From One-Nerd Game to Multi-Nerd Game

People who write about role-playing games sometimes harken back to a Golden Age of the olden hobby. In this white box dreamtime, the nerd did sit down with the jock and everyone in school was swept up in this crazy D&D fad, before [your least favorite edition] happened and everything collapsed.

The last time D&D was ever marketed to cool people.

Others quest for an El Dorado, a revitalized hobby scented by Febreze instead of cat piss. In this odyssey, families, regular folks, and the ever elusive middle aged soccer mom are skilfully steered clear of all things stigmatizing, difficult and awkward - lost sheep emerging into an engrossing world of participatory narrative that they never knew.

These twin idylls are probably distorted and certainly unrealistic as a characterization of the past or the conceivable future. They read like the “glorious past, glorious future” thinking of extremist terrorist groups (pdf link) although I’ll allow that those who follow roleplaying dreams destroy only disk space on forum servers.

All the same, many of us have glimpsed the possibilities. The impromptu game on a train with an utter non-gamer. The clique of punks in my high school who ran a wild mishmash of Runequest and D&D. And the Eden myth is somewhat true - earlier versions of the rules are more friendly to non-geek play. This is not because the rules themselves were readable and playable by the average person – quite the opposite! Rather, it’s because they invested most of the rules knowledge in the referee.

The approach up through AD&D was to give the DM authority and keep as much of the rules secret as possible. The DM Guide was supposed to be a secret from the players, the attack and saving throw matrices locked away inside its covers and behind the sacred screen. Skill use was entirely the province of the DM.

This meant that players could take a naive, analog approach to the game. With no rules knowledge at all, they could proceed by just saying, “I do this, does it work?” More to the point, they didn’t need to be confronted with a wall of stats and procedures. It’s not that they had no agency; it’s that their agency was completely in-character.

And then the nerds ruined it for everyone else; the way that, buying cases of cards at a time, they destroyed Richard Garfield’s vision for Magic: The Gathering as an ever-unfolding surprise. The nerds had to know what they needed to hit armor class zero; they had to have clearly defined skill procedures; eventually, they had to have feats and powers to feel special. As character options< became more complex, optimized builds became a focus and obsession. Instead of the wall of nerd elitism stopping at the DM screen, it grew to enfold the whole playgroup.

So D&D stopped being a one-nerd game and started being a multi-nerd game. Rule systems that put everything up front, no matter how simple, miss this point. To get non-nerd players into the game, you don’t need to increase their sense of understanding or control over the rules. In fact, you want them to ignore the rules and trust the referee. And that’s something you can’t buy in a store – a DM who is socially skilled, deeply knowledgeable, and trustworthy.

Blogroll Blitz

As I mentioned before, this GenCon was fun but didn't really connect as much as it could have in terms of old school blog community meetups. In fact, it sometimes felt like Desolation Boulevard. To avoid coming up with Sweet F. A. next year, I wanna be committed to thinking about what kind of get-together could help us match faces to names.

In my professional life the data blitz is a format of five-minute talks that strips out most of the exposition, assumes people are familiar with the background of the research, and lets a large number of people get known in a short amount of time - details can be fleshed out in conversation later. I figure up to ten people can get up there, each for 3-5 minutes, and briefly run down one or two of the best ideas from their blog, with an emphasis on outreach beyond the Old School rule set. Supporting slides should be sent separately so they can be worked into a single sequential presentation. Time for one or two questions is factored in but the MC is responsible for getting out the hook when things go on too long.

I figure the "call" for this seminar - Rapid Fire Ideas for Fantasy Role-Playing? - can go out in January, and some kind of selection process can take place in case there are more than 10 or so entrants. So of the regular readers, who thinks they'll be attending Gencon next year and would be up for this?

Report from GenCon

Things I did not do at GenCon:

• True Dungeon ((I must confess this oversubscribed event has little to no appeal for me)
• Any kind of Wizards seminar (I see little useful information in pronouncements about the next edition 2 years pre-release while the current edition enters a preordained death march)
• Buy T-shirts with marginally witty, embarrassing slogans

Things I did do at GenCon:

• Play a lot of prototype and pre-release board and card games thanks to behind-the-scenes invites from colleagues at AEG
• Get my own game design into the prototype cycle there, with some initial interest ... wait and see ...
• Party and hang out with my usual people in the L5R community and meet a number of new and cool faces
• Thursday night, play again with Tavis Allison as DM, another fun game of ACKS involving the investigation of the "old unused" dragon lair *uh huh*. The signal feature of Tavis' DMing, I came to realize, is that the party is not an entirely autonomus unit, but operates within a social structure of favors, errands and obligations to people both more and less powerful. This also comes through in the higher order social structures in ACKS.
• Friday night, run a game for the L5R people I hang out with. The module used was Mike Monaco's one-page winner, Belly of the Beast. One page does not by any means equal one night! Even using pre-gens the party only got to explore the lungs and some of the artery before fatigue overcame them. Thanks to all who played and took over from exhausted colleagues. Another memorable physical dwarf-minis moment occurred when we established that one dwarf had a 10' long beard from long imprisonment (all the party members were convicts on a Dirty Dozen-style mission) and I used a piece of kleenex to represent this on the board when a wind blew it forward and back, or a giant bat got tangled with it.
• Went by the old school booth and bought Anomalous Subsurface Environment and ACKS. I haven't really read ACKS extensively yet but like the advanced domain rules, simple economic systems and so on. ASE is great and worthy of a separate review later on. The booth was a little nondescript, with no real banner, and not quite the selection of material I was hoping for. I did see Tavis again and Beedo from Dreams in the Lich House with his two young boys, so the place did fulfill somewhat of the community meetup function. I guess I was more disappointed because of all the old-school bloggers who were at GC but I didn't get to meet. Can we think about just scheduling a meet-n-greet hour next year?
• The closest to that was Tavis' seminar (by this time I am feeling like a stalker) where he laid down some history and theory of the movement. Saw Trollsmyth, who had played in my 2010 game, and Jon Peterson, author of Playing At The World.
• Get tired enough that even a day after leaving I don't have the energy to fill in hyperlinks in this post. More reflections later, and picking up the series about chases again ...
• Bought a factory-second battlemat and about 50 cheapo D&D plastic miniatures to round out the collection. Plus Zatchbell spellbooks and various dice. Still not sure what I will use the blank d20 for.

Red Box NYC and GenCon

Being in New York City on Sunday gave me the opportunity to swing by a Red Box NYC game run by Tavis Allison, blogger, ACKS co-author and old school promoter extraordinaire. I came there prepared to run a variant of the game I'll be running off the grid at GenCon, but other players wanted Tavis to DM and the oracular die gave the table to him.

This has to be the most unusual location I've ever roleplayed in, apart from that one game on the high speed train out of London. Red Box NYC meets in the upstairs eating area of one of those big midtown delis, at a massive wooden table seemingly placed there as a sign from the Gods of Dice to game on! Stares and occasional curiosity from passers-by livened the session, which included bookbinder extraordinaire Thaddeus, and the Mule, also of The Mule Abides.

The game itself was a fun caper ensonced in Tavis' campaign. I rolled up a magic-user who started at 3rd level. The house rules in use are based off OD&D with a lot of interesting bells and whistles including backgrounds and some cool spells - like the one that summons a simian butler of random species and resemblance to a mid-20th century celebrity. Mine was an orangutan Dean Martin. Trapped in a world he never made, and 3rd level among blinging titans of level as high as 8, Istrobian the ex-librarian skulked around under invisibility, looting, dragging KO'd adventurers to safety and providing nuggets of lore.

After some good conversation on design and writing, we parted ways. Monday I flew out to Indy, and spent the next couple of days under the cone of silence at the AEG retreat. And now, I'm with my usual crew at the Hilton, looking forward to the Friday night game and a whole lot more! Will keep you posted ...

Moral Disgust II: Purism

In the last disgust post I went over some of our research showing that moral disgust mostly protects moral codes concerning the body. But I don't think that's all to disgust. I just haven't figured out the experiments to prove it.

See, there's a grab bag of other things from various other published studies out there that elicit disgust. One study of the role of emotions in attitudes toward various social groups found that disgust was predicted by two things. One is kind of obvious: the perception that a group threatens physical health (so, HIV patients, for example). The other is less obvious: the perception that a group threatens important values (gay men score high on this as well as, via the HIV perception, the disease kind of threat).

And then there's esthetic disgust, or I guess esthetic-moral disgust. This is not the esthetic disgust from a painting of rotting meat, but the disgust that comes from seeing something as "contaminating" a moralized esthetic category. And what sets apart a moralized esthetic category from the usual kind? Fortunately, Zak has just drawn a cartoon that explains this very point.

It's the disgust face that fans of black doom grindcore metal make when confronted with symphonic black doom grindcore. It's the disgust face that fans of the game with clerics and no thieves make when they come across the game with thieves and no clerics.

The second most subdivided form of entertainment there is.

Values, moralized preferences, cultural norms about sex and food and body decoration ... I suspect that what binds these all together, what throws those who violate them on the midden of disgust, is that these are learned primary associations to the concepts of "good" or "bad" that are hard to justify.

After all, it's hard to articulate why freedom is good or why your country is or why the greatest band in the world is that way or why exactly men get circumcised in your culture. There's always some after-the-fact reason like "it's just good" or "it's more healthy." But the truth is, you probably learned all these things as a primary, Pavlovian link between whatever it is - the flag, the band, the physically weird - and the concept of "good" or "bad." And you probably prefer to associate with people who share the same associations.

This is why, in our studies, people specifically have a hard time explaining their disgust at sexual transgressions, apart from self-referential concepts like "it's just disgusting" or "they're just evil." Other studies show that people also have a hard time explaining why their core values, like freedom, equality or tradition, should be followed.

