Drunk, Prone & On Fire (Tactical Transparency)

The success of Old School Renaissance games has resulted in this happening a lot in mainstream forums:

Someone’s like “OSR games rule! Player skill! Sandboxy freedom!”

And so then because words like “skill” and “freedom” are coded as good and metal, everyone then tries to explain how whatever random game they like is actually secretly OSR. And then you have to be like “No, sorry Magical Owl-Touch Factory is a wonderful game but isn’t OSR” and you sound like you’re being gatekeepy and grumpy.

So it’s good to clarify things, to give us some verbal technology to talk about them:

An important concept in the way OSR-style system-agnostic player skill is encouraged in a tabletop RPG system is “Tactical transparency”.

Tactical transparency is the degree to which a common-sense idea that would be effective in the “real” situation that the game-fiction mimics would also be effective in the game.

If you need to know the system in order to be effective, the system has a low degree of tactical transparency. Magic: The Gathering has a low degree, Dread has a low degree (all risky actions are represented by pulling a Jenga block, so an idea is only as good as you are good at pulling blocks), Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 has an decreasing degree of tactical transparency as you level up (feats and spells with obscure names and tricks with actions-per-round become increasingly important). You can be skilled at these games but that skill is system-specific, it requires system mastery.

If, on the other hand, common-sense tactics that seem to make sense in real life also make sense often in the game, the system has a high degree of tactical transparency. This is an OSR ideal.

Perfect tactical transparency is impossible and would be problematic anyway: first of all it’d require thousands of rules for things like chemistry and physics (our army’s steel swords beat your bronze ones!) which would take a long time to use and consult. But the point of OSR-style player skill is to be as tactically transparent as you can be while keeping the game playable and smooth: thus the requirement for a high-trust table where all players basically agree on the GM’s good judgment and are willing to speak up when they disagree.

So...

-Classic tactical transparency: a slow moving-monster with no distance attacks and no ticking clock (King Kong in the desert), so obviously you use missile weapons (it can’t hurt you but you can hurt it).

In many narrative systems, this wouldn’t matter—if you’re in a system where killing the monster is just a “Go Aggro” roll and it doesn’t matter whether you use a sword or crossbow, it doesn’t have a high degree of tactical transparency and so isn’t a system where player skill (or at least system-agnostic player skill) matters. Further, if thinking to use a distance weapon would only give you a +1 bonus, that is still a pretty low degree of tactical transparency--it's not giving you all the advantages you'd commonsensically have. In PBTA games, yes, fictional positioning can get you a "that won't work at all" or a "that auto-succeeds" but the whole range of options in-between is narrower, so it's less transparent. Keep reading if you don't understand.

-Fantasy tactical transparency: tactical transparency doesn’t have to be about plausibility. It can be about things that make sense by the fiction’s own rules, as long as they aren’t the just the system’s own rules. For example, one time I was playing with some people and they were trying to kill an OSR monster someone made up (Rules, Rolls, Roles) called the “Man of Wounds”. This guy is a man full of swords stabbed through him at every angle. The players keep bashing on him, landing attacks and spells, but he takes no damage.  They’re getting increasingly frustrated. Someone’s aunt is in the kitchen listening to us play—she doesn’t know the system, she probably hasn’t even seen an episode of Game of Thrones—she rolls her eyes and goes “Just pull out the swords”. They try it: the guy dies. If something works by trial and error in the fiction, that’s still tactically transparent because it required a common-sense tactic unrelated to the system: when faced with the unknown or fantastic, try different things to see what works. Trial and error is a legitimate real-world tactic.

-Vagueness works against tactical transparency. For example, World of Dungeons is not much of an OSR system since, for example, all the spells (regardless of what they’re called or “skinned” as) work the same way: they just do whatever you want and have an effectiveness number. There’s very little weighing of “Ok, well this is an area fire effect, so it will result in this while this is a single-target ice effect so it will have this other result, so in this case…” . The system is not asking you to think with much tactical depth because a lot of your decisions don’t matter. You aren't deciding when a bomb is better than a beam or whether the clear advantage of the bomb is worth wasting now before you get to the boss because you get fewer bombs than beams, etc. Different kinds of games are about the different kinds of thinking they involve you in.

-Limited scales of bonus and penalty work against tactical transparency. Meaning like: if you can only get a +1 maximum due to clever fictional positioning, period, then that limits how much tactical thinking you have to do. For example, in an early draft of 5th edition D&D, it was rare to get a worse modifier than just “Disadvantage” —two disadvantage conditions stacked didn’t matter. And, in addition, being drunk granted disadvantage but also gave a minor bonus (it made you inured to pain or something, if I remember?) so it was literally better in that version of the game to be defending while simultaneously drunk, prone, and on fire than it was to just be defending while prone. If you're not the Human Torch and setting you on fire doesn’t put me at an advantage over you, the system is lacking in tactical transparency.

-When a system-specific tactic competes in effectiveness with a common-sense tactic that works against tactical transparency: like Apoc World’s rule that you get bonuses that make you more effective the more you have sex with the “Angel” PC means a tactic nobody would think up unless they’d read the book (bonus mining via fucks) is a way better way to win a battle than, y’know, planning, digging a trench, concentrating force, choosing the right weapon, etc. Torchbearer is open about how it takes over a dozen sessions to master the system, so while, yes, there is a paragraph about how the GM can give you a bonus if your plan is actually reasonably good, the system has low tactical transparency because gaming the system matters a lot more.

-Systems which abstract tactical thought itself into a character skill reduce tactical transparency: like if there's a “Read a Sitch””Discern Realities” or “Tactics” skill which gives you an abstract bonus when invoked and that bonus could matter as much or more than actually reading the situation described or actually discerning the realities from the clues given or actually thinking tactically then that interferes with tactical transparency. Like if using those skills gives me a +1 and me, as a person, taking the high ground gives me a +1, the relative value of my player skill vs the character skill in that system is reduced.

-Tactical transparency is not identical to “realism”, but overlaps with it: often a tired-ass forum n00b complaint that an abstraction in a game makes it less "realistic" is also a legitimate complaint that it makes the game less tactically transparent. See the "drunk, prone and on fire" example above.

-High-powered abilities within the fiction can work against tactical transparency, or at least against tactics: in the Fantasy Flight 40k RPGs there are some weapons, like storm bolters, which’ll just plain murdalize anyone in your way. So while you can sneak around trying to outflank and trip up the enemy, every round you spend cleverly setting up your attack is one less you spent spinning the Ballistic Skill Wheel to see if it lands on “The tyranid dies immediately”.  The only skill there is reading the book enough to know that this gun is really good--and reading about every other gun and piece of armor that doesn't have a clear name like "spiky club" or "shotgun". When a game is full of powerful abilities with in-world names the best tactic is basically just about bringing them to bear asap—even though they are technically elements of the setting not the system, they still involve you less in player skill because the most skilled player will realize the best option is always just “press the nuke button”. Identifying that takes skill, just not much.

-Obscure or misleading names for character abilities can work against tactical transparency: in DC Adventures you can have "Disarming Finesse" and you can have "Advance Disarm". If you're Captain Machiavelli trying to send the Delta League into the fortress and one of your team has the "finesse" one and the other has the "advanced" one, which one do you send to disarm Plasma Pig? It's impossible to tell without reading up on the system, so: not tactically transparent.

