A Cordoba Spaniard in the Yellow King’s Court

Today, I played a session of old-school D&D. The Red Box, to be precise, or Labyrinth Lord, its retroclone. We had both the Red Box books and the Labyrinth Lord hardcover at the game table and used them more or less interchangeably. The adventure was the famous B9 Castle Caldwell and Beyond, the iconic Christmas calendar dungeon (you open a door and something completely random pops out). The module holds a special place in the Finnish gaming culture, because it was one of the few modules that got translated into Finnish and some elements of it are completely ridiculous. A few years ago, some people associated with the Roolipelaaja magazine got together and played several sessions of Castle Caldwell and Beyond in different rulesets and game styles. They posted game reports on the forum, which is unfortunately gone now.

The game was advertised as a one-shot, but seems to have already spawned a loose campaign-like structure. It’s connected by the Mekanismi wiki to a fairly large player pool. The name of the campaign is “In the Shadow of Hatheg-Kla”. As may be determined from the name, there’s a strong Lovecraftian influence to the game world, Celaeno. However, in a surprise move, it’s not so much the Cthulhu Mythos as it is the Dream Cycle. Other inspirations are R.E. Howard’s Almuric, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars and Venus novels, Leigh Brackett’s Skaith Trilogy, and Supplement V: Carcosa. It’s sword and planet and sorcery type stuff, weird fantasy that gives a context where even the reason-defying inhabitants of Castle Caldwell make sense.

I hadn’t actually played Red Box D&D before. It was an interesting experience. The game has a lot fewer rules than the D&D I’m used to, and is a great deal faster, especially in combat. That said, it’s also a bit inelegant, with the downward-counting Armour Class and to-hit chart, and the lack of a unifying core mechanic. Then, it is also a system that doesn’t really get in the way, and even the Armour Class thing just needs getting used to.

I played Alidan, a brave 1st-level elf, fresh from the Elflands, taken by wanderlust, searching for adventure. The other members of the group were Jado the Robin, a thick-skulled halfling and former slave, and Esteban, a noble fighter from a place he called “Spain” that nobody else had ever heard of. He kept going on about bad opium in a den in Macao. The DM was Navdi, who writes the blog Blowing smoke. He and another one of the players have also been playtesting Lamentations of the Flame Princess’ Insect Shrine of the Goblin King, which probably has something to do with the idea of running Labyrinth Lord.

A common concept in the sword and planet genre is that of the adventurer transported from our world to another planet or world – John Carter and Gullivar Jones to Mars, Randolph Carter to the Dreamlands, and so forth. Thus, Esteban and his henchman, Burt, were a nobleman and a sailor from 17th-century Earth. This kept coming up during the session. Clifton Caldwell was an Englishman, and one of the traders in the castle talked about Edinburgh.

This trick allowed the DM to do something interesting in the narration. Usually, at least in my experience, it’s a good idea to avoid cultural references reaching outside the game world, because they are damaging to the atmosphere. In narrating the events of a game set in the Forgotten Realms, you don’t say that the architecture looks like Ancient Egypt or that the bar is like the Mos Eisley Cantina. In my opinion, the narration and description of the game should be delivered to the cultural context of the PCs. I even criticised one of the papers (Hendricks) on the RPG course on this very topic. However, since it was established that one of the PCs was a Spaniard, with an Englishman as his henchman, Navdi could describe the architecture as “roughly Turkish or Ottoman” to Esteban, and all the players would understand it.

Making Making No Sense Make Sense

The other nifty trick in the game was that since the world is derived from Lovecraft’s Dreamlands and the sword and planet genre, where weird things happen, the sky has a strange tint and the Mona Lisa was painted by Erol Otus, it doesn’t have to make sense, as such. The weirdness brought by some oddities of the ruleset or idiotic module design is not unusual and doesn’t even need to be remarked upon. “This is the blackest kind of magic!” was actually Alidan’s explanation for a lot of things in the castle, and I feel it worked a lot better in the pulp setting than it would have in, say, Greyhawk, or in 3E.

That said, Navdi did cut out the dire shrew, because there’s weird and then there’s just plain dumb.

Another, bigger change that he wrought dealt with the three traders in Rooms 3, 4 and 5. In the original module, they’re three traders with no names who have identical stock for sale and are just resting. Now, they turned out to be identical triplets, who had no memory of coming to the place and who were overtaken by frothing rage when they laid eyes on one another. The first we recruited as a henchman, the second we tied up after he attacked the first one, and when we met the third one, our henchman charged him, while the other guy shook off his bonds and came to join in the fray. Then we had three identical traders, all named Charles, wrestling on the floor, and they started melding into one another, turning into some sort of monster straight out of a David Cronenberg film that attacked us. Overcome with revulsion, Alidan, Esteban, Jado and Burt hacked it to pieces and burned the foul goop that it melted into.

Also, the cleric in the last tower room worshiped Yog-Sothoth, which I clued into when Navdi described her holy symbol as looking like a key. The shrine itself was originally dedicated to Nodens.

