If you’ve ever read a description of one of Arneson’s original proto-D&D games, you understand just how far we’ve come in this industry. Six to twelve people, all huddled around a table with a hacked-together character sheet each, laughing and carrying on as the “caller” and “dungeon master” conversed about the realities of exploration and combat. No one at the table except Arneson knew the rules, and that was okay. It was a raucous, frantic, hilariously chaotic good time.
Somewhere between here and now, we lost that idea. Somewhere along the way (I suspect in the mid-eighties), we came up with this idea that RPGs should be serious endeavors. If you weren’t constantly concerned with your dwindling HP total, if you didn’t carefully manage the bookkeeping of your character’s encumbrance, if you didn’t know the rules for brawling, magic item creation, and individual initiative, you were PLAYING IT WRONG.
At some point, a lot of gamers tend to forget what got us into this hobby: the prospect of having fun with friends. This happens across the board; the roleplayer who is more obsessed with creating his own world than engaging his players in it is in the same bucket as the TCG player who is overly competitive and can’t seem to have fun any more.
For me, the part of this hobby I love most is bringing new players in. I’m not saying I don’t have fun with experienced players; on the contrary, I’ve had some grand times playing with a well-informed group. However, the times that are burned into my brain are, more often than not, those experiences with new players, a fresh dynamic, a raucous time more akin to Arneson’s early games than to what I hear described as “roleplaying” these days.
A friend of mine asserted the other day that roleplaying is, at its heart, an inherently “goofy” activity. I think he’s right, and that’s something that we need to come to terms with. I mean, think about it. Try to describe hardcore roleplaying to someone who has no idea what an RPG is. It’s going to come out something like this:
I’m going to get together with some friends of mine. We’re going to pretend to be murderous, sociopathic treasure-hunters [Editor's Note: replace with angsty sociopathic vampires/Jedi/people of no consequence as required] in a fantasy world. In order to do this, we need the assistance of one or more technical manuals, some strange-looking dice, and a lot of mind-altering beverages. We will be rewarded for arbitrary behavior, liking killing sentient creatures, doing as we’re told by one player (who is the Master), or playing pretend particularly well, with increased power and influence in this fantasy world. We will do this for several hours. It’s fun! Really! Why are you giving me that look? This is a legitimate hobby!
Yeah. Let me know how that goes for you.
Obviously, there are better pitches for getting newbies in. However, the best games are those you don’t have to pitch outside of the basic concept. Star Wars is amazing for this: “Come play a Jedi with us!” Once you get them okay with the idea that we’re going to be pretending to be Jedi, everything else is pretty much downhill.
However, this is a real problem with our hobby, and it’s an issue that is getting worse, not better. It’s not society getting further and further away from the idea of gaming; on the contrary, gaming is more exposed in the public consciousness than ever. It’s that gamers are getting further away from the idea that this should be an inclusive community. Instead of an inclusive community of players, with people stepping up to run games as needed, we seem to be moving toward an exclusive community of experts.
Gamers think they are smarter, more educated, more informed, more prone to risk-taking, or any number of things that make them superior to the average prole. When it comes down to it, that’s false. There are people just as smart (and smarter!) in Starcraft, stocks, and soccer. We aren’t special.
Given that mindset, though, it’s easy to understand why just about every gamer on Earth thinks he can design his own game.
This is the inherent danger of the “community” model, where everyone makes games, as opposed to an “industry” model, where actual game designers make games: it’s exclusive. It makes us out to be some sort of elite cadre of dual-classed warrior-kings, which we aren’t. It changes the playing field from the open vista of players playing games, to one of games masters. It turns a friendly, open hobby inward, into something competitive, antisocial, and obsessive.
Do you know what the worst part is? It doesn’t matter. If you want to devote your life’s work to making the forty-fifth Fantasy Heartbreaker retread of house-ruled AD&D, you’re only harming yourself. Being part of a community that endlessly orbits itself, churning out the same, repetitive schlock over and over, just means that you’re turning into a model train enthusiast. The industry, and the hobby as a greater whole, isn’t going to notice.
That’s because the good designers, the forward-thinking businessmen, and the creative writers are making new games that encourage fresh blood to dive into the hobby. They’re making games that bring people in, not drive them out for “playing the wrong way.” They are focusing on constant improvement and consistent innovation.
There are precious few of these heroes in the industry. If you want to be one of the good guys, be one of them.
