neat ladyboog

I've talked in the past about how Hasbro's efforts to deceptively market Dungeons & Dragons as universal entry-level game have fostered a culture of play in which any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game is regarded as evidence that you have a "bad GM", and how, in order to avoid being a "bad GM", it's necessary to treat it as a normal part of the GM's responsibilities to constantly monitor the outputs of the rules and quickly paper over any gaps between the game the rules want to produce and the game the group wants to play, like a cartoon train conductor frantically constructing the very tracks along which the train they're conducting is riding.

The trouble is that most players aren't stupid, and readily see through the act. They (correctly!) observe that the particulars of the rules don't actually seem to matter all that much, because most of the desired experience of play is the product of the GM's constant interventions, rather than the product of interpreting the outputs of the rules – but instead of identifying this as a problem, they conclude (again, quite reasonably, as they've probably never seen it done differently) that this is what tabletop roleplaying is. The GM merely pretends to be moderating a game; in truth, they're a pantomime-leader whose job is to maintain the illusion that we're playing a game with rules, when in fact what we're really doing is guided improv theatre.

And of course there's nothing wrong with guided improv theatre – it's a fine pastime, and one I've enjoyed myself on many occasions. However, it does put folks who really do want to play a game in a bind, because now there's this insurmountable communication barrier. You can say "I want to play a game, and these are the rules of that game", and receive what seems to be enthusiastic agreement with that premise; however, a significant portion of the people expressing that agreement think they're participating in a bit of kayfabe, like very dedicated professional wrestlers who stay in character even outside the ring.

Critically, nobody is necessarily acting in bad faith in this equation. The folks who don't bother to learn the rules because they think games aren't real mostly aren't fucking with you on purpose; they honestly thought they were yes-anding your improv prompt by pretending to care about the mechanics of play, and when they discover that you really do expect them to do all that fiddly dice math, from their perspective it genuinely looks like you were the one misleading them. It's just a fucked up culture of play garbling all the signals in both directions.

Yeah, big name "actual play" podcasts that pretend they're not scripted and workshopped to hell are a big contributing factor, though I wouldn't classify them as distinct from Hasbro's marketing apparatus so much as one of the most visible arms of that apparatus. The fact that Hasbro isn't paying them directly doesn't mean they aren't serving the brand.

Maaaaaan. So I'm DMing two DnD 5e games at the moment. One of them is a high level combat focused megadungeon with very experienced players, while the other is more open and has more RP with a mix of experienced and new players. I always feel way more drained after a session running the latter game than the former. And I think you really helped me see why. I'm DEFINITELY having to do a ton of track-laying while running that game, because it's such an unfocused game. I feel way more like I have to be an entertainer who's always the one responsible for my players' fun, rather than expecting them to make their own fun using the rules of the game, like the players in my other group do.

That's a fairly involved question for which a full answer is beyond the scope of a Tumblr post (even my notoriously long-winded ones!), but I find that a good place to start is with the "who gives a shit?" principle.

For example, suppose that the first piece of mechanically significant information on a game's character sheet is a statistic called "Strength", rated on a scale from one to ten.

Who gives a shit?

That is, why do we care how strong player characters are? Why do we care about having a definite, codified answer at our fingertips to the question of which characters are stronger than other characters, to a fair degree of precision? Why does any of this matter? What assumptions are we making about the nature of the conflicts that will be present within the game's narrative?

That's a fairly trivial case, but the principle can be extended to more fundamental features of a game's rules. Let's consider the classic Dungeons & Dragons style skill check, for example: roll a die, add a stat, compare to a target number, pass or fail. What assumptions are we encoding about the nature of conflict in this game?

Well, for a start, these assumptions might include:

The assumption that generating binary pass/fail outcomes for performing discrete physical, mental and social tasks is how most conflicts will be resolved;

The assumption that your game will benefit from these outcomes having a high degree of player-facing uncertainty;

The assumption that your game will benefit from this uncertainty containing a relatively high likelihood of complete failure;

The assumption that your game will benefit from the principal determinant of that likelihood of failure being some intrinsic and objectively measurable attribute of the acting character;

... and so forth.

If you're only familiar with Dungeons & Dragons and its very close imitators, these may seem like things you have to assume in order to have a functioning game, but there are a fairly specific set of conventions being expressed here. Why do we care about any of these things? Who gives a shit?

Even the first bullet point can easily be knocked down: one can imagine, for example, a game which simply assumes players can always choose to have their characters succeed at anything it's within the realm of possibility for them to do, and whose rules instead focus on providing a codified game-mechanical answer to the question of what that success will cost them, with the only uncertainty being whether the player is willing to pay that cost.

It's clear that a game which approaches conflict resolution in this way is expressing a strong set of genre assumptions. The trick is recognising that the industry-standard alternative (i.e., the D&D-style skill check) is equally laser-focused on a specific set of genre assumptions, in a way that's often rendered invisible by how common it is.

The title: "How to keep your party challenged and engaged"

The thumbnail: "Do this one weird trick!"

These tags just demonstrate the issue that this post is about: people think D&D is a completely unopinionated game that you can just take whole systems out of without altering the gameplay. But D&D is a game that is opinionated about many things, resource management being one of them, and once you remove the resource management out of it you end up with a worse game with no tension and DMs suddenly having to fix a bunch of new problems that arise out of that, like having to suddenly figure out ways to challenge their party when tracking resources (this includes stuff like spell slots and daily uses of abilities) is no longer an issue except on a per-encounter level.

