If you type the words “Svenny”
or “Wurú
the Unnameable”
into Twitter, you won’t get anything besides crickets – even with
the popular DnD or RPG hashtags.
If you type the words “Jim
Darkmagic”
or “Sly
Flourish”
in a Dragonsfoot thread, you will get no reaction either – a
big fat zilch.
These are two separate, self-contained ecosystems.
Sly Flourish is never mentioned on either Dragonsfoot or ODD74, and
the good old Jakállan
Underworld is never, ever
discussed or evoked on Twitter.
Why is that?
It’s all the same game, isn’t it? It is all
part of the same hobby. How in the world did Dungeons
& Dragons grow into two mutually
exclusive, parallel multiverses? When did this unholy schism happen?
Well, it “happened”
slowly and gradually, like any other fundamental change. A good chunk
of the first generation of OD&D
/ AD&D
players didn’t really get into Vampire:
The Masquerade and other such games:
they became what we now call grognards – they stick to one system
and play with the same old books they bought in the seventies. I’m
a bit of a grognard myself, to be honest. I still run a First Edition
AD&D
campaign, simply because it’s awesome – flaws and all – and why
the hell not?
The nineties saw a significant influx of new,
younger players. White Wolf and its line of storytelling games
brought in more women players than ever before. The old dungeon crawl
lost most if not all of its appeal. The
focus was now on character interactions: protagonists and allies,
rivals and archfoes. In one word:
backgrounds.
Yes, White Wolf did
publish an awful lot of material; in
the end, the whole affair felt more like a writers collective
than a gaming company. Those
innumerable clanbooks and supplements added much “fluff”
to the hobby of role-playing games. In retrospect, it may have been a
necessary reaction to the overly technical and realist
mechanics of the late eighties – when three distinct tables and one
location chart were needed for every single backswing of your
fighter’s broadsword.
Rich storyline, or complex game mechanics? That is
the question.
The folks over at Dragonsfoot favor the game
mechanics. “This
is how the game is supposed to be played, and if you do otherwise,
you’re doing it wrong.”
The crowd on Twitter seem to favor the storyline.
“We
are all telling this story together, and every character brings his
or her own uniqueness to the proceedings.”
One could go as far as
call it opposite political views.
Everyone must follow the same rules and gaming
etiquette, and do it exactly as it is supposed to be done.
Is this the Left, or the Right?
Everyone is welcome to do as they see fit, thus
bringing more texture and flavor to the shared experience of tabletop
role-playing. Is this the Right, or the
Left?
What is the mysterious Left, anyway? Is it
freedom? The sharing economy? The absence of social hierarchy? No
rules? But also, wealth
redistribution? Everyone being equal?
– And what is the mysterious Right? Tradition? Rules? Some people
being better than others? But also, entrepreneurship? Freedom to do
business?
Both sides demand “rules”
for some things and “freedom”
for other things. The only real societal split is around where to put
up fences, and where to free range.
Is there
overlapping somewhere?
I
want to see a
table of crunch
gurus
sitting back and laughing as one of their fellow players chants,
“Cheese!
Cheese! Cheese!”
In Gloomhaven,
the rules are the whole point of the game, and the story – because
there is
one – barely amounts to 1% of what happens at the table. Sometimes
my friends and I will finish a scenario, slay the last monster on the
board, and then one of us will ask, “What
was it that we needed to retrieve from this ‘Vibrant Grotto’
again?”
And if the very last monster is slain before
we had the chance to correctly loot all treasure tiles, nobody can
say, “Let’s assume we heal ourselves and grab any remaining
treasure, shall we?” Such reckless conduct amounts to “breaking
the game,” according to any and all of the Gloomhaven
forums. You cannot
do that. No free range.
In D&D,
the whole point is
the story. Any ruleset is just a frame to drive the story forward.
D&D
Dungeon Masters can say, “Okay, you finish off the last two goblins
and grab their treasure chest. Next, you find yourselves in front of
a raging, icy underground river. What do you do?”
You cannot – ever – do that in Gloomhaven.
There is no editing. No cutaways. Each scenario is one long,
uninterrupted take. No Dungeon Master means your movie has no
director, and all cameras just roll permanently. This
is yet another difference between “story”
and “rules.” The Wolf of Wall Street
versus the thousands of CCTV cameras in and around Wall Street
buildings.
