Noticing & Bracketing

Let's retreat and get back into thinking through a D&D game session while it is in progress.  My book How to Run was partly inspired by the situation awareness that fire-fighters manage while consuming huge information dumps from uncertain circumstances that are dangerous.  It may seem odd to compare fire fighting with running a D&D game, but honestly I've never found a parallel that so closely approximates my experience as a DM during the game.

It isn't just all the details I'm handling, as well as answering the players in turn as quickly as I can, in an accurate manner, taking into account that anything I say in this moment will be used by the players in the next moments to base their actions upon.  It is also that I accumulate a palpable stress level, one driven by needing to look up details from my preparations, concentrate to recall memories, while casting around for a particular die or holding a lot of different things in my head at one time.  In the hardest moments, I find myself getting into a locked state — realizing first that I'm stuck looking for something just before realizing that I've forgotten what I'm looking for.  Or I've forgotten the question I was asked.  Or I've forgotten who's done what, or what a player has just said they have in their hand or what spell they're casting.

Maybe this doesn't happen to some of my readers.  It happens to me a fair bit, perhaps because I'm pushing myself hard to make the answers to questions snap back as fast as the players ask, or to direct the game so that it moves quickly.  I've watched DMs who don't bother.  Me, sometimes I have to stand up to give myself room to expend the energy I'm channelling.  I expect I'll die someday in the middle of running a D&D game.  That would be an awesome way to enter Sto'Vo'Kor.

The moments where I start to fray around the edges are examples of tunnelling ... something everyone does when their stress hits a peak.  Which is how the fire-fighter connection enlightened me; fire-fighters, despite being under extraordinary amounts of stress, and danger, also experience tunnelling — which they train to overcome, so they can do their jobs effectively.  In the same way, I run my game table in a way that enables me to manage my stress, and thus I'm able to perform better during the game.  How to Run goes through all that.

[incidentally, that book is available on Amazon as well as Lulu; but just so the adventuresome reader knows, while the cost of the book varies, as Amazon changes their pricing back and forth constantly, I get more percentage of the sale if you buy the book from Lulu than if you buy it from Amazon, that takes a bigger cut; but hey, makes no difference, since from my perspective the book is written, I pay no overhead out of pocket and so all sales are free money]

The other day I linked a study on sensemaking that also addresses this training, or approach, which is entirely human and applies to everything we do.  I often get the argument, or hear it used as an argument, that total sandbox D&D has too many variables, too many possibilities, etcetera, for any person to actually manage it.  I also hear this argument used to justify a simplification of the rules, or the widespread use of DM fiat — because actually running the game without at least a little railroading is impossible.

The linked study addresses this, using the medical field rather than fire-fighting.  You can find the full paragraph on p.411:

"Sensemaking starts with chaos.  The nurse encounters 'a million things that go on' and the ongoing potential for 'clusters of things that go wrong' — part of an almost infinite stream of events and imputs that surround any organization actor ... the nurse's sensemaking does not begin 'de novo' [from the beginning; anew], but like all organizing occurs amidst a stream of potential antecedents and consequences.  Presumably within the 24-hour period surrounding the critical noticing, the nurse slept, awoke, prepared for work, observed and tended other babies, completed paper work and charts, drank coffee, spoke with doctors and fellow nurses, stared at an elevator door as she moved between hospital floors, and performed a variety of formal and impromptu observations.  All of these activities furnish a raw flow of activity from which she may or may not extract certain cues for closer attention.  During her routine activities, the nurse becomes aware of vital signs that are a variance with the 'normal demeanor of a recovering baby.  In response to the interruption, the nurse orients to the child and notices and brackets possible signs of trouble for closer attention."

Okay.  This may not seem immediately evident even to the context above.  The study goes on to explain that "bracketing" is the process of being guided by foregoing models of her experience with patients that she's acquired in her time as a nurse.  Habitually, she notices anything that doesn't fit with normal expected behaviour and brackets it; that is, calls attention to it in her mind, highlights it, sets it mentally aside from the other commonplace parts of her day, etcetera, so that this specific thing can get her attention.

If you've run a lot, particularly of a specific set of game rules, your chances of accumulating really solid models of expected behaviour increase exponentially.  The more often you change your core game rules, the more game genres you play, the more often you switch around, the more scattered your experiences as a DM will be with players reacting to specific rule sets.  I've been playing the same basic combat system as a DM since 1986; for 34 years.  I've seen the same ebb and flow, the same complicated sequences of players getting stunned, wounded, rallying back, getting separated and so on with lots of different people over a great deal of time.  When I run the system, it is like putting on a very, very comfortable coat that fits me so perfectly I can cease thinking about it, almost entirely ... which means it is like getting a cup of coffee or musing in the elevator is to the nurse.  During a game, even a complicated combat, I have lots of additional time to think and design in my head because I'm not fretting about how the combat system works.  Additionally, with long time players, they've seen the combat system function so often also, that they're not forced to puzzle it out either.  As such, we can run a battle with fifty pieces, even when the combat system is so complicated, because it isn't complicated TO US.  We've practiced using it.

It also means that if anything unusual happens, it's easy to notice it, just like the nurse above.  And here I don't means things like the players coming up with an innovation.  I mean stressed words in a sentence, a heightened reaction in a player, the suggestion of oncoming stress, the player becoming overly interested in a specific object or a new player deliberately making decisions that enables his or her character to avoid harm, while riding the coattails of others.  After a great deal of time playing, signs like these stick out like a sore thumb, where I can bracket them and wait to see if more information on that is forthcoming.  I can see players changing their habits, making more use of certain skills, communicating better with fellow players, getting comfortable in the game group and much, much more ... all important things for a DM to know if what matters is producing a GOOD GAME.

Because a good game is not found in the rules, or even in the way the rules are run, but in how much attention is paid to the reaction of the players to those rules, to the setting, to the ongoing stream of play and such.  IF you're spending all your time running some complicated new game setting that you invented just a month ago, or shifting which game you play from week to week, or which characters the players have, or any other random change that you're inserting into your game in order to "keep things fresh," what you're actually doing is blinding yourself to the incredible nuance that constantly bubbles under any group of people who spend a lot of time talking to each other.  Keeping things fresh is done by stirring things into this bubbling ... which is enormously helped by incorporating fixed variables into your game like the same rules, the same setting, the same player characters AND the same narrative flow.  By establishing these baselines for play, the DM's time and imagination is freed up for inserting additional, more complex ideas into the mix.

I believe I understood this intuitively up until a few days ago, but reading the study has woken me up to certain things I did instinctively and effectively ... and how to explain what those things were.  See, I'm learning also.

This evaluation obliterates the arguments made about how "complicated" it is to keep track of all these rules and uncertainties in what a player might do from moment to moment.  It also supports an argument I've repeatedly made that while D&D is multi-varied and far reaching, it isn't medicine or fire-fighting.  The nurse in the example above manages a tremendous amount of chaos as a daily part of her job ... which is possible because the forces around her job aren't aren't arbitrarily changing her tasks, or expectations, while she gets tremendous support from the other forces at work around her, to help her manage.  If DMs could realize that frivolously changing the rules or other aspects of the game, or running ten different games at one time, aren't helping them be better DMs, they might settle down, pick one game and one setting, and get good at that thing ... while simultaneously grounding the players in an experience that is ten times as imaginative while forsaking the shallow appeal of novelty for novelty's sake.