When I can force myself to watch more than 30 seconds of something like Critical Role, I find the game's pacing and direction is excruciatingly passive. The process is this slow crawl into a scene where the characters listen to an NPCs performance, ask questions, glean a clue to the story and move onto the next scene. This seems a stylized version of the modules I see, where the characters crawl into a room, listen to the DMs patient description of the room, poke about, glean a bit of something from the space and move thence to the next room. Things are accepted as they are, while moments of excitement, where dice are rolled, are met clinically as the next thing that happens, and no more than that. Entering a room, fighting a monster and picking up afterwards play out with no more concern than standing at a streetcorner and waiting to be picked up by a bus. Everything is so carefully paced, like an Ellery Queen novel. The next move is always clear — having learned all they can from the apothecary, it is time to move onto the market; when matters at the market have been learned, it's time to load up an leave town, to seek the shrine. When the events at the shrine have played out, the next place to be seen is always perfectly obvious, because it is given to the players by the DM.
My games do not function like this at all. Passive players are frustrated because they don't know where to go. Not knowing where to go, they imagine I have a place in mind that I'm refusing to give them. I must be refusing, otherwise, they'd know. It never dawns that there is no place to go. Or rather, any place is fine. It doesn't matter. Unlike the standard format, where every event contributes to a single narrative, I have no single narrative.
Cliche: suppose the players enter an ordinary-looking village that happens to have a vampire resident. If this were a traditional adventure, each member of the village would possess a single clue, from which the players would put together the puzzle of what was happening, who was responsible and where the vampire's resting place is located. The adventure functions like a book or a movie; the outsiders progress from scene to scene, moving from the exposition to the rising action, meeting the climax and descending to the denouement. Standard storytelling.
If a vampire resided in a village in my game, the villagers would certainly be the last to know anything. There are tens of thousands of villages, in all sorts of locations, and vampires possess an exceptional intelligence. They would certainly pick a residence lacking in significant thinkers. If there were any, these would absolutely be the first to die. Moreover, an intelligent vampire wouldn't be spawning dozens of kin, which would be idiocy and a sure way to bring a vampire hunter from far away. No, there would be a gentle, quiet culling of the herd, from dozens of surrounding villages and roadways, using victims for a time and then getting rid of them.
Thus, if the players were to enter the village, there would be no expositional scenes at all. No one knows anything. If a few of them even recognized the disappearances, they would assign the blame to a dozen possibilities, with no one agreeing and no one having any clues to give. If the players knew a vampire was present, at best they'd have a map to throw darts at. They could start a house-to-house search ... but doing so would probably get them in trouble with the authorities and would certainly tell the vampire they were looking. People talk. Anything the players did would be observed and relayed; and either the vampire, or the one associate the vampire controls as a mind-slave, a la Renquist, would soon learn about it.
So, how to solve this? As a DM, not my problem. It's not. I'm not here to lead the party by the nose, telling them what to do. I'm not here to craft the exposition carefully like Agatha Christie. I'm here to make the village, plant the vampire, know where the vampire is planted and then describe things that happen once the players start taking actions. This isn't passive. If the players want to achieve anything, they must act.
Look. In a Poirot mystery, Miss Agatha has followed her dictum and worked backwards from knowing who the murderer is. Poirot appears on the scene, like he's supposed to. He's introduced to a finite number of characters, never more than 12, so he knows who to interview. The characters produce a finite number of scenes, or locations, so he knows where to go. Each scene or location has a specific collection of things which Poirot never fails to find. From this, in true Miss Agatha style, Poirot conveniently confronts everyone, suddenly introducing clues and information never mentioned until they come out of his mouth, obviously given to him by the Dungeon Mistress, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a neat bundle.
This is not remotely realistic or, in fact, believable. You may find this fare to your liking, but personally to me, it smells. In any case, D&D is not a mystery or any kind of novel. It's a game world. An infinite game world. In it, while Poirot is solving the mystery, he finds that half the suspects can't be found. He goes to the locations they describe and finds next to nothing. The police are looking for the probable murderer — but so far, have come up empty. Poirot has no proof, no hard evidence, just a tiny pile of either facts or lies ... and so he has to write it out in a dull report, put the few bits of evidence he's located into a plastic bag, file it, and wait for the next case. Because that's how it actually works.
