Orcs are the baddies and fantasy games need baddies

You know where you are with orcs. Slaveringly ugly, utterly evil and just the thing to test to edge of your human paladin's blade or the power of your elf sorcerer's fireball. If you're stuck for some monsters to pad out your dungeon slap in a few orcs, sprinkle on a goblin or two and have them ordered around by an ogre.

The original 1977 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual has this to say about orcs:

"Being bullies, the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. Orcs dwell in places where sunlight is dim or non-existant, for they hate the light..."

It goes on...

"Orcs are cruel and hate living thing in general, but they particularly hate elves and will always attack them in preference to other creatures. They take slaves for work, food and entertainment (torture, etc.), but not elves whom they kill immediately."

Pretty clear, orcs are the baddies.

It seems, however, that these simple days are over as the plague of woke-ness spills into the world of fantasy role-playing games:

The publisher of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) says it will adjust the way it portrays some of its “evil” races, such as the “savage” orcs and the “depraved” dark elves, as part of a broader push against racism in the wake of George Floyd‘s death.

For a long while our world of fantasy gaming (and the wider world of fantasy literature) was largely immune to the 'everything is racist' tendency in the wider world. Occasional flares erupted when some English literature professor chasing a headline would say something like "Tolkien “created the blueprint for the troubling relationship between race and fantasy that would govern twentieth-century fantasies.” Now it seems we have to take the bizarre idea that orcs aren't essentially evil and lump it into our games, not because having a lawful good orc paladin is a cool idea, but because some people who don't play the game have decided that the orc is some sort of racist sterotype.

All this - outside infuences pushed onto the game - reminds me of the campaigns by Christian groups to get D&D banned because it normalised witchcaft and satanism. The assumption from the woke puritans (in taking up the battle from their Chrsitian puritan predecessors) is that the presence of 'races' with different characteristics somehow twists the minds of the people, especially young people obviously, playing the game. After three hours slashing, bashing and fireballing we come out worse people because we played a game with different 'races' - I toured a dungeon a week or so back with a man-sized turtle and what amounted to a tin man not sure what to make of that.

Later this week I'll be taking a half-orc paladin on a continuing quest to kill some drow (dark elves that live in a hierarchical society that happens to be a matriarchy) - quite how this sets me on the 'drow and orcs are a negative racial stereotype' continuum I'm not sure. What's clear to me from playing the game is that most players walk round the stereotypes because that makes the role play more engaging. For sure the orc tribe in the mountains are baddies but you might do better negotiating with them to stop the slave raids or the pillage rather than taking the old-fashioned route of extermination.

People outside the game seem not to appreciate its flexibility and the scope to play all the foibles of human psychology. If folk want a woke version - "orcx" as one wag on Twitter put it - there is nothing to stop you doing so right now. If what you want to do is make the game completely different because you (a political activist who doesn't play the game or a literature professor looking for career brownie points) dislike its central concept of 'races', then don't be upset if those of us who play the game - and have done so for over 40 years without turning into fascists - tell you politely to take a running jump.

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How Dungeons & Dragons changed the world...

Mark, from his place in France, has written about computer games. But first he tells us where it started:

I suppose it started at uni, with Dungeons and Dragons. This role-playing combat and treasure-hunting game is based on a map, figurines and rolls of the dice. And lots of rules, looked up in a book, for how armour, weapons, magic spells, and everything else in the fantasy world actually work. (How much time, magical energy and money does it take to develop a micro-fireball oven?) We'd collect together of an evening around the boards, dice and a considerable amount of beer, and play through the night.

To which I respond: Boards? Figurines? Before settling down and remembering the thousands of hours I spent playing the game. And playing didn't just involve turning up for a few hours and rolling some dice (well, absolutely thousands of dice if truth be told) - we also created the dungeons from scratch including new monsters, traps and fiendish puzzles. I once designed (I think that's the term we use these days) an entire assassin's guild complete with its constitution - my career direction was set even then!

The idea that you could create a functional model place into which players could bring their own imagination, creativity and very large two-handed swords may seem unremarkable in this age of on-line gaming, but back in the 1970s Gary Gygax's innovation was quite the opposite - remarkable indeed. Never before had there been a game that put those childhood make-believe games into its system. And, though there'd been plenty of team games, Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to have both team and individual competition - you worked with other players to slay monsters, solve puzzles and run your fingers through the loot while acting as an individual player. D&D even provided a framework - the alignment chart - to allow such individualism to range across all the variations in human character.

D&D begat a host of other 'role-playing games' (RPGs) from Traveller, which involved romping about in space, through other fantasy games like Runequest, and even a Japanese samauri game called Bushido (with by far the most over-elaborate rule book). RPGs were designed based in the wild west or capturing the incipient madness in H P Lovecraft. All these took the same model - create a character, place that character in the game when he, she or it interests with other players, and explore scenarios created by a 'game-' or 'dungeon-master'. But, while each of these games picked up flaws in D&D, the basic combat and magic system remains hard to beat (and the basis for combat systems in a pile of popular computer games).

