Workout Hiatus

You wouldn't think that writing is something you had to physically train for.  But at this age, I do.  Twice this year, I have managed to sustain a workout for two months, every other day.  I started the first go around the middle of June and was able to sustain it until early September.  Then, for some reason, I lapsed.  It started with me finding an excuse to put it off a day, then two days, then more, until for three weeks, I didn't work out at all.

I got myself back on the wagon in late September, about the time my grandson was born.  Three weeks of mostly non-activity, particularly since I sit at a computer all day, is unfriendly to my body.  But I did get over that and continued until about three weeks ago, after the middle of November.  Then it went the same way: finding reasons not to do it.

I've never been an exerciser.  I don't get much of a dopamine kick from it, I don't enjoy the endorphins overmuch ... and as such, it's boring.  This year is the most consistent I've been since High School, when I had practices before school and after, and coaches to bitch at me if I didn't show up, and enslavement that said I had to go to school and therefore be at the mercy of those coaches.  I've never like working out.

This year, however, it must be that I'm older and have a better ability to meditate while working out; I can think about something I want to write and find flow, and that helps make the 45 minute work out zip by.  I'm not sure why I've stopped; I was getting fairly comfortable with the routine, losing weight, feeling fit, and getting to feel it's something I could do for the rest of my life.

When I stop, I find that my body slowly, daily, seizes up.  Nitrogen deposits, most likely, perhaps a need for magnesium, but functionally I get up each morning feeling more and more stiff.  I may not be tired from working out, but I get less and less writing done because I sit in the chair and don't feel like digging in mentally.  I hurt too much.

I started working out again Friday.  A patient, strained 45 minute workout, going gentle.  Legs buzzing with charley horses (yes, I eat bananas), in-steps cramping when I point my toes, heavy sweating.  I do a stretch workout that is not designed to build up muscle mass, but which is chosen to stretch each muscle group and allow my joints to flex better.  It is a dancer's workout I learned back when I was in theatre.

For four days now, I have felt completely loose and anything but stiff.  But, the changeover to working out again leaves me drained, dehydrated (though I am guzzling everything) and mentally disinterested in digging into anything mentally.  So, effectively, the same mindset I had when I started working out again, but for different reasons.

This second feeling goes away in about ten days, or five workouts.  By eight or nine workouts, I feel fairly good; I stop needing aspirin or taking muscle relaxants.  By fifteen, I am really comfortable.  I don't know why I stay there, but ... for some reason I begin resisting the process.  Clearly, I have no choice about it.  It is work out, feed the white wolf and accept that some of my day won't be my own, or feed the black wolf and let my body tighten itself into inactivity.  I envy those people who get really excited about their opportunity to work out that day ... but, in retrospect, I've never been friends with people like that.  They always seem rather shallow.

Oh well.  I hope I can make this go-around last a month longer before I stop.  I should feel like writing about serious subjects in a few days.

The Last Two Types

The image shown is from p. 9-10 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: false

Here I start to break down.  These last two player categories were clearly written last; suggesting the list was written chronologically, in that even the writer is tired at this point.  Neither the "thinker" or the "watcher" have any continuity.  There's no connection between liking puzzles and choosing actions carefully.  There's no connection between showing up to play the game socially and acting as a peacemaker.  Each is a hodgepodge of dumpster traits piled in at the end, perhaps hoping the reader will not look too closely.

The smartest fellow in my offline campaign is a power gamer.  He's a genius dinkum-thinkum, a hands-on tradesman and also a peacemaker; he wouldn't think of telling other players what to do and he doesn't grind the game to a halt because he comes up with tactical options like riding a horse around barrels.  The people who slow up a game considering tactical options are not "thinkers."  Taking a lot of time to think shows they don't practice with that.

If I needed to recruit players to invent quests for me, I wouldn't be much of a thinker either.  A DM ought to be.

And the watcher here ... oh gawd.  This is what I mean by inclusiveness and rampant positivity.  Here you have this player; "he doesn't really care" about your game, but you, O DM, you're being counselled here not to force the player to be involved; to accept the player is fine with being a stuffed shirt; and, you know, take the time to urge the player to be involved, when necessary.

I'm going to say some things now that will make you, dear reader, never to want to run in my campaign.  So if you're sensitive, you should probably close your eyes before reading forward.

The Bullshit Delivery Company

This post is not part of the series I've been writing, but does reflect on it.  Regarding categorising players, which has made the last seven posts something of a trial, I understand why the 4th edition writers tried it.  I did it myself in my book, How to Run, published seven years after the text I've been deconstructing.  At that time, I had read the 4th edition version of player categories, but I can't specifically remember thinking about it when I wrote my own book.

"The Players" is the 3rd chapter of How to Run, which begins,

"Any attempt to classify a player ‘type’ based upon their personality is an awful strategy. It doesn’t work. Players do not fit into artificial categories. However clever I might be in organizing patterns of behaviour, I promise the player sitting across the table right now will fit into none of them. 

"On the other hand, trying to explain how a DM should tailor the presentation of the campaign for every unique, individual person who might ever play is an impossible task. First of all, I haven’t met everyone. The interview process alone would probably require the rest of my life. So we are stuck with classifications. The reader should remember while reading through the list that our goal is to examine the players we know for expectations, which we can then fulfill. By looking at a set of mythical players – stereotypes – I hope to create a model from which readers should deviate in assessing their own players."

This may or may not have been the thinking behind these 4th edition categories, but it is the thinking behind psychological profiling, which never thinks that any individual fits a "type."

The thing I did not do was to present every possible character type as a positive one.  I included "predisposed," "disenchanted," "badly behaved" and "the guest"—this last being a person who knows nothing about the game but has come along to watch or merely because their significant other is playing.  I based my categories on psychological behaviour, not gaming ideals; and the psychological principles being used were not "positivist."

"Positivist psychology" is a philosophical approach to human behaviour that argues we should only discuss elements of knowledge that describes only positive approaches and experiences.  For example, if you try to search "health" online, you will find endless articles encouraging you to be healthy and methods of how to achieve health—but you will find very little or nothing at all towards a definition of how "healthy" or "unhealthy" is defined, or where the line exists between the two.  You will find very little on being unhealthy, except mostly to argue that you shouldn't be.

If you look up "rape" you will find endless articles, both political and psychological, explaining its wrongness and how to get over its effects.  You will only find a little about what those effects are, as no one wants to wallow in the negative description of the aftermath.  You will find even less online as to what motivates a rapist; and you will find nothing at all about what the after effects of rape are on the perpetrator.  That is because online is almost wholly positivist in its view; rape is wrong, therefore any discussion of actual rape is wrong, as is any discussion about rapists.  Psychologically, the rapist ceases to exist once the crime occurs.

This is fine for building a better society and encouraging us all to be empathic and responsible, but if we're arguing that psychology is a science, then it's ridiculous.  Of course, there are experts in psychology who investigate these things; they spend every day of their lives detailing at length how the body breaks down and in what ways, and there are endless statistics that describe your chances of survival depending on what collection of unhealthy characteristics you possess: but it isn't published on the internet, because it would be viewed very negatively by readers who haven't been educated and who would misunderstand the point.  For the lay person, what they understand about psychology, medicine, war, perversity—in short, anything bad—is only half the equation.  As far as the experts are concerned, the general public cannot handle the truth; and they're right.  There are reasons why the last many months of locating a vaccine have not gone into detail about the price that had to be paid getting it; there are reasons why we have death statistics from Covid, but specifics regarding those morbidity statistics are deliberately kept vague.  The less you know, the better is it for you.

Certain elements in society think that's wrong; they want transparency with everything.  That comes from trusting no one, and thinking that if we can see it, we can prove its credibility.  I am not one of these people.  Truth is inconceivably terrible; it needs to be parcelled out in small pieces to a large number of people.  Those people must spend years of dedication to open the series of doors, guarded by gatekeepers who know what's there, before they can enter.  They have to be made ready to enter.  The average, uneducated, unprepared person is a liability with regards to such knowledge.  In many fields, I am that uneducated person; and in other fields, I'm very much on the inside.  In other fields still, medical fields, my partner Tamara was once on the inside.  Some of my readers are military and they understand perfectly what I'm saying.  It is better that these things be kept from the general public.

