Sorry

 

Hard Lines

I like to use movies and books as examples, because they're universal.  Either the reader has seen it or might see it; anything can be easily downloaded and watched in minutes for a few bucks.  The more popular the media, the better it works as an example.  The source doesn't have to be good; in only has to be relevant.

Near the beginning of 2008's Taken, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) approaches the performer Sheerah (Holly Valance) about his daughter wanting to be a singer.  Sheerah blows him off, but after he protects her against an attacker and recovers, she answers his question:

"So your daughter wants to be a singer ... you know, it's not what everyone thinks it is.  Once the glam wears off, it's just a lot of hotel rooms.  Lots of airports." {producing a card} "The first number is Gio, my vocal coach.  If he says she can sing, she can sing.  He'll give her the coaching she needs.  The fee is on me.  The second number is my manager.  If Gio clears her, he'll make sure she gets a shot."

Realities.  Most artists will never get an opportunity like this.  The gift Sheerah gives Mills represents about fifty hoops that his daughter won't have to jump through.  Most artists who jump through the hoops or get this opportunity won't get past Gio.  Why does Gio get to decide?  Because Gio knows what he's doing, and the manager knows Gio knows.  Most who get approved by Gio can't afford Gio.  That's how it goes.

Life is full of hard lines that you and I will never be permitted to cross.  You can't pass the courses and handle the material, and survive internship, you don't get to be a doctor.  If you can't make it through boot camp, you don't get to be a soldier; and if you're not a deliberate sort of person, you probably won't survive on a battlefield.  We pretend these hard lines are arbitrary; we pretend that Gio doesn't know, or that medical school or the army rooked us ... or for that matter, we weren't really fired from McDonalds.  We were cheated.  Better we believe that than we accept the shame of being fired from McDonalds.

[I wasn't, as it happens.  I was fired from Burger King]

We cannot talk about cultivating players without first talking about which players we allow past the hard line of our game world.  If you don't want to impose a hard line; if you think being a DM is about being "democratic," or you have to be democratic because beggars can't be choosers ... I think you better stop and look at the hard line on which you might be on the wrong side.

You've got to control your space.  You've got to manage the people in it.  That "management" is compassionate, forgiving, encouraging and supportive ... but it is also provisional.  Your players must be "seeds" you can grow.  Otherwise you're wasting hard work, sun and water on what might as well be small stones.

Don't try to find four players.  Find two good ones.  This is hard.  You've got to find two.  They've got to know what they're doing, why they're there and what to expect.  Find two players and the third is easier.  If the third lasts, finding players after that is shooting fish in a barrel.  The fourth player and those after find themselves sitting at a table with a capable DM and three true believers.  The DM can comfortably decide who's allowed to play thereafter.

There are several hard lines here.  You've got to be a capable DM.  You've got to find the two good players.  You've got to make the 3rd player want to stay.  The two good players have to acknowledge you as capable, by their standards, not yours.  You fail on any of these lines?  You fail everything.

You can get bad players.  You can get two or three or ten.  They won't hold you to any standard.  You, absolutely, won't be allowed to hold them to one.  Bad players don't want to be held to a standard, not even their own ... otherwise, they wouldn't be bad players.

Understand?  No hard line, no payoff.  No cultivation, no player investment, no immersion, no expandablezs game world.  Just indifferent players demanding plot hooks and upgrades.  Enjoy.

What is a "good player"?  Don't raise your expectations too high.  A good player is one who is polite, respects the rules, has consideration for other people and at least a year's experience with the game.  Among adults in any other activity, this would describe virtually everyone.  In role-playing games, this sounds like shooting the moon.  And we want two of them?  Napoleon might as well go to war against two Dutchmen.

Says something.

'Course, this presupposes a DM who's polite, respects the rules and has consideration for other people.  So, in fact, we need three of them.

The RPG game culture is toxic.  This is why every discussion of D&D has to be filtered through arguments like, "I knew this group of people who when they tried this thing it turned out so bad which proves it doesn't work."  Or, "I just want to feel like I'm allowed to be myself and do my thing without being held to a standard that I didn't invent."  Or, "I hear what you're saying but it makes absolutely no sense to me."  Or, "Maybe that's true ... for you."  Hold your head up and draw a hard line somewhere and you're going to be challenged.  Finding hard lines and challenging them has become a sport.  It's easy to get lost; to wander aimlessly between the maze of existing opinions; to self-doubt; and ultimately, to do nothing.  To resist getting a game started at all; or to resist taking the two or three toxic players in your campaign aside and ask them politely to just go.  "Please.  I like you fine as human beings, but what you're bringing to my game every week isn't what I want.  I'm sorry.  I'm going to have to cut you."

It cultivation terms, this is called "weeding the garden."  We weed the garden so that wanted plants can grow.  If the goal is just to "grow plants," then we can leave the weeds there, let them starve out everything that isn't a weed and succeed at our goal.  Come September, we will certainly have grown plants.  The weeds will be tall and majestic and devoid of edible material.

That's the option.  If the garden's going to thrive and produce food — the usual reason we plant a garden — then the weeds have got to go.  The weeds are not going to appreciate a game world where fictional creatures and persons deserve respect and affection.  They're not going to be concerned with the well-being of others, players and non-players alike.  They're weeds.  They spread through the soil, they make it toxic, they destroy everything except themselves and they produce nothing.   It is absolute stupidity to advocate for a constructive, layered, complex game world and immersive milieu if the weeds are going to puff themselves up, suck up the water, blot out the sun and make every plant of value die.

This is not optional.  It's this hard line or it's a garden full of crap.  Your decision.

Having weeded the garden, the cumulative result is always positive.  Gardening is not rocket science.  If you pull the weeds — and this presumes you recognize the weeds, which can puzzle a noob — the other plants will drink the water and find the sun.  They'll grow on their own.  As a DM, have faith in that.  If you pick the weeds out of your campaign, what's left will thrive.  In game terms, this describes players capable of appreciating the DM's efforts; players who want the DM to do well.  This promotes a mutual understanding of the Player-DM dynamic, from both sides.  Each player gives sufficient room and respect to the others.  Each gives deference to the DM, who views the players as cherished participants in the game process.  Jocularity and jovialness replace snark and attention-seeking.  The group as a whole bonds together.

Inclusiveness is a terrible premise for a group activity.  As a society, we often pay lip service to it, especially in the ears of children.  As DMs, there's space for only so many people.  Save that space for people who deserve it.

