The Prodigy and the Grand Master

Being half-Japanese American for me has meant a complicated relationship with Japan. I grew up exposed to Japanese culture through the lens of one person, my mother. I've visited Japan and have spent a bit of time there, so I've also had the chance to learn parts of the culture that appeal to me from family and every day lived experience there. Living in the US, I always feel unsure how to tease Japanese culture out of the Western fascination with Japan. I've never identified as "otaku," in fact in Japan it is a pejorative, not a hip counter culture.

Zen Buddhism is a staple of Western pop culture. Oddly enough, Japanese people often aren't familiar with the word Zen. They'll be like, "Huh? Oh like Zazen meditation, ok!" This is partly because Zen Buddhism is not the dominant form of Buddhism in Japan. Zen is wide spread and practiced across Asia, but every day Japanese people practice Shin Buddhism. This discovery was a bit of a revelation to me, and I feel much more comfortable eschewing the West-favored perspective of Zen, studying Shin instead.

With that the context there, I have some thoughts on Shin Buddhism in TTRPGs since that's where my brain takes everything.

In the book Dharma Breeze, Nobuo Haneda tells a parable of a young prodigy who visited Beethoven's house on a guided tour. At the house was Beethoven's old piano, which guests were allowed to play as part of the tour. So, the prodigy sat down and played an incredible performance, eager at the chance to play her hero's piano. When she finished playing, the rest of the tour group gave an enthusiastic round of applause. The next tour group came through, and in this group was a grand master piano player of world renowned fame. He sat down at the piano and caressed the keys but did not play a note. The prodigy watched him for a while, excited to hear him play, but he did not play. The prodigy grew frustrated and approached him, asking him if he would play. The grand master replied that he dared not, and that nothing he could play would approach the greatness of Beethoven's hands that had graced this piano. 

The meaning of this parable might seem to be that the prodigy is foolish. Instead the story is meant to show that youth is and should be eager to try everything, while spiritual mastery comes from simplicity and humility.

In Shin Buddhism, there is a single Buddha that is worshipped, Amida Buddha. There are many Buddhas, but it is taught that you should focus on the one, rather than the many Buddhas that exist in history. Even Amida Buddha sought to learn from as many masters as there are grains of sand in the Ganges River, but the teaching of Shin Buddhism is to focus solely on Amida. This is because of the need for humility in spiritual enlightenment. To focus on many is to indulge in hubris. There are many Dharma gates (practices of Buddhism), but at some point you need to choose and pass through one. The various Dharmas are like boats moored on a river. You can stand on the shore appreciating all of them, but you have to board one if you want to cross the river.

This idea applies to my personal experience with TTRPGs. There are many TTRPGs, different styles of play, and it is good to try many. But if you want to become skillful and grow personally, it is good to pick one approach and focus on it. Now I should be clear, this is not the stance of all of Buddhism, just Shin Buddism (hence the lengthy preamble). In fact other practices believe you should do the opposite. 

I do play a lot of types of games, I am curious and excited for all of the ideas creative game designers have and want to experience them. But at the same time, I do feel that I am always learning a little more about my preferred play style, and I am slowly honing my skills to create specific experiences I and my group want to have. I think this is the appeal of the "fantasy heartbreaker", the million OSR retroclones with slightly different rules and procedures, the seemingly never ending ranks of game designers interested in making their own systems, and the ravenously hungry fanbase interested in buying new games. It's all an attempt to chase that specific, idiosyncratic play experience that sits on the tip of each of our tongues.

Bureaucracy, Ritual and Games

Proto-Cuneiform tablet: administrative account of barley
distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure,
hunting dogs, and boars. Probably from the city of Uruk.

This will be my last blog post directly based on Graeber and Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything, an anthropological critique of our most basic assumptions about human civilization. I finished reading it a month ago but I revisited it and the notes I made to write this post. It is my final but also most sweeping application of their anarchist anthropology to TTRPGs, hopefully it is successful in making an interesting point.

