Pay for Play Tavis Allison How would musical culture have developed if the uninitiated were exposed to it through sheet music rather than performance? Role-playing games area new thing in the world, so it is not surprising that we should see them at a state of development that resembles that of early modern music. Before Dungeons & Dragons there was only play, just as before musical notation there was only performance. In 1967, Dave Wesely's proto-RPG Braunstein used documentation the way a band uses a set list, as an internal aid to structuring their collaboration. Dave Arneson continued running games in this tradition, most notably Blackmoor beginning in 1971, after Wesely left the Twin Cities for military service. ‘Arneson invented the RPG equivalent of musical notation when he assembled the pages of notes that he brought to Gary Gygax, with whom he had previously collaborated on a naval wargame. With this, Gygax was able to create his own local culture of play. Those who travelled between both like Michael Mornard recognized that playing “a Greyhawk” with Gygax was akin to playing “a Blackmoor” with Arneson, just as jazz is jazz whether it’s “St. James’ Infirmary” in Lake Geneva or “Stormy Monday” in Minneapolis. Gygax developed his own written instructions for how to play the game which he hand-reproduced and mailed to his circle of wargamers, similar to the way that sheet music was shared between performers before the printing press. When Gygax and Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974, RPGs entered a period similar to the musical era in which millions of people might most frequently enjoy music by buying mass-produced transcriptions of piano music that they could play in their homes. This is still the dominant paradigm for role-playing ears later, although one could argue that the greater popularity of RPGs as computer games means we're in an era when player-piano rolls outsell sheet music. In recent years, recorded performances of role-playing games have become more prevalent due to the widespread availability of inexpensive audio and video production equipment combined with Internet distribution to niche audiences. These recordings are predominantly non-commercial, although some have been created as promotional tools by publishers hoping to demonstrate and sell systems that individuals can use to almost forty create their own gaming performances. Despite the historic popularity of mass-produced sheet music, it seems likely that the production of live or recorded performance has traditionally been the dominant focus of music’s commercialization. It is probably not coincidental that the experience of listening is, for most people, the first exposure to music. Why is the situation so different in RPGs? RPGs have always been transmitted through interconnected social groups, i ———————— <<< -#=——“" |a beginning with the 1970s networks of wargamers th to, where interests included medieval miniatures and tales of swords and sore Once D&D appeared as a commercial text, RPGs quickly spread to other accustomed to getting together to share their fantasies: science fiction fans, histori recreationists, stoners, and Lord of the Rings devotees in college dorms and mills barracks. The soaring popularity of D&D quickly attracted the interest of people out any of the circles where you might expect to stumble across people who were alreg playing. These unlucky would-be roleplayers had to acquire some sheet music and} to understand how it will translate to the sounds produced by performers worl | together. ‘As D&D spread into the larger culture, its publisher TSR became increas focused on selling supplements to the game. Perhaps because someone who was baff | by the basic D&D text was unlikely to buy more products for it, TSR eagerly aoa an offer by J. Eric Holmes to edit a version outsiders, at Arneson and Gygax belong of the text designed to initiate comph Holmes was an imperfect candidate for the job. As an associate professor) neurology he had written a textbook, but its target audience was already as vet in his specialized field as TSR’s core wargaming customers were in the language| D&D. It was still decades before the publication of Dé-D for Dummies, and the ma ctitetion for the selection of Holmes was probably his geek cred as the author of published Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, rather than his pedagogical expertise. On the other hand, my mother was an ideal target: an intelligent, imaginatit Snconventional reader of science fiction. She became interested in D&D after see 2 Piece about the game in our hometown paper a something her ten-year-old son—that is, her qualifications asa potential roleplayer, ind guessing correctly that it W me—would be interested in. Despite bel ‘ the increasingly frustrated pencil annotatid in my mother’s handwriting that mark up my copy of Holmes’ introductory version! D&D Fecord her complete failure to figure out this strange new kind of play fromd ‘extalone, Although RPG publishers have made many subsequent attempts to devi an introductory product, my family’s experience suggests that looking at notes of Page is not a good way to learn how to make music. j fnally got into RPGs when my mom used her connections as an organizer f By poor Program for gifted kids to find some older kids who were playin Serta into pressuring these kids into letting us join the ae my younger friends and