Lying in bed and writing some stuff

[cashew]

I'm recovering from physical and mental exhaustion. Long story short, due to having anxiety and travel policies constantly changing, I had a hell of a time hosting. Along with physical exhaustion, I'm also mentally drained, on top of premenstrual cramps (apparently my body decided the week before menstruation is also an acceptable time to become inflamed and painful), I'm a bit nonfunctional at the moment.

So.

I'm writing shit on my phone because what else am I gonna do amirite?

---

International politics is crazy at the moment and I don't have the mental space to worry about anyone outside of my immediate circle at the moment. So instead, I'm watching DND-tube to distract my brain. Except this past week was Monster Week and the theme was Fey and I have... annoyances.

So much of DND is Anglo-/Euro-centric that it's honestly sometimes off-putting. When I'm playing solo, I can at least forget about how much of the space is dominated by this "White" centric culture. (I use "white" in the American understanding that, while there are still very much ethnicities, there is also a general schmear of Judeo-Christian influence with healthy dusting of Greco-Roman aesthetic that kind of all blends together into the concept of "universality" slurry referring only to the shared Western Civ roots rather than any actual human species universality.) But when I'm watching videos, it gets a bit hard to take the self-congratulatory "aren't we so inclusive" tones. Which is only mitigated by how much of the remaining communities don't even have that amount of awareness.

So I should probably get a bit more specific.

DND, despite going through roughtly 8 editions at this point (OD&D, AD&D 1e/2e, D&D 3e/3.5e, 4e, 5e/5.5e, plus however you count the BECMI versions), still very much adheres to the basic concept of "4-6 individuals go into known hostile territory to loot treasure." Very, very few DND written adventures have not followed this particular formula. One that comes to mind is the Strixhaven material (a magic school adventure that got panned widely) and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (an urban fantasy that garnered praise).

The point I'm trying to make is that DND at its heart, despite its push to present itself as a flexible system, is a game that participates in imperial colonialist values, albeit using the excuse of "they're the bad guys/monsters" as the justification for why it is heroic and completely reasonable for 4-6 plucky individuals to go traipsing in territory owned by clearly hostile groups of sapient creatures for the sake of taking other people's valuable items as their own. Concepts such as social contracts, collective action, institutional authority, interstate diplomacy... are meaningless. Apparently nothing is more efficient than a fireball. Well, other than upcasting the fireball, of course.

While DMs in the community try their best to come up with better ways to massage the "violence first ask questions later" mentality, exactly zero DMs consider it acceptable to end a campaign without an epic boss fight. (Which is only further reinforced by videogame RPGs, because combat is easy to code, diplomacy much less so.) And with the world as it is at the moment, yes, there's something comforting about escaping into the fantasy that all the world's ills can be curbstomped with a magical nuke. Yet, at the same time, it also feels bland AF and a bit disturbing when you consider just briefly that this further reinforces the idea that taking ill-gotten goods for oneself is totally acceptable if it's taken from the "bad guys." (Also, the "bad guys" are never "just some random rich dude who profits off of the exploitation of the poor." Oh no, it's always a lich or demon or cultist or some monstrous individual rather than, y'know, mundane human levels of evil like war profiteering or healthcare denials. Anyway.)

For me, personally, the most fun I had when playing a pre-written module was Wild Beyond the Witchlight. Because it was the only module where there was no fighting. Instead, the entire adventure was cleared through heavy roleplay and deal-making (albeit of the fey magic type), where the most helpful skills were not determined by how much damage you could do, but by the ability to put on magical disguises or find the right answers to inconvenient questions. Looting was discouraged and players are encouraged to find ways to barter and trade favors instead. In other words, diplomacy over violence.

So. I'm both escaping into DND and getting annoyed at the community's tonal blandness that lacks perspectives outside of the Anglo-/Euro-centric world view. Also getting tired of this "inclusive" posturing which doesn't question how the Western liberal values stem from a post-hoc justification for their imperial colonialist history and the maintenance of a world order that privileges the American-led political bloc by disadvantaging other nations and cultures.

Anyway. Thoughts.

Comments

[tanithryudo]

Hm... IMO, I feel that the anglo-centricity of western games comes more from background setting and design than the "action mechanics", or that more games tend to do fights instead of diplomacy.

I think people gravitate more towards fight fight fight RP mechanics simply because it's easier for everyone, than for any cultural reason. It also heavily depends on the people who are playing. Some people might just want to indulge in some power fantasy in their free time, rather than having to internalize some complicated social science essay. You could even compare the popularity of straight up beat-em-up games with puzzle/strategy-based games. Or how well the players know and get along with each other, restricting how complex the gaming session can be.

