Of course, there are all sorts of rumors flying around, but probably the most interesting thing that’s come out of the media hubbub is this bit from Monte Cook:

…imagine a game where one [...]]]> You probably have heard the news about #dndnext by now — the impending Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Of course, there are all sorts of rumors flying around, but probably the most interesting thing that’s come out of the media hubbub is this bit from Monte Cook:

…imagine a game where one player has a simple character sheet that has just a few things noted on it, and the player next to him has all sorts of skills, feats, and special abilities. And yet they can still play the game together and everything remains relatively balanced.  Your 1E-loving friend can play in your 3E-style game and not have to deal with all the options he or she doesn’t want or need. Or vice versa. It’s all up to you to decide.

If they can pull this off, I think, this has the potential to be one of the most engaging iterations of D&D yet, but not exactly for the reason described.  Mr. Cook couches this in terms of supporting differences in complexity, but I think that a better lens to view this through is differing levels of engagement.

Here is a story:

When I was in college, I ran a game of Dungeons and Dragons in the Eberron Campaign Setting, which is heavily informed by pulp adventure and film noir — it’s the kind of setting in which nobody’s true motives are fully apparent, and fights and scenes are meant to be cinematic.  By far it was one of the best games I have ever GM’d, or at least, that is what my players said.  But like many games, through the compounding interest of procrastination and busyness, it came to an end.

A few years later, I ran a sequel to that game, with a One Year Later, Lupin the Third-like jumpstart in which the PCs of old got together for “Just one more adventure,” teaming up with some new PCs (and their players).  Once again, it was great — as if the previous campaign had never ended — and I felt at the time at every session that we were just on the whole way through.

So it was a surprise to me when, after half a year of sessions, I learned the following:

1. Many of my players felt that it was one of the best campaigns I’ve ever run.
2. A few players either disliked or were uninvested in the campaign, but did not want to be vocal about it.
3. The opinion of the latter group was not apparent to the former group for several months, yet it was not hugely disruptive to the game.

It took me awhile to work out what happened here exactly, but if you think about it, what the actual at-the-table play of D&D asks of you, minimally, is pretty basic:

• Pick some actions.
• Roll some dice.
• Track consumed resources.

All the other stuff, the interesting stuff — the politics and NPCs and arguments in our shared world — were, you know, nice to interact with, but if you at least did the above, then you were committed enough to the game that the system just kept chugging along.  Nothing broke or stopped working, as long as you could roll some dice and occasionally determine if you were dead.

When I think about several of the other game systems I’ve run, I realize that for many of them, I have thought: You know, if someone doesn’t pull their weight in this system, the whole thing falls apart.  And this makes me think that a key facet of the longevity of D&D as a game is that the default mode of play supports people of different commitment levels at the table — Writes Ten Pages Of Backstory Girl and Too Busy To Make His Own Character Guy can both sit at a table and almost be playing different games, but their experiences are compatible via the core of the game.

The next edition of D&D appears to have taken this lesson one step further, allowing different commitment levels away from the table as well: If one person can create and manage their character in thirty minutes, and another can spend hours customizing, then all of a sudden the accessibility of the game increases dramatically.

This perhaps doesn’t sound all that revolutionary, but I must admit that if more games were wielding this sort of technology, my busy and time-strapped gaming group would be able to squeeze in a lot more games.

Also angry, anxious, ashamed, lonely and other tonalities and harmonics of the negative aspects of Panksepp’s primal circuits. If I try to hear the very beginnings of that song of woe and bother, it probably starts some time around second grade, as just a quiet noodling melody like the [...]]]> I was so unhappy.

Also angry, anxious, ashamed, lonely and other tonalities and harmonics of the negative aspects of Panksepp’s primal circuits. If I try to hear the very beginnings of that song of woe and bother, it probably starts some time around second grade, as just a quiet noodling melody like the beginning (anachronistically) of a Nirvana song. Some of this was down to my father’s alcoholism and my parents’ resulting divorce, some of it was undiagnosed ADHD, some of it was being born a geek into a culture that wasn’t quite ready for us yet, by the time our story begins not a little of it was as unromantic as really bad acne, and some of it was just – well, how I turned out. By the time I graduated high school and wrapped up my first undistinguished semester at an extremely distinguished university, it was a full-band, amplified concert of sadness, rage and self-pity. Like the middle of a Nirvana song. In fact, the world had to invent punk rock and new wave just for me, which was awfully nice of the world, though I’d have settled for getting laid.

