Don't Fence Me In

Stand on a forest-covered hillside slope and look out over the vista of the valley before you.  From where we are, we can see the hills opposite, a mile or more away, through the thin tops of the trees growing further down the slope.  Much of the valley's bottom is obscured, but we know that down there a river runs.  Trees surround us, their trunks blocking our view up the hill; their roots course back and forth over the ground, with every cavity filled with leaves that have just fallen this season.

There's so much we cannot see, but we know is there.  We've followed paths from a village to reach this spot.  That same village has roads that lead to towns and cities throughout the realm.  Hidden amidst the forests are little dairy farms and small green meadows, that we left behind when we began to climb.  We know how to find them again, just as we know if we continue upwards we'll reach the summit of this hill ... which again, we can't see.  Nonetheless, we know it's there.  We know this hill is the beginning of a series of ridges that wind together into a mountain range.  We can point in the direction of that distant range, whatever our immediate senses tell us, because we've been told.

This is the game world.  It's a collection of memories mixed with summations made by others whom we have no reason not to trust.  The world is a series of visions that unfold as we wend, or climb, or clear, in our habit of moving from one place to the next.  The adventure is the uncertainty in this earthly fabric, as no readiness or constancy can assure what we'll meet or what consequence that'll bring.  The act of travel makes the world, conveyed by the DM to the player, sentence by sentence.

There is a danger in thinking the game world is a map.  A map is a representation of a thing, it's not the thing itself.  It's value is symbolic, not concrete.  It's static.  The failing of fictional cartography is that it purports to create the world, yet it ends in reflecting a banal, facile representation of "earth-like" elements and saccharine sentimentality jumbled together to form empty white spaces delimited by lines of different colours.  It's not a "world."  It's a figment.  And too often it's easy with D&D to believe that because the game is imaginary, the mere invention of something imaginary is sufficient to make the game run.

Apart from conceiving the game's setting, this setting must be conveyed accurately to the players, even though each player must perceive the setting largely from the DM's phrases and gestures.  This limitation makes the "dungeon" much more practical than the outside world, including the setting's wilderness, countryside and variously sized settlements.  To present a dungeon room, I can give it's easy-to-conceive dimensions, shape and contents ... since these things usually exist on a small scale.  Each component can be reconciled with the size of a large living room, a school corridor, a theatre or a gymnasium.  The construction is ordinary, like a stone wall or a wooden gallery; the contents are ordinary as well, being composed of doors, platforms, gee gaws, trunks, tables, chairs, beds and so on.  Ten score items cover the gamut for most dungeons.  These can easily be described with a single word, surrounded by short-sentence text that can fit on a single page, yet providing sufficient information for a full night's running.

The outside has no such convenient partitions.  The forest stretches on and on without distinctive pattern; the valley cannot be "seen" and it's contents cannot be practically searched.  There is no door for the players to stand behind, to prepare themselves for the next encounter; the next encounter could randomly strike at any time, and appear from any direction, even straight up.  The players are exposed; there are no walls to provide defense:  no "front" for the fighters to defend, no "back" for the spellcasters to retreat into.   Yet days can pass without yielding a single enemy — and should the party meet one, it won't have thousands of gold pieces in its pockets.

Yet the dungeon is woefully predictable.  The party knows there's treasure here; it knows the monsters are defeatable.  It's just a matter of pushing from room to room until the source yields up its experience and wealth.  For as long as it takes.  And when this dungeon is completed and cleaned out, and our levels obtained, they'll be another dungeon, and another and another.  For as long as we care to open doors.

Initially, this seems dreadfully exciting.  What, we ask ourselves, is behind the next door?  Quick, get ready!  When the enemy rush out, our hearts pounding, we feel we've caught the true sense of this game, as we hurry to fight and support one another in a bid to survive.  So it goes ... at the beginning.  With repetition, however, the proceedings become a montage of doors opening and different monsters flooding out; of the same spells being used in the same order, by the same defensive arrangement of players; of the same aftermath in which treasure is sorted and numbers on character sheets are changed.

The energetic DM does what can be done to vary the proceedings, mixing in surprises, puzzles, bits of parley, clues to a mystery, dramatic speeches and cries for revenge ... whatever works to maintain the value of what becomes rather dry material in a year or two.  And when these run out, the players sort themselves into three groups: those able to enthall themselves with the same old thing, those who go through the motions for the sake of nostalgia ... and the largest group, those who quit.

The game world is not a dungeon.  The dungeon merely shrinks the map to a degree where the elements being symbolised are so simple as to feel concrete.  The price is enslavement to a rat maze ... where even the sunniest rats are eventually forced to notice the walls are all the same.

The game world is a world, with everything in it.  The game mastering strategies needed to run that world ask the DM not to simplify to be embrace complexity, like a scientist.  The botanist doesn't limit the study's knowledge to what grows in a temperate garden, just because there are too many plants to ever conceivably find and eventually name.  An astrophysicist doesn't limit the study's knowledge to those things that can be seen with the naked eye, just because there are trillions of objects, the number of which can never be known.  Medicine does not limit itself to only diseases it can cure; engineers do not only build the kind of things that have already been built; chemistry doesn't only repeat old experiments.  It matters not that something is impossible.  It only matters that we seek to find ways to raise the party's sense of the world's potential adventures as we DO, when we strive out into the world.

The players' appreciation and excitement in moving through a forest should reflect the same excitement they'd feel if in real life, they were walking in through the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Black Forest, knowing there's a chance of encountering a chimera or a manticore.  If it were you, and you knew there was a real possibility of some nasty, horrific monster in these woods, could you sleep comfortable in your tent?  If you had to carry swords for your protection, and your route led through a defile where it was said there were man-beasts that ate human flesh, would you not grip your sword more tightly as you began to descend?  Would you not hesitate first, and ask if they wasn't some other route?  Would it matter much to you that when the 14 pig-faced warriors slathered in white and grey paint came rushing from the nearby verge, that they carried only a few coins of treasure?

It's not the game world that's boring, it's the DM.  The DM who counts days on a map and rolls a die for each day, as though the party were commuting to work.  The DM who can't be bothered to give the wilderness substance, who fails to structure the journey in a manner that seizes the hearts of the players as much as an opened door.  It's the lazy DM, who treats the wilderness as a blank space on a map between tick marks indicating dungeons.

I am far more thrilled by the vastness of a wilderness I want to control and survive in, than I am by another room with another puzzle, the solving of which will get me to another room with another puzzle.  Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above.  Don't fence me in.