All this aside, the greatest proponents for positivism in presentation are marketing companies.  For a games company anxious to make profits, we don't care how much the players enjoy the game, so long as they buy it.  We don't care if they learn how to play.  We don't care if the game sits on a shelf in their room, or goes in the trash.  Did they buy it?  Goal.

The 4th Edition DMG is the sort of positivism that tries to keep on selling you after you bought the game, even as you're reading the game, because it's known that a good experience for the purchaser translates to the purchaser's willingness to buy a game.  It contributes to a feeling on the purchaser's part, "If I don't get it, this must be my fault; the makers of the game seem very concerned about me; they seem like really nice people."  This strategy works.  You might be surprised.  Did you know you can get more donations for a political candidate if you ask people, "Do you want to get involved with my party?" than you will if you ask, "Do you want to help support my party?"  It's not even a little bit of difference.  You can go from getting two signees an hour to eighteen, boom.

Gygax didn't present the AD&D version with marketing language in mind.  For one thing, much of what we know today hadn't been tested and advanced in 1978; for another, Gygax wasn't concerned with sales.  Gygax, for all his flaws, saw the game as a message he wanted to relay.  Very often, in my opinion, his message was idiotic and wrong, but on the whole the message was "Here's how to play, if you don't do it this way it's all your fault if it goes wrong, in reality you're by yourself, dig in and work hard."  That message didn't resonate well with a lot of people, and didn't hold up once the message got muddied and fucked over by twenty other messages that frankly contradicted themselves.  Present day D&D has learned from that; the message is mostly bullshit, but everything published now stays on that message.

This is why, I grudgingly admit, Gygax was a man with vision, whereas Mearls and others who represent the present-day ideal are sausage-grinders.  Gygax gave advice which was intended to make DMs better at running the game.  Modern D&D says "You're fine, don't worry about it."  One says to play the game, you have to "give."  The other says you only have to be "involved."

So, it is the manner in which the players are being organised here, not that they are being organized.  The purpose is for you, the reader, to find the category you feel most appeals to you and then feel the positive language flow over you.  Of course, if you're fundamentally cynical, you've grown to recognize this writing when you see it and immediately begin to gnash your teeth.  Me too.

I know a bullshit delivery company when I smell one.

The Carrion of Story

The image shown is from p. 9 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: false

This is not the last time we will talk about story in this series.  Story will come up again on pp. 10, 11, 13, 19, 23, 28, 29 and 31.  So we will have lots of opportunity to talk about it.

The word "story" appears a staggering 164 times in the 4th edition DMG.  For comparison, "story" appears 30 times in 3rd edition DMG; it appears just 5 times in the 5th edition DMG—and only once in the AD&D version.  In this last, the word appears in the forward by editor Mike Carr, as it happens, and not at all in the description of the game.  Carr notes of the game that it is "an opportunity to watch a story unfold ..."  That is, that the story is a byproduct of the game, not a constituent element in how to construct or run it.  One gets the feeling that 4th edition really pushed this concept hard, and that despite the failure of the system overall, this one idea took hold with players who began their relationship with the game between 2007 and 2014.  Though 5th edition initially dropped the concept overall, throwing out a very few phrases about it, the concept has stuck; possibly because it appears in 5th edition splatbooks.  I don't know about that, I did not bother searching each of these to see how often the concept comes up.

Because it is still relevant (a blogger writes that "D&D is about story" roughly the same number of times each day that a game module is thrown out because a game store going out of business can't sell it), we need to look at the "player type."  I say the text is false because it is disingenuous; a "chronicle" is a factually written account of historical events, not a fictional account of a character's background or even of the party's actions over time.  The player does not believe the "narrative" should win over the rules, the player believes that the outcome specific to the player's expectations should: that is, a thing that hasn't happened yet, because until the DM describes the outcome, it is in the future and not the past, and therefore NOT a narrative.  Because of this perspective of this type of player, "compromise" is a euphemism for, "I get my way and you compromise," as most of us have discovered when trying to run this type of player.  Sadly, many DMs do compromise as demanded, ensuring the outcome satisfies the storyteller player.  More's the pity.

Yes, I'm quite aware that "storyteller" is completely erroneous in this context.  "Story-conscious" or "story-aware" would be more accurate.  The player isn't inventing a story by explaining what they want or expect to see; to some degree, the player sometimes "tells" a backstory—but more often this is less of a story and more as a checklist for motivations justifying the player's behaviour in game.  It also tends to be the last story actually told by the player.

Occasionally, a player will relate a story to an NPC, explaining how and why the party got to this place and time, such as, "We were told by Arkady the Wise to travel to the Village of Wind; there we found a scroll that directed us to make our way to your doorstep ..."  That sort of thing.  Technically, this is a story, but not a very good one.

When a player explains what they're going to do during the game, i.e., "I jump on the giant's back and thump him," this is not storytelling.  Fifty things like this being said by multiple party members, and the DM answering, "The giant throws you off" or "The giant dies", do not together make a "story."  We often turn a blind eye to this fact when we pretend that an evening of such events is "collaborative storytelling."  It is not.  Because it is not written down, it is not even a transcript (though that is what it would be, if it were written down).  "Transcript" sounds dull.  The party got together for some collaborative transcript-making.  Hm.  Lacks flair.  Better call it a "story."

I've hardly ever met a story-conscious player who actually "worked hard" to make sure the character fit the backstory.  I've learned that backstories are written with tremendous lack of form, so that they can be used to defend any behaviour ... much like the Holy Bible or the U.S. Constitution.  So, yes, I'll concede that players do make their characters fit the backstory; I only dispute that any of them work hard at it.

I'm a writer, a reader, a DM and I've been at this a long time, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how a DM introduces a little, a lot or a medium amount of "plot" in every adventure.  The word "plot" describes the main events of a play, novel, movie or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.

It is an abstract term describing everything that happens.  Technically, plot can't be "introduced" into anything, any more than a driver crossing a river can introduce a little "span" into a bridge, or a chessplayer can introduce a little "board" into the game.  The word's presence in the sentence makes no sense whatsoever; but more frustrating, I'm unsure what word of the right definition was meant to be employed here.  I guess it sounded good to the writer, the copyreader, the editor and the publisher ... though I suspect, as with other sentences in this book, only 1 in 4 of these responsible people read these particular words (and probably not the writer).

On the whole, I see little difference between the warning given here and that given to the actor.  But it is good advice.  Yes, make sure the player does not act like a self-centered narcissistic git.  *Applause*

So much for criticism.  Let's address the problem and come to terms with it.  As a DM, you've read the books telling you that D&D is about story.  Your memory of ancient tomes, er, early game modules, suggests to you that Saltmash, the Borderland Creep, Hammlet and the Mountain of the White Plum had what you feel were good, solid stories.  You've played those stories out a bunch of times and they seem to hold up, so you imagine to yourself that maybe, if you work hard, you can dredge up something like that yourself.  Sometimes, the result feels good enough that you lay it out prettily and sell it online as a lark or even as the beginning of a business model.  Mostly, however, you want to wow your players and get them to really like your adventure.

Thing is, none of those modules—including all the new ones—can actually be called "a story."  Each of them incorporated a story, at least as you saw it.  Page 6 of Keep on the Borderlands gives a background for the DM to use, which reads,

"The Realm of mankind is narrow and constricted.  Always the forces of Chaos press upon its borders, seeking to enslave its populace, rape its riches, and steal its treasures.  If it were not for a stout few, many in the Realm would indeed fall prey to the evil that surrounds them.  Yet, there are always certain exceptional and brave members of humanity, as well as similar individuals among its allies—dwarves, elves and halflings—who rise above the common level and join battle to stave off the darkness which woudl otherwise overwhelm the land ..."

 

Okay, those words are stirring, if somewhat purple.  They elicit a threat, make a promise of reward and hit the high points of the world of high adventure.  Fair enough.  What they do not do is tell a "story."  There's no story here.  What we have here is description ... precisely the thing the DM is supposed to give to players, so they can answer back, telling the DM what they do.  A story is the relating of specific events.  In the above, there are no events being described, only generalised ongoing conditions.

