Constraints

I've written about contraints before, but they're worth reviewing.  Constraints are arbitrary limitations created to make an activity more difficult that it would be ordinarily.  As an example, I like to use golf as an example.

If golf is described as getting the ball in your hand into the hole three hundred yards distant, the obvious solution is to walk three hundred yards and put the ball in the hole.  However, anyone can do this, so we invent constraints.  We say you have to put the ball on the ground at your feet and then use a stick to hit it into the hole.  Sticks evolve for this process, producing odd shapes that are, nonetheless, practical.  We make a constraint that the ball needs to be a certain size.  Golf is originally played along a grassy beach with pools of sand, so we make constraints about how the ball is hit in "sand traps."  The ball gets trapped, so we make constraints to describe under what circumstances it can be untrapped.  Thereafter, as elements of the game are invented, constraints are also invented.  Since golf is substantially a game between equals, the equals agree to observe a certain set of "official" constraints by unilateral agreement.  "Clubs" are formed that encourage members to adhere to these agreements.

Contraints form the game's functional design, e.g. the way the game is meant to be played.  The game's behaviour is the way it's actually played.  The constraints say you can't kick your ball out of the rough.  Observation shows that if you kick your ball out of the rough when no one is looking, and its new location can be reasonably explained, then it's okay to kick your ball.  Those who follow the constraints call the practice, "integrity."  But it must be noted that those who kick their ball also identify themselves as having "integrity."  The difference is that the second group is lying.  Usually, the second group believes that no one can tell.  The second group is almost always wrong.  Everyone knows.

Role-players are often snobs about their game being compared with "sports" (if that's what golf is) — but games theory makes no such distinction.  In fact, games theory makes no distinction between games and war, or games and business, or really anything human beings do where constraints are involved.  Civilisation is built on constraint.  You and I sit in a restaurant and we agree to observe the social constraint that we will not stab each other with steak knives.  Yes, of course it's illegal; but more than that, we probably agree that stabbing each other with knives for any reason ought to be illegal.  Not everyone feels that way, obviously.  Quite a lot of people, both in and out of prison, feel differently.  But we'll go out on a limb and say that YOU don't feel differently.

That constraint began as our pre-human ancestors began to gather in clans, some 60 million years ago (sorry, Mr. Bible, you didn't invent "don't kill people" — nice try though).  Turn against a member of the clan in this way and the clan will kill you, or ostracize you, which is a way of having nature do the killing.  This was policy when we were still animals, when we weren't even lemurs yet ... we can watch lemurs carry out this policy today just as their ancestors did back then.

Society is made up of thousands of these constraints, which together allow us to live together in relative peace.  We ask our human folk not to steal, not to sleep with our spouse, not to cheat at games, not to fling snot during meals, not to poop on the street and so on — all with the express understanding that we all have to live together and it's nice when the place is kept clean and civil ... thus, "civilisation."  As more and more people decide it's okay to kick the ball out of the civil rough, metaphorically speaking, these agreements start to break down, followed by what we call a "decline" of civilisation.  Historically speaking, this is a good thing to avoid.  But we don't need to follow down that road further.

In most table-top games, there is a turn-feature that makes it practical for individuals to maintain the constraints put in place, through policing adjacent humans.  Golf is a difficult game to police, because the human-per-square-foot ratio is scant.  Chess, by comparison, is much easier.  All the pieces are on the game board.  None are kept in uncertainly defined piles, like in Monopoly, or in easily manipulatable, overturned thin cards, like with Poker.  Still, if someone wants to cheat at a game, there's a reasonable expectation that someone else will see the cheating and call it out.  Preferably without guns, but there you go, another argument for civilisation.

As games grow more complex, particularly as they increase the number of players, it becomes necessary to designate observers apart from the players to ensure the constraints are respected.  With respect to war and business, and politics also, even though we employ hundreds of thousands of observers, the task is still impossible.  We employ millions of observers, and give them actual policing authority, and still they don't manage the problem.

Baseball, a much less complicated game, can be played without an umpire.  When it became official, however, because there was money in it, the game started with one umpire.  This number has increased since.  This is how it goes when players won't respect constraints AND when it's desirable to establish standards for wins, losses and a host of statistics, which enables someone to compare a player from a recent era with an ancient one.  Not that I think this really works, but it's very important to baseball fans to believe it works, and so every effort is made to ensure that it does, as close as human observation allows.

The true innovation in D&D, the first role-playing game, is the invention of "dungeon master" — a participant who both sets the game in motion AND ensures the constraints of the game are observed.  This is sort of like the pitcher throwing the ball and then teleporting to stand behind the catcher, to call the ball — and assuring the call is accurate by the revolutionary idea that the DM has nothing to gain by calling the ball wrong.  This is meant to put a constraint upon the DM, asserting that the DM must be impartial.  Unlike a baseball umpire, the players can, if they feel the DM lacks integrity — that is, the DM keeps kicking the ball out of the rough — remove the DM from play, ostracize the DM and establish a new DM.

Theoretically.

Unfortunately, the teleportation trick is so difficult to master, so impossibly complicated to learn, and so inconvenient a learning curve for those willing to try, that DMs are often empowered to kick balls wherever they goddamn please, in full view of the players, who must accept the total lack of integrity because if they want to play, they cannot access another DM.  So, in fact, while the function of the DM is crystal clear, the behaviour of the DM is a bloody disaster.

Most of the time.

Therefore, the solution for how to ensure the longevity of D&D, or any other role-playing game, is perfectly clear:

1)  Encourage every participant around your gaming table to attempt DMing, even if this means initially simplifying the game to the level of 1974's Chain Mail.

2)  Give them sufficient practice to get better.

3)  Instead of using computers to simulate DMs, so that users can play, create simulations of players, so that users can DM.

Do these three things and D&D will never die.

Games People Play

"Stupid" is a game described in Eric Berne's 1964 book, Games People Play, in which "White" plays against "Black" to win by pretending to be stupider than they actually are.  The goal of the game is to compel Black to vocally call White stupid, or act in a manner that makes it clear that Black considers White stupid.  If Black does so, White wins.  This enables White to discount anything that Black says from that point forward, as Black is clearly abusive, while simultaneously taking comfort that being judged stupid will mean that others will require nothing from White going forward.

In fact, the less that White learns, the more effectively White can play this game.  Known already to be "be stupid," White need not study in school or improve at day-to-day tasks.

White is then free to play the game, "Schlemiel," which permits white to act like an asshole.  For example, White deliberately spills his drink on a woman at a party.  Black, seeing this, initially feels rage, but then realizes that since everyone at the party already considers white to be stupid, recognizes that actually raging at white will make black look abusive, in which case white wins.  Black therefore resists anger, enabling white to say, "I'm sorry," while Black forgives him (giving black the illusion of winning).

White then proceeds to inflict other damage on Black's property.

Alternately, White may also participate in, "Clown," which is not a game but a pasttime, which reinforces White in the position, "I am cute and harmless," which is true if Black has lost the game Stupid.

I read through this, and other games, last night, after reading this post by Stealth.  It's brilliant, naturally ... and explains a great deal about what's going on with our players in games.  And in the light of it, I'd like to run through a few comments from the post of a few days ago.  From Matt,

"... what I've found is that most of my players seem fundamentally uninterested in their character sheet.  They don't care much for their abilities and spells and powers.  They use what they can remember, usually in the most basic way possible.  They are all more interested in the character that they've made, than how that character is represented by the rules."

From James,

"I tried to get my players to switch to AD&D, it failed ... I could draw a line in the sand, and risk a 5+ year campaign by demanding to switch systems. But I just don't consider the risk worth it in this instance."

From Sebastian,

"... every session I hate the system more.  There is no challenge.  Everything is meaningless.  But the group consists of old friends ... That, however, is the difficult part.  They have watched Critical Role and all that youtube garbage Adventurer's League and have understood that is how the game is supposed to be played."

And from Shelby,

"I was introduced to the game through 5e, and so my extended friend group is very Critical Role and AL minded.  Gradually, however, I grew dissatisfied with the emptiness of 5e, which eventually led me here.  But I'm the only one of that group to have had that resolution so far."

Recognize the pattern?  In all four cases, the commenters are being held fast by peer pressure ~ the threat that they will lose their players, and thus the game, if they compel their players to act in a manner they're players don't wish to act.  In turn, the players are playing a game where the DM is the lackey, forced to perform to suit the game that the players have already won.

