In the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the latter character delivers the line, "Happy endings are stories that haven't finished yet." Consider the application of this within an ongoing D&D campaign and a dungeon master's description of the immediate circumstances and interactions which the players might experience. As things take place for the players in real time, the campaign has no predefined ending with an expected conclusion. Instead, the campaign is an ever-evolving story shaped by the actions and decisions of the players, whose choices in the here and now defines whatever's going to happen next.
The players therefore have no expectations thrust upon them. They're free to do whatever they like, presently, according to their whim. There are no guaranteed successes, no situations in which they must succeed in order to fulfill the next part of the adventure's expectation, no need to vie for a "happy ending" or indeed any kind of ending at all.
So long, of course, that the DM can continue to improvise a game that occurs in front of the players, that maintains a sentiment of fun, excitement, threat, opportunity, novelty and so on. Such a game would require a setting capable of constantly inspiring the DM, so that the events that circled the players had little chance of getting stale with repetition.
That's a big ask. Yet there's an inherent quality here that is wholly overlooked by the need to always make the game bigger and better in order to please the players: it shoves the responsibility for what happens off the DM's shoulders and onto the players ... where it ought to be.
This is the D&D that I played when I started the game, that in fact everyone played. This what the game that I fell in love with as a player, since I was totally free to take responsibility for my own actions and the DM was responsible only for answering my questions and deciding if what I wanted to do was practical. Since I'm a sharp-minded fellow, I could usually figure out a series of steps that would build one upon the other, all believable, that would force the DM to comply with my plans.
For example, let's say that my player wants to start a riot in the city, preferably a big one, to produce a lot of chaos, violence, buildings on fire and so on, for the purpose of seizing the daughter of an important official, keeping her as a prisoner in a dungeon where she could be reprogrammed in the manner of Patty Hearst, whose public exploits occurred just four years before I began playing D&D. Clearly, these steps are completely out of the realm of a typical DM's imagination, and while utterly evil in scope, "evil" is an alignment and thus fully and freely available to the player in the original game. So how is it done?
Well, in the first place, we do not tell the DM that we plan to start a riot. Our plans are none of the DM's business; it's not for the DM to have a say in what we're going to do, because the more in the dark the DM is, the better our chances of encouraging the DM to think that the "riot" is an original idea the DM is having. Don't you see? The idea is to inspire NPCs to respond in a manner of the DM's choosing, which fits the DM's expectations, by deliberately taking steps as a player that makes the DM think the way we want him or her to think. That way, when the riot happens, it's the DM that foments it; and while fomenting it, the DM thinks the riot is an obstacle for us, the player, which encourages the DM to make it a big riot.
Whereupon, the girl we've already subtly identified is, without the DM expecting it, found and snatched in the ensuing panic, which the DM has started and cannot now claim isn't affecting the whole city. When we tell the DM, surely the girl's father is busy with the riot, the DM sits there, stunned, trying to speak, trying to figure out some way to fuck us over, but it's too late for that now. In short order, we kick in the door of the house, slaughter the servants and seize the girl. The DM is so shocked by our willingness to brutality that he or she has trouble recovering from moment to moment, while we have quick answers for every inquiry. We seize curtains, quickly tie the girl up like a rug (we've read G.B. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, while the DM hasn't) and in no time we've seized horses, killed a few more "citizens" the DM has thrown at us as an obstacle and ridden out of town, the girl across our saddle.
Now, the DM thinks we're going to ransom her, because it would never occur to most people that we're going the Patty Hearst route. But with those events, there were books published about what the Symbionese party did and how and with what resources, and we're fully prepared now to run that playbook ...
Playing is a mind game, where the DM is gotten around by making the DM think he or she is in control. I don't think this is understood by most people, since all the trappings of control seem to be in the DM's possession. It seems for nearly all players that the way to obtain those trappings is to wheedle them out from the DM. But the truth is that the DM is a person, and one person at that, and not necessarily the smartest person in the room. There are multiple players, and if willing, and given the chance to enjoy the game's intended freedom, without the bullshit of stories and all else that I spoke of in the previous post, the DM can be gaslighted, derailed and gish galloped all over the place, while the player provides sufficient circular reasoning, moves enough goalposts, loads questions to the maximum and so on to have the DM chasing his or her tail into next week.
Is that fair. Of course it is! This is a game, a mind game, a game that is succeeded at not by having the best background or spewing forth language in the best thespian fashion, but by players getting what they want, how they want it, in as large an amount as they desire. And technically, there's no rule in the game that says that as players, we're somehow required to reveal out intentions or plans to the DM, or act in accordance with the DM's wishes, or be nice to the NPCs, or respect the game world's authority, or anything else that might fit with the expectations of "polite society" but don't in fact mean a gawddamned thing with regards to actual game play.
I want to raid the dungeon and take everything it has, with a minimum of risk and to the best of my ability. There are no rules that say I have to do this in the "standardised" way of walking into the place, single file, like pigs to the slaughter, except a lack of imagination for it being done any other way.
We keep getting told that it's a game of imagination, but apparently none of the players are allowed to have any.
None of this threatens me as a DM ... because, for the most part, I'd find it hilariously funny if the players in my game world kidnapped the daughter of a rich powerful man and turned her into Patty Hearst. I'd lose nothing, the game would be interesting, I'd wonder what weird damn thing they were going to do next and it would be fun. I don't give a fuck how the players want to enter a dungeon. That is not my responsibility. I provide a game world where the players are responsible for what they do, and responsible for the consequences they receive ... and that's all. It is in no way my responsibility to make the game "fun" for them, or help them "shine," or any other damned thing that the jargon ministers think ought to be included in my behaviour.
I run a world. It's quite a task, coming up with new stuff to throw every week, managing massive amounts of detail and keeping a running description of said world at the pace the players need it. I'm already busy. Game culture can take it's manufactured expectations of me and shove them, I don't have time for all that crap. I'm running a game here, not a nursery for pampered players. They're free to invent shit to do for themselves. If they want a "great campaign" to be a part of, what's wrong with their imaginations? Why can't they do it? They've got one hell of a lot more time on their hands than I have, don't they?
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