I'm thinking about buying the book; the government here in Canada is paying my bills, so I think I can squeeze out the cost of the book through my patreon resources. I think this would be a good use for those. If I do, I'll certainly relay my impressions.
I want to discuss for a moment the sentiment described at the end, culminating in the phrase, "Look at the big brain on me!" That frame is intended to shame the designer and oh, am I ever certain that it will, for the most part, fall on deaf ears.
For the user, equivalent to the player, design is oh so often a teeth grinding business. Over the last 18 months, blogger has been steadily forcing a change to its interface that, now, I'm forced to accept. The interface offers remarkably little compared to the previous interface. The graphics have been altered from "computer sensible" to "elementary school friendly." And there are one or two truly aggravating aspects now. The change, like so many changes like this, has obviously occurred because a bunch of corporate hacks with "big brains" have hired a bunch of servile designers to reinvent the wheel so that new term users will be gleaned from the stubble of the blogging field (there hasn't been a crop in years), while old timers like me can be forced to suck our eggs gratefully at still being allowed a platform. I used to see this crap all the time when I worked for the telephone utility company TELUS. It comes from a class of people being paid way too much money to spin on their thumbs, who in turn must make the spinning look truly productive or else they'll lose their cushy, pampered lifestyles and be forced down into the gutters with the rest of us.
D&D is like that. I shouldn't have to explain that, except to say, "new editions."
I confess, I have felt, and often, the "imagine the look on their faces" moment. That, however, does not only apply to DMs. Shakespeare must have chuckled at the transformation of Nick Bottom's head into that of a donkey, and must have positively giggled at writing out the line, "This is to make an ass of me," when Bottom doesn't know he looks like an ass. You can't tell me David Mamet didn't squirm proudly in his seat when he pulled out the line about steak knives. Writing and designing is something that is done in solitary, in anticipation that someday, sometime, someone is going to read this and when they do, hoo hoo, they're going to laugh or shit themselves. If that thought weren't in the minds of every people banking hours today for experiences in the future, none of us would fucking do this.
There's nothing wrong with looking forward to the effect ... but there is something wrong if that looking forward lacks empathy. That is what Meier is getting at here. It isn't really that we're not allowed to sit and think, "Damn, I'm a genius." It isn't that Brian isn't allowed to punch himself proudly in the shoulder at the end of The Breakfast Club, it's that we shouldn't do it if we're so bereft of empathy that we can't step outside ourselves and think, "If this happened to me, I'd be pissed." Meier is right when he says that a reversal of fortune is fine when it happens to Nick Bottom. But no one in the audience wants to be an ass.
If we don't want the players to feel like they're "soldiering on," then what do we want? Meier's answer is that the player is the "star" while the designer is invisible. On virtually every level, I agree with that. I have been writing here for 12 years that the DM needs to be gotten "out of the loop." Urban dictionary defines that as "ignorant of the situation," but it used to mean, out of the decision-making process, which amounts to the same thing. Whenever possible, I like to build rules that enable to players to know exactly what they're capable of (removing any need for me to make decisions) or that award the decision to a die roll (which, good or bad, is certainly indifferent). It takes a lot of effort to build rules on those grounds; and DMs who want their finger in the pie positively hate such rules, specifically ignoring them whenever possible in order to increase their decision-making opportunities. I believe this is core of what Meier means when he says the designer needs to be "invisible." The DM should not be the judge. The die should be the judge, or the courtroom dispensed with entirely. DMs who proudly strut into the DM's chair and declare that they're going to be "arbitrary but fair" are missing the point completely. We're not looking for "fair" DMs vs. self-righteous ones. We're looking for the absence of judging DMs altogether.
Most readers who hear that the D&D player is the "star" will leap straight to Indiana Jones or Han Solo: the cocky, able, plot-armoured hero who comes off a bit out of his depth but likeable, able to perform impossible stunts (there are no wires in D&D) and do it all with a grin on his face. Other players get to be all the supporting roles: the plucky youth, the wise counselor, the tough chick with her chin out -- effectively the whole Firefly gang. These are the "stars of the show" for most, and given their narrow perspective on what makes a good television show or flick, it's who these guys want to be. We're being inundated to death with this tiresome gang on Netflix and Hulu constantly, with endless hackneyed redos on rehashed material.
Wanted: weak angsty teenage or teenage-adjacent girl with slight goth overtones to play apparently useless role in team superhero vehicle, where it is revealed at the end that she is actually more powerful than the rest of the team combined. Every sallow-faced girl in Hollywood, please apply; we have more roles to fill than we have actors available.
The notion of "star" needs an overhaul. If we must have a popular icon, I'd rather John McLean or John Wick -- thoroughly capable punching bag with a will to get up off the floor, who perceives "soldiering on" to be a virtue rather than a tiresome ordeal, who can yet find humour in things and be humane when it is appropriate ... but even so, this is still a stock character and it still requires a particular kind of plot armour to be viable. There is no plot armour in D&D, unless it's the DM's will, and for myself I don't see this being my role. The player is the star, sure, but in my milieu, anyone can die.
