Manners maketh man

“It was their pity Driss hated. They seemed not to be aware that he could destroy them at any moment he chose. Destroy them and loot the little safe in their office, where they kept all their earnings from the bed and breakfast. They were not even aware of the compassion he was showing them. They looked right past his manhood and ignored it, as if it didn't exist and he was just a child who needed a bowl of milk every day.”

In Lawrence Osborne’s novel The Forgiven, an impoverished Moroccan named Driss illegally makes his way to Spain and is given a job by Roger and Angela Bloodworth. The Bloodworths shelter Driss from the authorities but they don’t appreciate that their liberal culture is not universal. The openness and trust they show to Driss, he takes as an affront to his masculinity. Wary hospitality according to a strict code would be fine. It’s the casual assumption that he can be treated as a member of their household that he finds disrespectful.

You don’t get much culture in fantasy. Oh, occasionally somebody will say, “It’s our custom to wear only green velvet coats on holy days,” but that’s barely skin-deep, a merely satirical look at the arbitrary nature of human customs. From the inside customs don’t feel funny, they feel like a matter of life and death. A Bedouin is obliged to offer hospitality. A samurai must atone for shame with seppuku. A calling card with “somdomite” written on it can destroy a reputation.

When roleplaying is set in a world with its own social structures and mores, and players are trying to get inside that mindset rather than play 21st century characters parachuted into a superficially exotic environment, then what you are doing is culture gaming.

Here’s an example of culture gaming from a convention game run by Michael Cule. There were a bunch of players who were new to Tekumel, and they were barbarians who’d arrived fresh off the boat in Jakalla harbour. Vortumoi, a priest of Hrü’ü played by me, brought them to be interviewed by his clan uncle, Lord Vrimeshtu, who wanted to hire them for an expedition. Also present was my bodyguard, Karunaz, played by Paul Mason. We sat on cushions to discuss the expedition over a meal – a real feast of Thai snacks that Michael brought along! – and Karunaz remained standing off to one side. (He’s Livyani, so never ate with Tsolyani, and in any case it was not his position to sit with his employer.) The tricky moment arose when Lord Vrimeshtu pointed to the wine and said, "Get your Livyani to pour for us, Vortumoi." Well, Karunaz was low clan but he was nonetheless a warrior, and you don't expect a bodyguard to serve you at table like a menial. What to do? Then I had it: “Allow me, uncle,” and I got up and served the wine myself. I could do that without loss of face because I was doing my uncle’s bidding rather than doing a favour for the barbarians. Thus my honour and Karunaz's were preserved and the clan head's wishes were fulfilled.

Whether you think that kind of thing is the lifeblood of a roleplaying game or a distraction from the main business of the adventure will tell you if you’re a culture gamer or not. It’s really the old (and often slightly forced) dichotomy between character-based and plot-based fiction. I lean towards character-based myself, much preferring Anton Chekhov to Robert Harris – though my bookshelves have room for both. And you do need both. If you think of the characters as heading towards a light, which stands for the plot objective, and the medium they’re moving through is their society, it’s the turbulence in the medium that makes the journey unique. Without it you’ve just got a straight line. But if there’s no light then they go around in circles or do nothing. 

(Examples of stories that are powered by events but flavoured by social constructs: Julian Fellowes' Belgravia, Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Francis Spufford's Golden Hill. Or any truly compelling narrative, really.)

So the plot isn’t just a MacGuffin. Still, I don’t actually remember the adventure from that session. I think it involved a ruined fortress in a swamp. Probably there were monsters to fight. The barbarians will have run about and hit things, but it’s the nail-biting nicety of that dining-room etiquette problem that has stayed with me.

So do we need rules for social interaction? Obviously there are rules – we live our real lives according to such rules, usually unspoken but very well understood. We are alert to nuances of manner in our own society, even if we couldn’t actually sit down and explain the rules of conduct to a foreigner. But do we need game mechanics - do we need that kind of rule?

I don’t think so. We use game mechanics for the “stage directions” of a game. “I climb the wall stealthily and the guards don’t hear me.” Do you? And do they? We’ve got dice for that.

