Camaraderie

 Before every session, there's typically a natural, unstructured conversation where players and dungeon masters chat about the game. These informal discussions include a wide range of subjects, as participants find in this an opportunity to share recent events in their lives, be social and otherwise unload stress through the support group that a game-group provides. These moments are socially important, contributing to the process of setting aside the real world prior to immersing ourselves in an imaginary endeavour. By sharing personal experiences, we bond as a game group, which connects us together so that should some form of anxiety or resistance between participants arise during the game, the camaraderie established at the beginning sustains the group's desire to maintain our social circle.

This is important in fostering the same resilience and flexibility seein in children's friendships. Just as children can fight passionately and remain friends, the pre-game socialising helps players engage deeply, sometimes even fight or disagree, without jeapardising their relationships within the party or the game itself. By creating a supportive space, the interaction is more than a filler before the game starts; it helps in their ability to view in-game disputes as affairs within the game's play, and not as personal attacks upon one another.

However, this relies upon participants who have developed conflict resolution skills as children, through proper play and trust-building experiences. A dungeon master faced with such a person as an adult is liable to encounter an unnatural amount of defensiveness, aggression or avoidance from the participant. Such adults, struggling with unresolved childhood issues, may potentially view any conflict as a personal attack rather than as an opportunity for growth; this can result in game disruptions and campaign-ending incidents where one or more participants permanently withdraw from the campaign, through what appears to be a very minor slight or misunderstanding.

Continued on The Higher Path

Workbench

 Nearly all persons who have read to this point have spent many hours either playing or running... and no doubt, their engagement with the game has encouraged them to seek out things to read and perhaps to study, for their personal edification. Most have received some guidance from other dungeon masters; through formal education, they've experienced the process of learning. Many can see, easily, how education in one field can be directly applied to role-playing games. Yet while absorbing a collection of resources, and seeking out direction from others, there's yet another strategy we haven't employed, a thing we can do on our own, apart from running a campaign.

A fitting metaphor for this could be called a workbench. This is a place where craftsfolk and hobbyists tinker with materials and tools in an unpressured, exploratory way. Unlike preparing for a game, this isn't about building something specific to a purpose, but about familiarising ourselves the tools, experimenting with elements of the game and playing with ideas. It's a place for trial and error, where the actual game rules receive application to things we make for ourselves, that might fail, or might end in adding vitality to our campaign.

There are examples that nearly every long-term DM fiddles with at some point, usually without achieving our goal. Nonetheless, what's important here isn't success, but familiarity, which contributes to our deeper engagement with the game itself. In bumping up against the game's limitations, however we might strive to put a harness on things to make them work for us, we yet create a profound connection between ourselves and the game, which filters into every other game-related action we take.

Continued on The Higher Path

Book Jacket

For those willing to give it, I'm interested in criticism regarding the text layout of the book shown, BEFORE I use it. I cannot and do not wish to change the image, it fits excellently with the content, but I would like to know anything anyone would like to tell me about spacing. Obviously, the title is fixed.

Go ahead and be harsh, I have no feelings to hurt. I won't necessarily take your advice.  Give me a good slapping around.

Instructors

The process of teaching, whether as formal as a classroom or as personable as a parent teaching a child, begins with a desire to instill confidence into the student... not only with the material at hand, but with the very idea of learning. If I teach my daughter the principles of chess, yes of course I wish her to grasp the movements of the pieces and the general idea of the game — but more importantly, I wish her to feel bold and trust in her ability to make moves without fear of losing. When we are taught our letters in school, we benefit greatly from tactile and hands-on learning, tracing the letters in sand or the air, even molding the letters out of playdough... because as we physically engage with the letters, we become more sure of ourselves when speaking the name of each letter and the sound it makes.

If we don't put the acquisition of confidence at the forefront of our teaching effort, then we risk creating students who may understand the material, but will become hesitant before repeating what they've learned. We must also take care not to cause students to second-guess themselves, or avoid taking the risk of speaking up in class — which, in my early 1970s education, was barely a concern to teachers who considered our "learning" the material as more important than our "relationship" with it. Thus we were educated "at" rather than "with"... and my fellow students, as a result, did not put up their hands nor give their opinions, for fear that they'd be humiliated in front of their peers for not "understanding" the material exactly as the teachers thought we should.

