Gen Con is King Shit of conventions. I get that. I understand that many — too many — tabletop gamers are so dedicated to the convention circuit that it’s their primary venue for face to face play. But convention games don’t have anything to do with the kind of bread and butter RPG play that allows a sustainable hobby to exist beyond the commercial con circuit, and the irony is that the more folks talk about how they want a grassroots hobby, the more they tend to depend on these contrived venues to not only get a game in, but analyze RPGs at all.

Think of how many recent games are designed to fit a whole story arc or tour of the game in one convention game slot and you’ll see how conventions damage our thinking about what’s possible for games. The more strictly a game regulates social roles and the right to speak, the more likely it is that the game was designed to support  nervous interactions between a handful of anynerds over four hours. I don’t care about any of that except to see worst case scenarios play out. I certainly don’t want to play in those situations, and it sure is sad to see people assume that this is what the hobby is all about.

What else? Well, I know it’s a great way for freelancers to hobnob and look for work, but I don’t feel like going to Indianapolis to sell myself. I’ve worked on some of the most successful games of the decade,

Panels? Not interested in the whole ritual. Hell, if I had a choice I’d break my panels up into small groups and do a non-hierarchical hobnob with plenty of snacks. Buying things? I can wait. I already have lots of things. Awards? Okay, I’ll use them for promotion when I remember, but it’s not like these things aren’t riddled with cheating and publisher-driven voting blocs so they’re nearly meaningless. Otherwise, I can experience noise, bad food, people who are way too into the Waffen SS, and military recruiters taking a long view by courting 14 year olds with an America’s Army booth.

(Did I mention the ethnic divide between venue workers and con goers? Creepy.)

Again, I had a pretty good time at Gen Con because I went with awesome people. That was a big enough deal that I’d really rather go on the road trip without the crowded money sink at the end. Nowadays I attend conventions when friends ask me to go. I’m not ruling out Gen Con but my main interest isn’t in the RPG hobby as a series of contrived performances, but as a regular affirmation of friendship.

I don’t know. Pretend I told you to hire me at a bar or that I’m glad I won or was nominated for whatever I did that was up for something, that I wish you the best at your creative work. It’s all probably true. I’ll be spending the weekend playing D&D and riding my bike in the country. Hope we all have a great time!

The main Nice Things post inspired threads, anger and a blog carnival about growing the hobby — and more threads and posts and such.

There’s a certain routine you need to sigh through in these discussions. Before you get anywhere useful you need to:

1. Take the idea of a hobby in decline to its most exaggerated, strawmanish extent so that we can claim that it will never die, even though there is a set of outcomes greater than 0 gamers and 0 games that is still awful.
2. Something-something THERE’S NO INDUSTRY HOBBIE SUMPREM!!!111!!
3. Make promotional statements for some clique in the hobby under a thin pretense of addressing the issue.

Let’s get past this. First, tabletop RPGs as we know them will never go completely extinct, but may reach a minimum, long-tail level that makes it extremely difficult for hobbyists to find each other or maintain a creative culture.

Second, the tabletop RPG hobby is permeated with commercialism and consumerist values at all levels. Hobbyists have internalized the language and values of social marketing to a stronger degree than many other communities. This is *because* the merchants are small scale. Elements like IP licensing, which were previously ignored in favour of fair use, can be seen in the smallest fan endeavours.

Third, if any particular clique was capable of reversing trends in the hobby it would have happened by now. The “indie” community has had a decade to establish a breakout hit, and has largely found its successes in games that emulate much of the commercial and play systems of “mainstream” games. The part of the OSR that cares (not caring is a valid choice, mind) is selling a solution that would have worked even earlier, since that style of D&D is decades old.

To sum up: We are not an immortal grassroots counterculture already possessed of the will to reignite our hobby, but bereft of the sense to pay attention to some brilliant scheme that’s already been devised by your favourite gamer.

We are a branch of a greater roleplaying hobby that extends into computer games and self-started online social networks, that can use tools and lessons from them to experiment, and hovers above an important threshold, below which many enthusiasts may lose what they value. We have complex relationships with an industry so that it’s difficult to say where the noncommercial ends and the commercial begins.

We should stop seeking comfort in familiar patter and before we dismiss new ideas out of hand, we should seriously examine how they might support or threaten the things we love about tabletop RPGs. But I think the biggest threat comes from ourselves. Beyond particular behaviours, I’ve noticed one awful thing: The default assumption about RPG play is that without expert advice, a special theory or even a particular product, it’s a failure mode. To put it more simply: Lots of people now talk like the basic way of playing RPGs is badly, and not amatuer theatre bad (which is fun), but find out your sitting next to a Nazi on the bus bad (which isn’t!).

We should start assuming that gaming leads to good times. People like that. We should start thinking of setbacks with more cheerfulness, and of play as something robust enough to survive differences of opinions or various social and technical blunders.

People like good times, even when it comes from screwing up.

Some communities aren’t so bad. Company forums are generally okay, but lack the vitality of general communities. Others (like ENWorld) sacrifice vital critical discussion at the altar of bland affability, but in the end don’t do either well. There’s got to be another way. Here’s what I’d like.

(By the way, this may look like it’s all about forums, but it isn’t — it applies to blogs and general social hubs, too.)

