Panic at the Game Table

From the as yet unpublished March Lantern:

"Before any counsel might be taken—whether we should press onward through the opened door, or else withdraw and be content... Warth strode forward without hesitation and passed between the doors..."

I wrote the above specifically because of a behaviour than one of my Discord players actively called out as the reason for not directly taking action: because they did not want to volunteer the rest of the party by compelling others to act in accordance with their actions. On the one part, I like that its appropriately assumed that if, like Warth above, someone just bulls forward, the party will step up from a sense of commitment, but on the other part I find myself bristling that a player would resist trusting that. It's a characteristic I don't see in my offline games... and it is a characteristic that causes parties to default to a place where they have to check and be sure first, in essence getting permission, before acting. Which demands that every step the party takes forward be first resolved by committee meeting.

It's worth discussing how the player's "I act" is transformed into "I commit others to my action."  The structure of the game, divorced of the Gygaxian "leader" model, which is for shit, asks for players to step up and take the helm when they see what needs doing. The problem is that most everyone has played with incompetents and damn fools that just rush forward blindly at every opportunity. One naturally gets tired of kicking someone else's chestnuts out of the fire. Too, responsibly minded players, the better players, assume a default mode of looking after one's fellow man which is hard to shake off. It's all well and good for characters from a film to watch Shalar the Monk go off running and fifty enemy by himself with the line, "What does he think he's doing?", followed by a sigh and, "Getting himself killed." Around a D&D table, no one actually wants Shalar to die. So while there is a sigh, it's almost always followed by, "All right, we all go too."

No better player wants to be Shalar. They want to respect their fellow players and not impune their agency by forcing their hand. This is why the "committee" is not evidence of timidity, or poor play, or even self-doubt, but in fact an example of mutual respect.

Which makes it all the worse for being a bad strategy.

The problem with this character-action design is that requires the DM to reframe time to allow for a committee meeting to take place between the party members, even when that insertion of time is utterly irrational. A combat round in my game lasts 12 seconds, but even if it lasted a minute, it would not be long enough to account for some of the conversations I witnessed in our last session of combat. At present, with a new party, in a new game, with an uncertainty about the combat rules (though the party did extremely well with them), it's not reasonable for me to hold them accountable for unfamiliar decisions... yet. But soon enough they will know the combat system, and soon enough it won't be reasonable for them to have a discussion about who stands where or who does what this round or what the strategy is now that there are rats flooding up the stairs. Sooner or later, rationally, within the time frame imposed by the game, decisions by committee are not only going to be impractical, I'm going to have to take a stance that attempts to discuss will be complimented by forfeitures of attacks and other action. When called up to the plate, it's time to swing, not have another confab with the coach.

Now, is where I must insert the scene from the ancient film The Untouchables, where Al Capone says,

"A man stands alone at a plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone."

Thereafter, Capone goes into this whole thing about the team and being there for the team, culminating in a brutal murder but hey, spoilers, right?  And Capone's point is made. But the reverse also has to be true. The team can field themselves the livelong day, pitcher, first baseman, outfielder, but if someone doesn't score a damn point on their own, then the best the team can do together is TIE. None of that is discussed in the film, it wouldn't make the writer's point, but it's just as true as anything the Capone character says.

This is how D&D is structured, however. When it's time for the player to act, to fight, to throw a spell, to leap across this gorge, the team cannot, by virtue of their location in the setting, by virtue of the action taking place in the setting, speak their opinions about what a player does with the character. I have not hesitated as a DM to tell everyone else to keep quiet, to put the player on the spot. I have not hesitated to state that the character fails to do anything because they have taken too long to act. This aspect of my game has not come up where I've played in text, because it simply wasn't practical. But Discord is closer to the real thing now and I'm not going to let time stretch forever.

In face-to-face play, there is less hesitation in taking an action before discussing it. One can look around at the other players and see in a glance that they're intention is plainly to go ahead. Excited people after a success cry out and jump around with excitement once the stress has passed; but excited people on the cusp of stress tighten up. They visibly begin to sit still; it's a body language that most of us register without thinking about it, as we have a hundreds of thousands of years of biological selection related to freezing while watching one of our clan approach a tiger or a mastodon or some other beast with a flimsy spear. I have repeatedly argued that the fundamental genius of D&D is not the rules, the culture, the structure of the DM or the reward system, but the way these things work together to create moments of feeling extreme danger and threat without our having to risk breaking our bones on a playing field, or getting shot at in Venezuela.

Intuitively, in the physical company of the party, the need for pre-verbal consent diminishes. We trust our instincts. We're sure the party will approve if we just go through the doors without asking first. We're confident that they have our backs without needing to ask first. In fact, it's more than that, we feel that the zeitgeist of the group together is willing us to act without the wasting of game time a committee demands.

In a moment like this, where every D&D game wants to be, asking permission isn't just unnecessary, it's actively immersion-obverse. Asking first ruins the tempo, the tension, the thrill of the game as it spins forward. These things are what makes "flow" happen in-game... where the players cease questioning themselves, cease putting a wall between themselves and their character, even cease considering survival as functionally relevant to just moving forward in the compulsive need to do so.

Some players can't do that on their own. They can't "let go" of the grey of real life. But they can be pushed, and one way of doing that is by saying, "What do you do?" and then one time — it usually only takes once — saying to the player fighting to make up their mind, "That's it, your round is done," before moving onto the next player. It sobers them. It shakes them from their sense of "this is a game, nothing matters" into "fuck, if I don't pick it up, I'm going to get killed here."

I've seen this produce a "tunnelling" effect into players that is both upsetting and mind-blowing, depending on their character and the number of times they've experienced it. The term describes moments of extreme stress, threat, obsession or motivation where one's attention collapses to manage a narrow set of cues and actions. It is a state, which people report as one of clarity, urgency, even simplification. If the reader has ever experienced that moment where time seems to weirdly slow down at the moment of an accident, where every detail of an oncoming car, or the sense of flying through the air, is comprehended with unnatural perception, that is tunnelling. In real life, it can be dangerous; drivers can find themselves unable to pull their gaze from an obstacle they end up hitting, or pilots can find themselves so fixated on a single instrument that they fail to take action to save themselves... but around a D&D table, I assure the reader, it is quite safe.

The very idea that D&D can achieve this state of mind feels specious; some reading this will outright state that it cannot be so. Others, however, have experienced this and it is queerly the reason why they refuse to surrender this game despite the growing dearth of players. I have experienced it. Hell, I've experienced tunnelling while writing. I nearly always experience flow while writing.

For those experiencing either for the first time, it is like achieving an alternative cognitive state without doing drugs. In Nichiren Buddhism, the term is shakubuku (yes, where Grosse Pointe Blank finds it), meaning to "break and subdue." It forcefully refutes a person's interior beliefs in a manner that shatters delusion and compels acceptance for that which was formerly considered untrue. This is what's upsetting for many —it usually means that the lies they've told themselves for years just won't work any more. In D&D, it means that the other game that the other people play has in a flash ceased to be good enough.

As I'm a prick, I tend to carry out this approach in D&D. Not because I'm a Buddhist or a Taoist, but because I won't suspend my privilege as a DM in attempting to impose this spiritual kick to the head. I'm ready to be fair, to not use my privilege to gain power over my players, to not fake dice or cheat or assume I'm my player's keeper. But, as a performer, if I can make you, the person, feel something through your engagement and attachment to the character you're running I will.

Time, as a game rule, is on my side in this. While party commitment by committee is not. As a DM, I will not hesitate to use time, real time, to create tension, discomfort, fear and their compliment emotions control, resilience and bravery, to produce an experience that a movie can't produce, that a book can't produce, that a VR table can't produce... and that the whole WOTC, for all it's money and influence, hasn't even heard of.

This is what makes this fun for me.

A Normal Part of Development

My grandson visited today.  He turned three in September and has discovered the raw, joyful thrill of endorphins for himself ... which is to say that he's learning he can run full-on into things face first without actually hurting himself.  This has built up slowly where it comes to cushy furniture and the 30-inch rubber workout ball that drifts into different parts of the apartment, but today it was my thigh — which I had to turn in his direction lest he, um, "unmanned" me.

Smashing face first into my thigh and bouncing back, then stumbling and falling to the floor, was instantly the best game in the world.  So he jumped up and did it again, with the same spinning, tumbling result.  Laughing, giggling, he rose and ran straight at it time after time, while I stood there, not hurt, letting him slam his whole strength at me over and over, about two dozen times.  I saw no reason to stop him.  He was having so much fun.

