Don't Give Me Some of that Old School Religion

I agree with Blaine that the "what if" game really doesn't get us anywhere... but then, I must confess I am not playing fair where it comes to my own story within yesterday's post. So, I'll come clean, though I don't expect the unfamiliar reader to much like it. Those familiar with me and my game won't be surprised... so, really, this is going to be nothing more than my indulging my enormous, bloated ego. Thank gawd I never became the head of a game company, huh?

I've said before I was given the three basic books of AD&D for Christmas in 1979. Two of them I still have, though they got so wrecked through use that I was forced to buy used copies from a bookstore in the early 1990s. My original copy of the Monster Manual went missing, so the copy I have was given to me for Christmas in 1982 by my then fiancee. The replacement is, understandably, more valuable to me.

I own copies of Keep on the Borderlands, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Village of Hommlet and the first two parts of Against the Giants... with the except of KotB, I've run none of them as modules in my game. I've only run a few rooms of KotB, the last time in 2004, when I ran my daughter and her boyfriend in it on the spur of the moment, nothing prepared. I only own these modules because another DM I knew in '82 quit D&D entirely and shoved them at me with, "Want them?" I told them I'd take them, expecting I'd get around to looking through them someday. It might shock some people, but I've never actually taken the time to read a few pages of any of these at a time — when I try, I find them so boring, I just can't be bothered.

The "Harndex" came up before the game session Friday — the 1983 edition, not the later splat book version that came out later. This, again, is not something I paid for, but gained when a different DM decided to quit D&D after his first very rough year as a barely surviving engineering student. It seems all through the 80s I was the dumping site for a lot of this stuff, without my having to buy it. The only reason I never read either Holmes or Mentzer before the internet happened was that none of the DMs that I knew, who quit, had bought those books. Though I do seem to vaguely remember a blue basic version of the game kicking around at some point... but because I never used it or opened it, I have no idea if it was Mentzer's work or not.

The Harndex was more interesting... but only in the sense of looking at someone else's invented wheel still having square corners and my thinking, "Hm, I bet that would work better if the corners were rounded off." I never used the Harndex. It didn't have anything to use. An ordinary real world encyclopedia has more usable information in it.

I have had a relationship with the local principal gamestore owner here in Calgary that reaches so far back that he and I can talk jokingly about his first store front back in 1979, as he remembers my being a customer then... only, I wasn't actually a customer of D&D for him. I bought a few war games, I think I bought my copy of Axis and Allies from him (now in my daughter's possession, as I haven't played it literally since this century started), and some dice and miniatures. I would go around and look at the enormous collection of books he had... more than enough to fill a good sized public library before the internet happened... but I'd leaf through the books, see what the designers were doing and think, "Oh, that's a wrong direction," or, "Yeah, did that, did it better"... or worse, "What the fuck is that supposed to acccomplish?" And then not buy the book.

All this is to say that my experience with D&D is the inverse of what virtually every "official" source thought it ought to be. Everyone around me practically worshipped The Dragon. I thought it was shit. Here, I stumbled across this issue from April 1986 while digging around for my copy of the Harndex.

"Dear Dragon... According to the author of the article, seeing is believing, about 2' is how far the invisibility extends. If the invisibility extends in all directions, the floor below him would be invisible for two feet down and over at an upward slope. Isn't there a special ruling that he, the author, should have made about this? If not, invisibility is useless because when a moving patch of invisibility saunters into a room, it would take a really dumbass monster not to know something was amiss."

See? The internet existed before the internet existed.

This kind of appeal to authority demonstrates just how stupid the average reader of The Dragon was, which the Dragon catered to because, hey, it wasn't making any money from me. I'd say "guys like me," but there were no guys like me, not then, not now. Back about ten years ago, I got so tired hearing from other bloggers about the amazing Dragon magazine that I made a plan to burn one of my copies on youtube in spite. My daughter put her foot down and I didn't. Raised my own petard, there.

I did not need a staff member from The Dragon to tell me that bad rule design (even joke bad rule design, which was what deliberately happened here) did not need an authority to clarify, it needed a will to step up. I, more than anyone, ought to hate "rule lawyers," because those are the first and foremost to call out descriptions like the joke one here as if God Handed Them Down to Gygax on Sinai... but I don't have that knee-jerk hatred because even in 1986 I could have out-argued any of these halfwits writing on the page above. I didn't care to because I'd already rebuilt the problems in the game The Dragon magazine was bent on, with it's virtually Holy Quest, making less clear, less practical or just plain worse, for the sake of having something to assemble words together in as so-called articles.

If anyone wants to do a Communications Thesis about the destruction of a popular hobby through inept or deliberately obtuse journalism, there it is. The Dragon's approach directly contributed to the need to replace every passage in the original game with a NEW VERSION, essentially by finding it's own personal way to exploit the reader's attention by nit-picking and derailing rules to death.

A good carpenter can tell you... for every tool that's really nifty and useful invented by someone, there are hundreds that are junk. But it's okay, because once a carpenter has done that for a few years, they get to recognise the difference... in fact, it's a reflex one develops habitually, looking for any part that's made of plastic or some other material that's bound to give within a day or two of use. Roleplaying games are not different from other things in the way that opportunists rush pell-mell to make things that are essentially useless but which look good for people who just don't know anything.

The difference with D&D is simple: there are no good products, aside from the dice. Every product, from the White Set on, arrived on the shelf broken as fuck. This is a fact that is deliberately overlooked by nostalgists who insist, instead, that "Sure, there are a few problems with AD&D..."

With regards to this aspect of RPGs, the cognitive dissonance is staggering. If anyone ever wants to put together a list of seven cognitive dissonance wonders of the world, I vote for D&D... though I suppose the U.S. Constitution deserves the number 1 spot.

The problem is not merely that D&D is old now, or that the substance of the game has changed, it is the stubborn conception that any of the original works served to create a playable game in their own time, never mind in ours... and that those who claim as much simply ignore decades of published arguments, replacement systems occurring long before 2nd edition, a wash of alternate RPG versions each trying to steal customers even before 1982, not to mention the flat out evidence of both self-conceit and ad hoc declarations by the self-righteous author that spawned all this... well, it's just breathtaking. I've said this before but it bears repeating... and repeating and repeating, I suppose.

We at the age of 15, playing in a world without an internet, without cable television, without at home video games, without telephones that were not still connected by wires to walls, looked at AD&D in the 1970s and recognised that large parts of it were not only badly written, but were the worst kind of game design compared to the games we already knew. We were trained game designers. We weren't journalists. Fuck, we hadn't even completed grade 10. But we knew. And not only was it utterly obvious that the rules that attempted to outline alignment, weapon speed, encumbrance, combat movement, the design of a believable medieval culture or pretty much everything in the book that wasn't entirely self-contained, wasn't up to snuff intellectually. We didn't argue about it. We didn't write to The Dragon. We dumped the shit that didn't work and decided, you know what, the game worked fine. Just fine.

All that shit from people who just couldn't get it, they weren't like us. We were early adopters. And like early adopters, we were curious, we wanted to look at how things worked, we wanted to test things, we were experienced with other sorts of complicated games, we knew already how to work around defects, fix or ignore beta-level documentation, expect the product to have limitations, criticise a design early... in large part because we had done all this before with other complicated systems.

Early adopters do not expect a new and complicated system to arrive complete. They tolerate crude documentation, test every component against actual use, distinguish the underlying possibility from the defective implementation and assume that repair is part of adoption. A later customer expects a finished product. Early adopters don't.

Those that come after early adopters are called "early majority." These are people who wait to see if there are reliable reviews about the product before moving forward. They are people who wait to assure themselves that a visible success has occurred. They want to see someone else demonstrate success. They count on technical support to fix problems. They wait for others to create usable instructions that will help them understand. They want to be sure the product will remain available and supported before they buy in.

When the early majority started to see the groundswell around D&D growing in '82 and '83, they started to climb on board the train. They detected that D&D had been validated, that it was popular enough to be considered viable to explore... but they came at expecting the rules to be explained to them, the rulings to be made clear by those in the know, the modules to be produced "officially"... and they are those who ran to publications like The Dragon to get those clarifications and desperately looked-for support.

There are always far more early majority that early adopters. Some people rushed to Android products in 2008 and 2009, when the Blackberry still dominated the market and Apple was trying to corner MP3 access. But Android products, initially, were quite hard to manage. Those that wanted to try, though, were those who consider Linux their go-to platform. They like complexity, because they view complexity as flexible, designable and more interesting. Android smashed Apple's market because it was able to describe itself more practically and usefully to the early majority when that sort came along in 2010 and 2011.  But unlike Android, when TSR was faced with it's early majority, it had its pants down around its ankles because it had fucked up its business plan and was being turned over the money makers. So, explanation and technical support just never happened. And it hasn't happened since. It's never going to happen.

The OSR movement failed in large part because the groundswell engaged participants who were old-school chronologically, but weren't early adopters psychologically. By the 2000s, they came into a D&D product that had been validated by decades of survival, reputation, nostalgia and accumulated commentary (and then controversy, through the internet). These early and "late adopters" were not approaching an unknown system and asking what could be made from it. They were approaching a canon and asking how faithfully it could be recovered.

