Beyond Concrete

[You can read today's post on The Higher Path here]
[You can read today's post on Authentic Adventures Inc. here]

I wonder that people have conversations about whether or not D&D is played to get experience and levels.  It is precisely the sort of distraction that indicates a human inability to express itself where it comes to abstract things.

Of course we don't play to rack up numbers.  Even the people who say they play for that reason don't.  No one plays Monopoly to buy properties; no one would say they play baseball because for the sole reason that they like to catch balls or make base hits.  We don't play chess to take rooks.  We don't play golf to successfully hit out of the rough.  These things matter, obviously; they are part of the game's play.  But we don't play expressly for those reasons, nor does anyone ever think that we do.

The very fact that this conversation about experience comes up often is indicative of our inability to express why we do play.  Barking alien says, "I play to explore an idea, create a personality, and to follow my character's story."  Unquestionably, I sincerely do not discredit this.  These things are, themselves, facets of the game and not the reason itself.  It is an attempt to take something that is essentially inexpressible and put it into some sort of box that we can grasp in our minds.  The same happens when we say we play for fun or for the companionship of our friends, or for problem solving or for any of the things we see people on line writing.

There is a condition within that says that until we explain ourselves, we haven't given others a legitimate reason for our obsession or infatuation with a given thing.  Sometimes, when we're caught up with something that overwhelms us, or which we understand affects us more greatly than other people, we find ourselves looking for phrases as though we're a lawyer explaining our case in front of a judge.  We want others ~ even others like ourselves ~ to understand how deeply we care or think about a thing, and we search around for descriptions that will somehow decode our feelings into hard, concrete evidence.

That's natural.  It is also unnecessary.

The largest things in our lives defy description.  And they should.  We shouldn't ever feel that we need to explain why we do the things we love.  We wouldn't expect to be able to explain why we love our partners; or what the country we live in really means to us.  We can't hope to explain why we've chosen to believe the things we do ... and no one, ever, expects us to.  Unless they have some absurd complex, they're willing to accept these things about us on principle.  You love your husband.  You love your country.  I'm not going to put you through an interrogation asking why.  That would be ridiculous.

All right.  We love D&D.  Who cares why?

Manon

Very well, it has to be this version of role-play.  But why do I love it?  Why do I not simply 'like' it? Naturally, most find it difficult to express the notion of love, or it's source, but this has been the purpose of the series I've been writing and now I've successfully gotten myself into a corner.  I have to knuckle down and explain. Genuinely.  For when I read people talk about the parts of things they love, like role-play, they seem to be pick words so as not to embarrass themselves, or reveal too much.  This always seems mendacious to me . . . and if we're going to talk about things we love, I don't believe we should begin from a position that is timidly fraudulent.

This said, I love control.  Seriously - the aspects provided by DMing that make me master of my house. Ego habis totalis dominatus. After all, who doesn't love that?  The game provides for it, demands it really, and the players willingly subject themselves to the power cheerfully, avidly and persistently.  Which means that I am exempt from the ethical framework that says one person in the context of a group has no more importance or value than any other person.  For all the egalitarian shit that I tolerate outside the framework of my campaign, both on and off line, for a six hour period, once a week, in a context where it is not only tolerated, but condoned, I am free from having to pretend that I'm just like everyone else.

It is like getting off the plane in Tortola, and seeing this:

More to the point, however, I possess all this power as someone without a desire to abuse it.  Were I interested in power that I could abuse, I would establish myself on Vancouver Island with a Bible and a book I had written about correct behaviour with respect to that Bible, and begin a religion. There's a whole lot more money in falsifying a religion, a whole lot more power . . . and the power flows out of a spigot, non-stop, until the babies are born or the state catches up.

By then, obviously, I would have taken my money, my 'family' and my ego to Tortola.

I love role-play in that I have all this power, and I don't need to use it.  Or rather, that it can be used to build a platform upon which players can obtain power that satisfies them.  Meanwhile, I get to watch.  Whereas I know for some, this means watching players jump through their hoops, I find the larger satisfaction in watching the players make hoops in my world, that they then jump through to satisfy themselves.  Heck, it's a good show for me.  I never know what these players will do.  What fools these mortals be.

