An invitation (and warning)
On Sunday I am going to start an open-table game of Dungeons and Dragons (ish). At the Empress ale house, 7pm (a little late can be OK, spectators welcome as long as they are ready for me to trick them into actually playing). It is, in the words of one curious potential player, “a really really informal low key…D&D day”. It will hopefully continue on a weekly basis. There is no expectation of attendance, and if you are at all interested, dropping in occasionally is a totally good way to play.
Edmonton readers: maybe you should come? No experience preferred.
At the same time that I extend an open invitation (OK, I can handle 15 people probably, maybe even twenty, above that things get pretty tough), I want to lay a few things out. Some thoughts that I feel ready to explain for the first time. Perhaps to the kinds of people who I imagine/hope read this blog, this is an explanation for why I find D&D interesting as play and as part of my practice. But I’m also very conscious of the fact that my desire to run an open table is going to make my job hard, the part where I have to establish a safe space for play and direct the tone to allow the players to do interesting things.
Yesterday I tricked a bunch of people into rolling up characters—they were largely male gamer types to start with, some with a pretty good idea about what D&D meant to them, or even regular players. I want some of these people in my game. But I want more people who have no clue, because they have better ideas. My job is going to be preventing or managing culture clash, while still keeping the liveliness of conflicting expectations at the table. Here it is then, a warning: if you like D&D I hope you’ll think mine is better but it’s not what you expect.
D&D is fucked
Take a look—well, actually probably don’t—at this mess of a story-games thread in which “Gygaxian naturalism” (the principle, invented by one of D&D’s co-authors, that monsters should be in some way naturalistic, believable, possessing of ecosystems) leads to squicky situations like: oh yeah, of course all of these monsters live in “primitive” tribal societies as well as being inherently evil. Which is to say: Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G that stands for Gygax.
The thread itself is an example of why these things are dangerous as much as the material it’s actually about. As it’s approaching godwin’s law, someone asks: why would Gygax write something fascist? and I have to say: because he was a disgusting fucking colonialist neo-con. Another story.
So this is an explanation of why I’m running D&D (not D&D), in a custom little rulebook that I assembled from open source documents and rewrote big sections of. Not only does it hark back to the early days when playing something someone had mimeographed was pretty normal (not that I remember such days), but because I am making a better game. I don’t think I’m being unreasonably pretentious here.
How am I escaping from the bro-world of published games, how have I dealt with this same dangerous subject, and how will I do even better in the future?
My game has a very simplified set of rules compared to currently published versions. It’s based on open designs from the “OSR”, a rough group of bloggers and players who approximate imaginary old versions of the game. Great. I’ve talked lots about this: increasing player agency by not codifying their options, exploring constructed authenticities, mixing in a little bit of modern story-game design junk, ritualizing play. What else?
The game, like its source material, is about travel and transformations. Unlike a lot of fantasy literature, we’re going to be clear about how that plays out: that literature has spent a lot of the last two hundred years erasing the fact that european folklore is as full of transgendered folk heroes, travel in other worlds, troublesome land spirits and terrible bargains as the folklores that we white people like to act all shocked about (oh my, “trickster figures”). That’s the good stuff.
I am thinking very hard about how to set up my games to enable players to challenge the narratives of “fantasy” as genre. I think I have some ideas beginning. Here are a couple of reflections:
I mentioned above, twice, that my preferred method of recruiting players is via trickery. It’s very simple: the game is based around a powerful ritual of rolling the dice to test your vision of ordered narrative against the unpredictable group. More or that test in a minute. But I start by offering the dice. Once you’ve rolled a few stats—and even more once you’re shopping for equipment, you’re in. And you get to roll again and improvise desperately as soon as you bring that character into the game.
But as I foreground this ritual I leave some parts out. I have not yet asked a player what gender their character is, despite this for some reason being a pretty common thing to see in a rulebook. Yeah, generally it results in yesterday’s situation: a bunch of people, then male, rolling up characters that are assumed to share their gender. But in Glasgow a female player was playing a dwarf of unspecified gender named Chad—and didn’t bother to even address in passing this conflict of expectation until well into the game. That’s nice. I won’t ask you to write anything down until it makes a difference, or until you chose to. This is part of why I am attracted to the simplest rules.
In the Glasgow game, the first time the players discovered otherworldly creatures—goblins—there was a stop. Because fantasy literature trained them to see them as primitive people, and they didn’t want to be playing a game about genocide, thank goodness. I will fight Gygaxian Naturalism to my last breath. Here’s how it works:
The player characters are necessarily people on the edge. Law and Chaos is necessarily trouble: the characters are neither of society nor of the wild, but are engaged in a kind of dialogue of colonialism on the edges of those two spaces, neither of which is actually very nice. That’s why they are magic. Monsters are a manifestation of this: in the rules they emerge spontaneously (“random encounters”) caused by nothing other than the player’s exploration. Unlike Gygax, I don’t see why this can’t be true in the fiction too. That’s what monsters are—the players’ characters are an aberration in the world that cause all kinds of trouble. “Heroes” in quotes like Bowie.
The big one: when tough questions come up, it’s for the players to answer them. Where do monsters come from? Ask the cleric.
And where from there? Let’s play and find out.
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emanuel-alec said:
LUV
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