"Car making is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision."
— Kumal Galhotra, Ford
Regardless of the many, many arguments I've made about D&D being a game, which have all been framed to explain why rules have to exist, we must also admit something else about it. However we choose to define it, and I've written posts about this too, it is a fact that many dungeon masters refuse to comprehend that their efforts and creativity is part of the entertainment industry.
Like the example above, players do not recognise the value of rules, they do not behave rationally, they do not understand those parts of the game that actually make them feel good, and they absolutely cannot understand how the purpose of the game cannot be, "to serve my needs."
This is how players approach the game. They think to themselves, "Tonight, I'm going to..." Which is to say, they're taking for granted that they're going to do something that entirely evolves from their choice to do it, which assumes they'll have the choice once the DM defines the circumstances around their characters.
Now, this looks like I'm saying two different things, so let me try to thread this needle. The player characters are entitled to "agency," which grants them a degree of control, influence and decision-making power that a player has within the game. This is not being argued against. However, this agency is rigidly constrained by whatever situation the DM has imposed at this moment. Therefore, the player cannot say, before arriving at the game, "I'm going to," because at that time, they don't know what they're options are going to be.
But this doesn't matter. The player, by and large, ignores the constraint, because fundamentally, they don't believe the constraint should be such that is defies what they, personally, wish to do with their character. This is where we come to the entertainment industry. The players believe that by showing up, they have "paid" for their journey, and therefore say to us, the DM, "make the journey happen."
But this doesn't matter. The player, by and large, ignores the constraint, because fundamentally, they don't believe the constraint should be such that is defies what they, personally, wish to do with their character. This is where we come to the entertainment industry. The players believe that by showing up, they have "paid" for their journey, and therefore say to us, the DM, "make the journey happen."
So whatever preparation we make, whatever rational decisions we make in the fabrication of our game world, we're still pressed into the situation of selling the fabricated game world to an emotional, somewhat irrational customer. Our success lies in balancing the need for that sale against our need to provide the players with an experience they don't know yet that they want.
In long time past, I've argued that a DM is not a cruise director, but let's parse that out. Part of a cruise director's role is to be aware that a great many of the passengers are going to make a supposition, ahead of time, about the things they want to do, against what they think is available to them. But the cruise ship is an enormous vessel, with a vast number of options that are available, that most of the passengers don't know about. And so, the job of cruise director is to sell parts of the ship that the passengers are ignorant about, but might want to engage with, once they know it exists. For example, we might not know that there's a facility that will allow us to skydive on the ship; this might be something we'd love to do, but we don't know that it's there, so we don't think to investigate it. Instead, we stand here waiting to get into the pool, because we know about the pool, but it's full of people so we're bored and talking about what's wrong with the ship, since it didn't provide enough pool space for everyone.
Every time you convince someone to go below and see the live porpoises, or try the skydiving, or learn how to cook sushi, or try the skeet range, or whatever, is one less person jamming up the pool or the casino. This moving people about is your job as cruise director. You're not here to give the people what they want. You're here to show them they want a lot more than might they might even know about.
As a DM, the problem is similar. The players think they know what they want, but most of them have a very thin concept of what the game's really capable of offering. Presumably, if they knew a lot more about the game, and it's potential, then they'd be DMs themselves... but nonetheless, using the constraint potential the DM has to push the players into situations where the use of their agency causes them to have really wild adventures they never would have crafted out of their own imaginations is the DM's role.
It is not, as the players think, to give the players what they want. Understand?
A problem arises when the DM doesn't know this. For example, the DM might think, "My role is to see to it that the players experience an adventure." But this is, more or less, a rather useless guideline to run by. Even if we define adventure, this hardly helps in the immediate scheme of things. A good DM may have the idea of a big picture, but the game is NOT run according to what's happening in the big picture. It's about moment to moment events, usually little ones, that drive the characters or lead the characters from this little scene to the next one, hopefully in a way that increases their attention and builds tension, so that they feel a little buzz in their middrift thinking about the implications of this thing they just learned held against the light of the three previous things they already know.
This isn't easy. It requires drafting non-player characters with relationships to one another and the setting, laying a strong foundation for the events at hand, with plenty of room that lets the players think they're still driving the narrative, while holding a lot of small details in our heads simultaneously in a manner that allows us to instantly answer questions and throw out the next event without losing momentum. Portraying a multiple-hour narrative strung over three nights of play is an enormous accomplishment, which a lot of people, no matter how badly they want to be a dungeon master, just don't have the chops to accomplish.
