Narrative in Role-playing Games - Continued

Theologian Randy Harris, in his post, "contra narrative" (on his seemingly now defunct Postmodern Mystic blog) is still available in Google's RSS cache, so I copy it here:

I want to share with you one of my favorite short stories in its entirety. It is written by the Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms.

“Now one day a man went to work and on the way he met another man, who having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was heading back home where he came from.

And thats about it, more or less”

Is that a great story or what?

You see, Kharms understood that our life is not a story as some contend. It is not full of action and sometimes the plot is meandering or totally non existent. Most of life is utterly mundane.  To expect life to have the neatness of a well written story is bound to lead to disappointment and even anger.  What the mystic asks us to see is that all of those mundane moments are filled with the presence of God - and that is the ultimate meaning of our lives – not the story as we would have it.

I think this one post helped me a lot to let go of the desire for every event, no matter how insignificant, to have some wide-ranging meaning.  And this carries over into what I now expect from table-top role-playing.

1st Edition Ish - Part Two

I stumbled upon a comment that I'd made to some friends in an email, which I'll also post here, slightly edited, because it still resonates with me now - and it's a good follow up to my comments earlier:

A confession here:  although it's true that I do dislike the absence of "true" (i.e. 3.x edition) multi-classing in 4th edition, I never actually got to DO that.  I only ever played 1st edition multi-class characters, and I think just one - a Wood Elf Druid/Thief.  The closest thing after that (and it doesn't really count) was a 2nd Edition Bard with the Swashbuckler kit, one of my all-time favorites.  Other than that, I only played single-class characters.  I wanted to do true multi-classing, but when it finally came around, I just wasn't playing all that much. 

For the record, I'm actually okay with multi-classing in 4th,  I just hate that they call it multi-classing.  I'd be happier with "dabbling" or "borrowing" or something equivalent.   It's one of my pet peeves with the current game system - the ever-present misnomers. When the effects of Two-Weapon "Eviscerate" last about a round or so, that just makes my head explode.  I have no problem with the exploit as written, just don't call it that.  It sounds like they are marketing to junior-high kids - "Look, Dad, I can do this really cool thing!!!"  Though I suppose that's exactly what they are doing. 

Meanwhile, Dad, the 1st Ed player, steps into the backyard and has a good cry.  After a while, his neighbor sticks his head over the fence.  "Kid playing 4th again?"  Dad doesn't say anything.  He just sniffles once or twice and goes quiet.  It's okay.  He and his neighbor have been buddies for a long time.

I have only one thing to say to the many, many watered-down, grossly misnamed Awesomely Awesome Power powers out there.

Save or die.

Narrative in Role-playing Games

I've heard it said that role-playing games, especially those of the indie sort, are really about telling stories. I don't think that's the case.  We do tell stories, out of game, about the game sessions we've played.  All the more reason to play and play well.  And there's no question that a character within a game can relate a story to other characters during play.  But gaming isn't equivalent to creating a single story or even a set of stories.  There's no script - at least, not one that survives much into any given game session.  In role-playing games, the characters do interact with and within imagined situations.  But it's improvised.  The choices and events don't fully merge into some over-arching, cohesive plot, nor should we require that they do so.  Any given interaction or event within a session may be enjoyable or satisfying in itself, aesthetically, viscerally, morally.  It need not tie into a story arc to be worth playing out.

In that way, RPG's are like life.  Though I'm a Christian, I'm not one who believes that everything happens for a reason, as part of One Big Plan.  A great many things do happen for a reason, though I tend to be pretty careful about reading meanings into events.  God is constantly involved in what we do, but He is under no obligation to make this obvious or to explain any of it to our satisfaction.  It isn't One Big Story that binds history together, it's God himself.  God involves Himself with His creation in such a way that it can and should be conveyed as story.  "Can" because God is intimately involved in events, and events flow from one another.  "Should" because we are story-telling creatures.  We recognize sequence and closure and, through story, find and create meaning.  "In the beginning" isn't just the beginning of all things, but the beginning of a story.  And our lives aren't complete without those stories.  But a single isolated event can have profound meaning, simply because God is behind it.

