We Have A Winner! (Thought Eater)

The final-round votes have been tallied and Paul Hughes is the winner of the Thought Eater Essay contest!

Paul's winning essays, voted on by the readers were:

Round one: The first essay about cuteness here.

Round Two:  D&D is Anti-Medieval

Round Three: Mass Combat Belongs in the Monster Manual

Paul, email me at zakzsmith AT hawtmayle to collect your fabulous prize. All others: hail Paul.
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The End of Thought Eater

These two essays are not by me--they are the final two essays in the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Contest.  The winner of this round reigns supreme for all time!

Here's the first one--if you like it best send an email saying only MASS in the subject heading to zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm .

Mass Combat Belongs in the Monster Manual

D&D started as a hack on a war game, which is why OD&D depends  on, but does not provide, mass combat rules. The original game  included kingdom management rules and prices for castles and  armies. The first adventure module, in the Blackmoor  supplement, had rooms that contained hundreds of soldiers. You  were expected to break out TSR's Chainmail war game to use  these things. In fact, as you got higher and higher level,  Gygax expected that more and more of your time playing D&D  would actually be spent playing Chainmail. That's sort of like  if you went to a Scrabble tournament and they said, "Good news!  You guys are such good Scrabble players that now you get to  play Monopoly."

D&D went mainstream because audiences liked the fast,  immersive, co-op game of the imagination, and they didn't latch  onto (or even understand the references to) the slow, rules- bound, head-to-head, miniature-requiring war game. So, in later  editions, the Chainmail references were cut. Essentially, D&D's  intended end game, conquest and rulership, was removed. The  middle of the game, grinding for money, was extended, even  though there were now no castles and armies to spend the money  on. 

And this is a big loss for D&D. In any edition, high level D&D  is not a solid product. High level fights are swingy, monster variety is  sparse.  And, worse, with epic battles and kingdom-building  mostly offscreen, characters can't leave their mark on the game  world, except by saving it from ever more powerful dungeon  monsters. Players and DMs alike generally try to keep away from  war epics, because running big battles isn't something D&D  does. 

To fill the hole left by the removal of Chainmail and epic-fantasy play, TSR and WOTC churned out stand-alone battle  supplements every few years:

-OD&D introduced Swords & Spells, which was an updated  Chainmail with special rules for each of the D&D spells and  monsters. It technically allowed battling lone heroes against  10:1 (10 soldiers to a mini) figures, although it recommended  avoiding cross-scale combat as much as possible.

-Basic D&D included War Machine: a sort of spreadsheet where  you came up with a rating of each army and then rolled a  percentile die to decide the battle.

-1e and 2e both published an edition of Battle System. This was  another entry in the Chainmail/Swords & Spells tradition, but  it came in a box with cut-out-and-assemble peasant houses,  which was cool.

-3e had the Miniatures Handbook. Again, its mass combat rules  were along the lines of Chainmail, featuring typical war game  rules for formations, facing, morale, etc, using d20 mechanics. 

-5e has playtest mass-combat rules, which will presumably see  official publication some day. They're traditional wargame- style rules.

All of these games perpetuate the flaw that kept Chainmail from  catching on in the first place: in order to play them, you have  to stop playing D&D.

D&D is not a war game. All the design decisions that make a  good war game lead to a bad D&D game, and vice versa. 

-Because war games are played competitively, they must be  fair. D&D campaigns can only achieve longevity when they are  unfair in favor of the players. 

-Because war games are fair: war games must have complete rules. You can't make stuff up halfway through without  favoring one of the players. So you can only make a pontoon bridge if there are rules for it. D&D rules are incomplete by  design. There are no rules in any edition for making a pontoon  bridge, but if you can scrounge up some boats and lumber, the  DM will let you do it. 

-Because war games are complete: war games must have  detailed rules. A good war game models the rock-paper- scissors of archery, cavalry, and spearmen, and provides big  bonuses and penalties based on terrain, flanking, morale, fog  of war, high ground, and anything else that might conceivably  come up. D&D, on the other hand, features abstract combat rules  that look nothing like reality. Core D&D combat is a barebones  transaction of combatants trading swipes. More important than  realism is simplicity, because most of D&D is not in the combat engine but in the DM and player improvisation that happens at the same time. 

running an epic battle in D&D

D&D is great at handling small fights - say, five characters  fighting a few trolls. Why can't the same rules handle five  characters, the town guard, and a dragon fighting against a  skeleton army, a lich, and a dozen trolls?

What if the first edition Monster Manual had contained stat  blocks for a skeleton horde, a town watch, and so on? Think of  the stories we could have been telling all these years.

My alternate-history army stat blocks are pretty simplistic, but that's what I like about them. A requirement for war-game standards of rules completeness and detail has been holding back high-level play for years. A  D&D  combat is great because of all the rules that Gary Gygax didn't include. Let me talk about the war game rules I  think D&D can live without. 

Casualties. When half your archers are dead, you can  fire half as many arrows, right? Nah. Just as a D&D hero at 1  hp fights at full strength, A 100-soldier army, even at 1 hp,  is still a 100-soldier army. After the battle, hit point damage  can be translated into some ratio of dead, wounded, and fled,  at the DM's discretion.

Facing, frontage, formation. These rules appear in  nearly every war game. We need that level of detail like we  need the First Edition grapple rules. 

Figure scale. War games are not designed for varying  figure scales: every miniature on the battlefield needs to  represent, for instance, 20 soldiers. A war-game fight between a lone  hero and a 20:1 army unit is usually wonky or impossible. On the other  hand, if every army is treated as an individual D&D monster, a  tenth-level fighter can battle on fairly even terms with a  troop representing 10 first level fighters, which can in turn  battle a troll or a unit of 36 goblins. 

Time scale. Most war games have realistic but D&D- incompatible turns of ten minutes or more. I'm sticking with D&D combat rounds. If a massive war is over within a few six- second rounds, that's fine with me. 

If anything, D&D-style fights can be too fast. To make it more likely that everyone gets a turn, I've added a special  rule in my army stat blocks, capping attack damage so that no  army can score a one-hit KO. This favors the underdog (and the  underdog is usually the PCs). Still, this is a special  exception and I wouldn't be surprised if it were unnecessary.

Leadership bonuses. Many war games assign static bonuses to  troops based on the abilities of their commanders. In a war game, which doesn't allow for referee discretion, this is the best  you can do. But in D&D, if a player delivers a speech and leads a charge, or  comes up with a clever scheme, the DM can assign appropriate  bonuses. The more the players act creatively, the more vivid  the scene will be - just as in a standard D&D fight. 

Spell rules. We do NOT want a Swords and Spells-style gloss on every spell describing its  interaction with armies. Here are my abstractions: 

1) Damage  spells ignore area of effect. An 8d6 fireball does 8d6 damage. 

