Role Playing before Character Playing

 

 

TL;DR: Old guy records his lived-experience as a TTRPGer in the late 1970s. Particularly, how play was focused on role in the group rather than the individual characters.

Like most people I meet, I have my own lived-experience, one that is unique to me. Unlike many people today, mine included playing Dungeons and Dragons in the late 1970s. There was a recent Reddit post where someone asked us old-timers to talk about how we used to play. Working from my phone, I couldn’t write too long of a response, but the short, little response I put there has gotten more upvotes than just about anything else I’ve ever said on that platform. This makes me think that there might be some people who would like to know more about my experience playing D&D when it was still young.

Back then we played the game differently. I’m not going to say that it was better than the way we play today, but it also wasn’t worse. It was just different.

Short backstory. When I was what we would now call a tween, I was hopelessly nerdy and living in a small, rural, university town in upstate California surrounded by hundreds of miles of trees, mountains, and the occasional ocean. Before the Information Age, boredom was a real thing and from about age 13 to my early 20s I lived in the same town and gamed with a core group of people that slowly changed over time and an ever rotating cloud of others. Being in Northern California, we were early adopters of Runequest and we had another game called The Arduin Grimoire. I recall playing Tunnels and Trolls a few times, Traveller a lot, same with The Fantasy Trip when it came out, and for me and some of my friends, every post-apocalyptic game as it came out, Gamma World, Morrow Project, and finally Aftermath! But most of those were in early 1980s.

Who was at the table. From about 1977 until 1981 or so, I played a lot of D&D. In the summer, around three 8-hour D&D sessions a week. There would be usually at least five people, typically seven or eight, and sometimes ten or more. For the first few years, I was usually the youngest player. Ages of the players would run from tween to college-age. The gender ratio was heavily skewed towards males, with a fair representation of openly gay players, but every game would have one or two women playing. After about 1981, I pretty much left D&D for Runequest, Aftermath! and then GURPS.

Roles not Characters. We played it differently from today. We tended to play roles, not characters. Each game session would start with organizing a party. Depending on who showed up, we would pick which characters to play, or we might roll up new ones. Most players had a small stable of characters—maybe three or four. If there were not enough players to make a good team, the DM would frequently allow some players to run multiple characters. You would usually want ten to a dozen characters going into the dungeon.

Once the party was assembled, the characters would head into the dungeon. For several years, my best friend, Will Handrich, would run three games a week (one in each real-world town in our area) and I would typically go to all three games. The parties would head into one of a small number of dungeons—places with names like the Sanskrit Place or the Old Tower. The game would ALWAYS end with the group leaving the dungeon, or the occasional TPK. After we got out, there would be some bookkeeping and dividing the loot and magic items. Nothing was ever left hanging for the next game—because you never know who would or would not be there.

But here is the thing, when we organized our groups, we didn’t really care about the characters, what we were interested in was the character’s role in the team. That’s why we called it roleplaying. Roles typically included heavy fighters, light fighters, thieves and magic users. Even after AD&D came in, these were still pretty much the roles we had. Even when Will let us start playing monster PCs, and I ran a young, Chaotic Evil red dragon that was trying to be Lawful Good, it was still more about the character’s role as a heavy fighter than about the wild and wacky backstory.

Party Organization. We always organized the characters into a marching order. It would be a block, three abreast. This is what would fit in a ten-foot-wide corridor, and the corridors were (almost) always ten-foot wide. Ideally, if you had, say a group of 12 PCs, you would want three heavy fighters up front. The second rank would often be light fighters like clerics who could also provide healing to the tanks. The “soft center” of wizards and thieves should never get directly exposed to monsters and the back rank would be lower-level heavy fighters or higher-level light fighters.