But social behaviour happens in the dialogue. Players can handle it perfectly well in conversation and mechanics couldn’t cover all the permutations anyway. Often a dispute in social terms comes down to very fine distinctions, and it’s possible that neither party is wholly right or wrong. If you wanted game-mechanical rules for social interactions, in order to cover every outcome they’d need to be highly abstract. Something like this:

“I seek to impose my status on you, rolling 6.”
“I roll a 3 and resist the attempt, countering with a critical social roll.”
“Now let’s decide what our characters actually said.”

Some people like to play that way, but I prefer immersion. Fortunately all you need is a sense of what the society’s rules are in common situations and in general principle, and a willingness on the players’ part to throw themselves into that. For example, Tsolyani law treats injury or death as a civil crime which can be settled by means of shamtla (weregild). Once you know that and the form for demanding shamtla or for taking the case to a duel, you get a lot of emergent possibilities.

Then when you include the fact that in Tsolyanu insults are also regarded as an injury, your social outcomes explode into Mandelbrot-set level richness. Your players might even forget there’s a monster-stuffed ruin out in the marshlands, because the cut and thrust of society is much more real and involving. Instead of Dungeons & Dragons, you’re in the territory of Sense & Sensibility – and, speaking as a culture gamer, that makes for much more memorable games.

Here's some reading and viewing to kick off ideas about how people act within the framework of a social setting:

• Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology by Peoples & Bailey
• Legal Systems Very Different from Ours by Friedman, Leeson & Skarbek
• Ridicule (1996) directed by Patrice Leconte
• Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Social Engineering by William H Stoddard

By the way, although Tekumel is an ideal setting for culture games, I don't want to give the impression that it can only be played that way. Professor Barker said that everyone should create their own Tekumel, and I'm sure most campaigns are very far from the "real" Tekumel. An example: in the Five Empires, belonging to a legion, especially in the heavy infantry, is a respected profession. In the most prestigious legions you'd need to be high-medium status even to sign up, and even "sergeants" (hereksa, commander of 100 legionaries) are mainly from aristocratic clans. Promotion is affected by your social class, manners, bravery and even looks as much as by your competence. That's the culture gaming version. Many Tekumel campaigns, however, treat soldiers as usually uneducated and poor, because that's what players in modern Western societies expect. Personally I can't see in that case why they wouldn't play D&D or something similar instead, but everyone should choose whichever style gives them the most fun.

Just dive in

"I'd like to try Tekumel," a gamer friend of mine said, "but I'm put off because it looks like a lot to get into. The culture is so detailed and exotic."

And so it is. But you think Medieval Europe isn't? Or Victorian London? Or New York in the 1930s, come to that.

How do we normally deal with the complexity of another society? The usual answer is to cosplay rather than roleplay. We drop 21st century characters into the setting and most of the time the clothing, technology, etc, are just window dressing. When players butt against the mores of the culture, it's just to make a joke of the difference between the locals' quaintly elaborate ways and the etiquette of our own society -- which as any fule kno is simple and completely straightforward and has no oddities of its own. Ain't that so?

Hollywood used to deal with historical epics using the cosplay method. Movie audiences didn't care how the ancient Israelites, Egyptians and Greeks really behaved, they were content to watch modern actors stroll through the theme park version of those eras and cultures.

There's another way. Think about how you'd introduce readers of a historical novel to the intricacies of Regency high society. Most likely you'd start with a viewpoint character who wasn't familiar with that world. A simple bumpkin arriving in the big city to earn his fortune, perhaps, or a gypsy girl with a tray of flowers to sell. They'd learn about the rules and manners of Regency life along with the reader. 

If you look at a modern edition of a novel like Dead Souls, you'll usually find it festooned with notes that the editor has added to explain Gogol's Russia. So you'll be reading a bit about Chichikov visiting a friend and there'll be a superscript number, and at the back of the book that number will point you to an explanation of the grades in the Russian civil service, or the modern value of the kopeks paid for a deed of serfs, or whatever. And it's great to have all that information (or was, before we could just look it up on the internet) but if you stop and turn to each note as you come to it then you'll ruin the story. The only answer is to dive in, enjoy the ride, and if there are details that you don't understand it doesn't matter. You can look them up afterwards. Not only that, but you'll get more value from the notes then, because you'll have the context of a good story to fit them into.

