The Tao of D&D

"You probably won't enjoy this training.  It probably won't be fun.  In fact, writers usually complain, because, they're like, 'This feels like math.  And I want to be a writer because I hate math.  When can we do the fun stuff?'  You cannot do the fun stuff until you are an expert at this."

~ Corey Mandell, Creative Integration

Apart from this being an appalling motivation to write, I furiously appreciate Mandell's perspective on this.  You want to learn how to do this.  But you feel that you want to learn how to do it in a way that doesn't try your patience or require hard work.  You think it should be fun.

You're not going to learn how to do this.

I don't care what it is: writing, gardening, brand marketing, mathematics or working as a sanitation technician.  You're going to work to fill in the gaps where you're weak, or you are never, ever, going to learn to perform this job well.

DMing gets a pass because, conveniently for 40 years, the leash-holders of the industry have taken every possible step to ensure that the people who are playing are off balance, at each other's throats, battling impossible to achieve rhetoric or have been fed heaps and heaps of books written as pure junk.  This has convinced a lot of people that no, DMing does not require work ~ and there is even a philosophical cult out there pushing the bullshit that it "shouldn't" require work and that if you're working, "you're not doing it right."

Bleh.

I was directed to the youtube video by the Grumpy Wizard, linking this post on a site that shall not be named.  On the post, Travis makes an argument that I've made a hundred different ways on this blog.  Break it down; figure out how it works and make the parts work better.  I greatly appreciate I'm not the only one (though of course, I knew I wasn't.  My regular readers are like me, too).

Make sure you watch this video, and think about what it says to the philosophy, "You do you."



Notice how the G.W. went outside RPGs to find his advice.  Notice how other people, dealing with the same problems ~ how to get better at something that seems fuzzy and uncertain ~ are solving those problems by teaching and demonstrating a process that others can follow.  Notice how they speak of their successes and can point to people in their field and say, "This person has vastly improved their abilities, once they were shown how."

When do you hear the Company ever chirp about that success?  When have you seen the company release some book, then take the next obvious step to say, "John here was a really crappy DM.  But now John, and thousands of others like him, are really good DMs.  If you're a crappy DM, we can teach you."

No, what the Company says is, "You do you, buy our books, best of luck.  Keep buying our books."

And all the little drones surrounding the company repeat, "You do you, buy their books, it will all work out, you'll see."

But we never see, do we?  We never see that.  We go to the cons and there are people stumbling around and asking questions, and saying they really like this book or that book, but there's never anyone teaching anything and there's no one who says, "Wow, this class or this course was amazing!  You have to take it."

A course in being a DM doesn't exist because: a) the Company can't figure out how to market it and actually accept being held accountable for the value of the content; and b) the stupider and more desperate you are for inspiration, insight, maps, scenarios, character classes and so on, the more you'll have to buy from them.

If they teach you how to do it, you won't need them.

And that's why we teach people, isn't it?  We teach the fellow how to fish so they can go out and get their own, and we can stop giving them our fish.  But if we have the monopoly on fish, and the fellow has to pay us, then it is in our interest to create all this bullshit that says, "Ordinary people can't or shouldn't or wouldn't know how to fish as well as we fish, because we're fishing specialists, just look at all this fish you want to buy."

If we learned how to fish, we'd destroy the company in just a few years.

They're not saying, you do you.  They're saying, you do us.

It starts when a significant group of people in the community takes a pledge to stop buying their fish.

Given my recent work on these RPG 201 posts, I think it's fair to ask the question, am I a mentor?  I know for a fact that some would say "yes," without hesitation.  Others might say I had important things to say or that I was useful.  And still others would answer emphatically, "No." What did he mean, "some?" Pray tell me, what parts do not fall into the purpose of those exercises? What parts of "role-playing games" are not governed by the same goals behind clinical and academic efforts as encouraging emotional, uncertain people to role-play out their experience?  Was he being deliberately obtuse, or did he really think that D&D consisted largely of people doing things disconnected from everyday human response?

In 2010, I agreed to review a module, Death Frost Doom.  And as someone who has reviewed newspapers and novels for publication, and been paid for it, I followed the orthodox tradition of running the module exactly as written.  As a reviewer, it was not my role to change the content, or adjust is as I might, since that would muddy the actual value of the content.  When another DM ran the game, that other DM wouldn't have the benefit of my experience, or imagination ~ so what good would it do anyone to detail the advanture as I modified it?

No one, absolutely no one, would expect me to change the words of a bad novel, to make it a good novel, in the process of reviewing that novel!  The very idea is obviously ludicrous.  But even now, 8 years after, I still occasionally run across some commenter on Reddit or elsewhere talking about how I "fucked up" Death Frost Doom.  By playing it exactly.

To be sure, were I to run DFD in tandem with my own judgement, yes, it would have definitely been a better module. In fact, I do this every session of D&D I play: by throwing the module into the garbage and then replacing everything with my own creaivity and ideas.

This leads to a point I made with my last post, Humanities vs. Social Science.  Specifically, what part of the game works, regardless of the quality ~ or the experience and expertise ~ of the Dungeon Master?

What do I mean by "works"?  Well, technically, the module DFD, or any module, "works" as a process for the game.  Not necessarily a good process, not reliably a joyous one, not even an interesting one ... but as a process, or series of events and descriptions that are given to the players for what happens, a module "works" whether or not the DM has experience and expertise.  The players will, for ill or not, either die along the way according to the rules or succeed, participating in the game.

Now, people will rush forward and chatter about how a good DM does so much, much more, but this would be missing the point.  As a game, baseball works even if the players are very, very bad at the game.  It works even if the pitcher has to be moved ten feet from the batter.  It works even if the pitcher is replaced by a tee.  The runners still have to run the bases, the fielders still have to put the runners out, and the most runs still wins.  It can be very funny to watch a bunch of five year olds play baseball, and obviously an adult or a professional baseball player can do much, much more than a bunch of tiny kids, but to the game, that doesn't matter.

This is a nearly impossible thing to get across to most RPGers.  You DON'T have to be skilled to play.  The existence of the module enables someone else, with a reasonable amount of experience, to jury-rig the game (just like replacing the pitcher with a tee) so that the least capable participants can still participate.

