A E S T H E T I C S

Everyone has things in art which they find appealing for both scrutable and inscrutable reason. Today I want to try to scrute some of the things which end up showing up in my games regularly and attempt to give my personal explanation for why I enjoy and use them. Below are some of my ideas about a few of my aesthetics in RPGs. (and D&D-esque games more specifically) I hope you enjoy.

Self Awareness
I enjoy when art makes statements about things. In fact, a thing made to convey a thing would be pretty close to my definition of art. That being said, calling one's own work, and specifically a D&D game, "art" brings with it many pretensions. As a 23 year old unemployed student living with my parents, the thought of making grandiose statements about life through a game I play on Sundays with my friends strikes me as a bit much. That doesn't stop me, but I find remarking on specific small things which I have intimate experience with much more appropriate. By far the thing which I have the most expertise in compared to the average person is games, which means that my games most end up talking about themselves. This ends up working quite well, since I quite enjoy things which talk about themselves in some way or another.

Just like how joking about my ravenously avid deer readers of whom there are many when really I know that there are only two people who read anything I write (hi Jeff and Keith) makes the absurdity and pain of writing long, personal, rambling think pieces about nonsense no one cares about hurt less, placing characters in my games which make fun of me for making games which attempt to say things makes trying to convey meaning through playing pretend feel a little less silly.

In addition, I find that self awareness helps to solve a bit of the tone problem RPGs can have from time to time. Everyone who sits down to the table has their own ideas about what kind of story they want to tell, and all of those ideas colliding at once can end up making things more awkward than good. Specifically self awareness lets everyone at the table know that, yes, you are aware how ridiculous it is that half the table is trying to rescue a princess from the horrors of capitalism while the other half is trying to burn down a bar and steal a gnomish submarine, all while getting pizza stains on a book older than everyone reading it and making anime jokes. Once we are able to acknowledge how absurd this game we are playing is, I actually find it easier to take it seriously for what it is.

An example of a character who makes a statements about the games I play in is Steve the Sloth Shaman and his buddy Sir Gabriel the Demon Slayer in Alex's Kadab Brazam game. Steve is a dorky kid with very low self esteem who really just wants to have friends and help everyone get along. He despises conflict and would probably be regarded as a pacifist, his only "weapon" proficiency being in Hugs. I try for Steve to say a number of things about the way that we play D&D. First, his morals are (probably) closer mine than any other character I play, and therefore he totally and completely fails to fit in. Steve is not an advocate for genocidal racism, the acquisition of wealth and power through use of force, or really much beyond kicking it with his friends and eating sandwiches. This brings him in conflict with the views and desires of most adventurers, and (imo) points out lots of the morally questionable aspects of the fantasies we revel in when we play games.

An example of me using a character in a game I ran to comment on the game itself was Jules from my Colors DCC game. Jules was the "familiar" of Schwaldon the Prismatic, the great wizard who collected the party and whose many "personalities" were the driving force of the plot. Jules only had a few things characterizing him: his emo hair and appearance, his ability to magically serve as the PC's and Schwaldon's mystical butler, his exasperated sighs and rolled eyes whenever serving as the PC's or Schwaldon's mystical butler, his residence in the basement of the party's house, and his membership in a band consisting of the kitchenware he magically animated in the basement. (He played the bass) The game was intended to in many ways be an examination of depression, and Jules was my way of showing everyone involved that I realized how silly that was. He appeared as a kid of a similar age to me (though much more fashionable) and encompassed most of the more ridiculous stereotypes of depression and/or someone who would write a D&D game about depression and play it with his friends. By laughing at myself and also placing a ridiculous version of myself in the world for everyone to also laugh at I was able to feel more comfortable writing the ridiculous narrative which I ended up making.

Cycles
If my desire for self aware games is a defense mechanism against the real world then my desire for cycles is a desire to bring my favorite parts of learning and understanding in the real world to my games. Pattern recognition is something which comes to us easily as human beings, and making things in patterns is similarly easy. Attempting to spontaneously create a large number of things with no limitations is quite difficult, but attempting to match a given set to ideas is a much more approachable task.

