The Unseen Game

Let me interrupt this series on the White Box set to address this answer from Blaine. Thank you Blaine. It convinced me a third option is needed. It isn't enough for the DM to cease being the agency for the players, if the players aren't educated on what to do with that agency. If they're "incompetent," it stands to reason that it's every participant's responsibility — player and DM both  — to build competence.

What's wanted to offer an education of structure without prescription. Suppose we take a course in history. We lay out the framework of the period, the key events, figures, the forces that shaped it, providing the chronological tools needed to interpret these things: chronology, causation, bias, historiography (how what we know came to be). That's structure. But we don't tell the students what they should think about the specific event, even if we know what we think. We withhold that. Instead, we assign readings from different historians and ask the students to write essays comparing those interpretations and defending their own. The structure ensures the students understand the "building blocks" of the period; but how the students organise those blocks, that's where their competence takes root.

Putting this guided-autonomy into a D&D style concrete example, imagine that we've told the party that there's a border town at the edge of a marsh. In a structure-without-prescription game, we describe what's there, not what to do about it. We say,

The town of Cothen sits where a trade road meets the river; flatboats come upriver from the north and farmers bring grain from the lowlands and fruit from the hills, which is loaded onto the flatboats for shipment down river to the sea. Of late, however there have been less flatboats that are arriving because they're being seized by smugglers and bandits after they've left Cothen, full. Now the goods are stacking up at the warehouses, while recent rains have begun to flood some of docks adjacent to the river, actually spoiling food that can never now be carted away. The local reeve has posted much of this information, with names of various merchants who are desperate for some kind of help, but what's to be done isn't specified.

Off-hand, I know a film from 1987 that gives the answer to this conundrum, and I have a digital copy of it. I could easily cut a snippet from the film and put it on youtube, but it would be taken down almost instantly so I'll provide the transcript instead (no, I won't tell the film, but if you've seen it, you'll know from the name:

Brantley: {picking up phone} Um, hello.

Voice: Tucker! Where the hell have you been, huh? We got a problem in mid-west distribution! What are you going to do about it?

Brantley: {uncertainly} What's the... what's the problem?

Voice: I can't anybody's approval for the extra two trucks. Tucker, what are you gonna do about it?

Brantley: Uh, look... what does a boxcar cost?

That's actually enough.

There will be some who can't get it from this — I don't know why, it seems pretty obvious to me; I invented the problem and then, after about twenty seconds thought, reached back into a movie released 38 year ago and remembered from that how a similar problem was solved. No boats? Got any wagons?

But the chances are, players won't grasp this solution, because they don't think as problem solvers. They think as a bunch of people used to being told what to do. They need an NPC to come forward and say, "Hey, I've been telling the people in this town for months that they need wagons," before they'll get it. And that's not what we want.

Without the prompt, they'll hear about Cothen's problems and think, "What can I do about it?"  That is as far as they'll get. We might suppose they say, "It's not my problem," but they know that because we've outlined it for the, it sort of is, and that we expect them to solve it. That's how they've been trained. In reality, they'll stop thinking, turning over the Cothen thing in their heads and coming up with absolutely nothing. It's easy for us to call it stupidity or a lack of imagination, but in fact it's a miscalibrated sense of relevance. They only know those pieces on the board that they can see. We didn't mention wagons in our description; we didn't discuss the route from Cothen at all except that the river is used. And most people assume that if a thing has always been done in a particular way (the boats carry the stuff away), then that's the only way it can be done. It's not a lack of out-of-the-box thinking; it's the assumption that, despite being told there's a whole game world that surround this, no "out-of-the-box" exists. "If it did, the DM would have told us about it."

Think of it as a "domestication" of the player's thinking. The players are accustomed to the DM's rulership in the same way that animals are accustomed to fencing, corrals, shed, food in bins, salt in licks, barns as shelters. For the player there is no "world out there," there's the world that they've been told about as a series of clues they're to solve. Imagine that we're asking them to solve a crossword puzzle where they can add boxes to the original display... and then offer them rewards for adding as many boxes as possible. Very soon they find themselves at a loss. A crossword puzzle may be hard, but at least we know what's expected. "If I invent boxes, I have to invent words, and then clues for those words... sorry, I just don't know how to do that."

