ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

In a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), a group of people take a trip into an imaginary world, guided by an MC or ‘dungeon master’. Not limited to the Tolkien-esque themes of the famous Dungeons & Dragons, TTRPGs range from gritty sci-fi scenarios to steampunk heist fantasies, and from everyday life to magic, monsters and vampires. […]

This is acid, man. Welcome to this microdose by ACFM. When the gang and I were preparing for the full trip episode on games, Jeremy referred to T-T-R-P-Gs a lot, to which I thought W-T-F. T-T-R-G-P's I discovered is the acronym for tabletop role-playing games. This will be familiar to some of you who play these games, but not to many others who perhaps like me didn't grow up in an Anglo-American world or were too busy enjoying life in the outside world

to spend their early 20s crowding round a table indoors pretending to be someone else. harsh, I know. So without further ado, for the first time on a microdose, both my weird and esteemed colleagues Jeremy Gilbert and Kia Milburn. Hello. Are joining me, Nadia Idol, for this full complement microdose on tabletop role-playing games, what they are, where they came from, and why they matter. So, guys, have I got the wrong end of the stick, or are tabletop playing games played indoors around the table. Before we get to that, let's correct something in your spiel. I didn't spend my early 20s playing TTRPs.

I spent my early teens playing. Yeah, early teens, both of us. By the time I was in my 20s, I'd sort of wish I could play them, but it was basically not possible because they weren't cool enough. This is good. I thought this was an older person thing. So where do you guys want to start? Do you want to start by building the picture of how this game is played?

Do you want to start talking about who plays it? We'll say first what they are, but yeah, basically the phrase tabletop role-playing game, it refers to what for the first 20 or 30 years of their existence were just called role-playing games, by far the most famous version of which is Dungeons and Dragons. They started to be called tabletop role-playing games about 20 years ago to differentiate them from online role-play games, from video role-playing games. Once people started to talk about certain kinds of computer games, that's role-playing games. And of course, ironically, especially post-pandemic,

like most tabletop role-playing games are played on Zoom or something. But we still refer to them as tabletop role-plan games to differentiate them from computer games, games you're playing some sort of a computer simulation. They follow the classic format, which people, again, if people know what Dungeons and Dragons is, although of course there are many other games and many better games, even in the classic fantasy idiom than Dungeons and Dragons.

It's a game or a sort of social practice. Usually the way it works is a group of people sit around the table and most of the people in the group each take the role of one character in some imaginary situation and basically act at, describe that character's actions and sometimes speak their words in the first person, sometimes not. And one other person in the group basically describes the world around them, describes for all the other characters who might be in that situation who aren't being played by the players, what they do,

and acts as a sort of narrator, stroke referee, stroke sort of godlike creator of the context. The person, the referee, the narrator, the Games Master, the Dungeon Master, whatever, usually goes into the game with some kind of rough idea of what the situation is that the characters are going to find themselves in, whether that's a magical quest in a Tolkien-esque fantasy land or a gritty set of political tasks, some new future urban scenario, or anything you can imagine, really. And then each of the other players takes on the role of a single character in that scenario and sort of acts it out.

And what makes them games is they usually have some sort of rules and some sort of randomising procedures, usually involving rolling dice, in order to determine possible outcomes of actions in the game. So basically, your character in the game will want to do something, whether it's, you know, pick a locked door or persuade somebody to believe a lie you're telling them, or, you know, figure out what somebody else is feeding or something. The game will have some rules for describing the probabilistic chance of your character, achieving those outcomes, and you'll use some mechanism like rolling a dice and having to get a particular score above or below a particular number,

in order to determine whether that's successful. And there's all kinds of permutations. There are tens of thousands of different games, different settings and different rules and mechanics. Because quite often it's a group of players who are collaborating and then some sort of referee. But within that, there's huge amount of variations that could happen in that.

And lots of controversies about what you should do in a role-playing game. So who plays the game? Are you going to try and inhabit the character and act as you think that character would act, or are you going to be the player who acts, the person who acts, basically? Is it just you, the person who's trying to win a game,

or is it you're trying to inhabit a character? And then, of course, from the other side, there's this, is the referee, the dungeon master, are you playing against the dungeon master or with the dungeon master, right? And also, should you know what the actual system is, what the rules are, or should that be kept from you by the dungeon master so that you get a more immersive sort of experience?

So very simple basic rules and then a huge variety of what you can do with that depending on all sorts of different ways in which you can interpret that the really basic description of role-playing game. And are those things that are things that are discussed in the beginning of each game or is there a certain culture that is built in said game?

There's a huge variation in playing styles. sort of between different groups. And as you might expect, just from the questions you've asked, these are things that people have been debating within the kind of world, the hobby of role-playing games since the 70s. I mean, one of the sort of very fascinating and off-putting things about role-playing games as a social practice is they've even compared to other hobbies,

even compared to something like football, you know, they generate an enormous amount of sort of meta-discourse. So people have been arguing about this in fanzines, in magazines, and websites on podcasts for like decades and basically it just varies one of the things people love to go on forums and moan about like oh my my the group i've just joined doesn't have a playing style that i like i don't like it and of course there's a lot there are hundreds of blog articles about how you should resolve these problems like exactly what what is the discussion you should have at the start of each game was it the discussion you should have

when a new person joins your group to kind of avoid any of this sort of friction so are there people who like playing these games that don't like all of this analogous kind of culture that goes with it? I mean, maybe that's something we're going to talk about later, but I'm trying to imagine why you'd want to do this. Like, is it a hobby like you'd think about any other hobby? Like, I play football and I play playing games or whatever. And then it comes with a specific culture. So, for example, just to exaggerate, if I like football, but I don't like drinking, perhaps, booze or whatever, I might come up against situations in going to the pub

or in the run-up to, you know, going to a game where I don't feel like I fit in because I don't drink. I mean, this must happen, you know, to some people. The analogy with, like, football fandom is quite a good one because, like, there's a history to all of these debates. There's a history of where RPGs came from and that sort of influenced these debates. We can talk about that later.

