What I'm looking for and why
Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 5:13 pm
Hi everyone. I'm fairly new here. I registered to join in on TristenC's Ravenloft game. Yesterday he and I talked about magic and wizards in D&D and AD&D, because I felt provoked to a philosophical rant. Poor guy. But I think my ideas have been coming together and fermenting over years of dissatisfaction with fantasy literature and games. And now the storm broke.
You see, there are some things I really admire in D&D and AD&D, but other elements of these games and similar ones have become unpalatable. I'm trying to figure out why. More, I'm trying to figure out what kind of game I should look for or run to have those wonderful things but not the other kind. Let me tell you a little about myself. I'm 35 now. I grew up on sword&sorcery books of Sprague de Camp, Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber et al. I've also read a good amount of general classics, I'm relatively educated with a humanities M.A. All that took time, but time didn't cause the change in my mood. I didn't become dissatisfied with books from the Golden Age of Fantasy as I grew up. On the contrary, with appreciation of Homer and Dante came an even clearer view of the merits of S&S – but not of contemporary fantasy, even when it manages to be thought-provoking or tackles serious issues. As time went by, I realized there are more important things in art than “issues” – imagination, creative consistency and full, rational, strict awareness. If you want an example of a fantasy/sci-fi writer who was a paragon of that last quality in particular, I can name Roger Zelazny, but the old S&S crowd outdoes him in sweet old imagination. As for consistency, it’s another name for style, and it is what gets a writer in the halls of fame – and imitated for a game.
An Amber RPG has been around for a long time, and there is a game based on Conan’s Hyboria, even a CRPG, and D&D borrows a lot from you-know-who and Jack Vance – just a few examples I’m most familiar with. Even though role-playing games are very different, what I will now say applies, I think, to almost all. The promise of games was to open up book worlds for exploration; however, to explore can never be enough. Any world we, humans, get in, we begin to change, including imaginary ones. Delivery of this promise of freedom in a fantasy world quickly ran up against a reverence for the texts.
Take D&D. The worlds of Jack Vance and Tolkien and Howard, comic book material had been exported piecemeal and thrown in at random, but the elements were not to be altered. A hobbit (halfling) couldn’t breed with an elf, alignments were limited to Good, Neutral and Chaotic (clear enough), up was up, down was down. It was satisfactory for a while, but after the novelty of the roles wore off the game had to change. We know what happened next. Restrictions began to melt, the alignments bore triplets, more classes came in, the expansion hasn’t stopped since. Playing an AD&D campaign now, I must admit the old limitations are cozy. The modern game is now tending towards the formless without becoming, in my opinion, really free-form. (The so-called free-form RPG genre bears more resemblance to collective story-writing than any game.) Inside the ballooning D&D game and others I’ve looked into there are still limitations: an excessive concern with rules, balance, fairness or (and) atmosphere and setting integrity. Random borrowings and grafts of Lovecraft for the Far Realm are a tribute to fashion, not a true decision to put style and content into the hands of players. On the surface there is complete freedom, countless options, deeper there is distrust of players and denial of the fact that fans could just as well have done it with house rules. The RPG genre is split between games that boast of rules and games that deny rules.
This situation prevents games from becoming genuinely free-form. Rules must exist but with players their masters. They need to learn working all the time and as a matter of course with their GMs to set their own story goals, bring about change in the setting, make room in the world for themselves and their desires. Instead players just get to enjoy a good ready-made piece from the GM, a kind of performance with bits of improv. They are passive. Now it’s not surprising that people’s usual hang-ups and fears carry over to their imaginary personas and even whole fantasy environments, especially in teenage years. But eventually we may outgrow family issues, dogma, reverence for the legal system, obsession with looks and so on. After we do that, how do we play?
