MetaCareers

It may be that a childhood of playing boardgames on a very regular basis is one of the reasons why I refuse to see D&D as a sort of Candyland game, where the players start off at the D&D equivalent of the Gingerbread Plum Trees, work their way to the Licorice Castle, wander the Lollipop woods, defeat the big bad Gloppy and are rewarded by King Kandy at the Candy Castle.  Not that there's anything wrong with Candyland; it's a very good game to teach patience and forbearance to four and five year olds.  It is, however, despite the presence of two short cuts, an extremely linear game.

As all board games are, to different degrees.  Being one who had the opportunity to play them, and very often, long before coming to D&D, I had the opportunity to pick their anatomy.  And as I continued to play board games, and tactical wargames, for the first twenty years of my experience as a DM, I stole from them and messed around with them in attempts to make them more interesting ... much as I continue to do with Dungeons & Dragons.  But that is a post for another day.

I understand that some of my readers will have far more experience with boardgames than others; not everyone grew up playing dozens of them, or indeed any boardgame at all.  It also helps that my upbringing came before the arrival of other distractions, like computers and video games.  If it helps, take note that I don't have a deep, nostalgic feeling for the boardgames I played.  That was then and this is now, and having experienced a life without computers and one with, I'll take this one, thank-you.

But whatever your background, these games exist; and if you're interested in expanding your consciousness about D&D or any other game, it doesn't hurt to familiarize yourself with a few examples of game play that's been invented.  Today I'm going to deconstruct one, talk about the premise of the game and then address the manner in which it could influence role-play and agenda building among player parties in a sandbox game.

The game is Careers.

This is the clearest, largest copy I could find, without glare on the game board so that every square could be read.  It's 1024 pixels squared, so I can enlarge a portion of it fairly well, maintaining it's "legibility" somewhat.  For example, I can read the portion with a little effort, right-clicking it and putting it in a new window.

Rules

Quickly, let me go over the premise of the game.  The players start at "Payday" and move around the board much like most other games, using two 6-sided dice.  When they land on a white square, such as one that says "May Start Farming" or "May Go to Sea," they can pay the fee and move through the appropriate inner "Career" track with their next move.  When moving on an inner track, the player throws one die.  When the player lands on a box that shows a given number of "hearts" — such as the first square of the farmer's track shown, where it reads "Beautiful Spring weather..." — the player collects 2 hearts.  In this way, players collect hearts, stars and money, which the victory conditions require.

Before anyone rolls a die, they decide individually and privately what their particular victory conditions are.  By the rules, you need 60 pts.  You may obtain these in the form of 60 stars, 60 hearts or $60,000; but you may also mix and match what you choose to "go for."  You could, for example, shoot for 25 stars, 15 hearts and $20,000, which together add up to 60 pts.  The game can easily be lengthened by increasing the number of base points played to (for example, doubling it to 120 pts.), or shortening the game by declaring that we'll play to 40, 30 or 20 pts.  The rules don't say as much, but any idiot can figure out that the points played for are arbitrary.

There are two kinds of cards: Experience cards and Opportunity Knocks cards.  I won't get into the details, but most experience cards involve using the card to move instead of rolling the die.  For example, if I want to move 4, and I have an Experience card that says I can move four, I can jump from the start to where I'm gambling in corn, rolling a die and collecting $1,000 per pip.  I could also use the Experience card to avoid the hailstorm that comes at the end that would cause me to lose half my cash.

Opportunity Knocks cards allow the player to jump to the Career track of their choice — providing they have that card.  Some careers are heavy in money, others are heavy in stars and some are heavy in hearts.  Obviously, we want to move into career tracks that get us the things we want for our personal victory conditions.

At the start, the player's "salary" equals $1,000.  Everytime you physically move past the Payday square, you collect that salary and then bump your salary $1,000 for the next go around.  There are also squares that will increase your salary by landing on them.  If your victory conditions require money, you want to get your bottom around Payday as often as possible.  You do not cross Payday if you use a card to jump to a Career square, no matter which direction you're coming from.  You must roll the dice on the track to get your Payday.

There are other nuances but we don't need to spend time with them.  The last thing worth mentioning is that in some places you can trade cash for either hearts or stars, in different ways.  There are places where you can waste time, not moving, but collecting hearts as you wait.  There are enough finicky bits in the game to create uncertainties ... and since you have no idea how close the other players are to winning at any given time, there's a bit of anxiety that you're not collecting your stuff as fast as you ought.