But there's also sort of waves of fashion, really, I think. that fashion actually linked to, like, different theories about what role-playing games should be like. And that's the same in football as a real fashion for, like, talking about tactics in a quite a sophisticated way and using statistics to sort of think through tactics and sort of thing, which is quite different to other sorts of football cultures, which is much more about sort of, like, banter and these sorts of things. And there's all sorts of reasons for why football fandom's gone in that direction to do with the fact that you can get access to all sorts of stats now, players wear GPS sort of bras when they play, you know, exactly how much they've run and how many passes they've made in all these sorts of things.

Wow, I did not know that. Yeah. Well, also within football culture, like if you really want to be a T-Total football fan, if you're following a big enough club and you get active on social media and stuff, you can probably find a group of T-Total fans to hang out. So there are different scenes, basically, and different sort of cultures that have developed. Okay, so maybe we can just set the scene of what this was like, you know, when these games came about and then talk a little bit about that history as part of that discussion. So kind of like, how do people get in touch with people and say, oh, we're going to play this game? Set the scene for me. Like, what does it look like? Did people ring each other up on the phone or like groups of friends are like, hey, come around mine, we're going to play this? Those questions you've just asked when I was a teenager in the early 80s were often just irresolvable.

They just weren't enough means for people, especially people who weren't adults, but even people who were to find each other, to organise each other, that kind of casual way to meet each other. And these days, it's just much, much easier. To be honest, I became fascinated in the sort of emergence of the contemporary role-playing hobby, partly because it's just an interesting example of something that's become much, much easier to do and to participate in, because of online communication, facilitating all these things. First role-playing games, so everybody knows, is this game called Dundans and Dragons. Of course, Dunders and Dragons wasn't even conceived as a role-playing game when it was first published.

It came out of the war game scene. So it was people who were into playing these big, sort of simulated battles using lead figures, like miniature toy soldiers, basically. These are societies or, like, what, there are clubs where people are doing these things? People would do it at clubs. Boys would, if they were big enough and posh enough, schools, there would be wargaming clubs. Lots of universities and colleges had clubs. It's not something I was ever really involved in.

But presumably very gendered at this stage. Yeah, very, very, very, very gendered. Very few women involved. Not none, but negligible. Wargaming goes back, well, certainly to the 19th century. And so you'd have like war games, Kriegspiel was a famous one, a Prussian game, where people who might be generals would play these games in order to train themselves in strategies of war, etc. On these kind of boardroom tables.

Yeah, yeah, big tables, pushing figures around, etc, units around. That's right. H.G. Wells was really into it, wasn't he, as all. Yeah, I was going to say one of the first sets of rules in English published for war games was by HG Wells. Basically, by the end of the 60s, there's a wing of the wargaming hobby, a small section of it, which is people, they're really into Tolkien, basically, and they want to act out. They want to recreate with their wargaming, some of the imaginary battles from Tolkien's world, or maybe have Vikings fighting knights or something like that. There's also a science fiction fandom. There's a big scene of people who are into science fiction.

You know, there are lots of fanzines, lots of amateur press, publications of science fiction. and to a lesser extent, like fantasy, sort of swords and sorcery literature. And within that scene, there's a small scene of people who are involved in what they call collaborative storytelling, where people kind of make up stories together, sometimes in groups in real time, sometimes just in the pages of fanzines or something. Did they call themselves collaborative storytellers, or is this the academic kind of like, right, okay, they called themselves that, right? Okay, interesting.

So then what happens is in the early 70s, one. group of people who are into the sort of fantasy wing of the wargaming hobby, these guys, Gary Guy Gax and Dave Arneson, they published a set of rules called chain mail, which are basically rules for kind of pseudo-medieval, fantasy, combat for war games. And then they start to develop a set of rules which are more intended for kind of small skirmishes. So you've gone from having these big battles, having small battles between groups of imagined sort of fantasy heroes. and warriors, basically, and monsters, like mostly Tolkien-derived monsters like

or maybe dragons. And then they publish a second iteration of that set of rules, which is basically designed for really these small groups fighting of fantasy heroes, fighting monsters, and they call it Dungeons and Dragons, partly because the way they imagine these battles taking place, these small battles taking place, is in these underground spaces, which they call dungeons,

which don't exist for any obvious reasons. reason except for people to go and fight monsters in them. But at that stage, they're not even calling it role-playing games. And it's just imagined as basically a combat system, like a very small scale sort of a war game, like a tactical sort of war game. But then what happens, that gets published in 74. And then what happens over the next five years is some of the people who are playing that game really start to bring in it some of the techniques and ideas from science fiction collaborative storytelling and to some extent they just start bringing in stuff from sort of amateur dramatics or just from general imaginative play and some people get really into

actually role playing their characters so instead of just saying right my warrior goes into this room and fight an ork they start to say well what if you what if you actually say what the guy says what if you even try to imagine him having a personality what if we're actually building a sort of literary story out of this instead of just so describing the battle And that's the point at which they start to refer to these things as role-playing games. And that's when it really starts to take off. So the idea that actually what you're doing is this thing you can call the role-playing game, sort of emerges around in the second half of the 70s.

And then people start publishing lots of lots of different rulesets for a different kinds of role-playing game. So science fiction role-playing game, really popular one is a game called Traveller, where basically you play the crew of a spaceship and your aim in life is to pay off the mortgage on your spaceship. Your Han Solo and Chewbacca and, you know, the people, Han Solo would be hanging around with if he wasn't having exciting adventures fighting the Empire in Star Wars. And even by the late 70s, you can see a real kind of cultural split, I think, actually.

So the sort of birthplace of Dungeons and Dragons is the Midwestern wargaming scene. And then things really start to change where you get hippies in California, like getting into fantasy role-playing games. have a completely different conception of what they are. For them, it's all about they want to create rules which enable you to act out these characters and to develop these quite complicated stories about being a kind of shamanic tribal warriors, fighting evil empires and things like that. And then from the early 80s onwards, there's a continue proliferation, probably the most important, the most influential game to come out of that

moment over the long term. It's Call of Cthulia, which is a game-based, is a horror game, loosely based on the work of HP Lovecraft and the idea there is that you play characters who are investigating mysterious supernatural events and it has this very kind of anti-heroic quality so the normal expectation is that most characters in those that game will end up discovering horrible cosmic truths about the the true nature of the universe which is not good and you find out as in H.P. Lovecraft's work, that the cosmos obeys no moral law, that it's ruled by these evil alien entities.

