Scribbles and Horrors

At first, forgive some religiosity.

In church they told me that if I took a class after school and went up front during part of the service labelled Communion on the bulletin and kneeled at the altar and took the officiant seriously when they said “This is the body of Jesus Christ, given for you” and “This is the blood of Jesus Christ, shed for you” while giving me a wafer and an ounce of sweet wine, and if ate it thoughtfully, (optionally) saying “amen”, they told me that if I did those things my sins would be forgiven.

Whether or not doing those actions in that order effected the forgiveness of Sin (indeed, whether Sin is tangible danger at all, or else some chimerical non-pumpkin-headed bugbear to make well meaning people terrified by ordinary human behavior and blind to real abuses), whether or not it “worked” to purify my immortal soul, I never failed to be moved by the ritual.

Doing prescribed actions intentionally, in a group, this produced a religious experience. I continued receiving communion long after secularism took over my mind, because it continued to produce a unique experience. I did in fact feel closer to God, or at least I felt what I figured being closer to god might feel like.

I don’t think pen and paper games and religion are the same thing. A good play experience is nothing like a religious one, and I do not believe the two should be mixed together. But, as activities, they share a principle, an exhortation:

Follow the steps and be amazed.

Several times I have attempted to read the Blorb principlesand still only have a vague idea of what it is. Elmcat wrote a helpful post about what it’s not, and Nathan provided a heated Blorb rebuttal.

The discourse has left me feeling like Blorb is too hazy a concept to be particularly fruitful for discussion; everyone can read into it whatever they’d like, and attack/defend whatever version of it they most understand.

In any case I really liked more of Nathan’s post, particularly his emphasis on the game not being real. This forefronts the idea that a game is an activity enacted by people, that what we’re really dealing with is people stuff.

Anyway, this isn’t part of the Blorb discourse but it is inspired by it.

“Throw out the rules, make the game just how you’d like it!” is the long-standing battle cry of the OSR and, while good, when taken seriously it plainly throws out the baby with the bath water.

Rules are important to games, and NOT simply as a tool to manipulate gameplay. What makes rules useful, procedures and preparation, is being locked into them. It’s the act of submitting yourself into the steps.

I wrote, and Weird Writer wrote, that rpg play is like a play rehearsal, the prep and rules are the script to that rehearsal.

But the thing about scripts is for the most part you have to read the words exactly as they appear in it. A script is not a handy inspiration guide for exciting theatre, it is words that you must read.

The trick, the fun of theatre, is finding a way to say the words in a way that is full of life. That’s the sauce, what comes out of being yourself within the game. It’s the combination of self, group, and procedures that make a game.

A bad script can make a good rehearsal. And what makes a script good is not necessarily that it’s easy to perform. For this reason highly polished, “well designed” games catch my interest less often; the frictiony bits that would be surfaces for me to hold onto and push against are burnished out. They slip out of my hands.

Rules and prep should not be tools, and they are mechanisms only metaphorically. Likewise, they should not be improvisational suggestions, flavor text; they are a framework for prescribed action. In willful discipleship to them, rules come alive, and we discover new truths about ourselves.

Follow the steps. Follow them exactly, while being most fully yourself. Push against them while adhering strictly. You will be amazed.

I humbly suggest that this is a principle of Oracular Play.