He’s Dead, Jim

Another aspect of the Red Box, compared to newer versions of D&D, is that it’s a lot more lethal. Esteban, at full hit points, failed a save vs. poison and died immediately, to be replaced by the thief Jevgeni, a henchman he’d hired from the village in the shadow of Hatheg-Kla. Jado was chewed up by a fire beetle, and replaced by Dimitri, a cleric of Nodens who had heard of the evil plaguing Castle Caldwell and showed up just as we were done burying Esteban.

Alidan mostly survived because of luck. His AC was low, but monsters, when their attacks were randomised, rarely chose to strike at him and when they did, still missed. He took a total of three points of damage during the whole scenario, while fighting at the front line with his scimitar. And one of those points was when Jevgeni accidentally shot him.

Since I spend most of my time in a different town from the rest of the gang, it’s not likely I’ll get to play Alidan again, but it was great fun.

I should be getting my grade for the course soon. I already received feedback on my study journal, the tone of which suggests that I probably have not failed the course.

The final lecture of the course discussed roleplaying games in society and culture. It’s been a few weeks since then, and my memory is not perfect, so there may be inaccuracies and rambling.

Examples of roleplaying games used outside of pure entertainment context include educational uses, product development, crisis therapy, and, interestingly, product development. Apparently Nokia’s got a patent pending for something that was thought up during a Shadowrun game. There are also roleplay elements in product development when they try to figure out how a given gadget would actually be used by the consumers.

For educational RPGs, we’ve got loads of examples. Especially the Danes have done well in this area. There’s a three-person LARP they use to train social workers, and then there’s “the RPG school”, Østerskov Efterskole, whose headmaster, Malik Hyltoft, was a GoH at Ropecon this year. Nice guy, very good English, ran an RPG session I was later told was seven sorts of awesome. The system at Østerskov Efterskole is very interesting, and apparently works very well for students who underperform in a conventional school setting. There’s an article by Hyltoft himself, describing it in some detail, in Playground Worlds, a book published in conjunction with Knutepunkt 2008. Ransomware, unfortunately, not available for free download. Yet. I’m considering buying a copy myself. There’s an in-depth review on RPG.net.

The slides also describe shortly an American military exercise/LARP in Bagdad, Louisiana, that costs $3,000,000/week and employs 1,200 professional larpers who speak Arabic. The purpose of this is to train American soldiers for counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, I can find no online information and the entire sources slide for the lecture is conspicuously blank. A military cover-up?

Then there’s reading roleplaying games as cultural products and how they explore their themes. Trinity was their parade example (future optimism, narcotics optimism, criticism towards government surveillance, the rise of Africa and China to replace USA as the dominant world power), but games such as Shadowrun (the implications of everyone having Augmented Reality systems on all the time, body modification), Transhuman Space (well, transhumanism), Paranoia (government surveillance, McCarthyism), Blue Rose (“probably impossible to play, but a fascinating read”), and Mage: the Ascension (the negotiable nature of reality) were also discussed. Then there were the LARPs, like Europa, which was set in a refugee centre somewhere in Eastern Europe, after the Nordic countries kicked the shit out of each other. The players were larpers from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and (I think) Russia, with the Russians as the camp guards and staff, and the rest refugees from their homelands. That had just kicked the shit out of each other. Ethnic tensions and hijinks ensued.

There was also a very amusing exploration of the political overtones of World of Warcraft. It’s a profoundly capitalistic utopia, where everyone starts at the same square and with hard work can make it to the top. The success of one person does not require that another one fails, so everyone can succeed. Resources are infinite, and there’s practically no cap to one’s personal development. Of course, the result of this is that begging is condemned.

After that followed the discussion of gender and sexuality in roleplaying games.

Gary Alan Fine, in his study of roleplaying games way back in the 1970’s, noted that in many (most?) gaming groups, members of the all-male party killed and raped female NPCs. Games with female players present were “cleaner”, but also, according to some of the interviewed, “not as fun.”

Here, I would like to note how happy I am that we, as a society and as a hobby, have come far since the 1970’s.

For a long time, RPGs were nearly exclusively a masculine hobby. It wasn’t until the early 90’s that the balance shifted, with Vampire: the Masquerade and larping bringing in women in significant numbers.

Apparently, around this time, there was serious debate in Sweden about whether women need handicaps to make the game fair. There was even a LARP where they’d taped hints to the wall of the girls’ bathroom.

It was probably necessary that it happened, so that the hobby could just get over it.

Once it was established that there are actually quite a few of these strange new people who were different inside their pants, and that they wanted to game and it wasn’t okay to treat them like they were dense, they could start treating the topic maturely. This resulted in things like Hamlet, where the PCs were written as gender neutral, to avoid the problem of people playing characters of the opposite sex (turns out that if you have 15 mat and 15 female characters, the first 30 players to sign up will probably not have an equal gender split). Since the relationships of the characters were written in, this inevitably led to homosexual relationships. Then there was Mellan himmel och hav, a Swedish LARP inspired by the novels of Ursula K. LeGuin. I missed which ones, specifically, but I’d assume The Left Hand of Darkness is in there (If you’re not familiar with the work, get it and read it. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, which is a reliable indicator of quality.). They’ve also developed different methods for roleplaying sex in a LARP. There is also a LARP called Gang Rape. It’s not as bad as it soun- well, actually it is, but it’s a mature work, and not in the sense that Jenna Jameson’s filmography is mature. The game was written as a criticism of the Swedish system where it’s practically impossible to get convicted of rape or gang rape. Takes some balls to tackle a subject like that. I haven’t read the entire game nor played it (nor do I actually want to), but trying to provoke thoughtful discussion of taboo topics without resorting to outright trolling is a commendable goal.

