The Peanut Gallery

noisms at Monsters and Manuals answered me.  I'm not exactly sure why I'm wrong, but apparently the entire teaching profession is misguided.

In the days of vaudeville, the "peanut gallery" meant the cheapest seats in the theatre, usually in the upper deck, who would throw peanuts to show their disapproval of the acts.  As an aside, imagine peanuts being so cheap that poor people could afford to throw them.  Probably, they just threw the shells.

Gene Kelly in the middle with his four brothers and sisters,
as a member of the "Five Kellys" on vaudeville.

Vaudeville consisted of a series of acts, usually comedians, light hearted duos or trios, harmonizing quartets and quintets, mixed with torch singers, a bit of burlesque, a chorus line if the stage was large enough and occasionally a snooty toff who would come out and sing an aria.  The vaudeville audience consisted of ordinary folks using their one night a month spending money (in an age when people worked 6 days a week), a scattering of upper class persons, the performers themselves, men with their dates and, of course, the drunk rowdies in the peanut gallery.

It was difficult to match up the performer with the crowd ~ and even the best performers, many of whom went on to be famous movie stars in the 30s, 40s and 50s (the list is endless) had tortuous nights on a vaudeville stage when the audience did more than throw peanuts, they pitched rotten tomatoes.  They would bring bags of such in with them.

Just imagine a young Fred Astaire, all of 13, dodging tomatoes.  Stuff like that built character.

If the singer had talent and was beautiful, she might sing a song that made the gallery cheer while the well-to-do would turn up their noses; whereupon the rich would talk to the management and the management would listen.  The poor, not having that kind of clout, having to listen to some hack butcher Aida for half an hour, because it made the moneyed audience happy, protested the only way they could.  They made life as miserable as possible for the performer.

This is how a democracy works.

I don't have the money to pay noisms to shut up, or write better material.  He might not even take money.  But I do have peanuts to throw, and a few rotten tomatoes ... and while the occasional unctious critic in the mezzanine might protest that my cast was out of line, truth be told, many of the upper gallery approved.  So goes the internet.  Whatever anyone does, whatever I do, people will be pleased and people will be offended.  Everyone is loved on the internet and everyone is hated.  That's the first rule of blogging.

It's not about the personality of the target.  The would-be tenor may be a really nice guy; he may have struggled to perfect his aria for months; he may even be classically trained.  None of that matters.  The peanut gallery hates opera.  And while they might endure it for five minutes, as that stretches on and on, there's no answer but to start pitching.

Another part of this whole blogging thing, however, is that the vaudeville manager would push the opera singer out there, knowing and wanting the audience to throw peanuts.  For one thing, it made the comedian who followed seem funnier, it made the dance girls prettier and it made the ingenue singer more talented.  It's the mix that matters.

The audience throwing their ire at the stage goes back well
before Shakespeare.  The Greeks did it.

I write a post about rules I'm writing, then I write something about politics, then a prescriptive post about DMing, throw up a map if I have one, write an RPG 201 post for the front seats and then I gnash my teeth and spit fire to make the peanut gallery happy.  The Thursday Night TV line-up was invented on the vaudeville stage in the 19th century.

Occasionally I have people say, "I wish you'd just write the high-brow stuff," but then I do and it gets few, if any comments.  My page views falter, the post gets less attention than average; then I write two screeds about Zak getting kicked in the balls and my numbers soar, the commenters rush out, everyone has a good time, the audience roars with laughter and sure enough, an aloof fellow asks, "Why did you feel the need to write that post?"

While I am trying to raise the bar for how D&D and other RPGs are played (and I feel I'm doing very well, thank you), there's little sense to doing that in a bell jar.  I've got to get the audience riled up; I've got to get them watching.  I've got to give them a little bump-and-grind.  So I push the talentless monkey out on the stage and let the audience "boo!" for awhile.  While backstage I dust off the concert pianist who will make the toffs happy.

This is how a blog stays relevant for 11 years.

Playtime

This is a very interesting puzzle. In the words of BaronOpal,

". . . this is something that I would have a very difficult time approaching dispassionately due to what I do on a daily basis. I usually have my fill of such pathos during the week. I wouldn't want my playtime to be filled with the same."

The precise context is available in the comments field of my post on addiction.  The Baron's perspective is sensible - we play a game because it provides an escape from the usual difficult, unpleasant aspects of life that we're forced (rather, it is the best means we have) to address in order to pursue our careers, obtain a living wage, support our families and so on.  If we are going to gather together once a week or twice a month to play, then for the love of peace we ought to be able to enjoy ourselves.