Levels. Characters progressed up level depending on how much they were played and how lucky they were in their adventures. We would routinely have third to fifth level characters forming the core of the group with new level one characters be protected as best we can. But here is the thing, characters died. Even high-level characters. Usually, one or two per game. Often up to half the party. If you survived a dangerous adventure or a bad encounter, you would be greatly rewarded. The treasure and the experience would be divided among less characters—so all the survivors got more. But you had to live. If you had a scholarly magic user, you might not opt to send them into what is expected to be a major fight. But then they don’t advance. I had a great, orcish fighter who had gotten to third level. Lots of HP and could really deal a lot of damage. I still remember that someone had to hold the door as we retreated from a swarm of goblins. Best I ever did with a normal fighter character. He did not make it out of that encounter—but he held the door and the others did.

The Great God NCR. One of the older players in the late 1970s had a cleric who, like all adventurers, was in it for the money. Someone asks the play who the cleric worshiped—this didn’t come up until several games in—and the player created the Great God NCR (National Cash Register made all the point-of-sale systems in our community and likely most of the US at the time). This is, I think, the earliest example of a player character having a unique character rather than just a role, I ever encountered. It couldn’t have been earlier than 1978.

Enter Characters. In my world, we were well into the 1980s before games became centered on the character’s character rather than the character’s role. When I ran Aftermath! every character, by their nature, was unique. So, players would make a unique character and try and find their role in the broader group. But there was a lot of what we would now call roleplaying by then. Same with our early 1980’s Runequest. Certainly, by the time GURPS dropped in 1986 everything was about the character and not their role in the group.

Conclusions. I mostly wanted to write this down so there was a record of the play style from when I was a kid, and the hobby was young. I don’t play this way today, and I don’t want to. It was a different time and place. But there are some things I’ve brought forward with me. In my Monday night game there are six of us in total, five players, and we could comfortably accommodate another one or two. Part of this is because we always end the session with the characters outside the place of adventure. When someone calls in sick (or whatever) it is not an issue, they just don’t run their character.

And also, boredom is gone from my world. If I don’t have something pressing to do, I’ll write a blog post or work on a new game system (or—you know—or clean the dishes.) It is almost impossible to get ten people together for eight hours per week. It was fun, but those times are gone.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below. (I love hearing from people and I’m certainly happy to talk more about old-school gaming with anyone who cares.)

Biopunk: Dire Wolves versus Humanized Flies

 

TL;DR. This conversation needs two biological terms—“alleles” and “transgenics”—and one bit of business jargon—“marcom”.

Sometimes weird things happen. Here I am, minding my own business, trying to write a blog about something I call “transgenic anthropomorphic genomes” (a follow up to this post) and marcom at some tech startup drops a video about how they “de extincted” the dire wolf.

Honestly, at first, I ignored it because it was so obviously false. When big science breakthroughs are coming, everyone in the field knows about it before some random marketing video. Remember when Thermo dropped the orbitrap? Everyone in mass spectrometry was talking about it. A fifth form of mass analyzer. This is going to change everything—and it did.

I’d been wanting to write some more about the biopunk elements in my game, Rubble and Ruin. I had things I wanted to talk about. I was researching specifics and gathering figures—all the things academic gamers do before making public statements. And then Colossal Biosciences announced that they had “de extincted” dire wolves. Anyone reading this more than a few months into the future will have forgotten about the announcement—it is just a bunch of misleading corporate marketing designed to attract attention. So, I’ll leave a link here to the story.

According to Science News – sited above – this Texas-based company isn’t really trying to recreate real dire wolves, instead Beth Shapiro, chief science officer at Colossal Biosciences said they wanted to create grey wolves as big as the old dire wolves. And if this is truly what the company is trying to do, then this is definitely #biopunk!

What they did. I’m not going to try and attribute who did what task. The company is the last player in an absolutely long list of scientific teams solving different problems. But, in short, they created a transgenic modern wolf that will have the size (allegedly) of a dire wolf and the color of a fictional wolf from Game of Thrones. And they did this by identifying which genes need to be altered, and then recreating allele sequences from information recovered in ancient DNA.

Public Response. I am a Hank Green fanboy, and he immediately posted this video and then not too much later he posted this follow-up which gives us an hour of Hank Green talking about this. And there are endless other groups dropping videos, but I’ll leave finding them as an exercise for interested readers. (Except I will call out Skepchick just ‘cause.)

