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     In this writing exorcise you will find a small-scale ethnographic description of a fantasy role playing game that I have recently participated in. Considering the limited amount of time I find myself with this semester, I have been trying to find ways to incorporate my thesis work into regular course work; since I intend to study role playing games as a thesis project this work will serve as a first-stab at organizing my thoughts and experiences on this topic. My goal is to try an incorporate four separate style-components into the body of the paper. Considering that most of the social scientific treatments of role playing games that I have read thus far lack the reflexivity of “new ethnography” and generally accomplish an objective, disembodied take on “FRPGs” (fantasy role playing games), I will try to include some sense of the subjectivity involved with role playing, as well as my own reactions to the session and the ways the game affects the body [1]. Second, I want to further emulate the style of Wynne Maggi’s superior text Our Women Are Free by incorporating an academic, theoretical perspective that flows with the rest of the text and appears in a conversational, easy-to-read style. Third, I want to try and include a feminist perspective on the role playing game session that focuses on gendered space and power relations between male and female participants [2]. The last component I want to explore is an experimental method of presentation in which you and I role play for a moment in the body of the text as a method for exploring role playing generally. Given the scope of this paper, I will divide up the body of the text into two acts. The first sets the scene and toys with role playing as a style and the last (yet to come I am afraid) will focus more on the theoretical components.

     A longstanding bit of dogmatic anthropological wisdom advises against the study of one’s own culture on the grounds that one is likely to miss the more basic and obvious characteristics that would necessarily have to be encountered and explored by a newcomer. In the case of role playing games, this advise makes less sense than usual for two reasons. As in the case with ethnography performed in other, more traditionally recognized languacultures (Agar 1994: 196) [3], that are not one’s own, basic understandings are achieved only after a great deal of work spent mastering the cultural-contextual nuances of language. Considering the vast amount of jargon and languacultural specific characteristics that just seem intimidating to people unfamiliar with role playing games, my own familiarity with the game setting is advantageous. Just as a fluent speaker of Kalasha could be more creative with Kalasha speech acts and would recognize more subtleties in Kalasha space than would any of us, someone familiar with role playing in general will be able to move into a deeper analysis of the game situation than the neophyte player. “Newbies,” as these people are sometimes labeled, require a basic description of the game before they play, and thus role players such as I who like to include new players find themselves regularly explaining the basic aspects and mechanics of the game [4]. This seems like a good place to start, so let us take a stab at role playing for a few moments. I will play the role of “experienced player” and you will play a character who is a “newbie.” seeking to learn how the game works. Keep in mind that during an “actual” role playing game, you would be the one deciding what your character is going to do, but this format is less than interactive, so I will have to lead your character about. Please excuse the control; role players are particularly concerned with the autonomy of their characters.

     A detailed description of the setting is important to any role playing scene, since the action occurs in mental space. Allow me to describe the scene as I would if we were role playing: from here on I will be speaking “in character” until I signal otherwise.

