You like dungeons and dragons, right /lit?

You like dungeons and dragons, right /lit?

You only need garbage systems like D&D if you play with deeply uncreative people. Good tabletop is collaborative storytelling (a deeply fundamental human experience), not 12 hours of random brawls playing out in a setting designed to maximise cliche.

no, fuck off nerd

the d20 system is pretty versatile and a campaign doesn't have to be filled with cliches, you can do basically anything you imagine using the rolls only to calculate success or failure.

I like Baldur's Gate

Best video game experience. The only game I've played in the last half decade, with the exception of alpha centauri.

Yeah but it's dead now. When "nerd culture" was redditized and mass-commodified, D&D (used here as a stand-in for tabletop roleplaying) was destroyed. Nerd culture was originally a nomadic space of fluidity-creativity, and D&D was its pure centre, approaching the limit of pure fluidity / pure creativity. CRPGs game development, wargaming, and a thousand other, more commodified, relatively less fluid media were emanations out of that centre. It's telling that the best CRPG devs were all basically tabletop roleplayers, and the best CRPGs were all simply concretizations of ideas, mechanics, storylines, characters, and adventures dreamed up in collaborative D&D games between devs. It's also telling that wargaming is essentially taking the settings and elements progressively established by more freeform roleplaying and turning them into "set-pieces" (battles, campaigns). ALL such things simply tapped into the pure font or wellspring of creative evolution that was tabletop roleplaying, they were all simply relative concretizations of the aletheia of D&D. They were able to stand because they stood in its light.

With the commodification of nerd culture comes a necessary emphasis on concretization in order to create stable object-commodities which are recognizable, therefore standardizable and advertiseable. They also become stultified, in Adorno's sense, rounded off and inoffensive, able to be digested by the lowest common denominator. The greatest goal of the commodity is to make the qualitative differential between itself and other products an absolute minimum - approaching a limit, similar to how D&D was approaching the opposite limit of pure Spieltrieb-like "play," but in this case approaching the limit of "How can we make this commodity just like everything else in every single sense except that it still technically isn't?" Keep it a theoretically distinct commodity, one that everyone needs because it's there to be consumed, but make it so that everyone can consume it, it requires no specialised ingress into an elite in-group or culture to understand. It no longer clears as art does, it is no longer "culture," but simply exists in the dead clearing, the lifeless horizon of mass culture.

>the virgin D&D
>the chad Burning Wheel

The transformation is visible on multiple levels:
1. The "streamlining" of the tabletop experience.
2. The infiltration of "haha I just like to have fun :) I'm not looking to put a lot of effort or thought into anything, just to have fun XD I love to have a good time hehe. I've gotta get back to posting Instagram selfies and retweeting the same things everyone else retweets from people who already retweeted them, then I gotta go to the trendy restaurant everyone goes to :) So I don't have a lot of time to cultivate expertise or special knowledge or participate in the clearing of new modalities of Being. I only have time to have a latte and play a quick match of Wil Wheaton Presents (tm) Dungeons and Dragons 10.0: World of Warcraft Edition, algorithmically and neural-netically smoothed out so that my koala smoothbrain prole consciousness can experience it without ever having to exert effort or 'stretch' my existing conceptions in a way that would create a hemerneutic gap and therefore the potential for novelty. Sick! You got the new iPhone? Haha me too dude. I love how we're the exact same person!" normalfags who are only there to "be seen" being there, i.e., for whom playing the game is another merit badge for their facticity sash.
3. The infiltration of women. When something has been thinned-down to the point that women can engage with it, it is a litmus test that the thing has been utterly and irreversibly assimilated into the "merely social." It is now a VEHICLE for the petty social latte-drinking herd mass behaviors of the sunk-in-life cows called normalfags, not an activity in itself. Normalfag men are corrupted by facticity, but women are like golems made entirely from facticity sashes. Unravel the sashes and there is nothing underneath. They are simply superpositions of das Man with no decisional kernel, not even a deeply submerged one.

