Some Progress

With an earlier post, Matt said, “In D&D, we need better DMs. We need better tools to teach DMs how to gage their table, how to open conversations, and how to care for the people around them.”

Yes, damn it. Every time we come back around to how to play, or how to manage a table better, or how to keep abuse from happening, or any damn thing on how people in role-playing games deserve the best possible experience, we come back around toteaching people how to DM. And yet though I've been shouting this for nine years now, it is still treated as a joke by the industry and by most bloggers or vloggers.

The best we have is a cadre of people who have taken it upon themselves to give advice. “Advice” is not teaching. It is a desire to guide or make recommendations concerning prudent future action … but that is not a systematic methodology towards deciphering and deconstruction what goes into making a DM able to read the temperament of other players, how to open conversations with players who might have trouble speaking freely, or how to care for others. At best, “advice” is well-meaning. More often, it is prejudicial and uniformed, and rife with people who don't care about the consequences of their advice except in how it raises their internet status and makes them feel important or financially supported.

Last year, I banged the drum for accreditation for game players and was virtually laughed off the subject. Yet here we are, dealing with the “public game” demanding a series of codified ethics to keep DMs from being abusive of players. No one wants to face the real question: how do we go about saying that some people shouldn't be DMing? We can't even admit there ought to be a guideline.

We can chatter and quibble about the definitions of words and how far DMs ought to go with the rules, or dissect role-playing from roll-playing endlessly, while we wait for the company or the gamestores to do something about the escalation of doubt and mistrust and gamesmanship at the RPG table, but until we approach the subject like adults instead of squabbling children, this game and this community ain't goin' nowhere.  It will still be like this 20 years from now, with the players then talking on whatever platform exists about this DM that abused their players or these DMs that are charging money for a two-dimensional game experience, or the newest module that still just rehacks the work that was written within five years of the game's invention.

Anyone who wants that to ever change has to sit down and puzzle out the answer to this question.  If we were to sit down our first year of college or university and take a option-course, 256 - Design and Management of a Role-Playing Theatre, what would the syllabus say?

That's the million dollar question, Dear Children.  The only place where we can't get to.  We can make the game popular, we can make it a cash product, we can build an industry out of the proceedings and we can dream build worlds until we choke on them, but until we can point at a fundamental structure for game play, that makes so much sense that people must embrace it, because it is so obviously better than what they're doing, then we are just leaning against trees and making fertilizer.

Don't tell me it can't be done.  Psychology tackles the whole human experience and we're looking just to solve four hours a week in a relatively closed and controlled environment.  There are art classes to teach people how to paint, acting classes to teach people how to act, salesperson classes to teach people how to sell and goddamn fung shui classes to teach people how to tell other people how to move furniture.  Think on that.  Fung shui is more organized than we are.  Frightening.

I suppose you could argue it had thousands of years to get its shit together.

For my money, the course work on that syllabus should read, "How to be a responsible adjudicator.  How to treat your players as equals.  How to make the game a meaningful challenge.  How to create immersion.  Why immersion matters.  Why understanding how these things work is necessary to self-examination and meaningful self-development.  Why making the game helps with playing the game." And why letting others make the game, and coasting on their work, is a recipe for disaster; or rather, one word for those taking our course: Pitfalls.

But hell, there are so few people I speak to who even believe the game is meaningful enough to justify a university course.  Remembering that this is a university course.

At least some designers are catching up to the place where the Sims was in 2001, seventeen years ago:

I'm just so gawdamned not impressed.  It's not even in color.  But at least we're finally using a computer.

Player's Wrongs

Taking a break from the trading stuff for a moment, I’d like to address the things I’ve read about “player’s rights.”

Jeez. Is this ever a politician’s phrase.

How exactly did the playing of this game become about the use of this sort of language? I mean, I can understand the prats in the marketing departments for various gaming companies inventing this sort of tripe, but when the use of it becomes prevalent among the actual players…

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t get together with my group for the purpose of raising the social consciousness of the neighborhood. The whole of my “player’s rights” include throwing empty cans at me during my runnings for the bad puns I make, making fun of my odd attempts at various accents for the Italians, Russians and Transylvanians they meet and generally treating my recent efforts to create a random system for the composition of road surfaces (17: cobblestone road, medium-sized red granite stones mixed with square blocks of slate) with contempt. I, in turn, belittle the crude artwork on their character sheets, their ability to roll dice successfully and the untimeliness of their arrival.

