Company

We hate the word "company."

And for good reason.  This last year, 20+ years since Office Space laid out the shit that goes on every day in white collar business, we've been treated to corporations who treated COVID as a personal attack on their bottom line ... not a threat to actual human beings.  The "company" declared itself willing to bring about your death rather than allow quarantine, health measures or sensible behaviour where money was at stake.

So I am somewhat in the hole when suggesting that the word "company" is a better descriptor for an immersive game than the word "party."  I ask only that you hear me out.

"Company" has a positive connotation as well.  Company is the cure for loneliness.  "Good company" is what we call our friends and family.  The word originates in the bosom of society, friendship and intimacy, not in a spirit of people enslaved jointly under the lash of some tyrannical force.  Soldiers began to describe themselves as companies in the 12th century because they battled together, they protected each other, they helped each other and made each other laugh in the face of danger.  Companions are bread mates, people who eat together, who make a future together ... and who seek to perform or carry out an activity jointly.  It is from this last that the commercial sense derives, since gatherings of individuals would make a pact among themselves to participate in a venture of some kind — an ad-venture, from the prefix meaning "to" or "towards" — in which they'd share each other's burdens and gain from each other's talents.  "Forming a company" meant exactly this.

Consider an example in the modern sense: a group of individuals decide to form a "band."  They each have a different skill set, a different personality, but they have a common goal: to produce music and achieve success, variously described as gaining fame, adoration, money and The Stones-like influence of personality.  So they agree to play together; and they agree on what kind of music to play.  Thereafter, a degree of commitment is necessary — to practice, to make concessions to others in the band, to agree to show up to gigs and to sustain each other in hard times.  A good band needs an amazing amount of commitment.  The members must be willing to sacrifice their time with other people.  They must "get over themselves"  — which some achieve for awhile and then, not so much (the history of Jefferson Airplane/Starship comes to mind).  They must get over failing for a long, long time before success happens (see Fleetwood Mac).  Most of all, they must be good company for each other.  They must coordinate with each other.  The final product is a single product, in which everyone is a contributor to something greater than themselves as individuals.

Now, I propose a band because we might imagine, for a moment, that a group of D&D players are not a group of disparate, solitary participants in a board game, but a company of individuals who undertake to accomplish something greater than they could individually.  They meet together at the beginning of the campaign and instead of thinking, "Oo, I want to be a fighter," or "Oo, I want this bling!" — they think instead, what do WE want?  What can WE accomplish?

Usually, this is handed off to the DM, who acts the tyrant and rolls out the worksheet for the group, even handing out the character sheets and saying, "You're the fighter and you're the mage, and we're gonna take this dungeon today," like a boss running a corporation.

Whereupon the players act like good little worker drones, bowing their heads and answering, "Yes sirree boss, we're certainly gonna get on that fer you!"  They know their jobs, they do their jobs, they get paid for their jobs and everyone goes home after a good day's work.  Yippee.

We keep defining "sandbox" according to "what sort of game the DM runs."  In fact, a true sandbox is defined by what sort of game the players choose to play.  No matter what the DM says or does, no matter how much money has been spent on modules and shit, the players can gang together any time they want and say, "We're not doing that shit.  We're want to do this."

Ha!  A Marxist argument, yes?

No.

Because I'm not arguing that the players get together, submit demands to the DM and then the DM provides the sort of work load that satisfies the players.  No, no, no.  I'm arguing that the players QUIT THEIR JOBS, refuse to do the work the DM provides entirely, and forms a good, respectable capitalistic company whereby they set out to profit and share that profit among themselves.

How is that possible if the DM won't consent?  Plain truth: it isn't possible.  The DM doesn't only control the corporation, but the whole blasted government as well — and if the DM won't consent to another company setting up business in the DM's world, then that's that.

However, this exposes the DM's rigged approach to the game for what it is:  a bullshit arrangement designed to control the players in a DM-run rat maze.  Personally, when I learned that every DM was going to approach the game this way, I quit playing and began to exclusively DM: because if I couldn't play the way I wanted, at least I could make it possible for others.

