Unhappiness

Let's move on and talk about the DM's running of characters at the table.  This is a next-to-impossible subject to undertake, given that situations of so many kinds can arise, it's hard to organise them all.  I'd like to eventually address answering questions, giving descriptions, adjudicating disagreements and awarding treasure, along with other things that may occur in the future, but today I'd like to discuss the matter of the DM bringing satisfaction to the players.

I don't want to get bogged down in the argument that it's the DM's role to ensure that the game is fun for the players, or that the player's enjoyment of the game is the DM's responsibility.  I've discussed these subjects before and on the whole, I think most people reading my blog are already of my mind where these things are concerned.

It's not possible for me to accomplish this task anyway.  I don't know the minds of my players sufficiently well to be spot on in creating moments and situations that are guaranteed to delight.  Often, something I've written off as a passing incident becomes enormously important to the players, while some moment I was sure would astound ended up fizzling.  Players are unpredictable ... and they are not of the same mind.  It's not practical to take the approach that creating the "right" sequence of events is going to create a good game.

The players must be allowed the freedom to pursue their own happiness.  They must learn to interact with one another and come to agreements about what they'd like to do collectively, without one or two members of the group being allowed to bully the others.  The DM has to wade in to settle disputes whether or not being asked to do so ... and the DM must take a position on who in the party is behaving positively vs. negatively.  Like it or not, the DM is defacto that authority in the room, and should embrace this responsibility with patience, tact and a firm ethical perspective.

Examples of positive behaviour occur when everyone in the party is fluidly discussing a situation, with each person interjecting their ideas spontaneously, without order or constant interruption.  Depending on the campaign, this may be common, rare or unseen.  Often, the possibility of such parlance occurring is thwarted by the DM imposing order as formalities and etiquette, intended to "fairly" distribute the right of speech to everyone.  While this can work to bring a chaotic party into line, it also squeezes the life out of genuine, excited discourse, where everyone wants to listen because they're more keen on what's being planned than on waiting for their turn to speak.

Negative behaviour includes players self-importantly speaking over other players, dictating the actions of other players or failing to take the wellbeing of other players into account when designing their actions.  More to the point, the real issue is not how the player plays, but rather the personality the player has ... a personality that would demonstrate itself regardless of the activity.  Thus, the DM's role is not to address the player's method of play, but to address the player's belief system.  This takes courage, a willingness to speak of things that might ordinarily be glossed over and the fortitude to take a position on matters of right and wrong behaviour.

This is something we can delve into further when discussing the settling of disputes.  I include the definitions here to explain what I mean by players pursuing their own happiness.  The game's play must include moments where the players are left to their own judgement on what to do and what they want.  They must be allowed to choose the best course of action.  Once that action is chosen, the DM must be of a mind that allows the best possibility of that action succeeding, while changing none of the precepts inherent in the situation.

Let's take two examples.  In both examples, the players have trapped an assassin, Garth, whom they have apparently at their mercy ... that is, the assassin is placed in the corner of a cellar, with four player characters between the assassin and the exit.  With the situation in place, the players are deciding whether to kill the assassin or to parley with him.

In the first example, Garth is armed with a dagger, is young, has little experience and that he's unassociated with any group or belief.  In this case, parley might be a practical alternative to killing.  Garth would likely view the circumstance as untenable, that he's lost the opportunity to assassinate the intended target and that his best chance is to negotiate and deal with the consequences thereafter.  Cave, and live to fight another day.

In the second example, Garth is armed with a dagger, is young, is a fanatic believer in the assassin's cult to which he belongs and is prepared to die rather than surrender.  To the party, this second Garth looks exactly the same as the first Garth.  The only difference is what we, as DM, have predetermined Garth's character and intent.  While listening to the players discuss the matter, we'd like to give some possibility of success if the players choose to parley, but in fact, we've already made parley an impossibility given this second Garth's outlook on the world.

This is what I mean by maintaining those precepts already in place.  The players' choice to negotiate does not automatically alter the fundamental details of the setting as they existed before the situation did.  The second Garth was always ready to die, and will attempt a last slash at the party before he goes down.  The first Garth was always ready to negotiate.  The DM's role is in fixedly deciding the game's conditions, so that these will be in place when the party steps up.  The party's role is to guess, for themselves, what their best action is.

Incidentally, the concept of alignment exists to take this agency from the players.  The players are told, long before Garth is ever encountered, the player's choices are decided.  The "good" player must parley, regardless; the "evil" player must sacrifice Garth in his or her own best interest.  This places the party members in conflict with one another, forcing one of them to invent some bullshit or another to explain why the good player can kill or why the evil player shouldn't.  Thus, the game becomes about the clever invention of bullshit explanations and not merely decisions made by players who simply do what they want to do.

Now suppose that we haven't decided, ahead of time what Garth's character is.  This happens.  Regularly, we create situations without considering every consequence.  Let's look at the statement above, again: 

"They [the players] must be allowed to choose the best course of action.  Once that action is chosen, the DM must be of a mind that allows the best possibility of that action succeeding, while changing none of the precepts inherent in the situation."

As I've said in this alternate case, we have no precepts.  We haven't previously considered what Garth would do.  Therefore, in following the rule, the player's action dictates our responsibility as DM.  WE must allows Garth's personality to be such that allows the players "the best possibility."  Having been asked, Garth willingly agrees to parley in good faith.

By following this rule of thumb, the DM is sure to create better situations and possibilities for the players.  Further, it places an onus on the DM to create as many precepts as possible — especially universal defaults that are always true unless we've chosen to make this situation unusual.  For example, one of my defaults is that guards are trained professionals and cannot be bribed by total strangers, or talked out of doing their jobs, no matter how much money a player offers or how much talking a player does.  Of course there are exceptions.  But I choose when the exception occurs, ahead of time; if I haven't done so, then the default is that the guard is inflexible, and will call for aid if offered a bribe.

Unless the character offering the bribe has a special sage ability enabling them to successfully circumvent the default.

I have hundreds of like defaults, perhaps more than a thousand.  Very slowly I am writing these out on my wiki, one page at a time.  They stem from a perception of what my game setting should be like, as a means to provide the players the best possible experience.  It's too easy to simply bribe one's way past a guard.  Guards should be an imposing obstacle.  Otherwise, why do they exist?

If the players hired a guard, what kind of guard would they want?  This dichotomy is an important part of choosing the precepts underlying one's game.  On the one hand, I'm making the character's situation more difficult by imposing harsh, often levelled guards between them and their goals.  On the other hand, I'm making the character's situation easier by making available reliable, strong guards to protect the players' stuff.

Formally, "precepts" are general rules intended to regulate setting behaviour and design.  We can call them principles, doctrines, guidelines and so on, but they amount to the same thing.  A DM should sit and think about each aspect of the game setting down to the micromanagement of how things in the setting behave, from guards to rats to mind flayers, and also with regards to little girls, buttercups and clowns.  Rivers, lakes, land, skies, towns, mountains and so on also require varying precepts regarding how these things work, interact with the players and incorporate themselves into the setting.  For the most part, the default on these things ought to be easy.  What's a little girl like?  Well, what are little girls usually like, in your opinion?  How do mountains usually respond?  What's the usual situation that follows entering a town?  Is that situation good enough for us?  If it is, then we should adopt that precept and move to the next ... and if it is not, then we should either produce a new precept, or invent exceptions to specific little girls, mountains and towns.  These things are up to us, after all.

But what about more volatile situations, where things change rapidly and unpredictably, such as general situations where the players are surrounded by scores of people ... like the aforementioned town, for instance.  Here, we have many possible things interacting at once, each with their own purpose and direction, moving round the players, bumping into them, offering to sell the players things and so on.  In the larger sense, the whole setting is like this, with millions swirling around, both near and far from the players, affecting one another, putting schemes into motion, producing waves of actions like political and religious struggles, wars and ideas — each with the potential to threaten the players unexpectedly in some manner.  How are these things dealt with from the DM's perspective.  We can't build a precept for everything.

Here, we have to build an "ethic" for the game world.  By definition, this is a set of right and wrong behaviours relating to or affirming a specified group, field or form of conduct.  Essentially, how does the world "act" for or against the players?  What is the "law" of nature specifically as it addresses the party's existence and place in the game setting?  Is the world against the party?  Some of the world?  And if some, which parts are for, and which parts are against, what the party wants to do?

