Wine

Apart from getting the new blog launched, after a couple weeks grumbling about it, let's continue with this series on worldbuilding — if my readers accept that's what I am writing about.   I'm pushing the idea that crafting the setting goes well beyond the visible contraptions with which we're familiar: the traditional map, the names of places and realms, the lines representing roads describing how the players travel from point to point.  Beyond these things there is the essence of the world itself ... it's philosophical perspective, it's manner of organising the forces of power that dominate the strata, the overall sense of cause and effect, not just from the players but also from the whole pattern of history that's gone before the players arrive.  And just lately, the way in which the game world is explained and expressed, right down to the words we choose to take hold of the players' attentions.

I can appreciate how these things are so alien to the usual dialogue surrounding D&D and worldbuilding.  As I keep saying, there is no groundwork for these ideas, except actual human history, geopolitics, religion and so on.  Recently, I've been reading a book from Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project, which is busy deconstructing the manner in which human beings ignore facts, interpreting things from a habit of wish fulfillment ... literally remastering things from what they are into what we want them to be.  This theme revolves around three statistician-psychologists in the state of Israel in the 1960s, each of whom also took part in the Israeli-Arab wars at the time, because every able-bodied male had to.  It's a profound perspective ... and it led to advancements in psychology that shattered belief systems in the 1950s and 60s.

Today's theme is literature, which can mean many things.  Although it technically describes any body of written work, the descriptor is often used to express things we ought to read, in the sense that if you haven't, you're a philistine, barely able to pick your nose with your spear.  [note the Israeli-philistine transition ... Literature!].  My intent is to discuss it in relationship to worldbuilding, as connected to elements of communication, aesthetics and form.  Let's begin with a story.

Once upon a time, a very minor academic without many credits and quite a few detractors stumbled across a theory that continues to hold a wide number of non-academics in thrall.  This theory explains that every popular story through the ages is the same, with the same means of elaboration, the same predictable elements of plot, and most important, the same approximate resolution.  What's more, this recognisable pattern reaches into every culture, every language, every historical period ... why, it's completely mind-blowing.  It's like there's just one massive, um, "singlesaga" that permeates through all Human culture.  Wow.

There's just this little glitch that this multitude of stories lack the same theme.  But what is a "theme," anyway?  Merely the reason the story is written at all.  Merely what the story is actually about.  See, it doesn't actually matter if the plots of two stories match up fairly well, if one of these stories investigates the collapse of military intelligentsia in the 19th century Russian state and the other examines the manner in which mid-20th century ideology forces individual to conform.  War and Peace and The Metamorphosis just aren't the same.  No matter how hard we stare.

See, it's like the plot-line of making wine.  We grow the grapes, or fruit, in varying conditions, but in the end it has to get crushed somehow.  In the next act, the resultant liquid is fermented.  Then the liquid is pressed, to allow the wine to run off the pulp.  After that, depending on whether the wine is red, white or from some other fruit extraction, a wide range of processes can take place that, in Act Three, ultimately wind up with wine in storage.  And here's the point at which this metaphor revolves: it's all wine.  Whatever we do, however we convert it, carbonate it, reduce it and so on, the fundamental process of making "wine" is universal ... in every culture, every language and in every historical period.

There are a great many who may nod and say, "Yeah, see, all wine is the same."  Which ... mm ... is not true.  Well, it is to non-academic philistines.

How literature arrives at its meaning, or the fact that it uses words of a given language, is irrelevant to its purpose ... which is why that clever little insight by the inventor of the singlesaga produced no accolades.  Let's forget, then, the standardised D&D notion of coming up with a "story" ... it's going to be the same story anyway, right?  I mean, it's all wine.

The first difference between two stories is aesthetic: not the story itself, but how well it's told.  If you or I were to try and write To Kill a Mockingbird from scratch, without even the title to call it by, even if we stuck to the "story" the end result would be execrable.  Not even because we're bad writers, but because we're not Harper Lee growing up in that era in that part of the world.  She knew how to make that story good because it was her story.  As in, a story fermented into her by the vineyards of her parents and culture.

Like stories all being the same, the events in D&D tend to obey a few narrow parameters: we can make the players fight, we can allow them to explore, we can offer them puzzles, we can set up parleys, we can threaten them with authorities, we can empower them with objects.  I've been playing for 40+ years and I can't think of something else that doesn't fit into what's named.

Does it matter?  A good event isn't based on it being a puzzle ... what matters is what sort of puzzle it is, and how it's encountered, and what the consequences of solving/not solving it are, along with how elegant the solution can be, whether invented by the DM or the player.  It's the beauty of the puzzle that counts.  And beauty, as I wrote in How to Run, is founded on four fundamental principles: (a) we have to begin with the best tools; (b) there must be an evident amount of time spent on the result: (c) it must show skill; (d) and it has to look like you took WAY too much time with it.

As a sum, your players must have the sense that you've created a conundrum (or a battle, or a parley, or whatever) that they know they can't duplicate.  You understand this game better than they ever could, you've spent more time working on it that they can even imagine, you're far more masterful at expressing yourself and what's happening that they can match ... and obviously, you've got time to squander on this game that they know they don't have.  In short, they're in awe.  They don't understand why, or how ... they just know that whatever you're doing, they can't do it.

In real terms, this manifests as a problem solving situation that makes their skulls hurt.  To actually do that, you really DO have to spend ludicrous amounts of time as a DM.  So, short answer: to produce something beautiful requires an excess of ability.

Okay, so, let's shelve that.  You can start working on being able when you finish reading this post, whereupon you'll be good to go in, um, 2042.

What about form?  Perhaps that's more accessible.  Form is the configuration in which a story is told, or in which a narrative is related.  For example, in D&D, the common form is to send the players out to the dungeon, let them pick up treasure and get hurt, bring them back to the village so they can buy stuff and heal, then send them out to the dungeon to get hurt and more treasure, then bring them back to the village so they can heal, then send them out to the dungeon so they can ...

Elegant, ain't it?

Form is easier to manage ... mostly because so many forms are utterly ignored by traditional D&D.  Virtually any situation that isn't organised around a "funhouse set-piece" will confound players sufficiently to think they've discovered a whole new kind of game.  Consider: if the traditional game is to send the players out to the funhouse, er, dungeon, consider how easy it is to turn that situation on its head by having the various denizens of the funhouse randomly and constantly raid the village?  Think of it ... a group of 1st level characters wake up in the middle of the night to find the streets filled with humanoids.  They rush out, kill 8-10 kobalds, only to soon after find a dozen goblins breaking into a shop.  The players kill the goblins, get their treasure from the shop.  Soon, they're fighting a big ogre who's tearing apart the inside of an apothecary.  The party kills the ogre, gets away with a dozen potions ... which they'll need, because now it's thirty gnolls.  These are beaten off as the sun rises and the players get a break.

Only, the humanoids are ringed around the village.  The players heal, sleep, and ready themselves for nightfall, when it happens again.  And again.  And again.  It's the same story.  We've just chosen to ferment it in a different way.

The key to "form" is to find ways to introduce the players to puzzles, parley and panic in different ways than they've already done.  The story lines are all obvious: it's a wagon train that needs protecting, it's different entities fighting over a business asset, it's a group of people who need their village defended, it's a king that needs restoring on a throne, it's a band of rebels fighting against an evil empire that will take new recruits for a special mission ... blah, blah, blah.  It isn't the damned story.  That's just the grapes the wine is made from.  It doesn't matter that the story's been used before ... ALL stories have been used before.  What matters is how well you use it.  And ultimately, if you personally can set up the story better than the players, you'll gather a little of that sweet, sweet nectar that creating something of beauty gives.  Oh, you may realise it's not all that, but the players will think it's beautiful and you'll get the laurels just the same.

Finally, there's communication.  This is tricky.  We've already spoken about language and locution ... this is your use of those aspects to send a message that's worth telling.  And here I know you're a fish out of water.  Creating a message out of D&D feels like ... well, we have no idea what it feels like.

A "message" is a discrete form of interaction that attempts to suggest a response without actually asking for it.  The idea is to signal the reader in a manner that causes him or her to gather an insight into the events surrounding the story, even though that insight was never actually stated.

This can be accomplished in a film by "showing, not telling," though most of the time it ends in a very disconnected insight.  All sorts of people have invented all sorts of messages from the first 20 minutes of 2001: a Space Odyssey.  None of these messages coincide with each other and ALL of those who think they have it believe they're the only ones who do.  It's not hard to send a "message" by creating a bunch of indistinct gobbledy-gook backed by very loud prestigious-sounding horns while human-like creatures are doing vaguely human-like things.  We're humans.  We like seeing ourselves in monkeys.

