The Bullshit Delivery Company

This post is not part of the series I've been writing, but does reflect on it.  Regarding categorising players, which has made the last seven posts something of a trial, I understand why the 4th edition writers tried it.  I did it myself in my book, How to Run, published seven years after the text I've been deconstructing.  At that time, I had read the 4th edition version of player categories, but I can't specifically remember thinking about it when I wrote my own book.

"The Players" is the 3rd chapter of How to Run, which begins,

"Any attempt to classify a player ‘type’ based upon their personality is an awful strategy. It doesn’t work. Players do not fit into artificial categories. However clever I might be in organizing patterns of behaviour, I promise the player sitting across the table right now will fit into none of them. 

"On the other hand, trying to explain how a DM should tailor the presentation of the campaign for every unique, individual person who might ever play is an impossible task. First of all, I haven’t met everyone. The interview process alone would probably require the rest of my life. So we are stuck with classifications. The reader should remember while reading through the list that our goal is to examine the players we know for expectations, which we can then fulfill. By looking at a set of mythical players – stereotypes – I hope to create a model from which readers should deviate in assessing their own players."

This may or may not have been the thinking behind these 4th edition categories, but it is the thinking behind psychological profiling, which never thinks that any individual fits a "type."

The thing I did not do was to present every possible character type as a positive one.  I included "predisposed," "disenchanted," "badly behaved" and "the guest"—this last being a person who knows nothing about the game but has come along to watch or merely because their significant other is playing.  I based my categories on psychological behaviour, not gaming ideals; and the psychological principles being used were not "positivist."

"Positivist psychology" is a philosophical approach to human behaviour that argues we should only discuss elements of knowledge that describes only positive approaches and experiences.  For example, if you try to search "health" online, you will find endless articles encouraging you to be healthy and methods of how to achieve health—but you will find very little or nothing at all towards a definition of how "healthy" or "unhealthy" is defined, or where the line exists between the two.  You will find very little on being unhealthy, except mostly to argue that you shouldn't be.

If you look up "rape" you will find endless articles, both political and psychological, explaining its wrongness and how to get over its effects.  You will only find a little about what those effects are, as no one wants to wallow in the negative description of the aftermath.  You will find even less online as to what motivates a rapist; and you will find nothing at all about what the after effects of rape are on the perpetrator.  That is because online is almost wholly positivist in its view; rape is wrong, therefore any discussion of actual rape is wrong, as is any discussion about rapists.  Psychologically, the rapist ceases to exist once the crime occurs.

This is fine for building a better society and encouraging us all to be empathic and responsible, but if we're arguing that psychology is a science, then it's ridiculous.  Of course, there are experts in psychology who investigate these things; they spend every day of their lives detailing at length how the body breaks down and in what ways, and there are endless statistics that describe your chances of survival depending on what collection of unhealthy characteristics you possess: but it isn't published on the internet, because it would be viewed very negatively by readers who haven't been educated and who would misunderstand the point.  For the lay person, what they understand about psychology, medicine, war, perversity—in short, anything bad—is only half the equation.  As far as the experts are concerned, the general public cannot handle the truth; and they're right.  There are reasons why the last many months of locating a vaccine have not gone into detail about the price that had to be paid getting it; there are reasons why we have death statistics from Covid, but specifics regarding those morbidity statistics are deliberately kept vague.  The less you know, the better is it for you.

Certain elements in society think that's wrong; they want transparency with everything.  That comes from trusting no one, and thinking that if we can see it, we can prove its credibility.  I am not one of these people.  Truth is inconceivably terrible; it needs to be parcelled out in small pieces to a large number of people.  Those people must spend years of dedication to open the series of doors, guarded by gatekeepers who know what's there, before they can enter.  They have to be made ready to enter.  The average, uneducated, unprepared person is a liability with regards to such knowledge.  In many fields, I am that uneducated person; and in other fields, I'm very much on the inside.  In other fields still, medical fields, my partner Tamara was once on the inside.  Some of my readers are military and they understand perfectly what I'm saying.  It is better that these things be kept from the general public.

All this aside, the greatest proponents for positivism in presentation are marketing companies.  For a games company anxious to make profits, we don't care how much the players enjoy the game, so long as they buy it.  We don't care if they learn how to play.  We don't care if the game sits on a shelf in their room, or goes in the trash.  Did they buy it?  Goal.

The 4th Edition DMG is the sort of positivism that tries to keep on selling you after you bought the game, even as you're reading the game, because it's known that a good experience for the purchaser translates to the purchaser's willingness to buy a game.  It contributes to a feeling on the purchaser's part, "If I don't get it, this must be my fault; the makers of the game seem very concerned about me; they seem like really nice people."  This strategy works.  You might be surprised.  Did you know you can get more donations for a political candidate if you ask people, "Do you want to get involved with my party?" than you will if you ask, "Do you want to help support my party?"  It's not even a little bit of difference.  You can go from getting two signees an hour to eighteen, boom.

Gygax didn't present the AD&D version with marketing language in mind.  For one thing, much of what we know today hadn't been tested and advanced in 1978; for another, Gygax wasn't concerned with sales.  Gygax, for all his flaws, saw the game as a message he wanted to relay.  Very often, in my opinion, his message was idiotic and wrong, but on the whole the message was "Here's how to play, if you don't do it this way it's all your fault if it goes wrong, in reality you're by yourself, dig in and work hard."  That message didn't resonate well with a lot of people, and didn't hold up once the message got muddied and fucked over by twenty other messages that frankly contradicted themselves.  Present day D&D has learned from that; the message is mostly bullshit, but everything published now stays on that message.

This is why, I grudgingly admit, Gygax was a man with vision, whereas Mearls and others who represent the present-day ideal are sausage-grinders.  Gygax gave advice which was intended to make DMs better at running the game.  Modern D&D says "You're fine, don't worry about it."  One says to play the game, you have to "give."  The other says you only have to be "involved."

So, it is the manner in which the players are being organised here, not that they are being organized.  The purpose is for you, the reader, to find the category you feel most appeals to you and then feel the positive language flow over you.  Of course, if you're fundamentally cynical, you've grown to recognize this writing when you see it and immediately begin to gnash your teeth.  Me too.

I know a bullshit delivery company when I smell one.