Settling Down

I attribute a great deal of my success as a DM to my choice early on to take up one roleplay system and one world design, and stick with it for all these years.  I looked at other role-playing games and never felt the need to switch.  If there was something I liked in some system I found there, I could always adapt it to D&D.  I felt that substantially any element of any system, reaching right up through cyberpunk and futuristic games, could be adapted -- and so I saw no reason why I should switch an entire system to obtain one tiny element that some other game system might have allowed.

I did not feel that there was anything I was missing.  With each passing year there was always some new system that came along -- but they always appeared to be reinventing the wheel.  I already had a wheel.  As such, I became adept and super-familiar with the system I kept, a benefit that has served me to this day.  It's easy to keep the thousands of details related to the game in my head at one time because I've never played any other game.  This gives my system, my methods and my game setting a remarkable stability.  I feel secure when I run.  I'm satisfied with the game environment.  I have no feelings that there is something better elsewhere, that I might have had more.  The grass is greenest under my feet, because it is under my feet that I have spent my time caring for my grass.

I would say that above all other things I have done as a DM, the best has been my acceptance that there is only one game system, and that one multi-faceted, interwoven game setting is better than dozens of set-pieces.  The sheer size of my setting has ensured that I'm never bored with it.  The consequent process of adjusting, tweaking, adapting and expanding the game system for myself has assured my sense of individuality and at the same time, grants me an overwhelming proficiency and competence as a DM.  No one can possibly know a house as well as the owner who designs, builds and maintains that house for thirty+ years, who can point to every pipe and wire and relay a tale of how this or that was changed.  There are some who might get tired of that house; but for me, knowing that I can build outwards from this wall or upwards from that ceiling has meant that there is no need to compromise with limitation.

That, however, is the thing that drives people towards constantly seeking a "new" project to replace the old.  The pattern is an element of fantasy.  It isn't just wanting what we don't have; it is also not wanting any more what we feel we've been stuck with.  I often personally experience this with video games.  Oxygen Not Included is a good example.  I play the game for relaxation; it is a bit of problem solving and quite a lot of logistics ... and primarily a game in which the decisions made early in the game return to haunt the player later.

For those unfamiliar, the game involves building an underground base, where material resources are sought in the surrounding rock, which must be shipped from one part of the map to another, where it can be used.  Common resources are both fresh and polluted water, oxygen for breathing, natural gas and hydrogen as fuel, and manufactured electricity which is used to run machines and provide the comforts of life.  At first, the game is quite simple; but as the base expands, it soon becomes a hodge-podge of electrical wires, liquid pipes and vents, all criss-crossing one another until together they create a tangle that becomes more and more snarled as time goes on.  Eventually, managing the snarl becomes, for me, so unpleasant that I'm ready to burn the game down and start a new game -- after all, I'm playing it for relaxation.  If I wanted to really work, I'd apply myself to my D&D setting or writing.  Such as I'm doing right now.

I would imagine that for most people, their game setting resembles the same frustration.  First efforts are put towards character design, then alignment, then combat, then perhaps an equipment list, then spells, followed by new ideas about alignment, which gets one thinking about religion, then social structure in the game world, which asks for simplification, but if we sacrifice this, then that needs to be sacrificed, and we really like that ... and like ONI, the snarl gets greater and greater over a series of months until the DM sees some other system and thinks, "I'll be that's better."

This grass-is-greener system is about avoiding the problems that accumulate in making the game world.  In all honesty, I've been quite the villain these last ten years insisting that people adopt a complex game setting.  After all, in the beginning of my play, in the 1980s, I didn't play that complex a system.  I played the rules in the four AD&D books (counting Unearthed Arcana and the Fiend Folio as half books each) and filled in the gaps with a few house rules.  The game didn't become complicated until after at least 7 years.  1986 would have been the turning point.  And I struggled with that addition to complexity.  Oh how I struggled!  Half the time I had to half-ass my way through my own rules, talking them over with my players and apologizing every session because I'd made some change here or there about something we'd only been doing for a few months ... but my players were patient because I would also talk about what I was trying to achieve, and they seemed to be on board with that.  They never failed to talk to me, or about these rules, or ideas; we'd have after-sessions that lasted until two or three in the morning as we parsed out some concept.  The profound stun lock system that I use came out of several of those nights; I didn't invent it myself!  I parsed out what my players suggested and built the process over time, listening to feedback and adapting to it.

