D&D as Art?

In what is surely a cosmic joke, I have thought more about fantasy role-playing games since I turned thirty.  But the character of thinking is not quite the same -- at least I can say that much.  I don't obsess over stats and manuals, nor attempt to create the ultimate character in some frenzy of misplaced alchemy (only to go on and greedily collect the treasures and kills to make said character a freaking god).

I don't even play much anymore, the drooling anticipation of the next marathon game a thing of the past.  Not that I would count on any of this as permanently in the past.  Periodically, I fantacize about playing the classics I never got to, or the game that has always been elusive, the complete adventures of a group of characters from novice to career's end.  Sometimes I even yearn to decorate my unpainted figurines.

Mine were never this good.

Most of my post-thirty D&D efforts have been directed at scenarios, which is to say more or less detailed sketches of adventures.   I've also devoted attention to designing my own mechanics, to facilitate a mode of play more plot and problem-solving based, with role-playing leaning toward the non-combatitive type.  I haven't been very successful in this regard, so mostly I just keep writing scenarios.

Writing "modules" has, for me, taken on a life of it's own, expanding it's ent-like tendrils beyond game preparation, becoming a hobby in it's own right.  I've even stumbled onto a principal component of active imagination, though I can't quite seem to find the missing parts that make the excercise psychologically productive. 

Mostly, I've got something like mythology without protagonists, though sometimes scenarios are written around specific "player characters."   I've got everything from sketches to fully finished adventures, nuclei if not bases of hundreds of hours of play.  And it's all one story, encompassing thousands of years on multiple worlds, with recurring characters and other motifs, interweaving plots and subplots.  In RPG parlance, it's a "megacampaign" (or "supercampaign"), a string of "campaigns," most of which encompass the adventuring career of a single group of characters. 

I've usually tried to leave open all but the most major of story arcs, and fates of most major characters.  In good DM form, I think enough can be reconfigured to accomodate the unanticipated moves of PC's, and a lot can feel open-ended even when it isn't -- a good DM is, after all, very often a trickster.


I don't know if all my modules are playable, so far has the excercise deviated from conception in those terms.  And this has made me ask, what else can this strange hobby be?   In addition to a potential psychological tool, my feeling that certain artistic processes and ways of thinking are at work has made me wonder, can this be art?

Gary Gygax would crush this line of inquiry:

Send anyone claiming that their RPG activity is an art form my way, and I'll gladly stick a pin in their head and deflate it just to have the satisfaction of the popping sound that makes….One might play a game artfully, but that makes neither the game nor its play art.

True enough, but I'm not so convinced that "RPG activity" cannot be art.  At the gaming table, it's theater, and even if it's bad theater, must it be so?  If the scenario is well written, the characters sufficiently developed, and the role-playing artful, well, why couldn't it be art?  I've never seen it happen, but if everyone at the table was a good actor and/or storyteller, why would the artistic potential be less than in other forms of semi-improvised theater?   I have felt something like music being created at the table, with participants riffing and playing off each other, via the characters they play, subject to the environment ("chart/score") they are in.  Why does the raw material need to be sound, or on a stage, to make art?

And scenario/world creation, minus players and mechanics, has the elements of a novel without protagonists:  characters, environments, plot and so on.  I consider many of Gygax's classic modules to be akin to pulp fantasy novels -- am I the only one who finds those fun to read?  I wouldn't call them art in a more strict sense, which perhaps explains Gygax's reticence, but what exactly did he think was missing from "RPG activity," prohibiting the leap from artful to art?  I see nothing fundamentally preventing this leap, and in the case of scenarios, if mechanics were harmoniously inserted into a well-written "module," with attention to design and conception, it could be an artful joy to read, with an inner coherence and beauty requiring no further actualization to become art.  


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