Purpose and Value

If D&D was a well-made game, properly supported, with rules that were structured well, then there should be an already memorised phrase that answers the question posed at the end of the last post. What we are likely to get, however, is something like this, which ChatGPT provided:

D&D is a game in which players, through fictional persons with limited abilities, enter a persistent imagined world, seek advantage within it, confront danger and uncertainty, and by their choices alter their own condition and the condition of that world.

I pointed out to Chat that this is really just a collection of ill-defined generated concepts that in fact do not determine the game's play at all. This is like saying that "Chess is a game that two people play on a board where someone wins." Which in no way provides a premise for that game. Chat agrees:

The key consequence is that D&D discourse is full of phrases that sound like premises but are actually atmospheres. “Persistent imagined world,” “danger and uncertainty,” “fictional persons,” “alter their condition,” “seek advantage” — these are not useless ideas, but they are not yet game statements. They do not tell a person what play consists of, what governs it, or what makes one course of action preferable to another.

The premise of D&D is that one person, the dungeon master, creates a set of fictional but believable imaginary scenes or situations, representing an "environment" or "setting," complete with residents, existing in a point of time, with a potential for rational consequences, which the players can interact with imaginably. When the players take an action within this environment, they cause a change which the DM must believably reconcile, producing a response from the environment, which is explained to the players.

This gets rid of all the details of the setting that have as much to do with the game's premise as the physical colour of the pieces has to do with chess's game play. In chess, the pieces must be a different colour, but they need not be black and white. Gold and silver, red and yellow, clear and opaque boards exist and do not change the game. There is a "persistent imagined world" in D&D, but that is the effect of the premise, not the premise itself; it is what the D&D makes. It needs the DM to interpret it, because it cannot provide interpretations in and of itself, because it's not a person, it's a mechanic. All the parts originally defined by Chat are mechanics: danger, uncertainty, persons, condition, advantage... as such, they descend from the premise, but are not the premise itself.

Hardly anyone plays D&D by the premise stated above, though the description of this does appear clumsily in several of the game's books, including the original 5th edition Players Handbook. But then virtually everything else about the game sets out to subvert this premise. The DM should not decide ahead of time what the players are allowed to physically do within the environment. The players should not be railroaded, required to act in a certain way, penalised if they do not act in that way or any other of the endless sorts of Gygaxian "punishments" that were invented as alterations to the game world that a DM should impose when players "misbehave."

Likewise, "backstories" are examples of the players attempting to erase the premise by inventing an environment outside the DM's sphere. When an NPC behaves in a manner that the players do not like, particularly if the player has built some "story" about the NPC and themselves, that player is NOT permitted to declare the DM has acted outside the premise. The premise does not include the players wishes being fulfilled just because they might walk if they don't get what they want. If a player won't play by the game's premise, or if the DM won't, then the game can't function. It is broken. Not because the game itself is, but because those participating are unclear about what the premise IS, or won't accept it for private, stubborn or selfish reasons. It is like a chess player picking up the enemy's knight and flinging it from the board because, "You have too many knights and I'm losing." It is childish, it is abusive, it is not proper game play... and where D&D is concerned, it is behaviour that is everywhere.

Very often, the openness of D&D and the lack of comprehension about the premise allows participants to disguise their abuse of the game under the rubrics of "free expression" or "emotional safety"; as "story" or "fairness"; as "what my character would do" or "protecting the players"... and quite a lot of others nonsense that has succeeded in making nearly everyone's game unplayable. Success begins by first defining the premise, then holding fast to the premise, then disregarding any protest of "personal dissatisfaction" related to the premise. A player that demands to know more about the environment than the senses of the player's character permits; who wants to define the end point of this adventure or the campaign at large; who wants to min/max for the sake of min/maxing; have all lost the thread. They're not playing dungeons and dragons. They're playing some other game that uses D&D as a mask.

Thus, the first principle of a good game is to accept the premise. Get in your lane, stay in your lane, make arrangements to play with others who together share an interest in the environment provided and STOP trespassing on the other side. The DM is the DM; the players are the players. Each has a purpose and a place; the line dividing the two is not a chalk line. It is the Great Wall of China. The boundary has to be inviolable because the temptation to cross it is constant.

Yet this does not, in itself, describe "a reason to play."

My reason for playing as a DM is because I like being made to think fast on my feet when a player does something I do not expect. I do not see this as contrary to my DMing. I see this as the coolest, bestest thing about the game. Nothing thrills me more than for a player to solve a conundrum in a way I could not myself, pushing me to then instantly respond in some way that fits the premise: i.e., a believable result, almost universally positive in such cases, because I have exactly no reason to keep a player from gaining wealth, power or benefit from doing something that they are mentally or creatively able to do. Does that creative thing put a lot of wealth into the player's hands? No problem, it'll be spent on things and they'll be broke in time. Does it give the player a lot of power? No problem, power brings responsibility; responsibility creates stress, stress creates game opportunities and fascinating conundrums. Bring that stuff on. Is the player benefitting? Awesome. Works for me. I do not understand DMs who fear player agency. I love it, it's a high, it's a thrill for me to play with. Why would I get in the way of it, or exploit it when it happens. It only means the game's experience can lift itself out of ordinary fighting and move into extraordinary fighting and intrigue. All I can say is "Please, can I have some more?"

I assume the reason my players want to play is because the playing field is wide open. I won't give them information they don't deserve and I won't help them enrich themselves without physically taking risks and earning it, but in short order they soon learn that if they ask for something that in fact does not meaningfully empower them, then sure, they can have it. "You'd like a hireling that's a gnome and of your religion and is a cook too, in a region where gnomes are rare? Sure. Why not? Makes no meaningful difference to the game world. Here you go." I'm not miserly. I don't care to be. A game rule is a game rule: "No, you cannot just use a two-handed weapon and a shield. Period." But when it's not actually a game rule and it doesn't need to be one? Sure, here you go. I don't receive any benefit from being tight-fisted.

I think my best players come to realise that smart choices will change the encounter; that I will allow them to surprise and even obliterate a hard enemy with little struggle by means of opponent brilliance. I think they understand that with my experience in game play, I'm hard to surprise, but at the same time, if I am surprised, I'll respond with respect and applause, not resistance. I buy into the premise so my game must, by definition, flow freely according to the players actions, meaning that by default those actions will be relevant where game play is concerned. I think, from experience, this is extremely rare in a DM. I don't know why. I'm not losing anything by letting my players succeed. I have an infinite number of monsters ready off stage. Why would I seriously care if the latest went down fast because the players got lucky or because one of the realised that something they bought had an unexpected benefit? I'm all sorts of jerk, but I'm not petty.

This is one of the reasons why I've resisted the philosophy of "balance" — and not merely because my deciding what the players are allowed to have or use is breaking the premise. I have no anxiety about the players becoming more powerful. If I have anxiety anywhere, it's the tendency of players to refuse to believe what I tell them, so they can walk straight into death presuming that I'm going to protect them. I used to make the error of actually doing that... but lesson learned. About ten years ago, with the Senex campaign, I decided, "fuck it, I'm just going to kill them now." Long story.

But more powerful because, oh no, it'll destabilise my campaign, or my setting? Nonsense. My setting has Constantinople and Paris in it. It has empires of more than a million square miles and tens of millions of people. Try as they might, the players could have a hundred million gold pieces and it would just make them equal in wealth to one of the big states in Europe. That wouldn't be enough to conquer China. So, you know... there's always something bigger than they are.

Moreover, I don't really care what my players do. That is, within the limitations of their imaginary physical selves. If they want to burn down villages and churches, kill women and children, slaughter innocents on the road... in reality, these things happened historically and are still actually happening in large parts of the world right now. They are not beyond the ken of human ability or cognisance for that matter. It is the premise that I don't bind their hands with my outlook on "permissable" behaviour. My only ask is they don't take abusive action against each other. That's because invented figures of imagination aren't real... not even, in fact, as demonstrations of moral goodness...  and like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, I refuse to be victimised by notions of virtuous behaviour.

My conflict with players begin when they want free things, especially information, to which they're not entitled. This was the source of a recent disagreement between myself and a player, who wanted me to explain what his best option was as a player to get more... well, money presumably, but ultimately agency beyond the limitations of his character. While yes, I am omnipotent in game terms, and money for me is a matter of saying it exists, as are experience points, I don't indulge in giveaway game mechanics for the sake of player's merely asking for them. One has to draw the line somewhere.

Some might suppose that my take on villages being burned down is expressed in the game consequences, and to some degree that's true. The village cannot be "unburned." But at the same time, my game world has a lot of villages, and I can certainly spare a few if players must indulge themselves. It's not like I'm slavering at the opportunity to go after the players with reprisals, condemnation or an assassin waiting behind every tree just because they've done something bad. That's possible, but it's not my sincerest wish. I'd rather, instead, that they just realise such things afford nothing in terms of game benefit and therefore invest in more useful activities.

Together, my response joy and I assume the player's ability to immerse themselves into an unrestricted setting not based on "fantasy tropes" or "DM ownership" settles the whole "reason to play" question. They play because they like D&D. They play in my game because they like my style of play. I cannot guess why other people play in other games. I stopped playing altogether more than 40 years ago because I could not find a DM with my play style.

Which brings us to "value"... or, how is the time spent so that something is accomplished?

