[old and new D&D] Eero and the Unitarian-Universalist branch of modern D&D

[Ron Edwards]

I wrote this as a way to express to Eero what I think of his postings about his D&D game, about his (excellent) work with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and about our discussions when I was in Finland. (Eero and I tend to pack about eighty days worth of discussion into our two or three day get-togethers.) He's seen it already.

--

It's the middle-late 19th century, in England. The Anglican Church, or Church of England, has lost its hold on the intellectuals and activists of the day, for whom reform is the goal, up to and including reforming humanity itself if that's what it takes for a better society. Many of these activists and reformers cherish religious imagery and narratives and seek to reform them, rather than rejecting them outright. Fascinating hybrids appear, whole multi-branched families of Christian Socialists and Christian Darwinians and whatnot.

A new intellectual endeavor or perception begins: the idea that if you scrubbed away institutional crust, mistranslations, and other obscuring factors, you will find a consistent and original personage, Jesus, "shining through" and available for inspiration. This Jesus is socially aware, counter-cultural, anti-institutional, benevolent - an entirely likeable guy full of completely sensible ideas. What a wonderful discovery! So this is what he was like!

Some activists retool a centuries-old heresy to contemporary activism, specifically anti-slavery (as it happens), based on this new, or as they see it, original idea of Jesus who so coincidentally happens to think just like they do. They see themselves as both secular and reverent, and combine with another viewpoint which enables them to extend (their) Jesus to all other religions in some fashion, cherry-picking bits of Buddhism and Islam and Hinduism toward that end. Historically: this is Unitarian Universalism.

Ladies and gentlemen of the discussion community, meet Eero Tuovinen. This is his D&D. Does it work? Yes. Does it meet his needs? Yes. Does it feel and seem to him as if he's discovered "the real" D&D? Yes. Does he sift through old and new-retro texts to find what works for him? Yes. Does he construct this sifting in terms of what is or isn't "really" D&D? Yes. Is he delighted at how functional and coherent it has turned out to be? Yes. Does he construct that function and coherence as a kernel of essential pre-existing D&D that he and others have winkled out from history? Yes.

Eero, when we were at the coffee bar, you told one of the people there, in his claim of playing Gamist+Narrativist Capes, that he was spotting unicorns. It so happened that I agree with you, as one would think I might. That doesn't change the fact that I think you're doing the same thing, when you speak and write in terms of finding D&D. You found D&D in precisely the same fashion that the Unitarian Universalists found Jesus, and who would have thought? It exactly matches what you like and value in the textual and cultural thicket of "D&D-ness," just in the way the Jesus they constructed out of the textual and cultural thicket of contemporary Christianity exactly matched their precise social ideals.

As the facts of the Jesus issue turned out, the line of research begun by David Strauss with Das Leben Jesus led to an unanticipated outcome, that the texts historically disintegrate rather than cohere or "clean up," to the extent that any such personage as Jesus as described piecemeal in the New Testament indisputably did not exist. The various interpretations of this personage turn out to be what Ghost in the Shell calls a "standalone complex," a cultural entity composed of deeply felt representations with no actual original model - only the insistent belief that there is one.

To clarify my position: I do not think there is a historical D&D which I'm comparing to your usage/creation. My position is that we're working with a true standalone complex. I also stress that the various games played throughout the 1970s were themselves a standalone complex, upon which the later and current ones are yet more elaborate (or refined) iterations. (My God, I can't believe I'm using "philosophy" from an anime as a serious intellectual point, but somehow they really nailed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_%28philosophy%29#Stand_Alone_Complex.

Therefore I have no stake in finding an original D&D any more than I take seriously all these silly attempts to find the historical Jesus. That's the "fundamentalist" position which matches as precisely to a particular subset of role-players relative to D&D as yours does to the historical UU.

The analogy holds beautifully with D&D, a standalone complex of the purest form. There wasn't any actual original D&D, only a widespread belief that there was one, represented only by incredibly diverse local and original constructions, some of which were institutionalized. Your D&D is one of these constructions, and not a recapitulation of a historical one, but entirely de novo. You're not finding the shining essence of it which has been obscured by institutions and misunderstandings. You're making something entirely yours out of textually scattered parts, almost certainly corresponding with nothing historical. It works because you want to play a game which works and in your craftsmanship - game design! - have settled for nothing less.

I'll give you this: it's a lovely construct. It feels wonderful to be so satisfied with successful play and so connected to "the heart of the hobby" at the same time. However, it draws you into careless talk about D&D as if it were a thing, and affects your judgment regarding others' publications, deeming them good or ill based on their utility for this alleged thing. Qualify it as you like with "speaking only for myself," but your phrasings outside of these qualifications sing a different song - that you've not only found it, it is the real and only "it," and you are also now situated to judge whether others have found it too. No amount of qualifications can override the strength of such statements as "useless" or "off-track." One cannot say, "This is useless," without it being a blanket judgment perceived as applicable to multiple aims. That's what "useless" means. There is literally no such thing, in any language, as "Useless! Oh, I mean, for me." When you say a given publication is off track, or that the author has lost his mind, you are not speaking as a single consumer with a single highly-localized, highly-original take. You are speaking as an arbiter of *legitimacy* relative to your particular chosen - and presumed *correct* - form of the activity.

It's a wonderful tap-dance, between "this is the real game" and "oh I'm just an interpreter," embedded in the larger shared illusion about D&D expressed as "you can do anything with it," which is worth a whole essay of its own. Again, a great parallel with the UU tap-dance concerning whether its members are religious or not.