A "star" in D&D is not a highly-paid actor pretending to take part in a tailored universe that only pretends to act as a counterweight to the players. All the more reason why the word "star" is a very bad word for it. There is a very bad movie out there, often worshipped as a good movie by people who are acutely tiresome at a party, called Rosencrantz & Gildenstern are Dead. For those who don't read Shakespeare, and haven't yet googled who Nick Bottom was (*Bottom, like in ass, get it? Don't tell me Shakespeare didn't chortle), R&G are totally disposable characters who are hired to off Hamlet, who themselves get offed off-stage, with post script. Tom Stoppard's play depicts the assassins/boyhood friends of Hamlet's as confused, irrelevant interlopers on the edge of scenes they don't understand and cannot fully appreciate. The subtext of the film is that actors who are forced to endlessly play parts like Rosencrantz and Gildenstern (in Shakespeare, not Stoppard) do so because that the only way they have of feeling alive as artist. Though inconsequential, they do their part, which helps lend credence to the sad little lives of myopically boring conversationalists at parties who think highly of Stoppard's play.
I hope that wasn't exhaustively confusing. I didn't like the play. It only reminds me that most people, even those in theatre, live dreary, desolate lives where they follow the orders of other people until they're shown where the grave, or the ashes bottle, awaits them. These people are adroit at blowing gas up their bottoms about how important they are to the world, and I've never been an enthusiast for that taint of air.
This post has acquired an unintended theme.
That said, the players to my mind are much more Rosencrantz than Indiana Jones. When we meet Indy in the first movie, he's already a person of recognition, who's plainly not participating in his first rodeo. We're introduced to a range of characters familiar with exploits we've never seen, instilling an understanding that we're watching a 15th level archeologist, not some punk on his first try at stealing a gold statue. In the third movie, we're introduced to Indy as a kid ... but it is still evident from his fellow scouts and his father that even this exploit with the cross is not his first kick at the can. Probably, Spielberg pitched a plotline where a baby Indy crawls out of his stroller at a natural history museum and foils an attempt by three goons to steal the Hope Diamond, but couldn't get the funding. However, since Spielberg is only able to write one sort of character, there'd probably still be an allusion to sometime in the womb when Indy had already taught his pregnant mother how to read sanskrit.
Because they want Indy and they don't want Rosencrantz, in true Spielbergian fashion DMs skip all the tiresome trouble of learning how to do stuff and developing real character and memories. They hand the players a fresh, new, 15th level character, expecting their players -- a bunch of non-writer/designers with delusions of being Indiana or Han -- to invent past histories that end up being rehashed versions of Netflix and Hulu episodes. So spurteth the well, so drinketh the blind.
The trouble becomes, as many DMs have learned to their displeasure, that if you make the players the "star," they become so bloated and full of themselves that next they're staging exactly the sort of things that real stars who are paid 20 mille a flick begin to indulge in. Stars are absolutely terrible people, particularly early in life, when they don't know how to handle this enormous influence and power that they've been given. Some of them, even later in life; Judy Garland's propensity for trashing hotel rooms in a single day is legendary. It seems appropriate at this time to remember that the late Eddie Van Halen's behaviour was something of a legend as well. It is worse when we consider that a lot of people -- and that number includes some of your D&D players -- feel that if an individual is a god, then everything else is considered acceptable. And they say Divine Right is dead.
While Meier is right that random obstacles are a miserable bitch, he misses that some events and obstacles serve a purpose: to keep players humble. We spoil the little preening ego-bags if we pile excessive boons upon them, too. The key is not to do either; to keep them uncertain as to just what's going on, to remind them occasionally that they are tiny little fish in an enormous and incomprehensible pond, and to install in them an understanding that if they learn how to behave themselves, someday they'll be more than a puffed up star with a gold-plated trailer and a chance to play the Superbowl. With time and patience, and having earned their bonuses, they may learn to appreciate that random obstacles can be managed with serenity and not sulking, and that while being a "star" carried a lot of glitz, being "accomplished" is better.
Truth is, not every player wants to "prove their worth," just as not every human being faced with hardships wants to do that, either. Meier's solution, that we must make the player a star, is based on selling as many games to as many people as possible, knowing that most of these bloated "stars" will be ensconced in their basements next to big pickle jars full of human juice, and not across a gaming table where anyone will need to tolerate them -- and most particularly, not Meier. The closest Meier will ever get to the "stars" he empowers will be on this side of a ring of large security personnel. The rest of us, however, who run table-top games, have to manage, face-to-face, the monsters we create with our game designs ... and so, let me explain, that if a player doesn't want to prove their worth as a human being, then I don't especially want that player in my game.
I understand that some DMs can't afford to be picky. Perhaps that is because a DM must prove their worth as well, and not just by being "willing to DM." That's as sad an excuse as a player who starts at 15th level. What did this DM do to earn phenomenal cosmic power? Riddle me that.
I'm glad you were compelled to discuss this thing!
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Meier's book, but I have the impression from the excerpts I've read that it's more personal memoir than game design discussion on the whole. I recently read Tynan Sylvester's Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences which I found extremely useful. The second half of that book drifts further into computer game design nuts and bolts, but the first half is terrific.
If you don't already know, he wrote Rimworld which is kind of like an accessible version of Dwarf Fortress.
Excellent stuff. Of course, you’re really hitting me in my wheelhouse with these particular pop culture analogies (especially the R&G thoughts).
ReplyDeleteBut, no, really...it’s too bad that the action hero ascendant (and the desire to be that) is the gateway impulse for new players these days. I realize that older literature has plenty of pulp heroes of the Doc Savage variety, but there just seems like there were more straight “normal dude/gal on an adventure” type story then there are these days. I remember reading them as a child. Hell, Bilbo is far from a competent, super heroic “star” in The Hobbit: he fails or squeaks by on luck or gumption alone more often than not...but these days everyone wants to be Orlando Bloom surfing on a shield and triple-shooting orcs as he goes.
Stars can suck it.
(he writes as he listens to Kansas playing “Dust in the Wind”)