Whimsy - An Addendum

I guess I have a few more things to say following yesterday's "Whimsy" post. I'll try to keep the digressions to a bare minimum. 

When I talk about whimsy in Dungeons & Dragons or adventure/game design, I'm using the definition from my old Merriam-Webster dictionary:

a fanciful or fantastic device, object, or creation esp. in writing or art

I don't mean capriciousness, nor light hearted or humorous, and I certainly don't mean "gonzo," which my MW simply defines as:

bizarre

...which is what you tend to get (in gaming) when you pile too much weird on top of weird.

When I wrote that Dragonlance was "post-apocalypse lite," I did not mean to imply it was light-hearted. I'm just saying that its particular version of PA fiction isn't quite as heavy and serious as what one finds in a "harder" look at the genre (considering "hard" to be like "hard science fiction"). And please don't infer my use of the terms "heavy" and "serious" to be "dark and awful" ...I'm saying it's not well thought out (see prior posts on steel currency and religion in DL). 

Dragonlance, for all its flaws, has whimsy. A treetop village is whimsy. A wizard cursed with hourglass eyes is whimsy. A dragon holding an elven king hostage in his own dreams is whimsy. And, yes, even a "steel currency" is whimsy...if also utter nonsense. 

No ewoks, just whimsy.

But for all its pretensions at being "epic fantasy," Dragonlance (at least in its fiction) is surprisingly down-to-earth. The characters care about money to pay for stuff. Their love lives are complicated and messy. People die of old age, get beat up, hurt, fall ill with sickness. They complain about things. They get annoyed with and yell at each other. It's not Tolkien. It's not Star Wars, following the exploits of some "chosen one." These people end up being the "heroes of the Lance," but ANYone could have been "heroes of the Lance" if they'd been in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time...the reason we're following this particular group is because they are the shmucks that ended up with the job and we want to watch how exactly that happened.

[okay, there is SOME pretentious "chosen one" stuff in DL...Goldmoon and Riverwind, for example, or Raistlin being a vessel for Fistandantilus, or Tanis just "happening" to have a past relationship with a Dragon Highlord. But the other characters are more-or-less interchangeable with ANY D&D miscreants]

That, for me, is what makes whimsy work. If you have this "normal" world (assuming, for the moment, that monsters and magic-users are "normal") with otherwise normal challenges (politics and economics, combat being a dangerous proposition, etc.) THEN the injection of the occasional strangeness can produce a feeling of "magic." Whimsy can produce wonder. And that makes for a cool/better game experience.

When EVERYthing is weird/strange...so much so that the weird/strange becomes "business as usual"...that's when you get into gonzo territory. And that's a territory I don't generally like to hang out in. Maybe because it lacks a true "normal" point of reference for me to use in orienting myself to the material at hand.

Consider the animated Heavy Metal film.  The climactic short, Taarna, is pretty lame/throwaway as a story because so much of it is just weird on weird. It's an interesting visual image (at times), but the only scene that works for me at all is the one in the bar, because it reference so many tropes viewed in the western (gunslinger) genre. The BEST short of the bunch is probably Den of Earth because while the thing piles gonzo weirdness on top of gonzo weirdness it has a running narration from John Candy providing a "normal dude" commentary on all the weirdness. Despite its psychedelic plot/visuals it never loses its viewers' perspective or orientation.

"This mutant speaks
pretty good English."

Some OSR stuff...even some of the best OSR stuff...just has a hard time with this. Operation Unfathomable (which I own in hardcopy) is an example that springs immediately to mind. It's weird on top of weird with no chance to catch one's breath, no true respite from the gonzo, no chance to sit back and take stock. It's still cool, incredibly imaginative and evocative, definitely a fun read...and probably NOT an adventure I'll ever run. I want long-term campaign play (or gaming that has the potential for campaign play) not one-off weirdness. A world that will develop over time in recognizable fashion by the actions of the players, not something that starts strange, stays strange, and only gets stranger.  That ain't whimsy!

Neither is whimsy (necessarily) humorous or light-hearted. My buddy, Kris, who wrote the Black Rock Island adventure? Not a humorous dude. Too serious, one might say, though given to a terse chuckle when something (rarely) tickles his funny bone. Knowing him as I do, I'd say any humor or slapstick in the adventure is completely unintentional. He just isn't a jokey kind of guy (and the things that he does find amusing aren't always the same as the average person). Most humorous and "punny" stuff injected into old TSR adventures he'd call "dumb." And the black humor found in stuff like Warhammer FRP would just go straight over his head...just wouldn't even register.

Yes, whimsy can be light-hearted and humorous. A race of kleptomaniac halflings cannot help but draw chuckles if used with some restraint (they're really not much different from the mischievous house brownies of folklore). So can foodstuffs with magical properties. So can talking monsters that exhibit human-style foibles and personality flaws.

In the long-running AD&D campaign of my youth we had one character with an intelligent talking sword. It was beefy...a +4 broadsword with both dancing and defending properties, if I remember correctly...but it just would not shut up. Thing had a British accent, so was called "Chap" and the PC would argue with it constantly (it had a higher intelligence than its wielder). Both fanciful and amusing, after the character was retired from play, she'd still show up as a (shared) NPC, an occasional bit of comic relief in our games.

Comic relief has probably always been a necessary part of D&D play, because the game can be very tense and very emotional even when its not grim, dark, and awful. But comic relief isn't the point of "whimsy." Whimsy's purpose is to add magic to a game that might otherwise resemble nothing more than a numbers tracking game...whether you're talking hit points or gold or encumbrance or experience. D&D is more than just resource management and friends kabitzing around a table. And whimsy, in the right dosage, helps elevate the experience of play to something even more fanciful and fantastical.

