Creator of Yoon-Suin and other materials. Propounding my half-baked ideas on role playing games. Jotting down and elaborating on ideas for campaigns, missions and adventures. Talking about general industry-related matters. Putting a new twist on gaming.
Two interesting questions popped up in the comments on yesterday's post, and I felt they merited further discussion at length.
The first is: why would the creators of this new D&D film create a new storyline, world, and cast of characters, when they could have made (say) a Dragonlance or Baldur's Gate movie and garnered a bit more name recognition?
I think the answer to this question has to be that while there is a certain amount of recognition of those names among old farts like us, we're not really the people this film is being marketed to. Middle-aged male neckbeards are nailed on to watch a D&D movie, irrespective of how it is titled. Non-middle-aged male neckbeards will need to be coaxed into it, and I can easily see how associations with fairly obscure artefacts of 1980s or 1990s nerd-dom would be off-putting or alienating to those potential audiences. D&D: Honour Among Thieves just sounds friendlier and more down-to-earth than Baldur's Gate (or whatever).
The second is: why is it that D&D films always seem to be so bad?
This is a good question, but one which could be broadened out to: why is that fantasy films in general always seem to be so bad?
It's difficult now to remember, but prior to Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, the landscape of fantasy film-making was an absolute ocean of cringeworthiness. No self-respecting actor or director would want to be seen dead in a fantasy movie, unless it was being played for laughs; the idea of pretending to be an elf or wizard and spouting hey-nonny-no lines would have struck anybody with an ounce of awareness as being deeply silly at best. The suspicion I always had as a fantasy reader back in those days was that almost any fantasy film you could name had been made to try to cash in on the genre's popularity rather than out of any authentic love for the field on the part of writers or directors. They almost universally displayed an absolute tin ear for what fantasy fiction is really all about, and were imbued with an atmosphere of faint embarrassment among all concerned.
The surprise me for is not that D&D films are always bad, but that The Fellowship of the Ring was able to capture the imagination of mainstream audiences so successfully. Peter Jackson's LOTR project turned into a monster, but he caught lightning in a bottle with Fellowship, and it changed the way the fantasy genre was conceived of forever. This has caused us to forget what things used to be like. If the new D&D film is crap, it will really just be (yet another) reversion to the mean.
(Never let it be said I can't write good clickbait headlines when I want to.)
So, there is a new D&D film coming out. I am so thoroughly and profoundly outside of its target audience (I don't even really watch films per se anymore, let alone big blockbustery ones) that I feel like a churl even expressing an opinion about it. So, sorry for the disappointment; I'm not actually going to do the 13 reasons thing. What I will do is express some reservations about the aesthetic on display in the trailer.
Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films are responsible for a lot - and above all for staking out a particular highly influential mood and look, which I suppose one could call 'Dimly Lit LARP with CGI Andy Serkisface Monsters'. When I was a university student, there was a 'Scandinavian Society' on campus who would get together on Sunday morning to hold re-enactments of viking raids. My friends and I used to watch, hungover, from our dorm windows; it was on the one hand impressive (a lot of time and energy went into all the costumes) and yet on the other very anticlimactic - an awful lot of fuss and shouting over essentially nothing. If you were to take that basic framework and bolt on lots of CGI creatures participating in all the fuss and shouting over nothing and make them all look a bit like Andy Serkis, and then shoot the whole thing at night when it's raining and visibility is poor, and possibly hire a Hollywood actress to stand in the middle of everything looking very serious while waving a sword and mouthing important-sounding gibberish, you capture this aesthetic perfectly. You all know what it is intimately; you know it the instant you see it. It is just what modern fantasy cinema and TV looks like.
D&D: Honour Among Thieves looks as though it is moving us into new territory, and for that we should be grateful. It appears as though the viewer will actually be able to see what is happening clearly and there may even be some sequences happening during the daytime. There is also a distinct lack of baddies who look like Andy Serkis. This is all very welcome.
