There Is No Try

The extraction of oil from a well depends largely on pressure.  Oil is created by the pressure of rock on carbon deposits that were laid down in past eras when vast parcels of living matter were subsumed beneath the earth's surface; as the mass of rock presses down on this matter, it transforms it from loose organic material into the structure we recognize and drill for.  Historically, the process of drilling would break through the ceiling of rock overlaying a oil reservoir, releasing the pressure and resulting in a "gusher" ... which would then have to be capped off so that the oil under pressure could be directed into a pipe.

Much of this geological principle was misunderstood 100 years ago.  Drilling companies, knowing that one well can only pump the oil so fast, and that the faster the oil could be pumped the more money there was to be made, built hundreds of oil fields directly adjacent to each other upon the same field.  It was understood by the 1940s, after much pushback, that this mass employment of wells had the effect of releasing the pressure on a reservoir so quickly that the oil would stop flowing -- even though as much as 80% of the oil in existence still remained at the bottom of a well that could no longer be induced up the pipe.  No pressure, no oil.  As a result, untold billions of barrels were made inaccessible through the rush of greed and ignorance.

In the early 1980s, I worked as a statistical clerk for an oil company here in Canada, Gulf Oil, about the time it was purchased by Chevron.  I served in a very small department that was on the verge of expanding its importance, because something that had been called "enchanted recovery" was proving its worth.  Officially it was, and is, known as enhanced recovery.  This describes the practice of injecting a variety of materials, most notably gas and water at the time when I was a part of it, to build up pressure inside an oil well so that a larger portion of the reservoir can be obtained.  In the 1970s it was a joke among many long-standing professional petroleum engineers, but when has that not been true when insight employing existing technology overcomes a problem?  We have a tendency to believe that things will change when we invent a new gadget; but, in fact, things change when we think about them differently.

The process of change in this regard is scientific.  Here is the problem: there is a lot of oil at the bottom of the well that won't come up the pipe because the pressure is gone.  Solution, introduce pressure.  If we can pump up, we can pump down.  Pump enough pressure into a well and the oil can be forced up; and we can sort the oil from the material we've pumped in afterwards.  Yes, it's more expensive, but we'll get more product and so long as it's still profitable, it doesn't matter.

It's this last that breeds doubt.  How can something so complicated possibly be profitable?  Ah well, so goes the story.

Science dictates we propose a hypothesis.  Normally, scientific investigation is about learning how the world works.  Scientific engineering, however, is about how the world could work.  So the hypothesis becomes, "We want this thing to happen -- can we make it happen if we do this?"  From there the procedure is the same.  Create an experiment, perform the experiment, draw a conclusion, propose a new hypothesis.  Nor does this stop when we start producing oil profitably.  It keeps going, as new generations of engineers build new models and draw further conclusions.  The whole point of the scientific method is that there is no end goal ... it is an eternally cyclical process.  This is why it has gone on kicking the crap out of belief systems once it was truly embraced by enough people, these past three hundred years.

All this has been to emphasize the relationship we have to problems that result, either naturally or through human behaviour -- in this case, a bit of both.  There's no reason to think humans could have possibly understood the nature of oil-producing geology without first making these mistakes.  We're not gods.

Successively, when meeting problems for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings self-select into those who die from the problem, who cope and manage the problem, and who solve the problem.  This last is a tiny, tiny proportion of the others; and there is a tendency among solvers to see themselves as superior, since when they act as they do, the problem goes away.  Because of this, solvers have a tendency to become a subset of enormously smug, intrinsically awful monsters, encouraging quite a lot of the population to believe that they'd rather have the problem than put up with these misanthropic pigs.  This is, arguably, quite reasonable.

As enhanced recovery was explained to me, so that it was possible for me to do my job, and as I explain it to you, the scientific method at play is called education.  This is a proposal that we don't have to put up with problem solvers feeling so entitled and irreplaceable, if we simply guide more human beings away from self-selection as ignorant and towards purposeful reasoning.  Surprisingly, the push-back against this reasoning is so polluted by such crippling bitterness against people who know things that even wanting to know things is considered reprehensible.  If we want to point at a self-destructive characteristic in the human species, one that is sure to end in the horrible deaths of billions of people, we should point out that education is seen as a terrible, abusive thing.

