Theo Dudek, Ultimate Game Master

The other night I had a dream that I was playing a tabletop RPG. I was at home and it was nighttime and all my friends were there — Shesh, Mike, Jen, Vartan, Hawwa — and they all wanted to play a game with me. I got out some old 3.0 adventure, a dungeon crawl with goblins and ogres and ratmen — the adventure had a brown cover, the whole dream was very brown- and red-colored — and I could feel my heart beating faster with excitement at having all my favorite players from L.A. and Escondido in one place to play a game. But unfortunately, the dream ended there and we didn’t actually get to play… we just made characters and then things sort of puttered out inconclusively.

I often have dreams about RPGs. Sometimes I even dream of years ago, the first time I ever played roleplaying games. Maybe I’ve spent so much time gaming that it is an essential function of my brain that even happens in my sleep. All kinds of monsters and scenarios float through my mind (Shadowrun, Warhammer, Cthulhu, D&D, Exalted, different science fiction and fantasy homebrews…). Unfortunately, these dream games, like the dream I had last night, often end before the game really gets going. More often than not, I dream that I am *about* to run a game, but then everyone is late or they want to watch a DVD instead or someone flakes out or something like that. :( I guess I’ll have to take comfort in the fact that I dream of gaming, but not be discouraged by the fact that so many of my dreams are dreams of frustration. In the end, I’m confident that the good games, the satisfying games, will outweigh the bad.

I have often regretted that I didn’t get to know Gary Gygax better before he died in 2008. Although I have some issues with his gaming philosophy, you can’t help but respect him. He was one of those onetime giants, like Michael Jackson or Eminem, who was already fading into the past when I was just starting to get into the world of roleplaying. (I don’t know if Jackson or Eminem roleplayed, I’m just mentioning them for a point of comparison. -_- )

I’ve already made my feelings about Gygax and his partner Arneson known in this video. The news that there may soon be a statue of Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva fills me with interest. Some gamers I know suggested that the statue could straddle the harbor of Lake Geneva like the ancient Colossus of Rhodes. Ancient Greek bronzeworking and construction techniques may not have been advanced enough to let the statue actually stand with one foot on either side of the harbor and have ships pass between its legs — that part may be a modern conjecture — but modern metalworking technology would make it easy to create such a structure. In an ideal situation, technology is about bringing us closer to the products of our imagination.

But admittedly, this might be impossible in the current economic climate (although I think constructing a giant bronze statue would actually provide lots of jobs). One smaller-scale option, which I find more personally interesting, would be a lifesize statue of Gygax sitting at a gaming table in a park, eternally playing D&D (1st edition, of course). This isn’t a bad second choice, but I would suggest going one further — what about constructing an automatic D&D-playing statue, similar to the famous Mechanical Turk of the late 18th century? At the time, this statue/robot fooled millions with its ability to play chess with human opponents. It is now believed that the Turk was merely a hollow (but still impressive) mechanical shell with a dwarven chess-player concealed in the cabinet.

The Gygax statue could operate on similar principles, since even today it is difficult to imagine a computer which could perform all the functions of a human DM. DMs could climb inside the statue and, by manipulating Gygax’s hands from within, simulate the rolling of dice and all other game functions. This would give DMs a true thrill — the opportunity to actually BECOME Gygax, seeing the world through his eyes as it were, blasphemous as this may seem. The idea makes me think of one of my favorite movies, “Being John Malkovich.” Some people might say that it is cheating to have an automaton-DM pretending to be a real one, but in the famous Greek temples of Alexandria there were numerous mechanical idols which were accepted by the believers. Sure, these sorts of things are “tricks,” but they may actually make people believe *more* in the game instead of less, and that’s always a good thing.

At any rate I am looking forward to what the statue planners have in mind for Gygax’s memorial and I hope that they will consider these proposals!! Although Gygax was apparently not the best Dungeon Master ever, his mark on roleplaying is indelible. Unfortunately I can probably not make it to GaryCon this year but I will be watching over the interwebs to see what develops. ^^

In some of the worst news I have heard all year, it appears that prison inmates in Wisconsin are forbidden to play Dungeons & Dragons or even possess D&D materials. This inhumane practice was just upheld by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, making Wisconsin one of those shameful government entities, like the IDF, that has an official anti-roleplaying policy.

