Asking & Answering

I feel a bit lately that I'm not "earning" the respect I'm gaining from readers, as I'm indulging in the online game (today's battle shown) and I'm committed to the ever-trying poster.  Four weeks into the latter and I feel I'm ... mm ... shall we say 40% done?  I gave myself a three month deadline; I'm still on track for that.

Twas a very good week with the campaign.  We've picked up an enthusiastic player and the group has been lucky with the time they've had to commit.  The dungeon themes are thickening and the party's beginning to pick up some relevant treasure.  Vafrandir went up a level today, to 3rd, and that's always pleasant.  I have no idea why DMs decide that levels are a bad thing that need to be expunged.  I've never seen a player that didn't burst with pride every time they've passed that milestone ... but it could be that I make my players sweat painfully for a long time before it's met.  The harder something is to gain, the more treasured it's bound to be.

The mental synthesis of D&D is found through translating a thoroughly irrational situation (animated zombies) into graspable applications.  I'm fighting something that operates against the laws of physics, but I'm doing it with a sword that operates normally within those laws.  The glamour of the game is found in the dualism between these two principles; just as science fiction and horror films resolve it.  Anything profoundly strange becomes reasonable once we discover what rules apply.  Rules make such things comprehensible; and while some might think this dilutes the enchantment of the game, the functional player continues to think, "Wow, I'm doing it!  I'm actually fighting animated skeletons and winning!"

Of course, this does require a certain amount of theatre in the presentation.  If the skeletons are simply walked on stage without building up a level of threat and thus tension, fighting skeletons will be as silly as fighting poles hammered in the ground.  A clown in a horror movie is just a clown; to make it seriously terrifying we've got to play with lighting, sound, cinematography, pacing, deception and obfuscation.  DMs will shrug and say, "What can I do with skeletons?  They're so boring!"  Such DMs don't know what they're doing.  Let me post the picture that proceeded the one above, when the players opened the door and found what they were faced with:

The players certainly don't seem bored.  However, look at what's happening here beyond the event itself.  Pandred's response, even online, is clearly emotional.  Both immediately move past the "oh shit, that's a lot of zombies" — understandable, since the party consists of two 1st levels, a 3rd level and a 4th level, with the two higher levels at less than half their hit points.  At once, they set out to solve the problem ... which is precisely what we'd want to be doing if this was really happening.  We don't want players who are overly emotional; we want players who are emotional enough to decide to coldly run or coldly dig in — like professionals.

As it happens, I never did answer Lexent's question here.  The doors were described as made of heavy plant-material, similar to thatch; they were never closely examined and I previously did say they didn't "close."  But these are the sort of things that get missed, as they seem mundane ... until security suddenly rears its head.  In any case, all the players were thinking in game terms.  This is what I want.  I don't want players to invent nonsensical solutions ("we try to climb onto the ceiling"); I want them to think in military terms, since this is a fight and they're in it now.  How do we defend this place, how do we build a line, etcetera.

The synthesis emerges as players move from frivolity to gritting their teeth.  Frivolity is a symptom of not caring what happens; or feeling so secure in one's own situation that no threat is perceived.  Frivolity describes those idiots in the Capitol filming themselves with glee, ensuring they would spend the rest of their lives on no-fly lists, being denied credit, hounded endlessly by one stupid day on which they had fun and enjoying their status as ex-cons.  They filmed themselves because they perceived themselves as untouchable; an unfortunately legitimized belief of many players who know the DM won't kill them, or who know they're so powerful that of course nine skeletons could never be a threat.

After my last post, Griffin wrote,

"I would be very interested in having a module or two from you that was less a 'here is an adventure' and more 'how to run an adventure'. Where you, in the product, go through the steps of building an adventure location and highlight certain parts how you might run them. Not a standard module that someone picks up and runs (though there should be enough information to do that) but that someone can use as an example and/or blueprint to reverse engineer to make their own."

Griffin, like most, hasn't understood yet that the game adventure isn't about building locations or blueprints ... gaming corresponds to a mindfulness about how human intelligence, time and space work.  Every location has relevance, if we choose to give it relevance.  Relevance derives from what we are able to make the players see, when we put them in that place.  Take any place — a bus stop, a lunch counter, a back yard, a grassy bank on a river.  See it.  Why is it there?  How can it be used?  What events in the human experience can be put there in your imagination?  Pick any experience, it doesn't matter ... the relevance of the experience only exists because we give it relevance.  We decide that what happens there has repercussions for other things that happen elsewhere, in other places, between other people at other moments in time.

