Deciding Why Things Are

This doesn't seem to be an especially popular series of posts, or else I'm talking so high in the clouds no one can hear me.  Nonetheless, with this post I sketched out the general context of a campaign's description, which I am following by going deeper into each point.  I wrote that the players decide the matters of their own lives, the things to which they commit themselves ... that which they see as the best course for them.

And the DM decides those things for everything else.

This is a hard line that many DMs simply cannot accept.  Granted, it's easy enough to see what's on our side of the fence, however enormous the task is.  We're responsible to make lands and NPCs, cultures and sequences of play, motivations and rewards.  Fine.  But in actually running the game, we're put into the position of watching the players struggle with everything that we create, that we're responsible for ... and when that struggle turns against the players, it's very easy to hold ourselves to account for the player's hazard.  If we hadn't included that third giant, if we hadn't decided this battle would be fought on the edge of a cliff ... if we hadn't rolled that bloody critical hit just when the players were starting to turn this thing around.  If the players die, we're all too clear on our part in that; on what we did; on what we could have done differently.

And worse, on what we can do, in real time, to make all those bad decisions and all the party's jeopardy just go away, in time, so that no one has to suffer or die.

With the desperately-named "One D&D," the company is making it clear by eliminating game elements like the DM's ability to throw a critical roll, where the responsibility lies when a player character is seriously threatened.  With us.  With the DM.  The finger is being pointed at you and me, to say "officially," we don't have the right to kill characters.  And if we do, then we're not playing "true" D&D.

Well.  Shelving that.

The DM's penchant for stepping up and saving the characters is the hardest edge for any DM to face.  Speaking from personal experience, I have broken my covenant as a DM to both secretly and openly to rescind parts of my game in order to ensure a character lived and did not die.  Of course I have.  I've been DMing for more than 42 years.  Any DM who says otherwise is lying ... and there are good reasons to lie.  Having the reputation that you're willing and ready to kill player characters, while at the same time reserving the right to covertly not do so, maintains a reputation that most hard-souled DMs consider to be valuable.  We've learned that scaring the players is good for play.  Nothing beats sitting down as a DM to a full table and declaring, "Okay, everything's ready for this week; I hope I don't have to kill anyone tonight."  When we have killed characters before, and the characters know that's a real possibility, saying so out loud sends a shiver through a party that raises tension, the player's sense of excitement and a pulling together of a party that knows they have to pull together to survive.  If there were the least hint that I might not mean it, that's it's just for show ... those benefits would evaporate.

It can take many months to build that kind of reputation.  In truth, it must be built by following through and killing the character.  The killing need not be done zealously.  It should not be done with a gloating tone of voice, or high-handed counselling about why the player "deserved it."  But it must be done.  Upon seeing the die rolled, either too high or too low to save the player, the DM must resist the compulsion to intervene ... specifically because it is ridiculously easy to do so.  One need only say, "roll again" ... or, "that doesn't count."  Any DM can say at the last second, "Before the blade hits, a wizard appears and stops time."  

We can get as ornate as we like.  "You feel the blade cut through your body ... and suddenly you find yourself in a large white cloud-like space; a woman in front of podium with a strange square board in her hand looks at you, looks at the board, and says, 'Hm.  Says here, it's not your time yet.'  You wake up on the floor, with the battle done and the party having won; one of your mates expresses surprise that you're still alive and hurries to help you."

Ridiculously, stupidly easy.

Worse, it costs the willing DM nothing to wade in and "fix" things.  He or she has no awareness that this is damaging to one's reputation.  The player is happy.  The DM is pleased.  There's no evident harm.

Moreover, this has become progressively correct behaviour, promoted by texts, pundits, "official" company rhetoric and the general consensus of the forenamed grander community.

As a player, you are in control of your character.  As a DM, I am in control of everything else.

Wisdom dictates that the correct way to manage the vicissitudes of fate in our lives is to practice restraint.  It begins with very simple lessons, like eating something very bad-tasting as a one-year-old or breaking your arm riding your bike.  Steadily, we accumulate thousands of micro-lessons along these lines as we age, realising that while rage quitting feels so very, very good to do, the aftershock is less so.  Or how owning our first car is associated with so many negative elements, as we choke down how much we have to spend on insurance, gas, new tires, the danger of a life-threatening accident and so on.  Marriage and children present bills we never expected to pay, with which we must make our peace or be crushed beneath.  Through it all, through every trial and heartache, steadily we move towards practicing restraint as the only rational strategy.

This is particularly evident as we watch so many others around us fail to practice restraint.  We watch our friends and family, and especially our acquaintances, throw away opportunities and securities in the pursuit of things that baffle our notions of life.  As the decades roll past, we see them destroy themselves and others, and recognise their willingness to destroy us, while steadily we pull away and into the arms of others who are restrained and practical like ourselves ... assuming, of course, that the reader at this moment isn't actively in the process of destroying whatever value you have in your own life, unaware that you're doing it.  If so, I speak with such people all the time ... and they are never aware of it.  It is always, so the litany goes, someone else's fault.

The effort of holding back, placing checks and hindrances on our own actions, often comes as a frustration to other people ... but as we do it, and see the sense in it, we get to like it.  We don't soar, but we don't face-plant in the dirt trying to fly.  And to be honest, once we get ourselves sorted, just waking up gets to be a delight.

DMing is an act of restraint ... not only upon the players, but more importantly upon ourselves.  Like the things of which we speak in real life, there are things we won't do.  Sometimes, because we've done those things and learned our lesson.  Sometimes, because we've seen others do them.  And sometimes, within the respect we have towards our lives, doing so seems stupid.

For me, deciding to be a DM requires certain things I won't do.  As I've just said, this is sometimes because I ran the game in a certain way, and have decided to stop running it that way.  Sometimes, it's because I've played in someone else's game, or watched people play and complain about it afterwards, or watched new players in my game feel resurrected by the way I play over what they experienced before.  And sometimes, because I feel that I'd have to be a fucking moron to play a game in which dice are meant to dictate everyone's success at something, only to wade in when I don't like the dice because it's easy.

I've played Scrabble off and on all my life, starting from the age of about six.  My parents believed that it was a game we needed to learn, because the benefits were so obvious.  This means that at some point I've played the same game with barely any vocabulary at all, and that I've played the game with the vocabulary I have now ... and all the shades of grey between.  I've played many, many games where at one point all the letters I had were vowels, usually some combination of I's, O's and U's, without anything else.

The rules say that when you're desperate, you can skip a turn by throwing all your letters in the bag and draw new ones.  But that's a fool's choice.  You're better off to play what you have, because every round you skip puts your opponent further ahead of you; and it is too easy to throw your letters in and get back a different collection of unusable letters.

When I was six or seven, my mother — whom I played with most often — could have let me change out my letters and still play ... because she was in charge.  Because she could make whatever rules she wanted for me.  She could have felt sorry for me; she could have been generous and kind.  And if that was the sort of person my mother was, I wouldn't be writing this for you, right now.  That's a fact.

From killing player characters, from forcing myself to do that as a restraint on my behaviour, I've learned how to set up encounters and build events so that, for the most part, I don't have to kill and I don't have to veto a death.  Those players who have been in my games for many years have learned equally well not to test me, while at the same time learning with tremendous pleasure that they're quite innovative when they know they're not going to get reprieved at the last moment.

Sure, my mother felt sorry for me.  And sure, I feel sorry as a DM when I have to kill someone, or take away all their money because they've fallen into a river and it's either strip off your stuff and live, or die rich.  But feeling sorry for someone isn't a good enough reason to make me compromise my values ... or for me to step across that line and decide myself that the player can't make a bad decision.  By restraining my desire to help them, I empower their desire to accept responsibility for their actions.  Which, in the long run, makes their actions feel the sweeter, because they know they've been able to do it AND snub me at the same time.

The momentary relief at receiving the DM's charity is a soul-sickening reality, that any good player will feel ashamed of receiving, and resentful of knowing that it's there.  On the other hand, the very worst players, those without any sense of restraint at all, revel in receiving charity ... and pity and anything that makes them feel they've "won" ... even when plainly that's not what they did.  These people, as they enter into the game world, have such miserable lives lacking in any kind of restraint that they desperately need their D&D game to fill some hollow part of them.  I'm not here for that.  And I don't like these kind of people.  The company, on the other hand, loves these people ... and why shouldn't they?  Players without restraint are addicts ... and what pusher doesn't like a good addict?