Streamlining is an invasive parcelization undertaken by capitalism algorithmically in order to re-assimilate nomadic Other spaces, full of wild energy and novel accelerations, to expand the bourgeois-machinic Same. As capitalism watches from the outside, it observes regularities and gradually constrains their after-effects. In this way, it traps many nomads, who think they are still in nomadic space but who are now completely circumscribed by ersatz commodity-form replacements of their former spaces. Once a space has been so assimilated, it is no longer wild, though it is superficially recognizable.

D&D is now fully a part of capitalism. To play it the way it used to be played, you would have to find several 50 year old manchildren who have somehow, against all odds, resisted accommodation and assimilation to the stultified and routinized commodity forms of the thing they used to love and create together. They still exist, but they are also aberrant enough to resist assimilation for some reason - for example, comorbid antisocial or pathological psychological issues.

Well sure, d20 isn't D&D. But without good players, you'll still find yourself as a murderhobo in a modern/high/cyber fantasy world, killing waves of mooks to earn gold-variant and eventually kill the dragon-variant.

Being asked "you like D&D?" involves a value judgement of tabletop as it actualises, not just the possibilities in the rules. When people dismiss roleplayers as trite nerds, that's a good description of the hobby as they would engage with it, and as you're probably engaging with it, because the unwritten social norms are le nerd ones.

Lose the r9k and you're bang-on.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I left my last D&D group because our DM was a shitty storyteller and kept railroading us into MMO grinding every session.

I basically agree

but wew, lad

yeah no adorno would have critiqued d&d for the being the absolute escapist culture trash it always was from the beginning. there is no "outside" to commodity production you goon, it was never an artistic endeavor and always about selling shitty books. you're just using the scaffolding of vague theoretical namedropping to excuse your manchild nostalgia.

>not engaging in collaborative poetry or making music together or having heartbreaking drug fueled love triangles amongst friends instead
Neck yourself nerds.

>Lose the r9k and you're bang-on.

You're better than this.

Whereas I'm using Adorno to stand in for a discourse of commodity regularization and mass consumption, you're eerily obsessed with whether the man himself, born in 1903, would have personally liked Dungeons & Dragons. I am namedropping to invoke a certain discourse, but you are namedropping because you have (1) a dogmatic fixation on a certain author's personal, not even theoretical opinion, and (2) a rigid understanding of that personal opinion, i.e., supposing that Adorno's critique would be "D&D: GOOD OR BAD?" and that he wouldn't identify misdirected positive energies (like spontaneous intersubjective creativity).

I would suggest that you read more, but if you're already familiar with Adorno, you are at an advanced enough stage that you should be able to perform these other operations reflexively. I'm afraid you are probably constitutionally bad at thinking. You might be better off in a discipline where you can rigidly apply normal science to achieve ontical results, like sociology.

as if you've ever lived out your stoner fantasies you freak

>uses incredulity as a defense mechanism

How very post modern of you

you namedropped a philosopher you're not actually that familiar with to bolster your shoddy argument about why infantile hobbies were ackshually good before women came and ruined them. i'm pointing out that the arguments adorno raised to critique the culture industry apply incredibly well to d&d, i could give a fuck about what he personally thought of the game. also lol "invoke a certain discourse" = "give my shitty arguments unearned weight". keep up the mental gymnastics and projection pal, you'll be well on your way to impressing people on Veeky Forums in no time

>soyboy

lol "spontaneous intersubjective creativity" is just what happens when you're trying to have sex in high school while your parents are home

Worst poster on the site at the moment well done

>i'm pointing out that the arguments adorno raised to critique the culture industry apply incredibly well to d&d,

That's what I said in my post. It just doesn't apply to the pre-commodified aspects until they are commodified. This seems pretty tautological, but your brain keeps reverting to hypostatizing "D&D" because you think Adorno is "the guy who hates commodities" and not "the guy who hates COMMODIFICATION of culture."

You're saying the equivalent of "Marx disliked religion." Well, yes, but why? Because the presence of religion presupposes certain things about the reigning system of production and its superstructural emanations. It's meaningless to say simply that he disliked religion, or that "Marx would dislike Catholic piety and fellow-feeling if he saw it today." He would dislike that the human drives underlying it are being channeled into ideology. The drives are good.

