[ur-D&D] What are we playing here exactly?

[Ron Edwards]

I'm trying to articulate a very difficult concept and need some help.

First, that if you and I and a few other people wanted to "play D&D" in the sense of what the fiction contains, we could do it with a coin to flip and a few pieces of scratch paper. We'd map as much corridor as we could stand, I'd play my half-orc fighter and you'd play your elf (for some reason), we'd have all the paladin-thiefy iron-rations rat-fights kobold-fights run-from-the-beholder moments you could want; we'd wander through a village called Omelette meeting blacksmiths and slatterns until whenever we got tired of it and went back to the fighting. You know how to do it and I know how to do it, and I repeat, system has nothing to do with it because at this moment we are talking about nothing but raw Color.

Second, that if you and I wanted to major Gamist dungeon-fighting fun, challenging ourselves with strategic, tactical, and possibly some social game-theory dynamics, all soaked in derived but perhaps sharply ironic fantasy tropes, then there are some games out there which do this mighty fine - Tunnels & Trolls first among them both chronologically and design-wise, but certainly more than that. By which I mean we could get our ashes hauled in this fashion really, really, really well, successful and satisfying role-playing equal to none. ... But it wouldn't say "D&D" on the tin and it most especially wouldn't have that holiest of symbols on it, the triple-initial emblazon of "TSR." (I will provide links to my enjoyable T&T game discussions if anyone wants.)

Third, that at my count we have no less than eight identifiable rules texts with that game title on the tin and emblazoned with that holy symbol, very few of which merit the literal acknowledgment of being rules texts, but one of which (pick one), nevertheless, may be used as the primary text at our gaming table. In which case ... work with me here, using it, we could play a kickass game with possibly some necessary house-ruling and rules-drifting, to whatever extent we can get away with that and still feel like we're using "the" rules, with fictional content corresponding to a violent fantasy setting with much travel and bloodshed ... but without, I repeat, without that content resembling the Tolkien-Disney-Vance (not really)-God-knows-what-Greyhawk fantasy cemented into place in the early 1980s, and instead basically making up our own entirely original fantasy content, perhaps itself even blatantly derivative but from something else entirely. (I will provide links to my enjoyable D&D 3.0/3.5 game discussions if anyone wants; plus I plan to make public my very cool notes for D&D 4E, unless I get to play it soon in which case I'll just post about that.)

Help me say what I'm grappling with here. Why are none of the above "not good enough?" What the hell are people seeking?

And so you know, all of this is is preparatory to asking, why the fuck do Dungeon World and Torchbearer exist in the first place, and why is Indie Gamerdom Assembled spraying jizz all over them like Peter North if Peter North were Jackson Pollack?

[Erik Weissengruber]

Does it have to do with System?

Could people already have commitments to some kind of hazy expectations about Dungeoneering and are looking for various systemic incarnations? I like the fiction -- resolution -- fiction dynamics of the Apocalypse-fueled games. If I were jonesing for dungeoneering I might consider DW.

I also love me the BITs of the Burning games. I can feel the flow from commitment to a character's beliefs, gaining currency for putting them into action, watching the character grow and change.

But I don't get the appeal of merging the Society for Creative Anachronism with spelunking. Swords and sorcery I like. Swords are cool. Sorcery is cool. Weird monsters are cool. Adventure fantasy in the sense of exploring a dangerous and awesome weird world really appeals to me. But why can't I dig going underground?

Is there something to imagining negotiating a creepy and claustrophobic fictional space where something weirdly awesome has HAPPENED (a cult's temple, a wizard's seclusion) that is different from imagining a situation where weirdly awesome things are HAPPENING?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Do you maybe mean some specific people, or people in general? I'm asking because I started thinking of people I know who play D&D, and most of them are totally satisfied by one or more of the options you outline - they don't particularly need the official D&D brand on their game, if that's what you mean.