Nordic LARP, or some elements of it, have occasionally been described as sex-obsessed. I don’t consider myself to be in a position to really comment on whether it is or isn’t, but I would describe humanity in general as sex-obsessed. At least the larpers seem to be putting a degree of thought into it.

Moving on, we come to the topic of world-building. A core aspect of roleplaying  games is the development and exploration of new worlds. What kinds of worlds are possible? What the world should be? What the world should be? What the world actually is? In some of the bigger LARPs and certain online RPGs, you get entire (dys)functional societies. An interesting example here was Hiljaisuuden vangit (“Prisoners of Silence”), a mid-90’s Finnish RPG set in a fascist Finland after the Nazis won WW2. Finland was an ally of Germany back then, so it’s not as bad as it could have been, but it’s still a dystopia. The game is next to impossible to acquire nowadays, unfortunately. The makers thought there was no longer any demand and dumped their remaining stock into paper recycling. There used to be a Finnish website that lavishly described a setting that may have been inspired by the game, but seems to have followed it into oblivion.

There was discussion of games as escapism, games as propaganda or counterpropaganda, games as a method of exploring themes and concepts, and so forth. More discussion of studying and researching roleplaying games, also outside of the actual game – historical research, for instance. Discussion of the impact of roleplaying games on culture in general. While D&D isn’t the only reason for the current “fantasy boom” in media, as BBC claimed (there’s a certain Oxford English professor who has a lot to answer for, and Harry Potter is not entirely blameless either), things would certainly be different without it. Electronic gaming in general would be very different, and World of Warcraft (11.5 million subscribers, at the moment) could not exist as it currently does. Trying to track the influences of D&D (and other roleplaying games, but let’s face it, to the outside world, it’s mostly D&D) in popular media is very interesting. There are a number of authors, such as China Miéville and Charles Stross, whose work has been influenced by roleplaying games quite a bit. I think  Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu isn’t also entirely blameless for the popularisation of Lovecraft. Vampire and modern depictions of vampires are an interesting topic as well, although most of it can be just traced to the source, Anne Rice. Other things… not so much.

Well, I think that just about wraps things up. I’ll still be writing a post or two on the course, but I’ll be discussing something else before that, in case I still have a readership after this.

asive Games: Theory and Design

Well, it’s been a while. Soon after writing the last post, I found myself with all sorts of deadlines and duties and even parties, which, among other things, led to me finishing the study journal for this course two days late, writing the last pages in a hurry with a second-degree burn on my left hand. I managed to steam-cook my hand in the afterparty sauna of the Helsinki University RPG club’s anniversary celebrations. While alcohol was involved, I hold that it was mostly my own stupidity.

The study journal required for the completion of the course is now finished, though I haven’t yet received a grade. I will probably not post it here, because in the end, I opted to write it in Finnish, and because even those who can read it are unlikely to glean anything interesting out of it. Also, there’s a good chance that it’s crap, since parts of it were written in a hurry and I had to fit in a great deal of material, not all of which I found entirely fascinating. After a while, even the interesting schoolwork starts feeling like schoolwork, which is destructive to my motivation.

Aaanyway, the penultimate lecture of the course discussed pervasive games. The lecturer recently published a book on the topic with one Annika Waern. After finishing the book, they also started a blog about it, since they couldn’t fit everything in, and new stuff keeps coming up.

In short, pervasive games are games that break the “magic circle” of the game. The “magic circle” is the contractual area within which the rules of the game preside, and sometimes override the general laws of the land. To use their example, when you step inside a boxing ring, it suddenly becomes permissible to hit another man in the face, but you are not allowed to remove your gloves. In Monopoly, it’s the board; in tabletop RPGs, a bit fuzzier but generally around the space the players occupy. The game is played in an area more or less clearly marked, it has a clear beginning and end, and the players generally know they’re playing.

A pervasive game, then, erases one or more of these things (or at least expands it to such a size that it might just as well be gone). Instead of a LARP taking place within three rooms in a schoolhouse, the playing area is the entire city. A pervasive does have beginning and an end, but the game might be continuous for several months (also, at least one of the Prosopopeia games had a false ending before the game really kicked off). Finally, it’s possible that people unaware of the game get interacted with in the context of the game.

Examples of pervasive games include the live Pacman games played in Manhattan, assassin games such as Steve Jackson’s Killer, alternate reality games like I Love Bees, and pervasive LARPs.

As an interesting example of pervasiveness in a LARP, they presented the Finnish trollpunk LARP campaign Neonhämärä (“Neon Twilight”) where some of the PCs belong to a troll rock band Sysikuu (“Darkmoon”). Some weeks ago, actually during the RPG course, a session of the LARP was played at Cultural Arena Gloria in Helsinki, at the band’s gig. As I recall, there were actually two bands playing, the first of them not even associated with the game in any way. Anybody could buy a ticket. Players had white armbands to mark them. For the players, it was a LARP session, but it also doubled as a gig (and a rather good one, I’m told). Hell, I think this is the first I’ve heard of an RPG session of any stripe that had meaningful content for an audience.