It doesn't help that much of the advancement in education in the last hundred years has meant the disparagement of experts (you know, those pricks) and their "facts," in favour of organizing schools as a political tool by people who are more concerned with teaching children how to be ignorant than how to solve problems.  But let's shelve that, shall we?

I settle in to educate the reader because I want the reader to solve problems -- though obviously I'm accused of doing it for my aggrandizement.  My particular subject is role-playing games, not oil extraction.  Because of this, the "problems" I describe are considerably more fuzzy, making it much easier to argue that these are not problems at all (thus the quotes I'm using) but are, in fact, miscues of my creation in order that I may use them for my own aggrandizement.  Looking back at the history of this blog, it is this misunderstanding that defines my personal sense of failure.  I have spent a great deal of time attempting to solve the problems I've faced as a DM, and which I see others facing every time I see anyone talking about this game.  Yet I have not remotely succeeded in convincing many people that there are problems ... and that these problems can be solved.

Consider.  There are forty years of oil drilling between the industry arriving at a consensus about the geology underlying the industry and the re-introduction of that pressure.  During that time, considerable advancements were made in oil conservation:  getting rid of the gusher process, so that the well was capped before the pressure was released; less rigs per acre of field; carefully pumping oil so that the pressure of a reservoir would be lost more slowly.  The science underlying petroleum technology made the study of pressure central to the industry -- and it made concepts like enhanced recovery inevitable.  But there were still a lot of people in that industry who turned a blind eye to the idea that the oil industry could and would be something very different from what it had been in the 1940s and 50s.  Even experts have to be dragged along, once they decide to stop educating themselves or letting others do so.

We are 40+ years into the development of role-playing techniques.  Most of those techniques have been unchanged since the 1970s, and have intrinsically been embraced as, "Normal."  The development of video game technology swamped TTRPGs, so much so that we still find ourselves reading articles about the success of the latter as though it's a marvel that anyone even still plays table-top.  Theoretical game-design textbooks largely ignore role-playing.  I could make a career for myself merely by buying design books, like that I lately quoted from Tynan Sylvester, in order to rewrite them solely from a table-top role-playing perspective.  Sylvester spends nearly 80 pages speaking about the relationships between soliciting emotions through games ... without one mention of a DM.  I could simply rewrite that section of the book using my DMing experiences and publish it.  There isn't one word that Sylvester writes that can't be found in standard psychology; he's just taking that psychology and interpreting it for games.  I'd only be doing what he's doing.

As a result of these forty years of doing the same thing, we don't question that the same thing is the "right thing."  As a group, experts in RPGs shrug off most user questions with handwaving, nonsensical advice, that is accepted whole cloth because, well, that's all that's out there.  Have trouble controlling your group?  Relax; don't try to force things; let the game evolve comfortably.  The players don't seem to engage with what you're doing?  Try to make your game more interactive; people want to feel they can relate to what the game represents.  I'm not liking the skill system for this game.  That's okay, we have a different skill system you can use from this other game.  General complaints, general answers.  Around the circle we go.

Therefore, while I sit and propose that character backgrounds, encumbrance tables and trade systems solve "problems," the reasonable response is that these are not problems felt by the general population.  DMs have issues like the player's disinterest; or inability to focus; or their personal sense of not feeling they know how to run the game at all.  When they try to add to their games, as James referenced in this comment, there's resistance.  They struggle with the pace of their stories or their means of refereeing their players' actions.  They don't know what to do when a bad die roll destroys their plans and expectations; they haven't all that much skill at narrating and they aren't able to keep the many elements of the story or the repercussions of the players' choices in their heads at the same time.  They create puzzles, only to watch the players struggle for hours with them, ruining the game's momentum.  They simplify these puzzles and the players blow past them, so that having the puzzle seems trite and pointless.  They find the players won't explore; or they don't get excited when it's expected; or they just don't care.  They hate the character creation process; they hate combat; they hate role-play; or each one hates one of these and so there is always a complaining background drone in every session.  These DMs are at their wits end.  But then they watch other DMs going through the same thing, having the same troubles, feeling the same frustrations, and it convinces them, maybe these really aren't "problems."  Maybe I'm no different from anybody else.  Maybe this is just how the game is.

