Blunder

 

Is There a Yet?

This is the last of these.

By pursuing self-education, we can fill ourselves with a lot of knowledge and a skill-set that will serve us very well as a dungeon master, unquestionably.  And if we adopt a ideal of service towards our players, not only will we benefit from the sense of value that installs in ourselves and others, but our efforts will lend an appreciation for the game and the dynamic that weren't there before.  And if we commit to improvement, both by these two previous strategies but also as a matter of wanting to be competent, the motives for being so will gather and accumulate, urging us onwards.  For what hasn't been said to this point is the trajectory these three approaches provide, turning "working on the campaign" from something we do for others into something we do for ourselves.  One of the weaknesses of DMing as a pursuit is that too often we frame the work in terms of, "I have to prepare for the upcoming game, so I don't fail the players."  That sounds like service, and it sounds like something we should be doing... but in fact, it's a tether around our throats until we gain sufficient competence to be able to say, "I'm running on the weekend and it's no issue.  I already have tons of stuff I can use, because I haven't stopped working."

Unquestionably, these things together will make a fine DM.  Any sustained effort, where we lift ourselves above a place where we're moving from episode to episode, trying to keep up, allows us to feel an internal shift, from acting out of duty to acting out of love. Few comprehend this psychological transition — but when it happens, the feeling dwarfs every other sentiment we once had.  We realise, in a rush, that D&D isn't a game we play, or enact, or build so that it's functional... but rather, a calling, a thing that we do because of the creative vitality it grants.  We cease to be insecure. We cease to search endlessly for "advice" on how to play, because we know and because the advice is so obviously being given by those without competency.  They don't understand where we are, because they've never been here.

Detached from the endless quest for guidance and approval, or even for the recognition that we've done something "amazing" that we must rush to the internet to describe, which in itself is a kind of validation, the process becomes more "what can I do?" than "what do others think of it?" This redirection can be seen as arrogance — I've been accused of that enough, both justifiably and not — but in reality it is something higher.  It is a lack of dependency.  We don't "need" players, because we know that when we want them, they won't be hard to find.

I was not surprised to find myself on the list of "100 Best D&D Blogs"... after all, I can read as well as anyone, and given the shit that exists on blogs the length and the breadth of the internet, I hardly need to be told my worth.  Especially by an entity whose merely striving to obtain self-promotion by giving "awards" that are wholly performative and basically useless, which itself has zero credibility and zero recognition anywhere, even on the internet.  I did not report it here when it happened. I'm not proud of it. I view it as as spam, a con, a joke. Because I do not define myself according to what powerless strangers think, but by what I provide.

If I'm there, given my volatility and refusal to engage with the empty economy of mutual status signalling, it's because I shoved my relevance down their throats. I'm sure they resented having to include me.  But if they hadn't, their credibility would have suffered.  And this is where real achievement rests.  Not built through consensus or marketing, but through the accumulation of substance, consistency and challenge over time.

Now, my apologies for making this personal, but to move past these points so far to the next point, I must speak of my own experiences.  I have long been a point of contention.  I have, many times, had others attempt to use inclusion as a weapon against me, in the sense of declaring, to hurt me, "No one likes you. No one cares about you. You could die tomorrow and no one would care." It's a scathing attack — and one that a certain kind of person employs, because it's effective. Most of us are alone in the world, we are unfortunately subject to the condemnation of the tribe, and there are many who will assume the authority of the tribe, putting on its coat as it were, in order to avail themselves of that power.  Anyone whose found themselves at odds with even a small community, half-a-dozen persons in a workplace, for example, has experienced this weapon employed against them.

This expresses a fear that many dungeon masters have. Not that one player will rise against them, but that every player will. That we'll criticise one, only to have an insurrection on our hands, with everyone walking out together. In fact, this happened to me this last year, about eight months ago. Not that it meant much of anything. Nothing has changed about my game world, except that I'm not running it presently... and as it happened, there were extenuating circumstances that were in place before the event occurred. But putting that aside, as its not relevant.

The fear of it happening ties the hands of many a DM, especially those who have begun to question the specifics of the surface-game... which we must do, once we begin to understand that vast swaths of the game either don't make sense or are just poorly designed.  Taking a stand on this, though, relates to the fear that a DM will be ostracised... and that alone is sufficient to tie many a DM's hands, even when they know they're right.

For myself, the "exclusion weapon" ceased to have power over me following two events, one that took place in November of 1986 and one in September of 1988.  The first was the day of my marriage to my first wife, and the second was the birth of my daughter.  And it was sometime after that some fool pointed a finger at me, shouting, "No one cares about you!"  Which enabled me to answer, "My wife does.  My daughter does."

And the look on that accusing person's face, as they realised, suddenly, that not only did they have no power over me... but realised, knowing already that I was a husband and a father... that they had named their own fear out loud, not mine.

To be able to say, without bravado but with quiet certainty, "my wife does, my daughter does," is not an act of defiance... it's the declaration of unshakable placement in the world, which the world in turn must respect, because of what those relationships genuinely mean.  It says that because I am not divorced, because my marriage is working, because I have spent those thousands of hours changing diapers, cooking, cleaning, walking nights patiently with a crying baby on my shoulder out of love, not performance, I'm due a respect that comes from what I've done, not from how I act or the entity whose criteria of approval I need have. Standing up and getting married is just a tiny part of the whole — the rest is staying married, until the bitter end if need be.  If we never quit on our partners and our children, and if we feel certain they love us, then the rest of the world's opinion matters such a tiny amount that it can't be measured.  And this, unquestionably, is something the popular internet, largely made up of single young man-boys, cannot comprehend.

I'm not an individual because of what I say here, or what I believe about D&D, or how I run a game.  But because, as I sit here, I'm conscious of the wife of 23 years that I'm with now, whose just 40 feet away at the other end of the house, whom I can go to right now and say, "I love you," without self-consciousness, because I do.  This is an experience that the internet has chosen to discard, because it doesn't fit the minimalist, dependency-driven criteria by which it seeks to score others.  It's why I can say what I like here, boldly, fearlessly, because I don't need to be loved.  I am loved.

In an online culture — not the authentic culture, made of those who are at work today, striving to do more than earn money to support their internet presence, but to support their actual families — that is increasingly shaped by immediacy, self-curation and a hunger for external affirmation, what I say here isn't just a rejection of those values, but an indictment of them.  It exposes how fragile and performative so much of that online life has become, especially in the realm of creativity, criticism or personal expression, where the unspoken rule is: say what will be received, or risk erasure.

The parents who are waking early today to parent children, shoulder long shifts, build and repair and nurture, aren't optimising for engagement.  They're living.  They're not curating their brands.  They're not posturing or editing for applause.  They aren't crafting narratives to be consumed.  They're too busy showing up, working, addressing real problems and defending the things they believe in to worry what someone else thinks about it.  And when they run D&D for their children, they are concerned about their children's responses as parents do, recognising when bad behaviour shouldn't be promoted, for reasons that any responsible person understands intuitively.  Because, in the end, it's less important that my son Billy gets his +5 sword than that my son Billy understands that the real world does not reward temper tantrums.

The missing factor in the previous three posts is responsibility.  Not only to ourselves, and not only to our players, but to the sacrifice, effort, building and loving that others before us tried to instill in our persons... only to so often fail with those who have drifted into online culture.  This is why, when I was able to go to game cons, and meet people who played D&D and talk to them, I found a completely different class of participants than the squalling children I found generally online.  Because these adults were using their weekends to engage with D&D as an activity they found the time to involve themselves with between their other responsibilities. Whereas those online are either bored because they have no responsibilities, or they're businesspeople trying to cheat their way into a business model with a game they didn't write, don't play well and barely understand, even in surface terms.

Am I saying, get married and have children?

Yes. Yes I am saying that.

Because D&D, and online, and streaming services, and serving yourself, aren't enough.  I said that we should be a part of something larger than ourselves. This is the ultimate form of that. It is the ultimate form of self-education, and the point where the rubber of competency meets the road.  Because we're not just talking about doing well, or being responsible, but the gut instinct that reminds you that your partner and your children are fragile, and rely on you, and that half of what you've taught yourself at this point needs to be thrown out with the trash as you address this.

It's admirable that you want to make something of yourself and be better.  But it's not respectable. Not to those who have a right to define that term, because of what we've done, and you haven't.  You have to decide if there's a "yet" that belongs on the end of that sentence.

The Refuge of the Incompetent

One of the best tools for teaching competency to the young is a traditional board game, particularly those with limited choices and strategy. The boundaries of a game like Monopoly, Life or even Candyland are clear, the stakes are low and feedback is immediate. Repetition is built in: every game is a cycle, with a beginning, middle and end, which can be revisited again and again. Mistakes, or a bad roll, merely lose us time... and this loss is rarely our responsibility, and more commonly the luck of the die, by which we watch ourselves move ahead or fall behind, in a manner having little to do with an inability to play. We may become inordinately invested in our progress, even maddened when we don't win, in truth our bad luck is not emblematic of our personal failings or lack of character.

By such games, however, we learn rules, we learn how to accept setbacks and how to handle the excitement of competition. We learn that we can always play again and that eventually we will have our day in the sun when we win.

But, when we play a game with even a moderate level of strategy, ranging from the comparative simplicity of RISK to Settlers of Catan, we notice a change. Suddenly, there are players who never seem to win, however close they might come. As the importance of the die roll subsides, the game for some becomes more and more difficult, particularly when played against someone who clearly has a greater skill where it comes to understanding cause-and-effect, which is all that "strategy" is at this level. IF I concentrate on seizing Australia, and succeed, I have only one point of entry to defend, so that I'm in a better place of security than if I concentrate on seizing South America, where I must defend two points. On the other hand, Africa is a practical continent in which to advance, to expand my power, while Asia isn't, so that in that way, South America is superior. These points, understood by some players and not by others, is what lends strategical games a benefit to learning that die-rolling games, such as Monopoly, don't offer.

