28. Detours and Lies (1, probably) - “What Is A D&D Anyway? - Combat Orientation and Stoves”
I’m going to take a day’s detour here, because while I’m going to self-express and say some things that are important for me to say out loud (“say” “out loud”). The benefit (and the reason it’s here and not part of my General Ludosophy [though I will likely cross post this there too] is because I’m going to introduce some language that will be critical to unpicking Blades in the Dark later. So let’s start.
Three days ago, Charlie Hall set a dumb fire. He didn’t mean to, it’s not his fault exactly (although he’s not blameless, as we’ll find). Charlie Hall is an exceptional journalist and most of the time we do not deserve him. Charlie was the first major “tabletop editor” in a US publication, and has continued to deliver excellent work since. Charlie fuckin’ gets it. So, first things first, we have to assume that everything written in this article is done so in good faith, as in “good, honest intentions”. Hall was not trying to start a storm, so it’s funny that a storm kind of kicked up. Now, I’m not saying that the particular post “is” the storm, but the 16k likes and bunch of retweets with opinions (not counting the subtweets) is the storm. It’s worth looking through. Worth discussing how we all see and talk about games.
So, Hall quotes famed “beloved internet comedy personality & quirky white boy AP superstar Brennan Lee Mulligan” (@qwinglemove, 2024) (sealing the deal for weirdest citation I’ve done in Daily Blade, so far). And the quote is good:
“[Calling D&D a combat-oriented game] would sort of be like looking at a stove and being like, This has nothing to do with food. You can’t eat metal. Clearly this contraption is for moving gas around and having a clock on it. If it was about food, there would be some food here. [...] What you should get is a machine that is either made of food, or has food in it. [...]
I’m going to bring the food. The food is my favorite part. [People say that] because D&D has so many combat mechanics, you are destined to tell combat stories. I fundamentally disagree. Combat is the part I’m the least interested in simulating through improvisational storytelling. So I need a game to do that for me, while I take care of emotions, relationships, character progression, because that shit is intuitive and I understand it well. I don’t intuitively understand how an arrow moves through a fictional airspace.”
Now there’s two important facts that I don’t think is given enough focus here: While Mulligan’s analogy doesn’t hold up to even slight analysis, it was delivered in a Behind the Scenes “fireside chat” for the podcast it’s referring to (Worlds Beyond Number (Mulligan, Ishii, Iyengar, Wilson, 2024)). This means it wasn’t delivered in conversation with analysis, it was delivered in conversation with a play group, a community, a social experience, who have all undergone shared exploration of this through play. A group that is best described by Mulligan himself: “maybe not as academic as other people but certainly plays games a lot” (for clarity, Mulligan name drops Dr Emily Friedman in the run-up to that sentence, I didn’t just decide on a random game scholar to link). This goes some way to showing why the analogy is…reductive and misdirected.
The second thing that isn’t getting enough attention is that the analogy is simple and Mulligan should apologise. Oh wait. He does. The lead in to the quote Hall uses is this:
“Sometimes when people will say something like ‘D&D is a combat-oriented game. D&D is a combat-oriented game, it’s not for storytelling, it’s for combat, the rules are all about combat’
And my reaction to that would be, that observation, and this is a little bit dismissive and I apologise, it would sort of be like looking at a stove and being like ‘This has nothing to do with food [...]”
How the FUCK did Hall skip that? Like, I’m not a journalist. I don’t know how quoting procedures work, but if someone leads into a story with a reflexive statement of the analogy’s weaknesses and an apology—?! Yeah. I’d print that. It’s a little frustrating because (and again, assuming good faith) Hall’s dropping of the reflexive statement artificially strengthens Mulligan’s position.
Before we go ANY further. We extend to Mulligan the same courtesy that we extended Hall, an assumption of genuine good faith and earnestness. Which is why this conversation matters. Because, if you disagree with Mulligan (like I do! Somewhat!) you are two people holding earnest, informed opinions that are in conflict. That’s something worth interrogating.
