Oooooo!

 

Heraldry

Starting with a brief overview of the sage ability system.

The goal is to systematize the game world's knowledge & skillset into a single organized system, not for the sake of simplicity but as a means to ensure continuity and complete inclusiveness.  Each character class is supplied with at least 15-20 "studies," which serve to classify everything that can be done or known.  In toto, this creates a great many sage studies — about 200, many of which exist as notes and ideas and haven't been fully sketched out.

Characters are able to specialize in the sage study of their choice, but by the system's design, will accumulate at an "authority" knowledge in every sage study available to that class eventually.  Being an authority would be equivalent to a fully-capable professional.  Each study permits a number of "abilities."  These are not "feats."  For the most part they are capabilities the character possesses which do not require a die roll.  For example, someone proficient in scouting doesn't roll a die to make a fire or locate nearby water; a potter doesn't need to roll in order to create pottery; an alchemist doesn't roll to identify a mineral.  Sometimes, a roll is made to determine how long something takes or how much can be found.  For example, a mushroom hunter will find mushrooms when searching, if mushrooms grow there; but will need to roll to see how many.  A lockpick will certainly pick a lock, but how long it takes requires a roll.

In some cases, a success roll is needed.  A physician knows how to heal a patient, but this doesn't mean the patient will always live.  A rock-climber is very likely to successfully climb a mountain, but some conditions, like ice, are never certain.  Therefore, each individual ability must be assessed for risk — but most abilities are a matter of the character knowing how something is done, or what something is, and simply knowing.

All knowledge is included in the system.  How is a wand made and filled with power?  That's two sage abilities, one involved with growing the wood and one embuing it with power.  Where do potions come from?  Sage ability.  How is an artifact made?  A collection of very difficult to achieve sage abilities.  How do you travel to another plane of existence, other than using a spell?  Sage ability.  How do you call a demon?  How do you build a coven?  How do you make golems or other sentient creatures from base materials?  How do you obtain contracts as an assassin?  How do you forge goods?  How do you fight better and hit harder?  How do you learn to breathe underwater?  How do you learn to manage a sled-dog team?  How do you build an airship?  How do you visit other planets?  How do you train soldiers to fight in an extremely tight formation?  How do you teach anything, or learn anything?  Sage abilities.

If I think of a thing that can be done, and the sage ability doesn't exist, I figure out which study it belongs in and put it there ... so that eventually a player possessing that study will be able to do that thing.  All told, at present, there are about 2,000 sage abilities that have been proposed for creation and eventual use.  It's no wonder I haven't written pages for all of them.  But I'm in no hurry.  All of these things consist of things the players have never been able to do; they are "extra" bonuses to their character's abilities, and they will wait to get them.

Okay, let's get to the meat of this post.

Some sage studies are ludicrously obscure — at least to the mindset of the traditional player.  Many have fairly oblique applications to the traditional D&D adventure structure.  One such example is the study, Heraldry, Signs & Sigils: 

"Armory is that science of which the rules and laws govern the use, display, meaning and knowledge of the pictured signs and emblems appurtaining to shield, helmet or banner.  Heraldry has a wider meaning, for it comprises everything within the duties of a herald; and whilst Armory undoubtedly is Heraldry, the regulations of ceremonials and matters of pedigree, which are really also within the scope of Heraldry, most decidedly are not Armory." 

— A Complete Guide to Heraldry

I've read several texts now on the subject and I can say with familiarity that the writing is all like this; I've come to believe there's a motive to deliberately obscure making plain statements as the result of a conspiracy bent to ensure that outsiders never really understand how Heraldry works.  Please, feel free to read the linked book and tell me I'm wrong.

The above seems a puzzling addition to the list of character abilities ... but I assure the reader, it's impossible to overestimate the importance of heraldry and heraldic symbolism as it pertains to the fantasy/medieval time period.  Most people, including nobility and most soldiers, were unable to read; society was organized along thousands of parcelled land units that existed semi-independently from overlords, and along the lineages of the families who controlled them.  Every parcel and every family possessed an "icon" that defined who and what they were, what their ancestors had accomplished, what rights and privileges they possessed and to whom they owed their fealty.  Making sense of the host of 25,000 French Knights at Agincourt required extraordinary skill in the realm of semiotic linguistics, compounded by the recognition that every family treated failing to be recognized and respected as a slight that could cause the break-up of an army and systemic hatred that could last for centuries.

A king's life was not made easy by this.

Still, this hardly bears much importance for a traditional group of D&D adventurers.  So why include the sage study at all?

Part of the benefit of the system is that it applies not only to player characters, but to NON-player characters also.  Every skill and bit of knowledge that exists in the game world is possessed by someone, even if it's not the players.  Moreover, the amount of knowledge required to have the particular sage ability gives a solid guideline as to the individual's experience level and social status.  Levels enable the accumulation of knowledge points, which enable the accumulation of sage studies and abilities.  Anyone making potions is a very high-level character, most likely a mage (but not definitely ... there are various ways to crosstrain into the sage studies of other classes).

Therefore, even if a player cares not at all for this study, someone does.  Additionally, since the character will gain knowledge points in the study, even if they don't actively show an interest for it, there's reason to create meaningful benefits to the study for the character to gain ... such as the old Monster Manual's enabling of attack bonuses to several non-human races when within a certain distance of a tribal standard.  This, like every other random bit of flotsam that appears in D&D, neatly fits into the system as well.

I bring up this particular example, however, because it's very hard to invent practical uses for something this esoteric ... though, slowly, things occur and get fit into the whole.  There's no hurry for heraldry for, as I say, it's not likely a player will choose the study over something more immediately applicable and useful.  Here, I'm using it as an example to support the readers' worldbuilding efforts.

Write everything you think down; and try to make it organized, so you can revisit it later on and expand upon it.  In creating your game world, you don't want to forget things.  I began my sage abilities system seven years ago; it is far too big to keep in my consciousness, not to mention far too arcane.  Yet each time I revisit a given page, or reconsider a certain place or proposed bit of design, having a single organized structure to my thinking enables me to be forever building on what I've done before, and not wasting time endlessly reworking the same things without advancement.

That's what it used to be like, when everything I did was on paper and stacked in binders in the 1980s and 90s.  Wiki-design a spectacular advancement in knowledge management — one that I would certainly include with double-entry bookkeeping and subject indexing.

On to other things, then.

Stoneless

Yesterday's post was written out of hurt.

Words were said about me elsewhere, days ago, that left me disturbed; in pain; feeling misused.  It happens.  I understand why it happens.  I say things here that lead it on, so of course there's no mystery.  But still, I'm human, I'm vulnerable to a cutting remark and occasionally, they will haunt me for several days while I puzzle my way out of it.

If I were the sort that cowered from a fight, I'd be afraid to punch back.  Unfortunately, I know I can punch back, I have a forum from which to punch back ... and I have a long history where the privilege of punching back was denied me through early abuse as a young man.  And so, there is a compulsion to punch back.

I was often told, "They're just saying those things to get a rise out of you; don't give them the satisfaction."  This is common advice.  Unfortunately, with some people, if they don't get a reaction, it doesn't mean they stop.  No, they see it as a challenge ... and they don't stop, ever, until they get what they want.  I learned early, if in fact you want bullies to stop ... scare them.

Outbully the bully.

This has a price.  So let me say clearly, anyone on the net has every right and justification for going after me as hard and as viciously as they please.  I've given them that right.  Exercising it would not put them in the wrong.

Imagine a horizontal scale.  Towards the left we become more and more destructive, to ourselves and to others.  On the right, we become constructive.  Imagine that everything we say and do fits somewhere on this scale, in terms of that act's consequences.  I push someone's car out of a snowbank; they get to work on time; that's constructive.  I fail to shovel my sidewalk after a snowfall; someone slips, twist their ankle; that's destructive.

