Monday, November 2, 2020

Imagination and D&D in 1100 Words or Less

Imagination is productive. The process of thinking takes in the information we receive from our senses, repurposing and combining what we've experienced into what we choose to believe. In this manner, imagination has the power to produce forms; and these forms may be turned over in our minds as though they are real things; indeed, they are just as real to us as places we have never been, history we were not alive to experience and languages we cannot understand. "Real" only describes something as it appears to us; even a table or a chair demands intuition and our faith that they DO exist — and yet, no matter how many times we "prove" the existence of either, they remain nothing more than suppositions, dependent on our receptivity. Immanuel Kant explores this far better than I, so I leave the remainder of this argument to him.

The product is that my game world is as real to me as this chair and this table, because I am as able to empirically define the former in my mind as easily as I can either of the latter. The game world has places; it has people; it possesses a superfluity of cultures and conflicts, joy, suffering, greed, self-sacrifice and the daily humdrum of millions who seek daily to bring food from hand to mouth. Most importantly, I do not think of this game world in grand sweeping vistas, but in street corners, back rooms, docks, hallways and empty crossroads. When my players venture into this setting, setting out from this place to that, my imagination forms the fields they walk between, the stiles of the fences they follow, the wheel tracks of previous travellers, the good woman who nods, the mounted patrol commander that scowls ... even the bluebird that sings on a branch for a moment before flitting away. What I tell my players as they walk along involves as much or as little detail as I choose to give; but every detail is there, at hand, when I want if, if I should think the setting needs one more element to give it life.

These components do not arise easily. Like everything we learn from our senses, they must be gathered, tailored, stuffed in boxes and bags and empty drawers, and ultimately catalogued and ordered so that they can be plucked out, on demand, by my thought process. To build a world of imagination, we must first experience THE world of our senses, deliberately, conscientiously and passionately, with every opportunity at hand. We must seek and study, read and relate with others, listen, discuss, propose, argue, impose on others to answer our questions and, most of all, rest back and think constantly about what's been found. If I haven't given sufficient thought to bluebirds, I cannot very well remember to have one alight near the players and sing.

D&D is a responsive game. As players, we hear the DM describe a scene or an action, and we are expected to respond to what we learn with an action of our own. We're told that there is a room and we say that we walk across it. We're told a monster reaches for his sword and we say we're drawing our own. We cannot walk across the room until we know it is there; we would not draw our weapon except that the monster did first. In the moment we respond, we take in an idea that we have heard and transform that, in the moment, into a real response to the imaginary situation. It happens so quickly that we forget it is imaginary. Our answer comes as instantly as if we were there, actually crossing a room; actually drawing our sword.

This rapidity occurs because we are ready — and we're ready because we anticipate what the DM is about to say before he says it. We've come down a hall and through a door and into this room ... and now as we're crossing the room, we're reaching for the doorknob and thinking past our present and into our future. We are doing the same thing when we draw our sword. It is not the sword being reached for that we cherish. It is the anticipation of what comes next! The fight, the dice we'll roll, the certainty of our success, the fleeting glimmer that we may not. And as each step is taken in the game's process, there's always another description and our next response. When the play goes swimmingly, the descriptions and responses come so fast that we forget ourselves, the danger, important things that we should remember, but we won't until after it's done ... we enter a state of flow, or being in the zone, that dazzling engagement where the real world falls away. We feel an immense personal control over what's happening, our enormous potential to succeed and a merging of action and awareness. It is what every player wants from the game, not the least because it is a momentary thrill we don't encounter daily.

Gaining this thrill, however, depends on the DM describing descriptions and actions just so. The players must be willed to respond. If, as dungeon masters, we describe a room and the players just stand there; if we say the monster reaches for his sword and they just stand there — then there is none of what I've described above. Nothing is transformed; there is no anticipation. The players are painfully rooted in the now, and the "now" ain't that great.

What to do, then? Is it just how the room is described? Is it the words we use to say the sword is drawn? Do we stand up and work ourselves into a lather, in the hopes that our excitement will be infectious? If only we had some strategy we could rely upon; some ordered set of tools in our belt that we could reach for when things don't seem to be going well, when we need an idea or a burst of that experiencing of our world that we could fold into our imaginations reflexively, so easily and quickly that we didn't have time to question the fluidity and certainty of our choice to describe this room in just this way, or relate that dangerous moment of someone doing something, all as naturally as falling off a log. It would be really great if we didn't have to think about it. If the inventiveness we need right now was just "there."

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