Warning: Contains Abusive Language

"This is a role-playing game. It takes place entirely in our collective imagination. I tell a story and you make choices in the story. Let's begin. You are all standing on a country road. Legend has it, the evil dragon Draconis dwells nearby, guarding a massive pile of treasure.  Working as a team, your goal is to track down the dragon, kill him, and then claim the treasure as your own.  Jeff, your turn."

Abed Nadir, Community S02 E14

Community was an infantile, facile, poorly written angst fest for miserable people desperately seeking a program that depicted characters more pathetic than themselves.  I did not watch it past, I think, about halfway through the second episode.  I just wanted to be sure we understood my perspective on the show.

On July 7th, Netflix and Hulu pulled the episode quoted above.  I could give a shit, both for the loss and for the reasons they pulled it.  The brief snippets I've seen of the show make it appear a deliberate civilization-wrecking shit-show, using approximately the same logics regarding free speech that made Larry Flynt's Hustler so prominent and profitable.  The fact that society has chosen to arbitrarily die on the hill of stopping one or two particular egregious improprieties the taste of the month does not justify the hundreds of other sickening degeneracies present in this and many other present shows that pass unnoticed.

However, the linked article above turned up on my feed, and as it was about Dungeons and Dragons (and yes, I had previously heard of the "infamous, beloved" episode), I chose to read it.  It is the first time I've seen a piece of this episode and ... well, it was obviously a post waiting to be written.  Since I am bored enough to be reading shit off my feed, I might as well write it now, though I am not scheduled to write a post on this blog until the 20th.

I've seen a lot of stuff over the years take a dump on my passion, but this steamed.

"Your turn"?  Huh?  That's not even accurate to the way the word is used in the game.  It is never anybody's fucking turn.  The DM does not turn to a particular player and say, "your turn."  Not in any game I've ever seen or heard about.  Jeebus.

"Working as a team," I am now going to give you a job, because I'm your employer here.  I am offering you pay in the form of a make-believe dragon horde.  Now do as I tell you because my version of "collective imagination" is that you're a bunch of pawns and I'm your gawddamned master.

The reader might have noticed, I'm pretty angry just now.

It would probably be best if I deleted everything I've written so far and started again.  I have no doubt I've offended people (since Community was so-so popular, in the way that television shows would have been taken off the air for piss-poor ratings when television had social relevance, like in the 1990s).  No doubt, there are those who will argue that the show "gets better" following this obscene introduction to the game.  This is the kind of post I keep saying I'm going to stop writing, because it's extremely negative and obverse to the process of teaching people how to expand and improve their D&D games.

Here's a clue.  Don't tell your players what to do.  Tell them where they are and pick something more interesting than a crossroads.

D&D does not "take place in our collective imagination."  If you believe that, then you don't know a damn thing about preparing for a game, managing your skills or your equipment, using a character sheet or reading the emotional state of other people in the room who are real and NOT imaginary.  What we choose to talk about may be imaginary, but the process of talking and playing the game is concrete and definitely real.  No doubt, however, some readers here don't know what I'm talking about.

"Our collective imagination" is a bullshit phrase that doesn't actually mean anything.  Try writing 300 words defining the concept without talking about any fixed game element, and without descending into meaningless purple prose that isn't just more of the same manure.  How is our imagination "collective"?  Discourse and planning are collective, but those things aren't done with our imagination, they are done according to established rules which the game defines.  Or, at least, that a game prior to 5e defines.  For our imagination to be "collective," we'd all need to be telepathic and we'd have to not be individuals.  The words sound fun and coercive, but that's just because you're a dumb human.  You're easily distracted by things that sound like they ought to be possible.

As an aside, I'm finding "cancel culture" very interesting.  I'm old, so my perspective is a little different from the younger folks.  Long, long ago, when the world was new and I was very young, if I wanted to see porn I had to go to a bookstore and ask quietly to see what was "under the counter."  This would enable me to buy a video from a choice of two options.  Anti-porn legislation, and all the legislation in existence that banned virtually everything considered a "vice" in the late 1970s and early 80s, that was a "cancel culture" far more rigorous and absolute than this one.

Only things that aren't worth hiding under a counter truly get cancelled.

Proof We're a Cult

Those readers who recently heard my guest appearance on a podcast will recall that I went on a diatribe about the way D&D is treated by the media.  No doubt, some of you strongly disagree with me.  I can only say that my experience with the media's missing the point has a long history.

Still, I try to have an open mind.  Which brings me to the recent article about D&D in last month's The New Yorker magazine.

