Concerns

This past week I have been deep in thought.  I am concerned that I am giving over a lot of energy towards the agenda of teaching others a deeper philosophy of DMing and D&D.  I am concerned about how much time I am spending doing this.  I am concerned about the lack of enthusiasm I am feeling towards creative writing, or working on my game world, or completing much larger projects that really matter to me.  I am concerned about the lack of back and forth between my "students" and myself.  I am concerned that blogging and writing has become about money and not about the things I love.

I have been unable to express these concerns I'm having, even to myself.  I have been turning these matters over in my mind, guessing at whether or not I am having doubts about nothing; or that my doubts have more to do with the stress of these specific times, what with disease, isolation, worry about my family, concern for my pregnant daughter or the eye surgeries my partner Tamara has had to endure (two so far, and there will now be a third).  Perhaps none of this has to do with blogging, or my relation to the internet, or with my writing.

Watching what's happening to America is distressing.  I'm married to an American, who is glad she is not in America right now.  She feels like she is safe in a life boat, here in Canada, watching the Titanic sink ... and hearing the screams and twisted metal of the ship as it sinks.  We were so lucky.  She received her permanent status here on February 25th, after 14 months of legal processes, just weeks before the March shut down.  We feel sick at the thought that if we had started just a little later, or if matters had dragged out a little more, she would be in Canada now without any expectation of medical services.  Instead, she's been able to have the cataracts in both her eyes managed at no cost to us except medications.  It took two surgeries to complete the work on her first eye; the doctor said he hadn't seen anything as bad as that since he had done work in Vietnam in the 1960s.  For us, this was the result of having to wait so long until the work could be done.  But at last, it is done, and she can see again, clearly, for the first time since 2018; since a year ago, she's been clinically blind.  Yet thank gawd she is here, in a civilized country, where we are battened down with government support and all our bills paid; with no threat that we'll be evicted, where we're relatively safe from Covid as we barely leave our home.

There's simply no way not to look at the disaster south of the border except with alarm.  Every long phonecall and videochat consists of an hour-long conversation in which friends and family express their stunned horror and bewilderment, at the government there, the stupidity, the utter indifference, the rolling outrage at how science and hospital personnel are treated, the deaths.  We watch and comment on the tallying of deaths like football scores and the ludicrous voiced imaginings that the tolls being counted are actual numbers or that they'll somehow go away.  Even as vaccine trials prove promising, very few will say with honesty that an available vaccine for millions of people is still probably 9 months to a year away.  And jeebus gawd.  The president.  The fucking president.  I took a vow not to talk about him, but what an unholy fucking mess of a human being.  It's exposed every crack and flaw in the political system, which careens towards a failed election that is sure to be full of fakery, fabrication and perfidy.  It's gone beyond anyone "winning" ~ as it's now impossible to obtain truth from the number of votes cast and counted.  There are too many crooks, too many swindlers and racketeers and miscreants who do not believe in the system for anything except villainy to thrive.  This is what comes of repeating that such is the greatest country in the world, while mercilessly pursuing selfishness, racism, graft and ego over the common welfare.  My country, whom no sane person here describes as the "greatest" anything, welcomed my wife, a foreigner, and undertook to care for her because one of its citizens cared for her.  America has undertook to care for no one, not its children, not its people, not even its dead.  It is impossible to stand outside and watch, and not wonder why the people in the streets do not shoot back at the cops.  Or why there are not hundreds of thousands surrounding the White House and kicking down the fences.  I'm old enough to remember a million people on the lawns in Washington protesting the deaths and murders that resulted from the Vietnam War.  What has happened to America, that even its starving and destitute no longer care enough to fight evil for the sake of the country?

I have the time to flip on Twitter and the News and watch this lurching brigade of lies; and because I don't want to bury my head in the sand, I want to be informed.  It is nevertheless soul-rending to watch ... and to see Americans furiously wave their flags and do nothing.  To see ten thousand messages urging other Americans to get out and vote while pretending those waters aren't already muddy, making clear the denial, the desperation, the sad praying, wallowing, bawling conviction that American values will somehow save the day and come November, everything will suddenly revert itself and be all right.  The pretence that this is all the fault of one man, and not a million "citizens" who have rushed to exploit the system, so that when that one man is gone, the sun will shine again, sickens me.  Sometimes, hope is not a good thing, nor the best of things.  It seems to me that stubborn, blind hope is the worst of things, if it keeps a defender's hand from taking up a gun while "hoping" the bear tearing apart the child will yet change its mind, and stop without being driven off.

