Let me back up a little and explain some of the history of my gaming group. As I mentioned when I was riffing on Wednesdays, I’ve been playing RPGs with these guys since the late 1990’s. For most of that time I was just a player letting someone else run the games, but eventually I took my turn coordinating a brand-new campaign. I had become so fascinated with a new role-playing game that I needed to see our group take a swing at it, and I knew that the only way that was going to happen was if I stepped up as the Game Master. I could probably rip through 3000 words or more on how that whole experience gradually unfolded, but most of that would not be particularly germane to what’s on my mind today. Namely, the concept of world-building.
When I talk about “genre entertainments” (or “the genre ghetto”) I’m usually referring to sci-fi, fantasy, horror – another way of lumping those all together is to point out that they don’t take place in the world we all live in. “Serious” literature or movies are about real people dealing with real problems in the real world, which everyone in the audience will be familiar with as a common reference point. But as soon as you introduce one fantastical element, you have moved into a different world with its own rules, and the audience has to understand those rules in order to really get the story. Sometimes the new world is extremely familiar; the world of the Spider-Man movie is exactly like our own except that genetically engineered spiders can confer quasi-supernatural abilities on high school dweebs (un)lucky enough to be bitten by them. Also, military contractors have some sweet toys. Other times, the world is completely alien, for instance taking the audience to a time long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. And when that’s the case the author can walk a fine line between things being mysterious and/or unexplainedly baffling, OR the author can spend a lot of time explaining how things work, which is all well and good when someone is dropping allusions to Clone Wars and rhapsodizing about their personal connection to the Force, but gets progressively worse when someone starts taking blood samples for midichlorian counts. (Ahem.)
So this game – Nightbane – which I ran for my friends was a fairly original idea to begin with, and I kind of took it as published and modified it extensively to accommodate some of my own ideas, and so the world in which the game was set was pretty complex. It started with modern Earth and then added on a mirror-dimension ruled by ancient godlike evil overlords with designs on conquering Earth, plus another dimension full of demons kind of like Hades and yet another dimension full of more weirdness like the Astral Plane, and the focus was on a mystical race living secretly amongst humanity and capable of shifting back and forth from human form to powerful (but still good-hearted) monster form, who are really the only ones capable of stopping the evil overlords, but who risk being hunted as monsters themselves if they act too openly, especially because 99.9% of Earth’s population is unaware of the existence of any mirror-dimensions or demons or anything like that. And that’s the starting line – it got stranger from there.
Now like I said, I was the only one who was obsessed with this game (or even knew it existed) when we started, so I was the only one who knew the contours of things. This actually turned out to be a blessing in some ways, because half of the fun of the game for the players was discovering the rules of the world their characters inhabited. (The hook was that the players' characters had no idea they were Nightbane creatures until the game began, and they were thrown into the deep end of this cosmic war of good and evil with no preparation.) We were literally building up an entire (altogether insane) world, adventure by adventure, and I say “we” very deliberately because although the Game Master always is the final authority on what is or is not a part of the fictional universe, our group has always been pleasantly collaborative and I was often taking suggestions from the players and incorporating them into the tapestry. It was delightful.
It was also a lot of work. Because we’ve all been playing for so long, inhabiting these fictional worlds, we all can spot logical inconsistencies and general fakeness a mile away, and we disdain it accordingly. So my job running the game was that much harder as I was constantly tempted to try new things as we went along but worried that I might contradict something we had established previously. It was often rewarding, but just as often exhausting. And eventually the bottom gave out. The game campaign never quite reached a satisfying conclusion, but tapered off because I couldn’t devote the energy to it that it needed.
Which is why, when I volunteered to run a new game, I suggested Dungeons & Dragons. Because that is a world that is already incredibly well-established, and therefore so much less mental upkeep. Even if you’ve never come anywhere near an actual game of D&D, you probably have a good sense of what you’d expect to find in one. Mostly it’s a shameless rip-off of Lord of the Rings, with every mythology and bit of folklore known to man (and a few invented just for the game) thrown in to boot. Plus the magic-study lore created by Jack Vance. OK, I could keep going about all the arcane oddities that constitute the game’s world (really technically worlds, each with a different flavor, but I’m desperately trying to rein this in) but the basics remain: pseudo-medieval, low-tech, swords and sorcery, monsters in the forests, fairy-tale world. Nothing could be simpler to grasp the essence of, right?
Somehow, though, I have managed to completely subvert my own undertaking. Last night’s game was fun, I reiterate emphatically, but here’s what it mainly consisted of: a walking tour of the city in which the game was set, which included some history, some economics, some sociology, some engineering, and some social etiquette. All of which is kind of suggested by “swords-n-sorcery-n-so-forth” but my friends and I were geeking out about nailing down the details. Because that’s what we do. There was also an extended philosophical discussion about the relative morality of organized crime in a semi-lawless environment, and what the proper response would be if one were to kill a “made man” and then be informed by the man’s capo that the only way to avoid eye-for-eye retribution was to undertake a hit contract on another enemy of the capo; this discussion was conducted entirely IN-CHARACTER. And then to wrap everything up (because I have always thought it was a shame to play a game where everyone has swords but doesn’t use them) there was a fight to subdue a random escaped zoo animal, which was essentially a venomous four-legged parakeet the size of a large elephant. And even that triggered some reflection from a character who is a mystically-powered nature-worshipping druid about the inherent evils of keeping wild animals enclosed in menageries in the first place.
So apparently, even when playing in a setting which is one of the all-time hoariest of hoary clichés, my friends and I find ways to build our own worlds from scratch, not because we have to, but because we love doing it. We’ve all played video games from Legend of Zelda to World of Warcraft, too, but it’s the limitless open-endedness of a pencil and paper and dice RPG that’s the reason why we will never stop geeking out with good old D&D.
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