Measuring yesterday's post, where does it fall.  I gave in to the hurt, so I wrote a post that many of my supporters would prefer I did not write.  Like this one, it's full of personality and is not about worldbuilding.  Additionally, the anti-establishmentarianism of the post contributes to the general feeling that my blog continues to be, without change, toxic.  Hate-deserving.  From that perspective, the post harms me and my reputation, displeases my avid readers, changes no one's mind and, in fact, wastes the 90 minutes I took to write it.

That said, yesterday's post also addressed a subject rarely examined.  It informed.  Among new readers, it helps establish my reputation as a well-read, multi-disciplined man of letters, that I'm clearly not interested in the white racist agenda, though I'm a very white male; that I'm clearly liberal; and that I'm not fundamentally dependent in my thinking upon pleasing other persons.  Yesterday's post was punching back ... but I didn't lie, I didn't make up falsehoods to support my position and I stand by every word.  It was written from a position of integrity.  From that perspective, was it really hate-deserving ... or does it only look like it is, as it was punching back?

Is punching back always wrong?  Or is punching back a means of correcting someone else's destructive behaviour?

If someone sets out to insult me, or my writing, or my belief system, or the effort I take towards D&D, are they doing so with an intention of constructive improvement ... or are they, like me, surrendering to a destructive impulse?

I thought long and hard about yesterday's response to the hurt I felt.  I didn't write, "Ya, look at this dolt, what a hack, yada yada ..."  I didn't link the source of my hurt.  I didn't address the actual comment at all.  I tried to address, rather, the reason why the comment hurt; and from what society-driven impulse it originated.  I believe I am not liked by most readers because (a) I write with an "authoritative voice," which implies that I'm right and you're wrong; (b) I hold opinions that virtually no one else holds; and (c) I'm inflexible.

Welcome to a large number of the criticisms I receive ... exactly the three words used here.  The fact that the website needs to say authoritative writing is NOT these things only goes to show how often it's accused of being these things.

My opinions derive from the many books I've read, the many people I've heard, met, and heard give lectures, the highly diverse array of materials from which I take my learning and my refusal to accept anything "on faith," ever.  Once I did take things on faith: the bible, the government, authority, love, the golden rule ... oh, many things.  I have scars all over me caused by the faith I had in those things.  Remove faith and wish fulfilment from your opinions and without a doubt, the new opinions you have will not sound like anyone you know.

I'm inflexible because I've done the research.  Because I've walked the walk.  Because I've defended my positions hundreds of times to hundreds of different people.  When those defenses have failed, I corrected my opinion, accepting that I was wrong and thus strengthened my position.  If I build a fortification, and someone comes along and destroys the west tower ... and I learn how and why the west tower fell, then the new west tower is going to be better built, better thought out, stronger and more able to withstand a siege.

Most people I know, when their west tower is destroyed, they pretend it wasn't.  They don't fix anything.  They just go on pretending everything is exactly the same, no matter how often they get punched in the face by others plainly demonstrating that tower isn't doing its job.  I've spent a lifetime placing every brick and firming up every juncture.  Yet some rube shows up and makes a big deal out of picking up and throwing a tiny stone, made of the first and last thought they've ever had about the subject.  And when this stone fails to penetrate my lifetime of evidence, consideration and argument on the subject, they become shaken and flurried that my wall didn't fall down.  "You never admit that you're wrong!" I'm told; though, in fact, it's because I've admitted I'm wrong thousands of times ... and corrected for those wrongs.

This is why I'm inflexible.

Still, my best readers would like me to return to great posts about worldbuilding.  And I would ... except that I don't have an unending storehouse of these great posts ready to go at any given moment.  I have to think of one; and that takes time.  And meanwhile, life is happening.  As a writer, I want to write ... and not always for the purpose of having something wonderful and new to say about worldbuilding, or because I've invented some spectacular new game functionality.  These things are not invented easily or often.  I just don't have them on tap.

I do wish I wouldn't get hurt.  It's not that I'd wish others would stop attacking me; I don't want to tell anyone else what they should do.  But I do wish it didn't hurt; that I was inured, or unfeeling, or like Quasimodo, made of stone.

Conformity

I don't like to read the IMDb trivia for a film.  While interesting details are learned, often I also learn something about the film's making or its design that I can't unsee once I know it.  This has occasionally ruined individual shots in films for me, and once or twice a whole movie.

I'm sure this is a common experience.

Knowledge has this side effect regarding a great many things.  Outside of art, I prefer the effect.  For example, I'd rather know that Alexius Comnenus of the Byzantine Empire wasn't expecting thousands of nutjob crusaders when he asked Pope Urban for help in 1095.  I was told otherwise by my high school teachers.  I also prefer knowing that the American and French revolutions were not grassroots popular uprisings, but propaganda campaigns by rich assholes who wanted to retain their properties while getting rid of their overlords.  Again, not the story I was told.  Likewise, many of us have learned much of what we were told about Christopher Columbus was horseshit, and likewise with regards to considerable host of other "heroes" and historical figures.  I recognize that people don't like having these icons shattered, but I'm different in that regard.

Moreover, once I learn something along these lines, I can't "unsee" it.  For example, recently I convinced my partner to watch Fury Road; this was the end of a long campaign.  She didn't like it; not because of the violence or the story, but because of the intensity of male toxicity that impregnates the story ... even though the toxicity is clearly messaged as bad, with that toxicity coming up the loser in the end.  Which is, of course, a reason why the film didn't do well with the white boys of the alt-right.

Our discussion turned to the appearance of the villain males throughout ... not just Immortal Joe, but all of them.  The desired effect of make-up, pins, nails and other freaky appurtanances is to evoke fear in the observer.  The same principle underlies the various face-painting that's been incorporated in hundreds of cultures when preparing for war, and the subject could be left there.  However, I feel compelled to point out that one's outward appearance is not of direct benefit to the wearer.  I can wear the paint; but when I'm out there, I can't see the paint.  No matter what others see, I'm still me.

Let's take that a step farther.  In a primitive culture without mirrors, relying wholly upon the occasional askew reflection to be found in water, only occasionally, our looking frightful as primitives is a truth we accept from others.  More to the point, I rely upon you to make my face, while you rely on me.  When I make your face, I'm not able to make a face that you may necessarily find frightening; I must make a face that I find frightening.  In effect, I create your outward "personality" and you create mine.  This is a personality made prior to a battle, without my input.  Yet, to maintain the respect of my clan, I must live up to the face I'm given — a face I'll never see.

This provides context for the tribalism that is fundamentally a part of our cultural structure.  It's not the paint that makes us think this way, but the co-operation that allows individuals to forsake that individuality for the benefit of the greater whole.  This practice has been co-opted for millennia, despite advancements in technology, because it's what makes humans ... human.

The practice of deciding how everyone is going to look, past the clothes and the helmets to precise ways of holding the weapon and the body erect; the manner in which everyone's facial hair will be maintained, the expression on everyone's faces, the tone of voice and ritual of speech ... once regimented in a specific, ritualised manner, the practice builds endurance, the willingness to stand fast in a fight, the willingness to die in place rather than forsake one inch, welds a group of individuals into a unit as unyielding as geology.  One man will not break and run, because there is nowhere to run to.  From birth, every man is indoctrinated to understand that cowardice is a permanent, irreconcilable social disgrace ... not only in that I will be disgraced if I'm a coward, but that I will perpetrate disgrace upon every coward I encounter, ruthlessly and contemptuously.  Every man knows this.  Better that I stand here and face impossible odds, knowing that I'm going to die, another faceless drone among an empire of faceless drones, than that I present the least sense of being an individual.

