Tribalism

Those who know me best know that I have a touchy temper and a tendency to want to go after all the stupid I see in the world around me. However, I also have a tendency to not want to suffer a self-induced rage stroke, so as a result, I stay well away from most controversy and politics online.

I am making an exception to this policy tonight.

There’s a story making the rounds about a group of gamers who really love the new 5th Edition ruleset for Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, they love it so much that they decided to show their love of the new game by gathering up a pile of 4th Edition books and burning them. Because there’s absolutely no symbolism there.

There’s video but I’m not linking to it. You can find it if you like.

I was talking to a friend (hey, John) who’s a non-gamer, and who was interested in knowing what exactly was going on with this display. For other non-gamers, a short version of the story: D&D has been around since 1974, and has gone through a number of different versions. 4th Edition D&D (from 2008 to about 2012) marked a very different take on the game from previous editions, and was highly polarizing. A lot of players loved it. A lot of players hated it. We’ll have to assume that this particular group of book-burners were in the latter category. But maybe they were just cold; I don’t know.

Anyway, in talking to my friend John, he used a phrase that struck an unexpected resonance with me, speaking about the sense of the ‘tribal and ritualistic’ in what he’d seen of the video. And in thinking about it, I realized that even more than the surface-level stupidity, that’s what bothered me the most.

You don’t like a game? Don’t play it. You bought books and ended up regretting it? Sell them, or give them away, or donate them to your local library. Destroying them is stupid. It’s decision-level stupid; it’s “Hey, this won’t make us look bad on the Internet, right?” stupid. Just plain stupid.

But roleplaying gaming is, at its most basic level, a positive social and tribal endeavor. That’s what sets it apart from other forms of entertainment, and even from sports (which is built around the idea of a winning side and a losing side — a concept that doesn’t exist in gaming). And to replace a positive tribalism of imagination and shared world-building with a negative tribalism of anti-imagination goes far beyond the merely stupid and pushes into darker realms.

That particular group of haters thought they’d show their love of the new 5th Edition D&D by burning 4th Edition books. I worked on a lot of 4th Edition D&D. I’ve worked on (and continue to work on) a lot of 5th Edition D&D. And what I have to say on the topic of people who would burn books to prove a point in the edition wars is that these fucking morons don’t deserve to play any version of this game.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

The Song of Belit

Believe green buds awaken in the spring,
That autumn paints the leaves with somber fire;
Believe I held my heart inviolate
To lavish on one man my hot desire.

      In that dead citadel of crumbling stone
      Her eyes were snared by that unholy sheen,
      And curious madness took me by the throat,
      As of a rival lover thrust between.

      Was it a dream the nighted lotus brought?
      Then curse the dream that bought my sluggish life;
      And curse each laggard hour that does not see
      Hot blood drip blackly from the crimsoned knife.

The shadows were black around him,
The dripping jaws gaped wide,
Thicker than rain the red drops fell;
But my love was fiercer than Death’s black spell,
Nor all the iron walls of hell
Could keep me from his side.

      Now we are done with roaming, evermore;
      No more the oars, the windy harp’s refrain;
      Nor crimson pennon frights the dusky shore;
      Blue girdle of the world, receive again
      Her whom thou gavest me.

— The Song of Belit

It’s not annoying enough that Robert E. Howard wrote epic alt-history better than just about everybody who came after him short of Tolkien. The dude could write poetry as well (including the above, from the Conan story “The Queen of the Black Coast”). It’s easy for lesser writers like myself to become vexed and annoyed by people with that kind of raw talent for doing the things we drive ourselves to do. But at the same time, it’s almost impossible to foment a jealous rage against Robert E. Howard’s life and career without inevitably circling around to the reality of how that life and career were both cut drastically and tragically short.

