(This post is a rewrite of several posts and responses from the LotFP Facebook Group.)
So at the beginning of March, the Dumpster Fire Youtube show ran an ad for LotFP. (The ad runs at the 19:35 mark, and reuses a gag they originally did in December when those pop-up monoliths were a thing… how could I resist?)
The ad ran exactly as I had scripted it, including having the host express doubts about doing the ad, and at the end claiming the game appealed to “freaks and weirdos.”
Dumpster Fire is not at all gaming related; it’s a lo-fi SNL Weekend Update “mock the news” sort of thing, run by someone who describes herself as “politically homeless.” I keep hearing that Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop gaming in general has gone mainstream, so I thought why not try to see if there were gamers in her audience. “Politically homeless” is as good a description as any for me (and to my mind hopefully have the sort of audience that won’t recoil in abject horror at LotFP’s attitude), and I’ve been a fan of Dumpster Fire since episode one, so why not have a little fun with things.
I’ve been advertising on different podcasts and such here and there, and this was the first time it had been noticed by my audience. (I don’t publicize these ads in LotFP spaces because A- the idea is to bring their audiences to me, not the other way around, and B- it’s a bit hard to track if the ad is attracting any new business via the given promo codes in the ad if my audience catches wind of it and starts using the promo code. :P) I haven’t tried advertising much in RPG spaces because, well… where? And these days, I figure much of the industry is either hostile to me, or has an audience that is so it would just be trouble for them to hawk my wares. So the outreach approach it is.
(I will be reaching out to RPG media when the next release cycle happens, and see if we can get make any inroads there.)
When the ad came out, and was mentioned in the LotFP Facebook group, one LotFP fan didn’t much like it. They were embarrassed by the ad, because it reminded them of the days of having to hide their D&D books as a child.
And… well… that’s exactly the point.
The Satanic Panic and all the negative press that came with it in the 80s left quite an impression on me. (People that have heard these stories before, bear with me, for completeness’ sake it’s time to do it again…) I got into D&D in late 1984 when I was 9 going on 10 years old, I do believe it was. Not long after, my mother (who had encouraged it in the first place since I was a little brainy nerdy kid who was into things like comic books, Conan the Barbarian in particular, and all sorts of genre media) made me watch Mazes & Monsters, starring Tom Hanks as a role-player who loses his mind, in the end being unable to distinguish the game from reality. Not as a joke, mind you, but as a warning about how dangerous these games could be. Holy shit.
Newspapers and TV news programs had stories about this dangerous new fad that was possibly dangerous to children. D&D had the reputation of being Satanic, of causing suicide, and generally impairing its players’ ability to discern fantasy from reality. A police officer came to my elementary school to give a presentation about the dangers of… not drugs (well, not that time anyway), but heavy metal and role-playing games. Parents refused to let their kids play RPGs, and this last through my high school years. (Some were very clueless and forbade their children from playing Dungeons & Dragons specifically, but any other RPG, even ones with all the elements of D&D, were just fine.) This never happened to me, but stories about parents throwing out (or burning!) their kids’ RPG books in the 80s are common, and I’ve even heard from people that say they were beaten when their family found out they were playing D&D.
Many people were sensitive to this sort of pressure, and many people remain sensitive. Any intimation of their hobby being weird brings up bad memories, and many more think that any subject matter or presentation that risks upsetting the “normies” is to be avoided at all costs, lest we bring the “bad times” back.
I had a different reaction.
See, I was never a popular kid. Part of that was there were some real assholes in my school. Part of that was that I am a bit eccentric in my tastes and expression, and that was in full bloom even as a child.
So me, owning D&D books and playing the game and knowing what it was and knowing that the portrayal of RPGs in the media was a massive pile of complete bullshit, didn’t have a lot to lose by liking the weird thing that meant staying inside, rolling dice, and (gasp!) reading for fun.
Being a D&D player in that era taught me a good deal about the world. A police officer comes to my school and tells lies about D&D? OK, cops can’t be trusted. The local news does a scare piece about this possibly dangerous new fad? Wow, if the news gets a subject I know lots about wrong, I can only imagine how much they’re fucking up all those stories about subjects I don’t know anything about. Parents ban their children from playing D&D but not other RPGs? Oh. Adults don’t actually look into things they’re passing judgment on, do they?
Basically, D&D indirectly taught me that the whole world is full of shit.
And then we can rinse and repeat for horror movies (and the general “YOU’RE A NERD” reaction to other genre media at the time, especially low budget type stuff where the special effects were ass and you had to use a lot of imagination to shore up the flaws), and a little later on for underground metal. Everything that spoke to me, absolutely everything, was shit on to one degree or another by “normal” people, and thus created pressure for the people wanting to be normal to reject it, and anyone associating with it.
People never gave me much comfort, but this stuff did, so I chose to reject the “normal” people and their judgment and gave my allegiance to the things that lit my brain up instead. (I wrote a line in my zine publishing days that summed this attitude up succinctly: “Music is better than people.”) And people generally felt the same about me. Why wouldn’t they? It was a mutual rejection.
