GM has to lead the players by the nose, rather than the other way round. That puts pressure on the GM and incentivises passivity on the part of the players. It just isn't as good that way.

You are responsible for your own orgasm

There's a daily free newspaper here in the UK called Metro, which appears on buses and trains in the early hours of the morning in time for the morning commuters. When you get on your morning train to the office you're greeted with a scene like the aftermath of a gun battle - Metro are scattered hither and thither, strewn at random, like corpses littering a battlefield. (If you like your "going to work = going to war" metaphores, I suppose you would see this as making a cosmic sort of sense.)

Anyway, the Metro has a weekly sex advice column, which I always read. (Don't pretend you wouldn't.) The letters people write run the entire gamut from the boring ("I'm 26 and my girlfriend is 34, and I'm worried she's more experienced than me") to the stupid ("I can't figure out which hole to put it in") to the amusing ("I'm in love with my boyfriend's grandfather"), so you get quite a smorgasbard of advice being given by the collection of Agony Aunts on the payroll, but one thing I've noticed them say quite often is "You are responsible for your own orgasm". This seems to be a Sex Counsellor Aphorism^TM of sorts.

I think, as advice/aphorism goes, the statement is pretty idiotic stuff. But it works for role playing games, if you replace the word "orgasm" with the word "role within the game".

I'll explain further.

This morning I was moseying about on my feed reader and found a link to this blog. I've never read it before, but it appears to deal, in part, with role playing games. The title of the post in question is "How to Run a Successful RPG: Some Tips", which naturally caught my attention, given my recent spate of posts related to this topic. Anyway, it's all very well-intentioned stuff, but in my view it is fundamentally wrong - but wrong in that interesting way that things can be wrong, when they reveal something that is taken for granted but is horrendously damaging if you think about it for even a second.

The wrong bits are:

Make Sure Each Player Will Have Something To Do.  
Some of the most frustrating games I’ve been in were where I told the GM, “I want to play a sniper,” and all of the combat turned out to be in hallways, leaving all my skills to atrophy.
As a GM, I’d be loathe to let someone play a sniper – it’s the kind of role that invariably involves splitting the party, and it’s hard (not impossible, just hard) to come up with consistently interesting combat challenges for someone who works best from half a mile off.  But if you’re going to tell someone, “Okay, put all of your points into ranged attacks and a weapon with a slow reload skill,” then you owe it to them to put them in a situation where they’re often going to be useful.
It’s way better to veto a player’s choice than to get them all jazzed up for playing a ninja, only to discover this isn’t really a stealth game.  If you give someone a skill, make sure they have regular opportunities to use it.

Now, maybe you can see where I'm going with the post title. Why is it that we, as a hobby, seem to think that it is the GM who is responsible for making sure each player will have something to do? Why is it that, if we assume that the players at the table are relatively reasonable adults, the players don't bear any sort of responsibility for making sure they themselves have something to do? In other words: Why do we think the GM is the one who has to give the players orgasms?

My response to the "make sure each player will have something to do" advice is as follows: "Make sure the players understand that they are free to choose whatever character type they like, and that they have the freedom to go with it, and from there on they're on their own."

If you have a player who insists on playing a sniper, then it's his responsibility to be a sniper. It's his character's special skillset, so he should be playing with that in mind. If all combat is turning out to be in hallways, what the fuck is he doing? Why isn't he engineering it so that all his combats turn out to be in the middle of a huge meadow, except he's the one who's in a tree? Why is the GM the engine of his fun/success, and why isn't he thinking creatively and gaming in such a way that he can use his special snowflake character to do what he does best?

It's the same with playing a ninja "only to discover it isn't really a stealth game". Who says it isn't a stealth game? If one of the players is being a ninja, he should be making it a stealth game. He should be making his part of the game, his role within it, about being a ninja. He shouldn't be sitting around with his thumb up his arse whining because the GM hasn't designed an entire game to service his every little whim. Unless he's 8 years old, in which case he's forgiven.

You are an adult. You are responsible for your own orgasm. Not the GM.

What this piece of advice reveals about the hobby, of course, is that too many people still persist in seeing RPG play as linear. The GM thinks of a scenario that he believes will be fun, with a beginning, middle and end, and the players follow it through to its conclusion. If the players don't have fun, it's the GM's fault, because it's the GM's job to be on his knees under the table giving them orgasms.

All of this falls away if you pursue nonlinearity. This is the USP of RPGs: the GM creating a setting, with hooks to get the players involved, and the players going about their business in a way they deem best. Computers can't emulate this well. It's one of the huge advantages that pen-and-paper has over the computer game. And yet for some reason the vast majority of players still don't seem to have got the message yet.