     You are in my den, a 20’ wide, 35’ long room with painted white cinderblock walls, a relatively new cream-brown carpet one might expect to find in a townhouse of this sort, and a plain white ceiling. This less than spacious room contains several tall, free-standing book shelves along the East wall and a metal, fake-wood surfaced computer desk one might find at NAU’s property surplus in the NW corner. Dangling Christmas lights drape and wander across the ceiling with an occasional burned out bulb over a window with closed blinds centered in the middle of the south wall. The central feature rests in the middle of the room and occupies the majority of the space: a large, wooden, octagonal table with a curious homemade-plywood leaf whose rough, light-colored textures contrast sharply with the smooth, dark, false-oak patterns of the table itself. The leaf is decorated with pencil, pen, and black-marker inscriptions. Some of these markings are faded, others fresh, some seem like random scribbles and others seem well laid out; you notice that the ones closest to the edge of the table, where players would have rested their arms and spilled drinks and rubbed powdered doughnut droppings and rested greasy Del-Taco delicacies over the span of years of gaming sessions are the inscriptions showing the most wear. Facing where I am sitting, at the head and North end of the table, is a thick-lined and ill drawn marker depiction of a handled grinding device with the phrase “welcome to the meat grinder” written underneath it. Adjacent to it lies a bordered box drawn in pen labeled with the phrase “zone for d20s deemed too lethal.” Drawn prominently in heavy marker down the edge of the east side of the board is the phrase, in quotation marks, “To our good fortune and the disappointments of the Gods.” Scattered about the remainder of the plywood surface are other quotes and perhaps fifty tombstones of various designs, each set with names and quotes and descriptions; there are no inscriptions in the center of the board, which is somewhat out of your reach as you sit in a folding metal chair at the West end of the table near my own comfy, larger, padded seat. The tombstones nearest you are labeled sub clevious the tentative, Liam the Kender, Bedlam Pandemonious chaos paladin translator, one tombstone in particular catches your eye: it is decorated with two horns, one is depicted as breaking off, the text inside the stone reads Cadroll the Dainty “ironfang” and a nearby line of text obviously drawn close enough to be in association reads “I’m not very dainty but I can learn!” Random quotes written at various angles to your perspective read 8 more points to become a GOD, “Can You Put a Cast on a Monkey? –Mighty Quinn,” as well as “I don’t want to bite any young girls, I’m a good priest!” Your seat is somewhat uncomfortable.

     There are a variety of usual and not so usual artifacts sitting on the table. Cans of soda are everywhere, mechanical pencils and heavily used stacks of perhaps five to ten pieces of paper (with pencil inscriptions heavily erased and worn) reside in front of where other players would be sitting (“they,” all six of them, went out on a food run a few minutes ago knowing full well it would take a while for you to get introduced into the game); most of these stacks of paper have graph paper stuffed in them somewhere, none are all of the same paper type (some college ruled, some not, some have lines, some look like computer paper), some are stacked neatly in piles or stored in three ring binders and others are haphazardly placed – you noticed someone refer to them as “characters.” The top pages you can see, with the exception of those you can’t read, all have similar words written on them like “alignment: chaotic good,” “alignment: lawful evil” “hit points” with a two or three digit number written after them, “strength,” “constitution,” “fate points” and so forth. In fact, many of the words are associated with numbers and for the most part each “character” has unique numbers. In the center of the table you can see a large wooden bowl overflowing with polyhedral dice of various opacities and colors; at least the guy sitting at the head of the table referred to them as dice but few of them look like the familiar 6 sided dice you have used in other games before – they range from “four sided dice” to “one hundred sided dice” and just before everyone left to go get food someone snatched several of the head-of-the-table guy’s twenty sided dice away, saying to him “you know you aren’t allowed to use those.” You get the feeling that certain dice are used by certain people, that some are luckier than others, that some “roll low” but are for some reason are just as useful as those which “roll high.” When the other people selected their dice a few minutes ago they spent time rolling certain ones over and over again such that the collective sound of bouncing dice on tabletop was getting somewhat annoying; you also noticed that they grouped their dice in small clusters in front of them and tried to keep other people from taking “their dice.” Aside from the dice and paper and cans of soda a bag of Doritos sits on the table, as do several books. The ones positioned so you can see their titles are labeled “players handbook”, “monstrous compendium,” and “psionics handbook.” That these books resemble perhaps a hundred other books on a nearby shelf, and that someone referred to them as “rule books” seems somewhat intimidating, despite the fact that someone else told you “oh, don’t worry, you don’t really have to know the rules, all you have to do is play,” which sounded at the time rather illogical. The only other person here at the moment, the guy at the North end of the table (who everyone else had called “D-M” as if those were his initials), puts a small pile of loose leaf in front of you along with a mechanical pencil that he shakes and checks over. He begins to speak…

