Prompts for Scholars of the Material Culture of Roleplaying Games

AN UPDATE TO ALL THIS IN THE YEAR 2020: G+, the social platform that all of these posts were connected to, and that made all of this game-playing happen, is long gone. I left all of this alone, this blog, while the DIY RPG community disintegrated more or less completely over the last five years. I imagine that all of this reads like code without a key. 

So pruning is due. But I still haven't seen much of anything on how and why people make things to play their D&D and other roleplaying games with. Nor much of anything about how and why those things change the game. I started writing this to think about those questions or, more optimistically, to find out what other people were thinking about it; no dice, or very small ones, at best. Maybe that curiosity will persist as I organize old (and maybe new game rules), notes and other ephemera rather than taking this blog down. 

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When I started playing D&D two or three years ago the first order of business was, as the rules suggested, to prepare the playing pieces.  

Some time not too long after, I discovered that there were people who favoured older style games over contemporary D&D. Even as the early rulebooks suggested a very rich material culture being part of the game, many of the most experienced players and scholars didn't have much insight into its details. I even played with a smart person who said, "I don't like to use miniatures in games: it stops the players from imagining what's going on." 

I hadn't thought about miniatures, maps or other props as a kind of visual railroad, something that forecloses the act of imagining. I thought precisely the opposite: that the playing pieces help to make play possible in some important, atavistic, way. Because the the props serve as a representation of one or more people's commitment of time and energy and serve to encourage mutual commitment.

Aesthetically, players' agreement to the terms of representation establishes a useful and particular distance between the player and the game. Story and style gets shaped by this distance. Per H.G. Wells, “You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realise(sic.) just what a blundering thing Great War must be.” Scale changes pathos and humour and gives the impression that someone–the players themselves? The characters in the fiction?–is an insect under the eyes of distant Fates.

However, Necropraxis' Pahvelorn game–the first long-running-D&D I played, the author of which I'm quoting above–used no miniatures and very little referee-provided visual information and was among the most involving and evocative games I've played.  So obviously there's more than one way to do this right.