The Halfling and the Knight

Time I addressed this point from a recent post; hands up, anyone who knew what I was talking about:

"Much of the time, I believe, people have little understanding of what purpose in the game a rule serves, or how that purpose is compromised, leading to a less robust system, when that rule is casually tossed aside. For me personally, whatever a DM may feel about the presence of experience or encumbrance, and the "inconveniences" they bring, casting those things aside does not improve the game. The game is worse without them.

"Yet this is hardly understood, and even less appreciated. Of course we can still play D&D without those things. Of course the players can still move from place to place, they can still fight, they can yet role-play and even accumulate status and influence upon the game world. But these things — and this is almost impossible to explain to the average player — ARE NOT THE GAME. They certainly seem to be; and most would argue with me on this point ... vehemently. But they'd be wrong."

We don't need to count runs to play baseball.  We don't need teams.  We can still pitch, bat and run the bases without these things, if that's what we want.  We don't need a king to play chess.  We can move the pieces around on the field, attacking one another, deciding the game ends when there are no pieces left to kill, or the opposing player's move assures that a kill can't happen.  We can choose not to race sprinters against one another, having them run without a clock while five judges hold up cards to decide how the sprinter did, like figure skating.  We can play scrabble letters without numbers, ignoring any "score," on a blank lined board, until the board is filled.  We can throw out the property cards of monopoly and just roll dice to move our pieces around the board.

With children, we teach chess in a manner that a modern gamer recognises as save scumming.  Make the wrong move, see the consequences, take it back.  Thinking back 28 years, my daughter moves her rook, I take it with the queen ... then I put the rook and queen back to let her try again.  I let her put her finger on the bishop, deciding if she's going to move it, but I don't make her move it, because she's seven and I don't care if she wants to move the knight instead.  We learn games like this.  We see the consequences of our actions.

Then, as we grow more serious about the game (my daughter didn't, but I did), we don't want those breaks.  We want to win for real ... because we grow to see that it's a measure of the standards against which we hold ourselves.  We put ourselves in situations that aren't comfortable, specifically because the rewards are greater.

There's nothing in my life right now that says I have to walk onto a stage and risk public embarrassment ... but if I had the chance to do it again, to play Uncle Vanya or Dr. Stockmann, I would.  There's no money in it for me.  I have no urge to take up acting as a career (though, admittedly, because no opportunity to do so has presented itself).  But I would do it because I've done it before, because I've challenged myself in that way, I've put my soul and my commitment on the line in a theatre before paying customers ... and received good reviews.  There are no take backs; there's no way to save scum a few seconds before delivering a seven-minute monologue.

I know that the way the vast majority of people play D&D is "entertaining."  Enjoyable.  It must feel good for many to save scum, with getting rewards without risk, to talk their way out of difficulty, to get experience for showing up ... to shirk combat or, to always win, without that much trouble.  Always knowing that the character I have at the start of tonight's session will still be mine at the end.  Never feeling that raw, brutal panic of a die that has to go the right way ... or the plunge of heart that strikes when it doesn't.

But —

I don't want to take my knight back.  And I definitely do not want to play with those who insist on having it that way.  I'm not playing with children.  No, let me put that another way, because it could be misunderstood.  I have no interest in having adults who want to be children play with me.  If you want your knight back, when you lose your knight due to your inability to play, this says more about you than you realise.

Yes, I said inability to play.  D&D is a game with random elements, that a good player knows are there, accounting for them ... expecting them ... so there's no reason to whine or have a fit when they don't go our way.  That is the game's play.  When the player shirks from that, trying to reconstruct the game so as to avoid those consequences, instead of taking them on the chin like an adult ...

The collapse of my game centered on one player who did not like that her 5th level 60-lb. halfling druid wasn't a "fighter."  She chose to be a druid.  She chose to be a halfling.  She chose her spells.  She liked the sound of being a druid.  She liked to make the cute little jokes about being so light that many of the bigger characters could carry her without an encumbrance penalty.  She liked the pretty-sounding spell names, with words like faerie, shillelagh, goodberry ...

But every time a fight came up, she didn't like having to put her trust in that 20-sided die.  She knew there was plenty of power in the party to manage the monsters, to protect her little child-like body, but she didn't like knowing they were going to kick ass and she wasn't.  She didn't like depending on them.  She'd had plenty of opportunities to put out a good spell and help turn the tide of a battle, but that wasn't good enough.  She didn't want to be a team player.  She didn't want to take a bow at the end with the team.  She wanted to shine.  And she didn't have the class, the spells, the hitting power or the experience level that would let her do that ... and she was getting tired of waiting.  Every time she'd miss with that d20, the feeling of failure gnawed just a little deeper.  She didn't need to actually die as a character.  She didn't need that much to push her over the edge.  What she wanted, and what she hadn't earned, was to make the game ... not a game.  To make it into something that would serve her will.  That would obey her.  And when that didn't come out of the things her character could do, she decided it would come out of her inventiveness with the spells, reinterpreting them as she needed them to work.

When I countered that, she tried harder.  She invented more desperately.  She insisted more emotionally.  When it was her turn to throw that d20, she stalled, staring at her spells, sure that they'd be some way to weave them into an action that would get the result she wanted.

And when I put my foot down, one of the other players, a shining white knight, came to her rescue. He chose that moment to tell me how to act.  And what tone of voice to use.  In no uncertain terms.  In my game.  In my house.  And I rose to the occasion, because I don't let people talk to me that way.

The desire not to play a game, but to make the game suit the player's moods and wants, is the insidious poison at the heart of 5th edition and all that the company has done to D&D these last 20 years.  I love the game of D&D.  I do not love the shambling, mawkish doppleganger that is called D&D by nearly everyone ... and I have no idea what's going to become of the game I love.  The game I love.  I expect it to die along with the undead ghoul that it's spawned.

With four weeks gone, I remain uncertain about the future.  The majority of the crowd walked in support of the halfling and the knight, but I think that's an oversimplification.  There is a whiff that remains in my thoughts that the game itself had ceased to satisfy the needs of the party; and as I read the accounts of others lately, I'm detecting that same whiff in their games.

My head feels clearer.  There's a measure of anger.  Of betrayal.  Of the cheapening of this thing I love, which darkly bites at the memory of myself discovering this game as a boy, and thinking of it as a brutal, consequence-ridden thing, like the chess I played, being the greatest game in the world.

Which it isn't.

Anymore.