Take note, even wikipedia fails to include a heading for the word "story."  Look for story and you'll find yourself on a page describing narrative, which is "an account of a series of related events or experiences."  If you look up "story" in the dictionary, you'll find it defined as "an account of imaginary or real people and events told."  If you look up the etymology, you'll learn that the word is a "connected account or narration of something happening," c. 1200; a "recital of true events" (14th c.); a euphemism for "a lie" (1690s) and a "newspaper article" (1892).  None of these descriptions align in any way whatsoever with how D&D or any other role-playing game is played, except when applied by bad writers who clearly did not understand the definition of the word.

Trouble is, you my readers do know the word's definition, as it was passed along very clearly from your infancy in the form of storybooks and readers that were read aloud to you before you learned to read yourself.  When you find yourself trying to reconcile what you do when you create an adventure with what you inherently understand is storytelling, the disconnect gets all muddled up.  In the end, you wind up calling your design "storytelling," when its definitely a similar description as that given in the module example above.  The confusion is a hurdle; if you understood clearly that it is your intention to write a description, you'll find the problem of having to invent a "good story" just goes away.  It is easier to write a description; it is easier to expand on a description.  And it is much easier to RUN a description.

Occasionally, you as a person will tell a "story" or two.  Here's my story of the time I didn't get drunk on "yards of ale," or how I learned my daughter was going to be born in an hour and I was all the way across town.  I could tell you about how I once met the singer Prince, or how my parents were introduced to each other.  These are all "narratives" I can tell; and as the reader will have noticed, occasionally I will tell these narratives to buttress a point I'm making.  But the narrative is communicative, not directly descriptive and not strictly necessary to the post.  The narrative makes the post a little more interesting—and in designing a description for an adventure, a narrative can serve that purpose.  But the narrative is apart from the point—that being to enable the character to clearly make choices about what to do.

Let me give an example.  The players enter a village in Spain, named Carrión (real place).  They discover, much to their horror, that there is an ongoing plague in the town, and that it has already seized hold of a third of the population.  However, they are there to find the daughter of a player character (this actually happened in my game back in 1990/91, or thereabouts), so they can't just run off.  They enter the town and I describe the various scenes they see; there is no narrative here, only description.

There are only 800 people in the village, so in not very long they find the daughter Carolina; she had run off, looking for adventure, terrifying her mother, and Peter, her father, was ready to force her back against her will.  However, when confronted, Carolina was tending the ill, exposing herself to the disease.  Whereupon she told a story: "Father, you told me that when you were young and in Vienna, you fought a basilisk in a church before dawn on a Sunday, to save the parishioners.  You might have been turned to stone that day, yet you fought.  Since running away, I have had time to regret my decision; I have been hungry, I have been in danger and I have done stupid things.  But here, now, at this moment, would you have me abandon this town because I might catch a disease and it might kill me?  Did you run from danger?"

I'm sure at the time, I was more clumsy than this, and failed to produce a sufficient emotional appeal, though the players responded well and I've restructured my memory so that I think I was much more clever then that I was.  That's not the point.  The brief story, her father's story, makes Carolina's argument, but it isn't the adventure.  And what happened next, when the party decided to stay in order to help, which meant organizing burials and searching for medicines and forcing back outsiders to maintain the quarantine ... that's all just a story I'm telling you.  It wasn't a story to the players, because in reality it was a sequence of descriptions met with a series of replies and actions given.  It was a transcript.  It's only a story now because I'm telling it that way.  This isn't how I ran it.

What's unfortunate is that D&D doesn't actually need any story at all to be interesting.  The company's decision to put "story" on a pedestal, then argue that DMs need one, is a snake oil pitch.  The game works perfectly well by having a bunch of really good descriptions and then waiting for the players to respond in kind.  There's really no need at all to pull together a series of climaxes or resolutions—as the sequence of events materializes, building itself atop whatever the players did before, the moments of crisis occur in relation to how the dice fall, or how the DM introduces a character who turns out to be something unexpected.  Carolina being found in that town under those circumstances, that was unexpected.  The later discovery that the town was originally infected by bandits (a brief story), of whom only one was still alive, having a sackful of money he was willing to hand over if it meant buying his way out of execution, that was also unexpected.  But as these moments took shape, the players made their decisions based on the problems at hand.

Was the plague of Carrion a story?  4th edition and later D&D would certainly see it that way.  But I didn't describe a whole range of events to the party, except that suddenly people started dying.  All the events that mattered came up in the course of the game; and were inserted just as I would any description.  "You see a field with nearly 100 bodies, some of which are in sacks, none of which are buried, with women weeping everywhere.  The bodies are covered with pustules, and around the periphery there are large black vultures picking at what they can reach.  They are kept back by black pitch, burning in holes on the ground.  What do you do?"  Is that a story?  I don't think so.  It is a description.  Is the player's response a story?  Again, no.  The player's response is just a different sort of description.

You can make your adventure design a lot easier for yourself if you will purge this ill-represented necessity for story out of your mind as you sit down to decide what the party will see, what they will be told, where things are placed and what options are available.  Think of it that way, and you'll feel the walls of your prison pushed aside while you design under a bright blue sun.

This series continues with The Last Two Types

Combat vs. Story

The image shown is from p. 9 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: false

The tenor of the text exploits a common theme that runs in the company's writings: that "combat" is somehow a separate part of the game from its other constituent parts—specifically, according to the text, the story and roleplaying elements.  Note the advice at the bottom: don't let the player ruin adventures by killing things at the wrong time, or too vigorously, or indeed things that shouldn't be killed at all.

Last night, I obtained a copy of Playtone's Greyhound, written by and starring Tom Hanks.  The film is based upon a novel by C.S. Forrester, The Good Shepherd, and relates real life events as historical fiction related to the movement of transport ships across the Atlantic during World War II.  I strongly recommend the film.  For those who appreciated Band of Brothers (and since I've written about both Band of Brothers and C.S. Forrester on this blog, you know I did), this is every bit as tight and visual as an afficionado could hope for.  Phenomenal.

I do not wish to spoil the film, but I do with to make a point about the writing, the storytelling and the overall relationship the film has to combat.  The film's story is all about combat.  I'll try to make my point as best I can, for those who haven't seen the film and may never see it, without ruining it.

If you've seen naval war films—for example, the commercialized Hunt for Red October, which I'm sure most everyone here has seen—you're familiar with the standard film presentation we all take for granted.  We're given an action scene, then the characters talk about the action, they express some of their tension, then we move into another action scene.  Hunt is excessively dialogue/character heavy, so much so that the action taking place is almost incidental to the characters; we know the Red October is going to get out of its scrape, so we're introduced to Ramius and Ryan and encouraged to watch their very personal struggles.  I can point to similar films from classic Hollywood, such as The Cruel Sea, Run Silent, Run Deep or the comical Operation Petticoat.  The intent of this intra-action dialogue is to relieve the tension, impose relatable characters for the audience to identify with and offer something other than a film made of shots of ships and subs that are necessarily models.  There's only so much that can be done with camera angles and lighting.

Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 Das Boot was a phenomenal game-changer in a lot of ways.  While backstory and character are instrumental, these are definitely shoved out of the way to depict a submarine crew stuggling to survive against odds.  The cold, raw brutality of the film, emphasizing the freakishly enclosed space aboard a German sub, with a crew that plaintively suffers through hell, eschewed scenes attempting to reduce the tension.  There are brief interactions with members of the crew and the captain; momentary interludes; but the "roleplay" aspect of the terrible adventure being faced is muted tremendously from other films of the genre.  Petersen had no intention of relieving the tension at all.  The film should have won best picture, but instead that went to an enormous piece of crap called Chariots of Fire, a vomitous boring romp that no one ever bothers to mention now.  Typical.

Greyhound goes one further.  It eliminates all character dialogue, except for two sequences that bookend the film.  There are no scenes where the characters express their feelings about what's going on, mutter phrases encouraging other crewmates or talk about whether or not they'll live.  There's zilch along those lines.  The film is about what is going on, and only about what is going on; yet there isn't a second where the pain, the sacrifice, the sorrow or the fear isn't palpable.  Truth is, a story doesn't need what D&D writers laughably call "roleplay," which is little more than silly staging that allows the players to goof off while tension pisses itself down the drain.

The point of all this going around the barn is to argue that combat is story.  Particularly if we choose to make combat matter, and if we don't attempt to create tension out of contrived game structures like "social or skill challenges"—which aren't stressful and are, in fact, dull as dishwater, especially after they've been reproduced ten times a session for months.  As the company found out with 4e when all their cleverness took a spectacular dump.

