Cold Start

Let's try a thought experiment.  I'm going to send you, dear reader, back in time to December 3, 1973.  You can't take anything with you, but you retain all the memories you have now, including what's going to happen in the world.  You can arrive anywhere in the world of your choosing (including the changing room of a clothing store), and you can be any age you choose to be when you arrive.  Naturally, it'll be up to you to obtain some money and a place to live, but let's presume you're able to do that, since my readers tend to be in the brightest 10% of humanity.

For this experiment, let's further presume you're never coming back.  Perhaps, in the present, you're dying of cancer or you're rapidly nearing your eighties ... and we can further postulate whatever else that might make a permanent trip to 1973 seem like the greatly preferred option.

Now, wherever you are, you're completely aware that, this being 1973, Gygax, Arneson and others are rapidly getting their first publication together ... but apart from that very small community, no one in the world knows of the existence of D&D.  Except you.

What would you do?  You could, possibly, take yourself to Chicago as soon as you had the means in the hopes of approaching the publishers before the actual publication.  You could confess what you know, or freak them out by demonstrating a knowledge of the game that would startle the creators ... that's up to you.  Alternately, you could simply wait for the first booklet to be published.  You could considerably jump well ahead of them and "invent" an alternate roleplay version using rules that won't be published until after 1977 ... literally stealing the game out from under their feet before they'd even conceived of things they haven't yet written.  You've got a good two years on the Dragon magazine, and a full year before the Strategic Review.  Plenty of time to become one of the "founders" of the role-playing community, if that's your bag.

But let's shelve that.  There are a lot of things you could invent that would make you richer than D&D, and better ways for you to get famous, if being Mr. Tannen is your bag.  I'd like to impress the reader with a somewhat different thought.

It's 1973, and given everything about how you play D&D, including all the rules with which you're familiar, and products, and races and monsters and so on ... you're the only person in the entire world who has any idea of the game's title or it's potential.  Just you.  Would you be interested in teaching other people how to play?

Nobody you meet has the least preconception; none of the players you might obtain will have come to you because they're "heard of the game" and have always wanted to play it.  However you get players, however old you are, and they are, you've got to convince them to play, you've got to describe the concept itself from a cold start, and you've got to convince them as a DM that they've just been introduced to the best game the world has ever seen.

Could you do it?

How would you do it?  Would you change the name?  Would you still include rules that you more or less accept but have never been keen about?  Would you use all the classes, all the races, all the monsters?

Remember, if you did want to start, you'd have to create the tables and details yourself, without any template to work from except your memory.  That's a lot of work ... and the players you present it to will obviously suppose you've invented everything out of your own head.  You'll have no "official" status as a DM (no one's heard of that) or be able to rely on ideals like, "This is how it's always been done."

Of course, you could just wait around until the various games you like come out.  You don't have to play D&D.  You can do without it for a few years.  It won't take long before the various official creators do all the work for you, producing the game you're familiar with.

But would you wait?  Or would you want to start playing right away?

_____

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Structured Activity

Life is boring.

I hear this invoked when defending the structure of role-playing games in every conversation.  Role-playing games have to be escapist because life is boring.  Role-playing games have to be about adventure and excitement because life is boring.  Role-playing games that are not about being heroic are equivalent to staring at, oh, something like tax forms, because life outside of adventure is boring.

I get it.  For a lot of people, life is boring.  We work repetitive, monochromic jobs with dull monochromic people, who do not change from day to day but repeat the same characteristics ... and there's never any achievement, or reason to be heroic, or element that causes us to think, "Wow, I really made a difference today."

We see this as we want to see it:

There are millions of people who lead very fulfilling, purposeful, busy lives, who do not find their day-to-day at all boring.  We like to think that most of these people must be wealthy, but in fact most of these people are simply engaged in doing something they like doing.  They're not "escaping."  They're pursuing.  They're running towards life.  They've made up their minds not to continue doing things they don't enjoy, so that they don't get up in the morning and think, "My life is boring."

They've examined their weaknesses and set out to compensate for them.  They've set out to learn whatever they need, overcoming their lack of education.  They've organized themselves and their relationships to make room for positivity, growth, support, understanding and direction.  They've worked their boring jobs to pay for it, then they've quit their boring jobs.  They've changed.