It is - as we all know from endless online flame wars that have long since reduced themselves to mere embers since - a slippery slope.  Is it okay to have a character lose a precious item?  A level?  To die?  How much humiliation can a DM apply before stepping across the line and spoiling a session?  How much squick?  How dear can the jokes or barbs from other players become before the 'fun' is ruined?

I have no interest in answering any of these questions with this post.  They've been hashed and rehashed and most of us have our opinions already.  Let's accept that it's very easy to prick a player's sense of dignity and self, promoting a sense of shame or encouraging vulnerability.

I can certainly attest to this myself.  I am profoundly vulnerable as a DM.  I'm concerned about the enjoyment of my players, about the quality of my presentation, about the degree of expectation I place upon my players to manage the paperwork I expect, how much each player is talking and whether or not I'm 'failing' in my own expectations about running a sandbox vs. railroaded world.  These are things I think about all the time and to run my campaign, I don't have the luxury of being certain my playtime won't be spoiled when I fuck up, try to gloss over something the players call me on or actually lose my temper because I'm running a lot of numbers and events happening all at once.

I get around this pressure by reminding myself that I can trust my players (they get angry at me and I forgive them, it works both ways) and that I'm not really seeing any of running my campaign as 'playtime.'

It may be pretentious and all, but I see myself pursuing a form of art.  To explain that, I'd like to reverse the circumstances of the addiction post I wrote last week.  Let's suppose that, in the sandbox I'm trying to run, a character imposes their desire for an addiction on me.

For the sake of argument, we'll say that I don't have an addiction result in my character background generator (I could remove it), but that a player wishing to have an experience they're not enjoying in the real world emphasizes that they'd like to run a character that is addicted to, say, opium.

It isn't that far-fetched.  Writers every day sit down to write stories about persons with addictions, in order to vicariously comment upon the world or explore the interactions between people caught up in something over which they have no control - resembling, in a lot of ways, their own feelings of helplessness, resentment, lack of self-control or whatever in ways that may have nothing to do with something as fine-edged as drug use.  Suppose, for example, I have trouble dealing with my family or speaking my mind when among groups.  These are troubles that can be cathartically evaluated through having a character who experiences a concrete impotence resulting from a concrete substance, something everyone has a least a little experience with and who can therefore relate directly to the problem.

If this player wants to do this in my 'sandbox' world, am I allowed to opt out?  Do I turn to the player and say, "My family are all alcoholics; I'm an alcoholic; I refuse to let you run your character in this manner, period."

This is precisely the sort of crap that ended my interest in running in anyone's world - that I wasn't allowed to do things because the DM had a problem.  Very early on, and here I mean when I was 15, I made a vow with myself that I would let players off that chain.  Though that has been challenged from time to time by things like player-vs-player (which I ban because it destroys games and builds bad blood, even between consenting adults), I strive to compel myself to go along with what players want to do because I think it makes my world better.

Even when that results in things getting squicky.

Things get difficult when I want to hold other people to that standard because it is my world.

While I understand BaronOpal when he describes "the human wreckage that washes into my hospital" as being the reason for not wanting to deal with this kind of thing, I already have a player who watched and experienced that exact same thing in a major metropolitan urban hospital serving a 9-million population base for nine years, when that was her occupation - and she is fine with it.  This makes me wonder if the real issue is that BaronOpal doesn't want to deal with it because he has to all the time or if it's just that BaronOpal hasn't yet dealt with it . . . at all.

Is that a fair question?  Absolutely not.  I apologize for that, Baron.  I don't know you.  I don't pretend to know you.  I only want to clarify the point that the excuse you give doesn't describe every person who is right now or has dealt with the sort of wreckage you're describing.  In other words, that reason alone doesn't cover the spread.  You don't want your playtime filled with the same because you just don't want it.  Period.

And that is very, very, very fair.  No huhu.  But I have been clear already that my world isn't for everyone.

My particular version of playtime includes discomfort and vulnerability.  It includes players getting so upset by what's happening that they actually overload and have to leave the room, or rise up in anger and passion now and then because the degree of immersion is overcoming their defenses or their comfort levels.  Hell, it overwhelms my comfort level all the time.  I used to have this same experience in certain kinds of theater with directors, actors or technicians who would lose it to the point where tirades ended in damaged equipment and sets.

