Role-playing (oh gawd, again)

Addendum to the last post.  It was argued, reasonably, by a reader that I should define the difference between the role-playing I was speaking of, which I described as "performative," and the alternative, the "basic roleplaying," that is normally undertaken through game play, with the players "taking the role" of the characters.  I agree, this distinction has to be made.  But...

When the players make decisions based on their abilities and in-game circumstances, the issue at hand is navigating the game world, solving problems and interacting with the non-player character element.  For example, my character has a discussion with the dockhand to determine when the ship we were after left; I'm obtaining information.  But I'm not "playing a role" when I ask the "dockhand" about this.  I'm asking the DM directly in the framework of the game, and it is the DM that answers.  No role is being played, except within the understanding that the "character" is on the dock, not actual me, and the "dockhand" is speaking, not the actual DM.

Now, this appears to fit into the actor framework, in that if I'm playing Leonid in the Cherry Orchard, I'm still Alexis, I'm not Leonid, though I'm speaking words that Leonid says, to other actors who are playing Trofimov and Anya.  But note, in doing this, I'm performing.  This is performative role-playing.

I'm fully capable of saying to the DM, in gaming, "My character asks the dockhand when the ship left," and the DM is fully capable of answering, "The dockhand says the ship left an hour ago."  We're not performing our characters, we're not "assuming" the roles of our characters, we're not "storytelling," we're discussing what our characters do in the same manner that we would move pieces on the board of a game, though there is no board.

If I say, "My knight takes your bishop," this is not role-playing.  There is no language difference between this and saying, "My fighter attacks that orc."  We're moving pieces on a board.

We are not assuming the role of a character in any deep, immersive way.  This doesn't keep us, as humans gathered around a table, from being immersed in a game, any more than the manner in which chess is played ceases to be immersive because the players aren't actually down on the board being physically threatened by the opponent's queen.  We're quite able to be fully immersed in a game without it having an attachment to the character.  Likewise, our capacity for being inventive, imaginative or innovative is not stymied because we treat the character as a game piece, either.  All sorts of game players of all sorts of games are fully capable of being inventive and so on without this requirement.  D&D is NOT more immersive than chess or scrabble or poker... it just happens to be immersive in a different way that appeals to a different sort of person.

This is an extremely common bit of propaganda about D&D, which was fabricated early on to propitiate the game as "earthshaking" and "unique."  There is no solid evidence that deep immersion in D&D requires a kind of performative attachment to the character — and, in fact, I believe that the vast balance of D&D players would rather there wasn't, and that this trope would just die.  Immersion results from decisions being made and challenges being navigated, not from assuming a personality.

Yet we continue to be saddled with this definition of "role-playing" where we are, in fact, moving pieces on a board, because... wait for it...

A bunch of college-students without any experience in game design or game marketing, and without any foresight regarding how really destructive choosing the wrong appellation would be after a fifty-year haul, chose the psychological buzz word that seemed closest in reflecting something they themselves couldn't explain to someone who had never actually participated in D&D.  "Role-playing" stuck because it seemed like the best fit at the time, and it has been exacerbated because the human tendency is to create a bunch of bullshit conflab interpretive language to justify things that don't make sense, rather than just accepting that, hm, maybe that was the wrong word for the thing and now its too late to fucking fix it.

"Car" is an awful name for an automobile, as the word is a shortening of "carriage," which sort of seems accurate but is in fact not descriptive of what a car does. "Television" is a grossly inaccurate name for what a "tele-vision" does, but we're stuck with it. "Role-playing" falls into the same category, not because it’s particularly accurate, but because it was a convenient grab-ass word for something that no one could properly define at the time. And it sort of sounded cool, especially in a 1974 world where pop-psychology and treatment-based role-playing were all the rage.  Thank gawd the boobs that invented the game didn't call it primal screaming.

And so, I was wrong not to make this clear in the previous post.  I have a tendency, far too often, to assume that everyone else understands what I just explained pedantically, but that's really not a reasonable presupposition on my part.

Counter-duality

Coming back to worldbuilding.

Let's put all the detailed structural work surrounding geography, politics, sociology and such upon a shelf today and talk about "function."  The world is a setting where things happen, but the world is also a tool designed to be practical and useful for game purposes.  The goal is to get the world up and running so that it's applications can serve both the DM and the Players, and other aspects of the game aside.

As a DM, I need the built world to provide me with inspiration at a glance whenever I need it, specifically during the course of the game.  This means that if I look at a map, that map is constructed in a way that upon looking at it, answers to questions and possibilities emerge within a few seconds, leading me to present situations for the players that I may have had no thought of 60 seconds prior ... but which some part of the work and preparation I've done regarding building my world has just provided.

Let's take a familiar example.  A dungeon room is a highly recognisable D&D construct.  Most DMs, having the map of a dungeon at their elbow, can visualise a number of monsters that could be placed on the fly in that dungeon room; what they're doing in the room is fairly evident as well, since there are only a few things that a group of orcs, say, or an ochre jelly, can possibly be doing as the players arrive.  While the structure of the dungeon is limited, that structure provides a clear-cut functional purpose.  The players are here to fight, they're here to find things in the room, they're here to seek passage to the next room.

If I take a random dungeon map, say the sort that Dyson regularly creates, as experienced DMs we can reason easily what ought to be there and, as the game session begins and gets going, the shape of the walls, the small incorporated details, whatever beasties we've inserted and so on sets in motion a fertile degree of invention ... one that we're used to because dungeons are such a large part of our gaming experience.  Plock any dungeon graphic in front of a DM with a mere two or three years of experience and running a single session without notice is not a difficult task.

Unfortunately, DMs tend to rely so much upon dungeons that they gain little experience with other possibly functional locations.  For many, a town encounter fails to produce an adequate experience because there are NO comparable, useful resources on par with what a dungeon layout provides.  Likewise with a wilderness or an occupied rural landscape.  This disconnect occurs because such places are not structurally limited like a dungeon.  A village or a town dictates that virtually anything that's done will be observed by someone, since these places are full of people; and if the act is observed, it's bound to be reported.  Many players, comfortable with doing whatever they want in a dungeon, suddenly become stymied by the lack of "freedom" a town offers.

And that itself is a strange happenstance.  We might suppose that the dungeon is the constrained environment, but it's not.  The consequence provided by a dungeon is whether or not our side can win in a fight ... whereas the consequence in a town is usually the recognition that if the whole town turns out in force, we're definitely going to lose.  Let us fight 20 orcs and not a hundred guards.

Taking the wilderness, it's a question of exposure.  Fight those 20 orcs in a dungeon and afterwards we can spike the doors and make our retreat, confident that once we're outside the orcs will lose our track ... and if the DM isn't the sort to hurl wilderness encounters, or run a strictly wilderness outdoor adventure, we're "safe" as soon as we get outside.  But if, when we're outside, a monster of any size, and particularly of great size because the outdoors gives lots of room, attacks us while we're recovering, um, we're fucked.  Players who lack experience with long-term outdoor situations also lack knowledge of how to protect themselves, while DMs who also lack experience tend to think the only thing one can do is throw large beasties as encounters.

In short, a dungeon seems rich and full of possibilities, while other parts of the setting feel repetitive and the players excessively vulnerable.  In response, many DMs choose to discard any conflict in towns altogether, along with any use of wandering monsters in the wilderness.  It's simply easier to ditch these adventure ideas and get the players out to the dungeon, where the DM is happier and the players as well.

These are setting-function deficiencies.  Because DMs have never been taught or even seen another point of view, they tend to perceive every setting in terms of the dungeon's combat-puzzle-trap model.  Or they turn to the dualism that if the game isn't combat, it's role-playing ... so that town encounters become long drawn-out chat exercises, where most of the party has no idea what to say and everyone is worried that saying one wrong thing will land everyone in loads of trouble.  This IS possible; there's no pretending it isn't.  But likewise, it's just as possible to make one incredibly stupid move in a dungeon and be in loads of trouble.  It's only that most of us have seen what those stupid dungeon moves are ... whereas we have next to no idea what they might be in a town.

Moreover, as DMs want to stress the importance of role-playing in their campaigns (if they're the type), they will up the stakes with every conversation until we're at the baker's, ready to draw our swords while discussing the cost of a dozen biscuits.  Overmuch ballyhooing is the bread-and-butter to many a role-playing DM, struggling to assign tension and difficulty where, in fact, there ought to be very little.  Most conversation isn't, and shouldn't be, stressful.  It should be interesting, full of enlightening details and suggestions for social and status advance ... but my own experience has shown that even if my foot isn't on the gas, the player's will be automatically.  Time and again I've had to explain to players that nothing bad is going to happen if they trust someone.  This is clearly a taught habit, as multiple DMs in the player's past has taken advantage of the player's trust at every opportunity.

