Fragility

The single comment I received to Friday's global warming post reminded me of Nassim Taleb's black swan theory, which I admit I haven't considered in years.  The post wasn't that popular, leading to the question, how many climate change economists does it take to predict the inevitable end of the world?

Apparently, all of them.

Taleb is an interesting fellow, engaging, informed, fair-minded and so on.  I am not one of his 'crowd,' so to speak.  But it is worth discussing his ideas about fragility and the reverse, that he argues must be called 'anti-fragility.'  Let's do that.

To quote Taleb: "If you do a top down, optimized system, it's going to be fragile.  If you let systems develop on their own, they'll be anti-fragile.  And this is how Mother Nature works; this is how evolution works."

What, then, is an anti-fragile D&D world?  Without question, it is a world where the game or adventure is simple enough that a given number of people - preferably only a few, as too many increases the number of relationships between individuals, increasing fragility - sit at a table and play, without preparation, without complex goals, without a long term plan necessitating the return of individuals at later sessions.  Why?  Because preparation can fail; because specific goals demand willing participation from all individuals; because there's no guarantee that the players who have come today will play again.

Thus, we have a single-session adventure that can be run on very little notice between a minimum number of people who accept that the game is going to be about gaining experience.  And this, dear reader, is exactly the sort of game that dominates the experience of role-players.  That is because every departure from these basic principles of play increases the inherent fragility of the game, stressing relationships between the players and the DM, until the centre does not hold and the campaign goes wonky.

The problem, however, with inherently anti-fragile systems is that they fail utterly to address the needs of the individual.  Nature, for instance, is a spectacularly coherent system.  Despite cataclysmic events right up to the level of exploding stars and galaxies, the natural universe as a whole simply plods on, billion year period by billion year period.  Which is great for the universe.  Sucks for us, though.  Everyone dies.  As a 'system,' it fails 100% where it comes to providing us with any of the basic things that make life worth while.  To provide those things - extending life, making life interesting, accumulating knowledge and relaying that knowledge forward, etc. - we're forced to make wholly fragile systems that Mother Nature necessarily abhors.

So it goes.  The alternative to fragility is a more certain death in undeniably less pleasant circumstances after a less fulfilling and less meaningful existence.  Thus my fundamental issue with Taleb and anyone who turns too much to nature as a template for design.  I find myself remembering the words of Rose Sayer, played by Katherine Hepburn, in the African Queen:  "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above."

Where this applies to the above quoted 'standard way' of role-playing - anti-fragile throughout - it doesn't take long before one is very quickly BORED.  Yes, it is easy to get together without making any commitment to future games.  It is easy not to require the players to think more about their characters or the world.  It is easy if we don't need time to prepare.  It means that if you and I and others are sitting around in Jim's mother's basement, without a thing to do, we can always say, "Hey, let's play D&D!"  It doesn't matter who the DM is, because we have a rule book, we have a module, we can make simple-simon characters and start rolling dice.  So easy!

And as we get older, where the vast segment of the role-playing tribe is tired from their jobs, tired from extra work they had to bring home from the office, tired from picking up the kids or the last fight with the spouse, tired from the housework and the yardwork and paying the bills and doing the taxes and seeing Grandma at the home and having to pick up stuff from the store for the social event that's coming up next week that we have to make arrangements for and pick up Aunt Trish from the airport and on and on, it is so much easier if we don't have to pile on designing a world or designing rules to run the world we can only run one week in six - maybe - because that's the only time Dave and Rob and John can all free themselves from their schedules in order to play.  Fuck, life is hard, and doesn't make room for role-playing.

So if we're not all too tired to do more than drink beer when we get together, surely we're only going to have enough energy to run a module while we keep shit simple - because none of us are ready for another thirty-five minute argument about whether or not a lightning bolt will electrocute a mage standing in water.  Fuck that.  Let's keep this game simple.

Do we truly wonder why people quit playing?  When it happens that their 'lives' dominate them so much that they can't play a game that is reduced in complexity to the level of Monopoly?  Fuck.  If this is all that D&D could be, I'd have quit it myself decades ago.

The difference between this style of role-playing and Role-Playing - capital 'R' capital 'P' - is the game's potential fragility.  The spectacular degree to which the game can be made fragile, to where it is not easy!  Unlike other games - unlike even computer games, that are spectacularly more involved for the programmer than for the user - role-playing allows everyone involved to increase the complexity of the game, as the game is being played.  The player, if allowed, is entitled to purposefully expand the power, influence and inherent nature of their character in a manner that the DM must cope with, even as that compensation becomes elaborately difficult.  The DM, in turn, may at any time, during the course of the game, kick the experience up a notch, on the fly, based on nothing more than whimsy or inspiration.  Role-playing is not natural.  It is as near to Calvinball as mutually accepted structure will allow.

The ensuant pandemonium is made possible by the same engine that applies in the cartoon to the right:  the commitment of the players.  Those participants who have chosen to play a deep game - or perhaps have the opportunity to play the deep game - that I have been describing choose to do so over the petty, workaday, banal existences that most embrace because they are too gawddamn tired to lift their faces from nature's mezzanine. To compensate for their chores and grievances and self-enslavement to careers they hate, as well as the fact that Aunt Trish can't take a fucking cab like an adult, they've denied themselves the pleasure that comes from indulging in fragile things.

What matter is that the game is hard?  What matter is it that it requires our being hit with the ball or singing at the tops of our lungs or jumping until we fall down?  Life begins with hard.  "It's supposed to be hard.  If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great."