The Gaming Outpost

I have very recently gotten into GURPS. I didn’t do so for the rules, which are the pinnacle of pragmatism and quite boring. Rather, it was the wealth of sourcebooks on such a variety of disparate topics that drew me in. I’ve been reading a lot of GURPS products and one thing truly stands out:

GURPS is fantastically egalitarian.

Being blind is worth 50 points. But, if you’re blind and have a compartmentalized mind, you’re back on equal footing with everyone else. One hundred points means everyone’s the same. Now, there are two ways to look at this. The first it that it’s a game, one in which play balance is important. Everyone must be equal or it won’t be “fair.” All the players in the group must be at the same power level or one of the PC’s might dominate and push the others out of the action. The second, and far more interesting, is that this represents an attempt to accurately portray reality. GURPS mentions several times that it is a “realistic” system. It isn’t fantastic or cinematic. It is realistic and that assumes close ties to reality. So, why is character creation so very zero sum?

Pointing out trends is always difficult because the case can usually be made for so many exceptions that the statement has to be quickly retracted. However, I’m going to bow to my own broadly generalizing nature and point out a trend as I perceive it: In the Beginning, as they say, dice created the character. Roll 3d6, add ‘em up, and put the results in the slots. This means that a party could be made up of one character with two 18′s, two 15′s, a 14, and an 11; and another with not a single stat above 12. But that’s just the way things were. You dealt with what you got.

Things are different now. Most RPG’s released in the present day take a point-based approach to character generation. If one believes there has been a level of progress made in the field, the reason for this switch must be called into question. If point-based is the almost unilaterally preferred method, it must have perceived advantages. Why is it better to have mathematically imposed equality across the board?

Because the truth is self-evident: All men are created equal. Right? They have to be, right? If they aren’t, it becomes possible (and easy) to cast a doubtful eye on those around you. Roleplaying games are representational. As such, they are not simulations brought into being with the hard tools of the natural sciences. They are a product of our own (un)conscious ideology. They are the way we want the world to work.

I’m not a big guy. I’m thin; I always have been and I always will be. There’s no football career in my future. I like to think I’m pretty smart but I’m not one of the greatest minds of my generation or anything. The more I think about it, the less I think the total of my advantages and disadvantages, high attributes and low, even out to zero. Just like I find it difficult to believe anyone’s do. That’s not the way the world is. Some people are simply smarter than others in ways that have nothing to do with “application of potential” or other educational buzzwords. And, if I were paralyzed from the hairline down, I doubt I’d take seriously any argument that stated I was equivalent to those more mobile people around me because I could read extra fast or remember pi to thousands of digits or empathically communicate with beavers.

Last week, I started playing in a small D&D campaign, the first of that particular game I’ve participated in since sixth grade. My character, a halfling detective named Lott, is, at least on paper, a product of the random character creation method. I rolled for each attribute and set them down in the order they came. I was fortunate enough to end up with an eighteen in dexterity, a benefit for rogues, but the rest of my stats are mediocre at best. It makes sense that way. The DM gave me the option of distributing some set number of points between my attributes but I opted to go with the traditional method. It somehow seemed more realistic.

When I wrote my article about themes of race in Dungeons & Dragons, readers jumped on me for reading too much into the text. D&D is, after all, just a game. It’s meant to be fun. There’s nothing “meaningful” about it. But if that were really true, there wouldn’t be much fun in studying any form of popular culture. Why bother with film criticism? They’re just movies, just excuses to waste a couple hours eating popcorn. The reason’s an easy one: popular culture is our culture. It’s us. It’s what we like, what we believe, who we are, and provides glimpses of where we’re going. Roleplaying games are popular culture.

What, then, is the importance of this shift from random characters to the more rounded edges of the point-based systems we see today? Political correctness. We are an “All Men Are Created Equal” society. In recent years, this has come more to the forefront. For the most part, one can call it progress. We are more accepting; there is less prejudice (although it obviously still exists). But political correctness also causes a great deal of problems. Witness the recent banning of To Kill a Mockingbird from a school because its themes might make (some) students uncomfortable. There are plenty of other examples just like that one.

I can hear the question: What does this have to do with roleplaying games? Just think about it for a while. Think about why we are so fond of our character points. Think about why we criticize random characters as somehow not as sophisticated. Sure, we accept them, but only if they’re part of a game like Dungeons & Dragons, a game that already has a reputation for being “behind the times.” If we, as modern gamers, aren’t concerned with power gaming, if we focus instead on the story and the characters, why do we feel the need to smear all differences to zero?