More Adventure Gamer Than Not

Friend of the blog EOTB at Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord spotted my post the other day about "classic adventure gaming" and was kind enough to respond, providing some very helpful background.

First, I'm not a podcast listener - the voices in my head don't like competition - so I missed the whole development of "classic adventure gaming" by EOTB and friends. I'll let EOTB take it from here:

And this gets to the reason for starting up the podcast - we want to reach people who aren't playing any form of "D&D" but love the idea of hanging out with their friends to explore lost tombs, find fabulous treasure, and cross swords with personal nemeses. But because D&D has been around for a long time now, with significant social media reach outside the membership of the hobby, when many of those people hear the word "role-playing" they think "an adult version of tea party".

Because that is what they read, see, and hear.

And often, they're just not interested in that. You can get all of the adventure I listed above in other media, with zero tea party. There's no reason at all to play D&D if you don't like tea party. You can play video games as a group, remotely. You can meet up somewhere and run a 40K scenario. You can get your fill and never have to risk sitting across from someone telling you that unless you are willing to repeat that in character, it never happened at all and they won't consider it valid for play. Or your funny quip that made everyone laugh, yeah...the DM insists your character said it too. (emphases in the original - BV)

So, I'm the epitome of "a little knowledge yadda yadda" in this.

EOTB's point is that many people who might be receptive to imaginary adventures with friends around the dining table equate "roleplay" with "playacting" - it's his assertion that this was never the intention of the creators of the hobby - I mean, OD&D bills itself as rules for "fantastic medieval wargames campaigns" - and "roleplaying" has come to means something quite different from my humble concept of simply "making decisions as your character." "Classic adventure gaming" is an concerted effort to unburden the hobby of a phrase that can be self-limiting.

"Adventure gaming" isn't really something new, actually; this has bubbled up in various forums and the blogosphere over many years - but this seems to be an effort to gain wider acceptance, particularly in differentiating CAG from whatever it is the OSR's become, and in light of the diversification of the hobby: "story games," "narrative games," &c. Fortunately for me, I'm not the only person with questions about to what extent charaterisation plays in CAG, and EOTB addresses that as well:

But now after explaining further why we arrived at the stance of rejecting the term roleplaying completely, let's get to the meat of BV's question:

"This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started. I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this."

The short answer is: there's nothing about this that is outside the bounds of CAG, at all.

Every time I create a character it is essentially myself as that class type. But as BV says, the character, by virtue of interacting with the game world, often becomes a variation of myself that is different than all the other variations of myself I've played before. I might never bother giving the guy a name (I do name some of my characters) but he's still different than EOTB-6106 and EOTB-5114. He's made different enemies, developed different habits and often would handle the same situation differently than another character of mine would.

But he also might not. He might handle it exactly the same. And that's the point: I don't care if he winds up different or the same as some other character. He's not why I'm playing, what happens with him as a character per se is some sort of happy accident, and it might be nothing worth remembering. Because I'm not here to develop a character, I'm here - me, EOTB-0001 - to explore tombs, find treasure, cross swords, and kick ass. He's the tool I use to do it, just like a good hammer. Nothing about the hammer is my hobby, however. It's rather incidental to the point even if I truly appreciate a great hammer.

I kinda suspected this, from the way EOTB wrote about refereeing non-player characters - " . . . the knowledge, goals, abilities, resources, and quirks of the NPC or monster they are running . . . " - but it was great to have it confirmed so clearly here: "The acceptable roleplaying floor for an individual participant must be zero so that people who aren't into that can relax and have fun. The ceiling can be whatever each group determines." (emphases in the original - BV)

And that becomes an important part of expectations setting at the start of whatever campaign a referee wants to run. I was upfront with prospective players for my new Flashing Blades play-by-post campaign that it's a "social megadungeon," in which the "rooms" are non-player characters and the "passages" the web of relationships between them - there's treasure to find, swords to cross, and even tombs to discover, but the main modus of exploration in this campaign is talking to people. This is in no way precluded by CAG, of course, but it's imperative to make clear what "adventure" means in the context of this campaign: duels, affairs, intrigue, sure, but also career advancement and social climbing, and if zero roleplaying is the floor, then a player should also understand that the ceiling is quite a bit higher than if I was running a good ol' fashioned dungeon crawl and leave room for others to explore and enjoy that space as well.

As for me?

With "roleplaying = playacting" as a starting point, I'd reject that term, too, and I can relate to how that perception of the hobby could be seriously off-putting to potential players who just want to imagine themselves, say, swashing bucklers in the gardens of Fontainebleau.

Playing 5e with the Cabin Kids and their friends years ago reminded me so much of my own experiences when I was introduced to D&D. 5e is a gawdawful mess of a game and I was throwing stuff out right and left because once the kids had their stats and classes, bought some gear and figured out their spells, they were ready to roll. Backgrounds? Backstory? Fuck that, I'm a ranger with a bow, let's go kill a dragon and find some treasure! And yet, as we played, personalities emerged, tiny bits of backstory crept in here and there - I think there's a certain amount of inevitability to this when you hand creative people an imaginary world to mess around in.

Me, I start every character, every game with some variation on the same basic motivation: "Out there is a fortune, waiting to be had! You think I'll let it go? You're mad!" Get rich, or die tryin'. Let's go kill a dragon.

So I'm more adventure gamer than not.