I have been thinking about setting up a window on Discord and then publicly working on my D&D world for several hours at a time, as a sort of inspiration for others to work on their D&D worlds, under the auspices that it is easier to find motivation to work if you don't feel you're the only one doing it. I remember that now and then my friends and I used to do that in the early 80s, and that it was sort of a good time. Not that we ever got much work done, since it's easier to talk and work... but still, it felt motivating and it was easier to work by ourselves in between those occasions.
Like many creative writers, I often start from a proposition that suggests some sort of wanted clarification... the kind that invites a muse to insert itself. Thus when I think of something like the Discord concept, I start to pull it apart in my head. The subject really isn't, "do other people want this?" I'm like to think I'm writing things because they have to be said, not because they please others. If they do please, that's well and good, but that's a byproduct, not the goal. The following question though, is, "do I want this?"
That's harder to answer. On some level it feels beneficial. I assume people have some interest in my work process: how do the maps get made, what does rewriting or designing a wiki page happen, what things do I consider important enough to work on. D&D is a constructive product. It is a thing we make. We can buy it, yes, but someone still has to make it, and they have some process by which they do that... so arguably, if we want to transcend from "user" to "maker," some form of learning that process is necessary. That stands to reason.
Not everyone understands that transformation. I didn't when I started; like most, I assumed random tables were necessary to create ongoing gameplay; I assumed that more of something already good would always be a good thing. It took time for me to understand that more spells, more monsters and more magic items really didn't improve game play... while more kinds of things to buy did. It took time to understand that rebuilding rules did not just mean rewriting the language, or providing more details: most of the time, it meant a complete reworking of the premises for what the rule was trying to solve. I spent an enormous amount of time rewriting experience tables based on Gygax's original structure before understanding that original structure couldn't be effectively redesigned. It was based on the wrong premises. That could apply to dozens and dozens of approaches to the game's original rules, which weren't "broken," they were fundamentally flawed. They didn't need "fixing." Then needed to be thrown away and replaced with things that actually addressed the problems at hand.
The ability to draw has absolutely nothing to do with dungeon mastering. If I take a piece of paper, scrawl two blue lines on it, add "swamp" on blank area of white, "forest" on another blank area, "mountains" below the forest and then make a circle where the rivers meet, then add the names of this map above, I've accomplished EVERYTHING this artist did. I still have to run the game. The relationship between map and game is not clearly understood and it is not clarified by having a mediocre artist on the internet prove that you, Dear Reader, can't draw as well. The problem is a lot more difficult that the snake oil being sold here. The artist has merely reframed "running D&D" as an "artistic problem"... one the artist can solve. And having substituted the problem, the artist solves the "problem" you, Dear Reader, didn't need solved... but heck, it looks cool.
Others thought so too in 1982 when I learned I could draw a map this well; I sold them maps for their D&D worlds for as much as a hundred dollars a map. Guess how many worlds those people got off the ground.
Yes, that's right. I used to scam D&D players too. Maybe that's why I hate the company so much... it's because of the dark part of myself that I hate so much.
This post is not to talk about the relationship between maps and D&D, but to point out that there are hundreds of like conditions that modify and affect the game, none of which are in themselves a solution to the way the game is adjudicated. It isn't just making the world, it is making it alive, giving it dimension, giving the players motivation, offering meaningful rewards or when to say "yes" and when to say "no." Even watching a good DM run does not actually offer much clarification here, because the DM must needs hold back during the running in terms of what's been actively thought in his or her head, so that the player never quite sees how the sausage is made, even when that sausage is being made right in front of them. It is a strange but fundamentally misunderstood element of the game's structure as an instructive tool. The teacher has to withhold information from you about, say, the plight of the Anasazi natives, while still expecting you to pass the test anyway.