The commitment I spoke of in an earlier post reaches fruition when the players set forth together as a unified company.  They roll and design their own character sheets, exactly as they want them, enjoying the process just as any self-employed individual enjoys setting up their venture.  They enjoy the roll of the dice, because a good roll for any member is a good roll for every member.  The experience gained by the company is shared, no matter whose character it accrues to, since every character is in it for the whole.  If the lead singer's voice carries the band to improbable heights, every band member enjoys the huge audience; every band member enjoys the money; and every band member receives respect, if not quite as much fame as the lead singer.  But fame is something that really only matters to outsiders.  Inside, it's really a different thing.

"The fame thing isn't really real, you know."

People forget that's the real message behind the "just a girl" speech.  Who would know better than Julia Roberts?  Even if she is speaking a line written by the well-known film-industry critic Richard Curtis.  When Roberts puts on her pants, she does them one leg at a time, just like you.

When a group of players work and fight as a company, the enormous strength, intelligence, spell power or whatever possessed by an individual isn't emblematic of the individual's "superiority."  That's the sort of shit that plagues workers in a DM's sweatshop campaign, who must find things to promote themselves over the group.  The wizard in a company knows where that power comes from; it comes from the others who provide a wall against the enemy, and rescue if that time comes.  By the time the campaign has stretched into its first four months, everyone has crashed at some point; everyone owes their lives to the others.  Like a rock band that has spent enough nights where the audience is the enemy, they have to love each other; each other are the only people they can really count on.  And if Grace is more famous than we are?  Hell, that's just the opinion of people who don't know.  Who weren't there.  They have no idea how many times the band members held each other, or went the distance for each other, or suffered pain for each other.  In the end, that's the stuff that matters to a band, or a company of fellows, or a "party."  Not how many fucking experience Jack got as opposed to Jill.

Which is perhaps why the "player balance" nonsense was so foreign to me as a DM when I first encountered it.  I'd been running for nearly 30 years, and had never had players demand a change in the rules to reflect their desire to be "equal" with other characters.  The idea was absurd.  The pursuit of the ideal has been as well, having successfully polluted two editions and the overall direction of the game.

Still, if the player has never had experience with this sort of game; if all they've ever known is the sweatshop; then it stands to reason that they'll promote what they know.  They make ridiculous arguments to me that just because their games aren't "deep," it doesn't mean they're "shallow."

Actually, yes, that's exactly what it means.  That's how words work.

It's also truth, for anyone who's been there, working for yourself is harder work than working for other people.  We work longer hours for less pay, and no one's there but the buyer to tell us that are work is any good.  When players act as a company, it can feel like a frustrating, thankless task for a long time — until one day the players find themselves in an unexpected position, facing four to one odds or greater, and find themselves kicking ass like a gangster.

It's a great feeling.  It's even better knowing that it's their feeling, bought and paid for.

Not a wage paid by a tyrant.

 

The Higher Goals

Much of the dispute I have with D&D stems from what goals are defined by the mainstream.  The value of the game has been vastly undersold since the 1970s.  It is as though someone invented railroading, and the only use, for which anyone could think to put it, was to make a little ride for the kiddies to sit on.

We are told variously that the goals are to "have fun," to "adventure," to "role-play" and other such short term ideas.  Marketing from the start has degraded D&D to a cute little activity shared by people around a table, like a board game — usually, featuring events that can be played out in a single session, with the characters having no more long-term importance than a racing car, a top hat or a thimble.

There is much, much more to the game.

The leading voices of the mob cherish Sesame Street level participation advice, such as "cooperation" is a better way to play.  Yes, I know, I learned this from Big Bird.  Yet the goals presented as achievable through genius-level immersion of this level are vague, unsketched and tainted by old saws about the judicial authority of adjudicators.  After nearly five decades of game play, we've hardly advanced game play from the goal of "getting to the end" of whatever adventure's being run.

The game provides us with indisputable concrete goals, but these are ignored or flately disdained as "impure" but numerous voices.  These are treasure, experience and preferred equipment — each of which lends itself to upgrading of one sort or another to make the player character more powerful.  The game structure of these things are repeatedly bypassed by providing free gear for pre-made characters, who also jump multiple levels rather than play their way forward — both of which either obliterate the need for money; in most campaigns, money is merely an exchange for better, more powerful gear.   Since most games last a single session, and most would-be campaigns fold after a few weeks, there's no reason not to dismiss these goals as unnecessary — particularly when getting to the end is all anyone cares for.

