Honestly, so much of what floats out has been influenced by marketing that I’d rather set myself apart by not talking about that. I worked in marketing for a few years, I did a pretty good job and I know decent people who do it, but it’s not my thing. (Ironically, people seem to think it is simply because I actually talk about this stuff, instead of blandly pretending to be your Good Buddy.) As far as RPGs go, the marketing cart has been pushed so far ahead of the horse that it’s dragging that thing down the fucking hill. Is there anything less interesting than OSR and indie sub-professional outfits talking about why you should buy something? Fuck that.

Of course, people preening themselves online to support the petty capitalist desire to Be a Boss aren’t the only ones ruining the conversation. Over in RPGland, everybody is fucking it up.

The big news over the past year has been undeniable confirmation that D&D has fragmented across two big games and a bunch of small ones. The two big games are both well-crafted and completely alienating to neophytes. The small games are approachable to hypothetical 1982 12 year olds as imagined by 40somethings. Outside of D&D, the indie experiment failed to bring in the new audience adherents repeatedly declared would be drawn by a supposedly-universal theory of story and play. Other companies sought refuge in retreads and licenses. The former appeals to old fans, and experience has shown that the latter almost always attracts gamers first, and license fans second. Keep in mind that this collection of games includes some great designs, and this attitude is understandable in the face of the current Depression.

This is the end state of what I occasionally call the Fail Era: a vision of games driven by abstract notions of markets and gameable relationships: characteristics of the larger, cultural stupidity that put us in the economic shitter to begin with. In all cases, we’ve lost sight of the objective that should precede everything else: the development of healthy, dynamic relationships between whole human beings. When we appeal to a “core story,” or “Creative Agenda,” we toss real relationships in the trash in favour of what the game demands. When we think about demographic appeal (including the demographic of nerds who came of age playing D&D in the 80s) as a goal instead of an happy result, we restrict what games to a kind of theatre where we play our scripted parts, instead of thinking about how we can get to know each other and share meaningful experiences.

How do we get out? I see a lot of hope in the alternative communities that have sprung up on forums and journals, where freeform roleplaying informed by media properties and original worlds evolve without the influences that cripple our own hobby. Sometimes these communities come to mind in our RPG scene, and I read our gamers give out terrible, unnecessary advice. If they needed us, they would be us. Fortunately, we can learn from them instead, and perhaps find a way out. Over the past few years in which I’ve monitored and studied online RP,  it strikes me that they revel in what the Fail Era declared taboo. They care about “pointless” events and relationships. They care about a world to share, and a responsibility to portray characters truthfully instead of as wish-fulfilment devices. They don’t always succeed, and many of them are deeply silly, but they show us what folks who weren’t initiated into our gaming style need — and what I think we need, now.

Worlds.

It’s hard to make worlds.

And here, I think, is where we come to the missing piece. We’ve lost the craft of worldbuilding. D&D and Pathfinder feature dull-as-fuck committee-built settings and little advice on how to build your own. This isn’t a problem unique to tabletop RPGs, but is endemic to any field where these more abstract creative elements have been pushed to the bottom priority, behind systems and core stories. Game designers like pushing these at fans to prove that they’re not frustrated novelists, and in larger outfits this touchy-feely creative stuff is hard to budget. Of course, it’s tempting to summon the spectre of TSR’s prolific settings or White Wolf metaplots (which is funny, since many of them were actually successful). But it isn’t always about laying out a specific world. One of D&D’s strengths was that by the time the five Mentzer box sets rolled around, key designers understood the patterns of D&D’s worlds, and laid them out as anchors for your game without over-systematizing them. Worlds for specific games require strong creative leadership, specifically two elements that are hard to fly in social marketing venues:

1)      Creative autonomy from the audience.

2)      Trust in the audience to find its own use for the world.

If you just listen to your audience, you won’t give them anything they can’t do themselves. Your receptiveness is really a type of contempt; you’re not ready to do the work needed to excite them. If you don’t think gamers are going to get it, you’ll systematize and over-explain the world, and it’ll turn into a trivial object, maybe the focus of a sub-game to design campaigns without ever playing them – and of course, it also indicates a fundamental lack of confidence that you have anything to give them in the first place.

Making worlds, or talking about building worlds without the safety net of strict systems, is a gamble. For big companies, it takes a lot of words, and those cost money. For small companies, the designer needs to writing ability and stamina. More than, that, there’s a chance that people just won’t be interested, regardless of how good a job you do. But now, at the sputtering candle stage of the hobby, somebody needs the gonads to try. Worlds are what the nerds you don’t know, the panfandoms, and the “Blue Ocean” you wish you could attract understand. This is the most accessible part of RPGs — not rules, not social legalese. In 2012, I hope somebody takes that risk and succeeds. We’ve done systems. We’ve done distrust-based management. We’ve done it all, and only amused various slivers of a stale pie.