In fact, the module isn't even needed.  So long as we wash out the expectation of a "story," which isn't strictly necessary to any part of the game, we can still play with virtually no ability.  The rules provide for setting up groups of people on opposite sides of a map, then having a fight, then awarding the winning side with experience that will enhance their powers.  In the strictest sense, this is still role-playing.  It just isn't very good role-playing.  That is immaterial.  The quality of something does not determine its nature.


The decrepit rose on the left is no less a rose than the vibrant rose on the right.  And this is the point that is so hard to grasp.  We have a tendency in our culture to rate the definition of things according to the value placed on that thing, whatever that value might be.  Yet a sample of DNA from either rose above could be used to make a completely healthy and beautiful rose ... so what does the appearance at a given moment in time have to do with the definition of a rose?

I hope that point is across.  Because we can get nowhere in any study if we cannot accurately describe things.  But let me drive it home with just one more example: a group of five-year old children playing baseball very, very badly, are having no less fun, and in many ways more fun, than a group of professionals playing baseball very, very well.

Bringing us back around to, what parts of the game do not require experience or expertise?

Surely, character creation.  If we get rid of the premise that a background must be written for characters, which in fact has no specific application to game play, the character creation process is an established series of IF-THEN processes that any DM can adjudicate, even if it is the first day they've DMed.  This fits into virtually all our experiences with our first games.  When we chose to DM, we were grateful that the rules for this part were at least laid out for us. Even if you were the particular kind of DM that rolled all the player characters in advance, then handed them out at the start of the game, that was still according to rules that you did not need expertise to follow.  You could roll the dice, see the result, be affected by the result, free-associate on the result and then watch the effect on the players as the result was made known to them.  It is a simple part of the game. Which might be why we were willing to play it so often.

Perhaps the reason why so many homebrew games don't get past the third running is because the first running is taken up with character creation, which goes so well, only to be followed by one or two runnings that fall flat, because the principals of the game are not nearly as clear.

What else?

I admit, it becomes harder to see another possibility.  But then I think of a little child running after a ball, falling down, getting the ball, dropping it, picking it up again, throwing it to first base and the ball not making it.  And meanwhile the runner is between home and first, standing there confused, while parents scream, "RUN!" having no immediate effect on the child's behaviour.  Seriously.  If you want to study game participants, throw away your clipboard and go watch children play anything.  Hockey is pretty funny, too ... especially for me, as I remember playing hockey at five.

So if we presume play without expertise, but still following the rules, combat is definitely a thing.  Expertise will bring a lot of nuance to combat, but again, value is immaterial.  The point is that it is possible to run combat, if you allow for everyone taking their time to look up rules as necessary and they're prepared to invest themselves.

This is one of the points where early versions of the game excelled.  There was no need to have "experts" on hand.  Any group of kids could buy books and if they had the patience, they could suss out a personal version of the game.  Some readers I have right now did it that way.

The way the books are written now, however ... well, it is back to Brian Griffin's book.  There are fifty pages in the back that you're expected to fill out on your own.

That's the primary reason for reviewing a module exactly as written ... I had to assume that some people wouldn't be able to enhance the module, as everyone said I ought to have done.  Some participants ~ a lot ~ simply can't.  They don't know how.  And the assumption that they ought to know how, or that knowing how is an obvious fact of any product that is provided by any manufacturer, is an erroneous approach.  I wrote my book as an "advanced guide" to role-playing ... to differentiate it from Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies, a book that had to be written because the rules were so flat out badly written that outsiders had to make sense of it.  I've read that book.  They still choked, largely because they did not stick to first principles and they allowed themselves to devolve into a lengthy attempt to comprehend the values of the participants.

To manage that problem, I'll have to step to the left for a bit and talk about ethics, as Matt suggested Friday.

Value is the degree of importance that is assigned to something, assigned by individuals either presently, or as the result of successful arguments that people have made in the past that creates a sense of tradition or belief connected with an assignment that happened a long time ago.  For example, someone, at some point in the past, conceived of the idea of a "god."  This happened so long ago, we can't even be sure the conception was voiced as words, since it is possible the invention of "gods" is older than the invention of even speech ... though it is a gray area.  Either way, the invention gained traction, and pervaded through all human cultures as a "good idea" for enough people, for certain reasons (which we can skip), to the point where we continue to have arguments on the existence of gods even though there is absolutely no real evidence of any kind for this belief.

Nonetheless, people value their belief in gods, and will embrace earlier silly nonsense, or make up their own, rather than sacrifice this value they have.  And in our society, we recognize the right of people to possess values, regardless of their scientific or rational formulation, because we believe that values, on the whole, so long as they don't hurt people, are a good thing.  And I will not argue against that.

HOWEVER, it is crucial that we don't get values confused with facts, or mechanics, because that's where things tend to go wonky.  When we start building bridges based upon the values of the designer, and not the designer's ability to understand how engineering works, things go bad in a very, very big way.  This is why one of the values we've put in place in our society is that people who design very large things with parts ought to be accredited by other people, before we trust them.  It's just a good value, all around.

That is why I have to beat the drum so hard ... because most people talking about role-playing just now are hopelessly caught up in defending values as examples of game play.  This is like a professional ball player explaining to a little boy that he needs to take 2nd base so that he'll improve his chances of being picked higher in the draft when he's six.  Arguing that all players of all games need to create backstories for their characters is like that.  Or arguing that all DMs of all games need to make great stories for their campaigns.  These things are values.  They are dearly embraced by many people, but they are not, in fact, relevant in any way to the actual game, or the thousands of ways in which the game can be played.

And before these values should be embraced by the whole community, they ought to be defended.  Not in the way we're seeing, where someone says, "It makes a better game," as if that is an argument.  No.  I want to see them defended in the manner that Immanuel Kant defended Reason.

I'm not seeing anything like that.

As I remember, most of my first level classes in university started off quite dull.  For example, 1st Year Psychology, course number 201, wanted us to be sure what psychology covered, what words were used, what theories and research had been developed in the past and how to think in terms of those advances.  The goal, basically, was to baptise students into the notion that psychology represented a distinct field of study, that it had been ongoing, and that students were expected to understand the field before advancing ideas about it.