Now, this isn't to say the GM doesn't have a role in this. If the player wants to be a ninja and is doing ninja-ish things, the GM needs to support him in that. When he makes ninja plans to ninja stuff the fuck up, the GM needs to interpret his ideas favourably, and certainly shouldn't be saying "Nah, you can't do that". The GM's job is to be the catalyst for, to encourage, creativity. But there's a world of difference between that and the GM engineering things to suit specific players.

To close with an example from the game I'm running at the moment: one of the players in the campaign has a "Rockerboy" character (it's Cyberpunk 2020). He's a superstar East German DJ who wears silver pantaloons. This isn't somebody who naturally fits with the other characters, who are more traditional noir-ish cloak-and-dagger corporate assassin/fixer types. But the player in question has become a huge part of the game by manipulating situations to his advantage (with the cooperation of the others). Almost every session he's at the centre of things, whether doing impromptu performances, arranging gigs, networking through his club contacts, or doing sham concerts as fronts for other activities. He's a massive piece of the group's armoury, and it's because he and the other players have been willing to think creatively. At no stage have I ever sat down to think to myself, "How can I make sure [x] will have something to do this week?" Because I know that he'll think of something.

You are responsible for your own orgasm, people. And don't you forget it.

I Blame The Children; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Declaring Actions Before Rolling Initiative

Yesterday's post aroused considerable comment that I think merits a full reply. (The good thing about having a blog that generates lots of comments is that you rarely have to sit around thinking about what to write today - you have a self-referential fall-back at any time.) For some reason I don't think I got my point across, as is evidenced by the number of people who seem to think I was worried about the fact that I or others was "playing it wrong".

It's far from the case. I couldn't give a monkey's how you, the gentle reader, play the game, and I certainly don't think that the game designer's word is Holy Writ. My position is much more reasonable than that, and is as follows: the designers of D&D are not stupid people. In fact, they are intelligent, thoughtful and creative people. This is true whether the year is 1974 or 2011. The things contained in the game manuals are there for a reason and deserve exploring.

Two such things are the declaration of action before the initiative roll, and forcing spell-casters to have a full night's rest in order to have a clear enough mind to memorise spells. These serve as useful examples, because they are rules that are commonly ignored (or Piledrivered) and they illustrate my wider point, which will become clear at the end of this post (yes, the suspense is killing you). Let's explore each in turn:

1. Declaring actions before rolling for initiative


In AD&D of either edition, the combat round has three steps. (We'll ignore the DM and focus on the players.) Step 1, all the players declare their actions. Step 2, all the players roll initiative. Step 3, their actions are carried out. What are the implications of this and why is it so?

• Most importantly, it's intuitively "true". Fights in the real world occur in real time. You don't take things in turns in real life, and although turn-taking is inevitable in a game there's an argument to be made that this should be reduced as much as possible.
• Second most important, it's fair. Everybody states their actions and then the person with the highest initiative roll is rewarded by being the person who can act first, in knowledge of what everybody else will do, rather than being punished by being the person who declares their action and then acts first, and thus cannot respond to what the rest of the combatants do. Perhaps this requires unpacking: the "Piledriver" way of resolving combat is for everybody to roll initiative and then go from top to bottom, with everybody stating and performing actions in turn, so that Step 1 above becomes folded into Step 2. So initiative is rolled first, then everybody states actions and carries them out in initiative order. What are the consequences of this? Arguably, in many situations it makes losing initiative advantageous, because what are the disadvantages to coming last in the round and being able to see exactly how the melee has panned out, where everybody's position is, what their weak points are, and what they are doing, before you decide how to act? But similarly, in some circumstances it also makes life even harder for the slow than it should be: picture the following scene. Bob the wizard has terrible DEX and rolls poorly for initiative. Everybody knows he will move last. So, the enemy concentrate their attacks on him, knowing that they have a good chance of killing him before his player can even state what he is going to do. In what sense is this better than having everybody declare their actions first, thus forcing people to act with caution rather than direction mass pre-emptive strikes at the slower characters, since they don't know what initiative order will be?
• Third, it allows for a more subtle approach to spell-casting. In every edition of D&D, the complaint has always been that spell-casters are too powerful and at mid- higher- levels come to dominate even combat, making it pointless to be a fighter (your niche isn't even your niche any more). But if you use the correct procedure for combat, this is much less of a problem: spell-casters have to declare their action first ("I'll cast fireball") and then wait their turn; if their concentration is ruined in the meantime (rather likely in a chaotic melee) their spell fizzles. Suddenly fighters are important again - they protect their allied magic-users' concentration and also try to disrupt opposition spell-casters before they can cast. Their role is vital even at the highest levels. I repeat: The game designers were not stupid.