Role-playing

D&D role-playing grew out of Chainmail due to a human predisposition for anthropomorphisation (I so rarely get to use 20-letter words).  This is the habit of ascribing human traits, emotions and intentions to non-human entities ... such as the North Wind and the Sun, foxes and crows, tortoises and to scale combat miniatures.  Among the creators of D&D, a leap was made that the wizards and fighters of the game combat system could talk and feel and have aspirations.  It wasn't much of a leap!  18-month-old children start doing this with their stuffed animals almost immediately after they learn how to talk.

The game-piece moving around the Careers board could just as easily be given a personality commensurate with the victory conditions that player chose ... but we don't do this because when we play a boardgame, we almost always identify the events and actions taking place with ourselves.  People do not land on Boardwalk and say, "Shit, my racing car has to pay $2,000!"  No, they say, "I have to pay $2,000."  It's automatic.  The main difference with D&D is that, having arisen out of wargames, each player has multiple units on the board.  This requires a designation that separates this unit from that one ... and this habit has perpetrated into normal game play of D&D, despite the players usually only having one player character at a time.

I believe that's because each PC has highly individualised traits related to the game's character design rules ... and that although I am playing my single fighter in this campaign, I've had dozens of other player characters in my past.  Thus, there's a need in my mind to separate this fighter from another fighter I ran five years ago in another campaign, or from any of the other character classes and races in my history.  This pushes my character further from me than an ordinary game piece for a boardgame; after all, there's zero need to differentiate this iteration of the game piece, or the game, from others.  I'm quite comfortable saying, "Damn, I was hit by a hailstorm last time," without this seeming incongruous — even though it happened in another game and perhaps some years ago.

Yet, Careers deliberately gives non-game material for sentimental, aesthetic reasons.  We do not land on a square that merely reads, 2 stars, 4 hearts.  No, it gives us a reason for that gain: we've raised a prize bull.  Knowing that we've raised a bull helps us not at all with winning the game or strategizing our next move.  And still it's interesting to know that's what we've done, while simultaneously giving the feeling that we're somehow involved with farming.  Another square, elsewhere on the map, also gives us 2 stars and 4 hearts; only this one's in the Politics Career and we get it for "Lead official overseas visit."  Somehow, though it's the same, it's not the same, is it?

Agenda Building

Careers was published and released for the first time in 1955, nearly 20 years before D&D.  Suppose that someone had realized the possibility of creating a series of random personal characteristics and predilections.  Suppose that before the game started, each career was not merely differentiated by what happened there, but also by our particular player character's ability to perform as asked, once entering that career?  An official overseas visit can go well; it can go badly.  If Careers is expanded into what we understand to be a role-playing game, then we know perfectly well that a player character can seriously fuck up a visit like that ... especially if that character has the attributes and nature that they ought to be applying to raising prize bulls and not entering politics.  Obviously, the number of choices for what a farmer does in Careers is limited to nine squares ... but if we were to take the whole of the profession and expand it rationally, there are hundreds of squares we could propose.  These could have very different pathways that could be followed, leading in some cases to politics, specifically labour management and socialisation, leading to others in researching hybrids or inventing farm equipment.

This is true for all the different Careers represented in the game ... and in hundreds of other possible careers as well ... and because I bring this up, I'm contractually obligated to include the image shown.

Whatever the Gentle Reader's feeling about such a game, the fact remains that we can learn from the thought experiment.  The D&D game is NOT merely a collection of rules restricting play and dictating how players advance.  I'm accused of believing that's what it is, because I spend so much time pointing out that there ARE rules and that the rules matter, and that those who ignore rules are not running a game but are instead perpetrating a ridiculous farce.

But believing that there are rules doesn't mean that I don't also ascribe to the principle that D&D is an emotionally sentimental, aesthetic game, and that many of the functions of the game are wholly separate from  "winning" or "surviving" the game world.  Hell and damnation, I run my game world based on the real Earth because the players taking an action in PARIS, FRANCE, feel emotions and connections they wouldn't feel in some made up city in a made up game world, even one that's been popular for — big whup — forty years.  Paris has been around for 1500 years and it has quite a lot more cachet than Greyhawk.  For one thing, you can buy a plane ticket to get there.