Except their perception of what was to be recovered matched that exact disaster which came into being as D&D failed as a business and began to excel as an exploitative product. While the earlier products by Gygax and Arneson, and the persons themselves, were revered, that reverence made it impossible for these "renaissance" folk to actually LOOK at the product directly and make up their own minds. In the actual Renaissance, architects like Filippo Brunelleschi studied and designed classical architectural ideas — or else they wouldn't have been able to achieve what they did — but then they set out to surpass the classicists. The structure of the Great Dome in Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, had never existed in human history before. The OSR went back to the origins of D&D and then did not surpass them at all. Instead, they turned D&D into a "religion," not a "renaissance." But thank gawd, the anachronym doesn't need to be changed.

To restate: with the OSR, the participants recovered the texts, terminology, visual presentation, modules and remembered procedures, but the recovered material had acquired authority through age. The defects became "authentic" features. Ambiguities became invitations to "rulings." Missing systems became proof of openness. Crude mechanics became evidence of elegant simplicity. Instead of asking what the original designers had failed to accomplish, the movement spent enormous energy explaining why those failures were virtues.

This is what a religion does. It preserves a founding revelation, develops commentary around contradictions, venerates founding personalities, treats departure from the sacred text as corruption and then, individually, the individual DM's themselves invent mantras as supportive evidence that their way is the only way that makes sense. The OSR did not produce a single product that surpassed old D&D... which is why it has proven to be thoroughly irrelevant within the progress of the game. It was a momentary period of zealotry, not enlightenment... and though it has created a sort of community in its wake, that community in turn has done nothing more than continue to churn out the same products that old D&D turned out to exploit an old player base... only now the so-called Old School Religion exploits a "new" player base.

And so, in the middle of all this, there's me.

I didn't quit like all the early adopters I once new. I didn't buy into the product train. If you'd asked me who Gary Gygax was in 1980 I'd have been unable to give you an answer. I did not care who made D&D any more than I cared who made Squad Leader or RISK or Cribbage. I loved the game as I played it... not as the books presented it, gawd no, but as my friends and I redesigned it for ourselves in the 1980s, without concern for what the company might have done or what Gygax's money woes were when he went down in flames. I didn't even know about any of that until the internet happened, because Gygax's life trajectory simply wasn't relevant to my deciding how much treasure to hand to a party. I make changes to AD&D because all the other versions of the game, to me, started deeper in the hole than AD&D had, while I'd already had ten years of fixing that system before 2nd came out and proved itself to be worse. I had 21 years of work behind me before 3rd, and 28 years behind me before 4th, and gawd help me, 35 years behind me by the time 5th made its appearance. Jeebus... what are you supposed to do when someone comes along and tells you to pull your thirty-five year old renovated house down because they've invented a new way to hammer nails?

That's right. You ignore them.

Now I write lengthy posts about how nuts all this is, not because I think I'll change anyone's mind, and not because I'm "obsessed" with being proved right, but because, well, damn, it's interesting. I said to my players on Friday that this is a slow running freight crashing into a wall, that I've more or less been around what feels, for me, like forever. I'm fascinated to reflect on this failure for this reason, on these misunderstandings or justifications, on this collective mess that grew and grew simply because there was no Cassandra around to tell Priam, "You're gonna lose, Dad." 'Course, that didn't work out for Cassandra.

D&D has lost. It's a joke. Not among the players, but... just consider. It's had fifty years to convince the world that it isn't a joke. It has acquired millions of nominal admirers while remaining something people expect to outgrow, apologise for or present with a smirk. Hell, they made a movie with the game as its title... as a comedy. Doesn't that sting... just a little? Hm?

Maybe it's just me.

What if...?

We had a discussion before the D&D session started yesterday, which though disjointed in the direction basically revolved around the question, "Was D&D destined to become what it has because that was really the only way it could have?"

Now, I have to be very careful here, because Matthew Colville wants us all to know that "some folks", a "they" who want to rally a community, manipulate the community. And how do "they" do this? You can tell that someone is doing that because "they" begin their message with, "Does anyone else..." or "I think players would prefer it if..."

Sorry, couldn't help dragging this in. You can find this piece of genius at 54:23 of the video, in which Matthew explains how some people invoke some people to make an argument that justifies they're cause. It's a delightful piece of recursive cognitive dissonance, said with the straight face of a man who has utterly no clue that he's engaging in it. The youtube video is a day old as I write this.

My reason for bringing that up is that it would be impossible to argue about anything related to human endeavours without supposing some kind of imagined collective preference: players wanted a thing, audiences rejected a thing, the community moved towards a thing.  Arguing that we can't argue on what groups do fits is a profoundly blind way to suppose we can argue about anything except whether or not we like vanilla ice cream.

I don't wish to argue about my favourite ice cream flavours, so I'm going to have to engage in some discussion about trends. That will, of course, be unlike every other writer and creator on the internet, so please forgive me.

On the whole, I tend to agree that D&D was destined to turn out as it has — but not because the game was inherently written or designed in a specific way, which a spectacularly waffling Mike Mearls more or less blathers about in this interview, from about a year ago — but because at some point the makers of D&D decided that it needed to be a "business" rather than "game designers." This makes sense, and there's an argument to be made that this was inevitable also, given the lack of foresight, intuitiveness or social intelligence of the creators, especially Gary Gygax. In 1973, "game designer" wasn't a profession or an ideal one sought to achieve; what one imagined was that having created a great product, it was a chance to become Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley... or, at the very least, Avalon Hill. That is the message behind the creation of Tactical Strategy Rules. The designers of a few wargames built more or less upon a single concept with various flavours supposed that they were suddenly going to propel themselves into the world of Corporate Scale Wealth. They had stars in their eyes and, as usual with such beings, they tripped over a straw in their blindness... that straw being that none of them knew jack shit about business.

No one can argue that D&D didn't "take off" as a phenomenon. Within just a few years it had reached a scale where mainstream media was aware of it. The problem being, of course, was that mainstream media's approach was all bad. 1982's Mazes and Monsters — funnily enough not mentioned at all in this very good two hour interview with Tom Hanks, where he spends a lot of time talking about how he got started in Hollywood (or, possibly, I missed it), was a mainstream media disaster for any company thinking it was would become huge based on the game's popularity. Further media investigations, which gave equal air time to D&D's detractors, did not promise a rosy future. But by then, the die had been cast, the cubic gate had been crossed. TSR was churning out modules instead of game structure, Gygax was bloviating egomaniacally upon the pages of the Dragon instead of accepting his responsibility as a guru and the rotunda was full of other game companies with knives waiting for TSR to come through the portico. Money merchants would seize the body, stand on it to orate their justifications in butchering the game as it had only barely become known and now, here we are, with Augustus gasping his last while we wonder what sort of Tiberius will next take over the company. In fact, the time frames almost match perfectly to the metaphor.

D&D was never going to be a financial success for numerous reasons, the first being that adults did not understand the premise of the game. That's not a judgment or an accusation, or a measure of adult imagination, it's a simple recognition that the game as structured did not fit with "game" in the minds of older, contented people who had been playing games all their lives. My parents and those of everyone I played with were not "bored" of board games or cards or backgammon or chess or, hell, horseshoes. They appreciated all those traditional, direct, sometimes gently physical games, which could be played competitively or not, restfully or not. They enjoyed those games, they could understand them, they could be explained in five minutes and a pleasant evening could be had taking tricks, pegging, jumping and getting kinged, hammering a couple stakes into the ground twenty paces apart and playing with a beer in hand. Those things were, in 1982, still universally viewed as fun and, more importantly, enough. They felt no special urge to spend hours to understand hundreds of nitpicky confusing rules to produce an experience not unlike, as my mother would say, "playing house."

Second, the "success" among it's adolescent audience was just as constraining. In the 1700 person high school I attended at the start of my game experience, about twenty students altogether played any kind of tactical or role-playing game... and even they could not agree on what was better in 1980. Some preferred Rolemaster, others Chivalry and Sorcery, others Traveller, others Top Secret... D&D was the premiere game among that set, but statistically that meant it was played by 12 out of 20 of that 1700 student body. One does not build a successful corporation on this kind of market share.

Third, the game had a time clock built into it's practical age window. Children become adults who don't have the time to spend six hours in an intellectual activity when what they really want to do it spend Fridays and Saturdays washing the intellectual out of their brains with suds, nachos and yes, obviously, far harder things. This isn't to say that we didn't, our small groups, prefer an intellectual activity of our own rather than spend Friday nights either drunk or stoned, but it is relevant that we were in a very, very small minority, that dwindled frequently as we aged. Again, while Janie and Jimmie could still get together for a rousing game of poker on a Friday night at 20, and continue doing that for the next twenty years, our experience was filled with excuses like, "Um, sorry guys, but I've got a trig final on Monday and I've got to study for it." Followed by steadily and slowly never seen Nathan again.

One realises that the hobby they love isn't really popular when it loses players because they get cars and can run off to the mountains and ski all weekend, among actual thousands and thousands of people. Our little rooms of a few score obsessionists did not compete, nor did we imagine in our wildest imagination that they ever would. When I hear people like Mearls say, "12 million" play D&D, I think, um, yeah, sure. So many that when I say I play in a room with three people in it, I still get blank stares or, at best, that look that conveys, "Oh, you're one of those people."  12 million people my ass. There's a corporate fiction.