We might recognise that St. James, Tennessee and New York are the best properties to own, but we still have to land there, which we might not, in which case we're behind the game through no fault of our own. At the same time, we might not have a chance to seize either South America or Australia, so that we're likely to lose for that reason alone — in any case, we need more LUCK to win if we start in Europe than if we start in Australia.
The moment a player realises they've chosen wrong, not because the dice were cruel but because they misunderstood the game or the "system" it imposes, is a critical developmental crisis. For some, the response is to think, "I must grab Australia," while others will think, "I never get Australia." The thinking process of the former vs. the latter defines, in great degree, the manner in which people view games of strategy.

The latter player is one who externalises their fate, who feels that despite the evidence, their success depends on chance. This reveals how they interpret their role in systems at large: in classrooms, workplaces and society. It expresses a feeling they have against competency of every kind. The guitar player is able to play because they possess "talent." The driver of a lambourgini was "lucky" in some way, either from being born into money or by chancing upon a great idea, which anyone might have had except this individual had it first. The CEO got there through connections, or glad-handing... certainly not through effort or hard work. This sort of thinking does more than discount an individual's personal sense of failure — it also shields them against any responsibility for confronting their own choice, and therefore their own lack of progress.

It is a mindset that is earned in the first few years of schooling, when we move from a five year period of progressing upwards from spud-like existence though family-oriented development, into a realm where we're measured against scores of other children like ourselves for the first time. These other children are complete strangers for the most part, quickly forming themselves into proto-cliques based on appearance, size, gender, clothing and social skills, into which we either belong or we don't. The whole process is spontaneous, instinctual and comparatively rapid compared to the slow measured pace of our pre-school childhood. And our placement in the heirarchy that forms, compensated by what we've been taught beforehand, defines not only our popularity, but also how we view the correctness of those "privileged" to be popular, which might include ourselves, and those not so privileged.

It's the first time we experience what it's like to be "ranked." How we interpret this ranking matters immensely. The logic, what there is of it, lies outside the capacity of a 5 y.o. to grasp. If we are "chosen," the arrangement seems eminently "fair." If we're not, we see it as the reverse. And as the years pass, and we intuitively come to grasp that there are pathways into "acceptance" that can be taken — competency at sports, competency at schoolwork, competency at amusing others, competency at forcing our will on others — we are further subdivided into those who may have these competencies and those who have none. Yet with each year, additional ways in which we might reveal a competency, as music, performance, new sports, prowess in trivia and such come to light, we continue to sort ourselves into more and more specific cliques, until nearly all of us belong somewhere. But not all, as it unfortunately happens.

We may think of these competencies as having various sized doors, permitting the entry of a few or a lot of people. Team sports allow for a wide range of competency, as we have room for a lot of players and not all of them have to be "good." Sufficient works, so long as the tertiary player can focus on the group win, and so long as the primary player does as well, so that a dozen individuals on the same team, having different competency, can enjoy their combined skills in a shared victory. There is less of this shared concept within individual-minded sports such as track, where we're a "team" when we go to the meet but the actual importance of lesser persons, who don't excel in their particular event, simply don't get the attention awarded to those that do. But the individually-minded activity, whether this is running, playing chess, winning at a game, playing an instrument, teaches us something completely different from the mere recognition of competency that a sports team can provide.

That there are degrees of competency.

The star player, for the most part, is compared against others. Even if that star player rises to the competency of professional sports, everything about the activity exists to reduce our competency to numbers, which exist so that we directly measured against how others in our sport perform. Success is measured in the most brutal fashion: one must be first. We appreciate the second and third podiums in an olympic events, but we rarely mention their names, and unless we're deeply invested into the sport, we're oblivious to those who do not reach the podium at all. I tell people, however, that the compensation for entering the Olympics and losing is that, if we're even remotely personable, the rest of our life is assured because we'll be well-paid somewhere for teaching our sport to younger others, well up into our sixties, seventies and even our eighties. It really doesn't matter if we win. If we can say on our resume, yes, we competed in the biathalon in the 2002 Olympics, it doesn't matter if we came in 22nd. This school will want us, badly, for their students who want to train in that sport. Because, in fact, we're only 22nd with respect to the rest of the world. In this university, we're so much better than anyone here, we're practically a god.

As an aside, this is why it's important to be both competitive and personable. Competitive is great when being measured as an athlete against everyone else, and when winning matters, but sports end at age 40... whereupon, the other skill one needs to survive is to be self-deprecating, pleasant, patient and giving. None of which are supported by the gritted-teeth attitude that coaches want; but then, coaches don't care what we do when you're 40. This is their time to exploit us, and that's all they care about; and if we're that type, when we're a coach, that might be what we do also. The field is certainly built for that approach.

But separating ourselves from what others want — and some of my teachers were certainly viperous monsters where it came to even debate events and Reach for the Top (with which my participation once in brings me much amusement) — and what we want brings us to this other sort of competency, one that is separated altogether from "competition."  At least, with others.  As my skill as a writer is indifferent to the skill of other writers, even in terms of how many books we sell or how much money we make.  My skill is entirely measured against one thing: what my skill used to be.

This is something a small number of persons begin to grasp at a young age, largely within the indifference of others, and often in conflict with their agendas.  I have no idea why so many teachers felt the need to take me aside and explain in depth that I would never be a writer... I suppose it mattered a great deal to them that I understood this, no doubt so that I would cease putting energy into something I cared about and into something they cared about.  What's interesting isn't that this happened to me, its the near universality I've encountered with every writer, artist, musician, and so on... we all have these stories.  Why, in particular?  Writing certainly didn't hurt my studies, it didn't keep me from eventually finding work, it didn't get in the way of my getting married and raising a family, it didn't confront my social responsibilities with regards to politics or giving assistance to my neighbour.  I wasn't taken aside and told to waste less time in sports, which I also wasn't going to excel in, or time I spent watching television or films, or Dungeons and Dragons, which certainly also weren't contributing to my education or future... so why, in particular, this?  It remains something of a mystery.

But it must be said — before others weigh in to tell me those authority figures felt threatened or unnerved, or were carrying their self-resentment for not following through with their writer dreams — that in school, I was a terrible writer.  Oh, gawd, simply awful.  Most of what I wrote before grade 11 was simply egregious; some might have been vaguely clever in a way, and at least by grade 12 I had improved my grammar and scansion, but even then, when I looked back on that work in my 20s, I always had to shudder.  So, in reality, I'd have to say their judgment was fair.  I hope that if I found a writer that bad, who wanted my opinion, I wouldn't say, "Quit, you'll never be a writer;" but I'd have to say, "Oh, oh... I'm sorry; you've got a long, long... long way to go."

It is in all of this, if the reader is still with me, that we find the third thing we need if we're going to be a better dungeon master, and run a better game.  It's that we must learn that the mastery of things isn't magic.  We're not, like our faces, our size or those other things that made others align with us in grade five, instantly blessed with an ability to run D&D or do anything likewise difficult.  D&D is not a board game, it can't be "won" with die rolls.  It can't be succeeded at just because a player has all 18 stats (or whatever the damn measurement is these days), nor is a player a failure if their stats are all crummy.  Stats don't matter.  Class, race, builds... they don't matter, not if the game is run at the capacity that it allows.  The "optimised" character only works in a campaign that is itself designed to make this sort of optimisation relevant.  If the player is stupid enough to evoke the ire of an entire town by their stupid play, they're going to die or be helplessly imprisoned no matter what their optimisation.  It really depends on how soft-hearted the dungeon master is... which can be extended just as easily to players with bad builds as with good ones.

D&D is a game of choices made and actions taken, and does not function like a video game.  In a video game, it's possible to power up the character to make it undefeatable; but in D&D, the most powerful combat-ready character can be undone by circumstance, in a twink, because unlike a video game, the question can be asked, "How would you beat him?" "With a stick, when he slept."

The "build" relies on me playing the player's game, and that's not what I play.  The player plays my game.

But competency in D&D is seen as something anathema to the game, because it's a "collaborative" game, which has come to mean that if some force is to bend, it must be the DM, as the DM is the enforcer of competency by assigning the world's parameters.  We define how the world breaths, changes and responds, and how predictable that is... and if this definition sets a standard upon play, demanding that we're not all playing Candyland, that some of us aren't going to cross the finish line, because there are no rolls, there's just good choices — then the modern implied contract of "collaborative" play is contravened.

This version of "collaboration," however, as I explained with my last post, is based on the premise that "everyone gets to play," not on the premise of "I am taking part in something larger than myself."  The latter is unselfish. The former, selfish.  I am not the arbiter of individual selfishness, but the rewarder of cooperation.  I was raised on Sesame Street, not Wall Street.

The proper view of collaboration, the one learned through sports, the education of sports, drama, camping trips, kitchen lines and so on, is one of service.  The service to others.  Not the hanging of ornaments on ourselves, but the process of designing ourselves better to SERVE OTHER PEOPLE.  D&D, run by a company, a selfish, obnoxious company so toxic that when other toy companies speak of it, the acidicity is rampant, has done all it can to obliterate this.  As such, competency has evaporated.

