Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Never thought I’d see the day, a Pirate Boat coming my way…

    I present this in honour of Sir Noisms’ adventures on the Inland sea, without further comment:

  • Why don’t more women game?

    It’s a pretty well-established fact that role-playing games aren’t exactly popular with women, and neither are the related nerdy activities of computer gaming or board gaming. Recent studies suggest that about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 MMO players is female. That’s a better ratio than at my kickboxing club, where it’s about 1 in 20 – and that’s in rural Japan, supposedly a sexist society. I’d guess it’s a better male-female ratio than exists in NZ or Australian amateur rugby. However, I’d suggest that the rate of women in role-playing clubs I’ve been a member of has been lower than 1 in 20, on average, and most people who game are pretty aware that the number of women who come to the game is low. For example, the club I went to in London had at most 2 women in a room of maybe 40 men (this happened once!) and I think one of them was a friend of a player and not playing herself.

    I suppose also I’ve been led to think about this as well by the controversy over “I Hit it with my Axe,” in which the response to a video of a group of women gaming was really sexist, including such fine sexist tropes as commenting first (or only) on their appearance, setting higher standards of required intellect or knowledge than equivalent male gamers, and judging them on their sexual behaviour (they’re porn stars, so their out-of-game sexual activity became an important part of the controversy). I don’t think many of the people commenting at the Escapist website, or in the other websites during the aftermath, ever stopped to think about whether the women playing might object to being called ugly, or being held to a higher standard of appearance than male gamers, or having their playing style judged, or whether the extent to which this was being done was greater than perhaps might be done for a group of men.

    The hobby generally also has a pretty serious set of markers indicating that women aren’t welcome, and although women who game might not care about, or might even appreciate, some of these markers, the fact remains that things like bikini-clad babes, novels with only male protagonists, obligatory skimpy clothing on women, and default mediaeval worlds with default gender relations all serve to tell women “this is a man’s world,” just like the nude calendar hanging in the workshop tells a woman it’s a man’s space, even if she happens herself to appreciate it aesthetically.

    So there’s a natural barrier to women’s inclusion in the hobby. Having seen these markers in game stores and computer games and online, the woman who wants to game is going to turn up to a group or a club and walk into a room that is maybe 90-95% male, mostly men who don’t have a great deal of success with women, she’s going to be stared at and ogled (this happens in every public rpg setting I’ve ever seen), and then she’s going to have to come to terms with a complex set of rules. She’s going to have to enact those rules in a social setting characterised by multiple people talking over and past each other, a kind of environment where women are much more likely to be interrupted or overruled by men, and all the while she’s going to be subject to (and probably aware of) a set of judgements and expectations which are probably not the same for her[1] as they would be for a new male player joining. And, inevitably, someone’s going to hit on her at some point, and some other guy who’s not very good with women is going to stare and pander to her too much and make her uncomfortable.

    So how did this come about, and is there anything that can be done about it? I think it’s partly an accident of history, in that when the hobby started in the 70s it developed in a very gendered section of nerd culture. Indeed, I think all of nerd culture in the English-speaking world, not just gaming, started off as very male-dominated, maybe because of its origins in science and tech. In Japan, for example, nerd culture seems to be much more gender-balanced[2], and I think this might be a result of it having grown from different cultural roots (i.e. anime) and being more connected to mainstream pop, as well as quite androgynous sub-cultures like Visual Kei. Anyway, so if the hobby starts in a gender-unbalanced subculture, it’s much harder for women to enter the subculture later because the traditions of the subculture have grown up around its gendered history. But beyond this historical accident, I think there is an element of the fundamental nature of the game – 4 or 5 people sitting around a table talking about a topic – which women have traditionally had difficulty dealing with when the people doing it are mostly men. Men in groups tend to unconsciously overrule, interrupt, ignore and belittle women when they speak, and this makes it difficult for women to stick it out in these groups unless they’re really good at mixing it up with men. But this problem is easily fixed.

    When I first started studying at Adelaide University in 1991, the student union produced a pamphlet for all new students explaining about good behaviour in tutorials, and a significant part of that pamphlet was devoted to pointing out to new male students how traditional male tutorial behaviour unconsciously discriminated against and excluded women from participation. It also gave a series of tips on how to avoid this traditional behaviour, most of which started from the standpoint of “you aren’t the centre of the universe, even though you think you are because you’re a 17 year old male.” I actually paid attention to this pamphlet and, in my English classes, I could see pretty clearly what was happening. I could also see that some tutors had taken the issue seriously, and would work to make sure that people got an equal chance to speak, and that women didn’t get overruled or ignored. This isn’t necessary for women who speak easily and loudly, but for a lot of women and some men it is.

    It’s also easy for men to form subtle, quick alliances against women without even realising it. For example, one of my friends (female) in a tutorial some years back witnessed the following conversation (in a class not oriented around women’s studies):

    • Female Student A: “That’s because of the patriarchy”
    • Male Student B: “You mean like a kind of conspiracy of men? That’s crazy.”
    • Tutor, to male students in the room: “Hey lads, don’t forget to meet me after class to discuss the next stage of our conspiracy against women.”
    • Male students: general sniggers and “okay”s

    In this conversation the tutor rapidly orients his conversation to form a kind of alliance with the other guys against a woman’s idea, and the guys quickly slip into form with him, ignorant of the irony that they’re doing exactly what the girl criticised in order to dismiss her point.

    A tutor who had even basic training in how to handle gender issues in class would never, ever have done this: if the girl’s point was stupid (as in this case, I seem to recall, it actually was) he would have found a way to point this out to her without making her feel small and excluded. Feeling small and excluded is not an issue when you’re not in a minority, but if you’re the only person in the room from a particular group, and the means of exclusion is clearly related to your membership of that group, you’ll get the message pretty fast – that you aren’t welcome.