2) "Condition" spells are all-or-nothing. If a Bless spell can  target all the members of an army, it operates normally.  Otherwise, it fails. 

Morale, flanking, setting ambushes, charging, fighting withdrawal, high ground, and every special case I haven't already mentioned. First and and Second Edition have explicit morale rules. In other editions, morale failure is by DM fiat.  If the local morale rules (or lack thereof) are good enough for  10 goblins at level 1, they're good enough for 100 goblins at  level 10. The same principle, "use existing combat rules", applies for flanking (present in 3e and 4e), charging (present in every edition but 5e) and so on.

Here are the stat-block templates I've used for turning any  creature into an army of any size. I've done first and fifth  editions (my current favorites).

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Here's the first one--if you like it best send an email saying only FOOL in the subject heading to zakzsmith at hawtmayle dawt calm 

A Fool in Lovecraft Country

There is no single story as important to roleplaying games as H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” and there is no single paragraph as important as the opening paragraph of the tale: 

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

This statement of theme is at the heart of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game (which reprints this story) and other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian horror. You see this statement in rules that drive PCs insane for learning about the Mythos and in countless published scenarios and campaigns that make it clear that any victory won over a cult or a monster is but a brief respite. Clearly that passage has captured the imagination not just of readers but of game designers as well with its depiction of toxic knowledge and comforting ignorance, and those inspired designers have created many excellent works of roleplaying horror, and yet, though I love and play many of those games, Lovecraft’s horror is not my horror.

To understand his horror requires understanding a little about him. Lovecraft, although not religious, was, in his words (in a letter to Maurice Woe in 1918), “Very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me — the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation.” Lovecraft thought highly of man’s curiosity, of “the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW [capitalization his].” Lovecraft lays out the case for the modernist view that man can, eventually, know everything. Although I think this point of view is naive, I also find it admirable, and like Lovecraft, I too am “interested in the relation I bear to the things about me.”

However, a few years later in 1923, Lovecraft had soured. He had this to say about Einstein’s counter-intuitive advances in physics: “My cynicism and skepticism are increasing, and from an entirely new cause — the Einstein theory […] There are no values in all infinity — the least idea that there are is the supreme mockery of all.” Reason and science, the tools he used to make sense of the world, had destroyed his sense of the universe. Better to retreat to the “safety of a new dark age.”

That betrayal of faith in modernity was felt by many of Lovecraft’s era. In addition to the chaos of science, they could point to the futile brutality of war, to the inability of medicine to combat a pandemic, to the helplessness of the elite who failed to maintain world order, and to the clergy whose explanations sounded more and more hollow.

This disillusionment, this betrayal, as profound as it was for Lovecraft and others, is not something I shared with Lovecraft. I first read him as a middle school gamer in the early 1980s, and what I read was not existential horror, not to me. Of course some situations were frightening and he created a dark, moody, atmosphere with his writing. But I never wanted the “safety of a new dark age.”I had already grappled with faith, belief, and atheism, and I came around to atheism, and I was the happier for it. 

I had considered Pascal’s wager: If believing in God costs nothing, and if belief in God is a prerequisite for a good afterlife and disbelief automatically sends you to Hell, then why not simply believe? What Pascal hadn’t counted on is that there many variants of “belief in God” but there is only one Hell, and so I saw his wager as a con: Someone is sending you to Hell, so I refused his wager, and was content with at least philosophical peace of mind. Unlike Lovecraft, I found comfort in the absurd universe that could kill me at any moment: At least I wouldn’t suffer forever. 

I envy those people who can feel in a Lovecraftian game or story the fear that the author tried to inspire in his readers, but I do not play those games because I feel a delightful frisson of fear when I play. Although I love Call of Cthulhu (and Delta Green), I play those games because the characters are the most heroic characters I know. They are saving the world, opposing an impossible evil, and the players, at least, “know” that it is a fool’s errand: “Well, Nyarlathotep will just get the world next time and your characters will die or go insane, so why bother?” Of course Nyarlathotep or some other dark god will walk the Earth one day, but the Earth will be swallowed by the sun one day too, and, in the meantime, the heroes who saved the world have bought its inhabitants another few years. And if according to the Talmud, “whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world,” how can you count the good (imaginary, I know, but also a good to aspire to) done by the heroic investigators in Call of Cthulhu?

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Thought Eater: The Final Round

We're down to the final round of the Thought Eater DIY D&D Essay Contest.

The winners, the last two contestants who will go on to the final round are:

The author of D&D is Anti-Medieval and the author of Shadowrun: No Escape.

Let me remind you these two souls not only wrote those, but have been whittled away in a grueling elimination tournament round by round for over a year. So congrats to everyone who got this far.

Now for the final challenge: Compose an essay on an RPG-related topic of your choice--as before, the key is it must contain at least one original idea. You have one month to email me your essays.

FIGHT!
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And now a word from our sponsor:

I Probably Decided to Save the Unicorn Because It's A Unicorn (new Axe + Thought Eater)

The girls try to rescue a unicorn and kill children. Pretty into my nun voice here...

Also new entry for ROUND THREE of the Thought Eater Writin' About Games Tournament.

This is not by me, it's by an anonymous contestant, since there's an odd number of contestants in this round if it gets more votes than the average contest entry for this round by the time I count votes then it'll go to the next round.

The theme for this round is to describe the significance of something that's missing from an RPG text.

Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "EVE" and nothing else.

Making Your Character A Character

You’ve just bought a new RPG for your group to try out, and if it’s organized like most RPG rulebooks there’s a players’ section and a GM’s section. If the game is at all well-designed, the GM’s section has tons of useful information to help you figure out what you’re supposed to do both before and during the game. There will be rules you need to know, tips on using the built-in conflicts of the game world as hooks for adventures and campaigns, formulas for coming up with the right level of challenge, ideas to help you set the tone and mood during the game (horror games in particular like to talk about music and lighting), tricks for making action resolution easier, advice on creating memorable NPCs, and lots of other stuff. In the players section, you’ll find--well--setting background and basic game mechanics.  

Ok, some games go a little farther than that. Sometimes the players’ section also gives you a few paragraphs about creating a character backstory or coming up with character goals and story hooks, but it firmly falls into the preparatory “character creation” step of role-playing. If the rules tell you anything at all about how to play your character once the game begins, it’s all very generic surface-level characterization stuff, like “use an accent” or “give the character a distinctive mannerism or nervous tick” or “masturbate vigorously when your character triumphs.” Most game books tell you how to create a character sketch, but offer very little information about how to tell a story with that character. They help you create an action figure, but don’t tell you how to play with it. If you’re mostly interested in the strategy game aspect of role-playing (hacking monsters, solving puzzles, that kind of thing), that’s probably all you need. If you want to focus more on storytelling, it might not cut it. 