If the reader can remember, from this post, back when dinosaurs walked the earth, when I said that as children we began to sort ourselves out through those various activities that we found we wanted to become competent in, I did not say at that time that D&D has become the very last stop on that road.  That was not always the case.  Once upon a time, when I was a boy, and my pet dunkleostus used to sit at my feet while I ran, one had to know things to play.  Things like physics, reason, problem solving, a bit of history, strategy and such.  Not with intense, adult-like capacity, but some knowledge had to be had.  This is no longer the case.

Presently, D&D has become the last refuge for the incompetent.  Those who, as said before, resent any expectation of having to improve any part of themselves, who feel that success ought not to rest upon ability, and not even upon luck, but upon a sort of self-assured guarantee that it's the DM's responsibility to provide — in part because the player has had the graciousness to show up, like a monarch entering the squalid hovel of the DM's world, but in much larger part because nowadays the whole thing has been washed with social responsibility and tolerance.  How dare I, as a scum DM, deign to say a halfling can't climb up a 6 ft. man and stab him in the neck with impunity?  What sort of anti-social monster am I, if I don't just accept that as a FACT, as something short people are OBVIOUSLY unable to do, despite the fact that it's never been done, not even in a faked wrestling match between a short person and Andre the fucking Giant.  Wait, I'm wrong.  It's been done with computer imaging.

As such, to be a dungeon master, competence isn't necessary either.  I need only enable my players in whatever they want to do.  The difficulty, though, lies in that it's not very much fun to be a DM these days.  Which leads them to ask on Reddit and elsewhere, "I don't understand what a story is, or how I'm supposed to present one, but it hasn't occurred to me to learn anything about anything yet, so I'm asking the internet for answers."

That's the problem.  What's the solution?

One thing that makes going back to original D&D is simply the breathable air it offers, in how it defines the DM's role vs. that of the players.  It's described as a game, not as a social responsibility.  The language assumes the DM's assumption of responsibility, not as an arbiter of the player's dreams, but as a gatekeeper of competence and success.  The language defacto states that if the players cannot act effectively in accordance with the rules, the rules dictate that the player's character should die, then and there, as a matter of course.  This is the same game structure that says, if you run out of money in Monopoly, you lose.  There's no system for taking another $1,500 of the bank so you can keep going (though there were those who tried it), there's no system for cheating (and yet, again, there were always those ready to slip a $500 bill when no one was watching — and whoa, didn't that end in violence?).

D&D was meant to act likewise.  Because it was a game.  And all games function this way.

We called it cheating, but in modern parlance, and to better define the problem, we can call it the removal of unearned outcomes.  Where the rules serve the integrity of the game world rather than the emotional validation of the player.  This soccer game does not exist to emotionally validate you, Jeremy.  Please leave.  That's not the language we use, but that's what we say.  This isn't about YOU.  This is about us.  Modern D&D has lost that, utterly.  Old school D&D still has it.

But the flip side of this is more important.  We don't pay to see a musician who is playing their instrument becuase it emotionally validates them, but because they've earned competency through sweat, tedium, repetition and discipline, and we recognise that when we see it.  We call it talent, but at some point, talent was only enough to get them started.  It wasn't talent that gave the lyrics of Jackson Browne or Billy Joel an insight that we continue to carry with us.  It's not talent that invests some performers with the capacity to keep playing and touring decade after decade, letting us see them now though they had their hey-day in a world two generations ago.  It's not our tolerance, our open-mindedness, that gives their work teeth.  It is that they humbled themselves before something they did not know how to do once upon a time, only to crawl forward in pain learning how to master it.  They didn't expect instant results, they didn't expect others to forgive them incompetency, they knew it would cost and they paid the price.  And for that, they've earned our respect in a way that doesn't require our concession of it.

Even when we hate them, we can't deny this of them.

I am not a fan of Lady Gaga.  I hate the fucking pretense of the name, I hate her politics, I hate the performative way she had of getting herself into the spotlight, I hate the smug shittiness of her face, I'm not particularly moved my her music and I'd rather not be in a room with her.

But if I was, she'd know none of this, because I wouldn't say it.  Because despite the rest, I respect her.

There are many people who can't carry those two thoughts in their head. They dream of the day when they'll see the famous person they hate in person and have the opportunity to scream hatred at them.  It's that sense of "I never get Australia" that pervades their thinking and makes them what they are. They don't respect investment because they don't know what investment is.  They never commit it.  And I'm choosing that word because "commit" is the key.  My teachers tried to correct me because they saw writing as something I "did."  They didn't see it as something I committed to; that I wasn't going to quit at just because I was bad at it.  And this is key to being a dungeon master.  Because if we can't commit do it, even when we're bad at it, we shouldn't be doing it.

To "fail" doesn't make us "failures."  The latter are those who cease to commit.  And as I've written a post about why failing doesn't teach us anything, I'm avoid saying that we should just keep trying.  Instead, I'll argue that what we should do is to commit ourselves to learning what's wrong with our style and ideals of the game, and ask questions about what do to about it.  We have to be able to look inwardly and ask, "what isn't working," so we can ask others, or seek material knowledge, with the intent of "what would make this thing that isn't working work?"

That's all I've ever done with this blog.  Right now, I'm saying that if you're emotionally validating their players, if you're giving them anything, and I mean a single die roll in their favour, that is unearned, then your game isn't working because your precepts of commitment, competency and value are all wrong.  You've convinced yourself, somewhere down the line, that everyone deserves to succeed, even just a little bit, and you've placed yourself as an arbiter of that success.

But for everything you're giving them that's unearned, you are stealing their soul.  No, that's not pithy. That's the fact of it.  You're stealing their chance to make themselves better, by lowering the bar they have to cross to make them BE better.  You're arbitrarily contributing to the ruination of your life as you cripple their ability to rise to a challenge, whether that challenge is in this game, their work life, their personal relationships, even the way they eventually face their old age.  And you're patting yourself on the back as you weaken them as people.

And as you smugly laugh this accusation off, stop for a moment and ask, who weakened you?  Which uncle, parent, older sibling, friend in school, teacher, coach, you name it, gave you a free pass in whatever institutionalised setting you were a prisoner in, that lowered your standards of behaviour, who made the success a dirty word for you, that crippled your ability to improve yourself, thus investing you with this fucking need to play fucking god with someone else's fucking emotional state?  Take a moment and find the answer to that question.  Because that answer will tell you who exactly it was that made you an asshole.

I'm guessing you already know.

How to Not Be You

The circumstance of giving advice to people carries with it a rather obvious constraint — that being, the advice won't be taken. Some see this as a "problem," for they see it as trying to help, only to have help rebuffed, since it's not wanted. But this is only the case if the help-giver is invested, for whatever reason, in the help-refuser acting in a manner that improves the lives of both, and others besides, in an effort to belay the unpleasant alternative.

For example, I want my brother to stop drinking, because it's causing issues for his children, me, my wife, my children and who knows how many others besides — so it would be really great if he could just shape up, take some good advice, adjust himself and save everyone a lot of grief. Or else some of us are going to have to stop allowing him to come around, we're going to stop taking his calls, and in essence, my brother must become dead to us. Which we don't want. This is a very common situation for millions of people, particularly with family members, but it reaches to other things besides.

Thankfully, it's not what's happening here.  I am not invested in anyone taking my advice here.  I am invested in writing it out as wisdom, first that those who already agree with me will have better language in describing it to others and to themselves, and in being responsible to the race, as I see it, where it comes to expanding the general knowledge of the zeitgeist.  I'm not going to say anything that hasn't been said before, but perhaps I might say it better, cleaner, without much of the politicisation that tends to pollute these things.  I won't use jargon.  I won't say that someone who wants to be a better player needs to decolonise their thinking or adopt a stronger personalised hierarchy or think with a greater critical intersectionality.  My approach, to discuss these things in plain English, because I don't care about anyone's feelings, seems more practical to me in achieving this communicative goal.

If we choose to categorise people, there are thousands of models we might employ, but here I wish to subdivide people usefully into three groups.  There are those, like me, who are willing to accept that striving to learn is an obvious, effective, responsible life choice, one that increases one's potential, one's usefulness to society, one's income, one's capacity to care and look after others, and a host of other self-evident benefits.  Unlike some who might respond negatively to the last post, which argues nothing more strenuous than getting off your ass and suggesting you might read books, those in the "yes, of course we want to learn" group merely smile and note in their minds how stupid it would be to do otherwise.  This group, incidentally, includes all the doctors, lawyers, researchers, engineers and developers in the world, that being all the people who make the world, the value of which would seem to be self-evident... though it isn't to some fucking people.  Plain language.

The second group includes most of those who have stopped reading at the above paragraph, who are disgruntled or angered by the above, who hate it when people say things like, "if you don't read, you're not relevant."  This second group of people divide into those who are lucky enough right now to have good paying jobs, thus justifying their privilege to be ignorant, and those not so lucky, who use their misfortune as a crutch and an argument to say, "I'm not a doctor because no one ever gave me a chance," despite the presence of free-for-use public libraries and a legal system that disallows their employment lasting longer than 8 hours a day.  Of course, many of these people rush out and get a second job, arguing that one job won't cover their rent and all the other things they need to purchase, in part because they want too many things and in part because they don't or won't pay for birth control, or were even more unlucky in that they USED birth control and still found themselves in their dire circumstance.  I do feel for such people, because, as they argue, they're too tired to get an education.  I for one don't want to blame anyone for their exhaustion, if that exhaustion really is the reason they won't read a book.  But there remains one way out of their hell, and that is an education, so that a better job ceases to be a matter of luck and becomes instead a matter of inevitability.

