D&S

Players are expected to bitch and moan through the entire game that they'd rather be out exploring a fantasy world.

Sometimes Players Just Deserve to Die

Most of the time, I am convinced that most D&D players are exactly stupid enough to fall for something like this ... [as most males would be in real life, too].

Sometimes as a DM, there's no way to protect against players ignoring all the signs and just going ahead with something, no matter what.  Unless, of course, it becomes necessary to have a neon light flashing just outside the door, stating, "Several hundred somethings, you will die if you enter."

Nah.  That probably wouldn't work either.

The Good Fruit Grows on the High Branches

I've now been posting the Campaigners comic for two months and the honeymoon is definitely over.  I don't mean that I'm done with posting.  I'm working on the comic every day.  Rather, I mean that the sense of it being something weird and profound with every comic I post has greatly diminished.

Some of you, I'm sure, have encountered this feeling.  The first dozen or so posts on a blog are a huge thing.  We find ourselves checking for comments every five minutes and wondering who will think it is the most amazing thing they've ever seen, expecting something big to come out of every post.  At first, that is.  Then, gradually, if we keep at it, the process of posting and checking the post becomes a routine.

With the comic, my first few weeks were spent in the height of anticipation.  The time between comics felt like a long time, as I anxiously waited for the moment when I would be able to post a new one.  But that feeling has gone now.  Now, it feels that the comics are barely up at all before it comes time to post a new one.  Whereas before there was no sense of missing a deadline, because I was ready to work on comics that would be coming out weeks and weeks after the one I posted today, now it becomes more and more evident that the train I'm on is moving faster and faster while I'm creating slower and slower.

This is what everyone experiences who sets a target for producing work.  Even as the regular practice of creating and setting a quality standard imposes itself, so does procrastination.  A day goes by without working, then another day, then a comic is posted and we remind ourselves, "Oh shit, I better make something right now.  I don't want to have to be putting in work last minute!"

But we know that day is coming.  At least, if we don't sort ourselves out and behave responsibly.

Just now, I'm not worried about getting comics out in time.  I still have a back-log that will keep me going a couple of weeks (which is down a long way from when I was five weeks ahead) ~ but I live in fear that I will get stuck for a joke.  And that is what this post is really about: writing jokes.

The one thing I don't want to do is get into the habit of creating what I call "low-hanging fruit."  I'll give an example from the Dragon Magazine #191, having found an archive just the other day:

This comic is an absolute piece of shit.  First of all, it's sexist.  Second, its a pathetic cliche, which itself started as a fabricated urban myth that got picked up by television and then repeated many, many times.  Everyone asks for directions.  I know this, because I am asked for directions very often.  So it doesn't even ring of truth.  Finally, for some reason, even though the cliche makes an argument that men are the stupid ones, the woman is made out to be embarrassed by the dialogue.  For fuck's sake.

Pillsbury, the author of this dreck, had a month to come up with this.  For fuck's sake.  I wish I had a deal to draw comics for the front-line magazine in the game culture, so I could phone in a decades-old joke.  This is the worst kind of low-hanging joke to reach for; it only requires watching reruns of old Johnny Carson shit and stealing from it.

But, sadly, there were many people ~ boys ~ who laughed at this.  Some of you, just now, smiled.  Low hanging fruit is out there, people use it and make a career out of it, just like Johnny-fucking-Carson did, as everything he spewed out for decades was stolen from the generation before him.

The same Dragon issue had three other comics: I'll post them together:

These are three jokes written by three different people.  Yet they're really just the same joke.  They are all three anachronisms.  Take something modern, slap it into the fantasy realm, point at it with an image and then have someone say something perfectly ordinary that is only funny because it's a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than a fantasy existence.

Bleh.  

Yet again, some of you smiled.  That smile is worth deconstructing, because if we're going to tell jokes, we ought to know a little about why they work.

First of all, we smile or laugh in part because we know it is supposed to be funny.  The joke is framed as a comic and for that reason we are given the cue to a certain type of behavior.  Those pathways have already been driven into our brains by a million comics that we read when we were soft, easily persuaded children at a young, easily impressed age.  As such, even by the time we get old and jaded, we can still relate to the format even if the actual joke itself is trash.

