John August

Scriptnotes, Episode 691: Collaborative Storytelling and RPGs, Transcript

Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 691 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most weeks we discuss storytelling designed to entertain an audience watching something in a movie theater or at home on their couches, which are passive viewers, consumers, numbering in the hundreds, thousands, or millions. Craig, what if your goal is just to entertain a few friends around a table?

Craig: Well, in that case, I think we know exactly what we do.

John: Today on the show, we’ll discuss roleplaying games, their history, their narrative design. We’ll talk about Dungeons & Dragons, sure, but also a host of games that have pushed the form to new areas of collaborative storytelling and world-building. To help us do this, we welcome a man who literally wrote the book on it, Stu Horvath. Welcome, Stu.

Stu Horvath: Hello, thank you for having me on.

Craig: Hey, Stu.

John: All right, the book in question is Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide To Tabletop Roleplaying Games. It’s out from MIT Press. It was a former One Cool Thing of mine. It is glorious. Congratulations on this book, Stu.

Stu: Thank you. It’s very large. Don’t drop it on your foot.

John: It is so, so heavy. It is a sizable tome, and it’s great. I want to talk to you about tabletop roleplaying games in general, the history of them, but also the evolution of the form, because Craig and I come at this mostly from playing D&D and a lot of video games. So much interesting stuff has happened in tabletop, and I just really want to talk about this and the similarities, the differences between the kinds of writing that Craig and I do and the kind of storytelling that’s happening in these games.

Stu: It used to be such a narrow thing that was very dice-driven, very simulation-driven, but now there’s just all kinds of storytelling that happen in roleplaying games. It’s almost impossible for me to figure out a place to start.

John: We’ll do our best, and so we’ll get into that, and then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to look at your appendix chapter, because you talk in this Appendix D about the concept of dungeons as narrative spaces, which seems like it should have always been there. It seems like this idea that’s fundamental to human psychology, but as you point out in this appendix, dungeons are actually a surprisingly recent literary thing, so I want to unpack that a bit.

Stu: Happily. My next book is about that, actually.

John: Oh, my gosh. A preview of an upcoming book.

Craig: All right, it’s going to focus on dungeons? I love that.

Stu: Yes.

John: Stu, talk to us about what it is you do, because this all came about because you are a collector, right?

Stu: Yes. Like a lot of folks who played Dungeons & Dragons when they were a kid, and other roleplaying games, I lost a lot of stuff, either to the attrition of borrowing and lending. I had a flood in my basement, which is a surprisingly common occurrence for folks. I eventually just started wanting those things back. In collecting them, I saw that there were more things out there that I had never heard of that were really exciting. To this day, eBay has become the bane of my wallet’s existence. I’m actually in the process of trying to sell some stuff off to make room for new stuff.

I accumulated all this cool stuff, and I just got really, really excited about it, so I started an Instagram feed, dedicated daily posts to roleplaying games and supplements, and things that affected the development of roleplaying games, or that I otherwise thought were interesting. Out of that daily writing process, it just very naturally turned into a book. There’s also a podcast that’s basically the same thing. You pick a roleplaying game and talk about it for 20, 30 minutes.

Craig: Which you apparently have over 300 different roleplaying games that you cover in your book, which is astonishing. Are you going to get to our- what are we at, John? 691?

John: [chuckles] 691.

Craig: I don’t know if you’re going to get to 691, but you’ll at least get to 300, which is amazing. I’m curious, given that you’ve been doing this for a while, I suppose it’s a good thing that as you create a book like this, the audience for RPGs seems to have exploded. How do you greet the increase in popularity? Are you excited? Are you a little worried that perhaps this special space is being invaded? Is it just an opportunity to sell a whole lot more books?

Stu: I like money, so selling books is a big benefit. No, I welcome everybody in. I think that it was always a hobby that was looking for its players. I think that the more people who come into it with different ideas, the more types of games and the more experiences that the games provide, and the more options everybody has to play more different games.

There’s so many new, fine-toothed experiences that are coming out of this indie scene right now that is just fed by people who come in through the big game, 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and they filter out. It’s not a lot of people who filter out into the larger hobby, but the people who do come brimming with new ideas that they want to fiddle with and tinker with, and from that comes so many cool new things. That’s what I’m here for.

John: Going back to your collection, one thing that strikes me is that we talk about these things being lost to basement floods, but the whole reason that there is this collection that exists is there’s so much material. There’s a materiality to the history of roleplaying games. These were published and printed things from these tiny presses or sometimes bigger presses that existed that people could purchase in hobby shops and game stores or out of the back of Dragon Magazine. You have amassed this huge collection, but there are likely so many more things that don’t exist simply for lack of enough copies of them being out there in the world.

What your book does so well, it’s really charting the growth, the experience of how everything fed into the next thing. So many of these games were a pushback reaction against Dungeons & Dragons and reincorporation and then old-school roleplaying comes back in. It’s just a great history, but it’s all possible because there’s a record. It’s like we know so much about the ancient Egyptians because there were just so many tombs full of hieroglyphics that we could actually study these things versus other cultural innovations are lost to us because there’s not stuff around to document.

Stu: The beauty of the whole hobby is that it’s a tinkerer’s hobby. Immediately after Dungeons & Dragons came out, people were like, well, this is cool as a basic idea, but I could do it better. I could fix it. I could do things to it that are going to make this the best game.

Craig: I love nerds. They’re like, “Not bad. Can do better.”