All the other people in the second group, who don't have four children or more to look after, who have reliable family members, who have a reliable life partner, who spend your evenings at the bar, who purchase drugs, who spend money on miniatures instead of books, or on splatbooks instead of educational books, I have no pity.  You have disposable income, you have free time, and you're choosing to be ignorant.  That's on you, not on your lack of opportunity.

The third group, not reading this now because they're too busy, are those that prey on the second group.  They prey on you because you're easy pickings.  You're not educated enough to protect yourself and you're convinced there's a short cut. You're own sense of victimhood, that you're not a professional earning in the high five figures or low six is the fault of society, your upbringing, your situation, your whatever, makes you easy pickings for this third group.  And they are more than willing to sell your victimhood, something you already have, at a price that you'll pay in the hopes they're selling something else.  That's just how ignorant you are.  And maybe, if you don't want to learn how to do something useful, you might learn how to be a predator yourself; but I don't it.  You haven't the sand for that.  You might think I'm the asshole here... but your kind, the second kind here, you're far more likely to suffer at the hands of these predators than you ever would at my hands.  Because I'm not a predator.  You can tell, because this attack is free.  You can see my jaws and they're way over here.  With the kind of predators hunting your type?  You'll feel the jaws before you see them.

My kind of person... we know what they are before they open their mouths.  It's in their faces.  Just look at that shit-fuck Tim Robbins.  Why would you ever trust someone like that?

Well... if you're still with me... 

This post is still fundamentally about being a better dungeon master, but there's no way to divide that ideal from a hundred other better things you'll become in the process.  Inevitably, being a better dungeon master is a by-product, and for many, the other things you should do in order to become better at managing people and a game table might be the impetus that makes you drop role-playing altogether... which I see as perfectly natural and even laudable.  Not because D&D isn't a bad game, or that people shouldn't play it, but because in the grand scheme of things it really isn't as important as what else we might do with our time.

At the end of the last post, I suggested that there were three other things necessary to lift yourself as a DM other than addressing your self-education.  The first of these is, as Lucy puts in, involvement. I say that with the sharp, impatient clarity that Lucy is known for — part scolding, part selfless — as she barks the truth at people not ready for it.  And like Charlie Brown, it's time you hauled your ass off your sofa and became part of something that isn't about you.

This demands that you remove yourself from what are primarily just your goals and act in tandem with others to achieve goals that everyone in the group seeks.  Play sports, where everyone, not just you, wants to win.  Volunteer, where the people at the centre are those being helped or supported, not you.  Run, hike, travel with other people, where the well-being of every person is at stake, not just your well-being.  Look after children, where their needs matter more than yours.  Help someone else get elected.  Learn how to function around others who won't see your personal contribution as the end-all and be-all of their goals.  Others who won't hesitate to toss you on your ear if you're selfish, uncommitted, discordant or unhelpful.  Learn how not to derail, how not to be performative, how not to assume that the reason for your being here is to satisfy your personal need for attention.  Join, shut the fuck up, and when work is wanted, do that work silently, cheerfully and in the same way as the others around you.

This is your only chance at becoming a better person.   Because if you only know how to read books, you'll never know how to apply what you've learned, without this.  Yes, I'm saying, join the human race.

And what will happen?

To begin with, you'll learn when to hold yourself back and not act until the right moment.  You'll find that your impulses are disruptive and inappropriate, whereas you need to be aware of the rhythm, needs and direction of the group.  You may know what's needed or what to say, but if it's not said at the right time, then you won't be heard and your great insight won't be appreciated.  In D&D, this is the space between knowing something and choosing when to say it; as a DM, this is a constant.  You may have prepared a rich detail in a setting, or a context twist, but if you deliver it too early, at the wrong time, or because you can't restrain yourself, then the effectiveness of your idea is going to face-plant; and if you don't realise why, because you have no comprehension of your impulses, then you'll assume it's because you're a bad DM, not because you fucked up a perfectly excellent moment because you have no self-control.  This sort of timing also separates someone who participates from the player that disrupts constantly.  Players who speak entirely from impulse, who don't wait and listen, who aren't aware of other players, are the plague of D&D campaigns.  They can't be restrained because they never learned how to function around others.  They don't participate in any group activity, and never have, except D&D, which only enables their selfish, reflexive impulses.

Group activities, particularly those that aren't recreational in function, underscore the importance of listening when it's not our turn to speak.  If we're participating in a soup kitchen, if we're a counsellor at a kid's camp, if we're an assistant coach for a hockey team, learning to comprehend the emotional shifts, listening is necessary to understand the reasoning of others, especially in interpreting their emotional state, their priorities and their intentions.  As a group, these things have to be in alignment; we must all have the SAME priorities and the SAME interpretations, or else its chaos, the food is late, the kids learn things they shouldn't and the team loses, not just all the time but badly.  Not every team is great, but if the kids pull together, if they get a chance to comprehend nature, if the visitors arrive and find the food hot and waiting for them, it provides a sense of accomplishment and the value of things that sustains them all their lives.

Applying this to D&D, it's easy to see why it matters if the players help each other, and are concerned for each other's welfare, and agree on the rules, and perceive the alignment of their goals as something they all want, together.  Again and again, disasterously, D&D players who fail to grasp these concepts ruin game play, they participate in time-wasting performative role-play that accomplishes nothing for others, they don't care what others feel and they don't sense the loss that others experience.  Seven supportive, team-minded players working together is easy to run as a DM.  Three self-minded validation-seeking monsters can successfully accomplish absolutely nothing in four hours of play.

From this, we can see the problem at once.  Not having learned to "play well with others," or even work together, something that many of us learned playing baseball, hockey or football; or which we learned on long canoe trips through semi-wild areas, where actual drowning and other injuries was completely possible; or which we learned through contributing our time to voluntary activities like church choirs, scouts, group fishing trips, debate clubs, drama... whatever... we don't know how to play D&D together and we don't know how to care about others while we're doing it.  And this is fundamentally the problem with the way this game is played, because it's not a video game where a computer keeps track of our performance, it's a social activity where human perception and human response matter more than how many experience we get or how many times we can invoke the rule of cool.  D&D does not function well in the spirit of "what can I get away with," because that fucks over the ability of others to get away with things.  In any group activity, volunteer or paid, "what can I get away with" is what gets us turfed and fired.  It is not, as in the case of D&D, the thing that gets canonised IN THE FUCKING RULE BOOK of how to play.

I have a lot of ground to cover, so I'm going to cease connecting this with D&D and just outline what we learn from participating in group activities... not because the point hasn't been made, but because I feel that we really should know what we're not obtaining when we play D&D in the way that's become normalised.

When we participate in a group activity — and here I'll use a soup kitchen as an example because I worked in one for a time, associated with paid-for cooking work that I did off-and-on for twenty years — we learn how labour is divided.  We learn where to stand, how to carry our end, how to watch others in a state of hurry so as to know when to move and how to do so safely, in an environment filled with sharp knives, vats of literally boiling oil, very hot surfaces and a slippery floor.  And fire.  Let's not forget that there's fire.  All this is done while dishing out food for people down on their luck, who need more than the food, they need patience and good will and kindness and reassurance that we are glad to be doing this FOR THEM, which is something that can't be faked.  Anyone who tries to fake it, for whatever reason because they want to be there for some other reason, is easily detected by those who are down on their luck; they can see, plainly, the little bit of contempt in the eye, the tone of reluctance to talk, the dismissiveness as a server slops soup into their bowl — and because the down and out are often at the end of their rope, and in a state of stress, they won't hesitate to say, "What the fuck is your problem" loud enough for the whole kitchen and dining hall to hear.

The key is to see the patron being as much a part of the team as those that make the food, so that when one of them cuts into us, we can absorb their bitterness and impatience not as a personal attack, but as a response to something that is larger than all of us — the plain, fundamental cruelty of life.  I've seen the server who shot right back, starting the war of words, accomplishing nothing; and I've seen the server who wilted, retreating from the line, letting someone else take over.  Me, ever the pit bull, I don't wilt; but I have starved, I have in my youth visited a soup line on the other side, and I'm more apt to make a joke, to self-deprecate, because what's going on here is more important than, say, this post being misunderstood, which would cause me to wage a blistering war against the misunderstander.  It's a question of what matters vs. what really matters.  If a player repeatedly disrupts a campaign, I'll storm about that.  But if a player loses a treasured character and responds with anger and fury, I'll feel none of that pitbull, because through group activities and through seeing people under stress, it's understandable that sometimes, we have to blow.  Working in a soup kitchen has it's upside; if you turn to one of the nuns — I worked at St. Anne's Catholic Church in the 1990s, here in Calgary — and say, "I'm going to go sit down with that guy for a bit," they won't care that you walk away from your "duties," because there's a higher duty.  And that, too, is something that the D&D community has totally failed to uncover.

We have, for years, completely failed to understand the meaning of "collaborative" where it comes to this sort of activity.  It doesn't mean either that we're "doing" or "making" things together, it's that we don't see ourselves as the end-all and be-all of the moment-to-moment participation as it's ongoing.  We're not concerned with our personal failure, our choosing the wrong spell, our attacking the wrong enemy... or even messing up and losing the respect of our friends or letting them down.  Because it's not about OUR performance, where what WE do, and what WE lose or gain, that matters here.  It's that others in our team comprehend that we've done the best we could, and that whether or not we fucked up, it won't change their opinion of us.  If our largest concern is what others think of us, then it's still ourselves that we're concerned with; it's still a perception of ME and THEM.  Which is not the ideal. The ideal is that we can say, "Sorry guys, wrong spell," and know before they do that everyone around the table will smile and say, "Fuhgeddaboudit."

