Boardgames & D&D

I was asked by ViP about the continuity in behaviours and social dynamics between board games and D&D.

There are obvious ones, starting with sore losers.  These are people who feel their personal worth is determined by the outcome of a game, equating their capability of winning with their competency or value as a human being.  It has to be understood that the connection is taught.  It arises out of family members or friends gloating over their wins or mocking their siblings for losing, which is a memory that can last the rest of a person's life — the pattern is at it's worst when the mockery is condoned by parents and authority figures.  In my childhood, this abuse was so common with boys that examples can be found on television shows and movies from the 1960s and 70s ... where the abuse is depicted as a positive thing.  Arguments like "it will make him a man" and "it'll give him motivation to win" were seen as good parenting.  If your parents are good people, just imagine the shit they had to overcome.

In D&D, the "incapable" loser manifests as envy; an inability for a player to hold themselves accountable for a mistake — and thus accusations against other players for not holding up their end; outbursts of rage at a bad die roll; calls that the game is "unfair" when someone else rolls a better character or succeeds more commonly in combat, and disappointment at not getting the character class the player wanted.  Listening and catering to this behaviour, effectively ennobling it, has led to die matrixes to determine character class abilities, safe cards for game play so that no one is made uncomfortable, fudging dice to make sure than everyone "wins" and a host of other design changes that have been baked HARD into 5th edition ... and ultimately into a whole generation of players.  This is the psychological backlash that arose out of the 80s and 90s to the poison described in the above paragraph ... and it is just as bad, in reverse.

Hopefully, boardgames can teach children how to lose without losing becoming a traumatic memory — either because the loss is minimized, thus crippling the child by creating a sense of constant primal entitlement, or because the loss is maximized, thus crippling the child by creating low self-esteem and a fear of taking responsibility.  The child that kicks over a checkerboard will grow up to rage-quit a D&D game ... just as the child who mocks a loser will grow up to chuckle and laugh when someone rage-quits their game (see the same clip).  The push at the end is encouraged by the DM's response ... giving insight to a combination of different things going on:  the paladin being told how to run his character, the paladin's obvious feeling of helplessness; the paladin's poor self-esteem, the sneering indifference of both the DM and the yellow-jacket guy, the total lack of empathy from any of the players, including the DM, when the paladin gives up, the paladin's cringing response after the push, the insult about whether the paladin is "retarded," the continued smiles and chuckling of the other players through the confrontation, the "asshole" insult, the DM's denial that he's an asshole, the DM returning the insult with "you're a fucking weirdo" ... it's all a wonderful example of an extremely toxic space with extremely toxic people.  Made all the better by someone getting their jollies by posting it on Twitch.

Here is another example, in the reverse.  Angry player wants to increase his chance to hit, finds himself DM'd by the DM (who can't take his pen out of his own face), and DM'd by the player across the table, and who then has his space violated by the player on his right, who snatches up the Angry player's die.  Of course the angry player feels entitled ... but is he necessarily an "angry" person, or has this browbeating been going on all night?  We may think he should "chill," but perhaps he's been doing that for the two hours before the 33-second clip is shown.

As children, when we're ready to start thumping on our friends because the threshold between tolerance and violence is pretty low, we learn NOT to fucking touch other people's armies in RISK, or other people's racing car in Monopoly, or the bank, or other people's D&D dice.  I remember when I was eight I had a drag out fight in my friend Kevin's basement over a RISK game that one of us was losing; it went sort of like this.  I don't remember who threw the first punch or why ... but it didn't end my friendship.  It clarified where the boundaries were.  When someone grows up to be 18 and they still don't know not to touch other people's stuff ... well, I can only say, I hope that guy doesn't find himself working on a job site, in a restaurant or joining the army.  I've played with ex-military who would have, spontaneously and without thinking, broken the kid's arm for that.

Politeness didn't originate socially by everyone agreeing to be sweet and kind; but by an inherent understanding that you WILL be sweet and kind on that side of the boundary or you'll lose an arm.  I grew up learning this from my vicious, selfish, self-righteous but extremely polite Russian and German family members ... who had to be polite with each other despite all those qualities.

