D20

So, across the development of RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons there came numerous games that were all based around a very similar system using the polyhedral dice. There had been previous attempts to form a generic system such as GURPS but the D20 thing was on a whole different level and very relevant to readers of this blog and ed tech people.

So, Wizards of the Coast bought up Dungeons and Dragons and the old TSR material in the 90’s and set about rejuventating the industry.

There was immediately a debate about the fact that the game core was almost generic, used by different games and companies and that they industry as a whole were like minded people who work with goodwill to each other. Could it be owned by a company?

So, not only did Wizards agree with the sentiment, in 2000 they created a set of common/open use licenses, legally freeing the core game component for use. These are available for download at their site. It includes free DL of the entire D&D rules set found in their commercial books too.

Wizard continue to make and sell good products based on the D20 system at the same time as allowing other ‘developers’ to create their own material freely with no fear of corporate retribution. And it came from a recognition of a community and a shared interest.

It’s not quite as simple or issue free as I just put it – but it’s a significant event that’s worth knowing about.

D&D and my oft talked about Drama games and processes are essentially collaborative. A group of people ‘play’ out a scenario together, share an experience and help it grow, with no emphasis on winning or losing.

This is at odds, obviously, with games of winning and losing, where slogans about doing your best or particiaption being the key have to be thrown in to soften the brutality of it all. This has a highly developed ideological branch in Game-theory, which is no longer a maths excercise but a way of thinking for neo-liberal conservatives.

A group of students at college level, studying business could well be asked to construct a game scenario in a class or on a computer. By playing it out they will probably be asked to analyse and devise effective strategies for winning or efficient game play. Think about Chess …

It all makes sense but it is a far cry from the core experience of playing D&D, that I had, and its possibilities for a community to explore and educate itself. It’s pretty much opposed to it, in fact, bringing me back to the start of the comment.

@Andy: I loved your blog post, and I really enjoy the way you frame the D2O movement as an open source form of gaming, I think it has a ton of legs, and to hear the way you used this in your teaching is mazing. I commented on your blog post, but I am now thinking of a bit from my own history. My sixth grade teacher, Mr Sobeck, actually had a Risk Board set up in the back of the classroom and it was a game that was going all year long. We would take time out of the day when things were quite and groups would rad while others, usually teams, would get up and play risk. It was a ball, without question one of the highlights of my early education.

And while the game logic behind Risk is an imperial urge for world domination that might characterize most sixth grade teaches, the idea of gaming in school was an early one for me, and it made sense. it was part of the fabric of teaching and learning, not external to and distinct from. So much of this latter logic has everything to do with gimmiks, selling, and forcing your market to understand these moments of shared attention as external to learning in a school. And schools, in all their wisdom, often just overreact to the paltry learning possibilities associated with games, fun, and alternatives making the process hat much more routinized, mechanical, and downright dull.

I just want to say, Jim, that i’m totally down with everything you talk about in your post …amazing post … I haven’t really gone over any of it at my blog cos I don’t want to be redundant.

The way the MM extrapolates into all these areas is indeed what I was hinting at in the Clash comments … hang on, I did kind of go over that in the new post.

Oh my head, long week.

Andy.

If you have any responses that is

Andy.

PS My post is just sticking with D&D with Education and ideas of ‘open-source’ ..no lengthy discussions of ‘evil’ or what have you. That’s a boredom warnign before you click the link.

@D’Arcy: How could you recycle that stuff? It is some of the greatest literature of the 70s. Up there with all of King’s short story masterpieces from the mid-to-late 70s. A cultural legacy gone to the hippie trash heap in the name of being green. The horror, the horror is right

@Joe:

Interesting that the game creates a sort of omnidirectional paradox, that is, even the “lawful good” is an inherently monstrous entity until you “realize” it.

Wow, amazing point. That makes so much clearer one of the idea I was trying to get at, everything is suspect with such a definition of monster, and the idea of form is no guarantee of a common ground around likeness or semblance. And what does lawful Good mean in this regard? It is just another alignment, like you suggest with the idea of the omnidirectional paradox—where is that term from?–I love it! Which actual anticipates Brad’s comment to some degree, how do we understand the idea of evil? Does it ultimately manifest itself as something essential bad and wrong, and if so, doesn’t the fact that it follows rules and is lawful make it not quite as evil as say a chaotic evil monster? I don’t know– but the issue seems to me the layers of meaning caught up in the very words. Lawful is often conflated and associate with good and morally upright. Someone who doesn’t transgress or fall or what have you. But Ad& D challenges that linguistic association by marrying the two ideas in a creatures alignment. Fasicnatng, I have to keep thinking on this.

@Shannon: Ya know Shannon, the bava blog loves you. “And why does it love you?” you may ask. Well because not only are you an awesome reader, but you are one of those rare souls that will actual take people’s advice and recommendations and go out and read stuff and find things you are interested apart from and rigid and regimented class logic (which can be fine and very good, mind you, but ain’t always as much fun).

Paradise Lost is a must, reading Books I and II with Gardner and co. was amazing. And as I was thinking about monstrosity, Book II immediately came up. What’s even more interesting, and I didn’t touch upon it in the post, is that leading up to the moment where Satan meets up with his daughter/lover Sine and son/grandson Death, a whole host of monsters are described as he is making his way through hell, it almost was like the AD&D Monster Manual: Hydras, Gorgons, Dragons, etc. The second half of book two seemed devoted to this idea of monstrosity in some interesting and extremely profound ways. But Gardner know far, far more about that than I’ll ever know.