I know it’s a skewed view (maybe an outdated view is more accurate) that anyone with a “normal” life won't be into things I’m into (I still can’t quite understand how all this superhero stuff that as a child I was teased for liking somehow came to dominate the movie business), but it's something that was impressed into me real early and at this point it’s just part of me.
Even going outside these walls here and into the larger RPG world, people look askance at LotFP and I can’t help but reinforce some people's attitudes that I just don't belong here. A core part of LotFP is fighting the moral panic of my youth that the producers of D&D themselves surrendered to (much more about that in a future post), and frankly I don’t have a lot of respect for today’s taboos either… so anyone wanting gaming to be “normal” or appeal to “normal” people has to contend with my attitude that “normal” (read: conformity) is nothing to aspire to, especially not when it comes to creativity and imagination.
(Note that even though what is “normal” in the general population, and what “normal” is in the role-playing community, are different from each other, you can consider them interchangeable and that my meaning is the same either way when I talk about “normal” people.)
So making it part of the message that something I do is going to be off-putting to most people (and scripting an ad where the story is that the host of the show is strong-armed BY A COSMIC ENTITY into doing the ad against her will) isn’t even a planned strategy so much as a base assumption of reality to be acknowledged and worked around/played with.
Same way that some stuff I release is testing to see what people can tolerate, or presenting a sales pitch as a dare more than an enticement, or even how I open up a little too much personally in “company” communications... there’s something going on in how I approach everything that’s not so much “I am making a commercial product and am strategizing to maximize sales and market share,” as “Is anyone like me out there? anyone?”
When people suggest (as they have a lot lately) that I should “get a PR person” for LotFP (presumably because whenever I open my mouth I say only wrong and unappealing things), what goes in my head is the LotFP presentation would become far more plastic. I don’t even know the content I publish would even work with a “professional” marketing strategy, and as far as I figure, I’d have to personally disappear as an entity out of my own thing.
But this is all very personal to me. Sure, it would be nice to hand off the public-facing communications to someone else, but I have tried that. Three people have had that job. One was for a time hospitalized for all the shit they took from the public, one quit because of all the shit they took from the public, and the other doesn’t much like me anymore and last I heard was one of the public slinging the shit.
There are reasons for this reaction, none of which I ever expect to address to the satisfaction of the critical public. I don’t think it is my missteps or incompetencies that draw this reaction, but rather my actual tastes, attitudes, and opinions. And maybe those will change a bit someday, as those things sometimes do. But I’ve ever been out of step with the public, and at this point it’s just something both me and the public have to just learn to live with.
And I can’t for a moment act like this is only a bad thing; it has provided me a living for over a decade now. I’m obviously not turning off the entire public. Not yet at least. (working on it!)
So, yeah, if the key to greater success depends on appealing to normal people with the promise that playing my game is something that is totally normal… that feels like a complete non-starter to me. I’d feel like a liar and an imposter trying to do something, anything, which would specifically target the “normal” person.
But I often forget that playing LotFP isn’t simply the domain of freaks and weirdos. That it doesn’t have to be an expression of one’s rejection of the world and its stupid media norms, or a reflection of an inner unease that most people seem to get out of their system (or at least learn to cope with so it doesn’t weigh them down as they move through the world) coming out of their teenage years. That people into the game aren’t necessary “with me” in any meaningful way. Nope. To most people it’s just a game. An interesting little footnote to their lives.
And that’s fine. That’s actually great, to create something that has appeal to people that aren’t like me. But they’ve got to understand that their enjoyment of my thing is simply a happy accident. I just do the thing that I feel I should do and hope it has any appeal to anyone at all. It’s all for the audience, but it’s not at all for the audience if you get what I mean.
In fact, I summed up how I see this monster I’ve unleashed into the world on a t-shirt I released a few years back. I ripped off the basic format from an old Morbid Angel shirt, but it was too perfect to let unoriginality get in the way of producing it.
I don’t know if people realized I was giving an honest assessment of what I do and not just creating catchy slogan for a bit of merch.
ah well.
(While you’re here, since you’ve obviously got time to kill, how about you go to that Dumpster Fire episode linked above and give a thumbs up to all the LotFP-related comments under the video? That would be terrific. </Lumbergh>)
'D&D indirectly taught me that the whole world is full of shit.'
Amen
I had the same experience of doubting mainstream news at a young age when my mother burned all my D&D materials due to a segment on the evening news. My high school civics teacher utterly decimated any lingering trust by giving our class extra credit if we went to the "Welcome Home" parade for Desert Storm Troops with Norman Schwarzkopf presented by Disney. There was hardly anyone in the Tampa Bay stadium when we arrived. Soldiers holding M16s instructed us to use the bathroom as we entered. We were herded into a tight seating on a small section of the stadium. Once seated, we were unable to leave our seats. I spotted several snipers. As the "parade" made its way across the football field, the troops, then Mickey, Minnie, and Norman riding in a pink Cadillac ignored the actual spectators and waved to the cameras. When I got home that night, it was broadcast on network TV. All the camera shots were tight to make it look like the few attendees were a huge crowd. We were just props in their bullshit narrative.