The Dynamic

In consideration of Zarious' thoughts from DMs Eat Last, it wouldn't hurt to delve into comparisons between business management and acting as a dungeon master.  Where are the similarities, for example, and does the proposal that getting a job as a manager/supervisor in a fast food/retail/service business hold water as a means of gaining experience in being a DM?

I can attest that it does, in part, though not as much as the reader might imagine.  Any negotiation between one person and another will convey this kind of experience; learning how to handle a customer screaming at us through a plexiglass window as we politely derail their demands will help in managing an irate player who's extremely disappointed at not getting the magic item they want or having their character killed.  Unfortunately, however, most manager jobs are not really about "managing;"  managers are very often little more than stooges who must adhere to policy being pushed down on them from above, giving them little to no latitude, even in what they're allowed to tell the staff or dispense consequences for employees who show up late or goof off when they should be working.  A low middle manager in a service job will usually be a special kind of hell, particular in retail, where the responsibilities are increased but the pay isn't.  Remembering that all those "responsibilities" equate to being responsible about acting as a good, obedient slave to managers higher up.  Most managers burn up under the stress; those who stay do so in hopes of climbing the ladder, which they may never succeed in doing.

Dungeon mastering is nothing like this.  For one thing, ALL the policies are there to be set by the DM, not by someone higher up some ladder.  Additionally, a DM is not in the position of doling out paycheques to players, who must show "productivity" in their weekly efforts around the gaming table.  Imagine how it might change the dynamic to explain to your players that you'll be paying them $15 an hour, starting at 7 p.m. and ending at 11; that they're expected to be on time or the first hour will be docked; that no, they cannot leave early; that they must play well enough to achieve certain goals in that time, or else they'll be fired and their position will be given to someone else.  Imagine saying as a DM, "I have plenty of players in line who would love to get $60 a shift to come and play this game; tell me why I should continue to let you participate in this game, instead of one of them?"

I've had periods in my life when I could afford $240 a week; and I know there are plenty of DMs out there making that much and a lot more, so this is in the realm of possibility.  Consider, however, how this shatters the dynamic.  The players are forced to play for the DM in compensation for their wages — even if the DM doesn't make it clear in what way.  The implication is there.  In return, the DM is more likely to feel they owe little or nothing to the players: "We're paying them, aren't we?"  Money has a way of making people feel they're doing enough ... and with some people, giving money alleviates any responsibility they have to be polite or considerate to the person being paid.  Thus the irate customer screaming at the manager (or employee), the moody diner growling at servers, the drunk who tells the bouncer to fuck off, since he's paid for his beer, and so on.  If I'm paying you — or I'm the jack-off filling out forms so my bosses can pay you — then you should do your job.  For a lot of people, including workers, who say in return, "I'm doing my job, fucking pay me," the presence of money gets in the way of seeing others as people.

Without money passing between the DM and the player, the dynamic is different.  My responsibility to the players as a DM, vs. their responsibility to me as players, is hard to define, mostly because we participate in very few daily activities where authority & subordination isn't defined by money.  Hell, look at the word "subordinate" in that description.  I looked around for an antonym to authority and they're all denigrating: junior, apprentice, sophomore, pupil ... and none describe a role-player in the least way.  A player isn't subordinate to the DM ... and yet the DM is very definitely an authority that "runs" and "manages" the game.  I find it extremely telling that we have no trouble at all in ascribing the right English terms to what a DM does, but we bristle instantly if we try to apply any comparative reverse terms to the player.  That alone should be telling us something.

Still, while I direct the game, this gives me zero authority to tell the players what to do, according to the dynamic.  I can tell them what they face; I can veto their actions within a certain scope; I can hold them accountable to the game's rules; I can dictate how they address me or each other, and maintain order at the table; and I can close the game down with a fingersnap.  But apart from the power to govern the legitimacy of the game or enable its existence, everyone understands that the line of my power stops dead where it comes to telling players exactly what they must do.  On that matter, I can only advise.

Whereas a store manager spends all day long giving the employees their marching orders.  And the employees, unlike players, do it in recognition that this is the manager's privilege.  Nor can we ascribe this acceptance to the matter of earnings.  In many career-level professions, the manager's right to dictate remains in place, even though the employee might rate their income as fourth or fifth on the list of priorities.  Higher ranked concerns would include a feeling of doing something important, knowing that one is helping people, the opportunity to do interesting or exciting work, the work culture and the presence of friends with whom we share values, etcetera.  In those cases, we do what our manager says because, unlike the jerk-off 19-y.o. shift manager at a McDonalds, these managers and their experience deserve our respect; we want to obey them; we know they know best.  It's a working environment that many, many people never experience in their entire lives; and others experience every day without fail.

So where is the relationship between business manager and DM?  What do they have in common?

As a DM, I can get away with pretty near murder if my players respect me on the same level as those career-level employees respect their superiors.  My latitude in dictating what a player can or can't do is vastly greater when I act brilliantly in front of them, regularly.  Whereas lesser skilled DMs, with less to offer, and less ability to regulate the game, will be far more limited in their power than I am.  Not only this, however.  It is also the case in career-driven professions that the managers also respect the capabilities and predispositions of their teams — and they make decisions that directly play into the strengths of those strengths.  Such managers do not have the cookie-cutter mentality of a McDonald's manager-drone, who couldn't care a whit about the lives of worker-drones further down the chain.

Sit down with a career professional for a beer as one of their team and the conversation revolves around our lives, our interests, our choices and what's going on with our families.  Everyone wants to know what's happening with everyone else in the here and now, because those stresses will directly affect the stresses of the work.  Sit down with a service-level manager and the conversation revolves around movies, stuff on the internet, who's fucking who ... and eventually everything descends into pissing contests and trashing people who aren't present.  People don't talk about their lives because they don't have lives; they have this shitty job they do most of the time, except when they go to their other shitty job.  I've worked at length in both environments.

The players around my gaming table are easier to manage because of who they are.  They don't feel a need to prove themselves or gratuitiously abuse others in order to feel better.  Those people do not last long around me, because, like an employer, I judge them on their ability to perform, even though I don't pay them.  Reading about other DMs, who describe the players in their campaigns, it's clear to me they have next to zero standards.

If you manage an establishment that has one capable worker and four incapable ones, you might imagine the one will improve the quality of the other four.  I've certainly worked in service industry jobs where the manager imagined that.  Instead what happens is the one capable employee quits, because he or she is sick of working there.  Capable employees can always find work; they can choose where they want to work.  It is up to the manager to rid the business of every incapable employee until everyone's capable.  Then all the capable people stay, often for years, because they like it there.