My own experience with the police has mostly been negative, so I can’t say I’m surprised, but this is incredibly frustrating. It’s the same old argument, used after the Columbine killings and many other times, that says that “fantasy games” (RPGs, MMOs, Settlers of Catan, what have you) will make people engage in violent behavior. Personal experience to the contrary, this is simply not true — roleplayers, if anything, are far more likely to act out their violent impulses in the game rather than taking them out on real people or objects. But once again, like in the old RPG “Paranoia,” the government insists on acting like thought police. (Especially annoying is the prison psychologist’s brainless association of the “Dungeon Master” with a “gang leader” — as if! It’s almost impossible to make a group of players even go on a mission to fight wererats, let alone commit real crimes!)

So prisoners are allowed to work out in the gym, and allowed conjugal visits, but not allowed the freedom of their imaginations. When will the government stop trying to control what goes on in people’s minds? Can the creative space ever be kept free of interference, or is this doomed to be an eternal human struggle between Lawful Neutral and Chaotic forces? I’d like to hope that the forces of roleplaying are victorious, even if this has to be taken to the Supreme Court. Better to roleplay a dragonborn or a tiefling rather than roleplaying a kowtowing yes-man to a prison guard or a tough gangsta gang member to those who know you. :/ But of course, some kinds of roleplaying are accepted by society and others are not.

The other day I was reading up on the various New Deal programs that were created then to get through the Great Depression. ^_^ Among them was a great deal of arts programs, the ancestor of modern government programs which sponsor artists, writers, playwrights, etc. (Of course, my high school had its arts program cut in my senior year, but…)

This got me thinking: could RPGs ever be deemed worthy of federal money? They could definitely be considered an art form — in addition to the writing and live-action performance elements, there is a strong connection to oral storytelling, which has its own guilds and subculture, like the Masons, that not many outsiders know about. Of course, there are risks that could come with accepting this money, such as the possibility that DMs might be forced to produce pro-government work (so no games of Dark Conspiracy, KULT, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, CthulhuTech…). But if the government was willing to stay hands-off, it could produce a great blossoming of roleplaying games. I know many DMs who would appreciate the opportunity to develop their campaigns without having to worry about financial pressures. It is similar to the Italian Renaissance when artists such as Michaelangelo worked under the patron system — but they didn’t do RPGs about how the evil Medicis were plotting to destroy Rome.

Of course, perhaps now is not the best economic or political time for this to be brought up. It is questionable whether a bill specifically setting aside money for Dungeon Masters (and players in the form of books, dice, pencils, etc.) could get through the Senate or Congress at the present time. RPGs might have to hide under the coattails of a more general ‘arts’ fund, with each game defended on a case-by-case basis, bean-counted down to every last hit point.

Personally, I think there are better ways to approach RPGing. My proposal is starting a petition to grant RPG publishers tax-exempt status. Of course, in return for this exemption, the publishers would have to make their sourcebooks and rules set open to the public — if they REALLY want people to play their games, if they are a sincere publisher, then exposure will be more important to them than money. Eventually, when the system has proven to be a success, “roleplay-based organizations” could even become eligible for federal funding and have an office devoted to them, perhaps along with neighborhood and community organizations, since most gaming groups are only 4-8 people. Perhaps this could be a second-term project for Obama?

I’ve already written a bit about goblins and lizardfolk, so I wanted to move on to another, possibly *the* most major, fantasy race creation of the 20th century. The difference between “orcs” and “goblins” (let alone bugbears, hobgoblins, redcaps, ogres, Uruk-Hai, etc.) is pretty vague, but I would say that orcs in the modern sense originated with J.R.R. Tolkien. The defining moment was sometime between “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings,” in which the former’s cave-dwelling goblins — probably inspired by the goblins in George MacDonald’s 1872 The Princess and the Goblin — morphed into the militaristic masses of army orcs seen in LotR.