A role-playing game could certainly have been created out of Careers ... or, for that matter, any boardgame we care to name.  Which is to say, looking at how a boardgame did a thing, then extrapolating that thing for the more complicated RPG that we're running, is a useful and practical exercise.   This includes the "fluff" — which is really no more dismissible than the presence of love in your life — as well as the hard, practical gains to be made.  Careers asks us to collect "hearts" and "stars," representing these things as numbers.  In D&D, they are the fulfillment that comes from working with one's fellow players, or the status one builds in the game world through deeds.  Not only deeds of valour, but deeds of generosity, sacrifice, duty, honour and dependability.  Do we not, in fact, record these things when they happen, even if we don't do it the same way as numbers for experience?  Are they any less important?

I see people try to pretend, on the other hand, that they are the only thing that's important ... and that's wrong too.  Success isn't just found in joy and glitz.  It's also found in hard, diligent work.  The numbers are there to represent the latter.  You don't "win" if you don't pull the cart.

Why D&D Takes What Boardgames Do and Makes It Better

The last post was quite negative, so let's balance that and talk about the good functions of boardgames and their relationship with D&D.

Despite the stories I've told, most whom I've played board games with came to the game wanting it to be a good, positive, honest experience.  I've played hundreds of times with my daughter, who is presently the owner of said games (having inherited them from my parents), and she continues to play the same boards, with the very same cards, houses, counters, money and additional bits and pieces I played with 50 years ago.  She and her friends continue to get joy out of those games, as I did before becoming the jaded, blunted D&D player I am today.  I have good memories of many of those games, including thousands of shouts of "hurrah!" at a moment of good fortune, many moments of triumph and very much nostalgia for the little jokes and details the games included.

Discussing yesterday's post with my daughter today, she reminded me that there are two versions of the game "Careers" in her possession.  In the earlier 1950s version, the game gave an opportunity to "Go to Sea," and potentially die horribly.  In the later 1970s version, sea was replaced with "Go to Space" ... where there was the potential to die horribly.  Yes.  Die.  I cannot help but appreciate a board game for children that included a rule for "lose everything" and go back to the beginning ... but there it was, long predating D&D.  Was I perhaps subconsciously prepared for the role-playing result by participating in frank, condition-conscious boardgames of the period?  Perhaps.

In the newest version, space has been replaced with "Computer Science."  Somehow, I think there's no die horribly option.  I couldn't tell from the image linked; the boxes are two small to read.  Still, perhaps there's "Get electrocuted and die; lose all your hearts, fame and money."

Boardgames survive because they are communal, relationship-building activities, especially when cooperation is more important than "winning."  My father was always generous about letting others win, while my mother wasn't; as a boy, I swung hard between the two poles, until recognizing there were more important things than winning a board game.  Quite possibly, D&D settled the conflict for me.  D&D is absolutely co-operative, once there are firm protocols in place that make it clear who are the enemies and why player-vs.-player is toxic.  In all the rules versions that were put out between 1974 and 1985, there are NO paragraphs promoting or condoning player-vs.-player.  I'm not sure it's even mentioned in AD&D ... if it is, it isn't called by that phrase.   I was able to find an excellent article from the Dragon Magazine #75 written by Lew Pulsipher (which I could easily highlight positively in a post), from 1983 (p.41):

"... sometimes the chemistry (or lack thereof) among players will ruin the session, because they're looking for different forms of recreation.  For example, players who get their kicks from backstabbing and player-vs.-player competition will not get along with players who enjoy cooperative or even regimented adventures.  How could one GM possibly satisfy both groups at once?"

I could have written that ... except there would be more swear words and I'd say "DM."   Rightly managed, D&D is supremely cooperative ... much more so than a boardgame that promotes a winner or a loser.

Another positive aspect of board games is their ability to teach us how to set goals and be patient.  Strategy requires the capacity to accept and tolerate trouble, set-backs, losing all your money or finding yourself forced to rethink your strategy in mid-stream ... without getting angry and upset.  Young players need to be coached on the principles of waiting for things to get better ... when stress arises at not getting something that's wanted, right now, the solution is not to dip into the bank and give the child another $500 ... because, as some parents might be convince themselves, "It doesn't really matter anyway."  Loss isn't the only lesson that needs learning!  Forbearance, faith in an expectation, knowing that the next hand or the next die roll might change everything ... these future things have to be conceived as if they were real, to counterbalance what is happening right now.  If the future cannot be appreciated, then all that's left is stress!  If your child is overwhelmed because everything up until now has gone badly, it's most likely because they're assuming the past is determining their future.  This is never the case ... but if they don't learn otherwise, they'll carry a distrust for the future with them all the rest of their lives.  Boardgames and card games can teach them otherwise, if they can be made to see it.

