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A beautiful handmade gift.
-was how one of my players described the campaign, and it stopped me in my tracks.
It was absolutely true - every week for years I'd spent a few hours crafting this thing for my friends, to let them be the heroes of a story told just for them - and by them.
But I'd never thought of it that way before. It was such a beautiful and grateful way of phrasing it, it made me look at the whole thing in a new light.
A campaign is a work of art we create not for money or fame but just for our own satisfaction and the joy of a handful of people around a table or chatroom.
It's a cozy private performance, often ephemeral, just for the people in this room on this particular evening.
Don't you have anything that you just wrote for yourself, and you didn't want to show anybody?
-Adult World, 2013
Our stories can be about that time you rolled two 20s in a row, or how clever your Paladin build was. But we can do better.
Some people look at a wall and just see a wall. Some people look at it and see a canvas.
When we play, FRP is our wall - a medium for art, personal, intimate, multidisciplinary.
We've already talked about how it involves writing (both dialogue and short fiction), acting, storytelling, mathematics - but you can bring any skill you have to the table. An artist can draw characters and scenes. If you're good at technical drawing, you can make amazing maps. If you're into modelmaking your table might have the best miniatures and scenery. A paramedic can describe injuries in more grisly detail. A student of anthropology can build more convincing cultures for their world.
You can take whatever you have and make it part of that handmade gift and give it to your friends.
It's an adage of FRP that nobody wants to hear about your high-level paladin; and maybe people still won't want to hear about your campaign even when you treat it as art. But maybe that's okay? Because it's not for them - it's for the people who were there with you at the table.
If it becomes the basis for the next ππ¦π€π°π³π₯ π°π§ π΅π©π¦ ππ°π₯π°π΄π΄ ππ’π³ or ππ·π¦π³π²πΆπ¦π΄π΅ then great, but always remember that's not what you're doing it for - it's for these people right in front of you.
As much as it's exclusive, it's also inclusive, egalitarian, democratic. You don't need money or qualifications - just friends and information. All you need materially is a table and some dice, books and something to write with. There are people in jail playing sprawling campaigns without even that much. Nobody can meaningfully gatekeep you. It's a space for ordinary people, where ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
During the fight over the attempted revocation of the OGL earlier this year, I first saw the tags #folkdnd and #opendnd. The idea that D&D is not a product or an IP that can be meaningfully owned by any one company (any more than chess or football or knitting could be so owned) but a folk tradition, something practiced, created and reacreated by ordinary people in different ways all over the world.
Hence, Elysium survived contact with the Real World through competition. It had its genesis during the turn of the century as a high fantasy setting. With β I would say β βsome interesting ideas.β Back then we were over the moon about it. We wrote incessantly. Mostly spells, hundreds if not thousands of them, each exactly one page. We visited Elysium via pen-and-paper role-playing, using a proprietary system that later became Disco Elysiumβs Metric. βWeβ were a group of 5-10 highschool dropouts called The Overcoats (it was terribly cold outside and we wore thick coats), anarchists of some sort, with the motto: βToday we drink tea; tomorrow we rule the world.β
Unironically, we intended Elysium to be the vessel of this conquest.
-Robert Kurvitz
These grandiose dropouts went on to make Disco Elysium, which sold over 2 million copies. The original D&D was created by wargame clubs in the midwest trying to figure out better ways to wargame than the anemic rules offered by Avalon Hill. D&D now makes perhaps a hundred million dollars a year.
Those are not the metrics that matter to us here, but it shows that what these little groups of people playing together are doing isn't nothing. It's literary, creative. The greatest things to come out of D&D were made, to borrow from pop culture, "in a cave, with a box of scraps."
And the original D&D was refined by groups elsewhere - such as on the West Coast, with the Perrin Conventions. From the very start it's been an open-source effort - everyone building on what others did. My game wouldn't have been possible without the work of Ben Laurence, Unweaver, J.V. West, the Judges Guild, David Black and a host of others.
Much as they've been trying to commodify D&D since Gygax realised what a good thing he was onto, it doesn't sit well with commodification. Its strengths come to the fore the more home-made and collaborative and open-source it is; commodifying it calcifies and weakens it.
The idea of D&D as a Marvel-style IP franchise, a set of proprietary ideas to be milked and marketed, is completely at odds with its origin as something cobbled together from the ideas and contributions of hundreds of enthusiasts playing for fun. Early D&D was a commons, quickly enclosed when its creators saw the chance to make a buck.
Its biggest strength is as a commons, something for us and by us, and that is likely also the reason it's overlooked as art. But real artistic questions arise from looking at D&D as a literary exercise - "is it meaningful if you can't die" is a question of art and artistic taste, it's discussing it as art. It's a meaningful question about the usage of the medium and how to convey meaning through it.
When you pose a similar question about painting or theatre, we have university classes discussing it, to understand how a particular period's art reflected their values.
And FRP isn't just created by the community - it creates the community right back. Creating art together is a bonding experience. We grow in confidence and connection to one another. We come to owe one another for the kindness we've all shown at the table. We express ourselves and explore our shared and personal values. We show each other that we care and will put effort into our friendship.
I've had half my players tell me that the friendships they've made at the table are the best they have. Recently a player was in hospital and three people from the game reached out to them, offering them comfort and entertainment while they were recuperating - none of their other friends did.
It's that realisation - along with seeing how good it's been for our confidence, creativity and mental health - that made me want to write this series.
This One's For You, Eddie... by Matthew Colville
The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row, Keri Blakinger, NYT
A short history of D&D and open gaming, Tomas McIntee
The Perrin Conventions by Christopher Helton