That on Which You Should Be Working

The reason I succeeded as a dungeon master emerged from my wanting so badly to understand the game.  I wanted to read the books, I wanted to play ... and I did so at every opportunity.  It didn't matter that things about the game were imperfect — it was plainly obvious from the premise that D&D was far too complex a game concept to be achieved in three fairly narrow books, even if they were published in 8 pt. type.  By the age of 15, I'd buried myself in many books relating to war, anatomy, history and science, any of which were as large and as thick as all three D&D books put together.  And any of which were just one of such books that I could find on a shelf stacked together.

Because I read the introduction many times, it was evident that the original designers understood this perfectly.   The game needed testing ... lots and lots of testing.  I was lucky that I had the time to test it, and that I played with groups of highly motivated, academic friends, who weren't hesitant about spending an afternoon at the library reading every book about medieval castles, life, weapons and culture.  That was simply what we did; it was, I remember, what everyone did.  It would be years before I encountered the "casual," uninformed player, who participated but didn't know the rules, didn't care to know the rules and who considered reading to be onerous and unnecessary.  I simply didn't play with that kind.  I didn't meet them until 1984.  I never dreamed that these would one day define what the game would become.

I wanted to talk about D&D.  We all did.  We discussed every rule and every fault.  It was fairly obvious that fighting 10 equipped orcs was much harder than one ogre, and that the ogre gave more experience.  Or that it seemed every time we rolled on an outdoor encounter table, no matter which table, it always ended up being a wolf.  Or that a lot of the spells were, well, pretty obscure in their explanations.  I was lucky, I suppose, that I saw these problems as fixable, and not a turn-off.  At various points in my early experience, I tried to rework the weapons vs. armour class table.  I tried to redesign weapon speeds.  Like everyone, I wrote out my own explanations of the alignments.  I painstakingly copied monsters into lists to make my own encounter tables — I struggled with those for more than twenty-five years.  Eventually I acknowledged that I would have to write my own descriptions for every spell, and for every monster.  I didn't just wait for someone else to fix the rules.  I didn't just throw out a rule before first trying to make it work.  I didn't address any part of the game casually.  I dug in, I worked — with pencil-and-paper, mind — for years and years, to get to the place I'm at now.

Why do I have an answer for every question?  Because I've heard every question before.  I've had decades to contemplate and redesign these things.  I didn't, as some do, just keep playing the same game, as written, for 40+ years.  I don't even play the same game today that I played ten years ago.  There are always changes, always new things.  There's always something that needs fixing.  Which I like doing.  I don't sit around, like some, "Oh woe is me," kvetching about how some part of the game doesn't work.  I make it work.  Or I throw it out.

I don't think this perspective can be taught.  I think if it already exists in a person, it can be encouraged, guided, sustained ... but if you're the sort of person who cannot do-it-yourself, then you must feel endlessly helpless in the face of every edition.  As written, they're all garbage ... in large part because the parts of the AD&D system that really needed fixing weren't.  They were reinvented, with some other broken system put in the place of the first.  The writers designers of the 1980s didn't have the capacity, the ingenuity, to properly conceive of or describe the potential for D&D except as a boardgame-without-a-board.  Having built the frame, they couldn't figure out how to run the pipes or wire the structure in a way that would make it comfortable.  They frittered away millions of hours inventing new character classes, races, monsters, magic items, spells, die modifiers and adventure descriptions which amounted to nothing but lists and more lists.  Nothing was more disheartening than reaching for a "new" book from the designers only to find that one third was more class descriptions, one third was more spells and one third was more magic items.  Ad nauseum.  It's all the designers knew how to do ... and since they were selling to those who were at their mercy, who loved the game but couldn't themselves reason out how to fix the game.

I'm lucky I was not one of them.

Thus, with the last post, when I speak of an "ethic," a set of right and wrong behaviours with regards to the way the world approaches the players, I'm trying to establish a foundation for how the DM should approach BOTH the setting and the game rules.  Those rules have to serve the setting, NOT the players.  In the climate that's evolved these many decades, that's nearly impossible to grasp, with so much boutique-style D&D having been churned out.  But there's no structure in that.  The player's character cannot function only as a personal vehicle for them to take out for spins ... the "fighter," the "mage," the "thief" and so on are templates of behaviour to which the game setting's non-player characters must also adhere.

