The Woods

I suspect the subject material of educating new DMs has begun to wear.  It's what I have, I'm afraid.  I've been gnawing the teeth of my intellect upon introducing two aspects of the problem.  Both are age-old troubles.  Neither has a factual solution to my knowledge, though I've attempted both in the past.

(a) how does a DM talk to players?  And (b) how does a DM start worldbuilding from scratch?

Briefly:

I just start talking.  It feels like that's how I've always been — I've been talking since a very young age ... younger than many, it seems.  Arguing began somewhere between the age of 5 and 6, I think brought on by the dynamics of board games.  Seems everyone in my family were always starting an argument during a board game.  As it happens, arguing is an important part of the dynamic of presenting D&D, since we're doing more than describing what the players see ... we're literally setting out to convince them that they're seeing this thing we've imagined.  Therefore when DMing, I'm "leaning in," compelling the players to get interested, get busy, get worried about what's going to happen next.

It's been so long since I started a world from scratch, I'm forced to draw on memories going back 37 years.  Essentially, pick a place.  Pick a scene within that place.  Have something happen there, which intrigues or threatens the players.  Explain why that thing happened, and specifically in that scene, by building up the place that enables it.

For example: Say the "place" is a big city, say something like Vienna.  The "scene" is a tiny plaza with stone paving, at night, where four streets meet.  What happens is that while the party is searching for a room at an inn, they see a long, reptilian creature laying in the street, and realise in time, from about forty feet away, that it's a basilisk.  Go.

Okay, so ... putting these two thoughts together.

We have no game world.  Just this street scene.  There's no inn, no larger Vienna, nothing.  The players have their characters, collectively they have more hit points than the basilisk, conceivably they could take the monster.  It's up to them to decide what they want to do.

It's not enough for me to say, "You see a basilisk."  To present the scene as real, I've got to present the basilisk in the same manner that I would if it were a large, 9-foot log laying in the middle of the street.  First, you don't know what it is.  It looks ... possibly threatening.  It's in your path.  Minimal details.  Because at night, with all the various obstacles a street might present (the street isn't level, there are steps and posts and possibly trees overhanging, plus shadows from various structures), absolute knowledge is not immediately available, so as a DM, I don't provide absolute knowledge.  It may be a log.  You don't know.  It may be anything.  And if the players pull their weapons and proceed to sneak up on it, and find it's only a log, they'll be embarrassed.  That is also in their minds.

Beyond the words of the presentation, there's my willingness to emote.  There's a difference between my leaning back in a chair, arms languishing, muttering bland phrases, and my looking sternly at the papers in front of me, standing up, leaning forward, frowning, and saying in low tones, "There's something up ahead."

We can go through the business of rolling fake dice to suggest something's happening.  We can shuffle papers and mutter, "oh shit," under our breath, as though we've discovered something unexpected that the party now has to deal with ... but in fact, the only real message we have to send about the thing up ahead is that we believe in it, and that it matters.  We don't need the dumbshow.  The dumbshow works; and it's a tool we can reserve.  But we don't need it.

My choice of words writing this post strives to convince you, the reader, that I mean what I say and that this is serious.  This same choice of words, the diligence that underlies them, bespeaks the same message to the players.  I'm expressing my view as hard as I can that there's something in the street.  I'm presenting arguments: it's this long, it's this colour, it's something that doesn't belong there.  Your reaction to that presentation carries the game.  If I can't convince you that there's something life threatening ahead, that you need to care about, then you will blow off everything I say as something not worth bothering about.  This is what I mean when I say that I'm arguing you into the game.

Now.  Once you've learned what the basilisk is, you have to assess the threat it offers.  It's moving as if it's heard something; the party doesn't dare watch it for any length of time.  No one has a mirror, because it's the first day and no one expects a basilisk.  Is it safe to run?  Can it run faster than us?  Is it just one basilisk, or is this merely one of a group?  These are questions you to which you want an answer.

Can you ask me?  Yes, but I'm under no obligation to answer.  You have no idea if it's safe to run, or how fast the basilisk can go, or how many of them are out here on the streets of Vienna.  You have no idea why it's here.  You can quote the Monster Manual at me, but I can answer that the statistics in that book are subject to revisionment by me, the DM, as I see fit.  The basilisks in Gygax's world may run this fast, but this isn't Gygax's world, is it?

