I loved this post. It provoked me to think – what more can you ask of a blog post?
On colonialism: As a Pole, I would add that "colonialism" exists also outside of what we usually consider as the colonial context. Poland was under foreign occupation for over a century. We see Russian colonialism play out in Ukraine right now. We see violence and the "might makes right" logic everywhere.
I never considered that *game mechanics themselves* had something ideological to say. This post really opened up a new perspective for me.
I have my own experience of how mechanics can open up new spaces for players to think in. I GM-ed the quickstart adventure for Swords of the Serpentine called "Losing Face." SotS has a really flexible social conflict system which lets you freely mix it with combat (and they can both feed off of each other). A group I ran this adventure for defeated the villain through social conflict: they made them realize the error of their ways and repent. And this was possible, because it was modeled *mechanically.* If it weren't, they wouldn't have come up with the idea, or if they did, it would've been up to my good will as the GM whether I allowed it. In any case, it wouldn't feel like the grand finale that it was. So yes, mechanics do matter.
yeah, and i think that’s the core of it! a lot of what we do is governed by the shapes we inherit, the patterns we’re used to seeing. in ttrpgs, that influence shows up first in the mechanics, because mechanics are the bone structure of the game. they quietly decide what’s legible before we even get to the story.
i like ur swords of serpentine example because the moment social conflict is modeled mechanically, it stops being “gm permission” and becomes a real, supported path, players actually take it.
I have to re-evaluate my games after reading this 😅
I’ve always just almost automatically thought that since combat is the most consequential thing in any game due to the risk of character death, it requires the most robust system from the mechanics perspective. And social interactions are then best modelled via natural conversation anyways so they may not even need a separate system.
But like you said in the article, that’s just because I’ve designed risk of death to be meaningful and violence to be the antidote. And I don’t even like combat that much!
So clearly I’ve been brainwashed by the colonialists, at least to some degree. Time to remedy that! 💪
Brilliant post and very thought provoking. Thank you for sharing. It has definitely got me thinking about the mechanical systems I favour and how I could approach them differently.
A Quiet Year is a great game, as is The Deep Forest by the same designer.
thank you for reading! a quiet year is such a clean example of how you can keep exploration without turning it into extraction. i will definitely take a look into the deep forest~
I remember in 2012 when I thought critical ludography, and critical theory was riveting stuff till I realized the only final turn of historical progressivism is nuclear armegeddon.
Man, this is such a tired opinion. It’s a game. It’s not an allegory for colonialism, which every human tribe, culture, and state that has ever moved or expanded their territorial border.
It’s just a game, unless you have an agenda you want to drive. But that has nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons. That’s just you.
So the thing about critical lenses are they are a system to look at different objects. For example, if you were looking at an apple, you would care about different things if you were focused on a pharmaceutical, botanical, or agricultural lens.
You don't have to choose to look at these lenses when you play. Some people enjoy doing so and looking at the results of these considerations. This is often called "critical thinking".
Similarly, if you had taken a critical reading process to *this* article, you would have seen where the author expressly states "no I am not accusing you, the player (or even the designer) of being a colonialist".
Because I work in spaces where colonial structures cause a lot of harm I’ve thought about the colonial setup of a lot of RPGs for a long time now. The exceptions are often better games in other ways.
Forbidden Lands, from Free League, is a good example. It rewards exploration, creative problem solving, good roleplay, and community building. Fighting is rarely optimal. It tends to be a last resort, and fighting smart is a must for survival. A two-year campaign I played amazing fun and absolutely gripping!
Cloud Empress ties advancement to characters surviving stressful situations. Combat is usually the worst option. I’ve run it a few times at home and at Cons and people grasp the concept of asking questions and figuring out what is happening before acting is the best way to get a character to the end of the session. It was a blast to run and made for some wild gameplay!
I like how Dolmenwood has the traditional XP for treasure but has an alternative experience systems that reward exploration and deeds. It allows me to run something close to D&D rules-wise without the reinforcement of a colonial worldview. I’m looking forward to trying it out!
That's the problem with today's D&D. If you look at the origins of the settings (B2 for example) you are not in a pretty civilized tea party adventure. You are at the border of civilization and CHAOS is coming to destroy everything you value, without truce. They are stealing everything valuable from others for them, and you want that to stop. It was a game about defending against Colonization
B2 is the epitome of the colonial adventure, as it is written entirely from the perspective of "law" in an outpost on the edge of "civilized" territory. This maps, pretty directly, to the way that that settler colonial states thought of their own presence vis-a-vis 'savage' indigenous people (in places like Wisconsin, for example). Your job as adventurer in b2 is to go into the homes of the native inhabitants, probably kill a fair amount of them and their children, take their stuff, and expand the territory of those who call themselves civilized and lawful.
