Systemic, Widespread Failure

Before the rise of widespread public schooling in the 19th century, education was largely a private affair. Tutoring was the dominant mode, whether it was a governess for the children of the wealthy, a village priest for rural families, or itinerant teachers who moved from home to home. The learning experience was highly individualised. Instruction could be adapted to the student's pace, interests and abilities. The relationship between student and teacher was often personal and long-term. Education was not standardised. It was not age-graded. There were no bureaucracies enforcing curriculum. The subjects taught reflected the values and goals of the family or the immediate community rather than those of a centralized institution.

Tutoring in this time period did not support the model, "Let students make their own mistakes." The model was built on correction and mastery. A tutor's role was to intervene immediately when a mistake was made. Mistakes were not opportunities for discovery. They were treated as failures of attention or discipline. The student was to be shaped and improved, not merely left to explore.

Naturally, when public education was imposed, the original model was borrowed from that of the tutor... which led to egregious abuse of students when something that was designed for individual guidance was instead imposed in a factory atmosphere. Putting that aside, our point here is that mistakes as opportunities for discovery were not a principle of early schooling. The model demanded imitation, recitation and memorisation, which didn't work as well as the tutoring model and were clearly a problem almost at once, as adddressed by John Dewey in the 1910s and 1920s, especially in the United States. However, the two wars, the Spanish influenza and the Great Depression interrupted the continuity, clarity and instituional coherence of new ideas, so that it appears to us, a century later, that these issues weren't "addressed" until the 1950s and 60s, when Dewey and especially Maria Montessori, a contemporary of Dewey, suddenly became the rage.

Long prior to that, however, Dewey had stressed the process of learning by doing — and in that framework, mistakes were reinterpreted as signs of engagement. It wasn't the mistake that mattered, but the process of struggling through it, guided by reflection and self-correction. But then, as decades passed, this subtlety was gradually lost. Over the course of the 20th century, as education systems expanded and bureaucratised, these pedagogical ideas were distilled into slogans — like "we learn from our mistakes" — which became detached from the conditions under which that learning might actually occur.

The result is that today, the idea of learning from mistakes is promoted as a kind of motivational shield against failure, not as a structured methodology for learning. It functions more as a cultural reassurance than a teaching principle. It is therapeutic, NOT pedagogical, that is, "related to teaching." Thus the phrasing we often hear, where a teacher says of the children, "We like to arrange things so that children have an opportunity to make their own mistakes," is a modern creation, not rooted in traditional education and not rooted in proper educational science.

Something important to note here is that education obviates the need for us to make our OWN mistakes. We already have a history of others humans before us making mistakes, which we can learn from just as ably and completely as our own — and more rapidly as well, since we can jump right to the conclusion. No one says to themselves, "I'm thinking about making my own bazooka, but since I believe we learn best from making our own mistakes, I've decided to do it that way." Likewise, numerous STEM fields do not give students a chance to make their own mistakes because the consequences would be disasterous, not just for the student but potentially for society as a whole. In fact, these things make it obvious that the right path is not to make our own mistakes and start from scratch, but to learn the right way the first time, from the get-go, and move forward.

The theatre of making mistakes is reserved for low-accountability environments, especially soft or poorly evaluated subjects — say, for example, Dungeons and Dragons — where failure carries no immediate cost and the teacher can retreat into ambiguity. Proper education, on the other hand, is fundamentally a preventative structure; it's designed to save time, to avoid the need to learn everything the hard way, to spare the student from making the same blunders their predecessors did. The humanities show us the failures of culture. Science teaches us not to re-invent the wheel, or misapply a method. Mathematics is a set of distilled truths we don't need to rediscover through trial and error. Coaching sports teaches the athlete how to move and direct their body. All of this is the inheritance of mistake — already processed, already learned from, and ready to be taught.

To replace this with "personal discovery" through unstructured failure is to destroy the core function of education. It's anti-civilisational. It romanticizes ignorance and reinvents hardship. Yet the reason for this mistake-as-positive myth persists is partly emotional — it makes students feel safe. It removes the threat of judgment. It's egalitarian. But it also flourishes because modern schooling is no longer trusted to teach the right path clearly. If institutions aren't transmitting mastery, then students are left thinking they must find their own way. And thus the mistake becomes the teacher, not because it is good, but because it is the only thing left doing the job.

This exposes the structural deflection of responsibility within modern education, which explains in large part why many would-be dungeon masters don't have the wherewithal to comprehend or manage the game books, even when they are studied, simply because the tools aren't there to jump ahead and comprehend without having to start from an educational scratch. This is further worsened by those self-same students having been programmed to believe that the "right way to do it" is precisely the way they cannot. They've been taught to learn from their mistakes, but they can't see the mistake even when they've made it, because they don't know what a mistake looks like. At the same time, having not been taught to accept principles and truths as a matter of trust, they automatically don't trust what they're told. This disaster of an educational approach has crippled nearly every D&D player, so that their own option is to play hard into their handicap, discarding the rules (which they don't understand) and the functional game (which they don't understand) for the principles of social exchange (which they've learned through trial and error) in order to create a game system that is essentially a mystery to them.

Let me state that again as clearly as I can, for those in the back not listening. For most players and dungeon masters, the game's mechanic's are opaque, avoided or discarded not out of rebellion but out of illiteracy — not knowing how to learn, not knowing how to trust what’s taught, not knowing how to correct themselves because they’ve never been shown what correction looks like. They play into their own limitations, not because it's ideal, but because it's familiar. And they compensate with social performance, because that’s where feedback is still legible.

That final paragraph nails something few are willing to say: that this modern educational mindset has crippled not just content knowledge, but the very ability to recognise structure, accept authority or pursue mastery — not just in formal disciplines, but even in games.