Combat becomes story when it ceases to be "an unexpected battle" to keep things from getting dull, and becomes that thing that every outcome in the campaign hinges on.  This is a concept that is not created through bigger or cooler monsters; it is not made by pouring bigger treasure into chests waiting to be plundered; it is not accomplished through ambushes, big massive weapons, monsters taunting players with insults or any other horrific cheesy combat trope.

Combat becomes story when the Battle of Helm's Deep is not just a way to receive x.p., but the lynchpin of the whole plan—and very definitely the PARTY'S plan, not the DM.  If it's the DM's plan to defend Helm's Deep, no one gives a good goddamn shit if it's defended or not, so long as we get our experience.  The players didn't invent the situation, they just went from one part of the DM's story to the next and now that they're here, they don't have an emotional stake in what's going on!  Why would they?  It's just a bloody story.

It has to be the party's battle; the party's stakes; the party's plan that's being tested.  The stakes have to be higher than experience and gold.  For example, if the party wins this battle, the party will rule this entire region—this, after small incremental victories, along their own path, with close calls all along.  Now this, this huge battle at Helm's Deep (or wherever, because we've ditched the LOTR plot) is where is all rides.  If the party loses, they lose everything.  Not just the battle, not just their overlordship, but all their allies and friends, all their commitments, all their contacts, everything.  Lose this battle, and they have to start from scratch, and probably in a new country where they've never been.

In a combat film, the characters are fighting for their lives.  None of the characters in Das Boot want to be there.  The characters in Greyhound are there because it's a terrifying, necessary job that if its not done, the war is lost and millions will die.  We can't create these sorts of tensions for the player, even if the players really love their characters.  Therefore, for combat to matter, it has to put things on the line that the players really care about: their mental faculties for making a plan; their shame if it fails; the sense of their joint effort with their friends, to commit themselves to something this big.

If it's the DM's story, those tensions are obliterated.  It's the DM's plan.  It's the DM's shame if we all die.  We didn't ask for this.  We're just here because the DM said, "Go to Helm's Deep," so we did.  Don't blame us.  We're just following orders.

That's why railroading and storytelling sucks for game play.  Not just because the players haven't agency to make their own lives, but because they haven't any reason to give a shit what the lives they're living stand for.  Thus players can squabble about petty bullshit, like saying "fuck all this talking" and killing the monsters that should have been talked to.  IF the players really cared; if talking to the monster really mattered; if this were our adventure and not the DM's, well, hell.  We'd want to talk to the monster, wouldn't we?  We wouldn't be "slayers," would we?  It's just that all this story-telling shit is so damned boring.

Like a Marionette with Visible Strings

Allow me to start by saying, thank you Jack.  I'm touched that you're willing to get involved with my writing and efforts to enlighten about the game to this degree.  I feel very positive about taking up the cause today.

The image shown is from p. 9 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: mostly true

This is the 4th category of player outlined by the 4e DMG.  The description is accurate for the most part, as is the means of engaging these players and concerns for the effect they may have on the game.  However, following this advice to the letter is a bad approach for a DM, in part because it tacitly encourages the DM to act in ways that are contrary to the position's legitimacy.

For example.  Strictly speaking, as a DM, and if everyone is playing according to the rules, I'm am I to be sure the power gamer doesn't become more powerful?  Arbitrarily dictate that there are only so many power mods they're allowed to pick?  I've see that encouraged.  Or should I specifically target the power gamer in fights, so that the game's balance is maintained by beating down the most dangerous opponent?  I've seen that preached too.  There are ways to constrain the traditional power gamer, but without some specificity as to HOW to do this, I expect that most DMs will reach for the lowest hanging fruit, through unjustified and inconsistent tactics.  If a power gamer is acting within the strict rules of the game, and this leads to excessive power on the gamer's part, then the RULES need adjustment, not the gamer.  Or, alternatively, the goals, and how they are obtained, need to be of a larger dimension that can't be solved by smashing everything between the party and success.

I rarely see a campaign described, even those that purport to be "roleplay based," that doesn't fundamentally work on the Mario Bros. template.  Sure, we can stand around talking for a bit, but in the end we have to jump, stomp and get coins.  Chat chat chat, stomp stomp stomp.  As long as the stomping is going to come, the power gamer will wait patiently until that time.  And if there is no stomping, the power gamer won't be the only player who's bored all the time.

Part of the power gamer's motivation is that the chat part is so meaningless.  It's like that scene in dozens of movies, where members of the gang meet with the one member who hasn't joined yet—the most important member—to convince him to join.  And he doesn't want to join.  "Aw, c'mon.  It'll be great!"  "No, I have a wife and kid now."  "C'mon, they'll understand."  "No, they matter more to me than anything now."  And so on, round and round, when we all fucking know the guy's going to join.  This scene is BORING.  It accomplishes NOTHING related to the plot.  It wastes five minutes of screen time and it's supposed to provide us with the character's motivations, but these motivations are trite, cliche and worse, later on when the same character that was worried about his family makes a twenty foot leap from the helicopter to the train, what the fuck is going through his mind then?  Not the screenplay, obviously.

99% of RPG "roleplay" that I've seen depicted online fits into this kind of screenwriting.  Blather, blather, blather ... oh, look, we're playing now.  It's a wonder that more players don't roll their eyes when the DM decides to roleplay another storekeeper or another guard or, fuck, another stupid old fart raking leaves by the side of the road.  This nonsense is not "gaming."  It's filler.  The power gamer is the player around your table that knows it, isn't silent about it, calls you out on it and makes you get the fuck on with it.

That's why you hate the gamer.  Because you thought the leaf-raker was a cool idea and the gamer is pissing on your ego.

If you want to make the power gamer care about some other part of the game beyond combat and treasure, you cannot rely on "good feelings" to be the only reward associated with roleplay.  Roleplay must have rewards that are just as concrete as those rewards that arise from combat.

No, no.  This does not mean giving experience for roleplay.  That is just another arbitrary means of DMs overstepping their authority, by inconsistently giving out gold stars whenever the players perform in a manner that makes the DM generous.  Gawd, what a terrible conception for a rule that was, or is—I haven't heard anyone preaching that one lately and I hope it has died the grungy death it deserved.  But probably not.  One thing about a really bad idea that doesn't work; it never really goes away.

 A "concrete" reward need not be the same rewards—they should be rewards that can be gained through roleplay and ONLY through roleplay.  This will cause the power gamer to get interested in role-play, as it is another access point towards improving and strengthening their character.  This transforms the game from "Blah blah blah cool" to "Cool cool cool cool."

"But Alexis!  What would these concrete rewards be?"

It's right there in the description above:  "Stress story element rewards ... facilitate access to new options and powers ... include encounters that facilitate attributes."  Yes, I have dropped some words from the original text, because the writers are in the ball park but they're standing on the wrong side of the foul line.  Let's do a rewrite:

• Add story elements that require making friends and diffusing enemies.
• Facilitate options and powers that rely on the presence of allies.
• Include encounters that emphasize the players' attributes, rather than the character's.

Force the power gamer, and the other players beside, to acknowledge that the world is too big and too dangerous, and the rewards are generous enough, that it ceases to make sense to see every exploit as a bunch of lone wolf idiots heading out into the wilderness.  Make them see that they need friends, and that loyal, reliable friends exist in the game universe.  Not just those who directly march with the party, but officials, tavern keepers, locale gameskeepers or whatever, who will continue to do their jobs but will also be a resource for information and aid when needed.  Make the party understand that if they don't learn to handle these associates respectfully and responsibly, they can turn into enemies, who will be there to add additional obstacles in the party's path, making the world bigger and even more dangerous because the players are too stupid to realize they can't do everything by themselves.

If we take it for granted that Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf are "the party" (though some will chafe with me on Gandalf, but take it for granted for the sake of the metaphor, okay?), we understand the choice to go around and free Theoden from the influence of Saruman is not so Theoden can be a member of the party.  Nor is it much of a quest.  They ride to Rohan, knock back a few of the guards, free Theoden and we're done.  But Theoden offers additional power for The Quest, plus knowledge, plus other associates that can be counted on, plus the outing of an enemy from their midst ... all things that require role-play but have concrete rewards.  More friends, more power, more options for what the party can do—even additional toys if the DM wants it that way.  These are real reasons to roleplay, not some meaningless palaver with a shop clerk.  If the stakes are high enough—if the power gamer is made to understand that going into the lair alone will mean certain death without help—then the power gamer WILL roleplay as that will be the power-yielding option.