However, we seem to have reached a point of technological advancement at which, while it is possible to make CGI monsters look 99.9% real, they still don't quite - with the result being a viewing experience taking place at the bottom of uncanny valley. When watching a cartoon, or a Ray Harryhausen film, one's imagination works overtime to paper over all of the obvious differences between what one is seeing on screen and what it would really 'look like', and the result is a satisfying amalgamation of the director's vision and the viewer's. When watching real people do real things, the viewer's imagination is largely irrelevant, and he or she can enjoy the director's vision unfiltered. What we seem to have achieved with modern blockbusters is a (to me) undesirable middle ground, in which the director is able to realise a vision which is very close to what a real owlbear (say) would actually look like, but not quite; the consequence is the viewers spend most of their time simply studying the behaviour of the CGI creations on screen and being aware they don't look altogether real. This communicates a feeling of weightlessness and lack of consequence, and ruins immersion - what is taking place in the film comes to appear like, well, a film.
I personally would prefer watching a very brilliantly realised animation to a bunch of real actors running around playing make-believe amidst not-quite-real-looking monsters. But maybe this is why I am firmly beyond that target audience, as I mentioned.
Issue 1 of my new 'zine, In the Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, is now available for purchase in PDF at the noisms games website. A print edition is soon to follow, but bear in mind that many copies are spoken for by Kickstarter backers.
The PDF is 222 pages long and contains 95% OSR materials (including my "The Devil in the Land of the Rushes", an experiment in creating gameable stuff that is also enjoyable to read as fiction), 5% OSR-adjacent short stories, and beautiful art.
Contents include:
The Well at the World's End by Roger Giner-Sorolla - an essay about the William Morris book of the same name, and how to use it to inform old school play, complete with a usable hexmap and key.
Offspring of the Siphoned Demon by Ben Gibson - a dungeon based on that oldest of old favourites, the prison of an ancient demon.
The Chevrelier by Brian Saliba - a clever piece of flash fiction, or a micro-story; if I described it in any more detail, the description would be almost as long as the story itself.
The Beloved and Oft-Recounted Tale of the Marvellous Birth by JC Luxton - a story I recently described to a friend as being "Like Little, Big but good".
The Cerulean Valley by George Seibold - a genuine old school hexcrawl, containing everything one could possibly need in such an offering: a near-perfect example of its type (and worth the price alone for the beautifully evocative monster name, "The Nightening Beast").
The Black Pyramid by 'Terrible Sorcery' - a jungle temple built over the cave of a gigantic carnivorous worm which was worshipped by an ancient cult; D&D's answer to a Werner Herzog film?
The Hollow Tomb by Harry Menear - described by its own author as "if Chekhov or Gorky wrote as part of the OSR (and were much, much worse) they might have written this". Be that as it may, it's an extremely well-written and put-together module. Again, a near-perfect example of its type.
A Turn of Fortune by Jose Carlos Dominguez - an excellent example of an almost non-violent puzzle adventure.
She Who Came Once to Oldgraves by Autumn Moore - a really exceptionally good entry in the "dungeoneering fiction" genre I seek to nurture; it has shades of Gene Wolfe, I thought. Whoever Autumn Moore is, they've got talent.
Winter in Bugtown by J. Colussy-Estes - it's an underground city inhabited by various sentient insect races and it has "mothman necromancers". YOU HAD ME AT MOTHMAN NECROMANCERS.
The Garden of Khal-Adel by Zane Schneider - a whimsical-in-the-right-way adventure, about music and sorrowful giants and...flumphs.
The Thirteen Dwarves by Jason Blasso-Gieseke - anything I say about this story will spoil it, so I can't say anything, really.
Moonrhythm Mire by Dave Greggs - a bizarre and brilliant feast for the senses; OSR DIY D&D turned up to 11.
And more!
Please spread the word if you find it a worthwhile purchase.