Then he backed off way across the room to get a really good run, 20 feet or so, stumbled on the way but absolutely ready to hit me as hard as he could — but I scooped him up and spun him around and let him go, to trip over his feet and fall on the floor, laughing and laughing and laughing ...

As I said, he's three.  It's not the same with every child, but as children's understanding of the world increases, and especially the limitations of their bodies, their sense of self and capability changes.  They want to test their physical limits; and if that's managed and not discouraged, so that actually hurting themselves too soon can be prevented, it potentially leads to a growth in confidence and curiosity.

He climbed up on the ottoman by the sofa today and I watched him tense himself like a cat to make the two foot jump from one to the other.  It was obvious he knew what he was doing and that he grasped the meaning of it.  A year ago, napping on that couch, he rolled over and fell headlong onto the floor, scaring the bejeezus out of himself (though he wasn't really hurt).  Today he leaped, easily made the distance, crashed into the sofa cushions and went wild with laughter.

Then, before I could stop him, he leaped back to the ottoman.  Not good; just beyond the ottoman is the coffee table, and if he'd crashed into that ... well, let us say it's not made of cushions.  Still, he gripped the ottoman like a cat when he landed and saved himself.  He has two cats at home.  He's plainly been watching them.

Now, today's subject is "fear."  Couple days ago I posted a cruel and angry rant about saving throws for death, which perhaps was unkind ... not that I really care.  The metric is essentially designed to assauge a weak sort of person against the severity of having to lose a fictional character in a game, so much that even knowledge of spells that bring back the dead aren't sufficient to ease the terrible suffering of such fragile sops.  These are not people willing to make a leap to a light piece of furniture that might tip over and smash them into something hard enough to give a few bruises.  I explained this consequence to my grandson (who knows if he understood me) and asked that he only leap from the ottoman to the sofa.  This was in no way dangerous, as I was right there, the sofa is deep and has lots of cushions, and anyway, endorphins.

He didn't do it the wrong way a second time; but he might when I'm not there.  When I think of the things I did when my parents weren't there ...

I don't want to applaud him, or even encourage him.  But I definitely don't want to punish him, because part of growing up is learning to judge oneself against one's fear.  He was evidently proud of himself; he shone a look at me that said, "Wow, did you just see that?"  I probably smiled.  What kind of monster would a person have to be not to smile at that moment?  But I didn't say "good boy" or "do it again."

I'll encourage a player to be brave.  They're not three, are they?  And somewhere along the line, they've talked themselves out of daring a consequence, even a very mild one, so that they'll stand back in my game and fear getting in and mixing it up.  I had a case of that happen a month ago, where I encouraged a player who lacked the magic weapon he needed to hit the gargoyle, to run in anyway.  "If nothing else, you'll take damage that someone in the fight with a magic weapon won't have to take."

The reader may doubt this, but the player reasoned this out and took me up on this.  He's new to the game, and although he'd already been in two fights, his character Torvik wasn't getting anywhere because my system is based on taking damage to get experience.  Holding back, not fighting up front, trying to hurl his club or fist-sized rocks and missing (a fist-sized rock does as much as a dagger, but it flies badly), Torvik wasn't getting anywhere.  So he waded in with the gargoyle that he couldn't hit.  Whereupon the gargoyle 20ed him and he took 16 damage.  Which, thanks to negative hit point rules, he survived.

And at the end of this fight, he went up a level.

We might say, he jumped for the ottoman and didn't fall over.

Friday's running, four days ago, Torvik hurried up to get straight into the fight (he rolled maximum for his 2nd level hit points) ... only to get blasted by a 7 damage burning hands spell seconds after he'd arrived.  So he got bruised a bit.  Still, he's got the equation in his head now, so that he's excited about taking damage and getting a chance to actually fight.

Somewhere, that little boy inside Torvik's player is slamming into God's thigh and laughing.

I know it may sound silly to many to make a metaphor out of this, but it's tremendously human for a small boy to act this way ... just as it sets up so many opportunities for scared, fearful parents to stop the boy from running into their thigh, or daring to make that two foot leap, or doing anything really, because something might happen.  I don't need to go down the road of explaining where this "something" leads to.  Certainly not to good D&D players.

Anyone who may happen to enter my D&D world certainly won't be held to some standard of toxic masculine risk-taking.  They'd die pretty quickly that way.  But if the game can provide a basis upon which an adult can engage in an activity involves some level of risk or emotional damage, which might make them a little more daring, and thus able and willing to test their intellectual and psychological limits, then I'd hope they'd acquire an increased confidence3, curiosity and desire for novelty and excitement.

This could only be a good thing.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

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Bolstering the Party

As dungeon masters, there's reason to appear unbiased.  We're pressed not to consider the party's advantage in things, and to appear as an unprejudiced judge when making game rulings.  However, it's easy for this visage to drift into an apparent lack of concern for the players' well-being ... even a couldn't-care-less attitude.  There's a danger here.  Detachment can encourage a party to fear what comes next, should they take an action ... but it can also persuade the party that the DM is "out to get them," and not in a good way.  While it's fun as a DM to chuckle while checking what's behind the door, as players reach for the handle, this sort of posturing has a down side.

When running games online, there was a considerable lack of trust on the players part for my DMing; and this despite all the things I'd written encouraging legitimacy and the responsibility a DM has towards producing a fair, proper game.  Where the rubber met the road, however, without my actual body language to indicate otherwise, with nothing but the words I wrote to convey feeling, the players couldn't rightly judge my intentions.  And since, as well, I happen to be a volatile snapping turtle besides, this produced a constant friction.  This was my fault.  Truth be told, I didn't compliment players often enough.  I still don't.  I have a tendency to be so fixed on the game, and making it run smoothly, while concentrating on the numerous details that must remain consistent, that once a moment is resolved, I'm rapidly moving to the next.

Allow an example; I'm told I don't tell enough war stories on this blog, so here goes.

Sorry about the quality of the image. Left click to isolate the image, then right-click to open the isolated image in a new window, then expand it by touching the plus-sign that appears.

This is the underground fortification my players have been fighting for two runnings.  The box on the upper left is the order of movement the players use, based on their dexterity (with ties broken by wisdom).  The dark tan indicates unexplored areas, assumed generally to be solid rock, except the space behind the double door on the upper right.  The detritus symbols on the tan areas are symbols I use during combats, to indicate whether a weapon is loaded (3 green circles for a heavy crossbow), if someone's stunned (red circle) or wounded (red star).  The goblin on the middle left is just there in case I needed another goblin ... as the map was revealed step by step, so goblin images were repurposed over and over throughout the battle.

The party entered through the chamber on the bottom right, were attacked by goblin bowmen at points A. (15 ft. above the chamber), then they had to go downslope through the middle, where minor goblins at points B. threw one-pound stones at them.  At point C., the goblins also threw molotov cocktails.  C. is located between two 10 ft. deep pits, which the mage (in blue, next to point C) created a tenser's floating disk (purple-yellow circle) to ship the players across the pits after the far side of each was secured.  Points D. are dead ends with spear traps, which one player took damage from.  The party then had to climb the stairs up from points D., fighting goblins as they went, clearing out the stone throwers.  Approaching point E., upon climbing the stair up (where all the players are jammed together) and opening the door, they were soaked with boiling oil.  E. was then used as a murder hole, so that while the party tried to climb the fixed ladder, they were shot full of holes and forced to retreat back to the stairs.  One player did reach the top of the ladder and nearly gained the ground before losing initiative and being knocked off.  That's where we ended it Friday night, with the two sides in a stalemate, while the party has chosen to regroup.

Much of this was made possible by a druid effectively using an obscurement spell, which followed her along as they worked their way down, then up.  Every player employed some clever technique or took a serious risk to survive the 35 goblins in their way.  Yet when the session ended, it didn't occur to me until after they were gone that I should have praised their work with more than the experience given (which was considerable and much appreciated, though no treasure has yet be secured).

And this brings me to the last post and this comment from Lance:

"I'm interested in your scary tunnel post. My players keep leaving dungeons/lairs half explored because of scary tunnels I didn't even try to make scary ha!"

I'm not saying this is the answer to Lance's troubles, but it's a beginning overall towards building a party's confidence and courage.  Not because we'll assure them that they'll succeed in every battle, but because we have to give them reason to try.  In essence, praise them.

