The Boys

 

These guys talked for 30 minutes yesterday, this far apart.  I could hear them clearly, with my window open in July.  They called each other "Bro" approximately once every 26 seconds, or on average placing the word at the beginning or end of every fourth sentence.  I took the picture because I thought it might give me the opportunity to talk about why I so heartily dislike men so much of the time.  Honestly. They shifted their feet, shook their shoulders, flapped their arms and so on, but they kept their distance.  Standing far apart keeps it het, bro.

I didn't think I'd find a use for the pic until JB of Blackrazor drew my attention to this podcast, using the acronym, "BROSR."  Ech.  Yeah, that's really ... execrable.  Makes me look forward to the future acronyms for BROCD and BROBE.  To be honest, the "bro" bit truly put me off.  At first.  I did listen to all of it.  From James Streissand:

"Every single time we bring up any of these, uh, '... well I just do what I feel like, I just do it whenever I want' — and then we have to spend time, every single conversation, spend half of it or more, explaining why attack rolls are not adjudicated through DM fiat, or sorry their attacks are not adjudicated through DM fiat.  We have attack rolls, because we as designers have decided that if the DM was there to, uh, adjudicate, was to decide on a completely new and random method of adjudicating how attacks are handled in the game, every time the game came up, the game would probably be unplayable.  At very least in this context.  We need some sort of supporting structure, we need some capacity at this value to players declaring that they're going to make an attack, as opposed to asking the DM whether they can make an attack, and then have them adjudicated ... there's value to independent mechanics that the players can rely on to ensure that the game will progress in some fashion.

"Having this conversation every single time is far slower than calling you an idiot.  And saving myself all that exhaustion because I know you're not going to get it anyway."

I fully expect that James gets blasted for this kind of talk but of course, here, I applaud him.  This is a game, it works like a game, you idiot.  James goes on to talk about how he'd rather use his energy for people who can understand what he's saying.

So.  This is not a post disparaging these guys ... though in many, many, many ways they have not done their homework.  This post is also not going to talk about AD&D, or the rules of that game, or comparing it to other forms of D&D.  I am done with all that shit.  I am not rehashing those conversations.

I'll begin by saying, first, that the boys, the "bros," have stumbled across the principles of playing the game as written first before thinking you're smart enough to change them.  Genius.  For the record, I played AD&D pretty close to "as written" between 1979 and 1985.  And there were many parts of the game that I found myself still adhering parts of it for no good reason as recently as four years ago; much of my gaming history has consisted of hacking off parts of the old game and replacing it with mine, with each part going over time.  The boys, however, seem to have hit on their comprehension in 2020.  It's hard to be sure; searching their names turns up a lifeguard in Clovelly with a hot bod named Jethro James who's described as a "deep-thinker."  That's my kind of boarder.

I give them credit.  It's not easy to rediscover the round wheel when every wheel we see is stupidly square; they've uncovered a basic fact about D&D that's been lost a long time (except to we who have not died yet) ... and they have spines, telling people who say a thing is "bad" must produce a reason.  On the whole, I'm in their camp.

But as a blogger I need things to write about ... and I know a good thing when I see it.  Here are the boys talking:

Streissand: "Those of us who are interested in objective discussion of game design — which a great deal of the stream is going to be — just having objective communication between different parties about the games that we love ... it necessarily comes off as abrasive.  People will come in and muddy the waters, and say, 'well just do what you think is fun, as long as everybody's having fun at the table, everything is valid' ... and those people of course don't hold to that standard themselves, but it doesn't matter.  Because what you have to do, I find — or the most effective way of chasing those people away, is just being abrasive."

Jeffro Johnson: "No, no, the worst thing is like when they're like, 'Hey, your message is going to go so much further if you just change the way you deliver it." [Streissand facepalms]

I don't know ... that could be something I've heard a few times also.

Johnson: "... when D&D, or the elusive shift happened ... where wargaming shifted into RPGs ... if that shift actually happened, and if it was predicated on rule zero thinking, then there are no standards.  There are no standards for discussing what role-playing is, there's no standards for discussing what's better at the table and what's not, for what works and what doesn't — there's not even a game there.  There's just people that are sort of larping as people that are playing a game.  And so, by having these objective standards, and pushing them really hard and not compromising on them, we can actually begin a discussion that in some sense that stopped sometime around like 1979, 1980 or so." 

Okay, so, this sets the tone for where I and the boys go our separate ways.  The reason why I keep referring to them as "the boys" is because, by phrases like this, they betray themselves as phenomenally stupid about the world's turning these last four decades.  Or, if you prefer, magnificently self-involved, believing that what they see about D&D in the present allows them to easily extrapolate events and perspectives based on a few extant source materials they've happened to read.  As if what Gygax or Arneson wrote down, or what the Dragon said, is the last word in early D&D culture.

