Adult Fare

Last month, you may have seen this article about a Vegan D&D player demanding a cruelty-free campaign.  If so, you should see the follow-up, in which the DM explained that there was more to the matter than what the click-baity argument let on.

I have a high personal bar for this sort of thing, which arises from personal experience with cruel things and I think a greater knowledge of history than most.

Recently, poking about the net looking into the butcher's trade, I came across this from The Pictorial Handbook of London, dated 1854.  It speaks of Newmarket street, where there were many butcher's shops to be found:

“The slaughterhouses for sheep are almost exclusively in cellars underneath the shop, where the pices or joints are sold in retail. The access to these cellars is by steps, over which a board is occasionally placed, to act as an inclined plane for the animal to slide down. More frequently a much more summary process is had recourse to—the animal is seized by the butcher and pitched headlong into the cellar by main force, where, unable to rise from broken limbs, or other injuries sustained by the fall, they lie awaiting their turn to be slaughtered ...”

 

My first instinct is to include the above in the Streetvendor's Guide, as a visual, to set the scale on which a fantasy world has every right to operate.  Not every D&D game is My Little Pony.  There's plenty of real life human history wallowing in gore, slaughter, sadism and extreme cruelty to justify a group of murdering adventurers chewing up the landscape.  Moreover, such is the material that causes young children to gaze at in rapture, wide-eyed, realising for the first time how spectacularly dark is the reality of human history ... before, that is, growing up and coming to their senses, assuming they do.  I did.  Personally, I've felt no desire to walk in the footsteps of either the Huns or the Mongols, rounding up whole villages in order to massacre every living soul.

Well, there was that one time.  But never again.

Given the youth of participants, coupled with the sheltering from knowledge by helicopter parents, I'm not surprised by the stark reactions of some to the details of skinning and deboning a pig ... a perfectly ordinary operation to a rural-born child a hundred years ago, some five years after my grandfather had come home from the Great War.  Those readers who have dared to watch recent fare like All Quiet on the Western Front or 1917 have merely glimpsed a tiny bit of the day-to-day hellscape that formed a whole generation's perspective on "cruelty."  The truth is, the fact that individuals can feel so passionately about the description of a pig's slaughter only goes to show how very, very comfortable the world has become, for all of us.  The bar for trauma has been drastically lowered ... and that's a GOOD thing.  The last thing we need is a return to the standards of the last century.

It produces an interesting conundrum.  Nassim Taleb's 2014 book, Antifragile, Things that Gain from Disorder, makes the valid argument that bad things make us stronger and better able to handle and overcome other bad things.  There's no question of that.  That doesn't mean, however, that a DM — who may already be fragile — is ready to tackle the rampant fragility of one or more players.  For some groups, the game itself, with it's elements surrounding combat and killing, evil, intrigue, villainous characters and supernatural overtones, is a ticking time-bomb.

It's only a matter of time before the DM advances some idea that seemed "really cool" on the surface, only to find that it's tapped into someone's fragility in a way that ends the session or friendship, or perhaps several friendships and the whole campaign.  We shouldn't wonder that many young people, with little to no experience in dealing with life's most difficult themes, end up pussyfooting their way around every aspect of role-playing.

This is why, early on, I conceived of D&D as an adult game.  Remember, unlike a lot of people who have been around a long time, I began playing at 15, not 9.  By that time I'd played D&D a year, I'd had two grandparents die, I had a front-row seat watching an uncle spiral into alcoholism, I'd been beat up several times by groups larger than two and I'd experienced the dehumanising thrill of playing high school football.  Life was not, as they say, great.  Yet I think I was old enough not to see D&D as a form of escape, which would have been ridiculous ... instead, I saw it as a way to express my frustrations, my desire for having something I could control, and a way to interact socially with others whose lives and frustrations reflected my own.

Children should not play D&D.  They should, first, get some sense of how the world works ... meaning that their early activities should be athletic, competitive, confrontational in a healthy manner that teaches them that sometimes we lose, that we have to overcome loss, that effort itself is a form of success ... and that just because someone is on the opposite side in this game, it doesn't mean they hate us or they're an enemy.  Sometimes, we agree to take sides in order to experience the abilities and strengths of our friends in the cold light of reality.

Not that I could have thoroughly explained this when I was a child.  Obviously.  But playing D&D, especially this decade's form of D&D, is a disaster where it comes to a child's upbringing.  Participating in adventures where the players always succeed, where everything can be changed at a whim, where the losers are always pretend creatures we don't know ... and where the gloss of magic obliterates the day-to-day struggle for existence in a world without technology ... paints a rather debilitating strategy for, um, fragility.

That's because D&D has transformed from a game of attempt/fail to operative wish-fulfillment.  Too much of that cripples children by making a large part of their lives too easy, just as William Goldman warned.

Turns out that taking away all the trauma that a child might conceivably experience doesn't make them happier, or bring about an end to trauma.  Instead, the child to find trauma in whatever can be found among the trivial things that are left.  The end result is a zero-sum gain.  No matter how good or rosey we make the world, it's impossible for us not to find something horrific anyway ... even when that "horrific" is pretty damned silly.

I much prefer a D&D game among tough, resilient adults, who can take being killed as a part of the game, who don't expect things to go their own way, who don't need the game to fulfill some empty hole caused by their lack of a meaningful life.  The adventures are sharper, the stakes are higher, the ethics less black-and-white and the artistry in running and playing the game at it's peak.  Shouting matches are a sign of passion, of really caring, not a form of emotional tantrum.  Nothing is off the table.  Nothing is denied.  No one expects to have things their way.

It's how I think the game should be played.