Imaginary Worlds - Re-Rolling Role Playing Games

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

The world of tabletop role-playing games is much broader than Dungeons & Dragons, and there’s been a boom of DIY tabletop RPGs in the last decade. But as new players are coming on to the scene, they’re asking new questions about what defines a game, and what might be problematic about classic tabletop RPGs. Game master Timm Woods explains how new game systems are embracing genre and storytelling down to the moves your characters can make. I talk with independent game designers Emily Care Boss and Avery Alder about how game mechanics can reflect not just the lore of the game, but also social issues and inter-personal social dynamics. Plus, James Mendez Hodes explains how he works at a cultural consultant for game designers, and why orcs might need a makeover. This episode is sponsored by Realm and BetterHelp. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, made with natural caffeine. They come in two refreshing flavours, Blackberry Yuzu and Mango Starfruit. Try them today, only at Tim's. At participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection.

Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body deodorant now. Before we begin, I want to reach out to our European listeners.

We are doing an episode about Krampus, and we'd love to hear your early memories or family stories around Krampus. The email you can reach us at is contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. You can also contact us through the show's website as well. Thanks. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, the show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Malinsky. Back in 2015, I did an episode about D&D. I never played D&D before, so I recorded myself learning how to play, and I did a follow-up episode a few years later because the people I met in 2015 are still the group that I'm playing with. Since then, I've had many requests from listeners to look into other tabletop role-playing games, or RPGs for short, because the world of tabletop

role-playing games has expanded so much in the last 20 years, and even in the six years since I first started playing D&D. And the designers of tabletop RPGs are using game mechanics very artfully as a way to comment on social dynamics or the nature of fantasy genres. Now, when I say game mechanics, I know that might sound kind of brainy with like a lot of math, but Emily Kerr-Boss, who is an independent game designer, says another way of thinking about it is that game mechanics are a way that we can use our adult brains to set up boundaries that can allow us to play together like kids.

For me, the idea that when you sit down at a table and imagine together through role-playing, what you're doing is bringing together multiple minds into consensus about what is true in this world and what has happened in this world. That is what underscores all the roles and all the dice and all the rules that the system brings forth. It's based on consensus. It's based on a shared idea that everybody can get behind.

Avery Alder is another game designer who thinks that what makes tabletop RPGs unique isn't just that you're all telling a story together, but the roll of the dice will keep throwing your collective story off course. I think that roll of the dice will keep throwing your collective story off course. I think that one of the things that role-playing games do is they offer lots of points of disruption and they offer lots of points of expectation breaking, right? Where we're like, my hero is going to leap across the chasm, you know, and swing the sword at the demon. And I roll a three. And so now my character is plummeting hundreds of feet into the bottomless chasm. What happens next? Like that moment is really

essential to what makes a role playing game. A role playing game is the moment where our expectations are disrupted and we have to pivot and we have to figure out like what happens next. But before we get to these new games, let's go back to D&D again. Now, D&D is not the only classic RPG that's still popular. But one of the reasons why D&D is popular with new players, especially people that have never played tabletop RPGs before, is because the game mechanics of D&D are relatively simple. The content may be about warlocks, orcs, elves, dragons,

obviously very influenced by Tolkien, but you wouldn't know that from the game mechanics. The game mechanics basically come down to whether your dice roll can beat the dice roll of the person running the game, who's called the game master, or if your dice roll can beat a certain number, then whatever you wanted to accomplish happened. You killed the monster, or if your dice roll can beat a certain number, then whatever you wanted to accomplish happened. You killed the monster, or you fooled the townsfolk. And because the mechanics of D&D are relatively simple and detached from the content of the game, people started using that system to invent their own games. That's how Emily got into game design in the 90s. That's how Emily got into game design in the 90s.