This is not going to be one of those happy-fun stereotype-shattering “How I got into RPGs” posts. (Deborah Donoghue has one of those, and it’s delightful.) And yet, gaming was often fun, and I was sometimes happy.

What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it?

It is 1979. I am just over one quarter of the way to flunking out of MIT. That overstates! I am one quarter of the way from simultaneously: going on academic probation; taking “time away from MIT.” That’s the exact phrasing of the official document on leaves of absence. Said time away continues even as I write this post!

My longest-serving friend (to this day), MB, is two years older than I, and my fraternity brother. We met in high school when I was in 9th grade and he was in 11th grade, and ended up in the same frat. He swore he did not pull strings. On this winter night, either January of February, he invites me to try this new game, Dungeons & Dragons, that they’ve begun playing at the drug apartment.

The drug apartment is one of three satellite facilities that augments the main dwelling on Manchester Road in Brookline. Each apartment sleeps 6-10 brothers, often in singles. By rule, the drug apartment is the only one of the four fraternity locations where it is permitted to do illegal drugs. Once a semester, the drug house throws a party for the entire frat, with delicious food, plenty of weed, a tank of nitrous oxide in the front of the apartment and a bag of coke at the back. I remind you, reader, it is 1979.

No lie: a dozen years later I ran into one of my classmates, who was one of the drug-house’s most legendary and permanent residents. (Many brothers rotated in and out of the drug house on a semester-by-semester basis. A few were dedicated.) He was doing great. He’d graduated med school, was finishing up his residency, and was about to start his professional practice. As an anesthesiologist. As Seamus Heaney wearing the mask of Sophocles wrote, sometimes hope and history rhyme.

Off we go to the drug apartment so I can try Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons is bizarre! In a good way. It’s these three little brown, saddle-stapled books in a little white box with some godawful line art and a text that seems less like it’s trying to explain something than like it thinks it’s just reminding you of stuff you already know. We’ve been over this. It reads like notes you wrote yourself while overestimating how much you’d remember later. This causes some confusion among the brothers, and it’s not just the drugs. In fact, and what would Pat Pulling and Rona Jaffe have made of this?, I don’t recall any of the brothers playing D&D while stoned – D&D was something you did straight. Maybe, something you did instead of getting stoned. Me, I’m a lifelong sobersides who has never done drugs, alcohol neither. I’m not bragging; unvarying sobriety is one more dimension of my alienation from my peers – like I said, it was 1979. But a family history of alcoholism will do that to you.

I suppose roleplaying games became my drug. Kind of. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sometime between the last pre-me D&D session and this one, they acquired a new little brown book to try to dispel the confusion. It’s called Greyhawk and has purple lettering on the cover. In a dozen years I’ll publish poems in journals that look just like these things, and be secretly amused. Tonight, though, we are playing this game. Dungeons & Dragons. With Greyhawk.

My first character is a Magic-User. Most of my early characters are. Drug-apartment resident NM, who was my Big Brother at the frat initially, is the Dungeon Master. I learn that he has made the official map of the dungeon we’re going to explore. We have a designated map-maker and a caller. We kibitz freely. Shaw, a close friend of MB’s and as much a friend of mine as any of these strange college people, keeps asking if he can play a dragon. The fictive content is . . . rudimentary. I don’t think any of us have given our character’s names, let alone personalities. The focus of play is substantially tactical – what’s the marching order? who will push on the door? when should you throw your flask of oil? is it time to use my one spell? can anyone get Shaw’s fighter out of the front line before he dies? (Hell, my own superhero wish-fulfillment fantasies – in college, as I recall, I am on a Green Lantern kick – have more sophistication of character development and narrative flow; I even give myself subplots!) This being MIT, we are prone to anachronism: someone is always wanting to invent gunpowder or otherwise smuggle real-world technical knowledge into the dungeon. The game betrays what we will come to call “the hobby’s wargaming roots.”

And yet, it is not much like a wargame at all. Not like the wargames I know, anyway, the SPI and Avalon Hill boardgames that MB introduced me to in high school. (I’m a couple of years from first-hand experience of the club-based miniatures gaming that evolved into RPGs.) There is something there. The very lack of a sophisticated fictional surround makes the fantasy of it, the otherworldliness, the I’ve a feeling we’re not in Brookline any more paradoxically salient on that evening and the evenings to come over the next several weeks. It is, dammit, primal. Archetypal.