2. The Full-Night's-Rest Rule

In AD&D, it is not assumed that spell-casters get to memorise spells automatically each morning before the day's "play" begins. The rules stipulate that "Memorization is not a thing that happens immediately. The wizard must have a clear head gained from a restful night's sleep and then has to spend time studying his spell books." Again, what are the implications of this often-forgotten rule?

• Instead of just camping wherever, players have to think a little more tactically about where they set up camp and how their sleeping arrangements are. Suddenly, something which players take for granted has to be carefully thought out. Do we want to risk sleeping in the wilderness, or push on to see if we can reach a settlement and possibly not find anything and get no sleep at all? The players' choice about where to camp becomes meaningful, and we know that giving players meaningful choices is  always interesting and one of the key characteristics of good play.
• The magic-users, who are important, have to sleep. They can't be disturbed by, say, wandering monsters. What does this mean? Players have to get damn good about picking places to rest if they plan on staying longer than a day in the dungeon. Goodbye 10-minute-adventuring-day, where players explore a bit of the dungeon for 10 minutes, have a fight, sleep and re-memorise spells, explore the dungeon for 10 minutes, have a fight, sleep and re-memorise spells, etc. Wasn't this cited as being one of the huge problems of D&D that the 4e designers were going to solve? Had they actually read their AD&D texts properly?
• Coming back to the old "magic-users are too powerful" discourse, the full-night's-rest rule obviously makes magic-users less all-powerful at higher levels and reliant on the rest of their party for protection and aid. I repeat: The game designers were not stupid. 

So how do we account for the Piledriving of these rules? In the comments to yesterday's entry, Zak writes that 

[I]t is strange how a bunch of mostly non-communicating non-overlapping groups all over the world all changed the same rules.

I agree with this, but what is really interesting is the question why. The simplest response would seem to be: it's because those rules were stupid or poorly explained. I'd like to suggest something different: the vast majority of people start playing D&D when they're, like, 12 years old and frankly not able to take in a big book of rules originally written by grown-ups for grown-ups. Because they're 12, they're not able to think very deeply about things, they find it difficult to speculate in a calm and orderly fashion about the underlying reasons for the way things are, they have very little patience for reading rulebooks carefully and looking things up in charts, they have short attention spans, and they act impulsively. They also, crucially, find it difficult to order each others' behaviour; managing the 3 steps of a combat round I outlined above is kind of hard when you're a 12-year-old DM and your 12-year-old players want to keep things moving. In fact, it's a rare 12-year-old DM who would think about things deeply enough to want to use the proper 3 step sequence anyway.

These things have a momentum of their own and once the Piledriving has started it's difficult to stop. This is why these misunderstandings persist until adulthood - that, and because even with bastardised rules D&D is still fun. Many of my readers will have been thinking, reading this, something along the lines of, "Who cares? We roll for initiative and then everybody states actions and performs them in turn, and it works." Yes, it does work, and this is why it doesn't get corrected. The question whether the standard rules may work better is never explored because the habit is too ingrained.

I'm not the first person to argue this. Faustusnotes, who often disagrees with me, seems on exactly the same page. And here we have Malcolm Sheppard saying something very similar:

I’ve really grown to love AD&D1e as a game of its own, however, and understand it now much better than I did when I was a child, playing Dragonlance or running my own game world hacked together out of Dragon Magazine articles, canned modules and seat-of-the-pants improvisation. AD&D1e is a grownup game, believe it or not: an RPG that requires a slow, deliberate exploration of your options, plenty of discussion and a willingness to look up fiddly bits.

I like this very much and think it an appropriate point on which to close.

Faking It; or, you'd better be Al Pacino; or, stop rolling the fucking dice

There's been a lot of talk recently about player agency, quantum ogres, the GM as illusionist, palette shifting, and so forth: see here, here, here, here and here. I won't regurgitate it all; suffice to say, I agree with -C.

This rebuttal interests me, though, because it raises an orthogonal issue that rarely gets mentioned in these sorts of discussions, here (none of it will make sense unless you read some of the linked posts):

[Robbing the players of agency is bad] only if the players are aware of the palette shifting. 

So long as nobody ever knows that the ogre so easily could have overcome the party could your predetermination in ignoring the agency of the dice be called into question. Remove the foreknowledge of the possible outcomes and you’ve removed all knowledge of the palette shift… and with removal of that knowledge, the palette shift itself is actually removed because the knowledge is a requirement of the shift by definition. 

What robs the game of fun is when the palette shift is known and is in direct opposition to the meaningful choice expectation of the player. Failing that, there is no measure against which to determine how the choice strayed from meaningful to false. 