The best thing about imaginary worlds is that they can bring us back to being people, sharing an experience and learning about each other, because we know how to live in them. From n00b to the veteran of a thousand edition wars, we can all ask what it would be like to live somewhere else. We can all think of how we coped with new, wonderful, frightening environments, unusual customs, and strangers around us. We can do it more readily that we can be taught to use a “setting hack,” or tag a trait, or modify a die roll, because it’s something we already do. It’s something human. And as we explore together, we can rediscover the deep bonds that come before rated, incentivized, curated, marketed relationships get in the way.

Creative work passes through phases that have less to do with improvement than exploration. Most people recognize that — it doesn’t get a second glance. But if Pablo Picasso was a game designer we’d read long screeds about how he really wanted to do Blue Period work all along, but the art world made him move on to Rose, or about how Cubist art was an objective advancement. Gamers and game designers are afraid of labelling themselves artists, so it really screws up their ability to recognize creative development as anything other than a technology. RPGs aren’t really engines that you can reliably improve until they work best on your chosen road. You’ll always wander, and you should play and design with the understanding that nothing will ever completely satisfy you. If you treat yourself like an artist you’ll get your feet moving, and you can embrace change with a degree of self-awareness.

My D&D game evolved a whole bunch since I originally vowed to play AD&D1e almost entirely as written and see what happened from there. If I was a typical gaming blowhard I’d talk about objectively improving the game to meet a set agenda, but if you’ve been following along, you know I think that’s pretty stupid. Instead, I’ve moved into a kind of symbiosis with the game, where some elements suggest changes, but these hacks aren’t global improvements that would have made the game better before. I finally dropped Weapon vs. AC not because it was a bad system at any level, but because it starts to become too cumbersome to justify its importance by levels 4-5. I still think it’s awesome at low levels, though. A DM or designer obsessed with gaming as a technical thing would probably try to systematize some compromise for all levels of play, but that strikes me as a waste of effort.

Protecting your mind from the illusion of progress is important at in every role in the hobby. Players need to do it to let go of what bores them and embrace temporary, non-doctrinaire solutions. Designers need to do it to get real insight out of their past designs and design heritage. Certainly, nothing marks creative stagnation in a game company than losing touch with the ideas behind past designs. Whenever you read about designers/developers lamenting that their predecessors sucked, you’re reading something that’s either a sales pitch for a new edition, or the musings of creative folks who have lost their way. I know I’ve been guilty of it — it’s part of the culture of working on established intellectual properties that the generation before you just wasn’t as awesome as you are.

Eventually you get over yourself and realize that the other guys took a different journey, and you learn to respect it unless it was genuinely facile or offensive. So nowadays, I try for a twofold perspective, where I not only judge things based on the values I hold, but I try to imagine the story of the creator and work, and assume they were smart people who did what they meant to do. And I think that’s why my tastes as a gamer and designer have steadily diversified, despite a culture where the tendency is to define your agenda, work within its narrow confines, and assume that without these controls, everybody else is a mindblind sociopath. We have come to not only see a pathology in journeys other than our own, but even in the possibility of having our own blue periods.

This pretence of mine is a sign of the times. D&D’s gone through at least one big commercial split and a huge sideshow of retro and custom gaming promoted by small presses and bloggers. I don’t really care which D&D is the most popular, but I don’t want to see the good ones go away, or the ones we love despite their flaws collapse instead of being modded and hot-rodded to fit particular tables. Honestly, the stakes are so low when it comes to the design of a D&D that the only reasons to care about an orthodoxy are driven by marketing or online community building. The basic format of D&D, where character-players collaborate with a Dungeon Master for their mutual entertainment in a broadly understood world, is so resilient that groups turn troublesome rules into cool ones pretty easily, and often find that project more fun than running a better-tuned game out of the box.

WotC’s D&D, the Pathfinder D&D, retro-D&Ds and a bunch of outsider-design D&Ds float around like droplets in a big cloud of ideas about D&D. I run a heavily modified version of the old AD&D, and play in the WotC 4e D&D. I’ve read a bunch of these Clone D&Ds people make and sell. Some of them are pretty good, or at least interesting, and they all tell you something about what makes for a D&D in the author’s mind. People argue that one D&D or another is the best one, or one category of D&D is better than the rest (or somebody talks about how they just happen to prefer one of them for reasons which leave no doubt that they really think the other D&Ds are stupid and their players are wrongheaded). Gamers hate examining themselves as a culture and get into all kinds of stupid theory and agenda taxonomies, but D&Ds really hang together through networks of friendship, hobby mentoring and communities that use classes, levels and other D&Disms as allegiance signs.

