---
title: Toward Convivial Play
date: 241127
category: phlog
---
From 2008 through around 2015, my preferred medium for tabletop role-
play 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 fract-
ured 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 mechanical-
ly 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, con-
vivially. 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 Cre-
ator and the database of all the board game pieces at my disposal.
Before and after sessions, my players and I would hunker over my per-
sonal 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 anti-
thetical 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 inevit-
ability 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 [1]
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 [2]. 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 diff-
icult 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 cult-
ural touchstones, it took several years before I was energized by play
in this format. Tunnel Goons [3] fits on a half-sheet of paper. The
Vanilla Game [4] can be read in its entirety in well under an hour.
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-
[1]
https://lukegearing.itch.io/volume-2-monsters
[2]
https://damaged.bleu255.com/Convivial_Computing/
[3]
https://tunnelgoons.com/
[4]
https://vanillagame.carrd.co/
