Irony and Gamer Uncool

The second great coping mechanism to stave off the Fundamental Uncoolness of D&D is irony. Forget hipster mustaches and Alanis, this sense of irony is closer to the literary sense, or the kind of "romantic irony" discussed by such writers as Schlegel.  Ironic literature is conscious of the ways in which it is art and not reality. One way to handle this, then, is joking about the gap between a lofty representation and its base material.

As soon as literature became aware of itself, it became aware of this rift, with the earliest expression being Don Quijote. I keep coming back to Cervantes because the Quijote staked out an early and commanding position at the tangled cloverleaf intersection of fiction, fandom, fantasy and moral panic. In spite of the increasingly baroque proliferation of fantasism in popular culture across the past fifty years, nobody has even tried to wrest an American Quijote out of the rich source material - wielding a bat'leth, perhaps, and defying a couple of gangbangers. Perhaps it's because the new Quijotes have a posse, a Facebook group, a con. They no longer tower in solitude over the Castilian plain, and whereas before the curate and Sancho Panza might have staged an intervention, nowadays they just shrug and go to watch The Big Bang Theory.

Three ways irony can enter a game, and reduce the self-consciousness of becoming one's character ...

1. At its least threatening, gamer irony-lite mixes the fantasy world with references from outside. Every dwarf named Shakira, every Holy Grail gag, every "joke" dungeon level tries to water down the FUDD in the same way that National Lampoon undercut the earnestness of Tolkien with Bored of the Rings. Some of these jokes have become so reflexive that they have themselves become uncool, contaminated with the residue of gamer earnestness - see Holy Grail, above.

2. At the same time more sophisticated and more nerdy, there's ironic distance to be had in the discrepancy between the fantasy world of the game and the rules used to simulate it. Two of the most successful RPG comic strips have played with this concept - Knights of the Dinner Table showing what a group of rules-lawyering players look like, Order of the Stick showing what a fantasy world looks like when awareness and semi-awareness of the rules absurdities pops through. These jokes require the most inside knowledge to pull off, but they also work against absorption in the game by showing the artifice by which it's upheld.

3. It's also an old source of ironic amusement to hold an unflattering mirror up to the self-same daydreamer, from Quijote to Walter Mitty. The ironizer of roleplaying has the same strategy at hand, but almost always it's the other guy who inhabits an unflattering reality in contrast to the high-flown fantasy world. Thus we get the alpha-nerd stance, with its one-two of "We know enough about this game ... to make fun of the losers who play it." As self-hating and hypocritical as this attitude is, there's no shortage of it around, as witnessed by Fear of Girls, Zero Charisma, and so on. A particular twist of the knife is to interpret role-playing as inadequacy compensation, so the weakling plays a barbarian, the socially challenged plays a smooth lover man and so on.

I should also mention the rare times when irony works in favor of fictional immersion - the irony when game play fails to fulfill the expectations of fiction. The villain makes her first appearance ... and the heroes manage to find a way to kill her dead then and there. The quest of the long lost McGuffin ... turns out to have been a false rumor all along.All the same, somehow, this kind of irony also works against the self-inflicted stigma of immersion because it makes the players feel like they are taking part in something real and messy and mature, not something out of storybook land.

Next, finally: Being immersed and staying cool.

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.

The New Wave of Geekish Heavy Metal

Continuing an irregular music series.

And lo, it came to pass that the child Dungeons and Dragons was given to be fostered in the years of the 1970's, in the sylvan glades of art rock and the mead halls of heavy metal. And as the years wore on, the two grew up together; so that the bards of metal sang songs of epic fantasy and derring-do,

the videos did writhe with wizards and dragons,

 

with far more iron than irony,

And, as all things revolve under the sun and nothing truly dies, the 2000's begat a new wave of alternative heavy metal. In the nomenclature of metallic groupuscules, these are bands faster and tighter than stoner metal, less complex than progressive metal, harkening back to power-metal and New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest.

Among these are bands unable to resist the lure of lyrics steeped in the 70-80's vibe of comics, speculative fiction and gaming. Such as 3 Inches of Blood:

And of course, The Sword, who give 3 Inches competition for the most old-school D&D lyrics of all time, with a postapocalyptic science-fantasy quest for weapons "wielded by kings of old" and "crafted by evil wizards":

"Hyperzephyrian" meaning "beyond the west wind" as "Hyperborean" means "beyond the north wind." Hey, if your campaign doesn't have ancient Hyperzephyrians in it, it better have something just as good!