Most gamers live their lives engaging in the broad wonder of fantasy, as a matter of course. As did Howard, obviously. Many gamers have histories of feeling socially isolated and closed off from the world, as did Howard. Many gamers have stories about moments in their lives when the pressure of being closed off from the world — of feeling different and distant, and of all the uncertainty and fragility that comes with that — opened up to a particular kind of darkness that has only one way out. As did Howard.

(Aside — I’m one of those gamers, but that’s not important to this line of thought.)

But if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, the vast majority of gamers are able to step back from that edge of darkness. And in many cases, often long after the fact, those gamers speak to the notion that gaming and fantasy played a significant part in what let them step back. For us, gaming and fantasy created a sense of a larger world that had a place for us, and gave us the understanding that even when the darkness seems like the only option, there are always choices. There are always ways to move forward. There are always reasons to fight on.

Whatever thoughts and emotions and pain resonated in Robert E. Howard on a particular day in June, 1936, they took away his reasons to fight — just long enough for the fight to end. And there’s a terrible kind of irony in the idea that Robert E. Howard’s imagination crafted fantasy worlds so vast that not only he but literally millions of readers have explored them without ever even getting close to learning all their mysteries, but that his own worlds of the imagination offered him no way out of the darkness of the real world.

Fantasy and gaming are about the ability to dream, and about how the ability to dream can help you look past the limitations of a real world that seems to promise nothing but pain. For me, and for a lot of gamers like me, the lessons of fantasy and imagination that Howard taught were a part of what kept us going. And I can’t help but wish that on that June day of eighty-odd years ago, Howard had been able to dream the future that the rest of us — in our time, in our own ways, and using the examples that Howard and so many others laid down for us — saw and made.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

Twenty-Eight Years in the Making

Way back in 1986, my college gaming group (which had previously been my high school gaming group) took on the classic supermodule “The Temple of Elemental Evil,” with me DMing. It was the culmination of a campaign that had been going with a steady core of characters for the previous three years, and which promised to unfold as an epic awesomefest of world-shaping dungeon-crawling goodness.

And then we never actually finished the campaign. Because partway through level 2, myself and all the other players seemed to simultaneously reach that annoying stage of mid-20s life when jobs and school and family and stuff finally demolish what’s left of one’s free time.

Last night, after a few months of prep and planning and experimentation, I rebooted that campaign. We started outside the front gates of the temple under thunder and lightning, with all the old player characters, and three of the original four players, and new players (including the wife, and the older daughter, and the older daughter’s boyfriend) taking on the old NPCs, and running everything in five cities across three time zones through G+ hangouts and Roll20.

My life is awesome.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

Fallen Heroes

If you played D&D in the 1980s, you knew Dave Trampier. You might not have known his name. You might not have known his story. But his iconic illustration work was the gateway to gaming for millions of players, in the most literal sense.

In the cover of the AD&D Players Handbook, published in 1978, a fire-lit archway in a mysterious temple becomes a portal beyond which a whole world of imagination lies. On the front side of that archway, you’re the observer stepping into the aftermath of battle. You take in what lies around you. You feel the sense of events and history that brought you to this point. You linger and dream of what might lie beyond the looming darkness.

Trampier’s work — including iconic illustrations in the Monster Manual, Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and some of the game’s most memorable adventures — did more than just define D&D in its early days. It created a foundation of fantastic authenticity that defined what the game could be. A Trampier illustration captured the essence of what fantasy gaming is all about — using imagination to create a portal beyond which anything is possible. Tramp wasn’t a realist by any stretch. Especially in the black-and-white that the early rulebooks and adventures of D&D demanded, his work was often sedately stylized. But that sense of the sedate was never static. Rather, it captured the essence of a fantasy world driven by the motions of life and conflict, then flash-frozen in a single image.

Tramp extended that gift for drawing the viewer into his world when he began tell his own stories in the comic “Wormy”, which had an occasionally intermittent but eventually breathtaking run in Dragon magazine for more than ten years. “Wormy” was a strip that never bothered to even glance at the mundane in its cast of working-class trolls, sadistic ogres, sarcastic monsters, and an eponymous wisecracking dragon. But within the confines of the strip’s comic fantasy, Trampier created a compelling story and some of the most strikingly beautiful art ever put to paper.