Or, if you prefer, English 201.  Again, the students begin hearing the message that styles, tropes and techniques have already been established in different periods and cultures.  Since the easiest element of those tropes to grasp for newcomers to the field is the short story, it is treated as a microcosm of the field.  So we track the progress of the short story, we have the students read short stories, we deconstruct the short stories and we ask the students to compare one deconstruction of one type of genre/culture with other genres and cultures.  As before, the students are expected to open their minds to what they can learn - and not to give them rein to express their own ideas, feelings or prejudices.

There is a distinct difference between these two approaches ~ in large part because one, psychology, is a social science, while the other is part of the humanities.  Before we begin anything, we'd need to determine which the study role-playing falls under.

I think if we wanted to teach a course in role-playing, the hardest thing would be to explain to the students, "Whatever you think you know about role-playing, or whatever opinions you have, leave them at the door."

I also think that many who would approach role-playing from a theoretical point of view would feel duty bound to discuss the history of role-playing, so that most of the course work would follow the English model above, and not the Psychology model.  Most would-be course would be spent reading and deconstructing role-playing games, in order to compare them with other role-playing games.  This would be the humanities approach and, in some degree, it's valid.  Just as English and other humanities is a methodology for causing people to deconstruct and think at a level of the best humans who have lived to date, exhaustive game deconstruction could lead to a greater understanding of how games are put together, and how to do it yourself (once the theory was fully understood).

This approach does not, however, evaluate how players respond to game-play.  It does not discuss the motivation for game play, or game theory and game research.  It's fine to learn how games are structured; we also want to learn how games behave ... and that requires evaluation of game-play during the process of gameplay.

Unfortunately, to date, no such evaluation has taken place, not to my knowledge.  If there is some social scientist group studying role-playing games as they manifest at the game table, it is keeping awful quiet about it's research.  And this is why I think a professor creating a lesson plan would run to the "history of role-playing games" as the practical, data-rich option.

But were I taking such a course, I would feel let down at the moment of being told we were going to start by reading and evaluating the White Box set, only to move onto Advanced D&D, then Moldvay's version, then how Tunnels and Trolls handled things, then Chivalry and Sorcery, then Rolemaster, followed by the supplement Ice Law, only to then move onto Gurps and Second Edition and the plethora of other games that exploded into the market in the 1980s, from Top Secret and Paranoia to Cthulhu and the Masquerade.  And so on.

Gawd.  What a boring, boring class that would be.  Someone would get something out of it, I'm sure, but a lot of us just spent 30 and 40 years taking this course already.  I think we're done.

I'd rather if we could start with three years of research that first established [a] what works as a DM/Player participation driver, regardless of the quality of the DM; and [b] what preparation best feeds point (a).  From there, we could then evaluate: [c] where do deviations from (a) lead, for good or ill; and [d] what forms of (b) reduces negative deviations that have come to light from research into (c).

That's as far as we dare go.  Any more and we'll probably be wallowing in our own conjecture and that is definitely not what we're searching for.

Let's look at [a] for a moment, acknowledging that we shouldn't attempt to establish an answer for what works regardless of skill at this time.  We can, however, argue against things that clearly do depend on skill: emotive role-playing for one, and player immersion for another.  These things clearly rely on some kind of inborn or acquired skill ... and therefore can be separated from the theoretical structure of the game in the 1st degree, as we try to understand what the game is.

This, already, is a lot to take in.  Theory always is.  Whatever impression I may have made so far, I don't know.  I do intend to keep thinking on this subject along these lines, and see what happens.  The more I hear from readers, the more focused my thinking is bound to be, as the process of explaining myself seems to trip switches in my head that opens doors.

And remember ... any one could get a PHD.  Get tested.

With an earlier post, Matt said, “In D&D, we need better DMs. We need better tools to teach DMs how to gage their table, how to open conversations, and how to care for the people around them.”

Yes, damn it. Every time we come back around to how to play, or how to manage a table better, or how to keep abuse from happening, or any damn thing on how people in role-playing games deserve the best possible experience, we come back around toteaching people how to DM. And yet though I've been shouting this for nine years now, it is still treated as a joke by the industry and by most bloggers or vloggers.

The best we have is a cadre of people who have taken it upon themselves to give advice. “Advice” is not teaching. It is a desire to guide or make recommendations concerning prudent future action … but that is not a systematic methodology towards deciphering and deconstruction what goes into making a DM able to read the temperament of other players, how to open conversations with players who might have trouble speaking freely, or how to care for others. At best, “advice” is well-meaning. More often, it is prejudicial and uniformed, and rife with people who don't care about the consequences of their advice except in how it raises their internet status and makes them feel important or financially supported.

Last year, I banged the drum for accreditation for game players and was virtually laughed off the subject. Yet here we are, dealing with the “public game” demanding a series of codified ethics to keep DMs from being abusive of players. No one wants to face the real question: how do we go about saying that some people shouldn't be DMing? We can't even admit there ought to be a guideline.

Very well, if you've read the last post ... how can we advance our games along the lines of hypothesis, research, testing and proof?

To begin with, we're the scientists; and like those early investigators of the 17th and 18th century, our resources are limited and our collection of guinea pigs is limited.  You might get yourself into a position where you can study the response of ten or twenty people, but chances are that right now you only have your party to work with.  Rest assured, this doesn't matter.  You're not curing cancer, you're only improving your game ~ and you're never going to run it for the mass majority, anyway.  What matters here is that you get your methodology under control, and that you stop wasting time.

I have some suggestions; these are not mine.  They are based on the principles of the scientific method, which has stood the test of time for nearly four centuries, so it dwarfs all of us.

1.  Stop Assuming that every new effort, system, plan or design is going to work.  A hypothesis is a proposal, not a solution.  It is a working guess at the questions or problems that have arisen, associated with your particular game.  Once you get it into your head that "new" does not automatically equate to "better," you have a much better chance of systematically doing the research on what's "old" before kicking it to the ditch.

An hypothesis is a response to a pattern that we have noticed during play.  The way the players respond, or act, when encountering particular things, the level of resistance or resentment about certain rules and so on.  The pattern need not be negative: we might want to know why players responded so well to something we did, so that we can reproduce the effect.

As I said, the hypothesis does not look for a solution!  It is, rather, looking for the cause behind something.  We're trying to explain, not eliminate.  Therefore, the proposal we make is not about what might happen if we do something; it is, rather, an explanation.  "I think the players were resistant to running away because ..."; and then going from there.

