Cooking & DMing

Talking about control ...

One daily activity from which we can get a sense of power is cooking.  The transformation of raw food into a pleasant or remarkable meal is a creative process, though not nearly as "artistic" as a great many made for streaming channels would have us believe.  It's actually simple enough that anyone can learn to do it tolerably well; and in the long run, as we get into our late forties, it's a reliable fact that being able to cook our own food will add 10 to 15 active and healthy years to our lifespan.  Those aren't years added on the end, either.  If you don't want to spend your fifties feeling like you're sixties, you had better learn how to cook.

Cooking offers much satisfaction and room for invention, which is perhaps why I drifted into it.  Invention, however, is not how you learn to cook.  I didn't learn through a school program, but through working in a restaurant and learning to prepare the meals as that restaurant did it.  Without experience, it was hard to get hired in the 90s, when I started; it's nearly impossible now.  My first job was a Burger King, where I worked in the late 1980s to help pay for my university.  I used that experience to get a "prep cook" job in 1992, from which I was promoted onto the line, where I learned to make meals exactly as the company did it, until I could make those meals in my sleep.

I had this silly notion at the time, however, that I'd like to own a restaurant someday ... so when I learned the menu of one restaurant, I found a job at another restaurant and learned their menu.  I asked questions.  I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with better cooks who freely gave advice, to which I listened.  Steadily I moved up into better restaurants, until I worked in a 5-star Italian restaurant for a year, owned by a fury-driven Salerno-born food-mechanic named Armando, who'd learned what he knew from his uncle since the age of 5, in Italy.  After that I swung a job in a hotel, having been told that's where "real food" was cooked (and hated it), and then the catering division of the University of Calgary, where we made meals for 500 people every Stampeders football home game, along with weddings, political events and the students themselves, everyday.  This was the end of my "education."

The only experience I received from all this was that of a slave.  Cooking, whether for a small restaurant or a giant facility, is an industrial process.  There's no feeling of power at all, even if you're the head chef ... because one little mistake, one clever little change to a menu, and the whole thing can sink awfully fast.  Restaurants are slaves to the customers.  All those clever news stories that journalists like to do about the new "hot location" are merely advantaging a fresh restaurant's flash in the pan.  Three years later, that same place is closing its doors forever.  This happens for a lot of reasons that I won't go into, but most of them stem from keeping the clientele happy, when you can't be sure if they are.  A restaurant-goer will lie to a chef's face and say the food was excellent, while at the same time thinking in their heads, "I'm never, ever, coming back here."  People don't like confrontation.  Except for a few cranks, most won't tell you they didn't enjoy the meal.  They'll even tip 15% if they think it gets them out the door without a scene.

What does all this have to do with D&D?

Ordinary DMing, the kind furthered by Mentzer and Holmes, along with others, is also on the low order of creative inventiveness.  Running plain D&D is definitely in the realm of a competent 9 year old.  It's meant to be.  No game manufacturer wants to put on the box, "For ages 35 and up, provided you're a university graduate ... And we mean a real university degree, not humanities or a social science."

Catchy.

To learn how to play D&D, it's recommended you do it by rote.  Here's a module, here's a one-page adventure, here's something that can lead you by the nose so that you know what to say and when.  Here's some additional guidelines to get your players interested in the game by suggesting they write backgrounds, choose from our tremendous host of personalised races and classes, and here's some suggestions about how each of them should interact with the game world we've provided.  Stay within these narrow precepts — a bar, a market place, a road to the dungeon or the next village and the next dungeon —  and you'll see, soon enough you'll be perfectly comfortable running D&D for your friends.

Judging from my anecdotal conversations with hundreds of people these last many years, most of them ex-players, this doesn't work out all that often.  Still, it does work out with enough people that there's hundreds of thousands of regular D&D players in the world.  Perhaps millions, but I sincerely doubt that stat every time I'm in a room with 20 other people who have heard of D&D, have never played D&D, and have never known anyone (they say) who has played it.  But maybe I'm wrong.

Yes, there's room to move outside those precepts, but we need players to be honest in their criticism.  Willing contestation between DM and player is the key to success.  A player has to feel motivated to say, "I hate this rule and I want to be rid of it," and a DM must be able to answer, "Tell me why," rather than, "Fuck you, it's a rule."  Every aspect of the game deserves to be argued over — and not just once, but every time some pretext arises that requires the rule be re-examined.  Neither side should have the perspective that the rule should be killed or supported absolutely; both sides must search for compromise.  This means lessening the rule, if need be; or making it apply to only some situations; or replacing the rule with something that tries to achieve the same effect in a different way.

