The Uncertainty Principle

I have been thinking about setting up a window on Discord and then publicly working on my D&D world for several hours at a time, as a sort of inspiration for others to work on their D&D worlds, under the auspices that it is easier to find motivation to work if you don't feel you're the only one doing it. I remember that now and then my friends and I used to do that in the early 80s, and that it was sort of a good time. Not that we ever got much work done, since it's easier to talk and work... but still, it felt motivating and it was easier to work by ourselves in between those occasions.

Like many creative writers, I often start from a proposition that suggests some sort of wanted clarification... the kind that invites a muse to insert itself. Thus when I think of something like the Discord concept, I start to pull it apart in my head. The subject really isn't, "do other people want this?" I'm like to think I'm writing things because they have to be said, not because they please others. If they do please, that's well and good, but that's a byproduct, not the goal. The following question though, is, "do I want this?"

That's harder to answer. On some level it feels beneficial. I assume people have some interest in my work process: how do the maps get made, what does rewriting or designing a wiki page happen, what things do I consider important enough to work on. D&D is a constructive product. It is a thing we make. We can buy it, yes, but someone still has to make it, and they have some process by which they do that... so arguably, if we want to transcend from "user" to "maker," some form of learning that process is necessary. That stands to reason.

Not everyone understands that transformation. I didn't when I started; like most, I assumed random tables were necessary to create ongoing gameplay; I assumed that more of something already good would always be a good thing. It took time for me to understand that more spells, more monsters and more magic items really didn't improve game play... while more kinds of things to buy did. It took time to understand that rebuilding rules did not just mean rewriting the language, or providing more details: most of the time, it meant a complete reworking of the premises for what the rule was trying to solve. I spent an enormous amount of time rewriting experience tables based on Gygax's original structure before understanding that original structure couldn't be effectively redesigned. It was based on the wrong premises. That could apply to dozens and dozens of approaches to the game's original rules, which weren't "broken," they were fundamentally flawed. They didn't need "fixing." Then needed to be thrown away and replaced with things that actually addressed the problems at hand.

Take, for example, mapmaking. The internet continues to be full of artists telling us how to "draw a map for our fantasy campaign," as though the example on the right in anyway actually helps a DM run a game session in any substantial way. This example, ends with a map that has exactly one centre of population, one label that says "Thieves Bridge" and one that says "The Werwoods." This accomplished through untold number of hours learning how to draw even this well, to produce information that takes me exactly one sentence to say to my players: "You're in a village called Riversmeet, downstream from the Thieves Bridge and near the Werwoods. What do you want to do?" Now, how does this map help me with the other FOUR HOURS of game time I have to create?

The ability to draw has absolutely nothing to do with dungeon mastering. If I take a piece of paper, scrawl two blue lines on it, add  "swamp" on blank area of white, "forest" on another blank area, "mountains" below the forest and then make a circle where the rivers meet, then add the names of this map above, I've accomplished EVERYTHING this artist did. I still have to run the game. The relationship between map and game is not clearly understood and it is not clarified by having a mediocre artist on the internet prove that you, Dear Reader, can't draw as well. The problem is a lot more difficult that the snake oil being sold here. The artist has merely reframed "running D&D" as an "artistic problem"... one the artist can solve. And having substituted the problem, the artist solves the "problem" you, Dear Reader, didn't need solved... but heck, it looks cool.

Others thought so too in 1982 when I learned I could draw a map this well; I sold them maps for their D&D worlds for as much as a hundred dollars a map. Guess how many worlds those people got off the ground.

Yes, that's right. I used to scam D&D players too. Maybe that's why I hate the company so much... it's because of the dark part of myself that I hate so much.

This post is not to talk about the relationship between maps and D&D, but to point out that there are hundreds of like conditions that modify and affect the game, none of which are in themselves a solution to the way the game is adjudicated. It isn't just making the world, it is making it alive, giving it dimension, giving the players motivation, offering meaningful rewards or when to say "yes" and when to say "no." Even watching a good DM run does not actually offer much clarification here, because the DM must needs hold back during the running in terms of what's been actively thought in his or her head, so that the player never quite sees how the sausage is made, even when that sausage is being made right in front of them. It is a strange but fundamentally misunderstood element of the game's structure as an instructive tool. The teacher has to withhold information from you about, say, the plight of the Anasazi natives, while still expecting you to pass the test anyway.