I weren't i eens music analo, ii % fjan incest ates cathy hg ta ee tart playing. As daunting as this is, the alternative! sople learn by watching and listening, as they do wi are not comfortable with oth hing them pli the exper au : others watching them 9 pea of speaking one's Private fantasies out loud is casi an to reveal in front of a spectator. It is also true th! —watching a RPG session is famously like watching paint dry. In Role Playing Games: A New Performance Art, Daniel Mackay argues that RPG players are both the creators of a work of art and its sole audience. It is not my goal here to support or contest his contention that role-playing is art. What interests me here is Mackay’s idea that the essence of the RPG is, by necessity, only accessible to the people involved in making it. Acknowledging that players of RPGs enjoy them because they are as exciting and engrossing as pre-existing forms of games, he writes “The role-playing game performance shares these structures with other activities. However, it also participates in a fourth structure, an aesthetic commonly attributed to art: a cathartic structure that encourages identification with its content and that persists sfeer the performance has disappeared. ‘This structure is at once a social process, a cultural process, and a formal process, but it is also something more. It is the creation of an aesthetic object that results from the collective interpretive process of the role- playing game performance.” Experiencing a recording of a role-playing session bores me because I am not part of the group that is actively engaged in turning dice rolls and player narration into the experience of acting together in a shared imaginative space. Some RPG fans enjoy listening to podcasts of gaming sessions more than I do, but I think it says something that the primary commercial example of recorded gaming sessions to date, “I Hit It With My Axe,” was one of the web shows that The Escapist, an online game magazine, discontinued during a downturn in its finances. Zak Smith, the show's creator, continues to maintain his blog, D&D With Porn Stars, and it remains deservedly popular. “Axe” was more expensive to produce, but one would imagine that being able co see Zak and his fellow porn stars at play would make a difference. When I reading Zak’s blog, his dazzling intelligence and maximalist aesthetic come alive in my mind. I would even argue that it is a shared imaginary space. Zak and I have spent enough time commenting and replying on one another's blogs—each working to understand the other's positions on aesthetic and commercial topics of mutual interest—that the voice I hear in my head when I read him sounds like part of a conversation. This is just what I want to get out of reading and writing and correspondence. When I watch Zak conduct the play sessions recorded at “I Hit It With My Axe,” I'm able to grasp the outlines of how his intelligence and aesthetic is creating an interesting world. I can see how exciting it is for the people who are part of it. Nicholas Fortugno, game designer and theorist, says that “don’t tell me about your character” is 2 familiar line among roleplayers because we know our narratives of play are not, and generally not meant to be, Apollonian objects to be admired from afar. When we are both performer and audience, being self-indulgent is a virtue rather than a vice. Zak had enough craft (and production budget) to avoid this vice, but watching a game is not what I want out of a RPG. What I want is agency, the capacity to take actions in the shared imaginary space, These actions become meaningful because the other players agree that what I say my character is doing, and the rules and dice we use to adjudicate the outcome, will have an impact on the way we tell the story of what happened next. I recently 13 _——————————————EES played a session of Labyrinth Lord in a G+ hangout with Zak and Ryan Browning. The GM was another blogger, James Maliszewski, Zak later pos synopsis of what we said while playing this session that is both opaque to read perhaps the least interesting thing an outsider to RPGs could possibly find on D& with Porn Stars—and exactly what I do want out of gamin another arty , James Maliszewski: What are you preparing? Tavis: Two Sleeps Ryan : Yeah, Zak: Awww, man, I'm always hoping we'll find a way Ventriloquism T: Alright, Ventriloquism (....dungeoncrawling occurs.....) J: Uhave to go soon it’s almost midnight and then I turn into a pumpkin and I da want anyone to see that on camera. 2: I always suspected. Ok, let's just keep running due south until we met monster... J: South? There's a monster! Well...yo like the other ones, ‘0 kill someone wi u hear some orcs up ahead anyway, they sout Z: Ok, we only have 5 minutes! We have to kill them with ventriloquism! OkOk@ We put a pool of oil here and stretch a chain across the doorway like this and we sat | on either side of the door like this... T: And we Sleep them 2: And then you make treasure after killing all T: Llove this game, your ventriloguism go like ‘Oh no! What do we do with all these orcs?’