RPGs as Art: A System Matters Metaphor

This tired old debate* rears its ugly head with alarming frequency, and every time, I am left wanting from the answer.

Whenever someone complains about a system being "misused" — which is to say, not used for its intended or supported purpose, like using the Dungeons & Dragons game engine to run an Animal Crossing-style game — a version of the debate that I frequently encounter is that RPGs are tools, and you wouldn't use the wrong tool for a job. You wouldn't, say, use a hammer to try to turn a screw, as you're liable to ruin the thing you're attempting to build or fix.

This metaphor has never sat right with me.

For starters, table-top RPGs are art and are tools to make art. That's a bit different than attempting to use a screwdriver when you need a wrench; some of the most compelling art uses nonstandard components, like that one of the industrial robot trying and failing to clean the blood pooling around it. You know the one:

Beyond being short-sighted from an artistic perspective, it also ignores what a large swath of role-playing games do. Many games aren't tools, but toolboxes; the creators certainly hope that you'll take them, use them, and enjoy them, but once it's in your grasp, it's up to you to figure out how to use it. A lot of hacks, custom systems, and mini-games come from here: add the Objective rules from Unknown Armies; the fishing rules from Rod, Reel, & Fist; and the narrative rules from Let These Mermaids Touch Your Dick Maybe into Call of Cthulhu to get the Frankengame of your mad dreams!

(I don't know why you need rules for organizational agency, fishing, and thirsty-ass mermaids in your hypothetical Gothic cosmic horror game, but I assume you know your group better than I do. Maybe you want the game to be a little more player-directed than your typical Call of Cthulhu game, and you want to add options for SAN refreshes that include fishing and mermaid-mediated sexual healing. But I am here to tell you that if someone on the internet said you're playing wrong by making the eldritch horror fishing and mermaid seduction game of your dreams, they can go pound sand.)

And of course, I will again bang my drum that RPGs are art. Pretending that RPGs are tools ignores why people actually like a particular game, which often has a lot to do with the myriad (and often subconscious) reasons people like art. Is it accessible? Do your friends like it? Does it fulfill some need within you? Is it especially resonant with your background?

All this to say: the tool metaphor always rankles me when I see it, but I only recently realized why.

RPGs aren't tools. They're cars.

If you're not in the United States, allow me to set the scene: everywhere is too far to walk, and public transit is often underfunded, so that means you basically need access to a car to live. So cars are ubiquitous, but I suspect most people buy, rent, or borrow cars for very prosaic reasons: you had access, you could afford it, it suits your needs, whatever. For the vast bulk of people, they just need something that will get them to work and the grocery store.

These are the equivalent of the vast hordes that indie gamers mock when they wonder why someone is hacking Dungeons & Dragons 5e to make an unofficial Uncharted RPG. Such people may neither know nor care about other RPGs that would do what they want more "efficiently," they just want a game that will handle some action, is somewhat familiar, and has lots of online support in case they get stuck.

The bog-standard American car consumer just needs a car to get from point A to point B. If the brakes work, it's good enough.

Then there are the car guys.

These are people with Opinions™ about cars. A car isn't just a convenient way to get from place-to-place, it's a statement. A lifestyle. They study the breeds of car, they know their natural habitats and ecological niches. This one is built for speed and needs premium petrol and hood clips. This one is built for hauling and can add a trailer hitch and a tow reel in the front.

In this extended car metaphor, that's the sort of people who collect RPGs and dissect them. If you're reading this blog entry, chances are good you're the RPG-equivalent of a car guy. We know where the different breeds of RPG live and like to graze, and we will invent new taxonomies to explain why we know them better than anyone else.

The elaborate taxonomy of cars might be interesting to a car guy, but it isn't as helpful to the kid who just started driving to her part-time job. Likewise, the elaborate taxonomy of RPGs is probably overwhelming or boring to someone who isn't obsessed with this stuff.

That's all right. If they're interested in RPGs, they'll come around to it in their own time.

* As you might surmise, my overall view of the "system matters" debate is, "It depends." Certain systems give you certain tools to do some things more easily than other choices, but my experience teaches me that most GMs tend to run games the same way no matter what system they're using — and that they often bring their assumptions to a new game without familiarizing themselves with it. Once again, the book is less important than the thing that happens at the table, and that is the thing that ought to be judged.

RPGs as Art: On Sincerity in Art

"Don't do fashionable science." — Max Delbrück

A mantra for 2023.

Wandering around the lonely corners of the internet in this foul year of our Lord two-thousand twenty-three, there's a repeated piece of advice that feels intensely counter-intuitive to me. Whenever someone is thinking about writing something for publication — often on one of the OneBookShelf community content sites like DM's Guild, Storyteller's Vault, or Statosphere — the most common piece of feedback I see is to write something that the author thinks will be popular. Or I see people soliciting their slice of the community for ideas, putting up a poll or open thread about what sort of thing the community wants to see next.

It doesn't surprise me that lots of those projects never materialize.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say that I am way more likely to finish something if I'm passionate about it, and I'm more likely to be passionate about it if it was more-or-less my idea. My idea is a relative concept — it might be a collaboration or even someone else's skeleton that I sketched out — but the key is that it's something that lit my brain on fire and I had to put it somewhere. If I produce it for public consumption, I'd rather produce a weird piece of art beloved by ten people (and perhaps hated by a hundred more) than a milquetoast piece of art that is passively enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people and then abandoned when the media cycle changes.

(In fact, the most melancholy version of the crowdsourced art trend is seeing someone abandon a passion project because they arbitrarily decided no one was interested in it. I still dream about the guy who was thinking about doing a Statosphere supplement about archery. Archery hasn't appeared in my modern horror games, but if someone is passionate about it, I want to see what they do with it.)

On the consumption side of things, the RPG products I enjoy and get the most use out of are things I never knew I wanted in the first place. Of the Unknown Armies offerings on Statosphere, everyone talks about big, ambitious products like American Dreams or GOAD or RITE, but I've gotten the most direct use out of Three Miles of Bad Road. (I'm not even running a car-centric campaign!) I haven't had a chance to slot The Sun King's Palace into a fantasy campaign yet, but I'm definitely going to do so. I keep returning to it, tasting it in my dreams. I certainly didn't ask for a d100 horror sci-fi game, but Mothership continues to beckon me. (And there's a sentence or two in the beginning of A Pound of Flesh that features some of the best game advice I've ever read.)