Understand, here I am not expressing the game's setting as being aware of the party, but rather that when the DM uses the world to act for or against the party, upon what ethic does the DM act?  Is it okay for the DM to ensure the player characters always live?  Is it okay for the DM to purposefully hurt the players?  If so, to what degree?  And if it's not okay for the DM to cause hurt and unhappiness, then what is the role of the DM in ensuring the players always ultimately get what they want?  These are essential metaphysical questions surrounding the nature of the campaign setting ... and for the most part, while they can be ignored, if they're addressed successfully, the effect this thinking has on game play is tremendously enhanced.

Unless you're nodding your head at this point, it's hard to make to make the reader understand.  These are, after all, questions that humans have been asking themselves for millennia.  But, for the sake of an attempt to explain, let me bring you back to where we started in this post.

Consider again the ethic that the DM's role is to make the game fun for the players, and that if the DM isn't doing this, somehow the DM is not running the game right.  This is a commonly held approach, though rarely examined ... and again, this post won't devolve into a discussion of whether or not this is true.

Instead, let's approach the question from the player's pursuit of happiness, that I've already argued must be done by the players.  How does the DM make the game fun, while enabling the players to pursue happiness?

Have to go around the barn for this one, I'm afraid.

A few years ago, I watched the movie Hector & the Search for Happiness.  This recently emerged on Netflix, so if you have that service, I recommend watching the film.  It will help you and your perspective as a DM providing a game setting for others who are essentially pursuing Hector's search (though admittedly, with weapons and the collection of treasure).  The film addresses the following point:

Avoiding unhappiness is not the road to happiness.

Your happiness as a person is directly related to your perspective, your experiences and most importantly, what you've overcome.  It seems counter-intuitive, but the less you've had to overcome in your life, the fewer unpleasant experiences you've been forced to acquire.  This has narrowed your perspective to things that are effectively pleasant, but it has also removed most comparisons you might make between that which is pleasant and that which is unpleasant.

Where you've been says a lot about where you are now.  What you've escaped from is more relevant to how free you feel, than is how free you are.  Your ability to face death well depends greatly upon how many times you've faced death before ... or, in fact, what you've faced that is perhaps worse.  If you've never faced anything, if every part of your life up to date has been beautific, then you're absolutely not ready to face most anything dreadful.

Consider that D&D is often first played by children.  This might lead you to think that the death of a character would be a difficult experience for them, because compared to an adult, a child's life is relatively easy ... especially if we're speaking of the sort of lifestyle that allows the time, space and education that's needed to play D&D at all.  That is, a largely middle-class lifestyle.  Such children take things like a bed to sleep in, food to eat, a roof to sleep under, a loving family and so on for granted.  And so, having their character killed, a thing the child has become attached to, is surely a considerable blow.

But it's not.  Children do not grasp loss as adults do; they haven't the context to view anything as permanent.  If I were to tell you that every year, without exception, you're going to be removed from your place of work and put somewhere else, with a different boss, higher expectations, constant training and only some familiar faces around you — while disallowing you the option of quitting this new job — you'd go insane in about three years.  Children view this shake-up as normal.  They may sleep in the same bed, but that bed may be in five different cities in the space of five years, depending on the parent's work record.  We hand children off casually to grandparents, aunts and uncles, sometimes for two or more weeks, never asking the child's permission.  Moreover, children grow up hearing endless stories of divorces, with friends suddenly vanishing forever from their lives because those parents have moved away or placed their child into a different private or religious school.  Children grow up realising that nothing is permanent.  The loss of a character is disappointing, but after so much disappointment, it doesn't take long to get over.

It's only when the child begins to settle down, gains control over his or her life, begins to make all the decisions and feels "free" from imposed authority that one more loss feels unacceptable.  Sometimes, children experience far, far worse that adults, and have to live with those experiences all their lives; sometimes, the child emerges from the home so pampered and safe that they've experienced nothing.  Point in fact, however, neither of these groups are likely to have played D&D as children.  The first usually has a family so toxic that cruelty and want are so pervasive that there's no opportunity to play a regular game of any kind.  The second has parents that won't let their child out of the house to play anything that sounds as "toxic" as D&D.  No, it's the middle group that has D&D players among their number.  And this middle group is fairly comfortable with the death of a character.  They play many kinds of games, unlike adults; and all games have winners and losers.

A lesson that, strangely, many adults seem to forget.

All right, all right, heading on around the barn.

The age of the player when they come to D&D matters, as does how much experience that player has with life, games and loss.  A DM running a group of softly raised older players who have recently come to the game will experience much more push-back than someone running players who have lost many characters already.

As a DM, it's part of the role to provide the players with unhappiness.  Unhappiness upsets, brings complaint, threatens the player's comfort level and potentially gives them a reason to quit the game, or that campaign ... but it also raises the game's stakes and relevance.  The best game occurs when the players have been unhappy — and have now extricated themselves from their previous situation.  The comparison is what matters.  Death, loss, misery, despair ... these things have threatened and these things have been overcome.

Difficulty is not sufficient.  Puzzles and problem solving are not sufficient.  These are intellectual exercises and have as much emotional impact as what you feel if you're unable to finish a crossword puzzle.  We're not speaking of disappointment.  We're speaking specifically of the character's being sincerely unsatisfied and unpleased with the situation at hand, potentially because it seems impossible to resolve.

It's not the DM's right to impose unhappiness ... it's the DM's imperative.  If unhappiness is not imposed, the players will never fully engage in the game.  More to the point, they won't be able to, because they've been taught by life that anything easy is not necessary or worth bothering about.  

Course, this creates a problem.  People quit when things are too hard ... and they quit when things are too easy.  Creating unhappiness is a fine art.  Too much, and people will find the campaign too hard.  Create none at all, and people will grow bored.  We want to slip in as much unhappiness as the players can possibly withstand ... while simultaneously maintaining some glimmer of hope that there's a way to emerge from this misery with success and treasure.  Getting the measure right takes practice ... and at the beginning, it's wise to incorporate unhappiness in small doses.

That said, the more unhappiness the players have overcome, the more experience they have with it.  Like Pavlov's dog, once they've gotten used to the unhappiness bell, they'll think of the success first and the misery after.  After awhile, no matter how unhappy you make the players, they'll be so focused on their "inevitable" success that they'll tolerate blocks of misery high enough to blot out the sun.

Takes time.  Does work though.

State of Equipment

With regards to what a character has, I wish to write a few sidenotes.  DMs ought to be warned away from things like "journeybread," a magic bread that eliminates the need to buy food, and other such items that proliferate now through the 5e system, but this is only a symptom of the wider misunderstanding of what equipment is and how it fits into the game.

The Gygaxian model, evident from early lists, is that equipment is there to manage dungeoneering, which to the voices of the time is essentially like camping.  Yet there's enough conscious awareness in Gygax and others that the players might want to buy things like cows, chickens and ships, though no rules whatsoever exist for the management or layout for such things.  Presumedly, the game's designers assumed that if players wanted to know how much a ship could carry, how fast it could move under various winds and what the arrangement of rooms and cargo space looked like, a library was available.  Which is just how we approached such things at the time.  Self-sustaining and all that.  It gave us something to do while walking miles to school, uphill both ways.

Later, as equipment lists grew through the Dragon magazine and other role-playing games, DMs realised that buying things was perhaps the best way to get rid of a player's vast income, in a way that seemed far less contrived than paying out ludicrous amounts for "training" and "research."  It does work this way, but this alone is not an especially valuable reason to provide characters with better equipment lists.

As an interesting sidenote, assuming 1 g.p. contains approximately 7 grams of gold (which complies with typical Middle Eastern coins from the Romans forward), then the cost for a 1st level to train to be a 2nd level equals 1,500 grams of gold for one week; divided into troy ounces, or 31.103 grams per ounce, this is 337.6 ounces, or 21.1 pounds of pure gold.  Compared against the price of gold in 1979, when the DMG was published — $459 USD per ounce — this is the equivalent of $154,953.  Converting this into 2022 dollars equals $632,428.  

Moreover, this is per level to be risen from.  A 2nd level moving to 3rd requires twice the amount, while from 3rd to 4th requires three times as much.  To put this into context, it costs nine times as much in equivalent money to be trained as a 2nd level fighter for one week as it does to go to Harvard University for a year.  And if the DM, according to Gygax, thinks you weren't good enough in your 1st play, he or she can multiply this amount by 2-4.  By fiat.  When I say ridiculous, I mean ridiculous.

