The trouble with Tlaloc

Thanks to Jeff Rients' excellent Gameblog I stumbled across the current brouhaha surrounding Carcosa, an "old skool" D&D variant created by Geoffrey McKinney featuring graphic depictions of child sacrifice. While such things are by no means unheard of in the pulp fantasy genre, McKinney has ignited the firestorm here by requiring such gruesome acts as the material components necessary for player character spellcasters, who are sorcerors in a creepy Lovecraftian mode. Suffice it to say that I'm not terribly interested in the controversy itself as I am the larger question of heroism versus Heroism in roleplaying games that the Carcosa flap has inspired.

Rients hits the nail squarely on the head with the problem of Tlaloc, the Mesoamerican rain god (a.k.a Chaac or Chaac-Mool). Featured along with the other Precolumbian Mexican gods in the 1st edition supplement Deities and Demigods, Tlaloc's demands for innocent blood presented an interesting challenge for players and DMs alike -- how do you square the otherwise civilized behavior of a people such as the Aztecs or Mayans with the mass human sacrifice practiced by both cultures as a matter of course?

The Hero with a capital H says that, put simply, you can't. According to big-H Heroism, when faced with an example such as this...

At each full moon, a priest of Tlaloc sacrifices a child or baby to Tlaloc. Once a year, there is a great festival held in his honor. Numerous babies are bought or taken from the populace. These babies are sacrificed to Tlaloc, after which the priests cook and eat them. If the babies cry during the sacrifice, this is taken as a good sign that rain will be abundant during the coming year.

...the only proper reaction is revulsion and disgust. What's more, even if you are born and raised as a member of this culture, as a Hero you must be aware on some fundamental level that these practices are shameful and wrong and not just the way things are done. If you've ever read Gary Jenning's Aztec, you get a great illustration of the big-H principle at work, as the protagonist -- a Mexica artisan -- quietly revolts against the injustice of giving Tlaloc his due. To suggest that acts such as this could be "normal" features of the hero's world marks you as some kind of Godless cultural relativist.

The trouble is, Deities and Demigods was inviting no such summary judgment on the player's part. The whole point of the supplement was to give campaigns some mytho-historic flavor, not to present players with the evils and injustices of alien cultures as wrongs to be righted. Not surprisingly, back in the 70's and 80's the Moral Majority types seized upon the descriptions of Tlaloc and other similarly cruel and/or bloodthirsty gods as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of D&D. Never mind that back then most of us (those of us just hitting puberty, at least!) were more interested in the naked pictures of Aphrodite and Ishtar than we were learning about how human sacrifice was A-O.K..

But D&D has always had these issues -- should fantasy roleplaying implicitly judge its setting, or merely describe it and let the players figure out what's wrong and what's right? As time has gone by, Dungeons and Dragons has drifted ever more solidly into Hero territory, reflecting both political correctness and corporate risk aversion as the RPG has evolved from a countercultural pastime to a mainstream gaming product. One of my favorite examples of this in D&D is its treatment of the use of poison by player characters. While the 1st edition does not shy away from providing a virtual apothecary of poisonous substances available to players, already by 2nd Ed. poison use has been marked as "evil" behavior -- never mind that Herakles, one of the greatest heroes of Greek mythology, used poisoned arrows to defeat several enemies during his celebrated Twelve Labors! 3rd Edition further circumscribed player use of poisons by making them available only to certain evil prestige classes, and while I'm not sure what 4E's take is on the topic it doesn't seem to be the kind of game that would favor such non-Heroic tactics.

While I've always enjoyed trying on another culture for size and questioning my own assumptions about what makes a hero, I know that even among gamers there's quite a spectrum of comfort in this regard. One of my best friends from childhood was squarely in the big-H camp, and refused even to entertain the possibility of a hero who was first and foremost a product of his times -- we would have the most epic arguments on this point, with him championing Joseph Campbell and me full of my recent studies in (of all things) Mesoamerican culture. The Aztecs are one of history's greatest character studies, and I daresay that they will always be.

In the case of Carcosa, I think McKinney is offering up something up something similar: a kind of Rorschach test for latter-day gamers. Do you play it at face value, or with a sense of irony? Do you accept the culture of the campaign world, or rail against it? The beauty of roleplaying is not just that you get to decide, but that there's plenty of room at the table for different answers.