When deciding to DM, the best strategy is to consider, from the start, those things that as a DM, you won't do.  Figure out what those things are, and then figure out precisely why you won't do them.  Then, restrain yourself.  If experience teaches me anything, restraining yourself absolutely, even as you watch others in pain, will be the hardest thing you've ever done ... excepting that you may have already learned how you have to do this with your children.  It is one of the reasons why fathers and mothers with excited, avid children as players make such good DMs.  The practice of restraint is universal, after all.  If you've learned how to restrain yourself with respect to addiction, money, family responsibilities, your workplace, religion, politics and so much more, restraining yourself as a DM will be easy.  You've already learned the hardest lesson.

You can do anything.  You must never, ever, do things for that reason.

Deciding What's Real

This issue has several aspects within it.  We could be speaking of what magic items and spells you allow, along with the logic behind the function of those things.  We could be speaking of the "reality" of the setting, since technically the world could be a fever dream entirely of the DM's imagination ... I urge the reader to remember that many writer-designed fantasy worlds dating back hundreds of years were exactly this.  Such could be run, but I wouldn't want to do it ... and the reader had best give serious consideration as to whether you consider yourself the equal of Swift, Raspe or Carroll.

But while we must give thought to these things, I have something else in mind.  To repeat elements from two comments I wrote to Pandred and Shelby last week:

"The players enter a goblin lair, lay waste to thirty or forty goblins over two visits, only to discover that the goblins are actually being run by three drow elves. In chasing down the drow, the players learn that the drow are in fact being funded with weapons and other things by a local human squire whose land is near the original goblin lair.

"So, that's two layers of deception against the players: first, these are not just goblins, second, the drow are not acting independently ... and we can learn further that the squire is specifically urging the drow to use the goblins to raid human lands the squire wants to buy.

"So, the players seek out someone strong enough to take on the squire; they locate a knight, provide the evidence and the knight agrees to join their expedition to root out the squire. ONLY, we discover soon after that the squire is in fact in the employ of the local noble Baroness, to whom the knight owes fealty; the knight succumbs, as he's sworn to GOD to remain faithful to the Baroness ... but he enables the party to escape, even though the Baroness has ordered the knight to kill them.

"Now, the party is fleeing the Baroness and her various subordinates ... and runs into the hands of others who HATE the Baroness. And so on.

"As each layer of the onion is pulled back, the players come closer and closer to the truth of what's going on, are never personally deceived against but ARE subject to the story changing and changing. Meanwhile, they acquire levels and speak among themselves of the day they'll reach a sufficient level when they'll KILL EVERYONE and let God sort it out.

"Suppose that instead of getting inveigled into a war between the Baroness and her enemies, the party asks the knight, "To where are you bound?" Whereupon he answers, his anger risen and his taste for the locale dissolves, "My only chance to redeem myself is to find a better place than this, outside the Baroness's control. I've heard the borderlands against the Ottomans are threatened more than ever; I shall journey to Kosice and see if I can be of use there."

"Whereas the party is free to decide ... do we remain embroiled in this, or perhaps take up with the knight and see what we can do on the borderlands? The party discusses it, makes up their minds and the campaign goes forward."

Very well, how is this done?

A skill you must master is the ability to see a given situation as others would see it, apart from yourself.   When you present a scenario that you understand from top to bottom, with every intricacy available to your own perspective, you must ALSO be able to see that scenario from the player's point of view, as people who have not yet learned everything about it — and in fact, probably never will learn "everything."  The beginnings of this skill allow us to present each room of a dungeon in a careful and precise manner, so that we give hints as to what the players see, without stating too much.

We'll break this down, but first consider — it means that your perception of reality is not that of the players ... but it will be that of the players, given time.  It matters that we understand how the player's perception scales upwards over time, and that each stage upwards upon that scale changes the participant's understanding of the DM's setting, the DM's style of gaming and the player's attitude towards which goals they want to achieve.  D&D is a fantabulously fluid game, if the DM is willing to take the game as far as it can go ... and that fluidity is greater than any human endeavour except life itself.  The player that sits down in the campaign today is NOT the same player who sat down in the campaign a year ago ... and if the setting does not advance in pace with the player's perspective, the player must ultimately feel restrained, bored and ready to quit your game.

This comes as a shock to many DMs who keep doing the same thing with the players month after month, who can't understand why the players are complaining now when six months ago everything seemed fine.  "What wrong?" these DMs ask.  "I'm running the same game they've liked up until now.  How come the players have changed?"

Because they've been there.  They've done that.  And the DM must recognise it.

Now, we can try to keep the player's interested by upping the stakes, essaying to create bigger and bigger in-game events with bigger payoffs ... but when I consider plans of this kind I'm reminded of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Bottle Imp, in which the MacGuffin will give us everything we ask for, except that eventually we're doomed.  Because, in fact, eventually one runs out of "bigger" and the campaign collapses under its own weight, with nothing to offer in the end except disappointment and ultimately the same result than if we'd done nothing and let the campaign die.

Lessons in life teach that gimmicks will kick a can down the road, but won't make the can go away.  It's always in front of us, and eventually we'll get tired of kicking it.  What's wanted is a sustainable, practical approach that, like the examples I gave to Pandred and Shelby, allows the campaign to unfold progressively and, effectively, forever.

This, however, requires that the DM cannot run "the same game" for any length of time.  The DM has to progress and change as the players do ... and this is easiest if the DM begins the game way, way below what the DM's already prepared and able to offer.

Like the need to possess both our own and the player's perspective when laying out some scenario in the campaign, with ALSO must have the insight to perceive how those perspectives are going to evolve over time.  Today I'm running a simple hack-and-grab campaign with the party and a bunch of orcs ... but that's not going to be enough in two or three sessions, so we'll adjust the campaign by providing a tiny shred of intrigue into the game, in the form of the hidden drow elves who are manipulating the goblins from behind the scene.

My etymology dictionary describes "intrigue" as originating from the Italian verb, intrigare, which means to plot, meddle, perplex and puzzle.  The Italian word derives from the Latin, intricare, which means to entangle, perplex and embarrass.  Let's look carefully at these six words, as "perplex" is mentioned twice.

Puzzle is used all the time in D&D, but unfortunately too often it's used in the sense of a situation that needs to be manipulated or guessed at until it's solved, whereupon the obstruction can be forgotten.  Puzzle is much more interesting in the sense of causing the players to feel confused because they cannot understand or make sense of something that's going on.  Within our example, at the beginning of the adventure with the goblins, we've deliberately with-held the involvement of the drow elves.  Therefore, naturally, the players have no reason to think they're dealing with anything except goblins.  At some point, we want to tell them they're dealing with more than that ... but we don't want to tell them outright!  No.  We want them to find out slowly.  Bit by bit.  We want to provide some kind of clue — not in the sense that the clue will help them understand the puzzle, but in the sense that the clue passes along the knowledge that there IS a puzzle ... which the players cannot see.  All they know is that something's going on here which they cannot know.

When we know that there's something going on, that we cannot know, this drives us crazy.  And forward.  We don't understand what it is ... we're puzzled ... but we do understand that it's out there and we want a bigger piece of it.

Perplex is very close to puzzle, except that it also conveys the emotion of not believing what we've just learned.

I'll give you an example from the real world.  This movie, 1968's Finian's Rainbow, was the same director who did this movie, four years later, 1972's The Godfather.  Whose nephew is, I kid you not, Nicolas Cage.  Altogether, it seems kind of fucked up, doesn't it?

Perplexing the players is an excellent tactic in that, first, when they find out the goblins are in fact in the employ of drow elves, there's a high probability that they'll assume the DM is kidding.  Most assuredly, that there's got to be something else in this that makes this association make sense.  And even if it doesn't, the very fact of it forces the players to change their preconceptions about the game world and it's possibilities, which in turn forces them to see the game world as bigger than what they previously thought it was.  Which is a very good reason not to maintain standard setting behaviours too closely.

This is why having elves feel a certain way about dwarves is an example of STUPID game design.  And rather lazy writing also ... looking at you, Mr. Tolkein.  Arguing that it's more believable for races to have a certain antipathy towards each other is a terrible trap if what you want is to create interest and not boredom.  Things that are easy to believe are boring.  Our goal is to take something that is fundamentally unbelievable and make it believable ... and therefore, astounding.

