When I started working on these articles, I was inspired by the resurgent Prequel discourse, especially the generational divide aspect of it. Star Wars discussions inevitably always come back to one point though, The Empire Strikes Back is a masterpiece. In the now-infamous Red Letter Media review of The Phantom Menace, Mike Stoklasa’s character Mr. Plinkett quips about people under 20 - about half of the Millennial generation circa 2008 - considering Empire the worst film of the series because it’s “the most boring.” This was not an opinion I encountered on a regular basis. For my generation, Star Wars: Battlefront (2004) and it’s 2005 sequel were major franchise touchpoints with the battle on the ice planet Hoth frequently being a favorite in both games. It introduces Boba Fett, a perennial fan-favorite character, and it boasts the best climax of the entire franchise. Star Wars fans of all ages will argue about just about anything, but one thing that’s nearly universally agreed upon is that Empire is the best the franchise has to offer. I’m not here to dissent either. If it’s been awhile since you watched Empire, you may have convinced yourself that it cannot live up to its reputation. As one X user said though, every time you rewatch this movie, it blows your mind all over again. Every thing that the original Star Wars does well, Empire does better. The performances are better, the spectacle is grander, the environments are more real, the cinematography is better and the script is a million times better. I will discuss all of these things in detail in this article.

My first experience with this movie was the weekend my parents rented the trilogy from Blockbuster. I watched this movie twice in the same weekend, just as I did with the first film, but I must confess that it was a different experience. I hated seeing Luke Skywalker laid low and Han frozen in carbonite even though my father assured me that this wasn’t the end for either of them. I also noticed that this movie was slower and more deliberate than the first. While Star Wars continuously ramps the action upward from the time Luke leaves Tatooine up through the destruction of The Death Star, Empire starts hot and then cools down in the middle as Han and Leia try to evade the Empire and Luke trains with Yoda on Dagobah. This is handled masterfully in the movie, but it is hard for a young man to understand the utility of such a slowdown. This may be what Stoklasa meant by his quip about young people not liking Empire, but it didn’t hinder my enjoyment of the movie. I didn’t have some sort of mind-blown reaction to the twist of Darth Vader being Luke’s father because I was told that before the movie. For some reason, probably just not thinking it was a big deal, my dad just let it slip to me before we started watching the movie. Did it hurt my viewing of the movie? Not at all because this movie is greater than the impact of its twist. This movie is more than just a twist.

George Lucas was the sole creative vision shaping the original Star Wars. He is the sole credited writer and the director of the movie. Aside from producer Gary Kurtz and the editing team, it was all him. As I discussed in my review of that movie, Lucas has obvious shortcomings as a writer and director. I think Lucas understood this though and enlisted help to bring Empire to life. The film is directed by Irvin Kershner, a director who had previously worked on smaller character-driven dramas rather than blockbuster spectacles. Likewise, writer Lawrence Kasdan was hired by Lucas to fix up the dialogue and add polish to the script he had written with some help from the late Leigh Brackett. The result is one of the most memorable scripts of all time. If you were to ask a stranger to quote Star Wars, they are just as likely to quote Empire as they are the original. Of course, the performances in this movie give life to that dialogue. Once again, Harrison Ford is the MVP as Han Solo is asked to carry a large portion of the movie. The romance between Han and Leia is built throughout this movie, culminating in the famous “I love you. I know,” exchange. Full credit for that iconic moment goes to Ford who improvised the line when the delivery of the written “I love you too,” was not coming across well. Not to be outdone though, Mark Hamill again answers the call and puts forward a fantastic performance in challenging circumstances. Most of Luke’s screen time is spent acting alone opposite special effects, namely the puppet Yoda. Hamill has described the experience as isolating and many of his scenes with Yoda are physical in nature. We see Luke in a very vulnerable place in this film. He struggles mightily to balance his Jedi training with his desire to save his friends and overcome Darth Vader. He is a young man who has seen a lot in a very short time, a fact which proves difficult to overcome as he endeavors to master his feelings and clear his mind. While it’s easy to meme about how often characters in the Star Wars franchise are called on to shout “NOOOO!” in their most histrionic manner, Luke’s cry of agony in this film feels genuine and you can watch it build on his face as he processes Darth Vader’s revelation. Speaking of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones once again brings a grandiose menace to the Dark Lord of the Sith. This is Vader at his most intimidating, freely dispatching multiple high-ranking Imperial officers as they disappoint him. And again, credit must go to David Prowse for the physical aspects of Vader’s performance. Vader is like a statue come to life, a living monument to the power of the Empire and the Dark Side. His movements are minimal but powerful, conveying absolute authority and control.

Empire’s good performances also include two newcomers to the cast with Billy Dee Williams portraying Lando Calrissian and Frank Oz providing the voice and puppetry for Jedi Master Yoda. Although Lando is a fan-favorite, I think his role is underrated. He’s not just there to be cool and smooth, he’s a mirror to Han showing him how much he has changed from where we found him. Han’s arc in this movie is about trying to run away from his role in the rebellion and the consequences that come crashing down on him and his friends as his past sins catch up with him. Lando comes from his old life in the underworld and makes a self-serving deal that puts Han in the hands of a ruthless bounty hunter. There but for the grace of the Force goes Han. Williams portrays this well and although we don’t see much of him in Empire, he receives a complete arc through the realization that a deal with Vader is a deal with the devil and he'll never get what was promised to him. On Luke's side of the narrative, we're introduced to Yoda, the ancient and wise Jedi Master living in seclusion. Yoda is an archetypal mentor figure who tests the patience of his pupil by not revealing his true identity until Luke fails his test of patience. The puppetry displayed in this film is top-notch, with Yoda feeling present and fully organic. He was a creation of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, so quality work was to be expected, but he integrates seamlessly with both Luke and R2.

Beyond the performances, the set design, special effects, and cinematography in this film are elite. Once again, I watched this film in its original format via the 4K project’s restoration (4K80). There are five major environments in this movie; Hoth, Dagobah, The Millennium Falcon, The Executor, and Bespin. Each of them is unique with sets that present a lived-in environment. The world of Empire is not a theme park. The Millennium Falcon is a tramp freighter that spends the entire film in a state of disrepair as it launched from Hoth before being fully repaired from its last outing. Hoth is one part snowy tundra shot on-location in Norway and one part dingy, ramshackle Rebel base. The dialogue between characters makes it clear that the Rebels have been on Hoth for a very short time, only recently getting there defenses up before the Empire found them. The Battle of Hoth itself is a spectacle, especially for people like me who enjoy quality miniature work in film. In a time before CGI, Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’s in-house special effects team) innovated new stop-motion techniques to add motion blur. Combinations of blue screen technology, stop-motion and miniatures create the illusion of giant four-legged AT-AT walkers running rough-shod over poorly-equipped entrenched Rebel forces trying to hold them off long enough to escape. Luke Skywalker goes from flying an under-powered land speeder to crashing and taking down an AT-AT with his lightsaber and a grenade without shattering the illusion. Everything has appropriate size and weight and the most impressive demonstration of this is the scene where Luke narrowly escapes his crashed speeder before it is trampled by an AT-AT.

The AT-ATs along with The Executor and Vader’s throne room present the technological advantage of an Empire at the height of its power. The bridge of The Executor is dark and foreboding, especially when Vader stands at the windows on the bridge overlooking the armada as if to project a literal shadow of the Empire. In his private quarters on The Executor, we learn more of Vader and see the first glimpses of his scarred flesh. We also see him communicate for the first time with the Emperor via hologram, a technology which is fully introduced to the franchise in this film and became a staple of the franchise moving forward. It’s a cool effect for the time and, as stated, holographic communication has become an established feature of the broader universe. The techno-Gothic grandeur of the Empire is on full display in this movie and this is accomplished with nothing more than physical sets, miniatures, costuming and, of course, the domineering Imperial March composed by John Williams. By contrast, the swamps of Dagobah offer a much more intimate form of menace, but an effective one. Most of Dagobah is a sound stage at Pinewood Studios in the UK, special built to accommodate Frank Oz and his Yoda puppet. There’s a tangible humidity that oozes off of the screen though. You feel sweaty just watching it. Yoda’s comments about the planet being strong with the Dark Side amplify the uneasy feeling. Anyone who’s spent time deep in the woods can attest to a feeling of hidden darkness just beyond your line of sight. The thick curtain of fog and swamp gas permeating the scene obscures the surroundings further.

Bespin is the last of the major environments in this movie and it is the most spectacular in my opinion. Cloud City is art deco in design and extremely polished, but we also get a good look and the industrial bowels of the city. The symbolic contrast here is obvious. Just as the bright exterior covers the dark, mechanical innards from initial observation, Cloud City appears to be safe for Han but hides a trap. Of particular mention is the blue-and-orange tinted carbonite chamber where Han is frozen and where Luke and Vader begin their clash. Luke and Vader battle through the innards of the city and the iconic “I am your father” scene oozes atmosphere as Luke hangs over a literal pit surrounded entirely by grey, lifeless machinery. Even though much of this machinery is benign, likely nothing more than gas pipelines and trash disposal systems, the atmosphere is oppressive as Vader tempts his son to the Dark Side. As the film enters its denouement, we see Luke hanging from machinery at the very bottom of the city, clinging to life as he calls out to Leia with the Force. The exhaustion from Hamill is palpable and the precarious nature of his situation is reinforced by the thin, flimsy antennas he clings to for support.

The success of the original Star Wars gave George Lucas the freedom to make another movie. The success of The Empire Strikes Back gave us Star Wars as a cultural institution. There is no generational divide on this movie; Boomer, Xer, Millennial, Zoomer and Alpha alike can acknowledge the beauty and triumph of this movie. It’s telling that this movie is the one that gets messed with the least in each remaster or re-release. I will cover the changes made when I talk about The People vs George Lucas, but this is the one original film that Lucas himself seems to find no fault with. Star Wars was a thrilling adventure with great special effects and an intriguing premise. Empire is just a flat-out brilliant film period. I’m not sure what Mike Stoklasa was driving at when he drew a generational divide at appreciation of this movie in particular. It could have just been an off-hand comment. Stoklasa is a self-professed Trekie moreso than he is a fan of Star Wars. His observation is not accurate though. Even through the eyes of a young child, this movie is thrilling and gripping.

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The first time I saw Star Wars was Friday, May 22nd, 2026. Before then, I had seen Episode IV: A New Hope several times throughout my life. I have vague memories of seeing the Death Star prison break scene on TV with my parents, most likely on TNT or TBS during one of the late 90’s airings. Sometime soon after, my parents decided that I was old enough to see the movies, especially since pop culture was in full-blown Phantom Menace mania at the time, and so my dad and I went to Blockbuster to rent the movies. This was 1999 or 2000, so I was confronted with a VHS cover declaring that this movie was Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Even though I was all of 4 years old, I knew that 4 came after 1. To his credit, my dad actually explained to me what was going on with the funky numbering and that even though this was “Episode IV,” it was the first movie made and the new movies that were coming out were filling in events that happened before this movie. It’s a testament to how ubiquitous Star Wars was that a regular dad like mine could adequately explain the whole prequel concept to a 4 year-old without confusing anyone in the process. We watched the movie that night as a family and, as I tended to do as a young man, I watched it again the next day. I was thoroughly captivated by A New Hope and looked forward to watching The Empire Strikes Back the next evening. A few months later, we purchased a boxed set of the Original Trilogy Special Editions at Media Play and watching these VHS tapes became a semi-frequent feature of my youth. If you’re playing 90’s bingo, check to see if you have 4 in a row after reading this paragraph.

Some of you may be wondering how I can say that I didn’t see Star Wars until 2026 at the age of 30 when I just described seeing it at 4 and then watching it repeatedly throughout the rest of my youth. The trick is in the title. I saw A New Hope over and over again. I saw the Special Edition of Star Wars with the added episode number and subtitle as a young man. Here in the present timeline, I had to hunt down the 4K77 fan project which scanned and restored the original 35mm film of Star Wars circa 1977 in 4K. In my reality, Han shot second to (or simultaneously with) Greedo. Tatooine was full of random sight gags, the Battle of Yavin was “enhanced” with CGI shots, and Jabba the Hutt could walk. For years, I never understood why “Han shot first,” was a meme because, until I saw the documentary The People vs. George Lucas as a teenager, I didn’t realize the extent to which Lucas had meddled with the movies. He didn’t stop there either. Every time the Original Trilogy is released in a new format, there seems to be newer and increasingly baffling additions to the movies. More color correction, more random CGI replacing old practical effects, replacing entire actors digitally and vocally for a sense of “cohesion” across the franchise, etc. The original film is the one that’s consistently the most changed. This isn’t a Blade Runner situation where every single version is readily available either. As soon as the new version comes out, the last revision disappears like it was photographed next to Stalin.

The most frustrating thing about these changes is that they’re completely unnecessary. Star Wars is a perfectly good film with revolutionary special effects that still hold up well even at modern resolutions. This is one opinion that I have that differs from my generational cohort. Most of the fans my age who grew up with the Prequel Trilogy struggle with this movie. They find it boring, or they don't like Luke Skywalker, or they get upset by how deliberately paced the single lightsaber fight is. What I see when I watch this movie though is a fun adventure film with a cool and cohesive aesthetic. The sets, costumes and special effects create an environment that feels real and familiar but with enough of the alien to make it feel like “a galaxy far, far away.”

I don't need to summarize the plot of this movie. You all know it. George Lucas is the platonic ideal of an idea man. He comes up with interesting concepts, but he frequently struggles to create cohesive plots and his grasp of natural dialogue is tenuous at times. That said, the story of Star Wars is tight and consistent. There aren't any moments where the movie feels like it's dragging (at least not in the theatrical cut) and the characters are interesting iterations of classic archetypes. The cast of this movie is incredibly strong which goes a long way towards elevating the material. For three relative unknowns being asked to carry a blockbuster, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford are generational pulls for Lucas. Ford in particular grounds the movie with his straightforward John Wayne-style natural performance. In a movie that asks for you to suspend disbelief and enter a world of fancy, Ford offers you a very believable blue-collar roughneck just trying to survive in the galaxy. The parallels between Solo and Bo “Bandit” Darville from 1977’s second-highest grossing film Smokey and the Bandit are obvious. While Mark Hamill has earned a bit of a reputation for being a cringe Reddit-brained type in recent years, his talent is undeniable even in this early film. While some view Luke Skywalker as a bit whiny in this film, he is portraying a teenager struck with wanderlust and experiencing a call to his true destiny. The handful of line deliveries that can feel genuinely grating like “This R2 unit has a bad motivator!” are few and far between and can be chalked up to greenness and poor direction. Carrie Fisher likewise struggles to find her character’s voice in the opening scenes, but settles nicely into the role of a confident but young diplomat receiving her first taste of the real consequences of war. Even though Disney has tried to convince audiences that Princess Leia Organa was a hardened revolutionary from age ten, the evidence in this movie shows someone who’s been on the periphery of violence coming to terms with the reality of it. The rest of the main cast is filled with proper British thespians like Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing who, despite not fully understanding the material they were working with, elevated it with their natural gravitas and presence. And of course, I must mention the iconic basso profundo of James Earl Jones bringing a terrifying sophistication to the imposing physique of David Prowse in the Darth Vader suit.