As you work up the gumption to recognize the needfulness of this, we'll continue on our discussion of making a garden, er, a D&D world, without false fronts and cardboard people.

Beyond the Cardboard Game World

Before having any possibility of comprehending an NPC's motivations, we've simply got to free ourselves from the ludicrous, narrow, flimsy story-development that pretends to operate as a "game world."  For that, let's look again at the mystery novel — and by extension, ANY story.

It doesn't matter if we're talking of Frederic Dannay's Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple or Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.  Even if the novel runs into a hundred thousand words, the amount of world that has to be created is pitifully small.  We need a train, an Egyptian resort, a library or a conservatory; a few street corners, a shop maybe; or an empty highway at night.  We don't need to explain any of this!  At most, we give the name of the house owner and maybe how he made his money; but these are a few fleeting paragraphs that provide no hard details about anything except the character's relation to it.  We don't need to set our novel in the whole country of Egypt; a few set-pieces will do as a stand-in.  And while the train needs porters and engineers, or the house needs servants, or the dirty side of town needs some hoods and cops, none of this needs to be meaningfully researched and portrayed.  In fact, it doesn't remotely need to be accurate, in any sense.  If the reader is told that Luxor is in the city of Karnak, the number of readers who actually know that "Luxor" was an ancient city and that Karnak is a temple doesn't actually matter, because most readers are dead ignorant and it's not going to hurt our sales.  In the framework of the book, Karnak serves as a city name as well as any other "Egyptian-sounding" word.  John Oliver's been pointing this out for years.  As far as the book's story goes, it changes nothing.

This habit is exactly reflected in D&D:  we need a town, a dungeon, a road between the town and the dungeon, a few necessary shops, some kind of faction that wants to overthrow something, a villain, a wiseman ... and there, we're pretty much done.  The "story" that gets pitched as "the thing" needn't have too many characters or place names, because they're hard to remember and anyway, they all look alike.  In a novel, even if we want two different planets, such as Arrakis and Caladan, it's easy enough to declare both have homogenous geographies and cultures — which we need only describe with regards to exactly those things that apply to the story — even though the only planet we actually know has neither a homogeneous geography or a homogeneous culture.  But hey, it's the future.  Of course that's how it shakes out.  After all, our knowledge of the future amounts to nil.

Since we know it's "impossible" to create a game world, because it's too much work, we can see how the shrinking straightjacket of the "story campaign" grossly simplifies the DM's workload.  If the gameworld is as narrow as a set of railroad tracks, we only need a train station, enough roads to hold a carriage, a hotel and thus an action scene ... before returning to the station to get on to the next town.  As a DM, I have to create very few things.  In fact, I don't have to "create" the station, since we know what a station looks like.  The hotel is memory-banked too.  It's all familiar.  As far as the rest, the town might as well be the set-up that fools Mongo and Hedley's goons ... which, point of fact, is a movie satirizing weak Hollywood storytelling, something lost amidst the adoration of fart jokes.

Even when a DM prances and struts about, talking about the cool stories in their game world, it's a STAGE they're running, with cardboard houses and cardboard people ... it makes perfect sense to give them black-and-white character traits like "all watchmen are bad," "beggers rob foreigners" and the like.  It's an eensie-weensie bit removed from "immigrants are rapists" and "people from shit-hole countries."  These are the stories that "work" with the masses.  The countries look like shit-holes on the news because we pick the camera angles that make the story simple.  The news shows us how superior and exceptional we are, which supports the argument that foreigners want "our stuff."  The houses have one side.  It's enough for a "story."

Therefore, when I say we want a "game world," I mean doing more than inventing a plausible reason for players to visit a set piece, which we paint up real pretty and hang with combat opportunities and treasure.  And let's have it understood: apart from conceiving the game in terms of whom the party meets, and where they go, most DMs have no clue what I'm talking about.  Everything past "person," "place" and "conflict" is a total fucking mystery.  And this is why I'm calling this series of posts right now "The Other D&D."  

To address this mystery, I'll start with a traditional source, one that won't get me in trouble:

"When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

"Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar, and had been the wonder of the Shire for sixty years, ever since his remarkable disappearance and unexpected return.  The riches he had brought back from his travels had now become a local legend, and it was popularly believed, whatever the old folk might say, that the Hill at Bag End was full of tunnels stuffed with treasure.  And if that was not enough for fame, there was also his prolonged vigour to marvel at.  Time wore on, but it seemed to have little effect on Mr. Baggins.  At ninety he was much the same as at fifty.  At ninety-nine they began to call him well-preserved; but unchanged would have been nearer the mark.  There were some that shook their heads and though this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexaustible wealth.

" 'It will have to be paid for,' they said.  'It isn't natural, and trouble will come of it.' "

On first reading, this is certainly about Bilbo, a person about whom you've never heard.  But knowing Bilbo as we do, it's equally clear that this paragraph is also about the people who aren't Bilbo.  It gives us a very clear idea of what this "Hobbiton" is like — and it's a place not unfamiliar.  The people are rather plodding and filled with simple minded platitudes; while they can recognize a detail when they see it, they haven't the imagination, even in a world filled with magic, to imagine what Bilbo's nature is or where it comes from.  They are sure they're getting the short end of the stick; and equally sure that in the end, everyone does — otherwise, it's hard to reconcile one's stick-handle.

Note also that while a consequence is expected, there's no hint of an action that ought to be taken.  There isn't for paragraph after paragraph, except perhaps a feeling that Frodo, at 33, ought to take a wife.  We learn all about the various persons in Hobbiton and their opinions of Bilbo and Frodo, but nothing whatsoever is suggested of an "adventure."  Why would it be?  None of the people in Hobbiton, except for Bilbo, have any inkling of such a thing — and Bilbo only does because he was pulled off down a road many years before and he wants to return to a place he's been.

I'm saying that when we create a setting, we don't create motives for the players with it.  If the players were to enter Hobbiton, such as we readers of the story do, they would meet a bunch of farmers; and hear a bunch of rumours, all of which were about what a queer fellow this Bilbo is and none of which would suggest the least adventure.  And if the players were to meet Bilbo, thinking he represented an adventure, they would find very, very little there, indeed.

Do remember that the first part of the novel covers a space of twelve years ... years of conjecture, of watching Frodo grow older and listening to the town's folk talk.  If the reader is thinking, "Ah, but then Gandalf shows up," consider if the player characters happen across the town when Bilbo is only 106.  What then?  The most powerful ring in the world is in Bilbo's possession, but how would anyone know?