I don't need to prove this. This series of posts, in which JB of B/X Blackrazor excoriates letter after letter from individuals who clearly don't comprehend and cannot express what's wrong with their game play, demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that these are people for whom traditional D&D is an utter, unfathomable, incomprehensible mystery. While JB does an excellent job of pointing out how a mixture of responsibility, self-improvement and messaging would enormously help, it's impossible to see these letters and believe, even remotely, that this advice could possibly be accepted as true. In short, though the letters were not written to JB personally but were, rather, sampled from the internet, we can see that a lot of people exist who are asking for advice, who at the same time are evidently not able to take it at face value.

We are articulating a problem that deserves to be repeated in every space where the integrity of learning, systems and self-improvement is taken seriously. This isn't just illiteracy in the narrow sense of rules comprehension. It's a meta-literacy — an inability to recognise that one doesn’t know, and worse, an inability to accept knowledge even when it's offered plainly. It's not rebellion. It's not defiance. It's not a choice being made by people who prefer this system to that, or this standard of play to that, or role-playing vs. roll-playing. It's something sadder and more dangerous — a learned helplessness masked by confidence, a posture shaped by years of vague instruction, shallow encouragement and the complete absence of epistemic accountability.

Those in these letters do not come from people who are stupid, but from those so deeply embedded in an unstructured, unschooled, emotionally therapeutic version of play that the very concept of D&D as a designed system with external logic is alien to them. The points that JB makes would be automatically rejected because the framework in which those points would make sense no longer exists for these people.

What we're looking at is the educational failure of the hobby space laid bare.

D&D landed in a culture that was far more traditionally educated than the present day's. Moreover, having learned to read standard board game rules starting from the age of 8 or younger, most of those who first came to role-playing table-top arrived from the culture of complex wargames, where parsing out rules like these had become second-nature, though we were just 12 or 13. It was therefore relatively easy, first of all, for three or four kids to figure out the rules of early edition D&D, and other game systems besides, with the added culture of knowing one could trust the elder generations because they're diligence with regards to rules was tightly established.

Reading and internalising dense, technical rulebooks wasn't just possible — it was expected. We did it for FUN. We nitpicked and argued and parsed out each and every rule not from the standpoint of "should it exist," but what was it accurately and precisely trying to say. This was the original meaning of the "rules lawyer" — not an individual seeking to redefine words to rid the game of the rule, but those ready to demand fundamental obedience to a rule "as the designer intended it."

This was possible because the rulebook was written like a contract or a constitution — not a soft, scurrilous, emotionally gratuitous document designed to make the reader feel better about the purchase they've just made, but a thing with internal logic and deliberate authorship that demanded respect, interpretation and rigorous application. The original DMG was a very strange animal, in that many of the rules didn't make sense, weren't well-crafted, weren't formally explained, lacked an internal logic and were quite obviously representative of the feeling of the writer and the company that supported that writer. Still, it was close enough to logical, the writer having been bred in the formalisation of games, so that a person — even someone new to the game — could try, test, fill in the blanks and produce a working model despite those designer shortcomings.

Moreover, the culture at that time, faced with this flawed document, saw the problem of interpretation as coming nearly as possible to the intentions within, which were — and are still, for many people who have moved back to AD&D and similar period games — interpretable through discussion, debate, reason and a deeper understanding of what games were and how they were supposed to work. Video games at that time were present, but weren't seen to overlap the board-game structure. They tended to be puzzle-based or sports-based, having more in common with the structures of jigsaw puzzles and competitions, than with intellectual examination. This is also largely still true; both competition-games and logistical styled games are still essentially related to sports and puzzles. Online RPGs are guessing games, or best choice options, solved through mental cognition but not through a strategical approach not already baked into the game.

Those coming to D&D presently, with the mindset of a video game, naturally seek immediately to see what the game will allow — this being the fundamental truth of video games. The boundary is simply, can I move here or not; can this thing be picked up or not. Nothing that can be done in the game is against "the rules." If it can be done, it can only be done because the program meant it to be done. Approaching role-playing with this attitude is logically, "If the DM can be convinced to let it happen, then that's fair, because if it was wrong, the DM could not be convinced." Of course, human DMs are far more manipulable than graphics.

This has trained a generation with a kind of "mechanical permissiveness," where the only test is, "can this happen." This strengthens the "learn by one's own mistakes" approach, since most game players start by trying to figure out what can be done, to get the most from the game. It's always possible, of course, to go learn from someone else's mistakes, to see how G-27rSexy Ranger solved the problem in a youtube video, but somehow this approach is less about "how do I learn to play" as opposed to "how do I learn to play like others do." It is a copycat approach, not a learning approach.

This learning process can't be applied to real world mechanics. A great many things that can be done shouldn't be done, for reasons having nothing to do with permissiveness. A game world has no consequences, except the requirement to start again. The real world has consequences that make starting again impossible.

Early D&D and other RPGs embraced the "What should be done?" model from the outset — not because the consequences of doing something that shouldn't be done were in themselves harmful, but because D&D, unlike video games, begins in a space where others are not merely engaged, but are directly adjacent to one's person. An individual player who develops a mindset of killing things in the game a bit too gleefully, though not necessarily against the rules, tends to cause others to question their physical proximity to the individual. Likewise, individuals who bully, who speak loudly, who fail to bathe, who talk out of turn, who don't show up or who commit a vast array of other unsociable behaviours tend to be removed both quietly or dramatically, as necessary.

