Rambling on a Sunny July Afternoon

July 1st and it is Canada Day.  I have nothing scheduled to write, because June is over.  I'll post a July schedule tomorrow, but for today I'm relaxing.

I wanted to add a bit to yesterday's post.  People noticed P.F.'s fear of confrontation and I concur.  I'm less convinced than some readers that what's depicted arises out of 5th edition, though undoubtedly that shares much of the responsibility.  My take is that the lion's share is related to a politicization of social relationships that 20/30-somethings have embraced through their upbringing with the internet ~ the idea that if anyone likes a thing, then everyone has to tolerate that thing so that the individual doesn't feel misused and isolated.  The absolute worst reference in the whole video is the "rule of cool," which readers did note.

TV Tropes defines Rule of Cool as,

"The limit of the willing suspension of disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness.  Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality as long as the result is wicked sweet or awesome."

This notion is largely meant to apply to film.  The application of it being applied to RPGs is ... troublesome.

Enabling that encourages dysfunctional behaviour, supporting the use of the rule of cool to solve game problems such as defeating enemies or overcoming obstacles, ensures that the players will ramp up the "awesomeness" of that dysfunctionality until it destroys all semblance of the game.  P.F.'s sin is not that he allows it, or that he supports it ... the sin is that clearly, he gives no thought whatsoever as to the origin of the rule of cool or how it became part of the D&D milieu.

This seems to apply to every other statement he makes throughout the video ... and indeed, through all his videos, as I've seen them.  He, and the people who comment beneath the videos, do not question the presence or the relevance of such rules.  They simply accept them, as though the presence of things like advantage and disadvantage, having the players discuss how they feel their characters should be rolled up, point buys, ignoring the DM, letting the players ignore the DM and so on, the rule of cool, are beyond examination or discussion.  These things just Are.

I find this continually jaw-dropping.  It is obviously creating problems.  P.F. repeatedly uses the word "impossible" to describe managing perfectly ordinary parts of the game, such as knowing the rules.  Clearly, the "rules" he refers to are not the sort I had when I started the game; and they're not the sort originating in the 5th edition books.  The rules as P.F. understands them are impossible because they are not rules at all; they are not even guidelines.  "Rule" is weak garbage-speak for "I have to listen to everyone's opinion and make a compromise."

Jeez.

On one hand, I agree that some things should be discussed and negotiated with the players.  How they roll their characters, or how the fundamental system of combat works, or fucking laws of physics (the rule of cool can go piss on itself), are not up for negotiation, period.  Ever.  I don't care who is pissed.  My partner and I have been together for 18 years, and if the die roll came up and killed her 13th level mage permanently, she would be pretty goddamned unhappy.  And given that we live together, and that she's more inventive with her revenge than I am, my standing by that die roll has every potential of a very long period of resentment. 25 years from now, when we're 80+, and sitting on rocking chairs, I'd fully expect her to pronounce bitterly, "You killed my mage, you bastard."  Not the dice.  Not her choices that she made.  Me.

If I'm not going to bend for the sake of Her happiness, the woman I love, the woman I would unhesitatingly take a bullet for, your chances that I'm going to go back on a ruling like that are right between fucking never and you-will-eat-my-shit-first, fucker.

Ah.  Trying to express my level of passion ... and on some level, the disgust I feel for the perpetrated idealism underlying P.F.'s video makes any language I could invent seem to pale in comparison.

People want to see P.F.'s trouble as "his inability to accept the role of DM," as Lance put it.  But I think it goes deeper, to something I see repeatedly on twitter and facebook, as people try to walk the fine line of standing by their principles while tripping over themselves to placate other people, either because they don't want to be hated or, worse, because they don't want to be labeled "The Hater."

See, as I keep pointing out, it isn't just P.F.  Read the commenters under him.  There are thousands of them.

"My rule is what I call Macgyver: if you can reasonably argue something being plausible, and the table agrees, I'll allow it..."

"For the rule of cool situations just say "remember, everything you can do, the monsters can do too" and the laws of physics will suddenly become sacred."

"Recently some of the other players started telling me that I was kind of being a prick for doing so, because I never call myself out for messing up, so lately I've been saying things like "And since I already cast Zephyr Strike, I can't Hide as a bonus action, so I guess I'll just end my turn normally."

"My simple rule when DMing is once the end of the round is reached no backises."

"I realized when I entertained the idea of save scumming, that I was only doing that because I was trying to make the character an extension of myself; I wasn't enjoying how much 'I' was failing. After that realization, I decided to play the character in a way that was vastly different than my real life self, which started to make the game more fun for me."

"It takes too much time and is too annoying to backtrack 4 turns later because someone forgot bonuses or advantage or whatever else. You just have to suck it up when you make a mistake and move on..."

This is just sampling the first 50.  It goes on and on, with garbage human being after garbage human being making arbitrary standards on non-rule based prejudices, smugly, while defacto accepting what P.F. has said as substantially reasonable.  The most profound thing about twitter, and virtually everyone discussing how something "ought to be done," is the inherent sense that the statement that has just been made is a "mic drop."

I've just said "this" in 62 words without examples or evidence.  Of course I'm right.  Of course I am.  I dare you to write something that disagrees with me.

I think my favorite is the guy who decided the solution to not feeling a failure was to distance himself from his own actions through inventing an invisible friend.  Because that is accepting responsibility for your actions.

boom.  mic drop.

