The 20' By 20' Room

Fantasy Vietnam

Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting, "which side are you on?"

Previously on the deep history of roleplaying games: When David Wesely created Braunstein, his seminal proto-roleplaying game, he was inspired, he said, by three books he'd found in the University of Minnesota library. One was a wargame by the glorious 19th-century crackpot Charles Totten. One was a primer on game theory by the Cold War eggheads of the RAND Corporation. And the third was Conflict and Defense, an assault on RANDian game theory by the Quaker peace activist, systems theorist, and mystical poet Kenneth Boulding. A catholic trinity, to say the least.

Like Totten's Strategos and RAND's Compleat Strategyst, Conflict and Defense is an odd duck. Written in 1960, it's a pacifist's heartsick response to Cold War brinksmanship. It's a critique of RAND-style game theory--Boulding calls the RANDies out by name--but it is written in precisely the same esoteric language of models and matrices they use. "Just as war is too important to leave to the generals," Boulding wrote, "so peace is too important to leave to the pacifists." The book is a forest of forbidding diagrams and equations, with "indifference curves," "bare-survival contours," and "mutual submission equilibriums." It seems to have been an effort to devise some universal geometry of conflict and peace, and in so doing save the world from nuclear war. Boulding was a prominent economist and a pioneer of general systems theory, but his quest for a unified ecology of knowledge ultimately became a kind of religious mysticism. The information revolution, he argued in the 1970s and 80s, was weaving us all into one planetary superorganism.

I'm not saying that all or even any of this found its way directly into David Wesely's Braunstein, though I remain impressed at Wesely's eclectic tastes, and consider the whole story yet more proof of the indispensable serendipity of open library stacks. But the fact that Braunstein was inspired by a spacey Quaker on the one hand and by the RAND Corporation on the other makes me wonder: which side of the culture war were roleplaying games on? Were the first D&Ders squares or hippies, hawks or doves? This was a hobby invented by young American men, men of draftable age, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Two of the biggest groups of early gamers were college students and the military. Is it strange that the conflicts of the era are not more reflected in the history of the hobby? Is it strange that the received history of roleplaying games barely mentions Vietnam?

The New History of Old Gaming

I was going to post this on my own site, and I will in a day or two, but I thought I'd put it up here first--in part for old times' sake, in part to see if anybody is still reading here, and in large part because it belongs here. "You dance with the one that brung ya," Ronald Reagan used to say.

Two of the pieces on this site (by which I mean this site) that I'm most proud of are my essays on the secret history of roleplaying games: Dungeon Master Zero, on the eccentric Indian fighter, pyramidologist, and Anglo-Israelite who brought refereed wargaming to America, and R&D, on Cold War simulation gaming at RAND. One of the things I'm least proud of is that it's been two years and I haven't completed what was to have been a trilogy of posts, not to mention a long-promised article for Jonathan Walton's journal PUSH. The idea for the trilogy came when I read that David Wesely's Braunstein, a seminal proto-roleplaying game from 1968, was inspired by three books: Charles Totten's wargame Strategos, the RAND Corporation's Compleat Strategyst, and Kenneth Boulding's Conflict and Defense. And it seemed to me that each of those three books could tell us something unexpected and as yet untold about the roots of the roleplaying hobby and maybe something about geek or gaming history more generally.

 

But a funny thing happened on the way to my third post: two years went by. And in those two years, the whole landscape of information available on the history of roleplaying has transformed. A renaissance in “old school” gaming, that is, gaming that tries to emulate the feel or philosophy of the hobby in the 1970s, has brought with it a new interest in the early history of tabletop rpgs.

One Year Later

Been a while, huh?

On the occasion of the one year anniversary since our last post, I've gone through and cleaned up most of the comment spam plus some of the trackback spam; the front page is, at least, clean once again. I've also attempted to turn off comments. I'm opening them for this post, but you need some sort of login, so I dunno.

I'm contemplating moving the archives off TypePad onto a solution which doesn't cost quite as much. Such action is predicated on being able to maintain the URLs, of course.

I've done a lot of things on the Internet. Looking back at the posts here, this was one of the coolest of them. From the Lexicon to the commentary to the flames, I'm rather proud of it all and I'm honored that so many smart people accepted the invitation to post.

Thanks!