There is no platonic "D&D," one of whose essential properties is "mass culture." There is the original moment of people coming together to have fun thinking up previously unthought thoughts, and then there is the commodification of those thoughts and thinking-togethers once they are detected as a source of energy by capitalism. Adorno stands in helpfully for that discourse of routinization and commodification, the latter process, so that it can be put in dialogue with Deleuze (or Heidegger, or Baudrillard, or anybody really) on how creativity and spontaneity really ought to work in producing culture, how reified commodities and objects and practices can be subverted to restore spontaneity.

You are bad at thinking, and will never experience insight. If I could help you, I would.

How was a fucking mass produced product ever not a commodity. Nerd culture if it may be so called has always been nothing more than a marketing niche. There is *nothing* spontaneous about playing a board game.

Poetry is fun in moderation, but it doesn’t scratch the collaborative storytelling itch
Musicianship is one of life’s purest joys
Drugs are degeneracy
Sex is disgusting and you should feel bad about getting naked in front of other people and presuming to expose yourself to them

>implying cocaine and lsd are degenerate
>implying love triangles are about the sex and not about subtle emotional combat/recreating the oedipal dynamic

>How was a fucking mass produced product ever not a commodity.

Well, how was music, which is now one of the flagship mass-produced commodities, ever NOT a commodity? Especially in Adorno's day, when it was just beginning to rigidify into its present stereotyped forms, how was music, in all its articulations and aspects, not already "a commodity?" It was being sold and marketed as one. Were the attempts at transgressive creativity by people like Schoenberg, Berg, and Stravinsky already commodities, because they appeared in a commercial society, on a market, and even worse, are now sold as kitsch? Or is kitschification and commodification the target of critique, not the attempts themselves?

Again: The reason that Adorno would both like and dislike D&D is the same reason that Marx both liked and disliked religion. Take the gestalt of Adorno's culture industry (like Marx's ideology) and lay it over various other images of humanity and society (Marx's base). Marx isn't useful because he gives us a big foam finger to point at "Religion" and say "Ideology! Ideology!" He's useful because he shows us how to think of religion with suspicion and pick apart why it occurs.

there are no "pre-commodified" aspects to d&d. d&d is, was, and always has been a mass-produced consumer good. there is, once again, no "outside" to commodity production under capitalism.

>original moment of people coming together to have fun
wow, welcome to literally every fucking game ever. welcome to playing cowboys and indians as a 5 year old. you're describing nothing immanent within d&d to suggest otherwise.

>detected as a source of energy by capitalism
how do you think this detection is accomplished? maybe millions of dipshit nerds buying children's games?

>Adorno stands in helpfully for that discourse
ah yes, adorno, who's entire magnum opus is a critique of identitarian thinking, can be dragged and dropped into your shitty argument without a second thought as to what he actually wrote. imagine reading any of his works on music and thinking he'd argue in favor of vulgar "spontaneity"

>put in dialogue with Deleuze (or Heidegger, or Baudrillard, or anybody really)

the specificity of your thought is truly breathtaking. turns out, if you're just casually namedropping philosophers who use vastly different ideas and methodologies without sparing a single thought to what they actually fucking writing about, they can be used to justify anything, including buying a product for 12 year olds!

How can I learn to write like this man? I pulled out a dictionary for six of the words he used in a two paragraph message.

>Well, how was music, which is now one of the flagship mass-produced commodities, ever NOT a commodity? Especially in Adorno's day, when it was just beginning to rigidify into its present stereotyped forms, how was music, in all its articulations and aspects, not already "a commodity?" It was being sold and marketed as one. Were the attempts at transgressive creativity by people like Schoenberg, Berg, and Stravinsky already commodities, because they appeared in a commercial society, on a market, and even worse, are now sold as kitsch? Or is kitschification and commodification the target of critique, not the attempts themselves?

maybe you could actually read his books and understand how he explored and differentiated between these complex topics instead of spluttering about on Veeky Forums like someone who just discovered the SEP

D&D is just geeks arguing with each other.