My game view is very different.  I feel that at the start, player characters should be given VERY little; that "the start" should happen only when the campaign is initiated, and should not be revisited again, ever if possible.  Campaigns should run for years, and the DM should responsibly attack that intention with a commitment that disallows alternative thinking.  Players should be chosen based on their commitment and not their availability.  Treasure, experience and choice equipment should be earned through play and never through convenience, or the desire to "play something new," on account of the player feeling so game savvy that they don't want to play any more characters below a given level or above it.

Moreover, I believe that wealth and character power, along with advetures and role-playing, are merely a means to an end, and not the end itself.  The end itself ought to be indeterminate and wholly in the hands of the PLAYER, unlike the course of single adventures where the end is in the hands of the DM.

In effect, "traditional" D&D, the sort promoted heavily by Gygax, Perkins, Mercer's crew and the general symbiosis of voices intent on keeping the game's design as crippled as possible, is argued to be a finite game.  Whereas the game I regularly present and carry forth in exactly the manner I've just described, is an infinite game.  There is no end; and therefore, no absolute last and final goal, except whatever happens to be reached on the day when I, the DM, am Dead, Incapacitated or — in the case of my online campaign — incapable of maintaining the 4-12 hours a week it requires to move the game along very, very slowly.  It takes me 12 hours in text to manage as much game as I can put together in about 90 minutes in face-to-face game play.

And still, I'm still there, swinging.  Because I don't think a D&D campaign should ever stop except for the other two reasons I've given.  And in this, I am in a very, very scarce minority.  Something in the neighbourhood of one-armed, left-handed pool-sharks successfully taking money from British sailors in Yemen.

An infinite game of the sort I describe possesses more than "immersion" or "problem-solving."  Very few things of this kind are infinite; and fewer persons vouching to run these things have the power to convince others that yes, there will be another game and yes, you can invest hard with your characters ambitions knowing there's a decent chance those ambitions will be realised.  This is key.  IF the DM cannot convey this direct and absolute formula, then no matter how complex, detailed, imaginative or wickedly fun the game is, human persons will not speculate in a future that may uncertainly collapse because the DM is suddenly bored with this genre, edition or the venture of role-play entirely.  And if so, game play WILL suffer for that lack of consignment.

Oh, there may be good games played short term.  And there may be long-term games that achieve some sort of relevancy, though the pall of quitting hangs over the campaign month-to-month.  But until the Dear Reader has played in a game that absolutely will be played without expectation of end, very little to nothing can be known of the depth of investment a player is prepared to make ... particularly as a creator.

With my last post, I expressed the hyperfocused state of my mind as I throw myself whole-hog into my game's design.  When I can offer players a game that doesn't stop, and maintain that game ad infinitum, that frees them to achieve a hyperfocused state of player participation that cannot be reached in the "traditional," paltry form of the game that is lauded so loudly by so many cheap voices.  When players know their "sandbox" won't be disturbed, they may work their will with it exactly as they do with the sandboxes of their personal lives.  ANY long-term plan is possible, in any field — with the understanding that any achievement that is made in the real world CAN ALSO be incorporated into the game world, and vice-versa.  What can be conceived as a strategy of success in the real world can be realized as a strategy in D&D ... meaning that players do not merely "play" in my game.

They flow.

A Ghastly Mess

Continuing from yesterday, then.

I think we need an example of "giving way" and "pushing back."  As well, I suppose, an example of the way I run a "sandbox."  The online party's actions can be read by anyone, so they'll do.

In summation: ages ago, the party discovered a crashed airship in the wilderness and encountered an entitlement of a fiefdom in Norway in the name of Hamish Ross, a Scotsman who had fought with the King of Denmark and Norway during the Religious Wars.  The party had no knowledge of this person and no reason to care.  The party investigated the ship, found it full of giant spiders and let it be.  They did not know that long before their arrival, that a group of goblins had already plundered the ship and made off with the 12,000 gold pieces that was meant for Ross, to go along with his title.