ChatGPT tells me that,

"The much-repeated 2017 claim was actually “12 million to 15 million in North America alone,” offered while the executive declined to disclose concrete sales numbers. That substitution is significant: the measurable commercial fact was withheld and replaced by an enormous, unverifiable population claim.

"The category has only become looser since then. Wizards described D&D Beyond’s ten million users as everyone who had used the service since 2017, while Hasbro later announced more than fifty million “fans” and D&D Beyond thanked eighty-five million people worldwide. Those statements do not measure the same thing, and the steady inflation from players to users to fans allows almost anyone who has passed through the brand’s orbit to be counted."

Far be it for me to argue with that level of market research.

To get around to the point, then... given the way the game was approached in the 1970s, given the priorities that were asserted, given the media's reaction to the game, given the limited viability among participants — the inevitable poison was that what was valuable about the game was mercilessly exploited in the same manner as "junk bonds."

I'm begging the metaphor here, so I'll admit that I don't mean the phrase in the manner of promising exceptional returns for an instrument, whose underlying condition is doubtful, because at this moment it can be sacrificed for greater profit. In a sense, D&D was treated that way, because I believe the corporate engine that took over TSR did not believe, truly, that D&D as a concept was going to last. As such, they changed the focus of the game's gestation for considering what might improve the game's value to one where exploitation of the existing asset — that being the players — was best achieved by offering modules that ignored any pretense of improving play or game development. What modules did do, and any other product that could be sold on the backs of the aforementioned asset, was make money, today, for the money managers. No one, I think, was as surprised as they were when D&D proved resilient enough to keep growing as a culture.

By the late 80s, though, seven years of junk shit had been moved onto the market, complimented by additional junk shit that tried to exploit new young players by literally rewriting the game as "basic D&D," so that as an intellectual property, D&D was done. The masters at the helm were all like Mearls — dumbass fan boys bent on doing whatever felt "keen" today, which amounted to shit thrown at walls and then scraped off even after it did stick, because more wall was needed to throw more shit at. I've covered all that part after 1989 before, so I don't want to do it again now.

To write it in the shortest way possible, "developing the game" hasn't been a relevant principle underlying D&D since 1979. Everything since, beginning with the death throes of a badly run TSR under Gygax flopping around like a fish in a boat, followed by money merchants who did not care at all, has been about maintaining a product cycle. Every product produced since 1979 has been produced for that purpose, to make money because money was either needed, and desperately so, or because money could be generated from doofs who did not fucking understand the game they were playing even as more of them grew to like it. The business history of D&D is founded on the simple reality that there are plenty of people dumb enough out there to believe that D&D is played by 85 million people worldwide.

Because there are those who will quibble, let me be frank. Yes, individual designers since 1979 have sincerely attempted to improve the game. There have been rule books that have included good rules and settings, with good material, that can be advantaged by a present-day discriminating DM. But none of those things occurred because the company deliberately set out to empower those designers. They happened because the designers found a large enough gap in the surveillance that they got away with producing something viable and sometimes brilliant inside a corporate structure that simply failed to catch them at it. None of those brilliant designers were regaled or shown appreciation; all of them were eventually moved out the door, in favour of people who would just shut up and take orders. If a product did happen to advance the game, it's important to understand that product wasn't commissioned to do so. Sometimes, smart people just won't take orders.

Fair enough. This is what did happen. And arguably, the pips were going to come up that way from the start... and that being so, if I'm going to blame anyone, it has to be Gygax's parents. They're the ones obviously responsible for producing a puffed-up pompous blowhard of a son, one incapable of self-awareness or humility... the damage being done sometime in the 1950s, before two D's were put together.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can get into a time machine and show a video to Gary's parents of their egotistical magniloquent of a son, causing them to hit him more or perhaps less or maybe increase the amount of greens in his diet so that he grows up able to play nice with the other kids. What then?

A less vain, more self-aware Gygax might have recognised that D&D was not the foundation of the next Parker Brothers, but a difficult specialist game with a small, unusually committed audience. He might have accepted that the real task was not to expand the company as fast as possible, but to spend twenty years discovering what the game actually was.

This was more or less what half the players argued in the session last night. Effectively, if D&D had been freed from proving itself on the market, if it had addressed the inconsistencies, if it had not struggled to add excessive irrelevant details to play in the manner of "alignment" and deliberately urging the DM to be a morality cop, perhaps D&D wouldn't have gathered the reputation it did as a socially immoral culture exploiting children's morality to sell content. Less visibility in those early days might not have ultimately solved those problems, but perhaps it could have mitigated the narrow market, the aging-out problem, the media panic or the difficulty of sustaining long campaigns among the players. If the designers, not organised into a non-human faced "TSR," but as a bunch of ordinary dudes just playing with the concept, had better managed their presence in the Dragon magazine by actually having a plan for what they published — that magazine being read by literally every player, pretty near fanatically — then perhaps some kind of rational forward momentum could have been created that would have made 2nd and 3rd edition unnecessary. If they had simply ignored the need to be "more popular," because they were hobbyists rather than corporatists, then perhaps in the long run they'd have ended up owning their game rather than having it eventually delivered to Hasbro — a corporation so evil that they considered the children's toy market a fair game for fucking over people younger than 12... and their parents too.

The most important difference is that Gygax might have understood his position as a responsibility rather than a coronation. He might then have realised that importing moral language such as good and evil as characteristics the players were expected to functionally play, was bound to attract the wrong kind of attention from people who treat these matters way too seriously. Had Gygax been willing to step back and let other voices be heard, or have the capacity to encourage frank debate instead of viewing himself as God Almighty, D&D might have found a greater support from that intellectual community willing to view the system in terms of its opportunities for education, social support... even as therapy, which people do use it for right now.

But, of course, many of the beloved products would never have been made. And these are all a lot of "ifs," requiring faith and human patience and unimaginable levels of restraint for people engaged in what remains, after all this time, still essentially a "children's game," played by those who are still expected to quit when they get to college.

I do believe that other "beloved" material would have been produced... that would have been, really, far more popular and valuable than what the community tends to bleat habitually about today. But that is neither here nor there, since we will never know.

Jingoism

🎵

My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R,

My bologny has a second name, it's M-A-Y-E-R...

I love to eat it every day,

And if you ask me why I'll say...

'Cause Oscar Meyer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

Jingoism is uncritical, emotionally reinforced allegiance expressed through simple, repetitive, celebratory formulas. This is most often done in a political context, but really, any object of allegiance can be subject to the practice, which means any thing that is liked in a widescale fashion can be expressed or explained through jingoism, thus sidestepping the need to actually and legitimately explain the thing.

The jingo above, for instance, which has remained in my head since my learning it from commercials in the 1970s, does not actually tell me that bologna made by the company is better than other bologna; or that because the kid on the dock singing the song happens to like the bologna, I should. No argument is made to explain why I should. It's just assumed I want to be like the kid, and thus being like the kid, I also want to eat bologna, and specifically Oscar Meyer's, because they created a memorable and cute jingo.

The benefit of jingoism as a cultural practice is that it replaces "justification" — the legitimising of a things value or condition through the demonstration of evidence or argument — with blind enthusiasm. Repeated formulas create familiarity; familiarity creates emotional comfort; emotional comfort replaces the need for evidence that a thing should be given allegiance, or trusted, or considered true.

And because of this, when an argument is made to someone who is blindly enthusiastic, the argument fails — not only because the listener does not want to be convinced, but because the listener already has been... by something that in no way did so through the use of thought, the evaluation of data, real consideration or a seeking of proof. Rather, they've embraced the tautology: the thing is true, because I'm comfortable with it, therefore my comfort makes it true. Oscar Meyer is a great weiner... Oscar Meyer itself told me so.

🎵

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner...

That is what I truly want to be!

'Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer weiner,

Everyone would be in love with me!

Sigh.

Since beginning this D&D blog, I have variously gone off on a number of anti-jingoistic battles that have repeatedly lost me readers and support, simply because I am figuratively pissing on parts of the hobby and it's practioners by doing so. The game is "fun;" the game is "imaginative" or "collaborative;" the game is about telling a "story." The players are "heroes." These are not windmills I'm tilting at. Quixote fought windmills because he thought they were monsters; he had a fundamental understanding what the arms were there to do. I am tilting at the Catholic Church that Quixote praises. I'm tilting at Dulcinea. I'm tilting at everything that's "beloved" about D&D because I do not love the game for these reasons. And I tilt because I don't think anyone else does, either... I think that what they do is lack any actual reason for liking the game, that they do in fact like, because they lack "imagination," so they just invent shit up that explains what the game is. That's what sickens me, that's what frustrates me... and that's what makes it impossible for me to ever really explain anything true about D&D...

Because when I see the bar wench, I see the bar wench... and like the bar wench for what she is. But when you all look at her, you all see Dulcinea. And like Quixote, you don't even fucking know it.

To put it another way, I look at the crude, ordinary, perhaps vulgar thing that D&D actually is and find it interesting on its own terms. I do not need to slather bullshit all over it and then bake it into feces pie, so I can lick my fingers clean and moan, "Ooooooo... home cooking."