    I don’t think that these kinds of interaction problems can be solved by women by themselves. They need the engagement and support of men, or the only solution will be for women to play in separate groups, which is okay I suppose but not, in my view, ideal. I don’t believe that women need different games to men, or even a different gaming environment[3] – they just need men to apply the same standards to them as they do to each other. The games themselves are not naturally inimical to women’s tastes or desires, but they’re difficult for women to enter when the natural, unmonitored social environment in which they occur is inimical to women’s interests.

    Role-playing actually comes with a built-in stabiliser to solve a lot of these problems – the DM. It’s the DM’s responsibility to make sure all players are heard, all players get a chance to put their ideas, and all players get equal consideration. If a DM sees some of these things happening in his or her campaign – women being talked over [seen it!], women being talked down to [seen it!], women being told what to do [seen it!], men getting credit for women’s ideas [seen it!] – to a woman in the group more often than the men, then the DM can step in to try and reverse this problem, for example by getting the woman to repeat what she said, or pointing out to everyone that that idea was actually Kate’s, not Bob’s as they’re saying. The DM, removed from the cut and thrust of player interaction, is ideally placed to do this. And not just for women either – shy and new players often need a lot of this sort of help. The problem for women is that sometimes these patterns persist long after they’ve got used to the game and the players, and they happen in a gendered way – i.e. more to the woman than to the other players.

    As a concrete example, players often compliment the originator of a good idea after it works out. The Ogres are a steaming pile of corpses, the treasure is in hand, and no-one’s hurt, so the player who suggested using the strap-a-mine-to-a-dog approach gets thanked. But I’ve seen campaigns where, if the idea was the woman’s, nothing would be said. Only men got credit for good ideas. It’s like all the male players had just subtly wiped her from a small part of their in-game manners. So, as DM, it was easy for me to point out to the players whose idea it was and how well it worked, at which point they’d all naturally chime in with thanks and accolades, because they didn’t deliberately intend to exclude her – it just happened that way[4]. So I’ve brought her gaming experience up to par with theirs, without any confrontation or awkwardness.

    It doesn’t take much effort for a DM to do this, and to remain aware both of a general responsibility to ensure all players get equal consideration, but to be particularly aware of ways in which women are being treated differently and to redress them[5]. If we all do this, then one of the main barriers to women’s participation – a quite confrontational social environment full of loud men – will be overcome without necessarily even making much effort or changing it much, and they’ll stick around longer, which will make it easier for other women to game. And then the other barriers – the social markers indicating it as a male-only space, the farting, the Body Odour, and the highly sexist bulk-standard mediaeval environments – will fall as well. And in my opinion, that makes the game better for everyone.

    I suppose, in conclusion: role-playing is a social activity, and when discrimination happens in social activities, it can only be fixed by people working together, not by the victims bearing up under it and trying to break through. I know a lot of role-players seem to come from a libertarian or quite individualistic perspective (possibly partly driven by their experience of “membership” at high school, which tended to work against us when we were the nerdy outsiders), and the idea of consciously looking at the way your social organisations work is anathema to them, but in this case, if having more women in the gaming world is of interest to us, we have to recognise that it won’t necessarily happen organically. Someone, somewhere, is going to have to work to subtly reorganise those social relations to make it easier for women to join. The presence of the DM makes this social reorganisation easy and hassle-free, if the DM is willing to do a very small amount of work to fix the problem, until the players work out how to change their behaviour themselves, and the problem goes away.

    —

    fn1: This is classic “entry” behaviour, as characterised in the old joke that women have to work twice as hard as men to get half the recognition – this is what happened when women first started entering male-dominated workplaces.

    fn2: Even the word for nerd in Japanese, Otaku, stems from a polite form of “you” traditionally used by middle-aged women and also adopted by nerdy guys to refer to each other. Or so I’m told.

    fn3: Though I think there’s lots of space for this too

    fn4: This is an important point here, which gets missed a lot in gender debates. A lot of the stuff men do to exclude women is not done deliberately, and they would stop doing it as soon as they found out they were. This was the central point of the pamphlet I read way back when, and it means that these social elements of the game are the easiest to fix, even though they’re the subtlest, especially if you have a neutral observer – like a tutor or DM – to check them and make them change.

    fn5: I’ve seen other ways too, such as when my German player was getting very uncomfortable at the implication that the group he was in was going to commit genocide, and I had to step in to try and guide them down a different path – it’s not like he was generally squeamish, but there are some things that a German is not comfortable with and the game is meant to be fun.

    —

    Update: Sysuro in comments has pointed out an error in my original post, based on a misreading (perhaps) of a table in a study (which I discussed previously here). I’ve updated the first paragraph to represent this. The discussion of the error is in the comments.

  • Congratulations, America!

    You’ve done it! 120 years after the introduction of the Bismarck system, a mere 60 years after the foundation of the National Health Service, 40 years after you put a man on the moon, and a mere 35 years since Australia introduced Medibank, you finally have a system of universal health coverage. Welcome to civilisation[1]! Admittedly, a lot of people are claiming it’s barely a universal system at all, no-one actually understands it, and 14% of your population now think that Obama is the antichrist, but at least you’ve got your foot in the door.

    Of course, some people seem to think that it’s a short and slippery slope from universal health care to armageddon, but 3 of the other nuclear-armed nations have it, and they seem to have avoided nuking each other yet. And on the bright side, public systems are much more likely to respond effectively to a massive public health disaster like armageddon than private ones are.

    I’m not so sure that a cobbled-together mandate that no-one really understands is a better approach than to have just, say, imported one of those existing, functioning systems wholesale – or even, just to have set up a government insurer for the 40 million uninsured and watched the rest of the country come flocking to it – but from this point the debate changes, doesn’t it? It no longer becomes “should we/shouldn’t we,” but “how can we improve what we’ve got?” And from there the only way is up up up that slippery slope to socialism and death panels for everyone!

    Well done, America! Next, illegal wars and oil dependence… surely they’ll be easy to fix now you’ve overcome this massive challenge?!??

