Revisiting Balance in Game Design (in which I ramble a bit ... you have been warned)

Balance, that old chestnut. People with opinions talking gaming seem to think it ain't necessary, because "player agency" solves all that, or that encounter balance is a myth, something that cannot be achieved so it needn't be tried ... I get it. If all you do is DMing games, you'd have to realize at some point that a Gamemaster is one key element to achieving balance in a game. And yes, it is a multi-faceted problem. Just doesn't mean it can't be solved. Lets talk about it once more ...

This is following up a discussion I had with my good friend Eric (of Methods & Madmen fame) on X, where I'm also at now (find me! follow me! hehe). It was his idea to change medium and write posts about it, too. Read his take here. I have also talked plenty about this with my good friend Mark, and he pointed me towards this nice little nugget of his about balance in a game he wrote. You can read that here.

Over the years I've taken several stabs at the project, and as I got more and more serious about designing my own games, my perspective somewhat shifted. One of my early takes on this (2014!) can be read here. Spoiler: I'm a bit further down the road right now, so I might not even fully agree with what I wrote back then, but clever young me already took that into account and left open what he couldn't know. Ha!

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Anyway. This one will be a bit all over the place. You'll find this examined through all kinds of lenses, as the discussion was all over the place as well.

Preamble

Balance is everything, and everything is balance. Anything that goes against that simple truth will produce some disharmony, if you are lucky, disaster, if you are not so lucky. So purely on the face of it, it is ridiculous to assume that games don't need to be balanced one way or another.

Assuming so, then, needs to come from some skewed understanding what is happening in game design, or what it means to play a game. Something different to what the original games offered. A paradigm shift of sorts.

I think I have a grasp on what is happening and why. It took a while and some discussion, but in the end it was right there in front of me. As usual it is there to be seen, but you have to look. Now I have to find a way to actually explain this in a way that gives others the chance to gain that same understanding.

I'll say it up front: this is no joke. We have been way too lax with how we talk and write games, what game design really means. And in the end (not "the end" end, but where we are at nonetheless), it fucked up what little gaming culture we had. what we are seeing now is the corpse of our hobby looted.

You think this is hyperbole? Keep reading ...

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Where we come from, where we are ...

I'll keep this one short. It will just be a reminder what was offered in the beginning and how that changed. It will be important to understand where I come from when I talk "balance".

Out of several different attempts to make role-playing games happen, D&D was the one that stuck, that actually produced a hype that not only carried itself quite well, but also inspired a wave of innovations in this new hobby that still needs proper reviewing.

What was the essence of that game? What was able to catch the inspiration of so many gamers all over the world? We know today that it wasn't just the rules, it also was the "zeitgeist" back in the early seventies. What the sixties sowed had been in full swing in the 70s, and it showed. The books people read, the movies that went along with it ... very fertile ground for something like role-playing games.

People had been ready to experience the stories themselves they had seen or heard and read about. I think it is hard to grasp what it actually meant to grow up in that time. For one, computer games hadn't been a thing. Board games hadn't been that big yet, either. If you really were into "gaming" and lived in the USA, it would have been in one of the war gaming clubs. A very fringe group of individuals, and ground zero for role-playing games.

Nerds! [source]

 So the hobby takes off and innovates up to the 90s like crazy. Hundreds and thousands of games come into existence. the hobby is broad enough at that point so that there is a general agreement on what it means to play the game, but yet no proper research. No one is looking, everyone is doing. Basically. Some forums here and there discussed aspects of the big picture, but it was all very much wild west.

The only way to find out if a game designer back then understood what they were doing, usually was publishing it and seeing if it worked or not (simplified, of course).

The end of TSR in a way marks the end of that momentum as well, even for the competition. Hasbro buying WotC (because of M:tG) then killed it for good and fully made it a corporate endeavor.

Then the revisioning started for good, and the strongest for that first game: D&D. 3e did what 3e did, but people wanted to keep playing that original game, so all the retro clones and blogs happened ... and ended up being successful.

4e failed, 5e tried to play catch up with a crowd that would rather play the old games. That worked a bit, but all the while another movement gained momentum out of the retroclone scene many associate with the moniker "OSR": minimalist games really started taking off.

Basically, we ended up with three distinct kinds of games. The "old" games that started it, including those designed in that tradition. The minimalist games, that basically take the core assumption of the old games, add a concept to that and assume that those playing know what they have to do. And finally, the corporate vision of role-playing games, that would rather have the game being a theme park, of sorts, where you pay and pay and pay to participate.

That's the way I cut it, and those three distinctions are crucial for the argument I make.

The Basic Tenets of  RPG Game Design

Role-playing games are, despite their war gaming roots, first and foremost about NEGOTIATION. You talk about what's happening until a disagreement makes it necessary to consult the tools the game offers until the problem is resolved.

Ongoing negotiations ... [source]

Those tools exist along a hierarchy, with the basically talking being the lowest, and the most complex tools being the highest spot in that hierarchy of negotiations. I go into detail about this in the GM section of be67 when talking encounters (following the paradigm established by the D&D RC). It goes like this:

Other than seeing Encounters as elements that form a cohesive narrative, they also need to be seen as interactive elements. As such, they will have several degrees of possible interaction. They are, ordered hierarchically (from easiest to most difficult):

•         Superficial – Can be negotiated without the use of dice.

• Passive – Can be overcome with a Save.
  

• Resource based – Can be overcome, but it costs.
  

• Active, Attribute based – Can be overcome with active use of Attributes.
  

• Active, Skill based – Needs specific Skills to be overcome.
  