That, I think, is what this game is all about: experiencing a fantasy. Folks may have additional reasons for playing, but they pale in comparison. There are better role-playing games for competition, challenge, and telling stories. But nothing's quite like D&D when you can add a bit of whimsy.

All right, that's enough for now.

Gonzo

I got some bad news earlier this week. Oh, it's no big deal for folks not from Seattle...and even for folks who are, it won't matter much unless you care about basketball (which I don't) or private investors dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy in the form of jobs, improvements, and infrastructure (that's me). So...well, a bit of a downer.

So to cheer myself up, I started surfing the blogs (as I'm wont to do), looking for something to lighten my mood. Specifically, I was interested in finding info about Paul Reiche's (and Erol Otus's) old FAE supplements The Necromican and Booty and the Beasts. What I found was Mr. Lizard's fantastic gaming blog, and I've spent much o this week reading his archives.

Ian "Lizard" Harac is a very smart, very funny guy who's been playing RPGs since the 70s...a looong time, in other words. A part-time game designer (his latest book has good reviews), he makes no bones about his affection for "gonzo" gaming...his pet project (years in the works) is a GW-style game with a bat-winged, laser-eyed bear for a logo (Earth Delta). He was heavily inspired in his formative years by the Arduin books of David Hargrave, and that's mostly what I've been reading: his series of posts reviewing, detailing and commenting on the three tomes that make up "the Arduin Cycle."

For me, a guy who was never exposed to Arduin (never owned, read, perused, or played in Hargrave's world), Lizard's articles have been nothing less than fascinating. And funny..I often find myself laughing out loud at his caustic observations. I'm a big fan of snark and sarcasm (there are worse failings to have...*drink*), and Lizard is an equal-opportunity offender, sniping at Old School, New School, and Indie gaming wherever his fancy takes him. At the same time, it's obvious the love and admiration he has for these crazy-works, books that have inspired his own gaming for decades...as I said, he makes no bones about it.

Not that he plays OD&D or S&W or any other retro-clone...Lizard is a Pathfinder guy these days, and the content he posts on his blog (other than reviews and reflections) is for that game, which he finds preferable with its well-defined limits and boundaries...even if he approaches it in a gonzo fashion. His stance is that "D&D" is more a genre than a system, a genre defined by its kitchen sink, gonzo attitude (not to mention dungeon delving and whatnot), and the system Pathfinder (or D20) provides (with its defined conditions and visual battle mats) gives him the freedom to allow his imagination free reign unencumbered by a system that can degenerate into argument over ill-defined rules.

In fact, Lizard is pretty explicit in his criticism of what he sees as some "revisionist history" among OSR folks. What he is quick to point out (and something I don't disagree with) is that, far from being enamored with a "rules light" or "streamlined" approach to role-playing, real "old school" play was typified by players (and DMs) wanting MORE rules...more systems, more mechanics, more definitions. More clarification of a game that was far from clear. The additional supplements to OD&D, the additional rules published in The Dragon, the larger page count of AD&D, the extra denigrated volumes of the Unearthed Arcana, etc. were all things clamored for by players...players dissatisfied with the Rules As Written.  In addition to Arduin, he points to the other fantasy RPGs that were published back in the day that (with the exception of Tunnels & Trolls) added more complex rules, skill systems, combat options, etc. to what was the basic D&D-ish premise...not necessarily trying to model realism but wanting to model more.

As I said, I don't disagree with him. If I like and champion B/X or other "basic" games these days, it's because they provide something closer to the happy medium I prefer in gaming. Certainly that wasn't how I operated in my youth, when I was a stickler for segments and speed factor and weapon vs. armor and minutia. A Dragon mag that provided new, specific "thieves' tools" (each with their own cost, skill affected, and individual bonus) and random tables for determining what was in the purse or pocket that the thief was picking...that kind of stuff was appreciated by myself and my players. New "content" for the game (whether from the UA or the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, etc.) was welcomed as new "canon" and quickly adapted into our game. It did head off arguments and provide guidelines when a young Dungeon Master (myself) needed some back-up "authority" for my rulings. It's no good saying the objective of a game is "having fun" when different people at the table have different concepts of fun.

Lizard's writing...both about Arduin and his remembrances of the hobby "back in the day"...has really got me thinking and considering my own game, reflecting on how much "gonzo" I want and what I feel are appropriate limits for, well, everything. Level advancement and allowable classes. Magic consumption and endgames. Adherences to genre consistency and allowing the imagination free reign. In my youth, my co-DM and I created all sorts of random tables and systems on par with what one finds in the Arduin books...but we only did so when there wasn't already an appropriate table or system available as "canon" for our games (which was often enough that we had many pages of such charts and tables). In my youth, I stole ideas willy-and-nilly from any fiction, film, or TV show that caught my imagination and while (I admit) I still do this somewhat, it's nowhere near the wild abandon with which I use to approach my "larceny." These days I'm more restrained (I'd like to say "refined" but that might be giving myself too much credit), and I wonder if my concepts suffer a bit from being too conservative and/or staid in my approach.

Well, regardless, it's gotten me thinking (though I have a lot of other things on my mind this week and most of it is NOT gamer related). And it is entertaining reading. If, like me, you had the misfortune to miss Arduin the first-time around, you might just want to take a gander at what Mr. Lizard has to say on the subject. His passion for the material is positively contagious.

"Gonzo" - when practical < awesome.