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How We Talk Past Each Other: understanding how the war over the future of Dungeons and Dragons is the entirety of the culture war in a nutshell
In a thread on Reddit Motte at least six months ago, I became enlightened to the fundamental difference between drag and crossdressing. The latter is fundamentally serious, a personal choice of expressing something important about one’s inner self. The former is a form of playing, specifically, performing a role meant to be absorbed as part of a fiction. It is part of the larger genre of performance known as clowning, which can be described as colorful character archetypes performing bold actions with obvious consequences for an audience. Clowning also includes professional wrestling, F/SF cosplay, Muppets-style puppetry, and political ads.
The same split is seen elsewhere in fiction; genre fiction is considered non-literary because it typically involves stereotyped archetypical characters walking a well-trod path in a specific type of world: Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Sam Spade, Batman, Spider-Man, Elric of Melniboné, and so on. I used words containing the root “typ” three times in that sentence because typing is the core of genre: any individual is an instance of a type.
By contrast, novels focus on individuals as beings-in-themselves, and might use types as something they struggle against. So do graphic novels, explorations and deconstructions of characters in a more realistic or nuanced way, even if they have types. They are more akin to the arthouse spirit of crossdressing than the clowning spirit of drag: the sitcom without the laugh track, the invisible and silent audience who appreciates instead of enjoys. And these two spirits cannot exist in the same world.
That brings us to D&D. Gizmodo/io9 published an article about taking biodiversity typing out of the stats of D&D playable species.
D&D is an RPG which is built on the clowning spirit of types and power levels, using fantastic biodiversity to tell adventure game stories. It is a core nerd culture property, enjoyed historically by oppressed people with autism to imagine being powerful people who don’t just fit into their milieu but who thrive as adventurers and heroes.
This little corner of the culture war turns RPGs from Fun With Action Figures to Serious Representation.
I think one issue I see is that the critics will never be satisfied. There have been tribes of neutral orcs since 2nd Edition, and Planescape allowed them to explore concepts like non-evil succubi (even demons can sometimes not be evil!), while 3rd edition gave us Eberron, which was designed from the ground up with the idea that traditional alignments not being relevant - with evil metallic dragons, broadly good orc cultures, evil halfling tribes, etc.
By the time we get to the 5th edition core books, race was already almost a non-issue. Alignment was a vestigial structure that barely mattered mechanically anymore.
Is anyone really offended by the idea that orcs might be stronger on average than humans? Is anyone really offended by the idea that a dwarf might be able to drink you under the table because they're built a little tougher? I kind of doubt it.
But once ability bonuses are mental, then people have a big issue.
One D&D is moving away from making ability bonuses for player races baked in. Fair enough. But this isn't going to fix the issue. Are mind flayers going to exist in the next edition of D&D? Is the default mind flayer stat block going to have 19 Int? Is the mind flayer elder brain going to have 21 Int?
If that's even sort of true, we're back at bioessentialism. Mind flayers and their elder brains are just naturally smarter than the average human peasant. Unless WotC wants to do something stupid like say "actually mind flayers have the same Intelligence range as playable humanoid races, and it's just the really, really smart ones who become psionic and start attacking people to eat their brains, but all mind flayers have free will and can choose to be vegans if they want" then mind flayers as a concept are going to remain problematic going forward, no matter how many steps they make to "clean up" the game.
Sometimes fantasy might call for nuance, or deeper understanding. And sometimes you just want to mow through a horde of orcs and not think too hard about whether they're inherently evil, or whether you could have talked them out of it under the right circumstances.
The mental stats in DnD have always been in this weird place. How does your 100IQ player or GM portray an INT 25 Psychic super genius? The answer is badly in my experience. All it usually comes down to is a stat that impacts your skill rolls, spells modifiers and so on most often. Do your spells key off Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma? What are you adding to your skill checks? It very rarely comes down to anything beyond that. Dumping INT as a Half-Orc Barbarian and then playing it with your own level of intelligence outside of stat modifiers is pretty common. And having an Int 20 Wizard played by someone who doesn't even themselves know what their spells do, or how many they get.
