WoW Minis

The World of Warcraft minis look pretty cool.

One reason I haven’t really amassed a lot of D&D mini’s, even though I could use them, is they just don’t look that good. It’s frustrating to pay out money for a random mix of which, I’ve got maybe a total of 4-5 characters who look like PC’s. (Protip: Grey and Brown do not a memorable character make). Mage Knight was far better for including characters who looked like heroes to work with in each mix.

Though the WoW mini’s are on a bigger scale, I’m sure I can find a way to make it work for my games.

Giving them what they want

Roleplaying games have a unique property that no other media shares- it can become the game that you want, as you’re playing it. This unique factor actually has been a Big Fucking Deal for rpgs, though few folks have really sat down and thought about how it gets handled in play.

Traditional games have left this task solely in the hands of the GM, usually without explicit guidelines or rules to help them figure this out. The GM usually has to try to guess or elicit or read the players’ desires, utilize the power of setting up scenes, controlling the spotlight, and creating interactions with characters and challenges to meet the players’ and adapt to their desires. In recent years, this has become easier (though, really, still not easy) through things like Flag mechanics or explicit understanding of Scene Framing and other techniques.

More innovative games have played around with stuff like giving camera control or narration rights to the players. I had been thinking about this for over a year unable to articulate exactly what it was about narration trading I found so fascinating, and it’s this: it’s a simple and efficient way for the players to directly input into the game and change the game into what they want. Though it’s somewhat of a clubbing tool for this, it’s important because it’s far more effective than what we’ve BEEN doing for the last 30 years in the traditional realm. More subtle games play with the ability to change elements or load the odds or other things that aren’t as hamfisted to adapting play to meet the players.

This self-guiding/correcting element is often what makes some games resilient in their fun factor: like I’m surprised EVERY time I play Inspectres how much fun I have with it. And that’s because it adapts to meet the players quickly and easily.

Supplemental Model and Inherent Fragility

It struck me today that the supplemental business model is inherently a fragile design decision.

So if we take the traditional expectation that games are supposed to be long term campaigns, and then look at the fact that supplemental releases are usually at least twice a year (if not more often) AND that you have to test the new rules against the current (growing) body of rules AND that if we’re talking a large company like WOTC, we probably have 2 or 3 rulesets in development simultaneously and not enough time to compare -between them-…

It’s not hard to see why 3E gave us Pun Pun the Infinite Kobold or Magic the Gathering is on what, it’s 10th Edition?

Rpgs have had the saving grace of a GM as a buffer generally. For some things like monsters or magic items, a savvy GM could make sure the players never saw these things if they happened to be a broken set. Other things, like player options are harder, since they often are the most popular rules, players want to use them, and of course, if the designers and playtesters didn’t see the broken combo, what makes you think the average GM is going to see it until it hits the table and causes problems?

Games which were a standalone, static set of rules have more leeway for bad design. If it’s a well designed game, the rules are closed and it’s stable. If there’s broken pieces, the group can identify, change or excise them and then play for years without having to readjust to a constant influx of new rules which could render their changes unnecessary or worse for the balance overall.

(This might also tie in a bit with the retro movement right now- traditional games which were open rulesets are now effectively closed as no new rules are being published for them. Plus they’ve had years of playtesting in the field and most of their design issues are well known at this point.)

This also explains why the whole issue of “dead games” or “unsupported games” which is such a big thing in the tabletop community is a non-issue for say, LARPS, or boardgames. Instead of concerning with a new influx of rules as signs of a game that is alive and strong, you instead look to play and play networks.

It may also be a doorway tabletop games keep narrow- having to stay up on a changing ruleset is a hardcore feature that makes it less accessible and less friendly as an activity to pretty much everyone else.

In the long term, I don’t think the supplemental model for rpgs is going to last as the primary form of our hobby. It’s a lot of work and investment, inconsistent in terms of results for play, and raises the bar for entry and retention. If we do see a roleplaying renaissance, it’s probably going to be in the form of a simple, stable set of rules that hits the combination of fun play, accessible subject matter, and a large enough base to form lasting play networks (an actual license? Unlikely unless it’s an outgrowth of an ARG).

The majority of what makes up tabletop roleplaying right now is analogous to old school wargaming- scattered groups of folks playing, with their own sets of rules to learn, and a relatively high barrier to entry into the social network. Compare that, to say, playing Settlers of Catan at a boardgame night - simple, consistent rules and play experience, and easy low-commitment entry to play.

Comics Culture, Games Culture

So I finally picked up Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. It’s a good read, though it didn’t strike me as deeply as Understanding Comics, though whether that’s because of the writing itself, the fact that it’s more techinical and dry, or the fact that I’ve internalized a lot of it’s concepts already, it’s hard to say.

Nonetheless, it has a couple of good parts that do make crossover to rpgs.

The section on character design covers motivation, building characters as part of a cast, contrasting them to one another, looking at character motivation without overbuilding the character before the story begins, a lot of good stuff.

The chapter on Comics Culture was the most interesting with rpg crossover to me. He talks about folks using comics as art for art’s sake, art for technical expertise/experimentation, art for expressing life and art for speaking to larger truths.

