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…

  • 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.

  • Weapons and equipment of the Victorian Era: The Spindrift Clipper

    No keel-hauling for these sea dogs...The only significant enhancement on the tall ship in 200 years, the Spindrift Clipper represents a considerable performance improvement over standard seaborne vessels for a limited additional cost. Behaving in every way like a normal vessel, the Spindrift Clipper has had low-power levitation magic added to its hull so that it can become airborne when needed. This has considerable advantages, enabling the ship to move much faster in fine weather and to avoid the risk of running aground or being damaged by reefs or wrecks. It also enables the ship to avoid being swamped in storms, though in instances it may be driven significantly off course. Many advanced Spindrift Clippers come with a special “storm anchor”, an emergency flight device which forces the ship to ride against strong winds, keeping it from being blown off course. Most Clipper pilots prefer to use their levitation to their advantage, rising from the water and riding ahead of stormclouds in the hope of regaining their course when the clouds have gone – better to survive at sea than to risk all for a few days lost journeying, after all. The Spindrift Clipper has made long-distance trading and exploration much easier and cheaper due to faster trips with lower risks of shipwreck or mutiny. Spindrift Clippers do not fly high, however, as their levitation magic is always weak and the ship is not designed to survive the stresses of such heights.

    The characters themselves stole a small spindrift clipper, the Unfortunate Lapse of Discipline, from the Iron House, and renamed it the Inappropriate Response. It took them to Greenland and Ireland and back to America during the final stages of adventuring to date, and although it did not protect them from some of the less pleasant monsters of the Atlantic, it at least gave them some advantage in battle against the forces laying siege to New York. The Inappropriate Response relies for its levitation magic on a weak antipathic magic, cheap to install but requiring large bodies of water to move over. Later models of the Spindrift Clipper, particularly those designed for river travel, would have true levitation magic built in, so that they could act essentially as hovercraft or helicopters. These innovations would be another 100 years in development, however.

  • A note on opinions of story-based gaming

    I posted this initially as a comment over at Zak’s blog, but thought I’d put it here too.

    There is a common view, I think, amongst role-players of all stripes, that later and newer editions of role-playing games encourage more “story-based” gaming than older ones, or that people who prefer to play later edition games are more likely to be “story-based” gamers. I don’t think that this is a result of system changes encouraging the development of story-based gaming, but a lot of people believe it is due to a kind of gamers’ version of the anthropic principle. When the game started it drew from wargaming, and story wasn’t a big part of it. As it developed over the following 10 years, particularly with the magazine-based theorising (in Dungeon, etc.) story-based gaming became more common. At the same time the systems developed, new ones were released, and obviously products were also released to cater to the wider range of gaming styles available. I think that this diversification, and particularly the interest in story-based gaming and character development, came with the increased maturity of the systems, and the development of the teenage audience into young adults looking for more meaningful social interactions than could be provided by gaming in which each player had 5 or 6 characters that died rapidly (again, I recommend this book as an insight into how the early games were played).

    So, when the OSR decided to turn their backs on the later editions, they associated them with this “story” problem. But really the two developed side-by-side. I was doing story-based games with AD&D 1st edition in the 80s, and my reasons for switching to Rolemaster had nothing to do with story – neither did my reasons for switching back to D&D3.5 in the early noughties. I’m pretty confident I’m not unusual in this development process, I’m pretty confident as well that most people who switched away from AD&D 2nd edition did so because it was pretty complex, and more interesting (but often less playable) systems were coming out at that time. We grew up with the game and we diversified with the game.

    Similarly this idea that OD&D is associated with regular PC death is also representative of the style of play at the time, not the system. Back when it was a wargaming spinoff, death was all the rage (e.g. the 5 or 6 PCs at a time phenomenon). As the gameplay styles diversified, DMs learnt to balance adventures to match the frequency of death they thought players would bear. It’s perfectly easy to play a D&D3.5 adventure and kill your PCs by the minute. But again, when the OSR decided to return to their 80s roots, they also returned (partially) to that wargaming style, and they associate (probably in some cases blame) the other styles with later game editions – not with, as is probably more likely, the maturation and diversification of a gaming crowd that was largely teenage when the hobby first developed.