It’s hard to call the highest-grossing movie of 1977 underrated, but consensus over time has not given Star Wars its due. This movie is a masterpiece of special effects and aesthetic. It’s not a revolutionary story, but one that is tightly executed and elevated by quality performances. Unfortunately, its reputation is hindered by two things. First, it is hindered by its sequels. The Empire Strikes Back is an improvement in every way over its predecessor and, of course, it has become the first piece of a multi-billion dollar franchise. The ideas in it are still underdeveloped when compared to the rest of the franchise and most people can only see it as a strong start. The other thing that hinders its perception is more pernicious and infinitely sadder, that being the constant meddling and changing of this movie. George Lucas is someone who cannot handle being told no and, due to the tremendous success he’s experienced, no longer has to. George Lucas can completely bury the version of a film that people have known for two decades and replace it with a version containing half-baked CGI that is visually incoherent. He can add in deleted scenes that undermine future installments and take away from character introductions. The changes are small individually. He didn’t change the ending or any of the major beats of pivotal scenes, but he has undermined the structural integrity of his film. Worse, he has revised the film two separate times and has handed it over to a company that, judging by how they run their theme parks, has no problem demolishing old work and then rebuilding it in the shape of its current corporate vision. Star Wars is not able to stand on its own like The Godfather or Rocky as work that came from a particular time and place. It’s a pliable product to be reshaped for each new generation and it’s horrible, especially when you consider that Lucas and Disney have gone so far as to completely remove and replace actors from these films. Even though the changes are small, they create a Ship of Theseus problem for Star Wars. My dad and I did not see the same movie when we each first saw Star Wars and the version he saw was better. Likewise, my daughter has seen A New Hope on Disney+. She didn’t see the same movie I saw on VHS when I was her age. It’s sad to say, but the damage has been done to the reputation of this movie. Until and unless Disney makes the original theatrical version of this movie widely available, it will stay damaged.

The standard Millennial perspective on the original Star Wars is that it shows flashes of brilliance but it is out-dated, slow and boring. This cannot be further from the truth, but the additions of the Special Editions and each subsequent revision hurt the movie and, worse, hurt the perception of the movie. How can a Millennial or a Zoomer or an Alpha or whatever it is we call my daughter’s generation be expected to view this movie as valid and of high quality when the creator himself treats it like a permanent project car instead of a completed work? I urge every single person who reads this article to seek out 4K77 or Star Wars Restoration or Harmy’s Despecialized Edition or any other fan preservation project designed to keep the original version accessible. Watch Star Wars as it should be seen and consider all revisions to be apocrypha at best. Star Wars needs no revision. The effects, set design, costumes, music, and performances were top-notch in 1977 and remain so today.

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People love to argue about Star Wars. I sometimes wonder if the internet wasn't invented solely to facilitate Star Wars arguments. One such argument that has become evergreen since millennials came of age to join the cultural conversation is whether or not the prequel trilogy, Episodes 1-3, is actually good. I have thoughts about those movies, as well as the original trilogy, the expanded universe and the current state of the property as Disney tries to wring every last drop of profit out of it. Before I give those thoughts, I feel it's important to understand where I'm coming from as a Star Wars fan. There are only a handful of truly multi-generational fandoms. There's Marvel and DC comics, James Bond, Doctor Who, Star Trek and Star Wars. Those other properties, venerable as they may be, would not be successful modern IPs without the blueprint that Star Wars created, even though Star Wars is the youngest of the list. The original Star Wars was released in 1977 and was first issued on home video in 1982. That is only a five year turnaround. By contrast, the Sean Connery Bond films were issued in 1980, but the films were nearly two decades old. Star Wars changed what it meant to be a successful media property and one of the biggest ways it did that was it kept the property visible and relevant as new generations became aware of it. To date, there are four distinct generations of Star Wars fans defined by what Star Wars films they saw in theaters, what ancillary media they consumed and what characters are perhaps most well-known to them.

The first generation is the one who first encountered Star Wars as a movie they saw in the theater. They are largely Baby Boomers and Gen X. Those in this cohort who saw the movies as children - those born between 1964-1973 - would become the first to engage with ancillary media and product which, at this stage in the life of the franchise, consisted of mostly toys and the Marvel-published comic book series. Those born before 1964 were less likely to engage with the property beyond seeing the movies, but they would still have a role to play in passing the franchise on to the next generation.

The second generation of fans consists of those born between 1980-1999. This generation missed the first theatrical run of the original trilogy. Their first exposure to Star Wars was most likely the February 1984 network TV premier of the first film on CBS or through home video. Their first theatrical exposure was either the 1997 release of the Special Editions or the first theatrical run for The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones. While this generation includes the very youngest Xers and the very oldest Zoomers, it is primarily made up of Millennial fans introduced to Star Wars by their parents, older siblings or cousins belonging to the first generation. This is the generation of fans I belong to and the one that I will be focusing on in this article and the subsequent sequels. There is something unique about the second Star Wars generation that informs our perspective on the franchise. The first generation knew a time before Star Wars or, at the very least, witnessed it become a cultural touchstone. For us, Star Wars not only always existed, but was always a big deal.

The momentum of Star Wars’s emergence carried the franchise for an entire decade. Although not every year had a major franchise milestone, all three films were the highest-grossers of 1977, 1980 and 1983 respectively. Following the release of Return of the Jedi, the franchise became available on home video, the animated Droids and Ewoks series were broadcast, toys were released and, of course, we can't forget about West End Games’ Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game. After 1987 and the 10th anniversary of the first film though, there was a drought of new content. This drought lasted until 1991 when it was abruptly ended with the explosion of what would become the Expanded Universe or EU. In ‘91 it was the one-two punch of Timothy Zahn’s novel Heir to the Empire and the launch of Dark Horse Comics’ new series beginning with the Dark Empire mini-series. Suddenly there was a flood of new Star Wars content. Dark Horse began consistently publishing comics exploring the further adventures of Luke Skywalker, Zahn wrote two sequels to Heir to the Empire creating the blueprint for the Star Wars continuation novel in the process. Star Wars video games followed soon after as did a new line of action figures. The merchandising frenzy reached a fever pitch in 1995 with the final VHS release of the original trilogy and the announcement of the Special Editions, remasters of the original trilogy, expected in theaters and on home video in 1997 just in time for the 20th anniversary of the franchise.

This was the frenzy that the second generation was born into or grew up within and it continued unabated through the mid-2000’s. For someone like me, born in 1995, there were no “dark times.” Star Wars was always there, always huge, and always the center of attention. What I didn't realize at the time was that a fissure was forming between the older fans and the younger fans. Unbeknownst to me, the Special Edition VHS set that my parents bought from Media Play contained a number of controversial changes to the original three movies. I was blissfully ignorant of the criticism of The Phantom Menace because it was the coolest thing in the world to a 4 year-old. As I grew up, I became aware of these controversies and the divide between Prequel and Sequel fans, the love-hate relationship with George Lucas, and the feeling that Star Wars had squandered its full potential as a franchise.

I've thought a lot about Star Wars over the years and I've come to the conclusion that there's a huge generational divide in the fandom and that both sides of this fandom are talking past each other. The Prequels are better than many people may remember, especially when compared to what we've seen since Disney took over the property. There's a reason why the Prequels still have cultural relevance and memetic power even 20+ years later. That said, the Prequels are extremely flawed films and George Lucas is a rather odd filmmaker with a great many unusual quirks. There are many interesting ideas that are better explored by supplemental material than by the main films. In each article, I will discuss my thoughts on the Original Trilogy, the Prequels, George Lucas and the Expanded Universe and how they may align with or differ from those of my generational cohort. I'll highlight Star Wars media that I enjoy personally and definitively settle this generational divide between Star Wars fans. We may still disagree with each other, but my hope is that we will understand each other better.

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Last Halloween after returning from trick-or-treating with our daughter and getting her to bed, my wife and I sat down to watch a curious little movie called The Menu. For those unfamiliar, The Menu is a 2022 psychological horror movie where Nicholas Hoult and Anya Taylor-Joy play a young couple going to dinner at an exclusive restaurant on a private island run by an enigmatic culinary phenom Julian Slowik played by Ralph Fiennes in his usual intense fashion. Hoult’s character Tyler is something of a gourmand who has obsessively followed Chef Slowik’s career and this evening seems to be the crowning moment of his life. The problem is that this particular meal seems to be different from all of the other meals served at this restaurant as Chef Slowik seems to be dispensing vengeance upon his customers for various ways in which they made him miserable or ruined his love for cooking. I found this movie uneven. Fiennes is a force to be reckoned with on-screen, but the film can’t seem to decide whether or not his character is a sympathetic monster or just an out-and-out psychopath. The snobbish detachment from reality displayed by the patrons is comical, possibly intentionally so, but it makes for a lopsided tone. That said, there are a handful of moments that stick with the viewer and show flashes of brilliance within the concept.

One such moment of brilliance is when the film’s co-lead Tyler gets his comeuppance. All throughout the night, Tyler behaves like an insufferable know-it-all, to the point of borderline inhumanity towards Taylor-Joy’s character Margo. As the second act of the film draws to a close, Chef Slowik calls Tyler into the kitchen to confront him. He compliments Tyler’s knowledge, gives him a chef’s jacket and tells him “I’m proud of you, Tyler. Now cook!”

Slowik forces Tyler to cook, taunting him about his lack of practical culinary knowledge and the scene culminates in Slowik tasting the final “dish” and remarking on how terrible it is. Slowik tells Tyler “You are why the mystery has been drained from our art. You see that now, don’t you?”

Slowik whispers something in Tyler’s ear and then Tyler leaves. In the next scene, we see Tyler’s body hanging from the ceiling in the executive chef’s office. As blogger and philosopher Curtis Yarvin once said, “God hates LARPers.”

This scene has stuck with me and not just because the image of Slowik whispering to a crying Tyler has become something of a meme. I’m an amateur cook and baker. I watch a lot of cooking shows, read a lot of recipes and try to recreate complicated recipes. Furthermore, I have a tendency to be a bit of a snob about certain things. When I saw that scene, I was terrified, angry and sorrowful all at the same time because the question I had for myself was “Am I Tyler?” I dabble a lot in various things. I get obsessive about new projects, hobbies, interests, etc. and have found myself talking as if I’m some kind of expert on fields I came to five minutes ago. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to learn to be humble and have some perspective and nothing gives you both like embracing the process. Throw yourself in the fire and see how you feel about your so-called knowledge and skill at the end of it. The recent resurgence of the AI conversation in the wake of the Superbowl being lousy with AI-generated ads and Seedance 2.0 videos going viral got me thinking about this all over again. There are people crowing about how Seedance has made them a filmmaker. There have been no end of heathens talking about how their mastery of prompts has made them a better artist than some danger-haired weirdo on DeviantArt. I’ve got bad news for those people; they aren’t artists. They are Tylers.

What “mystery” is Chef Slowik referring to and how has it been “drained” from the culinary arts? After all, cooking isn't some sort of Eldritch wizardry. In order to survive someone somewhere has to take raw ingredients and process them into something edible. If basic needs are met, why settle for merely edible when a meal can be both edible and delicious? Edible and delicious and both easily obtained, especially in the modern world, so what is left to make a meal truly stand out? That's the mystery underpinning the culinary arts. What can a chef do to make a meal, an everyday experience for the majority of people, into a memorable event? Your work is ephemeral. It takes about 10 minutes to eat a course, 20 if you really stretch it. Most people won't. How can you make 10 minutes last a lifetime and not just for one person, but for every single person who walks into your restaurant? These secrets used to be passed among only the most dedicated; from chef to chef. Now they're in books, on TV, and online in various forms. An untrained person can watch hours of Food Network and read books and talk the language of the chef, but they gained that knowledge second-hand. He may know what a Pacojet is and what it does, but he doesn't have the practical knowledge to know when, how or, more importantly, why to use it. In wrestling, these people are called smart marks or “smarks.” They know the previously secret terminology, they know it's all pre-determined, but they haven't ever taken a single bump and therefore all of their so-called knowledge is worthless.

I have gone pretty hard at AI art in the past and I did so again recently. When I did, I received a violent backlash from AI users and even some people who don't seem to use AI but see the potential of it. To those people, let me just say that I am not one bit sorry. You aren't artists, you're users. You aren't making art, you're generating content. There is no AI art, only AI-generated images. That's because art is more than just the finished product. Art is also the process of creation. Art is found in the small human touches that make up a work, regardless of the technology being utilized. How many paintings have places where old work was painted over? How many films and TV shows have mistakes, adlibs, or alternate takes that make up the final product? Creation of art almost never goes how it’s expected. Apocalypse Now and Jaws had nightmare productions and ended up being masterpieces. Evidence of the nightmare production is present on-film but enhances the final product. AI cannot generate Robert Shaw’s alcoholism or his antipathy towards Richard Dreyfus and therefore cannot replicate the ways in which those real problems bleed into the work. AI can only deliver what’s asked of it and it draws not from reality but from curated algorithms. That's the mystery of worthwhile art; the process and the struggle are just as important as the finished product and you can only truly understand that if you've been in the crucible yourself.

I'm willing to accept the idea that AI is a tool to be utilized in the process of creation, much like a Pacojet. It has many applications that are still being discovered by users. Some of them have creative applications, but AI is not a creative tool. At best it generates images. It produces content, not art, and when a person prompts an AI and gets an image in return, they aren't now an artist. They want to pretend to be artists though. They think it's funny to joke about AI putting working artists out of jobs not realizing that they're recreating the same phenomenon that killed the family restaurants in their hometowns and replaced them with national fast-casual chains. They're rooting for the same force of entropy that gutted mid-budget cinema to make way for more unnecessary cinematic universe slop. Does AI democratize content creation? Yes, but democracy is not some kind of inherent good. In fact, it's almost always a force of destruction. A powerful tool has been handed to people who don't understand its power and they'll use it to debase themselves. Why is it that AI pornography showed up almost immediately? I think we all know why.

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After a rather disastrous watch of Neon Genesis Evangelion where both my wife and I came to the conclusion that it was pretentious garbage that lost the plot halfway through its runtime and never recovered. We were watching The End of Evangelion to see how it ended and decided halfway through the movie that we didn’t need to see anymore because it wouldn’t change our thoughts in any meaningful way. It was too early to go to bed, so we decided to go back to a show that we hadn’t seen in many years but both enjoyed, Avatar: The Last Airbender. For those unfamiliar, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a show that originally aired on Nickelodeon in the mid 2000’s. It tells the story of Aang, the latest in a reincarnation cycle known as The Avatar. The world of Avatar features magic users (Benders) who manipulate the elements of water, fire, earth and air based upon their cultural background and heritage. The Avatar is able to Bend all four elements and is born into each of the different elemental people groups every hundred years. Aang is a man, or rather boy, out-of-time, having disappeared a century before the show’s present attempting to flee his responsibilities. In the time since his disappearance, the Fire Nation has risen up and overtaken most of the world. They eradicated the Airbending Monks and are in the midst of breaking the Earth Kingdoms as the show opens. When Aang is found suspended in a block of ice by Sokka and Katara, two adolescents from the South Pole’s Water Tribe, he discovers that he is the last of his kind and reluctantly resumes his training to become the fully-realized Avatar and defeat the Fire Nation. This show truly is a masterpiece. When it originally aired, I largely ignored it because I was a stupid child who compared everything to Walker, Texas Ranger when deciding whether or not to watch it. No roundhouse kicking drug dealers? No thank you. When I was in highschool though, the sequel series The Legend of Kora was airing and a girl that I was dating at the time was heavily into the franchise. I was also a faithful viewer of Doug Walker's content at the time and he had begun a series of vlogs discussing Avatar as a first-time viewer. I watched the show and found it compelling, sophisticated and fun. It intersected heavily with my existing interest in Chinese martial arts and even contained a satisfying number of roundhouse kicks. My wife similarly found it later in life, watching it when she was in college. Both of us have found it still compelling and we await the day when our daughter will be old enough to enjoy it with us.

