Goldpanning

I am in a much relieved humour today.

I've been contemplating the state of mind regarding D&D that I possessed in my teens and twenties, in a positive manner.  I don't think my attitude then was far wrong, though of course it was crude.  I was far more willing to accept the precepts of the game on face value.  Until a decade ago, I considered many of the rules as written to be sacrosanct.  Perhaps that was an adherence to tradition or nostalgia; perhaps I doubted my ability to improve them.  My mind as a young man certainly embraced those things and it is only with wisdom and consideration that I'm able to put today's prejudices aside and examine why that was.

Not that I want to go back.

At least 90% of the work I've done on my world or towards campaigns that I've run has come to naught.  All of that work was, in one way or another, discarded -- or more to the point, scratched out in frustration and disdain.  Part of the reason why I don't spend much time telling war stories from my games thirty years ago is because I don't much respect my efforts, then.  My runnings were dominated by players entering dungeons and hallways, scrapping with enemies and hauling away loot.  A vestige of narrative arc existed, but it was poorly done and, generally, forgettable.  I recognize that many DMs feel that their high school period was the best gaming of their lives ... but I believe they are addressing the memory with their feelings and not their wisdom.  I liken it to the feelings we once had about an old television show that we watched religiously in our early teens, that causes us to shudder today.  The only difference is that those old games were never recorded, and therefore we're never faced with the reality of just how really terrible they were.

It is an approach to the game, I'm sure, that I've never had.  Most DMs, after a running, experience something called "post-performance depression."  It manifests as a feeling emptiness, negative self-talk and rumination over perceived flaws, a destructive comparison with others and doubts regarding one's competence and goals.  In acute instances, this can lead to irritability, panic attacks, loss of a sense of purpose and, of course, quitting altogether from lack of motivation.  It's important to know that everyone feels this, in relation to many activities and pursuits.  While we prepare for an event, anticipating it, we get a natural exhilarating rush from being energized by the activity.  We experience an increased heart rate, tingling, greater focus and the encouragement of hoping for results that -- because they haven't happened yet -- we can still live out in our imaginations.  Afterwards, when faced with the cold stark reality of what's actually happened, as it remains fixed in our memories, we've lost all the rush that led up to the moment.  Our bodies have cooled down; that heart rate and anticipation are gone; our focus on the purpose we had has fled.

For most, these post symptoms will evaporate in an hour or so, and usually are completely forgotten by the time we wake up the next day.  For our own sake, most have a resistance to trash-talking ourselves; we may do it a little, but then we turn to some other thing to induce ourselves out of our heads, like watching something we like, having a beer, talking it over with a spouse, playing a video game -- things that give us a small hit of dopamine that sets us right again.  This is positive behaviour.  We do it the alternative, cutting ourselves fruitlessly, is very unhealthy.

But ... there is a price we pay as we skirt the abyss.  We rid ourselves of the depression and the trash talk, but we also purge the keenness of the memories we've just acquired about our gaming and design.  It is a little bit like failing to pan for gold properly.  We are in such a rush to get rid of the worthless soil that we end up washing away everything, including the self-examination we need if we're going to improve our gaming.  There is a difference between negative self-talk and positive self-talk.  Realistically, in a night of DMing, we probably have made mistakes.  We probably try things that didn't work.  We probably could have made some presentations or descriptions better.  We ought to give ourselves a little time to carefully turn those things over in our mind and examine them closely, if we seek self-improvement.  This approach, however, is unpleasant.  It stings.  It admits that we're not as good as we might be.  So we flinch.  We are so eager and ready to get past every hurt feeling that we wash all the dirt from the pan in one sweep and lose all the gold that might have been there.

When we're young, this is remarkably easy to do.  We don't have a lot of experience with improving ourselves as children, and certainly nothing like the suffering crises we have to master when pushing our minds to survive university, relationships and raising children.  By the time we find ourselves in serious careers, where every tiny facet must be diligently examined with a microscope, we're already getting to be adroit at picking ourselves apart and putting ourselves back together.  Of course the games we run today are never as good as those were for us as children.  We didn't look at things then as we do now.  We weren't trained to nitpick every detail exhaustively.  We still thought the world was an easy place to navigate -- because our tiny schoolworld was easy, comparatively.

