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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.
Oh, what a fun article. Really digging deep to explain why orcs are still Problematic.
I was reading, yesterday, about the origins of races and classes in old-school D&D. Not First Edition: I'm talking about BECMI, the weird parallel branch that emphasized different parts of the game and would eventually inspire the "Old School Renaissance" in tabletop roleplaying.
Ability scores in this game were rolled 3d6 in order without such conveniences as point-buy. Then the player picked a class from the following list:
Fighter
Thief
Cleric
Magic-user
Elf
Dwarf
Halfling
There's no strict limitation on which class you want to play, but there is a soft one: the Prime Requisite. Characters with a low Strength advance slower in the Fighter class. Critically, this turns out to be the main way in which stats affect gameplay! No scaling skill ranks (because skills don't exist yet). No suboptimal damage-per-round between characters of the same level. No influence of race on ability! Your character has merely chosen a job which for which they may or may not, by the vagaries of fate, have the natural aptitude. Insofar as players wanted to optimize their advancement, sure, you'd see strong fighters and clever magic-users. But it was a different time, and that character was liable to die by level 3 anyway, so why not play what you want?
Fast forward 40 years and there are reams of rules and oceans of options. In real life, people train in skills, so we've got to have those. And in Tolkien, the Orcs are strong and cruel, but the Hobbits are nimble and good-hearted, so lets....ah, hell. Racial essentialism snuck in like a kender in a curio shop. God forbid Wizards actually make any changes while trying to preserve game elements, since that's apparently an invitation. Suddenly the time is right to pen heartfelt thinkpieces and complain that the changes aren't good enough.
Perhaps the author needs to play some OSR and get back to those roots of unrestricted dungeon-delving potential. I hear Lamentations is pretty fun.
Meanwhile in the 1974 pre-AD&D Volume 1: Men & Magic races were class restricted and had hard level caps on those classes with special abilities to compensate in odd ways like Dwarf magical resistance. Basic introduced races as classes to simplify some of the awkward book keeping, especially with things like Elf multiclassing. "Hobbits are nimble and good-hearted" isn't some add-on, halflings are restricted to only the law alignment while men can take law, neutral or even chaos which none of the demihumans can take. It's a pretty quick read, 36 pages for what would become the Player Handbook. Volumes 2: Monsters & Treasure and 3: The underworld & Wilderness Adventures are essentially the Monster Manual and Dungeon Masters Guide and equally short.
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