Coming back to the point.  Throughout the game's development, there have been two suppositions that cut the importance of equipment off at the knees.  I know of no exception, counting every version of D&D and every other role-playing game I've seen, including those set in the present and the future.  Those two suppositions are:

1. Pieces of equipment are complete units onto themselves; they are not formed of other things, and therefore no information need be given as to how much wood is needed to make a wagon, or how much meat a chicken supplies, or what ingredients, amount included, are necessary to make a bottle of beer.  Furthermore, for the most part, very little effort is made to include raw materials on an equipment list — except for perhaps one or two dozen commodities.  Certainly, a concerted effort to include ALL the things that ordinary human beings can buy locally are never included.

2. Players have next-to-no knowledge of how anything is made, or how it works, and therefore zero information needs to be supplied as to the pieces, fixtures, parts, materials used, or any other aspect of the piece of equipment being bought.  We're buying a "rope."  Because as players we are universally ignorant, there's no need to describe the rope's breakweight, it's thickness, the manner of its weaving or even the materials from which it's made.  All rope, we are meant to understand, is exactly the same.  This same rationale applies to every object in the game universe.

As a result, if a character wishes to transform bars of nickle, manganese and iron into a sword, there is no price for the bar, no manufacturing time, no detail of the tools needed or what space is required ... so that even if the player has done this personally, and knows the answer to many of these questions, the DM has to invent the price of tools, materials and space out of thin air, since no game equivalent has ever been offered.  And if there is some version of the game that includes a price for a "blacksmithy shop" (I've never seen it, but there have been a hundred splatbooks, so it's sure to be out there), then it's a single-type all-purpose cookie-cutter blacksmithy shop, with minimal details and the assumption that every blacksmithy everywhere in the world is exactly the same, like waking up in a Howard Johnson's.

D&D has had 40 years to address this problem and it has done ... nothing.  Because it's perceived that nothing needs to be done.  Players don't want details.  They don't want to buy raw materials.  They want things they can march into a dungeon.  They certainly don't care what their rope is made of, or what food tastes like, or how to actually make armour in game.  "It costs such-and-such an amount of money per week to make a sword."  So you pay the money and "buy" the sword that you made, exactly in the way that you would have if you'd gone to the market.  What you've done is buy the right to say you made the sword yourself ... except that you didn't.  In any sense.

This minimalisation forces the players into a conformative, passive mindset where it comes to purchasing equipment and deciding how to spend their money.  The overall result is a total lack of interest in buying things past what's immediately needed to play the adventure ... which in turn causes the piling up of player money, making it possible for them to pay for the adventure's necessities, whatever they are, because no other enticement exists for which to spend their money.  That causes DMs to lament the inexhaustible supply of player money, producing the DM's feeling that somehow this money needs to be drained in some other manner, by theft or by irrational training costs, which matters not a whit anyway because players don't care about money.  Not in the system the game has built.

To a DM, this feels off ... because it seems evident that money should matter, since that is the human experience.  It doesn't equate, however, because we view money most romantically as something that obtains emotional highs and lows, new experiences, security and power ... whereas none of these things exist in the game's structure as designed by the originators.  In D&D, money is a number that's piled up until it's exchanged for something meaningless, that brings no special benefit to my character's personality, status or ability.  Unless it does so through rules that make no sense, that are obviously invented for the sole purpose of reducing my money.

There is a solution, but it requires a complete turnaround of the game's design.  JB likes to say that "D&D is about adventure."  Adventure is exciting.  It is certainly an intrinsic part of the player's experience.  But saying that D&D is about adventure makes as much sense as saying that life is about sex, or that childhood is about Halloween.  It is not necessary to adventure in order to play D&D.  I have run a year's worth of sessions as a party established and organised their colony, cleared and planted land, interacted both peaceably and threateningly with local tribes, helped supply a war effort, freed slaves, planned for the future, began personal relationships, attended a coronation, infiltrated spies into an enemy outpost and traded goods they had mined, raised and acquired through diplomacy.  None of this falls under the heading of "adventure" in any traditional sense, yet none of the players were the least bored, they were operating entirely according to their own agency, doing what they wanted to do ... and at no time would any of them believed they weren't playing D&D.

D&D is about playing a character that makes choices in a game world regarding their ambitions and intentions to accumulate varying measurable products: money, experience, notariety, the expansion of their belief system or anything they can invent.  I once ran a character whose sole desire was to acquire books, with the intention of building an Alexandria-sized library.  My tactic was to join the siege army surrounding a city, aid in the city's fall and then rush in to pillage the libraries within.  Is this "adventure?"  As a genre, I'd call it "criminality" or "war."  Just because it's exciting doesn't make it adventure.

The frustrating two-dimensionality of the adventure-arrangement for D&D is perpetrated by the system's total inability to support any other framework of play.  The books were of no help to the DM or me in describing how to wage war against a city, or how to be a small contingent of players operating inside an army.  The DM had to invent this on his own.  The books provided me no help in helping the players develop their colony and trading intentions.  I had to invent this on my own.  This led to the development of my trade tables, my massive equipment list and ultimately the menu I launched last year.  All things that my players, and many others who have experienced these things through other DMs, to realise that "adventure" alone is an extremely shallow approach to what the game offers.

I'm stumped, at present, on how to explain any of this to a new DM, with shiny copies of 5th edition spread out before them.  Some things just don't seem possible.

Further Notes on Creating the Character

The player's character is essentially made of four parts.  We have a loose perception of the character's personal nature, represented by the ability stats, telling us a little of what the individual is like.  Then there's the character's resilience, represented by hit points, number of levels and armour class.  This tells us the likelihood of the character surviving a conflict.  Next, we have what the character can do, represented varyingly by spells, proficiencies, special abilities, powers and feats, depending on the system version.  Finally, there's what the character owns, the list of personal equipment, tools, even property and emblems of status.

These things influence each other.  For example, the character's title (a thing that's "had") offers something the character can "do" (order soldiers into battle) or what the character is like (responsible or tyrannical).  A character's charisma gives a sense of the character's nature while also possibly defining actions the character can take, such as impressing others, or dare not take, lest they repel others.  What a character has, such as weapons, armour and magic items, can increase his or her resiliency.  It's not that any of this is new to the reader — but I wish to stress that there's a deep-seated interconnection between these different elements that makes the character a remarkably FLUID game invention.  Nothing like it has ever existed before; as a model, it's vastly more complex than those things it's often compared with, like the role an actor plays or a persona one takes to confuse an enemy.

An actor's role possesses NO fluidity at all, except in the exact way the performance is given.  As an actor, my location on a stage or before the camera is determined by the director, the camera operator, the limitations of the theatre space and the need to place me where other actors can be seen communicating and emoting with me.  In a rehearsal, an enormous amount of time is spent in a process called "blocking," in which the actor's movement is strictly defined — even to where the moment I lift my hand to brush my hair is defined by a specific word in the script.  In a good production, no movement is left to the actor.  The actor's role is to take someone else's words and directions and give it the ring of truth — to make all the artifice and fakery of the stage look as though a real person stands before you, actually going through something for the first time that he or she has actually performed hundreds of times before, in rehearsals and previous runs of the play.  NOTHING whatsoever in this bears ANY similarity to playing a character in D&D.  Those who wallow around for the actor as an example plainly know nothing of which they speak, either of role-playing games or of performance.  They're morons who have seen a play or movie and have been utterly duped into believing there aren't fifty people involved in the actor's performance.

The confidence artist hits closer to the mark, as the role requires considerable flexibility and nuance to fleece the mark.  However, the practice of playing a character in D&D has similarity to this sort of presentation when the player's character chooses to be a con artist within the framework of the game.  A con artist is a momentary effort; it's not designed to be sustained over a long period and ultimately depends on no one knowing the artist is really a different person.  Whereas in D&D, everyone knows what the character is.  There's no "con."  The character's actions are legitimate; even when the character sets out to dupe an NPC, those actions are still legitimate, because we all know what's happening.  In no way does the con artist's role reflect what a D&D character is.