Avatar gives many deliberate nods to other media including Star Wars, and an entire episode that adapts the Jack Schaefer novel/Alan Ladd film Shane, but the most interesting parallel to outside media is one that I think may be unintentional. Avatar has routinely reminded me of the much beloved Dark Sun setting. Maybe it's just my perception as I've had Dark Sun on the brain recently, but there are definitely some aesthetic and thematic parallels that are too interesting not to talk about. First up, there are a lot of unusual creatures in Avatar. Pretty much every animal in the series is some kind of hybrid creature, a fact that's used as a joke in season 2 when Aang and company encounter a normal bear and remark on how strange it is. The most Athasian of these creatures are the giant bugs, beetles, lizards and birds that characters ride in lieu of horses. The armies of the Earth Kingdom the creatures that bear such a striking resemblance to the Crodlu that it almost makes one wonder if Brom didn't do design work on the show. Towards the middle of the second season, a two episode arc puts the Avatar’s party in a desert environment where tribes of nomadic Sandbenders ride across the desert on sailboats which closely resemble the silt skimmers of Athas complete with sails and bladed runners.

The thematic resonance between Avatar and Dark Sun is more fascinating than the mere aesthetic similarities. As I mentioned in the introduction, Avatar takes place in the midst of a century-long war. While the destruction is not as devastating or widespread as that of Athas, the scars of conflict are omnipresent as Aang battles the Fire Nation. Populations are spread out, ruins of temples, cities and civilizations are common and Aang’s memory of the world a century before is frequently in conflict with the reality he observes. It’s not a full-blown apocalypse, but it would certainly feel like one to the citizens caught up in the march of the Fire Nation. Making matters worse is the absence of the Avatar at the time and the presumption by the majority of the population that he was dead. Avatar is not nearly as bleak as Dark Sun, it was intended for children after all, but it broaches many of the same subjects. In addition to the apocalyptic setting, Avatar takes on the question of power and its effect on the world. While Bending is not as destructive as Defiling, it does draw on the energy of the user and the world around them. While Avatar doesn’t directly address this, there seems to be strong pull towards evil for powerful Benders and many Bending styles have a dark twist to them. In season 3, we are introduced to an aged and powerful Waterbender who developed techniques for Bloodbending which allows her to manipulate people’s bodies against their will. Likewise, while Firebending is fueled by emotion, there is a cold and emotionless form of it that allows a Bender to manipulate lightning. It is used primarily by Azula, the heartless and calculating princess of the Fire Nation who becomes the series’ primary antagonist in the last two seasons. Her use of lightning does not come from some kind of enlightened detachment but from pure sociopathy.

One of the things that drew me to Dark Sun was its embrace of the inherent destructiveness of magic. The second you draw upon power to alter reality, you invite temptation into your heart. This is why Defiling dominates Preserving in Athas and why so many Benders in Avatar tend to have dubious moral character. Aang, Katara, Toph, Bumi and Iroh are all heroic, but each of them struggles with the consequences of their actions at some point in the series. Iroh in particular carries a great deal of guilt from his past as a Fire Nation general. The biggest recurring theme of Avatar seems to be that power must be tempered by discipline and wisdom. Dark Sun is a world where Sorcerer-Kings exhibited no such restraint and cast their world into Hell. Many of them have taken monstrous form, especially Boys of Ebe, and their tenuous hold on power demands blood sacrifice.

I don't know if the creators of Avatar ever played D&D or the Dark Sun setting, but I do know that both settings explore similar themes of power and it's effect on those who wield it. Both push fantasy into the realm of the bizarre while showing the reality of continental war. If anything, I would hope that this article convinces someone who grew up with Avatar to pick up the classic Dark Sun books or check out the spiritual successor Dragon Kings. For those of you who have fond memories of Dark Sun, give Avatar a watch, especially if you have kids between the ages of 5 and 13. The similarities aren't obvious on the surface, but careful observation will reveal the core commonalities.

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In 2016, I was in college and had been a part of my first regular D&D group for about a year and a half. It was the middle of the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years when a new sensation hit the media landscape. The show was called Stranger Things and everyone who knew me assured me that I would love it. After all, it was set in the 80’s and I've been known to enjoy 80’s pop culture. It heavily revolved around D&D and that was a recent obsession of mine. I've never been the biggest Stephen King fan, but the premise of dark secrets being hidden just outside the perception of small town America was an intriguing one. I put aside my cantankerous streak and gave the show a watch.

I mostly enjoyed the first season of Stranger Things, although I found many of the characters to be annoying and wondered where the show could go from there. Still, I enjoyed it. I did not, however, think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread like many people did. I was more concerned that year with defending Batman v Superman and pretending I was okay with Suicide Squad. I've always been a DC guy and I haven't always had the most discerning taste. The seeds were planted for me to turn on Stranger Things though and turn I most certainly did. The bloom was off the rose by the end of season 2 and by the end of season 3, I was a full-blown hater. I still hated the characters, especially Mike Wheeler, and the show had the gall to introduce even more annoying characters that season. What's more, the D&D connections were becoming strained to say the least. It was still a part of the show, but more as a frame of reference that the kids had for the supernatural. The main villain of season 2 was called “The Mind Flayer” because it mind-controlled people. It bore zero resemblance to the Illithids that D&D fans will be familiar with. Likewise with Vecna who is named after the ubiquitous villain but does not share anything else with him. Is that a problem with the show? Not necessarily, but it’s a fact that’s largely ignored by the simpering D&D community who, like many niche fandom communities, will do backflips for even a crumb of mainstream recognition or exposure. There were many tie-ins, including two boxed sets, miniatures and other branded items. Wizards of the Coast did a lot to advertise Stranger Things, but did Stranger Things actually do anything for D&D? No, I would argue that it didn’t and indeed it couldn’t because Stranger Things treated D&D as just another artifact of 80’s nostalgia and contributed to the further transformation of the brand into a lifestyle brand moreso than a game.

To cut to the heart of the matter, D&D is present in Stranger Things because it’s an article of 80’s nostalgia. The Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things, have admitted that they themselves were not D&D players growing up. Their inspirations lay more in the realm of 80’s horror and suspense media with the films of Steven Spielberg and the stories of Stephen King being the most apparent influences. D&D serves the same purpose in the series as Kate Bush and Metallica. They are featured in major moments that have a heavy impact on the plot, but they could easily be replaced with other artifacts of the time. Eddie could have played Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying? and Max could have been listening to Here Comes the Rain Again and the scenes would not be altered in any significant way. Likewise, D&D could have been Call of Cthulhu which would have been more thematically appropriate or it could have been Traveler or Twilight 2000 or any number of RPGs played by young geeks in the Midwest. The biggest giveaway that the game doesn’t really matter though is the fact that at the height of the Satanic Panic and in the middle of a supernatural incursion, there’s basically zero pushback to these kids playing D&D. The Duffers have a poor sense of time and place, a fact demonstrated repeatedly, but this is one of their biggest offenses. The mid 80’s was a time of tremendous fear surrounding the paranormal and child welfare. Within the lifespans of main characters of the show, they would have born witness to the crime spree and apprehension of John Wayne Gacy. BTK, The I-70 Strangler, Larry Eyler, and Jeffery Dahmer were all active in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio during this period. David Berkowitz was claiming to reporters that he was part of a Satanic cult that had ordered him to commit the Son of Sam murders. In 1979, James Dallas Egbert disappeared for several weeks and the media surrounding that case was very intently focused on his fascination with Dungeons & Dragons. D&D was still very much controversial in November of 1983 when the first season of Stranger Things is set and it has approximately zero bearing on the plot.

There is grist for a compelling story set in the high-paranoia Midwest 80’s where a group of D&D players have encounters with the supernatural that cause them to question if their parents, teachers and preachers might be right about the game only for them to have to harness the heroic traits of their characters to overcome some evil that has crossed over directly from their game world. A show like that could create genuine interest in roleplaying games and would authentically portray the attitudes of people living in that time period. I think that's the kind of show that many RPG fans wanted Stranger Things to be, but Stranger Things was never and would never be that show. The RPG world couldn't see it though because the RPG world is made up of the kind of guys who think the waitress is really into them and while they might have gotten her number, she never answered that 3 AM text. There are plenty of people who liked Stranger Things for what it was. It reminded them of their childhood or the movies they loved from that time and that was enough for them. Plenty of others wanted to believe that there was more to the connection between D&D and Stranger Things. Not only does Stranger Things love D&D, but it’s a tool of evangelism that will bring people to D&D. This is cultural relevance that that’s a good thing!

During the 1980’s indie comic boom, Eclipse Comics, one of the biggest of the indie publishers of the time, were in the habit of putting Elvis Presley and Marylin Monroe on the cover of their comics as often as they could. When writer Chuck Dixon asked Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney why they did this, Mullaney responded that Elvis and Marylin Monroe collectors were in the habit of buying any product branded with their likeness regardless of what it was. Putting Elvis on a cover guaranteed a certain number of sales. This was itself a version of what Marvel Comics did in the 60’s when they would put Spider-Man on the cover of books that he did not feature in, most famously Daredevil #1. Tying your product to a more successful product with co-branding is a marketing trick so old that it probably saw Homer recite The Odyssey live. When WotC and Hasbro put out those boxed sets, that’s all they were doing. Any players captured by the game through the Stranger Things starter set were a bonus. Nobody seriously thought it would be a gateway to the broader D&D portfolio. The audiences are not the same. Anyone who would be attracted to D&D from Stranger Things is already bought into D&D. Stranger Things was the last monocultural event that we will ever see barring some kind of cultural realignment. A lot of people were watching it just to say that they had seen it. Trying to make customers out of that crowd is a fool’s errand, especially for something niche like table-top gaming. Still, there are a lot of people with more disposable income than sense and some of those people will spend ungodly amounts of money on a show that they won’t be thinking about just five short years from now. That’s all the Stranger Things-branded content was ever intended to do. WotC took advantage of an opportunity to make a quick buck, not grow the player base of D&D.

The only thing that is going to make the tabletop world stronger is better games, better players, and better communities of gamers. Tying it to a passing fad is not a strategy for long-term health and growth. It’s a short-term strategy to get attention. Unfortunately, so many see this as a way to “legitimize” a niche hobby. This is ultimately the point of this article and why I'm so, frankly, resentful of Stranger Things. The only legitimacy this hobby needs is that it offers participants a social outlet and gives them a sense of enjoyment. Mass appeal is a dead letter in the age of hyper polarization and it's not something to wish upon your favorite thing if you genuinely enjoy it as it is. We've all had moments of excitement where we tried to evangelize our favorite game, band, book, etc to others and we've all felt both the triumph of the successful conversion and the tragedy of the rejection. The mainstreaming of your favorite IP tends to falsely trigger that feeling of vindication you get from turning a friend on to something cool. “I like the popular thing” is a fleeting feeling and chasing that particular dragon will lead to a spiritually empty life. Corporations look at your favorite IPs the same way that vultures look at carion. Stranger Things was not a love letter to D&D, it used D&D as a prop to evoke Gen X nostalgia. Beyonce and Lil Nas X were never country singers and online media acting like country music was racist for not wholeheartedly embracing them was stupid. Country music was a pose for them. Should the entire industry realign to serve dilettantes? This is the strategy that the RPG industry uses and one that many fans advocate for. Does it feel like it's made things any better though? We had a short spike in popularity, but not a sustainable one. Much like after a caffeine high, we're now crashing. Maybe instead of relying on stimulants, we should focus on long-term health.

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An important aspect to understand as a Game Master is one that few people are familiar with by name, but experience on a daily basis. It is present in young children and it informs every decision you make on a daily basis. This is the concept of time preference. In basic terms, time preference is the dichotomy between investment and return. How soon after you invest are you expecting some kind of return on that investment? People with a high time preference are looking for a rapid return on investment. People with low time preference are willing to delay their gratification if they perceive that doing so will net them a higher reward. If the high and low time preference man went car shopping, the high time preference buyer would be more likely to take a high interest loan with a smaller down payment if it meant driving off the lot in a brand new car today. The low time preference buyer would be more likely to leave the lot without the new car and come back at a future point when the car they want has been marked down and they have 25-30% to put down on the car. They negotiate a higher monthly payment with a lower interest rate and leave in a new car that they will ultimately pay less for overtime.

The concept of being low time-preference is fairly simple to understand when it’s broken down, but hard in practice. Waiting for the greater long-term gain rather than jumping immediately at the short-term gain seems self-evidently good, but it requires patience and foresight that are hard to cultivate for most and impossible to cultivate in others. Role-playing games are inherently a low time-preference hobby. It takes time to learn the rules and to truly get good at playing. Characters begin with limited power and wealth and have to place themselves in direct danger to acquire more of both. Your early choices may not be the optimal ones but, if you persevere, the pain you suffered for early bad choices will be offset by later gains. Still, players are given the positive feedback of overcoming smaller challenges over time. They kill the monsters, take the treasure, buy new armor, find magic items, etc. By contrast, the Game Master does not receive those direct rewards. The GM is the arbiter, but he does not have an active hand in shaping the world. At most, he is a reactive force. What is the greater value he receives from this sacrifice? The value of watching your players grow into prime movers, shape the world with their actions and slowly grow into the role of power brokers and king makers within the campaign. The GM’s delight is the chaos that the players kick up with their actions and the ways in which they resolve it.

As a father, I have realized that there is a lifetime of investment put into the rearing of children. It will never end. I will never get back the money or time that I have put into raising my daughter. If I expected to, I would be a cold, cruel, heartless individual unfit to raise a child. The “return” on my fatherly investment of time and money is the flourishing of an intelligent, beautiful and kind daughter who will, Lord willing, grow into a virtuous woman and someday get married and raise her own children. The role of a father is a sacred one, comparable to nothing else, but there are parallels to the role of a Game Master. A GM will not receive the spoils of campaigning the way that players do. Instead he instructs his players in the ways of the rules, the language with which they interface with the world of the game, adjudicates their actions based on those rules, and watches as they use those rules to make their way in the world. In a group with experienced players and a shared world, the GM role may even rotate between players as the original characters become the kinds of power brokers who send wandering, expendable adventurers on quests. You can be one of those adventurers while one of them takes on the GM role. Your group could grow to include several GMs if you embrace a club style of play. We will discuss that in a later chapter though. It may be overly grandiose, but there is a paternal quality to Game Mastering and its rewards echo those of a proud father if only in a small way.

Table-top games are not designed with a short on-ramp. The mechanics are open-ended and players must actually make decisions as to how their character will act as well as the mechanics that facilitate their action. Having both successfully and unsuccessfully onboarded brand new players in the past, I can tell you that players not only have to learn to play RPGs, but to think in RPG terms. This goes double for GMs. While this guide is intended to help GMs think in RPG terms, I can only offer a starting point. Both the new player and the new GM will find themselves paralyzed by the options in front of them or the choices of players at the table. I have stopped counting the number of times that a new player has asked “What can I do?” when I leave the party room to act on their own volition. I also remember the shock and terror of watching my players get overwhelmed by an encounter for the first time or the way I froze when faced with an unusual course of action taken by one of my players. These moments make the inexperienced feel like bad players and bad GMs. This above all is where having a low time-preference comes into play. RPGs aren’t a hobby like video games where you can “get it” fast. They remind me of two other hobbies I enjoy; baking and Jiu-Jitsu. The first time I attempt a bake, I rarely nail it. Usually, it takes a couple tries to get it right. Likewise, I am only a few months into my Jiu-Jitsu training and I am not very good at it. I frequently freeze and usually lose. I only recently discovered things that I’m good at on the mats and I still need to hone those. That’s part of the journey though. You have to view RPGs like an art and arts are a lifelong pursuit. How much lower time-preference can you get? You will work at this for the rest of your life or until you decide it’s not worth doing anymore. If you can make peace with that, then you’re ready to begin, Game Master.