Unfortunately for managers, however, is that capable people also want more money.  And as I said, low-level managers haven't any power to give wage increases.  As well, capable employees are hard to find.  So eventually they drift away, until they're replaced, and the business goes under.  Seen it many times.

A DM, however, can always afford the best players.  A DM can also improve the working environment, getting rid of the incapable players so the best players will stay.  Furthermore, since the DM sets all the policies of the game dynamic, those policies can be made not to serve profitability, but mutual respect and mutual compensation.  This changes all the rules related to how a DM, an authority, speaks to those over which the DM has charge.

The quote at the top of DMs Eat Last stated, "If you decide to look after the person to the left of you and look after the person to the right of you, you have become a leader."  It remains very clear that many cannot reconcile this definition in their heads.  We continue to think that a leader is the guy with the flag; that a leader is the one shouting "follow me!"

Let's take a moment and examine that metaphor.  The flag-bearer in an army wasn't armed.  We don't have flag-bearers and when we did they were always men (French portraiture of the Revolution notwithstanding), so I'm going to use the pronoun, "he."  He might have had a weapon, but he couldn't use it because he had the flag in his hand. These were great big things, that needed two hands to hold and a great deal of strength.  And because an army was trained to follow the flag, he had to go first, ahead of others.  This did not make "him" a leader, because people weren't following him, they were following the flag.  He didn't give orders or make decisions, because he went where the general told him to go — and if he didn't, he'd be shot forthwith by the nearest officer.  Thus, the most reliable men were typically chosen for this role; the bravest, it was observed, since they had to go unarmed and NOT run away when the bullets began to fly.

If the flag-bearer was killed, it was hoped that the army moving forward and shooting their weapons wouldn't notice by that point ... because once melee is engaged, no one has time to see what the flag-bearer's doing.  Still, Hollywood, dating back to silent film in the 1910s, LOVED the idea that once the flag was dropped, surely someone else would dive in and rescue the flag ... and there were cases dating to the Civil War (and probably the Crimean and Napoleanic Wars as well, though I don't know those as well) where a retreating army was perhaps turned around, as depicted in Roland Emmerson's The Patriot, by seeing the flag instead rushing towards the enemy.  However, even in such cases, it was not the man running the flag who was being followed.  It was the FLAG.

So let's understand this metaphor.  If, as a would-be leader, I pick up a flag, it better be the right flag.  No one in Napoleon's army is going to follow a flag unless it's the FRENCH flag.  99 times out of hundred, when some dumbfuck leader thinks they're picking up a "flag," they're fighting for a cause no one believes in, no one cares about and most have never heard of.  That alone is an act of sheer stupidity.

IF, picking up said worthless flag, the leader then shouts, "Follow me!" it's no wonder he looks like a flaming idiot.  He's carrying the wrong flag.

On the other hand, if you're part of an army, and they already have a flag, and that flag exists in the service of a general who HAS authority, and you run off with it, then maybe, yes, you'll get followed; but you better run in the right direction, or else count on an officer to shoot you in the back.  The only way to lead anyone with a flag is to run that flag in the direction you're told.  That's the only circumstance that the words "Follow me!" have any relevance of any kind.

Leadership is not about being followed.  It's about encouraging people to follow a flag they've given reason to care about.  The first part of that equation is easy once you've accomplished the second part.  But you must accomplish the second part first.

The way you do that is by divising a flag that promises to look after the person on the left of you and the person on the right of you.  That requires you learn something about these people.  That you learn what they seek.  That you're capable of providing that which they seek ... or at the very least, enabling them to believe that what they seek can be accomplished through your plans and experience.  That won't happen until those people believe that you know more than they know; and to convince them, you have to actually know more than they know.  You can't fake it.  They'll know.

A truly great leader understands what others seek before those others know.  I'm not talking about selling them a grift, which is inventing bullshit and then ultimately disappointing the rubes.  No, I mean, understanding others so well, by listening to them, and having the capacity to understand them, to see a solution to their problems that they haven't the capacity to see.  And then providing that solution, free of charge, for the good of all.

Hm.  I've just seen what's fundamentally wrong with Ayn Rand's objectivism.

Most aren't great leaders.  Most don't even want to be.  But I think that anyone who sits down to write a blog and offer advice and solutions about how to play or manage players, that they should probably have "what others seek" at the forefront of their minds.  Likewise, when DMs run a game, deciding why the players are there, and recognizing that they have their own reasons, which are certain to be different from the DMs reasons, should factor greatly into how a DM runs a game.

It's something like how you would act as a store manager if you assumed that, at their core, everyone wanted to be there for some other reason than "wanting the money" or acting "in the best interest of the company."  Specifically, figuring out how an employee might want to keep working for a reason that was in their own interest, that wasn't about money ...

And then enabling that.

How to Start a Trading Town VII - Dreambuilding

I don't want to draw attention away from yesterday's crowdfunding proposal.  I encourage readers to have a good look at it and to join in.  I've had some great conversations today with some all-in contributors about book characters and whose name might fit best and I've had some first-rate praise for the module: "Shadows?  You gave the furniture shadows?"  It is great stuff.  The reader shouldn't miss out!

At the same time I want to ensure the reader that I am still thinking about the blog.  Do remember that I love to write, it is my most endearing skill.  Where it is lighthearted and conversational, such as on a blog, it's a lot of fun!  So let's finish off the trading town series - but do not worry, I have another series I'm going to start soon that I think players will like very much and DMs, well . . . depends.

We're down to the last question - why go through all this business of making a trading post, despite the adventuring it might bring and the different way it would have of looking at role-playing.  In the end, what has my character won?

Like everything in the game, this depends on how both player and DM sees the final result.  Be sure that some DMs will resent it.  An ongoing trading town takes preparation investment, number crunching, a different way of looking at the game and the need to introduce characters on a regular basis that are much more cosmopolitan and interesting than Zeke the second-rate trapper.  The bigger the town gets, the more employees or sycophants the players are going to collect - carpenters, rat catchers, farmers, bartenders, bounty hunters, wardens, reeves, lackeys, bootlicks, heralds, rent collectors and so on.  Something like this balloons into a large bookkeeping hassle for both DM and player if someone on both sides isn't ready to sail into the job and find shortcuts.