The approach to role-playing, again, pushes the players back to the dungeon — where they need only worry about bloodsucking monsters and insidious pendulum traps.  Thank gawd, we're back where things make sense!

Caught between the game being either a dungeon crawl or an uncomfortable chat with townsfolk, it's difficult for most to glance at a map like the one shown and come up with anything except, obviously, to visualise a dungeon located near Reni or Macin or Ibraila.  The rest is a smattering of places and names, without a sense of "D&D" going on.

I've touched on this element before, but it's worth repeating.  The dualism of the dungeon/role-play model is that BOTH place the player firmly in the passive role, waiting for the DM to do something that makes the game go.  The players wait for the next dungeon room.  The players wait for the other side to start the conversation that decides what the players will do next.  And the players, used to this functional structure, dutifully wait to be told what expectations have fallen upon them.  "I need YOU to go to this dungeon;  I need YOU to fetch this object to me; I need YOU to rescue the princess."  The players are a foil in the hands of the DM, who arranges the targets, or obstacles, for the foil to overcome, all the while being in full grip of the foil's handle.  The players get the delicious promise of being the tip, the part that actually touches the enemy; the part whose whirling around in the air feels exciting.  But all the while, the tip possesses no actual control; the control is in the DM's subtle wrist.

Plenty exist to argue this ought to be the case, both DM and Player.  Virtually every player has  experienced only this form of play.  And having had only one sort of experience, it stands to reason that players loving the game would argue against a change.  After all, they don't know what they'd be getting.

When I look at the map, I don't see a passive experience for the player.  Given sufficient wealth, time, freedom from responsibility, freedom from worrying seriously about death — all of which is the player character's perspective — I see a place where I can freeboot around as much as I please, witnessing and personally experiencing the local culture, making arrangements, bartering, intervening as I please against any wrong I see and always confident that my escape is assured ... as planning my escape comes before taking the hazardous step to intervene.  For every enemy I make I'll be sure to make three friends ... and if I am a player in this location where the DM is a fellow like myself, then I have every reason to believe my friends ARE friends, and not a trick of the DM who cannot keep his hand off the foil.  I see half a dozen opportunities in the map for plunder, investment, piracy, trade and settlement ... with plenty of wilderness to clear out mere footsteps from my front door.  That is, wherever I happen to put my front door, which might be anywhere.

Freed of the worry that I might say the wrong thing in a "gotcha" campaign — as these are just people and I've spoken with people all my life — and equally confident of defending myself in a wilderness, I'm not beholden to the DM's instigation of a pre-planned campaign ... nor do I have to approach the DM to beg him to run such and such a module because I'd like to run in it.  I will, thank-you, write my own "module" on the fly, because I think I can do a better job.

And taking the DM's perspective, all the opportunities I've just cited are there:  the little village run by an petty overlord, the lake monster that needs killing so the barges can roll past safely, the beach where the players can lie in wait for a small river craft to seize, the hamlet they can pillage before making haste to another part of the marsh, the dock they can have built, the smuggling in which they can partake, the bay where they can build their lair and so on ... and of course, if it's really necessary, the half-drowned dungeon they'll find somewhere in this part of the world.

The map gives me this; the little symbols on the map as well; the perspective of how a world works; and the readiness to let the players do as they like without arbitrarily restricted their behaviour on any account.  This is worldbuilding to me.  Every part of the human experience laid out, good and bad, with clues baked right into the design that I can see clearly and reveal to the players as they set out to explore.

Succeeding Well

By the age of six, I did what all little boys did.  I tied a sheet around my neck and ran around pretending to be superman.  I built forts out of chairs, couch pillows and blankets.  By eight, it was playing guns, cowboys & indians ... and because it was 1972, Star Trek.  I liked being Scotty.  By the age of 10, it was chess and RISK.  At 13 it was Squad Leader, Panzerblitz and Tractics — this last being a set of wargaming rules for conducting WW2 style combat using armour miniatures.  We did it with model tanks we built from box kits; tanks and artillery pieces that we painted diligently.  By 13, I'd probably built between 50 and 75 model tanks, planes and ships, the last being everything from 15th century clipper ships to the USS Missouri.

Then when I was just nine days shy of 15, I encountered D&D.

Recognize the trajectory?  It starts with make-believe but as I mature, the subject material becomes increasingly more mature — and the rules' set grows denser and more exacting.  At eight we're designating parts of a schoolyard jungle gym as "the bridge" and "sickbay" and "engineering," with everyone respecting those designations.  Five years later, we're measuring the carpets with tape measures, recording distances down to the millimeter and holding each other account for the exact distance a tank can move or fire.

More to the point, as children we're bent on increasing the substance of the decisions we make.  At eight, I'm shouting into a pretend comm during a battle that "Engineering's been hit!  I'm wounded!  I need help!"  Five years later I'm speaking in low voices across the room with my co-commander, building strategies for my mauler, artillery units and guards to draw fire into the woods (this area carpet) so his faster panzers and panzerkampfwagons can move rapidly along the couch and come out around the coffee table, flanking the enemy.  We're collaborating.  We're making important decisions.  We're assuming responsibilities way, way past our maturity.  Leading soldiers; deciding upon acceptable losses; concerned about looking like morons in front of our peers, believing somehow that our ability to lead a battle matters with regards to who we are and what we say.

Why?  Why go down that road?  We read stories about war.  We had hundreds of examples from movies and comics that told us what men did and what men faced ... and whatever the later cultural resistance to all that macho-bullshit, as boys we ran towards that stuff, because it made us feel great.  We felt magnificent, raising our sense of self-importance through the activities we chose to enjoy.

What we felt certainly wasn't as clear-headed as a psychological calling for "adventure."  No, we wanted to be Scotty, to be Sgt. Rock, to act the way our heroes did, when we were still young and dumb enough to believe in heroes.  Rest assured, I do recognize that a 40-something today, growing up in the 80s the way I did in the 70s, could never have had things as black and white as we did.  But none of our assumptions about "taking charge" tacitly recognised the difference between which side we fought for.  Note the "I'm playing the Nazis" in the example about Panzers given above.  No, in the comics, the German soldiers were always portrayed as soldiers, and never as "Nazis."  Nazis were horror villains who died in Weird War Tales at the hands of enemy zombies.  And to be honest, we understood perfectly well that "soldiers" were just ordinary men.  Look at that comic cover: "Easy Company's newest recruit ..."  Soldiers were ordinary human beings who did extraordinary things, because they had to, not because they wanted to.  We grasped the pervading myth that rising above what we were, that being children, depended on the standard to which we held ourselves.  And when we played wargames, that meant winning by ability, honour, innovation and effort.  No one thought winning by dumb luck was praiseworthy.  We wanted to succeed well.

And then ... Dungeons and Dragons.

For all the interest they held for us, wargames were comparatively limited.  The focus, the necessary winning strategy, even the morality, were two-dimensional compared to D&D.  The units in wargames were based on real equipment, or at the very least mechanical elements of types and models of military designs.  Being table based, the limitations were the space allowed by the map board or, in the case of Tractics, how big a space we could play in.  And the number of units were limited by our physical capacity to own physical equipment, or move hundreds of little chits on a board in a space of time, before we had to take it down so the dining table could be used for eating.  These limitations were obliterated by D&D.

Keeping in mind, unit-based wargames required a degree of skill and strategic foresight.  We all remember the one player in RISK who decides, "enough of this patient approach, I'm going all in."  Their next turn, they start attacking, and attacking, and attacking, until every last attack they can possibly make is gone, even as they use three armies to attack ten.  Every territory is left with one army on it; and while the others cheerfully gobble them all up, there's also a question of, "what the fuck?"

Reaching back, there's the eight-year-old on the playground who can't play the Star Trek fantasy pretend game on the monkey bars, because he or she doesn't know what a "warp drive" is, or doesn't understand going to the transporter first before leaving the ship.  As children, we're not very forgiving about this sort of thing.  When Todd decides to run all his tanks out of the wood in a full-frontal assault against hulled-down troops, like Pickett's charge, and gets destroyed, there's a general consensus to stop inviting Todd to any further games.

Fellows like Todd find a new life in D&D.  They still rush headlong at orcs; they still stupidly cast fireballs in their own face.  D&D doesn't make them smarter.  It does give them room to be stupid, however.  There's an adjudicator to say, "Um, Todd, that will kill you."  Whereas in a war game, like chess, you touch the piece, you have to move it.

With the beginning of my experience in D&D, there were players who continued to treat it like a war game.  There are still such people.  They crave the fighting.  The two-dimensionality of it.  The "touch-a-piece-you-have-to-move-it" standards they invent.  But D&D offers much more.  We can't start a cult in a war game.  We can't pretend to be a prostitute to kill clients.  Or reunite lost lovers, or restore a king to his kingdom.  In a wargame, we can't organise a town against a plague.  We can't break into a castle at night and sneak around, thieving and assassinating.  There are so many things we can do in D&D that we can't do in any other game.  It and games like it take the generalised, non-specific parts of pillow-fort building, cowboys and indians, chess, RISK, squad leader and a thousand other games and makes them DENSER and MORE EXACTING.  So much so that most of us don't understand what's going on when we play.

