In the beginning everything was a mystery. You started off
with a broad sense of what you could be and what you could do but the specifics
of the experience were new. Your character, in those early days, seemed to know
little better than you. Learning the secrets necessary to stay alive was hard
and came at the cost of many ignominious deaths and much failure, but eventually
the knowledge came and with it power. Inadequate strategies were abandoned and
secrets to success discovered.
This was the structure of early D&D: the Dungeon Master
was an initiated repository of secret wisdom and the players seekers after that
wisdom. The DM’s book was off-limits to players, for whom surreptitiously
reading the mysterious knowledge secured therein was tantamount to cheating.
The process by which the knowledge could be transferred from the initiated to
the uninitiated was a series of ordeals. The master was not required to tailor
the ordeals to the specific capacities of the aspirant, part of the testing
involved determining what manner of ordeal could be endured. It was only by
undertaking carefully judged ascending gradations of challenge that the
character and their player could rise through the ranks, gaining new abilities
to help endure the ordeals and new ways of using them and, almost as
importantly, gaining the knowledge of how to go about things in such a manner
as to minimise unnecessary death. There were tricks of situational awareness
and cautious thoroughness in negotiating the dangerous environments the DM presented, as well as lists of vulnerabilities and immunities and powers
that had to be learned by rote, list upon list of weapons, armour, spells,
characters, places, monsters and treasures. All of these were mysteries at the
beginning. You didn’t know them, your character didn’t know them, only the
DM had access to the privileged information.
A useful concept for discussing these ideas is that of the
epistemic regime. The epistemic regime of a work of fiction describes what is
known by the different actors in the story and by the author and reader. Much
of the tension, drama and humour in narratives derives from the unequal
distribution of various facts: she doesn’t know he’s the killer, the author and
the reader know it’s a bad idea but the character blunders on regardless. Irony
relies on this unequal distribution too, there is an audience that derives a
secret meaning from an ironic statement and an audience that does not, the
knowledgeable audience and the author of the statement collude in the transfer
of this secret knowledge in plain sight.
Epistemic regimes are of special importance to fantasy and
science fiction because there is generally a whole lot more the author is aware
of that the reader does not know and a subsequent necessity for a greater-than-usual
amount of exposition. It is because of this wildly unequal epistemic regime
that so much fantasy relies upon reader surrogate characters from outside the
magic world; Harry Potter, Dorothy, John Carter, Alice; or reader surrogates
from a provincial backwater; Bilbo Baggins, Rand al’Thor, Taran the Assistant
Pig-Keeper, Pug/Milamber, Duny/Ged, Shea Ohmsford, Garion [Insert High Fantasy
yokel-destined-for-greatness here]. Their ignorance or outsider status requires
that mentors explain everything for them or that the author’s exposition be
justified by the mutually ignorant position of reader and protagonist. The
other, less-important-for-my-hypothesis reason for humble origins is a dramatic
one, it is more dramatically satisfying for underdogs to come out on top.
There is something of a distinction that can be made between
the ascending character arcs of post-Tolkien High Fantasy and the Picaresque
nature of much pulp fantasy. In the works of Jack Vance, Fritz Lieber or Robert
E. Howard, the protagonists tend to be worldly and exposition is a less weighty
component of the writing, even to the extent that, as is explicitly the case in
M. John Harrison’s work, world-building is impromptu and ad hoc – only that
which is necessary to pave the way for more adventure need be invented. Even the
author need not know much more about the world than is revealed to the reader,
and while some kind of character arc is often presented and new information
revealed as the narrative progresses, there is definitely a tendency for the
protagonist to not be a neophyte in need of initiation into the mysteries of
the invented world, nor need the reader be undergoing such an initiation by
proxy. Characteristically, such a world does not tolerate great upheaval, the
changes wrought by the actions of a Picaro are generally not world-shaking.
There is a fatalistic sense in the genre that the world will continues
regardless of the actions of individuals, while in High Fantasy, the fate of
the world is typically decided by the actions of individuals, their success changes
the world for the better and saves the world from some kind of terrible threat.
These slightly distinct subgenres represent the two major
sources drawn upon to develop D&D, and while there is a definite preference
displayed by Gygax for pulp fantasy, the epistemic DNA of High Fantasy is very
strong in D&D. A satisfying and
engaging character arc is one of the major rewards for bold and clever play,
and as characters get more capable the dramatic stakes of their exploits are
also raised. This state of affairs deliberately emulates the style of High
Fantasy and does it well. In a player’s first campaign, they are given an
experience that emulates that of the reader of High Fantasy, the particular
ways in which the campaign world functions are revealed, and the geography,
people and events unfold before their eyes.
---
Hide and seek is a game of practical epistemology. The
different players start each round of the game with a different set of facts,
and the seeker’s role is to remedy their ignorance through the application of a
set of epistemological procedures designed to reveal facts about the
whereabouts of the hiders: looking under things, looking behind things and
trying to elicit giggling with a humorous performance of these procedures. The
hiding players attempt to conceal the fact of their whereabouts by sneaking off
very quietly during the count, selecting especially good and, if possible,
novel hiding places and stifling giggling.
