Minefields

Following the enthusiasm expressed in this twitter thread, I recalled having read the pages from 4th edition D&D that are so lauded here.  Alyssa Visscher, the speaker, says, "It's 34 pages, has very little 4th edition specific stuff in it, and fills in some much-needed gaps in the DMG, and other published materials."

Okay, I'm thinking.  Let's draw it out and assess the validity of what she says -- at my speed, of course.  I'm not sure which 34 pages she means; "How to be a DM" starts on page 4 and ends on page 14 (ten pages); while "Running the Game" continues until page 33 (nineteen pages) -- and two of those pages are full-page artwork.  For the necessary 34 pages, we're well into "Combat Encounters."  I'm sure Alyssa just failed to notice the first part started on page 4 and not page 1, and counted page 34 as part of the total.  No big deal; anyone can make a mistake like that on a twitter post.

Shall we begin?

Chapter 1: How to Be a DM

Most games have a winner and a loser, but the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game is fundamentally a cooperative game. The Dungeon Master (DM) plays the roles of the antagonists in the adventure, but the DM isn’t playing against the player characters (PCs). Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and adversaries—monsters, nonplayer characters (NPCs), traps, and the like—he or she doesn’t want the player characters to fail any more than the other players do. The players all cooperate to achieve success for their characters. The DM’s goal is to make success taste its sweetest by presenting challenges that are just hard enough that the other players have to work to overcome them, but not so hard that they leave all the characters dead. At the table, having fun is the most important goal—more important than the characters’ success in an adventure. It’s just as vital for everyone at the table to cooperate toward making the game fun for everyone as it is for the player characters to cooperate within the adventure.

This chapter includes the following sections.

The Gaming Group: Here you learn what components you need to play the D&D game.

The Players: Understand your players, help them to assemble as a successful party of player characters, and run a game they want to play.

The Dungeon Master: Understand the role of a DM in the game and what kind of game you want to make.

Table Rules: Consider table rules you should agree on—guidelines for you and the players’ behavior during the game.

 

Rating: mostly true

Any straight up introduction to D&D and role-playing games has some pitfalls and mis-steps, since the role-playing concept is complex and subject to philosophical interpretation.  I can't disparage the above; in essence, it describes generally the purpose and function of the game, expressing motivations with which most participants can identify.  Once closely inspected, however, there are elements in the choice of language that is bound to raise confusion and pushback between the players and the DM, once the game is in play.  Some of these have no agreed upon answer; some are very old tropes and a lot of the RP gaming world would like to forget the endless hours they've wasted on bulletin boards attacking one perspective or the other.  But as this post (and this beginning series) is intended as an assessment of the content above, it would be a failing on my part not to point out these disparities and discuss them.

Please understand that, for early players, I'd argue the statements made are helpful.  It is only that, for the genre-savvy, taking the above as the equivalent of a legal-precedent is walking into a freaking land mine.  For experts describing the game, the glossing of these concepts is amateurish.

1. the DM's Agenda

It's all very well to say that the DM isn't playing against the players, in the sense that the DM isn't actively or intentionally seeking to destroy, subvert or otherwise act deliberately counter to the player's potential for survival or success.  However, the next sentence, stipulating that the DM represents the adversaries of the players, and that these adversaries are clearly (as antagonists) out to get the players, it is clear that one part of the DM's agenda IS to "play" against the players.

Why is this concept so hard to register?  As with any positivist description, where we attempt to express the DM's role in a favourable light, when it seems pretty obvious to any player that the DM is a tremendous potential threat to the players, what with the god-like powers and all ... we rush into defending the DM as a friend in the first sentence describing what the DM does.  Well, which is it?  Is the DM playing against the players or merely playing the adversaries that play against the players?  How, exactly, is this needle being threaded made clearer by this unravelling?

We can simplify this by getting rid of loaded words like antagonist, against, opponent and adversary, which are all words we habitually equate with competition and winning, even though the opening sentence of the passage says D&D is a cooperative game.