We weaken the invention every time we try to define the game character as "like" something else.  It's like nothing else.  It's its own thing.  We only turn to a simile in desperation, because the character is SO absurdly different from anything in our experience, we don't know how to properly describe it.  But we cheapen the concept when we make comparisons.

The character is a mechanism.  It is not a represention of the player's thoughts, beliefs, desires or personality.  It is a machine that translates what the player wants to do into a game system purposed to determine if that want is possible.  Any rule, therefore, which is not directly affected by some metric of the character's design, is an effort to bypass the "character" in order to empower the PLAYER.

For example, the so-called "rule of cool."  The player says, "My character climbs the giant's leg and stabs him in the chest."  Within the character's design, there's no ability for this.  There's no combat rule that covers this.  There are no rules at all for climbing a giant's body ... though there are rules that suggest this would take much longer than the player imagines, and that climbing a surface actually moving and in combat would make the move impossible.

However, the new interpretation urges the DM to "overlook the rules" whenever the player shows efforts at innovation and "being cool."  In other words, skip the character entirely and let the player's "thoughts" fight the giant.  This approach allows the player to change the physical laws of the universe.  If the DM thinks this has been done cleverly enough, he or she gives the player permission to do so.

Those who play this way might just as well admit that the character, and all that makes up the character, is merely a prop.  Which is not the game.  It is some other game that pretends to be D&D.  The game is to accept limitations the setting and the player's own character places on the player's actions, so that the player must work within the boundaries of what he or she has — no matter how cool the alternative is.  The game is not based on the player's ability to invent anything that might pop into the player's head, but to invent approaches within boundaries put outside the player's control.

The best case scenario for game play is, then, for the player to enable success from things that seem utterly inadequate to produce success.  To take a single, desperate action and turn around a combat.  To astutely turn a usually dismissable object, or ability, into a powerful if momentary weapon.  To bank on the lowest stat the character possesses and swing for the fences ... and have it pan out.  Such moments always produce wild cheers and pounding of the table, not to mention incidents that are remembered.

Of course, this also means that often such efforts are disastrously inadequate, ending in failure.  Which means, as has been stated on this blog, failure is also an intrinsic part of the game.

It means the players must accept failure as a possibility — even as a probable outcome, if they bite off more than they can chew.  It means they must accept that failure with dignity, if they wish to continue participating.  It means holding players who can't accept failure accountable, even when set out to change the rules loudly, or pound the table with demands, or sit and sulk until they get their way, by turning them out from the game until their behaviour improves.  Being a DM in some degree calls for defending the game against those who would dismantle it for their own ends.  Not the "DM's Game," in the selfish context that many DMs righteously defend, but THE game, the one that is defined by the rules and structure that everyone present has agreed to play by.

If you are a new DM, you must get this agreement in place before you can play.  The best time to do that is in rolling up the player characters.  As each part of the character is generated, make it perfectly clear to all the players what the boundaries are that these metrics and numbers define.  Your strength is this; it allows this; it does not allow that.  This is how many hit points you have.  If you lose them all, you die.  No special contingent last-minute reprieve will be provided; so cherish your hit points and spend them wisely.  This die that we roll determines if you hit or miss ... and no clever mixing of words or proposed inventive creativity will turn this "7" into a "17."  So plan to fail.  PLAN for it.  Because it will happen.  And when it does, make plans, now, to accept that you've failed.  Plan to laugh it off, plan to make little of it, even if your heart is breaking, even if you doubt your future interest in the game.  Be strong.  Remember there are others here, who feel your pain ... who worry that they will be next.  So plan.  Decide that you're ready to accept the game's consequences, NOW, while we're rolling your character.  Or don't play.

This is the message you have to send.  You'll need to be strong yourself; you'll need to possess an evident composed, serious manner and style as you gently describe each part of the character's limitations.  You'll need to be fair ... and so your tone and words must convince the players that you'll not inconsiderately spend their character's lives on some whim.  You care for their characters just as you care for them as people.  Promise that if anyone dies, you'll know the rule that killed them backwards and forwards.  Promise that if there's a means to reverse a disastrous situation, you, the DM, will be the first to bring the players' attention to it.  You are not their enemy.  But you will uphold the agreed-upon rules, because someone has to.

As DM, you've accepted that responsibility.

Map, July 31, 2022

So, six months work:

This is the full map so far, at 43% zoom.  Just gets bigger and bigger.  There's quite a bit more above than I had the end of June.  I rather like the effect of colour as the hexes begin to shrink and disappear, with the brighter patches being various shades of orange to tan.  That large light splash in the middle left is Transylvania; the orange arc north of the big river, the Danube, is Wallachia; south of the river it's Silistra in Bulgaria.  The light patch on the far left, just below centre, is Serbia; the light patch on the bottom right, along the sea, is Dobruja.

You can see from this that "nations" are less about boundaries and more about patches of density separated from elsewhere by forests and mountains.  Intensely populated centres are important militarily and economically; small patches, like the two orange groups in the upper right that represent Bukovina and Moldavia, matter locally but are mere satellites.

I have begun to place additional labels on rivers and mountains, but I'm still playing with colours for these things.  The map is so dense that there's little room to draw in large letters defining "Serbia" or "Transylvania."  I'm also beginning to feel that the boundaries need darkening, to a colour that's a deeper yellowish-brown or orange, that offer a better definition.  Not sure yet which way I'll go.

Posting the map in 100% of it's zoom now requires six plates.  Moving from west to east across the top of the map, and then from west to east across the bottom, this is Plate 1.  Moving clockwise from the top, Ruthenia, West Transylvania, Bidin in Bulgaria, the Banat. 

Plate 2.  Clockwise, northern Moldavia, eastern Carpathians, east Transylvania, Lower Banat.

Plate 3.  Southern Bug valley, the Dneiper-Bug estuary, the Black Sea, Ismailia, central Moldavia.  Incidentally, the Tulchin Forest is the site of a little-known (in the west) Jewish holocaust event.  I'd never heard of it until researching the map.

Plate 4.  Southwest Transylvania, Bidin, upper and lower Serbia, the Banat.

Plate 5.  Southeast Transylvania, Wallachia, Silistra, Oltenia.

Plate 6.  Ismailia, Black Sea and the Lower Danube, Dobruja, Silistra and east Wallachia.

By virtue of the method I'm using of going round and round the outside rim, I find myself reposting content that's already been posted.  I suppose this is somewhat boring for the reader.  I'm hearing less and less interest in these maps and if the reader likes, I can centre on one corner a month rather than posting the whole thing each time.  The map spreads out over eleven working sheets at this point and it would be easier for me to post the sheets as they're finished rather than trying to match them up.  Still, it looks remarkable to me.  I find myself gazing at parts from time to time as I'm working, startled by the slow, tremendous growth.  The chaotic terrain of southern Serbia was, this month, both a trial and something of a revelation, as I've never viewed this part of the world in such deep detail.  I can't imagine how difficult it was to invade and hold, for NATO forces, for the WW2 Germans or for the WW1 Austrians.  The mountains roll every which way and have no continuity.

Please let me know if you're still anxious to see what next month's generation produces.

Happy

I feel that I wrote a good post about story today.  I made the argument that the word story is an enticement, a gimmick that writers and business people use to fool listeners into thinking they're getting something good ... when in fact they're getting a moral of little value.  The post argues that we rush towards stories nonetheless, because we're biologically programmed to think we're going to find something when we search for it.  Even when we come up empty.

I love to write.  It's what I wanted to do for a living ... and now I do.  Whereas many times in the last seven years I've been in earnest where money was concerned, things seem to have sorted themselves out.  I have steady work, I'm appreciated, I'm ribbed almost daily for having the luck to go to Montreal in just 61 days ... and my partner Tamara and I have been able to enjoy our emergence from Covid (if that's what this is) with more comfort than we could have hoped.

Throughout the changes we've experienced, Patreon has been an important part.  Supporters made it possible for me to get a new computer when my old one failed.  Supporters made it possible for Tamara, an American citizen, to achieve permanent status in Canada.  We've filled out a form to become married in the next month, without a ceremony (as she wants) on a day that's yet unspecified ... though it'll be prior to Montreal.  On two occasions, Patreon stood between us and the street.