    Also I think when modern DMs dip into OD&D gaming, they often do so to experience that wargaming style of play, so when people sample OD&D, they often sample it with a particular historically fixed style of play. This doesn’t mean OD&D has to be played that way, or has to be representative of that punishing style of gaming. Compared to pure Rolemaster, OD&D is quite soft, for example. It is exactly the uncompromising harshness of RM which taught me to fudge dice rolls, something the OD&D crowd are very down on. Playing OD&D or AD&D, you can afford to be down on DM fudging (although the AD&D rulebooks are very supportive of this). Playing Rolemaster, not so much…

    Anyway the point is that these two phenomena – story based play and the TPK – are not system-specific so much as era-specific. But, because the systems developed with the eras, they two are easily confused.

  • Grindin’ for Gygax

    I am a regular reader of and occasional commenter at the left-wing political/academic blog Crooked Timber, though I don’t usually link my blog to them (the American political blogsophere is a bit scary). Recently, however, I discovered this post on the new Dante’s Inferno computer game, where anonymous commenter noen makes this great claim:

    The repetition [in porn and in WoW][1], the dross, is important. It is through the repetition that one realizes the value of the object of one’s desire by failing to achieve it. There is a great deal of the obsessional repetition of “dross” in religious observance also. That’s the whole point.

    The goal of religion, porn and gaming is the grinding. It is the core that is the real distraction.

    This is surely meant to be an amusing aside, right? But it got me thinking about sandbox gaming, story-gaming, and the oft-repeated claims that D&D 4e has been designed to be like an MMO. Particularly, I notice in the role-playing blogosphere a really serious dislike of story-based gaming. Old-school gamers (who seem to dominate the blogosphere outside of 4e bloggers) are really anti-story. They seem to have a strong preference for individual modules, and for sandbox gaming without a plot. Stand alone modules are often (especially in the early days which the grognards valorize) just a vague story and plot-hook to get the PCs on a treasure hunt – i.e. a kind of pen-and-paper based version of World of Warcraft’s grinding. Story is often associated with the “faggy” elements of the newer games like the “storyteller” systems by White Wolf, not with the “pure” older systems (and yes, I have heard them contrasted in this way). So what’s going on here?

    Fragmentary social relations and the Grind

    I don’t think this type of play is that popular with role-players. I have played and DMd in earnest since 1986, and I can safely say that I have played in very few sandbox games. The vast majority of gaming I have run or played in has been story-based. Not necessarily of the “kill the bad guy and save the world” kind – indeed some was quite nihilistic – but always with a plot. People like story, and our models for role-playing are mainly novels, which are pretty heavy on the story. In later years I have often played with friends who aren’t hardcore players, and I’ve noticed that the further I drift from the hardcore gaming community the less they care about randomness, system, and sandboxing, and the more they want story, description, description and story.

    But my experience was in Australia, where role-playing is not that popular or common and one often has to take what one can get, player-wise and system wise. My best players have (with a few shining exceptions) been almost invariably those who were completely ignorant of system, or the RPG scene. Now, something these people have in common is that they aren’t dysfunctional nerds, and they value coherent, wholesome social interactions.

    Then I moved to England, and had within 1 year three really bad role-playing experiences – shitty DMing and shitty playing. Two of these experiences occurred in a story-free, sandbox type gaming environment being run by hardcore old-schoolers (one shitty player was just a classic example of a violent British idiot, so doesn’t really fit due to culturally-specific retardation). It occurs to me that this style of play is very compatible with the fragmentary, meaningless style of interaction which characterizes the social relations of early teen boys – the exact environment in which a lot of players of my age grew up, and which is very nicely described in this book. These are also the style of fragmentary social relations which one sees in WoW a lot – join a group for 2 hours, fuck around, disappear. I think there’s a relationship between these things, and the grognard school of role-playing thought, which is all about trying to hang on to your old school roots, is also all about hanging onto a social milieu which we remember from our early teens, when this sort of fragmentary interaction made sense to us. I think the grognards are valorizing a style of play which is at best out of whack with what most people I have ever played or DMd with want to do, and which is tied to a socially disruptive and transient stage of human development which, let’s face it, a lot of nerd boys have never grown out of[2]. Those fat bearded know-it-alls at the pub who have an opinion on everything (and God, did I meet a lot of these pricks in the role-playing clubs in London) love this kind of teenage boy interaction – they’re still doing it at 40. Those of us who have moved on from that have also, I suspect, moved on from the stand-alone module plot-hook-for-a-dungeon-crawl random-monster style of play, to something a bit more socially and intellectually fulfilling. Grognardia essentially admitted this today with his little rant against change.

