Sunday, October 16, 2022

A Furtherance to the Effects of Guidance on D&D

D&D is a religion?  Alexis is well off his cracker this time.

I had a lot of trouble with the last post.  The subject material kept drifting, whereupon I'd kill several paragraphs and start again.  Altogether, I wrote three times as many words as the post ended up being.  Worse thing is ... I want to write it over.

Religion is theatre ... but unlike the theatrical play, that's been around for only 500 years, or film that's just over a hundred, or television that's passing 80, religious theatre has been in development for more than 5,000 years.  As it happens, "theatre" grew out of miracle plays, recently mentioned on this blog.  The Passion of the Christ grew from Medieval performances taking place 900 years ago.  Where it comes to reworking and rewriting the same story over time, there's something to be said when dozens of generations take up the pen to address the plot line.

Each nuance, each line, gets remarkable degrees of attention.  The same can be said for every visual cue we might witness laid out in a Cathedral, even something as late as the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal, which was constructed in stages between 1824 and 1843.



Nothing is left to chance.  Every inch is built upon a precept existing in other churches reaching back to Roman temples and earlier.  The presentation dwarfs the viewer.  Not only does it seek to awe the viewer, it also forces the viewer to look upon the scene with affection and attachment.  Imagine growing up as a child in this church ... visiting it up through the years until becoming an adult.  And then imagine having some reason to take a stand against the church, and risk never being allowed to enter this place again, that you've known since being a child.  Compare churches like this to what the world was like in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.  It's miraculous.  Can you imagine the self-will it took, the degree of anger and resentment required, for the iconoclasts of any century to enter a place like this and tear it apart?

All the hundreds of variant elements of D&D, as a body of design and rules, puts its unique pressure on the DM to see that it's included.  We must have magic; we must have these races and these classes; we must have critical hits and shields must be smashed.  We must have dragons and giants, medusae and chimera, ghosts and vampires, gods and alternate planes of existence, because all these things together have their individual parts to play.  From this I acknowledge how this same argument calls for the needful inclusion of all those modules that players have grown up with, that reach back in time to the 1970s.  That too is part of the game's core for most.

Deviations, then, are difficult.  Your choice to include calculating encumbrance, or how much food is eaten, or spell components, risks a player declining your game after a single session.  You'd better know what you're doing before heaping a lot of new rules on players who are used to playing the familiar form of the game ... because up front, they're not going to see the benefit of new rules.  It's easy for me, now, to bring a new player into my campaign, since there are seven other players who have already embraced all my new rules.  Peer pressure works in my favour.  But if you, the DM, are the only one defending your rules to a mob that knows none of them ... beware, because none have any reason to be on your side from the outset.

This is a point that I must stress regarding both your game building and the setting you put that in.  Start with the familiar.  Get them on board with your DMing style, your skills at presentation, your ability to play back-and-forth with the players as they make decisions and you offer consequences and returns.  Prove that you can run, first.  Only then should you ask for a little more.  They have to know us, and trust us, and have reason to invest in us, before we jump in and start changing their game to ours.

That approach improves the possibilities of our building the game and setting with these specific players in mind.  We can feel their resistance to some proposed rules more than others.  With time, we're able to sense with what, and when, to introduce a bold new concept into the campaign, not only in terms of rules but also as to the behaviour of NPCs or cultural norms the party might confront.  One reason why I've been able to inculcate sex into my campaigns originates with players who have come to trust me as a DM, who know that if I bring up the subject, it isn't going to somewhere lewd and tasteless.  I've worked for that trust, as much as I work to maintain it.  No matter what I might theoretically discuss as a rule for D&D, I always have the voice of my players in my head constraining my willingness to introduce that thing.  I know them, just as they've come to know me.

This is where the metaphor of religion comes into it: the priest is as beholden to the flock as they are to his counsel.  A priest is a fool to think it appropriate to act like a dictator; and a fool to let others bully and dictate what they want from their priest.  A priest leads.  It's done humbly, with concern, with kind words ... but the congregation is led despite themselves, often without knowing it.  That is the essential skill of DMing.  To lead without looking like we're leading; to make the players see what's best for them while letting them decide it's what they wanted the whole time.

7 comments:

  1. Trust seems to be the foundation on which the whole game is built. If there is no trust, the game is at best doomed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Individual campaigns perhaps, but given the company's approach to "the game," the total lack of trust seems to have no effect whatsoever.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You're far from being crackers. Hell, western theater originated (more-or-less) with the Greeks, who were performing their own "passion plays" and "morality tales" (based on their own religious traditions). Smart folks, those Greeks: they understood that you can have far more impact through an animate performance than through a static piece of art, or written text.

    [humans are visual creatures; it's why television so quickly supplanted radio shows for entertainment]

    This bit about the DM being a priest/pastor (and the proper way to minister to one's "flock") is good, but it's not...quite...100%...apt a comparison. At least, not if one equates the gaming session to a church service or Mass. The game session is far more dynamic, far less static than the service...the players are not reciting rote lines and being lectured from the pulpit.

    [similarly, players are not actors on stage with the DM as writer/director; they have autonomy that no actor has ever had]

    But OUTside the ritual of the Mass (or whatever), the role of the priest as a minister and leader to the congregation IS an apt comparison...providing guidance to the parish even as the parish takes their actions out into the wider world.

    Hm. I am trying to juxtapose these two allegorical images and make them work in my mind, but I'm having a bit of a "zen koan" moment. Hard to view the thing without a higher perspective.

    Still...I don't think you're crackers.
    ; )

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am thinking outside the Mass. Even outside Christianity, potentially. Many religions have no "mass" comparison.

    ReplyDelete
  5. One might think of all the set game mechanics like combat procedures and wandering monster checks as the "mass" and all the back and forth dialogic play as the "ministering to the flock." There is definitly ritual (and for some, superstition) involved in the die rolling.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Great post as always. I really like the comparison to Priest convincing them that what you're offering is what they needed all along :)

    As for extra rules, the only people I've ever had complain are the old grognards who want to play BX or AD&D, but they don't really, just the rules they remember growing up with (which were never RAW anyway). With new players it doesn't really matter what the rules are because they have no baseline of comparison. I guess I do slowly introduce new rules to the game, but thats because of the nature of my houserules and style if dming. At 1st level a player doesn't really need to know any rules, but as they level up the character can do more and the rules get more complicated. Simultaneously I expect players who have been playing longer and have higher level pcs to know more of the rules of the game and assist newer players.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I strongly concur with that approach, Lance.

    ReplyDelete

If you wish to leave a comment on this blog, contact alexiss1@telus.net with a direct message. Comments, agreed upon by reader and author, are published every Saturday.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.