Saturday, June 28, 2008

Role-Playing Games and Heavy Metal

Hmmm.

There's some talk about this going around lately, and it's interesting how closely people associate the two.

I personally find the relationship entirely coincidental, and also find it maddening that when talking about heavy metal, a lot of role-players (and I'm talking the traditional crew that I'd be more associated with) have heavy metal knowledge that's functionally equivalent to someone in role-playing that's only ever played 3.x or 4e and has never even read through the rules of older editions.

LotFP was about heavy metal before I thought to enter the RPG writing arena. We do (well, did, things are going kind of... slow there) long-form essays concerning the nature of heavy metal. If you're interested in the form, you need to see some things.

There was my Scum essay, released in 2005 (you might be most interested in the section on lyrics, which talks about fantasy and D&D. Forgive me grouping Tolkien as "sword and sorcery," as spending time on that sort of literary taxonomy was besides the point of the article at hand). That attracted the attention of the academic Mr. Burns, who penned two longform essays (with his research sources noted!) of his own in 2006: Impure Metal: How Underground Heavy Metal Became Mainstream Heavy Music, and False Metal: The Financial and Farcical Return of Heavy Metal. Hits to those pages and pdf downloads of the essays number in the tens of thousands.

(We had some fun... after Impure Metal, Decibel mag took to taking shots at him and LotFP for being "too tr00," and so Burns took them apart, piece by well-researched piece in False Metal. They stopped talking about us after that.)

Tell me there are no similarities between that and the current theorizing happening concerning the nature of "old school" versus "new school" RPGs. I dare you.

This might also explain why I'm such an angry and bitter old fuck. Everything I enjoy started as a grassroots movement that accidentally became successful, and has since been co-opted by businessmen who bury the traditions that built their cash cows in order to sell to whatever the latest trend is in their industry.

4 comments:

  1. No coincidence that I find this post very interesting (metal and RPG fan here, as you know). I definitely have to check out the links you've provided as I'm very interested in the origins and roots of metal, as well as metal theory.

    Totally agree about the corruption of metal--while it would be naieve to think that the great old metal bands weren't in it to make money, I think the genre was substantially damaged by "false" metal (hair bands specifically), which in many cases were actually record label influenced and produced. I've heard stories from bands like Dokken who were pressured by their label into going "glam" in order to sell records. Some serious corporate hack-work going on there.

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  2. Interesting. Thinking about my own involvement in metal, I have to admit it is very peripheral. I was attracted to the scene as an 'alternative' to the music and identity that was associated with the mainstream pastal shirt wearing folk. Part of the attraction was that it seemed to embrace 'fantasy', but also it was because I already knew people who were into it, and they were kind of role models to my young mind.

    My mental association of metal with RPGs (or D&D in particular) is almost entirely coincidental. We were listening to metal when we were playing, and a lot of the guys I knew who were into it were metalheads. There was a series of AD&D 2e adventures (Treasure Maps?)that took names from various Metallica songs, which reinforced the association.

    When I decided to put an RPG group together a few years back, I particularly and purposefully targeted folk who looked like they were into metal.

    Mind, it might be different here in the UK than in the US or wherever, as I get the impression that metal is a more acceptable mainstream sort of music abroad than it is here.

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  3. This might also explain why I'm such an angry and bitter old fuck. Everything I enjoy started as a grassroots movement that accidentally became successful, and has since been co-opted by businessmen who bury the traditions that built their cash cows in order to sell to whatever the latest trend is in their industry.

    Too true!

    I can't speak for metal (especially as scholarly as the sources you cite), but everything I've ever loved has gone this route. Role playing is just one of the many, many "industries" that has gone this route. And I hate it.

    Thanks for your very informative post.

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  4. This might also explain why I'm such an angry and bitter old fuck. Everything I enjoy started as a grassroots movement that accidentally became successful, and has since been co-opted by businessmen who bury the traditions that built their cash cows in order to sell to whatever the latest trend is in their industry.
    Take up gardening, maybe?

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