Bad wrong fun

I've been keeping an eye on the hits and I can see that you guys are getting tired of monsters and magical items. Which is good, because I have an essay here for you today.

Sometimes, when people don't like some argument being advanced against their chosen system they invoke the internet meme NOFUNALLOWED or Bad Wrong Fun. This is to suggest that their opponents, who are launching these nofun attacks, are pedantic to the point of absurdity and that their arguments amount to "You thought that was fun, now I want you to stop it." While it is possible that the exact scenario I have described has come up before, I have never ever seen nofun invoked in a case like that. The cases I see are always markedly different.

On Fantasy and Escape

Tolkien once famously said of fantasy literature: "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? ... If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"

I hate to disagree with the grandmaster of modern fantasy literature, but disagree I do. Not, of course, concerning his value of escapist literature (which I suppose is alright), but rather with his judgement that fantasy is necessarily escapist at all. George R. R. Martin, in an interview, explained why so many beloved characters died in ASIAF; he said it was not comfort literature. I would argue that Lord of the Rings isn't comfort literature either.

Fantasy does not have to be light-hearted, uplifting, or hopeful. What good is the escape of following Ned Stark? No good at all, in terms of escapism, I would argue. But the same can be said of poor Frodo, who is in essence a tragic hero: he wins only to also lose. While Middle Earth is saved from the machinations of the Dark Lord, Frodo himself is hollowed out and ruined by the experience. He sacrifices the things that make his life worth living in order to protect Middle Earth—he sacrifices himself.

This isn't escapism. Fantasy literature can be as true and vital and vibrant and necessary as any other genre. Just because it takes place in a secondary world doesn't mean that there are not truths about our world there. Indeed, Derrida would scoff to think that you could ever construct a document that was not riddled with hints and truths of the author's society and intention. Deconstruct Lord of the Rings and you will find the truths that Tolkien thought were essential to humanity.

I'm tired of hearing slanders made against fantasy literature. What exactly irks people about it? That it's not history? I'm sorry to say that most novels are not history. That novel you read about a love story? It didn't really happen. Not only that, but it probably couldn't have happened. What about the authors we most value as part of the English corpus? Shakespeare? Well, again, I'm sad to tell you that Shakespeare (while he didn't make up his stories, since he wasn't a great plot-author so instead had to take them from other sources) wrote a lot of things that didn't happen.

It seems hypocritical, strange, and almost unbalanced to rage against the fantastic simply because it is fantastic. Sure, you can be angry at bad writing (and I suppose fantasy has been an umbrella for poorly written work for a long time, due to the fact that critics simply dismissed the whole genre and refused to help sift through the shit) but to be angry at the genre of fantasy itself is as senseless as hating adventure, romance, documentary, or any other genre-style.

Fantasy itself is exactly as credible and as real as any other fiction.

Scriptor Liberator

If you're a reader of my work, you can probably tell that I have more than just the average bit of elitism going on in. I've been possessed of a terribly elitist ethic since I was a child, probably because I first went to Catholic School and then to a private boarding school in Cheshire Connecticut. Those sorts of places breed a holier-than-thou attitude. However, I like to think I've done much in the way of distancing myself from some of that posturing.

Something I realized only recently is that I my elitist attitude still lingered when it came to the domain of writing. For a long time, I honestly felt that most people just shouldn't bother. I never understood journals or blogs: what do you get out of them? Who are you talking to? No one! Yet, after starting this blog of my own and discussing it with other people, I have come to the realization that I would continue to write it even if no one was reading it. Now, that's not an invitation to stop following me, since I would certainly become despondent and probably update less, but it remains true.

Canned D&D

The first feedback I received on the Adventurers' Guide was that player's don't want to read more than one page of setting material. Bundled right along with this revelation was the fact that any DM who writes a setting manual of any kind is suspect, that they are automatically placed into a dangerous category of nutjob who probably won't run a good game. To me, this is bizarre; it led me to think about the way that D&D has changed since I started playing it, which is a topic that seems to get a frequent workout here.

The assumption that home-made D&D settings are somehow inferior to the boxed products seems to underlie that statement. Let's not even begin to try to unpack the sadness of the claim that reading a book is too much work for someone who wants to play a roleplaying game; the inherent contradiction there must rest for another time. But really, it brings home a shock that I've experienced all over the internet: people simply don't like homebrewed material. It looks like D&D has gone from something you make to something you buy, which is a true loss for the community. The same clearly can't be said about the OSR, so there's some hope yet, I suppose.

The Outrage of War

In conflicts, people die. Sometimes they die in terrible, horrible ways. Young lives are snuffed out forever indiscriminately. But sometimes it's not just people that suffer, it's all of history.