One of the main concepts introduced in the book is that there are three types of domination that occur, which are in their simplest forms: violence, control of information, and charisma. These types of domination can scale up to create "state" like power, respectively becoming: sovereign monopoly on violence, bureaucracy, and competitive politics. It's possible to make diegetic models of all three of these within a TTRPG or apply them to the practice of playing TTRPGs, but I'm going to focus on the real world application of bureaucracy in the form of game texts and unwritten procedures. It is tempting to think of WotC's hegemonic control over the industry as some sort of sovereignty, but that is a bit of a stretch for me. Similarly, a charismatic player can lead the table in any direction they like through force of personality alone, but that's not what I'm interested here.

In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow look towards anthropology to examine historical precedent for many ideas we take for granted about human nature. One of these assumptions they deconstruct is the parallel growth of cities and a need for hierarchy. 

In Uruk, one of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, there was an interesting phase that lasted for centuries before royalty appeared. The city has the oldest recorded bureaucracy, documented by their famous cuneiform tablets, tablets that recorded transactions of goods and services made by temple factories that output products in uniform packaging for equitable distribution to its populace. The authors comment in the book, "administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening." 

Across the ocean and centuries later in the Andes mountains, there was a similar phenomenon. Before the Inca empire came to dominate the land, ayllu village associations were a form of bureaucratic administration that performed the redistribution of agricultural land among families as they changed in size, to ensure that wealth disparity did not develop. They also made sure the infirm, orphans, widows and disabled were taken care of. 

Ayllus used an accounting method involving tying knots in strings called khipu to track debts. At the end of the year debts were to be cancelled out and knots were untied. When the Inca empire came to rule over the ayllus, these khipu knots were never unraveled, representing a permanent debt to masters.

Now, it is important to point out that these examples are not indicating a pure, primordial period of human innocence, but instead that bureaucracy is not inherently coercive. Tracking and control of information can in fact be used as a means of producing equality as much as it can to take it away.

I think this same bureaucratic tension exists in TTRPGs, where game rules control flows of information. Mechanics, procedures and modules can be liberatory, and push us to more unfettered ways of thinking, but they can also dominate us, narrowing our thinking and funnel us into restrictive, hierarchical behavior. What these are exactly, is hard to say, especially without getting sanctimonious about wrong-bad-fun. To a degree, if someone wants to finish a hard days work, turn off their brain and play a railroaded adventure prewritten by DM Johnny, that is their right and they should be able to do so free of judgement. But at the same time, games can create a space where instead of reproducing the oppressive structures of capitalist society, they can help us to transcend it and try to imagine something new. 

In the Dawn of Everything, there is another interesting thing that happens with bureaucracy. In some societies where the two other forms of domination - sovereignty and political power - come to the forefront, bureaucracy can be pushed to the imaginary. The ajaws of Classic Maya used control of information very little to exert control over their people, while their society observed a complex mythological, cosmic bureaucracy. Here the control of information can become the domain of ritual, or even games. Ritual and games can act as a repository of knowledge and zone of experimentation for a society. Throughout history, new technologies emerged first as experimental flirtations with new ways of life through play. According to French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the indigenous Australian corroboree can be a festive ceremony where ritual is marked off from ordinary life, where essentially imaginary social institutions are maintained, and where the power to create new social orders appears, projected onto totemic spirits and their emblems.

This is games at their most grandiose, where they offer a window to the most ambitious and idealistic visions for society and possibility. They already inherently contain these seeds. We talk about some of these ideas in the game design world as "the magic circle," to describe the separation of a game world from the ordinary world. While I am not saying that people are obliged to use TTRPGs to recreate society, I also hope that we can recognize the full potential that game texts and unwritten cultures of play have to offers us. 