The saddest thing about Dave Trampier’s passing — taken as a whole with his walking away not just from his RPG work but with his apparent retirement from art as a whole — is that his last days should have been filled with the knowledge of how many people his work inspired, and the degree of love that we have for that work, even after forty long years.

Trampier is gone now. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are gone. David Sutherland (whose art stood alongside Trampier’s in defining the look of D&D in its earliest days) and J. Eric Holmes (who edited the D&D “Blue Box” basic set that was the introduction to the game for so many players) are gone.

On some level, it’s an amazing thing to be part of a hobby and an industry still possessed of so many living legends. But the downside of that is the sadness that comes of seeing — even after only forty years — the first and greatest of those heroes slip away.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

Edition Wars

An actual dream I recalled upon waking this morning.

D&D Next was about to be released to much fanfare and anticipation. Only the security around the release was so intense that Wizards of the Coast decided they needed to do the initial print run at my house, which is eight hours out of Seattle, and in another country for that added layer of obfuscation.

Chris Perkins and Rob Schwalb were both flown in to personally oversee the transfer of files for the core books and the installation of an offset press and a bindery in my garage on which those books would be produced. (Aside — I know it was just a dream, but you guys are totally welcome to stop by anytime.)

Unfortunately, midway through running the first galleys for the Player’s Handbook, we discovered that my house was secretly infested with haunts (AD&D Monster Manual II, page 74) that were intent on preventing the new edition of the game from ever being released.

I remember we were fighting the haunts with chainsaws at one point, but things get hazy after that.

I rarely remember my dreams, and based on remembering this one, I think that might be a defense mechanism.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

It Was Forty Years Ago Today

According to Jon Peterson, who is wise and knowledgeable, today is as close a date as can be reckoned for the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.

Forty years ago today, I had absolutely no idea Dungeons & Dragons existed. Hey, I was in elementary school in a small town of two thousand people in the middle of the Canadian wilderness and had one channel on the TV; cut me some slack. Thirty-nine years ago, we got a second TV channel. Thirty-three years ago, D&D was broadsided into my consciousness like I’d taken a 2x4 across the frontal lobes. (There’s no connection between those two things; I just like to tell people I only had two channels of TV growing up to see their looks of horror.)

I had seen D&D around, but we never connected. In high school, my friends and I read a whole lot of fantasy and SF, and we read a whole lot of comics, and we played a whole lot of board games, including a number of Avalon Hill titles. I was more about Kingmaker; the rest of the party were into laboriously recreating World War II minute by minute. But any time I was in a bookstore or toy store, I would cruise the game shelves just to see what looked interesting, and I had thus seen the Holmes D&D Basic Set (called “the Blue Box” among the initiated) a number of times between 1977, when it came out, and 1981, when I played for the first time.

(I know the Holmes Blue Box isn’t actually blue. The rulebook inside was, though. Don’t worry about it.)

I can remember actually taking the Holmes Blue Box off the shelf and reading the back cover copy more than once. But I never took a chance on it, because as interesting as it sounded, I could never quite figure out what Dungeons & Dragons was supposed to be.

And so as is the case with a lot of people who play D&D, figuring out what the game was became a matter of hearing about it from someone who had already played.