The Deep History of Roleplaying Games

It took a flood of comment spam notifications to remind me, but I used to write for this here blog about roleplaying games. And over at Old is the New New, my mostly-about-history blog, I've been blogging about the deep history of roleplaying games. (I'm also writing something on the subject for Jonathan Walton's eagerly awaited PUSH vol. 2, though I keep missing Jonathan's ridiculously generous deadlines.) So if there's anyone still hanging around these parts who hasn't seen this already, here's the first two parts of what should be an ongoing series:

Dungeon Master Zero
In which our hero goes looking for the roots of roleplaying games, and finds the Lost Tribe of Israel instead.

R&D
The Cold War avante-garde, from R&D to D&D, the secret origins of hex paper, Herman KAAAAHN!

Jason Corley's Project: Tenebrous Campaign

Jason Corley talks about one of the campaigns he is running.

Wikipedia's List of Stock Characters

Here's Wikipedia's list of stock characters.

New Link to an Old Post

Here's Malcolm Sheppard's look back on 2006. As usual, he mixes the penetrating insight and the WTF in even measure. One thing I liked a lot (because I agree with it!) is this:

But the thing that the tabletop RPG community must accept -- must be beaten about the head with, in fact -- is that roleplaying, despite being one of the major new forms of entertainment of the late 20 and early 21st centuries, does not require tabletop RPGs. A tabletop RPG is a medium for the activity of roleplaying. MMORPGs, chat tools and fora are other media that support roleplaying -- the dominant media for the activity, in fact.

So the question for game designers in 2007 is this: What does your new game design offer that roleplaying in an alternate medium does not? I've asked this to many people and they invariably talk about the social element, but that's just dodging the question, as the social element often has nothing to do with the design. There are no concrete, in-design rewards for sharing meatspace. D&D currently has a good argument for this in the form of its miniatures play, which is annoying to do online because it either costs money (for special tools/MMO fees) or time (to set up webcams, house rules, etc.).

Your answer may well be "nothing," and that's OK. There's nothing wrong with designing a game for sentimental reasons. But the fact is that nowadays, we live in a world where we (tabletop hobbyists) don't control the direction of roleplaying and roleplaying doesn't even *need* our medium of choice. That's 2007.

It's all good, except for the last paragraph. "We" never had control of the direction of roleplaying, because there's never been a "we", in the sense of a coherent, organized polity with an overall direction. (I am afraid I imagine the world of Knights of the Dinner Table when I try to imagine such.)  It's always just been people doing stuff, and very occasionally (eg, D&D, Vampire) stumbling upon something that a whole lot of other people liked too.

Links, the lazy person's blog post of choice

via the Ninth Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy:

Here's a really excellent post on misogyny in genre movies and geek circles.  Now, if you read that, and then mash it up with this post on 'historical' gaming, then I don't really have any work to do here at all.

Detective Game Sketch

Inspired by a post of Plume's over on rpg.net, I wrote down a game sketch for detective roleplaying I've been thinking about for a while. It's a sketch, because it's not finished, but I think most of the essential features are clear (at least to me). So I figured I might as well post it.

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For me, the difference between a detective story and a mystery story is that in the first the detective doesn't have to solve the mystery. A detective is about a person, who has the obligation to render justice when in a situation where they will have no ultimate access to the "real" truth. They have to do their human best, with fallible perceptions and limited powers.

So the idea is to build the game around a single detective player, and have several NPC/GM players. The GMs work out a messy crime, figuring out who perpetrated it, who the victims were, who benefits from silence, who doesn't, who hates and who loves who, and giving each of the characters both reasons to use the detective and reasons to conceal (part of?) the truth from him or her. Then, in play, the detective gets called in, and has to a) figure out what's going on, and b) figure out who to punish and who to protect. Each of the main NPCs gets a different player, and in any given scene some subset of the NPCs will be there and everyone will be at cross-purposes to each other.

Most of play is just questioning, along with offered bribes, threats, seductions, and all the usual noir stuff. That's all pure roleplay. Violence is handled along the model of a first-person detective story -- the rules ensure that whenever it breaks out, the detective will never be killed, even though none of the characters should act like they know that. Non interpersonal investigation stuff is handled basically by just telling the detective player what he or she learns, with mechanics (maybe just a skill roll) determining only a) how long it takes, and b) whether any of the NPCs learns of the detective's curiousity.

Finally, the last rule is that the NPC players can never tell the PC's player if he or she was right, or what the real backstory was. This way you get an ending, but no definite closure.

Kid Stuff Redux

My playtest review of The Princes' Kingdom is up on RPG.Net as of this morning. I give it a 4/4 in RPG.Net's somewhat sketchy ranking system. No one will be able to deny the review's . . . length.

UPDATE: Some fellow named Sergio hates the version of my review written by the demons in his head.