Sunday, August 1, 2021

Writing

A party joining together in D&D collaborating on goals and objectives will traditionally sort themselves according to their class.  Like any entity wishing to get something done, the players will view their particular class in terms of the "role" they play ... and that role is almost always defined by familiar and often inflexible standards.  A fighter fights a bold forward action; a mage stands behind the fighter and casts spells; the cleric fights a little and heals the party; a thief circumnavigates the enemy and looks for opportunities to attack from the rear, or goes for the enemy's baggage.  If we set up a standard encounter with different groups of experienced D&D players, we'll watch them play out these parts over and over, with some variation but yet conventionally.'

As a result, the single action and trait of the character class becomes exaggerated amongst players who look to create a persona for the character.  Flanderization describes how this happens in television shows with long runs; as the site explains:

"Ned Flanders, who was originally depicted as a friendly, generous Christian neighbor and a model father, husband and citizen ... became increasingly obsessively religious to the point where he embodied almost every negative stereotype of the god-fearing, bible-thumping American Christian evangelist."


Over the years with D&D, every thief is played as the Grey Mouser, every mage is Gandalf, every fighter is the Hulk, every cleric is Father Mulcahy, every elf is Legolas, every dwarf is Gimli, every halfling is Bilbo and so on.  By and large, players enjoy slipping on these roles like suits of emotional armour.  It's what's expected.  The roles don't require a great deal of "role-play" or creativity.  There's no troublesome nuance to get in the way of game success and generating experience, such as occurs with those players who deviate considerably with the creation of annoying, obstructionist rules of behaviour, such as refusing to enter a town, or insisting they won't ride a horse under any circumstances, or portraying themselves with tourette syndrome.

These "character flaws" are often sold as "creating a unique character," but in reality they're just a different symptom of Flanderization, in which every meeting has to start with "Hi diddly ho, neighborino."  They're not persona, they're tics — sudden twitches, movements or sounds that inserted into the players behaviour in lieu of real individualism.  Confronted by such displays of shallow pretense, most genre-savvy players have retreated to the Legolas/Gimle/Bilbo model.  At least it isn't annoying.

Unfortunately, we're still talking about personalities designed for supporting characters or pulp literature, where the character is designed to advance the plot and NOT especially to promote self-examination or broad ranges of thinking, feeling or behaving.  As such, if the player insists on expressing their fighter as nothing but a hammer looking for the next perpetual nail, the DM has little choice but to provide nails.  Everything that isn't a nail will be treated as one ... and this will mean that however innovative the DM might hope to be with his or her campaign, in short order it will become a sad reflection of the same tiresome tropes repeated ad nauseum.  For those without a grounding in Latin, my recently employed grammarian describes this as eventually vomiting on our shoes.

Unfortunately, there's little a DM can do.  Players are notoriously stubborn in their enthusiasm for ignoring the game as an exploration beyond the satisfaction of their baser instincts.  "Hulk smash," or some equivalency, becomes the battle cry of the one player who proceeds to ruin not only the experience of everyone present, but the self-experience of the player as well, since nothing is achieved from running to running that hasn't been achieved already.  In effect, the battle cry in the D&D setting becomes the equivalency of those folks who work to make money to buy enough drugs to make them high until they have to work again ... who then wonder how they got to be 40.

What's particularly strange is how some players will start out with a bold new desire to invent a resourceful, out of the ordinary character — only to become increasingly dispossed by the campaign, or perhaps more comfortable in it, so that the bits and pieces of blue-sky thinking are flanderized exactly as it occurs in serial literature.  The reason why we have flanderization is because writers run out of ideas ... and because it is safest to produce work that relies on things that have worked in the past than to risk creating something new that might fall flat on its face and be hated.  The voices of the public dictated what parts of Ned Flanders character was found funny; and the writers pursued those parts, because writers enjoy being liked.  Unfortunately, those parts eventually became the whole character ... which in turn became a zombie-like shambling assemblage of crap and tiresome phrases that few liked — and those few fell into the categories of "the moron" or persons with an intense need to viscerally experience their real-life neighbor vilified weekly on television.

D&D players aren't generally writers.  This means they run out of ideas very, very quickly, often by the end of the first session.  After this, like all writers, they steal.  Unlike writers, however, players tend to have less than a score of sources to steal from.  After Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel, Stranger Things, Dragonlance and the Witcher have been plundered for their genius, there's not much left.  And let's be honest: if we threw something as pedestrian and pulpy as Mickey Spillane at them in the hopes of expanding their repetoire, they wouldn't know how to translate.  By and large, unfortunately, as DMs we're stuck with the stock range of titles most players manage to consume between grade school, slack jobs and video games.

I don't have a solution for this problem except, perhaps, shame.  It's up to the reader, of course, but I feel most players are unconscious regarding the tropes and recurrent memes they spew in moments of innovative crisis.  Like TV writers, when they latch onto a really, really good idea in their minds, it takes someone else to point out the story idea they've pitched ran for five seasons as Breaking Bad.  And their other idea ran for six seasons as Oz.  No wonder they sounded like such good ideas that night we sat around brainstorming while polishing off two bottles of Jack.

Dry writers make this mistake all the time.

So, when the player acts like the Hulk, mock him (it's always a guy).  When he shouts, "I slaughter them!" at a really stupid moment in the campaign, shout back, using the character's name, "TOKUR SMASH!"  Then stand up, hit your table, walk around the space and pretend to be the hulk, calling yourself Tokur or whatever the character's name is and put on a show.  Then sit down, return to normal and tell the player in an ordinary voice that he can "roll to hit."

Two or three displays like that will shake the player's perspective.

I promise.

12 comments:

  1. Of course, there's always the danger the player will start acting like the hulk as part of their role-play. Everything IS a risk.

