Significance and Outcome

To continue from the last post.

We ended the discussion of value with the players learning about the game world's real life qualities, which is something I learn myself whenever I make maps or choose to build a page about a specific provincial area (one with local boundaries). This learning was earlier stated to fall into the realm of "significance," and so it does, but there it more to significance than merely this.

I find myself asking the question, Why do I continue to play or work at D&D after all this time? It is not enough to say, "I love it," at least not for me, for I feel that merely sidesteps the question. Why, that is, do I love it? The answer to the question should not be evaded — it should be expressed in clear, comprehensible terms that anyone, even a person who does not love or appreciate D&D, can nevertheless understand.

My initial answer is this: D&D matters.

Much of the person I am, such as the way I interact within group dynamics, or my sense of belonging, or the appetite I have for bringing about change in the world, has been shaped by my being a dungeon master. Early, when I struggled with the desire for recognition that every world-be artist feels, I discovered that having become proficient in D&D sustained me at times when every other expressiveness failed. For a time I tried to be an actor; for a time, a singer; for a time, a journalist; and always, a writer. None of these were especially good for me early on. I was 34 before I had any success as an actor, long after I'd ceased to really care about it. I was 32 before I experienced what it might like to be a singer, though by no means was this a feasible career by then. I became a journalist at 26, then preceeded to fail at that until I reached the age of 44 (meaning, yes, I made money, but certainly received no special attention). And as a writer, my truest, more lasting success has been, oddly, in writing content about D&D.

Interestingly, though, whenever I wanted "attention," I could get it by running the game. As a skilled DM, I was in demand. I could set myself up pretty much anywhere, among anyone, and demonstrate that skillset. I could make strangers admire me. I could demonstrate more than prowess, I could show insight and cleverness. D&D therefore has demonstrated an opportunity for me, again and again, to prove that I am significant. And I can assure the reader most firmly: the worst thing about getting old, for most people, is losing that significance when they retire. Which means, more plainly stated, their significance is largely awarded to them by workplaces that agreed to employ them, until the time came that they wouldn't. This is a brutal, cold fact about the world.

"This kid from work... Ricky... couldn't remember whether you ordered pens with blue ink or black; but Ricky was a god for ten minutes when he trounced a local maître d' at a local food court."

D&D does not pay the rent, it does not impress the institutions that define status, it is not understood properly by culture, it is often not treated seriously even by the players themselves, who fear submitting themselves or becoming immersed in something they habitually see as "make-believe" because they cannot understand that, in fact, humans have sustained themselves with falsifications of reality for a long as we have written records. In fact, the oldest story we have extant from the far off reaches of five thousand years ago is about two adventurers who fight monsters and haul away treasure.

But nothing about the way others look at D&D matters, because the game is real while it lasts, when it is treated with respect as real, and when it allows us to step out of the ordinary world and into this place of imagination and gestalt.

Preferably, without anyone receiving actual bruises.

The first rule of D&D is not that we don't talk about D&D. The first rule is that we talk about it all the time.

It's significant that we choose to participate in a game where we invent our own actions rather than consigning us to another evening of watching films where someone else assigns the lines we're going to hear. It is no different from those who wish to spend their weekend playing football rather than watch others play it. Participation is a richer, more meaningful choice for us. We are not admiring competence, we are testing our own, by choosing, committing, responding, adapting, accepting consequence and all the rest. This is what makes the game good... because unlike the vast number who have decided that watching a bunch of actors NOT play D&D, but a performative mess that vaguely resembles D&D, we've chosen to be alive.

That is the "clear intent" we have with regards to playing. And when this intent exists among all the players, when none of them are tag-along spectators, when they all want to dig in and be part of the premise... when we physically boot those who don't belong here, who we decide aren't entitled to play, it's a better game. It's a "good game."  Because not only are we not dragging dead weight, we've all forgotten that we're playing D&D at all.

We are in this forest... we're not pretending to be. We are concerned about what we're venturing forth to slay. We're not turning to each other and saying, "Oh, hey, isn't D&D great?" No participant of anything that matters ever does that. Only those who aren't engaged, who can't let go, who can't try, ever look at the thing from the outside.

And the only thing they ever say is, "This sucks."

Which says much about such people. "If it does, please go find somewhere else to be. We're playing, and that'd be easier without you here."

This is perhaps the reason why I am so viciously surly on occasion... because I feel the actual game has zero to do with nostalgia bait or backstories or most of the lore pushed on the community. I don't find loaves of magic bread that replaces the need for food "cool" any more than a football player would want the length of the field shortened by five yards to make the game "snappier." I don't like the changes that have been made because all of them, every effing one of them for the last twenty five years, has been designed to specifically ruin immersion and the game I love.