Assuming they even know, which most of them don't, that this is what they should be doing!
In long time past, I've argued that a DM is not a cruise director, but let's parse that out. Part of a cruise director's role is to be aware that a great many of the passengers are going to make a supposition, ahead of time, about the things they want to do, against what they think is available to them. But the cruise ship is an enormous vessel, with a vast number of options that are available, that most of the passengers don't know about. And so, the job of cruise director is to sell parts of the ship that the passengers are ignorant about, but might want to engage with, once they know it exists. For example, we might not know that there's a facility that will allow us to skydive on the ship; this might be something we'd love to do, but we don't know that it's there, so we don't think to investigate it. Instead, we stand here waiting to get into the pool, because we know about the pool, but it's full of people so we're bored and talking about what's wrong with the ship, since it didn't provide enough pool space for everyone.
Every time you convince someone to go below and see the live porpoises, or try the skydiving, or learn how to cook sushi, or try the skeet range, or whatever, is one less person jamming up the pool or the casino. This moving people about is your job as cruise director. You're not here to give the people what they want. You're here to show them they want a lot more than might they might even know about.
As a DM, the problem is similar. The players think they know what they want, but most of them have a very thin concept of what the game's really capable of offering. Presumably, if they knew a lot more about the game, and it's potential, then they'd be DMs themselves... but nonetheless, using the constraint potential the DM has to push the players into situations where the use of their agency causes them to have really wild adventures they never would have crafted out of their own imaginations is the DM's role.
It is not, as the players think, to give the players what they want. Understand?
A problem arises when the DM doesn't know this. For example, the DM might think, "My role is to see to it that the players experience an adventure." But this is, more or less, a rather useless guideline to run by. Even if we define adventure, this hardly helps in the immediate scheme of things. A good DM may have the idea of a big picture, but the game is NOT run according to what's happening in the big picture. It's about moment to moment events, usually little ones, that drive the characters or lead the characters from this little scene to the next one, hopefully in a way that increases their attention and builds tension, so that they feel a little buzz in their middrift thinking about the implications of this thing they just learned held against the light of the three previous things they already know.
This isn't easy. It requires drafting non-player characters with relationships to one another and the setting, laying a strong foundation for the events at hand, with plenty of room that lets the players think they're still driving the narrative, while holding a lot of small details in our heads simultaneously in a manner that allows us to instantly answer questions and throw out the next event without losing momentum. Portraying a multiple-hour narrative strung over three nights of play is an enormous accomplishment, which a lot of people, no matter how badly they want to be a dungeon master, just don't have the chops to accomplish.
Assuming they even know, which most of them don't, that this is what they should be doing!
It's this narrative crafting that I've lost, with my now defunct campaign. Yes, of course I can go on designing the car, or building out corners of the cruise ship, but this isn't running the campaign.
For the record, I have mixed feelings on whether the DM is a cruise director at this time. When I trashed the idea, I was 16 years younger than I am now. There have been a lot of changes in my perspective, a lot of time spent parsing out the DM's role, a lot of wisdom accumulated ... and unlike a politician, who is called a flip-flopper for saying something different than what they said 16 years ago, I'm allowed to be a scientist, who can honestly say that 16 years ago I hadn't performed the experiments that have changed my mind before today.
It may be, perhaps, that I am a sort of cruise director. And if so, I may have failed my former party as one. If so, I'd say it was because I didn't maintain the balance between what they wanted and what I was prepared to give them. Perhaps I got tired of doing so.
For the record, I have mixed feelings on whether the DM is a cruise director at this time. When I trashed the idea, I was 16 years younger than I am now. There have been a lot of changes in my perspective, a lot of time spent parsing out the DM's role, a lot of wisdom accumulated ... and unlike a politician, who is called a flip-flopper for saying something different than what they said 16 years ago, I'm allowed to be a scientist, who can honestly say that 16 years ago I hadn't performed the experiments that have changed my mind before today.
It may be, perhaps, that I am a sort of cruise director. And if so, I may have failed my former party as one. If so, I'd say it was because I didn't maintain the balance between what they wanted and what I was prepared to give them. Perhaps I got tired of doing so.
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