Dungeons & Dragons & Death
A character approaches an obstacle and must decide what to do. They choose X, because their Ability Score in this area is formidable, which means that their chance of dealing with this obstacle in this particular way is relatively good.
It is relative to two things: other characters and chance itself. I used to assume that chance was relativity without a baseline (the Ability Score of the Universe), but it isn’t. It is relativity without anything to be relative to, but the nothing that it is relative to is a specific negative: it is relative to the prospect of that thing not happening. And in the “real world” we know that this involves an overwhelming presence of other factors, probably including “luck.”
I wonder what sort of subject was created — and what sort of subject that subject creates — in the practice of understanding agency and responsibility as this particular formula, for whom all players have a category and an alignment, and for whom the vast, messy calculus of the role-playing adventure game is an “escape” from the “real world.”
This summer was the first time I got to spend real time with my two older children since before the pandemic. Last summer’s visit was canceled, of course, and the last time I’d been able to see them in real life was during a visit in March of 2020, just before the shit hit the fan. A lot happened in that year and a half, the biggest change being that my girlfriend, who they’d hardly met, and I became serious and moved into a house together. Thousands of hours of facetime sessions aside, the new dynamic in a new place after an unsettling year and a half had created a set of daunting conditions, to say the least.
Before their visit, my reading and thinking about the climate crisis led me to reading and watching about “earth systems science.” I found myself almost immediately forming a critique of it, as I wondered (and still do), if it is an adequate epistemology for thinking — and therefore doing something — about the climate crisis (or worse, if it is somehow part and parcel of what got us into this mess in the first place). Somewhere in there I formed an anxious hypothesis regarding what it was I was doing: I wondered if my “‘paranoia’ re ‘systems epistemology’ was ‘really’ or actually a manifestation or symptom of my own ‘personal anxieties.” To quote further from my journal:
I was thinking about the way I try to cover all my bases re the kids coming to visit: setting everything up so that all needs are met, and all parties involved were included in working together to make how it’s gonna be work. I realized that no matter how thorough I tried to be, I was simply gonna miss some things, and I had to be ok with that. Furthermore (I think) I realized that it was a fear of missing things that has motivated my hypotheses re intellectual pursuits? Maybe?
About two weeks later my mother passed away, in a way that was both sudden but not altogether surprising. She had been struggling with health issues and for years her health had been “up and down.” It’s weird to say it, but luckily the children were already here for their visit. And as difficult as it is to make the summer visits happen, we found a way to get to Kansas for a week or so to attend the funeral and to visit family. A portal in a portal, if you will.
The math for the obstacle of her death does not seem to add up: considering both her ability to circumnavigate the obstacle and the chance that she might or might not die (or might or might not keep on living) does not seem adequate to the event. The event feels more explainable by, and therefore seems to be itself, a large number of cumulative events, and these do not feel reducible to the role of some dice. And yet the manifestation of chance — the actuality of her death — feels much more simple than the explainability demanded and provided by either the clacking roll of a twenty-sided die (plus a modifier) or the above-mentioned whole host of factors that go into an event “in real life.”
Would it be too reductionist to say that we play these games to stave off death? Not the fear of death, per se, or even the thought of death, but its radical simplicity? And not even the pain of trying to understand it, but the problem of how difficult it is to apprehend it in the first place, by nature of what it is — or isn’t? Do we provide a whole mess around the thing in order to feel something from the deep nothing that it actually is?
When we returned home I was very tired. I know this is how my grief is manifesting, how “my body” is “keeping the score.” But I have my own stubbornness. One of the things on one of our itineraries is “game night,” and one of the games I’ve always wanted to play with the children is Dungeons and Dragons. I want this experience to be fun for everyone, for everyone to participate with as much ease collaborative imagining can muster. This means, of course, not being bogged-down by rule-checking and haggling over rolls of the dice or weapons stats, which means I have to learn as much as possible in order to curate the game in a way that takes as much of this burden off of them as possible. Which means I need to sit and read and re-read the rulebook and watch YouTube introductory example videos as much as possible, acquaint myself with the ins-and-outs. But I am tired. My brain is foggy. Still I push through.
I don’t think I’m dying for it to be perfect. That was my mother’s problem, and a trait or compulsion that I picked up from her and have spent my whole life working on. No, I don’t want it to be, nor think that that sort of perfection is possible — hell even the rulebook says if you can’t figure it out, make it up. Maybe this is the most important rule in the whole game and maybe, just maybe, the most important rule in life?
Of course the stakes of a game are different. Of course we pad our rapid descent to the inevitable simplicity of our own negation with modifiers and difficulty classes and treasures. And of course we meet obstacles along our path that we were, are, and never will be ready for. But what is being “ready” anyway? Being ready feels to me like a myth. More of a myth than dungeons or dragons or the various ways we narrativize and package the messy events (see: “adventure”), including but not limited to death, that dot the landscape.
In Dungeons & Dragons, if one of your team members dies, they do not go away. It is true: they are no longer present on the field of battle, but the thing is, they are still there in a very real way. In this context we call this way that they remain “in real life.” They joke with you, they grab snacks and drinks from the fridge, they whisper warnings from the beyond and suggestions as to how to avoid joining them before the adventure is over. Which is how we begin to feel that the adventure is literally never over, because it’s never what we thought it was going to be, because adventure is a myth, which seems to me now to be either a distortion of, maybe an addendum to or even a decoration of, “real life.” Which doesn’t mean it isn’t real, the way your buddy having been eaten by the demogorgon isn’t real. It also doesn’t mean that adventure isn’t good. Adventure is good. Because adventure and death are both real and not real, here and not here. In the deeply contradictory way that gives everything value they “just are.” True, we do not have the deep magic required to bring people back, but that’s just because we don’t actually have ability scores — but only in “real life.” In the adventure we still have it all, even if we can’t have what we want.