If that doesn't seem reasonable, I'll throw this out (pun intended). The Infield Fly Rule was first adopted in 1895 by the National League... so it has been around for 131 years.

And some people still hate it. They don't care that it would mean intentionally dropping a ball so a double- or triple-play could be made. They don't believe restricting that option makes the game "better."

I feel the same way about standard arrays.

Lego and D&D

My grandson reaches the age of 18 months today, which is the sort of thing that reminds us of our youth and other things in the realm of shoes and ships and sealing-wax.  Across the neighborhood is a quaint little shop I dodged into a few days ago that sells Lego by volume ... and,  as it happens, is a bit of a Lego Mecca in Western Canada.  The owner possesses a few fellows reminscent of Jack Black in the film High Fidelity, only as a Lego nerd rather than with music.  Pleasant, playful, definitely the place where I'll go to build up a suitable Lego pile.  No rush, of course ... I have probably another two years or so, I should think.

My original Lego ended up in my daughter's hands years ago, going out the door with her.  So whether or not I collect another set, the grandson won't grow up bereft of the toy.  But truth, there's no such thing as enough Lego.

It's a small shop, not much room for wandering, but as I took it in I made several connections that are worth discussing on a D&D blog ... since unquestionably Lego was a gateway drug that prepped me for D&D.  I'll explain.

Because I'm very, very old, the bulk of my childhood experiences with Lego consisted of various shaped bricks and nothing else, as "sets" that included plans to make a pre-determined object, like fork lifts, police cars, tractors, helicopters and so on, did not become a thing until after 1975.  I was eleven in '75.  The first really big impressive themed object was the 493 Space Command Center, which emerged in 1978, by which time I'd moved on from Lego to other occupations.  I remember feeling at the time that the Set idea was a bad one ... which suggested that a great many children were far too creatively challenged to make their own stuff.  The outpouring of sets that followed and continues to this day seems to confirm this.  I have images of parents writing to Lego with remarks like, "I bought your product for my children, but they don't know what to do with it.  Can you please send ideas?"

For my friends and I, Lego was a group activity.  My friend Neil had well over 15,000 pieces of Lego and so his basement would draw us in every few weeks, especially in the winter.  We'd sit around building different objects, teaching each other how to follow and repeat our builds.  Redesigning objects and improving on previous designs was a large part, with most of us keeping blueprints for tanks, houses and planes in our heads.

Unlike board games, Lego was a co-operative group activity, which usually included a pre-planning period in the first half hour as we decided what we would make together.  Thus we built space stations and airports, towns, armies, navies and so on, with each person in the group having their preferences.  An agreement would be made on who was to build the con tower or the aircraft carrier — with the usual fights and settlements that nine y.o.'s experience.  Essentially, we were teaching ourselves how to act as designers working towards a common goal ... a goal that didn't exist except to us, as there were no sets to tell us what a spaceport should look like.

These experiences are probably the reason why I am so fucked up as a designer of D&D.  The pattern that enabled Lego to expand its customer base to non-creative children looks quite like the same that eventually crippled D&D.  Given an opportunity to make a world from scratch and have it be whatever we wanted, instead we were given modules ("sets") that told us what the world should look like, severing the creative backbone of thousands of potentially inspired children.  Today, every time I approach the game from the standpoint that it ought to include worldbuilding elements like theatres, universities and other cultural aspects, I'm sure to hear from someone crying out that "traditional D&D" doesn't include these things.  After all, where is the module where the players become world-class performing artists, or transform a village into a town, or become shipping magnates?  The modules don't exist, because such things don't include dungeons and ten-foot-poles.

Of course, there are the rare brilliant psychopaths who recognise the value of Lego for its stop-motion potential, or those who buy the sets to get the special bits and pieces that are only available through the sets, but for every one of these there are 200 Lego Death Stars sitting in corners gathering dust in some kid's room, that asked for just enough effort to put the thing together — and now that it is, why would we ever take it apart?  There's always more money in selling objects to people who want to be told "what to do," than there is in a pile of bricks with no plan.

If there's an underlying message behind the worldbuilding posts I've been churning out for months now it's this: the setting is rich with profound, highly variable opportunities.  Making the whole game about a dungeon and a place to go where we buy stuff for the dungeon is a pathetically narrow perspective on something where, literally, anything can be tried.  All that I'm saying only sounds weird because I'm the only person saying it.  I seem to be the only person willing to run it.  I've never been satisfied with being told how to put my bricks together.  Seems to me, so long as I have bricks, I can make a lot more things than the company remotely imagines.