Later, the party encountered the goblin lair while randomly searching the area, discovering it already destroyed by a powerful wight, one too powerful for the party to face.  However, the party did clear out two levels of the dungeon and discovered Ross's gold.  Here we have the true nature of the sandbox ideal.  The party learned it WAS the Scotsman's gold; they were able to learn through divination that he was alive and living in Norway, in fact in Bergen, three days sailing for the party.   Should they return the gold, or keep it?  The pieces were minted with the king's special emblem, but the party could have melted it down.  Did I care, one way or the other.  From the last post, it should be evident that I would not care.  It was the party's decision what to do.  So long as they acted wisely, the gold could have been melted down and kept (it would have been unwise to publicly spend it).  Had they taken those precautions, the push-back would have been minimal.  The gold had already been lost for nearly 3 years; and been in the hands of the goblins most of that time.  It was already stolen.

Here is a good first example of thinking rationally as a DM.  Don't put the gold in the party's hands unless it belongs in the party's hands!  Supposing the gold can be put there, and then cleverly taken back through some game story mechanisation, is a truly awful idea.  12,000 gold for a 3rd-4th level party is hardly gamebreaking.  Let them have it, let them keep it, don't stew about it, don't punish them for it and don't get petty!  If any amount of gold is too much for them to have, then DON'T PUT IT IN REACH.

There's an excellent scene in the series Band of Brothers, which I've linked.  The scene ends with the admonition, "Never put yourself in a position where you can take from these men."  As DMs, we're responsible for the player's welfare.  Like with war, that doesn't mean they can't get hurt or killed; it doesn't mean they get everything they want; it doesn't mean that they won't suffer and end up sacrificing wealth and status because of something they've done.  It means that of all the things against the players — monsters, selfish enemies, their own inability to solve puzzles, their doubts, the difficulty of the game's rules and knowing what to do next — what they DON'T need is a galdamned GOD mind-fucking with them.

Whatever I give, then, is properly and sincerely given.  It is not given with strings, it is not a part of some plot.  If it is given, there is a proper reason for it being found by the party.  12,000 g.p. is a proper number for gold being given by a King of a rich, important kingdom as part of an awarded fiefdom.

Likewise, whatever push back exists, it must be something the party can reasonably predict and potentially manage.  This doesn't mean they will manage it; only that it can be manageable.  If the party acts blindly, or incompetently, or dismisses the matter with phrases like, "Well, we're player characters, we'll be alright," then they're gonna die on D-Day.  But if they piece the details together carefully, keep a sharp eye and make preparations, there's a very good chance they will be alright.

This is a weakness with playing off the cuff, as many DMs will argue is the best way.  DMs are human.  They give too much and realize they can't take it back; so they have to engineer claw-backs and deus ex machina to restore the balance.  They kick too hard and realize they have; so they have to fudge and have the cavalry show up to restore the balance.  Then, while the players puzzle out the DM's concoction, the DM must parasitically steal ideas from the players ... until the players realize what's going on, whereupon they get hold of the DM's tail and wag the dog.  It's an unsustainable pattern.

I haven't met a DM yet who plays by the pant's seat, who isn't absurdly proud and righteous about the ability (I was, until I learned better); yet what is it when the DM spends two minutes inventing something and the players spend four hours sweating their thoughts on the same problem?  Cleverness?  Or Laziness?  And what have we got when pillars of the community, from the WOTC staff down to a blogger like Maliszewski, wear LAZINESS as a badge on their chest to argue their fucking virtue?  Is this, Dear Player, really what you want in a DM?

Between sessions, I have considerably more than four hours to pore over possibilities and reasons why the world might give way or push back against actions the players take; why shouldn't I use that time to their benefit, so that when the player makes a prediction about their first move, I'm three guesses ahead of them, thinking more clearly than they can (I have nothing riding on the answer), having given much more time to the problem than they've had during the night's running.  How can this not make me a better DM?  Especially, as I say, I'm not invested in any particular result.  I'm free to invent answers to questions on every side of the problem, as there is no side I'm banking on.  NO dungeon master playing on the fly has the wherewithal to do that during a game — AND manage the game as well.  Which means, every answer has to be on the fly as well.  Every answer has to be made without considering first if it's a good answer or not; and so who knows what the consequences of those answers will be?  Are they the best possible answers?  Probably not, being that they're the first answers, the most obvious answers, the answers with the least possible time given to invention.  These answers will reflect the DM's prejudices and the DM's gut instincts.