There is a lot of theft and murder in my games. There is never any on-screen torture, though it might be implied. There is categorically no rape or sexual abuse, and indeed that would be a red-line for me: if you think that kind of thing is fair game as subject matter at the table, then we're probably not going to get along.
Why is it that most people are okay with depictions of looting, violence, arson and the like in games (and indeed often see such activities as the most enjoyable element of the entire enterprise) but not rape? To extend the question a little further: why is that we do not see anything particularly concerning about cinema audiences getting excited about watching, say, swathes of Zulu warriors being mown down by Welsh riflemen gleefully singing 'Men of Harlech' while being egged on by Michael Caine, and yet we would (quite rightly, for reasons which we will come to) be very worried indeed at the prospect of people being entertained by sexual violence?
The answer I think is relatively straightforward, though not often articulated. It's that while we can envisage circumstances in which violence, or for that matter theft, is morally ambivalent or even justified, rape is simply always and unambiguously a moral enormity. It is absolutely right that people should be squeamish about it: it is disgusting and horrible and there is no situation in which it could possible be deemed as having any redeeming features whatsoever.
This is probably also why torture occupies a bit of a grey zone. I'm not persuaded that torture is ever justifiable even in the classic 'ticking timebomb' scenario. But I recognise that there is some fuzziness about that and there are some people who would take the opposing view. So while I feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea of PCs torturing an orc merely to find out where the tribe's treasure is hidden or whatever, I couldn't envisage imposing a blanket ban. Instead, in that kind of scenario I have usually accepted a statement to the effect of 'we torture the orc' and then moved on. (Thankfully, it doesn't often come up.)
I was intrigued to discover that the 'yoof' of today have come up with a way of systematising what is and is not permitted, and in what form, in a game, with the concept of 'lines and veils'. The idea here, at least as I understand it, is that a 'line' precludes a particular thing from cropping up during play entirely, whereas a 'veil' is something that can happen, but only ever, as it were, 'off-screen'. As is often the case when mainstream gamer nerds try to parse their way through normal human interactions the concept is always framed in an intensely cringeworthy way - like Martians trying to explain to each other how to get along with earthlings - but this is one innovation I can see some merit in. Sexual violence is a line. Torture is a veil. That works for me: I get it.
It's often said that OSR campaigns eschew narrative, or indeed are not "narrativist". This is wrong. A better way of putting it is that OSR campaigns are not like novels, but are more like shaggy dog stories - or biographies.
A shaggy dog story is one which has no identifiable overarching plot or climax, no purpose, and which involves many digressions:
I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois–got him of a man by the name of Yates–Bill Yates–maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon–Baptist–and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west. Seth Green was prob’ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson–Sarah Wilkerson–good cretur, she was–one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. She could heft a bar’l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don’t mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn’t trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was–no, it warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all–it was a galoot by the name of Filkins–I disremember his first name; but he was a stump–come into pra’r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old Miss Jefferson’s head, poor old filly. She was a good soul–had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn’t any, to receive company in; it warn’t big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn’t noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t’ other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass. Grown people didn’t mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn’t work, somehow–the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn’t stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, “Your game eye has fetched loose, Miss Wagner dear”–and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again–wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird’s egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But being wrong side before warn’t much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn’t match nohow. Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. When she had a quilting, or Dorcas S’iety at her house she gen’ally borrowed Miss Higgins’s wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than her other pin, but much she minded that. She said she couldn’t abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself. She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops’s wig–Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler’s wife–a ratty old buzzard, he was...
I think it was Robert Caro - the exact quotation escapes me - who said that you can only really understand a person's life story by reading it in the order in which it was lived. It's no good writing a biography of somebody divided by theme. You have to begin at the beginning and go through to the end, because that's how the figure in question encountered the events of his life. History in general is like this: thematic histories usually suck, because the point about human affairs is that they are chronologically ordered. Events follow one another, and to therefore to get a grasp on one you have to know what happened before it and what happened afterwards. This may allow one to identify themes retrospectively, but the actual telling of the tale has to happen in chronological order.