DMs I see go out of their way to make sure the players know the dungeon is absolutely inside their abilities, deliberately causing the players to treat NPCs like a bunch of spectators, or fodder that can be spent, because hell, we never really needed that fodder anyway.  This is precisely the way to make the power gamer feel confident and willing to treat the other players like lackeys, because hell, in a sense, they are lackeys.  Where the power gamer is concerned, they aren't pulling their weight, and anyway, the DM is going to fudge the die, balance the monsters and we're going to be fine anyway.  At least I get the pleasure of doing phenomenal damage every hit.  That's something.

Putting the players in the position of now finding themselves faced with a king who has regained power in his kingdom, who is still going to be a King and not an ingratiating poppet who will hand over all his kingdom just because the party rescued him, forces the players, not the characters, to draw on their abilities to convince this king that a) they weren't part of the conspiracy that enslaved the king in the first place; b) their cause is just; c) the King is as threatened as they are; and d) there's something for the King to gain if he helps the party.

Again, DMs subvert this dynamic all over the place.  These are things the power gamer needs to answer, that his or her powers can't achieve.  The power gamer, like all the players, is bound by what wits are available to the collective mind of the party.  But often they don't have to accomplish any of these things, because DMs utterly fail to think like the King of a Kingdom, and instead trip over themselves using the King to pile unearned power and support onto the party, no matter what the party says or does.  "The King is so grateful that he doesn't remotely question the party's motivations, he gives all he has to the party to help them fulfill their quest."  Apparently, the King has read the filmscript and already knows the party's cause is just.  The King doesn't remotely need to conserve his resources for himself and his own people, because he's protected by DM plot armour and anyway, if the enemy attacks Rohan, it will survive depending on what the DM thinks, not by virtue of what resources it has or keeps.  So, sure, open the doors, pour out wealth and weapons on the party, take it all, Rohan doesn't need it!  We absolutely don't need to roleplay any of this!  The king is obviously on your side, you've saved him!

Note how it does not go like that in the book.  Theoden is not magnificently generous.  He needs to be convinced.  He needs to be informed.  He is his own man.  He is not a dupe excuse for the DM to power up the party so they can go on being lone wolves.

Power gamers act as they do because DMs, stupidly misunderstanding the role of NPCs in the game world, push players to act in their own stead—a stead that is usually contributed to by a DM who doesn't understand what "roleplay" means in the game context.  This is because most DMs are terrible, awful storytellers.  It's remarkable that the same DM who will argue vociferously that "D&D is about storytelling," will never write a story longer than five pages, has never written a novel, and if they were to try and do so, the writing would be so execreble that the novel would be unreadable.  Tell me again how D&D is about storytelling when the one thing the DM can't do is credibly write one story that a learned person would want to read.

NPCs are not puppets.  They run everything, they have everything, they stand in the way of everything.  If a power gamer is put in a world where no matter how much power that gamer has, he or she continues to feel they need friends, they will embrace roleplaying because it will get them what they want.

More power.

This series continues with Combat vs. Story

The Place Where Rebellion & Incompetence Meet

The image shown is from p. 8-9 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.

Rating: indeterminate

I'm not looking forward to this; not because I don't know how to dress the subject of an instigator, but because I have my doubts that I can do it positively.

Incidentally, this makes a bad case for the "he does/she does" pronoun-use strategy.  I have hardly ever known a woman player who was an instigator, yet the choice of using the feminine pronoun here deliberately suggests otherwise.  Since we know from the credits that the book was written by, and the company is very much run by, men, this specific choice looks suspect and very much not in the vein of "inclusivity."

My etymology dictionary tells me that "instigator" arises from the Latin, instigare, "to urge on, incite," the context usually associated with shouting at sports teams to win games or the arouse the people in rebellion.  I think either is problematic since D&D isn't supposed to be about "winning" and we do have a situation where some players do resist the DM's authority.  This seems the best place to start.

"Making things happen" is a euphemism.  I think every player, whatever they're doing, are in the act of bringing about the happening of things.  Commonly, we like to associate "making things happen" with successful people fuelled by passion (and greed) set out to smash up the system in order to cause money to pour out of other people's pockets and into their own.  Here, I take this to mean instigators are people who selfishly wish to make the game all about themselves, who act out for attention, who want to go off on their own so that they can have the DM's whole attention and so on.  The way it is worded above, that they thrive in combat or dislike "having nothing to do" makes it sound like a perfectly reasonable, personal choice in how to approach the game.  Opening an obviously trapped chest, for instance, or provoking authority figures ... exactly the sort of thing that will get you killed in my game, over and over.

I'm reminded of the first online game I ran, in which the 1st level mage rushed into the town hall of a small town and decided to immediately start casting spells in the meeting hall.  He was immediately punched out by the guard and arrested, only to find himself facing a judge the next day.  I invented a storyline that would get him out of jail, because I figured at the time, "Okay, the player just needs a little time to understand how my world works."  Sadly, the player did not hang around afterwards.  I should have let him rot in jail as a message to other players, "Don't fuck around with authority."  Unfortunately, it took me several years to learn that lesson; off-line, I hadn't experienced this kind of player.

This is because someone who will "instigate" in game play will also act similarly in real life.  That I've seen plenty of times.  They're the sort who will decide they're going to teach the bouncer "a lesson," only to find themselves achieving hang time while going out the front door; or they're the type to stage an insurrection in the grocery store over the price of apples; or they're the type to argue that until they get what they think is "their due," they won't pay taxes or fix their brake-light (giving them the opportunity to rail at the indecency of the police).  These are the people who, when you go rafting with them, break their paddle in the first five minutes doing something stupid against a rock, and then sit miserably in the raft for the next hour and a half complaining because they've nothing to do.  They won't learn how to cast properly, because they can't be bothered, so you find yourself unsnarling their line or listening to them bitch and moan because they have to unsnarl their own.  They can't stop chatting on and on during the movie, and when you tell them to shut up, they call the usher to spew their grievances.  Either they scream and moan to have the football passed to them, only to drop it, or they're the player who won't pass the puck under any circumstances, ever.

Over time, you get to know the type.  In elementary school, you're forced to endure them as part of your "group," though they don't do the work and try to take all the credit.  In high school, you roll your eyes as they get thrown out of yet one more test for cheating, while crying out as they go that "I wasn't!  This is fraud!"  In university, you feel pretty good when the Prof comes in and says coldly of a student, "Mr. Garrett won't be joining us again for the rest of the semester," along with the whole class who breathes a sigh of relief.  Getting older, we recognize the signs.  We walk wide circles around these people.  We resent situations where we have to put up with them, at work, at the P.T.A., at the volunteer group that's gathered to discuss the route of the proposed city train.  Most of all, you learn not to invite them to your D&D game.

Going online, I hadn't considered that some of these people would want to play in my game world.  Not being visible, there was no way to see the signs.  For those people whose bad experiences mostly come out of attending games at conventions, game stores or other clubs, you just don't know what sort of freak you're going to sit next to when you get your character and start playing.

I have to remind myself that the advice being given by the 4th Edition book here applies mostly to such games.  It's considered bad form to be a DM at a game store or convention and kick out players who deliberately make bad choices.  Everyone, after all, has paid to take part.  In fact, conventions may draw such people like flies, specifically because they can pay their way in, whereas the rest of the world has decided they're done with these people.

My perspective is skewed, because I insist on seeing D&D in terms of my game, my group, my home, my friends.  I don't play with strangers.

I'm reminded of some football games I joined in post-high school—casual games organized through work or acquaintances—where some of the participants would tend to take things much too seriously.  There's just nothing like getting together with two people you know and 12 strangers, only to find yourself on a defensive line facing some asshole who thinks the game is important enough to try breaking your arm or leg; meaning you have to do the same with them out of self-preservation.  Some people get off on this level of competition.  I don't.  I don't get anything out of playing sports or games with people who fail to behave civilly.  I don't like spending any time with such people.  I don't like being in the same bar or on the same street with such people.  I am certainly not interested in paying for the opportunity to play my favorite game with total strangers, who might conceivably (with higher percentage odds, I'm sure), behave like idjits.