Like all of Tolkien’s worldview, orcs were heavily shaped by World War I and World War II. In orcs, the generic evil fairy/goblin fantasy race of European mythology was strained through a filter of literalism, making creatures which had once been phantasmal, fairy-like things (half-spirit, half-flesh) into solid living creatures. (Meanwhile, elves, dwarves and hobbits got the other aspects of the amorphous fairytale sprite — elves got the noble, Faerie Court qualities, hobbits got the home-and-hearth brownie aspect, and dwarves got the cave-digging, mining end of the deal.) As Tolkien’s Middle-Earth morphed from a world of individual heroism and myth into a world of mass warfare where flesh and blood were very real, orcs became The Opponents, The Other. This is how orcs were defined — as a mass of totally evil creatures, enemies so evil that you can feel no remorse about killing ‘em off in huge quantities.

For this reason, orcs are probably my least favorite of all the standard fantasy races. By definition, they are Evil and there are Lots of Them. That is really all there is to it. Their appearance is rather vague, except that they are ugly and brutal-looking. Sometimes they have gray skin, sometimes they have green skin. But what do orcs look like in Tolkien’s own words…? According to Tolkiengateway.net, in one of the letters reprinted in “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,” Tolkien describes orcs as “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”.

Yes — as “The Other,” orcs also represent an unavoidable element of racial prejudice. Tolkien’s quote is pretty blatant. If we were to be generous, Tolkien adds “to Europeans”, which by the standards of someone born in 1892, is at least admitting that he knows where his own prejudices are coming from. On other occasions, Tolkien did sometimes make anti-racist comments, to judge from another letter which recounts Tolkien’s answer when a publisher in 1938 Nazi Germany inquired into publishing “The Hobbit” and asked him if he was of Aryan origin. (”Thank you for your letter … I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware noone (sic) of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”) But just because one makes statements in defense of one ethnic group doesn’t mean that one is free from other types of racial prejudice. World War 2 made anti-Semitism (in the anti-Jewish sense) extremely unfashionable, but prejudices against other foreign “Eastern” mysterious dark-skinned Others continued to proliferate. And so, 50 years later, we have things like the movie “300,” in which the evil vaguely Arabic armies are literally transformed into orc- and ogre-like creatures.

Retroactively Blond Orc

Peter Jackson, I think, recognized this race-prejudice aspect when he made the Lord of the Rings movies, and he tried to skirt around it while not removing it entirely (because how could you? Seriously, someone tell me /_\ ). It’s the same as the scene in “The Two Towers” with the “Evil Men from the East”, Sauron’s allies, who are explicitly Middle Eastern. But then when you actually see a closeup of an “Evil Man” in “Return of the King”, and he’s some tattooed white guy. If I were being uncharitable to Jackson, I’d say that he was trying to sneak the original “oooh scary Middle Easterners” element in there, but then if someone complains, he can point to “Return of the King” and say “Hey, they’re white! What are you complaining about?” -_-;; A similar scene, I think, is in “The Two Towers” when you see a long, lingering closeup of an orc with scraggly blonde death-metal hair. This archetypally “white” hair defuses the other racial signifiers of the orc (the dark skin, etc.).

Of course, by now orcs have literally multiplied all over the pop-culture and fantasy landscape to the point that they’re everywhere, and you don’t need to have Tolkien’s views on race to have an orc desktop wallpaper or something. Some fantasy world designers, like the World of Warcraft people, have gone the Avatar route and given orcs the ‘noble savage’ flavor, so that gamers can enjoy being mighty orcish hunters or orcish hide-tanners and whatnot. Of course, as George Lucas could tell you, the majority of fantasy or science fiction “alien races” have some elements from real-world ethnic stereotyping, and orcs are just one example. Snakemen and lizardmen and other ’savage’ species in the Conan mode were certainly influenced by the racist views of writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. But orcs’ Otherness and Evilness is their strongest trait, and outweighs the specificity of anything else in their design. Lizardfolk are at least lizardy, they have aspects of a particular animal on top of being ‘monsters’ or ‘enemies,’ but orcs are just….. orcs.

