Classism in the Dungeons

...or how the PNP RPG scene has their own class tensions.

I have recently read this book review by Scott Alexander, and found it quite interesting. I think I’ve also seen some parallels with the way PNP RPG scene functions, which I will talk about today.

As usual, if you are confused about any terms, make sure to check out the glossary.

The basic point of the book (as re-told by Scott Alexander: i haven’t read the actual book) is that american society likes to pretend that it has no class, but in actuality it has clear class lines. Classes are determined by their manner of speech and dress, how they model their houses, what jobs they work, behavior, and a dozen other factors. 

In a way, you can see classes as sub-categories within a particular country’s culture, the same way you have sub-categories of generations within the broad class of people. People can be reliably classified as belonging to one generation or another, and will (with a high likelihood) share a lot of their experiences, behaviors and views with other people of the same generation. Obviously, any particular person isn’t obligated to share any particular trait in common with the people of their generation: but the general statistical regularity exists nonetheless, and has strong predictive power.

In the same way, classes are strong statistical regularities within society. If you look at a dentist, it will not be written on their forehead that they are “upper-middle class”; but, statistically, they will share a lot of things in common with other people who are “upper-middle class”, especially in regards to their behavior. For example, if you take two young people, their tastes in music are likely to be more similar to one another than to an old person. In much the same way, dress, manner of speech and behavior of a dentist will be more similar to social workers and artists than to coal miners and bus drivers.

Existence of these regularities gets interesting when you consider how people behave when they are subconsciously aware of them. For example (the book claims), the middle class is characterized by anxiety about their position in society, and a lot of their behavior has to do with making sure they keep or advance their relative position on the social ladder of the middle class, and look closer to “higher class” and further away from “lower class”. This determines a lot of their behavior, from dress to food to speech.

It’s important to point out at this point that labels “lower”, “middle” and “higher” have to do with the statistical regularity of wealth of people in different classes: a specific person of “lower” class may be richer than a specific person of a “middle” class (e.g. lumber barons being richer than grad students), but, statistically, the wealth of classes falls in a rough line: middle class above the lower class, and so on. And while people who fall into what I will call “middle class mindset” might try to claim that belonging to a higher class on this ladder somehow translates directly into having higher worth as a human being, I believe that this is a load of horseshit. Classes have to do with statistical regularities in behavior and - indirectly - with wealth, not with human worth.

So what does any of this have to do with PNP RPGs?

Well, I put it to you that in the PNP RPG scene, there are statistical regularities in player desires, and that these regularities lead to the same sort of social tensions as regular societal classes.

These “gamer classes” are fairly distinct if you pay attention to spaces where PNP RPGs are discussed a lot, such as various forums, chats, and even youtube videos of people who talk about the game a lot.

The structure of the relations between these classes is not the same as that of regular societal classes. While classes in normal society fall into a rough line, in PNP RPGs they fall into more of a Y shape. At the bottom, you have a class of “non-players”. Above them are “rules lawyers”, and above them still are two classes in parallel - “roleplayers” and “game masters”.

Let’s start with the “bottom” of the class hierarchy - “non-players''. These are various people who are pretty much not in the game at all. People who do not pay attention and sit on their phones during the game, ones who start stupid drama between players, and ones who have no idea what the game is about fall into this class.

Do note that these people are still part of the class hierarchy, whereas people who aren’t at the table at all (the rest of society, really) are not.

Above them is a class for rules aficionados - “rules lawyers”. The term “rules lawyer” originally refers to the kind of person who takes rules of a particular PNP RPG system - for example, dnd - very seriously, and is quite knowledgeable about them. Because of how complex (and, at times, self-contradictory and nonsensical) these rules systems can get, players from the two classes at the “top” of the hierarchy - roleplayers and games masters - may want to violate them, knowingly or unknowingly, in order to achieve some story goal. For example, a game master may want the villain to flee dramatically after engaging with one of the players in melee combat, but forget that the player is entitled to free attacks in such a situation, bringing the villain down. Or a player may want to use a loaded crossbow, but be unable to according to the rules of their system due to lacking “specialization”.

These kinds of violations bring roleplayers and game masters in conflict with rules lawyers, because of the latter’s strong attachment to the literal rules of the game system. A rules lawyer would say that you can not do these things according to the rules, and be more (or less) insistent on this point. This is, in fact, the main class signifier - high degree of understanding of the rules, and high degree of attachment to them. This is why various forms of munchkins, power gamers, character builders, exploiters, and so on should be grouped into the same class.

