# RPG A DAY 2025: Day 18 - Sign tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2025 ![[RPG a Day 2025 (illo).png]] There are things going on in the current hobby that I don't really understand. This is a painful admission because, like any pundit who follows a particular field of interest and has a personal emotional investment in that field, they like to think that they completely understand every aspect. If they happen to be wrong about something, Hades forfend, it behaves in a way which is unpredicted, they generally get defensive, recognizing that fact. Being a self-aware sort, I do my best to try and avoid falling into that intellectual trap driven by emotional reaction. More people should; few people do. Such is the way of life. This is where we get to today's topic. There are signs clawed into the trees of our forest, graffitied on the brick walls of the alleys of the cities we construct in our dreams. They are written in the blood of ideas that were killed by the fingertips of the ones that survived. The method of communication isn't new, but the ideas certainly are. Here, I reference an exchange that I had elsewhere and decided to reduce from the ephemeral. - **[[Railroading vs Story Gaming]]** Let's roll back a few years and do something that I hate to do: talk about me. *Once upon a time,* I was heavily involved in the RPG hobby, both as a creator and as a rabid consumer. For decades, I had been the Omni GM—the guy that my friends would come to with any system they wanted, throw it down in front of me, and say, *"Run this."* In a week, maybe less, we would be having a game. I have run a ridiculous number of things, whether I really wanted to or not. This gave me a great vantage point from which to decide what I enjoyed the most and what didn't really tickle my pickle.[^1] Probably not surprisingly, I ended up gravitating from the more classic game designs of the time to the new, more experimental things, including White Wolf's *World of Darkness*. Storyteller had many failures as a system, mechanically, but it was experimental for its time and was doing some really interesting, passionate things. This is how I ended up with a co-authorial tag on both [a supplement for **Mage**](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/3041/convention-book-iteration-x) and [one for **Big Eyes, Small Mouth**](https://www.wargamevault.com/product/18493/Hearts-Swords-Flowers)[^2] within the same couple of years. That wasn't enough for me, though. I needed to go further, like any good mad scientist—or *good evil mad scientist*—I had to push the bounds, which inevitably took me deeper into the nascent and growing story gaming community and further from classical gaming. This was, after all, the place that was pioneering things like GM-less games, which allowed me to get away from simply being handed a game and having to *bring the fun* to the table for other people and let me facilitate the game while getting to actually play. It didn't take me long to decide that GM-less gaming was where it was for me, and to turn my back on the traditionally architected player/GM dichotomy, something that has stayed true to this very day. Of course, this also put me in *[the Forge](http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php)*, which is the crucible from which much of modern RPG design in many ways descended. *"Story gaming"* was the literal creation of the people that kicked around there, having bloody knife-fighting arguments, which led to even more experimental ideas seeing the light of day, vivisected, dissected, and stitched back together in new and ever more radical formats. That part was great. I wouldn't give that up for the world. That was extremely formative for me. The problem was that a certain type of political activism was also becoming de rigueur within the context of that community. Unfortunately for me, or perhaps fortunately, depending on your point of view, it wasn't one that I shared, nor one that I share to this very day. The culture originally started as a group of individualists who shared individualism as a driving trait and unified them in disdaining politics. That apparently couldn't last. Instead, what became the necessary public persona was an ever-increasing leftward swing. Keep in mind that this was the 90s and early 2000s. For those who are currently concerned by the amount of *"woke"* in your hobby, congratulations. You're only about 25 years too late. I'm so sorry. Here's your sign. This began my movement away from the gaming subculture, which had effectively given birth to me both as a professional creator and as a gamer who came into his own understanding of what he really wanted out of the hobby. Apparently, what I wanted was to *get out* of the hobby, which is what I did for the most part. Or rather, I got out of the RPG side of the hobby for a number of years. There was still a part of the hobby which was open to my particular brand of weirdly fiscally conservative yet marginally socially classically liberal political inclinations. They didn't want to talk about my politics every time I opened my mouth. Nor did I need it represented in every single game I played with them. The hobbyists who welcomed me, as well as a lot of other expatriates over the years, were *wargaming*. For all that wargaming gets painted as a bunch of old white dudes pushing pieces of plastic, once pewter, around on beautiful fake terrain, it's also a bunch of older guys of all races pushing a bunch of plastic, once pewter, around on a beautiful pile of fake terrain. They don't care about your politics. They don't even want to talk about it, for the most part. They're upper-middle-class conservatives of all races, colors, and creeds, because that's what it takes to be able to afford to buy wargames and spend the time to really enjoy them. For them, it's truly a hobby, even the ones who make their livings working *in* the hobby. In short, those guys were fucking great and kept a lot of my gaming spirit alive for many years. Then I saw something interesting happening. Wargames were beginning to implement mechanics that story gaming had already implemented literally a decade before, but none of the people implementing these mechanics appeared to be aware of what story gaming had done, had ever read any story games, or shown any interest in experimental, cutting-edge game design. Instead, in a way similar to Gygax and Arneson of old, they just decided they wanted to tell more stories and focus on things like dynamic campaign generation and particulars of individual characters. Needless to say, this was exciting to me. It seemed like the things that I was fascinated by and had experience with were becoming applicable to a group of people who accepted me as one of them and were hungry to actually start integrating some of those ideas into gameplay. It was blindingly enjoyable. It's worth specifically calling out [Two Hour Wargames](https://twohourwargames.com), which is a fantastic publisher. They've been slowly moving from being strictly tactical exercises on the tabletop toward dynamically generated stories for quite a while, to the point that when they finally published **[[5150 - New Beginnings|5150: New Beginnings]]**, it was billed specifically as a role-playing game marketed toward the wargaming crowd. I was