Driving Force

One aspect of a good life is the gladsome energy of multiple things capturing our attention from one moment to the next.  Having work to do that we enjoy, being a part of a family engaged in various activities, looking forward to something wonderful in the near future, remembering some delightful accomplishment in the recent past ... and making plans for something we might do someday, though we don't know when.  Amidst the maelstrom of activities, even accompanied by its due ingredient of stress, there's never a moment we can't lean back and think on five or ten things that please us.  Jimmy will be starting university in January; we had a really good time on the weekend going out with the boss, of all people!  Our better half is really getting on with the new vocation; the notes I was making for my next book are beginning to flow like water.  There's just something about "being busy" that offers a day-to-day rush ... especially when things are going well.

Of course, they don't always go well.  There are times we're ready to scream.  That we would like to get off this ride.  I don't want to minimize that; we've been there.  Some are there right now.  I don't include myself with them, not at this moment, but I've been there a lot the last five years.  So I know.

Point is, with all respect to Curly, a good life is never about "one thing."  There's so much to do, so much to talk about, so many other experiences to enjoy.  A slow, plodding life, where nothing changes, where every day is the same, with nothing new in it, is a hell.

With my last post, I promised a discussion of momentum.  By definition, "momentum" is the quality of motion of an object; the impetus and driving force gained by the development of a process or course of events.  Note, it says nothing about "moving faster."  Momentum is not about speed.  An object moving one inch a millennium has momentum.  Yes, true enough, we want the campaign's velocity to move something faster than that, but the subject here is "impetus" and "driving force."  How do we create those things?

The module-adventure addresses the question by providing a clear direction for the players to follow, indicating which is the next step among hundreds of actions to be taken, until the module's end is obtained.  However, the module takes place in a temporal void.  The characters have no past or future outside the module ... only a now.  This gives them nothing to contemplate regarding what they'll do after the module's finished, nor what consequences might arise in their future from what they did before they began this module.  This is akin to working a job without any memory of what we might have done before the shift began, and without a guess as to what we'll do after.  Presumedly, perhaps, we might look forward to another day of work ... but what takes place between the days of work, the days we spend right here at our desks, doesn't exist.

Sounds like hell.

Like the metaphor, the module-adventure promises that, when we're done this adventure, there will be another adventure to come.  Of course, we may not even be the same characters for the next adventure.  Begging the question, what matter is it if we die or not, right now?  What is there to mourn ... and what is there that we can possible gain, apart from distracting ourselves from other things we might be doing.

One tactic that attempts to circumvent the "void" that exists before the adventure starts is the encouragement of writing character backgrounds.  These are meant to provide the characters with nuance, giving the players something else to think about — for example, the performative qualities of "acting out" the character's background story in front of the other players.  Unfortunately, however, the backgrounds are necessarily sterile, since they are created disjuctively from the campaign — specifically, they lack consistency or mutuality with the DM's vision, or the vision of whomever wrote the module, or even more on point, with what is going on right now during the GAME.  As such, backgrounds are a tacked-on accessory, like a kitchen sink bolted to car's trunk, or a player showing up to play golf in a full clown suit.  Backgrounds don't actually interfere with play ... but they don't better the play either.  At best, they create an entirely separate game for the players to act upon within the "now" of the module-adventure.  And when this separate game is played, the module's momentum is necessarily put on hold — while we listen to the player act — until we can pick up the adventure again following the performance.

As an aside, the "solution" of module-adventures to the question of providing impetus has spawned strange meta-games that also have nothing to do with D&D and role-playing.  For example, the writing of one-page adventures for the purpose of winning contests in which the best written one-page adventure is commended.  The actual play of the module — except possibly by the judges, who are defacto biased — is NOT A FACTOR in determining the winner ... only the perceived, unproven playability of the module.  Dungeon mastering is not a writing exercise; it is a playing exercise.  But this actuality is lost in the praise granted to things that have won contests and not by virtue of what they have done to improve the quality of a D&D game.  What, we should ask, is the inherent benefit of limiting an adventure to one page?  We may as well ask what the inherent benefit would be in limiting a bowling night to three frames, a football game to a total of 12 downs maximum for either side ... or sex to a period of eight minutes.  Recognizing that it wouldn't be the sex itself that's experienced for that period of time, but a description of eight minutes of sex.

