Entanglement

I left the last post promising to talk about complexity.  Just as we're astounded by great big things, we possess a similar awe towards intricate, mysterious things we don't fully understand.  Who hasn't kicked an ant hill so as to watch in wonder the ants scurrying around in what looks like panic?  As children, we explore this effect multiple times, making smaller or bigger dents with our foot in an effort to learn what's going on.  It looks cool; it looks utterly baffling to our young eyes.

The most interesting thing in the universe to my 13-month-old grandson is the cellphone.  He has no idea what it is or what it does, but everyone has one, familiar voices and unfamiliar noises come out of them, they play pictures and we, the adults in his life, appear to be utterly obsessed by them.  Since our phones are padded in leather and rubber, password protected and the floors carpeted, it's relatively safe to put one in his hands.  He can't do anything with it ... but once he has one, he absolutely does not want to let go.  If it's taken away from him, he cries in anger.  He understands perfectly how important these things are, and like a good primate he wants to take part.

It's a good trick if, as a DM, we can entice players to get this fascinated with some part of D&D.  It can be done.  It requires an intuitive understanding of what appeals to humans ... or, in designer terms, how an object obtains the behaviour we want from the user.  Cellphones, among many other things, are exhaustively designed to capture our attention in the worst way.  Yet this is part of a pattern going back thousands of years, which can be found in thousands upon thousands of little tricks and bits of aesthetic designed to inveigle people to get interested in what we want to sell, or build, or organize as a society.  Making early cars with cut glass and flower vases to hold roses; opening the door of a bakery to let the smell of bread waft down a street; building wooden roofs over the tops of towers to encourage watchmen to be more watchful; lamplighters making the streets feel safer at night; putting a crown on the pharoah's head; anything and everything to make something ordinary feel unordinary, and thus exceptional, attractive, envy-inducing and mouthwatering.

Judging by the literature, the best way of doing this in D&D is to have "a really good dungeon."  Expanded subclasses!  More character options!  New spells, artifacts!  Expanded rules options!  Puzzles!

Seriously ... 2020's Tasha's Cauldron of Everything advertises sincerely, in capital letters, "MAGIC TATTOOS."

Okay.  This isn't going to be a post bashing the WOTC.  But the reader's got to admit, game design in the subject field has gotten ... tired.  This is not the path to a better game.

A better game is built from giving the players things to think about during play that arise outside their natural focus on the setting and the rule system.  The setting is a vessel, it is not the substance of the game; while constant chafing against the rules by the player, with the DM allowing this chafing to go on and on and on, distracts from the game and prevents the experience.  These recent posts have been struggling to explain the vessel ... why it has to be so big and of such material and what the stopper is for and so on.  But acknowledged that very little has been said about the substance of the vessel except that it needs to build a certain degree of fear and excitement that will capture the players' imaginations.  This isn't enough, by far!  The game world is not a setting; it is not rules; it's a set of events with momentum and PURPOSE, presented in a manner that encourages the players to forget their chairs, their dice and their character sheets.  We can talk about "bumper cars" for months, but until we capture this fundamental of needing the player's ATTENTION, we're understanding nothing.

So ...

As much as I begrudge giving any concession to Critical Role, they've made one tiny leap in the right direction ... a direction that was plain as day in 1978 but which was lost amid really, really bad fiction writing in the Dragon magazine and the lack of video.  A direction that was plainly evident in the lasting footprint that emerged out of a terrible but very popular animated TV show between 1983 and '85.  It's called "role-playing."  Here's a sample from Critical Role [starting after 3:55:00]:

"She lifts the blade and throws it to the ground with all of her strength.  And {roaring} screams!  And falls to her knees and just crumbles.  She's shaking.  Her teeth are gritted.  You can see the tears and the mucus and spit all mixing, and she is just punching her fists into the ground, one after the other ... her eyes wide and tense with fury.  And just see the seething years of pain and anger, all coming to a head at once."

Ech.  Yeah, I know it's supposed to be so impressive, especially with Mercer just pushing so, so, so very very hard to shove the words out through his ovaries ... but.   Purple prose "is overly ornate prose text that disrupts the narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing.  This diminishes the appreciation of the prose overall."

Role-playing is "a" path towards increasing the game's complexity ... but the over-reliance on role-playing to sell every part of the game is a trap.  When the DM's scheme for building attention begins with taking something small and making it bigger through role-play, the law of diminishing returns applies.  At first, a scream is enough to convey frustration and inner torment.  Then, it's falling to her knees afterwards.  And when that's not "strong" enough, she's shaking.  Soon enough, the DM's shaking as he delivers the lines, working harder and harder to make this bigger and better and more memorable and deeper and more profound and holy fucking god the earth splits and the dead rises and god's finger appears and ... and ... and ... and.

Role-playing is phenomenal.  It absolutely is.  But it's not putting on a performance for the fucking academy awards.  Mercer has to take it there because as a DM, he's got one option card and he's playing it for all it's worth.  He's got to make it bigger and bigger because the people he's selling are NOT PLAYING.  They're spectators, in their living rooms and bedrooms, watching actors play a game in which they are not personally invested.  This looks like it will work great, if it could be done in real time with real players ... but in fact, if you try it with people living in the real world, you're going to get laughed at.  Possibly — possibly — if you've got the players already immersed in your game, and you've really built it up, they might let you get away with it.  But chances are, you eat the scenery like this, you're gonna look like a fool, and they're not going to let you forget it.

