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.