UPDATE: The web is a beautiful thing. No sooner did I sit down to work this morning than I noticed that Geoffrey McKinney himself stopped by to see what I had to say! For the record, he offered the following clarification to my admittedly hasty summary of Carcosa's setting--

"Not all PCs on Carcosa are sorcerers. Some are fighting-men. Also, about one-sixth of the sorcerous rituals in the book do not require human sacrifice. It is entirely possible to be a Carcosan sorcerer who never sacrifices a human. In fact, since the rituals that require human sacrifice are more dangerous to the sorcerer than are rituals that do not, a sorcerer who does not sacrifice humans will probably live longer than the sorcerers who do."

94 days until Christmas

I hope Santa brings me one of these: chainmail dice bags from You've Got Maille.

Why alignment in 4E sucks

It's not exactly a state secret that I'm lukewarm on 4th Edition D&D. I played it at Gen Con and my team even placed at the Open (though we got boned in the semifinals), and I think it's a perfectly harmless set of miniatures rules, but not really something I'd like to campaign in long-term. But something in the new edition really does irk me, and that's the change to alignment rules. Since 1st Edition D&D characters have chosen their alignment on two intermeshed axes: Lawful to Chaotic, and Good to Evil, with Neutral as a uncommitted option for both. Law and Chaos were not cast as necessarily good or bad things, but one's response to authority and the dictates of society; similarly, Good and Evil denoted a person's inherent selflessness or selfishness. The result is a system with nine permutations: Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Evil, Neutral Good, Neutral Evil, True Neutral.

As far as personality systems go, this ain't bad for a game played with funny dice -- Myers-Briggs, for example, has 16 personality types. And the best part of D&D alignment is that it could be applied not just to people but to societies as well, or even entire planes of existence. I've always found alignment to be both a clever and a useful mechanic, but this hallmark of classic D&D has had its enemies since Day One. From players who found the restrictions of playing their alignment too onerous to would-be game designers who found the Gygaxian ethical system lacking as an adequate description of RPG reality, there has always been a contingent of naysayers whose first question upon hearing about a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been: "Did they finally get rid of alignment?"

Well, the haters finally got thrown a bone this time around with 4E's simplification of alignment rules. Forget the interlocking wheels of Law and Chaos, Good and Evil - in Fourth Edition the grid of alignments has been pared down to a line. Now you progress from Chaotic Evil to Evil, then to Unaligned, and on to Good, then Lawful Good, creating a continuum whereby "Chaotic" and "Lawful" in this contest mean little more than "very". So who cares, right? Doesn't this make D&D simpler, more heroic? Doesn't it harken back to the old school days before AD&D muddled the issues or right and wrong with its relativistic wheel of cosmology where devils could be law-abiding and heroes could be antisocial?

On a fundamental level edition wars are a religious argument, and if it's already a given that I'm not too fond of the rest of 4E can I really be trusted to evaluate how well the new alignment system works or doesn't work? Well, the truth of the matter is that I can't. But that's okay: despite my animus towards the new product, my critique hinges less on my own loyalties to previous editions of D&D than it does upon my own experience in the real world. Just today I was reading the opinion section in my local newspaper -- a dangerous prospect, to be sure, as our community is a notorious collection of cranks who seem to have little else to do than compose their next angry tirade for the paper -- when I came upon a regular contributor who equated secularists with Marxist collectivism and God-fearing Christians such as himself with rugged American-style individualism.

Say what? Since when did secular humanism automatically make one a socialist? And how could anyone argue with a straight face that devotion to religion directly correlated to being an individual (in fact, isn't it the other way around? But I digress). This is when I realized that the problem was that the letter-writer was trying to use 4E alignment rules to understand his world, as so many people frequently do. Never mind that Religion-Secularism and Collectivism-Individualism are operate in most people on independent axes, whereby it's just as easy to find Religious Collectivists and Secular Individualists as it is vice versa -- this guy had created a continuum where those who agree with him are by their very nature Lawful Good and those opposed can only be Chaotic Evil. For you see, in this oversimplified conception Lawfulness is a manifestation of Good, and Chaos is what proceeds from Evil.

And this is why 4E alignment sucks-- not because it's new or different, but because it inflicts a false and quasi-moralistic duality onto the game world. Although alignment had previously suffused Dungeons and Dragons from the micro to the macro level, it aspired to be an objective determination of a character's/polity's/plane's ethical orientation. Alignment in the Fourth Edition on the other hand forces you to subscribe to the morality of this oversimplified universe in which good is Good (insert angelic choirs here) and evil is EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL! Gone is the legalistic menace of Lawful Evil, the Robin Hood-like healthy disregard for authority in Chaotic Good, the absolute madness of Chaotic Neutral, and the cold, sharklike self-interest that embodies Neutral Evil. It was always this last alignment combination that frightened me much, much more than Lawful or Chaotic Evil. Give me a mafia don or a serial killer any day over someone who is so dedicated to himself that nothing else matters.