For me, the biggest thing about D&D was - and is - the character you create as this is central to the game's ethos (not, of course, that slaying bug-eyed monsters controlled by evil priests isn't fun). I wrote about it some while ago:

What you have is a cardboard cut-out character that would suit the typical Hollywood blockbuster based on some comic book. But this is Dungeons & Dragons and you can do better. Your level one male ranger (OK you chose that because you fancied Aragorn maybe) has to round out by interacting with the other players - perhaps he's a bit grumpy when he doesn't get his way, maybe he never buys a round, or has a tendency to quote bad poetry. While doing this, of course, you have to stay alive which means you need to co-operate - even with the righteous lawful good cleric.

By the time Aerosmith (or whatever your ranger's name is) has survived to be 4th or 5th level, you know what he's like, how he'll respond to other sorts of character, his foibles and preferences. And with his recently acquired Sword of Daemon (+2, +3 vs evil things from hell) you have a real character. For sure, some of the character is the player themselves (we aren't all Constantine Stanislavsky, after all), but you'll have wrapped your mind round how to develop a character. And the wonder of this is that, for all there's a dungeon and a dungeon master controlling the game, the success or otherwise isn't just about the quantity of goblins slain or giants hacked to pieces but about having created, with a few others, a game within that game.

Looking back it sometimes seems childish to recall long conversations about what an imaginary character might do in a given situation - indeed, I'm sure that the worldly folk who though D&D was naff would make this point strongly. The thing is, however, that those conversations explored - through the medium of a game - a pile of concepts (what we mean by good and evil, the search for power, the benefits of collaboration) that would otherwise only get considered in the abstract. You learn more about evil by asking what a supposedly evil character would do than through argument, however reasoned. And it isn't simple, you quickly get past kill everyone and take all the gold (although I've done that too).

Dungeons & Dragons stretched the boundaries of the game (or at least the formal game - children had always, and still do, play games of imagination, what we'd now call RPGs) by allowing fantasy, in its widest sense, to arrive into the board game. The game became about personality, conversation, survival and growth rather than, in the old board game sense, winning or losing. Nobody dies when boys play cops and robbers but the idea of death is there as is questioning what is right and what is wrong. The child giving her dolls names, characters and roles does the same and we see it as a valuable way for that child to explore what it is to be human.

But, when children get to big school or thereabouts all this childishness has to stop. Games are either an entertaining means of passing time or else a simple matter of who wins and who loses. Outside drama classes and the school play there's none of this role-play and even the drama class wants you to be the person the playwright wants you to be not the role you want to try out. In the 1970s, for a bunch of mostly boys, mostly a bit nerdy and dorky, Dungeons & Dragons allowed them, without embarrassment, to play those games of imagination again. By making the games of young childhood fit with adult themes, D&D reinvented what grown-ups understand by a game, helped pave the way (along with complex war games from the likes of Strategy & Tactics) for computer gaming, and placed imagination right back at the heart of play where it belongs.
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How Dungeons and Dragons will save your life (or something...)

 

I thought that, rather than another partisan piece about the forthcoming election (just vote Conservative), I'd comment on characterisation in Dungeons & Dragons. As you know studying for my first degree (Upper 2nd Special Honours) was largely spent playing D&D, quite literally thousands of hours playing, discussing, arguing and creating. I've written before how my moral thinking is, in large part, shaped by discussing D&D's alignment chart - what it actually means to be good or evil, to see the law as paramount or challenging it as a statement of freedom.

So let me introduce you to Maoul.

Maoul is a thief (as an interesting aside I'll note that when we played back in 1980 the character-type was thief not what it is now, the less immoral and slightly PC somehow, 'rogue'). Looking at the character sheet from all those years ago I can summon my mental image of Maoul - 4' 11" tall, dark-skinned, ambidextrous, 19 dexterity. From these attributes my cheeky little first level thief developed into an altogether more laid back figure, confident and assured but still a little chippy about six foot tall paladins who think they can boss everything because of their muscles (and righteousness).

Like any good (true neutral) thief, Maoul prefers not to fight - that is, after all, what huge barbarian warriors and that annoying paladin are there for. So he'll go find a rock to sit on while the scrap's on, fire a few arrows and check out where in all this there's a profit to be made. At some point in his travels, Maoul acquired a magic whip - it never misses but only does 1-3 points damage, which is fine when there are hundreds of goblins but worse than useless against a fire giant - so he'll crack this at anything from the fight getting too close to his place of comfort.