Key point. The key point is that these animals are not really dire wolves, instead this company analyzed a source genome (dire wolf), identified how to change several genes in another genome (grey wolf), and then made a transgenic grey wolf which had the phenotypic trait of size that was expressed from the first genome in the second. I’m skipping the “changing the color of the coat” bit, because that appears to be bog-standard transgenics.

There are several things that are—in my humble opinion—missing from this conversation, and I think the easiest way to get there is to talk about humanized flies!

Humanized flies. In my day job I do bioinformatics for children’s health research. This finds me sitting on two different triage meetings. Now I am not a clinician, and I certainly don’t play one on at these meetings, but from time-to-time I have modest contributions to make to help shorten the diagnostic odyssey of some children born in our province, so I’m invited to these meetings. When a child presents at clinic with evidence of an inborn error of metabolism—a metabolic birth defect—it can often take years for the child and family to get a diagnosis and any indication of prognosis. We are running an experimental system to try and shorten this time.

The first meeting I sit on is for patients that have been referred for whole exome sequencing. This is where we sequence all of the parts of the patient’s genome that are expressed as proteins. And, it is a great thing for patients and their families and is rapidly becoming a common testing practice in developed countries. The idea is to sequence every gene in the child at once, rather than the old approach which would test a handful of suspected genes, then if none of them lit up, try another set.

With the whole exome approach, about one in three patients gets a diagnosis within a few months. About one in three gets an answer that nothing was found (which is helpful in accelerating the search for alternative diagnoses), but what is important here is that last third (approximately). They come back with variants of unknown significance—aka Vous’—these are previously unknown genetic variations which may or may not be linked to the patient’s condition.

 Which brings us to the second triage meeting I sit on. Once a month, about a half dozen clinician-scientists and another half dozen research scientists join together to talk about those patients without a clear diagnosis. Is there anything we can do as research scientists to clarify if VOUS discovered during whole exome sequencing is causing the patients’ condition? (As an aside, all of this is through the appropriate IRBs and none of the researchers access any patient identifiable data.)

At this point let’s meet our first English word that is not showing up in the dire wolf conversation, “allele”. If a gene is a locus (or a place) on a DNA strand, then an allele is the specific form of that gene in a given organism. I might have one allele of a gene while you have another. Of course, where all diploid so we each have two alleles of each gene—but often they have the same sequence. Sometimes whole exome sequencing finds an allele of a protein that could—for various reasons—be the source of the patient’s problem. From time-to-time our group decides that the best course of action is to humanize a fly and make a transgenic with this allele.

I have a colleague here in Manitoba that runs a lab that does this. What he does is he knocks out (or removes) the fly’s original copy of the gene and adds it to a human version. The fly now has the candidate defective human allele. If the fly develops normally, this is evidence that the vous is not causing the disease in the patient. But if the patient has, for example, neurological symptoms and the fly develops neurological abnormalities, then this is evidence that the new allele impacts neurological development.

Did you notice how I slipped in the word ‘transgenic’? A transgenic organism is simply one where the DNA from another organism, usually another species, has been artificially added to it. Our flies are transgenic. And when you add the entire human gene, we call it a humanized transgenic. Humanity has been making transgenics for over half a century. It is not inherently interesting or unique—I mean it is cool, but most research hospitals will have a transgenic core facility staffed with scientists who can make them to order.

It is my understanding that to make a humanized gene, you typically start with growing human cells and extract the gene, then modify it to the desired sequence based on the patient-derived information and then insert it into a fly. (Don’t hold me to this, I’m writing this over the weekend at home and can’t check with the people who actually do this sort of work.) The interesting part is that the information for the desired allele comes from the patient—but no biological material does.

Back to dire wolves. For the wolves, something like 15* alleles unique to dire wolves were identified. These alleles were on homologous genes (which means the genes were identical due to common descent) between both species. And likely common to dogs—which would explain how the company would be able to recognize them as being associated with the traits of interest, hair color, size, and skull shape.