Plot is an interesting word.  It begins as a word for a small piece of defined ground, such as a place to inter a body, and advances over several centuries to also mean to contrive a secret, fully formulated scheme, usually for some evil purpose ... such as, for example, how to get a body into a plot without anyone knowing how it was done.  The word shares an accidental association with the French, complot, which means to scheme together, so that the word "plot" became famously connected with November 5th some 400+ years ago, as a conspiracy and evil scheme to blow up parliament.

Curiously, with the Gunpowder Plot having occurred in 1605, by the 1640s the word "plot" became associated with the set of events that take place in a story or play.  It's easy to see how ... while a conspirator must puzzle out how to build a sequence of event that will allow them to "take over the world," the writer must contrive a similar series of events, sorting out how to make a collective set of events come together and form a coherent whole.

And so, with D&D, we come once again to the DM creating a "story" for the game, when in fact what the DM should be creating is a PLOT.  An active, devious set of circumstances that will, step by step, like in a narrative, with us witholding each bit and piece of information until the proper time, reveal it's evil import to the players.  The drow control the goblins, but the REAL plot is that the Squire is behind all this ... or is he?  No, it's the Baroness who's behind the Squire!

Think of these events like a dungeon room.  The players are given a description, which encourages them to check out the pond, and then the statue in the corner, and then the loose stone in the middle of the floor, which they pry up ... and discover underneath it, my gawd, it's the Baroness, and she's got a Staff of the Magi!

The more intricate we can make the plot, the better.  The more plots we make, the better at it we'll get.  The players can make plots also.  When I was a player, I immediately began plans to lead rich people into dark alleys where I and the other players could kill them.  Soon after, I was bribing guards, not to let me through some gate, but to let me know WHO was being let in the game and WHEN they tended to leave.  Then I could sit nearby the gate, watching a young boy acting as my agent, for the moment when he would take a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his face ... which would mean the baron had left the castle in his carriage ... and so on.  See, I'd seen this movie, 1963's The Great Escape, years before I'd heard of D&D.

Furthermore, it's possible to have more than one plot going on at one time.  While the Squire and the Baroness are doing their thing, there's a completely unrelated situation where two young lovers, one of whom is the daughter of the Burgher, are planning to murder her father and escape with a horse, thousands of gold pieces and the male lover's brother, who happens to be in a dungeon inside the Baroness's keep.  He's got a key to the siege door, but he hasn't found the nerve yet to set the plan in motion ...

Meddle is a verb.  It means to interfere in, or busy oneself with, matters that are not of our concern.  That is, the players who are meddling in the goblin's lair, or rather in that of the drow elves', and in turn into the Squire's plans and so on.  The Squire is meddling against the law's usually method of enabling the acquisition of land, while the Baroness is meddling in everything.  And this is the point.  Powerful people, who want their way, and don't want to wait, and don't care about piddling meaningless people like player characters, meddle.  That's what they do.  It's the way they meddle, and the steps to which they'll go, either as part of a plot or just because they don't give a damn, that's so interesting.

And yes, the players are the biggest meddlers of all, and the worst, because they tend to meddle into things about which they haven't a fucking clue.  They just meddle because it's fun.

What meddling tends to do is set people off against other people.  It frustrates people in their plots, urging them to act rashly and emotionally, causing things to happen that wouldn't have happened if they'd bided their time and not over-reacted.  The drow elves could just get more goblins, but they don't.  They let themselves — eventually — be seen, which they shouldn't have; and this makes the Squire out himself, when he shouldn't have; which justifies the knight stepping in, which causes the Baroness to involve herself directly against the knight, which only exposes herself to the party, who wouldn't have known about her existence if she'd let the knight kill the squire.  After all, she could just get another squire.  She'd still technically have the knight.

Entangle is thus the situation here.  The DM is put on the spot of deciding how the unpredictable party's actions ought to cause others to react, rightly or wrongly, which progressively makes the whole affair an utter mess, as people are doing things they shouldn't be doing, against each other.  In the case described, "entangle" means to involve others in difficulties or complicated circumstances from which it's difficult to escape.

Now, what in the game makes it difficult for the players to "escape"?  Well, there's always money on the table, which they might get, or money they might lose, or money they might have to give up on getting.  And the players also feel insults and oneupmanship just as anyone else.  When the Baroness scoffs at a threat the party makes, calling them "little children" who ought to head back to their rocking horses, while "adults" control the world, players tend to take that kind of thing pretty seriously.  They, too, can be spurred to act rashly by others telling them not to meddle, or not to enrich themselves.  That keeps the party quite entangled with what's going on, even though they probably could just walk away.

Which leads us, finally, to embarrassment.  That is, what the party will feel if they run away with their tails between their legs.  Curiously, it's also what they'll feel if they stick around, and things don't go so well.  Time and time again, the party will pause, find themselves getting deeper into the various entanglements, like quicksand, and say, "Why don't we just quit" ... and someone will answer, "I'm not quitting until that bitch gets hers," or "I'm getting something for all this trouble; when we find the squire's hoard and we kill that bastard, then I'm good to go."

Okay.

From all this, you should have an idea of how differing amounts of knowledge about what's going on has the capacity to keep moving the goal posts and pull the players deeper into the mire.

As a DM, we want to give them some, but not all, the information we have.  We want to do it progressively, at the right time.

Each time we do that, we change the player's perception of reality.

Thus, we decide what's "real."  For now.  Until we're ready to give more information.

Knowing when to do that comes from recognising when the players need more information to keep going ... and not to lose their taste for what's happening.  Withold too hard, and the players will quit out of frustration and lack of new information ... just as many, many people quit watching TV shows when they won't get to the point.  Or the next action sequence.  Or when they drown us in details that don't fucking matter to the reason why we're here.  Looking at you, Marvel Studios.

We need a feel for that.  We want to give them information with an eyedropper ... in part because exposition is easy when it's just one sentence long.  But too long between dollops and the players WILL stage an insurrection ... so when an information dump is needed, we've got to wade in and pour information out like rain.

At the same time, until the very, very end, we always want something left to tell.  That's what a "plot twist" is.  But plot twists are predictable, usually badly thought out and, after 90 years of film, boring.  Simple clarification is better.  The whole thing was a sled.  After four years his wife married a dentist.  In the end, it's about hope.

Even then, we can't have solved everything.  Okay, we stopped the wedding, we got out of the church, we fled to our freedom, we caught the bus before it pulled away, and we're together ...

... and now what?

P.S.,

Sorry for the various unexplained movie references.  I'll answer any queries about those in the comments, if anyone cares to ask what they're from.  I don't expect everyone to have seen every movie.

Deciding on Monsters

Let's take this a little slower.  Using the map from the previous post, republished here, suppose we starting the players in a lesser village, say Vardarac.  From previous work I've done, the type of hex (4) indicates a village with 2 hammers ... thus, a small temple, hostel, day market, bakery, hovels, a windmill and so on.  Nothing really special, but still decently settled.

Incidentally, Vardarac is real, though a Google map search only shows the village has been depressingly modernised.  The image from google maps is reminiscent of the kind of thing we see in small town Saskatchewan or Manitoba, here in Canada.

From here we want to decide on the monsters that will "kill the party."  We don't really want to kill anyone, but let's admit that having dangerous monsters available for the party to contend with remains a big part of D&D.  The chicken shown might be formidable, but it's not exactly what we're looking for.

The above map gives us some good locations: there are numerous swamps up and down the Drava and Danube rivers, which are surely inhabited by something; there are the rivers themselves, offering water beasts; east of Apatin there's a forest nearly seven miles across ... and of course any hex on the map that's even a little green has copses of forest that are anywhere between a mile and three miles wide.  Vardarac is in just such a green hex, so we can envision small forests near the village, with their east and southern edges meeting the swampy areas next to the rivers.

The area is upon the borderland between Hungary on the northeast and Slavonia on the south and west.  In my game, these are both controlled by the Ottomans, and therefore this is only a "provincial" border. The swamp is innundated deciduous forest land, covered with water in flood season (3-4 months after snowmelt), turning to brush & mud flats with autumn and eventually hard, dry dirtpan between trees as the land freezes with winter.  Because of this difficult-to-patrol area between constabularies, we can assume the forests are full of thieves, bandits, even river pirates since the rivers are important traffic routes.  