When I was a boy, my family would spend long weekends at the cabin where my parents refused to allow a television, or to pay long-distance bills on the phone to speak with friends. The phone was for emergencies, period. Obviously, we spent a lot of time playing boardgames, cards, horseshoes, lawn darts... whatever we could do in 1974 to keep from being bored out of our minds. The worst days, of course, were the rainy ones. Our beach, a bit stony, was just 300 yards away, so on a hot day we could swim or on a dry day we could fish or walk in the woods picking berries. But when it rained, which it would sometimes do all weekend, or a whole week while we vacationed there for two weeks in the summer, there was nothing but games and drawing. It got pretty hard. I wouldn't discover D&D for some years yet.

Around the age of ten, when we finished off the crossword puzzles we had, my parents suggested we try making our own for each other. Ever designed one? If you want it as tight as a newspaper, it's a lot harder than solving them. We easily spent hours and hours digging words out of memory or the dictionary, which was an excellent learning process as we discovered words we'd never heard of and meanings we'd never considered and stretched our minds into a different problem solving vista. No doubt, some of those long days I'd spent inventing crossword puzzled contributed to my thinking process as a DM.

This is the same threshold we're trying to get the players across — to realise that "gameplay" isn't just the following of someone else's game, but that making the game is also play. That's what D&D is really asking the players to do... to embrace a concept that everything isn't solved, it isn't pre-made for you, it's really fundamentally the tackling of problems, as DMs and as players, that we invent also.

My very first post on this block includes a comment made by Carl (his username is gone, but my answer reveals it) where he says,

"I used to view the use of modules as a weakness as you do. In the last 10 years or so, I've come to rely on them more and more. Part of it is laziness on my part. Part of it is that my players enjoy well-defined, computer game-like adventures."

There it is. The infection. Plain as day. We might as well say, "I used to create a setting, but now I rely on gates and cattle runs that move the animals between barn and the field; part of it is because it works more reliably and part is that the cows like knowing where to go."

The result is that there is an entire game of D&D that isn't played by nearly everyone who claims an interest in this. In part because it's hard to play it, in part because they wouldn't know where to start... and in large part because the whole concept has been swept under the rug, and a giant pretty fishtank pushed on top to make sure that part of the carpet is never lifted. The commercial game has become a beautiful, sealed ecosystem: colorful, self-contained, safe, curated — but sterile. Everything inside it survives, nothing evolves. The fish just move around in mildly appealing circles. 

The unplayed game beneath it is harder, uglier, unpredictable... and impossible to sell to a wide market. Most, LOUDLY, argue it should remain unseen, unplayed, even mocked and vilified as a negative, unwanted thing. Quite a large number claim the unseen can't be played. It's too hard, it's impractical, a DM can't actually manage all the rules and maintain momentum and keep it interesting for the players. We're not superhuman, we're told.

If, as a DM, you want to push the fishtank off the carpet and play the underlying game, you don't need to smash the glass, you don't need to tell the internet or convert the aqaurists who would insist you've misconceived the game as they see it. You stop feeding the fish. You lay out the machinery of your setting in full... not just what the players can see with their five senses, but all the knowledge about the world that they as people living in it would already know. They shouldn't need rumours... they've probably lived in your game world for enough years that they've been hearing tales about goblins in them thar hills since they were kids. They already know every abandoned priory or open hole in a ten mile radius.  You tell the players what your goblins are like because their characters have listened to old men on stoops tell them as children what goblins are like. You pour information over your players like a giant molasses tank breaking and slowly drowning a town. Where the context example was given above, you just keep providing more and more and MORE context, until the players begin to understand that there are things they can do, because we've inundated them with words to make crossword puzzles of their own out of.

Don't make chutes and corrals, don't make barns and fields, make vast open imaginative spaces and then fill those spaces so thick that the players can't walk twenty paces without stumbling across something they could do, if they wanted to. And make sure that when they've started doing it, keep adding more information about other things they might do, to see if they like it better, or for them to remember when they've finished doing this. Knowledge is NOT a precious gift to be dispensed with an eyedropper, as a thing the party fights monsters to get. Knowledge is a neverending costless product that flows and flows and flows until the players have to sit down and parse it. This is the concept you must grasp... if you want to play a game that isn't chutes and corrals.