So I'm much more open to saying that RPG's are about drama, than about story.  Stories will emerge, and our play will be better for it.  But  there's no need to worry if a party's jaunt through the woods isn't worthy of some novel.  It can still be exciting, amusing, or even deeply touching - no script required.

Attending the Ancestral Health Symposium 2011

I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the first Ancestral Health Symposium this last weekend at UCLA.  Quite a variety of speakers from the paleo, low-carb, and traditional food camps presented.  (You can see slides, videos, and abstracts here.)

All of these camps, at their best, attempt to define with some precision the real meaning of living naturally*, i.e. acting in accordance with our biological nature rather than against it.  The paleo folks start with a practical heuristic: how homo sapiens has lived and eaten, for the longest period of time, is probably the sort of thing we are most genetically adapted to.  The traditional diet folks use a similar though less expansive heuristic: the kinds of foods that successful (i.e., relatively healthy, long-lived, vibrant) traditional cultures have eaten, and the methods by which they've prepared them, serve as a better standard of diet that the current food culture, which has failed miserably.  And the low-carbers, often by trial-and-error, have discovered that the amount of digestible carbohydrate in the Western diet is thoroughly excessive, that very little (if any) carbohydrate is necessary in the diet, and that the restriction of carbohydrates can have remarkable health benefits.  Each of these camps recognize valid insights within the others, and thus we had a meeting of the minds and of kindred spirits.

Most of what I saw at the symposium I'd already been exposed to, typically in more detail, through the blogs or books of the presenters.  The more technical presentations were both new and fascinating, but I can't really say I walked away understanding more.  I need to dust off my old chemistry and math books before I can come away from those sessions saying that I really learned something.  Yes, I can rattle off some of those explanations - but that doesn't mean I understand them.  Still, I am motivated to return to those old textbooks.  That's the biggest thing that I've taken away from this.  That, and getting out of the office for a few days to enjoy the Los Angeles weather.

A lot that I heard was worth mentioning, but I note only a few things here:

Gary Taubes, in his ongoing campaign to oppose Blind Mutual Admiration, Fluff, and thus the Nutritional Academy way, questioned Stephan Guyenet on the quality (completeness, really) of his examples justifying his explanation of obesity.  Gary was nervous, perhaps thinking, "Great.  As I see it, this just isn't up to standards.  I'm going to appear like a jerk, but I've got to call him on this."  If this was what Gary was thinking, well, kudos to him for bravery.  He's taken a lot of heat for that.  Stephan, as neurobiologist, was, I think, simply asking, "Okay, I've got just this sort of hammer, so, considering the obesity problem as nail, what can we say about it?"  Very good stuff there, at least from this layman's view.

Mark Sisson's thoughts on play were great.  I'm not so much the "hedonist" that Mark claims to be, but life, insofar as it is good, is indeed something to be enjoyed.  He got me to thinking about how so many of the things that we consider drudgery today - cooking, walking, gathering (what we'd call "shopping") - used to be sources of great joy.  Now, not so much.  That's something to be recovered.

Tom Naughton (of Fathead Movie fame, and the accompanying blog) was an absolute riot.  He gave a talk on science for the layman and how to recognize bad science (and bad science journalism) when you see it.

This was well worth the time, and, Lord willing, I'll do it again next year.

*No doubt, "Natural" is, sadly, a ruined word, except to marketers.  But this is really what the folks there were about.

1st Edition Ish

I've got a few thoughts on 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, not for people who have never played it, but for people who have.  I played in a campaign (all thirty levels) as an Eladrin Ranger, dying once, coming back (sort of), dying again, and coming back a third time for the final finish.  I have to say that I don't like this new edition.  I even have to say that it's not really Dungeons & Dragons.

Brief background: I played AD&D extensively back in the day, 2nd Edition AD&D in a couple of campaigns, and one 3rd Edition campaign.

I've never DMed a 4th Edition game and never read any of its official books other than the Player's Handbook - and even that, not cover to cover, though I've read a lot of entries in the online Compendium for the game.  So I speak out of a lengthy, but rather limited, experience with 4th.