Secondly, jokes are built on the unexpected.  The joke I put up last night, the latest comic that can be found on the sidebar, is built on three unexpected results, one after another, only the last two of which are actually funny.  I'm going to spoil the comic now, so if you haven't read it, pause here.

First, we don't expect the adventure to work things out with a succubus and get married.  But the better twist is the pun based on a common phrase that parents use to describe other people's children (a cliche).  It works, because the cliche doesn't carry the joke, the pun does.  This is then followed by the double-entendre regarding baby-sitter fees.  If you don't see the entendre, think about it.  I did.  It took me an hour of patient thinking to nail down that joke.

Jokes work best when they confer fridge logic: when the joke isn't completely gotten on the first try.  This is what I aim for: a joke that has to be mulled over, where the whole joke isn't evident at once.  The British culture is brilliant at producing comedians who do this naturally, which is why I watch far more British comedy than North American.  There used to be a fair Canadian culture that produced this kind of humor, too, but that has been gone for more than a decade now.  Sadly, the best Canadian humorist working right now (obviously, in my completely non-humble opinion) is Katherine Ryan ~ and she abandoned North America for Britain.

Searching for that unexpected twist is the difficult part of writing humor.  If I have a favorite for this, it would be Jimmy Carr, who is a class by himself.  Here is the sort of classic twist he has the habit ~ meaning something he does so regularly that I am in awe ~ of producing:

"If only Africa had more mosquito nets, then every year we could save millions of mosquitos from dying needlessly of aids."

That is 21 words.  And in it he sets up the standard patter of NGOs asking for use to care and be concerned, only to slap us down.  The writing in those 21 words is so tight, most people I know won't realize it.  Look at the word groups in the one sentence:  "If only Africa" (the set up), "more mosquito nets" (the standard NGO request), "then every year" (building the immensity of the cause), "we could save" (the heart of the pitch, lulling us to expect the usual end of the sentence), "millions of mosquitos" (mid-twist, where it should be millions of people), "from dying needlessly of aids."  Bang.  A four-word punchline.

You can see Carr deliver the joke if you're willing to sit 1 minute and 10 seconds through this toxic bullshit.

I dream of writing like this.  If you haven't seen Jimmy Carr do stand-up, go look for him on you-tube and be ready to laugh very, very hard: because he is not like American comedians.  He doesn't spend three hours setting up a joke.

Time and time again, I find myself thinking up the low-hanging fruit for a comic and then I tell myself, "No, you can do better.  You can definitely do better.  Then I think for a few hours, or days, and slowly hammer out the difference in my head between what counts for low-hanging fruit and what doesn't.  And I live in fear that, in the end, after too much time, I will drift into that because I have burned out on writing things that are actually funny.  And I will know that people will smile and laugh anyway, because ~ hopefully ~ by then they will be trained to know that I'm funny, even when I am not.

That is why so many comics, both mainstream and internet, limp on for years long after they've ceased to produce anything noticeably clever.  Because, once, they did.  And as humans, if once a dry well had water in it, we will keep going back to that well over and over, hoping that one day we'll look down into the hole and water will be there.  It takes a long, long time for us to stop doing that.

Rats in a Maze

The first DM I played with, the one that tossed a basilisk at me on my first night, was probably the worst I ever played with. Let’s call him John, as I want to talk about why I say that and why it had influence on me as a DM.

John was very diligent with his world. He carefully crafted multi-level dungeons, he wrote out speeches for use in the quests he prepared for us, he drafted up towns and castles and pre-rolled all his NPCs. He developed quite elaborate personalities for said NPCs, which he took delight in role-playing when the time came for them to take their part in a given adventure.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Sounds just like the sort of effort a DM ought to make.

Except…

As a player, you could expect to move through every single room of every single level of John’s dungeon, without exception…there were no shortcuts for smart thinking. John designed that room, and he was damn well going to make sure that the room got used.

So, if you were in John’s dungeon, and you came to a place where three hallways branched off, you could be sure that at some point you were going to have to march your way up every hallway eventually. No exceptions.

If John wrote the speech for the Dragon on level six, you were by-god going to hear it.