I think music became commodified as soon as and while it is being recorded. The medium is the message i guess. I get your point about dungeons and dragons (except for the bit about women), but at bottom it is a social contrivance. The surrealists have already deconstructed party games and for good reason.

it's easy: gain a loose, surface-level appreciation for a wide variety of continental philosophy, perhaps bolstered by a survey course or two, haphazardly borrow the vocabulary of a half-dozen of the trendiest ones you come across, then freely apply it devoid of context or understanding to absolutely anything. when challenged, always double down on the perceived inability of your opponent to think, reason, etc. - remember, you know the Special Words! you can't ever be wrong!

Undergrad in liberal arts

Read more books.

Hmph, fitting. A metanarrative construct as reciprocation for what amounts to quasi-deconstructed semblances qua semblances. Talk to me when you re-actualize the imminent space of your own innermost qualia for once. Exogamic pederasty at it's zenith.

I like Shadowrun

It really isn't anything. This guy is basically right: except I do actually study this stuff. I get the feeling he does too, but these slapfights are always gay. I was trying to provoke Girardfag by being schizo-pretentious.

You can take my word for it or not, but: The disagreement we're apparently having is not a real one. Or if it is, it's at a deeper level of disagreement than "a-HA! See, Adorno doesn't think that at all!" could possibly be relevant to.

The guy wants to do the back-and-forth 2004 vbulletin forum argument thing where you quote segments of your opponent's replies and endlessly go back and forth, to argue for arguing's sake. You can see when the other dude I'm replying to goes "oh I kinda see what you're saying I guess" (because he's arguing in good faith, and not just grandstanding) that he has made the shift to that deeper level. The Adorno guy just did his senior thesis on Adorno or something, and wants to cherrypick-argue with a phantom of his own imagination.

I agree, I am just saying that humanity continues to exist (and struggle to breath), underneath and through the culture industry. That was my original point. Capitalism channels and vents the desire for creativity in the same way that normal/ontical science vents the desire for truth/revelation.

There's this great Frank Zappa interview where he says that the original New Age and hippie music scene was just as dominated by capitalism as subsequent decades were, with the sole difference that the culture industry fatcats didn't understand how the creative core of the commodity "worked" yet, so their method was simply to say
>We have no idea how you guys are doing what you're doing, or why people are buying it, but you keep doing it and we'll keep paying you and selling it.

Then, crucially, they start to learn (piecemeal, algorithimically) what sells, they learn "why" the thing is "good" in an external way, and they parcel it up, they invade the production process itself to experiment further and to enhance the "good" features by regularizing them.

That's what happened to D&D. D&D was basically a haecceity, in the same way the recent alt right phenomenon was a haecceity. It converged several flows of submerged energy, which have now been detected, circumscribed, and channeled back into the system.

>no "outside" to commodity production under capitalism.
Exactly. There is an inside.

>wow, welcome to literally every fucking game ever.
Exactly. People want to "play" - Spielraum/Spieltrieb, the creative potential of un-circumscribed, novel activities and interpretations. Capitalism follows these and commodifies the dead forms.

>who's entire magnum opus is a critique of identitarian thinking
Like I said: I'm putting him in discourse with Heidegger, whom Adorno wasn't very fond of, so I'm not dogmatically adhering to Adorno. Adorno just describes the machine well.

I used write fake nonsense articles in this style and share them on a commie discord. They almost always believed I was being serious.

>culture industry fatcats
the Marx and Adorno Understander has clearly logged on. all the (((fatcats))) ruining my [insert inane children's hobby here]

>Exactly. There is an inside.
this is literally meaningless if you concede there's no outside or aether from which d&d was miraculously birthed (decommodified!) onto the shelves of hobby stores the world over.

>Capitalism follows these and commodifies the dead forms.
i don't disagree, but explain to me again how the already-cliche roleplaying of d&d was ever "alive" or did anything other than push people into the most base, reflexive, and standardized methods of play imaginable. d&d was the rote mechanization of play from its very beginning.