We must choose our moment.  We know what's coming along as the session progresses and the players do not, plus we have time to make statements when the players arrive and are finding their places at the table.  We put it as lightheartedly as we can:  "Say, you guys have been doing pretty well lately.  That goblin lair was a tough nut to crack."

Of course, this praise must be sincere.  They must actually have been doing well.  Otherwise, it's hollow, and we risk being viewed as pandering and inauthentic.  It's not so much that we need to invent praise to give to the party, it's that we need to evaluate their play from time to time and recognise when individuals have excelled ... and then give them the praise they've earned.

We can also, respectfully, embolden them in situations where something appears much worse than it is.  Let's take the party moving through our dungeon.  They've fought off the mooks and moved into those areas affected by the thermal biome ... and here, they're attacked by a huge spider, which surprises them, takes a bit of meat out of the cleric's leg (3 damage), only to be effectively stomped by, of all people, the mage (who was the nearest person, rolled a critical with her quarterstaff and did 12 pts. of damage).  Unfortunately, the cleric fails the poison save—

—which in my game, causes 8 h.p. of damage per hit die of the venomous creature, at a rate of 1 h.p. per round, per hit die.  In other words, the cleric starts taking 2 damage each round, as the poison courses through his body.  As he's in pain, he can't concentrate on a spell; but the players have acquired four healing salves through their past efforts and rapidly apply them to counteract the poison.  As a result, the cleric is hurt, the players lose some capacity to heal, plus maybe the cleric's cure light wounds spell, but everyone is alive. 

Investigating, they find the spider has come through a small hole, from which warmth is exuding, about ten degrees more than the corridor.  Sending the thief through the hole, he discovers a winding vertical tunnel that's easily climbable, with surfaces covered with damp moss, about 4 to 6 ft in diameter.  The air within has tiny insects, and drifting pollen; and as the thief twists to work back to the party, he sees another huge spider squatting about twenty feet below, using its pincers to clean its forelegs.  The thief reports this.

We can't tell the party that the shaft is critical if they want to catch the lake hag below by surprise.  First of all, they don't even know there is a lake hag; and they're not blessed with knowledge of the future. They only know what they can see.  From their perspective, the strange shaft looks like a good way to be killed by spiders ... and that's the only thing it appears to be good for.  Now, the cleric in my game received 60 experience from the spider bite, and 320 experience from the poison damage ... and every player recieved 76 x.p. (before 10% bonus, if it applies) for just being there.  I treat "experience" as "practical contact with, and observation of, facts and events."  You know, like the actual definition of the word.  And it's awfully practical to know what it's like to almost die from poison, or to watch someone else nearly do so.

Oh, and the mage got another 110 x.p. for killing the thing.

Not every spider is worth 870 x.p.  If the spider hadn't hit the cleric at all, and the mage had then killed it, the total would only have been 110.  If the cleric had made his saving throw, it would only have been 230.  It's only high because the cleric would have been seriously depleted.  As a 2nd level, assuming no constitution bonus (and let's say that), suppose he had 15 hit points to start.  Minus 3, then minus 16, puts him at -4.  That'll kill him in a lot of people's games (and thus, less experience gained), but not mine, as I use negative hit points.  Still, those rules force the cleric to make a check to see if he's made unconscious at -4 h.p.; and if he is, that's quite the encumbrance burden if the party doesn't spend even more healing to make him conscious again.  This is how I justify one spider being worth a whole lot, and another spider being worth very little.

So, with lots of healing lost, does the party really want to tangle with another spider?

Okay, let me back up.  Remember when I said we could embolden the party, and I said we could take advantage of the session's initiation, since we know what's going to happen.  We're the DM.  We know all about the spider that's going to jump out ... and we're capable of guessing that someone's going to get bit (we rolled randomly to choose the cleric), and that they might blow their save (though the cleric has the best advantage there).  We know about the shaft and we can be pretty sure the players will wonder where the spider came from, and that someone will scout ahead.  We know they'll see the second spider.  None of this is a mystery to us.

We use this information to prime the party in their favour, and ours.  How?  They just fought a bunch of unknown minions and they all survived.  "Good job on those soggy humanoids," we say, as it's now the next running and they've all had time to get over that unexpected event.  We add, "I'd hoped it might cause you to think maybe you're in over your heads, here.  But you're good to go on, right?  Nobody here is afraid, right?"

If we can urge them, gently, to take a stance on how brave they are, then for a few hours you can fairly count on that declaration affecting their subconscious choices.  As the linked wikipedia suggests, the effect is rarely noticed by the players; they've consciously forgotten that they stated their bravery in the midst of the game ... but when the time comes to make a brave decision or not, most times they'll edge towards what they felt when they thought they were safe.

Priming works both ways.  If, as DMs, we're overcritical, or we demonstrate too much doubt in the players' abilities, that can also prime the players to lose confidence, doubting themselves and feeling a strong resistance against taking risks.  While priming is a powerful tool, it can also subvert the game if we're not careful what we choose to say, when making the game ready and spouting off.

As DM, our opinions carry enormous weight at the table ... much more weight than those opinions would carry if we were at a bar and talking over drinks.  This is because the players habitually strive to ascertain some clue about their success in every word we speak, and in the nuance of our voice tone and body language.  Our voice — strange as it may seem — has the potential to be both a positive and a negative influence on the player's willingness to take risks.

Myself, I think this factor had much less effect when we were playing as teenagers back in the day ... but only because we were less socially skilled at parsing out the words of other people, and ascribing to those words clues that would tell us whether or not we were succeeding within the relationship or with tasks in the work place.  As we grow older, and virtually nothing is said straightforwardly, we adapt to a social climate where everything a person says might contain a hidden meaning.  This is definitely true as a DM.  I notice the effect I have when I make an off-handed comment, or when I deliberately prime the players behaviour.  By merely mentioning something obscure about D&D at the beginning of a session — say, secret doors, which occur so rarely in my game that players don't search for them — I've caused a player to do something exactly at the time when I need them to do it, hours later.  It's a bit spooky sometimes.  And if I ask later, they'll claim they don't remember my ever mentioning secret doors.  They just "felt" like this was the time to search for one.  Even though they practically never do.

My answer to Lance, and anyone feeling their party is hesitant, is to suggest going over our own behaviour as DM.  What are we saying, or what are we not saying, that's adjusting their bravery in the face of a scary-looking tunnel.  Surely, we're not whetting their appetite enough with prospective experience or treasure; or we're giving them cause to feel they haven't the stuff to handle this tunnel; or we're making it too easy, socially, to turn hide and flee.

I don't know what that might be; I'm at my own table, and not that of others.  But I feel that if I sat in and listened, I might guess pretty quickly what's happening, based on the table's set-up, the distance between the DM and the players, the voice the DM uses, where focus is being placed, and how the dialogue is being handled.  Small things make big differences.

We must be careful about how remote we are ... because we're not on the hook, as the party is.  And if they sense that we're taunting them, or dismissing them, or feeling above them, they'll respond with distrust.  And that is something we cannot have when we run.  We need the players to believe that we're every bit as fair and honest as we appear ... else they'll think, consciously or unconsciously, that it's all an act.

Adult Fare

Last month, you may have seen this article about a Vegan D&D player demanding a cruelty-free campaign.  If so, you should see the follow-up, in which the DM explained that there was more to the matter than what the click-baity argument let on.

I have a high personal bar for this sort of thing, which arises from personal experience with cruel things and I think a greater knowledge of history than most.

Recently, poking about the net looking into the butcher's trade, I came across this from The Pictorial Handbook of London, dated 1854.  It speaks of Newmarket street, where there were many butcher's shops to be found:

“The slaughterhouses for sheep are almost exclusively in cellars underneath the shop, where the pices or joints are sold in retail. The access to these cellars is by steps, over which a board is occasionally placed, to act as an inclined plane for the animal to slide down. More frequently a much more summary process is had recourse to—the animal is seized by the butcher and pitched headlong into the cellar by main force, where, unable to rise from broken limbs, or other injuries sustained by the fall, they lie awaiting their turn to be slaughtered ...”