Stu: Exactly. There was this really influential publication at APA, Amateur Press Association, which is basically a bunch of zines that was produced monthly, sent to a central editor who bound them together and then sent them out to everybody who paid for a subscription. Started almost immediately after D&D. Lee Gold has kept it in print up until April of this year, so 50 years-

John: Incredible.

Stu: -monthly. I think she missed two or three issues in that entire run. It’s insanity. It was a real testing ground for those kinds of ideas. If you look back, especially in the ‘90s, right before the internet made that stuff faster and digital and online, you can see a lot of game design just happening in those pages, and it’s all about people just sharing ideas and arguing about them. Gygax hated it too. He thought it was really cool initially, and then he was just like, oh, no, these people are bootlegging my stuff.

John: Could you give us a starting place? When do we need to start thinking about tabletop roleplaying games from your book? Spoiler, I know it’s Dungeons & Dragons, but can you talk us through the history? This is 1974 we’re beginning, and can you just talk to us about the transition from military simulation games to roleplaying games and what the innovation was that made D&D the starting place?

Stu: 1974 is when Dungeons & Dragons first comes out and is published. It is the first commercially available roleplaying game. Prior to that, there’s this big scene in the Midwest which is focused on military war games, reenacting existing battles like Waterloo or battles in the Civil War, World War II. That has a very long tradition that goes back to HG Wells, created a game called Little Wars which you played on the floor. Peter Cushing of horror movie fame was a big proponent of that game. There’s great videos of him painting his miniatures.

That goes even further back to the Prussian School of Wargaming which was actual teaching officers how to command on these sand tables with miniatures and terrain. There’s two things that happened. Lord of the Rings gets popular and fantasy figures in a military setting are something that people get interested in in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s which leads to Chainmail which was Gygax and some collaborators created this war game in which you had optional units that were fantasy, wizards and dragons and such.

John: We should say for our listeners who are not big D&D people, this is Gary Gygax who is acknowledged as the person who created what we think of as Dungeons and Dragons with many collaborators and there’s a complicated history there but it’s his name on those initial books.

Stu: It’s Gygax and Dave Arneson. The Dave Arneson part comes from Minneapolis I believe and he was playing, I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but the game is Bronstein. The idea was that there was this war game that was happening but there was also a village and people had actual specific characters that they were playing in the context of this war game. That idea of players controlling one singular character instead of a unit of characters or an entire army plus the advent of fantasy influence in the war game sphere collided into this storytelling game that grew out of the collaboration between Arneson and Gygax.

John: In your book, I’m looking at an image from the 1977 white box edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The title on the box is Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Which is just such a mouthful, but that’s how they had to frame it. It wasn’t saying roleplaying game yet. It didn’t seem to have the full sense, or at least it wasn’t presenting itself as this is a thing that you play make-believe with your friends, but it quickly became that. What were the first moments where D&D broke out of just a very small Midwestern nerd culture to become a national thing?

Stu: I think it was almost immediate. I think that there were small pockets of interested war gamers all over the country who immediately glommed onto this thing that was new. You can see that Tunnels and Trolls comes out almost immediately after. I’m pretty sure he was based in Arizona. Pretty far. There was already a pretty big war gaming scene in San Francisco, the Bay Area, with Chaosium.

There’s this urban legend that Greg Stafford, who founded Chaosium, a friend of his ran into a guy who was at a print shop where D&D was being first made, and he got one of the very first copies. It’s hard to imagine in a world of snail mail only but I do think that it proliferated really rapidly. Immediately there were different games coming out to iterate on the basic idea of roleplaying.

John: Now, we don’t have audio or video in its initial play sessions. How closely do we think they resemble what we think about D&D today? Was it players controlling individual characters, going into imaginary dungeon-y rooms and fighting a monster then moving on to the next room? Was that always there from the start? How did that happen?

Stu: I think that it was. The idea of the dungeon, I think, was almost an accidental innovation for playtesting. It was just a situation that gave you infinite possibility, but only a very limited number of options at any given time because you only had so many routes out of a room. Gary Gygax playtested in Castle Greyhawk, which was his mega dungeon. Dave Arneson had Blackmoor, which was a little bit more like a campaign setting. He was very interested in reenacting some of his favorite fantasy stories that he had read and adapting them to play through, whereas Gygax is more interested in testing the cleverness of his players.

I think that in play, it’s a much different thing back then because you have all these folks who are really interested in simulating things like combat. There’s weapon speeds and lots of crunchy numbers, and there’s a ton of players. They’re all running potentially multiple characters at the same time. There’s something called a caller who is an intermediary between the players and the DM to help manage the size of the group. I think that the actual play loop is really still explore, fight, and loot, rinse and repeat.

Craig: There is certainly explore, fight, loot, but on top of that, there is our beloved RP, roleplay. I’m curious, looking at roleplaying games, one thing is very clear. By the time, say, it gets to John and to me when we’re in middle school, other than D&D we’re playing Top Secret and we’re playing these other games where it’s quite clear that the people who are making these games understand that RP is just as important, if not more important, than explore, fight, and loot. Believe me, we love rolling for initiative.

I wonder if, in Arneson’s way of I’d like to just give myself a chance to be a part of stories I’ve already read, or Gygax saying I’d like a chance to create my own dungeon with my own monsters, that the players, almost from the start, were saying, yes, but also, we’d like to write, because really, RP is writing. It’s improv. It’s creation of character. The interplay between the characters is some of the most fun. When you look at Critical Role, 98% of it at this point is RP. Where do you think the actual business of roleplaying games figures out and adapts to what the audience seems to be wanting? It takes a long, long time.

