Turned Off

The first post in this series can be read here.

The image shown is p. 13 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

This sets my teeth on edge.

The content of this page gives no information whatsoever about how to be a DM.  What is it doing here?

In my early days, I was part of a group that rotated being the DM each week.  However, it was not as described here.  We each had our own game world.  Except for one commenter who wrote earlier this month to say that he experienced this idea of multiple DMs, I've not met another instance.  No one running a blog that I know of talks about it and none of the hundreds of DMs I met while working at cons spoke about it.  The searches I've made have people talking about how they used to do it.  I don't know exactly why 4th edition felt it was needful to push the concept.

In any case, yeah, in most games, one person does a lot of work.  That's not a weakness.  Dungeon mastering being characterized in that fashion makes me incensed.

It is equally infuriating to be told that an ongoing game does not expose the players to new ideas or different play styles.

I do agree that disconnected adventures can start to feel purposeless.  I feel that purposeless in the first two minutes, once I know it is going to be a disconnected adventure.  Why should I invest?  I don't play one-shot games nor take part in convention events; I would not do so under any circumstances, either as a player or an adjudicator.  I equate it to a one-night stand with a sex worker whose health is evidently lax.

I don't have more to say about these things I've mentioned.  I have no respect for the position being offered or the inclusion of this text in the book.  I have a few things to say on the campaign.

I've been fussing with a definition of "campaign" in D&D since reading this post from JB.  I am thoroughly unsatisfied with the examples given, from Moldvay or Gygax.  These don't go far enough.  I keep thinking about a quote from 1996's The Craft (of all movies): "If God and the Devil were playing football, Manon would be the stadium they played on.  It would be the sun that shone down on them."

The campaign is the adventure, it is the setting, it is the boundaries provided by the rules and the decisions made by the players.  It is not just the series of adventures being played; it is one single ongoing adventure with episodes that resolve moments but never all the threads of possibilities.  Because I play a deep game, where the players can pursue possibilities as far as they want, and weave their own plans into the various quests that occur, there are no episodic adventures that take place.  As with our experience of being alive, each day carries the possibility of a new path, the abandonment of a path that never does get resolved or events that may bring about success or death.

Therefore the D&D that I play—the D&D clearly implied by Gygax and which everyone I knew played between 1979 and 1984, before we were overwhelmingly met by cries that it was just too hard or even impossible to run—isn't even mentioned on this list.  At best, the "campaign game" described here is a watered-down version of that, one supposedly fraught with painful cliches.

I'm quite disgusted.  I'm going to put down this series for awhile before picking up page 14.  I'm going to need a little time to clean the stink off me.  These last sections have been enough to raise my gorge and I could use a clense.

I'll tackle the subject of talking to NPCs.  That seems a worthy change.

What the ...

The image shown is from p. 12 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

I'd like to say there are no words, but this is a blog with too many words, so ...

The starting question screams trouble.  It gets worse as we realize the "right way" refers not to practical considerations of person and information management, but upon the feelings of the participants.  For specifically my game, and my relationship with my players, the "feel" of the game is intrinsically important to how we communicate and enjoy each other's company.  But any idea that the feelings of hundreds of thousands of potential participants can be addressed in a few paragraphs, in an attempt to be inclusive, is the sort of mindless propaganda that pretends to speak for, say, the LGBT community, while automatically lumping them into a single entity that all wants the same things.  Living in this age, we accept this as rote.  We've gotten used to it.  But a close inspection of the practice is enough to make one shudder.

No matter how many adjectives we stack together in a table predicting "style considerations," it will never be enough to account for all the possible styles of all the possible DMs participating in the game.  Moreover, with regards to the 16 adjectives listed here, my style includes every one of them.  My game is gritty but the participants DO accomplish heroic things—even though I, and they, do not consider themselves "heroic" by default.  My game is often silly; often intense; sometimes preplanned, with invariably large parts that are improvised.  "Heroic" and "morally ambiguous" are not opposites.  Any sort of concept can be "thematic"—it helps if the writer understands the meaning of the term.  "General" is entirely non-descriptive in any way.  How is a campaign "general"?  It's generally what?

It's bad enough that we've decided to take this graceless approach, we haven't remotely done it well.

Sigh.

And now, it's time to answer the questions.

1. "Are you big on realism and gritty consequences, or are you more focused on making the game seem like an action movie?"

Typical North American bias here regarding action movies, which presupposes that every film that's action oriented is a two-dimensional romp with bad marksmanship, speeding cars, beefy guys who endure through pluck and courage and stock villains.  No Country for Old Men, Seven, La Balance, the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Harry Brown, Hanna, Straw Dogs (the 1972 film), The Wild Bunch, Greyhound, 1917, We Were Soldiers, Blood Diamond, Haywire ... these are realistic action films, full of gritty consequences, so obviously the question is trying to assume the distinction between "serious" and "not serious."  Which, incidentally, is the distinction between every comparison being made on the list.  So why not just say that?

Because we want to believe we're being helpfully descriptive here.  We're not.  The terms are so general that they're non-exclusionary.  Some elements of Armageddon are quite believable.  Some elements of Atomic Blonde are scarcely credible.  It makes no difference, because both are "cinematic" and both are technically "gritty"  Hey, people die in Armageddon—all of Paris, ffs.  It doesn't get more gritty than that, although the film's science is jerkily ludicrous.

The larger argument to be made is that REAL LIFE incorporates every adjective on this list.  We can hang in a bar with our friends, laughing so hard that we fall off the stool, like being in a beer commercial, and then be crippled for life in a car wreck on the way home.  Does that mean every moment in life is "gritty" and has "consequences"?  Or is it that life is way more complex that we can tag with adjectives?  We have 4,800 adjectives in the English language because we have a lot of different situations to cover.  Why would we assume that players, being human and using their brains, and speaking language, would be able to describe something as complicated as a role-playing game with 7 adjectives?

2. "Do you want the game to maintain a sense of medieval fantasy, or can you tolerate some incursions of the modern world and modern thinking (anachronism)?" 

There's no possibility of keeping anachronisms out of the game.  We don't live in a fantasy universe, we live in a real one, and our natural experiences will cause us to use metaphors and examples from the world we know.  It's reasonable to explain to players that in a setting without flush toilets, there are other habits and processes that must take place in order to shift the gong (medieval term) out of our bodies and put elsewhere.  But it's impractical to keep players from using a tactic they picked up in a movie or a book, or to actively train their hired soldiers like a 19th century military unit.  If a mage figures out how to cast a spell that will produce images on a flat surface, is it acceptable for the mage to then build a theatre and charge for a show every night?  Are you telling me the customers wouldn't pay?

Whose to say that if magic didn't exist, "wall plays" wouldn't exist, hm?  Perhaps they could be found in every medium-to-large sized town.  Ask yourself: does your game world have street lamps?  Those came into existence because there were many more workers at night with the start of the Industrial Revolution, but there's nothing intrinsically hyper-technical about them.  It's an oil lamp on a pole behind glass.  The Romans could have built them.  How about baseball?  Are your players allowed to teach people baseball?  That's what the character Hank Morgan does in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, along with a great many other things.  Are these "allowed"?  And if they're not, precisely why not?  What is there about baseball that couldn't have existed in the 11th century.  Or in Ancient Egypt, for that matter.  How do you know for certain that it didn't exist, in some form.  We have staggeringly few records of that time.

And whose to say that the gods, being gods and not necessarily subject to time, haven't already taught other cultures on other worlds, how to play baseball?  They got it from Earth and now they've inspired my player character to reinvent it.  That seems believable and not a bit anachronistic.

I'm kidding, of course, but if you take the anachronistic thing too far, it must be noted how many things have come about since the 1200s that shouldn't be in your early medieval world—quite a lot of things.  No matter how you try to guard that gate, there will be anachronistic things in your world; you might just allow for their existence, realizing that it's not such a big deal anyway, whatever kind of fantasy world you're running.

 3. "Do you want to maintain a serious tone, or is humour your goal?"