• Combat – High resolution challenge triggering some or all the resources.
  

All elements can be combined, of course, and it should be possible to cleverly negotiate encounters towards a lower hierarchy solution in almost all cases. Instead of fighting, Characters could use Skills, instead of Skills, they could argue the use of Attributes or spend some resources they got available. Arguing Saves would be possible, if it is imaginable that a challenge could be overcome instinctively, and arguing down to “superficial” would render the challenge harmless because Players could talk their way around it. The Gamemaster needs to entertain the argument first, however, and has the last word in all things.

This holds true through all sorts of designs (hence "basic tenets"). You can add to this, or leave stuff out, but along these lines game design happens as soon as talking won't bring the narrative forward.

In a sense, and this is important to understand, the design starts where the negotiation ends. Or rather: the rules of a game EXPAND on language towards the narrative the game intents.

This is, then, where you decide how a game should play. The vision. But what makes a game?

Definition Time & Some Analogy

At this point we can start talking balance, then. We'll start with the analogy and go from there:

The relation between gaming system and GM is the same as between a car and a professional driver. Ideally, both compliment each other to completion, which means, if both work as they should, you get the best possible result. It also means that one balances the other. A good driver will easily tell what problems a car has and what changes need to be made, a good car is designed to accommodate a driver as good as possible.

So for one, a gamemaster needs to know systems like a professional driver needs to know cars. That may come with individual tastes and biases (and will produce new problems I'll address further down), but the more you know, the more you'll appreciate how a game is done before positioning yourself towards it (incidentally how you recognize a good reviewer as well).

By that same token, games need to be designed properly to elevate the performance of a good GM. If all a GM is doing is reduced to compensating for a lacking system, you might still have a game, just not as good as it could have been.

Proper design, therefore, needs to establish standards that new games can build on, just like cars developed standards and still evolve to this day.

In game design, that standard should be (as far as I'm concerned) that someone buying a game can expect to gain the same experience from it as the designer was able to conjure when testing it if playing it by the book. This is no small feat to begin with, to be fair, because it means that the designer must have done extensive testing to present the game in a way that takes all possible uses into account (as far as that's possible).

The only way to assure that is to have the engine of a game BALANCED to the extent that it actually takes some punishment before producing false results.

See it like this: a guy has a vision for a game. It is supposed to do xyz when playing it. That means, it needs to produce results to that effect on all levels of resolution. It is the "first principle" of the game. The base line. Now, when testing reveals a problem where, say, leveling breaks or classes aren't progressing properly or combat produces undesirable effects, or a plethora of other problems that could occur when designing a game, a designer would look at the problem and adjust the system towards the established first principle.

Doing so throughout will produce a BALANCED SYSTEM within the parameters established in the beginning. Which means, as a matter of fact, that there is a metric by which encounters are balanced within the system. It is the equivalent to having a sports car do the things a sports car does.

He's saying something about speed ... [source]

So what does "balance" mean, then? Well, chess, for instance, is balanced. Other than who starts, everyone has the same rules and moves. You play two games and switch who starts between the two of you, and it is the same for both.

The balance is in the symmetry of the game, as well as in how the single elements within the game move and interact. Making that happen is the act of designing a game. "Fairness" is not in the opponent you get, but in the fact that all have the same chance to reach the goals the game sets. finding an individual way to make that work is up to the player.

There you go, game design 101. You decide what your game wants to do, then you engineer it towards that goal anyway you can, balancing all elements towards the vision you have for the game. If you manage to make all that manifest, you have a balanced game on hand.

Balance is unnecessary?

Why aren't there proper distinctions and definitions? Or how come that balance is deemed unnecessary in role-playing games? The answer to both would be that gaming is part of our culture to an extent that general assumptions of what that entails interferes with a need to have a distinction to begin with.

We are expected to know games. At least the general principle of what "gaming" is. We are also expected to accept that while there are general distinctions between categories of games, our only purpose is to know what we like so that we can go and consume that. In other words, you don't need to know how a car is built to drive one. Or even enjoy driving one.

So on the customer side, we only learn to look for the signs of what we think we like, not how that is achieved or, necessarily, how something actually aligns with what we could, would or even need to enjoy. There is a huge wiggle room where selling and buying the illusion of what we want is absolutely fair game. That would be consuming for the IDEA of doing something, with no intention of actually doing so.

I have bought enough games to know exactly what that means. And I have bought games because I liked their presentation, not really thinking about actually ever playing them. Or pdfs, because of an appealing idea and some nice cover art. Guilty as charged, on all those points. Which is why there is a market for it, which also is why that market is over-saturated but, for lack of a better word, flat.

That said, make no mistake, producing artifacts that superficially manage to summon the air of being a role-playing game is not the same as actually writing a role-playing game. There might be overlap, for sure, but to satisfy the market of the former is far easier than doing so for the latter.

That same wiggle room also produces another problem: it results in a faulty understanding of what playing a role-playing game actually entails. It skews our meta-knowledge of this niche of gaming towards an idea of entertainment more akin to going to a theme park.

At this point we are back at the distinction made in the beginning, those three different approaches we call "role-playing games" without distinction. Following the original paradigm will lead to a different understanding of what the game needs than following that of a minimalist game. And corporate has its very own idea what it wants of a gamer (basically WotC wants for the game what Adobe does for its apps). 

With all three having very different approaches and need for their designs (again, with overlap), there will be confusion about what a game needs if the distinctions aren't clear.