And that is the true fallacy of the Quantum Ogre argument, that it is relativistic and requires player foreknowledge to categorize it as a false choice offering. Eliminate that foreknowledge and there is no Quantum Ogre.

The issue this raises is as follows: unless the DM is really good at acting and has a great poker face, players will often know when he is palette shifting/robbing them of agency/fudging dice/whatever. An RPG is not a Schrodinger's Box, and nor is the GM's head, because the players can observe what is going on indirectly. They are human beings and so is the GM, and human beings can often read each other's thoughts and feelings through body language. This makes the rebuttal of -C's arguments a kind of classic example of a Geek Social Fallacy.

I've been in a lot of sessions of games where I've suspected that the GM is either fudging dice rolls, palette shifting, or otherwise resorting to fiat to "make the game fun", and believe me, on every occasion that I suspected this, it made the game many orders of magnitude less fun than it was before. Suddenly, I didn't feel like a player in a game - I felt like a participant in an interactive story: I felt like the whole thing was a bait-and-switch. I no longer felt like I was master of my own destiny, and instead had become a participant in somebody else's prescribed idea of what my own fun should be.

This is the strongest argument I know of against fudging dice rolls, palette shifting, quantum ogres, and anything of that ilk: if you're going to do it, you'd better either:

a) be of Al Pacino-like stature in terms of your acting, because otherwise the players (if they have a brain in their skull and a rudimentary understanding of human nature) will be onto you and they probably won't like it; 

b) have a group of players who don't mind you robbing them of agency - in which case, you may as well just tell them what you're doing and forget rolling dice and giving them choices entirely (at least in the scenarios where you've already decided what's going to happen).

Here endeth today's rant.

Wherein I Drink Kool-Aid

I just came back from a session of Apocalypse World, Vincent Baker's new game. For those who don't know, Vincent Baker is the guy who came up with the games Dogs in the Vineyard, In a Wicked Age, Poison'd, and Kill Puppies for Satan, all of which have variously caused some level of controversy or other on the interclick, particularly at thepuritansite.com, and all of which are probably best put into the "aren't we hip?" story game category. I haven't played anything of Baker's before, except for Dogs...which I enjoyed but felt was rather power-trippy; his other games seemed specifically designed to court controversy, which I always find irksome, and that put me off.

But blimey if Apocalypse World isn't a fun game. I think this was the first session of a "story game" I've ever played in which it all fell into place for me and I actually realised that, yes, that thing where people at The Forge say stuff like "the mechanics support play" does sometimes make sense. There were only two players, and I think that hindered us in some respects (because interpersonal conflict/cooperation seems to be one of the keys to making the system really hum), but nevertheless the two of us were able to riff on our characters and their relationship in a genuinely intriguing and fun way, building something up that you don't normally get in a traditional game without some serious effort and time spent. And for once I felt that, as a player, having narrative control really added something: my decisions not only had the immediate effects that you might have in traditional gaming (I get more gold, I don't die, I kill the orc), they had world-building and narrative effects that seemed genuinely far-reaching. (Not that you can't do those things with old school D&D, or really any game, but it takes longer and requires a lot more effort.)

Once again I'm forced into the proposition that the "OSR" and "hip story games that cool kids play", both of which are faddish and somewhat exclusionary currents within the hobby, are attempts to achieve almost exactly the same things: basically, it boils down to giving players agency. In "old school" D&D, this comes from having a sandbox and letting the players loose in it and having them live with their decisions and their own tactical nous. In story games, it comes from creating mechanics in which the players can actually force the narrative in a certain direction through dice rolls. Both of these things are really very similar. The players generate whatever "plot" there is in an emergent fashion, from the ground up, with the GM as neutral arbiter. This puts them in direct opposition to the RPG mainstream (games such as D&D 4e, WoD, etc.) where plot comes from the top down, imposed by a GM who is at best a court jester and at worst an autocrat dick.

Ancient stick-in-the-mud fatbeards and horrible skinny kids in skinny jeans who listen to Arcade Fire should be friends, not foes. We dream the same dream, we want the same thing, people.

Lord Spare Us

A commenter on a post here wrote this:

Robin D Laws has already written that it would be cool if we (the gaming community) finally could get a marxist critique of D&D (you advance by killing and looting) and that it would signify maturity of the medium (being able to think itself in such way). But my question would be what kind of marxist critique. Some easy, neo-zhdanovist and vulgar (obvious product of a capitalist society that indoctrinates young minds…) or one more sophisticated (for example one that is incorporating nuances like the fact that most D&D characters are outsiders and fringe elements that was nicely grasped by Mieville in Perdido Street Station) that would echo that old Brechts joke that we (communists) probably know everything but that for propaganda purposes we must select questions that we will claim that we have no answer to.

