DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: “ALL MORALITIES BEING EQUAL”, PART 3

Hello all!

This will be a longer series than normal. Dungeons & Dragons, like Tolkien, set the stage for damn near everything. It is so expansive a topic, I can’t get all the details, nor focus on the nitty-gritty, without publishing a genuine book or two, to condense the small library of materials that was made under the DND umbrella. I can maybe write a book or two that gives a comprehensive groundwork for it all, like what Ralph C. Wood did with his book The Gospel According to Tolkien, where Wood describes all the underlying Christianity of The Lord of the Rings.* That is what I am best trying to do with this series, for DND, and the many other Roleplaying Games (RPG)—try to get at the themes, philosophies, axioms and assumptions under it all.

[*But to still get Tolkien, you need to read LOTR, The Silmarillion, the illustrated history book that ties the two together, and his personal letters to get the full picture.]

My biggest contenders will be nerds, pure and simple. Not you, who are statistically a mostly ordinary person. No, here I’m doing the equivalent of an exegesis*, a literary criticism of what are the holy texts of nerdom. In a similar way, to how some Christians will go on a frothing rant if you question the Bible too much, so too will some nerds have an equally adverse reaction to my probing. Except they will not respond with fire, but coldness. ‘That’s just your opinion man,” or ‘It’s all open to interpretation’, or some other dismissive reply that says ‘Let me believe what I want to believe, and maybe I’ll let you believe what you want.’

[*Exegesis—‘A critical explanation or analysis, especially of a text’ or ‘a discourse intended to explain or illustrate a subject.’]

This is the paradox—yes! Most of it is make-believe! Most of an RPG’s materials are written as ‘open to interpretation’ so that player-groups can reshape the game or such to their groups’ needs!

It’s the stuff that isn’t fake is what I’m going after.

It is also why I’m wary at getting bogged down in the details. Most rational argument is about details that prove why the forest exists but people get hung-up on the funny lichen growing on the bark.* You, mostly normal person, don’t have to worry too much about this, but I know my contenders—I grew up with them. What will invariably happen is that some hot-shot will try to ace me in the comments section by throwing out some obscure or difficult detail, and then use that detail to upturn everything that I’m trying to do here.

[*Miss the forest for the trees.]

Here’s the thing about details—most of them aren’t that important. They aren’t that important because they are secondary to a primary idea—they are contingent on that main idea. A detail is only truly important if, in a long run, in a long sequence of cases, its application changes the sequence. Most details don’t change a long sequence and are intwined with the sequence, subsumed in it. It does not matter if it is included or not, it is overshadowed by bigger things. Most details are mere extensions of a general principle—like, uh, …tentacles of an octopus, stretching from the main body but still traceable. …No, actually, the more appropriate but grotesque example is the film Deep Rising (1998), where its monster is a giant octopus-thing that eats people, and its tentacles also have mouths that eat people*.

[*It’s a cult classic but very gory. It’s a well-done cult classic because the people in the film act like how people would act in that given situation. I think there’s a golden rule of cult classics, in that ‘its story does a weird idea well and people react to the weirdness appropriately.’ Tell me, prove to me otherwise, that all cult classics don’t follow that rule! …And for you smart-alecks in the comments, yes B-Movies are the exception!]

It's the main body, the general principles, that I’m after. …One more thing. At the same time, I can’t explain something in general principles only, because the general principles, floating about in the air, aren’t sufficient either. I can wax lyrical about the benefits of all kinds of Socialism, but you won’t see the results until it’s too late. Talking is one thing, seeing things play out to the end is another. …It is not really possible to do this with fantasy, because magic makes everything possible. No matter how stupid, counterproductive, self-defeating, or contradictory, magic makes all things self-sustaining and resilient far beyond than what is possible. This is to say that none of these fictional settings have any damn common sense unless you bring it with you on the journey. But enough about principles that apply in Fictionland and Real Life, let’s talk DND!

SO! What do you need to make DND? Where do you start? Not with an adventure! You need groundwork before you go dungeon-delving. You need rules to simulate, mandate, and replicate action in the game-world. You need to make a world where adventuring is, not only a viable lifestyle, but a necessity.