A proper solution would require that the learner sit with the DM while the game goes on, so that the DM can whisper details into the learner's ear, but not in a way that reveals to the players what's being whispered, or even what specifically needs communication, because humans can sense the importance of things merely by what's paid attention to. A parent need only follow a child's line of sight to guess at what the child might be thinking... so that as children begin to reach the age of six, they begin to understand that the best way to get something is not to look at it. Once the DM says something, then whispers to the learner, the jig with the players is, as they say, "up." Thereafter, the running is sullied and anything that has been whispered to the learner is no longer of value in learning game play. It is, more or less, D&D's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
This is not to say that DMing can't be "taught." It's just that it can't be taught the way that a surgeon might teach a medical student how to resection a bowel. In the latter case, the surgeon can freely be exact and complete with the information given: the student must watch the surgeon's hands and attempt to reproduce the physical effort being demonstrated in an manner exact enough to allow the procedure to be accomplished gracefully. But it is the reverse in dungeon mastering... which, I want to stress, is not as important as learning to be a surgeon. As an example, this one is merely convenient. With dungeon mastering, the physical process of creating the substance of the game world can be duplicated... but the student has to "watch the DM's mind" to comprehend how the campaign can be run gracefully.
And in almost every sense, initially, that seems an impossibility.
None of this is made easier with bromides. Sorry, this is an Ayn Randian reference to the white salt-like crystalline powder that was added to a glass of water in an era before the invention of peptol bismol and all the other neat little chemicals that followed, designed to remove stress caused by ulcers that, in turn, were believed to be caused by worry. Thus, "bromides" are phrases that are designed to relieve your emotional stress in the way that the powder once relieved your physical stress. "Time heals all wounds," for example, and "everything happens for a reason." D&D is stocked full of them: “"The DM's job is to make sure everyone has fun," or "Never say no... always say 'yes, and...'" or "D&D is collaborative storytelling." These stock phrases are there to make the DM feel like they have a nice little role to perform that doesn't, in fact, require the least little bit of talent or doubt. After all, who doesn't want the players to have fun?
These bromides exist because the various persons attached to every form of role-playing game, regardless of their position or stance on some edition or some alternate rules structure they're promoting, find themselves helplessly in the same position: we can provide the rules, we can provide the premise for the rules, we can offer arguments that say our game is worth playing... but, unfortunately, and we're no different from anyone else, we cannot help you run this game. At best, we can offer this bromide: it is easier to run that someone else's game.
Thus, you can find yourself buying, say, Cairn... which is an outlandishly simplistic sort of, um, if we stretch the definition to include "bullshitting about stuff with your friends," RPG. Cairn is so simple to run that a child can run it — though, admittedly, that is also true of D&D. I'll therefore be a little clearer. Cairn is so easy to run that a child who has never read a book longer than Dick and Jane could probably run it. I'm not sure myself that that's, um, compelling for me. It seems to be compelling for others. I'm simply not in the market for an RPG that requires less intellectual effort than checkers.
The simple system, however, still requires the DM (in this case, the "Warden") to engage in "fiction first" and "neutral arbitration," which requires an invented causal connection between the situation at hand, the players' attempted actions and the consequence, all of which has to be essentially "made up," since the sparse rules do not address this problem. A capable Warden can make the game appear to be a "game"... but an incapable one does not, and there's no structure that's suggested that teaches someone incapable to be capable. So even with the easiest rule system imaginable, in some way the DM still has to "DM" (as a verb)... regardless.
Oh well, it was a nice try.
So where does this leave us? Going over in my mind the environment that existed when I learned how to DM, something I did not know how to do in the womb, I must assume that had something to do with my obtaining the skill. To some degree, surely, my interest in writing and reading mattered, as did my experience with maps, geography, statistics, drama, religion (I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church four months before encountering D&D)... but those are just incidental facts having to do with a certain degree of academic prowess. On the whole, I'd ascribe my transformation from user to maker to these things:
First, parents who did not play board games by the rules. A long history of board games was certainly of a help also, but in my case, the peculiar habit by mother and father had of adjusting rules to "make games better" was ingrained into me at a young age. Specific examples included paying dividends in Stock Ticker below par, which makes a very different game; being able to play in more than one direction in Scrabble; adding more children than the game allowed in the Game of Life; playing two full years in Payday as opposed to one; discarding protection cards from Mille Bornes. There were others, but that was a long time ago.
This history is supported in that my players liked to play cards, and together knew many scores of card games, including as many, many ways to play gin, poker and whist/bridge. In fact, it was quite common for us not only to sit down to play canasta, but to decide, beforehand (which meant, our parents deciding) which kind of canasta we were going to play this time. That meant that from the age of 6, I had no reason whatsoever to believe (a) that games could not be altered or restructured; (b) that changing dividends, directions of play or duration of a game wasn't something that simply were parts of whatever game was being played; and (c) that "official" rules meant anything to the way a game was played.