    Seriously, though. I get the impression that getting this through has been a lot of work and a serious challenge. The US health system as it stands is an astounding shambles, and without a public solution at some point was going to become an untenable mess. If this system works even half as well as the rest of the world’s public systems, then you’ll get

    • reduced infant mortality
    • reduced health care costs
    • better health care
    • better public and preventive health
    • more rational health decision-making, and more public say in how healthcare money is spent
    • 40 million more people (at least) getting access to healthcare
    • greater labour flexibility
    • more entrepeneurs
    • lower costs for business

    which is maybe not good news for all those countries (like Japan and Germany) whose heavy and medium industry has been dining out on American businesses’ hidden healthcare costs, but it’s all round good news for Americans. Antichrist or not, that Obama chap is a miracle worker!

    —

    fn1: see how we spell that with an “s”, not a “z”? It’s a slippery slope from universal health systems to British English… even Sarah Palin knows that!

  • Thieving bastards make better DMs

    Adventure preparation done right

    It’s RPG blog carnival time again, this time at the Questing GM, and the topic is “how to be a better Games Master.” There’s lots of good advice – I like what Carl at Back Screen Pass has to say, though I’m dubious about any claim that I have any strengths except my ability to describe stuff – and I think Geek Ken is right to say that you should try to play often if you’re going to DM, because I don’t think I play enough and I sometimes forget what works and what doesn’t for players.

    So, Carl’s advice is to play to your strengths, and I think my main strength is the ability to describe stuff. I think my DMing style is often based on building up a strong picture of things and letting the players enjoy the action that follows even if the details – the combat and skill resolution, for example – are clunky or not entirely satisfactory. The fun is in the experience, not necessarily the details of how it panned out, and provided everyone is able to see the vision, everyone gets to enjoy it.

    The problem then is getting ideas to describe, from the very broad vision of worlds through the narrower vision of particular characters and scenarios, to the momentary vision of what happens from point to point in an adventure or scene. My solution to this is simple – I steal stuff outrageously from as many cultural sources as I can. I lift from music, novels, comics, movies, literature, my day-to-day experiences, anything I can get my hands on. It’s unlikely that (outside of the Lord of the Rings and Buffy) my players have seen much of what I’ve lifted, so occasionally someone will notice I’m copying but in general they won’t see a pattern. And of course even if they do, I just have to leaven it a bit with something novel, and they’ll never know. After a few campaigns all the players change and I can steal from myself too, it’s perfect. As Chumbawumba said (and they said it first!!!), there is nothing new under the sun, so why be ashamed? Things I’ve stolen include…

    • Magua from The Last of the Mohicans, who I stole wholesale and dumped straight into my last campaign, name, manners, speech patterns and all
    • Dragon-hunting from Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a beautiful moment in science fiction history (and I really want to steal the title at some point too)(and I’ve stolen this idea twice)
    • Ship names from Iain M. Banks
    • Ideas for spells, schools of magic and famous magicians from English literary genres (Romantics, Regency novelists, etc.)
    • Settings for adventures from, for example Ocean Thermal Energy Convertors (there was a ghost in the top room)
    • Monsters and equipment from role-playing settings as diverse as Dark Space, Shadowrun, Talislanta, Skyrealms of Jorune, and Traveller:2300
    • Adventure locations from real life – Tottori Castle and Lundy Island, Devon spring to mind but there have been many others

    One big benefit of this is that the players are provided with something they know (except, obviously, in the case of Talislanta) and this gives them something to hang their own imagination onto. For example, a spell system based on existing literary genres made it very easy for the player playing a Priest to just make up new spells, and some of them were doozies – Suffer Not a Witch was a type of Dispel Magic, and Reveal the Spirit was a kind of Fascinate spell that worked really nicely into the narrative of the story. It’s easy for everyone to both invent the spell and visualise the effect when it’s tied to something they know, and gives everyone a grounding from which to develop a shared vision of the campaign. This is probably why I largely set my campaigns on Earth, with real historical or possible future scenarios to hold them together.

    The forces of evolution, tectonic plates, and 500 years of English creative history trump any crap I’ve got to offer, so I just steal shamelessly from the lot, and serve up to my characters a smorgasboard of rebranded ideas that I’ve tried to stuff together into a coherent framework. Don’t be shy! No-one’s going to sue you, and if you describe it well, the players won’t even notice…

  • Were AD&D demi-human level limits irrelevant for game balance?

    I’m pretty confident that demi-human level limits, at least in AD&D 1st edition and onwards, never worked effectively to balance demi-human powers because the experience point system was rigged to ensure that multi-classing as a demi-human was massively unbalanced. I am writing this theory out by memory, and I’m aware that it has been done over a bit in other blogs recently, but I can’t find any discussion of the effect of the early incarnations of the xp system on multi-class PCs. I recall when I was playing AD&D back in the day that I became acutely aware of the imbalance in the system pretty quickly, but it hadn’t occurred to me for years since I played it, and I’m going on my memory of the advancement tables in writing this post so I may be completely wrong, but here goes…

    Level advancement in AD&D was basically geometric, so for example you needed 2500xp to get to 2nd level, 5000 xp for 3rd, 10000 for 4th, etc. The amounts required doubled each level until about 12th, though there were a few levels in the middle where some classes went up in an arithmetic fashion, the most striking being (from memory) wizards, who between 6th and 9th level didn’t double in required xp. Multi-class characters required twice as many xps to gain a level. The big upshot of this is that a single-class character will, for the majority of the game, be only 1 level higher than the two classes in a multi-class character. For example, you could be a 4th level human fighter for the same amount of experience points as you could be a 3rd/3rd level Dwarven Fighter/cleric. In general, though, the benefits of these levels are essentially additive[1], and the natural assumption most people make is that a a 3rd/3rd level multi-class character is closer to a 6th level single-class than a 4th level single-class.

    This means that until about 9th level (roughly when the geometric advancement stops) a multi-class character will be approximately twice as powerful as a single-class character. A triple-class character will be even better – a 5th level single-class fighter would be roughly equivalent to a 4th/4th/3rd level fighter/cleric/thief by dint of this geometric progression. Once the characters reach (about) 9th level this distinction stops, and the multi-class characters go up in levels at the same rate as the single-class characters, so a 15th level fighter would be (roughly) the same as a 12th/12th level fighter/cleric.

