Say, Say, Say

There are two kinds of blog posts.

The first are easier to write.  I've written thousands of them.  One simply takes a position on something and discusses it.  Doesn't matter if its a prescription for play, a deconstruction of some element of life, a review, a commentary on someone else's opinion or whatnot.  Basically, just as I'm writing now about blogging, the idea is to sound very intelligent about a thing.  To be accurate, or insightful, or just entertaining.

The other kind is harder to write.  Hardly anyone does it.  Whole blogs do not contain the second kind.  These are posts where the writer explains, "I've done something ... this is what it is and how it works."  What's different with these posts is that they rely upon doing, not saying.  The saying is irrelevant, really.  If the thing itself has any merit, then very little, or nothing, needs to be said.

I've felt lately that I'm not writing nearly enough of this second sort.  Spiritually, I'm far more gratified when writing doing posts.  See, it's rather easy to tease oneself into thinking that a stream of commentary posts are pushing forward the envelope of knowledge, but that's just hash.  All one needs to see that is to do something.  Once we've done, its painfully clear how long we've gone without doing.

This is where I am.  I can see the map-making blog isn't nearly as popular as this one.  That's fine.  But just now, between working on the maps and working on the splatbook, and my job, it seems like such a waste of effort to wallow around here writing posts about ... well, empty air.  With nothing in it that I've done.

I'll be back when I have something to show. 

Judgement Calls

So, a few hours after writing my last post, I settled down to in bed to read some before going to sleep.  I typically read between 20 and 30 minutes a night.  Of course, I'm still reading Michael Lewis' The Undoing Project ... and right off, it punched me right between the eyes.

The book is talking about how things that have happened recently have much more effect on how we judge situations, because they're recent.  For example, I was recently in a car accident; the first one I've experienced in 38 years (the last one was a "bump" also).  While I know it's bogus, going out to the new car (we were covered by insurance), I can't get it out of my head that we're going to have another accident, and soon.  It's there in my face.  I tell myself there's no reason to think one will happen; I tell myself that even if one did, that's how statistics work.  But in fact, the only thing that will shove this persistent feeling aside is time.

So then I read two quotes on two pages, one after the other, at the end of chapter six.  Here's the first:

"What people did in many complicated real-life problems — when trying to decide if Egypt might invade Isreal, say, or their husband might leave them for another woman — was to construct scenarios.  The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgments.  'The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,' wrote Danny and Amos.  'There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.'"

There.  That's what I'm doing.  I'm making up a "story."  But can the reader see the implications this has for any social interaction?  Right now, it's exactly what every pundit is doing discussing the recent American election: they're making up stories about the future based on the very flimsy, immediate incident in the recent past ... and doing it as though everything they're saying makes perfect sense.  It's your mother, or maybe it's you, claiming that your knee hurts because there's a change in the weather; some bias you have about your knee, and some coincidence with a change in the weather you've experienced recently, assures you that your knee always hurts when the weather's changing.  But it's just a bullshit story you're telling yourself, like the nagging feeling that I have about another car accident.

Once you embed yourself into that story, however, it's THE reality you can't dismiss.  You've created your own bullshit and now you've bought in, and there's no path out, not mentally.  What's more, according to research, we all do it.  Once we've decided what the future's going to be, based on next to no evidence, THAT'S the future now ... for us.  Not for anyone else, of course.

It's not that we go on the internet and get hauled into some conspiracy bubble that programs us and constantly reassures us about things we want to believe.  It's that at some point we heard something, it made sense, and now we've locked onto that thing so hard we can't be argued out of it.  It doesn't matter if there's a bubble or not.  "We" are the bubble.  It's a bubble of one person.

Near as I can tell, the solution is that when we have an uncertain situation, the one thing we absolutely must not do is to interpret that situation at all.  Don't make a guess!  Any guess we make is almost certain to be wrong, and if it happens that we come to believe that wrong guess, it's going to lead to bad places.

I think, too, there's application for the way situations arise with players in D&D.  More often than not, as I introduce the players into some kind of danger, they begin to get themselves worked up over some specific kind of supreme danger that's only just popped into their minds.  Suddenly, they're panicking before every door, certain that this next one's going to unleash something that'll kill the whole party.  Quite a lot of the time, especially with parties that don't know me well, I have to stop the game and effectively say, "Buttercup does not get eaten by the sharks at this time."  Everything's fine, guys.  I'm not just going to kill you.

['course, I killed the offline party last week, so recent events might suggest that yes, I am going to kill you, but in fact I have no plans in that direction]

The practice of trying to "play the DM" encourages players to seek explanations for the DM's motives based on bad judgements.  The reverse can happen just as easily, with the DM assuming the players' collective motives are completely at odds with the campaign.  It demonstrates the importance of maintaining strong communication between all the participants.

Here's the second quote:

"The stories people told themselves, when the odds were either unknown or unknowable, were naturally too simple.  'This tendency to consider only relatively simple scenarios,' they concluded, 'may have particularly salient effects in situations of conflict.  There, one's own moods and plans are more available to one that those of the opponent.  It is not easy to adopt the opponent's view of the chessboard or of the battlefield.'  The imagination appeared to be governed by rules.  The rules confined people's thinking.  It's far easier for a Jew living in Paris in 1939 to construct a story about how the German army will behave much as it had in 1919, for instance, than to invent a story in which it behaves as it did in 1941, no matter how persuasive the evidence might be that, this time, things are different."

 

It's incredibly important that the DM see the game from the player's point of view, and vice versa.  This means having a very clear idea of why the DM wants to run the campaign.  What is the DM getting out of it?  I mean, specifically.  The tendency, like the quote above, is to produce a super-simple explanation: "Why, the DM wants to have fun."  How is that remotely reassuring?  "Fun" might include killing off player characters; it might mean deliberately humiliating people; it might mean getting one's jollies by forcing people to sit through boring speeches while walking through empty room after empty room.

The same is true of the DM: why are the players here?  What do they want?  Is it good DMing if we set out to create some profound scenario that the players have no reason to like?  Again, it's all communication.  We know ourselves fairly well; we know why we're in this.  We have to tell others.  We have to explain ourselves out loud, and often, rather than reserving ourselves and making probability judgements without any idea of the probabilities.

As a player, you don't know what I'm doing as a DM.  That's deliberate.  To make the game exciting and unpredictable, and therefore rewarding, I have to withhold an immense amount of information.  If I'm a good DM, then none of my scenarios are simple.  As a player, this is something you have to trust.  You have to believe that my first responsibility here is not my own fun, but the well-being of everyone present, with myself being no more important than anyone else.  If you don't believe that, we're going to have problems.  Your distrust will repeatedly manifest as a series of wrong, simplistic statements that you've decided to believe based on zero actual information.  As a DM, I've got to address that.  I need to know why you distrust me; why you think I have any agenda that's designed against you or any other player; and I've got to lay that distrust to rest.  If I can't do that ... if I can't convince you that I'm trustworthy ... then we can't play together.