All this to say: everyone has a story in them that only they can tell, in a medium of their choosing. Even if it's a lousy story, clumsily told, it will resonate with someone. Make your weird, idiosyncratic art and you will find like-minded people to play with you. Don't try to make the art you think people want to see, and don't try to make art because the topic is trendy. If you find yourself rushing to make something so you can release it while it's still topical, you've already lost.

So when you're staring down the gun barrel of your next RPG project and you don't quite know what to do, don't turn to focus-testing to tell you what to do. Brainstorm, try stuff, put your weird art out into the world. Consider this your permission to get real fuckin' weird with it.

(And astute observers will note that this applies to all art, not just role-playing games. I've watched a lot of mediocre film and television over the past month, things that were clearly focus-tested to death or tried to have Important Things To Say™ rather than honest things to say. Tell a story only you can tell.)

The Obligatory Addendum

Since the above screed largely talks about the individual (-ish) process of making art, let's talk about the uniquely collaborative activity of role-playing games themselves. (As I say repeatedly, RPGs are what happen at the table, and the rest is but smoke.) Even though the above post addresses the individual artist, it also applies to the group as a whole. If you're a Game Master, don't ignore your group's good ideas because they don't jibe with The Very Important Story You Have To Tell™. If you're a fellow player, don't ignore your other players' ideas because they don't fit your conception of this collaborative exercise.

The RPG table is going to be weird, messy, and collaborative. Your job is to enable that collaboration and have fun. (Please don't forget that games are supposed to be fun.) Everyone's favorite moments in a role-playing game are invariably when everything is chaotic and in total freefall. Lean into that, otherwise you could be writing a novel.

On Prophecy

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Colville published a new video about prophecies, both talking about the concept and soliciting feedback from the community as to whether anyone has ever successfully included prophecies and visions in their games. (For the record, he hasn't ever gotten it to work.)

I'm not in the habit of spraying my opinion across the internet, so I'm sharing it here.

I don't watch Colville's videos religiously, but I'm always a little surprised by them when I manage to watch them because I usually agree with about fifty percent of his content. (Let's say 40%-70%, probably depending on my mood.) He runs a very different game than I do, and so a lot of his discussion and advice isn't particularly applicable to my table. (He also doesn't seem to play or run terribly often, so I get the impression that his games are way more planned and plotted than mine. I'm embarrassingly running five-ish games right now on a baroque, rotating schedule, so I frequently have to be comfortable with a good answer now rather than a perfect answer derived from five hours' planning.)

Colville tends to see role-playing game scenarios as an alternate form of literature akin to short stories or novels: linear plots with plot points, themes, moods, etc. These things are all knobs that the author (in this case, the GM) sets and constantly tweaks in response to player action. Astute observers will recognize the core of '90s game design, with its metaplots and linear adventures, probably traceable back to Maliszewski's so-called "Hickman Revolution" in the early-to-mid-1980s.

My initial and anarchic foray into RPGs way back in the late 1990s may have started with White Wolf, but I quickly surmised that their Storytelling advice wasn't going to work for me. How can I establish a theme and mood for the game without knowing the energy the players are going to bring to the table on any given night? They have a say in how the game runs, too, and they're probably not going to explicitly tell me what they want.

In retrospect, it's hardly surprising that I fell in love with old-school play. Playing to find out what happens, the "story" of the game is the emergent story at the table, and all that.

Which brings me back around to the point: I think Colville's approach to prophecies and oracles failed because he was still thinking about role-playing game sessions like novels and not as their own genre of art, as I will argue again and again in this corner of digital real estate.

In a novel (for example), a prophecy usually serves two purposes: it acts as exposition and foreshadowing. If a prophecy is somewhat vague, as most of them are, then the audience might get the shape of it — enough to know that something big is coming and maybe even with some idea of what shape that thing is going to take — but readers won't know the outcome until later in the story. The more explicit the prophecy or the more deft the writer, the greater the likelihood that the audience will be "rewarded" by figuring out what the foreshadowing means ahead of time.

Contrast with role-playing games. Prophecies and visions serve a similar purpose, but the audience and the participants are usually the same people, so visions have a very different weight: they're clues. Clues don't have to be planned ahead of time — astute players in an investigative scenario are going to interrogate environmental details that the game master didn't explicitly plan, but can surmise based on what they know of the larger shape of things — but they do need to be deliberate and included with purpose. More importantly, the game is always about what the players do at the table. So, as with any clue, the game can't come to a screeching halt if the players aren't interested or don't understand the prophecy they receive.

What does all this mean? In my experience, prophecies, oracles, and visions all work pretty well, but the game master needs to be deliberate about their placement, and the game has to be able to continue running if the vision is ignored. I'll give you a handful of tips and examples:

• In the above video, Colville indicates that he included a vision almost as an afterthought: no preamble, no warning that the players were going to receive it, and most tellingly, he probably planned it only a session or two in advance. (Having watched some of his liveplay stuff, he seems to turn the plot on a dime as cool ideas occur to him. Protip: use your cool ideas, but make sure they're well-integrated with your existing game.) Even if a prophecy is about something minor, being able to tell the future is A Big Deal™, and should be both well-telegraphed and thoroughly considered in advance. How will this impact things? What happens if the players interfere? What happens if they ignore it? (Always assume your clues are going to get ignored. What happens next? Usually, ignoring a vision means that things escalate.)
• As long as we're talking about giving players oracular abilities, there is an alternate method to giving a player a vision. I did it sometimes in my Dungeon World game, and it is one of the recommended methods for some oracular powers in Unknown Armies: give the character an in-game bonus (a reroll or whatever), and then when they use it, ask the player what they saw in their vision earlier in the day. While it is a much more narrative way to solve the problem than giving the players a puzzle to solve every time you give them a vision, it gives them a little more agency when it comes to how they use their oracular abilities. Of course, as with trying to use oracles in the first place, that won't work for every game, either.
• In my Los Angeles-area Unknown Armies game, things were ramping up, and the player characters heard there was an Oracle in Las Vegas. They talk to the Oracle and receive the following poem. Unsurprisingly, the players didn't understand most of it, but it did reinforce that Something Big is happening, and that the player characters needed to interfere or else something bad is going to happen in Los Angeles. (This was further reinforced by the fact that many members of the occult underground left the city, evidently having divined that some sort of big trouble was on its way.) The core purpose of the prophecy was to let them know they were on a timer; any other clues they could derive from the prophecy were just icing on the cake.
• My Sunday night D&D game keeps encountering weird signs: a picture they can't perceive properly, a mysterious symbol they've found unobtrusively on at least one person in each town they've entered, various people asking them, "Are you forgetting something?" A merchant once claimed he met the characters before, but when they were insistent they had never encountered him before, he said he must be confused. (He's from the Underdark, so maybe he doesn't have a great memory for the faces of surfacers.) The cleric has received a couple of strange dreams featuring the player characters, his goddess, and a dwarven woman they've never met before. The players still don't know what to make of it, which is perfectly fine: it lets them know that something is happening in the background that they don't fully understand, and each weird clue or creepy vision just informs them that a clock is running down to an unknown revelation.
• My arctic Ravenloft game has two prophecies: a tarokka reading telling the characters where to find key elements to oppose Khan Yemur (a deliberate homage to Ravenloft's tarokka reading for treasure placement), and a prophecy. (Both the tarokka reading and prophecy may be found here.) They've been dutifully seeking elements from the tarokka reading, but they have a little less information on the prophecy itself. Again, that's perfectly fine: the prophecy is vague, and its main purpose is to let them know that they are important and that their destinies have been "claimed" by the Dark Powers of Ravenloft.

In every case, I fully recognize that the players aren't going to guess all the elements on the first try. Instead, these are sources of tension: each one lets the players know that their actions are important, that there's probably some sort of clock running in the background that they should be considering, and that there is some sort of confrontation coming that will relate to each prophecy. The more clues they uncover ahead of time, the more likely they are to have some warning for the coming event, but they don't need to perform any particular actions to enact the prophecy.

That's probably the key: don't treat prophecies as something you have to force the players to do, instead putting them there as additional sources of clues so the players can figure out what's about to happen. And if the players miss the prophecy date or misinterpret the vision and head in the opposite direction, so much the better! Whatever terrible thing they foresaw and failed to stop now gets to happen in their absence, and they can deal with it in the aftermath. Or not; maybe they decide to flee instead. If the continent is doomed, why is it always their responsibility?

Remember: the game is whatever the players decide to do at the table. Everything else is just fluff.

The Orc Problem, redux-upon-redux

Not to beat a dead horse too severely, but Dwiz at A Knight at the Opera wrote a post about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little bit ago, and it's a far more salient examination of the issue than I can muster.

(I know I already said the included links ought to be the final word on the subject, but well, here we are. Despite the vaguely sensationalist title and the fact that I'm probably still allowing demihumans in my dungeon-y, dragon-y elfgames, it's very, very good.)

Read it, won't you?

I Don't Think I'm Going to Allow Elves to be Playable Anymore on A Knight at the Opera

The Orc Problem, redux

I wrote about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little over a year ago, and like most of the things I write, you probably shouldn't read it.

However, vagabundork wrote a post on the same subject about seven months ago, and he said it far more eloquently than I. (To the point that it should probably be the last word on the subject, at least until the situation radically changes.)

Go read it:

Can racism be fixed? on Chaos Magick-User

The Orc Problem

Is this a bad time to revisit this conversation?

Fuck if I know. I'm just the guy who slings the wordcount. Then again, if other people are talking about it, why am I worried?

Also, you don't have to read the previous ramble on The Danger Zone, but these two are companion pieces of a sort. I'm hoping this one will be a little more refined than the last one, but we'll see.

Sometimes I just vomit words onto a page so I can be free of them.

The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ (discorcs?) has reared its ugly head again, this time riding the cultural wave of the Black Lives Matter protests. (I seem to remember The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ appearing earlier in the year, but I can't recall the context.)

For those of you who are reading this in the future or are unaware: the BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder have prompted a re-evaluation of our culture, which is always a good thing to do. However, the fact that we revisit cultural sensitivity every few years or decades and then invariably just make a handful of token changes, throw up a couple of censor bars, and call the problem SOLVED invariably leaves me rather cynical with regard to all this. (Make no mistake: things are getting better, but the increments tend to be small, and the pundits who declare problems fixed invariably do so prematurely. The work of making a better world never ends.)

If you don't believe me, here's a Richard Pryor bit from forty years ago, wherein he describes George Floyd's murder. The murder might be shocking, but the problems of class imbalance and racial injustice that have been highlighted in the aftermath aren't new:

(An aside, so you understand my biases: Censorship and rethinking cultural taboos are all well and good, but these tend to be nice, safe, symbolic actions rather than any sort of praxis. They make us feel good, and give the sense that things are changing without actually changing anything. Outlawing racial slurs doesn't make racism go away any more than outlawing sex work makes misogyny disappear. If you want to change how people think, you have to put in the long, hard work to reform society and show people how things are wrong rather than sweeping the ugly parts of civilization under the rug. Also, censorship is usually evil, but occasionally a necessary evil: parents must do it for their children, for example. I know people are arguing for greater censorship — both in artistic collectives as well as from private corporations — in light of the current culture war, which begs the chemotherapy question. Will you kill the cancer before you kill the patient? Will you save the culture before you permanently poison it?)

(A second aside: Always do the work to understand the biases of the people you're reading. It will help you live longer, and help you avoid the predations of personalities.)

Enough ramble. The re-examination has brought the fantasy RPG community to revisit a question that I've heard bouncing around for decades: should we rethink fantasy races?

The basic argument is that bad thoughts and actions regarding fantasy races reinforce bad thoughts and actions about real races — that Othering in fantasy is a stepping stone to Othering in real life (or that Othering in fantasy will act as a speedbump if you are trying to avoid Othering in your personal life). That's a vast oversimplification, but we'll still be having this argument (or a variation of it) in 2025, so you can Google it to get a more nuanced take.