Yesterday, JB wrote a brilliant, strategic investigation into what D&D offers, that the reader should definitely read.  But even at that, he misses a big, fat point that I need to add here (though he almost makes it himself).  At one point, JB uses his American Heritage Dictionary to describe adventure.  I'll repeat them here:

1. An undertaking of a hazardous nature.

2. An unusual experience or course of events marked by excitement and suspense.

3. Participation in hazardous or exciting experiences.

4. A financial speculation or business venture.

JB then elucidates upon the benefits of taking risks — the hazard, the excitement, the suspense, the fact of the undertaking, adrenaline, seeing other places, having strange experiences ... all definite truths and, unquestionably an important part of the game.

But it's not THE game.  No.  The game is not the risk.  The game is what we accept the risk to achieve.

And again no, not just the prestige or the sense of accomplishment, or wealth, or being a "hero," all things JB mentions, though only in passing.

We don't cheer Luke going down the trench, we cheer when the shots go down the exhaust port.  We cheer when the risk is over.  When we've survived.  As happy as a skydiver is falling, it's always a little bit better when the chute opens.  And better still when landing safely.  The fall is a terrific rush ... but it's still only foreplay.

When my players talk of an adventure they had, they don't talk about the risk.  They don't say, "Oh, hey, the best moment was when I thought I was going to die when surrounded by fifty goblins."  No, they say, "We wrecked that fort!  Blew it all to hell."  It isn't just a sense of accomplishment.  It's THE accomplishment.  The one we lived through.  And while others might think we're heroes, we know what it cost.  "Dagnar died.  I miss Dagnar."  They worry more than a bit about having to go through something like that again.  And when they are faced with a big risk, my players hedge and plan and hedge some more.

Because we don't run towards risk.  We run towards getting something we want so badly that will risk the bad stuff to get it.

D&D gives us so many cool things we can want and try to get ... more than any other RPG, more than any other game in existence.  We can literally get anything we can imagine.  The shackles of everyday life are off, the way the D&D struck off the shackles of being a kid under the tutelage of parents and teachers.  We can think of it, we can realise how to get it ... and then we can go get it, our way, using our wits.  Risk?  Risk is just something that happens along the way.

Like Sgt. Rock says, "Livin' is hard, soldier ... it's dyin' that's easy."

A considerably number of early D&D players recognised that the way the game was being structured it was far too easy to die.  This led to an increased sentiment that what these players wanted was the achievement, not the constant reminder that player characters can die at the drop of a hat.  From this sentiment came a host of poisonous game fixes: starting at a higher level, stressing "role" playing over "roll" playing, storytelling and backstories, fudging, matrix-determined ability stats, collaborative storytelling, the "rule of cool" and so on.  These philosophical approaches grew out of the ignorant brutality of early modules like the Tomb of Horrors and Vault of the Drow, complimented by the Dragon Magazine's constant stress upon all the things JB preaches, risk, excitement, et al.

There is a third path.  Lessen the risk.

Don't get rid of it.  Don't smash the game all to pieces in an effort to make sure characters get everything their hearts desire.  Don't eliminate the thrill, the suspense and the hazard.  But get it out of the players' face.  Find another kind of hazardous and exciting experience that gets the players' blood pumping without constantly putting them in fights where being killed has a greater than 5% chance.

I ran my online game for a decade.  Amount of excitement and fear felt?  Lots and lots.  Number of actual player characters who died?  One about every two years.  Granted, there was an incident where three of them died in one fight ... and another when I should have killed them all.  But, I find that killing a player makes a very poor use of game time.  The best use is to make a player think I'm going to kill him or her ... and then kill just enough players to remind them it's always possible.

This is how I'm always able to start players at 1st level, but they mostly manage to reach 12th.  Because not every risk is "life and death."  Players also risk loss of wealth and equipment, loss of opportunity, loss of face, loss of status ... and loss of surety and confidence.  It isn't always necessary to kill them.  In fact, it's hardly ever necessary.

Crying out as Scotty, I didn't decide to be killed, did I?  Where's the fun in that?  But I also needed help, didn't I?  It wasn't this bullshit of shaking it off either.

To use another example, consider the removal of Luke's hand in Empire.  Would it have been better if Luke lost his head?  Or if he fell hundreds of feet to hit the hard steel of the bottom?  No.  No, he loses his hand, he falls through a convenient port that allows him to retreat and fight another day ... but he's suitably chagrined.  He's upset about his father.  He doesn't feel he's "won."  There's excitement.  There's hazard.  There's the hard fact of livin' as opposed to the easiness of dyin'.  It makes a better game.  It allows the player character to try again, to make a better job of it, to succeed.

And it's succeeding well that matters.

This Shoddy Pedestal

"We all know that acting in character adds fun, but role playing enhances D&D for everyone at the table.  Role playing heightens the drama and the humor.  It raises the stakes by making goals, successes and setbacks personal.  It fosters relationships between characters."

~ David Hartlage, DM David

Like me, you've heard a ton of this rhetoric.  It washes upon the shore of D&D like a pounding sea, relentlessly telling us that our games need this role-playing, forever assuming that we don't already have it or that we're not perfectly happy with our games the way they are.  We're reminded of the benefits it will bring to our storytellings, of how much fun it will be, of how it will enable us to focus less on mechanics and how it will create spontaneous, memorable experiences.  Whenever the subject beats its chorus, expression and eloquence reaches to the very heights of game oratory.  It is surprising we don't automatically genuflect when we hear it.

I am a believer in role-playing.  I feel it immensely contributes to a game, but not because it adds to story or circumvents mechanics, and not because it uniquely creates moments of surprise.  Every part of the game can create a sponteneity, mechanics and role-playing are not polar opposites and drama is a given ... no matter how much actual role-play is taking place.  But I like role-play because it contributes to the player's personal, emotional investment in the moment-to-moment events of the game.

Where it comes to the hot air espoused by the role-play chorus, I cannot help but notice that nine times out of ten, this "stake-raising" ends up manifesting as players acting in a deceitful, self-serving and grasping manner.  We're told that we're advancing the story, but instead mainstream role-players are bent on tricking townspeople, misleading them, defrauding them of their goods or "getting around" them as they try to do their jobs ... and in general acting like a bunch of venal, materialistic assholes.  The moment a player opens a conversation with a merchant, a guardsman or an official, the first words out of their mouths are bound to be a string of unrelenting lies, followed by a desperate and amateur confidence game concocted by the player for nefarious purposes.  Players do not "make friends."  They push and shove against every weak point with sociopathic persistence ... and when they do not get a thing, they carp, they cry foul, they mutter about the unfairness of DMs ~ and then they try again.

I was recently told of a group of players who nearly ruined a campaign because they insisted on a personal audience with the local king ~ even though the players were nobodies, it wasn't their kingdom and they had nothing of any benefit to the king to say.  None of that mattered.  What mattered was that the players, greedy and avaricious to a fault, felt they had a right to talk to the "top man," no matter who the hell he was or what he might be doing.  This was about the players, after all, and them getting their cut, their entitlement, their expected, exclusive privilege to ask and receive whatever the hell they wanted, period.

I wish I could say this was rare.  However, whenever I read anything on Reddit, whenever I watch a let's play campaign, whenever some player is discussing what happened in last week's campaign, it invariably boils down to "We screwed these people, we stole from those people, we left this bunch of people holding the bag, we convinced this old fart to hide us or give us gold or kill his own daughter ..." or whatever the hell else the writer is expressing about their own utter lack of self-consciousness about criminal acts of inhumanity played for fun.

Now, all right, I get it.  It's not like NPCs are real.  Or can feel pain.  Or deserve better.  It's a game ... and we all have to accept that most DMs play NPCs like cardboard cut-outs pasted with labels that say, "Mess with me, that's why I'm here."  But none of this stony-hearted, unsparing behaviour relates at all to the profound grandiloquence we hear when some pundit sings the praises of the role-playing gods.  No one ever says, "Add more role-playing to your campaign so your players can be utter dicks."  No one ever admits that this adding to the story includes a long sequence of falsifications, cock and bull stories, barefaced lies and alternative facts that the players will myopically view as "playing the game well."

Surprise a character with an NPC and stand back as a host of bullshit whoppers quickly bounce off the walls.  Trust a character who already has 15,000 g.p. with 50 more and watch the player gleefully rub their hands together at screwing over the trusting chump.  Put a player on the carpet in front of the king and get on your gas mask as the air is rapidly polluted with mendacity, until the brown is fairly thick enough to cut into small pieces.  Allow a player to roleplay and expect the "stories" that follow to be fibs of spectacular proportions, bluffs, pretense, memberships to this years' Annual Wild Goose Hunt (with fun and prizes!) and yarns of terminological inexactitude.