Mechanically, it's much easier to calculate/code for some combination of hard numbers resulting in who wins (with some statistically balanced randomness thrown in), than to try and account for all non-combat options in a more free-style narrative. Not to mention, the latter can very much trigger differences in opinion and worldview, between players or between player and GM, which may end up causing arguments that just make things un-fun.

[cashew]

From a game design perspective, the mechanics/rules encourages a specific type of player behavior. And in TTRPGs, that in turn affects the type of story that is being told/molded by the GM.

In a videogame example: platformers are significantly less likely to lean into the power fantasy than metroidvanias. The mechanical difference between a pure platformer versus metroidvania is the inclusion of greater health bar and hidden weapon/tool upgrades in the latter. Yet, because metroidvania designed the game mechanically around "find better weapons", this encourages players to explore the game world with the express purpose of finding the most powerful weapon to play out a power fantasy. Meanwhile, games like Mario and Darwake heavily lean into a depowered protagonist (the 1hp wonder) who has to decide when running away is the better part of valor. Consequently, the narrative in these games is almost aways a rescue story without the aspect of looting hidden treasures.

Similarly, we see the same play out in TTRPGs. While in theory any system can be played in any setting, the rules prime the gamer brain to go down a specific route. D&D has, since its conception, been a game about looting treasure and gaining power from the looting of that treasure, and the game mechanics support that specific fantasy. So even an LotR D&D supplement can't get away from treasure looting when the original literary work had very little if any such elements. (Aside: the power fantasy is very much the result of American-led pulp fiction genre, which birthed D&D. So power fantasy itself is actually quite American-centric, which then got exported across the globe due to US geopolitical dominance. Of course it's popular, but I don't think its popularity is merely the result of it being easier to code. I think the prevalence of the power fantasy has to do with the fact that it is at its heart a consumption product rather than a literary one.)

And not all TTRPGs are about power fantasies. The classic PBtA system (along with its spin off BitD systems) are basically designed with narrative as mechanics TTRPG systems and you'll find significantly more non-power fantasy narratives that focus on diplomacy and social maneuvering in those games. Call of Cthullu is only a few years younger than D&D (modified from the Basic Roleplaying system), and it never plays into a power fantasy due to its sanity mechanic that weakens player characters with every round. The game cycle of beat up bad guy, grab loot, level up is very much a D&D cycle. It's just that so much of modern games (both TTRPG and videogames) got their game mechanic inspirations from D&D, which funnels the narrative down a power fantasy route.

We have tons of psychological studies showing that rules (and regulations) alter crowd behavior. Yes, there will always be some individual exceptions. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. The overwhelming majority of the population is going to alter behavior according to the rules/regulations because we're evolutionarily hard-coded to go with the flow and look for the path of least resistance. And when it comes to TTRPGs, building a narrative that goes against what the system was designed to facilitate is always going to be a very small minority of gaming groups.

Finally, on the matter of un-fun arguments due to world views, the amount of D&D groups that fell apart over "min-max" munchkin behavior and toxic spotlight hogging is countless. Yet shockingly, groups that fall out over world view disagreements in PbtA games are unheard of. Probably because when you're already primed to go into a game understanding the mechanics require social diplomacy, people bring their diplomatic lenses to the table and talk like adults. Whereas a system with "objective numbers" will bring the argumentative rules-lawyering mental space instead. So no, I'm not convinced by the idea that combat-heavy mechanics is somehow less prone to table disputes. At least the real world play experiences do not support that take.

[tanithryudo]

It sounds like then if you are not enjoying the D&D setup/mechanics/cultural-POV bundle, you should look into other games?

The first alternative game that popped into mind for me are the Pokemon and related genre. :p

More complicated mechanics/settings might look into strategy style games... like the million ROTK based games, maybe? Or maybe resource management games like EVE?

[cashew]

Oh I have been looking into other game systems. The problem with non-D&D systems (especially the non-d20 systems) is that either they don't have a public SRD or the ones that do have public SRDs don't end up appealing to my brain. It's part of the impetus behind my writing up my own system and jury rigging D&D adventures onto it.

Ultimately, TTRPG is a small hobby and D&D takes up the majority of the space in the hobby. For all of D&D's flaws, there's a constant stream of content, so a tiny percent of what comes out manage to appeal to me. Whereas in the smaller TTRPG games, there's maybe one or two adventures written for those systems and a lot of them also don't really appeal to my tastes either.

I'm also not really looking for complexity in my games at the moment. I've still got an entire back log of tactical video games I haven't finished, but at the moment I'm not really looking to scratch that particular itch.

Essentially, I've been random hacking my way through the D&D content to turn it into something that would appeal to me. So whenever I get the impulse to read the community opinions, I get a moment of "wow, we don't play this game for the same reason at all" reminder.