As you should always understand the biases of someone writing, you should never take persuasive anecdotes as reasons to change your thinking, but I want to provide a handful of reactions to the above thesis. Most of these will draw from my own experience, so again, make of them what you will.

1) The old "change the term 'race' to 'species'" argument. This argument usually emerges in any fantasy-race-is-a-backwards-idea conversation, but I always think this argument is backwards. Race is a synonym for species; that's why they called different lineages and ethnicities different races, so as to reinforce the idea that they were different creatures (and to reinforce the idea that some classes of people could be superior to others, given the whole Western obsession with the fallacy of Progress — another rant for another time). But words mean things outside their textbook definitions, so if "race" has become the preferred nomenclature for "ethnicity," then fine. Change it to species, but don't forget that the word "race" was originally there to control you anyway.

2) Context is key. This is one of those top-down societal things, and I know this is the reason why people think censorship is good, actually, in light of the current culture war. But as I said in The Danger Zone, art isn't bad or evil or dangerous — it's only dangerous when devoid of any other context. THOUGHTCRIME isn't a problem, but the lack of greater societal context is. We throw everyone into a culture saturated with information but give them no instructions on how to parse this flood. We have the ability to teach people critical thinking skills and media literacy, but we have yet to institute these as programs on any grand scale. You can argue about why that is, but regardless of the wherefores, the simple fact is that even the nastiest, most transgressive art ceases to be dangerous if people have a broader context in which to absorb it. (We can also get into the whole method by which people isolate and radicalize, but that's well outside the scope of this humble blog post. Still, our lack of cohesion as a culture provides a breeding ground for predators, and that's a conversation we'll need to have. One of these days. Along with all the other conversations we'll need to have about the various civilizations around the globe.)

3) Look at the intent. This is also another discussion for another day, but a lot of the discourse about "evil races" reflects the evolution of D&D and fantasy gaming over time. The game's fundamentals describe a world where the various races are on different cosmological teams, and although Law and Chaos don't get along, it doesn't matter to your warband, because you're just trying to get paid. (And don't forget that early adventuring parties often had members of radically different alignments, and it didn't matter because they were all looking to score the same treasure. Law and Chaos don't play well together unless they have a common goal. I severely doubt that Arneson and Gygax had any grand plans of promoting cultural egalitarianism in their work, but you can absolutely get a multicultural read on early D&D if you squint.) When you look at the AD&D Monster Manual and see orcs list Number Appearing as 30-300, you realize they're not there as dudes you're supposed to kill, but problems to solve. If you're hiking through the mountains and come across a warband of 165 orcs, you won't have the resources to fight them until high level, so you're going to have to figure out some other way of dealing with them, probably either involving fleeing or negotiating. (And if you have a skilled negotiator with high Charisma, they probably won't even be hostile, assuming you roll well on the reaction roll.) It's only somewhere in the 2e/3e era that violence becomes the assumed way you're going to solve your problems, and while 5e has done a little to scale that back from the 3e/4e era, it still isn't a common playstyle.

4) Art is subjective. Here's where we get into the personal examples. I still list H.P. Lovecraft among my favorite authors despite the rather exhaustive examination of his racism. Why? Because that's not my connection to the source literature. Lovecraft might have written through his racial anxieties with such hits as tribal cultures worship the Great Old Ones because they're stupid degenerates and the alien DNA in your lineage is a metaphor for mixed-race heritage disrupting your superior Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but when I was reading these stories as a kid, that sort of interpretation wasn't in my wheelhouse. I had the cultural context to know that so-called "primitive" cultures were just cultures with a different set of priorities than our own, so the sinister backwoodsmen and degenerate Bantu tribesmen of pulp literature were a metaphor for the frightening, hungry wilderness rather than people I actually thought I was supposed to hate or fear. (I admittedly thought it was weird that Robert E. Howard's N'Longa was treated as being sinister when he was both one of the heroes and more powerful than Solomon Kane himself, so it's not like it all went over my head.) As for the alien heritage that Lovecraft's protagonists constantly feared, that jibed with my understanding of Lovecraft himself — like Poe, Lovecraft had a lot of tragedy in his past, so the idea that one's family was a millstone around one's neck seemed a perfectly logical conclusion — as well as my interest in biology. It was a body horror thing for me: we do have alien ghosts in our genome, the hungry fragments of our ancestors, of proviral DNA, of faulty transcription that can result in cancer. That resonated, and even though the art may have been made with bad intent, my enjoyment of it reinforced a very different worldview. In the case of evil fantasy races, I never took it as people different from us are evil, instead interpreting the message as if we're extremely lucky, we'll be able to see evil intent before it arrives. It wasn't a warning or a fear, but a hope.

5) Sometimes you just gotta kill an orc. I understand why dark-skinned races that are dumber or more duplicitous than the "standard," European-style folk is intensely problematic, but I never saw those as stand-ins for real-world cultures. As mentioned in other places, I got my start with World of Darkness and other sorts of horror conspiracy games, and those games are all about moral relativism — asking hard questions, and realizing that every faction tends to think it's the "right" one while they all have good and bad aspects in them. That's what RPGs were for me. So I came to see D&D and its related games as a welcome change of pace: sometimes you can identify the evil thing by looking at it, and sometimes you can solve your problems just by punching them. It's a sometimes food for me, but not one that I begrudge anyone from enjoying: the real world is infinitely complex, and the more you delve into an issue, the more likely you are to find common ground with your enemy, or that the issue is more complicated than you first thought. But being able to play a game that paints in broad strokes, and that makes its villains obvious, is a nice change of pace sometimes, and one that tends to get rejected. (Full disclosure: I'm absolutely a hypocrite in this regard. Despite the fact that I think you should just be able to punch an orc if you want, I'm not sure I've ever run a straight-up orc punching plot. The drow invasion of Scandshar comes the closest, but even then, that course of action might seem perfectly reasonable if your former elf clans drove you underground and into the arms of a demon-goddess — sometimes the real enemy is the imperialism we met along the way. Evil races usually have reasons for doing what they do, and devoid of that imposed cultural context, they usually turn towards good if given the opportunity. Even my standard fantasy plots that lean on "evil races" tropes tend to be subversions rather than straight adaptations.)

