Like the Spider

Taking my morning walk, I could feel myself break a spider's web that had been strung from the tree on my left to the car on my right. Given that people must walk there every day, and given that the car must move off from the curb also, I found myself wondering about the spider that releases a light silk line into the air to let the wind carry it until it catches another surface. Once it catches, the spider tightens and reinforces it, then uses it as a first bridge line for the rest of the web. Course, that never happens, because human activity produces a routine environment destruction of the spider's efforts. Yet, "orb-weavers" who do this rebuild often, sometimes daily, even eating their webs so they can be reused, because if it catches just one decent sized insect (and for some of the smallest types, that can be very small from our perspective), then the effort hasn't been wasted.

My first thought was to connect this effort to prepping games for Dungeons and Dragons. Weird, huh?

It's a matter of apparent wasted effort when it seems to provide no real value or consequence. Obviously, the spider is functioning from instinct. It lets its web to the wind because it has adapted that way to its environment. Humans are harder. We do things by instinct, but because we have the capacity to think we find ourselves endlessly forced to justify that instinct in a concrete, identifiable way... even if that way becomes story-making we tell ourselves. We convince ourselves that this jam is better than that because this is "sweeter" or "less chewy" or "thicker"... when in fact, we're just reaching for things to call the jelly we like versus how to describe the jelly we don't. All jellies are sweet, chewy or thick; they're jelly. We only care which is which when we're forced to rate them. Human instinct says, eat the one that's closest when your hungry. Human thought tells us, we can choose which one to eat because we can prepare for when we are hungry. And... for the most part, that choice is simpler if we need only go to the shelf, look for the cherry and buy it. Cognisance, explaining the reason we do things, only gets hard when we have to explain to someone else "why cherry."

In turn, D&D preparation gets easier when we turn off the signal that keeps asking "what are we doing this preparation for?"  There are a great many DMs who simply enjoy making megadungeons. They don't need a reason. The dungeons don't ever actually have to be used in a game. Yet the act is just pleasant, and because it is, the act can consume hundreds of hours in the space of a season. It doesn't need to be justified. Like the spider, it's just what we do.

The leap comes when we realise that non-intentional preparation actually IS preparation, just in another form. Because it's more enjoyable than the forced stuff we have to do for a specific game, we do more of it. And it changes what we know, and how good we get at it, and how rational we become doing it and... ultimately, it gives us a group of skills we can apply to other things. Steady work enlarges our stock of patterns, instincts, procedures and solutions. We learn scale, we learn how rooms connect and how big they ought to be... and most of all, how repetition, drawing the same thing over and over again, pushes us to invent new things to draw, new ideas, new possibilities.

Anyone who's decided they're going to make a world because it has to be done, not out of love for world making, soon discovers how dreadful the experience is. As soon as you have to use your head to convince your body to go through the motions of dungeon design, you've already lost the battle. There's no way, when you're thinking about it all the time, and wondering if this is going to do any good, or if it has value, to just keep at it. You're like the spider would be if it fretted all the time about whether or not it would catch food today. The spider doesn't think about that because it can't. It just does. If it doesn't catch food, it dies. And it doesn't think about that either. Which might be a blessing... except the spider can't recognise a blessing.

This is why "shortcuts" appear so desirable. We don't want to make a world, but we want to have one. We get bored trying to make a module, so we buy one. We don't want to learn for ourselves how to DM through practice and effort and pattern recognition — we just want someone to tell us how to be one, in such a way that it happens easily. Like a fingersnap. Poof, you can DM now. That's much better than having to slog our way through endless room drawing and tedious research about things we don't in fact care about.

The spider is born to do what it does. People want to be born with the knowledge of how to DM. That would be perfect.

This is why the theory that some DMs are just "naturally" good at this is so popular. It lends credence to the belief that knowledge is a lock that all we need do is find a key for, and again, just like that, we can do it. And if we can't, well... there's no point trying. "I wasn't born a DM, so realistically, there's no point in my trying to be one."

I'll be conceited and arrogant and say that I've never met one of these "natural" DMs who especially impressed me, as the all seem to be a lot of show and performance and not much on flexibility and design. Mercer, for example, is all show; as a DM, he runs a pre-made story that's fleshed out with glitz and glamour... but it only works if the players don't have there own agenda. This is fine for what he was doing: "acting" like a good DM. I didn't see a thing in any episode I watched that suggested he had any skillset except that.

Dungeon Mastering as a skill we "inhabit" like the spider comes down to two things: the ability to assume authority that, right or wrong, causes the players to give way when we speak. The other is managing player independence. If you take that independence and cram it into a set of "if-then" options, as modules do, as Gygax told us to do, as the company continues to argue we ought to do, that solves the second problem. This argues that players, in essence, are leashed. They have only the independence we allow them to have. Which isn't really "independence," but hey, what'ya want for a game where the rules ain't really the rules anyway?

All the DMs I've met that were worth their salt had a "second game" going on the side. Not running other people, not creating their own characters to run in a dungeon like playing chess against ourselves (but a lot of us have tried it). No, just making. Like the whittler who makes squirrel after squirrel with a pen-knife until the squirrels look really, really good, and there are hundreds of them on every shelf in the basement, with a pile of them in the corner over there. Because the squirrel's end is not the object. Making is the object.

For the DM, the whittled squirrel is a laptop or a file book full of unused dungeons, failed attempts to create an economy, maps for other planets and planes the players will never see, scale drawings of towns that have no application, price lists, geneologies, histories... the list goes on and on. It does not matter that these things are not "useful." At some point, when the DM needs something, the thing may be remembered and sought after — either without success, or only to discover that the thing was made so long ago that it pales compared to how the DM would draw that map now, or design that dungeon now, or make up that geneology now. Which is fine, because the DM learned how and can churn out a better, needed product in a matter of hours. You want a squirrel? No, don't take that one off the shelf. Listen, give me two hours, I'll make you a better one right now.

That brings us back to the spider. I break the spider's web and think, what a pity, the spider spent that effort for nothing. But the spider's "effort" is irrelevant. The spider's nature makes the effort fluidly, unconsciously, and when it's gone, it's not wasted because it's not thought about. Thinking is the stumbling block, not doing.

The common DM thinks about objects. They want a dungeon, a world, an "adventure," an end result that they think they need to make their world happen. They are utterly trapped in the materialism of DMing because its the only part of their gaming that they can remotely understand. Thus, if a module sits on the shelf and is never used, it IS a waste... of money, of expectation, of space on the shelf. And because they need the object to run the game, they're dependent on others who can make it for them, They're dependent on the object arriving in time, or they need to make sure they have enough of every kind of object so that if something unexpected comes up, they'll be ready. They run their game worlds like an inventory.

But the more capable DM thinks of skills. Making the dungeon, making the world, making the adventure. The skill means I don't need to have one ready made, it will pop into my mind because I've made so many of this thing, out of nothing really, that I can do it for myself, any time, on demand, for free. And if I make it and it's not used? No matter, I didn't pay for it, I made it... and whatever the end object that is now, the process of making it remains eternally a part of me, forever. Without my needing to think about it.

It is impossible for something unexpected to come up that I can't deal with in the next five minutes. I've been doing this too long.

Obviously, I don't expect any reader to suddenly stop being an object-dependent DM, if that's what you are. I only want to make it clear that your manner of thinking about what "prep" means for you defines whether or not you are dependent or independent... and for you to think about what's a better strategy for you in the long run.