I have very little to say on this.  I have an excellent sense for comedy, as anyone who has read this blog for a time can realize.  I'm a wit in real life.  My marriage is like living in a 1940s screwball comedy, with zingers crossing back and forth between my partner and I; we're both very sarcastic and half the time she will best me.  We don't unleash these gifts on anyone but my daughter who, obviously, learned from a young age.

Trying to force comedy into a campaign might work for the groundlings, but not being a stinkard, I refuse to pay only a penny for my entertainment.  The humour I see presented on Critical Role, for example, is infantile acting out ... and these are experts at the "humoured campaign."  No, thank you.  Why don't these people just hit each other with pies?

You get better humour when you don't try so hard. 

That's all I'm going to say about comedy.  Others have written much more than me, and I bow to their wisdom.

4. "Even if you are serious, is the action lighthearted or intense?"

It depends on what's happening, doesn't it?  I'll say both.

5. "Is bold action key, or do the players need to be thoughtful and be cautious?"

Again, it depends on what's happening.  There's a reason why we have the two adages, "Look before you leap" and "He who hesitates is lost."  It's because sometimes, it is the best idea to rush in and seize the moment, and sometimes, it's necessary to be cautious.  That's really the players' problem, isn't it?

Yes, my world is threatening, in that it has monsters in it and the dice will kill you.  Judging by the amount of caution my online players seem to possess, I'm guessing my world is a LOT more dangerous than most worlds.

6. "Do you have a hard time improvising, or are you great at winging it?"

This is getting awfully specific.  The passage doesn't give me any information as to how either affects the game.  I know how it does, but this is supposed to be a how-to and these two questions are asking the same thing twice.  "Is it tails or is it not heads?"  Instead of asking me why I do it, why don't they take some time and teach instead?  Hm?

Okay, you need to improvise because there's no real way you can prepare for the game ahead of time sufficiently, that you won't also need to come up with something on the fly when the players act unexpectedly.  Mind you, this fact is in no way a "DM style"—every DM has to do this, constantly, regardless of their style.  True, some are not good at it.  But even in a railroaded campaign, players will go left when you expect them to go right, they will randomly set the place on fire, they will decide this is a good time to shout stupidly at the top of their lungs.  You've got to be ready for that shit.

7. "Is the game full of varied D&D elements, or does it center on a specific theme such as a horror?"

Again, this isn't "style."  This is genre.  Do these writers have a dictionary?

8. "Is it for all ages, or does it involve mature themes?"

Well, it's not for 2 year olds.  How mature are we talking about here?  You mean "mature" like the 16 y.o.'s who are buying drugs from the dealer and holding each other's hair when they puke?  Or do you mean "mature" in that the themes are related to 1950s standards of sexism and racism?  Please define mature.

Again, I can't help thinking this is genre-related, or political maybe.  The game is about killing monsters.  That's why we have monsters.  So we can kill them.  As it happens, all the weapons and spells are pretty good for killing men, women and children also, not to mention dogs, cats and cute lil' bunny rabbits.  So, if we're saying the game doesn't have "mature" content, then what the hell are all these weapons for?  Do you get just how horrific a fireball would feel like if you experienced one?  That doesn't seem pretty fucking mature?  Where the hell are these goal posts?

9.  "Are you comfortable with a moral ambiguity, such as allowing the characters to explore if the end justifies the means, or are you happier with straightforward heroic principles, such as justice, sacrifice, and helping the downtrodden?"

Please point to the person who's comfortable with moral ambiguity.  I'll wait.

If the players want to explore "the end justifies the means," how do you propose that I stop them?  Is that the style you're talking about?  How much we quantifiably deny the players' rights to take actions with their character unilaterally, if it steps outside a boundary?

I really like how "justice," "sacrifice" and "helping the downtrodden" are described as OPPOSITE to moral ambiguity.  Will someone please explain how the "heroic" versions of these things are lacking in ambiguity?  Again.  Happy to wait.

Well.  I know a lot more about DM Style than I did before I read this passage.  How 'bout you? 

This series continues with Turned Off

Keeping the Faith

The image shown is from p. 12 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Plain speaking here: yes, please, learn ALL the rules you're going to use in your game.  Every one of them.

I could almost think it was enough to say that, but pitifully, it isn't.  I read comments endlessly on reddit, twitter, stack-exchange; I see vlogs; and everywhere, "I want to be a better DM.  What do I do?"  And the answer is never, ever, do you know all the rules by heart?  Often, the answer is the reverse, as though the advisor is saying,

"Are you trying to follow all the rules?  You don't have to do that—D&D is a really simple game.  Whenever you run into some kind of problem, just call things as you see them ... and everything will be all right."

This is such bad advice.  Yet I hear it constantly.  I shudder, thinking what it must be like to run in the games these people run.

The opinions of your players are ... mm ... tricky.  The phrase, "something you don't know how to adjudicate" is like my giving directions to dinner guests by saying, "I live in North America."  Just exactly how is an answer "hashed out"?  Wouldn't that be useful information—rather than saying it's possible?"

Okay.  Let's get into that.  How do you hash out a fair answer, after asking the player's opinion?  Ready?

Understand please that this is how I resolve disputes from the position of knowing what the rules are.  The rules are your friends; they are the gavel you hold in your hand while trying to maintain order.  So long as its understood that everyone is going to follow the rules, the DM included; and so long as cooperation is the agenda, and not personal selfishness; these being the subjects of the last two posts; then the rules are a pathway to legitimacy and cooperation.  Get to know the rules and learn how to apply them.

Your first order of business as a DM in resolving disputes is to do it before they start.  This is done by finding rules in the books that either don't make sense, are biased towards a sort of game play you don't want in your campaign or might be interpreted in a bad way due to the language being used.  Whenever possible, don't throw out the rule's text altogether; the more of the original text you retain, the more any change you make will look like a legitimate adjustment and not an act of arbitrary abuse.  Hm.  An example, yeah?

The original text from the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide says this about Gaining Proficiency Levels:

"Experience points are merely an indicator of the character's progress towards greater proficiency in his or her chosen profession.  UPWARD PROGRESS IS NEVER AUTOMATIC.  Just because Nell Nimblefingers, Rogue of the Thieves' Guild has managed to acquire 1,251 experience points does NOT mean that she suddenly becomes Nell Nimblefingers the Footpad."

The caps are Gygax's.  Now, let's say we disagree with the rule at our game table.  Gygax's system was designed to tax player's wealth by forcing them to pay ludicrous sums to be "trained" to be a higher level; but we've decided that we're fine with exactly the opposite of what's said above.

In our list of house rules, we could merely write, "When a player character accumulates enough experience, they automatically go up a level."  Simple, succinct, clear.  But ... if our players are stalwart by the rules people, we can mess with their heads a little by writing out, 

"Experience points are an indicator of the character's greater proficiency in his or her chosen profession.  UPWARD PROGRESS IS AUTOMATIC.  When Nell Nimblefingers, Rogue of the Thieves' Guild manages to acquire 1,251 experience points, it means that she suddenly becomes Nell Nimblefingers the Footpad."

Written that way, even a long-time savvy player whose memorized the books will pause and say, "Wait a minute.  Did Gygax write that?"

"No," we say.  "I adjusted it to fit with my system.  Let's move on."  A, it proves you've read the rule and B, you've already set the standard for how it now works in your world.  The rules lawyer can't argue that this is not what the rule says; we've already demonstrated that and that we don't agree with it.  Quad erat demonstrandum.

This grants power where it comes to arbitrating rules at the table; though, of course, you must know the rule and you must take the time to properly correct it.  Incidentally, I chose the rule at random, by opening my DMG and reading under the first heading on that page (86).

You can make your point even firmer by adding examples of situations where the rule proved its worth, or even specifically when the players agreed to the change.  Dates have remarkable value in these disputes.  Admittedly, I don't do this—but if you read a random text on dispute resolution, such as the one Wikipedia provides—you will find an ironclad template on how to back players (and your own bad habits) back on their heels.  I'm using it as a guideline for this post.