They're not wrong about rule zero thinking.  They're not wrong that there was a discussion that existed in 1979 and 1980 that has evaporated since ... but Johnson hammers the word "stopped."  Obviously, it didn't.  There was no wargame-to-RPG shift.  And I'm material proof, as is every player I've participated with in 40 years, that the discussion never ended.  It's still ongoing, OSR notwithstanding, the company notwithstanding and the general popular bullshit notwithstanding.  Johnson, however, and Streissand as well, have no idea.  They live in the bubble of their present and they've no reason to step out of it.

This is not the only time in the podcast that they're guilty of this assumption.  It happens so often, with blinding regularity in fact, that it helps to look at their choice of branding ... and remember they're only boys with a bright idea.

Do I think the conversation should be taken up by more people?  Absolutely.  That's why I listened to all of the podcast.  I don't usually.  In general, they're insipid.  The boys are definitely on the right track.  They don't know why the track works.  Their "wisdom" is totally experiential ... and so it's regularly backed up with "explanations" for things that sound much like the "theories" most people concoct in high school about what the real world is like.  For example, they're convinced that the way they measure game time is an absolute necessity to game success.  To support this faith, they've radically misinterpreted and cherry-picked a few gygaxian paragraphs about game time, and then "proved" to themselves that "Gygax was right" about the importance of time.  It's a delightful bit of tautological thinking which helps them believe their one the right track about this whole following the rules thing.  They are on the right track.  Not for that reason.  But they think time matters ... so they'll grip that totem tight until they realise it's nonsense.

Since I was there when the discussion "ended," I feel bound to explain that the world of 1979 didn't have the internet, and therefore knowing what "everyone thought" was drastically limited to what the news decided to report upon and how many people one could conceivable talk to face-to-face.  As such, there existed a sort of dividing line between what we knew from direct communication (which we could trust for the most part, because we could ask questions and present arguments), and what we knew from the limited media (which we could not trust, because it was mostly presented by people plainly trying to bullshit us for our money).  In 1979 and 1980, between the 20 or so people I gamed with, the additional 15 people who played that I didn't game with, and they guy who ran the only gamestore in Calgary (population:469,000) that sold D&D content and therefore knew everybody, no one ever praised anything Gygax said or did; no one even knew Arneson's name; no one cared who wrote the books; and the discussion was mostly about important stuff like how many frost giants does it take to kill a gold dragon, and if elves live forever why isn't the world hip deep in immortal elven children?  We did not, ever, talk about the value of rules, or which rules to follow, or if we needed rules, or if the DM had to obey the rules; we argued over what the words in the books actually meant, exactly.   And those arguments often got so heated that physical fights started.

The "conversation" that mattered in 79/80 was this:  what is D&D, and How do I run it?  I mean, just what the fuck is it, anyway?  What is it supposed to be?  Because, if I'm going to run it, it would really help if I knew what the fuck I was running.  This is the core conversation that everyone was keyed on.  No matter where, no matter when, on the way to school, on the way home, waiting in line for a movie (we used to do that), laying on our backs and looking at the stars, with the game shop guy, with the older guys, with the guys who played Napoleanics, with the guys who played Tractics, with the guys who played Squad Leader ... how does it work when we say we want to do something and the DM doesn't know how we're supposed to do it, because there aren't rules for that and yet I'm not physically prevented by the game from doing that thing?  What is the DM supposed to do, and does that mean the players aren't allowed?

We went around and around in a circle with this ... and then modules to appear everywhere and the conversation was still there, but it was way easier to run a module and most of the lower echelon people ran to that as a DM tool, which kind of left us elitists still talking but still not finding an answer ... though I thought I was onto something because I'd started letting the players just do stuff, while I reacted sort of like how a player is supposed to react when I tell them that stuff is happening.

Then the splatbooks of Unearthed Arcana, the Fiend Folio and Deities came out, and the conversation started to be about which of these new rules we'd use, and meanwhile we were ditching rules that didn't work, and then I started inventing new rules, which changed my game and I moved away from the public discourse for about 17 years, and when I came back, it was all about 3rd edition and sandboxing/railroading, and generally people are better educated about what a DM needs to do now than we were in 1980.

So, the boys deciding that running AD&D by the rules "solves problems" makes sense from both a 1979 and 2022 point of view.  We did it, because those were the only rules.  The Dragon magazine was mostly about fluff and general interest chatter until 1983, coinciding with the splatbooks, when it got new rule heavy.  The boys in 2022 are doing it because they're seeking a grail and they think they've found it.  We played AD&D "raw" because when we didn't, we got shouted down.  Remember: I grew up in an age where every game had rules and everyone followed them.  No one thought to question the rules of AD&D ... at first.  It was only after trying to play with them for a couple of years that we decided they didn't work.  Which is what the boys are essentially selling on the podcast.

It's only that they don't know they're selling that.  Because they haven't gotten to where we were in 1983.  Yet.

So, yeah.  They're on the right page.  But they're 40 years behind me.  I'll be 98 years old before they get to where I am now.

You'll forgive me if I call them "the boys."  I don't think they're my age.