Too often, the game world's going to give way when it shouldn't; and push back when it shouldn't.  When the players get too much, they'll feel the game's too easy.  When they get thumped excessively hard, they'll scream injustice.  The middle ground, where the game is good, gets narrower until it's soiled completely from shit flying from the left and right.  And because the DM's making it up as we go along, we can expect overcompensation, impatience, sensitivity and desperation to cover up mistakes made, usually resulting in other mistakes.  In all, a ghastly mess.  This is why I said in the last post, when we try to run this way, we will fuck the game up.

Why, then, is no part of the sandbox intrinsically "better" than any other part?  I'll pick that up with the next post.

Gardening

After 41 years, were I a gardener, I'd be well past planting things and watching them grow.  I'd be well past relying upon store-bought dirt to grow my flowers, well past buying someone else's seeds, well past relying on the corner hardware store's garden shears.  There'd be a lot I could say about soils and fertilizers; about species and forms of blight; or about tools, bees and such.  For if gardening coupled with writing was my passion, I'd have a blog that outlined all this in phenomenal depth, delving into everything from geology to genetics.  Because after awhile, growing flowers isn't enough.  We want to grow better flowers, or flowers that are harder to grow; we want to invest ourselves totally into the science of what we're doing.  We want to get serious.

My actual flower-growing ability

Alas, I'm not a gardener.  I'm a D&D player ... something with far less cachet.  Yet the rest holds true.  I'm not interested in advice that promotes "Let the players have fun."  This is equivalent to advice like, "Plant the flowers in soil."  Of course it's true.  We can do better.

With this recent post, I said in passing that the players acted as a "company," deciding their goals — and that "I cause the game setting to give way to the party's designs or to push back with obstacles."  Fine.  What does that mean?

Combing through my files, I stumbled across this very old link to ChicagoWiz's blog back in 2011; he's breaking JB's balls, as I'm am want to do occasionally, which only proves that we've been around an indecently long time.  The whole page is worth a read, suggestive of a bygone day when people on the internet really felt that things could be discussed and pulled apart, with the expectation of finding an answer.  Ah, salad days.

Let's put most of the discussion aside, though it's relevant as a background, and deal with this single point introduced by JB:

"It requires a crap-ton of energy on the DM's part to keep the campaign world living/breathing/evolving/resolving as the PCs podunk around the imaginary countryside."

Coincidentally, JB's been writing a series of posts on imagination this week, which lend a meaningful nuance to the use of the term "imaginary" in this quote.  Presuming that JB's instincts have accurately endured for these past ten years, he's not talking here of merely "making shit up."  Here, the deeper, traditional meaning of imagination is in play, the sort that led C.S. Lewis, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkein to build complex, structured realms that presented as real to the mind's eye.

Plainly, this overtone is lost on the vanilla-some discharge we can expect from James Maliszewski, who writes,

"Really? Maybe I'm weird, but I've found just the opposite. A sandbox campaign demands a lot less energy on my part than do other styles of campaigns. It's true I have to be able to think on my feet and improvise when necessary, but that's what having lots of random tables at the ready is for!  I don't why sandboxes are so often portrayed as so difficult and time-consuming to run, because they're not. I'm lazy by nature; if they demanded as much of me as some suggest, I wouldn't run my campaign as a sandbox."

Gosh darn, I'm just going to say it.  If there's one thing Maliszewski can do, it's plant flowers in dirt.  He's unsurpassed in such skill sets.

ChicagoWiz's take more or less agrees; and with ten years of research and writing, he's managed to produce some truly boring helpful guides for DMs who want to do things super-simply.  Unlike, say, any of the writers mentioned above who spent a "crap-ton of energy" producing massive volumes of work that are utterly, unquestionably significant.  For those who feel their game worlds "improve" with less work or emphasis on design, I direct them to the empty shelves displaying the genius work of a would-be writers who disliked the time needed to research or edit their own work.

'Course, JB gives no indication that he intends to give that energy; his post is more about why he doesn't need to, or want to, or that he's not particularly good at it.  In 10 years of reading JB, he's tried to encourage himself otherwise, but it's fair to say he's not there ... yet.