    Demi-human level limits serve to “balance” the extra powers of demi-humans by stopping them from achieving epic levels. But consider even harsh limits like those on a halfling fighter/cleric (roughly 7th level and 6th level, I recall). The halfling fighter/cleric will reach this limit when a human roughly reaches 8th level. In order for the human to gain a numerically equivalent set of levels they will have to adventure for another 5 levels, i.e. the human remains weaker than the halfling until 13th level. For an elf magic-user/thief with good stats, the elf can probably reach 11th/10th level, so from 12th level until 22nd level a single-class human will be underpowered relative to this elf. Given most campaigns never reach 20th level, but the power imbalance starts at 3rd level and just gets worse until 9th level, this is a pretty blunt and ineffective tool.

    I think D&D 3.5 fixed this by making the level progression arithmetic and making multi-classing possible for everyone. This is a much more effective balance on the power of demi-humans than giving them level limits which occur too late to practically affect the most significant problems, and probably never become practically applicable for the majority of parties.

    I’d like to add the disclaimer that this post is based on my memory of a game I haven’t looked at in maybe 15 years, so any mistakes in the content should be seen as speculative revision. I recall being really vexed by the simultaneous problem of demi-human level limits on the one hand, and overpowered multi-class characters on the other, and I may be wrong in all the particulars. A lot of beer has flowed under the bridge since my last chaotic neutral magic-user thief freed the prisoners and killed the ogre…

    —

    fn1: in terms of THAC0 and hit points it wasn’t, but in exchange you got to start the campaign with spells and combat powers. So a 1st/1st level fighter cleric was basically a cleric with better THAC0 and hit points than a cleric; or a fighter with 1 less hp (on average) and cure light wounds. A 2nd/2nd level fighter cleric has the THAC0 of a 2nd level fighter and but has the spells of a 2nd level cleric. This fighter’s single-class comrade will be a 3rd level fighter, so his/her THAC0 will be one better and he/she will have 1d10+2 more hps on average. At 7th level, this fighter has 7d10 hps (mean 38.5 hps) and a THAC0 of 14, with no spells. The 6th/6th level Dwarf has 6d9 hps (mean 30hps), a THAC0 of 15, and the spells of a 6th level cleric. I’d rather play a character with 8 less hps (on average), 1 higher THAC0, and about 7 spells, as well as undead turning abilities,  personally. There is almost 0 mechanical advantage to any other choice. And I think it’s even worse if you play 3 classes, because the reduction in hps and THAC0 is negligible but you gain all the 3rd classes abilities. The classic would be a cleric/magic-user/thief, so you get double the spells of a mage, and better THAC0 and hps than a single-classed thief with the same xps.

  • Attacks of opportunity and weapon reach

    When I first returned to D&D through the 3.5 edition rules, I was quite impressed by the idea of attacks of opportunity, though as a game mechanic they add a lot of work and could perhaps be simplified without difficulty. I particularly liked their use to discourage spell-casting and missile weapon use in melee combat, encouraging the eminently sensible tactic of keeping archers and wizards behind a wall of warriors, and reducing the use of healing magic in the thick of battle. I think they can be used as well to address that old canard of D&D, the uselessness of pole-arms, quarterstaves and great axes. No-one in D&D would ever actually bother specialising in pole-arms as a weapon because they’re heavy, they do less damage than comparable two handed weapons, and yet you still have to forego the use of a shield. Even worse is the quarterstaff, which is weak and requires you forego the shield bonus. Sure, you can set a pole-arm against a charge, but how often do you have to do that?

    Over at Middenmurk I found a suggestion for improving the pole-arm based on initiative order, which is nice but I don’t think is sufficient to overcome their deficiencies. This post reminded me of an idea I have toyed with for a while, which can be implemented in pretty much any system (I think), and uses attacks of opportunity to make pole-arms and spears a fearsome weapon, to improve the value of daggers for dexterous fighters, and to make the quarterstaff a useful weapon, particularly for mages. Here is how it works:

    • In any combat where the combatants start at greater than melee range, L-sized puncturing weapons (i.e. pole-arms and spears but not two-handed swords or battle-axes) win initiative, so always strike first, against any other weapon class
    • Any M or S-sized weapon user fighting against an L-sized weapon of any sort[1] incurs an attack of opportunity when they attempt to strike
    • In order to prevent this attack of opportunity from occurring, the user of the smaller weapon has to exchange their attack for a combat manoeuvre roll, which if successful indicates they have closed range sufficiently to be able to attack subsequently without incurring the attack of opportunity. Failure, of course, means that they incur the attack of opportunity as well as losing their own strike
    • Once the user has closed successfully in this way, the pole-arm wielder can reverse the procedure, dropping their own strike and making a combat manoeuvre roll to widen the range again without incurring an attack of opportunity
    • If a person using an S-sized weapon closes successfully against a user of an L-sized weapon using this method, they’re considered to be inside the range of the big weapon, and then the big weapon user incurs an attack of opportunity every round that they attempt to strike the lighter fighter, until they widen the range again[2]
    • A quarterstaff can be used as a pole-arm at range (the Chinese kung-fu-y style of staff fighting) but can also be treated as an M-sized weapon (the Robin-Hood style of fighting) so quarterstaff users get the benefit of the pole-arm without its deficiencies against light weapons
    • Users of S-sized weapons do not gain the attack of opportunity advantage when fighting against Great Axes, but do suffer the attack of opportunity disadvantage when fighting at range against Great Axes
    • All combatants have to make their decision about what they’ll do at the beginning of the round, before initiative is rolled for

    The last rule is explicitly to benefit wizards. If you’re a fighter up against a wizard with a staff, you have a choice – you can opt to drop your attack and close range to dispense with subsequent attacks of opportunity from the wizard, but this means that the wizard gets to cast a spell without incurring an attack of opportunity from the fighter; but if you worry about this possibility and choose instead to strike from range, the wizard will get an attack of opportunity. Not particularly threatening, unless the staff has a paralysis effect built in…

    Also, this rule is intended to explicitly encourage the use of tumbling and daggers by rangers and thieves, and to make this dexterous style of fighting more interesting. It also means that a thief with a weak weapon can still be dangerous if they have a good tumble skill, since they can close on a fighter with a big weapon and gain attacks of opportunity until the fighter is out of range again. Ultimately they’ll still lose the fight but by pressing the fighter in this way they stay alive longer, enabling another party member to use a wider array of spells and/or missile weapons. You could even allow for the use of feats to extend the sneak attack to this situation, making the in-close thief a really nasty combatant[3].

