Succeeding Well

By the age of six, I did what all little boys did.  I tied a sheet around my neck and ran around pretending to be superman.  I built forts out of chairs, couch pillows and blankets.  By eight, it was playing guns, cowboys & indians ... and because it was 1972, Star Trek.  I liked being Scotty.  By the age of 10, it was chess and RISK.  At 13 it was Squad Leader, Panzerblitz and Tractics — this last being a set of wargaming rules for conducting WW2 style combat using armour miniatures.  We did it with model tanks we built from box kits; tanks and artillery pieces that we painted diligently.  By 13, I'd probably built between 50 and 75 model tanks, planes and ships, the last being everything from 15th century clipper ships to the USS Missouri.

Then when I was just nine days shy of 15, I encountered D&D.

Recognize the trajectory?  It starts with make-believe but as I mature, the subject material becomes increasingly more mature — and the rules' set grows denser and more exacting.  At eight we're designating parts of a schoolyard jungle gym as "the bridge" and "sickbay" and "engineering," with everyone respecting those designations.  Five years later, we're measuring the carpets with tape measures, recording distances down to the millimeter and holding each other account for the exact distance a tank can move or fire.

More to the point, as children we're bent on increasing the substance of the decisions we make.  At eight, I'm shouting into a pretend comm during a battle that "Engineering's been hit!  I'm wounded!  I need help!"  Five years later I'm speaking in low voices across the room with my co-commander, building strategies for my mauler, artillery units and guards to draw fire into the woods (this area carpet) so his faster panzers and panzerkampfwagons can move rapidly along the couch and come out around the coffee table, flanking the enemy.  We're collaborating.  We're making important decisions.  We're assuming responsibilities way, way past our maturity.  Leading soldiers; deciding upon acceptable losses; concerned about looking like morons in front of our peers, believing somehow that our ability to lead a battle matters with regards to who we are and what we say.

Why?  Why go down that road?  We read stories about war.  We had hundreds of examples from movies and comics that told us what men did and what men faced ... and whatever the later cultural resistance to all that macho-bullshit, as boys we ran towards that stuff, because it made us feel great.  We felt magnificent, raising our sense of self-importance through the activities we chose to enjoy.

What we felt certainly wasn't as clear-headed as a psychological calling for "adventure."  No, we wanted to be Scotty, to be Sgt. Rock, to act the way our heroes did, when we were still young and dumb enough to believe in heroes.  Rest assured, I do recognize that a 40-something today, growing up in the 80s the way I did in the 70s, could never have had things as black and white as we did.  But none of our assumptions about "taking charge" tacitly recognised the difference between which side we fought for.  Note the "I'm playing the Nazis" in the example about Panzers given above.  No, in the comics, the German soldiers were always portrayed as soldiers, and never as "Nazis."  Nazis were horror villains who died in Weird War Tales at the hands of enemy zombies.  And to be honest, we understood perfectly well that "soldiers" were just ordinary men.  Look at that comic cover: "Easy Company's newest recruit ..."  Soldiers were ordinary human beings who did extraordinary things, because they had to, not because they wanted to.  We grasped the pervading myth that rising above what we were, that being children, depended on the standard to which we held ourselves.  And when we played wargames, that meant winning by ability, honour, innovation and effort.  No one thought winning by dumb luck was praiseworthy.  We wanted to succeed well.

And then ... Dungeons and Dragons.

For all the interest they held for us, wargames were comparatively limited.  The focus, the necessary winning strategy, even the morality, were two-dimensional compared to D&D.  The units in wargames were based on real equipment, or at the very least mechanical elements of types and models of military designs.  Being table based, the limitations were the space allowed by the map board or, in the case of Tractics, how big a space we could play in.  And the number of units were limited by our physical capacity to own physical equipment, or move hundreds of little chits on a board in a space of time, before we had to take it down so the dining table could be used for eating.  These limitations were obliterated by D&D.

Keeping in mind, unit-based wargames required a degree of skill and strategic foresight.  We all remember the one player in RISK who decides, "enough of this patient approach, I'm going all in."  Their next turn, they start attacking, and attacking, and attacking, until every last attack they can possibly make is gone, even as they use three armies to attack ten.  Every territory is left with one army on it; and while the others cheerfully gobble them all up, there's also a question of, "what the fuck?"

Reaching back, there's the eight-year-old on the playground who can't play the Star Trek fantasy pretend game on the monkey bars, because he or she doesn't know what a "warp drive" is, or doesn't understand going to the transporter first before leaving the ship.  As children, we're not very forgiving about this sort of thing.  When Todd decides to run all his tanks out of the wood in a full-frontal assault against hulled-down troops, like Pickett's charge, and gets destroyed, there's a general consensus to stop inviting Todd to any further games.

Fellows like Todd find a new life in D&D.  They still rush headlong at orcs; they still stupidly cast fireballs in their own face.  D&D doesn't make them smarter.  It does give them room to be stupid, however.  There's an adjudicator to say, "Um, Todd, that will kill you."  Whereas in a war game, like chess, you touch the piece, you have to move it.