My chief contention with this argument is the word "energy."  The word implies negativity, as in, "I haven't the energy for that."  It speaks of forcing ourselves to do something, which maybe we recognize needs to be done but which we rather not do now, or which we'd prefer someone else did.  It's a strange way to speak about one's passion ... usually, as I described at the top of this post, we can't restrain ourselves from doing things we love.  It's a beautiful morning and we rush through the household chores so we can hurl ourselves into the garden with shears and soil knives, delighting in the opportunity to get dirty and become intoxicated among roses and orchids.  To an outsider, sure, it looks like "energy" ... but to the absorbed floriculturalist, the time spent is a drug, an experience that obliterates one's sense of time.

Many's a time I sank into a project with my first cup of coffee in the morning, only to notice by-and-by that the sun had set.  If ChicagoWiz, Maliszewski or JB were in the room with me, looking over my shoulder, no doubt they'd have been astounded at the unrelieved colourlessness of the work they watched me do in designing my game, puzzled at why anyone would plunge such dreary effort into something that can be done "on their feet."

Of course, the results can't be done on their feet.  I dare any of them to produce an 80-item menu of carefully described treats and intriguing dishes in a few minutes of game-time; or to recieve any real interest after the fact of them doing it, since the results would have next to no impact on the players.  As DMs, we do concoct moments of interest by the seat of our pants.  I do it all the time, at least half a dozen times a session.  But I also have a bag of holding deep enough to swallow the party anytime I want to slip the drawstring ... in case I want to invent a moment the players will remember the rest of their lives.

To come 'round again to having the game setting give way or push back against the player's designs, IF we try to do this by the seat of our pants, we will fuck it up.  This is the fundamental bedrock of JB's position on the whole matter, one that's utterly misunderstood by ChicagoWiz and others ... but understood perfectly by one commentor, The Bane.  As he says,

I wanted a chronological plot of time - an epic continuios story. I thought the only way to get that was through a well developed setting and predefined plot. Then I began studying on sandboxes.  When I /thought/ I had it, I tried it out as prescribed. Epic failure. I studied some more and off I went, armed with guidance. Epic fail. This went on until I got tired of losing players, which is painful in this day and age to find more, and went back to, "No shit, here you are and this is what you have to do..." tactics.

DMs try for what I'm saying I do normally (and I haven't said yet what that is), learning their lesson.  They learn to go back to the modules.  They think initially they can do it.  They see what their neighbour can do with roses and zinnias, so they buy plants, they set out neat rows, they purchase all the best tools and they work very hard all summer long ... and the results are AWFUL.  So they learn their lesson.  "I'm not a gardener," they say.  "I'm not cut out for it."  And they're right.  Oh, not for the reasons they think.  The results are bad because they don't know what they're doing.  They don't know anything about flowers or soil, or very little.  All they can think of is the result they want; whereas  actual gardeners are thinking about how much they love gardening.

Designing my world, I'm not thinking about what the players will think!  Who gives a crap if they want to go to Spitsbergen?  My game has steaming jungles, barren plains, people crushed together on narrow streets, spectacular palaces, offal dumps.  I don't give a damn where the players want to go.  There's no particular place I think is better than any other place.  I just want to run the fucking game.

Because I love it all, when I'm thinking, "How is the world going to give way or push back against this idea of the players?" — I have nothing invested in whether they win or lose.  I don't care either way.  If the idea makes use of the game's rules, the design of the various bits and pieces I've built into the world's structure, in a manner that reflects how a similar idea would actually work in the real world, I consider what dice should be rolled, what the probability on those dice ought to be, and decide while taking a walk or during a soak in the tub what labels belong on the world's roulette wheel to the extent of my imagination.  Then I roll, or wait to do it in front of the players, often telling them in advance what the results might be prior to the dice hitting the table ... and then I run the version the dice pick.

This gets pretty damn complicated.  And we'll get into that, with an example, in the next post.  I felt this post was needed to hammer out some principles of "sandbox" that I follow:

1) no part of the sandbox is intrinsically "better" or "more important" than any other part.

2) my first challenge as a DM is to be inventive with all the scenarios that MIGHT be, and then indifferent to the scenario that actually occurs.

3) my second challenge is to provide such depth of texture, intricacy and tension that's humanly possible, once I know which scenario I'm running.

I rise to these challenges because I have not spent one summer trying to garden like the floriculturalist up the street for one summer.  I've done this for all the summers.