Many eons ago I wrote two posts about how to tackle a dungeon, which I meant to be a series but which I never completed. I got into some back-and-forth with Mujadaddy which I didn't handle well and I lost interest.
In part, this comes from having had a DM's perspective for so long. I haven't run in any campaign consistently since the mid-1980s. Experiences with 4th edition and 5th weren't especially pleasant and I found myself facing the same old tiresome tropes that had been there three decades before. When I look at a dungeon today, I necessarily see it from the DM's perspective; my concern for the players is that they find it interesting, that there's a base level of uncertainty and tension, and that there's exactly enough treasure to whet their appetites but not so much that they progress levels too quickly.
Two sojourns into a dungeon should be sufficient to push a low-level character, less than 5th, up a level. That assumes they dig in, get into a fight, hold their ground long enough to take and give damage, then beat a healthy retreat. For me, it's about bravery, not chutzpah.
I've never taken the position that "reason" — a methodical approach to playing D&D — kills adventure. I grew up digesting tales of Robert Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic, Mungo Park and Livingston in Africa, Marco Polo and so on ... and found tales of these real people managing extreme difficulty and danger in a practical manner to be endlessly fascinating. Jules Verne invented fantasy tales filled with mechanical and well ordered approaches to adventure themes that excited me as a child. I read and re-red Robinson Crusoe and other tales of lost persons in the wild for the ways they solved problems and extricated themselves from death.
On the other hand, I found Gulliver's Travels and Baron Munchausen to be plodding and dull — and as I grew into adulthood, I recognized that these things were written as political allegories, and NOT as "adventures." Somehow, they never captured my imagination. Being very tiny in a very large world was handled much better in Asimov's The Fantastic Voyage, for my money, because it was about concrete science and not fairy tale.
Coming at D&D in 1979, there was no game community to argue most of the points that Mujadaddy made in that back-and-forth. Ideas like "supernatural malevolence" dominating a landscape, "red shirts" as a metaphor, "tomb robbers," the players are "special," or that "games exist for the players" had no infringement on my DMing or on those who DM'd me. Hard as it might be to believe, these things came along after D&D players began to form clubs and impose their philosophy on a growing community.
Ernest Shackleton went into the bowels of the worst place on earth and got stranded there with perfectly ordinary seamen, whose only chance to survive was the equipment they bought, their ability to sail and their sheer tenacity. Generations of those same soldiers undertook battles where they would load and fire and sail amidst volleys of cannonballs fired point blank into the ships they manned. Yet I'm to believe that men like this won't enter a forest because there might be an owlbear in it. I'm to believe they won't defend their country because of unseen malignant spirits. Or that person who are essentially underground thieves are definitively "braver" because meta-game D&D concepts remove honour, duty and resolve from anybody with less than 25 hit points.
I grant that player characters are "unusual." In my game, they have more training, more equipment, more abilities ... and yes, they have more hit points. But I also believe that, just as it was with the "British Grenadiers," ordinary folk also have little to lose, a love of money and a willingness to trade the former for the latter. Otherwise, how is it that so many perfectly ordinary folk were willing to cross one or more continents for the sake of a gold strike? Was that a lack of bravery? Was that because they had so many hit points?
Anyway, this post tries to tackle too many themes. I should come back another day and manage them better.
I remember those old posts. I was rather...mm..."intimidated" (?) by them at the time. You'll note: no comments from me on either. I didn't like what I was reading (non-"recognizable" D&D, right?) and yet could not see a logical path to the "recognizable" type of D&D that was my preference. Playing the way you advocated amounted to a lot more work than I was used to. And I was much lazier back then.
ReplyDelete[well, maybe preoccupied. I *was* in Paraguay, after all]
RE Bravery versus Chutzpah
This is a very interesting statement, if I'm reading it correctly (i.e. that you value the former, not the latter). I'm trying to parse out this concept, because (to me) chutzpah implies "boldness" and I've long been of the mind that fortune should favor the bold...and that's what I tend to reward when it comes to players in my game.
Is the distinction the presence of fear? "Bravery" to me is action even in the face of being afraid ("cowardice" would be allowing fear to control/prevent action). Chutzpah (defined on the internet as self-confidence or audacity) implies...what? A lack of healthy fear/caution?
I would like some elaboration from you on this, just to grok your specific point of view here.
Perhaps "chutzpah" isn't quite right. I'm thinking those people who have more cojones than brains; who don't concern themselves with getting ready before shooting out into the wilderness. Every year in Alberta we get a healthy pile of dead bodies that pile up because people get lost in the mountains and try to walk out of them at night, using their phone as a flashlight until their battery runs out - and so they can't be found through signal triangulation.
ReplyDeleteIncredibly stupid people have proved themselves to have plenty of "nerve" ... but not the bravery to be patient and adapt themselves to a situation.