And I had to respond; to wit, I can't think of anything less likely to signify maturity of the medium than having a Marxist critique of D&D. The existence of such a critique, I submit, would signify the horrible overintellectualisation of something that needs no overintellectualising, not its maturity. Maturity is something else. Maturity is, in large part, being able to compartmentalise different facets of ones life and being able to embrace and be comfortable with mutually contradictory positions - for instance, that you like playing a game about killing things and taking their stuff in a hyper-individualised Randian wet-dream of a fantasy world, but do not like killing things and taking their stuff in reality nor entertain that particular Randian wet-dream in other spheres of your life.

That isn't to say that pseudointellectual overanalysis of D&D isn't fun. It is. God knows I engage in it frequently enough, as any long-term reader of this blog will know. But I would never for a second pretend that this or this signify my "maturity". They mostly signify that I am often a bit of a pretentious twit.

Perhaps I can summarise my own position in an oblique manner by referring to the Robin D. Laws essay which the commenter in question refers to. In it, Laws begins by saying:

"Role-playing games have existed for many years as an art form without a body of criticism. Reviews of RPGs have been common for nearly as long as the games themselves. Criticism, however, remains an unploughed field. This means that we probably ought to look at the basics of criticism as applied to other art forms before we go charging off to rev up the metaphorical tractor."

To which I would reply, no, role-playing games have existed for many years as games, which means they do not need a body of criticism whatsoever. (Art doesn't need that either, by the way, but let's pretend for the sake of argument it does.) They are created for a reason, and that is to be played. Everything else is incidental. It may be fun, as pseudointellectualisation often is, but let's not kid ourselves that theorising about RPGs is necessary, worthwhile, or would signify 'maturity' of any kind whatsoever.

A Return to Escapism

Because I have a giant ego, I google the title of this blog on a fairly regular basis to see what "word on the street" is. Yesterday, while doing this, I discovered that the podcast Canon Puncture has talked about entries from my blog at least twice. The episodes in question were back in 2009, so it took a bit of digging to find them, but when it comes to ego-stroking there are no time limits.

I really enjoyed hearing people talking about Monsters and Manuals - it's a nice filip. But I have to take issue with some of the comments regarding this old post of mine, from the second of the episodes in question. This won't make much sense to you if you haven't heard the podcast and haven't been reading my blog for a long time, but indulge me: I'll be back to rambling on about monsters and Yoon-Suin tomorrow.

The critique of my position that Judd makes in that episode seems to me to be rather unfair, as it mischaracterises what I was saying, essentially, as follows: "Gaming is purely about escapism, and there's nothing wrong with that, and narrative/story-telling gaming is not escapist and is inferior for some reason that I won't make clear."

He rebuts this by making the following argument: whether you make it implicit or explicit, and even if you think you are indulging in "escapism", by participating in the act of gaming, you are still bringing yourself, your world, your assumptions, and your politics, to the game. It is impossible not to do so. As he puts it, whether you like it or not, "Your game says something about the world", because your opinions, background, and assumptions make their way into the game whatever you might think. You are therefore not, in any real sense, "escaping", and in fact you are best off admitting that and making it explicit.

Now, I should say first of all that I am more than familiar with this sort of analytical approach. Listen; I have a degree in English lit, a Masters in Law, and I'm currently finishing off a PhD in legal philosophy. The kind of argument Judd is advancing is not at all unfamiliar to me. It's basic critical theory.

The point I wanted to make in the initial post is that, irrespective of whether or not I am bringing my self, my world view, my politics and my beliefs to the game, irrespective of whether or not I am "saying something about the world", and irrespective of whether or not that is a good or a bad thing, I don't care. Analysing it is not enjoyable to me. It is a game that I indulge in for fun, because I like imagining weird shit. The way in which I imagine weird shit may be deeply political and may say all kinds of things about the world: I don't care to find out.

For other people it may be fun and enjoyable to analyse their own gaming in that way, and I'm perfectly willing to accept that. Different strokes for different folks, etc. For me, it doesn't work - analysing things is my day job. Gaming is sacrosanct.

This doesn't mean, by the way, that all I'm interested in is imagining killing orcs in dungeons or being "the good guy" versus "the bad guys" (as is implied in the podcast). I'm perfectly capable of playing games with far more nuance than that - and I resent the false dichotomy created in the podcast between subtle narrativist gaming which is "about the world" on the one hand, and braindead escapist heroic fantasy nonsense which is also "about the world" but doesn't admit it to itself on the other. And finally, I have to say that I find the podcasters' insistence that they are not being snobbish a bit rich, given that they explicitly state that their own mode of play is (quote) "best" - without giving any reason why - and portray my position as advocating a stance of sticking ones fingers in ones ears and saying (quote) "la la la la la, I'm an escapist".