Let me start by saying that it's nice to see that The New Yorker has become aware that people are still playing Dungeons and Dragons.  I don't mean that sarcastically: the writer makes it fairly clear in the article that there was every reason to believe the game had drifted into an enthusiasm-free obscurity by the time of Gygax's death in 2008.  The context suggests, with a sort of wonder, that people are still playing that game and that it seems to have retained an unexpected popularity ~ though the article makes clear that "the culture was receptive again" only after the amazing release of fifth edition completely revived the game from the brink of death.

Now, that may have exaggerated the writer's presentation.  From this point, I'm going to assume you've stopped reading me and that you've acquainted yourself with the article, so you can make up your own minds.  While the article is fresh in your mind, and you're mulling over the research the writer did into D&D, I'd like to explain that a typical fee for getting an article published with The New Yorker is $5 a word.  As the article is 2,614 words, one might impress on one's mind that the price tag here was about $12,500.  I offer this tidbit for the sake of perspective.  Measure the article however you will, but measure it with the article's value in mind.

On the whole, I think it is a positive article.  This alone makes it unique among those I've read.  Yes, the writer Neima Jahromi is off base on a few points, but as a media outsider writing about an unusual activity enjoyed fervently by a non-media driven agenda, the mistakes made are reasonable.  Thus the title of this post; when you're a cult, you can't expect non-believers to understand the basic dogma.

When I talk about the media's treatment of the activity, Jahromi gives an excellent example, with this description of ~ apparently ~ what I used to be in 1979:

"This turn of events might shock a time traveller from the twentieth century. In the seventies and eighties, Dungeons & Dragons, with its supernatural themes, became the fixation of an overheated news media in the midst of a culture war. Role players were seen as closet cases, the least productive kind of geek, retreating to basements to open maps, spill out bags of dice, and light candles by which to see their medieval figurines. They squared with no one. Unlike their hippie peers, they had dropped out without bothering to tune in."

She contextualizes it correctly, where she says, "Roleplayers were SEEN ..."  Yes.  That is how we were seen.  Unfortunately, Jahromi then does nothing to investigate this characterization, or suggest it may not have been the case.  Instead, she let's the media's description stand as is, as I would expect from a reporter who cannot be bothered to dig up a source to ask the question, "Were D&D players actually what the media depicted?"

But then, this would have ended in another 500 words of content, meaning another $2,500 out of The New Yorker's pocket, so perhaps the magazine just couldn't afford it.

So, the depiction stands.  And after some further discussion of how D&D is "everywhere now" ~ with the concurrent argument that it wasn't everywhere ten years ago ~ and that the Big Bang Theory highlighted the existence of the game to millions (or at least to The New Yorker, along with a few game stores in massively player-thick New York city), the article begins to expose its actual agenda.

D&D will save children from video games.

See, it's a wonderful thing that these boardgame clubs are including D&D in their line-up, since the games popularity proves that it's capable of drawing children away from their dark holes and out into the bright sunshine, where they can enjoy the ages-lost feeling of talking to people, before it is too late for them.

This brings me to a paragraph late in the article ... perhaps the most insulting, abusive, blatantly ignorant statement I have ever heard anyone write or utter in connection with RPGs.

"... the terms of hiding have changed. When mainstream American culture was largely about standing in a factory line, or crowding into smoke-stained boardrooms for meetings, or even dropping acid and collapsing in a field for your hundred-person “be-in,” the idea of retiring to a dimly lit table to make up stories with three or four friends seemed fruitless and antisocial. Now that being American often means being alone or interacting distantly—fidgeting with Instagram in a crosswalk, or lying prone beneath the heat of a laptop with Netflix streaming over you—three or four people gathering in the flesh to look each other in the eye and sketch out a world without pixels can feel slightly rebellious, or at least pleasantly out of place."

That is simply incredible.  As a feat of writing, I must pause and say, yes, well done.  The sentence construction here is excellent.  The theoretical balance between the depiction of the age past and the depiction of the present age is damn near perfect.  The nuance of the verbs and imagery is remarkable.  I am not, repeat not, being sarcastic.  I am a writer.  I recognize good writing when I see it.  Jahromi is a good writer and this paragraph proves it.  She is earning her money.  The New Yorker hires good people.

Unpacking it, I'll also pause to argue that, from the writer's point of view, this undoubtedly sounds logical.  I would guess, however, that she doesn't have the least idea of what the 1970s were like, having somehow connected D&D with factories and board rooms, as if to suggest that no other cultural circles featured in the world of 1970s science fiction, in film and literature, or the explosion of sexual role-play and film porn, or the technological explosion of video games and accessible computer programming.  I have to believe that Jahromi was not a conscious adult experimenting with sex and culture in 1979.