The funny thing about Unitarian Universalists is that they find themselves to be remarkably virtuous. They can't be intolerant of other religions - how can they be, when they are so welcoming of other religions ... as long, of course, as the adherents of those other religions admit that they are really UU as well under a crusty coating. They can't be accused of mysticism and superstition - how can they be, when they are so intellectual ... as long as it doesn't go so far as to invalidate the Jesus-construct they value. And they can't be accused of being merely a secular bunch of activists like any old other community organization - how can they be, when they have none other than Jesus on their side ... as long as, of course, they can tap-dance all day long about just how religious they are. Unlike other religions which are at least honest about such concepts as "we're right and you'll burn in hell," or "admit we're right or we'll fuck you up," UU members get to think of themselves as tolerant, rational, and spiritual in a kind of ecstasy of justification for their ends.

Just like the enthusiastic UU intellectual-activist, you also acknowledge that others might, in their way, possibly sort of legitimately worship Jesus, or rather, play D&D too. They don't do it very well, of course. Probably beknighted, poor souls, adhering to some errant text as if it were important, or utilizing practices which they clearly made up themselves. And most importantly, certainly not directed toward as meaningful or necessary ends. Again, just like the UU activist, you are only too willing to help these poor fellows understand, hoping that they can be tolerant, rational, and spiritual enough (as you) to agree with you.

I think you are in denial of your position as a genuinely committed person toward your deeply-felt and locally-constructed game, phrased as an appreciation of some external entity which in fact does not, and never did exist.
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Further little essays of this sort are forthcoming concerning the equivalent D&D analogies with fundamentalists, orthodoxies, and fundamentalist-orthodox, which are three different things.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I await your views on other branches of D&D religiousity with interest - this one was fun, and I'm sure the others will be as well! Perhaps you've met some specific people who are emblematic of these different attitudes as well :D

Perhaps my own view on the matter of whether I'm talking about "real" D&D might be best perceived like this: when people talk about Jesus, they have different motivations for doing so; some want to piggy-back on Jesus because others care about him, others are forced to account for Jesus because he's not extricable from a certain historical religious tradition, yet others find Jesus a compelling narrative - a Son of God, yet Become Man, charitable and kind and wise, and so on (or alternatively, a judgemental prick who wants you to love him at any cost!). It is true (or at least I believe so) that this latter view as Jesus as a definite personage is largely arbitrary in terms of historical proof about a historical Jesus, but that doesn't mean it is not significant that people form these perceptions. The people who have a need to imagine a personage behind the snippets we know, ascribing motivations to him - they're doing it because they need to.

What I'm coming to here is that just like people find it surprisingly important to craft clear, real-seeming narratives about Jesus as this definite person, the guy at the Sermon of the Mount, or the guy sitting in judgement of you during Judgement Day - just like the sensibilities about Jesus cluster around these archetypes, it is not surprising that our views on what D&D "is" will very easily cluster around certain archetypes of gaming when we attempt to put D&D to use as a game. This is unavoidable: we want to play a functional game, and this means that we need to do constructive reading, cohering towards a certain choice that excludes other choices. The Nordic liberal tradition of a Loving Jesus, like say H.C. Andersen has it, is simply incompatible with the fire-and-brimstone Jesus of American Evangelism; those are different cohesive pictures that both can be derived from the same base material by selective reading. Both readings are relevant and not just arbitrary false pictures, not because they're historically justifiable, but because they have utility for the people constructing them. These people are saying to us that hey, you might maybe need to care about Jesus, because see this narrative I constructed about him? It's a beautiful narrative speaking to human nature! Maybe one of these guys is saying that you need to care because you know that you're secretly ashamed of yourself and need a stern father figure, while the other guy is telling you that your existential angst can be fulfilled by belief in universal and unconditional love; however contradictory towards each other and arbitrary towards their source material, both of these Christian authors are developing narratives that are factually relevant to people with the in-built psychological drives that these narratives speak to. This is how religion functions, why it is relevant in the first place, and it has nothing much to do with historical standards of proof.

The above would probably be my justification for talking about Jesus if I was Unitarian, wouldn't it? (Nothing against UU, by the way - as people who know me at all might imagine, it'd be a toss-up between that, western Buddhism and humanist neo-paganism if I ever decided to get religious myself.) However, applying that to D&D, I hope that you can see why I might disagree with the picture that I'm reappropriating D&D and trying to define it for myself and others, judging what is "false" D&D. I will totally cop to thinking that I don't understand and appreciate some specific D&D implementations that people create, but that is not the same thing as thinking that my interpretation is something more true and primary than theirs. The only thing it means is that there is an understandable reason for me perhaps not being as excited about their stuff as they are about their own. It might also mean that I'll maybe write a lukewarm or even negative crique of their work, explaining why it's not that interesting for me, but it does not mean that I want them to stop calling their work "D&D", as Ron seems to suggest.

Instead, let me say in my own words what degree of "realness" I ascribe to the way I've learned to play D&D over the last few years: I believe that my current D&D is a very strong Platonic ideal form lurking beyond the oral and textual tradition of D&D. It is something that speaks to myself and others on the level of Creative Agenda, it's something sensible that people sometimes want to be doing at the gaming table. (To be specific, they want to be playing wargames, the way they can glorify human inventiveness, as elevated entirely into the Shared Imagined Space - that's what my path of D&D is about when you come down to it!) Some D&D implementations have gotten closer to the ideal in the past, while some are clearly going their own way; I've been reading the Gygax DMG over the last week, and he's making a horrid mess of the game he hints at in the original booklets; meanwhile, the Mentzer Red Box remains as beautiful and functional a statement of what challenge-oriented, fiction-respecting D&D can be as any written. If I've ever said that my D&D is the "real thing", the only thing I ever could mean is that I totally have almost entire deck here in my hands regarding this specific type of challengeful, cooperative, hardcore unforgiving yet compassionate D&D I practice, and I'll be only too happy to deal you a hand as well if you're interested in playing with me, or talking about it, or whatever. It's not "real" in a historical way, and my tradition of transmittal is really bad (nobody should believe a word I say about D&D because of my supposed closeness to the source, I'm just about as distant from lake Geneva as anybody can possibly be and still be over 30 years old); the only way in which my D&D is "real" is in that I believe that I've gotten really close to satisfying the gamist agenda that lies in the junction between psychological needs and what the D&D mechanical ideas can really accomplish.