In the game, "Stupid," Black defeats White by not caring what White does, or thinks, or wants, or believes ... and emphasizes that contempt by ostracizing White from Black's presence.  This, however, requires a risk: Black may be seen by others, particularly others who are also playing the game as White, as a threat, as unreasonable, as vindictive and as someone who deserves to be ostracized by other Blacks who are presently losing the game to various Whites.

But just to be clear, let me explain the game again without the metaphor.

I write a blog that defines 99% of the participants playing D&D as a clusterfuck of morons, which I don't care about and which I don't allow to post here.  The clusterfuck responds by expressing their innocence and privilege to continue holding onto their belief systems, which are strengthened by my calling them out, as now they can act freely as persecuted for what they believe.  This privilege of victimhood discounts any need on their part to do anything about improving their games.  In fact, NOT improving their games becomes a badge of honor.

At the same time, it privileges them with the option to vilify me, explain why others shouldn't listen to me, discourage any other person from improving their game because of the way I've brought harm to the community, etcetera.  Thus, by winning as Black, I create a comfortable space without Whites, but I slate every other game venue in my loss column.

To which I respond, c'est la vie.  And no great loss.  I'd rather win here than continue losing there.

Those who find themselves playing Black against their players who are playing White, who worry that winning as Black would mean losing their game worlds, their present campaigns or whatever else might be the consequence of not continuing to lose as Black, must decide for themselves what is best for them.  But we need to understand that one power of peer groups is that they enforce standardization of behaviours through emotional blackmail.  They ask, "Behave as we, the group, expect, or we will punish you."

Which is followed by losing Black players in my inbox saying, "If I behave as I want, my players will punish me."

Okay.  Just want to make that clear.

Satisfying Answers

I’d like to let the Gentle Reader in on a little secret, regarding the whole concept of the RPG 201 course and its mid-term. Like Lance Duncan, I also don’t feel I know the material well enough to give satisfying answers to these questions about role-playing theory. I’m only certain that I can give a more satisfying answer than this.

Where it comes to why do we play D&D, the staggering around in the dark is … epic. More than once I’ve come across someone describing a long convoluted series of game events, with the conviction that said events are “cool,” followed by the declarative statement, “… and that’s why we play D&D.”

Imagine the following:

“He takes the snap; there’s only three men rushing for Millsaps. Farmore throws it over the middle, complete to Thompson. Thompson looking for a block; he laterals it to Curry and Curry laterals it again … and it’s caught again, and Tomlin, now with the lateral, and now the lateral to Thompson ~ and he laterals it back to Maddox, on the other side. Maddox, looking for a block; he fakes the lateral to Curry, now he laterals it to Curry! Curry’s at the 49 yard line, he’s dancing around, he throws it back now to Maddox, who throws it across the field to Barbour, Barbour looking to run, he’s looking for a block, he’s got a convoy, he’s going to throw it to Thompson … Thompson’s at the 30 yard line. Thompson now laterals it back to Curry at the 35, they’re running out of spaces. Curry fakes, he’s gonna lateral it to Tomlin, Tomlin’s got a chance to go! Tomlin’s got a chance to go and he laterals it to Meadows, now it’s going to go to Maddox. Maddox at the 30 yard line, and now … now it’s a lateral … Curry’s got it … and Curry’s still going! Curry’s going! It’s a TOUCHDOWN! CURRY SCORES!!!”

And that’s why we play football.

Well, no. We love it when this shit happens, both when we’re playing and when we’re watching, but we know from personal experience that even when football is a grind, even when nothing special happens, we still go out and play, or turn on the game, because we love football for deeper reasons than, “When shit happens, it’s cool.”

I could try and write the rest of this post guessing at what that reason is, and write a bunch of deep from the soul literature that would make the reader feel like I really had a handle on that reason and we’d all walk away with a wonderful cathartic feeling about why we play RPGs. I’ve done it fifty times on this blog. But to tell the truth, I’m tired of guessing. I’m tired of catharsis. I want to actually KNOW what the answer is … which is what this quest for an RPG 201 course is about. I don’t have any really satisfying answers. I want some.

Regarding the exam. I knew those were brutal questions as I wrote them down. When I took courses from university that specialized in essay questions, it was understood that the prof was NOT going to answer the questions for us, ever. I remember my prof Dr. Barry Baldwin had a question that was on every final he gave for Classics 301 – the Roman Republic: “Compare the fall of the Roman Republic with the prospective fall of the American Republic. Be specific and give examples. Argue either for or against.” In the time I took courses from Dr. Baldwin, we talked about that relationship many times; and usually that involved being told to read source materials that Dr. Baldwin would pour like rain into my notebook. But I was never able to wrest out of him what he really thought about it. I think I know. But I’ll never be sure.

Because the “right” answer didn’t exist. The right answer was to make an attempt at an answer. To face it head on and figure out what one really knew about the subject, to ferret out the gaps in one’s knowledge so that, when we would sit at the end puzzling about our opinion, we wouldn’t stop thinking about it. We’d go on trying to answer the question.

As the reader can see, Dr. Baldwin taught me well.

GIGO

During my university years, I wrote about 40 essay exams, most of them like the exam I offered.  I don't remember enjoying most of them.  A few, yes ~ but not most.  I remember feeling unprepared for quite a few ~ and that drop that came as I looked at the questions and thought, "Oh shit, I am so fucked."

But I would stare at the questions, and think, and some how I'd get the nerve to try one ... and after writing out a paragraph, memories would rise and suddenly I'd find myself with one essay done and halfway through the two-hour exam.  I'd look over the remaining questions and one would pop out at me.  I'd realize that everything was going to be all right.

I'm not surprised that there were so few responses.  They were unpleasantly hard ~ not like the usual fare:

• What is your favorite RPG?
• What is your favorite OSR resource?
• What game are you running right now?
• What is your favorite house rule?

... and so on.  Straight out of Readers' Digest.

Had a conversation this afternoon with a friend who used to play D&D long time back, who stopped when he got out of the military and began to pursue music with a vengeance. He works on his composition and performance skills like I work on my D&D world ~ and as we respect each other's passions, we get along very well.

His question for me was rhetorical: why has role-playing persisted as a hobby?  Without effort, I gave an answer that took about twenty minutes, hammering out point after point based on fundamental principles of human behaviour and response, in keeping with content I've already written about.  As he listened, he made connections between my points and his own experiences with musicians, the army, training to be an electrician and social groups he knows well.  Everything I said rang true, which surprised me even as I set out my argument.

Four months ago all I would have had was guesses.

That's what most of the "advice" is that you'll hear.  Clever sounding phrases or vague postulations, such as that the old saw that RPGs are about telling a story ~ as if that clarifies anything.  Few admit that they're guessing.  Perhaps they comfort themselves with the belief that "no one knows," and that therefore it is okay to talk around and around the questions with blurred, sketchy, speculative conjectures, as if we were speaking about the existence of god and not something that happens daily in actual fact.  It is as though people believe that if we keep repeating the softball questions or that story and narrative is central to the game, somehow a great game will spontaneously manifest like a genie.

This reminds me of the cargo cults that seized various primitive island cultures of the Pacific beginning with the late 19th century.  As advanced outsiders made their presence known to places like Fiji, New Guinea and Melanesia known, they demonstrated technology and practices that mystified and temporarily enriched the inhabitants.  When the outsiders went away again ~ such as the Americans departing hundreds of islands throughout the Pacific after World War II ~ the natives committed themselves to the construction of airstrips, planes, offices, dining rooms and all sorts of Western goods, like radios, out of materials like coconuts and straw.  All this was done in the hopes that rebuilding the environment would somehow make the planes return again.  For myself, I don't see anything "stupid" in this behaviour ... it was merely the best information these people had for the way that things functioned.  The Americans built airports and planes landed.  If we build an airport, planes will land again.

It is a demonstrable weakness of subjective reasoning, based on appearances, feelings, assumptions or wish fulfillment.  It creates a representation of particular situations or processes that provide for an overarching set of aims or values. It creates a dialogue.  It enables.

But the answers provided fit the standards of GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.  Which explains why in 40 years of describing, developing, redeveloping, writing and designing, the standard quality of a typical game module written in the last three months is fundamentally unchanged from the standard quality of a game module written in 1978.  Some would argue that it is a little worse.  I would argue that any difference is found in the number of words actually used to describe the module.

I think it may be that many designers believe that if the same old material is stuffed into the same old format, somehow something different will emerge of its own accord.  Somehow this module will make the planes land again.

This thinking will not change until we find real answers.