Intelligent Antidiscrimination

A smart antidiscrimination policy is aware that racism, sexism and other issues are not just a subset of generic discrimination against any fucking thing somebody whines about. It takes historical and cultural realities into account. It doesn’t deprive people who’ve been attacked of the ability to defend themselves, or autonomously raise objections without begging for moderation. It’s administered as a collective ally, willing to adjust itself according to criticism — but not criticism coming from a reactionary sense of privilege.

Critical Categories

By tag, forum or dinner social, communities need to clearly differentiate between their different functions. Nothing fucks up serious critical discussion like participants who expect support for their sense of self-worth, especially when they confuse comments on their game as comments on their personalities. I know some folks think their games are precious pieces of themselves. Those people are weak. Still, there needs to be a place for them along with anyone else who just feels like shooting the breeze. So devote one section to casual discussion and one to high intensity criticism. Create another, separate section for making things — house rules, mods, whole games. Again, this sounds like online business but it can just as easily apply to conventions.

Fuck Actual Play — Just Play

It’s time to kick Actual (Capitalized) Play in the teeth. No other thing is as representative of the bankruptcy of gaming’s vocal minority than its fetish for play stories because this makes them a commodity in a community that has come to believe that the most common outcome of trying to play RPGs is some form of failure. Lots of things deserve their own forums, but Actual Play isn’t one of them. Instead, community values should uphold regular play as the objective: not be a special occasion that draws applause from other hobbyists. Not playing  should be a problem we work together to solve with all the social tools at our command.

Are play stories bad? No, but it’s time to break them out into a secondary form of entertainment and admit that it is a creative act above and beyond describing what happens in game sessions (which they don’t do well anyway). So let’s encourage the JRPG replay tradition and put in the “make things” category.

Sincerity, Not Selling

By clamouring for decorum at the expense of authentic conversations we’ve made communities which should burst with creative vitality into a place where the worst behaviours vomit themselves onto the public stage. Perpetrators expect some authority to deny it or let it slide. That’s why rather than being marketing resistant as some commentators naively believe, RPG communities have been vulnerable to calculated, insincere persuasion at all scales. Worse, this makes marketing something fans do to each other. Just the other day I read a fan blog for one game where the posts were mainly about delivering pitches to sell the game to other people.

If a game designer promotes this, he or she deserves your contempt. If a community emphasizes this, that community deserves your derision. Yes, boosting what you like is natural, but there are limits. Instead, demonstrate your enthusiasm by creating things, being sincere at the risk of being controversial, and valuing participation over hands-off commentary. Let’s be raw, inspiring and truthful. Let’s play.

We’re just resisting your marketing!

No. I’ve seen strong naiveté from the RPG community about what 21st Century marketers are really up to.The first thing you need to do is read The Cluetrain Manifesto. Recognize the sentiments? Things like You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention? That’s not resistance. It’s unconscious capitulation to the values of marketing as they have existed for over a decade.

The real danger behind post-Cluetrain thinking, and the line peddled by the likes of Clay Shirky, Seth Godin and others is that it is so easily adopted by adherents as a progressive ideology instead of the vapid simulation of honesty that it is. The indie community has basically been completely compromised by this kind of bullshit. It’s seductive because it consists of this internal programming:

1. It’s my job to have conversations and be responsive in a genuine, feeling fashion.
2. My empathy and responsiveness can be determined by objective metrics.

Is sincerity or integrity actually required? No. In fact, it’s probably something of a hindrance. Sincerity includes arguments and other unpleasantness, but “the conversation” doesn’t need any of the messy parts of genuine communication.

You might not notice it, but it affects you. It explains why being nice in gaming communities is so often a tense, passive-aggressive affair, always on the verge of breaking down. To gamers, good online behaviour is internalized marketing values — fake-positive, inhuman values. You’re not being yourself. You’re selling yourself. It’s a capitalist panopticon.

Think on this: My essay could never appear on ENWorld (because of the language) or RPGNet (because, incredibly, it would be against rules banning “group attacks” — RPGNet would moderate it as if it was racist hate speech).

I know you are, but what am I?

Some argued that by saying unkind things, I was the very thing I protested! Y’know, that’s not a bad objection. I don’t think it’s true, but it does emphasize the problem that we have when it comes to engaging in useful criticism. Right now the RPG community is stuck on competing dogmas that don’t honestly truck with the fact of their own subjectivity. Things are “broken.” “Core stories.” “Railroading.” “Toolkits.” “The Big Model.”

Some of these ideas are decent as folk terms, but they’ve been raised up as the basis of unity for a bunch of asshole subcultures. In some cases, the dogma is so strong that it will go to extreme lengths to exclude contradictory voices or evidence. I’ve read lots of essays describing how RPGs are made and developed that don’t match my direct experience. None of the writers ever bothered to email the people whose jobs they believed they were detailing. The capacity to own your own beliefs as an artistic stance has atrophied behind a pretense of RPGs as some kind of technology.

(That pretense also explains why games that try to aim for the stereotypical sense of art are so often clichéd and uninspiring. If you lie to yourself about the nature of your creative stance it’s going to draw shallow results due to a lack of critical introspection.)

So what’s left? Pushing back. Pushing hard. And it works. I was pleased to see some serious self-analysis on ENWorld and in comments on my own blog. But that’s not the best way. We need critical communities that work, that don’t force us to choose between flames and the banality of internalized conversation marketing.

Hm, maybe, but doesn’t every group have that?