Exactly.

Tolkein is interested in getting on with the story, and does in his good time ... but before then, he's also interested in describing a world in which other stories can take place.  He carefully crafts the town and its environs, introduces rumours of dwarves and Gandalf visiting Bilbo, cleverly building the setting between the chattering of the townsfolk.  We get a sense of these people as they tell "stories" ... but none of these stories have arcs.  They're gossiping.  They're not building quests.

If the PCs get it in their heads to visit Bilbo, then it's their idea, not the setting-maker's.  Just as it's up to the reader to turn the page and go on reading.  The writer won't do it for you.  Oh, we'll entice you, work on your curiousity, build up the habit of your turning pages ... but it's still an action that you perform.  And as you do, you learn.

Now, when Agatha tells you about the Orient Express, she tells you virtually nothing.  She doesn't care if you ever get on that train.  She may mention a few details, but they'll be fleeting because, hey, the cravat or boots of this or that possible murderer is what really matters.  In all truth, "Oriental Express" sounds romantic.  It has no more bearing on the plot than the "mysterious-sounding" and yet utterly forgettable town names the train rolls through as the mystery is solved.

Cultivating players from traditional D&D into the Other D&D begins first with introducing them to a game world where the residents and the day-to-day goings on matter.  Where conversations with the locals tend to be about tangible local things; their lives, the local gossip, things beyond their ken, troubles they can't manage, their worries about the season's food supply and so on.  But under that, all the things they know but they don't say.  The stories they don't tell.  At least, not until they trust.  Until then, it's business as usual: grow the crops, fish the sea, haul this or that to town, open the shop, respect the strong, prey on the weak.  And hide everything the party wishes they could know about.

Initially, without experiencing it, this seems a hard game to sell.  But in fact, as you add more and more details, teaching the players where they are and how things work, the tactile sensations and descriptions gather and take shape.  As these NPCs who have no game agenda become familiar and fundamental to the experience, the players grow fond of them; the PCs become concerned for their well-being.  They become an entity worth fighting for — beyond the simple motivations of rushing to enrich themselves.  With time, the players either put down roots, or they move on ... but somehow, moving on through a world that's constantly full of description and people doing something fruitful becomes wearying.  The panoply of rambling seems empty and fruitless compared to the possibility of building something permanent.

For a person who rambles in the real world, this is very hard to understand.  In the real world, it's very hard to build anything.  It's hard to get a stake, to risk the pleasure of eating, to risk losing everything that's invested ... which is why many of us never feel inclined.  But D&D has far less of a downside; and where it comes to fantasy, the possibility of doing something great, which we know we'll never do in real life, has an appeal all its own.

There's no appeal in building something in a game world that is all false-fronts and empty cardboard husks.  There's no fondness for meaningless placenames and expositional characters.  There's just "do the next thing," like working on an assembly line where someone else gets to play with the toys being assembled.  True enough, traditional D&D is better than a lot of things.  But it falls far, far short in enabling players to do things that matter.

We'll talk more of this, digging deeper into how a world that educates players cultivates better players.

Active not Passive

For days, I've been wrestling with this question: "How do we make the world so dynamic that the players want to bond together to protect themselves against the game world?"  I've been arguing the goal is fear; that anxiety is essentially excitement, making it the drug of choice.  None of which explains how it's actually done.  We can ask the players to "get immersed," but get immersed in what, exactly?

When I can force myself to watch more than 30 seconds of something like Critical Role, I find the game's pacing and direction is excruciatingly passive.  The process is this slow crawl into a scene where the characters listen to an NPCs performance, ask questions, glean a clue to the story and move onto the next scene.  This seems a stylized version of the modules I see, where the characters crawl into a room, listen to the DMs patient description of the room, poke about, glean a bit of something from the space and move thence to the next room.  Things are accepted as they are, while moments of excitement, where dice are rolled, are met clinically as the next thing that happens, and no more than that.  Entering a room, fighting a monster and picking up afterwards play out with no more concern than standing at a streetcorner and waiting to be picked up by a bus.  Everything is so carefully paced, like an Ellery Queen novel.  The next move is always clear — having learned all they can from the apothecary, it is time to move onto the market; when matters at the market have been learned, it's time to load up an leave town, to seek the shrine.  When the events at the shrine have played out, the next place to be seen is always perfectly obvious, because it is given to the players by the DM.

My games do not function like this at all.  Passive players are frustrated because they don't know where to go.  Not knowing where to go, they imagine I have a place in mind that I'm refusing to give them.  I must be refusing, otherwise, they'd know.  It never dawns that there is no place to go.  Or rather, any place is fine.  It doesn't matter.  Unlike the standard format, where every event contributes to a single narrative, I have no single narrative.

Cliche: suppose the players enter an ordinary-looking village that happens to have a vampire resident.  If this were a traditional adventure, each member of the village would possess a single clue, from which the players would put together the puzzle of what was happening, who was responsible and where the vampire's resting place is located.  The adventure functions like a book or a movie; the outsiders progress from scene to scene, moving from the exposition to the rising action, meeting the climax and descending to the denouement.  Standard storytelling.

If a vampire resided in a village in my game, the villagers would certainly be the last to know anything.  There are tens of thousands of villages, in all sorts of locations, and vampires possess an exceptional intelligence.  They would certainly pick a residence lacking in significant thinkers.  If there were any, these would absolutely be the first to die.  Moreover, an intelligent vampire wouldn't be spawning dozens of kin, which would be idiocy and a sure way to bring a vampire hunter from far away.  No, there would be a gentle, quiet culling of the herd, from dozens of surrounding villages and roadways, using victims for a time and then getting rid of them.

Thus, if the players were to enter the village, there would be no expositional scenes at all.  No one knows anything.  If a few of them even recognized the disappearances, they would assign the blame to a dozen possibilities, with no one agreeing and no one having any clues to give.  If the players knew a vampire was present, at best they'd have a map to throw darts at.  They could start a house-to-house search ... but doing so would probably get them in trouble with the authorities and would certainly tell the vampire they were looking.  People talk.  Anything the players did would be observed and relayed; and either the vampire, or the one associate the vampire controls as a mind-slave, a la Renquist, would soon learn about it.

