Passion, Pursuit & Evolution

Mpff.  Heh, heh.  My particular flavour of insanity, as OrwellianHaggis said a couple days ago.  Following two different conversations going on this month, I find myself wishing to make clear what my expectations are, for other people using anything that I propose for D&D.

I have no expectations.  None.

It wouldn't be practical.  I have people here who are contributing as much as $20 a month to my Patreon for my ramblings, who nevertheless run their own game using the 4th Edition or 5th Edition game version.  If I can't convince my most stalwart fans to abandon these systems in favour of my path, then surely I expect nothing more from the average reader who gives me nothing.  People come here as voyeurs, to see the monkey dance, to think about D&D, to fantasize about a granularity they'll never impose and to be entertained as they drink coffee first thing in the morning.  They come here because I make them think.  Some people like to think and they like to be compelled to do so.  I am one of those persons.

I have very few sources I can go to for that ... and with covid, fewer than ever.  Some content creators have completely vanished, leaving behind the bones of their original work with no explanation as to where they've gone.  They've given not even a goodbye.  At a time when they ought to all be home and bored, therefore having the time to commit to their so-called passion, they're invisible.  Are they tucked in a corner, arms around their knees, rocking and moaning to themselves?  Seems like they must be.  Other creators that I love, such as Folding Ideas or Innuendo Studios, are churning out half-baked content every three months or more.  Ninety days is a long, long time to wait for 40 minutes of content, if we get even that.  They're spending their patreon money on flair and presentation, when all I want is for these smart people to TALK a little more often.  I suppose they feel the fans need more glitz.  That's not what made them famous.  Glitter takes hundreds of hours longer to create than ideas, and so we wait.  And wait.  And wait.  It's a desert out there.

Smart people have to be experiencing the same lag I do ... and therefore any time I can ease that lag for them, by not waiting more than a couple of days before writing something, even if it's just about writing something, I'll do it.

I believe that passion is the make or break quality one must possess to run the game well.  All the tips and details we can muster won't be worth a thing if the DM has no passion.  A couple of weeks ago, ViP threw out a comment at me and I gave him a pat answer.  Let me look at that comment again:

"... given that most if not all the social aptitudes required to run (and participate in) a proper game are absent in most teenagers, especially the basement-dwelling type, is it actually possible for a teen DM to run for other teens or children?  Is D&D played by youngsters a different game altogether, that somehow evolves into the real thing later in life?  Is the continuity between our childhood memories of the game and our present experience of it an illusion?"

The emphasis is mine.  My pat answer was that I'm not interested in the games that teenagers play—but of course I was a teenager playing the game between 1979 and 1984.  It was certainly possible for me to run other teenagers, and in some cases 20-something persons.  Compared to what I played in the early 1990s, those games were totally different, absolutely.  That doesn't mean they weren't "the real thing" when I was a kid, or that they became more "real" as I aged.  My games grew more sophisticated and elaborate, absolutely; they have ever since I started.  They did between when I was aged 15 and 17.  It doesn't take 10,000 hours to learn a new skill.  It takes 20.  200 hours will make you as good a DM as any green commercial pilot is as flying a plane—we're talking people you'll trust your life with.  That's as good a DM as most anyone will be of any age, even those doing it for 20 years.

Evolving a game takes passion.  If you don't care, you won't find a reason to evolve.  You'll just run the game the same way you always have—you'll even argue that because you're running the game now, "the same way you always have," that this is the only way it needs to be run, can be run or ought to be run.  I've seen all three arguments online.  If you look around, you'll find all sorts of articles debunking the "10,000 hour myth," specifically citing Malcolm Gladwell who only reported the concept in his book, Outliers.  Gladwell didn't invent it, anymore than Dan Rather invented the Taliban after reporting on them in the early 80s.  Since, it's been understood—by really, really stupid people who never read the book—that the hours spent won't automatically make you the Beatles or Bobby Fisher.  Gladwell never says it will.  He wrote that if you ARE the Beatles or Bobby Fisher, you'll rack up 10,000 hours because you can't do or think of anything else except that thing you're passionate about.

Like me.

I was not, therefore, "most" teenagers.  The games I ran in back then, made by most teenagers, were good enough because, initially, I knew little to nothing about the game.  Within a year, however, I had my 200 hours of direct play.  By five years, as I turned twenty, I had a thousand hours of play and at least five times that in preparation and design.  By the time I turned twenty I'd quit other people's worlds.  I tried to play several times in the 80s and they were all terrible, even those run by thirty-something adults, some of whom had ten years experience.