This Is the Story of a Thing That Is Not a Story

Here's the difference between an immersive game and a story:

The persons in a story don't know they are in a story.  The persons reading it do.

So the person playing an immersive game shouldn't be aware of a story structure to his or her experience, either. The player should be focused on the play within the world, not consciously waiting for the big twist, the climax moment, or any of the other screenwriting-class crutches. ("Hey, GM, is this the part where they invade my safe space?")

Just like the experience of playing a tactical miniatures game, i've found the experience of playing a "story game" with mechanics aimed directly at narrative elements can be enjoyable, but is ultimately somewhat "cool" in all senses of the word. It sticks a critical, self-aware distance between the players and the characters. Perhaps this is what some people want ... but to me it comes off a tad insecure.

Embrace character identification! It's our hobby's dark, dorky secret. Hell, I'll even let you wear elf ears to the table if that helps.

These thoughts have come up as I preside over the wrapping up of our Tomb of the Iron God game. Instead of a big, climactic mastermind fight, there have been a number of tense moments, revealing areas, and epic battles, and the party is currently debating how many loose ends to tie up in the dungeon before moving on. C'mon ... you know you want to fight the Eater of the Dead ...

d20 Burlesque in NYC

The funniest things come up when you are searching for images of an icosahedral die. Apparently, there was a role-playing-themed burlesque show at the Parkside Lounge in New York last month! Sponsored by stalwart game store the Compleat Strategist, there were tributes to Red Sonja's chainmail bikini, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, Felicia Day and the mighty d20 itself.

Blog post here.
NSFW (pasties, naughtiness) photos and my favorite video.

Old school gaming meets old school stripping? I can get with that...

D&D in The New Yorker

There's a short story by Sam Lipsyte in this week's New Yorker that takes as its setting a dysfunctional high school D&D campaign sometime in the Old School Era. You can also read a short interview with the author (he's not much of a gamer these days.)

There will now be a short pause so you can read the story.

Well, that was certainly one way to work D&D into the perennial theme of American literature: success and failure according to the American dream.

The Varelli kid is a dick DM, a killer DM. His campaign is brutal, his mental health questionable, and he verbally abuses his players. But his players also bring failure on themselves again and again, doomed by their greed or overconfidence or inability to cooperate or undeserved hope they'll get a break. Given the chance to play in a more placid and rewarding campaign, the narrator feels like he doesn't really fit in, and has this wistful reflection:

We fly dragons, battle giants, build castles, raise armies and families and crops. But something is missing. No goblin child will shank you for your coin pouch. You’ll never die from a bad potato.

Out of context, sure, you might take this as evidence that Lipsyte gets the appeal of high-risk, high-grit old-school gaming. But the real message is more bleak: that style of game is preparing all its players and its DM, accurately, for their predestined and self-inflicted life (or death) as losers. In fact, strike one against the story is its cliched epilogue, where "loser" translates literally to "flipping burgers" and "crazy loser" translates, a la Dark Dungeons, to "death by hanging." Strike two (working backwards) is the ham-handed way Lipsyte muffs the climax, dead baby sister and all. We'll call it a foul that HAY THE GUY WHO PLAYS AN INCOMPETENT THIEF IS IN REAL LIFE AN INCOMPETENT THIEF.

But in spite of all this, the story reaches a base on balls for its accurate portrait of a bad D&D campaign, and its matter-of-fact approach to the game as something that is not necessarily seriously screwed-up - it's just more interesting to write about a group that is.

Even more entertaining is the metafilter comments thread, where blogger Malcolm Sheppard (mobunited) weighs in on his old-school campaign, edition wars creep in like the inevitable green slime, and we're treated to an account of how ex-Crips do roleplaying games. (As it turns out, with a strong sense of teamwork learned from their gang experience.)

While we're in this literary mood, please do visit the Huge Ruined Pile and get in on the ground floor of Scott's gargantuan, year-long fantasy author elimination cagematch.

Misfit Typing

Now let me make clear that I have no desire to use an analytic tool used by highly intelligent people in a somewhat inappropriate or dare I say "obsessive" way, characteristic of those who lack social eptitude, to enable me to categorize real people into social stereotypes.

However. I do want to do that for the D&D character I just rolled up.

Intelligence >12: Check "Intelligence"
Wisdom < 9: Check "Obsession"
Charisma < 9: Check "Social Ineptitude"

It's official, this dwarf is a Nerd!

Not me though.