Make an Insight Check: A Brief Comment on Tabletop Gaming

Part of what convinced me that games could be art has been the popular discourse around Invisible Sun, from Monte Cook Games, from both the genre press and the academic-critical press.

So I’ve been working a lot, and haven’t had time to do much reading or consuming of media – the normal fuel for these pieces. One of the things we definitely make time and space for on the calendar is tabletop role-playing games. RPGs are a way to spend time with friends and engage in a creative pastime – for this reason, we’ve got two separate groups that play games on alternating weeks (one of which experienced the very first version of Perdition’s Teeth), and it’s one of the primary ways that we’ve found to spend time with some of our friends.

Full disclosure: I’m writing this after the conclusion of a session of Invisible Sun, Monte Cook Games’s surrealist RPG. It was a fairly ordinary session, with far less bleed than some of them, but it was perfectly enjoyable, and I look forward to the next one.

I’ve been playing tabletop games for at least half of my life, and it’s been a rewarding hobby. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it, and I think I’d be a measurably worse person without it. From Dungeons and Dragons in high school and college, all the way up to more recent experiments with Powered by the Apocalypse, FATE, and Chronicles of Darkness games, it has been a constant for me.

Notably one that other members of my immediate family and some of my closest friends don’t get. My mother actually bought into the whole Satanic Panic meme of Dungeons and Dragons being unhealthy – something that was frustrating for a time, and completely flies in the face of the scientific studies on the subject, but which I don’t fault her for. She’s from a different generation.

For those of you unaware of what a tabletop role-playing game is, allow me to try to explain it briefly: it’s an activity where you and a group of friends sit around a table with dice, a formalized record sheet, pencils, and a book, and you generate a story. It’s a rewarding experience, especially a more modern, “indie” style of game, because the narrative emerges organically from the interaction of the players and the chosen ruleset: no one’s driving the bus, so to speak. In addition, in these games, there’s no “win” condition – it continues as long as the players all agree to continue it; but at the same time, there’s no real way to “lose” the game, outside of (for some games) character death. You participate or you don’t, and it’s completely your choice.

I attribute it’s recent surge in popularity to the Adventure Zone podcast, the first arc of which, “Balance” really shows the “It’s Always Sunny In…” vibe I mention here.

The archetypal role-playing game is Dungeons & Dragons, a toolkit for producing epic fantasy stories featuring muscle-bound barbarians, insane wizards, clever thieves, and pious clerics – except when you decide to use it for another purpose. Largely, though, those character archetypes will show up, and it will probably take an epic tone – at least until it degenerates into some kind of It’s Always Sunny in Middle Earth sort of thing.

However, there are hundreds – if not thousands – of other games, and while I’ve not played all of them, I have moved beyond the basic D&D paradigm and given a number of them a shot. In so doing, I’ve learned a few things that I think are worth noting.

The first is contained in the previous definition I gave for tabletop role-playing games: an RPG is the form of art that takes as its medium the social contract. Fundamentally, all games of this sort use conversation as a narrative engine and introduce formal rules for the interaction of the various players of the game that enable and constrain certain choices so that the narrative unfolds in a particular way.

Take D&D as an example again: combat takes up 9 pages (about two and a half percent of the total length of game document,) while general “adventuring” takes up 7 pages and magic spells take up more than eighty – clearly magic is a huge part of how the game is meant to be played.

Contrast this with another game, Savage Worlds, where combat is 12 pages of a much shorter book – say about seven and a half percent, while magic occupies only eighteen pages (and of that, only twelve pages maps on to the same material as D&D’s list of magic spells.)

Clearly, one is proposing that those who play it should reach into the toolbox of violent options more often, because the people who wrote it are putting more emphasis on those options: some people can play session after session of Dungeons and Dragons without resorting to violence, but a session of Savage Worlds without combat would be like a pie with no filling: the part that remains might be good, but the part that’s missing is the whole point.

Click the image for the publisher’s page.

Other games emphasize different ways of dealing with problems. One, called Dead Inside flips the “kill enemies and take their stuff” model on its head, and you can only advance by following the difficult guideline of “help people and give them your stuff.” On the other hand, another Monte Cook game, Numenera, gives you no rewards for combat at all – the only way to advance is to explore; some Powered by the Apocalypse games give rewards not for success – viewing success as its own reward – but for failure, meaning that the worst thing a participant in one of these games can do is avoid trouble.

This is the means by which they function as a behavior-modification system: they set up a simple behaviorist stimulus-response system. Do the thing the game wants, receive a reward.

This is partially connected to the idea of the Society of Control which I’ve discussed previously, but far less insidious. No one has to play Dungeons and Dragons, and it’s a far greater investment than binge-watching a sitcom on Netflix – it’s the more difficult option.