1st Class: A Game is a Rose (Introduction)

In 2010, I agreed to review a module, Death Frost Doom.  And as someone who has reviewed newspapers and novels for publication, and been paid for it, I followed the orthodox tradition of running the module exactly as written.  As a reviewer, it was not my role to change the content, or adjust is as I might, since that would muddy the actual value of the content.  When another DM ran the game, that other DM wouldn't have the benefit of my experience, or imagination ~ so what good would it do anyone to detail the advanture as I modified it?

No one, absolutely no one, would expect me to change the words of a bad novel, to make it a good novel, in the process of reviewing that novel!  The very idea is obviously ludicrous.  But even now, 8 years after, I still occasionally run across some commenter on Reddit or elsewhere talking about how I "fucked up" Death Frost Doom.  By playing it exactly.

To be sure, were I to run DFD in tandem with my own judgement, yes, it would have definitely been a better module. In fact, I do this every session of D&D I play: by throwing the module into the garbage and then replacing everything with my own creaivity and ideas.

This leads to a point I made with my last post, Humanities vs. Social Science.  Specifically, what part of the game works, regardless of the quality ~ or the experience and expertise ~ of the Dungeon Master?

What do I mean by "works"?  Well, technically, the module DFD, or any module, "works" as a process for the game.  Not necessarily a good process, not reliably a joyous one, not even an interesting one ... but as a process, or series of events and descriptions that are given to the players for what happens, a module "works" whether or not the DM has experience and expertise.  The players will, for ill or not, either die along the way according to the rules or succeed, participating in the game.

Now, people will rush forward and chatter about how a good DM does so much, much more, but this would be missing the point.  As a game, baseball works even if the players are very, very bad at the game.  It works even if the pitcher has to be moved ten feet from the batter.  It works even if the pitcher is replaced by a tee.  The runners still have to run the bases, the fielders still have to put the runners out, and the most runs still wins.  It can be very funny to watch a bunch of five year olds play baseball, and obviously an adult or a professional baseball player can do much, much more than a bunch of tiny kids, but to the game, that doesn't matter.

This is a nearly impossible thing to get across to most RPGers.  You DON'T have to be skilled to play.  The existence of the module enables someone else, with a reasonable amount of experience, to jury-rig the game (just like replacing the pitcher with a tee) so that the least capable participants can still participate.

In fact, the module isn't even needed.  So long as we wash out the expectation of a "story," which isn't strictly necessary to any part of the game, we can still play with virtually no ability.  The rules provide for setting up groups of people on opposite sides of a map, then having a fight, then awarding the winning side with experience that will enhance their powers.  In the strictest sense, this is still role-playing.  It just isn't very good role-playing.  That is immaterial.  The quality of something does not determine its nature.

The decrepit rose on the left is no less a rose than the vibrant rose on the right.  And this is the point that is so hard to grasp.  We have a tendency in our culture to rate the definition of things according to the value placed on that thing, whatever that value might be.  Yet a sample of DNA from either rose above could be used to make a completely healthy and beautiful rose ... so what does the appearance at a given moment in time have to do with the definition of a rose?

I hope that point is across.  Because we can get nowhere in any study if we cannot accurately describe things.  But let me drive it home with just one more example: a group of five-year old children playing baseball very, very badly, are having no less fun, and in many ways more fun, than a group of professionals playing baseball very, very well.

Bringing us back around to, what parts of the game do not require experience or expertise?

Surely, character creation.  If we get rid of the premise that a background must be written for characters, which in fact has no specific application to game play, the character creation process is an established series of IF-THEN processes that any DM can adjudicate, even if it is the first day they've DMed.  This fits into virtually all our experiences with our first games.  When we chose to DM, we were grateful that the rules for this part were at least laid out for us. Even if you were the particular kind of DM that rolled all the player characters in advance, then handed them out at the start of the game, that was still according to rules that you did not need expertise to follow.  You could roll the dice, see the result, be affected by the result, free-associate on the result and then watch the effect on the players as the result was made known to them.  It is a simple part of the game. Which might be why we were willing to play it so often.

Perhaps the reason why so many homebrew games don't get past the third running is because the first running is taken up with character creation, which goes so well, only to be followed by one or two runnings that fall flat, because the principals of the game are not nearly as clear.

What else?

I admit, it becomes harder to see another possibility.  But then I think of a little child running after a ball, falling down, getting the ball, dropping it, picking it up again, throwing it to first base and the ball not making it.  And meanwhile the runner is between home and first, standing there confused, while parents scream, "RUN!" having no immediate effect on the child's behaviour.  Seriously.  If you want to study game participants, throw away your clipboard and go watch children play anything.  Hockey is pretty funny, too ... especially for me, as I remember playing hockey at five.

So if we presume play without expertise, but still following the rules, combat is definitely a thing.  Expertise will bring a lot of nuance to combat, but again, value is immaterial.  The point is that it is possible to run combat, if you allow for everyone taking their time to look up rules as necessary and they're prepared to invest themselves.

This is one of the points where early versions of the game excelled.  There was no need to have "experts" on hand.  Any group of kids could buy books and if they had the patience, they could suss out a personal version of the game.  Some readers I have right now did it that way.

The way the books are written now, however ... well, it is back to Brian Griffin's book.  There are fifty pages in the back that you're expected to fill out on your own.

That's the primary reason for reviewing a module exactly as written ... I had to assume that some people wouldn't be able to enhance the module, as everyone said I ought to have done.  Some participants ~ a lot ~ simply can't.  They don't know how.  And the assumption that they ought to know how, or that knowing how is an obvious fact of any product that is provided by any manufacturer, is an erroneous approach.  I wrote my book as an "advanced guide" to role-playing ... to differentiate it from Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies, a book that had to be written because the rules were so flat out badly written that outsiders had to make sense of it.  I've read that book.  They still choked, largely because they did not stick to first principles and they allowed themselves to devolve into a lengthy attempt to comprehend the values of the participants.

To manage that problem, I'll have to step to the left for a bit and talk about ethics, as Matt suggested Friday.

Value is the degree of importance that is assigned to something, assigned by individuals either presently, or as the result of successful arguments that people have made in the past that creates a sense of tradition or belief connected with an assignment that happened a long time ago.  For example, someone, at some point in the past, conceived of the idea of a "god."  This happened so long ago, we can't even be sure the conception was voiced as words, since it is possible the invention of "gods" is older than the invention of even speech ... though it is a gray area.  Either way, the invention gained traction, and pervaded through all human cultures as a "good idea" for enough people, for certain reasons (which we can skip), to the point where we continue to have arguments on the existence of gods even though there is absolutely no real evidence of any kind for this belief.

Nonetheless, people value their belief in gods, and will embrace earlier silly nonsense, or make up their own, rather than sacrifice this value they have.  And in our society, we recognize the right of people to possess values, regardless of their scientific or rational formulation, because we believe that values, on the whole, so long as they don't hurt people, are a good thing.  And I will not argue against that.

HOWEVER, it is crucial that we don't get values confused with facts, or mechanics, because that's where things tend to go wonky.  When we start building bridges based upon the values of the designer, and not the designer's ability to understand how engineering works, things go bad in a very, very big way.  This is why one of the values we've put in place in our society is that people who design very large things with parts ought to be accredited by other people, before we trust them.  It's just a good value, all around.

That is why I have to beat the drum so hard ... because most people talking about role-playing just now are hopelessly caught up in defending values as examples of game play.  This is like a professional ball player explaining to a little boy that he needs to take 2nd base so that he'll improve his chances of being picked higher in the draft when he's six.  Arguing that all players of all games need to create backstories for their characters is like that.  Or arguing that all DMs of all games need to make great stories for their campaigns.  These things are values.  They are dearly embraced by many people, but they are not, in fact, relevant in any way to the actual game, or the thousands of ways in which the game can be played.

And before these values should be embraced by the whole community, they ought to be defended.  Not in the way we're seeing, where someone says, "It makes a better game," as if that is an argument.  No.  I want to see them defended in the manner that Immanuel Kant defended Reason.

I'm not seeing anything like that.

Humanities vs. Social Science

As I remember, most of my first level classes in university started off quite dull.  For example, 1st Year Psychology, course number 201, wanted us to be sure what psychology covered, what words were used, what theories and research had been developed in the past and how to think in terms of those advances.  The goal, basically, was to baptise students into the notion that psychology represented a distinct field of study, that it had been ongoing, and that students were expected to understand the field before advancing ideas about it.