And you go mad and die. And for some reason, that's really fun. Oh, no, I've failed by sanity role. Yeah, exactly. Then in the early 80s, the first kind of iteration of Games Workshop is as a company who basically makes its money importing these games to Britain,

and publicising them through its house magazine, which is really just sort of extended fancy, a white dwarf. But when you say importing games, what's being imported? They're just physical books, usually, with a set of paperback books with a set of rules in them, saying,

this is how you play this game. And dice. And dice. And dice. Okay. So from the beginning of Dungeons and Dragons, one of the features of these games is they use polyhedroids to resolve outcomes,

notoriously the 20-sided dice. Really, from, that moment around 1980 when this stuff is getting very popular with basically with teenage geeks in the States and Britain and other countries as well actually. From that moment there's a really interesting question which is well how does anyone actually make money out of this? Because all you need to play it is a rulebook with a set of instructions, a set of guidelines

for how to resolve situations in the game. And to be honest, as many people realised, even like age 12 or or 13 quite quickly, like the most popular game, Dungeons and Dragons, was very, very poorly designed if what you want to do is a role-playing game, as most people understood it by that time. It's a terrible rule system,

which was really designed for combat and nothing else. You can make up a set of role-playing game rules on the spot. You can say, right, your character has like five or six main qualities we're going to measure, like their physical strength, their agility, their charisma with other people, a couple of other things. Let's give them a score of one to six. Six is best. One is worst. And every time

you have to do anything using that attribute, you roll the dice, and if you get that number or lower, you've succeeded. There you go. That's a role-playing game. That's a set of role-playing game rules. That's pretty much all you really need. But couldn't the same argument be made about like, you know, a board game or whatever. Like, I would assume that people like being part of something, the outline or the skeleton for how we're going to go about this thing has been already pre-decided because then it fits you into a certain culture. Yeah, well, they do.

They absolutely do. And that's why there is still an industry. But it's always an issue. There's always a tension in that you don't need that stuff, the way you need the board for a game. So there's always a tension around, well, how are you going to get people to pay for this stuff? How are you going to make money out of it?

really from by the sometime in the early 80s there's a considerable tension between companies like games workshop in Britain who are trying to make profit to make a living out of it and people who see themselves as kind of passionately in love with this hobby and like wanting to play these games but not really interested in accumulating capital for anybody and so there's a growing network of fanzines there are growing numbers of independent publishers who are publishing their own rule sets if you're the age like here and I were in the early 80s, and really a lot of the people I play with now were, like, you're only sort of 12, 13. You know, you might have read Lord of the Rings, like, you might have seen a few films. It's very exciting to be able to play these games. There's no computer games in this world, you know. There's these sort of choose your own adventure books, but apart from that, this is like one of the most exciting things you can really imagine being allowed to do as like a 12 or 13 year old. But it is really difficult. Where do you meet people? Well, if you're 12 or 13 in Britain, like the early 80s, you meet people at school, that's it.

So either you've got a group of friends at school you can play with, or you haven't. And if you haven't, or if you haven't got a group of friends from school who want to play the same games you want to play, there was classified ads in White Dwarf magazine, but that's about it. You're not old enough to really be reading these fanzines, which are being produced by people, you know, maybe 18 and up, and that's who they're being written for. They're not really being written for you. you can go to game shops and tour to people there but you know you're not really old enough to start sort of making social arrangements with people who live in the next town along or something like that and it is quite difficult really and i mean my own experience was that you know i started off like really liking tolkien i was 11 and then i got dungeons and dragons and i found some people to play that with at school but i got quite bored of it and i wanted to play other games and i was reading all these fanzines um most famous famous famously a fancying called I'mazine produced by a guy called Paul Mason,

not the famous left-wing political commentator, Paul Mason. This is a different Paul Mason. But it's been produced by these guys who are sort of 10 years older than me, and they had all these allusions to, like, you know, Marxist literary theory and stuff in them. Because they, you know, stuff they picked up at university. And they talked about role-playing games as like an interactive art form. And there was also, you know, feminist consciousness had quite a big impact.

on some of the debates in the hobby, you know, there were some of the people writing for white dwarf and these fanzines who were conscious that this was a really male-dominated space and that we had to make an effort not to represent women in kind of objectified or degrading ways, all very simplistic, but very kind of meaningful to someone in their early teens. And I sort of desperately wanted to participate in this world of like grown-up role-playing games where people would theorize and there were some politics and you wouldn't, you weren't just playing stupid, like, sub-talkie and fantasy adventures. You would be having like cyber, dark cyberpunk stories you would be playing out

with quasi-political themes. But of course, I was basically too young to do any of that. And so by my late teens, I just sort of gave up. One of the things people who were involved at that time will talk about is the fact that it was completely dependent on this sort of commercial infrastructure. Even if you were making a fanzine, it was very hard to publicise at the fans. one of the things that happened in Britain at that time is Games Workshop, which had been just a sort of clearinghouse for different games and publications in the first half of the 80s, adopted a completely different business model where they would only publicise their own games. And the thing they would try to sell wasn't really role-playing games. It was this big fantasy war game called Warhammer. And for a certain cohort of us, that just sort of completely killed it. Like it just, once they withdrew support for the wider hobby, once they They stopped acting as like a communications network infrastructure.

There wasn't a communications infrastructure that we could all use to sort of meet each other and play games together. So a lot of us around that time just sort of stopped. What I'm talking about, this kind of slightly cool wing of the role playing game lobby, it seemed to me in my early teens, it was a tiny tip of an iceberg. And most of the iceberg was exactly what people would imagine. It was these sort of guys not interested in any of this arty crap about, you know, playing your characters or philosophical themes, they just wanted to act out fantasies of being a

big warrior and killing goblins. There wasn't this like some kind of quote unquote natural division that if you did this one thing, if you played tabletop rolepaying games, you were that kind of a person and therefore necessitates that that label of like geek or whatever. Well, I have talked to lots of people who've said at their school that was the case. And in fact, like you had to keep it secret or the tough or the tough boys would beat you. up. Fine. No, this is, this is the interesting stuff, you know. That actually, but that wasn't my experience. It's a good question. What would we have been doing instead? Honestly, what we would have been doing instead would be nothing. Just like hanging

around the estate, the estate being really bored. For us, it wasn't playing football. We were doing that as well. And then when I was a bit older, we was smoking hash as well. It wasn't that. It was literally just hanging around doing nothing. This game comes out of a scene where there's older people involved in the 19th. early 1970s as well. But then it gets really massive in 1980 and it's a deal with like what are people importing and selling

because it is the rules but it's also these sort of booklets which are scenarios so settings the keep on the borderlands that was an early one one of the original which would have a little map of this keep and then some dungeons and what would be in the dungeons

etc. So these are provocations for your imaginary? Well no I think that I don't think they are No, no, so one of the big things in it is how much preparation or how much knowledge does the dungeon master or the have and how much do they improvise. That's one of the things that varies amongst different game. And so I think what was happening in this was that these commercial pressures of people trying to monetize this thing meant that there were older people develop this and then young, early teenage kids. The way I got it was I got a set of the rules. with some scenarios, and I used to read the rules. Do you know what I mean?