In a word, I might be a lot like a UU religious activist (a lazy one - it's not like I'm actually doing anything active about D&D, except playing it weekly), but I'm the sort of activist who thinks that he's gotten at least one actually useful and interesting interpretation of Jesus out of the historical sources and my own theological thinking. I'm like the afore-mentioned H.C. Andersen, who claims brazenly that everybody gets to Heaven on the strength of his own religious needs and feelings, and little more. When I meet an American crazy-evangelical person who thinks that it's their duty to convince the gays to repent so they don't go to Hell, I'll engage them in comparative discussion, but I wouldn't tell them that they're not doing Christianity - most clearly they're deriving their historical and scriptural inspiration from a Christian tradition!

[Ron Edwards]

I totally get that and I think it applies perfectly - I nodded my head about five times through your post. I'm pretty sure we're agreeing fully on the material that matters the most to me in my post.

[Ron Edwards]

It occurs to me that some disclosure is necessary. My mother was raised - or as she would say it, badly raised - in the context of rather uneducated and fanatical Roman Catholicism which she rejected in her teens, which would be in the 1950s, long before I was born in 1964. My dad had long before rejected whatever brew of Presbyterian-Baptist-something his Okie-Californian family had raised him in. So my brothers and I received shockingly little religious instruction compared to others in our age group (or rather, theirs as legit Boomers and mine as Gen-X).

But upon the onset of family drama which one day will probably be a cable TV show, my mother and new stepfather joined the Unitarian Universalist church - or rather, that particular group of activists living on the Monterey Peninsula roughly 1970, and I began attending with her around 6 or 7 years old. I wasn't really a designated member and was too young to be in the Liberal Religious Youth group of the time (which is best understood as everything fundamentalists feared Secular Humanism would be), but I attended many functions, services, and camping trips. Think "hippies" and you will be on track, although I've found very few people who actually know what that word means in historical reality.

I definitely participated enough to be included in the grassroots construction of this building, and should you go there today and view the footage available to visitors, you will see my early-teen self laboring away at it. I went to a lot of wedding and funeral services there, and still find it nice to visit when I get back to the area.

I officially joined the church around 1979, alarmed by the re-appearance of religious fundamentalism and militarism in U.S. politics and greatly fearful of the re-instatement of the military draft, which had only been defunct for three or so years at that time, so hardly a dead letter. I was not fucking around, this was a strategic move on my part directed specifically toward enlisting church support if I found myself facing a draft board and claiming conscientious objector status. Attending various church activities and discussion groups let me know that I wasn't very interested in the actual content - new UU members seemed obsessed with whatever religion they'd just rejected* and also with whatever step of personal growth they'd recently invested in, and since this was the Monterey Peninsula in the 1970s, you have no fuckin' idea what that entailed, in a group of ten-fifteen adults. EST, recovering heroin addiction, experimental marriage groups, and transcendental meditation were the least of it.

The main benefit was a better understanding of comparative religions, such that in the 1980s I was probably in a tiny minority of Americans who even knew that Jesus is a greatly-revered prophet in Islam, for example, or how the various books of the New Testament do and do  not fit together. I learned quite about about technical Buddhism beyond the Zen faddism of the day, which given the timing of my mid-teens may have saved me from all manner of flakiness. I found all of this to be valuable information throughout my life, especially as an evolutionary biologist.

Upon moving to Chicago for university life in 1983, I looked about Hyde Park to find the UU church there, and unsurprisingly to anyone who knows that area, found it immediately in a prominent gothic building which puzzled me because it looked like, you know, a real church. I attended one service and was even more greatly puzzled because they seemed to be talking mostly about someone called "God" - at that point I had no idea that midwestern and west-coast UU cultures were so divergent that I might as well have walked into Rockefeller Chapel down the street instead. I didn't attend further and have not been involved in institutional religions since, partly because by then, it was clear that not even President Ronald was going to re-instate the draft (to those interested, all of this coincided exactly with the events leading up to and including the destruction of the Marines barracks in Beirut).

So there you have some cultural subtext or at least context for my posting.

Best, Ron

* Classic dialogue from an excellent film: "Secular humanist, what's that?" "Pretty much the last step before you give up entirely ... you know, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Unitarian, Secular Humanist."

[Eero Tuovinen]

(Cross-posting with Ron, I got inspired to write a bit more. I also think that we're agreeing on the big picture here.)

What Ron says about my being in denial about my game being "really" an independent design, and that I'm misleading and confusing in insisting on utilizing the terminological heritage of D&D in discussing it... I think he's entirely right about the specific nature of the thing we are talking about.

Specifically, when we talk about this game that we've been playing lately, it is entirely correct to say that it is a new practice, de novo as Ron says; I have never in this research opted for a weaker design decision because I would have been constrained by prior art. However, I would also like it if you acknowledged that viewing this very same phenomenon of "Eero playing D&D" from the opposite direction has merit as well. I'll explain why I think this way, and perhaps we can agree that both statements can be right at the same time: what we're doing can be an unique and to a degree new thing, while also simultaneously being heavily entrenched in an utilizing the roleplaying culture and prior art as it exists in the D&D cultural history, specifically.