This contributed to early tabletop becoming a self-correcting space rooted in real world consequence, where agreeing upon what the rules meant, why are we here, what kind of experience do we want and how to obtain consistency were placed front and centre in those discourses seeking to interpret and understand the rules, just as they were interpreted in Monopoly, RISK and a host of other games. We were used to this; we did not perceive a time when we would not continue to play boardgames in tandem with D&D... but it was becoming evident, as the end of the 80s approached, that there were new breeds of players emerging that did not share these priorities.

The cultural deterioration of the game table did reflect, to some degree, those points about video games already made. But the larger factor, I would argue, would be those coming to tabletop without any background in other games whatsoever, or interest in playing such games. These would not be the majority, not by any stretch. But it was a small but vocal element that seemed to find a value in game play that resisted or disregarded the rules of the game itself. This doesn't need to be thoroughly examined. We may simply refer to this as the "story people" and leave it at that. Tabletop permitted an outlet to a behaviour that needed a stage, and those with that behaviour began to make themselves known. Rules were not important, because a stage does not need rules.

It was, however, a loud minority, often charismatic, often admired for their creativity or "immersion," and increasingly elevated in published materials, actual play media and designer rhetoric. Their influence was disproportionate to their number, because what they offered was a new way to play — or more accurately, a way to use D&D as a scaffold for something else entirely.

This deviation was exacerbated by the arrival of a new "official" set of rules, 2e, which began the long splinterisation of game rules that were never universally settled. We're well aware of how this has turned out. Notably, 2e utterly ignored the efforts and structural analysis of those individual DMs who had spent the years after AD&D attempting to make sense of the game. Like each smaller splash that was made by writers like Moldvay and Mentzer, plus those crude splatbooks that grew from the published literature rather than the personalised game experience that was identifiable at the very small game cons that were in existence, the publisher's failure to interpret was shoved out in front. Progressively afterwards, D&D became less interpretable, by those less able to interpret, contributed to by an educational system which, as expressed, has moved increasingly to a hands-off approach.

So here we are... with a game more popular than ever, but less cognitively playable than it's ever been, approached by those without the educational tools needed to interpret a game never designed to be sensible. A game that, for many, is not even a game any more, but a genre and a mood. Something to be enacted, not mastered.

For a fellow like me, this leaves nothing.

Explaining how the game can be played, or should be played, requires an audience capable to accepting things on faith, as judged through long experience of recognising good from bad. Yet universally the sentiment is automatically distrustful, both because the industry itself had destroyed trust, so that every reader looks at a new idea or system with jaundiced eye; and because trust is something taught, in a present-world where every moment of trust means humiliation at the hands of a grifter or a phishing scheme. We're purporting in rhetoric to teach people "how to learn" but we're not in fact doing this. We're telling people to make your own mistakes, but we're not giving them the capacity to deconstruct a mistake sufficiently to recognise one.

I cannot teach if my audience cannot accept, even after a vast stream of effort, that I might know something they don't. This leaves very little.

We talk about "learning how to learn" as though it's a lightbulb moment — but what's actually being taught is a sort of non-discriminatory sludge, where all answers are valid, where the test considers the willingness to show up and mark the page as the only entry exam, regardless of what multiple choice is marked. Failure is not something to be eschewed, but a thing to be stamped onto a badge and worn as evidence, as though this itself was the proof, that something was learned. "I tried" has replaced the "participation ribbon." But we can't say what this learned thing is. We only have the badge. And those with similar badges band together and form cliques that praise the value of the badge, assuring that its meaning need never be fully understood. Because the praise of our fellows is enough.

Not only is it a club to which I do not want to belong, it is a club to which I cannot. I am unable to be "performative." I cannot replace fact with validation, or success with shared struggle. I automatically question the value of the badge because I was taught to question. And to demand an answer... that I might pass it on to the next person, without concern for their feelings about it.

And so, I drift. I feel a pang of fury, scream into the void, then immediately perceive it as a humiliating, stupid reaction. I write out long deconstructions like this one knowing they'll be read, misinterpreted, forgotten and the point not undertaken. If I'm honest with myself, there's no point left in my being here.

Those who may read this, and wish for me not to go away, should ask, if you have not adjusted your game world to fit the advice that's been given here for 18 years, what are you learning? If you feel you haven't been able to accept that's been said here, because you know better, then very plainly you're not learning ANYTHING. Because learning is not seeing and judging, then discarding. It's seeing and trying. With the comprehension that if someone takes the time to make a sound argument that can't be dismissed without handwaving, then it's time to think, "Hm, maybe he knows something I don't know."

If you cannot do that. If you cannot accept this about yourself, or your judgment, after reading this space and all that's here for 18 years, then I'm not your teacher, I'm the enabler of your complacency. And I don't want to be that. I have no participation ribbons for you.

(Continued)

Focusing on the Process

So ...

Addressing the primer that's called for, that we'll write without pathos, including all the bits, how in blazes do we "focus on the process"?  What in creation is that, assuming whatever we suggest has a snowball's chance in hell of being agreed upon.  Putting it in terms of how hard this would be, how do we prove that someone fucked the Virgin Mary?

Me, I take that on faith.

Look.  Forget the hokum about D&D being a game of adventure, action, fantasy, magic, character, story or even role-playing.  These things get incorporated into the way we play, but none of them are strictly necessary in the game's play.  We do not need to run an "adventure"; any series of events will do.  Action need not occur.  We can easily throw out the fantasy and the magic and set the thing on a 14th century farm.  The "character sheets" are a set of statistics ... play doesn't require these things be augmented by a personality.  Whatever series of events we want can occur; in play, they may produce a history, but there's no reason to think they will make a "story."  The last ten days of my life haven't.  And finally, describing the physical actions of a fictional stick figure, while rolling dice to determine success at attempts being made, does not constitute "role-playing."