Alas, these alignments no longer exist. I've always said that every generation gets the D&D that it deserves, and maybe this is more true than I had originally thought. As a child of the Cold War my childhood was a Manichean nightmare of light versus darkness, so the shades of gray suggested by the fantasy worlds to which I escaped seemed like nothing less than a revelation. These days however we are sufficiently through the looking glass where the kids of today only wish for a world as simple as the defining conflicts of the 20th century seemed to them. After 9/11, we wanted so much to identify civilization as a manifestation of the Good and barbarism the consequence of Evil such that even when we knew deep down that the pieces really didn't fit together that way it only hardened our resolve to make it so. Moral simplicity is the escapist fantasy of the 21st century, so I suppose it only makes sense that 4E should embrace this Zeitgeist with its take on alignment.

But I still don't like it.

No regrets?

There's an interesting thread making the rounds on the gaming blogs (I picked it up at Treasure Tables, who is responding to Abulia Savant), asking people to list their regrets as a Gamemaster. Well, let's see if I can take a crack at this:

The top five:

5. "Akl and the Cuisinarts" (2nd Ed. D&D, 1980's). One of my first extended fantasy campaigns, and the first involving one of my best friends. Although he was a first-rate roleplayer, he had a terrible time dealing with the fact that D&D quite often came down to the d20, and in my zeal to keep him enamored with the game I'm afraid I fudged a few too many die rolls on his behalf, creating a tension with the other players that lasted for quite some time afterwards. It also seriously undermined my credibility as a GM who hesitated to let the dice fall where they may when the chips were down.

Part of this problem is my own basic inability to say no, a trait that I'm afraid has colored my skills as a Gamemaster over the years. Strangely enough, it was only when I started to teach Ancient Greek that I began to learn how to engage the people in the room without compromising the integrity of my source material, for when teaching a language at its most elementary level the students are either right or wrong. The trick is finding a way to keep your students motivated and willing to come back week after week in spite of the fact that their understanding of Greek isn't ever going to meet their expectations and/or desire. For a long time I had always thought that being a GM made me a better teacher; now I see that the converse was also in fact true.

4. Dekkar Kelrig Joins the Cirus (PBEM, 2nd Ed. D&D, Summer 1997). When my best friend from college and I found ourselves on opposite ends of the continent, we resolved to continue a solo D&D game we had started in a Clockpunk campaign world of my own imagining. The result was a narrative-rich storyline in which my friend's PC, a bounty hunter named Dekkar Kelrig, stumbled upon a novel solution to a seemingly impossible plot gangster plot: he shot his antagonist in cold blood and ran off to join the circus in a foreign land.

The PBEM format lent itself very well to this storytelling change of pace, as instead of dodging crossbow bolts and getting pummeled by thugs our antihero now found himself in a setting that could have been lifted out of a Robertson Davies novel, and over that summer we fleshed out the architecture of Dekkar Kelrig's long-term attempt to exorcise his old demons and crawl out of the personal hell he created for himself. Whereupon, of course, we abruptly stopped playing the game. Had it grown too plot-heavy? To be sure, each update on either end was more like the chapter of a fantasy novel than an actual game. But I suspect that events in my own life (which were getting a little weird at the time) had prevented me from continuing the story just when it was getting good - that and my then-inability to bring anything I started to a meaningful conclusion.

All of that being said, I got a lot out of this abortive campaign, as did my friend. For my part dedicating myself to regular updates for an PBEM of this intensity helped me developed the narrative and world-building toolkit I would need to make my first attempt at writing a fantasy novel, which I completed last March after three years and one that I wrote a sequel to during NaNoWriMo 2006.

3. Taking it personally (2nd Ed. D&D, Summer 1988). In the last extended fantasy campaign that I ran for my old hometown crew there was a kid who wore the term Munchkin as a badge of honor. A powergamer to the core with no discernable roleplaying abilities whatsoever, the constant irritant of his presence was mitigated by the fact that not only had his own car but an apartment as well - two much sought-after commodities that allowed him to pull the same manipulative bullshit in the real world that he did in-game.