The players either come to their senses and leave the village, recognizing they're not ready to go one-on-one against a vampire. Or ... they take stock of themselves, figure maybe they're tough enough, expect a full-on press from the vampire and whatever minions there might be — and make sure the vampire knows they're coming. It's either that, or they think of something else. I don't know what that might be. It's not my job to know.
It's MY job that when the players leave the village, there's something happening in the next town. Something else. It's MY job that wherever they go, what they see and learn is believable and fluid. But that's it. I'm under no obligation to make each element of the campaign fit together logically ... no more than the real world does. You may go to Walmart and watch a fistfight take place there; but you wouldn't expect to walk over to Starbucks and have the barista tell you what the fistfight was about. That would be really freaky! You would have trouble believing something like that. And if you left Starbucks, got in your car and one of the fist-fighters started hammering on your window, you would not roll the thing down and learn what they had to say. That would be lunacy. But shit happens like this in game adventures all the time, and players just shrug and assume it's how the game is played.
It's a crutch. It helps make a complicated environment seem small and two-dimensional. Easy to comprehend. Not threatening. Because clearly, whatever happens next was meant to happen. The barista was meant to explain the fight to you. The fellow knocking on your driver-side window has important information to tell you about the adventure. You know, the one you're on. Because, you know you're on an adventure. It's the lens through which you see everything.
But I want to kick that crutch out from under you. I want the game world to be huge. And complicated. With multiple storylines, having nothing to do with each other. So you don't know what's what. This is scary. It's no scarier than the real world ... except, you know, for all the dragons and magic and terrible awful evil. But you have magic and weapons and your good sense; you're supposed to handle all this bad stuff. That's the game. You. against. everything. Good luck.
For people who've never played D&D this way, it can be pretty hard. It can feel "wrong." It should. By virtue of everything Gygax and the rest of them wrote, it's absolutely not the way D&D was meant to be played. But from my perspective, beginning in 1979 with certain DMs who did play the Gygax framework, I hated it. I hated knowing what I was supposed to do next. I hated having the DM frame everything in three choices or less. As a fighter, standing on an imaginary street, listening to the conversation between the party and some apothecary, all I could think was, "What the hell do we even care about some magic stone or sword that's going to give one of us a +10% bonus to hit? Why don't we just ride out, find a bunch of bad people beating up good people, and kill them? For that matter, why don't we just be bad people and beat up good people? What difference does it make, as long as we're doing what we want?"
But nope. Instead, we have stand here and listen to this sucky story about some shrine, so we can go meet some other blathering person at the market who will give a map, so we can haul our ass into the middle of nowhere and spend an hour solving some fucking puzzle ... sigh.
I didn't see this as a way to spend my evenings. So I started building this other pattern of play, pushing players into acting for themselves, without the crutches. While there was definitely some learning to be done — as expected — steadily I acquired players who preferred to think for themselves. And while they learned to make plans among themselves, I learned how to build a game world that provided me with information at my fingertips. I got to know the game backwards and forwards. Narratives emerged that the players built, by having ambitions that told them where to go next, rather than having me do it. These ambitions suggested obstacles they would logically encounter, which they fruitfully overcame, giving them a feeling of accomplishment that was far and away superior to obtaining some powerful magic item or sword. When players begin to build colonies out of the jungle on the coast of Africa by simply deciding they want to go there with supplies, soldiers, their guts and a can-do spirit, as a DM there's nothing to do but to fill the jungles and watch the party lay waste. When the party ACTS, instead of WAITS, the game plays on a whole new level.