In eleventh grade, Kevin (one of the aforementioned comic-and-fantasy-reading friends) left our small town of two thousand people in the middle of the Canadian wilderness and moved to Vancouver for a year. As we kept in touch by phone and the occasional letter (ask your parents), Kevin would share with us tales of the strange wonders he was seeing in his new life, like Conan writing home from Arenjun to his yokel kin on the Cimmerian frontier. I can remember one of those phone calls in particular, and Kevin talking like he was recounting the story of having scaled the Tower of the Elephant as he said, “I’ve been playing this game called ‘Dungeons & Dragons’…”

The first chance I ever had to play the game was a on trip to Vancouver to see Kevin, with another of the party (Dave) in tow. When we saw Kevin, D&D was the first thing he started talking about, with broad explanations of what the game was, and how it was played, and it’s like you’re a character in a book, and one player is making up the story of the book, but all the players are writing the action, and no, there’s no board, and no, you don’t really win the game, it just kind of goes on, and… you know what? I’ll just show you.

However, there was a problem with Kevin showing us the game, insofar as where we were together and talking about it, he didn’t actually have the game with him. But he showed us anyway, using the rules as he remembered them, and distilling them down to a simplified system we could actually grasp, and tearing paper into squares to make numbered chits in lieu of dice, and sketching out a dungeon off the top of his head. I don’t remember a lot of the details, except that I’m pretty sure Dave and I were both playing fighter/magic-users, because swords and lightning bolts got a workout at different points. I remember treasure chests and traps. I remember giant rats and flaming oil. I remember a dragon in the final cavern.  I don’t remember how we beat it, or even if we beat it, because it didn’t matter.

The reason it didn’t matter is that I remember, even as we were playing — even from the first moment that Kevin described us standing on a hillside staring into a passageway leading down into darkness — that the way I was feeling right at that moment was something I’d never felt before.

After the long journey back to Cimmeria, I picked up a copy of the Holmes blue box. I can still remember the feeling of reading it for the first time, in my bedroom in the dark of one of those awesomely lonely winter nights you get in the middle of the Canadian wilderness. I remember the feeling of slipping inside the game as it was laid out for me. Not just internalizing rules for movement and attacks and spells and monsters, but actually going to a place where those things were real. I got that same feeling again when I read the AD&D Player’s Handbook for the first time a couple of weeks later, courtesy of a guy named Mitch, who Dave saw reading it in the library one lunch hour.

(Some time ago, I relayed an anecdote regarding me, Kevin, Dave, and Mitch in the context of the Tomb of Horrors super-adventure I cowrote for Wizards of the Coast. I still think the anecdote is awesome.)

I’ve been gaming ever since that strange no-rules session with Kevin, the Holmes Blue Box, and Mitch’s Player’s Handbook in 1981. I’ve been writing professionally since 1992. I’ve been working as an RPG editor and designer since 2004. I stopped gaming for a long stretch when the demands of real life got in the way of my free time and sapped a large portion of my imagination and creativity. I got back into D&D shortly after the advent of 3rd Edition, when the philosophy underlying the Open Gaming License seemed like the herald of a renaissance of creativity in gaming.

But even through the years when I wasn’t playing, when I was struggling to create even as I was making stupidly good money doing it, I never forgot the feeling that comes of standing outside the yawning mouth of a cavern, with a friend at your back and a weapon in your hand and a world full of evil to defeat. I’ve never forgotten the feeling of falling into the game to become a part of it — not just being a reader or a player, but being a character in a world so real you can touch it.

Some of the best moments of my adolescence and of my professional life have revolved around Dungeons & Dragons. The game as we played it — as characters striving to prove that the actions of individuals taken in concert can thwart the darkest forces of fate and monstrous inhumanity — has inflected every word of fiction I’ve ever written— both fantasy and nonfantasy; during the times I was gaming and even when I wasn’t. Some of the most important friendships I continue to nurture can draw a line back through the game.

Like a lot of people, I can say with complete honesty that Dungeons & Dragons not only changed my life — it saved my life. D&D is the best training ground I know for storytelling. It’s an ongoing experiment in how to layer meaning into creativity. It’s entertaining and maddening and life-affirming and frustrating and rewarding in a way different from any other entertainment I’ve ever partaken in.

D&D is a lot like life that way. And having D&D at the center of my life means more to me than these or any other words can tell.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)

You Play What?

