The Most Romantic Thing (On The RPG-mediated search for Experiential Validation)

A version of this essay was originally published in the TEETH RPG Newsletter.

A former girlfriend once asked me what I thought the most romantic thing was. Blindly missing the prompt to say something cute, I mused that the most romantic thing would be to die leaving a vast unpublished catalogue of complex and near-indecipherable work for your heirs to discover, so that you became both an enigma to those who knew you and an out-of-time legend whose eccentricities echoed down the ages, like Diderot. She looked at me in a way that suggested that she did not think this was the most romantic thing, which perhaps goes some small way to explaining how that whole situation did not persist. But the important thing is that while I am not casting myself as Diderot exactly, I am likely to leave behind a vast catalogue of near-indecipherable work if anyone remembers to look through the leftover chaos of folders, notebooks and documents once I croak my last. 

In practice I rarely publish creative (as opposed to critical) writing as a solo-endeavour, and only ever produce fiction in collaborations. These include the numerous video games I have worked on, these current tabletop wonders with Marsh, Mileships with Ian McQue, and of course the magnificent, peerless opus that is The Ludocrats, with Kieron Gillen. All good efforts with strong themes, if I say so myself. Were one to go looking through the unpublished fragments of the Rossignol archive, however, one would find a muddling web of repeated themes and particular personal obsessions. My writing collects a junkyard of half-formed imagery (that I thought was cool at the time) into a dangerous reef of isolated scenes.

Yes, now that I think upon it, my unpublished writing has long been about doing something with words that is probably closer to how an artist works: sketches, sometimes developed into more rendered images, capturing a single frame, but mostly just left, like the thumbprint of a passing thought. Now all this is not all that unusual for a writer, but I like to imagine that proper grown up writers develop these raw materials into the stuff which leads to posthumously published philosophical treatises, or even fun stories that focus on characters and plots and mature, entertaining and laudable works, you know the sort of stuff. I haven’t really done much of that. Instead, I endlessly recombine my imagery, collecting more as I go, usually in attempts to capture hyper-specific vibes, or simply leaving these odd scenes abandoned where I write them: a swirling, confused river of fragments and phrases that don’t really have much in the way of context, and are no use in any wider project. Future executors of my estate, such as it is, will have trouble piecing it together into anything coherent, let alone a Diderot-style philosophical milieu. Perhaps the Rossignol remainder is not that romantic, after all. 

But it has come in tremendous use in GMing. Hah! Did you think I wasn’t going to bring this back around to the topic of this newsletter? No, no, I really did have a point, and it was to talk about how this mode of directionless creativity has found its greatest application in work that is unrecorded and unrepeated, and often for an audience of just a few friends. 

GMing types (myself included) often reference Cordova’s prescriptive 7-3-1 Technique for improvisation at the table, and they should! It’s good. But in truth I rarely employ anything so systematic, and instead I prepare nothing much at all before a session, instead idly browsing through my collection of disparate images and ideas, collected over a lifetime, and sometimes crowbarring them into whatever we are playing at the time. This means a few things come up repeatedly. Corridors flooded with water, non-player characters unexpectedly breaking down in tears, or characters being trapped in claustrophobic spaces with horrifying arthropods — these are all things that my regular players might have come to recognise — but it means I find it easy to come up with the vital unexpected stuff too: the surprising smell of a place, the distinctly alarming look of an abandoned mansion, the history of an invented sect, and so forth. It’s always useful material, and I find the vast repository of note-taking and invention I’ve put together from thirty years of writing routinely makes itself useful at the table, whether or not my audience knows it.

However, I’ve come to think that there’s actually more to this than simply having an image to throw on the table. The search for cool stuff explains something of how/why I play and create RPG things at all. RPGs transform my sprawling archive of notes, but they have also become a source of them. It is raw material for improvised scenes, yes, but I get to put that stuff in and then get new, often far more extreme material coming back out. The act of playing, and of finding out what happens at the table, is a sort of creative multiplier. The equivalent of a jazz band. The basic riff might have been there, and even some of the cool hooks, but the improv is where the magic happens. Indeed, the stuff that RPGs produce can often not be rendered anywhere else. I have in mind here a moment, years past, of a collapsing pocket-dimension spraying naked dwarves over an apocalyptic battlefield and… well, it’s a long story, but you get the idea: that was a landmark for me, but typical of RPG sessions. More of that sort of thing, I thought. 

So: RPGs are more or less devices for turning ideas into more ideas. Greater ideas? Maybe, but also different ideas, and combined with other people’s ideas, ephemeral ideas, ideas that are single use, like the conversation on the plane in Fight Club. A cyclical sort of project, to be sure, but one that I value immensely as I continue my search for truly satisfying scenes and images. And perhaps those materials themselves are not what I am searching for, but are instead the medium in which I dig for a specific feeling, or a particular aesthetic and emotional response, or a distinct, rare vibe, like a connoisseur forever searching for that rumoured but as-yet-unexperienced flavour.

I think, in some ways, this explains my interest in RPGs in the long term. Back when I was a feckless, blinkered youth, I was mostly interested in how individual scenes might include cool shit from a Rifts book: a really wide gun, or a particularly aggressive-looking robot, for example. But now I think my search is broader, more anxious, and even more aimless. Playing RPGs has become a sort of search through possible experience, via this rule set, that mechanism, or these settings, which is an end in itself. I don’t expect to find the one true scene or image which will end the search (imagine if I did! holy shit) and I am motivated to try both scenarios and rules in different combinations in order to produce more interesting results, for as long as life provides. This is perhaps why I am motivated to keep playing and making games generally, and not just TTRPGs, for my palette is both paper and pixel: I am searching for the combination, the moment, the equation of procedure, art, conversation, chance, and conceit that brings me the unimagined alloy of discovery. Really, creating stuff is the good shit, and however you do it, bringing everything else you experienced to the process is how it improves.

Perhaps the most romantic thing, Former Girlfriend, is that process. You asked, and now I’ve had years to revise my answer. Not the esoteric and necessarily-incomplete archive of one-day-to-be-found sentences orphaned among my broken computers, but instead all the things I did to create those materials in the first place. The books I read, the books I wrote, the games I made, and the games I played. The people I spent time with and the moments that were generated spontaneously in conversation, like being granted free downloads from the infinite. Perhaps romance is all the opportunities life provides to be a piece of the universe that is searching for more ways to appreciate that universe. 

You probably meant something like that. 

In fact, I am certain that you did.

[image credit]