Deciding What's Real

This issue has several aspects within it.  We could be speaking of what magic items and spells you allow, along with the logic behind the function of those things.  We could be speaking of the "reality" of the setting, since technically the world could be a fever dream entirely of the DM's imagination ... I urge the reader to remember that many writer-designed fantasy worlds dating back hundreds of years were exactly this.  Such could be run, but I wouldn't want to do it ... and the reader had best give serious consideration as to whether you consider yourself the equal of Swift, Raspe or Carroll.

But while we must give thought to these things, I have something else in mind.  To repeat elements from two comments I wrote to Pandred and Shelby last week:

"The players enter a goblin lair, lay waste to thirty or forty goblins over two visits, only to discover that the goblins are actually being run by three drow elves. In chasing down the drow, the players learn that the drow are in fact being funded with weapons and other things by a local human squire whose land is near the original goblin lair.

"So, that's two layers of deception against the players: first, these are not just goblins, second, the drow are not acting independently ... and we can learn further that the squire is specifically urging the drow to use the goblins to raid human lands the squire wants to buy.

"So, the players seek out someone strong enough to take on the squire; they locate a knight, provide the evidence and the knight agrees to join their expedition to root out the squire. ONLY, we discover soon after that the squire is in fact in the employ of the local noble Baroness, to whom the knight owes fealty; the knight succumbs, as he's sworn to GOD to remain faithful to the Baroness ... but he enables the party to escape, even though the Baroness has ordered the knight to kill them.

"Now, the party is fleeing the Baroness and her various subordinates ... and runs into the hands of others who HATE the Baroness. And so on.

"As each layer of the onion is pulled back, the players come closer and closer to the truth of what's going on, are never personally deceived against but ARE subject to the story changing and changing. Meanwhile, they acquire levels and speak among themselves of the day they'll reach a sufficient level when they'll KILL EVERYONE and let God sort it out.

"Suppose that instead of getting inveigled into a war between the Baroness and her enemies, the party asks the knight, "To where are you bound?" Whereupon he answers, his anger risen and his taste for the locale dissolves, "My only chance to redeem myself is to find a better place than this, outside the Baroness's control. I've heard the borderlands against the Ottomans are threatened more than ever; I shall journey to Kosice and see if I can be of use there."

"Whereas the party is free to decide ... do we remain embroiled in this, or perhaps take up with the knight and see what we can do on the borderlands? The party discusses it, makes up their minds and the campaign goes forward."

Very well, how is this done?

A skill you must master is the ability to see a given situation as others would see it, apart from yourself.   When you present a scenario that you understand from top to bottom, with every intricacy available to your own perspective, you must ALSO be able to see that scenario from the player's point of view, as people who have not yet learned everything about it — and in fact, probably never will learn "everything."  The beginnings of this skill allow us to present each room of a dungeon in a careful and precise manner, so that we give hints as to what the players see, without stating too much.

We'll break this down, but first consider — it means that your perception of reality is not that of the players ... but it will be that of the players, given time.  It matters that we understand how the player's perception scales upwards over time, and that each stage upwards upon that scale changes the participant's understanding of the DM's setting, the DM's style of gaming and the player's attitude towards which goals they want to achieve.  D&D is a fantabulously fluid game, if the DM is willing to take the game as far as it can go ... and that fluidity is greater than any human endeavour except life itself.  The player that sits down in the campaign today is NOT the same player who sat down in the campaign a year ago ... and if the setting does not advance in pace with the player's perspective, the player must ultimately feel restrained, bored and ready to quit your game.

This comes as a shock to many DMs who keep doing the same thing with the players month after month, who can't understand why the players are complaining now when six months ago everything seemed fine.  "What wrong?" these DMs ask.  "I'm running the same game they've liked up until now.  How come the players have changed?"

Because they've been there.  They've done that.  And the DM must recognise it.

Now, we can try to keep the player's interested by upping the stakes, essaying to create bigger and bigger in-game events with bigger payoffs ... but when I consider plans of this kind I'm reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Bottle Imp, in which the MacGuffin will give us everything we ask for, except that eventually we're doomed.  Because, in fact, eventually one runs out of "bigger" and the campaign collapses under its own weight, with nothing to offer in the end except disappointment and ultimately the same result than if we'd done nothing and let the campaign die.

Lessons in life teach that gimmicks will kick a can down the road, but won't make the can go away.  It's always in front of us, and eventually we'll get tired of kicking it.  What's wanted is a sustainable, practical approach that, like the examples I gave to Pandred and Shelby, allows the campaign to unfold progressively and, effectively, forever.

This, however, requires that the DM cannot run "the same game" for any length of time.  The DM has to progress and change as the players do ... and this is easiest if the DM begins the game way, way below what the DM's already prepared and able to offer.