When we do something silly like replace the thief with a "rogue," or remove the assassin, what do we say about all the game world's criminals?  What are their skill sets based upon now?  How do they progress through their lives?  When we argue that the game's setting exists to provide adventures for the players, what does that say for the setting in which the non-player characters function every day, without adventuring?  They have money.  They have levels.  Were they all achieved through adventure?  And if not, then why are players automatically exempt from the sort of wealth and experience that are available to NPCs?

I accept the argument that D&D is about "peril" — but I'm baffled as to why people insist that this peril is only obtainable through the transitory artificial construct of the "adventure."  Why are we eternally locked in this episodic approach?  Can we not see that the setting itself is the structure in which the players play, providing a continuous set of events that need not be broken up.  The players simply "are."

To return to the point, if we accept that the advancement of the game's structure is not more "sports cars" for the players to drive, then what is it?  What does the DM do with his or her time, if that time is not applied to building better character vehicles, or even special "hot wheel tracks" for the characters to run those vehicles upon?

First and foremost, stop doing any work intended to expand the player's choice about their characters.  Whatever you've created so far on those lines, or adopted from books, keep it as you like, but stop committing further time to those projects.  Most likely, you're doing it because a large part of you gets excited about a new character class or race, much more so than the players will ever be.  Chances are, the vast supply of these things has never found real use in your game world, or has been anything more than a disappointment, only to be discovered when the cool new character class or race was undertaken by a player.  You're ruining your game's continuity, you're wasting your precious time, you're adding no valuable aspect to ACTUAL game play and you're risking the decline of your credibility and reputation every time you put forth some design that falls on its face.  Stop doing it.

Chances are, you can't.  Most likely, you've convinced yourself that creating this endless parade of vehicles IS preparing your campaign as a DM.  You've fooled yourself into thinking it's "important."  You've become addicted ... and in large part because the character creation process is something you understand best of all, because you've spent so much of your DM's experience doing exactly this.  But it is an addiction.  And a useless one.  Put it down and apply yourself to something more game effective.

This same argument applies to the creation of monsters.  Stop it.  Monsters are very easy to understand and to create.  You're not adding to the value of your campaign by reinventing an existing humanoid, beast, elemental, god or whatever.  You're using your time to prepare as a way to assuage your ego, as if to hold up something as easy to create as a new monster is in any way an indication of your ability as a designer or a DM.  It's not the size of your monster.  It's how you use it.

Stripping you of the choice of making character classes, monsters, spells, equipment, magic items, weapons or even new adventures or NPC cultures leaves you with ... what?  Exactly the position that the writers of the Dragon magazine found themselves in the 1980s, or the splat book writers have found themselves in since the 1990s, when they had to fill pages with something.  To play D&D, you need exactly one character class, one character race, one weapon and one monster.  That's the cake.  Adding more types of these things only adds icing.  As of today, there's so much icing we can't find the cake, much less eat it.  All we have are mouthfuls of icing.

The reason why writers fell back on that list-making content was because they couldn't think of anything better to write ... just as you most likely can't think of any better way to spend your time than drawing out another dungeon, creating new NPCs or pre-generated player characters, and so on.  But now it's time to move on.

Are you afraid?  

You decide the kind of life the players will live.  You decide the monsters that will try to kill them, and where these monsters dwell.  You decide what's real and what lies the players will be told.  You decide why all the things in your world live, what they want and what they'll die to defend.  You hold that key.  You have all the resources you need.

You need a reason why your world exists ... and not the sort of glossy, fabricated reason that might start the beginning of a novel, that needs only tell one story, but something more substantial, along the lines of why does the Earth exist.  Then you need a culture in which your players were born; one that cares nothing for who they are or what they want, because the players are just a few more persons in a place filled with hundreds of thousands, or millions of others.  Essentially, you need a culture with which the players will have to contend.

Finally, you need a place for them to start.  A place that reflects the aforementioned culture in a hundred ways.  A place that makes sense inside the game world.  A place surrounded by monsters who have their own agendas and "things they will die for."

And then you will need to figure out how to explain all of this to the players, one sentence at a time, in a way that makes them have reason to feel confident and able, while at the same time also gives them reason to fear.

Don't worry.  We'll talk about all this.