Likewise, I have to trust you.  I have to believe you're not trying to undermine the game or the other players.  I have to believe you're ready to act on the information your given, and not on information you've invented, as a player, on the fly.   I have to know that you're here to play D&D and not some other game.

This could be a good explanation for why those who try a more complicated game run into such troubles.  If we're participating together in a predictable module adventure, there are less opportunities for distrust.  If you know that I'm running a module provided by a game company, then you don't have to trust that I built a good adventure; you only need to trust that I'm accurately presenting the game company's module.  That's an easier assumption.

As a DM, running a module, I know, doesn't ask as much from you.  I'm not laying my creativity on the line, I'm leaning on someone else's creativity.  If the module doesn't work, I'm less invested.  We, DM and player, can bitch together about the lousy module.  It's not you bitching about my work.  For a lot of people, especially those who find it hard to take criticism, that's a huge bonus.

It's not how I want to go.  I don't want simple scenarios.  I don't believe in easy, simple explanations.  It's why I spend so long deconstructing D&D over and over.  Because I don't believe that a game built almost entirely on human interaction can be simple.  I don't think the probabilities that might come up can be known.  At all.  I think the best players are those who DON'T make judgements about the future based on what's just happened.  I think the best strategy to employ, whether one is a player or a DM, is to take one's time and presuppose, "We'll see."

And no more than that.

What you remember about your past is more apt to warp the future than you realise.

Representative

I wanted to write one more post in this long series, about education, but I'm afraid I'm dry.  The basic idea was to educate your players how to be dungeon masters, in the sense of driving them to make their own adventures out of the guidelines provided by the game, but somehow I can't centre my thoughts on the subject.  I'll have to pick it up later.

At present, I'm a bit frustrated by the American election, especially at what's "passing" for journalism ... as in, "toilet."   I'm stunned that so many well-paid, long-standing political pundits are able to spectacularly misread, or staggeringly misrepresent, what's happening.  A whackadoodle losing an election by a thousand votes is NOT "the country stepping back" ... it's factual evidence that the whackadoodles are ready to step up their game and win next time.  We certainly haven't seen evidence that "the Republican party has to return to its roots now."  I mean, wtf.  For the record, the Democrats have LOST.  Even if it turns out they keep the house and senate by paper-thin margins, if this is the best you can do with two years of running the country after an attempted coup by the other side ... fuck.  I mean, um ... fuck.  Some days, I just want to scream and scream and scream.  Everyone lost.  Especially the country.

Changing the subject.  I haven't a post of my own, so I'll steal one.

I'm reading a book by Michael Lewis that follows the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who proposed the term "heuristics" in the 1970s, around the time D&D was born.  It's a fascinating read and utterly misrepresented by the wikipedia article, which seems to have been written by someone who hasn't read the book.  The first five pages suggests the words, "revisits Lewis' interest in market inefficiencies," but since the next 190 do absolutely nothing to discuss this subject, I suspect foul play.

Essentially, the theme of Tversky's and Kahneman's work (they switched their names around with every paper) is that we don't know what we think we know.  That is because we base our guesses about people and events and things on what we think is true, which in fact leads us to be wrong about everything.  I'll quote briefly from the book:

"When people make judgments, they argued [Kahneman & Tversky], they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds.  How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm?  How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer?  Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player?  Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide?  The world's not just a stage.  It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance.  And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity — or (strange new word!) representativeness.  You have some notion of a parent population: 'storm clouds' or 'gastric ulcers' or 'genocidal dictators' or 'NBA players.'  You compare the specific case to the parent population."

What happens is that, in fact, we don't really know storm clouds or ulcers or players as well as we think we do.  This ends up in our making a decision about something that sounds absolutely dead on to us, but is completely, totally wrong in practice.  For example ...

Once you played with someone who fudged dice and the games were pretty good.  You caught the DM fudging and the explanation you got back sounded "reasonable."  The game was, like I said, "pretty good."  You made the connection that "pretty good" = "dice fudging" ... and this was supported by meeting other interesting and cool people who also fudged dice and for the same reason.  You never actually played in any of their campaigns, but you assume from your representativeness that their games were probably also pretty good.

So, you fudge dice yourself.  Because that's how your best representative DMs in your past did it.  You have no actual knowledge if your game is "pretty good," but you assume it must be since you fudge dice.  But then one day, for no specific reason, people drift away from your game and it ends.  Why?  Well, you make up reasons based on your past experience with players.  Players are busy, you tell yourself.  Players have other things to do.  Sometimes, players don't stay around.  People quit the game all the time.  You absolutely DON'T question any of the practices you maintain as a DM, because those are the practices that other DMs — whom you don't play with anymore, for reasons — used.  It never occurs to you that one of your players discovered that you were cheating and decided to tell the others when you weren't there.  And because they found the behaviour so disingenuous and repulsive, they decided not to confront you.

But you're fine.  You're telling yourself now that Alexis is a person too, and makes judgements based on his representativeness, which is obviously wrong, because he's just basing his opinions on what he thinks is true, based on HIS past.  That has nothing to do with your past.

I admit, it's frustrating ... but this is why the book about Tversky and Kahneman is interesting.  It challenges us to think through the difference between making a decision based on reality and one based on judgement.

[notice: when I quote the American book, I spell the word "judgment," but when I write in the King's English, I spell the word "judgement"; I've done it both ways over the last fifty years and I've finally decided I'm a Canadian.  That's why I spell it "realise," "armour" and "manoeuvre" now]

Let me give you a simple example, one not fraught with arbitrary Alexis-bullshit judgements.  I'll continue to use examples I haven't found in Lewis' book, but I've only reached page 190.

Suppose that you're doing a very difficult multiple choice exam ... and although you've studied, it's very difficult and many of the questions and answers have been deliberately designed to mislead you.

About halfway through a four-hour exam, starting with question #117, you start to notice that every correct answer is (a).  You start to notice when it's four in a row, and soon enough it's eight in a row and then twelve in a row.  What's going on?  Glancing over each question, you're never quite certain of which is the exact right answer, because in many cases throughout the whole test, it really could be the choice you didn't pick.  And now you've stopped and looked at this list of 12 (a)'s in a row and you're seriously questioning your judgement.  Why?

Because, basically, if you were making a multiple choice test, it wouldn't occur to you to make 12 answers in a row all be (a)'s.  You'd mix them up.  You wouldn't decide to make every answer an (a) like this.  Which means, since you wouldn't do it, obviously, neither would the professor, or the tester.  Multiple choice exams just are done this way.  Right?

Is it right?  Is it logical to go back over your answers for the last twelve questions, wasting time, and making sure that you're absolutely correct with every one?  Is it logical to change your answers on some of them just to break the streak.  Is that good thinking on your part, or is it bad thinking?

Are you protecting yourself, or are you fucking yourself?

