Building Bhakashal - Consent and Troubling Content.

I saw a post this week on Twitter indicating that one of WotC’s latest products asks the referee to check in and get consent from players to have their PCs potentially transformed into a mind flayer. Do you need to get consent from your players to run a monster that, for example, can transform the PC in a permanent way?

People are falling into familiar camps on this question, but I want to suggest that the question itself is flawed. I sometimes think that people don’t actually pay much attention to the details of the game. They appreciate the broad strokes, but they don’t really look too closely.

Let’s just take a stroll through the monster manual, shall we? In D&D you can be:

1. Eaten alive by giant ants!

2. Have your face burned off by anhkheg spit!

3. Be turned to stone by a basilisk, alive but unable to move or act in any way, forever!

4. How about fighting a swarm of 3-12 bombardier beetles, each 4 feet long, they spray reddish acidic vapor from their “abdomens” out the back!

5. A black pudding can ooze over you, its thousands of small mouths will consume you alive while its acidic saliva dissolves your flesh!

6. How about a carrion crawler, they paralyze you and CONSUME YOU ALIVE, or, lay eggs in you!

7. How about a horde of foot long giant centipedes! Say 24 of them swarm you and crawl all over your body! Many people shudder at the sight of a 1 inch long centipede, can you imagine!

8. Ear seekers are good, horrific fun, they burrow into your ear, lay eggs and the eggs hatch and eat you alive from the inside!

9. A gelatinous cube paralyzes you then proceeds to digest you for 5-20 rounds, have your PC dissolved into nothing!

10. Green slime will attach itself to you and in 1-4 rounds TRANSFORM YOU INTO GREEN SLIME!

11. Don’t forget ghouls! If a ghoul kills you, they DINE ON YOUR BODY then YOU BECOME A GHOUL AND FEAST ON THE FLESH OF OTHERS!

12. The brain on legs intellect devourer will CONSUME YOUR BRAIN AND TAKE OVER YOUR BODY, making you a meat puppet. Ouch!

13. Mind flayers, in addition to apparently transforming you, can EAT YOUR BRAIN!

14. The touch of a mummy brings on “rotting disease”, charming!

15. An ochre jelly can ooze through small spaces and travel on walls and ceilings, and it can dissolve your flesh!

16. Ogres, trolls, troglodytes and such will kill you and EAT YOU, they may start before you are dead!

17. A peryton will tear out your heart and use it for reproduction, ICK!

18. Rot grubs will burrow into your flesh, you either burn them out doing damage to yourself or they burrow to the heart and eat it!

19. A shambling mound can draw you in and you suffocate and die inside of the creature  

20. Giant ticks will drain the blood from your body until you are dead!

21. Giant Wasps will paralyze you then insert eggs into you which hatch and devour your paralyzed body!

I’ll stop there before getting to the Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual 2. The Fiend Folio in particular has a ton of extremely grotesque and terrifying monsters, including my favorite, the Gibbering Mouther! 

Where are the consent requests for that badboy!

So here is the thing. D&D is chock full of horrific monsters like these. Any one of the listed monsters above kills in ways that are quite terrifying, and certainly as objectionable as being polymorphed by a mind flayer. Actually, being polymorphed by a mind flayer sounds positively FUN compared to being paralyzed and eaten alive by giant wasp larvae, being paralyzed, partially devoured and transformed into a ghoul or being transformed into green slime. 

Why are we requiring player consent for a mind flayer polymorph when all of these terrifying, body horror elements have been in D&D since the 1970s? Has WotC just figured out that D&D has body horror elements to it? It’s like the people running the show DON’T EVEN PLAY THE GAME. I can’t “get” how you can design for a game like D&D and not be aware of these things, green slimes, black puddings, ghouls, these aren’t “fringe” monsters, these are ICONIC! 

I think the WotC is falling down the same rabbit hole as they did when orcs became problematic. They aren’t considering the implications of what they are doing, they are just reacting without understanding.

What is the Problem?

IMO the problem here is that the hobby has adopted a consent framework for the player/referee relationship. Imported from the kink community, the idea was that just like some sexual activities require consent otherwise they can be coercive and traumatic, gaming should require consent as it has potentially traumatic elements to it. On the surface this sounds fairly reasonable, but the challenge is that it turns the relationship on its head, and makes it untenable.

Just like the objections to orcs can be applied to many monsters (I posted about this a few months ago), the objections to mind flayer transformation can be applied to other monsters. Unless you want to be asking for consent for a different monster in virtually every session you play, the consent model is not viable.

It creates a situation where the referee is beholden to individual players. 

It also takes a lot of the fun out of the process, part of the excitement is not knowing what will happen. Getting consent for each individual monster’s attacks is not a model that allows for surprise and fun.

Instead, I would recommend that gaming develop an opt out system, the referee makes clear the kind of game they are running, and players can opt out as they like. That way no one person is ending the fun for everyone, and there is still some mystery involved.

For my part, when a new player wants to join us, I send a standard document to the newcomers and their parents (I run an after school program) outlining the aspects of the game, I tell them that character death is on the table, that we don’t do “take backs”, that once the dice are rolled we don’t change results, that the game has multiple gods and a polytheistic setting, that players can play PCs of any gender (e.g., not their own if they like) and that there are a ton of grotesque, horrific monsters in the game (I cite a few of the examples above) that can kill you in terrifying ways.

If someone isn’t on board with the game I’m running, then they are welcome to find another table.