Should the player whose bard has 22 Charisma have to roleplay making a speech to convince the king to spare you or is their nigh supernatural charisma and a single die role the way to go?
Agreed. Mental stats are the unfortunate place where the fantasy of "you can be anyone" runs up against the reality of your real life "mental stats." It's not something you scream from the rooftops, but d&d is a cooperative roleplaying game, and your ability to depict the character you're playing matters. It's easy to abstract away swinging an axe or doing a fearsome war cry to the dice if you can't do those things but your character can. Coming up with a cunning plan or smooth-talking through an encounter... not as much.
The unfortunate result is that someone who freezes up when put on the spot simply cannot roleplay a suave rogue or bard as well as someone who can. Same goes for someone who, like you said, plays a 20 INT Wizard but can't memorize their spells. It's not like you need to be Bond or Einstein to play these characters — you just need to be able to approximate it well enough out of character that the other players can let their imaginations do the rest.
You could abstract things away to rolls like you said, but I find campaigns where that is the norm to be less engaged. If I have a bard as a player, I expect the player to be cracking wise and making rousing speeches instead of saying "I make a joke" or "I make a speech."
A lot of DMs expect players to actually come up with a motivational speech (or whatever) for their character to say, rather than rolling a die. But I think that's unreasonable. I don't ask the fighter to tell me in detail what sword form he uses to counter the enemy's defenses. I also don't ask the CHA character to actually have a silver tongue.
So yeah, I don't personally think there's a problem with abstracting mental stats behind die rolls. You use the same abstraction as for everything else, and don't impose harsh "your character can't do anything you can't" rules on only one aspect of the game.
How about "prior to rolling a die"? The role-playing is what makes TTRPGs better than computer games! If I'm DMing for my 10 year old, I'm not expecting a soliloquy that would sway royalty, but an argument that's especially good for a 10 year old might be worth a bonus to the subsequent Charisma roll, and one that's clearly just phoned in might be worth a penalty.
For young kids (this happened when one was 6, IIRC?) I've even gone so far as to say "make a Wisdom check" upon hearing a course of action that was likely to get the party killed, and when it passed I took that as an excuse to recount every line of reasoning that character would understand about why they're endangering themselves, though the final decision was out of my hands still. A bit of a cheat, I admit, since even a failure would have raised the question of "wait, why did daddy just ask for that" and so would have been a huge clue itself...
Nobody's yet given me the opposite problem. It turns out that the same sort of player who will min-max a low-Wis barbarian is also the same sort of player who will happily charge recklessly into danger rather than try to employ higher player wisdom. Not sure if that was intentional role-playing or a lack of higher player wisdom, but it was at least consistent and fun!
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The reason you ask for the player to roleplay his speech but not to describe his sword swing technique is because D&D is a game that exists in our heads. It is a real as the group believes it to be. That is to say, it can be very real, but this requires collective suspension of disbelief, engagement, buy-in, and yes — roleplaying. You aren't taken out of the collective fantasy by your fighter's player not knowing how to swing a sword, but you are by the player who is supposedly the high Charisma party face clamming up whenever an NPC speaks to him.
I don't have an issue with such players being at my table, and in my experience they tend to avoid those kinds of characters anyway. You don't need a silver tongue to be able to play a charismatic character, but you need to have some degree of wit and charm. If a player wants to give a speech, I'm not exactly expecting St. Crispin's Day, but he should have something to say.
Would you accept it if the player spoke in abstract about the themes his character is talking about, the buttons he tries to press, etc. without actually reciting it in first person?
Sure, especially if the player is less comfortable speaking in first person, or is performing something like a song that would take a long time to devise. I have a preference to first person roleplaying, but in the kind of example you gave the player is clearly demonstrating engagement and knowledge of what's going on, so it's all good to me. I take umbrage more with doing away with all of that and just rolling the dice in social situations.
Think "my character sings a song" vs "my character sings this folk song with specific themes that he uses to subtly mock the hostile lord."
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That's my preferred method. "I try to persuade the king to spare the captive by appealing to his sense of justice/diplomacy/humour/whatever." It's like how you don't just "attack", you attack with a weapon.
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