Then I found some friends to play with, basically. This introduction of like this huge amount of young kids who are getting it through buying these things and reading the scenarios and then playing through these set scenarios, etc. I think that probably alters what role-playing games were for a while. So you've got to have this thing of like what the story Jeremy was telling earlier about, you know, this small group in the Midwest,

sort of accidentally discovering this form of play. it's an accident in some ways or a development out of a couple of different scenes this sort of wargaming scene and a science fiction fandom scene and then they have to work out what it is they're doing and what the possibilities are

and that takes various waves and then this introduction of this huge popularity that Dungeons and Dragons goes through for a few years in the early 1980s that really basically narrows it down a lot that's when Dungeons and Dragons really dominates and, you know, the sort of much more free play and imaginative play and improvisational play becomes minimised to some degree. In fact, you might even say that like there's a tradition,

there's two cultures, one of them comes out of wargaming and people take that as a game where you're trying to sort of like maximise your power as quickly as possible. One of the things Dungeons and Dragons introduces is this idea of levels where you can get more and more powerful if you get more experience and treasure and kill powerful enemies, etc. So you can play it that way or there's another tradition which is a much more narrativeist tradition which you could probably link to this sort of science fiction fandom thing in which the idea is you're building up this shared world and this narrative etc and i think that what happened in the 80s was that like the gamist i took over and over and as that world sort of fell apart and then got reconstructed

you know the narrativist element has come back again and so it's one of the most dominant approaches just a gameplay at the moment is much more narrativeist than gamist, I'd say. Does any of this intersect with punk or other, like, big, social? Well, it definitely inspired a sort of sense of do-it-yourself culture and helped infuse that into the scene a bit. You know, people were doing loads of fanzines about role-playing games, partly because fanzine to become a part of the general culture, and that was very much a punk thing.

Also, I would say the sort of radical fringe of the hobby included a number of people who were very much influenced by sort of feminism and the feminism we associate with the post-punk scene and there was some pushback against, you know, the objectification of women, the objectification of women in cover art and games or magazines and what have you. But, I mean, that didn't go very far and, you know, it was pretty much, I mean, to the extent that there was some dissent from a set of aesthetic norms,

which were, to some extent, inherited from like heavy metal culture of the 70s, for example, that didn't last very long in terms of the mainstream commercial hobby. And by the mid-80s, I mean, the thing that had really happened by the mid-80s is games workshop had gone from being this quite boutique distributor of specialist role-playing. games and they had really dropped that completely and they they become instead the manufacturers and promoters of this very masculinist fantasy war game called Warhammer which is still hugely popular and made them a multi-million dollar I think a billion dollar company and did it and really did it through promoting this this aesthetic and imagery that was derived from the more reactionary strands of heavy metal culture so you couldn't really see

say punk had a big influence on that but it probably did inspire the sort of opposition to those tendencies which you know made itself felt in occasionally in white dwarf magazine occasionally in fanzines and indie games in the first half of the 80s but a lot of that sensibility wouldn't really become very publicly visible to people who weren't heavily immersed in the hobby at that particular time for quite a few years until quite a few years later I'm really interested in this point about how people who did this thing associated with each other, kind of pre-internet, were there things like, you know, cross-atlantic like pen pals or like writing letters to each other or, you know, sharing tips, like how did people, or around the country in the UK,

how did people communicate? Well, you mostly didn't. I mean, one of the things that sort of provoked my interest in sort of, you know, dipping my toe back into this hobby, like, you know, after sort of 30-odd years away from it was, you know, listening to podcasts. and the really popular podcast with people my age who are kind of doing this in Britain. It's a podcast called The Grognard Files done by a couple of guys from Bolton who were really into role-playing games in the 80s.

They didn't do it for decades, and then about 10 years ago they decided to get back into it, and it's all about their adventures doing that. And one reason it's become this kind of cult object, this object of intense affection for a network of like several hundred men in their kind of late 40s and 50s in Britain, it's because they talk a lot about their experience in the 80s.

And it was this really widespread experience, especially for people around mine and Keir's age, that we were basically too young. If you were older than us, then you would go to university, you would join a club there, you might live in a big city where there would be big games clubs. You would hang around at the game shops

and talk to other grownups who were into it. But if you were our age, none of that was available to you. So there was this very widespread experience of just feeling frustrated. I'm going to bang on about the gender question again, because if this is being played physically, you know, that physically a group of boys are sitting around and playing this game,

then, you know, there will be sisters and mothers and other women there so that who must have been aware that this was going on. I can imagine more so than football, right? Because if it's football, you know, is something that boys go away to do outside the home. But if you're a girl and you're inside the, home, you know, and you've got, you know, girl chores or whatever was attributed to your gender at the time, or you were just supposed to, you know, hang around and do your homework

or have your girlfriends over. I don't, I don't know. Then, then the young women and the gods must have been aware that this was happening. They just thought it's not for them, I presume. Yeah. My sister's thought it was just nerd shit. Right. And they were right. And this is, but this is what I'm interested in is it. I'm fascinated by this bit about what the impressions were and how the relationships were built upon and because of that. So that's great that you said that because if your sister's sort of, oh, Keir's doing his nerd shit again, that's advantageous to you, right? As someone who doesn't want to come into confrontation, perhaps with, you know, family