Additionally, when you are done with PL, pick up the Trials of Anne Hutchinson, it is truly amazing. Here struggles with the rhetorical and logical underpinnings of the Puritan faith is in many ways tightly related to Milton’s own struggles in his masterpiece. Hutchinson;s questions about Grace, Free Will, and the basic tenets of the Church that dictate the relationship between the individual and the divine is fascinating. More than that, she is so amazingly brilliant, funny, and powerful a character. It may be hard going a bit because they are dealing with some deep theoretical, philosophical, and religious concepts, but I imagine that might be something you would be interested in anyway. Thanks for the encouragement, Shannon, I guess the world can blame you for the next bava post that turns a molehill into a mountain.

@Brad: So you decided to stick with the simple questions, thanks for that!

OK, how do I come at this, well I guess head on…but with the caveat that I pinged Gardner that he would come in and clean up the mess I make. I remember him telling me he taught a literature class on evil up at the Smithsonian, and it sounded wild. I would love to have his syllabus in front of me for this response, but alas.

I think this idea of some essential and enduring Evil is at the heart of being nonplussed by the idea of a monster being designated with the alignment of Lawful Evil. It seems to be contradictory at some base level. If one follows laws and adheres to a principle, how can they be entirely evil. Yet, then I think of the 20th century and a figure like Hitler, and it becomes a bit less improbable. I don;t know, this is really the $64,000 question, but I tend to think Evil in itself is a product of a particular culture at a particular time with some consistencies running through history. Evil as a framework may have far more space to morph than we may imagine, and I think a lot about the idea of capital punishment in this regard, for it truly intersects with the idea of the moral, religious, and some kind of human facility for evil that must be annihilated. In fact, it must be killed at all costs.

Last Summer I taught a course at UMW called Discipline & Punish which was actually entirely devoted to Criminal Narratives in Early American Literature. A large part of the reading was narratives related by criminals as they were being sent to their deaths for heinous crimes like murder, rape, forgery (yep forgery), and sodomizing farm animals. The narratives are amazing in my opinion—you can find many of them in a collection called Pillars of Salt by Daniel E. Williams—and several of them discuss this idea of evil as a inhabiting the human body that must ultimately be battling through faith, grace, and the possibility of redemption. What’s interesting, however, is all too often the idea of evil that is born in this narratives is problematic, for examples several narratives deal with chambermaids who become pregnant, and as servants they have no means to support their illegitimate babies, and they commit infanticide with the hopes of no one finding out. Yet, if someone does find out they are often destined for death, a fate which kind of assumes some kind of innate evil in humanity, which cannot be reconciled. Yet, most of these women were poor servants who had no means to a perceived alternative. And the criminal narratives were equally tough on poor whites and free blacks of the colonial period, they were often at the mercy of the gallows, and their stories suggested more about how a culture’s values, than some timeless, ahistorical notion of evil.

Let me go where no man has gone before on this blog: abortion. Why would i do this? Well, quite simply because there is a passage from Thmas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia that has always blown my mind, let me quote it:

They raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after. During these parties they are exposed to numerous hazards, to excessive exertions, to the greatest extremities of hunger.

This is from Query VI, not to be confused with Query XIV (the most famous part of this amazing work) which deals with the questions of slavery, emancipation and the nature of the “negro” (this is important, so I want to note it hear, because I will be returning to this idea). Also, you can read most of the work online, here is one site from Yale with thew work that is decent, thought hard to navigate. What blows me away about this passage is that Jefferson talk s about what might be one of the most explosive issues in US culture of the 20th century as if it is purely a part of the everyday life of the Native Americans. Abortion seems a reasonable practice given the rigors of a woman’s lifestlyle in this culture. There is no moral outrage to be found, nor larger sense of some pervading evil. So much of this has to do with the way Jefferson relates it, and how it is somehow naturalized even further to link the act with a vegetable —it almost seems healthy here. Truly bizarre.

Now, this very topic is one which has driven some people to actually murder doctors, nurses, and other folks involved in Family Planning because they believe so strongly in the utter evil of such a practice of taking life. How do we process this difference. Now, take Jefferson’s ultimate respect for the Native American culture, which doesn’t come across nearly as strongly when he talks about the African American culture in Query XIV. many people argue that this has everything to do with the threat a largely enslaved population represented for the agrarian South, while the Native American was not nearly as big a presence on the East Coast by the 1760s and 70s. Their threat had been all but eliminated, which gave way to a kind of cultural idolatry we see in The Notes. My point? How do we not understand the very act of colonization and an indirect genocide of culture evil, if not in a directed sense, than in a more abstracted human sense of utter horror and existential angst?

How do we trace Evil through a Western paradigm like snakes, jealousy, and greed? They may smack of the universal to some degree for us, but no context can ever truly be universal can it? Anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss were after exactly this think, a kind of universal, structural map of the laws that govern myth, and in many ways help universally define something like Evil –which is born of myth, right? Can we graft a moral order on some larger space and expect we will finally be able to establish a few inalienable truths? I’m not so sure, but when I read history and texts as i tried above, the shifting notion of morality, evil, and some ure, clean idea of what is lawful Good versus chaotic Evil is not ever so clear.

This post is continuing from Jim’s post that carries on from a comment I made in a discussion of the movie Clash Of The Titans. I want to start on my entry into the world of table-top gaming and fantasy literature……

p.s. great post, indeed