(Note: it turns out Substack is boosting nazi profiles and trying to drive culture wars for money so I’m back here, blogging away)

As someone with autism and a whole host of mental illnesses, I often feel as if the world is not made for me, that I will not and do not belong and never will. Over time I’ve learned to draw some power from that, and also lessen my belief in the totality of it. Still, when I find something that seems made especially for me, I am often overjoyed – and bewildered. Such is the case with the MegaDumbCast, a creation of the brilliant Kris Newton.

I first stumbled unto the wonder of this podcast when a friend reached out to me to see if I wanted to be interviewed about my autism. The podcast, you see, began as a way to make fun of Palladium Games and their epic badness, a sort of MST3K walk-through of the worst dregs of published TTRPGs of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, it was common for some games to turn mental illnesses, neurodiversity and even less-than-mainstream qualities into flaws and/or powers, often intersecting with random tables. One could, for example, see too many zombies and as a result become homosexual, or terrified of clowns. Palladium’s version of Call-of-Cthulhu horror investigation was Beyond the Supernatural and it was happy to use the then popular trope of the Magical Autist. This was a VERY popular and stylish trope of the 1990s, especially after Rain Man won oscars, appearing in many TV shows and they even made a Bruce Willis movie about it. With the first two series of MegaDumbCast covering Ninjas and Superspies and Heroes Unlimited, series three covered Beyond the Supernatural and I was happy to take part and point out that the guy in Rain Man doesn’t even have autism.

In return, Kris healed my soul with comedy genius.

It’s possibly hard to explain what it was like to be nerd in the 1980s, and how absolutely arcane and demented most ttrpgs were on top of that. Designers were still figuring out what rpgs were (really, they still are) and had no idea what to include and why, and often their guesses were absolutely insane. And few books were as gloriously insane as Palladium Books. They served a particular kind of roleplaying which has (oddly) mostly fallen by the wayside nowadays, where everything is really about finding some insane combo to make you an untouchable godlike badass, and the GM’s role is to hit you as hard as you can until you man up and find those combos. But even that wasn’t presented coherently. Poor baffled gamers around the world had no idea why Kevin Siembieda simply cut and pasted his table of medieval weaponry from Palladium Fantasy into every other game he published (or rather why his long-suffering and hardworking wife Marianne did for him), or why it cost only $100 to buy one of those FBI lockpick guns which would make every GM plot swiftly solveable because doors couldn’t be locked, or why anyone would buy a dagger that only did 1d4 damage when it was cheaper to buy an Ingram submachine gun that did 4d6. I think a lot of game designers were born in this era because the games were not complete or coherent and you had to first build a useable game first, before you could even show it to others. And that experience, of being hunched over these amazing, arcane tomes, that you could only get from one store in the very centre of the city, that never had all the line so you only ever saw snippets and fragments, and trying to figure out why Kevin Siembieda was obsessed with how much bullets would penetrate bones or why certain superheroes would own a comb but others would not – that experience was not something a lot of people went through. So it feels very special and personal that the first few series of MegaDumbCast was about very much this, through a lens of “now we know better”. It’s like watching Space Mutiny being MST3Ked (or Hawk the Slayer) with people who grew up seeing it in the cinemas. (Being an MST3K fan was also a weird niche experience too, before the internet!)

But things grow. What started out as riffing on Palladium’s mistakes evolved. Kris crashed into the weird moment that White Wolf games were so rich and popular they tried to make a Street Fighter RPG, and along the way Kris also shined a light onto arcade culture. He took a stroll down FASERIP Marvel, which was still very much in the goofy 1980s school of design, when we learnt RPGs from our friend’s older brother, who was also a non-digital Joe Rogan. Then – as I said to him at the time and he mentioned on the podcast later – Kris hit series six and speedran the entirety of the World of Darkness. Much like me, Kris and the RPG hobby Came of Age via the World of Darkness, and Kris started to talk about how he left his restrictive Christian upbringing. As all great art does – and I use the phrase great art without a drop of irony: the show is goofy and ‘dumb’ but it’s really smart and really deep as well – as all great art does, it revealed the artist. Early on, Kris refers to his other podcast, Gameable, as his real podcast, but over time, MDC became the more popular one, and the one both he and I think has more depth and more legs, and the one that the fans responded to. It became a more personal journey, into Kris’ and our pasts, and who we were becoming over the years the podcast ran.