members or whatever, if people think it's geeking or it's nerd stuff, then it seems that what's attributed to that label is a kind of non-conflictual activity, right? not going to start, you know, doing something that is going to be bothersome to them by being in a room playing this game with other boys, right? My sisters were quite interested when they were younger. They were very intrigued. And by the time they would have been old enough to do it, they just wouldn't really have seen themselves as having time. I mean, the way I always describe this, and this isn't just my impression. This is something sociologists have written about a lot is that really, from the age of about 13, like typically, until quite recently, girls just don't

have hobbies the way boys do. Because basically, you know, learning how to do makeup and dress nicely and, you know, maybe do housework, like takes up all the time boys would spend doing hobbies anyway. I don't think that's the case now. I think it's also, I think anecdotally, this has always been less the case in the state or in progressive liberal parts of the states. So some of the most influential designers and writers in the role playing game world today are women who started playing with their brothers in the 80s. I mean, there is a really interesting question. What did people think of it as a hobby? Because I do think this has really changed. My parents generally tolerated it, but really didn't approve. This is from the point

of view of being sort of, you know, good lefties, because it smacked far too much of kind of hippie-ish escapism. Right. Well, I did want to get, I did want to ask a question about this, about what the social analysis by, you know, either sociocologist or anthropologists or sociologists about a cultural trend where a group of people are sitting around imagining themselves to be someone else. There are at least two waves of moral panics about it. There was an initial moral panic which was indeed just driven by psychologists. This was to do with people, you know, in California becoming really obsessed and playing these games for like 18 hours at a time and having identity crises and, you know, dissociating and thinking they're their characters and then going into

clinical depression if their character died. So that was one moral panic. And then that's kind of shaded into a moral panic driven by the Christian right, who were convinced that playing role playing games was a satanic practice. And even then, there were sort of two versions of that. There was a kind of headline version that if you did these games, you might get interested in the occult and end up being into devil worship. But also, there was this more sophisticated Christian theological objection that it was basically like taking drugs because you were sort of coming out of yourself. You weren't inhabiting your proper self all the time and therefore it left you open to demonic possession. But isn't there also a kind of, I can imagine a Marxist

slightly tanky kind of critique, which is to say, you know, this exists in the world of like postmodern imaginary and isn't, you know, doesn't necessarily produce the subjectivity that's necessary for, you know, whatever, like a healthy society or revolution or whatever. I mean, I can see how the other way around, you can see it as training for... Yeah. But there's, but I can imagine a critique of what it does, what it does to boys. It would just be thought of as something for kids, basically, and so it wouldn't be a bit of much concern to, to tankies in inverted commas.

So, yeah, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be something which would have a, which the left would have a moral panic about it. Right, okay. I'm just thinking about my, like, my parents' attitude to it. I've never really thought about all of that, whatever people thought. Because when you're a kid like that, you're just basically into your own world. You just carry on.

But thinking about it, my dad, he painted a big mural of Conan the Barbarian on our living room and a dining room wall. Wow. At some point, I'm not really sure why. He wasn't particularly into Conan the Barberian. But, like, you know, I wasn't as much into the hobby as Jim obviously was. so I didn't subscribe to

White Dwar Sorry, I was going to say Black Dwarth Which was a leftist Countercultural sort of magazine Yeah, the name White Dwarth initially was a joke Like it was a reference to Black Dwarth, yeah Basically I wasn't really into that Into the hobby but like I subscribed to 2000 AD

Which is a comic Which was created in early 70s And like you know sort of science fiction A fantasy sort of comic But with like quite an anti-authoritarian sort of feel to it and that had a massive impact on my imaginaries. A really, really big impact on my

imagination. Yeah, and that, again, that's also just really interesting from a gender perspective of whether there were other comics for, which, you know, could be a whole other episode, but like whether there were comics that girls were subscribing to at that age, I know that later there were for slightly older

girls, but I just, you know, I wonder like... Well, it would have been very, very unusual. Yeah. But 2000 AD, for example, did have like a number of strips with a very explicitly feminist message. But you know, I mean, it's interesting thinking about... But feminist message is different to women's engagement. This is what's, this is what I'm, yeah, this is an interesting point. I mean, when I was, because with a little bit older, by the time I was sort of 1617, it was why, I mean, this was very specific to that historical moment. Okay.

It wasn't kind of historically normal, but it was something to do with the different cultural waves and the ways in which feminist feminism got disseminated through different cultural groups. But it was very normal for there to be like more boys in a social cohort who would think of themselves and identify as feminists than girls. Because feminism as a term of reference had been very heavily denigrated and sort of policed out pretty much of girls' culture by the late 80s, whereas boys did have more access to things like, it was things like 2000 AD for me. And the debates in the pages of White Dwarf, but how we became less exclusionary towards women, that were really sort of allowed, certain kind of feminist consciousness to permeate. It was also about music. It was the fact that

you know, post-punk and kind of indie music, it was just much more accessible to boys at that age at that time than it was to girls. So maybe you guys can also explain a little bit more about like how these games interact with culture at large or other cultural trends or like what's the cultural impact of tabletop role-playing games? Well, it's a couple of different ways we could take that because the other thing you might want to talk about is their relation to like computer games, video games as they were called, and like how they've been like role-playing games in video or computer games. You know, it's a genre of computer games. But the difference you would say between them and tabletop role-playing games is that they're

very gamist and not very narrativist. So in computer games, the big game at the minute is a game called Eldon Ring, which is really, really, really influenced by tabletop role-playing games with the idea of leveling up, etc, and you have different attributes that you can put points into as you gain experience, really influence. But of course, you know, the thing in computer games is there's no dungeon master. You have algorithms instead. And so the thing with computer games is that the way you game a computer game is that you learn the algorithm. And so, you know, you increase your sense of agency by understanding the limits on your age. agency, which is set by the algorithm, and you game it, basically.

The problem with that is that it gets very repetitive, you know, because you have to do the same things over and over again in order to beat the algorithm, etc. And so one of the trends in computer games is towards open world games, where you don't have to follow a set path. You can do things in different orders, and, you know, you explore a world, basically. And so it puts off that moment where you sort of see the repetitions, if you know what I mean. So you can compare that to tabletop role playing game. The other way you can sort of, like, escape the dictatorship of the algorithm is by introducing other players.