[DM]: Have you ever played a role playing game before?
[you]: No.
[DM]: Well, I guess the best way to begin to describe the game would be to compare it to a choose-your-own adventure book..did you ever read one of those when you were a kid?
[you]: ya, I guess so, but…you mean like where you turn to certain pages when the book asks you what you want to do right?
[DM]: Exactly..a role playing game is like that, in that you take on the role of a character in a story who is presented with choices, but unlike the choose-your-own-adventure books you aren’t given a pre-determined set of choices. I remember when I used to read those damn books I was always frustrated with the choices, what do you mean I have to have to hide in the closet or stand there confused as the killer walks in? What kind of choice is that? Basically, the game goes like this. I am the storyteller, the author so to speak, the Dungeonmaster, DM, or Game Master. My job is to set the scene, to animate the characters that everyone else runs into during the story. You play the role of a character that we are going to create in a few minutes. All the action takes place in your mind, just as if you were reading a book, except that you decide what your character is going to do…
[you]: So I just imagine it all, but how do I act out the character, do we get up and act out scenes or something?
[Dungeonmaster]: We NEVER get up and act anything out..when people do we tend to tackle and sedate them [he smiles]. But really it goes like this, I describe the setting, what is going on around the characters, where they are in the story, and everyone imagines being in that situation, as their characters. Since everyone has spent time before hand determining how strong they are, what they look like, what their moral orientation is..or rather what their character’s traits are, it is relatively easy to imagine being in the scene as that particular character. You can see how the different states overlap. As the storyteller, my job is to describe everything that I think your characters would notice or sense, but along the way feel free to ask questions like “do I smell anything?” and so on since it is not always possible to describe everything that could be in the scene. All you do to participate in the scene is tell everyone else what your character is doing. For example, I might say “You are sitting in the corner of an Inn hall..it is night time and the only light sources come from a few lanterns hanging from thick wooden posts that support the sagging plank ceiling. There are perhaps ten, crudely crafted square tables in the room and you are seated at one of them. There are a few smoking, laughing, drinking patrons whose features seem grizzled and worn in the low lighting” I might make a map of the room so it is easier to picture the scene. I might then ask “what are you doing,” and you, imagining being in the room, just tell me what you want to do; if you speak to people I will try to speak back in character, if you ask questions like, “is anyone at the table closest to me”, I will tell you so long as your character could know. If it all works out properly, you will find that the actions flow and are easy to picture just as if you were reading the story.
[you]: So what are all the dice for?
[Dungeonmaster]: The game element. Whenever something could or could not happen in the game, we might roll dice to see what happens. Suppose you wanted to throw a mug at one of the customers in the Inn scene? There are rules governing what dice to roll and what number you would need to roll on them to successfully hit one of the customers. Not all dice rolls are for violent acts in the game, but many of them are.
[you]: So how do you win? What is the point of the game?
[Dungeonmaster]: In most role playing games the only point is to have fun. The stories usually continue from session to session and people usually use the same characters, so long as they survive. There is a point system in the game, but it is not the focus necessarily; they are called experience points, and the storyteller gives them out at the end of the session as a type of reward for coming up with good ideas, completing aspects of the story, defeating antagonists, and so on. As characters amass enough of these points, assuming they survive, they can “go up levels,” as we say, get more experienced at their abilities and generally become better characters. It might all seem a bit confusing at this point but role playing is really something you have to do to understand it. So lets start by making your character.
[you]: Ok, so what do we do?
[Dungeonmaster]: We need to first define your character in terms of a few quantitative character traits we call “stats” or statistics. These are, and you might want to write these down in a list [he looks at you and your paper as if he wants you to begin writing, so you pick up the pencil and wait], strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma, comeliness, luck, and speed [he pauses between stats as you write them down]. Good. Next we need to assign these stats values, but instead of just choosing the numbers we roll them on a set of dice [he sets the dice bowl down in front of you and picks out a standard, familiar dice]. You need four regular six sided dice to begin. Whenever role players refer to groups of dice they usually say some thing like 4d6, which would refer to four six sided dice. 2d12 would refer to two twelve sided dice, and so on, so pick out 4d6 that you think are particularly lucky.
[you]: [digging through the dice bowl trying to differentiate dice types, feeling somewhat on stage at the moment in an unfamiliar scene perhaps]: how would I know which ones are lucky?
[Dungeonmaster]: Good point, just pick four that you like. I have found that these types are luckier that most [holding up a faded-yellow six sided die with black pips he snatches from the bowl].
[you]: [after a few moments you pick four that appeal to you in some aesthetic sense].
[Dungeonmaster]: Ok, what we are going to do is roll the four dice nine times. Each time you roll them you add up the three highest dice, discarding the lowest roll. You can also re-roll ones on the first roll.
[you]: you mean just once?
[Dungeonmaster]: Well, once each of the nine rolls…ya I suppose that is a bit confusing but lets just go ahead and roll the dice and I’ll show you how it works.
[you]: [you end up with the numbers 13, 12, 16, 17, 14, 10, 18, 15, and 9. The DM has been writing down the numbers and shows them to you. The 18 was in fact a 16 but he changed it’s value saying “I think that was an 18…beginners luck I suppose, new players need a bit of an edge”]. So now what?
[Dungeonmaster]: Just place the numbers where you want across the nine stats there you wrote down on the paper. These choices will determine the profession of your character to some degree. It is kind of a tradition to let new players choose their stats and then to show then what choices are open for character professions afterward based on their choices. If you had played before you would know that, for example, wizards need relatively high intelligence scores for example, but just go ahead and place the numbers where you want, with the high scores in the areas that you think are most important. Keep in mind that certain scores, like luck and dexterity, are significant to any type of character, so you might want to place higher scores in those stats.
[you]: what kinds of characters are there? It seems like I should know before I place the numbers.
[DM]: Well, the setting is Tolkien-style fantasy, so there are character professions, we say “classes,” in the traditional fantasy fictional areas like warrior, wizard, priest, and rogue. There are other types but these are the main genres. Warriors generally have a high strength and constitution, wizards intelligence, priests wisdom, and rogues focus on charisma and dexterity to get them through stories. But really the stats don’t predetermine your choice of character class, or profession that is, and we can always change the numbers afterward, so just go ahead and place the numbers how you want.

