Thank you Stephen for this long and geeky Monday post!
Have a great week everyone!
For those in the readership unfamiliar with the concept of role-playing-games, or an RPG for short, let me explain that an RPG is an interactive game mixing tactical level maneuvering and interpersonal interactions of fictional characters often in an alternate reality or fantasy setting with a randomization factor, such as dice rolls. (Thus, often humorously referred to as roll-playing-games.)
Such games began largely as tactical tabletop miniatures to represent the relative positions of the characters and those who they encountered. In fact one of the leading companies in this emerging field was Tactical Studies Rules or TSR, which produced the original Dungeons & Dragons, D&D.
As the game moved more into role playing and away from the tactical miniatures, that fields was ceded to the likes of Warhammer, which took on more large scale battles getting away from the small group tactical level which was the origin of D&D.
In the original D&D, you could play the character of a Fighter, a Rogue, a Dwarf, or an Elf. Only an elf could use magic, dwarves were better at fighting but naturally slower, the rogue and the elf were lightly armoured and generally suited for distance weapons like bows and arrows, and the rogues could sneak around, but the bulk of any adventure would naturally be the fighters, the soldiers of adventuring.
As a little backdrop, one unfamiliar with the fantasy genre ought to be introduced into the completely anachronistic nature of every fantasy setting. The weapons and armor are essentially patterned after the early to mid middle-ages. (Except for “leather armor” for which there is absolutely no historical evidence that it was ever used by any society at any time.)
However, it is placed in an era of monsters, and fantastic creatures, which generally belong to the era of legend, as some would call it “the age of heroes”, with tales of the likes of Beowulf or Heracles (for those Romanized among you, Hercules). As several heroes in the Iliad traced their ancestry back to Heracles, that would be early to mid bronze age, or about 3000 years before the armor and weapons used in the fantasy settings.
(One of those pet peeves of mine is watching Hollyweird putting steel swords in the hands of people who lived hundreds of years before the oldest known examples of steel swords, in the bronze age, but the fantasy genre does that all the time.)
The restriction that humans could not use magic was in keeping with all of the literary traditions which associated magic with evil (demons, devils, djinn) or the fae (elves, dryads, sprites). People who used magic were either other worldly creatures, such as Gandalf and the other wizards in Lords of the Ring, born of such a creature, such as Merlin who was half demon, or made a pact with such creatures, such as the case with witches.
Anyone who has read King James’s treatise on demonology, or the Malleus Maleficarum, and let’s be honest, who hasn’t, knows that magic is inherently evil and corrupting.
But with the advent of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, AD&D, they separated out the races, technically species, from the classes, so that now dwarves could be fighters or thieves, elves could be simply fighters like Legolas, and humans could use magic like Merlin. They added a few races to reflect the popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien, such as the hobbit, though they called them “halflings”, I presume for copyright reasons.
However, they added a couple seemingly odd choices of additional races. One being a half-elf, which did not seem too far out of line, given a long history of tales of marriages between humans and th fae. But, the enemy of the good creatures in the LotR were the goblins and the orcs, so why did TSR add in the half-orc?
Effectively, a person could, for some perverse desire, then play if not a full monster, at least a partial monster, stronger and more brutish. It was a break from the original, good guys versus the evil monsters orientation of the original game.
In fact, characters were allowed to have a professed alignment or philosophy which was much expanded from the original D&D, now longer just Law and Chaos, or the Neutral in between, (originally to get away from the traditional good versus evil), the player could also choose to be Good or Evil, and a neutral with regards to that too, and to complicate or equivocate things further, they combined the two into nine different alignments.
Which brings us, rather unexpectedly to a YouTuber by the handle of Sargon of Akkad, and a recent discussion on the internet which included a couple statements which started me thinking regarding the moral changes in gaming.
He pointed out that the first character he ever played was a Minotaur, and that he got to go around smashing things. Essentially, his first character was not a character at all but a monster in the traditional view of fantasy. Not too unusual in the gaming world, not too different from the half-orc or the werewolf like creature, the Wolfen, playable in the Paladium game system.