There is a fountain on the second level with Nixies. (We learn what Nixies are.) They charm away one of the PCs forever. This is not old hat. This is wondrous and strange and frightening. We ended up on the second level by mistake. I can’t remember whether we survivors killed them all after losing our teammate, or retreated.

There is a huge pool of water on the first level, with a concrete apron along the far side and massive, bronze double doors. Bronze. MB can barely contain his excitement. Perhaps because of side conversations with NM, he is convinced that on the far side of those doors we will find Talos, the brazen warrior of Crete. He has to explain Talos to me because I know embarrassingly little of the classics or real literature. Heck, I don’t even know fantasy literature. Science-fiction, yes. Since I was 12. And read my first Heinlein juvenile. (See! Such people exist!) I’ll be following a path from RPGs to Tolkein and Moorcock and Howard and Leiber and Zelazny. But you don’t have to know a ton about the classics to get the thrill of a giant bronze automaton with but a single weakness.

And always, push on the door. Even, weirdly, cooler: listen at the door. On the other side of that door was something eerie and dangerous. And always, check the map. Make sure you know where you are.

Raymond Chandler tried once to explain the appeal of the pulp magazines where he published his early work in the 1930s:

And it takes a very open mind indeed to look beyond the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consommé at a spinsterish tea room.

I don’t think this power was entirely a matter of violence, although far too many people got killed in these stories and their passing was celebrated with a rather too loving attention to detail. It certainly was not a matter of fine writing, since any attempt at that would have been ruthlessly blue-penciled by the editorial staff. Nor was it because of any great originality of plot or character. Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate.

The smell of fear! That was part of it, as ridiculous as it is to contemplate.  Quick pen scratches on graph paper; dudes playing pretend with other dudes they knew; eventually little painted figurines (though these went some way toward ruining the effect). And yet: monsters. Loathsome trolls (“thin and rubbery”). Goblins and hobgoblins. (“The hobgoblin king fights as an ogre.” All Gygax and Arneson meant was that you should pull his stats from the Ogre entry if your players should happen to run into the hobgoblin king, but I love that sentence to this day.) Skeletons! Ghouls! Giant versions of everything: rats, spiders, crabs, weasels. Underground pools, rotting bureaus, slime and loose stones.

Understand that for the most part we didn’t even have video games yet, not even in the arcades. (Galaga; Space Invaders; Missile Command – awesome games but not exactly virtual reality.) And there was Star Wars, but no big-budget fantasy to speak of, not even mediocre scripts indifferently acted. No Ladyhawke; no Conan the Barbarian. Reader, if you can believe such a thing, there was not even Indiana Jones. We furnished our mental gaming landscapes with castoffs from the collective unconscious. We hiked twenty miles to the dungeon through the snow, uphill both ways, and we liked it.

Not that your music is just noise, you kids with your Walls of Warcraft and your Magical Gathering cards. It was compelling and primal and a pure vision of the strange, and we wanted more. Therefore, many of my cohort set about taking over the world, and now commercials use MMORPGs to sell trucks and a body can strike up a conversation with regular people about whether she likes the X-Men better, or Spider-Man, and I’d say, “You’re welcome, young geeks of today,” except I, personally, didn’t do any of that stuff. I just kind of drifted along, playing D&D and Traveller at college, and a couple dozen different games since.

What does any of this have to do with fucking Vietnam, Walter?

Hey, Bryant covered that two y – oh. You meant that metaphorically, as in, “Jim, why can’t or won’t you separate your discovery of roleplaying games from your youthful history of sadness and failure?” and I’m still not sure why. Poorly socialized young white man takes solace in RPGs lacks novelty, as stories go. But I keep picking at that coincidence of place and mood, years ago in poetry, lately in the draft of a novel (but that is a post of its own). I know that in after years I’ve figured MIT itself, with its famously extensive hallway system, including the legendary Infinite Corridor, as a kind of dungeon. Or say, my experience of it. It matters that, after those early sessions at the drug apartment, fraternity gaming relocated to a small room in the basement of our main building. Student gaming happens at all hours, sometimes in a row. We’d be simultaneously exhausted and wired, descending steps into the near-silence of small hours: random pops and clicks as the building settled; sudden roaring from the furnace and sudden cessation of that roaring; the low red light down the hall from the coke machine.