-Tactical transparency is not the same as transparency, clarity, or lack of misdirection in the fiction: If Sherlock Holmes can't find Moriarity because he's dressed as a bunny or can't hurt the Ghost Barghest of Belgium with his revolver even though the revolver should work, that has nothing to do with tactical transparency. If Sherlock can't find Moriarity because Sherlock was built with "Enhanced Perception" rather than "Perception Advance +3" or because the rules say Sherlock only can find Moriarity once he reaches Stage 5 then that is the system interfering with tactical transparency.

-Simple mechanics and tactically transparent mechanics can be completely different things. The rules of chess are simpler than those of almost any wargame. Yet the complex mesh of most wargames' rules generally end up reproducing simple military maxims: concentration of fire works, if there are rules for facing then flanking works, taking high ground works (you are above the enemy's cover so at a good angle), etc. Chess is an example of a game that is fairly simple mechanically but can be extremely tactically opaque. So a simple game system does not necessarily lead to simple choices for the player.

-5e's tactical transparency is arguable. At low levels, things that should matter in a fight do. At higher levels, feats and magic and alternate dice math make it less so, unless the GM is careful. You're picking spells: Is it better to have advantage on damage or 2 attacks? If you're trying to figure it out at all before a battle, that's not tactically transparent: that's doing system-specific math.

-A simple test: Is it worth bothering to get an opponent drunk, prone, and on fire before attempting to kill them? The more often true that is, the more tactically transparent the game you're playing probably is. There will be exceptions (no point in trying to get the robot drunk) but I'm going to make a big leap of faith and assume you get it.

This post is part of a series on RPG Theory:
Part 1--Intro to PIG-PIP
Part 2 
Part 3
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OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire (Send it around)

Recently, Google +—where the heart of DIY D&D hangs out—has announced it will be closing up shop in a bout ten months. It’s been, actually, very nice: the community of gamers has realized what its got and put together a number of projects to preserve it, and there’s been a real sense of collective effort and mutual appreciation. I like it.

Everyone is trying to figure out where they want to reorganize—some like MeWe, some like Discord, it’s all good. I’m sure it’ll work out.

In the meantime I think, rather than trying to shove anyone into the box I think they should be in, I think we could do a lot to explain, talk about, extend and preserve the breadth of what the DIY game scene has achieved and means by just talking to each other about it—and helping out any newbies who may just be stumbling onthe scene now (there are a surprising number). To this end, I’ve put together this…

OSR Guide For The Perplexed Questionnaire 

1. One article or blog entry that exemplifies the best of the Old School Renaissance for me:
2. My favorite piece of OSR wisdom/advice/snark:
3. Best OSR module/supplement:
4. My favorite house rule (by someone else):
5. How I found out about the OSR:
6. My favorite OSR online resource/toy:
7. Best place to talk to other OSR gamers:
8. Other places I might be found hanging out talking games:
9. My awesome, pithy OSR take nobody appreciates enough:
10. My favorite non-OSR RPG:
11. Why I like OSR stuff:
12. Two other cool OSR things you should know about that I haven’t named yet:
13. If I could read but one other RPG blog but my own it would be:
14. A game thing I made that I like quite a lot is:
15. I'm currently running/playing:
16. I don't care whether you use ascending or descending AC because:
17. The OSRest picture I could post on short notice:

…if you're so inclined, copy it and fill it out and post it somewhere. It'll help people keep track of you and the parts of the community you love most.

A Blurry and One-Sided History of the OSR (2008-2018)

...as if through one side of a cube-shaped aquarium. Or, really, more of an ant farm: industriousness, anonymity, repetitive and vital tasks, tunnels underground, connections you can't see no matter which way you turn it.

So: the Old School Renaissance, in tabletop RPGs...

Jeff's Gameblog, back in the day

pre-2009

This history is a Part Two. Someone else would have to write Part One: I wasn't there. Rob Conley (The Majestic Wilderlands), Matt Finch (Swords & Wizardry), Michael Curtis (Dungeon Alphabet, Stonehell) and people like that know more--as does everyone on small message boards I don't spend much time on where TSR legends hang out.

I'm going to forget things and people: sorry.

To summarize the impression I carry around in my head about this era I missed: People who'd been playing '80s D&D since the '80s and had been on the internet since the internet was invented were doing what you'd expect: enjoying talking to each other and making things. In 2000 the Open Game License had happened, allowing for legal clones of older, pre-Wizards of the Coast versions of D&D. OSRIC (based on 1st ed AD&D) came out in 2006, Castles and Crusades (an OSr style game with 3e-style bonuses and saves) had come out in 2004.

This hard work had been done by people whose names I don't hear much discussed long before I knew what a Moldvay even was.

2008

This is back when people used to spend hours googling esoteric things, before we knew that doing so would just result in banality and weird tumblr sex. I was writing a book--about something else, but my mind kept running back to when I played D&D as a kid--and one of my porn friends (Satine Phoenix, nowadays at WOTC) wanted to play.

It was also the year Gary Gygax died, the year that the 4th edition of D&D came out, and



--all three of which contributed to expanding the OSR in different ways.

I got to googling esoteric things "...and D&D". Many first contacts occurred here: first storygame (Shock--"Philip K Dick" "D&D"), first game blog: Monsters & Manuals  ("M John Harrison""D&D").

It must've been around November because everyone was discussing the controversial recent release of the original Geoffrey McKinney Carcosa.

Here was Jeff Rients on the Gameblog doing it (as usual: walking straight into controversy and coming out the other side unscathed simply by talking up only what he liked about the controversial thing) and here was James Mal on Grognardia doing it (as usual: conscientious, scholarly, but--really--not too bothered) and here was James Edward Raggi IV doing it (as usual: head first holding a broken bottle).

That November in 2008 is instructive now in many ways. All three of these guys were agreeing--the controversy around Carcosa was meaningless, and the book was full of interesting things--but James Mal dared to take Old School seriously: and people tried very hard to make him pay for it, James Raggi took it as a call to arms: and people took offense, Jeff took it casually: and the tone-police--who notice only tone--let it go, though the only respect he paid them was ignoring them.

Jeff was an old hand at talking to gamers by that point, unlike James and James he'd been gameblogging for 4 years. Jeff was the original gameblogger at least as far as this scene is concerned, and was the beginning of the OSR I know and knew.

2009

So I was reading these things--I was learning there was a scene. And--for the first time in years--I got around to playing. I bought my first D&D thing in years: Death Frost Doom. It was also the year Stonehell and Majestic Wilderlands came out and the first one-page-dungeon contest happened.

From Guy Fullerton in the comments: ...2008 events that created energy (or focused attention) around old school D&D: Fight On!, Quick Primer for Old School Gaming. Bob Bledsaw (Judges Guild founder) passed away. Castle Zagyg gets released posthumously, then Gail Gygax terminates the license with TLG. 

That atmosphere was intimate, collegial, with lots of discoveries, ideas and just basic facts being traded back and forth.

The newly-minted Grognardia was setting the pace: the blogs gave more scope to an individual voice than forums, had less gibberish, and, crucially, made it way easier for people like me--who didn't know shit--to find things.

People were attracted by James Mal's scrupulous, humane style and his basic project: to take a look at all these old books--often contrasting the basic approach with modern mainstream games.

The Grognardia comments section became a forum in itself--everyone blogging at the time was there. The Grognardia bloglist was where all this came from.