This is directly continuous with my later understanding of D&D's flawed premises. Long before consciously setting to adjust D&D, I had already tried my hand at adjusting numerous games with my family and friends, just because we wanted to. The maker, in our minds, had nothing to do with that.
Second, I began playing D&D when the "culture" had not yet come into being. Some culture existed: there were other versions of role-playing game and other genres like Gammaworld, Traveller, Top Secret, Paranoia. There was the Dragon magazine that tried its best to sell products. But these were like any other game culture at the time. There was no strict "official" group of people saying, defacto, "gaming is this" or "gaming requires this thought process." We thought nothing of playing a couple games of Ogre or Awful Green Things from Outer Space before settling down to actually playing D&D, since we were in school, we'd often get together at six pm and play until midnight. None of our parents knew what was going on, because there were no news stories yet; they were grateful that when we got together we wanted the kitchen table and not the television room. Thus, more or less, we were left to ourselves, to decide for ourselves what the game meant to ourselves, without voices other than other campaigns we knew of to tell us what was supposed to mean.
The parental thing matters. When I was 15 (not nine or ten as many early players around nowadays were when they started gaming), it was 1979. The parents biggest worries were threefold: drinking, drugs and sex. If we had been like other teens of that time, we'd have been out of the house on a Friday or Saturday night... and even if that meant, as it did for many teens, just hanging around talking by the river or in a park or walking along some road somewhere, it meant being out of our parents' sight, and their not knowing if we were engaging in drinking, drugs or sex. Being at home, around the kitchen table, where plainly no drink was, where plainly none of us were on drugs, and plainly we weren't having sex, was seen as a win-win-win for many, many parents. Moreover, because I grew up in a part of the world not run by a maniacal christian-nutjob cabal, where christian politics did not decide civic votes on things, there was no Satanic Panic where I lived in Canada. NONE. Why would there be? Our parents were all educated, as I grew up middle class; they weren't the sort who really, in actuality, believed in the devil. So that part of it just wasn't part of my past. At all.
Third, I started my gaming experience in the company of a lot of DMs. Besides myself, in my immediate high school peer group, were three other DMs: Scott, Joel and Asif. We rotated every weekend, but if Joel wasn't up to it then someone else would run that night, so that a straight rotation tended to be flexible. I also played in a separate D&D game with the Shane, who was my first DM, and a game of Empire of the Petal Throne, and a separate game using Rolemaster, and then later a game of Chivalry and Sorcery run by a friend from Hong Kong, Calvin. By 1982, in just 24 months of gaming, I'd played as a player with probably eleven or twelve other DMs in at least seven or eight different role-playing games, including all those named above plus Tunnels and Trolls. Thus I saw a lot of DMs play a lot of different styles of DMing, so I could take what seemed to work in one campaign and apply it to myself, while having the capacity to compare table management of any one person with many others.
Mind you, this was not the modern game store experience, where ten DMs all run the same four or five people each, without anyone changing tables. In those days, if you did not like the way a DM was running a game, you got up, crossed all of twelve feet to the next table and said, "Hey, can I get in here?" Nearly always, the answer was "Yes." Why wouldn't it be. Everyone wanted new players. So if you weren't flexible as a DM, there were lots of options around, because DMs were not treated as sacrosanct. DMs gained players from other games all the time and it wasn't seen as "stealing." It was seen as "sorting" or "trying" different groups to find where you belonged. That behaviour drastically lowers the capacity of any DM to simply act abusively entitled... and it trains someone wanting to DM not to be that.
Fourth, no one pretended to know what they were doing. We were all muddling through, reading everything we could about medieval worlds and culture, watching whatever movies we could find like The Last Unicorn, Conan the Barbarian, Krull, Deathstalker, Conquest... some of this was very bad stuff. We shared, talked, sat in libraries reading every book on a shelf or at least leafing through them... and where it came to the game itself, we retconned, asked others "were you fine with that decision?" and "do you think the rule means this or that?" We seriously did not know, and we knew we did not know... and like I said, there were no real entities around to tell us we should know.