But it is terrifying to act. Especially if you're not used to it, and you haven't a fellow player you're joining in a campaign to show you how. If any of you were to come and play with my offline players, and were smart enough to watch and listen, your eyes would be opened like Archimedes. But I've had new players come in and try to push everyone around, and act like they know everything ... and what happens is my players simply melt back and wait for the new guy (and it is never a girl) to do something phenomenally stupid and get himself killed. Alone. Because that's what happens when you make enemies of your friends, and then try to take on the world by yourself, forgetting that you're just a fat, pompous Frenchmen and that in the real world, murderers are ready to kill again before they run away. And unlike an Agatha Christie hero, player characters don't have plot armour.
When you know that acting really could end in your character's death ... and you know there are no maps waiting at the market place; when you know the world is a complicated place, where most NPCs are primarily involved in their own lives and have no convenient exposition to offer; when your success is really dependent on your preparation, because you're not special; it's not the same game.
It's not the same game at all.
Lol, had almost this exact scenario happen during a game last week. It was sooo obvious the players were frustrated. I literally stopped the game to reiterate (because I had said this before) in the strongest language possible that my game is not a story or mystery and that I dont have clues for them to find, etc, etc. And they kept laser focused on the same track. One of them literally said he wanted to search for secret doors when they are outdoors in wetlands, where the fuck are you searching?!!
ReplyDeleteA major challenge/hurdle exists here because players who play D&D (or who want to play or who are coming to the table with assumptions baked in by fantasy novels or computer RPGs) have been robbed of their initiative. NOT player agency (we're past that), player INITIATIVE, i.e. self-motivation.
ReplyDeleteIt's tough to cultivate that in players. I can take young kids (who don't have built-in assumptions) and let them "go" but they don't have a whole lot of life experience (or knowledge) to suss out their possibilities. But the older players are generally already broken. Re-training them SEEMS hard. Maybe it's not...maybe it's an illusion and the hard part is really just being the DM with the non-cardboard cut-out world. Maybe. But, you know, frustration abounds...on both sides.
One nice thing about the original premise: the dungeon provides a big, juicy target that compels action/initiative. Here's this lair. We know it has dangers. We know it has loot. We need to prep ourselves and dig deep into its depths to pull out that sweet gold. That's an EASY motivating force...all dungeons are (I think this was one of the topics covered in Through The Dungeon's Front Door...). It's "building adventures OUTSIDE dungeons" that has led to the trouble. Creating "situations" rather than allowing the "motivated" PCs to pursue their own motivations. And then having the DM build IN RESPONSE to those player urges.
This, I think, is what the DMG suggests as the means of proceeding when it comes to creating a campaign. I don't think it offers examples of putting players on rails or having them propositioned by wizards at the local tavern (I might be mistaken...I'm currently rereading the book exactly for this kind of stuff). Later books (and published) modules are, of course, another story. But I THINK the initial ideas, built upon, might work. Maybe. At least work insofar as helping the players retain their gumption. Because THAT is, in my estimation, the biggest problem once the DM has settled down to build a world.
Lots to parse there, JB.
ReplyDeleteCultivating players is the next post.
The dungeon is a weapon that cuts both ways. It IS all you say; and I run dungeons regularly, because like SAW or the House on Haunted Hill they carry remarkable tools for generating terror. A group of players in a dystopian dungeon setting are sure to cling together for survival, which plays into my fear model.
But the way many dungeons are designed and played are far more like silly Disney funhouses, offering cardboard cut-outs instead of nightmare fuel. They’re no worse that solving the puzzle that gets us to the next puzzle. Everything’s so carefully “balanced,” with enough healing milk to fill a bathtub, ensuring no one’s ever really threatened. Thus the old trope, begun in our early days, when parties were so keen they could imagine splitting up and going their own way IN A DUNGEON.
When the dungeons are toothless, it stands to reason the outdoors would be too. Gygax and crew were so disinterested in the outdoors, they chose to use another game’s board, “Outdoor Survival,” to kick the can down the road rather than invest the tiniest effort. This didn’t lead to “trouble” ... it let to a total dismissal of the outdoors as a venue.
(cont.)