Sorry... but that's what I think all the jingoism and the jargon is that's related to this game: pure, unmitigated, unrestrained bullshit. I don't think it makes the game "better," I don't think it clarifies anything, I don't think it helps play go more smoothly... and when I talk to someone who claims it does, I imagine them spewing this shit to their players while they sit there, nod their heads politely and think, "I wish he'd get done so we could play."

D&D is a procedural game where decisions are made by the DM to explain visual and situational elements to players through the use of language, which the players interpret so they can respond with described actions, importing the need for further descriptions by the DM, providing further actions, and so on, in a progressive infinite engine providing play, adjudicated with dice, bounded by rules, limited by the ability of the DM to make things comprehensible and the ability of the player to concoct useful actions. Nothing here is a "fuzzy" description. D&D is not an "adventure." The word "adventure" has no meaning whatsoever with regards to any of the procedures I've just described. An "adventure is a not a situation; it is not a part of a setting; it is not something a player can take an action within or against; it is not an action; it does not as a word or a concept promote further actions or description. The word "adventure" describes an arc of events that cannot, by definition of the manner in which the game is player, produce a RESULT. Consequentially, the word "adventure" is as valuable to D&D as is the word "story."

D&D is often described as an "adventure game." This is jingoism. It doesn't in and of itself explain how the descriptive applies to the game being played. It does not contribute to the game's play. It does not separate the game from other procedural games, as an "adventure" can be the Hardy Boys chasing smugglers, a pair of newlyweds heading off for the big city, a family on vacation or a rocket ship leaving Earth. In no way does the word "adventure" as defined by the dictionary in any way contribute to or benefit anyone in the understanding of D&D. Yet, there it is. Like an unremovable wart on a game that doesn't need it.

Like fun and imagination and story, "adventure" produces an emotional, comforting response. It carries the idea of excitement, danger, novelty, romance, discovery, childhodo, travel, heroism and escape. It conveys an intentionality that is glossed over D&D as though it, and it alone, the word itself, regardless of comprehending how, somehow makes the process described above "better." That is enthusiasm for the sake of enthusiasm. It is a fetish, an object held in the hand and rubbed because it is believed that by repeating the word, the game's success is somehow achieved. Except, it isn't. Because even those who embrace such jingostic words as "proof" of the reason their DMing succeeds, can't say why it succeeds for that reason. It just does. Therefore, like the fetish, it must be rubbed. It just does.

That is how fetishism works.

An object, or in this case a word, is credited with a power that cannot be demonstrated, located or explained. Its efficacy is assumed because believers believe in it, and experience confidence from it, and can name instances where they believe they've witnessed visions of that confidence, which in turn provides greater confidence in the thing that cannot be rationally justified, while overall the belief only grows stronger with time until it subverts all other discussion of the thing to the discussion of how it relates to the fetish.

This is why D&D discussions do not produce valuable results. Because the results the practitioners experience are not results gained through observing play, but experiences gained through achieving comfort from the enthusiasm the play provides.

It is as though we were all on a river rafting trip, during which we encountered rapids, large rocks, dangers, cliff faces, moments of extreme danger and our own resiliency... but that, at the end of the trip, no one but me can remember anything except the simple fact that we did it together. That is what everyone keeps repeating, every time the trip comes up. "Isn't it amazing that we all did it together?" And then, when I try to say, "What did you think about the rapids," there's a sort of dull, bland look that I receive, followed by the answer, "You mean the rapids we all did together?"

And yet, in fact, we didn't. During the rapids, I remember when I was afraid, not when "we" were; I remember when I needed to pull the paddle I dropped by its tether cord so I could get it back into my hands... not when we did that. I remember when the rock almost hit me; when I was almost thrown into the river when the raft tipped; when I grabbed Jacob before he fell off, when Jim fished me out of the water at the end when I did fall out, stupidly. But I don't remember what Sally did, because she was in the other raft, and I don't remember what Jenny did, because she was at the front of my raft and I was at the back. I don't have any memories at all of any collective "we" doing anything except that we were all there... with the caveat that for the most part, there was no time or opportunity to collaborate on anything. YET, when others talk about the journey, it seems almost as if they did, all the time, while I was apparently on some other planet.

It's not that I'm selfish. It's that this is how I experience the world. It must be nice to experience it in some other way, but evidence tells me that none of us do. There just seem to be a lot of us who need to pretend that we do.

The "we" that is tossed about claims a possession of other people's experience that does not exist. "We" are not on an adventure; I am doing with my character what I can while Jacob is doing what he can and Sally is doing what she can. I can offer a plan to Sally and Jenny can correct my plan, and Jacob can offer an addition to it, but "we" are not making a plan in the sense of one entity on one adventure. We are consciously viewing the world through our limitation as biological creatures, where "collaborating" means talking to each other and puzzling things out, not "creating a grand design" in which we all fulfill our comforting D&D destiny.

And stupidly, I think that until we acknowledge that everyone at the D&D table is NOT in fact experiencing the same game in the same way with the same thoughts, everything we can every say about the game is, again, just home cooking.

Further, as a player, if I were one, and I was told by a DM that my purpose in this campaign is to "be on an adventure," I'd either answer, "fuck that," or perhaps more politely, "I'll decide what my fucking purpose is, thank you," while certainly thinking, what sort of patriarchal assumptive bullshit is this DM spewing?  I don't like people taking it upon themselves to tell me why I'm playing a game. I take offense at that.

Because I do not play, and because I do DM, I don't tell my players things like this. I play the game. I start with, "You're here, this is what the place is like, what do you want to do." Everything else... gawd-fucking-dammit, everything else, has gotten to the point where it is just making me sick.

I guess that's why I'm not writing here on this blog very much.

And They Tell this Stuff to Children

Here is a subject that is never spoken of enough.

When the makers of RPGs, regardless of the given company — and of course there are many now — seek to sell their game, the marketing that's pursued promotes the product to a young, new, accessible, family-friendly, easy-to-onboard culture... something that, in particular, a kid can enter. The wording is always carefully balanced to include short words, to suggest emotional ideals such as "imagination," "adventure" and "fun," because the goal is to make something that absolutely encourages young people to play. Most of us here began playing D&D, as the front-leading example, when we were quite young. Therefore it seems perfectly natural to us, having been introduced to the game in school and early in life, that the company should go on promoting the game to the next generation.

However, when any part of the company's position is challenged on the ethics of its practices — fudging, for example; or story-manipulating the player's experience with railroading, illusionism, concealed forced outcomes; or questions of consent, the politicisation of the game with "safety tools" and "consent checklists"; corporate control over community labour; digital ownership and platform control; and monetisation of the product, building brands, the endless stream of book selling, the normalising of performance-centered versions of play, the mechanics of audience retention — then suddenly the imagined game table is composed of consenting adults who have negotiated every premise. Children are useful as customers; but magically, when discussing their customers, the manner in which the product's pitch affects children is never a part of the discourse.

Yes, I began playing D&D at 15, but the company did not at the time tell me what to think about D&D, what to believe about the game's purpose, what it was supposed to mean to me or any other form of propaganda, such that pours like heaven's flood, drenching the landscape now. I was given the rules and allowed to play. What I did with the game, how I spoke to my players, how they spoke to each other, that was NOT discussed by the game's seller. Now, if one wants to buy the product, the pitch that you should like the game you just purchased is there on the front page. Because the last thing we can allow is to let children think for themselves, when the opportunity exists to tell them how to think, fast and early, before they develop any opinions of their own.

We don't think about it because nowadays, the lawnmower we buy includes text before the instructions that tells us how much we're going to love our lawnmower... or the microwave, or even Christmas lights, if some justification can be made to provide printed material with the product. Sometimes, I believe the safety pamphlet is really only there as a performative way of the company telling us that they "care." As if to say, "See, we don't want you to hurt yourself by plugging in these five-watt fairy lights in some imagined manner that might cause the tiniest of shocks — if that doesn't tell you how much we LOVE you as a customer, we don't know what will."

It might be nice to buy a blender and not be told the lifestyle feeling I'm supposed to derive from owning my very own way to make pulverised carrots, but, c'est la vie. It's the world we live in now.

The difference is that my blender is not giving instructions in order to mind-fuck my players according to a supposed understood emotional contract that allows me as a DM to run a game in which the dice, or any other aspect, in an "advisory" way, for the player's larger benefit (as defined by me), to help them avoid an unwanted consequence (as defined by me), so that I can "save them" (a necessity that is, again, defined by me) from an unsatisfying game experience (as I define it). All, I might add, without admitting that I'm doing any of this.

Moreover, if a nine-year-old walks into an appliance store to buy a blender by himself, the store won't sell it to him. Guess why.

We supposedly live in a culture that views marketing and selling products as a rule-governed social practice. From the law's point of view, marketing and selling are regulated forms of public conduct. A thing may be offered to the public because it is presumed to be intelligible. The buyer is not merely handed an object; he is given a public account of what the object is, what it is for, how it is meant to be used, what sort of experience it promises and what kind of relation he is entering by purchasing it. The product’s description, packaging, instructions and surrounding language are not incidental. They form the buyer’s understanding of the thing.

At present, the role-playing game is not being sold as a product. It is being sold as a social practice. It tells persons, including children, how to exercise authority (as the company defines it), presenting it in scope as a "rule-governed game" while then immediately undermining the so-called rules by flat-out stating that the rules do not need to be followed. The DM does not need to follow them, the game is better served by not doing so, the DM should instead concentrate on the "vibe of the table," while the company argues loudly that those running the game — and again, this can be read by children able to read just as well as by adults — are empowered to subordinate the rules to flow, story, fun, pacing, and emotional management of, yes, other children.

