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FreyjaKatra
@FreyjaKatra

I watched Dan Olson's latest on Decentraland (thanks for letting us quote you in Hard Wired Island btw) and surprisingly, it got to a pretty salient core of what makes tabletop games work...

...and why Gygax's vision of tabletop games was never going to work.

In the 70s around Lake Geneva, play groups weren't little pockets of 5-6 people coming together for their game world. It was Dungeon Masters who ran tables, and players who could migrate from table to table. If a reward was earned at one table, it could be brought to another. If you got your +5 magic sword at Dave's table, Jim the DM might end up having to account for your +5 magic sword at his table a week later.

Almost like... some kind of NFT... you could use in different games...

This isn't a coincidence.

Gygax's AD&D was an attempt to consolidate a ruleset which would not be plagued by the need for "house rules." That you could play competitively. That you could migrate with from table to table with no friction at all. The goal was a shared fictional space of many tables. The most famous modules of D&D were run as competitions. Caves of Chaos. Castle Greyhawk. Tomb of Horrors. You would essentially have "high scores" of how far you got and how much loot you escaped with. The best players were the ones who survived really well.

The first actual tournament, running exciting new module "Dungeon Module S1 Tomb of Horrors," was a disaster that permanently soured the project. DMs ran with whatever rulings they preferred - of which there were many - and the expectations Gygax had from his own table's adversarial and competitive DMing style didn't transfer to any other table at the Tomb of Horrors tournament at all. He was left shellshocked. The dream was of something that would inform and, in a sense, program the social contract, a universal ruleset, to which he owned the copyright. And boy, did he know his copyright. He ran afoul of it multiple times, after all. And it failed utterly and miserably as no one obeyed it, whether from good intent or bad.

In fact, attempts to program social contracts with no moderation tend to fail. You can't make a ruleset immune to bad actors. You can't make Code Is Law, or AD&D Is Law. Whatever magic circle you enter only applies to your table. This is absolute death to large brands, hype, and marketing!

These are lessons I learned reading after-action reports from the 1970s, before the internet existed. I see them play out online 50 years later, with increasingly large sunk cost fallacy holes to fall into.

The lesson is: Make your own magic circle and realize it belongs to you. These large, all-encompassing virtual magic circles don't work. Minecraft worlds and VRChat instances function when platforms fail. As they become platforms, they become more prone to decline and failure.

But you can still play AD&D, 50 years later, at your table. It just won't be Gygax's vision. And that's a good thing.


ValerieElysee
@ValerieElysee
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in reply to @FreyjaKatra's post:

White Wolf tried it back-when with the LARP stuff and it was a fucking nightmare of weird politics, infighting, and rent extraction. My local group almost came to blows when one of their sales people came to town.

That's a pretty good analysis; D&D was, after all, born from competitive wargaming rules, where competition and portability between groups was the point.
And while I certainly harbor no love for the money-mongers at the big gaming companies who do these things to try and wring profit out of players... having been involved in the running of a few larger, open TTRPG world communities, I absolutely understand that some of these problems come from places of good intentions too. The idea of a highly-portable ruleset, after all, alleviates the organizational struggles of maintaining a smaller play group; the larger the group you can maintain, the easier it is to find people who can play stories you want to play on a schedule you can maintain. But of course, the larger the group grows, the harder it is to maintain something that everyone feels is consistent and fair.

Incidentally, does this frame the act of playing a small scale tabletop indie game with a select group of friends as an anti-capitalist act? not entirely, but have you heard of this one anti-capitalist game Hard Wired Island which absolutely encourages that sort of play

I think the most anti-capitalist thing you can do is simply spend time enjoying life with friends. It rejects the endless cycle of work, the unwalkable cities, the culture of isolation, everything.

Also I've vaguely heard of Hard Wired Island and definitely want to try it out some time.

Good to know, thanks. I'm hesitant to poke through places like Dragonsfoot - I mostly associate them with the parts of the TTRPG community I'd rather not interact with - but they are a source of first party accounts for a hobby now old enough to have a lot of folks present at the beginning start passing away.

Isn't the concept of the magic circle to describe that special rules apply within the concept of play? i.e. It's a concept meant to highlight "bleed" and show that whatever happens "is just a game" and shouldn't extend into real life consequences? I am more familiar with Huizinga's original concept than later expansions on the topic.

"Attempts to program social contracts with no moderation tend to fail" is a good statement, because west marches / living community style games are frequently successful because of moderation.

That is absolutely not the lesson of the magic circle or by extension social contract theory in any way, although it could be framed as a criticism of Huizinga's take on it. As Dan Olson says, the minute someone smashes the goalie's face in, the social contract stops mattering real fast (especially without the backing of an organization that can impose fines, and even then.) And even if it was an aberration, someone's face got smashed in. Real life consequences occurred as a direct result of emotions and actions taken within the magic circle. There's no taking those back, and they're not automatically forgivable for having been "rules breaks" in the context of a football match because the magic circle of society itself was broken.

Consider this: for football, riots - people-killing, property burning, car flipping riots - are normalized as part of the social contract of football and football behaviour. They're frowned upon, but ultimately considered to be just one of those things that happens inevitably after some football matches. Contrast a Black Lives Matter protest and how that's received when it happens. Both are extensions of social contract theory, of the magic circle. It just only happens that one involves a game.

If we limit ourselves solely to games, the magic circle is describing a kind of alternate reality - one where every participant adheres to a set of limitations on a temporary basis regarding one unified topic. in Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Castranova, 2005) the topic is tackled from the perspective of a "suspension" of reality where "normal" rules don't apply as applied to online games, but even a cursory examination reveals this layer of heightened alternate reality to be very porous - it bleeds very much, very hard, into real lives, and the content of the magic circle is based on what we bring to it in the first place. And as CLR James notes, it is "never just a game." https://videogameacademia.org/2021/08/04/in-the-shadow-of-huizinga-games-studies-and-cultural-history/