Schismogenesis in TTRPGs

My wife and I have a game we play occasionally when we are people watching in the colder months. The idea is that couples and families will often have matching jackets. We call them Jouples. This sort of reflects that people who end up together often have complementary aesthetic tastes, or that their aesthetics grow together. It also probably reflects the fact that one member of the couple might be buying jackets for the other. So you can guess if a group of people are a family, or a more incidental group of individuals, like coworkers or something. You can also use it to guess how long a couple has been together, and it's fun to joke "oh those two will never work out," because their jackets don't match. There is, however, an exception to Jouple Theory. A child of a jouple will sometimes have a jacket with aethetics completely at odds with that of their parents. The idea of teenage rebellion is of course common to all of us. There is a big, fancy word that I've recently learned for this phenomenon, and it's the theme of this post: Schismogenesis. 

Schismogenesis is a word used by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything, which they use to describe intentional culture creation by a society which is a direct rejection of their neighbors. The word's roots 'schism-o-genesis' mean generation through schism. The first example of this in the book is that of indigenous tribes in what is now the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada, like the Kwakiutl, who had decadent lifestyles and held slaves, and their neighbors in what is now California, like the Yurok, who were expected to be modest and focused more on individual work ethic. It is also used to describe the differences between the ancient Athenians and Spartans, with their sharply contrasting democratic and militaristic societies. 

So like the teenager who creates their fashion by rejecting their parents' fashion, or societies who create their own culture through rejection of their neighbor's culture, TTRPGs can also be created by rejection of other TTRPGs. In an AMA on the NSR Discord, Vincent Baker said:

"I think that there's a common misunderstanding of game design at large — the biological metaphor, the idea that a game has ancestors — that hits PbtA especially hard. The fact is, new games contradict the games that came before, at least as often as they build on them. PbtA should best be seen as a movement of contradictions."

So in other words, game designers in Baker's Storygamer cohort were influenced by traditional mainstream games like D&D and Vampire, but not in that they wanted to copy those games, but that they rejected them and the things that those games did. They disliked the idea that the game master had total control of the narrative, saying that complex mechanics meant that a game master had to plan encounters ahead of time because they needed to have opponents and scenarios statted out. Their design of contradiction meant that narrative control was partly taken away from the game master and redistributed formally through mechanics to the players. It meant that opponents needed minimal stats, so that they could be generated on the fly to handle whatever situation the table found itself in. 

Later on in The Dawn of Everything, schismogenesis comes up again. In discussing one of the first cities, Uruk of Mesopotamia, the authors mention a theory of Hector Munroe Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge in the 1920's (apparently a contemporary of J.R.R Tolkien who was at Oxford). Chadwick popularized an idea that fell out and then regained popularity of what he called heroic societies. These societies were characterized by "heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior." These societies emerge again and again throughout history on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities like Uruk. What often happens is that a city rises to prominence, and establishes satellite settlements to help manage the flow of resources to the city, and that those settlements realize that rather than acting in service to the larger city, sending the majority of resources down the road, they can keep that wealth to themselves through the power of individual charisma and martial skill. 

My next analogy here is that the OSR emerged from mainstream D&D similarly by creating a 'heroic society' of their own. Groups of players existed on the margins of D&D culture, getting left behind as more and more complex editions written through bureaucratic process came down the pipeline. These tables eventually realized that their cultural cache could be used to carve out their own spaces, rather than bending the knee to 'Big D&D,' relying on individual writing skill and artistic talent to break away and forge their own path. 

There are of course many other indie games that have come about over the years through their own processes, some similar to the ones discussed above, and some totally different. I just mention these reductive analogies for their simplicity. 

Thinking in broad terms of these two artistic movements, its easy to imagine a dialectic of sorts, where there are two competing styles of indie games, and the logical way forward is through a synthesis of Storygames and the OSR. But through the schismogenetic lens, the opposite can also be the case. As much as artistic styles will go back to look at older games as biological ancestors, they will also reject their parents, and find cool new jackets of their own.