With the beginning of my experience in D&D, there were players who continued to treat it like a war game.  There are still such people.  They crave the fighting.  The two-dimensionality of it.  The "touch-a-piece-you-have-to-move-it" standards they invent.  But D&D offers much more.  We can't start a cult in a war game.  We can't pretend to be a prostitute to kill clients.  Or reunite lost lovers, or restore a king to his kingdom.  In a wargame, we can't organise a town against a plague.  We can't break into a castle at night and sneak around, thieving and assassinating.  There are so many things we can do in D&D that we can't do in any other game.  It and games like it take the generalised, non-specific parts of pillow-fort building, cowboys and indians, chess, RISK, squad leader and a thousand other games and makes them DENSER and MORE EXACTING.  So much so that most of us don't understand what's going on when we play.

Yesterday, JB wrote a brilliant, strategic investigation into what D&D offers, that the reader should definitely read.  But even at that, he misses a big, fat point that I need to add here (though he almost makes it himself).  At one point, JB uses his American Heritage Dictionary to describe adventure.  I'll repeat them here:

1. An undertaking of a hazardous nature.

2. An unusual experience or course of events marked by excitement and suspense.

3. Participation in hazardous or exciting experiences.

4. A financial speculation or business venture.

JB then elucidates upon the benefits of taking risks — the hazard, the excitement, the suspense, the fact of the undertaking, adrenaline, seeing other places, having strange experiences ... all definite truths and, unquestionably an important part of the game.

But it's not THE game.  No.  The game is not the risk.  The game is what we accept the risk to achieve.

And again no, not just the prestige or the sense of accomplishment, or wealth, or being a "hero," all things JB mentions, though only in passing.

We don't cheer Luke going down the trench, we cheer when the shots go down the exhaust port.  We cheer when the risk is over.  When we've survived.  As happy as a skydiver is falling, it's always a little bit better when the chute opens.  And better still when landing safely.  The fall is a terrific rush ... but it's still only foreplay.

When my players talk of an adventure they had, they don't talk about the risk.  They don't say, "Oh, hey, the best moment was when I thought I was going to die when surrounded by fifty goblins."  No, they say, "We wrecked that fort!  Blew it all to hell."  It isn't just a sense of accomplishment.  It's THE accomplishment.  The one we lived through.  And while others might think we're heroes, we know what it cost.  "Dagnar died.  I miss Dagnar."  They worry more than a bit about having to go through something like that again.  And when they are faced with a big risk, my players hedge and plan and hedge some more.

Because we don't run towards risk.  We run towards getting something we want so badly that will risk the bad stuff to get it.

D&D gives us so many cool things we can want and try to get ... more than any other RPG, more than any other game in existence.  We can literally get anything we can imagine.  The shackles of everyday life are off, the way the D&D struck off the shackles of being a kid under the tutelage of parents and teachers.  We can think of it, we can realise how to get it ... and then we can go get it, our way, using our wits.  Risk?  Risk is just something that happens along the way.

Like Sgt. Rock says, "Livin' is hard, soldier ... it's dyin' that's easy."

A considerably number of early D&D players recognised that the way the game was being structured it was far too easy to die.  This led to an increased sentiment that what these players wanted was the achievement, not the constant reminder that player characters can die at the drop of a hat.  From this sentiment came a host of poisonous game fixes: starting at a higher level, stressing "role" playing over "roll" playing, storytelling and backstories, fudging, matrix-determined ability stats, collaborative storytelling, the "rule of cool" and so on.  These philosophical approaches grew out of the ignorant brutality of early modules like the Tomb of Horrors and Vault of the Drow, complimented by the Dragon Magazine's constant stress upon all the things JB preaches, risk, excitement, et al.

There is a third path.  Lessen the risk.

Don't get rid of it.  Don't smash the game all to pieces in an effort to make sure characters get everything their hearts desire.  Don't eliminate the thrill, the suspense and the hazard.  But get it out of the players' face.  Find another kind of hazardous and exciting experience that gets the players' blood pumping without constantly putting them in fights where being killed has a greater than 5% chance.

I ran my online game for a decade.  Amount of excitement and fear felt?  Lots and lots.  Number of actual player characters who died?  One about every two years.  Granted, there was an incident where three of them died in one fight ... and another when I should have killed them all.  But, I find that killing a player makes a very poor use of game time.  The best use is to make a player think I'm going to kill him or her ... and then kill just enough players to remind them it's always possible.

This is how I'm always able to start players at 1st level, but they mostly manage to reach 12th.  Because not every risk is "life and death."  Players also risk loss of wealth and equipment, loss of opportunity, loss of face, loss of status ... and loss of surety and confidence.  It isn't always necessary to kill them.  In fact, it's hardly ever necessary.

Crying out as Scotty, I didn't decide to be killed, did I?  Where's the fun in that?  But I also needed help, didn't I?  It wasn't this bullshit of shaking it off either.

To use another example, consider the removal of Luke's hand in Empire.  Would it have been better if Luke lost his head?  Or if he fell hundreds of feet to hit the hard steel of the bottom?  No.  No, he loses his hand, he falls through a convenient port that allows him to retreat and fight another day ... but he's suitably chagrined.  He's upset about his father.  He doesn't feel he's "won."  There's excitement.  There's hazard.  There's the hard fact of livin' as opposed to the easiness of dyin'.  It makes a better game.  It allows the player character to try again, to make a better job of it, to succeed.

And it's succeeding well that matters.