Like many others, I enjoy listening to the podcast Between Two Cairns. Their analysis of adventure design is fairly astute and their camaraderie is a comfort among the onslaught of other more edgy, false-outrage content. I send in questions now and then that are inspired by the show, and one of them was answered on last week’s show. I was disappointed by the answer, but it was illuminating. We’ll get to that, eventually.

Start the Questions! My original email read as follows:

Hi guys, question for the mootsack, obviously. 

Yochai has said that he writes adventures to fill a perceived void, and that resonated with me. But these days, I’m wondering, are we at or approaching the point where we have enough good adventures? Between different systems, I might have enough that I could realistically play for the rest of my life. Or are there never enough?
Thanks,
Andy

Yochai’s original statement did, indeed, resonate with me. I write adventures because I feel there’s a need to be met, and that need is for more good adventures. This impulse was probably driven by my time spent in the 5e space. There are folks that make stuff that just sings, that is elegant, fun, evocative, and innovative, but it can feel too uncommon, and my drive to make adventures has always been to make more of that. I don’t always (or even often, I’m sure opinions vary) hit that mark, but I try.

I don’t want people to suffer bad material. There’s far too much of it. When adventures inspire fan-made running guides that are as long as the original adventure, there’s a problem. Adventure text is already a run guide! you shouldn’t have to explain an explanation. It’s like a joke, if you have to explain it, the humor is invariably lost. If you have to explain how to use an adventure, the original text was half-baked.

And there’s a lot of this out there. The 5e scene is a sea of it, but it’s also true of the OSR. The Borderlands are dotted with “My Keep (That Has Learned Nothing From Design Developments, But It Is Mine.” It all reminds me of one of my favorite Simpsons bits, when Homer discovers a counterfeit jeans operation being run out of his car-hole.

Herman, how could you? We’ve all thought about counterfeiting jeans at one time or another, but what about the victims? Hardworking designers like Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt, or Antoine Bugle Boy. These are the people who saw an overcrowded marketplace and said, “me too.”

Now, I do think the OSR scene is where the most interesting design and presentation developments have taken place in the recent past, and 5e has lagged behind in this regard (but is catching up, mostly by borrowing from OSR adventures) because so many 5e adventures want to be WotC adventures, replete with all their shortcomings. People copy the art style and the trade dress and the linearity and it’s just…

Do your own thing, people! You have no other choice in this life! I don’t care about widgets being pumped out of the RPG factory. I have enough widgets. And this brings me back to the original question, and my disappointing misunderstanding of Yochai’s original statement.

How Much Art Can You Take? But first! (Geez, we’re never going to get to the end of this). My definition of art is an aesthetic expression that strives to cross the unbridgeable chasm between human consciousnesses. One weird thing about our advanced primate brains is, we assume to the point of knowing that other people have thoughts and internal lives as rich as our own, but we never witness them directly. Art is an attempt to say, “I feel this, maybe you do too? Or it inspires your own feelings, and I have feelings, so we have that in common.” And on and on. It’s a sharing of the unsharable. It strives, but never achieves, though the best of it gets close. And it’s unpredictable. You can make something and have it be interpreted completely differently from your intentions, but that’s illuminating in its own way. We’re all experiencing the world through our skin and weird holes in our skulls, bringing all of our pasts to bear, and its bound to come off differently. We are all the same in our differences, blah blah blah.

A brief aside: Sometimes RPG blogs get very think-serious, like “Kant and the Dungeon Crawl, Specifically Regarding OD&D But Not Including the Blackmoor Book” and my response is often, “Yes, I went to college too.” I can relate to that impulse to take what you’ve learned and apply it to the world, to shine a spotlight down from the ivory tower. I majored in economics, and it changed the way I saw things, and I was a surely insufferable idiot for six months or so as I applied it to everything. But the important part there was, “idiot,” because the world is much more complicated that any of these explanations capture, and most of them aren’t very useful.

Utility. Finally, back to the original question. My actual question was answered almost immediately, when one of the guys on the podcast said something like, “sure, if you look at it in terms of utility, we might have enough adventures.” I am certainly a utilitarian here. I’m playing games with my friends, and I’m writing adventures for people who are playing games with their friends. I’m not making anything for display or admiration. Yes, I majored in economics, and then I went and was a mechanic for fifteen years. I got my hands dirty. When I was younger, I was drawn to hardcore punk largely because of its promise of authenticity. This all ties together because it’s still a drive of mine. I don’t really care about fifty-thousand-foot think pieces. They’re fine, make them if you want, but an adventure that shows off your major without being useful at the table is not useful to me.