Extending this to all kinds of values, it then stands to reason that you're less likely to be disgusted with someone who who agrees with you that racial equality is good, but thinks that school vouchers (or whatever solution you prefer) are not the way to get there; you're likely to feel anger, because that person is at least in your community and just being frustrating. But if the person comes out and says that racial equality is not a highly valuable thing, not even good - they're an outright racist - that's more likely to feel disgusting. That person has shown themselves to be outside your true community.

Would you rather people play XBox?

One thing I find interesting about this moral-preferences-esthetics-values disgust is that it has a very weird reaction profile. If my esthetics are pragmatic, then (let's say) I love strawberry ice cream, will make do with raspberry cause it's kind of like strawberry only raspier, and just loathe chocolate. But if they're moralized, I will actually love strawberry, hate raspberry because it's a pathetic imitation and mockery of what strawberry is supposed to be, and be indifferent to chocolate. I think this is a vestige of contagion fear that comes from applying disgust to these moralized preferences. But this has abolutely nothing to do with nerds, fans, and gamers right?

All this is because the disgust reaction forms the boundary of the community. (I don't set these posts up, I swear...) So I won't give suggestions for working today's lesson into your game, because really, it applies more to your life as a gamer.

In Praise of Modular

I think there's some kind of message in the selection of Mike Curtis' Dungeon Alphabet to win the first Three Castles Award, the closest thing old-style roleplayers have to an Oscar. Or at least I choose to interpret it thus.

The award went, not to a fully implemented roleplaying game or setting, but to a creative aid with supreme versatility across many different games and settings. It beat out a field including two "system" products (LotFP and B/X Companion) and two "setting" products (Stonehell and Majestic Wilderlands).

If there's a message here, it's a congenial one for me, because I'm getting less and less excited about writing out a whole role-playing game as a vanity project for my houserules. As more and more of these retro-inspired labors of love keep coming out, I keep hearing - and feeling, myself - the same reaction:

"It's got some neat stuff I'll pilfer for my own game, but I wouldn't play using the whole thing."

So, why not just pack the neat stuff up, and set it out on the front doorstep for pickup? That way you don't have to worry which of seventeen and a half retro-clones your stuff is going to compete or be compatible with.

I've been on a break from creating new gaming material, between my usual computer being in the shop, and my game going on a long hiatus that hopefully will be broken this week. I've used this break to reflect on what's gotten the best reaction out of my creations. Without a doubt it's the material that people can plug into their own game - the one-page rules supplements in particular. I also have some encounter tables waiting in the wings, and like my NPC and trick tables they're also modular like modular furniture.

Or clothes that help you learn that light blue goes with dark blue.

Yep, modular is the way to go. Who needs yet another explanation of what a roleplaying game is or how fast you can move down an unlitten corridor? All I'm saying is, smart money's on Vornheim next year.

Something Awful Rags on Raggi!

I've been enjoying the snarky WTF D&D? series, lampooning old school roleplaying games and art (but from the inside), on SomethingAwful for some time now.

Well, now, with the author's collusion, they've turned their eye on the Old School Recombination and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Just remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity!

GenCon Dispatch

GenCon is over. Very behind on sleep but definitely one of the best ever. I had two goals this time: to hook up with the Old School crowd and to pitch my board and card game ideas to AEG.

Imagine that - the first time after going for some 10 years, playing L5R CCG, L5R LARPS and various boardgames, that I have actually played D&D at the nerdfest. This went down Friday night with an early evening romp through Caverns of Thracia as a somewhat demented druid, AD&D right down to the goldenrod sheets and Trampier screen, helmed by the pleasantly efficient "TacoJohn" Jon Hershberger and played by a cast of veterans (including, I believe, blogger Clovis Cithog) and one eager kid. Then back to the Hilton for my own heavily houseruled Basic run - my take on level 1 of the Castle of the Mad Archmage, till the late early morn. Bloggers Oddysey and Trollsmyth showed up with a couple of their friends and the rest of the 8-9 strong party was composed of Legend of the Five Rings CCG players, most of whom are also continuing D&D players of one stripe or another and most of whom had read up on the tenets of the OSR. I'll do a more extensive post on the game - what went on there was not just a huge blast as acknowledged by all, but has important lessons for how to handle different playstyles at the table.

Two hits but also two strikes; I went to an "old school seminar" Friday morning for which the presenter did not show up, chatted for a while with the other attendees about the old ways and days ... and sadly failed to make contact with Maj Dave Wesely for the run of the proto-RPG Braunstein that had been advertised.

And the design pimping goal? I can only give a cautious smile and optimistic thumbs up, but I think definite progress was made on that front too.

The rest of the con was eating, drinking, and socializing with L5R folks, helping some of my AEG colleagues demo boardgames in the boardgame hall, and the party for the 15th anniversary of L5R. In which it is proven that North Americans are indeed miraculously capable of running a competitive drinking event at a public gaming convention.

More later on the game and some thoughts about the publicity or lack thereof for the Old School movement.