The Sermon Today Is ...

The image shown is from p. 12 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

At last, a breath of fresh air.

I addressed earlier the matter of the DM being a croupier rather than a referee, so I'll keep my remarks on this subject short.  The referee metaphor has been around for awhile; I've used it myself though I've stepped away from that for the reasons I've given.  What's odd in the text is that the book, earlier, made very clear that D&D is not "competitive"—and yet here we've turned to a metaphor for a competive sport.  Books are huge, unwieldy things, with continuity being a nightmare.  It is the reason we seek editors.  Here, again, continuity is being deliberately ignored (I feel), because the notion of the D&D as "referee" is desirable.  Referees, while chafed against, are respected, even by players who shout in the referee's face.  That is because referees have legitimacy through organizations and clubs who ensure the judgment-giver has been vetted.  Some of that halo effect is being alluded to here, as the company attempts to sell the DM as something more than an arbitrary dictator.

Only, no one vets the DM except the players; who often fail to do so, for the sake of having a DM, even if he or she is a bad one.

I don't take the view that the DM is a mediator between the rules and the players.  A judge is not a mediator between the law and the people; a judge mediates between people according to the law.  It is the decision regarding where the most harm falls that sets a future precedent in the law; but the judge is still bound by the law regarding the decision being made, which is why appeals courts exist.  One judge does not make the law.  Several judges, according to a complex system that enables numerous people to raise up and strike down precedents, decides the law.

D&D's prime weakness is that the DM possesses the right to "define the law," or rules of the game.  The players have no appeal except to the DM's decency or reason; or to abandon the game and seek another.  A good DM recognizes that decisions have consequences, not only on the presence of the players but also upon their willing and cheerful participation in the game.  While the language here tries to establish the DM as a friendly voice, in several ways the language is weak on that regard, for the things it does not say.

In the second paragraph we're asked to imagine two players fighting a battle against each other and needing a referee; then it's admitted that the DM acts as the referee and also controls the monsters.  But the disparity here is never actually addressed.  We are given this information, which is true, but we're not actually told precisely HOW the DM does both these things.  It is skipped over in favour of saying next what the DM does, followed by an example of what the DM does, followed by an admittance that sometimes the DM has to enforce the rules.  But the substance of how we balance acting as "referee" and "competitor" is abandoned—perhaps because it is difficult to explain this in the space allowed; perhaps because the writer hasn't got a good answer; perhaps because it's assumed the players already understand the principle.  As text in a book purporting to describe the Dungeon Master's role, it's unconscionable and lazy to leave the matter out.

Without my diving in and explaining it, can the reader clearly define how the DM acts the part of the monster attacking the player AND acting as an impartial mediator between what the player is allowed to do against the monster?  Stop reading and give it a try.

Meanwhile, it was remarked positively earlier today that my discussion of the 4e text requiring so many posts seemed a little excessive (my word not the commenter's), and I suppose it might be.  I'm finding myself that the material is rich in opportunities to discuss a wide variety of subjects that go unnoticed, or which I've failed to cover in many years.  It's beneficial to seek out the gaps in logic that occur, such as the one at hand, since this text has formed the mindset of the modern player to such a degree.  Although 5e may have evolved away from 4e, many of the engendered ideas of the latter found their way into the former through the opinions of players who were asked to contribute their belief systems to the final format of 5th Edition.  Therefore, just as we might seek the causes belli of a historical conflict from the letters and speeches of politicians leading up to the event, it makes sense to pick apart the original founding documents underlying those rules which are so popular in the present.  If I were to do so with 2nd or 3rd edition, I could easily note the trips and stumbles those documents contributed to the illogical mess of a system that 5th edition is today: an edition which, I must point out, stresses that the DM's arbitrary judgement, without acknowledgement of the rules, is considered the absolute norm that DM's ought to practice.  Therefore, not only have we abandoned any idea of an appeal to the judge, we've also abandoned any grounding framework upon which a judgement is given.  This does not merely guarantee that an individual game is inconsistent in the extreme, it ALSO provides for every game run by every DM throughout the game's culture to be so wildly inconsistent that dropping a DM and moving to another campaign is a serious trauma for players.  In unilaterally granting DMs so much power, the company is forced to argue in compensation that the DM must use this excessive unearned power in total obedience and submission to the player.  We read this illogic every day without flinching, largely because we do not look at the perameters of it too closely.  Instead of a referee who decides if the ball is a strike or not, the batter tells the umpire which it is, and the umpire uses the power granted to confirm the player's perception and to quell any opposition that might arise from others in the party—as takes place in player-vs.-player campaigns.  No wonder we find so many DMs lamenting that they've either failed their parties or are unable to control them.

