Fear

Picking up on the subject of win conditions from last week ...

"Win conditions" are game mechanics that guide the player's actions in the game towards success.  In most games, these are cut-and-dry: mate the enemy's king, accumulate this much money, put the ball in the hole with the least number of swings, reach base, destroy the enemy's armies and seize territory, whatever.

Early D&Dites made a huge deal out of D&D being a game where "winning" wasn't part of the game.  The argument has been made many, many times.  D&D is an experience, D&D is about discovering the world or following a story ... blah blah blah.  I don't want to spend three paragraphs rehashing this position.  On the surface, it certainly looks to be true.  If you die, you roll up another character, but there's nothing to keep the other players from continuing on ... and since you continue on with them, it all feels like the Ship of Theseus (television's favourite metaphor).  If you don't know what that is, turn on any Netflix or Disney Star series made in the last year and you'll have it explained to you about five minutes in.

A total party kill certainly feels like "losing;" and on some level, finishing a D&D treasure hunt (this being what most adventures are) does sort of feel like "winning."  But more to the point, if you give human beings a game without a clear win condition, they'll just make one up.  The players will get into a pissing contest about who can make the craziest, most insane player character; they'll decide to see how far they can metagame the DM; or how far they can push rules lawyering; or how long they can go it alone, without cooperating; or how powerful a build they can create.  They'll prove how good a player they are, by caring more about their character than anyone has ever cared about any PC, ever.  They'll use D&D to work out their psychological issues, they'll burn the campaign to the ground, they'll role-play until someone knocks on the door with their Oscar.  They'll invent their own game, with their own win conditions, for as long as its allowed.

Worst of all, in a four-player party, they'll all make up their own personal game, with their own win conditions, and fuck everyone else.  Good luck getting that party together.

It is not a solution to preach D&D as a win-condition free game.  Humans are biologically programmed to seek food, shelter and dominance over their environment; the last pumps the body full of those sweet, sweet seratonins — and no one's giving up on those babies.

Nor is it a solution to get everyone to agree on a "win condition."  Everyone's nurtured and natured into squabbling over this corner of the sandbox, fighting over the licorice stick, getting in first through the classroom door to get the best desk, standing first in line for Star Wars tickets, getting picked for the team, getting picked for the job, etcetera.  If you let the players invent win conditions, they're bound to agree only upon those things about which they think they'll edge out the others.

There's only one way to get any number of rugged individualists to agree on a single agenda.

It should be clear to anyone who's played a serious game that D&D is a game of survival.  Survival is THE win condition.  For a lot of people, it's not satisfying.  Survival today only means there's still a chance I won't survive tomorrow.  That makes a dull goalpost.  One way around that is to get rid of survival as a win condition and just make sure the players always survive ... at least until we retire these characters and start other ones.  The practice gets rid of the pesky "survive tomorrow" problem, meaning we can concentrate on those other win conditions already mentioned.  You know, the ones the players invent, having to do with messing around with other people, preening oneself, standing out in a crowd, acting like a dick, mocking other people for fun and profit, you name it.  Survival is just such a bummer, you know?

Exactly.  It is a bummer.  When it''s pushed to the back burner and it's not in the player's face all the time, survival can be comfortably ignored ... you know, how you're ignoring it right now, reading this post, sipping your coffee, listening to whatever you listen to while smarmily frowning at my thoughts.  You're definitely not thinking, right now, about the plane that's run out of fuel and is slowly descending towards you.  Or the clot patiently forming in that cerebral blood vessel.  Or the kidney that's doing okay right now, but if you keep going like you are it's going to quit on you unexpectedly in 2037.  Wow, October of that year will be awful.

No, you're fine.  You're not trying to survive right now, so you're not thinking that sooner or later they'll come a day when survival won't be, well, in the cards.  Oh, you used to think about death back when, in high school ... and what with Covid around, it wedges itself into your thoughts now and then, but then you strategize with a little coffee and a tidy reading of that whackjob Alexis.

See, you only think about survival when it's in your face.  And when it's in your face, you're definitely not enjoying it.  At best, when you get past those moments, you wipe your brow, think "whew, dodged that one," and get busy not thinking about the one you inevitably won't dodge.

D&D is like this.  When the game is played with death on the table, "survival" is never far from anyone's thoughts.  It's there when you're buying equipment, it's there when some stranger rides up in the dark, it's there when Jimmy doesn't make the running and there are only three of you today.  Most assuredly it's there when the DM does something ... weird.