What’s obvious to me is that real free-form, interactive play with players in the driver’s seat but also a GM to set an objective standard is not for everyone. I have to say it’s for adults only. Learning to find and express your (character’s) desires, then shaping the world to them is very difficult. It takes a measure of education and discipline and a departure from conventional morality to even want to do that, so there will never be very many capable players or GMs. But it’s worth it to try and adapt AD&D or D&D or another fantasy game to adult sensibilities and thirst for freedom. Recover the fairy-tale charm of the old S&S books. Pull ideas from various settings and authors, retain them as rules that give players the most freedom in the expression of self and keep them most grounded in the virtual world’s reality. Those are the rules that should stay. But, of course, I’m also looking for a game and a group that would suit me, delight me and empower me. I have no other choice than to go by own preferences, most of which tend to that stated goal of realism and freedom of expression. So what do I like? And what turns me off?
1) I like games for grown-ups. Grown-ups are people who have loved, suffered, traveled, worked, fought, thought in their real lives, know facts from bullshit and, as I said, have a measure of education. And now they want to imagine and create. If you think S&S is necessarily childish or immature, look in Howard's Conan stories. There is absolutely nothing for-teens about that world. So what don’t I like? The opposite: I have to say, I don't like games for people who've done none of the above and only read comic books.
2) I like amoral games. I don't like ones where a player is presumed to be a hero – or, for that matter, a free-roaming mercenary shark. When amorality gets official, it becomes a new creed. But this is also something grown-ups understand.
3) I like playing with people who don't expect me to be nice. I don't expect them to be nice either, and as a result we can all relax and be incredible. Let’s dare to touch each other for caresses and friendly prods. I don't like games with people whose most treasured feeling is pouting offense.
4) I like games where forgiveness is the normal state of relations between players and a standing rule for the GM. Where absolutely everything is forgiven by default or they kick you out of the group. I don't like games where forgiveness is a privilege to thank for or a resource to tally.
5) I like games with some rules to give the players and the GM common ground and flesh out the world. But not fearful games with rules for every eventuality and an obsession with balance.
6) I like balanced games. Where "balance" means as much power as possible for everyone just short of compromising adventures, breaking the setting or inflating the currency. Which may be more or less, but to take the case of wizards, I like them to be normal people who can fight. I don't like them getting a d4 HD and a quarterstaff out of a concern that someone may abuse the rules and rule the board.
7) I don't like boards or anything that is a wargame or a game of miniatures disguised as an RPG.
8 ) I like classes. I don't like it when classes are substituted for personalities – or constitute them. Classes are a more vivid concept than skills, they have this advantage.
9) I like fighting. I don't like fighting as expected entertainment or with specified people and creatures only or on a plot, while everyone else is a peaceful 0-level "commoner" not to be touched.
10) I don't like disfigurement or lost limbs. In real life disability disables, precludes experiences. Why imitate it in fantasy? This kind of naturalism misses the point.
11) I like to have many opportunities to avoid death. I don't like Raise Dead if they don’t work out. Goners should stay goners, for the most part.
12) I like it when role-played decisions determine outcomes or give bonuses to rolls. I don't like flat and mechanical dice-rolling deciding my fate. I play fantasy because fantasy worlds are shaped by living beings in them, not by blind forces like gravity, evolution or the trajectory of a shell (or a die). Adjusted rolling is all right, but submitting to a standard vs. save or a THAC0 roll makes me feel displaced from my character’s body, as if it suddenly turned into a robot.
13) I like it when information is power and accumulation of knowledge is a sensible goal. A wizard, for example, needs incentives to hunt after ancient tomes and inquire into the principles that keep a fire elemental burning. Eventually he should be able to control or make an elemental, and so with everything. Knowing the world is also one way of interacting with it. What I don't like is a GM who drops rare hints about the world, just enough for the players to figure out where the dungeon is, and afterwards they can expect a few prods to the next "stage," and so on – crawling onward like blind mice. I don't like being kept in the dark, don't like cryptic hints. I want to be able to ask and get answers. And I don't care for a GM who himself is undecided as to whether the world is a planet or a plane or what the politics of the kingdom are. What am I supposed to discover, then? Or pursue?