You can’t culture dire wolf cells, because none are alive to start with. So, they cultured modern wolf cells. You can’t “dire-wolf-ize” the cells—same reason. But you can make a transgenic with an allele sequence matching that of the extinct dire wolf.

This is interesting in a biopunk sort of way, but not revolutionary science.

Marcom. Which brings us to our last word, marcom. Marcom is business slang for the Marketing and Communications group. If I head out of my little office at my day job, swipe one of the three access cards I wear around my neck, head down the hall past the various research facilities on my floor, and out into the administrative area—there is a door labeled  Marcom. It is for our parent organization’s Marketing and Communications group. At my last job I spent a lot of time interacting with (or better said, reacting to) the Marcom group for a large multi-national corporation we partnered with.

Marcom controls the message and brand of a corporation. Marcom answers to Legal, not to peer review. They can say anything they want, bound only by the law, not the truth. They want to say that dire wolves have been recreated. It’s legal for them to say that. It’s not true, but that’s not the test. (Side note, my current job’s marcom is full of great people who hold the truth in high regard—but they also don’t work for a tech start-up trying to raise venture capital.)

Conclusions. Humanized flies are not people, and transgenic wolves are not dire wolves. Both are useful and interesting, and both show how humanity is starting to take control over the living world. Not just by changing the environment but also by changing the living elements of the ecosystem, by creating new forms of life custom built to achieve specific goals. In my next post I will write about what I feel is one of the greatest unasked questions heading towards humanity, but for now let’s add some words to this discussion—alleles, transgenics, and marcom

 As always, thanks for reading and comments are welcome below.

 

* They say that five alleles were related to coat color, which would not have come from the dire wolf sequences, so I'm saying 20-5 or 15.

Biopunk: Meet some of the Archetypes

 TL;DR. There are three sci-fi ideas related to people that are important to biopunk. Cyborgs are people with mechanical bits inside them that they can control. Transhumans are people who have had their genetics improved, and uplifts are animals that have been modified to be human-like. Usually given language and human intelligence and often made where they can interact more with the physical world.

 

I am a biomedical researcher. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about how living systems work, both at the molecular and organismal level. I’m also a life-long gamer. So, when I wrote Rubble and Ruin it turned out to be more biopunk than anything else.

For my first biopunk blog post I want to define some terms. I didn’t create any of the terms for this post—but over the years, some of them have drifted in their meaning—and others have been forgotten—so I want readers to know how I use them. All three of these occur in Rubble and Ruin, but they are also worth just knowing about.

One more thing before we start, I can imagine all three of these technologies being close to existing around the year 2050. In my fictional world, this is when the wars start and the world gets 15 years of hyper-focused weapons research with very little quality control. So, in the R&R world, humanity starts towards these things but then ends with poorly implemented versions of them.

Cyborgs

In real life my father died of complications associated with having his lower leg amputated. Had he lived, he would have been fitted with a prosthetic that would have allowed him to continue to walk but not walk as well as when he had his natural leg. Humans have been making such prosthetics for a long time. Prosthetics are not cybernetics, but they are heading that way.

Then we get the term bionic. It comes from biological and electronic and refers to electronic prosthetics. The idea being that these replacement limbs are as good as or better than the original. My live-experience matches what the wiki article says, the word "bionic" may have existed earlier, but it becomes common due to a couple of 1970s TV shows. I will confess, I was not much of a TV watcher as a kid, but I did watch a few episodes so I remember the basics, but I haven’t watched any since then—so I might be wrong—but I don’t recall the shows ever talking about how the bionics interface with the living tissue of the host. This interfacing is the most important issue for cyborgs.

Let’s step forward to the 1980s, by then I was an undergraduate studying molecular biology and research psychology (later known as neural science) and playing a lot of cyberpunk. In the various cyberpunk games of the 1980s, we have what  I consider cyborgs. In these games, cyborgs are people who have mechanical, or more correctly, electro-mechanical devices implanted in their body to enhance their abilities.

Standard stuff for fiction, videogames, and TTRPGs.

But how do these devices interface? That is the technically challenging part.