Who's to say the prof wouldn't put the string of (a) responses there just to screw with you?  The answer to that is plain.  You're there.  And you're sure the prof, whom maybe you like, or maybe you respect, wouldn't pull a rotten trick like that.  Only ... is it a "trick?"

You're supposed to know the right answer.  If you know it, then what difference does it make how many times it comes up (a)?  Isn't knowing the answer what we're testing you for?  The only reason why you'd want to go back and doubt yourself is because you don't, in fact, know the right answer.  You're guessing.  And the pattern that your guessing is creating is what's stumped you.  Not the test and not the prof.

For me, this is the quintessential underlying basis of Kahneman and Tversky's work.  I haven't read this yet but I'm certain (representativeness) that it's coming.  It's not just that we guess wrong when we're asked to make a judgement, it's that we're certain we're right.  We don't evaluate the possibilities beyond our immediate gut-judgement.  "That's a storm," we say, even though we're talking out of our ass, and when the storm fails to materialise, we ignore it.  Usually, we think, we're right.  But are we ... "usually"?  Or is it just that we want to be usually right?  Because judging by the work I'm reading, I think we decide what we are usually and then ignore any expectation of living up to that claim.

So when I tell you that more people play 5th edition than any other, you think in your head and say, "Yeah, that's probably true."  But what's that based on?  The people you've met?  If, like me, you meet people who actually play D&D, it happens in very specific places like game stores and promoted events.  BUT ... what sort of players show up at game stores and promoted events?  All of them?  I don't know.  Because I don't know how many people actually play this game.  Nobody does.  I have numbers from the company, and from journalists who talk to the company, but the company HAS reasonably expected ulterior motives.

I'm not saying that 5th edition isn't the most popularly played edition.  I AM saying that, statistically, we have absolutely no idea whatsoever.   Because we haven't got statistics.  We've got judgements based on seeing a particular group of people participating in a particular game space ... which is deliberately organised to appeal to that particular group of people.  As such, factually, we have nothing.

But that doesn't keep us from stating as though it is a fact that 5th edition is the most popular.  And because it's stated as a fact online rather continously, it sounds like a fact.  But this doesn't make it one.  After all, it's easy to find hundreds of comments by people who say they don't play 5th any more, or that they never played 5th.  Are we sure that number isn't higher than the number who say they do play 5th?

I don't know.  I have reason to doubt either answer.

We live in an age where we're expected to give an opinion about things and where we expect that opinion to be (1) treated as accurate, based on our "knowledge," and (b) respected.  Most of the time, if we quote a source for that opinion, it's someone else's opinion ... and often the "someone else" is plainly someone who knows nothing for certain.  If we're not treated as knowledgeable and if we're not respected, we get mad, we block the other and we go looking for people who agree with us.

Thanks to the internet, these can be easily found.  Most of the time.

I see no particular reason why anything I say should be treated as "knowledge."  I have no source material for anything I write about D&D.  I cannot for certain say that when a firefighter learns to deal with complex situations through pattern recognition, that's also what a dungeon master is doing.  I feel fairly certain the firefighter's pattern recognition is real, since respected firefighters give lectures to other firefighters and not the general public.  In other words, their knowledge about what they're doing isn't merely representative, it's demonstrable.

That's key.  What I say means zip compared to what another DM says, who has applied my methods and discovered they either work or don't work.  And this is interesting.  My inbox is NOT stuffed with people who've tried what I said and come back to me with, "Yep, tried it, and you don't know shit Alexis."  What I occasionally get is, "I'm not going to try that, because it won't work."

But what I most often get is, "I finally tried it ... and wow.  My players love it."

Is that an ego-boost for me?  Sure.  I'm human.  Does it mean I'm always right?  NO.  It doesn't even mean I'm ever right.  It means I'm valuable as a resource enough of the time to make others examine my words for value.  Others are bringing their own judgements to my words and they're carrying out the experimentation.  I don't know what they're actually doing at their tables.  I'm not there.  As such, how can I ever be "right" in a sense that's reliable?

I know that what I'm doing works for me.  I'm outlining for others why it works, how it works, what I've done to make it work and what I plan to do.  The rest, as ever, is for others to DO.

So I'm not certain I'm right.  I could very well be wrong.  The only thing I'm certain of is that everyone who thinks I'm wrong is ALSO wrong ... for other reasons.

I'm trying to be right.  They're trying to be representative.

Budapest Sanjak, east of Budapest

Today's part is heavily populated.  Here's the map before doing any work; the white numbers indicating the infrastructure that each big, background hex has.

That "5" in the upper right corner represents a group of hills in another province, so it's unaffected by the spreading of infrastructure from Budapest, which has 1792.  That's because infrastructure is the responsibility of each individual province; it does not cross borders.  This is necessary for game play, as we want places of heavy infrastructure adjacent to places that are not - makes things interesting.  Otherwise, we'd have the same over-developed dynamic everywhere.

Doing this, I failed to notice the Danube river was missing.  Remember that the bottom two hexes from this map came from another map sheet.  Apparently the river failed to get copied.  I fix it later.

You can see from this screenshot that the section we're doing is literally on the outskirts of Budapest.

We're not going to do Budapest for months, however.  This is as far west as we go on this pass around the finished map.

Next, I determine the hex types, add in additional water courses, hills, symbols telling me which roads lead out of the hexes in which directions and towns ... and we get this, which is about as messy as we could ask for:

There should be 13 added towns, but when I took this screenshot I'd missed putting a town in the hex southwest of Nagykata.  That's also been fixed.  There are a lot of details and I'm out of my habits, so I'm finding I'm missing things from time to time.  Sometimes, the little coins, hammers and bread under the type numbers are inaccurate.  I change them when I notice.

The secret to clearing up the mess above comes from adding the roads.  Roads make everything make sense.  The towns get connected logically.

I took away the background, to give a better sense of how much cleaner the map is now.  I'll still need those infrastructure numbers for later, as the reader will see.  The Danube has been added but the missing town near Nagakata wasn't added when I took this screenshot.

Incidentally, all the towns are real places.  I've messed a bit with where they are, exactly, since I need them to align with the hexes and the map's random generation.  But all these places can be researched online; most of them have a wikipedia entry, but not all.  Here's a wikipedia entry for Jászalsószentgyörgy, appearing on the map without accents.  Sigh ... these Hungarian names.  Anyway, there's tons of information on the Hungarian wikipedia page, which can be read by simple translation.  Most of it's about the church that was built in 1701, about 50 years after my world's taking place.

Here's a completed, coloured map to finish:

 Crazy, eh?

 Hm.  The label for Tura needs moving ...

Northern Hills, south of Kovesd

Since it's all me, one way or another, for a time I'm going to highlight posts on the mapmaking blog.  Here's today's.  Hope no one thinks I'm artificially increasing the number of posts I write.

