Heretic

Slopware is low-effort, high-gloss product that mimics the shape of utility without providing it.  It's the repackaging of an aesthetic that arises as an inevitable commodification that surrounds any human activity: top shelf, branded, expensive crap that has more to do with signal than use.  Gold plated deluxe lightweight ski poles and LED-lit barbecue tongs, folding leather stools for camping, mason jars labelled "flour" and "sugar" in vinyl script, neon signs referencing drinks the bar doesn't serve.  The culture of buying shit surrounding the culture where the activity is actually pursued is intensively invested as far as the market will bear — there is nothing at all unique about D&D in this regard.

Except that, perhaps, it is actually possible to find content where people discuss actual skiing, actual camping, actual cooking and a host of other activities where slopware pervades overtop.  D&D, on the other hand, has evaporated within the cloud.  Miniatures, standees, tokens, dice and dice towers, plastic coins, item cards, lore snippets, holiday-themed packaging, artwork prints, miniatures, pins, stickers, mini-posters and even candles and soap, have eclipsed the old material contributions of maps, modules and splatbooks.  I have considered getting into it myself, as an act of desperation... but experiences with the menu, though I did better than break even, has soured me on it.

The literature that remains has devolved into "how to have fun" and "how to express yourself."  There's no tie to adjudication, risk, conflict, structure.  The aesthetic has become so dominant that the activity no longer needs to take place.  Buying slopware has replaced it.  That's the activity. How much can I get, how can I display it, look at my collection. The dice featured at the front of the video linked above are so obviously impractical for actual play as to be laughable, but this isn't addressed because it doesn't need to be.  We don't care how the dice land.  We don't care what they reveal.  We're just going to make it all up anyway.

The book, A Canticle for Leibowitz, is the perfect literary analogue for what's happening here: the ritual preservation of artifacts from a forgotten age, stripped of their original function, revered without comprehension. The monks in Canticle copy blueprints as sacred texts, illuminate circuit diagrams, recite fragments of technical manuals, all without any practical grasp of what they once meant. The act of preservation becomes an act of worship, disconnected from utility, divorced from context. D&D slopware mirrors this precisely. Dice that no longer need to resolve anything. Books that aren't read for mechanics but displayed for prestige. Rulebooks treated like lore-bibles, not instruction manuals. The game is lost but the relics remain, enshrined.  Slopware, then, is more than just kitsch and clutter... it's the liturgy of a secularised hobby — gestures repeated in the absence of meaning.  A die rolled to hear it clatter on the table, only to have the number "interpreted" out of existence.

Those who have been reading these brutal essays, one after another, will probably miss this next point; I've deliberately buried it in the fourth essay because at this point, only the bitter who remember the game will still be here.  Everyone else, who do not like their bullshit having been called out, will have left by now.  This fourth essay should be the nail in the coffin; a title, a diatribe about the last miserable performative element of what's left, so that such will be done and gone by the second paragraph.  So welcome, you made it here.

I love the game of D&D.  That's the tag line on this blog.  That's just performative, not a general reference to things related to the mystique of D&D... but the game itself.  The skill-set, the challenge, the problem solving, the fall of a bad die, the intensive complexity, the potential for high immersion on a massive, intellectual scale.  Those who have been here from the beginning know this is how I feel, because of the vociferousness and the ferocity with which I've argued it.

I personally no longer think the culture comes back from this.  Perhaps if I'd been asked last year, certainly three years ago, I would have said, "Yes, given the collapse of the official sector, the ceased flow of official materials, I think steadily we find our own way again."  As of these last few months, culminating in the clarity that has built these posts, I'm abandoning that perspective.  And I've just explained why.

But frankly, for myself, I was never in it for the "culture."  The culture has always been an annoyance.  I'm in it now, and always will be, for the concept, the meat and potatoes, not the glitz.  I continue to believe that the future of D&D is a computer-generated model, one in which a legitimate sandbox is obtained though an A.I. capable of processing and frankly killing player characters without batting an eye.  That isn't the first model we're going to get, if the ethical bullshit of chatGPT is an indicator.  But it doesn't need to be the "first" model or the tenth.  It just has to be a model, something that any small group of designers can put together, IF they have the substance and detail necessary to work with.

Some might say this is a bit pie-eyed of me... but I should hope that after all this slaughter, in which I've gratuitously called out every miserable shitty thing about this culture with razor-sharp finesse, that "naively hopeful or starry-eyed" is the last thing I can be reasonably called.  I'm not hopeful because the culture will save itself, but because someone like me, who can see the culture for what it is, would have the sufficient means and power to build a program that would strip all this crap away like so much mosquito netting.  It wouldn't be called D&D, of course, but it wouldn't have to be.  Stumbled upon by a generation that followed the last generation of those "role-playing farts" as immersive and brilliant wouldn't need or want the tarred, urine-soaked brand name of what D&D is going to be seen as in the next few years... because this isn't going to get better.  This is going to get a whole lot worse.  I think I've made that clear, too.

Fundamentally, it's never been the brand that mattered.  It's never been what the character classes are called or what monsters are included, it has always been the duality of the setting mixed with the potential of the possible... and that invention, utterly brilliant in the extreme, gets to stay, no matter what we slop over it for a time.  Look carefully at this a third time:

Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time. Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect. Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design. Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.

Do you see the word "dungeon" or "adventure" here?  Do you see the inclusion of dice, role-playing or collaboration?  Does it invoke a facilitator at all?  No.  Because those things, for all the substance we assume they have, aren't actually necessary to the procedure of the game.  The procedure is obstacle, investigation, action, obstacle.  Everything else is dressing.