None of this happens because my players are bumfuzzled or because the people I used to work with - for free, most of the time - on stage were deranged.  It's because the level of investment was high, incredibly high, even though none of us were required to take part even for the sake of a paycheque.

Allow me a personal disclosure:  when I was 17 and in high school, the fellow-student who dared to become director of the play we were going to put on that year had a father who had the clout necessary to present The Boys in the Band.  This is a daring, extremely uncomfortable play written about seven homosexual men and one unsure-but-certain-he's-heterosexual man that opened in 1968.  I was in this play in my grade 12 year.  I played the character Hank.  Hank is gay.  I am not gay.  Nevertheless, there is a kiss between Hank and his boyfriend Larry that takes place in the third act.

I was asked many times leading up to my being cast and after I was cast whether or not I would be able to handle the kiss.  The actor playing Larry was, for the record, gay.  We all knew this about Dave, even though it was 1981.  He was a dead ringer for Ric Ocasek of the cars.  Larry's problem with the scene was that he did not feel comfortable kissing another man while knowing his lover, Michael, was going to be in the audience.  Dave, I and Michael worked it all out and when the scene happened (we rehearsed it twice, the presented it once in front of an audience), there were no hard feelings.

Now, was it playtime?  No, I wouldn't say it was.  It felt like work, it felt serious, Dave and I both wanted to be in the business and it was a huge issue for Dave's relationship.  Was it something I was forced to deal with?  No, I could have opted out at any time.  I felt, substantially, that the kiss (written into the play and critical to the plot) was more important than my sexual proclivities.

Did I enjoy doing the play?  Absolutely.  I opened myself up to someone else's take on the world and expanded as a person, cathartically, while thoroughly enjoying the camaraderie of performing while getting the added bonus of pissing off parents, school trustees and one vice-principal, none of whom were actually involved with the play but all of whom felt duty-bound to stop it (as though stopping one small high school from performing the play would end the open and well-known homosexuality that we all knew, even at that time, existed).

I don't think the experience would have been fulfilling if we had played it safe and put on something like Guys and Dolls or Teahouse of the August Moon, both popular family-choices.  I think my outlook, my ideas about performing, my ability to handle it later on when gay actors would hit on me rampantly backstage, were all heightened by my experience and awareness.

I see D&D and role-playing as having the same potential and power to change the way people think about themselves.  I don't want my world limited only to what people are comfortable with based on their already-held notions and experiences about what should happen on a given evening of play.  On the contrary, I believe there's room to promote the possibility of anything happening . . . even if that temporarily sucks to the extreme for the given player.

We're all friends.  We'll be there to help pick the player up again when they've overloaded.  That's what we do.  That's what comes from booting selfish people from my campaign.  Everyone left is empathic . . . even if they do take it awfully seriously.

Perhaps, Baron, you might not feel the experience was dealt with as dispassionately as you suggest.  Perhaps you might find ways to laugh at it or get a new angle on it.  I play with people with all sorts of personal experience, who are friendly and able to talk about those experiences.  You might find you're not quite as full as you think you are.

Cooperative Improv

Occasionally, someone on the blog here has read something I've written and said, "Hey, that would be a good topic to cover in the book." And it would be, except that I've just covered it here, and that I did that because I did not want the book to include it.

Realistically, the book cannot cover everything. I would still be writing it in 2017 and the thing would be the size of the Monster in Spaulding Gray's Monster in a Box. That's impractical, and so from time to time I've had to accept that certain things aren't going to make the cut.

One of those things I'm not going to include would have been ripped from Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, where Chapter Four included a section on improvisational comedy and upon at least one rule that governs it, that which is called the single most important rule of improv: "Say Yes - and!" The wording has been ascribed to David Alger of the San Francisco Pan Theater, who seems to have no real background on the web ... but it is the world of improv, so yeah, underground.

A brief explanation of the improv rule would be that whatever one performer says on the stage, no matter how loony, the correct answer is "yes, and ..." which agrees with the premise. To steal Gladwell's example, if one performer says, acting as a doctor, "The leg has to come off," the correct answer is, "Alright. Should we take it off right now?" The correct answer isn't, "I'd rather not; I'm quite attached to it."

The reason for this is because the negative answer ends the scene. There's really nowhere to go except the doctor and patient arguing about whether the leg should come off, which isn't funny and is, in fact, dull. Alternatively, if both performers agree that the leg should come off, there's opportunity to discuss by what method, for what silly reasons and of course all the physical comedy that might come from trying it on stage. In effect, a negative response creates two performers who are at odds, while a positive response creates two performers who are cooperating. And cooperation is essential to both comedy and innovation.