    Also, I would rule that widening the range from a light-weapon fighter involves moving backwards, and can’t be done if there is no backward distance to move. So if fighter engages thief, thief closes in, fighter widens range but backs up to a wall, and then thief closes in again, it’s slice-and-dice time for the fighter[4].

    Just as Middenmurk draws on his experience of mediaeval reenactment fighting to construct the initiative rule he proposes, I am drawing here on my experience of knife-fighting and staff martial arts. Once a knife-fighter is inside a longer weapon’s range, the longer weapon becomes a significant hindrance to the user; but closing on a staff with a shorter weapon is all but impossible unless you are very agile.

    Attacks of opportunity don’t have to be a significant hindrance to game flow either if, instead of making them an extra roll, you represent them as a bonus on a single combat roll. So everyone declares their actions at the beginning of the round, and anyone who gained an attack of opportunity from someone else gets a +2 on their roll against that person (or grants a +2 on the roll of anyone who is attacking that person). I don’t think this rule is necessary but it can help to reduce the number of rolls in combat, always a good thing. Also, feats can be expended to increase the bonus, which would again benefit thieves and monks.

    —

    fn1: you could restrict this to “pole-arms”

    fn2: you could extend this to S-sized versus M-sized weapons

    fn3: this could be a useful way of making the monk’s unarmed combat nasty

    fn4: or, for an unarmed person against this fighter, the unarmed person has grabbed the fighter’s head and is bashing it against the wall

  • Fantasy role-playing, the ultimate expression of post-modernism

    I’m fairly confident that Noisms, Sir Grognard, and in fact any the people on my blogroll except (maybe) Wax Banks would be quick to describe themselves as “not really much of a post-modernist,” and probably even be quite quick to tell me exactly what they think of the idea. But if we go and check, for example, the website of any of the role-playing bloggers regularly visited, we will soon find a pastiche of interests. For example, today on Grognardia we can see his current reading is Lord Darcy, classic pulp, but if we go back in time a bit we’ll find he was reading Conan, or Lord of the Rings, and we’ll find posts about Gamma World (which is obviously drawn from 50s popular fear of nuclear holocaust, and the lurid visions of its aftermath which were common in the media then). Over at Noisms’ place we find a heady mix of Tibetan mythology, classic sword and sorcery, some Cthulhu (a common theme across blogs), and an American (?) cartoon with Japanese animation, plus a graph and a bit of piracy.There’s some film noir in there too during his Warhammer period.

    All of this, of course, against a regular backdrop of D&D, whose Appendices contain a highly eclectic reading list and which was itself influenced by such diverse arcana as Lord of the Rings, Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, ’30s pulp fiction, military history, and Jack Vance’s 60s science-fantasy. It’s a pastiche. And what is the classic theory of the pastiche? Post-modernism.

    D&D is really just a mechanism for drawing together a whole bunch of quite disparate genres, themes, broad ideals and even creative media. We have miniatures at Grognardia, mapping at Eiglophian press, illustration at Back Screen Pass, possibly some music to set the scene, and of course everywhere we have that medium unique to role-playing – dice!! About the only new thing about it is the rules by which the merging is done – rules which bind the genres and the creative media altogether through the interaction of a group of people, but the first rule of which is that the rules themselves are mutable and open to challenge. It’s just a mechanism for reinterpreting diverse texts; and a mechanism, at that, which is subject to dispute even as the process is underway.

    Which makes it post-modernism in a nutshell. It’s a critical theory! A synthesis!

    Consider even the creative process by which all of this pastiche is synthesized. A group of players get together at a table. One might be completely naive to the whole process, one is probably a die-hard Lord of the Rings and pulp fantasy fan, one might have a strong interest in westerns and 50s memorabilia, another might be actually quite disinterested in fantasy and more of a sci-fi guy, and another might be heavily into anime and mecha. Another person creates a world, usually by pasting together a bunch of ideas they stole from other genres, and everyone creates a story collaboratively, using a set of rules which they argue about and change where necessary (the medium is itself contested during the creative process!) Also, the whole thing often happens in the presence of at least 2 mind-altering substances (caffeine and alcohol). At the end of the night, the DM writes it all up and chucks it on the internet, where it becomes… a text!

    And, to chuck a final beautiful post-modern irony onto the whole thing, it’s safe to say that aside from a certain Dr. P[1],  and a certain Barbarian S[2], I’ve almost never had players who had any interest in post-modernism and who, if offered an opportunity to comment on this much-reviled form of modern art theory, will give a knee-jerk dismissive response, based on some kind of latent fear of “relativism”. They’re more likely to lay claim to an aesthetic, moral and cultural background in modernism, romanticism or neo-classicism than they are any kind of more recent wank like post-modernism. Yet there they are, clustered around a table, producing the perfect post-modern text, leaving Baudrillard and his shabby theories in the dust as they form from the raw material of multiple disparate texts and creative media the material of a perfect post-modern pastiche. This perfect post-modern art form is created by people who reject the underlying cultural theory almost in its entirety, and lay claim (mostly) to the very ethos it is supposed to replace!