There's a pervasive belief in the community that others shouldn't tell you how to run your character... and this, too, is a ME and THEM position.  As though the mere fact of someone saying "do that spell" is the same as "I am running Jim's character and he's using this spell," and the DM automatically saying, "Right.  Jim, your character is using this spell."

Nothing like that is happening.  Dave is saying, "Jim, do that spell" and Jim is absolutely, unquestionably free to say, "nah, I don't think so."  But more importantly, a collaborative ideal is for Jim to think, "Hm, maybe that's a good idea," and give credence to Dave's suggestion, and treat it as what it ought to be... a collaborative effort of players working together to make the most of their opportunities.  It's not personal, unless we're so wrapped up in our person that we can't bear the idea that someone else at the table thought of it before we did.

If the leader in a soup kitchen says, "give them a little less than you are," it's not her personal opinion, nor is it an attack on your judgment. It's a recognition that we have only so much soup, and there are this number of people it must be shared around, and your awareness of this, being here just a few times, doesn't match hers, because she's been doing this for ten years.  But people will take it as a judgment.  They will swear under their breath, they will miss the point, they will make it about themselves and they will make themselves untenable as a volunteer.  There's just nothing like watching a volunteer being fired... it is the strangest scene there is, to think that there are others who won't let you work there for FREE, because you're not worth the wage they're paying.

Effective collaboration means picking up the rhythm, not because there's a profit to be made, but because other people want to move faster than you do.  Collaboration under pressure means that no, there isn't time for you to waffle on about your family in Volhynia while we're buying equipment for the dungeon, because the rest of us want to get at it.  At the same time, it sometimes means sitting and waiting for the others to get done, because they're doing something important, and just because you're surer or more definite about what you want doesn't give you a special license to bark at others to hurry up.  Collaboration means spending a lot of time showing up when you don't want to.  It means finishing things we didn't start, we don't understand, we don't agree with and which we don't want to finish.  It means stepping aside, not being the first person in, when the best first person is someone else; and not griping about it, not saying a word, just shoving that doubt or dissatisfaction down your own throat, because it shouldn't be said in this context.  Save it for when you go home and tell your fridge.

These are all a part of the human group experience... and like book larnin', if you can't get on board this train, you haven't any right to get to this destination.  Oh, you can play D&D, in the shitty way it's usually played, but if you want to be any good at it, if you want to pick up your game, if you want to acquire the skills that will make you a really terrific DM, then you've got to immerse yourself in cultures where your importance and your feelings don't matter more than those of everyone else.  And you've got to do it in a way where others want you there; it's not enough if they just tolerate you.  A lot of people in the world, those who are happy for at least another body they don't have to pay for, will put up with some of your shit... but if that's what you're counting on, you're not learning anything, are you?

If you want to advance past this milestone, you have to learn how to not be you.

The Work Before the Work

This is the 4,000th post of this blog.  I have been giving advice on how to be a better dungeon master for 17 years (shy three days, as the first post of this blog was May 28th).  I have discussed strategies on how to adjust the game, how to think, how to view game culture and the details of my own efforts in creating both a campaign world and an ideal of what a DM ought to try to accomplish, and what a DM ought to believe.  One would think I'd be out of subjects, but no.  

With the last post, I think enough has been said regarding the shortcomings of things.  That post was set up to give context to this post, and those ahead.  I'd like to lift the discussion here: but that does not mean, by any stretch, that what I have to say will be welcome.  I'm not going to say anything, now, that hasn't been said thousands of times... as will become evident.  Nonetheless I'll take my swing at it.  I agreed that I'd write about the struggle to picture the game world in enough detail to describe it to players, and understand how it would reasonably respond.  I've written other posts on this... but those posts assumed a certain level of self-education, self-realisation and perspective, as many of my posts do.  I tend, as most find, to write with the expectation that if I make an obscure observation of "hobo culture," John Stuart Mill or the devastation of sheep farming in Scotland in the 18th century, the reader will either already recognise these references, or have the good sense to look them up on the internet.

That is perhaps unreasonable.  As a boy, I grew up on documentaries that reflexively made such references.  Presenters would unhesitatingly refer to Oliver Cromwell or Simon Bolivar as people the listener — presumably having had an education — would know.  Time was not spent explaining the presence of the Ottoman Empire if discussing the battle of Lepanto, which again an individual was supposed to recognise within the framework of Venetian and Genoan trade, while a passing reference to the Benedictines or the Jesuits was assumed to be perfectly understood, because that's the background that those years in the upper sixth or in 12th grade were supposed to provide.

In discussing the facets of medieval history that might apply to D&D, or detailing how an army or a village works, or the organisation of a state, or the manner in which individuals were conscripted, or what food was eaten, or how individuals travelled and so on, I don't want to constantly have to pause my narrative repeatedly, with every post in which I happen to mention any of these subjects.  I may wish to write a post specifically about the organisation of a village, but I don't want to have to spend five paragraphs every time a village is mentioned, in case one reader doesn't know this, and needs it spelled out, because they don't know how google works, or how chatGPT works, or how amazon book sales works, or any of a hundred other places on the net they could go to if they wanted to look up exactly the same information I'd be paraphrasing each time I stopped to make the reference clear.  Nothing would get accomplished, even with the number of posts I've written, because everything here would need to cater to the grade-3 level reader.

There are hundreds of sources, particularly on youtube, doing all they can to get clicks, who are prepared to discuss the simplest approaches to D&D by catering to people who know nothing whatsoever about it, since the number of ignorant is MUCH larger than my audience, those who have played the game and already know what is it.  Thus, I don't spend any time teaching people how to play, or writing posts that begin, "If you don't know what D&D is, let me tell you all about it." Instead, my attempts are to tackle aspects of game play that no one is discussing — such as, if you want to improve your capacity to visualise, dictate table policy, provide an intensive level of immersion or unshackle yourselves from the limitations what you can accomplish as a DM, you must think differently as a person.  Your present way of thinking, I'm afraid, just isn't going to cut it.  Were I to ignore this, I could give advice all day and accomplish nothing.  Which would be a waste of my time.

We do not become better DMs by embracing laziness.  We do not become better by buying every shitty product the company shoots out.  We do not become better by dressing up tables or rooms or ourselves in performative cosplay.  There are no shortcuts. But there ARE plenty of grifters out there ready to sell them to you anyway, because they want your money.  And they've learned from experience that if their last shitty product didn't fix your problem, it won't keep you from buying their next shitty product.

The way out, the means by which we put the company behind us and progress, isn't accomplished through re-embracing a dead form of D&D that sucked 45 years ago and still does.  It isn't accomplished by "rules-as-written" or the OGL or any of a dozen quick-fix solutions.  It is accomplished by your ceasing to be the person you are and by becoming a wiser, more skilled, more foresight-driven individual, through the betterment of yourself, by a means that is as painful as both giving birth to a child and being the child also... in a way that lasts a good fifteen or twenty years.  It's not pretty, it's not pleasant... and it will probably mean your separation from every friend or family member who doesn't want to change themselves, and would rather you didn't either.

I promise no liberation.  No fantasy of transcendance.  What I promise is a long, bleak road that is unforgiving and, for a long time, unsatisfying.  Worse, it's disarming and cruel in it's capacity to reveal just how ignorant you are, presently, in a manner that will make you wanna run back to your Mama's tit.  But this is the road.  If there was another, I'd be happy to pound a roadsign into the ground right here so you could go there.  Unfortunately, it's not up to me. My goal here is to be honest. I could make a lot of money just cheating people — I'm a whole lot smarter than most grifters and if I turned evil, oooo... I'd have roads to show you that were paved in warmth and sunshine that would make your feet smart enough to run D&D.  Let's just be glad I don't wish that.

One solace I can offer: the actual path is in your means.  Absolutely.  You have to give up your time, but it's cheap.  It'll cost you next to nothing.  A few books.  Spare time.  A little boredom.  Responsibility to other people.  You can have all this for the cost of one splatbook; and if you're a little clever, you can have it all for free.  Shortcuts empty your wallet.  Actual self-improvement is free.

You'll know this because what I'll say next has no price tag attached.

Start here.  With a few exceptions, most readers here will have had a traditional education, at least grades one through ten.  If you're like me, you spent much of that time skipping homework, not doing the readings, not learning the math, not studying the natives of wherever and so on.  You coasted.  You passed your exams, Cs, Bs, maybe even As, because school wasn't that hard for a lot of us and it's totally possible to learn how to write a book review or a 500-word history essay with about 20 minutes work.  The goal, we told ourselves, was to get the diploma, which a lot of us did, and some of us didn't, but in reality, that's not important here.

It's time... and you won't like this, but you're an adult now, and you ought to be old enough to admit this.  It's time to correct your grade school education.  It's time to go back, find the books, read those you didn't read, open the typing textbook and actually practice instead of what you did in grade ten, and buy a grade 7 mathbook in a used bookstore or online and work through it.  Front to back.  Whether or not it's fun.

For a long time now you've dismissed school as something behind you, but no ... school is still here, it's that third piece of baggage you're carrying in your left hand, weighing down your capacity to grasp things, leaving hazy black patches in your imaginative capacity, crippling you in a hundred ways, mostly because you've long since forgotten what you forgot to learn, because back then, you didn't care.  Now, it's time to care, if you can find the wherewithal and the backbone to do so.  It's time, I'm saying, to go learn the things you should have learned the first time, that you didn't think were important and which you know now — even if you can't admit it — mattered.