But such a concept would have been unthinkable when the original AD&D system was introduced, to play the evil monster. To be a Minotaur and not be instantly attacked by the city guard as an evil marauding villain would have been unthinkable. Then you look at other games where people play vampires and werewolves or even other monsters as part of the game.
There is a different mentality in a game where you are the creature to be feared rather than the hero opposing such evil. There is an acceptance and understanding of evil itself. I am reminded of a Rolling Stones’ song, “Sympathy for the Devil” and the TV show glorifying a serial killer, “Dexter”, evincing an ever increasing acceptance of evil in society.
The other statement was his dislike of TSR’s alignment system, which many other people have criticized, but I found disturbing because of the moral relativism which his statement espoused.
In particular, he was discussing the Lawful-Good nature of the Paladin character class, stating that a Muslim Paladin would not have the same outlook of what was good or what was lawful as a Christian Paladin because he did not believe that the idea of good and lawful could be universally objective.
This is rather ironic, given that the Paladin character is a fighter patterned after literary and historical figures like Roland and the twelve peers of Charlemagne, who stopped the barbarian Islamic horde from invading France. The name Paladin itself comes from a tale of a Christian knight in a foreign land who loses his armor but yet maintains his Christian virtue.
In short, good is objective and you could not have a Muslim Paladin because the laws of Islam would call for him to commit evil. But once you accept moral relativism, anything goes.
A word on the classes in AD&D, in order to create balance for the players, the magic-user class was created to be the anti-fighter, so he could cast some powerful magic, but he could not use armor or most weapons and was the worst at hand-to-hand combat. But, what class could they create to be the anti-thief?
Enter the creation of cleric, the unsung hero of the AD&D world. The cleric introduced an element of wisdom and morality into the fantasy setting. They made his fighting ability between the thief and the warrior, but he could wear heavy armor, unlike the thief. But to keep him from just being a lesser fighter, they restricted his weapons to those which did not bring blood. (Not historically accurate, but it helped the numerical balance of the game.)
Further, they gave the cleric a type of magical ability, but rather than demonic or scientific in origin, it was divine in nature, a blessing of his devout nature. It was really the introduction of the clerics’ magical/divine healing ability, which allowed for an accelerated game play which would make its way into almost every game thereafter in one form or another.
I have mentioned to others that the AD&D system, 1st edition, was a complete game system with just the first three books. That is because the fourth book, Demigods & Deities, (of which my copy has the Elric & Cthulhu mythos omitted from later editions.) attempted to introduce various examples of pagan deities for Dungeon Masters, DMs to use in their games if they wanted a bit of historical authenticity.
However, in the first books the image of the Cleric, and of the Paladin, fit very well into a very Christian medieval European setting. The Cleric, patterned loosely after the Knights Templar, could easily be seen fighting for God and country, not for a particular or specific pagan god. Much like the Arthurian legends, the Paladin was Galahad or Lancelot or Percival, the quintessential knight in shining armor.
But more powerful characters kept being introduced, balance in the game was lost so that in order to compete with the more powerful competitors, everyone had to work to make their characters stronger, to take advantage of the rules, “holy” warriors were created for different alignments and different gods in the name of “fairness”.
Fantasy lost the morality tale that was the heart of its creation. Good became relative to the “culture” you were playing, that particular “god’s” values. Now, the gamers lament that the SJW types are corrupting their games by trying to force them to the SJWs’ own morality, leading to idiocy like GamerGate, and PC Marvel.
But, it really started long ago, when the gaming world began to deny the concept that good and order were objective concepts, that it was okay to express Christian or Roman or American values in a game as a high moral standard, and that other cultures could simply be wrong, that they could be evil.
Orcs and Goblins, and other such fantasy races and creatures, represent a metaphor for other societies, other cultural norms, without naming them as such. It is the way in which people learn to call evil, evil. When games take away the objective evil, they must also take away the good. If all things are “okay”, then nothing is wrong, then odds are you are the evil.
Vampires are not teen angst ridden glittery perpetual teenagers, they are the walking undead returned from the grave with the stench of decay, creatures of pure horror. It is not okay to portray them as the former. (One of the many lessons of a true understanding of the genre.)
