Practice

As I write this, the number of pages that have been transferred on the wiki has now reached 437.  This is not bad for work that began on February 20th.  That's 22 days.

More than 200 of those pages have been straight up spell descriptions.  Much of the balance has been sage fields and studies.  But I have a considerable number of pages remaining ... and as I proceed, I am stunned at the amount of material I've been able to accumulate ~ just as I'm surprised that I launched the wikispaces wiki as long ago as 2011.  Somehow, it doesn't seem like six years.

I try to relate this experience of building a wiki to the first six years of my playing D&D, between 1979 and 1985.  Back then, I could never have imagined a project on this kind of scale.  I was still scrambling then, learning how to play, full of doubts about everything I started ... and constantly throwing out material and starting again, because nothing seemed to work, nothing satisfied.  Not that I cared.  I was so happy to be working at the process, blissfully ignorant that all the work I would do in those days would be nothing more than practice for the work I do now.

Practice is a funny thing.  Look back at the 2,500+ posts on this blog and think about how each post represents an hour of my life; and then think how this is only the start of the time I've spent writing since this blog began in 2008, adding in books, some of which are meant to be finished, some which will never be finished.

Add to that the 300 paid-for freelance articles I wrote for real estate magazines between 2001 and 2009, along with the article-a-week I wrote for five years for the business magazine I worked for between 2004 and 2009.  There's 600 hours of writing, plus 1,200 hours of research ... and that takes no account of the freelance writing that was never bought and paid for, or the work I did for myself in those years, that no one ever read, because it was never put up on a blog for examination.

So what does that come to ... about 6,000 hour of writing that I can account for between 2001 and the present.  I'll let the reader roll that around for a moment.

Think on this.  I began to write for my own pleasure in 1976.

I have no idea how much time I've spent writing.  I was published first in a school magazine in '82 ... and then here and there as a runner-up for insignificant writing contests throughout the 80s.  I didn't get any real notice until I started writing for the university newspaper in 1988 ... and then I wrote two or three articles, op ed pieces or reviews for four years.  I got some freelance work after university, started a couple of Zines, small-circulation self-published magazines that we distributed around coffee houses in the city.  I wrote virtually all the content for those, between 12 and 15 pages worth, whatever I could think of fill pages.

Okay, I'm sorry.  I've been going on for too long and I'm just hammering the anvil at this point.  I'm trying to explain that most of that time, right up to time spent on this blog, has all been practicing.  Most of all that writing isn't worth showing to anyone, ever.  I threw out about two hundred pounds of writing just a couple years ago.  It had only one value: that doing all that then makes it possible for me to do what I do now.

Now, think on this.  I have spent more time working on my D&D world than I have spent writing.  Granted, they are often the same thing ~ one feeds the other.  But with map-making, table-making, drawing dungeons, running the game, whatever ... it has been uncounted thousands of hours since I discovered this game in 1979.

Those first six years, working on the game was like a fever.

I drew scores of maps just like this, once.

If sometimes I sound recalcitrant, or doubtful, or resistant to a "new" idea, I can only explain that it's not a new idea and I've tried it ... or at least, something very like it.  Once upon a time, before many of a reader was born, I tried alignment.  I tried hit location.  I tried weapon-defense mechanics.  I tried mega-dungeon making.  I tried most everything that I've ever condemned on this blog (with the exception of stat arrays; jeez, who would need to?); or I've slimmed it down so tight that it doesn't need further examination.

Take this new fad, "session zero."  This is nothing more than introducing a player to the campaign and rules of a campaign.  On a need-to-know plan ~ what does a player really need to know in order play in my game ~ I can do this in about five minutes.  Or less.  If you're the kind of player that can't adapt to "not knowing" stuff that doesn't need to be known, or shouldn't be known, I don't need to cater to you; I need to move you along.  You're in the wrong place.

I don't couch this compulsion to make the game inclusive; I can't afford the time to run everybody.  I just need enough people to make up my game ... and after thousands and thousands of hours spent in practicing my craft, I can either entice those people into my game right up front, or convert them from the thinking they've acquired from DMs who have practiced only a few hundred hours.

I mean to disparage no one.  Nor to make anyone despair.  I was lucky when I started.  There was no one around who could claim to have played for thirty or forty years.  Starting just five years after the invention of the game, in a climate where so few people played, it was easy to feel as entitled as anyone to "knowing how to play."  It is a lot harder now ... with old horses like me around, carping on our time spent ... it's almost necessary to say to oneself, "Fuck him, what does he know."

I get that.  But if you are starting, and you have only a few years behind you, with one or two thousand hours to your credit, realize that this is all just practice for you.  You're a long, long way from really understanding what you can add to the game, or what the game means.

There's a lot more here than you can begin to fathom.

The Scientific Method

Very well, if you've read the last post ... how can we advance our games along the lines of hypothesis, research, testing and proof?

To begin with, we're the scientists; and like those early investigators of the 17th and 18th century, our resources are limited and our collection of guinea pigs is limited.  You might get yourself into a position where you can study the response of ten or twenty people, but chances are that right now you only have your party to work with.  Rest assured, this doesn't matter.  You're not curing cancer, you're only improving your game ~ and you're never going to run it for the mass majority, anyway.  What matters here is that you get your methodology under control, and that you stop wasting time.