D&D goes one further in this dynamic in that if things are going bad, they're going bad for the party as a whole.  One player with a run of bad luck in Monopoly necessarily enriches the other players during that run.  But one player with bad luck in D&D is a burden everyone shares together.  If Fred rolls six fumbles in a combat, the others aren't enriched, they're challenged further, especially if Fred dies and they've lost an ally.

This example can reveal the inherent nature of all the players.  IF the others turn and snipe at Fred, demanding to know why he can't roll better, or tell him to pick a different die, or in anyway dump their new troubles verbally on him, then as a DM you have a troubled, toxic party that needs addressing and possibly trimming.  What we want are other party members to step up and call out, "Don't worry Fred, we're got you're back.  We'll hold them until things turn around for you!"  This positive response reflects the party's understanding that they're in it together ... and that whether Fred rolls a 1 or a 20, he's embraced and upheld either way.

ANY sports coach worth his salt recognizes the importance of a team that "pulls together" ... and the necessity of trading away or benching even the best player on the team if that player cannot learn to play well with others.  D&D gives a tremendous opportunity for game participants to play together and succeed together ... or would, if the game's masters weren't busy making sure they have super-individualized avataristic personalities that cleave vast gaps between their attempts to fraternize and join forces.  There's a reason all the members of a team wear the same jerseys!  Sameness breeds trust and friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood and a sense of family.  Individualism breeds spite, entitlement and disunion.

When D&D asks a group of players bent on ego and eccentricity to form together and build a strategy, one they can all get behind together, the result is a ghastly mess.  Everyone wants something for themselves, and without the binding strength of a "party," everyone wants it right now and in great heaps.  But a group of players who are used to thinking as a friendly, supportive collective are instantly able to decide what's best for the greater good; and with the support of their friends, they're able to play the long game ... they don't need to be enriched today, because they know that it's going to come as soon as the battle's finally won.

It's a tremendous pity that most DM's will never experience this sort of party ... but it must be understood that this is because they don't understand their responsibilities AS a DM.  A party must be brought together, they must be encouraged and taught to act together, they must be REWARDED for acting together ... and those who won't act together must be kicked off the team.  There are no ifs, ands or buts to this program.  There's no other method, no great adventure module that will smooth over those rifts, no clever voices the DM can speak, no new RPG that can be switched to in hopes of better results.  Make them a team, or make them go home.  Do not play board games with players who throw fits and tip over the board; and make sure everyone feels they belong.

Point in fact, the "fudging" solution is an effort to keep players who would tip over the board from doing it, by ensuring they "win."  This is the unsaid part of, "I fudge so everyone has a good time."  It automatically equates "a good time" with "nothing goes wrong."  People this fragile need to re-train themselves at checkers or Candyland.  They don't belong at a D&D table.

The best boardgames enhance creativity and self-confidence.  The latter is far easier to obtain when the others around you are cheering you on, but let's move on from that argument.  Confidence in a board game arises from discovering for yourself a strategy that never occurred before.  This can be a very simple discovery ... for example, realising there are more hearts on the board than either stars or money in Careers.  In D&D, small adjustments to a character's possibilities arise all the time: in the weapon we pick, in the amount of armour we choose to wear, in recognizing there's a clever way to use a spell we'd never considered and so on.  But let me take an example from RISK.

For years, going back to my childhood, I took it for granted that the best strategy was to get hold of South America and hold it until the dice paid off.  If South America was unavailable, try for Australia.  But South America is better.  Even though it starts with two territories to be defended, it's adjacent to Africa with it's six territories; if these can be taken, there's four territories to defend.  Europe also has four territories, but if you break any of those the defender gets nothing.  The attacker has to break two territories, well apart on the board, to wreck the S.A/Africa block.  It doesn't always work, but it often does and I believed in it.

Then, in my 20s, I played with a fellow in multi-person games who consistently and deliberately avoided taking any continents.  His strategy was to work in the top of North America and Asia and just take territories that weren't in anybody's way.  While the other players were busting continents left and right, and losing armies as they did, he quietly accumulated 15 territories, getting the equivalent of South America without making enemies.  If the others didn't notice, he'd push to 18 territories ... and often he could do it because going after him meant letting someone else keep Australia or South America.  In the end, he'd simply edge out the opponents on territories alone.  I began to try the strategy; it works brilliantly.  The trick is to take one territory a turn and, like I say, make no enemies.  Perhaps it appeals to my Russian heritage.  I always had a special place for Irkutsk.