So, how to solve this?  As a DM, not my problem.  It's not.  I'm not here to lead the party by the nose, telling them what to do.  I'm not here to craft the exposition carefully like Agatha Christie.  I'm here to make the village, plant the vampire, know where the vampire is planted and then describe things that happen once the players start taking actions.  This isn't passive.  If the players want to achieve anything, they must act.

Look.  In a Poirot mystery, Miss Agatha has followed her dictum and worked backwards from knowing who the murderer is.  Poirot appears on the scene, like he's supposed to.  He's introduced to a finite number of characters, never more than 12, so he knows who to interview.  The characters produce a finite number of scenes, or locations, so he knows where to go.  Each scene or location has a specific collection of things which Poirot never fails to find.  From this, in true Miss Agatha style, Poirot conveniently confronts everyone, suddenly introducing clues and information never mentioned until they come out of his mouth, obviously given to him by the Dungeon Mistress, and the whole thing is wrapped up in a neat bundle.

This is not remotely realistic or, in fact, believable.  You may find this fare to your liking, but personally to me, it smells.  In any case, D&D is not a mystery or any kind of novel.  It's a game world.  An infinite game world.  In it, while Poirot is solving the mystery, he finds that half the suspects can't be found.  He goes to the locations they describe and finds next to nothing.  The police are looking for the probable murderer — but so far, have come up empty.  Poirot has no proof, no hard evidence, just a tiny pile of either facts or lies ... and so he has to write it out in a dull report, put the few bits of evidence he's located into a plastic bag, file it, and wait for the next case.  Because that's how it actually works.

The players either come to their senses and leave the village, recognizing they're not ready to go one-on-one against a vampire.  Or ... they take stock of themselves, figure maybe they're tough enough, expect a full-on press from the vampire and whatever minions there might be — and make sure the vampire knows they're coming.  It's either that, or they think of something else.  I don't know what that might be.  It's not my job to know.

It's MY job that when the players leave the village, there's something happening in the next town.  Something else.  It's MY job that wherever they go, what they see and learn is believable and fluid.  But that's it.  I'm under no obligation to make each element of the campaign fit together logically ...  no more than the real world does.  You may go to Walmart and watch a fistfight take place there; but you wouldn't expect to walk over to Starbucks and have the barista tell you what the fistfight was about.  That would be really freaky!  You would have trouble believing something like that.  And if you left Starbucks, got in your car and one of the fist-fighters started hammering on your window, you would not roll the thing down and learn what they had to say.  That would be lunacy.  But shit happens like this in game adventures all the time, and players just shrug and assume it's how the game is played.

It's a crutch.  It helps make a complicated environment seem small and two-dimensional.  Easy to comprehend.  Not threatening.  Because clearly, whatever happens next was meant to happen.  The barista was meant to explain the fight to you.  The fellow knocking on your driver-side window has important information to tell you about the adventure.  You know, the one you're on.  Because, you know you're on an adventure.  It's the lens through which you see everything.

But I want to kick that crutch out from under you.  I want the game world to be huge.  And complicated.  With multiple storylines, having nothing to do with each other.  So you don't know what's what.  This is scary.  It's no scarier than the real world ... except, you know, for all the dragons and magic and terrible awful evil.  But you have magic and weapons and your good sense; you're supposed to handle all this bad stuff.  That's the game.  You. against. everything.  Good luck.

For people who've never played D&D this way, it can be pretty hard.  It can feel "wrong."  It should.  By virtue of everything Gygax and the rest of them wrote, it's absolutely not the way D&D was meant to be played.  But from my perspective, beginning in 1979 with certain DMs who did play the Gygax framework, I hated it.  I hated knowing what I was supposed to do next.  I hated having the DM frame everything in three choices or less.  As a fighter, standing on an imaginary street, listening to the conversation between the party and some apothecary, all I could think was, "What the hell do we even care about some magic stone or sword that's going to give one of us a +10% bonus to hit?  Why don't we just ride out, find a bunch of bad people beating up good people, and kill them?  For that matter, why don't we just be bad people and beat up good people?  What difference does it make, as long as we're doing what we want?"

But nope.  Instead, we have stand here and listen to this sucky story about some shrine, so we can go meet some other blathering person at the market who will give a map, so we can haul our ass into the middle of nowhere and spend an hour solving some fucking puzzle ... sigh.

I didn't see this as a way to spend my evenings.  So I started building this other pattern of play, pushing players into acting for themselves, without the crutches.  While there was definitely some learning to be done — as expected — steadily I acquired players who preferred to think for themselves.  And while they learned to make plans among themselves, I learned how to build a game world that provided me with information at my fingertips.  I got to know the game backwards and forwards.  Narratives emerged that the players built, by having ambitions that told them where to go next, rather than having me do it.  These ambitions suggested obstacles they would logically encounter, which they fruitfully overcame, giving them a feeling of accomplishment that was far and away superior to obtaining some powerful magic item or sword.  When players begin to build colonies out of the jungle on the coast of Africa by simply deciding they want to go there with supplies, soldiers, their guts and a can-do spirit, as a DM there's nothing to do but to fill the jungles and watch the party lay waste.  When the party ACTS, instead of WAITS, the game plays on a whole new level.

But it is terrifying to act.  Especially if you're not used to it, and you haven't a fellow player you're joining in a campaign to show you how.  If any of you were to come and play with my offline players, and were smart enough to watch and listen, your eyes would be opened like Archimedes.  But I've had new players come in and try to push everyone around, and act like they know everything ... and what happens is my players simply melt back and wait for the new guy (and it is never a girl) to do something phenomenally stupid and get himself killed.  Alone.  Because that's what happens when you make enemies of your friends, and then try to take on the world by yourself, forgetting that you're just a fat, pompous Frenchmen and that in the real world, murderers are ready to kill again before they run away.  And unlike an Agatha Christie hero, player characters don't have plot armour.

When you know that acting really could end in your character's death ... and you know there are no maps waiting at the market place; when you know the world is a complicated place, where most NPCs are primarily involved in their own lives and have no convenient exposition to offer; when your success is really dependent on your preparation, because you're not special; it's not the same game.

It's not the same game at all.

So Very Close

Ah, good news.  After the contribution of a VERY generous European gentleman, who would like to remain nameless, the kickstarter is $81 from success.  That is all.  I also received another donation this morning from a 24th backer.  This is 25 in all.

One thing; in his email to me, he added that he "abhored" the captioned photos.  I understand.  The numbers do very well though, and for the most part people don't comment on anything I write between Thursday and Sunday, anyway.