I don’t think it’s worth posting a snarky image that says “we don’t have to have a bunch of discussion about what the system is actually built for […] Just have fun and be nice to people” as if it is the very act of analysis, of interrogation of ideas that makes some people into fuckheads. As if we can’t both interrogate ideas and be nice to people. As if this isn’t fun. And I’ll extend @CatieOsaurus the same assumption of good faith that this is just a (very gorgeous looking) joke that plays tongue-in-cheek with the same anti-intellectualism that always pops up to say that people are being too serious and need to touch grass. But it still rubs me the wrong way. Because the rest of the World's Beyond Number podcast that we’re quoting talks about why this conflict exists, and why “the system says it’s both” is an unsatisfactory answer to the problem at hand.
I want to find the satisfactory answer, an answer rooted in good faith curiousity.
So…I am actually a little more academic in my approach than Mulligan reports himself to be, so I want to help out a little bit here by introducing two core topics to game design that don’t get spoken about with enough clarity for my taste. The first is Jared Sinclair’s Rules Elide and the second is The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying (Montola, 2008). Starting at the top:
Rules Elide gets mentioned in the replies to the above-linked tweet by the original poster @gwinglemove. Here’s the pair:
It would feel incomplete to have the above two tweets without the tweet of the author making a reflexive statement softening the blow. Just sayin’, Charlie, mate.
In the simplest form, Rules Elide (Sinclair, date unknown) is the game design equivalent of the notes a Jazz musician isn’t playing. It states that rules can only remove the act of play, never create it. More specifically “To say that rules elide is to say that they do nothing else. That they cannot do anything else. Rules do not themselves create or conjure or elicit or inspire or invoke or incite—they only negate.” (Sinclair). For those of you like me who had never experienced the word Elide it means to leave out, omit, conflate, or merge.
The shortcut that people tend to jump to from here is, essentially where Mulligan (2024) took us during the podcast: “Combat is the part I’m the least interested in simulating through improvisational storytelling. So I need a game to do that for me, while I take care of emotions, relationships, character progression,”. According to this (partial/incorrect) interpretation of the concept of Rules Elide, the nature of putting rules to combat are because we don’t care about them. Thus we use rules to elide (omit, merge, de-specifiy) combat, so that we can go on with the fun relationships. As Mulligan describes it: the rules handle the stuff the DM/Players/Table don’t care to handle.
But that isn’t Sinclair’s point at all. Sinclair says that if we imagine a spectrum of rules, at position 1 we have “no rules” (though, actually there’s a very clear rule regarding DM/Player authority structures and “who says what when”. Not the point, Icarus![3]) At point 1 we have no rules. You describe what you do, I describe what I do. No dice, no mechanical restrictions. I tell you that you succeed because you earn the success through the quality of your description of narrative action. Point Two on this spectrum is a simple mechanic that resolves the interaction systemically rather than interpretively: I don’t have to listen for you to say a cool sword move that will cut through my defences, instead we flip a coin. Heads, you kill me, tails I kill you. Here, the rules are Eliding (merging) all of combat into one systemic interaction.
Point three is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, mixing Points 1 and 2 — a game where we some detail. We want to elide some of the combat away with rules, but we also want to have some negotiation of the fiction. And when we do that, when we say “okay you choose where to move, but we don’t worry about vertical distance unless you’re flying”, “you attack someone, but we only have to state which weapon, not like what stance or move you do”, when we say these things, we Elide, but we also CURATE. That is, we strip stuff out of a layer of play, and by doing so we SPECIFY the layer above it.
Sinclair: “And here’s the deep insight, if there is one: whatever level of the fractal we’re eliding on (in this example, one level below “the fact of combat”), that is us curating the experience of the thing one level up (in this example, “combat”). We are making play about combat, here, to some degree. Or rather, about some specific qualities of combat […] In this way, [Position 3 on our spectrum] becomes a commentary on combat, and a set of arguments about what is interesting about combat.”
