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.