You might be inclined to think that game books don’t talk about how to tell your character’s story because people can figure that out on their own. After all, it’s not like you have to give a kid instructions on how to use an action figure. The problem is that an RPG is not the same as playing childhood imagination games, no matter how many cookie-cutter “What Is Role Playing?” sections claim otherwise. There are a enough similarities that a lot of people can make the jump, but there are also enough differences that not everyone can figure out how to make their character and that character’s story a real part of the game. How many players have you seen show up to a game with pages and pages of character background that never comes into play during the game? Or worse, extensively detailed characters that they try to shoehorn into a game they don’t fit into well at all? 

To tell a story with a character, you need three things. The first is a character that the audience (in this case, the other players) can identify with in some way. This is the kind of “don’t just make a dead-eyed murderhobo” stuff that lots of game books (and thousands of gaming articles and blogs) have covered endlessly, so there’s no need to waste ink on it here. The second is the sense that the character fits into the group: giving the character a reason to be there, the group a reason to keep him around, and building relationships between the characters. This often happens naturally, and can be improved by making sure everyone knows the premise of the game and building connections between PCs from the start, either by working out more than just who has to be the cleric during character creation or by using something like Dungeon World’s Bonds mechanic. Most groups have not problem with players talking about the game before it starts, it’s talking about the game after the characters have left the tavern that some people have a problem with. 

For some games, that’s all you need. A mission (the story provided by the GM, whether in the form of individual adventures or an over-arching plotline), some characterization, and a sense of group unity were the key ingredients for most TV shows and movies until around the turn of the century. The thing that’s missing is the character’s story. Without character-driven subplots, the character doesn’t really have a life of his own. The character only exists within the context of the group and the story that the GM has set up (and sometime he’s only involved in that story because he happens to be a PC). Especially in today’s world of seasonal (as opposed to episodic) television and cinematic universes where every major character has their own story that weaves in and out of the main plotline, more and more gamers want their characters to have arcs and subplots as well, and that’s the thing that most RPG books don’t really explain how to pull off  (the lacuna, for those of you who have been wondering when I’d get to the point for the last five paragraphs).    

Most game books give the GM all kinds of information about telling the main story. Many also give the players good information for providing set-up for the character’s story (those pages and pages of background that never become relevant), but very few touch on how to make the background stuff an actual part of the game. Since story is traditionally the GM’s territory, the few games that talk about character-driven subplots put the pressure on the GM, assuming that it’s her job to bring all the stuff from the character background into the game. I think this is unfair to the GM (she already has enough to do) and to the player (who shouldn’t be completely dependent on the GM to tell his character’s story). It also ignores the reality of how most games work. In my experience,  the players with fully-realized characters were the players who actively worked to tell their character’s story by playing character goals and introducing supporting characters, character-driven subplots, and other character-centric stuff  in a way that naturally fit into the larger game (just forcing your way onto center stage just annoys everyone). They also worked with the GM to make sure the player’s story got told. 

The “working with the GM” part seems to be where most games drop the ball, in part because most game designers seem to be writing for an extreme (and mostly straw man) audience. For games aimed at the “let the dice fall where they may” crowd, who are nothing but power-gaming munchkins, any out-of-character discussion about the game is meta-gaming*, which is inherently evil, so talking about it would alienate the audience. On the other end of the spectrum are games aimed at the “drama club” crowd, where it’s taken for granted that every character is a special snowflake and the GM is not allowed to cause them any “agency”-destroying inconvenience without a drawn-out negotiation where everyone talks about their feelings. These games either talk about character subplots in vague terms or just assume that anyone playing them already knows what they’re doing. 

Most games ignore the vast majority of gamers who fall in the middle and want character-driven stories and surprises, but don’t really grasp how to accomplish it. That’s unfortunate, because RPG players are both audience and authors, so their connection to the story doesn’t fit the author/reader relationship, or even the co-author/co-author relationship. A lot of people, even game designers, have trouble grasping that. My third criticism of first-time adventure writers (after passive verbs and misplaced modifiers) is almost always that they’re trying to tell the GM a story rather than give the GM the tools to tell the story. If the stable boy is a vampire, the adventure writer needs to tell the GM about that when the stable boy is introduced, not when players are supposed to figure it out. On the player/GM side of things, if you want your character to settle his score with Jabba, you need to let the GM know that your character wants his debt to Jabba to be a subplot sometime during the game, and probably give her some background about Jabba and his resources. She’s got this whole “civil galactic civil war” plotline to deal with, so she’s not going to have a lot of time to fully detail the Hutt crime syndicate. At the same time though, you don’t get to stage manage your character’s encounter with Jabba or decide how it turns out. That takes away the uncertainty that makes the story fun. If you get some bad rolls and end up getting frozen in carbonite, you and the rest of the party have to deal with the consequences. It’s the risk you take when you decide you want your character to have his own story. 

Giving players the tools to work with the GM to tell their characters’ stories requires accepting the idea that not all meta-gaming is bad (just like most spoilers don’t actually make a movie less fun to watch), recognizing that playing an RPG isn’t the same as either creating or consuming fiction, figuring out what division of authorship between players and GM allows the players to enjoy the story both as a co-creators and as audience members, and providing advice about how to talk about it so players can figure out what works for their group. On the most basic level, this missing section is something like “How to Compromise,” but it’s a little more complicated than that and requires breaking down some long-standing gamer fallacies about how fiction, gaming, and adult social interaction work. Some of this involves theory and process that’s kind of hard to pin down, some of it involves basic interpersonal communication stuff that’s obvious to most people and potentially deeply upsetting to the people who need it most. I think I’m starting to see why most game designers just skip it. 

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*While talking about the game does meet the dictionary definition of meta-gaming (if it were in the dictionary, at least), when I first encountered the word (probably in the early 90s, when people added “meta” to everything), it specifically referred to using player knowledge to give the character an unfair advantage. I’m not sure where or when the usage drifted to include any and all out-of-character discussion of the game, but I’ve run into it online and with a few flesh-and-blood gamers. Depending on which definition you’re going with, meta-gaming is either absolutely essential (actually talking about the game) or cheating (reading the module), but the negative connotation of the most obvious term for the kind of thing I’m talking about is kind of annoying. 

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Fatalistic Shadowrun and the Elision of Gore (Thought Eater)

Here are some more entires for ROUND THREE of the Thought Eater Writin' About Games Tournament.

These are not by me, they are by two anonymous contestants, vote for which you like better.

The theme for this round is to describe the significance of something that's missing from an RPG text.

Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "LIH" and nothing else.

You were born without papers, in the shadow of a government or corporate enclave, never allowed to enter. Maybe your parents were anarchists, criminals, or just too poor and powerless for anyone to give a damn about. You lived in a slum (where else?), in the refuse of the elite. Disease, violence, squalor, pollution, and despair killed or mutilated so many of your peers, no matter whether they were monsters or saints or hustlers. If you’re honest with yourself, you realize that you weren’t any different, just luckier, and, perhaps, more of a monster than most. What is the line between courageous and psychotic? Whatever that line is, you walk it. You are willing to risk your body, your mind, your soul, and those of others, in pursuit of an exit. You run, but the shadows always follow you. This is the escapist game we play, a game with no escape for its PCs.