But don't talk about that. The WOTC never does.

A company should not be legitimately permitted to give public advice, market a game as accessible and family-friendly, while at the same time pretending that it's messaging is begin received only by mature adult tables who have negotiated all ethical premises in advance. A company cannot pretend to sell this form of propaganda about how to play a game in a manner that imposes lies, manipulation and brand-serving product language and then pretend it is not responsible if children do not understand the message.

Obviously, I have no problem with a game being sold. My problem is with people being told, screamed at really, through multiple mediums, supported by a cadre of fairly ignorant lock-steppers who ALSO do not discuss children when giving advice on their youtube channels, the principles by which the game should be played.

It is the word should that really gets under my skin, to be honest. Which might sound strange to some, since I've spent a lot of time on this blog doing my own shouting about how the game "should" be played. The difference, I think — and some might disagree — is that I'm not spending my time telling people how to feel about the game, or how to ensure others feel about the game as you should. A subtle difference, to be sure. Certainly one I don't expect the majority to grasp. But there is an enormous difference between my teaching a little leaguer how to hold a bat in order to achieve the best possible swing with the best possible leverage, to permit a better physical contact with the ball, and badgering that same little leaguer into liking the game more, because he should, because it's a great game, and everyone should love it, period, no questions asked. I think there's a difference.

Feel free to disagree.

Grumble, grumble...

Passing through an alleyway two days ago, early in the morning, about a mile from home — while taking a morning walk — I found the scene shown in the image. It appeared to be a set of cards thrown over the back fence of the house not shown, laying strewn across the alley. Obviously, there's no telling who threw them; there's every reason to believe they weren't dropped, since the distribution is too wide for them to have fallen out of a pocket, and not wide enough to have been dropped from a car or even a bike. Can't say if the owner threw them over the fence, for that's what it looked like, or if perhaps someone exhausted with the cards threw them out despite the owner. I like to write the story that they're the owner's cards.

Why? Because these are self-help cards. I have a closer image, that I've included below. Reproducing the text of one of the cards, it reads,

"I'm unapologetic about what I desire and trust that what I focus on WILL GROW."

The other cards had like phrases. I think what fascinates me is the irony of the scene, whatever brought it about, as I'll explain.

First, of course, there is the conclusion that the cards were not working. That personal fealty or self-discovery cannot be obtained by buying a set of cards. The introductory card happens to be upright also, it's at the bottom left in the image. It reads, in part,

"Hi Miracle Worker! I'm so excited that you picked up The Universe Has Your Back cards. My hope is that this deck will help you so deepen your connection to the innermost part of yourself and in the universe. In that connection you will be guided to your true purpose to be love and spread love..."

Sorry, that's as much as I can bear.

Self-help is a blight. Not because people don't need the help, and not because such needful people are responsible for their own misery, but because weakness is such an opportunity for a certain kind of person who invokes a certain kind of falsity in order to prey upon the weak. And charge them money in the process. I find that arrangement very hard to bear... and not because I was once the victim, or even because I've never needed help. I've always been able, somehow, to find help from real people... not the sort of sly, shifty, sweetly dressed monsters that created and distributed this deck of cards.

There is irony in that these garbage cards have been hurled into an alley to become garbage, but I think the deeper reading is that the act of not simply throwing them into a garbage bin is evidence of selfishness and abuse against what would otherwise be a fairly clean alleyway. I live in a fairly nice part of town. The streets are clean, the alleys too... and while I've lived in parts that weren't so, this is only to say that whoever scattered these cards bears a selfishness that just might, possibly, be the reason why they've had to cling to such means to get self-help to begin with. Help begins with concern for others. Others are not being shown concern for by littering the ground thusly.

On some level, civilisation begins with, "I will not make my shit someone else's problem." Here, I mean the slur in both the colloquial and denotative manner. Humans evolved, unlike cows, not to shit where they live. If there is one darkness that reveals a public test of character is it that we should not make our issues someone else's problem.

Because someone will ask, no. I did not clean them up. Perhaps I should have. If it had been next to my property, I would have. But somehow, on some level, I felt these neighbours by this alleyway had the right to deal with the matter in their way. Some would disagree. It is hard to explain why I arrive there, so I won't try.

Why, then, address it here? On this blog, purportedly about D&D? I am so happy you asked, Gentle Reader. I think it is because of a tendency that is growing to turn every group activity into some kind of default therapy. I wanted to play hockey, baseball, soccer and football as a youth because I enjoyed those activities. My coaches made them about winning, which ruined organised sports for me. Nowadays the same sports are being ruined because "they are good for the kids."  Not good fun, but something they can learn from, that they can grow from, to help them cope better in later life... when ultimately they realise there's a hidden agenda behind everything they might have enjoyed for the sake of the activity itself.

Whenever we hear about someone playing D&D in school, it's never to educate: it's teaching children to negotiate, to get along, to act as a group, to express themselves... or some other justification that the children would learn to do themselves anyway, without the need of our slathering the pseudo-psychology on top like thousand island dressing on a birthday cake. D&D is a game that is enjoyed. It is not therapy.

There is something deeply hostile in making every pleasure justify itself by forcing it to be a developmental experience for the participants. Can D&D be therapeutic? Of course. So can virtually every human activity that we enjoy or excel at or simply love. But "therapy" as a function is not the same as something that is coincidentally restorative. Therapy requires a therapist; an interloper, who wedges themselves between the activity and the participant parasitically, because the opportunity exists. The therapist model (the cards name her "Gabrielle") is poison because its a scam. It says, I'm not here to help; I'm here to exploit.

Frankly, I'm sick of my game being exploited by people who don't, in fact, want to play it.

Fair enough, we can look at the title here, "Mastering Your Dragons: Using Tabletop Role-Playing Games in Therapy," merely as a physical tool, just as therapists have used sand, dolls, painting, theatre, journaling, walking, music, gardening, chess... even picking up trash along the side of a road. But then, why the branding inclusion? Why isn't this just "Using D&D as a tool in therapy?" Why is it "Mastering your Dragons," as if that's remotely what the fuck psychology is supposed to be doing. Why are these professionals acting as though they have a marketing department on staff?

It's a language of a TED talk, which did soooo much for the credibility of TED talks. It's media self-promotion mainstreaming on what looks like, for the moment, like a hot commodity. They want its language, its costumes, its metaphors and its cultural capital... until, of course, it has none of the last, whereupon it will be dropped for whatever zings the strings of the next therapeutic model. It disgusts me.

Tonight, I had a conversation with a former co-worker, with whom I haven't connected since 2008. Nice enough fellow, working as a teacher now, had a working model of the Alexis I was back then... but of course he wondered what I've been doing since thing, which is, mostly, among various jobs, this blog. As usual, there's always the difficulty in describing D&D to people who have no real idea of what it is other than words they've heard. I never encounter impoliteness, just a sort of confused, slightly wondering stance about how anyone could be this engaged with something that is, so far as they know, a kind of game-hobby thing. Because they don't know what to say, they just sort of skip over it, you know, to ordinary things. "Oh, you have a grandson now?" That kind of thing.

The last thing I need is for someone at some point in the future to ask, "Oh, isn't that a kind of therapy?"

Honestly, it seems like it's been one simplification after another: childish, satanic, nerdish, escapist, socially maladjusted... and soon, coming to a theatre near you, "Oh, I'd heard that's very good as a therapy... are you having success with that?"

I can't wait.

It's like I've retroactively bought "universe" cards 47 years ago.

Dog Whistles

My last three posts no doubt were adversarial. I attacked people on a panel for employing business speak instead of actually discussing game play; and for using poor business speak; and for being opportunist in their intentions. For plagiarising a game that's 50 years old. And for failing to comprehend how a simplified game is likewise unable to provide agency for its participants. And finally, as pursuing goals related to the game design industry that I would consider "selling out" and a direction I do not authetically wish to go. I did not withhold any punches.

In political discourse, "a 'dog whistle' is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after ultrasonic dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not humans. Dog whistles use language that appears normal to the majority but communicates specific things to intended audiences. They are generally used to convey messages on issues likely to provoke controversy without attracting negative attention. A key feature is plausible deniability: the speaker can say, "That’s not what I meant," while the intended audience still receives the signal.

D&D — I cannot speak for other role-playing games — commonly employs a phrase like "It is my role to ensure the players are having a good time." This is meant to sound supportive and positive... but, in fact, what it usually means is, "I feel it's my right to fudge the dice or the experience in order to ensure that the game proceeds as I think best." This is not a dog whistle; it is, rather, a type of propaganda, where we are doing something bad while proclaiming that it's actually good.

A dog whistle strives to do the opposite. "I am against urban crime" means, "I am against black people." You're not supposed to know that unless you can hear the dog whistle. The average non-racist voter hears the words said; and they, too, agree that "urban" crime is probably not a good thing. It may or may not occur to the average listener that "crime" in general is a bad thing, and that it need not be "urban" also... but this is how we get the racist message to the listener. "Don't worry, vote for me, I don't like black people, just like you don't."