There is an environmental component to the game, a good
place for hide and seek has a lot of hiding places. The tension of the game is
increased by a prolonging the process of formulating and testing various
hypotheses about the possible whereabouts of the hiders. Eventually, with enough
rounds of play, the environment becomes exhausted as a source of novelty
because the players have discovered all of the potential hiding places. No longer is there any need for the
formulation of new hypotheses about the whereabouts of hiders. All that is
needed is to systematically check all of the known hiding places.
Vanilla D&D actually has a similar epistemic regime to
hide and seek. The PC begins play as the seeker, made deliberately ignorant by
a DM who knows all the hiding places. However, as long as there is no deviation
from the standard playbook, after enough time the players will know by rote
which strategy offers the best advantage against trolls, skeletons, ghouls, rot
grubs, rakshasas, yellow mold, medusae and mummies. They will know what to do
to best avoid running afoul of traps and surprise attacks, they will know most
of the spells available and how to use them and what magic items they should be
on the lookout for. This acquisition of lore is subverted and exploited by a
few notorious elements of the game like gas spores and rot grubs – punishments
for being too secure in your knowledge of in-game facts or confidence in useful
interrogative procedures. These, in turn, spawn ever more sophisticated
epistemic regimes where suspicion of malicious motives necessitate special
countermeasures.
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| Bastardry |
Whenever knowledge is gained, ignorance is lost – naïveté evaporates under fire. Not only do
the players gain the epistemological skills to better interrogate the game
environment for useful information as they play, they also gain information
about the generic game-world itself. Over years, every veteran player will also
have had a chance to run games, or at least read through all of the
once-forbidden lore so, unless a very strict separation of player and character
knowledge is adhered to to avoid metagaming, a certain amount of worldliness is
going to creep into the character’s interactions with the predictable enemies
and scenarios they encounter.
Thus, then, the OSR. The OSR is largely composed of people
who have seen everything and are rigorous and cunning in their interrogation of
the game environment. This makes their characters disproportionately deadly and
their play-style effective, especially if there is a predictability in their environment
and the challenges they face – they have seen all the hiding places. This creates
a need for the establishment of different play environments and different secrets
as a means of recreating something like the epistemic regime of the older
versions of the game. Because in addition to the worldliness of the veteran,
there is in the nature of the OSR gamer certain amount of nostalgia for a time
when everything was mysterious and new. It is impossible to recreate the
experience of the first encounter with a rust monster using a rust monster.
That door is shut now. There are other ways of recapturing the excitement of
the experience but it requires the implementation of strategies of estrangement
and a certain degree of invention.
I think there are many reasons why the source-texts of much
OSR material tends to be Pulp Fantasy rather than High Fantasy. There is a
degree to which the exhaustive creation of comprehensively detailed worlds only
makes sense if there is going to be a large audience to make it worthwhile and ensure its continuity over time. There may be a suspicion of the artificiality of grand sweeping story-arcs and a legitimate dubiousness about their unworkability as imposed from above by in-game canon (e.g. 2E-era Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk).
There is also the fact that picaresque Murderhobo-ism that is an emergent
property of D&D’s reward system seems to run counter to the prevailingly
axial morality of the High Fantasy genre but accords closely with the
urbane fatalism characteristic of Pulp Fantasy. I think the most compelling reason
for the preference is the inescapable fact of players Knowing the Score.
A related genre with
much overlap is the Weird. The Weird has about it something of an iconoclastic
punk sensibility, even in its earliest manifestations there is a quality to it that
is rooted in the erosion of certainties, in an ethical spectrum that runs from
fatalism through pessimism to the outer reaches of nihilism. The prevailing
epistemic regime here, particularly in Lovecraftian tales, is not merely
ignorance for the protagonist but a sense that the gaining of knowledge is
often inimical to sanity. The author is very much concerned with using
strategies of estrangement to undermine the certainties of the reader.
“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder,
bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain
atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must
be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and
portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the
human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of
Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the
daemons of unplumbed space.” HPL
This is, for me, the natural territory of the best of the OSR: a kind of
iconoclastic undermining of whatever assumptions existed before (though maybe without quite so much portentousness), because there is compelling reason to serve up predictability. Hence
Raggi-esque Negadungeons and Deep Carbon Observatory. There comes always into
my mind the ridiculous image of the OSR gamer as a kind of reckless libertine glutted
with sensation, walking blindfolded into unknown perils. I think that I am
guilty here of a certain amount of reductive essentialism for effect but I
know that there is a canny market for evocative novelty. The process of players having
to negotiate new theories about the way the world is run and engage in rigorous
interrogations of the structure of fictional things is potentially a source of
much enjoyment for GM and player alike. It is especially the case if you’ve
invented all the stuff yourself and the players are unravelling exposition as a
means of ensuring their character’s survival. Nothing will ever be
the same as the original experience but it might just be better.