Role-playing, like acting, works best when it's short, creative and unexpected.  Let's take a series of examples.  The players have just reached the edge of town as the sun is rising; wounded, weary and looking for rest.  They enter a tavern/inn and we describe it thusly:

a)  A fellow behind the bar asks what he can do for you.

b)  A fellow dressed as a bartender stands behind an oaken bar; he asks, "What happened?"

c)  A fellow dressed as a bartender sees the party, sees the party and rushes out from behind the bar.  "MAVIS!" he shouts over his shoulder.  "Fetch water and bandages!  We've got some hurt men here!"  Coming up to the party his face is awake with worry and concern:  "My god, my god!" he says.  "What's happened?  Who's done this terrible thing to you?"

d)  A fellow in an apron holds a steaming cup of coffee.  He coolly blows on it and says, "We don't serve your kind here."

Which do you go with?

"a" is short but it lacks all creativity.  "b" is better, but it's not especially creative.  "c" is creative all to hell, but it's cliched, a little anachronistic in a pre-20th century setting and it's definitely not short.  Hell, it's practically telling the party how to react.

"d" is creative and most of all, it's unexpected.  We naturally assume an inn is a refuge.  It's a slap in the face, provokes a confrontation and unlike "c," which gives the party a crutch and drains the scene of any fear of excitement, "d" is a threat.  Best of all, "d" is short.  There's no room for overacting.  There's a description and a phrase.  We get right to the point.

Of the three requirements, the weakness in role-playing is the belief that "creative" is the most important thing.  No, it isn't.  Short is.  If we go with "a," it's short.  The players don't care that we failed to be creative or unexpected, because we're already onto the next thing.  We speak, the players speak.  Big bang boom.  Momentum.  Anything long kills momentum ... and anything that kills momentum reminds the players they're in chairs with pencils in their hands in front of character sheets.  The players in Critical Role are "actors" ... they're paid to make big "o's" with their mouths and put on a show of being all impressed; but the audience is just waiting for the next thing to happen.

[in all honesty, it's the players' acting, and the dead air while it goes on, that makes Critical Role unwatchable for me.  It's like Gandalf saying something and then waiting 20 seconds for Frodo to reply; it makes me wonder why I'm not looking at porn or something]

Our fascination with ant hills and cell phones, the smell of new cars and the crowns of monarchs does not rise from the sensory elements of these things.  Yes, the ants are moving very fast and new cars smell pretty great, but there is a lot more going on there than what we see or smell.  The smell is proof positive of something we've just done, that's spectacularly difficult to process:  we've just spent $34,000 on a new car.  There are very few things in this world that most of us will ever spend more than $3,000 on.  When we do it, it doesn't feel real.  But that car smell ... that breaks through our confusion and our resistance to what's happened, making the moment substantial and genuine.  We realize we've just done something BIG.  It is not the smell.  When we sell it that way, arguing that the reason we buy a car is for the smell, we sound like morons.

Role-playing is the smell.  But it's not the thing we just did.  The thing we just did is whatever made us wounded, weary and looking for rest.  The confrontation of "d" is not interesting because the bartender's an asshole.  It's the deeper juxtaposition of doing what we just did, surviving, then having to come back to town and face this stupid bartender.  Leaving town to visit a dungeon is a culture shock, like leaving home to vacation elsewhere; coming home is, again, another culture shock.

And remember, as DM, we've been there the whole time.  We're a witness to everything the party's done.  We are proof positive that they did it; we even know better than they exactly what they've done.  Yet still we've got to find the wherewithal to push all that from our minds and interpret the bartender's point-of-view ... the perspective of someone who's never visited or seen a dungeon.

After a fashion, with the players aware that we're a witness, it's doubly insulting that we're not in awe of what they've done, that we have the temerity to minimize it in such a cold, slighting manner.  Even as the players answer the bartender, they're thinking in their minds, "Holy shit, Alexis can be such an asshole sometimes."

Exactly.  So we've got what the party did, what the party is doing now, what they're encountering from the setting, what they're thinking about the setting, and what they're thinking about me.  That's five layers of thought processes going on, at the same time.  Six if I interrupt the narrative to suggest that some kind of check has to be made to see if the most wounded player is about to take a turn for the worse before he or she gets treatment, rolling a die in the open as I bring up the matter.  Seven if I remind them about something else that was going on in town before they left for the dungeon, that they wanted to address when they got back.

Layer after layer digs the players deeper into the three points of momentum in play: what has happened; what is happening; and what might happen.  Get these going, and the player will become entangled in the narrative rather than what "characters" they're playing or whether or not they're "winning."  Those things fade into the background.

'Course, there are players who won't invest in the narrative.  Who insist on maintaining their constant, overarching indifference to what's happening or why it matters.  I wrote a post about those people, but let me reiterate:  D&D is not a financial venture.  It is not a better game if "everyone" gets to play.  Popularity with players is not a "feature."  Critical role needs it to be, because Critical Role is a media program.  But our games need only be popular with a very small number of people.  We don't need all our fingers to count them.

Still, I believe anyone with an open mind, who has time to play and feels they can trust the DM, can be lured away from the indifference of one-shot adventures that lack culture shock, levels of complexity and narrative, or long-term consequences for short-term actions.  I believe that by maintaining a firm level of discipline at the table, thus subverting those bent on derailing the game, coupled with a patient build of momentum layers, even die-hard genre-savvy players can be converted to this Other D&D.

It's only that very rarely do we get the chance to try.  It takes patience to convert a non-believer; it takes time and sacrifice from the other players as they wait for the non-believer to believe; it takes patience on the DM's part to make it happen without losing the non-believer's trust; and it is made worse by so much non-belief propaganda being out there in the zeitgeist, with which we cannot compete.  Still, had we the time, and the patience, and the wherewithal, and the bond of friendship, yes.  I believe anyone can be a believer.

With our next post, we'll talk more about momentum.