Philosophy is actually really important!

 

An Assertion. I am going to make the following claim without evidence. If people have reason to believe I am wrong, I legit would love to hear it (leave a comment below, please).

Most people think the discipline of philosophy is silly or useless.

I am now going to try and convince you this is wrong.

An Aside. Before I start, I want to mention that I only have three (maybe four) memories of interacting with professional philosophers. And the only important one is the time I got to meet Eliot Sober after he gave a talk at Oregon State University. I was very familiar with his work, having studied under someone who had studied under him. And at the time I thought about asking him to sign my copy of “The Philosophy of Biology” but I didn’t because I thought it would be too nerdy. Nowadays I wish I had. His work is a great asset to science and the world.

Background. So, I took a couple of Evolutionary Biology seminars and some more formal coursework in graduate school. People who want to understand biological evolution spend a lot of time thinking about what we know, and how we know it. And one of the professors had a cool way of thinking about the field of Philosophy and that is what I’m going to be writing about now.

Let’s start with two words, epistemology and metaphysics. First off, we should recognize that different people use these words differently. If you use them some other way than what I present here, groovy. But it is left to use to come up with some new word that matches the meanings of the usage I was taught. English be like that.

Epistemology is the study of the sets of rules different people use to decide what is or is not true.  If you believe that the only way to know truth is to read it in your magic book, then “reading it in your magic book” is your epistemology.

Most scientists have an epistemology that includes two things, empirical observation, and logical inference. You can be a scientist who accepts empirical observation, logical inference, and reading it in a magic book. But in the last half century, most of those people  are starting to have profound issues with cognitive dissonance, as most of the magical books make assertions that don’t literally hold up to the first two.

Metaphysics is, under this system, the list of things that you accept to be true. These are the things that you have found, or accept, based on your epistemology.

Different groups have different epistemologies and metaphysics. Some overlap between different groups. Some are reasonably unique.

Another short aside. Recently, I was involved with a Humanist forum here in Manitoba and I presented this approach to understanding people’s beliefs. In our presentations, the group would take breaks and have discussions around questions raised by the speaker.

I asked the attendees to talk about their own epistemology and metaphysics and one of the attendees made an interesting comment. Upon reflection, they asserted that they basically just believe what the people around them believe.

The core of my point. It is my considered opinion that humans are more of a perceiving and responding organism than we are a logical reasoning organism. We do both. But there are people who never really think about thinking. They don’t question “why” they accept something as true. They certainly don’t dive into critical thinking and the various types of logical fallacies (like my opening strawman) and they tend to just accept assertions made by the people they follow.

It's bad, even just among scientists. I tell my students I’m a professional cynic. I don’t believe anything “just ‘cause”.

“But Richard, it is in a peer-reviewed paper.”

“Yeah, but 20% to 50% of all peer-reviewed papers have non-trivial errors in them. Maybe up to a third have structural problems that invalidate one or more of their findings. Before I believe it, I need to do a little digging.”

Imagine how bad it is trying to understand what is true among the people who don’t have a rigorous epistemology.

So, let’s bring back the basics of philosophy. People need to understand how to approach thinking about things they don’t understand.

I honestly think that before people can understand what science is, or the dynamic relationships between and within various religions, they first need to understand the basics of how to think about thinking. And traditionally, that’s the realm of philosophy.

Secret Motivations. I actually have a secret motivation for writing about this. I want to introduce the idea of Philosophical Engineering which is an emerging approach to solving complex problems in biology and physics. Something that I have been spending the bulk of my day-job work hours on since last February. It’s really interesting, and I think it is a very promising approach to understanding, and correcting, all sorts of problems in complex, dynamic systems, but we can’t even start talking about it without first covering epistemology and metaphysics.

As always, thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Team Work makes the Game Work (?)

 

or Why I love the Fantasy Trip.

TL;DR. I’ve figured out that one of the reasons I run games is that I like to see groups of players working together to solve problems. And when a group is clicking, they will work at multiple levels, including the challenge in front of them and the story arc. And the story emerges from the individual character journeys.