..Oh and throw caltrops in the oil! What I love is that each of us got to do something—to participate in the story ina Wt that the others would accept as part of this collaboratively negotiated reality and buil upon with their next narration, Just listening to others play is frustrating because y® can see what's happening in their shared imaginary space but being unable to chang "means you're not halfway into that Space in the way you are as a participant. | posi collaboratively creating and acting “a acne el Id imposes a curious constraint. If roleplaying gam¢ are al the jobs for composer? fically one that thrives on group improvisation—¥4 SF ice ingens aesion, lets extend the metaphor and look at the role Create, Just as a group of musicians can atta! vibrations of different lengths produa snes and agree to tune their instruments to a common scale, a group of roleplayers an collaborate by using dice to produce probabilities and agreeing on a shared basis or determining the chance of a given outcome in the shared world. Consulting the ‘ritten rules of a role-playing game to determine that a poisoned character in the nagined situation will die if a twenty-sided die generates a number lower than 15 slike checking to see whether a given set of sounds fits in an unfamiliar seven-tone ale. For the foundational work ofa new art form, the original text of D&D is famously on-prescriptive. Gygax and Arneson end it like this: “We have attempted to furnish an ample framework, and building should be both easy and fun. In this light, we urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! On the other hand, we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you? Write to us and tell about your additions, ideas, and what have you. We could always do with a bit of improvement in our refereeing.” magine if Pythagoras’ directions for attaining the music of the spheres had consisted sf three chords and an exhortation that, sure, there are more but this is all you really reed, Go forth and play, DIY punk, and let me know if you come up with harmonics indreamed of in his philosophy: ‘The history of RPG publishing suggests that the question “Why let us do any more sf your imagining for you?” is “Because we can get paid to do it.” Building within the ramework established by D&D is a kind of private fun somewhere between writing | novel and a cookbook, One reason why the job does not pay very well is that so nany people are eager to do it. But it is hard enough that most players would rather et other people to do the work. Most of my semi-professional involvement in RPGs ras consisted of filling in perceived gaps in the original framework. Such work has its lace, but I believe that making writing texts the sole venue for professionalization has used framework-building to metastasize, endangering the overall health of RPGs as | n art form. One thing I've done as both a professional writer and an amateur GM is create new character classes for players to choose from. As a performer, I use the original 1974 edition of D&D in which making a new class takes about fifteen minutes. I outline the existing choices: “You can be a fighting man or woman, a magic-user, a ‘leric, or anything else you want.” If the last option interests a player, we discuss how we could modify the basic abilities of one of the existing classes to fit a new concept. Say the player wants to focus on archery. “Well, a fighting man can wear any kind of armor, and use any kind of weapon including bows and intelligent swords,” I would reply. “How about your new archer class gets to shoot arrows twice as fast, but is limited to only wearing leather armor?”a As a writer for the fourth edition of D&D, published in 2008, Creat new class as a writer took not fifteen minutes but a hundred hours. was working in had become much more complex, and the job is like technical wy because customers expect the abilities of their character to be specified in muchge detail. Here is a simplified sample of an arcane text I contribu you can grab your enemy's legs, swing him around, You must have both hands free and be category smaller than you, This is w The frameny ted: “Once pet and use him to batter hisal adjacent to the target, who must be on | hat you have to roll to grab the target, afer he is knocked prone. While swinging him around, this how far you can mare | what kind of terrain you can move through. This is what you need to roll to hit people you intend to batter, how much damage they suffe chances to hit them are affected.” Whether or not he believes that RPGs are a performing art, Mike Mearls, Dii senior manager for research and development, drew an analogy to music whenal in an online forum about the difference betwee: and how your subseq n these editions: “[The original edition of D&D] is like jamming with a band. A lot of stuff gets made up on the fly, and when we find something interesting everyone just rides with it,” he wrote. “[The fourth edition] is like Playing a symphony. There's more structure and more pieces to work with, but everything comes together in thi: grand ensemble.” Music is a broad field. ‘The term “professional musician” jam bands and symphonic orchestras, Fespectively, write the music for eac live or recorded musical performane Put together the mix of activities thar like teaching music lessons, These diverse possible app from any one kind of commercialization, ‘The only aspect of RPGs that has been com market has created a st : teady pressure over time for rule systems to become structut symphonies. When a publi; texts, it is shrewd to train c Products. Self-interest weigh: covers performers in W as well as the song-writers and composers h. The Opportunities for commercialization € as well as