The third class is “roleplayers”. At the low ends of this class you have players who care about roleplaying, but may not be very good at it, while at high ends of this class you may find people who write detailed backstories, act in character at all times, and propose various character arcs for their characters to the GM. Players who are just there to have fun, as well as new players, fall into the low end of this class, but still within it.

In parallel with the “roleplayers'' is a class for game masters. Similarly to the roleplayers, position within the class would depend on the degree of effort being put into roleplaying and acting out story beats.

So, I hear you ask, why these groupings, and why are the classes positioned in a rough Y shape?

The answer is very simple: it all depends on the perceptions of players from various classes within the community, and on how outcomes of conflicts between these classes are judged. For example, a player who sits on their phone all the time would “lose” in any conflict and receive condemnation. Similarly, stories of “That Guy” that leads to drama are abundant, and always end up with the same sort of judgement.

This gets more interesting when we consider the three other classes. Roleplayers and GMs do not fall into a strict hierarchy, and fall into sufficiently different perception buckets that I believe their classes effectively do not compete. You can view this in much the same way medieval society had classes of “clergy” and “nobility“ - neither was “above” the other, they were parallel ladders of status. But both of them were above the “peasants”: in this analogy, the rules lawyer class.

Go on any PNP RPG forum and look up posts describing various types of PNP RPG players. In that list, find labels like “power gamer”, “munchkin”, “rules lawyer” or “rollplayer”, and look at how they are described. I guarantee you will find one of these two sentiments:

• Complaints about how disruptive, bad and stuck-up these kinds of players are.

• Statements like “Power gamers aren’t inherently bad”, “This is a perfectly acceptable way to play, but...”, “There is nothing wrong with...” which really highlights the issue: there would be no need to claim there was nothing wrong with something if there wasn’t already widespread perception it was wrong.

Do the same with posts describing GM’s bad experiences with the game. Out of a dozen, several will be about how some player built a ridiculous character using obscure rules, or had gotten into an argument over the rules.

But it takes two to tango, and an argument requires two people. Where are the posts about how some GM designed a ridiculous story beat that relied on a blatant violation of line 2 paragraph 3 page 196 of the player handbook? Where are the posts praising the clever build choices of one of the players, in the same way that some praise clever roleplay?

These posts do exist, but they are few and far between. So what is going on here?

As I have written in my Building Foundations series, there are various sources of fun for the players when playing PNP RPGs. Some players enjoy roleplay, and some enjoy careful character building, exploitation of the rules, and power fantasy. From the perspective of the taxonomies of fun, neither of these two sources of enjoyment is “superior” to the other. In fact, even the idea that some sources of fun can be superior to others seems like complete nonsense from this perspective. And yet, the overall perception of the community is that some kinds of fun - ones related to deep understanding of complex rules systems - are somehow “lesser”. This is exactly the same type of social tension as regular class tensions!

When I hear someone say “Being a power gamer is a perfectly acceptable way to play, but it does kind of miss a lot of the point of the game. It shouldn’t be about being the most powerful character possible, but about roleplaying and having fun.” I hear the same notes as someone saying “Being a plumber is a perfectly respectable job, but I would rather my kids became lawyers''. Reading between the lines: it is not, in fact, respectable, but I will not say this out loud.

Now, obviously the magnitude of social derision on display is wildly different, but the kind of comparison is very similar.

In my opinion, class tensions also explain things like The Stormwind Fallacy. Indeed, imagine for a second that we have proved, for a fact, that no class tensions exist among PNP RPG players. How can we possibly hope to explain the existence of this fallacy then? Why would the question of two different kinds of fun (roleplaying and character optimization) being somehow mutually exclusive even come up? After all, we do not see any questions about roleplaying coming in conflict with enjoying puzzles being set up by the GM, or people wanting to draw their characters coming in conflict with liking to talk to NPCs.

The explanation that performing optimisation, or strongly caring about the rules, or reading obscure books serves as a signal of belonging to a class lower on the social hierarchy fits the data much better. If you belong to the class of “rules players”, you can’t belong to the class or “roleplayers” - or so the status mindset works. Therefore, any evidence of belonging to one class will be interpreted as evidence of not belonging to the other, and thus not sharing class signals with that other class. And the signal of the “roleplayer” class is quality roleplaying.

The simplest explanation is that classes - rough groups of behaviors, that impact perception of various people - exist both in normal life, and in pen and paper role playing games. And that is bad.

Many people subconsciously treat interactions between different players within this class structure, which leads to them missing the actual goal: managing emotional needs of the players, as described in taxonomies of fun. That leads to less fun for everyone, which (hopefully) nobody wants.

Stop being a classist. Be a consequentialist.

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