Coming from a faulty premise like that will make it impossible to evaluate the requirements of a good game from a customer perspective, even if you end up playing a lot of games that spawned in that dreaded wiggle room. The idea of "balance" would not even occur to you, as it is not needed for the kind of games that don't need it. You agree at the table what you want to experience, and then you experience that. The rules are more about engaging socially and how to behave. More LARP or improv theater than D&D.

Still my favorite LARP pic ... [source]

 What's more, the "balance" those minimalist or corporate games need is not necessarily anchored in the system, but outsourced to the participants (although with a different focus for each). That hierarchy I've talked about above doesn't track with those games.

Minimalist games, arguably, reduce the game to mostly the negotiation part. That has to mean that those mean rely on a proper "social contract" between the participants to make it work. That can be through having an experienced GM bringing their "meta understanding" of what constitutes a game to the table, compensating for the lack. It can be some form of ideology, that will force the experience through the same lens for everyone.

The corporate approach would be to gear the experience towards being a theme park. In that, you'll have always fun and never struggle and own nothing of the game and be happy (to know is to know). The first thing to castrate for that is the GM as well as the authority of the game itself.

Also seems to work well with ideology, as politics try to determine who is allowed to play and who isn't. Social engineering replacing the system, fucking up that nice hierarchy I shared above simply by giving a "get out of jail card" for all levels of resolution.

But all of it is, in its own way, a form of balance. Otherwise you couldn't play.

But people play games how they want to play them!

The one thing a game designer should ignore is how people are NOT playing their game as published but go their own way with it. If a game is designed as described above and playing it really does what the designer intended, then those playing it differently do so at their own peril. If the game is not at fault (and it might be, but if ...), then the gamer is. Limits of control and all that.

I mean, there is value in learning that a huge variety of people ignore a rule or use it differently. Something like that should be considered for revision, naturally. But if someone, say, uses a horror game to play a superhero campaign, the designer is not at fault.

But that's not even what I'm hinting at.

There is a whole movement in the ttrpg community to see systems as a mere trappings for their individual expression of the story they had in mind. Systems doing their jobs will then be seen as intrusive, disruptive even. And since that's a market, it's easy enough to find content creators (not game designers, mind you) accommodating that need.

That is all fair game, of course, but all the same something different to playing a proper role-playing game. Not even denigrating here. If you find enjoyment in playing something akin to what heavily scripted you tube theater groups call "playing a role-playing game", feel free to do so. It's just very different to what role-playing games had been originally and should be regarded as such.

Same goes for lite rules/minimalist games. Of course there is a beauty to keeping it nice and succinct, and of course is there the possibility that they will offer a proper gaming experience. Just not without an experienced gamemaster, who'd have to invest a whole lot of work to make a game with few rules worth playing for a campaign, if it's possible at all. Or without external forces (as in "not part of the rules") that engineer cohesion into a group.

It's all just different. You wouldn't take a Trabi to a Formula One race, is all I'm saying.

Unless it's pimped? [source]

In all cases, first principles apply: if you write a game with improvised theater in mind, maybe even for Twitch streaming or what have you, it will bring different necessities than writing a proper role-playing game that group of friends can play for decades without getting bored of it, or even writing something that's just supposed to last for a couple of sessions.

That all of this has its place does not mean that one form of design replaces the other. It is, rather, to be treated differently. That's not always easy, it seems.

Why bother, then?

To keep with the analogy, if you shift gears in a car to the next tier, you expect that car to behave like a car that has been shifted one up (ideally, going faster then before). How you react to the car performing is directly related to the feedback it gives. The same goes for players in a game. They'll try and test, maybe even read the rules, to get an idea how a game behaves and act accordingly. System mastery is, to use another buzzword, giving them "agency" over their characters.

If a system, now, produces unreliable results, their performance will be geared towards balancing and compensating the problems the system is producing themselves. Same goes for the GM, of course. They might even work together to address the shortcomings and find compromises to solve them.

It is, naturally, something the designer should have done to begin with to present a "complete" game. And if all of that produces more hustle than playing the game is worth, people will move on and play something else.

So this is why designers should bother with offering games that work properly, which means, they are balanced in a way that reliable results allow for all involved to have an enjoyable experience when engaging with the game. And those things will get apparent over time, of course, so even if a game is successful for, say, the sheer marketing power of its publisher, it will fall short sooner or later when people find out what a game is lacking.

D&D 3e, for instance, broke when characters reached mid to high level. The work load for the GM just got too big too handle, plus, the system did not take into account how powerful characters impact a setting and so on and so forth (I hear 5e has some of the same problems, actually). 

50 years into the hobby, examples are legion. But so are examples of good design. It just seems that people have a hard time accepting standards and building on them. Ignoring them, however, doesn't mean you'll get away with something subpar, because gamers will notice sooner or later. They always do.

Another important point why game designers should bother is that leaving the task to make a game work to a gamemaster is unfair to begin with and also introduces so many additional variants to playing the game that the outcome of playing the game is random at best, futile for all involved in its worse manifestations. Because you can't know who is running the game, how experienced, which tastes and biases. It is why the first principles discussed above are so crucial. It is why balance is crucial.

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 Which is, ultimately, why people find ways to argue that it wasn't needed to begin with. Or that it's okay as long as all follow the same ideology. Or that it can be known what a rpg is and therefor will sort itself out at the table. It is why those three distinct groups exist and fight for dominance.

My bias is towards writing games as complete as possible, following the design principles outlined above. I think it has value to do so and that it is important to see other games for what they are: different.  

