Acquired Play
This essay was originally posted to Detritus, where subscribers get access to exclusive content, behind the scenes posts, musings on the craft of writing, drafts of works in progress, and more.
Oral Traditions in Gaming
Recently on twitter dot com, Noora Rose of Monkeys Paw Games has been talking about roleplaying games as an oral tradition. This is a manner of framing discussion about these games that I really like – especially when you consider that D&D in its inception was essentially midwest American folk art that Gary wrote down and codified, in the same way that the Grimm brothers wrote down Germanic folk stories – and I think it’s useful to keep this in mind when writing games texts. The text is not the game, and the text is not the play. And if my attempts to read games on Twitter has taught me anything, it’s that learning a game from the text itself is very difficult.
Part of what makes it difficult is, I think, because the people writing rules texts don’t know exactly what that text is for. (I count myself among this group). We’re writing texts that try to be instructional, conceptual, and reference documents at once. This makes for bad texts that don’t achieve what they set out to achieve. Big Mikey knows more about this than me.
Today I want to talk about a couple of things that aren’t related to games. I’m risking straying into analogy and metaphor. I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ll try and keep this as focused as possible.
Baby’s First Coffin
My favourite band is The Dillinger Escape Plan. That wasn’t always the case. Miss Machine was released when I was 18 and I heard from people whose opinions I trusted that it was one of the best aggressive records ever produced. I ran out and bought the CD not knowing anything about the band, having heard nothing from the band before.
I got home, put the disc in my CD player, put my headphones on, and hit play. Panasonic Youth started up, a torrent of noise and aggression and jagged rhythms and Greg screeching down the mic. I think I lasted about 45 seconds before I turned it off.
I didn’t understand it. It was noise. I couldn’t listen to it.
At some point I heard Phone Home, which is very Nine Inch Nails, and I liked it. I tried Miss Machine again, and I still didn’t understand it, but I didn’t recoil like I had the first time.
A few years passed. My tastes developed. I started to get more into hardcore. I discovered Converge. I tried to listen to Miss Machine again, but I still didn’t get it.
In 2007, Ire Works was released. I saw the video for Black Bubblegum and thought “how is this the same band?” I bought that album, thinking it would be different to Miss Machine. I put the CD in, and I remember feeling a little thrill of anxiety that was almost fear before I pressed play. What is this going to be like? I got through Fix Your Face and really liked it, but I lasted maybe 30 seconds into Lurch before I said “nope, I still don’t get this”.
In 2009, Architects released Hollow Crown. I heard Early Grave in my friend’s car and asked her if this was Dillinger. I liked it, I went to see them with her, and I had a great time. They became my new favourite band for a long time.
I tried Ire Works again. I still didn’t get it. At this point I was starting to become a little intimidated by the concept of Dillinger.
In 2010 Dillinger released Option Paralysis. I was an early adopter of Spotify and so I didn’t buy the album, I just listened to it. Again, that thrill of fear as I pressed play.
The opening bars of Farewell, Mona Lisa were a full on sensory assault and I once again said “I don’t get this”, but for some reason this time I stuck with it. From 0:11-0:31 is pure chaos, but then the song drops into this big groovy riff that painted the biggest grin on my face. And by the time we got a minute in and we’re back to chaos, everything had changed. Suddenly I got it. I understood what Dillinger were all about.
It took me 6 years of not knowing what I was listening to, of having no context for what I was hearing and no way of understanding it, but I got there. And once I did, a whole new world opened up to me.
The people who told me that Miss Machine was the best aggressive record of 2004 were right, incidentally. I just couldn’t tell at the time.
Spellburn
Back in May 2020, I was getting into indie games. I’d played a lot of various iterations of D&D, I was writing Under The Floorboards. The Wretched had been in existence for about a month. Matt Sanders showed me the Fireball spell from DCC.
I loved it conceptually and so I bought DCC and tried to read it. The book is a doorstep, a massive slab of paper filled with wild illustrations and hundreds of pages of spells that look just like Fireball. It was cool, I loved the idea of the level 0 funnel, but I didn’t get it.
You know where this is going.