We incorporate these things as part of our behaviour ... but these things are not structurally part of the game.  It is folly to argue that we should adjust the game to suit our behaviour, when in fact we have adjusted our behaviour to suit the game.  It's the failure to understand the nature of this cause and effect that keeps us going round and round.  Without knowing what causes what, and what results from what, we're hopelessly unable to start an a priori position on anything.  It's all posteriori with us, which is to say, straight out of our ass.

Which is why I keep going back to game theory, wresting my focus back to basics, not just in relation to one game or one human activity, but in how D&D relates to all games, all human activity.  There I find that D&D is a simultaneous game with elements of turn-based strategy; a game built around imperfect information, and extensive form game with infinite action space.  It is many other things besides, but we don't need to go into all that.  The point I'm making here is that D&D is an absurdly, incomprehensibly complicated game ... which is why, the first thing that most players want to do with it, is get rid of the complexity and reduce it to a measure their brains can handle.

The complexity is why a "beginner primer" for D&D is a terrifically STUPID idea.  I've been asked repeatedly to write one and I've repeatedly refused.  It's flagrantly impossible to explain in words how a player has an infinite number of possible actions from which to choose at a given moment, especially when the perameters of the given moment change fluidly as multiple humans engage emotionally, existentially, triggered by the trajectory of their thoughts, their play and whatever they've witnessed on the fly.

The only rational means of learning D&D well is through demonstration ... throw the baby in, hope it swims.  It's how I learned.  I recognize it's not how most people learned — though in the beginning, it was.  I understand that a great many people learned through obtaining the books and then trying to understand the material, cold, without the benefit of demonstration.  Many received their education in groups that played puerile or stripped down versions of the game.  More learned from workshops that were more interested in finding children something to do than caring at all about the game's quality.  A vast number today are learning through Adventurer's League, or through copying the babblings of Critical Role and other Youtube products.  Of course this is a ghastly mess.  If you happen to be someone whose initial introduction to the game included half the bullshit encountered online, your chances of pulling out of that tailspin are commensurate with your chances of finding a normal life after being raised by religious fanatics.  I wish you luck.  But understand, I'm not the one that fucked you up.

Of course, a great many don't believe they're "fucked up."  They believe they're "doing their thing" — which is fine.  I can't do anything about it.  It's fairly obvious, however, that when they attempt to write anything about the game, or how it's played, or what purpose it serves, they universally descend into sentimentalism, nostalgia, egoism and multiple paragraphs of "filler words" like fun and story, which are never defined but are dogmatically absolutist.

If we cannot describe what we do better than this, then we don't deserve respect.

I don't worry about persons in my direct orbit — those I play with — because I know they're going to play a game I'm familiar with, on the level I like to play.  And with regards to "what is D&D?" or "Are people forgetting how to play?", I never need to worry.  D&D will exist, as it is, at least until the day of my death ... and since I have zero reliance on the wherewithal of others to produce the materials I need to play and expand my campaign, then every other DM in the world can die of a terrible disease and I'll still be here, playing, building, advancing my ideal of the game.  Teaching it nose-to-nose to other people.  Doing the good work.  Hammering the hammer, ringing the bell, singing the song.

Go ahead, try and write your primer if you want.  Write it any way you want.  It might make you a buck; I don't doubt it.  But as something useful?  C'mon.

Still out of charity, I'll give you another clue.  D&D is about constraint.  It is all constraint.

Now go write your book.

Dominance

 "We have to look at what makes something a game, so strap in because we're about to get good and crunchy with our definitions here.  Games are sets of rules.  Rules can be generally divided into three kinds: the board, the procedures and the goals.  Goals are self explanatory.  They're the things that the player wants to accomplish in order to bring the game to a close.  Ideally, winning.  Procedures are all the things you normally think of when you hear about rules: what counts as a valid move, what are the penalties for a violation, scoring systems and so forth all fall into this category.  The board is the defined limitations of the game system and can actually be a lot of different things.  Board games have a literal board, sports have a field, video games have the game world, card games have a starting layout and role-playing games have a communal agreement of assumptions and the foundational structure of character generation.

"There's one more important characteristic and that's metaphor.  The actions taken in the game are arbitrary and symbolic.  They do not have intrinsic external consequences.  That's important because the entire point of a game is to present the challenge of conflict resolution without the actual risk.  In fact, most competitive games, from chess to football ot Starcraft are really simulations of war without the actual killing of other people."

 Dan Olson, Folding Ideas - Source Code

Power and influence occurs when we force another person to do something they don't want to do, or accept something they don't want to accept.  My team faces your team in a game of football.  Neither team wants to lose; winning forces the other team to lose — and in some circles, winning a football game is a point of honour.  When the Browns win over the Steelers, this is a reason to crow, even by fans who have nothing whatsoever to do with the game's play, except that they've bought tickets that support the owners who use the money to maintain the arena and pay the players.  It is a long reach from a fan who warms a bench to a player who risks CTE in order to win ... but sitting in the stands is also a vicarious metaphor for those in attendance.  Some of these have never played; some played once, but never reached the status to play in a professional league game; and a tiny few, a very tiny few, might relive their own experiences from when they were younger.  When the Browns win, especially over Pittsburgh, it is a reason to scream victory; to wreck cars and set Cleveland on fire, in a strange ritual of simulating war without actually participating in war.