That was a period where, oh my gosh, if you didn't have a group that homebrewed X, Y, and Z games together and then made your own background, it was kind of weird. But no, it was not weird. It was just very common for people to do that kind of thing. Emily was also part of an online community called The Forge, which encouraged people to move beyond the D&D system and design games where the game mechanics were not detached from the lore of the game. They actually reinforced the themes of the game. One of the first games to do that was called Apocalypse World. It came out in 2010, and your choice of characters in Apocalypse World fit the post-apocalyptic genre, like the gun lugger or the savvy head. And the actions you can take are also very specific to that genre, like you can sucker someone or go aggro on someone. Aggro, by the way, is a term you hear a lot in gaming. It's an aggressive way of beating an enemy.

way of beating an enemy. And what's really unique about Apocalypse World is that you could take their system and use it as a template to create your own game that reflects whatever genre you're playing. Emily really likes playing these types of games. Because they are often

just so full of flavor and world. Any one of them almost feels like a little bit of DNA from the world so that you can sort of see it all roll out from there. Tim Woods is a game master for hire in Brooklyn. He used to focus mostly on games like D&D, but lately he's been enjoying games that are based on the apocalypse world system. Or as they say, these other games are quote, powered by the apocalypse. For instance, there's a powered by the apocalypse game called Monster of the Week,

which is inspired by TV shows like Buffy or Supernatural. And the types of characters you can choose include the chosen, the expert, or the spell slinger. I'd almost say what they did was the correct way to design a particular genre, which is like they took in the media and then just made a list. What are all the things that you do in this genre? So if it's a horror genre, running away just became a move. Running away isn't a move in any other genre, but in a horror genre when that can go wrong so many ways,

that's definitely a move. Monster of the Week had a move where it's like you can tell somebody about the supernatural and they'll actually believe you. And it's just a totally different take using a system that can mimic story beats. James Mendez-Hodes, who goes by the name Mendez, is also an independent game designer. One of his favorite games that is powered by the apocalypse is called Masks. Masks is about teenage superheroes, but the game mechanics go beyond

just trying to mimic the story beats of the superhero genre. The game mechanics also focus on the experience of being a teenager and how your identity can shift around. In a lot of games, your stats start at a certain place, and they pretty much only increase as your character gets more experienced and more powerful.

But in masks, anyone who has influence over you, which includes every single adult, all adults, no exceptions, can try to tell you who you are and how the world works. When they do that, then if you don't successfully resist them, then your labels shift around. Your capabilities literally change based on how you and other people see you. And then you have to take action to make them go back to where they originally were and spend time and work and effort and tears if you want to bring them back. When Mendez was hired to create the officially licensed game of Avatar The Last Airbender,

he used the system powered by the apocalypse. So in his Avatar game, you don't play as specific characters from the animated TV series. You play as archetypal characters from that world of magical martial arts. He also added his own game mechanic, which is called a balance track, where your character is given a set of ethical principles in conflict with each other. So if you make a choice in one direction, you lose points in the other. If you look at the television show, it's also similar. between on the one hand, self-reliance and wanting to define herself as like a strong,

independent, capable person who can do whatever she wants all the time and doesn't need to listen to anybody else. And on the other hand, feeling the pressure to lead and teach other people. So if I were to make up a balance track for just for Toph, it might be between like leadership on one hand and self-reliance on the other. Another indie game that was so popular it became a system in itself was Burning Wheel. Burning Wheel is a medieval fantasy game, but you can adapt the rules to whatever you want. And one thing a lot of people like about the burning wheel system is that the game mechanics embrace failure. That is very different from a game like D&D, where if your dice roll fails, your character could get hurt or die. But in the burning wheel system, you can't keep advancing through the game unless you fail a certain number of times. That makes sense to Tim.

I find that the burning wheel system of forcing failure is not only accurate and really translates into being very thoughtful about how do we level up as human beings, it encourages a totally different style of gameplay, which is if I need those failures, how am I going to get them? And the way that you do that in Burning Wheel is take

on tasks that you don't think you're going to succeed at. And some game designers have shown you don't need dice at all. Like there's a game called Dread where the game is moving towards an epic fail that the players want to happen. Dread is played not using dice, but using a Jenga tower. I shouldn't say a Jenga tower. It is a falling blocks tower, a non-marketed, non-particular falling blocks tower. You stack up the blocks at the beginning,

and then every time someone tries to accomplish something in the game of Dread, they are drawing somewhere between one or maybe even five bricks from off the tower. And when the tower falls, that is when somebody in the group has died. So I love Dread for that reason, because that's an example of the tone and the mechanics really mimicking each other really well.

