Are RPGs worth going to hell over?

Clearly they are not.

Technically there are four responses to this question. 1. No; 2. Yes; 3. They don't necessarily send one to hell 4. I don't take the questions seriously (AKA I don't believe in hell).

'2. Is a stupid response, you lack the morals and knowledge to understand the rest of the article.

'4. Don't waste your time with this article.

For responses 1 and 3 we go on to further dissection.

But first an analogy!

Paintings of Pin-up girls are a legitimate art-form. They don't necessarily tempt the viewer to lust. But, on the whole, do they open up that temptation? I think it's fairly clear that they would, and especially the more modern ones often have that as a primary or secondary goal. If you don't have that issue, then it is not a problem to view or collect them. If you do, they obviously should be avoided.

RPGs are a legitimate form of game, and yet we see these days they have a degeneracy problem. The core formulation of the degeneracy problem is that modern RPGs and RPGers cannot tell good from evil. The #brosr does a good job of pointing this out. The main suggestion for avoiding the degeneracy problem in the games is to know the people you play with for a sufficiently long time that you develop the sense that they are well-adjusted adults. This is a great suggestion. If you have this sort of game group, good for you!

Everyone else

So how do the rest of us avoid this problem, without spending a decade developing friendships get to know people well enough to play this way.¹ I'm in this boat, life circumstances and physical distance have put me in a position where I have 3 or 4 friends I've known long enough to do this with, but some don't want to play games and some are busy with other things. 1 or more might not even be well adjusted enough to play at this level.

How do you solve this in a way that might allow you to develop long term friendships, and even if that doesn't work, to play fun games while minimizing finding out the people you play with are degenerates?

Let's find the source of degeneracy problem in RPGs. We're not going to go into long discussions on the state of society and the fallen nature of man and the clear need for a civilization built on Christianity. All that's true, but outside the scope of impact of the game. This picture will give you all I need to say on the state of society.

The problem

The main source of the degeneracy problem in RPGs lies at the level of identification. Identification is where one associates certain attributes of a thing, action, or outside force, and internalizes some portion of said entity. "I'm a democrat/republican!" vs "I'm voting for the democrat/republican" are two very different things. "I'm a..." implies that you hope to behave largely as the thing that follows. The second statement does not. In RPGs people have a tendency to identify with the one character they are playing. See the Jack Chick tract, "Dark Dungeons" for this carried to an absurd extreme, it's funny and I've never seen anyone carry it that far, but it makes the point. A more real example would be a furry wanting to play an anthropomorphic version of whatever animal the furry wanted to be and then try to have sex with things (gross!).

You can pretty well gauge how well adjusted a person is by the degree to which they identify with the character they play in an RPG. But even for well-adjusted people there is a feedback loop that can have implications. For this reason, even if you have well-adjusted people to play with, it's advisable to generally play a character with the sort of morals you support. That way the feedback loop will reinforce good actions.

Let's look at this from AD&D 1e.

Why AD&D 1e? Because it is a rare game that has an RPG and a war game within it. (From what I've heard ACKS also has this, but I'm waiting on the 2e hardcopy to arrive) The rest of the reason follows.

AD&D 1e was born out of Chainmail, a wargame and OD&D as wargame that focused in on individual actors in the wargame. AD&D 1e added a lot of clarity and a huge amount of support for a wider world to adventure in. OD&D and AD&D could be played as role-playing games, where you assumed the role represented by a character class. AD&D as an RPG is certainly the most common method of approaching the game.

Well-adjusted vs not well-adjusted

Well-adjusted people may have favorite characters and may even be upset at the death of a favored PC they have played for a while. One thing they'll rarely do is see any blurring between themselves and their character. This barrier between the fictional character and the real human playing the game is necessary to prevent the feedback loop. In people who are not well adjusted, this barrier thins and a feedback loop is enacted. The primary way (Way A) this will work is for a person to seek to act out fantasies of immoral acts through their characters at the table. These acts could be unreasoned violence, sexual in theme, theft related, or stranger things I don't want to imagine.

In general the feedback loop is for someone to impose their pre-existing fantasies on the table at large through the character they play. A much more rare form of the feedback loop (Way B) would be induced when a morally questionable situation is presented in a fantasy game and inspires fantasies of committing the immoral possibility in the game, in the person playing.

One problem that exists is that Way A has the infrequent potential to give rise to Way B.

The problem that can be solved

So the reality of finding new people to play these games with poses the risk of playing games with people who are not well-adjusted. Meanwhile we want to engage in the hobby because that is where we will find people who also like this hobby (your not going to do a separate hobby to find people who like games for instance). If it's possible to also introduce people to the rules and ideas of the main game, while not exposing anyone to degeneracy, all the better. How do we minimize the risk that people will seek to play out their gross fantasies, while maximizing the chances of the rest of our constellation of goals?

We have to remove the primary way in which the feeback loop operates.

The clearest way to do this, is to impede the identification with the individual character in the people playing the game. Since this exists primarily as a risk in role-playing games, we can find the key difference between role-playing games and other games where it takes great effort on the part of poorly adjusted people to insert their immoral ideas and attitudes. Since AD&D exists as a wargame and an RPG, we can simply adjust the focus from the RPG to the wargame. Present the players with a squad of characters as in a squad level wargame (as does the board game HeroQuest for instance). The identification impulse will be diffused over the stable of characters.

If one person shows up, and the in-game timekeeping permits, then that person could play their whole squad. If more than one person shows up, then each player plays any number of their squad up to the abilities of the referee to manage. This is, coincidentally, how HeroQuest worked, but with a hard upper limit of 4 characters.

A carry-on benefit of this is that it is also possible to substitute a separate squad level wargame in place of AD&D as the squad level game (Chainmail man-to-man, Fistful of Lead, Frostgrave, etc.). I'm not sure why you would, but the main thing necessary for converting back and forth would be to generate rewards based on the appropriate AD&D 1e treasure tables for keeping track of the large scale wargame that is AD&D 1e.

After getting to know people a while, by playing the wargame version, if they prove they aren't immoral degenerates, then they can be introduced to the role-playing aspect, with little moral risk to those involved.

So given the danger of the feedback loop, I'm re-focusing any games I run at the squad level or above, away from the individual character level. I'll make an exception for those games where I've vetted the people playing. I'll still play RPGs with other well-adjusted adults if the opportunity presents itself. But in general I'm not going to publicly support a type of game with a clear moral hazard in a society that also clearly does not oppose immorality.

As a special note on the #brosr.

Learning from the games and styles that the #brosr plays helped me clarify these ideas that were a hunch before I started studying their methods and attitudes. On the whole they operate far to the moral side of the chart pictured above. This might be hard to tell from their online trolling though. If you are looking to play a better game watch what they've done, they'll be right more often than they are wrong.