The fundamental pleasure in winning is knowing that there are others who have lost.  Competition is a comparative apparatus ... and a biological one besides.  When two troops of primates encounter each other at the edge of their respective territories, they scream and shout at one another in a state of fury; this is an outward demonstration that they are ready for war.  We humans did the same a hundred thousand generations ago, a thousand generations ago, a hundred generations ago and all over the world within the last hour.  Shouting, stamping, taunting, threatening, demonstrating our prowess and our willingness to engage in war began as a necessary means of protecting our food supply for our troop against the danger that some other troop would diminish it.  The power and influence we exercised was to ensure that some other troop died of starvation before our troop did; and those troops that won that fight went on to give birth to the generations that gave birth to us.  The troops that lost are not represented in the present at all.

Wars are extraordinarily more destructive of late in our history, however.  As war has become progressively more destructive since the time of Lucy and far-gone Africa, efforts have been made to temper the devastation by seeking other forms of conflict resolution: negotiation, diplomacy, unification, the pursuit of higher things ... and, as it happens, games, which channels our biological urges to feel dominant into metaphorical avenues where less people die.

For some, "game" enables us to subvert the dominance-compulsion in large part.  My friends and I get together for some stickball and decide not to keep score.  Or to treat the score as something that doesn't matter.  This is possible because in fact we are already of one tribal organization ... these are my friends after all.  It is different if a group of strangers — another tribe — sees us playing stickball and asks if we'd like to play against them.  At once, the dynamic is changed.  We don't know these people; and as they start cheering whenever they make a goal, and slapping each other on the back, and start keeping score ... we're very conscious that our friendly Sunday-afternoon game is no longer that friendly.  Yet somehow, though we know we're not having as much fun as we were before, no one on our side wants to say suddenly, "Hey guys, we've changed our minds.  We'd like to just play among ourselves again."

The changed dynamic is that shame is on the table now.  Quitting is losing; even when we understand that "losing" means absolutely nothing here.  Our lives and the strangers lives won't be changed whatever happens ... yet still there's a tacit agreement among my friends that "we're going to win," because winning here is a means of escaping shame.  Our winning means that they're the ones that feel shame; and when afterwards we're congratulating ourselves, we'll say things like "Those guys shouldn't have messed with us!"  "Fucking right!"

No, I didn't play yesterday with my friends: covid and all.  But we've been here often enough we know how it goes ... and we know that when outsiders ask, the right answer when they ask if they can join is to say, "Nah, we want to play among ourselves."  We prefer to be loyal to the troop.  We've also been in that position when the outsiders don't take well to be rebuffed; when they return to the old trope of two primate groups threatening each other over territory ... though more nuanced, of course, with less screaming and jumping around.

Admitting, however, that in my teen years, going back to high school, there were groups who, if they weren't allowed to play, would want to fight for real.  Ah, youth.

Okay, so stick a pin in all that.

The communal agreement in role-playing games gives room for different groups to play different versions of D&D under an umbrella that lets them all identify as "D&D players."  Even if they play adjusted rule sets within a specific edition, even if the rules are contrary to one another, they continue to share a mutual desire to "accomplish" the game.  The differences are established along tribal lines, with each gaming group agreeing that they will play these rules and not those — and likewise disliking the pressure to play the game in a way that outsiders might want them to play.  When I, for example, stress that my readers should play in such-and-such a way, and with such-and-such an attitude, the tribal defensively begins to equate my stirring up a conflict with the need to protect and defend their tribe and customs.  That conflict awakens a spectre of shame.  Unlike the example above, however, I'm not directly competing with anyone; no one is losing because I'm not winning.  Yet there is still an inherent sense that if the territory isn't being defended, then the territory is in danger ... and to allow the territory to be lost, even if that loss was brought about by changing your mind, then shame rears its ugly head.  The biological urge is to push aside the enlightenment and go back to one's old ways.

Additionally, I don't make it easy, do I?  The way I write, the way I present my point of view, the way I vilify the old ways and mock them, the way I haul out all this psychological research about how humans think, the pedantic way I have of building up a case using a wide variety of metaphors based on both research and a good memory gives every impression that I want the reader to be ashamed that they don't run a better game.  My game or a game as dense as my game, with a rich and complicated game setting, empowering the players like most don't or won't or can't do ... it really feels like I am doing all that's in my power to diminish you, to dance and scream in your face, to scare you into getting the fuck off my territory and give up the tiny bit of ground you've managed to carve out for yourself.  The way I express myself, this can't just be a "feeling," either.  A person wouldn't write like this; wouldn't communicate as I communicate, unless they were an enormous prick with a threatening agenda.  Admit it. That's it. That's the thing that gets under your skin and stiffens your resolve to dismiss everything I'm saying.

Because ... and let's be clear ... I have to be wrong.  I have to be.  There's no other possible alternative.  I'm not there at the game table when the communal agreement between DMs and players is made.  I don't participate in con events, I certainly don't run them, I'm not invited to speak, I don't have my name on any official literature, I didn't write a module, I didn't invent one of the fourteen versions of the game, I've never received any approval from any of the known voices in the community, I'm absolutely not certified and I've made no effort at any time to get certified by any WOTC entity.  In no way do I have the least legitimacy.

Worse, I don't sound like any other DM anyone has ever read or met.  I make outlandish accusations, I attack beloved, traditional aspects of the game, I refuse to kowtow to long-established doctrine and I won't stamp "approval" on anyone who plays the game as a "game."

Do I want you to feel ashamed of the game you play?  Do I want you to feel ashamed of how much preparation you put into your games?  Or how you dungeon master?  Or about how you treat your players, what you handwave and what you won't let them do?

Is that what I want?

Teaching & Learning

I had an argument about D&D on twitter today, that went about as well as arguments on twitter go.  I don't tell people I have a blog or a book, or even a patreon; I don't tell them I've been playing or running for 40 years ... so they naturally assume I'm just another punk on the internet, whose name they don't recognize and whose credibility is zero.  No one ever googles my name to find out if I know anything.