Doom comes to the Monday Night game. Two weeks ago, I completely lost interest in my Monday night game. I’ve been running it for several months. I put a lot of effort into developing a setting that interested me—I like sandbox games where the players are free to develop the adventure according to their character’s interests and goals. I crafted a world that contained two classic OSR adventures, B2 Keep on the Borderland and B5 Horror on the Hill. I merged them with some really cool material from Raging Swan, and I ported everything to my favorite mechanics, D100 (I went with Mongoose Legend.) Then I added on the Sinister Secret of Saltmarch. The group did the haunted house, and we started the Caves of Chaos.

Along the way I realized I wasn’t enjoying running the game. Players were struggling with what I thought was a simple setting. No one wanted to play a character that was motivated for simple money, but no one could advance because they were always poor. We were just struggling.

And very few players had anything they wanted their characters to do.

And the fights were just boring.

The Problem. Now back in the day I could run games that were exciting, and everyone was on board with the action. A few players would drive the direction of the game and others would follow along because game play was always fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is constrained story telling. We’re not just sitting around building a group story. There are constraints imposed by the game system. In movie making there is something called cinematography. It has to do with what and how the visual images are presented on the screen. We might do a slow pan in on a pistol sitting on a desk. We draw the viewer’s attention to the pistol. Why? It must be important. At some point that pistol must play a role in the unfolding story.

In the same way, game mechanics—the physical rules of the game—act as cinematography for our unfolding story. They are a mathematical model that constrains what characters can do. I have 5 hit points. That’s not many. Will that be important to our story? The mechanics draw our attention to certain elements of the story and hide others.

If I used to be able to run games that interested me, but now I can’t, there are only a few places that things could have changed, the players, the GM, or the mechanics.

My players are as fine a group of players as I’ve ever had. So, they are not my problem.

I could have just lost whatever talent I had for GMing. It is possible. But I did put effort into this game, so I opted to focus on mechanics.  On where we focus the player’s attention. The first thing I did was look at reward structure for play. (But to be honest, at the end of a session, I was always so rushed that I didn’t do this well.)

Then I looked internally. I thought about what used to make my combats interesting and I realized that what had changed was the nature of fighting. The games that I play these days are built around the idea of heroic, or really super heroic, characters. Combat runs like a superhero movie. We focus on one character while they do a lot of things. Then we focus on the next character while they do their bit. Etc. But when your character is not in focus, everything is kind of boring.

So, I answered that with reintroducing interleaved combat. In this model of combat, everything is happening at the same time. No one gets the focus. Every character gets an action on each phase. What actions you can pick depend on the nature of your character, but everyone is potentially taking action at all times.

This worked great. It took a few weeks for the players to get the hang of it, but everyone agreed that combat was more fun. And I could clearly see that players were more engaged with the action.

So why did my interest suddenly die?

Realization. The answer was obvious. Once I recovered interesting combat, I realized that the game I had constructed focused on the wrong thing. The focus was on a series of combats—and we could pretty much map out what they would be. And at the end there will be a big, bad fight and the player characters will win or fail based on their preparation, luck, and die rolls.

And to me this was completely boring. It was missing a critical element, player character interactions...

Teamwork. I realized that once I had fixed the issue I was having with combat, suddenly I wanted characters that worked as a team. And I knew exactly how to do that. Basically, since I’ve been thinking about old school, Left-coast gaming so much recently (see for example here and here and here), suddenly I wanted that old-style of play were not only were characters constantly engaged with the action on the table, but all the characters had to act as a team in order to win. Characters have roles in the team, and the players need to build their characters to fit their role.

The Answer was in the labyrinth. Literally. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than play that old, Steve Jackson classic, The Fantasy Trip. In this game there are no random elements in character creation. You make the character you are going to play. But there are powerful constraints on what the characters can do. You can build a character to fit one role, front line fighter, ranged fighter, polearm-wielding second-rank fighter, support thief, sage, illusion-based wizard, and the like. If you are thoughtful, the character will be pretty good at their role, and if you really work at it, they can double in a second role.

