Carl Solomon and Me

"Our only respite [from the RPG community] is a self-awareness about our behaviour, our games, our efforts at legitimacy, our belief in a less toxic future and the real experience we have had playing among groups of highly intelligent, decent, remarkable people, having been customarily obtuse about closing our doors against the odious hordes."

I wrote this two days ago as part of an address I was writing against the state of play in RPGs — and rather than revisit my criticisms, I'd rather invest in the positivism that I indulged at the end.

This investigation into advice and community belief has been disheartening.  There are many things, I find, about which I have been happily ignorant; I could have gone my whole life without learning about stat arrays, for example, which I only learned about, gawd, Wednesday.  I can still feel the bile in my throat.

When I look at it all, I wonder how the original message got this distorted; and I stagger at the effort needed to get the game "back on track" — if indeed that is even possible, given the ongoing, "official" propaganda dispensed about role-playing, backstories, balance and deliberate cheating.  I'm already drifting into an age when saying that I play "Dungeons & Dragons" is an inaccuracy.  Whatever I am playing, writing about or designing, it certainly isn't D&D™.

And that is a pity, since it means I can't go to the local games shop and sit down to play a game, even if I want to.  I wouldn't enjoy the "game" being played.  It means that if I stumble across a fellow at the coffee shop who also plays, we can't have a conversation.  It isn't just that we disagree on relative points of play or method ... we're divided by the lack of a common language, where my game uses a set of descriptions and definitions from a once-upon period, while the fellow is garbling on about stat arrays, session zeros, backstories and an "adventurers league," all of which are common terms that did not exist when I began writing this blog, just nine years ago.  Nine years from now, who knows what shit the company is going to dump on the player, in an effort to retain the relevance of the company.

So yes, my game is about my table; and in a wider sense, the small number of readers I can maintain, here and on the wiki, where new players to the game are polluted with arguments against combat, against random chance, against risk and against even the concept of a homebrewed world.  The noobs are driven into the pens of "the new kind of game," where the die roll of the kid in Florida this Wednesday night is the same pre-planned die roll of the kid in Manchester, the kid in Kuala Lumpur, the kid in Vancouver and the kid in Johannesburg, on the same night or at least the same week ... all of which are similarly modified and fudged by DMs operating with the same permissive cheat-codified playbook.

Gah.

It's hard not to be negative.  It's hard to rise above that reality, to pretend this isn't how the community is being driven, by ignorance, by a lack of proper guidance, by hard information, by pervasively purple splat books and by a waxing desperation for some kind of clarity.  We can only sell the idea of a session zero because communication between DMs and players is atrociously bad; both sides will grasp with despair at anything that might promise a better connection between presenter and responder.  The pervasive acceptance of fudging and DM manipulation can only happen because we must do something in a game that has utterly failed the participants, forcing them to express their dissatisfaction, their feeling of being used, and the DM's concommitant feeling of inadequacy in making the player happy, somehow, even if it means gross cheating is the only option.

How else can we explain such an utter split from ethical behavior, or the cognitive dissonance in players being grateful when they are told, "Instead of rolling dice to determine your character, it will be so much better if you choose from a list of numbers that have been carefully balanced" so that no one is offended?  How else can we explain not only the acceptance of a predetermined success and fail adventure, but the SAME success-and-fail adventure being flogged at every game store, among every would-be player, everywhere?  The participants are lost, flailing around, quite obviously wanting to game, to the point where they are willing to swallow any idea that will help maintain some sort of reasonable expectation of play.

Because the home game has been a failure.  We've failed.  We weren't able to teach the next generation how to DM, as I learned how to DM from the DMs who came before me.  We weren't able to teach players how to play, being that we ourselves stumbled around so blindly, so vaguely, cramming together splatbooks from multiple game editions, stealing from hither and yon and finding ourselves lacking the time and the energy to make it work, make it come together, make the players come back to play again — rather, they quit and went back to the ordinary life of all the rest who never played, where they could wistfully hear the name of the game pronounced and say, "Oh, yeah, that.  I played that when I was in college."

We who can DM, who can play, who respect the rules, who respect the code of human ethics that says do not lie, do not cheat, do not fuck with your players ... we are just forbidden isles in an empty sea, untouched by and not touching the continental chaos that reigns.  We can feel good about ourselves; we can be appreciated by our players.  We can influence, perhaps, a dozen others who will try to run the game as we ran it, if they are not turned from that path by the siren song of easy modules and easy solutions to difficult players who can't deal with their character's death and must be cheated of a bad experience that might correct their entitlement.  We're nothing in this chaos.  We're in Rockland.

I’m with you in Rockland
     where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland
     where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland
     where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland
     where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

From Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Each time, it seems, that I rise up to write another post about D&D, I feel the weight of living in an insane asylum, where players drag themselves through a static dramatic play, speaking the lines they are told to speak and responding to the chorus in the way they are told to respond, orchestrated not by a single DM, but by a faceless, emotionless machine that doesn't care, so long as there's money.  And this is the game.  This is what's right.  This is what's praised.  This is what we are told to play.

Where I struggle not to rant.  Where I struggle to deconstruct patiently, and not to scream remorselessly at the void.  Where I struggle not to let my despair get the better of me.  Where I pretend I am making a difference and all is not chaos and piss.  Where I lie to myself instead of saying, I should not have fallen in love with this game, this game with knives in it, that staggers to the dais to die in its hubris.

I am all right.  I'll keep writing.  But I am mad, starving, hysterical and naked.  I am dragging myself through the negro streets at dawn looking for a fix.  I am caught in publishing obscene odes from the windows of my skull, broken, crying, trembling in a white gymnasium before the machinery of other skeletons.

I want to save this game that I love, more than success or sanity.  But it is already gone.