We'd like to believe that things have changed, but the very fact that we continue to test upon the cold, non-interactive nature of the taught material, and not the children's interaction with it, belies that assumption. We are concerned with absorption, not application, because no grade that appears on a report card speaks to the latter. A good teacher tries to make up for this shortcoming by writing on the report card, "Jennie responds positively in class and enjoys the material," but when these words are said to parents who have little understanding of what goes on in a classroom, this recognition of Jennie's confidence and willingness to plunge forward is lost. If "enjoys the material" is matched with an "A," all it well and good... but if it's matched with a "C," because Jennie is interested but has a less than perfect memory, the only thing anyone cares about is the grade.

Continued on The Higher Path.

2d6 Taoists

I'm pleased to share that a group of writers who contributed to the book, 2d6 Taoists... Maxwell Joslyn, editor, Danielle Osterman, Shelby Maddox and Jonathan Becker, are now putting that book up for sale on Lulu. The link is here.

While yes, my name and contributions to the game are part of the work, I think it's more important to acknowledge that these writers have worked diligently and well to create works that deserve recognition in their own right.  Becker's discussion of Dungeons and Dragons as a calling, Maddox's encouragement of a coherent order through the understanding of taxonomy, Joslyn's breakdown of the computer as a driving force behind the future game and Osterman's sociological breakdown of game advice found on youtube are well worth the read... I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of examining their work here, as I don't believe that I can do it the justice that it deserves.

I give it my full endorsement; if my work is worth reading, then so too is the work that these designers and writers have done.  Trust the effort, trust the value it offers; it is a small but meaningful tome that is worth reading more than once.

Best Guess

In building emotional depth into the game's campaign, we are fascinated by the manner in which a single action we take reverberates through the responses and actions of others... and how this escalates conflict. Our first efforts to reproduce this effect are difficult, because we don't fully grasp the layering complexity of how this believably occurs; but after studying film, literature or history, we see constructed or real narratives unfold in a way that feels interconnected, complex and inevitable.

It's an educator's role to help us elucidate narratives in this manner, teaching us what to look for in the development of layered cause-and-effect structures. Hopefully, this helps us understand complex narratives in a way that isn't obvious at first glance. A useful example for this would be the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For many, this seemed to be a spontaneous occurrence; the protests and public gatherings escalated quickly in the weeks leading up to that November. The media were caught with their pants down, focused largely on the immediate visual spectacle and weren't ready to explain in detail why it was happening. When the first stories emerged that tried to explain it, the influence of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms received tremendous attention, such that he ended up receiving a Nobel Peace Prize... but this was hype. The Soviet Union was broke; the war in Afghanistan had been a disaster and 30 years of intense cold war spending had emptied the nation's coffers. It could no longer maintain control over its satellite states, and as a result, the power vacuum was sensed by those in East Berlin who, not spontaneously, but because they were no longer being held back, acted as they were now able. The suddenness of the fall was more about the long-suppressed pressures finally finding release rather than an unplanned outburst.

This is, of course, a gross oversimplification; hundreds of factors are at play which, if unraveled, lends insight to what happened. Through the investigation of these factors, particularly under the guidance of someone who may have been there while also deeply involved in the event's political background, can lead us to comprehending more fully what happened. Steadily, we acquire a certainty that things happen for a reason, even the most spontaneous of things. By reverse engineering these things, we gain understanding of how to set up the factors, and where they ought to lead a fictional narrative that we construct for our own purpose.

Continued on the Higher Path

Atmosphere

A common weakness in many dungeon masters is to focus on the immediate needs of their campaign, to find a module that can be quickly adapted before the next session, to produce an NPC's "backstory" in the hopes of producing a quick, short-term motivation for the party, or the ideal of a throw-it-at-them encounter that will distract the players long enough to give enough time to come up with something else. As a result, DMs often rush from instant solution to instant solution, always at the edge of feeling like if they don't come up with something in the last few hours before game time, they're sunk.

This mindset largely emerges from a failure to grasp the influence of artistic design, atmosphere and emotional depth... which in turn reflects the tendency to see these things as "non-applicable" precisely because they don't address the immediate problems of the DM. On the whole, these elements seem like luxuries when the DM's immediate concern is keeping the game running and the players engaged. They are intangible and difficult to quantify. A combat encounter or puzzle has clear, actionable components, whereas "atmosphere" is an elusive quality that defies definition.

This is largely because of the form of education we obtain; in general, our grade school teachers themselves were unable to explain exactly why we were directed to study Shakespearean plays or deconstruct poetry. Art, for most people, feels unproductive, useless and unnecessary; it expends time attempting to duplicate work that plainly others, who have spent more time at it, will always be more proficient than we are. The answer received, in turn, usually consists of a poorly-experienced teacher saying that art is a way of unwinding, relaxing, that it provides an escape and helps us forget about things, momentarily, that are actually important.

