Wine

Apart from getting the new blog launched, after a couple weeks grumbling about it, let's continue with this series on worldbuilding — if my readers accept that's what I am writing about.   I'm pushing the idea that crafting the setting goes well beyond the visible contraptions with which we're familiar: the traditional map, the names of places and realms, the lines representing roads describing how the players travel from point to point.  Beyond these things there is the essence of the world itself ... it's philosophical perspective, it's manner of organising the forces of power that dominate the strata, the overall sense of cause and effect, not just from the players but also from the whole pattern of history that's gone before the players arrive.  And just lately, the way in which the game world is explained and expressed, right down to the words we choose to take hold of the players' attentions.

I can appreciate how these things are so alien to the usual dialogue surrounding D&D and worldbuilding.  As I keep saying, there is no groundwork for these ideas, except actual human history, geopolitics, religion and so on.  Recently, I've been reading a book from Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project, which is busy deconstructing the manner in which human beings ignore facts, interpreting things from a habit of wish fulfillment ... literally remastering things from what they are into what we want them to be.  This theme revolves around three statistician-psychologists in the state of Israel in the 1960s, each of whom also took part in the Israeli-Arab wars at the time, because every able-bodied male had to.  It's a profound perspective ... and it led to advancements in psychology that shattered belief systems in the 1950s and 60s.

Today's theme is literature, which can mean many things.  Although it technically describes any body of written work, the descriptor is often used to express things we ought to read, in the sense that if you haven't, you're a philistine, barely able to pick your nose with your spear.  [note the Israeli-philistine transition ... Literature!].  My intent is to discuss it in relationship to worldbuilding, as connected to elements of communication, aesthetics and form.  Let's begin with a story.

Once upon a time, a very minor academic without many credits and quite a few detractors stumbled across a theory that continues to hold a wide number of non-academics in thrall.  This theory explains that every popular story through the ages is the same, with the same means of elaboration, the same predictable elements of plot, and most important, the same approximate resolution.  What's more, this recognisable pattern reaches into every culture, every language, every historical period ... why, it's completely mind-blowing.  It's like there's just one massive, um, "singlesaga" that permeates through all Human culture.  Wow.

There's just this little glitch that this multitude of stories lack the same theme.  But what is a "theme," anyway?  Merely the reason the story is written at all.  Merely what the story is actually about.  See, it doesn't actually matter if the plots of two stories match up fairly well, if one of these stories investigates the collapse of military intelligentsia in the 19th century Russian state and the other examines the manner in which mid-20th century ideology forces individual to conform.  War and Peace and The Metamorphosis just aren't the same.  No matter how hard we stare.

See, it's like the plot-line of making wine.  We grow the grapes, or fruit, in varying conditions, but in the end it has to get crushed somehow.  In the next act, the resultant liquid is fermented.  Then the liquid is pressed, to allow the wine to run off the pulp.  After that, depending on whether the wine is red, white or from some other fruit extraction, a wide range of processes can take place that, in Act Three, ultimately wind up with wine in storage.  And here's the point at which this metaphor revolves: it's all wine.  Whatever we do, however we convert it, carbonate it, reduce it and so on, the fundamental process of making "wine" is universal ... in every culture, every language and in every historical period.

There are a great many who may nod and say, "Yeah, see, all wine is the same."  Which ... mm ... is not true.  Well, it is to non-academic philistines.

How literature arrives at its meaning, or the fact that it uses words of a given language, is irrelevant to its purpose ... which is why that clever little insight by the inventor of the singlesaga produced no accolades.  Let's forget, then, the standardised D&D notion of coming up with a "story" ... it's going to be the same story anyway, right?  I mean, it's all wine.

The first difference between two stories is aesthetic: not the story itself, but how well it's told.  If you or I were to try and write To Kill a Mockingbird from scratch, without even the title to call it by, even if we stuck to the "story" the end result would be execrable.  Not even because we're bad writers, but because we're not Harper Lee growing up in that era in that part of the world.  She knew how to make that story good because it was her story.  As in, a story fermented into her by the vineyards of her parents and culture.

