A Thousand Cuts

Some readers here may or nay not be aware of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. If you're interested in knowing what you'll do should your country ever be occupied by an unwanted alien force, you should read through it, as this reveals the depth of the new hobby you ought to consider embarking upon. As an aside, for those who haven't seen the film Number 24, you ought to, whether or not the sabotage manual is ever of use to you. It's a Norwegian film, available on Netflix. It would win for my best film of 2024.

The manual, briefly, focuses on simple actions that anyone can take that cumulatively disrupt the efficiency and practicality of an invading army, such as damaging machinery, wasting fuel or contaminating supplies, misfiling documents, "losing" tools or taking longer breaks, as ways to slow down operations without arousing suspicion.

For example, let's suppose you're employed in a factory making objects you'd rather not make, for people you'd rather not help. Any moment you're left alone, you might spend that moment effectively by walking across the room and breaking the knob off a simple cabinet. Or collecting a dozen nails in your pocket and throwing them into the brush at your first opportunity. It seems silly, but once you encourage thousands of occupied persons to commit these small things, it forces the occupiers to search every person who enters or leaves the factory... which you can treat as evidence of them wasting resources on you, whom they won't kill because they need you, instead of using those resources to chase down people escaping the regime or those performing sabotage on a greater scale. Believe it or not, this is why no occupying force has succeeded in changing the minds of a foreign country since the Second World War.

So, why bring it up? Simple sabotage operates on more levels than opposing an occupying force. We're experiencing the general sabotage of our present culture from what it was thirty years ago in quite a lot of ways, whether or not the saboteurs know what they're doing. The cumulative removal of books from libraries, the reduction of daily grade school course work, test reduction and movement away from test-centric evaluation, the implemention of lesson plans to focus on everything from "identity" to the importance of "social awareness," all contribute towards the slow and minute sabotage of education, producing year after year of individuals less able to judge the world around them according to either history or science. Reductions in expectation regarding the need to repeat experimentation before announcing "evidence" of medical or scientific breakthroughs, the absence of experimentation altogether in the politicisation of science, the pushback against vaccination, pressure in states that offer free health services to increase private availability, all exist as small forms of sabotage to the health care system at large.

Each minute change loosens the screws on a working system... and we can apply this same reasoning to politics, infrastructure maintenance, employer/worker relations (every sunday worked, or every cupcake stolen, serves to sabotage the other side) — in fact, any part of society we'd care to name. The reason so much of this all seems to be falling apart is because it is... one little cupboard knob at a time, by individuals who have no sense that they're contributing to any breakdown. They're looking for a small benefit to themselves, either by obtaining a little more "income" each month or just because they're unhappy with their present situation and they want to push back somehow. People don't think of themselves as "saboteurs"... they justify their actions as survival, a minor rebellion... but the overall effect is the same. Without respect for the present structure, there's no reason not to sabotage it.

Now, that seems awfully political for a D&D blog... but anyone reading the above for what it is can see immediately how this has been applied to 50 years of role-playing. Not as a "grand plan," of course, but as a thousand cuts that have basically ruined what the game was, and even the potential of nearly everyone now touched by it. Not only because they never experienced the original game as it was played, but also because they've been so poisoned into thinking the present game, and versions of it, is the "right" answer to the thing they've never played.

Overall, these last few years, I've tried to depart my thinking from this edition versus that as a strategy toward building a game campaign. Honestly, none of it amounts to "help" in the sense of telling you, the Reader, regardless of which source you favour, what you need to do as a DM or player. You're not going to find a better system through the advice of someone who tells you the "solution" is to play AD&D or ACKS or 20-based systems. The entire lexicon has been sabotaged in some manner — not in terms of the rules, but because a lot of the discourse has revolved for the whole internet era of persons standing on hills with flags, beckoning our joining them as though in some bizarre way the flagbearer with the greatest number of adherents is "the winner."  There are no winners.  We're all losers, one way or the other. All the cabinet knobs are broken.