I can think of two ways offhand to make orcs more interesting and less objectionable:

(1) Emphasize the ‘tainted elf’ aspect which Tolkien alludes to. Orcs could sort of become the new Drow, twisted mockeries of elves, with pointed ears and all, but mutated and monstrous.

(2) Emphasize the ‘mass production/industrialism’ element which was also part of Tolkien’s hatred of modernism. Orcs are creatures of mass warfare — in the Peter Jackson movies, they’re not even born, they’re sort of mined from the ground. They are about iron and smoke and soot and fire. (Of course, ’soot’ and the resulting ‘darkness’ has its own racial weight, but… but… where do you draw the line? >_< )

I may have bitten off a too-heavy theme in this article, and I know other people have said the same thing many times, but in short, this is what I don’t like about orcs. They don’t have enough flavor of their own; they’re just there to be beaten up, and to provide a group that is so evil, you can do anything to them and you’re still the Good Guys. All of this is buried somewhere in the back of Tolkien, and by extension in the back of D&D.

I don’t like to talk about my personal life on this blog aside from gaming, but once in awhile something happens which I need to speak about. I am a forgiving DM, but if there is one thing I cannot stand, it’s people spreading lies about me. ^^*

A few months ago I wrote about a filmmaker I encountered who wanted me to help him make a “Dungeons & Dragons documentary.” I declined because it was obvious that he didn’t know anything about D&D and I thought he would misrepresent the RPG experience. However, what I didn’t mention is that I was also approached, around the same time, by a writer — I won’t mention his name, just as I didn’t mention the filmmaker’s — who said he was doing a book on roleplaying. He asked me for a series of interviews about gaming and the experience of being a Dungeon Master.

Let me tell you — this guy knew *nothing* about RPGs. He thought that elves were a class, not a race. He thought that the dungeon master was somehow the ‘enemy’ of the players and not the creator of the whole world, benevolent and malevolent alike (on a side note: I’m so relieved that the designers of 4e decided not to re-craft D&D in a ‘players vs. DM’ model, as they mentioned they’d considered in the 4e DMG!). He thought lead miniatures were just two-dimensional ’standee’ cutouts. o_0 He even used the phrase “cast a saving throw.” (＃ﾟДﾟ) He said he had played RPGs ‘years ago’ and he was one of the “‘74 generation” so I thought statistically he might be telling the truth. But upon reflection I think he may have been lying. Hobgoblin, Mazes and Monsters… there was a lot of misrepresentation about RPGs in the early ’80s, and I think he was just drawing from the vocabulary of common stereotypes of the time.

I talked to him for awhile and signed a contract which he said his publisher had required him to get interviewees to sign. I am always eager to spread the word of RPGs so I gladly allowed him to use my name and likeness. But, unfortunately, I was not omniscient ._. and apparently the “contract” allowed him to use a great deal more than that. This “writer” has now come out with a book about RPGs which uses my likeness and those of the people in my gaming group. I am not so concerned with the matter of money and royalties, but I *am* concerned with the way gamers are depicted. There are 28 depictions of gamers committing violent acts upon others in connection to games. The RPG-playing characters are depicted as cowardly and oblivious and willing to turn upon one another at a moment’s notice. Most irritatingly, he presents my games (DMed by me) as a sort of rinky-tink operation in which everything is shabby and dilapidated. >_<* I *ALWAYS* clean all my gaming equipment between games and I would bet that NO ONE has ever found a piece of Smartfood or Pirate's Booty sticking to one of my books or miniatures. Furthermore, there is the implication that I mistreated one of my pets, making me a sort of Michael Vick of gaming. I would *NEVER* do this as I value my beasts dearly. The overall impression is that gamers are incompetent, unstable, dangerous and barely able to muster the energy to crawl to the door to answer the pizza delivery man in between rounds.