I’m just not interested in the adventure as a window to the soul, and I think most of The Conversation (or the discourse, if you prefer) is a circle-jerk. I don’t mean that quite as disparagingly as it surely sounds. It’s just not for me. I’m always returning to, “do I want to use this at the table?” That is always the target. And if you look at The Best list on Ten Foot Pole, it’s gotten really long! There’s a lot of good stuff out there, and it’s being acknowledged. Do we need more? I’m honestly not sure.

This line of inquiry may have begun with a dumb thought I had years ago, “do we have enough Les Pauls?” The factory keeps cranking them out and they’re rarely destroyed. Surely at some point, there are enough Les Pauls to go around. Do we have enough bands that aspire to sound like Youth of Today? Sure, it’s fun for you and your friends to pretend to be Youth of Today, but at some point, it’s cosplay. It’s inauthentic, and it misses the point. Do we have enough movies? Probably. There are more than anyone can ever watch. Look at how sculpture and rock n roll have fallen out of favor with the public. New works suffer from diminishing returns. We might have enough statues. We only have one Reign In Blood, but we have a thousand lesser copies. (Now that’s something, a record that both defined a genre and immediately made all follow-ups redundant.)

Back to the point, there’s something profoundly sad about art that is offered to an indifferent world. Especially so when it’s an adventure no one goes on.

Anyway. Sure, I’m still here to see new developments, but the pace seems to be slowing. Which is fine! We’ve got some really, really good stuff, and it deserves to be played. But if I want to bridge the chasm between consciousnesses, I have music and literature and everything else. I’ve never read adventures for a window into the soul of the writer. I don’t really like reading them, for the most part, and that’s one way I clearly differ with the podcast guys. I don’t know what void Yochai feels that inspires him to write adventures, and it’s a little sad that it isn’t the one I thought we had in common. Again, art and the bridge and all that. I thought there was a bridge, but I was mistaken.

Responses. I can’t recall everything they said and I have no interest in a point-by-point rebuttal because I wanted to hear what their take was, and we got that. I will just say that Sam’s “old man anxiety” take was weird and wrong, at least in my case. I don’t have an ossified attachment to the past in that way. Maybe he was thinking of the angry OSR types? I’m definitely not one of them. I just think we have more good games than I can play. I am a simple creature.

Scipio, local and friend of many Discords, kindly point out that someone blogged in response to the podcast, We Need More Adventures (Because of Birds and Bees). It’s an interesting take about how more adventures yield innovation, and I was happy to see that the question and response inspired another responses from someone I don’t know. I do, naturally, disagree, ha! My response:

But why do we need innovation? Sure, there’s a desire to perfect the form as it relates to the reader/game master/players’ experience (something I think we can approach but never reach, given people’s different preferences), but do we need innovation to its own end? We aren’t trying to solve climate change here, or something else that demands new solutions. It seems like an echo of capitalism, markets must expand, the line must go up. But there’s an answer to capitalism’s insistence: at some point markets no longer expand and something else comes to be. At some point in an artistic practice, there is no more innovation (or vanishingly little) and something else happens. And that’s ok.

In Conclusion. There might be a lot more of “me” in this blogpost than I usually include given the focus on games. I think it’s strongly implied, but in case it’s unclear, I’m a socialist of a sort, and part of the goal of that project is to alleviate our alienation from our labor so that we can return to making the things we need for our lives rather than something for someone else to make their line go up. Gorillas work for something like an hour or two a day gathering food and spend the rest of the time hanging around. We’re a particularly restless species of primates, and it has been our blessing but it may also be our doom. I don’t want to see the world buried beneath all the things we made just to make more things. At some point, we should have enough and just be able to live.

I don’t begrudge anyone their conversations or discourse or art, even if I laugh at them privately when it all gets a bit too college. I’m just here to play games and do the work like Boxer in Animal Farm. And at some point the work will be done, and like Boxer, I will die. <Ian MacKaye voice> “The… end.”