The reasons for why I think that our play is quintessentially D&D, and just as much that as anybody's has been historically, are as follows:
- We read and utilize D&D rules texts, reflecting them against our own goals, and taking or leaving ideas depending on their utility for what we're trying to accomplish in the given campaign. Currently we're actually playing with the LotFP rules system, which is entirely orthodox in itself. (It seems to me that this point in our practice is specifically tripping Ron - that I believe that I have the right to comment on the usefulness of D&D texts, despite playing in such an unique way. Hopefully I'm explaining it intelligibly why I dare to take such a liberty.)
- We make heavy use of D&D adventure modules in bringing content into our play. We create our own as well, but both old TSR material, as well as more recent OSR adventures of nearly all sorts get to perform; rarely do we find them in any way heterodox compared to our own practices. These texts are eminently playable for us.
- We discuss things and exchange ideas among step-wise wider and more authoritative segments of the entire D&D culture; my own close group, people who I play and talk with weekly, include some of the most hardcore and competent new-school D&D gamers in Finland; my own brother has old-school credentials that maybe half-dozen people in Finland might argue to surpass, having learned the game in his US exchange year in the '80s; I discuss D&D regularly with Jim, who might be considered a pretty good touch-point for the OSR scene; my wider Finnish discussion circles include a clear super-majority of all Finns playing OSR D&D at all; second-hand, this discussion community has a multitude of uni- and bidirectional communications and contacts over the entire international scene of what is D&D. I probably don't know anybody personally who knew Gygax, but I likely know somebody who knows somebody :D
- We have specifically opted multiple times to select the "D&D way" of resolving technical and procedural matters over some other, arbitrary choices. For example, when I choose to use hitpoints at all, it is partly because it's a cornerstone mechanic without which I would be taking a clear, undeniable step towards losing compatibility with the textual tradition that we rely on for e.g. adventure modules. I don't doubt for a moment that I would make a break if some cornerstone of this sort was truly incompatible, just like the UU would no doubt drop Jesus if he was truly not capable of being intepreted as a nice hippy; however, so far it has not come to that. I could list probably dozens of similar examples of things where we specifically take inspiration and choose to use one of the many traditional mechanical ideas over de novo creation; meanwhile, the truly, genuinely new ideas tend to be deliberate core choices not made lightly.

(Thinking of your religious terminology, it might not be far off the mark to say that this last point differentiates this sort of UU D&D practice from orthodox practice: the orthodox practitioner, like Jim basically is, will make the choice of retaining the mainstream orthodox ideas just because it's the tradition and they want to be in the tradition, while I will only keep them as long as they are capable of being interpreted towards this true ideal game I perceive. This is why e.g. Jim still has demihumans and experience levels in his game - when I truly listen to him, I perceive that the game he envisions wouldn't really miss these elements. I certainly fully recognize that I am in the far extreme liberal wing of the D&D tradition in this regard - although I don't think that I'm exactly alone here, historically.)

Considering the above points, it seems outright oblivious to claim that we've made a break with D&D: we're doing exactly the same locally-developing, uniquely independent thing that's always been remarkably characteristic of the D&D culture, just like you yourself acknowledge above. Some people might skew closer to the texts that are perceived as central, but if you don't believe the texts to be the primary source to begin with (as I do; I put much, much more stock to actual living play tradition that the OSR expresses than something written 30 years ago), then this shouldn't impress you much as some fundamental difference.

If and when our continuing exploration of D&D loses say two-ish of the four benchmark features I list above, then I'll be willing to say that we're not playing D&D ("a" D&D, not "the" D&D - I personally believe D&D as a historical social phenomenon to be a vague oral tradition pulled together by tradition, just like you describe it yourself) anymore, but rather merely playing a derivation game. For example, if and when we pull out T&T and utilize its rules and procedures, I'm willing to say that it's not D&D anymore - we've made a clear break in technical tradition, even if we're still playing the same genre of gamist, party-based, fantasy-genre, dungeoneering-involving adventure game.

However, as long as we talk intelligibly with other people who also think that they're playing D&D, and we care about what's involved in the D&D tradition, and we use products marketed explicitly for D&D (or "OSR" or "world's most popular tabletop rpg", or whatever weird fig leaf people want to use), it seems really counter-intuitive to me to instead emphasize the local creativity as the more important characterizing feature. I would not explain our play to an outside questioner by launching into an explanation of this game as if it was unique; I would simply say that it's OSR-style old school D&D, heavily house-ruled. That is the truth, insofar as I understand; if it's not well-phrased, then I suspect that a majority of currently existing old school D&D campaigns would need to be labeled as "not D&D" for the exact same reasons of not being orthodox enough. I mean, at least the people who write in the Internet constantly describe how they utilize their theoretical authority to make the game their own in massive ways: they remove or add character classes, use spell lists from one D&D edition with another, mess with the combat procedures, and so on. I do more of these than the majority, perhaps, but none of the things I do would singly take me over the line of not being D&D in terms of historical tradition.

(And yes, I recognize that more than anything else my conviction that I'm within the technical tradition of D&D is what makes me Unitarian Universalist in the first place in this metaphor. The equivalent of an orthodox Catholic would obviously think that I'm not playing D&D here. If I didn't think that what importantly makes D&D into D&D is the rich oral tradition and spirit of local responsibility, then I would most likely call our play a "D&D hack" instead of "playing D&D as God intended it". It's not our extreme gamism that makes me think that we play D&D - it's that we've used the proper D&D techniques of derivation in developing our campaign that makes it D&D. Our gamism just makes us a particular brand of old school adventure gaming, the above benchmarks make us D&D.)