pleased to help out here and there. I've done some editing and some work alongside them, and I have to say I owe them a lot of my modern belief and trust in the gaming public and the gaming audience, as opposed to many gaming publishers. Ed, if you ever read this, thumbs up to you, buddy. I got interested and curious about what had been going on in tabletop RPGs in the time that I'd stepped away. I wasn't completely out of touch; I kept half an ear to the wind and my nose to the ground. I knew stuff had been developed, and there were strong new strains of RPG design that were the inheritors of story gaming and that I should take the time to come back and start feeling out what was going on. That was years ago at this point. Some of the biggest selling games outside of the big two are the direct lineal descendants of story games that I watched being birthed. Game mechanics that I had helped hash out with their original creators, sometimes on their side, sometimes going head-to-head, had worked their way into surprising places and involved mutations I would have never foreseen, but was appreciative of. Story games were, in a very strange way, flourishing far more widely than I had ever expected they would. The experiments paid off. Of course, some things never change. A portion of the RPG hobby sneered at story games and story gamers just as they always had. You probably already know this because you've either been there and seen it or can figure it out from context. The big boy in the room, the 900-pound gorilla. **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** and **D&D**-adjacent gamers have always turned their noses up at dirty, hippie, filthy story gamers and relentlessly derided them. We were one step above furries in their eyes, and it didn't help that several story game designers were, in fact, furries. Remember what I said about the story game community being increasingly infiltrated/evolving along the lines of becoming more and more radically left? Yeah, that part didn't change. In fact, it became entrenched. You can tell that by looking at what kind of games are being published and promoted online in the story games side of the house, [[Day 16 - Overcome|stories about always correct rebels fighting against tyrannical governments or corporations with all the subtlety of a brick to the side of the head]]. Normally, this would be where I gave three examples, but frankly, that seems to be 80% of the games being produced in this particular style. I wish I *could* give more examples. That's not to say there aren't awesome games being made, which aren't politically freighted, but they aren't the ones being pushed. **[[Follow]]** is amazing, but nobody talks about it. And I don't think anyone's really talked about it since it was made, and yet, it has one of the best designs of its time. Contrast this with the clear political signaling being done by the OSR (the inheritors of the **D&D**-adjacent label), which are at least ostensibly and publicly conservative in the American sense. That tribalism has been entrenched for a bit but was not always the case. There is active social antipathy between the groups, combined with the public political theater of the last decade. The upshot of this is that they carved out separate social media contexts for themselves, isolated from one another. As far as I can tell, this has led to the same thing that happens when you put two different islands out and then populate them with a handful of species that derive from the same origins. Those populations diverge. They choose not to communicate if they don't have to. Eventually, they lose the ability to interbreed and represent entirely separate ecologies.[^3] So where the *fuck* did this sudden spike in talking about story gaming by people associated with the OSR come from? It seems to come out of nowhere. Not only that, it seems to be—I don't want to say artificial—but something less than organic. The reason I say that is because very few people associated with the OSR, and perhaps even fewer with classical **D&D**, seem to know jack shit about story gaming, either its history or its mechanisms. They know the word. They've seen it pronounced. They've heard it derided and referred to in the harshest possible terms. They know it's not something they should appreciate or like. They have a very strong negative opinion around it, but they don't understand anything about it. They don't seem to want to. This is hilarious to me because they are incorporating more and more elements of story gaming in its more experimental modes every year. Look at the amount of active procedural generation being folded into what are otherwise extremely conservative and classical game designs. Look at the number of places in which something as radical as solo play is getting put into games which would never even think about referring to themselves as story games. Solo play is the step beyond GM-less gaming, and these people are typically obsessed with the position of GM and the *"necessity"* of a centralized storyteller. Here we are with solo play integrated into very recent, otherwise somewhat classical RPG architectures. And here we are at what I do not understand. Somehow, they have acquired the traits of story games. They have internalized some of the advantages to what is the inheritance of story games 20, even 30 years old. They are in the very process of recapitulating the ontology of story games at a certain level, and yet they are simultaneously completely ignorant of story games and the mechanics thereof. Don't even start talking to them about the philosophy of story gaming—what it was grounded in, how it was constructed. They haven't even the faintest clue where to start with that. They have no idea how to start wrapping their minds around it, even while executing the exact processes that came from that cauldron of bubbling primordial soup. I can't read the signs. I don't know how we got here. Or rather, I know how *I* got here. But I have no idea where *they* came from. How did they get here? I feel like this is a reverse Roanoke colony. Someone scrawled on the side of a tree just before an entire village dropped into being. I'm glad to see that the ideas themselves are strong enough to continue into what is effectively a fourth generation. But I'm deeply frustrated by not just the absence of knowledge, but the absence of curiosity regarding how these things came to be and the utter disdain with which many of the people who are implementing or rediscovering these ideas hold their origins. I suppose the 8-ball was right. Signs are hazy. Ask again later. [^1]: The first RPG I ran on my own recognizance was **[[Call of Cthulhu]]**, which probably says something about my inclinations. The second was **[[Robotech]]**. Judge as you will. [^2]: Despite the write-up on that page, this is not purely a shoujo book. It incorporates elements of shounen as well, though not as importantly. Yes, I co-authored a book on girls' anime integration with RPG mechanics way back in the day. Don't think about it too hard. I'm weird. [^3]: Whether they've since become inbred and lost some of the hybrid vigor is a question for someone else, but I suspect that because I am having this discussion, albeit with the invisible audience, which you are, there's still hope for both sides.