And honestly "DMs can change anything" is not unique to D&D. If I wanted to run a game that doesn't care about dungeon-crawling and resource management I would much rather run a different game. And I wish people in the D&D playerbase realized this as well, because not only is it bad for their game and its play culture, it also stifles creativity within the hobby.

You can totally change any rule you don't like. In D&D, or any other game. You can change the rules in Sorry! if you want. You don't have to play Chutes and Ladders instead.

I've noticed over the years that WotC and Hasbro have changed the game from encouraging players and DMs to change rules they don't like, to severely discouraging them. (I assume this is to sell more minis, and now D&D One subscriptions.) We used to call people like that rules lawyers, and most of us stopped inviting them to our tables.

This post is about observations of a play culture where people clearly are not having fun, as attested to by hundreds of GMs trying to run the game in a way it's not optimized towards and suddenly having to do a bunch of work to patch over those newly discovered issues! That's what the first post in this chain is about: people have self-inflicted a playstyle onto themselves which simply does not harmonize with D&D, but because the current play culture of D&D doesn't consider the GM's fun a factor they need to deal with toxic memes like "a good GM can fix it" when they shouldn't, in fact, have to fix things if the game were fit to purpose!

Did you know that a Muslim woman founded the world’s first university? Were you aware that Islamic scientists invented the hand crank, discovered gravity, and were the first to realize that the earth revolves around the sun? Has it ever occurred to you that Muslim women gained the right to keep their surnames hundreds of years before Western women and were given the right to inherit wealth, which was unheard of in pre-Islamic times?

If you answered “yes”, you may have read a wikipedia article, or something based on one, written by a Bangladeshi-British guy with the username Jagged 85. This anonymous gentleman dedicated several years of his life to putting blatantly false, completely made up bullshit into wikipedia articles covering an incredibly broad number of subjects. Most of these additions were fairly well-written and sourced. If you read them, you wouldn’t think much of it. A wikipedia article tells you some guy named al-Ghazali influenced René Descartes and it has a little number indicating an academic source next to it–are you really gonna think too hard about it, or are you just going to accept it?

Well, most people evidently fall into the latter camp, since Jagged 85′s inventive editorializing continued undetected for quite a while. He created new articles (Islamic feminism, Physics in medieval Islam, Avicennism), added tens of thousands of words to others (Muslim world, History of geometry, Islamic Golden Age, Islamic economic jurisprudence), and removed anything critical of Islam–and inserted sources supportive of it–into hundreds of others.

How long can someone pump out hundreds of thousands of words on a subject before someone else looks at it and says “gee, I dunno, that doesn’t sound right to me”? Oh… I don’t know… maybe 80,000 times or so. Issues were first noted in the year 2009, four years after he began his little project, but he wasn’t banned until 2012.

What did him in? What finally convinced the good people of the wikipedia community that something was amiss? Did they read their site’s articles on Islam and notice that everything was presented in glowing terms, citing only either Western white Orientalists or Muslim scholars? No. In fact, it was something else altogether.

You see, our friend Jagged 85′s interests were not limited to Islam. No one can say why–perhaps he had just run out of Islam-related material, having blanketed the entire site several times over. Perhaps he had some strange fetish for putting false information into wikipedia articles. Maybe he was playing a game and seeing how far he could take it before someone noticed. But around 2010, he turned his attention to… video games and anime. Yes, Jagged 85 is an Islamic otaku, which explains many things.

The strange edits started out minor. Sometimes he’d inflate the sales of an obscure game. Then he’d assign undue importance to some game or another, calling it “the first game” to do something or saying it was the beginning of a genre. Again, he would always link to a source–it’s just that the sources didn’t really back him up. But who cares? Who reads the sources? It’s wikipedia, man.

Well, evidently someone cared, since the wikipedia gaming community has strict standards for statements like Silpheed “was the first fully 3D polygonal shooter”. Like a pack of hyenas, the kuffar descended upon our brother, chronicling his errors and demanding his blood. And they got it on the 22nd of September, 2012, when Jagged–who was only trying to spread our true faith and a love of Neon Genesis Evangelion–was heartlessly banned from the home he’d helped build.

But can the disbelievers ever truly prevail against Allah? They cannot. And we have evidence of this in the fact that ol’ J85′s work still stands across hundreds upon hundreds of wikipedia articles, due to disinterest and a lack of expertise by most other editors. From Criticism of Muhammad to the History of Bangladesh to List of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 chapters, our brother’s words have withstood their attacks, lingering in near-obscurity in order to avoid the knives of the enemies of Islam.

As I went walking that endless bread line My landlord gave me a 2-week deadline And Labor Action ran a better headline: “This land was made for you and me!”

This land is their land, it isn’t our land From the plush apartments to the Cadillac car land From the Wall Street office to the Hollywood star land This land is not for you or me

So take your slogan and kindly stow it If this was our land, you’d never know it So let’s get together and overthrow it ‘Cause this land was made for you and me

And then in the middle:

you clearly know nothing about Afghanistan nor the middle east

here’s Afghanistan in the 1950′s, 60′s, & 70′s

if you really want to know what caused all the instability & growth of extremist groups I suggest you take a look at the US foreign policy towards Afghanistan during the 80′s

It’s interesting to note that when the communist government came to power in Afghanistan in the late 70′s, one of the first things they did was declare equality of the sexes, made education for girls mandatory, & banned child marriages. The conservative tribal leaders who the US armed & funded (& who later became the Taliban) declared this to be a “war on Islam” & fought against the central government.

The US had no problem back then with encouraging the growth of Islamic conservatism to counter socialism/communism. You created your biggest enemy & you have no one to blame but yourselves.