Stu: Interesting. I think that, broadly, the hobby struggles with codifying roleplaying with rules. I think that it’s always been there, but it’s been something that has been outside of the scope, especially in the early days, of the mechanics of the system. I’m running an old-school-style game that has lots of random tables right now. It’s cool. I’ve never ran a game like this before. I run very narrative-heavy stuff. Now, I’m just giving myself over to randomness. From that randomness is where the beauty is. It presents situations and combinations of things that you’d never would have expected.

They are exactly improv cues for the players who then give me material back, and it goes back and forth. There’s very little, in terms of rule structure, we’re playing old-school essentials, which is basic Dungeons & Dragons. There’s no structure mechanically in the game for that. We’re just making it up as we go along. I think that’s always been with the hobby until the ‘90s when you have the storyteller system and it starts building into more structure for narrative in games.

John: Stu, this feels like a good moment to talk about crunchiness of rules versus the airy-fairy, we’re all playing characters, it’s a narrative, and it’s very player driven. That tension feels like it’s always been there. Most of the new versions of the game have been trying to push in one direction or another direction. We have things that are very open-ended. I had Craig and our group play through Dungeon World, which was too open for them. Then we’ve also struggled over just– A D&D session can get lost in the– Craig, what was it this last week?

Whether a hold person could be defeated by lesser restoration. It’s one of the annoyances, but also one of the great joys of D&D is those esoteric rule decisions. Can you talk to us about– Looking through this book with 300 games, it feels like a lot of it has been each game figuring out its own balance between these are the rules and this is what’s open for discussion and interpretation.

Stu: It absolutely has been. There’s just such a gradient of options out there now. In the early 2000s, that’s when the indie storytelling scene really opened up. These are just very open, loose, improvisational games really tightly focused in terms of theme. They’re fantastic to read about. They always have very clever mechanics. Dread is a good example. They use a Jenga tower for their conflict resolution.

Craig: Oh, that’s genius.

Stu: Every time you do something, you have to pull a piece out. If the tower stands, you succeed. If the tower falls, it’s a horror game, so your character dies. That’s it. That’s the only real rule. Everything else is just almost small improvisational theater. I love reading that stuff. I can’t run it, and I have a really hard time playing it. The structure of the rules is the thing that sets me free. I need something to lean on, or I start to panic.

Craig: I’m just like you. The rules let both sides of your brain work together. Screenwriting is the rules medium of writing because we’re constantly dealing with these constraints. General format and the fact that whatever we write has to be able to be filmed and so on and so forth, it is a more narrowly crafted way of thinking and creating. I find that when there aren’t any rules– John and I played what was it called? The one we played with Kelly?

John: Fiasco. Episode 142.

Craig: There you go. It was so much fun that night, in part because Kelly’s hysterical, but I wouldn’t do it again because there’s no rules. I love the idea that you get to ping-pong back and forth between your right brain creativity, coming up with characters with flaws, how do they talk, what decisions would they make in certain circumstances with. Now we have rules. The other part of this is, what do I do in my next turn? I’ve got options. How can I maximize my impact here? Engaging both sides to me is really important. I love an RPG that gives me both.

John: Just because we recently put this out as a YouTube video, when Greta Gerwig was on the podcast, she was talking about how she grew up in the mumblecore movement, which was wildly underscripted. Basically, they’d have a description of what happens in the scene, but then you just have to improv throughout it. She was so frustrated because she felt like the text actually set you free. The text gave it a form and let you explore and go further.

Without that, you’re just floating in dead air. You don’t commit to things because there’s no text to come back to. It feels like rules are part of that. You’re coming into a game with a set of rules and opportunities to succeed or fail can be really important. Finding the right balance between, okay, looking at everything in a table versus now I’m going to go do this thing, I can do anything in the world, is the real struggle.

Stu: One of the things that really differentiates roleplaying games, especially from theater, I think, because like theater is right there, aside of the fact that you have the script, it’s almost roleplaying games, it’s the dice, I think. It’s that randomness. I don’t think it’s so much about rules crunch. I think it’s more about where you decide to have the randomness that makes it a roleplaying game that is the thing people are trying to position.

With Dread the randomness is literally just that tower. With it just all the way over there in the corner that one time I don’t have enough structure in the game to figure it out. Whereas these random tables, we have combat and it’s D&D but the real juice of it is when we hit something that has random tables where I get to roll, and it just creates these situations on the fly. That’s where I like it.

Craig: Sure, you get suspense, but you also get a constant opportunity to react, which is fun. In the end, the most important letter in RPG is G. We’re there to play a game. We’re there to have fun. The more we get a chance to react– The first games we play, the simple ones as children, they all have either dice or a spinner or cards. There’s always random chance. That’s part of what makes it a game.

Stu: I want to talk about some of the similarities between the experience of playing a roleplaying game and other things that film and TV writers do. I’ve often said that our weekly D&D game feels like, oh my god, this is the most expensive writer’s room that you can find, because you have a bunch of well-played writers who are all around a table working together to tell a story together.

Whoever’s DMing that session is the share runner but there’s a much more shared authority. They’re coming down with the final rulings on some things, but the experience of playing the game is everyone should be contributing, and everyone is coming into that room with a point of view and a character and a voice and a unique approach to the world. Craig, that writer’s room analogy holds for you?