A proper solution would require that the learner sit with the DM while the game goes on, so that the DM can whisper details into the learner's ear, but not in a way that reveals to the players what's being whispered, or even what specifically needs communication, because humans can sense the importance of things merely by what's paid attention to. A parent need only follow a child's line of sight to guess at what the child might be thinking... so that as children begin to reach the age of six, they begin to understand that the best way to get something is not to look at it. Once the DM says something, then whispers to the learner, the jig with the players is, as they say, "up." Thereafter, the running is sullied and anything that has been whispered to the learner is no longer of value in learning game play. It is, more or less, D&D's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This is not to say that DMing can't be "taught." It's just that it can't be taught the way that a surgeon might teach a medical student how to resection a bowel. In the latter case, the surgeon can freely be exact and complete with the information given: the student must watch the surgeon's hands and attempt to reproduce the physical effort being demonstrated in an manner exact enough to allow the procedure to be accomplished gracefully. But it is the reverse in dungeon mastering... which, I want to stress, is not as important as learning to be a surgeon. As an example, this one is merely convenient. With dungeon mastering, the physical process of creating the substance of the game world can be duplicated... but the student has to "watch the DM's mind" to comprehend how the campaign can be run gracefully.

And in almost every sense, initially, that seems an impossibility.

None of this is made easier with bromides. Sorry, this is an Ayn Randian reference to the white salt-like crystalline powder that was added to a glass of water in an era before the invention of peptol bismol and all the other neat little chemicals that followed, designed to remove stress caused by ulcers that, in turn, were believed to be caused by worry. Thus, "bromides" are phrases that are designed to relieve your emotional stress in the way that the powder once relieved your physical stress. "Time heals all wounds," for example, and "everything happens for a reason." D&D is stocked full of them: "The DM's job is to make sure everyone has fun," or "Never say no... always say 'yes, and...'" or "D&D is collaborative storytelling."  These stock phrases are there to make the DM feel like they have a nice little role to perform that doesn't, in fact, require the least little bit of talent or doubt. After all, who doesn't want the players to have fun?

These bromides exist because the various persons attached to every form of role-playing game, regardless of their position or stance on some edition or some alternate rules structure they're promoting, find themselves helplessly in the same position: we can provide the rules, we can provide the premise for the rules, we can offer arguments that say our game is worth playing... but, unfortunately, and we're no different from anyone else, we cannot help you run this game. At best, we can offer this bromide: it is easier to run than someone else's game.

Thus, you can find yourself buying, say, Cairn... which is an outlandishly simplistic sort of, um, if we stretch the definition to include "bullshitting about stuff with your friends," RPG. Cairn is so simple to run that a child can run it — though, admittedly, that is also true of D&D. I'll therefore be a little clearer. Cairn is so easy to run that a child who has never read a book longer than Dick and Jane could probably run it. I'm not sure myself that that's, um, compelling for me. It seems to be compelling for others. I'm simply not in the market for an RPG that requires less intellectual effort than checkers.

The simple system, however, still requires the DM (in this case, the "Warden") to engage in "fiction first" and "neutral arbitration," which requires an invented causal connection between the situation at hand, the players' attempted actions and the consequence, all of which has to be essentially "made up," since the sparse rules do not address this problem. A capable Warden can make the game appear to be a "game"... but an incapable one does not, and there's no structure that's suggested that teaches someone incapable to be capable. So even with the easiest rule system imaginable, in some way the DM still has to "DM" (as a verb)... regardless.

Oh well, it was a nice try.

So where does this leave us? Going over in my mind the environment that existed when I learned how to DM, something I did not know how to do in the womb, I must assume that had something to do with my obtaining the skill. To some degree, surely, my interest in writing and reading mattered, as did my experience with maps, geography, statistics, drama, religion (I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church four months before encountering D&D)... but those are just incidental facts having to do with a certain degree of academic prowess. On the whole, I'd ascribe my transformation from user to maker to these things:

First, parents who did not play board games by the rules. A long history of board games was certainly of a help also, but in my case, the peculiar habit by mother and father had of adjusting rules to "make games better" was ingrained into me at a young age. Specific examples included paying dividends in Stock Ticker below par, which makes a very different game; being able to play in more than one direction in Scrabble; adding more children than the game allowed in the Game of Life; playing two full years in Payday as opposed to one; discarding protection cards from Mille Bornes. There were others, but that was a long time ago.