And most DMs will quickly see a very easy alternative to that . . .

When I was a boy and about 40-inches tall, I owned several sets of a sort of girder and panel building set.  Wait, I'll find a picture:

My friends owned legos but I grew up on these.  It's not mechano - these were light plastic sticks that locked together to make cubes that could be built one upon the other.  Like the image in the picture, we built them high; a story of pegs and girders would be about 3 inches high and we built these things up to sixteen stories - taller than we were.

My friends and I would spend all afternoon putting together cities with hot wheel tracks for roads and various other toys and building things.  We were diligent little engineers and we worked like dogs to get those cities built.

Then it would get past four and my mom would shout down the stairs that it was almost time for everyone to go home.  We knew what that meant: it was destroyin' time.

Destroyin' time meant sharing out about a dozen tennis balls and obliterating the hell out of our city.  This was done in a period of mayhem that lasted five minutes and was great fun.  What the hell, we were eight.

Then we'd pick up the shattered remains of our city, pushing it into a pile and loading the sticks and toys into the big trunk where my toys were kept.

It is fun to destroy things.

It is almost as much fun to destroy things as it is to build them - and for some people, if they could just have someone else build the thing, they'd be happy to handle the rest.  These are the people who, when they get older, get a kick out of smashing up the snowmen in front of someone's house.

If we get our trade town built, if we get the buyers in from across the sea and set up the tavern where we'll come home after a hard day's adventuring and kick off our high hard boots and have the bartender call us "Sir," we'll still have to contend with the DM whose imagination will go directly towards the most obvious 'adventure': having someone come along to tear it all down.

Pirates from across the sea, a horde of orcs, angry townspeople from the nearby city who have decided our trading center threatens their livelihood, the Lord's guard who just wants to take it over, whomever.  For most DMs, seeing that pretty map form and take shape, growing into civic buildings, docks, roads and warehouses, it's just too tempting to march an army over it.  It's so easy for a DM to think, "The players will get a great kick out of that!  Defending their homes against savages, that drips adventure!"

Perhaps it might, but it's the sort of adventure players will enjoy on the level of, "Hey, what if a plague attacked the trade town!  That would be great!  The players wouldn't know who was going to die and who wasn't . . . drama!"

We have to be careful going to this particular bag:  if the players bring it down upon themselves, that will tend to play fairly well.  My players once left their territory for 16 months in order to save the life of a friend and associate; when they came back, they found that a passel of goblins and orcs had been built on their doorstep.  Not in their actual keep, mind, but near enough that the players felt they had to go out and destroy the nest before it got any bigger.  The time spent away justified the change and the players were able to prepare for the battle rather than having it forced upon them.

If they had come back to find their home burnt and the goblins living on the site, they probably would have destroyed the goblins, sure enough - and then left.  The imagined idea of "We'll build it up again, better than ever," is probably not the mind-set the DM would get.  More like, "Why bother?"

Introduce a group of pirates come to destroy the player's homes "just cause" and you might as well be throwing meteor tennis balls at the player's work.  When we were kids we destroyed our own buildings - we knew we were building them up to destroy them because we knew everything had to go back into the box anyway when it was time to go home.  It wasn't like my mother was going to let us leave our city up in the rumpus room until the following Saturday.

We don't play by the destroy rules any more.  We can leave the thing up - period.  We can make beautiful renderings of the town we built, make it into posters and keep it in cherished folders or even post them in some out of the way, semi-private part of our man-cave.  We can pull out the sheets ten years from now (I have some I can say are literally 33 years old) and marvel at them, point to things that our friends made and about which we can still remember the friendly banter.

Why dump on that?  Why not, instead, use such an arrangement to build up better adventures?  Sure, it's paperwork, but I think that a DM will find that after the initial pleasure, breaking things down into coins and labor earned per month will satisfy the players.  They don't really want to be accountants.  They just want to feel that the thing is growing, getting better, bringing in people from far away (with plot hooks), bearing books for the library the players are building (books full of plot hooks), enabling the characters to get involved in the local tribulations of administrators (who have plot hooks to offer) or in local wars where strong, able adventurers are needed for the PHSS (plot-hook special services).

Destruction is fun but it lasts such a brief, brief time.  I think that as kids, if we could have had a room in the basement where we could have built and left it in place, we wouldn't have had to build so many versions of the same city every week.  We would have made amazing places that even our parents might have - someday - appreciated.

How to Start a Trading Town VI - Where's the Adventure?

There will be some who look at these posts with a doubtful eye, wondering what could possibly be the value in spending all this time accounting for people, money spent, amount of money coming in, keeping track of friends and associates, etcetera.  These have a very good reason to doubt the concept, as I have spoken about it so far.  However, it is always important to remember that in role-playing, 'fantasy' means that we can make the situation whatever we want.

I'm going to write as a DM for a moment, from the viewpoint of what would I do with players if they began setting up a trading town as described.

To begin with, the hinterlands bordering on this trade town are very important.  When the party describes the sort of location they want (empty, with access to other trading towns, on the right sort of coast, at the base of a mountain pass or as a transshipment point on a navigable river), I want to 'sell' them a location the same way a real estate developer would.  Yes, things like the movement of goods, production and the political situation are important - but like telling prospective buyers about schools, I always want to throw in that there are nearby hills or mountains, a virgin forest, nearby zone of absolutely no settlement at all and a nearby village where the leadership is corrupt or desperately needed.  "Oh yes, great location, lots of nearby borderlands and tribal conflict nearby, good places for finding dungeons and monster lairs, easy access to ruined castles, swamps and abandoned temples.  Just the sort of thing for a young party starting out in life!"

If I know my party, I can inveigle them with such enticements, so that while setting up the trading town there are opportunities for a quick jaunt out to the Back Porch of the Flail Snail King before they come back and begin building the tobacco smokehouse.  This allows for plenty of distraction amidst the accounting - so that while in their new settlement, they are thinking of the next adventure and while on adventure they are thinking about how long it will take to get the settlement's tavern up and running.  As the money runs out, they're thinking of adventuring to get a bit more, and as they find the big pile of gold in the Misplaced Tomb of the Barely Remembered Civil Servant, they're thinking of how this is going to pay for the marble stone floor of their new church floor.