Perhaps the closest to that come the guys who need to feel that the rulebook is made by somebody smarter than them, but even those are quite happy playing e.g. LotFP or Pathfinder - it doesn't need to be the official D&D, as long as it's printed in a book to provide confidence.

If it's not the D&D brand you mean, but rather the specific fantasy fiction style, that might be closer to it - I certainly know people who've internalized the D&D tropes to such a degree that they're not entirely happy with a fantasy game if it doesn't have such basics as commoditized magic items, a wizard/cleric split and demihumans. I tend to treat this as a failure of imagination brought about by an insufficient reading hobby :D

Of course my sampling is somewhat peculiar: while I do know some of the most hardcore D&D gamers in Finland, the Finnish D&D culture in itself is nowhere near as orthodox as the American mothership.

As for Dungeon World and such, my answer is similar to the 4th edition one: it's a game that appeals on the basis of the genre of fantasy alone. As I've often said, DW makes perfect sense to play if you're really in love with D&D fantasy, don't like the D&D game, but do grog narrativist games like Apocalypse World. It is definitely, certainly not my thing, but that's got nothing much to do with the game's design, and everything to do with the fact that I'm not nearly enough of a fan of the genre to actually want to play a story game about it.

Based on the big response the game's gotten, it seems pretty obvious that there are a lot of roleplayers out there who do like D&D fantasy as a genre, even if they've grown past D&D and can't stomach playing it anymore. I suspect that a lot of that is due to nostalgia, but then why do people like literary genres anyway - it's probably nostalgia all the way down, ultimately. It's like, DW brings in all the people who realize that they like Apocalypse World game mechanics when they're applied to something familiar that they like; such application makes it clear to them how the mechanics latch to the fiction, when before they had to deal with both an unknown system and an unknown genre.

[Joshua Bearden]

I will provide links to my enjoyable T&T game discussions if anyone wants.)

Wants!

Help me say what I'm grappling with here. Why are none of the above "not good enough?" What the hell are people seeking?

D&D is 'too big to fail' and 'constantly failing'.  By too big to fail I mean that excessive sunk costs by everyone: players, game designers, fantasy authors, and marketers make it inconceivable to simply abandon.  The "it" is alternatively any of the three big aspects you described the colour, the system, or the agenda.  And yet it consistently fails to fully deliver.  Everyone, from WoTC to Paizo to Luke Crane are interested in "repairing" at least one part of the behemoth.

And so you know, all of this is is preparatory to asking, why the fuck do Dungeon World and Torchbearer exist in the first place, and why is Indie Gamerdom Assembled spraying jizz all over them like Peter North if Peter North were Jackson Pollack?

Golden age fallacy? But you can never walk through the same river twice on your way back up the fountain of youth to the age of innocence ... thingie?  So like we have a generation of gamers who remember the awe and magic of their first dungeon crawl,  (Much of that awe was probably even then a recognition of the potential of the hobby rather than true delight in the actual play being experienced. Was true for me, anyways., but who have also gazed into the Forge and embraced the ... okay I'm just starting to repeat what Eero said. As usual I just agree with him. I'm shutting up now.

[Ron Edwards]

Tunnels & Trolls threads, in order: [Tunnels & Trolls] Killed me a player-character (spit), [Tunnels & Trolls] Second level characters, [Tunnels & Trolls] Half-elves are poncy nancy-boys, and [Tunnels & Trolls] Gamism ain't for the faint of heart.

I thought I'd clarify my three categories a little better now that I've re-read my post.

1. The "dungeon-delving" fictional situation with embedded specific visual elements and character-relationships is itself not connected to System.

2. A specific Gamist agenda expressed in both (i) dungeon motifs and (ii) hard-firing System support is itself not connected to TSR or D&D branding.

3. TSR or D&D branding (and whatever System is supported by any given rules text) is itself not connected to a given fictional setting and to strict dungeon motifs.

Best, Ron

[Troy_Costisick]

Why are none of the above "not good enough?"