There's no "blueprint."  There are infinite possibilities, any of which are suitable.  I choose to have a husband reading a book to his wife, who happens to be pregnant, this popping into my head because I recently saw the film Notting Hill and that's the last scene.  He's reading to her at a bus stop; he's reading to her in a lunch counter; he's reading to her in their back yard; he's reading to her on a grassy bank.  His reading to her gives the commonplace meaning.  What is he reading?  He's reading an instruction manual for motherhood.  He's reading an instruction manual for cleaning an AK47.  He's reading aloud the book that she's written.  He's reading a book about property law.  It doesn't matter what he's reading ... the book establishes a much wider context!  It's their first child; they are embroiled in questionable activities; he's comprehending her better; they're engaged in some wider legal matter that has them concerned.  The circle of events around them widen.  Are they concerned about themselves as parents, or are they laughing at the book's contents.  Are they just gun nuts, or do they work for the government?  Is it her first book, or is this a ritual they always do?  What is the legal trouble and who else is involved?  Why are they in a bus stop, with neither of them driving?  How are the other people at the lunch counter responding?  What is their back yard like?  Where exactly is this river?  Each answer breeds new questions, with new answers ... meaning that as the creator of the situation, it is your responsibility to ASK the questions and to ANSWER the questions.

If you cannot think of questions to ask, this is a failing on your part and you will never understand DMing.  Every game the player will pepper you with questions.  There are zombies in the room, you say.  Boom, questions.  You've got to move ahead of the players here; you've got to ask their questions before they do, or you'll find yourself facing Lexent, asking a question you've failed to answer.  And if you can't answer, you've failed again.  If you can't answer the questions the player's ask with style, then you're really a lost duck.

So you've got to think.  You're sitting at a bus stop, waiting for a bus, or you're at a lunch counter.  Don't be bored.  Who else might have been waiting at this same bus stop a hour ago?  How was this lunch counter started as a business?  Don't ask others!  Invent a reason.  Invent any reason, so long as you can work yourself through the intricate details of the bus rider's clothing, job, destination, belief system, whatever will make that person interesting.  Figure out how the diner started without help; imagine where the owner came from, how the money was obtained, what the motivation was and so on.  Build the frame in your mind so tight that if someone else were to ask a question about this diner, you'd shoot back an answer so fast that they'd believe you really knew.

THIS is DMing.  I'm building a world that exists, sort of, except it doesn't really exist, right?  There's no dungeon like this in Norway.  There are no rooms, no skeletons, no piles of furniture or dessicated inedible food.  There's no logic to the lair's design except the logic I invent; and that logic has to be sound enough that when a player asks a question about it, I have an answer that makes the player pause, think, nod, and move onto the next question.  Maybe I'm caught by a really odd question; that happens.  In which case, I have to go through the particulars of the dungeon, puzzle out what would be a GOOD reason, build a few sentences in my head and then trot the reason out for my players.  Remember, I've had a long, long time to think about this dungeon, and I know everything that's here.  The players are just tourists.  They don't even know there are skeletons behind the next door.  Answering their questions ought to be child's play for me — so long as I've given the problem the thought it deserves.

Consider.  I've been running this game world for 35 years.  It's not just a dungeon, it's the village of Treborg nearby, and the fjord that's next to Treborg, and the city of Stavanger on the other side of the Fjord, and the kingdom of Norway, and a bunch of other kingdoms nearby, plus the North Sea and the British Isles and Denmark, with Germany and France and Spain ... hey, it is a really, really big world, see?  There's no blueprint.  It is me, in my game world, thinking about different places, and what I would do if the players went to Picardy, or Sterlingshire, or Pomerania, or Palestine and Gujarat and Mongkawng.  It's me playing my fingers over the game map and the people, the customs, the ideals, the political struggles, the panorama of history, the habits of human beings, the cruelty, the mistrust between strangers, the literature I've read since childhood, and a million other details I won't list here.  It's my being in LOVE with my game world, and wanting to play with it in my head, all the time ... not according to some reverse engineered game plan that makes complicated modules, but looking at a piece of the earth, say, the desert south of Biskra in modern Algeria, and deciding, if there was an adventure to be found in this place, this climate, between these people, with their culture, etcetera, what would it be?  I'm not inventing something — or buying something — and then plunking it down in Biskra, like virtually every DM in the world does.  No.  I'm reading books about Biskra, and the desert, and the people, and asking questions ... and then answering them, because no one else will.  I'm answering questions that I know the players are going to ask, when they go there and things start happening.

Stop.  Looking.  For.  Shortcuts.

There aren't any.  Your world won't get better if you invent better stories, add more magic, remove classes, fix the combat system, write better modules or do any of the other hundreds of things you've been thinking you ought to do.  Your world will get better when you KNOW your world better than you imagine right now that you could; and much, much better than the players will know it; because you've learned to constantly ask questions about what your world is all about and you've learned how to answer those questions with really, really good answers.