The adventure is thus both a relief and a contribution to the building process.  I have found that if I tell a party, "We're going to have an accounting session" every five or six runnings, players are happy to buy goods, discuss plans for something they want to build, ask questions, fill in the blanks on their characters, obtain hirelings, make quick visits to talk to people in town, sketch out future ideas they have with other players and so on.  With everyone talking and addressing these issues, four hours can go by every bit as fast as fighting a host of zombies or harpies.  Admittedly, I have the kind of players who like to talk about the documentaries they've seen since our last running, rather that what the likely results of the SuperBowl are going to be, but I do feel that players will get invested in things they're making the same way I will get invested in a map or some other design I'm working on.

Where I've left off, the next development of the trading town will be to build interest in what we're doing with peoples farther away than the nearby city.  In effect, we've started to build our settlement in the shadow of nearby Athens . . . it's time to do a little exploration into what we might ship in from the islands of the Aegean, the coast of Libya, Italy or the Holy Land.  Suppose we've discovered a small silver mine, so we can be sure of having at least one product that will sell overseas - that will let us go out on another adventure, visiting five or six trading towns in Cyprus, Cilicia, Palestine and perhaps even Egypt.  All this ship travel will need a ship - so that's going to cost, along with the crew - but it's necessary if we're going to buy things out there that will sell well at home.  It will probably be small compared with the immense merchanters we'll encounter.

In the meantime, of course, the ship will get attacked by pirates or sea monsters, there's bound to be some remote island with a good adventure on it, we could get asked to take part in some sort of battle or we could discover a city under seige.

Everywhere we go, we want to be sure to set up an agent who will promote our little settlement, perhaps buy some goods for another journey we could take later (or send a hired captain to obtain for us) and in general spread our names about.  It is going to be a great day when a completely strange ship appears next to our trading town, wanting to investigate us and find out how much they can purchase from us!

We've got to be ready for that day.  That means being goods-poor for a time, steadily piling up more than just bars of silver or the best timber (spars for ships, perhaps, or some unusual wood for furniture/instrument making abroad) that will sit and sit and sit, waiting for the day when that buyer shows up.  All that wealth is bound to encourage someone to try to plunder it - so that's an adventure too, as we test out the quality of our own defenses against an incursion by raiders from land or sea.

There are many opportunities for the players to still make experience and go up levels.  We shouldn't overlook that.

How to Start a Trading Town IV - Business Partners

In April of last year, I wrote three posts called "How to Start a Trading Town."  When the third post fell flat (no comments), I ended it.

For good or ill, I use comments as a measure of interest in what I'm writing.  I can write on a wide variety of things and it is usually best to write on things that will get people involved and interested.  If I write a post in a series and it gets no responses, then I have to look at the effort in the same way that television looks at a show with bad ratings.  The show gets cancelled.

After nine months of silence, however, I was asked here to continue the series.  And since I asked for story ideas . . .

Let's take stock.  Our characters have started with a considerable amount of money - at least 20,000 gold pieces.  We've picked an empty shore on the coast, where the water is deep enough for a long boat (and a bigger ship no further than 300 yards/meters out), where we can conceivably build a stone quay (eventually).  We've made deals with the local lord.  And we've begun making a few contacts in the nearest city, selling land or enticing away a few of the residents there.

All this assumes the DM is a reasonable entity and that we're permitted to move along with these things without undue sabotage.  Personally, I like it when a party 'sets up.'  I rarely present the local lords as insipid, grasping, spoiled prats who act like infants the moment someone sets up on their territory.  My reading of history tells that squatting is usually the way that most towns have been founded.  All new residents are a source of income for the local lord and are therefore welcome, so long as they're not criminals who prey on the lord's capital.  We're definitely not interested, here, in setting up as criminals (that may come later).  We want a strong, industrious, religiously regulated community that pays its taxes on time, develops infrastructure in both the settlement and the hinterland and is rich in artisans and friendlies.

In my world, this is easier.  I have rules that support players having multiple characters, I give followers easily and my players tend to see a certain wisdom in not using these as cannon fodder.  That is because, I believe, my followers are not stooges - they are people with friends, associates, allies and thus serve as intermediaries between the party and the locals.  If I'm paying a low-level fighter as a follower and that fighter is a disgruntled, hateful, disconnected misanthrope - and I remember many followers were in the games where I acted as a player - then this is only going to encourage me to not care if said fighter dies.  On the other hand, if my fighter is a friendly, jovial fellow who's sister is friends with the priest at the chapel out near Clonmel, then perhaps that's someone who I might want to keep alive - in case I need a priest for some reason.

So at this point, as we build our dock, warehouse, corrals and perhaps a church, then we will want to do more than make friends.  We want to make connections.  We want to get to know the names of the people we're working for, who they know, who they've heard of in the area and what meetings can be arranged.

Yes, probably many of these people don't know anybody.  But if our DM is on the ball, a few smartly dressed people will show up, from curiousity.  They may be ill-mannered, doubtful, even insulting.  We may be bothered by this but we have to rise above that - these people who have time to wander about doing nothing but sight-seeing are just the sort of people we want.  One of them can surely introduce us to a guild-overseer, an alderman, a deacon or perhaps a fellow running a fighter training academy.  What we want is an introduction.  Just a chance to rub elbows with the middle class in the city and learn a little more about what makes the town tick.

This is a lot of work for the DM, particularly if that entity doesn't have a clear idea of how business/politics works.  To give a good portrayal of "what's happening," a DM has to have some idea of what happens in the upper corridors of power.  Many DMs, particularly the young, haven't the experience or taken the opportunity to read up on how power works.

I was into this politics thing at a very early age - and I remember distinctly playing with the heads of a few DMs in my youth as I maneuvered them into allowing me and my party to get away with murder.  Literally, in some cases.  This is why it is so important that any DM should acquire a wide range of disciplines . . . because if the only thing the DM understands are the rules of the game and the principles of combat, that is going to seriously balk any attempt at a deeper sandbox.

I don't want to digress into that just now.  For the sake of this post, what the players and DM should do - in the case where the DM feels unprepared - would be to work out between them a reasonable expectation of what might happen or what both parties (DM and Players) can see as a win-win.

All too often, this isn't even considered.  I have been running this game for 36 years and I still turn to my players, often, for a tet-a-tet regarding what's a reasonable response to something the party wants to do.  I'm only one fellow - I don't have all the answers.  Of course, I'm going to negotiate with an expectation that any concession I make will be one that has to be made in the future, too (and in my case, what happens in one campaign becomes policy in every other campaign - I suppose I could write a post about that, too).