It’s accurate if unfair (to the hobby) to note that my time spent roleplaying correlated inversely with my time spent doing problem sets. I didn’t have the word “hyperfocusing” then, but I had the experience. The glib and possibly even correct thing to say is that if it hadn’t been gaming, it would have been something else. I am uncomfortable pushing that claim too hard. It’s too much like those “defenses” of free speech that rest on the assumption that speech is harmless, without power. (“No little girl was ever ruined by a book.”) But if speech – the free communication of ideas – were truly inconsequential, it wouldn’t be worth defending. We value speech because it has enormous power, and power always comes with danger. Roleplaying games, as I hope I’ve shown, are powerful stuff. Creators I love and admire have nigh beggared themselves for the sake of them.

How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become?

I kind of hoped I’d have an answer by the time I got here. By many measures, that early gaming bears little resemblance to the kind of gaming I enjoy now – your artsy-fartsy pretentious gaming, thank you very much. Last year I had the most fun playing Fiasco and Nobilis. I flirted with taking up “old-school gaming,” specifically Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but didn’t because I decided I probably wouldn’t like it. I played nothing but Amber DRPG for about five years.

But I still love mimesis in gaming. Back then, the rules were so sketchy you had to interact directly with the fictional material on the level of the fiction. Today, I prize games like Fiasco that help me do that. I still love the experience of a small group co-creating for nobody but themselves, the power and the pity of that. (The pity is what makes “let me tell you about my character” so painful.) If I’m honest about it, I tend to play characters who could have many things but are afraid to choose any subset of those things for fear of losing out on the rest. Since RPGs really are, among other things, wish-fulfillment fantasies, these characters tend to eventually conquer their fear and choose.

But that last has nothing to do with my gaming back then. That was his life.

NOTES:

* Title stolen from the classic column in Different Worlds magazine.

Reverb Gamers and the January master list are a production of Jessica Banks and Michelle Nephew, on behalf of Atlas Games.

Frankly, after reading Robert J. Schwalb’s I heard somewhere — I forget exactly where, so I am sure this account is somewhat mangled — that once someone sold an online PDF entitled How to Start Your Own Tabletop Games Business.  It was a lavishly pure-white single-page document that said, in large, friendly letters: DON’T.

Frankly, after reading Robert J. Schwalb’s Crapping on your Dream and having some discussions with Keith Baker, I am surprised that anybody makes a living from the gaming business at all.  Indeed, my takeaway had been that you can’t make a living from the gaming business at all, unless you’re on the payroll of one of the mainstream gaming companies.

This was pretty much the frame of mind that I had when I attended the innocuously named panel “Designing and Publishing a Tabletop Roleplaying Game” during Penny Arcade Expo 2011, which turned out secretly to be about you personally designing and publishing a game, i.e. it had a very strong indie focus.  This was backed up by such esteemed panelists as:

To whom I am thankful for explaining to me the one thing that has always bewildered me about the indie RPG revolution: How, exactly, do you guys make any money?

The core of the answer to this turned out to be a lot simpler than I thought, if a lot more complex in execution.  On some level it is similar to the Jonathan Coulton model of self-marketing, which is to find an online community that already is interested in the kind of stuff that you are planning to write.  (The Forge is the premier example of this, of course.)  After you have an actual game, you bootstrap your way up to profitability by the key tenet of never spending any of your own money.  You start with PDF sales; then, you use the money to create a small print run; then, you use that money to create a large print run.

Perhaps someone asks you for a book early on: you simply go to the printer, ask them to print one (1) copy of your book, and sell it to the early adopter, pocketing the margin.

Perhaps you don’t have an actual storefront: you simply set up a website with Paypal.

Perhaps you get enough capital to finance a print run: you start mailing the books from your own living room!

The key tenet is, again, never spending any of your own money.  When you also don’t have to deal with middlemen, it turns out, you also get a significantly larger cut of the profit.  Vincent Baker, at the panel, suggested that his profit margins were enough to put him at a similar level as a third-tier games publisher, but without the overhead.  Which certainly sounds very impressive!

After the panel, I caught up with Jake Richmond, since I had written a post (on this very blog!) about his game G X B, which gave me a non-awkward way to introduce myself.*  (I am terrible at saying hello to people I like and admire.)