    Story-free gaming as religious observance

    The other noticeable trait of these grognard blogs, of course, is their worship of gary gygax. According to a commenter in the “I Hate Change” thread of grognardia, “D&D divorced itself from Appendix N entirely” when in 4e “Ioun has become the goddess of magic”. You certainly hate change if this is a problem for you. You also have elevated a single edition of a single game to the status of a bible, complete with appendices. This is religion at its heart, and what do all religions have in common? Hatred of change, unwillingness to tolerate dissent, they’re a haven for people who seek shelter from the consequences of their own social problems, they are full of bullies and disciplinarians, and they tolerate no narrative that conflicts with their own. This is why they suit the “grind” noen refers to in the comments at CT; and why their adherents are so fond of story-free games and suspicious of any later innovations which dilute a game-style that was developed for a feckless audience of socially isolated and emotionally stunted early-teenage boys.

    4th edition gamers and the story

    A common complaint I’ve read about 4e is that it has reduced the rules to a style of computer game, like WoW, with tanks, DPS characters, etc, and this represents the lack of commitment to real gaming of modern youth, their attention spans are short, blah blah blah. The irony for me is that the blogs which are most resistant to story-free play are the ones by 4e players. In the socially isolating and confrontational context of the British pub gaming scene, the most fun I had in a game I played in was a 4e game. Why? Because the person who chose to DM it had been lured away from previous editions by the promise of simplicity and freedom for the GM, and the character traits which drew him to 4e make a good DM.  It’s the focus on the story, the primacy of social interaction and the shared nature of the game which makes 4e alluring to these people. Ironically, this is what the grognards claim that OD&D encourages, even while they are eschewing the story and engaging in a complex grind, similar in fashion to the MMO they hate 4e for having “become”.

    I don’t intend to turn my gaming into a repetitive litany to Gary Gygax. Nor do I intend to reduce my DMing to a kind of sophisticated dice-rolling facilitator, or a disciplinarian high-priest of the Old School[3]. I will continue to DM for what my players want – an interesting story, in cool places, with high risks and high rewards, played in a way that is mutually satisfying for everyone involved, and not self-consciously situating itself at the heart of a geekish metaculture no-one outside of a few beardy opinionated fat guys gives two hoots about.

    —

    fn1: I think this is why you also see, in the threads of those blogs, a lot of comments about how players need to be “taught to be careful”, “disciplined”, “warned”, etc. For christ sakes, this is a game, something we do for enjoyment. This 80s British public-school model of “play” in which the bigger, stronger kids keep the smaller ones in line is not applicable anywhere in my life, and it makes me feel dirty when I see it being still enacted in my hobby.

    fn2: I am a strong proponent of the claim that porn has important validity as a measure of social interaction and political currents. Porn has changed a lot over the years, and its current gonzo incarnation in the west is as much a product of industrial decisions and consumer powerlessness as is the current plot-free dross that we’re seeing in the computer game world. I inserted (pardon the pun) porn into this comment thread for that reason…

    fn3: not that I’m suggesting anyone wants me to or is trying to make me do so. This is rhetoric by way of conclusion, ok?

  • On the mischaracterisation of role-players as escapist loonies

    Over at Terra Nova there is news of the release of a study conducted with the help of Sony, which is essentially a large survey of MMO users’ role-playing style, their attitude towards the game, mental health and degree of social exclusion. It’s an interesting attempt to characterise the qualities of MMO players by their degree of interest in role-playing and their sociodemographic and personal profile, and the first study of its kind to use data from the underlying game database. I have some problems with the statistics (outlined after my rant, below) which maybe will be clarified when the final version of the paper is released, but I have bigger problems with the interpretation of the results, and the view that the researchers at Terra Nova are taking of role-players as compared to the “non” role players in the survey.

    Specifically, in the summary of the paper, the first author Dmitri Williams states that

    Role players come much more often from offline marginalized groups, suggesting that some may engage in the practice to find acceptance or a safe outlet for their identity.

