What Kind of Folk Activity are RPGs?

A recent Questing Beast video has drawn a line in sand with respect to WOTC’s One Game Licence. A colloquial folk conception of D&D is contrasted with a corporately controlled singular vision of the hobby. When viewed as a folk activity, Ben Milton places RPGs in the same box as pass times such as knitting or painting.

Luka’s Wizard Thief Fighter blog has taken this thought further, considering the type of folk activity RPGs most resemble. Their answer is one I’d agree with, identifying RPGs as a type of folk performance art:

Some uncanny cross between improv theater, campfire ghost stories, literary jazz, and—in its heroic tropes—epic poetry and fairy tales

In this post, I wanted to flesh this out a bit more, and look at some parallels between RPGs and folk theatre. What I hadn’t expected was quite how close the connection between these forms can be in some instances.

Folk Theatre

Folk theatre is a very broad category. It can be frequently bawdy, crude and naïve, with a good number of fart jokes – qualities shared with some of the best RPG sessions.  Further superficial similarities with D&D are evident in this video, which could easily be mistaken for a LARP game.



This is the traditional English “mummer’s play”, which involves a good and a bad knight engaging in mock combat, with the loser then being healed by a doctor.  Replace the doctor with a cleric, and this could literally be my last RPG session. I chose this example video performed from in a pub, because it retains an amateurish folkish quality, in contrast to this more professionally staged version in Shakespeare’s hometown.

To genuinely qualify as folk, I’d suggest an activity should be producible without the resources of an institution like a theatre. It should equally involve skills that can be passed between ordinary people, without the need for instruction by an institution such as a university. A consequence of this is that folk theatre is outside the control of such institutions.

Folk theatre, as merely the repeating of a tradition can be fairly empty and conservative passtime. The performance of Mummer’s plays in quaint little English villages probably falls under this category. In its proper context though, folk theatre can also be very radical and subversive. Amongst the latter type are “carnivalesque” plays, particularly concerned with the mocking of authority figures.

Mistero Buffo

A brilliant source for appreciating the carnivalesque form of folk theatre is Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo. This was one of the most popular spectacles in post war European theatre, being performed over 5000 times. Dario Fo was both a scholar of the medieval comic mystery play and a talented comedic performer, well versed in its traditional style of delivery.

Mistero Buffo is at once a lecture on the comic mystery play (complete with slides) and a living piece of folk theatre. The comic mystery is a subversive takes on the religious mystery play, which were depictions of popular biblical episodes. Fo recreates these plays from surviving texts, but also adapted his show between performances to insert content from topical events.

Mistero Buffo begins by describing a procession before the performance of a comic mystery. These processions were made up ordinary people, who donned masks and sometimes played special fart-making devices. Here, they were not merely spectators but participants in the performance. Part of the event was a mock trial of local nobles and church figures, whose effigies were then burnt. In other words, an interactive event where participants were involved in decision making concerning the outcome of the trial (to me, this is beginning to sound like an RPG).

However, the comic mystery was not for the most part a crowd event of this kind, but the work of a single performer. This was the jongleur, travelling from town to town, skilfully performing every role in the play themselves. Mistero Buffo contains the play Birth of the Jongleur, which helps in understanding their place in society. It opens as follows:

Kind people, gather round and listen. The jongleur is here! I am the jongleur. I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh. I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the bigshots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull on the plug, and… psss… they deflate.

The play depicts the jongluer’s past as being that of an ordinary peasant, who finds an unwanted piece of land to cultivate for themselves. They work hard to make the land fertile, at which point a noble lays claim to it. Refusing to give up his land provokes the noble into brutal action, causing the peasant to lose their family. At the point of suicidal despair, Jesus appears and miraculously conveys the talents of the jongleur upon the peasant.

The jongleur’s folk credentials are shown here, as being one of the common folk, sharing in their plight and driven to speak up for them. RPGs are also an activity typically taken up by ordinary people, requiring barely any resources to undertake. This gives RPGs the freedom to be dissenting in the same way as the jongleur play. And even RPGs that do not deal with controversial subject matter have a natural tendency to stray from prescribed narratives, in a similar way to the comic mystery.

A Common Structure

The comic mysteries share a similar structure, which I think has striking parallels with an RPG session. There is typically a fragment of a narrative thread lifted from a bible story, already familiar to audiences. But much space is left between the beats of the narrative for bawdy, raucous antics. The focus is often on ordinary people in and around the event. The message of the play is also altered from its sanctioned religious morale.

The play The Marriage at Cana shows the kinship between the comic mystery and RPGs particularly well. In the excerpt below, the jongleur plays two roles in introducing the performance. On the one hand, we have the angel presenting the orthodox Christian narrative. On the other hand, we have the drunkard wanting to take the story in a quite different direction.

When reading the below, try to see the angel instead as a games master, wanting to run their players through a prewritten module. The drunkard corresponds to the type of unruly player we’ve all had in our campaigns, wanting to take the session instead in their own direction.

ANGEL: Pay attention, kind people, and I shall tell you of a true story, a story which began…

DRUNKARD: I would like to tell you a story too, about a drinking session, a glorious binge…

ANGEL: Drunkard!

DRUNKARD: I want to tell you…

ANGEL: Silence… Not a word!

DRUNKARD: …But I…

ANGEL: Silence… I am the one who’s supposed to give the prologue! (To the audience). Kind people, everything that we are going to tell you will be true, utterly true, and is all taken from books and from the Gospels. Nothing presented here is created from imagination…

DRUNKARD: I want to tell a story too, and mine is not imaginary either. I have just been on such a magnificent bender, such a binge, that never again do I want to get drunk again, lest I forget how magnificent it was. It was a bender like you’ve…

ANGEL: Drunkard!

And so on. In the comic mystery though, unlike the church, it is the drunk’s story that goes on to take centre stage. You can see this on the video below with the master himself, Dario Fo, telling the drunk’s story with English subtitles. It concerns a wedding where all the wine has gone bad. Luckily, that chap Jesus turns up again and performs the miracle of turning water into wine.



I don’t think it is much of a stretch to relate this to an RPG session. The games master turns up with their prewritten module - I’m imagining something with a particularly linear story arc. The players however rebel against the expected course. Some characters from the module may feature, but nothing goes as planned. Perhaps they go on a drinking binge with the big bad’s hench men.

In both these cases, a prescribed narrative is steered off course through the input of ordinary people. The jongleur turns Jesus’s first miracle into an endorsement of raucous celebration and drunken excess (Jesus is normally presented as a man of the people in these plays). In the RPG example, the players favour a drinking binge over defeating the individual supposedly responsible for society’s ills.

Summary

The comic mystery was about derailing rigid religious narratives, as presented by the church. These narratives often reinforced the interests of rulers and landowners, in maintaining a status quo in society that many of the common folk perceived to be unfair. We might think of RPGs as more diverse in their content than a canonical biblical text, but WOTC’s vision for Onednd certainly seems a step towards a singular sanctioned narrative.

As I’ve talked about in another post, the epic vision of fantasy that dominates many RPGs contains its own assumptions and associated world views. There are common elements that transcend many RPGs, such as the progression of characters along a heroes’ journey towards to the defeat of the big bad. Locating the cause and solution to society’s ills in the qualities of individuals crowds out contrary world views, reinforcing the interests of those who might prefer us not to seek alternative explanations. 

My feeling is that WOTC's attempt to control the narrative in D&D by turning it into a lifestyle brand won't be successful.  RPGs are inherently a folk form, and lose their appeal when participants are expected to conform with a single authoritative vision.  There is an element of the jongleur in every games master and hopefully never a shortage of unruly players.