Design Thoughts: Know Your Place 1

Let me get this out of the way first, because like the oppressive noise I make while assaulting a plate of hot wings, there's no avoiding it. This post is going to at points be so far up its own ass that I'll qualify as a proctologist. I'm going to be so academic that all the sex I've ever had will un-happen, a process that promises to be just as confusing for my former partners as the initial act was. Probably, there will be less crying this time. Possibly more, though. I'm super emotionally fragile these days.

But these thoughts to follow have been rattling around in my noggin like the squirrel bones in my car's engine block and, like the squirrel bones, I really need to get them out.

Role With Me On This

I'm sure there are people far smarter and less having-had-sex than I am who have tackled how we parse the roles of player and facilitator in RPGs. You should go find them and read them. I won't link them here because reading is for nerds and as we've established I'm a prolific sex-haver.

"Yeah, I know where a cliborus is, duh."

In any case let's look at some examples of how some notable RPGs proffer the role of player and facilitator; what they do, should do, etc.

Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition, on "The Role of the Players":

Once completed, your character serves as your representative in the game.

On "The Role of the Dungeon Master": 

The DM is in charge of the adventure, which appears in the adventure book, while the characters navigate the adventure’s hazards and decide where to explore. [...] The DM determines the results of the adventurers’ actions and narrates what the characters experience.

If you look at the Player's Handbook, you get (pg. 5) that a DM "describes the environment", "narrates the results". Players "describe what they want to do". I could do a whole post about the language of negotiation in D&D. 

If we look at Blades in the Dark, we get something a little different.

On "The Players" (pg. 2). Note that the bolding is not mine, that's in the book. John Harper wanted this to stand out.

This is the players’ core responsibility: they engage with the premise of the game, seeking out interesting opportunities for crime in the haunted city—taking big risks against powerful foes and sending their characters into danger.

On "The Gamemaster" (pg. 3)

The GM establish the dynamic world around the characters, [...] The GM plays all the non-player characters [...] The GM helps organize the conversation of the game so it's pointed toward the interesting elements of play.

I didn't choose those games arbitrarily. For better or worse, D&D is a mass large enough to have its own gravity within the RPG ecosystem; I don't think it's controversial to suggest many will enter the hobby here by mere virtue of its reach. And so, one might proffer that there are vast swathes of gamers who have internalized D&D's roles. The character are representative, advocating for their ambitions (mechanical, narrative, thematic, etc.) beneath the DM (who is "in charge", "determines the results").

"The enemy wizard casts Acid Orb, how do you plead?"

 And Blades in the Dark is a popular non-D&D RPG that is at least large/influential enough to have spawned its own ecosystem (and even a TV show). More importantly, its design came explicitly out of an interrogation of the power dynamics/narrative negotiations which are at D&D's bones. To quote Harper in February 2012 (five years before BitD was published):

"I wonder if it makes sense to look at the process you're currently using (your creative agenda, rulings, constitution, player/GM roles) as the game qua game. That is, there is no formal final state as a goal, but rather the functional implementation of this method and its evolution serves as "the game." I can certainly imagine a rules text that laid out the methodology as you're presenting it here, along with examples of rulings to form a baseline toolkit. That would be a complete game, IMO, and probably far more useful as a teaching text than the presentation of the final rules set when it's "finished."

There are plenty of ways to organize RPG design theory, and here I'm putting D&D at one end and Blades in the Dark on the other. One negotiates from a place of hierarchical authority (at its worst, 'mother-may-I'), while the other negotiates from a place more akin to Lev Vygotsky's pedagogical work (with the GM as a "more knowledgeable other" organizing the fiction-conversation, rather than strictly leading it).

To be honest, a child psychologist seems really apt to understanding RPG players.

I'm actually going to resist the urge to keep blathering; this is the third draft of this post and it feels only halfway done.

Keep on the lookout for part 2!

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.