Basically yeah the devil makes work for idle hands

Assumption 1:

Online communities produce good stuff when a large number of people who wouldn't otherwise meet can trade ideas with a minimum of noise and abuse. 

(Note that abuse and criticism aren't the same thing, criticism can be constructive. Abuse: lying, trolling, etc, can't.)

You get enough people talking with a low enough cost to talking and some statistically inevitable fraction of them will be smart and talented and learn from each other, becoming a whole greater than the parts. I consider that inevitable.

Assumption 2:

Abuse and noise come from dickheads.

Conclusion 1:

You get a good community producing good stuff by making a big community and excluding or rehabilitating dickheads.

Assumption 3:

Communities have a hard time agreeing who is a dickhead, or doing anything about it even when people clearly break rules the community espouses. This is familiar territory.

Any list of things not to do (guidelines, codes of conduct, strident Twitter hashtags about not being racist or sexist) falls by the wayside when contemplating members of that community who can claim to have some other value--they're productive,  they're powerful, they're entertaining, they're friendly, etc. Practically speaking, everyone can claim to have some other value--there's no douchebag so douchey that nobody in the community can't at least make an argument that some good outweighs the bad they do.

In the end most communities end up judging people more on whether they fit that community's genre of behavior than on whether the person did something to violate the community's explicit standards. Which just makes them into abusive, harassy echo-chambers.

Conclusion 2:

Communities need better ways to determine who is a dickhead.

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Gaming's most dickhead-rich subcommunities can give a helpful negative example. You can look at places where there's lots of participants, but so noisy or intolerant that no useful ideas ever get generated: When the desperately low level of discussion at Story-Games.com was criticized, the founder--Andy Kitkowski--defended it by going "Hey man, this is just a place for people to hang out and talk, people don't necessarily want to be challenged" when RPGnet's bigoted mods and sexism are brought up, Shannon Appelcline defends it by saying "The rules there create a pleasant community", Something Awful's purpose is, allegedly, to tell jokes--but the RPG threads aren't jokes, they're fairly earnest contests over who can most effectively smear people who don't play their preferred games, theRPGsite and Gaming Den have no rules or statement of purpose beyond "talk about games" and the same goes for many of the more hostile old-school forums.

What these places all have in common is describing no explicit reason to be beyond continuing their own existence.

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Think for a second about the difference between two different definitions of the purpose of a community:

-To talk about games

-To learn about games

These both seem kindergarten-level innocuous but the first one suggests that members should be censured, excluded, avoided, rehabilitated or removed (practically speaking people are usually just avoided) if they interfere with talking about games--which is an almost impossibly high standard. Even the most douchey members of the game community are fully capable of harassment or abuse while still talking about games.

If we assume the point of a community is to learn about games however, we suddenly have a guideline with teeth, that can be used to judge behavior:

Somebody a sizable chunk of the community considers a charming rogue keeps shitposting? That doesn't help anyone learn about games.

Somebody is very earnest and well-intentioned and accuses a game of being broken yet can't provide any proof?  That doesn't help anyone learn about games.

Somebody's kinda funny while lying about someone's game? That doesn't help anyone learn about games.

Someone asks questions about how games work that make some members stressed out because they don't have the presence of mind to realize there's no penalty for answering "wrong"? That's fine: it helps people learn about games.

Obviously that doesn't solve all problems, and I don't think "learn about games" should be the one-size-fits-all purpose of game communities, but the point is...

Assumption 4:

The more specific and explicit a community is about goals their ongoing conversation is pursuing beyond "to have a conversation", the easier it is to collectively and fairly identify people who are acting against that goal and being dickheads.

Conclusion 3:

In order to be healthy and worthwhile and not abusive, communities need to focus as much or more effort on describing why they are talking at all as they do on what kind of behavior they consider shitty.

(Assumption 5:

For some people this conclusion is anathema because talking about games is itself the main entertainment, and it serves no purpose being pursued out in the real world. These people are too boring to care about and should get lives.)

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At this point you might be wondering what I think the reason I write on this here blog is. It's been the same since the beginning: the purpose of this blog and any activity connected to it is to improve my game at my house. I write my ideas here so people can read them and maybe give me new ideas, I write books so that I can use them and so that other people will steal the ideas and write better books that I can use for my game, I talk about what a game community should be so that I can benefit from the ideas a good community produces. My goal is practical and selfish in that regard.

You don't have to have that same goal, but I do think you're better off if you know why you're writing and so is everyone else. Like once I remember Joethelawyer said he wrote his blog so everyone would know how smart he was--that definitely helped me know what kind of conversations I do or don't want to have with Joe.

