Rachel Bloom's autobiography update - there's a musical!

In a previous post, I mentioned hoping for a musical number. There is in fact a whole short musical! You can listen to it on her website, in .wav form.

RPG craft - radio

A few months ago I was reading and watching sources about old school roleplaying, wargaming as it evolved into tabletop roleplaying, and the Old School Renaissance/Revival, and came to the conclusion that one way I could improve in being a gamemaster was to get better at presenting the imagined reality to the players so that they could make system-agnostic decisions about the world as their characters.

In miniature wargaming, historical battlefields were recreated in miniature, so players and referees had real-world terrain or effects to negotiate a mechanical model from. Sometimes they could get into arguments based on historical or physical texts describing the region or the battle in question.

Subsequently, in many of the original tabletop campaigns, the referee, gamemaster, or dungeon master, wasn't expected to hand out maps to the players, or have the players look at their character sheet and work on the world from there - instead, the GM would describe the world to the players, and they would be expected to sketch maps, critical to do well when exploring dungeons. Some early computer RPGs, such as Pool of Radiance and Eye of the Beholder, required similar tasks of the player.

So how do you perform your part in this, and how do you improve these performances? I knew about theater of the mind in vague terms (mostly, in D&D, as an alternative to grid-based combat), but I was looking for specifics. I asked in an Israeli role-playing game theory Facebook group and was pointed to a discussion in Patrick Stuart's Silent Titans, and indeed, there are four masterful pages there, 8-11 (14-17 in the PDF), about exactly that. But there had to be more.

Then, suddenly, it hit me: radio! Radio drama, radio writing, those have to provide the listening audience with a world to engage with, based on verbal descriptions alone! Surely that is where I should seek answers. I am not going to pretend that this is an entirely original thought, as I soon after learned that tabletop role-playing games have been referred to as improvised radio theater in the past, but to me that was a revelation.

So I started reading and amassing sources about radio drama and writing, which lead me to Writing for Radio, a book by Vincent McInerney. The first chapter (which is as far as I've read) provided me with a breakthrough insight as to how what I am trying to grasp relates to philosophy, specifically to epistemology, which is about how we gain knowledge. One of the points raised, taken from Locke, is that it's possible to think of the process of imagining new things by building them up from basic blocks of things we have encountered in the past. Relating this to fantasy, a lot of ancient mythical creatures were described as amalgamations of known things. What is a minotaur? A man with the head of an ox. What is a gorgon? A woman with snakes for hair.

I got "stuck" in this chapter because it had a few exercises that require you to record yourself reading aloud texts and compare their appeal as radio, how well they conjure images into your mind as you read them. I felt I wouldn't get the most out of the book by simply reading ahead. Now that I have some vacation time, I plan to engage with it in depth. Maybe I'll even get used to the sound of my own voice!

Role-playing Monty Hall

The Monty Hall problem

The Monty Hall problem is a well-known mathematical brain-teaser: The player has survived to the end of some gameshow. The host now points to three doors. One of these is hiding a brand new car, the other two are hiding goats. Let's pretend that goats aren't a better long-term investment than a car, and that the player does want the latter. The player chooses a door. The host then opens one of the other doors, which reveals a goat. They then give you a choice: you can stick with the door you've already chosen, or you can switch. Which should you do?

The answer may depend on a lot of factors. In the framing of the problem that leads to the standard solution, more information is given: you are guaranteed that the host will open one of the doors that you have not chosen, one with a goat in it, regardless of whether you chose the one with the car or not. If you did choose the car, the host will choose the other door to open at random. You will always then be given a chance to switch.

Under these conditions, the solution is pretty clear: to start out with, you have no reason to favor any of the doors, so you can just roll a six-sided die (a d6), and take the first door on 1 or 2, the second on 3 or 4, and the third on 5 or 6. The probability of your first choice being the right one is one third. Then, the host opens one of the other doors to show a goat. Now you have more information: you know that the host had to have not opened the door with the car. So if you chose the one with the car, which was with probability one third, then he randomly opened one, and the other also has a goat - and you shouldn't switch. If you chose one of the ones with a goat behind it, which was with probability two thirds, then he already showed you the other one with the goat, so the other one must have the car. Not knowing which case you are in, you can nevertheless determine that you are two thirds likely to be in a situation where switching is the right move. So you should switch.

There's a lot to dig into as to why this is counter-intuitive to most people, and many variations that can be made on the conditions, but I want to focus on something else: how does the player know that this is how the game is played? Let's look at a more genre-ish scenario to illustrate what I mean.

Dracula's Hall

Your intrepid player character has made their way past many of Dracula's insidious traps and into his inner sanctum. The gamemaster describes the Count himself sitting smugly on his throne at the other end of an elongated hall, black curtains covering the high windows, sipping a red, viscous fluid from a chalice. "You have done well for yourself, brave one; but surely you cannot defeat me. Let us play a game." He points to three doors to your left. "Behind two of these doors there are my thralls, who will enjoy toying with you until your untimely demise. Behind another are the villagers you seek. If you choose the right one, you and they may leave unscathed. Choose poorly..." he tapers the sentence off melodramatically.

You mull it over, pray for guidance from whatever gods could allow for this creature to terrorize a poor village, and choose the middle door.