This is not a post about Fury Road ... but it is a post about the yearning of males, particularly white males, for individuals of the culture to conform with what they perceive is sacrosanct of that culture.  The 80s films, the ones where all the women were victims, were "great fun" and "innocent" ... but this new Mad Max is nonsense, nihilistic, sterile and empty of meaning (because the originals were Shakespeare).  What's changed?  Certainly not the filmmaker, as he's famously still George Miller.  Nope.  It's that women are depicted in the film as able, capable and ultimately triumphant over the white, white, white, white males.   So white, we have to paint them white, just to make the point clear.

Women are not "scary" ... painting them just makes them sexy.  They haven't got facial hair; they can't put the same expression on their faces; their tone of voice doesn't conform, the ritual of speech doesn't ring true ... and most of all, if one of them backed out of a fight, there is absolutely no way that society is going to indoctrinate women to stand fast and be murdered, or indoctrinate men to ruthlessly express contempt for a woman who protects herself.  Functionally, as humans, we just don't work that way.

Which can only exacerbate the fundamental, biological comprehension that males are disposable in war and battle, but women are not.  Understanding that this is a "comprehension" from the male's point of view and NOT THE WOMAN'S.  Still, males have been doing things in a particular way for a very long time, and they don't like that this way is turning out to be ... well ... limited.

Still, we are seeing an intensive cultural rise in white males abandon their individuality for the comforting conformity of a singular, co-operative, aggressive, discriminative outward-assigned communal value system.  Why comforting?  Because individuality is confusing and unsettling.  It is full of questions.  What do I believe?  Am I a good person?  Did I behave wrongly five minutes ago?  What should I have done?  Questions like these can dominate anyone's consciousness if they haven't something to ground themselves — like what my family told me to believe ... which is, in fact, just another outward-assigning group of people.  Thinking for oneself — being an individual — just feels wrong for virtually everyone in the population.  This is what's meant when sociologists or anthropologists talk about us having a "need" for belonging.  What they don't say, of course, because it doesn't play well in the media, is that "belonging" means being told what to think, how to think, when to think and why not to think for yourself.

As enlightened people of the 21st century, we pretend this isn't true.  We rush to spew out content like the comment above as though it's on point, imaginative and unique ... when it's exactly what I expected to find when I went to the comments section of IMDb's Fury Road page.  It was the fifth comment down on the 1-star ratings.  The other comments talked mostly about how the violence was "silly."  Because violent films don't sell millions of film copies, at all.

We pretend that everyone is special and that our tastes are so unique, but everyone's list of top ten anything always includes the same tired list of the same approximately 100 shared items.  We know inherently that if we include something obscure and commonly frowned upon in our list when sharing it publicly, we'll have to explain ourselves ... and that just brings up that list of self-abusing questions that make us run for the communal experience in the first place.  Everyone recognizes that if we post a list of, say, "top 10 films," what others see will cause them to judge us.  It is easier to pick "safe" options than to risk being judged.  As a result, we're taken at our word ... and most of us have found ourselves in some situation where we've agreed that Return of the Jedi is one of our "favourite" movies, only to have to sit miserably through it when family members set up a surprise birthday party where we're expected to be pleased as punch to sit through this awful, terrible film.  Again.  Rather than admit we never liked the thing.

Our clothes don't reflect our inviduality so much as the "individuality" we think others will accept quietly.  And those who don't behave this way, who dare to be actually individual, get to endure this constant, abusive, unrelenting joke-making, under the rubric of, "I don't mean to be disrespectful."  Because this is how things are.

This blog is hostile, but not towards those who fail to conform, but towards those who do.  This gives me the semblance of "affecting greater importance" than other people, because I have zero interest in identifying with other people.  The very fact that I don't care to identify suggests it's because I feel "superior" ... when, in fact, as a single, isolated, totally vulnerable outcast without a tribe, I'm vastly inferior to the forces arraigned against me.  A single individual makes a terrible army.

I speak disloyally of the D&D pantheon of holy inventors because I didn't sanctify them and I don't recognize the faith granting that sanctification.  I don't believe in any faith.  "Faith" is what we have when we let someone else paint our face for the greater good that I won't choose.  Fuck faith, and the seeds it gestates.

Finally, I scorn the words of bloggers who love editions, modules, artworks and other elements of traditional D&D because I can see plainly that these are not the blogger's words.  They are repeated words, unexamined words, ritually repeated and never truly defended, because they are indefensible.  This blog is a campaign that repeatedly examines the words, exactly the thing that individuals do, but which belongers are terrified of doing.  Over and over I post the words, ask questions, demonstrate the failings, demand explanations for why such as such is so popular, or what makes it good, when it is so obviously, flagrantly shit, especially compared with words originating from sources other than D&D.  Traditional D&D is bad game design, bad writing, bad interactive advice, badly organized publishing, mawkishly disastrous business envisioning and, on the whole, irascibly resistant towards educating non-players HOW TO PLAY.  This last, obviously, should be the first thing addressed, but it's the last thing every admitted.

The crime that other people see is "not conforming."  I know that.  But the crime I prefer to address is "the game is shit as written."

The British Army was once an irresistible military force; I don't question that.  But it was a force that defended racism, brutality, theft, systematic murder of both cultures and people and ultimately the perpetuation of human misery.

Letting someone else paint your face may be all well and good for you, but I'm not a native.  I don't live in a tribal group because tribes are selfish, territorial, coercive, ultimately enslaving entities, whose practice in dealing with any desire for freedom is to shame, hate and ultimately to ostracise, which once upon a time meant dying in the wilderness alone.

Civilisation has taken the teeth out of ostracisation.  I, for one, am happy in the wilderness.

Menu Content Arrived

The menu content has arrived.

Through the weekend, I'll be getting my ducks in a row; come Monday, I'll start mailing out to those people at the front of the queue ... with any luck, you should see your copy within 10 business days.

Unfortunately, the two additional menu pages, which will be coming, are not ready as yet.  Research and development is ongoing; I know what all the items are at this time so it's just a matter of ensuring they're well-written and that the prices match the original pages.

In addition, while the coasters have been ordered, but they've been delayed.  The logo will be the same; we're intending to get them in silver but we may have to settle for black.

I'm fully comfortable with sending a second package with these contents following the first to those select few who deserve to see the menus as soon as possible.  The second package will weigh very little and therefore incidental in cost — so don't bother to write and wave them off, I'm definitely anxious to distribute everything that I'm working on.

Naturally, I'm very excited right now.

Seriously

 

Constraints of the Real World

The goal remains to foster the creation of characters and game opportunities, promote the DM's storytelling, enable the players to cut their own way through the forest and encourage them to work together as a team in a rich, three-dimensional world.

I think I see a different way to the beach, so I'll follow that path and see how it goes.

Brandon addressed the subject of worldbuilding yesterday with regards to things written down.  I answered that my attention in writing things down applies to the rules ... and in retrospect, it occurs to me to explain that — present company excepted, of course — worldbuilding is not only a matter of building the physical game world.  That's needed, of course ... but there is a great deal more to the world than maps and dungeons.

This last year the systematisation of the wiki format has enabled me to build a list of 2,683 wanted pages for eventual writing.  Obviously, a considerable number of these are spells, monsters and knowledge-based abilities ... but other large segments include geographical features, organisations, provincial regions, religious subjects, goods and services, occupations, pieces of equipment and theoretical rule proposals.  It's a spectacular list; much too large for me to keep track of ... but thankfully, the wiki does the work.  On any particular day, I need only focus on those subjects that come up most often in the wiki's existing text.

If I had the money, I'd set up an office and hire approximately ten persons to develop and expand the wiki: five writers, two editors, two artists to create page-relevant artworks and a draughtsperson to do nothing except draw exhaustively detailed floorplans for castles, inns, temples, barracks, villages, towns, fields and so on, creating a game world so detailed that players and DMs could tromp hither and yon for scores of sessions.  I can see these phenomenal bull-sessions where we brainstorm how some village could be structured for open game play in a manner different than the other five or six villages that have already been mapped, populated, sketched and described in one vast wiki.