That was how Empire of the Petal Throne introduced new players to Tekumel back in 1975. Their characters arrived as simple foreigners fresh off the boat in the harbour of mighty Jakalla, "the city half as old as Time". As they found employment and mixed with Tsolyani NPCs, they gradually absorbed the background details. The players who cared about that stuff acquired the manners necessary to speak for the group. And it leaves the option, if you're not interested in that kind of thing, to remain a gruff and proudly ignorant barbarian. 

I've tried that introduction many times over the years, with variants. Oliver Johnson started as a marooned space traveller. Others have entered Tsolyanu as refugees or traders from outlying islands where history consists of family anecdotes and social structure is much less hierarchical and mannered than it is on the mainland. Yet after a year or two of that, players know the ways of Tekumel more thoroughly than they ever learn how to be Victorians or Ancient Romans.

Footnote: (See what I did there?) Some US friends have got in touch saying that the word gypsy is a derogatory term over there in America. But here, you see, is yet another case where the very different racial histories and divergent tongue of our two nations has taken us down forking paths. In the UK we have the British Gypsy Council and the National Federation of Gypsy Groups, and gypsy is one of several categories of nomad recognized on this side of the Atlantic.

How to stop your RPG sessions turning into Thor: Ragnarok

I’m glad it’s not just me. In this episode of the Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast, Messrs Cule and Bell-West talk about how irritating it is when players break out of character for jokes and facetious banter.

Most definitely I’m not against joking at the table. In-character humour is not only essential and lots of fun, it’s pretty much the Turing Test of roleplaying. If you can see things from inside your character enough to crack a joke like him or her, you’re doing it right.

That's like the first Thor movie. All the humour there was great because it came from character. Later the film-makers saw that they’d get more tweetage if all the characters spoke like Joss Whedon was writing their lines – which in many cases he was. What even Joss forgot was that flip, high-school comedy shtick made sense for Buffy and the Scooby gang because they were high-schoolers. Coming from Thor or Captain America it’s just dumb. If it were a roleplaying game not a movie, that would be their players just not bothering.

But what do you do? Michael Cule asks if you should bang on the table. But you have enough on your mind running the game without taking on the role of kindergarten teacher as well, and as Roger Bell-West points out, once the suspension of disbelief is broken it's a bit late to get it back. Maybe instead we need to look at why players might want to break character. It means either they’re bored or else they’re embarrassed by the make-believe and need an escape. Listen to the podcast, it’s all discussed there.

Maybe part of the problem is the trend in modern drama for every character to behave like a teenager with ADHD. And maybe that is caused by the tweetability of 21st century life. People talk all the way through movies, TV shows and roleplaying games now because they’re accustomed to providing the world with a streaming commentary of their entire lives. Sitting still and concentrating on one thing for a chunk of time measured in hours must seem like Swamp Thing waiting for a judgement from the Parliament of Trees. I’m a lot less connected than the average person (you should see my cellphone) which may be why I’m mostly happy to stay in character for the evening.

Incidentally I'm not discussing this because my own players are offenders. We do have a lot of humour in most sessions, but it's almost always in character and we don't, thank goodness, have one of the compulsive comedians Mr Cule describes in his groups. That said, I've noticed that when side discussions spring up between a couple of players, time was they'd be talking about something in the game (very often in character, too) whereas these days it will likely be something they're watching on TV or saw on Facebook. Attention spans are rotting away the world over, or so the anecdotal evidence goes.

Cnut couldn’t stop the tide. All you can do is make your games more engaging so that players don’t feel the need to step out of character and make jokes. Throw in more outrageous surprises, and be less forgiving if players were nattering and missed what just happened. Or you could have NPCs react to all those funny meme references as if the character really said them out loud. A little time with the Inquisition (or your world’s local equivalent) is a surefire cure for compulsive hilarity.

