Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Deciding Why Things Are

This doesn't seem to be an especially popular series of posts, or else I'm talking so high in the clouds no one can hear me.  Nonetheless, with this post I sketched out the general context of a campaign's description, which I am following by going deeper into each point.  I wrote that the players decide the matters of their own lives, the things to which they commit themselves ... that which they see as the best course for them.

And the DM decides those things for everything else.

This is a hard line that many DMs simply cannot accept.  Granted, it's easy enough to see what's on our side of the fence, however enormous the task is.  We're responsible to make lands and NPCs, cultures and sequences of play, motivations and rewards.  Fine.  But in actually running the game, we're put into the position of watching the players struggle with everything that we create, that we're responsible for ... and when that struggle turns against the players, it's very easy to hold ourselves to account for the player's hazard.  If we hadn't included that third giant, if we hadn't decided this battle would be fought on the edge of a cliff ... if we hadn't rolled that bloody critical hit just when the players were starting to turn this thing around.  If the players die, we're all too clear on our part in that; on what we did; on what we could have done differently.

And worse, on what we can do, in real time, to make all those bad decisions and all the party's jeopardy just go away, in time, so that no one has to suffer or die.

With the desperately-named "One D&D," the company is making it clear by eliminating game elements like the DM's ability to throw a critical roll, where the responsibility lies when a player character is seriously threatened.  With us.  With the DM.  The finger is being pointed at you and me, to say "officially," we don't have the right to kill characters.  And if we do, then we're not playing "true" D&D.

Well.  Shelving that.

The DM's penchant for stepping up and saving the characters is the hardest edge for any DM to face.  Speaking from personal experience, I have broken my covenant as a DM to both secretly and openly to rescind parts of my game in order to ensure a character lived and did not die.  Of course I have.  I've been DMing for more than 42 years.  Any DM who says otherwise is lying ... and there are good reasons to lie.  Having the reputation that you're willing and ready to kill player characters, while at the same time reserving the right to covertly not do so, maintains a reputation that most hard-souled DMs consider to be valuable.  We've learned that scaring the players is good for play.  Nothing beats sitting down as a DM to a full table and declaring, "Okay, everything's ready for this week; I hope I don't have to kill anyone tonight."  When we have killed characters before, and the characters know that's a real possibility, saying so out loud sends a shiver through a party that raises tension, the player's sense of excitement and a pulling together of a party that knows they have to pull together to survive.  If there were the least hint that I might not mean it, that's it's just for show ... those benefits would evaporate.

It can take many months to build that kind of reputation.  In truth, it must be built by following through and killing the character.  The killing need not be done zealously.  It should not be done with a gloating tone of voice, or high-handed counselling about why the player "deserved it."  But it must be done.  Upon seeing the die rolled, either too high or too low to save the player, the DM must resist the compulsion to intervene ... specifically because it is ridiculously easy to do so.  One need only say, "roll again" ... or, "that doesn't count."  Any DM can say at the last second, "Before the blade hits, a wizard appears and stops time."  

We can get as ornate as we like.  "You feel the blade cut through your body ... and suddenly you find yourself in a large white cloud-like space; a woman in front of podium with a strange square board in her hand looks at you, looks at the board, and says, 'Hm.  Says here, it's not your time yet.'  You wake up on the floor, with the battle done and the party having won; one of your mates expresses surprise that you're still alive and hurries to help you."

Ridiculously, stupidly easy.

Worse, it costs the willing DM nothing to wade in and "fix" things.  He or she has no awareness that this is damaging to one's reputation.  The player is happy.  The DM is pleased.  There's no evident harm.

Moreover, this has become progressively correct behaviour, promoted by texts, pundits, "official" company rhetoric and the general consensus of the forenamed grander community.

As a player, you are in control of your character.  As a DM, I am in control of everything else.

Wisdom dictates that the correct way to manage the vicissitudes of fate in our lives is to practice restraint.  It begins with very simple lessons, like eating something very bad-tasting as a one-year-old or breaking your arm riding your bike.  Steadily, we accumulate thousands of micro-lessons along these lines as we age, realising that while rage quitting feels so very, very good to do, the aftershock is less so.  Or how owning our first car is associated with so many negative elements, as we choke down how much we have to spend on insurance, gas, new tires, the danger of a life-threatening accident and so on.  Marriage and children present bills we never expected to pay, with which we must make our peace or be crushed beneath.  Through it all, through every trial and heartache, steadily we move towards practicing restraint as the only rational strategy.

This is particularly evident as we watch so many others around us fail to practice restraint.  We watch our friends and family, and especially our acquaintances, throw away opportunities and securities in the pursuit of things that baffle our notions of life.  As the decades roll past, we see them destroy themselves and others, and recognise their willingness to destroy us, while steadily we pull away and into the arms of others who are restrained and practical like ourselves ... assuming, of course, that the reader at this moment isn't actively in the process of destroying whatever value you have in your own life, unaware that you're doing it.  If so, I speak with such people all the time ... and they are never aware of it.  It is always, so the litany goes, someone else's fault.

The effort of holding back, placing checks and hindrances on our own actions, often comes as a frustration to other people ... but as we do it, and see the sense in it, we get to like it.  We don't soar, but we don't face-plant in the dirt trying to fly.  And to be honest, once we get ourselves sorted, just waking up gets to be a delight.

DMing is an act of restraint ... not only upon the players, but more importantly upon ourselves.  Like the things of which we speak in real life, there are things we won't do.  Sometimes, because we've done those things and learned our lesson.  Sometimes, because we've seen others do them.  And sometimes, within the respect we have towards our lives, doing so seems stupid.

For me, deciding to be a DM requires certain things I won't do.  As I've just said, this is sometimes because I ran the game in a certain way, and have decided to stop running it that way.  Sometimes, it's because I've played in someone else's game, or watched people play and complain about it afterwards, or watched new players in my game feel resurrected by the way I play over what they experienced before.  And sometimes, because I feel that I'd have to be a fucking moron to play a game in which dice are meant to dictate everyone's success at something, only to wade in when I don't like the dice because it's easy.

I've played Scrabble off and on all my life, starting from the age of about six.  My parents believed that it was a game we needed to learn, because the benefits were so obvious.  This means that at some point I've played the same game with barely any vocabulary at all, and that I've played the game with the vocabulary I have now ... and all the shades of grey between.  I've played many, many games where at one point all the letters I had were vowels, usually some combination of I's, O's and U's, without anything else.

The rules say that when you're desperate, you can skip a turn by throwing all your letters in the bag and draw new ones.  But that's a fool's choice.  You're better off to play what you have, because every round you skip puts your opponent further ahead of you; and it is too easy to throw your letters in and get back a different collection of unusable letters.

When I was six or seven, my mother — whom I played with most often — could have let me change out my letters and still play ... because she was in charge.  Because she could make whatever rules she wanted for me.  She could have felt sorry for me; she could have been generous and kind.  And if that was the sort of person my mother was, I wouldn't be writing this for you, right now.  That's a fact.

From killing player characters, from forcing myself to do that as a restraint on my behaviour, I've learned how to set up encounters and build events so that, for the most part, I don't have to kill and I don't have to veto a death.  Those players who have been in my games for many years have learned equally well not to test me, while at the same time learning with tremendous pleasure that they're quite innovative when they know they're not going to get reprieved at the last moment.

Sure, my mother felt sorry for me.  And sure, I feel sorry as a DM when I have to kill someone, or take away all their money because they've fallen into a river and it's either strip off your stuff and live, or die rich.  But feeling sorry for someone isn't a good enough reason to make me compromise my values ... or for me to step across that line and decide myself that the player can't make a bad decision.  By restraining my desire to help them, I empower their desire to accept responsibility for their actions.  Which, in the long run, makes their actions feel the sweeter, because they know they've been able to do it AND snub me at the same time.

The momentary relief at receiving the DM's charity is a soul-sickening reality, that any good player will feel ashamed of receiving, and resentful of knowing that it's there.  On the other hand, the very worst players, those without any sense of restraint at all, revel in receiving charity ... and pity and anything that makes them feel they've "won" ... even when plainly that's not what they did.  These people, as they enter into the game world, have such miserable lives lacking in any kind of restraint that they desperately need their D&D game to fill some hollow part of them.  I'm not here for that.  And I don't like these kind of people.  The company, on the other hand, loves these people ... and why shouldn't they?  Players without restraint are addicts ... and what pusher doesn't like a good addict?

When deciding to DM, the best strategy is to consider, from the start, those things that as a DM, you won't do.  Figure out what those things are, and then figure out precisely why you won't do them.  Then, restrain yourself.  If experience teaches me anything, restraining yourself absolutely, even as you watch others in pain, will be the hardest thing you've ever done ... excepting that you may have already learned how you have to do this with your children.  It is one of the reasons why fathers and mothers with excited, avid children as players make such good DMs.  The practice of restraint is universal, after all.  If you've learned how to restrain yourself with respect to addiction, money, family responsibilities, your workplace, religion, politics and so much more, restraining yourself as a DM will be easy.  You've already learned the hardest lesson.

You can do anything.  You must never, ever, do things for that reason.

20 comments:

  1. Maybe you don't get as many reactions with this line of posts as with takedowns of YT blabbermouths, but I like it. We are once again circling back to the big rocks, the solid stuff. It's necessary.

    I would appreciate if it led you to tackle, on the most conceptual level, the role of improvisation in world creation. Granted, in the most idealistic definition of D&D, every event or consequence to the PCs' actions, however mundane, could be logically derived, without any doubt, from the detailed parameters that the DM decided beforehand for his or her world. In such a deterministic game, no dice roll would even be needed. But it seems clear that such a game is out of reach for normal humans.

    In a more probabilistic perspective, where most old-school groups used to operate (or at least it seemed to me at the time, circa 1985), the DM is not expected to know, or be able to infer, everything. So he may fill in details on the fly, but only unimportant ones ; for unknown elements that could proove immediatly decisive, he will provide a reasonable probability, then roll, then abide by the results (ex : how many soldiers are there exactly near the gate I never expected my players to use ? And how many are still awake at this hour of the night?) Everything else is progressively laid out by the DM between sessions, never at the table.

    There are exceptions of course, and oftentimes I created an important NPC, or the layout of the guild HQ my players suddenly decided to break in, on the spot. But I always considered it that way : an exception.

    In short, it never occured to us that you could completely improvise a D&D session. I still think that way. But it seems I am in a very small minority.

    Even without wading into the murky waters of "emerging cooperative storytelling" or whatever, it seems these days that every busy middle-aged DM prides himself on being able to whip out some blank Dyson map, five "inspiration cards" and two random monsters to concoct a satisfying game night.

    Linking these thoughts to your current subject, I can't bring myself to imagine how such improvisation, which those DM most certainly perform on their regular campaigns as well, can play out without leading to all the perverse results you described : unbreakable plot armor, disappearance of all meaningful challenges, death of the game. Am I wrong? Can you really decide what's real in a near-vacuum and still be playing D&D ?

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  2. You've articulated in this post, and in this series, what the DM needs to do and why it's necessary. I'd like more insight into your creative process on these points; most especially around, "You decide why all the things in your world live, what they want and what they'll die to defend."

    Your Bumper Cars posts provided an inspiring example, and you've mentioned the role of your enthusiasm for film as a deep resource from which to draw. What I'd like to see, if it's not so subconscious that it's difficult to explain, is how you do it. I can't repeat your process, but I want to understand it to help me develop mine.

    You wrote in The Easiest Way a couple of years ago that, "the game world flows and turns continuously in the DM's imagination, touching the party here, interacting with the party there, building up a dramatic tension in different places and for different reasons."

    Hand-in-hand with understanding the motivations of the things in your world, I think, is in seeing and taking value from them as a DM to build dramatic tension. This is the skill I think that I need the most help in developing.

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  3. Before I got to the section on restraint, the word in my head was "impassivity." Not necessarily that the DM must be cold and unfeeling, but that we can't have the same visceral reaction to a character death that the player should have.

    The player will attempt to avoid death by any means necessary, and to a certain extent this is exactly what's expected. We want that emotional investment in the game.

    If the DM is invested in the same way, the emotional value is cheapened to the point of worthlessness.

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  4. ViP,

    I would tend to agree. If you as a player character step up to say some random thing to a blacksmith, I'm most likely to interpret how I think a blacksmith of this time and place would respond logically. The larger matter that's skipped over is that a blacksmith in Bristol ought to respond differently than a blacksmith in Medina, or one in Nanking. How I can't exactly say -- it would depend on what you said as a player. Then I would take the whole of responses I've seen in films and try to give my best interpretation of an English, Arabic or Chinese answer.

    That "whole of responses" jargon is the one that seems impossible to express. It's not done consciously. It is pattern recognition, like the example I used in my book How to Run about the fireman who suddenly realises what he has to do -- get everyone out of the house -- before knowing the reason why -- because the basement is on fire. I don't sit and review in an instant 20,000 moments in film, literature and personal experience in order ... but I DO have a pre-conception, from experience, how different people from around the world view things differently. That's not necessarily the same pre-conception someone else would have; or even necessarily an accurate one; but it's the one I've personally built up over the years, that I use now to serve me.

    Without this mental resource, I'd be lost as a DM. You'd make an offer to a boatsman and I'd sit there gibbering, not knowing what to say, or how the boatsman would react. I couldn't "fill in the details." But that's what PRACTICING improvisation is.

    My 23-month-old grandson is on the verge of making his toy animals talk to each other, and to him. In five or six months he'll have stuffed toy in each hand, making them have extensive conversations about ... whatever pops into his head. Psychologists have been screaming at parents since the 1930s that this is a GOOD thing; but there are still parents who will bash the toys out of the kid's hands and tell him to stop it, because it's weird or it seems wrong somehow.

    Now, can you, as an adult, pick up two stuffed toys and make them have an interesting conversation? Because if you can't, you're definitely in the hole where it comes to inventing your half of a conversation with a player character.

    This is just the beginning of this conversation; we could go back and forth for hours, easily. I'm just establishing, first, where I see my role in world creation improvisation.

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  5. Sterling,

    Every once in awhile you inquire as to my creative process and so I write a post about my creative process. Have a look at my answer to ViP above and answer for yourself the same question: can you take two stuffed animals and make them have a conversation?

    This is key. Have a look at this quick overview of "pretend play": https://www.scholastic.com/parents/kids-activities-and-printables/activities-for-kids/arts-and-craft-ideas/importance-pretend-play.html. As a DM, you need those spontaneous language skills, that pretense at producing "dramatic" answers and problems that need to be solved creatively. You're asking after the same thinking skills and nurturing of the imagination that we're supposed to be formulating before reaching the age of 36 months.

    If you didn't do the work then, of course it's going to be staggeringly hard to do the work now ... but the fundamentals are the same. It's just that instead of using stuffed toys and forts built from furniture and blankets, today I build character background generators and maps. It's fundamentally the same program.

    This is also a conversation we can go back and forth with for hours. So again, please consider this answer a first salvo, not a closing argument.

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  6. Shelby,

    Impassivity is a kind of restraint, isn't it? It's putting a restraint on your feelings or your willingness to have or show strong emotion. To have less of a visceral reaction, you must counsel yourself from a young age to restrain your tendencies in that direction, for reasons you think are best.

    Players will do this also, and often because they DID experience a highly visceral reaction at the death of a character when they were a young age, and were shamed for it. In general, we hold back from showing strong emotions in public for that reason. We don't want to seem deranged, or overly emotional ... especially as men. There's that line from the Dirty Dozen where Lee Marvin uses the word "emotional" as an insult, when describing his superior officer to his face. It hurts far harder than, say, "asshole" or "dick."

    In a sense, your last statement reflect this. MORE emotion cheapens; less emotion produces value ... unless we reduce emotion to the point where we're unfeeling. But where does that unfeeling begin? When does our emotion diminish to the point where we become cold monsters?

    I have to say, despite the talk of restraint, my in-person D&D games get pretty shouty. Which I consider a good thing. Some players find it a bit much, and I've had players quit because the games are not the quiet affairs of four persons sitting around playing bridge. D&D needs lots and lots of emotion to grease the wheels; and the DM has to match this emotion if the game's going to flow. It's just that the DM's investment must, as you say, not be one that allows grief or resentment. Emotions can be loud, boisterous, deeply felt ... but they must also be unremittingly POSITIVE.

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  7. Alexis, it's true I'm a bit of a broken record on this point. I guess you really have answered it at least once pretty thoroughly, too.

    Spontaneous language skills and carrying on a pretend conversation between two stuffed animals I'm holding is no problem. Forts out of blankets and beach chairs, no problem. My parents did the opposite of discouraging that sort of behavior. In way, I'm still doing that kind play by going sailing in this modern world. I'm asking about two other things.

    One is the set up of potentially interesting situations like Whitebirch's romantic troubles and Elias' larceny. This is something I can do, but which would benefit from improvement. Second is building dramatic tension in the players, which I don't do or do poorly, I suspect. It may be my education contained little literary theory. I don't have your love of film as something from which to draw, although I read plenty of fiction which could serve somewhat. My weak point may be an insufficient separation between my perception of the world and the players' as you described in this series.

    I'll give this more thought.

    Practice may be my only path to improvement.

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  8. "This doesn't seem to be an especially popular series of posts, or else I'm talking so high in the clouds no one can hear me." I specifically started reading this blog because of this series. :)

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  9. Sterling, I'm ready to go around this barn with you as often as we must, because unquestionably there are others who are experiencing the same shortcoming. Somehow, the words exist that convey the knowledge you desire.

    Start with what makes you feel unpleasant tension in your own life. Is it running out of money; is it physical threats to your person; is it anxiety about unforseen difficulties in the future; is it a perfect storm? What things cause you to lay awake at night, or hesitate before taking action.

    Me, I have a creative vision that verges on what might be called a disability. I can't look over the edge of a cliff without the compulsion to jump; I can't ride in a car without envisioning the head-on crash that happens because the oncoming driver messes up and we connect corner-to-corner. I'm always certain that spending money will make me broke; or that some wrong phrase is going to get me fired. Writing a book for publication, or making anything for publication, puts me in a hot sweat worrying about it's value or what mistakes or evidence of stupidity it will contain.

    Yet I plan trips and buy things; I express myself honestly; I continue to write. Nonetheless, all these things are a struggle -- and it's in that struggle that TENSION is made.

    Now, we know the players want to succeed with their characters, survive, make lots of money and fight big things. They don't want to die. It seems like the obvious solution is to create a great big crisis, so they'll get all worked up and worried about dying ... but in fact, that's never what happens when we create a crisis. The players expect a crisis. They're ready for that. In most ways, if the monster is really big, they're even RESIGNED about their potential deaths. Thus, you'll find you can't build real tension with a crisis.

    Because with you I always bring things back to the sea, let's go with those situations. What's worse, emotionally -- a big storm that hits, lasts for three hours and slacks off, one where you have to maintain your resolve to get through it ... or a big storm that hangs in sight, in the distance, for THREE DAYS, maybe or maybe not hitting?

    If it's the first, then you might be far too composed to appreciate the unpleasantness of tension. But if it's the second, then you understand why the THREAT is worse than the reality. The threat, particularly one that can't be resolved, that can't be avoided, that isn't fully known, is aggravating -- it grinds relentlessly at one's calm, cool nature. You can't ignore it; you can't reason with it or self-control your way out of it. The fucking thing just sits there, hour after hour, until your jaw aches from having it set so long.

    Whitebirch's romantic troubles work because they're unresolved, they matter, there's no clear solution and there's a human sense of wanting the romance to work out pleasantly. Criminality always works because it's frought with uncertainties and RANDOM behaviour; an idiot with a gun whose willing to hold hostages is much less rational than a methodical killer who works silently and unseen.

    To build dramatic tension, you must build something off in the distance, that they players can see, or learn about, that's threatening but not immediately so, and which cannot be ignored when the players make plans, because it might hit at any moment.

    Strangely, making it hit releases the tension. Eventually, though, you have to make it hit ... so you always want something else waiting in the wings when the first thing goes down. Something in the boat is working, for now, but looks like it's going to break, and we can't repair it here. We just have to hope it doesn't break before we get home ... because if it does, we're really fucked.

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  10. 3llense'g,

    I write these things to remind the reader that I cannot see you reading my blog ... and therefore, I have no idea that you are, or what you think about what you've read, if no one comments for many days at a time.

    It's been explained to me that blogs I view as producing only garbage get 40 comments a post because these blogs are non-threatening and don't ask the readers to think much; that it's easy to feel smart enough to reply to the writer because the writer is so obviously not that bright. Whereas people fear to comment to me, because doing so makes them feel stupid; that "I" make them feel stupid.

    Thus, to take the temperature on a series of posts that are getting next to no response, I have to stick a thermometer into my reader and make him or her say "Ah." Which you've done. Thank you.

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  11. Just commenting to say I'm still here, reading, though I don't have much to add to the conversation

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  12. I am greatly enjoying this series as well.

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  13. Hi Alexis,

    I'm reading this series to my 11 year old son, who has absolutely got the D&D bug and two weeks ago started DMing. It's absolutely fascinating to see him get into it.

    Thank you.

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  14. Thank you Alexis for you answer. I need to mull it over.

    I can make two stuffed animals talk to each over. Just not very well. Or more precisely, I'm afraid that should I do it for some time, without another person's input, the conversation would probably devolve into something quite repetitive - or sad, and dark. In fact, I'm not sure I want to try.

    But to make a stuffed toy talk to my kids, that I could do for hours with ease (I did). And you're right, when you're in character, whether it's a NASCAR driver teddy bear or a super spy alligator, you can get into a "diffuse" mode of thinking and rely on heuristics to instantly come out with answers that will delight the child.

    My rephrased question would then be : when you do that for some length of time with adults, is there a moment when you effectively stop playing D&D and start just doing some kind of structured improv ?

    From a different perspective : is it actually possible, in real time, to switch from prolonged improvisation back to level-headed, analytical world creation? If several monsters in a row appear at whim and not from a random table or logical reasoning, is there any hope for the DM to be able to resist the players' expectations of assured triumph and easy rewards ? Won't all NPC's backstory, preoccupations and goals mold themselves into the PC's current course of action ? Will there be anything left in your world for your group to play against, and not just play with ?

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  15. Making two stuffed animals talk to one another is what a writer does with dialogue between two characters. However, this is done with agendas relating to believability, pace, maintaining the character personalities and service of the narrative. Such as, say, Gary wanting to sleep with Fred, only not wishing to say so outright because it might put Fred off.

    There's no reason why the writer be "unable to resist" assuring the goals of Gary -- even if YOU are writing what Gary says and I am writing for Fred. I have in mind what Fred is like; and that has nothing to do with Gary's desire sleep with him. It has everything to do with my passing information to Gary through Fred's words. That is my agenda; to give details about the situation, which Gary must interpret if he wants to land Fred.

    Why should Fred mold himself at all to Gary's wishes? For that matter, why should I as a writer hold Gary somehow more important than Fred?

    If the metaphor is confusing, let me repeat it. The players want the location of the dungeon and Frederik knows where it is. WHY should Fred tell them? Because they're players? No, absolutely not. Players are not entitled to knowledge because of who they are, because Players ARE NOT SPECIAL. If they want Frederik's knowledge, they must give Frederik something that he wants. I know what that might be ... but the players have to figure it out with dialogue. My answers, and their answers, are pure IMPROVISATION. The players only met Frederik, and I only made Frederik up five minutes ago ... because Frederik is the man the local blacksmith said, "Hm, you should ask Fred; he might know."

    Dialogue is persons playing AGAINST each other, not with. Go back to your stuffed toys and invent a situation where the toys do not get along. That's D&D. Yesterday, I did not get along with three different strangers in trying to get some errands done.

    I'm not sure if I'm answering your position or not, ViP. I don't see a difference between spontaneously inventing detail about my level-headed analytical setting within seconds of my players asking a question, and months ahead of time when I'm drawing a line on a map. I have a REASON for something in both cases; an agenda I'm getting at ... to make the interaction as real, as charged, as relevant as possible, while maintaining the expectations of my NPCs vs. the expectations of the player. I have no idea why any of this would result in assured anything for the players. They have to react correctly, in the moment, which means in a way that ALSO seems right and believable to my ideal of what the NPC would likely believe.

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  16. @ViP, you've reminded me of a humorous description of D&D I once read that said something like, "playing D&D is walking your friends through dark parts of their personalities whilst pretending to be a goblin."

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  17. 'I don't see a difference between spontaneously inventing detail about my level-headed analytical setting within seconds of my players asking a question, and months ahead of time when I'm drawing a line on a map.'
    Maybe the crux is here. Because although I understand and believe you, I personnaly feel a *huge* difference between these situations. Is it an overall personality thing, or just a lack of focused practice? Should every DM be able to fly by the seat of their pants for a whole session ? And thus, is being an good DM more difficult for certain (otherwise normal) type of people - or even unattainable ? I definitely need to mull it over ;)

    @Sterling now that you say it, there was quite an inordinate number of corpse mutilations in our teen campaigns...

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  18. Greatly enjoying this series too, I hope it'll continue ! (yes, i know I could check, but I want to keep being surprised)

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