The door begins to shut at character creation. The only way to acquire papers is to take the flaw “Sinner,” a reference to the SIN (System Identification Number), which marks someone as a citizen of state or corporation. The various versions of this flaw all force the shadowrunner to pay taxes and make runner easier to identify, especially in the aftermath of a run. The criminal version of it puts the runner at the mercy of the justice system (the runner is basically paroled), and the corporate version makes the runner a failed corporate stooge or a low-level lackey, with little or no actual power in the corporation but hated, to the point of being targeted for death, by many of the SIN-less, the people the runner has to deal with every day in order to accomplish runs. Worst of all, a runner with SIN tends to be cautious and boring since if the runner is caught, off to prison the runner goes, losing whatever small benefits they had, and exchanging their national or corporate SIN for a criminal SIN. SIN can be acquired during gameplay, but as a friend once explained to me, no sane corporation or state would give a SIN to a runner without first equipping said runner with a cortex bomb, or something similar.

Still, if a runner can’t have a real SIN, the runner still needs a fake one to do anything in society, even buy a soy taco. This is what most runners opt for. A fake SIN keeps a runner trapped since it can be detected during any transaction, depending on the security level of the device checking the SIN. A fast food restaurant will only give the SIN a cursory glance, but trying to get a lease for a fancy apartment will put the SIN and the runner under great scrutiny. And all of these transactions create a trail. Eventually, the runner’s luck runs out (or an angry decker simply hacks into the runner’s life and outs the runner’s fake SIN to the authorities), and the SIN evaporates, and the runner needs a new SIN and, essentially, a new public life.

You might think that having a lot of money would help, but that too is a trap.  Money in Shadowrun comes in two forms: credsticks, which are like cash, tied to no one but much more portable and much more easily stolen, and money tied to a SIN, like in a bank account. Due to the dangers of a SIN being found out and the ease with which credsticks can be stolen, runners have to live like tax evaders--always spending their money on something or hiding their money under their mattress (see note 1). Most opt for weapons, cyberware, or magic items -- tools of the trade. This is good for runs, but it keeps the runner in the shadows.

Is there any physical escape? If PCs travel too far outside their neighborhood, their relationship with their contacts will suffer. Also, area knowledge is a powerful thing, and constantly moving makes area knowledge a weapon to be used against the footloose PCs. PCs from the neighborhood, however, can make use of area knowledge. Finally, the PCs’ reputation and criminal record will eventually travel with them too, and sooner rather than later in a world with better-than-modern electronic communication as well as magical communication.

What about other worlds? There is a small box in the core rulebook (fifth edition) that admits to the possibility of mages and shamans visiting other planes of existence, but the only support for that kind of play is Aetherology, a short supplement (39 pages) with some evocative details but short of the specific details that many gamers expect, and that Shadowrun delivers for its core setting. A GM would have to design almost everything about the metaplanes himself or herself (or liberally steal from other sources such as D&D’s Planescape). What about outer space? The world is too broke for that, mostly, and it is a hostile place to mages and shamans, and there is little support, and what support it does have (in Target: Wastelands) makes it clear that magic won’t work in outer space. Nor should you expect some kind of people’s revolution. The corporations won, and they won big. Any one corporation might fall, but the system remains.

It is the system that even blocks social escape. Shadowrun actually has three such systems: Street Cred, Notoriety, and Public Awareness. These reflect its cyberpunk origins, since that genre is very concerned about reputation. In Shadowrun, a high Street Cred is a positive, but its only effect is to allow you to keep more of the successes that you roll on social skills where Street Cred would matter. Notoriety does not have a precise effect, and exists mostly to allow the GM to punish you for being obnoxious and to reduce your Street Cred. Public Awareness makes you better known, and at high levels, you might achieve the fame of outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde or Pablo Escobar. Their fame, ultimately, did not protect them, nor will it protect PCs. Instead it acts like a target painted on them.
What is left for the PCs to do but to act outside the law? For the most part, their very existence is illegal, and becoming legal is difficult to impossible, so the PCs might as well murder and steal, but Shadowrun points out that there are different ways to be an outlaw. In this world that is a maze with no exit, PCs can still choose what to do and why they do it, and yet, morality matters less, grand things matter less, and personal choices, impulses, loyalties, and the details of the world matter more. If you choose the evil corps as your target (and they make a great target with their wealth, arrogance, and 100% dedication to evil), criminal acts against it are mitigated and downgraded to the courageous mischief we see in caper films or even upgraded to the doomed heroism of samurai and gunslingers (a great ending for a campaign). But until that glorious end, your PC is still a criminal. The runners steal and murder, but they also save the day. Shadowrun’s seemingly shoddy construction allows for PCs who can be dastardly and heroic and have a grand time doing so, and, indeed, who have little choice but to both be part of the world and be gleeful, semi-heroic bastards.

Is it possible to play such characters in other games? Of course it is. There have been semi-heroic bastard PCs since the early days of roleplaying, and some adventuring parties in D&D, Rifts, and other games seem to consist of nothing but such PCs. They are a lot of fun to play. But there are other PCs too. Some PCs are unwilling to take a risk. Others are virtuous or villainous to a fault. Others don’t care about the consequences of their actions. Others are so powerful or competent that they make other PCs unnecessary. Others are depressed and angst-ridden (see Vampire) or very serious about their honor (see Legends of the Five Rings).

But by removing the escapes from the shadows, the Shadowrun rules and setting direct the GM and players to create a specific game experience that encourages PCs to be semi-heroic bastards by discouraging overly “good” or “evil” behavior since both can make runs more difficult, by encouraging players to build PCs who are specialized (basically, encouraging PCs to choose a class) and who thus will also have weaknesses so they must rely on their teammates, encouraging risk-taking, since doing nothing leads very quickly to poverty, and by keeping PCs focused on a narrow geographical area, players have an easier time becoming immersed in the setting. Again, it is possible to do all of this with other game systems, but this is the Shadowrun default.

By limiting or eliminating certain choices that are common to other games and settings, Shadowrun creates a distinct yet common gaming experience for its many players. D&D players can talk about the wonders of Planescape or the silliness of Castle Greyhawk or the survival-horror of Dark Sun or the dungeon they sacked. Vampire players can talk about their super-heroes with fangs or their cunning political schemes lasting centuries or their Near Dark style epic road trip across America. Rifts players can talk about their human-animal hybrid characters, or their power-armor characters, or fighting for or against the Coalition or traveling to completely different dimensions.  But in my experience, when I talk with others who have played Shadowrun, the topic is always the same: The run.