You see the tower getting more rickety. It makes you more nervous, and it really engenders those sort of emotions of a horror film. By the same token, there's another game, Starcrossed, that also uses a Jenga tower, but it's a totally different genre. It's the romance genre. So the idea is you draw bricks to make your characters do stuff and it's two players playing two different characters who are destined to end up together romantically, but they must not for reasons that they have worked out ahead of time. This is the reason why my character can't be with you. Here's your reason why you can't be with me. And we're trying to keep that, but we're also slowly

giving into our feelings. And when the tower collapses in Star-Crossed, that is when the two characters get together. Speaking of sexual tension, Emily designed several romance games, including Under My Skin, which explores infidelity and monogamy. In that game, players are paired off into couples. And the game mechanics encourage flirting between players that are not in relationships with each other. When the characters are deciding, are they really interested in someone who's not their partner? Are they really going to take some step that would push the bounds of the relationships

that they've been in and maybe start something new? You have two other players come in and sort of sit at that player's shoulders, like the angel and the devil, or conscience and whatever else it might be, talk out reasons why you would or would not move forward with someone not your partner. But one of the people playing the angel or devil on their shoulder a minute ago was playing their romantic

partner who might get cheated on. The person playing the character's other partner who might be transgressed on has the first choice about playing one of those characters that speaks to their conscience and which role they want to take. So sometimes they take the angel there where they're like, oh, you really don't want to do this and that person's going to be so hurt. And sometimes they take the devil. With this renaissance of indie games digging deeper into realistic emotions,

there's bound to be controversy. After the break, tabletop RPGs tackle thorny issues and they question the nature of classic RPGs and what might be problematic about those fantasy worlds. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda.

It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. What's it like to trade crypto on Kraken? Let's say I'm in a state-of-the-art gym surrounded by powerful-looking machines. Do I head straight for the squat rack? I could, but this gym has options, like trainers, fitness pros, spotters to back me up.

That's crypto on Kraken. Powerful crypto tools backed by 24-7 support and multi-layered security. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Avery Alder is well-respected for designing tabletop RPGs that use game mechanics to explore complicated issues in the real world. I also have designed multiple games that explore queer identity and queer relationships and especially queer community. I think that reflects, I mean,

my own identity, obviously, but in particular, I think it reflects the fact that my relationship to queer community has often been full of hope, but also tension. It's often been like fraught optimism. And so I keep designing games, I think, to interrogate that and to tease that apart. And just to kind of ask questions about like, when your community lets you down, what do you do? Because I'm still trying to, as a person, figure that out, I think. Those themes play out in a game that she designed called The Quiet Year. The game takes place after civilization has collapsed. Your characters are part of a small group of survivors, but you're not going to go aggro on each other like an apocalypse world. This game is structured so that when it's your

turn, you make decisions for the whole community. In fact, you are playing as the community. Other players can't stop you, but they can use something called contempt tokens, which are physical game pieces that represent the buildup of tension in the group. And the Quiet Year kind of asks you to sit with like, or like, how do you relate to community when we've made, you know, 40 weeks worth of potentially subpar choices and here we are, right? Like, how do you live with community when 75% of your needs are getting met? And that's something that comes up in a few other games as well. That question of like, when things aren't perfect, how do you keep trying to push forward together? She also designed a game called Dream Askew, which is about a queer community in a

post-apocalyptic world. And the moves that you're allowed to make are labeled as weak, normal, and strong moves. But you have to use your weak moves early on. strong moves, but you have to use your weak moves early on. So weak moves are moments where we see your characters kind of flaws, foibles, their mistakes, their potentially self-destructive instincts, which means if we're going to see you being a productive, helpful, powerful member of a community, we also need to be seeing you as a flawed, messy person. I think that's another way of kind of modeling that tension of if we just throw people away the first time they make a mistake, if we try and make a perfect community, we're not going to get anywhere. Avery is not the only game designer taking on difficult subjects.

