"We are the ones asking the questions."
Classic phrase of domination based abusive power structure.
I did an interview.
I talked too much.
'Sometimes you gotta roll with the blows.' Anon
PART ONE
INTERVIEWER: "You have an honours degree in the Fine Arts but you prefer to use AI generated art, for your blogs at least, than to use your traditional skills. A lot of people at the moment resent AI generated art."
ME: "It's this generation. You'll find the vocal minority stirring up anti-AI sentiment are typically digital artists using graphics tablets, they do not represent traditional art techniques either. No digital art is 'real' in that sense. You accept photography and other forms of print as traditions already. AI is the same. It's another tool for creatives to share vision. AI art is the future regardless our opinion. How many people will ever see the originals anyway? All digital or digitised art is designed for the print-trade if it is commercial, but primarily for on-screen viewing. Art doesn't have to be hand-made. Duchamp proved this over a century ago with 'readymades'. It's all in the eye of the beholder, from the associations we project at the world around us. The Modernist socio-psychologist Lacan said the same more recently. AI art puts the power of quality vision sharing which essentially is visual storytelling into the hands of the masses. That is a Great Leap Forward for Humanitarianism."
INTERVIEWER: “You mention storytelling. You grew up on roleplaying games. When are you going to create your own?”
ME: "Some of my products are already commercially available. You know that."
INTERVIEWER: “Are you ever going to do a post-apocalypse, science-fiction cyberpunk world setting?”
ME: "Is there a need?"
INTERVIEWER: “Is there a desire to?”
ME: "Obviously yes! But, already so many gaps in the market are filled. Why waste the time and energy on yet another one overlapping what already exists? We are going into an era where it is no longer about competition but collaboration. The Aquarian approach. Roleplaying like any storytelling requires a level of adversity necessary for growth and personal development. Story requires tension. The same stories can be told throughout many roleplaying systems in different universes. All that is the backdrop to the story arc enjoyed by the players. A lot of the existing universes are similar enough already."
INTERVIEWER: “How could you do it differently?”
ME: "Exactly. A question running alongside that one is, how could it be done not so differently that people cannot understand it. The quest for novelty and newness inevitably leads to the unimaginable alien and therefore to unplayed, unplayable games. These are games of the imagination. People need be able to relate to them, to understand them as fluid, cohesive worlds with a coherent sense of functionality, even for a dystopia. If you cannot summarise it in a sentence or at least a short paragraph, it's too much. Imagination is about suspension of disbelief. We cannot have, because of believability being lost, something important in that world forgotten about which would have changed the outcome of the story simply because we forgot to include it in pursuit of exploring the other weirdness. Perhaps it could be integrated if structured in stages if the GamesMaster really knew what they are doing and the other strangeness doesn’t come as a surprise to the Players because it’s never before been mentioned.
'Oh yeah, that thing too, we forgot to include it and things would have turned out differently if we had integrated the canon.' So new worlds cannot be too complex.
This was a major problem with WoD and a lot of other games which became multi-release franchisees where you need more than one or maybe two books to delve into it properly. The game-world after having assimilated all of Vampire official product releases is an entirely different universe than if you had just only had one copy of the first or second edition core book and that’s it. In that scenario you have a personalised horror game based around your character, true to the original headline blurb. In the other case it really doesn’t matter who you are, the universe has its own agenda beyond your ability to know about much less have any real control over. You are inevitably going to be bent to fit into that regardless of whoever you happen to be. It’s macro rail-roading from the developers as they milk-the-cash-cow. The first thing thrown out is the original beautiful concept. The second thing thrown out is the promise to the players.
It’s the problem with industry. Too many cooks. The money-mentality steps in and the creative being steps out. It’s why we now have so-called professional dungeon-masters charging money to entertain newcomers to the lifestyle. An approach which is necessarily by its nature an entirely different experience to how collaborative storytelling has always supposed to have been done. A group of friends gather to collectively shape and share a story together between them with some structural element; as well as the dice representing chance, if you use dice at all."
INTERVIEWER: “What would you put in a contemporary or near future urban horror game?”
