Building Something

The newest work involves the design of a very mundane game setting, a frontier set of farmhouses, with no villages, thorpes or hamlets of any kind. Just 65 persons living in 14 farmhouses, spaced 3/4 of a mile apart. With this, I've been carefully designing really basic non-adventuring set ups for a 1st level party. Possible set-ups include: a disease takes hold of some residents; a group of residents plan an expedition into the true wilderness to hunt; one farmer loses some livestock and it must be searched for; a new settler in the area has more work to do than the family can manage, and the players can help; the players are asked to help improve the area by digging a water well. This mixed in with the possibility of getting into a fight with a small group of outlaws, with vermin, with a predator or possibly a roving monster.

This gives me some leeway as to what sort of tone a campaign might possess. For example, it could focuse on the difficulties and struggles of the farmers, the isolation of the environment and the general fight everyone has for food. We can imagine a party ready to take it upon themselves to help these people, but understanding that "gold" is more or less useless; there's no where to buy things and one can't eat gold. The obvious solution that most party's would do would be to travel some distance, find food, pay for it, and haul it back ... but realistically, these isolated self-driven folk would look down on this sort of "solution," calling it charity, doubting the veracity of the party, probably refusing to eat this food that they didn't work for. Going elsewhere to buy food for these people is not the answer.

Instead, consider the overall sense of community and cooperation. Imagine that these people are not resistant or hateful of outsiders; we're not trying to create a fabricated conflict here. Suppose them to be rational, that the hands and effort of the party, working side by side with these independent peasants, could make the party one of them. They could embrace these strangers, call them friends, respect them for getting their hands dirty or breaking their backs to clear stones, pick weeds, help bring in the slain deer from a hunt or help protect the farmhouses from predators and vermin.

This sort of tone is anathema for players much of the time, who value independence and rugged individualism ... but I want to think about the game on a different level, where the thing the players work to achieve isn't stopping some evil from doing a bad thing in this moment, but helping good folk achieve good work on a day to day basis. And in doing so, becoming respected, becoming members of that community, even rising to being leaders, where the community trusts them and has reason to do so. This positions the party for those deeper adventures at a higher level, where they must enter this dungeon or clear that other lair, or root out some village of dangerous humanoids, not for the plunder, not for the glamour, but because it makes "our village" safer and better able to sustain itself.

It's not unheard of; it's the premise of a great many westerns, where the bad people act like player characters normally act, and the "heroes" are the ones who vouch for law and order and risking life and limb for cause, not for coin. I understand how in this post-colonial world how alien this sounds, how utterly unlike the premise the game appears to have been founded upon; a premise I've run many times and would have soundly defended in my youth. But even then, in playing a game, I always liked to build things. On this blog, I've written about starting a trading town, I've written about building a base camp from which to launch raids on a dungeon. I've written about starting a mustard farm.

I think building gets very little credit in this game. Far less than it deserves. Nor are we just talking about houses and economic ventures. There's the building of a reputation, the building of trust between oneself and the residents, the empowerment of one's character in gaining the respect of people in the game world with power and their own agency. We only think of power in terms of how many spells we have or how much damage we can do; there's no room in a typical DM's lexicon for building a world that accentuates planning, collaboration or the development of the setting ... yet I believe that the players enjoying the evident fruit of their labours could be the richest and most fulfilling experience possible.

Much of the drawback is the need to create artificial conflict between NPCs and players. We see so much of this on television. People can't just work together. They can't achieve things together. They must be depicted as disagreeing over policy, of maneouvering behind each other's backs for leverage, of being absolute moral vacuums in their willingness to perform any loathsome act if it wins them one fleeting moment of besting the other character. DMs are raised on this story content, as we all are, and for them, "story" means drama, not out of some rational motive, but for the pure, unrelenting need for conflict ... because conflict is "interesting."

It's not, really. We know that Tom isn't going to succeed, or that Jane's efforts will end in her humiliation, or that the marriage between Brent and Rebecca is destined to break up, no matter how close they are in the first season, because every facet of every story is a glass pillar waiting for the hammer to fall in the second season or the third season or whenever the writers run out of conflict.

Instead of contrived conflicts, instead of the DM always inventing another obstacle to fuck over the party, instead of the party hacking every ally in the back before the ally can hack them, the enviroment and the task at hand, making this settlement thrive, or making the surrounding hills safe, has plenty of obstacles and trials without needing to invent interpersonal drama. And as hurdles are overcome, players can feel a genuine sense of accomplishment, creating a game experience that rises above all the others as "that one time we built something, because the DM let us."

It is perhaps because I have been at this 40+ years, and that I am tired of the endless cycle of conflict-driven adventure cliches. It's my game, and I'm a player in my game, and I want to make things. If there had ever been a DM in my life whose game I would have been a player in, that DM would have let me do this.