Change

My partner Tamara has had an accident and broken the neck of her left humerus bone.  The doctor was pleased; it's an easy bone to heal, so she isn't in a cast, just a sling.  As such, we're not going on vacation this month.  Thankfully, I work from home, so I can play nurse to her as she recovers.  With luck, that'll be in six weeks, with physio, whereupon I'll negotiate for time off I'm not going to be taking in May.

Yesterday was a crisis from 2:30 pm in the afternoon until 1:30 am in the morning.  Today has been a trial, but she's settling in.  I'm only writing it here because this blog is also a diary of sorts.

I'm going to address a comment made recently by Maxwell, about this post, and discuss habits for a bit.  Then, in the next day or so (I'm having a crown on my tooth finished on Thursday), we'll talk about the party returning to town.

"I'm finding myself really hard pressed to come up with descriptions and possible hooks on the fly. You'd gnash your teeth if you saw how often I've shamefully zipped the players from A to B, with minimal mention of the people, buildings, roads, signposts, smells, sounds, sights along the way ..."

Let me stress that no, I wouldn't.  I've done it myself; sometimes it's all one can do, if a session isn't going well and needs a reboot.  Plus, as I've stressed from time to time, I have 43 years of DMing experience ... that's more than a lot of you have been alive.  It's not like I played the way I describe now during the first 20 years of my gaming.  This approach I'm describing took time, and no one, not even those who have played as long as me, should feel in any way that I have an expectation about the reader's standards.

My goal is not to change the reader over to my way of thinking the moment you read my words.  That would be ridiculous.  Usually, we all have to hear something dozens of times before it becomes something we've learned ... and learning is itself a process requiring us to test a theory ourselves before accepting it, no matter where that knowledge came from.  It's not "wrong" to zip your players from place to place.  It that you've done what you knew to do.  That applies to everything I've said here.  My words can only suggest, or push you towards another way of thinking ... that you'll have to explore before you really come to adopt it.  If you ever do.

Explaining these parts of the game, one step at a time, serves to outline observations and principles I've collected for myself, because they made each element of the game a little better as I tried them out.  The players responded very positively to them, largely because they'd never heard of such things in the game and yet it seemed to fit with their experience of non-game narratives and real life.  I'm here to employ these ideas, having worked them out, because I'm a writer, and it's my business to deconstruct motivations for characters, as well as other aspects of messaging related to newspapers, advertisers and investor information of the kind I do.  All messaging has to be understood in depth before it's effective.  The messaging a DM does in D&D obeys the same rules as a company announcing a merger, or a newspaper telling you about a fire, or an advertiser that has new shoes to sell.  But forming the right message, and making it memorable, is not something you do well straight out of high school.  Even writers who have early successes, like J.D. Salinger or Harper Lee, tend to spend much of their lives trying to reproduce a message that's just as clear.

Therefore, if you as a DM have failed to hit on points that I've stumbled across, having so much more time to do the stumbling than you've had, please don't condemn your actions as a consequence.  You didn't know; you didn't have reason to know.  Your mother did not impart this knowledge to you in the womb.  Maybe that's her fault, but I don't think so.

Your approach should be to question what I have to say, doubt it, test it, see if it works for you, and if it does, get busy trying to apply it more often.  Nothing I say has the ring of absolute truth.  It can't.  It comes from a field where I've been wrong about most of this stuff for decades before hitting upon a better way.  It stands to reason that I'll be smarter in 10 years than I am now ... and know then that much of what I say now is wrong.  That's how knowledge works.

If it happens that you have habits, and you'd like to change them, remember that the first step of changing is to accept that you want to change.  This period of wanting can take years to pass, before the actual changing takes place.  That's okay.  If you're lucky like me, and you live to nearly 59, you'll have years.  Don't worry about that.  Concentrate on reminding yourself that you'd like the change to happen and then, one day, without much work, it will.  You'll find you want to do things differently, and you'll cease to think about it.

That's the best advice I can give on this matter.  We can discuss it further in the comments, but we needn't worry about it going forward.  I'll set this post down and go check on my partner to see if she's okay.