Originally posted 241127 at the Zaibatsu [1] but I read it again as my campus unveiled their enterprise AI and felt like sharing it again. Play.
--- title: Toward Convivial Play date: 241127 category: phlog ---
From 2008 through around 2015, my preferred medium for tabletop roleplay was the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. At the start, I loved the modular and (comparatively) stripped-down approach from the bloat of what 3.0 and 3.5 amassed and appended in attempt to unify a fractured hobby in the protracted edition mess of BX, BECMI, and AD&D. In previous editions, I always felt like I had catching up to do, like I couldn't adequately approach the game as a player or a referee without total knowledge of the options available in the officially-sanctioned modules and rulesets. This was often reinforced in the games I played (always as a PC in those days, never as a ref) where my approach to character creation stemmed from fairly mundane thoughts like "what if I had a couple of hand crossbows where I had different sets of magical bolts, and I could be a sort of trick-shot alchemist" that mechanically translated to a Very Bad multiclass mish-mash, while the others who had system expertise seemed to get their ideas from how to squeeze the most juice out of the rules. These were my very first introductions to the concept of TTRP from the table itself. When 4e came out, clean slate, I wanted to become the expert and, as it happened, nobody else in my group wanted to referee.
What I loved about 4e was how explicitly it told you, via its systems, what it was. 4e the *game* is for tactical combat. Characters have a set of moves with certain conditions and limitations, they live on a grid, and they progress and gain more complicated moves that let them combat more complicated foes. Within a single session of refereeing a 4e session of *play*, I could appreciate how by the system doing that one thing really well, it didn't matter how I adjudicated anything out of that realm. Combat was part of my play, sure, but so was mystery-solving, alliance-building, demesne-managing, artefact-identifying, et cetera, all the things that players wanted to do that was not directly tied to the grid we just negotiated and resolved collaboratively, convivially. This was easy and fun and the campaign lasted years.
As the system grew and the options grew and the bloat grew, I happily paid the monthly fee to have access to the Official 4e Character Creator and the database of all the board game pieces at my disposal. Before and after sessions, my players and I would hunker over my personal computer and poke through new power options in combat, ponder over the dozens of magical items added monthly. I felt like I was a co-conspirator, levelling the playing field for my group, making the play about our shared successes unlike in my prior experiences where my lack of access to game tools and content meant I would never have as successful or fun a character as those who did. This was the lie that 4e sold us, and I can see it now as the framework for the profit hydrae of Roll20 and D&D Beyond, which I consider to be wholly antithetical to tabletop role play (not just by virtue of being virtual, let it be noted).
In my work, I spend a lot of time fretting over the supposed inevitability and eventual importance of tools that accomplish tasks that we don't really need, providing shadow-forms of what we already have and worse. Sectors of academia have it in their mind that the only way to thrive is by buying into enterprise-level generative transformers (you know, "artificial intelligence"). It's in the best interests of those who sell enterprise-level generative transformers that people think it will make the game easier to play and that it'll do the heavy-lifting those sales teams assure you is essential. The reasons to avoid using mass-market "AI" are myriad, and I won't get into them here. Their ubiquity in modern software drags everything down with it, giving up control of play to the faceless and nameless ogres at the helm. More intention stolen and hoarded every day by virtue of playing the game they sold.
Muscle cords thicker than greed.
Take up all you possess, and carry it with you.
See what you desire, and come to possess it.
This is but one of the paths a man may walk
to leave humanity behind.
"Ogre" by Luke Gearing, 2021 [2]
In my free time, I've been rewiring those long shuttered compsci paths I haven't visited since ~2004. Starting with some self-paced Python lessons, I'm hoping to give myself a handful of tools for degrowth and convivial computing [3]. For a while, I'd used Notion to keep notes, tie in some relational databases, and so on. As it spiraled out into ever-increasing toolsets and features I actively oppose, I wondered if I was too far gone in my complacency. Dude, you know how to query a database. This is, in fact, a major component of your job. How difficult could it be to automate some of the stuff atop it? When tools I use today become deprecated or prohibitively expensive tomorrow, what recourse will I have other than to pay up or move on?
Freed from the parasitic thought-stealing convenience of my 4e medium when the edition changed, the tools changed, the texts changed, and the play expectations themselves changed to be more aligned with cultural touchstones, it took several years before I was energized by any sort of play in this format. Tunnel Goons [4] fits on a half-sheet of paper and is sharp as a rapier. The Vanilla Game [5] can be read in its entirety in well under an hour, then used to adjudicate basically any module that has ever existed. There is really no expertise one can have over this kind of ruleset that another couldn't attain within minutes, because the systems are deliberately incomplete. Like my precious 4e D&D at its outset, they establish what they do and leave the rest to play. The things they establish, of course, are fractions of others, but what they put back in my hands and yours in exchange is agency and intention. Once you can see how the mechanisms work, it's not difficult to make the whole machine yours. It has always been yours.
-30-
[1] gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~trunnion/phlog/
[2] https://lukegearing.itch.io/volume-2-monsters
[3] https://damaged.bleu255.com/Convivial_Computing/
[4] https://tunnelgoons.com/
[5] https://vanillagame.carrd.co/