Messages can be annoying simple and useless.  "Crime doesn't pay" has been a theme of human dramas for centuries ... not that this stops crime.  It works with children if all we want them to do is eat their vegetables — at least, until they actually eat vegetables.  It's not our goal to moralise or send messages that change humanity's focus on science fiction filmmaking.  This is D&D.  Our goal is to enable D&D.

We have a game setting deliberately created to give the players a place to create their own stories — or, if you prefer, to make wine.  We'd rather they made better wine than the same mashed grapes left to rot in a dark cupboard beneath the stairs year after year.  We want them to make excellent wine.

You're the DM and the players have just finished acquiring a big haul of stuff.  They want to go down to the local Magi-Mart and roll it into potions and scrolls.  What do you want them to do with it?  If you want the pathway between the village and the dungeon to become a trench, you'll let them leave the mart with their arms full of flasks and rolls.

If you'd rather they spent their money on something else, don't cripple their imaginations by making the game easy.  If you want them to build safe-houses and castles, make the world more dangerous.  If you want them to spend more time investing in local politics, don't invent rewards for chatter ... denude the dungeons of treasure.  Denude the game world of dungeons.  Push politics into the player's faces.  MAKE them deal with it.  

But, gently.  Let them occasionally seek solace.  Encourage them to feel they can affect their enemies with the right word, or making the right deal.  But move the game towards where you want the game to go by sending messages that worry or dissuade the players from going in directions you don't want.

We're not talking a story here.  We're talking crafting messages that make the party think differently about the world at large.  Sure, there's a dungeon over there.  Sure, they can go to it.  And sure, there's a sign on the outside that says, "Abandon all hope."  Only, um, mean it.  Hey, the party's gonna look at those words and laugh, right?  I mean, they're adventurers.  Abandon hope, surely that doesn't apply to them, does it?

What kind of world do you want to run?  Build the setting to create a message in the player's heads that directs them into your kind of world.  Make it subtle.  Be very definite about not stating the message openly or making your intent obvious.  Give the players reason to pause and reconsider the next time there's a scary message on a dungeon.  Give them reason to believe there's good gaming, and solid value, to be found in other things beside dungeon delving.  It's up to us to reward behaviour we ought to think deserves it, and underwhelm behaviour we don't want.

If that sounds bad to you ... if it sounds like I'm encouraging propaganda, or brainwashing, or coercion, then consider the possibility that you're a little overcautious about how you cope with your fellow human beings.  Personally, I'm completely assured that my players are "getting the message" and not minding it all that much.  Especially when it's coupled with the form of the adventures I create and the time I spend on their elaboration.

I believe in making very, very good wine.  It's not made simply, or doing one thing, or counting on the grapes to do it all for us.  There's a common adage among vintners that a joyous grape, a well-watered grape, grows into the happy part of a lousy wine.  We keep the soil dry; we make the grape suffer, so that it has to pull every bit of flavour from its surroundings just to stay alive.  It's from hardship, not ease, that invention and creation flourishes.  It's from not having everything handed to them, from having to seek their success in every valley, not just the ones planned for them, that a party discovers a fantastic game they never want to quit.

Locution

It's essential that we understand how to use language to describe the game world in a manner that draws in the players.  Throughout the game, DMs are asked to give details about places, events, motion and the consequence of actions that have taken place.  Wherever the party goes, whatever happens there, or has happened in the past, and how the players' actions affect the future, is received positively because we've couched those things in rich, interactive language that captures the player's imagination.

Our limitation begins with understanding language in terms of it's rigid structure, because that's how we've been taught language.  The teacher begins by writing a sentence on the board and then strictly describing what is a subject, a verb, and an object ... stale terms with which we have no attachment.  We're given too much information about what the words do as part of a sentence than how specific words affect our thinking and comprehension.  Words themselves can be taken apart thematically as well as etymologically.  I'll take some time to discuss how, while addressing questions about how to manage the game's wilderness without depending on dividing the setting into hexes like a dungeon is divided into room.  For this, we'll keep to little words.

Prepositions are words that govern nouns and pronouns, expressing relationships related to place, time, movement and manner.  For example, the preposition "through" describes the motion of a person or thing as it passes from one side to the other of an opening, channel or location.  We move through a crowd or through a forest.  The word suggests a confrontational element, in the sense that to move through requires threading our way through obstructions.  For example, I might tell the players they are moving through the brush.  This is different from the word between, that more often suggests rigid boundaries with a definite opening.  We say that we move between the posts; we don't say we move through them.  The latter feels less clear than the former, if passing through the channel created by the posts is the meaning.  Through suggests we butt up against the posts as we try to move through them.

So, for example, if I tell the party they're moving through the city streets, habitually we create a crowd that the party encounters.  The sense is different than my saying the party moves across the city.  Through has a 3-dimensional element, whereas across flattens the environment through which we're moving.  We say through a forest, not across a forest.  At the same time, we move across a meadow and not through it.  A forest is three dimensional.  A meadow is flat.  If the grass is high enough, we say we move through it; but if the grass is short, we say we move across it.

Thus, by choosing to say the players are moving through a city, we give the streets three dimensions; if say across, we demote the city to how it appears on a map: two-dimensional.  But there's no definite right or wrong here.  Telling the players they have to cross the river acknowledges their wish to remain upon the river's flat surface.  Through a river is very different; it means the players will get wet.  Over or above the river is better for them, as they can avoid the water altogether; thus we give the players a bridge and stress it's overness when the players are told to look down at the roiling, flooding waters they've avoided.  Under the river suggests we're going through the rock and silt, completely under the river's course; so we say underwater, which means the players will get entirely wet.

These are very common words, used every day ... but the manner in which they're used and stressed during game play matters.  The players must envision what happens, so we are specific about words that have exact meanings for this effect or that.

For example, getting involved is implied by moving into or toward something.  In the question, "Do you move toward the door," it's the positional word that affects, as the player grows more cautious as they approach more nearly to dangerous things.  Into the dungeon equates with in trouble, or trapped.  Out of conveys the opposite.

We can move through the streets, but we can also say that the party moves into the streets.  Through implies direction; into here implies that we're wandering, without going specifically anywhere; that there is some kind of confusion.  If we say to the party, "You move into the city," this calls for the players to suggest a specific direction, while suggesting the city is a sort of maze.  Because there's only so much into that's ever available for movement, since sooner or later we'll reach the center or the bottom, the word itself has claustrophobic overtones.

Out of suggests the opposite.  We free ourselves by getting out of things.  But out also has a sense of coming to a rest at some point, since once we're out of the city, we can stop.  On the other hand, away from suggests an ongoing process.  We just keep moving away.

This should be enough to get across some of the sense I mean when choosing a word.  English has something like 175 prepositions, all of which can be used in some manner to define the player's movements or placement in the game world.  Prepositions relating to time include before, after, until, during and since, all of which can be stressed when characters take some action, or want to.  "Until you get the door open, you're stuck."  "Before the monsters attack, there's an air-shattering shriek that everyone hears."  "After the last squid dies, the ink-filled water begins to clear."  

Prepositions relating to manner or phrase, or context, include contrary to, except, like, instead and including.  These are words we'll use to remind the players of something they've forgotten, or ought to think about, or is suggested by something they've decided and so on.  When giving advice to players, if you're not used to expressing your mind, it helps to clarify our thinking in terms of what concerns there are, or what bars the player's intent, or what acts in the players' favour.  "Instead of that, what might work better?"  "Including these things you've discussed, is there anything else?"  "That might work, except for this detail you've forgotten."

As I said, we use these words all the time without a thought.  But thinking about the words gives clues as to what we ought to be addressing as a DM ... or what things we might want to include in the game world spatially.  Players stand above a valley, a descending slope, a cliff, a river bank, or sights that can be seen in the distance.  The pathway meets a wall or an outcropping, moves along it, or around it ... likewise, that same route might confront heavy vegetation, and outpost, a hostile or ruined village, an enormous hole, a lake or a pond, a river, etcetera.  We move nearer to things in the distance, or away from other things.  We move between the rocks, the canyon walls or the fields.  We're beneath the hilltop, the cliff, the forest canopy, the flying birds, the overhang, the waterfall.  We go up or down the hillside, the valley, the rough-cut stairs.