    We are all, as the Germans might say, post-modernists now…

    —

    fn1: whose critical interpretations of Bladerunner, by the way, were fantastic!

    fn2: who had 2 mothers, not by a previous marriage scenario, and was studying genocide studies

  • The use of Tolkien to defend fascism

    Today I discovered an interesting interview with one Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, which was conducted in 2003 by the German Tolkien fanclub (at least I assume that’s what it is). At that time it would appear he had been working on a research theme similar to that which I’ve gathered here and here, about whether Tolkien is racist, racialist, or vulnerable to interpretation as such. The interview contains support for the claims I’ve made before about how Tolkien can be read, and contains some interesting information I hadn’t previously found about the way in which Tolkien is used by the far right in Europe[1]. The interview came out in 2003 and is, I think, a bit unfair on Peter Jackson – I think Shapiro has a very uncharitable reading of the poster advertising The Two Towers.  I’m no film critic so I can’t say anything about the claim that

    In visual terms, there are also uncanny references to both Leni Riefenstahl and DW Griffiths’s Birth of a Nation, the film that celebrated the Ku Klux Klan.

    If so, that’s a bit disappointing, but it’s also maybe not unexpected – Leni Riefenstahl is supposed to have done revolutionary stuff, isn’t she?

    Shapiro also suggests that Jackson’s film could have been tolerably done in a more multi-racial fashion, and says

    For Jackson’s part, he gives viewers too little credit, since many contemporary fans in the “fantasy and role-playing community” of games like Dungeons and Dragons and Everquest often encourage players to avoid racial stereotypes in their games, Jackson makes no concession to ethnic heterogeneity and often seems not to have considered if a non-white viewer would feel that her or his dignity had been degraded by the film’s representations.

    I don’t know if I agree with this – D&D et al are games which, while they superficially “avoid racial stereotypes,” tend to also err strongly on the side of making the protagonist white[2]. Also, these games strongly encourage racialism, and I’m not sure that racialism is compatible with “avoid racial stereotypes.”

    Shapiro also states that he is aware of someone else (internet link now dead) who claims to have proof that Tolkien subscribed for 20 years to an extremely right-wing, racist magazine called the League for Empire Loyalists. I don’t think this claim can be tested from the comfort of my armchair, so I’d like to add that I know someone whose dog has eaten someone’s homework, and on that homework it was clearly written that Tolkien was a member of NAMBLA.

    There is s sizable section of this interview which backs up my earlier evidence about how Tolkien is used by the far right. For example, the Heathen Front (some kind of long-since collapsed British organisation of right wing “volkists”) admired him as “racialist”, and he was also extremely popular on the far right in Italy. One far right movement even ran paramilitary youth groups called “camp Hobbits”, and infiltrated the Italian Tolkien Society in the 80s. The modern Italian far right developed from a rump movement that survived Mussolini, but it developed along very different lines – it eschewed the modernist futurism of pre-war fascism and instead developed a philosophy based on sacred fascism, in which a traditional and a modern world view are in constant conflict, with the traditional worldview slowly decaying but then reasserting itself. This decay is associated with a decline due to racial mixing and loss of religious strength. This ideology of the “sacred Right” is consistent with the themes in Tolkien’s work, and is a very common view across much modern extreme right thought – David Duke espouses it, it’s crawled all across the pages of Stormfront and the other far right websites[4], and the people who are closest associated with it also seem very likely to be Tolkien admirers. The links between the spiritual fathers of modern Italian fascism and Tolkien are well described in this essay, which also points out that modern fascism is now so diverse that it is difficult to ascribe it a single guiding philosophy or even to define it clearly as “fascism” anymore.

    I think that had Tolkien’s work been popular in the ’30s it would probably not have been popular with the Italian fascists, who were much more into futurism and total war than they were into romantic recreation of bucolic rural utopias. It might have influenced those who wanted religious re-development under the regimes, but these people were never popular with their leaders[5].  Had it been associated with Fascism then I doubt it would be very popular now, either, so it’s all round good luck for us that he published just a tad late. But I think in the post-war age there are clear parallels between the mythology and cultural history of the Lord of the Rings and the tale of cultural decline and racial mixing which the modern far Right want to tell. It’s not a coincidence, because like his fellow fantasy authors (and pretty much all of the white world) in the pre-war era, Tolkien believed in the Aryan mythology, the now-discredited model of Aryan archaeology, eugenics and the dangers of racial mixing; and he was, apparently, on the right-wing of British literary activity. Because he wrote such a detailed, lyrical and evocative world based around these ideals, he has become the literary standard for those elements of the modern far right who subscribe to the same mythology. I think he would probably see a lot of things in the modern far Right of which he would approve, but I think he would also see a lot (particularly in Berlusconi’s Italy) that horrifies him, and I think it highly unlikely that he would ever have supported the goals or politics of any fascist organisations in the 20th or 21st centuries. But his writing supports their ideals and he has been used shamelessly to reinvigorate their cultural background in the last 20 years[6]. Given the influence of Tolkien on role-playing and the fantasy world today, I think it’s fair to say that role-playing has a cultural heritage in these fascist ideals, and the closer one hews to the work of the pre-war canon that was steeped in them, the closer this heritage is to one’s game.

    I don’t wish to draw too many conclusions about what this says about people like me who enjoy playing in these worlds. Some choices:

    1. It’s actually really easy to sterilise artistic work of nasty meaning if you like the work itself
    2. Good literary work can transcend even very powerful politically objectionable ideals (Nabokov, anyone?)
    3. The reader’s intentions and goals are much more important in the interpretation of the work than even the most blatant political intent on the part of the author[7]
    4. I’m an outrageous fascist who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes

    I do think, though, that there must be some extent to which this racialisation in standard fantasy and role-playing has to make it seem exclusionary to non-white readers. Even if 1) were true, some proportion of non-white readers who would otherwise enjoy the work must be put off by their obvious placement on the wrong side of the story in the pre-war canon (and by extension, much of the post-war canon). I wonder how many role-players in the creation of their own worlds unconsciously move away from the outright racialism in the early work, or subvert it in some way. I know I have done by, for example, making Orcs noble (I did this long before I knew about this critique of Tolkien) or by making Elves fascist (in my 4th Age Middle Earth Campaign)[8]. But it’s really hard to preserve D&D in any original sense without keeping the racialism, and I think this must be a turn-off for some people, and I would guess particularly for non-white readers who are perhaps more aware of the consequences of racialism than a lot of white readers are.