Avery is not the only game designer taking on difficult subjects. Mendez says one of the most powerful experiences that he's had with a tabletop RPG was when he played a game called Steal Away Jordan by Julia Bond Ellingboe. I refer to this game as like the scariest game ever made. But it is not in the horror genre. In the game, you play enslaved Africans on a 19th century southern plantation. The game designer is black, and the game is often compared to novels like Kindred or Beloved. In Steal Away Jordan, every character has one numerical stat, and it's your worth. And your worth is defined by what kinds of privileges you have

in the society of the antebellum South, whether you are male or female presenting, or whether you're capable of reading, whether you own land, whether you have special skills that make you more worthwhile to society or to the person who is enslaving you. All of these things affect this basic calculation of your worth. So if you ever want to go into conflict against your own oppressor, you can't just go at them head on. It's extremely unlikely you'll beat them in a straight conflict. So in order to succeed, you have to be sneaky, and you have to do things that you think that they won't try to oppose you on because they don't realize that it's a problem. You need to make deals with other people around you, or even get the favor of other people who are more privileged than you so you can get them to

use their resources on your own behalf. Like the first game I played as, we were on Monticello. The guy enslaving us was Thomas Jefferson. So this guy's a founding father. If we want to go up against him, we can't just fight him. He can call the army. He can call other founding fathers. The only shot that you have

is through these social connections. And I thought that was really, really interesting. Has this game received any criticism? I mean, that it's, you know. Loads of criticism. I was going to say, I think I could imagine a lot of criticism from all angles. Yeah, yeah. It gets criticized a lot.

There was an article on a blog, a blog that I followed that was about race issues, talked about Steal Away Jordan and one other game that I wasn't really familiar with. talked about Steal Away Jordan and one other game that I wasn't really familiar with. It was really, really critical of the game as promoting what you might call misery tourism, like whether or to what degree it's acceptable to focus on racial trauma as kind of like the meat and bones of a creative experience. I was curious what Avery thinks about games like this, where people play characters from marginalized groups. Because in her games, there could be straight people playing gay characters

or cisgender people playing trans characters. Avery says if these games are well-designed with good intentions, she doesn't think the problem is with the game itself, but what players take away from it and how the game master handles that experience. And I think that when we step into a game and we play as people outside of our own identities

and outside of our own lived experience, we need to stay humble and remember that like any lessons we learn about what it must be like to be in that person's shoes, they're still a bit suspect, right? At the same time, I think it's really valuable to try to build that perspective, to like try and shift your horizons and shift your understanding. And so I personally really value the opportunity for people to play with and explore how identity

shapes perspectives and shapes understandings in games, as long as they recognize that, like, this is never a perfect replication. This is one way of building an understanding. Listening to the people who are actually affected by an issue speak about it is always going to be stronger than imagining it out for ourselves. But imagining it out for ourselves is also still valuable. But a game like Steal Away Jordan, which is about slavery, also brings up the issue of demographics in gaming. of demographics in gaming. The world of tabletop RPGs has expanded a lot since the days when D&D was seen as a fringe hobby for nerds or social outcasts.

But tabletop RPG players are still mostly white. This is something that Mendez comes across a lot because he is Filipino-American. In most situations where I sit down to play, I'm expecting to be the only person of color there. If I'm at a convention, I'm expecting that if I walk into a large crowded room and I turn around 360 degrees, I'm going to see like one other person of color. He thinks one of the reasons why is because classic tabletop RPGs were typically about white medieval fantasy worlds. That's why today he works as a cultural consultant for people designing new tabletop RPGs.

That's kind of a fancy way of saying that people hire me to tell them that they're racist. But that's really the more facetious description is really only like a little bit of a joke. The more facetious description is really only like a little bit of a joke. People hire me to help them research different cultures and identities, to connect them with other consultants who are from those identities, and to reframe and revise the work that they're doing so that people from these cultures and identities who they're representing feel good about it. For example, he was hired to give feedback on a game called Frosthaven, where your characters are defending an outpost on a frozen tundra. When I was going over the game materials with the game's creators, I was like, well, this seems kind of like a colonizer thing right now, because you've got humans who didn't live here.

