26th Class: the Drawbacks of Competence

With our last class, we spoke about the strategies that are taken up by the role-player as they fight their way from being a beginner to having competence. Today, we shall speak about competence and it’s effects.

As a DM develops as a game manager, becoming competent, the difficult learning curve that proved such a challenge for novices and advanced beginners begins to fall away. With each progressive game, the DM’s assuredness grows, until the DM begins to approach each game session with complete confidence. Where once there were concerns that a night wouldn’t go well, the competent DM now feels that if things don’t go as planned, it will be all right. Previous experiences with bad game sessions have been followed up with strategies designed to compensate.

Where previously the fear of failing or setting up for a game while unprepared was a motivation for reaching out to others for help, ideas, inspiration and – where possible – instruction, that fear and doubt has evaporated. The DM has this. There’s less reason to ask for help. Instruction seems unnecessary. In fact, compared to the DM’s peers, it seems more right now that they should be in the position of helping others who haven’t “mastered” the game. We should understand that from a competent DM’s point of view, in a field replete with tryers and failers, there is reason to believe in his or her judgements and in the accuracy of the beliefs that brought them thus far.

The tendency is to confuse “competence” with “expertise.” We discussed Dreyfuss’s definitions on this distinction in an earlier class. The competent DM has begun to see the bigger picture and is able to see why conventions they were given at the start of their experience make sense. They’ve broken a lot of those conventions, yes, to suit themselves and to make their game better, creating their personal axioms which are now set the standard for how their games run. There is a very strong sense that their axioms work; that they are reliable; and in that certainty there develops a resistance to the calcification of those axioms … into biases.

We have a common axiom which is often stated as truth, which has always been demonstrably false: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If something is working adequately well, leave it alone. These are the watchwords of competent DMs. They have climbed into a position of comfort and now that they are there, it works. It doesn’t need to change.

Very often, however, the first ~ and apparently effective ~ solution we find for a problem does not turn out to be what’s best. We once believed the solution to forest fires was to put them out; it worked competently well. However, a better solution is to let them burn while controlling the burn. We used to remove tonsils when patients had tonsillitus. As a means of relieving the patient, it worked competently well. However, tonsils are important to our immune system, so a better solution is to treat the tonsils and not remove them. We once used asbestos as a common material to insulate electrical wiring, which produced a competent measure against deadly fires in buildings. However, asbestos causes cancer; so we found a better solution. We can look at any field of endeavor and see hundreds of practices that were once standards of competence, that have since been abandoned.

Yet in every case, the adequately well/leave it alone camp fought the change tooth-and-nail, because the proposal for a better solution was brought about by “experts” rather than everyday firefighters, physicians, housebuilders, etcetera. We can look around and see that fight going on all around us, as the camp of competent practitioners resist new practices, new ways, new ideas, effectively fixing things that aren’t “broken,” depending on our perspective. While today we accept that asbestos causes cancer, it took years and years of lobbying, pressure, demands for proof, conflict with the industry and within it, before the practice was banned. Many, many people at the time of change refused to see any sense in it. In many parts of the world, a tonsillectomy is still standard practice. In many places, putting out a forest fire, rather than letting it burn, is normal.

The resistance arises from the acquisition of confidence in oneself as a capable, effective authority, often a title we give ourselves. We begin a conversation with others using the assertion, “I have a degree in this,” or “I am a trained such-and-such,” forgetting that we haven’t continued to examine or expand our knowledge in our fields because we’re far too busy using the knowledge we already have. We even lose knowledge, as parts of our training fall away from disuse, because our positions or responsibilities don’t include that knowledge. As we practice our craft, we actually get dumber at it.

Which brings us to something called the “overconfidence effect.” This is a state in which a collection of axioms that we’ve acquired through life, that have transformed themselves into biases we have about “correct” and “incorrect,” results in a miscalibration of our subjective perception of our own expertise. This is exhaustively the case of many competent DMs in role-playing games, as virtually every axiom they possess was obtained within a bell-jar, or rather a vacuum ~ and practiced on a very small sample of the population that is also, often, highly biased towards the DM. Overconfidence manifests along a number of predictable, well understood patterns.

As stated in the link, overconfident DMs tend to overestmate their importance, their judgement and their performance; they lack a clear perspective on their ability or on the level of control they have. They tend to behave as though they have control when in fact they have none; and their memories of an event tend to support their belief. They overrate the effectiveness of their work and its quality, they indulge in wishful thinking, they become passionately certain they know what’s right or what is true and finally they tend to judge their personal performance and ability as superior to others around them.

Is there a cure? To be clear about this, the above is not a disease or a shortcoming. DMs suffering from overconfidence generally have some legitimate reason for acting as they do. Becoming competent at a role-playing game is by no means an easy road; there is plenty of evidence around to demonstrate the difficulty, plus there are many voices that say, “I couldn’t do it” or “I tried and I failed.” A competent DM with a group of respectful followers enjoys the limelight each time they set up to run; very rarely do they receive any thoroughly constructive critique of their efforts, even if they ask for such. Most of all, because virtually every DM we are likely to meet comes from a self-taught, at best apprentice-like journeyman system of learning to play, there is a remarkable dearth of proficient and expert DMs in existence. In fact, as a community the RPG culture tends to award DMs the appellation of “expert” upon their celebrity, their contribution to a specific early game document or system as a particular moment in time or due to their long-lastedness. No certification or authentication of expertise exists … which is part of the reason why this course has come into existence.

Under such circumstances, we should expect a DM’s measuring of their own capacity as a DM to be miscalibrated. We should expect a reasonable error in axioms that are used at a typical role-playing session. To take the example from D&D, we have literally thousands of axioms which have been committed to print as canon at one time or another, with a like number of conflicts between them, the existence of “warring camps” in endless dispute about which ruleset is best, which rule should be in place and which not, which definition of the rule applies and even what the precise words used in defining rules have been interpreted correctly or falsely. In short, a ghastly mess.

Our only goal with this class is to recognize certain principles of learning and meaning making in role-playing games: a) that as we understand Dreyfuss, that competence is not expertise; b) that any subjective opinion is secondary to the general interpretation of consensus-derived evidence, which is as close as we can get to an objective opinion within social science; c) that consensus meaning is achieved through agreed upon definitions and descriptions of concepts; d) that consensus learning is acquired through situational give and take between all the participants, not just the DM and not just the players; and finally, e) that the process for expanding our knowledge is obtained through the process of rupture, reconstruction and growth, which in turn presupposes that rupture is healthy, purposeful and productive.

We do not need to concern ourselves with whether a particular DM is overconfident, or has ceased to grow as they’ve become competent, or if many DMs of a particular stripe demonstrate a resistance to the changing of their game or the “fixing” of a system that works but has the potential to be better. Our agenda is to determine what is better and what practices we must undertake to identify that.

Thank you. Until our next class.