Let's come back to the point.  The DM's management of the monsters in the game world during combat AND the DM's adjudication of the player's actions in the fight rely on two ethical principles: 1) that the DM will hold his or her self to precisely the same standards as the player; and 2) that the DM has no stake whatsoever in either the monsters or the players succeeding in winning the combat.

These two words, "precisely" and "whatsoever" should be treated as though carved in granite.  Any deviation will compromise the game, the DM's integrity and the compact between the players and DM as human beings.  Individuals in the DM's role may choose to ignore these conditions, finding all sorts of ways to abandon their integrity or justify out-and-out cheating, but we have thousands of years of ethical philosophy to fall back on with regards to how acting in this way seriously fucks you up as a person.  Naturally, many people are unethical.  Still, while I'm sure that most readers here have a firm grasp of what it means to be ethical, even if you are not, while I'm at this street corner I ought to knock on a few doors.

While "integrity" is often used to describe honesty, in a larger sense the word derives from the structural coherence of a designed entity.  When we speak of organizations, such as churches, political states, companies and such having integrity, we mean that these institutions are sound, whole and in good operating condition.  When an institution, say, as a random example to choose from, like the United States government, begins to show instability, this comes apart because the integrity of the various structures—the senate, the opposition, the presidency, the justice department, homeland security, what have you—begins to fracture along its weakest points, namely the individuals who fail to maintain their responsibility to their assorted positions.  Each of those individuals, in turn, are a composite of influences and choices that they've made over their lifetime that hold their ethical frameworks together.  Very few individuals suddenly cease to have integrity; most essay to make a change here and there, to step off the straight and narrow, as John Bunyan described, doing so more and more frequently over time.  Eventually, they develop a motto that argues, "Nothing bad has happened yet, so this must be okay too."  Steadily, as the individual drops in ethical freefall, unable to see the ground, they tell themselves, "So good so far."  We've all seen what happens next.

When the DM decides to put one foot outside "precisely" or "whatsoever," there are no immediate consequences.  This is what makes personal integrity so damned hard for people.  If there were some outside force that backslapped you, hard, when you stepped out of line, you'd happily find your balance and stay there.  But there is no outside force, which makes the next choice you make as a DM to go further out of line more, hm, defensible.  Getting away with it feeds your willingness to get away with it—even where your intentions were always good.  The key is that these are your intentions; not the intentions of the general group and not the openly discussed cooperation of everyone involved.  The very fact that you have to keep your intentions secret, because they are off the line, should be an indicator that your intentions have your head up their butt.  Yes, of course it's secret.  When you fudge the die, do you then immediately tell the player, "Oh, I just fudged the die there.  Actually the monster hit, but I'm judging that it did not.  Shall we continue?"

For many, however, it isn't an indicator, because it lacked a consequence.  As a rule of practice, ethical behaviour is where you practice the rule of law regardless of whether there would be a consequence.  You practice the rule because you agree with the rule.

If you disagreed, you'd argue the rule should be changed, until it became one you'd agree with; but until the change occurred, it would not be in your nature to flout the rule just because you disagreed with it.

It isn't important that we behave like this all the time.  We falter.  We're human.  What matters isn't that we're perfect, what matters is that we correct ourselves and get back on the line, making consequences for ourselves in the form of mental confessions and the decision to repent ... and, in the future, to do it better.

Apart from what the DM does, it matters what the DM believes. While the text is somewhat satisfying for the former, it completely ignores the latter; it takes no steps towards making DMs understand the responsibilities their bear or the need to adhere to fairness or propriety.  I can understand why it doesn't.  Many readers, if they're still here at the end of this post, will have been made VERY uncomfortable by all this discussion of ethics, because ethics are designed to make us uncomfortable.  Business models will argue that the business is ethical, but they won't look too closely at it; and businesses, except for the church, which doesn't have to pay taxes, DON'T preach at their customers.

Without the tax exemption, it's hard to stay in the black.

This series continues with Keeping the Faith