A biography is very like a shaggy dog story in this sense. It's one damned thing after another, the only coherent thread really being that the narrative follows what happens to one person across time. There is no necessary climax, no discernible plot, and many digressions.
Very few people do this, but it would be possible I think, once a long-running campaign is over, to - like a Robert Caro or Charles Moore - go back over it and identify themes that emerge; to write, as it were, the biography of the game. It's probably important to do this once the whole thing is over, to avoid pre-empting things, and requires some sort of a log to be kept. I'd be interested to know if anybody has ever attempted this.
Very often - Monday's post is an obvious example - I will post an idea on the blog for a campaign I'd like to run or a book I'd like to write, and people will pop up in the comments to say something like: "Why use D&D for this? Wouldn't Troika!/Into the Odd/FUDGE/etc. be better, for reasons X, Y and Z?"
These suggestions are always well meant. But I'm now at the point in my life where I feel comfortable saying that I can't really imagine ever playing anything with a ruleset other than D&D of the B/X or BECMI "classic" variety (with Pendragon and Cyberpunk 2020 being possible exceptions).
Why is this? Partly, I have to admit, this is just because classic D&D is comfortable for me now - as comfortable as a well-worn pair of slippers I can potter about in before bedtime. I don't really have to think about it. Yes, I still have to look things up in the rules, but I know where to look, and I know the system well enough to be able to wing almost anything and be confident it won't go horribly wrong.
But I would also make the case that D&D in its classic form is just a fabulously good game - certainly much better than any of its competitors in the fantasy genre:
It deals with advancement so much better. The rate at which PCs gain levels is at the Goldilocks "just right" point, so that it is not too easy and feels meaningful, but is not so rare as to be frustrating. More importantly - and the genius of this is very rarely if ever remarked upon - PC levels map perfectly onto monster HD and also dungeon levels, so it is easy for the DM to gauge levels of challenge, what needs to be on each dungeon level, how much treasure needs to be in it, and so on (PCs in level 1 of a dungeon will be roughly 1st level and the monsters in it will need to have roughly 1 HD, and there will need to be X number of gp-worth of treasure present to permit advancement to level 2 - and so on).
Relatedly, D&D has a huge catalogue of monsters in its many bestiaries, and is simple enough that new monsters can easily be created by the DM. As PCs advance in level, it is always possible for it to be the case that there of are lots of monsters weaker than them, as strong as them, and more powerful than them, thus presenting a variety of challenges throughout the gameworld. Even as they get to 9th level or above, there are going to be monsters out there who they can aspire to some day strive against, monsters they can easily beat up, and monsters which present a decent challenge.
Advancing by level in my experience is just more exciting and fun than the alternative, which many systems deploy, of the PCs getting XP and spending it to improve a stat or gain a particular ability. Going from level 3 to 4 is simply more satisfying and feels like an achievement.
This is admittedly a subjective thing, but the level of crunch in classic D&D is, again, at the Goldilocks "just right" point. More detailed and running the game would become a chore. More abstract and events would feel weightless and inconsequential.
XP for gold. More than with any other game - and, again, the genius of this is not remarked upon frequently enough - classic D&D has a reason to go adventuring built in. The PCs need gold and will go out in pursuit of it. They don't need to ride the DM's railroad, and the DM doesn't need to put vast amounts of time and energy into coming up with a "plot". You just wind the campaign up and watch it go.
D&D doesn't break. It's like an ABBA song: even when Piers Brosnan or Stellan Skarsgard are singing one in a ropey jukebox musical, it still kind of works. D&D also has this quality. You can bash it around and mess with it and do it badly, and it will still be ok. I'm not sure any other roleplaying game really has this quality.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that classic D&D is simply the most enjoyable role playing game to have ever been created, and this is the reason why there is still such a relatively big community of people who are into fiddling with it 40+ years after its birth.