Learning little things like that about a boardgame we've played all our lives is huge.  It boosts our faith in ourselves, jumps up our willingness to be creative and gets us motivated to look for other bits of genius.  D&D excels at this.  There are so many aspects to the game, so many little ways to find bits and pieces and adapt them to new strategies and possibilities, that players who are free to innovate develop a habit for doing so.  This habit drifts over into their other activities, as what's being practiced are those cognitive skills that universities crave to invest in their students.  If such institutions had the least idea what D&D could be offering, they'd rush to invest in game studies and courses.  Unfortunately, the true virtuosity of the game is magnificently concealed behind droll, tiresome plug-and-play innovation-killing expectations.

Ah well.

P.S.,

Turns out, neither my daughter nor I remember the Careers board as well as we think.  Sea did not become space; join an expedition became space.  I'll be writing more on the Careers game soon.

Boardgames & D&D

I was asked by ViP about the continuity in behaviours and social dynamics between board games and D&D.

There are obvious ones, starting with sore losers.  These are people who feel their personal worth is determined by the outcome of a game, equating their capability of winning with their competency or value as a human being.  It has to be understood that the connection is taught.  It arises out of family members or friends gloating over their wins or mocking their siblings for losing, which is a memory that can last the rest of a person's life — the pattern is at it's worst when the mockery is condoned by parents and authority figures.  In my childhood, this abuse was so common with boys that examples can be found on television shows and movies from the 1960s and 70s ... where the abuse is depicted as a positive thing.  Arguments like "it will make him a man" and "it'll give him motivation to win" were seen as good parenting.  If your parents are good people, just imagine the shit they had to overcome.

In D&D, the "incapable" loser manifests as envy; an inability for a player to hold themselves accountable for a mistake — and thus accusations against other players for not holding up their end; outbursts of rage at a bad die roll; calls that the game is "unfair" when someone else rolls a better character or succeeds more commonly in combat, and disappointment at not getting the character class the player wanted.  Listening and catering to this behaviour, effectively ennobling it, has led to die matrixes to determine character class abilities, safe cards for game play so that no one is made uncomfortable, fudging dice to make sure than everyone "wins" and a host of other design changes that have been baked HARD into 5th edition ... and ultimately into a whole generation of players.  This is the psychological backlash that arose out of the 80s and 90s to the poison described in the above paragraph ... and it is just as bad, in reverse.

Hopefully, boardgames can teach children how to lose without losing becoming a traumatic memory — either because the loss is minimized, thus crippling the child by creating a sense of constant primal entitlement, or because the loss is maximized, thus crippling the child by creating low self-esteem and a fear of taking responsibility.  The child that kicks over a checkerboard will grow up to rage-quit a D&D game ... just as the child who mocks a loser will grow up to chuckle and laugh when someone rage-quits their game (see the same clip).  The push at the end is encouraged by the DM's response ... giving insight to a combination of different things going on:  the paladin being told how to run his character, the paladin's obvious feeling of helplessness; the paladin's poor self-esteem, the sneering indifference of both the DM and the yellow-jacket guy, the total lack of empathy from any of the players, including the DM, when the paladin gives up, the paladin's cringing response after the push, the insult about whether the paladin is "retarded," the continued smiles and chuckling of the other players through the confrontation, the "asshole" insult, the DM's denial that he's an asshole, the DM returning the insult with "you're a fucking weirdo" ... it's all a wonderful example of an extremely toxic space with extremely toxic people.  Made all the better by someone getting their jollies by posting it on Twitch.

Here is another example, in the reverse.  Angry player wants to increase his chance to hit, finds himself DM'd by the DM (who can't take his pen out of his own face), and DM'd by the player across the table, and who then has his space violated by the player on his right, who snatches up the Angry player's die.  Of course the angry player feels entitled ... but is he necessarily an "angry" person, or has this browbeating been going on all night?  We may think he should "chill," but perhaps he's been doing that for the two hours before the 33-second clip is shown.

As children, when we're ready to start thumping on our friends because the threshold between tolerance and violence is pretty low, we learn NOT to fucking touch other people's armies in RISK, or other people's racing car in Monopoly, or the bank, or other people's D&D dice.  I remember when I was eight I had a drag out fight in my friend Kevin's basement over a RISK game that one of us was losing; it went sort of like this.  I don't remember who threw the first punch or why ... but it didn't end my friendship.  It clarified where the boundaries were.  When someone grows up to be 18 and they still don't know not to touch other people's stuff ... well, I can only say, I hope that guy doesn't find himself working on a job site, in a restaurant or joining the army.  I've played with ex-military who would have, spontaneously and without thinking, broken the kid's arm for that.

