Player Character Starting Money - I

Amy: It is just a rock.

Chris: No, it's not just a rock.

Amy: No?

Chris: No. It's forty-two pounds of polished granite, with a bevelled underbelly; and a handle a human being can hold. And it may have no practical purpose in and of itself, but it is a repository of human possibility and if it's handled just right, it will exact a kind of poetry.  For ten years, I've drilled for oil in 93 countries, five different continents, and not once have I done anything to equal the grace of a well thrown rock sliding down a sheet. Not once.

 — Men with Brooms

Most often, the belittlement of D&D frustrates me into a dark place.  The line in the film above to the belittlement of curling is said gently, kindly, with love; but I have been apt to write acerbically to the same argument.  D&D is not just a game.  Any practical purpose it may serve may be minimized or mocked ... but to my mind it is a repository of human possibility.  If handled just right, it is poetry.  If I feel an acute, burning fury from moment to moment when reading the phrasings other people use, it is in the clanging of their metre ... the desecration of rhythm, form and beauty.  The inapt insistence on understating, soft-pedalling, depreciating or deflating the game to a size and strain that can't impune their tragic egos.

Gygax writes on the bottom of page 25 of the DMG that it's important to give the player characters little money because we must "prevent the game from becoming too easy."  This, because he sees a scenario where the players will be able to wholly purchase all the tools they need to make the dungeon or the adventure "too easy" ... to which I say, phooey.

Don't tighten the purse.  Raise the fucking bar.

The United States has all the wealth of Mammon with which to settle matters between Isreal and Palestine, or Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan and India ... and guess what: there's not enough money in the universe.  If the problems we rely upon to make our adventures difficult can be solved with coin, then the problems aren't that difficult.  They're not that imaginative.  But they fit right inside the tiny mind of most D&D game designers.

My sympathies for those Gentle Readers feel a bit insulted by that.  I assume you're not paying me to pat you on the head; or to tell you that the same undead acculturations of 40 years of resurrecting long-dead game design content is okey-doke.

The nice comforting thing about dungeons as they usually manifest is their lovely straight-forwardness.  Oh, sure, there's a bit of mystery to break up the fights; and granted, you can always choose to go through the dungeon by the left-hand door and not the right.  But we are speaking of a linear, straight-line process whereby you meet an obstacle, surpass the obstacle, meet another obstacle, surpass that, then rinse, then repeat.  This ... isn't problem-solving.  This is puzzle-solving.  As far as D&D goes, gaming like this is as interesting as pouring out puzzle pieces and six people spending the evening putting it together.

Not a hideous evening.  Company, drinks, jokes, gossip, stories, dopamine ... not the worst evening I've had.  But jeebs ... D&D can be soooooo much more.  If it's handled just right.

Problems get interesting when there are no definite solutions; where that is the case even when a resolution has been met.  Where, when the situation arises again, there's reason to think that maybe, just maybe, though the first essay produced a resolution, it wasn't the best resolution.  The best problems are those that, whether we've committed ourselves or not, we are still taking apart the pieces and putting them back together again ... because there is no set way to put those pieces together.  Depending on how they're arranged, the pieces change shape.  And, more importantly, no matter how many ways we put them together, or how they change, we'll never be sure we did right.

I see DMs writing descriptions of how they're going to build their game worlds, and how they're going to put the pieces together, and what matters to them ... but NONE of these DMs ever write, "And once the players see this, they'll be able to do THIS ..."  For these DMs, there are no players.  The DM is building a puzzle; and crafting the pieces; and it is inherently implied that the players will have fun putting the pieces together.  So why talk about it?  Why discuss what the players will do?  Or what options they're being given?  They're being given the option to play.  That's enough for them. 

"I'm certainly not going to spend twenty blog posts writing about their experience possibilities in my new game world.  No, no, I'm going to spend the next twenty posts talking about my cleverness, and the reasons why I've decided to be clever in just this way, and why other people should understand how damned clever I am."

I love my game world and I talk about it a lot but please let's understand: the players need and want a game world that is more interesting than puzzle play.  And so we're clear, I'm counting a set-up where they enter a room and kill monsters as a PUZZLE.  I'll include that kind of play in my world — obviously I will, because my players online are participating in that now.  I won't tell them not to kill monsters, and I will put the monsters in front of them for as long as that's what they want to do.  Running an open game demands that I accede to that request.

But when the player stops one day and says aloud, "Hey, guys ... you ever think about why we even do this?" ... my answer is not going to be, "because that's how the game is played."

My answer is, "You don't actually have to."

Players can choose a different path.  First, however, they'd have to imagine a different path.

That's a problem.  And that problem has no specific solution.  It can't be solved entirely with money; it can't be solved by finding all the pieces and miraculously putting together a puzzle.  It must be solved by stepping back, looking at the whole picture and realizing that the choices we make in life are not limited by "doing the right thing" or "doing the obvious thing."

"Trying something new" comes to mind.  Or "trying something impossible."  Though while a player might conceivably attempt something on these lines, you, me and the cheese knows the DM is going to squash it because the DM needs to minimize the game to a size and strain that he or she can manage.

And judging by the field ...

That ain't fucking much.