Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[kenada]

Imagine if you took any other area- music, film, literature, and you tried to apply a one-size fits all approach to it. That a director who made a comedy, or a thriller, or an art-house movie, or a big-budget super hero movie, or a documentary, or a short animated feature, all had to be subject to the exact same normative demands!

This is something I’ve found personally frustrating when trying to discuss my homebrew system on another site. People assume that the way they play D&D is how RPGs are played. There are things that are different, and I have certain things I want to do with my system that I don’t feel D&D accommodates very well. I am up front about that (and not in a way that impugns other games), but I’ve ended up spending pages of discussion trying to dispel normative demands.

Let’s be honest. D&D is good at what it does. If I were doing exactly the same thing, what would be the point? I’d save a lot of time and effort just playing D&D with my group instead of working on my system.

 

[Atomoctba]

As my posts are often compared to the forum equivalent of War and Peace, assumedly because I tend to elevate the nobility of the Russian peasant...

Nah, Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky was always more interesting than the other characters

 

[The Shadow]

Why is it that people, generally, prefer rolling damage and "to hit," but get squirrely when it comes to rolling hit points and ability scores? This is something so basic you think we'd have more on it, and yet we often engage in endless arguments about it without having a real foundation.

This question seems to be easy to answer? Your hit point total and ability scores are going to be with you for a while - low rolls at starting levels in particular can be crippling.

But rolling to-hit and damage matters only for that round - at most for the encounter. They're exciting. A high roll gives you an immediate benefit, but a low roll doesn't usually have lasting consequences.

Where the really interesting questions come in, I think, are at a level higher up: Why have hit points at all? Why not some other mechanic?

I used to hang out at the True20 forums quite a bit. For those who don't know, True20 uses a "Toughness save" in place of hit points, and a feat-based magic system. And it was astounding how often people would come in and say, "I want to play True20, but I want to put hp, damage rolls, and Vancian magic back in. How can I do that?"

At that point one wants to say, "There's this game called D&D, maybe you've heard of it?"

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I assume every RPG features the possibility of death during character creation and judge them harshly when a game system fails to deliver.

I'm talking about you, Tails of Equestria.

 

[Maxperson]

Here, unless I've missed it, there doesn't seem to be any basic work on how underlying mechanics feel. IIRC, I remember that surveys were done that showed (while designing versions of D&D) that people prefer to "hit," which is why we have moved toward the "bag of hit points model." But there isn't a lot of shared vocabulary and testing specific to RPGs that goes into basic issues like the use of randomness.

I'd like to take those people out back and show them "to hit." Bah! Slogging through tons of hit points is boooooring.

 

[Umbran]

Here's another point to toss in the ring:

Criticism, discussion, and argument are three different things, useful for different ends. When you muddle them up, of course the result isn't terribly useful.

In addition, there is a failing of understanding of analysis that is well-covered in the following quote:

There's a point in every grad student's life, at least in the liberal arts schools, where he or she looks at all those theories and asks themselves a vital question: Does this really mean anything or is it all bull$%#^? I even remember this exchange form one of my fellow students and our professor in class.

Student: So you're basically saying history is a bunch of bull$%#^?
Professor: Yes. But it's well constructed bull$%#^.

If one comes to criticism and analysis with the idea that one particular theory is supposed to yield Teh TRVTH, then you end up thinking that they are all BS. If you come to criticism and analysis with the idea that each theory may produce some understanding, then you see the theories as tools to help increase your understanding. And well-constructed tools are not BS.

In the hard sciences, we have tons of theories, models, and frameworks for analysis. But much of the point is specifically to seek the points where the theory or model fails to reflect reality, and when that happens we (hopefully, if we are dong our jobs right) change the theory or model.

 

[Lanefan]

I have seen numerous discussions about TTRPG (hereafter shortened to RPG for brevity) theory on EnWorld. And while I have found many of the conversations to be interesting, and filled with knowledgeable people (for are we all not knowledgeable gamers?), I have also found them almost completely unsatisfying. At best, they provide a few interesting observations. But at worst (and they always, always end up at the "at worst" state) conversations about RPG theory devolve ... or perhaps ... degenerate into attempts to elevate one playing style or variety of RPG over another.

My own take is that they usually (d)evolve into proof that some people* just can't help overthinking this stuff. They often quote or reference others who evern more greatly overthought it in the past.

As far as I can tell, the tighter the theory gets around a game's design the less useful the resulting game becomes for anything other than play within the specific niche and playstyle for which it was designed. Loosen the theory and (perhaps paradoxically) think about it a bit less and you'll end up with a better - or at least more widely useful - design.

What the OP goes on to say after the quoted bit above seems to be, unfortunately, an overthinking of the overthinking.

* - including me sometimes, I'm guilty of it too.

 

[innerdude]

Another problem --- the Venn diagram of humans who have played enough variety of RPGs, for a long enough time to meaningfully digest the scope of intent and realization of intent of each creative work; who also have enough background in doing academically rigorous and meaningful analysis of those games; who also hold enough standing in the gaming community to have their theories (once produced) actually take hold and become culturally meaningful; is a sliver so small as to basically be a null value.