There are more than enough voices out there to say, "That's right.  This is how the game is."

When enough people argue, "We shouldn't expect to get more than 60-70% of the oil that's in the ground out; that's how the industry works" ... then corporations make their plans, assess their bottom lines, starve out research and development and stultify the industry for decades, all as a matter of course.  The tiny number of voices that complain are shunted aside, silenced or mocked.  In business terms, they're defunded.  Investigation into enhanced recovery went on in Western Canada solely because of the kind of fields that are here.  There is a lot of oil in Alberta; but not in the big, shallow pools it forms in places like Arabia or Texas.  Because of that, R&D found a place here -- not just with regards to methods like enhanced recovery, but because of the tar sands as well.  They drill a lot more oil in Texas than here; but they send everyone here, to learn how to do it better.

Maybe, I'm just another Albertan outlier.

Those issues I described above, about refereeing and bad die rolls, narration and motivating players, I don't have any of those.  Oh, I encounter unmotivated players; and players who make it about them, and players who bitch and moan about stuff.  But these are not problems for me.  I solved such things more than 35 years ago and for that reason, I don't think about them much.  Most of them relate to things like having the wrong sort of people as friends, or being unable to stand up for oneself, or holding politeness and mutual respect as more important than game play.  I can go to any bar and strike up a pool game with all sorts of loathsome characters.  But the better the bar; the better the management of that bar; the more respect I will receive from total strangers I meet there.  It isn't random; it's decency.  The rest, things like puzzles and poor game systems, which don't work out and all, I solved by getting rid of them.  The solution to a drug problem is not a different kind of drug.

I know every one of those problems and I know the solution.  I have expressed those solutions hundreds of times on this blog.  But if the DM hasn't the will or the education to employ those solutions, in part because they haven't learned the game cold or they haven't the nerve to stand up when people act rudely or indecently, then obviously, none of my solutions are going to work.  Supposing I teach you how to run, and how to make good habits, and what those good habits are, along with the bad habits that complement them ... that doesn't do a bit of good if, where the rubber meets the road, you haven't the knowledge, the conversational skill or the raw pluck that it will take to kick out a player who habitually ignores you, monopolizes your game, disregards your house rules or emotionally abuses your other players.

That's very cold and unempathic.  That's just the way it is with us problem solvers; we are all a bunch of smug, self-satisfied entitled shit heads.  Every one of us.  I am a monster.  I am one of the bad people.

My failing as a teacher is that I fail to take account of the fact that not everyone in the world is like me.  I'm not alone there.  But I suppose that people like me often feel that it isn't something intrinsic in who we are or how we were raised, but that we came around to thinking and acting as we do because it seemed necessary at the time.  As such, there's a belief structure at play that says other people can get to the same place we are, if they'll just recognize the steps and accept them as necessary.  We have a bad habit of seeing ourselves in some situation like crossing a river to safety.  Someone throws us the harness, we shuffle into it without a thought, hooking it up at once; and we throw ourselves into the river without wasting time.  Then, safe ashore, we watch the rescuer throw the harness to our companion and hear them cry out plaintively, "I can't do it!"  Encountering that, the rescuer has empathy; the rescuer will say the things that will help the victim get into the harness.  But those like me stand there agog, disbelieving, thinking, "What the fuck?  Don't you want to live?"

That's a failing I have.  I want to be the rescuer.  But I am a lousy rescuer.  I haven't the patience or the wherewithal to handle people who cannot pack up their own shit and carry it out.  That is why I find myself throwing out horrific, misanthropic phrases like, "If you can't do it, quit," or "I'm not your mother."

The rescuer will get the hapless person across the river.  Yet in my philosophy, there's always a part of me that says, it just means the next river will get them.  I can't imagine what motivates an emergency worker to rescue the same drug addict four times from overdosing.  But in that, I see exactly why it's a good thing that more people aren't like me.  I do know what it's like to be so laid up I can't rescue myself.

So.  What's the hypothesis here?  What's the experiment?  Like Jules, do I try real hard to be the shepherd, or do I finally accept that I'm not really about rescuing people, I'm about talking to my own kind and screw the weak?

I'm still working on that one.  Right now, the hypothesis is to stop sitting on the fence and pick one or the other.