Buried underneath an awful lot of nonsense, there is a game somewhere in Changeling: The Dreaming, desperate to get out. It is difficult to imagine that there could be a worse, more complicated and confusing - albeit beautiful - rulebook, and vast swathes of it are dedicated to perpetuating a vision of role playing that should really be anathema to anybody with an ounce of sense. One can read the book a dozen times and still have no clear idea how to begin, and ultimately everything just seems to boil down to 'make a railroad'.
And yet the idea - basically, there is a world of 'faerie' existing behind or in parallel to our own, visible only to certain people who have a fae soul - works when stripped down to its essence. Alongside and underneath the urban environment of houses, schools, parks, offices, pubs, shops and abandoned lots that we know so well is a fantastical landscape brimming with mythical beasts and fairy tale creatures; what looks like an empty old folks' home is really the palace of Lord Grey; what looks like a disused railway tunnel is the entrance to a network of caverns leading to a dragon's lair; what looks like a nondescript office building is really an enchantress's tower. The PCs inhabit the real world, but with exciting 'extras'. Walking down an ordinary city street, they notice that amongst that gaggle of teenage chavs there lurks a redcap, and that peering out of the window in the cafe in the floor above HSBC is the face of a witch. They have normal jobs and normal lives - but at evenings and weekends, they're searching for lost sidhe treasure or hunting a rogue member of the local unseelie court.
There is a way, in other words, to take the basic elements of C: tD and building it into something that is actually playable - a sandbox to have adventures in. It is ripe, that is to say, for the OSR treatment.
Some basic thoughts:
I would probably make it race-as-class, and likely keep the original Changeling kith types, basing them on existing D&D race/classes with some modifications. So there would be:
Boggan (halfling)
Eshu (druid)
Nocker (dwarf)
Pooka (illusionist)
Redcap (fighter)
Satyr (bard)
Sidhe (elf)
Sluagh (thief)
Troll (barbarian)
The PCs would begin as low-ranking squires in a noble sidhe house, borrowing slightly from Pendragon, and would work their way up - to perhaps one day founding their own 'cadet' houses
Gameplay would revolve heavily around pursuing sources of adventure through investigating rumour of the kind already described above: a friend of a friend says there's an ogre's lair in the waste ground at the back of ASDA; let's check it out
XP for gold might not work and would need replacing with a different mechanic - XP for glory, or something?
I was a bit of an unusual teenager, looking back, in that I had my feet in two quite distinctive camps. On the one hand, I was part of the extreme lower middle class RPG/wargame/metal scene. We played D&D, we played Warhammer, we played Shadowrun, we got stoned, we listened to loud music, we got into tussles with 'hippies' and 'scallies'.
Yet I was also really into Counting Crows, Dawson's Creek and Changeling: The Dreaming.
When I try to explain to my kids what the dominant aesthetic of the mid-late 90s was like, I will call it 'sincere'. This was before the internet set off an irony bomb under everything (circa 2003), before a pornographic style and attitude began to pervade the popular culture (beginning from I think the noughties), and before social media started to make everyone really angry and depressed (from, say, 2014). It was a time during which we were encouraged to see the best in one another and to look to the future with optimism. The teen films of this era are distinguished by being positive about the relations between men and women in particular: think of American Pie, Clueless and Ten Things I Hate About You. They are all about boys and girls learning to get along - especially about boys figuring out how to be sensitive and emotionally aware. These films don't undercut this message with meanness or archness. The message was sincerely meant. Back then, we valued the idea that everybody could learn to rub along.
Dawson's Creek was the apogee of this turn towards sincerity. As much as it had elements of humour, the series was unrelentingly intense and serious about teenage travails. Sex was not pornographic or transactional, but imbued with almost metaphysical meaning; divorce was treated as weighty and agonising; homophobia, snobbery, mental breakdowns and the like were considered sensitively; above everything else, the storylines revolved around finding love, which seems almost passe to our irony-infused, post-internet gaze.