Or, if you prefer, English 201.  Again, the students begin hearing the message that styles, tropes and techniques have already been established in different periods and cultures.  Since the easiest element of those tropes to grasp for newcomers to the field is the short story, it is treated as a microcosm of the field.  So we track the progress of the short story, we have the students read short stories, we deconstruct the short stories and we ask the students to compare one deconstruction of one type of genre/culture with other genres and cultures.  As before, the students are expected to open their minds to what they can learn - and not to give them rein to express their own ideas, feelings or prejudices.

There is a distinct difference between these two approaches ~ in large part because one, psychology, is a social science, while the other is part of the humanities.  Before we begin anything, we'd need to determine which the study role-playing falls under.

I think if we wanted to teach a course in role-playing, the hardest thing would be to explain to the students, "Whatever you think you know about role-playing, or whatever opinions you have, leave them at the door."

I also think that many who would approach role-playing from a theoretical point of view would feel duty bound to discuss the history of role-playing, so that most of the course work would follow the English model above, and not the Psychology model.  Most would-be course would be spent reading and deconstructing role-playing games, in order to compare them with other role-playing games.  This would be the humanities approach and, in some degree, it's valid.  Just as English and other humanities is a methodology for causing people to deconstruct and think at a level of the best humans who have lived to date, exhaustive game deconstruction could lead to a greater understanding of how games are put together, and how to do it yourself (once the theory was fully understood).

This approach does not, however, evaluate how players respond to game-play.  It does not discuss the motivation for game play, or game theory and game research.  It's fine to learn how games are structured; we also want to learn how games behave ... and that requires evaluation of game-play during the process of gameplay.

Unfortunately, to date, no such evaluation has taken place, not to my knowledge.  If there is some social scientist group studying role-playing games as they manifest at the game table, it is keeping awful quiet about it's research.  And this is why I think a professor creating a lesson plan would run to the "history of role-playing games" as the practical, data-rich option.

But were I taking such a course, I would feel let down at the moment of being told we were going to start by reading and evaluating the White Box set, only to move onto Advanced D&D, then Moldvay's version, then how Tunnels and Trolls handled things, then Chivalry and Sorcery, then Rolemaster, followed by the supplement Ice Law, only to then move onto Gurps and Second Edition and the plethora of other games that exploded into the market in the 1980s, from Top Secret and Paranoia to Cthulhu and the Masquerade.  And so on.

Gawd.  What a boring, boring class that would be.  Someone would get something out of it, I'm sure, but a lot of us just spent 30 and 40 years taking this course already.  I think we're done.

I'd rather if we could start with three years of research that first established [a] what works as a DM/Player participation driver, regardless of the quality of the DM; and [b] what preparation best feeds point (a).  From there, we could then evaluate: [c] where do deviations from (a) lead, for good or ill; and [d] what forms of (b) reduces negative deviations that have come to light from research into (c).

That's as far as we dare go.  Any more and we'll probably be wallowing in our own conjecture and that is definitely not what we're searching for.

Let's look at [a] for a moment, acknowledging that we shouldn't attempt to establish an answer for what works regardless of skill at this time.  We can, however, argue against things that clearly do depend on skill: emotive role-playing for one, and player immersion for another.  These things clearly rely on some kind of inborn or acquired skill ... and therefore can be separated from the theoretical structure of the game in the 1st degree, as we try to understand what the game is.

This, already, is a lot to take in.  Theory always is.  Whatever impression I may have made so far, I don't know.  I do intend to keep thinking on this subject along these lines, and see what happens.  The more I hear from readers, the more focused my thinking is bound to be, as the process of explaining myself seems to trip switches in my head that opens doors.

And remember ... any one could get a PHD.  Get tested.

Go Hard

As just explained to me by Ozymandias on Facebook, "Session Zero" is a discussion of the player's interests, what are the player boundaries, what is the player looking to get out of the game.  It's admitted that communication is good and that generally people should have it, but if the player is dictating everything to the DM, then where's the surprise and mystery?  And for my money, I'll add to his point by asking, where is the fear?

It's the same reason why professional BDSM doesn't make sense to a lot of people.  You want to be controlled, so you go to a ProDomme, who you tell what to do, then pay her money to do it, then pretend that you're being "controlled," while she pretends she's controlling you.  At the same time, if you made a contract with a person who might actually be ready to control YOU for real, you would wisely not show up.  So what's the deal here?

The deal is that players (and BDSM clients) want their fantasy dished out just the way they like it.  They don't want surprises, they don't want stress, they don't want to be challenged, they don't want to take a risk ... and the industry and community confirms that.  It may be a game but, unlike golf, we don't want anyone making difficult golf courses.  Unlike kayaking, we only want to boat on quiet rivers.  Unlike free climbing, we don't want t climb any unclimbed routes.  We want the cliches.  We want the same conversations to get around the guards or to convince the vendor to sell for a few coins less.  We want the adventures to end in a big bad, and we want the big bad to have a simple agenda and to be there waiting for us, and we want the big bad to be absolutely killable.  We don't want any surprises.

On the other hand, I advocate a stress game.  I want the D&D equivalent of the hole depicted on the right.  And as the players line up to take their shot at the next round of the adventure, I want them to hesitate just as you would if I told you your LIFE depended on you landing your golf shot somewhere on the green, the rough or the sand trap ... because if you hit rock with that ball, that ball is gone.

And I want my D&D game to have that flexibility.  It isn't about getting it on the green. The green is terrific; but there's enough flexibility that the rough or a sand trap will do.  It's an ascending scale of how much shit your character can get in before they actually die.  But there's always a chance you'll fuck up that stroke and yes, doing so, that's the end of that character.

Moreover, as a DM, I'm not going to have a session zero that shows you this golf hole.  I'm going to drive you out to it in a car with blacked out windows, and I'm going to have you make the bet with me before you see the hole.  By the time you see the hole, it's too late to back out.  That's the sort of game I run.

That's the sort of game I want to play ... because I think, for myself, if I were pulled out to that hole and told to take my shot, that I'd want to see if I could do it.  That's the thrill for me.  The test to see if I'm up to it.  Unfortunately for me, this seems to apply to situations where thinking is most of the game ... if we actually are talking golf, then yeah, I'm going to fuck that hole because I'm not that great a player, though I enjoy the nuance of the game.  But if we're talking D&D, and you're running me as a player, and you park me in front of this hole, then yeah.  I think I'm going to be fine.  I think I'm going to fucking enjoy making that shot and I'm damn comfortable with the consequences.

I have a pretty high regard for myself mentally. I don't need to talk it out with the DM before we get started.  I don't need to establish boundaries regarding what might happen to my characters because I don't have any boundaries.  Not because I don't get uncomfortable, but because I like discomfort.  I like being pushed.  I like the agony and stress of a frustrating, uncertain, and potentially unwinnable situation.  That's why I got into chess at an early age.  That's why I fell in love with D&D in a single night.  That's why I've thrown my whole potential life away in order to spend it obsessed with this game.  Because I like the fact that it isn't cut and dried, it isn't safe, it isn't sure, and it sure as hell isn't easy.

And that is why lately I have been so frustrated and down about the community as a whole.  Because of late I feel an increase of being the only one that feels this way about this game.  That I don't want it to be the same silly cliches of 40 years ago.  And I want others not to want those cliches too.

But ... oh fuck it.  No buts.  Let's just play this fucking game.

Super Smash Bros.

I scour the internet and youtube continuously for people who will impress me; and when I find such a person, I consume every single thing they've produced, whether or not I like the subject matter. Once I've identified a person as smart, I don't care what they talk about.  I know they're going to teach me something.

Recently, that person was Ian Danskin, or as he is known on twitter, Ian Goddamn Crosby Lexicon Barnfire Danskin, the creator behind Innuendo Studios.  Of things I have no interest in, Danskin's videos have covered the film The Handmaiden (NOT the Handmaid's Tale!), Sonic the Hedgehog, the video game the Walking Dead and, relevant to this post, Super Smash Bros.  Nevertheless, I have watched every video, and learned from every video, because if you're smart, I will let you talk about stuff I hate.  And I hate Smash Bros.  But that isn't important.

Watch this video. Yes, ALL of it.



I want to start with this quote, from 4:48 into the video:

"Chris DeLeon has a series of articles and a degra-talk about the idea that sports and board games have rules ~ but video games have laws.  That in soccer, you don't touch the ball with your hands because you've agreed not to, but in FIFA, you don't touch the ball with your hand because it's impossible."