They're just showing up in the north and they're taking land away from all of the locals who live here and they're making it their own and then they're going out into the wilderness and then taking stuff for themselves like that just kind of seems like a dick move i'm like i'm not sure i'd feel good about playing as that guy so we reframed the history of the town so that it wasn't entirely created by colonizers. It's a settlement that had been there for a long time, and it was in many ways integrated into the environment and the economy of the region. Now, the creators of classic RPGs are aware that there's been a shift in the culture. So they've been making changes to their games, which has sparked a backlash. One of the biggest controversies is around orcs. Orcs are often bad guys or thugs in a lot of classic RPGs. But some people have argued that

orcs play into the danger of dehumanization in the real world, so there's been an effort to make them more sympathetic. The counter-argument is that orcs are a race of fantasy creatures. People shouldn't feel guilty about killing them. Also, they're great fighters. They're fierce and tough. What's the problem? Well, orcs go all the way back to English mythology, but the modern idea of an orc came from Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien was inspired by more than just medieval folklore. So this is Tolkien in letter number 210, describing orcs. The orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the human form seen in elves and men. They are, or were, squat, broad,

flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes. In fact, degraded and repulsive versions of the, to Europeans, least lovely Mongol types. And I did not expect when I started researching this topic to find out that J.R.R. Tolkien created orcs as a caricature of Asian people. Because I didn't think of Tolkien as like a particularly racist guy. And he wasn't for the most part. Tolkien was very opposed to Nazism and antisemitism. He spoke against apartheid in South Africa. But Mendez says we shouldn't think of racism as binary.

We all know people who have enlightened ideas in one regard and then buy into other stereotypes. It's not like Tolkien's good things and his bad things. You don't subtract one from the other and end up with a final number. They both happened. And at this point, whether Tolkien was a racist or not doesn't really matter, right? The things that I interact with, the things that I'm trying to talk about are his work and the way that his work influences other people. I talk with Tim Woods about this because he is a game master for hire, and he has to respond to whatever the players want. So sometimes a group will hire him and say up front, we don't want to feel bad about killing orcs or goblins or any other type of fantasy

character. That's a tough one to step into because I just know where my limits are. I feel like I, yeah, I know a lot about orcs. I know a lot about fantasy worlds, but there are real world issues that I'm still trying to educate myself on more. And what I find very interesting is that D&D, as opposed to reading a book or watching a movie, allows you, the player, the group, to kind of dictate that stuff.

In a situation like that, Tim will literally dehumanize the characters and turn them into creatures, to the point where they might not even know how to talk. But he thinks the way that tabletop RPGs are set up, the game master is encouraged to make the players question the consequences of their actions. So there is a certain level of thoughtfulness that you can't help but end up stumbling into when you are role-playing. It'll literally happen like,

okay, three goblin prisoners. All right, I kill the first goblin. And it's like, cool. Then I ask the other one questions and then I go and kill him. I'm like, cool. What do you do with the third one? I'm like, I guess I guess we'll probably kill him. I go, OK, do you? And suddenly like that moment when it's like, yeah, you have to do it. You have. And then suddenly it's like, no, I don't want to. And that's when you know you're really like role playing at that point. like role-playing at that point. That also gets to the question of what people want out of role-playing. As we talked about earlier, tabletop RPGs are based on the idea of consensus. A group of players agree to believe in the same world and abide by the same set of rules. But as tabletop RPGs are getting more nuanced and sophisticated and bringing in a wider group of people, the games are starting to resemble the real world. Because these days in the real world, coming to a consensus and agreeing on the same set of rules or even agreeing that we live in the same idea of reality, it's getting harder. So in that sense, playing these types of games, especially with a group of strangers,

can be more valuable than ever. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to James Bendis-Hodes, Emily Kerbos, Avery Alder, and Tim Woods. I put a link to all of their work in the show notes. As usual, there is a lot of overlap between this episode and previous topics I've covered. Besides my older D&D episodes, I've done episodes about LARPing,

and I did an episode about board games, meaning tabletop games where you are not roleplaying. And there is a lot of overlap between people that design board games, tabletop RPGs, and LARPs. Also, I did an episode about Avatar The Last Airbender. You can find all those episodes in the show archives. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook and Instagram. I tweet at emulinski and imagineworldspod.

If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest

in every episode. And we recently lowered the pledge for the Dropbox account, so you can now access it at $5 a month. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.