Somehow, though, I got through that period of snarled ideas, until my present game coalesced and became what it is now.  The means of doing that would be impossible to describe; I can only say that I got better and better and figuring out what made a system functional and what was deservedly ignored.  I grew to understand where and how a system would serve the players' needs without coddling them; and why it was necessary to find that equation again and again.  Each step along the way -- such as giving the lion's share of experience for what damage a player took rather than the damage a player caused -- made clear how the equation had to punish and reward simultaneously, constantly.  All rules, fundamentally, must have an element of giving and an element of taking away; those elements must be balanced, not only between those two elements, but with the elements of every other rule in the game.  It is a D&D version of how to build an underground base without creating a snarl of pipes running hither and yon.  This isn't easy; I don't see how anyone could do it without first going through a period of designer hell, to get to the other side.  Those who encounter that snarl and shy from it, so that they rush to seek some better possibility someplace else, will never get there.

Lately I've been thinking of the moral in stories about selling one's soul to the devil.  The core motivation is that the present situation is awful, we'd like it to be better, and we're willing to sell something that has no immediate value to us (because it happens in the future) in order to have that improvement.  The improvement is, of course, something amazing.  Fame, wealth, happiness, love, whatever floats the seller's boat.  And predictably, when it sinks in that the price of that happiness will be eternal damnation, the pleasure in those things diminishes.  Time moves forward, as as the time transfers the wonderful stuff into the past, and the damnation into the present, we soon realize that all that great stuff in our past isn't worth a thing, when all that's before us is misery.

This strikes me as an allegory I hadn't considered before.  Take the devil out of the equation and view it from a manner of living one's life.  Rush towards hedonism now, towards immediate gratification, with or without the fame and wealth ... and we put so little aside for the future that eventually we will have to pay the devil for it, wither or not we feel we got our bargain's worth.  Spend another ten years of your life wasted away on frivolously making game systems that you're sure to discard, and ten years from now you'll have exactly what you have today: nothing.  That's the cold realization that comes to the seller when the devil pulls up in his carriage:  that, when the payment comes due, we're struck with the stinging realization that we got nothing for our soul, after all.

A good Presbyterian minister would preach humility as a vouchsafe against that feeling; a humble person asks nothing for their soul, but keeps it quietly in their heart, applying themselves to their work and to others, so that when judgement comes they still have a soul to spend.  I won't side with the minister here, but I will argue that if we have a soul, it is found in what we do, not what we get.  I am no Christian any more, for good reason, so a "soul" for me is a human construct pertaining to fulfillment and self-respect.  But I believe that the more we do for that soul, and the less we ask of it, the better we become as human beings.

This is perhaps too esoteric; we are, after all, only talking about a game world.  Yet I think that world requires enough from us that there's only room enough to make one of them.  I think that forever making a break with the past in order to have something perceived in our future is a recipe for selling our soul and getting nothing in return.

If I may return to the metaphor of goldpanning, there is some merit in evaluating the present dig as a dead end, and sensibly moving to a better spot.  But only a fool jumps from place to place a dozen times throughout the season, expecting the next sand bar must be better than the one underfoot.  Panning for gold, like any other activity, requires patience, deliberation, a willingness to address the difficulty at hand and the ability to observe that if a payout is to come, it will come from diligence.  That which is gotten by chance or by luck is lost just as easily.

Settle in.  Choose one system and accept it's the only system.  Imagine that you're on a desert island and that, after the shipwreck, this is the only system you'll ever have.  Then, pick a setting.  Do so with eyes wide open, knowing that this setting has to keep you fed for the next forty years or more.  Pay no attention at all to the depth of the setting; you can add that later with your labour.  Concentrate instead on the number of choices the setting will provide -- specifically, its mutable, flexible qualities.

Then, let everything else go.  If some element of the rest can be fit into your system then fine, fit it in.  Do not forget, however, that it is the system that matters, not some new element.  If you find that this new idea will compromise or destroy your system, then don't add it.  Let it go.  Probably, in a year or two, you'll probably find that element will fit in just fine, after all.  You just haven't had the time to give it enough thought.

Realize that all your feelings about greener grass or richer sand bars are just projections of fantasy, and not real.  What matters is the work in front of you, that will yield results from the efforts you apply -- and that going somewhere else will just bring you back full circle to this same expectation of applying effort and yielding results.  The only thing you will accomplish by moving is wasting time.  Time is finite.  You'll run out of it eventually.  Keep selling bits of yourself off year after year, you're going to find yourself facing a terrible debt that you'll hate having to pay.  Put your head down and work.  Learn to enjoy the work, and sing while you work, and one day you'll find your spiritual pockets bulging as you stand back and enjoy all that your labour has accomplished.

It begins when you decide, "Here.  Right here.  This is home."  It doesn't actually matter where.  It only matters that your wandering days are over, this plot of ground is yours, and you're ready to make of it what you want.