Having said that, once you are at the table then things are a bit different. If someone objects to a game element after they have been a player for a while, I generally remove it. This has only happened once in the last 4 years of my after school program, one player hated spiders, so I changed the spiders in encounters to lizards. Over time that player became OK with spiders, so we added them back.

Getting consent from players for particular monsters is unwieldy, there are too many monsters in D&D which, if actually played as written, are just as terrifying as a mind flayer transformation, and thus would also require consent. The referee already has a lot on their plates, and it makes much more sense for them to be clear about the kind of game they are running in a general way, and putting the burden back on the players to decide if it's the game for them or not. Don’t ask players for consent and change it if they don’t consent, get players to make the decision as to whether or not they want to play in the game as is. 

I await the enterprising individual who will list all the D&D monsters with grotesque and horrific attacks on a consent sheet and require the players to tick off all of the objectionable options.

Building Bhakashal – Game Design and History

Sigh. 

Another day on Twitter, another person dunking on AD&D for “bad design”. I get so tired of this sort of thing, and it seems to be on the uptake. Gygax is a common target, and since he’s dead, its oddly easier and more acceptable to criticize his work. Combine that with his perceived politics and it's a tempting option. 

I think it's fundamentally flawed.

TTRPGs were something new when AD&D was produced, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that AD&D wasn’t as slick and well organized as TTRPGs are today. We’ve had decades of experience to draw upon, Gygax’s work was the first of its kind. Yes, there were earlier iterations of D&D, but Gygax was trying to square the circle, to take both old wargame practices and at-the-table experience and standardize them in some way so they could provide a baseline for convention gaming. And he was doing it in a rush.

He was quite literally doing something that had not been done before and was also adding significant content to the existing game in the process. Looking back on this and calling it “badly designed” is ahistorical and misconstrued. I’m an academic. Academic literature is much like this, initial forays into new subjects are often coarse and somewhat clunky by later standards, because THOSE STANDARDS WERE NOT IN PLAY WHEN THE EARLIER WORK WAS DONE. AD&D is no different.

Also, and this is important context, Gygax was a bit of an encyclopedist, I believe he worked as an actuary for a time, he liked tables and lists, and given that the TTRPG was in its infancy, an encyclopedic approach is not uncommon. Later iterations of the game, and other games had the benefit of time and experience to reflect upon. TTRPG theory developed in the wake of early D&D, and fed into the design process. Gygax did not have the benefit of formalized theory to draw upon.

As a result, the AD&D DMG is hard to read, it’s not just his vocabulary, or his fondness for statistics, the organization and presentation is a challenge. Things are scattered around; you need to use the index and the TOC to find a lot of things. Rules are scattered here and there.

Is it a challenge? Yes! And later iterations of the game worked to present the material in a more intuitive way, and that’s a good thing. But that doesn’t make the older game “badly designed”, it was an early attempt at something without meaningful precedents. Gygax wasn’t TRYING to make the game difficult to understand, he was assuming you had experience with earlier iterations of the game, and that you were familiar with wargames (as, to be fair, many early adopters were) and he was putting together a reference document for your use. Later iterations were designed with newcomers that had little to no experience in mind, this is not uncommon.

People often complain that newer games can seem slick and soulless compared to early AD&D, and I would agree with that. But they are MUCH easier to learn and use. So, as with all things, there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach. But the same logic applies to early AD&D, it is flavorful and enigmatic, it reads like some lost text, just familiar enough to read but different and challenging enough to seem alien, magical and strange. The weird, esoteric bits, the hidden details, they all give the work a feel that newer books lack.

So just like newer games, there are benefits and drawbacks. Learning AD&D was a challenge, but it also felt like an achievement, and the game has an arcane, esoteric feel to it that few games can match. The cost to this is that it is harder to learn and play. The benefit to this is that the game has atmosphere and immersion that few can match.

People on social media are such positivists and presentists about game design, there is a trajectory towards the “ideal game”, older games are further away from the ideal, so they are by definition inferior. BUT YOU DON’T GET MODERN GAMES WITHOUT OLDER GAMES. The present builds on the past, holding up old games and suggesting they are “terribly designed” is just showing your vast ignorance about both game design and history.

To be clear, being able to work your way through AD&D doesn’t make you “smarter” than anyone else.

If anything, it makes you more persistent. You have to be willing to push through and dig deep to be able to get a handle on the rules. Many people don’t have the patience for this, and that’s fine. But to dismiss the work because of it is a mistake.

One last thing, dense, somewhat impenetrable, and encyclopedic work like Gygax’s has another advantage over slick, “intuitive” design: inspiration. AD&D has a lot going on, and all of that content works as a driver to inspire the DM to create. I still find inspiration in it today, after 40 years. No game that provides that much engagement over that many years is “badly designed”. Unintuitive, in need of editing and dense, yes, but there is a ton of good game design in AD&D (see my pinned tweet on Twitter, @blackdragoncan, if you are interested).

I suspect that the real issue here isn’t the design of the game, or the challenging nature of the prose, it’s that modern gamers can’t resist dunking on Gygax and the dense nature of AD&D is an easy target. This is such a weird thing about TTRPGs. I don’t see people dunking on musicians that create new styles of music, or artists that create new styles of art, or authors that write new kinds of stories. They are all lauded for creativity and inspiration, while accepting that things will change over time. For some reason TTRPG pioneers are seen as relics of the past to be mocked and derided.

I’ll leave it to someone more erudite than me to sort that out.