For example, it says on the page, "Talking to other parties is not a mere formality, but an integral part of writing the encyclopedia."  That instantly translates into the DM's guidebook as, "Talking to the PARTY is not a mere formality; it is integral to running the game."  Arguing with the players or using your position as leverage will not gain sympathy for your point of view, will demonstrate your bad faith towards the players and will show that you have no interest in their opinions.  This sort of disrespect will not smooth things out later in your game's play and soon you will find yourself without friends at the table, or any players at all.

Solid advice flat out rewritten from the Wikipedia page.

The key to dispute resolution between you and your players depends on what you believe you're trying to resolve.  The text from 4th Edition gives the impression that the result wanted (suggested by telling us we don't need to know all the rules) is to encourage DMs they don't look like fools if they ask for help, particularly by not worrying about their authority if they give into the player's opinions.  I apologize to those who feel this is a great way to run a game, but it really isn't.

If I know the rules, then I really DO know how to adjudicate something the player does.  This would seem a rational approach.  Know More Than The Player.  Duh.  "Fair" ought to be based on the rules, the believability of the action, the natural laws of the campaign and the manner in which it compromises the spirit of the game.  I've said again and again: if the spirit of the game is, in the minds of the players and the DM, is based on whatever is randomly made up by the players and all the other rules bend to that object, then of course every dispute settlement is going to be arbitrary and unfounded.  On the other hand, if the spirit is to challenge the player to adjust the player's tactics based on hard physical and defined limitations in the character's power, THEN the resolution is based on "Can this be physically done" and "Do the rules state that its possible."  Again, an example.

As a halfling standing in front of a 7 ft. tall orc, having rolled initiative against said orc, I tell you I'm going to climb up the orc's leg and stab the orc in the back.  What do I roll?

If you're trying to think of what feat applies to that situation, this is one of those moments when I wish I could punch people through the internet.

Is it physically possible?  Perhaps, if the orc were a statue, and not actively defending itself, and is unable to kick its leg in the fraction of a second, and if it doesn't jump back as the halfing runs towards him, and if my halfling doesn't actually sacrifice my initiative by abandoning my weapon because I need both hands to climb, well, then, sure ... so long as the game is taking place in fucking fantasy land.

Which is, of course, the argument rendered.  "Hey!  It is fantasy land!"  I have to stop and rub my head a moment.  Yes, if this is toddler fantasy land, or Mickey Mouse fantasy land, sure, why not, fill your boots—but then, why go for such a low bar?  "I pick up the bartender and the stove and slap the orc between them both.  Obviously I hit, because this is fantasy land.  How much damage does the orc take?"

My fantasy role-playing game is based on a more substantive set of rules, which argues that NO, it isn't physically possible for you to climb a self-aware defending orc, no matter how small you are, and NO, there is no feat that allows that because I don't incorporate ridiculous unbelievable nonsense into my game rules.

Oh, wait.  That was me "using my position as leverage," wasn't it?  That's not going to get me sympathy as a DM.  That's going to demonstrate my bad faith towards the player who wants to climb the orc.  That's bad for dispute resolution, isn't it?  Yes, it surely is.

Thing is.

One of the qualifiers for dispute resolution is that the other side comes into the negotiation with a reasonable expectation.  When you approach your boss for a raise, you don't say, "I think I deserve a hundred dollars more an hour.  Let's negotiate."  Now, in your sweet little heart, you may be thinking that 35 cents more is fine with you, and you're just taking a hard bargaining position, but in fact you're being tremendously insulting thinking your boss will find your opening position appropriate.  Even if you think it's a joke, it's STILL inappropriate; money and business are NOT things appropriately joked about.  If I were your boss and you opened a real negotiation this way, I would be thinking, "Why do I keep this idiot on my payroll?"

Player: "Can I climb the orc's leg and stab him in the back?"

Me: "Do you intend to take this game seriously?"

There's our bargaining positions.  I'm pretty damned rock solid on my position, because I've run the game for 40 years and I have an expectation that people will approach the game and my version of it respecting the rules and the hard boundaries they provide.  The player, on the other hand, invented this nonsensical plan about 30 seconds ago; I'm fairly sure the player isn't invested in it, but if I'm wrong, well, then the player isn't intending to take my game seriously.  Seems pretty obvious.  Therefore, I can't say I care to have the player in the game at all.

That's how I maintain my GOOD FAITH with the players who are there to take the game seriously.

Sigh.

This probably didn't help.  It's hard to talk about conflict resolution in text, and harder still without being able to address specific questions being asked by specific people.  Your game world is your business; and the spirit of your game as well.  I like a game where everyone plays the same rules and to which the same standards apply to everyone.  Then, everyone knows what to expect, everyone knows what the limitations are, everyone understanding that getting to do "cool things" requires levelling up and acquiring additional abilities and no one thinks they can skirt the rules with made-up metaphysical unearned self-empowering nonsense.  And the key there is "unearned."  You've got to learn to kill the orc the hard way before you get to kill them easily.

This series continues with What the ...

The Sermon Today Is ...

The image shown is from p. 12 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

At last, a breath of fresh air.

I addressed earlier the matter of the DM being a croupier rather than a referee, so I'll keep my remarks on this subject short.  The referee metaphor has been around for awhile; I've used it myself though I've stepped away from that for the reasons I've given.  What's odd in the text is that the book, earlier, made very clear that D&D is not "competitive"—and yet here we've turned to a metaphor for a competive sport.  Books are huge, unwieldy things, with continuity being a nightmare.  It is the reason we seek editors.  Here, again, continuity is being deliberately ignored (I feel), because the notion of the D&D as "referee" is desirable.  Referees, while chafed against, are respected, even by players who shout in the referee's face.  That is because referees have legitimacy through organizations and clubs who ensure the judgment-giver has been vetted.  Some of that halo effect is being alluded to here, as the company attempts to sell the DM as something more than an arbitrary dictator.

Only, no one vets the DM except the players; who often fail to do so, for the sake of having a DM, even if he or she is a bad one.

I don't take the view that the DM is a mediator between the rules and the players.  A judge is not a mediator between the law and the people; a judge mediates between people according to the law.  It is the decision regarding where the most harm falls that sets a future precedent in the law; but the judge is still bound by the law regarding the decision being made, which is why appeals courts exist.  One judge does not make the law.  Several judges, according to a complex system that enables numerous people to raise up and strike down precedents, decides the law.

D&D's prime weakness is that the DM possesses the right to "define the law," or rules of the game.  The players have no appeal except to the DM's decency or reason; or to abandon the game and seek another.  A good DM recognizes that decisions have consequences, not only on the presence of the players but also upon their willing and cheerful participation in the game.  While the language here tries to establish the DM as a friendly voice, in several ways the language is weak on that regard, for the things it does not say.

In the second paragraph we're asked to imagine two players fighting a battle against each other and needing a referee; then it's admitted that the DM acts as the referee and also controls the monsters.  But the disparity here is never actually addressed.  We are given this information, which is true, but we're not actually told precisely HOW the DM does both these things.  It is skipped over in favour of saying next what the DM does, followed by an example of what the DM does, followed by an admittance that sometimes the DM has to enforce the rules.  But the substance of how we balance acting as "referee" and "competitor" is abandoned—perhaps because it is difficult to explain this in the space allowed; perhaps because the writer hasn't got a good answer; perhaps because it's assumed the players already understand the principle.  As text in a book purporting to describe the Dungeon Master's role, it's unconscionable and lazy to leave the matter out.

Without my diving in and explaining it, can the reader clearly define how the DM acts the part of the monster attacking the player AND acting as an impartial mediator between what the player is allowed to do against the monster?  Stop reading and give it a try.