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Notes
If Shadowrun had a dark satirical streak (ala Ray Winninger’s Underground), the most popular cybernetic enhancement would be a pouch in your body where you could easily hide and retrieve your credsticks: “Wait, wait, I gotta pull it out...there it is.”


Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "SIR" and nothing else.

So, for this round of the contest we are to find something that our topic avoided, that the author is not aware it avoided, that the readers at large are not yet aware was avoided, and find interesting things that omission can tell us.   I've decided to take a look at Combat in gaming.

Love and Gore: the Sanitized Combat Experience

Roleplaying games across the spectrum are a form of reality emulator.  The open ended nature of actions in an RPG is one of the great features which let them mimic lived experience in a more dynamic way than other entertainments.  It even exaggerates the options for action beyond what is possible, into the realm of what is imaginable, so as to make the life inside the game way more fun than the real world.

Pretend fighting is one of those play activities inherent to mammals.  We find it fun so we have made Combat one of the mainstays of the RPG experience.   The emulators we use to make the reality of the game world are missing something essential to the experience of real fighting: trauma.

When you stab that goblin in the balls it isn't a traumatic experience, it's comedy. You don't hear his agonized screams ringing in your ears for the rest of living memory, his blood doesn't run over your hand staining it in your mind despite your compulsive attempts to wash them over and over for years thereafter.  If combat in the game even remotely resembled the real thing, it would not make for an enjoyable pastime.  It would be an emotionally tolling horror genre miserycrawl.

Even further removed from the combat in roleplaying games are the battles in tabletop wargames. The roots of roleplaying games were seeded here, and if you think about what wargames are it's kind of fucked up. It takes a deeply disturbing and psychologically scarring event: War, and turns it into a form of play where you push pieces around harmlessly on a map.   Even the idea of lining up your battalion of pieces that represent lines of soldiers, to knock other pieces over to mark them as dead, is a little bit cracked. The concept of "Soldier" is a cultural construct which serves to reduce the humanity of an individual so they are a killable thing.  Objectifying a living, feeling being crescendos to a disturbing logical conclusion when you represent a person who is dying as an abstract game piece on a board.

The wargame origins of the RPG genre might have biased the design process in the early game.  It could be the reason that fighting is so prevalent in most paper and dice games, as opposed to other parts of the human experience.   There are examples of another way to build an RPG experience.  In the King's Quest series of video games your obstacles are seldom combative in nature.  Exploration, collection, and puzzle solving play a much larger part of the experience than combat.  Character relationships, dialogue, and even romance occupy a larger portions of those adventures.

A cursory look at the design choices made in 4th Edition D&D will show you what the end result of the wargame bias can look like.   Combat is everything, the interesting powers all help you fight in some form or fashion.  The rate you use and regain your powers is largely measured by how often you rest between fights.  The rest of the varied experiences of life are condensed into a meager handful of skill checks.  The traumatic and visceral experience of fighting is codified into initiative turns, measured movement rates, and tidy dice rolls.  It quantifies something terrible and divides it out into safely experienced and knowable parts, so we can use it as a form of play that dominates the narrative.

If the play fighting in our RPGs more closely emulated violence in reality, combat would be the less attractive option for obstacle resolution.  We can also deconstruct the methods used to create tabletop combat and apply those systems to the other parts of the human experience in an effort to redress the imbalance. We might break the experience of romance down into its constituent actions.  Initiative rolls could be made for dilated pupils and raised hairs on an arm.  Stun saves could counteract the emotional paralysis between first base and second.  Encounter powers would activate when we engaged in a social bluff instead of a battle.  Carousing would get a d100 table.

I think that altering the balance between trauma and play in our game combat might be a useful tool for shaping a game's design, and in turn how we shape the imaginary lives lived at the table.
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Monocultural Dying Earth vs Anti-Medieval D&D (Thought Eater)

Here are some entires for ROUND THREE of the Thought Eater Writin' About Games Tournament.

These are not by me, they are by two anonymous contestants, vote for which you like better.

The theme for this round is to describe the significance of something that's missing from an RPG text.

Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line YEK and nothing else. It's about D&D-influencing author Jack Vance:

Jack Vance’s Dying Earth is basically a monoculture. Everywhere you go you get the same wildlife, the same wizards, the same measurements and money, the same aloof princesses and sociopathic adventurers, the same religious pedants and small-time conmen, the same backward villagers with stupid and dangerous traditions, the same card games, the same petty lords, the same conversations in the same bars. Even when someone goes a million years back in time there’s no sense that anything they see would be out of place on the earth they came from. Unlike Lyonesse, or every other fantasy epic, the Dying Earth doesn’t come with a map. It only has physical geography insofar as this is necessary to structure people’s adventures, and the same is true for cultural geography. It’s important for us to know that, in order to get the Silver Desert, Cugel has to cross the Mountains of Magnatz. And it’s important we know that in this little bullshit village they make you judge beauty contests and in that one they eat people’s fingers. But Vance is less interested in building up a coherent, inhabitable world than he is with leading us through a paratactic sequence of weird and memorable encounters. So it’s hard to lay down everything that happens on a chart in the same way that you can lay down everything that happens in Lyonesse, or its spiritual successor Game of Thrones. You can’t say that the guys who eat fingers are here and because of the placement of the river they would naturally come into conflict with the guys who regulate the sun. And these people all think the same way, anyway: they’re all literal, pedantic, hyper-rational and hateful small-minded pricks, like participants in the world’s worst internet argument. They all speak the same affected faux-courtly dialect and have the same basic approach to problem-solving. Even the monsters are like this. So what we lose is not a sense of place but rather a sense of distinction between places. It’s easy to visualise the Dying Earth, but it’s hard to think about how any one part of the Dying Earth is substantially different from any other part. Place-names abound, because Vance loves proper nouns, but wherever possible he avoids giving us a sense of context for them. He’s not interested in the relationships between them, or in fitting them into any kind of bigger picture, except insofar as it can be used to propel the story.

Here is a bit from Thomas Pynchon’s short story Entropy that explains what is going on here:

"Nevertheless," continued Callisto, "he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to a certain phenomena in his own world… [he] envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease."

The Dying Earth is a closed thermodynamic system that has simmered down to equilibrium. Everything is the same because the world is ending and the energy it takes to differentiate things has run out.