Wine

Apart from getting the new blog launched, after a couple weeks grumbling about it, let's continue with this series on worldbuilding — if my readers accept that's what I am writing about.   I'm pushing the idea that crafting the setting goes well beyond the visible contraptions with which we're familiar: the traditional map, the names of places and realms, the lines representing roads describing how the players travel from point to point.  Beyond these things there is the essence of the world itself ... it's philosophical perspective, it's manner of organising the forces of power that dominate the strata, the overall sense of cause and effect, not just from the players but also from the whole pattern of history that's gone before the players arrive.  And just lately, the way in which the game world is explained and expressed, right down to the words we choose to take hold of the players' attentions.

I can appreciate how these things are so alien to the usual dialogue surrounding D&D and worldbuilding.  As I keep saying, there is no groundwork for these ideas, except actual human history, geopolitics, religion and so on.  Recently, I've been reading a book from Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project, which is busy deconstructing the manner in which human beings ignore facts, interpreting things from a habit of wish fulfillment ... literally remastering things from what they are into what we want them to be.  This theme revolves around three statistician-psychologists in the state of Israel in the 1960s, each of whom also took part in the Israeli-Arab wars at the time, because every able-bodied male had to.  It's a profound perspective ... and it led to advancements in psychology that shattered belief systems in the 1950s and 60s.

Today's theme is literature, which can mean many things.  Although it technically describes any body of written work, the descriptor is often used to express things we ought to read, in the sense that if you haven't, you're a philistine, barely able to pick your nose with your spear.  [note the Israeli-philistine transition ... Literature!].  My intent is to discuss it in relationship to worldbuilding, as connected to elements of communication, aesthetics and form.  Let's begin with a story.

Once upon a time, a very minor academic without many credits and quite a few detractors stumbled across a theory that continues to hold a wide number of non-academics in thrall.  This theory explains that every popular story through the ages is the same, with the same means of elaboration, the same predictable elements of plot, and most important, the same approximate resolution.  What's more, this recognisable pattern reaches into every culture, every language, every historical period ... why, it's completely mind-blowing.  It's like there's just one massive, um, "singlesaga" that permeates through all Human culture.  Wow.

There's just this little glitch that this multitude of stories lack the same theme.  But what is a "theme," anyway?  Merely the reason the story is written at all.  Merely what the story is actually about.  See, it doesn't actually matter if the plots of two stories match up fairly well, if one of these stories investigates the collapse of military intelligentsia in the 19th century Russian state and the other examines the manner in which mid-20th century ideology forces individual to conform.  War and Peace and The Metamorphosis just aren't the same.  No matter how hard we stare.

See, it's like the plot-line of making wine.  We grow the grapes, or fruit, in varying conditions, but in the end it has to get crushed somehow.  In the next act, the resultant liquid is fermented.  Then the liquid is pressed, to allow the wine to run off the pulp.  After that, depending on whether the wine is red, white or from some other fruit extraction, a wide range of processes can take place that, in Act Three, ultimately wind up with wine in storage.  And here's the point at which this metaphor revolves: it's all wine.  Whatever we do, however we convert it, carbonate it, reduce it and so on, the fundamental process of making "wine" is universal ... in every culture, every language and in every historical period.

There are a great many who may nod and say, "Yeah, see, all wine is the same."  Which ... mm ... is not true.  Well, it is to non-academic philistines.

How literature arrives at its meaning, or the fact that it uses words of a given language, is irrelevant to its purpose ... which is why that clever little insight by the inventor of the singlesaga produced no accolades.  Let's forget, then, the standardised D&D notion of coming up with a "story" ... it's going to be the same story anyway, right?  I mean, it's all wine.

The first difference between two stories is aesthetic: not the story itself, but how well it's told.  If you or I were to try and write To Kill a Mockingbird from scratch, without even the title to call it by, even if we stuck to the "story" the end result would be execrable.  Not even because we're bad writers, but because we're not Harper Lee growing up in that era in that part of the world.  She knew how to make that story good because it was her story.  As in, a story fermented into her by the vineyards of her parents and culture.

Like stories all being the same, the events in D&D tend to obey a few narrow parameters: we can make the players fight, we can allow them to explore, we can offer them puzzles, we can set up parleys, we can threaten them with authorities, we can empower them with objects.  I've been playing for 40+ years and I can't think of something else that doesn't fit into what's named.

Does it matter?  A good event isn't based on it being a puzzle ... what matters is what sort of puzzle it is, and how it's encountered, and what the consequences of solving/not solving it are, along with how elegant the solution can be, whether invented by the DM or the player.  It's the beauty of the puzzle that counts.  And beauty, as I wrote in How to Run, is founded on four fundamental principles: (a) we have to begin with the best tools; (b) there must be an evident amount of time spent on the result: (c) it must show skill; (d) and it has to look like you took WAY too much time with it.

As a sum, your players must have the sense that you've created a conundrum (or a battle, or a parley, or whatever) that they know they can't duplicate.  You understand this game better than they ever could, you've spent more time working on it that they can even imagine, you're far more masterful at expressing yourself and what's happening that they can match ... and obviously, you've got time to squander on this game that they know they don't have.  In short, they're in awe.  They don't understand why, or how ... they just know that whatever you're doing, they can't do it.

In real terms, this manifests as a problem solving situation that makes their skulls hurt.  To actually do that, you really DO have to spend ludicrous amounts of time as a DM.  So, short answer: to produce something beautiful requires an excess of ability.

Okay, so, let's shelve that.  You can start working on being able when you finish reading this post, whereupon you'll be good to go in, um, 2042.

What about form?  Perhaps that's more accessible.  Form is the configuration in which a story is told, or in which a narrative is related.  For example, in D&D, the common form is to send the players out to the dungeon, let them pick up treasure and get hurt, bring them back to the village so they can buy stuff and heal, then send them out to the dungeon to get hurt and more treasure, then bring them back to the village so they can heal, then send them out to the dungeon so they can ...

Elegant, ain't it?

Form is easier to manage ... mostly because so many forms are utterly ignored by traditional D&D.  Virtually any situation that isn't organised around a "funhouse set-piece" will confound players sufficiently to think they've discovered a whole new kind of game.  Consider: if the traditional game is to send the players out to the funhouse, er, dungeon, consider how easy it is to turn that situation on its head by having the various denizens of the funhouse randomly and constantly raid the village?  Think of it ... a group of 1st level characters wake up in the middle of the night to find the streets filled with humanoids.  They rush out, kill 8-10 kobalds, only to soon after find a dozen goblins breaking into a shop.  The players kill the goblins, get their treasure from the shop.  Soon, they're fighting a big ogre who's tearing apart the inside of an apothecary.  The party kills the ogre, gets away with a dozen potions ... which they'll need, because now it's thirty gnolls.  These are beaten off as the sun rises and the players get a break.

Only, the humanoids are ringed around the village.  The players heal, sleep, and ready themselves for nightfall, when it happens again.  And again.  And again.  It's the same story.  We've just chosen to ferment it in a different way.

