A recent Questing Beast video has drawn a line in sand with respect to WOTC’s One Game Licence. A colloquial folk conception of D&D is contrasted with a corporately controlled singular vision of the hobby. When viewed as a folk activity, Ben Milton places RPGs in the same box as pass times such as knitting or painting.
Some uncanny cross between improv theater, campfire ghost stories, literary jazz, and—in its heroic tropes—epic poetry and fairy tales
In this post, I wanted to flesh this out a bit more, and look at some parallels between RPGs and folk theatre. What I hadn’t expected was quite how close the connection between these forms can be in some instances.
Folk Theatre
Folk theatre is a very broad category. It can be frequently bawdy, crude and naïve, with a good number of fart jokes – qualities shared with some of the best RPG sessions. Further superficial similarities with D&D are evident in this video, which could easily be mistaken for a LARP game.
This blog talks a lot about materialism in role playing games, but I’ve not covered where these ideas come from. Before I got back into RPGs, I spent a decade trying to write theatrical plays. My inspiration then was a 20th century movement that went against the dominant theatrical form of the time. I must like to go against the grain, because it is the rebellious “Old School”(OSR) strand in RPGs that has felt like home here too.
My previous post argued that the rule system of 5e D&D seems to encourage certain dramatic principles in its gameplay. I referred to these as idealist poetics, where outcomes in the game-world are determined by the characters in accordance with their personality traits. Here I will look at how this can play out in 5e campaigns.
I’m going to focus on a very character centric, high fantasy, approach to running campaigns. Of course, this won’t correspond to everyone’s experience of 5e. But as discussed in my previous post, the high power level of characters in 5e seems designed to encourage this style of play, where the fate of the kingdom hinges on their actions.
My previous post looked at how a certain approach to roleplaying games, that typical of the OSR, has seemed to align itself with a philosophical position known as materialism. The “Old School” (OSR) style of gaming is often contrasted with the approach characteristic of mainstream 5e D&D. It is not surprising then that 5e D&D itself shows an alignment with a different and contrasting position, one which I am going to refer to as idealist poetics.
My aim is to keep the philosophy light. A lot of the ideas I talk about here actually come from dramatic theory. This may not be their natural ground, but I think they help explain certain trends within RPGs surprisingly well.
In my previous blog post, I talked about Into the Odd (ItO) as a basic materialist RPG. ItO emerged from a revival of interest in “Old School” gaming based on the playing style of pre and early Dungeons & Dragons. Here I will talk more generally about features of OSR gaming that align with materialist principles.
Delving a little into philosophy, a materialist RPG would be one where “being determines thought”. Put simply, the emphasis is on the game world shaping the characters, rather than the characters shaping the game world. I previously discussed how ItO fits with this principle. But elements of this are also widely seen in the OSR approach to gaming.