And so you have like these multiplayer competitive games, like the classic one is like a Battle Royale game where lots of people start and you kill everybody off. And the person who's still standing at the end sort of wins of Fortnite is the big game in that. But there's also a really big trend towards multiplayer cooperative games where you have to work with other players in order to operate whatever it is. So there's a game called Sea of Pirates. where you have to work with other players via the internet just to operate your pirate ship, basically. And when you say there's a trend, do you mean a trend like in relation to one's politics?

So are, you know, kids in the alt-right playing these cooperative games, or is it a left trend? Or does the type of game you play determine your politics or the other way around? I mean, it's a trend, you know, same with Open World. world games, partly because that's the affordances of the technology at the moment. You can play seamlessly with somebody else, basically, via the internet, etc. It's the same question that Nadia as about, you know, why are the trends going on in Dungeons and Dragons?

Partly it's because video games fell into a very narrow sort of strata, and as that industry develops, people explore the possibilities a little bit more, and part of that is by breaking with the assumptions that most game designers would have carried when they first sort of started. I think it is really interesting thinking about that historic relationship between tabletop role-playing games and computer games. Because if you go back to even to the early 80s, there are already games which are sort of modelled on role-playing games. You can play on a computer. And what they are is they're text-based adventure games. So a message comes up on the screen. You are in a cave. There's a chair. There's a chest. There's a candle. What do you

want to do. And then you type in, I walk over to test, I walk over to the candle. The thing is, everybody knows the computer can only respond if you say one of like three things. If you say something else like, I just start screaming or I just leave this cave and go to some other place. You can't do it. Yeah. And then basically, basically what computer games have been, what you can do if you're playing with a human being, a conscious human being is you can say that. And then the human being just makes up a response. And that is the essence of a tabletop role-playing game, actually. The essence of it is, you know, you could give any answer to that question and the person can respond. So those early games are more like these Choose Your Own Adventure books where you

basically, you make a decision about, you know, you read a passage, it gives you a decision and you go to a different page depending on the decision. And essentially, the thing is, even something like Eldon Ring is basically on the same model. It's just it's got pre-programmed in now, like millions of possible responses and things you could do, but it still doesn't have any way of actually improvising a response to an unexpected, a completely unexpected input. One of the reasons, I think, for the big resurgence of interest in table-top role-plan games over the past 10 years,

is I do think about 10 years ago, we reached a sort of cultural tipping point where there's a general recognition that things like artificial intelligence and virtual reality were just not going to do the things people have thought they would be able to do. So one of the standard narratives about role playing games as an industry as a hobby is that it sort of goes into crisis around 1990 and it has various uptics,

but it never really become really big again until sort of around 2008. And one of the things that's going on doing that period is everybody assumes the computer games are just going to replace tabletop role playing games. There's some kind of computer game, whether it's World of Warcraft, where you've got loads of people playing cooperatively together and competitively together, but the whole thing is still being administered by a giant AI, but it's partly moderated by humans as well, but, or whether it's the things Keir has been describing. And also people imagine that some kind of VR is going to ultimately make the, the tedious clumsy business of just describing imaginary scenes to your friends with words seem like pointless and old-fashioned. And there's sometimes, time around, I think, about 10 years ago where we passed a cultural tipping point where people realize, no, that's never going to happen. Actually, artificial intelligence and virtual reality cannot do what human beings using language to describe things to each other and improvising

stories to each other can do. It can't do it. Another tipping point in terms of these cultural attitudes is also that today, compared to spending all your time on social media, or spending all your time playing Minecraft or even Eldon Ring, like to parent, and adults today, table-top role-playing games seem like really wholesome. They seem like this really wholesome activity because it's, you know, it's people actually talking to each other. It's people actually making up stories together. It has this, it has this irreducibly analog dimension. And so I think also that's another part of the story of the relationship to computer games, that whereas in the early 80s, role-playing games seemed like worrying the escapist,

like today they seem like reassuringly you know real in some way and reassuringly organic I mean on the on the main the main trip on games we talked about like you know the gamification of all sorts of aspects of like social media etc yeah exactly and so it's like this this knocking your head up against a repetition of a produced by an algorithm is like a general feeling and so like a turn away from that is you know it does make a lot of sense actually it's really good argument I think but there is a predictability. I mean, just on that with, you know, certain, you know, platform, even games that I've played on Nintendo, whatever, when I was a teenager. Like, I don't know. I think there's

also something comforting in the repetition. Like, it's not always about the, the algorithm. It, like, it gives you then the freedom. Like, if you're playing a fighting game or whatever, like in 2D, like I did a lot of, or a racing game, like, you want freedom within a certain realm because then it allows you to play the game better. I mean, that was my experience. of it anyway. Like if everything was up for grabs, then it's like, well, where do you start being able to produce strategy? I mean, that was my feeling around that stuff anyway, which is not how I feel about the only one time I played the tabletop game on Zoom with you guys, which we've chatted about. Like, it's a different, it felt like a different terrain between, you know, whether it was

me engaging with a computer and its algorithm or like human beings, and conscious beings like you were saying. Yeah, I mean, that's an absolute definition of a game is that, like, Like, you know, you set certain boundaries and then the agency is within those boundaries. Yeah. And that's also one of the problems that you come up with with role-playing games. When you minimise and really, really minimise the rules, it's like, it's a game anymore. Is there too much freedom, do you know what I mean? Is there too much freedom and not enough constraint in order to make a coherent experience and that sort of thing?

So, yeah, I mean, you're right, basically. Well, say the other thing to say about their relationship with wider culture, I think it does have to do with the relationship between role-playing games and narrative fiction more broadly. When they start off, role-playing games are all basically all directly drawing on certain strands of popular genre fiction. They're drawing on the sort of fantasy, epic fantasy literature of people like Tolkien and Michael Morkok or on kind of sort of science fiction of people like Asimov and sort of pulp science fiction writers. That's what they're drawing on. And then over the course of the next few decades. They'll draw on horror literature. They'll start to draw on comics as comics

themselves become increasingly sophisticated. From the mid-90s, they'll start to draw more on film and TV. And I probably, probably film and TV and more kind of dominant influences these days on newer games. Also, what will start to happen is they will start to influence back on those genre forms in a really striking way. So biggest TV show in history, in global terms, is Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is based on a series of novels. That novels was based on the author's Dungeons and Dragons campaign from the early 80s. By campaign, we just mean a long series of kind of linked adventures. It's like a story, it's a game, you know, a group plays a game together regularly for like an extended period. Which was really, it was interesting. I hadn't read any of