Why We Suck at Critiquing the Forge

It's pretty common to hear someone in the TTRPG space say that they hate discourse. I think its fair to say that this online discourse is shaped by social media algorithms of the platforms that the conversations are happening on. As the people who participated in the hobby moved between forums, blogs, Google+, YouTube and Twitter, the way that people interacted also changed. Modern social media algorithms maximize engagement by promoting the most divisive arguments, and under the forces of this machine, a certain conflict crystallized. This conflict was built on the unresolved tensions already existing in the discourse, but it distilled them into the argument that provokes the strongest reaction possible. This argument more or less makes the claim that game mechanics are analagous to real life systems of oppression, and that it is virtuous to get rid of them. We then go on to say that the idea that System Matters, and its originator Ron Edwards are the face of game designers everywhere who would impose their mechanics on you.

Regardless of how much I agree with the virtues of throwing off mechanical shackles, this critique doesn't seem to be familiar with the ideas of the Forge, so it feels like an unsatisfying critique to me. The problem is that advocating for rules light, lore heavy games is a preference in design, so it is still effectively a statement of system matters in the Forge sense. This creates a pretty deep cognitive divide and is a big part of the "discourse" we have all grown so tired of, with people shouting back and forth, not at each other but at boogeymen. Despite all this I don't think that discourse itself is bad, and I even still think that critique is the most interesting way to explore and understand the world.

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I got into the hobby the same way a lot of millenials like myself did, I played as a kid and then after a long hiatus, got back into it with the release of 5th Edition D&D. As I scratched the surface of the hobby, I discovered the two most interesting sub-cultures within the hobby, OSR and Storygames. The OSR was mostly blogs, and Storygames was mostly discussions on a handful of online forums. I dived into both and in the process I read some of Ron Edwards' posts about his Big Model and its three styles of games: narrative, game, and simulation. As an aside, these three categories are not his and date further back into forums in the 90s. I thought his writing was thought provoking, but at times infuriating in his condescention towards what he called incoherent games. Incoherent games did not have a clear idea of whether they were narrativist, gamist or simulationist, and suffered some sort of debilitating, internal conflict.

Modern day Forge adherents do exist, and they do still apply these principles of mechanical purity in the service of a taxonomical view of game design. In this view a game is an animal, and it should be a mammal, reptile, or fish. It should not be more than one type.

Why can't a game be an ecosystem, or group, or symbiotic relationship? What if instead of basing our conception of a game as an atomized creature, we think of it as an assemblage of interacting actors that feed off of each other? Maybe a TTRPG is like five goblins in a trenchcoat.

The clownfish can swim among the anemone's tentacles, immune to its sting. In exchange for this protection, it cleans and protects the anemone in turn. This mutualistic relationship goes beyond the pair, an array of crustaceans and algae can be a part of the anemone's symbiotes. A good example of symbiosis in games might be the core gameplay loop of D&D that cycles between dungeon to downtime. Dungeon exploration would fit into a competitive, gamist style of play, it features combat, problem solving, and stategic resource management. Downtime fits into a simulationist or narrativist mold, as it has to do with economics and making social connections. In the Forge purists eyes, this is a dysfunctional or incoherent game. But the truth is that these two parts work together perfectly well and even complement each other, despite their differences. A group of players who have a lot in common may still have people who are inclined to one or the other style of play, while still having fun playing together. These two parts can also have clear exchanges of gameplay currencies, benefitting each other. Just as a table contains a group of people, a game can contain a group of interacting, modular systems.

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In The Dawn of Everything, Graber and Wengrow write about the myth of the descent of humanity from primordial times. This myth says that we started as bands of foragers, then as we progressed to sedentary farming and then to industrial society, we became increasingly more organized and hierarchized. A progression of societal development follows where each form dominates and forces out the previous one. But the truth is that through prehistory back to the ice age, and up until modern times there have been societies that alternate between wandering nomadism and sedentary farm life with the changing seasons. Their social structure might annually cycle from fiercly hierarchical to egalitarian openness. If an entire society can choose to regularly change their fundamental mode of interaction, why can't a TTRPG table?