Krak des Chevaliers, before the recent damage

There's a report going around now in the news that the marvelously well-preserved crusader castle and archaeological site, Krak des Chevaliers, has been looted. As if that weren't enough, the Syrian government has occupied it and is using it as a fortress; in order to get their tanks into the courtyards, they have bulldozed part of the walls.

Death is inevitable. Destruction of our past is not. Some may think me cold-hearted to care more for artifacts, rare manuscripts, and archaeological sites than I do about people; but one way or another mortality catches up to every human on earth. The same need not be said for precious historical sites.

This matches in every way Caesar's fire of the Library of Alexandria, which robbed the late classical world of some of its greatest texts. It matches the mob's attack on the Serapium centuries later to finish the job. It is of the same caliber as the archaeological plundering during the fall of Iraq. It is as evil as the bombing of Montecassino and the destruction of her beautiful doors, which we can never study again. It is, in short, a horror. Our history is something that, once destroyed, we can never recover. This, more than any other element in this whole Syrian war (and don't get me wrong, I feel for the people Bashar al-Assad is murdering) rends my heart.

I have no words to express my grief at the ruin of Krak des Chevaliers or the nearby medieval mosques. The loss of our history is the loss of ourselves, of us all. Palmyra is in danger as well, if reports can be trusted, a great and ancient spread of Roman ruins occupied by Assad's forces to be used as a staging ground.

But perhaps Plautus already knew all of this, for after all... homo homini lupus.

Left Behind

As I feel as though I've had an inordinate amount of fiction recently (most of it not even medieval!) so I've thought long and hard about something gaming related to talk about. What I've hit upon today is that very thing which drove me to write this blog in the first place. I feel like there is a certain sector of the pen and paper population that's being driven away by Wizards and their marketing strategies, of which game design plays a large part.

I first articulated this feeling in a letter to Wizards nearly a year ago now. The purpose of the letter was to ask for permission to use the trademark AD&D freely within the now-defunct Grognard magazine to which, of course, Wizards refused. The efforts of people like Mearls to "unite" the apparently warring factions of D&D players now sheds some light on their refusal; they themselves are trying to draw people back to the fold who have long since been left behind. I fear they will never draw me back, though, and that is what I want to talk about.

What exactly is it that drove me from the loving arms of the corporate world of D&D? Steve Winter has discussed the poisonous release cycle espoused by Wizards, but that's not the core of the issue. It has exacerbated my problems with the alterations that have been made to Dungeons and Dragons over the past several editions, but the problems themselves come not from the dangerous re-iteration and reshaping of core ideas simply to wring a buck out of the D&D crowd, but rather from the exact direction they have taken.

That direction is simply this: Dungeons and Dragons has become less like the fantasy I want to run and experience. The baseline of D&D has shifted from my fondest days (AD&D 2e, of course) away from the grim fantasy I love and towards flashy action-fantasy. We are told in the most modern iterations of D&D that things like monster ecologies are a waste of valuable ink; they never become relevant, so we do not need to trouble ourselves with them. This is the very attitude that wrongheadedly informs the new iterations of D&D over and over. But why?

In just seven days... I can make you a man

I have a friend who likes all the wrong things in fantasy. He prefers the Lord of the Rings movies to the books. He likes third edition D&D way more than the earlier editions. He likes fast-paced escapist fantasy much more than slow meditative worldbuilding. Whenever we talk about it, there's always an element of tension in the air. Yet, a few days ago I hit upon a revelation about why he likes the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons even though he's old enough to remember AD&D. This is a story of that revelation.

I've been valiantly trying to catalog the differences between older editions of D&D and newer ones for years. It's a never ending conversation that I have with the entire world, posing the questions to everyone I speak with at one point or another. There may be interruptions for other things (such as actual playing) but the question is always there. Why don't I like third and fourth edition? What makes them so fundamentally different from that which came before? In addition to all the things I've discovered through reasoned use of logic, there is this fact that has escaped me again and again. It took looking at the game through someone else's eyes to really understand it.

The Grognard's Anthem

There's an Australian band called Tripod who wrote a Dungeons and Dragons opera. On that album, Tripod vs. the Dragon, there is a song entitled "I will still play." The lyrics towards the end of the song proclaim:

Laugh at me that's nothing new, it was always that way.
Change all the rules to the game from what they were in my day,
but I will still play. I will still play.

 (For the curious, here is Tripod's website)

That is the perfect encapsulation of the way I feel about modern D&D. I started playing D&D when I was young, probably at the age of ten or eleven. Before that I made up my own roleplaying games based on the SNES games I loved (like Link to the Past) using only six sided dice. I discovered D&D at my grandfather's house where a stray book was lying around. I don't remember what edition it was from, but my father thought I was too young for it. So I didn't start playing then, but the images in that book had entered my brain.