Cacophony

Thinking on the last post, I was reminded of the basement suite I had back in 1985, back in the dark ages as it were. I had no computer then, but certainly an ongoing game that I’d started in high school and had followed me into university. I would sit at my small, cheap dining room table filling out ordinary paper with notes, lists, encounter tables, monster descriptions and so on … much like now.

I had no one to share it with except for my players; and my players could only share it with others by description. I did not have copies. We played every Friday like clockwork. Apart from my players, there were no voices in my head. Apart from what was written in the books and a few Dragon magazines, there was no advice. My players did not play at game cons, they could not watch others play and … for the most part … they didn’t have the time to play in another campaign other than mine.

Apart from the lack of a computer ~ that I would really miss now ~ I suppose I was very lucky. I could follow the advice I gave yesterday because there was no other way. We were all going it alone in those days. Clubs would form (the university had one, so did the games store) and then fall apart, because apart from needing space and a table, there wasn’t anything to talk about between campaigns. You had yours and I had mine … apart from boring war stories, what were we going to talk about?

People did not stand around bitching for hours about the things they do now. There were no other editions, though there were other games: Tunnels and Trolls, Rolemaster, stuff that’s all gone now. We looked at B/X as just more content for our advanced worlds and no one played or even mentioned the White Box set. I played it briefly in 1979 before Advanced became available and no one called it that when we were playing it. I never heard it called the “White Box” until after the internet.

I hear now from people that there was a hue and cry for a 2nd Edition; but I remember none of that. I remember that when the edition came out, the response was surprise; then the first echos of the later edition wars, as people started to shake out if they were going to play it or not. My players didn’t ask me to change. The subject of my embracing these new rules never came up; my players were happy. They were invested. The rules were established and everyone knew what they were. A new edition seemed like a silly idea.

That lack of a culture was a blessing, I guess. It didn’t feel like one at the time. There was a hunger for some kind of approval; it always felt like we were morlocks, furtively hiding our dread secret about role-playing in the dark. We didn’t talk of it with outsiders, not because of the Satanic Panic but because we didn’t want to be judged as sissies. We rarely met anyone new ... and most new people we did meet had never played the game at all.

It must be hard coming into the game right now, with the cacophony of voices. Naturally, like anyone with a yen, a new player is going to rush to youtube to find out how D&D is done … but unlike doing something like building a shelf, there is no agreed upon template. There are hundreds of channels dumping their values on the new enthusiasts, sometimes repeating the values of others and sometimes slagging them off. I think I would be a hard site for a new player. I don’t explain my references to content, I assume the reader already has played and knows what they’re doing … and I disagree with everyone.

It isn’t about a backstory; it isn’t about making up a story at all. You don’t make a world by drawing a map. Most maps you will ever draw for your game will never produce any results at all. Don’t play with people who are rude, indifferent, inconsiderate or dull of mind ~ and be up front about telling them to get out of your campaign. Miniatures, pen and paper … burn those things and get a computer. Pre-made characters, empty room dungeons, mega-dungeons, modules, splat books … don’t use them. Make house rules. Stop using game puzzles. Break the fourth wall when your players overthink. Live-play sucks. 4th and 5th edition aren’t only bad choices for systems, they are literally poisoning the water.

I just had a fellow this morning explain how it was possible in his game for a rogue to hide behind the leg of a fighter during a full-on melee, then climb the fighter’s back and leap at enemies from above, attacking them from behind in the process. Then it was explained that it’s possible to sweep attack and kill three opponents with one blow. Then it was explained that if you’re on the edge of dying from lack of hit points, you get a saving throw that enables you to survive. Then it was explained that when the player rolls a fumble, the DM can just make up any sort of story to explain what that fumble means, entirely arbitrarily, from throwing your weapon deep into the woods where it won’t be found to being told that you have handed your weapon to the enemy and given some money from your belt pouch as well. In combat. Which then continues unabated.

So. Not my game. But out there. A kind of poison that flows furiously through the game community, enabled by the collection of voices, noises, insistences, arguments, flame wars and shit knows what else on bulletin boards set up by fools and poisoners.

To be a new player in this culture … jeez. All I feel is pity. Not sympathy or empathy, just the utter pathos for the hopelessly damned. It must be hell to exist in this culture without a solid background of playing this game intelligently.

I wouldn’t know how to help. I’m one DM. I run maybe 15 people semi-regularly, on and off line. That’s not enough. I could maybe stagger 14 different games over a three-week cycle, with five people a campaign, if I had the money to do that and nothing else, and an aid to help me prepare the campaigns … and that still only 70 people. It isn’t possible for even a small, rational gathering of people who still remember how to play to teach this psychopathically poisonous culture how the game is actually designed to work. The company is methodically enabling the shit I just described in the paragraph above through tens of thousands of players weekly all over the continent. There are rational DMs, but the mindset is fading fast.

It wouldn’t be enough to write a book for noobs. Even if they read it, even if they embraced it, they’d still rush to the net to read what they could find and they would still be poisoned by the culture. No one who starts this game today is free. They all have the ridiculous over-dramatization of Matt Mercer echoing in their heads, with the goofy, continuous spattering laughter of streaming play, telling them that the game is supposed to sound like this, look like this, present like this: the slurred, mumbled speech of people staring into splatbooks on a table as they piece out what powers they can declare between the DM’s over-the-top, incomprehensible descriptions of doors, rooms and physical features.

That is all they can see.

The poor buggers.