All this came back to me while playing one of the computer games derived from D&D (Icewind Dale on this occasion - I like this one because you get to create the whole party not just one character as in Baldur's Gate). Partly because, while Maoul is a 17th level thief, it is often more interesting to play lower level characters than super-powerful, magic-laden masters of the universe. I suspect this is because we are a little closer to understanding how a first level fighter might feel venturing into some kobold-infested hole.

The things we've rolled and the decisions we make based on that roll provide a loose outline. We know the degree to which a character is strong, fast, sturdy, bright, considered and engaging. We've maybe rolled for gender, height, handedness and physical characteristics (these weren't in the Player's Manual but the Judge's Guild produced tables for just about everything). From this we choose what they will do - hit things hard, cast spells, keep the party alive, pick locks and find traps (as the game developed sing heroic ballads and bore people about 'the balance' were added). And then the alignment - what degree of lawfulness and goodness our character will present.

What you have is a cardboard cut-out character that would suit the typical Hollywood blockbuster based on some comic book. But this is Dungeons & Dragons and you can do better. Your level one male ranger (OK you chose that because you fancied Aragorn maybe) has to round out by interacting with the other players - perhaps he's a bit grumpy when he doesn't get his way, maybe he never buys a round, or has a tendency to quote bad poetry. While doing this, of course, you have to stay alive which means you need to co-operate - even with the righteous lawful good cleric.

By the time Aerosmith (or whatever your ranger's name is) has survived to be 4th or 5th level, you know what he's like, how he'll respond to other sorts of character, his foibles and preferences. And with his recently acquire Sword of Daemon (+2, +3 vs evil things from hell) you have a real character. For sure, some of the character is the player themselves (we aren't all Constantine Stanislavsky, after all), but you'll have wrapped your mind round how to develop a character. And the wonder of this is that, for all there's a dungeon and a dungeon master controlling the game, the success or otherwise isn't just about the quantity of goblins slain or giants hacked to pieces but about having created, with a few others, a game within that game.

Dungeons & Dragons - the proper game not the computer versions - is back (they even sell it in Waterstones which is more mainstream than it was in my day), and a new generation of young people are creating characters, slaying bugbears, and learning about good and evil. I think this is great, Dungeon & Dragons remains the most creative game I ever played allowing players the scope to build their own worlds, to develop characters and to slay (or not slay) huge monsters. It also annoys assorted god-botherers into the bargain. I hope today's players do what we did - invent new monsters, create our own dungeons, and even a new pantheon of gods.

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Quote of the day: on role-playing games

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"The view of roleplaying games has changed over time," says Smith, "mostly because the predicted 'streets awash with the blood of innocents as a horde of demonically-possessed roleplayers laid waste to the country' simply never materialised."

Go read the article - good read about one of those awful moral panics that the USA seems to specialise in.

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Wednesday Whimsy: The Elections - introducing the characters (with apologies to Gary Gygax)

The suggestion has been made that the General Election should be conducted in the style of a role-playing game rather than in the rather old and stale format we currently have (or rather “real time strategy”). I thought that I would provide some pen portraits of the main protagonists.

Gordo the Brown. An aged, half-ogre Priest of Himmelfarb, Gordo has used his powers to overthrow Bliar the Great, the fallen paladin who used to rule. His prime weapons are Nokkya, a powerful throwing block that stuns on impact and Trak Tor Statt, a mighty iron-bound book. Assisting Gordo is Man del Sunny, a half-fairy, half goblin rogue (who many suspect of having designs on Gordo’s job for himself) and the apprentice, Ed who can also wield Trak Tor Statt.


David of the Cameroons. A paladin trained at the school of Eytone, David is protected by the Coat of Bullingdon and arms himself with the great sword of Tone (seized from the hands of Bliar himself) and the Mace of the Baroness. Beside David are Gideon, an apprentice mage of great promise but little charm and Boris the Magnificent, the greatest scholar and illusionist ever (according to his own story).

Clegg O’Hallam. Known as young Nick to most around him, this tyro Priest of Libdemfocus has little skill with weapons but the assistance of a strange yellow bird. His main strength is St Vince, a powerful and holy monk renowned for his doom-laden prophecies and surprising skills as a dancer. St Vince is armed with Ey-tol-uso and Iwuzreyet, paired clubs that may only be wielded by the righteous and holy (or possibly the smug and self-important – the tomes are unclear on this point).

These are the main players but watch out for others – for Gryphin, the evil half-orc streetfighter, for La Lucas, the overweening elven druidess and for Lawd Farage, the chippy old rogue. On the fringes of the battle we might see the barbarian shaman, Salmon and a strange old witch called Esther as well as various supporters of Gordo, David and Clegg. All is set for a great battle indeed!

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On wisdom...

