Codependency

The following sequence rose from events played between February 25 and 26, 2009.

In my last masterclass, I addressed the matter of players having to make up their minds how to interact with the campaign setting, and how the DM will be typically pressed to make this interaction happen for the players.  In short, the players want to adventure; and will wait for the DM to create the adventure for the players to run in, because this is easiest for the players.  Opposed to this, however, is the experience and opportunity that arises when the players do for themselves, even if doing for themselves is the harder option.  Good play calls for all the participants to dig in and work together to make things happen ... not when the DM provides for all the others, who then become hopelessly dependent on that DM.  Dependency is never a good thing.

This post is meant to address the contrary point of view, and how "doing for the players without waiting for the players" is easiest for the DM too.  In many ways, by creating the adventure from whole cloth, so that players know what is expected of them, makes everything easier for the DM as well.  Which is why DMs do it.  Nothing makes a D&D running go well like having the players be dependent upon our story, our plot twists and our moment-to-moment whims.

It will not be popular to say, but many of the substantial problems that arise in having ONE PERSON control all that is said and done at a game table for a bunch of people who are dependent upon that person's intentions to create, or not create, the adventure that is going to be run, arise from the same issues that we connect with codependency.  Role-playing is addictive; and while it is not a drug, I will rush to point out that the link explicitly states that codependency relationships can also arise from gambling, which is also a game, and the dysfunction that arises out of family relationships ~ which, incidentally, psychology invented role-playing in order to combat.

Which is to say that role-playing itself is not a bad thing.  It can be healthy, if approached in a healthy manner.  It is that healthy manner that promotes role-playing as a therapy.  We stress how every participant must learn to be responsible for themselves, and in their contribution to the general welfare of the relationship.  But when we say that the DM is responsible for everyone having fun at the table, ie., for the emotional state of other people; or that the DM is responsible to always say "yes" to player efforts at problem solving, ie., supporting and enabling the ability of another person to feel successful and validated; we are drifting dangerously into codependency.

When the DM knows who the players are going to talk to, and why, and what's going to be said, because that is the way the adventure goes, this removes everything else, the "unexpected," from the equation.  This shrinks the problem of managing the players' motivations and probable actions to a framework that most DMs can handle.  It is especially necessary for new DMs, who are hardly able to handle even this much interaction ... which is why "story-telling" DMing is presented as the best, more rational way to play.  Because it is easiest.

This is not the hall the players would see; it's a town hall from Passau,
a like town to the one the players were in, built in the 14th century.
Impressive, no?  Imagine how it was to the medieval eye.

Let's take an example from the campaign we left at the end of the last post, Who is Responsible.  The players have learned that to become guards protecting a merchant's wagon train, they must be bonded by the merchant's guild.  To be bonded, they must find a merchant to stand up for them.  And because they don't know any merchants, two players, Tiberius and Joseph, have decided to go where the merchants are: the merchant's guild.

And just like that, I'm in a trap.


continued elsewhere ...
This is the first of two such posts I will be writing in the month of May for the Tao's Master Class blog, where the rest of this post can be found. Examples on the Tao of D&D blog can be found here and here.

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