Tao

In 1987, I had been running a group of players for about five years, including my wife Michelle.  She was like the woman character from Knights of the Dinner Table.  Mike J. was a genius, the kind of player every DM wants and the sort that played a game five moves ahead of what he said.  Brothers Craig and Mike W. were steadfast, honest players, with Craig being staid and cautious, and Mike W. being energetic and emotional.  Darcy was enthusiastic, but the sort that constantly got himself into trouble.  I describe them because, in 1987, these were my only audience where it came to anything I did with D&D.

I had quit having anything to do with public gaming.  I had done public gaming with Mike J., whose friend Rob used to organize those events in the 1980s, so that I had shared beers with just about everyone on the inside.  Rob understood my sort of gaming no better than most people online do -- he was a "the game is meant to be fun" sort.  I just didn't like the scene; I didn't like playing with strangers and I felt that by necessity of being something that strangers could sit down and play on the spur of the moment, the games were stale and dull.  When I hear someone today talk about playing at a Con, I still shake my head because I remember those wooden, two-dimensional game designs, which I was asked to run by Rob, when I agreed to DM at Cons in '84 and '85.  Ech.

So, I went into the weeds.  I sat at home, designed my game, and didn't think about what I was doing.  I didn't start university until I was 21, and kept at it as a professional student until I was nearly 30.  I had no aspirations to become part of the ratrace and, now, I suppose I regret that a little.  Instead I wrote and designed and designed and wrote, and looking at all that work from today's vantage point, there is hardly a thing I did in those years that amounted, in itself, to anything I do now.  I got a lot of running experience and I got a sense for what an in-depth world demanded.  The Mac computer replaced my old commodore 64 and then I moved onto a Pentium III; it's laughable to think those are the equipment I used.  Nothing I designed in those days had lasting value; it was all gutted, replaced, circumvented or vastly expanded.

The reader has to understand.  I was 31 years old in 1995.  That's the age that I know a lot of my readers are at right now, who come to me and express their discontent with their D&D campaign, or their struggle with what to run or how to run it.  If I think about what I was doing in 1995 with my game, it's a little sad.  I have no maps from that era, no adventures that I wrote, no rules, no tables ... really, nothing at all that I can dredge up now and say, "See, this has real value."   If you're reading this and you're 31 or younger, then consider for a moment what it will be like when you're 56 and the world you're running was completely designed from scratch, starting at an age older than you are now.  Are you impressed by my world?  Then know you have plenty of time to make this, if you're ready to work at it.

Thinking about my mindset in '95 ... the '87 campaign lasted another five years and then broke up.  I played scattered games with other people and then almost nothing between '95 and 2004.  I went on working at my "world" ... which I remember starting anew in '98, the bare bones of what became this thing I run now.  When I worked at a project, I had no audience at all.  Even back in '87, when I told my players that I was going to create a trade system that would adjust prices from place to place, that was something that I only ever conceived of for my players.  I never had any aspirations to publish it, and I certainly didn't conceive that there would someday be an internet, where I could share it with other people.  It was just something I did for my own pleasure, in private, just to see it happen.  When I finally solved the concept 15 years after inventing the idea, there was no one to tell except my present partner Tamara.  That did not stop me from beginning to build the model.  I still wasn't running anybody when I started to build the 20-mile scale map of the world, in 2004, that I am still building today.  I did that work for me.  For the pleasure of doing it.  I didn't spend any time writing things about it, or trying to explain it, or justify it.  I knew how it worked and I didn't need to explain it to myself.  When I began running again in '04, I didn't keep track of the encounters or the adventures, because those were for my new players and no one else, and I definitely didn't expect to ever run those adventures again.  Even if I had had another party, there's absolutely no way that I would run some adventure I had invented for another party.  In 41 years of playing D&D, I have easily run 10,000+ hours, and I have never run any adventure more than once.

Funny, it's never occurred to me even to acknowledge that before.  I do see people talk about the multiple times they've run White Plume Mountain or some such, but I just don't see why the fuck I would do that.  It's a dumb ass adventure in the first place, I can definitely do better, but more importantly, what an awful, paralyzing BORE it would be to wade through a bunch of scenes that I've already watched play out.  Ech.  Just ech.

Anyway, the stuff I ran in 2004 was for then, not for now.  I didn't keep my notes, I didn't track any of the events, I didn't think about doing either.  It wasn't until I came across D&D blogs in 2006 that I began to think about writing one ... and yeah, when I finally decided to climb aboard with it, I got all excited about explaining what I had been doing.  And, when it happened that people just didn't get it, I got excited about justifying it, too.

That's what this blog, and about 18 months ago, the Higher Path, came to be all about.  After 10 years of banging my head against a community that didn't want to listen to explanations and were boneheaded about accepting justifications, I went and made a space where I could just explain without justifying, in depth, as deliberately and extensively as I wanted.  I have written a couple of million words of explaining.  I've written three books of explanations.  I have explained myself and my game, and what the game is, and what it could be, until I was blue in the face.

Perhaps it's been Covid.  Perhaps it has been having to explain stupidity to an audience that is capable of living in a country run by Donald Trump and not ganging up in the millions to burn the fucking white house down.  Perhaps it is that I had 8 months of unemployment in 2019, to sit and write and explain and such, expecting that was an unusual circumstance ... only to have it followed by another 8 months in 2020 where I am literally being paid by my government to stay indoors and not go out, where I will catch Covid and die.  16 months of essentially "retirement-quality" living, where I am making just enough money to pay my bills and eat, but not go out much and accepting that being at home, without even much face-to-face contact with my daughter and son-in-law, while she moves through her pregnancy, will affect a person.