I want those who have decided, or had to abandon my Patreon, to know that I understand completely and wish you the very best.  Inflation is rampant, there are many reasons not to continue funding an old D&D horse like myself ... and self-care must be first and foremost.  I don't know for a fact why you've chosen to go.  I may be repeating myself and you've become bored.  You may be on your last financial legs.  Possibly, you believe that since I'm no longer down and out in Calgary, I don't need your support.  I almost never learn the real reason.  It doesn't matter.  You've given what you can, or would, and I thank you.  I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Once upon a time, if I spoke of Patreon, it was to tell what dire straits I was in.  No longer, thank everything.  There are, today, only two reasons to give to my Patreon.  The first is that you feel I've earned it.  That I've written something that you would have paid some amount of money to buy, if it were stuffed in a book published by the WOTC, that you found on your gamestore bookshelf.  Something you read and thought, "Wow, that was really worth the money."  If I've written something on those lines, and you were moved by the value, then it makes sense to pay me.

The other reason is that you have enough money that you can indulge in frivolities like "making the world a better place."  And that you feel, perhaps delusionally, that I'm the right pitbull for you to back.  That you feel my work here, and on my wiki, and in the books I've written (and pretend to write), are the right place for your money.  If you believe that there is a better D&D culture and community that might exist out there, and you feel that my scribblings are helping make that possible, then it makes sense for you to contribute to my Patreon.

But if you're still giving me money to support me, to help me pay my rent, to ensure that I'm not so broke that I'll stop writing because I've been thrown out of my residence, then you're free at last.  It's a full year since I hit on my present writing job; if it lasts just five years, Tamara and I will be set for life.  I've had two other offers connected to the work I'm doing, so I have other places to go.  I'm comfortable.  I'm happy.  If you like, pat yourself on the back and know that you kept an artist from going down for the count.  YOU did it.  YOU supported me until I got here.  You've done your job.  Thank you.  Please feel free to withdraw your support now, and help some other poor down and out writer.  There are lots of us.

Felt I had to write this.  I don't want any of my supporters going away unhappy, or unappreciated, or feeling like I don't care.  I do care.  A lot.  I want all of you to be happy and I want to keep on writing, here and elsewhere, whether I'm paid or not.

It's all I ever wanted.

Story

"I don't see what the big deal is.  Just making a story."

I had in mind to discuss another aspect today, but I'll get to it later.  The above, too, is an obstacle that must be overcome.  There's a very good chance that the new DM has possession of a 3rd, 4th or 5th edition of the game, and most likely has seen some of the dreck on youtube and reddit that flogs the propaganda above.  And because it can't just be managed by providing definitions and in-game distinctions, as the new DM has no context for those arguments, we must find some other way to approach the subject.

I think much of the problem revolves around an incomplete understanding of the word, "story."  I and many others have addressed the matter by pointing out that an actual story involves a series of events that culminate in an ending ... and therefore, for a story to work in D&D, the ending has to be determined before the adventure begins.  In effect, making a railroad.  But we should remember that for many, many players and DMs, a railroad is just fine.  They see nothing wrong with it.  After all, we write a book or make a film that has the ending predetermined ... and those things are enjoyable.  Why shouldn't the adventure work exactly like that, with the players acting out their parts in a story for which they don't yet know the end?  When the end comes, won't that be fun?

We understand how this offers only half the game, or perhaps even less.  It steals away the player's agency in exchange for that of the DM, or worse, for that of module-maker who can't be there to appreciate the players' response.  As well, if a novelist or filmmaker produces bad work, there's no DM to blame; nor is there a DM that exists whose responsibility it is to fix the film or book for other viewers and readers.

Again and again, we find ourselves confronted by the bad language of all this.  The reflex when attempting to describe the players having more agency over how the adventure ends, or how it's played out, is to say, "let the players write their own story."  But that's bogus too, because the players have no more knowledge of the future end of their story than we do of what's going to happen tomorrow or ten years from now.  I'm not right now living a "story."  I'm alive, dealing with obstacles as they come, making decisions which can only be known to be good or bad by seeing what comes.  I feel that D&D is a better game when played that way ... but I have no word that beautifully describes that ideal.  That is, I have no word that can compete with the appellation, "story."

I have probably spoken about this before, but it fits in here so I'll risk repeating myself.  The rise of the word story does not begin in D&D or role-playing, but in business.  Dale Carnegie presents the idea in his wildly suscessful 1936 best-seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Chapter one starts,

If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive

On May 7, 1931, the most sensational manhunt New York City had ever known had come to its climax. After weeks of search, "Two Gun" Crowley -- the killer, the gunman who didn't smoke or drink -- was at bay, trapped in his sweetheart's apartment on West End Avenue.

One hundred and fifty policemen and detectives laid siege to his top-floor hideaway. They chopped holes in the roof; they tried to smoke out Crowley, the "cop killer," with tear gas. Then they mounted their machine guns on surrounding buildings, and for more than an hour one of New York's fine residential areas reverberated with the crack of pistol fire and the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Crowley, crouching behind an overstuffed chair, fired incessantly at the police. Ten thousand excited people watched the battle. Nothing like it had ever been seen before on the sidewalks of New York.

When Crowley was captured, Police Commissioner E. P. Mulrooney declared that the two-gun desperado was one of the most dangerous criminals ever encountered in the history of New York. "He will kill," said the Commissioner, "at the drop of a feather."

But how did "Two Gun" Crowley regard himself? We know, because while the police were firing into his apartment, he wrote a letter addressed "To whom it may concern." And, as he wrote, the blood flowing from his wounds left a crimson trail on the paper. In his letter Crowley said: "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one -- one that would do nobody any harm."

A short time before this, Crowley had been having a necking party with his girl friend on a country road out on Long Island. Suddenly a policeman walked up to the car and said: "Let me see your license."

Without saying a word, Crowley drew his gun and cut the policeman down with a shower of lead. As the dying officer fell, Crowley leaped out of the car, grabbed the officer's revolver, and fired another bullet into the prostrate body.  And that was the killer who said: "Under my coat is a weary heart, but a kind one -- one that would do nobody any harm."

Crowley was sentenced to the electric chair. When he arrived at the death house in Sing Sing, did he say, "This is what I get for killing people"?  No, he said: "This is what I get for defending myself."

The point of the story is this: "Two Gun" Crowley didn't blame himself for anything.

Why start with this story?   If you like, you can see endless interpretations of the answer on youtube, with titles like, The Undeniable Power of Business Storytelling ... Three Principles of Business Storytelling ... The Magical Science of Storytelling ... The Art of Business Storytelling ... and on, and on.  If you randomly pick any event where someone in business is going to tell you how to do better in business, I promise than in the first five minutes, they're going to talk about why you must learn to tell a story.  And, I'm afraid it's true.

Somewhere between the ages of 2 and 3, your brain developed to the point where you began to understand things in a chronological context.  Before you became aware of the fascination behind all this, you were intensely fascinated ... and if you were a child whose parents took the time to read you stories, or tell you their own stories, they hard-baked comprehensions and patterns into your brain that remain to this day.  Your ability to be a dungeon master is largely shaped by your parents — or whomever you had as a guardian — and their ability to lay out events in chronological order.  If your grasp of this skill is good, you can tell a joke.  You can frame the order in which work needs to be done.  You can look into your own past and understand how your present circumstances are the consequence of things that you did, or others did.

The next stage of that storytelling education emerges somewhere between the age of 5 and 9, or not at all.  It begins with your beginning to "get" a joke.  It starts with this sort of joke:

What's the difference between an apple and a grape?  A grape is purple.

Silly, but the formula is universal.  You're presented with a conundrum, you expect a serious answer, you get a nonsense — but true — answer, and your preconceptions are remolded.  As you mature, along with those around you, the pattern is advanced in an attempt to do more than remold your preconceptions, but to also shatter your pre-set assumptions about problem-solving AND the depths of imagination.  Here is an actual joke from my grade 2, not shared with adults:

What's easier to unload?  A truck full of bricks or a truck full of dead babies?  Dead babies.  You can't use a pitchfork on bricks.

As I said, the same construction.  Only now you're forced to uncomfortably acknowledge the truth about something that's deeply disturbing ... which is why children, restrained and oppressed by the brutal regime of school, adore jokes like this.

The pattern progresses, however, until comprehension of the joke requires worldly knowledge, preconceptions about what the answer should be and ultimately an admittance of seeing things from one side only:

If only Africa had more mosquito nets, then every year we could save millions of mosquitos from dying needlessly of AIDS.