Other examples included Sanningen om Marika, the Swedish TV production that had interactive elements and went on to win an Emmy last year, and street LARPs that have been popular in Finland for a long time. This has spawned a number of anecdotes about things going pear-shaped when innocent bystanders or police officers have taken the game for real. For instance, there’s one tale the lecturers related, of a criminal LARP of some description, where members of two rival gangs encountered at the Helsinki Central Railway Station. Everybody was packing, so they pulled their reasonably realistic-looking prop guns on one another – and caused everyone else to hit the floor or take cover. At this point, the players went “oops”, and made themselves scarce before the police showed up.

In another case I’ve heard of, a few players were doing an arms deal in front of the Helsinki Cathedral, at night, and the authorities took an interest. Things were easy to explain, though, since their guns were toys and the money in the briefcase wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

This, of course, brings up the ethics of pervasive gaming. There’s a chapter on ethics in Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, and we had to read it for the course. Taking your game out into the streets does bring up all sorts of interesting and important things to consider, such as how responsible it is to wave a realistic-looking replica gun in a crowded place. I’d imagine the questions are even more important in places like USA, UK or Israel (yeah, they do larp over there), where you’d likely stand a good chance of getting shot or prosecuted for it. In Finland, you’d probably get told off by the police and might even avoid a fine if you didn’t do anything spectacularly stupid.

Pervasive games aren’t my area of expertise (and it occurs to me that there are exceptionally few people in the world who can claim they are), but they are interesting. Somewhat annoyingly, my university seems to lack a Killer guild to run assassination games, and setting one up would be an awful lot of trouble. It seems like an interesting game with a low threshold of participation. Also, contrived plots to assassinate people? Excellent.

Next up is the seventh and final lecture of the course, RPGs and society. I’m also gonna be posting about the Praedor session at some point, though that’s gonna be more relevant to how I found the game and what happened in the session than to the course.

I’d otherwise be writing up a summary of the sixth lecture of the RPG course, but the slides aren’t online yet. It’ll probably happen sometime during next week. I’ll still be doing the two remaining lecture summaries, a post about the Praedor session, a summary of the games for the course, and I’m also thinking of writing up a review of the course. Since I can’t do it for Roolipelaaja, I’ll have to do it here. I may also put my study diary up for download once it’s finished, if there is interest. For now, I will take a look at some recent events outside the classroom.

Regarding the comments that I’m no longer as funny as I used to be now that I’m no longer reviewing 4E… well, gimme a 4E book to review and I’ll rip it apart for you. They aren’t giving me freebies, I don’t know anyone who buys the stuff and could loan me something to review and I’m sure as hell not going to pay for it myself. That said, I may soon be trashing something else.

D&D Brand Manager Scott Rouse announced on EN World a couple of days ago that he’s leaving the company. It is unclear if he got the boot or resigned, but I don’t think the annual round of Christmas layoffs is due for another month, and it’s not explicitly stated that he was laid off, so I’m inclined to think the latter. It is also unclear what, if anything, this portends. Some see it as an impending sign of the Fifth Edition, but really, neither the D&D Brand Manager changing or someone leaving from WotC is an exactly uncommon occurrence. According to Charles Ryan, Rouse’s four-year tenure is among the longest, if not the longest, in the position. I am curious to see who will be filling his boots. Rouse is known for being the only guy at WotC with the barest inkling of public relations and damage control. Those are some largish boots to fill.

Last week, Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games told us that “we were right, he was wrong”, pertaining to his decision to hold back a bunch of adventure modules so they might be released as 4E products under the GSL. The modules are now out in D&D 3.5, available as PDF. They are the mini-campaigns Eamonvale Incursion and Demonheart and the first part of the semi-mega campaign Slumbering Tsar. It’s “semi-mega”, because apparently the whole trilogy will clock in at half a million words. Slumbering Tsar is written by Greg A. Vaughan, who’s also written a bunch of Pathfinder adventures for Paizo.

Speaking of Pathfinder, the second Pathfinder Society Open Call for the PFRPG rules is up. Submissions due on the 30th, which, incidentally, is the same day as my study diary and two days from another writing deadline I’ve got. I’ll see if I have time to participate this time.

In other news (news, my foot, it’s two weeks old), Dennis Detwiller is working on Godlike 2E. You may recall me gushing unabashedly about the game last year. Detwiller is asking for corrections on spelling and geographical errors, but also does well in noting that the historical context of the game does not need updating. The 1940’s were a racist and sexist age, and to try and whitewash that would be all kinds of moronic in a game like Godlike where the whole damn point is gritty and realistic take on superheroes.

On the Ropecon front, the dates for Ropecon 2010 are July 23rd-25th (two weeks before Gen Con Indy), and the main organisers have been chosen. I have applied to to return as the RPG admin.

I’m catching up! Lectures six and seven are tomorrow and the day after, though, and then it’s a wrap. I expect to post about the Praedor session I ran sometime next week, and will be wrapping up with a post about the games of the course.

