I'm Not in it for the Friendship

I did not serve in the military.  I have a friend with whom I speak once or twice a week, usually on the phone for an hour or more, and once in a while I have him over for dinner or we hang in "our" coffee shop downtown.  He's ex-military; served as a master corporal, which in the Canadian army would be that fellow shouting into the face of Matthew Modine in Full Metal Jacket.  He and I speak about army life all the time, and geopolitics, and gun use, and military spending and any number of things with which he was once deeply acquainted and about which I'm extremely well-read and educated.

In general, I get along very well with ex-service people, both men and women.  I often find I have to finish their sentences for them, as there's a hesitation they quite properly feel as they drift into subjects that civilians are dead stupid about.  I know what they want to say, and what they're hesitating to say, because it's something they know a civilian's going to feel squicky about.  So I go ahead and say it for them, sending the message that sure, I'm a civilian, but an informed one, and I understand how the military and the real world works.  This puts them at ease and though I still have to do it once in a while, I enjoy that they begin to feel comfortable enough to speak with me as though I'm in "insider."

He and I regularly talk about the Ukraine situation — which I won't talk about here — as he knows various people connected to the inside of events there.  I have a better knowledge of geography than my friend does, so as he describes what's happening and where, I paint a picture of what the landscape looks like which fills in holes for him.  Of late, we regularly talk about the Israeli-Hamas situation too  — which I won't talk about here — from various standpoints, historical, geographical, military, etcetera, as we've both been steeped in that subject for more than 40 years; and we both have personally known friends from both sides.  When something happens, like the Maine shooting — which I won't talk about here — we turn it this way and that and talk about the ramifications and such.  He's someone with a firmly practical, pragmatic point of view that makes these conversations useful and bereft of emotional baggage ... which is another reason why I enjoy speaking with members of the military.

This relates to D&D, which this post is properly about.  I've been turning over in my mind the question of why dungeon masters find it hard to obtain and then maintain players in their campaigns.  I've not written about that much here, because I've not had that problem over the years.  I've spent periods not running as a DM, but during that time I didn't actively want to run, or indeed play at all.  But when I've wanted to run, getting players hasn't been a problem for me.

This said, I hear quite a bit for others about their problem on this front, both in personal letters written to me and general writings that can be found on the net if they're searched for.  From these, I get hints and wisps of what might be going on, other than the obvious, "I live in Podunkville Nebraska, Cherry County, and the nearest city is Scottsbluff with 14,000 people ... and that's 80 miles from me."

[I called "The Bard's Den Books and Beyond" in Scottsbluff just now, 1-308-632-4661, 2400 Ave Suite A, Ave 1, and no one answered; the name on the phone was the "Book Nook" so it may not be in the D&D business anymore]

This dearth is understandable in such places, but I hear these complaints from people living in Kansas City, Toronto, Calgary, all over.  It would be easy to just say, "It must be you," but that's not helpful and in a lot of cases, wrong.  Something is going on, and it would be nice to know what, so that useful advice could be given on what needs to change, or what actually causes players to bow out after their second session.  The problem is constant and exists everywhere, and as such deserves a lot more attention on this blog than I've given it ... but truth be told, I haven't had an answer.  I'm not sure I do now, though I'm going to take a swing at it.

From my perspective, the place is start has always been, "Why haven't I had this problem?"  Generally, I've taken the position that it must be something I'm doing that other people aren't doing, and much of what I've written on that subject has to do with giving players agency, building a deeper and richer campaign setting, taking no guff from players who complain about their lot or the game itself, viewing the rules as something that applies to the DM as much as other people and so on.  And I think it must be all those things, but undoubtedly, those things aren't enough.

Recently I heard from a DM whose game is falling apart for reasons that seem surface-oriented: the players want to do other things, D&D doesn't seem exciting enough, they were enjoying the game per se, but regular play seemed, um, not to their taste.  One thing that stood out for me in this was that the players weren't interested in playing on a Friday or Saturday night; the sessions had to be on a weeknight, Tuesday or Wednesday.

For me, this is a flat-out deal breaker.  If we can't play on a night where we can keep going until midnight, or beyond that, forget it.  Not worth my time.  In my mind, players who won't surrender their weekends — or can't make arrangements with their workplaces to get every other Friday off — raise a some red flags for me.  In the first case, D&D in the players' mind is clearly second to something: drinking at the bar, maybe, or skiing, or weekend fishing, or time at the gun range or whatever.  Hell, I don't care, it might be the player's family they want to spend time with; the point is that I'm be competing with something so important to that person that I'm sure to hear regularly from them that they can't make the game.  Obviously, fine.  But a would-be player who can't commit to 5 hours on a given night every two weeks, no matter what the reason, won't be a person I bank on being in my game world.  I won't be surprised if they don't show up.  In fact, I won't ask them to show up, because what's the point?