I think you've outlined, both in this forum and throughout the last 14 years, why they're not good enough.

What the hell are people seeking?

I hate to reduce it down too much, but perhaps they're seeking a good time.  In an age of personalized everything, is it weird to expect personalized dungeon games?

[Erik Weissengruber]

"1. The "dungeon-delving" fictional situation "

I look at the images of the Grindhouse edition of LotFP, like the Gorgon who petrifies prey with sex. Or the grotesque death cult shrine I concocted for my LotFP game: a hideous agglomeration of bones liquified into a slick, shiny plaster. The players walk through the landscape of statues in states of sexual abandon or jellied bonespew. They themselves are not entangled in such horrors. The are uncovering a disturbing past and trying to make their way through it.

Looking back over the fantasizing I did over Holmes' D&D set and the Player's Handbook and the DMG I found myself wanting to put myself into the fantastical landscapes the depicted characters were inhabiting, or to succeed where they were getting waxed.

There were early reading experiences that were congruent with my discovery of D&D. Like reading the Mines of Moria passages from LotR, or the underground expeditions in at the Mountains of Madness, or the Fafhrd/Mouser story where the two end up working for rival warlords in some underground domain, or the Tombs of Atuan by LeGuin. That narrative trajectory of entry into a hidden zone where secrets are buried and then making it through to the other side after having revealed secrets that others weren't brave enough to face: there is a family resemblance between all of these dungeon delving activities.

This is reflective musing. I could indulge in Jungian archetypes or hunt for Freudian symbols. But I think there is a straightforward genealogy of this fantastical imagery, drawing as it does on Gothic fiction tropes of graves and sinister castles and death traps. A genealogy that includes the illustrations of Dore, the stories of Walpole, the gloomy romanticism of Byron, 19th c. decadents, Poe, Conan Doyle, Lovecraft,and the weird fiction authors and illustrators who were getting reprinted or cited in fandom/underground culture of the 1960s. Lieber, Howard, and Lovecraft are all aware of the graveyard romanticism of the decadents. And don't forget the many cheesy dungeons showing up in gorgeous black and white on the many late-night creature feature shows broadcast by every little UHF station across North America.

This pile of semiotic goop gets some kind of catalyst or leavening circa 1970.

The wikipedia entry for Arneson talks about the role of the "dungeon" concept in Arneson's Blackmoor game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Arneson

An investigation of the aesthetics of the underground Braunstein might help explain the persistence of the dungeon trope. The cognate trope -- the wilderness adventure where you track your resources -- seems to have been pushed out of the meme pool.

[Ron Edwards]

Erik: The hunt for System: basically armed with #1 but looking for #2, or rather, wanted to do it with System X.  Which I suppose is fine in terms of raw hacking, but I'm squinting to find the value added.

For BW in particular, I'm baffled. Straight-up no-frills BW does Tolkien-RP better than just about anything. Using it to do faux-Tolkien seems retrograde to me.

For AW, I'm not baffled so much as repelled – without any sort of values-based reward system in place, AW is nothing more than a 2d6 resolution roll and a little shared-input feel-goodery. Here I not only don't see value added, I see value diminished. Again, not because "dungeon crawling is bad," but because the engine seems grossly misaligned.

... merging the Society for Creative Anachronism with spelunking.

That's fantastic, I'm stealing it for later use, for sure. But amusement aside, there are some good underground/indoors models to consider from the literature: the goblin tunnels under the Misty Mountains and the Mines of Moria, of course; also the lost city of Xuchotl from "Red Nails" and the equally fucked-up society of "The Lords of Quarmall."

(Ha! I wrote the above before reading your second post! We're on the same wavelength. And yes, The Tombs of Atuan, seriously.)

Eero: specific people, namely those who've designed and played some pretty innovative games, who, if they'd wanted any one of the criteria named above, or any combination, could have had it with no effort whatsoever at any time in the past ten years, now so excited because OMG you can do Dungeon World. As if they couldn't have done it without Dungeon World! Granted, they seem least interested in the imprimature of "official D&D," but the Baker Mystique or the Crane Crew apparently seem to be playing the same role.