Like the need to possess both our own and the player's perspective when laying out some scenario in the campaign, with ALSO must have the insight to perceive how those perspectives are going to evolve over time.  Today I'm running a simple hack-and-grab campaign with the party and a bunch of orcs ... but that's not going to be enough in two or three sessions, so we'll adjust the campaign by providing a tiny shred of intrigue into the game, in the form of the hidden drow elves who are manipulating the goblins from behind the scene.

My etymology dictionary describes "intrigue" as originating from the Italian verb, intrigare, which means to plot, meddle, perplex and puzzle.  The Italian word derives from the Latin, intricare, which means to entangle, perplex and embarrass.  Let's look carefully at these six words, as "perplex" is mentioned twice.

Puzzle is used all the time in D&D, but unfortunately too often it's used in the sense of a situation that needs to be manipulated or guessed at until it's solved, whereupon the obstruction can be forgotten.  Puzzle is much more interesting in the sense of causing the players to feel confused because they cannot understand or make sense of something that's going on.  Within our example, at the beginning of the adventure with the goblins, we've deliberately with-held the involvement of the drow elves.  Therefore, naturally, the players have no reason to think they're dealing with anything except goblins.  At some point, we want to tell them they're dealing with more than that ... but we don't want to tell them outright!  No.  We want them to find out slowly.  Bit by bit.  We want to provide some kind of clue — not in the sense that the clue will help them understand the puzzle, but in the sense that the clue passes along the knowledge that there IS a puzzle ... which the players cannot see.  All they know is that something's going on here which they cannot know.

When we know that there's something going on, that we cannot know, this drives us crazy.  And forward.  We don't understand what it is ... we're puzzled ... but we do understand that it's out there and we want a bigger piece of it.

Perplex is very close to puzzle, except that it also conveys the emotion of not believing what we've just learned.

I'll give you an example from the real world.  This movie, 1968's Finian's Rainbow, was the same director who did this movie, four years later, 1972's The Godfather.  Whose nephew is, I kid you not, Nicolas Cage.  Altogether, it seems kind of fucked up, doesn't it?

Perplexing the players is an excellent tactic in that, first, when they find out the goblins are in fact in the employ of drow elves, there's a high probability that they'll assume the DM is kidding.  Most assuredly, that there's got to be something else in this that makes this association make sense.  And even if it doesn't, the very fact of it forces the players to change their preconceptions about the game world and it's possibilities, which in turn forces them to see the game world as bigger than what they previously thought it was.  Which is a very good reason not to maintain standard setting behaviours too closely.

This is why having elves feel a certain way about dwarves is an example of STUPID game design.  And rather lazy writing also ... looking at you, Mr. Tolkein.  Arguing that it's more believable for races to have a certain antipathy towards each other is a terrible trap if what you want is to create interest and not boredom.  Things that are easy to believe are boring.  Our goal is to take something that is fundamentally unbelievable and make it believable ... and therefore, astounding.

Plot is an interesting word.  It begins as a word for a small piece of defined ground, such as a place to inter a body, and advances over several centuries to also mean to contrive a secret, fully formulated scheme, usually for some evil purpose ... such as, for example, how to get a body into a plot without anyone knowing how it was done.  The word shares an accidental association with the French, complot, which means to scheme together, so that the word "plot" became famously connected with November 5th some 400+ years ago, as a conspiracy and evil scheme to blow up parliament.

Curiously, with the Gunpowder Plot having occurred in 1605, by the 1640s the word "plot" became associated with the set of events that take place in a story or play.  It's easy to see how ... while a conspirator must puzzle out how to build a sequence of event that will allow them to "take over the world," the writer must contrive a similar series of events, sorting out how to make a collective set of events come together and form a coherent whole.

And so, with D&D, we come once again to the DM creating a "story" for the game, when in fact what the DM should be creating is a PLOT.  An active, devious set of circumstances that will, step by step, like in a narrative, with us witholding each bit and piece of information until the proper time, reveal it's evil import to the players.  The drow control the goblins, but the REAL plot is that the Squire is behind all this ... or is he?  No, it's the Baroness who's behind the Squire!

Think of these events like a dungeon room.  The players are given a description, which encourages them to check out the pond, and then the statue in the corner, and then the loose stone in the middle of the floor, which they pry up ... and discover underneath it, my gawd, it's the Baroness, and she's got a Staff of the Magi!

The more intricate we can make the plot, the better.  The more plots we make, the better at it we'll get.  The players can make plots also.  When I was a player, I immediately began plans to lead rich people into dark alleys where I and the other players could kill them.  Soon after, I was bribing guards, not to let me through some gate, but to let me know WHO was being let in the game and WHEN they tended to leave.  Then I could sit nearby the gate, watching a young boy acting as my agent, for the moment when he would take a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his face ... which would mean the baron had left the castle in his carriage ... and so on.  See, I'd seen this movie, 1963's The Great Escape, years before I'd heard of D&D.

