Twelve: Play
------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted 241127 at the Zaibatsu [1] but I read it again as
my campus unveiled their enterprise AI and felt like sharing it
again. Play.

```
---
title: Toward Convivial Play
date: 241127
category: phlog
---
```

From 2008 through around 2015, my preferred medium for tabletop
roleplay was the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. At the start, I
loved the modular and (comparatively) stripped-down approach from
the bloat of what 3.0 and 3.5 amassed and appended in attempt to
unify a fractured hobby in the protracted edition mess of BX,
BECMI, and AD&D. In previous editions, I always felt like I had
catching up to do, like I couldn't adequately approach the game as
a player or a referee without total knowledge of the options
available in the officially-sanctioned modules and rulesets. This
was often reinforced in the games I played (always as a PC in those
days, never as a ref) where my approach to character creation
stemmed from fairly mundane thoughts like "what if I had a couple
of hand crossbows where I had different sets of magical bolts, and
I could be a sort of trick-shot alchemist" that mechanically
translated to a Very Bad multiclass mish-mash, while the others who
had system expertise seemed to get their ideas from how to squeeze
the most juice out of the rules. These were my very first
introductions to the concept of TTRP from the table itself. When 4e
came out, clean slate, I wanted to become the expert and, as it
happened, nobody else in my group wanted to referee.

What I loved about 4e was how explicitly it told you, via its
systems, what it was. 4e the *game* is for tactical combat.
Characters have a set of moves with certain conditions and
limitations, they live on a grid, and they progress and gain more
complicated moves that let them combat more complicated foes.
Within a single session of refereeing a 4e session of *play*, I
could appreciate how by the system doing that one thing really
well, it didn't matter how I adjudicated anything out of that
realm. Combat was part of my play, sure, but so was
mystery-solving, alliance-building, demesne-managing,
artefact-identifying, et cetera, all the things that players wanted
to do that was not directly tied to the grid we just negotiated and
resolved collaboratively, convivially. This was easy and fun and
the campaign lasted years.

As the system grew and the options grew and the bloat grew, I
happily paid the monthly fee to have access to the Official 4e
Character Creator and the database of all the board game pieces at
my disposal. Before and after sessions, my players and I would
hunker over my personal computer and poke through new power options
in combat, ponder over the dozens of magical items added monthly. I
felt like I was a co-conspirator, levelling the playing field for
my group, making the play about our shared successes unlike in my
prior experiences where my lack of access to game tools and content
meant I would never have as successful or fun a character as those
who did. This was the lie that 4e sold us, and I can see it now as
the framework for the profit hydrae of Roll20 and D&D Beyond, which
I consider to be wholly antithetical to tabletop role play (not
just by virtue of being virtual, let it be noted).

In my work, I spend a lot of time fretting over the supposed
inevitability and eventual importance of tools that accomplish
tasks that we don't really need, providing shadow-forms of what we
already have and worse. Sectors of academia have it in their mind
that the only way to thrive is by buying into enterprise-level
generative transformers (you know, "artificial intelligence"). It's
in the best interests of those who sell enterprise-level generative
transformers that people think it will make the game easier to play
and that it'll do the heavy-lifting those sales teams assure you is
essential. The reasons to avoid using mass-market "AI" are myriad,
and I won't get into them here. Their ubiquity in modern software
drags everything down with it, giving up control of play to the
faceless and nameless ogres at the helm. More intention stolen and
hoarded every day by virtue of playing the game they sold.

```
Muscle cords thicker than greed.

Take up all you possess, and carry it with you.

See what you desire, and come to possess it.

This is but one of the paths a man may walk
to leave humanity behind.

"Ogre" by Luke Gearing, 2021 [2]
```

In my free time, I've been rewiring those long shuttered compsci
paths I haven't visited since ~2004. Starting with some self-paced
Python lessons, I'm hoping to give myself a handful of tools for
degrowth and convivial computing [3]. For a while, I'd used Notion
to keep notes, tie in some relational databases, and so on. As it
spiraled out into ever-increasing toolsets and features I actively
oppose, I wondered if I was too far gone in my complacency. Dude,
you know how to query a database. This is, in fact, a major
component of your job. How difficult could it be to automate some
of the stuff atop it? When tools I use today become deprecated or
prohibitively expensive tomorrow, what recourse will I have other
than to pay up or move on?

Freed from the parasitic thought-stealing convenience of my 4e
medium when the edition changed, the tools changed, the texts
changed, and the play expectations themselves changed to be more
aligned with cultural touchstones, it took several years before I
was energized by any sort of play in this format. Tunnel Goons [4]
fits on a half-sheet of paper and is sharp as a rapier. The Vanilla
Game [5] can be read in its entirety in well under an hour, then
used to adjudicate basically any module that has ever existed.
There is really no expertise one can have over this kind of ruleset
that another couldn't attain within minutes, because the systems
are deliberately incomplete. Like my precious 4e D&D at its outset,
they establish what they do and leave the rest to play. The things
they establish, of course, are fractions of others, but what they
put back in my hands and yours in exchange is agency and intention.
Once you can see how the mechanisms work, it's not difficult to
make the whole machine yours. It has always been yours.

-30-

=> gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~trunnion/phlog/ [1]
gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~trunnion/phlog/
=> https://lukegearing.itch.io/volume-2-monsters [2]
https://lukegearing.itch.io/volume-2-monsters
=> https://damaged.bleu255.com/Convivial_Computing/ [3]
https://damaged.bleu255.com/Convivial_Computing/
=> https://tunnelgoons.com/ [4] https://tunnelgoons.com/
=> https://vanillagame.carrd.co/ [5] https://vanillagame.carrd.co/