Sometimes I think design obsessions substitute for substantial relationships. When you only know people through blogs, forums and convention play dates, you’ll need to find some way to play your parts in the theatre of belonging, and bellow to the rafters that you think Fighter dailies suck, just like another guy you admire. Is there any other reason to have a conversation about whether AC goes up or down? I like a lot of different D&Ds but then again, I play with good friends: people I enjoy dinner with, and whose personal lives and nonverbal cues are share on a daily basis. But I’ve enjoyed most of the D&Ds I’ve played. I can’t wait to get back to my 4e game, and I miss the 3.5 game I used to play.

I’m happy all these D&Ds exist, and I’d love to play more of them — but I don’t want to sign up for any particular D&D design cult. Instead of self-conscious small press movements, hucksters and screeds, I’d like to see good friends talk about the way they do it. Instead of retroclones I want house rule sheets, warts and all. (No, random generation tables and item lists don’t count.) Instead of contrived play reports, I want unstructured anecdotes. In the end, the reason all these D&Ds exist is because of oral traditions, rough notions and field experiments. And although I think D&Ds can look like almost anything, none of them are essays, op eds and advice on the best D&D, best way to play it, or theory of it. All of these can be useful, but they’re not the centre of the experience, and that is what I feel the larger D&D community increasingly places this stuff.

Luxury? Compared to what?

I think game designers and some of the most vocal (and least useful) fans have been suckered into the idea that game designers make games happen by developing “core” rules and content, but if you look at the actual practice of roleplaying over the decades, this isn’t true at all. The original rules for Dungeons and Dragons are terminally incoherent, and the most important thing they transmit is a loose structure of ideas — nothing like enough to learn in the way you might learn a board game. But it plays just fine.

Similarly, the biggest real grassroots surge in roleplaying (something we can safely exclude the market-label “indie” and retro-gamers from) comes from online fandom, and they don’t need anything the tabletop community makes. (Yes, lots of them know what we do but they don’t care!)

So asking whether a book or other RPG item is “core,” or “necessary,” is useless. We are all dealing in luxuries when it comes to getting some roleplaying done. Realizing this is remarkably liberating, and frees oneself from various illusions about where different types of content stands. We don’t have the false belief that rules are more necessary and can soberly look at build-and-prep as something other than play, and take a closer look at ad hoc ideas without uselessly asking if they represent “really” playing something.

Basically, when you read anything here, you should assume that we’re not talking about necessities, but just whether something is compelling.

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

. . . but there’s one more thing: our guard against absurd arguments about some impossible tabula rasa:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not entirely defined.

We need guidance right from the beginning, though these bits (genres, mission statements, core stories) are subject to interpretation. Bad game theory promotes these initial definitions into a kind of church; follow the doctrine or fuck off. Play is obedience is play.

But this wasn’t always what we meant by play. What happened? It would be too easy to get into sappy talk about child’s play. Child’s play can be vicious; kids haven’t learned who has status, when to speak and when to shut up. They can be casually cruel. It’s the land of Lawrence Kohlberg’s first two stages of moral development, and a bit of his third.

(Note that this little trip of mine is not dogmatic Kohlberg. He ain’t perfect — Carol Gilligan’s critique is the best known. He’s too focused on formal polities as moral instruments. His framework is interesting, and I’m warping it as I go.)

Kohlberg also talks about “higher” post-conventional morality and here discusses a concept whose name will excite certain gamers: the social contract. The notable thing about social contracts as Kohlberg defines them is that they have little to do with the failed RPG theory of social contracts. Focused on “being on the same page,” rigid sets of expectations, and reward/punishment systems, dead-theory mechanisms prod players through a stage one (moral choices from fear of punishment) to restricted stage four (code-driven — Christian Fundamentalism is an example) framework. Highly defined notions of genre and convention (“back to the dungeon,” or a “Golden Age” implying an inescapable historical process) have the same purpose, through it’s rendered less formally.

The term “social contract” is poisoned; we have to use something else. Fortunately, Kohlberg’s notion of the social contract also marks a point where we can look to his critics and pull back from an overly academic, political context (Kohlberg tends to identify “higher morality” with sheer scale, and with formal institutions that carry Big Moral Plans out — the problems are easy to see) and into a style of interpersonal relationships that recognizes:

1. We possess different interests, and that diversity usually tolerable, if not intrinsically valuable. (If everybody was the same, we’d get bored.)
2. We also possess common rational interests that can often be inferred from early-stage development. (Avoid pain, seek pleasure, play that utilitarian banjo.)

