Last time (A Tangled Web of Rules):
Dungeons & Dragons can be addicting in a lot of ways, or at least the idea of it can be.
One of the more romantic aspects of the game is that it provides a proactive outlet for your imagination. For many people who spend a large portion of their day doing things they don't particularly care for (school, work, or otherwise) it can be incredibly refreshing to be able to use your head in a fulfilling way. D&D requires you to sit down with a number of other people and collectively use your imaginations to interact with characters, slay monsters, search for treasure, perform extraordinary feats, or, as is sometimes dictated by the dice, fail spectacularly. The addicting part is that you are being rewarded for being creative, usually just with imaginary riches or fame, but also with good times spent with friends. To those who haven't played, it might seem strange, but you can forge bonds over D&D that are almost as strong as if you had actually been adventuring together.
There are a few catches to the game, however. Much like communism D&D typically works out best on paper since it is difficult, at best, to account for the human element. (Or as 'the human element' is more commonly referred to in D&D, with a mixture of disdain and bemusement, 'the players'.) Although D&D's concept is quite romantic the reality can be much more akin to a wrench being tossed into a woodchipper (alternatively a vacuum encountering a length of shoe-string). The effect can be disconcerting to say the least, and worse, there are endless ways to disrupt the flow of a game. Players can be easily distracted which makes it hard to progress through events. In some groups treasure and loot are the source of endless squabbles. Players can be spiteful, either to the DM or to other characters. Cheating, tangents, confusion over rules, arguments over interpretation of rules, and small fires resulting from disputes over final arbitration of rules are frequent and difficult hurdles that must be cleared in order to run a successful game.
I know all of this now that I have years of experience with role-playing games like D&D and particularly because I have spent most of my time playing as a DM. (D&D is not the only one of its kind for those that were unaware.) That is to say I spent most of my time running the game itself and trying to simultaneously screw-over and reward the players. Being a DM can be a thankless job, and learning how to be a good DM is the single, most prominent factor in determining whether or not a game runs smoothly. As a DM, you are everything in the game world but a player, as well as a mediator, arbitrator, rule-keeper, and shepherd of wandering attentions. It's the sort of job that you can't do well, or at least for long, unless you can consider being DM its own reward (more ramblings on DM'ing in a future post). It's for this reason that nearly every DM, at one point or another, decides that they want to try their hand at being a player for once.
That's where Patrick came in. For most of High School, a small eternity at that point in my life, I had been running my 4312 campaign. Although I generally enjoyed acting as DM, seeing how much fun my players regularly had left me wanting to try my hand at being a player too. Around that time Patrick inserted himself into our group of friends, claiming to understand 3rd edition D&D's rules and boasting of his past experiences as a DM. It was a bit jarring at first, though not unwelcome. D&D had always seemed to exist in the vacuum of my social circles so meeting someone else who had actually DM'ed was unprecedented. It was like being a master of a skill in small town. In theory there are other people who do the same thing, who are, perhaps, even better than you, but for all practical purposes they don't exist because you never run into them.
Regardless, when Patrick presented the opportunity I decided I would try being a player. Even from the few brief sessions I played back then, the difference in perspective was immediately apparent. As a DM your perception of the game world is frequently hazy except for certain well planned details. In the best of times the world is connected seamlessly together, every element seems to have its own history and purpose, and on-the-fly ideas fall into place like they were planned all along. At its worst your world can seem slap-dash, with story ideas and facets of the world nailed together with plywood scrap while random ideas teetering precariously like a haphazard pile of junk. As a player however, so long as the elements presented to you make sense, you will have no idea how flimsy or fleshed out the ideas holding the world together are. As a DM the world and the story are a thing, constantly growing and shifting to accommodate the players. As a player the world and the story are just there, lurking in the background. For the player the real story is being made with each roll of the dice, each decision, and every action they take. Players don't usually talk about D&D like a story because as a player it is an experience. It's not, "Hey remember the arc where there was an evil wizard was threatening a town with giant lizards?", it's remembered first hand like it actually happened; "Hey, remember the time we tracked down that wizard bastard who was terrorizing a town we were hired to guard?"
I'm still a little hazy on the first session I played with Patrick. I think I played a ranger, although possibly I was playing a druid. All I remember for sure was that I had two animal companions, a hawk and a falcon. In my first battle I tried to use my hawk to distract an ogre while I made a bow attack. The ogre who happened to be wielding a small tree as a weapon responded by wiping my hawk out with a single swing, ending what was probably an all-too-short friendship. The moral of the story? If you're a woodland creature you probably shouldn't befriend my ranger. That session wasn't particularly memorable beyond that because we never played that particular campaign again, but it was significant because I realized, either due to my age and experience, or perhaps just through repetition and a knowledgeable DM, that actually playing D&D 3rd edition wasn't just theoretical. It really could be done!
