Dictators and Dispossession – Authoritarianism and Anarchism in RPG culture

People are discussing systems again. Whether they matter. And while I am definitely in the System Matters crowd, I am also currently reading The Dispossessed, and feeling a bit spicy about it. So, I feel like revisiting the classic System Does Matter essay by Ron Edwards, which I haven’t read in a while, and see if I still align.

Disclaimer: I’m not really an anarchist, I think. Depends on who you ask, the friends I have with more mainstream political views call me an anarchist, while my actual anarchist friends laugh at me and call me a syndicalist. That said, the idea of constantly seeking to dismantle hierarchies of power is pretty appealing to me.

Does System Matter?

According to Ron Edwards, definitely so. He makes two overall claims – first he claims that a good GM + an appropriate system is better than a Good GM and a non-appropriate system. Then he claims that some systems are better than others. So far so good.

Then we go into GNS theory: Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism. Noone uses this anymore, not even Ron Edwards, so I won’t dwell on it much. A more reformed version would be “Different people have different priorities”, an extremely self-evident and milquetoast statement. Edwards has his trademark style of knowing people and knowing what’s good, and yeah it’s kind of annoying. Really, I think the salient point is the claim that no RPG can satisfy all “creative agendas” at once. I think this is overall true.

A bad system is one that wastes a GM’s time. A gamist GM should play a gamist game. An underlying current is easily missed: This gives us a way of critiquing particular game systems beyond personal likes and dislikes. I agree that “Does this game do the thing it tries to do?” is a more interesting criteria to judge a game than “does this game do what I want it to do?”.

The next part goes into some particulars about some ways that a system can function, looking at fortune, karma and drama for resolution. I have nothing interesting to say about it. There are in fact different ways of doing the same things. He draws some conclusions which you could draw umbrage to, like how narrative-focused systems are better if they’re simple and karma-based, but really…

Does the question of whether system matters matter?

…I had forgotten how extremely basic the essay is, in hindsight. System matters is so obvious a fact that it is basically a truism. Let’s imagine a scenario:

We have a group of 5 people. They might not know each other, or they might know each other intimately. Before they play the game, I have handed one of them a picture of a medieval fortress, with the text below: Play a game based on this picture.

In another time line the picture is that of a sprawling cyberpunk metropolis. Same text.

What are the odds that the people will play exactly the same game? That the exact same fictional scenario plays out? I’d wager they’re pretty small. A system has been inserted into the group, changing their play.

I think “Does System Matter?” is a nonsense question, because “matter” could mean anything. Currently the question seems more to be “should we spend more of our creative juices on adventures than rules?”. In fact, I think there is a question lying below the surface that is much, much more interesting: From where do we wish to derive authority in our games?

A while ago I made an embarrasingly poorly worded poll on Mastodon.

It never really got to what I was actually interested in, and should have been posted as a question rather than a poll. People basically answered the question “what do I do when the rules suck?”, which really wasn’t my idea. What I was interested in was, where do we look when something unexpected, or something we don’t like, arises in the game? Where do we look to for Authority? Who decides what is done?

The Division of Power: Rules vs. GM vs. Group.

Roleplaying groups are small social groups. Authority derives from individual consent: Any given group could place their authority in whatever they wish – be it the Rules, the GM, or Group consensus. After all, if someone doesn’t like how the group is composed, or run, they don’t have to play with the group. Basic stuff.

However, even though it is basic, it is not at all simple. I think everyone can point to an experience they’ve had where roleplaying has had problems with authoritarianism. A GM might have started acting as a dictator, adhering to the Player’s Handbook might have become a bureaucratic nightmare imposing unwanted rules on a player, or the group consensus could have devolved into bullying. Nowadays authority could even be derived from the designer’s substack, Critical Role, or the like. And I think the reason an individual consents to bad play is the oldest problem in our hobby: Scarcity.

Scarcity of people who play the games we want to play. I might want to play Electric Bastionland, but all I can find in my local area is Pathfinder – so I consent, because it’s what I can get. Maybe there is only one GM wo wants to do the work of running a game, so I consent to their practices, despite finding them obnoxious. And so I find that there is actually a deeper issue at play than where authority is derived – and that is Particularism vs. Universalism: Do we want systems to deliver one particular experience, as outlined by the author, or do we want systems to have the capacity to act as toolboxes for anything we wish?

I am once again exposing you to my take on Apocalypse World.

the MC section of Apocalypse World starts thus (my emphasis):

There are a million ways to GM games; Apocalypse World calls for one way in particular. This chapter is it. Follow these as rules. The whole rest of the game is built upon this.

I have seen this statement strike a nerve, the rules part in particular. This is Apocalypse World enforcing their rules on a group of players. And in an anarchist utopia, this wouldn’t matter at all: After all, if you don’t like it, don’t play it, is the common refrain. Why would YOU consent to playing a game which tries to constrain you in ways you don’t want? I have said this lots of times. Edwards says it: Why play a game which doesn’t align with your goals?

Because of scarcity. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that Powered by the Apocalypse is the great opposition to trad play – OSR/NSR being a third faction. PbtA, even if it goes directly against its goals, can become a Dictatorship, if no alternatives present itself to the individual. We have two types of scarcity: Human scarcity, and also straight up capital. People generally want more stuff for their games, be it adventures or modules or artwork, or whatever. And I LOVE stuff for games, so much that I constantly make it myself. Capital is an issue because it is so, so scarce in the hobby. A big kickstarter that funds like crazy draws funds away from the styles we like to play, from the designers who we want to be able to make a living, so they can create. This is not an insignificant gripe. It is the reality in which we live.

Apocalypse World’s approach to rules and play isn’t authoritarian in itself – it only becomes so because of the scarcity that limits choice. The ones that will not subject themselves to play they do not want become dispossessed. The Forge was once a gathering of designers alienated from traditional modes of play, gathering enough numbers for new ideas to thrive. The OSR is the same way, and a multitude of movements have emerged in the very short history of the hobby. And then once a counter-culture becomes a culture, new counter-cultures emerge. Like on Anarres, the mere act of a centralization of knowledge leads the anarchist systems to organize into a hierarchy. Even in roleplaying games anarchism has to be constantly maintained. Journaling games are where I currently see a dispossessed mass gather, and I expect that particular counter-culture growing into a culture to be inevitable at this point.

Scarcity is driving us to rail for and against systems, because a particular scarcity can force us to either consent to play we disapprove of, or not play at all. A forum like The Forge shouldn’t be an issue, but it is, because it has had such a significant impact on a very broad part of the hobby. Digging up and dismantling old theories makes sense. I happen to like a lot of the games which came out of The Forge, but I also happen to have a very broad, eclectic network in my home town which plays very different games. The scarcity I face is simply my own time. I sometimes grumble that D&D has such a stranglehold, but it frankly doesn’t affect my own games at all. The ones who are well treated by the predominant play cultures, gain something from reinforcing old authorities – and I am not innocent of this.

As I see it, struggling to dismantle hierarchies of power, however they are construed, is worthwile. And ironically, I think many PbtA, narrativist, or System Matters designers would agree.