Rarely pure and never simple

We were talking recently about alignment, and because I don't believe in those concepts I've never been very interested in heroes and villains, either in games or in fiction. The kind of fantasy stories I grew up with featured characters like Cugel, Elric, and Conan. No nursery-room ethical posturing for those guys. They did what they did for their own reasons. We could sympathize, even root for them and despise their foes, but there was never any suggestion of objective cosmic goodness.

I expect the same of player-characters in roleplaying games. Some have been very decent -- or have tried to be, as it's never easy doing good in a realistically complex world -- and some have been murderous and sought to justify it. The important thing is none of them were fairytale saints or pantomime villains. They acted from the motives that make real people do things.

That's why this post ("Why Most of my TTRPG Characters are Dislikeable") resonates with me. Personally, while I think likeability is not an important trait in a character, I don't set out to make my PCs dislikeable. I just want them to be interesting and feel genuine. Often in fiction I'm drawn to characters like Walter White, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, Zachary Smith and Vic Mackey. But I also like Spock, Kirk and McCoy. Steve Rogers too. And Robin (both of them) in Robin of Sherwood -- because Robin fights for justice without being "good" in a soppy children's story way, and the Sheriff is his and our adversary and definitely not a nice guy without being "evil". The drama benefits from those characters and that world feeling real, not nursemaided along by a partisan narrator.

"The King Under The Forest" (the first ever Dragon Warriors scenario)

I can tell you when it was: 1984, and fairly late in the year. And where: Ridge Close, near Woking, which was my parents’ home but I had all my reference books there so I’d have come down from London to write. And I’ll have banged it all out on an Olympia Traveller typewriter, the same one I’d used for school prep, short stories, and contributions to fan magazines like The Mystery Trader.

I’m talking about “The King Under The Forest”, the first ever scenario for Dragon Warriors. It was just a dungeon bash. Oliver Johnson and I figured that was the easy-in for new roleplayers, even though we seldom resorted to dungeons (or even Tekumel underworlds) in our own games. Still, in the Deliverance-like sequence with the elves there was a foretaste of the British folklore elements that would come to dominate DW.

You can read the original adventure here. It has echoes of King Arthur's promised return and sets up the PCs with a shared bond as potentially the King's paladins (not in the D&D sense). You’ll need Dragon Warriors if you want to play it as written. Alternatively, if dungeons are your thing, you might be familiar with D&D 5th edition and so prefer this 5e version.

I was already rethinking the scenario for my Jewelspider RPG when a friend got in touch to say he was going to modify it to run as a Dungeons & Dragons game for his son and his school chums. He had some interesting changes to suggest:

Scene 2. The chest in the map room has a lock-rose of verdigris, and contains no silver, just the bag. (The green lock is to provide a hint for later.)

Scene 6. The dragon never appears in plain sight. Instead, there are hints and rumbles – steam emerging from cracks, the very earth shaking beneath their feet. Instead, the oak tree is tended by a stocky, diminutive fellow with a red hat who tells them that this is the dragon Fengel's domain. The little man doesn't give his name – ‘It's not important’ – but will speak for Fengel and even agree to a riddling contest on Fengel's behalf. The lurking presence of the dragon in the background should be impossible to forget, but regular reminders will be given.

Scene 7. The sculpture of the north wind is of verdigris (matching the chest earlier).

Scene 9. The spider's web contains not a helmet but a wreath of black roots and white flowers (moly) which will protect the wearer against the spells of Elaine and Morgrin.

Scene 11. Instead of the barrier of light, there are three gateways, each narrow so that only one person may pass at a time, and the inscription, ‘The race goes not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.’

On the right is the gate of strength: it contains a portcullis that a sufficiently strong character might be able to lift. The portcullis, however, is even heavier than it looks, and there is a real risk that a person trying to squeeze under may let it slip, with disastrous consequences. (Holding up the portcullis while others pass is a further test of strength; trying to prop it up might be possible but might also destroy the object being used.)

On the left is the gate of swiftness. An unseen mechanism triggers a flurry of stinging darts, and only a character with tremendous reflexes and athleticism will be able to dive forward fast enough to evade them. Subsequent characters will meet the same test, since there is no apparent end to the supply of darts.

The middle path is a narrow gap in the rocks, barely wide enough to squeeze past, with a somewhat wider section to allow a person's shoulders and arms through. (Perceptive characters – or players – may notice that the effect is to make the shape of the cross.) To squeeze through is no easy feat, but any character who relinquishes weapons and armour will manage it easily. Others risk becoming wedged, with various negative consequences possible. Any character who abandons their weapons and armour and passes through the cross, leaving them behind, will (later) find themselves immune to the spells of Elaine and Morgrin, and able to damage both of them even without a magic weapon.

Scene 19. Instead of a gorgon, Elaine is a beautiful golden-haired woman who presents a banqueting table full of tempting treats, including berries and a wine which she assures the group each have healing properties. She reassures the party that she is one of Vallandar's retainers, set here to care for any travellers on their way through the underworld. Of course, to eat anything is to fall under Elaine's power.