Once you grasp that a joke is about expectations and insight much more than it's about being funny, this empowers you to produce varying kinds of stories that lead persons into one kind of thinking, burying all the necessary seeds into the story that you'll need later to rip the listener from one kind of expectation into another sort of insight.  You never gave one second's thought to the death of mosquitos ... yet you most likely ARE extremely sensitive about death.  That inner discontinuity serves the manner in which you're dragged into examining your preconceptions in all of 21 words.  But that is why Jimmy Carr is such a brilliant joke writer.

What is Carnegie's story about?  Is it about the capture of a desperado?  The willingness of a murderer to kill?  Evidence that a criminal refuses to accept responsibility for his crimes?  Why is it you know that's not what the story is about.

Assuming you know.  Many people can't make the connections you or I can't.  Some are still trying to understand the mosquito joke.

We know that story is NOT about a criminal, because the title of the book is How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Obviously, this isn't done by being a criminal.  In fact, equally blatant, is that a trigger-happy criminal is exactly the opposite of winning friends or influencing anyone ... at least, in 1936.  First lesson: you want friends?  You want influence?  Don't kill cops.

Yet we also know it's deeper than that.  The story makes a connection between what Two-Gun Crowley does and what the reader also does, which is summed up in the last five words.  You recognise the moral because, well, you've heard thousands of stories with morals since the age of 2, jokes included, and you're ready for the moral from the first word of Carnegie's story.  From the start, you're looking for the moral, knowing it's there, like a commuter doing a crossword puzzle (sorry for that metaphor, must be the 1936 thing).  Long before Carnegie gets there, you're primed.

This priming is what makes stories work so well.  Not because you're satisfied with the moral — you're not.  It's trite, hackneyed, often isn't the reason you're not doing well with other people and, in general, a waste of your time, what with you being a 2020-something citizen of the world.  NO, it's because the moral is there.  It has to be.  Your disappointment is immaterial.  With something like this, you're a cro-magnon animal 125,000 years ago poking between rocks and lifting shrub branches looking for bird's eggs, which at this time of year are always around, but they have to be found.  You're standing up to your thighs, bent over a river, waiting for a trout that will come, so that you will eat, but only if you stand absolutely still for as long as it takes.

You're stupid this way.

That is to say, this behaviour made sense for your distant forefathers, but you actually have better things to read that don't end in cheesy moralisms.  But here you are, reading through an 86-year-old story about how to win friends, not knowing what you'll get or if it will be worth the time spent.  Sometimes, there are no eggs to be found.  Sometimes there ain't no fish.

Me, I'm taking this time to tell my own Carnegie-like story, because now I'm ready for my punchline.  Your fascination with game modules and other products is just like the fish-waiting habits of our ancestors.  You expect to see something cool and important in the module you're buying, just knowing it's got to be there ... and it doesn't matter how many times you've been disappointed in the past.  Because even if you didn't find eggs last time, or catch any fish, you know eggs exist somewhere, that eventually, yes, you'll catch fish.  Because that's how the world works.  That's precisely the way we're all stupid enough to eventually succeed.

The difference between a railroaded story and player agency is your perception of where fish comes from.  If you're the sort of person who hunts constantly for other people's fish, you'll buy modules and run to the name game version.  If, on the other hand, you're the sort who believes in finding your own fish, you'll stand in your own stream.

Those professionals telling audiences how stories are going to make them good business-people are lying.  The story is the message, not what the story says.  With an audience as primed as these, a good speaker can churn any sort of bullshit so long as it sounds clever and ends in a semi-literate moral.  Which is just what these people do.  Don't believe me.  Listen to their spiel.

The same argument can be made for how primed D&D players are for anything we want to put in front of them.  Once a player gets excited by the concept of making even tiny decisions, they'll climb aboard the train as soon as the whistle blows ... regardless of how well that train's run.  And no worry if the adventure's any good; these players are so stoked to find something, they'll lift every branch and stand freezing and miserable in every stream until they find it.  And they will find it, because they're stupid this way.

[and damn it, I set these metaphors up one by one; they're not mixed].

So.

What do we tell a new DM?  I think, probably, the standard boiler plate.  Try a module, and once you see how an adventure is put together, try to make one of your own.  If the DM had the select kind of parents, was raised on stories and jokes, can tell a joke properly, and understands the construction of chronology, he or she will grasp the notion of making their own adventures pretty quickly.  They'll want to catch their own fish.

But if the DM isn't that sort, didn't have books around, wasn't told stories, can't get jokes, yearns for others to make things make sense, then they'll buy fish at the store, every time.  No matter how often they're taught how to catch fish.  I'll remind you, this is the post that got this series started.  Admit it.  Some of you learned how to fish as a child.  Do you fish now?

Finally, there's an answer to the quote at the top of the post, about "just" making a story.  Ask,

"Can you tell the difference between a good story and a bad one?  Can you make a good story?  Or are you just assuming you can buy good stories, and you assume someone else is doing it?  Because I'm not convinced of that.  I think mostly what I've seen at the store are BAD stories, and I can do better.  But if you think you know the difference between good and bad, and you think you can make a good story, tell it to me now.  I'm listening."

 

The Woods

I suspect the subject material of educating new DMs has begun to wear.  It's what I have, I'm afraid.  I've been gnawing the teeth of my intellect upon introducing two aspects of the problem.  Both are age-old troubles.  Neither has a factual solution to my knowledge, though I've attempted both in the past.

(a) how does a DM talk to players?  And (b) how does a DM start worldbuilding from scratch?

Briefly:

I just start talking.  It feels like that's how I've always been — I've been talking since a very young age ... younger than many, it seems.  Arguing began somewhere between the age of 5 and 6, I think brought on by the dynamics of board games.  Seems everyone in my family were always starting an argument during a board game.  As it happens, arguing is an important part of the dynamic of presenting D&D, since we're doing more than describing what the players see ... we're literally setting out to convince them that they're seeing this thing we've imagined.  Therefore when DMing, I'm "leaning in," compelling the players to get interested, get busy, get worried about what's going to happen next.

It's been so long since I started a world from scratch, I'm forced to draw on memories going back 37 years.  Essentially, pick a place.  Pick a scene within that place.  Have something happen there, which intrigues or threatens the players.  Explain why that thing happened, and specifically in that scene, by building up the place that enables it.

For example: Say the "place" is a big city, say something like Vienna.  The "scene" is a tiny plaza with stone paving, at night, where four streets meet.  What happens is that while the party is searching for a room at an inn, they see a long, reptilian creature laying in the street, and realise in time, from about forty feet away, that it's a basilisk.  Go.

Okay, so ... putting these two thoughts together.

We have no game world.  Just this street scene.  There's no inn, no larger Vienna, nothing.  The players have their characters, collectively they have more hit points than the basilisk, conceivably they could take the monster.  It's up to them to decide what they want to do.

It's not enough for me to say, "You see a basilisk."  To present the scene as real, I've got to present the basilisk in the same manner that I would if it were a large, 9-foot log laying in the middle of the street.  First, you don't know what it is.  It looks ... possibly threatening.  It's in your path.  Minimal details.  Because at night, with all the various obstacles a street might present (the street isn't level, there are steps and posts and possibly trees overhanging, plus shadows from various structures), absolute knowledge is not immediately available, so as a DM, I don't provide absolute knowledge.  It may be a log.  You don't know.  It may be anything.  And if the players pull their weapons and proceed to sneak up on it, and find it's only a log, they'll be embarrassed.  That is also in their minds.

Beyond the words of the presentation, there's my willingness to emote.  There's a difference between my leaning back in a chair, arms languishing, muttering bland phrases, and my looking sternly at the papers in front of me, standing up, leaning forward, frowning, and saying in low tones, "There's something up ahead."

We can go through the business of rolling fake dice to suggest something's happening.  We can shuffle papers and mutter, "oh shit," under our breath, as though we've discovered something unexpected that the party now has to deal with ... but in fact, the only real message we have to send about the thing up ahead is that we believe in it, and that it matters.  We don't need the dumbshow.  The dumbshow works; and it's a tool we can reserve.  But we don't need it.

