On Tabletop RPGs, Cultural Ground Zero, And Finding A Way Out

Western culture, for all intents and purposes, ground to a halt in 1997. Some of the things carried by that culture maintained their momentum for a time, in the same manner as cargo atop a crashed truck maintains its momentum as it flings off and flies forward a space before itself crashing. Tabletop RPGs were one such thing that flew off.

Specific games in the hobby hit the ground at different rates, and specific companies did also, but one I want to focus on is the best RPG to come out of White Wolf Game Studio. This is also the game that marks the company (and the hobby)'s fall into Ground Zero: Exalted.

Originally published in 1999, Exalted was White Wolf's first move into fantasy gaming. I ran an Exalted campaign for three years. Despite the game's mechanical flaws, it was my best experience with a White Wolf game ever. It has never been surpassed. (Arguably equalled with Adventure but never surpassed.) This is because, as is clear in retrospect, White Wolf peaked at that time.

Today, you could remake that game as a D&D 5th Edition product--and if I were the current owners, I would--exactly as it was setting-wise in 1999 and it would be equally successful. You would need to do is change the skin tones in some of the background characters, but otherwise recycling the original edition's artwork works just fine. Mechanical design would be the bulk of the actual labor, and that's not as difficult as it might seem given how Exalted actually worked.

The tabletop RPG world hit Ground Zero before the videogame world did because it has always been centered around Dungeons & Dragons. D&D reached its point of stasis by this time, something that--again, in retrospect--was not changed with its 3rd Edition in 2000. Rather what happened was the very successful aim of making Official D&D such a dominant game that everyone else was reduced to a couple of also-rans and the majority put down to scraps from the table. (This is the other known effect of Ground Zero; if nothing really changes, then those who dominated then shall dominate now- and D&D did and does.) This ossified the hobby into its present state.

This also explains (a) the actual reach of dissident movements like the Old School Renaissance, (b) the convergence of tabletop RPGs by the Death Cult, and (c) the absolute visciousness of the response of B to A. There is no way out of this state of affairs without going back--without regressing hard and fast--and rediscovering what the medium is and how it actually works, instead of carrying on as if we knew how it worked all these years. We are people using wrenches for hammers; without knowing what a wrench actually is and does we cannot stop making the errors born of misusing the tools we've got.

This leads me to the #BROSR.

A core tenant of this group is to play the game as it is written. While currently focused upon AD&D 1st Edition, this ethos can be applied to any RPG. If operating the game as-written delivers the gameplay experience that it promises, much as using a wrench as intended delivers the work experience it promises, then it can be said to be a good game.

In all of tabletop gaming, only the segements of the OSR are doing anything worthwhile to solve the Ground Zero problem in tabletop RPGs. Of the OSR, so far only the BROSR has found a methodology that actually works for the purpose of examining if a given game is good or not. In doing this, they have also solved the problem of providing a definition of the medium that Normies can understand: they're tabletop wargames with more flexibility.

Similarly, getting out of Ground Zero requries that same commitment to regression--to rediscover and master what a thing is and how it works--so that the actual limits are found, identified, and clearly demarkated for others to follow. Following our simplified example: "This is a wrench. You use it to grip things and turn them, so that you may either tighten or loosen a connection between those things. It is used as part of a set of tools to assemble, disassemble, or repair things."

Things are what they are, and are not what they are not. Men are not women. Death is not life. Sanity is not insanity. RPGs are wargames, not narrative media. The way out of Ground Zero comes from this necessary, but not sufficient, step.