This is built on what I wrote over at SomethingAwful, but here’s my take on why “community”, as it’s been expressed in the comments, is inherently exclusionary.
So let’s take four players. Jane, Paula, George, and Ringo. Fab, huh?
Jane played D&D with her uncle and aunt and a couple cousins one rainy vacation. It was the old Red Box, and she remembered it when she saw some books labeled D&D in a Barnes and Noble. She picked them up and started asking friends if they’d like to try it out. Now she runs an on-and-off game with her roomie and a few other friends.
Ringo played the Old World of Darkness and plays the New. He got into RPGs with Star Wars back in the 1980s, and ever since then he’s hung around gaming shops and played with friends and with people he met for the purpose of gaming. He plays in a Changeling game with a few buddies and runs a Star Wars game for his work pals.
George reads RPG.net for the reviews and the articles and bought Fiasco and Dresden Files, in hopes of getting his group to possibly try them. He likes a variety of games, and is fairly willing to try anything. He plays more than he runs, but he doesn’t mind either.
Paula actively contributes to a number of forums and maintains her own blog. She is currently working on a Fiasco playset and has playtested a number of fan playbooks for Apocalypse World. She’s thinking about possibly writing her own game someday, though she’s not sure how to make it stand out from the crowd.
George and Paula are the only two people that are part of the “community” as it has been described, even though all four of these people ought to be considered part of the RPG community as a whole. The “community” thus becomes insular, because it considers itself THE community, that is, the one and only RPG community (exaggerating for effect). And so without any sort of feedback from the outside, two things happen. The first is that the community becomes unwelcoming through sheer accumulation of jargon, let alone any direct hostility towards newbies, which is problematic, and second, what happens is that bereft of outside critique, things begin to devour themselves. In terms of creative output, what happens is that things become rehashes and built around the desires of a small proportion of the community without thought to the larger community.
You can see this happen with all the Fantasy Heartbreakers and D&D 3.5 and 2e knockoffs and the World of Darkness knockoffs that all became popular at one point or another. These were developed by people who were intensely familiar (perhaps not on a design level, admittedly) with a specific source material, indeed with the community that grew up around that material, and were developed largely based on the concerns of that community- not that anybody necessarily asked for them, but rather they were built of off that basic frame and became “my World of Darkness houserules” because the people who designed them were isolated from the public as a whole and what they would want.
This could also happen to the OSR. It could happen to “story-games” save that those are broad enough to avoid some of the worst excesses. But I fear that one day we might see Shab al-Hiri Roach Heartbreakers staring out at us from the IndiePressRevolution page.
Now, one thing is missing. The advantages of the “industrial” model. I’m not going to say that thinking about things in industrial terms will help your game, but I will say this: companies have access to (potentially) surveys and marketing consultants who can study their customer base and get questions from a larger portion of the community. This isn’t perfect- in our terms, it misses Jane unless they include it in the book or hit up chain bookstores- but it still widens things to the Ringos of the market and people on the Ringo-Jane transition.
A final note: it’s occurred to me that you could frame this as conventional versus indie, but that wasn’t my intention- my goal was to present games in terms of how well each section of the community was aware of them.
I have to say that I completely agree with those post. I’m a newbie that came to D&D at the age of 38 even though I’d been familiar with it since I was a child. The first group I played with had been playing together for 20 years. They knew all the rules, the histories, the worlds, the monsters, the inside jokes. They were all nice guys (I was really the only female), but they got so caught up in rules and doing things properly that there was very little fun. They wouldn’t take much time to explain. It seemed like a chore to them. It took so long to calculate combat (and this was 4e) that combat became a chore to us. But even when there was no combat, it seemed like the newbie way of communicating with NPCs or doing the unexpected was frowned upon because that didn’t happen in the D&D they played. And these guys were NOT open to other games either.
My husband and I left and found a World of Darkness club with very open people who have played many games. Perhaps because we do LARP now, we haven’t encountered the rules tyrants although I’m sure they are there. Some know too much history, but they work really hard to incorporate and include new people. And they have a sense of humor.
In my experience, it’s D&D that seems to have an almost cultish following with people developing house rules and tinkering all the times instead of just playing another game. It’s weird. They are engineers and “artists” tearing apart and rebuilding instead of just having fun. Where did the sense of humor go? Anyway, thanks for the post.
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