As I said previously, the Society of Control functions by making the desired options easier than undesired options. Game systems create narrative by making certain story features easier to model and integrate into the fiction than others. It’s easier to have a pitched siege in Dungeons and Dragons than a protracted legal battle – it can model the one more effectively.

One of the longest-lasting games I ever ran was a campaign of The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, by Arc Dream publishing — despite what I’m saying here, the game was perfectly fine without combat, because we had difficulty figuring out how it was actually run. Click through for DriveThruRpg.

The people who made Savage Worlds wanted to make combat easier for players, so they created rules to allow granular modeling of individual combat encounters. Other systems do so differently: the One-Role Engine, used by Monsters and Other Childish Things and other games, has a shorter combat section (3 pages of the 52 page original version, about 5%), but has a very granular model for harm and injury: this is a game that makes debilitation and struggling against one’s own limitations very easy to model, more so than almost any other game I’ve seen. This shows you what’s included.

So it’s not just about the amount of material it’s about what that material does. For example, the flagship game of one of my favorite systems, Apocalypse World, has a fairly standard amount of information on combat in the dedicated combat section – roughly comparable to D&D. But it’s not placed in anything like the same context: there aren’t rules for movement, nor are there detailed lists of races or character options or skills. Apocalypse World isn’t about creating a highly detailed simulation, it’s about springboarding an involved narrative and (it seems to me) enabling bleed.

“Bleed” is a term that made it’s way into gaming through acting and LARPing, and it refers to the emotional interplay between the fictional character and the real person creating and portraying that character. It’s also, I would imagine, one of the primary ways that gaming has such positive correlations with mental health: you’re portraying a character who is receiving closure on their story, because that’s what stories, fundamentally, do: they lead to closed loops, or at least pseudo-closed loops, whereby things can acquire meaning.

I’m still a bit miffed that I never actually got to run Masks — one downside of this hobby is that it requires buy-in from other people, and I just didn’t have enough buy-in from one of my groups to run it. Which makes sense: adults have busy lives that they have to navigate, and they need a reason to do that. Still, I’d like to get a session going at some point.

Notably, I think that almost all RPGs can generate bleed, but some are certainly more likely to – I think that Apocalypse-World-derived games are more likely to, because it removes distractions like spell lists and movement tables and carrying capacity and focuses on allowing each person to tell their story. It strips away the distractions and allows a narrative to unfold – it may be a very particular narrative (Masks: a New Generation, much like its name suggests, is always going to be a Coming-of-Age story, and breaks down when you try to do something else with it).

I’m gushing about my favorite hobby. I’m going to change directions.

I think that there are important lessons from gaming for other fields I’m interested in. Being a good collaborator on an artistic project is 1:1 the same thing as being a good player, for example, and being a good artist and a good game master probably draw from the same general talents, especially when you’re creating things from whole cloth, because you’re learning to appeal to an audience.

But what I think is interesting is how politics and gaming might interact – not in the sense of gamers becoming a political force; I’m mortified at the thought of someone dressing up as an elf and marching for some reason – in the sense that gaming can give us a laboratory for alternative formulations of the social contract. Tools like the “X-Card”, where there’s essentially a panic button that everyone has the right to use to get a no-questions asked revision of some unpleasant element of the fiction (not failure, mind you, but a narrative choice,) strike me as forerunners to something else. Far from being a Society of Control, where choices are gamed and made certain in a probabilistic fashion (you can’t predict that a particular person will do something, necessarily, but you can predict that at least one person with XYZ traits will do something), I feel that contemporary experiments in game design can provide some kind of model for a hypothetical next step.

Consider, instead of a Society of Control, a Society of Consent or a Society of Solidarity. The tools of Control are made open to access for everyone, but constrained in who they may influence, to those who have a channel of influence back to you. It ceases to be a mechanism of coercion and turns into a channel of communications.

Instead of capturing the desires of a largely passive audience, this art form encourages the audience to become the participants; it makes creators out of spectators. In this way, it shows a reversal of the passivization and atomization that we’ve previously talked about as problems in our culture on this website.

Some RPGs even work politics from the other side, using their systems to dramatize revolution and use it as a teaching tool. Click through for DriveThruRPG page.

Of course, looking at the list of famous people who play D&D that you find on Wikipedia includes a fair number of people who have done some rather shitty things, including at least two Republicans. This hobby doesn’t make those who engage in it perfect, but it does, I feel, blunt some things that we’ve talked about as problems. It makes people more creative and less lonely: both of those are incredibly positive things.

As such, I feel comfortable saying that the people gathering around the dining room table shouldn’t just be the next generation of artistic geniuses – it should also be the next generation of people looking to refine and refit the systems of politics that run our world. Not to make politics run like a game, but because there’s something useful about looking at behavior-changing systems that people willingly buy into and can willingly put down.

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