We should not begin from a place like, "If we do this, the players will run away next time."  That is poor methodology on many levels: first, it assumes already that we know why the players ran away; it assumes we already have the solution; and we're already biased towards the solution we've created, because we haven't based that solution on any research, but rather on our gut.  Our personal observations, then, are bound to remove any practical benefit we might get from the experiment.

2.  Test the hypothesis.  Fair enough ... but how?  The guideline here is to build an experiment that changes nothing about the previous situation, while enabling us to take notes.  Let's say, for example, that recently the party refused to run away from a fight they were losing, and as a result they nearly died or a total-party-kill resulted.  And now, to understand better what happened, we want to build an experiment that we can test.

Let's pick a hypothesis.  I'll propose three:

• The Players don't seem to care very much about their characters; they're ready to roll the die and hope for good results because they're not really losing anything.
• The Players won't give up a fight from a sense of shame; they'd rather lose straight up than feel like cowards who ran from a fight.
• The Players can't see it coming.  Everything seems fine, they think they have it under control, but they don't realize the circumstance until it is too late.

Regarding the document from my last post; we can start with the structure and content section, requirements:

The projecting of the structure and content of training ... [for] the presence of significant problem from the view point of its research and creative nature that require integrated knowledge, research for its solution.

In English:  we want to identify what we need to know, for the purpose of relaying that information, about the research behind and the creative nature of role-playing.  We want an identifiable, single body of knowledge, so that we will be able to improve that knowledge, as a solution for further study and the creation of competence in dungeon mastering, or if you prefer, game mastering.

And ... wow.  Impossible, right?  No one agrees with anyone else, there's a concerted propaganda to argue that there is "no right way" and anyone who dares propose that there might be is condemned for inflexibility and being entitled.  The problem is further complicated by the "research" being 80 different significant game rule designs, all of which are integrated to some degree, as they share concepts, but not philosophies.  The first identifier everyone in role-playing uses is to reach for a tribal definition: I play 3rd edition, or I play Pathfinder, or I play [insert game title/genre here].  And that tribalism further subdivides into what rules group A plays versus group B.

Worse, the "research" itself produces uncertain, inconsistent results.  If we were talking about some other study, an evidentiary body of consistent results tends to emerge, which steadily drives the knowledge of that study in a particular, agreed-upon direction.  As more and more data piles up, one scientist after another begins to agree that something is clearly going on with the climate ... even as the issue itself is debated and/or ridiculed.  Role-playing games, which lack evidentiary support for anything about the game, as they suffer from a lack of meaningful studies, seems to point in no direction, a proposition which is embraced by a great many practitioners who don't want too close an investigation to be made into their practices.

So we're fucked.  The most anyone can offer for "knowledge" is to say, "I do it this way," or "Try this and it will work," which no effort of any kind is being made to say, "This worked" or "This didn't."  The ordinary RPG pundit on youtube is safe in proposing anything that sounds like it has potential, without the least concern that a great many people will respond with one voice, if the proposal is a farce.

But for all the proof or verification that exists for such advice, we might just as well tell DMs that they should kill a cat at midnight in an unkempt cemetery near an abandoned church at five minutes after midnight of the Spring Equinox ~ just 11 days left to obtain a cat and locate your site.  Maybe you can go to your local games store and get a group to go do it as an event.  Don't forget to Youtube it.

The alternative to the nihilism that pervades the role-playing community is, however, as the quote above says.  Research.  Investigation.  Not just supposition, but hypothesis, with a clear agenda that the hypothesis will then be tested in a lab, to determine what results, and what results can be repeated over and over with further experimentation.  That is, the same process that has united the rest of human knowledge into a forward, non-faith-based direction.

Rather than another scattered opinion-fest surrounding the importance of use and importance of armor or weapons, or how game design might be implemented to possibly bring about a change, which can then only ever be tried on one group of people by any one particular DM, how about we just stop until the data comes in?

This is what my online campaign blog was supposed to offer: evidence that my particular approach to D&D was not just a collection of words, but that it could be seen to work in the speech and actions of players who were actually responding to my philosophy.  Yet each time, in the recent debate, that I proclaimed that my combat system, as it stood, was working spectacularly well, with evidence to prove it, this evidence was flat out ignored.  When I said that the error in the campaign was my own, and not the combat system, because I should have gone ahead and killed the party, because they insisted on putting on their armor, that was also ignored.  Instead, the discussion devolved into pure, unsubstantiated opinion, that some rule change might have caused the party to feel less desiring to put on their armor first, thus [I conjecture] saving me the need to kill the party.

We, as a community, fall into this trap again and again. We don't acknowledge the evidence.  Instead, we turn to our prejudices about a particular element of the game [and combat is the worst!], and then argue again and again, in a circle, around those prejudices, without evidence, without rigorous investigation, without experimentation.  We jump right to a conclusion as though, in some way, because we feel a particular way because of our supposed experience, all that falderol with hypothesis, research, testing and proof just isn't necessary.

But the thing is, all that is necessary!  Because we are getting nowhere.  We're just wasting our time with this.

For people who claim they haven't time to waste building a campaign or to find the time to play more than once a fortnight, that's absurd.  The game deserves better.

To be sure, the problems that some players have about entering a combat without putting their armor on first is only one aspect of a familiar attitude: the same that causes players to insist there must be scads of healing in any game system before it can be fairly run, or that death is an unfair policy carried out by DMs who apparently hate players.

If it takes too long to cast spells, so that it is difficult to fire spells off like automatic weaponry at opponents, then the wizard is unfairly crippled.  If fighters don't have enough hit points, if thieves are not able to backstab every time an enemy turns their back, regardless of surprise, if a bard can't automatically put the enemy to sleep in less than eight notes of a cheap lyre, then the game is unfair and needs to be "fixed" and reworked until the players are properly served by the rules.

I don't want to rant about this.  I do want to stress that it is a problem.  Not so much for an old grognard like me [though, as recently stipulated, occasionally] ~ but it is very hard on a DM with only a little experience.  Such new gamers are already facing a steep learning curve, which is made harder by game systems and culture which steadfastly supports more and more player power.  Just look at the videos online: fudging is pressed on DMs, in order to ensure the players have fun; the DM is flat out told that the player's enjoyment is the DM's responsibility; even the idea of TPKs are treated viciously in comment sections; while player enabling through backstories and the right to negotiate the nature of the campaign in session zeros further compromises the free hand of the DM.