In D&D, one example is "rules lite"... which sounds neutral, even virtuous. The system is easy to learn, accessible to everyone. For DMs who have been baffled by rules, or players who tire of character design taking an entire session, being able to create a character in five minutes sounds wonderful. But what the dog whistle really means is, "the rules get in the way of me, the DM, doing what I like; rules light equals arbitrary DMing."  Presumably, the DM's players know this. They can hear the dog whistle. They don't care about rules, so they don't care about a DM who doesn't care about them.

The OSR has been blowing this dog whistle for 15+ years now. It has worked for them. They have successfully convinced a significant number of players to embrace a system that, when it falls down, the DM just does whatever the fuck they feel like doing. Acknowledging, of course, that no one, ever, ever, abuses power. In fact, I don't think anyone's ever invented an idiom about that.

Because my system is "crunchy," I'm often accused of liking crunchier systems. That my only reason for wanting them is preference. That this is just how I roll. My game play is not, in fact, about developing safeguards against arbitrary power, either by the DM or the player ("backstories" are the insertion of arbitrary power on the player's part) — even though every social structure in human history, from political systems to your local bowling league, are about restraining authority. One method of doing this is called "democracy." This silly system is founded upon another ridiculous idea, "the rule of law." For the record, this last concept is very crunchy.

The successful boosting of D&D in the early 70s, certainly before it was published, created a yin and yang with it's one essential element: the invention of the "dungeon master." On the one hand, the position offered tremendous opportunity: a single, detached referee could look at both sides of a battle and serve to enable the missing fog of war, which had to be discounted in order to make game play practicable. This is still my role when I DM. I "hide" what is in the next room, I hide the motives of the monsters opposing the players, I hide how many there are and I hide the benefit the players will receive upon defeating them. In addition, there is no aspect of the setting or the unfolding of events that I cannot influence by withholding knowledge from the players. Prior to the DM's invention, this was not possible to do in game play. Videogames hadn't gotten there yet. But let's save the videogame aspect for now.

The yang to this is that human beings are inherently untrustworthy. Allowing one person to see both sides of a question, and to withhold information, enables that person to enrich themselves; no doubt, the "enriching compulsion" comes from when we were still nearly animals, when one member of a tribe stumbled across a food source and decided to glom all of that source for themselves — to the detriment of others. Yet, the wish to "feel full," to cease to hunger, whether for food or safety or greater control or power, is a tremendous motivator for one to be self-interested. The introduction of the DM created this opportunity for thousands upon thousands of individuals who would never have experienced power otherwise. And a great many of them cannot resist it... just like their forebear that gobbled up all the berries from a found bush, gathering none of them for the rest of the tribe.

Understand, I do not use the word "compulsion" lightly. This isn't a choice. Ogg the anthropithecine, assuming they had names, probably has some sentiment that he shouldn't eat every berry on this bush... but he isn't choosing to do so, he just cannot help himself. He's hungry, he needs to stop feeling hungry. He is at the mercy of his needs. More often than not, Ogg might actually be a pretty all right tribe member. Which doesn't mean anything, obviously, if he's seen by Grug eating all the berries. Grug is also hungry. As is the whole tribe.

Here, Ogg isn't evil, narcissitic or ungenerous; he's an organism under immediate biological pressure. Hunger narrows the temporal horizon. The berries are present; the tribe is abstract. The future starvation of others is cognitively and emotionally weaker than the current sensation in his own body. This is why many social systems exist designed to control compulsion: norms, oversight, punishment rather than execution, ritual sharing, reputation, the encouragement of delayed gratification. These things stress an understanding that yes, we understand that you may want all these for yourself... but think for a moment about last week, when Judy shared her berries with you. Don't you feel guilty for not sharing your berries with her?

The problem with "rules lite" and the dog whistle it declares, "rulings not rules," is that it's a designed to be a social system that codifies and enables Ogg's behaviour. The DM is encouraged to discount the vote of others; to discount the presence of rules that make the game fair; to feel, in fact, that it is right and just to be arbitrary.

This is bad.

I am "crunchy" because more rules invites more player engagement, plus agency, from the kinds of players I want in my game: vision-seeking, active, unafraid of self-educating or novelty, highly communicative and willing to work for what they want. I am transparent with my rules system because I want to be held accountable for my actions and rulings. I want the players to have the right to say, "Your rule states..." — just as in a free and fair system, regardless of its purpose, there is always room for airing a grievance. Any system that denies the right to bring a grievance is an opportunity to fall victim to one's own compulsions.

Having standing as a player entitles the participant to cite the rules, question a ruling, request consistency, identify a contradiction and expect the DM to answer according to the system rather than according to preference. The player is not interrupting the game by doing this. The player is using the game as written. Rules define what the DM may do, what the player may do, what each participant may expect and what recourse exists when a decision appears inconsistent or unfair. A game without that recourse gives the DM authority without sufficient accountability. That is not freedom for the players. It is reduced protection for them.

Rules lite is an attempt to undermine standing. By minimising the presence of rules, the DM is insulated from grievances. The DM is entitled to ignore a player's knowledge of even those rules that do exist, because the DM is empowered to change those rules at will. This is authoritarianism, not "freedom from rule-based play."

Early in D&D, "rules lawyering" originally meant the player who knew the rules as well or better than the DM, who made the DM's life difficult by insisting the rules be acknowledged and followed. Those DMs who disliked this, or any player that attempted to call out a missed rule, however rarely, decided to re-engineer the idiom "rules lawyering" into what it means today: a time-waster. Someone who doesn't want to play, but wants to litigate. This has itself become a dog whistle: when the DM says, "no rules-lawyering," what's really being said is, "don't challenge my authority."

Together, the ideals of rules lite and no rules lawyering have created a sort of fascistic approach to dungeon mastering... but mind you, it's not "fair" to call it that. This is why the dog whistles exist. "See, we're not saying the DM can be a dictator... no, we're just saying, lighten up on the rules; go easy with the procedure; we just don't to waste a lot of game time dithering over rules that don't matter for game play. We're not 'fascists.' That's a ridiculous term to describe what we're really saying."

DO NOT FORGET the primary value of the dog whistle: plausible deniability. This is what allows racism to thrive while its participants can say straight-faced to the press, "We're not racists; we don't say racist things." It's what allows anti-abortionists to claim they are "pro-life," even though they don't care about the life of the mother or anyone else except the unborn life; because they have that wonderful deniability.

No, rules-lite DMs aren't fascists. Obviously. What a ridiculous notion. "Really," says the DM who wants to take away the player's standing to discuss the game's rules, "to even use the word is over-the top insulting. What nonsense! What hyperbole."

Just listen to the actual words from these people when we say, "I don't want DMing by fiat."  They say, "let's not bog things down," "trust the process," "don't be difficult," "stop litigating," "just relax," "the DM is trying to help everyone have fun." The language is always softened, because in fact, overt domination is in reality socially unattractive.

But sure. I take it back. I shouldn't have changed the register by invoking the F-bomb. I don't know what I was thinking. Probably, it's just that I'm such a pit-bull, I can hear a dog whistle when it's blown. Still, though... if it walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

Game Store Culture

There was no session on Friday.

Nothing untoward, the campaign is sound, it just allows some flexibility. We agreed to push things off until this upcoming Friday, the 3rd, so there will be a session. Sometimes this is for the best, even though, naturally, there's always a feeling that something is missed.

That's because D&D is a good game, and of course a good time. Those who commit to it always do so wishing they could play every week, that they had the energy and the available time to do so, but of course there are other things in the world also. I only wish, for myself, that a suspension wasn't automatically seen as evidence that there's something wrong... which is why I had to start this post by assuring the reader that the campaign is fine.

Now, why do I have to do that?

Because, simply, in this day, "commitment" has come to mean something totally different from what it once did when I began playing in the 80s. Then, our participation seemed awfully loose, a comfortable sort of, "Well, you're not here today, but I know you miss this and you'll be here next week."  I could count on that as a DM, while my players had faith that if I began a campaign session with, "You know guys, I'm just beat from the week I've had... how 'bout we just play poker and pick up the game next week?"

Can't do that now. People are so ready to quit, they assume everyone is. Cancel a session and the worry immediately is, "You're not dropping the campaign, are you? We're still playing, right?"  And this is made worse in that a player won't actually call up and say, "Oh, hey, I'm not feeling well, I won't be there Friday." No, they just don't show. And they don't ever show again. And they don't say why.

Trust is in short supply. I don't expect someone's word to be their bond all the time; that's just silly. Past the age of 20, there are too many things that come up, too many accidents, too much chance that something of unexpected bad health will crop up and say, "I'm here!" So yeah, for the last forty years, I've made it clear that all I want is notice. It's not a job, no one has to pretend to be sick to get out of a "shift," but hell, we'll all supposed to be civilised. You don't want to play, call and say so. It's simply decent.

Now, the reader here is trying to figure out which player is dropping out and my answer is, NONE of them, not presently. I have no reason to doubt these folk; I've known them for years, they've known me; it's been an internet knowledge, a "knowing" of each other through character names and avatars and user-monikers and in a large part not faces — though Discord has fixed that, I'm glad to say. But it is knowing, in the sense that none of these fellows picked up the game yesterday and none are going to stop playing it tomorrow. This is not a game-store sample. These are true believers and therefore I know for a FACT that if one of them wanted to stop playing, they'd definitely say so. For one simple reason: they want to be well-thought of by me, just as I want to be well-thought of by them.