Not going to happen.  Nevertheless, it's how I envision the game world.  The places of the world are real to me, as real as any historical figure whom I only know second hand, or any scientific truth that I only know second hand, or any promise that I've been given by a friend ... that I more or less have to have faith in rather than direct knowledge.  When I write a post or a book, it's something real; but it's also real, to me, before it's written down.

But, if we can cease berrypicking for the time being, this isn't getting us to the beach.  As I was saying, a game world is more than making maps.  It's also designing the rule systems, which build constraining conditions on the players, some permanent and some temporary until the players expand their list of abilities.  For example, the players are subject to the roll of the die in any circumstance where the outcome is necessarily uncertain, such as, "Can they hit an enemy?" or "Can they find a needle in a haystack given a set amount of time?"  They must adhere to the die whether they like it or not; and likewise as DM I must adhere to the die, whether I like it or not.  It's a hard boundary.  Hard boundaries exist everywhere in video games and players don't quit playing games on their account ... whereas the removal of boundaries in video games make them so boring than few desire to play.  D&D must adhere to the same principle.

But consider this: apart from the game's conventional rules relating to such like the creation of a character, which kinds of characters are available, the resolution of combat, the fixed potentiality of spells and such, there is other sets of rules inherent in the game's play which are not dictated by the game's rule books.  Understanding these other rules is central to understanding how to create scenarios and NPCs that can be effectively embraced by the players.

Let's start with reality.  To a lot of readers, this seems immediately counterfactual.  There are monsters, spells, unreal supernatural forces, la-di-da, so "obviously" D&D cannot possibly be "real."  However, I'm not talking about superficial elements and entities.  I'm speaking of laws of reality.  The game world must be livable, it must include gravity, it operates according to the principles of time and space.   There are fundamental facets to play that must not be circumvented with spells and monsters.

Normally, when we start to play, these things are taken for granted.  Rarely, I would imagine, does the DM begin a session zero by explaining that the game world operates as a physical universe constructed of atoms and electro-magnetic energy.  However magic in the game works, whatever the monsters do, whatever the supernatural forces are, they must manifest in some way that perpetrates and acts in tandem with forces we associate with reality.  Otherwise, it would be impossible for the game's participants to relate to the game world.  Therefore, water is water, everyone drinks it to sustain life.  The trees consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide.  Food is grown and eaten.  Characters get hungry.  Characters and every other living thing eliminates its waste accordingly.  

It seems so obvious that it needn't be stated ... but if it IS true, then physics and momentum are also a part of our universe, which means that a halfling CANNOT climb a giant while the giant is in motion without accumulating so many vectors of acceleration as to make the halfling useless while clinging to the giant and simultaneously as helpless a defender as an infant hanging onto my arm.  That infant on my arm is NOT in a superior fighting position.  Instead, it is largely dependent on my not shaking it off and causing it to land on the floor and sustain grievous injury.

We must not cherry pick which forces of reality exist in the game world and which do not.  They all do.  Ignoring those forces doesn't make the game "cool" or "fun" or "interesting," it ludicrously ignores the constraints of game play and turns everything that happens into a ridiculous farce.  Now I understand that many "players" seem to enjoy the farce; they pursue it vigorously.  To do so myself, however, would require my resuming many levels of stupid, restoring me to infancy.  Thank you, no.

With the rules of reality, come rules of culture.  A mere ten human beings cannot manage themselves without electing an intelligent leader, as any slasher film proves.  Forty human beings absolutely cannot, and with as many as a hundred human beings there are multiple levels of authority that are automatically pursued.  Therefore, the game world operates under "laws" as defined by the inhabitants of the game world — which are quite able to contravene the laws of reality AND the rules of the game.  Nevertheless, the characters must still adhere to these game culture laws, such as do not kill, do not carry weapons in town, do not say bad things to women, do not threaten children, do not set the bar on fire, do not blatantly cast spells in front of witnesses, do not be an ogre and walk into town like you're a human, do not kill, do not steal, do not pretend there are no laws, do not imagine that the town guard, watch, mercenaries, captains, outriders and bounty hunters are not capable of kicking your ninth level ass from here to creation.  Etcetera.  Flout these laws at your peril.

Because we are creatures with limited intelligence and senses, we have the law of ignorance.  No, you don't know where the nearest dungeon is.  No, you're not entitled to "rumours."  No, you have no special knowledge about the area.  No, you must actually seek knowledge and earn it.  No, there are no short cuts.  In addition, where there is knowledge, there are lies.  Many, many, many lies.  So do not trust one person.  Get a second opinion.  Always, always, always get a second opinion.  And watch your brother's six.

There are other cultural certainties.  Governments are always unstable.  As an effort to maintain stability through tradition and morality, there are always religions poking their noses into everything.  There is never enough money.  There is always a criminal class because there's never enough money and there are always those ready to break the law.  The criminal class is never made of nice people, because they those who don't respect law, traditional, morality, et al, tend to be very selfish.

When designing game environments, it pays to consider these constraints on the players' freedoms as opportunities to create stories.  There are stories about criminals and about why religion is important.  There are stories about falling governments and governments that sustained themselves.  There are stories about ignorant people learning things, and about why laws are passed.  There are many, many stories about leaders, and whom they led, and what they did, and why no one today is as great a leader as those people in the past.  Stories that encourage players to stop criminals or be them; that encourage players to embrace religion or fight it; that encourage players to discover and explore; that make them want to be leaders and pass their own laws.  There are a lot of stories and they already exist.  We just need to scratch out a few names and labels before writing in new ones.

Constraints create the need for ambition.  When the players haven't enough of something, they will always have to get ambitious about getting more.  When they want to do something, and can't, because they're not recognized in the eyes of the world, or because they haven't enough money, or because they don't know how to change their stars, then they'll have to overcome those failings.

Everytime they do, the DM can be right there, showing them a number of paths they could take, letting them decide how to accumulate, get recognized, power up and force their way in, whatever it takes and however the party wants to handle it.  Dealing with the constraints of a real world is not like poking around a set-piece dungeon, where all the routes are clear and obvious, and everything's waiting to be killed or picked up.  The real world is way more complicated ... but if the reader thinks of the game world as the real world, I think you can see plainly HOW the real world is complicated.  After all, you live in it.  It's right outside your front door.

The Other D&D was never about fetching things from dungeons.  I know that's what the game's makers thought it ought to be, but none of the participants I played with in the early 80's played that way.  We all saw the game world as THE world, with all the opportunities and possibilities the real world offered.  Yet there were things D&D couldn't provide in its early days.  There were no lap tops, no easy way to keep track of tons of data; no easy way to research and filter the knowledge of the world from the internet; no easy way to watch any film or read any book just by wanting to; no easy way to keep in touch with other DMs, or seek the advice from other DMs.  The isolation was just too ... intense.  So those players enjoyed their time in the sun until they finished school, then put "childish things" aside and got on with starting their careers and families.  And somewhere along the way, the Other D&D that I continued to play got lost.

Sometimes I think it'll never be found.

Well, we got to the beach.  And the water is nice.  I believe I'll be putting down this series for a while.  

Sense

There's more to wisdom than exercise.  A game world's got to make sense.  The people in it have to do more than move, they've got to do it with a purpose.  The world and its people have to react to the players like a pond reacts to pebbles thrown into it.

"Sense" comes of understand how "the" world thinks, as we have only one example to draw upon.  I don't count the novels and writings of fantasy writers; they draw on the one source just as any of us must.  We live and breathe and strive forward in this one world — and whether we comprehend it or not, the players respond to things as believable or not without needing to understand why.  If our game world is to hammer the button hard enough to ring the players' bell, it's got to hit true.  Hit false and the players will know it.