ME: "Well I did that one. Psycho Killer. You play as yourself and it’s set in the real world. Objective is to score the highest body-count before getting caught. Two play modes are Murder Spree and Serial Killer. The only rule is the consequence is always the most probable, realistic consequence in any given situation. No dice. Warning, this game causes psychiatric issues, don’t play it, it’s dangerous. See that? The whole game concept in a short paragraph. Example of what I mentioned earlier. You could try the even more disturbing version by swapping out the Death element for Sex but for some reason that is even more embarrassing and taboo than trying to get away with murder. Something disturbing about that reflection of our contemporary civilisation, if you ask my honest opinion about it."
INTERVIEWER: "I didn't and, ah, won't."
ME: "So back to your question. Apart from that level of intensity which is perhaps way too much for most peoples sensibilities and coping mechanisms to deal with, what game would I make for urban contemporary, near future? I don’t know or I’d probably have done it already. I’d play ShadowRun the proper way or Werewolf or Vampire the way it was envisaged at conception and not what it became after too many minds had developed it into something else. It’s hard to find players like that who would actually enjoy that. A lot of people want to wear the ‘I did the latest thing’ and ‘I’m in the cool club’ badges, instead of satisfying the deep human need to connect with the worlds and stories which are latent within us if we’d only connect our imaginations to our intuition and let it flow."
INTERVIEWER: “You should try Mage if that’s your intent.”
ME: "Same thing. That’s why they swapped out Ascension for Awakening. The pencil-sketch outline concept before the mechanics and development team have inked it into become something different. We have to drop a lot of 'the official canon lore' to get back to the raw insightful potential, to really fully enjoy it as a world emerging in its own right. We want the seeds and sprouts to grow a forest, not the pruned saplings readymade and requiring hours of study to understand it. For the game to feel realistic the players need grounding in the universe their characters are from and have lived their lives in. Which means they have to understand the intricacies before being thrown in the deep end.
‘A Galruum stomps before you, blocking your access to the Atiliar at this crucial moment. How much Hara can you collectively muster?’
I don’t expect you to know what I’m talking about there other than it sounds stressful and resource-based. But had you been trained previously and had it explained to you… this is the problem with investing attention into other peoples imaginations. The respondent is entirely reactive. Most roleplaying games do that. It’s not the most fun aspect of the game though."
INTERVIEWER: “What is?”
ME: "In my opinion? Watching the decisions you make affect the emerging world in significant ways. It's about validation reward. We all know this is a fantasy scenario but we, our brains, minds and emotional investment, we react to it equally as significantly as it does to real events. Lacan, again. It's the same neurological system reacting to an unexpected, expensive bill arriving through the mail as to a sabre-toothed tiger pouncing into the village and savaging one of us. It has a varying level of the same panic-reaction along the same core cognitive circuits.
Through storytelling, through roleplaying games involving suspension of disbelief, we develop coping mechanisms, levels of response appropriate and adequate for dealing with the real life situations we all inevitably and sometimes uniquely find ourselves in. That is a Human cultural tradition since prehistory. At the moment, for this generation, people require validation award, to feel their existence is not futile. Even if it is only for a couple of hours while pretending to be someone fictional, a fictionalised aspect of their own personality allowed to take the lead in ways they have not opportunity to develop in their daily lives.
So if I was going to write a modern or near-future roleplaying game, that awareness would be at the forefront of it, openly so. We saw how with the generation discovering 5th edition D&D it gave a safe-space for so many LGBT+ people to come to terms with themselves and feel supported in coming out. They did that through role-play and storytelling, through the sense of community surrounding the passion for the tradition, can I call it tradition? The hobby as they used to call it. Storytelling and Community.
My generation all grew up on television so acting was normalised to us, this was so deeply entrenched into our psychologies most people to this day still cannot tell the difference between acting and authenticity even within themselves. That is what Modernism was all about. Detachment from reality. Perhaps it is through our storytelling, our role-playing, we safely garner a sense of reality hidden beyond the layer of delusionment we enjoy for our own protection. Post-Modernism is when we realised collectively that detachment from reality is not comfortable, it is hideous. I think then perhaps we went into a further stage of accepting both and not caring any more."
INTERVIEWER: “Is that where you see the roleplaying industry going in the future?”
ME: "You mean after the general public gets through hits current phase of accepting and normalising D&D as a socially acceptable part of our lives on a regular basis and engages into the perpetual quest of joining or creating a functional regular campaign group? Which no matter what you think of Wizards of the Coast alleged mismanagement they have successfully managed to sustain a regular drama in the social media arena to keep the hobby from fizzling out.