By any normal stretch of the imagination, every world of DND is a living deathtrap. Truly. Dungeons and ancient ruins are the norm, and pockets of civilization are one of the few protections from a land filled with magical super-predators. The local economy is always in shambles, because towns and merchants are constantly attacked, and gold, for whatever reason*, is so common as to be almost worthless—unless gold or metals don’t exist, then they become viable currency again. Wizards tamper with forces they shouldn’t, and those forces tamper back. On the plus side, wars are usually infrequent, because any kingdom of large size has to spend so many resources on security that they’re too busy to make war on the regular. …Except when hordes of monsters do assemble into armies. Or when the local danger has subsided to the point where the kingdoms, who have amassed large amounts of resources and magical firepower, can spend enough money and manpower to wage truly apocalyptic wars against their neighbors. But don’t even get me started on when a wizard is the king of the kingdom! Then things go truly batty.

[*As Gygax was a fan of Medieval England, most of DND’s economy is supposed to be a reflection of England’s economy of the time. Copper pennies did exist as small change, but the standard coin was the silver schilling, where each coin was supposed to be 1/20th a pound of silver—20 coins makes 1 pound of silver. Gold was too rare and large for the local English economy. However, gold is far more pleasing to high fantasy adventurers, and thus is the standard coinage. So, gold coins are more common in DND than real life.]

But what do I mean, adventuring as a viable lifestyle? Well, in real life, adventurers did exist among the Viking and Germanic cultures. They were, unofficially, a legal class all of their own—they were one step above outlaws. And by outlaw, I mean that—a person who is outside the protection of the laws. Real life adventurers were do-or-die, mostly dying. They lived a life of hardship, doing dangerous mercenary work for lords, or they worked as security for explorers. They had little money, not that much respect, and were living a big gamble as a lifestyle—get wealthy or powerful or die violently, unknown, unnamed, and unloved and unremembered in some unremarkable ditch. The only thing an adventurer of that kind had was his curious type of freedom—the freedom to escape from a desperate fate. Not the usual case with DND adventurers—they’re heroes, with benefits.

But what else do you need in that world of constant adventure? Humans need to be badasses. This comes straight from the mouth of Gygax himself—humans need to be on a whole other level to compete with, not only the monsters, but with all the other fictional races (elves-dwarves-halflings-gnomes-half-elves-half-orcs-others-etc.). The very first edition of DND, authored by Gygax, was built to give favoritism to players who played as human adventurers. (This changed some in the 2nd edition, ‘Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’.) In addition, Gygax propounded that humans also need to be the dominant and/or most common species in any given setting, both to make the setting more grounded and to make humans interesting enough to be adventurers among some dozen other alternatives.

This is not to say that all the other fantastical species are in some kind of ghetto. They are more specialized (elves being more graceful, dwarves being tireless, dragonborn lizardmen breathe fire, etc.) which is good, say, for building individuals as adventurers, but when scaled up to the level of a whole species, their specialties, and potential weaknesses, and their preferences all limit their options. (Ex.: Dwarves don’t like trees. They’re fine with living mostly anywhere as long as it doesn’t have any tall tree life or tall grasses. It’s just, a thing! They aren’t even that maladapted for wide open spaces, they don’t like plant life that is taller than they are…) So, the species-wide preferences mean they fill out their niche. In DND parlance, humans as a species fill out wherever others don’t settle, and as individuals (as adventurers) they have a drive, an edge, that makes them go an extra mile to pick up the right advantage for the right situation. The other fantastical races don’t have this extra oomph. It does not mean that a human adventurer picks up useful skills if they don’t know what they are doing.

What else is needed? Surely, a cosmology? We will get to that, soon. The third ingredient to the usual DND world is a bucketload of evil to fight—and usually, though not always, the evil is so proliferate that it drastically outnumbers the forces of good, but the forces of evil are too busy fighting amongst themselves to be regular trouble. I can’t emphasize how god-awful some locations can be, especially if a religion of evil, an evil wizard/confederacy of evil wizards, demon cults, or an entire species that is innately born evil lives in the area. Though, of course, fictional, there are a truly horrific number of ways to die, on the regular, in any given DND adventure or world. …That’s what makes it fun! Keeps you on your toes.