I have some suggestions; these are not mine.  They are based on the principles of the scientific method, which has stood the test of time for nearly four centuries, so it dwarfs all of us.

1.  Stop Assuming that every new effort, system, plan or design is going to work.  A hypothesis is a proposal, not a solution.  It is a working guess at the questions or problems that have arisen, associated with your particular game.  Once you get it into your head that "new" does not automatically equate to "better," you have a much better chance of systematically doing the research on what's "old" before kicking it to the ditch.

An hypothesis is a response to a pattern that we have noticed during play.  The way the players respond, or act, when encountering particular things, the level of resistance or resentment about certain rules and so on.  The pattern need not be negative: we might want to know why players responded so well to something we did, so that we can reproduce the effect.

As I said, the hypothesis does not look for a solution!  It is, rather, looking for the cause behind something.  We're trying to explain, not eliminate.  Therefore, the proposal we make is not about what might happen if we do something; it is, rather, an explanation.  "I think the players were resistant to running away because ..."; and then going from there.

We should not begin from a place like, "If we do this, the players will run away next time."  That is poor methodology on many levels: first, it assumes already that we know why the players ran away; it assumes we already have the solution; and we're already biased towards the solution we've created, because we haven't based that solution on any research, but rather on our gut.  Our personal observations, then, are bound to remove any practical benefit we might get from the experiment.

2.  Test the hypothesis.  Fair enough ... but how?  The guideline here is to build an experiment that changes nothing about the previous situation, while enabling us to take notes.  Let's say, for example, that recently the party refused to run away from a fight they were losing, and as a result they nearly died or a total-party-kill resulted.  And now, to understand better what happened, we want to build an experiment that we can test.

Let's pick a hypothesis.  I'll propose three:

• The Players don't seem to care very much about their characters; they're ready to roll the die and hope for good results because they're not really losing anything.
• The Players won't give up a fight from a sense of shame; they'd rather lose straight up than feel like cowards who ran from a fight.
• The Players can't see it coming.  Everything seems fine, they think they have it under control, but they don't realize the circumstance until it is too late.

I'm going to suggest the second hypothesis: that the players feel shame.

Now, standard practice for DMs who have just caused a TPK is to rush at a solution: "I'm never going to let that happen again."  This is no way to build an experiment.  During the TPK, as it presented itself, the DM was likely in as much distress as the players ... and was, therefore, not paying attention.

To test our hypothesis, what we want is to engineer another possible TPK, watch what happens and make notes.

[As an aside, I suggested this scheme to my daughter, who immediately went to this place with it:

... sorry I haven't got a better copy]

Now, relax.  I'm not suggesting that parties are guinea pigs and that we should deliberately kill them just so we can watch.  I'm not Dr. Mengele.

I am saying, however, that if we create the potential for another TPK, knowing that the player's behaviour will once again be tested in the same manner, we can prepare ourselves in advance and take notes (mentally) about what happens.  Were this a legitimate experiment, we could have an outside observer, preferably a sociology or psychology student, come along and sit in ... but that is probably out of the question.

Whatever the reader's personal take on this proposal (and obviously, it would not be questionable if I had chosen a less sensitive subject than TPKs), our goal here is to gather data.  What do the players say?  Do they equate the present situation with one that occurred earlier.  Are some people suggesting that maybe everyone should be pulled back, only to be shut down by other, more reckless players?  Do the players seem to draw upon irrational bravado?  Are there signs of comprehending that they're going to lose?  What happens?

We can't draw a general theory about the potential and implementation of situations resulting in total-party-kills without examining the data, refining our hypothesis, observing relevant, isolated situations (single player deaths), rejecting bad guesses that isn't supported by the data and, on the whole, finding out if we know what the hell we're talking about.

3.  Stop Guessing.  Virtually all the content surrounding the betterment of campaigns is nothing more than guesswork.  If we try A, B might result.  This could improve your running.  "I'm not saying this is right, this is just the way I do it."  And so on.

If you don't know something, stop presenting the proposal as though it is, "known."  I could just as easily make a hypothesis that all online DMs who talk about their game worlds or systems are influenced by knowing that they are being observed by their own players.  As a result ~ still hypothesizing ~ they puff up their feathers in order to look more sure of themselves than they really are.

To find out how much they really know, it is necessary to a) test them personally, by asking questions, to see what sort of clear, factual responses you get, as opposed to nonsense hedging and misdirection; and b) test their players, asking what they think of the DMs position and advice.

For myself, my players are right there to be asked.  Some will definitely not agree that I am a good DM; there have been hard feelings all over the online campaigns.  My data says that I am a good DM for some players, but I am not for many, many others.  I don't imagine that anyone can be "good" for all the players ~ realistically, I just have to be good for enough players.  That is a general theory I've developed.