I'm suspicious about whether the "dungeon crawl" is being granted legitimacy in their minds by getting enfolded in one of the above-named brands, or whether the idea is to provide said brand with legitimacy by showing that it can do dungeon-crawling, i.e., "real role-playing," after all.

... I certainly know people who've internalized the D&D tropes to such a degree that they're not entirely happy with a fantasy game if it doesn't have such basics as commoditized magic items, a wizard/cleric split and demihumans.

Yes, a little bit like that. But the post-Forge, Story Games crowd? Nostalgia ... maybe, except that few of these people were even born during, much less before, the early days of D&D. If they're going to be nostalgic for something, it ought to be more like 2nd edition, right? (Or maybe I'm too simplistic about such things.)

Joshua, this is awesome too:

D&D is 'too big to fail' and 'constantly failing'. ... Everyone, from WoTC to Paizo to Luke Crane are interested in "repairing" at least one part of the behemoth.

Your Golden Age fallacy actually sounds more like what my mostly-inaudible inner mutterings are on about than Eero's nostalgia. I'm starting to get a better idea now – OK, modify what you said such that the "early experiences" were themselves not actual experiences – I do not credit the claims that "Back when I first played role-playing was sooooo awesome," which now that I think of it reek of the Geek Social Hierarchy more than credible reporting. So the Golden Age fallacy is especially fallacious because their actual experiences were themselves no more than a promise of such a Golden Age. That meshes in my mind with Moreno's spot-on observation that today people are maundering about Ye Olde Paradisical Days of D&D which those of us who were actually there are quite sure did not happen.

Troy: by "good enough," what I mean is, given any one of those three things I identified, or any desired combination of them, there is literally no need on this earth to retool, e.g., Burning Wheel, to mimic the tropes thereof. That's why "a good time" isn't enough; the desired good time is already sitting in front of our noses.

Best, Ron

[Troy_Costisick]

Troy: by "good enough," what I mean is, given any one of those three things I identified, or any desired combination of them, there is literally no need on this earth to retool, e.g., Burning Wheel, to mimic the tropes thereof. That's why "a good time" isn't enough; the desired good time is already sitting in front of our noses.

That's all true, but perhaps people are looking for a new type of good time.  They've had good times with TROS or BW or PTA doing the D&D Cartoon.  They have those memories of playing those games a certain way and when trying to use those games to do this other thing (dungeon crawl-gamisty-story game mashup) they are looking for something new that doesn't have the baggage BW or whatever else has.  They know that BW is supposed to be played a certain way, and to them it doesn't mesh with the half-remembered dungeon crawls of old.  So, they create and/or buy new games that gives them a fresh start to make new memories and new good times.

[glandis]

Ron - Your 1) is, to my experience and thinking, pretty easy to grasp: while there is no *real* connection between that Color and (a particular) System, we look(ed) to the system to validate our Color choices. My way-back examples are trying to play a Tolkienesque Ranger or a Vance-ish illusion magician before there were (easily available, generally consistent) rules for 'em. We did it, because the pull for such was strong, but it felt better when there were rules clearly designed to support that choice (even if it turned out to deliver less than we'd hoped). I suspect similar pulls exist from later fictional sources, with the added complication (as you so often point out) that the fictional sources (novels, computer games, and more) became circularly referenced with D&D play. If you stop looking for that validation from (a particular) System, and hold your own decision about how to add desired and subtract undesirable Color from play as sufficient, then there's no "not good enough." You trust yourself, your own System-as-you-do-it, and stop caring if it matches System-as-textually-delivered. I equate this with the RAW(rules/read-as-written)-obsession readily apparent in many d20 (esp. Paizo Pathfinder) discussion forums. Even though I consider my days of obsessing over making my system equivalent to TSR/WotC/whatever system long past, I still take satisfaction if the Color I want is validated right there in the "official" sources.