I think a lot of people, consciously or unconsciously, do have this same goal as me in DIY D&D though: they have a game, they have ideas, they want to trade so they can have a richer and more fun game. Once you've explicitly said "this is why we're talking" a lot of bullshit can be cut through very quickly. For example: we collectively produced The Hexenbracken very quickly by describing a problem we needed solved--we want an easy-to-use hexcrawl--and then creating a thread that only allowed for behavior directed toward that goal.

The thing is: after a while you get what you need. You learn how to run the kind of game you want to run. When you need less, you give less, and the community tumbles past you. So just as the tree of liberty needs to be fed with the blood of tyrants, DIY D&D needs to be fed with problems to solve. When people have no real problem to solve they either don't show up or just show up out of loneliness, and you haven't got any decent reason to cut the good from the bad--after all you're just there to pass the time and shittiness passes time as well as niceness. This is why people tend to post better stuff when they're actually playing.

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In the past few years, the DIY RPG scene has had a lot more success than anyone might've expected. It rescued lots of good ideas from the trash and invented lots of new ones that keep getting used, it introduced a new diversity to gaming, it produced publishing companies that actually turn a profit, it influenced a new edition of D&D that's proved to be popular, it put out products and web widgets that will probably be sought after for as long as tabletop RPGs are a thing, it exposed the pretensions of many of the worst elements in the game scene, and, more than all of that but less tangibly, it got information and new ideas into the hands of thousands of people who are using the ideas at tables that they might not have been inspired to play at before. It does, broadly, what it set out to do. But in order to keep doing it, it needs challenges.

So I guess the point is: cherish and share your problems. Tell people what you're trying to do right now and why it's hard to do it. Make it difficult. We're at our best when we have something to think at.
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Get one here.

Be Good.

The picture that sticks with me I heard about second hand--the rescue workers in Orlando going in to the club to pick up the bodies, many fallen where they stood, and all the victims' cell phones still ringing--their friends and loved ones calling to see if they're ok.

The image hits because it's about how things ripple out.

Matt Finch, "the Swords & Wizardry guy" is in a same-sex marriage and was more eloquent than I could ever be about the shooting and about how lives touch other lives--"Except for an accident of geography, Ian and I could have hit the point of "Death Do Us Part.""

Locally, on the same day LA Pride just barely escaped being bombed by some nutjob--and every woman here at D&D w/Porn Stars is L, B or T. This blog wouldn't exist if I wasn't playing games and without them I wouldn't be playing because I'd never have had a game group. My books would have no covers, for lack of models, and no playtesters, and no reason to exist.

An OSR and a DIY RPG scene without the inspiration of like Jennel Jacquays' Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia, without Scrap Princess or Brendan or without many of the other L and G and B and T fans and creators who make this place fun would be much different and suckier.

I haven't got anything smart to say about it that will in any way contribute to one less person getting shot because (yet again) some asshole saw a sexy thing that wasn't their sexy thing and got offended. Just: be a good friend to your friends. Friends are all a community is and friends are all you really have.

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Four Projects, Three Castles

Project One:

Remember Red & Pleasant Land? Winner of 2 gold and 2 silver Ennies the Indiecade judges' award and an Indie Rpg Award?

Well that went ahead and won another award: the Three Castles Award. This one is very special to me personally not just because it has a nifty trophy...

...but also because the judge panel is fucking amazing this year and consists of names I've known ever since I was a wee lad and first started thinking about going into dungeons to kill dragons:

Dennis Sustare--as in Chariot of Sustarre, the most badass druid spell in AD&D--who invented the class
James M Ward--who did Metamorphosis Alpha--the first sci-fi RPG. And who I've heard from multiple sources is literally the best GM in game history.
Zeb Cook--Whose name I know best from the cover of the Oriental Adventures book I read over and over and over and over and over as a child.
Steve Winter--Who did a lot on FASERIP, including the best superhero sandbox ever.
and Steve Perrin--As in fucking RuneQuest.

That's an amazing slate and I'm honored that the people who added druids, laserguns, ninjas, rebel superheroes and die mechanics that actually make sense to RPGs even read Red & Pleasant Land much less decided to give it an award--especially considering the other nominees this year were hella impressive.

Let's hope in a couple decades she writes a game and I get to be on a panel giving her an award.

PS if you don't have one and are going to Gen Con, LotFP, the publisher will be there. Though copies do go fast.