To close with the analogy: give a good car to a mediocre driver, and you'll get a good performance out of it. Give that same driver a bad car and you open the result up to such a huge variance of failure, that everything between "passable" and "disaster" could be the outcome. A good car avoids that, as does a good game. Both car and game will follow or even develop standards and need to be engineered towards producing reliable output throughout.

And that's why you bother.

Conclusion

This will be a long one no reads or bothers thinking about. Yet, I stand by the above. We need proper definitions for what's happening around us, if only to recognize what has been done, what can be done and even how to do something else. It is also to save what is left of gaming culture, I assume.

All of this is already happening, but of course some people have a vested interest in keeping it foggy, unexplained and vague. Because then you can claim "this is how it's supposed to be played" or that something that isn't, is a natural evolution of a design (as, say, AD&D 2e to D&D 3e ... rather a neutering than an evolution, I'd say). People earn money or just street cred by keeping things just as they are.

Not an evolution ... [source]

That is a problem.

Not that I have anything against them doing so, but y being honest about what a game can do, maybe even MUST do to fulfill certain criteria, it might end up appealing to far less people. What happens to D&D now regarding rewrites and 6e is a very good example for what I'm talking about here.

What's worse, the fact that the gaming community is split across political and ideological lines is very much due to the fact that lots of rules don't care to create an experience SO COMPLETE that those things don't matter. Or the other way around, if all you argue is rules for that years long campaign you are in, then the game did you a service. Once a game leave too much room for interpretation, those spaces are filled with all kinds of nasty surprises instead, like what the publisher wants you to do, think or buy. Or that political/religious/ideological bullshit someone wants to push down your throat.

So we need definitions, we need to be clear about what game does what service for what audience. And we need to understand that balance is a very real aspect of games, but the kind of balance you chose has a HUGE impact on your gaming experience. And some of that has NOTHING to do with the original idea of what role-playing games are.

If you are like me, you'd want that hustle on the system side of the game, not anywhere else.

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Almost all my shit on drivethrugh is on the cheap right now, this being the time of the year for it, so check it out. If you want to do me a huge service, think about getting Monkey Business, as that only needs two more sales to make copper!

Cheers and all the best for the next year!

Railroading the DM - Is it a thing? And if so, what about it?

Railroading is generally understood as the process of one actor leading other actors towards a certain goal without allowing diversion from what is "planned". In gaming we usually see that as something a DM does to the players. I want to challenge your perception in that regard a little bit. Is it possible to "railroad" a DM? What would that look like? And is it as bad a thing as it is considered to be for players*? Lets find out (it's a long one, you are warned).

Time is not linear, that's why!

[Disclaimer: all of the following will lead to some game-theory thinking. Just stay with me here. It's also "only" how I interpret these things. All will be somewhat less obscure in the end, however, as I aim to talk about gaming sooner or later here. Turns out I needed to take a big swing here ...]

I'll start the year post with claiming that there is, broadly speaking, no free will since the presumption that time is linear may be quite faulty. We experience it that way, yes, but even in hindsight alone we realize that things couldn't have happened any other way as they did. There's even a causality to it, at least one we can negotiate individually (and I'd argue a very complex one playing out from that point in time we call the Big Bang).

The past of this timeline is solidified (not "history", as a concept, but that'd be another argument I'll make later), which means that the future will be solidified, too. Or from a more general, non-linear perspective, all of it is already solidified**. A symphony that will play out as it plays out. Like seeing Beethoven's Ninth engraved into a vinyl record instead of playing the record ...

So there is no free will, you may ask, and I answer to that: well, we (in western culture, mainly) need the idea of free will to help people seeing that the history of things we experience in life is not the whole picture. There is an out and you can find it yourself. It is, if you will, a key that opens a door to an autonomy away from, say, the shackles a culture may present. Or a personal history. The list goes on ...

Anyway, I'd go as far as wagering that the idea of free will is incompatible-but-comparable with, say, the classic Daoist way of thinking in that the shamanist culture creating the conditions for the Daoist movement found an alternative way to show the outline of that same door (or one of those doors?).

The Doors got a kick out of that quote ... [source]

In that sense, or at least as I came to understand it, "free will" is a hallmark of critical thinking and has an immense psychological value. It is a necessary tool to free minds in our society, but the general (maybe naive?) understanding that we are free agents able to make "unimpeded" decisions is, in a very physical sense, false. That Big Bang has its course, down to the smallest subatomic particle, and we are along for that ride. Knowing what that ride exactly is, is an entirely different issue.

An excersize in critical thinking?

So free will is more like a cultural neon sign (blinking, of course) to point the way to the insight that there is more to the universe than what we know and are able to communicate or fully grasp. There is, to describe it by ways of daoist thinking, an unknown pattern underlying everything, and we can somehow tap into that.

All of this alligns nicely here: free will denounces the limitations of an individual's past and makes social "suggestions" out of social "norms", Daoism denounces the Ego and cultural norms to form a deeper understanding, and all of the above can be described as "critical thinking" as that needs an individual capable of autonomous thought and all the necessary steps to become "autonomous" fullfil several criteria we can see mirrored in cultures all over space and time to have something akin to "free will" or (much more developed) spiritual "enlightenment".

Not all the same, but HUGE overlap.

In short, autonomy from the forces limiting our growth is the key signifier. We see this evident and very well researched in psychology as well. Having "agency" (another buzzword that fits here), as in "being able to chose independently", is a healthy condition for us humans. To achieve autonomy is tricky, though, and maybe starts with the vague notion that we have to find out what we actually decided for "ourselves" and where we are manipulated into acting without questioning.