So we... made it up. If it worked, we kept doing it. If it didn't work, we'd sit around after a session sometimes for hours and talk about why it didn't work. We'd walk home from one guy's house and talk the whole time about D&D, and what could change, and why the rules were written in a particular way, and how they could have been written in some other way. There was no sense that someone of "authority" was going to come along and fix the rules for us. No one talked about "Gygax" as a person that mattered. The game was a set of books. We didn't care about who wrote them any more than we cared about who wrote the rules of Monopoly, RISK or Careers. Game rules were just game rules. We didn't care whose feet we stepped on... because it wasn't like any of us had any reason to think the game makers would care.
Okay. So what?
Let me say, I'm not nostalgic for all that because I'm still doing all that. Nothing about my approach to my game has changed. I've stopped looking for other DMs for advice because for 30 years now they've been giving me precisely the same non-advice bromides that they acquired from the books: more monsters, more spells, more magic items, more feats, more character classes... those are all good things, because they offer more choice. I have yet to hear anyone tell me that more choice does anything but paralyse a player who is new to the game, but heck, I'm bored with all of that anyway. More things make D&D more "collectable." For a lot of people, I think, being able to say that once they had a tiefling is much the same as an old girlfriend I had whose room was full of little mushroom knickknacks, because she liked them: mushroom lamps, mushroom pictures, mushroom statues, little gnomes on mushrooms, sheep hiding under mushrooms... that's what choice is. Something that can be collected over time.
I pay attention to "official" D&D and rail at it at times not because I'm obsessed, but because I believe that a great many DMs would do much, much better with their design and their games if they would just turn their back on all present D&D culture. Including this blog, I suppose, if need be, but certainly upon anything that defacto does not help run the actual week-to-week game. Repeating bromides like mantras will not make anyone a better DM. Allowing voices on youtube to dictate mapmaking skills or how to choose adventures for a party only promotes dependency, not experimentation. Don't assign monsters to a party according to the experience of someone not at your game table. TRY picking monsters at random and learn from your own experience what has worked and what might. Try everything, at least once. If you've never used that monster, do. If you've never handed out that magic item, do. What can it hurt. Experimentation brings knowledge.
And if there's something in your game that you don't like, throw it away. Don't ask permission, don't wait for the company to abandon the game element, do it yourself. There's no one who can stop you but your players... and if you're only permitting something you hate because they like it, you're just making yourself a slave to their whims.
Stop doing that. Respect yourself, for heaven's sake. Better that you have no players and you're free to work on your D&D campaign in peace, than that you let others boss you into doing things you hate.
No, there's no "right way" to run D&D. There are certainly plenty of wrong ways. Oh yes, are there ever. Stop running D&D the wrong way. Start there.
If you've played with less than ten other DMs in your lifetime? That's not enough. Play whatever game they're playing. Watch them. Listen. Learn. And when you find you're not learning from them at all, or not any more, then stop running in their campaigns. They've taught you all they have. You can move on now.
Play other games. Play board games. Play war games. Play sports. Hell, LARP, though personally I can't imagine. Collect experience. It's what your player characters do. It's your turn.
And last but not least: talk about what you're doing, or want to do, with anyone willing to listen: including your kids, your wife, that co-worker or people on the bus. Walk along a deserted road and talk to yourself. You have got to learn how to express what you're thinking out loud so you can do that with players, without thinking about what you're doing. Talking because you care about what you want to say will overcome nervousness about possibly not saying the right thing every time. Talk and talk until your mouth is dry and your throat is sore and you have a headache. DMing is the art of talking. Talk more. And get used to talking more.
My thoughts about sitting on Discord and working on my world was not to enable talking... but to help enable others to sit and actually work on their D&D world, as a habit they need or want to acquire. It was that. I did not hope that it would spark a conversation. Rather, I thought it would be just fine if there were a group of people who knew that between certain hours on a certain day, they'd get out the books and the stuff and the thought process and work on that world.
But... I don't really believe that people do need other people, like the sociologists tell us. In the end, I think people are way too, uh, self-conscious to actually want to seem vulnerable around others. And the problem with "working on the D&D world" is that in this culture of so many voices, and so many authorities, and so few opportunities for experience, admitting to working on a D&D world just feels too... uncomfortable. I think that's what this culture has wrought for a lot of people.
So I didn't try the experiment last night, between 5 and 9 my time, MST, like I was going to. But I am still thinking about it.
I'm still trying to work out if I was relieved or disappointed when I didn't see you hop on. I've been stuck at the start of a couple of projects that I need to be working on, but I really didn't feel like tackling them on Sunday. It's a good idea, and one I want to feel motivated to join you in.
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