Project Two:

Those of you wondering about Black Metal Amazons of the Devoured Land or Amazons of the Metal North or whatever we're calling it--we're working on it:

The girls modeled as the amazons for the paintings I'm doing, here are some pics from the shoot:

Project Three:

Maze of the Blue Medusa (Yes, I plan to do a book for every color in the goddamn rainbow) is now physically manifest and I am pleased to breathe a sigh of relief and note that neither man nor machine has ever devised a finer-looking megadungeon. Not empty boasting, check it:

Also, if you want to play it at GenCon, hurry up and sign up. The games are being run by Ken Baumann,  Satyr Press' publisher and actual real-life tv actor and he's been hilarious and clever in every game I've ever played with him and cracks everyone up.

Here's an actual-play report. And a thorough review.

There will be copies at GenCon but like they will probably be gone in seconds because they're heavy so each vendor can't really carry that many so you might best just order one.

There might be a few expensive signed copies available, too, maybe. If you're into that sort of thing. And if you get an early flight. Stay tuned to this blog for details.

Project Four:

Some stuff about Project Four:

-Project Four is secret, because it will be the subject of a major and official announcement by a big game company.

-Project Four is going to make all the right people incredibly upset when it's announced. Before they even read it.

-Project Four is taking up all my time right now which is why I haven't been posting much.

-Project Four has two main creative people on it, both doing writing and art: me and a woman whose work I've admired for years.

-The necrophilia was her idea.

-Project Four is weird and experimental.

-While writing Project Four I checked into a hotel. Next to the bed was a bible and a copy of Keith Richards' autobiography. I consulted both a great deal.

-"Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased"

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And now,  a word from our sponsor:

Here

The Lacuna: Winners Advance to Thought Eater Round Three

The winners of the second round of the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Contest are in...

source

Ferris Bueller as RPG beats Lovecraft Was A Bad Shrink

Tolkien Was A Bad GM beats The German Illustrator

Annotated Tomb of Horrors beats Revelation in Lovecraft

RIFTS Psionics beats The Hobbit Movie Is Bad Adventure Design

Strahd is Cooler Than Dracula beats Elven Snowflakes

Casablanca As Adventure Design beat the average

Melville, Freud, Lovecraft beat the average

If any of the authors (winner or loser) would like to out themselves in the comments, feel free to do so now.

Ok, rules for the third round:

-This round is inspired by a line at the beginning of Houllebecq's essay on Lovecraft:

"If one defines a writer not by reference to the themes that they treat, but by reference to those
they repudiate, then one agrees that Lovecraft occupies a place totally apart."

...this is the essay where Houllebecq goes on to point out that Lovecraft studiously avoids sex and money in his fiction.

The crucial point here is: this is a lacuna that Houllebecq had to discover, it was not explicitly on top. Lovecraft's stories are not advertised as "Tales of cosmic horror that don't have typical human relationships or class in them".

So for this round I'd like the winners to take some subject and tell us what is avoided in it--and what this tells us and why it's interesting. It should preferably be something the authors may not even have been conscious of avoiding, and should definitely be something the rest of us are not yet conscious that they avoid.

So, for example, writing about how some iteration of D&D lacks noncombat task resolution is immediately out. Whereas if you discover that nobody laughs during the entire Morte D'Arthur or that no-one ever ever eats in a Clark Ashton Smith story or that agriculture never appears in any RIFTS module or that nothing from Green Ronin publishing ever has the word "pig" in it, that's fair.

As this is a fairly difficult and demanding remit probably requiring a little research, the range of topics is relatively unrestricted other than "it should be an RPG or obviously RPG-adjacent" and that it can't be Lovecraft or Tolkien as we've beat those two to death recently. I would definitely be interested in thoughts on RPGs outside the OSR usual.

-This is different than the previous rounds because I will exercise a veto/editorial power over these. If I get one that has a lazy line like "I don't know why this is, but I think it it's true, or at least interesting" about its central premise, I will be like "This needs to be better, try harder, rewrite". 

-If you are one of the winners named above, then email me your new essay by July 1st--zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the all-caps subject THOUGHT EATER 3.

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Kill A Church

"the only Christianity they defeated was the last piece of Christianity within themselves. Which is a very good beginning, of course"

--Erik Danielsson in Black Metal Satanica, 2008

Short Preamble

Today's controversy. Remarkable for 3 reasons:

1-Most self-defeating moral outrage in human history.
2-RPG people are still signing onto it. Morally outraged that a comic book has a cliffhanger.

3-Some of the people reading this still pay attention to those RPG people when they talk about games and will keep doing it even after today.