But player characters are easy to make, and players are expected to keep a pool of characters around. For a given evening of play, they will pick the characters that they want to bring. They might want to build this fighter up, and they might feel that they need a scholar to tackle a specific problem, so for this game the player picks those two characters.

And in this game, all the players need to make characters that work together to accomplish the party’s goal. Failure to make a useful character is no one’s fault but yours. Experimenting is to be encouraged, but you made your character. If they are not working, make a new one.

For my campaign, I started with something simple. Everyone is on the island capital of the old empire, full of adventure. The empire was destroyed by powerful magic and outsiders are finally getting a chance to return. There is limited government and lots of opportunities to explore and gain wealth and power.

For each game session, the players get to pick one of three or so goals. There will be a known XP reward for each goal. Over time, I hope the players will propose their own goals. But to start with, the players can explore the edge of the mushroom forest for 100 XP, find a path to that castle over there for 125 XP, or explore what is behind that strange door for 50 XP + treasure.

Stories Emerge from the Actions of the Teams. Just as in other OSR games, the story will emerge from the series of actions that the group undertakes. It will not be something that I, as the GM, predetermined. Instead, certain players will like certain characters. They will pick adventures that those characters are good at. Overtime, the list of options for a given sessions adventures will come to be focused on what characters the players like to play, and a story will emerge.

And as the GM I will be able to watch this happen.

And that is what I like about running games. Not the banter between super powered characters, but rather the way a group of my friends drive the creation of a story, based on what elements of the setting they prefer to engage with the most.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Old-School, Left Coast Gaming Magic Systems

 

TL;DR. Back in the day, in Northern California, my friends and I not only viewed TSR as a corporate bully, but we gravitated towards TTRPGs with well researched magic systems. Not well balance, but well researcher. And it occurs to me that many of these games were heavily influenced by the SCA.

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s the people I gamed with in Northern California were not too fond of D&D. We loved TTRPGs but we had already moved on. For this post, at first I was going to only focus on Animism and the early days of Runequest. But I needed to look at my old copy of Chivalry and Sorcery in reference to my current gaming WIP, and when did, II noticed something which I had long ago forgotten. Something that strengthened my point but also broadened this post.

Background. Let’s remind ourselves about Chivalry and Sorcery. This game was first published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977. It is a remarkably complex game, with prints of hand-typed pages. Tiny type, hard to read and full of endless charts and tables. I, of course, loved it!

This is an early game that tries to catch the look-and-feel of the real Middle Ages. Knights and Fiefdoms and Castles and all that. The game is what we would now days call “simulations”. It is trying to model somewhat realistically (through a somewhat Arthurian lens) the high Middle Ages. The cover image is a knight in full plate on horseback tilting with a dragon.

And inside, on the title page, is the text, “Dedicated to the Society for Creative Anachronisms (the S.C.A.)”.

The SCA. Once upon a time, there was a very large overlap, at least in Northern California, between TTRPG players and SCA members. Founded in 1966, in Berkly California, the SCA was a constant element of my early life. Almost all my friends were members. The SCA is still around. It is a Medieval reenactment group with a twist. Most reenactment groups put on public-facing “shows” that aim to be as accurate as possible. (I had a buddy once who was big into French and Indian War reenacting who would call the American Civil War reenactors “button counters” because they were always concerned with having the exactly correct number of brass buttons for the uniform they wore.) SCA people don’t have this problem—at least not at the time when I hung out with them. Instead, each person would research a time and place over an incredibly large space – if memory serves, it was from the year 500 to 1500 and any culture in Europe or that interacted with Europe. You would pick a time and place of interest and research the heck out of it. And then you’d start teaching all your friends about it.

For the record, this was all within a certain cultural framework. There would be “events” which had a regular structure and there was “fighting” which also had a different structure. But in general, the folks I knew spent a lot of time learning about history and teaching it to others—frequently through crafts and music and the like. There is a lot more that can be said about the SCA, but the key point is the SCA was never an outward-facing performance, instead it was an inward-facing educational opportunity. And it came out of Berkley.

And where did Runequest come from? Same place. (Well, Oakland and Alameda—the next BART stop south.) Runequest combat is a very good simulation of SCA combat. 

