Go Big

I collected some things from storage last month, things I haven't seen since my finances collapsed in 2016.  That was a frenzied move, where things went directly from my apartment's storage to the locker storage without looking.  So there are things I haven't seen for ten, even twenty years.

One of those things is a map, in an old cardboard tube, of the world I drew in 1981.  The game world I created in High School, when I was 17.  I thought, as long as I'm talking about creating a "big" world, I should assemble the six parts of the map, take a pic and post it online.  Alas, however, two parts are missing.  I don't know when they went missing.  I didn't know they were missing until today.  Here's what's left:

The full map measured 47 by 57 inches, all hand drawn and invented from blank paper.  The missing section in the upper left, the NW, filled in the coastline and consisted of a bunch more towns; beyond it, a field of mountains.  That's all I remember.  The missing piece on the right was a long peninsula that reached vertically to the section's bottom, completing the sea.  I can't remember anything about it's content.

Here is a close-up of the northeastern corner:

And the west:

And the south:

To my eyes, it seems terribly juvenile.  The color has been enhanced to make it easier to read online, but in fact it's done in number-2 pencil ... so, not very dark.  Nevertheless, the reader can imagine the effect this had on my readers when I unveiled it, posted two reinforced pieces of drywall (as one was not enough) so it could be portable.  I was still living with my parents and they were not the kind to let me post it in the gamesroom, where I used to run my players.

They were, to say the least, stunned.

It was my first experience with building a large game world.  Without realising it, I stumbled across something I would write about in my How to Run book 33 years later (p. 262):

"... human beings are hard-wired to see beauty in those things that have obviously required time. The Pyramids are merely large piles of rocks (with profound mathematics that are usually overlooked). They are staggeringly huge piles of impossibly large rocks — so the viewer is left in awe, wondering how it could be possible that so much rock is thus stacked. Size alone is enough to produce beauty . . . so long as the work in it can be felt."

What it boils down to is this:  we're making or designing something the players "know" they can't equal.  In all probability, they could equal it; but they think they can't.  This fine line is the difference between having and not having respect.  My players back in 1981, being as young as me, and not having spent 10 years remaking maps (which had been my favourite hobby before discovering D&D), were in complete awe.  The labels not being straight, the inconsistencies in the trees, or the mountain shapes, didn't matter.  In fact, I'm quite sure the reader's thinking, "Oh, but those things make it look more genuine ..."

Horseshit.  The compulsion to explain away flaws and faults, because the work's big and impressive, is the hard wiring that makes us look at any big thing with wonder.  The stones in the pyramids are not perfectly neat and straight, whatever the mathematics of the structure as a whole; there are flaws and mis-alignments, with endless wear and tear, both natural and artificial ... but none of that matters.  It's very big.  It's very old.  Every failing is seen as an enhancement.  Every shortcoming is forgiven.  We don't give it a second thought.

I'm endlessly reading DMs online talking about their players, saying things like, "They don't listen; they just want to go off and do their own thing.  Whenever I want to introduce something new that I've written, they're not impressed.  It's like pulling teeth to get them to do something together."  And so on.

Setting up a D&D game with three small rule books, a thin folder filled with pencil-scratched papers that we never actually see, a D&D screen bought from a store and a dice bag is not very impressive.  If you're the sort of DM who buys hundreds of dice, no doubt you've noticed there's an emotional effect to taking them all out of their box and spreading them out in a sea, even though you'll never use all of them.  I used to get a kick from taking out the six volumes of AD&D, along with printed rules of my own in duotangs, and dropping it as a single bundle on the game table with an enormous thump.  I knew those books cover-to-cover, which I can tell you is impressive as hell to people who can't memorize a poem.  Like a priest, I once was able to repeat whole paragraphs from the DMG from memory — which is a time-saving measure when running a game, I can tell you.  I didn't need a DM's screen; I had the combat tables memorized, including the weapons vs. armour tables, and would let the players double-check me when in doubt.

This made me seem smarter than the players, harder-working than the players, more committed than the players ... and most of all, smarter, harder-working and more committed than any other DM they knew.  When I introduced an idea to the campaign, I didn't have to fight for anyone's attention.  I didn't have to struggle to impress them.  My authority wasn't challenged.  And when I made mistakes ... just like with any impressive thing ... I was forgiven for them.

I didn't have to be an asshole; I didn't have to make threats, or worry that if I was rude to a player they'd have a fit and storm out.  If I was running Carl and Dave, and you chose to talk to Eddy, I could whirl on you and say, "Shut the fuck up, will you?" in any tone of voice I liked ... and everyone, including you, would accept it, because there was no game like my game.  You were welcome to leave.  I was ready to boot you.  But you didn't want to leave, and I wanted you to stay; moreover, I wanted to recognize this wasn't the time to be bored and talk to Eddy.  This was the time to pay attention to what Carl and Dave were doing.  That's why every player I had swallowed down the rules.  Because when it was your turn in the spotlight, you got to play in absolute, respectful silence, with your fellow players on edge wondering what you were going to say or do next.