We can't go back and look, really look, at those old games because, like I say, they weren't recorded.  But we can look at everything else in that world and feel a cold splash of reality today.  Walked into an elementary school recently?  Read a favorite book from when you were ten, the one that you "understood," but which the teachers thought was trash?  Hard to admit, isn't it, that the teachers were right.  It's hard to see yourself, just so high, rushing in each morning to hang your coat on its tiny hook, fitting yourself in that tiny desk, sitting in this tiny room and remembering when this was the WORLD for you.  But we do it, because the evidence is just that stark.  We may think those old games we played as kids were the best games ever -- well, you may think that, I don't -- but I'd wager you couldn't sit ten minutes in such a game today.

I did not wash out my gold after my games.  I did my fair share of trash-talking myself, sure; and there's some evidence of it in the millions of words written in this blog.  I think its more important to focus on my viewpoint of games I played once.  Sometimes, I think I must be the only DM who looks back on those teenage games for what they were: an attempt, a juvenile bid to climb a mountain that we never had a chance of properly climbing without sufficient experience or equipment.  At the time, I thought we were doing pretty well ... but today I look at the tiny hump we stood on and praised ourselves for climbing and shake my head wistfully.  Gawd, we were so damn young and so damn ignorant.  We didn't know what we had.

Which is perhaps why I am contemptuous at full-grown adults who write and propose gaming ideas that sound much more like little children standing on elementary school dirt-piles and shouting that they're the king of the world, than adults who take on real responsibilities.  Adults ought to know better.

Ah, but that's a course in this discussion, that sings to me like a siren dragging me onto rocks.  The greater intent here is to see clearly what's happened through this process of bringing ourselves from being children playing a game to being adults re-examining our motives.  For those who claim that D&D is just a game, I wonder why you still play it into your 30s?  Why is so much print dedicated to conversations about how it was "better" once upon a time?  Why do I see would-be DMs flailing about for some kind of system or campaign that will turn back the hands of time and enable them to recapture a feeling that they've lost, that they haven't been able to identify yet.  What, they ask, was it that made those old games so great?  If it is just a game, why does any of that matter?  Are there not many, many wonderful things in the world, that can offer an excitement and fulfillment on a par with anything you might have experienced as a child or a young man, decades ago?

And if there are not, then isn't it time to admit to yourself that this was never "just a game?"  Wouldn't it serve you better, today, if you came to terms with that simple fact?  That this is a powerful need you possess, an itch that demands scratching, that brings you back repeatedly to the same problems you've so efficiently pushed aside by arguing that none of it really matters?

When you say, it is just a game, I don't believe you.

If it were just a game, you'd have quit by now.

That thing you played when you were a child, that was a "game."  And it was enough for you then, because the level of game that could drag you away from the trifles and troubles of your life did not have a high bar to clear.  It is far harder to distract you from the unrest, irritations and worries you endure now.  Then, others took care of you; now, you do the caring and the carrying of their burdens.  This "game," if it is to offer the you of today any meaning, must be a far, far better game than anything you ever used to play.  I mean that in ways beyond the "pimp your ride" form of game design that we see so prevalently strewn about, such as we can see in the recently released Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

But ... I know that's not fair of me.  I can see people up and down the river panning diligently for gold, wondering why after so much vigorous washing there is never any glint showing when the dirt's all gone.  I know that telling folks, "come on, make it a better game," is null advice.  I might just as well ask that you all take flight, or pick yourselves up by your bootstraps.  It's the frustration I feel, that drives me away from this blog for days at a time.  I just don't know how to tell people how to play a better game than they do.

It is hard enough explaining why they ought to.  Even when it is so plain from their words and their self-examination that this is what they desperately want.  If they didn't want gold, they wouldn't spend so much time publically writing out posts indicating how hard they're willing to pan for it.

Yet if you don't know how it's done, all that work will come to naught.  You might just as well sell your claim, go home to your farm and quit this silly idea of having dreams.