We might equally assume there are places in the swamp where even the criminals won't go — which grants a potential hook.  Classic D&D would have this be a "rumour," which is a lazy means of exposition.  Since the party is starting in Vardarac, we can assume their locals and they already know where the bad places are.  Don't go into the swamp south of Darda; river pirates dwell on the Danube's offshoot north of Kopa; the old abandoned manor north of Vardarac is haunted ... these are things the party would have heard about all their lives.  Who knows if those are true warnings or not?  They are a place to start.

But "where" isn't the real problem.  Our larger requirement is a sustainable setting, which asks for monsters that make sense in the environment — and by this, I don't just mean that swamp monsters belong in a swamp.  The city of Osijek and the surrounding towns are ALSO part of the environment.  These places are filled with professional soldiers, knights, nobles, wealthy merchants with hundreds of river sailors and guards ... whose livelihood relies upon not being attacked by river pirates and oh, say a dragon turtle, conveniently floating in the middle of the Danube.  Anything truly big, or overtly accessible, should have been found by some non-player professional, and therefore shouldn't be there for the party to find.

Additionally, we should assume that whatever's out there doesn't exist in convenient lame-scale D&D sizes.  Oh, sure, we can have the party kill half a dozen bivouacked goblins or an owl bear that's somehow escaped the net of professional hunters, but that does not make a sustainable campaign.  It makes a session, maybe, if that.  No, what we want is some sort of monster that the party can fight for a while, settled somewhere between the trees and mudflats where it's deliberately kept from being noticed.  Perhaps a small cadre of doppelgangers, though I'm borrowing from my own earlier campaigns with that one.

How about a legion of huge spiders, mysteriously gestating from a source within the swamp?  This has potential, since we could have so many spiders that yes, the various local leaders and hunters are themselves overwhelmed.  Local talk could start along the lines of, "Doesn't it feel like there's more spiders that usual, lately?"  Followed by the burgher of Vardarac calling the villagers together to assemble a hunting party to clear out the infestation of spiders that are harrying the farmers along the eastern woodlands.  A bounty per spider could be offered ... and as the 1st level party engages, they do rather well.  These spiders only have 2 hit dice, and perhaps have a weak poison, or can only deliver one dose a day ... certainly not a poison that outright kills.  Maybe they're wolf spiders and have no poison at all.

But as the party continues to engage, there seem to be a lot more still ... and at last they're forced to withdraw, as all the hunters are.  A call is made for help; local constables arrive and the battle is re-engaged.  Do the players take part?  That's up to them.

Next they learn this spider problem has affected many places throughout the swamps, from Petrijevei to Sonta.  They learn the spiders appeared in such numbers in Apatin that the town was literally under siege, until a grouping of mages were able to reduce the numbers.  Speculation arises that the spiders are coming from some place ... perhaps if that place were identified, the local lords could deal with it directly; if only there were a group of scouts willing to plunge into the swamp and locate the source.

But then, where might that be?  A helpful librarian might know the answer; perhaps some subtle clue exists for the players to witness and upon which to build a theory.  Wouldn't it be interesting if, when the players did enter the wilderness at the guessed at place, suddenly, no spiders.  Hm.  That's ... telling.

The problem with examples is that they derail the real point — that whatever monsters we choose, they must fit the wholistic nature of the environment.  There are swamps here, but none are more than 3-5 miles from human settlement.  An underground setting is impractical because the water table's so high, the sub-surface is porous and impossible to build down into.  A mysterious tower within the swamp makes no sense — the excessive water in the soil denies the growing of any really big trees, which would fall over in a flood, so a high enough tower to be adventured in would be noticed.  And approached, in order to tax the owner and question their appearance within this already-owned swamp.

So we're rather limited to surface, secretive adventure models.  Something which the party is the first to discover, or which represents a problem too big for the area to manage easily.  Very often, good adventures are made from the party stumbling around and finding something that simply hasn't be found before.  Virtually every horror movie follows this trope — and a great many thrillers, also.  For example, the party is walking through the woods and discovers three trolls who have swum their way downstream from the hills to the west ... and there are hills just 40 miles that way, surrounding the upper Drava.  Or perhaps there are three treants who have been here for two hundred years ... and perhaps haven't even moved in all that time.  Heck, a treant could grow to full size in the middle of a town, without anyone suspecting for a moment that it's a treant ... until someone decided to cut it down.

Another interloping sort of design is the "disaster."  A plague ship arrives in Osijek and is forced to moor in quarantine across the river.  It's there for a week, with the crew dying one after another; but any who try to escape the ship are shot full of arrows or obliterated by a mage.

Then, unexpectedly, a fire breaks out aboard ship; there are screams, and burning bodies throwing themselves into the river ... but this isn't the problem.  The problem is that the rats aboard ship abandon it.  Hundreds of rats, streaming out in every direction, soon to infect other rats — and in a different way we've reproduced the spider narrative.

Or perhaps it isn't a plague; perhaps it's a ship full of ghouls.  Upstream, one ghoul got aboard and before anyone could deal with it, a dozen crew members were infected.  Now the ship runs aground outside Apatin, while the former crew of 160 now emerge and stumble into the town.  Of course, many would be killed, but all of them?  And so instead of rats or spiders, it's ghouls, with the party stumbling across them from time to time ... perhaps encountering an isolated hamlet that's been completely transformed ...

None of these possibilities challenge the status quo.  Despite the rats, the spiders or the ghouls, despite what treants or trolls might do before they're dealt with, the wagons continue to roll, the ships continue down the rivers, even as the number of plague victims begin to stack up.  The setting's structure and function is maintained ... and the players are free to find ways to press their advantage, either by meeting these problems head on, or using the distraction to find their way into other activities that might be more difficult if the local lords weren't away fighting ghouls.

The World Turtle Bears the World

I know my readers have been waiting.  Forgive me for a little preamble first.

Sterling, I got the book.  I picked it up from my mailbox just before heading out today, so I've been able to glance through it and read your kind letter.  My grandmother was also a schoolteacher.

After not driving for 20 years, my partner Tamara has spent the time since the relax of Covid here in Canada chasing all the details that would let her regain her driver's license.  This involved communicating with the Michigan bureaucracy, where her last license was issued, getting Alberta to believe Michigan, retaking her learner's license test, taking driving courses to invigorate her driving habits, taking the test twice and passing, as of Thursday six days ago.  Tamara was anxious to get a car as soon as possible, so the last days have been filled with a visit to the bank, arranging financing, finding a car and then buying one, which we did yesterday, amid a rather ludicrous car price inflation that's ongoing.  We got a good deal on a Ford Edge.  Today, we took it out for a five hour drive around outside the city, visiting a provincial park and regaining some of our skills (driving comfortably in a new car for Tamara, navigating for me).  Once upon a time I had an interest in being a navigator for a rally car, but no opportunity to pursue that ever emerged.

Tomorrow, I'll be getting a full analysis from the lab for my yearly checkup; I've had to wait two months for an appointment.  It's possible I have a hernia; that's added to the list of other old man diseases I might have.  No biggie, but it helps fill up the week.

Then, Sunday, on the 14th, Tamara and I will be getting married.  We've been together continuously since March 30, 2002, so it's going to be a very simple ceremony.  We have the license, there's no need for a blood test and the arrangements have been made.  Just one more thing on my plate.  Otherwise, it's been work, exercise and juggling advice about cars, marriage brokers and other minor details.  This is why I haven't undertaken the post I promised.

Gee.  I hope I remember what I was going to talk about.

Looking around for a neutral example to discuss, to kick off a campaign description, this comes from  the one drive page from the Blue Bard, discussing Geoul.  I plan to discuss it out of context; if you'd like it IN context, read as much as you can.  It's time well spent.

"Bablemum, the great sultanate of the utter south has long been protected from its arch enemy, the Society of the Jaw: this by virtue of powerful leaders and, according to common myth, a seldom spoken of secret organization known as the Esoteric Order of the Twilight Princess.

"You live well, plying your trade and making reasonable money. But recent years have brought unrest to your heart and you begin longing for something more.

"Inquiry and risk draw you south, across the Six Kingdoms, to the quaint, hibiscus shadowed lanes of Geoul. Geoul is an ancient town of vineyards, scholars and painters, and there you receive your initiation into the Esoteric Order of the Twilight Princess -- hopeful that your new title "Secret Master" will begin your path to greater things. But shortly after joining this secret society, the building you were initiated in burns and the man who inducted you, a Master Elect of Nine named Nihs'Lohc, vanishes without trace."