So, is the concept of "evil races" bad? As with most art questions, it depends. Are you using it as a dumb escapist fantasy thing to be used as a counterpoint to the complexities of modern life? You're probably fine. Are you doing something interesting with the source material, or using them as some elaborate metaphor for a real-world issue? Again, that's probably okay as long as your motives are well-considered. Are you using them as a metaphor for real-world cultures, or to desensitize your players to real-world racism? Well, now you might want to take a step back from the fantasy RPGs for a while, because you're getting into that danger zone where the line between fantasy and reality becomes exceedingly porous, and that's frequently a bad trip no matter what your motives are.

As with most of these posts, the dirty secret is that there's no good answer, no hundred-question quiz that will definitively identify whether or not you're using fantasy races responsibly. As long as your actions in a game don't make you more of a jerk in real-life — something to remember in the midst of your next Twitter argument — you're probably still doing okay.

RPGs as Art: The Danger Zone

I've had this post brewing in my brainmeats for a couple of days, and then Cavegirl posted a thing yesterday about this topic, so I guess it's time.

With SARS-CoV-2 and the Black Lives Matter protests and Trump being homophobic, I've seen The Dreaded Discourse™ raise its ugly head again, this time regarding what content belongs in games. Is it appropriate to set a game during the coronavirus pandemic, or to set a fantasy game during a plague pandemic, or to have some plot dealing with the current anti-police brutality protests and rioting?

As is often the case, the answer is, "it depends."

The other day I found myself in a Facebook comments section (my first mistake, I know) reading a series of comments answering someone who asked if it was appropriate to set a World of Darkness game amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and to make the pandemic the result of some supernatural agency, or to have them otherwise profit from it.

The overwhelming answer was, "No!" The reasoning being that these events are too close and too raw, and to include them in a game is inappropriate to those who have lost a loved one, suffered, or died from these events.

(Contrast this with an answer that mercifully didn't occur in this particular comments section, but which you occasionally see: edgelords saying that SJWs are ruining games, and that you should run whatever content you want, that the World of Darkness should be dark, and that anyone who objects is a whiny little pissbaby.)

But both of these answers ignore the purpose of art and the social contract that goes along with it. (And RPGs are an artform, remember?)

The purpose of art is to express an idea or emotion and to hopefully convey something of that to the viewer. (Sometimes, you just make art for yourself to try to exorcise something from your head, or to remember something, or to try to grapple with an event you experienced. The definition still applies, but it just so happens that you're the only intended viewer; the artist observing itself.) People make art for all kinds of reasons, and people consume art for similarly diverse reasons, but the core concept is one of catharsis. You make and experience art to think and feel about things, and to avoid feeling alone — the fact that someone out there is grappling with the same emotions as you means that you're connected to the rest of the species, no matter how distant in time or space.

We make art to understand the world and our place in it.

That's the first half of the social contract with art. We make art to understand. And because of that, people make all kinds of art. There are seven billion living perspectives on this planet, all of them searching for the same measure of understanding. Some art is pleasant and mindless, while other art is savage and bleak and potentially offensive to you. But the key part of this is that you don't get to dictate what art gets made.

The trade-off is that you do get to dictate which art you consume.

(And I absolutely know the long list of caveats here: the capitalist system favors art that can draw investors and generate revenue; social media lets someone thrust art at you in a way that might be disingenuous and you may end up consuming art that you did not want; the long debate as to whether or not art is harmful, particularly in the context of the modern culture war. In a broad sense, though, you still get to choose what art you consume, even if the permutations are a little more complicated.*)

Out in the world, if you dislike a piece of art, you can walk away from it. What's more: the modern world has enough resources to give you context before you consume a piece of art. You can ask about the content of art on message boards, or browse Wikipedia summaries, or even check out doesthedogdie.com for comprehensive coverage of triggers across multiple kinds of media.

You cannot prevent art from being created, but you can curate your own interaction with art. This is the second half of the social contract. Some people might make art for malicious reasons, or they might make art that deals with taboos to better help them grapple with the state of the world, but if you find these things offensive, you can walk away.

(We can get into the morality of whether or not art that is designed to be actively harmful should be allowed, but in many cases, you won't have that kind of clarity. Somebody might find understanding and empathy from making something horrible, and they might be doing it without malice. You don't have to watch it.)

All this rambling is to return to the main point: what content belongs in role-playing games?

And the answer is: whatever you and your group are comfortable exploring.

Coronavirus is real and scary, and a lot of people probably don't want to deal with it. But if your gaming group thinks it would be cathartic or interesting or "fun" (for certain values thereof) to include it, then you should. Some groups will even find a heavy catharsis in the idea that they can solve the crisis, or that some supernatural agency is behind it. (Using the World of Darkness as an example, however, most players and GMs will advise against this — as will I, frankly — and the books themselves tend to recommend against turning real-world tragedies into grist for the supernatural mill. But if your player group is on board, sometimes it can be cathartic to think that our problems aren't fully our fault or our responsibility. Just don't go throwing your ideas around where they will offend people.)

Likewise, there's a lot of question about whether it's right or proper to play people of other cultures, genders, sexual orientations, or what-have-you. This, again, depends on the individual group: everyone needs to be okay with it, and ideally, you're doing it with an eye towards empathy and understanding. But it's ultimately your group with your friends in it.

While you're only beholden to your small group of friends at the table, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• If you talk about your game outside your circle of players, you might get pushback — remember, those people didn't agree to the same social contract, so they're going to have different ideas about what is appropriate in a game. Related: if you add a new player, you have to go through this rigmarole again to ensure they're on board.
• Absolutely make sure everyone is on board without exception. The dirty secret is that, even with safety tools, you might have a player who feels uncomfortable drawing attention to themselves by using safety tools. You might want to have some conversations one-on-one to avoid peer pressure, or solicit feedback through Google Forms so the data is anonymous.
• If you're a publisher or a streamer, though, you have to think about your wider audience. That's the third part of the social contract implied by the other two parts: once you have an audience, you have to decide how much of a duty you have to them. As with your home group, you don't just want to drop potentially upsetting or offensive on them without warning.