So when we are setting up our trade town and meeting people, we should be looking at this thing from the DM's perspective - and working to get the DM on our side.  We should be explaining that if we stay here, we will be less interested in wandering all over the world.  This means the DM can take time to design this one space.  All we want in exchange is that the space where we've planned to stay is one that will keep us happy - and that means we'd like the benefit of someday having a regular monthly luncheon with the Lord Mayor.

I realize that we're all trained to think that a second trade town is competition (and therefore should be crushed), but that's not really the case.  In fact, that second town should be seen as a sort of franchise - where the people from the first trade town can expand outwards, buying land, setting up a colony, using that second trade town as an alternate depot or transshipment point, one that's a little closer to the source of some other region's good and which can act as a supplier in case of siege.  The stronger that second trade town (the one we're building) is, the better it can act as a subsidiary.  Therefore, we want to talk to the Lord Mayor to pass the message that our little bit of land on the sea is really a good investment in the future for both the town and us - like Pepsi having Doritos.

For Those Who Think It Will Burn

I've taken a little piece from the BBC series I linked a couple of days ago, the Tudor Farm:




There is widespread belief in the role-playing world that if characters choose to light a house on fire, it will burn.  The above is demonstrable proof that it probably will not.  It's possible to get a house fire going, depending on how much flammable material there is inside the building - hay in barns, furniture, oils, cloth and so on - but the chances are when the fire is finished, the outer wall of the building will be blackened but resolutely unmarred.

I have been explaining to players for ages that pitch and sand can be mixed together as a means fireproofing wooden structures such as bridges or docks, that are necessarily associated with water.  The palisades constructed in the area where I live - where pitch is easily gotten from trees - were painted with this mixture, enabling them to remain standing a century later.

Another form of fireproofing is the building of Cob walls, a mixture of straw, water, rough sand (or small stones), clay and soil, which can be combined to form an insulting adobe that was employed in many parts of the world, notably jungle & scrub lands from Spain to India.  Since a cob wall is usually 16 inches thick, it tends not to notice fire at all.

If you are tired of your players spontaneously putting everything in your world to the torch, perhaps it could be time to give the world a proper facelift.  Then, the next time the players think they're going to set the place on fire by shooting it up with fire, you can look at them blankly and say, "Nope.  Doesn't look like that wall's gonna catch."

The Unknown is Concerning

I'll take a translation if someone has it.

Ah, war story time.  I'm only including it here for background.  I'll try to be brief.

Some readers might remember one of my parties is in possession of a flying ship.  Saturday, this led them to a floating town in the sky, Ternketh, a collection of wattle-and-daub houses, a group of some hundred 'docks' supported by nothing at all except magic, surrounding a castle-keep.  The entity is about a mile in diameter and largely denuded of people, as some years ago Ternketh was attacked by 80-200 harpies.  Most of these harpies are gone now but the remainder dwell in the keep and are kept away from the still inhabited part of the town through the use of wards (an occasional person is still caught and eaten).

It isn't known how many harpies are left - probably more than ten, perhaps as many as fifty.  The party also learned that the wealth of Ternketh - so far as the town knows - remains in the keep, as none of the Lords there were able to get free.  All were charmed and destroyed.  A view of the keep 'yard' (made of stone) from the air showed large patches of dried blood and many bones.

There, those are the details I'll render; the party hasn't actually entered the keep yet, so I can't say more than what the party knows.  If someone wants more information, I'll share it but only so long as it's something I've already told the party (or might tell them, since after reading a question here they will probably ask it during the next game anyway).

My point for writing the post is this:  the party had most of the information they really needed by 9 o'clock.  There were details to be worked out, obviously, but by nine they had decided to go in and do their best.  They're 5th-8th level, most of them have wicked saving throw bonuses on account of various benefits, they've loaded up with one heroism & one speed potion (they're going in at night), an ultravision scroll and there are 18 total characters, henchmen and followers involved.  They have waxed their ears to stop from hearing the singing and they're loaded for bear.

We did not run any combat Saturday.  The players spent two hours planning and I called the game at eleven.

I have watched this phenomenon again and again.  An unknown number of harpies is concerning.  No one wants to tackle that - but they don't want to lose out on heaps of treasure, either.  Understandably, they want to be sure they've covered everything.  They've got a lot of manpower to share around and naturally this has to be done right.  There's every chance the wax won't work - that has to be considered and a ready plan for that contingency is in the offing.  The players are wise enough not to rush when they could better prepare themselves.

And yet . . . two hours.  I wasn't bored.  The players weren't bored.  There was plenty of tension and voices were rising a bit here and there.

None of the adventure is quest-driven.  The party is on a quest, but they have a little time to spare and this is very tempting.  But they know they can back off and just continue on their way (though it is guessed already that the harpies know something is up, since the party passed over the keep in the daytime in a big floating ship, and may choose to swarm the ship as it leaves if they believe the ship's owners are frightened and weak).  They don't have to attack the keep.  They're not terribly concerned about the townspeople but they won't mind saving them anyway, since there's at least one old man (a venerable cleric) who might be a very good friend to the party.

Players will, however, find excuses not to go right now.  As a DM, it's important not to push them.  If they want to spend the rest of the night going back and forth over the best tactics, for the love of blue bloody bacchanalian behemoths, LET THEM.  The game is running itself.  A resolution will come in its own good time.

A forgivable error - but an error, nonetheless - comes when the DM mistakes 'pacing' for 'advancement.'  Though the party may not be taking physical action or physically moving forward as characters, this does not mean there is no momentum in the game.  Some momentum is oscillation; where the same ground is gone over and over again because the players are adapting themselves to several things that may be about to happen due to their decisions:  one of them may die; something dear and important may be lost; there may be other unforeseen consequences that could have been avoided but are now part of a reckoning.

The unknown is concerning.  Whenever possible, let the players make up their mind about how concerned they want to be and then wait.  Just wait.  As I've said many times, these moments are not about the DM.  It's about them.

When It Lacks Visuals

This is not going to be a post about Witcher 3.  Just relax.

It is a post about storytelling in the role-playing world, specifically how the average DM playing a game around the kitchen table wants so bad to tell a story like this one here, from Witcher 3.

In effect, you've been punked.  Games like the above are going to tell a better story, they're going to be more personal for the player, there are going to be weeping and attractive women, buff men, a visceral feeling of pushing peasants out of the way and leaping from high cliffs onto the backs of birds before slaughtering them mercilessly.  The visuals are going to be so dramatic, so overpowering, that where it comes to telling a story for your players (making them use their imaginations, sheesh), there is just no way you can compete.