It always starts the same way.  I field a question like, "If your players do not go through one of the doors in your dungeon, do you tell them afterwards what was there?"  I'll answer, "No, they've got to pay the fee if they want the prize."

This sort of blithe, pithy answer gets a like, and if I'm smart, I'll leave it there.  I don't give a shit about likes, I want a real conversation, and sometimes when I'm bored I'll stupidly decide to say more about the subject ... as in, "Every time you reveal something, you train your players to expect you to reveal it -- that dimishes the mystery of what's behind the door, eventually turning your game into garbage, from which it will never recover."

Now, a normal, unimaginative reader will see only one word in that reply: "garbage."  And a common, tetchy twitter-reader will immediately assume, as they ALWAYS do, that I'm speaking specifically of them, calling them 'garbage' to their face ... and they will remind me that I don't know them, that I don't have a right to call them garbage, that they're a perfectly fine DM and anyway, "Such and such a website that tells DMs how to play says that all DMs are different so you don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

Sensitive much?  Oh yeah.  You know: twitter.

My fave is the call-out to authority.  It is never the same authority.  I've had everyone quoted at me at some point ... but the quote is always the same.  On some level, it is a quote that gives every DM, ever, permission to be whatever sort of DM they want to be, because there's no right way or wrong way, period.

Teaching as a profession is going straight into the gutter because of this thinking.  Teaching anyone begins with the assumption, I know how to do something, and you don't, so listen, and I'll tell you.  On the other hand, marketing works on the assumption that the more people you prop up with bullshit, the more followers, likes and money you'll collect, so never, ever, tell people anything except that they already know everything they need to know.

This includes people who come forward and say, "I don't know something; can you please tell me?"  Because this mostly includes only people who are really saying, "My ego needs boosting; can you stroke me?"

Again: twitter.

I met my grandson yesterday for the first time.  Three weeks old, born a month ahead of schedule and of course there are covid concerns and such, because the boy is still vulnerable.  I'm the sort of personality that lives in the future rather than the present or the past; my daughter also and my partner, because I can barely stand people who think otherwise.  Today is okay, but the purpose of today is to be doing something that will make tomorrow better.  As such, much of the conversation about my grandson is about deciding how to set things up so that the boy will be in a good position to choose what he wants to do, when he decides that.  Some parents and grandparents who talk about the future will talk about getting them into a good school and how they're going to be educated; but our conversation was more along the lines of how we'll support him if he wants to do this, or that, or this other thing.  We have absolutely no idea what that will be, but its possible to speak in large swaths of human experience: maybe he'll get interested in athletics, art, politics, the military, NASCAR, science ... who the hell knows, really.  We don't and we're not exactly playing for favorites.  Yes, some of those will be harder than others, but the main point is that so long as its not illegal or self-destructive, we will bend before we ask the boy to do so.

That's pretty alien to some folks.  This is not my first rodeo: it is how I approached my daughter's upbringing and it worked out just fine: I educated the living shit out of her and she is a terrifyingly assertive, responsible, no-nonsense force of nature and believe you me, you better think it over four times before you tell her she can't do something.

She's ready to do it my way and I am far more certain about the approach this time that I was last time.  What's more, honesty, it isn't in my hands.  I'm just the back-up here as a grandparent; I'm here to give perspective, explain the boy's mother and father to him when he asks me someday and not to be the blasted asshole my grandfather was when I was a boy.

[part of the reason why I'm so comfortable being an asshole is because I was raised by so many of them]

The first half and the second half of this post come together thusly.  One day, my grandson is going to get interested in something.  Really, really interested.  So interested, that he'll spend every waking minute they can reading and studying that thing.  And one day, he'll know more about it than I do, or his parents do, or his friends at school do or pretty much anyone in his life, because it will matter so much to him that he'll want to be an expert.

When he reaches that stage, he'll want to talk about it.  And because he'll be the expert, so that any of us will be able to follow along, he'll have to teach us what he knows.

This is the critical moment.  This is the moment in every child's life that determines what sort of person they'll grow up to be.  Problem is, there are too many parents in the world who, met with an 8 year old who thinks he knows everything, and wants to talk about it, don't care and won't listen.  Most of us should know exactly what that's like, because there came a time when we tried to explain to our parents how an RPG worked ... and oh, did it go badly.

As a result, a great many of us failed to learn how to teach something to someone.  Arguably, the most important student that any child will have should be their parents: who, recognizing how much this thing matters, should supportively and interestingly listen and learn what it is that has their child passionately fired up.  Even if that thing doesn't make sense, and even if that thing seems "wrong" somehow.  We can literally point at people around us all day long who didn't receive that.  Who got interested, got rebuffed -- were even told they weren't allowed to continue doing that thing -- and have since become people so desperate for approval that they only thing they can do is wander onto twitter with sad faces begging for approval from total strangers.

And so, rather than being able to learn from others, they are so sensitive to the disapproval inposed by their parents, they displace that disapproval on every person -- even on the internet -- that doesn't immediately pat them on the head and give them a doggie treat.

When marketers see this, they know just how to make a sale.  Give that punk a doggie treat and watch him wag his tail.  Watch him repeat our bullshit verbatim as though the words, "Everyone DMs their own way" actually means a blessed thing.

It is my role as a grandfather to let my grandson teach me what he cares about.  And then it is my role to care about that thing enough that I'll add to his store of knowledge in a way that matters to him.  In that way, I'll build up a symbiosis that lets my grandson teach me, and lets me teach him, and we'll BOTH get smarter.

We can point out these kids, too.  That one there is Kamala Harris.  And that one there is Anthony Fauci.  People who became experts because the adults behind them listened.  Because the adults behind them learned.