Not my game, thank you.

If, however, you do feel it is your responsibility as DM to provide these people with a place to play, for the sake of inclusiveness; if you feel that your role is equivalent to that of a public defender, where some law written in your head says that everyone deserves their kick at the D&D can, then by all means, empower instigators.  That probably will mean fudging the dice, given that they will get the group killed and attack other PCs or their allies.

But seriously, why even care?  I mean, if inclusion is the rule; if the game itself isn't important enough to defend against the entry of barbarians; then why even give a shit if the whole party is killed?  Why care about player-vs.-player?  Your decision not to hold a player to a standard indicates clearly where your priorities lie—obviously not in the integrity of the game or its play.  So what the hell do you care if the player takes stupid actions to gain attention?  Isn't that the behaviour you're enabling?  Isn't that what you want? 

If it isn't, that's an odd signal you're tapping out.

This series continues with Like a Marionette with Visible Strings

Where No One Has Gone Before

The image shown is from p. 8 of 4th Edition's DMG, How to be a DM.  Please forgive the change in format; after reworking yesterday's post, I decided this was cleaner.

Rating: vaguely true

This isn't really a thing, of course.  I've indulged in this myself, with my book How to Run; it's natural to try to categorize players in order to explain their motivation.  People relate to categories and examples help.  I think the writers have missed their mark here; even at that, the title is wrong.  The industry term ought to be "hex crawlers."

Anyone can be a hex crawler; everyone wants new experiences and everyone likes discovering a lost item.  Atmosphere, not being defined here, is a useless term; combat is not divorced from story.  Nor do I understand the point about being willing to move ever on.  I don't know of any player who wants to sit in the mud and stop the adventure from progressing.

Still, the publishers are trying to define people who are enthusiastic and involved, without casting these people as special.  Eager and keen players are the bread and butter of a DM's campaign and woah, yes, a DM can definitely identify them almost immediately.  Without their passion, interest and approval, D&D is a deadly dry game; when recognizing one of these gems in the group, it is almost impossible not to design the adventure—and especially the most pivotal parts of the adventure—around knowing that they'll seize the moment when it needs seizing.

"Atmosphere," I think, defines the intrinsic sense of being in a game and having control over the character's actions.  Whereas some players hold themselves aloof, or question every detail, or expect that the bad thing is going to pop out and grab them without warning, in some twisted unfair manner, enthusiastic players aren't concerned about "what ifs?", but "what now?"  This has nothing to do with "exploring," but getting their hands dirty and searching around is certainly one of the more evident signs of a player ready to engage with the game.

Let's look at those two things I'm to be I don't do as a DM: letting the player use their knowledge and keeping down their thirst for detail.

What?

No, seriously.  What?

I wonder what sort of absurd place a writer, a publisher and a game player has to be in to consider the player's knowledge of the game world as something that shouldn't be used in game play.  Try reading that using a different activity.  Be sure that quarterbacks don't use their knowledge of the gridiron to their own advantage.  Be sure that chess players don't use the knowledge of the board and pieces to their own advantage.  Be sure that doctors don't use their knowledge of the body to their own advantage.  Be sure that lawyers don't use their knowledge of the law to their own advantage.

In other words, take steps to make sure players aren't allowed allowed an advantage through the use of their brains.

Maybe this isn't what the prescription was meant to say.  This is what it does say, but I suspect there is some cultural implication at work here, where the words aren't included.  Don't let the player act to their own advantage over the welfare of other players?  Don't let the player remember details about the world so that the DM has to adhere to things said in the past?  Not trying to make strawmen here; I just don't know what the fuck this direction is meant to accomplish.  Maybe we don't mean "the game world;" maybe we mean the game's rules.  I still don't see that as a problem.  Please name a game, any game, where knowing the rules or knowing the boundaries of the game is considered something that needs to be suppressed.  I'll wait.

I present my game world expecting players to learn it, use it to their advantage and accomplish amazing things through that acquisition of knowledge.  This is a good thing.  If my player knows the game rules, all the better.

I just feel that somehow I'm be actively told by the company to kick my player in the teeth, jack them when they try to get ahead and argue that the book told me to do it.  Thus, demonstrating that it's my right.  That is just really fucked up.

Okay, the other one.  Be sure the explorer doesn't bore the other players or exhaust me with a thirst for detail.

Hm.

Usually the problem is ... reversed.  Players don't ask for enough.  A player that asks for detail is a good thing; but sure, I can think of some cases where the player wants me to give them the whole history of the region from geologic times to the present, or asks about the lineage of the royal line, or wants me to describe every brick in a dungeon wall.  However, I don't know what this has to do with "exploring."  It's a phenomenon I've only ever encountered in online games; I've never had a face-to-face player act this way and there might be a reason for that:  seeing my face, and the faces of other players, would probably wake the player up to the fact that they're within arm's reach.

What I'm saying is that players who ask for excessive detail are not explorers, they're trolls.  One favorite troll tactic is to ask questions, then sit back and amuse themselves while the victim spends time writing out an answer.  I don't know why this pleases these scumbag deplorables, but somehow there's a pleasure to be hand in forcing a victim to make themselves a puppet on a string, answering with hundreds of words while the troll punches out five or six in the form of a question.

In real life, while the question is being answered, the troll can't turn back to their video game or the questions they're asking other victims.  They can't get a cup of coffee and chat with a neighbour, getting back around to the chat when they please.  At a live game, they have to sit, and look interested, and nod their heads, while I explain in painful detail that first the movement of the plates caused an emergence of igneous rocks, that were folded atop themselves until metaphormosing, prior to weathering and other forces that eventually produced a sedimentary form that collected via rivers towards the sea, etcetera.  Because if someone really wants to troll me in my home, I know just how to pepper them back with questions and when to begin mocking the player so everyone can appreciate the show.  It's only on the internet that this is a problem.

In any case, the correct answers are, "You don't know" and "These are the only details that matter."  It's a fingersnap of a solution and it applies to every character at the table, not just this one type.  In any case, it really doesn't describe hex crawlers, who just want to get to the next place, or enthusiasts, who are more interested in what they do than what they see.  I have no idea how this bit of advice came into existence but I'm fairly sure the writers couldn't think of anything better and the space needed to be filled.

If you find yourself doing a bit of writing someday, be wary of the format that's shown on the page above.  At the outset, it will feel like a good idea to create headings like what a thing does, how to engage it and how to manage it.  But having created that straightjacket, often you'll find that while it really applied to one thing, it really doesn't apply very well to others.  Somewhere along the line you'll find yourself looking at a category you haven't defined very well, that you're not really clear on yourself, and yet now you have to provide concrete details about, because you provided those same details for something else.

Trust me.  This blog is littered with examples of me pushing myself into this trap.  This series is an example of it.  I've set myself to write comments and explain elements of each of these pages, patiently writing 2-3 posts per page, when I have no idea if I can maintain this process or not.  Every once in awhile, I find myself looking at a passage and thinking, "Okay, what in hell am I going to write about this?"  I'm definitely trapped, because I already wrote about the ten passages before this one, and surely if I skip this one it's going to be noticed.  As a result, I hem and haw and piece it together, finally writing something and hoping it doesn't look like a faceplant.  Been here fifty times with this blog.

That doesn't describe this post, however.  The reader can tell because it has been written just one day since the last post.  When I'm stuck, it takes two or three days, sometimes more, to suss it out.

The reason I jump in and try is because I know A LOT about D&D, and rule-making, and what DMs and players should do in given situations, and how to tell bullshit from truth.  I possess no compulsion to hesitate in calling out the former, because all my heroes are people who screamed bullshit when they saw it.  Watching these amateurs from the WOTC write this section of this book, when it's clear it wasn't written by people who have had a lot of experience directly and personally running games, particularly games that didn't depend on modules and such, makes this series a cake-walk.  At least, so far.  Once in awhile, they hit on something smart.  Once in awhile, they've painted themselves into a corner and thrown out a real boner.  I don't believe anyone responsible for this book really meant that players shouldn't be allowed to play the game well or use their knowledge to their advantage.  But time, confusion, bad editing, chance, a misunderstanding and probably a feeling that the "gist" of it would be understood by DMs who were afraid of rules lawyers and some such, caused the sentence to be written in a fashion that has no trouble jumping over the Fred Snodgrass bar.  Snodgrass was an unfortunate who made a boner.  I'm sure the participants here were also unfortunates ... though probably, most of them haven't read this passage since it was published and probably, most other people have never read it.

