Tag: miscellania

(I feel like I can’t be bothered with naming post drafts as anything but “Notes on…” recently)

I’m currently moderator for a Discord server until they decide to depose me due to wickedness. In the meantime, I’ve seen some noise about how to build a good community around the hobby. I didn’t create the server or anything but I’ve been there for a long time before being moderator as an active contributor. So, some thoughts?

Note: all said here is purely my perspective and not necessarily shared either by my fellow mods or other members.

The above meme is, at the time of writing, pinned to a channel in a DIY Adventure Games Discord I participate in. It came about because people there, often newbies, time and again propose mechanical solutions to social problems at the table, while we encourage discussing the issue directly with the players. This comes from a commonly held position in the community that, if TTRPG rules, among potential roles, elide aspects of the conversation we don’t want to focus too much cognitive energy on, we have a problem when we are trying to elide the conversation itself, by denying opportunities to recognize the others at the table as social beings. In other words, to defeat the point of non-solo TTRPGs. By then solitary activities, or other group activities that demand less constant negotiation (watching a movie together, or board/video games, for example), would be something to consider. This is especially troublesome living in times when people are more alone than ever.

I’m currently running more or less four sessions per week, and as I reflect on those and how I feel during them, this issue comes, which propels me to write about it here. TTRPGs are a social activity. I love TTRPGs. I also hate people.

The above is of course glib. I hate TTRPGs too.

Back on track, I’m not a misanthrope at all but I have recognized antisocial tendencies due to a variety of factors relating to personal history, temperament and such that don’t need to be disclosed. I’m an antisocial prat. So why would I prefer a medium that is defined by the difficulties of communication, intimacy, agreement and constant exposure to others instead of ludic activities that block the other? Even more, why do I embrace approaches that center the dialogue as much as possible instead of eliding?

I already need to be constantly social and intimate with others in my daily life. More than that, I need to deal with the pain of trying to untangle what is unsaid, what is expected, and what is alienated.

This all relates and is intensified by the need to Do It Right in every action and interaction in daily life. What is “to Do It Right”? I don’t need to explain it. If you reading this are BIPOC, neuroatypical, disabled/Mad, queer, woman, or/and many other categories, you know what it means to Do It Right every day and every time to exist. If you aren’t any of those, even seeing me refer to those categories makes my meaning come across.

And this is particularly painful to those among us who suffer from bad socialization or thought patterns that make understanding what we must do even worse.

So why would I bring that pain to my hobby life? I think I like the failure.

Again, we can’t ever fail in our daily lives. And the TTRPG hobby is a haven for neuroatypical people or those who had fraught socialization processes. Those people do experience the need to get every interaction Right to be able to live. But we aren’t unable to live when we fail to communicate during a game, or when we explore the fraught field of making our needs and wants known for the supreme stake of a dork elfgame. TTRPGs stand for something the world cannot quite ever offer: a space where it’s okay to fail at being social. This not only allows the development of confidence and better communication practices, but also reminds us that we will fail no matter how much we learn, and that’s quite comforting. I don’t need to Do It Right. I will sometimes, but I’m not worried.

Sometimes we do it “right”? Maybe, but I think we need to reframe our thinking towards the idea there isn’t a right to achieve at all. We know the magic moment when everyone seems to be creatively and energetically in sync at the table, but I propose that this moment is no more or less magical or worth it than the moments of disagreement, of stopping to figure it out, of taking a breath to re-establish communication from zero. I like TTRPGs for their infinity as a creative project, but also because they allow me to live a complete ethic of social failure that is too risky in the everyday. To fail is wonderful.

Back to my four sessions a week. I sometimes go to the session with dread of talking, of disappointing the players, of making myself not understood. And when I fail at that and look at feedback, or belated realize my failure at some point, I can think “God. I’ve failed at communication and interacting, and it’s okay. It’s finally okay.”

I’m a puppetry fan, and considered more than once taking up the art. The key quality of the puppet, much like the doll, is its vital, tactile consciousness. It carries an anima of inanimate quality that nevertheless inspires and reacts to the puppeteer or child, forming a mutual performance through the connected elements of stage, scenario, physical materials and the performer/player’s own imagination that challenges basic conceptions of user and used in favor of an object-oriented ontology. It’s appropriate that, when Bruno Latour explains the principles of Actor-Network Theory that open the field for non-human actors as participants into affairs and social groups, he picks as example the marionette who pulls the puppeteer through strings as much as it is pulled by fingers.

Dolls are usually acquired at toy stores. So was the Basic edition of D&D. I propose, on the OSR style of daydreaming the road not taken, imagining which conversations we would have if we regarded roleplaying texts as toys and not games.

I have been following Jenx’s latest blog series on hobby best practices with joy. I believe he will be pleased in seeing me and others tackle the issue from our perspective. I wouldn’t be convinced to put this on paper without his enthusiasm in writing about it.

My belief is that creative hobbies are not a hobby as singular object but a category of tangentially related hobbies with different ethos that are created to take advantage of one core hobby – which is not necessarily the most practiced despite its core status. This is better explained by analyzing the roleplaying category.

My creative life has been a bit of a rump these past few days due to exhaustion. It includes writing, scholarship, and roleplaying. This made me reflect on my own methods regarding creativity – I believe in a disciplined and methodical approach to life, consistently analyzing and altering practices –, and, well, perhaps sharing would do good. This is tangentially related still to the blog’s topic since it’s a creative and literate hobby.