This friend of mine was playing a wizard that summer, and since he was using the Academician kit from the old Wizards Handbook he got it into his head that he was going to research how to make... wait for it... gunpowder. What, you're not surprised? After throwing up every imaginable roadblock I could think of to keeping him from doing so - from the esoteric nature of the knowledge to the relatively scarceness of sulfur in my world, a kludge which persists to this day as a feature of that campaign setting - eventually I caved and started to let him amass a whole arsenal of black powder in the hold of the sailing ship the party had taken possession of a few adventures back.

Angry that he'd worn down my resistance and annoyed at him in general for various matters both in and out of game, I decided at long last to take my revenge on him. Remembering that the party had a necromancer foe who actively scryed on them (and what's more had a magical mirror that allowed him to cast spells into the area he was viewing at the time), I ruled that at some point he must have noticed that his magical opponent was brewing up enough gunpowder to blow up his entire tower. So without so much as a warning, I had the evil wizard cast a fireball through his mirror and BOOM! the whole ship goes up, killing pretty much everyone on board - including my friend's NPC girlfriend and a new party member who had just set foot on the boat.

Oops. Well, someone managed to get away from the flaming wreckage and retrieve the rest of the party's charred corpses, and since this was old school D&D no one really blinked twice about the thought of having their characters raised or resurrected in order to continue with the game. At this point everyone but my wizard friend was aware of the fact that I had been out to get him specifically, and amazingly they were so eager to see his character get the boot that they were willing to lose a point of Constitution and hazard a Resurrection Survival roll in order to do so. There was barely-restrained jubilation when he was the only person to blow the roll, and although this act on my part is a celebrated piece of gaming lore among my circle of friends, it didn't feel quite right then and it still doesn't sit well with me now.

2. Failing to pull the trigger (Homebrew Fantasy System and Campaign World, 1996-1998). This is more of a designer thing than a Gamemaster thing, but insofar as this system was concerned the two were intertwined. My college friend and I had been evolving a FRP system out of 2nd Edition D&D for years, and over a three-year period we attempted to get this thing from the drawing table to the gaming conventions in what turned out to be epic fits and starts. The 1.0 version of the rules - which were based on a 2d6 mechanic, similar to Traveller - were something we had managed to get to the playtesting phase before we chickened out and fled for the relatively safe comfort zone of academia (me) or blew out of town entirely (my friend).

After realizing that this was too good a system merely to abandon like this, and having found inspiration for my part from my then-fiancee - who although not a gamer found the work I had done up to this point absolutely fascinating and encouraged me to get it into print - we resolved to try again in early 1998, thus crafting the 2.0 sourcebook. Neither a student any longer nor gainfully employed yet that winter, I worked like a madman, copyediting the mechanics my friend wrote up and sending pages after pages of campaign world background for him to do the same. It was again when we hit the playtesting phase of the development that everything seemed to fall apart again. With the end in sight, it was as if we suddenly were actively conspiring against ourselves to prevent us from having a salable product for the next con season, and then the moment was lost.

Believe it or not, we almost attempted a 3.0 edition, but then 3rd Edition D&D hit, and unwilling either to market a non-d20 fantasy product or retool what we had to accommodate the OGL, we let the project go out with a whimper and not a bang. My friend did manage to start up a campaign using our 2.0 rulebook a year or two back, and after some tinkering with the mechanics it runs quite well, but the idea of giving it yet one more go (especially now that d20 is at its nadir) is something that holds no appeal to either of us. When we attempt to do a post-mortem of the venture, my friend is always quick to fault the system, but now that I've had about ten years to think about it I think the real failure was one of execution. If only we had figured out to silence the internal critics telling us that our product was crap and just starting selling it, who knows what might have happened?

1. The death of my friend Art (Summer 2004). My ultimate failing as a Gamemaster, however, came in the form of a real-world tragedy: not being in attendance at my friend and long-time player's funeral when he died unexpectedly at the end of the Summer of 2004. Art was the consummate gamer, willing to give any system a try and unwilling to apologize for his love for roleplaying when so many of us treated our passion for gaming as a dirty habit best not shared with the general public. Art was a writer, a poet, an amateur filmmaker and probably would have been one hell of a game designer, had he lived long enough to see just one of the myriad ideas he'd fleshed out over the years go to print. He was a hell of a player, and a right proper GM in his own right, and we still miss his presence when we gather around the table to game. While at the time there were serious extenuating circumstances that kept me from being there with the rest of my hometown friends and fellow gamers, to this day I would give anything to somehow change that decision not to go.