"Purpose" argues the same principles upon what we consider worthwhile activities ourselves: improving life, gathering wealth, seizing power, making a dent in the universe.  If the game world's denizens are nothing more than dolls moving around a clockwork mechanism, single-mindedly acting without sentiment, vitality, ambition or passion, again, the players will know it.  And if we do not have a grasp one what those words mean ... if we cannot produce attitudes about a situation when required, then the fault is not in the world, the game's design or the edition played, but in ourselves!

The players enter the world, enacting upon it, jumping in and splashing about.  WE make the ripples happen.  With each splash there are more ripples; the ripples of multiple splashes interact and interfere with each other, and as the ripples hit the far shore they rebound and return to interact and interfere with the players.  This must be apprehended with the clarity of the finest crystal ... or there's no chance of lifting ourselves out of old, tired habits, reading from the banal descriptive paragraphs written by people who cannot look into the eyes and faces of our players.  D&D, and by extension RPGs, are not a communication between absent persons who've never met communicating through dry text, but Me, You, Here, Right now, Face-to-Face, acting and reacting with the speed of thought and voice.  It is nuance, tone, subtlety, body language, watching, guessing and leaping forward mindfully from one happenstance to the next.

Is it any wonder that I can't say in a few paragraphs what to say or think?  There are a million possibilities of what can be said or thought in any given moment ... and none of us know even half a dozen of them.  Collectively, a DM or a Player might describe anything, take any action.  The play, and the fun, and the thrill, is waiting to see what it will be, so we can respond, get a response and surge forward excitedly.  There are no lists, no tables, no pre-planned if-then strategies that will keep pace with a group of humans sitting together participating at this speed.  When we try to "simplify" and "order" the process, we emasculate it, we hamstring it, we cripple human inventiveness and possibility to the pace of crutches and bed rest.

Is that what we want?

If I could wave a magic wand and enable the reader to know what I know, I would ... but as the last post described, I did not know seven years ago what I know now.  I didn't know three months ago what I know now.  I didn't know when I started this post that this was the paragraph I'd be writing once I explained the matters of sense, purpose and ripples in a pond.  We are learning and growing and changing ourselves every minute of the day, even when that change is negative and we're repeating the same lessons we took up before.  I cannot pick you up and put you beside me merely from wanting to do so.  I have to walk you through the process just as I was walked through the process, by others who knew more than I did when I was young.  That's all I have.

What's worse, I'm guessing here.  I don't know exactly what worked with me and what didn't ... or what drove me to make a world this way and not that.  I don't know why, from the first, I found the notion of a module-adventure distasteful and bland.  Was it the writing?  Was it the long experience in watching films or reading books before coming to D&D?  Was it the plain linear quality of the adventures that restrained and blocked my wish to pursue personal whims?  I don't know.  But while other players seemed to like them, I hated them.  And when I ran my own style of game, with the open setting I've always run, my players never said, "Oh, please, won't you run a module?"  No, they wanted what I was selling.  I've always found players that wanted what I was selling ... I've never had to complain that players couldn't be found.  I don't think that's coincidence.

I started this blog in 2008 because I felt I could explain a better way to play D&D.  I hadn't guessed, until feeling a lot of resistance, that it would be so hard.  I hadn't guessed how few people there were who played like I did.  Except for players I've met personally at game cons, I've hardly met anyone online that comprehends running a game in the manner described in the above paragraphs.  It's flabbergasting.  Why would people want to play this game in such an obstructed, shackled, bankrupted manner?

But they do.  They do want it.  And they will argue viciously for their point of view.

So.  As I say: I'm guessing.  On that account, starting with "sense," it works to discuss how the world does think.  We can't understand that point if we don't discuss it.

Hm.  Seems a pretty big subject.  Where do we start?  Philosophy?  Human events?  Anthropology?  Biology?  Surely, you've read fifty to a hundred significant books on each of those, yes?  No?

How are we going to understand the motives of a peasant, a king, a criminal, a tax collector, a hermit, a friar, an admiral, a teacher and so on, if we haven't a solid grounding in why we humans do what we do, or what we've done, or what we've overcome to become human, or what "human" even means?  A person is not only their job; there isn't just one kind of peasant or criminal.  It's not like there are only 200 types of person.  Everything is way more complicated than that.  Understanding how the world thinks, and therefore how the world reacts, and how the ripples work and why they rebound in just this way or that, depends on knowing what ripples are and what makes them.

The full scale of learning to dungeon master cannot be obtained with plug-and-play components.  It is not a matter of putting round pegs in round holes.

Oh, hell.

Here it is.  This is a dead end.  Without an inspiration at this point, I'm out of gas.

Athena

Let's take stock.  We've created a game world that we can perceive surrounding us, to a degree that when we close our eyes, we can see the trees, the houses and the people.  The world is BIG, so that it overwhelms the players, impressing them, and likewise providing us with every possible resource we could need to create game elements and game stories.  We can picture what the people in the world are doing; we can see the world moving around them.  There's a lot happening, all around the party — we're not limited by a single context or narrative.  Got all this in your head at the same time?  Good.

How does this come together, enabling us to invent people and moments spontaneously?  The goddess Athena was said to have been born from the forehead of her father Zeus; Athena is the god of wisdom and we may presume that "forehead" is a euphemism for thought.  This is what we want to do: pluck a thought, bang, right from our minds, like a magic trick, instantly creating something for use in the game.  Go.  Make it happen.

At some point, a transition is required, from academic comprehension to practical application.  With regards to the former, take note that Athena doesn't spring forth from a library of books written by Zeus.  She appears instantly ... it's not a matter of piecing together contemplative thoughts from weeks of study.  This is an inspiration.  The writer, William Faulkner, wrote,

"You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression."

 —  Interview with the Western Review, 1947

Capturing the momentary thought in the game's running is like seizing a will o'wisp, accepting it for what it is ... and then obeying the set of contraints the wisp provides.

It's like this; let's imagine standing on a street in the game world.  Picture this cinematically, like a scene from the Matrix; we pop in, we see the various persons going about their business, we feel the sun on our arms, hear the sounds, smell the odours ... and as we turn, we see one thing after the next.  And while I've given no examples in this paragraph, the reader has some sense of what ought to be there.  We do not, for example, have a motorcar at a sidewalk curb, idling its engine while a man in a suit smokes a camel cigarette.  We might have a dragon laying waste to the street, but let's try for something more mundane, hm?  I could give examples, but I don't want to constrain your imagination with mine.  This is a thought experiment ... your thoughts matter here, not mine.

Try to think what's there.  Put something on your right, then something on your left.  DON'T imagine how you'd describe either to the player ... just put the image in your mind.  Provide the image with motion.  Listen to the sounds being made.  Turn to your left and look at something else.  See it.  Now imagine what the scene might have looked like five hours ago, in the morning.  Now see it at night.  Have a person shout something off to the left; what was said?  How is it changing what's happening.

It hurts, I know.  You're not used to thinking this way, using your third eye ... and it's harder still to do it without writing something down or perhaps drawing it.  Faulkner is concerned with retaining a moment of inspiration, but this is also inherent with parsing those moments from thousands of other thoughts he doesn't write down because they're unworthy.  He's speaking specifically of a special thought, something really amazing.  Just now, I want you to picture the mundane, the daily happenings on this street ... and I know it's hard to keep your mind from wandering, to maintain the vision for more than a few seconds.  It takes practice.  And clearly explains that one reason you can't "think of something" on the spur of the moment is that you don't work at it much.