Each step in that process needs to be taken, owned and understood ...

[source]

The Limits of Control

There are limits to the things we can control physically and mentally, there are limits to the forces controlling us and there is something beyond what we define as control. Autonomy, then, is first of all "knowing the territory".

It is the kind of birds-eye-view on ourselves that helps us realizing our shortcomings, limits and potentials, and with that we can work. Freedom is, then, operating within those limits to develop our potential.

Many of us carry, for instance, trauma, one way or another (especially given the times we live in) and it manifests to our surroundings through acting out in pathological ways. It varies between individuals, but it's always what C. G. Jung would describe as the "Shadow" and it takes, according to Jung, "considerable moral effort" (Aion: Phenomenology of the Self) to face and overcome that shadow.

[source]

Naturally, there is obvious value in overcoming those limitations imposed through trauma. What's more, it seems to be a function of cultural development to implant the seeds for that throughout a society so that most (if not all) get a chance to find their way out of misery. It's why I think there is truth in the saying "Psychoanalysts are the shamans of the 21st century". We find ways to track down and map those doors within the cultures we create.

It really seems to be an universal constant. Shamans, holy men or women, psychoanalysts, priests, all seem to be functions of societies to connect us to ... ourselves, more or less. As we are lost. Allan Watts wrote in his book "The Book" that god plays hide and seek in us and it is our quest in life to find him. I think that's a beautiful way to describe it.

My point being, as soon as you go looking for those doors, you will start questioning the world surrounding you. And if you take this upon you long enough and with vigor and discipline, you will grow, you will become a "better" person in the best possible way. It is a process and not all people will go it all the way, but the journey is the goal, as they say.

And while you are at it, you will develop the skills necessary for critical thinking almost instinctively. Over time you will gain autonomy and "free will", maybe even enlightenment.

I'm aware that I've glossed over some aspects here, like what "the unknown" is or could be and how it limits or frees us. Or what the difference between free will and enlightenment might be. It'd be too esoteric to dive into all of that at this point (I might in another post).

In passing I want to mention that there are rather profane ways to, for instance, "manipulate" time, for one by interpreting our past differently or even just by starting to act differently so that our acting today will change our "future past". Exploring even more obscure ideas in that direction (maybe like how words form reality, and so on) might further help illustrating my train of thought here.

However, it'll lead too far away from the point I'm aiming for (as this will be about gaming eventually), so we'll leave it at that for now.

Not an elephant, but the outline of it ...

There is a famous analogy that describes how we can see the outline of a thing by looking at the other pieces (which are usually the pieces we can know). One huge outline-inducing piece regarding "critical thinking" is what happens if a society decides it doesn't need that kind of personal growth. Or how "interested parties" manufacture consent by attacking, side-lining or undermining critical thinking.

The main word to describe that would be propaganda, which basically is about using psychological tools to wage war against a populace. Those tricks are as old as the need for those in power to keep the populace down, but the earliest 20th century saw some of its ugliest manifestations of it and the early 21st is doing its best to top that, it seems.

As far as methods go, the simple version seems to be to keep a populace in fear, which means they can't negotiate their way out of a problem as it seems either to be too complex, too contradictory or too intimidating. A populace primed like that is easily open to suggestions how to solve a given problem without questioning it much. Which will be abused, of course. Always.

[source]

Advertisement has discovered this for profit decades ago, which is why we don't teach in schools today how to recognize and counter those methods.

Another term helping with the outlining seems to be the postmodern idea of deconstruction, which seems to have lead to the idea that there are no basic truths other than what can be decided individually. I'm making shortcuts here, of course, but when people say they can't have an idea of, for instance, certain scientific fields because they didn't promote in it, then we see the result of deconstructive thinking as interpreted by the mainstream.

Sneakily forcing people into submission through lies and intimidation or helping them thinking their way out of coming to their own conclusions are both counter-intuitive to what critical thinking is about. Both perfectly line out their opposite, if you will.

And this relates to gaming how?

Well, what kind of gaming experience are you looking for? If you are prone to critical thinking, gaming can challenge you to explore ideas and grow. If you are happily subservient, gaming can offer you mindless entertainment with opportunities to show your thought-fealty.

Is there an in-between? Don't know. You tell me. But gaming can offer a door to critical thinking, and that's where gamedesign can come in. This is where the Gamemaster can make a difference. It is where players have a choice (not necessarily where they get a choice ... there's a difference). All it takes is taking on that considerable moral effort Jung talked about.

An idea like that will have, of course, detractors. People will say "but it's only a game" or "why so serious, I play to relax!", and to all of those I'll say: have it your way. It's all right to just let go and consume. No harm, no foul. People will take your money, for sure, and you will be entertained.

As for the statements themselves, they are just patently wrong. We play to learn. Not only that, we thrive when we play to learn. It's not work, it's not serious. IT'S WHAT WE DO. You don't have to, of course, but it is well established that gaming is among the only things that get us forward in life. It just can also be used to keep us in a lull, but that's NOT it's original purpose.

[source]

People telling you otherwise are either trying to sell you something or believe what they are being told. I'm not saying this to insult, but merely to point out facts. Those distinctions are important.

How to (properly) railroad a DM, then?

The greatest benefit of training in Judo is not that you learn to fight. It is a Zen discipline, and as such going that path is about engaging with yourself through discipline and training in specific, say, rituals. The fighting part is almost a fringe benefit, if you will. In a way, it offers an individual expression of the philosophy not only through combat, but in life. I've met people who've trained Judo their whole life and it is quite obvious that it informed their behaviour and way of thinking.

