The Mythical and the Mundane in TTRPGs
Housekeeping
Regular readers will have noticed that my posting schedule has been somewhat erratic (i.e. entirely absent) over the last month. I won’t bore you with the reasons for this, but they are ongoing and it seems implausible that I will be able to return to my weekly publishing timetable in the immediate future. Instead, I will post things as and when I am inspired or motivated to write something coherent, although it seems more probable than not that these pieces will be shorter (or pithier, if one is feeling charitable) and more likely to be opinion-based rather than in-depth discussions of history.
Over the last few weeks and months, I have observed a discussion taking place in certain sections of the TTRPG space. The essence of the disagreement is between those who advocate for game worlds to be underpinned by the dictates and assumptions of myth and those who prefer what I will call naturalism. Narrowly, this divergence was focussed on whether dungeons should ‘make sense’. Does it matter that a monster exists in a self-contained underground environment without taking into account questions of how it got there, why it remains and how it survives? Is it legitimate to say that, in a world of magic and divinity, rational, natural explanations are not only not required but, in some instances, might actively undermine the desirable tone of mystery and otherness of fantasy?
I am by temperament a ‘naturalist’. I don’t believe in ‘the supernatural’ in any sense. For those of you who care about the epistemic details, I would add that I am a methodological naturalist, not a philosophical one. I do not absolutely rule out from first principles the existence of some supernatural phenomena, but I don’t believe we have ever demonstrated the existence of any such thing using the empirical and observational methods that seem to be our most reliable guide to what is real. And yet I have for more than 40 years been playing and running games of make-believe that almost always feature at their core the presumption that some combination of magic, gods, aliens, ghosts, monsters or psychic powers actually exist. Further, I spent a number of years studying late medieval English culture and society and acquired an abiding interest in pre-modern ways of thinking with all that that might be said to entail about alternatives to a modern, naturalistic, world view.
For the purposes of this discussion, the meaningful difference between mythology and naturalism revolves around the question of what I will label explanatory sufficiency. The proponents of worlds of myth and legend are right to point out that it is entirely legitimate to respond to some (perhaps even many) questions with (say) ‘because the gods made things that way’ or some other appeal to authority that lacks any particular justification or explanation. They also have a sound point when they argue that this sort of answer, while perhaps being profoundly unsatisfying to brains that are wired like mine, does conjure up something of a world (whether one calls the world that is being emulated at the table mythic or heroic or fantastic) that is profoundly different from our own. Since I am on record as saying that the enduring appeal of RPGs for me is the capacity they afford to evoke other times and places, it would seem churlish of me to chaff against this preference.
To be clear, I am not wholly against what might cruelly be called ‘just so’ stories or ‘wizards did it’ explanations. These things can be very effective tools for invoking the disorientating sense of a world that is mysterious, capricious, dangerous and wondrous. Another way of thinking about this process can be through an exploration of narrative rigour (or lack thereof). In this conection, it is well worth watching David Lowery’s 2021 film The Green Knight. This loose adaptation of the 14th century Middle English poem Gawain and the Green Knight is an interesting translation to the screen of late medieval narrative concerns and techniques. The film is a dream-like series of encounters between Gawain and those he meets on the way to keep his appointment with the Green Knight. Each of these situations has some immediate dramatic purpose - to present the questing man with a trial or dilemma that he must respond and adapt to. But these events take place not strictly as a logical or narratively satisfying sequence that we would now describe as ‘the plot’ but rather as a series of isolated, almost hallucinogenic, incidents connected only by the role each plays in allowing Gawain to outgrow his previous selfish, dissolute and inconstant character. The comparison to the sometimes jarringly episodic structure of folk and fairy-tales before the Victorian effort to sanitize them should be obvious, as any reading of the stories gathered by the brothers Grimm makes abundantly clear.
It is for this reason, I think, that there is a substantial overlap in the Venn diagram berween ‘advocates for mythic games’ and ‘fans of low- or zero-prep games’. Procedural generation of random session content through the use of more or less sophisticated encounter tables clearly has a tendency to result in a similar sense of narrative disjunction of the kind we see in The Green Knight or fairy tales. This, in turn, perhaps requires (and certainly encourages) the deployment of mythic (lack of) justification and explanation for in-game circumstances and events. It is a matter of taste whether one regards this as an harmonious agreement of form and function or an inevitable consequence of the limits of either or both. I will here employ an almost parodic illustration for effect. The GM uses a dungeon encounter table that yields the result ‘In this 30’ x 30’ stone room lurk a clan of nine gnolls’ and, a few moments later, the roll on the table reveals ‘In the middle of this vaulted stone chamber stands a tomb, on the surface of which reclines an armoured knight fashioned in white marble.’ My rather arid brain jumps to the immersion-breaking thought of ‘Wait… why haven’t the violent and descructive gnolls next door smashed or looted this monument?’ No such tiresomely mundane or stale, literal thoughts need detain GMs and players in a world of myth and mystery where the universe owes you no explanations or reasons.
All of which is to say that I freely concede that my default personal attitude and preference - a desire for rational explanation - actually works directly against my competing interest in ambiguity, mystery and otherworldliness in my games. On some days, I could be persuaded that those who prefer playing in worlds where the answer to ‘How does magic work?’ or ‘Why do dragons exist?’ is some variant of ‘Because that is the way of the world’ are more liberated and freer to exercise imagination and creativity than I, trapped as I am to some degree by the nagging voice in my head that says ‘Yeah. But why?’ In fact, I’ll go further and admit that, in certain situations, my internal demand for satisfying answers to the questions ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ have entirely derailed any attempt at creative output.
Yet, on other days, I would be emboldened to make the claim that, in order to summon a sense of the strange or the magical or the unsettling other, one must be able to measure those things against the mundane, the parochial and the quotidian. To my modern mind, conditioned as it is by a lifetime of media consumption, the disjointed narrative of The Green Knight achieves its queasy and unsettling atmosphere in large part because it stands in contrast to what we might call the ‘ordinary’ structure of most modern visual entertainment. Without that tacitly understood default cinematic grammar, Lowery’s film would be just another series of flickering images on a screen. In the same way, I think I would maintain that even the most ardently mythical quasi-medieval fantasy RPG cannot hope to inspire a sense of the wondrous and the extraordinary absent the abilty to contrast these qualities with the prosaic. Whatever ‘the ordinary’ might mean in the context of any particular game setting, it surely cannot be defined by reference to concepts like ‘it is a deep mystery’ or ‘magic made it happen’.
I like this discussion. I regularly refer to verisimilitude when I am creating content for my games and settings. I don't necessarily think all should be explained, but I would like a feeling of constancy that allows greater immersion, if for no one else, than at the least myself.
Having trained originally as a physicist, I'm with you on the natural explanation of things in the real world, and yet I'm constantly striving to find a non-modern mindset in many of my roleplaying settings. Magic, for example. I think we can all agree that lists of spells for "magic-users" (itself a rather mechanical term) don't model the mystery we'd like in a medieval-like magic system. Yet we do have to have rules if the game isn't simply to turn into the referee (or GM) telling the players a story. Novelists don't have this problem as they are under no obligation to build a consistent theory of magic. Maelstrom used a probabilistic system, which was clever but a bit too mathematically precise for pre-modern settings. I'm currently working out a system of magical phyla, with different effects having different difficulties and various magical laws (contagion, imitation, etc) influencing the difficulty. That's for a medieval-like, European-like setting. But I'm not sure if such a task can ever be completed, only abandoned!