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.