And the look of the series - let's just go balls to the wall and call it its mise-en-scene - buttressed this mood. In Capeside, it always seems to be late summer or early autumn. The music is earnest, romantic, singer-songwritery, po-faced. The visuals are elegaic, somehow evoking nostalgia in its teen audience for an era which has not yet passed - the era of their own youth, passing before their eyes. Phenomenologically, watching Dawson's Creek was a bit like being transported into the future to inhabit one's own middle-aged self, and looking back at one's own teenage years through the rose-tinted spectacles of time and distance; it somehow felt simultaneously set now (1998), but also set then, as 1998 imagined as the semi-distant past.
The music of Counting Crows also seems to encapsulate this era. Adam Duritz's lyrics are expressionistic, romantic; his heart is worn on his sleeve; he never tries to be funny or sexy, but always earnest about emotional affairs. The relationships he depicts are imbued with drama and pathos. They all seem to matter, not just to him, but somehow to the very universe itself - as though part of some grand narrative in which matters of the heart are all engaged. It is all so very sensitive (a word which women used to useall the time, it seemed, in those days: "If only I could find somebody sensitive.")
Watch Duritz go - this, whatever else you might say, is a very sensitive man:
It could just be timing, but I can't help but feel that something of this aesthetic filtered into role playing games, perhaps in Vampire: The Masquerade, but most notably in my experience in Changeling: The Dreaming. I never really played Changeling, not much, because the way it was presented by White Wolf made it essentially unplayable; but what I did do was look through it lovingly and wallow in the waves of bittersweetness and nostalgia for lost youth that seemed to wash out of its pages. It struck exactly the same kind of notes as Dawson's Creek did: it felt elegaic, sorrowful about the passing of time, veiled by late-summer sunlight, and above all obsessed with the importance of feelings sincerely felt.
If you're not sure what I mean when I refer to this aesthetic, then looking at some internal art from Changeling communicates it, I think, perfectly. I mean:
(You probably have to 'embiggen' that one to get just how Dawson's Creek it is.)
There is a bit of mid-late 90s sincerity to the D&D of that era, as well, to my eye - indeed, it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that Monte Cook had also been into Counting Crows, Dawson's Creek and Changeling: The Dreaming. This was the period during which TSR, and WotC after it, really began to get serious about PCs having an emotional life of their own rather than being mere ciphers for the players. Gradually, it began to seem as though it mattered for PCs to have personalities, feelings, and relationships. Dungeoneering and gaining treasure was passe; what began to matter was story and "role playing rather than roll-playing". The whole enterprise came to be very sincere as a consequence.
Sincerity is entirely defensible in TV, film, literature and music, but not, I think, in the context of games, where it easily becomes very cloying and awkward. With that said, a little goes a long way: the OSR often seems to pride itself on having a lack of sincerity, and a sprinkling of a little po-faced sentimentality may be what is needed to freshen things up a bit.
DMing advice is common. Advice for players, less so, though Rise Up Comus has an interesting recent post on the subject, with more here.
What is noticeable about these kind of pointers is that they tend to revolve around the question of how to play the game well ('solve questions orthogonally'; 'here are some tips on looking for secret doors'). We can call this kind of advice interior in that it involves what happens within the framework of the game itself.
Jordan Peterson (yes, I know: boo, hiss - just hear me out) made a very insightful comment in an interview with, I think Sam Harris. To paraphrase, there are two ways of being good at a game (let's say, five-a-side football or hockey or chess) when you are a kid. You can be the best at the actual game itself on its own terms. Or you can be somebody who it is very enjoyable to play the game with. These are two different things and are often, indeed, at odds with one another: the kid who is best at five-a-side and knows it is often the last one that other kids will spontaneously invite to play with them. What is probably better, in the grand scheme of things, is to be 'good' in the sense that it's fun for other people to have you involved - that is the way to make and keep friends and influence people.