People who need us to be "polite and decent" because it makes the world a friendlier place are walking around with a big sign on their backs that says, "Fuck me over, because I want to trust people so bad that if you're nice to me, I'll open my wallet."  The absolute worst people in the world know just how to be so nice that butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. 

Give me readers and listeners who don't care if I'm a nice, decent guy or not.  Give me readers who care about what I have to say, not how nicely I say it.  Give me readers that want to teach me what they know, and are rude enough to get in my face and make me learn it.

There are not enough readers like that in the world.

Raising D&D

Recently I found a floorplan of the rented condo I lived in between 1989 and 1997, as shown.  I find it a little funny that, thinking of it, finding it took just a few moments.  I'm not living too far from the place now; if I were making a little more money, I could move back there.  That would be sort of funny.

This would be the first home my daughter knew, and as it happens she met one of the players in her present-day D&D campaign while living here (who grew up in the same collection of condos), so moving back in would be pretty weird.  But that's not what this post is about.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I did not begin running my daughter in my D&D campaign until she was 14, because I'm a miserable, strange and complex person.  My personal feeling is that children shouldn't play the game until they are at least 11, at least not with adults.  This isn't because I feel the game is too violent or difficult; it is because I believe (and there's only three or four mountains of evidence in psychology to back me up on this) that young children build patterns of behaviour that hold with them all their lives, and that these patterns influence the way they see things.  If a child's first interpretation of the game is as a child, that will be a different interpretation from what we could expect from someone who first came to the game as a youth or an adult.  Children play D&D very differently from adults; I wanted my daughter to comprehend how adults play, not how children do.

That's not quite what happened.  She did begin playing with her friends when she was 8; but these were silly games (her description) and I don't think they had much influence over her thinking.  Her real experience came from another source ... which brings us to the floor plan presented.

The reader can see the location of my daughter's bedroom.  Beginning from about the age of 4 or 5 (her description), her mother, Michelle, who has long since passed away, would put her to bed between 7 and 8 p.m.  Then my daughter would wait for a bit, for the game to "get going."  Then she would sneak around the hallway, to the little cubbyhole where the washer and dryer was, where she would slip inside and close the thin sliding doors.  Then, she would lie on top of the dryer, just 7 ft. from where her mother, me and our friends were playing D&D, bringing a pillow with her and listening for hours.

We never caught her.  She did this for years, she told me around the time she was 17, but we never knew.  You can see plainly from the floor plan that we walked past her dozens of times on our way to the washroom; the lower, smaller bedroom was my study, where I kept back-up materials, so I would have gone there over and over.  She faked a lump in her bed so if we checked in on her, we wouldn't want to wake her up; and when she got tired, she put herself to bed without a word.

I can only assume that she really liked the game; and, for the sake of my ego, she really liked the way I played it.

I have other evidence for that.  Here is my daughter, showing me her D&D books, from about a year ago:



 At least I did one thing right as a parent.

[p.s.; I may have posted the video once before on this blog, but I couldn't find it; I might have told the story about her hiding in a closet, but I couldn't find it.  I'm old.  I forget things.  Like your grandfather who keeps telling you the same story, over and over.  Have I not mentioned lately that my daughter is pregnant?] 

The Medium

There are thousands of possible scenes that are iconic from the 1960s.  A film-maker makes a choice not from what's available, but by having a message to give and then finding the scene that fits that message.  That is what's meant when we say, the medium is the message.  All the possible choices are "true."  All the possible choices are "real."  But we don't show all the possible choices.  We only show what we want the viewer to see.

What is it that makes this scene impressive?  Is it the soldiers ... or the girl with the flower?

I was asked the question in relation to this recent post, haven't I ever had a player say, "well met" during a game.  Haven't I ever had a player ask me what a saving throw was.  Haven't I ever had players complain about paperwork in a D&D campaign?

This isn't really the point.  As this video explains, it isn't about what an actual player might say at a particular game table ... it is that James Gifford chose to highlight these particular remarks, from thousands of possible remarks, because he felt that these, and not other possible remarks, were the most iconic or importantly relevant things that we should expect a new gamer to say.

Gifford's choice to have one of his fictional characters say, "well met" is, to use Ozymandias' words, "cringe-worthy."  It is what we call, "a cliche."  An awful, terrible, face-palming cliche.  Cliches don't inform, they distract.  They suggest very strongly that the presenter does not know what the hell he is talking about.

Gifford's choice to have one of the players ask, "What are saving throws," is cringe-worthy.  It is an obvious and very lazy attempt to indicate the players are inexperienced.  But surely we can find more confusing and obscure things related to the game than saving throws.  The players have just finished making up their characters; wouldn't a question like, "What's the difference between wisdom and intelligence," be more relevant to a new player, or "How does charisma work?"  Charisma is a peculiar touch-point for most new players because while the other five abilities seem straightforward in terms of how they define a person, charisma is vague.  Most people habitually define their personalities by their intelligence; for a noob, charisma is an intelligent, very common question, with a complex, difficult answer if you're speaking to someone who isn't game experienced.

Gifford's choice to have one of the players use the phrase, "Is this homework, the game," is cringe-worthy.  First of all its a commonly used snarky joke used by experienced players, not noobs.  Secondly, I have NEVER had a new player complain, ever, that making a new character was boring.  For noobs, it is all amazingly fresh and new: there are dozens of things to learn, to explain, there a difficult decisions to make that are only difficult for noobs, there is a lot of confusion ... but it is excited, anxious confusion, a sort of "Wow, this is really deep and complex, I hope I can handle it."