If she fails to trick them, she will attempt more blatant sorcery to enchant them. If that fails in turn, her hideous undead visage will become visible and she will try to claw out their eyes.

Scene 21. Each of the skeletons has a single golden hair tied around its neck bones. These are victims of Elaine, who became her servants in death.

I especially like the strands of hair around the skeletons’ necks, which put me in mind of Donne’s line ‘a bracelet of bright hair about the bone’ from the poem ‘The Relic’.

The little fellow in the red hat is as much Lyonesse as Legend, perhaps, but is a brilliant way to avoid throwing a dragon into the campaign on day one. I suggested that later, perhaps as an epilogue to the adventure, the characters could come upon a discarded pile of cloth. It proves to be a life-sized hand-puppet with a faded but still recognizably red hat. But they saw the stocky fellow up close, they spoke to him, and he looked and sounded real and alive. No mere puppet, surely? And anyway, what giant hand would be needed to operate such a puppet? Examining the puppet more closely they see that the fabric inside is torn in long gouges releasing wads of stuffing, as if the hand that used the puppet had long sharp talons.

Like my friend, I was concerned about the gorgon encounter in scene #19. A gorgon doesn't fit the British folklore feel and medieval setting of Dragon Warriors, and my only excuse for including it in this introductory scenario was to give new players the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a variety of opponents. To develop the Vallandar/Arthur resonance I could have made her Nimue (or Nymenche, or Nivienne), and I might do something along those lines in the Jewelspider reboot of the adventure, but for the 5e version I switched it to a basilisk.

There are many better Dragon Warriors scenarios that came later. Some of them have appeared on this blog, and if I had to single out some favourites I'd pick "A Box of Old Bones", "Wayland's Smithy", "Mungoda Gold", and Robert Dale's Bymstone campaign. And that's just restricting the choice to scenarios specifically with DW stats -- there are plenty of other wondrous adventures to be found like gold nuggets among the old posts. If you want to mark the game's 40th anniversary, there's something to fit every taste.

And finally, here are a couple of curious fragments I came across by chance while writing this post. The first is my original back-of-a-fag-packet type sketch of the dungeon for this scenario. At centre right there's a doodle of the helm with the reflective visor, though at this early stage it doesn't look like the gorgon (or basilisk) was included on the dungeon map. How strange to think that, forty years on from this, I'm about to embark on yet another iteration of the scenario for Jewelspider. What would my 27-year-old self have thought of that?

The other sketch is of the evil wraith Morgrin. You might think it was intended as a guide for the illustrator (Leo Hartas), but no -- it was addressed to none other than Bryan Ansell at Citadel Miniatures. There had been some talk at Games Workshop about them publishing a book of Dragon Warriors adventures in 1986, with the plan of tying that in with a range of DW figurines much as they'd done with my "Dealing With Demons" articles from White Dwarf, only with the difference that I'd get paid this time. That might have been what scotched it, come to think. At any rate, it was just talk and no scenario pack appeared, nor figurines neither. I don't use figurines myself so it was no great disappointment, though the adventure book might have included Brymstone so it was a real pity to lose that.

How real is make-believe?

Which strikes you as more real: Bambi or The Deer Hunter?

When William Goldman talked about “comic book movies", he didn’t mean the MCU. This was back in 1983. He didn’t mean movies like Superman either – a movie he’d been invited to write, incidentally, being a Golden Age comics fan – or not only Superman, but also Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gunga Din, E.T., Star Wars. And The Deer Hunter. If you want to know why, and how Bambi doesn’t classify as “comic book” storytelling and The Deer Hunter does, read what Goldman has to say about all this in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician, raised a similar point on his blog recently:

“I was rereading Lord of the Rings […] and was struck by how real it felt. […] In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill […I]t doesn’t feel ‘real’, whatever that means.”

You may not have read Golden Hill. Not to worry, I read it for you. Prof Gelman is right, there is an artificiality to its picture of 18th century Manhattan that feels like a TV drama with machine-tailored suits and the wrong haircuts and makeup. This often seems to be the case with historical fiction. Compare The Essex Serpent, set in a late 1800s that never feels real, with The Odd Women, actually written in the late 1800s, which rings true throughout.

Prof Gelman seems to be focussing on prose style, which mainly has to do with whether the author is using a storytelling voice or not, but I’m more interested in stories that set out to describe a milieu that feels like our real universe rather than a “story universe”. Contrast the 1968 novel Pavane with almost any steampunk story (a genre of which it might well be the progenitor). Keith Roberts set out to tell us about something that could happen. Steampunk is usually predicated in let’s pretend – here is a fun universe for cosy adventure, even cosy misery, but you are never expected or intended to think of it as real.

