Scribbles and Horrors

Like wads of cotton dipped in kerosene for firestarters, my written and unwritten prep-work jottings are consumed entirely in the heat of roleplay. No little secret is safe, it all gets exposed, burnt-up.

I used to think my job as referee was to be a coy asshole, sitting behind my Dungeon Masters Screen armed with a book of secrets, secrets which could be meted out carefully and objectively as the players uncovered how to make characters live in my world. My DM notes were instructions for dripping and drabbing the PCs through the slog of well-balanced progression, agentic storytelling, meaningful simulation, and so on.

I find now though that as soon as I write down some fact about the world it pops up immediately into in in play. Whenever the PCs see some thing I can’t help but tell the players all of it, the whole caboodle, it just spills out of me in the flurry of description, and suddenly for me, the Referee, the answer to the next question isn’t in my notes and its not in the rulebook and it has to be real and now and when I finally speak it has become real, going somewhere I do not know where.

And that’s when the game really starts, when we’ve taken the leap of trust into the unknown. There is no safety net, and so anything can happen.

Sauce

What makes a good dungeon layout? Well, obviously one that has sauce, one which makes you want to sit down and play with it right now, because whoa wow what a cool-seeming place to imagine being in lets see what it’s actually like.

Sauce is a useful concept, though as I’ve phrased it just now might seem dangerously close to “A good dungeon layout is one that is good.” Maybe true, but perhaps tautological. Set it aside, then.

Meaningful Choices

Some say that a good dungeon is one which maximizes choices, particularly meaningful choices, in order to allow players to make moves that don’t feel arbitrary. The motive is to enable informed consent, if not tactical positioning. Avoid quantum ogres and all that.

Nobody wants to play a game that’s boring, and an easy target for “Hey this game is boring and I don’t like it!” is moves which feel pointless. So you try to increase the opportunity for cool moves by piling Interesting Consequences on to all the points of decision.

Example: “Aha! The left passage smells like baked beans, and so the party will be rewarded for their left-hand choice with a fight to the death with the Bean Baron.” (The party which goes right is still rewarded for their choice, not with the Bean Baron, but with a set of Mysterious Footprints, belonging to a foolish and Odorless Curmudgeon who despises beans and barons alike.) The choice (bean smell or not bean smell) leads to consequences (Bean Baron fight or Odorless Curmudgeon roleplay).

I don’t really want to poo-poo this kind of thinking too hard, but, for me, in my experience, it doesn’t really match what I find compelling about dungeons or what I’ve found effective at the table. For one, it presupposes the idea that some outcomes are palpably more meaningful than others. The referee is supposed intuit which is which and then make decisions about decisions at varying levels of granularity in accordance with the ideal play-practice for their table. The result (whenever I’ve tried it, at least) is messy and too-crowded, like I’m trying to play my game on behalf of the players, like I’m chewing their food for them. Gross. Well, set that aside, too.

Questions

For the sauce-averse, and for the meaningful choice-averse another framing might be questions. Hypothesis: A good dungeon is one that asks questions.

Where is the entrance to the dungeon? What kinds of things live there? What treasures are inside? What will happen to my character if I drink from the fountain? Where does that door lead? Does it connect back to the passageway we were just in? Is there a secret room here? How deep can we go? How easy are twisty passages to map on graph paper? Can we find a better way to move this treasure to the exit? Why is it designed this way? Can we go even deeper? How will players respond to a hallway that rotates imperceptibly? Can I deduce where the edge of the referee’s graph paper is by going all the way to the east?

You get the idea. All of these questions encourage making game-moves towards answering them, and because of the way D&D is structured, making those moves is fairly immediate. These are actionable questions–you investigate them by playing the game. A good dungeon layout is one that encourages you to play D&D.

A series of empty rooms might not provide very many meaningful choices, but it sure does present a lot of questions. Questions about what’s in the rooms, why they’re empty, whether it’s worth it to investigate them all or better to move on to somewhere more interesting.

(The answers to these questions are, I think, less important. Sometimes a dungeon map will answer the questions it asks. Sometimes the referee will decide upon one later. Sometimes questions are never answered, looming gently in the background. The point is the process of trying, not necessarily the results.)

***

I don’t know how I feel about this framing, ultimately. I definitely don’t want a heuristic for “good dungeons” to be how many Interesting Questions it asks, and I don’t think it’s worth anyone’s time to make a literal list of dungeon-questions to have in mind while making one. Question-based dungeon design sounds abysmal tbh.

It’s just more an observation that, when a dungeon map is finished and I’m looking at it and I think “Hmm, this is good.”, oftentimes one of the things that makes it good is that it asks many questions, questions which demand sitting down with the thing and playing D&D with it. It has sauce.

At first, forgive some religiosity.

In church they told me that if I took a class after school and went up front during part of the service labelled Communion on the bulletin and kneeled at the altar and took the officiant seriously when they said “This is the body of Jesus Christ, given for you” and “This is the blood of Jesus Christ, shed for you” while giving me a wafer and an ounce of sweet wine, and if ate it thoughtfully, (optionally) saying “amen”, they told me that if I did those things my sins would be forgiven.

Whether or not doing those actions in that order effected the forgiveness of Sin (indeed, whether Sin is tangible danger at all, and not some chimerical non-pumpkin-headed bugbear to make well meaning people terrified by ordinary human behavior and blind to real abuses), whether or not it “worked” to purify my immortal soul, I never failed to be moved by the ritual.

Doing prescribed actions intentionally, in a group, this produced a religious experience. I continued receiving communion long after secularism took over my mind, because it continued to produce a unique experience. I did in fact feel closer to God, or at least I felt what I figured being closer to god might feel like.