Like stories all being the same, the events in D&D tend to obey a few narrow parameters: we can make the players fight, we can allow them to explore, we can offer them puzzles, we can set up parleys, we can threaten them with authorities, we can empower them with objects.  I've been playing for 40+ years and I can't think of something else that doesn't fit into what's named.

Does it matter?  A good event isn't based on it being a puzzle ... what matters is what sort of puzzle it is, and how it's encountered, and what the consequences of solving/not solving it are, along with how elegant the solution can be, whether invented by the DM or the player.  It's the beauty of the puzzle that counts.  And beauty, as I wrote in How to Run, is founded on four fundamental principles: (a) we have to begin with the best tools; (b) there must be an evident amount of time spent on the result: (c) it must show skill; (d) and it has to look like you took WAY too much time with it.

As a sum, your players must have the sense that you've created a conundrum (or a battle, or a parley, or whatever) that they know they can't duplicate.  You understand this game better than they ever could, you've spent more time working on it that they can even imagine, you're far more masterful at expressing yourself and what's happening that they can match ... and obviously, you've got time to squander on this game that they know they don't have.  In short, they're in awe.  They don't understand why, or how ... they just know that whatever you're doing, they can't do it.

In real terms, this manifests as a problem solving situation that makes their skulls hurt.  To actually do that, you really DO have to spend ludicrous amounts of time as a DM.  So, short answer: to produce something beautiful requires an excess of ability.

Okay, so, let's shelve that.  You can start working on being able when you finish reading this post, whereupon you'll be good to go in, um, 2042.

What about form?  Perhaps that's more accessible.  Form is the configuration in which a story is told, or in which a narrative is related.  For example, in D&D, the common form is to send the players out to the dungeon, let them pick up treasure and get hurt, bring them back to the village so they can buy stuff and heal, then send them out to the dungeon to get hurt and more treasure, then bring them back to the village so they can heal, then send them out to the dungeon so they can ...

Elegant, ain't it?

Form is easier to manage ... mostly because so many forms are utterly ignored by traditional D&D.  Virtually any situation that isn't organised around a "funhouse set-piece" will confound players sufficiently to think they've discovered a whole new kind of game.  Consider: if the traditional game is to send the players out to the funhouse, er, dungeon, consider how easy it is to turn that situation on its head by having the various denizens of the funhouse randomly and constantly raid the village?  Think of it ... a group of 1st level characters wake up in the middle of the night to find the streets filled with humanoids.  They rush out, kill 8-10 kobalds, only to soon after find a dozen goblins breaking into a shop.  The players kill the goblins, get their treasure from the shop.  Soon, they're fighting a big ogre who's tearing apart the inside of an apothecary.  The party kills the ogre, gets away with a dozen potions ... which they'll need, because now it's thirty gnolls.  These are beaten off as the sun rises and the players get a break.

Only, the humanoids are ringed around the village.  The players heal, sleep, and ready themselves for nightfall, when it happens again.  And again.  And again.  It's the same story.  We've just chosen to ferment it in a different way.

The key to "form" is to find ways to introduce the players to puzzles, parley and panic in different ways than they've already done.  The story lines are all obvious: it's a wagon train that needs protecting, it's different entities fighting over a business asset, it's a group of people who need their village defended, it's a king that needs restoring on a throne, it's a band of rebels fighting against an evil empire that will take new recruits for a special mission ... blah, blah, blah.  It isn't the damned story.  That's just the grapes the wine is made from.  It doesn't matter that the story's been used before ... ALL stories have been used before.  What matters is how well you use it.  And ultimately, if you personally can set up the story better than the players, you'll gather a little of that sweet, sweet nectar that creating something of beauty gives.  Oh, you may realise it's not all that, but the players will think it's beautiful and you'll get the laurels just the same.