I said with the last post that you'll decide the life the players will live ... here, they're being told that they're an initiate, which brings responsibility and awareness of a JOB the players will have in the campaign.  Succeed, and they're doing what's expected of them.  Fail, and there will be consequences.  If the EOTP works like most like orders, don't expect a lot of gratitude for doing their job.  That's why we're initiating them in the first place.

This sets a powerful tone for the engagement of the players, one utterly different from the one I set in my world, but NOT wrong.  This is important.  When I said that the campaign needed an ethic, I absolutely did not say it had to be my ethic.  Here is an ethic.  Here is a path to greater things (not necessarily known to a mere initiate).  Further, here's personal responsibility.  Their mentor, the guy that got them here, disappears and leaves them to bear up on their own.  "Get with it soldier.  Don't fuck up."

I said that you'll decide the monsters that will try to kill the players, and where they dwell.  What is the "Society of the Jaw"?  Do you think it's solved by one adventure?  By a string of adventures?  This is an arch enemy to a great sultanate.  Whatever The Jaw is, there are members in every village; in every round table; secretly camped near every military post; in elaborate tunnels under every city quarter; attached to every priesthood ... indeed, hiding under a lettuce leaf in the players' garden.  The Jaw are everywhere ... and they are the players' deepest, darkest nightmare of an enemy.  No where is safe, and no one can be trusted.  There are no "adventures."  There is a continuous, fluid power struggle that moves seamlessly from day-to-day.  Victories are as momentary as keeping back the tide; defeats are the smashing apart of age-old institutions and whole cities.  The moment the party finishes off the "big bad" in his lair, which they've spent twenty sessions getting to the bottom of, they must dodge an assassin's knife seconds before they learn that all this effort has been taken to kill a mere lieutenant.  There is no final victory, no final end to some episodic adventure.  NO, there's life.  Theirs, the world's, the battle to defend what's good, and their will to go on.  That is all.

I said that you'll decide what's real and what lies the players will be told.  Do the players really believe that these quaint, hibiscus shadowed lanes are what they appear to be?  Are they so foolish to think that the vineyards, scholars and painters are merely what they look like?  What is this entity they've been drafted into?  Are they truly the enemy of The Jaw?  Or ARE they The Jaw?  Do they know?  They cannot know.  They must decide on the evidence before them, from running to running, whom they really serve ... and what might be the true nature of what these beings pretend to represent.  They're not granted the luxury of absolute knowledge about right and wrong.  No one is.  For all they know, they're serving the enemies of Bablemum, and not it's protectors; for all they know, they're comfortable with that.  Perhaps there's no good reason to defend Bablemum at all.  In any case, it's up to them to decide.  This is THEIR life.  THEIR loyalties and actions.  THEY must choose the best path for themselves ... while always being careful what they trust.

After all, I said that you'll decide why all the things in your world live and what they want and what they'll die to defend — except the players.  The players are hurled into this maelstrom without guides, without assurances ... unless as a DM you're stupid enough to give it to them.  As DM, you hold the key to your setting.  The PLAYERS must find their own key, to unlock how to survive the DM's setting.  This is the game.

Let me draw on another quote from the Blue Bard.

"Here, you can see a fleshed version of the Country of Ormolu (formerly known as Wardale) and the city of Sanctuary that abuts the Marches. A good deal of player time has been spent in this vicinity, investigating the ruins of Copper Grove, exploring the Misthalls and Amharc Mountains, braving the crags of Geir Loe (the great peak that overshadows Sanctuary) and striking out on perilous missions into the march land."

I wrote with the last post, you need a place for the player characters to start.  Here it is.  And on the surface, suffering from the mindset with which D&D has poisoned you, you foolishly look at the above description as a series of "adventures."  But is it?  Are there any words in the above that state clearly that there's been an end to any of these activities?  Does "investigating the ruins" state clearly that the ruins have been cleaned out, or that the investigation is closed?  Is there no more exploring of the mountains and crags left to do?  Are "missions" a short hand for "adventures," with a beginning and an end, or are they in fact just temporal raids in an ongoing, potentially life-long operation where a thousand raids would still not clean out every villain, monster and demon from these awful places?

It depends on how you see it.  The "adventure" model is a stupid child-like perception of social realities ... the sort of thing that we watched naively when we believed that once the cops arrested the drug dealers that "closed the book" on drug crimes for good.  Nothing ENDS!  And why should it?  Why shouldn't another visit to the Copper Grove or Misthalls reveal yet one more secret, one further deeper undiscovered place, one other game changing fact that obliterates all our foregoing preconceptions?  Would you care as a player?  Would the ennui of knowing that you'll never kill every last orc, or root out every last evil treant from this forest, or kill the last city rat, sour your desire to play D&D?  Not me.  Not any serious player I've ever encountered.  Imagine bringing out another orc and have the players cry, "But I thought we killed the last one!  This sucks!"  More likely, "O gawddamn, another?  All right, I'll kill it ... you get the next one."

The mountains, the ruins, the halls and the march lands are always there, always ready for another sojourn, as soon as we recoup, attend to a few matters at home, clean out the chicken coops and whatever.  This makes sense in the game world.  The problems don't just go away.  They're not just solved.  At first level, they're surface problems ... but as the players go deeper, they find their original perspectives adjusted; they realise the orcs are just dupes, that the real evil is something worse ... until later on they realise how unsophisticated and artless was their earlier comprehension.  These initial problems are just turtles standing on the backs of turtles ... and it's turtles all the way down.  What really makes the world turn; what really drives the model; that's yet to be known.  But when it is learned, wow.  It'll blow the players' minds.

Yes, I'm saying that if you think you know what the ethic of my game world is, that's only because you've only played or seen the surface.  There are things about my world that I've never told anyone.  And they're BIG.

I said that as a DM, the monsters need to have their own agendas and things they'll die for.  They are alive, too.  And they're just as annoyed at these players that keep returning and making trouble as anyone.  You can't keep going back to the same mountains and ruins forever without someone powerful deciding that's it for you.  Sure, in the beginning you're a pest.  You're a tiny chigger draining your little bit of blood off the immense body whose existence you can't imagine.  But you take enough blood from that body ... you get big enough to get noticed, and felt ... something gargantuan and fast moving is going to slap you so fast and hard you won't know your body is about to be paste across the surface flesh of that being.  That's the game too.  If a DM isn't keeping one arm tied behind his or her back.

Sooner or later, the plundered become the plunderers.

Now.  If you want further explanation, and examples, you'll need to ask a question.  I understand this just fine, down to the bottom turtle.  If you want to understand it also, you'll have to tell me what you don't understand, so I can help you.  And everyone else reading this.

​

That on Which You Should Be Working

The reason I succeeded as a dungeon master emerged from my wanting so badly to understand the game.  I wanted to read the books, I wanted to play ... and I did so at every opportunity.  It didn't matter that things about the game were imperfect — it was plainly obvious from the premise that D&D was far too complex a game concept to be achieved in three fairly narrow books, even if they were published in 8 pt. type.  By the age of 15, I'd buried myself in many books relating to war, anatomy, history and science, any of which were as large and as thick as all three D&D books put together.  And any of which were just one of such books that I could find on a shelf stacked together.

Because I read the introduction many times, it was evident that the original designers understood this perfectly.   The game needed testing ... lots and lots of testing.  I was lucky that I had the time to test it, and that I played with groups of highly motivated, academic friends, who weren't hesitant about spending an afternoon at the library reading every book about medieval castles, life, weapons and culture.  That was simply what we did; it was, I remember, what everyone did.  It would be years before I encountered the "casual," uninformed player, who participated but didn't know the rules, didn't care to know the rules and who considered reading to be onerous and unnecessary.  I simply didn't play with that kind.  I didn't meet them until 1984.  I never dreamed that these would one day define what the game would become.