This is also why it’s so hard for the characters in the Dying Earth to ever get anything done. It’s why The Eyes of The Overworld ends with Cugel returned to where he began, stranded on a frozen beach and condemned to repeat the exact same journey again in the sequel. It’s why the only people on the Dying Earth with anything resembling ambition are either wizards or eccentrics like Guyal of Sfere, all of whom ultimately aspire to escape the world on which they were born and on which the laws of physics themselves conspire against accomplishment. The beginning and end of a story are two distinct points, like two cities on a plain, and it takes energy to keep them separate. So Dying Earth stories inevitably tend to gravitate towards the picaresque, the kind of episodic narrative where nothing ever changes and the status quo is never seriously disturbed. A lot of people have written picaresques over the years and you’ll find many of them listed in Zak’s essay on the subject here, which I assume you have all read a bunch of times on account of how it’s foundational to the genre of games blogging. But what Vance does that, e.g., Jack Kerouac or the writers of superhero comics don’t do is make the story not just a picaresque but a commentary on the nature of picaresques, and write characters that are struggling against the limitations of the picaresque form. Pynchon is his buddy here. Entropy in Pynchon is an active force of destruction, waging tireless war against his characters’ motivations and memories, eroding their sense of self and making it impossible for them to remember what they’re supposed to be doing. Vance shows us a world in which this kind of entropy has almost totally won. The future does not exist, all human potential has been dramatically curtailed and the only remaining options are to flee to the stars or become a wandering hate machine like Cugel, with no real emotional register and no ability to care about anything beyond immediate survival.


This is not as obvious a choice as it might seem. Cugel is the archetypal murderhobo, and not having to worry about the future is the whole point of the murderhobo. We don’t necessarily want to see ourselves as the heroes of some grand narrative. We’re just as likely to see ourselves as people who have a few adventures and then get eaten by a grue. It’s funnier and there’s less pressure. Vance maintains the same kind of ironic distance from Cugel, never quite endorsing him but never quite condemning him, as we often do with the characters in our own games. On the one hand, he says, it would be depressing to actually be this guy. On the other hand, at least you wouldn’t have to go to work in the morning. And even the idea of the sun going out holds its own macabre charm. The Pynchon story ends with his heroes shattering the barrier between them and the rest of the world in order to embrace thermodynamic equilibrium, “a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion”. The perverse appeal entropy holds for them, half alienating and half welcoming, is the same kind of appeal the Dying Earth holds for us.

Here is the second essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line LUA and nothing else. It's not about D&D-influencing author Jack Vance:

D&D is anti-medieval

You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as "Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games" (on the cover) and "rules [for] designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign" (in the introduction). However, in the game itself, there's precious little to suggest feudalism, Europe, chivalry, a post-imperial dark age, or even the existence of a monarchy at all. Apart from the technology suggested by the weapon list, it could just as well be a simulation of the professional meritocracy of Byzantium, or the city-state sovereignty of Barsoomian Mars. (There's more explicit textual support in OD&D for Mars than there is for fantasy medieval Europe.) But neither of these strike the mark. OD&D's cultural details suggest a society original to Gygax - nonsensical as a medieval fantasy, but coherent and striking as an American fantasy of empowerment and upward mobility. It's an armor-clad repudiation of medieval feudalism, like Twain's Connecticut Yankee.

It's not feudal

The way you advance in a feudal society is to win glory in battle for your overlord. Then he grants you land, which is the main form of wealth. Unless you're a peasant. Then you can never advance at all.

That's not at all what happens in D&D. There is no overlord to grant you land. Land, instead of being a form of wealth, is completely free! ("At any time a player/character wishes he may select a portion of land (or a city lot) upon which to build his castle, tower, or whatever. The following illustrations are noted with the appropriate cost in Gold Pieces.") The cost of building a structure is merely the a la carte cost of all its architectural elements. It costs nothing at all to acquire the land to build on, even inside a city. 

Wealth in D&D is primarily in the form of coinage and jewels, not land and cattle, making the D&D economy more modern than medieval. Some have suggested that D&D takes place in a time of exploration and renaissance when coinage, and the middle class, is eclipsing the power of the nobility. I'll go further. There is no sign that there is any nobility to eclipse, even a waning one. 

If you build a castle in the "wilderness", you have to clear the area of monsters for 20 miles around. You then gain control of a handful of villages within this area. You don't have to compete against any other ruler or pay taxes to any overlord for these villages! This omission seems significant, since Gygax will always gleefully mention any relevant obstacle if it exists.

The people who live in villages are called either "villagers" or "inhabitants", not "peasants," "commoners" or "serfs." They pay you taxes. If you piss off the villagers, the DM is encouraged to annoy you with "angry villagers", "city watch", "militia", or "a Conan type." Notable in its absence is any local form of knighthood, gentry, nobility, or ruling class to oppose you.

There are no knights

The word knight doesn't even appear in OD&D. But there is one group of people who act distinctly knight-like. The wilderness contains castles, ruled by fighters, magic-users, or clerics. The fighters will challenge players to a joust (using Chainmail rules), taking the loser's armor and offering hospitality to the winner. This has a sort of Arthurian chivalry to it, but Pendragon it is not. Gygax carefully avoids calling these folks "knights." They're fighting-men, with retainers (monstrous and human) and armies, looking very like the ones players can acquire. Furthermore, castle-owning fighting men are just as rare as castle-owning magic-users and clerics. The Outdoor Survival game board, which forms the default OD&D map, has a land area of 25,000 miles, half the size of England. There are about six castle-owning fighting-men in that area. In other words, castles of the wilderness aren't dominated by an analogue of a knightly order, leavened by a few fantastic spellcasters. It looks, rather, as if they were built by a small handful of adventurers, appearing in roughly the class proportions of a typical adventuring party. (Fighters are, if anything, under-represented.)

There are no vassals

Let's talk about how you gain followers. Gary says, "It is likely that players will be desirous of acquiring a regular entourage of various character types, monsters, and an army of some form." In a truly medieval game, there's a model for that: people swear themselves to your service in exchange for your protection. You raise an army by requiring service from peasants who live on your land. In other words, you gain vassals. D&D ignores this model, replacing it with one in which you pay retainers and specialists by the month. Loyalty is bought with a mixture of cash and charisma. You can hire armies, too, from Light Foot to Heavy Horsemen. (No knights.)

There are no kings 

There's no evidence of a monarchy. You never have to declare fealty to anyone. While you can create a barony, there is no way to level up and become a duke or King. There are no rules for controlling territory more than a day's ride from your castle. In the hostile emptiness of OD&D's wilderness, power doesn't travel well. 

The only mention of kings in the little brown books is in the descriptions of humanoid monsters, e.g. in a goblin lair "the 'goblin king'" will be found. (Gygax quotes the term "goblin king".) It seems unlikely that the term implies a crown, a system of divine right, inheritance laws, etc. Since a goblin king leads a single lair of 40-400 goblins, he's probably just the local boss, just like the less evocatively named "leader/protector type" who rules every 30-300 orcs. 

There is no lost empire

There certainly seems to be a power vacuum in the world of OD&D, ready for the player/characters to exploit. What used to fill that vacuum?

There's no evidence for (or against) the idea that OD&D takes place in a dark age after a fallen Roman Empire analogue or during the death throes of a feudal kingdom. Sure, someone built those "huge ruined piles" under which lie the dungeons. But based on the treasures to be found there, the dungeon builders were part of a coinage economy just like the current one. There hasn't even been significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were built. The richest dungeon treasure hoard, on level 13 and deeper, averages out to about 10,000 GP in coin. That's as much as a baron can earn from a year's worth of taxes: not an insignificant sum to sock away in a dungeon, but not kingly or imperial either. This doesn't suggest that dungeons are relics of a far richer past. It seems rather that things used to be like they are right now. 