Like I said, we noticed that out of all the groups we worked with, the gamers stood out. It may be that every scene has the same number of jerks, but RPG jerks are remarkably easy to meet compared to non-jerks. They dominate conversations about how games should be played and designed.

That’s a big problem. Why?

• Jerks act as if failure is the default result of trying to get a game together. Success is difficult.
• Jerks think of other people as instruments to be manipulated, and assume they’ll be treated that way in kind.
• Jerks focus on superficialities and technicalities, not intentions and aspirations.

Putting assholes in  the drivers’ seat takes games and the scene away from a place where it could be influential not because gamers are some kind of counterculture, but because their ideas look like the results of annoying personalities and deficient values. There’s better stuff beneath the surface, but if your initial scouting reports look bad here and better elsewhere, why dig? Nobody has an obligation to get to know you better.

Why do you hate us?

That’s easy. I don’t.  I think most gamers are cool people. I’d like to hear some of these cool people speak out.

So why should we have nice things?

So after saying all these bad things about a subset of gamers, why do I think they should be a part of all the cool stuff that’s happening in media and fiction? The answer’s easy: Once you correct for assholes, gamers are pretty much guys with flamethrowers in a world trying to bang the rocks together. I’ve said it before, and I’ll talk about why in more depth in a future post.

Once we got actual tabletop gamers from the “leading edge” of the hobby, he discovered they were so insufferable he changed his business model to stop attracting them. They were bad for business. They weren’t the gamers he remembered having fun with. They were assholes.

How were they assholes? My client used a bunch of methods to tag RPG players and monitor them moving through the system. This is what he found out about them:

• Instead of having social conversations, they focused on concrete goals.
• They related to content in a cynical fashion.
• They dissuaded other users from getting involved with the content.
• They resisted most desired behaviors (that is, the stuff that actually might make money).
• They complained all the goddamn time.

Because it was easy to track user origins, we knew this was more true for gamers, than general users. So the counterargument that everybody on the internet is like this doesn’t work. They aren’t.

This story of mine — a true story, though I’ve kept names out of it — is not unique. It’s why even though there are millions of lapsed gamers, transmedia developers shy away from developing them as an audience. Over on Twitter Gareth-Michael Skarka talked about how transmedia takes lessons from RPGs, but isn’t interested in the RPG audience. Yeah, that’s pretty much true. There are millions of lapsed gamers, but in my experience they’re largely considered no benefit to or a pox on growth.

I’ve met plenty of great gamers, and I don’t think the bad traits listed above belong to the majority — just the ones who have a strong online presence, who the CMO and co. are going to look at after the nerd in the project makes an argument for his peeps.

Meanwhile, the tabletop’s anti-intelligentsia are roaming Outer Fucking Space complaining that they don’t get enough respect, service and other super-good stuff that nobody with a good long term business plan should be especially eager to provide. They are right to think that as a bloc, gamers (not just them, but the whole group of people who are familiar with tabletop RPGs) could have significant power in the market, but don’t understand that they are undermining this power.

One of the first things you learn in any marketing program is that you not only don’t have to cater to everybody, but that you shouldn’t. There are customers out there who can faithfully buy from you and still run your company into the ground. Effective marketing includes making these people go away with a minimum of fuss. Smart folks avoid the temptation to poach from toxic segments. For example, if you want 10,000 subscribers/buyers by a given date it might be easy to grab early adopters from a certain segment to hit this target, but if that segment drives other people away, you’ll miss future growth targets.

This applies to tabletop RPG companies as much as it does to ventures that might pull gamers from the tabletop to somewhere else. WotC’s D&D Encounters may look a bit desperate but it’s smart enough to provide alternatives to the established D&D community. Lapsed gamers can take a fresh look at D&D without getting involved in the war between edition adherents, meeting character-build zombies, or dealing with other public killjoys. The killjoys . . . well there’s a point where you realize that rational decision making doesn’t come into it.

When the visible side of a fanbase doesn’t react with nuance, who wants to deal with that? It means that group will be difficult to work with, conservative and socially intractable. There might be great people beneath the surface, but not everybody has the time or money or interest to do that. You’re not going to get a second chance when there are much nicer people out there to please.

How could gamers be nicer people? Do the opposite of what you did in bullet points up at the beginning of this piece:

• Be friendly, casual and socially full-featured. Shut up about storming the castle every once and a while (and don’t just replace that with combative garbage about some other field.)
• Demonstrate that you appreciate the content instead of developing some fucked up hateful relationship with it. If you don’t like it by all means, move on.
• Respect neophyte insights that jerkwad gamers think are naive or problematic.
• Make peace with the fact that people want money for things and have models for doing so. If you don’t like the model, stay the hell away from the product.
• Create/mod in response to preferences that you will own instead of some inevitable truth you’ll crap on something for defying.

I would really like the tabletop RPG community to be at the center of roleplaying in all media, sharing their insights, but it’s not going to happen unless that center attracts.

Eddy and Russell both proposed that no matter what, we shouldn’t tell people they’re playing it wrong. We should support their creative choices by giving them tools to make their own. That’s interesting, but . . .

. . . oh Christ. Can I say first I think they’re both nice guys? Creative? That I like their work? I hope they take that to heart because I don’t agree with them. I mean that in the nicest way, but not so nicely that it’ll adulterate my response.