What can the reader imagine that the party moves over, or up against, or upon?  What is the landscape without?  What's hidden behind a thing, or beneath it, or among these features?  Create something for the players to find.  They won't notice that you keep saying up, up, up, as you urge them up the valley, up the stream gulley, up the outcropping, up the scree slope, up between the cliff faces, up and across the glacier, up into the gap between the mountain peaks ... they'll merely understand that the theme of what's going on, especially as the scenes are peppered with opportunities to slip, slide, tear a boot heel, match wits with a mountain goat, find tracks of some kind and get doused with freezing rain by a flash storm ... and all the while catch glimpses of something unlikely just beyond sight or reach.

The words themselves are only a crutch ... but an important one.  The collection of moments and scenes that we've accumulated through our lives must be collated and managed so they can be used to enable us to create things at will.  Imagination is no more than an immense database located in our minds, enabling us to produce sounds and images from the immense noggin source book we've stuffed full.  Language is the program that opens the cabinets and drawers, with the things you're looking for, when put on the spot to "come up with something" when the players reach the summit.  Language isn't an obstacle ... it's a process.  

Language

Language is an expressive system that relies on verbal and non-verbal codes to transfer information.  It's a set of tools that enables us to relay information ... albeit imperfectly.  D&D is a game constructed of language.  We can create other mediums, like maps, figures, models and diagrams, but functionally, it's the mastery of language that determines the effectiveness of a dungeon master.  The game requires that multiple persons be able to relay, parse, reconstruct and plan around a tremendous quantity of details that are transmitted by all the participants.  This means that the DM must no only be a great speaker, able to deliver a strong, comprehensible message, but must also be a fluid and flexible listener, able to interpret phrases accurately given often by players who may have poor language skills. 

The "message" is distinct from language the way that music is distinct from an instrument.  Thus, the goal is first for us to understand how the instrument works: what it does, why we need it and most importantly, how to create with it.

That is a vast subject matter, worthy of it's own book specifically prescriptive to D&D.  We're going to touch on the highlights ... and even that's going to take awhile.  Our goal for the present is to awaken the reader's appreciation of language; like the air, something we think very little about, yet is absolutely necessary.  

Entering into D&D, we're quickly overwhelmed with a mountain of phrases and new words.  There are scores of special colloquial phrases that apply to D&D as a discipline, such as "roll to hit" or "make save."  There are hundreds upon hundreds of monsters, spells, abilities and the like, each of which require that we dredge their meaning up from memory on the spur of the moment, because not doing so greatly constrains the grace and elegance of play.  Common words like "combat," "experience" or "intelligence" have much more precise meanings than they would in some other context.  Less familiar words, like "psionics," "cantrip" or "ultravision," may never occur in any context except with D&D, including television shows obviously plundering D&D for concepts.

Once the basic terms are grasped and committed to memory, there follows an increasingly diverse set of circumstances surrounding the adventures themselves asking the players and DM to commit to memory more terms, describing characters, historical figures, place-names, mythical objects, parts of things, along with whole lists of equipment and how it works in play.  Should the characters undertake shipboard adventures, sieges, the pursuit of industry, even farming, there comes even more things to know, at least as much as an amateur, as discussions of ship mechanics, tactics, the commission of trade and seasonal cycles all become part of game play.  There is no literal end to this proliferation, as all human knowledge can be co-opted into the game, at any time, by any participant, merely by stating they'd like their character to get interested in that thing.

As complexity balloons, so does stress as the players and DM struggle to manage the data along with the intermingling of opinions and intentions displayed by persons of disparate natures.  Every word grows in weight, so that showing respect, giving demonstration that we're listening, managing our body language so as not to intimidate, forcing ourselves to ask questions, expressing ourselves in an open-minded manner and giving strong and useful feedback all become critical skills ... or else, we have chaos.  As a DM, I can use my pulpit to bully players, shut down free dialogue, enforce my expectations and end disputes through my nominal authority ... but I guarantee that my only players will be weak, deprived toadies so starved for D&D that they'll trade their dignity for the privilege of a faux-campaign.  If I want the best players, then I must live up to the standard that good players set: the expectation of being able to force their will on the game setting, without my meddling.  That requires an ability to express myself clearly, decently, honorably, thoroughly and magnetically.  A very tall order.

Accomplishing this cannot be managed by having a "DM's cloak" in one's closet that's afterwards shed when everyday life begins.  We have to practice these language skills with constancy, until they become second-nature in all our activities.  It's from this meshing of D&D into other parts of life that a DM discovers the many skills in managing and attending to other persons contributes vocationally across the spectrum of our activities.  If I rise to speak at a political gathering, the voice I have, the words I choose, the manner of my stance, my habit of looking at every person in the room as I speak, all come from thousands of hours playing D&D.  Likewise, as a cook for 15 years, I learned to handle dozens of orders at a time, interweaving my movements around the rapid steps of other cooks, calling back to show I'd heard what I was told — while making jokes and laughing amidst the panic of stress.  Those habits transformed my dungeon mastering, empowering my attention so as to manage question after question without relent.  Every occupation I've undertaken, from publishing to theatre, from sales to landscaping, from furniture moving to database management, has contributed it's important part to my language and interpersonal skills.  I am a DM no matter what I'm doing at any given time.

The key element of dungeon mastering is teaching.  All that I've just described above is there to be learned by all the players and the DM too ... but the DM has the extra assignment of encouraging the players to immerse themselves into the subject material as much as the DM has.   This means grappling with the player's subjective assessment of why he or she plays at all, evaluating the strengths that has for our game, the liabilities it creates, and then wading in to address how the player's perspective has to be re-grounded in terms of the group activity the game represents.  Those strengths have to be cultivated, just as those liabilities must be wrestled with and brought to heel ... generally by explaining as often as necessary why a given player's subjective perception is inimical to the general play of all present.  Relationships must be objective ... our immediate wants and expectations have to be trained to respect other people's wants and expectations.  This means sometimes, we must teach ourselves not to want something we want very badly, in the present, consigning the acquisition of that want to the future.

Finding the path that leads to that Shambala in other people's heads is very nearly impossible.  People are stubborn and distrustful.  Their trust must be earned; they must be made to believe that there will be a future, and that we as DMs are duty-bound to make that future happen, in exchange for their foregoing their present.  Promises as a DM are contracts; thus one learns not to talk lightly, which lends a remarkable weight to everything that's said through the game.  If I need Jim to let Jane get her way today, then I'd better damn well plan for the day that Jane'll have to wait while Jim gets his turn.  That means managing both Jim and Jane in a positive, absolutely sincere manner.  That means letting Jim or Jane shout full in my face when I've said something that plainly mis-states my position ... and making it up to them, as I should.  It means not getting my way, while ensuring that others — all the others at my table — get theirs.

All this offers room for the nitty-gritty of language mechanics: the use of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, control of one's pronunciation, the use of words to evoke images, the "priming" of players so as to make them respond and think in predictable ways, and of course the vast, bottomless well of semiotics.  I've spent time on this blog discussing at length subjects like meaning-making, semantics, pragmatic meaning and existential learning.  Each of these possesses the capacity to deepen a DM's understanding of D&D's description-response dynamics.

What we don't know about the way we ourselves think is our greatest liability ... and we must wrestle with ourselves to overcome our habitual approaches to "how" we think D&D is played or "what" we're either capable of doing, or willing to do.  No manner of approaching the game is sacrosanct.  I believe there IS only one correct way of playing D&D.  I have no expectations that I'll ever fully learn what that is.

Entracte

Let me pause a moment before continuing this slowly evolving series on worldbuilding to address those who have expressed both wonder and confusion regarding the content herein.  I understand perfectly that you're saying it plainly it has meaning ... but equally, the path in how this meaning is applied is unclear.

I have been running and thinking about D&D a long time.  Unlike most, I've never seen it as a "game."  Many times, I've argued that DMing is a sort of performance art.  As an artist, rather than a hobbyist, I've chosen to study the pursuit in the traditional sense, in the way that one might study music or writing.  I've examined D&D's relationship with the chronological era and period that it's meant to take place.  I've studied the source material from which it comes, and here I do not refer to pulp 20th century b-fiction.  I've questioned the manner in which it's delivered, and the effects the process has on the players, and drawn connections between the way D&D works to create a social construct.  I've examined how it functions as an art, how it's perceived, how it's performed and how others would have to be guided to achieve certain elements of player response.  I've systematically cut the game to pieces, and done so in print, at extraordinary length, for many years.