    —

    fn1: For those who don’t want to wade through all the other crap I’ve written on this, I should point out that although I think the association of LoTR with the far right is evidence that it is easy to read as racist, I don’t take it as evidence that Tolkien was racist and I don’t care if he was[3]

    fn2: There is a whole literature and 15 years of internet debate over whether making your protagonists white is a sign that you, your story, your game, or your movie, is racist. I think that it’s better if, where race is an explicit motif, the races in question are inclusive. I don’t think in early D&D they are. I don’t take this to mean Gygax (or anyone else) was racist

    fn3: In the sense that, I think it’s bad to be racist, and I think it’s bad if a book sets out to tell a racist story, but it doesn’t change my appreciation of all the other appreciable elements of the book. And I think it’s interesting to investigate the politics of a book and of its writer, but that doesn’t mean I think every book should be PC, etc. blah blah, insert other ritualistic disclaimers about not being a killjoy here.

    fn4: As ever, I’m not going to link to these sites, because they’re evil and I don’t want them coming here!

    fn5: Am I the only person who thinks it highly suspicious that “hyperborea” and “hyborea” sound very, very similar? I might have to investigate Howard, who wrote “The ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth.”

    fn6: It’s worth bearing in mind that after a movement engages in the level of monumental fail that the fascist movement fell to, they need some serious help reinvigorating, and a completely new ideological direction. It’s a miracle really that they’ve managed to survive in any way, shape or form and I’m sure any kind of long-term survival depends on their finding a new ideological basis.

    fn7: Again, I’m not saying here that fascism was Tolkien’s intent. It’s worth noting that Orwell is consistently misused too, and loved by people on the right, even though he’s obviously a ferociously left-wing writer

    fn8: This is really piss-poor subversion, because it doesn’t change the inherent racial essentialism of the framework, just reverses who gets what trait. Is this better? I would argue not… it’s just fun. I think Stephen Donaldson may be a good example of a popular canonical fantasy writer who screwed with the racial essentialism in the most obvious way – by writing a recognisable fantasy world mostly devoid of racial structures.

  • Cyberpunk, post-modernism and orientalism 2: Race in Cyberpunk

    So I’m still struggling through the introduction of the PhD thesis I promised to read: understandable since the introduction is still going at page 50. In between my last post and this one I’ve had to wade through some sleep-inducing academic wank, but now I’ve got to the outline in the introduction of the importance of race, and its fluidity in cyberpunk.

    The first thing to note, mentioned quite a bit in this article, is that Gibson had never been to Japan when he wrote Neuromancer, which was written in 1982. So here we have a North American in 1982 writing a book redolent with themes from a country he has never visited, during an era when North America was afire with fear of what the Japanese were going to do in America (this was the bubble era and Japan had just, apparently, become the largest creditor nation in the world – they were supposedly buying up American businesses and land). This, I think it’s easy to see, is a situation ripe with potential for cultural stereotypes to eclipse nuanced thinking.

    It’s worth noting before we go on – and for the rest of any posts I get around to writing about this – that the author of this thesis I’m studying makes it clear at this point that his goal is not  “reading cultural representation for their positive or negative (authentic or inauthentic) portrayals”, but that he is interested in examining the ways that these representations “function to reiterate, challenge, transform and/or create cultural norms”. His interest is the relationship between existing stereotypes of Japan, the way the cyberpunk texts interpret them, and how these interpretation serve to create new images (at least, that’s what I assume this means). I know a lot of (both of) my readers are eager to find examples of transparent whining leftism, so please relax – this chap is trying to do something a little more interesting than that.

    So what does the introduction tell us about how race will be handled in the thesis? For a start, in the 4 pages covering “The Fluidity of Race” we don’t see the word “multiculturalism” once, even though Gibson himself states that “I’ve always lived in Vancouver … a Pacific Rim city with a lot of interaction with Japan.” Vancouver, the world’s most multicultural city, in a country with a policy of multiculturalism… it seems that this might have influenced Gibson’s views on race and his power to interpret race, or to imagine multi-racial societies. Also, isn’t Vancouver in … Canada? But the classic interpretation of cyberpunk is as an American urban myth. So for example we find this description of the relationship between America and Japan at the time:

    the now obligatory Japanese reference also marks the obsession with the great Other, who is perhaps our own future rather than our past, the putative winner of the coming struggle – whom we therefore compulsively imitate, hoping that thereby the inner mind-set of the victorious other will be transformed to us along with the externals

    [this is actually a quote from Jameson, a key post-modernist writer influencing our author’s text]. But is this right to apply to Gibson? If he lived in Vancouver most of his life, is this relevant? Canada is a resource exporting country, and such countries are never threatened by manufacturing countries the way that another manufacturing country (e.g., America) might be – the manufacturing countries need us so long as we have stuff in the ground. The quote as written certainly sounds like something that could be said about Phillip K Dick, or about Allied war propaganda from world war 2, but is it applicable to the mindset of a man who has “always lived” in a multicultural city as relaxed and easy to live in as Vancouver, in a resource-exporting country? I think it might be a little overwrought. And Jameson seems to be saying this about Bladerunner as much as about Gibson’s work.

