The Joy of Solo Gaming

"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."

Honoré de Balzac

Let me establish my pedigree on the topic of playing games by myself; it is a legacy handed to me from my very own father.

My father had the kind of childhood that would inspire jealously in any well-adjusted aspiring comedian. It's often best when hearing about this kind of childhood to breathlessly say 'ha ha what' in a careful neutral tone. That said, it's not really my story to tell. 

(Except, okay, just this one bit: when my father was in military school they would have snowball fights except instead of snowballs they used rocks and there wasn't any snow.)

But also, it's the kind of childhood that left him with a lot of free time on his hands and not always a surfeit of friends with which to take advantage of that free time. 

(My father once wistfully reminisced to me about how he'd play football behind his parents' property. If you ran hard enough and recklessly enough, clipping off a tree was very much like being tackled by someone)

I don't know if I'd have had the creativity to figure out how get beat up by trees rather than people. But then my father is an intelligent and successful man with his own business and (presumably, by now) friends, while I have this blog so what the fuck do I know.

It didn't stop there, though. In Avalon Hill's World War 2 boardgames--Jutland & PanzerBlitz, among others--my father found a way for dead trees to also brutalize him.

This is the lineage from which I descend, this is the inheritance I have been given. Some nights I wake up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding as I try to squash the urge to hurl myself face-first into a nearby oak.

 The sins of the father shall be visited on the son

Joking aside, playing games by yourself need not be as weird as it sounds off-hand. Especially with a heady, intellectualized boardgame the central appeal may exist regardless of an opponent. The puzzle may yet remain; your opponent then is yourself, or your own expectations. In a historical wargame, it might be the historical result-- there are few joys as sweet to a grognard as the smug satisfaction of outperforming Napoleon from the comforting dimness of your basement or garage.

I think we often think of authorship as two ships passing in the night. The game's author disappears, and the player's authorship begins. In RPGs, people talk at length about their stories at the table. They talk about the collaboration necessary to create those stories with other players. And yet, the game itself is there. Its authorship remains long after the designer has gone home with their small paycheck and large growler of bathtub-hooch.

Even if you repudiate that--and you shouldn't, because I'm handsome--a game system nonetheless represents a complicating factor in your own authorship. Mere engagement with these systems can tilt and nudge you out of your own biases, quirks, habits, foibles, and so on. They can help develop your bicameral mind-- switching between sides in a boardgame, viewpoints and perspectives in an RPG.

Anyway, if you've been to my Twitter (you should go make that mistake) you've undoubtedly seen the occasional battle-report (for example, Captain Finlay Stuart's naval adventures). Maybe you've seen me champion one of my favorite RPGs, Ironsworn by Shawn Tomkin. Maybe you've seen me and my friend Eric play a homebrew Fantasy Classic Mediterranean version of it, The Wine Sea Sagas as a GMless cooperative game.

You might rightly come to the conclusion that I carry on the legacy handed to me, and you can expect to see more of that legacy enshrined here.

RPG Rambling: The Bibliarchy

 The Reign of the Bibliarchy

I won't pretend to know how widely the aphorism is known, but I think at least among wargamers and those interested in cartography there is a saying: "The map is not the territory". The linguistic equivalent is "The word is not the thing" which might be more immediately intuitive to understand. Both refer to and attempt to undermine the misapprehension of a thing for its representation.

In wargaming, this can be invoked purposefully. I was part of a Kriegsspiel game in which the umpire specifically noted this to be true-- we could rely generally on what the provided maps showcased, but not in exactitude. The precision of our measurements of the map would not translate to similar precision when our armies marched. That doesn't mean the map is useless-- it retains the structure of the underlying reality, after all, even where it omits or transforms detail.

The purpose of this blogpost is not to opine about how I totally and certainly won that Kriegsspiel game hands down and anyone who says otherwise is a liar and not nearly as handsome as me.

Rather, it's to pivot that line of thought to RPGs. If the map is not the territory, if the word is not the thing, then the book is not the game.

This springboards from a conversation I had with someone--the details aren't hugely relevant, except that I'm handsome--about the "Core" of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Their position was that the Player's Handbook represented the "Core"; that the most useful text you could give someone in order to play 5e was the PHB. I balked at that.