There are few European details

The monster descriptions of "men", "elves", and "dwarves" don't suggest that the game is set in a European culture. The types of "men" are Bandits, Berserkers, Brigands, Dervishes, Nomads, Buccaneers, Pirates, Cave Men, and (perhaps) Mermen. Berserkers are a little Nordic in flavor, but are balanced out by Dervishes and Nomads from the "desert or steppes". 

The government suggested by the player's "barony" is almost completely a-cultural. A player builds a stronghold, and then they can extort money from the surrounding people. This is the structure of every non-nomadic human society. The only European element is the technology level of your stronghold: it has merlons, barbicans, etc.

The D&D weapon list has a medieval feel to it, but partly that's just because that's what we're expecting to find. In fact, it's a sort of survey of (mostly) pre-gunpowder weapons. Most of the weapons and armor appear in ancient Europe and in Asia as well as in medieval Europe. Partial exceptions:  Composite bows are mostly non-European, while longbows are associated with Europe. The halberd is basically a Renaissance weapon, and the two-handed sword appears in medieval Europe, India, and Japan, but not the ancient world. No one knows what "plate mail" is supposed to be. 

If not medieval, what?

All over, the D&D rules seem to be explicitly eschewing a medieval, feudal model in favor of a cash-based economy, a nonexistent or powerless government, and a social-classless society in a sparsely inhabited, unforgiving world. 

If the OD&D rules suggest any government at all, it is a meritocracy, or more precisely, a levelocracy. Creatures with more XP and hit dice rule lower-level ones, from settled barons and goblin kings to wandering bandits and nomads. This is not only non-medieval, it is anti-feudalistic and anti-aristocratic. Level requirements for baronies are at odds with the hereditary gloss added to D&D in nearly every subsequent setting. 

OD&D also exhibits an obsession with money-gathering for its own sake that is suggestive of mercantilism or capitalism. 

D&D is not "fantastic-medieval." It's not even "fantastic renaissance" or "fantastic-post-apocalyptic." It's "fantastic American history." 

How did Gygax set out to write a fantastic-medieval game and end up writing an American one?

OD&D is meant to be setting-free. The game's referee is to create his or her own campaign, ranging in milieu from the "prehistoric to the imagined future" (with emphasis on the medieval, especially for beginners). In the later 1e Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax further explains, "There are dozens of possible government forms, each of which will have varying social classes, ranks, or castes. Which sort you choose for your milieu is strictly your own prerogative. While this game is loosely based on Feudal European technology, history and myth, it also contains elements from the Ancient Period, parts of more modern myth, and the mythos of many authors as well. Within its boundaries all sorts of societies and cultures can exist, and there is nothing to dictate that their needs be Feudal European."

But it is very difficult to write a document with no cultural assumptions at all. Gygax consciously excluded the trappings of a medieval society, and filled that vacuum with "real life" American details. Gygax wrote D&D in a country where, 100 years before, frontier land was considered free for the taking. (19th century propaganda depicted the land's original Native American inhabitants as inimical savages, like orcs). At the same period, the success of America's industrialist "robber barons" taught the country that birth and family weren't the keys to American power; the American keys were self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money. 

While it's possible that D&D's modern details slipped into the game unobserved,

Gygax may have been quite aware of his game's implicit setting. After all, his original pre-publication Greyhawk campaign drew heavily from his own American experience. It took place on a United States map with Greyhawk at Chicago, and Dyvers at Milwaukee. His buddy Don Kaye's Greyhawk character, Murlynd, was a gunslinger from Boot Hill. I think it's quite likely that Gygax intentionally gave his game a New World spin. 

Intentional or not, OD&D represents a milestone in American fantasy - and maybe the last un-muddled example of the genre it inspired. Most of D&D's thousands of imitators, in game and fiction, preserve the game's democratic bones (cash economy, guns for hire, rags to riches stories) while overlaying a medieval-European skin. The combination is not fortunate. Gygaxian levelocracy, where a villager can rise to become a baron or a "Conan type", is fundamentally incompatible with the European fantasy typified by Lord of the Rings, in which no fellowship can alter the fact that Sam is by birth a servant, Frodo a gentleman, Strider a king, and Gandalf a wizard. 

OD&D's American strain of fantasy didn't even last within TSR. In 1980, Gygax himself reworked the World of Greyhawk into what looks, from its cover, like a supplement about Arthurian Knights:

But it's worth taking a step back from the medieval-fantasy cliches that overran later D&D publications, and playing the original, more coherent setting: A swords-and-sorcery world, empty of government, where anyone can pick up a sword, become a hero, and live the American dream.

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The Lacuna: Winners Advance to Thought Eater Round Three

The winners of the second round of the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Contest are in...

source

Ferris Bueller as RPG beats Lovecraft Was A Bad Shrink

Tolkien Was A Bad GM beats The German Illustrator

Annotated Tomb of Horrors beats Revelation in Lovecraft

RIFTS Psionics beats The Hobbit Movie Is Bad Adventure Design

Strahd is Cooler Than Dracula beats Elven Snowflakes

Casablanca As Adventure Design beat the average

Melville, Freud, Lovecraft beat the average

If any of the authors (winner or loser) would like to out themselves in the comments, feel free to do so now.

Ok, rules for the third round:

-This round is inspired by a line at the beginning of Houllebecq's essay on Lovecraft:

"If one defines a writer not by reference to the themes that they treat, but by reference to those
they repudiate, then one agrees that Lovecraft occupies a place totally apart."

...this is the essay where Houllebecq goes on to point out that Lovecraft studiously avoids sex and money in his fiction.

The crucial point here is: this is a lacuna that Houllebecq had to discover, it was not explicitly on top. Lovecraft's stories are not advertised as "Tales of cosmic horror that don't have typical human relationships or class in them".

So for this round I'd like the winners to take some subject and tell us what is avoided in it--and what this tells us and why it's interesting. It should preferably be something the authors may not even have been conscious of avoiding, and should definitely be something the rest of us are not yet conscious that they avoid.

So, for example, writing about how some iteration of D&D lacks noncombat task resolution is immediately out. Whereas if you discover that nobody laughs during the entire Morte D'Arthur or that no-one ever ever eats in a Clark Ashton Smith story or that agriculture never appears in any RIFTS module or that nothing from Green Ronin publishing ever has the word "pig" in it, that's fair.

As this is a fairly difficult and demanding remit probably requiring a little research, the range of topics is relatively unrestricted other than "it should be an RPG or obviously RPG-adjacent" and that it can't be Lovecraft or Tolkien as we've beat those two to death recently. I would definitely be interested in thoughts on RPGs outside the OSR usual.