I play Oxygen Not Included because it is just enough problem solving as to not be boring, while at the same time it is not stressful. It permits a very mild sort of relaxation that is more engaging that watching television, and considerably more than my phone offers. I usually play with music or some video playing on the other screen I have set up for my computer. Little is accomplished. More base is built. A supply problem is solved. It's not much to speak of.

D&D is arguably the same. It is a game, after all. I like to think the value is better in part because of the player's relative freedoms within the game's structure, but also because my game's structure is dense, gritty and there is always some aspect of it that can be challenged or learned. Since my players are largely DMs themselves, they are seeing the Authority Wiki's presence in the game, seeing how easily a game rule can be challenged and fixed, especially if something isn't clear... and that adds value to the games they play, using my style of DMing as a template.

I don't mean to sound full of myself. But not only have I been doing this for a long time, I've gone at my setting in a way that no one I know of has. For one thing, I've been running the same game setting since 1984. I've been running games in the way that I do now since then. I've run a lot of different kinds of players. I'm flexible. I'm quick-witted. I like game rules and I like it better when they're functionally written out, in an agile way that can be repaired, updated or simply gotten rid of when appropriate. These things are noticed. One can see from recent comments that my DMing style is considered "good."

Then, apart from the metagame, the actual setting has it's own learning mode. People aren't familiar with the world on a ground level. The players are in northern Hungary; they and I are learning in depth what opals are, how the Ottomans occupied the region in the time period, the lay of the land, the nature of the individual towns, the weather, the behaviour of the occupants and the logic that underlies the way people in the game setting think. That's a lot of information and much of it is absolutely useful in the real world. If one of my players were in Ozd, the actual Hungarian town, they would know at once where the Bukk Forest and the Karancs Hills were. They'd know how close they were to Slovakia. They'd know how to find their way to Miskolc or, as the case may be, Budapest. The setting is functionally the same as the real world... and as I'm now letting ChatGPT describe what the actual terrain looks like, it's a fair guess that the players would recognise parts of the landscape as they moved through it. That very valuable... in a way that no one else, to my knowledge, considers D&D to be.

Take the presence of opals where the players are. I didn't decide that. The location did. Opals actually do come from this part of Hungary. Moreover, the literal geology of the landscape gives the reason why they do. It's hilarious to think that someday a player in my world will be in a museum somewhere and say, "Oh, yes, opals like that come from tufa. They're very common in northern Hungary because of the geology there." That's a pleasant little coup, since the player never has to say it came from a D&D game they played once. This is the kind of thing that cannot be faked by invented "lore."

All right. I have been typing for five hours. I'm going to stop and continue this post tomorrow.

What is It, Anyway?

What is it I get from being a dungeon master?

That is, within the game itself. Obviously, outside the game there is the satisfaction of worldbuilding with a purpose, of redesigning game imaginatively, of concocting some justification for a thing to exist... and in my case, the hands-on experience of constructing maps that secures me a better knowledge of the real world, which fascinates me, while enjoying the artistic endeavour itself.  So far as I know, chatGPT can't meaningfully construct one of my maps yet, no matter how I prompt it, because apparently it can't organise the aspects that make my maps what they are.

Actually, that's a bit of a pity. I'd rather have the maps made worldwide than the effort to make them. Reasons for other effort into other things can always be found.

I have a game coming up tomorrow, and right now, as far as the game goes, I don't know what's going to happen next. I have some potential plans for what the party might encounter, and I have some potentials for what the party might decide to do with those encounters, but I don't have a set plan that A and B and C and D are going to happen. So basically, I don't know what is actually going to come about tomorrow night. As a DM, I have a setting that I can function in because the setting gives me ideas as people move through parts of the setting, and I trust my imagination and my improvisational skills to "come up with things" — not with invented plans, but with inspired ideas from the game world as the players actively go and confront them. But as far as what actually happens, that is outside my ken. I really don't know.

Understand: I am not improvising because I've failed to "prepare" — but because preparation automatically boxes in what the players are free to do, for all the reasons that a lot of writers have named: because if you spend hours making a session, and the players don't want to do it, then you have to railroad them or throw that work away, or ultimately repurpose that work somewhere else... all of which feels like manipulation and gaslighting.

Further, I have prepared. I've spent so many hours building the map and studying the land — because I run the real world with my game — so that I know Hungary, I know Hungarian history, I know the land that the players are in, I know what the hills look like, I know what the rivers look like, I know where they go, I know the people, I know the climate, I know as much as I possibly can know about that part of the world. That's the preparation that I'm doing. Knowing what's made there, knowing what trades there, knowing where the trade patterns are, knowing what the people care about, knowing what the historical character of the time period was... having all of those things. That's my preparation: not to build this particular dungeon that the players have to go in because it's a box, or if you prefer a metaphor that I've used in the past, my game world is not a Midway ride.

This all means I don't need to assemble the "ride" in advance, with painted scenery and a concealed track, waiting for the players to be loaded into the correct car. The Midway ride is more than artificial, it's predetermined under the guise of motion. It gives the appearance of travel while ensuring that every turn has already been decided.

Doing things this way would scare the living shit out of most who wanted to DM. I know this because they've told me so. Not knowing what the game is going to be when they sit down, that is absurdly frightening because they don't trust themselves to come up with something on the spur of the moment. And likewise, they don't think they'll be able to flesh out that thought in the time provided for the game's presentation. And perhaps they're right. I have never DM'd any other way. I did not go through a period in my early game where I used modules every session; at most, I tried a module now and then to fill in a gap, but from the start I just like "DMing by the seat of my pants..." except, in reality, that is not what I'm doing at all.

I am also writing this blog post by the seat of my pants; I write all my posts this way. Which means in essence that I am inventing ideas at the speed of about 60 words a minute, which is more than fast enough for a D&D campaign. The reason I can be creative at this speed isn't just because I've practiced — I can remember when my typing speed did not keep up with my thinking, and worse, when my handwriting did not. It's also because creativity as a writer is a double-sided process made up of what am I writing now and what logically follows from what I'm writing now. There's always the next sentence waiting upon the last one, because logic dictates that the next thing to say is this: if you know what the subject is, you know how to talk about it.

Running D&D is also a chain... and it's not a chain that we build by ourselves. The DM does not build that chain. The players say this, the DM responds to that. The players say that, the DM responds to it. The players are building the chain along with the DM. So long as the DM says things that are more or less open-ended for the players to respond to, the players are going to say things that are more or less open-ended for the DM to respond to. And thus the players slowly and steadily decide that they're going to go up into these hills, and the DM thinks, these hills would logically contain these things, and so I'm going to put these things on this hill, though I don't know when, or where, or perhaps not even if, I'll decide if the moment seems right. After all, I don't want to make that encounter appear like it's instantaneous the moment that the players start to climb the hill.

So I trust that as I tell the players they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, I'm not actually "being boring." The tendency is to think that's what we're being, because we grow self-conscious if nothing happens, but in reality we're not alone and the players are thinking continously, filling in the gaps as they climb the hill with a sort of tension... because they're perfectly aware that at any moment something could jump out from behind that rock or that tree, even if, as the DM, I have no intention of having a creature do so. 

And so, after a while, you tell the players they're at the top of the hill. The players start to realise that if nothing has happened yet as they climb this hill, they begin to talk between themselves because obviously there's nothing here. That motivates the players to say something else or do something else, which again builds more of that chain, which the I then respond to and the players respond to. And then in the middle of that, something hits me as a DM, "Oh, I know, I'll put a village, a very strange and unexpected village at the bottom of this hill that the players won't know what it is at first glance." But once I put the village there, then the chain begins and we can discuss what's in the village and all the answers and the questions related to the village. And there, we're running D&D. We are not running a railroad. We're not deciding ahead of time what's in the village. Hell, we didn't even know there was going to be a village there five minutes ago, but now there's a village because we've established it. It doesn't matter if I did it on the spur of the moment or if I invented that village three weeks ago on a piece of paper that I now have on the desk in front of me. What matters is that once it's invented, I'm responsible for defining how the players relate to the village. I am answerable. I must know why it is there, what sort of people live in it, what relation it has to the hill, to the road, to the surrounding country, and to the players now that they have seen it. These are things I can know because I know the region in which this village is located.

And so the chain continues into the future of the campaign.

I truly like this process.

I enjoy instantaneously coming up with a rationale for the village, for what they do there, what it's organised around... and most of the time, these questions are answered within a few seconds of the player's querries. Certainly, there are some who would see this as cheating, or even "faking" the world... but again, it does not matter when the village comes into existence... what matters is that, once it's here, not only does it remain consistent as to itself, it must affect every other thing surrounding the village. Because, after all, a village is not limited to its own environs. Those in the next hex are influenced also, because they know perfectly well the village is here. That it has always been here. Only the players and the DM did not know it.

Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five comes to mind because of the way the aliens in it, the Tralfamadorians, talk about time. Time to a Tralfamadorian isn't a sequence of disappearing moments, but a field of fixed landmarks that only happen to be "sequenced" because of the way that humans conceive time. To a human, the village I've invented came about five minutes ago. To a Tralfamadorian, it's always been there, waiting in the future, for me to stumble across it when the time came.