As for not being able to get a wanted night off due to work ... uh, yeah, red flag.  I used to work as a cook and I preferred nights.  In that time, I preferred the starting rush which lapsed off, following by closing down the kitchen, to the process of getting everything started from a dead start in time for the lunch rush.  Just the way I'm built.  Some people hate shutting down a kitchen.  I liked it.

Thing is, I was good enough at my job that once I'd worked in a place for a few weeks, my handlers — um, bosses — were anxious to keep me happy and content.  If it happened that I was ready to work Thursdays and Saturdays and holidays, so long as I could get some Fridays off, a deal could always be struck and I could run my D&D game as I wanted.  If, on the other hand, I hadn't been much of a worker, or I'd been willing to work for kitchens that were run by monsters who didn't give a crap about their staff, then no, I wouldn't have gotten those Fridays off.

As such, if a would-be player says to me, "I work Fridays and I can't get out of it," this tells me one of two things:  they're either incapable of impressing anyone with their commitment, and thus can't ask for anything at work, or they haven't the confidence to stand up for themselves, and are thus willing to be treated like a slave for money.  Either way, such a person's going to make a bad D&D player, and I don't want them.

I know there are people who would say, "You expect D&D players to have no other life."  Yes, I guess, if you expect people to commit a third of one day out of every 14, that's clearly a sign that they can't do anything else with the other 13 2/3rds days.

Now, to this point, the post feels, um, schizophrenic.  What does all that stuff about the military have to do with this stuff about losing D&D players?  Straightforwardly, everything I've just said about D&D players has been in my mind for a good many days ... but I've been stuck at the end of the previous paragraph. 

Okay, I'm inflexible as a DM.  I expect players to show up.  I expect to choose the night when they will.  If they have other lives, fine, I'd rather run other people.  Does this argument go anywhere?  No, not really.  I'm an asshole.  An asshole with players.

But why am I an asshole?  That's the key to this post and the reason the opening was about the military.  My friend and I were discussing the sort of jobs to which ex-military attach themselves.  In the navy and the airforce, or the artillery as my friend was, that experience with heavy equipment translates into work with the railroad, water or road transport, bus driving, repairs, jobs where the individual looks after a lot of very expensive, massive-scale equipment, such as an office tower or a dam.

My friend then made the point about foot soldiers not having that be as available as it is for those in the technical army.  They've been carrying a rifle for however many years; and my friend added that once there was work delivering mail for the post office, since walking wasn't a problem, but that job is disappearing.

True enough, I argued, but one of the strengths those ex-military have is their ability to endure jobs where they're entirely alone.  They're used to standing on parade grounds or at post for hours and hours, forbidden from talking to others, in their own heads, and being completely comfortable with that.  At present, my friend is working as a bus driver; he's retiring from 15 years of doing that, after 20 years of working on the railroad, following his stint in the artillery.  He's been working "alone" since forever, as those jobs require people who able to work diligently by themselves without going nuts.  Not that this last point works out for every ex-military.

I too, have spent most of my life alone and am comfortable with it.  From very early on I chose to be a writer and therefore chose to spend thousands of hours deliberately separating myself from other people in order to "work" — or play, however one chooses to see it.  I rolled into DMing, which is the role we assume that presents the game for others, while not really playing with them.  I have such a volatile personality that I don't get along with people who want me to care about what they care about, or support them for the sake of supporting them, or accepting their right to be insipid or ignorant, etcetera.  I've been married twice, both times to "loners" whose impatience with others made our union pleasant, supportive and long-term committed.  My first wife passed away and Tamara and I have been together for 20 years.

Being alone carries weight where it comes to managing and handling others.  It's easy to take a stand and demand a commitment because it's just as easy to say, "If you can't play this Friday, goodbye, I don't need you."  It's easy to say, "If your family's more important to you than this one night of D&D, fine, great, I hope you're happy, but please I don't need you at my D&D game."

It's easier, though it's never "easy," to kill a player by the rules and then argue, sorry, them's the rules.  It's a streak of the military that runs through me, where I've spent enough time holding myself to a certain standard, alone, and knowing how that standard has served me well and properly through the years.  It provides a gravitas when dealing with D&D players, who are tacitly aware that it does no good to equivocate, plead or take a stand with me.  I know how to be alone.  I'm always going to be fair, I'm always going to offer a decent compromise, because the time I've spent alone, committed to things that mattered my whole life to me, has argued that there is no life without commitment or standards of belief.  But I'm not going to bend.  I'm won't understand that you want to go camping this weekend.  Half the weekend's throughout the year, I won't be playing D&D.  Pick one of those other 26 if you want to go camping.

This is why my friend and I get along, though he's ex-military and I'm not.  It's why I get along with most in the military.  Because on my own, I taught myself to think as they do.

And, by extension, it's why I don't get along with virtually every other person in this game.  I'm not in it for the friendship.

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