The next inevitable phase is the expanded new audience of the general population will discover there are far more roleplaying games than D&D alone and will want to explore those. Whether they intend it or not that is a consequence of WotC expanding and simultaneously popping their own bubble. That is already underway with franchise such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk having video game tie-ins stimulating a re-release of the tabletop product. There is a Skyrim tabletop now too. Too much cool stuff commercially available for the masses to afford to buy it all results in generic home-brews.
So we see more commonplace practise of indie games and home-brews without any need for expensive buy-ins, pay-to-win commercial products. Out of practicality of people wanting to game are making time to do it when they can instead of organising a regular weekly evening slot. Which means a lot more text-based social media home-brews the mainstream feedback loop never gets to know about. How would you do a poll on that to find out? There is no centralised focal community hub; which is usually taken to be a good sign for the hobby in general. People who go to conventions are not necessarily people who would but can’t, or the cyber nerds who game online continuously but would never leave their bedroom even if their home town held a convention."
PART TWO
“It's a good heart that gives, not rich people.” Stella
INTERVIEWER: “Thanks for coming back. How have you been?”
ME: "Dealing with mental health issues.”
INTERVIEWER: “Oh, are you okay?”
ME: "No I mean mostly dealing with other peoples mental health issues. I’m a counsellor.”
INTERVIEWER: “What do you do for your own mental health?”
ME: "I avoid the assholes as much as possible. Also I write.”
INTERVIEWER: “What do you write about?”
ME: "Sociology and psychology, largely. Often through the device of fiction. I do that when I don’t have a regular roleplay group to focus on.”
INTERVIEWER: “You have in the past?”
ME: "Many times. Currently seeking players for a WhatsApp based homebrew Medieval Fantasy RolePlay.”
INTERVIEWER: “It sounds exciting.”
ME: "It is. If anyone is interested they should contact me about it.”
INTERVIEWER: “How does it work? Don’t you need to roll dice and stuff like that?”
ME: "No. I have 35 years experience as a GamesMaster. Dice are not necessary when you follow the simple rule of: What is the most probable outcome of that action?”
INTERVIEWER: “So you don’t use numbering system for personal attributes like in D&D and other similar games?”
ME: "None of these convenient phone apps have integrated dice rollers so no the technology has let us down for doing it is that way.”
INTERVIEWER: “Aren’t there dedicated forums specialising in that?”
ME: "5th edition D&D is intensely restrictive for a number of reasons. Even more so than previous editions despite its popularity and the availability of official apps which support it. We play an imagination based game. It’s not D&D it’s, ah, better.”
INTERVIEWER: “You sound confident about it.”
ME: "I have a right to be. Previous experience had taught me what works and what doesn’t.”
INTERVIEWER: “So if it’s not D&D why would people want to play it?”
ME: "The problem is getting newbies who want to taste ‘the D&D experience’ because it’s ‘the latest thing’ have followed from LGBT and Wokism, taking over the roleplaying games industry in public awareness. Meanwhile hundreds of superior indie games are out there and thousands of sandbox games such as this one, all run discretely by people who know what we’re doing.”
INTERVIEWER: “While the official brand commercial companies, they don’t know what they’re doing?”
ME: "You can wade through the drama and hype community to sit at a table rolling dice and being railroaded on an ‘official brand commercial adventure’, if that’s your thing. It will give you a jaded view of what the hobby is really all about.”
INTERVIEWER: “What is that then? What is it really about?”
ME: "Improvised collaborative storytelling. Developing of the imagination through study of consequence. Sharing a feelgood experience of having an impact on a cohesive world.”
INTERVIEWER: “The same could be said about brand products, about all roleplaying games.”
ME: "When they’re done well, yes. But it takes a good GamesMaster to help bring that to life. Otherwise it’s simply just a book or a boxed set. What we have observed through decades of committees producing products for the commercial arena is how the original vision is full of potential which the great GamesMaster’s will recognise and bring to life. However the same committee go on to produce their own derivatives of that idea and take it into a direction of their own bias with release of multiple expansions for commercial gain. The original vision is lost in all that.”
INTERVIEWER: “You sound jaded about the industry.”
ME: "Perhaps. I accept it’s inevitable, that’s how most any industry works. I grew up in Wales in the 1980s where nobody had the money to invest in expensive hobbies, especially involving books, miniatures and dice. What we have abundance of is imagination.”
INTERVIEWER: “We? You mean yourself and others like you who enjoy roleplaying games.”