If someone were to ask, at this point, "I'm just getting started in D&D; what system should I base my world on?" — the discourse gives me only two rational answers: it doesn't matter and don't play D&D. Find something better to do with your life.

I am a happenstance product of an age where a dozen people could sit in a room and feel no compulsion whatsoever to discuss the game in any of the frameworks that have arisen since. We did not in those first five years talk about dice application logic, character motivation, secondary skills, point buys, collaboration, "stories," the fairness of ability score generation, the need to run other races as player characters, the need for new classes, even the need for new spells. We just played. And because this is the crucible that established my perception of the game, and because I am notoriously hardnosed, I still see the game in these terms. Not because that's what the game was meant to be, but because all these discussions, and the hundreds of others, have added exactly nothing to game play. All the distinctions that people fight over are meaningless in practice except as a form of sabotage, while the overall discussion itself in all its spaces have hollowed out the game's value. I could easily put myself into a venue where I could produce new players in my campaign, because I'm hyperphantasic and I can talk powerfully and fast enough to convince anyone that I'm a good DM. But "sabotage" of my game would and must be an expected part of what I'd face from players, because that's become the game. If allowed, every player out there has been trained by the internet to sabotage whatever you're trying to do, and everything you'll ever try. Your best strategy is to find people to play in your game that have never heard of D&D. Those will be the best players you'll ever have, because they'll be the ones not trying to sabotage your game.

Briefly, let's look at how. Erosion of game focus strengthens the player who can't play well, because every minute makes them feel inadequate to the game's demands. Yet, because they want to enjoy the social aspect, focus erosion allows them to chat, make jokes and feel both engaged and part of the whole. These people do not want to play, and should not be there, but you won't toss them because, well, you like them. So you'll let them sabotage hour after hour of your game, because the form of sabotage feels so insignificant, it's not worth worrying about.

Those who sit rolling dice over and over, distracting the sound while increasing the ambient noise, are bored. They maybe thinking about disrupting game focus or they may have been dissuaded from doing so, but that doesn't change that they're not really engaged and they'd rather be doing something else — which might be wanting to fight instead of this boring role-playing or wanting to role-play instead of this boring fighting. There are many players who believe that its perfectly fine for them to sabotage those parts of the game they don't like, while still claiming to "like the game," meaning those parts they approve. You're not here to have the game bisected and "approved" in this manner, nor are you here to be distracted by dice rolling, or players getting up to get drinks, or play with your cat, or any of a number of things they'll do to manage their boredom... but you won't toss them from your game because you don't see it as boredom, or you think that if they're bored, that's YOUR fault. Which it isn't... because they're the only ones dropping dice on your table to see them bang around.

When a player builds an exhaustively detailed backstory that takes no account of the game world they're participating in, that's sabotage of the experiences of other people and your structure for their purposes. When a player asks for a rule to be softened, that's sabotage. When a player tries to re-interpret a spell not designed for this situation just because they want to be able to cast it with effect anyway, that's sabotage in that they're not respecting the rules, they want to bend the rules towards their own needs, or they don't understand how rules require them to think outside the box. If a button exists that answers the phone, no matter how many times the button is pressed, it won't open the fridge. But players will say it "ought to" and tell you your game sucks when it doesn't. Any comment by any player that addresses your campaign as a whole? That's sabotage.

Consider the following: games that regulate what can be said; what parts of the game can be touched; what touching implies; where the participant can put their feet; the size, weight and materials from which parts of the game are made; who can play and under what expectations... these are games that endure, because it's recognised that adherents of the game will nevertheless try to sabotage it in hundreds of ways. Anyone who has watched a player argue viciously with an umpire in a game that has no financial, status or vocational consequences — such as the games I used to participate in with my cousins and uncles at family reunions, where obviously nothing was on the line — shows how willingly some people will press against the rules for no good reason.  A game based on the logic that "rules are something that can be discussed and changed in game" has no chance of surviving the level of sabotage that invites.

Once D&D accepted this as a premise, it had no chance.