The key to "form" is to find ways to introduce the players to puzzles, parley and panic in different ways than they've already done.  The story lines are all obvious: it's a wagon train that needs protecting, it's different entities fighting over a business asset, it's a group of people who need their village defended, it's a king that needs restoring on a throne, it's a band of rebels fighting against an evil empire that will take new recruits for a special mission ... blah, blah, blah.  It isn't the damned story.  That's just the grapes the wine is made from.  It doesn't matter that the story's been used before ... ALL stories have been used before.  What matters is how well you use it.  And ultimately, if you personally can set up the story better than the players, you'll gather a little of that sweet, sweet nectar that creating something of beauty gives.  Oh, you may realise it's not all that, but the players will think it's beautiful and you'll get the laurels just the same.

Finally, there's communication.  This is tricky.  We've already spoken about language and locution ... this is your use of those aspects to send a message that's worth telling.  And here I know you're a fish out of water.  Creating a message out of D&D feels like ... well, we have no idea what it feels like.

A "message" is a discrete form of interaction that attempts to suggest a response without actually asking for it.  The idea is to signal the reader in a manner that causes him or her to gather an insight into the events surrounding the story, even though that insight was never actually stated.

This can be accomplished in a film by "showing, not telling," though most of the time it ends in a very disconnected insight.  All sorts of people have invented all sorts of messages from the first 20 minutes of 2001: a Space Odyssey.  None of these messages coincide with each other and ALL of those who think they have it believe they're the only ones who do.  It's not hard to send a "message" by creating a bunch of indistinct gobbledy-gook backed by very loud prestigious-sounding horns while human-like creatures are doing vaguely human-like things.  We're humans.  We like seeing ourselves in monkeys.

Messages can be annoying simple and useless.  "Crime doesn't pay" has been a theme of human dramas for centuries ... not that this stops crime.  It works with children if all we want them to do is eat their vegetables — at least, until they actually eat vegetables.  It's not our goal to moralise or send messages that change humanity's focus on science fiction filmmaking.  This is D&D.  Our goal is to enable D&D.

We have a game setting deliberately created to give the players a place to create their own stories — or, if you prefer, to make wine.  We'd rather they made better wine than the same mashed grapes left to rot in a dark cupboard beneath the stairs year after year.  We want them to make excellent wine.

You're the DM and the players have just finished acquiring a big haul of stuff.  They want to go down to the local Magi-Mart and roll it into potions and scrolls.  What do you want them to do with it?  If you want the pathway between the village and the dungeon to become a trench, you'll let them leave the mart with their arms full of flasks and rolls.

If you'd rather they spent their money on something else, don't cripple their imaginations by making the game easy.  If you want them to build safe-houses and castles, make the world more dangerous.  If you want them to spend more time investing in local politics, don't invent rewards for chatter ... denude the dungeons of treasure.  Denude the game world of dungeons.  Push politics into the player's faces.  MAKE them deal with it.  

But, gently.  Let them occasionally seek solace.  Encourage them to feel they can affect their enemies with the right word, or making the right deal.  But move the game towards where you want the game to go by sending messages that worry or dissuade the players from going in directions you don't want.

We're not talking a story here.  We're talking crafting messages that make the party think differently about the world at large.  Sure, there's a dungeon over there.  Sure, they can go to it.  And sure, there's a sign on the outside that says, "Abandon all hope."  Only, um, mean it.  Hey, the party's gonna look at those words and laugh, right?  I mean, they're adventurers.  Abandon hope, surely that doesn't apply to them, does it?

What kind of world do you want to run?  Build the setting to create a message in the player's heads that directs them into your kind of world.  Make it subtle.  Be very definite about not stating the message openly or making your intent obvious.  Give the players reason to pause and reconsider the next time there's a scary message on a dungeon.  Give them reason to believe there's good gaming, and solid value, to be found in other things beside dungeon delving.  It's up to us to reward behaviour we ought to think deserves it, and underwhelm behaviour we don't want.

If that sounds bad to you ... if it sounds like I'm encouraging propaganda, or brainwashing, or coercion, then consider the possibility that you're a little overcautious about how you cope with your fellow human beings.  Personally, I'm completely assured that my players are "getting the message" and not minding it all that much.  Especially when it's coupled with the form of the adventures I create and the time I spend on their elaboration.

I believe in making very, very good wine.  It's not made simply, or doing one thing, or counting on the grapes to do it all for us.  There's a common adage among vintners that a joyous grape, a well-watered grape, grows into the happy part of a lousy wine.  We keep the soil dry; we make the grape suffer, so that it has to pull every bit of flavour from its surroundings just to stay alive.  It's from hardship, not ease, that invention and creation flourishes.  It's from not having everything handed to them, from having to seek their success in every valley, not just the ones planned for them, that a party discovers a fantastic game they never want to quit.

Tao's Mapmaking

I'm going to try this and see how it goes.  Link also in the sidebar.

Banter

Well, there's this.  A group of wits decided to do a 51 minute podcast about this blog.

And honestly, it's flattering.  We don't rise to this level of smarm without having achieved ... something.

Please support my patreon.

Locution

It's essential that we understand how to use language to describe the game world in a manner that draws in the players.  Throughout the game, DMs are asked to give details about places, events, motion and the consequence of actions that have taken place.  Wherever the party goes, whatever happens there, or has happened in the past, and how the players' actions affect the future, is received positively because we've couched those things in rich, interactive language that captures the player's imagination.

Our limitation begins with understanding language in terms of it's rigid structure, because that's how we've been taught language.  The teacher begins by writing a sentence on the board and then strictly describing what is a subject, a verb, and an object ... stale terms with which we have no attachment.  We're given too much information about what the words do as part of a sentence than how specific words affect our thinking and comprehension.  Words themselves can be taken apart thematically as well as etymologically.  I'll take some time to discuss how, while addressing questions about how to manage the game's wilderness without depending on dividing the setting into hexes like a dungeon is divided into room.  For this, we'll keep to little words.

Prepositions are words that govern nouns and pronouns, expressing relationships related to place, time, movement and manner.  For example, the preposition "through" describes the motion of a person or thing as it passes from one side to the other of an opening, channel or location.  We move through a crowd or through a forest.  The word suggests a confrontational element, in the sense that to move through requires threading our way through obstructions.  For example, I might tell the players they are moving through the brush.  This is different from the word between, that more often suggests rigid boundaries with a definite opening.  We say that we move between the posts; we don't say we move through them.  The latter feels less clear than the former, if passing through the channel created by the posts is the meaning.  Through suggests we butt up against the posts as we try to move through them.