You can say that any well-made DND world has a problem of evil—not the moral quandaries of ‘what is evil?’ or ‘why does evil exist?’ Shut the hell up and grab your sword, you fool! You can say that a given fictional setting can be judged by how maliciousness operates in the world. Is it blatant? Is it obvious? Is it subtle? Is it organized? Is it alone? What ‘flavor’ of evil exists in the setting? The standard DND fare has all the flavors on tap. The high fantasy versions, I mean.

Much like with Conan, DND does not delve too deeply into the nitty-gritty of social evils. Slavery can exist in DND, and it is seen as a problem, but it won’t go into the details of say, sex slavery or child slavery. Majority of the time the slaves are ‘just’ worked to death, or offered as virgin sacrifices to unspeakable horror. A given culture can be dedicated to a flavor of evil, in broad strokes, and the horror of that comes from how blasé they are to the suffering. The usual fare (unless different) among the savage species—orcs, goblins, drow (evil elves)*—is that slavery, rape, murder, theft, and constant warfare is the norm, to the point where the whole society should not be able to function. But it does. Why?

[*Ogres and trolls normally have all of the above, and practice cannibalism on the regular. They are usually worse off and less organized than the goblinoids and drow.]

Evil gods. Genuine, divine intervention is what sustains these cultures. The gods are a topic for another time, but anywhere you look, in DND or that which was inspired by it, civilizations of evil only function because they’re living off the trust fund of a wacked-out deity. Sometimes it is because the deity is the direct progenitor of a species (traditionally Grummush for orcs) or the deity adopted the race later on (Lolth the spider-goddess for the drow). If the kids act disproportionally stupid, even by their bad standards, mom and dad send in enforcers to kick them into line. But that assumes a perverse parent-child relationship. Some evil gods are completely loveless…

But does that make a species born complete monsters? From the DND canon, are goblinoids and ogroids and adopted-by-evil races (drow) born utter psychopaths, or all born as sociopaths to a T? It was my encounter with this kind of question that, among others, kick-started my …what would you call it? You’ve read me now, would I have been a philosopher in another life? Or, at least, a person who tries to be one. Probably not, because my attempts at getting into actual philosophy is like reading a long, boring, instruction manual that goes nowhere until the philosopher finally says his profound statement, in an unexpected out-of-the-way paragraph. Boring-boring-boring—and this comes from a guy who has read instruction manuals for most of his life.

Can a race, a species be born evil? It is a question as dangerous as nitroglycerin*, and as a question it is either ignored altogether, or is answered too quickly, too irreverently. Tolkien beat his head against a brick wall when he was writing LOTR when he was pondering if his orcs had free will. Tolkien hated the conundrum—he did not hate the orcs per se (he pitied them) but their existence was troublesome in all ways. Did orcs, as made by Sauron**, have any free will? Were orcs, effectively, organic meat-puppets that Sauron acted through? Did orcs have personal choice, but if so they clearly could only choose what variety of evil to commit. The big question—did Tolkien’s orcs have rational souls? (That is, a creature with a spirit—that gives it life and form—that can make choices and can gather information to make better choices, and who can choose to act in accord or against its nature.) Tolkien did not find an answer. A few, big-name settings have emphatically answered ‘yes’—yes, a species can be born evil. The clever settings then further confuse the issue by introducing the moral relativism, ‘whatever is good is whatever promotes the species even at the cost of other intelligent species’.

[*The ‘talk-too-loud and it explodes’ chemical.]

[**Yes, technically it was Morgoth who did it first.]

I’ve boiled in anger for 15 years at that answer. It’s what got me into writing.

But there’s more to that. There is more to the groundwork. What is the appeal? I say the Quest. Now, yes, unfortunately, in DND campaigns and in settings that try to be ‘more grounded’, the Quest can become more like a business contract than a noble ideal. How it goes with normal things, though even I have to admit that you refrain from calling too-mundane things ‘a quest’, like fetching an exotic cheese for a princess so that she can enjoy her ham-and-cheese sandwich. Do you have to journey to an exotic land and return with the cheese before it spoils? Okay, sure, that makes it extra difficult, but that does not necessarily make a Quest.