I refuse to believe that I am duty-bound to give any credence to people who feel a role-playing game must be "this" or "that" because their lives are boring.  That's not an argument.  That's an excuse.  My life isn't boring.  Harried sometimes, and lacking in some things, but certainly not boring.  When I wake up in the morning, and get myself together, I have things to watch, artwork to consider, a partner and a daughter to converse with and hug, music and films for entertainment on the bus, necessary work to perform for income, future plans to make, a difficult blog post to structure in my mind, a loving partner to come home to and lay in bed with and snuggle, games to work on and words to write ... and none of it is "boring."

Some of it I like much, much more than other things.  I would rather my personal writing paid the income that my job pays ... but it is fun to write about costumes and talk to people on the phone about what sort of costume they're trying to make for Halloween this year.  It is reassuring to help people and make them laugh at the absurdity of things they plan to wear.  It is fun to write posts and reach people's mental interests.  It is fun to snuggle.

I do not play D&D to escape anything.  For me, it is a structured activity.  I play it to pursue my intellect and my imagination.  I'm not afraid of life.  I don't need to shout at others not to spoil my form of escape.  I'm not that fragile.

I refuse to limit my game design for people who are.

Theories

I promised myself I'd write a post today no matter what.  I wanted to write another RPG 201 post, but that's not quite coming together so instead I'm going to pick around the edges of it a bit.  Sometimes, thinking through writing is all I need.

My goal for the next four classes, nine through twelve, is talk through some of the theories related to how role-playing games work.  I feel I've established a grounding for processes, how expertise is acquired and how to approach a deconstruction of the game from an objective viewpoint ... so it stands to reason that we need to move forward into role-playing itself, to define how we see it and what is generally believed to make it work from the point of view of both the DM and the Player.

It seems strange at this late date, but I'm having a little trouble defining the goals of the whole course itself.  I am thinking of it, generally, as Introduction to RPG Mechanics ... the way it is done or operated, the practicalities behind it and the manner in which it causes participants to behave.  In that sense, it is also an Introduction to RPG Design ... except that I'm not talking Game Theory and how to design a "role-playing game."  Design is involved, but only in a meta-sense.

There are four theories I mean to discuss: the game as storytelling; the players as heroes; adventures written as quests; and role-play as the central purpose of the game.  I call these "theories" because none have been factually proven by any clinical research of any kind, but they are held to be true somewhat universally throughout the role-playing community.

I have written posts disparaging all of them ... but that is not my purpose with this course.  Instead, I want to deconstruct each theory from the perspective of explaining why they are held to be true, and why that belief carries a conviction that subverts any attempt at examination.  Most role-players would be hard pressed to admit that their impression of these things ~ stories, heroes, quests and role-play ~ is founded on a complete lack of evidence.  In fact, it would seem, for very good psychological reasons, that these things are all drowning in blatantly obvious evidence, which most readers would be able to point to at a moment's notice if the topic came up.

Except that all the "evidence" is subjective evidence.  In other words, not evidence.  As I explained with my last class.

So this is a tall order.  I have it structured in my head but the words themselves haven't had the time to ruminate their way off my fingers so the process of getting it written hasn't happened.  Sometimes writing is like having a room full of legos but we haven't decided which end of Verne's Nautilus we're going to start building first.

Today, I had an odd request at work, where much of my job has become explaining to callers what costumes our store has in stock, if at all.  I get a lot of requests for adult costumes for kids, many of which we have: like an Indiana Jones costume for a kid or a Tyrannosaurus costume for a kid.  Today, I had someone ask about a kid's costume for an adult - specifically, a carebear costume in an adult size.  It is a world gone mad.

I spend my days also writing about WWE costumes, or LOL Surprise costumes, or disco lady and material girl costumes, or Oogie Boogie costumes.  Three months ago I had a job where I made the same soup every shift without fail ... now I'm writing at length about a sexy nun costume full of double entendres, and five minutes later I'm writing about a puppy costume for a 12 month old child.  It is indeed a world gone mad.

So I'm having a bit of trouble putting together the legos to explain why storytelling for role-playing is a self-fulfilling problem solving mechanic for illusionary problems, yet a crippling blind spot where it comes to moving from the pedantic thinking of someone competent into the progressive thinking of someone proficient.  I'm thankful I've had the time to describe the terms; but there's a long way to go yet.

I'm on it.  A bit distracted, and bound to be more distracted before Halloween ends, but I'm on it.  To whet your appetite I'll leave you with this graph about narrative identity and it's relationship to the process of getting acquainted with a new job.  This has direct bearing on what I just said about story telling in role-play.