MetaCareers

It may be that a childhood of playing boardgames on a very regular basis is one of the reasons why I refuse to see D&D as a sort of Candyland game, where the players start off at the D&D equivalent of the Gingerbread Plum Trees, work their way to the Licorice Castle, wander the Lollipop woods, defeat the big bad Gloppy and are rewarded by King Kandy at the Candy Castle.  Not that there's anything wrong with Candyland; it's a very good game to teach patience and forbearance to four and five year olds.  It is, however, despite the presence of two short cuts, an extremely linear game.

As all board games are, to different degrees.  Being one who had the opportunity to play them, and very often, long before coming to D&D, I had the opportunity to pick their anatomy.  And as I continued to play board games, and tactical wargames, for the first twenty years of my experience as a DM, I stole from them and messed around with them in attempts to make them more interesting ... much as I continue to do with Dungeons & Dragons.  But that is a post for another day.

I understand that some of my readers will have far more experience with boardgames than others; not everyone grew up playing dozens of them, or indeed any boardgame at all.  It also helps that my upbringing came before the arrival of other distractions, like computers and video games.  If it helps, take note that I don't have a deep, nostalgic feeling for the boardgames I played.  That was then and this is now, and having experienced a life without computers and one with, I'll take this one, thank-you.

But whatever your background, these games exist; and if you're interested in expanding your consciousness about D&D or any other game, it doesn't hurt to familiarize yourself with a few examples of game play that's been invented.  Today I'm going to deconstruct one, talk about the premise of the game and then address the manner in which it could influence role-play and agenda building among player parties in a sandbox game.

The game is Careers.

This is the clearest, largest copy I could find, without glare on the game board so that every square could be read.  It's 1024 pixels squared, so I can enlarge a portion of it fairly well, maintaining it's "legibility" somewhat.  For example, I can read the portion with a little effort, right-clicking it and putting it in a new window.

Rules

Quickly, let me go over the premise of the game.  The players start at "Payday" and move around the board much like most other games, using two 6-sided dice.  When they land on a white square, such as one that says "May Start Farming" or "May Go to Sea," they can pay the fee and move through the appropriate inner "Career" track with their next move.  When moving on an inner track, the player throws one die.  When the player lands on a box that shows a given number of "hearts" — such as the first square of the farmer's track shown, where it reads "Beautiful Spring weather..." — the player collects 2 hearts.  In this way, players collect hearts, stars and money, which the victory conditions require.

Before anyone rolls a die, they decide individually and privately what their particular victory conditions are.  By the rules, you need 60 pts.  You may obtain these in the form of 60 stars, 60 hearts or $60,000; but you may also mix and match what you choose to "go for."  You could, for example, shoot for 25 stars, 15 hearts and $20,000, which together add up to 60 pts.  The game can easily be lengthened by increasing the number of base points played to (for example, doubling it to 120 pts.), or shortening the game by declaring that we'll play to 40, 30 or 20 pts.  The rules don't say as much, but any idiot can figure out that the points played for are arbitrary.

There are two kinds of cards: Experience cards and Opportunity Knocks cards.  I won't get into the details, but most experience cards involve using the card to move instead of rolling the die.  For example, if I want to move 4, and I have an Experience card that says I can move four, I can jump from the start to where I'm gambling in corn, rolling a die and collecting $1,000 per pip.  I could also use the Experience card to avoid the hailstorm that comes at the end that would cause me to lose half my cash.

Opportunity Knocks cards allow the player to jump to the Career track of their choice — providing they have that card.  Some careers are heavy in money, others are heavy in stars and some are heavy in hearts.  Obviously, we want to move into career tracks that get us the things we want for our personal victory conditions.

At the start, the player's "salary" equals $1,000.  Everytime you physically move past the Payday square, you collect that salary and then bump your salary $1,000 for the next go around.  There are also squares that will increase your salary by landing on them.  If your victory conditions require money, you want to get your bottom around Payday as often as possible.  You do not cross Payday if you use a card to jump to a Career square, no matter which direction you're coming from.  You must roll the dice on the track to get your Payday.

There are other nuances but we don't need to spend time with them.  The last thing worth mentioning is that in some places you can trade cash for either hearts or stars, in different ways.  There are places where you can waste time, not moving, but collecting hearts as you wait.  There are enough finicky bits in the game to create uncertainties ... and since you have no idea how close the other players are to winning at any given time, there's a bit of anxiety that you're not collecting your stuff as fast as you ought.

Role-playing

D&D role-playing grew out of Chainmail due to a human predisposition for anthropomorphisation (I so rarely get to use 20-letter words).  This is the habit of ascribing human traits, emotions and intentions to non-human entities ... such as the North Wind and the Sun, foxes and crows, tortoises and to scale combat miniatures.  Among the creators of D&D, a leap was made that the wizards and fighters of the game combat system could talk and feel and have aspirations.  It wasn't much of a leap!  18-month-old children start doing this with their stuffed animals almost immediately after they learn how to talk.