I had dozens of arguments about experience distribution back in the day, when it was based on the AD&D DM's Guide.  I reshuffled the numbers and reshuffled the importance of monster powers endlessly, until finally an argument ended with my deciding that I could track hits against monsters and against players during combat (which seemed impossible) ... and poof, no more arguments.  The dissatisfaction the players felt, and my repeated agreement that the standing method was invalid, eventually forced an epiphany that solved that aspect of the game.

DMs hate this, however.  They want a rule to stand forever, no matter how crappy it is, because it's "the" rule and fuck you.  Or they want to abide by a precept that says they'll make up whatever the reality as I need it to be, right now, by arguing DM fiat.  But actually argue and ponder and redesign and fail repeatedly in that for years?  No, not doing that.

My experience in cooking taught me that Some restaurants that succeed fall into a habit of doing by rote something that eventually tires the customers until they quit coming.  In other words, the restaurant didn't change and now we hate it.  Other restaurants that succeed rush forward to change their menu on a regular basis to keep things fresh, only to piss off customers who can no longer get the dish they like.  In other words, the restaurant changed and now we hate it.  Can't win?  Nonsense.

Change, when it occurs, must happen slowly.  Instead of changing the whole menu (adopting an entirely different RPG), watch for those dishes that drop progressively week to week.  Make small (!) changes in those dishes.  If that doesn't work, surreptitiously take those dishes off the menu.  Put a new dish in its place.

Restaurants hate to do this because any change to the menu means a reprint of the menu!  How can we give out a menu that hasn't got this dish, so the server has to disappoint the customer?  Some restaurants just white out that dish.  They literally write in the new dish in ink.  Front managers HATE this.  It looks so ... "unprofessional"!  Fooey.  It looks like the restaurant is run by real people, who fixed a problem.  It looks personal.  It looks like a dish we'd like to try.

D&D is too complicated a game to be consistent.  A full change will never work; and spot changes without discussion from the players is a certain failure.  The game has to move fluidly forward at a pace that both the DM and the players can handle, while the concern's of both feel addressed and respected.  This means that a DM absolutely cannot adhere to any fixed position, whether that's "rules as written" or "DM's fiat."  Both are terrible ends of a spectrum that won't be sustained in the long run.

I didn't fully appreciate my education as a cook until I ceased to work as one professionally.  These days, I do all my cooking from home and I'm free to explore and try new things, or to find new ways to do an old thing.  As I've said before, my partner can only have the barest amounts of salt or sugar.  She constantly tests herself daily to ensure her sugar levels are maintained, which involves a tiny needle being stabbed into her finger, then applied to a test strip.  On account of her dietary needs, any restaurant is just a pain in the ass, as it means having to explain that "NO" sugar and "NO" salt are real requests, not guidelines.  I experienced the same thing with my mother, who could not eat salt after 1977 because of her blood disease.  I was a teenage boy, listening to her and my father wrestle with servers who would not listen as they explained that salt could kill her.  Then the meal would come to the table, my mother would taste the tiniest bit of it and helplessly declare, "No, it has salt in it."  Many's a time I watched as a chef came out to the table, and a second argument occurred, ending with the chef saying something like, "I'm sorry, the steak is marinated in salt."  Which would could have been told, had the server known anything about the kitchen.

I'm in my dad's position now, only I'm an experienced cook whereas he wasn't.  There's nothing a restaurant can make that I can't, with a little practice.  Tamara loves fries, pizza, chicken wings and such, but we can't go anywhere and get these ... but I can make them, sans sugar and salt ... well, almost.  In small amounts, Tamara my partner can handle a product up to 7% salt, like mozzarella cheese, whereas my mother couldn't.  But if I could cook for my mother today, after the recent practice I've had, I could rock her world.

Because, as we go forward, even with things we know how to do, the rules change.  They have to change.  And we have to change with them.  We have to encourage the players to see why we've made the rules a certain way (which means we must have a good reason), or we must let the players convince us.  There's no definite, absolute, this will work in every situation solution, ever ... because all things creative are made for human beings, not round pegs and holes.  We change ourselves, in our tastes, our beliefs, our priorities ... and if the game is going to be the best it can be, it has to change with us.

The power to make that change is what makes it satisfying.  The control we have to fit the game to what we need it to be ... and then fit ourselves to the game ... this is what makes it so exciting in the long term.  This is what keeps the game alive, moving it far past bars and market places and dungeons.