So, for example, if I tell the party they're moving through the city streets, habitually we create a crowd that the party encounters.  The sense is different than my saying the party moves across the city.  Through has a 3-dimensional element, whereas across flattens the environment through which we're moving.  We say through a forest, not across a forest.  At the same time, we move across a meadow and not through it.  A forest is three dimensional.  A meadow is flat.  If the grass is high enough, we say we move through it; but if the grass is short, we say we move across it.

Thus, by choosing to say the players are moving through a city, we give the streets three dimensions; if say across, we demote the city to how it appears on a map: two-dimensional.  But there's no definite right or wrong here.  Telling the players they have to cross the river acknowledges their wish to remain upon the river's flat surface.  Through a river is very different; it means the players will get wet.  Over or above the river is better for them, as they can avoid the water altogether; thus we give the players a bridge and stress it's overness when the players are told to look down at the roiling, flooding waters they've avoided.  Under the river suggests we're going through the rock and silt, completely under the river's course; so we say underwater, which means the players will get entirely wet.

These are very common words, used every day ... but the manner in which they're used and stressed during game play matters.  The players must envision what happens, so we are specific about words that have exact meanings for this effect or that.

For example, getting involved is implied by moving into or toward something.  In the question, "Do you move toward the door," it's the positional word that affects, as the player grows more cautious as they approach more nearly to dangerous things.  Into the dungeon equates with in trouble, or trapped.  Out of conveys the opposite.

We can move through the streets, but we can also say that the party moves into the streets.  Through implies direction; into here implies that we're wandering, without going specifically anywhere; that there is some kind of confusion.  If we say to the party, "You move into the city," this calls for the players to suggest a specific direction, while suggesting the city is a sort of maze.  Because there's only so much into that's ever available for movement, since sooner or later we'll reach the center or the bottom, the word itself has claustrophobic overtones.

Out of suggests the opposite.  We free ourselves by getting out of things.  But out also has a sense of coming to a rest at some point, since once we're out of the city, we can stop.  On the other hand, away from suggests an ongoing process.  We just keep moving away.

This should be enough to get across some of the sense I mean when choosing a word.  English has something like 175 prepositions, all of which can be used in some manner to define the player's movements or placement in the game world.  Prepositions relating to time include before, after, until, during and since, all of which can be stressed when characters take some action, or want to.  "Until you get the door open, you're stuck."  "Before the monsters attack, there's an air-shattering shriek that everyone hears."  "After the last squid dies, the ink-filled water begins to clear."  

Prepositions relating to manner or phrase, or context, include contrary to, except, like, instead and including.  These are words we'll use to remind the players of something they've forgotten, or ought to think about, or is suggested by something they've decided and so on.  When giving advice to players, if you're not used to expressing your mind, it helps to clarify our thinking in terms of what concerns there are, or what bars the player's intent, or what acts in the players' favour.  "Instead of that, what might work better?"  "Including these things you've discussed, is there anything else?"  "That might work, except for this detail you've forgotten."

As I said, we use these words all the time without a thought.  But thinking about the words gives clues as to what we ought to be addressing as a DM ... or what things we might want to include in the game world spatially.  Players stand above a valley, a descending slope, a cliff, a river bank, or sights that can be seen in the distance.  The pathway meets a wall or an outcropping, moves along it, or around it ... likewise, that same route might confront heavy vegetation, and outpost, a hostile or ruined village, an enormous hole, a lake or a pond, a river, etcetera.  We move nearer to things in the distance, or away from other things.  We move between the rocks, the canyon walls or the fields.  We're beneath the hilltop, the cliff, the forest canopy, the flying birds, the overhang, the waterfall.  We go up or down the hillside, the valley, the rough-cut stairs.

What can the reader imagine that the party moves over, or up against, or upon?  What is the landscape without?  What's hidden behind a thing, or beneath it, or among these features?  Create something for the players to find.  They won't notice that you keep saying up, up, up, as you urge them up the valley, up the stream gulley, up the outcropping, up the scree slope, up between the cliff faces, up and across the glacier, up into the gap between the mountain peaks ... they'll merely understand that the theme of what's going on, especially as the scenes are peppered with opportunities to slip, slide, tear a boot heel, match wits with a mountain goat, find tracks of some kind and get doused with freezing rain by a flash storm ... and all the while catch glimpses of something unlikely just beyond sight or reach.

The words themselves are only a crutch ... but an important one.  The collection of moments and scenes that we've accumulated through our lives must be collated and managed so they can be used to enable us to create things at will.  Imagination is no more than an immense database located in our minds, enabling us to produce sounds and images from the immense noggin source book we've stuffed full.  Language is the program that opens the cabinets and drawers, with the things you're looking for, when put on the spot to "come up with something" when the players reach the summit.  Language isn't an obstacle ... it's a process.  

Tonight's Running

Had a total party kill tonight.  11th level druid, 9th level ranger and mage, 8th level fighter, 7th level monk and thief, 1st level druid.  All dead.

Four mind-flayers.  Small room.  Underwater.  I didn't use mind blast, because there are no actual rules for what it does.  I didn't use the combat-oriented tentacle pulling the brain out of the body.  The only special ability I gave them was that each flayer that wasn't stunned could dominate one character, mentally enslaving them, so they'd fight against the party.  I aided the party by teleporting them into the fight, granting them first round surprise.  At first, it really looked like the party was going to wrap it up fast ... but then the ranger blew save and everything went BAD very quickly.  Two mind flayers died; the ranger bashed the druid into pulp.  The party couldn't use magic, since the mindflayers are 90% magic resistance, most of the magic wouldn't work in a submerged environment and I use a spellcasting system that makes casting slow.

But ... and this is a big but ... I felt there was a high chance the party wouldn't come out of this alive.  So I built a plan.  The actually dead party found themselves in Elysium, with it being fully understood that they had died trying to keep a very bad door to a very bad plane of existence closed.  So the judges in Elysium have granted the party, who are dead, the privilege of placing their case before the angel Arseil, Prince of Gehenna, who may release them from death (though I haven't told them yet).  Before the night ended, they set out from Elysium for Hades, because first they must cross Hades to find Abaddon, Keyholder of the Abyss and Gehenna, the former down, the latter up, and convince their way past the gate.

To aid them, remembering that Dante had Virgil, I chose a guide.  The players exist in the year 1654.  In the year 1650, Rene Descartes died.  So that is the party's guide.  He has advised them, and taken them by boat from Elysium to the shores of Hades.  I described it thus ...

Two miles out to sea, with the cliffs of Hades in sight, around the sloop being handled by Descartes, souls began to burst onto the sea's surface, taking in breaths of air and looking about.  With the ship nearing the land, I could tell the story of how these souls reached the land ... a beach between cliffs, where they would have to try to wedge their way through gates there.  The party saw that the people floating started to swim towards the land.  Then they passed through a part where everyone was swimming.  As the ship passed, these souls banged on the side of the ship and tried to catch it, wailing as they failed.  The water was full of swimmers.  As the ship moved faster than the swimmers, they could see the swimmers closer to the land were getting more and more tired, moving more slowly.  They began to fail ... and as the boat went on, the swimmers helplessly clumped together.  Descartes could no longer find open water.  By a few hundred yards out, all the souls were spent, helplessly letting the waves drift them towards shore.