This is all the linked post above, Fight Semantics, serves to investigate: the idea that armor class can be served by holding a weapon, thus reducing all the inconvenience ~ and cost ~ of holding a weapon.  Most rule proposals that I see pushed by newish DMs, or DMs who run scattered, one-off campaigns, where player power doesn't really matter, more or less push enablement in one way or another.

The finger can be pointed at me, as well: what else are the sage abilities, except more power for the players?  At least, that's how they could be interpreted, if too much leeway was given as to what sort of things could be accomplished with an ability to "brew poison" or "breed horses."  I see the sage abilities enabling the player's motivation and personality, as opposed to the player's power ... but another DM could easily be browbeat by a player looking over the list, to considerably abuse and exploit the system as written.

With all this pressure on a new DM (and players asking questions like, "Does my long sword do more damage if I swing it with both hands"), it's no wonder that moving the game onto rails is a viable strategy to reassert the DM's control over his or her game.  No doubt, philosophies like "the DM is always right" retain a vitality because of what a DM faces with more and more rules that legitimize the player's right to drive the game.

That "pressure" only exists because ~ supposedly ~ finding players is hard to do, or because standing up to a player and giving a flat out, "No" is treated as a risky choice.  Many poor souls, not realizing that a DM nixing a player's pet plan is no different than an umpire calling a strike, get themselves into far worse situations than I did with the village in my recent post.  Such DMs have to fudge, because letting the players have their way on a constant basis, trying to follow game advice that says, "Make your players feel enabled, not disabled," [my words], gets them into corners they haven't the skill to get out of.  Dungeons wind up being too feeble, or overpowered; when the players circumvent some plan, the DM feels confused and helpless; parties get overcautious; parties slaughter everything; plot hooks fail, because the DM doesn't know what the players want; the players show little or no interest in doing anything and the DM feels lost; roleplaying does a face plant, or a smart player talks the DM into everything ... and there's a constant threat the players will simply walk out if they don't get what they want.  Basically, threatening extortion.

Off record for one of the podcast interviews, I was asked to explain my support of accreditation.  My only real argument is that the game is broken ... and not because players can't use weapons to replace their armor or because an arrow can't be blocked with a sword.  The deeper issue presents within the game's play, where DMs are simply disassociated from the pre-conceived framework they've created in their own minds, which they cling to as a way of controlling a game they're clearly incapable of controlling.  Case in point:



I keep watching these videos, because they just ... don't ... make ... sense.  The DM functions in some quasi-real game space, the players just go with it, the farce is allowed to play out like a bizarre Ionesco play and a group of functionally game-retarded participants stumble through a session only to realize there's nothing out there that's better (which is a running theme in Puffin Forrest's content).


It is baffling on the surface ... but with some consideration it makes perfect sense.  The philosophy has been, for decades, whenever the rules don't cover something, the DM should make a ruling so the game can just go on.  But when DM fiat becomes less and less rational, and that irrationality is supported by a wider and wider populace, with a player-to-DM apprentice system that is all positive, all the time, the video above is what results.

I regularly get people who answer a post of mine with, "Well, I run by fiat in my game and it is just fine."  That's not a good recommendation ~ but they don't know it.  They really do think that it is "just fine" ... just as the people do who participate in the game video above.  Just as people all over the internet are increasingly feeling.  That this sort of irrationality is "fun" ... so why worry?

Regarding the last post, New Grass, I understand the resistance to any thought of consensus.  Some nine years ago on the blog I proposed a crowd-sourced effort to create homebrew rules on a wiki.  I thought it was a great idea; an opportunity to build rule ideas using the creative capacity of dozens, perhaps hundreds of people.

No interest.  Didn't happen.  Null program.

Every time since that I have made any proposal for a consensus regarding D&D, the answer has always come back the same.  I slowly built a wiki myself of more than 1,300 pages ... and did get four volunteers to come work on it with me (after all, I'm a "volunteer" too).  And yet, in three years since proposing that, I've had no one else come forward.  Consensus just isn't a thing among D&D players.

I have some theories about that.  Culturally, we have a high resistance to any idea of "consensus," because the concept has been co-opted by the powerful, particularly employers, as code for "obey and do it our way."  Consensus means conformity, which is another word for enslavement.

Similarly, accountability has come to mean, "Getting axed because I didn't conform."  Those in control reap the benefits, the reward, and everyone else reaps the accountability.  This has been inculcated into our perceptions.

So when I say, a consensus for how to play D&D, the reader goes straight to, "Others telling me how to run my game."  And when I say accountability, the reader goes straight to, "Having to answer for not running my game according to the consensus."

And no one wants that.

A strong case for the rules-as-written folk is the consensus that arises out of everyone having to bow to those rules; many of the trials and troubles of game play arise from lawyering, misunderstandings and frustrations between those who are prepared to run by the rules and those who are compelled to game the rules at every opportunity.  Rules-as-written is a bulwark against excessive gamesmanship, the art of winning games by using various ploys and tactics to gain a psychological advantage.  RPGs, with its elements of role-play, innovation through using equipment and abilities in new ways, interaction between players in the party and the presence of an adjudicator who may not know the rules as well as the "gamesman," is particularly vulnerable to this practice.  And while the methods of playing the DM and the other players isn't technically illegal, it is dubious and, on the face of it, self-serving and directly aggravating to others who have no interest in it.  Gaming the game has ruined many a campaign and driven many a player out of the activity.  It is a pervasive, viral, difficult to manage problem that sits at the heart of game play.  Worse, it surpasses the capacity of many a DM to handle it ~ mostly because "handling" it requires less a sort of game skill and more an ability to be the sort of personality who can face selfish people down when they behave selfishly.  Not only do many people not possess that skill, many people don't want to possess it, or take part in an activity where possessing the skill is a prerequisite.