I wanted to talk about D&D.  We all did.  We discussed every rule and every fault.  It was fairly obvious that fighting 10 equipped orcs was much harder than one ogre, and that the ogre gave more experience.  Or that it seemed every time we rolled on an outdoor encounter table, no matter which table, it always ended up being a wolf.  Or that a lot of the spells were, well, pretty obscure in their explanations.  I was lucky, I suppose, that I saw these problems as fixable, and not a turn-off.  At various points in my early experience, I tried to rework the weapons vs. armour class table.  I tried to redesign weapon speeds.  Like everyone, I wrote out my own explanations of the alignments.  I painstakingly copied monsters into lists to make my own encounter tables — I struggled with those for more than twenty-five years.  Eventually I acknowledged that I would have to write my own descriptions for every spell, and for every monster.  I didn't just wait for someone else to fix the rules.  I didn't just throw out a rule before first trying to make it work.  I didn't address any part of the game casually.  I dug in, I worked — with pencil-and-paper, mind — for years and years, to get to the place I'm at now.

Why do I have an answer for every question?  Because I've heard every question before.  I've had decades to contemplate and redesign these things.  I didn't, as some do, just keep playing the same game, as written, for 40+ years.  I don't even play the same game today that I played ten years ago.  There are always changes, always new things.  There's always something that needs fixing.  Which I like doing.  I don't sit around, like some, "Oh woe is me," kvetching about how some part of the game doesn't work.  I make it work.  Or I throw it out.

I don't think this perspective can be taught.  I think if it already exists in a person, it can be encouraged, guided, sustained ... but if you're the sort of person who cannot do-it-yourself, then you must feel endlessly helpless in the face of every edition.  As written, they're all garbage ... in large part because the parts of the AD&D system that really needed fixing weren't.  They were reinvented, with some other broken system put in the place of the first.  The writers designers of the 1980s didn't have the capacity, the ingenuity, to properly conceive of or describe the potential for D&D except as a boardgame-without-a-board.  Having built the frame, they couldn't figure out how to run the pipes or wire the structure in a way that would make it comfortable.  They frittered away millions of hours inventing new character classes, races, monsters, magic items, spells, die modifiers and adventure descriptions which amounted to nothing but lists and more lists.  Nothing was more disheartening than reaching for a "new" book from the designers only to find that one third was more class descriptions, one third was more spells and one third was more magic items.  Ad nauseum.  It's all the designers knew how to do ... and since they were selling to those who were at their mercy, who loved the game but couldn't themselves reason out how to fix the game.

I'm lucky I was not one of them.

Thus, with the last post, when I speak of an "ethic," a set of right and wrong behaviours with regards to the way the world approaches the players, I'm trying to establish a foundation for how the DM should approach BOTH the setting and the game rules.  Those rules have to serve the setting, NOT the players.  In the climate that's evolved these many decades, that's nearly impossible to grasp, with so much boutique-style D&D having been churned out.  But there's no structure in that.  The player's character cannot function only as a personal vehicle for them to take out for spins ... the "fighter," the "mage," the "thief" and so on are templates of behaviour to which the game setting's non-player characters must also adhere.

When we do something silly like replace the thief with a "rogue," or remove the assassin, what do we say about all the game world's criminals?  What are their skill sets based upon now?  How do they progress through their lives?  When we argue that the game's setting exists to provide adventures for the players, what does that say for the setting in which the non-player characters function every day, without adventuring?  They have money.  They have levels.  Were they all achieved through adventure?  And if not, then why are players automatically exempt from the sort of wealth and experience that are available to NPCs?

I accept the argument that D&D is about "peril" — but I'm baffled as to why people insist that this peril is only obtainable through the transitory artificial construct of the "adventure."  Why are we eternally locked in this episodic approach?  Can we not see that the setting itself is the structure in which the players play, providing a continuous set of events that need not be broken up.  The players simply "are."

To return to the point, if we accept that the advancement of the game's structure is not more "sports cars" for the players to drive, then what is it?  What does the DM do with his or her time, if that time is not applied to building better character vehicles, or even special "hot wheel tracks" for the characters to run those vehicles upon?

First and foremost, stop doing any work intended to expand the player's choice about their characters.  Whatever you've created so far on those lines, or adopted from books, keep it as you like, but stop committing further time to those projects.  Most likely, you're doing it because a large part of you gets excited about a new character class or race, much more so than the players will ever be.  Chances are, the vast supply of these things has never found real use in your game world, or has been anything more than a disappointment, only to be discovered when the cool new character class or race was undertaken by a player.  You're ruining your game's continuity, you're wasting your precious time, you're adding no valuable aspect to ACTUAL game play and you're risking the decline of your credibility and reputation every time you put forth some design that falls on its face.  Stop doing it.

Chances are, you can't.  Most likely, you've convinced yourself that creating this endless parade of vehicles IS preparing your campaign as a DM.  You've fooled yourself into thinking it's "important."  You've become addicted ... and in large part because the character creation process is something you understand best of all, because you've spent so much of your DM's experience doing exactly this.  But it is an addiction.  And a useless one.  Put it down and apply yourself to something more game effective.

This same argument applies to the creation of monsters.  Stop it.  Monsters are very easy to understand and to create.  You're not adding to the value of your campaign by reinventing an existing humanoid, beast, elemental, god or whatever.  You're using your time to prepare as a way to assuage your ego, as if to hold up something as easy to create as a new monster is in any way an indication of your ability as a designer or a DM.  It's not the size of your monster.  It's how you use it.

Stripping you of the choice of making character classes, monsters, spells, equipment, magic items, weapons or even new adventures or NPC cultures leaves you with ... what?  Exactly the position that the writers of the Dragon magazine found themselves in the 1980s, or the splat book writers have found themselves in since the 1990s, when they had to fill pages with something.  To play D&D, you need exactly one character class, one character race, one weapon and one monster.  That's the cake.  Adding more types of these things only adds icing.  As of today, there's so much icing we can't find the cake, much less eat it.  All we have are mouthfuls of icing.

The reason why writers fell back on that list-making content was because they couldn't think of anything better to write ... just as you most likely can't think of any better way to spend your time than drawing out another dungeon, creating new NPCs or pre-generated player characters, and so on.  But now it's time to move on.

Are you afraid?  

You decide the kind of life the players will live.  You decide the monsters that will try to kill them, and where these monsters dwell.  You decide what's real and what lies the players will be told.  You decide why all the things in your world live, what they want and what they'll die to defend.  You hold that key.  You have all the resources you need.

You need a reason why your world exists ... and not the sort of glossy, fabricated reason that might start the beginning of a novel, that needs only tell one story, but something more substantial, along the lines of why does the Earth exist.  Then you need a culture in which your players were born; one that cares nothing for who they are or what they want, because the players are just a few more persons in a place filled with hundreds of thousands, or millions of others.  Essentially, you need a culture with which the players will have to contend.

Finally, you need a place for them to start.  A place that reflects the aforementioned culture in a hundred ways.  A place that makes sense inside the game world.  A place surrounded by monsters who have their own agendas and "things they will die for."

And then you will need to figure out how to explain all of this to the players, one sentence at a time, in a way that makes them have reason to feel confident and able, while at the same time also gives them reason to fear.

Don't worry.  We'll talk about all this.

Further Notes on Creating the Character

The player's character is essentially made of four parts.  We have a loose perception of the character's personal nature, represented by the ability stats, telling us a little of what the individual is like.  Then there's the character's resilience, represented by hit points, number of levels and armour class.  This tells us the likelihood of the character surviving a conflict.  Next, we have what the character can do, represented varyingly by spells, proficiencies, special abilities, powers and feats, depending on the system version.  Finally, there's what the character owns, the list of personal equipment, tools, even property and emblems of status.

These things influence each other.  For example, the character's title (a thing that's "had") offers something the character can "do" (order soldiers into battle) or what the character is like (responsible or tyrannical).  A character's charisma gives a sense of the character's nature while also possibly defining actions the character can take, such as impressing others, or dare not take, lest they repel others.  What a character has, such as weapons, armour and magic items, can increase his or her resiliency.  It's not that any of this is new to the reader — but I wish to stress that there's a deep-seated interconnection between these different elements that makes the character a remarkably FLUID game invention.  Nothing like it has ever existed before; as a model, it's vastly more complex than those things it's often compared with, like the role an actor plays or a persona one takes to confuse an enemy.

