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.