Craig: It does. We have to expand it a little bit to include a rock star because we have Tom Morello that plays with us. It does. Everybody in there either is paid to tell stories or is paid to analyze stories. We all love the structure that comes with a good tale. I think also, for me, we all appreciate the fact that we don’t have to actually create a great story for anyone else. It’s for us. That means we don’t have to tie off loose ends. We don’t have to do setups and payoffs. We can be sloppy writers, and in being sloppy writers, the stupid crap we do, and one of the things about our groups, whether I’m DMing or I’m playing, is the utter futility of plans.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Stu, but when you’re playing and especially when you’re DMing, everybody loves a plan. We’re so familiar with the scene where people plan stuff and then they pull it off. Ocean’s 11, plan, execute, awesome. I don’t think one of our plans has ever worked. It is incredible. Sometimes they go so bad so fast. It’s hysterical. I love how not in control we are because when we’re writing, we have both the pleasure, but also the accountability of being completely in control.

John: I would say a similarity between the experience of writing for movies or television and playing this is there are still scenes. Each encounter is essentially a scene. It’s a moment, it has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is really what we’re looking for in scenes, but there’s a lack of structure overall. As Craig was saying, the payoffs don’t always come. There’s not a sense of where we necessarily are at in the journey.

A lot of times these campaigns end up being more like a soap opera that’s open-ended. There’s not one final thing you’re going to get to. Talk about the laughs around the table, we’re participants rather than the audience, or we are the audience ourselves, which makes things like Critical Role videos and stuff like that this weird middle ground, because are you a virtual player with them? Are you an audience? That dynamic is relatively recent and also new.

Stu: I’ve always felt that roleplaying game sessions are great in the play of them, and they make for really poor storytelling afterwards to somebody that has not played the game. You had to be there. Stuff like Critical Role has always let me scratch at my head because I don’t quite feel like I’m in the game like you said or an audience member or what. I’m not getting what I’m supposed to get out of it. I will say though just to Craig’s point about plans, my current game they’ll play an all week and then they’ll set off into the wilderness and they’ll hit a random encounter right outside of the settlement and that’ll be it. So much for the plan.

Craig: They never got to the plan. It’s interesting because we can talk about Critical Role for a second. For people who don’t know, Critical Role is an internet show. They have a cartoon. It’s an empire and it’s generally run by a man named Matt Mercer, who is the DM and general storyteller. Then he has a fairly stable theatrical troop that play characters. A lot of them are voice actors. Our own Ashley Johnson is one of them from our Last of Us universe.

You do follow along with them, and I think they have the benefit of a little bit of editing and preparation. There is something going on there behind the scenes that I think does help curate it a bit. When you’re playing pure RPG, it is not efficient. There are long stretches that, if anybody else were watching, would be falling asleep. There’s a lot of, okay, we’ve captured somebody. What do we do with them? Thirty minutes of back-and-forth argument, debate.

John: A war crime is being committed.

Craig: Yes, inevitably, the discussion ends when one character just murders the person. Then that gets discussed. It can be almost like watching a Congressional hearing. If you’re in the Congressional hearing, I suppose it’s probably fun. I think it is this weird, curated experience, and people are very connected to those characters, which I think is great. People who get it really, really love it. They are really into it, and I love that for them. To the extent that it might inspire people to play their own games, I think they will be shocked when they play their own games to go, oh, this isn’t anywhere near as consistently entertaining and crazy as Critical Role. This is actually more like a deposition. Hey, I love a deposition.

I’m curious from a writing point of view. Since some of roleplaying is pre-written, obviously each RPG creates a set of rules and a general structure of how to play and allows a game master to create whatever story they’d like. As was the case with D&D from the start and moving forward through most RPGs, they also write modules that they hand you and say, “Here’s a story you can guide players through.”

They will wander through in their own path, and you can customize, you can homebrew it, whatever you want, but here’s a story we’ve written. I’m curious, since you are such an impressive student of all these RPGs, you mentioned D&D 5E, the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons that came out a little over 10 years ago now, which absolutely changed everything and has not just the most popular version of D&D ever but it’s the most popular version of any RPG I think, tabletop RPG ever, why did that work so well and how much of it had to do with the writing of the early adventures?

Stu: That’s a very interesting question that’s probably going to get me into a lot of trouble.

Craig: Go for it.

Stu: I think that one of one of the things that 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons did poorly was their pre-packaged modules. For me, I don’t think there’s a legendary classic in the bunch. Partly because so many of them are very reflective of earlier material that’s been remixed. Almost all of them off the top of my head, like Tomb of Annihilation really goes back to Tomb of Horrors and so on.

I think that maybe those provided a controlled experience for people to experience these older things that they had heard about in a way that was new and had a lot of guidelines and help, support for the players and the people running them. I think it was a bright and easy enough system to pick up and at the right time, it came out of fourth edition that didn’t have the right amount of adaptation. People weren’t into that system. This felt similar but new. I think that the pandemic really juiced it. I think that it was really easy to adapt to online play at a time when online play was about to just become the only thing that you could do.

John: In fifth edition, and for folks who aren’t aware of it, that we’re talking about the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which reframed and reformatted a bunch of how the game worked and was wildly successful, and it became the baseline behind which a lot of other things are compared, I think I will say about the game as it’s run by Wizards of the Coast, there’s really good writing throughout.

If you look at the quality of the manuals and how things are laid out, the world building that’s around it is incredibly impressive. Where does world building begin in the history of RPGs? We talked about there’s Castle Greyhawk, there’s Ravenloft, [unintelligible 00:29:41]. Is Ravenloft the first of the cinematic universes within these roleplaying games?

