25th Class: Strategizing the Learning Process

We ended our last class by explaining that situational learning is something that can take place between the DM and players, as well as between players.  With each session, a DM acquires experience about what things worked during a session and what things did not; what might annoy players; what rules are impractical or incomprehensible; what aspects of combat are especially hard to run and how many combatants can be practically managed; points of weakness and places where preparation would have been helpful; and so on.  This is a never-ending process; even the most advanced and experienced of DMs will continue to learn things as they run games.

For the Novice and the Advanced Beginner, this learning process is painfully slow and even undetectable.  Each of the examples I've just given contain elements that defy intuition, so that a Novice might feel less like a session is teaching knowledge and more like it is proving the DM ought not to be a DM.  Role-playing offers a crippling learning curve for a lot of Novices, much like course programs that are designed to winnow out the incapable from the desirable.  Further, this learning process has been hampered in past years by various belief systems: that DMing is a "natural" ability, that it can be done or not, that no one can be "taught" how to DM ... or that its easier if you "relax" or "don't take it so seriously."

With D&D, it's not a question of whether or not you can walk.
DMs who say they don't feel this way are lying.

Whatever the rhetoric, a Novice DM must make sense, or meaning, from the complex interplay of player chatter, game rules, momentum and emotional aggression that compliments game play.  There are three strategies that must be employed if the DM is going to get better (see Zittoun and Brinkmann, p.2).  It should be noted that these will each naturally emerge for most DMs as part of deepening their knowledge of the game dynamic.  Our goal here is to outline these strategies in the hopes of making them more concrete ~ and therefore more structured and evident to the DM that exploys them.

1. We analyze what's happened, usually after the fact, for ourselves, reflecting on what we tried to do and how it ultimately came out.  We use this to explore better objectives, to employ ourselves more effectively in the setting's design and the game's preparation; to implement ideas that we think will work better; and to evaluate each time why a plan didn't work ... or why it did.  This is the teaching-learning process.

2. We sit and discuss the game directly with the players, asking them to give their opinions on what we should have done, or what we might do in the future, making up our minds about how reasonable the player's words are, what fits with the player's actions in the moment and what provides us with a clearer vision; often this centers our thinking; often we learn that we did make the right plan, we merely implemented it in the wrong way.  This is the didactic process.

3. We address ourselves to other examples of other DMs have done, to see their design paths, to copy them, to deliberate on them, to adjust and alter them and to "steal" small concepts and fit them into our own designs.  This is often the most fruitful strategy, certainly early on; and can also be the laziest strategy in the long run if we adopt them wholesale and cease to be critical of the materials' value.  This is the investigative process.

There's no need to examine these in detail.  The larger point is the understanding that if the Novice takes a position that there are things to be learned, and will set about learning them, the methodology for improvement is there.

Let's return again to my words earlier in the course when we discussed how the Novice becomes the Advanced Beginner (same link as above):

"As game sessions are played, our novice becomes increasingly aware that the conventions being followed have issues. Some seem to actively stifle play, or encourage resistance from the players, or lack sufficient reward for the players efforts. As our DM becomes familiar with game play, various "aspects" ... will make themselves evident. Recognizing these, our DM is encouraged to question the conventions and explore these aspects, and so becomes an Advanced Beginner."

It is this methodology for improvement, through meaning-making, that challenges those conventions we discussed earlier.  As we seek to free play, provide for the players, provide rewards and familiarize ourselves with game play, we transform from a DM who doubts continuously if the game even can be run into one who begins to see how this comes together.  We feel encouraged to change rules.  We push hard against those game aspects that are hardest to learn, seeking either to streamline them or to dedicate more and more of our time to their understanding.  We spend hundreds of hours working on dungeon design as we try to make that aspect of the game "come alive."  We stage battles for ourselves between combatants, like playing chess with ourselves, to study the game board and test new ideas.  We roll up new player characters until we're sick of it ... and until producing a new character is child's play.  We read and read whatever we can find, looking for new angles and new ideas, believing that someone, somewhere, has already designed or written down the things we know that we want.

We are, at this stage, still in a highly dependent position regarding our game.  We will continue to seek for things and ideas throughout our game participation, but as a Beginner we are yet in need of sign posts.  If we could call ourselves self-reliant, then we should categorize ourselves as Competent.  That is not this stage as we're defining it ~ or as Dreyfuss defines it.  We "get it."  But we're on the outside, looking in.

Dreyfuss writes that,

"The chess beginner learns to recognize overextended positions and how to avoid them.  Similarly, he or she begins to recognize such situational aspects of positions as a weakened king's side or a strong pawn structure ..."

Likewise, a Beginner DM learns to recognize when a battle is going very wrong for the players and that a TPK is in the wind.  Or begins to recognize when a player is arguing rules so as to gain advantage for the player's character and not for the sake of clarity.  We see that there are serious problems with aspects such as making perception checks, following one's alignment code to the letter or innovating new ways to use skill-sets in a way that is sure to break the game.  As a Beginner we may not know how to address these things or solve them, but we are definitely aware that they are challenges to both the management of the game and the game's functionality.

From this point forward, most of our strategizing (teaching-learning, didactic & investigative) becomes aimed at determining a satisfactory answer to these weak points.  Most exchanges between role-playing participants, particularly flame-wars, will be set to deconstruct, evaluate and reconcile one's opinions about these ... and as we know, there are a lot of weak points, more than enough to provide years of debate, disagreement and permanent rifts between true believers.

Steadily, over time, we do not so much as solve these weak points as reconcile ourselves to playing them one way or another.  With each final decision that we make, we move the needed a little further out of being an Advanced Beginner towards being a Competent DM.  For a long time, that meaning-making process ~ which can only be made for ourselves, as we will be the one running the game far into the future ~ will plague us, particularly with regards to things about which we have little or no real understanding.  For example, how geography or cities work, how weather works, how technologies work, how combat works in real life or how religion and politics work.  We will find that many Beginners, and Competents too, will take strong steps to work around such issues rather that research them and become knowledgable ... most definitely in a way that strictly limits the content of the game settings they design and allow.

Thank you.  We can leave it there for today.