 

My first instinct is to include the above in the Streetvendor's Guide, as a visual, to set the scale on which a fantasy world has every right to operate.  Not every D&D game is My Little Pony.  There's plenty of real life human history wallowing in gore, slaughter, sadism and extreme cruelty to justify a group of murdering adventurers chewing up the landscape.  Moreover, such is the material that causes young children to gaze at in rapture, wide-eyed, realising for the first time how spectacularly dark is the reality of human history ... before, that is, growing up and coming to their senses, assuming they do.  I did.  Personally, I've felt no desire to walk in the footsteps of either the Huns or the Mongols, rounding up whole villages in order to massacre every living soul.

Well, there was that one time.  But never again.

Given the youth of participants, coupled with the sheltering from knowledge by helicopter parents, I'm not surprised by the stark reactions of some to the details of skinning and deboning a pig ... a perfectly ordinary operation to a rural-born child a hundred years ago, some five years after my grandfather had come home from the Great War.  Those readers who have dared to watch recent fare like All Quiet on the Western Front or 1917 have merely glimpsed a tiny bit of the day-to-day hellscape that formed a whole generation's perspective on "cruelty."  The truth is, the fact that individuals can feel so passionately about the description of a pig's slaughter only goes to show how very, very comfortable the world has become, for all of us.  The bar for trauma has been drastically lowered ... and that's a GOOD thing.  The last thing we need is a return to the standards of the last century.

It produces an interesting conundrum.  Nassim Taleb's 2014 book, Antifragile, Things that Gain from Disorder, makes the valid argument that bad things make us stronger and better able to handle and overcome other bad things.  There's no question of that.  That doesn't mean, however, that a DM — who may already be fragile — is ready to tackle the rampant fragility of one or more players.  For some groups, the game itself, with it's elements surrounding combat and killing, evil, intrigue, villainous characters and supernatural overtones, is a ticking time-bomb.

It's only a matter of time before the DM advances some idea that seemed "really cool" on the surface, only to find that it's tapped into someone's fragility in a way that ends the session or friendship, or perhaps several friendships and the whole campaign.  We shouldn't wonder that many young people, with little to no experience in dealing with life's most difficult themes, end up pussyfooting their way around every aspect of role-playing.

This is why, early on, I conceived of D&D as an adult game.  Remember, unlike a lot of people who have been around a long time, I began playing at 15, not 9.  By that time I'd played D&D a year, I'd had two grandparents die, I had a front-row seat watching an uncle spiral into alcoholism, I'd been beat up several times by groups larger than two and I'd experienced the dehumanising thrill of playing high school football.  Life was not, as they say, great.  Yet I think I was old enough not to see D&D as a form of escape, which would have been ridiculous ... instead, I saw it as a way to express my frustrations, my desire for having something I could control, and a way to interact socially with others whose lives and frustrations reflected my own.

Children should not play D&D.  They should, first, get some sense of how the world works ... meaning that their early activities should be athletic, competitive, confrontational in a healthy manner that teaches them that sometimes we lose, that we have to overcome loss, that effort itself is a form of success ... and that just because someone is on the opposite side in this game, it doesn't mean they hate us or they're an enemy.  Sometimes, we agree to take sides in order to experience the abilities and strengths of our friends in the cold light of reality.

Not that I could have thoroughly explained this when I was a child.  Obviously.  But playing D&D, especially this decade's form of D&D, is a disaster where it comes to a child's upbringing.  Participating in adventures where the players always succeed, where everything can be changed at a whim, where the losers are always pretend creatures we don't know ... and where the gloss of magic obliterates the day-to-day struggle for existence in a world without technology ... paints a rather debilitating strategy for, um, fragility.

That's because D&D has transformed from a game of attempt/fail to operative wish-fulfillment.  Too much of that cripples children by making a large part of their lives too easy, just as William Goldman warned.

Turns out that taking away all the trauma that a child might conceivably experience doesn't make them happier, or bring about an end to trauma.  Instead, the child to find trauma in whatever can be found among the trivial things that are left.  The end result is a zero-sum gain.  No matter how good or rosey we make the world, it's impossible for us not to find something horrific anyway ... even when that "horrific" is pretty damned silly.

I much prefer a D&D game among tough, resilient adults, who can take being killed as a part of the game, who don't expect things to go their own way, who don't need the game to fulfill some empty hole caused by their lack of a meaningful life.  The adventures are sharper, the stakes are higher, the ethics less black-and-white and the artistry in running and playing the game at it's peak.  Shouting matches are a sign of passion, of really caring, not a form of emotional tantrum.  Nothing is off the table.  Nothing is denied.  No one expects to have things their way.

It's how I think the game should be played.

Judgement Calls

So, a few hours after writing my last post, I settled down to in bed to read some before going to sleep.  I typically read between 20 and 30 minutes a night.  Of course, I'm still reading Michael Lewis' The Undoing Project ... and right off, it punched me right between the eyes.

The book is talking about how things that have happened recently have much more effect on how we judge situations, because they're recent.  For example, I was recently in a car accident; the first one I've experienced in 38 years (the last one was a "bump" also).  While I know it's bogus, going out to the new car (we were covered by insurance), I can't get it out of my head that we're going to have another accident, and soon.  It's there in my face.  I tell myself there's no reason to think one will happen; I tell myself that even if one did, that's how statistics work.  But in fact, the only thing that will shove this persistent feeling aside is time.

So then I read two quotes on two pages, one after the other, at the end of chapter six.  Here's the first:

"What people did in many complicated real-life problems — when trying to decide if Egypt might invade Isreal, say, or their husband might leave them for another woman — was to construct scenarios.  The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgments.  'The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,' wrote Danny and Amos.  'There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.'"

There.  That's what I'm doing.  I'm making up a "story."  But can the reader see the implications this has for any social interaction?  Right now, it's exactly what every pundit is doing discussing the recent American election: they're making up stories about the future based on the very flimsy, immediate incident in the recent past ... and doing it as though everything they're saying makes perfect sense.  It's your mother, or maybe it's you, claiming that your knee hurts because there's a change in the weather; some bias you have about your knee, and some coincidence with a change in the weather you've experienced recently, assures you that your knee always hurts when the weather's changing.  But it's just a bullshit story you're telling yourself, like the nagging feeling that I have about another car accident.

Once you embed yourself into that story, however, it's THE reality you can't dismiss.  You've created your own bullshit and now you've bought in, and there's no path out, not mentally.  What's more, according to research, we all do it.  Once we've decided what the future's going to be, based on next to no evidence, THAT'S the future now ... for us.  Not for anyone else, of course.

It's not that we go on the internet and get hauled into some conspiracy bubble that programs us and constantly reassures us about things we want to believe.  It's that at some point we heard something, it made sense, and now we've locked onto that thing so hard we can't be argued out of it.  It doesn't matter if there's a bubble or not.  "We" are the bubble.  It's a bubble of one person.

Near as I can tell, the solution is that when we have an uncertain situation, the one thing we absolutely must not do is to interpret that situation at all.  Don't make a guess!  Any guess we make is almost certain to be wrong, and if it happens that we come to believe that wrong guess, it's going to lead to bad places.

I think, too, there's application for the way situations arise with players in D&D.  More often than not, as I introduce the players into some kind of danger, they begin to get themselves worked up over some specific kind of supreme danger that's only just popped into their minds.  Suddenly, they're panicking before every door, certain that this next one's going to unleash something that'll kill the whole party.  Quite a lot of the time, especially with parties that don't know me well, I have to stop the game and effectively say, "Buttercup does not get eaten by the sharks at this time."  Everything's fine, guys.  I'm not just going to kill you.

['course, I killed the offline party last week, so recent events might suggest that yes, I am going to kill you, but in fact I have no plans in that direction]

The practice of trying to "play the DM" encourages players to seek explanations for the DM's motives based on bad judgements.  The reverse can happen just as easily, with the DM assuming the players' collective motives are completely at odds with the campaign.  It demonstrates the importance of maintaining strong communication between all the participants.

Here's the second quote:

"The stories people told themselves, when the odds were either unknown or unknowable, were naturally too simple.  'This tendency to consider only relatively simple scenarios,' they concluded, 'may have particularly salient effects in situations of conflict.  There, one's own moods and plans are more available to one that those of the opponent.  It is not easy to adopt the opponent's view of the chessboard or of the battlefield.'  The imagination appeared to be governed by rules.  The rules confined people's thinking.  It's far easier for a Jew living in Paris in 1939 to construct a story about how the German army will behave much as it had in 1919, for instance, than to invent a story in which it behaves as it did in 1941, no matter how persuasive the evidence might be that, this time, things are different."