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  2. Ah...and here I thought you were going to talk about shaming DMs for THEIR lack of ability to come up with better ideas.

    I'm not sure I've had an issue with Flanderized PCs...not for a long, long time anyway (that I can remember). I'm going to have to think about that one.

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  3. JB,

    I believe it is a "stealth problem" ... the sort you shrug off because it seems so completely normal there's no reason to question it. Fighters behaving like fighters? What do you expect?

    The headstrong way people have of going about D&D, either playing or DMing, reminds me of Oregon Governor Tom McCall, who when proposing to fix Portland's horrific freeway boondoggle of the 40s, said,

    "Some highway engineershave a mentality ... that would run an eight-lane freeway through the Taj Mahal."

    You cannot "come up with better ideas" when the players are going to scratch their heads and ask, "I don't get this; what part of it do I kill?"

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  4. By less than amazing coincidence, My girlfriend's long time motto for her fighter has been, "Gargg Smash!"

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  5. Drawing from experience, I would suggest an other solution : putting players in charge of one or several dependants, like a child, or helpless villagers, or even a dog, and then in a situation where behaving on autopilot, while possible, would certainly hurt those significant NPC. Responsibilities, in D&D as in real life, make many people grow up quickly.

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  6. Some this morning have expressed their concern that I am "shaming" my players, and how wrong that is.

    Just to be clear. Not only will I shame my players if they participate in my game in a lazy, tiresome and vomit-inducing fashion, I will also make effort to shame my readers if they allow their players to act that way.

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  7. Many people today seem to have forgotten that shame, carefully and appropriately applied, is a powerful corrective action in society.

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  8. Joey,

    That's because the internet has taught everyone to use it as an indifferent cudgel. One of the comments that failed moderation had as its argument that I should feel shame for insisting others should feel shame. Recursiveness indeed!

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  9. I guess I have had a bit of a different experience with this. Yes, we have the standard stock people who come in and play the traditional set... but for the most part, because the groups I play in tend to have more varied backgrounds in terms of what they read, watch, or enjoy... we get a lot of variations.

    Take for example a recent game that I got started once the restrictions came up. Everyone got the world document that contained languages, regional history, the general political state of the region, and the area they were going to start in with the suggestion that they get characters at least researched for session 0.

    What we got was four people who made rogues and a cleric.

    We didn't get four 'The Grey Mouser'; we got a spy master rogue who was more focused on gathering information and investigation, a rogue who was I think wanted to be a monk but liked the idea of one good hit over a flurry of strikes (he wanted to grapple everything), a poison master who is good at disguises, and a sniper who is pretty solid at pick pocketing.

    If I was a proper GM, I should have demanded a party balance or a diversity of classes but they all decided independently this is what they wanted and after a good laugh, decided that they were going to try to explore the world as a group of rogues and their holy friend.

    But because they had a greater depth of experience in terms of books, movies, and media they have consumed outside of just the stock selection of, as you put it, 'Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel, Stranger Things, Dragonlance and the Witcher', they were able to do a lot more.

    And because I as a GM don't just pull from that limited data set, my own materials being quite extensive, they suddenly felt the freedom of being able to break out of the enforced mold that most labor under. Seems players get excited when they are allowed to get a bit more wild than just the old fashion Conan the Barbarian/Lord of the Rings ideal that many cling to like a life vest.

    But yes, I do shame those who come to my table with a 'traditional' mindset and cliche roles... unless they are going to put an interesting twist on said concept.

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  10. Wow, Blaine, it's been ages! Good to hear from you again; I trust you're well and healthy.

    I too have a different experience with the norm. I also have players with a wider sense of the dramatic, who seek greater variation, so that my experiences have mirrored yours. I see no reason why a party should not include four thieves. I don't remember anyone commenting on the film Ocean's Eleven with, "They're all thieves! How is it possible for them to get anything done? What are they going to do if they get in a fight?" No, it's a given that smart, capable people, whatever their profession, are complicated, multi-talented, flexible and able to apply their gifts to solve a problem with finesse, forethought and innovation.

    The insistence on party balance as a strategy is the "rotary phone" of gaming; it was invented about the time of rotary phones and those who cling to it are game luddites, worthy of as much praise as the fellow who hasn't replaced his phone since 1976.

    You and I are different, Blaine ... but I write these posts so that we will not be alone in the world.

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  11. I remember quite a bit of struggle with this in the online campaign. The thing I don't remember is any really productive conversations about it. My point being I don't think shame really works for you... If you couldn't come to a shared understanding of what game you were playing with people who had access to years of your writing on the subject, how do you think shame would go with other DMs? I haven't reread any of that in years, so it's possible that you remember it differently. I haven't been around for a long time, so I can't speak with authority on your audience, but I remember it being composed of people similarly tired of the game devolving into the same tired mess.
    Your approach strikes me as panning for gold -- you're providing us better techniques to kick aside the gravel. What I want though, is ideas for how to build a satisfying game with the players I have.

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  12. Shame couldn't work with the online campaigns because they're ONLINE. You're forgetting the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory You wouldn't believe the nightmare of shame I could put you through face-to-face if I had the power of tone, facial expression, body language, a space under my control that you inhabited and a game-level quality about ten times better than anything you experienced online.

    Twenty thousand hours of DMing, prior to entering the internet, taught me that intimidation is the DM's friend ... and that the privilege of this intimidation is directly proportional to the quality of one's game. Shitcock + cruddy game? Total intimidation/shame failure. Passionately intense DM fanatic + truly exceptional game? Dial to 11.

    You've never experienced my game, Max. And by extension, you've never actually experienced ME. If you felt any richness from my text-driven game, imagine what a force of nature I am in person.

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