Jon Cogburn's Blog

some background on Harman and Speculative Realism (and cool new book series) [click link for full post]

Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.

via www.newappsblog.com

some nostalgic reflections on 2nd Edition D&D rulebooks

Harman's post about his Dungeons and Dragons paper (HERE) inspired an overwhelming sense of nostalgia in me, in part because he posted a picture of the First Edition Monster Manual (which his paper is going to be on). If you are one of the Gen Xers for whom D&D was both a powerful escape and gateway to philosophy, it will inspire the same for you. Here it is:

Maybe the nostalgia is just because we associate these books with a certain time in our youth. I don't know.

I think part of it really is that First Edition D&D balanced the ludological and narrative aspects of role playing gaming in a nearly perfect way. It is no accident that all RPGs (including Third, Three Point Fifth, and Fourth Edition D&D, and contemporary computer based RPGs too) are footnotes to First and Second (which was not a radical change) Edition. Those of us who massively prefer Fourth Edition to the previous one in part like it because it has to some extent restored the First and Second Edition balance.

But there's also just something about these books. Remember this Second Edition classic:

A whole book of Fiends!

And prior to Edith Hamilton, I first learned of mythology and non-Christian religions from this classic.

These three books radically opened up my sense of possibility. The Monster Manual and Player's Handbook were basically Tolkienesque, but the Fiend Folio added a hint of traditional Christian dread, and with Deities and Demigods you got Lovecraftian creatures statted up as well as Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and the Norse pantheon that initially inspired Tolkien. All the sudden you could play characters and collaboratively create stories in these fictional worlds.

I think the only substantive improvement from 2nd Edition is probably the way non-magic classes in fourth edition are ludologically balanced with magic using classes, since all classes now have Daily, Encounter, and At Will feats that allow combat based powers as strong as magic users at the same level. This to some extent just corrects the creep by 3.5 that made higher level magic users god like and everyone else not that much more powerful than they were at lower levels.

But I still worry that Fourth Edition is too many rules to the detriment of narrative. I mean, with the simpler rule set of 2nd Edition, they were able to present a physics of sorts for of all of the mythological realms described above. This is really quite amazing.

The sordid history of Deities and Demigods shows the exact nature of the Third Edition Disaster. Consider this from the Wikipedia article:

The original edition of the book contained 17 pantheons of gods:

• American Indian Mythos
• Arthurian Heroes
• Babylonian Mythos
• Celtic Mythos
• Mesoamerican Mythos (i.e. Aztec and Maya)
• Chinese Mythos
• Cthulhu Mythos (from H. P. Lovecraft and related fiction)
• Egyptian Mythos
• Melnibonéan Mythos (from Michael Moorcock's Elric novels)
• Finnish Mythos
• Greek Mythos and Heroes
• Indian Mythos
• Japanese Mythos
• Nehwon Mythos (from Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar novels)
• Nonhuman's Deities (original TSR creations)
• Norse Mythos
• Sumerian Mythos

The third edition version edition contains only four pantheons:

• A condensed Greyhawk pantheon meant for insertion into any game world ("Core D&D Pantheon")
• Greek Mythos and Heroes ("Olympian Pantheon"), among them: Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo, Hades, Nike, Pan, Poseidon and Tyche
• Egyptian Mythos ("Pharaonic Pantheon"), among them: Re-Horakthy (Amun-Ra), Anubis, Apep, Bast, Hathor, Isis, Set and Ptah
• Norse Mythos ("Asgardian Pantheon"), among them: Odin, Balder (Baldr), Frey, Freya, Frig (Frigga), Odur, Sif, Skade, Thor, Thrym and Uller

So in Third Edition you have less worlds, but vastly more rules that players have to master to be able to collaboratively role play in these worlds. [I should note that the philosophical issue Neal Hebert and I address in our issue is whether something is lost when you stat up horrific creatures such as the Lovecraftian entities. We conclude that this issue actually leads to a refutation of ludology, since any set of algorithms to be mastered by the player robs magical entities of their magical aspect in the phenomenology of the player, and that the only way to handle it is through the Dungeon Master's narrative expertise. We don't draw this conclusion in the paper, but one could go on to argue from it that the rules/narrative balance in 1st and 2nd edition are much better than 3d and 3.5th.] Fourth Edition just has an elaborate mythology invented whole hog for D&D. I think that a sizable majority of adult players don't avail themselves of it.