Meanwhile, it was remarked positively earlier today that my discussion of the 4e text requiring so many posts seemed a little excessive (my word not the commenter's), and I suppose it might be.  I'm finding myself that the material is rich in opportunities to discuss a wide variety of subjects that go unnoticed, or which I've failed to cover in many years.  It's beneficial to seek out the gaps in logic that occur, such as the one at hand, since this text has formed the mindset of the modern player to such a degree.  Although 5e may have evolved away from 4e, many of the engendered ideas of the latter found their way into the former through the opinions of players who were asked to contribute their belief systems to the final format of 5th Edition.  Therefore, just as we might seek the causes belli of a historical conflict from the letters and speeches of politicians leading up to the event, it makes sense to pick apart the original founding documents underlying those rules which are so popular in the present.  If I were to do so with 2nd or 3rd edition, I could easily note the trips and stumbles those documents contributed to the illogical mess of a system that 5th edition is today: an edition which, I must point out, stresses that the DM's arbitrary judgement, without acknowledgement of the rules, is considered the absolute norm that DM's ought to practice.  Therefore, not only have we abandoned any idea of an appeal to the judge, we've also abandoned any grounding framework upon which a judgement is given.  This does not merely guarantee that an individual game is inconsistent in the extreme, it ALSO provides for every game run by every DM throughout the game's culture to be so wildly inconsistent that dropping a DM and moving to another campaign is a serious trauma for players.  In unilaterally granting DMs so much power, the company is forced to argue in compensation that the DM must use this excessive unearned power in total obedience and submission to the player.  We read this illogic every day without flinching, largely because we do not look at the perameters of it too closely.  Instead of a referee who decides if the ball is a strike or not, the batter tells the umpire which it is, and the umpire uses the power granted to confirm the player's perception and to quell any opposition that might arise from others in the party—as takes place in player-vs.-player campaigns.  No wonder we find so many DMs lamenting that they've either failed their parties or are unable to control them.

Let's come back to the point.  The DM's management of the monsters in the game world during combat AND the DM's adjudication of the player's actions in the fight rely on two ethical principles: 1) that the DM will hold his or her self to precisely the same standards as the player; and 2) that the DM has no stake whatsoever in either the monsters or the players succeeding in winning the combat.

These two words, "precisely" and "whatsoever" should be treated as though carved in granite.  Any deviation will compromise the game, the DM's integrity and the compact between the players and DM as human beings.  Individuals in the DM's role may choose to ignore these conditions, finding all sorts of ways to abandon their integrity or justify out-and-out cheating, but we have thousands of years of ethical philosophy to fall back on with regards to how acting in this way seriously fucks you up as a person.  Naturally, many people are unethical.  Still, while I'm sure that most readers here have a firm grasp of what it means to be ethical, even if you are not, while I'm at this street corner I ought to knock on a few doors.

While "integrity" is often used to describe honesty, in a larger sense the word derives from the structural coherence of a designed entity.  When we speak of organizations, such as churches, political states, companies and such having integrity, we mean that these institutions are sound, whole and in good operating condition.  When an institution, say, as a random example to choose from, like the United States government, begins to show instability, this comes apart because the integrity of the various structures—the senate, the opposition, the presidency, the justice department, homeland security, what have you—begins to fracture along its weakest points, namely the individuals who fail to maintain their responsibility to their assorted positions.  Each of those individuals, in turn, are a composite of influences and choices that they've made over their lifetime that hold their ethical frameworks together.  Very few individuals suddenly cease to have integrity; most essay to make a change here and there, to step off the straight and narrow, as John Bunyan described, doing so more and more frequently over time.  Eventually, they develop a motto that argues, "Nothing bad has happened yet, so this must be okay too."  Steadily, as the individual drops in ethical freefall, unable to see the ground, they tell themselves, "So good so far."  We've all seen what happens next.

When the DM decides to put one foot outside "precisely" or "whatsoever," there are no immediate consequences.  This is what makes personal integrity so damned hard for people.  If there were some outside force that backslapped you, hard, when you stepped out of line, you'd happily find your balance and stay there.  But there is no outside force, which makes the next choice you make as a DM to go further out of line more, hm, defensible.  Getting away with it feeds your willingness to get away with it—even where your intentions were always good.  The key is that these are your intentions; not the intentions of the general group and not the openly discussed cooperation of everyone involved.  The very fact that you have to keep your intentions secret, because they are off the line, should be an indicator that your intentions have your head up their butt.  Yes, of course it's secret.  When you fudge the die, do you then immediately tell the player, "Oh, I just fudged the die there.  Actually the monster hit, but I'm judging that it did not.  Shall we continue?"

For many, however, it isn't an indicator, because it lacked a consequence.  As a rule of practice, ethical behaviour is where you practice the rule of law regardless of whether there would be a consequence.  You practice the rule because you agree with the rule.

If you disagreed, you'd argue the rule should be changed, until it became one you'd agree with; but until the change occurred, it would not be in your nature to flout the rule just because you disagreed with it.

It isn't important that we behave like this all the time.  We falter.  We're human.  What matters isn't that we're perfect, what matters is that we correct ourselves and get back on the line, making consequences for ourselves in the form of mental confessions and the decision to repent ... and, in the future, to do it better.

Apart from what the DM does, it matters what the DM believes. While the text is somewhat satisfying for the former, it completely ignores the latter; it takes no steps towards making DMs understand the responsibilities their bear or the need to adhere to fairness or propriety.  I can understand why it doesn't.  Many readers, if they're still here at the end of this post, will have been made VERY uncomfortable by all this discussion of ethics, because ethics are designed to make us uncomfortable.  Business models will argue that the business is ethical, but they won't look too closely at it; and businesses, except for the church, which doesn't have to pay taxes, DON'T preach at their customers.

Without the tax exemption, it's hard to stay in the black.

This series continues with Keeping the Faith

Oil to my Elbows

The image shown is from p. 11 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

This gets harder.

Each step along the process of re-inventing D&D into this sludge takes us a little further down the road of subverting the DM's control over the game and his or her authority.  Note the choices being made here.  The player's invented background is reframed as "building the campaign world."  The DM needs "help" in creating details about the player's missions.  In the spirit of inclusion, "each" player takes a part in defining the game world; and the DM is encouraged to make sure the player's background is relevant to what happens next.

Yes, there is lip service paid to the DM who wants to "take as much control over it" as they want.  But note that 9/10ths of the text is distinctly written contrary to this idea, and that the language used for how much control the DM takes deliberately presupposes the DM will want to surrender at least some control over the game world to the players.  Expectedly, the DM will be lacking in being able to create the complex setting required: so, we're expressly told the DM should feel free to seek help.  Don't take so much all on your own shoulders.  Share it around.

Then, right at the end, after cajoling the reader into accepting this perspective, the passage slaps us right in the face:  let the player's help, but don't let one of your players help too much.  Spread it around.  The writers know perfectly well that the creative abilities of the players will differ considerably; and that there will certainly be one player with lots and lots of ideas, and others who will complacently bow to that player's will.  The writers will have seen, as we all have, that giving the party more power usually translates into giving ONE PLAYER more power, creating a conflict between two people at the table that pushes the rest out.  Therefore, this warning.  However, the writers don't think its necessary to tell you how this revolving around one player happens, or what to do when it happens. 
"Oh, hey, when this happens, don't let it."  That's all that you, as a DM, get.

Time to warn you again: if 4e is your thing; if the above seems rational and appropriate, stop reading here.

The Character is Only a Game Piece

The image shown is from p. 10-11 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: garbage

If you are a modern D&D player, who feels that players creating a background in order to "flesh out their characters," then realize that much of what's written in this post won't fit with your ideals and perception of the game.  Particularly if you believe that the agenda of D&D is to live out your fantasy life, rather than addresssing your personal ability to succeed against the standards involved with game play.  I strongly suggest that you do not read farther.  This post isn't for you.

The Typical Party & the Typical DM

The first image shown is from p. 10 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.  The second image, below, is from p. 15 of 4th Edition's Players Handbook.