Moving to a different author, if you will, I'll pull Tolstoy now, who after the body of War and Peace talks at length, for more than a hundred pages, about fate. Tolstoy relates time or events as we perceive them as the bow wave of a boat moving through water. In his conception, all the events of the present are affected and "pushed forward" just as the boat pushes the wave... but because in time we only perceive the edge of the wave, we imagine that we can choose to go this way or that, that our consciousness allows a choice to be made, as though we are in control of our consciousness. To put it as Tolstoy does, we look at the bow wave as though it is pulling the boat — that the wave "turns" left and that the boat follows, or the wave turns right, and so on... whereas, in fact, the bow wave has no control at all, and neither do we, as we are required to make the decisions that are forced upon us by all the decisions that have been made prior to the moment we experience as the instantaneous present.

Taken at it's word, this view dictates that when I think, "Oh, I know, a village..." in fact, I was never in a position to force that thought to arise in my brain at all. That was not a moment of my making a decision, that was a moment of my brain spontaneously, and apparently randomly, impressing upon me, without my compliance, that a village ought to be at the bottom of the hill. That is a very difficult thought for a lot of people, but I'm quite comfortable with it — since, quite right, it would be impossible for me to decide to invent a village before actually inventing the village, or thinking its a good idea before spontaneously thinking its a good idea. 

I have no idea why my brain would impose a village on me, of all the random things it might impose at that moment. I'm comfortable with not caring about that. I trust it will happen, because this is the manner I seem to think. But it isn't really in my power to decide whether or not I shall trust it, either, because that too is the bow wave... and at this point, I shall stop hurting the heads of my readers, who must by now realise that this post was not considered in advance before I decided to write it, either.

The logical end of this post is to describe "time" as a ride that we're on, that we don't control, that for whatever reason I've decided (without deciding or even being asked) to enjoy some of that ride in the process of D&D, and then to bow out looking all clever and shit because I've read Vonnegut and Tolstoy. Whom, really, the reader ought to read. All that matters here is that I enjoy D&D because it makes me think at a scramble in a way that no other activity does, which is why I find myself returning to running it every now and then, instead of just designing it.

Panic at the Game Table

From the as yet unpublished March Lantern:

"Before any counsel might be taken—whether we should press onward through the opened door, or else withdraw and be content... Warth strode forward without hesitation and passed between the doors..."

I wrote the above specifically because of a behaviour than one of my Discord players actively called out as the reason for not directly taking action: because they did not want to volunteer the rest of the party by compelling others to act in accordance with their actions. On the one part, I like that its appropriately assumed that if, like Warth above, someone just bulls forward, the party will step up from a sense of commitment, but on the other part I find myself bristling that a player would resist trusting that. It's a characteristic I don't see in my offline games... and it is a characteristic that causes parties to default to a place where they have to check and be sure first, in essence getting permission, before acting. Which demands that every step the party takes forward be first resolved by committee meeting.

It's worth discussing how the player's "I act" is transformed into "I commit others to my action."  The structure of the game, divorced of the Gygaxian "leader" model, which is for shit, asks for players to step up and take the helm when they see what needs doing. The problem is that most everyone has played with incompetents and damn fools that just rush forward blindly at every opportunity. One naturally gets tired of kicking someone else's chestnuts out of the fire. Too, responsibly minded players, the better players, assume a default mode of looking after one's fellow man which is hard to shake off. It's all well and good for characters from a film to watch Shalar the Monk go off running and fifty enemy by himself with the line, "What does he think he's doing?", followed by a sigh and, "Getting himself killed." Around a D&D table, no one actually wants Shalar to die. So while there is a sigh, it's almost always followed by, "All right, we all go too."

No better player wants to be Shalar. They want to respect their fellow players and not impune their agency by forcing their hand. This is why the "committee" is not evidence of timidity, or poor play, or even self-doubt, but in fact an example of mutual respect.

Which makes it all the worse for being a bad strategy.

The problem with this character-action design is that requires the DM to reframe time to allow for a committee meeting to take place between the party members, even when that insertion of time is utterly irrational. A combat round in my game lasts 12 seconds, but even if it lasted a minute, it would not be long enough to account for some of the conversations I witnessed in our last session of combat. At present, with a new party, in a new game, with an uncertainty about the combat rules (though the party did extremely well with them), it's not reasonable for me to hold them accountable for unfamiliar decisions... yet. But soon enough they will know the combat system, and soon enough it won't be reasonable for them to have a discussion about who stands where or who does what this round or what the strategy is now that there are rats flooding up the stairs. Sooner or later, rationally, within the time frame imposed by the game, decisions by committee are not only going to be impractical, I'm going to have to take a stance that attempts to discuss will be complimented by forfeitures of attacks and other action. When called up to the plate, it's time to swing, not have another confab with the coach.

Now, is where I must insert the scene from the ancient film The Untouchables, where Al Capone says,

"A man stands alone at a plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone."

Thereafter, Capone goes into this whole thing about the team and being there for the team, culminating in a brutal murder but hey, spoilers, right?  And Capone's point is made. But the reverse also has to be true. The team can field themselves the livelong day, pitcher, first baseman, outfielder, but if someone doesn't score a damn point on their own, then the best the team can do together is TIE. None of that is discussed in the film, it wouldn't make the writer's point, but it's just as true as anything the Capone character says.

This is how D&D is structured, however. When it's time for the player to act, to fight, to throw a spell, to leap across this gorge, the team cannot, by virtue of their location in the setting, by virtue of the action taking place in the setting, speak their opinions about what a player does with the character. I have not hesitated as a DM to tell everyone else to keep quiet, to put the player on the spot. I have not hesitated to state that the character fails to do anything because they have taken too long to act. This aspect of my game has not come up where I've played in text, because it simply wasn't practical. But Discord is closer to the real thing now and I'm not going to let time stretch forever.

In face-to-face play, there is less hesitation in taking an action before discussing it. One can look around at the other players and see in a glance that they're intention is plainly to go ahead. Excited people after a success cry out and jump around with excitement once the stress has passed; but excited people on the cusp of stress tighten up. They visibly begin to sit still; it's a body language that most of us register without thinking about it, as we have a hundreds of thousands of years of biological selection related to freezing while watching one of our clan approach a tiger or a mastodon or some other beast with a flimsy spear. I have repeatedly argued that the fundamental genius of D&D is not the rules, the culture, the structure of the DM or the reward system, but the way these things work together to create moments of feeling extreme danger and threat without our having to risk breaking our bones on a playing field, or getting shot at in Venezuela.

Intuitively, in the physical company of the party, the need for pre-verbal consent diminishes. We trust our instincts. We're sure the party will approve if we just go through the doors without asking first. We're confident that they have our backs without needing to ask first. In fact, it's more than that, we feel that the zeitgeist of the group together is willing us to act without the wasting of game time a committee demands.

In a moment like this, where every D&D game wants to be, asking permission isn't just unnecessary, it's actively immersion-obverse. Asking first ruins the tempo, the tension, the thrill of the game as it spins forward. These things are what makes "flow" happen in-game... where the players cease questioning themselves, cease putting a wall between themselves and their character, even cease considering survival as functionally relevant to just moving forward in the compulsive need to do so.

Some players can't do that on their own. They can't "let go" of the grey of real life. But they can be pushed, and one way of doing that is by saying, "What do you do?" and then one time — it usually only takes once — saying to the player fighting to make up their mind, "That's it, your round is done," before moving onto the next player. It sobers them. It shakes them from their sense of "this is a game, nothing matters" into "fuck, if I don't pick it up, I'm going to get killed here."

I've seen this produce a "tunnelling" effect into players that is both upsetting and mind-blowing, depending on their character and the number of times they've experienced it. The term describes moments of extreme stress, threat, obsession or motivation where one's attention collapses to manage a narrow set of cues and actions. It is a state, which people report as one of clarity, urgency, even simplification. If the reader has ever experienced that moment where time seems to weirdly slow down at the moment of an accident, where every detail of an oncoming car, or the sense of flying through the air, is comprehended with unnatural perception, that is tunnelling. In real life, it can be dangerous; drivers can find themselves unable to pull their gaze from an obstacle they end up hitting, or pilots can find themselves so fixated on a single instrument that they fail to take action to save themselves... but around a D&D table, I assure the reader, it is quite safe.

The very idea that D&D can achieve this state of mind feels specious; some reading this will outright state that it cannot be so. Others, however, have experienced this and it is queerly the reason why they refuse to surrender this game despite the growing dearth of players. I have experienced it. Hell, I've experienced tunnelling while writing. I nearly always experience flow while writing.

For those experiencing either for the first time, it is like achieving an alternative cognitive state without doing drugs. In Nichiren Buddhism, the term is shakubuku (yes, where Grosse Pointe Blank finds it), meaning to "break and subdue." It forcefully refutes a person's interior beliefs in a manner that shatters delusion and compels acceptance for that which was formerly considered untrue. This is what's upsetting for many —it usually means that the lies they've told themselves for years just won't work any more. In D&D, it means that the other game that the other people play has in a flash ceased to be good enough.

As I'm a prick, I tend to carry out this approach in D&D. Not because I'm a Buddhist or a Taoist, but because I won't suspend my privilege as a DM in attempting to impose this spiritual kick to the head. I'm ready to be fair, to not use my privilege to gain power over my players, to not fake dice or cheat or assume I'm my player's keeper. But, as a performer, if I can make you, the person, feel something through your engagement and attachment to the character you're running I will.

