Toybox Creativity: The Genius of Dragon Ball
It is tradition to include an “appendix N” for tabletop games, a list of inspirational media for a particular game or even a style of play. Tabletop games is, so far, a very parasitic medium, leaching off other modes of storytelling. I think this makes sense insofar as TTRPGs are games of pretending to be. In a book, you can imagine Paul Atredies. In a movie, you can watch Paul Atredies. But in a tabletop game, you can be Paul Atredies. So a list of inspirational media tells the potential player, “Here are the types of people you can pretend to be, here are the types of worlds you can pretend to be in.”
Of course, I pretended to be long before I met tabletop games. We all have, on the playgrounds or in our childhood bedrooms. These are “kidgames”, a related genre to tabletop games, or perhaps the same genre but gussied up a bit for adults. There is nothing I could say here that hasn’t already been articulated more clearly by my colleague from Possum Creek, Jay Dragon’s post on Playground Theory and the follow-up post on pretending to be Warrior Cats on the playground. Although nowadays, who I pretend to be is most often dictated by the system–will I be a wretched vagabond or a mouse? Well, am I playing Errant or Mausritter? Both have their own fictional touchstones, their own implied appendices N, but the system is the mediator. Not so as a child. When I “played” Dragon Ball Z on the playground, I simply was Gohan or whomever. There was no system intervening between myself and the fiction. Or, more accurately, according to Dragon (Jay, not the Dungeons & or the Ball Z variety), DBZ was itself the system.
The work of Akira Toriyama looms large in the worlds I create today, and would certainly be among the appendix N works for the Prismatic Wasteland, if not up there on the Mount Rushmore of my personal touchstones for creating fantasy worlds. Not just Dragon Ball Z, a playground favorite but also his art for Dragon Quest (which, if I’m being honest, was always more of a draw for me than the games themselves) and my favorite video game of all time (I know, I know, I have very basic taste), Chrono Trigger (where the game was finally an equal for his art). And unlike many of the others, Toriyama’s work had a creativity to it that is hard to recapture after adulthood begins to warp one’s body and mind. In the wake of his tragic passing, I was discussing his brilliance of creativity with a colleague, Dwiz of A Knight at the Opera, a portion of which is reproduced below.
Dwiz: There's a really appealing childlike "pure imagination," anything-goes flavor of fantasy that I wish I could tap into. If only I could undo a lifetime of built-up preconceptions about genre and tone and aesthetic rules and historical background.
But I'm also endlessly impressed at how he seems to make it still feel so *cohesive*. If I just threw together every image and idea that I find compelling willy-nilly, it would *feel* clunky and artificial. "Wizards versus robots, dinosaurs plus ninjas," that sort of thing. Just painful.
WFS: He’s aided, I think, by how consistent his art style is. So the dinosaurs and the robots simply look like they’re from the same world. Tbh, it’s why he was so perfect for Chrono Trigger as well.
But also yeah it is a hard bar to mentally hurdle. I feel like so much of my goals with Prismatic Wasteland is to justify mixing as much sci-fi with as much fantasy and pulp as I can.
And I think you’re right to identify it with a childishness (but non-derogatory). As a kid, my Digimon toys interacted with my Star Wars toys and my DBZ toys and I thought nothing of it. It was only as I matured, seeping in the dastardly influences of the taxonomical nerd, that I began to lose that. It takes effort to undo.
I distinctly remember a moment, it must have been like 4th grade or so, where I was like it doesn't make sense for lego people to interact with non-lego toys. Taxonomy is the enemy of fun, in many ways.
How can one return to the childlike state of imaginative flexibility? That is a question for your therapist, not a blog about tabletop games. If I could simply lay my hands on your forehead, say “begone, demon!” and in doing so rid you of any nerdish predilection for taxonomy, I wouldn’t be writing this blogpost because I would be too busy leading my pentecostal mystery cult. However, I can give you the mantra I use to smooth the rough edges of my brain that threaten to get in the way of a good time: Assume it makes sense.
The ninja rides a dinosaur? No need to question it, there are probably a ton of “lore” reasons that it makes complete sense. “Assume It Makes Sense” is a related precept to the “D&D is always right” hypothesis from my last post. Because for any zany mix of science fiction and fantasy, there is usually a rationalization that a clever worldbuilder can come up with. Whether that rationalization is more “magic did it” or “science did it” is irrelevant if you aren’t abiding by the post-golden age of science fiction genre delinations. For instance, in the Prismatic Wasteland setting, the characters mostly use medieval-esque technology because that is the level of technological development that humanity is at after the millennia of apocalyptic crises, so there are knights and lords (it also is very similar to the faux-medieval society because the economy-running, all-powerful AI was used to run a faux-medieval fantasy game and integrated those tropes into its worldview). But there are also all manner of far-future and science fiction technology that are the remnants of the many civilizations that have come and gone before. There are dinosaurs because someone did a Jurassic Park at some point; there are “demons” because of an alien invasion that took over the moon; there are wizards because what they perceive as spells with somatic and verbal components are actually just triggers for the world-spanning AI with reality altering capabilities. When I tell Alexa “turn on living room lights”, how is that not a spell? I can throw nearly anything into my setting from hoverbikes to talking gorillas and there is a rationalization I can come up with to make it make sense. But the best way to run it (or to play in it), is to not get bogged down in the rationalizations. The players assume it makes sense and my only goal is to come up with cool ideas, not to backfill the scientific justifications for those cool ideas.
Toriyama never bored readers with explanations for how the kamehameha worked, or why there are dinosaurs alongside hovercars. The reader (or viewer, or player) just assumed it made sense, and it did. Don’t divide up your games and inspiration and hermetically seal them by genre. Put them all in the toybox and play with whatever strikes your fancy.