Rating: mostly true

I might have divided this section up into two or more posts, but I believe that would have been frightfully dull and overthinking the issue.  The second image indicates what you'll find if you search page 15 of the player's handbook.  A complete description of the four types covers all of page 16; I felt that was a bit much.  In short hand, controllers are wizards; defenders are fighters & paladins; leaders are clerics & warlords; and strikers are rangers, rogues & warlocks.  Most readers, I'm sure, can work out the relationship between label and class easily.

We can see here an attempt by the publishers to formalize what we commonly see as the chief combat structure that D&D players employ.  I think the content is self-explanatory and doesn't need repeating.  Accepting this structure is, I've found, fairly universal in the experience of most participants, though I can't say that I've seen it in action since I played in a club at the University of Calgary in the late 1980s.

I played 4th edition for about three months in 2015/6; that association led to a disturbing confrontation with the 4th and 5th edition game culture at the gaming store where we played.  Returning to that post is my only way of positively identifying when I played.  I have no other associations with that brief period, and gained no acquaintences from it.

As I remember, while lip-service was paid to the theory described here, what I remember were blocks of player characters fighting blocks of monsters, jammed together without much sense, pouring damage back and forth until one block evaporated.  I don't doubt that some people do strategize as indicated, but many players have no concept of strategy—and therefore, we may argue they need a passage like the one shown.

I see two general discussions worth having from the material.  The first is the idea that the strategy employed here is correct and effective; the second relates to the need to have these four character roles in a party.

I cannot, alas, speak properly to 4th edition with regards to these things.  Frankly, I don't think the character role labels worked.  I read a lot of D&D description and argument, and I can't recall people making use of these terms.  Unquestionably, the roles played by a wizard or a fighter in a fight match up to "controller" and "defender"—it's only that when I see people talk about it, they say "wizard" and "fighter."  Not the terms here.  Like "fetch," these terms didn't happen.

As such, I'm not going to use these terms; nor am I going to discuss 4th edition classes.  4th edition fairly tanked as a system, though for many it was their first system and of course there are many who still play it.  But after 12 years of talking about AD&D, original D&D or my Frankenstein's version of D&D, I doubt anyone here will be heartbroken if I don't talk about the fantastic striking abilities of rogues.  This notion that fighters stand in front, wizards stand in the back, thieves go around and clerics heal has been around for a long, long time; I can't recall settling in to write about it, so this is a good excuse.

Part 1: Strategy

Taking from the 4e text, we're told that without a fighter, a party is vulnerable; that the lack of a cleric seriously compromises the party's ability to heal; that without a thief to backstab or a ranger to fire multiple arrows into a target, it's hard to do enough damage to kill monsters; and that without a wizard, the monsters can't be wiped out in groups.  Well, true enough.

This being a post for going back in time, I remember I got into some big trouble when I ran at game cons in the mid-80s.  Those were my first experiences running players who I didn't know, and didn't know me.  I saw them use the tactics I've just described: fighters in front, wizard in back, etc.  And, having played years of Avalon Hill wargames as a kid, as well as plenty of practical experience with capture the flag (which used to be a fanatical pursuit among cub and scout trips in the mountains, training us for the day when we'd join the army, as para-military propagandistic organizations did in the 1970s), it was awfully simple to break the player's strategy.  In a word, as a strategy goes, it sucks.

Think about it.  "Fighters in front, wizards in the back" works if you're fighting in a hallway that definitely has a safe rear.  Why would a monster building a lair ever design it with a rear that was safe for an invader?  But more to the point, I'm Russian.  The way you kill an invader is not to rush forward and fight them on the ground they choose.   No, no, no!  You back away, let the invader grab worthless territory, and then, when they're good and deep into your territory, you encircle them and let them die in their own juices.  That's pretty obvious.

If you're outside, fighting in the wilderness, it's worse.  Where's the "front"?  What side of the wizard do you stand on?  If I do attack you in the wilderness, I'm sure to have missile weapons, even if its just rocks.  Why would I waste my missiles on a fighter?  Of course, it is always assumed that goblins and orcs are amazingly stupid, and haven't learned the difference between a fighter and a wizard.  In my opinion, since they have language, I'm sure they'd invent a little rhyme* to help out the new soldiers:

Lots of robes and no plating,

That's the one you should be hating.

Shiny armour and metal sword,

Kill them when the wizard's snored.

* yes, I just invented this

So, I cheerfully made pincushions out of wizards from goblins behind trees, or had monsters with an intelligence of more than five bulldoze straight for the wizard, specifically when the party stopped to camp or got into an argument about something.  Seems to me, DMs usually perceive that the instant an intelligent monster spots a party, they have an uncontrollable urge to break cover and run straight at the fighter, waving their club around irrepressibly, in mad rage.  Take my word for it: when you don't play monsters this way; and you don't have the intelligent monsters make dungeons that have avenues taking outsiders straight to the treasure vault, players get mighty sore.  As I learned, using a monster to take advantage of the party's poor understanding of strategy is definitely playing outside the rules.  Though, of course, I can give you the page and passage where Gygax says that's exactly what you should do.

These days, I rarely go all out strategically.  It just isn't fair.  As a kid, I ran with players who could spend hours discussing the tactical choices made at Borodino; nowadays, I rarely find people who have heard of Borodino (yes, yes, I know, you all have, but ask around; the readers here are rare, don't you know that?).  Today, I reserve all out tactics for really smart monsters, high intelligence and up.  But I still target wizards.

I have sat with my mouth hanging open when a DM says, "Sure you can run around and attack the monster from behind."  Says right in the original books that you can't do that.  I have had online players in the last year ask if they can move around an enemy and attack them from behind.  I try to explain, over and over, that even if it is turn-based combat, everything in game-reality is still happening simultaneously, which means, if you run around the enemy, the enemy would have time to turn and face you.  But I still get asked—because, well, players are always doing their best to improve their odds of winning a fight.  I can't blame them for that, but surely we can understand the game is not intended to enable characters to break believable reality.  A defender in the center of the circle you're making to get around to his or her rear has to move far, far less than you do in order to maintain their facing.  It therefore takes less time to turn right, then run around to your left.  We can think this through, right?  It is pretty obvious.

Yet, there's the thief, running around and doing it "in shadows," like I can't see you moving or hear you tramping your feet at a full run.  Says right in the original books, you can't surprise me if I know you're there.  Also says, you can't hide in shadows or move silently when you're under observation.  But people don't read the books, they don't like the books, and hey, "fun."  Uh huh.

Strictly speaking, the standard tactics as described are garbage.  In general, the tactics employed by many players in my online D&D game are a mystery to me.  Usually, off-line, my players will keep tight, guard each other's flanks, stand back to back and try to keep the mage more or less in the center.  When the fight is full on, the mage fights, like everyone else.  It is impossible to maintain concentration when the fighter can get stunned and be forced to stumble backward.  Human beings are not walls.  When they're hit, they falter.

Online (thinking over games I've played all the way back to 2009), especially in outdoor fights, players choose to run in three different directions, splitting themselves up.  Instead of a mage running away from the combat, taking advantage of their spell range, they stand in easy reach and begin casting—even though they know I have a rule that it will take them one full round to cast their spell.  Anything will throw them off balance: a boot, a rock, a dagger, a flying tackle ... but still, they insist on doing it, with faith that the enemy will rush to attack the fighter and certainly not the mage.  I don't get it.  I have to assume they've learned certain tactics in the presence of other DMs, who have allowed them to get away with stuff that is a disaster when running in my game world.  It is much like those games I played with strangers in the 80s.

What's weirdest is that the players don't seem to learn from one fight to the next.  A new fight and once again, they take up the same old tactics.

Part 2: Covering

I need to be clear.  Given the way most campaigns are built; and the habits developed by most players in those campaigns; the expectation that there needs to be a fighter, a cleric, a mage and a thief of some kind is pretty near a necessity.  Most modules are designed with the presupposition that the players will have one of each of these character classes (or modern equivalents), and therefore the party will not be able to solve many of the problems or compete effectively in the combats without a full covering.  This is why many genre-savvy players will, upon entering my world, ask immediately, "which kind of character does the party need?"