A fair number here won't understand the purpose of this exercise.  "This is D&D; D&D is about adventure.  A street scene isn't very adventurous."  Some are stuck now on the dragon's blasts of fire burning up parts of the street.  "Ah, now that's more like it," they'll say.  But really, it doesn't work.  Introducing players to a game by popping them into a street scene with a rampaging dragon will not produce immersion.  It'll produce resistance to the game's message, make the players feel corralled and, overall, produce a very shallow experience, despite the images of catastrophe and body counts.

We don't get a thrill from a stranger shooting a tie-fighter with a ship's blaster.  We get a thrill from a young, dumb farmboy hitting anything with a blaster he's using for the first time.  To get that payoff, we have to put the farmboy on a farm, portray the farm, portray the farmboy's life and listen to the farmboy say unhappy things.  If we can't do that well, the later moment falls flat.

We're not just creating a scene; we're creating the groundwork for later scenes ... potentially, all kinds of scenes, not just one.  There are hundreds of spectacular, adventurous things that can happen on a town street ... but if we don't invent one first, and make the players see it, then the adventures will have all the verve and excitement of a microwaved hot pocket.

At first, this creation process feels hard.  That is why so many artists equate creation to giving birth ... to pushing the baby out, with all the complications that implies.  But Athena was not pushed out from Zeus' legs, but from his forehead; and she is not the goddess of birth, but the goddess of wisdom.  Wisdom makes everything easier.  When I first began writing and playing D&D, it did feel like labour; but after forty years, it's nothing like labour.  I sit back, close my eyes and visualize my D&D world as a way of relaxing.  This is the benefit of time spent, practice, having clarity of mind and knowing what's waiting on every street and every field.

It's much harder to communicate what I do in words that make sense, to people I can't see, who most likely will not follow my advice, or haven't read the last ten posts very closely, and thus cannot make the leap they must make to free themselves from wasted effort and bad choices.

In 2014, I recounted a tale of the writer Mordecai Richler:

"Anytime a known writer speaks in public, at a library or a university, and the field is open to questions, there's always one adventurer who will rise from the audience and ask, 'Where do you get your ideas?'

"I have seen a number of answers to this question: polite answers, vague answers and academic answers. I remember seeing Mordecai Richler speak (for non-Canadians, this is a 'famous Canadian writer' whom every body praises but nobody reads). When the question came up, he became quickly incensed. 'From my BRAIN' he bellowed, having obviously answered the question a thousand times already. Then he added, 'Sit down, you stupid girl!' "

It's funny what seven years will do.  I said at the time that Richler may have given the best answer.  Today I recognize that Richler was a fool ... and I too, for seeing the world that way.  Seven years of writing, and the accumulation of wisdom, has changed me.

The right answer would have been for him to say, 

"The ideas have accumulated through a lifetime of consideration and thinking of many things — the world around me, the people in it, the experiences I've had, the things I've wanted that I've had to sacrifice ... the correlation of a million moments that have lent me the wisdom to see what needs to be taught and what needs to be understood by my readers.  I don't possess all the ideas there are; I'm only one writer.  But I understand from the question that you see yourself as unable to reproduce the ideas I have, or what you perceive to be the value of ideas that I have.  You're wrong.  You just haven't had the time to think as long as you'll need to before ideas as good as mine or better begin to emerge from the maelstrom of your thoughts.  That time will come ... and when it does, it'll be up to you to make them valuable to other people.  That's where the real work begins."

Richler didn't say that, though he was as old then as I am now.  I'm disappointed about that.

Don't lose faith.  There's more to come.

Driving Force

One aspect of a good life is the gladsome energy of multiple things capturing our attention from one moment to the next.  Having work to do that we enjoy, being a part of a family engaged in various activities, looking forward to something wonderful in the near future, remembering some delightful accomplishment in the recent past ... and making plans for something we might do someday, though we don't know when.  Amidst the maelstrom of activities, even accompanied by its due ingredient of stress, there's never a moment we can't lean back and think on five or ten things that please us.  Jimmy will be starting university in January; we had a really good time on the weekend going out with the boss, of all people!  Our better half is really getting on with the new vocation; the notes I was making for my next book are beginning to flow like water.  There's just something about "being busy" that offers a day-to-day rush ... especially when things are going well.

Of course, they don't always go well.  There are times we're ready to scream.  That we would like to get off this ride.  I don't want to minimize that; we've been there.  Some are there right now.  I don't include myself with them, not at this moment, but I've been there a lot the last five years.  So I know.

Point is, with all respect to Curly, a good life is never about "one thing."  There's so much to do, so much to talk about, so many other experiences to enjoy.  A slow, plodding life, where nothing changes, where every day is the same, with nothing new in it, is a hell.

With my last post, I promised a discussion of momentum.  By definition, "momentum" is the quality of motion of an object; the impetus and driving force gained by the development of a process or course of events.  Note, it says nothing about "moving faster."  Momentum is not about speed.  An object moving one inch a millennium has momentum.  Yes, true enough, we want the campaign's velocity to move something faster than that, but the subject here is "impetus" and "driving force."  How do we create those things?

The module-adventure addresses the question by providing a clear direction for the players to follow, indicating which is the next step among hundreds of actions to be taken, until the module's end is obtained.  However, the module takes place in a temporal void.  The characters have no past or future outside the module ... only a now.  This gives them nothing to contemplate regarding what they'll do after the module's finished, nor what consequences might arise in their future from what they did before they began this module.  This is akin to working a job without any memory of what we might have done before the shift began, and without a guess as to what we'll do after.  Presumedly, perhaps, we might look forward to another day of work ... but what takes place between the days of work, the days we spend right here at our desks, doesn't exist.

Sounds like hell.

Like the metaphor, the module-adventure promises that, when we're done this adventure, there will be another adventure to come.  Of course, we may not even be the same characters for the next adventure.  Begging the question, what matter is it if we die or not, right now?  What is there to mourn ... and what is there that we can possible gain, apart from distracting ourselves from other things we might be doing.

One tactic that attempts to circumvent the "void" that exists before the adventure starts is the encouragement of writing character backgrounds.  These are meant to provide the characters with nuance, giving the players something else to think about — for example, the performative qualities of "acting out" the character's background story in front of the other players.  Unfortunately, however, the backgrounds are necessarily sterile, since they are created disjuctively from the campaign — specifically, they lack consistency or mutuality with the DM's vision, or the vision of whomever wrote the module, or even more on point, with what is going on right now during the GAME.  As such, backgrounds are a tacked-on accessory, like a kitchen sink bolted to car's trunk, or a player showing up to play golf in a full clown suit.  Backgrounds don't actually interfere with play ... but they don't better the play either.  At best, they create an entirely separate game for the players to act upon within the "now" of the module-adventure.  And when this separate game is played, the module's momentum is necessarily put on hold — while we listen to the player act — until we can pick up the adventure again following the performance.

As an aside, the "solution" of module-adventures to the question of providing impetus has spawned strange meta-games that also have nothing to do with D&D and role-playing.  For example, the writing of one-page adventures for the purpose of winning contests in which the best written one-page adventure is commended.  The actual play of the module — except possibly by the judges, who are defacto biased — is NOT A FACTOR in determining the winner ... only the perceived, unproven playability of the module.  Dungeon mastering is not a writing exercise; it is a playing exercise.  But this actuality is lost in the praise granted to things that have won contests and not by virtue of what they have done to improve the quality of a D&D game.  What, we should ask, is the inherent benefit of limiting an adventure to one page?  We may as well ask what the inherent benefit would be in limiting a bowling night to three frames, a football game to a total of 12 downs maximum for either side ... or sex to a period of eight minutes.  Recognizing that it wouldn't be the sex itself that's experienced for that period of time, but a description of eight minutes of sex.