And, crucially, perhaps surprisingly, many would not have called themselves "old school" or "osr" bloggers. They were just people with game blogs. Monsters & Manuals or TheRPG Corner, for instance, could just as easily be about Cyberpunk or some new hotness. It took a remarkably long time for all of us to realize that most of the things we liked were things the mainstream RPG scene had increasingly forgotten about. Probably because the mainstream RPG scene was so far away from anyone who is actually playing's daily experience of play.

What about the gameblogs that didn't eventually become part of the OSR? They existed but they didn't really connect to each other much--they seemed happy on the forums, as the same people now seem happy on Twitter.

The OSR I know is or was a blog thing. It involves a lot of people who like writing and who like books, and who like continuous, articulate and sometimes complicated ideas, sometimes with footnotes.

It's also worth noting that there was and still is a sort of "old-school-Nonrenaissance" which stayed on the forums and fucking hated the OSR as arrivistes and poseurs. They would rail against James Maliszewski as if Grognardia had been built on the graves of their mothers' mothers. They saw the OSR as carpetbaggers, claiming Old School cred despite having been out doing things like living and eating and gong to college and having jobs instead of just playing D&D and posting on Prodigy about it since the Carter administration. They're still around. This is also the year the hatethread "grognards.txt" started on Something Awful, which claimed to be just making fun of dorky posts but immediately descended into aggressive smears and eventually harassment campaigns against pretty much any OSR figure they noticed.

Anyway, that was the year I started my blog.

2010

""James [Raggi] is one of the most interesting and daring writers *period*, no matter what school of gaming you like." 

- Mike Mearls

The OSR was already becoming a thing.

Either because it was good or because people wanted to see boobs, this blog became popular. Jeff, James, James and Zak became the Four Horsemen of gameblogging for the next few years--though we were just entry points for a much deeper and bigger scene. Michael Curtis with his Dungeon Alphabet was way ahead of the game in terms of making sellable stuff, Alexis/Tao and Monsters & Manuals/ Noisms were doing the brainiest work, The RPG Corner was the widest-ranging and had great visuals. I'm pretty lazy about clearing dead blogs my bloglist over there exactly because I want people to keep looking back at that Devonian Explosion of creativity. Look at Valley of Blue Snails sometime--I hope that guy's ok, wherever he is.

Someone noticed that porn stars were playing D&D and we got a web show. This lead to the very first gaming controversy involving this blog. Part of it had to do with an internal OSR organization that put the show on its list of interesting things and somebody there was like "Fuck this bullshit there's swearing in it and they're not even playing our edition!" and part of it was just the mainstream misogynist gamers being misogynists ("They're all faking") and mainstream ("Wait, that's not how feats work! Let's cry!").

Gratifyingly, after a few weeks of being yelled at, these people fucked off. The OSR scene rallying around the girls was a big deal to us--certainly nobody else in gaming did it.

Notably, James Raggi of LotFP came to bat for us in a big way. I respected that a lot: basically all porn people get harassment online literally every day of their entire lives and James was one of the first human beings outside the industry to go out of his way to stand up to that. Most people won't ever understand how meaningful it is, when you've had to take the baseball bat to the fucking gophers every morning, to have another hand that isn't in the business helping. It's unheard of. Even today when I can get pretty much any liberal protest thing retweeted around the world in ten seconds you never see any of the dozens of reporters, gallery owners, authors or directors who follow me on social media lift a finger to mention SESTA/FOSTA. And if you have to google that to know what it is and why everyone in porn has a hard time using a bank account because of it, you're seeing my point: most people do not give a fuck. And James did.

I worked on the Grindhouse Edition of Lamentations of the Flame Princess for free. James commissioned Vornheim (advertised as The City From I Hit It with My Axe!--over a million people had seen the show, after all) and a fancier new version of Carcosa around the same time, stirring the trolls to new heights of freaked-outness: LotFP was well on its way to being The Fucked Up One among the retroclones.

The phrase Gygaxian Democracy got invented, the Dungeon Alphabet came out, Kevin Crawford launched Sine Nomine Publishing with Stars Without Number, the prototype of Secret Santicore got launched (originally designed to celebrate Dave Arneson's birthday), Satine started the first Charity D&D Event in LA at Meltdown Comics--a small thing, but events like that where voice actors, comedians, celebrities and other Hollywood people realized they all liked D&D were what sprouted into Critical Role and its ilk. Here is the thing about Hollywood: Satine knows everyone.

2011

Satine was also a key pebble and factor in another coming avalanche: she was the one who told me--on the way to my first San Diego Comic Con--that this Google + thing could be used for free multiperson videochat. Then this, then this, then this. Soon, Calithena of Fight On! magazine (very important in the old school scene up til that point) contacted me and Jeff Gameblog, and proposed to us the idea that eventually became FLAILSNAILS games.  At the time I said online games would "revolutionize the hobby".

I googled "Dungeons & Dragons" in order to write this article--the first thing that comes up is Roll20--so maybe I was right. Either way, 2011 became the year of online games--but, more than that, it became the year of all these people who'd been talking to each other via blog comments for years actually seeing each other face-to-face for the first time. It was also a way for OSR types who didn't have the spare time to write eight-paragraph blog entries every three days to meet each other. The tech was big for a lot of reasons, but the biggest was probably: it made it a lot easier to become friends.

The storygamers before us had little conventions (like Camp Nerdly) where they met and decided they liked each other. We were a combination of busier and poorer, so we didn't--we instead met on G+.

It was magnificent and it changed everything. Beautiful, generous, excited, fascinated days--everyone sharing. We played every game, and things expanded rapidly.

On top of the new connectedness, LotFP's relatively risky publishing experiments were paying off: LotFP's Grindhouse Edition was an entire boxed set--including dice and a pencil, Carcosa was one of the most sumptuously bound printed books you're likely to see in or out of RPGs, and Vornheim was 2000 copies--unheard of at the time for an OSR book. And they were all making money.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the fanciness, Kevin Crawford was proving if you stuck to a schedule and put out a solid product (Red Tide and An Echo Resounding the next year) you could do this full time.

So the OSR was meeting itself and it was getting the idea that it could sell itself new things. I think the folks involved in Hydra Collective met and started working together around this period, and a number of other ventures that would soon come to burden Bryce Lynch on his newly launched quest to review every single goddamn module began to playtest and gestate.

But where to get the capital?

2012

Kickstarter.

James Mal of Grognardia joined forces with some people we used to call "That Mule Abides blogger" to put out Dwimmermount--the megadungeon he'd been writing about for the past year or so. 30,000$. Thirty! Thousand! Dollars! We were stunned. In 2012 it hadn't occurred to anyone that people would pay 30,000$ for OSR anything.

It all went to hell very fast: Dwimmermount became a scandal (though one eventually somewhat rectified years later) and James Mal became a genuine OSR casualty. Being Top OSR Blogger had made him a subject of immense online abuse for 4 years already and the same trolls were now suddenly walking around acting as if it had all been justified. James did not take the harassment well. If you're wondering whatever happened to Grognardia? That. James made some mistakes, definitely, but he never took it out on other people--so the whole thing was that much more frightening to watch. This is one reason why I never believe anyone when they say prominent game figures "bring harassment on themselves": before Dwimmermount it would've been impossible to find a blogger more polites, deferential and more willing to state his taste as mere taste than James Mal, yet here he was attracting endless shit. People hate hardest on the tall poppy and that's all there is to it. Jeff Gameblog escaped this fate only by going to grad school instead of sticking around while the rest of us had started monetizing talking about games to each other.