Time, as a game rule, is on my side in this. While party commitment by committee is not. As a DM, I will not hesitate to use time, real time, to create tension, discomfort, fear and their compliment emotions control, resilience and bravery, to produce an experience that a movie can't produce, that a book can't produce, that a VR table can't produce... and that the whole WOTC, for all it's money and influence, hasn't even heard of.

This is what makes this fun for me.

In Preparation for Running

As I said in the last post, I'm planning on running D&D this Friday. I have no definite story in mind, but I do have a few set pieces and ideas to start with, if the players' earlier phrasings about what they might want to do can be counted upon. I don't intend to force anyone into anything, however — I'm confident that if the players decide to throw a curve ball at me, I'll be able to manage in real time.

Some issues I've had with online campaigns thus far has been the assumption that whatever I'm doing will involve some kind of "gotcha" mechanic. Even if it should appear as much, the players should assume that if I've arranged to corner them somehow, it's in my mind to get them out of it just as quickly. I had an incident with my first online campaign where the players were repeatedly warned about an area of the map that was overrun with hostiles; they persevered forward just the same, until I trapped them in a house, surrounded by an impossible to manage number of enemy, to send the message that yes, I was serious, there were a great many enemy about. Then, before I could demonstrate the trap door and secret exit to the trap, which had been part of my plan all along (I merely wanted to press that my earlier warnings were well met), one of the players rebelled viciously, claiming that I had broken my DM's obligation, the one I'd always stood by. That went back and forth for a time, the player quit, while I was quietly stunned by how easily a cliched 1920s serial-based plot sequence could be so easily misunderstood.  I supposed ever after that there were things I could do in a real life running, with the trust earned therefrom, that I could not do in text online. I don't wish to make that same mistake again, and I do wish for my motives to be clear, thus my efforts here to outline this at length.

Another issue I found was the players' tendency to express their intent in the future tense, rather than the present. For example, "We will go to the dungeon," rather that "We go..." Or, "We want to attack the enemy," versus "We attack..."

Wanting to do something is not doing it, nor is saying that at some future point we're going to do a thing. Yet when I brought this up, I found myself facing a rather stubborn resistance to the use of the present tense. I suppose it's defensive; by framing things as "we will do" as opposed to "we do," the players arranged an emotional difference between wanting to commit to an action rather than actually committing. As a DM, however, it puts me in a difficult situation.

First, if I'm to assume that the future tense is the same as the present, that removes the future tense as an option for the players. They might, for example, really mean that its something they "will do," just not yet. My assumption is bound to create misunderstandings, and so I'd prefer that we separate the two tenses clearly. However, this requires the players to discipline themselves; to understand that if they say "we will," I plan to take them at their word and assume they're standing where they are and doing nothing. I have tried to hold this line... only to find players becoming upset about it, that "of course" they meant that they were doing it, and that I'm being unnecessarily particular.

D&D is a game of language. As such, language matters. It's a bad habit to express things in future tense when we mean the present. I want my players to be aware of it.

I bring these things up because they cause conflict. In the first case I'm assumed to have an agenda, to "get the party," when I don't, and in the second, that I'm being pedantic when I demand people speak English properly. I don't have an agenda, and I do expect people to speak properly. And I'm saying so now with the expectation that these things are going to arise, because in the three previous campaigns I've run online, they did.

I don't expect my players will be interested in asking questions about my running style here, but perhaps others might like to, so I'm opening the door to that.

Gotta D&D

There have been some changes.

Because I'm a stupid kitten who is mollified by shiny objects, I've let some of the patreon supporters talk me into running a D&D campaign on discord. We're going to start in northern Hungary. I have four players now, I'm not sure I could manage a fifth, but I'm only going on what it was like to run games through text; this is going to be speaking and answering, Sunday evenings starting February 1st, tentatively at 5 p.m. (my time), but that's not absolutely set yet. Naturally, it is the usual schedule problem, coupled with us being in various time zones. I'm in Mountain, two are in Central and one in Eastern.

Just now, I should be working on the Lantern for the 1st of February, but... no. What I suggest is that those putting forward the $10 donation for the advanced copy rescind it, with my apologies. It's selfish and stupid of me, but life is meant to be lived in the moment and the Lantern can wait a week or two for the present. My apologies, sincerely meant; I can't convey them any more strongly, except to assure that anyone pulling out, believe me when I say there's no way I could hold that against you. If you feel you've been shortchanged, that the work here hasn't justified it, then please, reach out to me and we'll come to an agreement.

In the meantime, I will be working on The Lantern and there will be a March issue. I wish I could just get myself into a headspace where I work on it everyday, instead of stacking it up day by day toward a deadline. I've worked that way all my life, I'm afraid, and though I'm much better now than I was 20 years ago, it continues to be my nature to a degree greater than I'd like.

What else?

This has forced me to address the pricing table, which I have kicked down the road more years than I can believe, honestly. I'll have a largely working version of it by this upcoming Saturday, and I'll post it for $10 patreon supporters. It's just too much work for me to give it away free. Plus it's an endless fix and patch job, even when it's done. So I really have to keep it behind a wall, I'm sorry.

That's what, six, seven apologies? Well, I'm Canadian.

All right, I'm here, if anyone wants to yell. That'd be totally fair.

Bitchslap

In essence, a "sandbox" is usually ascribed to be a world built for freedom of motion rather than the delivery of a fixed narrative. The DM prepares places, factions, resources and tensions but doesn’t predetermine which ones will matter. The players decide where to go and what to engage with, and the narrative arises from the friction between their choices and the world's structure. What distinguishes a sandbox from a plotted campaign isn’t the absence of design — it’s that the design creates potential instead of direction.

That's not my definition, that's ChatGPT. It's beneath me in this day and age to spend a lot of time quibbling about this word or that in a definition when I have a program to do it for me. I changed one word in the above. Bonus points if you can guess it.

I have written numerous posts in defense of the "sandbox." I have talked about how systems should be designed to "take the DM out of the loop," to effectively sabotage the DM's freedom to be arbitrary. I believe that a list of imposed narratives ("1–3: bandits raid; 4–6: plague spreads...") does not really provide choice for the party, it merely catalogues which story the DM's going to force on the players first. I've sparred with dozens of naysayers who tell me I don't understand, that the "sandbox" I've defended really isn't one, that I'm a fraud, that I'm playing mindgames with my players and so on.

But I haven't had any of these conversations in years for a couple of reasons. First, because I've stopped using "sandbox" in my head to think about the game I design. I don't really think its a good label, it's a hypersimplification of what's really happening and it's a metaphor. Of late, as a writer, I'll still use a metaphor of course, but when I'm trying to define something, I try to avoid them. Not using a metaphor puts one less thing between the message I'm telling and the reader's comprehension.

Likewise, I don't use "railroad" anymore, either. I don't care if it's meant as a verb or a noun, because it's a metaphor and therefore unclear. I prefer, "arbitrary DM manipulation of players" because that doesn't have another meaning. It can't be spun by pretending its a form of grammar. The DM should not use assumed authority not rightly granted to dictate the actions or otherwise manipulate or enforce actions upon the players without their sincere and informed consent. There, that's even clearer. No metaphors necessary.

When I see someone use "sandbox" or "railroad" in an argument, I think immediately, "That is soooo 2011. Fourteen years and they've learned nothing."

The other reason is that, for me, the argument is settled. Nobody anywhere is going to rationally come forward and say, "I prefer to run a railroad." They're going to frame that sentiment in a lot of other gobbledygook that rationalises, "I feel perfectly justified in fucking over my players, because..." and so on. So basically, if you're still fighting this fight, you're doing it against an enemy that doesn't exist. The present justification, "I’m just telling a story," "I’m maintaining tone," "I’m guiding pacing," are all using corporate speak to justify what corporations use it for: "We're exploiting you, you're ripe for exploitation, you need this job, so we've invented this language to make you warm and fuzzy while we bend you over a table. Really, we love you. Spread your legs a little wider, please."

The people on the net NOT using corporate speak separate into two groups: those who don't care any more, because they're done explaining math to ignoramuses; and those like me, who talk about the "agency" of players without talking about it. For years now I've just assumed my reader knows what I mean. My rhetoric includes, plainly, that I'm speaking of the players being given agency to do whatever they want in the game setting, without any expectations whatsoever, from a belief that whatever they do, I can adjust, roll, design in my head and have it ready for them by the time they get there. If I need an extra three minutes, this is a good time to go to the bathroom, get a coffee, whatever. I dungeon master at the speed of a firefighter putting out a fire. The fire isn't going to do what I want, it won't give me very much time to pivot, so I've learned to pivot as fast as I have to. I wrote a book about this.

When I read others, or hear them, talking about how they can't do this, how they have to urge the players this way or that to manage them in a finite system, because "no one" can build a world at the speed that the players can change their minds, I think, "amateurs." 

Anyone who thinks it's easier to fight a fire than it is to DM has their head on wrong. If a fire, if a war, if an emergency room, can be run at the speed they experience, then any DM who really tries can do it too. It requires just a few revisions to the thinking process.