I've spoken to the manufacturer of the binding I need to complete the menus; the image and printing has been confirmed a week now.  I told the company to go ahead and print the menus for me; I expect to have them in my hand come the first week of November.  I will then mail them out to those who deserve them through the Kickstarter forthwith, the moment they arrive, and I will start taking orders come mid-November.  In time for Christmas, if anyone's interested.

UPDATE.  We're there.  Thank you everyone.

Soy Sauce

Anxiety & Excitement

Picking up where I left off, the sort of fear experienced when we're worried our D&D character's about the die is more rightly called "anxiety."  I pulled a fast one, there.  Anxiety is a state of inner turmoil, often seen as an overreaction to a situation that's only subjectively menacing.  This last is the reason why numerous people reading my last post thought, "I don't feel fear when I play D&D."

These people have a cynical view of game.  That is, they don't get immersed in it.

Some who get very deep into the game are able to convince themselves very easily to become "over"-emotional about it ... in a good way.  It's similar to those who see scary movies in order to prove that nothing bothers them, and those who go because they want to experience every jump scare as if for the very first time.  Approaching the game earnestly, as though death in it really means something important, is an aesthetic choice for some.  It's not surprising that snobby people make such a show of being above such things.

Yep.  If you see that as a personal insult, that's because it was meant for you.

Let's look a bit at the connections between anxiety and excitement.  From Excitement vs. anxiety: Same chemicals, different vibe:

"These two arousal emotions are separated by the associations we make with them, says Sal Raichbach, Psy.D., LCSW, a psychologist with Ambrosia Treatment Center.

"When you experience anxiety, the first thing that happens is that your senses observe your environment and you feel that rush of cortisol in your brain as the fight-or-flight response begins to set in.  This is an instinct humans have evolved to sense danger and respond quickly, which is why it all happens in a matter of seconds, Raichbach says.

"But another part of this response is your ability to recall your previous experience, and that’s where the anxiety or excitement will start to differentiate.  For example, if you’ve been anxious in the past while public speaking, chances are you’re going to be anxious when you’re walking up to that podium again.

"The difference between healthy anxiety and unhealthy anxiety is your relationship with this stimulus and whether it’s making you feel fear."

Sometimes, when I claim things like anxiety and excitement being chemically related, I feel my readers think I'm making shit up ... so, I felt it was best to include the whole quote.  To get a firm handle on this DMing thing, we've got to grasp the mass of chemically-induced emotion taking place as the die bounces across the table and we feel the tension of whether or not our character's about to die ... even in tenths of a second.  Our senses observe the die; the cortisol hits like a bullet in a heart beat; it has to set in fast enough to keep you alive on the savanna two million years ago — or else your ancestors don't make it and you're not here.

From Raichbach's observation about public speaking, we have the same connection with characters you've see die in the past.  Good old Luxtar got eaten back in good ol' High School and now Tablik's one pip from the same fate.  The more death-as-part-of-the-game you play, the more that feature preys on your mind ... and on your hormones more to the point.  And you can't think your hormones away ... not without conciously deciding to repeat to yourself like a mantra, "This is a game, this is a game."  Which, of course, ruins any possibility of the game equalling it's measure.

Turning our anxiety into excitement is possible because we know, intrinsically, we're not actually going to die.  We can let go, let ourselves feel anxious, enjoying the anxiousness ... especially when we're playing with the sort of friends who won't use our mistakes as an opportunity to shame us.  Playing with strangers or near-strangers, there's never the feeling that we can roast our emotions on the game's spit ... and there again is the explanation behind players who can't fully immerse themselves in the game.  Their experience playing is so affected by the strangers they've played with, they don't know how to be vulnerable.

Take public speaking.  Have you done it?  Would you do it?  For decades, research has named it one of our greatest fears; many people would rather have a near death experience than get on a stage and speak in public.  In fact, that's often the example used when pointing out an overreaction to something that's seen as menacing, but in fact isn't.  People very rarely get spontaneously lynched for tripping over their words when speaking in public.  It's even more unlikely that they'll be catcalled for the clothes they're wearing.  To date, I haven't yet seen an audience member insult someone who chances to freeze up on stage.

If you see public speakers, you know that what you feel for them is concern and empathy.  It takes a real asshole to condemn someone showing nervousness while giving a speech; if anything, the applause is louder when nervous people step down.  We want them to feel encouraged.

The people we really hate are those who step up and act all, "Hey, I've got this; I'm so prepared, you're in awe of my perfection."  These people are awful gawddamned speakers.  They're dry, they're boring, they have the audience playing with their silverware, restlessly tapping their feet, looking mournfully at the exits and wondering if perhaps they couldn't pretend they really, really have to go pee so they can pass the time outside the auditorium doing nothing — which is sure to be more fun than listening to this speaker.  When the speech is over, the speaker is pleased that nothing went wrong; except there's only a smattering of applause and it doesn't last long.

Why is it the speaker who does everything "right" gets so little love?

Because we don't like perfection.  We like imperfection.  We like self-effacing.  And those of us who like caring about our characters so much that we scream in pleasure when they live, or scream in pain when they die, do it because our friends ... don't mind.

Which is why I can argue that the best way to DM is to make the world frightening enough that the players don't want to compete with each other.  They're too busy supporting each other so they can survive 'til tomorrow.

Now, I have noticed ... I get a kind of player online who responds to my inculcation of anxiety with a kind of neuroses: that every rock and tree is a death sentence waiting to happen.  Online, I have to keep reassuring my players that I'm not going to kill them in an unreasonable, no-win situation.  I've thought about this.  I don't have it with off-line players.  But online, playing as I do ... there are certain players who get rigid about this.  To the point where they feel they can't act.

I think it must be my expression.  Players who can't see me can't read the signs my off-line players recognize.  My face, when I'm pushing fear, is a message all it's own; and likewise, when there's nothing to be afraid of, it's my face telling that to the players moreso than my words.  Online, the player is stuck with his or her imagination ... and only their imagination.

This dichotomy is more than enough to convince some that I'm a scary nightmare of a DM without sympathy for the vulnerable, perhaps happily wringing my hands as I anticipate the next character's death.  I certainly talk about death a lot.  This is only because the audience here, online, has taken the position that death in the game is bad, that it's always bad, and that forestalling death by ANY means, including lying to the players, is plainly better than the alternative.