It was our turn when me and the girls appeared in Maxim in 2011. One of the new harassers was an obscure Onyx Path author. I'd never heard of her or her company--or her endless waves of shithead friends that were soon to become a regular fixture of our lives for (apparently) ever.

This kind of thing, combined with the ease of trying new games via the technology not yet called "hangouts" fed into a new theme: finding out how bad various storygames sucked. We came, we played, we were like meh. A pattern became evident: The games weren't fun for us and when we talked about them the people who did like them were mean about it. And Google+ gave everyone a chance to find out just how mean on a scale never before seen. Especially since this was the year Dungeon World came out.

Y'know how people say things in games are "divisive" and people are in "bubbles"?  Well: it didn't used to be like that. And it was terrible idea--in the early days of Google+ it was like as if the French and Germans not only shared a border but kept insisting on eating at one long picnic table at that border every day. Thank god for divisiveness.

But in the actual games, things were changing. After years of publishing retro-modules, Goodman Games came out with the Dungeon Crawl Classics game--another big and expensive tome that people nevertheless seemed eager to shell out for (plus buy weird dice), there was also Jon Peterson's Playing At the World--the first-ever actually-good book about D&D as a phenomenon or a game design --and Vornheim (after losing an Ennie to a bunch of dungeon tiles) got nominated for a Diana Jones, got noticed by a dude named Kenneth Hite, and was recognized outside the RPG scene at the Indiecade festival. Commercially and in the minds of designers, OSR stuff was being recognized.

If you read the old entries in this blog you'll see a lot going on in 2012 and 2013: people and ideas were colliding like crazy. The ability to play anything via hangout pretty much whenever and to meet the designer seconds later made theorycrafting second-nature. This game works like this, while this game works like that.

Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast, owners of official D&D,  did its best to give people more things to yell and theorycraft at each other about--announcing, over the course of the year:
-it would be retiring the controversial 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons--roundly unappreciated by old school gamers and worshipped like god's own precious milk in game form by the forum trolls who hated them most,
-Monte Cook would be the lead designer on this new edition,
-Monte Cook would ok wait not be the lead designer on this new edition, and
-it was hiring a team of RPG designers and gadflies as consultants including Robin Laws (Feng Shui), S John Ross (Risus), Kenneth Hite (Trail of Cthulhu), Zak Smith (Vorn..heim?), and......the RPGpundit (fuck-all).

2013

Contessa begins, I believe, around now, as does basically everyone interesting finally all getting off or being thrown off RPGnet, as a direct or indirect result of the final convulsions of the Edition Wars (5e playtest documents were coming out all year) or OSR authors finally getting noticed enough to get yelled at. Everyone had better things to do on Google + anyway, which was humming at this point: community projects were getting made including the Hexenbracken, Kraal, and Colossal Waste. Secret Santicore was now just a normal thing people expected to get done, as was the One Page Dungeon Contest.

By this point Frog God Games was producing old-school style modules for S&W and Pathfinder, Goodman Games was doing well with DCC, Kevin at Sine Nomine was producing exactly the quietly useful work he promised and Lamentations of the Flame Princess was firming up its reputation as The Gross One That Was Easy To Make Fun Of but...then it threw curveballs like Vincent Baker's Seclusium of Orphone and Ken Hite's Qelong.

It seems so calm, in retrospect.

2014

Now all this is a personal take, and I haven't done much new research this evening to prepare it. It's all just an impressionistic blur nailed down by the dates of old blog entries and some left-handed googling--so I hope I can be forgiven for saying at least my main OSR memories from 2014 were the frenzied bacchanal of harassment against me and the women in my game group that reached its peak with the release of the 5th edition of D&D in July and the coinciding realization on the part of the parties responsible that I wasn't joking when I said I worked on it. They saw it in print and they wept, and fell upon us like jackals in the cold night.

I don't know if it's it's accurate to say the years-long campaign of incredibly widespread bad behavior on the part of Fred Hicks, Cam Banks, team Green Ronin and co caused or solidified a real and lasting rift between the OSR and adjacent indie gaming communities whose principals aided and abetted it, but I fucking hope so.

The other big thing to happen this year was both the OSR and most of the rest of RPGs decided this 5th edition was Good, Actually. It seemed to be every experienced gamer's second favorite edition, and many newbies' first. The mechanics were within a stone's throw of fitting three or four different fairly popular styles, and things like advantage/disadvantage went over with most sane people.

Though I have no idea how much they took my advice, I did notice improvement from prototype to prototype, and our email exchanges about the rules were long. In terms of mechanics, if not writing, art and content--it ended up as close to the D&D I want to play as any other edition.

Closer to OSR home:

At this point the Google+ community has become a finely-honed you-want-it-you-got-it content-making machine, culminating in the Last Gasp instant generator tool being proposed, designed and programmed in less than a day, if I remember.

Contessa solidified its pre-eminence in woke gaming circles at bringing new people into the hobby, upsetting both conservatives and competitors in the process (which made people wonder: what kind of wokeness looks at something like Contessa and decides to compete with it?). Lots of new faces started coming in.

Slumbering Ursine Dunes--conceived, playtested and developed by Chris Kutalik on Google + came out.

There were personnel shifts: more of the folks from the early, Wild Westy, snarky/scholarly/pulpy/literary pre-Google+ days (like Huge Ruined Scott) were closing up shop and more surreal/postmodern/arty bloggers were taking their place. I could tell because people started asking me whether old TSR modules were any good--as if I'd read them or something.

Red & Pleasant Land--which, with it's gold embossing and whatnot, was a step more de luxe than even Carcosa had been--made insane fucktons of money for a cottage RPG project. I don't know if this counts as impacting the wider history of the OSR other than it got the guy in charge of Lamentations of the Flame Princess out of debt for the first time in his life, but it proved at least to me that either the OSR's appetites extended far beyond dying in tunnels or people far outside the OSR wanted OSR stuff.

2015

The Year of the Goat.

5th Edition D&D is definitively a blockbuster success (with help from this new show Critical Role). Though this doesn't directly bear on the OSR, it doesn't hurt interest in 3rd party product at the Reddit level and it quiets a lot of RPG critics who sniped incidentally at the OSR on their way to performing disgust that either (depending on faction):
-the most popular RPG was still D&D or
-that it was D&D but wasn't 4e.

They withdraw quite a bit. The discourse in general gets about a hundred times more sane because of it. It becomes a lot harder to paint the entire project of killing monsters to get treasure as some kind of regressive neckbeard-man-only activity with Critical Role in the gamer imagination.

The bridge free of trolls, truly exotic stuff starts to roll out, and is justly (and almost exclusively) celebrated: Yoon-Suin, Fire on the Velvet Horizon. Break!--a hybrid of anime, mainstream D&D and OSR game--starts to be developed. We also get things like Strange Stars (retro weird sci fi) and Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid (literally a dungeon from when the GM was a kid) from Hydra Collective.

In worse news, Alexander Macris of Adventurer, Conqueror, King starts to turn into (or: reveal himself to be) the dipshit that would eventually become Milo's manager. We got away asap.

Then the Ennies: the early retroclones had won some awards 5 or more years back--but this was the first year that stuff from the OSR with brand new content won anything. Red & Pleasant got 4 awards--including beating the D&D Player's Handbook--which surprised everyone, me most of all. The wailing, gnashing and rending that followed was to become an annual event.