But yes, it's true, the media depiction of friends "retiring to a dimly lit table" does seem fruitless and antisocial. Of course, those of us who were playing in brightly lit rooms with up to 40 people at a time, as every table in a study hall was packed with gamers playing just as socially as they could, have to stare agog at the words of a writer as, however well she writes, goes right up her own ass, a dimly lit place all of its own.

Following that, the balance of the paragraph feeds the "save the children" argument: we must rescue children from instagram and Netflix by letting them see each other in this pixel-less world that is so much more real and nice and decent for everyone.

Sigh.

Given the perspective of the article, that it began with a gamestore in New York, which is getting along a little better because they added an unexpected game to their roster, it only follows that the writer of the article will view the world from the inside of that bottle.  It is painfully clear that the internet was not consulted as part of this article's research.  The word, "internet" only appears twice in the whole article: once in a quote from the television creator of "Community" and then immediately after in the next sentence referring to that quote. Here's the quote:

"The internet really allowed everyone to realize that everyone was a nerd."

That is probably true in the mind of a television producer, but in actual fact the internet really allowed everyone to realize that everyone is a troll.  Followed immediately by the immediate awareness that salespeople on the internet are the first to try to express a tautology, thinking that's what being brilliant sounds like.

As a nerd, still able to make everyone in a room feel uncomfortable just by looking at them, I have some contention with the argument that D&D is popular "now" because everyone is, in fact, a nerd.  If so, why is it that I'm still spoken of as "strange" and "fucked up," not to mention "autistic," by people who still reach for a label to explain something they don't understand.

Frankly, I think D&D is popular with those people who are likely to turn up at a board game place because those are the same people that were likely to turn up at a board game place 40 years ago.  And yes, we had stores where they played board games back in the days of factory workers and sweaty board rooms.  More to the point, D&D didn't "save" kids from video games in 1979, either, when the games were not nearly as enticing as they are now.  I wouldn't expect a huge bust up of the video game market because the media is willing to admit that, lo and behold, a lot of people play D&D.

Go figure.

Smart People

This will probably be the strangest post ever found on this blog, because it is a radical departure from every sort of post I've written; in another blog, the post wouldn't seem odd at all, but coming from me some readers will check to see if this is really Tao of D&D.  Rest assured, I'll be writing another brief post in about an hour, so try to overlook this one if it is just too weird.

I watch a lot of British Television.  This is partly because the British are willing to let people talk about sex openly, partly because people are allowed to swear and act like human beings, but it is MOSTLY because being smart, blatantly smart, on television is something that is celebrated and encouraged.  People willfully make fun of stupidity, they denegrate behaviour which Americans and Canadians tolerate, and overall there is an attitude that, on the whole, the people who act badly are not those pointing out that there are people in the world who act badly.

There are a number of shows on you tube that can be watched, which are so different from North American television as to be from another world.  These follow a premise that allows the presenters to speak in a non-scripted, witty manner, and to banter among themselves.  Shows like Q.I., You Have Been Watching, Eight out of Ten Cats, News Wipe, Would I Lie to You, Was it Something I Said, The Bubble, TV Heaven Telly Hell, and the Graham Norton Show, where Americans turn up on a program where alcoholic drinking is allowed on camera and even encouraged.  Watch Bill Murray get drunk on this episode as it progresses - after clearly being drunk at the start.  Be warned, however, that Graham Norton is extraordinarily gay and absolutely no one cares.  And, too, I'd like to throw in some radio programs, such as Heresy and The Unbelievable Truth.

Now, I like smart people.  I am a smart person, and sometimes I feel as though I am the only one that exists.  I also like very witty people, and very sarcastic people.  And this is why, for reasons that escape me, I find myself following closely the careers of two utterly remarkable people, neither of whom could be who they are outside of Britain ... namely, Victoria Coren and David Mitchell.  Who, after appearing on various panel shows after 2007, were married on November 17, 2012.

It would be impossible to explain how deeply vicious both individuals are, or how intelligent.  For me, this goes a long way to summing up Mitchell, but it really is only a bit of gathering how fast the man's mind works, which is evident from watching 10 O'clock Live, which features Jimmy Carr, Charlie Brooker and Lauren Laverne as well.

Coren has to be understood partly through episodes like this from Heresy (where she speaks with Mitchell before they got married), her hosting of Only Connect, rants like this and her obsession with poker.