14) Experience and rewards. Cause and effect. I like it when my character achieves only what I, the player, have earned by my intelligence, initiative and role-playing. It must be relevant to the character's actions. If a wizard has been practicing a spell, let him get better at the spell or all spells. If a rogue has been looking for a treasure chest and found it, let him have what's inside. If a priest has spent the same time obtaining a boon of longevity from his god, let him have that. The GM can do it with a skill-based system or a level-based system or no system at all, in the case of free-play, so long as the reward is appropriate for the effort. What don't I like? When experience points or skill points can go towards upgrading any ability, even one that hasn't been used. Cause disconnects from effect, so any joy at the upgrade is remarkably shallow.
15) I don't like Fate points or any other "gameplay conveniences" without physical existence and meaning in the played world.
16) Wizards and all magic-users need to be able to cast whatever they need at the moment. Most S&S wizards can. The memorization slot system is an odd creation of Jack Vance, meaningful only on his Dying Earth with its ignorant and decadent magicians who learn spells by rote. That world was necessarily restricted for aesthetic reasons. Other worlds, ones we want characters to live in and change, shouldn’t be. 3E sorcerers are still slot types. The alternative I prefer to memorization in my eyes is the fatigue system from Spells&Magic – it connects magic with the character’s body, makes it grittier.
17) I like spells with permanent effects. I don't like spells with a duration, especially if they require no concentration from the caster to maintain. Everything we achieve should be tied to what we do, and a spell just lasting so long or extending so far by itself is too mechanical.
18) I don't like the fantasy races at their stereotypical. I don’t dislike them either, but in the whole D&D game only humans aren’t a given personality type.
19) I like psionics so long as it means telepathy and telekinesis rather than a weird and irrelevant magic.
20) I don't particularly like items with charges – wands and such. Running out of ammo is not a good dramatic device from the GM's 3rd-person view and it isn't interesting from the player's 1st-person view. There can be other limitations on use, or perhaps charges can stay but treatment of magic items change.
21) I have a singular dislike of the Deck of Many Things. It feels at first as if there is no reason, but a little thinking finds the cause. I hate randomness, it interferes with my free will. But perhaps others’ will is more enlightened and they can find pleasure even in random fate. Wishes as a spell are a bad idea, I think. That everything can be rolled back and corrected, that rules of reality can be cancelled goes, I think, against the spirit of irrevocability that makes adventures possible. But others may enjoy a malleable reality. How far would they take this, though? If they got more wishes, more freebies, wouldn’t they eventually tire of staying in-character at all? The sick feeling of munchkinism, “I can do whatever,” the Caligula complex. The role would lose all worth.
22) I like economies, crafted goods, architecture and GMs or writers who take the time to describe how a silk feels as it runs through the fingers or the construction priniciple of a great dome. I don't like those who go over the sensuous part of life unless it's because they are fixed on the plot, world-building and characters.
23) I like over-the-top features like a Tomb of Horrors or Bone City, Stygian pyramids, floating corpses of dead gods in Planescape. I respect Baba Yaga's hut with skulls on stakes. I have absolutely no trouble believing in those things. More modest inventions like Sigil city in the same Planescape are more dubious to me. Everything well thought-out and original goes. Magic swords, crystal balls, poisoned lotus, see-through ghouls, draconians and other great inventions of writers are fine by me. On the other hand, attempts to write up imaginary kingdoms and empires and social life in fantasy books rarely come off well. Most authors and game writers are too ignorant to describe what life really was like in Europe's Middle Ages or in ancient Greece. They have absolutely no historical sense. They just haven’t read enough. Some kind of combination of well-researched history and fantasy usually works the best.
24) I like fantasy worlds with a future. Future isn't necessarily about rockets in the sky. It’s just potential. A fantasy world can have a future. It need not end in an Age of Mortals or a Fourth Era of Middle-Earth. Fantasy can remain fantasy: new sorcerer-emperors can arrive, continents can sink or rise, rat-men or snake-men or snake-women can conquer the world or the gods can sex up an orgy and blend into a supergod. So long as they all do it with an expanded assortment of spells, weapons, feelings and thoughts every time, so long as their society changes, it's a future. In a genuine free-form game players would effect these changes, not the GM or writer.
