Some Progress

With an earlier post, Matt said, “In D&D, we need better DMs. We need better tools to teach DMs how to gage their table, how to open conversations, and how to care for the people around them.”

Yes, damn it. Every time we come back around to how to play, or how to manage a table better, or how to keep abuse from happening, or any damn thing on how people in role-playing games deserve the best possible experience, we come back around toteaching people how to DM. And yet though I've been shouting this for nine years now, it is still treated as a joke by the industry and by most bloggers or vloggers.

The best we have is a cadre of people who have taken it upon themselves to give advice. “Advice” is not teaching. It is a desire to guide or make recommendations concerning prudent future action … but that is not a systematic methodology towards deciphering and deconstruction what goes into making a DM able to read the temperament of other players, how to open conversations with players who might have trouble speaking freely, or how to care for others. At best, “advice” is well-meaning. More often, it is prejudicial and uniformed, and rife with people who don't care about the consequences of their advice except in how it raises their internet status and makes them feel important or financially supported.

Last year, I banged the drum for accreditation for game players and was virtually laughed off the subject. Yet here we are, dealing with the “public game” demanding a series of codified ethics to keep DMs from being abusive of players. No one wants to face the real question: how do we go about saying that some people shouldn't be DMing? We can't even admit there ought to be a guideline.

We can chatter and quibble about the definitions of words and how far DMs ought to go with the rules, or dissect role-playing from roll-playing endlessly, while we wait for the company or the gamestores to do something about the escalation of doubt and mistrust and gamesmanship at the RPG table, but until we approach the subject like adults instead of squabbling children, this game and this community ain't goin' nowhere.  It will still be like this 20 years from now, with the players then talking on whatever platform exists about this DM that abused their players or these DMs that are charging money for a two-dimensional game experience, or the newest module that still just rehacks the work that was written within five years of the game's invention.

Anyone who wants that to ever change has to sit down and puzzle out the answer to this question.  If we were to sit down our first year of college or university and take a option-course, 256 - Design and Management of a Role-Playing Theatre, what would the syllabus say?

That's the million dollar question, Dear Children.  The only place where we can't get to.  We can make the game popular, we can make it a cash product, we can build an industry out of the proceedings and we can dream build worlds until we choke on them, but until we can point at a fundamental structure for game play, that makes so much sense that people must embrace it, because it is so obviously better than what they're doing, then we are just leaning against trees and making fertilizer.

Don't tell me it can't be done.  Psychology tackles the whole human experience and we're looking just to solve four hours a week in a relatively closed and controlled environment.  There are art classes to teach people how to paint, acting classes to teach people how to act, salesperson classes to teach people how to sell and goddamn fung shui classes to teach people how to tell other people how to move furniture.  Think on that.  Fung shui is more organized than we are.  Frightening.

I suppose you could argue it had thousands of years to get its shit together.

For my money, the course work on that syllabus should read, "How to be a responsible adjudicator.  How to treat your players as equals.  How to make the game a meaningful challenge.  How to create immersion.  Why immersion matters.  Why understanding how these things work is necessary to self-examination and meaningful self-development.  Why making the game helps with playing the game." And why letting others make the game, and coasting on their work, is a recipe for disaster; or rather, one word for those taking our course: Pitfalls.

But hell, there are so few people I speak to who even believe the game is meaningful enough to justify a university course.  Remembering that this is a university course.

At least some designers are catching up to the place where the Sims was in 2001, seventeen years ago:

I'm just so gawdamned not impressed.  It's not even in color.  But at least we're finally using a computer.