The Grand Affordance

Sort of catching my breath today. Moved over to working on the March Lantern, which will probably be late, not because of this work this month but because I tried to pick it up yesterday and found I'd not saved the file that I'd been working with at the start of this month. So, spent today rebuilding it and there are some details I haven't got notes for, so I'm building them from scratch. Official publishing date is Feb 21st, so plenty of time for that, don't know what I'll have on the 1st of February for a preview, but I'm sure to have something.

Ah, I needed a break from the thief for a bit anyway. Too, I want to get a post written today, and this is a good time to talk about "affordances."

This is a new word for me too. No doubt I've run across it reading about theoretical game design, but I've never had a reason to use it until now... and you know what they say: when you learn a word, it's always easier to remember the word if you use that word right away. Probably best to start with a clear definition.

In the context of D&D, an "affordance" is what the game's rules and the fictional situation make it possible for a player character to do, right now, in play, without the need for a new rule to be invented. This doesn't just count the character's ability to do something — say, to climb walls — but also the needful circumstances that have to exist in the game's setting that makes the ability mean something: in this case, an actual wall to climb, and a reason to climb it. If the dungeon master does not include a wall in the setting that must be climbed for some reason beyond, "Hey, it's fun to climb walls," then the character's ability has no in-game meaning.

And it's in this last that I think a lot of D&D truly fails. On the whole, the affordances created by the setting are so limited — a dungeon is always going to have a pit, a secret door, a puzzle, an empty room, a stuck door — that circumstances get overused ad nauseum because the game culture only knows a handful of "things you put in a dungeon." Those things are designed to trigger the set band of character capabilities... and once you've played D&D for a year, the dungeon, the things the character can do in it, becomes dull because the total number is regrettably finite. The stock obstacles get solved by the stock abilities, which the players inevitably achieve in toto, whereupon it's all just going through the motions.

This is why no deeper game emerges. Not because affordances of both types — abilities and situations — but because the arrival of new abilities advanced in later editions are not complimented by an arrival of new setting problems. Because, in the frame of a game board (which is what a dungeon really is, a 2D setting that characters moved vertically and horizontally through) there are so few situational possibilities that CAN be invented. The dungeon is too narrow a design structure to lift D&D higher.

Thus, you get a design ceiling. We can keep adding abilities, but if the field of action stays "a constrained traversal puzzle/maze with keyed obstacles," then most abilities never have much use, or are merely beneficial to the most peripheral of player needs: the ability to "make torches," say, or "lantern pointing 3," where the light can be shone just that much better on the approaching monsters. Or, more truthfully, minor scouting bonuses, slightly improved resource conversion, small numerical adjustments to detection... whatever we can dream up to sand the corners off the old skill-set.

We can get into affordances that bypass the dungeon model, but before we can do that it's necessary to acknowledge the crushing weight the dungeon imposes upon the participant's mindset. Dungeon crawling is "lucrative." It is the only kind of play that D&D offers that reliably converts effort into a quantifiable reward that brings power, wealth and prestige. Even if the players don't collect "experience" at all, but simply "go up a level when the adventure is finished," this dictates a sort of finish line that can be defined... and finish lines are one-dimensional things to be crossed when exiting a two-dimensional framework. In a three-dimensional world, finish lines are meaningless.

Dungeons are bounded, legible and procedural, making them easy for DMs to run once they have the dungeon example in hand. The module is the LINEAR structure of the game's rules that are not, as evidenced by my recent work, not easily understood as linear.  Room 1, kill monster, collect loot, move forward, turn left, count time, consider light, roll for monster, roll surprise, fight, trap, treasure, rinse, repeat. It's so simple a child can DM it, and many do, every day, however many adults simply can't.  But so long as the dungeon continues to exist as the "grand affordance" to game play, then every attempt by a DM to expand outside of that structure is going to be met by players who say, "I don't get it — where's the objective? How does doing this help me get gold pieces, what's the path here to levelling. Is there a boss at the end? What is the point of this?" ... because these questions are so clearly answered by the dungeon, there's no room for any other kind of game. Hell, most participants are so used to D&D being structured like this, they pin a badge on their chest for running the game in the exact same way for 40 years.

But then, I'd do that if I were a chess player. If I was still playing baseball now, and the subject came up, I'd be saying to my team, "Yeah, I've been playing this game for nearly 50 years."  So what's wrong about saying the same about dungeon-based D&D? Isn't that what everyone expects the game to be?