Now, that is straight to the heart of it, and clearly Chris DeLeon has this wrapped. [side note: DeLeon previous residence was the Georgia Institute of Technology, the location of Ian Bogost, the brilliant fellow I consumed everything from last year; smart people talk to smart people]

But I want to add one more of my own:

RPGs have permits.  In role-playing, you don't touch the ball with your hands because the DM doesn't let you.

Think about that a moment.  Most people you will ever talk to will interpret that as, "It's the DM's world, and whatever the DM says, goes."  And if we, dear reader, think that's what I'm arguing, we're probably the sort that believes a judge in a court of law can do whatever the fuck they want.  Which is not true.  There is a great deal of nuance in what a DM permits.  If it is all arbitrary, because the DM thinks arbitrary is just fine, we're going to find ourselves playing a pretty shit game.

The attempt to argue that the DM should always say, "Yes," argues that the DM should be more permissive, more considerate of the player's position, more yielding to the player's expectations and innovation.  If the player tries something really interesting ~ regardless of its practicality or sensibility, which are subjugated to the god of fun ~ then the DM ought to say, yes ... just as a legal judge is bound by laws that restrict the decisions that a judge can make.

I can agree with that.  But the way it is proposed in practice is an exercise in flimflammery.  Take the case of Matt Colville that I discussed last December, that I will update to the Stavanger adventure I have been discussing lately.

When I say, I'm not running a railroad, a great many readers will jump to the same conclusion to which Colville leaps. They think I'm saying, you don't have to hunt the wolf.  You don't have to take the token from the shaman. You have a choice.  And because you have a choice, it isn't a railroad.

This perspective is a huge steaming pile of utter bullshit.  Because this is not how a world should operate AT ALL.  Not remotely.  Because the village of Stavanger ISN'T an adventure.  It's a village.

Yesterday I got a message from an old reader, Carl, that I haven't heard from for a while.  I thought he'd quit reading me.  Carl somehow got it into his head that the subway boardgame image in that post was what I was going for in the last post and NO!  No, no, no.  A thousand times no.

This is the head-in-the-sand insistence of those dumbfucks who run the WOTC, who think that players arriving at the village sets the adventure in motion and, lo and behold, they can choose what they want to do, inside that adventure.

Let me pull you back to the smash brothers video, at 5:55:

"The thing about systems is there's what the system was meant to do, and then there's what the system can't stop you from doing.  In Smash, an advanced technique like say, a shield drop, is put there by the designers ... but things like pivoting, wavedashing and D-sinking are not.  These things were not designed; they were discovered as accidents of the system.  And they often take phenomenal skill to execute reliably because it's something the game doesn't actively want you to do ... but they are just as integral to competitive play as the things designers put there on purpose."

The only reason your brain isn't shattered by that (and some, given just this much context, are right now reeling with the realization), is because it has never occurred to you, or to anyone, that this applies in exactly the same way to RPGs.

The designer creates the village of Stavanger, and the designer puts in the chief and the wolf and the shaman, but that's just the stuff that is going on in the village when the players happen to show up.  The players don't have to do it, right ... but in a legitimate RPG, where the DM plays the actual GAME, and not the piece of sucky crap the company wants us to play, the players are entitled to do what the fuck they're able to do, because the rules don't stop you from becoming someone with their own agenda in this mix.

Suppose I am running in your version of this Stavanger village, and you've created this nice pat adventure for me, and I ask you, "How is the leader of the Sand clan determined?"

And you as DM say, "Um, uh, it's hereditary."  To which I answer, "This is a goddamn primitive culture, one that doesn't even owe any allegiance to a king, because this is Norway in 892, and you're going to tell me that the clan is led by whomever is born to the job?  Bullshit.  I'm a member of the Sand Clan.  I have the same rights as any other person in the clan.  You tell me that Yelana is the clan mother.  Who is running these people?  I want to know my path to making myself the leader of my own clan."

And now, the DM's adventure has ceased to be what's happening here.  Because I'm in charge, NOT the DM ... just at the great players of Super Smash Bros. are the Five Gods, NOT the game designers.

This is what you, as DM, have got to get into your head.  YOU are not the player.  You are the designer.  And if the player wants to turn that design on its head, in a way you didn't think of, but kicking your pat adventure into the garbage can and starting one of their own, then buckle up, baby ... you're going for a goddamn ride.  Because now it is your job to design your game to LET the player challenge the leadership in the Sand Clan, in a way that preserves the game, and lets Pivoting happen, so the player can enjoy a little competitive play on a high level.

Don't tell me that your players don't know how, because no one knew how to wavedash or D-sink once upon a time ... but they learned, because no one could stop them.  And let's not forget the words, phenomenal skill.  Yeah, you're damned right, it wasn't easy.  But they still learned how to do it, didn't they?

But they haven't in role-playing, because DMs the world over and the fuck-fuddled company did. not. let. them.  Because RPGs think we're giving players a choice by letting them play Falcon, Sheik or Marth ... but Red Yoshi?  No.  No, we're not going to let anyone play Red Yoshi.

We've got to realize here ... Super Smash Bros., for all it's excitement, is an incredibly limited intellectual game, with an incredibly limited set of possibilities, compared to role-playing games.  The number of potential Red Yoshis in existence in a D&D game is literally infinite.

If you're a DM, used to playing the company way, that ought to scare the shit out of you.  And it ought to shame you.  It ought to stick in your craw as you realize, fuck, what have you been doing with your game?

I'll bet ... I'll just bet ... there are more than a few of you who will say in your heads, "Fuck you Alexis."  And quite a few who will try to argue, "But I like my game ..."

Uh huh.  Sure you do.

You're not even ready for Smash Bros. yet.

Will the Real Participant Please Stand Up

Continuing with yesterday's post, I'd like to expand some of my points about character, discussing what a character is, as opposed to what a character does or wants.

First, I'd like to express any misgivings that some readers have that this post, or the last one, is a lead-in to any idea of creating game effects to enhance character play.  Far from it.  It is my wish here to explain that characterization is so far afield of role-playing games that it is actually quite foolish to pretend that we're role-playing a meaningful character.  At best, we're manipulating cardboard cut-outs of characters ~ what I called in the last post, "robots."

To understand what I'm arguing, we have to get a better idea of what makes a character.  It's safe to say that the readers and I are helplessly adrift where it comes to any assignation regarding character types, character quality or the meaning of character in a story.  As individuals, we easily fall in love with characters whom we find familiar, or with whom we identify, blinding ourselves to legitimate interpretations of merit or import.  Because we think a character is "cool," we discard all discussion regarding the actual structure, function or legitimacy of the character in the story, becoming hot-headed and insisting to others that they just don't understand why such-and-such is the "greatest character that has ever existed," a belief that is based more upon our visceral sense of that character as it relates to us, rather than how it might relate to others who have different interests or tastes.

It gets worse when a judgment is applied to that belief.  We decide not to be friends, or even acquaintances, with people who don't like our favorite characters, as though these are yardsticks towards determining who is a real person of value and who is obviously a dolt.  The internet is full of this sort of thing; and it makes any instructional discussion of character nearly impossible.

I am, here, going to discuss three types of character, directly in terms of how they functionally act within a story, with an intention to explaining what makes something fictional more like what any real person actually is.  The goal of an artist making a character at all is to relay a certain reality, from the perspective of someone who is not you in the hopes that you will understand the motivation of a perspective other than your own.  Our perspective, however dear it is to us, is limited.  We turn to art to expand our limitations; to understand better how other people think; and hopefully, in understanding, we expand ourselves, so that we become more aware, better prepared for other people and more empathetic of their needs.

And so ... this long-winded effort is simply for this purpose: please put your emotional attachments on a shelf, and listen.

Looking through literature on this subject today, I am unsatisfied by the scholarship on this subject.  Most of us are familiar with the terms round or flat characters; fewer, perhaps, with dynamic vs. static.  I'm perfectly in agreement with these terms; but I find that I want a more definitive separation in types of round or dynamic characters.  Therefore, I'm going to propose three character types that I'd like to discuss: fixed, reflexive and conflicted.

Fixed characters are those that fit into the categories flat and static.  Regardless of the circumstances of the story, regardless of what's happened, the character neither expresses nor functionally acts in a different manner.  For example, He-Man and Skeletor.  Every episode of the children's show features the same characters, acting in the same predictable manner, with the same goals, the same function, employing the same responses, with no real emotion.  An earlier example, from my childhood, would be Dudley Do-Right: utterly without fear, or comprehension really, but excessively brave, ready, tenacious and indestructible.