With the sort of material I've been writing in this last month, I've had to crack my own skull apart in ways that are new to me.  Some of the things that I've been writing of late express my first thoughts on a given revelation that's never occurred to me before.  This last month, over and over, I've had to toss out thousands of words, because my train of thought has tried to take me places where I've been before, or where I want to rant about something, or where I become suddenly aware that the trail is leading up my own ass.

Please understand.  I have no help here.  I can't go to some clever D&D site, read a few brilliant comments about a subject and then riff for a few thousand words.  I'm just me.  I'm interpreting material written for some other purpose, like religion, like geography, like history, and translating it into the value it offers.

This would be easier if I knew the answers.  I don't.  I'm exploring the answers.  I'm seeing a pattern in arranging moments in a wilderness as I relate those moments to episodes in literature:

"The route taken by Hawkeye lay across those sandy plains, relived by occasional valleys and swells of land, which had been traversed by their party on the morning of the same day, with the baffled Magua for their guide. The sun had now fallen low toward the distant mountains; and as their journey lay through the interminable forest, the heat was no longer oppressive. Their progress, in consequence, was proportionate; and long before the twilight gathered about them, they had made good many toilsome miles on their return.

"The hunter, like the savage whose place he filled, seemed to select among the blind signs of their wild route, with a species of instinct, seldom abating his speed, and never pausing to deliberate. A rapid and oblique glance at the moss on the trees, with an occasional upward gaze toward the setting sun, or a steady but passing look at the direction of the numerous water courses, through which he waded, were sufficient to determine his path, and remove his greatest difficulties. In the meantime, the forest began to change its hues, losing that lively green which had embellished its arches, in the graver light which is the usual precursor of the close of day."

There is the text, like thousands of other texts scattered in a hundred languages in the long, winding path of human history.  A travelled route; knowledge of the land that permits choosing the correct path and signs that the forest is changing as the route is gone over.  The gripping pace of the text, published in 1840, sentence upon graceful sentence, pulling the reader along.  In the story, pursued and pursuers, struggling to find rest, food, enduring the savagery of the wilderness, outwitting and overpowering the enemy.  Translated to D&D, the party struggling to rescue an ally, or one of their own; blindly rushing into the wilderness, hoping to happen upon the enemy in time.  The DM, painting each scene — and not one!  But scene after scene, using the changes to lay out possibilities of ambush, hunting for a sign, desperately crossing an open lake in potentially full view of an enemy ... never knowing exactly what horrific way the collection of scenes will play out.

To build these scenes from a start of some kind, the DM must invent a thread.  Something that's found, someone that's encountered, some event that's witnessed, with a strong enough impact to make the players eventually engage.  How or why they should depends on what thread we invent; but it is only one thread.  As the players continue, we invent others, inserting each into the right moment, creating amounts of curiosity, indignation, compassion for others in pain, avarice ... or whatever it takes to make the players wade in and start swinging.

That I don't have a simple formula that allows the gentle reader to "just do it," I apologise.  There is no formula.  6,000 years of building stories and tales, no one has yet invented a "formula."  Steal a scene.  Steal a dozen scenes.  Cheat the players by making them believe they're seeing something new.  And if you do this for 20 years, you'll learn instinctively how these things are patterned, and how they're made without having to steal.  But if anyone here thinks I'm going to whip out a simple guide for "how to be really clever in making up shit," you're a gawddamned fool.

If the reader is able to apply one tiny thread of the fabric I'm trying to describe, so that it raises one player's eyebrow, you will have accomplished a miracle.  You will have done something for which there is no class, no coursework, no handbook, no youtube video, no blog post, no shortcut.  You will have done something artistic.  

Don't expect so much so soon.

It'll come.

Don't Fence Me In

Stand on a forest-covered hillside slope and look out over the vista of the valley before you.  From where we are, we can see the hills opposite, a mile or more away, through the thin tops of the trees growing further down the slope.  Much of the valley's bottom is obscured, but we know that down there a river runs.  Trees surround us, their trunks blocking our view up the hill; their roots course back and forth over the ground, with every cavity filled with leaves that have just fallen this season.

There's so much we cannot see, but we know is there.  We've followed paths from a village to reach this spot.  That same village has roads that lead to towns and cities throughout the realm.  Hidden amidst the forests are little dairy farms and small green meadows, that we left behind when we began to climb.  We know how to find them again, just as we know if we continue upwards we'll reach the summit of this hill ... which again, we can't see.  Nonetheless, we know it's there.  We know this hill is the beginning of a series of ridges that wind together into a mountain range.  We can point in the direction of that distant range, whatever our immediate senses tell us, because we've been told.

This is the game world.  It's a collection of memories mixed with summations made by others whom we have no reason not to trust.  The world is a series of visions that unfold as we wend, or climb, or clear, in our habit of moving from one place to the next.  The adventure is the uncertainty in this earthly fabric, as no readiness or constancy can assure what we'll meet or what consequence that'll bring.  The act of travel makes the world, conveyed by the DM to the player, sentence by sentence.

There is a danger in thinking the game world is a map.  A map is a representation of a thing, it's not the thing itself.  It's value is symbolic, not concrete.  It's static.  The failing of fictional cartography is that it purports to create the world, yet it ends in reflecting a banal, facile representation of "earth-like" elements and saccharine sentimentality jumbled together to form empty white spaces delimited by lines of different colours.  It's not a "world."  It's a figment.  And too often it's easy with D&D to believe that because the game is imaginary, the mere invention of something imaginary is sufficient to make the game run.

Apart from conceiving the game's setting, this setting must be conveyed accurately to the players, even though each player must perceive the setting largely from the DM's phrases and gestures.  This limitation makes the "dungeon" much more practical than the outside world, including the setting's wilderness, countryside and variously sized settlements.  To present a dungeon room, I can give it's easy-to-conceive dimensions, shape and contents ... since these things usually exist on a small scale.  Each component can be reconciled with the size of a large living room, a school corridor, a theatre or a gymnasium.  The construction is ordinary, like a stone wall or a wooden gallery; the contents are ordinary as well, being composed of doors, platforms, gee gaws, trunks, tables, chairs, beds and so on.  Ten score items cover the gamut for most dungeons.  These can easily be described with a single word, surrounded by short-sentence text that can fit on a single page, yet providing sufficient information for a full night's running.

The outside has no such convenient partitions.  The forest stretches on and on without distinctive pattern; the valley cannot be "seen" and it's contents cannot be practically searched.  There is no door for the players to stand behind, to prepare themselves for the next encounter; the next encounter could randomly strike at any time, and appear from any direction, even straight up.  The players are exposed; there are no walls to provide defense:  no "front" for the fighters to defend, no "back" for the spellcasters to retreat into.   Yet days can pass without yielding a single enemy — and should the party meet one, it won't have thousands of gold pieces in its pockets.

Yet the dungeon is woefully predictable.  The party knows there's treasure here; it knows the monsters are defeatable.  It's just a matter of pushing from room to room until the source yields up its experience and wealth.  For as long as it takes.  And when this dungeon is completed and cleaned out, and our levels obtained, they'll be another dungeon, and another and another.  For as long as we care to open doors.

Initially, this seems dreadfully exciting.  What, we ask ourselves, is behind the next door?  Quick, get ready!  When the enemy rush out, our hearts pounding, we feel we've caught the true sense of this game, as we hurry to fight and support one another in a bid to survive.  So it goes ... at the beginning.  With repetition, however, the proceedings become a montage of doors opening and different monsters flooding out; of the same spells being used in the same order, by the same defensive arrangement of players; of the same aftermath in which treasure is sorted and numbers on character sheets are changed.

The energetic DM does what can be done to vary the proceedings, mixing in surprises, puzzles, bits of parley, clues to a mystery, dramatic speeches and cries for revenge ... whatever works to maintain the value of what becomes rather dry material in a year or two.  And when these run out, the players sort themselves into three groups: those able to enthall themselves with the same old thing, those who go through the motions for the sake of nostalgia ... and the largest group, those who quit.

The game world is not a dungeon.  The dungeon merely shrinks the map to a degree where the elements being symbolised are so simple as to feel concrete.  The price is enslavement to a rat maze ... where even the sunniest rats are eventually forced to notice the walls are all the same.