I've long since accepted that 3 will always be true--there is no level of insane that an Indie game designer can be that people won't be like "Maybe I will give Crazy some attention and money?".

So let's not dwell. These conservatives are crazy, Some of you are still reading them, funding them, inviting them into the larger conversation about RPGs. You will never stop. It makes the world worse for fans online and creators, you don't care. Ok.

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But when the world is dumb: let's at least learn something...

Now fucktheory, who not only is very smart but comes at this--helpfully--from a wider philosophical and radical queer background (non-gaming, non-geek) is addressing the issue of cultural appropriation, but this pretty much applies to all the controversies of online psychoculture. Let's Read:

But this...

RPG examples abound. You must consult ninjas, the dumbest thing ever said about RPGs, etc.

This is an important point. The Drama Club never has a concrete checklist of what "doing the thing right" requires--whether that's use of violence, sexuality, cultural appropriation or diversity. At most they point to examples--which devolves to unbelievable vagueness ("be respectful") or, "Well I know it when I see it". In other words: they the critic get to decide what's morally suspect on a case-by-case basis rather than outlining a set of principles that their own work can be judged by.

Also: outlining principles or definitions (of, say "respectful") would invite discussion and Discussion Is Bad.

The obsession with whether a Cap storyline hurts me as a Jew and descendant of Holocaust survivors and all similar controversies where the Drama Club share a Concern on behalf of numb, objectified marginalized people whom they aren't which is inextricably linked to unacknowledged Contempt for the voices of equally marginalized artists they aren't isn't a condition arrived at through thought. It's just their own anxiety and desire for universal concession to concessions they themselves have made long ago made (there's a reason so many are religious or parents--conservatism is the fear someone else is having fun somewhere), writ large and pointed at anyone who points that out.

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So, ok. Maybe you aren't invested enough in the world being good to click the Unfollow button when faced with The Bad. But at least know how it got that way. At least learn something while you're here at D&D With Porn Stars, even if you never ever ever ever ever do anything with what you learned.

Seeya.

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David Foster Wallace Correlating The Mind's Contents

David Foster Wallace talking about an early bout of suicidal depression--as quoted in David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself...

...it may be what in the old days was called a spiritual crisis or whatever. It’s just the feeling as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function.

 What's interesting for RPG fans here is: that is exactly how the Cthulhu Mythos stat in Call of Cthulhu works. The more useful things you know about the Cthulhu stuff--the real engine of the universe--the lower your max Sanity.

Melville, Freud & Lovecraft (Thought Eater)

Here is an entry for the Thought Eater DIY RPG Essay Tournament.

If you're new to the contest, it's like this: this essay is not by me--got that Metafilter?--it's by an anonymous DIY RPG writer who was assigned to write something interesting and original about hoary old RPG topics.

Anybody reading is eligible to vote for which one you like best and voting will be cut off once all the votes for all the second round Thought Eater essays are up...

The rules for the second round are here.

The difficulty is I am an idiot and accidentally left this one out when I was rolling out the entries, meaning this one's orphaned. This is how it'll work--if you like it,  send an email with the Subject "NUD" to zakzsmith AT hawt mayle. Don't put anything else in the email, I won't read it. If you don't, do nothing. At the end I'll look to see if it has more votes than the average entry. If so: it goes to the next round.

I reread Moby-Dick recently (you have to hyphenate it, it’s like Spider-Man) and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it had in common with The Call of Cthulhu.

There’s a scholarly young man in New England who lets restlessness and curiosity drag him into a quest for a terrible sea monster rumoured to lurk in the Antipodes. He has a series of adventures, each more spooky than the last, involving half-mad sailors, derelict ships, strangely-shaped animals, the threat of cannibalism and the deep existential terror of having to interact with people from the Pacific Islands. By the time he realizes what a bad decision he’s made it’s too late and he’s pulled inexorably into a confrontation with the monster, which kills everyone aboard the ship except for one man who’s left alive to tell the tale. There’s a bunch of structural differences - Thurston is just reading about the voyage, Ishmael is actually on board - but the narrative progression is the same.

There are a couple of explanations for this. One is Freudian. Cthulhu’s a vagina, Moby Dick’s a dick, sex is a nightmarish leviathan that can never be looked at directly and the Pacific Ocean is the Victorian unconsciousness in which it lurks. As tedious as this kind of thing always is, I can’t help but feel like there’s something to it. More importantly, however, both Melville and Lovecraft had read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which is by Edgar Allen Poe and about all the same shit. We don’t have to invent some kind of weird laborious psychosexual code language when we can just say that they liked a book. I like that book and I’m not terrified of women. Melville didn’t write eighteen billion pages about whale biology because he was wrestling with his homosexuality. He probably was wrestling with his homosexuality, but he wrote those pages because he liked whale biology. We don’t have to assume that just because sex is super important, nothing else we do is important unless it can be made to relate to sex.