Moving onto cheaters.  Much of this has to do with the sore loser problem, taken to extremes.  "I can't bear to win, so I'll cheat to make sure I do."  By and large, cheaters fear conflict; though maybe you haven't caught one, cheaters have been caught before, and probably often, since cheating is a compulsive behaviour.  Cheaters tend to avoid intimacy — again, because letting someone behind the wall increases the likelihood you'll see what they do there.  Cheaters in D&D especially don't like what business calls "quality assurance."   They don't like to prove their character's possession of things or how much experience their character has ... and will usually use the "privacy" argument I've just made about dice to protect their character sheet from a DM.  These are the same kind of people who hold their monopoly money in a single stack, habitually in their hand, or like to add armies to their RISK territories in a glob rather than one at a time.

The principles of performance magic are built on tricking the senses into being able to cheat you ... obstensibly for the purpose of entertainment, but there are more than a few magicians in stir who realized that the skills that enable them to perform magic will also help them lift your wallet.  For an ambitious player of any game, there are many, many ways to cheat.  There are no sure-fire ways to guarantee that one of your players isn't slyly cheating from time to time ... though the player who rolls six 1s in a particular game night probably isn't.  [who knows?  It could be a set-up; that's how cons work].

It's strange to me that people would cheat in D&D, since the game isn't about "winning."  By the time I'd played a year of D&D I'd already met several examples.  After all, I'm talking other 15 y.o. kids, not experts along the Las Vegas strip.  I'd learned to watch my relatives for cheating; my uncle Igan had a nasty habit of counting four holes in cribbage when he pegged three.  He was a huge, leathery, terrifying farmer with hands like a catcher's mitt, but even when I was eight, if I called him on cheating he'd shrink and apologize, counting accurately.  Usually, my aunt could hear us playing.

Truth be told, cheating in D&D as a player will not help that much.  I don't randomly ask to see a players' character sheet ... but eventually they'll have to roll a saving throw for every item they're carrying due to a breath weapon or a high fall.  For those times, I'll definitely be looking over the player's shoulder as they roll down the list.  I insist on all dice being rolled in front of at least one other witness, and it's not usually me ... but if I want to see a roll because it's a life-or-death roll, then I'm going to get up and watch that puppy hit the table.  So for all the cheating any player might do, sooner or later, they're still going to roll or die, when I'll be watching.  They might hit a little more often; they might level a little more sooner; they might have a bit more gold than I gave them — but unlike a card game or a chess, the other players and I don't "lose" by their cheating.  At worst, its a pathetic bad habit they ought to shake before getting into a situation with not-nice people, where their habit gets them thrown out of a fast-moving car.

Ah, then there's gamesmanship.  This is the art of winning games by being a total fucking dick.  I have played everything from golf to football to chess to tiddly-winks with people like this, in my family and out, but I don't have this problem with D&D.  See politeness, above.  I expect my players to wait patiently for their chance to throw dice in combat, I expect them to listen politely to other players, I do not allow harassment of a player (except by an occasional taunting NPC, and the players get to kill those) and I don't trust anybody who commits an infraction against protocol more than once in the same way, despite being told to stop doing it.

This is why I have rules like, "no one throws a die until the DM says its time."  I did my years of play where players would roll a die out of turn, get a high number, then pout and complain and moan that they didn't get to keep the roll in spite of rolling it out of turn.  Note that if they're rolling it out of turn, everyone else is distracted by watching the legitimate roller, so who the hell knows what was really rolled?  And even if they do, it creates a lot of negative energy around the table when a player has to be disappointed because they really did roll a critical ... which no, they can't keep.  Rulez is Rulez.  Everybody abides by the same ones and everybody sucks it up.   Nobody, but nobody, rides for free.

I get exactly how that makes me sound like a "miserable bastard."  I'll remind the Gentle Reader that we all thought the teachers were miserable bastards when they forced us in line ... which they did for good reason, because if you don't force 35 kids in line, you get chaos and nothing gets learned.  I'm only a miserable bastard DM when a particular player feels the protocols don't apply to him.  When there are protocols, and the players get used to them, and accept them, and recognize why they exist, they're just as annoyed as me when someone bulls in and decides to act chaotically, while vociferously proclaiming that protocols are wrong and unnecessary.

Thankfully, like our grade school teachers, I don't give a rat's ass who thinks I'm a miserable bastard.  I care that my players are able to invest themselves totally into a game that runs as smooth as creamcheese glaze.  I played several year's worth of games without protocols; as I closed my first decade as a DM, I couldn't help noticing the protocols were making the game a lot tighter and efficient ... and thus improving both momentum and immersion.  After four decades, I will boot the cog that won't turn right before I'll tolerate it in my engine.

Those are the problematic game elements that occur to me.  If anyone has any others that deserve discussion, let me know.