Awe

Note on the last post:

Further content in this series assumes a game world that sits somewhere on the scale of setting approaches between "fair" and "indifferent."  Creating a setting that's entirely insouciant would be next to impossible for a single individual working within the constraints of time and the necessity to occasionally acquire income ... thus, some elements of the setting do work towards providing players with structured opportunities to enrich themselves, both in game terms and experientially.  No effort, however, is granted the approach of appeasing and servicing the players wants and desires, like a cruise director on a luxury liner.  If that's the approach the reader desires, then you'll have to find your wisdom for that approach elsewhere.

Part II

Though we are mere dungeon masters, and perhaps correctly described as "workers and students in an industrialised and technological society," the condition remains that the game setting is brought to life out of a void — in principle unchanged from any creation story we might have learned.  Naturally, our game setting is rather crude; it depends thoroughly upon the deity's constant, clumsy attentions; because it's all imaginary, the new world lacks the benefits of spontaneous, physical biological creatures roaming about on it's surface.  Nonetheless, it is real; and we have conjured it out of, as they say, nothing.  Whatever the setting's shortcomings, we did the actual making of the thing.  It's ours.

I speak of "my world" when I discuss the setting with my players or anyone else that listens, brushing off the dusty chair next to Yahweh and taking my place among the Gods.  This is a joke, naturally.  If there was such a chair for me, it would be rude stool indeed.  Still, no one familiar with D&D will give a moment's thought to the gargantuan assumption that a person, a DM, can "own" a whole world.  World ownership can easily be assumed by anyone who scrawls make-do lines on blank paper, arbitrarily dividing the firmament from the waters, and seeing that it's good.  No one thinks a thing about it.

Viewed through the lens of "fantasy fiction," the medium underlying D&D is a mixture of believable elements and unbelievable elements — with the latter included into the mix as though they were believable.  When introducing the presence of a God meeting the players, fifty or sixty feet high and resting down on one knee to speak gently to the party, the unbelief of the situation is intensely played down, while the players conjointly agree to suspend that unbelief for the overall benefit of the game.  Much pleasure is obtained in the understanding that imaginary things in the setting are "real;" everyone here wants them to be real; and thus it's taken as a premise that they are real, and woe betide the naysayer in the crowd anxious to spoil everyone's fun.  We don't question the arrival of the god; we want to know what the god has to say.

Where, however, does this shared agreement begin?  We can argue that the originators of the game stuffed it full of practical forms of magic and unnatural beings, and therefore we continue that trend, but the originators are hardly the source for why this sort of thing appeals.  They merely thumped a big red button that humanity's been carrying around with them since the time of the world resting on the back of a turtle and talking snakes whose day job is "apple salesman."  The originators are come-latelys to this love affair ... and in fact provided the disservice of throttling much of the distinctive character extant in many a mythical beast and fantasy myth, to reach a press deadline.

I think we can take as a given that any D&D setting must possess this reality/unreality mixture.  The degree to which we embrace it varies; and we'd be silly not to expect that.  The question, therefore, is not whether fantastic elements are present in the game setting, or which elements are included, but rather what is accomplished by having them at all?  And by that I mean, beyond the factor of "cool" they possess.  An argument is called for that explains to the DM why a world should have gods and strange beasts in it, or comprise elements of the supernatural, or any of the features that we've come to associate with D&D.

The answer is that while we might question the validity of unreality, it's reality that we should sincerely question.  You and I are sure to come closer on the subject of what kills vampires than we might on how to kill a serial killer.  The vampire is a myth; and the defining characteristics of that myth provide for a totally evil being that can be killed indifferently, by necessity.  But a serial killer is a flesh and blood soul, and however we might want to assess that killer by the same standard as a vampire ... the fact remains that the killer is made of the same corpuscles as ourselves.  Worse, the killer has a family, and defenders, who offer a version of reality different from ours, as does the killer too, and the whole matter becomes increasingly more complicated the more we know.  A necessity of killing the vampire is, however, appealingly lacking in vagueness.  There's no question of guilt.  It's a vampire.  Of course it has to die.

By extension, for a thousand years there has been no reason to regret the death of Grendel, nor the rightness of Edward Spenser's Red Cross Knight killing a dragon at the outset.  Much of D&D's appeal comes from a cultural attachment to these tales, explaining why the killing of monsters and the acquisition of treasure maintains it's allure.  Creatures being unreal provides the solace from our day-to-day morality that frees us from second-guessing our actions and the remorse we'd ordinarily feel if we did something wrong.

Further, we're compelled by the enormity of our actions, including our perceived bravery to just stand there as the unreal god bends down to speak with us.  We're fascinated.  We're in awe ... not only of the god, dragon or giant, but of ourselves, for taking part in this experiment of game play.  We cannot wait to jump in again, to see what happens next!

This is something the dungeon master needs to apprehend in the creation of the game's setting, so that the feeling of being magnificent is bestowed upon the player — not in the sense of granting them an ponderous ego, but in making them feel part of something larger than themselves.  The sense of grandeur that accompanies jaw-dropping awe contains, within it, a deep intuitive sense of fear, a legacy of our ancestors who stared at lightning storms and fire without comprehension, yet with an intense appreciation for nature's frightening beauty.  This mix of awe, fear and beauty underlies the fabric of the successful game setting, with it's source in the manifestation of religion and religious adornment.

The intensity of religion lies in its capacity to fire the imagination ... while at the same time motivating it's proponents towards right action and right belief in a manner that unifies them together as a body.  The rich splendor of the religion's buildings, the spectacle and pageantry involved in the proceedings of spiritualism's ritual, the terrifying sense that one's soul is on the block and being discussed, combine together to form an impression in the worshipper's mind that they are part of something huge and incomprehensible ... and yet beautiful and impossible to abandon.  Each element of the exercise has been carefully crafted over millennia to seize a precise, intricate human capacity for emotion and give it substance.  It matters not if any of the words are true; if the promises given have authenticity; or even if the end purpose of the religion's toffs falls in line with the purported goals of the sacred texts.  What matters is our feeling, sitting in our pew, surrounded by the vastness of ornament, history, sacrifice and compassion that form the fundamental tenants of what brings us to this place, tiny beings that we are.

D&D is a religion of sorts.  Not one that cares about our souls, or what happens to us after death, or  how we should act ethically towards our fellow beings.  D&D is concerned with our sense of action.  It dresses that action in conflict and consequence, risk and high spirits, adventuring and desperation.  The game has the bigness of ornament, at a premium as it's ever-present in our collective thoughts; it has all history to play with; it recalls our sacrifice and the sacrifice of so many player characters that have gone before, that we feel keenly in our hearts ... and in those moments when we work and fight together, triumphing against impossible odds, there's compassion for our fellow players.  D&D, too, taps into a complex human capacity for creativity, resourcefulness and fantasy, giving purely imaginative moments a substance that astounds and awes.

Comprehending the means by which this game inserts itself into the human's thinking process is critical for the DM who wishes to dig deeper than setting up stick figures to roll dice at one another ... though it must be conceived that we'll never really understand how this works.  If we could, we would not be awed by it.  The game would not possess us with its wonder.  Therefore we should approach the elements of the game, it's trappings and direction, with the expectation that it should subsume into our consciouseness without our ever truly understanding how.  Then it should be embraced, and loved, and left to grow healthily on its own account, as we become slaves to it, and not it to us.