A lot of wordcount to say: make the art you want, but make sure the people involved all consent to the experience. Even if someone on the outside would look inside and be horrified, it's okay as long as it works for your group.



* Important permutations for generating and consuming ideas:

• Every author has an agenda. Make sure you have a good grasp of the author's biases as you consume their content. You might only learn their background as you go along, but they'll probably let you know in some fashion.
• We're a species that deals poorly in abstract concepts but very well in concrete certainties. As such, most models — metaphors and frameworks for understanding a complicated series of concepts — tend to simplify the enormous complexities of life to a few key components, and that means that any given model or explanation will have a whole host of exceptions or edge cases that don't fit the theory. (For that matter, the pointillistic structure of humanity means that some perspectives might be totally unique, found only in a single individual or a small group. Not every idea is equally applicable.)
• Just because you disagree with an idea or are offended by it does not mean that it's invalid. Even an abhorrent idea might just be the author's way of grappling with something alien to their background. Don't assume malice where carelessness is more likely.
• The caveat is that you shouldn't feel the need to engage with an idea that offends you, even if it has merit. Life is too short, you know?

RPGs Aren't Art

Last year, I made the assertion that RPGs are a unique artform, something that requires a specialized language to describe.

But perhaps solely looking at RPGs as art is also the wrong idea.

I operate in a lot of indie gaming spaces because that's roughly where I started and because those games are fun. (All games are fun, you cowards!) At their best, these spaces are a showcase for new and innovative games, or an interesting place to discuss game design. At their worst (which, since this is the internet, is much of the time), they're a place to bash other people's design, invoking the dreaded badwrongfun and decrying certain games as "not real roleplaying games, like we play." (Make no mistake, though: if I were in more forums centered around traditional sorts of RPGs, I'm sure I would see someone's terrible discourse about "imagine wanting to play regular people" or "who wants to play a game about feelings?" or whatever. I just notice the bad indie RPG discourse because that's where I am.)

The timestamp tells me I downloaded this in 2006. Your argument is not original or interesting.

And the real shame is that we could still have interesting conversations about the failings of RPGs, but we don't. Using D&D as an example (because that's often the target), we could have interesting conversations about the domination of corporate art in a folk art scene, or how popularity breeds homogeneity, or even have an in-depth discussion about how rules and writing reflect the state of play at the table. But instead, we rehash the same, tired complaints about how people who try to do something creative with D&D or use it to emulate certain storytelling tropes are doing it wrong, how other games do it better, and how the state of the industry would just be so much better if other games had an equal shot.

(Completely ignoring that our hipster asses would be hollering about Apocalypse World or GUMSHOE or Noumenon if those games were the top of the heap. Popularity breeds contempt while somehow also disrupting critical thought on both sides of an issue.)

But these arguments somehow completely ignore the fact that RPGs aren't just art; they're also tools. We've already briefly delved into RPGs as their own artform, but it's just as relevant to recall that the overwhelming majority RPGs are also game engines designed to model certain situations and then give the player group the tools necessary to overcome those situations. Comparing different RPG systems is like comparing different computer languages: while different languages are better at performing different sorts of tasks, some people just like programming in specific languages based on their ease of use, flexibility, ubiquity, or whatever other criteria meets their needs. (This ignores the fact that people also appreciate art for a host of personal reasons that they often cannot articulate, and also ignores the fact that some people use tools because of the simple fact that they learned how to use them. Why do you speak in your native language all the time? Or if you don't, why do you speak the language of the prevailing culture in which you live? I ought not to presume etiquette on this wretched internet of ours, but you wouldn't go up to someone and say, "Japanese is more poetic than English, so why are you trying to write poetry in English? It's so much easier to create new words in German, so why are you attempting to make new lexicon in English? Imagine trying to talk about snow and the coastline without speaking Tlingit.")

It's useful to remember that people gravitate to certain games for various reasons, including:

• Cost. While many indie games are low-cost or free, don't forget that D&D (as an example) is technically free and also ubiquitous enough to be easily pirated from The Trove or other sources. If you're building stuff, you probably started stocking your workbench with Craftsman tools (or the local equivalent) because of the price rather than the quality.
• Availability. People shop where they shop, so they're going to get what they find. Your local game store isn't going to have every game, and if you don't know about OneBookShelf or the thriving indie scene on itch.io, you're not going to look there. You might assume that people can easily research any RPG on the internet, but remember that assuming good Boolean search techniques or even steady internet access is sometimes a tall order.
• Ease of Use. An RPG that is dense (either in mechanics or setting) is probably going to have less of a fanbase than one that is easier to understand. Although even some particularly complex RPGs can be made accessible through...
• Ubiquity. Not only are you going to pick something readily-available, a starting gamer is going to pick something with a burgeoning community and with a lot of information available. Unknown Armies only has a handful of Actual Plays, and you have to hunt for them. (Shameless Plug: That's why the Unknown Armies Fan Club has an Actual Play thread.) On the other hand, I can think of at least four D&D Actual Play streams/podcasts without heading to Google to confirm. And the fact that gamers are often taught the rules by someone else rather than reading them means the bigger games tend to get passed down from gaming group to gaming group.
• Support. Have you heard nerds crowing about how their favorite game is no longer making new material? Since the game police don't confiscate your out-of-print books, it's clear people like playing games with lots of content, and with the promise of new content to come. If you want to make a thriving game, support your local gaming community with new material!

I've seen people's social media feeds blasted into oblivion when they suggest the "play more RPGs" argument comes from a place or privilege, but they're not entirely wrong. Access doesn't just mean cost or complexity, and while there might be a system out there that does the thing they want better, they might not know about it, or might not have the resources to understand it, or might not have the time to learn a second RPG even if it's technically "easier."

Every RPG has its high points and low points, a complex alchemy of factors that determines whether or not it's right for you and your group. Don't let some social media chump who doesn't know the needs of your table tell you you're playing RPGs wrong just because they don't like what you're doing. How you use your tools is your business.

Never forget: Once a game enters your house, it's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. The idea that art or tools are somehow sacred and must be used as intended is a false claim. Have fun however you want.

Basically how I live my life.