What We Talk About When We Talk About D&D

Juno and Jupiter would have Minerva over to play 2nd edition AD&D in the basement of their parents' house. They played all through high school. Jupiter was the DM, who hacked the system for "realism" and homebrewed his own fantasy kingdom. Juno played a Cleric and was mostly interested in growing her religion in the city. Minerva played a Fighter and was the driving force for adventure. She would drag Juno into dungeons and relish in the strategic use of space and violence. Juno would mostly hang back and play support, but she would step in during encounters that could be resolved by talking. Once, in a parley with one of the settings villians, she got concessions that would bring respite to many suffering folk of the realm. After returning to the city from a dungeon delve, Juno would use the party's considerable spoils to spread her religion. In the city, Minerva would mostly hang back until she discovered the fighting pits, but they never really held her interest. As Juno's following grew, they drew the attention of a rival cult who eventually sent assassins after them. In the campaign finale, the party raided the cult temple and defeated the arch-priest in a climactic battle. That was the summer that Juno and Jupiter left for college, going to opposite sides of the country. No one played D&D after the party split that year.

Many years later, they made plans to play again when they were all back in their hometown for the holidays. They would play at Minerva's place. She had never left town, and was now a welder and married with kids. Jupiter worked in sales and Juno worked in Silicon Valley. 5th edition D&D had been out for a while and Jupiter had been listening to actual plays, and had been crafting a new setting set in the original kingdom of their high school days, but hundreds of years in the future. He could never sleep in the hotel beds he stayed in while visiting customers across the Midwest region, and often stayed up late feverishly writing the new campaign. Unfortunately that year COVID-19 hit and they called the game off to avoid flying. Soon after that, Jupiter was promoted and relocated to the company HQ in England. The three had a group chat for years, filling it with Critical Role memes, but Jupiter eventually dropped off the map getting absorbed into his new career. Juno and Minerva stayed friends and sometimes visit on the holidays. They like to talk about the latest Soulsbourne game.

OCs against Consumer Culture

Blorthax the Lizard Wizard (art by
@fitivarka.bsky.social)

I have a stack of books and zines on my bedstand, things I am currently reading by cycling through or intending to get around to soon. I've always been like this, a bit ADD and curious about more than I have the ability to actually sit down and read. In the last 12 years that I have been rediscovering TTRPGs and getting into the indie scene, TTRPG products have taken up more and more of this stack. It seems like there is an endless stream of must-have instant classics being released at all times. A recent Polygon article states that tabletop board game crowdfunding is loosing steam. The same does not seem to be true for the tabletop role-playing game world. The new Ultraviolet Grasslands boxed set seems deluxe as can be with custom dice, and Tomkin Press's latest provides options for four books and two decks of cards. If TTRPG crowdfunding is flagging, there is still enough momentum to propel our little cottage industry well into the future. 

I try to keep up with what I can, helplessly compelled to buy all these exciting new products. I probably finish one or more adventures or other TTRPG books a month, and this content inevitably shows up in my games in some form or another. I have three different groups I play with that are all curious to try different games and ideas, although a lot of people are also attached to the longer committed campaigns. I think the appeal of these longer campaigns is that players get the time to build an emotional connection, or at least resonance with their fictional characters. This is what Levi Kornelson calls Kenosis in his Manyfold Model. Characters pass into the realm of familiar, and players become comfortable inhabiting characters and interacting with one other, fleshing out their own unique rapport and shared history. This kind of play might be supported within an active zine-buying hobby, where the GM focuses on only adventure modules, rejecting products that would present too drastic of a shift from the game in terms of system or setting. I know many tables actually do this successfully, but for me and for some that I know, the depth and breadth of cool stuff being made destroys any chance to only bring zines to the table that won't break the tone of the game. It seems that overall, too healthy of an interest in the indie TTRPG scene means it's impossible to have a long, epic campaign with a familiar cast of well-worn heroes. 

Or does it.