I have a master's degree in English. My capstone bachelor's degree course was in modern theories of literature criticism. Believe me when I tell you I am well versed in all possible manner of "academic speak."

I read several of Snarf's proposed academic essays from his post last year decrying the state of RPG critical theory. And truthfully I came away thoroughly unimpressed with the "scholarship" I read. In very few ways did the texts consider or capture what I consider to be fairly fundamental "normative structures" around RPG play, almost as if they were purposefully distancing themselves from "those dirty, filthy, far beneath my regard 'populist' game theories held by the unwashed masses."

Any sort of RPG critical theory should start with Robin Laws, Vincent Baker, and yes, Ron Edwards, because at least they addressed RPG play from the ground level.

The academic essays from Snarf's list read like a bad mashup of new historicist lit theory and shallow board game theory, very much like I'd expect a "historian" to describe the hobby as if its entirety was encapsulated by D&D.

 

[aramis erak]

Trimming heavily.

1. The Lack of a Single Unified Language of Criticism Hampers Serious Analysis
The chaos and dislocation of the OGL fiasco were so great that people had stopped paying attention to celebrity dogs on twitter.

At some point, a consensus will evolve to discuss things. we've seen 3 fairly decent ones crop up for RPGing... but they're not talking to each other. (The Forgite dialect, the Trad/OSR dialect, and the WWG & friends dialect, each within their fandoms...)
And that's before we look at the transactional analysis and the games theory models in academia and how they apply...
Until there is a widely accepted source which has some level of central authority backing it, the odds of actually unifying on a single set of jargon are between super slim and none...
... as Humans have this nasty knack for new jargon.

When RPGs become widespread curricular topics, then we can expect a nearly unified jargon.

3. It's Not About the Money (It's About the Money)
Generally, though, we see the same thing playing out- RPG criticism and theory is almost never neutral, but is instead used to advance particular gaming systems; because it is almost always tied to advocacy, it often fails in its explanatory power.

Any reviewer of a product who thinks themselves without bias is insufficiently self-aware. This is as much true of theorizers as actual reviewers.

A truely good reviewer also analyzes their own bias as part of the review.

4. Normative (Ought) v. Descriptive (Is).
If you can't find the suspect part of the Wikipedia entry, the whole entry is suspect.

This is the most important issue, as far as I am concerned. If you're all into grammar and spelling, you probably instinctively know the difference between prescriptive and descriptive. This is a similar distinction; the notion that there is a distinction between theory describing things that "are" as opposed to using theory to bootstrap ideas into things as you want them to be ("ought"). This can be referred to as the distinction between normative (how you want it to be) and descriptive (how things are).

This one gives me a MAJOR quibble... Two, actually
1: rules can be proscriptive as well as prescriptive - if the group is one to follow them.
2: there's the huge issue that what is good for subpopulation A isn't good for subpopulation B

5. Conclusion
So is it all useless?

At the moment? Criticism isn't; trying to unify it is.

 

[Aldarc]

The problem with RPG discussion isn't RPG theory at all. It's about general devolution through social media into a positions over interest culture. Folks want to win, they want to be right, and they want these things above a good discussion. It is also accentuated by gamers propensity for being anal retentive and overly pedantic.

One problem is that gamers, in general, want their games to be perceived as "art," especially when they are perceived as not being "art," but then they get toxically hostile when people criticize said games as they would "art." There is a pervasive sense, IMHO, that gamers want to remove the games, media, and entertainment they consume from any and all criticism. People like what they like. But if they like it, it's good and it can't and/or shouldn't be criticized. That attitude may be the greatest hurdle, IMHO, when it comes to developing TTRPG theory: "Don't criticize games that I like!"

Video games are a slightly older art form than RPGs and have a fairly well-established set of terms and theory. We could do worse than adapting those to suit our purposes. But most RPG people seem eager to reject those terms and theory.

As you say, RPGs are not a monolith, more like 2d20 things stacked on top of each other in a trench coat pretending to be an adult. Likewise, gamers are not a monolith and want different things from the same games. But to make things even worse, the same game can be multiple things, pull from multiple art forms, and need multiple sets of (often contradictory) terms at the same time…to describe one thing.

RPGs are not a monolith. Neither are video games, which I suspect have a greater breadth of play than TTRPGs.* Theory is nevertheless being applied to video games. It's a common error in academia to treat one's own field as being "exceptionally unique" when compared to other fields.

* I mean no offense here to TTRPGs. There is simply far greater number and variety of video games out there than TTRPGs. Moreover, TTRPGs may have more shared commonalities with each other than video games do. TTRPGs are simply a niche hobby.

To circle back, we could do a lot worse than borrowing from video games. They have spent a lot of time and money developing their terms and theory. There’s a lot of overlap and several obvious places where there are pot holes. So it should be a fairly painless lift and shift.

It's a starting point. Often academic fields borrow terms from other fields that have already developed them: e.g., literature -> film - > television, etc. Those terms are then tweaked or discarded when their applicability to the new field or medium is "tested" through criticism, discussion, argumentation, and theory.