DMs who get a kick out of watching a player jump through a hoop of their creation, when the whole world is there to be stormed through, sought through or relaxed upon, reminds me of the religionist who gets excited about God having created a chicken when the sun, 821,000 miles across, blazes overhead.  Scale.  My being DM isn't a question of my running a game show for contestants.  It isn't even being a coach watching his team perform well.  To quote, "If God and the Devil were playing football, Manon would be the stadium they played on."

If this seems a bit megalomaniacal, or worrying, then too bad.  If you're going to present a world for your friends, a world worth having, go big.  Make sure it counts for something.  Don't equivocate, don't downplay your part.  Because if your world is good enough, your players won't care how narcissistic you are, nor how arrogant.  Trust me in this, as someone who has possessed these characteristics for a long, long . . . long time.  Players do not mind that DMs are pompous louts - so long as they are pompous louts who make a good game.

To do that requires an arrogance that is not self-absorbed.  The DM requires a haughtiness that is not fully self interested.  I'm amazing - but so are my players.  I love power - because it feels great to give it away. I'm a boastful, bragging, conceited, egomaniacal asshole - but I take pride in stepping out of the way and letting the players HAVE the spotlight.  Not merely 'share,' mind, but have it.  Full on.  Unreservedly.

Because I am that amazing that I know I'll take it back when its time to make the next thing happen.

It just feels so damn good to play a game like this - not only when I am actually running, but the rest of the time as well - when I am designing, thinking, writing, researching and so on.  All with the approval of others. All with the shining look in their eyes that I'm going to see when I say, "Finally, the book is done, we can start running again."

Because they can't wait.

How could I not love this game?

A Very Simple Ideal

I suppose I can't wait.

We can call this Part II of why I love D&D.  And as I said with my previous post, that requires separating why I love D&D, and why I don't love the various other near-forms of D&D.  What is it, exactly, that separates this one game from all the others?

I should be clear.  I love D&D as it was originally proposed, and later elaborated on, up until 1981.  After about the later winter of '81, when I was still 16, the game began to change.  I remember we all talked about it at the time, the group that I ran with and other groups - about twenty people in all, switching and playing at my high school, plus a few adult DMs we knew who ran very serious games.  D&D was barely out of the box, and everyone could tell it was changing.

Mind you, in those days, no one I knew referred to the DMG and the Player's Handbook as "AD&D."  I didn't actually encounter that until the late 90s, and for me it wasn't widespread until I saw it on the internet. But I digress.

The change wasn't in D&D, but in the other games that were coming along - Rolemaster & Ice Law and Tunnels & Trolls were the biggies, supported by the appearance of Greyhawk, Empire of the Petal Throne and the Dragon Magazine.  These weren't seen as 'bad,' but it was a recognizeable change, and we discussed the positives and negatives of those changes.  Some of the DMs began to experiment with hit location, which became all the rage for a long time.  Everyone tried building a scheme for it, including me. Lots of ideas came out of the Dragon, and we experimented with those things too; some of those ideas got into my campaign.

A sort of fetishism began to arise.  For example, there were modules, and then there was Tomb of Horrors. ToH had a strange fascination for a particular kind of player - a kind that was beginning to emerge and become more popular.  We recognize them everywhere today.  I'm talking about this kind of player.  The reason for the appearance is quite clear.  The young high school students who where there to embrace the game as gathered steam (call it '77) were hitting the age where they were failing university at 21.  Failing university and getting crap labor jobs and beginning the age of the man-boy.  I remember there were groups that took to playing ToH every weekend, for months at a time.

Other fetishes were growing: larping, dressing up for sessions, tournaments and so on . . . oh yes, the game was certainly changing.-
I saw it then, and I still see it now, as proof that the actual participation in the role playing game isn't enough for a certain type of player.  Oh, they like the game well enough, but they don't have the imagination necessary to get everything they want from simply playing the game.  So they develop other habits, participation events, fetishes and so on to compensate.  To make them feel involved.

Anyway, I was going in another direction.  The game culture was certainly changing.  Why didn't I change with it?  Why didn't I feel the need to dress, or swing a live weapon, or play death sports like the ToH every weekend instead of my campaign?  Why is it when I was told who or what Lolth was, my general response was 'meh' (hadn't been invented yet)?

