Company

We hate the word "company."

And for good reason.  This last year, 20+ years since Office Space laid out the shit that goes on every day in white collar business, we've been treated to corporations who treated COVID as a personal attack on their bottom line ... not a threat to actual human beings.  The "company" declared itself willing to bring about your death rather than allow quarantine, health measures or sensible behaviour where money was at stake.

So I am somewhat in the hole when suggesting that the word "company" is a better descriptor for an immersive game than the word "party."  I ask only that you hear me out.

"Company" has a positive connotation as well.  Company is the cure for loneliness.  "Good company" is what we call our friends and family.  The word originates in the bosom of society, friendship and intimacy, not in a spirit of people enslaved jointly under the lash of some tyrannical force.  Soldiers began to describe themselves as companies in the 12th century because they battled together, they protected each other, they helped each other and made each other laugh in the face of danger.  Companions are bread mates, people who eat together, who make a future together ... and who seek to perform or carry out an activity jointly.  It is from this last that the commercial sense derives, since gatherings of individuals would make a pact among themselves to participate in a venture of some kind — an ad-venture, from the prefix meaning "to" or "towards" — in which they'd share each other's burdens and gain from each other's talents.  "Forming a company" meant exactly this.

Consider an example in the modern sense: a group of individuals decide to form a "band."  They each have a different skill set, a different personality, but they have a common goal: to produce music and achieve success, variously described as gaining fame, adoration, money and The Stones-like influence of personality.  So they agree to play together; and they agree on what kind of music to play.  Thereafter, a degree of commitment is necessary — to practice, to make concessions to others in the band, to agree to show up to gigs and to sustain each other in hard times.  A good band needs an amazing amount of commitment.  The members must be willing to sacrifice their time with other people.  They must "get over themselves"  — which some achieve for awhile and then, not so much (the history of Jefferson Airplane/Starship comes to mind).  They must get over failing for a long, long time before success happens (see Fleetwood Mac).  Most of all, they must be good company for each other.  They must coordinate with each other.  The final product is a single product, in which everyone is a contributor to something greater than themselves as individuals.

Now, I propose a band because we might imagine, for a moment, that a group of D&D players are not a group of disparate, solitary participants in a board game, but a company of individuals who undertake to accomplish something greater than they could individually.  They meet together at the beginning of the campaign and instead of thinking, "Oo, I want to be a fighter," or "Oo, I want this bling!" — they think instead, what do WE want?  What can WE accomplish?

Usually, this is handed off to the DM, who acts the tyrant and rolls out the worksheet for the group, even handing out the character sheets and saying, "You're the fighter and you're the mage, and we're gonna take this dungeon today," like a boss running a corporation.

Whereupon the players act like good little worker drones, bowing their heads and answering, "Yes sirree boss, we're certainly gonna get on that fer you!"  They know their jobs, they do their jobs, they get paid for their jobs and everyone goes home after a good day's work.  Yippee.

We keep defining "sandbox" according to "what sort of game the DM runs."  In fact, a true sandbox is defined by what sort of game the players choose to play.  No matter what the DM says or does, no matter how much money has been spent on modules and shit, the players can gang together any time they want and say, "We're not doing that shit.  We're want to do this."

Ha!  A Marxist argument, yes?

No.

Because I'm not arguing that the players get together, submit demands to the DM and then the DM provides the sort of work load that satisfies the players.  No, no, no.  I'm arguing that the players QUIT THEIR JOBS, refuse to do the work the DM provides entirely, and forms a good, respectable capitalistic company whereby they set out to profit and share that profit among themselves.

How is that possible if the DM won't consent?  Plain truth: it isn't possible.  The DM doesn't only control the corporation, but the whole blasted government as well — and if the DM won't consent to another company setting up business in the DM's world, then that's that.

However, this exposes the DM's rigged approach to the game for what it is:  a bullshit arrangement designed to control the players in a DM-run rat maze.  Personally, when I learned that every DM was going to approach the game this way, I quit playing and began to exclusively DM: because if I couldn't play the way I wanted, at least I could make it possible for others.

The commitment I spoke of in an earlier post reaches fruition when the players set forth together as a unified company.  They roll and design their own character sheets, exactly as they want them, enjoying the process just as any self-employed individual enjoys setting up their venture.  They enjoy the roll of the dice, because a good roll for any member is a good roll for every member.  The experience gained by the company is shared, no matter whose character it accrues to, since every character is in it for the whole.  If the lead singer's voice carries the band to improbable heights, every band member enjoys the huge audience; every band member enjoys the money; and every band member receives respect, if not quite as much fame as the lead singer.  But fame is something that really only matters to outsiders.  Inside, it's really a different thing.

"The fame thing isn't really real, you know."

People forget that's the real message behind the "just a girl" speech.  Who would know better than Julia Roberts?  Even if she is speaking a line written by the well-known film-industry critic Richard Curtis.  When Roberts puts on her pants, she does them one leg at a time, just like you.

When a group of players work and fight as a company, the enormous strength, intelligence, spell power or whatever possessed by an individual isn't emblematic of the individual's "superiority."  That's the sort of shit that plagues workers in a DM's sweatshop campaign, who must find things to promote themselves over the group.  The wizard in a company knows where that power comes from; it comes from the others who provide a wall against the enemy, and rescue if that time comes.  By the time the campaign has stretched into its first four months, everyone has crashed at some point; everyone owes their lives to the others.  Like a rock band that has spent enough nights where the audience is the enemy, they have to love each other; each other are the only people they can really count on.  And if Grace is more famous than we are?  Hell, that's just the opinion of people who don't know.  Who weren't there.  They have no idea how many times the band members held each other, or went the distance for each other, or suffered pain for each other.  In the end, that's the stuff that matters to a band, or a company of fellows, or a "party."  Not how many fucking experience Jack got as opposed to Jill.

Which is perhaps why the "player balance" nonsense was so foreign to me as a DM when I first encountered it.  I'd been running for nearly 30 years, and had never had players demand a change in the rules to reflect their desire to be "equal" with other characters.  The idea was absurd.  The pursuit of the ideal has been as well, having successfully polluted two editions and the overall direction of the game.

Still, if the player has never had experience with this sort of game; if all they've ever known is the sweatshop; then it stands to reason that they'll promote what they know.  They make ridiculous arguments to me that just because their games aren't "deep," it doesn't mean they're "shallow."

Actually, yes, that's exactly what it means.  That's how words work.

It's also truth, for anyone who's been there, working for yourself is harder work than working for other people.  We work longer hours for less pay, and no one's there but the buyer to tell us that are work is any good.  When players act as a company, it can feel like a frustrating, thankless task for a long time — until one day the players find themselves in an unexpected position, facing four to one odds or greater, and find themselves kicking ass like a gangster.

It's a great feeling.  It's even better knowing that it's their feeling, bought and paid for.

Not a wage paid by a tyrant.