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.
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.
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.
*sigh*
ReplyDeleteYes. To all this.
Please accept my congratulations on 4,000 posts, Alexis. I hope I speak for a number of us when I say that for as long as you write, I'll be here to read and reread with abandon.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to the subject at hand, reading: I and my game have certainly profited by reading extensively in nonfiction as I've come to adopt a historical game world over the last few years. There's just so much to KNOW about the world, in different eras and different countries of the past. I appreciate your reminder to reach back into the world of fiction more frequently. I've read the books listed in the middle of the post, but I'd never heard of the Forster or Stendhal ones.
Joey Bennet, if you're reading this, I think nonfiction could be just as useful as fiction for getting a handle on what NPCs ought to be doing and thinking, and how you can present such info to the players in a naturalistic way. I, too, struggle with off-the-cuff descriptions ... However, slooooowly but surely, as Alexis says here, load more and more context into my brain has given me ready-made chunks of "the game world" to fall back on in the large. Even though I may fumble the moment-to-moment transmission to the players, if my head is teeming with enough facts, something I've read about sumptuary laws, or religious processions, or civil wars, or battle formations, will reliably pop up to let me add depth to the world.
Training yourself to instinctively activate that "popping up" feeling of having game world info at-hand in your head is, admittedly, harder. I can recommend to you some habits/tools from intensive memorization practice that could help you there -- the kind of thing that will train your working memory and recall. Might be useful, caveat emptor, it's at least helped me cope with a deluge of historical facts. Feel free to contact me (maxwelljoslyn@gmail.com) or ask further here (if Alexis doesn't mind.)
Congratulations on 4000. A crowning milestone!
ReplyDeleteThe question naturally following from this is "What do I read?" (specifically to improve the baseline level of self-education required to be able to DM well). There is clearly a huge quantity of irrelevant or downright anti-helpful material out there, as you referenced. Obviously there is much more required than the dozen or so titles mentioned in this post. What would you recommend as 'course of study'?
ReplyDeleteIt would be my hope that such a collection of works or topics would be something that a newer DM would be able to find from a reliable, trusted source, so that they could learn from the experience gained by those who have gone before rather than wasting much of their time on unnecessary mistakes.
Or is that entire concept obviated by the ability to get highly precise information from generative AI, especially since the absolute accuracy of most of it does not matter. In either scenario, one must, of course, put in the work themselves to actually read and learn the material.
Maxwell, my thanks to you as well for the advice and offer. I think that with Alexis' latest post I may have the path forward I have been searching for, but if that fails to yield the results I am seeking I'll remember you as another good source to whom I can reach out.
I have come to the conclusion that it's not the specific things I read that made a difference in my ability to comprehend or to create, but just the fact that I read. If you cannot go to a random shelf, open a book, and decide for yourself if it should be read, then you should just read everything until you acquire this ability. Any librarian or bookseller can lead you to the shelf where you ought to start at. Just say, "I want to learn how to like reading, I'd like a shelf where I can start."
ReplyDeleteIf you never read as a child, I suggest you start in the children's section. As a former parent and now a grandparent, I can attest that I've read "Green Eggs and Ham" more often than any other book in existence.
Then that is where I suppose we have differing experiences, as I do love to read and to learn. As a youth and teen I spent hours in the library and drove my parents to distraction with constantly reading instead of taking care of other, less desirable activities. I still read a fair bit, and am currently also studying six languages because I find linguistics fascinating. I do not claim to be as well-read as you clearly are, but I do not find the assessment that I don't have a reasonably strong foundation in self-education, general literacy, and desire and/or willingness to put in the effort to learn to be a plausibly accurate explanation for why I am not yet able to process the information in my brain requisite for running the type of game that you do and that I want to.
ReplyDeleteIf you have this strong foundation in self-education, general literacy and desire and willingness to put in the effort to read, how is it you need me to tell you how?
ReplyDelete