I dislike this question.  As I say, it comes from the above structure that most players are used to playing, or designing adventures for.  It demonstrates a fundamentally flawed thinking in the game's design, however—one that is largely ignored.  Or which, perhaps, people simply can't see for the trees.

Let me give an example.  My present online party consists of two fighters, an assassin and an illusionist.  The players were in a good-sized town.  They proceeded on their own volition to a tiny village, and from thence into the wilderness, to explore.  Every reader here will have already noted that there's no cleric in the party.  Many will wonder, "What sort of healing did you give them, Alexis?"  Well, there was healing available in the large town, but it is very expensive and two members of the party did not think to purchase it.  One of the players has a bottle that will dispense a salve that heals 1-4 hit points per day.

"But surely, Alexis, you gave them a healing potion, or more than one.  Surely there was one in the first treasure they found."  Actually, no.  I don't run my game as though it is a series of set-pieces waiting for the party to turn up and get what they need.  The party is told the risks, then they decide what to do.

In my opinion, the party is crazy for deciding to be in the wilderness, with these limitations.  The assassin has been strengthened into a kind of dark fighter, but still, that makes three fighters in the party.  However, the reason why they chose to explore the wilderness is obvious:

This is the game as it is usually explained to the players.

The wilderness features an absence of laws.  Everything they find is theirs.  There's no one telling them what to do or where to go.  There's always treasure in the wilderness; there's always another dungeon.  And the DM's there to protect them, right?

This is how every party learns to play the game from day one.  Virtually every manifestation of the game argues that this is HOW the game is played.  Run a party with four illusionists?  That would be insane.  How would the party survive in a dungeon?

Give me three other players and a twin of myself as a DM, and I'd happily run a game with all of us playing illusionists.  We would not head off into the wilderness.  We would not explore a dungeon.  We'd find a nice large city and carve ourselves out a little safe place in it, and then use our wits and magic to spin the residents like tops—gaining experience through cleaning out shops and houses, or making bargains with local authorities to root out criminals or rebels, thus getting our experience through rewards and thankful gifts.  Or both.  We'd strengthen our lair, hire dupes to fight, associate ourselves with smart followers who would loyally help us protect our stake and steadily build up a tremendous underground network, like Sherlock Holmes, or an empire, like Moriarty.  It would definitely be fun.

What would I do with three grunts and a spellcaster?  That is definitely a town party as well.  We need to be near a large city so we can count on someone to heal us.  We need to make friends with a church mamber, so we need to make a donation and join the congregation.  We need intel, so we either need to lean on an official or a snitch.  The assassin can get us in with the criminal element, though not all at once; the fighters are muscle, so let's use them to either help protect some backstreet where we can set ourselves up, or settle ourselves in with the middle class.  We've got a little money; the illusionist has 1100 g.p. credit, for heaven's sake.  Let's use it.

The DM can set up a few in-town dungeons, build a faction that competes with the party, throw in some frivolous plots and provide one or two "do a side job and I'll pay you" arrangements with NPCs.  A couple more levels and the players will get henchmen, square out their party and THEN try the wilderness.

There are several reasons why a party balks at this.  The first is that a typical DM thinks that "intrigue" needs twists and turns like a Bond-movie; every follower is a turncoat, every NPC is a liar and the money is never, ever paid out as promised.  Second, a typical DM can't envision a city the way they can a dungeon; they don't know how the politics in a city work, they can't frame the motivations of half a dozen factions and a dozen more individuals, except in the cheesy 2D frame of a television show like Breaking Bad.  It just isn't possible for typical DMs to imagine that, in fact, criminals are often deeply loyal, which is why real life cartels and terrorist groups survive for decades.  Leaders do not kill their own followers to make a point and once you're on the inside, you're rewarded if you do good work.  This is not how a typical DM thinks.  A typical DM does not understand that the competitors are the enemy, not your own faction.  TV and films describe a world where that isn't so, and these are accepted at face value.

Third, typical players can't comprehend who the enemy is, or how to make friends.  Running a game in a town, where there are plenty of resources, beds, blankets, a continuous supply of food, equipment that doesn't have to be carefully preserved, and lots of healing, still seems confusing.  How is that player going to make friends with a priest?  Or a guard?  What do I say?  Am I supposed to just walk up and say, "Hey, I want to be your friend?"

[I've had players in games do exactly that—SMH]

Social skills are often a bridge too far; players have been trained to walk up, explain to the DM what they want the NPC to do, and then roll dice to see if the NPC does it.  That doesn't translate well to "Let's be friends."  Rolling dice to see if a coldly approached NPC suddenly becomes the party's friend is ridiculous; and the players feel that it's ridiculous, wrecking any possibility of the game being meaningful.  Players simply do not understand how one person talks to another in the game world without it being a matter of "what I want/what you'll do."

I sincerely HOPE players do not approach real people in the real world with this constant mindset.  But I have had players who only considered NPCs and buttons to be pressed, with the dice determining whether or not something would pop out of the little chute.

There's unquestionably a post to be written about how to communicate believably with the game world, but that's not the goal here.  I only want to highlight that the covering of classes in a party reflects the very narrow sliver of what's considered game-play, according to the way people normally perceive a role-playing game.  So long as what we want to do adheres to the resources a particular group has, there's no such thing as insufficient coverage.  But so long as there's only one adventure scenario structure we're allowed to play, then yes: better have one of each.  It's the best plan.

This series continues with The Character is Only a Game Piece

The Last Two Types

The image shown is from p. 9-10 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: false

Here I start to break down.  These last two player categories were clearly written last; suggesting the list was written chronologically, in that even the writer is tired at this point.  Neither the "thinker" or the "watcher" have any continuity.  There's no connection between liking puzzles and choosing actions carefully.  There's no connection between showing up to play the game socially and acting as a peacemaker.  Each is a hodgepodge of dumpster traits piled in at the end, perhaps hoping the reader will not look too closely.

The smartest fellow in my offline campaign is a power gamer.  He's a genius dinkum-thinkum, a hands-on tradesman and also a peacemaker; he wouldn't think of telling other players what to do and he doesn't grind the game to a halt because he comes up with tactical options like riding a horse around barrels.  The people who slow up a game considering tactical options are not "thinkers."  Taking a lot of time to think shows they don't practice with that.

If I needed to recruit players to invent quests for me, I wouldn't be much of a thinker either.  A DM ought to be.

And the watcher here ... oh gawd.  This is what I mean by inclusiveness and rampant positivity.  Here you have this player; "he doesn't really care" about your game, but you, O DM, you're being counselled here not to force the player to be involved; to accept the player is fine with being a stuffed shirt; and, you know, take the time to urge the player to be involved, when necessary.

I'm going to say some things now that will make you, dear reader, never to want to run in my campaign.  So if you're sensitive, you should probably close your eyes before reading forward.

The Carrion of Story

The image shown is from p. 9 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: false

This is not the last time we will talk about story in this series.  Story will come up again on pp. 10, 11, 13, 19, 23, 28, 29 and 31.  So we will have lots of opportunity to talk about it.

The word "story" appears a staggering 164 times in the 4th edition DMG.  For comparison, "story" appears 30 times in 3rd edition DMG; it appears just 5 times in the 5th edition DMG—and only once in the AD&D version.  In this last, the word appears in the forward by editor Mike Carr, as it happens, and not at all in the description of the game.  Carr notes of the game that it is "an opportunity to watch a story unfold ..."  That is, that the story is a byproduct of the game, not a constituent element in how to construct or run it.  One gets the feeling that 4th edition really pushed this concept hard, and that despite the failure of the system overall, this one idea took hold with players who began their relationship with the game between 2007 and 2014.  Though 5th edition initially dropped the concept overall, throwing out a very few phrases about it, the concept has stuck; possibly because it appears in 5th edition splatbooks.  I don't know about that, I did not bother searching each of these to see how often the concept comes up.