Along the way of all this, Kris has also proved to be not just a historian of tabletop roleplaying, but an incisive critic thereof. Every episode there’s some core nugget of why these things are bad and what is better, and every few episodes I’ll hit a quote that I’ll write down or a concept that I’ll blog about. Like me, Kris gets that there’s something interesting in ttrpgs, even if it’s only interesting to ttrpg nerds, and it’s worth thinking about them and getting them right.

A few weeks ago we found out that series seven would tackled D&D 3rd ed (2000). Now, even though it was only 5 years after Advanced D&D 2e Revised (1995), 3E is quite a different beast than anything that came before it, representing a kind of seismic shift in terms of quality and coherence. It was certainly anything that had been on MegaDumbCast before. In many ways, 3E is a GOOD RPG. It’s not insanely bad like Palladium, or messy like FASERIP, or a bad idea like Streetfighter, or poorly assembled if ambitious like the World of Darkness. I wondered: what could MDC say about such a game? Indeed, would Kris’ insistence on taking our games to task mean he would come for a game I quite enjoyed? Would I find MDC coming for me, and thus find it less funny?

I should not have worried.

The second episode is Kris being angry. Angry that the game isn’t Ninjas and Superspies. The contents is in the right order, alphabetically and numerically. Shit is nailed down and specified. Everyone is credited correctly. Things are done well, and there seems to be nothing to make fun mode. This is “MDC hardmode”, says Kris – the jokes aren’t just writing themselves. 3E, he says, is “beautiful and obscene…because of the mania of (these designers) for creating something perfect”. To the point that Kris starts to wonder if, after all, the megadumbness we found along the way is inside himself, that he was the Kevin Siembieda all along. Or at the very least that he has met his match. This is his White Whale, his kryptonite, his Nemesis: the unriffable RPG. In other words, he is saying what I’m thinking. But also – because he’s really, really smart and really, really understands TTRPG design – he’s pointing out also the deeper problem with 3E and its moment in time, and its precursors and its decendants.

See, that precision comes from a particular kind of mindset, which is that the rules as written are sacred. That what is in the book is not just more important than your homebrew, but acquires a kind of mystique and power. And this idea emerged early in D&D’s history. Although Gygax intended to emulate something like Kriegpsiel where the players would not know the world and react as if they were themselves, stumbling onto strange things, what he ended up making was a world where knowing the rules and the text and the monsters described was the secret code that unlocked how you win. To a certain kind of nerd, this was a spiritual proposition. Just as D&D came out, nerds were sliding into popular culture and being taught, along the way, that they were at once the downtrodden, just as people of colour and women and gay people were, but also that they would inherit the earth, and grow up to control the computer that the jocks had to work on. The 80s told us the nerds would get all the women, soon enough, and in the 1990s, as computer gaming took off and the tech boom began, it seemed to be coming true. By the 2000s, nerd culture had become no longer something that other people laughed at, but still liked to pretend they were outcast martyrs (much like Christian fundamentalists do). And that, and culture around it, was transforming into something that believed this religious proposition: that if you knew enough of the rules, you got to be in charge and you were not just a king, but a philosopher king. You were SPIRITUALLY better than other people. Futurama made a joke that “technically correct is the best kind of correct” and the nerds took this literally.

Which is why they were utterly bamboozled when the humanities came along and insisted that they were sexist creeps. Gamergate could never have really been comicsgate or fantasygate because it needed that sense of Rules As Written precision.

And what’s really bad and really important about all of this, is that the people who really truly believe this? They are now running the world. Neonazi Peter Thiel met neonazi Elon Musk when they were both running D&D at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s. Musk was a game designer who was known for running a bit off-book. Thiel was more traditional, following the core D&D. They are not isolated examples. I sometimes call them Gygax’s Bastards: children of a dark enlightenment, who think that knowing facts makes them powerful. They are both, interestingly, most likely autistic, as well as having high IQs. A lot like me.

I’ve been pondering a book about this, about how D&D broke the world, about how Rules As Written became a magical thinking that broke nerds and made them into fascist futurists, and how we now live in that world. In lieu of me writing that, I recommend you tune into MegaDumbCast, for this series or any series. D&D3E is Newton’s great challenge, but I think what we’ve seen is he is rising to the occasion, as he and us grow older and understand more of who we are and how we got here. Sure it’s dumb. But it’s dumb on the square – dumb with meaning. Dumb with insight. Dumb with truth.

Strap in. Join me. It’s going to be epic. Like a twentieth level fireball.