Let's start, first of all, with the "story." Stories take a long fucking time. You need to invent characters, provide exposition and reason, provide motivation for said characters, invent a solution that resolves that motivation, create an end destination and have it all make sense, because that's what stories do. This takes a really, really impractical amount of time. Even in the space of a week, doing this well really isn't in your wheelhouse unless you're a writer, and an educated one at that, and still you're going to steal to get it sorted in that amount of time. You haven't the chops to INVENT something from scratch that fits this exact place and time where the players are. And you're certainly not going to manage it while the first starts eating the second floor.

Which is why, when you invent a story — or buy a story — you're going to milk that puppy for everything you can squeeze out of it, because when it ends, you're fucked. Not only do you need another story, it needs to compete with the first one and you have to hope your players liked the first one enough that you can sell them on committed to that eventually sucked-dry story concept again. Good luck with that.

So that's your second problem, and it doesn't just apply to stories: sustainability. You have a fingersnap of time to get these players' imaginations to catch on fire, a need that's crippled by them knowing you want this more than they do. They have no reason to buy in; and if they do want to buy in, it's not for the same reason. So now, whatever you do, it has to please everyone. Good luck with that.

No matter how good it sounds, no matter how many are trying to sell you that storytelling creates "a better game" or "more excitement," inventing a narrative is the driving a train equivalent to a dead stick. You may be flying now, but it's going to crash and when it does, you won't have a train. How's that for a metaphor.

I can hear the whining. "But Alexis... how am I going to run a game if I don't know what happens next?"

I don't know... how the fuck do you play chess?  What blankety-blank said you were entitled to know what happens next in a D&D game?

That right there is the crippling dependency foisted upon you by the first module you ran, which made you stupid. It was so nice, so comfortable, so convenient to know what would happen next, you never put down that security blanket. And it's enslaved you ever since, dulling your mind so that as a DM you have to wait for the players to act while you already know everything, while you're bored, while you're wishing they'd just stop dicking around and opening the next door. The only fun part of those modules is when the combat happens, because then it's like a sport. If you roll the dice honestly, and the fight's a good match, you don't know who's going to win.  You know, the way a GAME works. EVERY GAME. 

Just not this one, just now.

But hey, if you want to go on giving guided tours the rest of your life, have at it.

How many times has it been said? The DM's role is to describe what the player sense about their location. The players then ask questions or explain their actions. The DM provides the reaction of the setting to the players actions, or describes what can now been seen, heard, touched, etcetera, that couldn't before. Why precisely do I need to know ANYTHING before the players get there?

I've explained that situational awareness provides an ability to recognise patterns in accumulated experiences. If I run D&D for a year, the number of experiences running D&D, if I do it once per week for what I did at the time, 5-6 hours a session, I'll gain around 250 to 300 hours of listening to players tell me things they want to do and what they want to know. If we assume around 30 such phrases per hour, that's an experiential pile of some 7500 to 9000 queries or statements. Just one session offers 300 to 360. Just one session is enough, if you're paying attention, to provide a semblance of patterns that a focused DM can create. If, then, after a game, we go through what we heard, and think about it, then we have time to build patterns out of patterns.

Once a set of patterns are comprehended, either consciously or not, one's situational awareness in a fleeting moment of time allows for the prediction of what players are going to say next, if given exposition about any number of specific things that naturally repeat in games. The players want to go through a door, the players want to fight the bad guys, the players don't know what to do next and want to talk about it, the players want to interrogate the NPC and so on. As this predictive ability accumulates, more and more accuracy is gained. And so, like seeing three moves ahead on a chessboard, a DM can see three moves ahead on the players deciding what to do when entering a given room or whatever.

So I don't have to prepare for every contingency, just the ones I haven't any experience with. And that's pretty darn rare after ten years of running... and what's more, D&D really doesn't offer that much for players to do other than to talk to NPCs, fight them, deal with hazards, move from place to place and  make plans. And if you know your setting cold, I mean really cold, then all of this is easily managed without that much effort.

Of course, you've gotta fucking practice. If your answer is always, "Room 17 says..." then you're not practicing. You're a tour guide.

Still, if people tell you that no amount of practice is going to make this possible, then you're probably going to believe them. Remember when you decided you were going to learn guitar?  And you found that practice was hard? But it was so much fun to play Guitar Hero? Well there you go.

I play D&D. You play D&D Hero. That's the difference between us.

And just because you make pre-gen programs for your D&D Hero game doesn't mean you're doing what I'm doing. When I sit down to run, I have a prediction for what's going to happen, but if it doesn't, I'm fine, I can roll with it, I can invent something here and now that will let the players use their agency to find what they want and go where they want and never feel like I'm boxing them in. But if they don't do what you expect them to do... then you're rapidly flipping through your text trying to find where your D&D Hero should start up again, so you can feel safe and secure in your dependency blanket.

Yeah, I know, you're having a good time. Well, sure. Think whatever you want to. But I've had the choice to do it your way, and I find it pretty boring. Like knowing the Mariners were mess this up months ago.

I don't mean thinking they probably would. That gives you hope. But knowing. Which really sucks, doesn't it? For me, that's what your D&D feels like.

I was going to call this post D&D Hero, but after writing it, the title used seemed more appropriate.

We Don't Learn from Our Mistakes

Progressively, I've come to think less and less of my personal writing as an artform.  This isn't to say that writing can't be art — of course it can be, with the metre and order of words being laid out for the purpose of expressing aesthetic, rhythm or emotion.  I've long since ceased to be interested in this direction myself; I'm more interested in the communicative aspect, the passing of thoughts and ideas, than I am in esoteric concerns.

Quite often, some will describe writing as a craft, including my writing, and when it's used that way I'll let it stand.  However, I tend to see "craft" as the composition of a physical article, such as a chair or a garment, in the fashion of repeating the creation of a thing to the point where high competence is achieved.  Again, this can certainly describe writing, especially with any content where the thing being communicated is more or less the same.  One monster in the wiki is described pretty much like any other, as is any given spell, place, sage ability or whatever.  The "craft" is making the subject material clear, not in necessarily communicating something unique.

In a larger sense, I'm much more interested in design, the making of original things for a purpose, than in these first two.  Design can incorporate craftsmanship; it unquestionably can and ought to relate to aesthetic.  But with things such as the game campaign's creation through text, or the fabrication of this specific post in the making, the joy is in building a structure that conveys first one point, then builds upon that point with the next, and so on, until the overall design becomes evident.

Perhaps the two most destructive sentiments attached to the creation of art, craft or design are the simplifications expressed by, "If you don't succeed, try, try again..." and "We learn from our mistakes."  The latter has led to an expression that particularly annoys, "I need to make more mistakes," as though the making of mistakes automatically teaches, or the even more egregious, "I've reached this point because I've made enough mistakes," which likewise tries to commodify effort as though the only thing we need do more of is fuck up.

These phrases trivialise what happens in the creative process and — as I've witnessed — tend to undermine a creator's resolve when it turns out that repeatedly trying something fails to magically create a positive result, while at the same time the individual fails to learn anything from their mistakes.  Trying and failing are not a recipe for success.  Unfortunately, however, the model for success does not fit easily into a framed wall plaque.  Thankfully, education is not limited to 10 word sayings, while we have infinite time and space with which to sketch the problem.

Let us begin with the notion that we've tried, failed, made a mistake, and yet we're prepared to press on.  Our first effort must be to examine what we've done, not what we want to do.  This is often missed or forgotten, as the desire to reach the goal seems to dictate that the first action is to get up, forget what we've done and move forward. In fact, it's often framed that we should put the failure entirely out of our mind, as though the failure itself is the enemy, and not the inadequacy in ourselves that it represents.  We shouldn't, we're told, admit to inadequacy; surely, if a failure occurred, it wasn't us. It was the alignment of the planets, the shape of the earth we stand on, the temperature of the air... anything conveniently blamed outside the framework of our responsibility.

If we throw a ball at a fence and wish to hit a small spot 90 feet away, then presumably with enough effort we'll eventually hit the place wished.  The goal, however, is not to hit the place once, or occasionally, but to hit it precisely when we mean to hit it, every time.  At first, it's generally assumed this has to do with our eye and our aim — but in fact it also has much to do with our fingers on the ball, our stance, the way we move when throwing and the clarity of our thinking... things which can't be resolved through merely hoping our aim will improve by repeating the action endlessly.  It's often because there's no one around to kick the thrower's feet further apart by a few inches, or straighten the thrower's body, or change the fingering on the ball, that many would-be pitchers simply cannot comprehend why those thousands of hours throwing a ball at a fence never amounted to anything.  They suppose, "Well, I guess some people have it, and I don't."  While, in fact, a proper coach might have changed everything.

The point being made is that rather than assume we know "how" to do a thing, and that the failure is in our lack of effort or practice, we should stop and examine a problem from all angles.  In role-playing, it's often taken for granted that much of one's success depends on the game being played.  But from experience, I can state with experience that while I consider 1st edition D&D to be superior to 5th edition, it's quite possible to be a consistently terrible dungeon master in both, such that the edition really doesn't matter in terms of the game's design.  This is very last thing that matters, in fact, since most of what happens at a table between the adjudicator and player has little to do with the rules as compared to the manner in which information is communicated, the temperament of the adjudicator, the attitude of the player and the reasons for which all participants are there.  The first thing to be addressed as a dungeon master is not, "Am I running the right version, genre or system?" but "Why am I acting as a dungeon master?"

