Gardening

After 41 years, were I a gardener, I'd be well past planting things and watching them grow.  I'd be well past relying upon store-bought dirt to grow my flowers, well past buying someone else's seeds, well past relying on the corner hardware store's garden shears.  There'd be a lot I could say about soils and fertilizers; about species and forms of blight; or about tools, bees and such.  For if gardening coupled with writing was my passion, I'd have a blog that outlined all this in phenomenal depth, delving into everything from geology to genetics.  Because after awhile, growing flowers isn't enough.  We want to grow better flowers, or flowers that are harder to grow; we want to invest ourselves totally into the science of what we're doing.  We want to get serious.

My actual flower-growing ability

Alas, I'm not a gardener.  I'm a D&D player ... something with far less cachet.  Yet the rest holds true.  I'm not interested in advice that promotes "Let the players have fun."  This is equivalent to advice like, "Plant the flowers in soil."  Of course it's true.  We can do better.

With this recent post, I said in passing that the players acted as a "company," deciding their goals — and that "I cause the game setting to give way to the party's designs or to push back with obstacles."  Fine.  What does that mean?

Combing through my files, I stumbled across this very old link to ChicagoWiz's blog back in 2011; he's breaking JB's balls, as I'm am want to do occasionally, which only proves that we've been around an indecently long time.  The whole page is worth a read, suggestive of a bygone day when people on the internet really felt that things could be discussed and pulled apart, with the expectation of finding an answer.  Ah, salad days.

Let's put most of the discussion aside, though it's relevant as a background, and deal with this single point introduced by JB:

"It requires a crap-ton of energy on the DM's part to keep the campaign world living/breathing/evolving/resolving as the PCs podunk around the imaginary countryside."

Coincidentally, JB's been writing a series of posts on imagination this week, which lend a meaningful nuance to the use of the term "imaginary" in this quote.  Presuming that JB's instincts have accurately endured for these past ten years, he's not talking here of merely "making shit up."  Here, the deeper, traditional meaning of imagination is in play, the sort that led C.S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkein to build complex, structured realms that presented as real to the mind's eye.

Plainly, this overtone is lost on the vanilla-some discharge we can expect from James Maliszewski, who writes,

"Really? Maybe I'm weird, but I've found just the opposite. A sandbox campaign demands a lot less energy on my part than do other styles of campaigns. It's true I have to be able to think on my feet and improvise when necessary, but that's what having lots of random tables at the ready is for!  I don't why sandboxes are so often portrayed as so difficult and time-consuming to run, because they're not. I'm lazy by nature; if they demanded as much of me as some suggest, I wouldn't run my campaign as a sandbox."

Gosh darn, I'm just going to say it.  If there's one thing Maliszewski can do, it's plant flowers in dirt.  He's unsurpassed in such skill sets.

ChicagoWiz's take more or less agrees; and with ten years of research and writing, he's managed to produce some truly boring helpful guides for DMs who want to do things super-simply.  Unlike, say, any of the writers mentioned above who spent a "crap-ton of energy" producing massive volumes of work that are utterly, unquestionably significant.  For those who feel their game worlds "improve" with less work or emphasis on design, I direct them to the empty shelves displaying the genius work of a would-be writers who disliked the time needed to research or edit their own work.

'Course, JB gives no indication that he intends to give that energy; his post is more about why he doesn't need to, or want to, or that he's not particularly good at it.  In 10 years of reading JB, he's tried to encourage himself otherwise, but it's fair to say he's not there ... yet.

My chief contention with this argument is the word "energy."  The word implies negativity, as in, "I haven't the energy for that."  It speaks of forcing ourselves to do something, which maybe we recognize needs to be done but which we rather not do now, or which we'd prefer someone else did.  It's a strange way to speak about one's passion ... usually, as I described at the top of this post, we can't restrain ourselves from doing things we love.  It's a beautiful morning and we rush through the household chores so we can hurl ourselves into the garden with shears and soil knives, delighting in the opportunity to get dirty and become intoxicated among roses and orchids.  To an outsider, sure, it looks like "energy" ... but to the absorbed floriculturalist, the time spent is a drug, an experience that obliterates one's sense of time.