Yes, that’s right, we’re friends. We’re not lawyers.

The seriousness of my world does not extend to the point where I try to control their behavior beyond, “Will you guys shut the fuck up for three minutes?” My world is serious in its design. I don’t limit their use of language by demanding overmuch that they phrase every word as though it were spoken from Shakespeare, I don’t limit their use of lap tops in a session or their hopeless dependence on cell phones. I can’t imagine thinking that as a DM I somehow have the right to tell such-and-such he can’t step out of the room for a smoke while I’m computing treasure (though I will kill the fucker if he does it during combat), that he should wait for a “formally established break-period” to do so.

Yes, it’s annoying sometimes. But my player’s don’t get given “rights” by me…they have rights according to the society we live in.

One of the dumbest, most ridiculous ideas supported by the DMG was the predesignated caller, who was supposed to take everyone’s suggestions and then direct them towards the DM, as though we were not all sitting at the table together. This was supposed to overcome the chaos that can be a running, with everyone talking at once. It’s the sort of rule that only helped crush the overall excitement of the game, trying to hammer it into some kind of ritualized activity.

I think it is the responsibility of the DM to know his books well-enough that he can answer most questions right off the top of his head…and to be able to find the pertinent data quickly if he doesn’t know it. The incorporation of a lap-top into the game as I play it now is a god-send…I can quickly find obscure files with obscure rules and read them off, even print them off if necessary, within a couple of minutes. We have not yet begun to run LAN cables between people’s computers—mostly because not everyone has one yet—but we look forward to doing so. I would like it because I could rid myself of the map, for one thing…how excellent it would be to display combat electronically, having the ability to move people around so they were able to see where they were on their screens.

I’m often pressed with questions, and often questions that players could damn well look up themselves: How much experience do I need to be next level? How many proficiencies should I have? Which one is an eight-sided dice?

I could growl and snarl that the players ought to read the books, but I don’t. It takes seconds to answer, precious seconds that are much briefer than the ten minutes it takes them to find the information themselves (or for me to find it in the books for them, as often happens). And they don’t retain the information any more than they retain the page number where the information is found: they’re players.

Look, I’m the expert. I better be. They’re more interested in their new dice and character sheets.

Rights? I have no rights, they have no rights. I DM because I must…they play because I don’t bore them. And the dynamic is based on our mutual regard for one another, NOT on our recognition of each other as political entities.

I don’t control them because I CAN’T control them. And woe betide the DM who tries. They will find themselves running a campaign for no one.

No Pics Please, We're Mathematicians

Yes, I know, the posts with the math haven't been terribly interesting. I have a friend who believes that while he likes it, no one else will...and the comments line clearly directs that.

I just can't post about artwork, however. Artwork and D&D that is. It seems strange that nearly every blog about D&D that I've come across seems to post regularly about the artwork, and I have no idea why.

Don't get me wrong. I like art. I can wax poetic about it. I'm more likely to talk about Turner and Botticelli, or the Group of Seven, or Gainsborough...or the many interest artistic developments in the field of pornography. But fantasy artwork? No, not too much.

I grew up around a great many artists who produced artwork leaning towards the elves and fairies and large castles and big burly fighters tearing the heads off other things. Very impressive. I couldn't match their efforts. But not particularly interesting to me. Didn't expand my consciousness, if you get what I mean.

I can't remember one conversation about art in D&D in twenty years of playing that didn't end within about three minutes. Have you seen this pic? Yeah, not bad. Yeah, I liked it. End of conversation.

So, why so much time spent on blogs? I guess they've run out of things to talk about. Or they don't want to post about their worlds for copyright reasons.

Me, I'm happy to go on about math. Oh, sure, its a limited appeal. I don't pretend to have the handle on what appeals to the blogosphere...I have never had much in common with it. But I will babble away about my systems and then move on to other things. Things about my world. Things about actually playing D&D.

Not pictures.

Baffling. Some kind of softcore pornography for I don't understand who...