Corporate Role-Playing Games

   This is called “Go,” and it is a Chinese game. There are no extensions, no patches, no DLC and no booster packs. It’s just the board – a 19×19 grid – and those black and white stones. That’s it.

   And it’s great.

   This game has endured for twenty-five hundred years without a Second or Third or Fourth or Fifth Edition, and without Twitch.

   What am I getting at, you ask?

   When I was thirteen years old, my dad put me up in a private school, and the other kids there had expensive pastimes like alpine skiing or tennis or bike racing with 10 speed Carbolite Peugeot bikes. Luckily, there was also a D&D club. I chose role-playing games because it wasn’t as expensive a hobby. Three core books – yay!

   Lots of things have changed since.

   There was this little debate on Twitter about a year ago: Was it possible to play D&D for free? At first, I thought it was a joke. Of course you can play D&D for free – or any other role-playing game, for that matter.

   Spend Money Regularly to Stay Engaged in Your Hobby is a blatant marketing model, and it is contrary to almost everything Gygax and Arneson envisioned in the very beginning. Granted, these guys were no businessmen – not in the corporate sense, that is. We must remember how Gygax, in the beginning, was opposed to the idea of published adventures. In his own vision of D&D, you were supposed to stay engaged with the hobby through your very own creative process and imagination. The merchandise line itself was named Products of Your Imagination.

   Imagine that.

   I’m still running First Edition AD&D. To be frank, I feel both satisfied and guilty at the same time. Satisfied, because those consecutive editions are nothing but an attempt at making more money. Guilty, because I clearly don’t do anything to “help my hobby,” as they say.

   Then again, where does that notion of helping your hobby even comes from? Is my dad helping chess in any way? He still plays with his old chessboard and pieces from the sixties – and he only ever plays with his friends and a few neighbors. My dad really isn’t helping the hobby of chess.

   I don’t think the hobby of chess needs any help from anyone.

   Now, there is a major difference between role-playing games and Dungeons & Dragons. Role-playing games are like chess – they don’t belong to anyone, and don’t need any help. Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, belongs to Hasbro, and Hasbro’s purpose is to make money. Thus, D&D needs help. It’s weird, I know.

   Imagine how weird it’d be if chess belonged to Hasbro and suddenly needed “help.”

   People buy stuff. It’s what they do. It’s their voice. When they’re happy, they buy. When they’re unhappy, they buy something else. If they agree, they buy, and they buy differently if they happen to disagree. That hasn’t changed. People keep buying.

   What’s actually changed is: small ain’t beautiful no more.

   Or rather, because of the Internet, small can sometimes get blown to stratospheric heights, like Matt Colville’s Strongholds and Followers. a simple homebrew idea put up on Kickstarter that suddenly collects over two million dollars. In this case, small is so beautiful it becomes HUGE.

   But then, “small” business people feel threatened by smaller bloggers or non-profits. That, also, is contrary to Gygax and Arneson’s original vision. Someone told Jeff Berry that his amazing blog was “a detriment to their business interests.” Man, oh man.

   There are way too many business interests in this world and definitely not enough genuine people like my friend Jeff / Chirine ba Kal.

   If you remove the Internet from this equation, it’s 1980 all over again: every Dungeon Master developing his or her own campaign, some DMs sending their work over to Dragon Magazine and crossing their fingers – and once in a blue moon, a lucky one like Lawrence Schick (White Plume Mountain) seeing his creation published.

   Nowadays, anybody can be Lawrence Schick, write his or her own White Plume Mountain, and sell it. Unless you put your stuff online for free, that is – and then you become a detriment to somebody else’s business interests…

   And is there really more variety now?

   Maybe, maybe not.

   When White Plume Mountain came out in ‘79, everybody played that adventure simultaneously. Same thing with Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, one year later. At one point, every AD&D character I came across in the club owned a blaster rifle, wore a suit of powered armor, or wielded the sword Blackrazor. Party #1 and party #2 and party #3 met at the Green Dragon Inn, and it ended in a Star Wars gunfight. Everyone had had the chance to explore a spaceship; an entire friggin’ fleet had crashed in Western Flanaess.

   Most of us still play the same adventure at the same time in 2018. Think Tomb of Annihilation.

   Sly Flourish said to Chris Perkins that he shouldn’t spoil the ending of Tomb of Annihilation in his streamed game. To which Perkins politely replied, “But you can always change the ending!”

   Well, yes. And now we’re back to square one, aren’t we? Or rather, we’ve come full circle. It’s your homebrew game. Like in 1980.

   Corporate is the new norm. Anything that was original and one-of-a-kind becomes corporate sooner or later. For instance, Person of Interest told the story of one man and his offstage efforts to change the world all by himself, or at least make it a better place – with no government oversight, no sponsors, and no investors. Wisdom of the Crowd was a corporate rehash of Person of Interest.

   Same thing happened with The Mentalist. This guy was gifted, knowledgeable, very charismatic, and always did his own thing on his own terms. Bull is nothing but a corporate retelling of The Mentalist.

   Everything geeky has now become something corporate and (most of the time) entirely unrelated. Google searches are fascinating.