Many's a time I sank into a project with my first cup of coffee in the morning, only to notice by-and-by that the sun had set.  If ChicagoWiz, Maliszewski or JB were in the room with me, looking over my shoulder, no doubt they'd have been astounded at the unrelieved colourlessness of the work they watched me do in designing my game, puzzled at why anyone would plunge such dreary effort into something that can be done "on their feet."

Of course, the results can't be done on their feet.  I dare any of them to produce an 80-item menu of carefully described treats and intriguing dishes in a few minutes of game-time; or to recieve any real interest after the fact of them doing it, since the results would have next to no impact on the players.  As DMs, we do concoct moments of interest by the seat of our pants.  I do it all the time, at least half a dozen times a session.  But I also have a bag of holding deep enough to swallow the party anytime I want to slip the drawstring ... in case I want to invent a moment the players will remember the rest of their lives.

To come 'round again to having the game setting give way or push back against the player's designs, IF we try to do this by the seat of our pants, we will fuck it up.  This is the fundamental bedrock of JB's position on the whole matter, one that's utterly misunderstood by ChicagoWiz and others ... but understood perfectly by one commentor, The Bane.  As he says,

I wanted a chronological plot of time - an epic continuios story. I thought the only way to get that was through a well developed setting and predefined plot. Then I began studying on sandboxes.  When I /thought/ I had it, I tried it out as prescribed. Epic failure. I studied some more and off I went, armed with guidance. Epic fail. This went on until I got tired of losing players, which is painful in this day and age to find more, and went back to, "No shit, here you are and this is what you have to do..." tactics.

DMs try for what I'm saying I do normally (and I haven't said yet what that is), learning their lesson.  They learn to go back to the modules.  They think initially they can do it.  They see what their neighbour can do with roses and zinnias, so they buy plants, they set out neat rows, they purchase all the best tools and they work very hard all summer long ... and the results are AWFUL.  So they learn their lesson.  "I'm not a gardener," they say.  "I'm not cut out for it."  And they're right.  Oh, not for the reasons they think.  The results are bad because they don't know what they're doing.  They don't know anything about flowers or soil, or very little.  All they can think of is the result they want; whereas  actual gardeners are thinking about how much they love gardening.

Designing my world, I'm not thinking about what the players will think!  Who gives a crap if they want to go to Spitsbergen?  My game has steaming jungles, barren plains, people crushed together on narrow streets, spectacular palaces, offal dumps.  I don't give a damn where the players want to go.  There's no particular place I think is better than any other place.  I just want to run the fucking game.

Because I love it all, when I'm thinking, "How is the world going to give way or push back against this idea of the players?" — I have nothing invested in whether they win or lose.  I don't care either way.  If the idea makes use of the game's rules, the design of the various bits and pieces I've built into the world's structure, in a manner that reflects how a similar idea would actually work in the real world, I consider what dice should be rolled, what the probability on those dice ought to be, and decide while taking a walk or during a soak in the tub what labels belong on the world's roulette wheel to the extent of my imagination.  Then I roll, or wait to do it in front of the players, often telling them in advance what the results might be prior to the dice hitting the table ... and then I run the version the dice pick.

This gets pretty damn complicated.  And we'll get into that, with an example, in the next post.  I felt this post was needed to hammer out some principles of "sandbox" that I follow:

1) no part of the sandbox is intrinsically "better" or "more important" than any other part.

2) my first challenge as a DM is to be inventive with all the scenarios that MIGHT be, and then indifferent to the scenario that actually occurs.

3) my second challenge is to provide such depth of texture, intricacy and tension that's humanly possible, once I know which scenario I'm running.

I rise to these challenges because I have not spent one summer trying to garden like the floriculturalist up the street for one summer.  I've done this for all the summers.