GGF #1: Gunpowder Is Naughty

We’re heavily influenced by first perceptions, and the greatest influence on fantasy fandom for generations now has been Lord of the Rings, which depicts a bucolic agrarian paradise threatened by dystopian industrial enemies.  Written by a man whose upbringing and early years were in the grim industrial cities of Birmingham and Leeds, the trope -- from his pen -- was unsurprising.  How this trope turned into a granite-hard prejudice against gunpowder (and against anything smacking of technology more advanced than simple machines generally) in fantasy RPG settings is another matter.

Geeks, by and large, are not nearly as erudite as they fancy themselves, their knowledge all too often coming from a mashup of their favorite fiction, dimly remembered college textbooks, Some Article They Read Somewhere, That Movie They Saw Last Month, and -- in recent years -- That Guy's Blog or Facebook Post. 

In particular, they’re crappy historians.  People get these shibboleths about How Things Were Back When imbedded in their consciousness, and they will never, ever, ever shake them.  (There’s a scientific term for this: "confirmation bias.")  My first wife is a recognized quilting historian, something I pushed her into because of her frustration that idiots she ran into in the Society for Creative Anachronism kept telling her that quilts weren't period.  Now in an era where clothes were so expensive you made a point of disposing of yours in your will, it'd take a moron to imagine that people just threw cloth away, at any point in history after textiles were invented -- and what you do with otherwise unusable fabric scraps is quilt them, a practice which has been documented going back several millennia.  Alas, those mooks were firmly rooted in the paradigm that quilts were invented by 19th century pioneer housewives industriously churning out Log Cabin patterns, and defended their POV to the death.  (She'd found something like twenty solid citations to back up her own knowledge that quilting was a practice dating to antiquity.  I suggested that screw it, she should accumulate two HUNDRED cites, and batter the idiots to death with sheer volume.  Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.  Eventually, she was the first person in SCA history to receive the highest honor for arts and sciences based on quilting research.)
                                   
It's the same thing here. We know that cannon were first used in Europe in the 1200s, and we know that they were ubiquitous by around 1350, the time handguns started to come into vogue. We know that well into the era of arquebuses, they were very inaccurate, temperamental and took longer to reload than many fantasy combats last. We know that longbows were far superior weapons to arquebuses -- the adage about needing to start with the archer’s grandfather in order to train him properly seldom pertaining to a RPG’s skill system -- and not many gamers whine about wizards casting powerful spells which blow the bejeezus out of foes at range.

But in the same way those SCAdians -- who fancy themselves as having an informed handle on history -- work nonetheless under their own unfounded delusions, gamers seem to equate arquebuses and muskets with the speed, accuracy and stopping power of modern firearms, and well, machine guns and assault rifles aren’t capital-H Heroic, doncha know.

The funny thing is that you not only can’t blame JRRT any more, you haven’t been able to blame him for decades.  From Roger Zelazny to Jerry Pournelle to Brian Daley to Joel Rosenberg, the guns-in-fantasy concept has been around for a long while.  (Heck, Dave Hargrave and Steve Jackson put them into their fantasy systems back in the 1970s.)  Can we stop making the sign of the cross at it, please?

Gaming Geek Fallacies

Plymouth is the home of my heart, forever.  It's appropriate to begin with a sunrise!

I've long been a fan of Michael Wilson's brilliant Five Geek Social Fallacies.  They're extremely applicable to tabletop gamers (as, indeed, to most subcultures).

It struck me early on that there are several shibboleths taken as much as unquestioned, unchallenged articles of faith by tabletop gamers as GSF is with those subcultures.  So I wrote up my list of Gaming Geek Fallacies -- really, posting them somewhere permanent was the motivating factor behind me starting up a blog in the first place -- and here they are to get the ball rolling.  Hope you enjoy the ride!

GGF #1: Gunpowder Is Naughty

GGF #2: We Have To Have One Of Everything

GGF #3: Magic Changes Society

GGF #4: My Game Is Great, Your Game Sucks

GGF #5: “X” Is The Opposite Of Fun

A beginning is a very delicate time.

So here I am.  Hoorah.

My name is Bob, and I've been involved with roleplaying games since the 1970s.  I've played them, I've gamemastered them, I've created them, I've playtested them, I've written for them, I've made money off of them, and I've pontificated a great deal about them -- gaming and music are the two enduring hobbies of my adult life.

That pontification bit is what I'm doing here.  I've been active on several gaming forums over a decade and more, and I'm an opinionated fellow.  I'm going to put down my thoughts, and even a solution or three.  Whether anyone cares, that's another matter, but heck, the Internet would never have gotten off the ground if its creators worried about how many people would bother with it.

My blog title comes from the legend of the invisible city of Kitezh, the Russian version of Atlantis or Brigadoon, and is the specific title of the last scene of an opera based on the tale by Rimsky-Korsakov.  From 1981 until around 1989, I was active on the UMass computer system, where there was a primitive chatroom facility called "Confer."  (As geeks will, they couldn't leave standard practice well enough alone, and insisted that it be pronounced COHN-fer.)  The program allowed users to create their own private chatrooms, which could then be made invisible -- and thus open for private invites -- and when I did this, I used this name for my chatroom.  I rather like the notion of reviving it.

I've a couple rules of the road that will color -- directly or otherwise -- everything I'll say.  First off, I don't play D&D.  Haven't played it for over twenty years, haven't GMed it in over thirty.  I'm a GURPS GM.  I'm happy with the system, I've been using it since before it was published, I'm not inclined to change.

Second, I'm a realism bug.  You'll hear more on that down the road, but IMHO, the "It's a game so trying to make it 'realistic' is stupid" crack is moronic BS, and you'll hear my refutation of that down the road.

Getting those out of the way now will save angst later.

I might be invisible here.  But I'm speaking nonetheless.