You see where I'm going with this?

Role-playing games CAN offer guidance towards critical thinking by providing the tools by which a gamemaster will find that damn door through mastering the game (what the name actually implies, you know?). That's a gameDESIGNERS gold standard, actually, to offer a design that allows some form of insight into reality through playing in addition to being entertaining. You will find no long-term successful game that doesn't fullfil that criteria (really, try me).

GMing a role-playing game won't lead to enlightenment, as it is. But with proper design, it'll take a gamemaster's hand and show them how to master the craft and that can show a way to enlightenment (if we accept this as a spectrum). I think that we should aspire to achieve something like that as designers. Every craft deserves that kind of excellency, why shouldn't role-playing?

Doesn't need to be every game, but it'd be nice to see it given a shot (I'll try that anyway, but I'm not really what you'd call an influencer ...).

If nothing else, gamemasters being successfully able to form narratives through conveying a resemblance of reality that translates to a participating audience needs an understanding of many, many facets related to critical thinking. The question is: is a DM railroaded for following the recipe in order to make their own game or is a DM railroaded for being neglected that growth and just being told what to do (making them some sort of medium for a designer's vision)?

If you read up to that point, you know the answer: both can be considered railroading, although the intentions in the necessary designs are very, very different and that will be obvious in the games.

I've said this before: a first person shooter is mostly bound to be a railroad. Sure, there are those with huge sandboxes, but the stories are linear, with very simple decision trees and character development to go with at best. The point of playing them, however, is to express yourself within those rails***. How to move, how to kill, which weapons ... the rest is noise, and as a player, if you came for a shooting, you appreciate the fast-forward for the rest (if it's a well done addition, all for the better).

Same can be true about a DM expressing themselves within the rules they are provided with. It mostly remains true regardless of the intentions the designers had, btw, if the DM is already "on the path", because they got their informtion from another game (even from another activity!), for instance.

Either way, railroading the gamemaster is a rail real possibility. As with players, it just isn't inherently a bad thing. Like I said, the intentions are making the difference here. Are you supposed to be compliant sheep, dancing on the marked spots? Are you just reduced to be an author's mouth piece, with the weak promise to shine in their supposedly superior light, as long as you keep it on track? Or is there a chance of growth in keeping within the rails?

Situations to avoid, Part 1 [source]

Opportunities to take responsibility?

Be it the gamedesigner who aims to manifest great ideas through complex designs in their games or gamemasters aiming to convey some very specific and demanding story in their games or players testing the boundaries of their limits, nothing of that is per se necessary to play games. But all of them are opportunities, and as such, one should not dismiss the good it can do to explore the possibilities here.

I keep saying that our hobby is still in its infancy, but we still have seen some high marks. From the beginning, actually, as everybody and their grandmother will tell you how playing the early games changed their lifes, or how they learned this and that.

To connect the dots her a little bit, the whole DIY attitude of the first editions of D&D, the idea to let DMs roam free in their campaign development but giving them the tools to get it done properly (which had to be mastered, of course), all of that was one of the main reasons for the success of those games. Incidentally, it's that encouragement to create and, implicitly, the idea of some form of autonomy (and all that might entail) that made the early OSR movement so lively and eclectic.

To keep something like this alive it needs voices in the community realizing that there comes a responsibility with writing, publishing and even playing games. Again, that considerable moral effort Jung is talking about. The effort not to make it about profit. The effort not to reduce something to brainless entertainment. The effort to strive for some kind of excellency in our endeavors.

"Build it and they will come", right? And we know how to do all of this properly. We know what's possible and where there's still room for exploration. We are able to recognize intentions in designs ... Nothing of this is news. The beauty of culture is that we can stand on the shoulders of giants to get a chance to see maybe just an inch further than they did.

We don't have to start from the beginning, we already have a headstart, IF we take the responsibility that comes with it. If we put in the work.

It needed saying, now I stop ...

Just one last thing, to bring that last argument home: the Tao Te Ching, that original first text about Daoism, is roughly 2500 years old, based on ideas that are even older than that. Shoulders of giants ...

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.” (Laozi, Tao Te Ching)

See? They already knew.

Role-playing games can be a journey for all willing to engage in this hobby to find growth. And not just individually, but as a group. How cool is that?! I hope we don't lose the values needed for that growth out of sight and instead manage to inspire others to start that journey as well.

I also hope people don't take issue with the broad strokes and shortcuts I had to make in this post. I know the devil is in the detail and one generally shouldn't lump in all those different ideas into one concept, especially if some of those ideas are highly debatable themselves. However, I believe my shotgun-approach here holds true and I'm willing to discuss particulars, if someone would be so inclined. Just keep it casual :)

Have a good start into 2022, friends and neighbors. And remember, no matter how dark the world is, there's always a journey inwards waiting for us to make the next step. Ranger out ...

[source]

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If you are interested in finding out if I actually try to do what I'm talking about above, you can check out a free preview of Ø2\\'3|| (that science fiction role-playing game I published) right here (or go and check out the first reviews here). I'm still doing a sale on it ...

If you already checked it out, please know that I appreciate you :) It'll certainly help to keep the lights on here! I'd love to hear about that, too.

Just look at that beauty ...

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*With which I disagree, btw, for the simple reason that there are different modes of play and "railroading" is one of them. Like you'd see, for instance, in the heavily scripted Call of Duty series. You don't have to like scripted games like that, but that's no reason to disregard them as valid, right? So if people want to get a ride through something a DM planned, and all are on the same page, then that should be totally fine. Just saying.