That is the core of where the lack of trust lies.

The 80s carried a sting that the present does not, which is rarely accounted for. I started playing with people I went to school with, as most do. I then moved onto people I was in university with. And then I played with people who I worked with, who knew my wife, my daughter, my home, my job and so on... which meant, if they didn't show up ever again, they gave up a lot more than a D&D game. They gave up playing with a smart little girl, they gave up my Wife's cooking... and they had to face me at work, or in class, or when I continued to invite their sisters and their cousins to my house for parties. Walk out of my game and that made a pretty big hole, because I didn't play in faceless gamestores. It makes a difference when you can't call me up and ask me to help you with your resume, or move your shit the next time you change apartments, or any of the things we used to do for each other because we weren't just D&D players together, we shared our lives together.

An unexplained absence carried weight. This made the "We'll play next week" culture stable, because we were, in fact, friends. The same way we played baseball together, and went to the beach together, and stood up at each other's weddings and so on. This is all gone because, for reasons that surpass understanding, game store culture obliterated it. Because, I suppose, it's so easy to just not give a fuck if you don't show up on Friday. You owe nothing to nobody.

This, I think, is one of the reasons I didn't jive very well with the 2010 perspective of how players approach the game: the assumption that I was out to screw them, or cheat them, or make stuff up designed to humiliate them, or whatever. And why, in some cases, the anger at my insistence that they "suck it up and just play" was so unexpected and absolute. Because they could, in fact, just flip off my game like a switch. I never played like that. With those kind of people. It wasn't the game culture I learned to run my game in.

It's a sort of pre-emptive way of protecting themselves... of sparing themselves an investment in something they know, from the outset, they can't actually control. Knowing they can't, or having that demonstrated for them — and heck, my last post was about the kind of prick I can be — creates this assumption that if they can't get around me today, that's it, there's no point. D&D, they think, is a give and take... and honestly, they couldn't be more wrong.

Something like a thousand years ago, I wrote that I wasn't a cruise director. I'm not here to make sure everything runs smoothly and that all the passengers have a good time, are entertained and are pleased with their stay. I'm not charged with my players welfare and comfort. I'm not here to provide social activities. I'm not an event planner, a master of ceremonies, I don't do customer service and I'm not a cheerleader.

Since, I've revisited the "cruise director" concept, here and there. I think it comes down to the idea that I'm willing to plan events, I'm willing to do customer service... I'm willing to be a cheerleader, even.

It's just not my JOB.

In fact, everyone exists to do all the parts listed here. If the campaign is sound, everyone has opportunities to help everyone have a good time, to think about others enjoying their game, to give ground regarding cheerleading and such.  D&D is absolutely about giving.

What it's not about is taking. And this is where the "give and take" model collapses, because those who go into this game with the expectation that the two things are going to even out in the end, that they'll get their opportunity to "take" as much as they give, in their minds of course, the program falls apart. Anyone, ever, who approaches a social activity with the headspace, "What am I going to get?" is a null signal. It's the player no one wants at their table.

But again, this is the game store culture fucking everything up. Because these aren't friends and they're not people you give to — because you don't know them. Hell, you don't even know if they're good people. You sure as hell don't know that you'll ever see them again. So it's natural to head off to the game store with the same ideals that you use when heading off to the theatre, the eatery, the hockey game or the bar:

"I am here to be served. Serve me."

What a terrible, terrible culture.

No wonder it invented concepts like D&D as a sport, where groups compete against each other to win fucking prizes and prove that they're better players than others. No wonder it invented player-vs.-player, then called it a virtue. No wonder. Because this isn't about four people helping each other survive, this is the "virtue" that screams, "He got his, where the fuck is mine?"... with the other side of that flag reading, "I got mine, so fuck you."

I'm too Canadian for this nonsense. Though, of course, we have game stores here and yes, it thrives there.

Funny, I don't have an inkling from any of my present players that this nonsense is present at the table. Perhaps it's playing by Discord. Perhaps its their familiarity with this blog. Or with my previous game, since three of them have played with me online before. But I also like to think its because they've got the right mindset about why we want to play. Not just that it's fun, it obviously is... but because its fun in a way that doesn't actually expect anything specific. We're just going to play, and see how it turns out. Investment as play and not as success.

Gives me hope.

AD&D Should Be Ashamed of Itself

As I wade into the thief and search the DMG for details about traps, I ran across this:

"Assume that your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checking for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: "You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—", might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full with silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures."

I read the DMG straight through several times during the 1980s when I was still running most of the book; and through the '90s, when I wanted to find something new to work on, I would glance through the DMG to see what might trouble me that I could start as a project. So of course I remember this passage above as one of the great Gygaxian moments. When I was 15, this made sense to me; by age 20, not so much. Around the time I started this blog, I'd have been so incensed by the above I'd have written three rants about it. Now, it is merely evidence of a much larger problem, the toxic DM who felt he — and no, never a woman — was in his rights to decide that game play that had been forced by the rules, the aforementioned "checking" from the last post, was itself bad, presumably because it limited how many "gotchas" the DM could impose. After all, if they are daring to actually listen at doors, something the rules expressly allow them to do, then absolutely invent a plot-earseeker to stop that. Absolutely mock the players. Absolutely be a dick about the players playing the game. That's how you get to be the greatest DM in the world, as many thought, and still think, Gygax to be.

Where last week I found myself corralled by a rush of arbitrary rules imposed to manage the paladin, now as I undertake the thief is it all opportunities for gotcha. The flat percentage to pick pockets, not a very beneficial skill for the thief for reasons I outline in the text, must be twisted by an additional adjustment for the level of the target, so that the DM can invent a 12th level whom the thief has "randomly" (because 12th levels are just laying about the streets all the time) try to filch — oh look, gotcha! Oh, and of course there's a chance if the thief succeeds but the target recognises it, so that the thief can be tracked home and attacked — gotcha!

The treasure chest or the door that has to be smashed open because the thief's one chance to open the lock fails, bringing monsters and such — gotcha! Try to move silently and fail, but to have the DMG expressly say, "Do NOT inform the thief that his or her dice score indicated a lack of success at this attempted stealth, if that is the case. He or she thinks the movement is silent, and the monster or other victim will inform the character of his or her misapprehension soon enough."

Gotcha.

It's not that I didn't know about these lines, as I said; I remember the one about move silently too, though I haven't read it in decades. It's that, first, I didn't have the power to speed search the DMG and Players for terms back then, because they were books, not pdfs. And second, I'm doing something unusual for me; I'm not randomly reading text to just read about the game, I'm assembling paragraphs and notes from multiple places and putting them side-by-side. As a result, I'm finding multiple cases of discontinuity in the rules, between books, sometimes in the same book, which despite these books being constantly open on my table while I worked on my work with pencil and paper in the 1980s and 90s, I never noticed. And neither did my players.

As such, until now, I hadn't realise just how many gotchas are specifically associated with the thief rules, or really, how ridiculous some of the rules are. Did you know the wand of secret door and trap location (I never had any reason to give one of these to a party, ever, even randomly) does not allow you to expend a charge and find both? You need to expend a charge if you're trying to find a secret door, and then another charge to find a trap. And if there are no traps or secret doors? There are no words said about that, but it's implied you've wasted the charge on an empty room. Two charges, in fact. How miserly is that?

It all reveals a kind of systematic methodology that's designed to TEACH the DM to literally mindfuck the people at the table, without constraint. The DM doesn't have to roll to see if there's a 12th level on the street. The DM doesn't have to roll to see if we've run into someone ready to punish our success in picking a pocket. The DM can just decide, ad hoc, that a thief that's practiced at moving silently can't possibly know they're not succeeding, because obviously the thief's own ears, attuned to the ability hear noise, cannot hear the noise of their own feet. It's all absurdly empowering for the DM, and then that power is deliberately messaged toward a persecutorial framework, to weaponise the game world against the PC, and encourage the DM to pat himself on the back while doing so.  "Who's a good DM? You are... yes you... what a good DM you are..."

The paladin, who has no power, must walk a tightrope of perfectly good and lawful behaviour... but the DM, who has all the power in the world, is encouraged to be chaotic (without governance) and evil (vindictive and gloating) at every opportunity. Not just "firm," but mocking. Not just "mysterious," but deceptive. Not just "challenging," but punitive. And the advice is framed as craft, as professionalism, as what separates a "good" DM from a weak one. The DM is given permission to lie by omission, to invent consequences ad hoc, to punish caution, to punish competence, and to enjoy the punishment.

Together, this makes the book's text something that one could argue deserved the satanic panic. If someone wanted to argue that D&D teaches something unhealthy, this is the material that would support the argument. It teaches the DM that they are above others, that their role is to control and correct and that the players' attempts to protect themselves are moral failures. It teaches the paladin's player that virtue is a trap and that the punishment for error is humiliation and dispossession. If you were a parent, a pastor or a moral entrepreneur looking for evidence of corrupting influence, the real indictment would be this adversarial pedagogy. 

I read these passages and I must tell you, I  feel honestly ashamed to be a DM... though I never did any of this. What I feel is shame by association.