25) I like it when a GM isn't afraid to treat imagination's work as art. And I dislike it when a GM sets out with a stated purpose to provide entertainment, so same-old it’s not even announced.
With these values in mind, is there any game happening here that might fit the bill?
You see, there are some things I really admire in D&D and AD&D, but other elements of these games and similar ones have become unpalatable. I'm trying to figure out why. More, I'm trying to figure out what kind of game I should look for or run to have those wonderful things but not the other kind. Let me tell you a little about myself. I'm 35 now. I grew up on sword&sorcery books of Sprague de Camp, Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber et al. I've also read a good amount of general classics, I'm relatively educated with a humanities M.A. All that took time, but time didn't cause the change in my mood. I didn't become dissatisfied with books from the Golden Age of Fantasy as I grew up. On the contrary, with appreciation of Homer and Dante came an even clearer view of the merits of S&S – but not of contemporary fantasy, even when it manages to be thought-provoking or tackles serious issues. As time went by, I realized there are more important things in art than “issues” – imagination, creative consistency and full, rational, strict awareness. If you want an example of a fantasy/sci-fi writer who was a paragon of that last quality in particular, I can name Roger Zelazny, but the old S&S crowd outdoes him in sweet old imagination. As for consistency, it’s another name for style, and it is what gets a writer in the halls of fame – and imitated for a game.
An Amber RPG has been around for a long time, and there is a game based on Conan’s Hyboria, even a CRPG, and D&D borrows a lot from you-know-who and Jack Vance – just a few examples I’m most familiar with. Even though role-playing games are very different, what I will now say applies, I think, to almost all. The promise of games was to open up book worlds for exploration; however, to explore can never be enough. Any world we, humans, get in, we begin to change, including imaginary ones. Delivery of this promise of freedom in a fantasy world quickly ran up against a reverence for the texts.
Take D&D. The worlds of Jack Vance and Tolkien and Howard, comic book material had been exported piecemeal and thrown in at random, but the elements were not to be altered. A hobbit (halfling) couldn’t breed with an elf, alignments were limited to Good, Neutral and Chaotic (clear enough), up was up, down was down. It was satisfactory for a while, but after the novelty of the roles wore off the game had to change. We know what happened next. Restrictions began to melt, the alignments bore triplets, more classes came in, the expansion hasn’t stopped since. Playing an AD&D campaign now, I must admit the old limitations are cozy. The modern game is now tending towards the formless without becoming, in my opinion, really free-form. (The so-called free-form RPG genre bears more resemblance to collective story-writing than any game.) Inside the ballooning D&D game and others I’ve looked into there are still limitations: an excessive concern with rules, balance, fairness or (and) atmosphere and setting integrity. Random borrowings and grafts of Lovecraft for the Far Realm are a tribute to fashion, not a true decision to put style and content into the hands of players. On the surface there is complete freedom, countless options, deeper there is distrust of players and denial of the fact that fans could just as well have done it with house rules. The RPG genre is split between games that boast of rules and games that deny rules.
This situation prevents games from becoming genuinely free-form. Rules must exist but with players their masters. They need to learn working all the time and as a matter of course with their GMs to set their own story goals, bring about change in the setting, make room in the world for themselves and their desires. Instead players just get to enjoy a good ready-made piece from the GM, a kind of performance with bits of improv. They are passive. Now it’s not surprising that people’s usual hang-ups and fears carry over to their imaginary personas and even whole fantasy environments, especially in teenage years. But eventually we may outgrow family issues, dogma, reverence for the legal system, obsession with looks and so on. After we do that, how do we play?
What’s obvious to me is that real free-form, interactive play with players in the driver’s seat but also a GM to set an objective standard is not for everyone. I have to say it’s for adults only. Learning to find and express your (character’s) desires, then shaping the world to them is very difficult. It takes a measure of education and discipline and a departure from conventional morality to even want to do that, so there will never be very many capable players or GMs. But it’s worth it to try and adapt AD&D or D&D or another fantasy game to adult sensibilities and thirst for freedom. Recover the fairy-tale charm of the old S&S books. Pull ideas from various settings and authors, retain them as rules that give players the most freedom in the expression of self and keep them most grounded in the virtual world’s reality. Those are the rules that should stay. But, of course, I’m also looking for a game and a group that would suit me, delight me and empower me. I have no other choice than to go by own preferences, most of which tend to that stated goal of realism and freedom of expression. So what do I like? And what turns me off?