** That's not even all, of course, since a non-linear approach might also mean that all points in time are readily accessible at all times, so to say. And Merlin lived backwards in time, as we all know ... The point I'm making is that it just might not be only linear and that ONE cnclusion of that is that the whole thing is fixed. I'm aware of the idea that changing the past might introduce parallel timelines and that might be happening all the time. Our consciousnesses might even travel in between or visit them in dreams or ... whatever. All interesting sidetracks, just not what I'm aiming for. 

*** Even if the rails are wider, you are still lead somehwere. Sometimes that is a good thing, but I'd offer it's always a good thing to make it a conscious decision to be lead, even "only" for entertainment.

Movie Review: The Green Knight (with SPOILERS)

We saw The Green Knight in a local cinema yesterday, and I have to say, it is a disgrace to the original. Calling this an 'adaptation' is stretching it so far that the Super Mario movie looks like a win in comparison. The audacity of that director to touch a classic like that without even a hint of an idea what the source is about (beyond the basic premise) to then project some very immature, pseudo-intellectual thoughts unto it (and I'm being generous here), seems very much to be a sign of our time. I want to talk about that a bit. Originally I started writing a comment on MeWe about it, had to stop in the middle to make it a post, as it very much concerns the state of what "art" is supposed to be nowadays and we can make a good example of this. This will contain spoilers and I will rant about this movie. You have been warned.

 

Preamble 

 

I have read a prose translation just last week. It had an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien attached where he talks about why this is an important work. I came prepared. If you want my two sentence take on the original (just as far as story goes), I see it as a pre-psychological examination of what is supposed to be the ideal man of the 14th century, measured versus Christian and social morality and values, tempted by seduction and fear of death. How Gawain (the best of knights) acts and why and what that means are themes that the author of the original masterfully played with. Let's talk about what the film did.

 

[source]

--**SPOILER ALERT**--

So Gawain is still King Arthur's nephew, but not even a knight. Instead the film begins with him waking up in a brothel, not knowing where his shoes are. He has no father, you see, and his mother seems to be a witch (as soon will be very clear, as she summons the Green Knight), so to flee facing this, he makes himself useless by drinking and whoring a lot. On Christmas eve the mother doesn't want to go to King Arthur's court and sends Gawain alone so she can do some witchcraft. Arthur is all splendor and father figure, but weak and decaying (a returning theme here, kudos to the actor actually pulling that off). Enough of a father figure, though, to be present enough at christmas to ask little Gawain if he is the man Arthur hopes him to be. Gawain says no, the queen says 'Not yet'. Then the Green Knight appears with his challenge, and Gawain, primed like that, jumps on the challenge without understanding a single word of it.

 

In the original Gawain protects the King from himself (Arthur wants to take the Green Knight head on) and takes the challenge willingly. Here? Not so much. Gawain thinks they are playing a game and is surprised that he just beheaded somebody, even more that it didn't take (side note: he gets to use Excalibur for the beheading, which should have done the Green Knight in, since it's all Morgan Le Fay's doing). A year goes by (just like in the original), but nothing changes for little Gawain, just more drinking and whoring and a bit fighting when the mother is addressed. Then the King appears to push him a bit to go to the Green Chappel and find out what's up (which in the film is supposed to be 6 days travel due north). He doesn't want to, but goes nonetheless. Scenes of the brooding mother are interjected throughout. Two days later he meets a stranger on the remains of a battle field. The stranger pretends to help, but sends him into a trap instead, where he is bound and gagged and left behind ... to die!

I kid you not. The camera moves from his concerned face through the forest and back to his dead and decayed remains, then back through the forest and then to the concerned face again. Next thing you see is him encountering a ghost and interacting with it. Actually, this is the point in the film where the quest turns psychedelic and 'magical' (before that magic is shown as something people like Merlin and the witches are the cause for, after that it's the land itself). It is reduced to nothing more than Gawains soul travelling the in-between to face death through the Green Knight's axe. The whole seduction part of the original (the core of the piece, according to Tolkien) is just one more random encounter, again with a massively changed focus. The frame is there, but the picture drawn is something else (and, I'd argue, lesser) than what the original had to offer.

In the end, the fox that accompanied him ushers a warning not to go (a warning like that was in the original, but mainly to elevate Gawain's resolve, here, again, it's all twisted and changed). Gawain chases him away and enters the boat that would lead him to the chapel (there is no obvious reason why the boat or the small river is necessary, he could have walked, again underlining the underworld-character of the scenery ...).

When confronted by the knight, he offers his neck to be chopped off, but flinches the first time (like in the original, but not with the same effect or for the same reason ... again, twisted and changed). The second time around, Gawain flinches again and asks "Why like that", just to get a "How else" as an answer. Before the third attempt goes through, he flees, screaming he can't do it, runs home, gets his low-status fling pregnant only to have the baby taken away from her (she wanted to be his lady, ended up being his brooding station ... many witches and a Merlin had been involved), he becomes king, gets married to a princess (witches and the mother, again).

 

He stays a coward long enough to see his son die on the battle field (the kid, for sure, believing the lies about the great Gawain, thinking it would make him invincible as well, because blood and all that ... that's only implied, though), and in the end, before "they" run down the gates to get to him, he sees all the women excerting power over him, leave him. Sitting alone in the throne room, realizing his unavoidable doom ... his head falls of and the scene cuts back to the chappel, before that last attempt with the axe.