There’s a specific example on page 103 of the AD&D dungeon masters guide that talks of Celowin Silvershield and the Tale of Getting an Associate Turned Back to Flesh.
ReplyDeleteReading the three paragraphs, one can see the template for a game world based on confrontational and ignorant NPCs, Greta Garbo level isolation, ham & cheese over-acting, magic as a form of exchange, forced questing of the players and a whole lot of general DM bullshit obfuscation. For those without the book, the pdf for the DMG can be found online:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/804915/348b48a0cbd967122dcb76f5cc6f5a01.pdf
While most DMs and players have no idea this passage exists, when the DMG was the only book for several years in the 1980s, it was deconstructed like a bible. The lessons learned from passages like this were embraced fervently by DMs everywhere, who taught them to players, who became DMs and taught them to their players, poisoning table-after-table. This was helped by numerous other examples built on this same Gygaxian model of human relationships, where nearly everyone is a total prick, out for themselves, ready to lead strangers into dungeons for the sake of stabbing them in the back ... and REWARDING players for emulating this behaviour with each other.
SOME genre-savvy players cackle with glee over these opportunities, happily pissing in the pool, embittering would-be thoughtful players out of the hobby altogether. Other genre-savvy players, sick of this toxic bullshit, retreat to personal Shangri-las of their own making, recognizing that “the books” are jaundiced with exactly the sort of contamination that makes gumption impractical. Thus they turn to other sources for inspiration outside D&D, and build on THOSE.
"There’s a specific example on page 103 of the AD&D dungeon masters guide that talks of Celowin Silvershield and the Tale of Getting an Associate Turned Back to Flesh.
ReplyDelete"Reading the three paragraphs, one can see the template for a game world based on confrontational and ignorant NPCs, Greta Garbo level isolation, ham & cheese over-acting, magic as a form of exchange, forced questing of the players and a whole lot of general DM bullshit obfuscation."
Now hold the phone, man. You yourself have written before that NPCs should have their own motivations, never necessarily aligned with the PCs, and something other than happy little quest-givers and help-mates. That townsfolk found in taverns are unlikely to be friendly and open with stranger travelers, that PCs should take the time to build relationships (give birthday gifts!) and not simply assume things will be handed to them on a silver platter. I read this passage on page 103, and I feel Gygax is simply advocating for the same type of game YOU would...specifically one where NPCs think like people with their own agendas.
Gygax's example of milking the players of money and magic seems quite a VALID way of building relationships in a fantasy world where players are likely to have acquired money and magic by way of their adventures. Perhaps, if such things are uncommon in a particular campaign other quid pro quos could be used instead (doing favors, etc.) but I don't read this as a particular screw-job by the DM/Gygax considering how many +1 whatsis and whatnots abound in his adventures.
Neither do I see this as a particular call to over-acting, nor even confrontational NPCs! What...the beggar? There are beggars. There is bad weather in world as well. It's not just idyllic strolls through magical Renn-faire land in eternal springtime. A clever PC might be able to turn the beggar to an ally or informant. A clever group might figure out a way to profit by selling umbrellas. Adversity presents opportunity. Etc.
I realize that Gygax grates on you, and that after 40+ years you are more than a bit jaded with regard to his text, but the fact that DMs have misinterpreted...or mis-inferred...these ideas, and built on them, and then further misinterpreted, mis-inferred, built on, etc. doesn't mean the guy was advocating for the crap campaigns and adventures that have become ubiquitous.
I think the fourth paragraph of the section you cite is the more pertinent...and more instructional...to how NPCs should be run.
[all that being said, the "thief-guide" example on page 96 is absolutely terrible and more-or-less indefensible as far as building trust between DMs and players]
RE Toothless Dungeons (and thus Toothless Worlds)
The GAME itself has become "toothless." That is how the thing has "evolved" over the decades. Soft players, soft DMs. It certainly doesn't have to be that way (I don't really see much need to put healing potions in dungeons myself, unless there's some specific reason for them to be there. But that's me).
Looking forward to the next post on cultivating players.