I think toolkits suck. I hate trope-remixes and elevator pitches for any serious gaming. I think openmindedness is overrated. It sounds friendly and impresses hardcore gamers (especially gamers who waste words emphatically telling you how non-hardcore they are) who, thanks to the decline of friendship, believe other hobbyists and designers are trying to fuck them over. I don’t think that’s the motive behind Eddy and Russell’s opinions, but I do think that gives them significant traction.

But I don’t agree with those guys, as smart and friendly as they are. I think game designers should tell you what to do, and tell you if you’re doing it wrong.

You might have some questions at this point, like:

Aren’t you always saying that narrowly focused games are bad too? Doesn’t that make this position a contradiction, since you’re saying that the designer can recommend that you play a narrower set of possible scenarios?

I don’t like games where the system does its best to enforce the its themes and core story types. The ideal Forgey game is probably one where the rules make sure you never play it wrong. Or to put it another way:

. . . not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees . . . but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

(Yes, that is a quote.)

You can have fun with the resulting story choreography. It’s a great way to ritually imitate other more popular media. It’s also implicitly recognizes of where cultural power lies, because these all tend to be about abasing oneself to the constraints of another form, like the short story (as you learned it in school, with Rising Tension! and crap). You know the score: If you loudly wish fantasy games are more like fantasy literature, you’re an intelligent fan aiming for something better than the cesspool; if you want it the other way around, you’re a lame fanboy drowning in it.

Roleplaying should be capable of more than imitation. It should create a distinct set of experiences that aren’t literature, theatre, or movies in the head. Games benefit from systems that allow people to “play them wrong” because they can use them to play in a dialogue with the game’s intended themes and stories. If you can’t argue with your games they’re probably not worth playing.

Isn’t it perverse to make something possible, then recommend against it?

No more than  life! That’s what I love about RPGs. Game sessions are messy spaces where justify things post-hoc, go off half-cocked, tell bad jokes, piss each other off, wander off topic and eventually pull it all into a narrative. This isn’t a story because stories are bullshit. They’re simplified manifestations of experience.

Tabletop RPGs occupy a strange interstice between mimesis and diagesis. I’m my warforged character, but I think about him as a third person when I describe his actions, or even when I contemplate his motives. (Sometimes he’s a second person too — “Cinnabar, what are you doing?” is a common mental refrain right after I decide my conflicted machine-man does something strange.) There’s too much going on for simple storytelling. Sometimes the important story is my relationship with the other characters, so our quest fades into the background. Sometimes I need to pass on a bloodless after-action report.

It’s virtually impossible to enforce a play style through hard rules without destroying this side of the game. Sometimes it’s fun to provoke things a bit with a toy, but don’t make that toy the main interface for play. In Vampire I can Wuxia backflip and shoot folks with my twin gats and crap but every once and a while Humanity prods me: “Hey asshole, you’re a monster!” That means I have to find a frame of reference that includes my action movie persona and my withering empathy. But if Humanity (or derivatives/relatives) was all I used, then by gun roll would be Wrath of something, the system would spit out a pat answer about who I am, and there’d be no depth. The system doesn’t take over; it just inspires.

The drawback to designing with a lighter touch is that you need guidance to make the connections I’m talking about. You need fluffy stuff: the strong background and fictional societies that create shared social expectations. You need ways to figure out if you’re playing it wrong. If that fluff’s good enough you don’t even need a system: the tension between your milieu and personal desires becomes the sole, powerful engine for dramatic action.

(Yeah, I know: We’re not supposed to talk about gaming with no rules any more. That would make us lame 90s types, as long as you don’t pay attention to the fact that all the kids are doing it that way. Why is the cutting edge of RPG thinking assbackwards as far as the rest of the world is concerned?)

How can you force me to play the right way? Fuck you — I won’t do what you tell me!

That’s what I’m counting on. What I said about tension? That’s important. Navigating the space between what you want and what you’re being told to do is a creative act. Some people believe that creativity flowers under freedom and an ample set of tools. I think that’s bollocks.

Say you want to design a version of Mage: The Ascension where modernity never did anything bad. Yes, you’d be doing it wrong, but responding to the game raises all sorts of interesting questions. How can you justify extraordinary rendition via Man in Black? (My friend Alex actually posited that the Technocracy held trials for “reality deviants.” How cool is that? What would you have to do to make that possible) The stronger the material, the better the response.

Creativity is a relationship with the social and political relationship around you. It’s a negotiated response that scales from slight subversion to rebellion with a hint of parody, but it never completely rejects or obeys its influences. I could use fancy terms like “metatext” and “subject position” to make this point, but you can look those up.

Laying it on the line:

Game designers should absolutely tell you when you’re playing it wrong (while simultaneously giving you ways to do it!) because it sparks cool creative conflicts. Just laying out tools doesn’t work as well because there’s no sense of commitment. If the game doesn’t care, why should you?

That’s it. I have to admit, this wasn’t the easiest post to write because of the potential for (drama!) with people whose work I enjoy, but if I didn’t write it, I’d just be submitting to the messed up things in tabletop gamerdom, where every disagreement is an attack. This ain’t that.

• 90% are passive observers — lurkers, subscribers and occasional commenters in online communities.
• 9% are active contributors — in online communities, power posters and second tier collaborators.
• 1% are leaders and creators — dedicated creative folks, organizers, people who shepherd long term projects and so on.

