Scribbles and Horrors

On twitter the other day someone posted a link to a series of articles about D&D. It was this, from a blog I hadn’t read before: Chasing The Dragon—An article series exploring the storytelling potential of RPGs. I think this is a worthwhile series of articles to read. It makes a lot of good points, and directs attention to problems that exist in the position that D&D occupies.

There’s a lot that can be said about it, which I won’t say now. However, there was one paragraph that really stuck with me. It had to do with the “story” that the rules of D&D encourage and enable.

…D&D is already a storytelling game – just not the story you’re probably trying to use it to tell. The men who wrote the foundational rules of the game – rules which largely still exist in current editions of the game – had their own idea of what a good story is. And you need look no further than the cover art to AD&D to understand what that story is.

Here we see a group of armed thugs invading the cultural temple of some lizard men, hacking them to pieces, and defacing their god’s statue to plunder it. Are the lizard men evil? Did they deserve to die? There doesn’t seem to be any indication that there are even good or bad guys here. From the body language of the killers, “heroism” doesn’t factor in at all. This is strictly business. Ideology is absent. There is only the logistical challenge of pulling off this latest murderous heist. Maintain the gear, pry up the jewels, update the map, figure out where to go next. The vermin have got to have a hidden treasure cache somewhere.

I’m not entirely on board with this characterization, particularly its description of ideology as absent. Seems like ideology is very present: D&D is about the logistical puzzle of entering a bizarre unknown, and returning with money. That is the adventure. The much-maligned “murder hobo” trope, where players have their characters perform indiscriminate violent chaos on the world is, in fact, precisely what the rules encourage.

This should be, I think, a little uncomfortable. Not because the rules aren’t fun, or because they don’t center elaborate stories, but because the project of extracting treasure by sword and guile is fundamentally a colonial one. Dungeons and Dragons is rules for conquest. It doesn’t take very much scrutiny to see how that can be problematic, even dangerous.

There is nuance here. OD&D, many will be quick to point out explicitly rewards non-combat solutions to problems by awarding xp for gold far more lucratively than monsters. So OD&D isn’t about killing as much as it is wealth-extraction. That’s a difference, and an interesting one. It’s worth a great deal of thought.

Now what I like about D&D is the mazes and the weird discoveries. I am fascinated by the architecture of the dungeon, and what it means to occupy that space. What’s more, I’m fascinated by the process of navigating that space. D&D is useful to me because it provides structures and norms about how to explore places like the Mythic Underworld. These rules are focus on the logistical, militaristic, and economic.

Perhaps there is a way to keep some of the aspects that I am most interested in with D&D while decentering violence and theft and intrusion. So that’s a project I’m starting to try and work on. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.

To this end, I am trying to get a sense for what options there are for non-violent roleplaying games. I asked this question on twitter and got a large number of responses, which I’ve compiled into a list here.