Prior to a D&D campaign, where none of the players have yet entered the game, the aforementioned void exists.  Likewise, to some extent, the lack of a future.  This is all the more reason why the first minutes of the game are critical for giving the players an impetus to play.  The easiest way is to provide the module-adventure; but as we've seen, this is a short-term solution that provides impetus but NOT driving force.  In physics, "driving force" is the force that puts an object in motion; colloquially speaking, however, driving force has come to mean someone or something that has the power to make things happen.  A player participating in a module-adventure is acted upon by the setting; we want settings that are acted upon by the player characters.  This means that while it's inherent upon the DM to get the campaign in motion, the goal is to build a perpetual momentum ... enabling them to adventure continuously without stops and starts, where everything that happens provokes more things that will happen in the future ... while simultaneously building a course of memories and moments of pride for the players to reflect upon amidst the actions they're taking at any given time.  In short, we want the players to "be busy" with their character's lives, enriched by all the things they have to think about.

One critical element of this ambition is dispensing with the as yet unmentioned flaw in the module-adventure.  To explain that, I need to briefly speak about Chekhov's Gun: 

"Chekhov's Gun is generally regarded as a brilliant principle for writing tight narrative. The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote:

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.

"He elaborates that if you don't plan to fire your firearm in a subsequent act, then it doesn't belong in your story, and you should remove it entirely.

"The widely accepted interpretation is that nothing should be present in your story unless it's serving some critical narrative purpose. Judicious application of Chekhov's Gun can rid your story of elements that aren't doing anything for you."

Dungeons & Dragons is NOT literature.  It's not a story designed for a reader; it's not intended to produce a theme or an object the audience needs to grasp.  It doesn't possess an "audience."  D&D is a game.  It's intended to be played by participants in a setting that in no way seeks to provide a model for behaviour or an ideology, belief or virtuous template.  Therefore, it's the antithesis of Chekhov and every form of narrative writing that exists ... particularly as it isn't being written, it isn't being invented by a single voice and there's no editor to decide which fair action in the game ought to be taken.  The guns can exist without being fired, the adventures can exist without being pursued.  There is no dramatic structure that need be recognized, no necessary fall, no certainty of resolution and no single point of climax.

Yet there are all these things in a pre-written module-adventure.  There have to be ... because the narrative is a finite piece of writing, where everything in it is assumed to have a purpose, even if it's to waste the players' time until the next part of the narrative is met.

With a momentum-rich infinite game, ten threads of possible action — ten Chekhov guns — can be invented and provided for the players in the first ten minutes, none of which ever need to go off for the game to function and move forward.  In the ten minutes after than, we can introduce ten more, and then ten more and ten more again.  The players can reach out and fire whatever gun pleases them; there is no right gun and no wrong one.  There are certainly no necessary guns.

However, once a gun has been chosen and fired, we're off to the races as far as DMing goes.  The direction and angle of the bullet, once put in motion, perpetuates a series of events that, once enacted, cannot be undone.  Every action has consequences and the consequences are final; but the consequences produce opportunities, littering guns everywhere for the players to take up as they will and evoke new, desired consequences according to their proclivity.

The tendency is to read the above and suppose that this shooting of guns and creation of consequences accords itself to ONE NARRATIVE.  It does not!  No more so than my writings here create consequences for my workplace activities, or the visits of my grandchild, or the next venture I choose to explore, or any of a hundred activities I might participate in over the next year.  My fist fight with you at a bar has a set of consequences, but these don't affect the discourse I have afterwards as I describe the events to my partner.  Her reaction is an entirely different set of consequences.

In the novel The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan inadvertantly annoys and obtains a duel with three separate men in three separate instances, to be fought one after another.  Because it is a novel, the separate men naturally know each other, creating the humour of D'Artagnan happening to insult three men who are close friends and companions.

In D&D, the same result could happen, except because there is no novel, the three men need not know each other at all; there is no motivation to assure that our player character makes a single friend of the three challenged men; and the consequences to befall the character depends on how the character deals with the odd situation.  D'Artagnan, in short, is not required by a narrative to like musketeers, to want to be a musketeer or to refrain from killing musketeers.  Such matters are left entirely up to the player.  There is no writer to say different.

All this leaves us with the nagging difficulty of how to make guns of the Chekhov variety?  How, dear Alexis, do we create opportunities for the players to make choices upon?  And how, for the love of all that's decent, do we decide what the consequences are when a player does something?

25 or 30 thousand words and we've at last arrived at the crux of everything: "I want to be a DM; how do I know what to do?"

Well.

I'll try to answer that question.

I need a little more time to think about it.