First Principles

Of late, I've been thinking about the first principles underlying my affection for D&D.  To start, why did I take to the game so strongly at the beginning, so that it became a central part of my creative drive?

To start, I grew fascinated with the sheer power it offered.  As a player, within the limitations of space, time and having a mortal body, I could do anything I might imagine.  Organise an army and raid a castle?  check.  Use that army to appropriate money and establish myself as the monarch?  check.  Employ diplomacy to make allies of other monarchs in order to form a coalition stronger than any other in the world?  check.  Use that coalition to conquer the world?

check.

In essence, my view of what D&D should be used for was from the perspective of a bond villain.

Unfortunately, as the DM had more power than the player, and as DMs in my youth tended towards smaller perspectives and goals, we the players had to be tomb robbers.  Read that with the thought that after getting hired by Disneyland, you learn your job's going to be cleaning toilets.

So it was tomb after tomb for a long time, until I worked out how to manipulate the DM during those brief moments we'd visit a town to exchange our loot for gear.  I began to ask how to invest my loot into other things ... like, how much does the bar next door actually cost?  Or, can I get a house built?  And a tower.  And I'd get back answers like, "the book says you're not allowed to build a castle until you're 9th level."

Whereupon I'd say, "If I put a bunch of stones on top of other stones, how many stones does it take for the book police in the game world to show up and check my pulse to find out what level I am?"

To which the answer would be, "Um ..."

Then I'd say, without waiting for an answer, "If it's a so-called world, with so-called 'people,' and we can't tell what level any of the NPCs are, then how does anyone in this world know whether or not I'm high enough level to build a castle, hire men or anything else?"

And in response, "Um ..."

By the time I'd played the game a year, and had read all the books twice, and gotten used to all the aspects of play, I could fuck up a DM pretty hard with questions like this, one after another, until I got what I wanted.  I wasn't willing to wait to be told that, "in a game of imagination," I had to wait until I'd passed some arbitrary guide post that made no sense at all in the game's setting that I was allowed to do something.  Fuck that.  I have money for stone, in my pocket, plus money for contractors ... so tell me how much my tower costs.

This galvanised the other players, who found the scales falling from their eyes, and right off they wanted things too.  Turns out, constant day-in and day-out tomb robbing is unfulfilling.

[as Jack and Jim wend their way down a narrow, dripping tunnel, acrid torches pouring fire over the cold roof stones]

Jack: Hey, Jim, you ever wonder why we do this?

Jim: Do what?

Jack: Constantly return to dank places like this.  I mean, it's not that I'm uncertain we're going to find whatever's down here, kill it, and take all its gold, but in the bigger picture ... why are we doing this again?

Jim: Well ... it passes the time.  And bits of it are exciting.

Jack: Okay, I'll grant you that.  But still.  Jus ... just here me out.  I have a ton of coin right now.  You have a ton of coin.  Fran, back there, she has a ton of money.  None of us are lacking for money.  So we're not in this for the money, right?

Jim: No, we're in it for the adventure.

Jack: Ah, yes.  But let's just look at that a moment, huh?  We keep plumbing down into the depths of these caverns looking for deadlier and deadlier monsters — because what we used to kill before is so easy to kill now that its boring — and half the time we come within a hair's breadth of the whole party getting killed.  Then we carry all the gold out ... gold we don't need, I'm just saying ... and head back to town, where we heal up and drink ale until we go out and do it all again.  The same old way, time after time.  I'm just asking why?  With all this money we have, we could build a castle or something.

Jim: We're not 9th level yet.

Jack:  What does that mean?  What's a level?  Now come on, man.  Remember that village we raided on the coast.  We waded in, slaughtered half the people, took all their gold and then we left.  We left.  Why didn't we just stay?  We were obviously tougher than the whole town!

Jim:  Whatta we gonna do in a village?  There ain't no monsters in a village.

Jack:  Then why were we there?

Jim:  Duh.  Gold.

Jack:  All right.  Follow me here.  Where did the gold come from?  How did the village get all the gold.

Jim: The DM?

As soon as my fellow players began to follow my lead, it began to sort out DMs from the chaff.  For a time I played in some really terrific campaigns, as DMs tried hard to keep up with our wants and needs ... but in the end, each felt the pressure overwhelming them.  And each, in turn, shut their campaigns down.

As they did, and I was left as the last DM standing among my associates, I forgot that my friends had tried.  In fact, I forgot until just a few days ago, as I reviewed my memories.  It's something I should have remembered before I went gangbusters on this blog 15 years ago.  Back then, I began to ask for things as a player that others could not do as a DM.  And here, for all these years, I've been asking DMs to do something that most of them can't do ... and for the most part, not because they won't (though I've framed it that way hundreds of times).

They can't do it because they can't.  Partly because they don't know how, which I've tried to manage, but I'm increasingly coming to believe that's not a solution.  And partly because they've been bred, like Jim, to a particular sort of viewpoint that they cannot see past, because there's no reason for them to see past it.

Most of all, however, I think it's because my perception of the game is utterly alien to the human experience.

I fell in love with writing in and around grade 3, at the age of 8 or 9.  Four years later I knew that what I wanted to do for a living was to write.  The thing about writing is that it's about inventing your own world.  Even more so than D&D, because it's about convincing the reader that whatever happens, it's reasonable and possible for that thing to happen.  If we're speaking non-fiction, it's about convincing the reader that the thing being said is true.  That these events in history actually happened.  That this part of the body is responsible for the way you're feeling right now.  That the star you're looking at gets dimmer and brighter at predictable intervals.

Everything about writing is about convincing someone of something, even if it's that Dick and Jane really are running.  But people in general, I've found, suck at convincing anyone of anything, even when they try really, really hard.  And this includes me.  Just look how hard and how long I've worked to raise D&D to a higher standard ... with the only people I've been able to convince being people who already agreed with me.

My accomplishment here hasn't been that I'm writing to someone other than the choir.  It's that I've been able to keep the choir amused for this long.

Most can't even do that.  The largest problem with D&D is that it asks people to master the game; people who are barely able to master themselves.  Their momentary success, for the most part, lies in finding a group of people who want to play D&D ... which is easy enough.  We're all here because we like the same thing.  The deeper problem, however, is maintaining that interest once it's given.  For a period that's at least as long as an entire season of Stranger Things.  Most DMs attempt to do this without ever having witnessed another DM doing this.  Imagine that.

If anyone wants to succeed at DMing, it requires a skill set that comes from something other than D&D.  Writing.  Performance.  Design.  Film-making.  It's a way of thinking on your own that the game's not gonna give you, that you're not going to find in the rules, that you won't "pick up" as you go along.  If you've never felt a moment of honest, real power, one that allows you to choose your own absolute destiny in real time, where you choose where you're going to go despite all the forces of nature and culture that says "no" to you ... then you're never, ever, going to master D&D, or any role-playing game, in any real sustainable sense.  Your best hope is to pick up a bunch of losers who keep turning up at your game because they've got nowhere else to go.

And you don't want to run that crowd.

So, if you're not figuring out what it is to DM, then I suggest you put the game down for a few years and learn how to do something you can control, so that you know what real control feels like.  Become an actor.  Learn how to sail.  Go outside right now and try to convince someone of something they don't believe.  Try hard.  Learn how.

It's your only hope.