Jump forward to August 2022, as I’m writing this. I’ve played a lot of level 0 DCC, but until last week I still hadn’t played without it being a funnel. I knew the term “spellburn”, I had a lingering memory of those spells in the book, I knew some conceptual stuff (like the Warrior’s Mighty Deed Of Arms being very fucking cool), but the sheer size and complexity of the book was intimidating. Even though I’ve read and played a lot of games in the intervening two years, I still felt a little afraid of DCC.
At Gen Con 2022 I played in the DCC tournament. The first round was a level 0 funnel, and that was fine. I’ve played and run a lot of funnels. I knew what I was doing.
The second round – the final – was a continuation of the adventure, this time with 1st level characters. And suddenly I was anxious, because I don’t actually know how to play DCC and – this being a tournament – nobody was about to teach me.
I sat down at the table, and we got handed five character sheets and told to pick who would play which character. I picked one of the two Warriors because I figured it would be the most simple class to play.
I looked at my sheet, saw “Attack +d3” and “Mighty Deed of Arms” and thought, fuck. I don’t know what this means. But the rulebook was right there on the table, and so I just picked it up and flicked to my class section and read it. That was the only time I touched the rulebook in the nearly 4 hours that we played.
Every now and then as we played, people would reach for the book when it wasn’t their turn and quickly look something up. Nobody made a big deal of it. It never slowed play down. At no point did anybody complain that they didn’t know what they were doing. We just got on with it.
We all, obviously, were drawing on our own experience of other similar games. We each had context that wasn’t specific or even necessarily “correct” for DCC, but it didn’t matter.
Some people might say, “but what if you were playing it wrong?” To them I say, we won the tournment.
I promised a point to this, and so I’m going to try to arrive at it now.
DCC is, I think, a very good example of a book that fails miserably as a teaching text but functions very well as a reference text during play. And part of that, I think, is because the text of DCC doesn’t actually try to be an instructional text.
DCC has one of the strongest play cultures of any game I can think of. They run tournaments, their Road Crew run games in shops and are rewarded for doing so, and I can jump into their Discord server right now and have a game tonight. They produce a free Quick Start PDF that comes with two adventures. The Purple Sorcerer character generator means you can go from “I’ve just heard about DCC for the first time” to “I’ve got 4 gongfarmers and a pitchfork, let’s play a funnel” in less than 5 minutes.
The weakness of DCC is that the book is intimidating. But it’s only intimidating if we expect that we’re going to have to use it to learn how to play. If we expect that we’re going to have to read the whole thing before we can enjoy the game. And this isn’t a weakness of DCC specifically – this is a fault across the entire hobby.
It took me six years to discover my favourite band despite actively trying to learn to like them because my approach was wrong. I bought albums, and I put them on, and I tried to listen to them in order when I wasn’t prepared for them. I didn’t have the context I needed. I hadn’t developed my palette. Whatever analogy you want to make. I tried to learn by reading the book.
In hindsight, I had found songs I liked. Phone Home was there. Unretrofied was there. Black Bubblegum and Milk Lizard were there. These were entry points that I could have taken and didn’t.
I know now, after being a Dillinger fan for years, that they tend to frontload their albums with a brick wall of noise. The most aggressive, inaccessible song on the record tends to be track 1, especially in the Greg Puciato era. I had no chance of getting into them by listening to the albums in running order.
So, too, with new players and RPGs. Vanishingly few players are going to read a What Is An RPG? section followed by rules for character creation followed by 8 contextless classes and understand how to play the game. People don’t learn by reading reference books cover to cover.
What I needed in order to get into Dillinger was context. What I needed to understand levelled DCC play was context. So give new players context. Don’t throw a book at them and say, “read”. Show them other people playing. Sit them down and play with them, and leave the book in the middle of the table. Just get on with the important bit – the play – and trust that if they have questions, they’ll reach for the text and look for an answer.
When people talk about games they often do it from a point of textual analysis of the rules as written, divorcing them from play and breaking them down into numbers and hypothetical situations and “but what if a player does X?”. I have grown increasingly uninterested in these sorts of discussions. The only thing I am interested in discussing now is play itself, and how to make it easier for more people to get to play, faster.
Ultimately, your text should be in service of play. It’s there to support play as need is identified through play. The rest of the time, the text does not exist. Guide them to where play happens and then trust them to do the rest.
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