The application of this to role-playing should be obvious. One D&D player makes an assertion or suggestion, and where the response is negative, both players are stymied and the game doesn't move ahead. If, on the other hand, the suggestion is approved, action moves forward and the players are working together towards a goal.

The difficulty lies, of course, in the question of who gets to make the initial assertion, and who HAS to go along with it.

In improvisational comedy, this isn't an issue. No one cares what the performance is, or where it goes, because the purpose is to please the audience, who is outside the construct. As long as the audience is pleased, and therefore laughing and applauding, the performers aren't concerned with who's idea it was, or where it goes, or who ends up looking like an idiot in the end. All the performers recognize that at any given moment, any of them might have to jump in with "yes, and..." in order to make the process flow. Who did what right now, or who's idea it is, is irrelevant. The whole troupe gets the credit because the troupe are all part of the process.

The concern of the D&D player is that they may never get to be the initiator who makes the assertion, but that they will always find themselves being the lackey that has to go along with it. Which produces competition between the players, as to whose assertions have been obeyed how many times, and "what was the last time we did something I wanted," and so on. The competitive reaction builds over multiple sessions until the whole is brought to a crashing halt by one negative assertion too many.

None of this, of course, exempts the Dungeon Master. More than anyone at the table, the DM must be the one that says, "yes, and ..." The players are driving the game, and are the primary performers and initiators in that game. This is not to say the DM does not initiate; obviously the DM does, and quite a lot. Only there is less justification for the DM to insist that the players answer "yes, and ..." than there is for the DM to do so. If the players refuse, it only puts the onus on the DM to initiate something else; and the DM should have lots of possible assertions in his or her bucket that permits that. On the other hand, if the DM is negatively responding to the player's assertion, then there will be conflict and problems that are going to be difficult to resolve. The players will feel pushed, ridden, constrained and otherwise not permitted to run their characters.

So the pattern should run more or less like this. The DM should produce at the outset of an adventure (or a break in the action) an assertion that the players are more than willing to respond, "Yes, and ..." followed by, "We'll go to the inn/castle/far off place and get/destroy/investigate the thing/creature/unexplained occurrence." The players then state how they're going to do that, how they're going to supply themselves and when they're going to be off, and the DM replies, "yes, yes, yes, yes ... and, and, and, and ..." throughout this process. Eventually the players set off and as the various instances come up, the DM gives information and the players reply and on the whole, the process is cooperative with both sides working jointly towards the ultimate solution, creating and resolving the given situation.

If this were all there was to the process, then we'd be fine and could simply play according to those rules and the games would be better for it. However ...

The DM cannot be entirely acquiescent to everything that goes on. In improvisation, the audience's disapproval for what goes on stage is made evident in a lack of applause and moody silence. A participant in a company troupe that consistently insists upon the limelight, pushing aside other performers, playing up their own importance and deliberately showboating, will be dismissed. If he or she is not, because they are among those of bad temperament who also happen to be talented, then other performers will become unhappy and they will leave. Off-stage, the social interaction between members of the troupe will be something like that presented in The Commitments, a brilliant example of how people who truly, fundamentally hate each other can still get together and perform splendidly.

This is not the sort of interaction that's wanted at the gaming table, even if it 'works.' Nobody who is playing should be put into a position where they are feeling any resentment, whatever the reason. If resentment has begun to gather, something at the DM's table has gone seriously wrong, and it should be nipped in the bud.

The key is the improvisational theatre's policy that what is happening is focused on this moment, and not through racking up the number of instances in the past that Bob has done this so many times and Jimmy has participated in that on occasions 1, 2 and 3. It is what I said about no one caring about who looks like an idiot right now. In the long term, Bob will have his turn to be the dupe, and then Jimmy, Amy, Margaret, Jerome and Stacey will each find themselves in that position. No one is special. No one draws a line in the sand where they say, "I won't do that" ... because that's going to produce a negative response and that response is death in improv.

It's death in role-play, too. Roles are fun to play, they build excitement and produce humor, they're interactive and they allow us to step outside of our ordinary behavior and be another person. But roles are, and must be, a convenience. They cannot be a fixed, immutable element in the game. That is because the role's immutable quality will always produce the inevitable response, "No, I can't do that," and then the party and DM are at odds. Cooperation is struck dead and play comes to a halt.