So why don't we just tone down the magnificence a little and put it plain to players?  During a role-playing game, try lying.  Go ahead and use your weapons and roll dice and whatever else you do with your feats ... and remember that if you meet an NPC, lies also work.

Then we can stop this campaign of lying to ourselves.

Parley

Charisma reaction adjustments, Player's Handbook, p. 13: -5% per point of charisma below 8;
+5% per point of charisma above 12.

The above, for those who do not recognize the passage, originates with the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 63.  With the charisma adjustments that I've added in the caption, this represents pretty much all the rules designed to manage character interactions with NPCs ... or "role-play."

When I was a teenager and dumb as a post about the game, I played by these rules.  Or to put it another way, omg, I played by these rules.  These rules are awful.  Just awful.  If your real life interactions were this random, you'd attack strangers first and parley afterwards. It would be the only sane way to act.

This is an example of pothole game design.  A hole exists.  We need some kind of rule for interactions.  Anyone have any ideas?  No?  How about a scale of the worst imaginable reaction to instant acceptance, with a die roll that exactly balances the two?  Hey, awesome!  Good enough!  Well done!  Let's go fix something else ~ dibs on tossing together rules for spell research!

It's completely pointless, but I want to mock the rules a moment.  A group of bandits, bent on robbing from the next people who come up the road, suddenly decide, because the fellow in front seems very jolly and quite handsome, to rush out from behind their trees and shake his hand.  "Well met, well met, we can't rob you!  You're far too charismatic!"

Or a group of pilgrims, bound for a shrine in a distant land, see a group of adventurers step out into the road.  "Arg!" they cry.  "That one's hideous!  Kill them all!"

A random roll simply doesn't work.  What about the number of the enemy, their equipment or their heraldry?  Shouldn't our purposes be the first arbiter of what we'll do when we meet others?  When was the last time you changed your mind about something because a total stranger with charisma wanted you to act in a particular way?  Don't we deal with ALL strangers with distrust and caution, before all else?

Friendly, enthusiastically friendly and immediate acceptance are somewhat vague.  Shouldn't we be concerned with more concrete issues, like asking for directions, getting news, bartering for equipment and food, possibly gaining aid for sickly companions, asking for a ride ... or simply ignoring passersby?  What do four adventurers, decked in armor and weapons, have to say to a peasant if they got directions already, just five minutes ago?  What peasant would be comfortable looking ahead on the road and seeing armed adventurers at a distance, coming along?  They could be anybody; they look dirty and unclean, perhaps they're recruiters for some war, or three armed guards for a tax farmer.  That one isn't wearing armor, after all.

I don't see any possible random table that could be built for parley or NPC reactions, without it being something awful silly.  In many campaigns, no doubt the need to improvise some ridiculous scenario to suit the die roll provides much fun and frivolity.  But it seems ... dumb.

I would like to write some rules for parley & negotiation, but I can't see a random roll.  Nor do I need a negotiation system that will tell me what bandits, or a local patrol, a given monster or most things that are bound to be encountered would do.  Nor do I need something as complicated as an I-mech ... though that is probably where I'll have to go, if I want to nail a system down.

It all seems needlessly complicated for a set up where two groups meet on a road, at a bar or while sitting near each other at an event to just start talking.

What is Playing a Character?

I wonder if someone who has been a DM as long as I have, without much playing, should give any advice about rolling up a character. I’ve watched many do it; I have seen players create back stories and establish “characters” outside themselves … but I’ve never seen any of these people choose their stats for any reason except to satisfy some mechanical need, such as dexterity to ensure safety checks or a high charisma to help with speaking to NPCs.

Suppose that before we threw any dice, we decided who and what our character was going to be, regardless of race and class. Suppose we didn’t base a character on our die rolls or upon our skill set … what would we base that character on?

The most obvious answer would seem to be alignment: is the character good or bad; a team-player or a loner. My feeling is that generalizations such as these are so large as to be useless. We are all sometimes a loner and sometimes a team-player. We are all sometimes good and sometimes bad ~ and I lean to the argument that villains consider themselves either justified or heroic. Adhering to alignment just creates cardboard cutouts. We can surely do better.

Likewise, I am learning through these last five years that it’s no good to think in terms of ambitions, either. We expect that everyone wants to be rich and powerful, certainly enough to obtain those things they want, whatever they might be. That’s all very well for the future, and it might be a motivation for the present, but it isn’t a personality. It might explain why the character is willing to raid this dungeon, or how hard the character is willing to quest … but unless your character is a one-note monster, it doesn’t make much sense. Nor does it make interesting play.

Does this character, or this player, have any sense of personal growth, beyond accumulation and revenging his father’s death? How about the character’s ideas about community, social responsibility, the state of the kingdom or the world? None at all? What entertains the character? How does the character relax … does the character like doing ANYTHING except killing and hauling away the loot?

We can pretty much assume, “no.” The subject never comes up. A stranger turns up, starts up a story about some secret amulet that a bad person is using to mess with a kingdom’s residents and everyone gears up and heads off to a land we never heard of five minutes ago. Ask someone if they’d like to borrow a strong cabin in the woods near a pleasant pond and spend the week there before the next adventure and we get blank faces.

We build murder-hobos because the adventure format demands we pack up and ship out on a moment’s notice, while most of what we’ll meet is so evil there’s nothing to do with it except kill it. There’s no time to think about having a family or building a future. There’s no time to deliberate the everyday issues of the local troubles of the people. If everyone here is starving, don’t ask us; unless there’s a Macguffin involved, we can’t be bothered.

It is silly to talk about “character” when every facet of the game boils every individual down to pressboard cut-out.

I guess that’s where I am different. I’m happy to go on adventures and kill things. I like hauling away loot. But I want a home. I want a reason to go home, and someone to go home for. As I beat this ogre into the dust of his own bones, I want to be thinking of spinning my kids around and showing them this beautiful new gem I found. I want to be planning the new mill and getting back in time for the festival that begins this year’s harvest. I want to tell the stranger who’s bitching about how some wizard in HIS kingdom is stuffing his face with the blood of his people to get the hell off my land, I have problems in my own kingdom to fix. I want to enter into adventures that are RELEVANT to my needs, my environment and my future.

If I think of the character I want for that, I’m ready to forego some charisma in favor of wisdom; or to suspend dexterity in favor of strength. I’ll pay someone else to do my talking; I’ll pay someone else to backstab an enemy. I want a class that will let me command men; or at the very least, will help me establish an entourage that I can rely upon when enemies begin organizing the local villagers against me. I want to encourage grateful immigrants and hamstring entitled locals who resist my changes. I want to help a scarlet-lettered woman regain her reputation; I want to sully the reputation of a narrow-minded bigot. I’m going to need to be tough; generous; dutiful; self-sacrificing; pleasant to know and fearsome to oppose.

I can do that with any race; there are quite a few classes that will let me manage that. If a fighter, I’ll move to an urban setting; with a ranger, something rural. With a cleric, I’ll seek a mission. If I’m a mage, I’ll need isolation at first, then the opportunity to marry into a reputable family. There’s always some means to make my designs work. My designs are flexible enough for that.

What I can’t bear is to have some DM decide what adventures I ought to follow, or what designs I ought to have, or whether those designs deserve constant harassment from the DM. I’m willing to admit a little bad luck, but when it is orcs this week and last week it was giant grasshoppers eating the crops, and the week before that a chimera was destroying the neighborhood, it gets to be suspicious.

But then, I’m weird. Truly, truly weird. I think this game is about playing a character in a setting, when in fact it is about playing a block of wood in a very small box.

What is D&D for 9-Year-Olds

[I was prodded into this]

To play Dungeons and Dragons, one person is chosen to be the Dungeon Master, or DM.  The other players then pretend to be characters, like those in a story.  These characters are made up partly by the players and partly by rolling dice.  The DM watches the players roll and acts like a referee, making sure everyone follows the rules.

Different parts of the player's character say what the character can do.  We learn how strong or how smart the character is, or how tough or limber.  We learn how much damage a character can take before dying and how hard it is to hit the character.  We also learn all the things the character can do, and all the things the character owns.

Then the players pretend to run their characters in a place that the DM makes up.  It can be any kind of place: a city or forest, an underground labyrinth or a desert, whatever the DM decides.  The DM describes what the players see and where they are, so that the players can say what their characters do.  In a way, the players pretend that they are in the actual place the DM describes.

There are lots of imaginative settings the DM can invent.  The DM can invent lots of different imaginary persons for the player's characters to meet.  There are lots of different things the characters can do.  They can talk to the imaginary people (the DM pretends to be each person) or they can wander through the world to find things.  The players can fight other people or they might meet monsters they can fight.  If the player's characters win a fight, they can grab the stuff other people or monsters had in their pockets or in the places they were living.  If the player's characters lose a fight, they could die ~ and then the player has to "roll up" a new character, who then joins the game in progress.