The game world is a world, with everything in it.  The game mastering strategies needed to run that world ask the DM not to simplify to be embrace complexity, like a scientist.  The botanist doesn't limit the study's knowledge to what grows in a temperate garden, just because there are too many plants to ever conceivably find and eventually name.  An astrophysicist doesn't limit the study's knowledge to those things that can be seen with the naked eye, just because there are trillions of objects, the number of which can never be known.  Medicine does not limit itself to only diseases it can cure; engineers do not only build the kind of things that have already been built; chemistry doesn't only repeat old experiments.  It matters not that something is impossible.  It only matters that we seek to find ways to raise the party's sense of the world's potential adventures as we DO, when we strive out into the world.

The players' appreciation and excitement in moving through a forest should reflect the same excitement they'd feel if in real life, they were walking in through the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Black Forest, knowing there's a chance of encountering a chimera or a manticore.  If it were you, and you knew there was a real possibility of some nasty, horrific monster in these woods, could you sleep comfortable in your tent?  If you had to carry swords for your protection, and your route led through a defile where it was said there were man-beasts that ate human flesh, would you not grip your sword more tightly as you began to descend?  Would you not hesitate first, and ask if they wasn't some other route?  Would it matter much to you that when the 14 pig-faced warriors slathered in white and grey paint came rushing from the nearby verge, that they carried only a few coins of treasure?

It's not the game world that's boring, it's the DM.  The DM who counts days on a map and rolls a die for each day, as though the party were commuting to work.  The DM who can't be bothered to give the wilderness substance, who fails to structure the journey in a manner that seizes the hearts of the players as much as an opened door.  It's the lazy DM, who treats the wilderness as a blank space on a map between tick marks indicating dungeons.

I am far more thrilled by the vastness of a wilderness I want to control and survive in, than I am by another room with another puzzle, the solving of which will get me to another room with another puzzle.  Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above.  Don't fence me in. 

Non-linear D&D

Getting the game running like a machine calls for the DM to manage the co-equal problems of time and space within the model imposed by the setting.  Space and time function in two ways in D&D.   First, these define the momentum of game play: time is needed to describe the game's setting to the players, who must use time to choose how they'll move from space to space.  Secondly, the characters lose resources as time passes, so that taking more time to move from space to space reduces the survivability of the characters.

Running the game, compressing time spent increases momentum; the more things a party encounters in the space of a four-hour session, the "faster" the game seems to run, increasing it's potential for being exciting.  However, if we compress time too much, the players can feel rushed, even cheated out of enjoying the excursionary aspect of play, as players like to emotionally and mentally involve themselves into what's happening.

However ... we can also build sequences that cost the players' resources in order to reach their goals, such as lengthening a journey so that it requires more food, the replacement of equipment and more opportunities to soak hit points from the players' reserve.  This demands more resolve from the players.  In fact, by deliberately reducing momentum, to stretch out how long it takes to reach a goal, we can whet the players' appetites ... actually improving the game's excitement by decreasing momentum.

As such, there is no definite formula on how time and space is managed.  Knowing which dynamic to apply, and for how long, to make distances "feel real," is a considerable obstacle to good DMing.  It is so easy to take too long to describe parts of the setting and make the game feel dull.  It is just as easy to hurry the game to the point where the individual events just don't matter, giving the party has little reason to invest themselves.  Like telling a joke, each word must be stressed just so, with just the right degree of pacing.  We must "time" our delivery with pauses, holding the listener's rapt attention as much when we're not speaking as when we say the next line.  This is the underlying substance of DMing that calls for artistry.

Most do not have it ... largely because the need for pacing hasn't been explained.  We are instead consumed with the problems that arise from needing to know what happens next ... because it's perceived, if we don't know what's going to happen next, we won't know what to say when it happens.

The fundamental structure for game play is the railroad, defined as a sequence of events that have been predetermined, providing the DM with foreknowledge of what the players experience as the game plays out.  This "script" strengthens the DM's presentation when the game is running, especially if the DM has run the same script on some previous occasion with another party.  With script in hand, the DM feels a greater confidence in knowing what to say and when to say it; he or she has time to hone their performance, inserting jokes, clever moments of drama, practiced speeches given by NPCs and so on.  He or she need not sweat the problem of what happens next; everything "unexpected" is accounted for.  And because the players haven't experienced the railroad's sequence of events, they feel new and shiny.  Further, if the railroad is written well enough, many players will commit to the railroad even after they've seen where it goes, because they want to try a different strategy from that undertaken on previous trips.

Railroad settings can include multiple tracks, giving a greater illusion of player choices, since the choices and their consequences can also be predetermined.  With sufficient time spent, players can experience twenty or more pleasant excursions, jostling back and forth between stops, switches and roundabouts.  The format reduces the DM's stress and can even be packaged for other DM's to enjoy.  These virtues have established themselves as "how the game is played," being seen as vastly superior to any other approach ... which, in any case, would defy the ability of most DMs to deliver.

The problem with the railroad, then, is not its basic structure, nor in inability to supplying DMs with practical, useful material for play.  Arguably, the adventure module has been wildly successful ... and must continue to be so, given the audience it has.  The problem is in a railroad's limitation as a form of transport.  To work — that is, to provide material that predicts game play — the railroad is highly dependent on game forms like the dungeon, which provides a highly linear game experience.  The population of the railroad has to be minimal; groups that are encountered must be generally of like mind, with perhaps a single deviant that takes the party aside to show them the "secret way" out.  The setting itself is infertile and passive.  To function, the railroad's information must be hidden before it's discovered, and gotten past before the next hidden thing can be learned.  This disallows any possibility of the participants "playing off" their enemies against one another; they don't know who the enemies are.  This leaves only the very narrow tactics of immediate response.  Larger strategy is out of the question, unless the intended strategy has also been predetermined for the players.

As such, for all their fine qualities, railroad games become tiresome for most participants within 60 to 100 hours.  Participation for many hinges on the "sociability" of chatting and joking with other players ... which quickly devolves into mocking events of the game in order to maintain one's interest.  There are only so many ways to open a door, or collectively fight a group of enemies, or take down a "big bad."  Over time, the repetitiveness leads to other player behaviours and game-rebuild formats that don't need to be discussed here.

The problem remains one of time and space.  Desirably, we should wish for an approach in which the DM can expand rationally on what's already happened; can formulate play from moment-to-moment, in the present; and can predict, from the present circumstances, what ought to happen next.  Handling these matters in one's head can produce a fluid, logical pattern of events, with future moments becoming self-evident through examination of the past.  This pattern can then be "monkey-wrenched" with random events that can be generated with dice, or as suggested things likely to arise from the specific character, culture, vegetation or habitation of a given part of the game's setting.  All without predetermining anything.

Effectively, the players create their own fates based on the actions they've taken thus far.  If they venture into a dungeon, then for brief periods the game can become linear; but once the dungeon is left behind, there are greater opportunities for both random events and player interventions, as they decide the scope and temper of the non-linear adventure they want to pursue.

With the last post, I proposed a long-scale structured existence based upon the movements of pieces on a chess board.  Expanding on that metaphor, consider: at some point in the distant past, the game setting was brought into existence out of the void by the dungeon master.  At the moment when the players enter the campaign, an amount of time has passed — presumably, many thousands of years, but not necessarily.  Our metaphorical chess board began with the advance of a single piece, followed by move after move until the arrangement reached the moment where the players entered the campaign.

I ask the reader now to imagine the game's continental setting as a chessboard of enormous proportions, with half a trillion squares and tens of millions of pieces.  Pieces can move anywhere on this board, but they're limited in how many squares they can move per turn.  It's fairly easy to find space to oneself, but to compete with other pieces requires coming into their influence, where they can kill you.  As with the previous metaphor, there are intrinsically "whitish" pieces and "blackish," ranging into grey pieces.  These work independently or in groups ... with allegiances potentially changing from moment to moment.  Unlike chess, most of the moves taken by these pieces are non-threatening (but we need not concern ourselves with this nuance, at present).

The players, then, are pieces themselves, moving from sphere to sphere of controlled areas, separated by dozens or hundreds of squares through which the players travel towards their next intended goal.  The party's colour on the board is entirely up to them; they can move about doing good or evil as they wish, depending on how they judge the threat imposed by other pieces.  As a faction, the party threatens groupings that form villages, but are not so much to those conglomerations that form towns and cities.

Wherever the players go, the pattern of response reflects what the players do or say.  There are already pre-existing factions operating wherever the players go; it's possible for the players to win one of these over, or more than one, or alienate one or all the factions that are present.  The players may potentially expand their faction by picking up stray pieces or stealing pieces from other factions.