Anyway, I will not give this "writer" the satisfaction of linking to his book, but I wanted to make the record clear that the whole thing was a breach of trust and a major distortion of what actually happened. I have again learned an important lesson to make my Sense Motive rolls (3e reference, nostalgia ^^ ) when dealing with people who profess an interest in RPGs but in fact know NOTHING about them (and may even share a family relation to anti-RPG interests... I couldn't help but notice that the author shared a last name with the infamous anti-gaming crusader Jack Thompson. Neither have returned my emails asking for comment.) To paraphrase Edward Said, RPG players have to be allowed to represent themselves, not be represented by others who present them as ‘exotic’ and primitive! RPGers are not orcish demihumanoids who are prone to erupt in savage violence, nor are they fanatical obsessives unable to see past their cherished books. And now back to reading Primal Power.

This has been making its way around but I thought this five-minute speech, All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons, was interesting. It’s too bad he wasn’t up on the podium for longer. I don’t know what the size of the audience was, but if he had had more time, he could have actually run a short game, perhaps with 8-12 PCs and the other audience members playing minion NPCs or providing sound effects such as crowd chatter. As I always tell people, the best way to learn about roleplaying games is to play them. ^^

A few years ago I was running a play-by-web-forum game set in the Crimean War. (I don’t normally like these as much as tabletop RPGs because it’s difficult to get people to abide by the results of die rolls — RPGs should be challenging!! — but anyway. -_- )

Anyway, there were eight players in the game when it started. However, as is the way of RPGs ._. two of them dropped out almost immediately and three of them dropped out within a month. The forums were getting dead and the Ottoman Empire was totally not represented. So I came up with some fictional characters and had them create characters for the forum. BUT, I didn’t want the other players to know that people had been dropping out and were being replaced by NPCs, so I just played the characters as if they were real people who had happened to stumble onto the forum and started playing. (One of them was a Hussar with a missing limb that had a primitive cyberware pistol attached to it; the other one was a Turkish sturgeon fisherman; and the third was a Russian noblewoman in an open relationship living in Sevastopol.)

The game was going really well for awhile and the Russian woman and the caviar fisherman were starting to hit it off after his boat had picked her up when her private ship was sunk by the French navy along the Ukrainian coast. Then I accidentally posted as the Hussar using the Turkish guy’s account, and the remaining three players found out that I was just playing the others as NPCs. Two of them got really ticked off and left the game after an exchange of irritated emails. With only one PC left, the game collapsed after three exciting months. /_\

The thing that I don’t understand is why they got so annoyed when they found out that three of the characters were NPC personas. Although they didn’t exist in “reality,” they existed in my mind as deeply as any personality I have ever constructed: the personality I use when dealing with the registrars, the personality I use when DMing, etc. I even had figured out the birthdates and families and blood types of the fictional people playing the PCs. (Two of them were history majors at Princeton and one of them was an iPhone developer in New Delhi.) In the gameworld within the world, they were as real as I could make them; and the interaction with the players had with them was totally real. They were real in the terms of the game.

Now, if one of the other players had asked me, the DM, “Hey, are these people NPCs?” I would have told them they were. Of course, if they asked the *NPCs* “Hey, are you a NPC?” then of course they would have reacted with surprise and befuddlement. The NPC doesn’t know that he is a NPC!! *-* It is impossible by the very nature of existence for an NPC to acknowledge their “unreality.” At least I assume it is.

I am reminded of the sample adventure in the old RPG Over the Edge, written by the great Jonathan Tweet, in which the player-characters discover that they are just fictional characters in a RPG, and the game ends with the PCs encountering their “real” selves. I’m also reminded of “The Circular Ruins,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which a person travels to a mysterious shrine in the jungle where they discover that they are not real, but only someone else’s dream. Do RPG characters have an existence outside their creators? Is playing a PC or a NPC in a RPG “faking,” or acting, or what? I think that as long as it’s sincere, it’s good.

(There is the small factor that a manufacturer of Crimean war pewter miniatures was buying ads on the site and encouraged me to keep running the game so he could make money and split it with me in this profit-sharing scheme. -_- But let me tell you: Google ads money or no Google ads money, I would have kept that RPG going. I loved it just the same.)