I think this validation issue can carry-over into your next two areas, taking on new details, but maybe that's too easy. I do think the need for "D&D/TSR" in your #2 is maybe more about a need for familiar touchstones: some variably-minimal overlap with Armor Class, d20's, classes/skills with particular names/ranges, and etc. I blame this somewhat on the pervasive use of D&D-ish systems in computer games over the years, because a LOT of the younger (22-34, say) folks I've played with in the last decade (making 'em 32-44 now? I called that 'young'? um...) came to the game via that route. With these familiar touchstones, "knowing" how you're doing in Step On Up terms is easier to grasp. Whether that "easier" is a good thing for the CA or even actually a real factor in the CA is not so clear to me, but I do think it is sought after. So again, abandon that desire for mechanical/textual touchstones (maybe by looking instead to Social Contract/CA directly?), and "not good enough" disappears again.

#3 is about how easily possible it is to AVOID getting pulled into particular gameworld motifs? And yet people still look for "something better" to keep that from happening, rather than just saying "look, this isn't Greyhawk, alright?" The thing I'd point at here is that for a certain kind of thinking, things like Eero's "commoditized magic items" are an inevitable and necessary outcome of the system as presented, and so the only solution is to alter the system. I've personally found this to be the hardest "not good enough" to get people to let go of. Just saying "things don't work that way in this world" is often met with "butbutbut the system requires magic/monsters/leveling/etc. work THIS way!" Luckily, if people are OK with letting go of the "not good enoughs" in the other cases, this can usually be handled with a reminder that we're not really using "the system". Which is not to say that the "butbutbut"s don't show up from time to time, just that there is a context available to avoid dwelling on 'em.

So - people will take joy (even North-Pollack joy) when what they want from System (validation of a particular Color, functional Gamism within that Color, and creative freedom regarding that Color?) is provided by a particular game, even if those same things were available to them already. Either because they didn't/couldn't see that, and/or because social/market factors kept them from doing so.

Well, that's longer than I'd wanted. Hope it's useful.

PS Reading what was posted while I was typing - comparing/contrasting that rich, fictional "the dungeon" with it's D&Dish instantiation in computer games (from Wumpus/Zork/Ultima through WoW) would be quite interesting. And I suspect that "new good time" is fine in some cases, but that there's a lot of "BETTER good time" involved. I think Ron's comments and my post can be seen as confronting the "why BETTER?" question as well, and that a lot more than just "because it's new" is at least sometimes involved.

[Jesse Burneko]

Hey Ron,

I don't know if I can give you straight up answer but I can tell you this: My favorite incarnations of D&D are 3 and 4 with their every more focusing on grad-based tactical encounters.  I think I prefer 3 in terms of flexibility but 4 is a bit more streamlined.  However, running those games the way I want is a lot of work.  I lament not having the time to basically do Video Game Level Design and lovingly hand craft environments and populating them with cleverly constructed encounters.  I just don't have the time, creative energy or commitment to tactical detailing to really play those games the way I would want.

So what's the alternative?  I could go back to Red Box/Blue Box. That's fairly simple right?  I can draw maps and just wrote Trolls! in the margin and that should be enough, right?  Well... not quite.  That game is super stressful because I have to adjudicate so much all by myself.  Unlike 3e/4e where I feel like most the fun is moving from straight-up tactical fight to straight-up tactical fight, I feel like most of B/X D&D is about avoiding having to roll that d20.  So you spike shut doors and find off-brand ways to use spells and block off corridors with walls of burning oil and lay down fresh rations to lead the creature to the pit trap... and so on.

Which leaves me where?  Making a fuck ton of decisions with no back up.  Is this creature strong enough batter down the spiked door?  Can sticks-to-snakes work that way?  Just how afraid is this creature of fire and what happens if it chooses to charge forward anyway?  Is the creature hungry enough to follow the rations?  Does is like this KIND of rations?  Does it actually fall in the pit?  Doing all that is EXHAUSTING.