1) I like games for grown-ups. Grown-ups are people who have loved, suffered, traveled, worked, fought, thought in their real lives, know facts from bullshit and, as I said, have a measure of education. And now they want to imagine and create. If you think S&S is necessarily childish or immature, look in Howard's Conan stories. There is absolutely nothing for-teens about that world. So what don’t I like? The opposite: I have to say, I don't like games for people who've done none of the above and only read comic books.
2) I like amoral games. I don't like ones where a player is presumed to be a hero – or, for that matter, a free-roaming mercenary shark. When amorality gets official, it becomes a new creed. But this is also something grown-ups understand.
3) I like playing with people who don't expect me to be nice. I don't expect them to be nice either, and as a result we can all relax and be incredible. Let’s dare to touch each other for caresses and friendly prods. I don't like games with people whose most treasured feeling is pouting offense.
4) I like games where forgiveness is the normal state of relations between players and a standing rule for the GM. Where absolutely everything is forgiven by default or they kick you out of the group. I don't like games where forgiveness is a privilege to thank for or a resource to tally.
5) I like games with some rules to give the players and the GM common ground and flesh out the world. But not fearful games with rules for every eventuality and an obsession with balance.
6) I like balanced games. Where "balance" means as much power as possible for everyone just short of compromising adventures, breaking the setting or inflating the currency. Which may be more or less, but to take the case of wizards, I like them to be normal people who can fight. I don't like them getting a d4 HD and a quarterstaff out of a concern that someone may abuse the rules and rule the board.
7) I don't like boards or anything that is a wargame or a game of miniatures disguised as an RPG.
8 ) I like classes. I don't like it when classes are substituted for personalities – or constitute them. Classes are a more vivid concept than skills, they have this advantage.
9) I like fighting. I don't like fighting as expected entertainment or with specified people and creatures only or on a plot, while everyone else is a peaceful 0-level "commoner" not to be touched.
10) I don't like disfigurement or lost limbs. In real life disability disables, precludes experiences. Why imitate it in fantasy? This kind of naturalism misses the point.
11) I like to have many opportunities to avoid death. I don't like Raise Dead if they don’t work out. Goners should stay goners, for the most part.
12) I like it when role-played decisions determine outcomes or give bonuses to rolls. I don't like flat and mechanical dice-rolling deciding my fate. I play fantasy because fantasy worlds are shaped by living beings in them, not by blind forces like gravity, evolution or the trajectory of a shell (or a die). Adjusted rolling is all right, but submitting to a standard vs. save or a THAC0 roll makes me feel displaced from my character’s body, as if it suddenly turned into a robot.
13) I like it when information is power and accumulation of knowledge is a sensible goal. A wizard, for example, needs incentives to hunt after ancient tomes and inquire into the principles that keep a fire elemental burning. Eventually he should be able to control or make an elemental, and so with everything. Knowing the world is also one way of interacting with it. What I don't like is a GM who drops rare hints about the world, just enough for the players to figure out where the dungeon is, and afterwards they can expect a few prods to the next "stage," and so on – crawling onward like blind mice. I don't like being kept in the dark, don't like cryptic hints. I want to be able to ask and get answers. And I don't care for a GM who himself is undecided as to whether the world is a planet or a plane or what the politics of the kingdom are. What am I supposed to discover, then? Or pursue?
14) Experience and rewards. Cause and effect. I like it when my character achieves only what I, the player, have earned by my intelligence, initiative and role-playing. It must be relevant to the character's actions. If a wizard has been practicing a spell, let him get better at the spell or all spells. If a rogue has been looking for a treasure chest and found it, let him have what's inside. If a priest has spent the same time obtaining a boon of longevity from his god, let him have that. The GM can do it with a skill-based system or a level-based system or no system at all, in the case of free-play, so long as the reward is appropriate for the effort. What don't I like? When experience points or skill points can go towards upgrading any ability, even one that hasn't been used. Cause disconnects from effect, so any joy at the upgrade is remarkably shallow.