 

It's incredibly important that the DM see the game from the player's point of view, and vice versa.  This means having a very clear idea of why the DM wants to run the campaign.  What is the DM getting out of it?  I mean, specifically.  The tendency, like the quote above, is to produce a super-simple explanation: "Why, the DM wants to have fun."  How is that remotely reassuring?  "Fun" might include killing off player characters; it might mean deliberately humiliating people; it might mean getting one's jollies by forcing people to sit through boring speeches while walking through empty room after empty room.

The same is true of the DM: why are the players here?  What do they want?  Is it good DMing if we set out to create some profound scenario that the players have no reason to like?  Again, it's all communication.  We know ourselves fairly well; we know why we're in this.  We have to tell others.  We have to explain ourselves out loud, and often, rather than reserving ourselves and making probability judgements without any idea of the probabilities.

As a player, you don't know what I'm doing as a DM.  That's deliberate.  To make the game exciting and unpredictable, and therefore rewarding, I have to withhold an immense amount of information.  If I'm a good DM, then none of my scenarios are simple.  As a player, this is something you have to trust.  You have to believe that my first responsibility here is not my own fun, but the well-being of everyone present, with myself being no more important than anyone else.  If you don't believe that, we're going to have problems.  Your distrust will repeatedly manifest as a series of wrong, simplistic statements that you've decided to believe based on zero actual information.  As a DM, I've got to address that.  I need to know why you distrust me; why you think I have any agenda that's designed against you or any other player; and I've got to lay that distrust to rest.  If I can't do that ... if I can't convince you that I'm trustworthy ... then we can't play together.

Likewise, I have to trust you.  I have to believe you're not trying to undermine the game or the other players.  I have to believe you're ready to act on the information your given, and not on information you've invented, as a player, on the fly.   I have to know that you're here to play D&D and not some other game.

This could be a good explanation for why those who try a more complicated game run into such troubles.  If we're participating together in a predictable module adventure, there are less opportunities for distrust.  If you know that I'm running a module provided by a game company, then you don't have to trust that I built a good adventure; you only need to trust that I'm accurately presenting the game company's module.  That's an easier assumption.

As a DM, running a module, I know, doesn't ask as much from you.  I'm not laying my creativity on the line, I'm leaning on someone else's creativity.  If the module doesn't work, I'm less invested.  We, DM and player, can bitch together about the lousy module.  It's not you bitching about my work.  For a lot of people, especially those who find it hard to take criticism, that's a huge bonus.

It's not how I want to go.  I don't want simple scenarios.  I don't believe in easy, simple explanations.  It's why I spend so long deconstructing D&D over and over.  Because I don't believe that a game built almost entirely on human interaction can be simple.  I don't think the probabilities that might come up can be known.  At all.  I think the best players are those who DON'T make judgements about the future based on what's just happened.  I think the best strategy to employ, whether one is a player or a DM, is to take one's time and presuppose, "We'll see."

And no more than that.

What you remember about your past is more apt to warp the future than you realise.

Representative

I wanted to write one more post in this long series, about education, but I'm afraid I'm dry.  The basic idea was to educate your players how to be dungeon masters, in the sense of driving them to make their own adventures out of the guidelines provided by the game, but somehow I can't centre my thoughts on the subject.  I'll have to pick it up later.

At present, I'm a bit frustrated by the American election, especially at what's "passing" for journalism ... as in, "toilet."   I'm stunned that so many well-paid, long-standing political pundits are able to spectacularly misread, or staggeringly misrepresent, what's happening.  A whackadoodle losing an election by a thousand votes is NOT "the country stepping back" ... it's factual evidence that the whackadoodles are ready to step up their game and win next time.  We certainly haven't seen evidence that "the Republican party has to return to its roots now."  I mean, wtf.  For the record, the Democrats have LOST.  Even if it turns out they keep the house and senate by paper-thin margins, if this is the best you can do with two years of running the country after an attempted coup by the other side ... fuck.  I mean, um ... fuck.  Some days, I just want to scream and scream and scream.  Everyone lost.  Especially the country.

Changing the subject.  I haven't a post of my own, so I'll steal one.

I'm reading a book by Michael Lewis that follows the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who proposed the term "heuristics" in the 1970s, around the time D&D was born.  It's a fascinating read and utterly misrepresented by the wikipedia article, which seems to have been written by someone who hasn't read the book.  The first five pages suggests the words, "revisits Lewis' interest in market inefficiencies," but since the next 190 do absolutely nothing to discuss this subject, I suspect foul play.

Essentially, the theme of Tversky's and Kahneman's work (they switched their names around with every paper) is that we don't know what we think we know.  That is because we base our guesses about people and events and things on what we think is true, which in fact leads us to be wrong about everything.  I'll quote briefly from the book:

"When people make judgments, they argued [Kahneman & Tversky], they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds.  How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm?  How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer?  Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player?  Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide?  The world's not just a stage.  It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance.  And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity — or (strange new word!) representativeness.  You have some notion of a parent population: 'storm clouds' or 'gastric ulcers' or 'genocidal dictators' or 'NBA players.'  You compare the specific case to the parent population."

What happens is that, in fact, we don't really know storm clouds or ulcers or players as well as we think we do.  This ends up in our making a decision about something that sounds absolutely dead on to us, but is completely, totally wrong in practice.  For example ...

Once you played with someone who fudged dice and the games were pretty good.  You caught the DM fudging and the explanation you got back sounded "reasonable."  The game was, like I said, "pretty good."  You made the connection that "pretty good" = "dice fudging" ... and this was supported by meeting other interesting and cool people who also fudged dice and for the same reason.  You never actually played in any of their campaigns, but you assume from your representativeness that their games were probably also pretty good.

So, you fudge dice yourself.  Because that's how your best representative DMs in your past did it.  You have no actual knowledge if your game is "pretty good," but you assume it must be since you fudge dice.  But then one day, for no specific reason, people drift away from your game and it ends.  Why?  Well, you make up reasons based on your past experience with players.  Players are busy, you tell yourself.  Players have other things to do.  Sometimes, players don't stay around.  People quit the game all the time.  You absolutely DON'T question any of the practices you maintain as a DM, because those are the practices that other DMs — whom you don't play with anymore, for reasons — used.  It never occurs to you that one of your players discovered that you were cheating and decided to tell the others when you weren't there.  And because they found the behaviour so disingenuous and repulsive, they decided not to confront you.

But you're fine.  You're telling yourself now that Alexis is a person too, and makes judgements based on his representativeness, which is obviously wrong, because he's just basing his opinions on what he thinks is true, based on HIS past.  That has nothing to do with your past.

I admit, it's frustrating ... but this is why the book about Tversky and Kahneman is interesting.  It challenges us to think through the difference between making a decision based on reality and one based on judgement.

[notice: when I quote the American book, I spell the word "judgment," but when I write in the King's English, I spell the word "judgement"; I've done it both ways over the last fifty years and I've finally decided I'm a Canadian.  That's why I spell it "realise," "armour" and "manoeuvre" now]

Let me give you a simple example, one not fraught with arbitrary Alexis-bullshit judgements.  I'll continue to use examples I haven't found in Lewis' book, but I've only reached page 190.

Suppose that you're doing a very difficult multiple choice exam ... and although you've studied, it's very difficult and many of the questions and answers have been deliberately designed to mislead you.

About halfway through a four-hour exam, starting with question #117, you start to notice that every correct answer is (a).  You start to notice when it's four in a row, and soon enough it's eight in a row and then twelve in a row.  What's going on?  Glancing over each question, you're never quite certain of which is the exact right answer, because in many cases throughout the whole test, it really could be the choice you didn't pick.  And now you've stopped and looked at this list of 12 (a)'s in a row and you're seriously questioning your judgement.  Why?

Because, basically, if you were making a multiple choice test, it wouldn't occur to you to make 12 answers in a row all be (a)'s.  You'd mix them up.  You wouldn't decide to make every answer an (a) like this.  Which means, since you wouldn't do it, obviously, neither would the professor, or the tester.  Multiple choice exams just are done this way.  Right?

Is it right?  Is it logical to go back over your answers for the last twelve questions, wasting time, and making sure that you're absolutely correct with every one?  Is it logical to change your answers on some of them just to break the streak.  Is that good thinking on your part, or is it bad thinking?

Are you protecting yourself, or are you fucking yourself?