This lecture was about the history of RPGs, and probably held the least new material for me. I’ve written one myself, and know the legends in greater detail than they had time to present us. They also gave us a history of Dungeons & Dragons as a case study. I’ve written one of those as well (Neither one of these was listed as a source, likely for many reasons including that they are not very well sourced. I would have laughed for a week.). It’s the old yarn, Arneson, Gygax, Chainmail, Dungeons & Dragons, woodgrain box, and so forth. Look it up on Wikipedia, they’ve got a decent article (indeed, apparently that one was used as a source).

Of course, it is not an entirely accurate one. I don’t think anyone has conducted a rigorous historical study of the topic, and then there’s all that stuff that came before Dungeons & Dragons. The lecturers gave us examples such as Pharaoh Senusret III’s games at Abydos, and the naumachiae of Ancient Rome. I could add certain religious rituals in some tribal cultures, where members of standing in the tribe took on the roles of the tribe’s gods. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart depicts several such rituals among the Ibo people.

Then they pointed out that the act of taking on a role, pretending to be someone else, is universal among human beings and children learn it at an early age.

We also went over the 1980’s moral panic about Dungeons & Dragons, with Pat Pulling and Mazes & Monsters, of which clips were shown. Yeah, Mazes & Monsters as lecture material. I ordered the DVD from Play.com the very next day, and expect it to be magnificently hideous. Interestingly, my fellow RPG blogger Sami Koponen over at Mythopoeia recently started dissecting Pulling’s book, making surprising finds and casting doubt on the generally accepted view that she was a fanatic. Unfortunately, he posts in Finnish, and is apparently using a Finnish translation that is not entirely faithful to the original, The Devil’s Web. The Finnish version also includes a chapter on Satan-worship in Finland, which is less than objective. Might be an interesting read, that. Especially when compared with The Pulling Report, by Michael Stackpole. I’d also be interested in comparing the translation with the original.

Following these was the brief history of virtual roleplaying games, from MUDs to Second Life.

We were also given a brief glimpse of the Czechoslovakian LARP scene, which had evolved behind the Iron Curtain with little to no influence from the west. The government considered larping subversive, and the games were more or less secret, out of the way, and little documented. What documentation there is is in Czech, which makes the researcher’s job a bit difficult.

We also got a history of roleplaying games in Finland. I’ve written one of these as well, though it’s admittedly not very good.

Possibly the most interesting part of the lecture was the development of gamers’ self-understanding. The development of terminology and slang, the switch from mere dungeon crawling to playing the role, and so forth. Here they also trotted out the gamer typologies such as the GNS, though neglecting to mention Real Men, Real Roleplayers, Loonies and Munchkins.

Finally, there is the problem of studying and documenting RPGs. A roleplaying game session can’t be studied after the fact because you cannot possibly have all the data. An audio tape and even a detailed transcript cannot reveal where people are looking and how they are acting. A video would, but even in the best-case scenario, you can’t get inside the minds of the players, to determine the invisible content of the game. You can’t record the game, merely the act of playing.

From that and the economic insignificance of RPGs it follows that not much research has been done. They could fit the full list of all academic RPG critique, designer reports and studies on a single slide. Additionally, new theoretical tools need to be created since the player is not the audience and the traditional theories from theatre, movie or even digital gaming studies cannot be directly applied.

Additionally, following an RPG session as audience isn’t very fruitful, and in the case of any LARP taking place in a space bigger than a few rooms, impossible. To properly study an RPG, the researcher must participate in it, and that explosion you just heard was the concept of academic detachment imploding. Also, much like in quantum mechanics, it is not possible to observe the system without changing the system.

Every time you observe a roleplaying game, Schrödinger kills a kitten?

Next lecture, pervasive larping.

The fourth lecture of the RPG studies course was about virtual roleplaying games. That is, RPGs online. However, it started by differentiating virtual RPGs from other types of RPGs that are played online or that have online components, such as RPGs that are played on IRC or an instant messenger program or a forum or by e-mail or what have you, or LARPs where the characters have Facebook profiles. Me, I use a Finnish campaign wiki called Mekanismi for managing my Pathfinder campaigns and try to run the downtime stuff like selling loot and crunching numbers online to save time at the table, but this does not make it virtual roleplaying.

The concept of virtual roleplaying was also differentiated from the concept of artificial personalities, fictional characters passing off as real people online, either covertly (lonelygirl15 before she was figured out) or not (Heroes characters’ MySpace pages). I find these, especially lonelygirl15, interesting. I like a well-crafted lie or plot. I think the ultimate example of this kind of creation is the Brits’ Operation Mincemeat during World War II, where a carefully equipped body planted in the right place at the right time led to the German forces being moved to Greece and Sardinia to guard against an impending invasion while the Allies took Sicily, and in the future led to them repeatedly disregarding actual Allied battle plans that had fallen into their hands. Operation Mincemeat is such a skilful deception that I can only weep when faced with its sublime beauty.

But I digress. The virtual roleplaying games meant here were roleplaying games in an artificially created world – that is, in a programmed game. Roleplaying in a MUD, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Second Life. There was also some talk of text, hypertext and cybertext, but the terms “texton” and “scripton” made my little philological heart blot out most of it.