It isn't that rules-as-written is the preferred way to play.  It exists because it is a weapon; as is any consensus, against any sort of game play, adopted by a community in any activity in which humans take a part.  I've said that doctors became accredited in order to maintain a standard of life[-saving practice; similarly, engineers became accredited to stop disasters like the St. Francis Dam disaster or the collapse of the Quebec Bridge.  Rules arise that restrict behaviour when it becomes clear that behaviour needs to be restricted.


Similarly, rules appeared in hospitals for visitors when it became clear that patients needed silence and periods of rest, so that visiting hours and visitor behaviour required a sort of management that had nothing to do with the wishes or comfort of the visitor.  Likewise, rules for behaviour exist in all sorts of activities, most familiarly with sports.  The last words said by the chair umpire at a tennis match before a serve are, "QUIET PLEASE," words that are directed at the crowd and not at the competitors.  Cell phones are silenced at movie theatres and events because the personal right of a person to be notified of a personal call is suspended when the pleasure of a majority is compromised.

When I say "consensus," I'm not speaking of how the Gentle Reader runs their game.  I mean the basic attitudes and mannerisms that should be expected from all participants in accordance with what we, as the community, feel ought to be in place.  When I say there ought to be an accountability, I mean that those rules should have teeth, in that individuals should be warned to cut it out, or told to leave the campaign.

The power of a consensus is that the individual doesn't need to feel that the onus for deciding correct and inappropriate behaviour is on them.  Back in the days when fighting was considered a reasonable activity, a code called the Marquess of Queensberry Rules was drafted to ensure "clean" fighting.  Read them?  It's a short list.  They don't say that fighting shouldn't happen; they don't say that people are necessarily safe during a contest.  But they do argue, in different ways, that you can't beat on someone who's down and you can't use equipment that gives you an edge.  They say you have to win by winning.  And they exist because gamesmanship has always been a thing.

Likewise, this is why Edmond Hoyle set out to establish official rules for games back in 1742; to put a stop to the endless fighting and disagreements associated with multiple cultures and groups wasting time that could be used for fun on contests of gamesmanship and the perpetuation of self-satisfaction.

Humans cannot be trusted to police themselves.  Yes, yes, we're basically good, because if the situation calls for it, we're more or less willing to be policed.  But without the police, there's always a certain amount of fraying at the edges, of getting a bit more than we've got ... and this eventually ruins everything for everyone.

This cup not for sale

For those who may be interested on the podcast front, I have finally solved my technical problem.  I had a successful test and I can now record voices off the internet without the guest sounding like he is at the bottom of a well.

Unfortunately, the process of solving that problem has put me two weeks behind my intended schedule.  I have had to cancel on three guests, which I hope I will be able to reschedule in late February or in March. There has been disappointment and I really can't blame anyone.  I don't like having to fail on any commitment ... but I had run out of options.

One of those guests was supposed to be interviewed tonight, and one tomorrow night. But I haven't been able to do any real tests with my introductions or proper preparatory work ... but thankfully that's past me and I should be good to go with everyone who has scheduled with me to date.

These last two posts, the one about accreditation and the one that discusses credibility have been part of the launch I'm working towards.  The name "Authentic" on the podcast is not just a random buzzword that I've opted to exploit ~ to me, the word has a definite responsibility attached to its use.  I want to get to the genuine role-playing substance:  what is it in the hands of independent DMs, creating their worlds, coming to grips with their demons, their lack of inspiration, their frustrating players and their own sense of right and wrong ~ or properly terms, the pursuit of legitimacy.

Here is what frightens people where it comes to measuring their capacity to Dungeon Master: accountability.  We've all been in this discussion: it's the one where Person A says, "It's the DM's world" and Person B says, "Players can leave any time they want to," while Person C chimes in with "The point is to have fun," with Person D adding, "It's the DM's responsibility to ensure the players have fun," followed by no one explaining in clear, concrete terms how this is done.

Accountability, real accountability, demands quantifiable evidence that a particular DMing strategy is effective at producing a valuable player experience ... and on that score we're lost.  We can talk about "improving" the game, but until now most of this "improvement" has been about shifting and moving random rules around with new editions and seeing what happens.  No one is talking about a "discipline" of DMing; or serious attention being paid to teaching others how to run the game; or increasing the game's quality or the number of experienced participants.  I have seen the format for Game Cons and their "tournaments" ... they move the players in like cattle, making them sit as tight as imaginable at cruddy tables, taking their money under the auspices of "enabling" these players to basically entertain themselves as the money-rakers look on.  I don't see this as an effective strategy for producing anything but the worst game experience ... but I also think it flies because the masses just don't know any better.

Getting people to know better involves "teaching" ~ and yet, before teaching can happen, there has to be some consensus on what ought to be taught.  There isn't a consensus.  Even between myself and my small number of readers, what consensus have we reached.  Now and then I get a comment that encourages me to keep writing about a point, or someone says they agree with a particular aspect or post that I've written, but this is a whole helluva a lot of miles away from a consensus.  And right now, most readers are still grappling with the notion that any consensus would also have to incorporate a sense of accountability.  And doesn't that make the hackles on the back of your neck rise?

Yet shouldn't we see past our emotions, our sensibilities, and see the sense of it?  This was the point of Jane Austen's book, after all: that Sense, a sane and realistic attitude to situations and problems, superseded the idiocy of sensibility, in which a person's sensitivity to ideas rendered them offended or, worse, imprisoned by their own choices.

We've had sensibility; it is all we have right now in every venue.  Sense demands that individuals be encouraged to examine and change their practices of play, that they acknowledge that there are better examples and techniques, that these techniques need to be examined and evaluated, so that they can be taught to others, through methods that encourage support, a means of governance, and a population of students who arrive at the gates with an eagerness to learn.  It demands that the participants conform to recognized facts because those facts yield measurable, proven results ... and that the measurements are not compromised by baseless defensiveness, gut feelings and self-serving prejudice.

Just now, I don't have a road map for how we get there.  No one person can; or ought to.  That is the meaning of consensus.  But we have to get there; because there is no "game" in the future without this.  The cattle who are amused by the herders will evaporate as soon as new grass takes their fancy ... the trick is to be the new grass, to figure out how to grow it and steal the cattle away, teaching them how to be people.

That's our job.  Which we can't do if we can't decide the difference between what matters and what really matters.

So, on Quora, I asked the question, "How can anyone giving advice about "How to dungeon master" prove their advice is competent?"