    This part of the introduction concludes with the statement that

    in an era of globalisation, Asian Americans are becoming ubiquitous in American popular culture both as producers and consumers. Globalisation … has been accompanied by intensified transnational cultural practices and cultural hybridities in societies around the world. Thus “race and its cultural meanings remain at the core of globalizing media flows and their local receptions”

    This leads to the discussion of the other big issue in cyberpunk, globalisation, but it doesn’t seem to me to put the race issue to bed. Is the representation of race in cyberpunk related to globalisation or to the triumph of multiculturalism as a cultural model, if not for everyone in the west, at least for young people from a certain cultural elite? And what does that tell us about the kinds of stereotypes that will enter the work of a man who had never visited Japan when he wrote the book? Will they be stereotypes based on outdated cultural models of Japan, or will they be a combination of the various Oriental things he saw in multicultural Vancouver (including shops, Asian cinema, visits to chinatown, art exhibitions etc.) and the hugely influential Bladerunner? If so, the stereotypes Gibson is building are being built not only from a distant, imagined Orient, but from an Orient which has plonked itself on his doorstep, modified itself to suit a relaxed, multicultural, very Western city, and presented itself to him full of late 70s and early 80s vigour.

    If so, what we’re seeing here is the production of stereotypes in a very different way to that envisaged by Said in Orientalism. We’re also seeing, perhaps, the production of images of the Orient in a sub-cultural genre that may not actually be influenced very strongly by the insecurities and biasses of that great producer of modern popular culture, America. Perfect material for the development of a theory of post-modern Orientalism. But our author hasn’t mentioned multiculturalism or paid much attention to Gibson’s Canadian heritage – so is he going to miss this chance when he approaches the topic in more detail?

    Only time will tell…

  • Current reading: Tokyo Real

    Iconic enough, kids?

    This book, Tokyo Real by “Ryu” is something of a milestone for me! It’s the first Japanese book I have read completely, from beginning to end, in Japanese. This isn’t as much of an achievement as some might think, because it’s a “keitai shosetsu” (Mobile phone novel), I think, or at least it might as well be. Being a keitai shosetsu means that

    • it’s in large font, double-spaced lines, with lots of very short lines for dialogue
    • The kanji (japanese characters) are drawn from the limited set on a phone, and a lot of them I can read
    • It’s only 190 pages long, with a blank page at the start of each chapter
    • chapters are short

    so, you know, not really such a big deal. But it’s in Japanese! Since it’s untranslated as far as I know, and a pretty crap book, I’m going to lay out the plot, because there’s not much else to the review really. This means there are spoilers below. If you really want to read a crappy Japanese mobile phone novel about sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, skip the next paragraph:

    Aya is a schoolgirl who takes lots of ecstasy and parties a lot with her friend Yuko. She is raped after a trance party by 3 guys in a van and goes into a bit of a downward spiral that is arrested by a friendly yakuza chap called Naoya who is very rich and likes her very much (presumably because she’s a schoolgirl?). They fall in love but she can only have sex on ecstasy and he won’t let her use ecstasy because drugs are bad oh no! This means they don’t get to have sex (stupid man!) so he goes and hangs out with his favourite hostess (this is really not a relevant point in the story, it fills 3 sentences at at the very end). Aya starts using ecstasy during the day because she’s sad, and then she realises that she can have sex on ecstasy with men other than her lover, so she goes to her drug dealer and spends a lot of time having lots of sex with him, on ecstsasy, and becomes a junkie, and loses weight, and Naoya notices but doesn’t want to admit that his girlfriend’s a junkie loser so he ignores it. Anyway, Aya’s dealer gives her K and she has an overdose and her friend Yuko stumbles on her being a freak ,so she calls Naoya, who comes over to the dealers house, and Aya, in the middle of her k-hole dream, stabs him to death by mistake while she thinks she’s a god. Then she goes to prison (this takes a page) and when she comes out Yuko is there for her, so she decides to try living again.

    That’s it. It’s a classic overwrought teenage-junkie story, but it has a sweet ending: Aya has been in prison till she is 22 years old, and this means she missed coming of age day and spent it instead in her cell thinking about her dead boyfriend. When she gets out, Yuko takes her to a hairdresser and then a photographers, and reveals that, because Aya was not there for her, Yuko too didn’t go to her coming of age day celebration – she wanted to wait. So on the last page they’re wearing their kimono and having their coming-of-age day photo taken, and Aya gets to say “thank you” just before the flash of the camera and that’s it.

    It’s a perfect movie script, and in fact it was turned into a movie. Happy days!

    So, my Japanese is definitely not good enough for me to comment on the writing style. I asked a friend, though, and she told me that the narrative style is very plain and direct, really just stating the facts without any poetic twists or style. However, the dialogue is written in a very naturalistic style, like young people speaking, which helps to give a certain atmosphere of trashiness to the novel. Unfortunately, this means that for me it’s the equivalent of a Japanese student of English, having done one 6 month intensive course and a bit of self-study, trying to read the dialogue from Trainspotting. Bad plan. Fortunately by the miracle of Japanese characters (kanji) I could get the general gist of the dialogue without having to understand the nuance of teenage slang. Whew!

    My main complaint about the novel is that Aya’s slide into disgrace doesn’t seem to be related to her rape at all, which means that the rape scene could be construed as slightly gratuitous. Once she reveals to Naoya that it happened, and he says “you’re not dirty”, that’s it! It just kind of slides out of her pscyhe. But, even though it’s emotionally overwrought and sentimental, I really liked the ending. The final meeting between Aya and Yuko was quite moving. Maybe if I could actually read Japanese like a native it would have come off as trite and contrived (scratch that maybe). Incidentally, I worry about this with my Japanese in general – because my education is always going to be sub-standard compared to even a middle-school graduate, I’m going to be very vulnerable to sentimentalism, cheap imagery, etc. I don’t think this is true in English, even though I like Last of the Mohicans.

    My next attempt at Japanese reading will be the Japanese Pathfinder. I don’t want to tell you why because it’ll jinx me. This is going to be a lot easier to read than Tokyo Real because:

    • I don’t need to care about nuance
    • I already know what it will say
    • The language is like a formal document, say, a stats text, and I’ve studied that language before (plus it’s simple)
    • I can use rikaichan to read kanji I don’t know as I go (My God, rikaichan is the most miraculous software ever invented).

    Anyway, if you’re as crap at Japanese as me, I recommend this book. If you can actually read Japanese well, I strongly suggest reading something good.