An important point is this: chess is a game where little or nothing is hidden.  The board is open; the factions are obvious.  As the players remain in an area, we can pour information into their kettle and in no way ruin the quality of the game ... because the non-linear game is strengthened by information.  Information allows navigation of the various factions; it allows long-term strategy and the acquisition of power.  We may choose to occasionally obscure a motivation, or provide a secret ... be we can clearly see the lord in his town on the hill, his power over his village, those who attest to the lord's power and those who don't, and whom we might approach, or what actions we can take, to either aid or obstruct the lord's dominance.  The game ceases to be the piercing of mystery and becomes the assumption of authority.

Both are puzzles to be solved.  One is a vastly more difficult and uncertain puzzle.

As I delve deeper into this discussion of non-linear D&D, I'll be expanding the use of chess as a metaphor to describe relationships between time and space, and the acquisition of power.  If you are unfamiliar with chess, and wish to be a DM, then you have done yourself a disservice.  Chess is a game that teaches the player how to predict the moves of an opponent, while building a strategy of one's own moves into the future ... a strategy that has to repeatedly be adjusted each time the opponent moves.  While more highly structured than D&D, the habit of constantly playing in the future terrifically strengthens a DM's predictions of what players might do before they do it, especially as one gets to know one's players very well.  As I played chess for decades in my youth, preparing for as-yet-untaken actions, and changing my preparations constantly once actions are taken, has hard-wired flexibility into my performance as a DM.

Learn to play chess or give up DMing.  Or accept that you'll always be limited as a DM.  If you're over 40, and chess still isn't part of your experience, then chances are you'll have difficulty applying anything you learn in chess to D&D.  You're just too old to change.  With a lot of effort, and a thousand hours of play, you might advance as a DM; but it's more likely that, since you've never played chess, you see chess as silly and not worth your time.  Meaning you'll never accumulate those useful thousand hours.

Chess is a linear game, in that the pieces have a limited space in which to move, which consists of two dimensions.  Each side alternates in moving one piece, controlling the measure of time over what becomes a complex space.  That said, the gestalt of chess is multi-dimensional, in that different pieces move according to different rules, producing a non-linear interaction between single pieces or groups.  In the right arrangement, a bishop can attack a rook, without that rook being able to attack that bishop; in a different situation, the dynamic is reversed.  The strategy, then, consists of making it possible to attack one's enemy, while simultaneously reducing the enemy's opportunity to attack.

To explain how this dynamic materialises in D&D, beyond obvious comparatives relating to combat, allow me to use various chess tactics as metaphors for role-playing situations.  The seven I'll be discussing are forks, pins, skewers, batteries, discovered attacks, zwischenzugs and sacrifices.  In each case, try to think outside the limited theatre of combat, and rather in within the context of the players moving through the game's setting, encountering enemies or friends at a distance.  These are strategies that both the DM and the party can use, to gain advantage in either producing interesting situations, or overcoming obstacles to obtain power.  

Forks.

In chess, a fork is a tactic in which one piece threatens multiple pieces simultaneously.  Because only one move is possible in response, the defender can't counter every threat.  When used by a DM in D&D, this is a situation where the party and others are being threatened by a single force ... for example, an army approaching a city or a tsunami flooding inwards from the sea.  A similar situation might be having to deal with a large organisation seizing multiple, lesser groups in its collective tentacles.  The players may be able to flee from the situation, but in doing so they have to sacrifice others.  The DM can then stress the party's selfishness by forcing them to see how their self-preservation led to the suffering of others, preying on the player's humanity and building up the resentment needed to make the players act and not run.  The best strategy against a fork is to force the enemy's flank, to attack something the enemy has spend its energy to protect, so that the forking piece is arrested in place and can't move.  Then, all those threatened by the fork have time to escape the threat.

The players can use a fork by simultaneously threatening two enemy assets at the same time; this encourages the DM to create enemies that are more complex, and HAVE two or more assets (and not just one "big bad").  By learning which asset the enemy protects, the players can learn more about the enemy and succeed in weakening that enemy at the same time.  How the plan is accomplished is the party's problem.

Once either of these strategies are put in motion, it becomes fairly easy for the DM to see how a sequence of events can be built up on the fly: (1) there's a general threat against multiple entities; (2) the players decide if they have to save themselves or try to save others; (3) it's made clear to the players that the enemy has an alternative vulnerability; (4) the players decide if they dare to flank the enemy; (5) the players choices play out with a confrontation, deaths on both sides; (6) the players improve their position or the enemy does; (7) as DM, we introduce a new dynamic, either another fork or one of the other situations described below.  This pattern applies to all the situations named, with additional nuances and opportunities as can be proposed by the DM in game, based on what the players propose themselves.

Pins.

In chess, a pin is a tactic in which the attacked piece cannot be moved without causing the loss of a much more valuable piece.  For example, in D&D the players are caught in a chasm, facing an enemy force ... and yet have the opportunity to escape.  However, if they do escape, the enemy will pour through the chasm and slaughter women and children, or the rescued king laying on his sickbed, or destroy the gateway the party needs to return a lost party member.  The players are pinned, forced to resolve the situation by fighting the enemy ... or potentially, sending one of their number, or a message, to some ally the players have in order to attack the enemy's flank from outside the chasm.

Once again, this encourages the DM to create situations where the players HAVE allies, of some kind, whom they can call upon in times of trouble.  It calls on the DM to build situations where the players are either depended upon in a crunch situation, or are themselves the more valuable piece, while their allies are the ones being pinned.

Players, in turn, can use the pin by trapping an enemy in such a way that it dare not move without surrendering something more important.  For example, the players want to obtain the dragon's egg, but the dragon will die first in defending it.  IF the players can figure a way to "pin" the dragon, so that it cannot move without losing the egg, then the dragon's inability to move makes it more vulnerable to a prepared attack.

Skewers.

In chess, the skewer is similar to a pin, except that it's the valuable piece that's threatened.  When the valuable piece moves to protect itself, a lesser asset is easily seized.  In D&D, the DM threatens the party to a degree that they have to give ground and protect themselves, certain that they're going to die otherwise.  Whatever the party is protecting is secondary; the players won't give up their lives for it, but they're going to lose that thing because they were driven off.  Used by the DM, the tactic is cruel and effective, and sets up a series of adventures as the players struggle to get back whatever they've lost.  Likewise, the players can feel the pang of self-recrimination if their choice to protect themselves ended in the permanent loss of a thing.  Forever, the players will wonder if they could have held their ground, which affects the way they think about similar situations in the future.

The same applies to situations the party presses in its tactics.  If the vampire is sufficiently threatened, it will flee it's lair to protect itself.  The lair isn't as important as the vampire, but by destroying it, the players hurt the vampire's chances of protecting itself in the future while reclaiming a desecrated place.  The situation is thus ongoing, with the party obtaining a small victory.

Battery.

In chess, a battery is a formation that consists of two or more pieces, usually pawns, that stand on the same rank, forming a blockade defending some portion of the board.  In D&D, a battery is any situation where an enemy force is protected behind a fortification, or controls a part of the setting to such a degree that any approach is spotted and threatened.  In chess, batteries are broken apart by sacrificing a piece in attacking the blockade, or drawing the enemy out into other parts of the board so the battery lacks support.  Then, a supported piece can rush in, take a pawn, threaten the king behind the battery and survive, because there are no sufficient threats to the attacking piece.

If the players use this tactic in the game, they can figure out how to take down a castle, or root a villain out of a town quarter where everyone is the villain's ally, by systematically taking apart the defenses piece by piece.  Using distractions and sorties, the players can draw off a part of the enemy, or destroy a part of the enemy's camp, leaving the remainder less protected and less in number long enough for a well-focused attack to rush in and take the defenses apart.  The players dig under a wall, or sneak half a dozen members into the castle to start a fire, or kidnap an important person, or poison a well, or whatever hampering plan can be conceived of in order to weaken the defense for other assaults that come later.  Over time, with numerous "moves," the players can eventually take down any defense.

The DM can, of course, do all this to the party's castle.

Discovered attack.

In chess, a discovered attack occurs when a friendly piece is moved out of the way of an attacking friendly piece.  For example, a knight is moved, revealing a bishop's attack on the enemy queen.  As the enemy moves to protect the queen, the knight can move again, causing much havoc.

This is a great way of creating a threat to the party.  They are introduced to a potential enemy who, after negotiations, agrees to step aside to let the party act freely as they wish.  As the first enemy steps aside, the party suddenly finds there is some other enemy, who won't negotiate and will fight the party directly.  The party sets out from their holdings to take the fight to the second enemy, only to discover upon returning home that their holdings have now been destroyed by the first enemy.