The natural conclusion is that we must fairly negotiate the role of our differences in various contexts. This unites our differences and our common self-interests into a single process. This fairness does not, however, require a fixed set of rules to “get on the same page” or any of that bullshit.

Kohlberg discusses a “prior to society” perspective, but this is a bit grandiose. Certainly, we must return to primordial, progressive honesty as best we can to evaluate the most fulfilling way to play from moment to moment, and  ideally, this region of our thinking comes before we apply rules and customs, but we’ll always get a little “dirty” with other concerns — we are never in a pure place.

We’re starting to create a process, answer a question from last time: What kind of communication takes place?

Negotiation. Constant negotiation. Simple and complicated negotiation. Negotiation where each party believes something different happened but it still works out.

Second question: How do participants use rules and customs while communicating?

The answers depend on our moral commitment to the game. Let’s come up with some stages:

1. Retaliatory (“You killed the Big Bad? ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES,” or “Escalation.”)
2. Egoistic (“Look at me! Look at the GMPC!” or “Bringing the Awesome.”)
3. Peer Pressure (“This is how you play a proper Tremere,” or “I will never abandon you.”)
4. Fundamentalist (“System Does Matter” and D20-supremacist dogma)
5. Interpersonal (“How do you feel? How do you want to feel?” This mature mode of gaming is our realistic goal. Negotiation with a respect for difference.)

Beyond this, I could posit a Transpersonal Stage moral commitment, where social good and high level artistic achievements take centre stage, but Kohlberg’s already-shaky structure loses its grounding.

But what about those kids? A moment ago I looked down on idealized childhood roleplaying, but in the West (and maybe elsewhere) we’ve got life stages where we bounce around: adolescence where we roam around the first three stages as we try to find a place in the power structure, and early adulthood, where, conventional identities in hand, we appear to fall back into an antisocial low stage when we’re really arguing with cultural norms — and as often as not, that argument is a good idea.

Coincidentally, these life stages — these “Fuck the Law” eras — are also where most gaming takes place. That’s what some dated market research says, anyway.

Basically, we do most of our TRP gaming during volatile periods where we might be at our worst, but which also have the potential to liberate us from being boring, obsessed with social conventions and base reward/punishment cycles. When we’ve been hurt by this it’s easy to get stuck fixing things with rules — that’s how society, with its naturally low opinion of the us (the mob), already regulates our behaviour.

Toy Dogma is more optimistic. It craves the dangerous realm of play because post-fundamentalist play demands we listen to each other now, and not just during design or setup. It’s hard to listen when rules tell you to shut up, how to speak or what to say. We know we’ll bounce around different levels of commitment. Games help us; they don’t rule us. We play with them like toys.

I’ve really grown to love AD&D1e as a game of its own, however, and understand it now much better than I did when I was a child, playing Dragonlance or running my own game world hacked together out of Dragon Magazine articles, canned modules and seat-of-the-pants improvisation. AD&D1e is a grownup game, believe it or not: an RPG that requires a slow, deliberate exploration of your options, plenty of discussion and a willingness to look up fiddly bits. I used to think that this was an indictment of the game’s design, but I got turned around from a chat with Ed Greenwood where he talked about his encounters with wargamers and how “slow” they seemed, while the deliberated over the next moves on huge hex maps. This also explains why 1e’s text meanders so damn much; organization was just not as big deal when collectively touring the books is part of the ride.

Once you look closely, you come to understand that with all the bells and whistles intact, AD&D1e is a game of remarkable cohesion and subtlety. You can encounter some crazy things, but encounter reactions determine whether you’ll step right in to a fight. Charisma is an extraordinarily powerful ability score because it influences henchman and hireling numbers and loyalty. Weapon vs. AC adjustments justify the large weapon table. So do the special abilities of certain weapons. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s not just a bunch of crazy shit hacked together in the way even supporters claim. It sure seemed that way to me when I was a teenager, but I played it in an impatient, edited form. It looks to me that this half-game is the AD&D OSRIC emulates.

Most of the changes I’ve made have been ways to keep the behaviour of the system while appeasing my generation’s decreased patience. For example, even though I use increasing AC, I add -5/+5 modifiers at 1 and 20, respectively to emulate the old tables. I’ve shifted to a 20-sided die where possible. I use a universal ability score table, but it has three entries per score – between them, I can emulate most of the older mechanics.