The OC or "Original Character" is described by the Retired Adventurer blog as: 

"OC basically agrees [...] that the goal of the game is to tell a story, but it deprioritises the authority of the DM as the creator of that story and elevates the players' roles as contributors and creators. The DM becomes a curator and facilitator who primarily works with material derived from other sources - publishers and players, in practice. OC culture has a different sense of what a "story" is, one that focuses on player aspirations and interests and their realisation as the best way to produce "fun" for the players."

 The OC having their own backstory is not central to the point I am trying to make here. The important part is that the OC is the player's creation that transcends the game. An OC can appear in any system, in any setting, in any time period. Blorthax the Lizard Wizard knows no boundaries, surfing from table to table unfettered, slaying goblins in Mork Borg one day, and blasting aliens in a Starfinder game the next. OCs take on a sort of quantum nature, where alternate reality instantiations of them could multiply endlessly across groups of players.

Although OCs are thought of as a modern phenomenon, I think there are traces of similar characters that go back to the early days of the hobby. People brought characters from Gary Gygax's house to Dave Arnesen's to play in their respective dungeons, and since high lethality games call for regarding characters as replaceable pawns, created the same or similarly named characters over and over. 

The point for me in bringing this up, is that here we have two contradicting strains of play that seem to develop together because of their difference, and perhaps even depend on each other in a weird way. Not all differing styles of play are mutually exclusive. Some are even symbiotic.

Sandboxing Volturnus 2: The Octopods

Preamble 

In continuing my project to rewrite the classic Star Frontiers adventure as a sandbox, I am now moving on to one of the planets many sentient species. In the original series, there are two main entries for each species, one to introduce them, and another for a quest to win their support in a climactic finale. 

The first species encountered are a desert dwelling, dinosaur riding species of octopii that have an Avatar-like 9th tentacle that can be used to mind meld with other living creatures, including their dino-mounts. In the linear adventure narrative, these octopods rescue the party soon after their starship crashes, and together they set out on a journey to their holy city, where the players can partake in a religious ceremony doing battle with an ancient genetically engineered beast to gain favor with the tribe. Fighting the beast is part of the agreement for receiving help, so this is a section of the railroad that I am trying to unwind and turn into a sandbox. On the way back to the holy city, the party becomes separated from their guides while traversing a dangerous underground cave system/dungeon due to a cave in, and must forge on through the railroad alone. 

In their second entry in the adventure series, the party needs to once again gain favor with the tribe, this time to convince them to join an epic battle for the fate of the planet. In the second appearance, the players must once again win the favor of the tribe, this time by finding another one of these genetically engineered beasts to capture it and return it to the tribe. The two octopod quests are so similar that they are a bit boring, but I can try to imagine a greater cosmology surrounding these beasts. 

Octopods Culture

Octopods worship an essence that permeates all things in this world. Objects and individuals are merely differentiated expressions of the underlying essence. When a living thing is born, they emerge from the great world essence, and when they die, they return to it once again. Their worldview is tightly bound to their ability to use a specialized ninth tentacle which allows them to connect to nearly any living creatures nervous system via spinal cord and communicate with it telepathically. Because of this bond, they feel a great sense of responsibility to the living creatures of their world. Among the creatures they commune with, they have a very close relationship with their dinosaur like mounts called striders. Striders often play roles in their many religious ceremonies and athletic competitions. 

There are however, many genetically engineered creatures left behind by a great and malignant race of worms who reject communication with the octopods, and are thus seen as outside the great world essence. The worms set these creatures loose on their planet long ago in an attempt to conquer it, though they were driven away in a great and fabled battle. In remembrance of this history, the octopods have also taken it upon themselves to hunt these genetically engineered creatures. In particular are the manglers, a quadrupedal death machine that can shoot poisonous barbs from their tails. Many octopod ceremonies center around the capture and ritual combat with manglers. In order to gain favor with an octopod tribe, outsiders may have to participate in one of these mangler related ceremonies to prove their worthiness. Despite being wary of outsiders, they extend mutual aid such as water and shelter from extreme desert weather to all living creatures that can commune with them via ninth tentacle link. This includes almost all living creatures in space except those genetically engineered by the worms.