So, Dungeon World.  All of the above?  Defy Danger move.  Or if not that, then good potential Hard Moves for other botched rolls.  Oh, rolled a six on your Defend move?  Yeah, remember that troll behind that spiked shut door right behind you?  Yeah, it just splintered wide open!  See?  No stressful decisions.  Just follow the bouncing snowball of moves.

Note 1: The hardest thing in Dungeon World to adjudicate is a 7-9 on Defy Danger for reasons very similar to my complaints above.

Note 2: The local crew here in SoCal agrees with you that the XP system in Dungeon World is not very good.  We actually have an alternate XP system that rewards based on heroic actions.  You highlight categories of actions (much like individual stats in AW) and you get XP when you do anything in that category.  But admittedly that's because we play Dungeon World in a very action oriented, crazy stunt kind of way.

So Dungeon World is way low stress for the GM.  But it's also fairly low stress for the player.  What if you want a more dangerous game?  What if you want those wandering monsters and encumbrance and bad planning leads to worse situations of B/X.  Well then Torchbearer.

So Torchbearer leaves in all the player facing stresses without creating all that work for the GM?  I don't know DOES a spellbook, a latern, a wand of magic missiles and a pair of iron shackles all fit into a large sack?  Wait how many rounds/turns has it been based on how many feet you've traveled?  What exactly does your 30' radius torch illuminate?  Torchbearer keeps those elements of play but again alleviates the GM/players from having to make all kinds of exhausting decisions.

So that's what it's about for me.  It's about putting helper tools in place to do some of the heavy lifting on the dungeoneering experience.  It's about saying I want my dungeon exploration game to look and feel like X, Y and Z and NOT having to bring that to the table on sheer creative/social will power alone.  The game helps you by putting in tools that keep play focused on those specific things and doing some of the heavy lifting in making decisions ABOUT those things.

Jesse

[Dan Maruschak]

When my group decided to play Dungeon World it was because we wanted to see what all the fuss was about with the AW mechanics, but our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction ranged from disinterest to active dislike so we didn't want to play AW itself. DW was the first AW hack that claimed to be playable by people who weren't already familiar with how to play AW, so we got it and played it. From my POV the interesting stuff about the AW system isn't the die mechanic, it's the move-triggering mechanic (which serves an anti-murk group-synching function) and the GMing procedures (which make it feel more like a game role to me rather than a weird black box of social expectations to "bring the fun"). If this thread is leading to a conversation about why people like Dungeon World then the Step-on-Up/Gamism stuff seems like a weird direction to me, because I don't think many DW enthusiasts see that in the game -- I don't think I'd characterize my experiences of the game that way.

My interest in Torchbearer is similarly system-based. I had a ton of fun playing Mouse Guard and all of the system evolutions between the games seem like they'll be improvements (I haven't gotten a chance to actually play yet), although I'll probably miss the fun episodic situation-generation step from MG.

For both games I get a minor hit of vicarious nostalgia -- I've never actually played any editions of D&D, but I did read the Basic D&D rules as a kid, and had my older brothers' vague accounts of their play to inspire my imagination (at the time I was almost certainly the "annoying little brother" from their POV and therefore didn't get any first-hand experience), plus whatever I pick up through osmosis from the internet RPG culture. When I got into the RPGing hobby as an adult after drifting over from computer RPGs I never bothered with D&D due to all of the weird "conventional wisdom" like fudging and illusionist techniques that seemed really lame to me, especially since there were other good games from the indie movement that didn't have that stuff. Maybe there are good D&D games hiding under all the cruft of D&D culture, but since I have no vested interest in it I don't really feel any desire to do the game design archaeology to find it. For me, the fantasy "color" in these games isn't a huge draw, but it's a nonobjectionable delivery mechanism for the stuff I do care about.