This history is supported in that my players liked to play cards, and together knew many scores of card games, including as many, many ways to play gin, poker and whist/bridge. In fact, it was quite common for us not only to sit down to play canasta, but to decide, beforehand (which meant, our parents deciding) which kind of canasta we were going to play this time. That meant that from the age of 6, I had no reason whatsoever to believe (a) that games could not be altered or restructured; (b) that changing dividends, directions of play or duration of a game wasn't something that simply were parts of whatever game was being played; and (c) that "official" rules meant anything to the way a game was played.

This is directly continuous with my later understanding of D&D's flawed premises. Long before consciously setting to adjust D&D, I had already tried my hand at adjusting numerous games with my family and friends, just because we wanted to. The maker, in our minds, had nothing to do with that.

Second, I began playing D&D when the "culture" had not yet come into being. Some culture existed: there were other versions of role-playing game and other genres like Gammaworld, Traveller, Top Secret, Paranoia. There was the Dragon magazine that tried its best to sell products. But these were like any other game culture at the time. There was no strict "official" group of people saying, defacto, "gaming is this" or "gaming requires this thought process." We thought nothing of playing a couple games of Ogre or Awful Green Things from Outer Space before settling down to actually playing D&D, since we were in school, we'd often get together at six pm and play until midnight. None of our parents knew what was going on, because there were no news stories yet; they were grateful that when we got together we wanted the kitchen table and not the television room. Thus, more or less, we were left to ourselves, to decide for ourselves what the game meant to ourselves, without voices other than other campaigns we knew of to tell us what was supposed to mean.

The parental thing matters. When I was 15 (not nine or ten as many early players around nowadays were when they started gaming), it was 1979. The parents biggest worries were threefold: drinking, drugs and sex. If we had been like other teens of that time, we'd have been out of the house on a Friday or Saturday night... and even if that meant, as it did for many teens, just hanging around talking by the river or in a park or walking along some road somewhere, it meant being out of our parents' sight, and their not knowing if we were engaging in drinking, drugs or sex. Being at home, around the kitchen table, where plainly no drink was, where plainly none of us were on drugs, and plainly we weren't having sex, was seen as a win-win-win for many, many parents. Moreover, because I grew up in a part of the world not run by a maniacal christian-nutjob cabal, where christian politics did not decide civic votes on things, there was no Satanic Panic where I lived in Canada. NONE. Why would there be? Our parents were all educated, as I grew up middle class; they weren't the sort who really, in actuality, believed in the devil. So that part of it just wasn't part of my past. At all.

Third, I started my gaming experience in the company of a lot of DMs. Besides myself, in my immediate high school peer group, were three other DMs: Scott, Joel and Asif. We rotated every weekend, but if Joel wasn't up to it then someone else would run that night, so that a straight rotation tended to be flexible. I also played in a separate D&D game with the Shane, who was my first DM, and a game of Empire of the Petal Throne, and a separate game using Rolemaster, and then later a game of Chivalry and Sorcery run by a friend from Hong Kong, Calvin. By 1982, in just 24 months of gaming, I'd played as a player with probably eleven or twelve other DMs in at least seven or eight different role-playing games, including all those named above plus Tunnels and Trolls. Thus I saw a lot of DMs play a lot of different styles of DMing, so I could take what seemed to work in one campaign and apply it to myself, while having the capacity to compare table management of any one person with many others.

Mind you, this was not the modern game store experience, where ten DMs all run the same four or five people each, without anyone changing tables. In those days, if you did not like the way a DM was running a game, you got up, crossed all of twelve feet to the next table and said, "Hey, can I get in here?" Nearly always, the answer was "Yes." Why wouldn't it be. Everyone wanted new players. So if you weren't flexible as a DM, there were lots of options around, because DMs were not treated as sacrosanct. DMs gained players from other games all the time and it wasn't seen as "stealing." It was seen as "sorting" or "trying" different groups to find where you belonged. That behaviour drastically lowers the capacity of any DM to simply act abusively entitled... and it trains someone wanting to DM not to be that.

Fourth, no one pretended to know what they were doing. We were all muddling through, reading everything we could about medieval worlds and culture, watching whatever movies we could find like The Last Unicorn, Conan the Barbarian, Krull, Deathstalker, Conquest... some of this was very bad stuff. We shared, talked, sat in libraries reading every book on a shelf or at least leafing through them... and where it came to the game itself, we retconned, asked others "were you fine with that decision?" and "do you think the rule means this or that?" We seriously did not know, and we knew we did not know... and like I said, there were no real entities around to tell us we should know.