If I could recommend another system, I’d say that Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies is a good one as well! It’s focused on a community in isolation, and players track their story through changes in the words they create.
I really enjoyed reading this piece. I’m preparing to run the next installment of a legacy game I’ve had going for a year now, and this is making me think more about the system I’m running it in. It’s not one that’s as conquest-heavy as DnD, but despite it saying in the book that it prioritizes other solutions than combat (which is how I run the game), the rules are cleanest for combat. This perspective is definitely going to make me think more as I continue my prep, and I’m going to brainstorm if I should make any changes to how I run this campaign. Great work!
I'm reminded of The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. Or, in a corporate world, when you make a metric of something, THAT is EXACTLY what you're going to get. Often, regardless of the fallout or impacts elsewhere.
This did make me think a good bit. I'd known the colonial concerns but the mechanical underpinning quantizes is much more clearly. It made me ask a bunch of related questions. If the origins of RPGs are in wargaming, why is that mechanical preference surprising? Then the questions start getting more broad to human nature and history. With a society and politic and law built up on violence and domination and the other, why wouldn't the 'play' mirror that?
Pivoting from there, has that made the default violent mechanics easy to understand and quantify? How do we quantify social mechanics - or can we? Looking at games like Earthdawn that have social mechanics and defenses, there's still conflict, there's still a victory state, and whether that plays out as a compromise or exerting one's will over another is up to the conflict at hand.
To go one step further - is it all about winning? Making someone else a loser?
There's a lot of questions and implications. The gut reaction to it is also worth examination.
it took me a while to pinpoint what felt off too. i’d always clocked the colonial concerns in fantasy on a narrative level, but it didn’t click until i was bouncing between pf2e and d&d and realizing how much of the reward structure is anchored to combat and “overcoming” in a very specific way. not because the designers are evil, but because it’s the most legible thing to quantify with "clean math".
and the "war-gaming roots" is av very welcome discussion to this! if the hobby starts from modeling conflict, it’s not surprising that conflict gets the richest mechanical support, and everything else becomes softer, more gm-dependent, more “ask nicely.” the ideological part is when that default conflict model quietly becomes a default worldview: progress as domination, advancement as extraction, the world as a series of problems you solve by winning.
Phew, I feel that you spend the first half of your post building a strawman to beat, sure the heroic fantasy genre is the most iconic because it is the oldest genre in the hobby, but even very old games like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk put you in the role of underdogs kicking against the system (a leftist take if you want to ideologize).
But I agree in your take that game mechanics are still needlesly combat-centric, me and my gaming group also appreciates the rules where there are either some social conflict mechanics or is generally more agnostic to what is the means of conflict solving (fight, wits, influence...)
Always important to review one's default assumptions, and this is enlightening to remember that the civilization versus barbarism narrative is only recently becoming more challenged. The impact of that is that the old remnants of that sneak into a lot of our media. That narrative also lends itself to people wanted to keep their morality simple and go fight the bad guy and rescue the damsel without having to delve into the implications.
However, I do find myself designing for more complex morality and I currently love my go to system Savage Worlds for attempting to have systems for skill (Dramatic Tasks) and social challenges (Social Conflict) that have a similar level of dynamism as combat. This helps a game keep a feeling of drama and excitement even if the players decide to talk the necromancer down rather than kill him.
I have even wanted to run a game using those mechanics primarily to try and see what kind of adventure that would make. I feel like it would allow us to move into a lot of spaces away from the default dungeon, taking loot and smiting those weaker, and into more complicated and different spaces.
I am glad to see systems trying to branch out, like the quiet year and spire you mentioned. I think examining our assumptions and trying to move away from ones that are more unfortunate can only help grow the hobby.
“you start from somewhere safe. a town, a tavern, a guild, a settlement that reads as “civilization.” then you go outward into somewhere framed as unknown. wilderness. ruins. a dungeon. a place that is treated like it exists for discovery. for encounter. for danger. and if you survive, you come back with proof that you were there: xp, gold, magic items, levels, leverage.”
You just described the basic framework of every hero tale in every human mythology. Seriously.
Is it possible for “colonial” themes to be present in a game of D&D? Of course. Or even the point of an entire game? Sure—check out the 80’s RPG Merc.
