First off: Looper is a really great film and not at all what I was expecting when I walked into the movie theater. I was expecting a sci-fi action movie. Instead I got an indy sci-fi film featuring outstanding performances. (It might be Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s best performance on film to date.)

Second: I’ve seen a lot of confusion over the way time travel works in the movie, with many people online complaining that it “doesn’t make sense”.

SPOILERS AHEAD

If you watch the film carefully, however, you’ll note that it has a nearly consistent handling of causality: Any changes to causality due to time travel propagate instantly, but only forwards from the point in time at which the change is made. (This is consistent across the maiming, the death, and the memories.)

The only inconsistency to this is that the movie seems to suggest that the reason the Rainman is closing loops is because he saw Bruce Willis kill his mother. That doesn’t work with the rest of time travel as we see it. However, we don’t actually KNOW that this is true. Since his mother had previous connections to loopers, it’s possible that in the “original” timeline he saw some other looper kill her. Or possibly just some transient. Or maybe the Rainmaker killed his own mother before he gained control of his powers. (One of the interesting things about the ending is that we don’t actually have any way of knowing if things turn out OK for the kid. The film certainly feels hopeful at the end, but it resists delivering any certainty.)

The film could probably have also benefited from being clearer on what precipitated the change which allowed the main character to change the outcome of his loop. (I.E., break his bonds and control his arrival.) But that’s a minor quibble which usually plagues any time travel story that isn’t based around closed causal loops.

If I was going to change anything, I’d have probably had the transient that the main character “saved” the mother from be a legitimate threat (instead of just some kook with a placard). That would have strongly suggested that in the original timeline that guy killed the mother and precipitated the child’s abandonment.

A TEST CASE

To further demonstrate what I think Looper was actually doing, consider this simple test case:

• At Point C, Future Bob travels back in time to Point A.
• At Point A, Future Bob arrives.
• At Point B, Future Bob kills Current Bob.

If causality changes spread in both directions from Point B, this would obviously cause a paradox: Future Bob kills himself, so he doesn’t travel back, so he doesn’t kill himself, so he… yada yada yada. But if we assume that causality changes only propagate forwards through time, then the situation resolves itself simply:

• At Point A, Future Bob arrives.
• At Point B, Future Bob kills Current Bob. Future Bob instantly vanishes.

The change at Point B cannot affect Point A, so there’s still a Future Bob running around between Point A and Point B. But once the change happens at Point B, causality propagates forward, Future Bob never traveled backwards through time, and therefore he vanishes.

Similarly, during the maiming sequence in the movie: You start cutting off his legs, so he crashes his car as his legs disappear. If causality spread in both directions, there would obviously be no way that he was driving a car in the first place. But since causality changes only flow forwards, we get the result we see in the film. (You can see this in the memories, too: They don’t change until something in the present moment changes the causality. Because, again, the change isn’t propagating backwards.)

The interesting case would be something like this:

• Future Bob travels back to Point A.
• Current Bob gets maimed Point C.

From Point C forward, Future Bob would be maimed. If you jumped into another time machine and went back to Point B, though, you’d see a perfectly whole version of Future Bob. (Because the causality change at Point C didn’t propagate backwards.) But what if maimed Future Bob travels back to Point B? Hard to say. The movie doesn’t show us that scenario and it could be argued either way.

Regardless, the result is a universe that looks like a complete mess. But, of course, time travel universes always look like like a complete mess. And this would be one way for the universe to “handle” causality that would prevent a paradox from ever occurring.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s a bug in WordPress that periodically closes all comments on the site. Worse yet, I can’t see that comments have been closed when I’m logged in.

I just fixed the problem again, but this has been happening a lot lately. I’m not sure if it’s due to the lack of posting on my part, because the site is currently getting hammered with spam, or if it’s just WordPress being random.

But if you see it happen, drop me an e-mail and I’ll get it fixed ASAP.

I just got done running the most heavily railroaded session in probably my last 15 years of gaming, including heavily forced scene transitions and huge dollops of illusionism.

(Context: It was a dream sequence being experienced by a comatose PC. They were taken through a highlight reel of their memories — both the ones they’ve experienced and the ones their amnesiac character has forgotten — with the other players jumping in to play current and former versions of themselves in a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.)

I bring this up because I think it’s given me a fresh appreciation for why combat encounters — particularly those in “delve format” adventures — have become so overwrought in the past 10 years: It’s because, in a culture of “storytelling” GMs with railroaded plots, the combat encounters are the only place where players can actually experience freedom; where their choices actually matter.

So you get a large class of players who are primarily focused on the combat encounters because that’s where they’re actually allowed to experience the true joy of roleplaying games (and, therefore, that’s where they have fun). And to cater to those desires, adventure design (and then game design) focuses more and more on making those encounters really exciting.

But then, as that cycle degrades into itself, we end up with a situation where the tail is wagging the dog: Where the railroaded plot that strings together the combat encounters becomes thinner and thinner as more and more effort is put into propping up the combat encounter tent poles.

(Insert obligatory references to the Don’t Prep Plots and Node-Based Scenario Design.)

Couple congruent thoughts synchronistically spun themselves into my head recently.

First, Delta’s D&D Hotpost asked, “Was Module B1 a Good Design?” This revived my old argument that B1, B2, and the original version B3 are — at least conceptually — a really solid introduction to dungeoncrawling:

B1 teaches the DM how to key a dungeon. For those unfamiliar with it, the module provides a map with an incomplete key: Rooms are described, but blanks are left for monsters and treasures. At the back of the module, a list of monsters and treasures are provided: The DM is supposed to take them and assign them to rooms. In practice, this teaches the DM that:

(1) Rooms are not defined by the monster you fight in them.