The game-piece moving around the Careers board could just as easily be given a personality commensurate with the victory conditions that player chose ... but we don't do this because when we play a boardgame, we almost always identify the events and actions taking place with ourselves.  People do not land on Boardwalk and say, "Shit, my racing car has to pay $2,000!"  No, they say, "I have to pay $2,000."  It's automatic.  The main difference with D&D is that, having arisen out of wargames, each player has multiple units on the board.  This requires a designation that separates this unit from that one ... and this habit has perpetrated into normal game play of D&D, despite the players usually only having one player character at a time.

I believe that's because each PC has highly individualised traits related to the game's character design rules ... and that although I am playing my single fighter in this campaign, I've had dozens of other player characters in my past.  Thus, there's a need in my mind to separate this fighter from another fighter I ran five years ago in another campaign, or from any of the other character classes and races in my history.  This pushes my character further from me than an ordinary game piece for a boardgame; after all, there's zero need to differentiate this iteration of the game piece, or the game, from others.  I'm quite comfortable saying, "Damn, I was hit by a hailstorm last time," without this seeming incongruous — even though it happened in another game and perhaps some years ago.

Yet, Careers deliberately gives non-game material for sentimental, aesthetic reasons.  We do not land on a square that merely reads, 2 stars, 4 hearts.  No, it gives us a reason for that gain: we've raised a prize bull.  Knowing that we've raised a bull helps us not at all with winning the game or strategizing our next move.  And still it's interesting to know that's what we've done, while simultaneously giving the feeling that we're somehow involved with farming.  Another square, elsewhere on the map, also gives us 2 stars and 4 hearts; only this one's in the Politics Career and we get it for "Lead official overseas visit."  Somehow, though it's the same, it's not the same, is it?

Agenda Building

Careers was published and released for the first time in 1955, nearly 20 years before D&D.  Suppose that someone had realized the possibility of creating a series of random personal characteristics and predilections.  Suppose that before the game started, each career was not merely differentiated by what happened there, but also by our particular player character's ability to perform as asked, once entering that career?  An official overseas visit can go well; it can go badly.  If Careers is expanded into what we understand to be a role-playing game, then we know perfectly well that a player character can seriously fuck up a visit like that ... especially if that character has the attributes and nature that they ought to be applying to raising prize bulls and not entering politics.  Obviously, the number of choices for what a farmer does in Careers is limited to nine squares ... but if we were to take the whole of the profession and expand it rationally, there are hundreds of squares we could propose.  These could have very different pathways that could be followed, leading in some cases to politics, specifically labour management and socialisation, leading to others in researching hybrids or inventing farm equipment.

This is true for all the different Careers represented in the game ... and in hundreds of other possible careers as well ... and because I bring this up, I'm contractually obligated to include the image shown.

Whatever the Gentle Reader's feeling about such a game, the fact remains that we can learn from the thought experiment.  The D&D game is NOT merely a collection of rules restricting play and dictating how players advance.  I'm accused of believing that's what it is, because I spend so much time pointing out that there ARE rules and that the rules matter, and that those who ignore rules are not running a game but are instead perpetrating a ridiculous farce.

But believing that there are rules doesn't mean that I don't also ascribe to the principle that D&D is an emotionally sentimental, aesthetic game, and that many of the functions of the game are wholly separate from  "winning" or "surviving" the game world.  Hell and damnation, I run my game world based on the real Earth because the players taking an action in PARIS, FRANCE, feel emotions and connections they wouldn't feel in some made up city in a made up game world, even one that's been popular for — big whup — forty years.  Paris has been around for 1500 years and it has quite a lot more cachet than Greyhawk.  For one thing, you can buy a plane ticket to get there.

A role-playing game could certainly have been created out of Careers ... or, for that matter, any boardgame we care to name.  Which is to say, looking at how a boardgame did a thing, then extrapolating that thing for the more complicated RPG that we're running, is a useful and practical exercise.   This includes the "fluff" — which is really no more dismissible than the presence of love in your life — as well as the hard, practical gains to be made.  Careers asks us to collect "hearts" and "stars," representing these things as numbers.  In D&D, they are the fulfillment that comes from working with one's fellow players, or the status one builds in the game world through deeds.  Not only deeds of valour, but deeds of generosity, sacrifice, duty, honour and dependability.  Do we not, in fact, record these things when they happen, even if we don't do it the same way as numbers for experience?  Are they any less important?

I see people try to pretend, on the other hand, that they are the only thing that's important ... and that's wrong too.  Success isn't just found in joy and glitz.  It's also found in hard, diligent work.  The numbers are there to represent the latter.  You don't "win" if you don't pull the cart.