I don’t think pen and paper games and religion are the same thing. A good play experience is nothing like a religious one, and I do not believe the two should be mixed together. But, as activities, they share a principle, an exhortation:

Follow the steps and be amazed.

Several times I have attempted to read the Blorb principlesand still only have a vague idea of what it is. Elmcat wrote a helpful post about what it’s not, and Nathan provided a heated Blorb rebuttal.

The discourse has left me feeling like Blorb is too hazy a concept to be particularly fruitful for discussion; everyone can read into it whatever they’d like, and attack/defend whatever version of it they most understand.

In any case I really liked more of Nathan’s post, particularly his emphasis on the game not being real. This forefronts the idea that a game is an activity enacted by people, that what we’re really dealing with is people stuff.

Anyway, this isn’t part of the Blorb discourse but it is inspired by it.

“Throw out the rules, make the game just how you’d like it!” is the long-standing battle cry of the OSR and, while good, when taken seriously it plainly throws out the baby with the bath water.

Rules are important to games, and NOT simply as a tool to manipulate gameplay. What makes rules useful, procedures and preparation, is being locked into them. It’s the act of submitting yourself into the steps.

I wrote, and Weird Writer wrote, that rpg play is like a play rehearsal, the prep and rules are the script to that rehearsal.

But the thing about scripts is for the most part you have to read the words exactly as they appear in it. A script is not a handy inspiration guide for exciting theatre, it is words that you must read.

The trick, the fun of theatre, is finding a way to say the words in a way that is full of life. That’s the sauce, what comes out of being yourself within the game. It’s the combination of self, group, and procedures that make a game.

A bad script can make a good rehearsal. And what makes a script good is not necessarily that it’s easy to perform. For this reason highly polished, “well designed” games catch my interest less often; the frictiony bits that would be surfaces for me to hold onto and push against are burnished out. They slip out of my hands.

Rules and prep should not be tools, and they are mechanisms only metaphorically. Likewise, they should not be improvisational suggestions, flavor text; they are a framework for prescribed action. In willful discipleship to them, rules come alive, and we discover new truths about ourselves.

Follow the steps. Follow them exactly, while being most fully yourself. Push against them while adhering strictly. You will be amazed.

I humbly suggest that this is a principle of Oracular Play.

Dear reader, I am not someone who believes the be all end all of tabletop games is player agency. I subscribe to a different idea, that games are social and material processes which are fruitful in themselves; the mere application of rules to a gamestate–even when that application is choiceless and tedious–is worthwhile to me. Monopoly is good, actually.

However, I found myself making an argument about player agency and I’d like to explore it here. For the sake of this post, then, I will take up the position that agency is King: the point of making and playing games is for players to be able to make cool moves. Say this is true.

I argue that, sometimes, character creation reduces player agency. Decision-paralysis and the pressure to make “good” character creation choices can reduce players’ abilities to make cool moves in play at the table.

The argument isn’t very complicated, just that energy and inspiration are components to agency—finite resources—and that choosing to expend them while in the adventure rather than before can be a better idea.

“How can I make this photographer that my Ref handed me useful in this fight against a bugbear?!” is a more interesting and fruitful choice (a cooler move, more agency) than “Should I put my skill points into Tact or Righteousness?”

You could say that allowing the player to choose the photographer in the first place gives them two cool moves instead of the one, and thus that character creation still increases agency. This might be so if we had unlimited time and unending energy, but I think the effort necessary to choose a photographer lessens the coolness of the photographer’s bugbear actions. It feels less efficient to me.

Besides, if that were the case, then we could increase agency infinitely by letting players choose what classes are available, what rules to use, and so on. This would be fun, but in the infinite series of increasing agency the game sort of disappears.

My basic claim is just that often “here’s the situation, make do with the pieces you have to achieve some desired outcome” can indeed enable agency in a way “here are building blocks, assemble them so that you can be prepared for some situations, and then we will have you go into some situations” does not.

Now this is a focus thing, right, like if you’re playing The Character Creation Game, where the goal is to build the best character, obviously eschewing character creation only reduces agency. In the games I generally play the focus is on what one does with the character, so prioritizing player time for doing is what will increase agency.

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Again, though, my real thoughts are that agency isn’t really the most important part of these games, that process is. From a process perspective, character creation is great.

“Prep scenarios, not plots” is a big ole’ touchstone for playing dungeon or field games in my circles. The idea is that it’s not the referee’s job to plan out players’ adventures for them.

What you should do instead is come up with a situation you find interesting and plop it in front of ‘em. Trust your friends who you’re playing with to take your idea seriously and explore it earnestly—and if you’re playing a Fantasy Roleplaying Game with someone you should be at minimum friendly because otherwise what are you even doing?

It’s a trust thing, right, you have to be willing to risk an imperfect game experience in the hopes that your game companions will put in their own kind of investment and make something with you that none of you could do on your own.

So far so good: eager referees are taking notes down for How To Play D&D.

…

Okay but I have another DM Advice I wanna throw out there in the same vein: when writing or drawing stuff, it’s not your job to make it playable.

In the same way it’s the players’ job to make an adventure out of a scenario, it’s the at-the-table referee’s job to make the map/key into a game.

The writer, on the other hand—the version of yourself who that draws the maps and writes the keys and publishes the rules you run? They shouldn’t worry about playability, or even intelligibility. Their job is just to make something inspiring for the oracular art of playing a board game.

High trust is the way. At each stage of the hobby, you have to have faith that those operating the next stage will pick up what you’re putting down, or at least find something worthwhile and run with it.

Don’t worry about making something that’s effective or principled or in accordance with expectations: make something that’s beautiful and engaging to you right now. Life is too short, and play-time is even shorter, to bother with anxiety about whether your near-future hypothetical self will find your work fun.

its all made up anyway