those novels, but when the TV show first came on, like the first episode had been on for half an hour. And I said to my partner, Joe, I said, oh, this was based on a D&D campaign. It obviously was. Like, it's obvious from some of the tropes and, et cetera. And I didn't know it was at the time. We could talk about other ones as well. So the expanse, which is a big TV, science fiction program,

a set of novels. That also came out of a role-playing game. There's this game I've mentioned before, Disco, Elisi, which is a video, a computer game, really, really sort of, like, modeled on tabletop role-playing games. And the whole world was built and created out of a, tabletop role-playing game. I think now, from what I know about the history of the hobby,

the biggest development after that moment in the late 80s and people like myself and Keir will stop playing was a wave of games with really a kind of goff vibe. So the most famous is still really popular game called Vampire of the Masquerade where you play vampires who are part of this global vampire subculture. Sounds cool. Yeah, I've never played it. But there's a lot of that sort of stuff in the 90s.

Well, vampires were very big in the 19. Well, this is the thing. Vampires were very big. Especially in America. I think Vampire of the Masquerade is itself quite a big influence on Buffy and Angel, which was written later. And really, by the sort of 2000s, you're in a situation where a large proportion of the people writing for American TV and films

are people who've grown up being into D&D and other role-playing games. And you can very much see the influence on all kinds of things. a lot of kids TV these days. I mean, a huge amount of kids TV for girls, I think I mentioned this on the main episode, is written in this kind of epic fantasy idiom, which would have been completely absent kind of girls programming even 20 years ago.

And that is because, you know, it's mostly written by women who mostly grew up playing loads of D&D. And, you know, I remember people, friends who worked in British TV telling me about all the, all the well-known TV writers who had a regular call of Cthulhu game or a regular D&D game. So it's really had a big sort of impact in that way.

So when have the women started playing? Well, I think it's been pretty gradual. I think it's pretty, I think it hasn't been one, there wasn't one big moment. I think there's clearly some sort of tipping point in the past 15 years. I mean, one of the things that's impacted that has been the fact that one of the things that's really massively popularized D&D and other role playing games has been, things like Twitch streams and YouTube channels where people, often people who are trained actors and voice actors, often people who are quite good looking, will play, you know, they'll make

videos and them as playing the games. And there's a very conscious effort by the people developing those outlets to include lots of women. But that's now, I'm just trying to get the picture as you were talking about the development of like whether we get to a point where there are groups of you know girls and young women playing games with the boys or are they playing them in some kind of like gender separatist situation? I think both. Yeah, both. And that is, I would, I just think that has become more, it became gradually more prevalent over the course of the 90s and 2000s to the point where it's just not really strange now. But I think you have to think about the sort of cultural status also of those fictions that role playing games conventionally

draw on. You could point to different historical moments punctuating this. So, I mean, when I was a kid, like girls did not read Tolkien. And then basically, as far as I can see, that changes with the Lord of the Rings films. Lord of the Rings films, you know, they really have their moment in the late 90s. They're very carefully tweet. Like one major character is brought in who's a woman who doesn't play anything like that role in the books. You know, Orlando Bloom is marketed as this kind of heartthrob at teenage girls. And, you know, it's much more normal now, you know, for girls to read those books. And so it's much more normal to think of something like Dungeons and Dragons as part of the cultural universe they inhabit as much as boys do. And that, you know,

those are all kind of, but I think those are all just general consequences of, you know, the spread of liberal feminism and the kind of general breaking down of some sort of gendered expectations. I mean, it's still a pretty marked generational difference. I mean, you know, I know some women my generation who play games, but there's very, very few. And it's much more the case. It's much more normal, like people in their 20s and 30s now, to be playing in sort of completely mixed groups and women to be playing.

I think that has to be seen as part of the much broader changes. But of course, it also has to do with the completely changed cultural status of sort of geek culture, you know, the fact that all of these things that were seen as fringe to the mainstream culture, marginal, so geek culture in the 80s, I mean, all kinds of things from computer games to psychedelics are today seen as part of mainstream culture, basically because they're things that, you know, computer nerds in Silicon Valley like. And computer nerds in Silicon Valley in the 80s, we're just computer nerds in Silicon Valley.

And now they are the rulers of the world. And also the pandemic helped with all of that as well, didn't it? Because it's the sitting indoors and doing things. And there's Kickstarter for funding, printing, etc. Yeah, well, Kickstarter is, it's fascinating. is completely fascinating. And it does speak to that thing I mentioned earlier about nobody ever really being sure how you make money out of this. I mean, the thing that happens in the 90s, for example, is that people making games come to the conclusion. The only way you can make money

out of games is tradable card games because of the success of Pokemon and Magic the Gathering. There's all these people who really want to be writing tabletop role-playing games, but instead they're trying to recreate Magic the Gathering and stuff. And then what happens is Kickstarter, the crowdfunding model, it's turned out to be incredibly, successful for role-playing games. So I think the story is, one of the main guys at Kickstarter was a lifelong fan of tabletop

role-playing games. So early on in their history, they started encouraging people doing role-playing games to use Kickstarter to crowd-fund games. Of course, the level of money involved is nothing compared to what it is for films or novels or other, all kinds of really,

video games, really high-level projects on Kickstarter. But my understanding is statistically table top role playing game products basically being lavishly produced rule books and setting books with lots of nice pictures are they're the thing on Kickstarter

which exceeds its initial target by the most amount like most regularly, most routinely and yeah it has become the accepted funding model in the role playing game industry is if you want to produce a product you kickstart it and I think it's fascinating

because it is it does speak to the fact that the people involved with these games do have quite an intense emotional relationship to them. It's quite an intense fandom and there always has been an anxiety going back to the early days of the hobby which is, well, we do want there to be a class of people

who can make their living from this. We want there to be even though there's no obvious reason why anybody should pay anybody for it. And it's incredibly risky to try and invest a load of time and money in publishing a game that might does not sell. So crowdfunding, kickstarring is a way of like

eliminating risk, basically, for people who are trying to do it professionally. And it's been hugely successful. From the funder perspective as an individual, the things that are most successful, I would imagine, are things where you think, shit, if I don't give money to this, like there is no other way it's going to happen. Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah. It needs people like me when you buy into the narrative and the whole concept around something like Kickstarter. So I'd imagine that genuinely people think, you know, these are probably mostly two guys, or let's say, you know, two people sitting down designing this. I mean, I've definitely, myself, even though I don't identify as a gamer,