I'm going to leave you with one last thought, one that is (admittedly) quite selfish. I know the desire to see your favorite RPG succeed comes from a good place, and in this capitalist cyberpunk hellscape of ours, you want to see your favorite content creators get paid so they can make more of that content you love. (And also, you know, so they can live.) But think about what you're asking when you want your personal game to lead the pack. Do you really want every two-bit weirdo with a handful of dice to invade your local fandom? Do you want all the grognards invading the Ryuutama community, trying to bend a light game about cozy journeys into a wargame simulator? Do you want every person unironically playing FATAL and laughing about sexual assault playing Bluebeard's Bride? Do you want a group of munchkin Vampire: The Masquerade players trying to cultivate a cube of Physical Attributes and combat Disciplines coming to your careful, investigative Fear Itself open table at the next convention?

Of course you don't.

You don't want these people at your table anyway, so why are you trying to hard to dissuade everyone from having their own fun? Every genre has a mainstream, and the MCU people aren't necessarily going to like Mulholland Drive or Sorry to Bother You just as the core Call of Duty audience isn't guaranteed to enjoy Braid or Gone Home.

Don't worry about selling to them. There are over seven billion people on the planet, and you have an audience somewhere. Target the weirdos you want to encourage in the world and the rest is but smoke.

RPGs as Art

To anyone who runs RPGs - please widen your reading beyond modern mainstream homogenised story structures.

Read non-Western/English language literature and myth. Read pulp and picaresque. Read *one* Conan tale. Things will begin to make so much more sense.

— Dylan Chapman (@CustardFaceKid) March 20, 2019

I've been trying to devour more RPG-adjacent content lately, which brought me to RPG YouTube and RPG Twitter.  I've encountered this idea in a couple of places — I know The Strix mentioned it, and Matt Colville has definitely talked about it — but here we confront the idea that RPGs don't have a narrative.

There are a couple of interviews between Adam Koebel and Matt Colville where they mention it at length.  If you have some hours to kill, watch them.  I'll be here after the jump.

They talk about a lot of stuff in those interviews, but the part that interests me in this blog post is the idea that RPG sessions don't have narratives — the RPG session is about following the rules of the RPG while ignoring the tropes that make literature happen, and it's only in retrospect that the narrative happens.  (I know Matt Colville mentioned this in another video, but I'll be damned if I can remember it.  For that matter, I don't even remember in which of the two videos Adam and Matt reiterate this idea.)

Like life, basically.  Stuff happens without adherence to narrative tropes, but we narrativize life by organizing our thoughts and stories in ways that make sense to us.  Life has no meaning except that which we give it.

There's some truth to that, but that relies on a very Western view of what a narrative is.  It is well beyond the scope of this blog post to deconstruct the Western concept of the narrative, but a good counter-example is kishōtenketsu.  Kishōtenketsu often eschews conflict — the essence of Western drama! — in exchange for portrayals of dynamic relationships.  A comic giving an example of this four act structure follows; click for a more detailed examination of kishōtenketsu:

The core of the story isn't that the main character is buying a can of soda, but why, and what that says about the relationship between the two characters.

More to the point, trying to emulate genre narrative structures with RPGs ignores the fact that RPGs have their own narrative structure, and have a few unique quirks about how they tell stories.  Most forms of literature do, so let's unpack that a bit.

Novels and short stories are incredibly intimate, projecting a story directly into your brain.  You can do all sorts of things with them, but they excel at showing the reader someone's mental environment: you can spend an entire story in someone's head (or perhaps several someones' heads) without too much difficulty.  (You would be hard-pressed to get a feature length movie out of, say, "To Build a Fire," but the short story contains an entire bleak world in the narrator's head.)  The drawback is that any new or complex concepts have to be conveyed with words, so the more you have to explain, the more complicated the narrative becomes.

Films aren't terribly intimate, but the format means you can include a lot of visual storytelling, thereby packing a lot of story into the comparatively short runtime.  Television has similarities, but you can use it for long-form storytelling, as soap operas have known for decades.  (Police procedurals and anthology series ignore long-form storytelling for familiarity: if you're watching The Twilight Zone, no given episode has anything to do with any other episode, but you know the kinds of stories to expect from episode-to-episode.)

Comic books have a lot of the strengths of television, with the difference that they can visually convey things that television would find prohibitively expensive.  I'll freely admit I don't read a ton of comics, so I'm not fully aware of what comic books can do that other formats cannot.  I expect it's more than that, though.  (For example, I'm sure there's some resonance to the fact that comics are paced like television episodes but rely on static images so that understanding relies partially on the reader's engagement with the text.  You can always slow down and investigate an image or ruminate on a concept for a while before continuing, like you can with a book.  Whereas a television show keeps moving whether you've fully processed it or not.)

Video games are a bit odd, because they get a lot of the visual shorthand of film and television mixed with some of the intimacy of a book.  A video game may not tell a terribly original story, but you still love it because you lived the plot.  The sense of ownership is what makes it enjoyable.  Plus, the interactivity means that video games can turn some things that would be narratively boring into interesting mechanical challenges.  (No More Heroes turns mowing the lawn into a challenging mini-game, for example.)

So what about table-top role-playing games?  Puffin Forest recently had this to say about it, comparing RPGs and film.  (If you don't have the half-hour to watch it, his main thesis is that movies have a lot of time for spit-and-polish, while RPGs are improvised and in-the-moment.  I'm going to invoke Meisner here just to annoy Nicole.)

He dances around the subject that I want to address here about the interactivity and intimacy of RPGs.  (I would argue that movies aren't the best analogy: the visual language of film isn't most directly comparable to the verbal language of RPGs.  Role-playing games are somewhere in-between, having both the nonverbal subtext of film with the textual language of books.  It's an odd blend, to be sure.)

RPGs combine part of the intimacy of novels with part of the interactivity of video games.  A role-playing game session is not quite as intimate as being alone with a book, but a role-playing game still injects a narrative directly into your brain.  On the other hand, it tends to be more interactive than a video game, because you (presumably) perform any action you want.  (Some RPGs and individual GMs are more prescriptive than that, but we'll casually assume here that the traditional model wherein you can attempt anything you could reasonably consider in a given situation is still in effect.)