2016

There's a lot of talent just lying on the ground at this point--the free pan-OSR collaboration Princess of the Silver Palace shows it off.

2016 is the point at which I completely lose track of how much is coming out how fast-- Fever-Dreaming Marlinko, Blood In the Chocolate, the new Swords & Wizardry, The 20k Operation Unfathomable Kickstarter from Jason Sholtis of the Dungeon Dozen, Misty Isles of the Eld, Hubris, Broodmother Sky Fortress, and Towers Two.

None of this stuff is normal. It all bucks Old School stereotypes and none of it trades on TSR nostalgia in its presentation. Marlinko is a hallucinatory romp, BitC is a Willy Wonka murderworld, S&W has abstract art and no men working on it, Eld is a whimsical sci-fi take on Elves, Hubris is hundreds of pages of tables as metal as a bull made of dead volcano gods drinking blood from the sun, Unfathomable is as gonzo as only an adventure made by stringing Dungeon Dozen table results together can be, Broodmother looks like a Jack Kirby comic and starts off telling you to get ready to destroy your gameworld, and Towers Two is literally written by the lead singer of Gwar.

Like frogs in a slow-heating pan, we're all quite used to this kind of thing now, but dial back just four years all of it would seem bizarre and half these books would've had a moral crusades launched against them before they even shipped. Towers Two alone contains more offensive content than everything RPGnet has ever complained about put together, but--blessed blessed divisiveness--nobody gives anyone any shit about any of it.

Ken Baumann also forms Satyr Press this year just to put out Maze of the Blue Medusa and the interesting thing about this is the company's conceived as a sort of pop-up LotFP: its got the LotFP production finish, LotFP authors, printed by a LotFP-equivalent press and even sold at the LotFP table at GenCon. As this results in LotFP-like sales and awards, it's a pretty solid proof-of-concept: you can spend a year putting out a fancy boutique RPG book, make a profit, and then go back to what you were doing before.

Jacob Hurst and Co's Hot Springs Island is a pair of black-and-white books retailing together for 100$, but the buzz is: the content is worth it. And it translates into sales.

In the larger game universe, RPG vlogging is increasingly a thing, people getting tens of thousands of hits giving basic 5e advice. Ben Milton's Questing Beast becomes increasingly important as pretty much the only OSR person with any juice on YouTube.

OSR Ennie winners L to R: Jacob Hurst (Hot Springs Island), Ken Hite, behind Reece Carter: Mike Evans (Hubris) in the back, Daniel Fox (Zweihander) w/devil horns, me, Adam(?) from Zweihander, Christian Kessler (Fever Swamp),
James Edward Raggi IV (LotFP), in the back on the right: Jon Peterson (Playing at the World)

2017-2018

When you write something like this you necessarily are talking about events not in themselves, but as signs of things to come--about what seems important in retrospect--and I don't have much retrospect on the last two years. I can point to what happened, but it's hard to tell which parts are important--the noise from the footsteps.

So, knowing that the job's half-impossible, I'll describe what I think I'm seeing:

A clean upward slope since 2008 Since the OSR started, more diverse things are being made by a more diverse group of people and they're selling more copies and winning more awards. The only exceptions are people who've completely opted out of pointing up the novel or special aspects of what they've done (even when they're there). Commercially, even if the OSR is in a bubble, it won't burst all at once.

Professionalization People are Patreoning, Kickstarting, learning skills. You meet someone and four minutes later you're giving them fifteen bucks. This isn't as gross as it sounds--there's a genuine talent farm, building on a collective knowledge pool. People are taking the weirdness you give them and taking it three weirder.

Yet you still meet people You think you're done, you're tired, you've had your fun and...nope. Here's someone who wants to run a game, play a game, test a game, pay you to make a game, has an idea for a game, has a new blog, has a new blog idea... It isn't stopping. Which: considering how much content and how much theory has gone under the bridge, is a little surprising.

Non-OSR OSR Games I don't know if a bunch of other people besides me will work-, or are working-, on games like Demon City which are meant to be played in Old School ways but use completely new mechanics, but I do know a bunch of Old School gamers were happy to pay me to do it, so there's probably an interest. And there's Break! too for instance. Plus, if the rest of art history is any help: a lot of people will branch out sooner or later.

The competition is increasingly a mess Fans of Not-OSR will likely write this off as Zak being Zak but honest to god: shit doesn't look good for most of the not-OSR game companies working on the OSR scale. Many of the big non-D&D franchises are moribund (and the companies doing Savage Rifts and DC Adventures just tripped over sex scandals), Paizo's Starfinder seems to have fallen flat since Star Wars is already out in several iterations, the post-Forge/storygame indies have had twice as long to get their act together (that scene started around 2000) and they don't seem to be seizing the opportunities: the art and design aren't improving and few artists are involved as content creators, there's only one or two of them known as writers, and the theorytalk and functional social organizing that used to hold that cohort together seems to have evaporated when rubbed up against other people doing it better. WOTC itself is doing well, but they're focusing on spreading the Good News more than creating content--and what they do create is kinda what you'd expect. Basically, you can go to even the most hostile forum and ask what the good modules are this year and you'll get a face full of OSR.

(ADDENDUM A DAY LATER: Don't take my word for it. Take a look at that.)

In terms of people with genuinely surprising talent making things, there are a few independent voices (Third Eye, for instance) but I'm not seeing a lot of other big noises outside the OSR, Cthulhu and Fantasy Flight--with the last two relying heavily on established properties. There's a massive gap in the market for genuine creative content and the OSR seems to have the vast majority of personnel capable of filling it.

That said: the OSR still has very little on video--and that's where the action is now. Video isn't fun. Or: unlike drawing, writing or blogging, it isn't a kind of fun that has a lot to do with running or playing a game. If the OSR is going to get much bigger, someone will have to bite the bullet get good at that--or better. YouTube does love How To's.

So anyway that's the history, goodnight.

The 5 Reasons Evil Hat Is Going Under

Fucking hell. This post has been Reddited. As usual, this means very stupid comments from the fans of whatever's being criticized including inaccurate summaries of the posts' contents. So to recap at the top, the reasons I give for Evil Hat failing are:
1. Generic art
2. Competition from newer, similar systems
3. The heads give a lot of signs of not being very attached to what they put out
4. Generic & bad writing
5. They intentionally cultivated a toxic fanbase (proof)
If you're coming from there and read someone suggesting I said anything other than that: they're lying and they're exactly that toxic fanbase I just mentioned.
On to the article:

So some very big tabletop RPG news hit the ground yesterday: Evil Hat--the independent game company which produces Fate RPG, Dresden Files, distributes Blades In The Dark and many other things--is sinking:

The way they couched it you might think "Oh they're selling dice, they're selling card games, they're selling magazines, they're selling novels, they just didn't make as much profit as they th..."

Nope. About a month after GenCon they are operating at a loss:

It's not a large company and multiple people have gotten laid off. 

Now you may be wondering: "Is this surprising? Do indie RPG companies really make that much profit?" In 2018, yes. Yes they do*.

Evil Hat started in 2000. Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks took the FUDGE system (which was open-game license and had been around for about 8 years) and turned it into Fate--a more narrative-based system which they used to power the Dresden Files game and pulpy hit Spirit of the Century and then went on to a wildly successful Kickstarter with Fate Core. Based in Maryland irl (all along I think), they hung out in mainstream and narrative-leaning RPG circles online. Both indie and mainstream RPG developers know and get along with them and the company has only grown up until now--as has the RPG industry.