It's OK if the above does not convince as a viewpoint, as this is ultimately just a terminological question. I know that some UU people find it offensive if you call them "non-Christians", but personally I tend to think that that's just because they're opportunistic (they want to ride the coat-tails), or because they're not comfortable with being Universalists in the first place. Not so with me; for me it's just a terminology question that doesn't change the matters of fact down on the ground, so to speak.

[Ron Edwards]

More good posts and thoughts.

I'll let others challenge your call for what you'd like to see acknowledged; Moreno comes to mind as one who'd very much like to see the reliance on "D&D" as a unifying term be shot in the head, dismembered, soaked in acid, and immolated at temperatures exceeding 1650 degrees Celsius.

As for my position, if I recall correctly, Jim and I agree that perhaps it might have been better to let the term die as a commercial entity sometime around 2000, with D&D 3.0 being called something entirely new instead. So I end up with somewhat more sympathy toward the OSR practice of avoiding the term "Dungeons & Dragons," not at all for the frequently stated reason of being challenged for IP infringement, but for the benefit of acknowledging the standalone-complex features of the term.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Also, that's a very inspiring religious background, if I may say so. I have a lot of respect for UU, and have been interested in their story for years, in my own exploration of human religiousness.

I haven't participated much in these religion discussions that have been a long-running side-line in the Forge community over the years, in large part because they tend to be somewhat America-centered, which tends to translate to obnoxious political correctness in my eyes; it mostly feels like I would just be disrupting the self-congratulations if I entered with my own story, which is obviously wouldn't fit any of the boxes that American religious discussion seems to like for people. (I mean all the labels, of which there are more, and they're different from the ones used in Europe. Here it's much more correct to describe your religious status as a process instead of a label, while in an American discussion it seems that most of my friends should be described as "nothing at all" - myself included. The picture I get is that it's OK to be "stupid-atheist" or "humanist Jew", but good luck attempting to discuss religion as something you perceive and engage with, instead of attempting to label yourself with some flag that you want to be proud of.)

That being said and put aside, Ron's interesting UU background inspires me to say a few words, just to make it more understandable where I come from with my perception of this whole liberal/orthodox/fundamentalist metaphor. (Ron probably knows most of this from our prior private discussions, or can guess it from my politics, although I don't remember anything explicit.) It's an interesting metaphor and I think that I understand it well on the basis of my religious studies, but you be the judge.

Modern Finnish society (basically since the power of the conservative cultural order broke in the socialist-liberal '60s upheavals) is basically single-church secular, which most Americans tend to interpret as more religious than it really is. I'm coming slowly to understand that this is because Americans put more weight on orthopraxy than orthodoxy in comparison to us; for example, when Ron jests at me about how Lutheran I am, he's perceiving the cultural background, and not the deep ideological secularization of religion that Finland's gone through.

Anyway, in this Finland I was born into (and that is changing, as things are wont to, as internationalism grows), basically everybody is a member of the Evangelic-Lutheran Church, which in American terms I would characterize as a nice middle-class status quo feel-good institution, except that in Finland it's the only game in town, and therefore works hard to be an umbrella institution for the entire range of religious activity, ranging from the normal people who only go to Church at Christmas to feel the Christmas spirit, to the people who don't own a television and will disown their own children for perimarital relations. There are a bunch of minor movements, of course, but they're either venerable Christian history (e.g. the Orthodox Church, which is associated with Eastern ethnicities), or part of the Evangelical 19th century history that is very much shared with Americans (even if I don't hear them talking about it), and mostly very non-visible. And then there is, of course, the "civil registry" of people who do not belong on any church.

I consider my religious upbringing to be very representative of the Finnish mainstream of this generation, which of course means that if I'm going to make mistakes in analyzing it, it'd be because I'm blind to something that just happened to not be a part of my own course through the Church. Anyway, here's what it was like: I was baptized, my mother was a Sunday school teacher, my father is completely indifferent to religious ideology while also finding it inappropriate and offensive to not belong in the Church as a community. Religion was a matter of old fairy tales, basically, for our generation: we were taught them in school, mostly (the Church in Finland is not that active in society, the specifically Church-y social work is pretty much limited to the true believer contingent). Moral or societal requirements were never brought up at any level of the up-bringing: being a member of the Finnish Evangelic-Lutheran Church makes no requirement whatsoever of you ideologically or politically, it is purely a commitment to having a Church wedding and paying the maintenance of the institution in the form of a Church tax. I would even say that it is part of the unwritten constitution of the country: the Lutheran Church's ideological pre-eminence in religious matters is tolerated as long as it is crystal clear to everybody in theory as well as practice, that the Church shall not be a political institution in the sense American religious institutions all are.

Personally I did my stint in Sunday School, Boy Scouts and even the church choir, largely due to social reasons. The others didn't leave much of a mark, but the Boy Scouts did: the organization in Finland is only nominally independent of the state church, and in my home town in the '90s it was basically a religious organ. Despite this, I took to the semi-militant ideology with relish, and the Scouts probably left me with most of what religious empathy I'm left with for Lutheranism. This is not surprising: the Finnish Scouts are basically a paramilitary patriotic youth club, so quite a few Finns who like their country will have fond memories, even if they want to reinterpret them in a non-religious manner, like I do. (Like the entire Scouts movement in Finland does, to be honest: its increasingly controlled by people exactly like myself, who want to move it further away from the Church and more towards a secular paramilitary patriotic youth club.)