Politeness didn't originate socially by everyone agreeing to be sweet and kind; but by an inherent understanding that you WILL be sweet and kind on that side of the boundary or you'll lose an arm.  I grew up learning this from my vicious, selfish, self-righteous but extremely polite Russian and German family members ... who had to be polite with each other despite all those qualities.

Moving onto cheaters.  Much of this has to do with the sore loser problem, taken to extremes.  "I can't bear to win, so I'll cheat to make sure I do."  By and large, cheaters fear conflict; though maybe you haven't caught one, cheaters have been caught before, and probably often, since cheating is a compulsive behaviour.  Cheaters tend to avoid intimacy — again, because letting someone behind the wall increases the likelihood you'll see what they do there.  Cheaters in D&D especially don't like what business calls "quality assurance."   They don't like to prove their character's possession of things or how much experience their character has ... and will usually use the "privacy" argument I've just made about dice to protect their character sheet from a DM.  These are the same kind of people who hold their monopoly money in a single stack, habitually in their hand, or like to add armies to their RISK territories in a glob rather than one at a time.

The principles of performance magic are built on tricking the senses into being able to cheat you ... obstensibly for the purpose of entertainment, but there are more than a few magicians in stir who realized that the skills that enable them to perform magic will also help them lift your wallet.  For an ambitious player of any game, there are many, many ways to cheat.  There are no sure-fire ways to guarantee that one of your players isn't slyly cheating from time to time ... though the player who rolls six 1s in a particular game night probably isn't.  [who knows?  It could be a set-up; that's how cons work].

It's strange to me that people would cheat in D&D, since the game isn't about "winning."  By the time I'd played a year of D&D I'd already met several examples.  After all, I'm talking other 15 y.o. kids, not experts along the Las Vegas strip.  I'd learned to watch my relatives for cheating; my uncle Igan had a nasty habit of counting four holes in cribbage when he pegged three.  He was a huge, leathery, terrifying farmer with hands like a catcher's mitt, but even when I was eight, if I called him on cheating he'd shrink and apologize, counting accurately.  Usually, my aunt could hear us playing.

Truth be told, cheating in D&D as a player will not help that much.  I don't randomly ask to see a players' character sheet ... but eventually they'll have to roll a saving throw for every item they're carrying due to a breath weapon or a high fall.  For those times, I'll definitely be looking over the player's shoulder as they roll down the list.  I insist on all dice being rolled in front of at least one other witness, and it's not usually me ... but if I want to see a roll because it's a life-or-death roll, then I'm going to get up and watch that puppy hit the table.  So for all the cheating any player might do, sooner or later, they're still going to roll or die, when I'll be watching.  They might hit a little more often; they might level a little more sooner; they might have a bit more gold than I gave them — but unlike a card game or a chess, the other players and I don't "lose" by their cheating.  At worst, its a pathetic bad habit they ought to shake before getting into a situation with not-nice people, where their habit gets them thrown out of a fast-moving car.

Ah, then there's gamesmanship.  This is the art of winning games by being a total fucking dick.  I have played everything from golf to football to chess to tiddly-winks with people like this, in my family and out, but I don't have this problem with D&D.  See politeness, above.  I expect my players to wait patiently for their chance to throw dice in combat, I expect them to listen politely to other players, I do not allow harassment of a player (except by an occasional taunting NPC, and the players get to kill those) and I don't trust anybody who commits an infraction against protocol more than once in the same way, despite being told to stop doing it.

This is why I have rules like, "no one throws a die until the DM says its time."  I did my years of play where players would roll a die out of turn, get a high number, then pout and complain and moan that they didn't get to keep the roll in spite of rolling it out of turn.  Note that if they're rolling it out of turn, everyone else is distracted by watching the legitimate roller, so who the hell knows what was really rolled?  And even if they do, it creates a lot of negative energy around the table when a player has to be disappointed because they really did roll a critical ... which no, they can't keep.  Rulez is Rulez.  Everybody abides by the same ones and everybody sucks it up.   Nobody, but nobody, rides for free.