So we... made it up. If it worked, we kept doing it. If it didn't work, we'd sit around after a session sometimes for hours and talk about why it didn't work. We'd walk home from one guy's house and talk the whole time about D&D, and what could change, and why the rules were written in a particular way, and how they could have been written in some other way. There was no sense that someone of "authority" was going to come along and fix the rules for us. No one talked about "Gygax" as a person that mattered. The game was a set of books. We didn't care about who wrote them any more than we cared about who wrote the rules of Monopoly, RISK or Careers. Game rules were just game rules. We didn't care whose feet we stepped on... because it wasn't like any of us had any reason to think the game makers would care.

Okay. So what?

Let me say, I'm not nostalgic for all that because I'm still doing all that. Nothing about my approach to my game has changed. I've stopped looking for other DMs for advice because for 30 years now they've been giving me precisely the same non-advice bromides that they acquired from the books: more monsters, more spells, more magic items, more feats, more character classes... those are all good things, because they offer more choice. I have yet to hear anyone tell me that more choice does anything but paralyse a player who is new to the game, but heck, I'm bored with all of that anyway. More things make D&D more "collectable." For a lot of people, I think, being able to say that once they had a tiefling is much the same as an old girlfriend I had whose room was full of little mushroom knickknacks, because she liked them: mushroom lamps, mushroom pictures, mushroom statues, little gnomes on mushrooms, sheep hiding under mushrooms... that's what choice is. Something that can be collected over time.

I pay attention to "official" D&D and rail at it at times not because I'm obsessed, but because I believe that a great many DMs would do much, much better with their design and their games if they would just turn their back on all present D&D culture. Including this blog, I suppose, if need be, but certainly upon anything that defacto does not help run the actual week-to-week game. Repeating bromides like mantras will not make anyone a better DM. Allowing voices on youtube to dictate mapmaking skills or how to choose adventures for a party only promotes dependency, not experimentation. Don't assign monsters to a party according to the experience of someone not at your game table. TRY picking monsters at random and learn from your own experience what has worked and what might. Try everything, at least once. If you've never used that monster, do. If you've never handed out that magic item, do. What can it hurt. Experimentation brings knowledge.

And if there's something in your game that you don't like, throw it away. Don't ask permission, don't wait for the company to abandon the game element, do it yourself. There's no one who can stop you but your players... and if you're only permitting something you hate because they like it, you're just making yourself a slave to their whims.

Stop doing that. Respect yourself, for heaven's sake. Better that you have no players and you're free to work on your D&D campaign in peace, than that you let others boss you into doing things you hate.

No, there's no "right way" to run D&D. There are certainly plenty of wrong ways. Oh yes, are there ever. Stop running D&D the wrong way. Start there.

If you've played with less than ten other DMs in your lifetime? That's not enough. Play whatever game they're playing. Watch them. Listen. Learn. And when you find you're not learning from them at all, or not any more, then stop running in their campaigns. They've taught you all they have. You can move on now.

Play other games. Play board games. Play war games. Play sports. Hell, LARP, though personally I can't imagine. Collect experience. It's what your player characters do. It's your turn.

And last but not least: talk about what you're doing, or want to do, with anyone willing to listen: including your kids, your wife, that co-worker or people on the bus. Walk along a deserted road and talk to yourself. You have got to learn how to express what you're thinking out loud so you can do that with players, without thinking about what you're doing. Talking because you care about what you want to say will overcome nervousness about possibly not saying the right thing every time. Talk and talk until your mouth is dry and your throat is sore and you have a headache. DMing is the art of talking. Talk more. And get used to talking more.

My thoughts about sitting on Discord and working on my world was not to enable talking... but to help enable others to sit and actually work on their D&D world, as a habit they need or want to acquire. It was that. I did not hope that it would spark a conversation. Rather, I thought it would be just fine if there were a group of people who knew that between certain hours on a certain day, they'd get out the books and the stuff and the thought process and work on that world.

But... I don't really believe that people do need other people, like the sociologists tell us. In the end, I think people are way too, uh, self-conscious to actually want to seem vulnerable around others. And the problem with "working on the D&D world" is that in this culture of so many voices, and so many authorities, and so few opportunities for experience, admitting to working on a D&D world just feels too... uncomfortable. I think that's what this culture has wrought for a lot of people.

So I didn't try the experiment last night, between 5 and 9 my time, MST, like I was going to. But I am still thinking about it.

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