Better: "The DM, by managing the game setting and the fictional characters therein, provides hard boundaries to play that the players must cooperate in order to overcome."

This lacks the thrill of mentioning monsters, traps and non-player characters, but it is more strictly accurate.

2. Balance

The DM's goal IS to make success sweet by presenting challenges -- but it is those five words that are like a thumb banged with a hammer: "that are just hard enough ..."

This philosophy of the WOTC is founded on a reasonable principle that begins in literary writing: the protagonist and antagonist are two sides of a coin, presenting the best stories when both possess believable and obtainable motives, are characterized with depth and are equally intrinsic to the story's resolution -- but, presumedly, as the protagonist is meant to win, the best stories are those when it looks impossible for the protagonist to do so, that the reader may be excited at the end by the protagonist's durability, ingenuity and sheer guts in the face of impossible odds.  Yes, of course we want players to feel that moment when, just when it looks like all the cards are stacked against them, they pull it out in the crunch and win.

Uh huh, exactly.  There's that concept of winning again, even though we've been told the game isn't about winning.  The implication is subtle; it isn't stated in the text.  But that's the thing with land mines.  They're buried.  Even if we don't tell the players that they're meant to win, when we include a philosophical argument that places the onus on the DM to come up with challenges that are "just hard enough," we've thrown out any legitamacy for challenges that are slightly too hard for the players to overcome, plus anything above that.  Worse, given the entanglement of dice, strategy, bad choices and in-player fighting, a DM and players being told that the challenges aren't meant to kill the players, we end up in a blasted warzone of players holding DMs to account because the monsters were "too hard" or the game wasn't "balanced enough" to ensure they had a "fair chance" of winning.  These three concepts written in quotes are spectacularly smudgy and lacking in the remotest definition, but that won't stop players from dying on them as hills.

The players deserve a reasonable impression of what they're getting into.  They deserve to be told that really, really dangerous things can be found beyond this point, and the specificity of that danger should be unilaterally explained in such a manner that the players can't miss the obvious threats just beyond.  That why we use descriptions like, "the things are as big as houses" or "the land was laid waste by a beast that streamed fire from its mouth."

But the DM is expected to provide challenges.  The DM is not, repeat not, expected to measure those challenges.  Give the players a heads up, a good honest warning, and let them figure out the balance for themselves.

3. Characters Die

Yes, I'm saying that players do die in the game.  And sometimes, yes, they die because the challenges are so hard that death is the result.  D&D doesn't have "winners" and "losers" in the sense that the players compete against each other or another team.  This does not mean that D&D is all "success" and never "failure."  This is a weakness of glossing, generalized arguments.

4. Fun is Not More Important

I don't know of any game anywhere that feels the need to repeatedly make this argument, except when an authority figure must make it clear to children that "winning isn't everything."  We've already been told that D&D isn't about winning, but here again we're in this bailywick.

We play games because we enjoy the ordered, provocative test of our tenacity and problem-solving skills that a game demands.  It is the game that makes playing a game "fun."  Arguing that the fun supersedes the game -- i.e., that our emotional response to those parts of the game that imply we've failed or lost -- argues that any part of the game that does not gratify our immediate emotional needs can be dispensed with.  This is narcissism.  Losing is learning.  Facing bitterness and struggle builds the ability to play.  Overcoming a disasterous situation IS exactly the sort of challenge the passage above says the DM and the game are supposed to supply.

If the players can bail any time the game isn't "fun," because things aren't going their way, there is no game.  There's just narcissistic people sitting around doing stuff.

Last words.

Most of the troubles inherent in the above are miscommunications rather than deliberate attempts to permit poor behaviour and gameplay.  However, we know from experience that a certain class of players will do their best to game the system, which includes filtering through written descriptions of what the game "ought" to be and using them as precedents to force DMs into responses that are not in the interest of the DM or the players.  We need to be aware when a miscommunication occurs or how a well-intentioned philosophy can breed negativity, so that we are able to arm ourselves against some player chooses to trip that mine.

This series continues with The Croupier