Colouring Books

I don't think it's true that players, once exposed to a higher level of game, would continue to be satisfied with D&D as it's typically presented.  It's only that the game I offer requires a different approach from the one normally taken.

I'm not looking for shortcuts in the preparation of my world, so I don't buy modules ... and because modules are limited in that they have to present a closed-loop adventure that can fit the lowest common denominator as buyer, I don't have any respect for modules, either.  This attitude, stretched over four decades, calls for a lack of respect for those who depend on modules ... since, for me, it's evidence that the DM wants to side step the responsibility of running a game, for people, whom I feel deserve better.

That contingent of D&D publishers that sells to the "lazy" DM has identified this slouching, "fuck-my-players-they'll-get-what-I-give-them" and has chosen to empower it.  "Come to us," they say.  "Like you, we don't give a fuck for your players either ... so long as we get your money."  What's unsaid, of course, is that the publisher is no better than the buyer, as the quality of the goods they sell is plainly evident to anyone whose run the game for a few years.  Material for the garbage DM is logically garbage, because why work hard when the DM doesn't care?  Thus we have a spiral of goods produced by people averse to labour, action or effort, sold to like people ... with the victim being the player, who has turned to character creations and background in a desperate attempt to insert creativity into the game.  Such as it is.

Because I grew up in the 1970s, when the game emerged from the Zeitgeist into my reality, there were several years for me when the establishment had not yet been established.  There were those who called out for the establishment.  There were those who radically defended it even before it had been put in place.  For the reader who doesn't know what I'm talking about, the "establishment" as I'm calling it was the media-driven perspective of a very tiny minority whose voices were given credence by magazines, occasional interviews with the mainstream media and early game cons.  The writers of Mazes and Monsters did not look for their source material among the thousands of ordinary players entrenched in D&D by 1982.  Ed Bradley and his team from 60 Minutes didn't think to interview any of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary players in 1985; no, they spoke to the radical whack-jobs screaming about Satanism and one poorly educated, fat, scruffy physical loser incapable of plausibly defending D&D on its merits.  A win for the Satanists and a win for 60 Minutes, who soothed their right-wing listeners and threw D&D back under the run where it belonged.

Because I was older, I side-stepped all that.  The media didn't define my perspective of D&D.  My education derived from medieval studies, historical references and 9th to 16th century literature.  My opinion of Appendix N was that it contained a number of sadly B-grade pulp authors, many of whom I'd already discarded before the age of 14, and not nearly enough A-grade contemporary content.  Where was Mallory?  Dante?  Homer?  Where were the works that Tolkein spent his life studying fervently before daring to produce a work that compared with them?  Altogether, that list featured what I'd expect from uneducated, paperback sensibilities.  How is it that Burroughs and Howard are included, but not Haggard?

Buried in descriptions of medieval town life and legitimate maps, I veered sharply away from the amateurism of early TSR, destroying any possibility of my finding a consensus with the D&D community henceforward.  My personal take on the game, that it's there to present dense, believable scenarios set to challenge and deliberately upset the players, who must rise above themselves to succeed or die from their inability to show courage or change, is seen as abusive, destructive to game play and "not fun."  My game design is so rigid and inflexible, or so it's perceived, that when I refuse to insert some half-baked idea into my game, I'm viewed in the same light as the police officer that gives you a ticket for driving 2 miles over the speed limit.  Because of the laziness in the community, because of the lack of research or the desire to push the game past the traditional childhood sentimentality of how exciting it is to be a "fairy"-like character, it's hard to explain that game design is not a set of moral principles, it's engineering.  I'm not slapping down a would-be designer for a 2-mile-an-hour violation; I'm pointing out that if the driver's gearbox is 0.5% out of alignment, the car will crash.  For the moralist, 1% of anything is dismissable.  For an engineer, 0.01% is a fucking disaster.

This isn't understood because the game isn't understood.  To begin with, that an "adventure" is no more a collection of strung-together incidents than real life is a guided tour.  Without a deeper reason to win this fight or acquire that object beyond, "It's what's next," then the combat is empty, the travel is empty, the acquisition is empty.  Disney's Pirate of the Caribbean ride is cute and pretty, but it's not living life as a pirate.  It's not transforming.  And this ideal is what's seriously lacking in virtually all game play and game design.  The players are not expected to be changed by the experience of playing.  They're expected to come out of an adventure the exact same human beings, with the same knowledge and perspective, who went into it.  To suggest otherwise is to sound like ... me.

Today, if you choose to spend your Easter taking in a Passion Play, you expect to be entertained and possibly to reconnect with your faith, as you wish to do now and then.  But that isn't how the Passion Play originated.  In a world without widespread media, the play originated as a ritual of the Church, designed to transform the viewer.  The intensity of the presentation was set to wrest you from the commonality of profane existence and inculcate concepts of sacredness and divinity into the hearts and minds of the audience.  And it did exactly that.  The effect was so powerful that there arose a powerful taste for mystery and miracle plays that took root in the Middle Ages, representing as Wikipedia says the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, the Last Judgement and many, many more.