So: something has legitimately gone wrong at Evil Hat. This is a diversified company that has respectable nerd licenses, a rabid fanbase, and Fate--a game so popular in online circles the refrain "Have you tried Fate?" is a cliche so cliche even pointing out it was cliche stopped being funny a year ago.  This shouldn't have happened.

Let's take a look at why it did...

1. Art

You may be thinking "Oh but you're an artist so of course you think..." No.

The main difference between the RPG stuff in these blog entries, which are free, and the books I make out of them that pay James Raggi's rent is one thing: the art.

The difference between Uno (a fabulously successful card game in the '80s) and Crazy Eights (a nearly identical game which you can play with any deck of cards) is art, the difference between Exploding Kittens (one of the most successful Kickstarters in history) and either of these games is, largely but not entirely, the art.

What made Warhammer its own fantasy franchise competing with D&D while Runequest and Tunnels and Trolls struggled to stay afloat is the art. The difference between the Warhammer 40k universe and every other military SF game (there were hundreds if you check the ads in old Dragon Magazines)--and in fact what makes you kind of feel like "military SF game" is a sort of weird description of Warhammer 40k, is the art. (Yes, miniatures are art.) Warhammer (a tweaked D&D on a d100 system with critical hits) made Games Workshop so big it became an entire gaming company so big that it has its own chain of stores.

Vampire, Rifts, Shadowrun, Pathfinder--the big games have/had big and distinctive artists.

Art, of course, makes the product look nice and feel like a collectors' item but it also does something else, it projects information to the reader, like:

a) This game has a distinctive style, making it like/unlike other games

b) The creators have a sensibility which does/doesn't line up with mine

c) The creators invested effort in this game

d) The worldbuilding has an implied depth to it

Evil Hat has always had problems here. It's not that they didn't ever hire competent artists, it's that the people hiring them didn't really have a sense of what to do with them.

With the best will in the world: even Evil Hat fans do not go around talking about how stunning the images in it are. Evil Hat has a fanbase eager to praise every single aspect of its design, business and marketing online and yet the only praise (or even discussion) I've seen Evil Hat's art ever getting was for depicting diverse casts of characters, which: that's basically a standard thing in RPGs now and even when it wasn't that's a pretty easy bar to leap once you're asked.

Even accepting that Fate is a universal system on purpose and therefore distinctive art would be a challenge (nobody ever picked up a picture and went "That's so Fate!" but then again nobody did that with GURPS either):

Dresden Files was based on novels, Evil Hat did nothing to expand or solidify that world visually.

Blades In The Dark managed to do A and B but there wasn't very much art, it wasn't in color and most of it didn't do much more than the standard Storygame/DeviantArt "Take a photo of some guy, jack up the contrast, glue a gear on it" standard. So it fell down hard on C and D. You may like or dislike that setting but the art and aesthetics refer to other things that it hopes you like, too rather than helps create the world and make you go "Oooh, I need to know more about this part". Basic art tasks--like illustrating the alternate cultures and alien backgrounds that PCs come from--are entirely skipped. 

Atomic Robo (like other poor-selling indie games Mouse Guard and Marvel Heroic) had great art--but it was all from the licensed property--so fans could get it without buying the game. And in the case of something as niche as Atomic Robo, they probably already had it. The art wasn't doing any new work.

Say what you want about 40k, but the visual of, say, a chainsword does a lot more than go "Ok, you're playing a sci fi game". Even if your sensibilities lined up with Evil Hat's, the art wasn't dragging you to new places, and if RPGs need anything, it's that.

While excitement about the licenses or the flexible system may be enough to bring in fans of that license or of online RPG discussion, outreach to new audiences is nigh-impossible without good art.

2. Competition: PBTA and Cortex

Let's assume every Dresden Files fan who wants to play an RPG is going to find the Dresden Files RPG--besides that, Evil Hat's main product is Fate.

Fate is a universal system, so you can't sell it on the setting, and the art is forgettable, so you can't sell it on that. So you're left selling it on the system itself--and the Fate Core kickstarter found many online RPG fans eager to do just that.

But the strength and weakness of system-centric online fans eager to shell out cash is they are...system-obsessed online fans eager to shell out cash. 

They're always looking for a new system. If they write their own, they're not buying yours and unless yours is the newest one, they're not buying yours either.

Without getting too far into game-design inside baseball, the fact is someone who wants 

A Generic Narrative System With Few Mechanical Penalties For Failing To Problem-Solve, Some Narrative Control And Lots Of Sliders For Emulating Random Pre-Existing Genres they can play pbta ("powered by the apocalypse"--games derived from Apocalypse World) or Cortex (a Fate-like system with regular dice developed for a romance RPG).

Pbta is The New Hotness and therefore will vacuum up a good chunk of online system-obsessive fans and Cortex was used on the Marvel Heroic RPG--that game came out right around when the first Avengers movie did, reached into the mainstream, and gave lots of newly-minted superhero fans and lapsed gamers a chance to discover that they didn't like Generic Narrative Systems With Few Mechanical Penalties For Failing To Problem-Solve, Some Narrative Control And Lots Of Sliders For Emulating Random Pre-Existing Genres.

Let's assume for the sake of argument Fate does what it does very well. So did Steve Jackson Games' GURPS and Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing--neither were enough alone to keep their respective companies afloat.

What did they do? Diversify. But there's a problem with that..

3. Caring

Just the facts:

-Neither Fred Hicks nor Rob Donoghue have written much for their own company in years. They often speak about being more managers now than creators.

-None of the writers or artists they have hired are people whose names exactly ring out in RPG circles or inspire massive fan support (okay: the esteemed Kenneth Hite was one of the authors on Bubblegumshoe and indie darling John Harper did BitD, but Hat just distributes that game). None of the workhorse authors have built up any fanbase.

-Online, neither Fred nor Rob much talk about playing any of these games very often or talk in any detail about their content. That thing where someone at a game company (anyone: Monte Cook, Mearls at D&D, James at LotFP, the folks at Chaosium) casually say on social media "When I first read ____ in what so and so turned in I was like _____! Y'all are gonna be amazed at what they cooked up". Fred and Rob's main passions online appear to be business management tips and the same progressive politics retweets as the rest of us.

-A major part of their business is shipping people different kinds of Fate dice (which is fine, but its not exactly an in-depth creative vision here).

-Considering the size of the company and the amount of online support, Evil Hat winning fewer and fewer fan awards every year is surprising.

-Considering the size of the company, it's surprising how little they're willing to pay their talent  compared to smaller companies.

-Fred Hicks has openly said that the products they put out (even ones that do win awards) don't have a long tail and don't sell more and more copies each year...

(and no, this is not true for all indie games, there are many indie RPG products where awards do move the needle and they do sell more and more copies the longer they're out).

Quality is subjective, of course, and I have no way of knowing for sure how much Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks care about what they're putting out. But every sign I've seen suggests: not that much.

In order to run a small creative business which is in constant contact with a fan base, you don't just have to be comforting, useful, and send the boxes on time, you have to communicate (and have) a strong vision of what you are doing that nobody else is. What is Evil Hat about? What's the big image? A bunch of dice with plusses and minuses? That gorilla that they put everywhere? Otherwise there's 200 other tightly-run nerd companies out there willing to tweet "black lives matter" just as many times as you are.