-This is different than the previous rounds because I will exercise a veto/editorial power over these. If I get one that has a lazy line like "I don't know why this is, but I think it it's true, or at least interesting" about its central premise, I will be like "This needs to be better, try harder, rewrite". 

-If you are one of the winners named above, then email me your new essay by July 1st--zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the all-caps subject THOUGHT EATER 3.

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Melville, Freud & Lovecraft (Thought Eater)

Here is an entry for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

If you're new to the contest, it's like this: this essay is not by me--got that Metafilter?--it's by an anonymous DIY RPG writer who was assigned to write something interesting and original about hoary old RPG topics.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the second round Thought Eater essays are up...

The rules for the second round are here.

The difficulty is I am an idiot and accidentally left this one out when I was rolling out the entries, meaning this one's orphaned. This is how it'll work--if you like it,  send an email with the Subject "NUD" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it. If you don't, do nothing. At the end I'll look to see if it has more votes than the average entry. If so: it goes to the next round.

I reread Moby-Dick recently (you have to hyphenate it, it’s like Spider-Man) and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it had in common with The Call of Cthulhu.

There’s a scholarly young man in New England who lets restlessness and curiosity drag him into a quest for a terrible sea monster rumoured to lurk in the Antipodes. He has a series of adventures, each more spooky than the last, involving half-mad sailors, derelict ships, strangely-shaped animals, the threat of cannibalism and the deep existential terror of having to interact with people from the Pacific Islands. By the time he realizes what a bad decision he’s made it’s too late and he’s pulled inexorably into a confrontation with the monster, which kills everyone aboard the ship except for one man who’s left alive to tell the tale. There’s a bunch of structural differences - Thurston is just reading about the voyage, Ishmael is actually on board - but the narrative progression is the same.

There are a couple of explanations for this. One is Freudian. Cthulhu’s a vagina, Moby Dick’s a dick, sex is a nightmarish leviathan that can never be looked at directly and the Pacific Ocean is the Victorian unconsciousness in which it lurks. As tedious as this kind of thing always is, I can’t help but feel like there’s something to it. More importantly, however, both Melville and Lovecraft had read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which is by Edgar Allen Poe and about all the same shit. We don’t have to invent some kind of weird laborious psychosexual code language when we can just say that they liked a book. I like that book and I’m not terrified of women. Melville didn’t write eighteen billion pages about whale biology because he was wrestling with his homosexuality. He probably was wrestling with his homosexuality, but he wrote those pages because he liked whale biology. We don’t have to assume that just because sex is super important, nothing else we do is important unless it can be made to relate to sex.

Now Melville is a much better writer than Lovecraft. This is because he is more specific. Lovecraft will tell you that the monster is spooky and you should be spooked by it. Melville will tell you how a whale’s dick works. There is a scene in Moby-Dick where a guy wears a whale’s foreskin as a poncho. And despite this, Melville’s whales continue to be spooky. Advantage: Melville.

But Lovecraft has a much greater influence over our culture than Melville. Nobody has ever tried to make a roleplaying game about Melville. And I think this is because Melville is more specific. You can take Lovecraft and put him in space or the Himalayas or the grimdark future where there is only war. You can’t do that with Melville. I mean, you can, but there’s like one or two space Moby-Dicks. There’s a million space Lovecrafts. Lovecraft gets in everything, like sand the day after the beach. Melville is less flexible. If Lovecraft is sand then Melville marble. Beautiful on his own, but denser and harder to cut and you need to be much smarter about it if you’re going to make anything out of him.

Lovecraft, because he is not very good, dares you to improve him. The first thing you do when you’re writing a Lovecraft adventure is to make it more interesting than anything Lovecraft ever wrote. Well, the first thing you do is cut out all the racism, but you get the picture. Lovecraft’s work is full of such clever phrases as “the Thing cannot be described”, and when you read one of these you immediately try to describe the Thing. You have to do all the work of making it horrifying yourself. Lovecraft’s not going to help you - he’s just going to tell you it’s horrifying and ask you to figure out the details. And whatever weirdness you come up with is almost always going to be better than whatever Lovecraft is thinking of.

But it’s also not Lovecraft. Because Lovecraft is that shit writing. The implicit challenge of Lovecraft is “can you do what I did, but not shitly?”. And you can’t. So people are constantly Doing Stuff with Lovecraft, trying to Use Lovecraft, trying to make things Lovecraftian, and Lovecraft is constantly in the public eye but never actually supplanted. He can’t be. It always seems like there’s something Lovecraft never quite pulls off, some great achievement that’s persistently evading him, but if you actually achieve that - as Melville pretty much does - you don’t solve Lovecraft’s problem. He wants to pull it off while still remaining Lovecraft, and he can’t do that, because the inability to pull it off is what makes Lovecraft Lovecraft.

This is also D&D. D&D is pretty shit in most ways, and there’s a million spinoffs which are technically better, but you will never get rid of original flavour D&D because what makes D&D D&D is the big hole at the heart of it where something awesome should go. In order to radiate potential you need to not fill that potential. Patrick Stuart says here (http://falsemachine.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/art-in-games.html) that it’s actually easier to notice that a thing has psychic energy when it’s bad. I think this is maybe why. A good thing, like Moby-Dick, has a great idea and then lives up to it. The guy who wrote it did his fucking job. He did all the work and there is no room left for you to do any. But you want to do the work, you feel compelled to do the work, which is why you are drawn towards shit things that have ideas and fuck up the execution. There is something left in them for you to work with.

And I think this also accounts for the persistence of Freud. Freud has psychic energy. Freud actually talks about psychic energy, a little. He has a whole theory of cathexis, which is the process by which the erotic charge that’s supposed to accrue around people you want to bone gets redirected to something else, like a whale or a child’s hat or a piece of wallpaper or whatever. This is clearly stupid. People don’t become obsessed with weird shit because they’re not allowed to fuck their dads. But Freud is all about the unconscious and the inexpressible and terrible forbidden things lurking just beyond sight - the same shit Lovecraft talks about - and his stupid theories about it demand that we try to explain it better. We think we can outdo him, and so we keep coming back to him, and so he’s a constant presence in academia and literature to this very day. We don’t want to explain away Moby-Dick by saying it’s about sex but there’s something in that idea that prevents us from ignoring it. I still felt the urge to talk about Freud at the beginning of this essay. I don’t think Moby-Dick is about sex, I think it’s about whales, but I can’t just fuck the idea off altogether.

You might be more comfortable ignoring Freud then me, of course. That’s fine. The point is, the kind of infuriating vagueness that both Freud and Lovecraft possess can wield a huge influence over us and our creative process, even as we consciously acknowledge that it’s dumb. And also that Patrick Stuart should read Moby-Dick. Have you read Moby-Dick Patrick? I think you’d really like it.

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