I only have guesses.  I had a very popular world.  Between '80 and '92 I ran between 5 and 14 people every Friday night, year-in, year-out, from my parent's kitchen table and the high school cafeteria to my crap first apartment, to the university club and the house I rented, and from there into my condo.  I took great jobs, I went to university, I had a kid . . . and all of that was with one group that included people I knew in high school, ex-girlfriends, co-workers, co-students, my wife and so on.  I never had any trouble getting players.  I was always turning away players, in fact.  And when the main group left in '92, it wasn't very long before I had another group, that I kept until '97.

(then my life fell apart, but that's not important now)

So I didn't need change.  My game was fine.  My game is still fine.  I never needed modules because I found them trite and predictable, and I felt my own adventures were better.  If I ran a world where the plot lines ran like Excalibur or Conan, the modules were like the awful Conan sequel or Red Sonya. I'm saying I wasn't 'great,' but I was a fuck of a lot better than Red Sonya.

The logic of 2e simply escaped me.  3e was worse.  In my Advanced Guide, I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of tension - where it comes from, how to build it, how to handle the players once it's built, how not to lose it yourself in managing all the stress it creates and so on.  Virtually everything about the mechanics for 2e, 3e and especially 4e seemed about destroying as much of the tension as possible, and using the rules to do so.  More hit points, more shortcuts to more hit points, more elaborate ways to heal, less and less meaning to the subject of 'dead' . . . and the elaboration of skill sets that would entitle the character to eventually do anything, even circumvent the need for thought.

When I look around, all the other systems seem to be doing the same thing.  What I know of Pathfinder and the rest just looks like a lot of super-empowerment to the point of blandness.  The difficult thing about superhero films is that they are so easily just meaningless walk throughs from A to Z, where the hero is never seriously threatened and the only real 'conflict' results from someone - or everyone - holding the idiot ball.  The later rules for role-playing games all seem destined to make this the norm.  And this is not what I like about role-playing.

I like that people have to die.  I like that they can't do most of the things that they imagine.  I like that they recognize their limitations.  I like that they don't have a tool that will do that thing for them.  I like that they're scared, and they have to plan, and they think there's a good chance it will fail.  I like that the way isn't clear. That things aren't certain.

I don't even like alignment because it gets rid of a seriously important character-driving conflict - the dilemma.  The player in my world who plays their character with the certainty of always knowing what the character would do is the most horrifically boring characterization, ever.  How ungodly dull is this?  The character never questions their motivation?  Never finds themselves pulled between two possible decisions? This isn't a character, this is a corpse.  Save me.

I know there are some who would blame video games, but in fact both video games and this eventuality in other role-playing games comes from the same source.  Humans like a sure thing.  And they will sacrifice excitement, purpose, hope, celebration or relief in order to get it.  Most humans, given the opportunity, would rather stand like a dead thing nailed to a dead thing's stand in front of a slot machine guaranteed to pay off than feel a moment's tension at not being sure.  And they would continue this preference even after they had grown wealthy.  Because most humans are sad, fearful sacks of dung.  They only push through the terror each day makes them endure because they're more frightened still of what might be on the other side. And most humans don't do this one thing well.

Tomb of Horrors, I think, was a fetish because you knew you would die, and that took the pressure off.  A slot machine that never pays off is as comfortable as one that always does.  For some people, pulling a meaningless handle is enough.

(joke intended)

D&D, the original D&D that I began playing in '79, before the change, loved this death thing, and appreciated that people would try to live.  That was a very simple ideal, and I find myself still surrounded by people who want to play in a game where that is still the ideal.  It is just harder to find that ideal when the rules are designed to fuck with it.

The End of Star Jumper

Memorial Day in the States, so I expect to see less people around today.

I'd like to write something positive.  It's summer, it's a beautiful day where I am, I finally figured out what was wrong with the ebook publishing, the book is thumping along (I'm about halfway through the third and last draft now) and on the whole I'm feeling as if there's an end.  Matt gave me some good news about things we can offer or give as a door prize for the fundraiser in Calgary, I have people in Toronto anxious to see me and I'm looking forward to it being a great year.  So I'm in a good mood.