 

Gawain is in the know now. He has been dead all the time, his life would have led to nothing. He gets rid of the garb that is supposed to protect him and tells the Green Knight that he is ready. The Green Knight says something to the effect of "Good boy, and now off with the head ...", which is how the movie ends. You don't see the actual death, the original ending is off the table, too, at this point.

 

If you disagree with my take on this being a dead Gawain, travelling to the great beyond, I'd just like to add that there is actually a scene where he sees himself decaying AND he brings it up in a discussion with the lady in the castle, where green is associated with decay. The director also uses the the old 'god shows the character how his life would have turned out to let him find peace'-trope*** to bring that shit home. So yeah, you can disagree, but dismantle that for a hot second ... 

 

Analysis (light spoilers)

What we have here is the story of a loser boy that believes the stories about knights and heroes enough to be forced into a quest by his mother and a sick father replacement, dies two days into the quest due to his naivity only to get tormented some more and get killed in the end again, this time accepting his fate, because being alive would have sucked way more (he came to this conclusion himself?).

 

It inverts and perverts the Heroe's Journey, which should be bad enough, but it also categorizes the relationship between men and women as evil and toxic. The mother is a witch, love doesn't exist, only obligation does, the idea of maturity through trial and initiation is a lie, institutions are a lie ... They went as far as having Gawain's shield, in the film a portrayal of the Holy Mother instead of the pentagram in the poem, splintered in front of him (which he laments, for unexplained reasons, more than anything else in that scene).

 

Now, in Symbolism, Mother Mary is The Throne of Wisdom, she is a positive influence on Jesus, helps him finding his way and bear his cross. A positive representation of the relationship between men and women. Psychology has caught up to that, actually, so it's not only the Bible talking about this. All of this is shat upon in that movie.

 

It'd be the hip thing to say "it is deconstructing Christianity and its cultural influence as a lie", but I don't think it does the harmful ideas given air in this movie any justice at all. This is, plain and simple, an aestheticization of Satanism*, and not the cute kind of Satanism people like to flirt with, but the serious kind that aims to pervert you towards uselessness.

The methods to convey those ideas are the most effective propaganda tools available to humanity: the film is drowned in music, the scenes are hypnotic, always aesthetically highlighting something irrelevant to veil the interaction and intentions between the characters (something you can see quite well in the discrepancy between Arthur's gravitas and his decay, for instance).

 

It's one sleight of hand like that after another. You don't question what you see because the film never asks those questions. It rather takes your attention to something else, something 'magical', and lets the interactions stand as something 'given', as if it is reality. That is some powerful psychological manipulation right there!

Really, just take all the glitter and lights on face value. What does it add up to? Beautiful noise, nothing more. Abusing the original like this only adds to the diversion by claiming the story is in dialogue with something bigger, but it only pays lip service to that (or attempts to corrupt it).

 

We need to start looking closer ... (no spoilers here, I think)

 

In the end, it's either very shallow and nice to look at, or it's hiding something very ugly while trying to inject certain values into an unassuming viewer. I tend to believe it's the latter, for the reasons I state above. 

Readers might be inclined to think this is about Christianity since I talk Symbolism and Satanism and what-not. They are mistaken**. This is about the values we held high in our society and culture for a long time.

 

Those values are, naturally and to some degree, influenced by the religions surrounding us, and as far as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is concerned, an early idea of Christianity is a key element and needs to be considered. However, we, as a society, had been on a good way to transcend religious values into a set of staples that exist independant to religion (at least I'd argue as much).

 

It seems we are learning the hard way now that these values need to be upheld and protected. Taking movies like The Green Knight apart in public is part of that process. I know my reach, so this is of no significance for any Hollywood type out there ... still had to say my piece. But I see this happening again and again. Star Wars is a good example, Wanda Vision seems to be another one (see where the * leads). The US Comics scene has massive problems with telling 'good' stories, and the successfull ones seem to hide questionable messages. 

 

In a discussion on MeWe an online friend wrote that a lot of the public discourse today isn't about right or wrong, it's about having values or not having them. I agree with that a lot and I believe it applies here. Could I be off with my assessment? Maybe. You've seen me argue my case, I can provide sources for all of that (if I haven't already), so to take that apart, you should at least be able match that. I'm confident I can hold my ground, but would be happy to hear some great counter-arguments about it.

 

So would I recommend seeing this movie? Well, actually, yes. Avoid paying for it, if that possibility arises (in a legal way, of course), but yeah, if you've read the above (even if you disagree with my take), see the movie. The visuals are often stunning, as is the soundtrack, and there are some nice little story bits in it, all things told, so you'll most likely not be bored. I'd use some of the visuals for my games, for sure (and some of the ideas to portray evil, heh).

 

Far more important, though, would be trying to see what I saw, verifying it, if possible (it maybe all in my head, after all). If nothing else, I believe it can help creating an awareness for some ugly trends and ideas manifesting in our culture. Just because something is nice to look at, it doesn't mean it's virtues or 'true'.

If you have seen the movie already, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on it. Can you see my points? Where am I off?

I'll leave it at that (although I'd have to say more, I think I said what I needed to say).

* Jonathan Pageau has a great take on Satanism like that. See the video here on yt.

** I'm not a Christian, but I appreciate the positive influences Christianity had in our culture (there's lots of bullshit, too, mainly stupid politics, but anyway). If pressed, I'd say I'm a Daoist. If I were pressed to explain that, I'd say it's like Zen Anarchism (in that Zen is the little brother of Daoism, and thinking like that makes you an anarchist, it seems). 

*** Only thing is, where that insight comes from is not explained. If that's something the character is alluding to, it's even more stupid than I assume it is.