JB, the poison I speak of runs DEEP in your veins. You and I, lovers of the game, butt heads constantly on virtually every part of it. We have waged war over attitude in play, over player-vs.-player, over alignment, over simplicity vs. complexity, and recently over your iconography of AD&D vs. my iconoclastic version of that game. I should expect that now you would totally miss my point regarding the tale of Celowin.
ReplyDeleteThe game I would run? Wash your key-tapping fingers with soap. Perhaps you haven’t read The Merry Wives of Windsor or Much Ado About Nothing, or for that matter Pilgrim’s Progress, but people of the erstwhile age were perfectly willing to give directions to strangers without the demand of coin. The middle ages were replete with foreigners, who usually had money else they could not afford to travel; and a watch paid for by the MERCHANTS of a city did not randomly attack them ... as Gygax and his half-acquired sociology education supposed. Towns that did would gain a reputation that would wreck their business in a year. According to Gygax’s rules, a “warlock” is a 6th level mage ... and would hardly have a “lack wit” servant’s mentality. Mul would ASK what it was about, learn of the stone-to-flesh ask, request contact information and pick a moment to let Llewellyn know there was money to be earned for a spell. An APPOINTMENT would be made. A fucking appointment. Has Gygax never heard of such a thing?
Oh no, he’s too busy building his devious little player-rip-off scenario, which leads to bossing the players into performing a quest, willing or unwilling, because ... hey, ADVENTURE! Fuck you, Gygax. Fuck you and your cheesy drama, your half-wit knowledge of human behaviour and your eternal pestering need to scrub your asshole’s hands together to force the party onto your rails.
This side-trip to get the players back on the road again is as interesting a little scene as visiting the doctor’s office. An insidious, grasping, empathy-forsaken doctor that, like it works in America, can’t wait to fleece your insurance company and raise your rates. This is NOT how I run my games. And your assumption, JB, that I would run a game like this, only proves how far apart we continue to be regarding our different understandings of this game.
I have written that NPCs should have their own motivations. And that yes, they’re not always nice. But the argument that humans are basically GOOD did not begin in the middle of the 20th century. You can find it in Plutarch, ffs. For the most part, so long as players are polite, patient and respectful, YES, most townsfolk ARE likely to be friendly and open.
It’s the players who act like boors, with strutting around like Mul and Llewellyn, presuming because they can beat up anyone in the place, they ought to get their way all the time. And this is the point where the townsfolk’s “own motivations” get vicious and mean.
ReplyDeleteVery well...I must be misremembering your prior posts on the subject of NPC townsfolk. I apologize and retract that bit.
I hate being the Gygax apologist (that I most certainly am), but he definitely has a genre he's representing, one that is less based on "real life" than your model, and (perhaps) one with tropes that he'd prefer to lovingly embrace. It *seems* to have worked for him, it doesn't appear to work for you. I think I am more on your side of the argument...but much as I think people are "basically GOOD," I think they are often fearful and selfish and that this is what drives them to do all sorts of shit that is contrary to their best interest (let alone the best interests of others, their communities, and the world in general) and act in ways that are "not good."
["ignorance" is, IMO, an aspect of "selfishness"]
Currently reading McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Are you fuckin' kidding me? It "worked for him"? This is extent of the ethical empiricism we're expected to employ? That a man responsible for failing to responsibly manage his own game, thus killing it, ensuring an endless mess of editions and people arguing constantly, just gets off with an excuse worthy of 4CHAN?
ReplyDeleteHey, in case you hadn't noticed, he didn't broadcast his method as some innocent noob ... he LOUDLY PROCLAIMED his superiority to others and toxically took glee in sacrificing the game, his reputation and any value he had to anyone in favour of being an utterly Selfish and Ignorant Fuckface, END-TO-END. See, I equate ignorance and selfishness, too.
RE "basically good" ...
I think you're confusing a very tiny but loud and feckless portion of the population, with time on their hands to blare their crap on the internet, with "people."