Steve Jackson games got themselves out of Generic System Limbo with Munchkin--and someone there cared about that game--the art and the writing are by someone deeply invested. Chaosium will always have Cthulhu and Runequest, and they have been able to find authors deeply invested in horror--and they have Greg Stafford. Fate fans love the company's scrupulously polished image of non-problematicness but...that's a list of things Fate doesn't do, not a list of things it does.

4. Writing

The writing in Evil Hat books is something even the Evil Hat fans complain about. The entire virtue of the Fate system, other than being narrative, is its simplicity and yet the authors signally have a really difficult time communicating that simplicity.

Evil Hat can move people: The Fate system excites an online fanbase that wants to play it and tell you to play it, Fred Hicks' and Rob Donoghue's loud and frequent support of normal liberal ideas excites an online fanbase terrified that a secret racist might be hiding under their game table. The writing does not excite anyone.

While neither Donoghue nor Hicks talk a lot about writing or reading and should perhaps not be judged as people based on how well they write, the fact is when you're in the RPG business, not to mention when your books are being read by people who are fans of the actual novels they're based on and the main competition in your niche is pbta and Vincent Baker's clear, fan-friendly prose, and your main competition outside your niche is winning writing awards literally every year this is a problem--and one they are signally unwilling to shell out money to freelancers to solve.

5. The Motto

You may be forgiven is this gushy heckload of prose blinds you to the fact that "Take care of your peeps and your peeps will take care of you" is also the mafia's motto.

Fred Hicks has been very explicit about his marketing strategy. When asked how Evil Hat became so successful: they spent 10 years online making friends. 

There's nothing wrong with friends, of course, or even networking--but there's something very wrong with putting Taking Care of Your Peeps above all else when those peeps become the engine of an endless right-wing harassment campaign that culminates with you being forced to accuse the only good writer who ever worked for you and a Jewish guy of being Nazis--thus legitimately costing game folks whose names you don't even know their livelihoods.

Despite the vast marketing potential of friendship, Rob and Fred have never had much stomach for what most smart people try to do online in RPG communities: discuss stuff that matters to them.  They peace out whenever discussions become serious or difficult:

...being neither "smart enough or calm enough" to have the conversations that characterize the community you sell your game in is not a great trait in someone who is designing games, but it's a million times more dangerous in someone whose whole marketing strategy is trying to start conversations that end with "Hey look at what we made" with people who are actually affected by these issues and know way more about them than than you.

There are probably Fate fans who know nothing of Rob and Fred's online activities, but the core of their fanbase is people who do and who engage and sympathize with the desire to snipe at other peoples' projects and then flee. That is: the worst people in the RPG community. And it has paid dividends: Fate fans, authors and Evil Hat associates and employees are an RNC-worth of toxic names in the RPG sphere, up to and including open transphobes and trolls like fucking Ettin:

Business on the indie scale isn't just about moving product--it's also about striking people with talent and wherewithal as the kind of people worth working with, recommending, supporting and signal-boosting. 

Rob Donoghue added me on social media long before I had any idea who he was, and yet whenever Fred or Evil Hat's friends started spreading toxicity his response was always no response. Not disagreement, not defending them, just--total stonewalling, avoiding the issue, obliqueness, using the distance technology provides to refuse to be a person.

This behavior will get you a fanbase--because all the other people who want to relay signals that put you on the right team without giving a second's thought to the content of those signals will like you. All the other straight white cis-guys who talk a blue streak about diversity while funneling money into the hands of two straight white cis-guys will nod and smile and Like. But if literally nobody honest or smart is willing to work with you or claim what you do is good, that puts a ceiling on what your company can do. This might not be true with a bigger company or another industry, but this a small scale and a creative field, both as creators and humans you have to be able to offer potential partners something of real substance or they can just move to the next cottage nerd property.

Maybe nobody cares about that stuff and it's all inside baseball, but if you sponsor the biggest RPG forum, run constant banner ads on the other, and can get hundreds of fans to retweet your most workaday political snark and yet they not only won't pay for product but won't even vote for it in a fan award once they bought it, something's wrong.

When your Peeps work themselves into a position where they betray every value you sell yourself on as a company and when the targets of your Peeps' ire turns out to be the diverse progressive creative community that you claim to want to be part of, maybe reconsider who your Peeps are.

-------

*Evidence:

...and that's just from LotFP, just one payment and at the time LotFP was exactly one permanent staff member and at the smallest table you could get at GenCon, selling nothing but game books and t-shirts.

There Will Probably Never Be An RPG Review Better Than This

Source.

Maze of the Blue Medusa: Worth 3 cars & 2 years of your life. Get it here

The Human Machinery of the RPG Business

And you can micromanage it down to a pixel, and that happens all the time...That’s not how you manage artists. You encourage artists, and then you’ll get – you know – art. If your idea of managing artists is just pointing out what’s wrong and making them fix it over and over again, you end up with artists who just stand around asking “OK lady, where do you want this sofa? You want it over there? No? Fine.You want it over there? I don’t give a fuck. I’ll put it wherever you want it.”  

-Phil Tippet, special effects guy on the original Star Wars, Empire, Temple of Doom, etc.

 
This week the Roll20 people fucked up so bad it made Newsweek. In a move utterly true to their story-game roots, they banned someone even while admitting the user hadn't done anything wrong. Then defended that decision.

What's shocking is that anyone noticed. Most of us are completely over being shocked that the rearguard of the RPG business regularly creates human wreckage on a cottage-industry scale. Fans can be good or bad, indie creators can be good or bad, but within the Serious Business end of it, people who talk the talk but have less than zero regard for fellow human beings the second any other piece of cake is dangled in front of them are not hard to find. 

On the surface, this makes no sense: these are people united by a passion for games, a wholesome and beautiful thing, and not one marked by either the moneycrunching rapacity we associate with stockbrokers or lawyers, nor the bitterness of people doing menial jobs they hate for way too long. They get to make games all day! And a living wage! Why are so many of them such dicks?

I do think there's a reason for it, and I think it has a lot to do with money and talent and the kind of work RPGs demand.

This'll take a second:

The Owlbear Fallacy

If you read a lot of what the RPG community writes you'll frequently see the following chain of reasoning:

1. I like (say) owlbears.

2. Most people like owlbears.

3. Owlbears are therefore the popular choice.

4. Owlbears are therefore the moneymaking choice.

5. Refusing to include owlbears in your game is therefore a bad business decision.

6. Refusing to include owlbears in your game is therefore an act of arrogance or ignorance.

7. Refusing to include owlbears in your game is failing to listen to the wise and deserving people in your fanbase or company.

8. Refusing to include owlbears in your game is therefore morally wrong.

So: if you like what I don't like you're a bad person. Q.E.D.

This chain of reasoning is extremely common in gamer circles.

"These people are evil because they refuse to do the popular thing" is the exact opposite of the Marxist critique "These people are evil because they have chosen to do the popular thing". While both are often invoked by people in order to avoid the embarrassment of just saying...

...the difference is the Marxist critique can actually sometimes be valid, whereas the capitalism-as-morality argument is never valid.