Dealing with both enemies is now the party's problem and the set-up for a lengthy in-town campaign, which enables us to aid the party by providing allies who have also been wronged by both enemies.  So the fight goes, with the players being harassed on both sides, but encouraged to feel that if they can eventually wipe out both enemies, they'll own this town.

The players can use the tactic exactly as above, with one half of the party pretending to be the first enemy, while the other half acts as the second.  Similar situations can be invented by both DM and players through the use of additional groups of monsters and allies who weigh in on one side or the other.

Zwischenzug.

In chess, a zwischenzug is a tactic in which the player, instead of playing the expected move, does something wholly unexpected while imposing an immediate threat the opponent must answer.  For example, instead of attacking the battery and threatening the king with my rook, instead I take this opportunity to exchange my bishop for the enemy's knight ... because my opponent's taking my bishop changes the position of his pieces in a way that works in my favour.  THEN I attack the battery.

There are all sorts of bizarre ways this can be used by a DM and by players.  Most of the time, doing anything unexpected is good.  The effect of altering the circumstances for the players, by introducing some element of the setting into the mix, makes them hyper-aware that they can never be sure of anything.  For example, the players decide to break into a workshop to kidnap the blacksmith, who knows how to get into the town's North Tower.  Just as the players are about to kick in the front door, a fireball engulfs the formerly quiet, dark apothecary's shop across the street.  In seconds, the street is inexplicably filled with some unnatural creature that the party must confront ... until the blacksmith also comes out from the workshop to see what's going on, with varying other peoples too.  Is this a good time to still kidnap the blacksmith?  Only the party would know.

If the party is clever, they can set up distractions like this also, but obviously the DM has many more opportunities to do so.  The key is remembering that the zwischenzug mostly likely has nothing whatsoever to do with the adventure ... except that once it's occurred, it can add flavour by creating a completely different sequence of events with which the party may also have to cope.

Sacrifice.

In chess, a sacrifice is a move in which one side surrenders a piece with the objective of gaining a tactical advantage.  A caught informer kills himself rather than surrendering information; a low-level mage uses burning hands in a shed full of lamp oil, to destroy an enemy protected behind guards and wards next door.  A high-level lieutenant dies in an attempt to overcome the enemy's bastion, which temporarily offers a reprieve from the enemy's siege weapon batteries.  A non-levelled hireling tries to hold back a dragon "for a few rounds."

Players can sacrifice themselves with the expectation that their body can be recovered and themselves be raised; or they can sacrifice their hirelings or followers.  The effect this has on a series of events making up the campaign has much to do with how well the players have thought the sacrifice through, and what steps they've taken to exploit it.  The DM's part is to give the players the benefit of the doubt, to rationalise what the probable response would be and then to play the game out as honestly as possible.

Conclusion

In each of the above cases, an action sets up a counteraction, just as we'd expect on a chessboard.  Opponents move to protect their assets, or regroup to try a different attack, while the players do the same.  Once the moves begin to take place, the next logical move on the DM's part should emerge just as if the DM were a player and the players were the DM.  As the players invent a strategy, the DM puts his or herself into the head of the NPC, decides how the NPC responds, expresses that response by providing players with information about what effect they've had on the campaign (Remember: hide as little as possible!) and the back and forth alternate play of the campaign should develop organically.

This ideal isn't based on some silly theory of always saying "yes" or "no."  It's based on what ought to happen, given what we know about what's previously happened, and given what we know about how the NPCs would respond, given that they're peasants, guards, a particular kind of villain or monster, or whatever else we've assigned to their personality.  That response should be defensible, rational, reasonable and with an eye to contributing to the ongoing process of the campaign.  Choices by the DM should reflect the creation of more possible choices for the players, which they'll limit by making their choice and thus rendering former alternatives now impossible.

Above all that's been said on the subject so far, we have a singular constant that we can turn to as a model on which to render this game proceeding:  human history.

All that I've described is visible in the interactions we've witnessed as a people and as individuals since the beginning of the world.  We can study conflicts to understand how people respond to conflict.  We can study the creation of good things, like supportive networks and civilising projects, to discover what resistance arose in response to those efforts and how that resistance manifested.  Looking around for what the players can do in a game, we have millions of examples of what people HAVE done, locally, in foreign places, last year, a hundred years ago and thousands of years ago.  The pattern of human history has been an exercise in the ongoing patterns of time affecting the available space, with humans choosing how to make use of time to change space.

Understanding the human project, studying psychology, anthropology and other subjects I mentioned with the last post, explains what I mean when I say that something ought to logically follow if the players do "this," just as we can guess what the players will do if we as a DM have the enemy do "that."

This formula transfers our power as DM to willy-nilly do things ad hoc into a dynamic frame in which we do things as we honestly believe would result, whether or not that "fits" into our desires or expectations.  Letting ourselves accept results because they're what we would expect to happen, and not what we want to happen, drives an engine that does run the game world ... and yes, almost as if by magic.

If you've enjoyed this post, and yet you find yourself so overwhelmed that you're unable to produce a rational comment, don't worry.  You have an alternative.

Pursuing a Dynamic, Running Model

The matter of running players in a game world should be seen a problem, in the frame of something to be solved.  Like the riddles inside D&D, the game itself, and how it's mastered, is a riddle.  The joy and satisfaction inherent in being a dungeon master derives from one's fascination with this riddle, and the various efforts by which we set ourselves to solve it.

The verb "run" is commonly used for something a device does - for example, a car runs, or a watch runs.  And so for the present, I propose that instead of thinking of the game world as something that we run, that we set out to design a setting that runs itself.  Such a design would exist to provide answers to the riddle of how to master the game, providing for the intents and desires not only of the players but also the dungeon master.  The setting would therefore have to surpass the limitation of being an artistic rendering of maps, backgrounds and collections of monsters organised as dungeons.  In effect, the setting would exist to suggest, even compel, certain answers and explanations that the DM could draw upon during the game's running.

We have numerous frameworks in place that we can invoke to aid us in conceiving a dynamic formulation of the game's setting ... one in which the various active forces are out of balance, producing motion through the exchange of power throughout the system.  To explain that another way, we're seeking a world that is in a constant state of energy, potential and kinetic, that drives a pouring out of conflicts that the players may encounter at different times, and in different ways, as they move about the setting.

For the traditional theist, this sounds like a grandious embellishment of a far more moderate difficulty.  The solution, most would say, is simple: build a closed system, populate it with monsters, puzzles and traps, then introduce the players so they can investigate and sort the arrangement.  Repeat.  Various closed systems can then be strung together and that is called a "campaign."

I do not concur.  I believe the problem lends itself to a more dramatic design, though such requires the designer to wrestle with various metaphysical concepts, the scope of human knowledge, facts, fancy and narrative fabrication ... subjects that, typically in case of most people, are abandoned upon the day of one's graduation and never juxtaposed with activities seen as "entertainment."  The Venn-diagram of "play" overlapping with "think" presupposes a mere sliver of the populace ... but since I find myself in that sliver, let's move on with how we might achieve a dynamic setting design for D&D.

To understand conflict, we need to grasp the distribution of power within the game's setting, beginning with the single entity whose power is absolute — the DM.  Thus introduces the first problem: the DM cannot exercise power and maintain the game's integrity.  We must therefore restrain the DM's power to keep ourselves from using it.  Cosmetically, this is done by requiring the DM to adhere to the same rules at the players, including tossing the dice openly where they can be read and interpreted by everyone ... but there are too many instances where the game demands the withholding of information from the players in order to make the narrative functional, such as the space behind this as-yet-unopened door.  In such cases, the DM's power continues to be unrestrained.

We can provide limitation by insisting that the DM predetermine events before the players arrive on the scene ... but again, to rely upon this all the time depends on creating game elements that quickly become stale with repetition.  Dynamism requires the DM to react and respond intuitively to the players on matters that cannot possibly be predetermined, since the DM does not know what a player might say or do before that moment in the game.  Predetermination makes fair dungeons; it's a disastrous tactic when any other part of the setting is in play.

Therefore I propose a strategy in which the DM is required to share and divide his or her power among the entities inside game's setting [and not, to stress, with the players!].  The power division is arbitrary, of course; the DM possesses absolute power.  Once the division is made, however, the DM freely respects the division, having made it.