But that's okay, because your players aren't coming 'round to your campaign for this shit.  Just read through the storyline I've linked, particularly things like this:

"Unfortunately, the Wild Hunt reaches the spy before Geralt, torturing him to death.  Geralt manages to recover the spy's notes, which indicates that Ciri sought refuge in Crow's Perch, the castle of Velen's self-appointed ruler known as the Bloody Baron.  The Baron refuses to help Geralt find Ciri until the witcher locates and returns the Baron's own missing wife and daughter."

Okay, that's enough.  I don't mind that we're guaranteeing the spy will die before Geralt finds him, that's just good drama - I do that sort of thing all the time myself.  It's this ridiculous compendium of quests upon quests: Geralt wants to find Yennefer, who wants him to help Emhyr, to find Ciri, who can't be found without first finding the wife and daughter, but to do that he has to find Keira, who tells him to find the Crones who . . . oh fuck, I just don't care anymore.

One of the horrible things about quest stories - and this applies to episodic television as well - is this never-ending process of being dragged into subplots that have shit to do with the character's motivation.  We're not looking for blah-blah-blah because it will make our lives' better, it's because my wife's sister's employer's cousin's nephew's wife's friend is in trouble.  At some point I find myself watching this shit thinking, "Well, if this person dies, why do I even care?  None of these people are critical to the story, to the character's inner conflict or remotely has my sympathy.  In fact, if the quest-target gets ripped apart by a wyvern right now, we can all get back to shit we care about."

Video games work because the visuals sustain the endless, meaningless episodic relationship of scene to scene - and people keep playing them because the visceral quality of watching people die by a weapon used by the user gives a nice dopamine/endorphin hit from time to time.  They don't work because the story is great, because the story is just an endless meandering mess full of conflicts that are cheap, derivative and ultimately disposable.

This is even worse without the visuals.

When your world is full of side-quests, where the players themselves have no freedom to pursue strictly their own interests, regardless of who might die and who might live, then that's you putting a knife into your own campaign and slowly turning the blade.  If you find your players having trouble keeping the story character's straight, so that they have to ask more than once who such-and-such is, that is a sign that they no longer care.  You'd do better at this point to announce that a flood has killed everyone but the player characters and oh look, there's a nine-foot sludge monster rising out of the flood waters to kill them.

This will not seem less meaningful than the 'story' that's been created and is endlessly going nowhere.

Don't feel bad.  Storytelling of the "We have to think of a quest that justifies this quest" form has been around since serials in the 1930s, when the only thing that mattered was that the hero survived, the heroine was in danger and the bad guy lived to be bad later.  Because all those tropes are now vomitous, it's been replaced with the hero is unhappy, the heroine is unhappy, the bad guy is unhappy and no one, ever, is allowed to find their way out of this trap for more than a few minutes without something completely implausible happening.  Pretty much the plot line of Jessica Jones' first season.

When, as a DM, we try to sustain a story plot over a period of several sessions (or a season, as WOTC has lately tried to do), we wind up creating this same dynamic over and over: the characters have to find someone; the characters have to bring something back; the characters have to go back to the beginning and find something they missed; the characters kill someone but it turns out they're not really dead . . . and so on.

It is boring.  And ten times more boring when there's no imagery.

Stories aren't bad because sandboxes are better.  Stories are just bad.

Using the Wilderness

In the dim hours of the morning, kimbo left a comment on yesterday's wilderness point-crawl post, one that has me thinking - specifically about this part:

"To find water, shelter, food for survival. Find a place (a path for an army to advance or bandit stronghold) or a thing (resources for exploitation), find someone or hide/escape. To get through it as fast, discreetly, safely as possible. To acclimatize or learn how to live in that environment. To hunt/trap to earn cash. To establish contact/trust with a group for trade, information or alliance."

I found this prescient, as I had just been working on road development for culture connected with tech-6 in which Wikipedia used the phrase, "communications, trade and governance . . ."  This is not so much coincidence as a firm grip on the principal issues involved.

I'd like to try and discuss kimbo's points one by one, as he's helped clarify some of my thinking on this.

Passing Through

As fast, discreetly, safely as possible.  I think this lends credence to that bugbear that's been hanging over me since 2011, what I've called wilderness damage.  This is a concept that I've smacked my head against on several occasions (last month in fact) only to find myself overwhelmed by the various elements of trying to track the proper amount of damage suffered by individual party members due to terrain, weather, habit, personal equipment carried and so on.  It is the last that proves the most difficult, as in truth each character has to be tracked separately based upon their decisions and level of response to the wilderness.  In structure this gets to be more and more like the problem of managing encumbrance, something very logical but which no player wants to deal with because of the bookkeeping involved.

My players told me frankly last session that they'd be happy to include encumbrance as part of the campaign experience IF it meant no bookkeeping.  They don't mind being slowed down or having a limit to how much they can carry - they DO mind having to track it from moment to moment.  But if I want to make an automated system that will track it for them, they're good with it.

Unfortunately for me, I have more than 1500 items that can be purchased and carried by players - and while I could limit the measured items to just a few (so that the odder stuff counts as 'no weight'), I'm a purist and that makes no sense to me.  The same thing is true with wilderness damage.  I keep thinking that if I don't take into account ALL the possibilities, then I can count on my players finding ways to circumvent any system I build.

I know the answer is to sit down with excel for a month or so and painstaking program a system for either wilderness damage or encumbrance (it could be done!), but I feel a sense of ennui every time I think of it.

I don't know how that die got in there;
they're just laying all over the place.

Still, the wilderness is dangerous - and not just when monsters are around.  If I ask the reader to limit equipment to what would be available for a post-Medieval culture and then send them off into a wild part of Oregon or the Black Forest without any expectation of meeting people/finding services at all, expecting that a good distance is covered, then it will take about a day to get injured to the point where something is bleeding, something is bruised or something is sprained or fractured.  There are dozens of ways in which the wilderness lies in wait to get us - and I know this because books about survival in the wilderness are page heavy and dense in content about all the ways we can die.  The book on the right only covers mountaineering.  There are countless other books that will describe our possible deaths from skiing and snowboarding, scuba diving, surfing, caving or ever being stupid enough to set foot on a boat.  Let's face it - the wilderness is dangerous.