And if that doesn't work, switch to playing boardgames, where there's no suspension of disbelief to break. In which case, here's just the thing.

Rules for status

My role-playing group has been using GURPS as our default system for many years now. Third edition was a little kludgy but the overhaul they did with GURPS 4e fixed most of that. Even if you don't use the rules, I recommend the sourcebooks.

One aspect of GURPS that we've rarely had cause to explore are the rules for status. Our Legend characters are reviled mercenaries, our Spartans characters are a law unto themselves, our sci-fi characters zoom through a Mass Effect inspired universe of libertarian laissez-faire chaos, our Ghosts of London characters are misfits who have more intercourse with spirits than with regular society. There hasn't been much call for a skill like Savoir-Faire.

Until now, that is. Tim Savin's 1890s Investigators campaign has us playing a mix of social classes, talking to people rather than fighting them, and so we've been drilling down into how GURPS handles all that.

Not terribly well, is the answer - not even in the GURPS supplement designed expressly for the purpose: Social Engineering. Probably one reason is that there is after all no such thing as a generic status system; every society is different. French writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries were continually puzzled and horrified at the way social classes mixed in England in a way unthinkable on the continent at that time. Henri Misson de Valbourg made this observation while visiting London in the late 17th century:

If two little boys quarrel in the street, the passengers stop, make a ring around them in a moment, and set them against one another, that they may come to fisticuffs. During the fight the ring of bystanders encourages the combatants with great delight of heart, and never parts them while they fight according to the rules. And these bystanders, are not only other boys, porters and rabble, but all sorts of men of fashion.... The fathers and mothers of the boys let them fight on as well as the rest, and hearten him that gives the ground or has the worst.

These combats are less frequent among grown men than children, but they are not rare. If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with the gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart:the gentleman pulls off his sword, lays it in some shop with his cane, gloves and cravat, and boxes in the manner I have described. If the coachman is soundly drubbed, that goes for payment; but if he is the beater, the beatee must pay the sum for which they quarrelled. I once saw the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street with such a fellow, whom he lambed most horribly. In France, we punish such rascals with our cane, and sometimes with the flat of the sword; but in England this is never practised. They use neither sword nor stick against a man that is unarmed, and if an unfortunate stranger (for an Englishman would never take it into his head) should draw his sword upon one who had none, he'd have a hundred people upon him in a moment.

A bigger problem might be that GURPS is written by Americans. Hold your horses there, I don't mean any insult - simply that it makes perfect sense for an American game designer to just add wealth and social class together to get an overall status number, but in fact an impoverished aristocrat, a rich commoner and an average member of the gentry (all in GURPS terms Status 3) would not be treated as exactly equivalent even in 1970s Britain, much less in 1890.

And then there's what higher statuses actually mean. When I visited Bali in the 1980s you'd meet Brahmins - usually not so well off (because they wouldn't stoop to wheedling cash out of tourists) but on the top rung when it came to status. But high status in late 20th century Bali means a very different thing from high status in mid 18th century France. The same numbers of status levels may separate high from low, but what does that translate to? It all depends on the society - indeed, on the sub-stratum of society you're considering. In War and Peace, Field Marshal Kutuzov has lower status than some of the junior staff officers at court. Even a lieutenant can keep him waiting at a whim. Yet on the field, among his own men, presumably Kutuzov's status is very much the higher.

Status and social class have always been important factors in our Tekumel campaigns. There it matters not only which clan you belong to, but also the status of your lineage within the clan. A comparison might be: is it more prestigious to be a commoner at St Peter's College or head porter at Christ Church? A complex issue. In Tsolyanu, if you join a legion or the civil service, your rank doesn't simply add to social status as it does in GURPS. Rather, your social class determines the rank you are likely to rise to. Any damned fool of the aristocracy can become a junior officer in a medium regiment; after that, further advancement depends on ability and bribes (wealth). But that's Tsolyanu. In other societies, wealth might not count for so much, or might count for more.