Toward a Leftist OSR - blog post

#21

I don’t think the Sandbox is any more explicitly colonialist or Rightest then a community building game is explicitly Leftist.

You could start a sandbox where the party is a band of refugees trying to survive, or even political revolutionaries on the run. You could play a community building game about building the perfect military ruled exterminationist ethno-state.

The distinction is often not even player goals, and while XP=GP certainly encourages primative accumulation (not capitalism), and may not be ideal for a didactically Leftist game, I don’t think it or the Sandbox are the root of the colonialist D&D narrative. 'Cause I agree that that narrative exists. The issue is likely the perceptions of the designers as largely boomer era American white men raised on John Wayne and Gunsmoke. The difficulty with the Western narrative is not really that it presents a sandbox, but that it treats exploitation as heroic.

Yet the politics of traditional game fantasy has gotten more offputting as it’s moved away from morally suspect Swords and Sorcery heroes to those of high fantasy because it puts even more emphasis on the violent wandering murderer as heroic then B2 did. I think this is the crux of moral play - what the GM and to a lesser extent the mechanics hold up as unexamined good. For me the presentation of the world and providing context for player morality is more important then the techniques.

Yet I also doubt the effectivness of simply changing the direction or target of heroic violence. Players need to be able to act in an evil manner to understand the moral choice involved.

I think what I’m saying is that I don’t think any of this is as simple as replacing the XP system with milestones for good deeds.

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#22

I don’t mean “privileged” in terms of attitude or outlook or whatever, I mean exploration for its own sake requires surplus resources. You literally need to be in a privileged financial position to explore without it being necessary. An expedition to the North Pole costs money. Modern science is breathtakingly expensive.

By contrast, an rpg session about exploration is pretty cheap. Even less than a hike in the woods! But if our characters have no past, no social connections, and no motivations besides the players wanting to have fun, we’re ignoring the political questions of how those types of expeditions, studies, and research activities happen: who controls those surplus resources, how do they get allocated, who gets to undertake the exploration, and who benefits from it?

Do we have to answer them? No. But we can, if we want to (and have the privilege to do so). I mean, I do like playing murderhobo dnd, but I like playing lots of other games too.

But yeah, connecting PCs to a whole world, and then having them explore another one. There’s basically 3 sources for that stuff, right? The GM, the game, and the players. Personally, I would put it mostly on the players to create the setting that is familiar to the PCs, and have the GM create what is unfamiliar. Apocalypse World kind of already works that way. Having games with like, any amount of rules focused around societies also helps, but aren’t as common as fighty games.

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#23

Oh yeah, for sure. I’m not saying “don’t play sandbox D&D,” I’m just saying that wild west narrative is baked into the sandbox we have. If most sandbox play instead cam out of Revolutions & Refugees, this would be a pretty different discussion.

But also, that Platonic Ideal of the sandbox which doesn’t come with any political or social baggage doesn’t really exist except as an idea. There’s always going to be our culture attached to the material product, so if you want to take the colonialism out, you need to put something else in.

Or anyway, that’s my experience of game design. But maybe others can find solutions that I can’t.

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#24

If there’s not a game called Revolutions & Refugees, there really should be!

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#25

Saw this today as well, really interesting stuff to unpack. I’ve been getting frustrated as a GM when running 5E and trying to encourage different scenarios and approaches than pillage, exploit and manipulate the world put in front of the players. This is some really refreshing food for thought and making me consider the very colonialist, Western savior sort of implications in classic heroic fantasy games. I’m very much intrigued by ways to not only tie PCs to a given region and community but better develop stories that reward strengthening their communities rather than simply going on dungeon raids for gold, etc.

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#26

As far as I’m concerned, what it came out of doesn’t really matter, heck TTRPGs as a whole come from a game played by Prussian army officers, yet I don’t see the argument that modern TTRPGs must therefore be infected with the Junker mindset…

Certainly there’s no need to uncritically accept the classic sandbox/dungeon raider narrative - but I utterly reject the idea that the playstyle of putting player choice and emergent story first needs to be replaced with heavy backstory and scene based adventures to remove some sort of Edenic taint.

The Western genre itself has changed numerous times - from foreign adaptions like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai (which because they remove the racialized context of the American Western manage to be very populist anti-corruption pieces) to 70’s Vigilante cinema like the Wild Bunch which turns the endemic and heroic violence of the Western into a sickening spectacle but ultimately deals heavily in themes of social decay and revolution. Of course the Western continues to evolve - tackling the ideas of women and the construction of masculinity in the genre (from amusingly bad like Quick and the Dead to much more nuanced and interesting like Meek’s Cutoff) and producing numerous other self-critical works. I don’t see why the classic TTRPG needs to change its mechanics to be more like PbtA to do so either?

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#27

Maybe I’m just not expressing myself very well, Gus. It seems like you think I’m saying something that I’m not intending to say.

There are hundreds of different ways a person can express their ideas and their understanding of the world in an rpg system, from principles and procedures to die mechanics and reward systems to resource economies and fictional content. PbtA mechanics are just a small selection of them. Backstory is just one thing. Sam asked a question about connecting PCs to NPCs and I answered with an opinion and a suggestion.

When I say you need to put stuff in not just take stuff out, it doesn’t have to have anything to do with PbtA (and maybe I am being dumb and actually arguing against people who say “you can play D&D and just not be racist!” just because I see that a lot, even though I don’t think anyone here is saying that). What I mean is that to design something effectively (in my opinion) you need to know what it is you want it to do, not just what you want it to not do. Which is really what Hamza is doing in the blog post–he wants characters to be more connected to communities, so he writes rules for characters interacting with communities. That’s a clear, actionable goal, unlike say “D&D but not colonialist.” Does that make sense?