Because it is still relevant (a blogger writes that "D&D is about story" roughly the same number of times each day that a game module is thrown out because a game store going out of business can't sell it), we need to look at the "player type."  I say the text is false because it is disingenuous; a "chronicle" is a factually written account of historical events, not a fictional account of a character's background or even of the party's actions over time.  The player does not believe the "narrative" should win over the rules, the player believes that the outcome specific to the player's expectations should: that is, a thing that hasn't happened yet, because until the DM describes the outcome, it is in the future and not the past, and therefore NOT a narrative.  Because of this perspective of this type of player, "compromise" is a euphemism for, "I get my way and you compromise," as most of us have discovered when trying to run this type of player.  Sadly, many DMs do compromise as demanded, ensuring the outcome satisfies the storyteller player.  More's the pity.

Yes, I'm quite aware that "storyteller" is completely erroneous in this context.  "Story-conscious" or "story-aware" would be more accurate.  The player isn't inventing a story by explaining what they want or expect to see; to some degree, the player sometimes "tells" a backstory—but more often this is less of a story and more as a checklist for motivations justifying the player's behaviour in game.  It also tends to be the last story actually told by the player.

Occasionally, a player will relate a story to an NPC, explaining how and why the party got to this place and time, such as, "We were told by Arkady the Wise to travel to the Village of Wind; there we found a scroll that directed us to make our way to your doorstep ..."  That sort of thing.  Technically, this is a story, but not a very good one.

When a player explains what they're going to do during the game, i.e., "I jump on the giant's back and thump him," this is not storytelling.  Fifty things like this being said by multiple party members, and the DM answering, "The giant throws you off" or "The giant dies", do not together make a "story."  We often turn a blind eye to this fact when we pretend that an evening of such events is "collaborative storytelling."  It is not.  Because it is not written down, it is not even a transcript (though that is what it would be, if it were written down).  "Transcript" sounds dull.  The party got together for some collaborative transcript-making.  Hm.  Lacks flair.  Better call it a "story."

I've hardly ever met a story-conscious player who actually "worked hard" to make sure the character fit the backstory.  I've learned that backstories are written with tremendous lack of form, so that they can be used to defend any behaviour ... much like the Holy Bible or the U.S. Constitution.  So, yes, I'll concede that players do make their characters fit the backstory; I only dispute that any of them work hard at it.

I'm a writer, a reader, a DM and I've been at this a long time, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how a DM introduces a little, a lot or a medium amount of "plot" in every adventure.  The word "plot" describes the main events of a play, novel, movie or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.

It is an abstract term describing everything that happens.  Technically, plot can't be "introduced" into anything, any more than a driver crossing a river can introduce a little "span" into a bridge, or a chessplayer can introduce a little "board" into the game.  The word's presence in the sentence makes no sense whatsoever; but more frustrating, I'm unsure what word of the right definition was meant to be employed here.  I guess it sounded good to the writer, the copyreader, the editor and the publisher ... though I suspect, as with other sentences in this book, only 1 in 4 of these responsible people read these particular words (and probably not the writer).

On the whole, I see little difference between the warning given here and that given to the actor.  But it is good advice.  Yes, make sure the player does not act like a self-centered narcissistic git.  *Applause*

So much for criticism.  Let's address the problem and come to terms with it.  As a DM, you've read the books telling you that D&D is about story.  Your memory of ancient tomes, er, early game modules, suggests to you that Saltmash, the Borderland Creep, Hammlet and the Mountain of the White Plum had what you feel were good, solid stories.  You've played those stories out a bunch of times and they seem to hold up, so you imagine to yourself that maybe, if you work hard, you can dredge up something like that yourself.  Sometimes, the result feels good enough that you lay it out prettily and sell it online as a lark or even as the beginning of a business model.  Mostly, however, you want to wow your players and get them to really like your adventure.

Thing is, none of those modules—including all the new ones—can actually be called "a story."  Each of them incorporated a story, at least as you saw it.  Page 6 of Keep on the Borderlands gives a background for the DM to use, which reads,

"The Realm of mankind is narrow and constricted.  Always the forces of Chaos press upon its borders, seeking to enslave its populace, rape its riches, and steal its treasures.  If it were not for a stout few, many in the Realm would indeed fall prey to the evil that surrounds them.  Yet, there are always certain exceptional and brave members of humanity, as well as similar individuals among its allies—dwarves, elves and halflings—who rise above the common level and join battle to stave off the darkness which woudl otherwise overwhelm the land ..."

 

Okay, those words are stirring, if somewhat purple.  They elicit a threat, make a promise of reward and hit the high points of the world of high adventure.  Fair enough.  What they do not do is tell a "story."  There's no story here.  What we have here is description ... precisely the thing the DM is supposed to give to players, so they can answer back, telling the DM what they do.  A story is the relating of specific events.  In the above, there are no events being described, only generalised ongoing conditions.

Take note, even wikipedia fails to include a heading for the word "story."  Look for story and you'll find yourself on a page describing narrative, which is "an account of a series of related events or experiences."  If you look up "story" in the dictionary, you'll find it defined as "an account of imaginary or real people and events told."  If you look up the etymology, you'll learn that the word is a "connected account or narration of something happening," c. 1200; a "recital of true events" (14th c.); a euphemism for "a lie" (1690s) and a "newspaper article" (1892).  None of these descriptions align in any way whatsoever with how D&D or any other role-playing game is played, except when applied by bad writers who clearly did not understand the definition of the word.

Trouble is, you my readers do know the word's definition, as it was passed along very clearly from your infancy in the form of storybooks and readers that were read aloud to you before you learned to read yourself.  When you find yourself trying to reconcile what you do when you create an adventure with what you inherently understand is storytelling, the disconnect gets all muddled up.  In the end, you wind up calling your design "storytelling," when its definitely a similar description as that given in the module example above.  The confusion is a hurdle; if you understood clearly that it is your intention to write a description, you'll find the problem of having to invent a "good story" just goes away.  It is easier to write a description; it is easier to expand on a description.  And it is much easier to RUN a description.

Occasionally, you as a person will tell a "story" or two.  Here's my story of the time I didn't get drunk on "yards of ale," or how I learned my daughter was going to be born in an hour and I was all the way across town.  I could tell you about how I once met the singer Prince, or how my parents were introduced to each other.  These are all "narratives" I can tell; and as the reader will have noticed, occasionally I will tell these narratives to buttress a point I'm making.  But the narrative is communicative, not directly descriptive and not strictly necessary to the post.  The narrative makes the post a little more interesting—and in designing a description for an adventure, a narrative can serve that purpose.  But the narrative is apart from the point—that being to enable the character to clearly make choices about what to do.

Let me give an example.  The players enter a village in Spain, named Carrión (real place).  They discover, much to their horror, that there is an ongoing plague in the town, and that it has already seized hold of a third of the population.  However, they are there to find the daughter of a player character (this actually happened in my game back in 1990/91, or thereabouts), so they can't just run off.  They enter the town and I describe the various scenes they see; there is no narrative here, only description.

There are only 800 people in the village, so in not very long they find the daughter Carolina; she had run off, looking for adventure, terrifying her mother, and Peter, her father, was ready to force her back against her will.  However, when confronted, Carolina was tending the ill, exposing herself to the disease.  Whereupon she told a story: "Father, you told me that when you were young and in Vienna, you fought a basilisk in a church before dawn on a Sunday, to save the parishioners.  You might have been turned to stone that day, yet you fought.  Since running away, I have had time to regret my decision; I have been hungry, I have been in danger and I have done stupid things.  But here, now, at this moment, would you have me abandon this town because I might catch a disease and it might kill me?  Did you run from danger?"

I'm sure at the time, I was more clumsy than this, and failed to produce a sufficient emotional appeal, though the players responded well and I've restructured my memory so that I think I was much more clever then that I was.  That's not the point.  The brief story, her father's story, makes Carolina's argument, but it isn't the adventure.  And what happened next, when the party decided to stay in order to help, which meant organizing burials and searching for medicines and forcing back outsiders to maintain the quarantine ... that's all just a story I'm telling you.  It wasn't a story to the players, because in reality it was a sequence of descriptions met with a series of replies and actions given.  It was a transcript.  It's only a story now because I'm telling it that way.  This isn't how I ran it.