writing music allow individuals t feels right to them, not to mention allied creating and repairing of musical instruments, and sot roaches make the musical field more resistant to distort! rofe ar C. rk rules. The question “Why ie) fessionals who maintain the complex framewo! ae 2a then be answered like this: “You don't have nie sow content fits in the grand ensemble of the Teision-engineered balance ofeee nd marginalized in role-playing? Mackay’s observation that in a RPG the audience s necessarily the same people as the performers holds the answer. A professional nusician can hope to sell between hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tickets to “concert, Recordings of the performance lose some of the excitement, but Rush's live Ibum Exit Stage Left remains deservedly popular among RPG fans. [ have been part of roleplaying events that involved fifteen audience/performers, sut five is closer to the ideal, and as I’ve said, a recording of this performance would -apture very little of the appeal. Over the last seven years T’ve tested multiple approaches o the goal of providing roleplaying experiences semi-professionally rather than the ools others might use to do so. I believe that the problem is not simply scale but its -mergent property of distance. The girls who screamed in delight to watch Elvis from the anonymous darkness seyond the stage lights might have screamed in terror if his pelvic gyrations had instead been right in their faces. During a roleplaying session, we are always up close and personal, The strangeness of playing an RPG in front of an audience doesnt just ome from letting people see what you do. When a game is successful and moving, it’s because that the players are sharing intimate fantasies. “I'll show you mine if you show me yours”—and the presence of spectators violates this reciprocity. [am the most prominent advocate of professionalized performance in RPG circles, and I hear from professionals who make a living by writing for game systems. Some of the stars in this world are approached by fans who ask them to GM their favorite game for $100 an hour. They could make a living from RPGs as live performance rather than a text product. But this all happens off the record. Professionals don’t want their colleagues to know that they were involved in play for pay. When I braved this stigma and wrote a post for The Mule Abides, an RPG blog, about how I think I ama better GM than a writer, and that I would like to be paid for my skills in both areas, I got the following comment: “Tavis, have you read Martha Nussbaum’s writings about the criminalization of prostitution? [In an essay in Sex and Social Justice] she discusses (and critiques) the idea that some things ought not to be paid for because they are too intimate or because the social bond around them is supposed to be different. So the idea goes that prostitution is bad because sex is supposed to be an intimate act between people who love each other, not a commercial transaction between people with no personal tie. To my mind, part of the hobbyist idea in RPGs is the idea that gaming should bea labor of love-of love of the GM for the game, of the whole playing group for each other, of the authors of material for the game-and that money taints that. I think that’s part of the source of the hostility towards the idea of paid GMs... This notion of a “labor of love” is very parallel to the idea that sex shouldn't be commercialized, even though there are other problems with the analogy. “{ personally think that there's nothing wrong with ——————T'ang commercializing RPGs. Sure, the GM is kinda like a guitarist, playing with other people playing in the band... but if a guitarist is good enough, they can get paid to play. (And even the analogy of being paid by the other members of the band can hold members of community choirs to p. it's common for ay membership fees, at the same time as the chorus as a corporate body p: ays a salary to the music director and fee to individual soloists/instrumentalists). ‘There's nothing wrong with being a completely hobbyist guitarist. But there's nothing wrong with being [insert favorite guitarist), either. The question for me is whether many (any but a token number?) of GMs can actually pull it off, but there are people I would gladly pay to GM for me more often. Adams suggestion rings true to me in part because charity fundraisers are an except to the stigma against paying for GMs to exercise of their talents. Arneson is the ultin example of a GM whose greatest gifts went under-utilized because the RPG busit did not have a way to for him to profession: tun games for fans who donated money to act of love instead of commerce, and our best record of Arneson’ style as a GM cas | | from a fan who took advantage of this opportunity to play with a respected eldera shared his notes on the experience, | Artis another field where the that tarnishes and debases labors o world, and it has been interesting and production in their professio: that issues of performance art’s agen RGU ARRANGER alize what he did best. But Arneson| a charity auction. This was perceived as Presence of money is perceived as a pollutant,¢ f love. Recently, I have had more exposure to thei to learn how artists incorporate both performat nal lives. What little I know of art history suggé ommodification and financial support for creat been the subject of vigorous discussion #