The party reacted finely to this horror; the side of the boat was only five feet above the water's surface, so the misery they passed was fully visible.  I gave it as much description as I could.  Descartes explained that he would try to land the boat between the beach and the cliff, but that it was necessary for the party to travel at least some way along the beach, even if only 40 yards.  The philosopher explained that the party needed to realise that they weren't living persons moving through Hades, but dead souls; which meant, if they allowed themselves to be corrupted by Hades, or took actions of violence and anger, they could become permanent residents.  Meaning, mistreating the souls all about them could bring down a terrible judgement.  Descartes also advised that these were not "evil" people, but only people who had "failed to care" about religion and duty.  Thus, though they were destined to suffer, the players could have no justification in adding to their misery.

Thus the party gingerly leapt from the boat into the water near the beach, where the slough of exhausted, corpse-like bodies had formed together as a mass.  On the nearest part of the beach, the tired bodies lay everywhere and atop one another, forming a difficult carpet to climb over.  While further up the beach were those able to drag themselves onward, towards a great wall, with gates and a parapet ... gates they had to get through, to free themselves from the horrors of the beach.  But the press of people made it difficult to open these doors, so that the guards inside — whatever they were — had to beat back the petitioners to let a few in at a time.

With this mass press going on, the party moved along the edge towards the cliff, to climb it.  There were souls trying to climb the cliff, but they were much too tired to succeed ... but the party had come in by boat, so they had their strength to do it.  Still, they had to fight off the clinging hands and hear the desperate cries of the souls, who tried to swarm over them.  The party handled it well, and though there was trouble in starting their climb up the cliff, they succeeded in wresting themselves from the mob.

Stealing from Dante ... looking back from above, the 1st level druid, now nearly 2nd level, saw a childhood friend below, trapped on the beach.  This reference had all the effect upon the player I could have wished.

This is where I stopped the running.  The fight, the dismal feeling of the party as they realised they were going to fail and die, was sharply contrasted with the party realising they were being given one last try at life.  Naturally, the party wanted to joke about it all, so I had to wade in and warn them that "I am still trying to run a game here, and I need you to take it seriously."  The effect this had was chilling.  Much of being a DM is "presence" ... the ability to be in charge, even of friends, by centering their attention on the game and not themselves.  The experience of being in Elysium, being given exhaustive information, without hesitation, about magic items they possessed and hadn't fully investigated, about ordinary things they wanted that were simply handed to them, was doused by the grisly scenes I've just described above.  I couldn't ask for a better running.

Language

Language is an expressive system that relies on verbal and non-verbal codes to transfer information.  It's a set of tools that enables us to relay information ... albeit imperfectly.  D&D is a game constructed of language.  We can create other mediums, like maps, figures, models and diagrams, but functionally, it's the mastery of language that determines the effectiveness of a dungeon master.  The game requires that multiple persons be able to relay, parse, reconstruct and plan around a tremendous quantity of details that are transmitted by all the participants.  This means that the DM must no only be a great speaker, able to deliver a strong, comprehensible message, but must also be a fluid and flexible listener, able to interpret phrases accurately given often by players who may have poor language skills. 

The "message" is distinct from language the way that music is distinct from an instrument.  Thus, the goal is first for us to understand how the instrument works: what it does, why we need it and most importantly, how to create with it.

That is a vast subject matter, worthy of it's own book specifically prescriptive to D&D.  We're going to touch on the highlights ... and even that's going to take awhile.  Our goal for the present is to awaken the reader's appreciation of language; like the air, something we think very little about, yet is absolutely necessary.  

Entering into D&D, we're quickly overwhelmed with a mountain of phrases and new words.  There are scores of special colloquial phrases that apply to D&D as a discipline, such as "roll to hit" or "make save."  There are hundreds upon hundreds of monsters, spells, abilities and the like, each of which require that we dredge their meaning up from memory on the spur of the moment, because not doing so greatly constrains the grace and elegance of play.  Common words like "combat," "experience" or "intelligence" have much more precise meanings than they would in some other context.  Less familiar words, like "psionics," "cantrip" or "ultravision," may never occur in any context except with D&D, including television shows obviously plundering D&D for concepts.

Once the basic terms are grasped and committed to memory, there follows an increasingly diverse set of circumstances surrounding the adventures themselves asking the players and DM to commit to memory more terms, describing characters, historical figures, place-names, mythical objects, parts of things, along with whole lists of equipment and how it works in play.  Should the characters undertake shipboard adventures, sieges, the pursuit of industry, even farming, there comes even more things to know, at least as much as an amateur, as discussions of ship mechanics, tactics, the commission of trade and seasonal cycles all become part of game play.  There is no literal end to this proliferation, as all human knowledge can be co-opted into the game, at any time, by any participant, merely by stating they'd like their character to get interested in that thing.

As complexity balloons, so does stress as the players and DM struggle to manage the data along with the intermingling of opinions and intentions displayed by persons of disparate natures.  Every word grows in weight, so that showing respect, giving demonstration that we're listening, managing our body language so as not to intimidate, forcing ourselves to ask questions, expressing ourselves in an open-minded manner and giving strong and useful feedback all become critical skills ... or else, we have chaos.  As a DM, I can use my pulpit to bully players, shut down free dialogue, enforce my expectations and end disputes through my nominal authority ... but I guarantee that my only players will be weak, deprived toadies so starved for D&D that they'll trade their dignity for the privilege of a faux-campaign.  If I want the best players, then I must live up to the standard that good players set: the expectation of being able to force their will on the game setting, without my meddling.  That requires an ability to express myself clearly, decently, honorably, thoroughly and magnetically.  A very tall order.

Accomplishing this cannot be managed by having a "DM's cloak" in one's closet that's afterwards shed when everyday life begins.  We have to practice these language skills with constancy, until they become second-nature in all our activities.  It's from this meshing of D&D into other parts of life that a DM discovers the many skills in managing and attending to other persons contributes vocationally across the spectrum of our activities.  If I rise to speak at a political gathering, the voice I have, the words I choose, the manner of my stance, my habit of looking at every person in the room as I speak, all come from thousands of hours playing D&D.  Likewise, as a cook for 15 years, I learned to handle dozens of orders at a time, interweaving my movements around the rapid steps of other cooks, calling back to show I'd heard what I was told — while making jokes and laughing amidst the panic of stress.  Those habits transformed my dungeon mastering, empowering my attention so as to manage question after question without relent.  Every occupation I've undertaken, from publishing to theatre, from sales to landscaping, from furniture moving to database management, has contributed it's important part to my language and interpersonal skills.  I am a DM no matter what I'm doing at any given time.