What's unfortunate is that D&D doesn't actually need any story at all to be interesting.  The company's decision to put "story" on a pedestal, then argue that DMs need one, is a snake oil pitch.  The game works perfectly well by having a bunch of really good descriptions and then waiting for the players to respond in kind.  There's really no need at all to pull together a series of climaxes or resolutions—as the sequence of events materializes, building itself atop whatever the players did before, the moments of crisis occur in relation to how the dice fall, or how the DM introduces a character who turns out to be something unexpected.  Carolina being found in that town under those circumstances, that was unexpected.  The later discovery that the town was originally infected by bandits (a brief story), of whom only one was still alive, having a sackful of money he was willing to hand over if it meant buying his way out of execution, that was also unexpected.  But as these moments took shape, the players made their decisions based on the problems at hand.

Was the plague of Carrion a story?  4th edition and later D&D would certainly see it that way.  But I didn't describe a whole range of events to the party, except that suddenly people started dying.  All the events that mattered came up in the course of the game; and were inserted just as I would any description.  "You see a field with nearly 100 bodies, some of which are in sacks, none of which are buried, with women weeping everywhere.  The bodies are covered with pustules, and around the periphery there are large black vultures picking at what they can reach.  They are kept back by black pitch, burning in holes on the ground.  What do you do?"  Is that a story?  I don't think so.  It is a description.  Is the player's response a story?  Again, no.  The player's response is just a different sort of description.

You can make your adventure design a lot easier for yourself if you will purge this ill-represented necessity for story out of your mind as you sit down to decide what the party will see, what they will be told, where things are placed and what options are available.  Think of it that way, and you'll feel the walls of your prison pushed aside while you design under a bright blue sun.

This series continues with The Last Two Types

Combat vs. Story

The image shown is from p. 9 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: false

The tenor of the text exploits a common theme that runs in the company's writings: that "combat" is somehow a separate part of the game from its other constituent parts—specifically, according to the text, the story and roleplaying elements.  Note the advice at the bottom: don't let the player ruin adventures by killing things at the wrong time, or too vigorously, or indeed things that shouldn't be killed at all.

Last night, I obtained a copy of Playtone's Greyhound, written by and starring Tom Hanks.  The film is based upon a novel by C.S. Forrester, The Good Shepherd, and relates real life events as historical fiction related to the movement of transport ships across the Atlantic during World War II.  I strongly recommend the film.  For those who appreciated Band of Brothers (and since I've written about both Band of Brothers and C.S. Forrester on this blog, you know I did), this is every bit as tight and visual as an afficionado could hope for.  Phenomenal.

I do not wish to spoil the film, but I do with to make a point about the writing, the storytelling and the overall relationship the film has to combat.  The film's story is all about combat.  I'll try to make my point as best I can, for those who haven't seen the film and may never see it, without ruining it.

If you've seen naval war films—for example, the commercialized Hunt for Red October, which I'm sure most everyone here has seen—you're familiar with the standard film presentation we all take for granted.  We're given an action scene, then the characters talk about the action, they express some of their tension, then we move into another action scene.  Hunt is excessively dialogue/character heavy, so much so that the action taking place is almost incidental to the characters; we know the Red October is going to get out of its scrape, so we're introduced to Ramius and Ryan and encouraged to watch their very personal struggles.  I can point to similar films from classic Hollywood, such as The Cruel Sea, Run Silent, Run Deep or the comical Operation Petticoat.  The intent of this intra-action dialogue is to relieve the tension, impose relatable characters for the audience to identify with and offer something other than a film made of shots of ships and subs that are necessarily models.  There's only so much that can be done with camera angles and lighting.

Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 Das Boot was a phenomenal game-changer in a lot of ways.  While backstory and character are instrumental, these are definitely shoved out of the way to depict a submarine crew stuggling to survive against odds.  The cold, raw brutality of the film, emphasizing the freakishly enclosed space aboard a German sub, with a crew that plaintively suffers through hell, eschewed scenes attempting to reduce the tension.  There are brief interactions with members of the crew and the captain; momentary interludes; but the "roleplay" aspect of the terrible adventure being faced is muted tremendously from other films of the genre.  Petersen had no intention of relieving the tension at all.  The film should have won best picture, but instead that went to an enormous piece of crap called Chariots of Fire, a vomitous boring romp that no one ever bothers to mention now.  Typical.

Greyhound goes one further.  It eliminates all character dialogue, except for two sequences that bookend the film.  There are no scenes where the characters express their feelings about what's going on, mutter phrases encouraging other crewmates or talk about whether or not they'll live.  There's zilch along those lines.  The film is about what is going on, and only about what is going on; yet there isn't a second where the pain, the sacrifice, the sorrow or the fear isn't palpable.  Truth is, a story doesn't need what D&D writers laughably call "roleplay," which is little more than silly staging that allows the players to goof off while tension pisses itself down the drain.

The point of all this going around the barn is to argue that combat is story.  Particularly if we choose to make combat matter, and if we don't attempt to create tension out of contrived game structures like "social or skill challenges"—which aren't stressful and are, in fact, dull as dishwater, especially after they've been reproduced ten times a session for months.  As the company found out with 4e when all their cleverness took a spectacular dump.

Combat becomes story when it ceases to be "an unexpected battle" to keep things from getting dull, and becomes that thing that every outcome in the campaign hinges on.  This is a concept that is not created through bigger or cooler monsters; it is not made by pouring bigger treasure into chests waiting to be plundered; it is not accomplished through ambushes, big massive weapons, monsters taunting players with insults or any other horrific cheesy combat trope.

Combat becomes story when the Battle of Helm's Deep is not just a way to receive x.p., but the lynchpin of the whole plan—and very definitely the PARTY'S plan, not the DM.  If it's the DM's plan to defend Helm's Deep, no one gives a good goddamn shit if it's defended or not, so long as we get our experience.  The players didn't invent the situation, they just went from one part of the DM's story to the next and now that they're here, they don't have an emotional stake in what's going on!  Why would they?  It's just a bloody story.

It has to be the party's battle; the party's stakes; the party's plan that's being tested.  The stakes have to be higher than experience and gold.  For example, if the party wins this battle, the party will rule this entire region—this, after small incremental victories, along their own path, with close calls all along.  Now this, this huge battle at Helm's Deep (or wherever, because we've ditched the LOTR plot) is where is all rides.  If the party loses, they lose everything.  Not just the battle, not just their overlordship, but all their allies and friends, all their commitments, all their contacts, everything.  Lose this battle, and they have to start from scratch, and probably in a new country where they've never been.

In a combat film, the characters are fighting for their lives.  None of the characters in Das Boot want to be there.  The characters in Greyhound are there because it's a terrifying, necessary job that if its not done, the war is lost and millions will die.  We can't create these sorts of tensions for the player, even if the players really love their characters.  Therefore, for combat to matter, it has to put things on the line that the players really care about: their mental faculties for making a plan; their shame if it fails; the sense of their joint effort with their friends, to commit themselves to something this big.

If it's the DM's story, those tensions are obliterated.  It's the DM's plan.  It's the DM's shame if we all die.  We didn't ask for this.  We're just here because the DM said, "Go to Helm's Deep," so we did.  Don't blame us.  We're just following orders.

That's why railroading and storytelling sucks for game play.  Not just because the players haven't agency to make their own lives, but because they haven't any reason to give a shit what the lives they're living stand for.  Thus players can squabble about petty bullshit, like saying "fuck all this talking" and killing the monsters that should have been talked to.  IF the players really cared; if talking to the monster really mattered; if this were our adventure and not the DM's, well, hell.  We'd want to talk to the monster, wouldn't we?  We wouldn't be "slayers," would we?  It's just that all this story-telling shit is so damned boring.