I'm happy to entertain the notion that it is impossible to game without "saying something about the world", but in the same way that I will watch a game of cricket without worrying about what that says about the world, because I like watching cricket for its own sake, I don't want overanalysis to get in the way of my imagining of weird shit. Simple as that.

EDIT: I feel compelled, because I'm such a nice guy (as if you can't tell), to insert the disclaimer that generally speaking Canon Puncture is a good, snappy, fun listen, and Judd is a very eloquent and thoughtful speaker in general. This particular episode just made my hackles rise.

Wherein Swedish LARPers Get All Political

Perhaps I should be all morally outraged about the game which is the subject of this thread, but I must be mellowing in my old age, because now I mostly find it amusing. I mean, this stuff is so close to a parody it's practically indistinguishable from one: "a short, game masterless jeepform game centred around the idea of using fiat as a means for oppression", "the game mechanics were conceived for the purpose of playing gang rape, but are equally useful for any form of oppression, like for example bullying/mobbing" (woohoo, not only gang rape, which is my favourite form of oppression to explore, but I get bullying and mobbing too? But wait, no, now I'm disappointed - there doesn't seem to be any racist lynching involved), and, best of all, "don't play this game unless you're in a good place mentally, and really think you are up to it. It is not meant to be fun to play."

Ah, Swedish LARPers, where would we be without you?

Anyway, I've written before on the futility of this sort of thing (let's all get together and explore flavour-of-the-month-political-issue-[x] via the medium of role playing games), but this example strikes me as even more redundant than most. I mean, is there anyone out there, and I mean anyone at all, with the possible exception of genetically predetermined sociopaths, who needs to be reminded that gang rape isn't very nice? Least of all who needs to be reminded of it through a LARP? If you do know such a person, it's nothing a sound slap to the chops and a trip to a psychiatrist won't fix.

Now, to play devil's advocate, it appears the game creator isn't only trying to remind us that gang rape is bad, he's also making a political comment - "One thing that has been severely bugging me the last couple of years is that (at least in Sweden), it seems nearly impossible today to get convicted for rape or gang rape." (Well, I'm sure like me you try to get convicted for rape and gang rape in Sweden all the time, so you don't have to tell us twice!) Zounds, the razor-sharp political insight, eh? I mean, whatever next - "One thing that has really been annoying me recently is climate change - what are we going to do about all those nasty emissions?"; "Recently I've been getting really pissed off about all the murder and stuff going on in those African places, colonialism was such a bad thing, I'm really cheesed off about it"; "These days the big issue that really gets my goat is whaling, man, those sea cows are like the most beautiful and intelligent thing that has ever lived, they even discuss the general theory of relativity in those sea songs and the evil Japanese are just committing genocide against them and stuff".

For the record, I don't need game designers telling me what is or isn't bad. I don't need to LARP away my inner demons. I have a moral compass, thanksverymuch. Now let's get back to rolling dice and killing orcs. And kids, remember: don't do gang rape, mobbing, bullying, racist lynching or use fiat as a form of oppression of any kind. (Other uses of fiat are probably okay, but check with your local branch of the Jeepform LARP Society all the same.)

Come not between the dragon and his wrath

I read today something which surprised me from several different directions:

In previous editions, metallic dragons were good aligned, meaning that a DM would have to either create reasons that that the dragons were violently opposed to the PCs, or just ignore the “Always Lawful Good” and similar alignments. As we already knew from Monster Manual 2, this default assumption has changed a bit, tossing many of the metallic dragons squarely into the Unaligned category, giving some wiggle room to those playing it by the book. Draconomicon: Metallic Dragons takes it even further...

Critical hits previewing Draconomicon: Metallic Dragons, how doth thee surprise me, let me count the ways:

1. The trivial one: You're telling me metallic dragons weren't in the first 4e Monster Manual? I suppose that makes sense from a business point of view (don't blow your load of iconics on the first book, because nobody will be interested in the second) but still.
   
2. More serious: It's amazing how combat-oriented this quote reveals 4e to be. The fanboys on rpg.net will say otherwise, but how else are we to interpret this radical rethink of "good" dragons, other than that it is geared to making them a more convenient enemy to fight? I'm particularly interested in this idea that in previous editions, DMs would either have to dream up reasons for metallic dragons being "violently opposed" to the PCs, or else just ignore the default alignment. It seems to imply that the only reason why you would want a monster to appear in a game is to have the PCs fight it. What happened to, you know, PCs just interacting with creatures, as opposed to fighting them?
   