Mismanaged his own game? Sure. Mismanaged his company? Absolutely. Mismanaging his name, brand, reputation, and message? Yeah, all that too.
DeleteBeing the reason/cause behind the “endless mess of editions” since? Mmm…I really have a tough time putting that on EGG’s head. Not because he wasn’t planning an update (word is that he was), but what has come out since his departure from the company/brand he birthed was all done without him.
It was Gygax's bloated ego that ignored the importance of building a consensus with his peers, that caused him to rush off and take the glory. It was his constant preening in the Dragon that created the ego-driven philosophy that is a guide to the voices running the present WOTC. Whenever anyone wants to justify their self-righteous indignation, in the company, on line, anywhere that voices bang away on bulletin boards, Gygax's quotes are there as justification.
ReplyDeleteWe are responsible for more than our direct actions, JB. We're responsible for every ounce of bullshit we put out in the world. 50 years from now, America will still be dealing with the crap that Trump has been allowed to preach. D&D is a small microcosm of that; a tiny hobby with relatively few voices, hopelessly unable to come together.
If Gygax had been a better person; if there had been others to practically constrain him; if he hadn't handed his company out of desperation to the LAST people who should have had their hands on this, we wouldn't be here.
The nomer, "EGG," is used whenever anyone wants to soften him, hoping to transform him somehow into this folksy kind of entity. But he wasn't. He was an incompetent megalomaniac. And the only reason to make apologies for his actions comes from 40 years of bullshit hero-worship, built in the minds of children, and the disbelief that this guy, who "invented" the game, who's magic name was embossed on the books, could really be the cretinous swine he was.
But he didn't invent the game. And what he did for it didn't last; and even as you try to defend his version on your site, all you've gotten is pushback and resistance, doubt, discord and an increasingly apologetic tone in your own writings as you try to qualify over and over what you've tried to define as "true."
I can't help that you can't open your eyes, JB. But you're not convincing anybody of anything, and you're certainly not going to wash away the stain that Gygax left behind.
Jeez, man. I only use the initials EGG so
DeleteI don’t have to write out “Gygax” yet again.
; )
Just to be clear, I don’t dismiss Senor Gary’s part in the collective culpability that has led to the (sad) state of D&D gaming. Heck, I don’t even dismiss MY infinitesimal (by comparison) responsibility…was I not promoting (and engaging in) PvP conflict just a few short years ago?
However, I would not assign him the lion’s share of the blame. And even as I acknowledge MANY other people as having contributed to the D&D game (both before and after the publication of AD&D) I *am* willing to award him the lion’s share of the credit for what I deem to be the “best” version of the game.
Not that anyone should rest on their fat laurels. But the man IS dead, after all. He’s done growing and developing in this life.
Whereas there may still be some hope for Yours Truly. At least, I’M hopeful.
Very well, I'll concur with this last point. But I'm the good man who won't do nothing and let evil thrive, JB. Dead the man may be, but you can't kill an idea. They fester and cause rot, choking every attempt to move forward, putting the past behind us and making the game what it could be, instead of our having one foot in EGG's grave.
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking about this post since I read it, but haven't been sure what, if anything, I could add.
ReplyDeleteA digression, if I may.
I recently took a week vacatiom with my family and friends, and I spent a large amount of time tinkering with the trade system. Specifically, I set it up so that: 1. I can easily switch cities; 2. Creating a template for easily making new items.
That last sentence is unnecessary, but it felt good to succeed.
But what I realized is how I look at DMing is ~not~ the norm. I don't know if it is because I didn't start playing until my early 20s, or because you were one of the first blogs I found when I went looking for advice when I started DMing, but it has slowly dawned on me that most games are run with a STORY in mind, so even if you could fail, you can't really fail.
And this really hammers that home. My players are gearing up for a big fight next session, and there isn't a single disappointing outcome for me. They could run, win or die, and all would be satisfying.
Because sure, I've put a ton of work in to the world, but the world is still there. My NPCs will still be going forward with their schemes, both on grand scales and small ones. And that feels like a good place to be.