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If a GM is to be the keeper, enforcer and arbiter of the rules before all other things, then a reasonable follow-up question is “Why are the rules so important?” For some reason, RPGs are the only games where rules are treated as optional and this issue permeates the entire culture. You will often find football fans arguing over the merits of specific rules and how they’re enforced at the college and professional level, but could you imagine a referee stepping in front of the camera and saying, “The ruling on the field would normally be holding, but we do not enforce holding as a penalty on my field because I think it’s more fun.” This fundamentally changes the way the game will be played and, unless the NCAA and NFL decide to completely do away with holding as a penalty, it will only apply to this specific game. This is self-evidently bad as it means that every single game played will be under a slightly different ruleset depending on which crew is officiating the game. There’s nothing consistent to appeal to or plan for when the rules are constantly in flux. Inconsistent rules are not fair in the purest, most objective sense of the word.

RPGs are games and games are defined by their rules. Rules set the frame within which all participants must act. In soccer, a team must place the ball into the opposing team’s goal but they cannot manipulate the ball with their hands. Only the goalie is permitted to use his hands defensively. Contact with other players is strictly limited so that tackles, holds or blocks are expressly prohibited. Those are the parameters under which the game of soccer is played and soccer players must develop their skills accordingly. These rules are accepted from FIFA and Premier League all the way down to pickup games played in dirt fields by little Peruvian boys. Failure to observe these rules results in punishment in organized play and social shaming in informal play. Sometimes folk games immerge by removing from or adding to an established ruleset. Gaelic football, Australian football and Rugby are all examples of this, being offshoots of traditional football or soccer. All three games are acknowledged as being different entities from the root game and have their own separate evolutions from each other. Sometimes these offshoots develop heated rivalries with one another as in the Brazilian vs Japanese Jiu-Jitsu rivalry. Both call themselves Jiu-Jitsu and both employ similar techniques in many instances, but there’s a fundamental difference in focus that makes them completely different martial arts.

What does all of that have to do with roleplaying games though? Well, as RPGs have developed, a culture of cavalierness towards the rules has developed along with it. The fault for this lies squarely at the feet of the man himself, Gary Gygax, who included the following statement in the 1974 Men & Magic book from the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set:

These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets. That is, they cover the major aspects of fantasy campaigns but still remain flexible. As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign. They provide the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity — your time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination — the fascination of the game will tend to make participants find more and more time. We advise, however, that a campaign be begun slowly, following the steps outlined herein, so as to avoid becoming too bogged down with unfamiliar details at first. That way your campaign will build naturally, at the pace best suited to the referee and players, smoothing the way for all concerned. New details can be added and old “laws” altered so as to provide continually new and different situations. In addition, the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique, and this is quite desirable.

Men & Magic (1974), Pg. 4

From here, the concept of “Rule Zero” was born and, even though it clearly states that players should begin simply and lean heavily on the text of the rules and expand outward and upward as they build mastery. Tim Kask and Gary Gygax would expand upon this in the introduction to 1976’s Swords & Spells where they state that fantasy is not rigid, but rather imaginative and that players should feel free to amend or expand upon the rules when appropriate, with Tim Kask emphasizing that balance must be maintained, even putting balance in all-caps. Gygax would go on to elucidate in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979) that the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law, advising that Dungeon Masters might encounter players looking to manipulate them by using the written words divorced from their greater context. By including these passages, Gygax et al clearly wanted to send the message that D&D had room for creativity and expansion, but the rules exist to ground the game with some kind of uniformity. The world of wargaming had a long tradition of community interaction and discussion. Gygax clearly wanted this for D&D as well and that kind of community can only exist if there’s something solid to refer back to. All of this talk about roleplaying has to be undergirded by something and that something is necessarily the rules.

In his seminal comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, cartoonist Bill Watterson introduced a game called Calvinball, created by the titular Calvin, a game with only one rule; players cannot play the same way twice. In the strip, Calvin invents the game out of frustration with his attempts to join a baseball team and the rigidity of organized sports. Being a six year-old boy, Calvin frequently struggles with accountability for his actions and comes up with esoteric ways to avoid it. All children, at one time or another, struggle to understand something that their peers have already understood. All children discover differences between themselves and their peers in aptitudes. Maturity is recognizing this and learning to apply yourself and your skills to solve problems. In this process, a mature person may realize that the juice is not worth the squeeze and decide to disengage from it. At first blush, Calvinball seems like it’s Calvin withdrawing from sports into his own imagination, but the last comic strip to feature Calvinball brings reality into sharp focus. What starts as a game of football between Calvin and Hobbes devolves into Calvinball with Calvin stating that “Sooner or later, all of our games turn into Calvinball…” Calvin is unable to stick to a coherent set of rules, even in an imaginary game with his imaginary friend. Specifically, this comic shows that Calvin pivots to Calvinball when he’s asked to hand over the ball. At any point where he would lose the upper hand, he evokes Calvinball to avoid consequences.

For the past 40 years or so, Gary Gygax’s “Rule Zero” has not been interpreted as a license to build upon a foundation of knowledge and experiment, but to throw out rules when they are found to be inconvenient. The RPG commentariat has turned Rule Zero into Calvinball. Little effort, if any, is given to understanding the rules as they’re written. As a good friend of mine says, they’ve been found difficult and left untried. Like Calvin, they have decided that their arbitrary rules are more fun than the given rules and therefore better. The problem? Fun is subjective. Fun is fleeting and, oftentimes, fun is only realized in hindsight. The issue with the rules that the Calvins of the world have is not one of fun but one of time preference. Time preference will be elaborated on in the next chapter. The result of this emphasis on homebrew over rules-as-written (RAW) is that the objectivity of the game has been stripped away. There is no guarantee in RPGs that the same game will be played on each field with each referee. A player may get flagged for holding in one game and then horse collar tackled in the next. As English occultist Aleister Crowley prescribed, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” This philosophy has led no small number of people to lives of ruin and that too is what has become of the RPG industry and the communities that surround it. It is chaotic destruction. We will not be bound by such a fate. Instead, we will embrace order.

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For awhile, I’ve been struggling to figure out what exactly to write about. Have I said everything that needs to be said? What can I still contribute to the discussion of RPGs? Sometimes, it definitely feels that way, especially these days. I’ve been a little burnt on RPG discourse, but then I sat down with Dave from Tooky’s Mag and had a post on X go thermonuclear in response to WotC’s latest campaign for sodomy and perversion. In my interview with Dave, we discussed a lot of the deep lore and history of the online RPG sphere, namely the contributions of the BrOSR, and it became plainly obvious that all of this was a little impenetrable. I've known for awhile that Wizards of the Coast was losing its grip on the industry. The fact that they would post a piece of art so hideous to pander once again to the alphabet coalition shows how creatively and morally bankrupt the enterprise has become and the fact that an account of my size can ratio them into oblivion (literally double their likes) shows that people are tied of it all. They want something new, but WotC still has the clearest path for the onboarding of new players. Dave and I discussed parallelism during our show and clearly that's the route we need to take. Parallelism takes time and effort though. You can't just build a WotC competitor overnight even if we need one right now. We can't despair our situation though. We need to start somewhere. A year or so ago I had an idea for a pamphlet called “The GM’s Dagger.” It's meant to be a pocket guide for GMs. A kind of side arm to carry at all times. Every knight carried a dagger and so should every GM. That's what this is. I’ll be publishing a series of articles designed to introduce new players to these ideas over the next few weeks. Eventually, I'll compile them into two books, one for players and one for GMs. This article will comprise the first entry of the GM’s Dagger which will define the roll of the Game Master. I encourage all of you to share this and all subsequent articles with inquiring players and first time GMs. We’re going to build an alternative infrastructure for onboarding new players one brick at a time. Here’s the first brick.

1. Knowing Your Role

In discussions of RPGs, one will hear a lot of talk about the illusive and put-upon figure known as “The GM.” There are endless memes and stories that portray the GM as some kind of cross between an evil mastermind and a frustrated parent of toddlers. Most people who enter the hobby these days are first exposed to the game and its various roles through internet gaming culture. Their preconceptions are an amalgamation of memes and YouTube videos which propagate disinformation. The Game Master, or GM for short, is not Ra’s al Ghul plotting to overthrow world governments. He is not a frustrated parent of unruly children. He is not a “world-weaver” or “story-crafter” or any other pretentious self-bestowed title found in someone’s Bluesky bio. Rather, the role of the GM is that of a referee. The Game Master possesses a deep understanding of the rules of the game, enforces outcomes on the players based on the rules, and arbitrates between players when disputes arise.

I understand why many first-timers believe that there's an authorial aspect to being the Game Master. When observing the game from the outside, one will see that a single player generally sits at the head of the table. He does the bulk of the talking and seemingly every action is approved or disapproved by him. There are all of these maps and environments that aren’t present there at the table and seem to be spontaneously generated from the mind of this shot-caller figure. As if that weren’t enough, this so-called “Game Master” is usually giving voice to hundreds of different characters that the other players are interacting with. In martial arts, there are legends of how certain fighting styles were developed by fishermen who watched Shaolin monks practice their forms from a distance and adapted their styles from what they could see. I believe a similar phenomenon has occurred in the development of RPGs. The first generation of players were college-educated young men. They were used to complicated wargames and engaged with this new style of game the way they did with other games; the read the rules and ran the game as outlined. The second generation started playing much younger than the first though, usually between the ages of nine and thirteen based on anecdotal evidence, and as a result did not comprehend the rules which were written and laid out in a very dry fashion. They learned by observation first and that built the foundation for their game. Some of them did eventually go back, read the rules and adapt but many didn’t. Their foundation for gaming was not Dungeons & Dragons as-written, but a folk game loosely adapted from the original.

In the 2019 documentary The Secrets of Blackmoor which covers Dave Arneson’s history with wargaming and how he contributed to the original Dungeons & Dragons, the subjects of the documentary tell stories about how they would roleplay to add context to the results of their roles. Did an army pass a morale check that they absolutely shouldn’t have? There was an enthusiastic officer who refused to let his men surrender. It was a natural evolution of nerdy guys playing games. It was not the sum total of the experience. That context was lost on 9 year-old Timmy when he watched his college-age brother running the game with his friends. He heard his brother doing funny voices and heard his stories about the epic adventures his party went on after the fact but he wasn’t aware that he was seeing the sizzle, not the steak. This problem has only gotten worse as time goes on, especially as game companies have leaned into this notion. Almost every rulebook you buy now has some variation of “If you don’t like a rule, don’t use it” or “It’s about having fun,” printed before the actual meat of the rules. The problem with this is, well, it doesn’t work very well. Narrative-first gameplay requires GMs to craft some kind of story that’s closed enough to create a curated experience but open enough to make players feel like they actually matter. They have to worry about progression, pacing, and keeping player interest. All of these things are incredibly stressful and above-and-beyond the call of duty for a GM. They require extensive prep and dedication and they make gaming a massive time-sink. This is a tough sell for busy people, brining us back to the actual role of the GM. He should know the rules, enforce them at the table and arbitrate when disputes arise.

The GM is the judge, the referee and the rulekeeper. He has no other duties aside from this, not even hosting. It doesn’t require acting talent or the creativity of a literary master. It does require reading-comprehension, selflessness and consistency though. A GM must be detail-oriented, firm and fair. In subsequent chapters, I will explain the concepts that will help you achieve these lofty goals. Being a Game Master is not easy, but it is far simpler than internet RPG culture portrays it as being. If I can leave you with one piece of advice that I’ll expand upon in the next chapter, it is this; the rules matter above all else and it is your job to make sure that they are adhered to and interpreted.

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Nighthaven is a behemoth that leaves her inhabitants feeling like a lost sheep who wandered into the wolves den. If a sheep looks like a wolf though, he won’t be seen as prey and thus the hapless wanderer sells his soul for the perception of safety. One could hardly blame Ghostblade and Argonne De Gasse for looking for allies. Their alliances had protected them from death already in their short time in the city. Argonne opted to solidify an existing alliance by partnering with Willem Vanderhoek to re-establish The Slayer Society. Ghostblade went searching for allies among the city’s predators and found himself joining one of their packs. As a result, both men found themselves again caught up in a web of intrigue. Vampires are not the only ones with dark secrets and plots within plots in this city.

Public exposure of a Vampire death cult stirred up quite a commotion in the leadership of the Temple of Kador. Lord Commander Gregorius XII, Marshal of Kador’s Legions, issued a declaration of Holy War against The Liminal Temple, the first such crusade declared since the fall of the Dragons three decades ago. Being a faithful worshiper of Kador, Argonne saw an opportunity to assist in the fight. He spoke to his host, Willem the Stalker, about resurrecting The Slayer Society. Willem himself was experiencing a positive change. He had cut back hard on his drinking and cavorting with the women at The Warm Embrace. He was becoming more cogent in speech and thought and was enjoying his bolstered reputation amongst the public. Additionally, the arrival of his grandnephew for training in the family business had sharpened his monster hunting instincts back to what they had been. Willem was enthusiastic about the idea and eagerly back Argonne’s push for re-establishment. Once all licenses were applied for and fees were paid, Willem and Argonne were licensed monster hunters, legally able to collect monster bounties and hunt within city limits. Argonne was at the beginning of a legitimate business utilizing his skill with a blade. He could assist the clergy of his religion and collect a tidy profit for it too.

Ghostblade went looking for leads on potential work from his contacts in The Knave Syndicate, but found himself faced with an unusual offer. All face cards representing the Batons were assembled and they offered him something that few are offered; membership in the organization. They could keep throwing him small-time jobs, or he could get in on the real action as a Number Card. He accepted and was initiated as the 5 of Batons. He was assigned to work under the Batons’ Joker leaning on his training as a singing minstrel. He was to go under cover as a musician playing in taverns along the waterfront to learn about the city’s latest intrigue; a ship moored in the harbor, loaded with gunpowder. The Headless and Hawke’s Talons, Nighthaven’s two power players in the underworld, were vying for the shipment which was ostensibly owned by one of the Headless’ legitimate cargo businesses. The Batons knew that information regarding this ship would be valuable, so they set out to put informants in the area. Unfortunately for them, their new asset was a little rusty.

The Batons had the foresight to give Ghostblade a test run and assign him a tutor in performance. However, Ghostblade’s first showing under the moniker of “Blaide de Grasiello” left something to be desired. Before the crowd could tar and feather him though, Ghostblade’s superiors pulled him from the stage and placed him under the care and tutelage of Giselle di Bonaventura, Mistress of the Cabaret and lutist extraordinaire. The voluptuous Giselle took a shine to her young pupil and whisked him away to her mansion in far northern Nighthaven. Ghostblade had already been swallowed up by the world of criminal intrigue and, perhaps more frightening, show business. Still, his mistress was a very attractive and knowledgeable one. Her connections in the city are nearly limitless and she certainly has eyes for the young troubadour-assassin.

