If you like Carver, or, better yet, if you don't like him, there's a great parody piece that ran in The New Yorker years ago called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts".
It's hilarious, and it's probably in some anthology or other.
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The Dungeon Master: A short story in the New Yorker
- Thread starter ppaladin123
- Start date
It's hilarious, and it's probably in some anthology or other.
DumbPaladin
First Post
Oh, I definitely have to find that story. I'm sure I will enjoy it, because "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" just really annoyed me and I truly dislike it ... but I do think Carver's "Cathedral" is pretty interesting.
Not even sure what I think about "The Dungeon Master". I'm neutral, right now.
Goblyn
Explorer
I agree. I've seen this writing style before; reminds me of Catcher in the Rye. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now.
Still, thanks for the link ppaladin123.
Chronosome
Explorer
Great story.
tylerthehobo
Explorer
Happy Reinforcin' O' the Stereotypes!
Lighten up kids. Let me find my comments from Metafilter, clean them up, expand them and repost them here:
(Warning: Mature subject matter that directly refers to the story. I'm not bringing anything in here that isn't there.)
I have mixed feelings. Certainly Lypsite acknowledges social class in the divide between D&D groups, but it seems like this is a token effort to buy him the right to treat the Dungeon Master and his crew shallowly. Meditations on social class from the top side always seem to be about some kind of dangerous coarseness, as if Eric the top shelf gifted gamer isn't masturbating as avidly or fantasizing about people as close by as the narrator. There's bourgeois primness in the treatment.
But it's a great story, tight and good at letting procedure dissolve into the background.
There's this idea that the essence of old school AD&D is that you have to fight off a dozen murderous cats with a donkey's jawbone or something. This is interesting on a couple of fronts. First off, I've been trying to play AD&D1e as written with all rules, changing stuff gradually to fix stuttering points instead of altering the rules' outputs -- I use ascending AC, for instance, but with some adjustments to make it very close to 1e DMG attack tables.
Going back to 1e and trying *every* rule as written led to interesting discoveries. There's a whole whack of robust social/reaction systems that have made my campaign equal parts tense conversation, flight, fright, friend-making and mugging -- not just one combat or straight, testable challenge after the next.
The rules as written don't actually support a world of relentless hostility. Reactions and morale drive that home but ignoring and/or scaling back these systems was almost universal, and OSR recreations replicate the original player omissions. Later editions have let things degrade into a purely deterministic world where people will kill or be killed, or be conquered through a social system framed as a "challenge," or a struggle for some kind of control -- social control, narrative control, some kind of control.
More recent games (including most OSR rebuilds of D&D) prefer a shallow model of personal relationships centered in the character/playing piece, not in his or her accomplishments in the narrative or the wider context in which they occur. I find it fascinating that AD&D1e's social systems, which use acts and contexts (a base score with situational modifiers) represents a more mature vision, where things are not subsumed entirely within a player's will and game resources.
I meditated on this and on the story, and came to a realization about The Dungeon Master:
Eric's game -- the "gifted" game -- is terrible.
We don't know this from straight testimony, but the protagonist doesn't really seem to care about it, does he? Its wish-fulfilment rings hollow. And so I have to sort of step back from critiquing the classist elements of the story and say it's an indictment of fantasies based on the illusion of control, where my guy always wins, or if he loses, the universe somehow bends to respect that loss. I get to fly the dragon. I Am Special.
In RPGs the bourgeois fantasy of a control that is total -- that extends from that class' expectation to inherit the earth -- is currently a big thing. It's the final evolution of a movement away from what's implied by encounter systems, morale and parley, where everyone navigates uncertain territory, into a simpler place where there are specified channels to kill, or dominate or fail through, determined by whatever force players bring to bear within them.
We've gone from a fantasy of simply being another person in another place to something more grandiose, but less interesting. We demand control, and our ability to get it determines our success and value as participants. You can't just accomplish your goals -- they have to shake the world. You need to be able to dominate the story through big gestures in the narrative or some kind of meta-control. It's a typical pose for people who assume they'll inherit the earth. It comes from a privileged, coddled world view, and will always lack diversity in potential. Fantasies of entitlement are always about making things smaller.
Eric's game is probably limited in just this way. It's a narcissistic triumphal story that in the end has no purpose but to promote in-class bonding through mutual ego-stroking. Our protagonist has little empathy for this. He's not a part of their class and he has a broader view of the world that reveals the falsity in shallow fantasies.
The crazy Dungeon Master's game is not fun. It's hurtful and maybe even abusive, but there's something more memorable and sincere, and it's a truer reflection of the situation outside the fiction. These are people in malformed worlds, where menace is embedded in the banal. It's real. It's awful and nobody should do it and it's true and it's better than Eric's stupid game.
Reactions to this story have only served to reinforce my opinions. The folks at Story Games miss the author's implicit criticism of privilege's effect on the imagination (and identify with its limits); they only detect Lypsite's rough rendering of the damaged Dungeon Master and his group. They reproduce Lypsite's own limitations as a writer while ignoring the piece's subtler strengths, because exalting the shallow -- reducing complex contexts to simple codes -- is a basic part of indie dogma.
Another part of the mythos -- part of the middle class mythos that the story attacks -- is the idea that anybody can succeed (or fail due to moral inferiority) through the correct technocratic solution. As long as somebody invents a system for it, it can be done, and if someone fails to take advantage of the system, then the existence of that system absolves the community for its lack of empathy. The Dungeon Master is supposed to be a tragic figure. There's something wrong with him. We don't have to (and shouldn't) like him, but that is something quite apart from feeling compassion. In the story and in reactions to it, D&D serves as a system that makes us feel better about feeling unmitigated contempt instead, as a way to boost our own egos.