There are many rules that explain how to run fights or what sorts of things can be found and taken.  There are also rules about things the characters can try to do and possibly fail at ~ like jumping between high places and possibly falling, or trying to climb a wall and succeeding.

The game is a lot of fun when the DM makes up a place that is interesting.  It is also good if the players want to get something special and it is possible, but challenging, to get.  It can be fun to chat with all the strange people and creatures the DM can invent.  In a lot of ways it is like be a character in a movie, who starts out to find something and then meets friends and enemies along the way; or discovers strange monsters; or gets trapped in a bad place; and then has to figure out how to get out, beat the monsters, defeat the enemy and get a lot of treasure at the end.  Sometimes the players' characters can come home and receive a parade.  They might even be allowed to marry the King's daughter or son, or become a member of the King's guard.

It is up to the DM what's possible and it is up to the players to succeed.  It can be hard to succeed, since everything might depend on a die roll or on making the right decision at the right time.

When people start playing, it can be very simple ~ a lot of fighting and hauling away the loot.  But as people get better at the game and the DM becomes more imaginative, it can be as BIG and as REAL as your imagination will allow.  There's no real limit to how complicated everything can get.  Even the rules can change if everyone agrees it will make a better game for everyone.  It really is different than any other kind of game!

You can even pretend that everyone that goes to a D&D bar will be smiling!
No one ever goes to bar unless they're happy.

Thorn in My Side

Teasers can be maddening.

Recently, JB dropped such a teaser on his blog and I've been ruminating on it for days now:

"I've written in the past (more than once, I'm sure) that "there's more than one way to play D&D." But folks inferring some sort of non-judgmental, egalitarian declaration should note that I'm NOT saying there exists more than one RIGHT way to play D&D. Truth is, I secretly believe that many of the multiple ways in which folks run the game of D&D are wrong, some of them dead wrong."

JB promises to explain this, but he doesn't have the time he expected to have so there it is, just waiting.  There's only one thing I can do about it.  When hearing the tap dripping, eventually we have to get out of our chair and fix it our self.  So ...

No one is surprised that I think there is a right way to play D&D.  However, even after writing about that for ten years, I doubt there's a reader who can put my "right way" into a succinct, accurate sentence.  D&D, and by extrapolation any long-standing RPG, is a highly complex, versatile, multi-layered game of inexact boundaries and irregular design. Knowing how to play D&D the right way is something like making love the right way or training a horse the right way.  It takes years of consideration, practice, interpersonal awareness, empathy and a skill at trusting your gut when you shouldn't be trusting your head, and equally the reverse.  In other words, don't expect a ten-point guide on "the right way to play" ... which would be sheer idiocy and evidence the writer doesn't have a fucking clue.  We can't will ourselves, or dupe ourselves, or stumble into the right way. We get there by doing and learning from our mistakes.

Of course, that means admitting that we've made mistakes.  I've met hundreds of people in real life ready to admit that; but hardly anyone online.  We often people online write, "There is no right way; everyone does it the way that works best for them!"  This is the gross error: it surmises that we ARE doing it the way that works best for ourselves ... and that is unmitigated horseshit.  We're doing it the best we can ... but not the way that works best.  No one, anywhere, is doing it the way that works best ... unless they've decided to stop learning, that they're done with making mistakes.

What a horrible DM or player that must be to have.

If we're learning, if we're trying, if we're recovering from mistakes, the way that works best will always be in our future; and that is what we need to accept.  That we're not as good at this game as we could be; and that those who think they are have quit that process long, long before they should have.  They think they have all the answers because they've rushed for easy answers.

Beware easy answers.  Beware people who will tell you that it is easy to start a campaign, or that making a game setting can be accomplished in a few steps, or that "simplifying the rules" will make running a game "better."  Better for who?  Better how?  Just "better"?  What does that mean, exactly?  Are there a great number of wonderful things in this world that we wish were "simpler?"

I'm writing this on a computer.  I was introduced to computers 40 years ago, when I had it explained in my grade 8 science class that I could make computers do things for me by programming in basic, something that was done by punching holes in cards, which were then stacked in order to be read by a computer that would view the cards one at a time.  It was all terribly simple.  We had a very simple machine that we placed the cards into, that had keys that we pressed to make punches in the cards; and then the whole program, which was quite simple and only needed twenty or thirty cards, could be held in our hands until it was our turn to feed the cards into the computer.

Who wants to go back to that?

I choose this example because this is the same timeline between our game play today and the "simpler" time of the Old School Revival.  As an old man, I should be the one advocating for the old ways, and hating the hateful complications of this world that is so little like the world of my youth ... but I am utterly baffled at any group that thinks 40 years of reflection, design, imagination and spectacular tools, not to mention the latter half of that time that lets me talk to the world about D&D, should be thrown into the shit-bin for the sake of the white box set, or the red book, or the chance to make elves or dwarves a class rather than a race.

But let me set that befuddlement on a shelf and propose this ... if the community will argue that the game has gone the wrong way since the beginning, and the answer is to go back to the beginning, then I think it begs a question: what about that decision precludes the game's improvement in a different way than what was tried in the 80s, 90s and 00s?  I'll argue emphatically that the creation of new editions WAS a mistake, in the extreme, and that we should not tread that path again!  But does that mean there are no other paths?  No other ways in which we can evaluate the game as it stands, as it is perceived, so as to choose a better way to improve it than slashing rules to make the existing game all over again?

Don't say, as I think some of you might, that you can't see a way to improve it ... if we had relied on those who could not think of a way to improve computers past punch cards, we would not be debating the issue now.  Rest assured, there is a way; and it won't be more simplification, because that's already being tried and it isn't catching on.  No, I'm sorry; the only path ahead of us is the opposite of simplification ... because when we design and augment anything, it naturally gets more complicated.  Not because complication itself is better ~ but because we want all those features we've chosen to add.  We want functionality.  And we always want more.

The right way to play D&D is to find the right way to design D&D.  To take it apart, deconstruct it, figure out how it works ... and then set about the business of making it work better; making it do more; making it make our games more interesting, more engaging, more unexpectedly fluid and playable.

People who want to do things as they've always been done cause me pain, for I look around everyday and see that we do nothing like "we've always done."  And I don't understand why other people can't see that.  It's right in front of their eyes.

Nostalgia

I have heard from people who were not pleased with my treatment on Al and Chad's podcast.  But I do rush to point out, it was not I that set the agenda; nor the time constraint.  I approached the podcast with the desire to express my thorough belief that the game must be taken out of the hands of the game seller and put into the hands of the game player.  I feel I got that point across, and that it was made stronger by Al's repetition that I made good points, without either Al or Chad mounting an argument against me.

However, I would like to be interviewed by someone with a more pin-point agenda.  Rather that talking about the Satanic Panic and how outsiders built their case, I'd rather be talking about how we build a case today to change how outsiders feel about the game.  Rather than talking about whether edition wars are good or bad, I'd rather talk about why the change in content between editions created factions and what those specific factions stood for ~ that is, why people felt the need to hate others.  I'd rather dig down into the day-to-day subjects of play, game rulings and world design, than returning to the same questions about the past.

Building my own podcast, I questioned if I should ask DMs how they got started.  I felt it was a question that deserved examination, from the standpoint of each person, compared to each other person.  But having heard the story repeated, I am beginning to think it is the least valuable question we can ask one another.  Should I ask mathematicians to tell me about the first time they added numbers together?  Or politicians about the first time they did a book report in elementary school?  Or soldiers about the first time they played guns with their mates?  What is that going to tell us?  Why are we as participants in this game so infatuated with the way we started?

I argue it is because, for most people, playing this game exists in a constant universe of them having "lost" something.  Why investigate our memories of the Satanic Panic?  Why investigate our memories of when the game reached the mainstream?  Why ask our feelings about how the game has changed, without producing facts or evidence of investigation, so that at least we might be describing history?  Why is it that we are so locked into the past?  And specifically, that past when we first started playing?

I think it is because most people came to this game when they were children; younger than 16, at least.  And that in that first formative period of their participation, the imaginary element of the game was more keenly felt than it is today.  That as children, every adventure, every image, every moment of explaining what their character did, every argument over some rule, every nub and bobbin of the game was amazingly, astoundingly fresh and spectacularly divorced from the ordinary, common experience of being a kid in a school, under the control of authority figures.  I think it is because for most people, D&D, or Role-playing, was their first real experience with total independence as a self-aware person, discussing a passion with other similarly aged self-aware persons.

And now it is hard to remember exactly how that felt.

By talking about it, we have moments where we're momentarily in touch with that feeling.  It is visceral, not intellectual.  We can't express it.  We know it, but we can't grip it and hold onto it; for we don't think like we did when we were children.  We're different now.