People tend to quote Sinclair as saying something like: “I think it’s plain to see that “making a game about X” is not merely a matter of writing a bunch of rules that have to do with X. Instead, we make rules about everything that is not X.” But this too truncates a critical quote. Next line says “We use rules to remove parts of X from play, thereby presenting a vision of X that is inherently ideological and opinionated.” Rules Elide does not say that games make rules about things they don’t care about, therefore D&D doesn’t care about combat. Rather Rules Elide says we make a LOT of rules about things we care about so that we can CURATE that experience. D&D has a lot of rules to balance the play experience, because it doesn’t care about success or failure in combats that aren’t a tactical puzzle with risk. D&D cares about the decisions of combat, not the manipulations of combat. Tactics, not employment. Arguably, it cares only about the Currencies of combat (hp and spell slots) not the reasons or goals of combat.
But you may notice that isn’t what Mulligan is saying. He’s not saying “The combat rules give me the perfect level of fidelity so I don’t have to care about them” because that’s not how the rules of D&D 5e are eliding the situation. To use 5e’s combat rules is still care about combat, but to care about a Curated Combat. In the same way to use Apocalypse World’s relationship moves is to still care about relationships, but only through a curated transactional lens. To use Blades’ action roll is to curate for desperation, consequence, and ambition.
[3] This is a really important catch when considering how to apply Rules Elide to your analysis. Sinclair asserts that there are “no rules” and so nothing is hidden in his first example. Except that an adversarial GM relationship in which players petition for success by describing fictional actions is, in fact, a rule. Jared assumes these core rules to the point that they become invisible to his lens. The relationship is a rule, and as such the way we rule that relationship affects the “curation” of the play experience at the table. See the later point about Mulligan vs Iyengar and how their power relationship affects their perception of rules that generate “world power”.
At roughly 42:50 in the podcast (almost twenty minutes before the quote that kicked this off), Mulligan introduces the questions that lead into this statement. It’s worth listening for the context (but I’ll quote it here anyway). Mulligan hits the nail so clearly on the head that, for someone who has declared himself non-academic, he has evoked one of my favourite papers.
“These are all sort of assumptions baked into, I would say, the culture of the game and not the mechanics of the game. You don’t have to fight all of the time in the rules of 5e. But it’s assumed, culturally- even sometimes, like not in the text but in the miasma surrounding the text. There’s sort of an idea that you will be fighting all the time. And that as you level up you’ll have a higher station in the world. But it’s not explicit”
THIS is why Mulligan and I disagree. This is why a lot of people disagree. This is why one person sees a stove, and one person sees “the best physics engine for world-building” (Ishii, in Fireside Chat, 2024).
In 2008, Marcus Montola published a paper called The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing: The Social Framework of the Role-Playing Process. In it, he uses a Threefold model from Fine (1983) to discuss different layers or “frames” of play:
Exogenous - The social contract of play - “Do not discuss non-game business during the game”
Endogenous - The mechanic sets that define play interactions -”A sword does d10 points of damage", and
Diegetic - The fictional circumstances - “Carrying a sword within the city limits is punishable by a fine” (Montola, 2008)[1]
Montola (2008) says that the applied art of role-playing is building the Diegetic through the Endogenous, using Exogenous structures to allocate responsibility. I’m allowed to say (Exogenous) what the arcane sigil looks like (Diegetic) because my character is a Wizard (Endogenous). And, in reverse: Because my character is a Wizard (Endogenous), when I cast a spell (Diegetic), I can demand that you (Exogenous) make a Dexterity Save (Endogenous).
[1] Fascinatingly, this was written originally in 2005, based on a 1983 framework. In the same year (2005, I mean), Vincent Baker wrote the Dice and Clouds model under the title “How RPG Rules Work”, which produces almost exactly the same framing.
Montola’s position is thus:
“i) Typically the decisive power to define the decisions made by a free-willed character construct is given to the player of the character.
ii) The decisive defining power that is not restricted by character constructs is often given to people participating in game master roles.
iii) The defining process is often governed by a quantitative game ruleset.
iv) The information regarding the state of the game world is often disseminated hierarchically, in a fashion corresponding
with the power structure of the game.”