Stu: I would say so. The module Ravenloft changes things. It really builds more of a narrative structure into the game outside of that looting mechanic gameplay loop. You’re there for a reason. You have a real villain for a change who has agency to work against you actively.

John: He’s not just waiting there at the end for you to fight him?

Stu: No, he shows up periodically and tests your strength and becomes a real pain in the butt. That was just never done. He was also a monster that combined aspects of the player character. He was also a very powerful spellcaster, which was surprising. Going after a vampire you knows certain things about vampires in the context of the game and all of a sudden, this guy’s throwing spells at you.

It was a paradigm shift. I think people look back before that and they want stuff like Castle Greyhawk and Greyhawk generally to be more cohesive and a more sensible world, but it really isn’t. Even though Ravenloft changes things, it really is the ’90s, ’89, ’90, when Forgotten Realms sort of starts to gather steam and Dark Sun comes out, and then these things start to become real worlds.

John: Yes, and also Ravenloft as a campaign, but also the books, which were very successful in themselves, is that one of the real innovations was that these roleplaying games then spun off a bunch of other merchandise. In your book, you talk about the Dungeons & Dragons wallets and other things you can collect. They spun off enough merchandise, and a lot of world-building which happens outside of the game. It was a virtuous cycle. It just all fed into each other.

Stu: Your Dragonlance.

John: Totally.

Stu: Dragonlance is something that they tried to make this big, epic narrative, but it didn’t really work as a roleplaying game. It was better as books. The novels are the things that people really honed in on.

John: Yes. Craig and I have played Fiasco, we’ve played a few other things along the way. I did a session with the Alien RPG, which I thought was fantastic. Do you have much more information about the innovations that have come from the indie space or other experiments we missed along the way? Help catch us up. What are the threads that we’re missing and what are the things we should be looking for now?

Stu: I think that if you’ve not played the original West End Star Wars game as movie people, that’s cinematic roleplaying. It takes the language of cinema and applies them directly to the mechanics of the game and it’s great.

John: Give us a sense of a thing that you’re doing in a play session of the original Star Wars game.

Stu: Oh, it encourages you to do smash cuts to pull out from the actual action. You have these asides where you read dialogue between other characters that aren’t there. This idea of the rules say, start in media res. It’s all just built around upping the ante and constantly referring back. The great thing about Star Wars is you have the text of the movies to tell you how to play the game. It’s just do that at your table, except with different characters in different situations. It comes together really well. It’s just six-sided dice. It’s a very simple system that’s so good.

Craig: I played that, John, with Ken White.

John: That’s great.

Craig: It is really fun, and the simplicity of the dice is fantastic.

John: With that thread, and again, the history of this, there’s a lot of licensed products that are coming through, and sometimes they’ve had more control or less control. The IP holders have had more or less control, but there’s also been this indie game movement, which I’m sure accelerated greatly with the rise of the internet and through the pandemic. Can you just talk us through that thread?

Stu: Yes, it was a direct reaction, I think, to the D20 D&D, and, starting in 2000 they universalized their system, the D20 system, and everybody started to make D20 versions of their other games. It was a really bad moment for the industry as a whole because it destabilized it, almost knocked a whole bunch of people out of business.

John: Tell me more about that. How did it destabilize?

Stu: Basically, everybody overbet on the enduring popularity of this system, which was too crunchy for most other play experiences. It just saturated the market, and then the market imploded. There was also some messing around on Wizards of the Coast part, where they changed the terms of the licenses, and they announced the 3.5 edition without telling anybody. There’s all this stuff that destabilized the market, made people not want to deal with it anymore, but everybody who was overcommitted to the idea of this system was caught out and went out of business.

John: Now, one of the things that’s always been a strength and a challenge for roleplaying games is that, especially at the start, you had to basically know somebody who knew how to play the game in order to play the game. You have to find out that the game exists in the first place and then go to a hobby store or a game store to buy something you could start with and then realize there’s also monthly magazines and other places you can find out more information. You needed somebody to play with.

I remember I was probably eight or nine, so I was really young, but you needed somebody or somebody’s older brother to teach you how the game actually worked because it’s not obvious and not intuitive. This was an era before there was YouTube, before there was the internet to be able to look things up. It’s probably both the reason for success, but also one of those limiting factors is that it spreads from person to person rather than mass worldwide all at once because to play it, you have to play with a group of people around you.

Stu: Yes, it was like an older sibling thing. If you were a younger kid, your older brother or sister could sit you down and go, “Okay, you’ve seen me play with my friends, let me pass it along.”

John: Yes, if Diego Rodriguez’s brother hadn’t played D&D, I probably would never have learned.

Stu: There you go. It really resists casualness in a lot of ways. It’s gotten better. I also think that it just resists a good elevator pitch. It’s really hard to explain to somebody who has zero context for it.

John: It’s like my friend Jason’s dad coming downstairs and asking, “Who’s winning?”

Craig: Well, nobody.

Stu: I think that in a very admirable way, the 2024 Player Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons really does try. They actually took time to start the book by saying, what is this? What actually happens in this? Then they give you an example of what some sample play would sound like. Is it a little bit canned? Is it a little bit corny? Sure. If I didn’t know anything and there was a time– The actual first rule book I ever picked up for an RPG was for Traveler.

This was back in, I don’t know, 1979 or something, 1980. I don’t know, way back then. It was just like, Traveler, here you go. Here we go. Here’s a bunch of tables. Here’s this, and I’m like, “What? What is it?” It takes time, and it feels like, in a way, they’ve grown up, Wizards has grown up enough to go, “Hey, a whole lot of people want to play this. Why don’t we take eight pages to talk to the people that know nothing?” It’s quite welcoming, I think.