like I have donated to the next edition or whatever of, like, certain board games or like, you know, the card game version of something. So I thought this is really cool and I wanted to continue happening. The times when I'm doing role-playing games, I'm not dimming it at times when I would have been out going to the pub or DJing or meeting people. mostly I would have been watching TV. I think for me personally, the thing it's affected is my relationship to narrative fiction, mostly screen fiction. And I am just watching a lot less TV, arguably too little for a professional media theorist. It is partly because it's

really raised the bar for me in terms of how willing I am to sit and watch scripted TV that someone else has written and produced, because it's just not as interesting. Like it's not There isn't anything on Teny that's as good, a story as like you and Keir and Matt and Chow pretending to be, you know, cyberpunk revolutionaries in 22nd century Ilford putting on a rave. Like, if somebody made a TV show about that, I'd be all over it. I'd watch it, but there's nothing on that's as good as that. Can I put a flourish on that? There was that Stranger Things TV series, which really featured some young kids playing Dungeons and Dragons,

but the structure of the first series was really based around it. And that sparked a real wave of interest. And I started downloading D&D scenarios off downline and just reading them and stuff like that. But at the same time, I was also doing the Red Plenty Games stuff where we designed games. And my friend Will, one of the people that me and Jeremy play TT RPGs with now, has always been much more into games and into RPGs and has played it for a long long time. And I was bit jealous. I could work out how you get it together to get it together.

get some game sessions together. So FOMO is the core of, like, you guys getting back to me. It is, but there's also other people having fun, other people having fun. Because of that read plenty games thing, it's both me and Jeremy, whenever we'd do something, we'd always be thinking about its political contact. But it also started with the social strike stuff. It totally did, yeah, yeah. I played the social strike game or like I helped you with the social strike game the first time

we did it in 20, when was it, 2016 or something like that? Probably was, yeah. So when I've been playing the role-playing games, I've really, I've been thinking, can this be used as a form of consciousness racing, really? I think they probably can. I haven't quite worked out what's going on with RPGs and how you would do it.

But that's at the back of my mind as well, is that sort of, well, you could do something really interesting with this, I think. Yeah, but what's really interesting with both of your points, they're both about the TV and the kind of like the feeling and the subjectivity that's produced, which definitely I experienced when we played the game, is that from my little knowledge, Jeremy will tell us more about this. Like in the 70s and 80s, up to even, I think, the early 90s on British television on the

four or five channels, there was some really like batch it experimental like BBC programming, you know, and some of the other channels as well, in a way that we do not have now at all. There was programming, which was actually just quite radical. I mean, I'm not saying that you can't access these things, because obviously like there's, you know, all sorts of other platforms, but in a way, I think having so much choice means that people are not necessarily exposed in big enough groups at the same time to a certain kind of cultural out. There's something about, you know, using the example of coming up with a rave or whatever,

that kind of giddy excitement when you're in a flow of like creation, which happens when you're playing a game or it happens when you're kind of interacting, even with one-way media, if it's really experimental, that I think is something that makes you just feel really alive. and it produces a kind of you know, it produces a kind of feeling that you carry in for the rest of the day and potentially, you know, a subjectivity, which can be really radical.

So that would be kind of like my closing on those examples that you gave. Well, I think that's entirely right. And I would say there's a series of claims which have been made for role-playing games, table-top role-playing games, as a practice since the 70s. And those claims are that it is somehow

a kind of formally radical practice, because it's inherently collaborative, it's non-competitive. Like, even if the game involves characters like competing with each other in some way, at a meta level, what you're doing as you're collectively producing the experience together and you're collectively producing the story together. It's collaborative, it's participative, it breaks down the kind of relationship between the passive audience, the spectating audience and the people who are telling the story in a really radical way.

In a way, it's like radical theatre and radical art and experimental arts have been trying to do for decades. I mean, one of the things is kind of really fun about role-playing games is that every session is an experiment. Every expression, you set up a set of parameters, you hope it works, you hope it produces something engaging and interesting. But it could not. You could break down and you don't know what the outcome is going to be. You know, the story we kind of acted out when we played that game together. I had no idea that was going to conclude with you guys organizing a raid. and it was really fun, that unexpected. And that all of that does constitute some kind of intervention

into the kind of highly mediated, highly individualized, competitive culture of late, screen-dominated culture of advanced capitalism. And that conversely, I mean, part of this argument, which I do take quite seriously, is that if you look at where reactionary tendencies and have pushed back against role-playing games since the 70s, You look at the attempt by the early writers of Dungeons and Dragons,

which they did really, the guys who wrote Dungeons and Dragons didn't want it to turn into this thing. They wanted it to be a sort of fancy war game with very clearly defined rules and a very clearly defined set of limited objectives and not too much of this, you know, prancing about in your imagination. And lots and lots and lots of books, they could, expensive books of rules they could sell people and lots of trademark copyright content. That's what they wanted. Games Workshop just gave up on role-playing games. Having brought them into the UK, they just said, we can't make money out of this.

What we can make money out of is really blatant adolescent male power fantasies and war games. Like role-playing games, there's no money in it. And to some extent, there wasn't any money in it until Kickstarter became the thing in the whole hobby, until Kickstarter, which is an interesting kind of commercial model, which isn't really sort of capitalist. There isn't real direct exploitation of labour going,

in that economic model. So there is a sense in which this is sort of a tendentially radical practice that various attempts have been made to sort of capitalise on and commercial art in some way. But it does have this kind of tendential, this quality. And maybe the future has some kind of mish-mash between like a tabletop gaming room, a rave with really good music and excellent sound systems, and I don't know, some kind of chill out.

adult creche, as has been, has been suggested from people before. Like, maybe that is the future of socialising. We haven't talked about live action role playing, and we probably shouldn't. We've run out of time. But, I mean, that's the obvious route to raving, where you do a rave and you have, you get given a role and you have to solve a mystery while you're absolutely off your trolley. Yeah.

I just taught myself into a contradiction. This begs the question, and therefore the next episode of how does Straters, interact with getting out of your head. Can you do both? You can, just not at the same time.