Or as Mulligan puts it in the 2024 Podcast: “the assumed conventions of tabletop — That you will have world power when you have character power, and that character power will be gained through combat, and that combat will be plentiful. These are all sort of assumptions baked into, I would say, the culture of the game and not the mechanics of the game. You don’t have to fight all of the time in the rules of 5e. But it’s assumed, culturally- even sometimes, like not in the text but in the miasma surrounding the text. There’s sort of an idea that you will be fighting all the time. And that as you level up you’ll have a higher station in the world. But it’s not explicit”
To which Iyengar importantly replies: ”My minor pushback on that is that there is something inside the skill checks. That the fact that a lot of your levelling up will increase your ability to ‘have your way', uh, even like- in conversation. There’s a bit of that too. […] But, generally speaking, I do agree.”
All we’re doing is putting these two together. That “Miasma” Mulligan references? That’s Exogenous play. Social norms? The “social layer”. World power and Character Power is what Montola (2008) calls decisive power allocated by the defining process. If we were to overlay Montola’s Academia over Mulligan’s culture of play and inform it with Sinclair’s Rules Elide it would sound like this:
“The assumptions of tabletop’s exogenous play culture are that you will be given authority to say what happens in the diegetic fiction when your character construct is endogenously powerful enough to seize it (diegetic authority) through a decision process guided by quantitative game rules, and that the most curated experiences within those quantitative game rules and therefore the easiest in which to express endogenous power is curated combat.”
And this is, I believe, the best bit:
“These are all sort of assumptions baked into, I would say, the exogenous frame of the game and not the endogenous process of the game. You don’t have to fight all of the time in the rules of 5e. But it’s assumed, exogenously - even sometimes, like not in the endogenous rules but in the exogeny surrounding the endogeny. There’s sort of an idea that you will be endogenous all the time. And that as you grow in endogenous power you’ll have a higher station in the diegesis. But it’s not explicit”
I love how clear Mulligan’s position is when we have the right words for it, how it repeats and rhymes with itself. The Exogenous Culture has created an expectation that the best way to seize control (to say what happens in the diegesis) is through combat, because that is where the rules most elide (or, provide the most curated experience for seizing control of the diegesis outside your character). Or, as Iyengar points out, through (endogenous) skills checks. Thus, because players want to seize control (my own exogenous assumption there, that players want some descriptive power), they gravitate toward the curated section, which is one-up from the elided section.
And if we look to Iyengar’s reply - Asserting that endogenous skill checks provide a greater ability for players to seize diegetic control when players are endogenously more powerful. Which suggests that maybe Mulligan’s statement that growing in endogenous power being not explicitly growth in diegetic power is missing the forest for the trees. Iyengar is right, in this case, according to Montola (and me).
But! I promised this would help you understand why you might disagree with Mulligan’s position of food and stoves, and all I’ve done is helped you understand it. And the answer lies in this one question: Is D&D the Endogenous, The Exogenous, the Digetic or some mix?
Mulligan’s position is clear from the way he speaks about play. To him, D&D is story, it’s Diegesis. D&D requires no rules to be D&D. As he says he can resolve everything but combat with “improvisational storytelling”, and only needs the rules around to cover “how an arrow moves through fictionalised airspace”, which he is more than happy to just…not cover (see Hall’s article which discusses the dearth of combat in Part 2 of Worlds Beyond Number). Brennan, as they say about so many lifelong Dungeon Masters, is only interested in rolling dice to enjoy the sound they make.
Which is why Brennan can hold this weak stove analogy without much dissonance: If you believe D&D to be “anything we do at the table while we are Exogenously agreed to be Playing a D&D” then it’s VERY easy to imagine a game of D&D with no combat at all. With no dice at all. We need only a way to assert consensus (the Baker-Boss Principle, with which we’re familiar).
