hardcore Midwestern U.S. D&D style gaming

[Rob MacDougall]

This paragraph caught my eye in Ron Edwards' newer article on Fantasy Heartbreakers: [emphasis added]

Deathstalkers, from Cutter's Guild, is simultaneously the most deconstructive and most preservative game I've ever seen, relative to the oldest-of-schools D&D play, in detail after detail. It's almost impossible to summarize them: castings, ingredients, hit points, levels, alignments, etc, are all hard-core D&D belt (Madison to Springfield) dungeon crawl. The game is the very essence of midwestern U.S. D&D style gaming and should probably be studied in detail by anyone interested in the history of the hobby - it distils out nearly every strategic element from the old-school texts and places them into prominent, character-mortality-challenging center stage.

"Midwestern U.S. D&D style gaming?" "hard core D&D belt?"

Maybe this was just a casual off-the-cuff remark, but I think it's a fascinating idea. Are there in fact regional styles of gaming? Is there a "hard-core D&D belt"? Any generalization has its limits of course, and we all know how much preferred gaming styles can vary even around one gaming table. But it's by no means inconceivable that the broad profile of gamers might vary region by region (in the U.S. and certainly around the world) in terms of games played, genres enjoyed, GNS preferences, demographic of the gamers, etc.

Do people have any broad (hopefully friendly) impressions of different gaming styles in different cities, regions, or countries? I'd love to hear about it -- if, that is, the thread can be prevented from turning into a mere catalog of half-formed impressions based on regional stereotypes and "that one guy I knew from Santa Fe."*

Rob

(*) My own half-baked impression: I wandered into an RPG store in Muncie, Indiana a couple of years ago and there were some people playing what appeared to be the ancient AD&D module White Plume Mountain (or maybe there was some sort of "Return to White Plume Mountain" published more recently?). I thought I'd stepped back in time. But maybe I'm just projecting, cause I'm, you know, one of them snooty latte-drinking Boston sophisticates, and a pinko Canadian to boot, eh.

[clehrich]

When I was an undergrad at University of Chicago, there was a distinct regional style based around that school.  This rather small group included Kenneth Hite (Out of the Box & the Outies awards), John Kim (frp.advocacy and one of the original GNS people), and Richard Garfinkle (check out his novel Celestial Matters, which Harry Turtledove loved).  Simultaneously there seemed to be a pretty large (and separate) Warhammer gang, but that was pretty much par for the era.  By the mid-1990s, however, this group had split up, and the RPG Club had turned into tedious games of Magic: The Gathering.

Don't know if this helps much.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I've been legitimately slammed in the past for over-generalizing about regional differences, regarding Glorantha, so anything I say along these lines is definitely not "known" or rigorous.

But that "D&D belt" thing is a big deal, as far as I can tell. You all know, right, that Gary & Dave did their stuff in the context of hobby culture in the early 70s in that belt? Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and associated areas? You can still go to local cons there and meet all these guys who were "in on it from the beginning," many legitimately so. An enormous set of values and standards of D&D play were established among that culture in a rapid-fire fashion, and I am not at all certain that single-person author-style design played much role in what D&D "was" in that context.

For instance, I think that rules for tourney play, which were widely distributed via modules, and publications by (e.g.) the Judges' Guild were far more influential than any particular paragraph Gary wrote in the DM Guide.

Anyway, in case I wasn't clear about it, the authors of Deathstalkers are from the St. Charles, Elgin, etc, area, and I have no doubt that most young gamers in that area get their "D&D training" through the well-established culture of older guys.

Best,
Ron

[Nick the Nevermet]

There was a book written in the early 80s by sociologist Gary Allen Fine on roleplaying games.  I don't remember the name, unfortunately, but he spends some time comparing differences between roleplaying at U of Minnesota and at UC Berkley.

What I find interesting is you could probably talk about distance in several ways.  One of the most obvious is geographical distance, obviously.  Probably another big one is online use.  The consensus at, say, rpg.net or The Forge does not necessarily reflect the aggregate views of gamers.

[Rob MacDougall]

Thanks for the replies. (But isn't anyone going to tell me "welcome to the Forge"? :( )

I've read that Gary Fine book, I think. I remember being amused by his list of gamer slang, some of which I was entirely familiar with, and some of which I had never heard before in my life.