The key element of dungeon mastering is teaching.  All that I've just described above is there to be learned by all the players and the DM too ... but the DM has the extra assignment of encouraging the players to immerse themselves into the subject material as much as the DM has.   This means grappling with the player's subjective assessment of why he or she plays at all, evaluating the strengths that has for our game, the liabilities it creates, and then wading in to address how the player's perspective has to be re-grounded in terms of the group activity the game represents.  Those strengths have to be cultivated, just as those liabilities must be wrestled with and brought to heel ... generally by explaining as often as necessary why a given player's subjective perception is inimical to the general play of all present.  Relationships must be objective ... our immediate wants and expectations have to be trained to respect other people's wants and expectations.  This means sometimes, we must teach ourselves not to want something we want very badly, in the present, consigning the acquisition of that want to the future.

Finding the path that leads to that Shambala in other people's heads is very nearly impossible.  People are stubborn and distrustful.  Their trust must be earned; they must be made to believe that there will be a future, and that we as DMs are duty-bound to make that future happen, in exchange for their foregoing their present.  Promises as a DM are contracts; thus one learns not to talk lightly, which lends a remarkable weight to everything that's said through the game.  If I need Jim to let Jane get her way today, then I'd better damn well plan for the day that Jane'll have to wait while Jim gets his turn.  That means managing both Jim and Jane in a positive, absolutely sincere manner.  That means letting Jim or Jane shout full in my face when I've said something that plainly mis-states my position ... and making it up to them, as I should.  It means not getting my way, while ensuring that others — all the others at my table — get theirs.

All this offers room for the nitty-gritty of language mechanics: the use of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, control of one's pronunciation, the use of words to evoke images, the "priming" of players so as to make them respond and think in predictable ways, and of course the vast, bottomless well of semiotics.  I've spent time on this blog discussing at length subjects like meaning-making, semantics, pragmatic meaning and existential learning.  Each of these possesses the capacity to deepen a DM's understanding of D&D's description-response dynamics.

What we don't know about the way we ourselves think is our greatest liability ... and we must wrestle with ourselves to overcome our habitual approaches to "how" we think D&D is played or "what" we're either capable of doing, or willing to do.  No manner of approaching the game is sacrosanct.  I believe there IS only one correct way of playing D&D.  I have no expectations that I'll ever fully learn what that is.

Entracte

Let me pause a moment before continuing this slowly evolving series on worldbuilding to address those who have expressed both wonder and confusion regarding the content herein.  I understand perfectly that you're saying it plainly it has meaning ... but equally, the path in how this meaning is applied is unclear.

I have been running and thinking about D&D a long time.  Unlike most, I've never seen it as a "game."  Many times, I've argued that DMing is a sort of performance art.  As an artist, rather than a hobbyist, I've chosen to study the pursuit in the traditional sense, in the way that one might study music or writing.  I've examined D&D's relationship with the chronological era and period that it's meant to take place.  I've studied the source material from which it comes, and here I do not refer to pulp 20th century b-fiction.  I've questioned the manner in which it's delivered, and the effects the process has on the players, and drawn connections between the way D&D works to create a social construct.  I've examined how it functions as an art, how it's perceived, how it's performed and how others would have to be guided to achieve certain elements of player response.  I've systematically cut the game to pieces, and done so in print, at extraordinary length, for many years.

With the sort of material I've been writing in this last month, I've had to crack my own skull apart in ways that are new to me.  Some of the things that I've been writing of late express my first thoughts on a given revelation that's never occurred to me before.  This last month, over and over, I've had to toss out thousands of words, because my train of thought has tried to take me places where I've been before, or where I want to rant about something, or where I become suddenly aware that the trail is leading up my own ass.

Please understand.  I have no help here.  I can't go to some clever D&D site, read a few brilliant comments about a subject and then riff for a few thousand words.  I'm just me.  I'm interpreting material written for some other purpose, like religion, like geography, like history, and translating it into the value it offers.

This would be easier if I knew the answers.  I don't.  I'm exploring the answers.  I'm seeing a pattern in arranging moments in a wilderness as I relate those moments to episodes in literature:

"The route taken by Hawkeye lay across those sandy plains, relived by occasional valleys and swells of land, which had been traversed by their party on the morning of the same day, with the baffled Magua for their guide. The sun had now fallen low toward the distant mountains; and as their journey lay through the interminable forest, the heat was no longer oppressive. Their progress, in consequence, was proportionate; and long before the twilight gathered about them, they had made good many toilsome miles on their return.

"The hunter, like the savage whose place he filled, seemed to select among the blind signs of their wild route, with a species of instinct, seldom abating his speed, and never pausing to deliberate. A rapid and oblique glance at the moss on the trees, with an occasional upward gaze toward the setting sun, or a steady but passing look at the direction of the numerous water courses, through which he waded, were sufficient to determine his path, and remove his greatest difficulties. In the meantime, the forest began to change its hues, losing that lively green which had embellished its arches, in the graver light which is the usual precursor of the close of day."

There is the text, like thousands of other texts scattered in a hundred languages in the long, winding path of human history.  A travelled route; knowledge of the land that permits choosing the correct path and signs that the forest is changing as the route is gone over.  The gripping pace of the text, published in 1840, sentence upon graceful sentence, pulling the reader along.  In the story, pursued and pursuers, struggling to find rest, food, enduring the savagery of the wilderness, outwitting and overpowering the enemy.  Translated to D&D, the party struggling to rescue an ally, or one of their own; blindly rushing into the wilderness, hoping to happen upon the enemy in time.  The DM, painting each scene — and not one!  But scene after scene, using the changes to lay out possibilities of ambush, hunting for a sign, desperately crossing an open lake in potentially full view of an enemy ... never knowing exactly what horrific way the collection of scenes will play out.

To build these scenes from a start of some kind, the DM must invent a thread.  Something that's found, someone that's encountered, some event that's witnessed, with a strong enough impact to make the players eventually engage.  How or why they should depends on what thread we invent; but it is only one thread.  As the players continue, we invent others, inserting each into the right moment, creating amounts of curiosity, indignation, compassion for others in pain, avarice ... or whatever it takes to make the players wade in and start swinging.

That I don't have a simple formula that allows the gentle reader to "just do it," I apologise.  There is no formula.  6,000 years of building stories and tales, no one has yet invented a "formula."  Steal a scene.  Steal a dozen scenes.  Cheat the players by making them believe they're seeing something new.  And if you do this for 20 years, you'll learn instinctively how these things are patterned, and how they're made without having to steal.  But if anyone here thinks I'm going to whip out a simple guide for "how to be really clever in making up shit," you're a gawddamned fool.

If the reader is able to apply one tiny thread of the fabric I'm trying to describe, so that it raises one player's eyebrow, you will have accomplished a miracle.  You will have done something for which there is no class, no coursework, no handbook, no youtube video, no blog post, no shortcut.  You will have done something artistic.  

Don't expect so much so soon.

It'll come.