This division is profound and intuitive ... and naturally, the reader must be lost until it's explained how the division is made.  Patience ... these sentences can be read again once more context is gained and understood.  For the present, see the DM's power as a collection of game pieces arranged on a board; and suppose these pieces represent the dualism of the DM's personality: darkness and light, evil and good, despair and triumph.  Thus, a given power is not bestowed into one game piece, but two ... so that in the vast dynamic driving the mechanically running setting, there is a piece dedicated to destruction and evil, and a piece dedicated to nurturing and good.

For simplicity, imagine that we are speaking of pieces on a chess board; each of the 32 pieces represents a super-ranking power, something far larger than individual empires or religions, races or ideas.  Let's say for the present, individual powers that are too large to grasp.  At the moment when we decide that there will be a game world, none of the pieces have moved.  Yet we plan to move them, and have them war against one another.  Every move is up to us; we can therefore decide, before advancing white's kings pawn, the first move, that white will lose this battle.  Or we can decide that white must win.  In any case, that is not the only outcome we decide — we also decide the order of the moves.  If white is destined to win, there are still trillions of ways the pieces can be moved to ensure that win.  Until, of course, the game is set in motion.

With each move, the number of possible variations rapidly dwindles, especially if we already know that either white or black must win.  Consider: the game must be ongoing when the players are introduced into "the game."  When the game is over, so is the universe, so presumedly the players are introduced at some point when it's still impossible to tell which side has the better position ... especially since the board still has most or every piece upon it, in play, while importantly the players are utterly unable to see the whole board.

From the perspective of an amoeba poised upon the chess board, the setting's powers appear as an immense forest of immovable, unassailable towers of unimaginable strength and endurance.  That pawn is as large as a continent; it has stood there since the world's construction and it looks as though it will stand there forever.  This perception is all the more certain if the amoeba's consciousness is a few seconds, when a move on the board takes place once a minute.  And that move may happen on the other side of the board, out of sight, with the elimination of a piece the amoeba may never have conceived of, much less grasped the importance of its disappearance.

In dividing our power among the pieces, we limit ourselves by setting up the game's arrangement so that only a few possibilities are rational.  Yes, we could have white stupidly move its horse to an untenable position, but that would be devastating to white's survival.  If we want white to win, then we must not do that, no matter what our powers may be.  Nor if we want white to win, should we allow black to make a stupid move, because for our purposes the game is better if black fights back as best it can.

Nor will we simply restore white's horse, on a whim, using our absolute power.  We've agreed to distribute that power into the pieces, wresting it from ourselves.

To step out from the metaphor, then:

The various entities of the game world are a vast collection of individual pieces, each of which has a varying amount of power.  The combined influence of all the religions of the world, for example, has enormous power; a single goblin has much, much less.  Yet each possesses it's tiny influence, like the butterfly's wing that beats upon the air.  Ahead of time, as DM, I've decided not only what exists in the world, but the general trajectory the world is taking towards some other world it will become in the future.  Like the game in play.  The tiny, insignificant pieces the players encounter in the world each have their part to play in that trajectory ... and therefore each must make moves that make sense in the context surrounding the players at a given time.

This context defines what I'll let myself do as a DM and what I won't do.  Therefore it doesn't matter what I can do as "god" ... my powers as god are divided into the limited choice of movements available to that river, this cultural group, that besieging army or this goblin.  Not all the intricate, tiny moves are planned in advance, because as I've said above, that would produce a tired and stale, lethargic campaign.  But where the players are concerned, their direct influence simply isn't enough to easily unbalance the huge pillars of the world.  Try as they might, the players may bring down a kingdom, or a series of kingdoms, but they won't destroy the institution of monarchical power, or the ongoing march of scientific exploration.  The players, and the things they affect, are paltry compared with the gigantic 32 pieces on my chessboard.  They cannot even grasp the fullness those pieces represent.  I'm certain I can't.

That doesn't matter.  There are various grand forces aligned against one another, blasting the players this way and that, as they try to make their way through the world.  The particulars of what those alignments seek to achieve, and how they conflict with one another, is measured by an entirely different set of parameters, which I shall undertake to describe with the next post.  Here I take my leave, first taking the time to express once again that an approach of the kind I describe requires a constant and thorough investigation into the premises upon which our real world is founded.  Those premises are all around us, characterised with labels we scarcely understand: psychology; anthropology; politics; philosophy; relativity; religion; evolution; economics; and so on.  Subjects that even experts admit to understanding only in part ... and yet I ask the gentle reader to become as familiar with each as they can, to empower the fundamentals on how to transfer one's absolute power as DM to a dynamic-creating framework that will run one's setting almost as if by magic.

A Furtherance to the Effects of Guidance on D&D

D&D is a religion?  Alexis is well off his cracker this time.

I had a lot of trouble with the last post.  The subject material kept drifting, whereupon I'd kill several paragraphs and start again.  Altogether, I wrote three times as many words as the post ended up being.  Worse thing is ... I want to write it over.

Religion is theatre ... but unlike the theatrical play, that's been around for only 500 years, or film that's just over a hundred, or television that's passing 80, religious theatre has been in development for more than 5,000 years.  As it happens, "theatre" grew out of miracle plays, recently mentioned on this blog.  The Passion of the Christ grew from Medieval performances taking place 900 years ago.  Where it comes to reworking and rewriting the same story over time, there's something to be said when dozens of generations take up the pen to address the plot line.

Each nuance, each line, gets remarkable degrees of attention.  The same can be said for every visual cue we might witness laid out in a Cathedral, even something as late as the Notre-Dame Basilica in Montreal, which was constructed in stages between 1824 and 1843.

Nothing is left to chance.  Every inch is built upon a precept existing in other churches reaching back to Roman temples and earlier.  The presentation dwarfs the viewer.  Not only does it seek to awe the viewer, it also forces the viewer to look upon the scene with affection and attachment.  Imagine growing up as a child in this church ... visiting it up through the years until becoming an adult.  And then imagine having some reason to take a stand against the church, and risk never being allowed to enter this place again, that you've known since being a child.  Compare churches like this to what the world was like in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries.  It's miraculous.  Can you imagine the self-will it took, the degree of anger and resentment required, for the iconoclasts of any century to enter a place like this and tear it apart?

All the hundreds of variant elements of D&D, as a body of design and rules, puts its unique pressure on the DM to see that it's included.  We must have magic; we must have these races and these classes; we must have critical hits and shields must be smashed.  We must have dragons and giants, medusae and chimera, ghosts and vampires, gods and alternate planes of existence, because all these things together have their individual parts to play.  From this I acknowledge how this same argument calls for the needful inclusion of all those modules that players have grown up with, that reach back in time to the 1970s.  That too is part of the game's core for most.

Deviations, then, are difficult.  Your choice to include calculating encumbrance, or how much food is eaten, or spell components, risks a player declining your game after a single session.  You'd better know what you're doing before heaping a lot of new rules on players who are used to playing the familiar form of the game ... because up front, they're not going to see the benefit of new rules.  It's easy for me, now, to bring a new player into my campaign, since there are seven other players who have already embraced all my new rules.  Peer pressure works in my favour.  But if you, the DM, are the only one defending your rules to a mob that knows none of them ... beware, because none have any reason to be on your side from the outset.

This is a point that I must stress regarding both your game building and the setting you put that in.  Start with the familiar.  Get them on board with your DMing style, your skills at presentation, your ability to play back-and-forth with the players as they make decisions and you offer consequences and returns.  Prove that you can run, first.  Only then should you ask for a little more.  They have to know us, and trust us, and have reason to invest in us, before we jump in and start changing their game to ours.

That approach improves the possibilities of our building the game and setting with these specific players in mind.  We can feel their resistance to some proposed rules more than others.  With time, we're able to sense with what, and when, to introduce a bold new concept into the campaign, not only in terms of rules but also as to the behaviour of NPCs or cultural norms the party might confront.  One reason why I've been able to inculcate sex into my campaigns originates with players who have come to trust me as a DM, who know that if I bring up the subject, it isn't going to somewhere lewd and tasteless.  I've worked for that trust, as much as I work to maintain it.  No matter what I might theoretically discuss as a rule for D&D, I always have the voice of my players in my head constraining my willingness to introduce that thing.  I know them, just as they've come to know me.

This is where the metaphor of religion comes into it: the priest is as beholden to the flock as they are to his counsel.  A priest is a fool to think it appropriate to act like a dictator; and a fool to let others bully and dictate what they want from their priest.  A priest leads.  It's done humbly, with concern, with kind words ... but the congregation is led despite themselves, often without knowing it.  That is the essential skill of DMing.  To lead without looking like we're leading; to make the players see what's best for them while letting them decide it's what they wanted the whole time.