An actor's role possesses NO fluidity at all, except in the exact way the performance is given.  As an actor, my location on a stage or before the camera is determined by the director, the camera operator, the limitations of the theatre space and the need to place me where other actors can be seen communicating and emoting with me.  In a rehearsal, an enormous amount of time is spent in a process called "blocking," in which the actor's movement is strictly defined — even to where the moment I lift my hand to brush my hair is defined by a specific word in the script.  In a good production, no movement is left to the actor.  The actor's role is to take someone else's words and directions and give it the ring of truth — to make all the artifice and fakery of the stage look as though a real person stands before you, actually going through something for the first time that he or she has actually performed hundreds of times before, in rehearsals and previous runs of the play.  NOTHING whatsoever in this bears ANY similarity to playing a character in D&D.  Those who wallow around for the actor as an example plainly know nothing of which they speak, either of role-playing games or of performance.  They're morons who have seen a play or movie and have been utterly duped into believing there aren't fifty people involved in the actor's performance.

The confidence artist hits closer to the mark, as the role requires considerable flexibility and nuance to fleece the mark.  However, the practice of playing a character in D&D has similarity to this sort of presentation when the player's character chooses to be a con artist within the framework of the game.  A con artist is a momentary effort; it's not designed to be sustained over a long period and ultimately depends on no one knowing the artist is really a different person.  Whereas in D&D, everyone knows what the character is.  There's no "con."  The character's actions are legitimate; even when the character sets out to dupe an NPC, those actions are still legitimate, because we all know what's happening.  In no way does the con artist's role reflect what a D&D character is.

We weaken the invention every time we try to define the game character as "like" something else.  It's like nothing else.  It's its own thing.  We only turn to a simile in desperation, because the character is SO absurdly different from anything in our experience, we don't know how to properly describe it.  But we cheapen the concept when we make comparisons.

The character is a mechanism.  It is not a represention of the player's thoughts, beliefs, desires or personality.  It is a machine that translates what the player wants to do into a game system purposed to determine if that want is possible.  Any rule, therefore, which is not directly affected by some metric of the character's design, is an effort to bypass the "character" in order to empower the PLAYER.

For example, the so-called "rule of cool."  The player says, "My character climbs the giant's leg and stabs him in the chest."  Within the character's design, there's no ability for this.  There's no combat rule that covers this.  There are no rules at all for climbing a giant's body ... though there are rules that suggest this would take much longer than the player imagines, and that climbing a surface actually moving and in combat would make the move impossible.

However, the new interpretation urges the DM to "overlook the rules" whenever the player shows efforts at innovation and "being cool."  In other words, skip the character entirely and let the player's "thoughts" fight the giant.  This approach allows the player to change the physical laws of the universe.  If the DM thinks this has been done cleverly enough, he or she gives the player permission to do so.

Those who play this way might just as well admit that the character, and all that makes up the character, is merely a prop.  Which is not the game.  It is some other game that pretends to be D&D.  The game is to accept limitations the setting and the player's own character places on the player's actions, so that the player must work within the boundaries of what he or she has — no matter how cool the alternative is.  The game is not based on the player's ability to invent anything that might pop into the player's head, but to invent approaches within boundaries put outside the player's control.

The best case scenario for game play is, then, for the player to enable success from things that seem utterly inadequate to produce success.  To take a single, desperate action and turn around a combat.  To astutely turn a usually dismissable object, or ability, into a powerful if momentary weapon.  To bank on the lowest stat the character possesses and swing for the fences ... and have it pan out.  Such moments always produce wild cheers and pounding of the table, not to mention incidents that are remembered.

Of course, this also means that often such efforts are disastrously inadequate, ending in failure.  Which means, as has been stated on this blog, failure is also an intrinsic part of the game.

It means the players must accept failure as a possibility — even as a probable outcome, if they bite off more than they can chew.  It means they must accept that failure with dignity, if they wish to continue participating.  It means holding players who can't accept failure accountable, even when set out to change the rules loudly, or pound the table with demands, or sit and sulk until they get their way, by turning them out from the game until their behaviour improves.  Being a DM in some degree calls for defending the game against those who would dismantle it for their own ends.  Not the "DM's Game," in the selfish context that many DMs righteously defend, but THE game, the one that is defined by the rules and structure that everyone present has agreed to play by.

If you are a new DM, you must get this agreement in place before you can play.  The best time to do that is in rolling up the player characters.  As each part of the character is generated, make it perfectly clear to all the players what the boundaries are that these metrics and numbers define.  Your strength is this; it allows this; it does not allow that.  This is how many hit points you have.  If you lose them all, you die.  No special contingent last-minute reprieve will be provided; so cherish your hit points and spend them wisely.  This die that we roll determines if you hit or miss ... and no clever mixing of words or proposed inventive creativity will turn this "7" into a "17."  So plan to fail.  PLAN for it.  Because it will happen.  And when it does, make plans, now, to accept that you've failed.  Plan to laugh it off, plan to make little of it, even if your heart is breaking, even if you doubt your future interest in the game.  Be strong.  Remember there are others here, who feel your pain ... who worry that they will be next.  So plan.  Decide that you're ready to accept the game's consequences, NOW, while we're rolling your character.  Or don't play.

This is the message you have to send.  You'll need to be strong yourself; you'll need to possess an evident composed, serious manner and style as you gently describe each part of the character's limitations.  You'll need to be fair ... and so your tone and words must convince the players that you'll not inconsiderately spend their character's lives on some whim.  You care for their characters just as you care for them as people.  Promise that if anyone dies, you'll know the rule that killed them backwards and forwards.  Promise that if there's a means to reverse a disastrous situation, you, the DM, will be the first to bring the players' attention to it.  You are not their enemy.  But you will uphold the agreed-upon rules, because someone has to.

As DM, you've accepted that responsibility.

Story

"I don't see what the big deal is.  Just making a story."

I had in mind to discuss another aspect today, but I'll get to it later.  The above, too, is an obstacle that must be overcome.  There's a very good chance that the new DM has possession of a 3rd, 4th or 5th edition of the game, and most likely has seen some of the dreck on youtube and reddit that flogs the propaganda above.  And because it can't just be managed by providing definitions and in-game distinctions, as the new DM has no context for those arguments, we must find some other way to approach the subject.

I think much of the problem revolves around an incomplete understanding of the word, "story."  I and many others have addressed the matter by pointing out that an actual story involves a series of events that culminate in an ending ... and therefore, for a story to work in D&D, the ending has to be determined before the adventure begins.  In effect, making a railroad.  But we should remember that for many, many players and DMs, a railroad is just fine.  They see nothing wrong with it.  After all, we write a book or make a film that has the ending predetermined ... and those things are enjoyable.  Why shouldn't the adventure work exactly like that, with the players acting out their parts in a story for which they don't yet know the end?  When the end comes, won't that be fun?

We understand how this offers only half the game, or perhaps even less.  It steals away the player's agency in exchange for that of the DM, or worse, for that of module-maker who can't be there to appreciate the players' response.  As well, if a novelist or filmmaker produces bad work, there's no DM to blame; nor is there a DM that exists whose responsibility it is to fix the film or book for other viewers and readers.

Again and again, we find ourselves confronted by the bad language of all this.  The reflex when attempting to describe the players having more agency over how the adventure ends, or how it's played out, is to say, "let the players write their own story."  But that's bogus too, because the players have no more knowledge of the future end of their story than we do of what's going to happen tomorrow or ten years from now.  I'm not right now living a "story."  I'm alive, dealing with obstacles as they come, making decisions which can only be known to be good or bad by seeing what comes.  I feel that D&D is a better game when played that way ... but I have no word that beautifully describes that ideal.  That is, I have no word that can compete with the appellation, "story."

I have probably spoken about this before, but it fits in here so I'll risk repeating myself.  The rise of the word story does not begin in D&D or role-playing, but in business.  Dale Carnegie presents the idea in his wildly suscessful 1936 best-seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Chapter one starts,

If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive

On May 7, 1931, the most sensational manhunt New York City had ever known had come to its climax. After weeks of search, "Two Gun" Crowley -- the killer, the gunman who didn't smoke or drink -- was at bay, trapped in his sweetheart's apartment on West End Avenue.

One hundred and fifty policemen and detectives laid siege to his top-floor hideaway. They chopped holes in the roof; they tried to smoke out Crowley, the "cop killer," with tear gas. Then they mounted their machine guns on surrounding buildings, and for more than an hour one of New York's fine residential areas reverberated with the crack of pistol fire and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Crowley, crouching behind an overstuffed chair, fired incessantly at the police. Ten thousand excited people watched the battle. Nothing like it had ever been seen before on the sidewalks of New York.