Craig: The last 10 years has seen an explosion in starter boxes. The fifth edition had one in–

John: Lost Mines of Phandelver.

Craig: Yes, and it’s a huge success. That’s one of the best. If there is a solid gold campaign, I think that one’s great.

John: The fifth edition, that’s the one.

Stu: That’s the one.

Craig: I think it’s telling that it’s not one of the hardcovers. It’s in the starter set. Chaosium does great starter sets. The Alien game has a great starter set. The Chaosium ones are great because they almost always have a solo scenario for you to play, which allows you to get into the game and figure it out and see what it’s like without the onus of having to put together a group.

John: Can we touch briefly on solo RPGs, because that’s the thing I learned about from your book that I wasn’t aware were a thing out there. It’s the solitaire version of some of these games and it feels like there’s some real innovation in them.

Stu: It used to just be basically like the fighting fantasy games, game books, that thing, where it’s like a choose-your-own-adventure with light mechanics thrown in. Chaosium solo is going to really resemble that. In recent years, there’s just a whole bunch of different approaches that people have taken to solos. Black Oath Entertainment puts these games out that are where you’re simulating everything as you go and there’s all these rule mechanics. You’re not only like playing the game by yourself, and it’s a game that resembles something like Crunchy or like a D&D, but you’re also building the world as you go and creating these narrative touchstones. It’s really very interesting.

John: Yes, it goes back to one of the core mechanics of roleplaying games is play to learn, basically, play to explore. You’re building the world as you’re going through it. The Hex Crawler games were a lot of that, where the map is not filled out until you get there.

Stu: Then there’s games that are just journaling prompts, which have an underlying system to them. Thousand-Year-Old Vampire is just an amazing game in that regard, where you’re collecting memories, and you can only keep so many of them. As you go, the game is making you lose these memories. It’s a very emotional and sad game.

Craig: Isn’t that what’s going to happen to me just from living?

Stu: Yes. Just think of it as being 1,000 years old then. It’s horrible. Dementia, the RPG, I don’t know, that sounds terrible.

Craig: But also beautiful.

Stu: Yes, there’s a mechanic where you get a journal in the game and you can write stuff down, but there’s also mechanics in the game that take that journal away from you at once. Those memories are gone. It’s just like, oh my god.

Craig: Flood in the basement?

Stu: Yes, exactly.

John: There’s also a rise of GM-less games where everyone is just a player in it and you’re all doing the thing, which tends to emphasize the roleplaying it all. You have a little section on Honey Heist, which was a great example of the absolute most minimal game. There’s one page back and front and those are all the rules.

Craig: Honey Heist I’ve played and it is as ridiculous and as satisfying as the name promises. Just so folks know, you’re playing bears and you’re trying to steal the honey at the honey convention. There’s a table for random hats, so it’s just amazing. It’s all you need to go, and it’s great.

John: As we wrap up here, I want to talk just a bit about Lovecraft because so many of these games, especially in the horror space, use Lovecraft IP, I guess is the way to phrase it. I think you do a good job in the book of talking about Lovecraft himself is so problematic, and yet so many of these games are built upon these ideas that come out of that space. It’s a whole vibe that wouldn’t exist without him. Where do you see the current moment with these games and where are we headed?

Stu: I think that in the last 20 years in general, horror writers have explored the cosmic in ways that have left Lovecraft behind. I think that there’s different ways to approach it now that aren’t– Everybody uses the word ‘Lovecraftian’. If it has tentacles, it’s Lovecraftian. It’s not. Lovecraftian actually refers to the really peculiar racisms of one guy in Providence. I think collectively we’ve learned how to work with some of his ideas without always bringing him along. I think that’s good. I think it’s going to get better and better as we go.

John: I think it’s also an interesting example of by giving yourself away or basically not trying to bunker down and hold on all your stuff, your ideas get out there further. The people who like, no, use my characters, use these names, use whatever, allows that stuff to get out much wider. One of the reasons we recognize his name is because not just what he did, but the influence he had in a whole generation of other creators who took his ideas and ran with them.

Stu: That’s always been the case from the very beginning. He personally allowed it. It engendered this collaborative and free form expansion of his ideas. That has definitely grown beyond what he would have condoned.

John: To bring us all back to the start, obviously we don’t get Dungeons and Dragons without Tolkien. We probably don’t get the same version of Dungeons and Dragons without Tolkien there. Early on, Tolkien had said, “No, you cannot call these things hobbits. That’s my term.” That’s why we have halflings in it. It’s lessons there.

Craig: Didn’t really slow D&D down, did it?

John: D&D works just fine. Stu, because you played so many more of these games, if listeners are curious about trying out some of these things, what would you recommend as a first RPG for someone to try, a first tabletop RPG?

Stu: If you’re of a certain age, having grown up in the ’80, I think that Tales from the Loop is a fantastic game to try just because it has a lot of nostalgic and emotional touchstones that will juice your engagement with the game. It’s a fairly simple– It’s like Alien in terms of the basic system. It’s crunchy, but also pretty narrative. I think that’s a good one, but there’s also a gazillion simple games that you could play. Honey Heist, which is literally printed in my book, the full rules. You can grab that or Mork Borg or there’s so much stuff. Go to my website. Just look around.

John: That is a great idea. Let us do our one cool thing. Craig, what do you have for us this week?

