Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Who Does It Serve?

"Happy endings are just stories that haven't finished yet."
-- Jane Smith, Mr. & Mrs. Smith


For those begging for adventures to have stories ... stories have endings and the last thing an infinite game needs is an ending.  D&D is stuck in the headspace that the characters should somehow get through their times of struggle and reach that point where they will live "happily ever after" ... except they won't, because they will head off to another adventure and another, and die eventually.

The notion arises that players become "tired of this adventure" and perceive that there is greener grass over the hill ... but being tired of an adventure at all is a sign that the "adventure" has ceased to be adventurous.  Now it is just one long slog to the end, with the party duty-bound to clean up the mess like a group of maids who ought to be on holiday but were forced to stay home because the owners were sick.

From a zombie site of its own.
An ending exists to resolve the plot and theme, and all the loose ends, so the audience can go home sated and refreshed from their evening at the theatre or cinema.  This is necessary because the audience can't sit in their seats forever and the actors can't simply continue the same play credibly every week ... unless it's a serial, in which case maybe you haven't noticed it yet but television doesn't have "endings."  Deliberately.  Serials deliberately avoid tying every last thread because they're under an obligation to continue this story, given that the audience never wants to live without these characters.  Naturally, after seven years or so, as the show enters into it's "zombie years" and the writers burn out and new, crappier writers are dragged onto the show for less money, the audience winnows away (except for diehards who will die with their cold, dead fingers wrapped around this TV show).

As a DM, try not to burn out.

But then, "endings" serve DMs, don't they?  Is it the players who are anxious to try a new adventure, or is it the DM, who just wants an opportunity to quit this game and this genre with the excuse that the adventure ended.  I suppose a lot of DMs don't want to contribute a quarter or a third of their present existence to the trudging, accountable work-schedule of having to present the same world with the same features and the same logic week after week for no pay and little perceived appreciation.  Better to end this adventure thing, and thus end my responsibility, kicking off this liability in search of ... well, something else.

Because, shit, after running this campaign for a whole four months, frankly, I'm sick of it.

2 comments:

  1. What IS an adventure, really (in D&D terms)? A dungeon? A scenario? A single session around the table?

    Maybe we should just do away with the term altogether. In a (potentially) endless campaign, we simply have ADVENTURERS (i.e. the player characters) doing "stuff" on a regular/semi-regular basis: getting in trouble, fighting foes, looking for loot, whatever.

    Running D&D for the last couple months for my kids, they've seen half a dozen different adventure sites ("dungeons") and we've largely been unconcerned with "finishing" any of them; no need to put a bow on any of it, no need to fight some Big Baddie, or find some ancient McGuffin. Just places to explore, seek treasure, and moving on once they'd had enough.

    [of course, I still find myself needing to take a break from running D&D, but THAT frustration isn't born from the style of play so much as from the circumstances of play]

    One of the major problems with 5E is its emphasis on advancement via "milestone" which requires players to accomplish story goals (plot points) in order to go up in level. It shifts the paradigm to one that REQUIRES stories, each (probably) more desperate than the last to be exciting, emotionally impactful, and/or meaningful.

    Maybe. Because the only alternative is thudding boredom, right? Or anticlimax? Or "starting over" with a new band of 1st level "heroes" on a journey to become "legendary" with some New Awesome Storyline produced by the company? I mean, is there any other alternative other than buying a new splat book with new featured classes/races/character options in order to "spice up" yet another tale of an evil dragon cult bent on taking down the vanilla fantasy setting.

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  2. The company decided with 5th Edition to get rid of the word "players" and replace it with "adventurers" because they "completed adventures" rather than just playing. So, no, I don't think we should go with ADVENTURERS.

    PLAYERS, as in people who play a game, and do not slave to company products and precepts, seems like a pretty good word to me.

    This milestone sickens me. The company has chosen to willfully indoctrinate children with this crap as a means of selling its crap ... and at times it makes me more ashamed than I ever have been to be identified as a D&D player. I can only count that the company's efforts will ultimately fail, because children can think for themselves.

    JB, I'm 98% sure that you're being sarcastic with your last paragraph, because it's YOU. But I could have heard those same words said with their literal meaning on a reddit page.

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