An Unhealthy Dependency

Now the reader can see why I wanted to put these maps on another blog.  And it's evident that I'm not dead, since I've posted there every day since November 9th.  But yes, I understand, I'm not posting here.  I'm not saying how to build a world or be a DM, or what rules to make or why rules are important.  I'm not counselling the reader on how to manage their players, or how to prep, or what's wrong with the game company.  I'm not bellyaching about someone else's blog, module or perspective.  It's all terribly dull because instead, I'm making maps.

But, if I must have some thoughts ...

This, said very earnestly, by a young woman leaning repeatedly into the camera to hammer home just how gawddamned earnest she is about what's she's saying:

"We want to continue to reach out to folks who are interested in fantasy, who love storytelling, who enjoy spending time with their friends and creating these collective stories that they can remember for years to come."

Not what appealed to me from the beginning, no.   Myself, I liked the depth and complexity of the game; the widening of possibility for action, the requirement to express one's actions in words, accurately, regardless what the actions were.  When I think of D&D play, I see it in very thin slices:

Me: "You see this, and this, and this ... what do you do."

You: "Fuck.  Do I have time to do, um, this?"

Me: "You can try.  Roll.  High."

You: "Omfg ... a 20.  Shit."

Me: "They shield their eyes and fall back."

You: "We fucking run!"

Clickety-click.  There's little time to think.  The back and forth relies on the space described; the limits are what's possible based on believability, rules, precedent.  Jump in, fight, defend, back out, escape.  So much happens, with so many people speaking, that there's no time to remember anything except in sweeping generalities.  We might remember that Tamara threw the critical when it was really needed, but after the fact, the details get muddled in the other hundred things that happen.  From the beginning, I've never been interested in one "amazing" narrative.  I'm interested in fifty narratives.  When my sessions really work, they're like those stage farces with people popping in and out of doors, each with their own agenda, where the audience gets lost remembering which of the four identical suitcases had the diamonds and which had a bomb.  The players jump from frying pan to fire to shark-infested tank and so long as they survive, we keep going.

As near as I can tell, I'm the only person in the history of the game to see it this way.  I'm the only person who doesn't give a flying fuck if the players want to hear a story or not.  I do not care if the game is memorable after ... "after," I'm not running the game.  As far as I know, no one has time for a collective anything, except to figure out in the immediate what's going on, what they need to do and whether or not it worked.

I'm definitely not interested in creating D&D as a "legacy."  My daughter has become a DM, but that's because she heard me doing it a hundred times, she had an opportunity to play it with her friends and she likes to run.  She plays in my game, likes the patter and duplicates it as best she can.  She's nowhere near as obsessed with it as I am (obsession = "unhealthy dependency").

In truth, no, I don't think of D&D as an "edition."  I don't play "AD&D", or "old" D&D, or "original" D&D, or any other manifestation of the game that someone else has invented or labeled.  I certainly won't play "One" D&D.  I don't play the game I played ten years ago, when I didn't play the game I played ten years before that.  I won't be playing this game ten years from now.  The game is too far-reaching, too full of possibility, too rich, for me to restrain myself or my practices when designing or running it.  It's always just been "D&D."  But in truth, it's "my" D&D.  It's better, deeper, more flexible, more advantageous to both me and my players than any set of rules in a book ever will be ... even my own book, since to publish something, I have to stupid-simplify its structure.  It takes someone obsessed to play my D&D.

Like anyone whose self-reliant, it's a joke when I hear someone talk like this:

"The sort of change you're going to see isn't about taking anything away from you, it isn't about changing any of that stuff you love.  It's much more about giving you more.  Giving you more options, giving you more choices you can make, more character types you can play, more magic spells you can cast ... basically, you know we're very happy with the game the way it is today."

More "choices" and more "options" are the same thing.  As is listing the example of what the choices are.  With acknowledgement that this is the same "more stuff" the company's been providing since 1977.

As an obsessive, self-made, self-sufficient, self-supporting, self-sustaining, independent, self-contained, autarkic DM living on his own hump (all the words, straight out of the thesaurus, that mean the same thing), I've chosen to create my own options.  When I want more, I'll make more.  Myself.  Using my brain.  I'd like to see the company come into my game and tell me how to run it.  That'd be a hoot.

But you see, none of this is new.  I've been saying this sort of thing for years.  The maps are new.  The maps are a steady, comprehensive investigation into the game world on a ground level.  They're not just opinions spouted for the sake of opinions.  The world being examined, taken apart, rebuilt, is the real world.  It's places where you or I could fly to, and look around, and see how the goblins would look rushing out from the trees ... those trees, right there.

I appreciate that the mapping seems somewhat repetitive.  Or that it lacks verve.  In reality, every section has a distinctive character; every tiny corner of the world has some element that's worth examining with a magnifying glass.  None of these corners are a "story."  They're framed pieces of setting in which events have or might take place.  Where history has already left its mark over millennia.  The very place where I mapped today was once visited by Huns, who slaughtered the residents there, who looked at those same mountains, who fought with the ancestors of the people living on the map in my game time.  It's all a fathomless tapestry ... but to use it, to gain from it, to discover what sort of DM it can make a person, it has to be seen and puzzled over.  The daily constructions of map that I've been doing are far more valuable than the boilerplate deconstruction I've just written above.

This is why, at present, I'm not driven to write here.  I have the splat book to design.  I have the maps to draw.  I have the ongoing game responsibilities I've lately assumed again.  I just don't care to write another chapter on how the reader should dungeon master.  You want to worldbuild?  Get down on your hands and knees and look at the dirt on which you stand, and grok it's fullness.  Action, not words.  Comprehension, not counselling.  Get out your shovel and dig.