• “Greyhawk” is a consulting firm
• “Palantir” is a technology company
• “Orthanc” is a medical imaging server

   Take the next fresh new thing, and turn it into a corporate thing.

   Role-playing games aren’t any different. D&D once was an edgy, fresh new thing. Arneson and Gygax didn’t intend for this hobby to perpetually need its player’s influx of cash.

   Irreconcilable conundrum?

   It’s a blessing, in fact. Cheaper than Peugeot bikes, remember? Anyone can role-play. And I really do mean anyone. Pick up a few dice or one of those dice rolling apps, choose a system – Tri-Stat, Black Hack, whatever – and start a game. The wine remains the same, even though they keep pouring it into a different container every ten years or so. Companies are containers. Big corporations are bound to be nothing more than scattered footnotes in the checkered history of tabletop role-playing games.

The Truth About Maps

   Maps are a universal staple of tabletop role-playing games. Everybody loves maps. But I recently came to the realization that maps are, in fact, almost useless. And here’s why.

   For four years now, I have been running a First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign set in Greyhawk, 150 years before the Nyrond / Great Kingdom split. After fourteen game sessions and 9 different adventures, the player characters still don’t own a map of their region – and they don’t seem to need one. The ranger knows how to get from point A to point B most of the time, and even my own “DM’s map” is nothing more than a sketch made in 2015, onto which I keep adding details and numbers as the campaign progresses.

   One cannot even compare my lousy DM sketch to the gorgeous map of the Sword Coast people use when they run 5E. But honestly though, I don’t think I need much more than this little sketch. If the PCs ever leave the area and head for Rauxes, Irongate, or Greyhawk, I’ll just make another sketch, and continue the story.

   In The Lord of the Rings, the heroes don’t have maps – they have guides, which is much more reliable. Gandalf knows a shortcut to get from Rivendell to Lothlórien. Aragorn knows the way from Lothlórien to Edoras. Gollum knows how to get into Mordor without going through the Black Gate...

   “Hold your horses,” I can hear someone say. “Tabletop role-playing games stems from Tolkien and Robert E. Howard – and these books had maps!”

   Sure, I say. There’s no denying it: we are a visual generation. The Lord of the Rings have beautiful maps, but they’re meant for the reader. Aragorn himself don’t have these maps, and never will. What kind of mapping do people in a medieval world really have access to? Think about it. Drawing accurate maps is a hard thing. Even good old Italy is a misshapen blob on most medieval maps – and Italy is a rather straightforward peninsula! If they couldn’t even get Italy right, what about the rest?

   Even Florida (and that is after the end of the Middle Ages) is fucked up on some sixteenth-century maps. Florida is even simpler than Italy, and they still couldn’t get it right until 1820!

   If I ever provide my players with a map of Rel Mord and its surroundings, it’ll be full of hilarious mistakes and wildly inaccurate, believe me.

   And what about those beloved dungeon maps? As Dungeon Masters, do we really need such maps or could we possibly do without them? The Caves of Chaos, that is okay. The Tomb of Horrors, alright. But what about sprawling megadungeons like the Tekumel Underworld or the Underdark – who needs a complete and accurate map of that?

   In my First Edition AD&D game, I no longer map my dungeons. I build interesting rooms and passages – bottleneck locations where fighting is bound to occur, and that’s it. The only other thing I need is an intuitive chart of what that labyrinthine complex might look like. A “dungeon flowchart,” if you will.

   The Three-Tiered Room is a complete diorama, and so is the Obelisk Chamber. The Duergar Throne Room and the Shrine of No Spells both use the same basic terrain, only with different bits and accessories. The Duergar Maze and the Deep Lakes don’t have fixed, pre-assigned terrain. And all remaining areas can be described orally. I don’t need a map.

   “You went through eleven different rooms, nine of them smallish and all of them empty except for excessively thick dust and a few pieces of decayed furniture. No secret doors and no scattered bones anywhere.”

   “Can you map these rooms for us?”

   “You go right ahead and do it yourselves. The nine small rooms are more or less clustered around the two larger rooms, separated by various short passages.”

   Players 1 and 2 come up with two very different maps. Roll INT checks. “Maybe the cleric was a little muddled. There is a slight stench in the air; spores, maybe, or weird unseen fungi... Anyway, the thief appears to be right. His map is fairly accurate. Now, what do you want to do?”

   If the players should ever decide to lure the Duergars away from their Throne Room and ambush them in some corridor where they can take them two at a time, no problem. I can whip up any stretch of corridor with modular dungeon walls. “You made enough noise banging shields together for five minutes – the Duergars are coming. You already see five or six of them. Do you prefer a straight corridor, a T-shape, or one with a 90-degree angle?” The Duergar Maze sector certainly has at least one straight corridor, one T-shaped passage, and many 90-degree angles. I’ll build whatever I need. What I don’t need is a complete blueprint of that rather large maze.

   Again, maps are a universal staple of tabletop role-playing games, and that ain’t going to change anytime soon. Everybody loves maps – and that includes Yours Truly. Because a beautiful fantasy map is like a beautifully painted Tiamat or Orcus figure: it’s pretty nice to have, but you can run memorable games and campaigns without it.