Changes to the real output of the system are only just starting to establish themselves. I added critical hits (If a natural 20 is also a hit). The biggest change I’ve made is to eliminate the daily rest requirement for magic user spells. MUs now have a study time per spell slot equal to 1 + spell level hours, and a slot “recharge” time of the same duration. Spell slots represent the maximum number that can be memorized and ready to go at any given time.

Eventually, this will turn into its own game, and I might even publish it. For now, I’m enjoying designing a game the old fashioned way, how most of us do game design in the beginning, but unlike many people – including a younger me – I’m not fixing something broken. I’m learning the cut of the suit, appreciating the craftsmanship, and tailoring it with care.

Tabletop roleplaying game theory used to concentrate on finding ways to describe the hobby and find connections with other types of art and culture. For about a decade, this form of inquiry has largely been suppressed partly as a matter of deliberate intent and partly as a side effect of basic changes in how the Internet functions for people. Dead tree publications, Usenet and the static web were the primary vectors for serious (though only pseudo-academic – academic work on RPGs was and remains a disappointing pretence indulged by partisan hacks) discussion. The rise of simple forum interfaces and blogging essentially erased this legacy.

That’s why most of the people who will read this will probably not by familiar with any form of TRPG theory that existed before 2000, except where it was ripped off without clear acknowledgement (as it has been many times).

Modern TRPG theory is primarily designed to create false tautologies. These are the signs:

• It relies on terminology that’s been invented whole cloth instead of evolved from cousin media.

(Engagement with other media theory and politically engaged discourse can reveal problems. Talking about a theory from within its invented language makes it difficult to find flaws.)

• Its primary discourse is based on marketing, rather than the substance of the medium/pastime.

(Most TRPG theory groups closely align discussions with how games ought to be designed with how they ought to be sold. Theory discussions are preoccupied on how to make games appealing to perceived market segments, and spam is usually permitted and traded.)

• Its communities value statements of faith, conversion and belonging.

(Typical narratives of belonging include dissatisfaction with play, and “Actual Play” stories about converting to a community’s favoured practices.)

• It is especially attractive to people who have been unsuccessful roleplayers.

(There are many instances of more active participants in communities admitting that they don’t play TRPGs anymore. This is sometimes difficult to trace – for example, a few years ago former Forge poster Jack Spencer Jr. admitted that he had not played any RPG in a long, long time, then erased every trace of having made that statement. Beyond that, the basic story people tell about getting involved in theory is that they were part of some failed experience. Naturally, this experience is almost never reported to be that person’s fault.)

I’m not interested in inventing false tautologies to ease disappointments in my own gaming. I greatly enjoy my gaming and count myself a “naturally” successful gamer. I want to know where my enjoyment comes from – that’s the first question in this investigation.

To find the answer we’ll need to find ways of talking about TRPGs that connect to other fields. We’ll also need to find new ways of talking about fundamental concepts. Some popular language is superficially useful, but contains assumptions liable to take us the wrong way.

What needs to go?

Ideas Disconnected from Other Types of Culture: TRPG thinking avoids connections with other bodies of critical theory and practice. For example, Forge theory uses a simple concept called “stance” even though mainstream literary criticism from Frye onward provides examples of multi-levelled engagement with texts.

Ideas Validated Through Marketing: By “marketing” I’m not just talking about the kind of things gamers readily identify. Now that the majority of commercial TRPG activity rests within long-tail offerings, conversational marketing occurs at all levels. Most RPG theory work is explicitly connected to what theorists are selling you, and of course have linked communities. So in lieu of arguments and partial commitments (like the game, hate the theory) discussions are now enmeshed in circular, interlocking modes of persuasion (to be in the community you need to commit to the game, to commit to the game you need to believe in the theory, to believe in the theory you need to commit to the community

Ideas That Disguise Individuality: By “individuality” I mean the basic assumption that every player’s involvement is dynamic and unique. It’s incredibly destructive to our understanding of games to suppress this with contrived social contracts, hard-coded stances and other tools designed to delete the fact of individuality from the discussion.

Finding our way back will help us identify the patterns of success that arise naturally instead of through indoctrination. I feel that this is absolutely vital for innovation and artistic growth.

So it becomes time to talk about what TRPGs are all about. We have some rules to keep us honest now, so we have to get basic, say things like:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate.

Then:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate about fictional narratives.

. . . and we can even take it to:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate to establish details about fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

Even “fictional” might be stretching it! I can see an RPG-like process being used to build a more coherent account of real events. I don’t think this has ever been done. See what insights you can get from returning to the source? Note that I also said “narratives.” We have rules now. We can’t just invent a shared story box into which we throw our ideas because we’re not allowed to disguise individuality. That includes individual accounts of the fiction. We accept these differences as a basic fact, not a problem to be suppressed.