    Role players engage in the practice for a number of reasons, but the standout one tended to be for creativity. Escapism was present, but was rarely the main reason.

    which suggests a reasonably balanced view of gamers’ reasons for playing in the second paragraph (escapism is rarely the main reason) but a very blunt and anachronistic explanation in the first paragraph. It seems to assume that there is a higher level of escapism in these marginalised groups, which is supported only by a tautological hypothesis. The authors argue that marginalized groups would be more likely to role-play than the non-marginalised, because role-playing is a form of escapism, or a safe outlet for their identity. Having found this statistical difference, they conclude that escapism must be the reason for this higher representation. But the original hypothesis is untested. I see no realistic or reasonable link between marginalization and greater role-playing. It’s not like you get to be gay in an MMO, or your blackness becomes more acceptable, or your non-christian religion. You get to be an elf, or a magician. That there should be a relationship between taking another role in a computer world and being dissatisfied with your role in the real world is a highly dubious claim. The truth of this claim needs to be established before the next postulate can be finalised.

    However, the claims get a little more disturbing in a subsequent piece on RMT (Real Money Transactions) by a non-author of the paper, Castronova, who states that this paper

    shows pretty clearly that players who desire strong refuge from reality, the sincere role-players, are a distinct minority. My arguments were delivered with a background assumption that very large numbers of people were scrambling over themselves to get out of the real world. Not so. That doesn’t make the arguments wrong, it just indicates that any plea for the right to live in a deep fantasy is less socially resonant than I thought… I’m an advocate for a minority, a somewhat disturbed one at that according to Williams, Kennedy, and Moore.

    So Castronova’s assumption is that role-playing is about escapism, and plain and simple – people want to “get out of the real world”. Note in this paragraph Castronova doesn’t change his view that role-playing is about escapism, he just discovers that most people in MMOs don’t role-play much and therefore aren’t doing it for escapism. He goes on to use the loaded language of the claim that they are a “disturbed [minority] at that.” Judging the loonies is always a good look in academia, I find.

    My problem with this is that, as far as I can tell, all media are a form of escapism. You can’t run around claiming that only 5% of people who watch movies do it for escapism – they all do! So what’s different about MMOs? Why should it only be some select group of extreme role-players who are doing it for the escapism? Couldn’t it be that everyone is doing the game as a type of escapism, and role-players just have a different style? A style more suited to minorities, apparently, but so what? The assumption underlying the paper and Castronova’s further comments are that those people at the “low” end of the role-playing spectrum, grinding out the levels and the monsters, are not doing it for escapism. I’m sorry, but no matter what style of play you have, when you pay by the month to engage for hours in a computer game where you play an elf, orc or rogue, you’re in it for the escapism. The rest of it is just about style.

    So no, role-players are not a “disturbed” minority (at that!) who want to escape reality. They are a small subgroup of a large number of people who play a game as a form of escapism, and do it with a particular slightly pretentious style.

    —

    Problems with the statistics of the paper are:

    • they claim the survey is a “stratified random sample” taken on 4 strata (4 different servers) but there is no evidence in the analysis that the stratified random sample has been taken into account
    • They don’t report a response rate for the overall survey or the servers. Maybe “marginalized” heavy role-players were more likely to answer the survey than the non-marginalized heavy role-players?
    • The differences in the groups are in some instances very small and only significant due to the large numbers in the survey, and Cohen’s D statistics don’t really give any additional weight to the results (there are significant problems with the use of these kinds of stats in my experience). Consider the loneliness scale: high role-players differ from the low ones by 2 points on a scale of 4 to 80 (about 2.5%), which is not a big difference no matter how significant it might be. It appears that there was only 1 woman in the High RP group (out of 300 or so people!) but the gender difference between this group and the medium RP Group was statistically significant! These are large-sample anomalies
    • There is no multiple regression analysis, so no adjustment for confounders. Given the supposedly significant demographic differences between groups, it might be wise to have done this. Particularly, adjustment for the 7 categories of education, and for social marginalisation, might have removed the mental health differences between groups
    • Mental health appears to be estimated by a form of self-report. This is always a dubious measure.

    So the stats could probably have been better explored…

  • Have beard will argue

    This post at Grognardia reminds me of why I am uncomfortable with the “old-school movement” and its pronouncements on all things nerdy. Putting aside the strange fascination with naff artwork and Dr. Who style special effects, the weird, almost religious obsession with pronouncements by one strange, pedantic, over-opinionated game writer (i.e. Gary Gygax) is almost religious in its intensity, and disturbingly forgiving of his mortal traits. The thread in question, where people variously try to understand a completely pointless and meaningless quote by a man famous for his indecipherable prose, makes my point. But Wax Banks makes it better, with a few digs at Gygax’s noble character on the way.