Athena

Let's take stock.  We've created a game world that we can perceive surrounding us, to a degree that when we close our eyes, we can see the trees, the houses and the people.  The world is BIG, so that it overwhelms the players, impressing them, and likewise providing us with every possible resource we could need to create game elements and game stories.  We can picture what the people in the world are doing; we can see the world moving around them.  There's a lot happening, all around the party — we're not limited by a single context or narrative.  Got all this in your head at the same time?  Good.

How does this come together, enabling us to invent people and moments spontaneously?  The goddess Athena was said to have been born from the forehead of her father Zeus; Athena is the god of wisdom and we may presume that "forehead" is a euphemism for thought.  This is what we want to do: pluck a thought, bang, right from our minds, like a magic trick, instantly creating something for use in the game.  Go.  Make it happen.

At some point, a transition is required, from academic comprehension to practical application.  With regards to the former, take note that Athena doesn't spring forth from a library of books written by Zeus.  She appears instantly ... it's not a matter of piecing together contemplative thoughts from weeks of study.  This is an inspiration.  The writer, William Faulkner, wrote,

"You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression."

 —  Interview with the Western Review, 1947

Capturing the momentary thought in the game's running is like seizing a will o'wisp, accepting it for what it is ... and then obeying the set of contraints the wisp provides.

It's like this; let's imagine standing on a street in the game world.  Picture this cinematically, like a scene from the Matrix; we pop in, we see the various persons going about their business, we feel the sun on our arms, hear the sounds, smell the odours ... and as we turn, we see one thing after the next.  And while I've given no examples in this paragraph, the reader has some sense of what ought to be there.  We do not, for example, have a motorcar at a sidewalk curb, idling its engine while a man in a suit smokes a camel cigarette.  We might have a dragon laying waste to the street, but let's try for something more mundane, hm?  I could give examples, but I don't want to constrain your imagination with mine.  This is a thought experiment ... your thoughts matter here, not mine.

Try to think what's there.  Put something on your right, then something on your left.  DON'T imagine how you'd describe either to the player ... just put the image in your mind.  Provide the image with motion.  Listen to the sounds being made.  Turn to your left and look at something else.  See it.  Now imagine what the scene might have looked like five hours ago, in the morning.  Now see it at night.  Have a person shout something off to the left; what was said?  How is it changing what's happening.

It hurts, I know.  You're not used to thinking this way, using your third eye ... and it's harder still to do it without writing something down or perhaps drawing it.  Faulkner is concerned with retaining a moment of inspiration, but this is also inherent with parsing those moments from thousands of other thoughts he doesn't write down because they're unworthy.  He's speaking specifically of a special thought, something really amazing.  Just now, I want you to picture the mundane, the daily happenings on this street ... and I know it's hard to keep your mind from wandering, to maintain the vision for more than a few seconds.  It takes practice.  And clearly explains that one reason you can't "think of something" on the spur of the moment is that you don't work at it much.

A fair number here won't understand the purpose of this exercise.  "This is D&D; D&D is about adventure.  A street scene isn't very adventurous."  Some are stuck now on the dragon's blasts of fire burning up parts of the street.  "Ah, now that's more like it," they'll say.  But really, it doesn't work.  Introducing players to a game by popping them into a street scene with a rampaging dragon will not produce immersion.  It'll produce resistance to the game's message, make the players feel corralled and, overall, produce a very shallow experience, despite the images of catastrophe and body counts.

We don't get a thrill from a stranger shooting a tie-fighter with a ship's blaster.  We get a thrill from a young, dumb farmboy hitting anything with a blaster he's using for the first time.  To get that payoff, we have to put the farmboy on a farm, portray the farm, portray the farmboy's life and listen to the farmboy say unhappy things.  If we can't do that well, the later moment falls flat.

We're not just creating a scene; we're creating the groundwork for later scenes ... potentially, all kinds of scenes, not just one.  There are hundreds of spectacular, adventurous things that can happen on a town street ... but if we don't invent one first, and make the players see it, then the adventures will have all the verve and excitement of a microwaved hot pocket.

At first, this creation process feels hard.  That is why so many artists equate creation to giving birth ... to pushing the baby out, with all the complications that implies.  But Athena was not pushed out from Zeus' legs, but from his forehead; and she is not the goddess of birth, but the goddess of wisdom.  Wisdom makes everything easier.  When I first began writing and playing D&D, it did feel like labour; but after forty years, it's nothing like labour.  I sit back, close my eyes and visualize my D&D world as a way of relaxing.  This is the benefit of time spent, practice, having clarity of mind and knowing what's waiting on every street and every field.

It's much harder to communicate what I do in words that make sense, to people I can't see, who most likely will not follow my advice, or haven't read the last ten posts very closely, and thus cannot make the leap they must make to free themselves from wasted effort and bad choices.

In 2014, I recounted a tale of the writer Mordecai Richler:

"Anytime a known writer speaks in public, at a library or a university, and the field is open to questions, there's always one adventurer who will rise from the audience and ask, 'Where do you get your ideas?'

"I have seen a number of answers to this question: polite answers, vague answers and academic answers. I remember seeing Mordecai Richler speak (for non-Canadians, this is a 'famous Canadian writer' whom every body praises but nobody reads). When the question came up, he became quickly incensed. 'From my BRAIN' he bellowed, having obviously answered the question a thousand times already. Then he added, 'Sit down, you stupid girl!' "

It's funny what seven years will do.  I said at the time that Richler may have given the best answer.  Today I recognize that Richler was a fool ... and I too, for seeing the world that way.  Seven years of writing, and the accumulation of wisdom, has changed me.

The right answer would have been for him to say, 

"The ideas have accumulated through a lifetime of consideration and thinking of many things — the world around me, the people in it, the experiences I've had, the things I've wanted that I've had to sacrifice ... the correlation of a million moments that have lent me the wisdom to see what needs to be taught and what needs to be understood by my readers.  I don't possess all the ideas there are; I'm only one writer.  But I understand from the question that you see yourself as unable to reproduce the ideas I have, or what you perceive to be the value of ideas that I have.  You're wrong.  You just haven't had the time to think as long as you'll need to before ideas as good as mine or better begin to emerge from the maelstrom of your thoughts.  That time will come ... and when it does, it'll be up to you to make them valuable to other people.  That's where the real work begins."

Richler didn't say that, though he was as old then as I am now.  I'm disappointed about that.

Don't lose faith.  There's more to come.