However, if you see D&D as mostly an endogenous act, where players have to roll to see if they can achieve things, then it’s very clearly a combat-oriented system, because that is where the rules provide the most curated experience for engaging a defining process that allows players to “seize” diegetic control, and to increase their endogenous capabilities (levelling up). Even in changing how experience works in Worlds Beyond Number (Wilson describes it as something to the effect of “Ame levels up when she has time to go home and clear her head”. Forgive the imperfect quote, I lost the timestamp for this one), even in changing that level up trigger, levelling up (endogenous growth) is still seen as the best way for players (people relatively disempowered by the exogenous power structures) to “have their way” per Iyengar.
I find it telling that DM’s response to questions about rules is that the curated rules are extraneous to play, that players don't need endogeny to influence the defining process. We bring the food, friends. Players get enough diegetic control just telling a story improvisationally. To which one of the players replied that actually, the game has rules that allows the players to get their way and have their say, and then highlights that some players have a harder time being effective in the story because they roll poorly. I’m not meaning to imply that Mulligan isn’t a good (great) DM, or that he’s not listening to his players, but gee, look how people’s experience of the diegesis of D&D is warped by their exogenous power structures (and the endogenous extension of that, Montola’s Defining Process of rolling dice to seize authority).
Mulligan is a loooooong time Traditional DM, and an exceptional storyteller. He also has a perspective that conflates "D&D” the text (endogenous), “role-playing” the act (exogenous), and Worlds Beyond Number the story (Diegetic). I don’t mean to suggest that he doesn’t know other games exist (having run at least 2 systems on Dimension 20, and also just being a smart guy). But I have not seem him depart from an exclusively “traditional” exogenous approaches to play (which, for those who aren’t familiar with Indie RPG slang, trad exogeny usually means GM-as-word-of-God, where players control their character monogamously, and the world has a big line between playing from the character’s perspective, and playing from a more informed audience perspective. GM is Director Stance, players are Pawn Stance). I don’t think he’s ignorant to the world our there, I think he just knows what he likes and has built strong habits that provide him the play experience he wants and needs. It’s like how every woman of a certain age still refers to anything that players a digital game as “A Nintendo”. It’s not ignorant or malicious, they just have other stuff they care about (love you, Mum).
To Mulligan, saying that D&D is combat-oriented is the same as saying that role-playing is combat-oriented, or that Worlds Beyond Number is combat-oriented. And that’s obviously a false and indefensible position (hence the stove nonsense). When Mulligan presents Worlds Beyond Number he says “See! I have proved a D&D that isn’t combat-oriented!”, to which I reply "No, my friend. What you’ve proved is that there's a D&D (role-playing) that isn’t D&D (game text)!"
And I don’t think our viewpoints are antithetical, at least not in the sense that they can’t exist in the same hobby or even at the same table! I don’t even think that I’m likely to be right! I oft repeat the quote from Rules of Play (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004): “The phrase "to play a game," in both German and French, for example, uses different versions of the same word for both "play" and "game." In French "on joue á un jeu; in German, man spielt ein Spiel."“ I am probably the more off-base when it comes to what a D&D is. A D&D is probably as much bearing witness to the Diegesis as it is being participant to the text. Famed Indie roleplaying luminary and strong woman in gaming[2] Diana Jones seems to think so. I hope I come around on it.
[2] Not to dissect the frog here, but yes, thank you I know that Diana Jones is not a real woman in roleplaying.
The important thing is not whether Mulligan is right about what D&D is and how the combat-oriented critics approach it. The important thing is what his thinking shows us about the way he engages with games as a professional and as a person, and helps us to better understand how we do and can approach games as professionals, academics, and as people. Understanding the way we play is the only path to better play in the future.
Maybe we should act ourselves with some of that good faith we assumed of other people earlier. Neither with fawning adherence nor snarky rejection; with curiosity, not judgement. Because Brennan is right about bringing the food. Food has brought us together since the dawn of the first communities. We literally break bread. Food and Social Exogenous Play are twin applied arts that we are always willing-and-welcome to bring to those for whom we care. So Brennan, if you’re ever looking for a dinner-date, bring the food. I’ll bring the food too. And the play. Just…do you mind if instead of 5e, we try out some Blades in the Dark?