I am 100 percent certain that it is possible to write a sandbox exploration game that requires no PC backstory and uses no PbtA mechanics, but is still socialist as fuck (or anarchist, or just emphasizes mutualism). I don’t know if I, personally, can do it, but plenty of people out there can do things I can’t.

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#28

A very smart dude named Adam Dray ran a D&D5e game for a while called “City of Brass” (and then renamed to “Mirrorrim”). It was about poor, down-on-their-luck people trying to survive in a big city, dealing with themes of disenfranchisement and oppression. That might qualify, in some ways!

There’s some info here:

https://cityofbrass.obsidianportal.com/wikis/commune-meeting

Edit: This game was mentioned in the blog post (linked in the original post), so my apologies if this redundant. (And it is, to anyone who actually read the blog.) For everyone else, worth checking out, though!

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#29

Johnstone, cool, I guess I misunderstood your personal confusion on the means to that Leftist classic sandbox with a more general despair at the possibility.

I also have some personal confusion in that regard, though from running games I tend towards the idea that setting and not mechanics does that work - which isn’t disagreement with Humza so much as a choice of emphasis. I don’t think that town building mechanics - even with a focus on good government necessarily produce Leftist stories - I think the can, and Humza’s take is solid (though likely his execution will involve more Landschknecht and less Spiderknecht then mine would).

The danger and solution I see is an insufficient idea of what ‘Leftist’ means? To me the unique opportunity to engage in moral play, to play with the problem of expediancy, right and wrong is the revolutionary aspect of TTRPGs - the point that the players realize they might be the evil ones, that they have dues to pay for thier past actions and that prosocial action may be both personally hard and/or offer long term benefits are the most ‘Leftist’ game elements in a consciousness raising way. The superficial and mechanical elements seem to fade comparatively. Is a game where you play Red Army fixers in the Soviet far East circa 1923 “Leftist” - cause despite the red stars on the players coats if the nuance and ambiguity of the time isn’t addressed along with some questions of the morality of violence the party is just going to be another band of murderhobos who get little red and gold medals occassionally.

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#30

Yeah, I prefer specificity too, and I wouldn’t use “Left” and “Right” myself, but at the same time I think I get what Humza’s going for.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by Spiderknecht?

#31

I took Humza’s (with a ‘U’) post as a broader call to think about what Leftist politics might look like in the context of old school game design and play. His suggested methods I take to be more a “get the ball rolling” set if ideas, an example rather then prescriptive universal.

Spiderknechts are spider knights, but with a German word - so middleurope, dark foresty. In the 5E Fairyland version of B3 Palace of the Silver Princess I am running they are nasty redcap, treeroot, forest gnome Autumnal Court fey things that live in bramble castles and make up the nobility of the nearest domain to B3. My home game PCs have decided to be buddies with them, because of course they have.

#32

(Ah good I still have time to edit spelling in my post, thanks).

I’d probably try to be buds with the spider knights too, can’t blame them.

#33

Oh I don’t blame them, factions being one my favorite things in ttrpgs. The only GM side issue is that I had to scramble to produce more content, because rather then continuing to explore the dungeon and solve the problems they had set themselves to solving the party was like “drunken sadistic forest fey frat boys! Let’s sign on to work for them!”

In some ways it’s another example of how moral play can work. The players are having second doubts about the Dominance of Briar, it’s not a great place for non-fey what with the ruling classes’ constant need for blood based haberdashery. Of course the party is also pretty excited because if they do enough dirty work for scheming nobles they can maybe have status, power and wealth. As a GM it’s not my place to decide which story they tell and what morals they decide on - but there’s no simple choices.

I don’t know if the quandary of complacency with and co-option by a murderous regime in exchange for wealth and power is “Leftist play” but it feels like the possibility to consider the price of oppression and resistance are a fairly good thing in a game, let alone one about being out of town guest workers plundering a fairy castle after the wedding blows up.

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#34

For years, I’ve thought about building a system to better do Adam’s City of Brass, as D&D has always seemed like a stretch.

I’ve tried this in a few ways. I think the right places to start has been staring me in the face: Blades in the Dark.

I think i’ll ping Adam, see what he thinks and if hacking Blades to emulate City of Brass has his blessing. Or maybe I’ll just do it and tell him when I’m half done.

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#35

I know that Avery Alder ran Blades with a crew of Hawkers who were grocers(?) trying to keep their community fed. So you can do something Leftist with Blades as is. :wink:

I am prepping a much bigger response to this whole thread, but one thing I find interesting is that @Humza_K is proposing something people can tweak in their current game system of choice to give it a bit more of a community focus - as opposed to designing a brand new game.

I am still trying to tease it out, but I think there is something important in that distinction beyond differing philosophies of different gaming communities…

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#36

Oh yes, much as our hawkers are selling thieving gear, training, and looking to end the secret peace that protects nobility from thieves.

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#37

WolfPacks–Winter-Snow-Rev. is a curious mix of both versions. You get XP from monster killing. But, then you also get XP from every 50 ft of exploration you do. But, leveling up is weaker than standard D&D. Meanwhile, the point of your exploration is generally to make sure your tribe prospers (and perhaps to show your dominance in the tribe).

If you do well enough, your clan grows but instead of creating a dominion, the tribe must split once it reaches a certain size. Then, you need to support or run your new tribe AND possibly compete with the old one. Meanwhile, the rules are all very OSR - D&D based. I do not know in which camp this game falls but it is obvious that the primary reason for all of the hunting and exploration is for the benefit of the tribe.

I would love to play this one day but never found anyone else the least bit interested. If the nearly 300 page rulebook over revised is overwhelming, there is always the original version (the copy I own) with about half the number of pages.