It being "possible" for teenagers or anyone else to run a game for other people is an obvious fact.  I'd argue that most adults run a game that is no better or worse than any game run by any teenager, given that most adults have never advanced their game a smidge since the day they began.  And, I'm sorry, but that describes virtually every reader here.  When someone writes me to say that reading me vastly improved their game, and that it's on a whole new level now, that's only because until reading me, that DM had ceased to question the precepts of the game.

Teenagers automatically question the precepts of EVERYTHING.  From the age of 5, when we start school, the reason we're given for doing anything is "because."  By 13, most children are mostly fucking sick of that.  Even the dumbest of them want a real answer.  Most of the time, it dawns that the "real answer" is that school is bullshit, teachers are bullshit, the curriculum is mostly bullshit and the promises that working hard in school is almost certainly more of the same.  It isn't, because if you don't jump the bullshit hoops you'll never reach the hoops when real stuff happens ... but given that everything else is clearly bullshit, and no one will admit it, it's hard at 13 to take an adult's word for anything.  Those that do, have the benefit of a parent who can explain what's really going on, or happen to get that rare, wonderful teacher who will admit that, "Yes, it's all shit, but eat enough of it and they'll give you steak."

Most adults stop questioning about the time they become adults, because they start thinking they already know the answer.  If you know the answer, you don't question.  My 15-y.o. daughter used to say that they must take adults out into a field somewhere and drop an anvil onto their heads; it was her explanation for why adults behaved so irrationally.  She's 32 now, with a child of her own; she's seen with her own eyes now, the friends she had once who just stopped learning.  That's what happens.  That describes virtually everyone I write for.  They're not here to learn or to grow, they're here to be amused.

Therefore, the game people played as children and the one they play now IS a state of continuity.  There's no illusion—except maybe in their minds.  A self-aware person ought to look at the game they played back then, and the game they want to play now, and either assess 1) that there's a difference or no difference; and 2) why or how they came to a place where they changed or they refused to change.  We are right here, in our minds, the whole time, so when someone says, "I don't know how I got here," they must have chosen to be willfully ignorant at some point.  Apart from a severe trauma, there's no other excuse.

Being self-aware, I can pinpoint every choice and change I've made to myself and my game.  I can tell you about the time I chose to be more likeable as a person; and I can tell you why I decided I hated being more likeable.  I can tell what sort of parent I thought I'd be when I was eight, when I was 16 and when I was 24, when my daughter was born.  And I can tell you what kind of parent I was, every step of the way.  I have NO empathy for people who blew left and right with the wind, who closed their eyes and let the stream take them or who believed so dearly in the bullshit of their elders that they didn't realize they'd become their fathers until they found themselves habitually beating their own kids.  The way ZiP asks the question in his comment, I find myself wondering, "Don't you remember when you were a teenager?  Don't you remember how you thought?  Aren't you able to identify the aptitudes you had when you were 15 or 18?"

But then I remember that a lot of teenagers around me were doing a lot of drugs.  That's trauma.  That's the excuse I'm ready to take.

In which case, try to live your life right now as though you are a teenager and willing to question everything that's happening to you.  That's the point of this blog.  Making you "think" is tantamount to making you question.

The other day, when I asked if player characters should have a favourite colour, I got various answers.  I even got one fellow who tried to argue that he had a reason for choosing his favourite colour, while proving in fact that his "reason" was no more than pure sensory perception.  This is like saying my favourite ice cream is chocolate, because when I tasted chocolate I decided I wanted it more than any other.  Yup.  And at what point did I decide the taste of chocolate would be best?

Self-awareness.  It's a mystery to some people.

What OrwellianHaggis calls my peculiar flavour of insanity is really just my peculiar belief that if we can make rules to fabricate combat or resource management as game functions, why not clothing as protection against the weather?  Why not a craving for a kind of food?  Why not a favourite colour?  These are human experiences too.  Why should a game that provides context for every human experience be limited arbitrarily by those the original creators of the game presupposed?  Are we as humans limited to what other humans have invented?  I don't think so.

So, I will bring this long, rambling post to an end.  Seems I've been making nine or ten different points, which will seem disparate to many.  I'll try to sum up.  Passion causes pursuit; pursuit leads to evolution, in order to pursue better; evolution is marked by insight and new ideas; new ideas trash old ideas.  People without passion don't pursue.  They don't evolve.  They don't invent.  They just drag on doing things in the same old way.

Which sort are you?