Appropriate, Proportional

The content of the last post relates to a much earlier post about meaning-making.  Investigating the concept of what happens when things "pop into my head," led me to search for "epiphany" on wikipedia, then situation awareness and then sensemaking ... which meant looking up the study by Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, which is here.  See, we're not stumbling around in the dark. When we want answers for how something happens, we need only look.

"Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing. Viewed as a significant process of organizing, sensemaking unfolds as a sequence in which people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing circumstances from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively, while enacting more or less order into those ongoing circumstances."

Weick et al might as well be talking about D&D.  They go on to say explicitly, "The emerging picture is one of sensemaking as a process that is ongoing, instrumental, subtle, swift, social, and easily taken for granted."  There's the player's response to the DM describing something in a nutshell.  The study tells us that "the first question of sensemaking is 'What's going on here?,'" and "the second, 'what do I do next?'"  Again, straight D&D.  As DMs, the weight is on us to answer these questions: a. knowing what's going on and the far harder b., what happens when the players do what they do.

Remember that when DMs are watching and listening to the players, we too are making sense by determining what's going on and then deciding what we're going to do next.  The players are making as much of a struggle for us as we are making for them ... only in our case, we have all the power.  If we don't like what's going on, we can snap our fingers and have the roof cave in.

This is known as cheating.

Good DMing means that we take the player's choice of action and create an appropriate, proportional response.  That is, the circumstances remain within a framework of the players expectations that they accept as believable ... which in turn gives the players a sense that they have a reasonable amount of control over what's happening to them from minute to minute of gaming.  Break that plausibility and you break the players's trust ... which in turn will cause players to treat your game as something that doesn't really matter anyway, since they have no real control, which leads to the players goofing off and making jokes, breaking the mood as often as they like because "Hey, when we try to play seriously, you just fuck us over."

This may not manifest itself consciously ... but it sure does responsively, as each time a player tries to invest in the game they get the game's metaphorical door slammed in their face.  As a DM, you may think it was a very clever stunt you pulled, having the roof cave in at just that moment; that it was really good for the "story" ... and that the players sure had a tough time extricating themselves, with plenty of mayhem and momentum, making it a really good game, right?  Yeah ... except that the player was trying to do a particular thing when you stepped in and did your DM Shuffle, making the doing of that thing obsolete, leaving the player to think, "Why do I even try?"

When the players have already started to invest in something, that is the moment for DMs to put their plans aside and invest in the players' investment.  The players want to do this?  Put your shit on a shelf and help the players do that.  Put obstacles in their way and make it a struggle, but HELP them get to the end of THEIR path.  They're making sense of your world ... they're deciding what they want to do.  Be deliberate about not deciding what they want to do for them.

Which brings me back to what I was saying about DMs making game worlds without concern for what the players might want.  I posited a DM saying, "Once the players see this, they'll be able to do THIS ..."  I don't think this is a strawman.  I see DMs talking about their game all the time in these terms.  I see people writing endless discriptions of modules with this very sentiment in mind.  "I want to run the players in this adventure," goes the DM.  It's always implied that the players will "love it" because, as the DM thinks, "I did."  We hear DMs saying all the time, "I love running this module," because they've shoved it down the throats of many a party.  To which said DMs would respond, "I did run it and they DID love it."  Uh huh.  Compared to what?  How many of these "lovers" have had D&D given to them in any other way?  And how many of them have codified themselves so they can't play except according to the box they know?

JB later explained that he was writing somnambulistically in the early morning, implying he wasn't responsible, but he explained that,

"You're like the guy who says, 'Hey, I have a car ... I could drive from Calgary to Tierra del Fuego.  I've always wanted to see penguins in their natural habitat.'  And then you do it."

After three million words, I should think at least my regular readers would understand me a bit better.  The above is inaccurate.  The actual description is that I'm the guy who says, "If a player wanted to drive from Calgary to Tierra del Fuego, they'd need a damn good car, one that was reliable, one that didn't let them down.  I'm going to build them that car; it's going to be the car of their dreams and once they're behind the wheel, it won't matter where they want to drive — because this car will get them to the moon if they want."

I'm not the driver.  I'm the manufacturer.

I want the players to identify what matters to them; to interpret the events in their own way; to consider what they've done already and how that influences what they want to do; to enact their plans, and to build their own narrative accounts; to do this socially, with other players who support them; to do this continuously, for long, long periods, not just a running or two; to develop a larger sense of what D&D playing is to them, to stretch themselves towards even larger goals; and to provide them an equivocal world with depth, people with shifting identities and the freedom to believe what they want to believe, because it helps them find the game they're looking for, not the one I want.

While I get to watch and answer questions.