After being burned many times, my first inclination is to avoid movies and documentaries which claim to show the ‘truth’ of roleplaying or D&D. (Also, the biggest ones, Darkon and Monster Camp, are about live action roleplaying, presumably because it’s more videogenic. While I like live action roleplaying, I am still waiting for a good movie to come out about tabletop RPGs — particularly since so many people get the two types of RPGs mixed up.)

However, I just found a promising trailer for The Dungeon Masters, a documentary on tabletop gamers directed by Keven McAlester. Though it seems at points to be making fun of its subjects, the mockery appears light and the gamers seem to be fairly realistic older gamers. I’m really looking forward to seeing it~ ^^

Information available in the trailer suggests that the film has a theme I haven’t seen elsewhere (well, maybe in just one other book): basically, that the political & economic turmoil in the ‘real world’ makes it understandable for someone to spend time in a ‘fantasy world’ playing Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve heard this argument made about people from broken homes playing D&D, but it is rare for people to make the obvious leap and apply it to a global level — why do people play RPGs? Because Forgotten Realms is better than Earth. And I don’t even like Forgotten Realms that much.

However, while I think this is close to the truth, it’s only halfway there. While some roleplayers are certainly forced into ‘extreme’ roleplaying — the drow cosplay, the nude D&D, etc. — by the torments of a difficult world, becoming more and more extremist when the real world falls apart around them, other people roleplay simply because roleplaying is great. They’re not doing it to get away from suffering and misery and electric bills. They’re not doing it because they were bullied. They’re doing it to celebrate the awesomeness of roleplaying, of having good imaginations and stories (and DMs -_- ) and characters beyond the number of characters anyone can play in a single lifetime.

Even if we lived in a paradise, people would want to roleplay. They would ask the timeless question, “Who am I? How was I created? Why am I here?” To the first question they would answer “I am a Skull Elf Fighter”, to the second question they would answer “Two 15s, a 12, an 11, a 16 and and an 18″ and to the third question they would answer “To plunder the lost city of Sardathrion, fight its monsters and steal its riches.”

These are just examples, but you get what I mean. RPGs are great. I’ll post more soon.

It’s been ages since I’ve posted, and I must apologize profusely. -_-;; The solstice and (thankfully) RPGing has gotten in the way of my posts.

I was thinking recently about what, to me, are the irreplaceable elements of good roleplaying games. To me, it boils down to two things:

(1) ROLEPLAYING. Er, this is obvious, isn’t it? -_-;; If you aren’t invested in the character, if you’re not willing to act it out and get into it, then you’re not really playing a RPG, you’re playing something else. (A board game?) Nonetheless, some people can’t seem to do this. But when I find someone who really knows how to get into character, who really loses their “self” in the process of roleplaying, then it’s like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. It’s like finding a secret door leading to a room full of treasure. There is nothing better than good roleplaying! That’s also one of the joys of being the DM, getting to play all the thousands and thousands of minor characters who the player characters encounter. ^^

(2) CHANCE/RANDOMNESS/MAYHEM. This is the “game” part, I guess. But what I mean to say is, good RPGs should have an element of chaos. This is the main thing that makes me dubious of diceless RPGs (though some of them are OK) and things like messageboard RPGs, where people just say whatever they want — “I’m a wizard! With sparkling green eyes!” “I’m a vampire! A glittering vampire!” Sure, it is fun and admirable to imagine yourself as a fictional character, but you need to keep one foot in the reality that the world is a random and chaotic place where you are often buffeted around by forces outside your control. You must improvise, you must roll with the punches, and you must deal with torments (which the DM must provide despite their natural desire to go easy on their friends), not just imagine yourself as some superstar.

So, good roleplaying games (to me) require the players to identify with their characters… in unpredictable and genuinely troublesome situations. ^^ If you’re just playing a difficult video game or a board game, it’s not a RPG. If you’re just saying “I can flllyyyyyyy” and flapping your wings (although this is good emoting if you’re playing a serious game) it’s not a RPG. You have to combine these two elements. Many gamers do not like the first element, and some RPers do not like the second element. But for me, that is the essence of roleplaying — playing a character, but playing them through adversity, not just good times.