Obviously, I like the adventure, the character classes, the particular skill-set and the atmosphere of a medieval fantasy setting... but these things are, in essence, just a topology for arranging obstacles.  Adventure is just the narrative shell we've adapted ourselves to, but any procedural motion will suffice.  Dice are merely a way of resolving uncertainty mechanically; real life is full of uncertainty, none of which is resolved by dice, so it's reasonable to expect that any adaptive future mechanic need not depend upon 14th century technology.  No matter how popular it's become.  The die isn't sacred; it's not a holy relic before which all future generations must bow.  Future generations, those not habituated to the nostalgia of a childhood they never realised, will comprehend this.  In the end, it won't really matter what the genre is, or how the skill-set is devised, or what limitations we impose upon character action.  What will matter is that in some form we'll be able to functionally live an alternate life, fascinating and profoundly able to affect the real one we also have, devoid of all this constant crap and bullshit.

Well, okay.  We won't.  But our grandchildren will.

More importantly, because we must apply this now to the living, we should just go on doing what we're doing.  The future depends on this.  The less they have to do, the less skull-sweat they need expend on stuff we could be inventing now, the more ahead of the game they'll be.  The success of the process isn't getting to the finish line.  We're not in a single-competitor event, we're in a relay; it's our job to carry the baton from the year of our birth to that of our death, as well as we can, not for our own personal glory, but for the greater good.

Don't worry.  When it comes the time to reach your hand out with the baton, when you're on your last gasp, you'll find a hand waiting to take it.  This is the one fundamental truth that gets lost in all the performative personal glory that seems to pervade... but it's just air, it's just noise, it's not real.  Macbeth was a fool.  It's not about our hour upon the stage; its not our importance as the player; it's not about our being heard.  The idiot is he who thinks, after all this time, that what happens in our lifetime is what decides the game.  There is no decision yet; death is just a story that seems to end for us; it's not the real end of the story, else none of us would be here now.

It's the baton that matters.  The baton is free of marketing, it's free of ego, it's free of flattery and self-importance, because it's value rests only in how well it can serve to make the next baton.  Those of the past, those who past it onto us, they had their demons, they had their critics and their own self-puffery; they too did their wheezing about their time on the stage, as we do, as our children will, and their children also. Which comes to nothing at all, because in the end, even the sound and the future are silent.

Perhaps it "signifies" nothing... but all that is mere association, implication, shared ego.  But the amount is not nothing.  The amount is everything, since without the amount passed ahead from the first human that discovered how to spear fish and feed more kin to the one before me that built a cabin.  The amount is everything.

Damn all the rest of this, though know it for what it is.  Lift your head, mutter your curses, then put it all aside and pay attention to what matters.

This reversal, following these posts, breaks the rule.  A diatribe like this is supposed to end, after all the venom, after all the dismantling, in either collapse or self-immolation.  I'm supposed to conclude with saying, "As a consequence, I'm shuttering this blog and seeking another approach to life."

But this is what I mean when I say, I am not like other people.  I have not come to this commitment through nostalgia or happenstance or because it just happened to be popular.  I'm not capitalising on it, I'm not dependent on it and I'm not limited in my capacity to research and understand human behaviour by "what I have learned from role-playing."  

A running theme through these posts has also been the question, "Why am I different?"  Something happened to me in those formative years with wargame playing; almost at once, I took to D&D like a fish to water.  I didn't wallow around for 25 years before finally realising what the game was about or putting aside the rhetorical preaching of the official class.  I despised, hated and resented the bullshit I found in the Dragon Magazine from the first time I read the thing, though I'd been playing D&D all of two months.  It was so obvious to me, if not to others, that the slop parading as "helpful" in those pages was just filler: bad writers with bad ideas and limited writing skills without the least understanding of what they were screwing with.  My friends had to listen to my 15-year-old diatribes then, as you good readers do now, as I sliced into some awful bit about the "biology of the purple worm", which was utterly unhelpful and irrelevant to actual game play.

That nature of mine did not come from D&D.  It was firmly in place some six or seven years earlier, as I began to open textbooks about human anatomy, astronomy, geography, statistics and history that were sitting on the shelves of my school library, at a time when an elementary school had baldfaced books with rich, glossy plastic fold-over plates showing the circulatory, endocrine, nervous and hormonal systems, which I greedily drank with my eyes and explained to my friends — who did not understand and did not believe me, even as I turned the pages and read the words and proved it was so.  Something in me broke... perhaps in a good way, perhaps in a bad way.  It depends on one's point of view.  But by the time I came to D&D, I was well versed in the historical persecutions of knowledge and adaptation, along with the fundamentals of human ignorance and propaganda.  Hell, I read Mein Kampf in junior high school, two years before D&D, because it too was there on the shelf, for anyone who wanted to take it down.  Because in those days, when they said that sunlight was the best disinfectant, they really meant it.  Not like now when we say, "let's educate the kids about fascism," what we really mean is to soften it until it feels like a minor case of the mumps.

Coming from that, from seeing at 13 the unmasked face of evil, and how truly deep and pervasive the lies could get, the frivolous nonsense surrounding D&D when I began the game was child's play.  And so, I've never been "one of the number."  Never been a "true believer" in the Leibowitz sense of the word.  I am a born heretic.  One that got through the door, that shouldn't have, and now that he has the bone between his teeth, won't let go.

This is a great game.  No matter how many ways people find to piss on it.