People often ask me about gaming, often at the most inopportune times. (Talking with the teller at the bank when i’m depositing a cheque from Hasbro is a surprisingly consistent starter to that particular conversation.) And when i’m asked the usual questions of what RPGs are really about; and why do you play; and did you used to do all that weird freaky shit like put on cloaks and run around in university basements and stuff, i usually go into a kind of prepared spiel about how it’s kind of like a group improv-drama exercise, but there’s strategy and problem-solving and fighting; and because it’s socially and philosophically stimulating; and hell, no. But then a thought popped into my head recently that i think covers the attraction and allure of gaming for me in a way that people who’ve never indulged can easily understand.

If you’re like me and most other people in the world, you’ve probably read a reasonably large number of good books. (I’m taking fiction, here, whether mainstream or genre; and i’m talking books, but the analogy applies just as well to film and TV, so expand it if you like.) These are the books that we read and enjoy; the books that we recommend to other people, that we remember fondly even years later.

However, if you’re like me and most other people in the world, you’ve probably read a much smaller number of great books. These are the books that change us. The books that run us through the emotional or intellectual wringer; the books that not only do we recommend to others and remember fondly, but which we re-read time and time again, seeking what we found that first time and hoping desperately to catch a little bit more of it again.

I’ve always noted this seemingly fixed ratio of good/great in myself, and it seems king of logical and obvious insofar as great is better than good, and so is necessarily rare, so what’s the big deal anyway? But i’ve always noted at the same time that if you take any group of people with similar tastes in genre and drama, their lists of good books will very often run in almost perfect sync — whereas an individual person’s list of great books is almost always exclusively unique to that person.

For each of us, good books are a broadly nebulous continuum; great books are a kind of quantum cluster of specific and often inconsistent states. X and Y might be pretty much the same book in terms of genre, quality of writing, themes, and authorial intent. But only one feels “great” to the individual reader. And the reason for that is that great books aren’t simply better good books. Great books are the books in which we find meaning.

Meaning in fiction is ever elusive. It’s a thing that, to some degree, we as readers bring into a work as much as we draw out of it. Because meaning isn’t about the quality of the work in isolation (what makes it merely good). It’s about the quality of the work as it interfaces with the quality of the heart and mind that reads the work.

So here’s the thing with gaming.

The narrative that is the foundation of any roleplaying game is a gestalt construct created on the fly as the sum total of the reactions of players to circumstances sketched out and changing in real time. (That’s the “it’s kind of like a group improv-drama exercise” bit from above.) Players in an RPG always have a certain amount of themselves invested into the game. A sense of the character. An affinity for the goals of the game. A desire to succeed in a very particular, often very personal way. And so it is that most every RPG narrative is saturated with meaning for those who play it — because that meaning is created by those who play it. However, an RPG is never the equivalent of writing a book for yourself, then reading it and saying “Yeah, that means a lot to me”, because an RPG is transformative. The experience of the overall game is more than the sum of each individual player, but the whole carries all the meaning that each player brings into it.

In my view, roleplaying games are unique among all the various forms of entertainment we can choose to pass time with because they’re a form of entertainment within which the participants shape and craft the meaning they want to extract from the experience. Because everyone involved in a campaign has a hand in “writing” the campaign, it’s impossible for the campaign to not have meaning for those who create it.

Meaning is the difference between good fiction and great fiction. And so for those involved in it, a well-played RPG carries all the weight and importance of a great book — a book pregnant with meaning; one of those rare books that seems to carry a bit of you inside it. And the most awesome thing about RPGs is that this feeling of connectedness carries itself even within the most horrendously contrived narratives, because if you have played RPGs, you’ll know painfully well how most campaign narratives only ever seem cool to the players who were in them at the time. Only by playing the game can you experience the context — experience the warm embrace of meaning — that makes the game what it is.

(Archive post from the personal blog.)