Philosophers, Heretics and Madmen
I often think of tabletop roleplaying as a form of time travel, or even better, mind travel. It is a chance to jump out of the circumstances of one's own life and look at things differently. Other media can also allow a similar escape, but the two factors that differentiate roleplaying are that players must act and make choices and they must also simulate the world inside their own brain. This feeling of freedom, of seeing things from perspectives that you might never otherwise experience is one of the great joys of the hobby for me.
Recently I read that Thales of Miletus was the first recorded practitioner (and possible inventor of) deductive reasoning. I was flabbergasted. The idea that something seemingly so fundamental as rationalist reasoning simply didn't exist as recently as 2600 years ago is actually kind of astounding.
If the past is a foreign country, then the distant past is an alien world. Imagine what it would be like to interact with someone who reasoned without the aid of rational hypotheses. Sidestepping the low-hanging humor here, imagine it. In Miletus's time (6th C. B.C.) people would have used myths to explain natural phenomena.
What if we had to convince someone at that time to take our perspective or to act to help us? Imagine we want someone to embark on a journey with us. They have made a sacrifice or consulted an oracle and determined that it is an unpropitious time. What kind of arguments would sway them? Of course money or other rewards might be enticing but what if our erstwhile companion has determined the gods are against our efforts?
It is tempting to assume that people in the past were credulous and superstitious, but arguments about why the gods, in fact, do favour our cause would have to conform to a logic inherent to the culture- a logic we as moderns do not have.
This brings us around once again to the past as a foreign country. How would modern players appear in the eyes of these characters? What would our words sound like in their ears? Relative status would certainly matter: come to them wearing fine clothes with a certain type of speech you could be an intellectual equal or better. Marshal strange, outlandish arguments and you might be seen as fool or utterly mad. A dangerous business, talking.
Some RPG players may not be interested in this kind of conjecture but I think it gets to the heart of roleplaying as mind travel. As a GM representing the world, considering how NPCs view the character unquestionably adds depth and variety. A correct invocation of myth, invoking the correct gods, drawing on pre-existing conceptions ought to be more efficacious. Perhaps players might attempt a relevant ritual of their own. Some characters would be much more susceptible to certain types of persuasion- flattery, perhaps, or appeals to moral duty.
The key thing when preparing for a game where you anticipate significant will be to imagine how these types of arguments will play out with different NPCs. It might even be worth listing wherever you note down NPC descriptions. I have an NPC spreadsheet for each campaign and one of the key items is what the character wants. In many cases you can generalize this to an entire faction or for one-off NPCs create a quick caricature in the mind, perhaps a scene from a book or film.
Aside from myth and after Thales, educated people argued in ways that were more structured but no less strange to us. Greek stoics might have also employed semantics using definitions and etymology during debates. From the notes of an essay by John Dillon, this quote by Arius Didymus (c. 1st C. BC)
“It is not possible for one who possesses intelligence to get drunk (οὐχ οἷόν τε μεθυσθήσεσθαι τὸν νοῦν ἔχοντα); for drunkenness involves error, since it is definable as babbling in one’s cups (λήρησις… παρὰ τὸν οἶνον) and in no respect does the wise man err, by reason of the fact that (reading διὰ τὸ) he acts in all cases in accordance with virtue and the right reasoning (ὀρθὸς λόγος) emanating from this.”
In the middle ages many philosophical debates took the form of allegory or parable. Both allegory and the semantic tradition draw on the idea of a collected body of truths that can be drawn upon to illustrate the correctness of a body of knowledge. Still other traditions of argument proceeded by common wisdom, things that everybody knows, like the idea that witches cannot cry (h/t Scott Alexander):
"For we are taught both by the words of worthy men of old and by our own experience that this is a most certain sign, and it has been found that even if she be urged and exhorted by solemn conjurations to shed tears, if she be a witch she will not be able to weep..."
In other cases RPGs take place in a fantasy world, with alien customs and traditions: shifgrethor (the shadow of personal prestige) in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness or the Fremen code of honor in Herbert's Dune.
Do we need access to these bodies of knowledge and shared truths in order to imagine social interactions at the table? Given that we lack the knowledge base and belief systems of long-dead and fictional peoples, is it even possible?
Le Guin rides to the rescue in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness:
"Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants and futurologists. A novelist's business is lying... fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth- to know it, speak it, serve it but they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places and events which never did and never will exist or occur and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion and then when they're done writing down this pack of lies they say 'There, that's the truth!' They may use all kinds of facts to support their tissue of lies... This weight of verifiable place/event/phenomenon/behavior makes the reader forget that he's reading a pure invention, a history that never took place anywhere but in that unlocalizable region: the author's mind."
So that's it. We can't authentically time travel but we can't authentically do anything outside our own minds and experiences. We can find some aspects of the truth and build around them an then use the alchemy of our combined brains to reflect a vision beyond any one of own experiences. Because RPGs are a conversation and because humans are wired for interaction, socializing with NPCs can act as a shortcut to suspended disbelief and draw players into emotional responses. It can be hard to visualize how these kinds of interactions vary in strange or foreign contexts but I think it is possible to create models (lies supported by the weight of truth) to approximate a panoply of worlds, eras and peoples.
I would like to explore how to operationalize social interaction at the table but this post is already quite long. The next several posts will explore various aspects of social interaction. There are a few topics I will talk about: types of interaction, relationship, foreign ideas and psychology, conflict and progress.
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