When Crowley was captured, Police Commissioner E. P. Mulrooney declared that the two-gun desperado was one of the most dangerous criminals ever encountered in the history of New York. "He will kill," said the Commissioner, "at the drop of a feather."

But how did "Two Gun" Crowley regard himself? We know, because while the police were firing into his apartment, he wrote a letter addressed "To whom it may concern." And, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his wounds left a crimson trail on the paper. In his letter Crowley said: "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one -- one that would do nobody any harm."

A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with his girl friend on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the car and said: "Let me see your license."

Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut the policeman down with a shower of lead. As the dying officer fell, Crowley leaped out of the car, grabbed the officer's revolver, and fired another bullet into the prostrate body.  And that was the killer who said: "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one -- one that would do nobody any harm."

Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair. When he arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, "This is what I get for killing people"?  No, he said: "This is what I get for defending myself."

The point of the story is this: "Two Gun" Crowley didn't blame himself for anything.

Why start with this story?   If you like, you can see endless interpretations of the answer on youtube, with titles like, The Undeniable Power of Business Storytelling ... Three Principles of Business Storytelling ... The Magical Science of Storytelling ... The Art of Business Storytelling ... and on, and on.  If you randomly pick any event where someone in business is going to tell you how to do better in business, I promise than in the first five minutes, they're going to talk about why you must learn to tell a story.  And, I'm afraid it's true.

Somewhere between the ages of 2 and 3, your brain developed to the point where you began to understand things in a chronological context.  Before you became aware of the fascination behind all this, you were intensely fascinated ... and if you were a child whose parents took the time to read you stories, or tell you their own stories, they hard-baked comprehensions and patterns into your brain that remain to this day.  Your ability to be a dungeon master is largely shaped by your parents — or whomever you had as a guardian — and their ability to lay out events in chronological order.  If your grasp of this skill is good, you can tell a joke.  You can frame the order in which work needs to be done.  You can look into your own past and understand how your present circumstances are the consequence of things that you did, or others did.

The next stage of that storytelling education emerges somewhere between the age of 5 and 9, or not at all.  It begins with your beginning to "get" a joke.  It starts with this sort of joke:

What's the difference between an apple and a grape?  A grape is purple.

Silly, but the formula is universal.  You're presented with a conundrum, you expect a serious answer, you get a nonsense — but true — answer, and your preconceptions are remolded.  As you mature, along with those around you, the pattern is advanced in an attempt to do more than remold your preconceptions, but to also shatter your pre-set assumptions about problem-solving AND the depths of imagination.  Here is an actual joke from my grade 2, not shared with adults:

What's easier to unload?  A truck full of bricks or a truck full of dead babies?  Dead babies.  You can't use a pitchfork on bricks.

As I said, the same construction.  Only now you're forced to uncomfortably acknowledge the truth about something that's deeply disturbing ... which is why children, restrained and oppressed by the brutal regime of school, adore jokes like this.

The pattern progresses, however, until comprehension of the joke requires worldly knowledge, preconceptions about what the answer should be and ultimately an admittance of seeing things from one side only:

If only Africa had more mosquito nets, then every year we could save millions of mosquitos from dying needlessly of AIDS.

Once you grasp that a joke is about expectations and insight much more than it's about being funny, this empowers you to produce varying kinds of stories that lead persons into one kind of thinking, burying all the necessary seeds into the story that you'll need later to rip the listener from one kind of expectation into another sort of insight.  You never gave one second's thought to the death of mosquitos ... yet you most likely ARE extremely sensitive about death.  That inner discontinuity serves the manner in which you're dragged into examining your preconceptions in all of 21 words.  But that is why Jimmy Carr is such a brilliant joke writer.

What is Carnegie's story about?  Is it about the capture of a desperado?  The willingness of a murderer to kill?  Evidence that a criminal refuses to accept responsibility for his crimes?  Why is it you know that's not what the story is about.

Assuming you know.  Many people can't make the connections you or I can't.  Some are still trying to understand the mosquito joke.

We know that story is NOT about a criminal, because the title of the book is How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Obviously, this isn't done by being a criminal.  In fact, equally blatant, is that a trigger-happy criminal is exactly the opposite of winning friends or influencing anyone ... at least, in 1936.  First lesson: you want friends?  You want influence?  Don't kill cops.

Yet we also know it's deeper than that.  The story makes a connection between what Two-Gun Crowley does and what the reader also does, which is summed up in the last five words.  You recognise the moral because, well, you've heard thousands of stories with morals since the age of 2, jokes included, and you're ready for the moral from the first word of Carnegie's story.  From the start, you're looking for the moral, knowing it's there, like a commuter doing a crossword puzzle (sorry for that metaphor, must be the 1936 thing).  Long before Carnegie gets there, you're primed.

This priming is what makes stories work so well.  Not because you're satisfied with the moral — you're not.  It's trite, hackneyed, often isn't the reason you're not doing well with other people and, in general, a waste of your time, what with you being a 2020-something citizen of the world.  NO, it's because the moral is there.  It has to be.  Your disappointment is immaterial.  With something like this, you're a cro-magnon animal 125,000 years ago poking between rocks and lifting shrub branches looking for bird's eggs, which at this time of year are always around, but they have to be found.  You're standing up to your thighs, bent over a river, waiting for a trout that will come, so that you will eat, but only if you stand absolutely still for as long as it takes.

You're stupid this way.

That is to say, this behaviour made sense for your distant forefathers, but you actually have better things to read that don't end in cheesy moralisms.  But here you are, reading through an 86-year-old story about how to win friends, not knowing what you'll get or if it will be worth the time spent.  Sometimes, there are no eggs to be found.  Sometimes there ain't no fish.

Me, I'm taking this time to tell my own Carnegie-like story, because now I'm ready for my punchline.  Your fascination with game modules and other products is just like the fish-waiting habits of our ancestors.  You expect to see something cool and important in the module you're buying, just knowing it's got to be there ... and it doesn't matter how many times you've been disappointed in the past.  Because even if you didn't find eggs last time, or catch any fish, you know eggs exist somewhere, that eventually, yes, you'll catch fish.  Because that's how the world works.  That's precisely the way we're all stupid enough to eventually succeed.

The difference between a railroaded story and player agency is your perception of where fish comes from.  If you're the sort of person who hunts constantly for other people's fish, you'll buy modules and run to the name game version.  If, on the other hand, you're the sort who believes in finding your own fish, you'll stand in your own stream.

Those professionals telling audiences how stories are going to make them good business-people are lying.  The story is the message, not what the story says.  With an audience as primed as these, a good speaker can churn any sort of bullshit so long as it sounds clever and ends in a semi-literate moral.  Which is just what these people do.  Don't believe me.  Listen to their spiel.

The same argument can be made for how primed D&D players are for anything we want to put in front of them.  Once a player gets excited by the concept of making even tiny decisions, they'll climb aboard the train as soon as the whistle blows ... regardless of how well that train's run.  And no worry if the adventure's any good; these players are so stoked to find something, they'll lift every branch and stand freezing and miserable in every stream until they find it.  And they will find it, because they're stupid this way.

[and damn it, I set these metaphors up one by one; they're not mixed].

So.

What do we tell a new DM?  I think, probably, the standard boiler plate.  Try a module, and once you see how an adventure is put together, try to make one of your own.  If the DM had the select kind of parents, was raised on stories and jokes, can tell a joke properly, and understands the construction of chronology, he or she will grasp the notion of making their own adventures pretty quickly.  They'll want to catch their own fish.

But if the DM isn't that sort, didn't have books around, wasn't told stories, can't get jokes, yearns for others to make things make sense, then they'll buy fish at the store, every time.  No matter how often they're taught how to catch fish.  I'll remind you, this is the post that got this series started.  Admit it.  Some of you learned how to fish as a child.  Do you fish now?

Finally, there's an answer to the quote at the top of the post, about "just" making a story.  Ask,

"Can you tell the difference between a good story and a bad one?  Can you make a good story?  Or are you just assuming you can buy good stories, and you assume someone else is doing it?  Because I'm not convinced of that.  I think mostly what I've seen at the store are BAD stories, and I can do better.  But if you think you know the difference between good and bad, and you think you can make a good story, tell it to me now.  I'm listening."