In the '80s CBS TV took Cagney & Lacey off the air even though it had good ratings because the execs at CBS thought the leads were too butch and maybe lesbians. This was bad: not bad because it cost CBS money (who cares? Not any of us who don't work at CBS.) its bad because that's a gross standard to have, and an unfair one (did the execs similarly feel like they had to personally enjoy every show on CBS? No.). The fact they did it even though it may've cost CBS money only shows the lengths they went to in order to be that gross.

A company making a moneylosing decision in the name of aesthetic standards is itself morally neutral--it's the aesthetic standards themselves that make this decision not morally neutral.

A Scarcity Problem

So there's that. But that's not why we're here today.

What I am interested in is the kind of game personnel that this give-me-what-I-want-regardless-of-what-you-want attitude demands.

There's a frequent back-and-forth in game design about this, it goes like:

"I want this!"

"Then make your own fucking game!"

"But I can't draw/write/make rules!"

"Talent" can mean a lot of things but the simple baseline talent of being able to concentrate long enough to make a finished game thing is actually a talent. Even people who are very bad at it have a talent, even being a hack at game design, writing, or drawing is miles past what most people can do.

And here's a thing about creative talent: stupid people with shit ideas have it less often than smart people with good ideas. Creative talent doesn't demand being a smart or thoughtful person but it definitely trends toward it.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this I can think of is Fox News: while there are anchors and execs who are true believers, most of the technical crew and a good chunk of the reporters on Fox News do not like Fox News. This is not great for Fox News because it results in a lot of leaks at Fox News and they have to pay people a lot more than competitors, but--it is literally impossible to find that many people who went to journalism school or know how to operate a camera who are cool with Fox News.

Fox News is such a bad idea that, in order to even run, it requires nonbelievers to do their storyboards, graphic design, lighting, everything. Likewise, people who are deeply invested in various kinds of Owlbear Fallacy aren't so much demanding new personnel as demanding the existing ones just kuckle down and do the stupid thing they want--they need and want cynics designing games for them. And they get it.

Cynics

I've seen people honestly disgusted at the thought that a decision on D&D might be "Just Mike Mearls doing what he wants to do!" And their issue wasn't Mike Mearls himself but that Mike was ignoring the mandate of the People and doing what he thought would be fun.

Let's leave aside whether Mike does that (he doesn't) but rather what kind of demands they are making on creators: they want them to do the work of producing hundreds of spell descriptions, tables, drawings, paintings, monsters and they want them to take themselves out of it.

If they want cynically-produced art they are asking the industry to create the kind of people that cynically-produced art makes. I've often talked about what this does to the art, but not so much about what it does to the people. Luckily Sarah Miller happens to have a great article up about exactly that.

Sarah was a film critic for a small Philadelphia weekly, her job reviewing movies:

-was creative

-was fun

-was full of people with higher aspirations

-was not particularly well-paid

...just like the RPG business. And, just like the RPG business, in that business sooner or later someone will offer you the opportunity to write something you don't want to for more money--and, perhaps more importantly, for a step just a little higher on the ladder.

Authors are asked to lie in order to maybe get a chance to write on a big piece of IP, to write at 3 cents an hour and act grateful for a company that could afford way more in order to get maybe a foot in the door with them, artists are asked to tone things down or simplify them to match what someone's mom or 12 year old wants, and to participate in various other gross Faustianisms to prove they're On tThe Team.

The RPG business is full of people who took that deal. In fact, pretty much every single full-time professional who's gotten caught lying or supporting harassment in the RPG community has taken a version of that deal--has admitted to doing work they knew that wasn't their best and passing it off as if it was.

Sarah took that deal too--all the paper wanted was a good review of The English Patient. 

Crucially, neither Sarah nor RPG hacks do it to survive --this isn't a job at Hardee's. Turning your creative talent to the defense of bullshit ideas is fundamentally different than daily drudgery: working at Taco Bell doesn't force you to constantly create arguments for Taco Bell, and it does not require you to agreeing to pretend something's a good idea when it isn't.

Sarah (emphasis mine):

I thought a lot about my lying review of that racist, boring, laughable, pseudo-intellectual movie. I thought about how at the time, I was proud of myself for having the courage to make shit up because I was afraid to disagree with someone I wanted to impress, and also afraid of not making money. That one decision had led to a lot of other similar ones and had eventually ended up as an agreement with myself to spend over 10 years of my life being a different person than the one I had planned on being and feeling smug about being good at writing crap and then even actually starting to think the crap was good because of the money I was given to produce it. I look at all the people in tech who are convinced they are saving the world, that what they do matters. When the money goes, and it will, that feeling will go with it. 

If you write thousands of sentences that have absolutely nothing to do with what you think or feel those sentences are still what you will become. You can turn yourself into another person. I turned myself into another person. 

That person was very sure she understood the way the world worked. If she met a writer who was unsuccessful, she always thought, “Oh, they are either extremely untalented,” or “They are still trying to be themselves—what an idiot.” When everything fell apart, this person was incensed she could no longer make lots of money for saying incredibly stupid things. She thought about killing herself all the time. 

I used to think I thought the right way, like, who cares if everyone does bad things, because bad things are just what important people have to do. Who cares if Barack Obama bombs people and doesn’t even try to prosecute bankers, because that’s all just his job, and he loves gay people and yells at bigots and his wife is smart and has great arms. Who cares if Hillary Clinton is best friends with Henry Kissinger, because she is a woman and so am I, and she stands up to men, and isn’t that what feminism is all about, finally getting into the rooms, finally getting to be the one to kill the people who don’t matter? Since my life was a fantasy, I had no trouble inhabiting a larger one. 

That technocratic smugness ("Including Owlbears Is a basic game design principle!") is thick on the ground in the RPG industry, as if the terrible decisions being made could not possibly be made another way and subjectivity isn't any part of it.

So if you're already inhabiting the fantasy "I have to tell people a game you don't like to play is good just to survive" then how much easier it must be to convince yourself "I have to refuse to even talk to people who disagree just to survive!" or "Thinking hard about how my decisions affect people who don't even make me money isn't my job" or "If someone disagrees with my friends, its more work than I have time for to see if they might have a point". They've already crossed a moral threshold: using their talent to lie about the one thing they love. Most of the rest just follows from there.

Of course they'd think it's not just ok but necessary to pretend you know more about transphobia than the trans girl or pretend to know more about "decolonizing games" than game authors from colonized places. You already agreed to pretend that module you wouldn't be caught dead playing (but wrote) was amazing and that thing by your friend that you never even read was magnificent!

Sarah (emphasis not mine):

I just can’t stop thinking of—hmmm—The English Patient. This was a movie about good looking mostly white people talking complete rubbish to each other, the end. But it was based on a LITERARY NOVEL with LONG SENTENCES using BIG WORDS. It had RESPECTED ACTORS. PEOPLE DIED in it. Also, WORLD WAR II WAS THERE. Everyone had agreed to care about this thing, to call it good, to give it nine Academy Awards. But it was just a piece of shit sprinkled with glitter that everyone, including me, agreed to call gold.

Next time you see someone obtusely waving the flag for some stupid idea or stupid game, think what the RPG business' would need a game to have in all caps to feel ok about itself. A POPULAR IP for YOUNG ADULTS, from a company with a WOKE REP, it had CRYING and NONVIOLENCE in it. How many of the all caps words do they have to line up to forget they wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole?

And then think about how pissed and sad and broken and secretly cynical they are when they see people making money or just having fun writing and playing what they love without having made any of those compromises.
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