Now Melville is a much better writer than Lovecraft. This is because he is more specific. Lovecraft will tell you that the monster is spooky and you should be spooked by it. Melville will tell you how a whale’s dick works. There is a scene in Moby-Dick where a guy wears a whale’s foreskin as a poncho. And despite this, Melville’s whales continue to be spooky. Advantage: Melville.

But Lovecraft has a much greater influence over our culture than Melville. Nobody has ever tried to make a roleplaying game about Melville. And I think this is because Melville is more specific. You can take Lovecraft and put him in space or the Himalayas or the grimdark future where there is only war. You can’t do that with Melville. I mean, you can, but there’s like one or two space Moby-Dicks. There’s a million space Lovecrafts. Lovecraft gets in everything, like sand the day after the beach. Melville is less flexible. If Lovecraft is sand then Melville marble. Beautiful on his own, but denser and harder to cut and you need to be much smarter about it if you’re going to make anything out of him.

Lovecraft, because he is not very good, dares you to improve him. The first thing you do when you’re writing a Lovecraft adventure is to make it more interesting than anything Lovecraft ever wrote. Well, the first thing you do is cut out all the racism, but you get the picture. Lovecraft’s work is full of such clever phrases as “the Thing cannot be described”, and when you read one of these you immediately try to describe the Thing. You have to do all the work of making it horrifying yourself. Lovecraft’s not going to help you - he’s just going to tell you it’s horrifying and ask you to figure out the details. And whatever weirdness you come up with is almost always going to be better than whatever Lovecraft is thinking of.

But it’s also not Lovecraft. Because Lovecraft is that shit writing. The implicit challenge of Lovecraft is “can you do what I did, but not shitly?”. And you can’t. So people are constantly Doing Stuff with Lovecraft, trying to Use Lovecraft, trying to make things Lovecraftian, and Lovecraft is constantly in the public eye but never actually supplanted. He can’t be. It always seems like there’s something Lovecraft never quite pulls off, some great achievement that’s persistently evading him, but if you actually achieve that - as Melville pretty much does - you don’t solve Lovecraft’s problem. He wants to pull it off while still remaining Lovecraft, and he can’t do that, because the inability to pull it off is what makes Lovecraft Lovecraft.

This is also D&D. D&D is pretty shit in most ways, and there’s a million spinoffs which are technically better, but you will never get rid of original flavour D&D because what makes D&D D&D is the big hole at the heart of it where something awesome should go. In order to radiate potential you need to not fill that potential. Patrick Stuart says here (http://falsemachine.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/art-in-games.html) that it’s actually easier to notice that a thing has psychic energy when it’s bad. I think this is maybe why. A good thing, like Moby-Dick, has a great idea and then lives up to it. The guy who wrote it did his fucking job. He did all the work and there is no room left for you to do any. But you want to do the work, you feel compelled to do the work, which is why you are drawn towards shit things that have ideas and fuck up the execution. There is something left in them for you to work with.

And I think this also accounts for the persistence of Freud. Freud has psychic energy. Freud actually talks about psychic energy, a little. He has a whole theory of cathexis, which is the process by which the erotic charge that’s supposed to accrue around people you want to bone gets redirected to something else, like a whale or a child’s hat or a piece of wallpaper or whatever. This is clearly stupid. People don’t become obsessed with weird shit because they’re not allowed to fuck their dads. But Freud is all about the unconscious and the inexpressible and terrible forbidden things lurking just beyond sight - the same shit Lovecraft talks about - and his stupid theories about it demand that we try to explain it better. We think we can outdo him, and so we keep coming back to him, and so he’s a constant presence in academia and literature to this very day. We don’t want to explain away Moby-Dick by saying it’s about sex but there’s something in that idea that prevents us from ignoring it. I still felt the urge to talk about Freud at the beginning of this essay. I don’t think Moby-Dick is about sex, I think it’s about whales, but I can’t just fuck the idea off altogether.

You might be more comfortable ignoring Freud then me, of course. That’s fine. The point is, the kind of infuriating vagueness that both Freud and Lovecraft possess can wield a huge influence over us and our creative process, even as we consciously acknowledge that it’s dumb. And also that Patrick Stuart should read Moby-Dick. Have you read Moby-Dick Patrick? I think you’d really like it.

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