[Erik Weissengruber]

Doing theatre history is more than about reading plays and tracking the changes in style and imagery (Color). We look at the play practices of the participants, especially their relationship to authority figures (authors, directors, designers), and their physical interaction in space. The history of games could be studied the same way. It is not just about the Color being elicited by the prompts of a DM/director or author, but the arrangements for communicating, exchanging, and building on that colour.

Play-Practices within A Dungeon-Mastered Dungeon
- We have players controlling single avatars often represented by kitbashed minis

- There will utilization of common popular amusements like word or logic puzzles, but one important play element will be a riff on the paperback books of mazes used to occupy kids in the car or at the cottage: these are part of the bricolage.

- War games were structured physically by players facing off against each other, singly or in teams, across a playboard representing open terrain or constricted built environments(Traveler had associated wargames that allowed you to do strategic and tactical spaceship engagements AND tense firefights in enclosed spaces, D&D did not have anything like Trillion Credit Squadron or Snapshot).

- The "fantasy Braunstein" changes the relationship of participants: we have players controlling avatars around a single player -- the DM -- who controls a number of monster avatars, often built from kitbashed toys. They are gathered around a representation of the maze of which the DM has perfect information (in the form of a complete map) and to which they are committed (a good DM will follow wandering monster tables and/or stick to prepped locations -- no douchebaggy throwing in an extra squad of monsters just 'cause the players are advancing too fast). The representation the players see could be the map they themselves are drawing. But what drew me in as a kid -- from newspaper articles, from seeing the counselors at my summer camp killing time, from seeing expos and the Canadian National Exposition -- was the grouping of players around battle board, with one player doling out the monsters and the fictional landscape, like the director of a good monster movie or a Ray Harryhausen epic, or the author of a cool adventure story. The GM took a slice from the maze and put it out on the table, using anything from drawing with marker, to using Legos and building blocks, to full wargamer terrain. And players moved their avatars around that. We are not talking the full obsessiveness of wargamers but even the loosest games had people moving THINGS around a concrete representation. When I walk around cons now I see folk with all sorts of new toys and cool printout character icons from Pathfinder or whatever. But that arrangement of bodies -- 4-9 folks around a representation with which they are interacting, and behind a screen the DM offers them portions of the finite fantastical space they have presented, with all of its active inhabitants -- that play arrangement persists.

- The 4-9 players are interacting with the fictional space that really only exists fully in the imagination of the DM. This territory is represented by a schematic map, lists of monsters, visual inspiration that might be sketched but is more likely to be richly described, but each of those representations only represents a slice of the fictional space that the DM is sharing and the players are exploring. And this isn't spelunking simulation -- there must be monsters to fight. No lovers to lay with because were are ripping off color from sword and sorcery and its fandom, but we are not enacting sword and sorcery stories. It is about slaying and risking being slain, fantasizing about many ways to slay and being slain.

[Ron Edwards]

You have all given me a great deal to think about, and I greatly appreciate it. I'm not sure I can deliver a wrapped-in-brilliance conclusion soon, if ever, but more and more, I can see that gamerdom does indeed hold a gold standard in its collective mind that is somehow associated with the variables I'm talking about, indeed in goalpost-shifting ways among them.

One quick minor point: Jesse, Tunnels & Trolls does the kind of stuff you're talking about incredibly well. My call would be 5th edition from 1979, but any of them, really.

Best, Ron

[Callan S.]

Attempting my post again (two parter, to see if the forum will let me post):

I'll give this a shot - warning, the second part is maybe 'out there' (prolly the first part too): The reason it's not enough is that there is no 'push back'. There's no interaction with someone else (just your (probably) harmoginised group). It's a bit like not just having sex with a sex doll, but a sex doll you made yourself. It's hardly getting it on with anyone else, is it? And that's not enough because you are not actually engaging any kinda outside author (to keep up the sex analogy, there is no tall, dark stranger involved...no stranger at all, just Mrs Palmer)