The next campaign I played with Patrick as a DM was much more instructive, albeit only slightly longer-lived. I played a monk assigned to keep peace between Tim, playing a half-demon, and Brandon, playing a half-angel. Again, I'm rather hazy on the details of why or how I was expected to keep the peace between such over-powered characters but the experience was rather telling. Over the course of several sessions I began to get a feel for how Patrick liked to DM. The thing about running a game, and with D&D in particular, is that there is a lot of room to have your own personal style. No two authors tell a story in the same way, each has their own voice, their own characteristic flair that makes the story their own. You wouldn't expect Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino to design similar worlds, even if working from the same template, and that's how DM's are too. Patrick's worlds tended towards the fantastic, even for a fantasy game. He liked his players well-armed with magical trinkets and custom abilities. His campaigns were typically generous with gold and even from a low level the stakes were high and the characters extreme. In my head I sometimes compare Patrick's games to blockbuster action movies; they are melodramas that carry you swiftly from big event to astounding discovery while making it hard to complain that the sessions aren't exciting. And then there was the combat.
Combat is a big part of D&D. It's in the title almost: (loot) Dungeons & (slay) Dragons. So how you run combat has a big impact on the flavour of a campaign. In my 4312 campaign my battles were typically a very descriptive affair. You described what you wanted to attempt and then rolled to see if it worked, often followed by a detailed description of exactly what happened and how it did or didn't fail. Then again, my 4312 game was also very free-form by comparison to 3rd edition D&D. In Patrick's case D&D 3rd's combat was a well-oiled machine that only occasionally warranted an extended description when you used a special ability or the dice decided to roll toward the extremes. Under Patrick's DM'ing combat was swift and efficient, like clockwork. Hits, misses, and damage numbers fell from his lips like a a judge's verdict. You could call Patrick's combat sequences a bit dry at times, but you could never accuse him of dragging it out. Although the most impressive thing was that he could remember most of the conditional combat rules and often the specific rules for abilities without reference. Often combat was distilled down into a series of questions designed to present those of us, unlearned in the ways of the compendium of D&D rules (now with added appendixes for fantasy building codes and regulations), to make more informed combat decisions. For the most part that wasn't necessary though. Many of the rules in 3rd edition only existed in the event that there was something specific that a player wanted to do. There were dozens of options that provided the DM with tools designed to allow for what the player intended without unbalancing the game. Over several campaigns with Patrick, however, I confirmed what I had always suspected. Most of the rules weren't necessary.
I went on to play a half dozen (usually short) campaigns with Patrick in the years that followed, and somewhere along the way I fell out of DM'ing. All things considered it probably wasn't being a player that did it. If I had to wager a guess it was trying to cope with the responsibilities of being an actual adult, because DM'ing wasn't the only thing I fell out of around that time. That period was roughly the equivalent of life punching me in the gut, taking all of my money, and then calling me mean things as it walked away. Long story short I was in no mood to be a DM at the time, but I digress. Instead of DM'ing I spent my time as a gnome warrior who wrestled bears and assaulted forts with only my cantrips (low level spells), or on other occasions as a paladin who later discovered that he followed an absent and possibly dead god. Throughout all the sessions I always ended up thinking about how I would run things though. Ideas for settings, towns, stories, and confrontations would leap into my brain and scream out for release. It wasn't that I unsatisfied with Patrick's DM'ing, it's that once you DM and do it well it's hard to go back to being a playerSha.
Years later, that is to say now, I am convinced that whatever you start as, player or DM, is what you eventually come back to. When you are fresh and just getting into role-playing for the first time you tend to gravitate towards what suits you the most. After the first few sessions you have either fallen into the player category or you are running the sessions as a DM (or secretly plotting to steal players from the group you started in once you realize you want to DM). In my case I've been a DM from the start. And although I've learned the joys of being a player I can't turn my back on DM'ing. As a DM it is up to you to create an immersive world, but you have endless possibility at your disposal, the only limit is your imagination. You have the opportunity to bring an entire world to life, to share your ideas in an engaging way that most arts struggle to achieve. It is your job, or rather, your privilege to allow your players to share in that feeling...oh, and also try to kill them. That too.
(The last and final part of my Dungeons and Dragons series coming soon!)