Who's to say the prof wouldn't put the string of (a) responses there just to screw with you?  The answer to that is plain.  You're there.  And you're sure the prof, whom maybe you like, or maybe you respect, wouldn't pull a rotten trick like that.  Only ... is it a "trick?"

You're supposed to know the right answer.  If you know it, then what difference does it make how many times it comes up (a)?  Isn't knowing the answer what we're testing you for?  The only reason why you'd want to go back and doubt yourself is because you don't, in fact, know the right answer.  You're guessing.  And the pattern that your guessing is creating is what's stumped you.  Not the test and not the prof.

For me, this is the quintessential underlying basis of Kahneman and Tversky's work.  I haven't read this yet but I'm certain (representativeness) that it's coming.  It's not just that we guess wrong when we're asked to make a judgement, it's that we're certain we're right.  We don't evaluate the possibilities beyond our immediate gut-judgement.  "That's a storm," we say, even though we're talking out of our ass, and when the storm fails to materialise, we ignore it.  Usually, we think, we're right.  But are we ... "usually"?  Or is it just that we want to be usually right?  Because judging by the work I'm reading, I think we decide what we are usually and then ignore any expectation of living up to that claim.

So when I tell you that more people play 5th edition than any other, you think in your head and say, "Yeah, that's probably true."  But what's that based on?  The people you've met?  If, like me, you meet people who actually play D&D, it happens in very specific places like game stores and promoted events.  BUT ... what sort of players show up at game stores and promoted events?  All of them?  I don't know.  Because I don't know how many people actually play this game.  Nobody does.  I have numbers from the company, and from journalists who talk to the company, but the company HAS reasonably expected ulterior motives.

I'm not saying that 5th edition isn't the most popularly played edition.  I AM saying that, statistically, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever.   Because we haven't got statistics.  We've got judgements based on seeing a particular group of people participating in a particular game space ... which is deliberately organised to appeal to that particular group of people.  As such, factually, we have nothing.

But that doesn't keep us from stating as though it is a fact that 5th edition is the most popular.  And because it's stated as a fact online rather continously, it sounds like a fact.  But this doesn't make it one.  After all, it's easy to find hundreds of comments by people who say they don't play 5th any more, or that they never played 5th.  Are we sure that number isn't higher than the number who say they do play 5th?

I don't know.  I have reason to doubt either answer.

We live in an age where we're expected to give an opinion about things and where we expect that opinion to be (1) treated as accurate, based on our "knowledge," and (b) respected.  Most of the time, if we quote a source for that opinion, it's someone else's opinion ... and often the "someone else" is plainly someone who knows nothing for certain.  If we're not treated as knowledgeable and if we're not respected, we get mad, we block the other and we go looking for people who agree with us.

Thanks to the internet, these can be easily found.  Most of the time.

I see no particular reason why anything I say should be treated as "knowledge."  I have no source material for anything I write about D&D.  I cannot for certain say that when a firefighter learns to deal with complex situations through pattern recognition, that's also what a dungeon master is doing.  I feel fairly certain the firefighter's pattern recognition is real, since respected firefighters give lectures to other firefighters and not the general public.  In other words, their knowledge about what they're doing isn't merely representative, it's demonstrable.

That's key.  What I say means zip compared to what another DM says, who has applied my methods and discovered they either work or don't work.  And this is interesting.  My inbox is NOT stuffed with people who've tried what I said and come back to me with, "Yep, tried it, and you don't know shit Alexis."  What I occasionally get is, "I'm not going to try that, because it won't work."

But what I most often get is, "I finally tried it ... and wow.  My players love it."

Is that an ego-boost for me?  Sure.  I'm human.  Does it mean I'm always right?  NO.  It doesn't even mean I'm ever right.  It means I'm valuable as a resource enough of the time to make others examine my words for value.  Others are bringing their own judgements to my words and they're carrying out the experimentation.  I don't know what they're actually doing at their tables.  I'm not there.  As such, how can I ever be "right" in a sense that's reliable?

I know that what I'm doing works for me.  I'm outlining for others why it works, how it works, what I've done to make it work and what I plan to do.  The rest, as ever, is for others to DO.

So I'm not certain I'm right.  I could very well be wrong.  The only thing I'm certain of is that everyone who thinks I'm wrong is ALSO wrong ... for other reasons.

I'm trying to be right.  They're trying to be representative.

The Truth About Fun

From p. 7-8 of 4th Edition's chapter, How to be a DM:

"The last essential component of a D&D game is fun. It’s not the DM’s job to entertain the players and make sure they have fun. Every person playing the game is responsible for the fun of the game. Everyone speeds the game along, heightens the drama, helps set how much roleplaying the group is comfortable with, and brings the game world to life with their imaginations. Everyone should treat each other with respect and consideration, too—personal squabbles and fights among the characters get in the way of the fun.

"Different people have different ideas of what’s fun about D&D. Remember that the 'right way' to play D&D is the way that you and your players agree on and enjoy. If everyone comes to the table prepared to contribute to the game, everyone has fun.

"Everybody plays D&D to have fun, but different people get their enjoyment from different aspects of the game. If you’re preparing and running a game for a group of players, understanding player motivations—what they enjoy about the game and what makes them happiest when they play—helps you build a harmonious group of players and a fun game for all."

Rating:  true

This is a little bit of therapy, though perhaps some folks need that.  In a larger sense, however, we're not talking about fun.  We're talking about maturity.

Break down the above without using "fun" as the carrot, which is the message.  Be responsible for yourself.  Focus on the game.  Treat others with respect.  Don't be selfish.  Cooperate.  Basic virtues that smooth the road for yourself and for other people.  When someone isn't cooperating, and is being selfish, deriding others, derailing the game or acting unconcerned; or demanding that other people need to act in a certain way ... not only do we not have fun (which is a reward people understand), we also build memories of gaming that discourage us from wanting to play in the future.

I imagine my regular readers expected I'd disparage this section on fun but I must tell you, this is the first group of sentences that all make sense and all need to be there.  On the surface, this may seem like the usual drivel, but it targets every problem you'll have as a DM.  Problems that you're bound to ignore, because it's uncomfortable confronting others—especially your friends, about their poor behaviour.  Most of the time you'll let it pass, for reasons you won't think about.  Let's break that down:

1.  You want to please them.  They're your friends.  Even before the running starts, your thoughts will be full of, "I hope they like this adventure" and "I had better do it this way, or they won't have any fun."  Chances are, you spend most of your life fine-tuning your personality and your choices for the sake of other people—and you believe that you have to do that or other people won't like you.  If this gets to be a constant habit—and I notice that it is with most people—then after a time you'll be seen as a "go along, get along" sort of person, and others around you will make assumptions about your willingness to tag along with them to the bar they like or take part in the activities they like.  If you occasionally find yourself in situations where you're not having a good time, while others around you seem to be, you have probably become this sort of person.

Being concerned about ensuring the happiness of others and "respecting them" is not the same thing.  We're responsible for our behaviour towards other people.  We should speak considerately, help when they're in distress, ensure their welfare, give them a leg up when they need it and act like a good host, so that they have comfort and feel safe while they're in our homes.  There are things we should do towards seeing that they have a good time.  We lay out snacks, we clean the bathroom and the play space, we shower, we have our books ready, we maintain a positive attitude about the game and we ask them how they are and show we're listening to them.

We do not, however, change ourselves to suit their needs.  If we don't want to see a hockey game, we say so, and expect them to take our opinion into account without judging us.  Maybe we'll see that hockey game, but we want some recognition that it isn't our first choice and that if we go, we won't be expected to act like we're as excited about it as the next person.  With D&D, as a DM, this adventure is the best we have today.  If the players don't like it, oh well; I wasn't able to do better and they ought to understand that.  If I feel the adventure needs this, then it does; fun has nothing to do with it.  A DM has to take risks, see what works, do their best, judge how to do it better in the future and try things out, even if that means a faceplant now and then.  A DM has to be bold.  A DM cannot spend all their time obsequiously trying to ensure that others have fun.  If the players feel respected, they shouldn't need to be ingratiated.

Chances are, however, if you have this urge to please others, that probably runs pretty deep and you're not going to rid yourself of it without a lot of work and undoubtedly therapy.  The need to ingratiate will be a crippling element of your DMing and your players will walk all over you, because that's the signal beeping atop your head.  If you can't draw the line, you can't DM.