I am fascinated by these two people, and I particularly enjoy the occasional comment they'll make about each other as they appear on various panel shows, where everyone in British Television knows everyone else, and will occasionally tease either him or her.

The motivation for this post, which has nothing whatsoever to do with D&D, is from this excerpt of David Mitchell's biography, David Mitchell: Back Story:



No one in the North American media would ever, ever, be this genuine.  Smart people should only marry smart people.

Proof That People Do Not Get Worked Up Over Star Wars

Poking Fun

I had a housewarming party this last weekend, which went very well. A good friend of mine brought me what has to have been a gag gift—him being a D&D player himself—a copy of the made-for-TV, 1982 film, Mazes and Monsters.

I detect a shudder among those reading.

I had seen this film precisely one time before: in 1982. I eagerly anticipated the movie and was sure to be sitting at the screen when it came on, as it was the first media acknowledgement of the game that I’d heard of. I think there were a lot of us who, ignorant of the content (there was rarely any previous information distributed on ANY media then), were very angry with the film. I know I was. Angry with the message, angry that they got not one detail accurate, angry that the other side of the story was never going to get its say.

This is not a review. I don’t really care about the film itself; all made-for-TV movies are shit. I would like to say that if it were actually possible for players to “lose their sense of reality” within the game, we would all be playing MORE, not less. Would that the game were that engrossing.

Someone on a blog last week (I won’t say who, but he knows who he is) made an excited post about the movie Hawk the Slayer, asking why had he never heard of this movie before? I would answer that it was because he was lucky enough not to have been born in 1964 and thus not to have been 16 when the movie came out in 1980. It, with other films like Krull (1983), Clash of the Titans (1981) and Dragonslayer (1981) were part of a whole genre of cheesy fantasy films that came out in that period—partly, I suppose, because there was a groundswell of interest in fantasy fiction that was making itself clear to those making movies. But oh my god were these movies bad. Those people I played with at the time would grind their teeth whenever the subject of fantasy film was raised, wondering when in hell someone was going to make a good film. The best we had so far was Conan the Barbarian (1982), which was not well loved due to Schwarzenegger, who thankfully speaks about 8 words, total, through the entire film.

But all these films have become cult favorites—even Mazes and Monsters—because role-players have always “embraced the cheese.” As far back as my memory goes, the type of nerdy loner who enjoyed a good Saturday night with a D&D campaign was the same lad who Sunday night would take in a World’s Worst Film Festival at the vintage theatre downtown. There is something about the mindset that says that a really good film is impossible, so I will find really bad films and laugh at them.

I was born stodgy, I suppose, as I’ve never found anything funny in a bad film. I do not titter at bad dialogue, I wince…and then wonder why its not possible to have writers like this taken out and shot, or how it comes to be that people are willing to raise millions of dollars in order to put their shit screenplays on film, and by that time I’m out of the theatre and on my way home. I would rather watch bowling than a bad film.

The embracement of the cheese does not, however, end with the love of film. Many DMs, not blessed with any more talent than the average writer of fantasy screenplays (Uwe Boll comes to mind), produce campaigns which, if movies, would have all the angst of Ron Howard’s Willow (late for the genre, it came out in 1988). Princesses in need of saving, threatened villages, mindless quests, never ending and irrational dungeons (filled with hundreds of traps intended to guard…what, exactly?)…it is all part of the same stale block of Gouda. Most players love it; attempts at anything deeper are doomed to failure, since your personal dungeon master wasn’t born a C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien. Hell, not even a J.K. Rowling.

(What is it with the initials?)

So cheese is all they have. The protestors against the evil satanic cult of roleplaying should be aware that there are far more moments in a game where the players are making up bad puns about the last monster they’ve slaughtered, or how many times they can “surprise rape” their fellow party members, then fiendishly inventing ways to sacrifice real live victims in the game. At the heart of it, the gamers are the first to poke fun.

The myth of a “serious” campaign, that elusive thing, is the wheel upon which most DMs are broken, as players with their Mountain Dew and cheesies settle into their roles of Dave, Bob and Brian, ready to make hay of B.A.’s efforts. (More initials. Coincidence?)

It is the genre. Whatever Mazes and Monsters got wrong, it did get one thing right: people spouting fantasy fiction at each other around a kitchen look like morons to an outsider, any outsider. And we laugh at morons. Even at the other morons playing with us. Even at ourselves, being morons, while we play. Every once in awhile I find myself muttering phrases from the mouth of some NPC, and I have to wince.

Which is why no one is ever going to take this game as seriously as many of the bloggers or game pundits would like. It will never be cool. It will never be hip. It’s just such an easy target.