Theory Takes The Fun Out Of It

I just finished reading an article in today's Wall Street Journal that got me thinking about "theory" in role-playing games. (Bear with me here.) It's a review by Barton Swaim of a new book called Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism by James Seaton. In the article (which is entitled "Toward a Theory of Lit-Crit"), Mr. Swaim examines Mr. Seaton's premise that most academic literary critics today don't really give a damn if a work of literature is any good from an intellectual or aesthetic perspective. Instead, they mostly care about how well it fits within the fashionable political and philosophical theories of the modern academy. Whether a book brings joy or pleasure to the reader is beside the point. The "meaning" of a work--if such a thing can be said even to exist--is irrelevant. The theory is the thing.

This is, of course, the dreary post-structuralist approach to literary criticism that has haunted humanities departments since at least the 1960s. The litany of (mostly French) names associated with this mode of reading literature is well-known: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc. The list goes on and on. Having studied some of this stuff in graduate school, reading Swaim's article reminded me just how deadly dull and serious these guys are. They can drone on for a hundred pages about how words have no meaning, morality is a mere tool of the powerful, and so on, but I never got the sense that they really enjoyed what they were reading. By subordinating the poem or novel in question to some grand theory into which it must fit, these "theorists" were no longer able to appreciate or take pleasure in the work on its own terms.

This is where role-playing games come in. Over the last few years, some advocates of the old-school renaissance seem to have become enthralled with a "theory" or "theories" of what old-school role-playing ought to be. For example, a true old-school game must be a sandbox campaign in which there is no "story" as such. The players must have complete freedom to go where they will and do what they want with little or no GM "guidance". The goal should be to maximize the recovery of treasure. Dungeons should have lots of empty rooms. Megadungeons should be the default campaign style. I could go on here, but I won't. For some people, any campaign that doesn't have most (if not all) of these features isn't a true "old-school" campaign.

Now, I understand why the advocates of such "theories" about old-school campaigns became so vocal. They were reacting to the "story-path" adventures that had themselves become the default in works published by TSR, Wizards of the Coast, and other major publishers. Nobody (except for maybe the GM) likes an adventure railroad in which the players don't make any real choices because they aren't allowed to deviate from the adventure's plot. The Time of Troubles and the Spellplague series set in the Forgotten Realms or the Heroes of the Lance modules from the World of Krynn spring immediately to mind here. In such campaigns, the players become mere bit players in the GM's amateur novel.

Still, although I want to avoid railroading my players as much as the next guy, I worry that focusing primarily on whether a particular adventure or campaign comports with some a priori theory about what an old-school campaign should look like will, like some turgid essay by Jacques Derrida, drain all the fun out of the experience for everyone. So what if your campaign isn't "really" old-school because it's a quest with a defined beginning, middle, and end? What difference does it make if you don't keep track of experience points or treasure all that closely? Who cares if the PCs are heroes participating in world-shattering events rather than small-time adventurers just looking for the next score? If the game is interesting and stimulating, and everyone in your group has a good time, then isn't that what it's all about? I certainly think so. These are games after all. They're supposed to be fun.

So, here's my big thought (theory?!?!?): elevating abstract theory over all other considerations (such as whether the book or adventure is any good on its own terms) is the enemy of both intellectual pleasure and a plain, old good time--whether one does it to D&D or Tolstoy. Avoid it at all costs.           

My RPG Story

Welcome Back!

In my previous post, I had promised to explain a little more about myself and the campaign I'm running. I had wanted to put that post up last week, but the Fourth of July holiday and a mini-vacation to Surfside, Texas intervened. I apologize for the delay. From now on, I'll try to post at least once a week. I know I probably won't keep up that pace, but it's still good to have goals--even unrealistic ones. Nothing concentrates the mind like an approaching (or, especially, a blown) deadline. 

Anyway, as my Blogger profile states, I'm a 40-something guy who lives in Houston, Texas and likes role-playing games. I have a wonderful wife, two amazing children, and a job that sucks up my free time like Beelzebub's vacuum cleaner. As for the other details of my personal life, I'll skip those for now and get right to what this blog is all about: role-playing games and my interest in them. 