But that basic pattern, including a focus on combat, etc.? That’s a deep groove in the human psyche that existed long before there were ever any such things as colonizing powers. And that, I would say, is what makes it such a compelling artform/activity.
Excelent take! As I was born and raised in South America, colonialsm is part of my essence as much as my country's History. And its impacts and mechanics are pretty much still in action, although mitigated. Maybe - as a direct product of pulp literature from the early 20th century - D&D carried much of its 'sins', one of which is a dominant clonialist view.
Realizing it, and acknowledging its impacts doesn't necessarily make our games 'bad' (as you pointed out). In my view, it creates a great opportunity to reflect on the subjects that arise from the colonialist 'hidden-nature' of D&D (and include subjects like racism, exploitation, supremacy, oppression, slavery and so on in our campaigns and settings).
But I guess there are ways to circumvert that. If, in your setting, dungeons are the ancient palaces, temples and citites left behind by a founding civilization, then the theme should not be one of plundering and sacking, but actually searching for your roots, your heritage. A strglle to recuperate something that was lost to time and reclaimed by nature (beasts, monsters, overgrowth). Like Thorin trying to reclaim Erebor from Smaug.
Perhaps, as we get more and more designers and writers coming from the "Global South" and publishing their ideas, we'll start seeing some very interesting takes on the matter.
And no, I am not defending that orcs and drows are P.O.C. or anything like that, but merely pointing that fiction reflects thought structures, societal values and cultural inheritance.
I concur on this assessment of the hobby. Been talking in the same vein for years, thus I am glad that I find such a reasonable post here in my first week on Substack. And such considerations are exactly what drives my own design project, which I call Heartbleed. It is a drama-first system that deals more with internal conflicts than external. A niche that I have not seen widely explored in our hobby space. Decolonisation is important to me, and thus othering and conquest fantasies get not perpetuated under my watch. Have eventually to talk about more in my Substack about, but like I said, it's my first week here...
This is absolute exploding mind article. Great exam of the colonialist culture without blame anyone. I hope to see more about that, and with this kind of writing, illuminating.
I loved this post. It provoked me to think – what more can you ask of a blog post?
On colonialism: As a Pole, I would add that "colonialism" exists also outside of what we usually consider as the colonial context. Poland was under foreign occupation for over a century. We see Russian colonialism play out in Ukraine right now. We see violence and the "might makes right" logic everywhere.
I never considered that *game mechanics themselves* had something ideological to say. This post really opened up a new perspective for me.
I have my own experience of how mechanics can open up new spaces for players to think in. I GM-ed the quickstart adventure for Swords of the Serpentine called "Losing Face." SotS has a really flexible social conflict system which lets you freely mix it with combat (and they can both feed off of each other). A group I ran this adventure for defeated the villain through social conflict: they made them realize the error of their ways and repent. And this was possible, because it was modeled *mechanically.* If it weren't, they wouldn't have come up with the idea, or if they did, it would've been up to my good will as the GM whether I allowed it. In any case, it wouldn't feel like the grand finale that it was. So yes, mechanics do matter.
yeah, and i think that’s the core of it! a lot of what we do is governed by the shapes we inherit, the patterns we’re used to seeing. in ttrpgs, that influence shows up first in the mechanics, because mechanics are the bone structure of the game. they quietly decide what’s legible before we even get to the story.
i like ur swords of serpentine example because the moment social conflict is modeled mechanically, it stops being “gm permission” and becomes a real, supported path, players actually take it.
I have to re-evaluate my games after reading this 😅
I’ve always just almost automatically thought that since combat is the most consequential thing in any game due to the risk of character death, it requires the most robust system from the mechanics perspective. And social interactions are then best modelled via natural conversation anyways so they may not even need a separate system.
But like you said in the article, that’s just because I’ve designed risk of death to be meaningful and violence to be the antidote. And I don’t even like combat that much!
So clearly I’ve been brainwashed by the colonialists, at least to some degree. Time to remedy that! 💪
Brilliant post and very thought provoking. Thank you for sharing. It has definitely got me thinking about the mechanical systems I favour and how I could approach them differently.
A Quiet Year is a great game, as is The Deep Forest by the same designer.
thank you for reading! a quiet year is such a clean example of how you can keep exploration without turning it into extraction. i will definitely take a look into the deep forest~
I remember in 2012 when I thought critical ludography, and critical theory was riveting stuff till I realized the only final turn of historical progressivism is nuclear armegeddon.