I'm not able to push these thoughts out of my mind as I settle in to explain, again, how best to dungeon master a game.  I'm not emotionally free as I tell DMs to stop cheating the dice, knowing that cheating has become a raison d'etre for people, not for the reasons they give, but because cheating is everywhere in the culture arguing with me.  I can't forget that when I tell players and DMs that they need to follow the game's rules, that I'm speaking to people who live in a civilization unable to keep itself from pointing weapons at children or embracing the principles of ratfuckery in what should be a sacred exercise.  I feel ridiculous, knowing people who agree wholeheartedly with this shift in principles are reading my blog, laughing at my absurd notion that a 17 should be read as a 17 and not a 15 or a 4 as it would be convenient to do, for the sake of "story."  Why should they care?  The underlying principle of justifying any deceit, because gawddamn, "We need this die to swing this way right now," trumps any contrary position.  Yes, "trumps" it, as in, what I selfishly need right now is more important than any other thing in the universe, including any self-respect I may have had before deciding to treat double-dealing and false-heartedness as virtues.

In the face of it, what am I accomplishing when I write about D&D?

I don't know.  I've been promoting my patreon for a couple of years now and I honestly can't tell if I'm taking money under false pretenses, as I've apparently failed to convince anyone of running a D&D game properly, or if I'm not charging enough money to compensate for my time and frustration.  I pound a drum and present fifty arguments for why a particular game rule or strategy will cripple and distort the playability of a campaign, discussing point-by-point why it is abusive to players, and not in the spirit of the game, only to visit the blog site of some long-time and supportive reader to find them making an extensive new version of said piece-of-shit game rule.  What am I doing here?

I heard last night that people do not approach problems like scientists, searching for evidence and then arriving at a conclusion based on that evidence.  Instead, they approach problems like lawyers, having already decided the conclusion and then seeking specifically that evidence that supports that conclusion.  This sounds accurate to me, describing virtually everyone I know.  Yet, while a scientist can easily work alone, a lawyer expects to argue with another lawyer.  Furthermore, the lawyer must submit to a judgment, in which a judge will say to the lawyer, essentially, "You're full of shit."  The lawyer must then accept that judgment, and move on.  No philosophical lawyer ever has to submit to a judgment; they are free to go on forever with their treasured cause, gathering more and more shit in piles to defend that cause, explaining virtually everything that is said by everyone on the internet.

I am sick of arguing with lawyers.  I can handle some shyster at my table, as he or she must submit to my judgment.  But some boob on the internet who has only the argument that "Holmes wrote this" only exhausts me.  Who is this Holmes and what did he accomplish outside of writing a cheap, second-rate version of an already existing game?  I've also written such versions; I've run the game longer than Holmes or Gygax did, I've written more and better words than either of them ever had and I've worked in other fields beyond game design.  I'm a cheap hack, but so are they.  That's why, when I support my arguments, I turn to legitimate, recognized experts in other fields and apply their expertise in game-design, psychology, learning and problem-solving in their words, then translate this to D&D.  I am not pulling arguments out of my ass.

What good does it do?  I change someone's mind about this or that specific thing, but that's about all.  People want to be lawyers.  They want to hedge and prevaricate, resisting the implications of how any one thing ought to affect everything.  All right.  They can do as they wish.  But then, what I am doing here?

For nearly 30 years, I worked on my game and designed scenarios for naught but me and my players, a very small audience.  I had stepped out of that bubble briefly in the 80s, only to find rather a lot of ignorance and incompetence, along with adult people who played what I thought to be a silly, childish game.  Where my players in my campaign were playing out scenes that could have been written by Dumas, Hugo or Dickens, these runnings had all the depth of The Famous Five and Tintin.  I lost all interest in communicating with these people, so I quietly returned to my game and my world and continued to work happily for the next 22 years.

I spend a lot of time on this blog, and on others, teaching people how to run and how rules work.  These things do not afford me anything.  I already know how to run.  I already know how the rules work, and why they do.  The time I don't spend rehashing old arguments and finding new ways to outline them is time I could spend working on my game world, my creative writing and myself.  I teach myself new things just about every day, figuring out some new rule, measuring some detail, or sketching out a useful and practical application.  Teaching is fun and its useful, but it is a waste of time if the students can't learn or won't learn.  A teacher in a classroom expects a student to raise their hand once in awhile to ask a question.  I'm lucky if I get two or three questions a month.  That's well and good, as I expect no one to change their behaviour on my account ... but I can certainly change my behaviour on my account.