Maybe we can say:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

And finally, let’s get really bold with:

• In TRPGs, participants communicate using rules and customs to establish details about related fictional narratives that are not yet defined.

Now it’s time to cautiously build. We have a basic statement of what people to in TRPGs. This statement inspires questions that in turn inform the answer to the first question I posed at the beginning of the series: What do naturally successful gamers do?

I want to know:

• What kind of communication takes place?
• How do participants use rules and customs while communicating?
• What relationship exists between participants’ narratives?

I’ll get to these next time.

I love TRPGs. I think I’ve been looking at them as a field where performance matters for about 20 years (I don’t count vague ideas that I should be “better,” or you should be “better,” or pretending that something about being a teenager over 20 years ago is about the game). I had some success applying theatre theory and craft (theatre was a hobby of mine) but I couldn’t help but notice a stopping point where I couldn’t credit anything I could identify from consciously acquired skills. Meanwhile, my play and GMing instincts improved, and it led me to the primordial question: How are we doing these cool things? or:

1) What do naturally successful gamers do?

(Part of the answer will always be “Friendship.” I’ve got good friends and have had the luxury of years to grow with some — as many as 13 continuous years in the case of one player — but I rarely go without that spirit even with groups I’ll never see again. I might tie this. I might not.)

While I explored the answer I started freelancing and working on games of my own. I observed players, wrote down interactions and processes do inform my work and general ideas about TRPGs. Now I think I’ve thrown together a good way to express what I’m talking about.

Again with the Toys.

To answer question #1, I needed to address :

2) What do TRPGs do as an art that is is distinctive?

and I needed the Toy concept to express it properly.

Toy suggests Play but Play does not always lead to Toy. You play games, play sports, play a part, play the fool. You might be in a play. A toy is something designed for creative engagement, though it can also be a verb describing frivolous action. Toy is what I use to centre TRPG play in what makes it interesting. I want you to see a TRPG as a type of toy and not like its dull-ass cousin, the board game. I want you to associate it with childhood not because I want you to indulge in childish things, but to play and make TRPGs that work like this:

Primordial, Progressive Honesty In Relationships: This was a tough one to label. “Primordial” refers to conditions that feature minimal manipulation by game or GM fiat. “Progressive,” means that from primordial conditions, we explore friendships. “Honesty” means we recognize player/character, GM/world, and story/person divides as artificial at all times, and subject to intersections.

(Primordial does not mean a sterile, neutral starting point. That can’t happen. Honesty helps us recognize that.)

Toys come into it because we can view this type of play as similar to how children (and adults, since humans go for neoteny) use toys to establish relationships. This article touches on it. We progressively integrate the flow of our play with others until we become interdependent. We make a chimera. This process is not in of itself a proper bargaining point or type of currency in the game — or if it is, this isn’t something the game sets out to legislate.

Discovering Narratives, Not Designing Them: If you want to write a story or pen a play, just get it done. Games can do them well — for games. Compared to actual stories . . . yeah. Sorry.

Stories are artificial. Most of what people believe is universal is a result of deeply ingrained cultural biases. I’m not just talking about Hamlet in Africa style issues, but the idea of rising action, climax, denouement — all fake! We stick old stories in the frames of our biases to create the appearance of universality, but they don’t quite fit. The Iliad is about the rage of Achilles largely because we have tailored its standard telling to fit, for example (its boundaries are fluid, and we know little of its original context in the Epic Cycle). Stepping back from cultural works, personal stories are artificial in the way they assign the impression of theme and pacing to certain stretches of our lives. The actual passage of events is raw data at a steady beat and our immediate reactions melded into experience.

Even when we recall a story we’ve been told, we can only do it by telling another story. We make fiction out of fiction. Instead, TRPGs should provide common experiences, and we should have a riot fighting over what they mean, and loving differences in perception. Game is for feeling and doing. Story is the lie you’re compelled to tell after the fact.

So:

Play is Experience: Not banal experience, but the experience of the world, of being in the fiction. This is not “immersion” (though it can be) or about fidelity to the world, but about a sense that it is happening in an unstylized fashion even when style has been strongly coded into other areas. In this, I found some inspiration in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida – in his assertion that what the (pre-digitally malleable) photograph is a representation that dissolves into what it represents, creating a third type of semiotic object distinct from handmade representational art like painting or the thing itself.