We talked a bit more about the business side of indie RPGs, which I outlined above, but then Jake went on to say that he also had a third important tenet.

“Um,” he said.

“Hang on,” he said.

I waited a bit.

“You know, I have no idea why I can’t remember this.  It’s one of my key principles,” he said.

I waited a bit more.

“Ah!  It’s this.  Don’t sell to roleplayers.”

“You mean don’t sell to people who typically roleplay?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.  ”We are living in a period where there are a ton of untapped genres that haven’t had RPGs made about them.  That’s a built-in audience for your game that doesn’t know it yet.”

“That’s like the Wii,” I noted.  ”The Blue Ocean strategy.  You create a new piece of the market for gaming, which means you’re the first one there and you make things better for the market as a whole by expanding the consumer base.”

“Right, exactly,” he said.

The takeaway I got from all this was that the RPG market, at least so far, is pretty wide-open in terms of things to say.  Which is to say: There’s room for a lot more voices in the market, because there are a lot of people out there who would be terribly interested in buying the game that is just right for them.

There is, it turns out, a bit of money in that.

* Later I found out that one of my coworkers from upstate New York apparently knows Vincent Baker in a vague Kevin Bacon-y sense.

First, awesome! All for it. Something close to ten years ago now, I read a really good piece about presenting your roleplaying hobby to non-gamers without fear, guilt or shame and the various socially dysfunctional behaviors that go with those emotions. That [...]]]> It’s Speak Out With Your Geek Out week! I have some thoughts.

First, awesome! All for it. Something close to ten years ago now, I read a really good piece about presenting your roleplaying hobby to non-gamers without fear, guilt or shame and the various socially dysfunctional behaviors that go with those emotions. That is, normalizing it as an enthusiasm. The post was by, yes, Ron Edwards, and appeared on, yes, the Forge. It did me an enormous amount of good over the years, so when I play the word association game with “Ron Edwards” I think of that piece well before I think of B**** D*****.

The core of Ron’s treatment was that he (had learned to?) discuss gaming with people the exact same way he discussed his martial arts studies. If you study martial arts, you don’t assume people are going to look down on you for it. You aren’t afraid to be known as a martial arts student, so you’re not unconsciously adopting appeasement behaviors or preemptive disdain before you even start speaking. You know martial arts is interesting, and you think other people will have some degree of openness or not to hearing about it, but you also don’t assume they want to know every goddam thing about it. (“Let me tell you about my kata . . . “)

This would be a much better post if I took the time to find that link, huh?

Anyway. I have managed to adopt this as my way of being a gamer in the world. I’ve found it has helped my life. I can’t, in good conscience, promise it will do the same for you – we should talk about that – but it might.

What this means in practical terms:

•  I don’t go out of my way to work roleplaying games into random conversations
• But I don’t avoid the subject or talk around them either
• In a mixed group – with at least one other gamer and non-gamers – I won’t leave the gamer to twist in the wind if talk turns to gaming
• I don’t take any crap about it
• I don’t assume any crap I get is other than “the usual crap”

Levi Kornelson has a great public post on Google+ about how to get better gaming. A lot of this is common-sense advice (share your toys and treat people nice) but it’s always worth reading and considering it again.

Gamera Spinning asks what tabletop games [...]]]> Another “three things make a post” post.

Levi Kornelson has a great public post on Google+ about how to get better gaming. A lot of this is common-sense advice (share your toys and treat people nice) but it’s always worth reading and considering it again.

Gamera Spinning asks what tabletop games can learn from consoles and computer RPGs. I consider what I can learn from tabletop and apply to PBEM/PBP/PBJ all the time, so it’s an interesting question to me even though I don’t have an answer. I agree with the comment in the linked post that computer and console games can track a lot of data easily; the type of games that can probably absorb the most from CRPGs are resource-intensive or rule-intensive.

My Google+ buddy Skwid linked this post about American tropes in storytelling. The author’s primarily talking about Hollywood blockbuster tropes, but it made me think about some of my experiences roleplaying over the internet with folks from outside the US and the kinds of interesting things they brought to the (metaphorical) table. Sometimes I’ve felt like I’ve missed signals with players and GMs because we weren’t working from similar tropes; that it was cultural differences in tropes themselves hadn’t occurred to me.