Prior to a D&D campaign, where none of the players have yet entered the game, the aforementioned void exists.  Likewise, to some extent, the lack of a future.  This is all the more reason why the first minutes of the game are critical for giving the players an impetus to play.  The easiest way is to provide the module-adventure; but as we've seen, this is a short-term solution that provides impetus but NOT driving force.  In physics, "driving force" is the force that puts an object in motion; colloquially speaking, however, driving force has come to mean someone or something that has the power to make things happen.  A player participating in a module-adventure is acted upon by the setting; we want settings that are acted upon by the player characters.  This means that while it's inherent upon the DM to get the campaign in motion, the goal is to build a perpetual momentum ... enabling them to adventure continuously without stops and starts, where everything that happens provokes more things that will happen in the future ... while simultaneously building a course of memories and moments of pride for the players to reflect upon amidst the actions they're taking at any given time.  In short, we want the players to "be busy" with their character's lives, enriched by all the things they have to think about.

One critical element of this ambition is dispensing with the as yet unmentioned flaw in the module-adventure.  To explain that, I need to briefly speak about Chekhov's Gun: 

"Chekhov's Gun is generally regarded as a brilliant principle for writing tight narrative. The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote:

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.

"He elaborates that if you don't plan to fire your firearm in a subsequent act, then it doesn't belong in your story, and you should remove it entirely.

"The widely accepted interpretation is that nothing should be present in your story unless it's serving some critical narrative purpose. Judicious application of Chekhov's Gun can rid your story of elements that aren't doing anything for you."

Dungeons & Dragons is NOT literature.  It's not a story designed for a reader; it's not intended to produce a theme or an object the audience needs to grasp.  It doesn't possess an "audience."  D&D is a game.  It's intended to be played by participants in a setting that in no way seeks to provide a model for behaviour or an ideology, belief or virtuous template.  Therefore, it's the antithesis of Chekhov and every form of narrative writing that exists ... particularly as it isn't being written, it isn't being invented by a single voice and there's no editor to decide which fair action in the game ought to be taken.  The guns can exist without being fired, the adventures can exist without being pursued.  There is no dramatic structure that need be recognized, no necessary fall, no certainty of resolution and no single point of climax.

Yet there are all these things in a pre-written module-adventure.  There have to be ... because the narrative is a finite piece of writing, where everything in it is assumed to have a purpose, even if it's to waste the players' time until the next part of the narrative is met.

With a momentum-rich infinite game, ten threads of possible action — ten Chekhov guns — can be invented and provided for the players in the first ten minutes, none of which ever need to go off for the game to function and move forward.  In the ten minutes after than, we can introduce ten more, and then ten more and ten more again.  The players can reach out and fire whatever gun pleases them; there is no right gun and no wrong one.  There are certainly no necessary guns.

However, once a gun has been chosen and fired, we're off to the races as far as DMing goes.  The direction and angle of the bullet, once put in motion, perpetuates a series of events that, once enacted, cannot be undone.  Every action has consequences and the consequences are final; but the consequences produce opportunities, littering guns everywhere for the players to take up as they will and evoke new, desired consequences according to their proclivity.

The tendency is to read the above and suppose that this shooting of guns and creation of consequences accords itself to ONE NARRATIVE.  It does not!  No more so than my writings here create consequences for my workplace activities, or the visits of my grandchild, or the next venture I choose to explore, or any of a hundred activities I might participate in over the next year.  My fist fight with you at a bar has a set of consequences, but these don't affect the discourse I have afterwards as I describe the events to my partner.  Her reaction is an entirely different set of consequences.

In the novel The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan inadvertantly annoys and obtains a duel with three separate men in three separate instances, to be fought one after another.  Because it is a novel, the separate men naturally know each other, creating the humour of D'Artagnan happening to insult three men who are close friends and companions.

In D&D, the same result could happen, except because there is no novel, the three men need not know each other at all; there is no motivation to assure that our player character makes a single friend of the three challenged men; and the consequences to befall the character depends on how the character deals with the odd situation.  D'Artagnan, in short, is not required by a narrative to like musketeers, to want to be a musketeer or to refrain from killing musketeers.  Such matters are left entirely up to the player.  There is no writer to say different.

All this leaves us with the nagging difficulty of how to make guns of the Chekhov variety?  How, dear Alexis, do we create opportunities for the players to make choices upon?  And how, for the love of all that's decent, do we decide what the consequences are when a player does something?

25 or 30 thousand words and we've at last arrived at the crux of everything: "I want to be a DM; how do I know what to do?"

Well.

I'll try to answer that question.

I need a little more time to think about it.

DBD

 

Entanglement

I left the last post promising to talk about complexity.  Just as we're astounded by great big things, we possess a similar awe towards intricate, mysterious things we don't fully understand.  Who hasn't kicked an ant hill so as to watch in wonder the ants scurrying around in what looks like panic?  As children, we explore this effect multiple times, making smaller or bigger dents with our foot in an effort to learn what's going on.  It looks cool; it looks utterly baffling to our young eyes.

The most interesting thing in the universe to my 13-month-old grandson is the cellphone.  He has no idea what it is or what it does, but everyone has one, familiar voices and unfamiliar noises come out of them, they play pictures and we, the adults in his life, appear to be utterly obsessed by them.  Since our phones are padded in leather and rubber, password protected and the floors carpeted, it's relatively safe to put one in his hands.  He can't do anything with it ... but once he has one, he absolutely does not want to let go.  If it's taken away from him, he cries in anger.  He understands perfectly how important these things are, and like a good primate he wants to take part.

It's a good trick if, as a DM, we can entice players to get this fascinated with some part of D&D.  It can be done.  It requires an intuitive understanding of what appeals to humans ... or, in designer terms, how an object obtains the behaviour we want from the user.  Cellphones, among many other things, are exhaustively designed to capture our attention in the worst way.  Yet this is part of a pattern going back thousands of years, which can be found in thousands upon thousands of little tricks and bits of aesthetic designed to inveigle people to get interested in what we want to sell, or build, or organize as a society.  Making early cars with cut glass and flower vases to hold roses; opening the door of a bakery to let the smell of bread waft down a street; building wooden roofs over the tops of towers to encourage watchmen to be more watchful; lamplighters making the streets feel safer at night; putting a crown on the pharoah's head; anything and everything to make something ordinary feel unordinary, and thus exceptional, attractive, envy-inducing and mouthwatering.

Judging by the literature, the best way of doing this in D&D is to have "a really good dungeon."  Expanded subclasses!  More character options!  New spells, artifacts!  Expanded rules options!  Puzzles!

Seriously ... 2020's Tasha's Cauldron of Everything advertises sincerely, in capital letters, "MAGIC TATTOOS."

Okay.  This isn't going to be a post bashing the WOTC.  But the reader's got to admit, game design in the subject field has gotten ... tired.  This is not the path to a better game.

A better game is built from giving the players things to think about during play that arise outside their natural focus on the setting and the rule system.  The setting is a vessel, it is not the substance of the game; while constant chafing against the rules by the player, with the DM allowing this chafing to go on and on and on, distracts from the game and prevents the experience.  These recent posts have been struggling to explain the vessel ... why it has to be so big and of such material and what the stopper is for and so on.  But acknowledged that very little has been said about the substance of the vessel except that it needs to build a certain degree of fear and excitement that will capture the players' imaginations.  This isn't enough, by far!  The game world is not a setting; it is not rules; it's a set of events with momentum and PURPOSE, presented in a manner that encourages the players to forget their chairs, their dice and their character sheets.  We can talk about "bumper cars" for months, but until we capture this fundamental of needing the player's ATTENTION, we're understanding nothing.

So ...