TRPGs create unreal experiences that are stubbornly real, authentic fakes. That’s another Toy feature. Playing with a Toy creates a window into an authentic realm. In childhood, toys prepare us for survival, work and socialization by acting as this gateway. TRPGs are similar, except that they provide tutelage in experiences that will never happen, and are forever in danger of falling away to reveal our naked wills because they are fiction, because they are what we made.

And believe it or not, we can get better at it.

This was not (and probably still isn’t) a big problem for young gamers who are genuinely inspired by the hobby, but let’s be honest: There aren’t as many kids coming in and grasping at words for their discoveries. Those kids were valuable for more than just the hobby-as-dynasty; they entered adulthood with the idea that roleplaying games were successful by default. The fundamental question was, “How are we doing these cool things?”

Compare to the present, where culturally closed communities treat play like a minefield, and the only safe place a retreat into emulating other media. They want TRPGs to be like popular short fiction or theatre (or at least, they way they imagine them to be). Since the easiest way to emulate these forms is by actually writing a short story or putting on a play, cargo-cult emulation through an RPG always rings hollow.

Now it’s easy to retreat into nostalgia as well, and even though it seems like I’m setting that up, you need to understand that emergence into “adulthood” as a thinking gamer was never an easy process because TRPGs have qualities that are so unlike other creative outlets. It’s difficult for gamers to even see that they’re creating art. None of the usual signs and rituals guide the way; there’s not much money and less prestige in it. You can see why, searching for something to help navigate this unknown territory, we tend to hold onto the familiar: traditional story arcs, corporate branding, clichés and genre. Nobody’s immune. You can use these things as tools to investigate what you’re doing or build a shallow foundation for some functional gaming. You’ll play through the same basic story arc or go back to the dungeon again — and again, and again.

Trapped by the gross semiotics of the situation, gamers frame lowered ambitions as success — as applied theory. They age. Fewer kids come in asking, “How are we doing these cool things?” Tired veterans police discourse, taking control right down to the meaning of individual words, and the basic narrative of what gaming is changes to a failure mode.

Over the past decade, the default assumption of what happens at TRPG play has changed from confused success to elaborate hierarchies of how you might fuck up. And it is just so easy to say that one limited conception of roleplaying is the only way out, especially if it appeals to nostalgia (like D&D revival movements) or bourgeois insecurity about artistic legitimacy (like the indie movement). None of these movements have revived interest in TRPGs or even demonstrably improved play beyond the level of unfalsifiable anecdotes.

Is this a problem? The dominant voice might be a stunted, whiny one, but despite what that whiners say, TRPGs are easy to enjoy. Should we just leave them to the slow “Meh” of long tail-enabled denial, banal dungeons and shitty novel-building engines?

I don’t think so. I think it’s a better idea to return to “How are we doing these cool things?” and add, “What are these cool things?” and “What good are these cool things?”

In other words, I want to ask three questions:

1. What do naturally successful gamers do?
2. What do TRPGs do as an art that is is distinctive?
3. Are RPGs moral? (That is, are their moral consequences to playing them beyond sessions about moral issues?)

I’ve been thinking about these questions a lot. I don’t have sympathies for any popular house. Story game types, OSR adherents, toolkit wonks — I don’t care for any of them and I don’t care about building some kind of competing “house.” But I will gather ideas and spit them out. And I have. I think I have partial answers to each of these questions, and for me, they all grow from one metaphor I have found increasingly useful.

We’re talking about toys.

What people assume versus where it’s coming from probably explains why folks get so surprised that I’m enthusiastic and positive in person. I like to make friends and play enthusiastically. Even though I hate, my love is powerful: the soil in which the poison, fibrous hate-vines grow. Why is it that I do everything you think is bad, say nasty things and still have more fun playing RPGs than you? Why is my buddy Steve, who we all mocked mean-spiritedly for getting a cursed ring in D&D still around, and why does he play better than the shmoe who’ll be sitting across from you? Because I’m a conscious hater. My hateration is finely honed. You should hate like I do. What makes my evil so strong?

Quality Hate is Hate as in Seafood, not Hate as in the Klan

I hate most things the way I hate seafood. It’s not going to kill me. It is not a threat to civilization. I don’t like the taste and if you must shove it in my face I might barf. Lots of people think you must choose between anaemic ”dislike,” as you might have for the Australian Shriraz that, while acceptable, is just not the same as your fave Australian Shiraz, or being a totally evil bastard who suddenly wants to buy det cord, fertilizer and some fascist books that are so terrible I’m not even going to name them.