Players aren't stupid.  Well, mostly.  We can pretend that we're keeping them alive for the sake of "everyone's fun," but pretty soon every risk related to the game is an empty superficial gesture.  We know that whatever happens — losing all our money, getting stripped naked and thrown in a dungeon, being humiliated in front of the king, having the big cheese teleport in to threaten us — is just our going through the motions.  We know none of this matters because, with this or that coming next, we'll roll around and get on top again.

Faced with a DM who won't pull the switch, the players have to make up their own game, if only to pass the intermidable time between the DM's plot rhythms.  It's the guy on stage whose droning carefully crafted sentences puts us to sleep ... in uncomfortable chairs.  If we didn't have to be here because it's a professional conference or it's the only way we can see the next speaker, who's got to be better, we'd leave in groups.  We've got to play with this DM.  It's the only DM we have.  Not to mention the same as all the others.  Obviously, this must be the game, because this is the way that everyone plays it.

Except us few on the periphery, chatting on about death.  Obviously, any sane player wants to stay far from us.

All this weaving around, I hope I'm making a point.  I'd like to address things I said in the last post about how to set up fear and destabilize a party.  Surely, that's got to be a better post than this one.  Only this, this one is way, way easier to write.  Thing is, knowing what to throw and how much, and when to throw it, not to mention when to stop, or when to filter aid to the party so they don't give up, while giving them what they need and making all of this matter, in the sense that it "matters" what happens when the party succeeds ... there's no road map here.  160 years of psychology and we have no idea where ideas come from, or how to form them together to create things.  All we know is the brain lights up and it fuckin' happens.  That's it.  That's where we are.  So my telling you, do this, do that, do the other thing, make it count ... makes as much sense as my saying there's no D&D without a monkey, seven ballerinas and the exhumed corpse of Modest Mussorgsky.

Still, I'll take a swing at it.  What else have I got to do?  Cure cancer?

Fear

Picking up on the subject of win conditions from last week ...

"Win conditions" are game mechanics that guide the player's actions in the game towards success.  In most games, these are cut-and-dry: mate the enemy's king, accumulate this much money, put the ball in the hole with the least number of swings, reach base, destroy the enemy's armies and seize territory, whatever.

Early D&Dites made a huge deal out of D&D being a game where "winning" wasn't part of the game.  The argument has been made many, many times.  D&D is an experience, D&D is about discovering the world or following a story ... blah blah blah.  I don't want to spend three paragraphs rehashing this position.  On the surface, it certainly looks to be true.  If you die, you roll up another character, but there's nothing to keep the other players from continuing on ... and since you continue on with them, it all feels like the Ship of Theseus (television's favourite metaphor).  If you don't know what that is, turn on any Netflix or Disney Star series made in the last year and you'll have it explained to you about five minutes in.

A total party kill certainly feels like "losing;" and on some level, finishing a D&D treasure hunt (this being what most adventures are) does sort of feel like "winning."  But more to the point, if you give human beings a game without a clear win condition, they'll just make one up.  The players will get into a pissing contest about who can make the craziest, most insane player character; they'll decide to see how far they can metagame the DM; or how far they can push rules lawyering; or how long they can go it alone, without cooperating; or how powerful a build they can create.  They'll prove how good a player they are, by caring more about their character than anyone has ever cared about any PC, ever.  They'll use D&D to work out their psychological issues, they'll burn the campaign to the ground, they'll role-play until someone knocks on the door with their Oscar.  They'll invent their own game, with their own win conditions, for as long as its allowed.

Worst of all, in a four-player party, they'll all make up their own personal game, with their own win conditions, and fuck everyone else.  Good luck getting that party together.

It is not a solution to preach D&D as a win-condition free game.  Humans are biologically programmed to seek food, shelter and dominance over their environment; the last pumps the body full of those sweet, sweet seratonins — and no one's giving up on those babies.

Nor is it a solution to get everyone to agree on a "win condition."  Everyone's nurtured and natured into squabbling over this corner of the sandbox, fighting over the licorice stick, getting in first through the classroom door to get the best desk, standing first in line for Star Wars tickets, getting picked for the team, getting picked for the job, etcetera.  If you let the players invent win conditions, they're bound to agree only upon those things about which they think they'll edge out the others.

There's only one way to get any number of rugged individualists to agree on a single agenda.

It should be clear to anyone who's played a serious game that D&D is a game of survival.  Survival is THE win condition.  For a lot of people, it's not satisfying.  Survival today only means there's still a chance I won't survive tomorrow.  That makes a dull goalpost.  One way around that is to get rid of survival as a win condition and just make sure the players always survive ... at least until we retire these characters and start other ones.  The practice gets rid of the pesky "survive tomorrow" problem, meaning we can concentrate on those other win conditions already mentioned.  You know, the ones the players invent, having to do with messing around with other people, preening oneself, standing out in a crowd, acting like a dick, mocking other people for fun and profit, you name it.  Survival is just such a bummer, you know?

Exactly.  It is a bummer.  When it''s pushed to the back burner and it's not in the player's face all the time, survival can be comfortably ignored ... you know, how you're ignoring it right now, reading this post, sipping your coffee, listening to whatever you listen to while smarmily frowning at my thoughts.  You're definitely not thinking, right now, about the plane that's run out of fuel and is slowly descending towards you.  Or the clot patiently forming in that cerebral blood vessel.  Or the kidney that's doing okay right now, but if you keep going like you are it's going to quit on you unexpectedly in 2037.  Wow, October of that year will be awful.

No, you're fine.  You're not trying to survive right now, so you're not thinking that sooner or later they'll come a day when survival won't be, well, in the cards.  Oh, you used to think about death back when, in high school ... and what with Covid around, it wedges itself into your thoughts now and then, but then you strategize with a little coffee and a tidy reading of that whackjob Alexis.

See, you only think about survival when it's in your face.  And when it's in your face, you're definitely not enjoying it.  At best, when you get past those moments, you wipe your brow, think "whew, dodged that one," and get busy not thinking about the one you inevitably won't dodge.

D&D is like this.  When the game is played with death on the table, "survival" is never far from anyone's thoughts.  It's there when you're buying equipment, it's there when some stranger rides up in the dark, it's there when Jimmy doesn't make the running and there are only three of you today.  Most assuredly it's there when the DM does something ... weird.