Yeah, tell me that doesn’t happen in rpgs, both from the design side and the people playing side.

It didn’t just lay out for me the issues of people talking past each other, but also the passionate commitment to the hobby people have. Unlike comics, it doesn’t leave this long lasting artifact we can interact with and call art, but roleplaying does have a value as a performance entertainment- it’s a participatory entertainment.

With other things, you have something left behind that can be judged by someone outside of the experience- and eventually you form a body of critics who spend a lot of time thinking, comparing and talking, and with that dialogue, those of us who are less informed can get the analysis after the fact. We don’t have to do all the hard thinking about it. (This applies to anything from sports commentators to Lit Majors, so…)

For roleplaying, only the people present can fully analyze the experience, so unless someone who thinks along those lines is there, basically our critical culture is limited to the people with both the inclination to think about games that hard and their game experiences. Imagine if music criticism was limited to only the times you’ve played music, as part of a band or larger group, and that only very few people took the time and effort to develop their own music theory from the ground up.

Anyway, Making Comics is a good book on it’s own. I wouldn’t recommend buying it for rpg stuff, but if you can borrow it, or time to spare at a chain bookstore, read those sections. I’d love to see rpgs get their own book that has such clear and down to earth analysis of our hobby, but I think we’ve got probably about 20 years more stuff to work through first.

Debunking White Fantasy

So watching white gamerdom go through it’s usual cycle of “Why aren’t there more POC gamers/Maybe the imagery is problematic/Oh no everything is just fine/No U!” is tiring.

So what’s up with white fantasy? At the heart of it is the white normative- around which the whole universe must revolve.

In fantasy, you can find societies that have room for dragon people, demon guys, 20 kinds of elves, etc, which function in this incredibly cosmopolitan fashion- yet ironically and most sadly, there’s no actual significant space for characters of color.

Well, why is that? All these weird species either boil down to alien non-human species or white people that look a little different and act funny. In other words, neither type threatens to dislodge the white normative. (Remember, human is synonymous with white!).

When and where we do see characters of color, they’re carefully shown with heavy stereotypical markers- asian people dress and act like this, african people dress and act like this, etc., because in that way, they’re not complex and full humans and threatening to the fantasy itself.

What is that fantasy? Well, the nature of modern fantasy is simplification- easy to understand roles, easy to understand problems that are almost always solved by either trying harder or having faith in your own badassery/love/whatever. People of color represent something difficult and complex- a real world issue unresolved (and fundamentally unresolvable as long as one wears the blinders of the white normative/white privilege/white supremacy at it’s heart).

Sci-fi suffers some of the same things, though sci-fi also has a strong tradition of accepting it’s role as a critique and mirror of the times, which is why you generally see more progressive break-outs of stories and imagery than fantasy.

And really, that’s the part where we reach the point of frustration and having to walk away from the foolishness.

It’s not enough that the media has issues, it’s when you watch someone who spent 2 years learning a fictional language, analyzing the theology of Tolkien, and who tries to compare the stories of their favorite fantasy with Babylonian Creation Myth, who YET cannot connect the dots between media issues which have pervaded Western media much, much wider than simply fantasy… that’s when you fucking lose it.

You know the ability to see is there, the intelligence, and even the geeky OCD to look at it hard and take it seriously, and yet… basically what the person is saying is that their fantasy white privilege is more important than you as a fellow human being. (A friend once pointed out that in these conversations, that concern doesn’t hit because they’re not considering you as human to begin with, so deep is the white normative).

And so, any attempts to have this discussion without a firm foundation in looking at fantasy as part of a larger media concern, will always fall back to the cycle of stupid above. Any concerns will be washed away either in straight up trolling or having to “convince” every comer to a random thread or discussion, at the end of which, there can be no victory.

After having gotten into many of these “discussions”, I’ve come to the conclusion that within white fandom, they don’t actually exist to discuss the issue at hand, or seek changes- they exist to provide the appearance of concern, the appearance of progressive thought, while letting things stay the same.

You can observe this for yourself because most end in simple flame-outs, a few white folks attempt misguided missionary efforts to bring in more people of color (mostly by making a story or game about some POC culture), which almost always involves NOT talking to said people of color directly, and a few others give support without actually doing anything.

For this reason, we kind of have to look at it the same way when McDonald’s decides to celebrate Black History Month- it’s a sham with no redeeming value.

At the end of the day, we can either keep waiting for these fictions to gain truth, or take our truth and build our own fictions. I already know which choice seems more sane to me.

Pt. 2- Debunking White Fandom

Amazingly, people prove my point as they protest it. Anonymous commenting? Racist slurs? “No U!” logic? Wow, what was I thinking when I said fandom was hostile?

For the less crazy, it’s tempting to try to even dialogue, but I realize this: Their words are already everywhere. Why should I give racist bullshit more space on my blog? We already know they’re crazy. And the crazy? They’re not going to learn.

So hey, thanks for the support. Let’s keep building this thing without these fools. Fantasy, fandom, roleplaying, sci-fi, geekdom, comic books, anime, whatever- all of this is not theirs to have. We’re taking everything back, including our imagination.

Part the 3

You could also ask a professional in the hobby.