Etude

My goal with this series of posts has been to answer the question of what to do with players at the start of a campaign.  Having them find something, or suffer a consequence, builds a series of connections with the game world upon which later, more personally-oriented adventure structures can be built.  Perhaps we can get to those in time.

In service of this goal, I've used examples from the online game I ran between 2016 and 2020.  As readers can witness, the action of presenting those examples tends to elicit strong feelings from my former players — which says a lot about the game I play.  JB played in my game for about 5 minutes back in 2013 (2012?) and still remembers the experience acutely, so that he occasionally engages in self-deprecation about it.  Pandred has come away from the campaign with a strong sense of introspection regarding what he believes as a person.  Drain has strong feelings that persist years after.  These don't sound like the usual sentimental blather we associate with former game play.  Players who commit to my game come away having experienced a sensation that mixes ardour with vehemence.  It's difficult to express and it leaves its mark.  I've experienced that response for most of my DMing career.

JB has just written a long account of his progression through role-playing over the last 40+ years, a narrative replete with tiny details that my memory couldn't hope to produce from my own life.  I'm particularly unsettled by his weaving, erratic approach to the game of D&D, as he drifted through varying renditions of game rules and choices, from BCEMI to 3rd to B/X to AD&D.  I have to remind myself sternly that this is a standard model of game play, far, far removed from my own approach.  I played Empire of the Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls and Chivalry and Sorcery, but these were dabblings that were quickly thrown aside within three years of my introduction to RPGs.  Traveller and Top Secret lasted a little longer because those games were very different in scope and their goals.  But my D&D world began as AD&D in 1980 and remained my game — though progressively gutted and rebuilt — from the beginning.  It's another cold reminder that my ideals and approach were, from the beginning, unique.

I'm not certain how my style of play and approach grew into existence; how and why did I set out to mind-fuck my players with situations that would force them to evaluate themselves as people more so than participants?  With each post in this series I've made an effort to give a literary example that might serve to indicate the situation described.   Tom Sawyer braving the anger of Injun Joe; Bilbo's regret at picking up the ring; Sidney Carton's willingness to sacrifice his life in order to gain a life he could never have; these situations and stories left their mark on me before I encountered D&D, because in the year that JB saw Dungeon! in a Fred Meyer store, I was already 17, meeting the woman I would get engaged to (and never marry) and so far down the road into liberal politics that I'd begun marching in political rallies opposing the cruise missile.  Life at the time was moving very fast and my sense of being a person in those early years of D&D were consumed with art, performance, violent music, lovemaking and a very great deal of anger.  I saw the world within its propensity to commit cruelty and sadism towards it's occupants and ... I suppose ... the savagery the world seemed to possess left its stamp upon the sort of game world I chose to run.

I remember next to nothing about the early narratives that established my game.  I can recall scenes of plunder and mass slaughter; the players always seemed to be piling up dead bodies of one creature or another.  I remember creating the darkest enemies I could imagine, and the players eventually killing each in their turn; but the only one I remember was the "Countess de Sade," the overarching Moriarty-like crime manipulator who was never met in person but whose influence was everywhere.  Much of the adventuring was based upon travel-and-kill, travel-and-kill ... my game didn't start to develop a more structured aspect until I began using the real world in 1984.  Those players in the campaign began as mercenaries, found their way to Spain, became engaged in a protracted war between the humans of Iberia and drow elves, fought a great battle, were rewarded with land and titles by the King of Portugal and settled in Viana do Castelo.  From there, they established an outpost in Portuguese Guinea-Bissau, and another in Barbuda in the Caribbean, to establish the triangular trade link that uses the winds and currents of the Atlantic to such as effect.  At one point they were shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland and had to overcome lack of resources and a bloody civil war to escape the island and return to their lands.  When that campaign finally came to an end in 1992, they were venturing inland to help put a prince on a minor throne in the vicinity of "Upper Volta," modern Burkina Faso.  They hoped to establish permanent trade between the prince's lands and the port they were building in Guinea.

My game improved vastly with the flood of information the real world provided; it advanced vastly again with the advent of computers.  My learning the processes and business of publishing in the 90s was another big improvement in my skillset that led to the mapmaking skills I've developed over the last two decades.

My actual marriage in 1986 helped to calm me down considerably as a person; my fatherhood in 1988 was a big step in my sense of self, as I set out to raise a child very differently from the way my parents raised me.  University gave me scope, stage performance gave me bearing, being published regularly after 1988, so that strangers could read my words, built confidence ... as did performing in stage at festivals and, eventually, on film.  Step by step, becoming an experienced human being transformed the practice of my game world towards serious, relevant game play, in which people were enabled towards passion and the potential for being uplifted and hurt by "pretend" game play.

And that is the key, I think, to my approach.  The monsters and the abilities may be imaginary, but the decisions and the consequences ARE NOT.  Those are utterly, frustratingly, maddeningly real.  In ways that force people into discomfort and self-reckoning.  No other game does this, or can do this.  I imagine other DMs have caught the method I've embraced, but I don't see them talk about it online, in books or anywhere else.

Yet it is crystal clear: players want this.  Once they've tasted it, they don't want anything else.

It's a damn shame I can't run everyone.