Researched games. I was going to write this post about animism as a magic system—and I will likely write such a post soon. Runequest was written by a cultural anthropologist with a history of interest in animism. And he built that into his game. Runequest has shamans and ancestor spirits and everyday battle magic and polytheistic religions with different cults being fundamentally different.

And the reason I was looking through my 1977 edition of Chivalry and Sorcery was to reference the historically based information about Western European magical beliefs of the Middle Ages.

Back in the day, we didn’t “make up” combat systems. We thought about what human conflict is actually like and tried to capture that in our games. Likewise, we didn’t always make up magic systems, but frequently we would ask, “What do the people who believe in magic believe it can do?”

Magic Systems in SCA-influenced Games. Chivalry and Sorcery came up with one answer. In this book they did things like divide magicians into a huge number of religious traditions. And these traditions were structured. There were Natural Magic Users which included drug-trace induced casters, those who evoked magic with dances and chants, mediums, and shamen. The Minor Arcane with the alchemists, artificers (who build magic items), astrologists, diviners, wizards and witches, evil priests, and covens. And then the Major Arcane with conjurers, enchanters (who use chants and song to create magic), necromancers, thaumaturgists, mystic cabbalism with their magic symbols, those who know the words of power words, and the numerologists. 

I don’t know who came up with this classification of real-world magical beliefs (I kind of think they grabbed it from existing occult works—maybe the Golden Bough, but I will confess, it is still my default way of classifying magic to this day. When I encounter people who believe in magic, I usually find they fall into one of these groups.

And Runequest found another answer. Buried in the Natural Magic of C&S were the dance / chant and shaman traditions. Both of these (and a few others in the Minor Arcane) reflect an ancient, real-world tradition frequently called Animism. One of the key influencers of Runequest was Greg Stafford (who I never met) and his interest was cultural anthropology.

Stafford was trying to create his own bronze-age cultures. And if the world had magic, then the magic should be a real part of the world, not just a set of random powers strapped on for a few lucky casters. So, he started from the assumption that the world worked the way that surviving religious traditions that were present in the bronze age believed it did.

Spirits were real. Shaman were people who could interact with them. Spells were gifts from the spirits (or maybe treasures wrestled away from them). Gods were powerful spirit-like entities that interacted with people. They had spirits of retribution for those that crossed them. They had gifts for those that worshiped them. And they had limits on their powers.

Limitations. The drawback to this approach is that we were frequently constrained in the types of stories we would tell. Powerful wizards were rare. Because most cultures don’t actually believe in powerful wizards.

Even when we would cut loose from the real world, we would play games like The Fantasy Trip and GURPS Fantasy. Two related games that do not have massive, Earth-shattering wizard types.

Advantages. The flipside is that you end up with a really good understanding of human cultures and religious beliefs. I live in Canada now and I am frequently near animistic rituals and enchantments. I find it easy to understand them and respectfully stay out of their way.

As a person who grew up in the shadow of the SCA and who played RPGs heavily influenced by their tradition of research, understanding, and teaching, I have a very different approach to magic in my worlds. In my worlds, if there really is magic, then the magic is real. It affects everything. If diseases are caused by spirits then they are not spread by microorganisms.

I wrote Rubble and Ruin to be a world that plays like a cannon fantasy game, but which doesn’t have real magic. Instead, I replaced it with science and technology. I’m currently working on a fantasy game that tries to capture the feeling of my old SCA-influenced RPG experience. It has real magic—and in that world it is real.

As always, thank you for reading this reflection on my early gaming experience. I always welcome comments and questions below.

p.s. A little true-confession at the end. I haven’t played Chivalry and Sorcery since forever, but I use it as a historical reference. I was looking at the current edition on Drivethrurpg and noticed that I own it. I must have gotten it in an early bundle or something—maybe I used some Rubble and Ruin money to pick it up. So, I start flipping through the pdf. Oh, they have cleaned it up. I bet they’ve fixed lots of bits and improved lots of others. But it is 583 pages long! That tells me just how much was crammed into the original work.