Yet obviously the first question receives all the attention.  It is easier to answer — we merely repeat what we've been told by those who are supposedly "in the know," whom we respect (again, a respect whose justification we should question), allowing us to assign "awareness" of the best game to the testimonial of another, rather than ourselves.  This outward looking assignment of truths, however, is nothing short of disasterous for the system runner; they don't really know why, from experience, that it's a better system and they don't really know why the respected individual defended it (and there can't be many reasons for this).  But worst of all, they don't know what they personally want to achieve.  It's more or less the assumption that, like a car, once I turn on the key and get it started, everything else is a matter of respecting the dangers involved, following the rules and not hitting other things too often... as that gets awfully expensive.

Operating a car, however, is comparatively simple with regards to basic rules and risk management.  Moreover, there's a clear, ever-present motivation to pay a great deal of attention to what one's doing, understanding that failing to pay attention carries with it the factor of having no attention left to pay.  The consequences of running as a DM are nowhere near as dire.

"Failure" is inevitably baked into the expectation players have of a DM, as well as what we tend to expect of ourselves.  We know that whatever the system might be, it's extraordinarily complex.  Most don't want to run it, so that even "trying" is seen as a conquest of sorts.  It's sort of like being told to drive a car over two eight-inch wide boards at 10 km two feet above the ground.  Lack of success is more or less guaranteed, so that the willingness to perform the stunt becomes all that matters.

Note that in the example, the damage sustained from failure is purposefully minimised.  A slip off a board two feet above the ground is hardly going to seriously damage the vehicle, which serves to express how little we need to care when our game chokes.  "Oh well," we can say, "No big deal, do a little better next time, practice makes perfect, etcetera."  Except of course practice in itself makes nothing, since practice without intent or self-awareness only calcifies the manner in which we make mistakes.  In fact, repeated bad DMing in an atmosphere without consequence only makes a DM worse, given our propensity to feel comfortable once we're assured that we're doing "well enough."

It's for this reason that we can't count on our players to improve our play.  Most either resort to a passive-stance, simply dropping the campaign if it fails their needs, or tolerating endlessly our mediocrity for social or purposeful activity on a given night.  Pressing a player to criticise forces them into a place of responsibility for our actions they don't want.  At the same time, after months and perhaps years of complacency, having a new character enter our campaign who is willing to criticise becomes the last thing we would want; we were doing fine, weren't we?  Thus we can see how DM-player relations calcify mistakes rather than encouraging any learning from them.  It is only when the DM cannot get players, or has players consistently drop out of campaigns to where they fold and fail with uncomfortable frequency, that a DM is pushed into a place where they have to confront that second question in the above, "Why do I want to do this?"

"Learning from our mistakes" is an intellectual process that defies repetition or resolve.  We can resolve to hit a fence with a ball, but we can't force ourself to do it precisely.  We must set aside the goal and look clearly at the problem: why did this failure occur?  That is the first rule of design.  Deconstruct the previous attempt, look at all the parts, test each, learn what each thing is doing and then adjust or replace the part that fails to produce the desired effect.  This is very much what we do not do when our game world fails.  Must likely, we rush out to obtain some other sort of system, assuming this is the problem. Or we choose to adopt another individual's mechanics within our system of choice — such as a module or a campaign, while retaining no understanding of the errors or mistakes made by that individual's design.  These patterns of behaviour follow modern consumerism.  This car's a lemon?  It's a Ford?  Don't buy another Ford.  Surely, it's a bad car company, unlike all the others that don't produce lemons.  Our bank ignores us?  Move our accounts.  This neighbourhood doesn't suit?  Move.  Don't like the couch?  Buy another.  Pay no attention to the universality of car designs at a certain price point, or the universal motives of a bank, or the consistent quality of property occupation at our income, or the fundamental cheapness of every couch at such-and-such a price.  Make a cosmetic change, hope for the best.

The proper mindset as a dungeon master is that of the individual who chooses to "rough it" by wresting themselves from the contrivances of civilisation and learning self-reliance.  That is, the willingness to cut our own timber, saw our own lumber, use tools to fashion the chair from scratch, upholstering it ourselves until we have the "perfect" chair that would be uncomfortable for anyone else but suits our needs precisely.  This is more than a lot of work — it's a mindset that craves work, that craves a level of suitability that won't permit tolerance of inadequacy.  It's a rare mindset... one not cultivated by the consumerist culture in which we live, as the foregoing examples describe.  It is a mindset that one is not born with, but is obtained through observing others with the trait.  In my case, it came from my father, who live in an outback region of a minimally-civilised frigid climate, who grew up making his own fun — there being none to purchase — who thence learned to build oil derricks from scratch and eventually applied that ability to the construction of his own cabin, which I witnessed as a child and grasped was possible, even if that wasn't my peculiar choice for fun.  Watching someone else do an "impossible" thing, however, encourages a belief that there is possibility in ourselves, once we can wrest ourselves away from the assumption that if we haven't got what we want, we just haven't yet found the store where they sell it.

My own efforts with this blog and elsewhere contribute to this feeling in various readers.  Though they don't know me, they don't necessarily understand me, they accept that I have my demons and sense that the things I do can be done by themselves.  The message sent is that personal achievement breeds — in a particular few — a desire to experience personal achievement.  This is aided in that many of us, for either long or brief periods, have already witnessed someone else in our lives who sacrificed time and convenience to make something of their own accord, for their own purposes, though they could have just gone out and bought something that was nearly the same.

Many, however, eschew this notion entirely.  Perhaps they were required at some point to make a birdhouse or fix their own bicycle, only to despise the process.  Perhaps they were pushed into participation activities like sports or games by their parents, only to have coaches insist they hold a ball in such a way or swing a bat just so, finding that they hated the criticism, the expectation, the demand on their time and the sense that they would rather just be in front of something else they'd enjoy more.  For such persons, "success" always means something that can be found on Amazon and shipped to one's door in 48 hours.  And any success that can't be so shipped isn't worth having.

My memories of "organised" activities, from cubs to scouts to church events to sports to school activities and drama, with all the fluidity of abuse that those entailed, it does not surprise me that many people simply aren't "enlightened" by such opportunities.  Most tend to be run by taciturn, inflexible persons with an agenda that precludes empathy or patience, particularly those where competition is involved.  I did not find "team" sports to be particularly "team" focused... but then I grew up in a very different time, when an adult coach screaming at a small child unrestrained was not only commonplace, but encouraged as a form of encouragement.  The balance of abuse no doubt drove many who might have gotten something positive from such far away from "do-it-yourself" fun.  I found competitive running and writing provided sufficient isolation to enable me to become interested in the process and not the achievement, and thus escaped the crushing of my ego that was so fervently attempted by so many well-meaning institutions.

I have no doubt that many egos did not thrive so well as mine.

The various parts of D&D, and indeed any activity, ought to be posititively structured to deviate from such approaches.  The goals are deceptively simple.  Arrange a series of events with which the players can engage in order to experience a verisimilitude with place and time.  Provide a remuneration for effort that encourages more effort and less hedging or deviation from the game's functional aspect.  Downplay participation behaviour that clutters up either the verisimilitude or the game's progressive design.  Discourage the attendance of persons who resist the design.

To comprehend the design requires, as said before, deconstruction.  Looking at each premise in turn, and starting with the first sentence, we must puzzle out what "series" means with repect to "events"; what "events" are fundamentally; what does it mean to "engage" with these events.  What is "verisimilitude"?  How do we define "place" with regards to the game's rules, and what meaning of "time" are we applying here?  Are we speaking of game time, or are we speaking of the "modified historical timeframe" of the events.

All of these things have been discussed in this blog, but it becomes very easy to get our of our depth.  "Series" dictates a rational narrative based upon cause-and-effect, where the players' actions, and not the inventiveness of the DM, dictates the course of what happens next, so that the players may control the thread of their game play in a manner similar to which we control our real-life presence — that is, in the way that we choose to leave our house, buy a ticket for Bermuda, interact with the people there, buy things of our own accord, swim in the sea, take risks that we can see as risks prior to taking them, all without a sense that our actions are being unduly influenced in a manner that isn't also being dictated to everyone else around us.  When the DM decides that as the player characters, the things that specifically happen to us are not that which might happen to anyone else in the campaign — such as an expositional NPC coming forth to give us, and only us, the information that only we need, specifically because we are the players, then we are not speaking of cause-and-effect, but influence-and-response, where our actions are dictated by the DM's choice to act against or for us, and not by our choice to decide what matters to use in a free and fair indifferent game world.

Likewise, "events" are definable moments in a campaign that ought to occur spontaneously, due to the player's actions, not as prescribed set-pieces similar to a midway funhouse, where the players are prescribed to enter at this point, prescribed to experience a set of curated events, before being allowed to leave by the designated exit with the pre-designated goal having been achieved.  Desirably, events should be culminations of sequences, some random, some dictated by player choice, where a fluid and uncertain consequence may or may not arise, such as what we might expect in a sports event, where the certainty of success does not exist, where the winner is not known in advance, and where ultimately any odd event may occur that adjusts or shifts the outcome in a manner that neither the players nor the DM had reason to expect.  There are limitations for achieving this in a table-top RPG, but the possibilities far exceed that in a video game or a standard module, though it requires a considerable hands-off approach from the DM, a willingness to allow the players to fail, a recognition that consequence and is not a bad thing in and of itself in a game atmosphere, and the lack of presumption that the DM exists as a shield to protect players from their own emotional states.