I think this is almost certainly true. Although every professional sportsperson you could name was probably in the other camp and was willing to sacrifice friendship in order to be 'the best' (and did very well as a consequence), we don't pay much attention to the many thousands of their failed fellow travellers who would probably have been better off being 'good' at playing in the sense to which Jordan Peterson was referring. Genuine individuals with faith in their own talent are free to do what they like, but society, as they say, should back the field.
There is space also, then, for exterior advice - how to be a good player in the sense that it is nice to have you involved. I think this would include, for example:
Don't have your cellphone handy - concentrate on what is happening at the table
Listen and pay attention even when your PC is not the centre of the action
Take notes and appear engaged
Ask the DM if you don't understand something
Prompt the other players for their ideas, especially the quiet ones
&c.
There will of course be others.
The question then becomes: is there a relationship between interior and exterior advice? I think that there is. Engaging in trying to play the game well in the interior sense can, in the right balance, bring exactly the right sort of energy and buzz to the table, and thus make one valuable to have around. Being good at the game is in other words a way of being good at playing. But be careful - because if you try to play the game too well, just like the kid who can't stop scoring goals at five-a-side, you may end up getting a reputation.
The flâneur, literally a "stroller" or one who "wanders without purpose", is the word for a man (or woman) of leisure who saunters idly through urban streets observing his surroundings with detached curiosity. Though a part of the scene, he stands apart from the activity around him, choosing instead merely to watch, as though from behind a glass screen. Tourists often engage in flânerie, but of course it encompasses a wider range of behaviours than that - think about the last time you went for a stroll along a high street, promenade or shopping mall, or sat at a cafe watching the world go by. You were engaging in flânerie then, and you liked it.
A lot of what we do as RPG enthusiasts is the equivalent of this. We buy campaign settings and modules not necessarily to play them, but really just to dip in and out of - to read at our leisure, flipping from one page to another, becoming absorbed in a text box here, an illustration there, a table, a hexmap. In one sitting we might look at 10-20 pages, not necessarily in the right order, and rarely all contiguously. Thoughts and images pass through our mind as we briefly imagine what the places described really look like and what would happen in them. We enjoy turning the potentialities over in our own minds, knowing that they will never be realised: what it would be like to run a game in this setting, to create a character for it, to interact with the contents. I could reel off a list of RPG books I have bought and only ever really used for flânerie: Changeling: The Dreaming, most of the Planescape stuff, that time travel game whose name escapes me, Maze of the Blue Medusa, and many more.
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact it places RPG materials in a venerable and rich tradition of literary forms which are best enjoyed through flânerie. Travel guide books are the best example of this: I own dozens, but I don't believe I have ever referred to one 'in anger', so to speak - they are spurs for the imagination, not sources of useful information. Ordnance Survey maps, of course, are another example; road maps likewise. (I still keep a big A3 road map book in the glove box of my car just so I can gaze at random pages when bored, muttering things like "Oh, so that's where Wednesbury is?" or "Hmm, Derby is further north than you would think..." under my breath.) Then there are all those thick tomes about dinosaurs, animals, tanks, and the like that you always used to see on people's bookshelves before there was an internet to speak of, and which now primarily seem to exist only in the context of holiday rentals. There's encyclopedias, too, of course, and all those 501 Beers to Drink/Albums to Hear/Paintings to See/Cheeses to Eat Before You Die books which grow up from nowhere, like weeds, in garden centre bookshops in the run-up to Christmas. And let's not forget cookbooks - I can't tell you the last time I cooked something from out of one of them, but I can tell you the last time I looked through a Hairy Bikers book and imagined eating wild boar in Corsica.
I am not ashamed of a bit of flânerie, and I like to think that Yoon-Suin has given something to its own select audience of flâneurs, too. We sometimes take all this 'at the table' stuff too seriously - what happens at the coffee table matters also.