And, I think it true, that the Quest is a bit too large to fit into a typical DND campaign, which has plenty of room for minutiae but not much room for worthwhile things. It can take inspiration from the Quest…hmm? What is the Quest? For crying out loud, I have to explain it to you? Well, I suppose, yes, given the state of Western civilization. That is for another post, as it is so large a topic. What it gives DND, at least, is structure and direction, that there ought to be structure and direction.

The structure is commonly called the campaign, which includes both the events as described in-game as well as the number of sessions needed by the human players to make their way through the events. Basically, you ‘win’ a game of DND if you see the story through to its completion—or until you get bored because you accomplished everything possible and want to move onto fresh ground. Thanks to Arneson, Gygax, and others, they made the original campaigns or ‘modules’ that set the tone. They can be remarkably short, designed to fit into any larger story, or a single stand-alone dungeon (the most famous being the Tomb of Horrors, by Gygax), or can be long, complex, and elaborate—enough to make a novel or two out of the events described therein. There is a craft to it, enough where modules can require several people working on different parts to get it ready for publication.

There’s a clear beginning, middle, end. Now, in the parlance, there are two styles of campaigning—the Railroad and the Sandbox. The best Dungeon Masters (DM) navigate between these poles. The first is by-the-book, no deviation, no additional work, and is great for the more docile or…unimaginative players. It follows the events as written, and if scripted well can be as enjoyable as a drama on stage. The bad version of a Railroad makes for a frustrating game, as the DM and players can become stubborn and angry over the ‘you-must-stick-to-the-plot!’ mentality. The Sandbox rewards creativity, and allows for players to make permanent changes to the campaign, even allowing—if they be so bold—to rewrite a whole chapter of the story. This style requires a DM who can improvise but who also can lure the players back on track, lest the players a) lose track of what they are doing and b) become bored from a lack of clear purpose.

In practice—the best campaigns are a Flexible Railroad, with the plot being a clear line that the players can dance around as they follow it—or even abandon it temporarily. There is something satisfying to a finished campaign, even ones that end in failure. How does one fail? If all the adventurers are slain and there is no way for the Quest to be continued by someone else. For my group in particular, it is the jokes and bad decisions that are the most fun, as we try to spin the chaos forward into something useful. If—for we’ve become this skilled in our years—we can act with the tactical precision of a SWAT team, all well and good. Just as fun is when we make a stupid decision, refuse to back down from the edge, and jump off—we’ll figure out how to make a parachute from this pile of ducks, or die trying!

The fifth and final element to any world of Dungeons & Dragons (or the like) is, not just the characters, but understanding how a person would act in the world. Make no mistake—a DND setting just isn’t interesting if it is not strange and dangerous AND is strange ‘n’ dangerous in its unique, personal way. How would a person act in that world? We players can only make an educated guess, based on our real-world knowledge and the stated quirks of the setting, and by how knowledgeable said character is about the world he lives in. A fisherman may know nothing of dungeon-delving, but he better be able to speak to mermaids, out of necessity. A soldier who fights for a feudal lord will know nothing of democracy, but may have a passing knowledge of how to recognize magical objects (magic swords, for example).

Those are, of course, practical skills. Harder still to wrap your head around is understanding that adventurer’s worldview. In a sense, a good DND role-player has to be like an author in that they have to grasp simple and complex psychology. Most don’t, but the world-builders—those who make the campaigns and modules—usually spell it out for sake of ease. It is interesting, and dangerous, to put yourself in the mind of an alien. There are aliens in DND settings—not just critters from outer space but beings with alien minds. Sometimes, those very aliens are but humans who live in fantastical societies, who worship clear gods and have things which they call virtues, and who have precepts that tell them what are the highest goods a mortal can achieve. And then there are some beings who are technically intelligent but have so narrow a conceptual worldview that they can be mistaken for the mentally challenged. And then there are some beings who fear not death or sleep, hunger or thirst, who have no concept of time but who say with the full force of their entirety, ‘this is how things ought to be’.

Depending on the type of campaign, the planning an investment, a DND player can try to adopt the mind of an alien, literal or figurative. Our efforts as actors can only go so far, but they are intriguing to say the least.

More to follow!