A Response Palette
I have been in therapy long enough to recognize that my childhood fantasies around both the assassin fly and the caryatid in the Fiend Folio are closely related to the freeze stress response. Those fantasies test out alternative forms of attention from within a freeze state, forms of attention that open up into different ways to move back and forth from a freeze state. They cultivate kinds of imaginative agency.
And imaginative agency lies at the heart of traditional Dungeons & Dragons play (remember, I'm old, and when I say "traditional" D&D, I mean the game in its Basic/Expert/Companion/Master [B/X for short] and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons [AD&D] forms). Creative approaches to fighting, fleeing, freezing, and fawning form the core of the fantasy of the adventurer.
Fawning might seem like an outlier, but what else do you call the patter meant to keep a dragon from eating you if not fawning? Much of old D&D's social trickery and cunning emerges from and elaborates upon fawning behavior until it, too, becomes a form of imaginative agency.
All of this is pretty darn cool! People get together to play a game and over the course of that game develop and refine fantasies about having proactive attitudes toward stress responses. But the game does push those proactive attitudes in specific directions, and I want to reopen the game to other forms of imaginative agency.
So let's turn back to the freeze response. The usual fantasies of freezing in a D&D game are about stealth and grace, overcoming an enemy either by never being seen or by being seen too late, after a deadly ambush has been set in motion. The rogue whose hand freezes just before setting off the needle trap in the chest and manages to then carefully disarm it explores agency around the freeze, too.
My childhood fantasies focused on reception more than reaction—receiving the egg, receiving the command. A game centered on reception would play differently than the usual sort of traditional D&D game! I plan to keep that at the forefront of my game design process going forward. What other parallel forms of fantasies could we develop using all of the stress reactions as the starting point?
Traditional D&D (and many of its OSR descendants) has rules to support exit from fighting. Morale rules makes surrender, rather than unconsciousness or death, a meaningful victory condition. Retreat, too, remains a ready option. However, sitting within the heat of the fight response itself, what other responses might there be? It doesn't all have to be some tumbledown Hegelian master-slave dialectic!
Looking at the surface of the fantasy genre, we find numerous examples of fighting ending the mutual recognition of the combatants. But what about de-escalation? How many actual fights just sort of subside into restive peace without a well-defined resolution when the two sides have exhausted their initial adrenaline?
For much of that, you might only need to build out more points along which to engage the morale system. When you try to cease active fighting, check the other side's morale to see if they might be ready to stop, too.
The imaginary of D&D made flight and fight into opposites sides of a coin, largely making flight into one of the fail states of a fight. But flight can be regulated from within itself, too, just like the other stress reactions. It can become movement toward safety (immediately raising the question of who or what is "safe" for those who flee), or it can be the space in which courage appears as a slowing and steady turning toward the danger without the presupposition that the end result will be fighting.
And there is always flight that seeks chase, that hopes to draw the chaser to weary themselves. That has potentially violent applications, but perhaps a tired animal might be offered food and water in an effort to convince it to be friendly toward the player characters.
This is all a little abstract to be part of a game's actual design. It does give me a framework for finding more of the fantasies that are essential to the sort of game I am after. The stress responses put the alternative queer trajectories I am looking for in sharper dialogue with the actual historical trajectory of D&D.
Keywords emerge, too. Courage, truce, receptivity, and negotiation punctuated by wonder, intimacy, and transformation.