Companies of actors and theatrical productions built their popularity upon the basis of these plays, which over the centuries evolved out of troupes in Italy, Germany and France into the more familiar (for us) English works of Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare.  These companies were concerned with taking in money, but the intensity and richness of the works, in addition to the presentation, maintained their power to transform the audience's opinions about things.  Delve into the politics behind Richard III or Henry IV, and you'll find that Shakespeare was channelling the English crown's veracity and legitimacy in ways that are hardly known except to scholars who have gone those roads ... but every groundling in the "O" knew what was being said, and why ... and there were often fights that broke out in the Globe Theatre because of it.

Theatre and film today continue in this tradition, though both have been sadly gutted by derivative works, an inexplicable raising of the ability of a film-maker over the purpose of a film-maker ... and of course Disney is bent on destroying every vestige of artistry in every film produced in their monopolistic crusade to make people even stupider than they are ... a holy war that Hasbro, the leash holders of the Company from Mordor, fully endorses.  But I do not.  Dungeons and Dragons is a form of presentation.  One that offers the possibility of walking individuals through scenarios that do more than make a Saturday evening less boring, but which can leave them exalted and surprised at their capacity as human beings.

I'm obviously not talking about investing D&D with some shit propaganda ... nothing as gauche as that.  I'm saying that human beings naturally possess a thirst for ambition, power, acquisition and novelty.  Any game that quenches that thirst is certainly a fucktard better than a game that operates like a communal colouring book, eating time while patting players on the back for staying inside the lines with their crayons.  That is the substance offered by most RPGs ... which works most successfully because the players always need to buy a new colouring book when the old one's used up.

Enabling a player to be legitimately ambitious, however, is expert work.  The DM has to have some notion of how ambition works, to begin with, which won't be gotten by repeated claims that D&D is a game of imagination, a fun game, a social game, a great way to make a "unique" character or any of the other totally empty statements we can find on the company's website.  To begin with, ambition is generally described as a bad thing, a selfish thing, a way to fuck over other people while enriching oneself with entitlement and the corrupt control of others.  And so it can be ... only in D&D, the "people" being fucked over and controlled are NPCs, who are fictional, while the influence being acquired is more levels, more money and more options for styles of play.  "Power" is the ability to do something or act in a particular way, without constraint from others.  "Dominance" is the use of that power to bring other persons and institutions under control, to make them work for the player,  These are drugs that humans like to have flowing through their systems ... but it doesn't make suitable subject material for a game being marketed to 9-year-olds.

It's not that 9-y.o.'s don't understand power and dominance.  They understand those things better than you do, because they haven't learned yet the guilt and regret that many, many humiliations will help them develop.  But an adult that knows enough to feel guilty and regretful can still remember how much gawddamned fun it was to lord power and dominance over others.  Much, MUCH more fun than it was to pretending to be a fairy.

And this is the fatal flaw of the company's rhetoric.  D&D as they sell it is "fun," but it's only a little fun.  It's kindergarten, colouring book fun.  It's approved fun, or acceptable fun.  It's not up-to-your-elbows-in-the-enemy's-blood fun.  It's not slaughtering a whole village fun.  It's not seizing-control-of-an-empire and forcing-it-to-its-knees fun.  And it can't be, because these are scenarios that are too extreme for a module, or can't be made to happen through a linear series of events.  The greater sort of fun I describe is what the 9-y.o.'s will play anyway, because they're nine, and they don't give a fuck what kind of game the company or their parents want them to play.  But its the sort of fun that you, the adult reading this, don't play because it's too hard, it takes too much work, it's wrong or there's no module that covers it.  Because you've forgotten what it felt like to be nine, to spend nine hours tiring yourself out building a sandcastle on a beach that you may never come back to, because you wanted to.  Because seeing that castle grow mattered.  You've forgotten what it felt like to bury yourself in work that mattered to you, because you've been emasculated by work you don't give a fuck about.

And because of that, you're ready to buy your D&D colouring books from the company, and hand them out to the players in the form of character sheets, which they can fill in with their crayons, before proceeding through the CandyLAND version of D&D you've purchased for them.  Telling them, and yourself, that this is "fun."  Sure it's fun.  It must be.  We're not bored.

It's this disconnect, this utter failure to understand what D&D actually allows, that blinds players and DM alike to the fundamentals of game design inherent in the system.  Because they've never worked at their game, they can't conceive of the benefits that work offers, or how the fruits of work lead to the desire to work harder, to produce larger rewards.  It's this ignorance that encourages players to think that they'd rather vacation in the D&D world rather than live in it ... because they don't understand what the term "live" even means.  Or what that would feel like.  Like most children who get excited about colouring books, it never occurs that the bigger thrill is in drawing the lines rather than colouring between them.