critique 2.5: od&d, kittens game, and capitalism

i think that generally speaking, people are interested in od&d because it lacks any consistent interpretation. by reading something into it and saying that it's what gygax et al. did, we are operating in the same realm of discourse as people who appeal to the founding fathers of the USA for political decisions. so i hope that by looking at od&d through a different frame, i will actually introduce new concepts for how to play at the table regardless if they have actually been done before. this exegesis is totally ideological, and i'm just having fun with it. i'd rather not actually appeal to gygax for fun new ways to play d&d.

my girlfriend got back really into kittens game (link), the "dark souls of incremental games" as it calls itself (and which we have a lot of fun telling each other). an incremental game is a computer game where you manage resources with the aim of making more resources. cookie clicker (link) is probably the most famous of these, where at first you start by clicking a big cookie-shaped button to accumulate cookies, and then you invest your cookie-points into increasingly advanced cookie generators. kittens game, being the dark souls of incremental games, has a lot more complexity and depth than cookie clicker. here's what it's like to play kittens game, at least as far as i've made it (my partner has me beat):

• you begin as a kitten in a catnip forest.
• you collect catnip.
• eventually, you can turn catnip into wood.
• you can accumulate enough wood to build huts.
• other kittens arrive, and you can assign them to tasks.
• kittens eat catnip; you must accumulate more catnip.
• you must research agriculture by assigning kittens as scientists.
• once you learn agriculture, you can assign kittens as farmers who produce catnip.
• once you have a catnip surplus, you can invest kittens in other tasks.

i hope you see where the game is going. it doesn't stop there, because eventually your kittens will become literate and you must develop government policies with which to organize your kitten society. at some point, your kittens will even go to space. anyway, the point of kittens game is to constantly expand your productive potential. it's not just about managing resources such that you have enough for whatever reason, but producing surplus resources and then investing this surplus back into the cycle of production. rinse and repeat!

we generally treat the early dungeons & dragons games as dungeon crawls [1] because, duh, that's what we got out of them. since that's the "beginning" of the game, that's what people will necessarily spend the most time doing. the later part of the game is famously inaccessible because no one has enough time to actually progress that far in a campaign! we sort of know what it's like--you build your own castle, you collect taxes, and you fight wars with armies. however, besides no one making it that far, i've also found that people are confused as to what to do at this point. your characters are already well-established in the world, and there's not much reason to keep going back into the dungeon when you can hire people to do that for you (e.g.). isn't this sort of a weird thing to tack onto the end of the dungeons & dragons campaign experience? maybe not if you're familiar with the sort of literature that gygax et al. liked to read, but it still might feel out of place and hard to orient yourself as a player.

what if the point of the original dungeons & dragons was not to explore dungeons per se, but to progress your character? this is basically a truism, especially if you're someone like gygax whose enjoyment is diametrically opposed to people playing just to play. what i mean to say, though, is that the early play experience of exploring dungeons and looting them is only one facet of the od&d journey as received in the text. once you get enough money from dungeons, you build a castle, you collect taxes, you fight wars, you build infrastructure, you get richer. this is emphasized to such an extent that the tax rates for land-owning fighters and clerics are given upfront as class features, along with the costs associated with magic-users producing magic items for sale. of course, the game is called dungeons & dragons for a reason, but dungeons themselves are not explained until the third volume and even then, they take up one section as do outdoor exploration and castle construction and aerial combat and nautical combat… you get the point. the text suggests, to me, a trajectory of character progression beyond the dungeon.

this is, to me, what distinguishes od&d from war games (e.g. compare to the fantasy supplement for chainmail). war games are really nothing more than resource management games where you must diminish the resources of your opponent, while you don't really work towards making more resources. od&d on the other hand is resource management structured like capitalist production from the perspective of the capitalist: the goal is to produce resources, and invest those resources into expanding the production of resources.

i'm going to put a massive caveat here. let me repeat: this is only production as it appears to the capitalist. the cycle of production is a black box into which you put capital and out of which comes out more capital. i say this because i wanted to make the comparison, but i didn't want to appeal to self-identified socialists who think that capitalism is unique because it is geared towards surplus [2]. sure it is, but that's missing the forest for the trees: the cycle of production is an abstraction of living activity, so that the activity can be geared into the larger system of capitalist exchange. surplus drives capitalist society, but it is production's appearance as a black box (i.e. taking surplus for granted) that abstracts production to facilitate the exchange of commodities thereby produced. [3]

anyway, i point this out because it seems like there is a breadth and depth to playing d&d that we collectively miss out on since it's basically impossible to play it to the end (and because we tend to be more interested in the adventurist dungeon-crawling experience). meanwhile the thread of expanding production is what holds od&d together as a cohesive experience, and what distinguishes it from resource management games (i.e. wargames) prior to it. i have written a blog post before that shows how even the dungeon crawl has elements of worker placement games (link), even if in hindsight. now i hope to have shown the extent to which self-expanding resource management is key to od&d at large from beginning to end.

i'm going to shout-out errant (link) by ava islam (twitter) as a game-text which is specifically geared towards this weird capitalist fantasy of d&d that we often repress or downplay by focusing on the dungeon crawl as a thing in itself. errant's rules for claiming territory and developing it (link) really help facilitate this economic aspect of d&d. for a while i was wanting to write about this game because i think it's clever how it presents itself, and because i wanted to practice reviewing texts by people i know, but i think talking specifically about errant is outside the scope of this post. i have also previously written about the fantasy-structure of the d&d campaign in my series critiquing historical trends in the role-playing game hobby (link). i'm procrastinating on the next entry for that because i know people who make PBTA and no-dice-no-masters games, and i still don't know how to approach the topic at large.

happy spooky season!

[1] if you're not familiar with the early dungeon crawls, they were not combative hack-and-slash adventures, but explorations of unfamiliar areas with the aim to seek and extract gold. i figure you'd probably already know that if you're reading this blog, but it helps to align on this.

[2] or worse, that it is unique because it is geared towards accumulation. the point of capitalism is that you reinvest what you have left over, rather than keep it. generally speaking i think it's correct to say that surplus is constitutive of capitalism compared to other systems of production? but usually people who think this think of surplus as someone making more money than someone else, rather than something that constitutes production-for-exchange as such.

[3] production for exchange constitutes capitalism.