I can imagine people implanting small video monitors under their skin. Maybe a little circular one where your wrist watch would be. And maybe the thing get its power from the temperature gradient between the person’s body and the environment—easy enough in principle. The device could just sit there for the rest of your life displaying information--like the current time. 

But where would this device get the information that it displays? If it has a “Bluetooth-like” wireless connection to the owner’s cellphone, then I would not call this thing cybernetic. It is just implanted technology. We've been doing this for years. If, on the other hand, it is displaying information sent to it from the hosts body or mind—now I would call it cyberware.

So, for me, in order to consider a prosthetic as cyberware, it has to have some kind of interface with the user. If could be listening to neural signals directly, or maybe it interfaces with surviving muscle fragments or maybe there is a brain implant that feeds information to the limb. I don’t care; all of these are cyberware to me. But without that control, it’s just a prosthetic.

There are people who would call a cyborg a transhuman--but I consider transhumans to be something else.

Transhuman

I have come to realize that a lot of young people today have lost track of the old meaning of the sci-fi concept of a transhuman. I happen to use this one a lot. Some people believe that a human’s physical and mental abilities are heavily determined – some even argue, primarily determined – by their genetics. Time and time again science has shown that this is not true, but the myth lives on. I’ve written a little about this as it relates to TTRPGs here.

So, if you believe this is true and you have the power to edit people’s genes, then you start to imagine what I call transhumans. Other people use this word differently. For me (and others) a transhuman is a person who has a direct genetic ancestry from someone who was recognizably human, but the transhuman has had their genetics purposefully edited with the goal of improving the transhumans life. The two movie examples that come first to my mind are Khan from "The Wrath of Khan" and most everyone from Gataca.

With this definition, editing out a gene variant that causes an inborn error of metabolism is creating a transhuman. As is, editing in cassettes of new genes which gives the recipient the ability to hold their breath for thirty minutes, just like a whale. Intentional gene-editing defines the transhumans.

There is an interesting question of if the change needs to be inheritable. In my usage it does not. I would call a person who had sickle cell anemia blocked with an implanted gene as transhuman, even if their children would still be at risk for getting the origin sickle cell gene. But, you can easily imagine someone requiring that the change be permanent to the transhumans genetic lineage before we call them transhuman. I could be talked into this requirement.

Uplifted Animal or Uplift

The last of the old sci-fi biopunk concepts I want to talk about here, are the uplifts. The idea is that we are going to “lift” an animal species “up” to human-like levels.

The name presupposes something called the “Scala Naturae” or natural scale. It is an old idea that dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers and was popular during the Middle Ages, and still popular with biological determinists. It supposes some sort of “natural order” in which some organisms are “above” or closer to God than others. When someone makes an animal species more like humans, they are lifting them up this natural order.

In modern science, the idea of the Natural Scale is silly. All living creatures are just as far removed from the last universal common ancestor as any other, and therefore just as viable as all others. But, we still use the term uplift.

To create an uplifted species, you start with a well-understood organism. The key thing you need to understand about your creature is its developmental biology. What has to change in its neuronal development for its brain to develop such that it can understand language, mentally manipulate objects, create abstract thoughts and whatever other mental abilities are required for sentience. You then modify the animals genome to make these changes. While you are doing this, it is also useful if you can give the critter hands and tool use. Typically, we assume that you do this to a large enough population to create a new species that can breed true and persist over time.

The classic table-top roleplaying game uplift are the Vargr in the 1970s science fiction game Traveller. They were introduced in 1980 and are terrestrial dogs uplifted to dog-people by an unknown ancient species. In Rubble and Ruin I have two, the Barkers--which like the Vargr are uplifted dogs--and the Embul rats who are (you guessed it) uplifted rats.

Going Forward

In my next Biopunk post I want to push the boundaries of biopunk a little, but in order to do that, I need the reader to understand what I mean when I use these three old sci-fi terms—so I thought I should start here.

As always thanks for taking the time to read this, and please feel free to write any questions or comments below. I always enjoy hearing from people.

Biopunk #2: Dire Wolves and Humanized Flies.