I'm certain Nick Pagnucco is right that the internet complicates this immensely, and creates all sorts of "regions" (like The Forge) that cut across and work against the formation of regional styles. The mechanisms that Ron Edwards describes (established oral cultures, distribution of modules with rules for tourney play, etc.) probably had more impact back in the proverbial day. Or did they?

Chris Lehrlich mentions Ken Hite in Chicago. Hite might actually be another good example of a "style" or a kind of meme-spreader (even if, thanks to the internet, his influence is not really regional). I know a lot of gamers now who subscribe to Pyramid and love Suppressed Transmission, with a visible impact on their gaming subject matter, if not style. So I now see and hear of a lot of alternate history games, typically weird mixes of genre and GURPS setting books ("Its a voodoo pirate thing set in an alternate version of Elizabethan England, with mecha.") and even the replication of subjects I would have thought were fairly particular to Ken Hite, things like the occult meaning of Shakespeare's plays, or sacred architecture. It's interesting the sort of diffuse impact one person or gaming group can have on the wider hobby, or at least subsections of it.

Rob

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Rob,

And welcome to The Forge!

Christopher

[contracycle]

I think, as an external observer, that there were certain tropes to the American experience I didn;t understand; like the portability of characters from game to game, correctness from game to game, etc.  I don't know how real the perception is beyond the pages of Dork Tower and the like, but there did appear to be a set of understandingd emanating from how it occurred as a public event, as it were, distinct from the strict contents onf the box.  Just my tuppence.

[James Holloway]

Certainly, back in the 80s, one of the designers of Paranoia (Greg Costikyan, maybe? I don't really know) was able to write (in "Different Worlds?" I think so) as if he were the representative of a "New York style" of gaming which was sufficiently different from most gaming styles to require explanation.

[Rob MacDougall]

Christopher: Thanks! Glad to be here.

Contracycle mentions Dork Tower; there's also a very clear style of play portrayed in Knights of the Dinner Table (has anyone ever done a serious GNS examination of KODT back issues?).

James: can you elaborate at all on what that "New York Style" entailed?

(Also: are you the James Holloway who illustrated Paranoia & sundry other games? If so, it's very nice to virtually meet you; your Alpha Complex jumpsuits and smoking boots were as much a part of my interior life as an adolescent as Tolkien's elves and Lucas' stormtroopers. Plus the interior cover to "Oasis of the White Palm" was one of my favorite gaming illustrations ever.)

Rob

[ADGConscience]

Welcome to the Forge, Rob; thanks for opening an interesting can of worms.

When thinking of "the Midwest," I tend to think in terms of the rural and semi-rural Midwest, and the Canadian Prairies where I grew up. The factors that could lead to gaming conservatism are geographic isolation (particularly pre-Internet boom) and a relatively small population.

Even more importantly, consider economics: in a poor economy, retailers can't afford much game diversity or to take many chances. Those same economic forces encourage distributors to choke off access to many innovative games.

For a kid gaming through D&D module after D&D module during the winter in Io-way, a voyage to GenCon with its wider view of the totality of the industry would indeed have been a pilgrimage to MECCA.

Dave Panchyk

[James Holloway]

James: can you elaborate at all on what that "New York Style" entailed?

(Also: are you the James Holloway who illustrated Paranoia & sundry other games? If so, it's very nice to virtually meet you; your Alpha Complex jumpsuits and smoking boots were as much a part of my interior life as an adolescent as Tolkien's elves and Lucas' stormtroopers. Plus the interior cover to "Oasis of the White Palm" was one of my favorite gaming illustrations ever.)

Rob

As to what "New York Style" was: it seemed to be mainly concerned with humorous, and with "breaking" the game's reality. You can see a lot of the ideas from that article in Paranoia, I think, where one of the core concepts of the game is that it's an RPG and therefore sort of absurd.

I am not that James Holloway. I had the same admiration for his stuff as a young gamer (oddly, Paranoia was one of the games I got into really early) and every now and again I get confused with him. In my very little published RPG work, I'm James E. Holloway, for more or less that reason, and I recall he was occasionally Jim Holloway.

- James