Patrick seemed to appear out of nowhere one day. He befriended Brandon seemingly overnight and soon he just seemed to be hanging out with us all the time. He also happened to bring with him years of D&D 3rd edition experience. It seemed impossible that anyone could comprehend and effectively wield the living mass of rules that was 3rd edition, but somehow he managed it. Little did I known that I would be drawn again into D&D's siren call, or whatever sound a small tome's worth of technical fantasy jargon sounds like. (In my previous experience it typically sounded like a book slamming shut followed by a defeated sigh.) With Patrick offering to take the helm of a D&D campaign, however, my fate was sealed. The legwork was going to be taken care of and after so many years I couldn't help but want to give it another shot...
Dungeons & Dragons can be addicting in a lot of ways, or at least the idea of it can be.
One of the more romantic aspects of the game is that it provides a proactive outlet for your imagination. For many people who spend a large portion of their day doing things they don't particularly care for (school, work, or otherwise) it can be incredibly refreshing to be able to use your head in a fulfilling way. D&D requires you to sit down with a number of other people and collectively use your imaginations to interact with characters, slay monsters, search for treasure, perform extraordinary feats, or, as is sometimes dictated by the dice, fail spectacularly. The addicting part is that you are being rewarded for being creative, usually just with imaginary riches or fame, but also with good times spent with friends. To those who haven't played, it might seem strange, but you can forge bonds over D&D that are almost as strong as if you had actually been adventuring together.
There are a few catches to the game, however. Much like communism D&D typically works out best on paper since it is difficult, at best, to account for the human element. (Or as 'the human element' is more commonly referred to in D&D, with a mixture of disdain and bemusement, 'the players'.) Although D&D's concept is quite romantic the reality can be much more akin to a wrench being tossed into a woodchipper (alternatively a vacuum encountering a length of shoe-string). The effect can be disconcerting to say the least, and worse, there are endless ways to disrupt the flow of a game. Players can be easily distracted which makes it hard to progress through events. In some groups treasure and loot are the source of endless squabbles. Players can be spiteful, either to the DM or to other characters. Cheating, tangents, confusion over rules, arguments over interpretation of rules, and small fires resulting from disputes over final arbitration of rules are frequent and difficult hurdles that must be cleared in order to run a successful game.
I know all of this now that I have years of experience with role-playing games like D&D and particularly because I have spent most of my time playing as a DM. (D&D is not the only one of its kind for those that were unaware.) That is to say I spent most of my time running the game itself and trying to simultaneously screw-over and reward the players. Being a DM can be a thankless job, and learning how to be a good DM is the single, most prominent factor in determining whether or not a game runs smoothly. As a DM, you are everything in the game world but a player, as well as a mediator, arbitrator, rule-keeper, and shepherd of wandering attentions. It's the sort of job that you can't do well, or at least for long, unless you can consider being DM its own reward (more ramblings on DM'ing in a future post). It's for this reason that nearly every DM, at one point or another, decides that they want to try their hand at being a player for once.
That's where Patrick came in. For most of High School, a small eternity at that point in my life, I had been running my 4312 campaign. Although I generally enjoyed acting as DM, seeing how much fun my players regularly had left me wanting to try my hand at being a player too. Around that time Patrick inserted himself into our group of friends, claiming to understand 3rd edition D&D's rules and boasting of his past experiences as a DM. It was a bit jarring at first, though not unwelcome. D&D had always seemed to exist in the vacuum of my social circles so meeting someone else who had actually DM'ed was unprecedented. It was like being a master of a skill in small town. In theory there are other people who do the same thing, who are, perhaps, even better than you, but for all practical purposes they don't exist because you never run into them.
Regardless, when Patrick presented the opportunity I decided I would try being a player. Even from the few brief sessions I played back then, the difference in perspective was immediately apparent. As a DM your perception of the game world is frequently hazy except for certain well planned details. In the best of times the world is connected seamlessly together, every element seems to have its own history and purpose, and on-the-fly ideas fall into place like they were planned all along. At its worst your world can seem slap-dash, with story ideas and facets of the world nailed together with plywood scrap while random ideas teetering precariously like a haphazard pile of junk. As a player however, so long as the elements presented to you make sense, you will have no idea how flimsy or fleshed out the ideas holding the world together are. As a DM the world and the story are a thing, constantly growing and shifting to accommodate the players. As a player the world and the story are just there, lurking in the background. For the player the real story is being made with each roll of the dice, each decision, and every action they take. Players don't usually talk about D&D like a story because as a player it is an experience. It's not, "Hey remember the arc where there was an evil wizard was threatening a town with giant lizards?", it's remembered first hand like it actually happened; "Hey, remember the time we tracked down that wizard bastard who was terrorizing a town we were hired to guard?"