15) I don't like Fate points or any other "gameplay conveniences" without physical existence and meaning in the played world.
16) Wizards and all magic-users need to be able to cast whatever they need at the moment. Most S&S wizards can. The memorization slot system is an odd creation of Jack Vance, meaningful only on his Dying Earth with its ignorant and decadent magicians who learn spells by rote. That world was necessarily restricted for aesthetic reasons. Other worlds, ones we want characters to live in and change, shouldn’t be. 3E sorcerers are still slot types. The alternative I prefer to memorization in my eyes is the fatigue system from Spells&Magic – it connects magic with the character’s body, makes it grittier.
17) I like spells with permanent effects. I don't like spells with a duration, especially if they require no concentration from the caster to maintain. Everything we achieve should be tied to what we do, and a spell just lasting so long or extending so far by itself is too mechanical.
18) I don't like the fantasy races at their stereotypical. I don’t dislike them either, but in the whole D&D game only humans aren’t a given personality type.
19) I like psionics so long as it means telepathy and telekinesis rather than a weird and irrelevant magic.
20) I don't particularly like items with charges – wands and such. Running out of ammo is not a good dramatic device from the GM's 3rd-person view and it isn't interesting from the player's 1st-person view. There can be other limitations on use, or perhaps charges can stay but treatment of magic items change.
21) I have a singular dislike of the Deck of Many Things. It feels at first as if there is no reason, but a little thinking finds the cause. I hate randomness, it interferes with my free will. But perhaps others’ will is more enlightened and they can find pleasure even in random fate. Wishes as a spell are a bad idea, I think. That everything can be rolled back and corrected, that rules of reality can be cancelled goes, I think, against the spirit of irrevocability that makes adventures possible. But others may enjoy a malleable reality. How far would they take this, though? If they got more wishes, more freebies, wouldn’t they eventually tire of staying in-character at all? The sick feeling of munchkinism, “I can do whatever,” the Caligula complex. The role would lose all worth.
22) I like economies, crafted goods, architecture and GMs or writers who take the time to describe how a silk feels as it runs through the fingers or the construction priniciple of a great dome. I don't like those who go over the sensuous part of life unless it's because they are fixed on the plot, world-building and characters.
23) I like over-the-top features like a Tomb of Horrors or Bone City, Stygian pyramids, floating corpses of dead gods in Planescape. I respect Baba Yaga's hut with skulls on stakes. I have absolutely no trouble believing in those things. More modest inventions like Sigil city in the same Planescape are more dubious to me. Everything well thought-out and original goes. Magic swords, crystal balls, poisoned lotus, see-through ghouls, draconians and other great inventions of writers are fine by me. On the other hand, attempts to write up imaginary kingdoms and empires and social life in fantasy books rarely come off well. Most authors and game writers are too ignorant to describe what life really was like in Europe's Middle Ages or in ancient Greece. They have absolutely no historical sense. They just haven’t read enough. Some kind of combination of well-researched history and fantasy usually works the best.
24) I like fantasy worlds with a future. Future isn't necessarily about rockets in the sky. It’s just potential. A fantasy world can have a future. It need not end in an Age of Mortals or a Fourth Era of Middle-Earth. Fantasy can remain fantasy: new sorcerer-emperors can arrive, continents can sink or rise, rat-men or snake-men or snake-women can conquer the world or the gods can sex up an orgy and blend into a supergod. So long as they all do it with an expanded assortment of spells, weapons, feelings and thoughts every time, so long as their society changes, it's a future. In a genuine free-form game players would effect these changes, not the GM or writer.
25) I like it when a GM isn't afraid to treat imagination's work as art. And I dislike it when a GM sets out with a stated purpose to provide entertainment, so same-old it’s not even announced.
With these values in mind, is there any game happening here that might fit the bill?