I balked because, fundamentally, I've come to believe the book is not the game.

Now, the first prong of my argument was that if there is to be some Holy Bible of 5e--an essential text which enshrines the "Core" of the game--then it definitely isn't the PHB. But that's an argument which adopts as true the notion that there is (or should be) a Holy Bible of 5e whatsoever.

The book is not the game, though.

Neither is it the social performance, it needs to be said. The interlineated vectors of performance, authorship, co-operation; these are also not the game. People sitting at a table playing pretend is a game, undoubtedly, but it's not 5e. It is no more 5e than the dead paper and inert ink of the PHB is 5e.

"Wow," I hear you say, "This sounds like a lot of bullshit."

Well, yeah, obviously it is. My point--burred and blunt though it may be--is that 5e only exists as an accretion of table performance and textual object. It unites the two discrete texts of oral and chirographic culture (as described by Dr. Ong) into a single body-- which, I'll argue, is one of the things that makes RPGs as an art form so fascinating. It cannot be comfortably either, and so it is both.

But aside my admittedly academic self-stroking on this, there's another reason it is important to repeat the mantra that the book is not the game. There's a reason it is important for RPGs and those who play them to stop treating the textual objects as though they are preeminent or definitive in some theological sense.

Bluntly, as soon as introduce some kind of canonicity to an RPG text you're inviting some True Scotsmanning bullshit. Communities may organize themselves around different canons--I look to the grogs of old, the OD&D versus AD&D shitspitters--but they all lead to the same gatekeeping nonsense.

"That's not the real [game]"

We don't need canonicity, bibliarchy, or textual supremacy in order to recognize the importance and value of rules. Of the mechanics and clever structures which a text enshrines. Of the hard blood, sweat, and tears that underpaid designers pour into these widgets for us to play with. We can place value in these texts without putting them on a pedestal.

Arguing about texts--and rules, and mechanics, and all the numbers therein--can be a game.

But the text is not the game.

Welcome to the Blog!

 I'm Colin Mr. Coolguy

And I love history, wargames, and historical wargaming. Also boardgames. And RPGs. I love a lot of stuff, it's what makes me so handsome. If you're here, it's because you found my blog! Possibly it's because you're my mother, possibly it's because you got lost searching for erotica, and possibly you followed some Twitter shitpost here.

I'm not here to judge, I'm here to inform and entertain. Occasionally arouse.

What can you expect? At the moment I've got a couple of projects I'm working on. In no particular order:

• Occasional boardgaming with attendant (not entirely sober) blow-by-blow accounts.
• You want examples? I got examples:
• Livetweeting GMT's "Here I Stand"
  
• Livetweeting GMT's "Sword of Rome"
  
• Livetweeting Ares Games' "War of the Ring"
  
• Game design: You can find some of my "finished" work at The Phantom Rollbooth. Additionally, I'm working on...
• Schwerpunkt - A rules-lite wargame for the Thirty Years War
• Swounds! - A reskin of Shawn Tompkin's Ironsworn, for a pseudo-Renaissance aesthetic
• Consuls & Strategos - A wargame campaign system for the Roman invasions of Greece
• Miniature painting: I collect Age of Sail naval miniatures, Italian Wars 10mm, a variety of 28mm fantasy, and additionally make a lot of my own paper tokens.
• Battle reports: And how! Up until now a lot of my stuff has gone on Twitter, but this blog is partly to create a better archive of these battle reports.
• For example, The Continuing Adventures of Captain Finlay Stuart

Don't expect this to be a consistent space, nor one filled with homogenous content. Think of me as the wargaming equivalent of a rich lesbian aunt who sweeps in unexpectedly, rich with experience and unanticipated gifts, only to disappear for an unspecified length of time.

If you have a thirsty desire to get in contact with me, feel free to leave a comment on any post. If I don't like you, I'll ignore you. If you're racist or generally a shitbag, I'll delete you. If I love you, I still might ignore you but by accident.

Otherwise, you can contact me out by email (thephantomrollbooth@gmail.com), Twitter (@ColinItLikeISee), or Discord (pliantreality#3911).