Notes from a Materialist Game Session

This is a report on a recent adventure I played in run by Panic Pillow, based on an empire toolkit The 2nd Age we created together. I’m calling it a “materialist session” of the dialectical sort, where social processes drive a lot of what happens in the game. I can’t vouch that Panic Pillow would label it similarly, but I can speak for having this type of thing in mind when designing The 2nd Age.

Panic Pillow ran the game on a HUDless basis, meaning players don’t have access to stats or dice rolls (you can read more about it in Panic Pillow’s write up here). The 2nd Age document is also very light on rules, mainly consisting of some institutional “classes” and qualitative abilities. I’ve not been part of a session with so few explicit mechanics, and was interested to learn from the experience.

Central to The 2nd Age is the idea of character advancement being tied up with the agendas of institutions, and ultimately that of an empire. Social processes operating through the empire, such as expansionism, come to have a direct bearing on the characters. That’s the theory anyway, but I was keen to see how it worked in practice.

The Worst Jobs in the Weird

I’ve been catching up online with the early 2000s UK TV series The Worst Jobs in History. It’s been useful inspiration for coming up with a character’s former job in a fantasy RPG setting. The presenter Tony Robinson tries out the jobs, showing that many had revolting or dangerous aspects that aren’t always obvious. 

I imagine many RPG creators use this or similar sources in compiling lists of background careers for character creation. This is judging by the regularity with which gong farmer turns up anyway. Most lists are rooted in factual examples from history, which inevitably leads to a quite vanilla flavour. Lists often only provide a job’s title, offering little opportunity to embellish on this.

Foreground Growth and Dialectical Growth

I’ve been catching up with posts on foreground growth at Bastionland.com. Foreground growth is an alternative take on character development put to work in RPGs such as Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and Cairn. It’s a principle I'm finding dovetails nicely with a materialist approach to gaming, serving to ground character development within the gameworld.

Foreground growth seeks to subvert the abstract style of class advancement you get in D&D. Instead of a magical metamorphosis occurring in downtime, development of your character is based on events in-play. For any character ability, players should be able to relay a story from a game session that explains its origin.

There is a good illustration of this in Cairn’s FAQs, in an extended descriptive example of gameplay. An unexpected encounter with a patch of bioluminescent water leaves a character with a foot that glows in the dark. This somewhat dubious ability isn’t found in a shopping list at the back of Cairn’s rule book, but emerges in the context of an adventure.

Fear my glowing leg

When a Character Class is not a Class, but is in Fact an Institution

When I was at school, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones. Sadly, things didn’t quite work out that way. It turned out there wasn’t much call for whip wielding tomb raiders in the wider world. 

From childhood to adulthood, there felt like a trend in my career options - a move from the abstract to the specific. At childhood, “what you want to be” was a vague notion of what I liked doing. Career guidance at school presented general categories of job, becoming more specific career paths at college. Then "shit gets real" with an actual job – and it doesn’t get much more specific than that.



In RPGs, there seems a similar spectrum between the abstract and specific in “what you can be”. Classically though, there is a tendency to stop at the final stage - where a character class becomes a concrete role in the game world, rather than just a career guidance template. This post ties in with a collaborative project I am undertaking with Panic Pillow, where we attempt to represent the last bit in an RPG context. 

Character Advancement in 1st Edition AD&D

This is the second of two posts looking at character advancement in D&D. I previously argued that D&D takes a character-centric approach to advancement, with the game-world playing little role in determining the path of this progression. I suggested this went against the tendency in “old school” D&D (OSR) to prioritise the game world over the character. Here I will suggest ways to address this, looking at attempts made to do so in 1st edition Advanced D&D (AD&D 1e).

Last time, I singled out “Oath breaker” paladins in 5e D&D as emblematic of character classes failing to impose constraints on player agency. This subclass effectively jettisons any influence the game world has on a paladin through their religious order and deity. Basically, you get to advance whether you follow the paladin code or not. In AD&D 1e though, paladins got a bit less of free ride. This was literally so in terms of their special warhorse, which develops an “immutable enmity” towards the character if their actions cause them to lose their paladinhood (p18 Dungeon Master's Guide).

Oath-breaker Paladins – The Problem with Character Advancement in D&D

I’ve recently been taking a harder look at some enduring features of D&D that can be traced back to game’s original edition (OD&D). My goal is to run a campaign that moves its centre of gravity away from the characters, shifting it instead onto the game world. My last post looked at how such a “materialist” approach to gaming could be applied to ability scores. Here I will look at D&D’s approach to character advancement under a similar lens.