Here's the first point, then: the wilderness is like a huge, natural trap.  It helps to think of a day's journey as walking along a dungeon hallway containing a trap: someone is going to get injured and take damage, possibly everyone.  We should accept that - so that when we think of going off road and into the wilderness, we should also be thinking, "How much damage can we afford to take today?"

Meaning that every other activity in the wilderness is obtained by spending hit points.  That's a little different from a dungeon, where a thief has a chance to see the trap coming.  In the wild, while the ranger might see said trap, chances are the mage, the cleric or the bard won't.  And since the wilderness isn't built out of comfortable, defined and stone-built lines, it's really easy for a character to think, "Oh, I'll just go the other way around this tree."

Treasure

To hunt/trap to earn cash.  This is generally overlooked, as the wilderness is seen or presented as just a big pile of nothing.  But this isn't true - players just don't think of all that wood standing around in the forest as being valuable because cutting it down and dragging it to market doesn't produce experience points.  Yet players will conscientiously skin a ferret-monster if it will yield 60 g.p. while standing amidst a million g.p. of untouched, uncrowned virgin forest beyond the Keep on the Borderlands with nary a thought.

Because players don't think in those terms; having to cut down all those trees and make coin out of it seems less like adventure and more like their day jobs.  It is sort of funny, however, that the resistance many of us feel towards being self-employed (gawd, I have to organize everything?) keeps the players from doing the same in game when all they have to do is speak the words and write down a few notes.

So putting aside traditional pursuits to gain wealth in the wilderness (starting a mine, running herds over rich green meadows, gathering fish in nets, etcetera), suppose we simply deal with the one 'earn cash' method that does appeal to players: finding the dungeon.

It's always assumed that the dungeon, when it is out there, is easy to find.  I'm as guilty as anyone as I too have grown up on concepts like The Caves of Chaos where obviously every resident of the keep knows where the caves are: "Here, let's go up onto the north wall, I'll point them out to you."  We treat the various dungeons of the game like Disneyland; it's surprising the local town doesn't have a brochure or a local shop where curios from the Caves can be bought cheap.  "Ah, this is a nice piece; a paladin brought this back after a fighter in his party had his head cleaved off by an ogre's axe - see, you can see the tear in the leather armor where the axe hit."  And so on.

Having to actually stumble around in the wilderness for days, even weeks, to find something that doesn't have a tour guide telling you about the place before you get there seems grossly unfair.  Find a dungeon on your own?  One the town doesn't know about?  Nonsense!

Yet it seems to me that players ought to accept a bad week of stumbling over tree roots, slipping off ledges and being carried down raging torrents before lucking out and finding a hole about four feet in diameter under a bush that leads them into an underground wonder.  This is just me.

Escaping

Hide/escape.  I must confess, I've never had anyone in my world propose rushing into the wilderness in order to escape pursuit.  But then, I haven't chased anyone out of town in a very long time.  Either the locals decide someone needs to die - and then in a very un-Hollywood way fail to give warning that it's about to happen by having hundreds of people stand in the street and give speeches - in which case the character is ordering a beer and gets a knife in the back instead; or the player characters are asked politely to leave.  In which case, they use the road.

My players tend to figure out almost immediately that they've done something wrong - just from knowing the difference between right and wrong.  Thus they usually think, "Wow, we just killed that guy without knowing who he is; maybe we should leave now."  Rarely are my players all, "Why, what did we do?" where it comes to having committed some atrocity that is likely to get them vilified by the locals.  I used to have players like that - but this isn't high school any more.

I think it might be fun to have the players escape into a desert or a forest.  Knowing what my players know, however, they'd have to be really desperate.

Finding Things

This is much more likely.

To find water, shelter, food for survival. Find a place (a path for an army to advance or bandit stronghold) or a thing (resources for exploitation), find someone.  This is much more likely.  I've already mentioned finding dungeons - but this is more of a McGuffin idea, where the one guy has to be located so that the next part of the campaign arc can be attempted.  About a year ago my players decided to slaughter a kobald village, just 'cause.  No problem.  They'd stumbled across the village on the way to the dungeon so they knew where it was.

I spent some of last night organizing the Scouting ability set for rangers - leaving some of the work undone because I find I'm spending too much time trying to hammer down every last detail.  I'm beginning to think the sage process needs some streamlining if I'm ever to finish it - meaning that some of the actual rules will need to be devised in game, where I can apply to the players for aid in deciding what the details should be.  Remember, always ask for help.

I'm hoping that sage abilities like scouting can enable players to survive in a very dangerous wilderness or locate water, shelter and food in a logical, in-game/setting driven manner without my needing to be in the loop as a DM.  I always prefer a random die roll based on a logical probability for deciding these things than by simply declaring that yes, there's a water hole or no, there isn't.  Then if the players have to find something or somebody, the actual distance is established by that thing or person being in a place that is obvious enough that the players can look at a map and decide the probabilities for themselves: "Ah, this hex between two highlands would probably be the best route for a clan or tribe in pursuing game, I bet if we venture towards it we'll find a trail that will lead us to a sizeable camp."

I know that most games have zero concept of this sort of thinking.  Most games absolutely need a Zeke to stand at the entrance, greet the players, go through the tourist schtick and wrap it up by reminding the players that keepsakes can be found at the gift shop.  As a DM I'm fairly tired of that method.  I use it occasionally, I always hate it and I always love it when the players circumvent me by getting their own ideas about things - which they will do only if they're encouraged to have ideas.

Yes, this will mean making mistakes and going to the wrong hex and then having to figure out they're in the wrong hex, spending an extra running climbing up the side of a mountain that leads to nothing except perhaps the view of another similarly possible mountain that might also be the mountain they're not looking for.  Yet this is how adventuring actually plays out.

Lewis & Clark never, ever had to back track.  Zeke told
them the way.

Getting Used to It

To acclimatize or learn how to live in that environment.  This is only possible if a party stays in the same place.  Abilities like scouting can help with generally living in a type of environment, of course, but to acclimatize to a particular wild the adventurers have to actually get to know the place through repeated journeying through the countryside until the rocks, creeks, hollows and heights become familiar.  As long as the players insist on adventuring somewhere new, they forsake the potential for calling a particular hinterland 'home.'

This is fine for most campaigns.  Unfortunately for me, though my players do tend to roost eventually (they're rewarded for it), they never think about learning to live in the hinterland.  Once they own their land their characters share the urban-mindset that the players have, since everyone I run has grown up in a big city.  Sure, the country is out there, it is good for camping . . . but even if they learn where the hollows and heights are, what are they going to do with that knowledge?  They just don't know.