Continued on the Higher Path

Education

We come now to the most difficult part of this series, where we have to set aside what "resources" are and how to use them, and take up the unholy, unwanted subject of "education." This disaster of a field, that has induced nearly every conscious person to equate with their frustrating, provably irrelevant school experience. Where, as teenagers, we used to say to our teachers, "Why are we learning this? I'm never going to use it," only to be chastened to warned not to question the importance of school, we can look back now in our late adulthood and say with surety, "I was right. I never did use that crap I was taught."

For this reason, when most of us hear, "education," we equate it at once with the traditional system — hours of rote memorisation, irrelevant topics, boredom, long wasted hours and the absence of practical benefit. This is made worse in that most assume that if there's anything to be gained from education as a DM, it must come from a formally named subject-specific class, "How to be a Dungeon Master 201" — which, in fact, the reason why this collection of posts is called "RPG 201." The title mimics the academic naming convention because if we do not say what a thing is right on the tin, they won't trust what they're buying. This puts me the position of having to lift that boat out from the water and scraping the barnacles off it's bottom.

Education differs from research in that learning from others is part of the process, either because we undertake to teach a subject or learn one. As a student, we do not hold the teacher accountable with every statement made to prove that the knowledge being given is worth knowing. As a teacher, we don't waste the student's time, discarding conventions and assumptions about what education ought to include. The weak point in the education system was not us, the students, and it was not our teachers; it was the vast panoply of interveners who were not in the classroom with us, but yet forced us ALL to obey a ridiculous set of protocols that continue to get in the way of everything. Education can be meaningful when it's focused and practical, and free from unnecessary distractions. This has to be understood first before any good can come of what's written here next.


Continued on the Higher Path

Chemical Reactions

Continuing with the effects of resources upon things, consider the manner in which a book, film or an experience can serve to fuel creative thinking, like a chemical reaction that accelerates or enhances the mind. This sort of catalyst has no definite outcome; it rushes at us without expectation, but when it hits, our creative process feels a flash of insight, inspiration and excitement at the possibilities with which the idea fills us.

But though we want catalysts to occur on a regular basis, we don't know when they will, or even IF they will. There’s no method, no sign, no clear way to predict when a moment of insight will, or won't, come. No matter how much we’ve read, learned and experienced, we can never tell if an outcome will come, or what that outcome will be. From our perspective, it seems to just happen—it appears out of nowhere, with no pattern to follow. This is what makes it puzzling, because even with all the knowledge and tools at our disposal, we can’t predict it or force it.

This is a substantive characteristic of creativity that forces would-be painters, musicians, film-makers and writers into becoming shop clerks, insurance salespeople, resource managers and electricians. Creativity is, and will always be, something that is beyond our control; it depends upon inspiration, which is a miserable, taciturn, rotten little zeitgeist that has a tendency to stay as a guest too long when our relatives are visiting from Schenectady and is never around when we've taken two weeks off for a holiday.

Continued on the Higher Path

Barbara Stanwyck

For fun.

The Wiki is Active

The Authentic Wiki is up again, at last, two days late, but life goes like that sometimes.  Naturally, when it's down, that's when I finally feel like starting to do some kind of work on it.

AND... it isn't.

There were log in problems, so it was up for the public, but I couldn't get into it. Problem's being worked on.

AND... it is.

Only, there's something wrong with the log-in feature, so that even us administrators can't log in.  The wiki is accessible but for the present, it can't be adjusted until it's moved to a highly upgraded server... and given the recent move, that isn't happening any time soon.

Three Measly Bucks

I am continuing the series on the Higher Path, which can be obtained by anyone for just $3 a month. It's up to the reader to decide if they already know everything they want to know about D&D.

Here's a snippet of today's post:

... When the players respond to such unusual motifs and in-depth situations, stolen blatantly from real history, they nevertheless respond in reflection of the complex, believable situation we've woven. It's believable, we know, because it really happened.

The more resources we engage with, not only in one small field, but across a large spectrum of ideas, the more situations and ideas we can add to our overall arsenal. This makes us not only more complicated at grand, complex schemes, but simple, momentary situations as well. Our source material should also include small, tactile little moments, dredged up from stories, personal accounts and even letters home. This last, which is plentiful enough a resource in later time periods, expresses the exact same sentiments that existed a thousand years ago than they did in the last war. We haven't changed... so any bit or piece of knowledge...

It's no skin off my nose if you miss what I've said because you can't raise three measly bucks.