Yet I feel there are a majority of players who sit down to D&D games every week as if the ritual of playing the game in its most familiar incarnation, the old structured format from their childhood days, will magically resurrect the childlike wonder, the awe, that once possessed us when we cast spells and fought giants, when we watched the die bouncing over the table with open-mouthed reverence.  I'm quite sure that many fully-grown adults believe this effect is exactly what the ritual produces.

I find that sad.

As I said in the podcast, I did not come to D&D at 9 years of age.  There was no chance of that for me; the game did not exist until I was ten, and did not make its way into my world until I was 15.  Moreover, I was a much older 15 than my peers.  I could count several university students among my friends.  My teachers had asked my parents three times to push me forward to a higher grade (my parents always refused).  I was already deep into statistics and map-making, amateur astronomy (in which I would head out on my own into open farmer's fields in the summer time, after midnight, with binoculars and later a telescope, to record my sightings), writing books and plays, working as a summer camp counselor and so on.  I had all the tools I needed in my mental pocket to make being a DM my life's work.  I was never in awe of the game.  I was in love with it.

This infatuation with the past, with how we got started, or what it meant to us, or how it felt the first time we went to a game con, or what it was like to be a young DM ... it's lost on me.  I vaguely recall my first disastrous efforts, the desire to possess certain dice and miniatures, or the intensity of those around-the-clock sessions that would start at noon and go past midnight ... but that is not why I play now.  I play now because I love it now.

The way some people approach the game, it reminds me of a husband who loves his wife because once she was pretty and very popular, and he likes to have her around because he enjoys remembering the woman she was.  But I love my wife for the woman she IS ... the sweet, cuddly nearly-60-year-old who is fighting time with dignity and good humour.  She's not who she was, and nor am I ~ and how sad it would be if we were both clinging to each other fantasizing about something that is long gone, that can never change, because we wouldn't let it change.

That is not love for me.  Love is growth.  It is living and seeing the next day, and making that next day special for its own reasons, regardless of what happened once upon a time.  I am sad for people who are helplessly caught in their own nostalgia, who can think of nothing to talk about except what we did, what happened way back when, who used to think what and how terrible and awful it all that because a bunch of old people, who are most likely dead now, used to think the game was about worshipping Satan.

Comedy

Let's talk about comedy.

Comedy is a construction in which subjects with particular characteristics are placed in jeopardy which, ultimately, never comes to pass.  The jeopardy is played upon, usually up to the very last scene, to give the impression that it might occur ... for comedic effect.  In some cases, when the jeopardy does "occur," such as in one of the film cuts of Army of Darkness, the jeopardy is played for laughs.

The protagonist of a comedy is usually someone that is incompetent, occasionally due to a lack of intelligence but more commonly from a lack of social intelligence ~ due to being of some other culture, social class or pattern of thinking.  Or planet, as in Third Rock from the Sun.  A good example, taken to a clever extreme, is to bury Brendan Fraser in a time capsule for 35 years in Blast from the Past, so that his "incompetence" can play off the familiar perspective of the remaining cast.  Usually, such a plot is resolved by having the incompetent characters achieve competence through luck in some fashion, or by having it revealed by the third act that the character was actually the most competent ~ or at least empowered ~ of everyone.

In tragedies, incompetence, in whatever form it takes, usually results in death.  When Cinna is murdered by the mob in Act III of Julius Caesar, because his name happens to be the same as one of the villains, his death is nothing less than pathetic (or pathos).  When Juliet is too incompetent to tell a dead Romeo from a live one, she has no chance.  When Patroclus pretends to be Achilles, he ends up being killed by Hector.  In tragedy, incompetence is a death sport.  In comedy, the incompetent is protected by plot armor.

The point of comedy is for us to enjoy the protagonist as a stranger in a strange land, so that mayhem might ensue.  It is possible to turn this on its head.  The Marx Brothers were able to make everyone else feel that they were in a strange land, as the dialogue was controlled by Groucho and Chico.  The Three Stooges are a threat to everyone who comes near.  In all cases, however, the point is to make the observer feel smarter than the people in the film or play, who just don't understand what's happening.  We know, so we enjoy the joke.

Irony occurs when the participants of the comedy act and speak as though they know what is going on, when in fact, they don't.  Seinfeld is a good example; but we're innundated with ironic comedy now, in the form of Archer, Rick and Morty, The Family Guy and so on ... all of whom make the audience feel terrifically expert, in that the characters on the screen are so wonderfully dense.

Ironic comedy used to be marked by having the characters brought to task for their folly; and this explains the final end of Seinfeld, which was lost on most of the audience who had bought into what the cast was saying as "truth."  When they wound up in prison, this was justified by these having been horrible, awful people; but by then, the only audience left were fundamentally horrible, awful people, who did not understand the final scene.  This is a problem with much modern irony.  Audiences don't know the characters are being ironic.

The folly that these ironic characters speak is hubris; the certainty of being right because, well, I'm me.  In tragedy, hubris again usually ends in death.  But not in the pathetic sense of Romeo and Juliet, but in the, Oh Christ, can't-this-guy-just-please-die-now of Richard the III.

Okay.  In D&D, most players are concerned about dying due to incompetence.  They second check everything, they plan, they worry they're going to make the wrong choice ... and because they do their best to control incompetence, it is usually only bad luck, which cannot be accounted for, that brings about death.  (fudging, however, introduces plot armor, so this can't happen)

But hubris is another animal altogether.  There's no sense in arguing, "don't be hubristic," because if you're capable of realizing you might be hubristic, you're not.  Hubris is not merely being conceited or narcissitic; it's the willing disassociation that comes of failing to see this trait in one's self. And then, ultimately, being hoisted upon your own petard.

A petard is a bomb.  To be "hoisted," or "blown up," by your own is the act of conceiving the bomb, building the bomb, putting the bomb under one's own chair, setting the timer and then waiting for it to go off.  See the aforementioned Richard the III.

Players will occasionally invent the idea of being blown up by petards, but they are almost always imagined as a result of the DM's conceptions, and not their own.  Thus, all the focus on incompetence.  "We didn't make this bomb, but if we're not awfully careful diffusing it, the bomb will go off."

The trick to creating tragedy out of a sandbox campaign, where the bombs are mere parts in the hands of the DMs, and constructions in the hands of the players, is to induce, through game play and suggestion, that building the bomb should sound like a good idea to the players.  "Hey, if we take this part, and pour this into that, and shake it up really good, that would be just what we need ... uh oh, why is it ...?"  BOOM.

This isn't easy.  Done right, the players should be able to recognize "this isn't a good idea," but be willing to go with it because it's the best idea they have.  That way, if at some point, someone does have a better idea, there's still a chance of avoiding the bad play.

Of course, a large number of players, not being very bright, will seize on the "not good idea" algorithm and just start killing whatever NPC is talking.  And there is only one answer for players like this:

Boom.

It is easy to kill an incompetent party.  They read the situation wrong, they act hastily, they use 21st century logic in speaking with 16th century aristocrats and ... well, that sort of thing should go wrong for the player.

It is harder, much harder, to get the competent party deeper and deeper into their own mess, as they keep trying to fix their situation only to find they're making it worse, because they really are hubristic at heart.  They really do think, "This will work!" ... only to find it doesn't, because it wasn't thought through.

The point of tragedy, unlike comedy, isn't to make the audience feel smarter.  It is to make the audience feel dumber.  Because, we hope, the audience will get caught thinking, "Woah, if I had been in Richard's situation, I would have done just what Richard did ..."  [trust me, it did seem rational for a 17th century audience].

I'm sure you can think of a film you've seen, which ended badly, where you realize, if you'd been there, you'd have done no better than the protagonist.  That's the point.  You're meant to empathize. You're meant to feel that you're not really as bright as you think you are.

Once you get players into that mindset, your game is going to get a LOT more meaningful.

Dump the comedy.  And all that that entails.

Will the Real Participant Please Stand Up

Continuing with yesterday's post, I'd like to expand some of my points about character, discussing what a character is, as opposed to what a character does or wants.

First, I'd like to express any misgivings that some readers have that this post, or the last one, is a lead-in to any idea of creating game effects to enhance character play.  Far from it.  It is my wish here to explain that characterization is so far afield of role-playing games that it is actually quite foolish to pretend that we're role-playing a meaningful character.  At best, we're manipulating cardboard cut-outs of characters ~ what I called in the last post, "robots."

To understand what I'm arguing, we have to get a better idea of what makes a character.  It's safe to say that the readers and I are helplessly adrift where it comes to any assignation regarding character types, character quality or the meaning of character in a story.  As individuals, we easily fall in love with characters whom we find familiar, or with whom we identify, blinding ourselves to legitimate interpretations of merit or import.  Because we think a character is "cool," we discard all discussion regarding the actual structure, function or legitimacy of the character in the story, becoming hot-headed and insisting to others that they just don't understand why such-and-such is the "greatest character that has ever existed," a belief that is based more upon our visceral sense of that character as it relates to us, rather than how it might relate to others who have different interests or tastes.

