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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Things anyone who has played Kingmaker will know...

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Alex Massie - to the point as ever - has this to say:

Moreover, if there is a geographical dividing line in British politics is should probably be drawn above the Trent not the Tweed.

This is true and has been for at least 600 year - hence Kingmaker where those bishops with a see north of the Trent receive 30 extra troops by way of protection from the rough and tumble of Northern politics!

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Talbot to Ludlow

I thought long and hard about whether to call this particular little piece, "keeping the Welsh out" but decided since that was a fool's errand to talk instead about games. And why we play them.

The title I've chosen refers to an event card from the game Kingmaker which has long been one of my favourites featuring all the best things about games - plague, pestilence, storms, battles, castles and general skullduggery (and the picture is Ludlow Castle). And since I was brought up in the days before computers, we played games involving small pieces of card being piled up on a board and moved around. Proper games, if you ask me!

Indeed - along with ridiculous amounts of D&D - I spent a significant proportion of my waking hours at university playing games. Along with Kingmaker we played Machiavelli (no surprises that this is set in renaissance Italy), Mighty Fortress (set in reformation Europe) and assorted Diplomacy varients. These games required thought, considered approaches, some understanding of strategy and a wide streak of devious nastiness. Which I guess is why they don't appeal to everyone - I'm told there are people out there for which the prospect of a rainy day in playing board games is some kind of purgatory.

Today we still play board games - Kingmaker if we can find enough willing victims (I think they like to call themselves 'players') but more usually more recently publish board games like 'Ticket to Ride', 'Carcassonne' and 'Puerto Rico'. And I still have a love hate relationships - great to play, exercises the mind. But when you're as competitive as I am rather stressful. And don't get too near me when I'm losing!

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Can I be ten again, Sir?

When I was ten….

We climbed over the fence to play football in the school grounds (it is only a rumour that we climbed on the roof) & could cross the fields to Elmers End Cricket Club and watch them play – and so long as I was back for tea no-one bothered

With Jeremy Lesuik I got the bus and tube to go to football – Highbury, Stamford Bridge, Upton Park – on our own and paid for from our pocket money. And in the Summer a trip to The Oval or Lords for cricket

Mr Sparks took us to the old golf course to play cricket – on occasion up to twenty or so playing an impromptu game. In bad weather he took us swimming. We walked the two miles there and back to South Norwood pool

There was the ‘Front Room Space Race’ – building the biggest Lego rocket – and the matchbox races: sprints, rallies and loop-the-loop

When the subbuteo men broke (and finally refused to be re-glued) we played the game with my sisters farm set – minutes to go and it’s Sheep 2, Cows 1…

And climbing the cherry trees and digging for Roman remains in the garden (which of course we found in abundance)

Playing cricket with a big plastic ball and the roses as fielders – and ducking my Mum’s sandals when we knocked a flower off

Back then bikes were old, slightly rusty and lacked brakes – but we still raced down The Glade (with my little brother in the old pushchair – and that didn’t even have steering)

…there wasn’t any “Attention Deficiency Disorder”; there were fewer social workers; no CRB checks; there were coppers who clipped you round the ear or, worse, took you home for Dad to thrash; we had no computers or TV and only partial central heating (told you we were posh) but….

… there were clippies on the buses; old men with allotments who didn’t mind you scrumping so long as you helped to pick the soft fruit; lino you could slide on down the hall; and ‘The Clitheroe Kid’ or ‘The Men from the Ministry’ on the radio signalling the approach of Sunday lunch

It may be old age and I’m sure my specs are rose-tinted but….

….can I be ten again, sir?