Craig: Well, it’s more of a hope than a thing. Apple had their WDC 25, which is where they show off the stuff that’s intended for developers. Oh, I guess it’s WWDC, Worldwide Developer Conference, not just world. This is the upcoming technology that is going to power things. They show this to the developers. Developers then can incorporate it into the apps they’re building so that Apple can make money off of their genius. There’s a bunch of things in here that I’m like, okay, great. The thing that I zeroed in on is that they appear to be getting closer to what I think is going to be the really important shift in technology soon.

Obviously, AI is taking over the conversation, but AI is a mode. It exists to accomplish things. The thing that I think will make a real difference, and we’ve talked about this before, is translation, the elimination of the language barrier. It seems like they’re getting closer. They’re providing something called live translation where text messages will be automatically translated as they go. More importantly, spoken translation for calls in the phone app. That’s the one that made me sit forward. Now you can call somebody who does not speak the same language you do and have a conversation on the phone. If that works, okay.

John: Yes. Impressed. We’ve been on this trajectory for a while. It’s good it’s being introduced in a product. I think we often say this on the podcast, this is the worst it will ever be.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It may not be great out of the gate, but I think it will be transformational because I’ve definitely been in situations like Northern Greece and we’re going to a restaurant and, well, no one speaks English. They pull out their Google phone and you’re just talking back and forth and handing the phone back and forth as it translates, but it’s not the immediacy that you really want.

I would love to be able to be on a Zoom with somebody who doesn’t speak my language and have it really work. I think we’re getting closer to that day. I share your optimism. My one cool thing is a video by Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright. They were performing She Used To Be Mine. I think it was at Lincoln Center or Kennedy Center. This is the song from Waitress that Sara Bareilles wrote the musical for and it’s her singing the song with Rufus Wainwright and it’s– Craig, you’ll love this. You love a good singer.

Craig: I do.

John: They are phenomenal together. I’ll put a link to the original video, but then also there’s a whole category of people reacting to it, including this Australian vocal coach who’s going through watching segments of it, then talking through how they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s always so great to see experts really help you understand why this thing is working so well and the techniques that they’re using. Two videos I’ll put in there, both about Sara Bareilles and Rufus Wainwright singing She Used To Be Mine.

Craig: Love it.

John: Stu, do you have something to share with our listeners?

Stu: I feel like mine’s not nearly as cutting edge, but I just finished watching Kolchak: The Night Stalker series. Have you seen it before?

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: Tell us about it. I know almost nothing. I recognize it as a name.

Stu: Oh, it’s so good. There’s a movie called The Night Stalker written by Richard Matheson with Darren McGavin as Kolchak, who’s this hard, shouty, awful reporter who finds out that there’s a vampire terrorizing Las Vegas. He kills the vampire there and he gets run out of town and goes to Seattle, which is the second movie, The Night Strangler, where there’s an alchemist who’s the Count de Saint Germain who’s killing women to steal their blood to keep his youth tonic. Kolchak kills him and then he gets a TV series called Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which is one hour creature of the week.

Totally inspires X-Files and basically anything else that has that creature of the week format really comes right out of Colchak. It’s just, it’s great. It’s ‘70s. It’s gritty, but also hokey. Darren McGavin’s performance is through the roof. He’s so endearing and obnoxious at the same time. It’s 20 episodes and I’m sad to see it go, but I finished watching it last night and it’s a fever dream of a show too.

John: I love it.

Stu: After a while, it just doesn’t make sense. He’s so quick to be willing to kill monsters. It’s great.

Craig: You know how you know a program was made before the tyranny of focus groups and overthink? Its title is Kolchak: The Night Stalker. That would not get off a piece of paper.

Stu: It back to the movie. I didn’t realize how huge the movie was. Millions and millions of people. It rivaled the Superbowl’s ratings. It was a TV movie. In 1971, it was just–

Craig: Just to put things in perspective. Back in 1971, everything rivaled the Superbowl.

Stu: True.

Craig: Three channels to watch. Yes. How many people watched the finale of MASH, which was the most watched thing on television I think of all time?

John: What, 70 million? Is that something?

Craig: It is 106 million viewers.

John: Good Lord. Jeez.

Craig: If we say percentage-wise of the population, if you adjusted that to our population today, it would be 152 million. You get a million people to watch something now, it’s like, meh, not bad.

John: I think Magnum PI’s finale has something ridiculous too like 70 million.

Craig: Yes, back in the day, there was only three channels. It wasn’t that hard.

John: Great stuff. Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Stu: Yes, it’s really great. Bring it back.

John: We love it. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes, including a Fiasco episode and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Dungeons. Oh, and, Stu Horvath, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Stu: This has been a blast. Thanks for having me.

John: Let’s remind people the book is called Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground. It is available everywhere, but where should people find you online?

Stu: You can find me at vintagerpg.com. There’s something like 2,500 entries, over 750,000 words and 2,000 pictures, all dedicated to roleplaying games for your edification and enjoyment.

Craig: Amazing.

John: I love it. Stu, thank you so much and stick around and we’ll talk to you in the bonus segment.

Stu: Right on.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so, Stu, I finished your giant book, and it’s huge. It’s a compendium. It’s so good. It’s the right size for a D&D book because it’s D&D manual size. There’s a specific size it should be. On page 409, you talk about, in appendix D, that dungeons are a recent concept. Can you give us a little of the history of dungeons as a literary space?

Stu: As I mentioned, this is the subject of my next book, which is supposed to come out this year, called Down Down Down.

Craig: What a great title. I love that.