This trend is strongly measurable in online communities because each level of participation leaves a different electronic footprint, but it applies outside of the Web. You’ll always have the communicators and obsessives at the heart of a scene, at least as a common reference point for quieter, more casual folks.

It’s easy to interpret the power law in a misanthropic way. You might say the 90% is a pack of people who won’t take control of their own subcultures, or that the 10% are obsessive dweebs.  That’s the wrong way to go about it. People who lurk in one scene might be powerful participants in another. The number of communities we belong to usually outstrips our capacity to take active roles in them all.

Mover, Shaker . . . Shoveler

It’s in a social media guru’s interests to pretend that the influential tenth represents everyone else. If I (as a Social Media Guy) influence 10 people to agree with me, that’s really 100 — or even 1000, if they’re in the 1% of leaders! I don’t have to bother doing difficult research if I pretend that every loudmouth is backed up by at least 10 quiet allies.

It helps that the vocal 10% want to believe it too; they want to be important. So we’re all in it together, perpetuating this heap of bullshit.

Unfortunately, while the ultra-visible 10% can organize consent to their opinions from the 90%, they do not necessarily represent them. In any community with a low investment (fans of a band, forum members) the majority may have very strong opinions about the topic, but just don’t care about sharing or promoting it. It might be hard for that 10% to understand how holding an opinion doesn’t lead to the urge to share it and as mentioned before, there’s a natural tendency for joiners to want joining and acting to count for something and persuasively represent the whole. And it is so very tempting to take communities at face value so you can work less and believe in their positive feedback.

Surely, nobody wants to hear that they should distrust the Vocal Tenth and take what it says with a grain of salt, but I’m still going to say it.

A Little Something for Everybody Else

If you’re making games, telling stories and generally getting creative on stuff for a mass audience it’s not your job to obey the Vocal Tenth. Don’t create through regurgitation; if that’s what you’re doing, nobody needs you. Quit. You don’t need to be an original precious flower, but there should be that extra thing holding it all together.

To put community feedback in perspective you absolutely need this kind of creative integrity. Part of your job is to protect it and the majority from the Vocal Tenth.  Otherwise, the Tenth undermines your efforts with:

• The desire to be experts, which leads to making shit up, whether it be in the form of conscious fanon or something that’s just wrong, but repeatedly stated by someone who won’t shut up.
• Criticism that dismisses something you think probably serves a less vocal segment of the audience — often, one discouraged by the Vocal Tenth from participating.
• Emphasis on open participation and structural issues over a strong, holistic creative direction. Things are more accessible once you break them into modular chunks, but the stuff made from those chunks tends to be dull or ugly.

. . . and other problems. The Vocal Tenth has a tendency to grab stuff and run with it to the point of undermining your original vision and alienating the other nine-tenths.

Creative stewardship means giving the majority of your audience license to have opinions at odds with the ones people broadcast, and exploring lines of development implied by your work whether or not they come preapproved by the Tenth. It’s also about developing your work as a leader, not a servant. People talk as if they want and shout outs and other forms of deference, but that’s only going to reflect what they’ve already brought to your work. Why are you doing something they can do themselves?

(I see this kind of thing in tabletop RPGs all the time, when some fan says “I can’t possibly play this game because they didn’t include this idea that I spent several months developing and several hours describing, because it would be too hard to do it without official support.” Really?)

Ultimately your audience wants new ideas they wouldn’t develop themselves. It’s risky — you can choose something that sucks — but regurgitating community consensus will always lose, given time. You’re not adding anything original, and that hollow lack of direction won’t go unnoticed. The danger here is that the Vocal Tenth love this. Their constituents like having the official stamp of approval, and as diehard fans it takes them longer to get bored with autocannibalism.

Meanwhile, and without raising a fuss, everybody else abandons your project. They don’t lurk on your site. They stop buying your books. Whatever. While you’re partying it up with the Tenth, nobody else cares any more. You lose. Isn’t pleasing your network fun?

If you want to keep your entire audience around, here’s what I recommend:

• Stick to your vision. If you don’t demonstrate forward looking leadership and simply react to reactions, your IP will eventually sink under the weight of mutually referential garbage.
• Define participation. Develop a canon policy and degrees of recognition that create one vision for the community to form around, but doesn’t discourage fan works.
• Question consensus. When the Vocal Tenth settles on an idea, privately explore its downsides and publicly give yourself room to maneuver no matter what the “true fans” decide. Sometimes, you may settle on something similar to what they’re talking about, but it should never be because that’s what they’re talking about.
• Seek alternative sources of feedback. The Vocal Tenth is a limited slice of your total audience. You need information from other sources, from face to face encounters to reliable research. Looking outside the hard core’s demographics is critical, otherwise you might get lured into appearing racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.
• Recruit, acknowledge, reward. Don’t take what I’ve said to be a straight out dismissal of your most vocal fans. Be guarded, but provide a thoughtful place for their contributions. Get them on your side. Send them cool stuff. They do have pull, even if (as I said earlier) majority consent isn’t the same as vigorous agreement.

Nowadays we have a few tools to measure near-total interest that anyone can use, at least for rough estimates. Silent Majority or Vocal Tenth, everybody Googles, so Google Trends is a handy way to make comparisons. Check out the difference between Vampire RPG brands, for example. Whatever you do, remember that you can’t go wrong by following through on your original ideas with dedicated craftsmanship. Your success is always bound by the quality of your core effort. Nine-tenths or one, everybody knows when you cut corners, and they’ll turn their attention elsewhere.