Depicting a noob complaining that it is too much like homework suggests to me that Gifford has only ever started one group of noob players in his entire experience ... and that he has mixed up that experience with the sort of snarky crap he gets from gamesmanship complainers who arrive in his game sick to death of his patronizing, contemptuous, "I'm the DM and I will let you know shit when I'm ready" gaming style.

To be sure, I don't think in nearly 40 years of playing D&D (Sept. 6 this year) that I have ever started a group of ONLY new players.  I have had as many as three new players at once, but there are always old guard around to help me explain details, like what's a saving throw, for the noobs.  The old guard always outnumbers the new.  The old guard serves as the template, so that as the game progresses, the new players watch and listen how the game is played, then begin to emulate the gaming style and responses they witness.

The internet loves this idea of total noobs being introduced to the game.  I know a lot of new players had their first experience when they and a bunch of their friends bought the game without knowing how to play, then had to figure it out from scratch.  But I learned from a game where everyone knew how to play except me; and had others follow me into those same games.  When I began DMing, it was with others who knew how to play ... and through the years I taught others how to play by a simple apprentice-like system.

It would make a lot more sense to depict a DM and four experienced players bringing one player onboard ... but then, every game table I see depicted online seems to be a collection of abusive, snarky assholes.  Again, TOTALLY different from most of the games I have ever been a part of, and certainly different from my own game.

Comics like Gifford's, and indeed the 5th Edition Players Handbook, seem to foster an atmosphere which supports the greatest amount of fabricated, unjustified drama for the least amount of effort ... and I think that is a damaging agenda.  It's all about describing the amazing, fantastic things that might happen and totally failing to understand that even the smallest, nitpickiest little details can be thrilling moments for a given player.  I've had players get excited because they found pomegranates were listed on my equipment table.  Players in my game will remember the humblest incidents or finds.  A Roman helmet half-buried on the side of a road.  A little girl handing one of the players a flower.  The moment an appreciated NPC bid the party farewell.  Game events don't have to be Huge and Impressive.  Most times, the players are just glad to be there.

The heavy-handedness of Gifford's comic reflects a clumsy disregard for detail and resonance that I continuously see overlooked and unappreciated by those who want to set themselves up as voices for describing game play.  Pumping up your chest and speaking in a deep voice doesn't make you impressive.

It makes you look like a pompous schnook.

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.

What is D&D?

Dungeons & Dragons is a game in which a single presenter, called the Dungeon Master (DM), describes an imaginary setting to the remaining players, complete with physical features and inhabitants.  The players then adopt a mental image of a fictional character that exists inside that setting.  The character may act in whatever way the player decides, but the character's limitations are determined by rolling dice that define the character's attributes, capacity for survival, skills and possessions.

Through play, the character, by interacting with the setting as maintained by the DM, seeks to increase their advantage in the setting, and to alter or modify the setting as they are able.  This is most commonly done by pursuing "adventures," the end result of which increases the player's possessions, opportunities, skills and hardiness, while causing small but satisfying alterations to the DM's setting.

The setting can be as elaborate as the DM is willing to present; the player's ambition in accumulating power and wealth, or in making a change to the setting, can be as willful as the player wishes.  The convergence of the DM's presentation and the player's will produces the effective quality of the game.  If the player fails to immerse themselves in the adopted mental image of the character, the DM lacks an enthusiast for which to present the setting.  If the DM presents an inflexible, unrealistic setting that acts contrary to the player's will, the player quickly loses the enthusiasm necessary to play.

Game quality, therefore, centers upon finding the correct balance between the DM's motive for producing the setting and the Player's motive for participating in the setting.

That is the Holy Grail.

The setting is usually a mixture of medieval and fantasy, but is not necessarily so.  Technology is typically 12th to 15th century European or Asian, lacking gunpowder, global economics or politics.  Magic, in the form of spells or physical artifacts, supplants the limitations of the technology.

For those who have never taken the position of the player, the process for creating the character, which identifies the limitations of the character, can be managed as a methodical, repeatable process that becomes familiar, so that the novice will adapt quickly to this part.  Interaction with the setting, which consists primarily of communication with the setting's natives, exploration, investigation of clues, confrontations leading to hand-to-hand combat with period weapons, this latter referred to as combat.  Combats are the primary cause for potential character death but are not the only cause.  Character death enables the player to roll a new character and begin the process from scratch.

For those who have never presented in the position of DM, the procedure is daunting, demanding the retention of considerable information at one's fingertips, the ability to manage players who may stoop to gamesmanship to gain advantage, the creative capacity to imagine, describe and alter the setting as need be, often demanding spur of the moment decisions that may alientate players or soften the setting's capacity to offer the player a meaningful challenge.  The DM must often keep much of the information about the setting a complete secret; the preparation of the setting from week to week can be a time-consuming project; and much of the DM's experience separates the DM from receiving empathy from the players, who often see the DM as an adversary.  Simultaneously, the DM's power over the setting can induce delusions of grandeur, an obsession with the maintenance and exercise of power, fear of the player's circumventing the DM's plans and a sense of wasted effort spent in preparation for players who fail to appreciate the DM's efforts.

As such, the DM's role is usually the reason that the balance between the setting's motive and the player's enthusiasm tips, causing the gathering of DM and players to scatter, ending the exercise.

The players, too, are sometimes to blame; but not nearly as often as the DM.  Bad players in a group are often tempered by good players; but the DM, who stands alone, has no other entity to temper errors in judgement or failings in the effort necessary.

Therefore, if we are to understand how to make the game of a greater quality, we must understand the role of the DM better; to understand what that role is; how that role affects the players; what the players have a right to expect; how to recognize players who are over-indulging in gamesmanship; and ultimately how to locate and maintain that balance that enable consistently good play over a long period.

That is my description of what D&D is.