We can call that "exploring" ... because sometimes, digging this material out and really looking at it, I feel like I'm going to a place no one has gone before.

This series continues with The Place Where Rebellion & Incompetence Meet

Acting!

The first post in this series can be read here.

From p. 8 of 4th Edition's chapter, How to be a DM:

Most players enjoy many aspects of the game at different times. For convenience, we define the primary player motivations as types of players: actors, explorers, instigators, power gamers, slayers, storytellers, thinkers, and watchers.

 Actor

The actor likes to pretend to be her character. She emphasizes character development that has nothing to do with numbers and powers, trying to make her character seem to be a real person in the fantasy world. She enjoys interacting with the rest of the group, with characters and monsters in the game world, and with the fantasy world in general by speaking “in character” and describing her character’s actions in the first person.

The actor values narrative game elements over mechanical ones. Unlike the storyteller, she values her character’s personality and motivations over other story elements.

An Actor:

Provides PC background, emphasizing personality.

Plays according to her character’s motivations.

Prefers scenes where she can portray her character.

Often prefers social encounters to fights.

Engage the actor by:

Facilitating her PC’s personality and background development.

Providing roleplaying encounters.

Emphasizing her character’s personality at times.

Recruiting her to help create narrative campaign elements.

Be sure that the actor doesn’t:

Bore the other players by talking to everyone and everything.

Justify disruptive actions as being 'in character.'

Rating: vaguely true

Ah, 2007.   When we dared to dream that behaviour at the gaming table could be managed with a few simple bits of advice.  A time before professional actors were hired to pretend to be a DM and D&D characters, in a scripted romp that made so many think that they, too, could be an "actor!"

(slow, patient face-palm)

Do not engage the actor at all.  Don't facilitate the actor's personality, or background development, because these are enormously precious, personal things, and if you dare to have the world cater to these intimate, deeply idiosyncratic qualities with something as crass as actual game play, you'll soon find yourself dealing with a wounded sow, whose distress and trauma at the vilification of their cherished character has been insulted past all decency!  If you provide role-playing encounters, you'll absolutely bore the shit out of the other players ... or create pissing contests of supposed acting prowess between players that will bring deep, stabbing pains to your bowels.  Don't do it.  Just don't.

Take the actor in hand and lead them gently from your home.  Help them into your car.  Drive them to the center of the nearest large city, until you reach a theatre.  Get out, walk around the car, help the actor out onto the pavement ... at which time, club them like a seal, kick them repeatedly, drag them to the theatre's doorstep and drive away.

Sorry, this is as positive as I can be.  The beneficial effects this will have upon your game world, if you have been miserably subjected to the actor up until now, will be unprecedented.  The sun will shine, the birds will sing, the players will become interested in the game world and the intense stink of saccharine ego will have been fumigated from the experience.

I find it hard to identify just when this acting bug infested the game.  I never encountered it in my early days, and three of the players I had were fellow actors in high school drama—yes, I was one too.  There isn't a word of "being your character" or "choosing your character's personality" in AD&D that I can remember.  Here is Moldvay's example of creating a player character; apart from alignment, there isn't a word about the character's personality:

I have to believe it rose somehow out of the Dragon Magazine, or perhaps one of the other D&D copycats that came out in the 1980s.  I don't remember it in Rolemaster, Traveller, Gammaworld, Top Secret or Paranoia, all of which I played.  Maybe Steve Jackson invented the idea.  Wherever it came from, however, it has arisen like a plague on the land, drowning game play in purplish language that wouldn't pass a grade 3 English test.  What is it, exactly, that encourages adult players that it's rational to make every character statement sound like it was invented by a medieval-themed fast-food restaurant chain?

It isn't just that it's acting.  It's bad acting.  Atrociously bad acting.  Mystery Theatre 3000 acting.  Yet the participant never seems to realize that; somehow, they adopt a demeanour like John Lovitz crying out his superiority to Laurence Olivier. 

[Hm.  That reference is probably very dated.  Well, I'm very old]

The book's advice is probably as well as most people could do in 2007, if the motivation is inclusiveness.  And it must be, since the female pronoun is used throughout—which has never made sense to me.  Using the other sex is still sexist.  It ought to be rewritten using the plural, but I'm quoting here so my hands are tied.  My point is that, before so many examples of creating backstory and character traits, with evidence provided by so many media sources that have appeared since 2010, this old 4e attempt might have been a half-decent attempt to encourage DMs to get such players under control.

The disease has become so widespread, however, that zero tolerance is the only practical solution.  I simply don't allow players to "pretend to be another person" while gaming with me.  I have no problem with them gaming their characters in the first person or the third person, so long as they make no special distinctions between "What I as a player do" and "What my character would do."  I am a fan of roleplaying.  I stage conversations between my players and me all the time, and do so expecting the player to adhere to the dialogue without anachronism or derailment.  But for the love of cheeseballs, talk like a human being; act like a human being.  Don't behave like a pantomime stock character from a children's Cumberland Lake District performance in July funded by the Conservative Party.  Have a little decency around other people.

This series continues with Where No One Has Gone Before

The Truth About Fun

From p. 7-8 of 4th Edition's chapter, How to be a DM:

"The last essential component of a D&D game is fun. It’s not the DM’s job to entertain the players and make sure they have fun. Every person playing the game is responsible for the fun of the game. Everyone speeds the game along, heightens the drama, helps set how much roleplaying the group is comfortable with, and brings the game world to life with their imaginations. Everyone should treat each other with respect and consideration, too—personal squabbles and fights among the characters get in the way of the fun.

"Different people have different ideas of what’s fun about D&D. Remember that the 'right way' to play D&D is the way that you and your players agree on and enjoy. If everyone comes to the table prepared to contribute to the game, everyone has fun.

"Everybody plays D&D to have fun, but different people get their enjoyment from different aspects of the game. If you’re preparing and running a game for a group of players, understanding player motivations—what they enjoy about the game and what makes them happiest when they play—helps you build a harmonious group of players and a fun game for all."

Rating:  true

This is a little bit of therapy, though perhaps some folks need that.  In a larger sense, however, we're not talking about fun.  We're talking about maturity.

Break down the above without using "fun" as the carrot, which is the message.  Be responsible for yourself.  Focus on the game.  Treat others with respect.  Don't be selfish.  Cooperate.  Basic virtues that smooth the road for yourself and for other people.  When someone isn't cooperating, and is being selfish, deriding others, derailing the game or acting unconcerned; or demanding that other people need to act in a certain way ... not only do we not have fun (which is a reward people understand), we also build memories of gaming that discourage us from wanting to play in the future.

I imagine my regular readers expected I'd disparage this section on fun but I must tell you, this is the first group of sentences that all make sense and all need to be there.  On the surface, this may seem like the usual drivel, but it targets every problem you'll have as a DM.  Problems that you're bound to ignore, because it's uncomfortable confronting others—especially your friends, about their poor behaviour.  Most of the time you'll let it pass, for reasons you won't think about.  Let's break that down:

1.  You want to please them.  They're your friends.  Even before the running starts, your thoughts will be full of, "I hope they like this adventure" and "I had better do it this way, or they won't have any fun."  Chances are, you spend most of your life fine-tuning your personality and your choices for the sake of other people—and you believe that you have to do that or other people won't like you.  If this gets to be a constant habit—and I notice that it is with most people—then after a time you'll be seen as a "go along, get along" sort of person, and others around you will make assumptions about your willingness to tag along with them to the bar they like or take part in the activities they like.  If you occasionally find yourself in situations where you're not having a good time, while others around you seem to be, you have probably become this sort of person.

Being concerned about ensuring the happiness of others and "respecting them" is not the same thing.  We're responsible for our behaviour towards other people.  We should speak considerately, help when they're in distress, ensure their welfare, give them a leg up when they need it and act like a good host, so that they have comfort and feel safe while they're in our homes.  There are things we should do towards seeing that they have a good time.  We lay out snacks, we clean the bathroom and the play space, we shower, we have our books ready, we maintain a positive attitude about the game and we ask them how they are and show we're listening to them.