Another noteworthy, but oft-overlooked point: RPGs are art three times.  For, say, a novel, you extract the art twice: once from the text itself, and again from re-living it.  (That's rather simplistic, since there are artistic choices that go into the cover and layout, but we're going to keep it simple here.)  While we often talk of the text-as-art, the act of vicariously living with the text — letting it infect your headspace, integrating it into your life, telling your friends about it — is a form of performance art.  And that's before we get into literary criticism as a form of literature unto itself.  (David Lynch famously refuses to discuss the meaning of his movies because he considers the audience a key participant in the process, and whatever meaning the audience draws from the work is as relevant as anything he could convey.  I can't find a good example at the moment, but they dig a little into it in this article.)

Likewise, movies have the same sorts of layers: you can watch the movie, then wrestle with the movie.  It's up to you whether you want to argue that the-script-as-literature is still part of the movie, but I'd argue reading the script vs. performing the script are two different things, and in the case of film, you can also take the script as another layer of art.  (Part of this is personal preference, but part of this distinction is to maintain my point that RPGs are special due to their three-fold art process.  You come to my blog, you get my bullshit meta, kids.)

(A brief digression: I again recognize that this is a little simplistic.  A single piece of art in wide release tends to generate ancillary art in its wake: people write fanfiction, make advertising posters, and suchlike.  You can argue this all falls under grappling-with-the-text, but on a grand scale.  You can then further fall deep into the rabbit-hole of what ancillary procedures count as art.  Is editing art?)

But RPGs are art three times: once in the role-playing text itself, once in the performance art at the table, and finally when you narrativize it with your friends in the aftermath.

The text is probably the most obvious piece of art: a work of literature, usually with illustrations, and created with an eye towards both being aesthetically pleasing and used as a reference manual.  (That's a hard balance, one with which a lot of people still grapple.  What's the best way to organize information in RPGs?  A definitive answer to that question is The Holy Grail.)  Soberer minds than my own have analyzed both RPG texts as art and the utility of good visual art in RPGs, so let's move on.

The game at the table itself is the one with which Adam and Matt take issue: they argue that the action at the table is largely about rules adjudication.  (We'll ignore the fact that Colville's own postmortem videos for The Chain, hidden somewhere near the bottom of this playlist as of this writing, often talk about hitting certain narrative beats while running the game.  For the benefit of future readers, I'm talking about videos #24 through #33 in that playlist.)  And while there's a certain logic to that — is just doing stuff and living your life art? — even the most hardened grognard does a certain amount of role-playing at the table.  (Did you react to something that happened in-game?  Congratulations, you're an actor now.)  It's the equivalent of arguing that improv isn't art: Yes, and and audience prompts are simpler rules than, say, the entirety of the Player's Handbook, but there are still rules to be followed to construct the action that happens on stage.

(I would also make an argument that the standard progression of RPGs — overcome challenges to improve your character, who can then tackle bigger challenges with raised stakes — mirrors the rising action of Western literary canon.)

Even if you're totally eschewing traditional Western narrative rules (and as noted above, there are other cultural options), you're still collaboratively building something at the table.  It might not be in the standard literary sense, but performance art is still an artistic exercise, even if it's mediated with rules.  (A philosophical question: if RPG sessions aren't art because of the logistical rules governing play, do the social rules governing traditional art forms limit their artistic content?)

Finally, the narrativization post-game is another form of artistic expression.  It's the one that you talk about with your friends, put up on Obsidian Portal, use to draw pictures, use as the basis of your fantasy novel, or turn into another RPG product.  It's not quite as obvious as the RPG text itself, but if you sufficiently broaden your view such that a story told orally is as much art as one recorded textually, you can recognize the art content.  (It's still art, even if it's unpolished.  An entertaining tale told drunkenly outside an IHOP at 2 AM still potentially counts, even if it's not recorded for posterity; your brain still engages with it the same way, and it still leaves you changed afterward.)

But all of the above content argues that RPGs should be considered a form of artistic expression along all points of development while ignoring the main thrust of my point: RPGs are their own thing.  They resist clean comparison to other literary forms because they're not exactly the same, and possibly require their own language to describe them.  You get some Western literary tricks in there: rising action (most of the time, assuming the standard challenge/improvement/bigger challenge model), foreshadowing (although no fact in an RPG is guaranteed to later be important), and irony (to varying degrees), but the interactive nature of the medium suggests that we ought not to be looking to Western canon for our models of RPGs.

Traditional Western narrative structures rely on control: the creators of a work have total control over the structural events that take place therein.  (The audience's engagement relies on the fact that the work's interpretation is beyond the creator's control, but the basic facts of the work are ultimately known.  Fun fact: in literary criticism, the common convention is to refer to literary events in the present tense, because they're all happening concurrently.  The book has been written; the contents are ongoing.)  To contrast, role-playing games are not predetermined; the outcome is left to the participants (and to a varying extent, the use of randomizers).  I know a lot of wordcount has been devoted to RPGs-as-stories, but to get full enjoyment out of the genre, you have to abandon the idea that they're going to be the traditional, linear stories you're used to telling and reading.  Table-top RPGs can handle linear chains of events — particularly if your group is primed for that sort of thing — but they excel when groups are confronted with choices to make and open-ended problems to solve.  That yields a lot of information about the characters' interior worlds.  (Even a bunch of old grognards, moving their characters as playing pieces through a megadungeon, still engage in this behavior, making choices in an ever-branching decision tree.  Those choices tell us important things about their motivations, even if that's just gold-for-XP.)

Keep in mind: this is in no way an indictment of genre emulation in RPGs.  If that's your thing, go for it!  A lot of storygames try to cleave to literary tropes, making for tighter narrative structures in game.  But also keep in mind that RPGs have their own genre conventions, and maybe it's time we start confronting those rather than trying to use the language of novels or film to talk about them.  Different media are capable of supporting different sorts of stories, and the collaborative nature of the role-playing exercise precludes neat classification into existing literary forms.  Learn to embrace the loose, free-flowing nature of RPGs and you'll have fewer frustrations about keeping the players firmly on track of the plot, or how to deal with player absences, or whatever troubles you have.

Final Note: This is unlikely to become a series, but I'm sure I'll revisit the subject as I have more organized thoughts on it.