Virtually every character ever run by a player in a role-playing campaign is a fixed character.  The background fetish, as a feature, is the means by which most players set their character's behaviour or motivation in stone.  Who among us have not noticed when a given fighter, regardless of how many fights, how many close calls with death, how many foolish mistakes, ALWAYS bulldozes into every doorway and every fight without the least hesitation?  Or the thief that always steals, or the cleric that always gives the same sort of speech before a fight, or the dwarf that perpetually argues with the elf, no matter how many years the two of them have spent saving each other's hide?  Players, as a species, love fixed characters.  This is part of their fetish.  Having dreamt up the perfect representation of their character's identity, they will play that identity with unvarying exactitude ... even to where that same identity will float from character to character, as previous incarnations (whatever their skills, class or backgrounds) die away.

Fixed characters, however, are boring.  They may satisfy the player, but they exhaust everyone else.  They are the furthest sort of being from an actual, real person ... and in a way, for role-playing, that is a positive feature.  For while fixed characters don't change, they also can't be really missed when they die.  Another stock character can be easily made on the same pattern.  Therefore, any personal relationship between the player and the made-up character can be dismissed.  Nothing is lost, because nothing was ever really there.

Reflexive characters, which might also be thought of as responsive characters, are quite different.  As the narrative continues around the character, the character is forced to adapt, converting themselves to fit the new world they find themselves in.  Reflexive characters are a kind of dynamic character; but in a very particular way.  Intrinsically, they don't change.  I have hundreds of examples to pick from, but I'll choose something from a film that I'm sure 90% of my readers have seen more than once:  the character Henry Hill from the film Goodfellas.

Throughout the film, Henry is repeatedly forced to deal with the steady, unrelenting changes going on around him, as the mafia/mob lifestyle he lives transforms from the 1950s into the 1960s.  He experiences the lifestyle in multiple ways: as a kid, as an enforcer, as a husband, as a member of a vitriolic set of friends and acquaintances ... then as a struggling drug dealer trying to make it on his own and finally as an informer against the very people he's known all his life.  With each change, he adjusts, he bends his moral framework, he allows himself to participate more fluidly and in an hands-on manner, he submits to the risks he has to take and finally, he submits to the only choice he has left as the walls close around him.

But he doesn't change.  He doesn't question his infatuation with the goodfellas' lifestyle when his dad beats him, or when he sees a man knifed in the street, or when he watches his friends murder Billy Bats, or when he goes to prison, when people are murdered all around him, or when he's lowered to having to deal in coke or even after he's been forced into retirement as a relocated witness.  At the end of the film, Henry's chief regret is that he isn't able to return to the lifestyle he loves.  And while this makes an interesting movie, and it makes Henry into a very interesting, profoundly unique character, the actual character himself is without regret, without doubt, without remorse, without any rational response to any of the awful, criminal, sociopathic activities with which he's connected.  In that particular way, he's a very flat character ... no more changeable than Dudley Do-Right.

This is the sort of character than DMs want when running adventure-driven campaigns that steadily move from adventure to adventure.  The characters need to make the best possible use of their resources, adapting themselves to the circumstances, overcoming the problems they face, and never questioning why their character is always ready for another adventure, always ready to risk their lives again, always ready to put it all on the line for treasure or what other motivation they have.  No one wants a character who hesitates at the start of an adventure, who suddenly questions the point of all this; that is not in keeping with the substance of the game.

Conflicted characters represent much more nearly what we are as human beings.  They, too, are dynamic ~ but not only in the way they respond, but also in the way they recognize that there are multiple choices that they can make regarding any situation.  They're not sure.  They are filled with doubts.  When something startling, unexpected or significant happens, they question themselves, even to where they are ready to separate themselves from the life they're living, and accept the consequences of that decision.  Again, I have many examples I could draw from, going back to the Greeks and Shakespeare ... but none of you want me to explain any of this by pulling out Hamlet, again.  Given that I want an adventure of sorts, and a familiar character, whom most readers have probably seen, I will go with Remy from the film Ratatouille.

Remy, like Henry, is in love with something: being a cook.  However, Remy is far more conflicted over the relationship between his love of food and his family.  He knows his father is wrong; but at the same time, throughout the film, it is important to Remy that his father understands, because Remy isn't capable of just abandoning his family without hesitation.  As such, he lets himself be pushed into situations (being food-tester, providing stolen food for his brother Emile and friends) ... but he knows its wrong and he experiences angst over it.

Similarly, he doubts a lot of his actions, even his bold ones.  He hesitates before fixing the soup.  He runs away from Linguini at first before changing his mind.  He throws away his morals in a fit of pique and lets all the rats into the kitchen; and then experiences remorse when he's exposed and he's lost his friend.  Then he returns to the kitchen to help Linguini anyway, even though he is only a rat and may very well be caught and killed (we know he won't be, obviously, he's the star, but that is not Remy's perspective).  He does it because he knows Linguini can't face Anton Ego without him.

With each change in the story, Remy re-evaluates his belief system.  He's never sure what he wants.  He's never sure how it is going to turn out.  And often, his choices land him in hot water, which he clearly regrets.  It is this conflict that makes Remy compelling: because it is a conflict that we ourselves struggle with every day, as we go to work, as we make plans, as we fight with our families, as we puzzle out the message behind a blog post, as we act like human beings.

A character like Remy would be a disaster in a role-playing game.  Trying to run such a character, inventing the character's inward struggles with each part of the adventure, might be an interesting artistic venture, but it would make a frustrating, undesirable and masturbatory excursion for a group of players ... perhaps more so if every player attempted to do the same, in different ways, according to their personal interpretations of how their conflicted character viewed the world. Admittedly, there might be various drama troupes who found such an activity interesting (though note that when improving, actors always play the scene for laughs, not drama) ... but I don't think a role-playing game would be made better by the experiment.

That said, we ARE playing this experience in one way. We are actual conflicted humans, playing the game with our own conflicted selves.  But we are not, thankfully, trying to puzzle out how some invented personality deals with conflict; we're quite used to our own conflict and we are quite able to put it on a shelf, if need be, so that we can participate in a social activity, like playing a game.

Admittedly, some are not.

When the players struggle with making up their minds about what to do; when they hesitate before fighting a dragon or question if their quest-giver is actually the villain; this is the sort of realistic, pleasant and meaningful conflict that we are seeking from game play.  We don't want this from characters; but we DO want it from players.

And that is why questing to make role-playing a matter of playing a character is the pursuit of lunacy.  We don't want "characters" ~ we want flat, fixed, reflexive personalities that respond to their situations in a predictable manner, so that the REAL PEOPLE can enjoy the game for the contextual dilemmas it provides.  Any role-player waxing on about the "amazing" qualities of an invented character is in a state of delusion; they've fallen in love with a wooden, two-dimensional robot, and not with any being of the substance of a fellow player.

We've missed the fact of this.  We've allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by words used in a particular way, concocting a particular chicanery, which we've bought into because it "sounded good"; but it doesn't stand up to authentic scrutiny.

It's bullshit.

Core Principles

Fair's fair ... I can accept that I'm an old grognard and that where it comes to the game of Dungeons and Dragons, I'm conservative.  I'm ready to change the combat and experience rules, throw out a lot of the peripheral material designed to support character design, rebuild monsters, consider mechanics that standardize role-playing and such ... but where it comes to "the core principles of the game," I'm utterly inflexible.

I made mention of those principles in the last post and was not called out on them.  I find that reassuring.  It suggests to me that the reader has a good idea of what I mean ... at least the gentle readers who still visit this blog.  But I feel that the subject needs to be reviewed now and again: particularly when I make outlandish claims that stupid shit being done by the WOTC is going to kill the game.

Being inflexible, I don't believe I'm writing an "opinion" about those core principles.  Rather, I'm writing about what the core principles ARE, whether or not I write anything.

The game, as we know, started as a battle game invented by a group of university students.  Without mentioning names, this group created a series of rules to dictate how armed, armored figures could fight each other to the death in colosseum framework, for the pure pleasure of rolling dice to determine if my armed figure could beat your armed figure in a fight.

That establishes the first two core principles of what became D&D.  D&D is about fighting.  And D&D is about resolving issues by throwing dice.

Now, we live in a world where a plethora of players would argue that the game has "evolved," so that it is no longer about those two things. In fact, role-playing doesn't even need those two things, so both can be discarded without anything whatsoever being lost.  I strongly disagree.  Both fighting and die rolling have been discarded by a particular kind of player because these are both things that are outside the player's direct control.  Fights are not necessarily won.  They might be lost.  And dice, rolled openly, fairly, cannot be made to favor any individual, no matter how earnestly that individual feels about the importance of being personally stroked by the game's play.