When I say that it isn't D&D, that's not necessarily a bad thing.  D&D was the first RPG I ever played, and has a certain place in my heart because of that.  But it's never, in any of its incarnations, been anywhere near what I'd call a solid system for playing generic fantasy campaigns (though, to its credit, 4th Edition comes a little closer).  I was always frustrated that I couldn't play magic-using characters that felt like the sort of characters I read about in my favorite books.  (I loved Rolemaster for precisely that reason, though I'd now consider it to be too much work for what you get.)  Even now, the Vancian system isn't gone.  The slots-per-day (indeed, slots fixed with but a single power) mechanic is now just diluted throughout the classes.  D&D has been, however, a great system (or set of systems) for playing, well, D&D.  The fellows over at The RPG Haven Podcast (and others, too) have commented that D&D is basically its own genre.  Bingo.  The reality is that D&D is a thing all its own. And that's okay.

But I'm confident that, as a game, 4th isn't really the same as earlier editions in that it's not backwards-compatible.   As a rule, you can't really convert characters from prior editions without basically re-imagining them.  Again, not a bad thing in itself.  If I have any gripe here, it's that you're not really getting what's on the box, red or otherwise.  It's made a lot of people really angry, and I understand why.  I was more disappointed than angry.  I hoped for fixes to a venerable system that would make all those books and movies that I loved finally playable, but instead I got a thoroughly new system, pretending to be the old one.

Indeed, I got a new system of rather more limited scope.  Like so many players of earlier editions, I loved the flexibility in character design that surfaced as the game matured into its 3rd edition.  Sadly, I never really got to enjoy it, but I did get to see much of that customizability simply evaporate in 4th.  A step backwards, in my book.

In regard to its handing of classes, I heard the word "pigeon-holing" being tossed around a lot after the game's release, and I heartily agree.  Most mages I've wanted to play in editions past were not Controllers and most fighters I played were by no means Defenders.  That kind of oversimplification drives me crazy.  The four roles are actually a nice way of thinking about what you want your character to do in combat*, but those roles can be filled, to varying degrees, by multiple classes.  It's not a one-to-one correspondence.  They've moved away from this somewhat in the new Essentials line-up, and that's a good thing.


If any given RPG has both Role-Playing and Gaming aspects, 4th Edition leans heavily in the direction of Game and is thoroughly combat-centric - more fantasy wargame than fantasy role-playing game.  I saw plenty of role-playing around the table in the campaign that I was a part of, but it was really kind of optional.  Which was good, because I rarely had the energy for it.  Mostly, I just created a character that did his part in a fight and was easy to play.  I was really there more to be with friends than anything else.

As I say, 4th Edition isn't D&D.  It's D&D-ish - but then, so are a lot of games.  You can play the various pre-4th D&D settings, races, and classes with, say, BRP or Hero or even Mutants & Masterminds.  4th Ed is, however, an official product, released by sort-of-the-same folks who gave us the 3.x editions. So I've given in to my more cynical side, calling it 1st Edition "Ish" - up until now, mostly to myself.

Hey, it's not a bad game. I've had fun (sometimes a lot of fun) playing it!  Not much more to say on this one.  If you have a good time with 4th, by all means keep right on rockin' with it.  I can't say I'll never play it again. I wouldn't mind playing the occasional session sometime in the future.  It's very much like 1st Edition was for me, in that I played it because that's what everybody else was hankering to play. :)  But for what I'm looking for, there are better games out there.

*If you want to see a more adequate list of party roles, a list not quite so combat-obsessed, look at Crafty Game's Fantasy Craft.  Although I'm not so much into the class-and-level thing any more, this is a system I'd gladly play as my go-to fantasy system, no reservations.  Very nicely done.

Always late...

Thankfully, there are twelve days of Christmas!  Amazing how I don't get into the Christmas spirit until, oh, Christmas Day.  I still have time to read A Christmas Carol (as has always been my custom this season).  And it wouldn't hurt to read the Gospel accounts either.  In my own tradition - Churches of Christ (of the Campbellite variety) - we haven't paid the church year much mind.  That's a thing I should take more seriously.  If I have any resolutions this year, that should probably be it.  That and showing up in public worship more than once per quarter.