When our age group came to our teenage years, there were basically three reactions that each personally took to the Church; this was in the '90s., but the same process has been happening with each generation since the '70s, I think, and it is on-going. Here are the three types of people who come out of the Evangelic-Lutheran mill in Finland:
- The true believers are people who delved basically voluntarily into the deeper teachings of Lutheranism. Many are, of course, from religious homes, but not all; my dear friend Sami Koponen, for instance, is from a secular home, despite being a true believer himself. The true believers are basically a slightly oppressed minority in the cultural politics of Finland, in that they are the ones who have to justify themselves and be curiousities for others.
- The vast majority are what I might characterize as the "ordinary Finn", when we're looking for a snapshot of this ultimately pretty homogenous culture. They're members of the Church because they were baptized into it, and they have grown used to the idea that they'll get married, have their children baptized, and will have a funeral at a church. Put one on the spot, and it's even odds whether they'll admit to believing in e.g. divinity of Christ. The vast majority of people in Finland belong in this group that I would characterize as secular in nature: they will be respectful, but ultimately unsympathetic and non-understanding of any attempt at reinstituting religion as serious business in the country: it's OK as long as it remains this nice little appendage of cultural history, perhaps something to cry over when you're feeling bad, but nevermore a societal force. It is indicative that most pastors of the Church in Finland believe this way, I think.
- The opposite minority are people like myself who get out of the church once we hit legal age, because we're sufficiently interested in the matters of ethics and theology to actually care about whether we're quietly supporting an institution that we might not like. This crew varies widely in terms of self-satisfaction and religious feeling; some are proud of being hardcore secular atheists, while others are alternatively spiritual in ways that don't get anything from the barren and routine Lutheran church.

In the above scheme, I'd characterize myself as an incorrigible Agnostic, and much too interested in intellectual honesty to remain in a church that teaches stuff that I don't actually believe in. It might be interesting to note that my final disagreement with my upbringing was of a pretty intellectual ethical nature, as opposed to an emotional revelation: I could not figure out why the existence of God should matter ethically in any way (I recognized that Christian morality is basically cowardise, unwillingness to brave hellfire for what is actually right), and therefore Pascal's Wager lost its lukewarm hold on me, and left me with not even a bad reason for staying in the church.

Since I'm so inquisitive by nature, I've since then read quite a bit about all sorts of world religions, alongside everything else in this world. My studies of philosophy have left me so inured to existential crises and fear of death that I don't particularly long for the certainty facet of religion (true Agnosticism/science being willingness to withhold judgment until you have certainty or operative reasons to rely on beliefs), but I find them interesting as aesthetic and cosmological constructs; it sometimes shocks my friends how easily I deal with given religious notions as aesthetic constructs, quite willingly retooling them into e.g. fantasy literature.

There is much to be learned about humanity in religion, however, so I don't feel that close to the new Atheist party line; it's simply arrogant to think that you're so much better than somebody else without understanding the pressures they operate under any better than you average atheist does. If I had some operative need for it, I could make a pretty convincing UU, Buddhist or humanist neo-Pagan without trampling much on my convictions on matters we don't have knowledge about. Baha'i, too, probably, if I didn't mind catching the monotheist bug and an inordinate respect for authoritative lineage from somewhere :D

The thing is, though, there's very little need and pressure for doing religion in Finland nowadays. In my adult life the only reason to even distantly care on a personal level is that sometimes some family events are held in a church. Aside from that, my direct relationship to religion nowadays mostly consists of going to listen to Sami's sermonizing (he started working as a pastor recently) for ironic humour. Finnish churches are not political or even practical organizations; if they were, I could well imagine joining e.g. some sort of neo-Pagan alliance (good luck getting them into one church) for the sake of social activism, and to support people whose viewpoints I have empathy for.

[Eero Tuovinen]

As for the D&D brand, I agree whole-heartedly that it should have been dropped by WotC; the redesign with 3rd edition is a culture-political travesty that would never fly in e.g. literature. That's commercial culture for you, no integrity when all's said and done.

That aside, it seems to me to be pretty unavoidable that the OSR people would regardless call the game they play D&D; it's just got such utility and tradition behind it in everyday gaming. I mean, it'd be pretty weird for somebody who's been playing since the '90s to continue playing the same exact game they've been playing as a living tradition, and suddenly change its name because they've reached an arbitrary point of distance from their starting place. It's like we stopped calling "playing Sorcerer" just that once Sorcerer and Sex was incorporated in the practice - suddenly it's no longer the same game, eh? Considering the role these sorts of "old-timers" have had in starting up the OSR discussions over the last decade, it's a surprise to me that there's even this much support for dropping the historical term.

[Ron Edwards]

Back to D&D, fortunately.

Eero, I agree fully with what you wrote,

I think that our play is quintessentially D&D, and just as much that as anybody's has been historically

but I think I mean something a little different from it: that there is nothing singularly meaningful in that term "quintessentially," in this case. Meaningful, yes, but not singularly meaningful in the way your overall post strongly implies. "just as much as anybody's has been," means to me, that no one has been close - because there's nothing to be close to.

One can point to an equally prevalent and fascinating oral/practical tradition of play which is marked by the titles The Fantasy Trip, Champions (ed. 1-3), GURPS, and Champions (ed. 4-present) as a kind of spine of publishing, with probably as many as a hundred titles so deeply influenced and continuous with them in practice that they might as well be considered the "same game."

But no one calls that quintessentially anything, do they? No one claims they're all manifestations of The Fantasy Trip as if TFT existed right now in ur-form, enveloping and connecting them. And that's the case even though play of these games I'm talking about is historically much more unified in technique than the scattered plethora and incredibly customized (to the point of new game design) of play called "D&D."

It'd be good to get some other voices into the conversation, especially if people focus a bit less on personal religion and more on D&D. We can get into the personal religion stuff when we talk about the Estimated Prophet games again.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Agreed about other viewpoints, here. Interesting stuff.