So borrow your nephew's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, that he's not reading in school, and read it.  Force yourself through Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies.  Read 1984.  Not for the fun.  Not for the message or the kudos of having finally read it, but just so that you'll get the bloody jokes in the South Park and Simpson's episodes that had you scratching your forehead.  So that the next time someone mutters in apparent obscurity, "two legs bad, four legs good," you'll know what the fuck they're talking about.

Without knowing it, because you know everything about Jedi Knights, you've been walking around in a kind of cultural illiteracy, one that ensures that vast numbers of important writers and thinkers can't talk to you, because they don't make Star Wars references, but wholly other ones you're not versed in.  And mind you, these books aren't lofty literary artifacts. These are SAT 400-500 level books, 3rd form books, 6th grade books.  Every list on the internet describes them as "the greatest books ever written," but only because the level of discourse and comprehension on the internet falls right in that 425-475 SAT range.  A range you have to climb up to, because not having read these books, you're even lower.  Which helps explain, just a bit, why you're so far behind the game where dungeons and dragons is concerned.  You don't know what a medieval village includes?  Oh, sweetie... please start reading something.

A capable DM must have a strong reading comprehension, be able to infer unstated meanings, track complex arguments, draw on cultural references without stumbling, demonstrate a real control over language, improvise, portray characters and provide consistent in-world logic.  Math matters, but against all this it's a secondary concern; it's the qualitative that matters, which on the scale just discussed would be 600+... which means that the work put into these subjects has to surpass the bare bones of what school tried to teach.  It demands getting into the realm of those students who, when not in school, read for fun, or studied things out of interest, beyond homework and exams.  It means that after catching up on what you didn't learn at school, you've got to embrace some of those ideals that nerds did, just because they wanted to.  So doing your homework, finally, all these years later, won't do the job by itself.

To get there, you'll have to read a mess of books that you never thought you would, that aren't made to be cut through easily.  These will require time, time to puzzle out one paragraph after another, time to look up words, time to put the book down and think... but books that will force your brain to adjust and develop the basic tools that will let you read the books that will let you read the books that will finally let you read the books that will tell you what dungeon mastering is.  This isn't an easy process.  It's not like, if you read Howard's End or The Red and the Black, you're not going to suddenly be a better DM.  But five or six dozen books like those will, steadily, shift the assumptions you make and the concepts that arise in your mind when you're trying to dream up a new idea... and you will, steadily, find it easier to do so.

After five or six years have passed.

Intellectual change is geological.  There's all the wrong-thinking to get rid of first, all the closets and miserable back rooms in your brain to remove all that crappy furniture out of before dusting and making those places livable; there's that mass of hoarded magazines and the saved paper wrappers from McDonald's to trash, and... worst of all... the oubliettes that need to be opened and plumbed to learn what awful things you left to die there.  The process is a lot of work.  Work that I have done, that I did 30 to 35 years ago, which is why I think like this, and write like this, and am so damnably hard to argue with.

I'm not talented, I'm not clever.  My tone, my clarity, my precision arises through a zeitgeist of thousands of other authors and thinkers that I gorged upon and have learned to spit out.  Generally through long, unglamorous, solitary labour.  Call it the result of decades of disciplined mental sanitation... and anyone who wants this, who wants to talk like this, know what I know, do what I do or invent as I invent, must also do this.

But not, sad to say, only this.  No, I'm afraid, there are three other things besides.

Book Larnin'

Those first six months that followed my discovery of D&D, as some of my old friends undertook the game, and I met new friends, there seemed to be a rush of interest in going to the public library and learning all there was to know about the medieval age.  This, I remind the reader, was the winter and spring of 1979 and 1980.  There was no easy way to gain knowledge, no channels to flip on and watch documentaries about the Dark Ages or the Renaissance, no 'net to dig through, no person upon who to call in order to ask questions, as for the most part even our teachers knew next to nothing about the period.

So... some of us sat in the library, our only source, with the thought of becoming experts.  On the whole, most drifted towards the war apparatus, the weapons, the armour, the siege engines, things we knew only vaguely but soon acquired an appetite for.  Much interest was employed in the shape of weapons and the various components of armour, with huge books 14 inches high that were filled with colour plates of how armour was fixed to the body and how the weapons were held, drenched with descriptive, somewhat florid... and somewhat inaccurate, though we didn't know that then and didn't care.  This is where most people stopped, however.  There were a dozen books of this kind at the library and it was enough.

But not for me and a few others.  We loved the books that discussed "life in a medieval village" or '... in a medieval castle," though I can't precisely recall when those were published and I'm not sure it was within the time period I spoke of.  Books of that nature, that wanted to talk about being a person and living life in the time period seemed obviously useful to me as a dungeon master, so that I read them multiple times and took notes — and because I was a write I wrote pages of description of my own that I could return to before and after games, to "get into the mood" and "add flavour."  It is this kind of practice that makes me so insufferable now, as I watch others do practically nothing about learning a thing about the era surrounding the game.

There is so much more to learn about the manner in which people lived and means by which, historically, the movements of people inspired the creation of villages and how those villages were designed and constructed, than what there is to say about weapons and armour, yet it's all ignored.  We live in an age now when there is SO much knowledge, a driven individual can sit down at a computer, in the comfort of one's own home, with one's own grounded-bean coffee at hand, and just READ from awaking to bedtime. There is endless content on youtube, endless content to be found in books that can be purchased and reviewed within literal seconds, and book searches on google that literally dates to the 18th century and earlier, to see how people wrote and spoke about these same ideas 200 or more years ago.  Any number of programs allow the user to simply sit and talk, by text, about the time period, literally starting with, "I'd like to know more about the medieval village" and then going into asking specific question after specific question about anything that's mentioned.  When I'm told that it's usually part of a larger feudal manor, I can simply ask, "What is a feudal manor?"  When I'm told that it was the backbone of feudal society, I can ask how so... and on and on, FOR FREE in this age, for hundreds and thousands of hours, without let up.

The richness that can be brought into a game now, by anyone willing to simply follow a curiosity, is staggering.  What makes this frustrating, and unquestionably tragic, is that the availability of this knowledge hasn't sparked a comparable rise in the general effort people put into the understanding of the game they're playing.  Once some knowledge of war materials is faintly gleaned, the rest is simply ignored.  The human story, the real one, with the architecture surrounding the lives of real people, as they killed each other and killed themselves in the direst of life situations, is simply passed over.  We don't care.  We don't read the content of the time period, we wedge modern day issues into the game and call it a day.

And strangely, especially for Dungeons & Dragons, the question of accuracy is paramount.  The sources, we're told in endless videos embracing performative negativity, aren't strictly accurate.  People did not live exactly the way the sources tell.  Programs that will answer questions are now often identified as having "wrong" information, which surely can't be trusted, so why bother at all?  I mean, if there are these 15 common misconceptions about what medieval life was really like, a video half-assed by a non-academic using sources that are themselves unquestionably suspect, then obviously we don't know anything about medieval life and therefore it's useless to try an apply any such knowledge to D&D.

A fictional game.  About a fantasy environment.  Which needs to be as accurate as what I tell my 4 y.o. grandson about the tooth fairy.

Accuracy, presently, has become a sort of strawman, a target for content creators to go after, usually without much insight, often grossly misunderstanding something that was never literal as literal in their condemnation of that.  Recently, I watched a video where the presenter argued that that the idiom, "head over heels" made no sense, since the head is already "over" the heels and therefore it means nothing has changed from the normal.

This is a classic case of incomprehension based on a narrow, literal, high school level of language.  "Over" is interpreted to mean above, while in fact the idiom refers to the concept of being "pushed over," of falling down, of the head passing OVER the heels as one crashes to the ground in love.  That there was once a 14th century idiom that goes, "heels over head," which means to tumble, is irrelevant, though the two are often conflated because it's assumed that human language follows straight lines.  There's something revealed when those without sense attack knowledge as something that lacks sense.

The incomprehension itself comes from not knowing very much, but assuming otherwise.  Such people view knowledge as a series of trivia facts to be confirmed or rejected, rather than a network of evolving, culturally situated understandings.  This goes far beyond trivia, however.  In 2010, a house on the street where I grew up, that I knew quite well, exploded when a gas line was punctured.  What the linked article does not tell, is that the "contractor" wasn't one, and that the gas line was punctured because he was using a circular saw to remove a section of a wall, without looking at the plans, and cut right through the line.  And this kind of thing happens all the time, because people who think they know things don't really know anything.

This is an embodiment of the larger point: the gas line, the circular saw, the house, are all a metaphor for what happens when shallow confidence meets complex systems.  Whether its construction, history, language or game design, the failing comes not from ignorance, but from the belief that no further knowledge is necessary.  When encountering an idiom, "head over heels," that has been in use since the late 18th century, more than 200 years, the default is not to think, "these people of the past must have interpreted this in some way that makes sense, I should investigate that."  It's to think, "these people of the past were such rubes, they believed stupid things."  This is what gets the house blown up.

Which is one reason why there are those who keep from knowledge altogether.  They don't renovate their house, fearing this is what might happen, and they know they don't have the knowledge to build a game campaign or run it.  And so they use the same argument I just made above: since it doesn't have to be "real," because it's just a game, then I don't actually have to know anything.

It's a defensive move dressed up as a creative one.  A refusal to build masked as a philosophy of freedom.  But of course, it doesn't free the game, it flattens it.  Having to rely on templates and repetition, every town is the same, every encounter is the same, every dialogue flavorless.  But better this than undertaking to learn anything that might conceivably add nuance to these things, because that would require an amount of time, no doubt a lot of time, learning something about the time period — and why bother, since that would mean years taken to never even acquire perfect knowledge of what I sought after, which would mean a lot of time wasted in an impossible to achieve effort.  Better to just let the world be flat.  Why invest time into something we'll never master?