2.  You won't adjudicate.  That is, you're incapable of taking sides when a squabble or fight starts.  It can be hard when you're put in a position of having two friends fight.  You don't want to pick one over the other; you don't want to be seen as favouring anybody; and you worry that if you support Fred, George will hate you.  So you sit, helplessly, while the fight goes on, eating up the game, muttering out stupid sooky phrases like, "Can't we get along," or acting the self-righteous tyrant and shouting, "No one will fight at my game table!"  Both tactics will only prove you don't care about what the players obviously care about—they're fighting over it, after all—you only care how you will be perceived.  You only want others to behave as you expect them to.  Your lack of investment in the squabble is a sign of your selfishness.

Most likely, this is how you are all the time; and chances are it arose from a conflict-heavy childhood, in which your parents argued constantly, causing you to adapt to that by hating argument and automatically retreating from it.  You didn't know this defense mechanism would also force you to see those conflicts only in how they affect you, since there was no one around to explain the conflict, why it was happening or give you a chance to engage with the subject matter as opposed to the irrational shouting.  As a result, you hate shouting, or even voice tones that suggest shouting will start soon.  When that conflict-detector kicks in, you stop listening.  Out of habit, you shut down, the words cease getting through and you just want everyone to stop it.  So that you will be more comfortable.

Other people care about things.  Other people care enough that they will fight to defend their positions on what they care about.  Peacemaking is not accomplished by telling everyone to be peaceful.  Instead, we resolve the matter.  We step in, impose a formality to the argument, giving each person to state their side, and then WE pick one of the two sides and give our position.  As a DM, we do that with the weight of being the person in charge of the game.  And yes, that's what we are.  We are not just "another player."  We're running this show; and we do so legitimately because we listen, we consider both sides, we render our judgement and then we turn to the loser and explain, "Here's why I didn't take your side."  Then, if we see the winner gloating, we turn and we say, "What the hell are you smiling at?  I agreed with your position but you could have been more polite in making it.  Shake your friend's hand"—or words to that effect.

If you can't settle arguments, and the players can't settle them either, those arguments will fester and grow and consume your campaign and both friendships.

Chances are, if you're unable to handle conflicts as I've described, you won't be able to change that behaviour easily.  Once again, problems handling conflicts is an issue for you and your therapist.  There are many roles and professions that involve regular, difficult conflict resolution: police officer, doctor, call center operator, sales manager, restaurant server.  Another one of those roles is dungeon master.  If you can't resolve conflicts, you can't be a DM.

3. You think the game is about you.  The DM has the most power at the table and is the least important person as regards the game.  This makes very little sense to some people.  During a game, I invent the description, I invent the non-player characters and I invent the speech coming out of their mouths; I run the fights; as I've already explained, I am the table's croupier.

However, I do not lay bets.  I do not win anything.  I do not coordinate a plan.  I do not have an ambition that needs achievement.  Oh, yes, I want an adventure to sort itself out and reach a climax, but I'm a very good DM and I know well in advance, months, sometimes years in advance, that eventually the players will open the door or discover the chest or meet the guy that sorts out the mystery.  This is a done deal for me the minute I concoct the adventure in my head.  The "ambition" is to concoct the mystery; running the mystery merely involves methodical attention to the details.

Most DMs, I think, don't get this.  Even after I explain it, the numbers don't add up.  My description above seems ... lacking.  "What?  I'm supposed to just 'run' the game?  Where's the fun in that?"  Exactly.  It isn't fun.  The players run around, fighting monsters, feeling the fear of failure and the triumph of victory, twisting their brains to figure out the mystery or deciding what they want to do from thousands of interesting possibilities ... and I just sit there, asking, "What do you want to do next?"

I am amused at what players decide to do.  I feel tremendous satisfaction when something I've described gets the players really going: fuddling around trying to figure out how to get in the castle; turning pale when some really horrific monster is only mentioned as possibly being in the neighbourhood; or rubbing their hands with glee as I pour out treasure at their feet.  I'm disappointed when a monster I expected to give the party real trouble fizzles out and dies in a few rounds.  Not because I loved the monster, but because I've just realized I should have thrown three of them.  I'm disappointed in myself; I don't give a damn about the monster.  I don't love any of my monsters.  They serve a purpose and that is all they're good for.  I hate it when I listen to DMs wax on about how much they love some NPC who's just been killed by a player.

That is because DMs like this want the game to be about them.  They think the game is about them.  They think because they do all the talking and designing; because they have the last word; because they call out the bets and rake in the house's take; that somehow, this whole game revolves around them.

This is called primacy.  We all have it to some degree.  It starts in us when we're babies and we don't know what the world is all about—but we do figure out fast that it is about us.  We cry and we get fed.  We're uncomfortable and we get changed.  Life is pretty straightforward; and it's obvious these massive giants in our universe are here to please us.  Slowly, we learn the truth.  That truth is hard and unpleasant.  We're not the center of the universe.  We're not here to be served.  We're expected to do for ourselves, and care about other people and act appropriately in ways that do not involve bawling for the things we want.  It's awful.  It is a huge step down from being a pampered baby.

A certain number of people are raised by parents who believe that the child's happiness is the ultimate goal, and that every other emotion or expectation is subservient to that goal.  They think the child should be happy all the time, and if they're not, then something is wrong and it has to be corrected.  The result is that many of these children grow up to be people who are not at peace with their other emotions.  This hurts them and it hurts their relationships; and when they drift into a role where it appears that everyone else gathers in a circle at their feet, and hangs on their every word, making responses that appear to confirm that they are the most important person in the room, they fail to recognize the actual parameters of their role and end up acting like an enormous douchebag.

This happens all over this culture, from low-level managers who don't see that their role is to facilitate sales and productivity, to minor officials who see themselves as supernumerary gatekeepers who are designated to preserve society by keeping out the hordes ... to dungeon masters who think that because they've built the game and its their table, that they are the most important player and that, obviously, it is their job to cheat the dice, railroad the players and make sure that everyone has a good time, THEIR WAY.  So they can feel good about themselves, as the person who knows what's best for other people!

If you are this person, then either you stopped reading five paragraphs ago, or you absolutely do not think that you are this person and you're already self-explaining the seven reasons you're not like this—and anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about, that's obvious.  There is nothing that can be done about these people, except to stay away from them until they're hit accidentally by a truck or something.  You know, a bad thing that's an act of god, so none of us feel bad or responsible or anything.

It never happens soon enough.

Honest.  There ought to be a policy of ensuring that everyone gets therapy, just to effectively locate these people and weed them out of positions of authority.  They will never, ever, willingly put themselves in a place where others have the power to judge them.  So most of the time, unless they get caught committing a crime, none of these monsters ever get therapy.

Last remarks.

"Fun" is easy.  It happens when the people around us are not actively behaving in weak, selfish, abusive or otherwise self-aggrandising fashion.  Clean up your gaming group, clean up yourself, and fun will come naturally.  People online often say, "A good game needs good players."  Truth is, we can teach people how to be good players.  It is much harder to teach players how to be good people.

This series continues with Acting!

Games People Play

"Stupid" is a game described in Eric Berne's 1964 book, Games People Play, in which "White" plays against "Black" to win by pretending to be stupider than they actually are.  The goal of the game is to compel Black to vocally call White stupid, or act in a manner that makes it clear that Black considers White stupid.  If Black does so, White wins.  This enables White to discount anything that Black says from that point forward, as Black is clearly abusive, while simultaneously taking comfort that being judged stupid will mean that others will require nothing from White going forward.

In fact, the less that White learns, the more effectively White can play this game.  Known already to be "be stupid," White need not study in school or improve at day-to-day tasks.

White is then free to play the game, "Schlemiel," which permits white to act like an asshole.  For example, White deliberately spills his drink on a woman at a party.  Black, seeing this, initially feels rage, but then realizes that since everyone at the party already considers white to be stupid, recognizes that actually raging at white will make black look abusive, in which case white wins.  Black therefore resists anger, enabling white to say, "I'm sorry," while Black forgives him (giving black the illusion of winning).

White then proceeds to inflict other damage on Black's property.

Alternately, White may also participate in, "Clown," which is not a game but a pasttime, which reinforces White in the position, "I am cute and harmless," which is true if Black has lost the game Stupid.

I read through this, and other games, last night, after reading this post by Stealth.  It's brilliant, naturally ... and explains a great deal about what's going on with our players in games.  And in the light of it, I'd like to run through a few comments from the post of a few days ago.  From Matt,

"... what I've found is that most of my players seem fundamentally uninterested in their character sheet.  They don't care much for their abilities and spells and powers.  They use what they can remember, usually in the most basic way possible.  They are all more interested in the character that they've made, than how that character is represented by the rules."