Over at Living with Rats, Julian Dobson speculates on building what he terms “the wisdom economy.” I pondered on whether to indulge in my usual response to Julian’s stuff – to try and tear it to shred’s from the perspective of what I might call “real liberalism”.

However, I was rather more struck by the balance between knowledge and wisdom – a balance I have commented on before and which players of Dungeons & Dragons will appreciate better than most – as you’ll read here where this trite little distinction is sourced!

"Intelligence tells you what the problem is and how to solve it, wisdom tells you whether or not you should."

I’m not sure this takes us much further forward. But is does perhaps set wisdom somewhere else than knowledge. Here’s Bruce Lloyd saying much the same thing in management speak:

“In essence, Wisdom is the vehicle we use for integrating our values into our decision-making processes. It is one thing to turn information into knowledge that makes things happen, but it is quite another thing to make the ‘right’ (/’good’/’better’) things happen. How we actually use knowledge depends on our values. Instead of moving up from knowledge to Wisdom, we actually move down from Wisdom to knowledge -- and that is how we incorporate our values into our knowledge based decision-making, as well as see the application and relevance of what we generally call Wisdom.”

So, as we might expect, “wisdom” is about the application of values. But whose values? My values – of free choice, liberty, independence and self-reliance – can respond to wise application just as easily as can the so-called progressive values of no growth, collectivism and the superiority of the group. And the authoritarian too can apply his values in just the same manner and just as wisely.

Now in all this there is an assumption that wisdom is superior to knowledge – and it leads inevitably to the “I am wise, I know best” position (as K Sridevi rather raspingly points out here):

“One can understand the progression from storytelling to leadership to wisdom. Both storytelling and leadership, in different ways, depend on "the willing suspension of disbelief". The storyteller asks his audience, "trust me, follow me, even when my story seems to defy the way everyday life works". The leader asks her people, "trust me, follow me, even when the path looks difficult and against your immediate interest". And the idea of wisdom management does seem to have that "trust me, I know best, you're not really qualified to question me" character to it. "Wisdom" is sufficiently imprecise to make its possession effectively unverifiable in a general objective way, and sufficiently confusable with charisma to make its claims believable at least by some.”

So while the “knowledge economy” is defined by what we know, the “wisdom economy” does not have these bounds. It is defined only by the wise – and who decides who is wise or what is wisdom? In truth, we already have that “wisdom economy” since wise men have acted according to their values – and those values are the values of our societies.

Another way of seeing wisdom is as the exercise of “judgement”. We are back with phronesis – with Aristotle’s practical wisdom. And again this takes us through a process of firstly understanding good and bad (what Aristotle calls the “conditions for human flourishing”), the ability to consider what is required in such a context, to deliberate on that consideration and to act accordingly. We are where we started with the vexed issue of values – so long as I apply what I consider to be the “conditions for human flourishing” and do so with consideration, deliberation and follow through with action, so long as I do this I am acting with wisdom.

The idea of the “knowledge economy” was a recognition of the added value that derived from greater knowledge – this economy was less resource intensive, more culturally varied and more personally satisfying. It was about real economics. Sadly, the idea of the “wisdom economy” is just words – all successful economies and polities rely on the application of wisdom. Taking society’s values and applying them to decision-making, management and administration - that is wisdom.

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Wednesday Whimsy: saving trolls

I want to rescue trolls – not that they’re especially nice creatures but it rather annoys me that unpleasant, rude, interfering and often anonymous frequenters of on-line comment environments have muscled in on the act.

For the record this is what a troll is:

“The average troll stands nine feet high and weighs roughly 500 pounds, though females tend to be a bit larger than males. The hide of trolls is rubbery, and usually either moss green, putrid grey, or mottled gray and green. Their coarse hair is typically iron grey, or greenish-black.

Trolls initially seem to be somewhat shorter, due to their sagging shoulders and tendency to hunch forward. They walk with an uneven gait, and their arms dangle and drag the ground when running. Despite this apparent awkwardness, trolls are quite agile.

Trolls are infamous for their regenerative abilities, able to recover from the most grievous of wounds or regenerate entire limbs given time. Severing a troll's head results merely in temporary incapacitation, rather than death. After cutting off a troll's head or other limbs, one must seal the wounds with fire or acid to prevent regeneration. Because of this, most adventurers will typically carry some sort of implement capable of creating fire.”

Or maybe not....

...some trolls live under bridges and scare less experienced goats, while others just look like big ugly humans (with a penchant for raw flesh). What ever, trolls are not spotty teenagers with nothing better to do than annoy folk on line, trolls are not self-appointed queens of snide and trolls are not irritating automated bots sending out crap spam.

I suspect there might be a better word for these people so trolls can be left in peace to annoy goats, waylay passing parties of adventurers, eat up small children and generally deliver on their mission of being rather nasty mythological beasties.

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