I get exactly how that makes me sound like a "miserable bastard."  I'll remind the Gentle Reader that we all thought the teachers were miserable bastards when they forced us in line ... which they did for good reason, because if you don't force 35 kids in line, you get chaos and nothing gets learned.  I'm only a miserable bastard DM when a particular player feels the protocols don't apply to him.  When there are protocols, and the players get used to them, and accept them, and recognize why they exist, they're just as annoyed as me when someone bulls in and decides to act chaotically, while vociferously proclaiming that protocols are wrong and unnecessary.

Thankfully, like our grade school teachers, I don't give a rat's ass who thinks I'm a miserable bastard.  I care that my players are able to invest themselves totally into a game that runs as smooth as creamcheese glaze.  I played several year's worth of games without protocols; as I closed my first decade as a DM, I couldn't help noticing the protocols were making the game a lot tighter and efficient ... and thus improving both momentum and immersion.  After four decades, I will boot the cog that won't turn right before I'll tolerate it in my engine.

Those are the problematic game elements that occur to me.  If anyone has any others that deserve discussion, let me know.

Bored Games

To appreciate this post, it has to be undestood that I was born in 1964.  I was 9 y.o. before there came a 3rd channel on the TV.  I did not see my first arcade game until I was 11, and only then because I was in California visiting Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland.  I didn't see an arcade game in Calgary until 13.  I didn't have cable television until I was 15, which only meant about twelve channels.  I didn't have a Betamax video recorder until I was 16, the year after I began playing D&D.

In short, the number of distractions apart from boardgames and sports was far more limited than now.  Thus, when I say I spent hundreds of hours playing a wide number of boardgames and card games, it was because there was lots of time.

My parents were serious about games.  By the age of 6, I'd learned to play numerous card games, chess, checkers, battleship, parcheesi and Chinese checkers.  Game nights on Saturday were a regular thing, two or three times a month, so that by eight I'd was a veteran of cribbage, backgammon, rummy, canasta and poker.  Whist, and then bridge, would come later.  Every member of my extended family, especially my hard-fisted German material grandfather, played cribbage ... and he in particular played "to educate" trusting young children.  If your not familiar with the cold-hearted rules of cribbage, if you fail to count all the points in your hand accurately, your opponent can call "mulligan" and count those points against you.  No empathy intervened.  My grandfather would be the first to say it was a mean, son-of-a-bitchin' world out there, and if you can't learn to rely on yourself, you deserve to get kicked in the teeth until you do learn.

So ... games were a weird, fucked up battlefield.  Virtually every elder person I played cards with held those sosrts of beliefs, on both the German and Russian side of my kin.

I got rather good at cribbage; there's more to the game than might be imagined, as it's about leading your opponent into playing cards that will enable cutting their throat.  No need to go into it.  Like poker, it's a skill.  I'm an excellent poker player ... if the poker is REAL poker, that doesn't rely on ridiculous levels of chance, such as the ignorantly popular Feckless Hold-em.  I love convincing a bunch of young "players" to try stud or draw; they just don't understand percentages or pressure.

As a kid, I played poker for literal peanuts, poker chips, matches ... whatever was available.  I once was busted during a school science fair for playing poker while waiting for the teachers to bring the classes down to the auditorium one at a time.  Gave lots of time to sit around and be bored.  Got a week's detention for "gambling" ... with jelly beans.  Authority fails to recognize a lot of the time that they're teaching the wrong lesson.

 I never liked checkers as much as chess.  If I played with my sister, it had to be checkers because she didn't understand complicated games.  She was good for games like "war" and "go fish," or any board game that was really linear, like Careers, Payday, Life, Mille Bornes, Snakes & Ladders, Monopoly, that sort of thing.  I played more board games in my childhood than I can possibly remember now.  My sister and I used to play games at the family cabin, all afternoon, playing one kind of game after another.   For my sister, the tougher games were onces like Masterpiece or Stock Ticker, and she certainly wasn't up to RISK.

But, let me get back to chess.  My father taught me when I was very young and I regularly played with him and with my brother, who was five years older than me.  My brother was and is a bastard; he and I have been in the same room four times over the last thirty years.  The last time I saw him was my mother's funeral, nine years ago.  I began beating my father at chess when I reached 11.  My brother, when I was 12.  By 14, I was deep into chess with the school club and competing in the occasional tournament.  My best rating was just over 1400.  I did okay, not great, but I was studying chess by then in addition to playing it; the game became a science rather than fun.  But ... as writing became more important to me, and with the time I wanted to give to D&D, I recognised that to get better at chess I would have to give up other things I liked more.  So I backed away.  I continued to play into my 30s, but I haven't played a game offline in 20 years now.  I'll be sure and teach my grandson, and play with him if he likes it, but that's all chess is to me now.