Meanwhile, Argonne was feeling displeased with his friend’s choice, but opted not to abandon him. The Batons offered Argonne a position as well, although he turned it down to pursue monster hunting and to avoid placing himself into positions where the Hangman’s ghost could easily tempt him. Instead, Argonne followed his friend to his debut performance and then followed Giselle’s carriage to keep an eye on his friend. Satisfied that Ghostblade would not be mauled by hecklers, he returned to the Gate District but witnessed something horrific as he departed North Nighthaven. A handful of Hawke’s Talons gangsters, returning to their digs after a night of drinking, were targeted for death via bombing of their quarters. The bombing was proximal to Ghostblade, who went to investigate the matter rather than fall into the hungry arms and silk sheets of his mistress. Argonne meanwhile fled the scene to avoid getting wrapped up in yet another criminal intrigue. By pure happenstance, Argonne ended up in the carriage of Ronaldo de Bridge, another famous minstrel and figure of intrigue in the city. Ronaldo offered the fledgling monster hunter a chance to make connections at an upcoming soiree he would be entertaining at. Being the guest of Ronaldo would grant him access to a number of wealthy clients with family crypts that periodically need clearing.

Ghostblade’s difficult and complicated night ended in near-disaster as he found himself the subject of scrutiny at the scene of the bombing. His presence was unwelcome and no less than Mandrake Hawke himself threatened him with bodily harm should he wrap himself up in their affairs again. While Ghostblade’s prowess in tracking and combat is unparalleled, it seems as if his skills of covert operations and subtlety leave a lot to be desired. Things are afoot in Nighthaven and our intrepid duo again find themselves in the middle of it all. Their case for innocence in matters is growing weaker as they stay in the city and rub shoulders with figures of the underworld.

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It is often said that the truth is stranger than fiction. This axiom holds true, but with the addendum that the truth is often so farcical in nature that the exaggerated legend seems more realistic in comparison. Take the story of the slaying of Calytrix the Dark Madame. Ask anyone on the street how it happened and they will tell you that a cunning plot was laid by the venerable Willem the Stalker, Nighthaven’s venerable slayer of the undead, and Brother Clement of the Temple of Kador to eradicate The Liminal Temple cult from the Gate District. These two heroes, along with Willem’s apprentices Argonne de Gasse and Ghostblade, lured Calytrix, the Rector of The Gate District Temple of Liminus and a Vampire retainer of Calytrix to The Warm Embrace and boldly dispatched the trio along with their human familiars. The reality of the situation though was that the ruse was devised by Calytrix, Willem and Clement were brought into it by Argonne and Ghostblade, and it was only through her own hubris that Calytrix and her cohort were defeated.

Following two weeks of intense celebration, Argonne and Ghostblade had their moment of clarity when they woke up inside the Nighthaven Citadel. Neither of them were acquainted with the Baron or any member of the Riordan family meaning that their presence in the family’s residence would be difficult to explain. To make matters worse, both of them had taken possession of items presumably from the Baron’s personal trove. Ghostblade acquired a Wand of Webs, an item that was absolutely worthless to him as an individual with no magic training to speak of. Argonne’s acquisition was more useful but far more problematic. He woke up wearing a set of white opalescent scale armor made from some kind of colored Nightsteel. When he tried to remove it, Argonne found that the armor caused him intense pain. The pair narrowly escaped the citadel before being discovered although Ghostblade sustained an injury falling out of a window.

In the time following their escapades, Nigthhaven had changed significantly. Whether it was influenced by the robbery and trespass committed in his familial home or just the general state of lawlessness that had set in during the two weeks of bacchanal, Baron Castor Riordan had decided to exert tight control over his city and crack down on excessive vice. Curfews were put in place, public drunkenness became a serious offense, and the Gate District became a particular target of the Guard. Lord Commander Cyrus Renier remained in his station as Commander of Nighthaven’s Guard and it seemed that the district would bear the full brunt of his grief-fueled ire. In the midst of this crackdown, Ghostblade and Argonne laid low in the Slayers Society manor house and took stock of their current position. Argonne also found himself in the presence of Donal “Hangman” Hartigan, the spirit of his grappling hook’s former owner. Hartigan’s ghost explained what all he was capable of doing and also that the theft from the Baron’s treasury was his doing. Hartigan was exerting influence over Argonne. When alcohol lowered his inhibitions, Hartigan had a much easier time forcing him to steal. When sober though, Argonne would be able to fight, but, the more he gives in to temptation and cajoling, the harder it would be to come back from.

While the intrepid duo had managed to kill Tobias Renier and end the direct threat of a vampire contagion, they had left one thread dangling; Calytrix and the Liminal Temple. The pair had not pursued the vampiress despite insinuating themselves in her plot. Calytrix was aware of their interference though and decided to make them an offer. She summoned them to the Liminal Temple requesting a parlay. Argonne and Ghostblade smelled a trap though and countered with the suggestion of The Warm Embrace. Calytrix agreed and our heroes began to put schemes into motion. They brought in both Willem and Brother Clement to assist as well as Pauline, the new Madame of The Warm Embrace. Their plan was to hide weapons in the meeting room and then use Holy Water disguised as vodka to initiate an ambush. The plans were set and Calytrix arrived with a human familiar, a vampire underling and the Rector of the Liminal Temple. Her offer was a simple one: allow her to embrace them and initiate them into the Liminal Temple or die. They of course chose a third option.

Holy Water is an imprecise weapon under the best of circumstances. It’s best thrown in a fragile container so that the effective range is multiplied. Throwing from a glass is only effective at very close range and even then a lot can go wrong. That’s exactly what happened as neither Argonne nor Ghostblade were able to hit their targets. Calytrix dominated the mind of Ghostblade and set him about killing Argonne, which he narrowly did. Things looked bleak until Willem made his way to where Pauline had hidden the Orb of Illusory Sunlight, an obsidian orb that blasts a light so bright that it is indistinguishable from actual sunlight for most vampires. It blinded the trio of vampires and activated their autoimmune reaction to sunlight…but it also blinded Willem, Argonne, Clement and Ghostblade. What resulted was more of a mummer’s farce than an actual battle as Argonne and Willem blindly fired revolvers in the direction of the blinded, disintegrating vampires who had shifted into bat form to make an escape. Fortunately for Argonne, receiving the brunt of the brutality, the vampires were too distracted by trying to escape to do much to him. Willem and Argonne were able to get the better of Calytrix though, freeing Ghostblade from her mind control in the process. When the dust settled, Argonne and Ghostblade were triumphant, but nobody wanted to believe that two powerful vampires could be vanquished in such a comical fashion. Thus the details were embellished and the true masterminds of the encounter, were sidelined in favor of the known monster slayer and the heroic priest. The Rake knows the truth though and now you do too.

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In my everyday life, I encounter a lot of people who have to interface with technology but don’t actually understand how it works. I’m far from a technical expert. I’m not an engineer or a computer scientist. I’m a salesman. Still, I’m a curious salesman and it matters to me how things work. What I find endlessly frustrating though is dealing with people who don’t understand how their own systems work. They have no desire to learn and, in many cases, they do not possess the capacity to understand the inner workings of systems they interact with everyday. It’s a frustrating reality of automation. The better and more efficiently a system works, the easier it is for people without specialized knowledge to use. The hard parts are automated away and the task becomes easier. Wonderful, right? Sure, but what happens when those complicated systems break down? We’ve all had the experience of having to help an elderly relative with technology, but increasingly many of us are finding that it’s not just the elderly who have trouble understanding and using technology. It’s young people too.

There are basically three generations of people that exist around technological revolutions. Firstly, you have the predecessors. They lived the majority of their lives without this technology. A small number of this generation will be the innovators, but most of them will never understand the technology. Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates are core Baby Boomers. They understand computers because they were among the innovators. The majority of their generational cohort can barely work their emails though. The second generation is the generation that grows up alongside the technology. Sticking with the computer metaphor, this is where Gen X and Millennials fit. John Romero and Mark Zuckerberg encountered computers as young men, saw potential in the burgeoning technological frontier and set about making their mark upon it. Many other members of their generations worked in technology or took it on as a hobby. They built out the infrastructure and community that you see around the technology and make up the core of its power users. Their innovations made the technology more efficient and more useful and created an easy experience for the next generation. This next generation, here represented by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, have lived with usable, efficient technology for their entire lives. They learned to use tablets and phones as young children because the tech was intuitive. Do they know how it actually works though? No, they largely do not. Technology has become a black box for them.

For those unfamiliar, a black box is a system that inputs go into and outputs come out of, but the inner workings of the system are obscured. The reality is that someone has to know how the transfer characteristics work in a given system in order for it to be replicable. If nobody understands how tapping the icon for the YouTube app causes YouTube to appear on their phone screen and how the input of a search for a video can return a result, much less how the requested video can play, then they won’t be able to replicate that technology. What does any of this have to do with RPGs though? If you examine many of my articles over the past two years or so, you will get the sense that almost nobody knows how these games are supposed to work. RPGs have become a black box for many users and, unfortunately, many creators. In the name of “simplification” critical information is outright omitted from rules. Why do so many OSR games devolve into an Esperanto—like amalgam of house rules and mechanics from other games? Because the games that lie at the base are incomplete. A game like Deathbringer only works when run by Professor Dungeon Master himself because in his head he possesses a robust knowledge of other complete systems and enough mastery over those systems to plug in the missing components. Without him though, you have an incomplete system that doesn’t work.

Rules are what turns input into output. They’re the guts, the innards of your game. So far this is all old hat for me. You’ve heard me say all of these things before and I won’t get into simulation complexity yet again. However, the RPG world is clearly stuck in the black box phase. Rules are seen by many people as a black box and the ignorant are resistant to learning the ways in which they function. I know it sounds harsh, but how else can you describe the “I don’t want to do homework” crowd that pops up when you suggest reading the rulebook? They don’t care to be involved in the process, they just want it to produce fun for them. What else would you call a Virtual Table-Top? It’s largely a Black Box that automates the rules. Is there anything wrong with that? No, not necessarily although I do find that VTTs are bad at teaching the game. They’re more like video games than table-top games. No, the problem is that the people who prefer the Black Box want to dictate the conversation to those of us who desire system mastery. That’s what the GNS/story gaming phenomenon is at its heart. Eliminate the systems that I have to interact with and just give me the story.

We’re at the core of the issue now; the desire for a Black Box is a desire for easier consumption. This is desirable in technology, of course. Cars, phones, computers, etc. are better when the user doesn’t have to fiddle around with internal processes just to get their device to function. Cars are better now that they have starters. Similarly, the advent of shortcut icons on computers and phones make it a better experience than having to manually search directories to launch a program. Cars take you places though and programs help you do other things. Removing heavy user involvement in the transfer characteristics is a net positive. Instead, let’s image a Black Box that converts raw ingredients into fully-cooked meals. You can input any recipe into the box, you insert all the ingredients into the top of it, and in 15 minutes you have a complete meal. It would be a wonderful innovation, but would users of this device be able to call themselves cooks? Of course not. If you put someone who used this device on the Food Network, they would offer nothing of value for people who want a discussion of cooking technique. They have taken the labor, and therefore the art, out of cooking and reduced it to base consumption. They aren’t cooks, they’re eaters. If you enjoy eating but not cooking, that’s fine, but don’t demand that the entire conversation of cooking be tailored to your tastes.

The problem with the Black Boxing of RPGs is that wanting to play an RPG just “for the story” is like wanting the meal without cooking. The story, like the meal, is emergent from the act of playing. If all you want is to consume a story, you have books, movies, TV and theater. If you want to consume a story with bare minimum mechanical interaction which has been automated away from your view, you have video games. RPGs are analog though. They’re labor-intensive activities that reward effort with fun but a majority of that fun comes from the process of forging. Why do I cook and bake? I like the results of my cooking and baking, probably too much, but I also like the process of turning disparate ingredients into cohesive dishes. That’s why I like making things from scratch as much as I can, even though ready-made ingredients can be bought at a store within walking distance of my house. If this were a cooking blog and some ignoramus wandered in here making comments about how I’m an HR lady for insisting that your chateaubriand must be coated in duxelles and wrapped in puff pastry for you to call it Beef Wellington, you’d be laughed at. If you don’t want to perform the laborious process of making that dish (and it’s a task and a half) then you don’t like cooking Beef Wellington. You don’t get to wrap a frozen burger patty in a tortilla and call it Beef Wellington. It may be easier, but you’ve failed to cook the dish. It’s no different for RPGs and the hobby with continue to degrade until we realize this. If you prefer a different set of rules to the ones I prefer, then we have a methodological disagreement and can have a conversation. If you reject the need for specific, established rules that must be followed consistently else the structure of the game fall away, you don’t belong here. Your Black Box has been constructed elsewhere. Go consume its output until you’re satiated. Those of us who enjoy the old ways will be much happier over here without you.

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Our intrepid duo of Argonne de Gasse and Ghostblade had spent the 3 weeks since their arrival in Nighthaven gathering information and meeting with contacts. In particular, they became close with Willem Vanderhoek, AKA Willem The Stalker. The once-famous monster hunter had been reduced to little more than a shambling drunk, rendered half-crazy by the mindbending gaze of a vampire some years ago. Though Willem was three sheets to the wind when Argonne found him in Big Barnaby’s Taphouse, he sobered up when he discovered two young men hunting a vampire and in need of a mentor. He put them through their paces in the basement of his home, the former headquarters of the defunct Slayers’ Society, and taught them the finer points of vampire physiology. He also granted them access to an arsenal of weapons useful to the killing of vampires.

At the same time, they made contact with The King and Bower of Batons, one of the four Suits of the Knave Syndicate. Graem Halford, King of Batons, remained angry that his union with Madame Calytrix of The Warm Embrace and the political situation had become untenable for the Bower, Jormunder Miasmer. Calytrix was defying hundreds of years of established precedent and Miasmer’s King was growing impatient. To outsiders, it appeared that Miasmer could not control his district and to insiders, it looked as if Graem had everything necessary to stage a coup on his superior. Sensing the sand shifting beneath his feet, the Bower made a bold offer to the two men who were walking into his casino asking sensitive questions; if they would do the bidding of his King, he would grant them one item of their choice from his personal vault of spoils. Fifteen years of baubles pilfered from adventurers, merchants and mercenaries in thrall to dice and cards would be opened up to two greenhorns who would likely be consumed by the beast. Compared to the loss of his entire empire and reputation, it was a steal. All they had to do was bring the monster to Graem alive. For some reason, Graem believed that the monster was an integral part of this Calytrix conundrum. Whether he was or not, it didn’t matter to Miasmer. All that mattered was lowering the temperature of his second-in-command’s temper and stemming the tide of a mutiny.

Unfortunately, all of this training and information gathering undertaken by Argonne and Ghostblade came at the cost of time and the thirst of the creature was unslaked over the course of those three weeks. It fed continuously and sired several offspring. The city was being overrun by fledgling vampire bats. Their benefactor, Lord Thomas Foss, had withdrawn out of grief over the lack of progress in finding his beloved. Brother Clement was becoming impatient and Graem Halford was becoming frustrated. Argonne and Ghostblade had a plan though and were set to execute it. They decided that pursuing the monster at night was a fool’s errand and set out to find its lair in the daylight. They began at The Sellsword’s Mission where many of the victims of the attacks were being treated. Along the way, they encountered two of the Gate District’s colorful characters; Haldor Lightfinger and Rufus the Filch. While Rufus tried and failed to run his helpful guide scam on them, Haldor ended up being a source of helpful information, pointing out the abandoned guard tower from the old gates as a possible lair for the creature. Other witnesses questioned at The Sellsword’s Mission corroborated the direction of the creature’s flight if not the exact location posited by Haldor. One of the victims they interviewed was a working girl from The Warm Embrace who mentioned that the creature was a regular presence in that area. Before setting off to check the Guard tower, Argonne had Brother Clement find some mercenaries to accompany them. Clement secured the services of Reedy, Willink, and Abel, fighting men from Daerholm’s Frontier Legion. With their three hired swords, Foss’s bodyguard Garrett, and even half-crazed Willem in-tow, Argonne and Ghostblade set out to find the beast’s lair.