And as far as accepting the quest in the first place? No choice. When the furtive little civil servant came to speak to you at your tavern of choice on behalf of Meycroft the Munificent, Viscount of Yuer and its Environs, you better get ready to spend the next twelve runnings in diligent service.

Finally, can I just add that ALL the NPCs were as annoying as hell? Especially the doors.

“Doors,” you say?

Yes. As you moved down through John’s dungeon, you would occasionally encounter doors that defined the difference between this level and the next, more difficult level. And these doors were always sentient.

And indestructible. And annoying. To get through these doors, you needed diplomacy.

A typical conversation might go like this.

“Who goes there?”

“A brave party, in the service of Meycroft the Munificent.”

“Who’s he?”

“He rules this land.”

“So?”

“So, we want to pass.”

“Why?”

“Meycroft has sent us to retrieve the Emerald of Rill, the center jewel of his family crest, which was stolen a mere two weeks ago.”

“I never heard of it.” (This from a door, two hundred feet underground)

“We have reason to believe it’s on the other side of you.”

“Reason to believe? I scoff at your reason to believe.”

“Look, we just want to get past and look around.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you’re a door. You’re supposed to open for people so they can pass from one place to another.”

“I’m also designed to keep people out. I have my defensive side, you know.”

“Wouldn’t it feel better to be useful? To have a purpose beyond protecting people who don’t care about you?”

“Who’s that?”

“The people inside. I bet they don’t even think of you.”

“No, no, you’re wrong! They love me!”

And so on.

This sounds interesting, but believe me, when you’ve talked your way through about thirty of these doors over the course of a year of playing (sometimes twice in one session), you’re ready to leap across the table and kill the fucking DM.

John’s failing as a DM was that, fundamentally, he designed his world to highlight his own importance. We players could have been anybody; we were mere rats in his maze, meant to take pleasure at being able to gather in the elements of John’s genius, revealed one running at a time until the story was given to us whole. Whatever semblance of interaction there might have appeared to be, in fact we could never accomplish anything until we hit on how to do it John’s way. Each door was like an episode of You Bet Your Life, where you were just trying to say the secret combination of words or phrases that would open the door.

There was no sense that the “world” offered a variety of choices…the opportunity to seek out a given group of people, or decide to adventure in a dungeon or in a wilderness. This was predestination…the forerunner to video games like Final Fantasy.

For many players, this is the only way they want to play. It comforts them to be part of a milieu that will deliver a structured setting in which they can participate.

I found it annoying, at best.

I have always felt that D&D, in its best form, provides the opportunity for people to live a life vicariously that they could not do in the real world. That is, if I wish to be Jenghis Khan, or Francis of Assisi, I should be able to make that happen—without being constantly annoyed by the Meycrofts of the world who are living out their ambitions. Fuck Meycroft and his family crest…I’m busy building the world’s largest library or founding a cult of STD-carrying women assassins. If Meycroft needs someone to follow his quest, let him pick an NPC to do it.

The problem this creates for most DMs is that it becomes difficult to plan anything; Free Will means there’s no guarantee the party will enter the Temple of Buwana, even if they’re standing in front of it. I’m of the opinion that the party ought to be able to look at each other and say—after having just killed the couatl defending the place: “What do you think people…show of hands. Who says fuck it?”

But if they don’t enter, that’s ten hours of painstaking work that will never get used. So the DM feels he must have some fairy princess show up and quest everyone (no saving throw permitted).

And there are those out there who would argue a party wouldn’t say that…that the treasure and the promise of adventure would guarantee they would enter the Temple.

Surprise, surprise. I have found that parties, if given the choice, are perfectly capable of walking away from a thing if they’d rather get their treasure and kicks in another venue. Some parties don’t like combating clerics, or mages, or paladins, and would rather choose to fight fighters. All power to them.

To make Free Will possible, a DM must eschew the “pre-created” dungeon. Really, the party doesn’t give a shit anyway…it’s just a big masturbatory fun-time for the DM, who usually gets perturbed when the party shits all over their creative skills anyway. This, more than any other reason, is why modules suck; they have no flexibility.

It does mean that most long time players, the first time they step into my world, find themselves confused. They’re so used to being told what to do, it takes time to realize I’m not going to tell them.

Which is what I’ll discuss next.