Starting the first week in August, I hit some kind of wall.  At that time, I wrote some long diatribes, where I explained that not hearing feedback, and not seeing any actual effect from all the explaining I had been doing for 12 years, was having an effect.  People took that to mean that I wanted my readers to comment more often, and told me so, even though I wrote several times that while that would have been nice, it wasn't my place to expect it.  It still ISN'T my place to expect people to comment!  I do see some readers trying to do so, and thank you, but that isn't what any of that crisis was about.

A wall like that would have knocked a lot of people right off line, permanently.  But I've continued to write, sporadically for me but still a damn sight more than most bloggers.  I've continued to create public content.   I'm still here, still accessible, still D&D-positive, still the same guy that I was.

If the reader is finding that I seem to have changed a bit, then they'd be right.  I have come to a conclusion.

At least as far as a public blog goes, I'm not interested much in explaining D&D anymore.  I have explained it.  There's more than 3,000 posts going into the past that explains D&D in remarkable clarity.  People who are, at this time, unable to understand what D&D is, or how I see it, are simply too dumb-fuck stupid for me to bother with, anymore.  I don't want to care any more whether or not they get it.

They'll never get it.  They'll play their stupid D&D for a few more years, then they'll quit.  Or they'll get work with the company and settle into a groove where they steal content that's been made before and rewrite it endlessly.  I hope they all feel sick inside for doing that, but it will feed them like pigs to a trough, so they'll keep doing it.  I imagine most of them really, really hate D&D, but they'd be contractually obligated to say otherwise.

If the reader is looking for a parallel to my perspective just now, I'd suggest Jon Stewart.  Stewart and I are very different sort of people, but here you have a man who walked away from huge popularity on national television, for reasons that I'm sure are still cryptic to most people.  He did explain it at the time.  He is a smart, comprehensive fellow who understood politics and wants to bring about change.  After years of trying to do that through comedy and satire, he finally understood that his audience really wasn't getting it.  He was explaining, but they weren't grokking what he had to say.  This led him to feel that he was wasting his life; or that he would be wasting it, if he went on doing what he was doing.  Instead, he felt he could do more on a grassroots level, making films and honing his desire to communicate his politics in some other way.

That's where I am.  I don't see any point in explaining the game or even why I do any of the things I do as a DM.  Oh, I'll still do it, it's habit now.  But just now, I feel I'm doing better work by working on the wiki, and posting that content to this blog, than I ever did trying to explain D&D.  I'm sure I'm losing readers.  People gotta hate, and they look for visceral ways to hate everywhere on the internet.  I hate good when I rant, so I drew a lot of that kind of reader.  They've melted away now.  My numbers are less than half of what they were this time last year.  My numbers are all the way down to what they were in 2013.  Once, I could count on 35-50 thousand page views a month.  I'm lucky if I can get 20K now.  And they're falling all the time.

Some people will argue that's because blogs are dying, but I still read wildly successful blogs all over the net that are thriving and doing very well.  Only the badly-written blogs are actually dying.  People will never tire of reading the written word, because in many ways, it is deeper and more thorough than video can be.  There's too much fluff to address in video-making; too much time spent needing to keep people from growing bored at the pace of speech the speaker is using.  That is never a problem in text.  People are always able to read as fast as they want to.

No, I can point to decisions I made all along the way that sacrificed my viewership.  A lot of it was backing off on rants and really being draconian about trolls and comments.  Some of it was from becoming very academic in my writings.  Some of it was because I would stop writing consistently; and some of it, because I wrote too much about myself.

Right now, I want to find my way back to the work I did way back when, in '87.  Those days when I would design a hobgoblin the way I wanted hobgoblins to be, or the way I wanted the quest spell to work.  I'm a way, way better designer today than I was in '87; and I still really care about those things.  At this point, I think it is more important to just visit the design I'm making than it is to talk about it theoretically.  I would rather spend an afternoon drawing up a description of how a sailing ability works than explain why there ought to be sailing abilities and what those abilities contribute to game play. 

Rather than write yet one more post answering questions I did with my book, How to Run, on how to DM, I think just now I'd rather just be a DM and do as a DM.  Sometime tomorrow I'm going to rewrite the hellhound monster.  Not because I need one for my game, or because I especially like hellhounds, but because it is the next monster on my list and, well, everything deserves a good design.  Judging from some preliminary reading about hellhounds on wikipedia, I'm sure it isn't going to work exactly like a classic hellhound; it certainly isn't going to be a diatribe about how evil they are, or lawful, or hungry.  I'm sure its mostly going to be about when one should expect to find them and why they are actually in that place.

And if it seems pretty good, and I find a decent picture, something that isn't too fuzzy, abstract or cartoony -- I like a well-made, gritty picture that's clear in its depiction -- then I'll take a screenshot of the page and post it on the blog.  And what with the wiki's content and the few words I'll say, I feel that's good enough reading material for a blog to keep people from getting bored over their coffee.

In the meantime, it'll help me make the transition from "teacher" to "guru."  See, I've been a teacher.  I've been teaching class for years.  I've had students gather around and I've explained all these many concepts about game play, in lots of dense detail.  But now, if you climb to the mountaintop, I'm not to ask you to listen to me explain things.  I'm going to be here, doing my own thing, just being.  If you like, you're welcome to find a place on the mountaintop next to me, and be a little yourself.  Hopefully, I can get to a place that when a reader asks, "What is the DM supposed to do when a player says--" by raising a hand to stop them before answering, "The bee gathers honey not because it is sweet, but because it is food."

And let my readers figure that shit out without my needing to explain everything.

My aspiration is to be this guy: