Quite often, some will describe writing as a craft, including my writing, and when it's used that way I'll let it stand. However, I tend to see "craft" as the composition of a physical article, such as a chair or a garment, in the fashion of repeating the creation of a thing to the point where high competence is achieved. Again, this can certainly describe writing, especially with any content where the thing being communicated is more or less the same. One monster in the wiki is described pretty much like any other, as is any given spell, place, sage ability or whatever. The "craft" is making the subject material clear, not in necessarily communicating something unique.
In a larger sense, I'm much more interested in design, the making of original things for a purpose, than in these first two. Design can incorporate craftsmanship; it unquestionably can and ought to relate to aesthetic. But with things such as the game campaign's creation through text, or the fabrication of this specific post in the making, the joy is in building a structure that conveys first one point, then builds upon that point with the next, and so on, until the overall design becomes evident.
Perhaps the two most destructive sentiments attached to the creation of art, craft or design are the simplifications expressed by, "If you don't succeed, try, try again..." and "We learn from our mistakes." The latter has led to an expression that particularly annoys, "I need to make more mistakes," as though the making of mistakes automatically teaches, or the even more egregious, "I've reached this point because I've made enough mistakes," which likewise tries to commodify effort as though the only thing we need do more of is fuck up.
These phrases trivialise what happens in the creative process and — as I've witnessed — tend to undermine a creator's resolve when it turns out that repeatedly trying something fails to magically create a positive result, while at the same time the individual fails to learn anything from their mistakes. Trying and failing are not a recipe for success. Unfortunately, however, the model for success does not fit easily into a framed wall plaque. Thankfully, education is not limited to 10 word sayings, while we have infinite time and space with which to sketch the problem.
Let us begin with the notion that we've tried, failed, made a mistake, and yet we're prepared to press on. Our first effort must be to examine what we've done, not what we want to do. This is often missed or forgotten, as the desire to reach the goal seems to dictate that the first action is to get up, forget what we've done and move forward. In fact, it's often framed that we should put the failure entirely out of our mind, as though the failure itself is the enemy, and not the inadequacy in ourselves that it represents. We shouldn't, we're told, admit to inadequacy; surely, if a failure occurred, it wasn't us. It was the alignment of the planets, the shape of the earth we stand on, the temperature of the air... anything conveniently blamed outside the framework of our responsibility.
If we throw a ball at a fence and wish to hit a small spot 90 feet away, then presumably with enough effort we'll eventually hit the place wished. The goal, however, is not to hit the place once, or occasionally, but to hit it precisely when we mean to hit it, every time. At first, it's generally assumed this has to do with our eye and our aim — but in fact it also has much to do with our fingers on the ball, our stance, the way we move when throwing and the clarity of our thinking... things which can't be resolved through merely hoping our aim will improve by repeating the action endlessly. It's often because there's no one around to kick the thrower's feet further apart by a few inches, or straighten the thrower's body, or change the fingering on the ball, that many would-be pitchers simply cannot comprehend why those thousands of hours throwing a ball at a fence never amounted to anything. They suppose, "Well, I guess some people have it, and I don't." While, in fact, a proper coach might have changed everything.
The point being made is that rather than assume we know "how" to do a thing, and that the failure is in our lack of effort or practice, we should stop and examine a problem from all angles. In role-playing, it's often taken for granted that much of one's success depends on the game being played. But from experience, I can state with experience that while I consider 1st edition D&D to be superior to 5th edition, it's quite possible to be a consistently terrible dungeon master in both, such that the edition really doesn't matter in terms of the game's design. This is very last thing that matters, in fact, since most of what happens at a table between the adjudicator and player has little to do with the rules as compared to the manner in which information is communicated, the temperament of the adjudicator, the attitude of the player and the reasons for which all participants are there. The first thing to be addressed as a dungeon master is not, "Am I running the right version, genre or system?" but "Why am I acting as a dungeon master?"
Yet obviously the first question receives all the attention. It is easier to answer — we merely repeat what we've been told by those who are supposedly "in the know," whom we respect (again, a respect whose justification we should question), allowing us to assign "awareness" of the best game to the testimonial of another, rather than ourselves. This outward looking assignment of truths, however, is nothing short of disasterous for the system runner; they don't really know why, from experience, that it's a better system and they don't really know why the respected individual defended it (and there can't be many reasons for this). But worst of all, they don't know what they personally want to achieve. It's more or less the assumption that, like a car, once I turn on the key and get it started, everything else is a matter of respecting the dangers involved, following the rules and not hitting other things too often... as that gets awfully expensive.
Operating a car, however, is comparatively simple with regards to basic rules and risk management. Moreover, there's a clear, ever-present motivation to pay a great deal of attention to what one's doing, understanding that failing to pay attention carries with it the factor of having no attention left to pay. The consequences of running as a DM are nowhere near as dire.
"Failure" is inevitably baked into the expectation players have of a DM, as well as what we tend to expect of ourselves. We know that whatever the system might be, it's extraordinarily complex. Most don't want to run it, so that even "trying" is seen as a conquest of sorts. It's sort of like being told to drive a car over two eight-inch wide boards at 10 km two feet above the ground. Lack of success is more or less guaranteed, so that the willingness to perform the stunt becomes all that matters.
Note that in the example, the damage sustained from failure is purposefully minimised. A slip off a board two feet above the ground is hardly going to seriously damage the vehicle, which serves to express how little we need to care when our game chokes. "Oh well," we can say, "No big deal, do a little better next time, practice makes perfect, etcetera." Except of course practice in itself makes nothing, since practice without intent or self-awareness only calcifies the manner in which we make mistakes. In fact, repeated bad DMing in an atmosphere without consequence only makes a DM worse, given our propensity to feel comfortable once we're assured that we're doing "well enough."
It's for this reason that we can't count on our players to improve our play. Most either resort to a passive-stance, simply dropping the campaign if it fails their needs, or tolerating endlessly our mediocrity for social or purposeful activity on a given night. Pressing a player to criticise forces them into a place of responsibility for our actions they don't want. At the same time, after months and perhaps years of complacency, having a new character enter our campaign who is willing to criticise becomes the last thing we would want; we were doing fine, weren't we? Thus we can see how DM-player relations calcify mistakes rather than encouraging any learning from them. It is only when the DM cannot get players, or has players consistently drop out of campaigns to where they fold and fail with uncomfortable frequency, that a DM is pushed into a place where they have to confront that second question in the above, "Why do I want to do this?"
"Learning from our mistakes" is an intellectual process that defies repetition or resolve. We can resolve to hit a fence with a ball, but we can't force ourself to do it precisely. We must set aside the goal and look clearly at the problem: why did this failure occur? That is the first rule of design. Deconstruct the previous attempt, look at all the parts, test each, learn what each thing is doing and then adjust or replace the part that fails to produce the desired effect. This is very much what we do not do when our game world fails. Must likely, we rush out to obtain some other sort of system, assuming this is the problem. Or we choose to adopt another individual's mechanics within our system of choice — such as a module or a campaign, while retaining no understanding of the errors or mistakes made by that individual's design. These patterns of behaviour follow modern consumerism. This car's a lemon? It's a Ford? Don't buy another Ford. Surely, it's a bad car company, unlike all the others that don't produce lemons. Our bank ignores us? Move our accounts. This neighbourhood doesn't suit? Move. Don't like the couch? Buy another. Pay no attention to the universality of car designs at a certain price point, or the universal motives of a bank, or the consistent quality of property occupation at our income, or the fundamental cheapness of every couch at such-and-such a price. Make a cosmetic change, hope for the best.
The proper mindset as a dungeon master is that of the individual who chooses to "rough it" by wresting themselves from the contrivances of civilisation and learning self-reliance. That is, the willingness to cut our own timber, saw our own lumber, use tools to fashion the chair from scratch, upholstering it ourselves until we have the "perfect" chair that would be uncomfortable for anyone else but suits our needs precisely. This is more than a lot of work — it's a mindset that craves work, that craves a level of suitability that won't permit tolerance of inadequacy. It's a rare mindset... one not cultivated by the consumerist culture in which we live, as the foregoing examples describe. It is a mindset that one is not born with, but is obtained through observing others with the trait. In my case, it came from my father, who live in an outback region of a minimally-civilised frigid climate, who grew up making his own fun — there being none to purchase — who thence learned to build oil derricks from scratch and eventually applied that ability to the construction of his own cabin, which I witnessed as a child and grasped was possible, even if that wasn't my peculiar choice for fun. Watching someone else do an "impossible" thing, however, encourages a belief that there is possibility in ourselves, once we can wrest ourselves away from the assumption that if we haven't got what we want, we just haven't yet found the store where they sell it.
My own efforts with this blog and elsewhere contribute to this feeling in various readers. Though they don't know me, they don't necessarily understand me, they accept that I have my demons and sense that the things I do can be done by themselves. The message sent is that personal achievement breeds — in a particular few — a desire to experience personal achievement. This is aided in that many of us, for either long or brief periods, have already witnessed someone else in our lives who sacrificed time and convenience to make something of their own accord, for their own purposes, though they could have just gone out and bought something that was nearly the same.
Many, however, eschew this notion entirely. Perhaps they were required at some point to make a birdhouse or fix their own bicycle, only to despise the process. Perhaps they were pushed into participation activities like sports or games by their parents, only to have coaches insist they hold a ball in such a way or swing a bat just so, finding that they hated the criticism, the expectation, the demand on their time and the sense that they would rather just be in front of something else they'd enjoy more. For such persons, "success" always means something that can be found on Amazon and shipped to one's door in 48 hours. And any success that can't be so shipped isn't worth having.
My memories of "organised" activities, from cubs to scouts to church events to sports to school activities and drama, with all the fluidity of abuse that those entailed, it does not surprise me that many people simply aren't "enlightened" by such opportunities. Most tend to be run by taciturn, inflexible persons with an agenda that precludes empathy or patience, particularly those where competition is involved. I did not find "team" sports to be particularly "team" focused... but then I grew up in a very different time, when an adult coach screaming at a small child unrestrained was not only commonplace, but encouraged as a form of encouragement. The balance of abuse no doubt drove many who might have gotten something positive from such far away from "do-it-yourself" fun. I found competitive running and writing provided sufficient isolation to enable me to become interested in the process and not the achievement, and thus escaped the crushing of my ego that was so fervently attempted by so many well-meaning institutions.
I have no doubt that many egos did not thrive so well as mine.
The various parts of D&D, and indeed any activity, ought to be posititively structured to deviate from such approaches. The goals are deceptively simple. Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time. Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect. Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design. Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.
To comprehend the design requires, as said before, deconstruction. Looking at each premise in turn, and starting with the first sentence, we must puzzle out what "series" means with repect to "events"; what "events" are fundamentally; what does it mean to "engage" with these events. What is "verisimilitude"? How do we define "place" with regards to the game's rules, and what meaning of "time" are we applying here? Are we speaking of game time, or are we speaking of the "modified historical timeframe" of the events.
All of these things have been discussed in this blog, but it becomes very easy to get our of our depth. "Series" dictates a rational narrative based upon cause-and-effect, where the players' actions, and not the inventiveness of the DM, dictates the course of what happens next, so that the players may control the thread of their game play in a manner similar to which we control our real-life presence — that is, in the way that we choose to leave our house, buy a ticket for Bermuda, interact with the people there, buy things of our own accord, swim in the sea, take risks that we can see as risks prior to taking them, all without a sense that our actions are being unduly influenced in a manner that isn't also being dictated to everyone else around us. When the DM decides that as the player characters, the things that specifically happen to us are not that which might happen to anyone else in the campaign — such as an expositional NPC coming forth to give us, and only us, the information that only we need, specifically because we are the players, then we are not speaking of cause-and-effect, but influence-and-response, where our actions are dictated by the DM's choice to act against or for us, and not by our choice to decide what matters to use in a free and fair indifferent game world.
Likewise, "events" are definable moments in a campaign that ought to occur spontaneously, due to the player's actions, not as prescribed set-pieces similar to a midway funhouse, where the players are prescribed to enter at this point, prescribed to experience a set of curated events, before being allowed to leave by the designated exit with the pre-designated goal having been achieved. Desirably, events should be culminations of sequences, some random, some dictated by player choice, where a fluid and uncertain consequence may or may not arise, such as what we might expect in a sports event, where the certainty of success does not exist, where the winner is not known in advance, and where ultimately any odd event may occur that adjusts or shifts the outcome in a manner that neither the players nor the DM had reason to expect. There are limitations for achieving this in a table-top RPG, but the possibilities far exceed that in a video game or a standard module, though it requires a considerable hands-off approach from the DM, a willingness to allow the players to fail, a recognition that consequence and is not a bad thing in and of itself in a game atmosphere, and the lack of presumption that the DM exists as a shield to protect players from their own emotional states.
Thus we may continue with this sort of deconstruction at considerable length. Each point in the last paragraph can be further examined within its constituent parts, and ought to be, excitedly, by the would-be DM. A self-driven DM should pause to consider what a "culmination" is, or "curation," or "consequence," any of which could be another lengthy paragraph to follow this. My willingness to deconstruct each of these things in turn, ad nauseum, descends from my willingness to do it only to myself beginning with when I first ran the game, when they were less clear to me but no less important where it came to the question, "What am I trying to achieve as a dungeon master."
There are no straightforward answers. There are no answers that are sufficient for the rest of our lives. My revisitation to any point intellectually never fails to derive some aspect or condition of the game's structure or value that I hadn't previously considered, because the game's potential for examination parallels that of understanding the human being itself, how it is formed, how it relates, how it shifts its behaviour in response to new knowledge, what motivates it and so on. D&D is not a game of hit points and spells and monsters. Those things are merely the house that D&D lives in. I live in my house while giving very little consideration to the floors, the walls, the windows or the manner in which the refridgerator runs (except, of course, when it doesn't). Most of the time I am concerned with what I'm doing in my house, not the house itself. I don't care so much about what a spell does, but that it is rigidly defined and cannot be used to exempt the player from the fundamentals of play — that it's a tool the player uses, not a get-out-of-jail free card the player employs in order that they don't need to play. Much of my DM-player contentions have revolved around this particular viewpoint: that I expect the player to succeed as a responsive human being, whereas the player wishes to succeed as a consumer who has bought an item that fixes their problem. Enforcing the consequences of viewing a competitive activity from the latter point of view had produced enormous volatility and resistance over the years; and I've found, with such people, no degree of precision in language can dissuade from the seeking a particular Holy Grail that will let them "win without trying."
For some players, this seems to be the only point in their participating.
That is not a system problem, or a genre problem, nor a DM failing, it is a person problem. It is the case of an individual who, like the footballer who strives to injure opposing players, or the blackjack player cheating in a casino, needs to be asked to leave. This isn't personal. It is dismissive of a certain person who has clearly been raised incorrectly. There are certain individuals who consistently act in bad faith, sabotage group dynamics or refuse to engage with any sense of responsibility or self-awareness. More importantly, we all have some degree of this behaviour, as we've all, to some extent, been raised badly. This isn't a question of separating out these good people from these bad people. The question at hand is not can we fix them, however, but can we encourage them to play well with others, or is it a case where we're spending more time handling such persons than we able to give to the game itself?
It is for these persons that we need rules. Most, however, are more than willing to accept that it would make no sense for a character to use a two-handed sword and a shield at the same time. Their approach to the game carries a recognition that their survival depends on their choices, not their effective game-awarded power.
Extrapolating from this, we can see the difference between those who view the game as a challenge to be overcome, at no cost to their own ego, and those who view the game as representative of their value as a human being. It is in these dichotomies that we come to understand the tremendous capacity of the game to represent not just actions, not just rewards, not just an experience that allows the suspension of disbelief, but the whole human condition slathered on top in a way that can't be achieved through a video game or story. No one at the table is "controlled," even as much as they might be in sports. In sports, where we stand with respect to others, how we're permitted to hit or kick or throw the ball, or where we're allowed to land, or what boundaries we're allowed to pass between, are rigorously designed to limit freedom of action. We're allowed to win, but that win is prescribed by the shape and limitations of the competitive space. If a player chooses to inordinately assign too much emotion to their winning a match, if they emotionally step out of the "construct" expected of the player, then they are sent from the field, and potentially the game and the sport entirely.
D&D has none of this. The boundaries are utterly fluid. Actions are not limited by a pre-set win condition. Emotional excitement beyond the pale is, to some degree, encouraged. As in sports, players argue, they engage vociferously, they shout and feel the intensity of a near win or a near loss just as keenly; but they are also able to lie, discard the competitive, pursue alternative life actions, conspire, investigate and even gloat without consequence. If a player were to survive a combat, stand up and shout at the DM, "In your face, asshole!"... that would be entirely keeping with the game culture, even viewed with laughter and memorability, whereas in a tennis match it would get the player tossed.
A working model of the game is achieved through attitude, approach, a focus on design elements that reward thinking and disregard convenience, an understanding of what we're trying to achieve and the awareness that mistakes — those things that disregard the game's function — can't be fixed without first understanding what those mistakes are. It's in this that the game wallows and fails and increasingly breaks across the main of tables where it is played, from a refusal to (a) accept that the game's design is incapable of managing a human problem this complex; and (b) accept responsibility for adjusting ourselves to that need.
We cannot learn from mistakes if we think just making the mistake is all we need to do.
Continued
Okay, so...this is an excellent post. It is also a looong post. I'd get through a third of it, want to comment, then have to read another third, want to comment, then had to continue reading starting to consider "are we meandering here?" But it's all good...I really have no quibbles at all with the content.
ReplyDeleteDescribing writing or DMing or, well, ANY activity as "craft" is a good approach. Back when I was still into the acting thing, having a "craft" mindset (as opposed to an "art" mindset) immensely improved my ability. I'm finding it the same with adventure design these days...it's not about doing something "artistic" (new, creative, original), it's about doing something COMPETENTLY and CONSISTENTLY. "Consistent competence" is probably a good way to describe what it is the craftsman is trying to achieve.
And yeah, the thing about 'making mistakes' is a great point. We have so many of these pithy, short-hand phrases that people throw around as "tips" but that, lacking the underlying context, are nearly worthless...or, worse, can lead people down the path to ruin. I'd say those stupid "Old School Primer" rules are exactly an example of this: taking pithy little phrases and trying to systematize them, creating a paradigm founded on ignorance. Which leads to (duh) flawed and/or terrible results.
And you are also so right about how little training MOST of us have in the kind of ego-building (what once might have been called "character building") examples of people rolling-up-their-sleeves and getting down to the brass tacks of hard work. The Amazon economy is the natural evolution of a society that has been trying to create more and more ease and convenience for ourselves. Not that I want to grow my own food or anything! But we do (and know how to do) so much LESS than we COULD. The presence of Home Depot and YouTube videos mean it's easier than ever to build your own birdhouse (for example)...and yet most of us won't even do THAT. How can we hope to master something as complex as potentiality that exists in fantasy roleplaying?
There IS a person problem here...but it applies to ALL of us (well, maybe not YOU, Alexis...). I can be dismissive of the person who was "raised incorrectly," but I myself wasn't raised to be a DM...as a craft, D&D is still in its infancy of being understood. All any of us can do, I think, is work on ourselves, improve our own game, use our mistakes as the starting points for examination and self-reflection as we strive for that consistent competence. If I don't present my game properly to people who come to my table, how can I have expectations of them playing correctly? That presentation falls under MY responsibility...especially for a game that is poorly explained and poorly understood by the masses.
Anyway. Great post.