However, we're not talking about survival here.  Not really.  We're talking about fear.  From decades of experience, I can assure the Gentle Reader that intense, riveting D&D is all about fear.  Not in the way that we'd be afraid if someone suddenly broke through the front door with guns.  More in a "Yes, this is badly out of control but we're ready for it," kind of way.

Putting that down and going around another barn — because, hey, what the hell.  It's a barn I've gone around before, when I talked about the movie Greyhound last December.  With that post I wrote,

"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."

I brought this up with an ex-military friend, who has yet to see the film — though I plan on having him around this month.  I asked him what situations like this were like, because he's seen a few; and he agreed generally with my assessment, adding one more detail.

I asked about soldiers expressing their feelings in moments of crisis.  He shook his head, said, "No you don't.  There isn't time."

Right there.  That's the key that pulls all this together.  The invented win conditions for players who don't play in games with death on the table; the process of primping themselves and pimping their rides; the dissatisfaction with survival, when there's time to think about the fact that we have survived; the sense of fear that pushes the possibility of not surviving up front; and the question of why we would play a game that deliberately wants us to feel stress about the possibility of losing, without there being a comparable condition for winning.

You come in, you sit down at the gaming table.  The DM shuffles and mutters prior to starting.  Everyone chats.  Drinks, snacks, stretching out, fumbling with the dice, making notes ... it's like other things that presage something great about to happen.  Musicians in the pit before an opera.  The lights and rumbling of the crowd before a sporting event.  The warning that the enemy is coming over that hill, that one there, as everyone digs in.  A clutch in the throat.  Anticipation.  High expectations.

Two kinds of games.

There's one that rolls along: open a door, bunch of decisions being made, dice being rolled, a joke, laughter, have a role-play ... 8:45 now, get into a combat, get a drink, take a pee, argue over treasure, debate a point with the DM ... 9:10 now, decide which door to go through, search the hall, stumble across the puzzle, solve the puzzle, open the next door, bunch more creatures to fight ... hm.  10:30.  "Let's call it guys; pick it up there next time."

The other: open a door ... shit, it's ten to midnight.

Or, to be fair, holy shit! Fear, swing, fear, hit, hit, hit, fuck, fuck, shit, jesus mary mother of god, JIMMY!  Run! ... ten to midnight.

That second kind comes out of fear; it comes out of forcing the party to act in desperation, seeming to be on the edge of success and then suddenly not.  It comes from a good combat system, from a DM who knows precisely how many whatevers the party can barely handle ... and how to introduce those baddies in a pattern that induces the kind of steady, time-consuming panic that we recognize coming from our own experiences at the worst times of our lives.

I'd like to suss it out, explain how exactly that's done.  A big part of it is practice, fighting a lot of battles, maintaining a single, consistent set of rules so that the battles that were fought in 1989 are still relevant to the battles I fight in 2021.  In part it's knowing what to throw right now and what to hold back ... and then knowing when to throw them in, like Napoleon's last ditch effort at Borodino.  It's running the game so that I'm struggling, too; I'm holding my own line, keeping my own troops at it, breathing the struggle of this group of orcs or that death throes of two treants.  Everyone 'round the table is rushing for their dice, frantically searching their characters for some forgotten note or gadget, some way of looking at a spell to save their ass in a way they haven't had to before ... and I'm doing that too, keeping the game running, making it a real thing.

There's no time.  No time to invent frivolous win conditions.  No time to think about winning at all.  Only time to hope this die drops right; that this try is the one that works.  Knowing the basic system is UTTERLY inflexible, that there's no way to talk oneself out of it, no way to invent hit points that don't exist, no way to take back a bad roll, nothing that can be done when things go sour except to ACCEPT IT.

It's a combination of all those things.  But fear is at the core.  If the dice aren't final, there's nothing to be afraid of.  If the DM is plaible, there's nothing to be afraid of.  If my choices aren't intractable, there's nothing to be afraid of.

And if there's nothing to be afraid of, then there's no reason to worry.  There's plenty of time.  Time enough to fill it with whatever seems clever or challenging.  Or self-aggrandizing.  Or goofy.  Whatever.

Whatever happens, we're going to be fine.

Pulling a Curtain

Okay, JB, I'm up for taking a swing at this comment from September 30th ... specifically this:

"I AM content with the game I'm playing.  I'm not dithering about rule changes and shit anymore."

This is fine and I've no trouble with this position and won't try to dissuade you from it.   But you've made clear with writings on your own blog that the materials provided by AD&D (and by extension, other materials of the period) are sufficient for play.  You're not alone in making statements towards that as a "goal" in play.  I don't disagree; sufficient is what they are.  But sufficient isn't really a positive.  It isn't worth aspiring to and it definitely isn't praiseworthy.

I ask you, and others, to consider the following.

When the first three books of Advanced D&D were published, TSR and the "original" version of the game were all of five years old.  If you credit the idea of player characters and sequenced adventures existing in the minds of the writers before the actual publication of OD&D, surely it's implausible that those things could have manifested before 1971 ... given this is the year Chainmail became available.  From the writings of that game's creators, we can reasonably argue that the IDEA of D&D had to formulate past the formation of the IDEA of Chainmail.  All told, at best, Gygax's experience at the moment when AD&D was published was all of 8 years.  Given that it probably took at least two years to produce the work, a normal amount for material of this scope, his initial experience was no more than 6 or 7 years.

Unless you're prepared to make the argument that GOD came and gave the words to Gygax, who then inscribed the holy writ into the passages we recognize today, we must assume that these were ideas and writings ARE fallible.  In other words, they are not the rules that Gygax would have written had he chosen to write the books three years later than he did, or six years later, or ten years later.  It is, therefore, ridiculous to give them any special merit as THE baseline to build upon.  It happens to be the baseline we have.  That is all.

You may be personally incapable of further dithering with rule changes, perhaps from experience.  But it is ignorant, irresponsible and deliberately obstructionist not to ASK others to take up that effort ... in fact, not to INSIST that those efforts should be taken.  Because, dammit, the effort serves the betterment of the game and everyone who plays it.

The static production of a simplistic game such as Monopoly might be all very well, but more intrinsically satisfying and complex games, like chess, golf or baseball, pass through dozens of iterations ... and in the case of some games, are still changing.  D&D is vastly more complicated and full of potential than any other game in human existence: it stands to reason that the iterations of this game would smash through the ceiling set by any previous game form.  Just because the attempts so far have been materialistic, stupid and short-sighted doesn't mean the "changed" game is an idea to be abandoned.