>how the already-cliche roleplaying of d&d was ever "alive"

Depends on your ontology of creativity, but I don't know what yours is. Mine is that:
- Being is immanent and irreducibly symbolic (so, any combination of Derrida/Wittgenstein/similar things)
- Truth is subordinate to aletheia (logic is the tautology of grammar)
- Creativity is also irreducible, because every act is necessarily interpretative (immanent)
- There are authentic/inauthentic modalities of interpretation &
trying to understand the interpretations of others (Heidegger obviously, but also recentish interpretations of Hegel and pragmatism on reason-giving and reason-receiving)
- The culture industry (along with capitalism in general) is one aspect of the social form of the inauthentic mode
- Creativity occurs nevertheless, because irreducible in any action (any act of reason-giving), but it is stultified and atrophied, reduced to a bare minimum, with the subject's range of action being routinized down to the point where all drives and their possible impulses have already been channeled directly into concretized forms (for instance commodities)

>how the already-cliche roleplaying of d&d was ever "alive"
Anything that the machine (and its subsets, like the culture industry) doesn't have a ready-made form or channel for is vital. Actually, again, the drives are always vital (kind of Bergson), creativity is always occurring, and it's always just a matter of how well the machine channels and constrains it. But when something occurs which is truly not "expected" (and therefore directed, shaped, into forms that inter-articulate with the machine), that is a potential source of new myth, a source of new grammar, of aletheia. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The chains can be tightened, even to the point that the subject no longer actualizes ANY potential self, but the free subject is irreducible.

That's my ontology anyway.

>or did anything other than push people into the most base, reflexive, and standardized methods of play imaginable.
I think this is the actual crux of where we disagree. Capitalism's task is to make sure there is never a critical mass of myth that can ground something other than capitalism. But that myth is always creeping up, the subject is always innocently trying to make something new.

>cont.

Certainly D&D always existed within the culture industry - if only because anything that appears for us must appear within the world, the symbolic regime, etc., of capitalism. But the story of D&D isn't just the story of a commodity routinizing behavior. It's the story of completely average people engaging in mythopoeia EVEN WITH only commodities to "work with," thinking outside capitalism (from inside anthropos), even if only locally, even if only incipiently. And more tragically it's the story of capitalism then enclosing, because easily able to circumscribe and overwhelm, such incipient transgressions or disclosures. It's the story of the transition from the "desire" model of capitalism to the libidinal, drive-harnessing model (as in Stiegler's proletarianization).

So the ontology of this model is that humans are creative and self-determining in a broadly Hegelian sense but they need SPACE. They will always create spaces, this can't be stopped until humanity itself is replaced with something inhuman, but the spaces CAN be constrained. Capitalism does this procedurally. Capitalism doesn't even try to understand essences. It simply closes the circuit a little more tightly with each pass, narrows the range of action, until the space of no spark can be generated.

what a wonderful sexy goodtimes thread
so many smart and thoughtful anons
so much think
so many good posts

makes me wonder what philosopher i would want to inspire a D&D campaign or basically be the intellectual conscience of the DM. i think deleuze is a good pick but they would all be pretty dope.

lacan DM
heidegger DM
deleuze DM
land DM
&c

you can kind of imagine or get a better sense of their thought even by transmuting it into the game ideas or rules.

>Capitalism's task is to make sure there is never a critical mass of myth that can ground something other than capitalism. But that myth is always creeping up, the subject is always innocently trying to make something new.

>And more tragically it's the story of capitalism then enclosing, because easily able to circumscribe and overwhelm, such incipient transgressions or disclosures. It's the story of the transition from the "desire" model of capitalism to the libidinal, drive-harnessing model (as in Stiegler's proletarianization).

Veeky Forums is so darn interesting

>(so, any combination of Derrida/Wittgenstein/similar things)

here, again, we see the absolute compression of difference in your "ontology". you cannot even separate the uniqueness of the ideas espoused by (extremely) different thinkers, and lump their disparate projects into a homogenized mass, allowing you to pick and choose between their coinages. philosophy is not a buffet. i'm not going to unpack the non-sequiturs you've lumped into an "ontology," but to say they require more argumentation would be an understatement.

>but the free subject is irreducible
>the subject is always innocently trying to make something new
that's some pure ideology you've got there

>But the story of D&D isn't just the story of a commodity routinizing behavior. It's the story of completely average people engaging in mythopoeia EVEN WITH only commodities to "work with," thinking outside capitalism (from inside anthropos), even if only locally, even if only incipiently.

again, you haven't even taken the basic effort to differentiate d&d from any number of other creative and/or collaborative human activities.

>He doesn't play MYFAROG