However, we're not talking about survival here.  Not really.  We're talking about fear.  From decades of experience, I can assure the Gentle Reader that intense, riveting D&D is all about fear.  Not in the way that we'd be afraid if someone suddenly broke through the front door with guns.  More in a "Yes, this is badly out of control but we're ready for it," kind of way.

Putting that down and going around another barn — because, hey, what the hell.  It's a barn I've gone around before, when I talked about the movie Greyhound last December.  With that post I wrote,

"In a combat film, the characters are fighting for their lives. None of the characters in Das Boot want to be there. The characters in Greyhound are there because it's a terrifying, necessary job that if its not done, the war is lost and millions will die. We can't create these sorts of tensions for the player, even if the players really love their characters. Therefore, for combat to matter, it has to put things on the line that the players really care about: their mental faculties for making a plan; their shame if it fails; the sense of their joint effort with their friends, to commit themselves to something this big."

I brought this up with an ex-military friend, who has yet to see the film — though I plan on having him around this month.  I asked him what situations like this were like, because he's seen a few; and he agreed generally with my assessment, adding one more detail.

I asked about soldiers expressing their feelings in moments of crisis.  He shook his head, said, "No you don't.  There isn't time."

Right there.  That's the key that pulls all this together.  The invented win conditions for players who don't play in games with death on the table; the process of primping themselves and pimping their rides; the dissatisfaction with survival, when there's time to think about the fact that we have survived; the sense of fear that pushes the possibility of not surviving up front; and the question of why we would play a game that deliberately wants us to feel stress about the possibility of losing, without there being a comparable condition for winning.

You come in, you sit down at the gaming table.  The DM shuffles and mutters prior to starting.  Everyone chats.  Drinks, snacks, stretching out, fumbling with the dice, making notes ... it's like other things that presage something great about to happen.  Musicians in the pit before an opera.  The lights and rumbling of the crowd before a sporting event.  The warning that the enemy is coming over that hill, that one there, as everyone digs in.  A clutch in the throat.  Anticipation.  High expectations.

Two kinds of games.

There's one that rolls along: open a door, bunch of decisions being made, dice being rolled, a joke, laughter, have a role-play ... 8:45 now, get into a combat, get a drink, take a pee, argue over treasure, debate a point with the DM ... 9:10 now, decide which door to go through, search the hall, stumble across the puzzle, solve the puzzle, open the next door, bunch more creatures to fight ... hm.  10:30.  "Let's call it guys; pick it up there next time."

The other: open a door ... shit, it's ten to midnight.

Or, to be fair, holy shit! Fear, swing, fear, hit, hit, hit, fuck, fuck, shit, jesus mary mother of god, JIMMY!  Run! ... ten to midnight.

That second kind comes out of fear; it comes out of forcing the party to act in desperation, seeming to be on the edge of success and then suddenly not.  It comes from a good combat system, from a DM who knows precisely how many whatevers the party can barely handle ... and how to introduce those baddies in a pattern that induces the kind of steady, time-consuming panic that we recognize coming from our own experiences at the worst times of our lives.

I'd like to suss it out, explain how exactly that's done.  A big part of it is practice, fighting a lot of battles, maintaining a single, consistent set of rules so that the battles that were fought in 1989 are still relevant to the battles I fight in 2021.  In part it's knowing what to throw right now and what to hold back ... and then knowing when to throw them in, like Napoleon's last ditch effort at Borodino.  It's running the game so that I'm struggling, too; I'm holding my own line, keeping my own troops at it, breathing the struggle of this group of orcs or that death throes of two treants.  Everyone 'round the table is rushing for their dice, frantically searching their characters for some forgotten note or gadget, some way of looking at a spell to save their ass in a way they haven't had to before ... and I'm doing that too, keeping the game running, making it a real thing.

There's no time.  No time to invent frivolous win conditions.  No time to think about winning at all.  Only time to hope this die drops right; that this try is the one that works.  Knowing the basic system is UTTERLY inflexible, that there's no way to talk oneself out of it, no way to invent hit points that don't exist, no way to take back a bad roll, nothing that can be done when things go sour except to ACCEPT IT.

It's a combination of all those things.  But fear is at the core.  If the dice aren't final, there's nothing to be afraid of.  If the DM is plaible, there's nothing to be afraid of.  If my choices aren't intractable, there's nothing to be afraid of.

And if there's nothing to be afraid of, then there's no reason to worry.  There's plenty of time.  Time enough to fill it with whatever seems clever or challenging.  Or self-aggrandizing.  Or goofy.  Whatever.

Whatever happens, we're going to be fine.