I was going to include a passage on why I love D&D in the book, but the feel of the book was wrong for it so I decided not.  It's a difficult question anyway.  Too, it should address the issue of why I love D&D and not, say, Pathfinder, or Traveller, or Top Secret that I used to play.

Traveller had some great qualities, and I ran a Traveller world for nearly a decade.  Towards the end, I meshed Traveller and Top Secret together, as I really liked the Top Secret combat system (and very little else about the game).  That took some tweaking, but in fact the games merge pretty well - in the end I called the composite 'Star Jumper.'  Until I got out of university, it was a popular game.

There were two faults, I think.  The first was that a realistic game set into the future is just too deadly.  The weapons are profoundly kill-friendly, there are many, many opportunities for death and the character improvement system didn't really compensate for the weapons, the physics of losing your grip on something at high speed or the whole death in space thing.  If you're going to play shoot 'em up games in the present or the future, there's simply more likelihood that the character is going to die. That makes it harder for the players to invest, and it makes it harder for them to willingly enter conflict.  I used to say that the point of D&D was to find combat; the point of Star Jumper was to escape it.

The other fault was largely due to money.  Money is a very important aspect of a future game, more important than it is in D&D, as very large sums of money are necessary to buy the toys and gadgets that keep you alive.  And those things are expensive.  Plus, there's just no fun in the game without a ship, and your ship can't be big without a lot of money, so there was always that to consider.  The problem wasn't, however, in having too little money, it was that inevitably, what with trade and economics, a party would eventually acquire all they needed to fight with, and more money than that, until ultimately money just became meaningless.  The game sort of churned down once that point was reached.  The players would want to start another set of characters, which we would, running them until that natural limit was reached.

I was trying an experiment at the end of those games that had begun to prove itself, but never reached fruition because the commitment ran out and people went off around the world to start their lives (literally - I had a friend move to Vietnam, another to Montreal, a third to California and so on).  Being '92, there was no internet, so that was that.

For those familiar with Traveller, the character generation system works sort of thusly (it's been awhile, I don't have the books with me, though I still own them, so I'm going on memory):

Basically, your character goes through cycles that represent 4 years of training.  The character applies for training, it is determined which branch the training occurs in (I'm thinking of the more complicated Navy track now), the character rolls for skills, and the character rolls to see if they survived the four years.  If the character fails to enter, then the character musters out and is finished.  If the character dies, then a new character is started.  It is the weirdest character creation scheme ever made, I think, but it is oddly appealing.

Towards the end of playing Star Jumper, I had conceived of starting the characters as new recruits in the Navy, and role-playing the above cycle.  In other words, your character accepts that they are in the Navy.  They don't want out, they want the training.  First, as before, the branch is rolled, and all the characters are assigned to that branch.  They meet their commander.  The commander gives them a 'mission.'  They are given a base level of training in order to accomplish the mission.  Remember, the original character system presumed the characters would get "blaster-1" in four years, so this base training is "blaster-0.1."  The mission was fairly simple, these were raw recruits.  They were sent into a combat zone, they had one brief skirmish, survival was fairly likely and the mission was over.  Back to base, and if they got really lucky during the skirmish, they'd have another 0.1 added to their blaster skill.  Then they'd be paid, left on their own to explore around on their leave, before returning and getting another mission.

Meanwhile, there'd be role-play.  A lot of shipboard stuff like Starship Troopers, other naval conscripts they had to contend with, girls they'd meet, officers to impress and so on, building up an operational framework.  Between missions they could roam about, push around a few people, try not to get killed or worse, expelled from the Navy, and so on.

I had a group of sharp players and this was working very well.  We'd gone through two years of missions, they were getting to know people, racking up skills, making a little money on the side, and not too much so as to spoil the game.  One was thinking of getting married, another was considering officer candidate school (I would have run the missions so the party still worked together, or encouraged them all to try OCS), and in general they were feeling the role-play.

I never went back to it, however.  I don't know.  It just didn't feel worth it after the game broke up.  I doubt I'd have a host of players like that again.  I got to feeling like I just wanted to play D&D.

So, I'll continue in this thread tomorrow.  Enjoy your holiday.