One can point to an equally prevalent and fascinating oral/practical tradition of play which is marked by the titles The Fantasy Trip, Champions (ed. 1-3), GURPS, and Champions (ed. 4-present) as a kind of spine of publishing, with probably as many as a hundred titles so deeply influenced and continuous with them in practice that they might as well be considered the "same game."

That is a very interesting point, even if you intended it more as a counter-example: perhaps, if you're right, these games should be considered together in comparative terms? I mean, what I usually encounter with these point-buy games is people who play Hero System or people who play GURPS, but I certainly don't meet anybody who'd have the kind of holistic and text-critical viewpoint that D&D gets treated with in the OSR scene.

I mean, this isn't quite a matter of terminology only, it's an important basic presumption in analysis to determine how we're limiting observation and which kinds of tools we use to model data. Maybe it'd be easier to understand what these point-buy games are trying to accomplish (as a long and varied tradition, I mean, presumably at least loosely connected by similar creative goals among the people who've opted to work with them over the years), and how to go about bettering them, if one did consider them as a lineage instead of separate phenomena?

I imagine that if such analysis went along similar lines to how the OSR has been treating D&D, then the first step would be to take the earliest texts under scrutiny, and then do comparative analysis between those and later treatments, figuring out what has changed and why; then one might pass judgement on whether anything of worth has been lost in the organic historical development, and whether there are elements of practice or mechanical ideas that should perhaps be revived and recombined with modern though to bring about a new, better GURPS/Champions.

I've had very little practical experience actually playing these hardcore point-buys, and despite some study (e.g. I read through the Hero System 4th edition book in detail last year), I've had major difficulty really grogging what sort of excellence people see in these games - why the point-buy, basically, as to me it very easily seems like a massively fiddly waste of time, speaking of my natural reaction. Thus I'm naturally interested in fresh viewpoints. Maybe I should get familiar with Fantasy Trip to figure out Hero System?

I don't know if this viewpoint would be useful in practice, but then that'd be the test I'd use with D&D as well: do we actually benefit from treating D&D as a tradition of practice? My current answer is yes, not the least based on the fact that I'm doing pretty well mixing and swapping mechanical ideas from a wide variety of editions, but I don't know, maybe there is some trade-off there, analytical roadblocks or blind spots caused by this historiography over a different one? Would I be doing even better if I did not consider the unity of practice? As a first suggestion, it seems to me that without that particular conceit, I would probably prioritize non-D&D sources more, and thus I might have read Fantasy Trip already by this point :D

[Joshua Bearden]

One fascinating thing that happens to successful commercial products is the paradox of 'genericide' in which the mark of success - becoming a household word and the template against which all your competitors will be judged is inextricably combined with the risk of losing the right to prevent anyone from using your name for their products. (Put that kleenex in  your thermos and think about it!)  The link above is full of advice to companies about how to avoid this but I think, the more pertinent quandary to Ron and Eero's discussion is the one found in the minds of the users.

The OSR as a movement, is I think agnostic in practice as Ron noted that they try to avoid usage of the term D&D or Dungeons and Dragons. Eero seems to be (intentionally or inadvertently)  in league with those who  seek to 'liberate' the term from the trademark holder. Ron's position, on the other hand, perhaps rejects the idea that D&D et al even deserves to be the word that encompasses and describes such broad swath lexical territory. Actually their positions I think go far beyond the mere naming of the thing - but distilling their discussion into a debate over the name gives me a simpler narrow metaphor than religion to work with.

Calling 'it' D&D has many implications, on one hand it implies that the platonic form of gaming we're talking about is most closely achieved on this mortal plane by the commercial product with the same name.  I don't think Eero or anyone actually believes that.  On the other hand, using the most recognizable name for 'it' brings the largest possible group of participants into the discussion, search, or quest for the thing. It also sends the  message that D&D cannot be contained or constrained by a single commercial vision and truly belongs to all players. While one position might be to attempt to topple D&D from its position of privilege in the democratic committee for the determination of the ideal party-based dungeon crawling thingie; the other simply seeks to remove TSR or WoTC or even Gygax from their place of privilege in the definition of D&D.

Full disclosure: my personal stance is almost that of a genericidal maniac.  I like to use the market leader in any category as a generic term for even its most bitter competitors. I'm gonna go google this on Bing now. Or maybe I'll invite my girlfriend to sit and play a cool D&D with me called "Breaking the Ice" where you make characters and see if they fall in love. I'd prefer to use a name that is historically inaccurate, unfair and possibly offensive to some than a name that is clinically precise but incomprehensible and without meaning to anyone outside the hobby.  My reason is that I want outsiders to pay more attention and form more opinions about it. Because I think it will grow faster and in more unexpected ways that way.

Another thing I like about saying I'm playing D&D is that it helps me stop attempting to be a game designer. I only want to be a game tinkerer at best. By calling it D&D I can play the heartbreaker of my dreams without breaking any hearts.  The word eliminates any expectation of a perfectly designed, complete and logical system and instead foreshadows that the players are going to be negotiating for a system even as they play inside it.  If I give this thing any other name, or if I highlight the name of any other important independent product then the focus immediately comes away from the emergent play and is drawn to the creator or authors narrative. When introducing any other game to people I have to play an advocate for the game, its system and even its designer. But with D&D I get to approach it as a critic, or rebel.   Eero's descriptions have that quality for me more than anything.  His descriptions of 'primitive D&D' strike me as a subversive deconstruction of D&D more than any sort of revivalism or homage.  I can enter the hoary halls of D&D with crowbar and can of spray paint in hand.  On the other hand I remove my shoes and step ever so respectfully and worshipfully into the exquisite shrines of Burning Wheel or S/Lay W/ Me.  These are both good things.