3. The third surprise: Where usually I read stuff about 4e and it makes me want to poke myself in the eye with a fork, I find myself conflicted about whether I think this is a bad development or a good one.

On the one hand, there is something in me that is repelled by the wimpiness of D&D dragons, and especially the good ones. The blame more or less lies with the Dragonlance books, which started off by building up dragons into terrifying demigods but wound up painting them as little more than big and talkative flying pets. Dragons should be in my opinion the most powerful and frightening D&D monsters; from The Bible to the legends of Tiamat to the works of William Blake to The Lord of the Rings, their most compelling portrayals have always been huge and mighty embodiments of malice, antagonism and cruelty. So doing away with good dragons is something I can get behind.

But on the other hand, I do think there is a place in the game for what you might call Old Testament Good - by which I mean the portrayal of God in those volumes as so Good he is to be feared. The stern, just, righteous kind of Good that sees wrongdoers turned into pillars of salt and smites the wicked. Good dragons play into that - as holy guardians and powerful fighters against evil everywhere. A bit like Batman, maybe.

So I view this development with mixed feelings. On the one hand, making Good dragons Neutral so that it's okay to fight them represents a kind of depressing banalism - yet more fodder for the Awesome Things Hitting Each Other routine that the 4e designers seem to want people to play. And yet on the other hand it represents a more-than-welcome step away from the odious Weis-and-Hicksian vision of Dragon-as-My-Little-Pony. A tough call, but I give the move a C+.

Spare me the 'insights'

Sometimes google reader throws up these little blog recommendations. Often they are crushingly dull and of no interest whatsoever to me. ("English skill isn't built in a day", a blog about trying to learn English, for example. Not only do I know how to speak English, I also spent some years of my life despising myself for teaching it, so why on earth I would want to read such a blog is beyond me.) But sometimes you get some vaguely interesting titbits.

It was through such a recommendation that I came across the (now defunct) blog Enter the Octopus, what seems to have been a general grab bag of geek miscellania. This entry caught my interest; in particular this quote, which seems to have been cited with approval:

"Populated with cross-bred elves and dwarves, fantasy realms make people feel not quite so freakish, releasing them from their cages of identity. Playing half- or non-human characters can be an exploration of their freak side, a new door into themselves..."

pp. 56-57, Chapter Four, "Into the Dungeon Again"

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, by Ethan Gilsdorf.

Mainly because it seems like cod arm-chair psychology of the most banal kind. (You'll notice it's also self-contradictory - either fantasy realms make people feel less freakish or they help people explore their freakish side; which is it?)

I never think of fantasy gaming in that vein, and know very few people who do. Gaming is fun for a lot of reasons, but for me it has never ever been about making me feel "not so freakish", releasing me from my "cage of identity" or allowing me to explore my "freak side". I can do all that with beer. Maybe absinthe if I really want to explore my freak side.

Gaming for me is about two things: playing a game, socialising and stretching your imagination. All fun and worthy endeavours, especially when mixed. And there's nothing much more complicated to it than that.

No, liking 1st edition does not make you a badass.

It's funny how geeks, who really should know better, like to divide themselves into in-groups and out-groups based on their own interests being "cooler" than the others. You can see this in lots of areas. Fans of Star Trek (Original Series) like to see themselves as somehow superior to those who prefer The Next Generation, perhaps because TOS lacks TNG's PC undertones (or overtones). Adult fans of Harry Potter wouldn't dream of touching a proper fantasy series like The Book of the New Sun, despite that series' infinite superiority in every respect. And people who frequent forums like the Forge and story-games.com love to trumpet their preferred games' superiority over more traditional ones.

The way some 1st edition AD&Ders talk about 2nd edition is another example of this phenomenon, I often think. The complaints against 2nd edition (that it got rid of "devils" and "demons"; that it was written for young adolescents rather than adults; that it had a high fantasy tone where 1st edition was sword & sorcery) are primarily attempts to annex coolness to the 1st edition flagpole. In this discourse 1st edition represents some sort of mature, edgy, rebellious game which only True Badasses are brave or foolhardy enough to even touch, whereas 2nd edition is fluffy, inconsequential, childish and anodyne, and the preserve of only the most pathetic of nerds.

I find the whole thing utterly laughable, and whenever I see such arguments advanced I always envisage Tommy Saxondale, the ex-roadie turned pest control expert, standing there in his greying beard and faded leather jacket, waxing lyrical about the time he toured with "the Floyd". These people may think they are true nonconformists screwing The System, but what they usually are are rather drab middle-aged men pining for their lost youths and shaking their fists at a world that has absolutely no place for them.