I expect people reading this blog to disagree with me, and often; I am just surprised how often they seem to disagree on matters where no evidence is being presented on their part, but plenty of evidence exists on mine.  I believe, from my observations, based on the grammar being used to express themselves, that "guessing" is more commonly relied upon than knowing.

If a DM has been running games for 30 years, it is probable that they are a good DM for a sufficient number of players ... and it is also probable that their experience at recognizing patterns in their games results in doing the right thing when the moment comes along.  It does not follow, however, that this means they "know" what that right thing is.  More likely, given the advice, given the patterns of speech and given the lack of hard data presented, they are responding instinctively to a problem, not cognitively.

And that's fine.  For most of us, instinct is more than enough to get us through.  It will make a great firefighter, a great cop, a great doctor, a great artist and a great lover.  What it will not make is a great educator.  An educator has to be able to explain how and why something works for someone who doesn't understand it; and that's not possible with only gut instinct to guess from.

So before trying to educate yourself, start from learning, not guessing.

P.S.,

Obviously, the TPK experiment can't be performed just once.  We'll never duplicate results that way.

Research

Regarding the document from my last post; we can start with the structure and content section, requirements:

The projecting of the structure and content of training ... [for] the presence of significant problem from the view point of its research and creative nature that require integrated knowledge, research for its solution.

In English:  we want to identify what we need to know, for the purpose of relaying that information, about the research behind and the creative nature of role-playing.  We want an identifiable, single body of knowledge, so that we will be able to improve that knowledge, as a solution for further study and the creation of competence in dungeon mastering, or if you prefer, game mastering.

And ... wow.  Impossible, right?  No one agrees with anyone else, there's a concerted propaganda to argue that there is "no right way" and anyone who dares propose that there might be is condemned for inflexibility and being entitled.  The problem is further complicated by the "research" being 80 different significant game rule designs, all of which are integrated to some degree, as they share concepts, but not philosophies.  The first identifier everyone in role-playing uses is to reach for a tribal definition: I play 3rd edition, or I play Pathfinder, or I play [insert game title/genre here].  And that tribalism further subdivides into what rules group A plays versus group B.

Worse, the "research" itself produces uncertain, inconsistent results.  If we were talking about some other study, an evidentiary body of consistent results tends to emerge, which steadily drives the knowledge of that study in a particular, agreed-upon direction.  As more and more data piles up, one scientist after another begins to agree that something is clearly going on with the climate ... even as the issue itself is debated and/or ridiculed.  Role-playing games, which lack evidentiary support for anything about the game, as they suffer from a lack of meaningful studies, seems to point in no direction, a proposition which is embraced by a great many practitioners who don't want too close an investigation to be made into their practices.

So we're fucked.  The most anyone can offer for "knowledge" is to say, "I do it this way," or "Try this and it will work," which no effort of any kind is being made to say, "This worked" or "This didn't."  The ordinary RPG pundit on youtube is safe in proposing anything that sounds like it has potential, without the least concern that a great many people will respond with one voice, if the proposal is a farce.

But for all the proof or verification that exists for such advice, we might just as well tell DMs that they should kill a cat at midnight in an unkempt cemetery near an abandoned church at five minutes after midnight of the Spring Equinox ~ just 11 days left to obtain a cat and locate your site.  Maybe you can go to your local games store and get a group to go do it as an event.  Don't forget to Youtube it.

The alternative to the nihilism that pervades the role-playing community is, however, as the quote above says.  Research.  Investigation.  Not just supposition, but hypothesis, with a clear agenda that the hypothesis will then be tested in a lab, to determine what results, and what results can be repeated over and over with further experimentation.  That is, the same process that has united the rest of human knowledge into a forward, non-faith-based direction.

Rather than another scattered opinion-fest surrounding the importance of use and importance of armor or weapons, or how game design might be implemented to possibly bring about a change, which can then only ever be tried on one group of people by any one particular DM, how about we just stop until the data comes in?

This is what my online campaign blog was supposed to offer: evidence that my particular approach to D&D was not just a collection of words, but that it could be seen to work in the speech and actions of players who were actually responding to my philosophy.  Yet each time, in the recent debate, that I proclaimed that my combat system, as it stood, was working spectacularly well, with evidence to prove it, this evidence was flat out ignored.  When I said that the error in the campaign was my own, and not the combat system, because I should have gone ahead and killed the party, because they insisted on putting on their armor, that was also ignored.  Instead, the discussion devolved into pure, unsubstantiated opinion, that some rule change might have caused the party to feel less desiring to put on their armor first, thus [I conjecture] saving me the need to kill the party.

We, as a community, fall into this trap again and again. We don't acknowledge the evidence.  Instead, we turn to our prejudices about a particular element of the game [and combat is the worst!], and then argue again and again, in a circle, around those prejudices, without evidence, without rigorous investigation, without experimentation.  We jump right to a conclusion as though, in some way, because we feel a particular way because of our supposed experience, all that falderol with hypothesis, research, testing and proof just isn't necessary.

But the thing is, all that is necessary!  Because we are getting nowhere.  We're just wasting our time with this.

For people who claim they haven't time to waste building a campaign or to find the time to play more than once a fortnight, that's absurd.  The game deserves better.