As did many men my age, I first became aware of this odd hobby toward the tail-end of the RPG fad in the early 1980s. My first (relatively) clear memory of role-playing games involves trying to play D&D during lunch breaks in the sixth grade (circa 1982-1983). I don't think my friends and I really followed all the rules. (How could we?) However, we certainly liked the monsters and spells and weapons. And the fighting? That was just awesome. Nothing fires the imagination of a preteen boy like killing things and blowing stuff up. The vehicle for all this grand destruction was Tom Moldvay's "red box" D&D Basic Set. Remember this?

We played the Moldvay red box for a little while that year, but, boys being boys, we didn't want to limit ourselves to just levels 1-3. So I purchased David Cook's D&D Expert Set in order to expand my horizons and find more worlds to conquer. Oddly enough, I also bought Fiend Folio at around the same time, not realizing that it employed an entirely different set of rules. It actually took me at least a year (I think) before I realized that D&D and AD&D employed two different rule systems. I finally figured this out some time in seventh or eighth grade, leading me to promptly ditch D&D as a "kiddie" game in favor of the more "grown-up" AD&D. I soon bought the Players' Manual, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and all the rest.  (With thirty years of hindsight, choosing one game system over another based solely on their intended audiences seems silly, but it certainly didn't look that way to me back then.)

By high school, my friends and I--there was a core group of six of us--had discovered the cornucopia of other games out there besides D&D. We played Traveller, DC Heroes, Marvel Superheros, Boot Hill, Twilight 2000, 2300 AD, Gamma World, Paranoia, and even Toon. Of all these systems, Traveller and AD&D were our favorites. During this time, I rarely acted as GM. A close (and still very dear) friend of mine did that duty. He regularly ran outstanding Traveller adventures and authored a multi-year AD&D campaign that I still consider the gold-standard for RPG campaigns. I eventually took my turn at DC Heroes, Marvel Superheroes, AD&D and Traveller. I wasn't as good as he was at running adventures. But, I was learning, and no one cared all that much as long as we had a good time (which we did more often than not). 

It all ended of course. We graduated from high school, left for college, and (mostly) went our separate ways. During college, we played a little in the summertime when we came back home. We even tried Torg one year. (I still love that game. So sue me.) But, it was never the same. The interest waned. College ended. We moved away. We got married. We had children. Adulthood arrived. By the mid-1990s, I couldn't find anyone in my city interested in playing and, frankly, I didn't care anymore. I hung it up as far as RPGs were concerned. 

Then, in early 2010, John J. Miller, a political reporter for National Review and National Review Online, posted a column about D&D and a website called Grognardia. As a regular reader of National Review, I was intrigued. John J. Miller is a famous (in conservative circles) devotee of D&D. If he thought Grognardia was interesting, I had to see it for myself. I followed the link, and there it was: James Maliszewski's Grognardia. It was a revelation. James seemed to know everything about RPGs as well as fantasy, science fiction and pulp-adventure stories. His posts were literate, measured, and always interesting. I couldn't stop reading them. I soon picked up OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Mutant Future. I also started e-mailing my old gang about my discoveries. (We had started up a regular e-mail correspondence several years before.) I read the new "clones" voraciously. I even went to GenCon in 2011 with two of my old buddies. It was great. And, when Grognardia petered out in December 2012, I took it as a personal loss. (I'll write a separate post about that fiasco later.)

Finally, in February 2013, I started my own OSRIC 1(e) campaign. I had read enough and wanted to get back into it for real. Luckily, I had made a few friends in Houston over the years who liked complicated board games and were receptive to the idea of playing in an old-school AD&D campaign. We all agreed to give it a try, and the rest was history. I continue to run this campaign today. It's set in the 1987 Grey Box Forgotten Realms. I follow a slightly modified OSRIC rules-set that employs some of my favorite additional rules from the original AD&D but still uses OSRIC's cleaner (and vastly improved) combat system. We have now played two seperate adventures over several sessions. Although we only meet (on average) about once a month, it's enough for us. We're all middle-aged professionals with demanding jobs and family responsibilities. The sessions are a great time for all of us and especially rewarding for me as the GM. I will post regular session reports here for anyone interested in them. (My old high-school friends read them avidly.) I hope any other readers out there will find them just as interesting. I don't foresee ending this campaign any time soon, and we are now even looking at playing other game systems. It's been, as a learned sage once said, a long and winding road.

Well, that's my RPG story. It's not a particularly original one, I suspect. But, it's my story nonetheless. I hope you enjoyed it.