Old School Gaming and Brechtian Drama

This blog talks a lot about materialism in role playing games, but I’ve not covered where these ideas come from. Before I got back into RPGs, I spent a decade trying to write theatrical plays. My inspiration then was a 20th century movement that went against the dominant theatrical form of the time. I must like to go against the grain, because it is the rebellious “Old School”(OSR) strand in RPGs that has felt like home here too.

Professor Dungeon Master has talked of theatre being the closest art form to RPGs. In keeping with this, they have recently published an adaptation of Macbeth as an RPG adventure. I’m not going to claim that a strictly plotted 5 act drama is the best basis to create an adventure in keeping with the OSR’s sandbox style of game play. This much is reflected in Bryce Lynch’s review of a similar product. Theatre though, much like RPGs, has its own divergent schools of thought. I've found there to be one such movement that reflects the OSR's philosophy surprisingly well. 

There are certainly stereotypes around theatrical plays that run contrary to OSR principles. We might think of plays in terms of linear narratives, emotionally charged climaxes and highly character centric stories – and a great number of them do work like this. But prior to RPGs, there were theatre makers who saw such aspects of theatre and didn’t like them much either. One of these was the German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Brechtian Theatre

In Playing at the World, Jon Peterson locates the origin of the term “role playing” in Jacob L Moreno’s experience of running a theatre group in the early 1900s called “The Theatre of Spontaneity”. A little later in Weimar Germany, Brecht was writing plays which introduced elements we’d also recognise as characteristic of RPGs.

Two of Brecht’s early plays are particularly noteworthy in this connection. He Said Yes / He Said No is a play with two alternative endings based on the response to its central decision. Then there is The Decision, which asks the audience to adjudicate over the actions of three undercover agents in killing a fellow activist. In both, the intention is to avoid railroading the audience into perceiving a single correct outcome.

Brecht’s work at this time was an early form of participatory theatre. He Said Yes / He Said No was conducted as an exercise by more than 300 groups of school children. Imagine a behind closed doors rehearsal session, done not for the benefit of any audience, but the participants themselves. In some ways, this affords more freedom than RPG players normally get. Participants could debate and alter the scenario itself, rather than just the decisions of its protagonists.

Photo from a 1930 production of Der Jasager (He Said Yes)

Beyond this general similarity to RPGs, Brecht’s theatre can be seen as having a particular affinity with the OSR. Brecht summarised his approach to theatre in a handy table, showing the contrasts he perceived it having with the historically dominant form. Much could be said about this table, each line perhaps being worthy of its own blog post. I’ve posted the whole table here, as I think some points leap out on their own.




Brecht’s Epic Theatre is on the right of the table. Some items, such as being forced to “make decisions” and arousing the “capacity for action” have a quite obvious affinity with OSR gaming. The items concerning observation and studying to build a “picture of the world” resonate strongly with the OSR’s emphasis on exploration. For Brecht, this was more about learning power relations in the world rather than points on a map. But there is an outward looking emphasis in both, with a respect for the objectivity of the world as the subject of study.

For Brecht, “Each scene for itself” means being able to arrange a play’s scenes in any order, without dependence on a fixed structure that builds to a conclusion. This resonates strongly with the OSR sandbox style of adventure, where encounters can unfold in any order, without following a preestablished story.

There is further, “Social being determines thought” versus “Thought determining being”, which I have talked about a lot in this blog. It reflects Brecht’s commitment to materialism as a philosophical position. I’ve argued before that the OSR leans into materialism, at least in the respect of physical, graspable things.

I think it is equally possible to see many tendencies characteristic of 5th edition D&D on the left of the table. It might be harsh to say items such as “Plot” and “Linear development” characterise 5e games, but these features infiltrate 5e publications with far more regularity than in the OSR. Being “implicated” in a staged situation, to arouse “feeling” and “sensation” very well describes my impression of watching a Youtube 5e Critical Role episode. “Thought determining being” in 5e is also something I have discussed in some length in another post.

The connection between RPGs and Brechtian drama has been recognised by game designer Greg Costikyan (the Steve Jackson game Toon and the original Star Wars RPG). The fact this has not been explored in more depth is perhaps down to the very separate spheres they occupy. The rest of this post will think about why there would be commonality between a 1930s theatre movement and a 1970s gaming hobby.

A Rebel Alliance?

The commonality between Old School gaming and Brechtian drama is best viewed in terms of what they are a reaction against. That is, two thousand odd years of baggage associated with the dominant dramatic principles in Western society. This stems back to Aristotle’s Poetics, which continues to be reflected in the dramatic principles stated on the left-hand side of Brecht’s table.

In some ways, D&D’s starting point represents the end point that Brecht was trying to get to. D&D emerged from tabletop war games, which were essentially materialist and lacking any form of poetics or conventions associated with conventional storytelling. Whereas Brecht had to shake off the traditions and practises of a very old art form, RPGs had the benefit of a blank slate.

RPGs didn’t occupy this virgin state for long. From the point Chainmail’s fantasy supplement introduced a “hero” miniature to the battlefield, the conventions of fantasy literature began to exert their influence. While Original D&D retained a strongly materialist basis, subsequent editions increasingly imported elements from popular fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is an often-cited example of “The Hero’s Journey”, a method for written fantasy novels that is highly influenced by Aristotelian poetics.

The fantasy author Tracy Hickman pushed D&D further into this territory, as official D&D modules began to follow guidelines originally intended to produce well written novels. Such principles increasingly became reflected in the rule mechanisms of the game, which I have argued foster a style of game play heavily steeped in Aristotelian poetics (as discussed in this post, under the wider heading of idealist poetics).

The trajectory of D&D has therefore been opposite to that of Brecht’s drama since pretty much its inception. This brings us to the “Old School Renaissance”, which in the 2000s sought to move in the opposite direction to D&D – seeking a return to a primal state of the game prior to it becoming an emulation of high fantasy literature. It is partly this sense of being a reaction that gives the OSR its kinship with Brechtian theatre.

Summary

I’ve talked about how the OSR and Brechtian theatre share a push factor, in their response to idealist poetics. What’s interesting is that their response has taken a roughly similar form. As I’ve written on previously, the OSR has strongly materialist tendencies, while historical materialism is the underlying philosophy of Brecht’s theatre.

The reason D&D started off as materialist is partly accidental, in its emergence from war games. A soldier in a war game is not treated as an independent actor, instead being swept up along with the material forces that determine the battle’s outcome. The Chainmail rules reflect this, where a soldier’s identity is determined almost entirely by physical equipment.

Brecht’s historical materialism is somewhat different to this. It is “social being” that determines the character, with an emphasis on economic and cultural forces rather than just physical, graspable objects. Neither Original nor B/X D&D fully incorporate this social dimension of Brecht’s theatre, though there seems some efforts to do so in first edition AD&D.

The original sense of the OSR, which focused on certain editions of early D&D, might not align exactly with Brecht’s goals in theatre. But recently, the term OSR seems to have become something of a banner, under which the “reaction” to 5e D&D gathers its forces. Thought of this way, Brechtian drama feel like a useful tool to challenge the elements of 5e that in fact represent a very old enemy. Ironically, this flips around the usual perception of the OSR as being a regressive movement. In dramatical terms, it is 5e that has its head locked in the past, with the OSR in the role of progressive usurper.