Giant Robot Fight Club!

The first rule of Giant Robot Fight Club is...

Okay, well I'm breaking Rule One, aren't I?

Save versus insanity

One of my favorite parts of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition Dungeon Masters Guide is the section dealing with Insanity. Long before the tides of political correctness and upright moral sensibilities lapped against the shores of Lake Geneva where TSR made its headquarters back in the day, one could find a rule for just about everything under the sun in the old AD&D rulebooks -- from the effects of alcohol and narcotics on player characters to the necessity of quelling peasant revolts as quickly and brutally as possible.

(Drugs! Violence! And drawings of bare-chested women! How could a prepubescent kid resist such a treasure trove of questionable human behavior?)

The Insanity table was sandwiched in with a lot of other odds and ends at the conclusion of the Combat rules, since Insanity was primarily encountered as a special form of damage dealt by certain monsters with psychic or psionic powers. Basically it was a list of 20 psychiatric conditions cribbed from the DSMV:

1. Dipsomania
2. Kleptomania
3. Schizoid
4. Pathological Liar
5. Monomania
6. Dementia Praecox
7. Melancholia
8. Megalomania
9. Delusional Insanity
10. Schizophrenia
11. Mania
12. Lunacy
13. Paranoia
14. Manic-Depressive
15. Hallucinatory Insanity
16. Sado-Masochism
17. Homicidal Mania
18. Hebephrenia
19. Suicidal Mania
20. Catatonia

This made for a simple enough mechanic: in case of Insanity, roll d20.

The funny thing about Insanity is that the 1st Edition rules assume that it's a deal-breaker as far as roleplaying is concerned. The DMG sayeth, "As DM you will have to assume the role of the insane character whenever the madness strikes, for most players will not be willing to go so far." Unfortunately taking such an arbitrary course of action robs Dungeon Master and players alike of a rare opportunity that is afforded by Insanity, one that I completely forgot about until my friend's Planescape run last week -- namely, that Insanity is the perfect cover for in-game PvP (player vs. player) action.

Not to give too much of a play-by-play of what happened at the gaming table, but suffice it to say that a weird and unexpected passage between planes of existence forced our party to make Saving Throws versus Insanity. Of the four PCs, two of us blew our rolls: yours truly and the player with whom I had had the most antagonist relationship in the campaign up until this point. Instead of rolling a d20, our DM had prepared several little slips of paper with different forms of insanity written down on them and asked those of us who had missed the Save to pick one, read it, and to keep the contents a secret from the other players. I chose Manic/Depressive; my friend picked Paranoia.

And hilarity ensued.

Due to the peculiar brew of Faction politics and other shifting allegiances which characterize a Planescape campaign, my character and his would-be antagonist had quickly settled into a relationship of animosity and mutual distrust that while realistic proved to be less and less enjoyable to play out with each successive adventure. It was becoming increasingly obvious to both of us that our characters were on a collision course, and that sooner rather than later one of us was either going to have to retire from the party or kill the other.

In the midst of resigning ourselves to this eventuality, however, the DM sprung his Insanity mechanic on us, and suddenly a conflict that had been brewing just under the surface had been forced out into the open -- only instead of being a gut-wrenching episode of accusation and betrayal, my fellow gamer and I spent most of the time laughing our asses off as we played our respective characters' insanity to the hilt. When's the last time you thought it was funny when someone in your party fireballed you on purpose?

The reason for why this worked when regular PvP probably would have failed miserably is that when properly roleplayed, Insanity adds an extra layer of abstraction to the mix. Sure, we're all already a combination of people, players, and characters when sitting at the table, but then when the characters we are running are also wearing masks of their own we are able to surrender a little of our precious emotional investment as people and/or players into those characters and enjoy their actions as as if we watching them act and not in fact directing their actions. Wild stuff, if you think about it, but then again roleplaying games are far more complicated social activities than we credit them for being in the first place...

(Funny postscript: I went back to my old DMG in order to look up the various forms of Insanity and found that my player friends from high school had written each others' names next to several of the headings. So even though Mr. Gygax didn't realize it at the time (or rather, perhaps because he did realize it and didn't want to encourage such divisive sentiments in what was still very much a party-based gaming dynamic), Insanity had already become a vehicle for airing PvP sentiments.)

Welcome

Because I don't have enough blogs as it is...