We do not, however, change ourselves to suit their needs.  If we don't want to see a hockey game, we say so, and expect them to take our opinion into account without judging us.  Maybe we'll see that hockey game, but we want some recognition that it isn't our first choice and that if we go, we won't be expected to act like we're as excited about it as the next person.  With D&D, as a DM, this adventure is the best we have today.  If the players don't like it, oh well; I wasn't able to do better and they ought to understand that.  If I feel the adventure needs this, then it does; fun has nothing to do with it.  A DM has to take risks, see what works, do their best, judge how to do it better in the future and try things out, even if that means a faceplant now and then.  A DM has to be bold.  A DM cannot spend all their time obsequiously trying to ensure that others have fun.  If the players feel respected, they shouldn't need to be ingratiated.

Chances are, however, if you have this urge to please others, that probably runs pretty deep and you're not going to rid yourself of it without a lot of work and undoubtedly therapy.  The need to ingratiate will be a crippling element of your DMing and your players will walk all over you, because that's the signal beeping atop your head.  If you can't draw the line, you can't DM.

2.  You won't adjudicate.  That is, you're incapable of taking sides when a squabble or fight starts.  It can be hard when you're put in a position of having two friends fight.  You don't want to pick one over the other; you don't want to be seen as favouring anybody; and you worry that if you support Fred, George will hate you.  So you sit, helplessly, while the fight goes on, eating up the game, muttering out stupid sooky phrases like, "Can't we get along," or acting the self-righteous tyrant and shouting, "No one will fight at my game table!"  Both tactics will only prove you don't care about what the players obviously care about—they're fighting over it, after all—you only care how you will be perceived.  You only want others to behave as you expect them to.  Your lack of investment in the squabble is a sign of your selfishness.

Most likely, this is how you are all the time; and chances are it arose from a conflict-heavy childhood, in which your parents argued constantly, causing you to adapt to that by hating argument and automatically retreating from it.  You didn't know this defense mechanism would also force you to see those conflicts only in how they affect you, since there was no one around to explain the conflict, why it was happening or give you a chance to engage with the subject matter as opposed to the irrational shouting.  As a result, you hate shouting, or even voice tones that suggest shouting will start soon.  When that conflict-detector kicks in, you stop listening.  Out of habit, you shut down, the words cease getting through and you just want everyone to stop it.  So that you will be more comfortable.

Other people care about things.  Other people care enough that they will fight to defend their positions on what they care about.  Peacemaking is not accomplished by telling everyone to be peaceful.  Instead, we resolve the matter.  We step in, impose a formality to the argument, giving each person to state their side, and then WE pick one of the two sides and give our position.  As a DM, we do that with the weight of being the person in charge of the game.  And yes, that's what we are.  We are not just "another player."  We're running this show; and we do so legitimately because we listen, we consider both sides, we render our judgement and then we turn to the loser and explain, "Here's why I didn't take your side."  Then, if we see the winner gloating, we turn and we say, "What the hell are you smiling at?  I agreed with your position but you could have been more polite in making it.  Shake your friend's hand"—or words to that effect.

If you can't settle arguments, and the players can't settle them either, those arguments will fester and grow and consume your campaign and both friendships.

Chances are, if you're unable to handle conflicts as I've described, you won't be able to change that behaviour easily.  Once again, problems handling conflicts is an issue for you and your therapist.  There are many roles and professions that involve regular, difficult conflict resolution: police officer, doctor, call center operator, sales manager, restaurant server.  Another one of those roles is dungeon master.  If you can't resolve conflicts, you can't be a DM.

3. You think the game is about you.  The DM has the most power at the table and is the least important person as regards the game.  This makes very little sense to some people.  During a game, I invent the description, I invent the non-player characters and I invent the speech coming out of their mouths; I run the fights; as I've already explained, I am the table's croupier.

However, I do not lay bets.  I do not win anything.  I do not coordinate a plan.  I do not have an ambition that needs achievement.  Oh, yes, I want an adventure to sort itself out and reach a climax, but I'm a very good DM and I know well in advance, months, sometimes years in advance, that eventually the players will open the door or discover the chest or meet the guy that sorts out the mystery.  This is a done deal for me the minute I concoct the adventure in my head.  The "ambition" is to concoct the mystery; running the mystery merely involves methodical attention to the details.

Most DMs, I think, don't get this.  Even after I explain it, the numbers don't add up.  My description above seems ... lacking.  "What?  I'm supposed to just 'run' the game?  Where's the fun in that?"  Exactly.  It isn't fun.  The players run around, fighting monsters, feeling the fear of failure and the triumph of victory, twisting their brains to figure out the mystery or deciding what they want to do from thousands of interesting possibilities ... and I just sit there, asking, "What do you want to do next?"

I am amused at what players decide to do.  I feel tremendous satisfaction when something I've described gets the players really going: fuddling around trying to figure out how to get in the castle; turning pale when some really horrific monster is only mentioned as possibly being in the neighbourhood; or rubbing their hands with glee as I pour out treasure at their feet.  I'm disappointed when a monster I expected to give the party real trouble fizzles out and dies in a few rounds.  Not because I loved the monster, but because I've just realized I should have thrown three of them.  I'm disappointed in myself; I don't give a damn about the monster.  I don't love any of my monsters.  They serve a purpose and that is all they're good for.  I hate it when I listen to DMs wax on about how much they love some NPC who's just been killed by a player.

That is because DMs like this want the game to be about them.  They think the game is about them.  They think because they do all the talking and designing; because they have the last word; because they call out the bets and rake in the house's take; that somehow, this whole game revolves around them.

This is called primacy.  We all have it to some degree.  It starts in us when we're babies and we don't know what the world is all about—but we do figure out fast that it is about us.  We cry and we get fed.  We're uncomfortable and we get changed.  Life is pretty straightforward; and it's obvious these massive giants in our universe are here to please us.  Slowly, we learn the truth.  That truth is hard and unpleasant.  We're not the center of the universe.  We're not here to be served.  We're expected to do for ourselves, and care about other people and act appropriately in ways that do not involve bawling for the things we want.  It's awful.  It is a huge step down from being a pampered baby.

A certain number of people are raised by parents who believe that the child's happiness is the ultimate goal, and that every other emotion or expectation is subservient to that goal.  They think the child should be happy all the time, and if they're not, then something is wrong and it has to be corrected.  The result is that many of these children grow up to be people who are not at peace with their other emotions.  This hurts them and it hurts their relationships; and when they drift into a role where it appears that everyone else gathers in a circle at their feet, and hangs on their every word, making responses that appear to confirm that they are the most important person in the room, they fail to recognize the actual parameters of their role and end up acting like an enormous douchebag.

This happens all over this culture, from low-level managers who don't see that their role is to facilitate sales and productivity, to minor officials who see themselves as supernumerary gatekeepers who are designated to preserve society by keeping out the hordes ... to dungeon masters who think that because they've built the game and its their table, that they are the most important player and that, obviously, it is their job to cheat the dice, railroad the players and make sure that everyone has a good time, THEIR WAY.  So they can feel good about themselves, as the person who knows what's best for other people!

If you are this person, then either you stopped reading five paragraphs ago, or you absolutely do not think that you are this person and you're already self-explaining the seven reasons you're not like this—and anyway, I don't know what I'm talking about, that's obvious.  There is nothing that can be done about these people, except to stay away from them until they're hit accidentally by a truck or something.  You know, a bad thing that's an act of god, so none of us feel bad or responsible or anything.

It never happens soon enough.

Honest.  There ought to be a policy of ensuring that everyone gets therapy, just to effectively locate these people and weed them out of positions of authority.  They will never, ever, willingly put themselves in a place where others have the power to judge them.  So most of the time, unless they get caught committing a crime, none of these monsters ever get therapy.

Last remarks.

"Fun" is easy.  It happens when the people around us are not actively behaving in weak, selfish, abusive or otherwise self-aggrandising fashion.  Clean up your gaming group, clean up yourself, and fun will come naturally.  People online often say, "A good game needs good players."  Truth is, we can teach people how to be good players.  It is much harder to teach players how to be good people.

This series continues with Acting!