In regard to virtual roleplaying games, they expressed in more detail and academically what I said over a year ago in this blog about the limits imposed by the interface and graphics of the game, what’s coded in, and how this affects roleplaying in the world. Here, there are two broad varieties of MMO, the amusement park and the sandbox. The amusement park is a game where all the attractions are open to the player and he can go and have a ride in the carousel or whatever, and come back tomorrow and do the same, while the world remains unchanging. Examples of this are World of Warcraft and EverQuest. You can’t change anything, you can’t create anything of your own.

In a sandbox world, you can change things, and players can sometimes even provide content. Roleplaying is easier in a sandbox environment, I think. The ultimate example of a sandbox is Second Life, while EVE Online also has strong elements of it.

There were many interesting cases presented. I won’t go into the Gor roleplayers of Second Life, mostly because I do not know much about them and I feel I will be happier the less I know about anything associated with John Norman’s writings in general.

Another presented was the case of the Guiding Hand Social Club, the famous and awesome event in EVE Online when a mercenary corporation infiltrated another corporation over the course of ten months, real time, with numerous agents, including the so-called “Valentine Operative” whose purpose was to get in very close with the corporation’s leader. Then, at the go-code “Nicole”, they stole everything the corporation had, shot up the corp leader’s ship and vacuumed her frozen corpse into a cargo hangar. They stole about $16,500 worth of assets and really ruined someone’s day. I can only stand in awe. While it was also a horrible thing to do to someone, it’s also EVE, and that’s the name of the game. According to the article linked, both corporations are also roleplaying corporations, so it can be said that the entire thing happened in-character, but in an online RPG the line between the character and the player can be thin, especially over such a long period of time.

The second really interesting case presented is another classic – Twixt, a social experiment in City of Heroes, where the player, in playing the game as it was designed to be played instead of how it actually was played, became the most hated person in the game. It’s an interesting case, but I get this nagging feeling there’s more to it than presented. I doubt a man could arouse such animosity just by how he plays. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that he also acted like a dick on the discussion channels. The article only presents Myers’ version of the story. Apparently, there’s also been a complaint to the ethics committee about his research methods.

The fifth lecture was last Thursday. Its topic was the history of roleplaying games.

Riimuahjo Oy, the company behind the Roolipelaaja magazine, announced yesterday that the magazine is ceasing publication. The current, 23rd issue of the magazine, is its last, and Finland is, once again, bereft of a roleplaying game magazine.

It did come as a bit of a surprise, though not a great one. It was always known that the magazine was not making profit. It was the original reason H-Town ceased its publication and sold it to Riimuahjo. I do not know if it did any better under its new management, but if it did, it evidently did not do well enough.

I will not engage in speculation as to what could have been done differently, or point fingers. Roolipelaaja was certainly a bit of an oddball in being billed as a lifestyle magazine for gamers. However, it was well made, most of the articles – even the LARP stuff – was interesting, and I, at least, enjoyed it.

Of course, I am strongly biased. I started writing for Roolipelaaja in late 2007 and wrote a total of twelve articles, reviews or other pieces for the magazine. In the most recent issue, “Luolaston perukoilta” (From the Back of the Dungeon) started. It was to be a regular feature where I talk about recent events in the D20 and OSR scenes. So much for that, then. It does sting a bit.

Writing for Roolipelaaja was a very rewarding experience. I learned a lot about writing and editing – especially about editing. I learned to condense to the relevant. I learned about conducting interviews. I am also grateful for being given a chance to write for the magazine at all, given the crushing review my book received. I suspect my writings also played a part in me being asked to apply for a position in Ropecon’s committee.

And, well, I gotta admit, I did get a certain ego boost from seeing my name in print.

The loss of Roolipelaaja is a heavy one for the Finnish scene. It developed the community and served as a communications channel. It endeavoured to have something for everyone, from art larpers to D&D grognards. This, perhaps, was its failing – it is hard to appeal to everyone.

In any case, second guessing is useless in at this point. For my part, I would like to express my gratitude to Juhana Pettersson, Mikko Rautalahti, Petteri Moisio, and all the others who made Roolipelaaja happen. During its four years of life, it enriched and vivified our hobby, and played its part in ushering in the new renaissance of Finnish roleplaying.

Thank you.

Other bloggers weighing in on the topic:

• Ville Vuorela of Burger Games
• Mikko Rautalahti, Roolipelaaja’s first editor
• Eero Tuovinen of Arkenstone Publishing
• Jukka Koskelin, an early contributor to the magazine
• Kka0s, a game blogger
• J. Tuomas Harviainen, a LARP writer

First off, I apologise for being late with this. The third lecture of the RPG course was sometime last week and a number of things (other games, drinking, schoolwork, flu and fever, more drinking, and most recently, my browser crashing and eating a draft of this post when I tried to open the PowerPoint presentation for the lecture from the course website) conspired to keep me from getting an update done. It’s now half past six on a Sunday morning. I got up an hour ago to finish writing up Praedor PCs and create an adventure for today. It’s game time in eight hours, and one of these days I’ll tell you all about it.