There is a class of aversions in the world which engage the emotions but are not battles for the heart and soul of civilization. You shouldn’t frame everything as if it’s as serious as social justice. This is not making an excuse for kyriarchy manifest in hobby scenes, which is serious. Race in WotC art direction is a big fight even if the arena is small. I’m saying that it’s stupid to feel the situation is quite so critical when arguing the merits and mistakes of 4th Edition. This smaller thing is the pond in which you splash your super-chlorinated  hate-water. Do not be a dork by treating every expression of ire like it’s President Palin O’Beck’s Tea Party Party coming at you.

Quality Hate is Specific

I don’t say that something’s a piece of shit — at least not in isolation. In fact, very few things are globally terrible. Whenever I hate on something I target specific elements. There are some godawful things about The Burning Wheel like Let it Ride but that doesn’t damn the whole thing. Lesser minds confuse this with some wide ranging condemnation of the game, which is really quite good once you get past the fandom and vapid marketing.

(By the way, BW scenesters, Ifound that old thread where you gathered a posse to fight me. That’s pretty funny.)

This explains why I like most RPGs despite being a hater, and other folks hate most RPGs despite pretending to be nice. They have no consciousness of their hate, so they don’t check themselves. They just kind of cast vague broadsides with fake-ass smiles in place. That’s why I can have fun with pretty much any game and so many of you cannot. My hate, being defined, is quite limited. Vague hate runs on forever and chokes everything.

Listen: I went to a convention and played Fiasco and probably had more fun than you, the Fiasco-lover who won’t shut the fuck up about it, ever will. Look at the para above. That’s why.

Quality Hate Saves Ad Hominems for Jokes and Retribution in Kind

I don’t like saying bad things about people. I don’t do it that often and when I do, it’s usually a joke or a response to someone who’s become an insulting pain. This is often because he or she believes disliking someone’s creative output is the same as disliking them. This mistake issues from dorks like John Tarnowski and creators who drink too much of their own Kool-Aid. Crybabies.

Leaving them aside (and one should) it’s not cool to hate on people. It’s supercool to hate on works and entire scenes (Christian Fundamentalism or “Old School” D&D fandom, for example) but leave individuals out of it (If you think you are your scene, get over yourself!). Once again, refusing to acknowledge and refine your hate just makes it stronger. It’ll stick to more of your mental cast of thousands. Ron Edwards’ “brain damage” essay is one of those rare works in gaming that can make you a worse gamer if you read it with defences down, but I assume he’s a good guy. I’m not going to say stupid shit about his lifestyle or job, like some have. I’ve erred from time to time here, but I generally try to stick to this ethic.

Quality Hate Destroys Illusions

Hey, I think that American quasi-anime-manhua cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender is awesome, even if it does look like a bunch of guys grabbed Exalted and asked themselves how to write out the masturbation and nipple rings (making it an ideal WotC setting!). One of my favourite bits is when Toph, an earthbender (moves rocks around with magic kung fu) tells Aang, an airbender (moves air around with kung fu and is a sop for the collective Western messiah complex) explains that earthbending (moving earth with magic kung fu) isn’t about any tricky-trick novelty way to get around something, but demands a head on confrontation.

Like hate.

Hate is strong medicine.  When you think of hating on something you have to question yourself. Can I back that shit up? You need to make an argument, perfect your stance. If you do, the content of your vitriol cannot be absorbed or deflected with patronizing Columboing. I’ve seen a lot of good criticism wither because it was so nice it could be absorbed and neutralized. Everybody shakes hands, ignores each other and learns nothing.

Let’s get back to “brain damage.” It’s hateful in a good way. I don’t think many people understand that Ron Edwards is making a coherent argument here because they’re in it for the drama, one way or another. I absolutely disagree with his conclusions (the idea that narrative structure as defined by sub-undergraduate English is the proper endpoint of a neural Darwinist pruning process has lots of funny self-owning outcomes, like implying that like tolerating homosexuals is also “brain damage” because that’s a Fancy Modern Fashion too. Also, the Iliad mostly resembles Vampire instead of anything he likes, so LOL.) but (as you can see by the huuuge aside in there and here!) it’s thought provoking for anything with the gonads to rise to the challenge.  It added something good to the critical world.

Quality Hate is Self-Hate

Ooooh! Self-hate! Nooo! Self-esteem triggers are like fucking Kryptonite for anybody born after 1965. Relax. It’s okay to hate yourself.

Sort of.

See everything I wrote earlier? Apply it to your own gaming, writing and designing. If you have bigger problems than a stalled creative process, seek help for them. Limit the scope of your self-criticism to the most coherent items. Do not view things you don’t like about yourself as essential markers of your identity. Be direct.

And remember what I said about love? Found it in an overarching love. I’m a Gamer Hater because I love gaming, and there’s no Goddamn contradiction.