The Higher Goals

Much of the dispute I have with D&D stems from what goals are defined by the mainstream.  The value of the game has been vastly undersold since the 1970s.  It is as though someone invented railroading, and the only use, for which anyone could think to put it, was to make a little ride for the kiddies to sit on.

We are told variously that the goals are to "have fun," to "adventure," to "role-play" and other such short term ideas.  Marketing from the start has degraded D&D to a cute little activity shared by people around a table, like a board game — usually, featuring events that can be played out in a single session, with the characters having no more long-term importance than a racing car, a top hat or a thimble.

There is much, much more to the game.

The leading voices of the mob cherish Sesame Street level participation advice, such as "cooperation" is a better way to play.  Yes, I know, I learned this from Big Bird.  Yet the goals presented as achievable through genius-level immersion of this level are vague, unsketched and tainted by old saws about the judicial authority of adjudicators.  After nearly five decades of game play, we've hardly advanced game play from the goal of "getting to the end" of whatever adventure's being run.

The game provides us with indisputable concrete goals, but these are ignored or flately disdained as "impure" but numerous voices.  These are treasure, experience and preferred equipment — each of which lends itself to upgrading of one sort or another to make the player character more powerful.  The game structure of these things are repeatedly bypassed by providing free gear for pre-made characters, who also jump multiple levels rather than play their way forward — both of which either obliterate the need for money; in most campaigns, money is merely an exchange for better, more powerful gear.   Since most games last a single session, and most would-be campaigns fold after a few weeks, there's no reason not to dismiss these goals as unnecessary — particularly when getting to the end is all anyone cares for.

My game view is very different.  I feel that at the start, player characters should be given VERY little; that "the start" should happen only when the campaign is initiated, and should not be revisited again, ever if possible.  Campaigns should run for years, and the DM should responsibly attack that intention with a commitment that disallows alternative thinking.  Players should be chosen based on their commitment and not their availability.  Treasure, experience and choice equipment should be earned through play and never through convenience, or the desire to "play something new," on account of the player feeling so game savvy that they don't want to play any more characters below a given level or above it.

Moreover, I believe that wealth and character power, along with advetures and role-playing, are merely a means to an end, and not the end itself.  The end itself ought to be indeterminate and wholly in the hands of the PLAYER, unlike the course of single adventures where the end is in the hands of the DM.

In effect, "traditional" D&D, the sort promoted heavily by Gygax, Perkins, Mercer's crew and the general symbiosis of voices intent on keeping the game's design as crippled as possible, is argued to be a finite game.  Whereas the game I regularly present and carry forth in exactly the manner I've just described, is an infinite game.  There is no end; and therefore, no absolute last and final goal, except whatever happens to be reached on the day when I, the DM, am Dead, Incapacitated or — in the case of my online campaign — incapable of maintaining the 4-12 hours a week it requires to move the game along very, very slowly.  It takes me 12 hours in text to manage as much game as I can put together in about 90 minutes in face-to-face game play.

And still, I'm still there, swinging.  Because I don't think a D&D campaign should ever stop except for the other two reasons I've given.  And in this, I am in a very, very scarce minority.  Something in the neighbourhood of one-armed, left-handed pool-sharks successfully taking money from British sailors in Yemen.

An infinite game of the sort I describe possesses more than "immersion" or "problem-solving."  Very few things of this kind are infinite; and fewer persons vouching to run these things have the power to convince others that yes, there will be another game and yes, you can invest hard with your characters ambitions knowing there's a decent chance those ambitions will be realised.  This is key.  IF the DM cannot convey this direct and absolute formula, then no matter how complex, detailed, imaginative or wickedly fun the game is, human persons will not speculate in a future that may uncertainly collapse because the DM is suddenly bored with this genre, edition or the venture of role-play entirely.  And if so, game play WILL suffer for that lack of consignment.

Oh, there may be good games played short term.  And there may be long-term games that achieve some sort of relevancy, though the pall of quitting hangs over the campaign month-to-month.  But until the Dear Reader has played in a game that absolutely will be played without expectation of end, very little to nothing can be known of the depth of investment a player is prepared to make ... particularly as a creator.

With my last post, I expressed the hyperfocused state of my mind as I throw myself whole-hog into my game's design.  When I can offer players a game that doesn't stop, and maintain that game ad infinitum, that frees them to achieve a hyperfocused state of player participation that cannot be reached in the "traditional," paltry form of the game that is lauded so loudly by so many cheap voices.  When players know their "sandbox" won't be disturbed, they may work their will with it exactly as they do with the sandboxes of their personal lives.  ANY long-term plan is possible, in any field — with the understanding that any achievement that is made in the real world CAN ALSO be incorporated into the game world, and vice-versa.  What can be conceived as a strategy of success in the real world can be realized as a strategy in D&D ... meaning that players do not merely "play" in my game.

They flow.