Fighting and Dice are threats.  Threatened people despise both.  And it is very, very clear from the rhetoric gushing forth on the internet, that most of the present adjustments to the game revolve around the removal of game threats.  Specifically, anything that gives the emotional feel of losing.

Let's go back to the beginning. The originators of the game began to notice themselves growing emotionally attached to their own battle figures, particularly when those battle figures succeeded in a string of battles, due to the odd nature of random number generation.  Talking about it among themselves, it eventually happened that they began to make unique and specific rules surrounding the persona of long-term survivors ... which eventually morphed into the creation of drama-fed mechanics: charisma, intelligence, wisdom, alignment [for good or ill] ... and ultimately motivation, ambition and character.

These, then, became the next two core principles.  Character we know well.  Attachment, however, is often overlooked, misunderstood or frankly made meaningless by the present-day rhetoric.  But the core purpose to making a character grew out of the attachment the player had for the character.

The character mechanic was designed to feed this attachment.  And because dice rolling was a key structure of the originator's design, one that they liked, and because it was clearly understood that what made the character's likable was that they survived fights, the character-building rules that followed employed dice and the acceptance that not all characters would be equal!

In the arena, some characters deserved to die. Other characters deserved to live, ALWAYS through luck, either luck of the attack die or luck of the character stat.  That was the thrill, the core principle: to throw characters into an arena and SEE which characters would die and which characters would live.  Because seeing, without knowing ahead of time, was exciting.

From this, role-playing evolved from an attachment into a powerful desire to make those characters more and more real in the players' minds.  The passion to speak for the character, to sketch the character, to devise habits and aspirations, weaknesses, prejudices, dispositions ... these things were naturally evolving things within the framework of dice-rolls that went against all our plans, that favored or disfavored our designs, the results of which we had to overcome by our wits and risks, in a way that did not seek to break the fourth wall by insisting that the DM solve those problems for us!

It is all about the love.

But of course, not everyone felt that way.  With the rush of players who flooded into the game in the early 1980s, thousands and thousands of players recognized at once that the DM could break the fourth wall, any time; and because of this, there developed a particular kind of recognizable player who missed the whole damned point of the game. 

This player hated failure; hated the very idea of failure for the sake of failure.  For this player, any altenative to failure was better than failing ... even in a game where the probability, nay the certainty, of eventually failing was very much the point.  This player, then, turn to gamesmanship: the use of dubious, not technically illegal, obtaining of advantage, by turning the screws on the DM, by means of rules lawyering, bemoaning a lack of balance, coercion, whatever was necessary to turn the game in their favor.

We recognized these players.  We recognized when these players had gotten a hold of an existing group.  We walked away from such groups.   It is quite possible to read dozens of articles written at the time, in the Dragon magazine and elsewhere, about this type of player.  We understood the player was a threat, yes ... but we assumed, if we kept this player out of our games, we were fine.

THEN the company, the fucking company, made it clear with the release of second edition, that the company could be played.  And steadily, through the 1990s, and the 2000s, the fucking gamesmanship fuckers have been gameplaying the company, en masse, driving the company to make more and more ridiculous concessions, pissing all over the core principles of the game, until fights are seen as boring, and dice as unnecessary or changeable at will, where character creation is regulated and processed to guarantee the utter greyness of balance, where role-playing is GOD in an Olympus where the mechanics have been cast out and made lame ... and where attachment to character is a bloody joke, because really, who cares?

"I stopped playing him because, well, I got tired of playing a healer, jeez, it's so boring; I'm playing a tiefling now; her parents were killed when half the planet was destroyed; I really like her because she has green hair ..."

It is this distance from the character that is killing the game; a distance that is increasingly encouraged by every official position taken on what the game is about.  And yes, I would expect a lot of people to just not get that ... because they are children of the way the game has been fucked over these last 30 years.

That moment when the originators began to realize they were identifying with their cardboard chits, playing the combat game of Chain Mail, was the result of a human biological habit, one that we are utterly unable to resist, called anthropormorphism.  It is what enables us to make characters of anything and everything, from toasters to moons.  We can't help ourselves.  When we see a drawing like that in the text above, we give human traits, emotions and intentions to completely impossible things, because we are built this way.

However, when we seek to hold things more and more at arm's length, insisting that everything can be controlled, that it has to be controlled, denying uncertainty, denying failure, building superficial constructs where those things can't occur, in order to make ourselves feel safe and comfortable, we increasingly divorce ourselves from everything that makes something pleasurable, exciting, surprising or spontaneous.  With statistics, and cheats, and parity ... we drain the blood out of things.  We make them less human.  Less tactile.  Less lovable.

Less alive.

It Isn't Defined by Winning

From my favorite etymology source:

win (n.):  Old English winn, "labor, toil; strife, conflict; profit, gain," from the source of win (v.). Modern sense of "a victory in a game or contest" is first attested 1862, from the verb.

win (v.): "be victorious," c. 1300 fusion of Old English winnan, "to labor, toil, struggle for, work at, strive, fight," and gewinnan, "to gain or succeed by struggling, conquer, obtain," both from Proto-Germanic *winn(w)an, "to seek to gain" (source also of Old Saxon winnan, Old Norse vinna, Old Frisian winna, Dutch winnen, "to gain, win," Danish vinde, "to win," Old High German winnan, "to strive, struggle, fight," German gewinnen, "to gain, win," Gothic gawinnen, "to suffer, toil"), from root *wen-, "to desire, strive for."

It is not surprising that a writer becomes frustrated at people not being able to understand words.  Consider the oft-touted phrase, "There is no winning at D&D," which I hear all the time from particularly daft people who feel that it's necessary to define every activity by virtue of whether or not it can be won.

Somehow, this lack of winning seems a damning sort of condemnation ... until it is recognized that many enjoyable activities, such as swimming, laying in the sun, engaging in conversation and reading aren't defined by "winning" or "losing" either.  This does not seem to hurt the popularity of these activities.  I can't see how it matters, then, whether there is winning or not; but as I've put up the etymology of the word, we might just as well talk about it.

I love that "winning" is more traditionally associated with striving than with overcoming.  I love, too, that gain and fighting are central to the meaning, more so than our modern take that the winner is the only person (or team) that counts.  All sides struggle; all sides fight; and most of the time, the only real meaning to "win" with most games is to describe who happens to be in front when an arbitrary time limit is reached.  If the last Superbowl had been permitted to go on twice as long, are we absolutely certain the Falcons would not have won?  And if they had not, would that make it certain that they would not win if the game went on three times as long or four times as long?

Of course not.  "Winning" is an arbitrary measure.  When we say someone has "won" at Monopoly, are we describing the person or the dice roll?  We are perhaps closer when we say someone has won at Chess, Checkers or Go; these are elimination games that are questions of pure skill; but does winning a game ensure that the player will win the next game?  Or the next?  If not, what does "winning" really describe?

I am happy that my favorite game ~ the only game I am interested in playing at this point ~ is not about elimination of players but about struggling, fighting and gaining.  D&D is about accumulation, in a milieu where the accumulation can go on and on, without finish.  Of course, a DM can mistakenly rush the accumulation process by pouring too much into the coffers of the players too quickly, which often happens.  All too soon, players without any real skill or knowledge at playing the game are empowered with ridiculous advantages that quickly destroy game-play, mostly brought about by DM's who ignorantly assume that Chess could be a better game if one of the players was allowed to replace both bishops and both rooks with four queens.  Quickly the benefits of too much accumulation destroys any hope of learning the fundamentals of the game, ensuring that thousands of tables never gain a modicum of skill.  There's no need to understand how the knight works if both knights are flanked by queens.

For how else can one describe a proliferation of magic wands, rings, potions, smashing weapons and defensive armor that accumulates for most parties after only a few months of running?  Where is the need to be careful or clever when fifty sorts of healing are available, floated by fifty sorts of bonuses when a hand takes the weapon?  In such circumstances, for so many players, of course D&D isn't a game.  It is hardly a past-time.

It is all too easy to rush and condemn all accumulation in this; to say that we should eliminate magical items altogether, along with levels, special attacks, excessive hit points, whatever might be called into the mix.  But there is nothing wrong with a player climbing a level; if it is not the second time in a three-hour running. There is nothing wrong with a player gaining a magical item, if it is not a magnificent staff being given to a low-level mage.  There is nothing wrong with a potion or two; but ten or twenty is surely overdoing it.  There is nothing wrong with accumulation ... so long as it isn't a dump truck backed up and emptied into the campaign.