Man, this is such a tired opinion. It’s a game. It’s not an allegory for colonialism, which every human tribe, culture, and state that has ever moved or expanded their territorial border.
It’s just a game, unless you have an agenda you want to drive. But that has nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons. That’s just you.
Hello!
So the thing about critical lenses are they are a system to look at different objects. For example, if you were looking at an apple, you would care about different things if you were focused on a pharmaceutical, botanical, or agricultural lens.
You don't have to choose to look at these lenses when you play. Some people enjoy doing so and looking at the results of these considerations. This is often called "critical thinking".
Similarly, if you had taken a critical reading process to *this* article, you would have seen where the author expressly states "no I am not accusing you, the player (or even the designer) of being a colonialist".
Because I work in spaces where colonial structures cause a lot of harm I’ve thought about the colonial setup of a lot of RPGs for a long time now. The exceptions are often better games in other ways.
Forbidden Lands, from Free League, is a good example. It rewards exploration, creative problem solving, good roleplay, and community building. Fighting is rarely optimal. It tends to be a last resort, and fighting smart is a must for survival. A two-year campaign I played amazing fun and absolutely gripping!
Cloud Empress ties advancement to characters surviving stressful situations. Combat is usually the worst option. I’ve run it a few times at home and at Cons and people grasp the concept of asking questions and figuring out what is happening before acting is the best way to get a character to the end of the session. It was a blast to run and made for some wild gameplay!
I like how Dolmenwood has the traditional XP for treasure but has an alternative experience systems that reward exploration and deeds. It allows me to run something close to D&D rules-wise without the reinforcement of a colonial worldview. I’m looking forward to trying it out!
That's the problem with today's D&D. If you look at the origins of the settings (B2 for example) you are not in a pretty civilized tea party adventure. You are at the border of civilization and CHAOS is coming to destroy everything you value, without truce. They are stealing everything valuable from others for them, and you want that to stop. It was a game about defending against Colonization
B2 is the epitome of the colonial adventure, as it is written entirely from the perspective of "law" in an outpost on the edge of "civilized" territory. This maps, pretty directly, to the way that that settler colonial states thought of their own presence vis-a-vis 'savage' indigenous people (in places like Wisconsin, for example). Your job as adventurer in b2 is to go into the homes of the native inhabitants, probably kill a fair amount of them and their children, take their stuff, and expand the territory of those who call themselves civilized and lawful.
If I could recommend another system, I’d say that Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies is a good one as well! It’s focused on a community in isolation, and players track their story through changes in the words they create.
I really enjoyed reading this piece. I’m preparing to run the next installment of a legacy game I’ve had going for a year now, and this is making me think more about the system I’m running it in. It’s not one that’s as conquest-heavy as DnD, but despite it saying in the book that it prioritizes other solutions than combat (which is how I run the game), the rules are cleanest for combat. This perspective is definitely going to make me think more as I continue my prep, and I’m going to brainstorm if I should make any changes to how I run this campaign. Great work!
I'm reminded of The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. Or, in a corporate world, when you make a metric of something, THAT is EXACTLY what you're going to get. Often, regardless of the fallout or impacts elsewhere.
This did make me think a good bit. I'd known the colonial concerns but the mechanical underpinning quantizes is much more clearly. It made me ask a bunch of related questions. If the origins of RPGs are in wargaming, why is that mechanical preference surprising? Then the questions start getting more broad to human nature and history. With a society and politic and law built up on violence and domination and the other, why wouldn't the 'play' mirror that?
Pivoting from there, has that made the default violent mechanics easy to understand and quantify? How do we quantify social mechanics - or can we? Looking at games like Earthdawn that have social mechanics and defenses, there's still conflict, there's still a victory state, and whether that plays out as a compromise or exerting one's will over another is up to the conflict at hand.
To go one step further - is it all about winning? Making someone else a loser?
There's a lot of questions and implications. The gut reaction to it is also worth examination.
it took me a while to pinpoint what felt off too. i’d always clocked the colonial concerns in fantasy on a narrative level, but it didn’t click until i was bouncing between pf2e and d&d and realizing how much of the reward structure is anchored to combat and “overcoming” in a very specific way. not because the designers are evil, but because it’s the most legible thing to quantify with "clean math".
and the "war-gaming roots" is av very welcome discussion to this! if the hobby starts from modeling conflict, it’s not surprising that conflict gets the richest mechanical support, and everything else becomes softer, more gm-dependent, more “ask nicely.” the ideological part is when that default conflict model quietly becomes a default worldview: progress as domination, advancement as extraction, the world as a series of problems you solve by winning.