My choice of words writing this post strives to convince you, the reader, that I mean what I say and that this is serious.  This same choice of words, the diligence that underlies them, bespeaks the same message to the players.  I'm expressing my view as hard as I can that there's something in the street.  I'm presenting arguments: it's this long, it's this colour, it's something that doesn't belong there.  Your reaction to that presentation carries the game.  If I can't convince you that there's something life threatening ahead, that you need to care about, then you will blow off everything I say as something not worth bothering about.  This is what I mean when I say that I'm arguing you into the game.

Now.  Once you've learned what the basilisk is, you have to assess the threat it offers.  It's moving as if it's heard something; the party doesn't dare watch it for any length of time.  No one has a mirror, because it's the first day and no one expects a basilisk.  Is it safe to run?  Can it run faster than us?  Is it just one basilisk, or is this merely one of a group?  These are questions you to which you want an answer.

Can you ask me?  Yes, but I'm under no obligation to answer.  You have no idea if it's safe to run, or how fast the basilisk can go, or how many of them are out here on the streets of Vienna.  You have no idea why it's here.  You can quote the Monster Manual at me, but I can answer that the statistics in that book are subject to revisionment by me, the DM, as I see fit.  The basilisks in Gygax's world may run this fast, but this isn't Gygax's world, is it?

Over and over you ask, what is this thing doing here?  A basilisk?  In the middle of Vienna?  What the hell?

I ran this encounter in the Autumn of 1984, after deciding I'd start running the real world.  I had a fascination with Vienna at the time and felt it was a good place to start the campaign.  I hoped to draw the players into the Wienerwald Forest (my first Earth-campaign took place in 1500, so obviously the forest was much wilder that Johann Strauss found it), also known as the Vienna Woods.  I hoped for a journey into the Alps, and around the Neusiedler See.  The players decided they preferred to travel east, which they did until they reached Odessa.

They killed the basilisk and learned the beast had escaped from a mage's menagerie and that much of the city had been searching for it.  The mage was unhappy that his monster had been killed; the desire had been to catch it.  Nonetheless, the party was forgiven, the mage invited them to dinner, I dropped hints about places to visit and the party snubbed me.  No harm done.

My point here is that inventing a reason for the basilisk to be here has to be believable ... which, thanks to D&D, is provided by a wide range of possibilities.  The mage's reaction to the killing, coupled with the others around the mage who showed signs of relief, established the theme of my game world, which had been growing in the years before 1984: first, that things are not as they seem; second, that anything can happen anywhere, at any time; and third, there's always a reason.  No matter how nutty the outset might be, once all the facts are known, the thing won't appear to be nutty at all.

I have no idea how such a thing can be conveyed to someone who has never run the game before; or who hasn't the imagination to produce a reason for things; or thinks that "reason" is a detriment to a campaign, which really ought to be about "fantasy."  Such people are wrong.  Players, whether they're conscious of it or no, are human, and thus are helplessly driven to understand why a thing happens, for no other reason than because they're hard-wired this way.  We are thrown into an absurd world about which we know exactly nothing, about which we must persevere to understand if we'd rather not get hit by a bus, starve, work a miserable job for years upon years or die alone.  Quite obviously, many people fail at this.  Most commonly, for lack of proper instruction.  Particularly the failure to bring the message effectively that survival means knowing things.

As a DM, not convincing the players that the game world "matters," along with the decisions they make, is a campaign's death sentence.  The death sentence, as a matter of fact.  We only care about things that matter, and only because that thing serves our immediate need in a way that sustains our agenda.  The more frivolous things appear, the less we care, thus the less we invest and, inevitably, the more likely we are that we'll find something else to do come Saturday.

My game has survived, and continues it's appeal, because I present it as deadly serious, as if the players were deciding which college to attend, which partner to marry, which car to buy, which house they want to live in.  It makes next to no difference that my game is NOT the equal of these other things; I present the game as if it is, arguing with all my passion that it is ... and my players, in turn, receive pleasure from the campaign's significance.

Pleasure is infinitely more gratifying that fun.  "Fun" is lighthearted, momentary, easily obtained in hundreds of places, not just a D&D game.  The DM striving to produce fun competes with drink, family, company, sports, film, fast cars and other instant-and-easy amusements.  Such activities don't need individuals to fritter with details or situations that don't resolve themselves.  Fun can certainly be had without the necessity of books or making decisions!

Pleasure, on the other hand, has the potential for intimacy and affection.  Run right, with players anxious to stretch themselves as thinking persons, D&D can entangle the participants in a way that no other activity can.  It offers itself as an addiction ... which is as potentially destructive as a narcotic, in that a person can grow so attached that they abandon all other pursuits, including fruitful work and family.  A friend of mine from the 80s ended up going to a counsellor and had to quit D&D because he loved it much too much.  He had quit his job, essentially abandoning his marriage as he lost his grip on responsibility and reality.

I don't believe there's a need to be cautious here.  We are, most of us, grounded.  But in giving advice to a new DM, I would suggest most strongly that falling in love with their game world, and especially the character's of that world, is not a requirement.  Nonetheless, they should view the project with a sense of doing something important, like producing a piece of entertainment for the benefit of other persons — with all the responsibility that implies.  It is a responsibility I yearn for, personally.  I like the opportunity to build mazes, to lead others through these mazes and to do so for their pleasure, as something they'll treasure.

Acknowledging that the whole process is useless without an audience.

Well, I've been listening to Strauss for more than an hour, wandering these woods in hopes of finding a path.  Alas, I'm still lost.  It isn't that I don't know what to do as a DM; only that I'm at a loss how to explain it to someone with no experience.

Making the Character (official)

Proposed:

Making the Character

Most D&D versions provide a step-by-step method for generating player characters from scratch, which is helpful for the new DM. It helps enormously when we become exceedingly familiar with the routine of making characters, so we can be a helpmeet to players – especially new players – we introduce to the game. I recommend that you puzzle out as many nuances of your particular rule book by actually making two or three dozen characters, from start to finish. Try to view each part as the player would.

For some, making character after character is an exciting prospect; for others, it might become a bit tedious. Remember that you’re doing it to acquaint yourself with the character making process – tough it out as best you can, but get at least two dozen characters made. Three dozen is better.

When the time comes to direct the characters through the method, we can encourage them not to spend very much time providing incidental details regarding their character’s likes or dislikes – or even the character’s origins. These things can be left for later, if we need to include them at all. Primarily, we need to concentrate on getting the character’s structure ready for game play ... and for that reason we can concentrate on the bare bones of detail we need.

One reality of being the DM is having to know much more than the players. Players are free to choose the character class with which they’re most comfortable – but the DM must have a complete knowledge of all the character class abilities and nuances. This allows the DM to supervise what the players can do, to ensure they’re playing inside the game’s boundaries ... but more importantly, an thorough knowledge of characters also lets us make useful suggestions, helping guide players when they need it. Players often ask, “What should I do?” In such moments, the DM could offer advice as to what a fighter or a thief would probably do – or a mage, if that was the player’s character at the time.

Such advice must never be compromised by the game’s events at that moment. For example, if the players were in an underground setting, gathered outside a door hiding who knows what, it would be very bad form if a DM urged the players to rush through the door and into the gathering of monsters waiting on the other side. Equally, a DM shouldn’t give tactical advice on how to deal with the door either, as this would be “running” the player characters.

Good advice is general. We tell the players to check their equipment lists; to make a plan; to remember that fighters have more hit points than other classes; or to be careful. This non-specific but cautionary advice supports the players without “giving away the game.”

Thus, during the character building phase, a DM with good, solid knowledge on how each character will function once the game begins can offer the best advice about what the player’s choice of weapons, spells, needed equipment and so on. By spending time making our own characters, complete with choosing every detail down to buying equipment with varying amounts of starting coin, we educate ourselves better than the player as to HOW to make a character from scratch. The more experience we have with this process, the more good sense we can provide.

If the grinding out of imaginary characters that you’ll never run in a game begins to get you down, here are a few things to consider. First, in your game setting, the player characters will meet people along the way, ready to act as friends or enemies towards the players. Each “non” player character – commonly called “NPCs” – can be inserted into your setting to serve in that capacity. They may be guards, farmers, informants, tavern keepers, mercenary soldiers, members of the court or whatever you choose to make them.

