D&D General Matt Colville: "50 years later we're still arguing about what D&D even is!"

[overgeeked]

This is a terrific video, even by Matt's standards. Well worth the watch. (or listen - I had it on headphones while I was cleaning. Even better!)

I'm actually old enough to remember when some people thought players should not know the rules, but I'd forgotten. That viewpoint got so soundly defeated that I think I can be forgiven for not recalling it was even a debate. But indeed it was!

Like most things in RPGs, nothing is ever settled. People still play games this way. There's the FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Renaissance) where having the referee running the game, deciding on the rules, and the players not knowing the rules is common. There's also "black box" gaming, where the referee runs the game according to a specific set of rules without letting the players know the rules (most people learn new games this way). As mentioned, this style is how Dave Arneson ran games (it's literally how D&D started) and it's also how Bob Meyer ran the Blackmoor game after Arneson's death up until a few years ago.

 

[GothmogIV]

I started in 1981, and I remember being completely flummoxed by some of the tables in the DM's Guide. We used to play AD&D, but mixed it up with the Basic/Expert box sets rules and modules. It wasn't until I reengaged with D&D five years ago-- after an 15 year absence-- that I saw how brutal some of the arguing could be between different people. Social media has made the space very toxic is a lot of places, which is why I am thankful for the moderators at ENWorld. Everyone get back to writing letters to zines!

 

[Hussar]

/me steps up on soapbox. Sorry folks, this might be a bit long and personal, so, feel free to skip.

On the notion that facts are attacks.

Maybe it's because I've lived in Japan for the past twenty years or so, but, I see just how damaging this notion that facts are attacks really is. Japan has a ... complicated relationship with it's 20th century history. If you go to pretty much any museum in Japan, you'd think that history ended in Japan in about 1880, and then started again in 1950. That sixty year gap is pretty much excised from the conversation. No museum displays, no documentaries, no teaching it in school. Nothing. It's about as buried as it could possibly be.

And the argument is that it's the past. It's been dealt with. There's no benefit from dragging up the past. ((Sound familiar? It sure does to me.))

This is where the whole calls for "nuance" thing falls down for me. I remember some years ago, my daughter was chosen as a child ambassador to Sri Lanka. She and a handful of others, would travel to Sri Lanka, experience life there and promote Japan. Fair enough. Cool job for a 12 year old.

So, I wound up attending a number of the lectures that she had to attend talking about the good stuff about Japan. Interesting stuff. But one stood out in my mind really hard. A professor from the local uni talked about how in the 1920's a pair of Japanese botanists developed a strain of rice that would grow in Taiwan. Seemed that local Japanese rice wouldn't grow in Taiwan's hotter and wetter climate, so, a new strain had to be developed. Great scientists. Doing good work.

But, I had a few questions. Left out of the presentation was any mention of why this rice was being developed. There was no blight in Taiwan. No failed crops and Taiwan had been happily growing its own rice for generations. So, why did it need to be changed. And therein was the harsh fact. The rice was grown for Japanese Imperial forces in China who didn't like the locally grown rice and demanded good old Japanese rice. The farmers in Taiwan were forced to change their crops, not to feed their own people, but, to feed the invading Japanese army.

Which rather paints a whole new level of "nuance" to the story. This wasn't really a story to be proud of. This was a story of forced labour and cultural imperialism.

So, no. To me, facts are never, ever an attack. If the fact was unknown before, but now paints something in a new light? That's ALWAYS a good thing. We should never be afraid of facts. The people who want us to be afraid of facts are always wrong. They are always trying to force a specific viewpoint on others. And they should always be pointed out and a big, bright spotlight placed on what they are trying to do.

 

[Voadam]

On the notion that facts are attacks.

. . .

So, no. To me, facts are never, ever an attack.

You keep making this binary, either facts are always attacks or never attacks.

That is nonsense.

Rhetorical or character attacks do not have to be false to be attacks, truthful attacks are attacks. Someone may be ugly or stupid and stating such can be stating a fact, but it can also be an attack using an insulting personal attack. Denying that seems nonsensical.

Your rice story is an attack upon an unblemished view of Japanese botanical development and historical benevolence. That does not make it wrong to point out the context or suggest the context should not be made apparent. Context can be very important.

 

[Hussar]

. . .


You keep making this binary, either facts are always attacks or never attacks.

That is nonsense.

Rhetorical or character attacks do not have to be false to be attacks, truthful attacks are attacks. Someone may be ugly or stupid and stating such can be stating a fact, but it can also be an attack using an insulting personal attack. Denying that seems nonsensical.

Your rice story is an attack upon an unblemished view of Japanese botanical development and historical benevolence. That does not make it wrong to point out the context or suggest the context should not be made apparent. Context can be very important.

