Watch the video for context – I can't spare the space to summarize the whole debacle here. What's important for my purposes is that the "fruitful void" that Milton describes around 7m19s is... not what Mulligan is talking about with his tortured "stove" metaphor.
The "fruitful void" refers to the idea that a system should take care not to accidentally answer the focal questions that are supposed to be answered through play. Baker illustrates this with a diagram describing the rules for the now-defunct Dogs in the Vineyard:
At the centre of the diagram are the unanswered questions of the game. The mechanics surround them, support them, and direct play toward them, but the mechanics must never directly answer those questions – or else the game would "play itself" (at least with respect to whatever topics are in the middle of the diagram, there). Like in Snakes & Ladders, the participants would have nothing to add.
Now, Milton is indicating that he thinks that because D&D doesn't have rules for things like "emotions, relationships, and character", that must mean that those things exist within D&D's fruitful void. But what he's not realizing is that, in addition to the fruitful void at the centre of the rules, there's also another, regular-ass, non-fruitful void that exists entirely outside of a game's rules. Here's a diagram for D&D:
Over on the left, the "fruitful void" is, of course, combat. All of D&D's rules surround and support combat, directing us toward it. If we engage with those rules (if we're taking turns in initiative order, using the actions, rolling saving throws, adjusting our hit points, and so on) then we are necessarily also answering D&D's focal questions, like "Will we survive? Will we triumph? How will we do it?" Even when we use those rules to the absolute fullest, we will never be obliged to talk about our characters' emotional journeys or the arc of their relationships.
By contrast: if we are managing to avoid answering the focal combat questions, then we're probably disregarding many or most of the rules of D&D. Perhaps instead we are out over on the right of the diagram, in the space where D&D's rules are largely irrelevant. Trying to use the rules of D&D to play a game in this space is... well, it's a bit like trying to eat your stove. Stoves are related to eating, but they're not for eating – you need other things, like food, to do that.
These metaphorical "other things", of course, include what Milton describes as "the very sophisticated and finely honed set of improv rules that [Mulligan] has running in his head". This system in Mulligan's head – and not D&D – is the primary game system upon which Dimension 20 runs. And that works wonders for Mulligan! But for those of us who are not trained, experienced, professional writer/actors, trying to use a system that only exists in Mulligan's brain is challenging. What the fans of Dimension20 need, and what Mulligan and Milton therefore ought to promote, is a system with a fruitful void that encompasses those emotions and relationships that Mulligan finds so easy.
As someone who grew up with "I'm not going to praise you for doing what's expected of you; that's not being good, that's doing the bare minimum" I want to encourage you to celebrate every little thing you can. Everything that takes energy and effort should be appreciated and you're allowed to be happy about trying.
I think a lot of people reblogging this from @probablybadrpgideas are interpreting this as “this would be such a funny wacky way to make the table soooo complicated” but I mean this as a complaint about the way that so many tabletop players seem to just. completely lack an understanding of ethics. what it actually means to behave ethically and treat others ethically. and i dont mean this as "why do people want to be mean and play as villains? :(" i mean "why are there so many tabletop players that sympathize with outright fascist factions to the point of wondering why theyre listed as 'Lawful Evil' in the book"
Goblins were in fact, for me, a turning point on this concept. I had a player who wanted to be a goblin, and I forgot about this fact up to the point that the party got a quest to kill goblins. As soon as I was announcing the quest I realized it would be a problem, though I didn't have anything else ready so I went with it. And it was! The players immediately questioned why the mayor was paying mercenaries to kill goblins, and then further questioned his justifications, at which point I realized it would be a better story if the goblins were a scapegoat and not an actual villain.
This turned into a terse interrogation where the mayor threatened to put them in jail once their questions got pointed enough that he would have to either field accusations or lie; they then went CSI on the situation and drilled through his political cabinet to get answers. I had to improv pretty much all of it and I don't remember the actual ending (I know they sided with the goblins and the mayor was guilty), but this helped me realize that the Gary Gygax writing style of "certain races are just BAD and that's why they hang out in dungeons" was very short-sighted.
D&D writing, by and large, encourages a lack of questions. The surface runs deep. "Go into a cave and chop up goblins." Why are we doing this? "Goblins are bad." All goblins? "Yes."
I think the question of "why are there players comfortable siding with fascist factions and wondering why they're called 'lawful evil'" is pretty easily answered with... because D&D itself is inherently kind of fascist. And it's the most insidious kind of fascist, too- its villains are fascists, so how could you point fingers at the book?
Fire Giants are dwarf slavers. Drow are a megalomaniacal theocracy who hate men. Orcs are violent tribes of marauding killers. Illithids want to destroy all life and keep an entire civilization to scrub their floors. But these narratives still push the idea that "evil" is a racial trait. The players are not only justified in their campaign to destroy these cultures, they're encouraged to do it.
They let the cat out of the bag by making these playable races; because now, they're not cut-and-dry villanous societies. They're people. There are Drow accountants whose lives are about balancing taxes, not worshipping Lolth. There are Yuan-Ti who don't sacrifice babies on altars, and much prefer playing the lute or sewing blankets. Yet we're still expected to read "Chaotic Evil" under the Monster Manual entry for a bugbear and take it seriously.
I worked on a limited press run of The Poppy War series by R.F. Kuang, published by Subterranean Press. Featured here are the cover art and interior illustrations for The Poppy War.
I also did work for book 2, The Dragon Republic, and book 3, The Burning God! Those will be posted soon!
Sketches and other BTS content of my art are available on my Patreon!
Everyone talks about the wonderbread guy but nobody talks about how the wonderbread isn't necessarily the fetish object - it's supposed to symbolize like overcommodification or something. Like wonderbread is such a synthetic suburban concoction it implies wherever it is, that area has become gentrified and mown over by capitalism and this like caricature of commodification. That's why all the other pics the dude commissions are women (typically white and blonde) chopping down forests and stuff. The fetish isn't the bread. The fetish is this extreme caricature of earth and culture being consumed by the unstoppable force of like. Sterile Kroger marketability and commerce. That's why the women are always BUYING the bread and not like, fucking it. Its not about the loaves people. It's about Karen Bad End TF.
To be completely fair to the folks who focus on the bread thing, the fact of it being bread is not purely incidental to its role as a class signifier. If you look at the guy's broader patronage, yes, there's commissioned art of blonde white women personally cutting down rain forests with chainsaws in order to build giant smoke-spewing factories, but the thing that these factories are manufacturing is... sandwiches. Many of his commissioned pieces include dialogue explicitly stating that this is the case. Leaving aside the implications of the fact that these pieces are apparently situated in a world in which a "sandwich factory" is a thing that exists, that this whole complicated edifice of eroticised environmental destruction ultimately loops back around to making sandwiches suggests there's more to it than Wonderbread just happening to be a convenient signifier of gentrification.
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