It gets worse when a judgment is applied to that belief.  We decide not to be friends, or even acquaintances, with people who don't like our favorite characters, as though these are yardsticks towards determining who is a real person of value and who is obviously a dolt.  The internet is full of this sort of thing; and it makes any instructional discussion of character nearly impossible.

I am, here, going to discuss three types of character, directly in terms of how they functionally act within a story, with an intention to explaining what makes something fictional more like what any real person actually is.  The goal of an artist making a character at all is to relay a certain reality, from the perspective of someone who is not you in the hopes that you will understand the motivation of a perspective other than your own.  Our perspective, however dear it is to us, is limited.  We turn to art to expand our limitations; to understand better how other people think; and hopefully, in understanding, we expand ourselves, so that we become more aware, better prepared for other people and more empathetic of their needs.

And so ... this long-winded effort is simply for this purpose: please put your emotional attachments on a shelf, and listen.

Looking through literature on this subject today, I am unsatisfied by the scholarship on this subject.  Most of us are familiar with the terms round or flat characters; fewer, perhaps, with dynamic vs. static.  I'm perfectly in agreement with these terms; but I find that I want a more definitive separation in types of round or dynamic characters.  Therefore, I'm going to propose three character types that I'd like to discuss: fixed, reflexive and conflicted.

Fixed characters are those that fit into the categories flat and static.  Regardless of the circumstances of the story, regardless of what's happened, the character neither expresses nor functionally acts in a different manner.  For example, He-Man and Skeletor.  Every episode of the children's show features the same characters, acting in the same predictable manner, with the same goals, the same function, employing the same responses, with no real emotion.  An earlier example, from my childhood, would be Dudley Do-Right: utterly without fear, or comprehension really, but excessively brave, ready, tenacious and indestructible.

Virtually every character ever run by a player in a role-playing campaign is a fixed character.  The background fetish, as a feature, is the means by which most players set their character's behaviour or motivation in stone.  Who among us have not noticed when a given fighter, regardless of how many fights, how many close calls with death, how many foolish mistakes, ALWAYS bulldozes into every doorway and every fight without the least hesitation?  Or the thief that always steals, or the cleric that always gives the same sort of speech before a fight, or the dwarf that perpetually argues with the elf, no matter how many years the two of them have spent saving each other's hide?  Players, as a species, love fixed characters.  This is part of their fetish.  Having dreamt up the perfect representation of their character's identity, they will play that identity with unvarying exactitude ... even to where that same identity will float from character to character, as previous incarnations (whatever their skills, class or backgrounds) die away.

Fixed characters, however, are boring.  They may satisfy the player, but they exhaust everyone else.  They are the furthest sort of being from an actual, real person ... and in a way, for role-playing, that is a positive feature.  For while fixed characters don't change, they also can't be really missed when they die.  Another stock character can be easily made on the same pattern.  Therefore, any personal relationship between the player and the made-up character can be dismissed.  Nothing is lost, because nothing was ever really there.

Reflexive characters, which might also be thought of as responsive characters, are quite different.  As the narrative continues around the character, the character is forced to adapt, converting themselves to fit the new world they find themselves in.  Reflexive characters are a kind of dynamic character; but in a very particular way.  Intrinsically, they don't change.  I have hundreds of examples to pick from, but I'll choose something from a film that I'm sure 90% of my readers have seen more than once:  the character Henry Hill from the film Goodfellas.

Throughout the film, Henry is repeatedly forced to deal with the steady, unrelenting changes going on around him, as the mafia/mob lifestyle he lives transforms from the 1950s into the 1960s.  He experiences the lifestyle in multiple ways: as a kid, as an enforcer, as a husband, as a member of a vitriolic set of friends and acquaintances ... then as a struggling drug dealer trying to make it on his own and finally as an informer against the very people he's known all his life.  With each change, he adjusts, he bends his moral framework, he allows himself to participate more fluidly and in an hands-on manner, he submits to the risks he has to take and finally, he submits to the only choice he has left as the walls close around him.

But he doesn't change.  He doesn't question his infatuation with the goodfellas' lifestyle when his dad beats him, or when he sees a man knifed in the street, or when he watches his friends murder Billy Bats, or when he goes to prison, when people are murdered all around him, or when he's lowered to having to deal in coke or even after he's been forced into retirement as a relocated witness.  At the end of the film, Henry's chief regret is that he isn't able to return to the lifestyle he loves.  And while this makes an interesting movie, and it makes Henry into a very interesting, profoundly unique character, the actual character himself is without regret, without doubt, without remorse, without any rational response to any of the awful, criminal, sociopathic activities with which he's connected.  In that particular way, he's a very flat character ... no more changeable than Dudley Do-Right.

This is the sort of character than DMs want when running adventure-driven campaigns that steadily move from adventure to adventure.  The characters need to make the best possible use of their resources, adapting themselves to the circumstances, overcoming the problems they face, and never questioning why their character is always ready for another adventure, always ready to risk their lives again, always ready to put it all on the line for treasure or what other motivation they have.  No one wants a character who hesitates at the start of an adventure, who suddenly questions the point of all this; that is not in keeping with the substance of the game.

Conflicted characters represent much more nearly what we are as human beings.  They, too, are dynamic ~ but not only in the way they respond, but also in the way they recognize that there are multiple choices that they can make regarding any situation.  They're not sure.  They are filled with doubts.  When something startling, unexpected or significant happens, they question themselves, even to where they are ready to separate themselves from the life they're living, and accept the consequences of that decision.  Again, I have many examples I could draw from, going back to the Greeks and Shakespeare ... but none of you want me to explain any of this by pulling out Hamlet, again.  Given that I want an adventure of sorts, and a familiar character, whom most readers have probably seen, I will go with Remy from the film Ratatouille.

Remy, like Henry, is in love with something: being a cook.  However, Remy is far more conflicted over the relationship between his love of food and his family.  He knows his father is wrong; but at the same time, throughout the film, it is important to Remy that his father understands, because Remy isn't capable of just abandoning his family without hesitation.  As such, he lets himself be pushed into situations (being food-tester, providing stolen food for his brother Emile and friends) ... but he knows its wrong and he experiences angst over it.

Similarly, he doubts a lot of his actions, even his bold ones.  He hesitates before fixing the soup.  He runs away from Linguini at first before changing his mind.  He throws away his morals in a fit of pique and lets all the rats into the kitchen; and then experiences remorse when he's exposed and he's lost his friend.  Then he returns to the kitchen to help Linguini anyway, even though he is only a rat and may very well be caught and killed (we know he won't be, obviously, he's the star, but that is not Remy's perspective).  He does it because he knows Linguini can't face Anton Ego without him.

With each change in the story, Remy re-evaluates his belief system.  He's never sure what he wants.  He's never sure how it is going to turn out.  And often, his choices land him in hot water, which he clearly regrets.  It is this conflict that makes Remy compelling: because it is a conflict that we ourselves struggle with every day, as we go to work, as we make plans, as we fight with our families, as we puzzle out the message behind a blog post, as we act like human beings.

A character like Remy would be a disaster in a role-playing game.  Trying to run such a character, inventing the character's inward struggles with each part of the adventure, might be an interesting artistic venture, but it would make a frustrating, undesirable and masturbatory excursion for a group of players ... perhaps more so if every player attempted to do the same, in different ways, according to their personal interpretations of how their conflicted character viewed the world. Admittedly, there might be various drama troupes who found such an activity interesting (though note that when improving, actors always play the scene for laughs, not drama) ... but I don't think a role-playing game would be made better by the experiment.

That said, we ARE playing this experience in one way. We are actual conflicted humans, playing the game with our own conflicted selves.  But we are not, thankfully, trying to puzzle out how some invented personality deals with conflict; we're quite used to our own conflict and we are quite able to put it on a shelf, if need be, so that we can participate in a social activity, like playing a game.

Admittedly, some are not.

When the players struggle with making up their minds about what to do; when they hesitate before fighting a dragon or question if their quest-giver is actually the villain; this is the sort of realistic, pleasant and meaningful conflict that we are seeking from game play.  We don't want this from characters; but we DO want it from players.

And that is why questing to make role-playing a matter of playing a character is the pursuit of lunacy.  We don't want "characters" ~ we want flat, fixed, reflexive personalities that respond to their situations in a predictable manner, so that the REAL PEOPLE can enjoy the game for the contextual dilemmas it provides.  Any role-player waxing on about the "amazing" qualities of an invented character is in a state of delusion; they've fallen in love with a wooden, two-dimensional robot, and not with any being of the substance of a fellow player.