Over and over you ask, what is this thing doing here?  A basilisk?  In the middle of Vienna?  What the hell?

I ran this encounter in the Autumn of 1984, after deciding I'd start running the real world.  I had a fascination with Vienna at the time and felt it was a good place to start the campaign.  I hoped to draw the players into the Wienerwald Forest (my first Earth-campaign took place in 1500, so obviously the forest was much wilder that Johann Strauss found it), also known as the Vienna Woods.  I hoped for a journey into the Alps, and around the Neusiedler See.  The players decided they preferred to travel east, which they did until they reached Odessa.

They killed the basilisk and learned the beast had escaped from a mage's menagerie and that much of the city had been searching for it.  The mage was unhappy that his monster had been killed; the desire had been to catch it.  Nonetheless, the party was forgiven, the mage invited them to dinner, I dropped hints about places to visit and the party snubbed me.  No harm done.

My point here is that inventing a reason for the basilisk to be here has to be believable ... which, thanks to D&D, is provided by a wide range of possibilities.  The mage's reaction to the killing, coupled with the others around the mage who showed signs of relief, established the theme of my game world, which had been growing in the years before 1984: first, that things are not as they seem; second, that anything can happen anywhere, at any time; and third, there's always a reason.  No matter how nutty the outset might be, once all the facts are known, the thing won't appear to be nutty at all.

I have no idea how such a thing can be conveyed to someone who has never run the game before; or who hasn't the imagination to produce a reason for things; or thinks that "reason" is a detriment to a campaign, which really ought to be about "fantasy."  Such people are wrong.  Players, whether they're conscious of it or no, are human, and thus are helplessly driven to understand why a thing happens, for no other reason than because they're hard-wired this way.  We are thrown into an absurd world about which we know exactly nothing, about which we must persevere to understand if we'd rather not get hit by a bus, starve, work a miserable job for years upon years or die alone.  Quite obviously, many people fail at this.  Most commonly, for lack of proper instruction.  Particularly the failure to bring the message effectively that survival means knowing things.

As a DM, not convincing the players that the game world "matters," along with the decisions they make, is a campaign's death sentence.  The death sentence, as a matter of fact.  We only care about things that matter, and only because that thing serves our immediate need in a way that sustains our agenda.  The more frivolous things appear, the less we care, thus the less we invest and, inevitably, the more likely we are that we'll find something else to do come Saturday.

My game has survived, and continues it's appeal, because I present it as deadly serious, as if the players were deciding which college to attend, which partner to marry, which car to buy, which house they want to live in.  It makes next to no difference that my game is NOT the equal of these other things; I present the game as if it is, arguing with all my passion that it is ... and my players, in turn, receive pleasure from the campaign's significance.

Pleasure is infinitely more gratifying that fun.  "Fun" is lighthearted, momentary, easily obtained in hundreds of places, not just a D&D game.  The DM striving to produce fun competes with drink, family, company, sports, film, fast cars and other instant-and-easy amusements.  Such activities don't need individuals to fritter with details or situations that don't resolve themselves.  Fun can certainly be had without the necessity of books or making decisions!

Pleasure, on the other hand, has the potential for intimacy and affection.  Run right, with players anxious to stretch themselves as thinking persons, D&D can entangle the participants in a way that no other activity can.  It offers itself as an addiction ... which is as potentially destructive as a narcotic, in that a person can grow so attached that they abandon all other pursuits, including fruitful work and family.  A friend of mine from the 80s ended up going to a counsellor and had to quit D&D because he loved it much too much.  He had quit his job, essentially abandoning his marriage as he lost his grip on responsibility and reality.

I don't believe there's a need to be cautious here.  We are, most of us, grounded.  But in giving advice to a new DM, I would suggest most strongly that falling in love with their game world, and especially the character's of that world, is not a requirement.  Nonetheless, they should view the project with a sense of doing something important, like producing a piece of entertainment for the benefit of other persons — with all the responsibility that implies.  It is a responsibility I yearn for, personally.  I like the opportunity to build mazes, to lead others through these mazes and to do so for their pleasure, as something they'll treasure.

Acknowledging that the whole process is useless without an audience.

Well, I've been listening to Strauss for more than an hour, wandering these woods in hopes of finding a path.  Alas, I'm still lost.  It isn't that I don't know what to do as a DM; only that I'm at a loss how to explain it to someone with no experience.