Jojodogboy wrote a supportive comment to assure me the world is really a great place and that there are people who play good D&D.  He argued for granularism, which is the process by which we rebuild the mountain one grain at a time, because we're ready to take the time while the rest get bored and find something else to do.  I agree.  I defend granularism and I practice it.  Doing so right now.

But I don't think that the things Jojodogboy mentioned ~ builds and feats, or maximizing, or the need for interacting with the world as a game fiction ~ have anything to do with it.  My sage ability system encourages "builds."  For that matter, so does Monopoly, RISK, creating a baseball team, putting on a play, starting a company or clerking for a political party.  Builds are a good thing.  3e didn't suck because it had "builds."  It sucked because the build system it employed was a really, really shitty build system.

A "feat" is just another word for a skill.  Skills are necessary for game play.  The idea of having skills, and indeed the skills that were called "feats" in various games, is a powerful feature for building character behaviour, opportunity and imagination.  It wasn't the concept of feats that sucked in themselves, it was the compulsion to reduce every skill to a stale, universal rolling system that failed to make allowances for the individualism of the human knowledge being instituted.

If I play again, you can bet I'm going to maximize my strategies for survival.  I do so in real life; and I laugh when people, in real life, say things like, "there's nothing wrong with preparing for survival, but it is important to have fun, too."  Maximizing is a good, solid functional metric for players to follow in aiding their game play and their success at the game.  And games are, whether fun or not, about Success.  The problem with previous game systems isn't "maximizing" per se.  It was the game-breaking shitty design in what maximums were possible that sucked.  Instead of bitching about people who want to maximize, why not make a game where the "maximum" is still inside a rational limitation.  Fuck, brother.  When I play any video game, you can bet I'm "maximizing."  The good games don't make it possible for me to buy something that breaks the game.

You know, I really don't know what the words "within the game fiction" actually mean.  I suspect it is just new jargon for, you know, "playing."  I've been around for a long, long time.  I've heard lots of jargon.  The DM describes a scene; the players decide what to do.  There are all kinds of people on the net who feel the behaviour underlying this interaction needs to conform to some ideal nature of play ... but in the real world, I have tens of thousands of people telling me similar things about what to believe regarding work, religion, politics, artistic expression and on and on.  I am a function guy.  I am not here to tell the players what to do.  I am here to make the world and to present the world, and then have the world unroll and respond to what the player's behaviour is.  That is my form of emergent play.  I have no idea what was meant in the sentence, "I get a lot more..." but that sounds suspiciously like someone is trying to sell me a product.

Thank you for the support, Jojodogboy.  I don't really need it.  I'm pretty well wrapped up in disgust and righteous indignation.  I don't mourn for the game.  I mourn for the fucking idiots playing it.

Going back ... P.F.'s failure, and the failure of those commenters, isn't that he can't accept being the DM, it's that he seems to be unable to accept the nature of being a human being.  Forgive my saying this, but I'm somewhat experienced and I've picked up a few things.

I'm thinking of a movie written by Billy Wilder.  "Why don't you grow up, Baxter?  Be a mensch.  You know what that means?  A human being."

I think the most pathetic behaviour that has come out this last quarter of a century is the sickening effort people will go to not to draw a line in the sand and stand by it, through thick or thin, come hell or high water.  I watch the line of celebrities as they wait to stand in front of a mic and apologize for some frivolous, irrelevant, human statement that some doofus happened to overhear, as though what such-and-such said about A. or B. or C. has any application to their responsibility to a public so endlessly distracted by bullshit that they can be bought by the banning of a flag at Nascar, the pulling down of a few hunks of metal and Mississippi changing their flag.  Covid rages across countries throughout the world, yet we can be certain the news has time to point another camera at another waggish second-rate half-forgotten grammy winner, writer, movie actor or who the fuck knows what, because he said or she said a word that only one race is permitted to use, lost their temper while drunk, failed as a parent or said that a person born with a penis isn't a woman.  My gawd.  At LEAST We're Paying Attention to the Shit that Matters.

P.F. himself parts the curtain on his anxieties at the begining, when he paints his own eyes in huge anime glitziness to indicate his super-innocence in the world of pulling down his own shitty videos, then depicts himself again at the very end as a stuttering, uncertain, "please like me" sook.

He's terrified, as a infant child, that saying what he supposedly believes won't receive approval.  The world is not populated, as we're constantly told, by entitled narcissists.  It is populated by children, whose political battlecry of tolerance is not aimed at other people ... but from a terrible fear that someday, someone will see them for what they really are, and not feel inclined to tolerate them.

Well, not being a baby; and not overly concerned with whether or not people like me; I'll point out that Canada Day is a celebration of how my country came to a reasonable set of terms with it's colonial master, amicably settling our disputes and agreeing that it was best to move forward in the future like adults and not squabbling, grasping, demanding, petulant children, which is how the Continental Congress sounds to me as they debated things like trade and whether or not to keep humans as slaves.  See, when you're an adult, and the goal isn't to be liked, but to stop shitting around and come to an agreement that stands the test of time ~ 153 years and counting ~ things can get done without leaving endless irreconciable bullshit floating around, like who said what to whom about what and why they should be punished for it, or what are we going to do about stopping doing the bad stuff we've been doing for 244 years even though it even came to war over the issue that still didn't fucking settle anything.

Want to be a better DM?

Don't ask to be liked.

Be a mensch.