Thus we may continue with this sort of deconstruction at considerable length.  Each point in the last paragraph can be further examined within its constituent parts, and ought to be, excitedly, by the would-be DM.  A self-driven DM should pause to consider what a "culmination" is, or "curation," or "consequence," any of which could be another lengthy paragraph to follow this.  My willingness to deconstruct each of these things in turn, ad nauseum, descends from my willingness to do it only to myself beginning with when I first ran the game, when they were less clear to me but no less important where it came to the question, "What am I trying to achieve as a dungeon master."

There are no straightforward answers.  There are no answers that are sufficient for the rest of our lives.  My revisitation to any point intellectually never fails to derive some aspect or condition of the game's structure or value that I hadn't previously considered, because the game's potential for examination parallels that of understanding the human being itself, how it is formed, how it relates, how it shifts its behaviour in response to new knowledge, what motivates it and so on.  D&D is not a game of hit points and spells and monsters.  Those things are merely the house that D&D lives in.  I live in my house while giving very little consideration to the floors, the walls, the windows or the manner in which the refridgerator runs (except, of course, when it doesn't).  Most of the time I am concerned with what I'm doing in my house, not the house itself.  I don't care so much about what a spell does, but that it is rigidly defined and cannot be used to exempt the player from the fundamentals of play — that it's a tool the player uses, not a get-out-of-jail free card the player employs in order that they don't need to play.  Much of my DM-player contentions have revolved around this particular viewpoint: that I expect the player to succeed as a responsive human being, whereas the player wishes to succeed as a consumer who has bought an item that fixes their problem.  Enforcing the consequences of viewing a competitive activity from the latter point of view had produced enormous volatility and resistance over the years; and I've found, with such people, no degree of precision in language can dissuade from the seeking a particular Holy Grail that will let them "win without trying."

For some players, this seems to be the only point in their participating.

That is not a system problem, or a genre problem, nor a DM failing, it is a person problem.  It is the case of an individual who, like the footballer who strives to injure opposing players, or the blackjack player cheating in a casino, needs to be asked to leave.  This isn't personal.  It is dismissive of a certain person who has clearly been raised incorrectly.  There are certain individuals who consistently act in bad faith, sabotage group dynamics or refuse to engage with any sense of responsibility or self-awareness.  More importantly, we all have some degree of this behaviour, as we've all, to some extent, been raised badly.  This isn't a question of separating out these good people from these bad people.  The question at hand is not can we fix them, however, but can we encourage them to play well with others, or is it a case where we're spending more time handling such persons than we able to give to the game itself?

It is for these persons that we need rules.  Most, however, are more than willing to accept that it would make no sense for a character to use a two-handed sword and a shield at the same time.  Their approach to the game carries a recognition that their survival depends on their choices, not their effective game-awarded power.

Extrapolating from this, we can see the difference between those who view the game as a challenge to be overcome, at no cost to their own ego, and those who view the game as representative of their value as a human being.  It is in these dichotomies that we come to understand the tremendous capacity of the game to represent not just actions, not just rewards, not just an experience that allows the suspension of disbelief, but the whole human condition slathered on top in a way that can't be achieved through a video game or story.  No one at the table is "controlled," even as much as they might be in sports.  In sports, where we stand with respect to others, how we're permitted to hit or kick or throw the ball, or where we're allowed to land, or what boundaries we're allowed to pass between, are rigorously designed to limit freedom of action.  We're allowed to win, but that win is prescribed by the shape and limitations of the competitive space.  If a player chooses to inordinately assign too much emotion to their winning a match, if they emotionally step out of the "construct" expected of the player, then they are sent from the field, and potentially the game and the sport entirely.

D&D has none of this.  The boundaries are utterly fluid.  Actions are not limited by a pre-set win condition.  Emotional excitement beyond the pale is, to some degree, encouraged.  As in sports, players argue, they engage vociferously, they shout and feel the intensity of a near win or a near loss just as keenly; but they are also able to lie, discard the competitive, pursue alternative life actions, conspire, investigate and even gloat without consequence.  If a player were to survive a combat, stand up and shout at the DM, "In your face, asshole!"... that would be entirely keeping with the game culture, even viewed with laughter and memorability, whereas in a tennis match it would get the player tossed.

A working model of the game is achieved through attitude, approach, a focus on design elements that reward thinking and disregard convenience, an understanding of what we're trying to achieve and the awareness that mistakes — those things that disregard the game's function — can't be fixed without first understanding what those mistakes are.  It's in this that the game wallows and fails and increasingly breaks across the main of tables where it is played, from a refusal to (a) accept that the game's design is incapable of managing a human problem this complex; and (b) accept responsibility for adjusting ourselves to that need.

We cannot learn from mistakes if we think just making the mistake is all we need to do.


Continued

Maybe, I am a Cruise Director

   "Car making is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision."

— Kumal Galhotra, Ford

Regardless of the many, many arguments I've made about D&D being a game, which have all been framed to explain why rules have to exist, we must also admit something else about it.  However we choose to define it, and I've written posts about this too, it is a fact that many dungeon masters refuse to comprehend that their efforts and creativity is part of the entertainment industry.

Like the example above, players do not recognise the value of rules, they do not behave rationally, they do not understand those parts of the game that actually make them feel good, and they absolutely cannot understand how the purpose of the game cannot be, "to serve my needs."

This is how players approach the game.  They think to themselves, "Tonight, I'm going to..."  Which is to say, they're taking for granted that they're going to do something that entirely evolves from their choice to do it, which assumes they'll have the choice once the DM defines the circumstances around their characters.

Now, this looks like I'm saying two different things, so let me try to thread this needle.  The player characters are entitled to "agency," which grants them a degree of control, influence and decision-making power that a player has within the game.  This is not being argued against.  However, this agency is rigidly constrained by whatever situation the DM has imposed at this moment.  Therefore, the player cannot say, before arriving at the game, "I'm going to," because at that time, they don't know what they're options are going to be.

But this doesn't matter.  The player, by and large, ignores the constraint, because fundamentally, they don't believe the constraint should be such that is defies what they, personally, wish to do with their character.  This is where we come to the entertainment industry.  The players believe that by showing up, they have "paid" for their journey, and therefore say to us, the DM, "make the journey happen."

So whatever preparation we make, whatever rational decisions we make in the fabrication of our game world, we're still pressed into the situation of selling the fabricated game world to an emotional, somewhat irrational customer.  Our success lies in balancing the need for that sale against our need to provide the players with an experience they don't know yet that they want.

In long time past, I've argued that a DM is not a cruise director, but let's parse that out.  Part of a cruise director's role is to be aware that a great many of the passengers are going to make a supposition, ahead of time, about the things they want to do, against what they think is available to them.  But the cruise ship is an enormous vessel, with a vast number of options that are available, that most of the passengers don't know about.  And so, the job of cruise director is to sell parts of the ship that the passengers are ignorant about, but might want to engage with, once they know it exists.  For example, we might not know that there's a facility that will allow us to skydive on the ship; this might be something we'd love to do, but we don't know that it's there, so we don't think to investigate it.  Instead, we stand here waiting to get into the pool, because we know about the pool, but it's full of people so we're bored and talking about what's wrong with the ship, since it didn't provide enough pool space for everyone.

Every time you convince someone to go below and see the live porpoises, or try the skydiving, or learn how to cook sushi, or try the skeet range, or whatever, is one less person jamming up the pool or the casino.  This moving people about is your job as cruise director.  You're not here to give the people what they want.  You're here to show them they want a lot more than might they might even know about.

As a DM, the problem is similar.  The players think they know what they want, but most of them have a very thin concept of what the game's really capable of offering.  Presumably, if they knew a lot more about the game, and it's potential, then they'd be DMs themselves... but nonetheless, using the constraint potential the DM has to push the players into situations where the use of their agency causes them to have really wild adventures they never would have crafted out of their own imaginations is the DM's role.  

It is not, as the players think, to give the players what they want.  Understand?

A problem arises when the DM doesn't know this.  For example, the DM might think, "My role is to see to it that the players experience an adventure."  But this is, more or less, a rather useless guideline to run by.  Even if we define adventure, this hardly helps in the immediate scheme of things.  A good DM may have the idea of a big picture, but the game is NOT run according to what's happening in the big picture.  It's about moment to moment events, usually little ones, that drive the characters or lead the characters from this little scene to the next one, hopefully in a way that increases their attention and builds tension, so that they feel a little buzz in their middrift thinking about the implications of this thing they just learned held against the light of the three previous things they already know.

This isn't easy.  It requires drafting non-player characters with relationships to one another and the setting, laying a strong foundation for the events at hand, with plenty of room that lets the players think they're still driving the narrative, while holding a lot of small details in our heads simultaneously in a manner that allows us to instantly answer questions and throw out the next event without losing momentum.  Portraying a multiple-hour narrative strung over three nights of play is an enormous accomplishment, which a lot of people, no matter how badly they want to be a dungeon master, just don't have the chops to accomplish.