Obviously, they can't; which is my point.  What's always interesting in a question like this is the way in which people answer ... as Miguel Valdespino did.  The full comment is available on the Quora list I just posted; some of it is a joke, some of it attempts to help me as though I must be some sort of noob ... and the remainder goes as follows:

"RPG’s are a hobby and your DM ain’t getting paid for this. What’s more, these games can be played in many ways. I’ve seen everything from martinet killer DM’s to loosey-goosey hippies. Each group has it’s own feel and it’s own problems."

I don't want to disparage Valdespino here; though I must point out that his self-made description reads, "Over 3 decades of RPG's."

At the same time that he is saying there's no way to tell, he's being sure to establish his own credentials by telling you how long he's been playing.  And he's not alone.  Let me run through some other commenters that we can find on Quora, from a search for "role-playing games."

• Ed Han, Been playing for decades. 
• Edward Conway, played from 1st edition on, familiar with 5e and Pathfinder 
• Thomas Pierson, I own more games than is probably healthy 
• Inigo Gonzalez, GM for The Penumbra Extinction, an actual-play podcast 
• Robert Anthony Ramos, Been playing RPGs since the early 1990s. 
• Steve Waddington, Player and DM for over 40 years 
• Rebecca Harbison, Played and ran tabletop games for 20 years 
• Travis Casey, GM since 1980; wrote columns on RPGs, currently publishing 
• Matt Slater, Lifelong roleplayer, 30+ years experience 
• Steffen Hauser, playing Pen&Paper Games since 30 years 
• Thomas Narvaez, Avid 15+ Year gamer 
• Adam Smith, Fan since 1st Edition AD&D. Currently DMing 5th Edition 
• Samuel Silbory, I've played and/or DMed every edition of D&D 
• William Travis, D&D player since the red box days

And on it goes.  See a pattern?  We can argue all day that there is not "certification of competence" associated with D&D, but it is plain that if it isn't there, people will go ahead and make one up.  And as one can tell from the above, it is based on a) how long you've played; b) how many games you've played/purchased; and c) are you a DM?  Publishing and podcasting is a good secondary notation.

In my last post, I talked about how it became necessary to establish accreditation for surgeons because the number of people dying on operating tables was getting embarrassing.  I want to ask the question, how did that accreditation happen?  Do people not think that before the establishment of surgeon's colleges in the 18th and 19th century, there was a rather intensive effort for individual surgeons to create measurements for what made them a better surgeon than the cutthroat down the road?  Of course they did.

Patients not dying, obviously.  Getting a diagnosis right.  Being able to train others to do what you do.  Shared, reproducible knowledge!

Note that no DM ever says, "Have trained dozens, scores, hundreds of people how to play and run D&D."

Why?

I'm guessing most of the reason comes out of Valespino's rebuttal.  That DMs come in all shapes and sizes, and we can't know what sort of DM we're going to get until we run with them.  Game "feel" is not universal.  Game problems are not universal.  And most important of all, no one's getting paid for this.

Those are tremendously specious arguments.  What does "pay" have to do with it?  If it has, we've just discounted the first hundred years of amateur Olympic sports, where rules were rather in force, no matter who you were, not to mention the millions of people who are right now giving their time free of charge to NGOs, not only a home but also overseas, in some awfully dangerous places, where still, rules apply.  And somehow, these volunteers manage to teach other volunteer noobs how to volunteer.

But DMing is just too darn hard.

We can teach people how to talk to people in the jungles of Brazil, the urban slag heaps of Sao Paulo, the war zones of East Ceylon and Zaire, where the people really are different, where the rules really are different, where martinet killers and loosey-goosey hippies really take on characteristics of immeasurable proportion ...

But DMing is just too darn hard.

Yet there it is, the quest for credibility.  Believe my answer on Quora, because I've been playing for a long time; I've played lots of different kinds of games; I own a lot of modules; I'm a DM.

Something here just doesn't add up.

Today, just before starting this post, I asked the question, "How can the game company run D&D tournaments at hundreds of Game cons world-wide if there's no such thing as a way to accredit a DM or a Player?"





And got back this answer:




Which, nicely, came back just in time for me to get to this point in the post.

Do you agree?  Do you think "League" accreditation is indicative of being able to Dungeon Master or Play?

I'm asking four questions of Cliff, who of course has done his best to create his own aura of credibility, just as everyone does (because we're human):

• Does accreditation as a DM originate with the WOTC?
• Does this accreditation indicated competency and ability running D&D, or does it indicate competency and ability adhering to WOTC policy?
• How rigorous is this accreditation?
• How are the people who examine and evaluate the game reports accredited?

I feel these are fair questions.  They're questions we should all start thinking about.  Just as soon as we're ready to pull our heads out of the sand.


PS.  Giley has recently responded to say that this tracking method isn't an accreditation at all.  Which makes me wonder why he answered my question with it.

I've recently been tooling around the website Quora, where anyone can ask or answer questions on any subject, including role-playing, Dungeons and Dragons and other table-top gaming subjects.  Naturally, my opinions there are just as weird, just as incomprehensible, just as contrary as they are in the blogosphere or anywhere else.  Still, it is fun to push the envelope and answer questions.

I recently asked a typically Alexis question, mostly as a preliminary to writing this blog post:

"Why is there a right way to hold a golf club, a right way to swing a baseball bat, a right way to perform an operation, a right way to try a case, a right way to build a bridge, a right way to worship, but there's no right way to DM an RPG?"

 And not surprisingly, I received but one lone answer, exactly what I expected to hear:

"Surgery is science, do this, this happens, etc.  DMing is art, it is about creativity and individuality."

I suppose it's of little interest to most who would answer this question that "science" is about trying one hell of a lot of things before ending up with "do this, this happens" ~ and that it is STILL trying a lot of things, because that is never ending.  The bigger point about science, however, is that nothing counts as "do this, this happens" until "this" is measurable.  We're really saying that science is measurable and that art is not.