I'm still a little hazy on the first session I played with Patrick. I think I played a ranger, although possibly I was playing a druid. All I remember for sure was that I had two animal companions, a hawk and a falcon. In my first battle I tried to use my hawk to distract an ogre while I made a bow attack. The ogre who happened to be wielding a small tree as a weapon responded by wiping my hawk out with a single swing, ending what was probably an all-too-short friendship. The moral of the story? If you're a woodland creature you probably shouldn't befriend my ranger. That session wasn't particularly memorable beyond that because we never played that particular campaign again, but it was significant because I realized, either due to my age and experience, or perhaps just through repetition and a knowledgeable DM, that actually playing D&D 3rd edition wasn't just theoretical. It really could be done!
The next campaign I played with Patrick as a DM was much more instructive, albeit only slightly longer-lived. I played a monk assigned to keep peace between Tim, playing a half-demon, and Brandon, playing a half-angel. Again, I'm rather hazy on the details of why or how I was expected to keep the peace between such over-powered characters but the experience was rather telling. Over the course of several sessions I began to get a feel for how Patrick liked to DM. The thing about running a game, and with D&D in particular, is that there is a lot of room to have your own personal style. No two authors tell a story in the same way, each has their own voice, their own characteristic flair that makes the story their own. You wouldn't expect Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino to design similar worlds, even if working from the same template, and that's how DM's are too. Patrick's worlds tended towards the fantastic, even for a fantasy game. He liked his players well-armed with magical trinkets and custom abilities. His campaigns were typically generous with gold and even from a low level the stakes were high and the characters extreme. In my head I sometimes compare Patrick's games to blockbuster action movies; they are melodramas that carry you swiftly from big event to astounding discovery while making it hard to complain that the sessions aren't exciting. And then there was the combat.
Combat is a big part of D&D. It's in the title almost: (loot) Dungeons & (slay) Dragons. So how you run combat has a big impact on the flavour of a campaign. In my 4312 campaign my battles were typically a very descriptive affair. You described what you wanted to attempt and then rolled to see if it worked, often followed by a detailed description of exactly what happened and how it did or didn't fail. Then again, my 4312 game was also very free-form by comparison to 3rd edition D&D. In Patrick's case D&D 3rd's combat was a well-oiled machine that only occasionally warranted an extended description when you used a special ability or the dice decided to roll toward the extremes. Under Patrick's DM'ing combat was swift and efficient, like clockwork. Hits, misses, and damage numbers fell from his lips like a a judge's verdict. You could call Patrick's combat sequences a bit dry at times, but you could never accuse him of dragging it out. Although the most impressive thing was that he could remember most of the conditional combat rules and often the specific rules for abilities without reference. Often combat was distilled down into a series of questions designed to present those of us, unlearned in the ways of the compendium of D&D rules (now with added appendixes for fantasy building codes and regulations), to make more informed combat decisions. For the most part that wasn't necessary though. Many of the rules in 3rd edition only existed in the event that there was something specific that a player wanted to do. There were dozens of options that provided the DM with tools designed to allow for what the player intended without unbalancing the game. Over several campaigns with Patrick, however, I confirmed what I had always suspected. Most of the rules weren't necessary.
I went on to play a half dozen (usually short) campaigns with Patrick in the years that followed, and somewhere along the way I fell out of DM'ing. All things considered it probably wasn't being a player that did it. If I had to wager a guess it was trying to cope with the responsibilities of being an actual adult, because DM'ing wasn't the only thing I fell out of around that time. That period was roughly the equivalent of life punching me in the gut, taking all of my money, and then calling me mean things as it walked away. Long story short I was in no mood to be a DM at the time, but I digress. Instead of DM'ing I spent my time as a gnome warrior who wrestled bears and assaulted forts with only my cantrips (low level spells), or on other occasions as a paladin who later discovered that he followed an absent and possibly dead god. Throughout all the sessions I always ended up thinking about how I would run things though. Ideas for settings, towns, stories, and confrontations would leap into my brain and scream out for release. It wasn't that I unsatisfied with Patrick's DM'ing, it's that once you DM and do it well it's hard to go back to being a playerSha.
Years later, that is to say now, I am convinced that whatever you start as, player or DM, is what you eventually come back to. When you are fresh and just getting into role-playing for the first time you tend to gravitate towards what suits you the most. After the first few sessions you have either fallen into the player category or you are running the sessions as a DM (or secretly plotting to steal players from the group you started in once you realize you want to DM). In my case I've been a DM from the start. And although I've learned the joys of being a player I can't turn my back on DM'ing. As a DM it is up to you to create an immersive world, but you have endless possibility at your disposal, the only limit is your imagination. You have the opportunity to bring an entire world to life, to share your ideas in an engaging way that most arts struggle to achieve. It is your job, or rather, your privilege to allow your players to share in that feeling...oh, and also try to kill them. That too.
(The last and final part of my Dungeons and Dragons series coming soon!)
No comments:
Post a Comment