Interview at the Walking Eye - not just me, either

[Ron Edwards]

Kevin Weiser hit me up yet again for a Walking Eye interview, this time framed as a dialogue with a really interesting guy named Victor Raymond. He's a long-time role-player with a lot of ideas & stuff, and we found a lot in common.

The interview: Part 1 and Part 2

My Interviews page at the Adept site

Victor's website

Best, Ron

[Miskatonic]

Hey cool, part 2 is up. I really enjoyed part 1.

That observation about the evolution of Traveller publishing as a mirror of the state of RPG publishing is shockingly solid.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Larry,

That observation has a painful knockout punch at the end of it.

I didn't attend any gaming cons of note until 2000. Either that year or just afterwards, I found myself at Marc Miller's table, where he was selling a newly-printed compilation of his old, original work on Traveller, which I presume had reverted to him upon the closure of GDW in 1996. I was right int the throes of getting Sorcerer's book version underway, the Forge was bursting at the seams with enthusiasm, and I didn't know what to say. "Should have done this from the beginning!" seemed ungracious, to say the least. I expressed appreciation for his work and felt helpless.

Some of that response was assumption on my part. For all I know, his work gets the sales it deserves and original Traveller - the famous "Free Trader Beowulf boxed set and many of the small supplements which followed - is appreciated and played. But if it is, I don't know about it; maybe someone can point me to the community. However, if it isn't, and if such appreciation is limited to people like me (or better, to those who played the game a lot more), that's depressing. My response was based on my perception of the tragedy of the actual playable DIY-SF I remembered from that box being subsumed and literally obliterated beneath the weight of the three-tier system and the publishing/play model it spawned. I hope I'm wrong.

Best, Ron

[glandis]

Marc Miller recently conducted a quite successful "BIG black book" Traveller 5 Kickstart: Trav5.  The company website is a bit ugly and hard to use, IMO, but it seems to get traffic and links to a number of active Traveller communities on the Web.  Fulfilling the Kickstart seems to be slower than some hoped, but progress is being made and communication is good.

That said, I have friends who lived through the whole publishing history of Traveller and indeed came away scarred and disenchanted.  Mostly just with Traveller specifically rather than SF rpgs (or even ALL rpgs) in general.  They cared/were in touch enough to be aware of the Kickstarter project, but did not choose to participate.

[Justice Platt]

Thanks for the interview/conversation.  I enjoyed the podcasts.

I had one question.  IIRC, you've said that all three creative agendas were present from the beginning of the hobby. While the accounts I've read seem pretty clear about Story Now/Step On Up being present, I haven't really found anything that seems to me like an account of unambiguously Right to Dream play in very early gaming.  (With, natch, alloanaces for likely imperfect understanding of the CAs). 

Frex, from my limited reading of Tekumel play accounts and whatnot, I get the impression that some of the appeal was in the sense of "discovery" of Tekumel, of the mutual creation of the world, and finding clever ways to put pressure on the setting.  It seems like Barker's rules kinda evolved in a way that could be taken to facilitate RTD play, but I'm not certain.  Call of Cthulhu is the other example that springs to mind, but so many early modules seem like they might not do an especially good job of getting to RTD either.

So assuming that I'm not way off base in talking about CAs, can I ask where your chief examples of early RTD play would be found?

[Ron Edwards]

Distinguishing play from text is always tough, and especially so for the early days. If we go by the texts, then Gamist and Simulationist seem widespread to me - Simulationism especially for early RuneQuest. However, in talking to people who played that game at that point, then apparently Gamist/Narrativist clashes showed up a lot at the table, or went strongly in one direction or the other. Apparently my impression was correct that Pavis was invented so the monster-killer Clack-collector players would have somewhere to go. But that was only one person's testimony, albeit a significant person, so I'm open to whatever anyone else has to say, who was there. I also recall a fair amount of D&D play that ran in the "this is the adventure, I'll run you through it" vein, with a strong emphasis on alignment specifications. For example, one summer workshop in 1979 or so for junior-high students I played in permitted only Lawful characters, although interestingly they were OK with Evil.

My take is therefore that probably local specifications produced CAs of all stripes, and that local, verbal instruction played a far greater role in training/finding like-minded players than anything the texts provided. Another example of very Simulationist leanings in text is The Fantasy Trip, and yet somehow I always pushed players to come up with problematic backgrounds for their characters, probably because I was trying to arrive at Night's Master as my model for stories.

Best, Ron

[Justice Platt]

I agree that mapping texts to play is tough, which is why this puzzles me a bit.  That is, it seems like the vast majority of people's talk about early play seems to fall squarely into gamist or narrativist drift, whatever the text says.  It seems like most of the examples you've put out (with the exception of the "run me through the adventure" example) fall squarely into that camp as well. 

(As a personal biography note, most of my very young RPG play was Tunnels & Trolls, with lots of GM and solo play, so that's pretty much my only old school touchstone.  Just figured it's worth saying where I was coming from if I'm missing something that s/b really obvious.)

But anyway, it kinda looks like, maybe, possibly Sim play, whatever the texts said, grew kinda slowly and haltingly, and (advancing this very tentatively 'cos I can thing of lots of ways I could be wrong) out of at least some strain of subcultural encouragement to get it right.  Or maybe I'm straight wrong and I'm just seeing that sim play is kinda uncommon.

I freely grant this could be all horseshit.

[glandis]

I started maybe just a bit earlier than Ron, and on the East coast, so not quite in the true midwest first wave.  Still, I saw plenty of what I'd call Sim play real early - strongly driven by just how serious a particular group (or scenario, at a convention game) was about conforming to a particular subset of the source material.  An example I played and enjoyed was a convention scenario that was essentially Pratt & DeCamp's Incomplete Enchanter goes to the Egyptian afterlife.  After experiencing what that story "would have been like" for a while, the Wizard PC (named something like Stadius Shea) had to cast "Feather Fall" to pass the Judgement of Osiris and return the party to the real world.

Longer term games I was aware of focused on either a particular creation (Lankhmar was one) or a particular groups' melding of their favorite things.  In the latter, whenever I tried to play I found it rather unpleasant, for reasons I guess I now consider more social (I felt very much like an outsider, not knowing the ins and outs of the melding of, say, Star Wars, Deryni, and Pliocene Exile) than anything else.

From what I remember, the rules were always vagely recognizeable as D&D, but the modifications were extensive.  But because those modifications were driven by a vision of adherence to a sometimes-familiar aesthetic, they often "clicked" better than, say, the time I tried to play in an Arduin-influenced game.