For this post, this above makes the point.  If you're a "reader," you don't need the above.  If you're prepossessed to buy into what's being criticised, you're a lost cause.  I don't honestly believe there are more than a handful who fall between those two points, because fundamentally, from my own experience back in early 1980, most people, regardless of their habits, interests or motives, don't read.  They don't try to learn anything.  It is one of the reasons why I snuffle in laughter whenever I see some youtube video lamenting that people just don't read anymore.  "People" as a body have never read.  Back in the 19th century, before education, literacy was something like 7% (that's not an exact, accurate number, which is why I included the equivocation, "something like"; just take it as a given that the percentage was unquestionably very small).  After education, I'd guess that present day literacy, defined as that percentage of the population interested in reading more than signage, is something like 7%.  Education is wasted on most people.  That's not my opinion. That is a demonstrable fact.

Therefore, the rest of this post will be wasted on many here.  And it's going to take a sharp widdershins turn (that's "left" for those of you uneducated) which won't seem to address anything discussed so far, at least not for a while.  So get out your tl;dr button and pop off.

Since the A.I. "adjustments" that hit the mainstream in late winter of 2023, we have been awash in drivel specifically designed to weaponise the hatred of A.I., fear of it and misinformation about it.  We have been plagued both by companies that want to sell it as the arbiter of our dreams and incomprehensibly ignorant journalists, academics and youtube content creators doing all they can to simplify the tool in the exact way that allows them to say, "See?  It's garbage."  The metrics that anyone might require to understand it, or employ it, are being deliberately kept incomplete in a universal manner that seems almost like a conspiracy... except, instead, it's merely the dogpile mentality that built itself during covid on anti-vaxxing and anti-masking that has seen A.I. as an untapped Teapot Dome of vindictive, insinuative attention-and-money-grabbing.  After centuries of snake oil, the Rapture and the end of the world, land for sale in Florida, communism, the dangers of non-Whites buying property in our neighbourhoods, ADHD, gays, gay marriage, euthanasia, aliens landing, transexuals in bathrooms and what not, at last we have something NEW to scare stupid people with.  The grift trough is full and happy days are here again. It's like when we used to think everyone was going to die of AIDS.

And just like with Napster and pirating (yes, I would absolutely download a car, and the best part would be the owner would never know), two new groups of artistic creators have been thrown on the ropes, forced to confront the reality that their content is so BAD, that a system designed to sweep up all the combined knowledge of their fields and reproduce sludge, is a legitimate threat for them.

Napster didn't kill music, though we were told it absolutely would, and that there'd be no more musicians, and that the music industry would collapse.  What Napster did was expose the rot in an industry that had been force-feeding mediocrity at premium prices. Now we're seeing A.I. produce books that some writers — and this I don't understand — feel threatened by, because a program can turn out thousands of shitty books a month (suffusing the industry's capacity to print books) now threatens their livelihood.  The assumption isn't that after 30 or 40 years of perfecting their craft that they can easily write better than a computer, no; the assumption is that because there's so much "competition," their work must become so obscure that they'll just disappear.

A.I. doesn't write very well.  But it does write well enough that those writers whose profession has relied upon being the one that got the deal, who landed the agent, who wrote the book about the hot political topic at the moment, will find that the publishers won't reward placement when saving costs with an automated alternative.  We don't have to sell nearly so many books if we don't have to pay an author, which is the same logic that lets Walmart destroy its competition by paying as little as possible to as few as possible staff as it can, so long as the store still opens every day.

We forget that publishers are not bastions of human culture.  They've never existed to bring enlightenment, or serve as beacon of knowledge or advancement.  They're brokers, facilitators, intermediaries.  They don't make anything, they don't add anything themselves, they're just there to introduce A to B and get their cut.  To get their cut, they don't give a fuck if B is satisfied or if A gets treated well... so long as A and B shut up and do as they're told, which pretty much describes the writer and the reader in the present age.

The myth of the publisher as a source of "enlightenment" has been marketing from the start, going back four centuries. It was challenged, seriously, as cheap, direct-to-market self-publishing demonstrated that a writer could make just as much money personally selling their own book than they could make with a publisher.  But publishers rallied; they communicated through youtube, they shouted from the rooftops that self-publishing was a way to fail (and it is for most people, just as trying to get published by a publisher is a fail for most people), and they were just starting to get the myth back in place when 2023 happened.  The publishing industry is terrified at the moment, in ways it's never been.  And all I want to do is clap my hands together with glee.

We're not witnessing the end of writing, but the end of an illusion that publishing deserved its legitimacy as a priesthood.  GOD is dead.  And the publishing houses can't decide if they should rush A.I. books into existence, worried that if they themselves do it FIRST, they'll fall flat on their face and lose all credibility, while worried that if someone else does it first and succeeds, the entire industry will fall into that other company's hands and be destroyed.  It's a dilemma no company hopes for, and the sort that only new technology can produce.

And how much will the world suffer if every publisher, everywhere, collapses into ruin?  If every buggy whip manufacturer goes out of existence?  Say it with me, dear Hitchhiker of the Galaxy fans: none at all.

A.I. is a steamroller, and the role that publishers once served, connecting writer to reader, validating quality, managing distribution... those things were hollowed out, automated and abandoned ten years ago in the fight with self-publishing.  And now, like Arthur Dent, they're lying in the mud, squawking about their house, while the bypass is coming through.  Only there's no Ford to come save him (if we can call Arthur's afterwards adventures being "saved").  This Arthur, in this universe, is getting plowed under.  I have my popcorn and I'm ready.

That's their motivation, which I understand.  And likewise, the agenda of those on youtube who just want to grift on the fear, to tell us that the "boss A.I." will be built by 2028 (says the dude with the placard saying the world's coming to an end), whereupon all our jobs will be lost, our lives will be redirected and we will all be made slaves.  I for one welcome my new A.I. overlord, but that's not really the point of this.

The larger point is that it's all irrelevant.  No cultural imprint is being imposed by this grift, no substance that a future generation will make a movie about; the impact of this years-long drivelling rant will one day find itself in the background of whatever passes for theatre/self-made films (also done with A.I) some years from now.  As a joke.  Like A.I., it's not the real world.  It's not what real people care about.  Or ever will.  The grift will move onto how your children are being ruined by the end of educational blockhouses in favour of tap-and-play personal learning (TPPL), driven by the "disaster" of millions of teachers losing their jobs (which they hate) and being unable to properly educate children (which they can't do now).  Schools will again be painted as fallen temples, which will go on until the next non-functional, gutted temple meets its fate when we invent something else that does it better than they were able to do in the 19th century.  Two centuries ago.  Give a moment and think about that, when considering how really well-thought out the original was.

We all have two choices before us as these changes and others come.  Do we want to be the guy in the example above with the power saw, assuming that whatever we're cutting into probably isn't dangerous... or do we want to put down the fantasy that the school system ever gave a fuck about teaching us anything?  Because honestly, our grade-school education never existed to give us what it promised; that was just a grift, designed to pacify critics, while doing the job the 19th century creators intended.  Sorting bodies.  Keeping children out of the factories as a means of limiting the factories exploiting a group too stupid to properly look after themselves.  Brainwashing generation after generation into loving their country, being willing to die for it, and accept the hogslop that same country was going to shove down their throats until the grave.  Education was something that some of our teachers believed in, who tried to give us some, but the entire structure above and around them did everything possible to get in their way on this front.  And eventually succeeded in winning on that front, if the present day education system, which my grandson is due to enter into in less than four months months, is an indication.

If you want to put down that fantasy, then it's up to you to take responsibility for whatever comes next.  Personal responsibility.  Not a responsibility that relies on hopefully finding a magical book that someone else wrote that will tell you all you ever needed to know.  That one book doesn't exist.  There's no splatbook, no rule set, no article, no blog post, no single opinion or clever argument that is going to SNAP! make you a better person or a better dungeon master.  No one person standing behind a stupid contractor is going to keep that pipe from being cut through. Because the contractor won't listen.

Unfortunately, if you want to have the benefit of an education... if you want to know things... you're going to have to do it.

And most importantly of all... if you don't do it... there are no penalties awaiting you, except the rare chance you might blow yourself up.  IF you want to be ignorant, the world will line up and help you.  It won't get in the way of that choice, if you make it.  It's what the world wants of you.  Ignorantly to get up, ignorantly to go to your job, ignorantly to accept the pay you're given as reasonable, ignorantly to accept what your players tell you at your D&D table, ignorantly to not know how to describe things in your own D&D world.

That is what the world has wanted for you from the very start.  No matter what lies it told you.

Is that what you want?  Because the alternative... ah, the alternative: learning something on your own.  It sucks.  At least, in terms of how much thankless work you'll have to do, and the numbers of others who won't care, who will in fact disparage you for trying, who won't think you're right despite your being able to prove you are, who won't respect you for knowing things... and will tell you, repeatedly, "you think too much."

It's your choice.  Do what you will.

Corporate Marketing Game Culture

The original tabletop role-playing game.

Watching this video (it really isn't worth the effort), I was struck by how little I recognise now about present-day D&D.  This isn't relevant to game play or my opinions about the present state of the game, merely the acknowledgement that there's been enough change that even if I were to sit down at a table nowadays, I'd probably have to be retaught the game from scratch.