Which is now why I think that anyone running around shouting that AD&D is a great system, without immediately and in depth addressing these serious concerns about DM behaviour and rule design, risks encouraging people toward committing further abuses such as the ones found here. It would be like telling people to see 1915's Birth of a Nation by saying only, "It was a great early film, one of the first that really employed a full-length story as filmmaking! Everyone should see it!" Such, nowadays, would read to anyone outside as "I'm listening to a racist." When I read the texts I'm reading and think about people preaching AD&D as a system, especially "as written," I'm going to be thinking going forward, wow, toxic masculinity.

The quotes (and there are many more) above show that I'm not overstating this. AD&D has a lack of shame problem.

Praising AD&D without acknowledging these things is tantamount to endorsing, or at least laundering, a DM posture that is openly adversarial, socially coercive and proud of itself. If someone refuses to discuss that, in depth, they are not being neutral. They are choosing to keep the praise clean by leaving the filth unmentioned, which is exactly how harmful legacies persist.

I know that going forward I'll be more careful when I refer to the game. I know that I'm going to try and keep my discourse through this text I'm writing carefully framed around the flaws in the text's logic and not the egregious morality it's preaching, but that's already been hard with respect to the paladin... I can see it's not going to get easier with the thief.

What's a little ironic is that I don't care about the thief's purported badness as a character class. I don't care about stealing fictional objects, or killing fictional creatures or persons — I do care about the meta-framing of the DM as a living person abusing other living persons in a game setting. The two have nothing to do with each other in my mind.

 

Criticism by Submarine

Because I could, I reformatted the content I've been putting up on the wiki into PDF format, similar to my Lantern, as a gift to those who already support my writing and this blog.  If you donate $7 or more monthly, thank you!  I know that it's easier to read a PDF than is a wiki, while it also gives me a chance to play around and create a few images to go with the content.  The present content created this week managed to reach 24 pages of the PDF. Quite impressive.

The PDF can be found on my patreon page. I will continue to create the version that's on the wiki, but for those who want a little more, I'll make the effort and keep up the PDF file as well. It's a little more bothersome than cut and paste, took me about three hours today to reformat, but it also looks so nice I think it's worth it. 

I have been thinking about other things. The March issue for the Lantern is due the end of this month as an advance copy, so I'll be putting more time to that. Maxwell asked with the last post why I was doing this for AD&D and not for my own version — I gave an answer in a comment, but I felt I should do a better job of it, so let's wade in.

For a year I've been listening to JB of B/X Blackrazor (and others, but mostly JB) pitching hard for AD&D over other game systems. I fully support his agenda; he wants to send the message that in fact the game's only gotten worse since 1983 — and I'll throw in, without let-up — and he feels it best that others know this. "Just try it," he's saying, which is fair so far as it goes.

When I tried AD&D back in 1979,  how could I have known there was ever going to be another version? I didn't even know there was going to be an Unearthed Arcana, or that people would get excessively frustrated about clerics that weren't allowed to use bludgeoning weapons. I didn't know "fantasy" was going to get redefined, or that "role-playing" would be, or that the crummy little modules, which none of the DMs I played with at the time used, because they all felt they could do better — and so did we players — would one day become "classics" that people would be willing to play over and over? No, I didn't predict any of that. I assumed these were the books we had, that this was more than enough D&D for anyone, and that where there were problems, well, a little thought could fix that.

Sure, I noticed back in 1980, after I got my copy of the DMG, that the halfling druid didn't have an age roll. I saw that the gnome and the half-elf had no bonuses or penalties to their ability stats, which I thought was stupid given that they were non-humans just like the other four races. I could see with my teenage eyes that there was all kinds of stupid with AD&D. And I don't mean the clerical/mage weapon limitations! A child could recognise those characters had spells, why should they be given all the weapons too? Fighters didn't have spells! They deserved to rule over their section, right? Was obvious.

So in 1981 and '82, once I'd gotten my feet wet as a DM for more than a year, I began "fixing" stuff. I didn't wait for permission — the DMG made it perfectly clear it was already given. I talked over what I wanted to change with the players and we pooled ideas. When we tried the changes, they worked. We did not think someone else was going to come along and fix this stuff! That was crazy! Who would have? Someone else had already invented the GAME... how do you reinvent something that's already been invented?

With lots and lots of stupid, it turns out.

Forty-five years later, my game is still recognisable as AD&D, but obviously it isn't. AD&D is like the property that still faces the street, while I've bought all the back country behind the house and rebuilt this entire living space that only a few have seen. And when they do see it, like JB, they muse, they observe, they say, "Sure, you could do it that way," and then they go back to playing their crappy, shitty, ancient version of the broken game it always was and pat themselves on the back for not player a worse game. Which is, admittedly, a step up.

So why, as Maxwell asks, am I deliberately choosing to teach AD&D and not my game? It depends on how we look at it.

Yesterday I presented Chat's opinion of my approach to Introducing Gameplay without the editorial mode. How about we try it with:

"Where the writing wobbles is less about grammar than about consistency of register and the degree of commentary. You have two voices braided together: the instructor voice that is careful about sequencing, and the polemic voice that wants to settle scores with designers, nostalgia, and bad pedagogy. The polemic voice is not a problem in itself; it gives the book identity. The issue is that it sometimes expands inside a section that is otherwise doing careful, incremental work, and it can feel like a lateral digression just when the reader expects forward motion. For instance, “amateurs throwing soup at a wall” is vivid and memorable, but it also changes the temperature of the paragraph from explanatory to prosecutorial. If that is the intended effect, it should land at structural joints (openings, transitions, or brief asides) rather than midstream, so it reads as deliberate punctuation rather than loss of focus."

Translated, this is Chat saying, "You're making this personal," while in essence arguing that I should be unemotional all the time, if I want to be taken seriously.

That might carry some weight if it didn't smack of the High School teacher that says, "Criticism and sarcasm is fine for Mark Twain, but you're not him, so mind your p's and q's, mister." 

In wondering what I'm doing with these lateral digressions and temperature changes, one might consider how a book that purports to explain "how to play golf" works. Instructional books about golf, and a host of other past-times, are full of polemical rhetoric, calling out bad habits, bad teachers, bad traditions and bad advice constantly. The golf pro that writes a book always starts from the premise, "Everyone else is a fucking idiot," then they tone that position down until they're merely polemical and sarcastic. That is all I'm doing here. I could be much darker about AD&D, just as I am being with the White Box set. I'm holding back.

Just look at the fog that everyone who participates in this hobby has to breathe constantly. The culture is screaming with background noise, in the form of what the company writes, in what the company drops next, in the rules that local gameclubs impose, in jacktards like Brennan Lee Mulligan and his Madison Square Garden performance, in what Sly Flourish writes, in what Colville writes, in what spews forth from the business that is Critical Role, in hundreds of thousands of "I just don't get it" commentors on Reddit, in whatever DnD Beyond is churning out this week, to the people spending $25,000 in a weekend renting out castles to play D&D in... the absurdity of the nonsense is so loud, the air is so crammed with mediocrity and blaring nonsense, it's a wonder that anyone can actually play D&D. My tiny little comment about throwing soup at a wall is one sentence of tone-change; yet for the AD&D worshipper, who prays at the altar of White Plume Mountain, it's sacrilege.

This is a way to express the criticism under the radar. See, I'm explaining every weapon used in detail, but I'm also stating why this collection of polearms in fact makes no sense. I'm highlighting those things that AD&D deliberately sidestepped, like what does a character actually look like, or the illogic of age rolls. If a human cleric can cast the same spells with the same skill and power as an elven cleric, why does it take the human cleric only four years longer than the human fighter to emerge, but 400 years longer for an elf? What are they doing all that time? Not being fighters... or else every Elven cleric would have had six human lifetimes to amass enough points to be 20th level. Humans do it in one life-time. What, are elves just stupider than other beings? Hell, look at the Half-orc. What takes a minimum of 510 years for an elf takes them only 21.

So yes, I'm explaining AD&D. But I'm also showing where all the flaw are... where the rule does not exist, where the rule does not make sense, where the designers have plainly not thought it through, where the game needs attention and so on. Essentially, all the things I noticed the first time when I was 16... and began to fix. And haven't thought about since, because I moved on.

And gawd, there are so many flaws. Flaws that any player has to turn a blind eye to over and over. Assumptions about things that were never explained, that just are, that have to leave any newcomer to AD&D scratching their head. Why does a long sword do 1-12 damage against a giant opponent? Doesn't that just undermine the number of hit dice that the giant's been given? Where's the game value in that? How does having more meat make the mastodon more affected by the same sword swung by the same arm? Is it ever explained? No, you're just supposed to take it on face value. However you swing the rule, it makes no sense. If hit points are meat, then more meat should make it resistant to sword damage. If hit points are fatigue or luck, then how does size affect anything? If hit points are a combat abstraction, then why abstract it in this way for these weapons, but not all the weapons and not all to the same amount?

The minute I took the large-damage model away from my players in what, 1983, the long sword's dominance evaporated. It became just another weapon. Weapons no one would take before suddenly got interesting. The erasure of the rule improved the game overnight, all my players said so at the time.

Anyway, addressing the large-damage column was what I was supposed to write about next today, and I didn't have the energy. So I worked on the PDF instead.