     You start to get the feeling that the numbers are overly significant, and the DM tells you over and over again that you can re-roll the numbers as many times as you want. You spend time rolling up three more lists of numbers until you get one that satisfies you. Damn this takes a long time! Before you can even place the numbers all the other players return and begin setting their items on the table as if displaying them: more cases of soda, candy bars, a special fountain drink for the DM [and he replies “I’ll be sure to include this in the XP” whatever that means], food from Wendy’s and Del Taco. The noise level raises considerably as the other players joke with one another, search for more dice, and ask you unusual questions like “what are you going to be?” “Have you chosen an alignment yet? I wouldn’t recommend chaotic evil, the last character who was chaotic evil pissed off Dartagneous and died pretty fast.” You wonder who the hell Dartagneous is.

An Appendix of Asides

[1]: Again, as found in Robert Desjarlais’ Shelter Blues and Sensory Biographies. [back up]
[2]: This component derives from the arguments of Gary Fine, a sociologist and author of Shared Fantasy (the only book-length treatment of FRPGs I have yet discovered), who not only argues that women (as of 197X) comprise less than 5% of role players, he explains this lack of female participation in terms of the “characteristics of women.” An excerpt from his text explains that: “Since fantasy role playing games can have as many as ten players, and players may range in age from twelve to forty, and games may continue over years with game sessions lasting eight hours or more, fantasy role-playing reflects a “male-type” activity. The issue of the length of games was commented upon by one regular gamer: I don’t know whether it’s intellectually, culturally, constitutionally or whatever, [women are] just not able or willing to maintain that kind of interest for hours and hours and hours the way these guys maintain it” (1983: 63). The female players who participate in the role playing sessions I sponsor would strongly object to these notions and do not display any “deficiencies” as some innate quality of their sex or their gender.
It has been my experience however that there are more men than women who play FRPGs, and that role playing game space is predominantly male space. [back up]
[3]: The term languaculture is used by Agar to represent the importance of context and semantics in both language and culture; since one can not be successfully employed without the other in everyday communication, Agar welds the two concepts into one. Linguistic anthropologist Paul Friedrich uses the term “linguaculture” to express the same idea (Agar 1994: 60). [back up]
[4]: Another reason why the “avoid studying your own culture” advice does not necessarily apply here… [back up]