We can tell ourselves that we were enlightened enough to choose a different system, or we can say we used that system "properly" and render an uncomplicated moral judgment in tune with the simplistic, egoistic worldview that is the story's covert enemy. In fact, nothing could have "fixed" the Dungeon Master, or could have uplifted the not-gifted, except for a wider social change that no individual can achieve, and which could not be created by anything as simple as an RPG.
(Warning: Mature subject matter that directly refers to the story. I'm not bringing anything in here that isn't there.)
I have mixed feelings. Certainly Lypsite acknowledges social class in the divide between D&D groups, but it seems like this is a token effort to buy him the right to treat the Dungeon Master and his crew shallowly. Meditations on social class from the top side always seem to be about some kind of dangerous coarseness, as if Eric the top shelf gifted gamer isn't masturbating as avidly or fantasizing about people as close by as the narrator. There's bourgeois primness in the treatment.
But it's a great story, tight and good at letting procedure dissolve into the background.
There's this idea that the essence of old school AD&D is that you have to fight off a dozen murderous cats with a donkey's jawbone or something. This is interesting on a couple of fronts. First off, I've been trying to play AD&D1e as written with all rules, changing stuff gradually to fix stuttering points instead of altering the rules' outputs -- I use ascending AC, for instance, but with some adjustments to make it very close to 1e DMG attack tables.
Going back to 1e and trying *every* rule as written led to interesting discoveries. There's a whole whack of robust social/reaction systems that have made my campaign equal parts tense conversation, flight, fright, friend-making and mugging -- not just one combat or straight, testable challenge after the next.
The rules as written don't actually support a world of relentless hostility. Reactions and morale drive that home but ignoring and/or scaling back these systems was almost universal, and OSR recreations replicate the original player omissions. Later editions have let things degrade into a purely deterministic world where people will kill or be killed, or be conquered through a social system framed as a "challenge," or a struggle for some kind of control -- social control, narrative control, some kind of control.
More recent games (including most OSR rebuilds of D&D) prefer a shallow model of personal relationships centered in the character/playing piece, not in his or her accomplishments in the narrative or the wider context in which they occur. I find it fascinating that AD&D1e's social systems, which use acts and contexts (a base score with situational modifiers) represents a more mature vision, where things are not subsumed entirely within a player's will and game resources.
I meditated on this and on the story, and came to a realization about The Dungeon Master:
Eric's game -- the "gifted" game -- is terrible.
We don't know this from straight testimony, but the protagonist doesn't really seem to care about it, does he? Its wish-fulfilment rings hollow. And so I have to sort of step back from critiquing the classist elements of the story and say it's an indictment of fantasies based on the illusion of control, where my guy always wins, or if he loses, the universe somehow bends to respect that loss. I get to fly the dragon. I Am Special.
In RPGs the bourgeois fantasy of a control that is total -- that extends from that class' expectation to inherit the earth -- is currently a big thing. It's the final evolution of a movement away from what's implied by encounter systems, morale and parley, where everyone navigates uncertain territory, into a simpler place where there are specified channels to kill, or dominate or fail through, determined by whatever force players bring to bear within them.
We've gone from a fantasy of simply being another person in another place to something more grandiose, but less interesting. We demand control, and our ability to get it determines our success and value as participants. You can't just accomplish your goals -- they have to shake the world. You need to be able to dominate the story through big gestures in the narrative or some kind of meta-control. It's a typical pose for people who assume they'll inherit the earth. It comes from a privileged, coddled world view, and will always lack diversity in potential. Fantasies of entitlement are always about making things smaller.
Eric's game is probably limited in just this way. It's a narcissistic triumphal story that in the end has no purpose but to promote in-class bonding through mutual ego-stroking. Our protagonist has little empathy for this. He's not a part of their class and he has a broader view of the world that reveals the falsity in shallow fantasies.
The crazy Dungeon Master's game is not fun. It's hurtful and maybe even abusive, but there's something more memorable and sincere, and it's a truer reflection of the situation outside the fiction. These are people in malformed worlds, where menace is embedded in the banal. It's real. It's awful and nobody should do it and it's true and it's better than Eric's stupid game.
Reactions to this story have only served to reinforce my opinions. The folks at Story Games miss the author's implicit criticism of privilege's effect on the imagination (and identify with its limits); they only detect Lypsite's rough rendering of the damaged Dungeon Master and his group. They reproduce Lypsite's own limitations as a writer while ignoring the piece's subtler strengths, because exalting the shallow -- reducing complex contexts to simple codes -- is a basic part of indie dogma.
Another part of the mythos -- part of the middle class mythos that the story attacks -- is the idea that anybody can succeed (or fail due to moral inferiority) through the correct technocratic solution. As long as somebody invents a system for it, it can be done, and if someone fails to take advantage of the system, then the existence of that system absolves the community for its lack of empathy. The Dungeon Master is supposed to be a tragic figure. There's something wrong with him. We don't have to (and shouldn't) like him, but that is something quite apart from feeling compassion. In the story and in reactions to it, D&D serves as a system that makes us feel better about feeling unmitigated contempt instead, as a way to boost our own egos.
We can tell ourselves that we were enlightened enough to choose a different system, or we can say we used that system "properly" and render an uncomplicated moral judgment in tune with the simplistic, egoistic worldview that is the story's covert enemy. In fact, nothing could have "fixed" the Dungeon Master, or could have uplifted the not-gifted, except for a wider social change that no individual can achieve, and which could not be created by anything as simple as an RPG.
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