The pair soon discovered that while daylight offered an advantage against vampires, it made it difficult for a small force of heavily armed men to move secretly, especially at midday. Argonne, Willem and Reedy moved through the crowd with ease, but Ghostblade had the misfortune of running straight into a Guard Sergeant. Had it not been for the intervention of Lieutenant Simm who was on-duty at the Gate that day, they would have been detained. Instead, Simm took them down a dark alley, berated them for their stupidity, and let them on their way. Once he made his way to the tower, Ghostblade climbed to a boarded-up window and was able to push his way in with little noise. Inside he found the monster, a giant bat with matted fur and a scaly hide, asleep as all vampires are in the daylight. Ghostblade, sure of himself as ever, drew his longbow and nocked a silver arrow from Willem’s arsenal. His aim was true and he pierced the heart of the monster in a single shot. The monster was immobilized but alive, so long as the arrow stayed put. Examining the lair uncovered a number of unusual treasures. The creature had stockpiled valuables from its victims, but it had also taken a live hostage; Thea, the betrothed of Lord Thomas. She was chained and dressed in an elegant gown, almost like a living doll. Fortunately, she was unharmed, much to the relief of Garrett. The last thing that was discovered in his trove was a correspondence between Madame Calytrix of The Warm Embrace and Tobias Renier, the black sheep son of Commander Cyrus Renier, Commander of the Nigthaven Guard.

The party loaded the monster’s body onto a cart brought by Willem for the purpose of delivering it to The Royal Flush Club. Halford’s homicidal excitement was on full display as he took the axe from the hands of his Ace to behead the monster himself. When the monster’s head was removed, he transformed from a gigantic bat creature back into his original form; that of Tobias Renier, revealed by the letters to be Halford’s romantic rival for Calytrix. Halford emptied his revolvers into Renier’s lifeless body and ordered that the head be packaged and sent to Calytrix. Miasmer was impressed with their work and offered them future employment if they desired it. He was also true to his word and offered the duo their pick of treasures from his vault. Ghostblade picked a cuirass of Nigthsteel, a lightweight metal used to make flexible, concealable armor. Argonne was drawn to a mysterious grappling hook and, upon selecting it, was introduced to Donal “Hangman” Hartigan, or rather, his ghost. with a tremendous amount of wealth on-hand, the two warriors threw an outrageous party that spilled over into the entire city for nearly two weeks. They woke up in Nighthaven Citadel, the home of Baron Castor Riordan, bearing items that seemed to be from his personal trove. Argonne bore a mail shirt made of opalescent scale and found it painful when he tried to remove the armor. Ghostblade had a wand which, for a non-mage, was little more than a fancy stick. The pair made a daring escape out a window which nearly cost Ghostblade his life. Our intrepid duo now find themselves in good with the Knaves, but participants in the murder of a prominent noble’s issue. Who knows what awaits them as the bacchanalia dies down on the streets of Nighthaven…

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Every day on X is like the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow. We’re gonna have the same arguments, fight the same battles and nobody will learn anything. It all resets the next day. Every time you think the definitive statement has been made explaining the utility of 1:1 Time and the importance of strict timekeeping in general, some new ignoramus pops up on the timeline Whack-A-Mole machine to spout off that they’ve been playing so long they’re original handbook was a cuneiform tablet (not that they bothered to read it) and they’ve never kept time records. When you get down to the heart of the matter, not tracking time is the same as not tracking ammunition, encumbrance or any other resource. Resources are finite and must necessarily be finite even in a world of imagination. Why do they need to be finite? What does finite time do to a campaign? This is my definitive statement on the necessity of timekeeping and what it does for a campaign.

What does it mean for time to be limited? Well, we all experience this daily. If you have a job, a family, hobbies, go to the gym and want a full eight hours of sleep, you exactly what it means for time to be limited. In the context of an RPG, it means that when the merchant caravan is leaving in ten days, they’ll be gone ten days from now. If the demonic ritual must be performed during a New Moon and it’s currently a Waxing Gibbous, you have just under 20 days to stop it. When there’s a timer set, you have to have a way to track that timer. In my first conversation with Jeffro Johnson, he explained that the easiest way to track these things is just to use the existing calendar, time of day, weather, etc. You don’t need to track two separate calendars, seasonal cycles, weather patterns etc. Just use the ones at hand. Barring that, you’ll have to come up with some other way to quantify the passage of time as a campaign goes on, especially time spent outside of the game. What happens when your players aren’t active in the world? Does it just wait for them to come back like in a video game? It could, but, as I have said repeatedly over the past few weeks, the static world of video games is a technical compromise that we don’t have to make when we transcend hardware. Video games are static. They’re programs. Your game world is alive and always-on. If you don’t treat it that way, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

What does it mean for the world to be always-on? It means that time continues to move even after the session ends. Along with time, factions move. If the party takes on an Orc warband at the behest of the local lord and then leave his fief to go adventure somewhere else, they may return to the fief to discover three new warbands have moved in to avenge the fallen band. If there’s a coup being planned in the palace before the party departs, why should the party expect everything to be the same six months later when they finally blow back into town? Things continue to march forward regardless of whether or not you’re involved in them directly. What this means is that you have a limited amount of time to act on information and the amount of time it takes to do something matters. If it’s a six day journey from your current base of operations to an adventuring location, it will take six days to get there. If you make any major detours, it will take longer and the likelihood that the circumstances have changed goes up. From here the cause-and-effect is obvious. If it takes real time to do everything then priority must be assigned to tasks based on value. Time becomes a kind of currency just like in real-life. You put time in and then you don’t get it back. If the investment was sound, you’ll accomplish something substantial or save yourself time down the road. You may not see immediate return and it may turn out that what looked like a sound investment turned out to be a bust. There’s nothing more complicated to it than this. Time is only valuable when it’s limited and it’s only limited if it’s tracked.

The most common objection is that it’s needlessly punitive to limit activity this way. If it’s just a game, why not allow your players to do it all? There’s nothing you can potentially miss, there’s no need to make hard sacrifices. In short, your choices won’t matter a damn bit. If you’re playing right, the choices of your players will have a dramatic impact on the game world. Remember the scene in 1978’s Superman: The Movie where he flies so fast around the world that he turns back time so he can stop the flood and save Lois from the earthquake? Nobody likes that scene because it’s stupid and it robs Lex Luthor’s plot of its gravity. He’s challenging Superman’s morality by presenting him with a choice between saving one person he loves or thousands of people he doesn’t know. It undermined the personal sacrifice that Superman had to make to be heroic. That’s what you do when you don’t take time seriously in your campaign. It doesn’t matter what the player chooses to do first because you’ve guaranteed that they can do both things. You remove entropy from the equation entirely and the result is a boring, sterile experience. You’ve shown the players the wires and they know it’s fake now. I’ll say it over and over again, but player agency means choices matter, even if the outcome is suboptimal or undesirable. Time spent doing one task means times spent not doing another task. The only way to understand and quantify that concept is to track time and the easiest way to track it is to align it with real-world time.

This article will not end the debate, but hopefully it will convince another group of holdouts to view time as a resource that should be tracked strictly. Timekeeping is essential to a living world and anyone saying otherwise shouldn’t be taken seriously. Unfortunately, many RPGs that are made today don’t treat time as a resource, but there are a few. This is something Shadowdark does very well and, of course, the BrOSR crowd has written exhaustively about how they used it in various systems. It’s a small addition in the grand scheme of things, but the results are game-changing. I encourage everyone to take timekeeping seriously just as Gary Gygax himself said you should.

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As I have mentioned a few times, my latest Nigthhaven campaign currently consists of two non-gamers; my dad and my little sister’s boyfriend. Neither of them have much in the way of gaming experience, although both of them do have baseline knowledge of the fantasy genre. I outlined the in-game actions of my new party in The Rake’s Report 001, but I wanted to discuss some of the out-of-game stuff too, especially since this is my first time using Shadowdark. I found the experience of making characters to be very intuitive, not too time-consuming and easy to teach. I also found that my players, inexperienced as they were, picked up on the basic idea very fast, especially with a couple pieces of advice that I gave to them. I’ll explain exactly how as we proceed, but my ultimate conclusion from this experience is that normal people with few preconceived notions about the game are actually pretty good at picking the game up and playing in a pro-social way. To find out how, let’s dig into how the session went.

Before game day, my sister’s boyfriend, who I will call Jordan throughout the article for expediency and anonymity, reached out to me to ask how he should prepare for the game. I was really impressed that he reached out as I figured he was playing just to get to know my dad and I better, but he seemed genuinely interested in not just playing the game but playing it well. I told him two things to help him get his head right. The first was to always say “I want to do x” instead of “Can I do x?” The habit of what’s often called “Mother-May-I roleplaying” is an early development from not knowing the rules and it can be a hard habit to shake. It’s the wrong framing for the table-top too because your actions are unlimited. You aren’t tied to a handful of possible inputs, you just need to call your spot and I’ll tell you what to roll. The other piece of advice I gave him was to treat character creation more like discovery. Yes, he should look over the classes, think about what he’s interested in, etc but because we’ll be rolling for stats, it will be much more rewarding and much less frustrating if you let the dice lead. To his credit, that’s exactly what he did and he had some serious beginners luck on his rolls. I had both players roll 3 stat arrays and then choose which one to use as their first character and he rolled a character with a natural 17 as his highest stat and no single stat under a 12. A true miracle character.

Unlike Jordan, my Dad was coming in with some RPG experience, mostly in the form of MUDs. Because of that, Dad was approaching the table with a handful of ideas forming in his mind about what kind of character he wanted to play. I gently discouraged this though and, to his credit, he didn’t play the “But that’s not what I had in mind for my character” game that I’ve dealt with in the past. Dad was also not as lucky with his dice rolls. While Jordan rolled about as well as anybody could, Dad’s first character had single-digit stats in everything but Wisdom. He created the world’s best bartender or the world’s worst Priest. Of course, he went with one of his alternates that had a respectable 15 high stat with only one negative modifier coming from a 9. Dad was a good sport and this illustrates why I believe in creating multiple characters for the first session. Generating 3-5 characters up-front instead of just 1 reinforces the idea that this character isn’t supposed to be your idealized alter-ego. He isn’t your OC, he isn’t particularly special (yet), and his perspective is a borrowed one. If he dies, you have a number of replacements on the bench. If he’s in time jail, you have another character to utilize while you wait for his timer to run out. If he survives and thrives, then you have a special character that you can tell stories about. The problem with conventional play is not that it values cool, powerful characters and epic stories. The problem is that it puts the cart before the horse because of a high time preference.

There were two things that genuinely surprised me. First, both Dad and Jordan read The Rake’s Codex. I’ve given experienced players 1-2 paragraphs of primer material on a campaign setting that they never read, but these guys read a 152 page book of their own volition without my suggestion that they do so. Granted, one of them is my father who was likely to read the book anyway, but it’s nice to know that they wanted to interface with my campaign. The other thing that surprised me was that both of them chose to play classes I created instead of one of the default Shadowdark classes. I almost cautioned them against doing this. After all, I’m one of the loudest voices calling for people to play RAW before adding and subtracting parts. That being said, I do plan to publish these classes in the forthcoming Shadowdark editions of The Rake’s Codex. Somebody’s got to playtest these classes and they seem happy to do so. It’s apparent that they’re putting a lot of trust in me to keep things fair and they’re willing to engage with my work. I think this is the core of this new group that has me excited to keep playing with them. As Billy Joel would say, it’s a matter of trust.

We talk all the time about high-trust roleplaying, but trust is something that’s built over time. It’s hard to trust people you just met, even if you share a mutual love of RPGs and a common goal of creating a fantastic game. Again, I must reiterate that RPGs are games and when you treat them like games then it’s not so bizarre to play them with family. Games can get competitive but we ultimately trust each other to play fair, follow the rules and be good sports. So who is going to be introduced to this game in the future? Exclusively friends and family and I mean that very seriously. My dad has already invited a handful of people from his church that may join us in the next couple weeks, I may invite some close friends, and we are going to proceed with that as criteria for joining. I know that they’re willing to engage with the game and with my the stuff I come up with. They know that I’m experimenting. They trust me to be even-handed in my application of the rules. I trust them to follow the rules, even in the event that they get competitive with me or with each other.

If you read my campaign report, you’ll see roughly how things worked out during the first session. For the record, my Dad is Argonne de Gasse and Jordan is Ghostblade. I’m impressed with how they’ve adapted to the game and I’m really looking forward to the next session and, especially, what happens when we introduce new players. They know that the clock is ticking and events are moving. Will they want to play more when they see what happens in their absence? What factions are they going to buddy up with? Who are they going to piss off with their actions? I think they’re going to find themselves in-over-their-heads in much the same way their characters are. You know what it’s called when the lines are blurred between character and player? Immersion.

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The following is a play report for session 1 of my latest campaign in Nighthaven using Shadowdark. The story you are about to read is true and names have not been changed so that the innocent and guilty may receive their just desserts.

Nighthaven is like a corrupted heart. The innocent and unsuspecting enter her walls through the arteries of commerce and are expelled from them infected with her disease, rotting from the inside out. I, the Rake, know their stories for my eyes and ears are omnipresent and always observing. One such innocent soul is the young lord Thomas Foss. He set out for Nighthaven in his father’s carriage, a detachment of five men-at-arms in his company, to meet and retrieve his betrothed Thea for a grand wedding in the rolling hills of Emmelot to the South. Their trip was beset with all sorts of ill omens, the worst of which was a manticore just outside the borders of Cromwell’s Keep. The beast took the lives of three men and left the other two grievously wounded. Though Foss was troubled by events thus far, he had no idea that the worst was still in front of him. Still, things looked up when he found two itinerant warriors waiting in the assessor’s line at the gates of Nighthaven.

In point-of-fact, the warriors were the ones to approach him. An odd pairing, these two warriors. The first was a former scholar, Argonne de Gasse, who found that his love of swordplay and penchant for heroics outweighed his desire for knowledge. The second was a mysterious young man. He had been brought up as a traveling minstrel but likewise found himself drawn to violence as a trade. While his companion Argonne was drawn to the thrill and challenge of swordplay, he was drawn to the feeling of power that one gets from catching an opponent unaware and killing him before he even realizes what’s happening. If the young minstrel ever had a name, he abandoned it long ago. Now, he insists on being called “Ghostblade.” A few have laughed at him for being so macabre with his nom de guerre, but those few are dead now. Fortunately for all present, Ghostblade is wise enough to allow his more genial companion to speak for him. Indeed, Argonne was able to secure both of them passage and payment by volunteering their services to young Foss who paid the duty for himself and his retainers to the city in advance. A mutually beneficial arrangement to be sure, but entropy always finds a way to strike from the cover of serendipity.