Assuming they even know, which most of them don't, that this is what they should be doing!

It's this narrative crafting that I've lost, with my now defunct campaign.  Yes, of course I can go on designing the car, or building out corners of the cruise ship, but this isn't running the campaign.

For the record, I have mixed feelings on whether the DM is a cruise director at this time.  When I trashed the idea, I was 16 years younger than I am now.  There have been a lot of changes in my perspective, a lot of time spent parsing out the DM's role, a lot of wisdom accumulated ... and unlike a politician, who is called a flip-flopper for saying something different than what they said 16 years ago, I'm allowed to be a scientist, who can honestly say that 16 years ago I hadn't performed the experiments that have changed my mind before today.

It may be, perhaps, that I am a sort of cruise director.  And if so, I may have failed my former party as one.  If so, I'd say it was because I didn't maintain the balance between what they wanted and what I was prepared to give them.  Perhaps I got tired of doing so.

Not for Amateurs

Here's an uncomfortable subject.

As dungeon masters, we can use mind games to manipulate and control players, as a means of presenting the game so as to achieve certain narrative or stylistic goals. We can use mixed signals, passive-aggressive behaviour, emotional manipulation, and even "gaslighting" to create the dynamic, engaging experience we're going for. Thus we're able to confuse, intimidate, or undermine the players' confidence and sense of reality, making it easier to dominate or influence their actions.

Skipping over, for the moment, whether we should do this, let's take a moment and run down what these mind games are. Mixed signals can keep players guessing and unsure about the true nature of the challenges they face, enhancing the sense of mystery and unpredictability in the game. For example, we can appear helpful and friendly, or we can appear hesitant to answer certain questions, suggesting that these are bad strategies or ideas on the players' part, causing them to be uncertain about what they're asking for, or what actions they're taking.

We might be passive aggressive by suggesting disappointment at the players deciding upon a certain action, or failing to be sufficiently brave or creative in their strategies. We might say, "Oh, you're taking that route? Well, it's probably the safer option, even if it means missing out on potential rewards." This pressures players to reconsider their choices, without outright forbidding their actions.

We can craft scenarios to tun at the players' heartstrings or evoke rash actions, as forms of emotional manipulation. For example, the DM might introduce a young, innocent character in need of help, only to later reveal that aiding this character inadvertently caused harm to others. This can be effectively used to jerk the players around in all sorts of ways, while heightening the emotional stakes of a game ... while simultaneously causing players to feel guilty or perhaps incompetent as players.

Gaslighting is all about distorting the players' perceptions of events, to sow doubt and confusion. We can present a key to the players, setting everything up so that the key seems very important; and then, inevitably, have it be the case that the key never mattered at all. We can invent faint, eerie voices, which never lead to the discovery of anything, and are just meaningless, extraneous details we threw in for no good reason. We can cover a door with symbols, causing players to drastically overthink the importance of these symbols, assuming they wouldn't be here if they weren't important ... and then have the symbols mean exactly nothing beyond decoration.

In the short run, most of these can be used to deepen the players' engagement ... until such time as they feel like they're being abusively manipulated, whereupon expect an insurrection. If they feel consistently manipulated or unfairly treated, frustrated, and feel they have reason to cease trusting the DM, it shouldn't be a surprise if they refuse to further play the game. While yes, uncertainty and misinformation can enhance game play, it can also easily undermine the players' enjoyment and agency. If mixed signals become too frequent or convoluted; if passive aggressive behaviour is evidently judgmental; if emotional manipulation goes too fare in exploiting sensitive topics, or creates situations that lead to excessive guilt or distress; then a backlash is bound to occur. And gaslighting, of course, is not far from downright lying.

The goal, though it shouldn't need to be said, is to enhance the players' experience; the presentation isn't, and never should be, about what the DM wants. Take the example of the door covered with symbols. As the players drift into overthink, our better nature ought to realise that, "Oops, I've shoved them into a loop," and feel guilty enough about that to explain in short order that no, these are just decorations. On the other hand, if we sit and listen to the players suffer, enjoying their confusion and all the game time it wastes --while even enjoy the fact that it's keeping the players busy without our needing to do anything, that's a bad thing. We ought to stop engaging that impulse.

We exist to present and progress the game in such a way that it's enjoyable and engaging for the players. When we plan to use any form of manipulation or psychological tactic, it is crucial to also plan for the moment when the misinformation becomes evident. This approach requires the DM to anticipate the players' eventual realization and be prepared to address it honestly and transparently. When the truth comes out, admitting openly with a statement like, "Yes, I was playing with you," can transform potential frustration into a shared laugh, fostering a sense of camaraderie and enhancing the overall enjoyment of the game.

It's difficult to explain in clear terms just how this works. To see how it does, we must begin by admitting that IF our coming clean is going to anger the party, then we should avoid playing that mind game in the first place. It's not acceptable to think, "Well then, I just won't come clean." That's not an answer. It's evidence of why you don't deserve friends. Think of it like a "practical joke." Approach it with the same care as a well-intentioned prank. The goal is to entertain and surprise, not to upset or frustrate. Consider how the players will react when the truth comes out. Concentrate on inventing misdirections or deceptions that will, in the long run, be viewed as "clever" or "enlightening."

Consider this scene from Lord of the Rings,

At the top, as high as Gandalf could reach, was an arch of interlacing letters in an Elvish character. Below, though the threads were in places blurred or broken, the outline could still be seen: two trees, each bearing crescent moons. More clearly than all else there shone forth in the middle of the door a single star with many rays. There are the emblems of Durin! cried Gimli. And there is the Tree of the High Elves! said Legolas. And the Star of the House of Fëanor, said Gandalf. They are wrought of ithildin that mirrors only starlight and moonlight, and sleeps until it is touched by one who speaks words now long forgotten in Middle-earth. It is long since I heard them, and I thought deeply before I could recall them to my mind.

 All this is a mind game. It's intended to convey the idea that the door is very complex, and certainly not easy to enter. Of course, we all know the joke now, but the subtle manner in which Tolkein sets up the confusion about "Speak, friend, and enter," is compelled by the initial description of the door. The mind game lies in the juxtaposition of the straightforward solution against the perceived need for a more intricate one, highlighting themes of wisdom and simplicity over unnecessary complexity.

This is a simple example.  I recently indulged in the creation of a mind game in a book I'm writing; I'll provide the relevant text without context, except to say the narrator is the DM here:

Unfortunately, the girl Mnkeh, who's just five, is nowhere to be seen. I roll a six-sided die to see how long it takes to find her, doing it until I roll a '1.' I mentally tell myself that if I get a ‘1’ within four rolls, Mnkeh is safe. It takes six rolls for me to roll a ‘1.’

As the die hits the table each time, in full view—I don't play with a gaming screen—the players look on with confusion and concern. When I stop, with a ‘1’ showing, the room is silent. "Galatea hears a scream to her left," I say. Galatea launches herself in that direction, and as she reaches the top of the dry wash bank, she sees that Mnkeh is being threatened by a wolf. The little girl is trying to wedge herself into a crack along the far bank. It's not big enough for her.

"I scream, trying to get the wolf's attention," yelps Susan, who then has Galatea leap down the bank. It's ten feet, onto soft loam, and she makes her dexterity check and ends on her feet. The wolf and Mnkeh, I say, are 40 feet away.

Galatea throws her hammer, Susan snatching her d20 from the table. She misses.

I roll a twenty-sided die in full view of the party. It comes up a '17.' A clear hit. The wolf attacks Mnkeh and kills the girl."

This is a mind game simply in that the DM has set up a situation where the girl conveniently disappears, is conveniently found by a wolf at the same time that the player character Galatea conveniently finds them both together.  It's a story that's been pre-written, up the point where there's time for Galatea to throw her hammer, for good or ill.  With the possibility that the wolf might miss, even when Galatea does.

It's definitely a manipulation.  And it creates a stake that might, for some players, be seen as too far: a little girl dies.  It also creates an emotional echo where, Galatea having missed, the player Susan is conscious of how she might have felt if she'd hit.  And if she had hit, and driven off or killed the wolf, she'd be just as conscious of how she might have felt if she'd missed.

It's this duality that is a mind-fuck.  That once the balance of the die being rolled is presented, BOTH possibilities remain in the player's mind after the fact ... but only because the stakes are high enough.  If there had been no little girl, if she'd only be throwing at a wolf that happened to be passing by, the die roll would have none of the importance that the mind game I'm playing generates.

After the fact, as a matter of fridge logic, the player eventually recognises the manipulation ... and then, makes up their mind about whether or not this is the sort of game they want to play.  Either way, hit or miss, the player feels the excitement of the moment, the thrill of the stakes being high ... or, alternatively, feels that this isn't the sort of upsetting game she wants to play.  It's a risk as a DM.  But taking the risk, or not taking it, gets us the sort of players we want ... or the sort of players we deserve.

Without a good deal of experience in the human emotions of others, along with the capacity to see the world through their eyes, I wouldn't recommend playing a whole lot of mind games. Which is, reasonably, why DM's don't. It's really easy to fuck up. On the other hand, the payoff for both player and DM can be pretty high. And for that reason I suggest, GET some experience in how others feel, or see, or think.  Experiment carefully.  This is not a tactic for amateurs.