Aaanyway. The third lecture was about LARP. For this lecture, we’d read Professor Frans Mäyrä’s (whose name means “badger” and whose AD&D Forgotten Realms campaign stories in TYR’s archive are some of the earliest RPG material I ever read on the net, well over ten years ago) article “Muodonmuuttajien maat” (“The Lands of the Shapeshifters”), which is a very general overview of roleplaying games, their history and how they work in practice. There’s also a couple of paragraphs on the geek culture and fandom surrounding RPGs, which I think is a very interesting topic, especially in the Finnish context. The science fiction side of the fandom was pretty thoroughly dissected by Irma Hirsjärvi earlier this year in her PhD thesis Faniuden siirtymiä - suomalaisen science fiction -fandomin verkostot (“Transitions of Fandom – The Networks of Finnish Science Fiction Fans). It reminds me that Finland is a very small place and our fandoms are even smaller.

The second article we read pertained more closely to LARP. It was “Eye-Witness to the Illusion: An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing”, from the book Lifelike, an essay-collection on RPGs. They publish one every year around Knutepunkt, this annual LARP convention that keeps jumping around the Nordic countries.

360° role-playing is Koljonen’s term for the school of thought which seeks to provide a WYSIWYG game environment – what you see is what you get. Everything must be made as real as possible, right down to the characters’ medieval underpants. This has spawned some awesome things, like Carolus Rex, a pulpy space opera game set on a spaceship of the Swedish Imperial Fleet during a war with Denmark. The game itself was played on a submarine. At one point, they made contact with an escape pod, which then turned out to be filled with Danish space marines, played by Danish larpers smuggled to the scene by the GMs. Then there was Dragonbane, for which they built not only an actual medieval village but also a fucking dragon. And then there’s Luminescence, which I dig up every time someone asks me on IRC what art larpers are. Tell me, Americans, are your larpers as creatively insane as ours, or is this a uniquely Nordic (or European) phenomenon?

But I digress. Koljonen puts forth the theory that the 360° immersion actually damages suspension of disbelief because normally you must concentrate to maintain it and imagine that the northern barbarian’s sneakers are actually fur boots and that sheet hanging over there in front of the garage door is the castle wall, which helps in actively filtering everything through your character’s perception. When everything is real, there’s no longer any disbelief to suspend. As she says, “if no effort of self-estrangement goes into putting you in that fictional space, then it is indeed often you, not the carefully constructed character with its carefully filtered thoughts, that stands awed in the medieval village.” This ties in an interesting way to my experience with MUDs – I still maintain that the best roleplaying I’ve ever done was in a text-based environment. I think that ought to be good for a few hundred words in the study diary, if I can present it coherently…

Personally, I do not larp, for a variety of reasons, most of which I think stem from old preconceptions, but also because I’m lazy and the type of stuff that most interests me would, it seems to me, require a certain amount of work. There was one LARP once I’d signed up for, called Faerûn IV: Baron of the Stonelands, a fairly large affair as I understand, but it was cancelled after the head organiser got sick. Therefore, I have no personal experience of this topic as I do with tabletop RPGs or online RPGs.

A lot of the lecture dealt with applying Peirce’s semiotic theory to LARP and the formation of the diegesis. I will spare you the details, because it’s not even eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and it’s too early for semiotics. Fucking Peirce hounds me across academic disciplines. The damn theory has thus far popped up on both general and English linguistics courses, literary analysis, two journalism courses, and now here.

Next up, virtual RPGs. I’ll try to get it up before the next lecture.

Yesterday was the second lecture of the roleplaying studies course that I’m attending.

I notice I have garnered a bit of attention with this. I’ve been getting hits from strange places, some of which I’ve had to put through Google Translate to understand what they’re saying. It’s mostly variations on the theme of “lucky bastard”, which warms the cockles of my heart.

Today’s topic was tabletop roleplaying games. The lecturers went over stuff like power in narration, the question whether there is or isn’t a story in a roleplaying game session, and what the hell is a story, anyway, and so forth.

And then there was the dread diegesis.

“Diegesis” is one of the terms that I’ve heard bandied about in RPG theory for about as long as I’ve been aware of it existing. Ironically, it’s been mostly Stenros and Montola bandying it about. For the first time, I actually understood the concept.

It’s probably easiest to use a movie as an example. Diegesis is, in short, what is real inside the context of the story. In, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indy, his whip, the temple and Mola Ram and all that crap exist inside the diegesis, are real within the film. The John Williams score is outside the diegesis – Indy doesn’t hear the familiar chords every time he performs feats of derring-do, or he’d probably get fed up with it right quick and keep to the classroom. It is possible, of course, that a character dreams or hallucinates some of the events, but even in that case, the act of dreaming or hallucinating exists within the diegesis.

I hope I got that explanation right. If not, someone will likely be along shortly to correct me.

Every player also creates his own diegesis, because every player interprets the game material in a subtly different fashion. This was illustrated with a Knights of the Dinner Table strip, where B.A. (the DM) tells the party they see a beholder, his concept of it described with the beholder illustration from the 3E Monster Manual. The party’s different interpretations of this were different pieces of beholder art from other supplements, except Dave’s, who had no idea what a beholder was. Though the different pieces of beholder art have a number of differences between them, they are still identifiably the same creature and though each player’s concept of the beholder is subtly different, they are still compatible enough for the game to smoothly proceed. There is a constant process of negotiation between the players to find an equifinal diegesis.

