Applying Models To What Is Modeled, part 1: I Really Fuckin Like TNU

The Nightmares Underneath is in a lot of ways basically my ideal dungeon delving game. I was, as is common to ttrpg players, fully prepared to make my own system where I cut out all the parts of dnd-and-adjacent games I found uninteresting, and tacked on just as many new things that I did enjoy. My notes on this game of my own that never came to fruition are probably spread across several notebooks I could go find, if I wanted to. Maybe I will at some point, to give myself some much needed critique.

Luckily for me, I found The Nightmares Underneath instead. TNU fuckin rocks. I am not sure where exactly I ran into it, but I gave the free version a skim and was smitten. This was a game that was interested in all the things I was interested in, and then some! It excises the weirdness of dnd race rules. It’s interested in what an influx of treasure into a town’s economy does. It cuts down the bookkeeping per individual character while offloading the complexity of advancement onto social institutions, which also helpfully outlast characters, meaning that even if your fragile little guy dies they will have contributed to the permanent progress of all current and future party members. Adventure happens within the core of the settled realm rather than an exploitable periphery! Alignment is understood as a construct enforced by an extant hegemony rather than a metaphysical truth. This is all so perfectly my bullshit! All of these things are places my mind goes when I run a dungeoneering game! I bought the full deal, and I’ve now run several games of it, including a current long-term campaign that I am excited to continue. It’s good as hell to play.

So I should probably clarify what my project here actually is. I, as a person who likes games that are recognizably in the tradition of Dungeons and Dragons while simultaneously being suspicious to outright disdainful of the social and political content within Dungeons and Dragons, am often faced with contradictory ideas and choices to make about my tabletop gaming. What I’m planning to write, over several posts (unsure how many it’ll take) is basically the way I think about games, my play of them, how I apply my worldview to them, in the hopes of both squaring a few circles in my own mind. I don’t intend this as a set of moral instructions or a prescription for using ttrpgs as such, largely because I truly don’t think media objects actually do that in some sort of direct will-to-power way — my use for this has much more to do with how I play successfully with people who have different ways of interfacing with games than I do.

One of those circles to square is, of course, the why and how of a huge number of people who have similar aims in making dungeoneering ttrpgs less wretched land on so many different and contradictory stances on what is and isn’t necessary to do so. It’s something I end up thinking about a lot, especially when I read a “better” ttrpg and find it in some way thoughtless, lacking, misguided, etc. I found myself on the wrong side of this recently when I, presenting The Nightmares Underneath to my playgroup in preparation for the aforementioned ongoing campaign, was asked something along the lines of: “so are we just pretending that this is more interesting than it’s presented here?”

I and my friend, a person with pretty similar tastes and worldview to me, had looked at the same text and come to completely different conclusions.

I am tired after a long day of working, so the followup to these thoughts will be in a later posts. Some of said later posts will include me trying to:
-Think through my internal understanding of what the play of a ttrpg involves.
-Think through the way games, while themselves often models, are subject to the models we the players bring to them.
-Provide play reports on my TNU campaign, especially as illustrative to the above.

As a final thought, I want to give a shoutout to my players, who are all dear friends I love. Wouldn’t be near as fun or worthwhile to ramble about this stuff, or play ttrpgs at all, without yall.