It is completely possible to run D&D
like it was a game of Gloomhaven
– but it is impossible to play Gloomhaven
and indulge in what Cecilia D’Anastasio calls “the role-playing
caprice.” I already touched on this subject last year in a post
titled Rules Light,
after one GURPS aficionado had said on Twitter, “Fuck
narrativist and rules light.”
The current “XP or no
XP” debate is another
shining example of this ideological split. Adding up XP is pure
crunch. Awarding levels for milestone achievements is pure fluff. Is
there really more freedom to be found on one side or the other? I’m
not convinced, either way. Sure, math is an unforgiving, rigid frame
– but so is a DM that can damn well decide when and where
the characters level up. It’s like putting money in your bank
account without ever knowing that account’s balance – until one
day the bank says, “You’ve
got enough now! Buy house?”
Role-playing games started off
very much to the “left.” Arneson used to hide the rules behind a
screen so that he could change them on the fly. He probably awarded
XP on the fly, too. The rigid math came later. Mind you, rigid math
can be fun. Last January, my Gloomhaven
character finished a scenario just 1 XP short of level 4. If I had
played one more of those 1 XP attack cards, I’d be level 4 now. But
no. Yours truly will have to play one
more scenario at
level 3, tagging along with
a level 4 Mindthief and a level 4 Tinkerer.
Well, it’s fine: the
grinding and suffering are part of the fun. In a way, it’s
hilarious.
In my AD&D
campaign, since we only get to play 2 or 3 sessions a year, I would
have enthusiastically granted the missing XP to any player character.
“You’re 1 XP short of leveling up? I give you 10 more XP right
now, my friend – and you level up!” Maximize the fun factor,
always; a level 5 cleric is more fun than a level 4 cleric; a level 6
thief is more fun than a level 5 thief.
“Story” versus “game
mechanics” again.
Perhaps the whole thing isn’t about Left and Right after all, but
simply about “Easy” and “Hard.” Many
hardcore gamers are eager
to adapt
RuneQuest’s
magic and skills to Tri-Stat, and run that
in the Malazan world instead of Glorantha. That’s the epitome of
custom-made.
It
is
the equivalent of delving into the intricacies
of Linux: some
like it, and others prefer the seamless, readymade easiness
of Mac. Linux is “hard” and Mac is “easy” – or is it the
other way around? You can do what you want with Linux, and set it up
whichever way you like: isn’t that “easy?” With Mac, you’re
pretty much held hostage:
they’ve got a firm grip on your throat. Isn’t that “hard?”
Linux is “Left” and Mac is
“Right” – or is it the other way around? That is for someone
else to ponder.
Sly Flourish recently said that
the majority of D&D
players have now only been playing for the last three years. The
majority? That is
huge. A paradigm shift is absolutely inevitable. And perhaps five or
ten years down the road, a segment
of this mass of new
players will get into other role-playing games, perhaps
adapting American
Gods for
Nobilis
or The Expanse
for
Shadowrun
or The Witcher
for
Numenera
– or something even weirder. New blood is always
a good thing.
One commenter over
on Chirine’s Workbench
summed up this paradigm shift quite nicely. “Back then,” he
wrote, “we were playing worlds; nowadays, we play character
backstories.” This is
interesting. Indeed,
during
the seventies and eighties, the real world was very much the story,
and everyone living in it felt
like an extra – just a brick in the wall. With the advent
of social networks today,
everybody can be “the story,” and the world around appears
to be merely a decor. But
it is
a lie, of course: you’re still
just a brick in the wall – only this brick has way more friends /
followers / boosters than the
next brick…
The world was the thing, like in
Avatar.
Characters just happened in it. Was
this the “let
the Free Market decide” Right,
or was
it the “no
elites / everyone’s
the same” Left?
Back in 1983, if someone
had told me that Dungeons & Dragons
would one day see a sort of left-right axis,
I would have replied, first, what the fuck, and second, anything else
besides D&D,
sure, but not D&D!
Not the one
precious thing in
today’s cultural landscape that isn’t
a god damned competitive dick-measuring contest!
There shouldn’t be any kind of schism: we’re better than that.
I
just wish the two sides would talk more – Dragonsfoot
and Twitter – the
old-school “game
mechanics”
side, and that
new majority
of
story-focused role-players.