There is nothing wrong with Raging Against the Dying of the Light - like Voltaire, I will defend to the death a 1st edition AD&D fan's right to enjoy his game of choice, even though I may not like it all that much. (I won't actually defend it to the death, but you know what I mean.) But let's not pretend that there's anything cool about liking 1st edition, or that it makes you more of a badass than those silly 2nd edition nerds. In the final analysis you're a grown man pretending to be an elf. Which, okay, I suppose could be described as edgy, but not in a good way.

This is all very ridiculous shaped.

I'm prepared to accept that 4e is a fun game to play, but its most rabid fanbois don't make it easy to love. Take a look at this thread, which explains the new jargon categorising character classes as 'A' shaped, 'V' shaped, 'Y' shaped and 'MAD'. Am I the only one who pictures the comic shop owner from The Simpsons explaining all this? "No, you pathetic moron, 'V' shaped means the class has one attack stat and two secondary stats, and 'Y' shaped means it has two choices for attack stat and one as secondary! And you call yourself a D&D player?"

Lord help us. Does anybody remember a time when you just picked a character class because it's what you happened to fancy playing this time around? I wonder when it all became so very serious - like it really matters that you pick the optimum character to fit into the optimum group. As if that sort of thing has any impact at all on how fun the game is.

Touching It with a Barge Pole

Let's lighten things up around here and talk about racism.

Somebody put up a thread over at rpg.net with the provocative title Playing in a Racist Campaign the other day, and I just had to break my self-imposed rpg.net pointless-debate vow of silence. Namely here, here and here.

Partly because, to be honest, it's a pet hate of mine when people on internet forums drop in the middle of a debate with a self-aggrandising "I am clearly on the side of the angels" post which adds absolutely nothing substantive. But also because, really, I had to know whether or not I'm alone in thinking that there's something strange about the moral compass of a great many D&D players.

Namely: there seems to be a tendency among a large group, let's call them a sizeable minority, to eliminate issues of racism (I suppose sexism too) in the campaigns in which they play - that is, to give characters the attitudes which young, urban, middle-class types in the real, modern day world profess to have. Bob the dwarf and Lothario the elf might be non-human mystical beings from a pseudo-medieval world in which dragons exist, but hey, deep down inside they're not really any different to Bob the SOAS lecturer and Lothario the Dentist from Dublin in our reality.

What's weird about this is not the laudable attitude that racism and sexism are bad and it would be nice if everybody did have the tolerant attitudes of Bob the SOAS lecturer. What's weird is that Bob the dwarf and Lothario the elf have probably killed dozens of orcs in their lifetime just for being orcs, have probably either first or second hand knowledge of rape and torture, think nothing of pillage and burglary, and regularly engage in bouts of violence against unthinking animals which in our world would bring the RSPCA and PETA down on them like a ton of feathers. In other words: Nothing about these people is at all like a modern day, real world, young, urban, middle-class person - either in attitude or experience. Apart from the fact that they're carefully and deliberately not bigoted.

Does anybody else think this is odd, not to say morally contradictory? Why is it that issues of bigotry are swept under the carpet, but ultra-violence (usually racially motivated ultra-violence at that) is a critical part of almost every single D&D campaign that has ever been? That is to say, why is racism apparently ranked higher than murder in the heirarchy of things that are bad?

I'm not arguing that D&D shouldn't be violent. Nor am I arguing that it is, or should be, racist. I am arguing that it's rather unrealistic and strange for a D&D campaign to not even deal with the idea that, hey, people of difference races probably don't get along so well together, especially given all the sectarian and racially motivated killing that goes on. That the issue should not even be explored requires a huge suspension of disbelief. Moreover, it is kind of worrying to me that squeamishness about racism is a commonplace in the gaming community, but squeamishness about murder generally isn't.

Also note: I hate having to say this, because it should be taken as read, but of course I think that real-world racism is a blight on society that needs to be got rid of. Just to make that clear.

Mindless Pap of the Worst Kind

There seems to be something in the air, because this month has seen the release of not one but two inspid, uninspired, hackneyed, crappy, poorly executed fantasy spoof series - and the BBC has its hand in both of them. First up is Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, which is by all accounts godawful and which made me want to kill myself out of sheer boredom and hatred when I saw some clips of it on YouTube. And second is ElvenQuest, a "hilarious" programme on Radio 4 whose first episode aired today. To call it bad is perhaps unfair. Unfair to the concept of badness, that is. It was not only one of the worst radio programmes I've ever heard; it was flat out one of the worst things I've ever experienced. Ever. It wasn't so much that it didn't make me want to laugh; at times it actually made me think that I would never be able to laugh at anything ever again. Like sense of humour kryptonite.

I don't mind people spoofing fantasy - there's so much ammunition. But does it really have to be this unutterably terrible guff that the BBC is currently serving up?