"Ah, an interesting choice", Dracula responds. "But are you quite sure? Here, let me make it easier for you." With a wave of his hand he opens the door closest to you. The maddened thrall inside starts stepping out, but Dracula stills them with another gesture. "Are you still certain about that door?" What should you do?

The answer depends on many factors. What was the framing of Dracula as a character? Has the gamemaster provided you with rumors about his fairness? Is he instead known for being a lying cheat? Have the various traps so far been set up as logic puzzles, or on the contrary, as deadly bundles of misdirection? In the first case, maybe you can assume that the situation corresponds to the honest gameshow above. In the second case, maybe he only chose to show you one of the other doors because he knows you chose well the first time. Or maybe all three doors contain thralls, and it's less of a gameshow than a shell game.

Since this is a role-playing game, with lateral thinking allowed or even encouraged, you didn't even need to get to this point. You could have had your character yell out "enough of your games" and come at Dracula, hoping to surprise him. Depending on how his capability was framed, maybe you have a chance of defeating him that way. You could also have your character literally pray to the gods, or cast a spell that will guide you to the right decision. Or you could have them try and look at Dracula closely to see whether he's lying, or is nervous about your choice.

And then the gamemaster may react in many ways to these attempts at working around the problem. They may choose to go with your choices and see where they lead through the known mechanics of the game. But maybe they telegraph Dracula's power through rumors or having him dispatch a known strong monster as you enter. Or maybe your gamemaster just plain tells you "if you fight Dracula you will die." Maybe the gods aren't listening right now, or your character is in an anti-magic field. Maybe Dracula is preternaturally unreadable.

This might erode your trust in the gamemaster. If they won't let you engage with or fight Dracula on your own terms, how else will they, or have they already, interfered with your agency? Is your choice of room significant at all, or does the gamemaster have some narrative beat to get you to, so whatever you choose, the pre-ordained encounter is what's going to happen?

So far I've assumed a somewhat traditional role-playing game, with in-character mechanics. But let's say this was a game with narrative mechanics, where the player can make choices that relate to engaging with and advancing the narrative. Your character could have some kind of skill or ability that allows them a good chance at succeeding at negotiating with creatures of the night. Then you can say "I want to make the right choice." You roll for that. And then the probability distribution is entirely different, and the results are defined differently.

Say you had a range of success, partial failure, and total failure. The system makes it so that you have a success with probability 80%, partial failure with 15%, and total failure with 5%. That's removed entirely from the problem as posed, but could hone in on creating a more interesting story. On a total success, you could realize that Dracula is trying to fool you, stick to what you chose, and then see that the villagers are there. A defeated Dracula then allows you to leave. On a partial success, you could choose to switch, then have Dracula laugh at you, open the door you had chosen before the switch to show you the villagers, chained and terrorized, then close it and let the already exposed thrall leap to the attack. Yes, you have failed, but the villagers are still there, so it's just a matter of going through a battle to release them. On a total failure you switch, then Dracula opens the door you've switched to in order to reveal the villagers - which he had turned into vampires the night before. Not only did you fail to free the villagers, the story will now be about how you survive this failure and live to tell their families.

In the case of a game with narrative-focused mechanics, you could ask another question: why bother with a Monty Hall-type situation in the first place? Maybe just as a reference to this well-known problem, as some kind of indicator of Dracula's sense of humor, rather than any specific probabilistic features of the problem, or a test of the player's reasoning or skill.

Back to Monty Hall

You are back at the gameshow. The host has shown you the doors, you made your initial choice, the host has opened one of the doors and shows a goat in it. What do you do?

The same thing you would have done before reading the alternate situation with Dracula. Because you have made the decision to play this gameshow, which is why you accept the premise - it's also frowned upon to fight gameshow hosts for the prizes. Because you know for a fact how the host makes decisions, why they went through revealing the door with the goat and giving you the choice - this gameshow is regulated, and has been running for several years, so you know that there is always a reveal and the ability to switch, so you may have done some game theory analysis about strategies and came down to always switching. Because the game doesn't care about narrative considerations, so you can't reframe it as about plotting out the story of you as a person and what the car means to you.

Rachel Bloom's autobiography, first impressions

Before Rachel Bloom co-wrote and -produced The CW's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she was known on the internet for her humorous Youtube music videos exploring heady subjects, such as her sexual feelings towards science fiction author Ray Bradbury (Fuck Me Ray Bradbury), or compulsions and intrusive thoughts (The OCDance). The CW show gave her co-creators, a budget, and more professional actors with which to explore these themes, but any production environment, especially with the expectations of a television or Youtube-monetizeable audience, is going to act as a bit of a filter.

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are (Grand Central Publishing, November 17, 2020), her autobiography, is as unfiltered of a Rachel Bloom experience as you're going to get. I've only read the first few chapters, but I would describe my experience as follows: every page or two I would laugh explosively, and every ten pages or so I would need to take a break. She's had a childhood that ranges from relatable to peculiar, and tells of it with her famous eloquent, acerbic, and self-effacing delivery. There haven't been any musical numbers yet, but here's hoping!

You will put this book down, only to pick it up the next evening (depending on your reading schedule).