Jim took me very seriously and came back with a very detailed rebuttal (each word goes to a different segment of the response). I really appreciate that, so this post follows his with some thoughts about friendship in RPGs, why I emphasize it and what it’s doing to design and culture. I brought up how the decline of friendship might influence RPGs before, and linking to it is a good way to refresh the idea and remind everyone that this is a real social problem, not an off the cuff supposition.

Naturally, veteran readers may wonder where I get off telling anybody about friendship, given the fact that I don’t play well with their pretend-happy communities and just insulted them in this sentence. Here’s what I think:

• Just because you trade big emotional notes with people over the internet doesn’t mean you’re making friends with them.
• Online communities like to model themselves on performance communities (both crave attention over intimacy) but tabletop RPGs aren’t about performing for a third party.
• While low trust groups have always been part of roleplaying, the past decade marks this being considered the best we can aspire to, instead of something to be overcome with practice.
• Friendship rot is pretty embarrassing to status-conscious gamers and geeky folks in general, and the most embarrassed react by attacking the whole project of friendship. These are the guys that quote that Geek Fallacies article all the time. They need procedural rules because they can’t hack an ethos of compassionate friendship.

(I don’t think Jim necessarily fits the bill in all ways, or maybe even any of them. If I named names, he wouldn’t be on the list. This is a general observation.)

People frequently think a relationship is friendship when in my view, it isn’t. So what am I talking about? What are the characteristics of friendship?

A friend is an end, not a means.

This is the granddaddy and heart of “indie” gaming’s failure. Its ethics are corrupt from design up, and destructive to real friendships. It assumes that relationships mutual, egoistic exploitation are the rule, and that the goal of any system is to efficiently regulate selfishness.

True friendship requires you to think of any systems, customs and tools as ways to please your friends first. Even your character exists to further that friendship, not drive an ego trip. Even if you believe that all actions are ultimately selfish, this principle remains true because in that case, a friend is someone for whom you find selfish satisfaction in their enjoyment. They are very nearly one and the same.

Friends trust each other.

This too-obvious point never seems to stick. Players don’t trust GMs, RPG theory types don’t trust game designers and people post complains to RPG boards because they don’t trust their groups to handle an issue. (Yeah, posting behind your group’s back means you fail the trust test in a pretty basic way.)

If your relationships are like this you’ll need systems that are more than toys to play with (and ignore or tweak when the spirit moves you). They have to carry the creative process because your group can’t function without them.

At one point, Jim talks about what Capes “promises” him that GURPS doesn’t. That’s the problem: Games don’t promise. People promise. Friends make promises you can trust. They’re the basis; rules are toys that provide interesting output.

(Naturally, somebody’s going to call this “system doesn’t matter” rhetoric. It isn’t. Toys matter.)

Friends place emotional bonds over ritual relationships.

That brings me to my next point. Friendship thrives in liminal moments where no one has a particularly well-defined obligation, but come through nonetheless. Nobody tells you to pass your friend the spotlight, but you do it because you want her to be happy. Telling that joke might damage focus, but it’s fun, and you want your friends to have fun.

Recent RPG designs target these undefined moments, incorporate them into formal rules of play – the RPG ritual, in other words – and steals them from the dominion of ad hoc judgments based on mutual trust. And no wonder: Without the primacy of an emotional connection, you’ll see these interstices as threats. You’ll bitch about Rule Zero all day along.

A friend sets the example for new relationships.

If you don’t have a selfless, trusting informal relationship with the people you game with they aren’t your friends – not really. You may swear friendship up and down, but your claim lacks substance. And if your self-defined friendships lack these qualities, what about the people you meet online or at conventions? If anything, it’ll be worse. That’s why in my experience, the “indie” table is one of the unhappiest at the con.

I often surprise people by being so affable in face to face interactions, and when I run games at conventions (something I’m generally reluctant to do, by the way – when it happens, it’s to support relationships I value) people usually leave satisfied.

I associate gaming with some great friendships, so my first reflex is to assume that the potential for more of the same exists with anyone I play with. I don’t worry about them being “little bitches” (to refer to Jim’s comment about actors and improve) because it’s not acting – the performance to the third party isn’t adding its unique pressures. Tabletop play is about intimate experiences. It thrives on compassion. It needs friendship, or good faith in friendship to come.

(I should double-emphasize that it’s not as if RPGs don’t have a ways to go with that last one. For instance, I’m still a bit stung that the transgendered cop I created for “Bloody Mary” in Urban Legends got that part of his background cut at the developer’s insistence.)

Right after the D20 licence came out but before the Book of Erotic Fantasy I floated a thought experiment with some other writers about attacking the license with three books:

• The Killing of the King: The occult flow of causality requires you to assassinate JFK using every possible permutation allowed by the (loosely conceived) constraints of evidence to prevent the early rise of “Third Way” liberalism, because it sucks. Just look at how many times Tony Blair had to lie.
• D20 Eco Ops: This’d be a modern resource with rules for eco-activist sabotage. The game systems would be integrated into comprehensive descriptions of the organizational and tactical methods used by real groups, with the explicit position that the book was an ideological training ground.
• The third one is still a project I’m pursuing so I won’t go into too much detail, but it involves methodical real-world drug use by characters to stimulate their creative autonomy.