That feels great.  And when I had 14 players playing, and ran them just like this, your moment in the sun, with your thirteen peers hanging on your every word, and me too ... it felt like you were a rock star.

This is the fruit that comes from drawing those hard lines I was talking about.  One person's commitment — the DM's — taken to the highest possible level, produces unexpected and unfathomable results.  I never had any trouble with a player bellyaching that their character wasn't as good as their peers.  I can think of one incident with a player who was unhappy with his ranger's charisma; he'd decided to use it as a dumpstat, so his charisma was 8.  When he got to 8th level, that charisma was becoming a real disability.  But he knew whose fault it was; he knew it had nothing to do with his peers; and his peers felt his pain.  This bullshit nonsense of "balance" that emerged in the 1990s came out of lazy DMs producing low-energy games that inspired competitive pissing contests between players that built resentment.  The solution was to boot the selfish-minded shit stirrers.

Instead, we rebuilt the whole fucking game.  Three times.

From the beginning, there were two paths among the early players of the game ... back when I was making and presenting the map above.  Some would look at that map and try to duplicate it themselves.  Naturally, they'd make changes and have their own ideas, so their maps turned out differently.

And there were some who wanted to buy the map.  Because that road was easier.

Since, it's been a push-pull between "making" and "buying."  The buyers, obviously, look like the winners.  The buyers can chat endlessly about the nuances of specific popular modules, even those printed 40 years ago; the buyers can rattle of the names of module-writers and coo about the time they got to meet such-and-such at a game con in Wisconsin in 2006.  The buyers can flood the internet with their favourite pics from their favourite books and modules; they can show their vast, library-sized game collections of all the RPGs and supplements they've collected since 1978, and oooo!  What a big collection it is.  The buyers are buying the biggest amount of respect they can buy.  No doubt, there are players who sit at Rod the Fodd's game table, surrounded by $50,000 worth of posters, books, movie memorabilia, the beautiful set of curule chairs and magnificent video-inclusive game table they have, plus the framed t-shirt Dave Arneson wore at the first game-con in Chicago in 1975, complete with cheeto-stains ... and the impressed players sit in this room and think to themselves, "If I ever quit this game, I will never get to sit in this room again."

Hey.  That's power.  Fodd can push and pull his players with every bit of pressure I can bring to bear, unquestionably.  At least, he can do it with a certain kind of player.  The kind who thinks these stuff is worth this kind of money.  And who doesn't care that everything is still being read from a book ... though they remember the last time Fodd tried to make one of his own adventures.  Shit.  Hope that doesn't happen again.

The makers are totally the losers.  No one outside the party can talk about their stuff, because only the party sees their stuff.  No one knows their names.  Whatever they're doing, it sure as hell isn't affecting the mainstream.  How could it?  In fact, do we even know there are "makers"?  Do these people even exist?  Are they just a rumour?  Because obviously, if one of them has ever died, there's absolutely not a yearly anniversary for it.

I am a maker.  I've met others, particularly at game cons.  They stand at my table and describe their game worlds.  They buy my books.  Then they wander back into the zeitgeist, never to be heard from again.  They're like ghosts.

I think the makers are happier.  In making something, there's a remuneration that's difficult to explain to a buyer.  In the early 80s, I'd sit in my room and let my eyes roam over the map above, contemplating the place names and lines ... and I'd feel the aesthetic inherent in the map.  It felt exactly as if someone else had made it.  It's a feeling that every maker has when they've made something important in their evolution as a designer or an artist.  The Greeks invented the muses to explain it.  They argued that it feels like I didn't make it because I didn't; for a brief time, a muse inserted herself — all the muses were women — into my consciousness and made the work for me.  That's why I can't remember drawing the lines, or where the ideas came from, or how the thing seemed to have formed on its own account.  And why now, as I stare at it, I'm in awe too.

Well, I'm not in awe now, because I've created better things; this was a long time ago and I'm jaded.  Yet I see a glimmer of what I felt then.  Certainly, there was nothing in the Dragon magazine or in any of the artworks I saw in the various books by TSR to compare with it.  As a 17-year-old I was way past all that shit ... which no doubt is the reason why I've felt so superior to the buyers and their bought goods all this time.  I mean, I was pretty young; and measuring myself against what I could find in the real world is what a young man does.  At that age, we're looking for a way to judge our importance.

Add to that a host of players dutifully showing up at my games, listening to me, asking me questions, having them believe whatever I said ... that sort of thing will go to a young man's head also.  Especially when the pattern then repeats itself decade after decade, right up to the present, when I'm still miles ahead of my worldly competition.

See, the world may not see what the makers are making, but their players do.  They see the scope, they see the intricacy, they see the passion.  Moreover, the maker and the players see what the world is doing ... and if they're in the same place I am, they see what I see.  That you can buy stuff, but it's all shit.  Now, maybe we can't convince the buyers; but the buyers do not represent this side of D&D.  This is the Other Side, that I'm talking about.  The side that's going to go on making and playing D&D, and teaching it to others, whether or not we're ever "popular."

All this said, size isn't everything.  Size is just the first thing.  With our next post, we'll talk about complexity.