As much as I begrudge giving any concession to Critical Role, they've made one tiny leap in the right direction ... a direction that was plain as day in 1978 but which was lost amid really, really bad fiction writing in the Dragon magazine and the lack of video.  A direction that was plainly evident in the lasting footprint that emerged out of a terrible but very popular animated TV show between 1983 and '85.  It's called "role-playing."  Here's a sample from Critical Role [starting after 3:55:00]:

"She lifts the blade and throws it to the ground with all of her strength.  And {roaring} screams!  And falls to her knees and just crumbles.  She's shaking.  Her teeth are gritted.  You can see the tears and the mucus and spit all mixing, and she is just punching her fists into the ground, one after the other ... her eyes wide and tense with fury.  And just see the seething years of pain and anger, all coming to a head at once."

Ech.  Yeah, I know it's supposed to be so impressive, especially with Mercer just pushing so, so, so very very hard to shove the words out through his ovaries ... but.   Purple prose "is overly ornate prose text that disrupts the narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing.  This diminishes the appreciation of the prose overall."

Role-playing is "a" path towards increasing the game's complexity ... but the over-reliance on role-playing to sell every part of the game is a trap.  When the DM's scheme for building attention begins with taking something small and making it bigger through role-play, the law of diminishing returns applies.  At first, a scream is enough to convey frustration and inner torment.  Then, it's falling to her knees afterwards.  And when that's not "strong" enough, she's shaking.  Soon enough, the DM's shaking as he delivers the lines, working harder and harder to make this bigger and better and more memorable and deeper and more profound and holy fucking god the earth splits and the dead rises and god's finger appears and ... and ... and ... and.

Role-playing is phenomenal.  It absolutely is.  But it's not putting on a performance for the fucking academy awards.  Mercer has to take it there because as a DM, he's got one option card and he's playing it for all it's worth.  He's got to make it bigger and bigger because the people he's selling are NOT PLAYING.  They're spectators, in their living rooms and bedrooms, watching actors play a game in which they are not personally invested.  This looks like it will work great, if it could be done in real time with real players ... but in fact, if you try it with people living in the real world, you're going to get laughed at.  Possibly — possibly — if you've got the players already immersed in your game, and you've really built it up, they might let you get away with it.  But chances are, you eat the scenery like this, you're gonna look like a fool, and they're not going to let you forget it.

Role-playing, like acting, works best when it's short, creative and unexpected.  Let's take a series of examples.  The players have just reached the edge of town as the sun is rising; wounded, weary and looking for rest.  They enter a tavern/inn and we describe it thusly:

a)  A fellow behind the bar asks what he can do for you.

b)  A fellow dressed as a bartender stands behind an oaken bar; he asks, "What happened?"

c)  A fellow dressed as a bartender sees the party, sees the party and rushes out from behind the bar.  "MAVIS!" he shouts over his shoulder.  "Fetch water and bandages!  We've got some hurt men here!"  Coming up to the party his face is awake with worry and concern:  "My god, my god!" he says.  "What's happened?  Who's done this terrible thing to you?"

d)  A fellow in an apron holds a steaming cup of coffee.  He coolly blows on it and says, "We don't serve your kind here."

Which do you go with?

"a" is short but it lacks all creativity.  "b" is better, but it's not especially creative.  "c" is creative all to hell, but it's cliched, a little anachronistic in a pre-20th century setting and it's definitely not short.  Hell, it's practically telling the party how to react.

"d" is creative and most of all, it's unexpected.  We naturally assume an inn is a refuge.  It's a slap in the face, provokes a confrontation and unlike "c," which gives the party a crutch and drains the scene of any fear of excitement, "d" is a threat.  Best of all, "d" is short.  There's no room for overacting.  There's a description and a phrase.  We get right to the point.

Of the three requirements, the weakness in role-playing is the belief that "creative" is the most important thing.  No, it isn't.  Short is.  If we go with "a," it's short.  The players don't care that we failed to be creative or unexpected, because we're already onto the next thing.  We speak, the players speak.  Big bang boom.  Momentum.  Anything long kills momentum ... and anything that kills momentum reminds the players they're in chairs with pencils in their hands in front of character sheets.  The players in Critical Role are "actors" ... they're paid to make big "o's" with their mouths and put on a show of being all impressed; but the audience is just waiting for the next thing to happen.

[in all honesty, it's the players' acting, and the dead air while it goes on, that makes Critical Role unwatchable for me.  It's like Gandalf saying something and then waiting 20 seconds for Frodo to reply; it makes me wonder why I'm not looking at porn or something]

Our fascination with ant hills and cell phones, the smell of new cars and the crowns of monarchs does not rise from the sensory elements of these things.  Yes, the ants are moving very fast and new cars smell pretty great, but there is a lot more going on there than what we see or smell.  The smell is proof positive of something we've just done, that's spectacularly difficult to process:  we've just spent $34,000 on a new car.  There are very few things in this world that most of us will ever spend more than $3,000 on.  When we do it, it doesn't feel real.  But that car smell ... that breaks through our confusion and our resistance to what's happened, making the moment substantial and genuine.  We realize we've just done something BIG.  It is not the smell.  When we sell it that way, arguing that the reason we buy a car is for the smell, we sound like morons.

Role-playing is the smell.  But it's not the thing we just did.  The thing we just did is whatever made us wounded, weary and looking for rest.  The confrontation of "d" is not interesting because the bartender's an asshole.  It's the deeper juxtaposition of doing what we just did, surviving, then having to come back to town and face this stupid bartender.  Leaving town to visit a dungeon is a culture shock, like leaving home to vacation elsewhere; coming home is, again, another culture shock.

And remember, as DM, we've been there the whole time.  We're a witness to everything the party's done.  We are proof positive that they did it; we even know better than they exactly what they've done.  Yet still we've got to find the wherewithal to push all that from our minds and interpret the bartender's point-of-view ... the perspective of someone who's never visited or seen a dungeon.

After a fashion, with the players aware that we're a witness, it's doubly insulting that we're not in awe of what they've done, that we have the temerity to minimize it in such a cold, slighting manner.  Even as the players answer the bartender, they're thinking in their minds, "Holy shit, Alexis can be such an asshole sometimes."

Exactly.  So we've got what the party did, what the party is doing now, what they're encountering from the setting, what they're thinking about the setting, and what they're thinking about me.  That's five layers of thought processes going on, at the same time.  Six if I interrupt the narrative to suggest that some kind of check has to be made to see if the most wounded player is about to take a turn for the worse before he or she gets treatment, rolling a die in the open as I bring up the matter.  Seven if I remind them about something else that was going on in town before they left for the dungeon, that they wanted to address when they got back.

Layer after layer digs the players deeper into the three points of momentum in play: what has happened; what is happening; and what might happen.  Get these going, and the player will become entangled in the narrative rather than what "characters" they're playing or whether or not they're "winning."  Those things fade into the background.

'Course, there are players who won't invest in the narrative.  Who insist on maintaining their constant, overarching indifference to what's happening or why it matters.  I wrote a post about those people, but let me reiterate:  D&D is not a financial venture.  It is not a better game if "everyone" gets to play.  Popularity with players is not a "feature."  Critical role needs it to be, because Critical Role is a media program.  But our games need only be popular with a very small number of people.  We don't need all our fingers to count them.

Still, I believe anyone with an open mind, who has time to play and feels they can trust the DM, can be lured away from the indifference of one-shot adventures that lack culture shock, levels of complexity and narrative, or long-term consequences for short-term actions.  I believe that by maintaining a firm level of discipline at the table, thus subverting those bent on derailing the game, coupled with a patient build of momentum layers, even die-hard genre-savvy players can be converted to this Other D&D.

It's only that very rarely do we get the chance to try.  It takes patience to convert a non-believer; it takes time and sacrifice from the other players as they wait for the non-believer to believe; it takes patience on the DM's part to make it happen without losing the non-believer's trust; and it is made worse by so much non-belief propaganda being out there in the zeitgeist, with which we cannot compete.  Still, had we the time, and the patience, and the wherewithal, and the bond of friendship, yes.  I believe anyone can be a believer.

With our next post, we'll talk more about momentum.