"From the tail of his eye he saw the Natividad looming up, but he could spare no attention for her. For the moment she represented merely a tiresome interruption to his work, not a menace to his life.
"Then once more he was engulfed in the smoke and din of the Natividad's broadside. He felt the wind of shot round him, and heard the scream of splinters. The cries of the man under the carronade ceased abruptly, and beneath his feet he could feel the crash as the shot struck home in the Lydia's vitals. But he was mesmerised by the necessity of completing his task. The mizzen stay parted under his axe; he saw another rope draw up taut, and cut that as well — the pattern of the seams of the deck planking at that point caught his notice — felt another severed and flick past him, and then knew that the Lydia was free from the wreckage. Almost at his feet lay young Clay, sprawled upon the deck, but Clay had no head. He noted that as an interesting phenomenon, like the pattern of the deck seams.
"A sudden breaking wave drenched him with spray; he swept the water from his eyes and looked about him. Most of the men who had been on the quarterdeck with him were dead, marines, seamen, officers."
— from The Happy Return by C.S. Forester.
Re-reading this excellent post from JB, who argues diligently that D&D is not about "stories," I'm reminded of the above scene in which the British ship Lydia goes toe-to-toe with the much larger Natividad, a scene that runs two chapters, I think, and the two vessels blow the hell out of each other one brutal paragraph at a time. I've taken the above out of the middle of the action; the whole passage runs the complete chapter, and it's madness unabated, with cannon fire steadily tearing both ships apart over time.
It is a "story" in the sense that it's part of a novel, and the end of the battle has consequences, but with Forester being the writer he was, with an engaged interest in sea travel and battle, it's clear that he's much more interested in describing what such a battle was like, this one taking place somewhere about 1804. Forester, writing the book in 1937, spares no kindness in essaying the most brutal scenes imaginable ... such as the almost casual death of Clay, who is there one moment and dead the next. Clay is a secondary character in the book to this point, a young midshipman with prospects — but unlike a traditional story, "prospects" aren't good enough to keep you alive in a battle. The good die right alongside the bad, without the least compunction on nature's part.
And it's here, I think, where we have a written example of what D&D's actually like. The stories that JB is speaking of, that he justly counsels others to go out and write in books and not use in D&D, are inherently the type that assumes the group of plucky characters are going to survive whatever happens, with all the plot armour the DM can muster. But actual D&D offers no such promise. In my last game session (I haven't run in two months, due to my vacation and that of other players), a fairly large dragon crashed half-conscious near the players, who had taken precautions though they had no idea what to expect. If they hadn't taken precautions, one or more might have taken upwards of 75 or a 100 damage — enough to kill most characters up to 10th level, and quite a few above that.
In D&D, you can never be sure you're not going to walk into something that will kill you, like a ball neatly removes Clay's head above. And because of that, when something hoves into sight, like a huge ship that's about to release a broadside, everyone has reason to think they might die this round. There's a good chance they won't — but they don't know for sure. And that drastically changes the dynamic during play.
Not only during actual battle, but because much of the setting is unknown. And here I don't speak of the trap waiting to be tripped, that kills the player. Rather, the unusual situation, like the Ice Cave linked above, where the player's progressive examinations and choices produce an unexpected, yet reasonable result, without anyone having specifically pulled the wrong lever or stepping on the wrong bit of floor. Gameplay isn't about one consequence; it's about the possible combination of multiple consequences for multiple actions, coinciding together into something utterly unforeseen.
I understand that's not in the experience of a lot of players. Many games tend to be quite stale. Yes, it's still take an action, see what happens, take another action, see again what happens. On the other hand, it's possible to create a scene where multiple players can do different things in different places, out of sight of one another, though technically all locked in the same battle. Take the scene with the goblins I wrote about in June. Because the party's hunting goblins through varying tunnels, without always being able to see what some other group has stumbled across, at any time group A. can make a decision to do something that group B. assumes can't affect them. For example, someone, somewhere, is wrestling with a door, while someone else is preparing to cast burning hands. When the door opens, the goblins above pour hot boiling oil down a shaft, with the now open door at the bottom. The oil flows and splashes everywhere, just as the mage unleashes the burning hands spell.
Multiple choices, multiple consequences. Fun, fun, fun.
The thrill of the open game isn't just that the players have agency, and can do what they want. It's also that they can't be sure that something they do will definitely end well or badly. Unlike a story, where that's been decided, the players are victims of chance and possibility.
It's far more interesting.
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