Sense

There's more to wisdom than exercise.  A game world's got to make sense.  The people in it have to do more than move, they've got to do it with a purpose.  The world and its people have to react to the players like a pond reacts to pebbles thrown into it.

"Sense" comes of understand how "the" world thinks, as we have only one example to draw upon.  I don't count the novels and writings of fantasy writers; they draw on the one source just as any of us must.  We live and breathe and strive forward in this one world — and whether we comprehend it or not, the players respond to things as believable or not without needing to understand why.  If our game world is to hammer the button hard enough to ring the players' bell, it's got to hit true.  Hit false and the players will know it.

"Purpose" argues the same principles upon what we consider worthwhile activities ourselves: improving life, gathering wealth, seizing power, making a dent in the universe.  If the game world's denizens are nothing more than dolls moving around a clockwork mechanism, single-mindedly acting without sentiment, vitality, ambition or passion, again, the players will know it.  And if we do not have a grasp one what those words mean ... if we cannot produce attitudes about a situation when required, then the fault is not in the world, the game's design or the edition played, but in ourselves!

The players enter the world, enacting upon it, jumping in and splashing about.  WE make the ripples happen.  With each splash there are more ripples; the ripples of multiple splashes interact and interfere with each other, and as the ripples hit the far shore they rebound and return to interact and interfere with the players.  This must be apprehended with the clarity of the finest crystal ... or there's no chance of lifting ourselves out of old, tired habits, reading from the banal descriptive paragraphs written by people who cannot look into the eyes and faces of our players.  D&D, and by extension RPGs, are not a communication between absent persons who've never met communicating through dry text, but Me, You, Here, Right now, Face-to-Face, acting and reacting with the speed of thought and voice.  It is nuance, tone, subtlety, body language, watching, guessing and leaping forward mindfully from one happenstance to the next.

Is it any wonder that I can't say in a few paragraphs what to say or think?  There are a million possibilities of what can be said or thought in any given moment ... and none of us know even half a dozen of them.  Collectively, a DM or a Player might describe anything, take any action.  The play, and the fun, and the thrill, is waiting to see what it will be, so we can respond, get a response and surge forward excitedly.  There are no lists, no tables, no pre-planned if-then strategies that will keep pace with a group of humans sitting together participating at this speed.  When we try to "simplify" and "order" the process, we emasculate it, we hamstring it, we cripple human inventiveness and possibility to the pace of crutches and bed rest.

Is that what we want?

If I could wave a magic wand and enable the reader to know what I know, I would ... but as the last post described, I did not know seven years ago what I know now.  I didn't know three months ago what I know now.  I didn't know when I started this post that this was the paragraph I'd be writing once I explained the matters of sense, purpose and ripples in a pond.  We are learning and growing and changing ourselves every minute of the day, even when that change is negative and we're repeating the same lessons we took up before.  I cannot pick you up and put you beside me merely from wanting to do so.  I have to walk you through the process just as I was walked through the process, by others who knew more than I did when I was young.  That's all I have.

What's worse, I'm guessing here.  I don't know exactly what worked with me and what didn't ... or what drove me to make a world this way and not that.  I don't know why, from the first, I found the notion of a module-adventure distasteful and bland.  Was it the writing?  Was it the long experience in watching films or reading books before coming to D&D?  Was it the plain linear quality of the adventures that restrained and blocked my wish to pursue personal whims?  I don't know.  But while other players seemed to like them, I hated them.  And when I ran my own style of game, with the open setting I've always run, my players never said, "Oh, please, won't you run a module?"  No, they wanted what I was selling.  I've always found players that wanted what I was selling ... I've never had to complain that players couldn't be found.  I don't think that's coincidence.

I started this blog in 2008 because I felt I could explain a better way to play D&D.  I hadn't guessed, until feeling a lot of resistance, that it would be so hard.  I hadn't guessed how few people there were who played like I did.  Except for players I've met personally at game cons, I've hardly met anyone online that comprehends running a game in the manner described in the above paragraphs.  It's flabbergasting.  Why would people want to play this game in such an obstructed, shackled, bankrupted manner?

But they do.  They do want it.  And they will argue viciously for their point of view.

So.  As I say: I'm guessing.  On that account, starting with "sense," it works to discuss how the world does think.  We can't understand that point if we don't discuss it.

Hm.  Seems a pretty big subject.  Where do we start?  Philosophy?  Human events?  Anthropology?  Biology?  Surely, you've read fifty to a hundred significant books on each of those, yes?  No?

How are we going to understand the motives of a peasant, a king, a criminal, a tax collector, a hermit, a friar, an admiral, a teacher and so on, if we haven't a solid grounding in why we humans do what we do, or what we've done, or what we've overcome to become human, or what "human" even means?  A person is not only their job; there isn't just one kind of peasant or criminal.  It's not like there are only 200 types of person.  Everything is way more complicated than that.  Understanding how the world thinks, and therefore how the world reacts, and how the ripples work and why they rebound in just this way or that, depends on knowing what ripples are and what makes them.

The full scale of learning to dungeon master cannot be obtained with plug-and-play components.  It is not a matter of putting round pegs in round holes.

Oh, hell.

Here it is.  This is a dead end.  Without an inspiration at this point, I'm out of gas.