Stock Ticker hit me like a fever around age ten or eleven.  I got better at the game and my father liked it a great deal.  He did all the calculations instantly in his head — it's just two and three digit multiplication — but it was impressive when he could rattle off how much 11,500 shares of stock would cost at 1.35 cents a share.  He taught me tricks that I used through high school and university, but computers ruined me.  I'd have to struggle coming up with the right number in my head today.

I liked S.T. because it consisted of edging out the competition by risk and tenaciousness ... personality traits I still possess, though I apply them to other things.  I don't imagine many readers here have played the game, and if they did most likely found it rather dull.  But around age 11, it was my favourite game.

RISK, not so much.  I appreciated the geography of it and I was always a strategy player, but children playing the game are liable to argue, kick the board over, sneak armies onto territories and that sort of thing.  I lost friends to RISK, some from cross-accusations and some from hard feelings from getting pasted.  It's hard to like a game when, if a run of luck occurs, the losers start screaming.  I began to shy away from invitations to play that game.  I did try Axis & Allies for a time, but I felt the game was structured against complete freedom of play.  Every game tended to follow the same objectives, reaching the same three or four possible conclusions; I didn't feel there was enough imagination involved to hold me.  In any case, by 13, I had a friend introduce me to Panzerleader.

Before D&D, that set of Avalon Hill tank games became fairly central to me, apart from playing chess.  I continued to play Panzerblitz, Arab-Israeli Wars and Squad Leader through university, until other participants evaporated.  I had two copies each of Panzerleader and Panzerblitz and I remember one summer our group of four played a vast game with 14 boards and seven hundred units to a side — two commanders to each side, each moving two armies against two armies.  Obviously, we never finished it; when the tide of battle started to go one way, the losers lost interest — though of course it could have gone either way, still — and I learned my first lesson in player "commitment."  Often, the idea of a game is much more interesting than actually playing it.  I could have happily played that battle to the last man standing.  Perhaps if there's a heaven, I'll get to yet.

D&D was the elephant that changed all my patterns.  I still played boardgames with my family, but with my friends it was mostly D&D.  There were some dalliances with Car Wars and The Creature that Ate Sheboygan; The Awful Green Things from Outer Space was a riot.  Those were games I never played with family.  Much later on, my parents got interested in things like Puerto Rico and Settlers of Catan ... but these are games that have a limited number of practical strategies, and once the strategy is realized, the game is as linear as Careers.  Truth be told, video games in the 1980s began to obliterate any interest in board games.

My father taught me how to play whist when I was 10 and cutthroat bridge soon after.  Bridge was his favourite game; he played it like a tonic, and once I'd become a decent player he wanted to get up a foursome between him and mom and me and whomever I was dating, engaged to or married to.  So a string of girls sat in as a fourth until my first wife Michelle, who was about my level.  But my father really understood that game; he never failed to teach or praise after every hand, as necessary.  For a time he turned me into a good player, a skill I used well at university; through the 80s I played nearly a thousand rubbers with other friends and strangers; sometimes we'd play all day, changing out partners as people went to class, picking them up again when class was over.  Typically, there were two or three tables going at a time, with alternates waiting to jump in.  It wasn't a "club" ... it was just something to do in a world without social media and cellphones.

There are no boardgames of the '70s I didn't play for hundreds of hours; and most especially Monopoly, as there was always a copy of the game around.  On one level, I count a lot of that time as wasted.  There's not much to learn from one's 157th game of Life.  It's really just waiting for death.  It helps put a little perspective on those who talk about teenagers "wasting" their lives with social media.  At least that's a potential to learn skills like communication and writing.  We tend to forget that many of the pasttimes of erstwhile days were based on chewing up hours with purposeless make-work.  Roll the dice, move the piece, buy the property.  Wup wup.

'Course, anyone reading this will argue, "But Alexis, clearly you established a set of game principles that have served you in good stead these decades since!  Not cheating, waiting for others to take their turn, thinking before acting, understanding how many, many different games were constructed — all of that is good meat for the stew!"  Sure, I'll go with that.  One thing a video game doesn't do well is teach participants to wait their turn; and both D&D and life require a considerable amount of letting other people speak and act ... and not just waiting for our chance to speak.  But I'd argue that D&D was a better teacher of that then those old board games.  It's a far, far better game.  I'd far rather work on my game world than spend a minute playing a board game or a card game.  I've spent enough of my life doing that.  I'm not interested anymore.