Additionally, you may have a penchant for collecting “miniatures” – small three dimensional figures made of plastic or metal, which can be used to represent the players on some representation of setting, like a street or an underground corridor. To maintain your interest, you could invent a personalised NPC for each miniature, giving them a name, a class, even ambitions. Even if the miniature is someday used for someone else’s character ... for you, that miniature will also be Recard or Falyn, or whomever. Quite possibly for many years to come. Connections of this kind between your game and physical representations can be thoroughly satisfying ... and those feelings will strengthen the relationship between you as DM, your setting and your players.

Mentzer

It's torture to read Mentzer.  There's hardly a paragraph that doesn't stoke my ire, from his toxic interpretations of strength, intelligence, wisdom and so on to his clumsy, splattering approach to delivering game rules at random throughout his books.  Reading through the famously popular scene of "Learning how to play the D&D game," I want to bang my head repeatedly on the table as he unreservely, irresponsibly primes the reader towards the worst kind of railroaded gaming, ending with the absure and insulting, "You have just played a D&D game!"

No, I have not.  I've watched a hack write language imposing his actions and his choices on me, with flagrant use of the 2nd person, while making every decision in exchange for my tacit, momentary input.  Vomit.  Thank the fucking CHRIST I didn't read this fluffy, shit crap refuse until the 2000s.

It's indefensible.  For the record, "I thought it was amazing when I was an ignorant child" is not a defense, it's evidence of the brainwashery going on here.  I don't want to pull every bloody sentence and deconstruct this steaming drivel, but I could.  Oh, fuck, I could.

My point being that this is a considerable obstacle towards teaching people how to be a DM.  Not because they'll have ever read Mentzer, but because of this:  quoting from Dennis Laffey,

"I got the Mentzer Basic set for my 11th birthday, back in 1984. I'd seen the D&D cartoon, had a few Endless Quest books (plus Choose Your Own Adventure and similar 2nd person fiction game-books), and was into fantasy and mythology ... Anyway, that birthday gift changed my life.

I remember reading the Mentzer set's player introduction. There's the little tutorial where you meet Aleena the Cleric and Bargle. It gives you a bit of railroady interactive fiction and makes you roll some dice here and there. Explains some terms as they come up.

Then there's the "choose your own adventure" tutorial. Numbered paragraphs or sections of text with CYOA type choices of section to go to lead you through a solo game. It's possible to fail. Since it's just you and the book, it's VERY easy to cheat. But again, it helps guide you through some of the game mechanics and introduces not just game terms and systems (in a watered down fashion), but also the sorts of situations you could expect as a player.

And it worked pretty well. I got it. I think I cheated on the CYOA adventure the first time I did it, but I played it a few more times until I was able to beat it fair and square."

Sorry, Dennis.   I don't have no intention of diminishing your real emotions here.  I read the above last night and took your words as an inspiration to look at Mentzer in application to issues I've discussing with this series.  Unfortunately, I cannot get out of Mentzer what you did, because I come at this game from a very different place.

However, like you, many, many don't.  Mentzer's propaganda caught on and invested itself deep into the D&D community's consciousness ... and because D&D is an apprenticeship-style education for most of its participants, what Mentzer wrote nearly 40 years ago has been perpetuated and corrupted into the abomination that is 5th edition.

Naturally, I'm a voice in the wilderness.  People love and adore Mentzer's work for those examples Dennis gave, and more than a few are scratching their heads now (if they're even still reading) as to what the hell is my problem with this:

"It's hard to run with the cleric across your shoulder, but you finally get back just as the sun goes down.  Once there, you take her body to the church.  It's too late to help her, but they can give her a proper burial.  They thank you for your kindness, and offer a small bottle as a reward."

Wow, you tried to save her and you couldn't.  And the church was so moved by your action that they gave up something of theirs for you.  Isn't that wonderful?

Sigh.

The #1 action of a good party is to ask questions.  During an average game, outside of combat, I field between 3-5 questions a minute, maybe more.  The DM's #1 action is to answer questions.  THIS is the game.  The players ask, the DM answers.  The players ask, the DM answers.  This goes on all night.

Mentzer's "example" has no questions; because it cannot.  It's a story, which D&D is not.  The framework of the example totally denies the possibility of player expression, because of the format.  And the game IS player expression.  So how exactly have we played a D&D game?

And for that matter, what does the passage teach DMs?  Remember, the people who actually have to invent all this?  It doesn't.  At all.  Because Mentzer definitely isn't interested in teaching you how to DM.  The module will DM you.  This passage is teaching you how to obey a module.

You're a young, impressionable child, reading this, being educated to depend on modules ... and decades later that idea remains unsurfaced in your approach to the game.  So you think this is okay.  You buy some modules, play with your friends, have fun ... so it's okay.  You meet others, they have modules which they run, and soon enough it's time to go to college and still it hasn't occurred to you that nothing you've read has ever seemingly been written for specifically DMing the game.  2e comes along, imposes it's universal metric which makes writing modules — and balancing modules for different party strengths — easier.  3rd comes along and drenches the players with opportunities and possibilities, but what does it do for the DM?  Nothing ... except give the DM more to memorise.  Each step along the way, there's always more and more for the player, but for the DM?  We have this module.  Run this module.  We have lots of modules.  We'd prefer you run it as is.  Sure, you can rewrite it as you please ... but we're not going to help you do that.  We're not going to give you advice, hell no.

I started to seriously drop out of the D&D community by 1985.  I had my game, I was working full time as a statistical clerk making absurd amounts of money ... and the whole vibe I was getting from others was just ... ech.  I'd pretty much learned how to run tolerably well.  My best player at the time, who was deeply invested in the community still, told me around 1989 that I was the best DM he'd ever known ... and as he'd grown up in Chicago in the 1970s, he'd met Gygax and Arneson personally.  So I respected that compliment ... but honestly, I thought I was just doing what a lot of others were doing.  After all, one player has a pretty limited experience, this being long before the internet.

There's something to be said about my dropping out.  I didn't buy modules.  I had one party, so it's not like I could run the Keep on the Borderlands multiple times.  I learned how to write.  I learned how to perform on a stage.  I'd started in the debate club and moved into campus politics, so I knew how to produce a defending argument.  That was strengthened by my classics degree.  And through it all, I operated in a vacuum.  No contact, with anyone else, with regards to D&D ... for nearly 15 years.

So, I have zero nostalgic feelings about any part of D&D, period.  Not about AD&D, not about Basic, which I played for about four months before we all switched to 1st, not about modules, not about the forgotten realms books, not about anything.  Long before I stepped forward into the D&D community again, I'd so absolutely broken up every system I'd encountered that I had as much respect for them as a renovator has for the house he bought vs. the house he's rebuilt.

Those who taught me how to DM all did so in '79 and the early 80s ... and apparently then went on DMing in exactly the same way for the next forty years.  They waited for others to tell them what to change and what to adopt.  Essentially, they let others into their house, allowing repairs to made that broke the plumbing, broke the heating, weakened the foundation, fouled the wiring and — upon departing — left holes in every wall and scratched the floors beyond repair.  Because that was easier than making the repairs personally.

And now I read homeowner after homeowner with a house like this happily going on youtube and telling me, "It's GREAT!"

Definitely an obstacle.

Ask yourself, from Mentzer's observations on page 2:  do you want your player to "be like an actor," imagining they are someone else and pretending to be that character?  Do you want your player to be "a strong hero, a famous but poor fighter"?  Does that support a vivid, flexible campaign?  Do you want the party to "be playing different roles and talking together as if [they] were the characters"?  Have you experienced where that goes as a DM?  Do you want the players thinking that the game is "looking for monsters and treasure" with the result that "The more you find, the more powerful and famous you become"?  Is that how the setting works for you?  That despite the total lack of witnesses, when a group of rich pillagers and killers show up in a town covered in dust and blood, wounded, but with tons of money ... everyone automatically makes them beloved celebrities?  Really?

Is the equipment the party needs "very similar to what you would carry when camping"?  Is the choice to take weapons and armour, in order to invade an underground lair, properly described as "protection"?

Each description is there to blow right past any real issue a nuanced, thinking person would have with the activities supported and condoned by the work.  And the fall-out?  That's the DM's problem.  Is it any wonder that DMs have, for a long time, struggled with the concept of parties who act like murder-hobos ... when the modules that are made, the language that is used, the pandering position that's taken, encourages this.

I keep reading how the "answer" is to remove the reward system for treasure; that's not the answer.  The answer is to devise better adventures, ones in which the comfort level of the participant is challenged realistically, instead of enabling the players to be monsters.