So, in your view, it's better to spread half-truths and actually bury facts out of some sense that a fact is too "hurtful" to be presented?

See, things like "ugly" or "stupid" aren't facts. Those are opinions. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that.

But, again, that seems to be the way things go. Something being a demonstrable fact shouldn't be presented because it might be "harmful". Harmful to who exactly? See, no, that wasn't "historical benevolence" at all. That was one culture oppressing another culture in order to destroy that culture and supplant it with their own. Pesky facts like the enforced labour of the farmers. The farmers being not given a choice about the crops they would grow under severe penalties, up to and including death.

But, sure, it's "historical benevolence".

It absolutely is binary. Facts are just that. They are demonstrable truths. They are truths with the weight of evidence. They aren't just opinions that can be debated endlessly. So, no, they aren't attacks. Again, if you think that facts are attacks, then you really need to examine what it is you are defending. If learning that something has ugly truths attached to it, and you like that thing, then you have to ask yourself if the thing you like really is what that thing is.

A person's reactions to facts says a lot more about that person than the thing the fact is about.

 

[Distracted DM]

Huh, I'd never thought of the DM (or referee / umpire, this is directly inherited from wargames) being conceived in the early days as a teacher making up problems for Prussian officers in training students to solve, hence the Gygaxian adversarial DM style.

And the benign version was "the problem is hard or deliberately misleading, but for the purpose of making the student better", while the less benign version was "the problem is hard or impossible to solve, and the student doesn't learn anything, so the teacher is bad".

I find this fascinating. To be clear, I don't want it anywhere near me, it's the opposite of my jam (it's a bloody roleplaying game, not homework), but I do understand it, and it's very interesting, and it explains SO MUCH about oldschool DM, err... arrogance.

One of my wife's two college DMs was punishingly adversarial in that fashion. "You didn't say you were sneaking, so the guards hear you loudly clomping in your chainmail!"

I do feel like I might handle my players with kid gloves a little too often with regard to such things, but I always try to think of it in the context of the PCs living in the world and having better knowledge of it than the players do.

I guess that's where those terms come from, pawn director etc stances.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I got over the sunk cost fallacy with D&D long, long ago.

Many never do. That's sort of what I was saying.

On the other tentacle, we have folks like me who see a new game with a cool element and go "Ooh, shiny!" and buy it and never get around to actually running it.

That's fair, but the former group is a local minimum, pulled back to the center. Your position is comparatively unstable, where all it takes is a nudge to (potentially) push you in a new direction.

 

[Autumnal]

D&D is that which one points at and says, "That is D&D."

Hold it right there!

Very influential science fiction writer, editor, and critic Damon Knight once defined science fiction as “what I’m pointing at when I point at something and call it science fiction”. But vintage sf fandom being what it is, folks had fun chewing on this. Clearly it works when Knight does it. But do you have to be Knight for it to work? Could he deputize you to also point with authority? What sorts of criteria might there be to establish who’s duly empowered?

Obviously very earnest expression these concerns all apply to pointing at D&D.

 

[Hussar]

TBH, I find the whole question of "what is D&D?" in the context of trying to claim "this is D&D" vs "that is not D&D" to be largely nonsensical. It's the worst kind of genre wank.

I do find the question of "what makes an RPG and RPG" to be a far more interesting one. At least it's one that I can see there being an actual answer to, even if that answer isn't totally satisfying. My own personal definition is that RPG's are game making engines, more than they are games in and of themselves. Which is why any discussion of "Is this D&D?" falls flat for me.

For me, we use the rules of an RPG to build a game that is idiosyncratic to that table at that time and virtually impossible to reproduce. Two groups running a D&D module can have wildly differing experiences because each of those groups builds a different game for that table. Unlike a normal game, you can't just sit down, read the rules and play. And each instance of play will start (more or less) the same way and will play out (more or less) the same way. Play Risk a bunch of times and each time, it will grind out with lots of dice rolling until we get a victor. ((Or people give up because the game has taken WAYYYY too long ))

But, RPG's aren't like that. The starting points and ending points are undefined. The starting point is defined by the table and has so many different variables that it's nearly impossible to claim that my group, your group and their group are playing the same game.

 

[prabe]

Hold it right there!

Very influential science fiction writer, editor, and critic Damon Knight once defined science fiction as “what I’m pointing at when I point at something and call it science fiction”. But vintage sf fandom being what it is, folks had fun chewing on this. Clearly it works when Knight does it. But do you have to be Knight for it to work? Could he deputize you to also point with authority? What sorts of criteria might there be to establish who’s duly empowered?

Obviously very earnest expression these concerns all apply to pointing at D&D.

It's plausible I was thinking of something similar to Knight's line, but I didn't remember it as being about SF.