We've missed the fact of this.  We've allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by words used in a particular way, concocting a particular chicanery, which we've bought into because it "sounded good"; but it doesn't stand up to authentic scrutiny.

It's bullshit.

The Flaw in Role-Playing

I have lately been thinking that there is a case to be made against "role-playing" ~ in which players take the role of an imaginary character who engages in adventures ~ which I am not seeing elsewhere.  I am seeing the very notion itself as a sort of fraud ... in which an idea, not very well explained or examined, is sold to a group of would-be believers, ready to pay out for something they haven't actually received.

In my usual way, I'm taking this opportunity to write out some thoughts on the matter, as a method for concretely thinking through the problem.  After a time, pursuing thoughts in one's own head, without making notes, is a fruitless operation.  After a time, it requires an act of communication with others to force one to clarify one's thinking.  That is the purpose of this post.

To begin with, looking closely, I'm not very happy with the definition of "role-playing" as it is described for the purpose of gaming.  Let's look at the definition as it appears on Wikipedia:

"... a game in which players assume the role of characters in a fictional setting.  Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development."

The WOTC was somewhat disappointing.  I found this on their D&D support page:

The best definition I could find on their website was this (after twenty minutes of searching):

"The first Dungeons & Dragons game was played back when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson chose to personalize the massive battles of their fantasy wargames with the exploits of individual heroes."

Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian, a blog that's been around longer than me, defines it as:

"Roleplaying games are self-evidently about playing a role. Playing a role is about making choices as if you were the character. Therefore, in order for a game to be a roleplaying game (and not just a game where you happen to play a role), the mechanics of the game have to be about making and resolving choices as if you were the character. If the mechanics of the game require you to make choices which aren’t associated to the choices made by the character, then the mechanics of the game aren’t about roleplaying and it’s not a roleplaying game."

And the International Journal of Role-playing points out that, after expressing doubts about the latest attempts at defining role-playing (circa 2009),

"There are no final definitions for role-playing games, only definitions suited better or worse to a certain historical understanding of role-playing games. However, this does not mean that role-playing games should not be defined, as the definitions given can advance our understanding of what role-playing games are and could be. This paper takes part in the ongoing process of definition."

I warn the reader at this point that the paper above spends most of its time trying to produce a universal definition of role-playing games ... which, like most academic papers that quibble, sours for me on that issue.

Finally, we come to the definition that the above paper from Finland discusses, the definition by Michael Hitchens and Anders Drachen, which can be found on the same article.  It is quite long; but what the hell, we're not paying for ink here.  Let's have all of it.

"Game World: A role-playing game is a game set in an imaginary world. Players are free to choose how to explore the game world, in terms of the path through the world they take, and may revisit areas previously explored. The amount of the game world potentially available for exploration is typically large.

"Participants: The participants in the games are divided between players, who control individual characters, and games masters (who may be represented in software for digital examples) who control the remainder of the game world beyond the player characters. Players affect the evolution of the game world through the action of their characters.

"Characters: The characters controlled by the players may be defined in quantitative and/or qualitative terms and are defined individuals in the game world, not identified only as roles or functions. These characters can potentially develop, for example in terms skills, abilities or personality, the form of this development is at least partially under player control and the game is capable of reacting to the changes.

"Game Master: At least one, but not all, of the participants has control over the game world beyond a single character. A term commonly used for this function is 'game master,' although many others exist. The balance of power between players and game masters, and the assignment of these roles, can vary, even within the playing of a single game session. Part of the game master function is typically to adjudicate on the rules of the game, although these rules need not be quantitative in any way or rely on any form of random resolution.

"Interaction: Players have [a] wide range of configurative options for interacting with the game world through their characters, usually including at least combat, dialogue and object interaction. While the range of options is wide, many are handled in a very abstract fashion. The mode of engagement between player and game can shift relatively freely between configurative and interperative.

"Narrative: Role-playing games portray some sequence of events within the game world, which gives the game a narrative element. However, given the configurative nature of the players’ involvement, these elements cannot be termed narrative according to traditional narrative theory."

Excellent.  That is nice and meaty.  I grant it does not define a great many role-playing games, of a kind, but it does better for D&D than anything I've seen.  It gives a sound, roundish definition for role-playing games as a body

It does not, however, make a good case for "role-playing," per se.  Where it comes down to the principles of "playing a character," we have the same familiar designations:

• Players can have a personality.
• Players can participate in a dialogue.  

I can see that I'm going to get in deep water from here, so I'll ask the reader if they really want to keep reading past this point.  I'll give this warning: if you view "role-playing" within the game with strong sense of nostalgia, personal subjectivity and visceral prejudice, you're not going to understand what comes next ... because you will have missed the point that this post is a deconstruction on what the game allows, not a judgement on how you, as an individual, feel about the game or the sense you have of role-playing in it.  Whatever your personal gut-level instinct about the intuitive thrill you get from pretending to be whomever, most of that is coming from the cathartic soup that is the human construct that defines who and what you are.  All of that is not coming from the game; it is not transferable to any other human; and it is not relevant to this discussion.

All right.  I'm going to take a moment to explain that the substantive quality that makes a "character" is that it has a set of mental and moral qualities distinctive to that construct.  We can call this a personality.  Exploration, skills, definable traits like how much we can lift, how fast we can run, how much we know about beekeeping, what sequence of events have recently revolved around us and so on ARE NOT elements of our personality.  My personality, your personality, any personality will view exactly similar events, will possess exactly similar skills, see exactly similar places and react to such things in a wholly unique and individual manner.

Therefore, it must be understood that when we say, "we are role-playing a character," we do not mean someone with a high strength or a breast plate made of bronze or possessing red hair; we do not mean a fighter, a cleric or a thief; we do not mean someone with dead parents or a lot of money or seven reasons to kill the man who killed our father.  These things are outside our mental and moral qualities.  These things are what we have, how we look, what circumstances have occurred and what plans we make.

The moral quality of a character is NOT defined by the desire to seek revenge.  It is defined by why this particular character, and not a different character, would seek revenge for something that many other characters would happily leave as a problem for the authorities, the gods or pure chance to resolve.  Why in particular is your character built in such a way that your character sees the only possible reaction to murder as the compulsion to commit more murder?  Until you look into the character, and see the motivation ~ which is not, as many believe, the death of the father ~ then you are not, as yet, playing a personality.

And it is here, I think, that the role-playing game offers absolutely no contribution whatsoever.  Once it is established that the role-played character is going to kill the killer of the father, everything else that follows is a mechanical operation that can as easily be performed by a robot, with little or no evidence to the contrary.  The player must find the killer, the player must trap the killer and the player must kill the killer ... all of which is problem-solving and none of which is in any way captured as the "mental quality distinctive to the individual."  Another character, with a purportedly different personality, would have to solve the puzzles of finding, trapping and killing the target in pretty much the same way.  We are fooling ourselves if we think we are "creating a personality" by defining what the character wants or does.  Such things are superficial materialism, and nothing else.

Therefore, the "role" that is being played is very definitely not a matter of reproducing a personality.  None of us are remotely capable of understanding any personality except our own, except in the superficial observation of others, whose thoughts we don't possess.  Therefore, if we are killing the killer of our fictional father, at the very best we are playing a part in which we are acting as we think we would, if our real selves lived in such a place, was possessed of such a father, had such and such abilities, had the nerve to carry forward with finding and trapping the enemy, with the understanding that killing is definitely our intention afterwards.

Unless you are the sort of person whom NO ONE wants at their game table, this isn't even a realistic portrayal of your own personality.  At some point, in order to commit yourself to the deed, you will have to obtain a greater and greater perspective on your character, before the murdering even comes close to happening, so that you can view your actions as one would view the superficial appearance of another person whom we learned to be capable of such a thing.  So again, the role we are playing here is the role of a robot.

And that is the definition of role-playing we find when we don't attach "game" to the search:

"The unconscious acting out of a particular role in accordance with the perceived expectations of society."

Role-playing is a delusion.  It is a chance for the participants to speak in funny voices, to ham up a performance, to present a thoroughly sketchy, slapdash, artificial representation, more or less as well as we might expect a sophisticated robot to present, without any real interest in subjectively examining the fundamental reasons why our character became a fighter, how being a fighter fails to meet our expectations, how neurotic we are about our ability to fight, how guilt-ridden we feel once we've acted in accordance with our abilities or how possessed we are by the general sense of inadequacy, doubt, a need for denial in the face of horror or any of the other uncomfortable, unspoken of things that we are careful not to speak of in mixed company.

Once that is grasped ~ and I expect very, very few to reach that awareness ~ then we can see that all attribution to "role-playing" as a superior functionality in role-playing games, versus "roll-playing," as is often cried, is nothing more than a superficial desire to enact a superficial narrative in a superficially controlled manner, in such a way that no element remotely emblematic of game-play can circumvent our intentions.

Which is atrocious.