What we are asking for is a struggle ~ a grappling, grueling, uncertain contest where the common condition of overcoming an opponent is replaced with periods of lull and extreme terror, waxing and waning with irregular momentum.  The gains from that struggle need only be sufficient enough to encourage further struggle; gains should never challenge the needfulness of the struggle's presence.

Yes, the players won't understand this.  Players often misunderstand what is good for them; like little children left alone with a crockery jar full of brownies, they will glom onto them voraciously and devour them at once, until they grow sick and potentially hateful of ever eating brownies again.  But if we will keep the jar out of the child's hands, and doll out a brownie now and then, the child's appetite for brownies will only increase, as they fantasize about the day they will have full access to the source.

Which we must never let them have.  This is a central condition of being a good DM; the understanding that what players think they want is not what players want.  On the surface, it seems cold, heartless, mean ~ just what we thought of our mothers when they would let us have "only one."

That was love.  Some children never grow up enough to recognize that.  But if we want to be grown up enough to be DMs, we have to learn what love means.

Structural Bias

In a conversation I've just had with Maxwell, I equated the DM's game designer problem of creating rules ~ concrete, objective and publicly visible ~ to the rules and structure of video game code.  This, I think, is apt.  A great part of the difficulty in RPGs moving forward these past forty years has come from an inability to agree on the code, which in turn disallows for our moving forward on things that really matter, like the process of the game itself.

Recently in an email, I made a point about initiating an adventure and the structure of that initiation which I think is worth repeating in a blog post.  I began by explaining that when I first began to play D&D, I saw that the biggest problem I was having as both a player and as a DM was the notion that the DM was always right.  This idea gained strength pretty quickly.  I did not hear the term 'fiat' until many years later, though that is certainly correct in its description: a 'fiat' is generally considered a very bad thing in the real world.

As such, I saw that my chief axiom as a DM would be to take myself, as much as was possible, "out of the loop," letting the dice decide as many conflicts as possible while pushing myself to create situations that were logically based on what had gone before and not upon a personal, arbitrary desire to see something happen.  However, though I argued the importance of this with many DMs in the early 1980s, I always felt I was the only one who applied this thinking to my world; and today, I still find myself in contention with those who think there are times when it is "okay" to DM fiat a problem.  This is clearly evidence of broken philosophical thinking at the ground level of the participant and user of the game's structure.

Imagine someone asking on a football web forum, "When is it okay for the New England Patriots to cheat?"

[makes me want to go try it, actually]

When I say "take myself out of the loop," I don't mean that every part of the game I'm running has to be structured in advance.  That would be impossible, particularly for the size and complexity of campaign I'm running.  To prepare and script every option a player might pursue would take far too much time for even a single adventure.  While this might mean that I am compelled to run a given room exactly as it was written, thereby removing my immediate judgement from the equation, it also means I have to create very simple, very limited systems for my players to move through.  It means the scripts for anything that anyone says have to be simple as well, or else I'll be writing scripts ten years from now.  Everything that the players might do has to be accounted for, and the players would be barred from doing anything that wasn't already created.

Basically, a video game.

My concept of the loop came in 1980; at that time, narrative video games were astoundingly primitive.  Consider, this was the level of video game when I started playing D&D:




I could see at the time that the "control every variable" option was going to produce a spectacularly bad game.  Even now, with the progression of video games, I'm still bored with games that seek to produce a narrative experience, right up to and including a game like the Witcher, Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed.  I don't want to be someone else dealing with their problems, I want to be me, dealing with my problem ~ and I want total freedom of choice to decide what my problem is.

A better methodology for running an adventure, I believed, could be found in the narrative rules that novel-writing compels, something I was also tinkering with in 1980, as those were my formative years as a writer.  At the time, I could not have described it, but I've studied deconstruction a great deal now and I believe I have a good handle on the basic principles.  In a novel, everything that exists must apply somehow to the development of characters and setting, which in turn serves to drive the plot and create the conflict, which then must be resolved with the instruments, ideas and motivations that have already been instilled in the characters.  When Frodo is imagined to be dead in Lord of the Rings, we cannot simply have aliens land in a ship and then destroy the ring with an extraterrestrial blaster.  In the same vein, what Samwise does next has to make sense.  He cannot behave in a manner that would make the reader think the author had suddenly decided Sam should no longer act like Sam.  We know that is not how humans behave in a situation (or, at least, we think we know that).  Humans behave according to how they have behaved in the past.  We stubbornly cling to that notion.

Doing this in an RPG, this setting up of the adventure, should follow the same principles.  Each object found, each discourse, each motivation of the non-player participants, should match up with the final goal.  However ~ and this is incredibly important ~ RPGs are not novels.  Nothing can be fixed.  There's no certainty that the players will pick up the object or pursue the motivation.  If they don't, the DM must, this being the axiom, resist the desire to push into the loop and compel the players to pursue the unwanted set-up.  The set-up must be abandoned and a new set-up created, one that hopefully the players will pursue.  If they do, then the movement in the set-up's direction will produce a conflict and an end result, so long as the players remain interested.

This means that my world is a series of narrative set-ups, sometimes without result.  If the players don't like an idea, I kill it in my mind, or figure out another potential clue that might make the previous set-up more enticing (which sometimes works but more often does not, discouraging this tactic).  This requires that I place no sympathetic (or sentimental) attachment to a given set-up . . . but why should that be difficult.  Artists abandon ideas all the time!  If the necktie scene works better without the necktie, the playwright dumps the necktie and writes the scene.  Those who fail to recognize that any part of a work can be abandoned for the sake of the whole work will in turn fail to achieve a higher degree of skill and self-awareness.

Okay, but what is a "set-up"?  How does it work?  I'd like to give an example, but I can only hope the gentle reader has read the book [hell, if you haven't, you're damaged in some way and should not be DMing adventures].  I'll try Around the World in 80 Days.

The set-up is simple.  The story is told primarily from the point of view of Passepartout, who has just acquired employment with an extraordinarily precise master, Phileas Fogg.  The set-up is that a bet is made, one that requires Fogg to act in a manner that seems very unlike Fogg; Passepartout is taken along on a journey which, at the beginning, he does not really conceive in scope.  Passepartout does not believe his master's simple statement that they are going around the world; he doesn't know Fogg well; he thinks his master must be joking.  By the time it is clear it is not a joke, Passepartout is already far away from home and well in the midst of the adventure.

Consider: Passepartout could have refused to get on the train out of England.  He could have refused to cross the Channel.  He could have refused to leave France, where he was from.  He could have stopped anywhere along the way ~ but this would have meant unemployment for the manservant and at every step, the prospect of keeping pace with Fogg seems more enticing that being unemployed anywhere along the way.  That is a set-up that works.  The players have free will; but the choice right in front of them has to seem much more interesting than any choice they can make on their own.

That is how I lead players "by the nose."  Not by railroading them, not by controlling them, not by denying them agency, but by creating a set-up that is more interesting, more enticing, than the set-up they imagine themselves creating.  Once they are in the adventure, everything else follows logically.  Like in Verne's book, once Fogg, a wealthy Britisher, appears to be moving quickly through Egypt, the detective Fix assumes Fogg must be a bankrobber that he has been told to be on the look-out for.  Fix follows Fogg and is in turn embroiled in the adventure.  Events in India then create the opportunity to rescue Aouda, Fix's machinations lead to Fogg's being stranded in Hong Kong, the trip through the United States leads to the encounter on the train and so on ~ all of which are perfectly predictable to me as a DM, as I know the players, once on the adventure, will move through India and Hong Kong and Nebraska.  I can set the events of the adventure well up in advance without the party feeling railroaded, as they know they chose to take each step as it was given.  That is precisely why, although they have agency, they can be predicted in their behaviour.

I believe that this connection between setting up a narrative in a book and setting up the premise for an adventure has been utterly and entirely missed by the game-making community.  I feel that calls for necessary solutions to narrative, such as that called for Noah Wardrip-Friun, have already been created and structured for centuries by writers and artists, but that these things are being ignored because most game systems and formats do not have the flexibility to ditch set-ups that are not wanted or desired by gamers.  Not like an RPG can do.

If we don't like a book, we can stop reading it.  If we don't like a video game, we can stop playing it.  But if you don't like an RPG, that RPG can be changed and changed until you do like it ~ unless the person in charge steadfastly and stubbornly refuses to change.  And that there is the problem.  That is the structural bias we have to overcome.