Assuming — and I've been arguing this for the last 18 years of this blog — that we want to break out of the dungeon affordance, how would we do that? Well, honestly, how have we done that, because in fact a lot of the chance in later D&D arises because the dungeon has  dwindled in the player's eye. This is why they've tried to escape the 2D structure through persuading the players to "roleplay harder." Roleplaying — inventing things for my character to care about that aren't game payoffs (like x.p., wealth, power), and then pretending to care about those inventions, livens the game up for some people. Whatever we might feel about the "acting version" of D&D, it's not linear. It's ridiculously mastubatory, but we've never needed to invent reasons for people to masturbate. There's a legitimate, special pleasure in convincing ourselves that we've just said something really, really clever, which encourages us to try to say something else that's likewise clever. Even it that isn't a game, human interaction is the system where the affordances — the listening apparati of fellow humans — are built right in. A player says something, another player reacts, the DM reacts, the group gets a little hit of social success, and that becomes the payout. It’s self-fuelling.

This personally does not appeal. I would rather get the dopamine hit here by saying actual intelligent things, not just that which seems momentarily clever in-game. I was past playing-pretend at twenty; I get no sense of achievement through acting like a made-person, unless I were to do that on a stage in front of a large audience of total strangers who have no reason to respect me unless I work hard to present a good performance. Once a person has done this in front of hundreds of people at once, and I have, I'm not much impressed because I made my friends, who have been hand-picked to like me, laugh. The laughter of strangers is much harder to win and far more gratifying.

In game play, I want to overcome resistance that's hard to overcome. A dungeon can provide that; a good dungeon can push back hard and so, when it's taken, this feels like an accomplishment. Thus the dungeon's monopoly: it is spatially bounded, it has a repeatable procedure and it offers a reliable payoff. An alternative to that monopoly demands that, to be popular, even a little, it has to compete with the dungeon on those terms: the DM must be able to conceive the structure; the DM must be able to run it in a rational, predictable manner; and in the end it must pay off.

Realistically, however, even if these points are met, most DMs can't do it — in most cases because DMs can't fathom it — and the stranglehold that dungeons have on the game causes a lot of players to mistrust any game structure that does not look like a dungeon. I know. I've run what, three, four campaigns online through text, none of them dungeon based, and the players never ceased to struggle with deciding, "What am I supposed to do, exactly?"

50 years of dungeon-and-field combat play have taught players that unbounded situations (not "dungeon) are where engagement goes to die, where reward goes to die, and where the players feel their collective heads are going to roll because they don't know what a "safe" action is from an "unsafe" action. Dungeons are easy; line up, put the casters at the back, test the hall ahead, keep your weapons out, expect an action or trap at any time. Whatever's coming, it's going to come from behind or ahead, or out of that door, or that well, or that pond, or whatever access to this space that we can see.

But outside... danger can come from anywhere! The players can't look in every direction, cannot tell if that bush is safe, knows they can be hit by things from hundreds of yards away... "safe" is impossible. And everyone we talk to? Piss the wrong one off and your head will roll — while there's no way to know what the "wrong one" remotely looks like. So don't do anything. Pay for your ale, go to your room, block the door with all your gear and seal the door closed with a spell if you've got one, and DM willing we'll all be a nice, safe dungeon as soon as possible.

What I've tried to teach with parties in the non-dungeon setting is this: that everywhere is in fact safe. Don't attack anyone, obviously. Don't enter a large, official guild or castle-keep and start casting spells. Treat the guards in the game as you'd treat a real life police officer. But in reality, so long as you obey the law, no one cares if you're here. They don't care if you're standing on the street, they don't care if you're a foreigner or you don't rub blue mud into your navel like the locals do. You're actually very safe in a town, because no one else wants to break the law either, including the local guard. It's their role to keep things peaceful so commerce can take place.

The reason why this message doesn't land, however, is that there are too many DMs out there trying to turn towns into dungeons, or wildernesses into dungeons. The DMG, with it's town encounter table, tries to do exactly like this? The party is just standing around? Can't have that. Roll a die and then have the guard or rakes or whomever come and bully them. Because this isn't a town, this is a different kind of dungeon. More cowbell. Hammer in hand, every thing looks like a nail. That kind of thing.

In reality, no one wants trouble. The guards don't want to die. The merchants just want to trade. The labourers just want to get their work done. The "rakes" want to be ignored. Even the crooks don't want trouble, which is why they tend to operate as far away from awake people as possible. But DMs refuse to let "safe" exist. They treat safety as boredom. They treat a stable environment as wasted table time. They are conditioned to believe that if dice are not being rolled and threats are not being applied, then the game is not happening. So they invent irrational harassment, random confrontations, petty insults and gotcha consequences. The result is that players learn, correctly, that the DM will punish stillness. If you stop moving, something will jump you. If you talk to someone, or they talk to you, its a trap. If you relax, you’ll be robbed. That is "town as dungeon." And it's why I can't run my world online, because the people who find this blog know D&D too well to believe that a townperson can be taken at their word and isn't trying to set them up somehow. Gotcha D&D, invented by Gygax and pushed hard through the Dragon Magazine and others, ruined this game.

I'm going to go ahead and publish this as the first part of a two-post series. I'm not done, but a lot's been said and I am going to use this to move past the dungeon premise, so it's a good time to break.