From James,

"I tried to get my players to switch to AD&D, it failed ... I could draw a line in the sand, and risk a 5+ year campaign by demanding to switch systems. But I just don't consider the risk worth it in this instance."

From Sebastian,

"... every session I hate the system more.  There is no challenge.  Everything is meaningless.  But the group consists of old friends ... That, however, is the difficult part.  They have watched Critical Role and all that youtube garbage Adventurer's League and have understood that is how the game is supposed to be played."

And from Shelby,

"I was introduced to the game through 5e, and so my extended friend group is very Critical Role and AL minded.  Gradually, however, I grew dissatisfied with the emptiness of 5e, which eventually led me here.  But I'm the only one of that group to have had that resolution so far."

Recognize the pattern?  In all four cases, the commenters are being held fast by peer pressure ~ the threat that they will lose their players, and thus the game, if they compel their players to act in a manner they're players don't wish to act.  In turn, the players are playing a game where the DM is the lackey, forced to perform to suit the game that the players have already won.

In the game, "Stupid," Black defeats White by not caring what White does, or thinks, or wants, or believes ... and emphasizes that contempt by ostracizing White from Black's presence.  This, however, requires a risk: Black may be seen by others, particularly others who are also playing the game as White, as a threat, as unreasonable, as vindictive and as someone who deserves to be ostracized by other Blacks who are presently losing the game to various Whites.

But just to be clear, let me explain the game again without the metaphor.

I write a blog that defines 99% of the participants playing D&D as a clusterfuck of morons, which I don't care about and which I don't allow to post here.  The clusterfuck responds by expressing their innocence and privilege to continue holding onto their belief systems, which are strengthened by my calling them out, as now they can act freely as persecuted for what they believe.  This privilege of victimhood discounts any need on their part to do anything about improving their games.  In fact, NOT improving their games becomes a badge of honor.

At the same time, it privileges them with the option to vilify me, explain why others shouldn't listen to me, discourage any other person from improving their game because of the way I've brought harm to the community, etcetera.  Thus, by winning as Black, I create a comfortable space without Whites, but I slate every other game venue in my loss column.

To which I respond, c'est la vie.  And no great loss.  I'd rather win here than continue losing there.

Those who find themselves playing Black against their players who are playing White, who worry that winning as Black would mean losing their game worlds, their present campaigns or whatever else might be the consequence of not continuing to lose as Black, must decide for themselves what is best for them.  But we need to understand that one power of peer groups is that they enforce standardization of behaviours through emotional blackmail.  They ask, "Behave as we, the group, expect, or we will punish you."

Which is followed by losing Black players in my inbox saying, "If I behave as I want, my players will punish me."

Okay.  Just want to make that clear.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own ..."

I should just leave this alone, but ... hey, when is this going to come up again, to this degree?  This time around, however, let's forget the particulars.  I'm resolved to examine and deconstruct the behavior I see going on, like any good anthropologist.  How are people reacting to the unfortunate Mandy's Letter and Zak's reprehensible Response?

[Yes, that's a judgement.  Anyone who does not see that response as reprehensible is ... well, reprehensible.  Look the word up]

Most of those who have accepted the most likely situation have divided into two camps.  We know these camps well; in our lives we've had hundreds of similar conversations about people, both personally known and in the celebrity spotlight.  Is this person aware that they are totally full of shit, or do they actually believe their shit?

I think this says more about the person landing on one side or the other than it does about the subject.  We know said person is absolutely full of shit; and we know that whether or not the person believes what they're shovelling or not, we're agreed that the shoveler needs to be told to put down the shovel and shove off.  So why does it matter to us as individuals whether or not the shoveller is lying or deluded?

It matters because of how we see ourselves.

On the one hand, we think, "I would never lie like that to anyone; I'm a good person.  Lying like that would be hurtful and abusive on levels I don't aspire to and would never consider.  I would have to be a fucking villain before I let myself do something like that."

And on the other hand, "I'd have to be fucking nuts."

Some of us can imagine being self-aware and devious on this level.  We've perhaps had moments when we realized we could seriously fuck someone over by saying the wrong thing or by giving away the secrets of others ... and we're concious of the decision NOT to act like a monster.  So we presume that when we see a monster, it's someone who has decided to throw away the rule book and embrace the evil.

But some of us cannot imagine that.  The tiniest tickling of the slightest possibility of having the vaguest notion of saying something cruel to someone has never entered their head, and when such things have been suggested to them their brain produces a null-program.  They can't remotely imagine such a thing.  When they see a monster, they don't see a human being moving the levers.  They see a monster.

There's plenty of evidence ~ oh, about 150+ years of research ~ that shows neither of the above are the case.  Sometimes the human inside the monster is pulling the levers and sometimes the human is fast asleep and the monster is rampaging at will.  Sometimes it's a matter of pointing the monster at the problem and then turning off and letting the monster handle it.  Yesterday, I had a long discussion about how to write a post about Mandy & Zak, decided I would write about the effects the MeToo movement has on invisible, hidden people ... and then the monster in me took over.

Then I reread what the monster had written about four times and decided to let it stand.  On this occasion, I agreed with the monster.

We see ourselves do this all the time ... and we see others make excuses for us, we see others vindicate our monster's behaviour, we have still others rake us over the coals and settle into grudges that never cease.  It is a factor of being human.

A simple scientist goes about his business of bettering
the plight of fellow human beings.

All of this is purely Freudian.  Call it the human at the levers or the monster, it is still the Id and the Ego ... and though we say over and over that Freud was all wrong and did not know what he was talking about, we continue to have ridiculous, pointless arguments about which was actually in control.  We continue to write novels based on Jekell and Hyde, because the question of "Who is really responsible, the guy who drinks the potion or the guy who acts on the potion?" continue to fascinate us much, much more than the actual damage that's done.

There's no debate in the damage that's done.  That's settled.  We're all in agreement.  There is only so much meat to eat in saying, "Wow, he was bad; what a bad guy he was; can you believe he was that bad?  I knew he was that bad; I should have known; I didn't know until I did; and can you believe others don't think he's bad?"  The real gristle, the bits we can grind in our teeth for days, is the why.  Why is he bad?  Well, me, I think he's just a monster.  No, no, I think he knows he's a monster.  Look at this sentence; it proves he knew what he was doing; actually, I think that sentence proves he had no idea.

And on it goes.

This is human.  It is a way we have of resolving the issue, of settling our minds about something that's upset us by making sense out of it.  Of course, we'll never know the real answer.  We could grab Zak and chain him down for decades and never get the real answer.

"Mr. Manson, why did you kill those nice people?"

There is no answer.  There's just the bullshit we tell ourselves, as we settle into the question of whether we're running the asylum of our own brains, or if the asylum is running itself.  When you shit, dear sir, how does it smell to you?

Zak isn't on trial here, dear reader.  YOU are on trial.  You and your beliefs, your decision-making process, your willingness to drink the potion and your tolerance of the Hyde that results.  As you point the bony finger at the criminal in the dock, are you ready to accept that you're pointing at a mirror?

We know we've done at least a little of what he's done.  All the people rushing about posting snippets of dialogue, celebrating his downfall with the same tactics and methods that Zak himself used to burn others who were posted to the pyre before it became his turn, all the commentors feasting on the bones and tearing through the gristle on Reddit, are just poor reflections of the criminal on trial.  Must I paint the image of the French Revolutionaries cheering in the stands as the guillotine dropped and dropped?  Is this post itself not just one more echo of those cheers, of Zak's cheers, of the cheers of every villain who has been executed in turn to the roaring crowds of the murderers who clap themselves on the back and say, "Job well done"?

So it goes. So it goes. Note that I've been careful to produce examples that predate the internet.  Note that I haven't tried to blame any of this on our ability to "live in bubbles" or receive "confirmation bias."  We, dear fellow humans, have always been like this; only we used to stand shoulder to shoulder as we laughed at the witches as they pleaded not to be burned, creating arguments with our words that they surely knew they were witches, they were only pretending not to be witches because they were obviously lying ... and pity in our minds as we thought, "The poor woman. She has no idea she's a witch."  But no matter which, the wood still burns.

I don't ask you to stop what you're doing.  I only ask that you stop pretending.