If I need to make 7 new characters for a plot, blindly creating personalities can be difficult, but if I instead base each of them around one of the deadly sins then the characters start to write themselves. In addition, if I think up something interesting and compelling for one of the members of a cycle, I can then take that as an opportunity to adjust and reapply that idea to each of the other members, making them all more fleshed out.

Now of course cycles don't always work and aren't always appropriate. When attempting to create and represent something alien and unknowable, organizing it around an understandable pattern defeats the purpose. In addition, sometimes attempting to squeeze the last few elements into the mold created by the first ones is all but impossible. But this is also why I enjoy using the cycles; they give the world some sort of order which can be understood by everyone involved. In addition, for me trying to make the hardest elements fit in the cycle is when I get the most creative and come up with my best work, even if that creativity comes in the form of redefining what the cycles is/means in order to allow it to fit the elements I want it to.

An example of when I used cycles in a way I think worked was also in my Colors DCC game. It has its name because each of the split personalities of Schwaldon the Prismatic corresponded with a different color. I got to have each of the 7 personalities be based on a different hue and some of the philosophies which I felt went along with them. I got to make names which were anagrams of different synonyms for the colors, give them all a design which matched their colors, and color their personalities appropriately. When I came up with the idea of a relationship between two of the colors I then got to apply the same ideas to each other of the personalities, and create a web of understandings between all of the entities. This ended up with what were (imo) my best defined (if very silly) characters for the players to meet with, since I understood how all my reactions and thoughts for the personalties should be organized.

Hell/Devils
In addition to my embarrassment about attempting to create things I'm proud of and my joy at understanding and decoding the universe, I also have angst about the world we live in. Systems of oppression, evil, or just incompetence seem to perpetuate themselves everywhere in terrible ways which get to the root of the problems in our world. Cycles may do a good job of representing the logic of our reality which I comprehend and appreciate, but I also need a way to convey when I feel the logic of our existence doesn't make sense. For me, Devils and Hell are the perfect vessel to represent these ideas. While a Demon's evil is random and doesn't need to have any rhyme or reason, Devil's evil is instead one of twisted logic. Their thoughts makes some amount of sense, but not in the way you think they would.

This where the three ideas collide. Devils are characterized as simultaneously hyper intelligent and completely lacking in any sense what so ever which allows them and the things they do to occupy a unique space in a narrative. If a farmer winks at the camera or makes a meta pun, it seems silly, but when a Devil does it they instead show their knowledge of this ridiculous and terrible world which they live in, and yet only an insane and disturbed entity would continue live in the same way knowing what they know about their reality. Self aware comments no longer take one out of the game, but instead convey the terrible anti-logic required to be a Devil. In addition, ironic punishment is something which is both famous in stories of Hell and requires some meta knowledge of a story and what is happening. The match of self aware commentary and terrible anti-logical evil is one which draws me back to Devil's as villains time after time.

Cycles also have a role to play in the diabolical too. While the demonic focuses on the individual and what they alone are exceptional at and can do by themselves, Devils instead focus on what is created as a whole. This understanding means that many things will occur in patterns, even if these patterns don't make traditional sense or are artificially created. In the real world forcing something to fit a cycle can lead to awkwardness, but for the Devils forcing a round peg into a square hole is what they do. This allows one to convey Devil's need to make everything fit in a specific cycle when it naturally wouldn't while also using a useful tool to help flesh out designs.


By colliding these three aspects, Devils and Hell become much more interesting to me than most other subjects in D&D games. My love for self reference, well organized and comprehensible systems, and edgy darkness all get fulfilled with just one type of bad guy. In addition, including the outer planes gives the games a philosophical undercurrent which I find incredibly interesting and engaging. Hopefully reading this has given you some idea how these three ideas (and many more) have guided me towards making the things I do today.