When it doesn’t work, it leads into the Tale of Eric and the Gazebo. Which the lecturers acted out in front of the class. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed with tears in my eyes on a lecture before.

In addition to the lectures, we also have articles to read, included in the 31MB pack of course material. For this one, we had a pair of articles from the collection Gaming as Culture, by Dennis D. Waskul and Sean Q. Hendricks. They’re very basic descriptions of roleplaying games from a sociologist’s point of view.

I did find a point of irritation in Waskul’s article, “The Role-Playing Game and the Game of Role-Playing”, though, in his example of “bad metagaming”. It is a direct quote from a player interview, and the game is explicitly stated to be Dungeons & Dragons.

Once, when we were fighting an army of goblins – well, maybe an army is over exaggerated, but anyway – because one of the players knew the average hit points of a goblin and the average damage of his fireball spell, he knew exactly how many times he would have to cast the spell. While it could be seen that the player would know this, it seems that the player took the role-playing out and turned it into a numbers game – which, in my opinion, takes the fun out of the game!

Which doesn’t really hold any merit whatsoever as an example of metagaming. For a start, it cannot be generalised into any game system that cannot be reduced to a numbers level. Additionally, the details, when viewed inside the context of Dungeons & Dragons, make no sense. A goblin’s hit points are, depending slightly on the edition (and the article only refers specifically to the third edition), around 5-7. In every edition of the game, a fireball spell does 1d6 points of damage per level of the caster. It’s a third-level spell, and a wizard gains it at level 5. Therefore, the minimum damage of a fireball is 5d6. The absolute minimum that can be rolled, with a really crappy roll, would be five. A fireball will more or less automatically kill any goblins it hits. The example makes no sense because it makes it look like it’d take some sort of calculation, analysis, or conscious thought to count the fireballs, which it doesn’t, since anyone who’s played a character to the fifth level will know that a goblin has jack and shit for hit points and hitting a goblin with a fireball is much like hitting a first-grader with a frag grenade. Now, class, how many frag grenades can a first-grader take? Anyone? Bueller?

Essentially, unless the player really rattled out the numbers in that instance, one cannot say that metagaming has happened, and even then, I’d call it bad roleplaying instead of metagaming

Oh, and what the hell is a fifth-level wizard doing fighting goblins, anyway? They’re what you fight at first level, and amount to little more than speed bumps at fireball levels. Using a fireball on goblins would be a waste, anyway, since the group’s fighter and cleric can just wade in swinging and take them all out without expending a third-level spell, a valuable resource.

I’d say a far better example of metagaming would be a player utilising intradiegetic information that his character can in no way possess – for instance, after a PC and an NPC have had a conversation without the presence of other PCs that was played out at the game table before all the other players, using information gleaned from that conversation even though your PC was not present. Or the classic example, when a party member is getting his ass kicked on an alley while the rest of the party is carousing in the inn, the carousers suddenly getting an urge to go check out the local graffiti.

Next week, LARP.

Perhaps I should review the course for Roolipelaaja. I wonder if I can get a five if I promise to give them a top score?

I am now quite convinced that the University of Tampere is the right place for me.  I already got a pretty good clue last year when I noticed that one of our Options courses in English philology featured H.P. Lovecraft and another is entirely about science fiction, but this one really sealed the deal.

I’m taking a course on roleplaying studies.

Originally, I was gonna just go hang out at the lectures and see if there’s anything interesting I can learn – it’s a Hypermedia/Media Culture course, at the subject studies level, which usually aren’t taken until the basic studies are finished, and I haven’t done any of those. Nor will I. So, I went there, since there was a convenient gap in my schedule, and the other lecturer, Markus Montola, talked me into taking the course.

The damn thing is worth six study credits and only includes the lectures, a 3,500-word study diary and, I kid you not, playing or running a roleplaying game session. The list of approved games is fairly short, but of the seven games, four (Under My Skin, Fat Man Down, the LARP Prayers on a Porcelain Altar and The Upgrade) are distributed in PDF as study material, and the other three (Praedor, City of Itra [hah!] and “Joutomaa”, out of Juhana Pettersson’s Roolipelimanifesti) I own. I figured that doing Praedor could work. I’ve never actually played the damn thing. Running it would probably be ideal, since many people on the course aren’t gamers and Game Masters may be in short supply.

I’m just slightly worried about my eventual grade. The last time Jaakko Stenros graded anything of mine, it was rather crushing.

The first lecture covered the basics – first they defined what’s a game (including some interesting linguistic limitations – it is a rare day indeed when English has inadequate vocabulary for something), then they defined what’s a roleplaying game, and at this point we’d been sitting on our asses for three hours. It was very entertaining, though. Montola and Stenros had good witty banter going on, and then, you can’t make a lecture about games too serious.

The course is off to an interesting start. Next week’s lecture will cover tabletop RPGs. I’m looking forward to it.

I will probably be blogging about the future lectures as well, and possibly the course material, once I can get the damn things. University web courses, never working like they should…