Finally, there's communication.  This is tricky.  We've already spoken about language and locution ... this is your use of those aspects to send a message that's worth telling.  And here I know you're a fish out of water.  Creating a message out of D&D feels like ... well, we have no idea what it feels like.

A "message" is a discrete form of interaction that attempts to suggest a response without actually asking for it.  The idea is to signal the reader in a manner that causes him or her to gather an insight into the events surrounding the story, even though that insight was never actually stated.

This can be accomplished in a film by "showing, not telling," though most of the time it ends in a very disconnected insight.  All sorts of people have invented all sorts of messages from the first 20 minutes of 2001: a Space Odyssey.  None of these messages coincide with each other and ALL of those who think they have it believe they're the only ones who do.  It's not hard to send a "message" by creating a bunch of indistinct gobbledy-gook backed by very loud prestigious-sounding horns while human-like creatures are doing vaguely human-like things.  We're humans.  We like seeing ourselves in monkeys.

Messages can be annoying simple and useless.  "Crime doesn't pay" has been a theme of human dramas for centuries ... not that this stops crime.  It works with children if all we want them to do is eat their vegetables — at least, until they actually eat vegetables.  It's not our goal to moralise or send messages that change humanity's focus on science fiction filmmaking.  This is D&D.  Our goal is to enable D&D.

We have a game setting deliberately created to give the players a place to create their own stories — or, if you prefer, to make wine.  We'd rather they made better wine than the same mashed grapes left to rot in a dark cupboard beneath the stairs year after year.  We want them to make excellent wine.

You're the DM and the players have just finished acquiring a big haul of stuff.  They want to go down to the local Magi-Mart and roll it into potions and scrolls.  What do you want them to do with it?  If you want the pathway between the village and the dungeon to become a trench, you'll let them leave the mart with their arms full of flasks and rolls.

If you'd rather they spent their money on something else, don't cripple their imaginations by making the game easy.  If you want them to build safe-houses and castles, make the world more dangerous.  If you want them to spend more time investing in local politics, don't invent rewards for chatter ... denude the dungeons of treasure.  Denude the game world of dungeons.  Push politics into the player's faces.  MAKE them deal with it.  

But, gently.  Let them occasionally seek solace.  Encourage them to feel they can affect their enemies with the right word, or making the right deal.  But move the game towards where you want the game to go by sending messages that worry or dissuade the players from going in directions you don't want.

We're not talking a story here.  We're talking crafting messages that make the party think differently about the world at large.  Sure, there's a dungeon over there.  Sure, they can go to it.  And sure, there's a sign on the outside that says, "Abandon all hope."  Only, um, mean it.  Hey, the party's gonna look at those words and laugh, right?  I mean, they're adventurers.  Abandon hope, surely that doesn't apply to them, does it?

What kind of world do you want to run?  Build the setting to create a message in the player's heads that directs them into your kind of world.  Make it subtle.  Be very definite about not stating the message openly or making your intent obvious.  Give the players reason to pause and reconsider the next time there's a scary message on a dungeon.  Give them reason to believe there's good gaming, and solid value, to be found in other things beside dungeon delving.  It's up to us to reward behaviour we ought to think deserves it, and underwhelm behaviour we don't want.

If that sounds bad to you ... if it sounds like I'm encouraging propaganda, or brainwashing, or coercion, then consider the possibility that you're a little overcautious about how you cope with your fellow human beings.  Personally, I'm completely assured that my players are "getting the message" and not minding it all that much.  Especially when it's coupled with the form of the adventures I create and the time I spend on their elaboration.

I believe in making very, very good wine.  It's not made simply, or doing one thing, or counting on the grapes to do it all for us.  There's a common adage among vintners that a joyous grape, a well-watered grape, grows into the happy part of a lousy wine.  We keep the soil dry; we make the grape suffer, so that it has to pull every bit of flavour from its surroundings just to stay alive.  It's from hardship, not ease, that invention and creation flourishes.  It's from not having everything handed to them, from having to seek their success in every valley, not just the ones planned for them, that a party discovers a fantastic game they never want to quit.