Phew, I feel that you spend the first half of your post building a strawman to beat, sure the heroic fantasy genre is the most iconic because it is the oldest genre in the hobby, but even very old games like Shadowrun or Cyberpunk put you in the role of underdogs kicking against the system (a leftist take if you want to ideologize).
But I agree in your take that game mechanics are still needlesly combat-centric, me and my gaming group also appreciates the rules where there are either some social conflict mechanics or is generally more agnostic to what is the means of conflict solving (fight, wits, influence...)
This is not colonialism, this is pillaging. Both are bad, but language is important and we shouldn't mix words when they carry so much weight.
Always important to review one's default assumptions, and this is enlightening to remember that the civilization versus barbarism narrative is only recently becoming more challenged. The impact of that is that the old remnants of that sneak into a lot of our media. That narrative also lends itself to people wanted to keep their morality simple and go fight the bad guy and rescue the damsel without having to delve into the implications.
However, I do find myself designing for more complex morality and I currently love my go to system Savage Worlds for attempting to have systems for skill (Dramatic Tasks) and social challenges (Social Conflict) that have a similar level of dynamism as combat. This helps a game keep a feeling of drama and excitement even if the players decide to talk the necromancer down rather than kill him.
I have even wanted to run a game using those mechanics primarily to try and see what kind of adventure that would make. I feel like it would allow us to move into a lot of spaces away from the default dungeon, taking loot and smiting those weaker, and into more complicated and different spaces.
I am glad to see systems trying to branch out, like the quiet year and spire you mentioned. I think examining our assumptions and trying to move away from ones that are more unfortunate can only help grow the hobby.
“you start from somewhere safe. a town, a tavern, a guild, a settlement that reads as “civilization.” then you go outward into somewhere framed as unknown. wilderness. ruins. a dungeon. a place that is treated like it exists for discovery. for encounter. for danger. and if you survive, you come back with proof that you were there: xp, gold, magic items, levels, leverage.”
You just described the basic framework of every hero tale in every human mythology. Seriously.
Is it possible for “colonial” themes to be present in a game of D&D? Of course. Or even the point of an entire game? Sure—check out the 80’s RPG Merc.
But that basic pattern, including a focus on combat, etc.? That’s a deep groove in the human psyche that existed long before there were ever any such things as colonizing powers. And that, I would say, is what makes it such a compelling artform/activity.
Excelent take! As I was born and raised in South America, colonialsm is part of my essence as much as my country's History. And its impacts and mechanics are pretty much still in action, although mitigated. Maybe - as a direct product of pulp literature from the early 20th century - D&D carried much of its 'sins', one of which is a dominant clonialist view.
Realizing it, and acknowledging its impacts doesn't necessarily make our games 'bad' (as you pointed out). In my view, it creates a great opportunity to reflect on the subjects that arise from the colonialist 'hidden-nature' of D&D (and include subjects like racism, exploitation, supremacy, oppression, slavery and so on in our campaigns and settings).
But I guess there are ways to circumvert that. If, in your setting, dungeons are the ancient palaces, temples and citites left behind by a founding civilization, then the theme should not be one of plundering and sacking, but actually searching for your roots, your heritage. A strglle to recuperate something that was lost to time and reclaimed by nature (beasts, monsters, overgrowth). Like Thorin trying to reclaim Erebor from Smaug.
Perhaps, as we get more and more designers and writers coming from the "Global South" and publishing their ideas, we'll start seeing some very interesting takes on the matter.
A good example is Yoon-Suin, the Purple Lands (https://www.noismsgames.com/creations/yoon-suin-the-purple-land) which melds D&D tropes with a rich southeast asian myhtology to create an inspiring and innovative setting.
And no, I am not defending that orcs and drows are P.O.C. or anything like that, but merely pointing that fiction reflects thought structures, societal values and cultural inheritance.
Thank you for the thought-provoking post.
Luiz.
I concur on this assessment of the hobby. Been talking in the same vein for years, thus I am glad that I find such a reasonable post here in my first week on Substack. And such considerations are exactly what drives my own design project, which I call Heartbleed. It is a drama-first system that deals more with internal conflicts than external. A niche that I have not seen widely explored in our hobby space. Decolonisation is important to me, and thus othering and conquest fantasies get not perpetuated under my watch. Have eventually to talk about more in my Substack about, but like I said, it's my first week here...
This is absolute exploding mind article. Great exam of the colonialist culture without blame anyone. I hope to see more about that, and with this kind of writing, illuminating.