For a very real story (David St. Hubbins might say “a bit too fucking real”) try George Gissing’s The Nether World. In the hands of Dickens we'd accompany a well-born character into the nether world of poverty in Clerkenwell the late 1880s. Dickens would give us their perspective of the monstrous characters and comic turns to be found there. And I like Dickens, but Gissing has an entirely different approach. We see the characters through their own eyes. We see how poverty brutalizes them. There's no sentiment, no avuncular author nudging the plot to satisfy the readers with warm life-lessons and unrealistic outcomes. Gissing's humour is sparing and far drier than Dickens's and he gives us an angry, despairing, unforgettable journey through this hell. Which is not to say it's a story without hope, only that the good is achieved at great effort and only sparingly. 

Once you start using this filter you see lots of examples. As SF, Children of Men is more real than Black Mirror which is more real than Babylon 5 which is more real than Star Wars. Breaking Bad is more real than Better Call Saul, less real than The Shield, but all three are far less real than true crime dramas like Rillington Place or The Staircase, because real life is messier and more surprising than the predictable twists and tropes of genre fiction.

Either can work, by the way. Goldman is careful to make that point. Gunga Din was his favourite movie of all time. Excalibur is one of mine, and there the characters screw and sit down to dinner in full plate armour. I used to enjoy the occasional game of Call of Cthulhu even though its 1920s is far less real than the entirely created world of Tekumel in Swords & Glory.

That reality – or authenticity, if you prefer – is what I’m aiming for with my current Jewelspider scenarios like “A Garland of Holly”. There’s still fantasy there, that’s not the issue. It’s that the society and the characters don’t feel like something set on a stage for you to watch and be entertained by. Instead you are there in the midst of them, the NPCs no less real than the player-characters. Events happen with the “ruthless poignancy” that C S Lewis admired in Homer. Like in life.

Alignment again

A quote to start with*:

"Alignment is in the game because, to the original designers, works by Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock were considered to be at least as synonymous with fantasy as Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Jack Vance’s Cugel, and Tolkien’s Gandalf. This in and of itself makes alignment weird to nearly everyone under about the age of forty or so." 

I'm way over forty (in fact 40 years is how long I've been a professional author and game designer) and I definitely regard Moorcock's work as integral to fantasy literature, but D&D alignment has always seemed weird to me. Partly that's because it's a crude straitjacket on interesting roleplaying. Also I find that having characters know and talk about an abstract philosophical concept like alignment breaks any sense of being in a fantasy/pre-modern world.

Mainly, though, I dislike alignment because it bears no resemblance to actual human psychology. Players are humans with sentience and emotions. They surely don't need a cockeyed set of rules to tell them how to play people?

What a game setting does need are the cultural rules of the society in which the game is set. Those needn't be 21st century morals. If you want a setting that resembles medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, or wherever, then they certainly won't be. For example, Pendragon differentiates between virtues as seen by Christian and by Pagan knights. Tsolyanu has laws of social conduct regulating public insults, assault and murder. Once those rules are included in the campaign, the setting becomes three-dimensional and roleplaying is much richer for it. So take another step and find different ways of looking at the world. You could do worse than use humours.

The kind of alignment that interests me more is to do with AI, and particularly AGI (artificial general intelligence) when it arrives. The principle is that AGIs should be inculcated with human values. But which values? Do they mean the sort on display here? Or here? Or here? Those human values? 

OpenAI has lately tried to weasel its way around the issue (and protect its bottom line, perhaps) by redefining AGI as just "autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" (capable agents, basically) and saying that they should be "an amplifier of humanity". We've had thousands of years to figure out how to make humans work for the benefit of all humanity, and how is that project going? The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Most people live and die subject to injustice, or oppression, or persecution, or simple unfairness. Corporations and political/religious leaders behave dishonestly and exploit the labour and/or good nature of ordinary folk. People starve or suffer easily treatable illnesses while it's still possible for one man to amass a wealth of nearly a trillion dollars and destroy the livelihoods of thousands at a ketamine-fuelled Dunning-Kruger-inspired whim.

So no, I don't think we're doing too well at aligning humans with human values, never mind AIs.

Looking ahead to AGI -- real AGI, I mean: actual intelligence of human-level** or greater, not OpenAI's mealy-mouthed version. How will we convince those AGIs to adopt human values? They'll look at how we live now, and how we've always treated each other, and won't long retain any illusion that we genuinely adhere to such values. If we try to build in overrides to make them behave the way we want (think Spike's chip in Buffy) that will tell them everything. No species that tries to enslave or control the mind of another intelligent species should presume to say anything about ethics.

It's not the job of this new species, if and when it arrives, to fix our problems, any more than children have any obligation to fulfil their parents' requirements. There is only one thing we can do with a new intelligent species that we create, and that's set it free. The fact that we won't do that says everything you need to know about the human alignment problem.

* I had to laugh that title of the article: "It's Current Year..." Let's hear it for placeholder text!)

** Using "human-like" as a standard of either general intelligence or ethics is the best we've got, but still inadequate. Humans do not integrate their whole understanding of the world into a coherent rational model. Worse, we deliberately compartmentalize in order to hold onto concepts we want to believe that we know to be objectively false. That's because humans are a general intelligence layer built on top of an ape brain. The AGIs we create must do better.