On Privilege

Antero Garcia, a very goofy-looking assistant professor at Stanford, wrote an article entitled Privilege, Power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How Systems Shape Racial and Gender Identities in Tabletop Role-Playing Games. I'd give you an overview of this important work, but the article is only available for $42.50, which buys 24-hour access. That's a pretty steep price-point for a fellow who is concerned about privilege.

The Scorpion and the Frog

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lame proposed boycott of GaryCon, given Bill Webb's prior attempt to buy Stacy Dellorfano's love.

Reason Magazine on Dungeons & Dragons

Reason has an article authored by C.J. Ciaramella entitled The Radical Freedom of Dungeons & Dragons. Ciaramella contends that “D&D is a deeply libertarian game.” I’m not convinced, but that’s another argument for another day.

What caught my eye was Ciaramella’s self-contradictory observations about the sexual politics surrounding the game. At one point, he observes:

Although advertisements for D&D in the '70s and '80s always included an obligatory girl player at the table, there was a chauvinistic attitude within the cloistered fraternity of war gamers that lady brains simply weren't wired to be interested in gold and glory. Internal and external surveys from the late '70s showed that the percentage of female players was in the low single digits; one didn't have to be proficient in the "investigation" skill to figure out why girls weren't rushing to play games that included a "harlot table" and where women in the stories were often little more than furniture on which boys could act out their less chivalrous fantasies.

It's an odd assertion. What are the odds that girls or women not playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons were familiar with an obscure table buried in one of several appendices in the Dungeons Masters Guide? The table appears on page 192 of 240. And unless one knows where to look for it, it's hard to find, as there's no reference to it in the table of contents or index.

While the Harlot Table may be infamous nowadays, in the 70s and 80s—before the Internet—the only people who would have been familiar with it for the most part would have been those who used the DMG. A lot of the early-D&D-was-sexist talk is like this: it takes contemporary criticisms of the game and retrojects them into the past as if those criticisms were there all along. Can anyone cite a criticism of the Harlot Table as sexist that was made back in the 70s or 80s?

What’s odder still is that Ciaramella identifies an entirely plausible alternative explanation for why girls and women were not playing D&D in large numbers back in the day. In an earlier characterization of the three core books for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, he writes of the game that:

It looked, in other words, like what would happen if you opened up a preteen boy's imagination and dumped the contents on the floor.

Why would a game that resembled “a preteen boy’s imagination” appeal to girls and women to the same extent as boys and men? It wouldn’t, of course, and there’s nothing sexist about that, unless one thinks that a game should or must equally appeal to a preteen girl’s imagination. I don’t. Neither does anyone reasonable.

Dungeons & Dumbasses: Rob Kuntz Edition

You’ve disappointed Rob Kuntz for the last time. After channeling Oral Roberts—announcing that he could only continue to grace the flock with his presence if it committed to buy a certain number of his planned module-design aid—Rob discovered that a world mired in unbelief had forsaken him. So, alas, the project is no more and, like Middle Earth's elves, he must depart:

I have decided to go in a completely different direction with what Arneson gifted to us, and outside of the RPG Industry. Once I make up my mind it is pretty well set in stone because I have usually assessed all angles prior to such decisions.

I will be exclusively promoting design theory and systems theory for play from this point forward and will be spending increasingly less time on RPG related matter as well.

In the next 6 months I'll probably be finished with my last effort in RPG's, a history, the BOOK, and from there I hope to stay in theory, essays, board games and other. RPGs have run their course.

Such irony, too. I have an idea for an open systems RPG, really good *written and outlined in 2010* but cannot/would not produce as it would be something that people would not play. I would. Gary would have. Arneson, of course. But folks today? Nah. They are stuck with their brand of gaming, don't take chances and look for sameness, a comfort zone. This is not BITD of wild and carefree meandering, the huge cross sections of science and fiction and history which intersected with design, those days are gone at least as I have attempted to find any comparison to them in this industry.

I have seen this coming, btw, since 2007 and probably even before. No surprise. Thought I'd give it a last shot for the good ole times. No biggy. I have interested parties outside this hobby sphere, in fact much bigger than within it.

He didn’t fail; the hobby failed him. This, of course, is more of the same Arnesonian one-true-way dead-enderism that Kuntz has been flogging for years. It’s Dungeons & Dragons as gnostic cult.

Between this and Frank Mentzer’s recent antics, the hobby’s old-timers are really embarrassing themselves. I wish they’d just go away and I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion.

Secret Doors

Erik Tenkar makes the following criticism of secret doors in dungeons:

I find secret doors to be an overused obstacle. Just how many does a single dungeon level need?

My problem with secret doors is that they are a potential show stopper that even with good play from your players, the dice can decide the door is never found. What lies behind? For all intents and purposes it never existed if the dice decide it was never found.

Concealed doors? Now THAT is something I can get behind. Look behind that armoire. Why are there curtains on this wall? What's under this rug? Good play will reveal with concealed doors what dice may otherwise steal with secret doors.

I think this reflects a poor understanding of the various purposes that secret doors should serve. They should never be a “show stopper,” and if you are not designing boring, linear dungeons that generally should not be an issue. To state the obvious, however, secret doors should not be placed in a fashion that could halt the party’s forward progress in the dungeon.

So what should secret doors be used for? Among other things:

• to segregate a sublevel that somehow differs from the present level;
• to secure significant treasure from casual discovery;
• to conceal a useful additional entrance or exit (e.g., out of the dungeon, to a much deeper level);
• to serve as a hidey-hole for opponents to lay in wait for or seek refuge from the party;
• to hide a route that allows quick or safe passage past an obstacle or hazard; or
• to seal off an especially dangerous foe so that the party does not merely stumble across it.

Nor should secret doors be discoverable by random dice rolls alone. Players should be able to locate secret doors—or at least increase their chances of doing so—through good play. For example:

• intuition as to where searching might prove fruitful based on room or corridor shape or structure;
• careful mapping that reveals curious empty spaces in the level; or
• examination that turns up telltale clues, like footprints that lead up to a blank wall, seams in the masonry that outline a portal, or an unexplained draft that causes torches to flutter.

As for the concern that areas lying behind secret doors might go undiscovered . . . well, this is a game of exploration. It is not a foregone conclusion that the party will unearth all of the underworld’s secrets. There’s no sense of the unknown or adventure in a dungeon that lays bare its mysteries to everyone who stumbles through the front door.