My father tells me the story of his religious career.  Raised Roman Catholic, he rejected 'church' for a while but became fascinated by Jesus as depicted by Kazantzakis and Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Later this led him to join a struggling and unassuming non-proselyting 'evangelical' fellowship.  His story doesn't exactly make sense, but I think it demonstrates the principal that stand alone complexes can do quite well even if forced to share a name with other opposite looking complexes.

[Marshall Burns]

Interesting to me: is there a Platonic D&D? Do things exist in ideal form in some other plane of existence, from which they are translated by creators, who in their non-ideal fallibility may actually translate them wrong? Can the accuracy of the translation be aided by appropriate techniques?

This works as an operational theory in some areas. Works for geometry, within a certain scope. Worked for some of the Beat poets, sometimes. But it can also be explained away by the kind of rationale in Ron's original post, in which -- even if there are other worlds than these -- anything that can be explained entirely through phenomena found in this world is functionally composed of phenomena found in this world. These explanations all work, and, as an occultist, the closest I can come to a judgment of truth is, "if it works, then it is true."

From that standpoint, I see plenty of practical value in the concept. Unfortunately, it's very hard to talk about without getting all metaphysical, and then before you know it we're standing on nothing, surrounded by planets and Kirby dots.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Interesting to me: is there a Platonic D&D? Do things exist in ideal form in some other plane of existence, from which they are translated by creators, who in their non-ideal fallibility may actually translate them wrong? Can the accuracy of the translation be aided by appropriate techniques?

I use this idea myself. To be specific, I think that the "realness" of an idea like Platonic D&D is an illusion caused by our inexact conceptualization of what we mean, and ultimately meaningless in comparison to the utility of the idea: if you can get results from an analytical method, then it's worthwhile, whether true or not.

If I had to explain why a Platonic ideal of a game exists, my explanation would rely on the idea that a person perceiving the game's structure relates it to a creative motivation (individually felt creative agenda, if you will), and therefore has a clear gauge against which to evaluate whether the game's better or worse at fulfilling what they think it seems to be fulfilling. This idea can easily and naturally be expressed by saying things like "changing this rule will make this game be more like itself", or "the Platonic ideal of this game is X, and therefore these bits are the real rules and these other bits are just confusion". It's not a claim that really pertains to the game text or any other physical, external object, but rather an observation about the abstract fusion of a structure (the game) with purpose (what you think that game is good for). It's like saying that the Platonic ideal of a hammer is to be a thing that is good for hammering nails: I think this is a perfectly sensible expression, as long as we remember that the property of purpose is not in the hammer as an object, but rather in your own perception that hey, an item shaped like this would be pretty good for hammering nails, considering that I have nails that need to be hammered.

I use this type of mental construct all the time when evaluating a game in development, or when playing a finished game. It usually leads to a slow adaptation as I figure out how to improve the game in small ways; even the most perfect designs tend to get a little bit of shoeshine from me over time, and at least to me these changes look like improvements towards the perfection of its ideal form. Of course sometimes I do stuff that's just for personal aesthetics, instead - not all choices in game design are determined teleologically by some ideal goal, many are quite arbitrary.

In the specific case of D&D, though, there are very clearly multiple quite strong ideal D&D's involved. For instance, the "perfect Tolkien simulator" is a strong meme - I am not at all surprised that e.g. Dragonlance completely convinced many people in the early '80s that the true D&D is to be found in epic, GM-railroaded storytelling. For this reason we can't really say that some specific thing is the ideal D&D, we can just point at different ideals of what D&D can be. In a way 4th edition is very close to a certain sort of ideal that was glimpsed in e.g. the 3rd edition already, but only fully flowered in the 4th. Despite being the newest idea of what D&D could be, I wouldn't dare call it "the" ideal D&D, like it somehow superseded the past, incompatible ideals.

Compare this to a game like Diplomacy, which has a venerable history, impressive Platonic form (after playing it for over a decade, I hesitate to change a single rule), and a rich culture of writing and play surrounding it. Unlike D&D, Diplomacy has not had any serious contention regarding its ideal nature: there have been sort of simulationist wargaming strains of habit in some play of it, and some people have made Diplomacy more into community theatre than a boardgame, but the dominant strain, the game that the vast majority actually cares about, has remained essentially unchanged in its agenda; I don't think that anybody would seriously claim that their variant that did not concern itself with zero-sum multiplayer boardgaming was the "real" Diplomacy.

[Ron Edwards]

Too many fascinating or inspiring details to develop here ...

As a minor point, and as a useful way to contrast my views by posing them against Eero's,

we can't really say that some specific thing is the ideal D&D, we can just point at different ideals of what D&D can be.

... my version of this would stop at "different ideals," period, full stop. The final clause as written still appeals to an ur-form, however qualified by "well of course there isn't one" or anything else tap-dance like.

I'm still hoping for a more diverse group of voices, and Eero, at this point, your massive screeds are creating a social space that's all about you. Addressing the original post to you was supposed to be a device for others to understand, not a specific me-and-you alternation of Castro-style speeches. Can you hold off for a bit until more posts beyond mine or yours are involved?

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

I'm still hoping for a more diverse group of voices, and Eero, at this point, your massive screeds are creating a social space that's all about you. Addressing the original post to you was supposed to be a device for others to understand, not a specific me-and-you alternation of Castro-style speeches. Can you hold off for a bit until more posts beyond mine or yours are involved?

Most certainly, and I agree. I blame my unusual verbosity on the subject of D&D on the throttling I do on myself regarding it - I really should be writing something ambitious about it, instead of just assassinating people with forum postings now and then in between developing Eleanor's Dream.