In retrospect a rewrite of the D20STL would have just resulted sooner, but the real point wasn’t to attack the license as much as use it as a conceptual benchmark in pursuit of challenging ideas. It’s all pretty contrived, but I’m afraid that I don’t think RPGs are doing better right now. They’re about Meta-issues for gamers, either situated in the game or the community. There are a whack of games stabbing at depth, but they just don’t succeed. It’s stuff like Man, organized religion sure is screwed up! or It’s hard when people die! or Poor people sure have it rough! or Aren’t you offended when I’m gross!

Challenging art requires to to fight a position that’s commonly believed in a way that gets to the point. Gamers are overfond of Star Trek-style superloose allegories (It’s really about black people/queer folks/etc, not aliens!), possibly because these were invented to avoid complaints from people just like them. The fact that these people lived in the 1960s indicates we haven’t come very far, have we? We like to use these to dodge blame for the bad stuff (like orcs as stand ins for colonized peoples) and take credit for the good stuff. We need to build challenges that are harder to dodge.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension (and others; just going with what comes to mind first) both tried out these sorts of challenges, though neither succeeded completely. Werewolf started out by saying Human nature and corporate capitalism in particular are immoral, destructive forces. Mage said Modernity isn’t necessarily desirable, probably isn’t rational and is a servant of political interests, anyway. Boy, did that make people mad, and not mad in a kind of throwaway fashion. Gamers still get pissed off about it. They get pissed off when hints of it come up, like when Awakening added a nod to John Zerzan-like primitivism in Tome of the Watchtowers, or whatever Phil Brucato wrote in Changing Breeds, and they’re probably not going to like something in an upcoming book where the easy colonized-peoples metaphor are the smart guys.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen too often though. It’s hard to present a commercial proposition that’s based on telling the audience their beliefs are screwed up unless it’s about religion. If it’s about religion it’s pretty easy because people who can’t irreverently manipulate signs suck at RPGs anyway. So besides things like like Satan was a good guy! Angels were stone killers! writers and designers get scared of saying this stuff because they don’t want to alienate their audience, especially now that segments of the audience can broadcast all kinds of crap in response on a public forum.

You would think that smaller publishers would pick up the slack here but by and large, they don’t. They’re pretty addicted to Trek-level allegories to inoffensively pick up the slack, with a side order of the ‘ol grossout (like that Old School thing where the guy details the evil things you do to summon demons and crap). I’m not saying it’s never been done there (Steal Away Jordan, for instance) but the small press sure has some ways to go.

It also doesn’t help that the culture of gaming is chock full of creative machismo. Everybody wants assurances that their creative impulse isn’t being oppressed by the GM or designer or group of something — everybody’s an enemy of the big swinging cock of self-expression. Challenging that . . . Well, it pretty much feels like pointing below the belt and laughing to these types, and making a statement about how you ought to think or feel can’t help but do that. It’s a pity, because it other media people take more responsibility for their responses.

I’ll put it this way. You know those crazy far right movie reviews that talk about how every flick will turn you into a gay(er) (more) heathen (card carrying) communist? Keep that style of analysis but remove the slant (mostly; there’s something inherently totalizing and fascist about that mode anyway) and you have how pretty much every internet-vocal gamer reacts to new RPG stuff they have a problem with. If someone did that for every movie they saw without a hint of satire or comic effect you’d probably think they were assholes, wouldn’t you?

Finally, you can’t do your best job without revealing something of yourself. It’s possible to do a good job writing against your beliefs, but it can be seriously disconcerting. I despise the world views of the Euthanatos and Silver Ladder, but people frequently cite that stuff as some of my better work. RPGs represent a special danger because the audience generates its own deep narratives and might really piss you off with them. I really sympathize with Vincent Baker dealing with Dogs in the Vineyard being used to play SS members, resulting in oneupmanship where everybody tried to sympathize with the SS. The answer to these challenges is that doing something like this means you’re an asshole, but nobody really wants to be put in a position where they have to call somebody an asshole. And win or lose that fight, you’re dealing with someone who created an involved narrative to an immoral end.

That’s the danger; that’s the challenge. Once you flirt with the heavy stuff you’re not dealing with remote intellectual questions any more. You’re laying it out, and you may end up confronting what you don’t just think is a creative conflict, but a basic moral error while you’re fighting for a position you believe leads to something finer in the world.

Who’s up to the challenge? Am I up to it? I don’t know. I think we need it. I hope we get it in 2010. Like I said at the beginning, it’s not the purpose of art, but without it, an art form has no purpose.

1. Peer pressure.
2. An unacknowledged desire to dominate others through the game’s text.
3. A misunderstanding of how it works (which is often contrived due to the influence of the other points).

The first two problems  are pretty easy to fix unless you get caught in a destructive scene, which happens frequently when people start gaming as teenagers. Teenagers are status and peer group focused to the point where it mutes individual moral and creative agency, but that’s not their fault. The second and third points stick around because of Graphocentric cultural biases and poor explanations in the books, respectively. They reinforce each other in a pretty insidious fashion.