For all your equivocating, and justification of position, there's no way to see your phrasing as plainly narrow-minded, slow to understand and unhelpful in directing ANYONE, the innocent and the savvy alike, to an altar of any value except one built on the bones of dogma and charlatanism.  You have put a stuffed figure on a throne, called it "Oz" ... and chosen to hide behind a curtain as if you're not responsible for this half effort.

Not enough.  I want you to think harder.

Bloodletting

Rather proud of this page.

Still needs an edit.

Former

The Why, How and What

Why I started designing my game world as I do dates back to my very first efforts.  Unlike JB, I never had the least impression that AD&D was the "highest expression" ... it was the only expression worth paying any attention to.  I never saw it as "the game" ... but as the bare bones of an unfinished concept that hardly touched the vision of D&D that I imagined.  Like Gus L, I saw AD&D as "a mess" — but unlike him, I recognized that every branch of human knowledge looks like a tremendous mess when we start to learn about it.  There is no single narrative in history, medicine, chemistry, biology, education or anything else one cares to point at.  Any argument that starts with, "it's a mess" and ends with "therefore it's not worth pursuing" is an observation made by a fool.  Everything is a mess until we understand it.

I never thought D&D as written was much of a game.  I've believed from my first times playing it that the essence of what made it great came from what players were willing to venture.  I saw no reason why the only pursuits in the game should be dungeons and more stuff; obviously just becoming more powerful was a pointless will-o-wisp, since there was always something more powerful.  No, no, the genius was that there were things that players, with their imaginations, could choose to pursue ... and damn the DM and what was "planned."  My first efforts as DM were built around the notion that "my plans" were always disposable!  The greater game was in the players trying to do things.

Thus the development of house rules, so awfully simple in those early years, were meant to make the game more immersive, with developing narratives that focused on more important things than what's in the next room.  Players will immolate themselves for a game that gives them the opportunity to touch upon matters of great significance or that which is fundamental to our existence.  That is why there are maps, complicated rules about combat, trade and changes to the character classes; that is why so much of the focus of my game is on politics, religion and social behaviour ... because these things MATTER in the course of our lives; they touch us viscerally in ways that experience and treasure never can.  And mind you, I'm not talking about silly notions like "role-play" and "story," or even "problem solving."  I'm talking about the need to create a game world that incorporates the deep rooted issues that plague us as people — notions of right and wrong, what has real value, what is our purpose, etcetera and etcetera.  For the game world to be truly immersive, the players must be put into situations where there are no solutions to the problems they encounter; where the events plumb deeper than story; where the players are forced to contemplate the unfolding events as themselves, and not just in role-play.

These were not things I fully understood at a young age; but as I became educated in university, sitting down with brilliant minds and discussing the big picture; and as my own experience piled higher and higher ... I began to see in clearer phrases what I'd been grasping for.  The game of D&D as it was invented is a childish, puerile plodding repetition of simple-minded events.  But D&D doesn't need to be any more limited by its infancy as a old man is limited by his having once been born.  The constant need of most folks to hamstring the game and infantilise it is something I'd hoped once to wreck; but, nyet.  Still, the why of what I do is decades past what the game was originally meant to be.

The how is self-evident.  I write and I demonstrate the game as much as I can.  I provide examples of the game being played by real people in text.  I have a wiki that I rework and rebuild year after year, slowly but suredly adding new material.  I design maps, I design on products, I work on designing new ways of looking at the game and put those into charts that I intend to use for my own game.  I rethink and deconstruct everything.  I take nothing on face value.  I argue and teach and think.  I build up a litany of perspectives, make connections with real world disciplines and their influence on the game and research game design from its basic structures to its dizzying heights.  I educate myself constantly.  I work.

And unlike my critics, unlike those who chafe and balk at every word I say, I have the evidence of that work online, where anyone can read it and more importantly, USE IT.  People ask if they can steal some idea or scheme and I tell them, that's why it's online.  Anyone can see what I've done and what I'm doing, every day.

Whereas I have NO ONE I can turn to.  There are no blogs churning out constructive world designs, no wikis that do more than repeat the cheap knock-off material found on the WOTC's website, no innovative approaches, no perspectives on human knowledge's influence on D&D from professionals in their fields ... nope, nada, nothing.  I read a few people regularly because they have insight and intelligence, but these people NEVER offer anything concrete and useful.  No one, anywhere, can right now dredge up a url that will do more than repeat the same old hackneyed garbage that was perfectly viable 35 years ago ... and therefore has not progressed at all in 35 years!

I am alone here.  And every person who reads me, likes me, hates me, resents me, mocks me or otherwise acknowledges me knows it.  I know it too.  And I don't talk about it, because I know how that makes other people feel.

But I am alone because I earned it.  And I won't pretend otherwise.

None of this would mean a damn thing if it were not for the what.  D&D cannot be run on "why" or "how."  It has to be run on what.  What do the players see, what is the world like, what lives here, what does this thing do, what are these abilities, what's there to do?  My game world is a vast collection of whats.  Every what is a player choice, or a place to go, or a reason to act.  And until a DM begins to accumulate a sufficient number of whats, the game is a cheesy, pasteboard, pretentious smidge of what it might be.

Stories are not enough.  The world's knowledge and set of options are not made up of fictions, but of non-fictions.  Your family, your passions, your education, your decisions to travel, your intentions and aspirations, your limitations, your aptitudes, your failings, your resilience and willingness to keep heading on no matter how brutal and difficult life gets ... these are NOT fictions, they are non-fictions.  They are the facts of your existence.  Until the game world incorporates some of these characteristics that you have into a milieu that can draw upon and enhance these things, the game is as disposable as Monopoly.

Dungeons, Dragons and Fairy Princesses are delightful and all, but taken unto themselves without anything concrete to give them weight, they are fatuous.  They are playthings.  WE are not children.  Our souls are not satisfied by a child's playtoys.  We need more.  We need things dense and rich enough to properly fill our bellies.  The "what," therefore, has to be all the parts of the world that we reckon with consciously, with or without our leave, because we are not naive.  We are not blind.

D&D, like any art, has the potential to shrink these things to a manageable size, so that we can roll them around, contemplating them, considering them ... so that when we are ready to walk away from the table, we have a tool or two more to tackle these real issues in real life.

Those who want to hammer D&D into a flawed, insipid escapist fantasy are simply people who haven't yet learned how to live.  I pity them, but I haven't the wherewithal to condone them.