Games, and all social activities, are pleasant when they are cooperative. Remove the cooperation and all you have is a reason not to play.

Tragedy Tonight

Yesterday I promised that today's post would not be a rant, but that it would contain substance. I had considered writing something about the physical and economic requirements of giants, and too I had considered writing on the subject of feudalism and labor. Instead, I'm going to tackle a subject that is not quite making it into the book I'm writing, but addresses a struggle I am having with the exact language I'm using to make a point. And because I want the reader to understand the various elements of the point, I'd like to begin with catharsis.

Wikipedia correctly defines it as a 'purification' or a 'clensing' ... it is a state of being that is obtained through embracing an emotional state that one might fear, or feel repulsed by, that threatens the wall of comfort and security with which we embrace ourselves. It is an unpleasant process. It can occur because we have forced it upon ourselves, such as those who cut themselves in order to feel something (chemical bodily responses as well as a sense of life and vitality) or plunging into an environment no sane person would enter in order to obtain knowledge or clarity. George Orwell lived as a bum on the streets of London in order to understand what it meant to be poor and homeless. His account can be found in "Down & Out in Paris and London," in which he revealed in the 1940s many of the experiences which newstories and documentaries have now made common knowledge - that it is a fight for food, for shelter, for respect and so on. Orwell did not need to live that life, but in living it he discovered things about himself he did not know.

Dramatists explore the reaches of tragedy in order to force their audience to examine elements of life and experience that they would not normally encounter ... or which they are encountering every day without comprehending. In Albee's Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf, he depict the twin horrors of a young, optomistic couple and an old, pessimistic couple, to examine the pain of ordinary life in marriage. It is an thoroughly unpleasant, disconcerting play. It is particularly acute for older persons, then, as they become less like the younger couple and more like the older. There are reflections that one would rather not look at directly. The play can last for three hours, and if the performance is good, the process of watching it and ultimately leaving the theatre is entirely cathartic.

It is a strange thing, but the process of wounding ourselves, emotionally or physically, is an important element of our understanding ourselves. Not merely our limitations, but in many ways the lack of them. Catharsis is strange in that while it is emotionally troubling, draining, even to some degree destructive, the other side of catharsis is awakening, empowering and phenomenally potent. A truly cathartic experience, such as losing a loved one, ending a marriage, losing all one possesses to fire or another element, can result in the most marvelous comprehensions about one's personality, one's ability and the importance of things.

There's no question of why dramatists - and other artists to a lesser degree - turn to tragedy in order to produce results. Why, one may ask, does Bambi's mother have to die? Because there is reality and meaning even in the most meaningless things. In such events, even in a child's film, we begin to adjust our thinking to understand that there is not always understanding. And that the wisdom is in the adjustment, not in the answer.

When an artist sits to create, that artist is not bound by rules that the creation must bring pleasure and happiness and good times. The artist is only bound by the rule that it must bring value. If it is valuable, it may yet be horrific in its structure. It may not seek to produce a smile, it may produce terror, or pain, or even depression and despair. If the work does so truthfully, then it may be embraced, whatever the discontent it offers in addition to its distraction.

This has always been known with regards to the Art of Presentation. Else why is this image so well known?

It is this truth in art that supports articulately the argument that D&D cannot only be pleasure. It must also be pain. It must be cathartic. It must include in its boundaries the possibilities for a party to experience the awful, indescriminate sufferings of life and battle and loss and tragedy just as any other art form embraces them. The DM cannot be forced to choose the game only by the mask upon the left. The mask on the right has too much behind it, far too much to offer, to demand that it be ignored.

If the gentle reader will look back upon the fictional works, the films and music and art that shaped their existence, that gave their lives meaning, that have shown the way to wisdom and knowledge, the reader will be forced to recognize that, in their isolated form, they were ALL BAD. Those moments, if any of us were forced to live in them without reprieve, would be awful hells. We have been reprieved. We have glanced at them, shaped our lives around them, altered our perspective and become wise ... because of them.

Comedy, the left hand mask, is a distraction. It is pleasant. It removes us from ourselves and gives us a rest from trials. It enables us to gain our perspective, to rest before addressing once again the mask on the right. But we inevitably return to the mask on the right because it gives us something the mask on the left can never give us. Purpose. Meaning. A reason to wake up in the morning, and be proud of ourselves, and to strain ourselves for others. All that is good in us comes from behind the mask on the right.

D&D must wear it as well.