What do I mean by “Graphocentric?” We belong to a literate culture where certain texts are privileged as sources of revelation. These texts typically have teaching roles, are the focus of communities and are not written to be chronologically sensitive, like newspaper articles. At the simplest level, we have a tendency to revere texts, but once you combine that with a slightly educated middle class its members discover that they can jockey for position over who gets to tell you what the text means. Either way, power doesn’t flow from the text, but from us. One really dangerous aspect of the Graphocentric perspective is that even though hermeneutics are subjective, we are reluctant to admit this because it makes the text look weak and undeserving of its central role. That’s where you get a lot of chapter and verse bullshit about what things really mean, but make no mistake: It’s really a social control strategy using the text as an instrument. To express it simply:

People use RPGs to tell you what to do because we all like to pretend the RPG is really telling us what to do, to the extent that even the folks telling you what to do through the RPG believe it’s all the game, not them.

Vague advice about fudging doesn’t help, though it’s vague for a reason. In their own way, game designers understand the triple threat and usually advise fudging as a way to escape it and take ownership of the game. Many know (though some have forgotten) that the most serious play issues have little to do with differing agendas or any of that bullshit. They stem from hermeneutic conflicts between people aiming for the same thing. These people fail because they put the rules at the center of the relationship instead of each other. That’s why designers who advocate fudging are reluctant to codify the process. They fear that text will just assimilate the specifics anyway, making them a new source for dispute, but it should be obvious by now that people are so twisted by Graphocentrism that they’ll use any bit of text to reflexively impose their wills.

(Once we acknowledge Graphocentrism we can also see that hitching your wagon to a text is a foolish way to cure social problems, that expressing the group’s relationship as a contract [text] of any sort isn’t significantly useful compared to a bunch of other things, and how poisonous in-vogue advice to do either of these things is.)

This insight frees us to talk about what fudging and fiat really are. Let’s begin by looking at a common but incorrect formulation:

Fiat happens when the GM ignores the results of the rules in favour of what s/he wants.

or

Ignore the system for a GM-determined result.

But when you observe fudging and fiat in the wild it generally doesn’t go down this way. The GM is usually very concerned with the rules, and rarely makes a decision that ignores them in such a simple, binary fashion. (If you haven’t taken the time to sit by a game as an observer, there are a bunch of places you can read about this stuff. I recommend Over the Edge 2nd Edition to start, though it’s more about in-world consequences than where the dice fall.)

It’s more like this:

Rules results + player input + GM input + story needs = result

Changing your perspective answers the question of why GMs roll dice if they’re going to make a ruling that ignores them – they aren’t! GM-adjusted/”ignored” dice rolls (or equivalent system outputs) are extremely useful. Let’s look at a classic move: Changing a hit that will kill a PC if left as is. The rules results tell us that the monster hit and inflicted 20 HP damage. The target character only has 8 HP. Depending on the exact situation this could tell us the following:

• The encounter might be too difficult if the scene’s function was to drain resources. This teaches us to use the system better and recognize any issues that require our ongoing attention.
• If it’s a fluke result we get a better understanding of how variable rules results can be.
• We might learn more about the player’s competence as a tactician, or whether s/he even cares about that aspect of play.

With this information in hand we consider the player’s input. What does s/he want? What did s/he do to get there and how does it relate to the situation at hand?

• If the player really wants to be thrown to the wolves for strict tactical gaming we might let the roll stand. If not, we’ll consider fudging it.
• If the player wants something in between or is at a critical stage where s/he’s testing the waters of tactical play but also feels very invested in his/her character or a certain narrative arc, it may be more useful to use the result as an inspiration, scaling it back to an incapacitating blow, to send a signal to the player that this is a serious situation without killing his/her character.

GM input exists throughout the whole process in this instance, but it’s easy enough (though not always desirable) to open this up to group discussion and reduce the GM”s direct input. In terms of traditional GM responsibilities s/he may consider the following:

• The whole encounter might have come about due to players ignoring or misinterpreting signals. If the campaign is meant to impose serious penalties for error or question player agency in course of events (concepts that many people are terrified to bring into play, but which can work well) then it might be time to let the dice stand. If Frodo and co. head in through the Black Gate, they’re screwed.
• Then again, it just might be the GM’s fault for any of the reasons above or because s/he communicated the situation poorly. S/he may be forced to tweak the entire encounter to compensate for the mistake, starting with this roll. After that, s/he revises monster stat blocks accordingly and inserts the possibility of new narrative threads that stem from this encounter.
• The GM may have something special planned for that particular character, and sticking with it would be more interesting for everyone than dropping it upon that PC’s death. S/he fudges the roll, but takes its existence as a hint to foreshadow or even implement the special event. In some situations s/he could pull the trigger on the event without fudging the roll. S/he might bring the character back from the dead – it worked for Jesus!

Fudging is the sum total of these influences, so it really is silly to say that the dice or player actions are meaningless. They’re usually more important than the GM’s intentions, though the GM has some serious responsibilities in the whole equation. I should also note that this flood of information doesn’t wait for the decision point. Most of it happens in the run up, as the group discusses its situation and play unfolds, so it’s already done most of the “work” required. It’s not that hard when we compensate for the Graphocentric perspective, put the game in its place and trust each other.

That’s it for now. I was going to delve into objections that hiding fudging and fiat is a bad thing, but it struck me that the arguments against these are so value-laden (like getting mad at costumes in plays, erasing wires with CGI and a host of other craft techniques) that it’s probably a waste of my time to deal with them. The idea that fudging and fiat can be eliminated by better design is dumb, but I’ll talk about that some other time.