Furthermore, it's possible to have more than one plot going on at one time.  While the Squire and the Baroness are doing their thing, there's a completely unrelated situation where two young lovers, one of whom is the daughter of the Burgher, are planning to murder her father and escape with a horse, thousands of gold pieces and the male lover's brother, who happens to be in a dungeon inside the Baroness's keep.  He's got a key to the siege door, but he hasn't found the nerve yet to set the plan in motion ...

Meddle is a verb.  It means to interfere in, or busy oneself with, matters that are not of our concern.  That is, the players who are meddling in the goblin's lair, or rather in that of the drow elves', and in turn into the Squire's plans and so on.  The Squire is meddling against the law's usually method of enabling the acquisition of land, while the Baroness is meddling in everything.  And this is the point.  Powerful people, who want their way, and don't want to wait, and don't care about piddling meaningless people like player characters, meddle.  That's what they do.  It's the way they meddle, and the steps to which they'll go, either as part of a plot or just because they don't give a damn, that's so interesting.

And yes, the players are the biggest meddlers of all, and the worst, because they tend to meddle into things about which they haven't a fucking clue.  They just meddle because it's fun.

What meddling tends to do is set people off against other people.  It frustrates people in their plots, urging them to act rashly and emotionally, causing things to happen that wouldn't have happened if they'd bided their time and not over-reacted.  The drow elves could just get more goblins, but they don't.  They let themselves — eventually — be seen, which they shouldn't have; and this makes the Squire out himself, when he shouldn't have; which justifies the knight stepping in, which causes the Baroness to involve herself directly against the knight, which only exposes herself to the party, who wouldn't have known about her existence if she'd let the knight kill the squire.  After all, she could just get another squire.  She'd still technically have the knight.

Entangle is thus the situation here.  The DM is put on the spot of deciding how the unpredictable party's actions ought to cause others to react, rightly or wrongly, which progressively makes the whole affair an utter mess, as people are doing things they shouldn't be doing, against each other.  In the case described, "entangle" means to involve others in difficulties or complicated circumstances from which it's difficult to escape.

Now, what in the game makes it difficult for the players to "escape"?  Well, there's always money on the table, which they might get, or money they might lose, or money they might have to give up on getting.  And the players also feel insults and oneupmanship just as anyone else.  When the Baroness scoffs at a threat the party makes, calling them "little children" who ought to head back to their rocking horses, while "adults" control the world, players tend to take that kind of thing pretty seriously.  They, too, can be spurred to act rashly by others telling them not to meddle, or not to enrich themselves.  That keeps the party quite entangled with what's going on, even though they probably could just walk away.

Which leads us, finally, to embarrassment.  That is, what the party will feel if they run away with their tails between their legs.  Curiously, it's also what they'll feel if they stick around, and things don't go so well.  Time and time again, the party will pause, find themselves getting deeper into the various entanglements, like quicksand, and say, "Why don't we just quit" ... and someone will answer, "I'm not quitting until that bitch gets hers," or "I'm getting something for all this trouble; when we find the squire's hoard and we kill that bastard, then I'm good to go."

Okay.

From all this, you should have an idea of how differing amounts of knowledge about what's going on has the capacity to keep moving the goal posts and pull the players deeper into the mire.

As a DM, we want to give them some, but not all, the information we have.  We want to do it progressively, at the right time.

Each time we do that, we change the player's perception of reality.

Thus, we decide what's "real."  For now.  Until we're ready to give more information.

Knowing when to do that comes from recognising when the players need more information to keep going ... and not to lose their taste for what's happening.  Withold too hard, and the players will quit out of frustration and lack of new information ... just as many, many people quit watching TV shows when they won't get to the point.  Or the next action sequence.  Or when they drown us in details that don't fucking matter to the reason why we're here.  Looking at you, Marvel Studios.

We need a feel for that.  We want to give them information with an eyedropper ... in part because exposition is easy when it's just one sentence long.  But too long between dollops and the players WILL stage an insurrection ... so when an information dump is needed, we've got to wade in and pour information out like rain.

At the same time, until the very, very end, we always want something left to tell.  That's what a "plot twist" is.  But plot twists are predictable, usually badly thought out and, after 90 years of film, boring.  Simple clarification is better.  The whole thing was a sled.  After four years his wife married a dentist.  In the end, it's about hope.

Even then, we can't have solved everything.  Okay, we stopped the wedding, we got out of the church, we fled to our freedom, we caught the bus before it pulled away, and we're together ...

... and now what?

P.S.,

Sorry for the various unexplained movie references.  I'll answer any queries about those in the comments, if anyone cares to ask what they're from.  I don't expect everyone to have seen every movie.