Stu: That’s going to be out through Strange Attractor Press, not MIT. Everybody’s like, Dungeons & Dragons is the first roleplaying game, and that’s awesome. I’m like, yes, firsts are all good, and sure, it’s a new form, but I feel the game itself was inevitable. I think that the thing that makes Dungeons & Dragons special is the dungeon. I think that it brings this idea of this mythic, irrational space and puts people in it to explore it that we had scratched at, but never really realized fully until Dungeons & Dragons.

John: Actually, can I stop you for one second? Craig hasn’t read this chapter, so I’m curious what Craig’s instinct is. What’s the first thing you think about with dungeons in the sense of where this comes from as a human experience?

Craig: My suspicion, or I’m just reaching into my brain, and what I’m finding there is the Spanish Inquisition and their torture chambers. That feels dungeon-esque to me. I don’t know why I thought they were torturing people in the subfloor of a building, but I feel like they were.

John: Yes, we think about prisons being down below, which is great, and we have that sense. My first thing was, oh, well, ancient Egyptian tombs and that stuff. There were tomb robbers, and so that was a thing. There wasn’t a connected space where there were monsters who were living in it. That’s not a new thing. Sam, talk us through what you found.

Stu: Basically, everything that’s older than Dungeons & Dragons has a couple of the things that are recognizable as a dungeon, but not all of them. I think the earliest one is the Labyrinth of Crete, which is a maze space with a monster. There’s no treasures. There’s no real traps. There’s no real room for adventure either. Most people, except for Theseus, who went in there just got eaten by the minotaur. Then there’s other stuff. There’s oubliettes, which is a misunderstanding of medieval architecture.

There’s a lot of slander of the medieval world in the idea of the dungeon, where people think that the medievals were much more barbaric than they were. The idea of the oubliette is you throw somebody into a room that has the door in the ceiling, you close the door, and you forget about them. That’s not true. They were really like cellars. They were salt cellars and stuff.

Craig: That’s not as menacing, really.

John: it wouldn’t be good to be thrown down in there, but that’s not the purpose of the room.

Craig: It’s not the purpose of the room. You’re just getting salt. I think that’s fine.

John: We go back to Orpheus in the Underworld. We have that sense of a hero crosses into an underground place, an underworld place, but it’s not a dungeon. There’s not a treasure. It’s always that they have one specific quest that they’re trying to do, to kill this thing or bring back their true love.

Stu: The Underworld is expansive too.

John: It is.

Stu: It’s not a constricted space. Where does the first real dungeon show up? I think that the first real dungeon shows up in the Blackmoor book, which is 1975, I think, supplement 2. Even that doesn’t really feel like a dungeon. It takes a little while before we get the dungeon-ier dungeons, like Tomb of Horrors and stuff. That’s ’78. Then there’s also stuff in Dark Tower, which was put out by Judges Guild. Other people were playing with dungeons more. What about the Mines of Moria?

Craig: That feels very dungeon-y to me.

John: That’s 1954?

Stu: Yes. Closer, but again, there’s no traps, really.

Craig: It’s true.

Stu: Tolkien never really put obstacles in front of his characters. They just walk through and get chased out. There’s that one battle in the tomb, but for the most part, there’s something missing. That’s very close.

Craig: There’s a puzzle to get in, which is interesting, and it certainly does feel like you’re going down, down, down, although weirdly then they end up in the top of a mountain, which I never understood. It has a central monster, and it definitely has sections, but you’re absolutely right. It is a long slog with tons of spaces where nothing happens, and if Pip doesn’t accidentally fail his deck save and knock that thing down a well, they probably just walk out of there.

John: As we talk about dungeons in terms of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s a space in which the adventure takes place, which the story takes place, and so it doesn’t actually literally have to be you went into a mountain or you went underneath the city. It’s just this is the space. Using it as a general holding place for this is the setting for this series of adventures, and there’s going to be some sense of going from room to room and there being a place you’re trying to get to and resting spots. All that feels our bigger conception of what a dungeon is, even if it’s not literally a place underground.

Stu: Yes. I think that one of the things that disqualifies Moria is that it feels rational. There’s a sense of place and history and purpose to the architecture. It does get a little irrational when you hit that bridge.

Craig: Yes. It’s the worst bridge ever.

Stu: Worst bridge ever. Yes. That is, I think, Moria at its most dungeon-like, when you have this ridiculous bridge that the players have to cross to escape a giant monster. That’s a dungeon.

Craig: They’re getting shot at by little dinky NPCs with range weapons. That always felt like, okay, we went through this massive carved hall with these huge columns and then they just got to the most important part and went, eh, let’s just do a really skinny bridge.
[laughter]
Yes. Definitely. Definitely.

Stu: If Wonderland was more dangerous, I think that would maybe be a good example of a dungeon.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

Stu: Gygax adapted Wonderland into a pair of adventures.

Craig: Oh, okay. I like that.

John: I remember reading through those modules and like all Gygax’s things, it felt like they were just designed to kill you.

Stu: Yes.

John: They felt completely unsurvivable.

Stu: You really did not have balanced encounters.

John: No. Oh, that’s great. We look forward to seeing the full book version of your conversation on dungeons because it is a clever thing, which I’d never considered until I read your appendix. Again, Stu, thank you so much for coming on this podcast. It was such a great conversation with you.

Stu: Thank you. This was so much fun. I was honored when I heard the book as a one cool thing and to be asked on was equally honoring.

Craig: Great convo, Stu. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.

Stu: Thanks for having me on. Bye.

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