It offers me very little to go on as I have been doing.  To date, I know of no person who is running my ruleset as is, or is interested in doing so.  That is a piss-poor record for a teacher.  When I encouraged people to come help me with my recent wiki, I had eight people who rushed forward to "help."  I was not treated like a teacher, or like the source of the knowledge being manipulated.  Volunteers bulled their way in, tried to push me into doing things their way, grew upset and hurt when I smacked them around for their lack of respect for the person who had worked on the material for decades ... and then evaporated rather than submit to a subordinate position.  Each of them, I'm sure, feels very differently about how those events played out, but none of them opened a dialogue with me to properly settle upon a division of labor and none of them stayed with it.  They're all gone now, with not a word in months.  And mind you, these are people who continue to support me on Patreon, some with a rather expensive tone.  So, I'm patiently working on the process alone, as I have done for a long time, marvelling that people who proclaim my genius and wherewithal haven't the willpower to endure my direction even a little bit.  The work is tedious, exhausting and most of the time, apparently useless, as I haven't any knowing of whether or not anyone ever goes there.  Worse, I'm unable to tell if a stranger to this blog could find the wiki and even understand it.  There are so many holes in the work, so many flaws, that it will probably be three or four years before the grammar and layout is sufficiently edited and made useful for game play.  That is very distressing and disheartening; yet it is at least one thing I feel does contribute to my personal sense of value.  My game and my players will use it, even if no one else does ~ and though it takes years, my players will never carp at the wiki's insufficiencies.  They will ask me to work on a particular thing, and because I want to provide service to my players, I will work on that thing if asked.

On the whole, rather than go on blogging, I'd like to renew the process of running online.  I enjoyed that, and it felt like D&D.  Those people who played were seriously engaged ~ the connections were real and purposeful.  I had the ability to be creative and to be a DM, rather than merely writing about it.  The audience was negligible, apart from the actual players, true enough.  I suppose it has to be that way.

I'm not interested in writing about D&D for entertainment's sake.  If the goal is to write posts that can be read over a cup of coffee, only to be forgotten, then I might just as well write about film or politics, as there is a much larger audience for those subjects than for D&D.  I could write a ten-part series on The Umbrella Academy, nitpicking every scene and discussing the relative merit of the players, explaining the tropes being used, the plot-stealing elements and taking screen shots of character expressions, then go and do the same for Fargo, the Watchmen and Billions, all popular shows with millions of fans, who could argue and bitch at me about my opinions in the exact same way that D&D fans do ... with as much actual purpose being accomplished, if we're talking entertainment and the possibility of my raising money for patreon.  I'm a good writer, and I'm observant, so some people will hate what I write and some people will love it ... and to the point, more people, if my goal is to be an entertainer or a money-maker.

No teacher teaches to entertain.  But teachers do quit and decide to do other things.  This is in my mind and I am concerned with these thoughts.

I can't go on doing this.  There must be more fulfilling things I can do with my energy and my talent.  It is all very well for another D&D blogger to think, "What makes him so special?"  This is not the only content I know how to write.  D&D is not the only substantial thing I am knowledgable about.  I wanted to write about D&D because I wanted to teach, to make people see that there are better ways to view this game than to lapse into the same old crappy original books written 40+ years ago.  Whenever I read someone holding these books up as examples of credibility or direction, I am unable to see anything except willful, stubborn ignorance.  I am tired of arguing with it.  Nothing related to official D&D, in any capacity, can ever be said to have been of quality.  We play as best we can by cherry-picking bits and pieces from upteen sources and our own personal experience ... and it has become such a habit with us that we're unable to recognize a legitimate answer when we see or hear it.  I'm done discussing it.

I'm not sure just now what I'll do with this blog, or any of them.  For the time being, I'm disinterested in writing any "observational" content about D&D.  I think I'll suspend advice posts, though the advice is remarked upon occasionally.  That leaves posts about what am I'm doing with my world.  Those posts have never been very popular.  I'm willing to answer questions, which I like doing, but I'm not getting them much.

That doesn't give much reason for anyone to continue supporting me on patreon.  Frankly, there is so little contact that I receive from my supporters that I wonder sincerely why anyone supports me there.  Look at this:

On December 2, I was ranked 656th.  My present rank doesn't show a drop in support, only a comparative drop with others.  I have very loyal patrons, and very few compared with others around my status.  I also have the quietest, most humble patrons on the planet.

I have to assume this is a combination between my being (a) an asshole, ready to argue my position so vociferously that even my supporters are afraid to approach me; and (b) I am so absolutely "out there" with my writings that even my supporters have no idea how to even address what I say.  For 12 years I have written post after post discussing this issue, trying to convey what it is like to communicate constantly inside a bell jar ... even one that is supported as well as it is.  The stats above are terrific.  There are 174,634 patreon pages with at least 1 patron, at the time I'm writing this.  That puts me in the 85th-90th percentile.  That's really something, particularly given that I'm not writing about the latest video game or pop culture, but about a nerdish 40-year-old game, about which I hate almost everything.  I look at these numbers and I don't see failure; I see spectacular success.  Just imagine how well I'd be doing if I wrote about something popular.

I don't think I want to.  At least, not presently.  I'd rather just play the game, on or off-line.  I'd rather work on the wiki, or maps, or some other part of my game.  I'd rather work on longer, denser efforts, such as either of the two books I have in the works, projects I've abandoned ... or new ideas I have bounding around inside.  I'm really starting to hate this dynamic of shouting into the voice in the hopes of receiving two comments.  Or none at all.

I'm hungry for more than that.