Upon arrival at the city gates, a Guard Sergeant boarded the carriage to send Lord Foss immediately to the Gate District Garrison to meet with Captain Carver. Along the way, the carriage stopped at The Sellsword’s Mission of Kador so that the two injured men-at-arms could receive treatment. Argonne accompanied the wounded man and spoke with the mission’s rector, Brother Clement. From the young priest Argonne learned that the Gate District of Nighthaven was being haunted by what was surely a monster, but the Guard was not responding in an appropriate manner. The city ought to be in full lockdown as the Guard ferreted out the monster but instead the Guard was behaving as if the violence was a set of unconnected killings or, at worst, the work of a human killer. Brother Clement beseeched Argonne for help, bemoaning his lack of resources for handling a monster while affirming his duty as a Soldier of Kador to fight evil. Argonne told him that he would have to confirm with his companions but that he would return on the morrow with an answer.

At the Garrison, Clement’s paranoia was confirmed as Captain Carver informed Lord Foss that his betrothed had gone missing and that the Guard was doing everything in its power to find her. Our pair of warriors also came face-to-face with Lieutenant Lionel Simm, the Hammer of the Streets. Ghostblade’s impulsive reaction to Simm’s stony demeanor almost created an incident, but he once again yielded to his level-headed companion. When pressed, Simm gave little away but did inform Argonne that the brutal murders were the probable work of a monster and that the reasons for not initiating a Corpse Walk were political. Before they departed, Simm warned them that they should be careful in their pursuit of this matter, but that he would assist them where he could. What began as a means of passage through the city gates and some quick coin was swiftly evolving into an ordeal.

Lord Foss was distraught by the news, of course. He had lived a charmed 24 years with few tragedies and suddenly his fiance was missing in a city where a monster was running rampant and the Guard was seemingly more focused on making sure nobody figured out the truth rather than exterminating the beast. Left with no other option, he summoned his new companions and asked them to name their price for finding his beloved alongside his remaining man-at-arms, Captain Garret, who would serve as his witness that the job was done. Argonne and Ghostblade were merciful, asking for only 100 Gold Pieces with 25 paid up-front. Time will tell if this streak of altruism will be a weakness or a strength. After a night’s sleep in a comfortable inn, the two swordsmen set out for The Sellsword’s Mission to commit their services to Brother Clement. He showed them two new victims who had arrived overnight. One of them was wounded but pulling through. The other had suffered a bite from the creature and was being monitored to see if he turned, for Brother Clement believed the creature to be a fledgling Vampire. Argonne spoke to the wounded man and discovered that he was a 10 of Batons from The Knave Syndicate and that he received his wounds protecting his King from the creature. The 10, identifying himself as Kimbo, told them to go speak with his King and Bower at The Royal Flush Club for further information. Brother Clement suggested that they seek out the old monster hunter Willem the Stalker for detailed information on Vampires. Our twin protagonists set out to find the Stalker. I shall continue to observe their actions closely…

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My name is Ryan Howard and I am a Millennial. This means that in the halcyon days of 2009, I was active on the internet, especially YouTube. Like many other young men at the time, this meant that I was directly exposed to the swirling void of chaos and suffering known as Channel Awesome. The topic of Channel Awesome is too big for this article. The downfall of this site has been going on longer than their glory days lasted at this point and there are far too many details to cover in what should be a brief introduction. For those of you who don’t know any of this story though, Channel Awesome was a collective of video creators who covered nostalgic movies, video games, comic books and, of course, table-top games. For my generation of nerds, Channel Awesome was a nexus point of all of our interests and the place where many of us were introduced to new interests. It also is one of the biggest examples of how destructive ego can be. It turned out to be a collective of high-strung, thin-skinned, chaotic back-biters and none were more high-strung and chaotic than Noah Antwiler, AKA “The Spoony One,” or just “Spoony.” Spoony has more lore than Warhammer 40K and tracking his downfall has been a project of over a decade. This man is a walking disaster and a loathsome, miserable bastard who single-handedly torpedoed his own career. However, there was a time where he made some of the most popular content on the internet covering everything from obscure movies to professional wrestling. My personal favorite series of his though, was a side series to his regular content where he told stories about playing RPGs and working at a game store. This series was called Counter Monkey and it is the sole reason why I decided to play D&D. Not only is is formative to my early days of roleplaying, but I genuinely believe that there are nuggets of gold to be found throughout the 68 episodes made.

Unlike his regular content which involved a fair bit of production, Counter Monkey is a low-effort vlog-style series done in one take. The videos are rambling stories about RPGs. The name came from his days working at a Phoenix-area game store in the late 90’s and early 2000’s when people would walk up to the counter and shoot the breeze about gaming. He and his co-workers called those people “counter monkeys” and this series is Spoony taking on that role himself and talking to you, the audience, as if you were working the counter. These videos ranged from just under 10 minutes to just under 2 hours depending on the story and how many tangents Spoony went down. I didn’t know anything about RPGs when I was a teenager, but Spoony had this ability to make his gaming stories seem epic. The best example of this is his two-part series on the Thieves’ World RPG. I found his enthusiasm for the game infectious and I longed for the chance to participate in something as grand as one of Spoony’s campaigns. That was twelve years ago though. I was seventeen and stupid, susceptible to suggestions made by people who were, in hindsight, turbo losers. It brought me to the dance, sure, but is there any value to be found in the videos today? Surprisingly, yes. In fact, there are many things that Spoony discusses in his videos that you can hear from the likes of The BrOSR. There are episodes of Counter Monkey that strongly advocate for rules mastery, reactive GMing, descriptive roleplay, and even open tables.

A recurring theme of Spoony’s stories is an arms race between players and the GM over rules. The players would get a new splat book (the 90’s!) which would create a new meta at the table. As they began running rough-shod over his plans, Spoony would have to think on his feet, research the rules and resources available to him and craft a response that followed logically. More often than not, this was animated by a spirit of “I’m gonna get those bastards!” but, in practice, Spoony was creating a living campaign world where threats and tension escalated in proportionate response to the actions of the players. Thieve’s World is a good example of this, but he also illustrates this idea in the show’s first installment, Shadowrun: The Squirt Gun Wars. Spoony frequently describes himself as a harsh DM, steadfastly adhering to the rules. Knowing what we know about his thin skin for criticism, it’s fair to assume that he probably wasn’t as even-handed as his stories made it sound like he was. Still, the overall lessons you can mine from his stories are solid.

Spoony was also capable of giving truly good advice on purpose too. For my money, the best example of this comes in his video The Bardic Knock Spell in which he gives advice to players about better quality roleplaying. I rewatched this video just a few days ago, which is why I ultimately landed on this topic for the week, and it definitely holds up. The premise of this episode is replacing the phrase “I use x skill” with a description of an actual action. It’s the kind of thing you can hear someone like Crispy discuss in his videos these days, but here it was over a decade earlier. Something hit me while watching these videos that was staring me in the face the whole time; Spoony was not some kind of luminary of RPGs, he was just a veteran player dispensing common sense. He’s a product of a time before Critical Role and before the lifestyle brand overhaul of the hobby. These videos stand as a kind of archive of RPG common knowledge right at the end of the 4e era. It shows just how much was lost in just a short decade and also how much RPG discourse changed in the same amount of time. He’s not over concerned with replicating fantasy stories or what kind of voice his character should have. Instead, Spoony’s commentary is far more focused on understanding mechanics, keeping a world alive, and keeping the game moving and focused at the table. It’s refreshing after all this time and, even going back to when the content was new, it definitely inspires people to up their games.

The last thing to point out about these Counter Monkey videos is that they not only introduced me to D&D, but other games as well. Spoony was really good at pointing out the cool things that non-D&D games did. As previously mentioned, my favorite episode is focused on Green Ronin’s Thieves’ World. From him I learned about Vampire, Shadowrun, West End Games’ Star Wars and even GURPS. This is probably a product of the fact that 4e was the current edition of D&D at the height of Spoony’s output and the consensus on 4e was already settled by the time I discovered him so he had ample incentive to spread the word about alternative RPGs. As interested as I was in fantasy roleplaying, I was even more excited to discover that other genres were covered by these kinds of games. Again, this was one of my earliest exposures to roleplaying as a medium. I vaguely knew that a thing called Dungeons & Dragons existed and I saw all of the books in my local comic shop, but I had zero idea what any of it was. If I could learn to play these games, then I could have access to basically infinite games. No more waiting on video games to be made on topics I liked or having to deal with lame stories, I could make my own with a group of players. It was an exciting prospect for teenage Ryan and the fact that there was an element of performance to it all hit me right in my theater kid heart.

In a weird way, I owe it all to Noah Antwiler. That’s a profoundly weird and slightly shameful thing to admit, but that’s the reality. I was exposed to this profoundly odd but weirdly charismatic figure right as his star was starting to crash and, in the midst of his epic crashout, his videos inspired me to get started in RPGs. If it weren’t for these videos, there would never have been a Rollin’ Bones. There would be no Nighthaven and I would be doing something other than this on my lunch breaks. If you’re reading this, Mr. Antwiler, thank you. I realize that many of those videos were made during some dark times in your life and I hope it cheers you to know that they had an impact on someone. For everyone else, this should be a fun trip down memory lane or perhaps an exploration of content you never knew about. All of Counter Monkey is still available on YouTube right now, including a playlist that puts them in chronological order. Go check them out and see how much of it still holds up.

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Sandy Petersen is not the only old-timer dishing out bad takes on the timeline. If only he were the only one. This hobby might be in better shape if the problem were isolated. Unfortunately, it looks like Mike Mearls is suffering from a similar affliction. In a recent post on X, Mearls opined the fact that the Rogue’s Sneak Attack damage does not scale well compared to the damage output of the Fighter. On its face, the idea that a sneaky thief-like character would be as good at dishing out physical punishment as a trained warrior is stupid. However, when you consider this in the context of the game he famously worked on, 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, you may find that this is just a symptom of a larger problem with not just 5e but with post-2000 D&D in general. Since 3rd edition, a lot of time has been put into making every class a viable combatant. Spellcasters now have cantrips that serve as standard attacks meant to replicate a Fighter’s ability to attack with a weapon. Characters are given feats that allow them to take on skills from other classes. Subclasses are designed to turn classes into facsimiles of each other. A Warlock can select Hexblade and basically become a dark Paladin. A Rogue can select the Scout subclass and become a better Ranger than the actual Ranger. So much of this character choice bloat boils down to enabling classes to be better stand-up fighters. D&D seems to have forgotten a few fundamentals not just of fantasy gaming but of fantasy in general. Not everyone needs to stand and fight. Not everyone needs to deal massive amounts of damage every single round. Hell, not everyone needs to make an attack every single round. The Rogue, a muddy conglomeration of two previously distinct classes, is a perfect illustration of these problems. Today we’ll discuss the Rogue and what it actually should be.

As I previously mentioned, a Rogue is a mashup of two older classes, the Thief and the Assassin. The Thief dates back to the first Greyhawk supplement from 1975 and represents the Grey Mouser/Ali Baba type of sneaky, dexterous filcher. The Thief had a suite of skills like pickpocketing, climbing shear surfaces, and sneaking. Interestingly enough, Gygax cites Roger Zelazny’s Shadowjack as a major inspiration. For those of you who don’t know, Shadowjack is the main character of the novel Jack of Shadows who draws magical power from shadows. Thieves have a borderline supernatural skill at thievery, climbing, sneaking, etc. Part of their skill set is backstabbing. Naturally, if you’re hidden, you’ll be adept at appearing behind enemies and leaving a dagger in their back. Flanking attacks already get a bonus and the Thief gets the benefit of doubling their weapon damage if the attack is successful. The Assassin uses Thief skills at three levels lower than their own (minimum of level 1) but gets to backstab and, if he has the drop on his target, gets to roll on the Assassination table. The key difference between backstabbing and assassination is that a successful assassination roll kills the target instantly. Assassins are also skilled in using poisons and in disguising themselves. Still, both classes have lower hitpoints meaning that they’re better off striking from the shadows than squaring up with an Orc. Their other skills reinforced this and gave them other options besides attacking. Thieves could partially read and decipher other languages and magical texts, meaning that they could potentially utilize spell scrolls with a chance of catastrophic failure. Assassins had skills with poison meaning that they could debilitate a target in one shot depending on saves. These characters aren’t gonna be swangin’ and bangin’ every round like a Fighter. They’ll be sneaking, hiding, sabotaging, and lining up for the big one.

In 2nd Edition AD&D, classes were put into categories. Fighting characters like the Fighter, Ranger and Paladin were in the Warrior group. There was a Priest group, a Wizard group, and a Rogue group. The Rouge classes were Bard and Thief. Assassin was absent but later added back in through supplemental material. In the early days though, Thief and Assassin were basically combined into Thief. The full synthesis wouldn’t come until 3rd edition where the class was renamed to Rogue, Bard was separated out into its own class, and Assassin became a prestige class that you trained into at higher levels. From here on, the Thief was gone and replaced by “The Rogue.” I think the idea was not to pigeon-hole players into thinking they needed to steal things to play properly and both Thief and Assassin would continue to be repurposed as prestige classes and then subclasses in 5e. I suppose the idea is that a Rogue is the gen ed requirement and then you major in Thievery or Assassination moving forward. I can follow the logic of the decision in my head, but I disagree with it. Thieves and Assassins are very different. They have a small amount of skill overlap and may need similar aptitudes, but their professional directives are entirely different. Thieves retrieve things while Assassins kill people. Most Thieves pulling a heist would try to avoid bloodshed as it increases the likelihood of discovery. Most Assassins wouldn’t distract themselves from their target by stealing things unless doing so would advance their goal. A Thief has broad skill application whereas an Assassin has very specific skills. I don’t think it makes sense to have them begin in the same place and then branch off. I think they need to be separated entirely.

3e is not just where Thieves and Assassins were fused, but also where D&D begins to shift into what some call a “Grid Game.” My friend RuleofThule on X described this in a response to one of my posts, but the basic idea is that combat was increasingly resolved on a grid and the ubiquity of the grid got players out of the habit of picturing combat in a real location and into the habit of viewing it as taking place on a grid. I call this the “JRPG Pocket Dimension,” after the phenomenon in Japanese-made RPG video games where running into enemies shifts the perspective of the game into a battle world where the environment looks like where you were but you cannot interact with it and your actions have no impact on it. This isn’t the fault of Square or Nintendo or anyone else who made video game RPGs. They were limited by the hardware of the time and even now games with fully dynamic environments are rare. Table-top RPGs have no such restrictions though and there are mechanical advantages to be found by utilizing the environment. Imagine a fight in a castle corridor lined with suits of armor. In a video game, they might not factor in at all or they might fall over if something hits them or they might be an object that can be thrown in rare circumstances. In a table-top game though, the possibilities are endless. A player could hide inside one, push one over onto an unsuspecting enemy, trip an enemy into one, etc. They can be a means of escape, a force multiplier, or something a particularly clever Wizard could use to wreak havoc. Most players don’t think like that anymore though because video games and grid combat have inadvertently convinced them that combat happens is a pocket dimension that has no impact on the rest of the world. To most players, that means everyone has to line up and fight toe-to-toe. Even backstabs are treated that way. It’s the conga line of death with players just trying to get behind their enemies every turn.