Lack of imagination, I suppose.  They could use that back country the way Robin did, running into it and hiding while the Normans take wilderness damage until they have to retreat before finding themselves weakened to where a group of green-dressed peasants can take them.  However, players never seem to want to be Robin Hood in my campaigns, sitting out in the woods and the rain.  They'd rather be the Sheriff of Snotengaham . . . er, Nottingham.

Wilderness Grit

Dungeons are easy to describe.  They are built of straight lines, defined pathways, ceilings that are such and such a height and features that are substantially made.  Even natural caves have a 'constructed' feel, in that they are hollowed out of rock by a clear, understandable force.  When setting out to draw a map of a dungeon, those dark black lines defining the walls are reassuring, easily limited sets of choices for the players to make.

Compare this to the map of a forest.  It is easy enough to fill in a large hexagonal field with trees - but what does that really define, where player movement is concerned?  In dungeons, the players move in a straight line.  Dungeons are broken up by doors that require decisions.  Things differ from one room to the next.  But the forest is just . . . a forest.  Tree followed by repeated, dull, never-ending tree.

It is this lack of boundaries that makes the wilderness harder to run than the dungeon.  What does one do with the players?  We can't just describe the trees.  If the party finds a brook or an outcropping of rock, so what?  How can stumbling across a large, dead log compare to stumbling into an underground shrine or treasure vault?  We can describe the forest, fill it with descriptions of dry, ponderosa pine trees, their branches thin and scrawny for lack of rain.  We can describe a forest floor with wild blueberries, roses and hazelnut bushes.  We can describe the leaves as sounding like walking on cornflakes.  We can describe a carpet of pine needles a foot thick or an undergrowth that confounds movement like a choking mass.  We can make the players feel like they're in a forest - but that alone doesn't make for adventure.

That is why many DMs resort to reducing the wilderness to a point-crawl, in effect reducing the wilderness to a dungeon.  See, dungeons are simple to understand.  Dungeons are theatrical; all the action can take place on a defined stage, where all the players are contained in a very small space and are thus immediately accessible to one another - and to the events of the performance.  The space between dungeon rooms is immediate, explicit, limited in scope.  If a point-crawl can reduce the scattered, difficult to manage spread of the wilderness to something that can be shrunk to the size of an arena, then excellent, nyet?

Yet, for those who have tried this tactic arises the question: why not just run dungeons?  Why not reduce the wilderness one more degree to where it is a measurement of time between town and the dungeon's front door?

I have struggled against this option from the beginning of my gaming.  I feel intrinsically that the wilderness should be different - and I have written in that regard many times.

Recently, however, I've been working on this series of posts regarding primitive clans and that has highlighted the problem.  Perhaps the point-crawl - if there has to be one - could be more 'gritty.'  By getting a firm handle on what should be in that wilderness (more than just the features and the vegetation but the ground-level adjustments put there by humanoids as improvements, the business of wilderness travel could have a bit more guts to it than just finding things.

Part of what makes a dungeon so interesting is that features are clues that lead to puzzling out a mystery of what the dungeon represents and who (or what) is at the heart of it.  The wilderness has to include that same reasoning, making it possible for players to wonder who camps at this campsite, what these images mean on the walls of the cave and where does this trail go.

I feel I am onto something - and perhaps it will reveal itself a bit more when I move into the technical qualities associated with tech-6.

Dropped

I suppose I've gotten used to it, but it strikes me weird that DMs do not naturally gravitate to adventures that are open-ended in their construction and design.  The adventure ideas I've put up lately aren't especially designed to be different from the norm - this is just the way I think when I imagine throwing the party into some situation which they must then manage.

Tim's comment yesterday made the point clear - an 'adventure' is just a hopped-up encounter that has enough threads for the players to follow.  Like any adventure that the reader might expect to fall into organically, it starts with meeting someone or observing something, whereupon everything that follows depends upon what the observer puts into it.

Being that this is D&D, we expected 'adventurers' to go find out the cause behind something strange or odd.  I would not expect the same from the reader.  If the reader were in a hotel in Dominica that was attacked by a group of men wielding pistols with the intent of killing a local businessman, I would not expect that anyone we know would load up with weapons and go to find out why.  But we do expect this of adventurers; in fact, we can almost be sure it will happen - especially if we touch some button by letting the player's meet the businessman's cute, recently orphaned, tear-soaked daughter.

Then again, I am the sort of person who thinks of a vacation in terms of paying for a flight and then 'visiting' whatever city or place I've gone to.  I don't look for someone else to pick my hotel or set up a tour for me.  I don't spend money on a book that tells me all the interesting places there are to see.  I don't schedule my vacations to line up with some festival or world-shattering event.  In fact, the less that's happening, the more normal the place is that I'm going to see, the better I like it.

I hate other people telling me what to look at because, for the most part, other people are very easily enamored with things that bore me shitless.  Simultaneously, I have found that invariably those same people lack the necessary knowledge about whatever it is they're showing me.  Every time I wind up being forced on a tour somewhere - usually through being thrown in the wrong people and going along to be polite - I always end up delivering half the tour myself, as my various interests in art, history, architecture, science and so on won't let me stand there listening to the tour guide give half the information about what we're seeing.  Thankfully, I'm a great presenter - so people are always glad I came along.  Unfortunately, I'm really not.

It's like forever being a DM who can't find a game in which he can play.  I like DMing; I have no strong desire to be a tour guide.  I really, really don't want to be shown what I should see.  I like to poke around, investigate, turn up at some lonely coffee shop and get into a four-hour conversation with the barista, sharing ideas and perspectives as they can only be shared away from home.  I like to stumble across a museum or a church, arrange a personal walk-through with the priest in residence who will chat for twenty minutes about where this particular image of cavalry originated and why the artist was driven to shoot his mother.  I love finding my way into an unexpected, off-the-track restaurant where I'm the only white person in the place, where I am served the best meal from Laos or Tanzania or Cappadocia I ever expect to eat again . . . where I am invariably welcomed by staff and other patrons as one of their own.

I like agency.  I don't understand people who want to give their agency away.  I don't understand how people can talk about an "adventure's end" in a game where the adventure never, ever needs to end, where it can just take a step to the left and follow the next string to the next logical development.

Gawd.  Maybe I was dropped as a baby.