(2) The distribution and arrangement of monsters and treasure will fundamentally change the gameplay of a dungeon.

(3) You can stock a given chunk of geography in many different ways (and many different times).

B2 teaches the players how to play. When you go the Caverns of Chaos, you enter a valley and the first thing you see are a dozen cave entrances: So the very first action the players have to take in the module is to make a choice. And the choice they make will completely alter the future course of events through the module. It’s an incredibly empowering moment and a really important lesson for any player of an RPG to learn.

Finally, the original version of B3 (which was very different from the version eventually published) introduced what was originally supposed to be the centerpiece of every D&D campaign: The megadungeon. Jean Wells provided the upper levels of the dungeon, but included several “empty” rooms which the DM was supposed to key for themselves. And she included a number of passages that would lead down to lower levels that the DM was supposed to design for themselves. Although sometimes crude and inadequate in its presentation, B3 would have transitioned the DM into designing and expanding their own megadungeon on the superstructure it provided.

None of these modules were perfect. But new players who worked their way through them received a really solid education in what it meant to run and play an RPG.

In the years since then, a lot of introductory adventures have been produced by the RPG industry. And the interesting thing about most of them is that they take a very different approach: They try to simplify and carefully curate the first experiences of new players. They spoon-feed the GM and hand-hold the players.

Which brings me to the second thought, this one from the Psychology of Video Games: “How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity.” In this essay, Jamie Madigan discusses a psychology experiment which demonstrated, in brief, that:

(1) If you take a toy with many different functions which are not immediately evident and introduce a child to it by “spontaneously” discovering one of its functions, then the child will experiment with the toy and discover its many different functions.

(2) But if you take that same toy and introduce a child to it by saying, “This is an awesome toy. Here’s how you use it.” And then demonstrate one of its functions, the child will spend less time playing with the toy and discover fewer of its functions.

(Madigan’s discussion of the study is excellent. I recommend clicking through the link and reading the whole thing.)

The application to roleplaying games should be almost self-evident: Introductory scenarios should be robust (so that new players don’t become stymied or lost). But that robustness should not take the form of hand-holding or railroading. If you want to introduce a new player to roleplaying games, then you need to embrace the Caverns of Chaos: You need to show them twelve options and say, “The choice is yours.”

Because, ultimately, it is that power of choice which makes RPGs special and exciting and worthwhile.

Over at Blog of Holding, Paul has just posted “The Cycle of Repudiation and Reclamation, and the 2nd Coming of 2nd Edition“: It puts forth his theory that a lost generation of 2nd Edition gamers, who have hitherto been silent, will emerge in the near future:

I predict that, within two years, some blogger will come along and express, with the persuasiveness of a Philotomy Juramont or James Mal, what was so special about the story-based, Elmister-infested, roleplaying-over-rollplaying Silver and Bronze Ages of D&D. We’ll learn why Spelljammer was actually awesome. THAC0 will stop being a punchline. People like Zeb Cook and Douglas Niles will finally get some praise for carrying the D&D banner for a while.

I started gaming in the summer of 1989: A brief period of BECMI followed by an almost immediate leap into 2nd Edition. So I’d be pretty much the definitional poster child for this “lost” generation.

But I think the reason no movement or “voice” has coalesced around this generation is that it’s never actually been been lost and it’s never really gone away.

For example, the OSR has been primarily driven by revisiting/rediscovering:

(1) Out of print systems

(2) Different ways of prepping and running adventure material

(3) Different ways of organizing your players and your campaign

And the exploration of these older ideas have resulted in the publication of new products using these lost methods. Many of which have also found new ways to explore these concepts.

With that in mind, let’s consider what these elements are during the 2nd Edition era:

• Narrative-oriented / scene-based adventures.
• Encyclopedic presentation of campaign settings.
• Splat books.
• Campaigns defined by a consistent group of 4-8 players who all attend each session.

And what you quickly realize is that the distinctive elements of the 2nd Edition era are still the distinctive elements of the bulk of the RPG industry. I mean, I basically just described Paizo’s entire focus and product line. There’s nothing to rediscover here: People never stopped publishing this stuff. People never stopped playing like this.

(I mean, yes, the late-3E/4E Delve Style adventures can be seen as beginning to depart from the classic narrative forms set by Call of Cthulhu and the original Dragonlance modules. But Paizo’s adventure paths are still being published every single month. And most other RPGs haven’t followed the path of 4E.)

So when you’re talking about something being “lost” from the 2nd Edition era, all you’re really talking about are the actual rules for 2nd Edition. And maybe a specific campaign setting that’s been allowed to malinger out of print.

And that simply isn’t enough material for a movement to really gain traction on. Particularly because 2nd Edition doesn’t actually have a lot of mechanical distinction from 1st Edition. Once you’ve said “let me count the ways I liked 2E” a couple of times, you’re basically asking a movement to coalesce around the glories of a proficiency system and three-hole punched monster manuals.

More likely would be strong communities forming around the out of print campaign worlds. But, of course, that’s already happened.

And to be perfectly clear here: I’m not trying to diss 2nd Edition. I actually think some of the best D&D products ever published were published during 2nd Edition.

What I’m saying, to sum up, is that the conceptual stuff from the era never went away: Which means there’s nothing “new” to rediscover and add to your games. And there’s no vacuum in the market waiting to be filled (because lots of people are still publishing products like that). So the only thing a “2ER” could be built around is a nostalgia for very specific products. And that’s why it hasn’t happened. And why it isn’t likely to happen.