Okay, that sounds reasonable.  Let's take something measurable: say, how to tie a Windsor Knot:



And let's examine the introduction:

"Hello, I'm Charles from Louis Purple, and today I'm going to teach you how to tie a Windsor Knot.  The Windsor Knot is actually a very simple knot to tie, and its very useful because it projects confidence.  It's a wide, triangular knot, that's very suitable for presentation, job interviews or cultural appearances ... so this is how you start:"

Why am I showing this?  DMing is a LOT harder than tying a tie, so what do these things have to do with each other?  Well, I'd like to break this down.  First, Charles gives his credentials: he's a well-dressed person in the fashion industry, employed by a recognizable name.  You're not trusting Charles to explain this, you're trusting Louis Purple, which is giving its endorsement (we assume - we have no actual proof of any of this, but we take it on faith because we're hardwired to do that).

A Windsor Knot is recognizable.  And yet, still, many people are in error about what they think a Windsor Knot actually is.  Ask yourself: before seeing him tie the tie, if you even watched the video, were you absolutely certain that your perception of a Windsor tie was going to match his?  And if it differed, would you change your mind, or would you rush to argue that Charles doesn't know what he's talking about?

So, "facts" are pretty darn tricky.  If you and Charles agree, that's great.  But if you disagree, well, it's pretty much a free-for-all.

And this is what everything is like, all the time ~ and it is certainly what surgery was like for most of human history.  Which killed a lot of people.  So after a while, with really, really important things, like tying ties and removing kidneys, various entities began to take things out of the hands of common, ordinary, everyday idiots and establish measurements.  When ties mattered, absolutely everyone knew what a Windsor Knot was, because they could recognize one on sight.  When your tie was tied in some independently imaginative way, it branded you in the eyes of everyone who cared about presentations, job interviews and cultural appearances.  It showed you weren't competent to tie a proper tie, and therefore you weren't competent enough to hold a job.

But now, when ties don't matter, we've lost that awareness; most people couldn't recognize any knot from another, and so we have an endless variety of knots.  Along with an endless variety of meaningless claims as to which is a Windsor Knot or any other form, because it no longer matters.  There's no accreditation.

When something matters, like removing a kidney, we ensure you acquire a great many credentials before anyone lets you legally cut into someone's body in order to remove a kidney.  Naturally, if you wish to do this illegally, you'll find the accreditation path somewhat less rigorous.  You might need to take a few stabs at finding the kidney, though, if you don't read a book first.

My argument is that we're free to argue endlessly about things like how to DM or if there's a right way because, well, it doesn't matter.  I will never see you DM.  Apart from my putting stuff online, you will never see me DM.  We don't need accreditation to run a game and no one gives a good gawddamn if people not at our table like what we're doing.

There is something about this that really, really bugs me.  D&D doesn't matter?  This game I love?  It doesn't matter if it is run well?  Huh?

Right now, I can't get into a game as a player.  Not because I can't find one.  Hell, I could probably figure out how to get into a game in the next couple of hours ~ there are about three game shops I know that are running games right now.  No, my problem is that any game I can find is going to be, almost certainly, a total shit-show.  That's not a definite fact.  I could be wrong about that.  It's just that in the last 30 years, every single live example I have ever seen of a game, both on and off line, looks like the last fucking game in the world I would ever want to play.  I mean, these people who are running these games seem cosmically incapable of running the sort of game that would remotely interest me.

Let's have some examples.  I'll skip imbedding the videos; I'll just quote as much of the introduction as I'm able to watch before feeling I have to roll my eyes:

Call of the Wild Ep. 1:  "I will be the Dungeon Master, and I will be running ... through another Epic Campaign of mine.  In this one, these adventurers start as members of a barbarian tribe ..."  Gad,cliche.

Out of the Abyss, Session 1, Part 1:  "I'll be your Dungeon Master for this travel through the Underdark, and out of the Underdark, perhaps maybe, no, [mumble mumble] they're probably just going to die ... [players giggling] ..."  Oh, ffs.

D&Diesel with Vin Diesel:  [speaking in excessively dark Pantomime]  "The small village of Bronbog has recently come under a baneful curse.  The young are born deformed and demonic.  The denizens are driven to madness and suicide.  Those that remain, stubborn ..."  Trying pretty damn hard, aren't we.

YogsQuest, Episode 1:  "YogsQuest!  Scraping the bottom of the barrel of adventure. It is the age of heroes ... unfortunately, none of them were available at the time of recording ..."  Okay, this is supposed to be funny, but the first two jokes are older than steam, so I'm not that fucking impressed.

And no, I'm not going to feel bad that I'm judging these books by their covers.  I'll explain my reaction.  It is something akin to entering a doctor's office to be examined, only to find the floors and walls haven't been cleaned.  It's something of a clue, see, as to why I should immediately get the fuck out and find a better doctor.

You, gentle reader, most likely see nothing wrong with any of the above.  They're fun, they're dramatic, they're just dudes mucking around, playing a game.  What's the big deal?  It's not like any of this really matters.

That's why this blog is so damned contrary; and why I am contrary.  It matters to me.  The games above don't sound interesting, they sound cliched and boring; like the Wandering Gamist's quote put it in my last post, "To pretend to heroism or godhood has lost its appeal to me; better to strive for true abilities in this beautiful, chaotic, universe in which we find ourselves."  I so agree!  The examples above strike me as derivative, amateurish, pandering and lacking any real substance.  I don't want to play in a game where I'm a "hero" or even an "anti-hero" ~ or any crude stereotype of a wooden character.  I want to play an actual human personality, with depth, individuality, self-determination, with the power to meaningfully examine the ethical quandaries that arise from my decisions, while pursuing a worthwhile purpose enabled by my imagination.  That is, I want to be me ... and fight goblins.

This is the creative and individual "art" that runs contrary to the do this, this happens "science" that starts this post.  Only it is my belief that, as a character, if I "do this," what happens should NOT rely on the creativity and individuality of the DM, but upon the rigorous, reliable fundamentals of what happens in all art when we investigate motivation, narrative and conflict.  We've spent thousands of years interpreting and establishing principles for the effectiveness of creating art that perfectly fits the "do this, this happens" argument that is supposedly only applied to science and not to art.

When art is run without rigor, we get the cheesy content I've linked above.

I'd like to believe that rigor in this particular art form of RPGs is possible ... because right now, what passes for "the best" examples of role-playing wouldn't receive even minimal attention if it was attached to any other form of art.  It's juvenile and reflective of the outside world's perception of Dungeons and Dragons: that it is a children's game.