With this mindset, players expressed two needs. Firstly, they need to be more durable. This means more hitpoints and more defensive abilities. Secondly, they need to feel like they’re contributing to combat every round. If they feel like they can’t contribute in any other way, then that means they have to fight. Suddenly you start to get padded hitpoints and every class has some kind of attack they can do every round. The video game influence is obvious and this term DPS suddenly enters the conversation. For those not in the know, DPS stands for “Damage Per Second.” It’s mostly associated with World of Warcraft and it refers to characters that deal high damage rapidly but don’t have much in the way of defense. When I posted my initial criticism of Mearls, this was the most common response I got. “The Rogue is a DPS!” In a table-top game, this category is entirely meaningless and this type of language should be expunged from pen and paper gaming as a whole. DPS matters in video games because of a lack of options outside of directly targeting an enemy with a weapon attack. These things will not be on your character sheet but a clever player can figure them out. Some games even have systems for this. In Shadowdark they’re called improvised actions. The DPS Rogue who dances around the battlefield playing the shoulder tap game is stupid. The Thief who slips out of combat, shoves the archer off of the balcony and then cuts the rope holding the chandelier up so that it drops on the enemies below is awesome.

So how should this archetype be handled? Firstly, Assassins and Thieves are different classes. Do you want your DPS glass canon? That’s an Assassin. It’s fine if the Assassin is an Ezio Auditore type and I even like the idea of both the Thief and the Assassin at higher levels being able to point in the direction of an enemy and whistle and then that enemy is swarmed by hirelings. That’s your force multiplier at higher levels. You run a guild, don’t you? Bring 5 initiates with you on an adventure and have them scout and sabotage. Focusing specifically on the Thief, don’t feel like you have to stay in combat or you aren’t contributing. You can climb, right? Get vertical and drop something on someone’s head. The hitpoint bloat of modern games is the reason why you feel like you have to have your damage scale equally with the Fighter, so that’s going away. The Thief is not here to fight. He is here to sneak, take occasional opportunistic shots, and create general havoc within the environment. The Rogue needs to go away and the Thief and Assassin need to be restored to their proper place. DPS is meaningless in a game without technological limitations and the Fighter needs to be the only one worrying about toe-to-toe slugging.

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There’s been drama in the scene related to the BrOSR. I know that sentence may shock some of you, but I can assure you that it is true. The most recent dust-up stems from a video made by Luke Hart of the DM Lair in which he outlines the history of the Braunstein and how to use it in your D&D game. The problem though is that Luke had clearly pulled information from various familiar sources, most notably Brozer, but did not give credit to the Bros. When I say that he pulled from Brozer, I mean that he verbatim quoted the definition of Braunstein from it. He also outlines the idea of the session Braunstein which is a concept created by Jeffro Johnson without giving any sort of attribution. In fact, Luke credits only two people. In the video, he mentions the Braunstein creator David Wesely and, in the video description, he mentions my good friend Harmony Ginger who he has been consulting on Braunstein-adjacent topics for a few months now. He did not mention Jeffro, not even in text, nor did he mention Meffridus, Bdubs or anyone else who was instrumental in reviving these ideas. The Braunstein is coming back in a big way and much of it is due to the work done by the collection of lovable miscreants known as the BrOSR. The idea is penetrating the mainstream of RPG discussions and it is clear to me that it will drive the important conversations within the RPG industry over the next five years. In that time, many people will glom onto the idea to present themselves as cutting-edge. Inevitably, these people will influence others who will have never heard of David Wesely, Secrets of Blackmoor, or Jeffro Johnson. It will just be an idea that they heard from Luke Hart, Harmony, me or any number of people talking about it now. It will spread, be commodified, be sterilized and homogenized and eventually become a shadow of itself in the collective consciousness of the masses. At least, that’s what will happen if those of us who spread the idea are not careful to credit those who did this work. Today, I will discuss how culture grows and spreads from the fringes to the masses and where exactly this Braunstein revival came from in the hope that those of you who want to pursue this style of play will know who you have to thank for it.

My analysis of culture comes courtesy of author, podcaster and Twitter troll Michael Malice. In his book The New Right, Malice puts forward the idea that culture begins on the fringes. Small outsider groups begin the practice. One example that Malice put forward is the historical fact that wearing red used to be reserved for prostitutes in many cases. Suddenly the origins of Nighthaven’s Sisterhood of Scarlet Madames comes into focus. Gradually, the fringe practice or idea is adopted by a wider audience of people with a bit of an edge looking to position themselves as iconoclasts. It becomes a subculture and then that subculture is adopted by a broader culture. The trappings of the subculture are seen outside of their usual confines as they become homogenized and commodified by corporations. The example that Malice uses for this process is punk rock, a genre born in dingy clubs that was edgy and dangerous 50 years ago but has become so culturally ubiquitous that a teenage girl can walk into Forever 21 and buy a Ramones shirt without even knowing that they’re the “Hey! Oh! Let’s go!” band, much less knowing that that song is called Blitzkrieg Bop or that the Ramones are anything other than t-shirt branding. If the BrOSR were the Ramones, then now would be 1976, the debut album has dropped, and you can think of ideas like 1:1 Time as their Blitzkrieg Bop. The idea has breached its containment zone and now there will be a wave of people inspired by them building new ideas on the Braunstein foundation. There will also be clout chasers, impostors and also-rans trying to position themselves as the innovators.

At this point, there are no more valid claims of authorship, stated or implied. David Wesely invented the Braunstein. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax took elements of it and put them into Dungeons & Dragons. People like Ben Robbins wrote about it sporadically but Braunstein was mostly forgotten until 2019 when Griffin Morgan released the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary. Inspired by that documentary, Jeffro Johnson began researching Original D&D and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to rediscover how these games are supposed to work, documenting the process on his blog. Around the same time, Meffridus and Bdubs began playing with Jeffro in these experimental games and the three of them developed the persona and tone of the BrOSR and its rhetoric. From there, a couple dozen other guys came in to form the core of the movement. Guys like Jon Mollison, Fluid, Oghma, Macho Mandalf, Cirsova, Brigadine and Gelatinous Rube (to name a few) made up the core of the original movement. If I didn’t mention your name specifically guys, I apologize. Dundermoose, Crossface and Krafty Matt also deserve special mention in my mind. Dunder did a lot to evangelize the movement and Krafty and Crossface were instrumental in getting me to entertain the ideas of the movement and for getting the ideas of book control and RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) into the conversation around Braunstein and faction play. The people I mentioned here are the ones who deserve thanks and credit for this thing gaining steam and popularity. Those guys will likely point you to others who deserve credit as well. Everyone else, myself included, is an adopter. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that either. I wasn’t in the room when it happened. I had to have Jeffro, Bdubs and Crossface explain these things to me after the fact. Now I have these ideas in my lexicon and they are informing my work. I acknowledge their influence and thank them for doing the work of researching and testing these ideas and posting their findings online for us to review.

It is a good thing that is happening right now. The ideas of the Bros are good and they are spreading at the hands of great ambassadors like Scutifer Mike, Dunder, Harmony, etc. People like Luke Hart who have built up large audiences are now paying attention to these ideas and discussing them seriously. That’s good. What’s bad though is when someone like Luke who knows better refuses to acknowledge the source of these ideas, even when quoting from them verbatim. Either he’s afraid to be associated with the fringe group that generated the ideas in the first place or he’s trying to subtly position himself as an author and authority on these ideas. Let this serve as a warning. Credit for this innovation belongs to the Bros. If you aren’t willing to acknowledge them, then you aren’t ready for this yet.

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Nerds ruin everything. Absolutely everything. I could end the article right there but I feel obligated to expound upon my statement because some of you pay money to support my writing and, considering the source of this statement, I need to actually justify my position. After all, am I, an RPG blogger and publisher who named his child after a Batman character, not a nerd too? Well, no. I don’t think I am a nerd. I think I was at one point in my life, probably for a majority of my life at least from the time that I was 13 until just a few years ago. These days though? Well, I certainly still enjoy fantasy, science fiction, comic books, etc. I dedicate time to interfacing with these things. I like to spend time with people who like these things. At the end of the day though, these things do not define me the way that they used to. Do your consumer habits and interests define your personality? Congratulations, Urkel. Are you a complete person apart from those interests who is able to carry on a conversation about something other than your niche interests? If so, congratulations on being a normal person. Unfortunately, normal people are becoming more and more abnormal as consumer culture has turned vast swathes of people into nerds. There’s no difference between the guy in the dandruff-covered Star Wars t-shirt who can’t hold a conversation not centered on that franchise and the guy in the football jersey who can’t hold a conversation not centered on sports or gambling. Every person who constantly gushes about the latest show that you totally have to watch? Nerds. The girl who suddenly becomes a homicide detective whenever the latest docu-drama drops onto Netflix? She’s a nerd too. Nerds are consumption machines who have organized their identity around consumer brands and hold them sacred. These people ruin everything. This snapped into sharp focus during a conversation with another normal man during a church social event I recently attended.

As I chronicled in a recent article, I have been searching for a regular in-person game since I moved back to North Carolina. My Father, himself eager to begin the campaign, has been helping me get this started by introducing me to potentially interested players. I was speaking with one of these perspective players over beers at a local brewery when I laid out my vision for the game. You will all be familiar with this if you read my articles. It’s a Shadowdark campaign set in the city of Nighthaven. Players will roll up 3-4 characters, pick the one they want to start with and hold the others in reserve. We’ll start off with my adventure Corpse Walk as an introduction to the factions within the city and immediately the entire city will be open to them to explore. Each week, players will be able to group up, pick an activity or a location to explore and then we’ll run it during game time. Outside of sessions, the world moves in 1:1 time. Factions will interact with each other and with the players as they act. So far, so BrOSR. The players direct the world and the world responds. There’s no weekly “story” and there’s plenty of room for players to dip in and out as their schedules permit so long as they’re okay with the world continuing to move without them. When I described this plan for the game, the guy looked at me and said;

“That sounds great! Last time I tried to play there were a bunch of conflicts with schedules and the GM was always frustrated about what to do with characters who weren’t there. This sounds great though. Do most people play this way?”

It hit me like a lightning bolt. “That sounds great! Do most people play that way?” No, unfortunately they don’t. For some reason, the most pro-social version of the game, the one driven by players themselves and open enough for players to come-and-go as their schedules permit, is seen as some kind of niche within a niche and the people who champion it are consistently shouted down. Why though? Why is this style of play so odious to the RPG cognoscenti? As a player, you get as much or as little playtime as you want. As a GM, you consistently have a quorum of players so that you actually get to run a session. There’s barely any prep involved. Just roll on some tables. The world is dynamic so it’s nearly impossible for things to be repetitive. Even if your players go back to the same dungeon 5 times over, there will be something new to find there if you’re tracking time correctly. Players will be the center of the universe and everything done will be interesting to them because they are deciding what to do. If they’re bored, it’s their own damn fault. What’s more, this style of play directly incentivizes recurrent play because the players who show up most often and engage with the world will get more out of it than those who are in-and-out. With factions, your players have a source of constant drama that will drive action. They will feel ownership of this world because it is driven by their actions making it their world. This is a damn-near bulletproof operation. What’s the problem here?

The problem is nerds. The nerds cannot handle this style of play. Firstly, this is an intensely social style of play. It’s club style play and, eventually, there will be a hierarchy of high-level players that basically direct the game with their actions. You see this develop in Vampire LARPs, although those have their own set of problems. Suffice it to say that players will have to learn to collaborate with each other, make deals with each other, and ultimately be able to shake hands and say “Good game!” when the session is over for the night. This is a competitive game and the kind of nerds that have infested this hobby hate the idea of competitive games because they hate competition. If the game is competitive, it means that a character can’t be special just because it’s written on their character sheet or in their backstory. You become special by doing exceptional things and getting people to support you. In a club-style game, there may come a time where multiple Fighters are of lordly rank and may be vying for a throne. This means that one player will have to convince enough of his fellow lords to back his play for the throne. That requires social capital and it requires all participants to be cool and remember that, once the session ends, they aren’t real kings or nobles. Normal people have meaning outside of the game. They have good jobs, loving families, children, etc. The game is just a bit of fun for them. Nerds have nothing and must retreat into the game to avoid the stark reality of their meaningless existence. If they can’t even be King of Fantasyland, what’s the point? They can’t leave it up to fate, they must control their status through iron-fisted tyranny of the table.

Players and GMs fall victim to the curse of clinging to their power in the game. This is the real problem with the oft-vilified Rules Lawyer. A well-adjusted player practicing system mastery and book control gently admonishing a fellow player or GM over a misapplication of a rule is very different from the frothy-mouthed bark of the Rules Lawyer. Rules Lawyers often don’t practice system mastery because they only know enough of the book to twist it in their favor. That’s the difference between a Rules Lawyer and a player with system mastery, by the way. Another expression of antisocial behavior designed to control the table from players is the Power Gamer. Once again, this is not the player who has optimized their character from careful study of game mechanics and a clear notion of what their character should be able to do. No, this is the player who cannot shut up about all of the cool stuff his character does, demands the spotlight, demands the coolest gear and the best loot, and then screams bloody murder when the dice deny them their moment of glory. This is also expressed in the overly horny player who must sleep with everything. They can never just play smart, get better and take Ls on the chin when they inevitably come. They must be the coolest, strongest, smartest, sexiest character in the game at all times regardless of reality. This is frequently the source of the infamous “I shouldn’t even have to roll” cope. These attitudes will drive other players from the table in droves. This is poor sportsmanship plain and simple and it’s the source of the continuous downward spiral of the hobby.

I did mention that GMs exhibit these poor behaviors too. There are two common ways that this expresses itself from behind the screen; The Author and The God. The Author GM is someone who’s tried and failed over and over to write a fantasy novel and turned their half-baked world and plot into a campaign. That in and of itself isn’t a problem though. The problem comes when they can’t let go of their role as the author. When the players don’t find their “cool” NPCs cool, aren’t interested in their political intrigue, and don’t want to pursue the objective laid out by the remaining plot structure of the aborted novel, the Author GM fumes. The God GM takes this to a whole new level by directly intervening in the game by breaking rules, altering stats, or fudging dice to achieve certain outcomes. As I have discussed numerous times, doing these things violates the ethos of the game and is not acceptable behavior. When normal people see things like this, they rightly recognize it as cheating and don’t want any part of it. They don’t see this as “your story” or “the table’s story.” It is a game and the GM is the referee. Video games do linear stories better than RPGs, so all you’re doing is creating a crappy video game with no graphics that you can only play at certain times. GMs have to relinquish power to the players to dictate the direction of the game and adjudicate accordingly. If your players are enjoying what they’re doing, they’ll prioritize doing it as much as they can.

The BrOSR and other advocates for player-driven open tables are not the ones who scared the normies away from the game. The scariest thing about this hobby to normal people is being committed to a weekly activity where they’re forced to interact with poorly-adjusted weirdos who are constantly fighting out-of-game for the upper hand within the game. They don’t want to be locked into a mediocre version of something they could watch on TV, read in a book or play in a video game because their time is at a premium. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of the game except for the fact that the subject matter of fantasy has been linked in their minds with socially maladapted weirdos. Much of the standard practices of RPG play that have been hammered into us since the early 80’s are just ways of protecting people with poor social skills from having to be social in this social activity of group gameplay. That’s done though. We’ve reached the absolute nadir of that play style and it’s high time we went back to club-style play. RPGs will be competitive and player-driven like other social games. They will adhere to standardized rules and they will be accessible to normal people who are willing to engage with them fully. Why did Jeffro Johnson spend so much time talking about dancing? Why does Crossface primarily focus on discussions of martial arts? These are activities done in groups that are accessible to normal people with normal schedules. People who are willing to dedicate themselves to learning the steps or the moves will get the most out of the activity and the whole community built around these activities will benefit from having more partners available for practice. These communities serve as a way to meet people socially but with an associated activity that’s designed to bring people together. All of this hinges on being open and friendly so that a community can flourish. For all of my harsh rhetoric today, that’s really what I want and I hope to provide that for the people who will be playing in my game.

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