This is different from the way I felt watching videos just pre-covid.  Not that much that was in those videos wasn't obscure or ridiculous-sounding (I'm old, and therefore still reeling from the concept that tieflings ever became a "thing"), but it more or less sounded thereabouts to D&D.  Not so much now.  In the video linked, the content maker pats himself on the back for providing "species traits" — that is, "abilities," when D&D used a human-spoken language rather that corporatese — to each of the races that the "new" version of the "new" version has gutted the individualism of humanoid species in favour of a "same humanoid statblock."  Yeah.  Woke meets fascism, please stamp hands here.

It strikes me funny that players of two years ago are already finding themselves wallowing in a re-envisionment of the game that has less to do with a new edition and more to do with rando-marketing changes that seek to appeal the loudest voice in the crowd about whatever rankles them most this month.  I recognised none of the "species traits" imposed by the content maker.  Oh, I can kinda, sorta, mostly figure out what they were called once, or might have been in ancient times, but the words themselves are emblematic of the recontextualising of skill-sets to the point where there's just no way to guess the thing without being on the inside.  And since this official approach is ongoing, month by month, players in 2023 should find themselves scratching their heads by 2028.

The comments below the video are rich with people who have decided to ignore the new rules.  They've gone back to a book that makes sense, they trash the grey soup the new generic template has created, they describe about thirty different ways to personally solve the problem for themselves.  Exactly what the company doesn't want.  The point being, however, is that the new player, picking up D&D today, doesn't have any of this baggage to carry.  They'll have no knowledge of the old way of doing things, so they'll just embrace the new.  And thus the rift begins.

Now, I've been hearing lately that I'm "provocative"... that my use of language, even now, when I'm not ranting, might still alienate new readers.  That "woke/fascism" thing, there.  I refer to things with clear sarcasm, meaning that some of my readers might not wish to engage with what I say.  Worse, I often post a link to a video and then fail to summarise it.  My bad.

I used to work for a massive telecom monalith, an entrenched utility, with infinite security with regards to it's placement in the national market; essentially, the sort of entity that half the country has to buy product from because that's the only available product.  I'm on the internet now by their grace.  If the reader's curious about what a company like that is like, imagine a villain in a Philip K. Dick novel.

I remember getting an email one afternoon that ran pretty much,

"Letting you know that Jenny Marsden has been sunsetted. Her work is being reassigned."

This turned out to be one of those 15-minute things.  No one knew what Jenny had done.  Obviously something really wrong.  Security shows up, time given to pack desk, gone.  Yet unquestionably the cleanest place I've ever worked, one of the best paid, time unhesitatingly given for stress-related issues if one asked.  When my mother passed and I needed a week, it was granted without hesitation, and by that afternoon a $200 basket of niceties, with flowers, arrived for me to take home.  So one has to wonder just a bit how bad evil really is.

As an aside, Hasbro, the corporate-entity struggling to get by, is typically seen as a big company.  It has assets of some 6.34 billion.  The company I speak of, that I worked for, is nine times as big, 58 billion. I'm well aware of what it's like to live and be in a culture that's eternally hedged, sanded down and laced with apologies, that they might not wish to feel abrasive to people who are having a policy shoved down their throats.  I was three rungs down the ladder from the company's CEO; two below the vice-president, whom I soooooo enjoyed the company of about once a week (sarcasm), thankfully on video phone, as he was 2,000 miles away.  Meetings were an interpretive joke, where everyone spoke in a sort of mixed-bag of positive, non-rational rhetoric, straight-faced, as though this is how they'd been taught to speak in grade school.  Sometimes, I would marvel at the skill of it; but I would worry over how these people spoke to their kids.  I mean, what does it feel like to be "outsourced" to summer camp... er, "seasonal transition for junior stakeholders."

This is what a lot of this D&D jargon sounds like to me these days.  I know, I know, my voice, calm or heated, is unfiltered.  I don't make my readers comfortable, I don't sanitise my positions or concern myself about those I might repel.  Many, unquestionably, instinctively flinch at my charged words, while my sarcasm registers as hostile.  The problem is that people don't understand what I'm saying; the problem is I'm saying it so brutally that the immediate response is that I must be attacking something about the reader, personally, specifically, related probably to whether or not they're a good person.

The "sunsetted" email is a perfect example of the alternative.  Don't say fired, it's upsetting.  That VP used to avoid — spasmodically, I'd call it — ever using the word "bad."  Things were either good or not good.  As though the use of the word "good" counteracted the need to use the attendant "not" whenever things weren't working out as planned.  But a sunset... well, that's nice, isn't it.  Jenny went into the sunset.  Compare to that my grief and the company's compassion.  I can see my immediate boss reaching for his cell, punching the button that brings up the caterer in my city (again, he was also 2,000 miles away, though he'd visit occasionally), making an order for the "grief package" and hanging up, job well done.  No one does soft, smooth, compassionate, flower-sending like a soulless evil corporation.  I have personal experience with that.

When we loop this back to present-day D&D, the connection isn't forced at all.  Just as the illusion of fairness, progress or unity pervades the office environment with saccharine finesse, this hobby, where players used to argue over saving throws and now argue of terminology that's been rewritten into PR-safe think and talk, has been remade in Hasbro's corporate image.  The old guard that used to direct the game — when the leaders of the D&D division were actual DMs and players — have been replaced with number counters concerned about churn and marketing analysis.  They're disassociated from anything to do with the game, and are renaming and redesigning it according to surveys, brand strategists, messaging architects and identity leads.  And the "speak" associated with the game has deeply reflected that now — so much so that when the content maker above uses the language himself, he does so unflinchingly, without any self-consciousness, unable to guess at how ridiculous he sounds to an old-school player or, more importantly, those who don't play D&D at all.

And this, of course, has led into another practice that we should consider most carefully.

As a client of Patreon, I make them money by encouraging people to support me and my efforts to bring clarity and improvement to D&D, both as a game and a cultural fixture.  Patreon, of course, sees me as a "cow."  It is my role, as they see it, to walk out into the field every day and eat the grass, which also happens to be green.  You, dear reader, are the grass.  Then, having consumed enough of you, my role is to return to the barn and allow myself to be milked; this changes nothing about my physiology, so I can surrender the milk at little suffrage to myself.  Which is why cows don't kick up a fuss.

Youtube uses the same principle, so do most service providers, who count upon content makers to produce product (eating grass) while making content that provides income (milk), while the lion's share of the proceeds goes to the company, not the milk-producer.  With Patreon, I at least get to keep most of the grass in my belly, while with Youtube, I don't even get a lot of that.  But enough with the metaphor, let's make the point.

I don't work for Patreon... but because it relies on me, and how much I can make for them, they have tended in the last few years to push me to make more milk for them.  As I said a few posts ago, they urge me constantly to sell product, because they make more money from me on products I sell through their system than they do on donations I receive.

Recently, however — and this doesn't just apply to Patreon, but to many platforms — they've begun to seek me not as a client or a person to provide service for, but as an employee.  For example, I received this email a few days ago:

RSVP for the fireside chat,

Don't forget to join in on Tuesday, May 20 (12:00-1:00 p.m. ET // 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT) for a fireside chat with Eric Han, VP of Trust & Safety. You'll hear about some proposed policy developments for this quarter and have a chance to participate in a Q&A.

It's 10:11 AM as I write this, and I'm in Mountain Time, so the chat is going on while I write this. I'm a terrible employee.  When I was at Telus, I had to attend something like this every six weeks.  But I don't work for Patreon.  They don't pay me.  They provide me a platform but they don't pay me — you, Dear Reader, do.  But you can see the corporate speak plain as day. There's no fireside here. This isn't a chat. I'm not joining anybody, I'm being asked to listen to a vice-president I don't work for tell me policy I have no part in setting, and it's being framed in a way that's intended to frighten me.  "Trust and Safety."  Those are loaded words, no less so than any I've used in this post, including woke and fascism, and deliberately crafted words to make me think that if I don't attend this meeting designed to help someone else's business, I'll be in danger.

Patreon might have a quarter they worry about, but I don't.  I have no questions.  They have no answers I'm interested in.  And just to be clear, for those readers who have been programmed to equate the word "answers" with the dictionary definition of that word, in corporatese answers are "words that sound conclusive and are designed to placate you as you bend over this table while we unbuckle our belt."  Many of you here probably don't know that.  I thought I might be helpful in translating that for you.  It's a word they often use in the process of sunsetting you.

For those who think I should protest, therefore, and close down my Patreon account, oh, how naive of you all to think there's a space left where this isn't the norm.  You're watching it in real time ruin your D&D game, and the total resistence is negligible.  Because the approach, mask slipping an all, works.  Because, it's estimated, 35% of the population lacks an inner monologue — though that's a simplification, it has a lot to do with the variability of a monologue rather than the total lack of thought; all it really means is that the "doubt" response in many is compromised — there's a good chance that 1 in 3 of your audience is going to buy the language hook, line and sinker.  In essence, we're speaking of a lack of radar.  On this same principle, anything I write in a blog post is going to bang right into that 1 in 3 demographic, which won't understand the connections I make from paragraph to paragraph, will feel my shifts in subject are "jarring" or "abrupt," will respond to words like "woke" and "fascist" emotionally and not intellectually, won't get sarcasm (because what is sarcasm) and will feel that I'm just a bad, bad person because I didn't say we were going to have a fireside chat by the sunset, with a nice basket of goodies on the table.

A writer has to make choices.  We can go for the sure thing, the 1 in 3 that's out there, has disposable income and is enormously gormless, or we can speak to the other 2 in 3 who can't agree on a fucking thing, including how wide your stance should be while taking off your belt.  Like I said, choices.  You can't please everyone all the time.  But you can please that 1 in 3 all the time.  Which is what all this corporatese is designed to do.