ME: "There’s that, the few-and-far-between groups and many isolated individuals, same as now really. We didn’t have internet or mobile phones back then. But also Wales cultural history of folklore and mythology. We have more castles than anywhere else in the world and we still have Dragons here.”
INTERVIEWER: “So your small group were geeks before it was cool to be a geek?”
ME: "In retrospect it wasn’t so much a nerd thing to do as an elite thing to do. Most everyone else was into Rugby or Doctor Who. Those who had money and interest in roleplaying got swept up by Games Workshop products. We were the only kids who imagined playing Rogue Trader as a pen&paper format rpg without tabletop and miniatures. The way it was originally intended. I believe it was recently re-released specifically as a pen&paper roleplay product, I still have to look into that.”
INTERVIEWER: “Having no money and a great imagination, you began creating your own games.”
ME: "Game systems and worlds. We usually payed lip-service to mechanised game systems and discovered dice aren’t really necessary. After a while you get a hang of probabilities. ‘Usul no longer needs the weird-as-fuck module’. That’s why doing this on a phone-app which most people I text with use daily is possible.”
INTERVIEWER: “You described that to me earlier as ‘generic medieval fantasy roleplaying’.”
ME: "That’s right. I would describe it as GMF-storytelling except GM has connotations and I need to specify it’s a roleplaying game because storytelling sounds like a kids entertainment to most people who disconnected from our human cultural roots but gladly spend megabucks to veg-out and watch a remake of a remake at the cinema.”
INTERVIEWER: “Branding issues.”
ME: "Tell me about it. I started Medieval Fantasy RolePlay on Telegram app before migrating it to WhatsApp. I got one interested roleplayer and a dozen strippers assuming I meant something entirely different by ‘D&D’ and so on. True story. Apparently these words have another meaning in the sex trade.”
INTERVIEWER: “That’s funny.”
ME: "I had some explaining to do to my significant other.”
INTERVIEWER: “Is your partner into ah, pen&paper and tabletop miniature games using dice?”
ME: "We did once do a battle of Warhammer. Her plastic Slaanesh hammered my oldschool metal Orks but she was cheating. Next time I’ll use Eldar. I find remarkable about WarHammer community unlike D&D is how in this era of segregation at every level of society, people who are into Games Workshop are a unified community. They’d rather do hobby than fall out with people. It’s like Christianity used to be in Europe as a unifying force when everything else was falling apart. It sounds extreme to analyse it this way but you get out there into the community and see for yourself. We have segregation agendas everywhere, thanks to usury based privatisation policies.”
INTERVIEWER: “I’ve heard that too, ‘nothing is free any more’. It’s not like the old days.”
ME: "It’s what the cut-throats want. I have had many discussions about what ‘professional’ means. I’ve been a GamesMaster since the mid 1980s and only in the last few years I’m encountering ‘professional Dungeon Masters’ who have been doing it for two or three years and charge money for the experience of being railroaded through official brand products, commercial boxed sets. Even for their regular groups. It’s their income.”
INTERVIEWER: “How do you feel about that?”
ME: "I do it for free, for the right people. Those dedicated to the same goal. It has always been about community-building and sharing in something which has roots to prehistory. Connecting with that Humanitarian level of reality.”
INTERVIEWER: “Don’t you find yourself being exploited?”
ME: "No to the contrary. People are so indoctrinated by commerce they’re afraid of it. A lot of people assume the quality will be poor because it doesn’t have a corporate logo and hasn’t cost them money to partake. Perhaps I should start charging money. I’d certainly get more interest because that’s a language people understand. I am reticent to. As a counsellor I use those skills in my games, the awareness of psychology and sociology, to make the fantasy world and its inhabitants more believable and engaging. The problem is people raised on TV think it’s normal to be an actor, so they don’t resonate with anything that isn’t fake. It’s the curse of Modernism. Does that make sense?”
INTERVIEWER: “Sort of. The people in your imagination are more real than the people who would pay you for a taste of it but reject it if it’s free.”
ME: "Something like that.”
INTERVIEWER: “Let’s leave it there shall we.”
ME: "Okay. Thanks for interviewing me.”
INTERVIEWER: “Thank you for your time and your insight into what it is like being a Storyteller and an Old School Games Master living in late-stage capitalism.”
ME: "You think that’s where we’re at?”
INTERVIEWER: “It’s possible.”
ME: "Let’s pave the way forward then.”