Scribbles and Horrors

The aim of D&D -1 is to never quite get around to playing D&D. Rather than eschewing Session 0, D&D -1 is composed entirely of Session 0s.

Here’s how to play:

The first few meetups should consist of detailed discussions about which edition of D&D to play, or whether it would be better to use another system entirely. Rulesets should be compared and contrasted and preferences about the kind of play desired should be taken into consideration.

When a consensus has been reached, a short course on the history of the chosen edition would be in order, perhaps with guest speakers. The group should read through the ruleset paragraph by paragraph or, (if there is time) sentence by sentence, pausing to discuss unclear or confusing elements as needed. No more than a handful of meetings will be necessary here.

It will be a good idea at this point to work out resolution procedures for rules-questions. Even in games where the referee has “final say”, there are many edge cases and social considerations which should be considered.

Once the foundations of the ruleset are firmly covered, the group could move on to a study of various safety tools. Group bonding exercises could be used to get everybody used to one another, and several meetings can be had about safety expectations for the game. Some themes or topics might be explicitly forbidden, although most probably won’t be. Likewise, certain behaviors (bullying, overturning tables, etc.) will be preemptively prohibited or assigned boundaries. Set aside at least three meetings for this.

After this, review could be made of various kinds of roleplaying playstyles. Reading lists could be developed to give an overview of common cultures of play. One might be picked, and the ramifications of that particular style upon the chosen ruleset should be noted.

It may be worth it at this point to write up some sort of play agreement or pledge to ensure that everyone is on the same page about playstyles and safety. This agreement should include a provision for amendment. While it can’t really be binding, it should be thorough.

A club charter for the group could be set up, and, depending on the scope expected, it might be worth setting up as a 501(c)3 in your state.

A method of scheduling which works for everyone should be settled upon, along with expectations for attendance, taking time off and so on. Schedule at least 2 meetings to nail it down.

After all this, you can start thinking about character creation. Careful study should be made of each character class and attribute, going over the options and their implications. (Don’t be afraid to review the chosen ruleset, or perhaps choose a new one!) It’s important to connect through discussion the various character options and the play philosophy of the group.

Characters should be rolled up strictly according to the rules agreed upon, and if there’s any confusion about these they must be discussed and revised using the resolution procedures worked out earlier. If these procedures fail to achieve a desired result, they should be revisited.

Backstories for the characters should be written—set aside at least half a dozen meetings for this—drafts should be presented and read aloud, notes given and taken, making sure to treat each character fully. It may happen that the story of a character leads them to their death; if this happens, the process will have to begin again. Like any creative process, it’s important not to rush things. Allow the character backstories to develop as they will and the characters will be better for it.

Once the characters are ready, it will be necessary to develop relationships between them and the world at large. It may be useful to write and perform scenes of the characters growing their relationships with each other, after thorough drafting of course.

Next is precepts for the world (because surely the referee hasn’t begun writing up the adventure—not yet!). Conversations about the sorts of things that are desirable and undesirable should be had. Here D&D -1 really opens up. The referee can begin a series of sessions setting the stage for the world. This will include lectures about its history, of course, but also scenes, readings, exams, etc. naturally, if there is consternation about any element of the world (or potential consternation about how a certain element might appear in play) this must be discussed and worked out according to the group-decided procedures for this kind of thing. If these procedures cause confusion, several meetings should be spent revising them. A dozen or more meetings might be necessary to fully flesh out the imaginary world.

If your group has gotten this far you’ve done something wrong, but you may as well switch to playing D&D. A short one-shot is appropriate, preferably one which you suspend halfway through and never get around to scheduling the second session of.

The End.

Epilogue

My point in writing this is to think about how what counts as “play” depends a great deal on one’s perspective, and how in many instances, from the outside, a “play” activity and a “not-quite-yet play” activity look pretty much the same.

Play is about process. Goals are important as the aim of processes, but the process is the point. For many games it does not matter too much whether those goals are actually achieved, only that the players tried to achieve them.

This is why losing is an acceptable component in many games—the loser has participated in a game just as much as the winner.

What of games where there are no winners? The teleology of roleplaying games is frequently infinity. How many OD&D campaigns close their doors long before players start building strongholds? How many dungeons sit unexplored, hexes untouched, characters dormant, etc.?

OD&D is Chainmail -1.

Each session of Redux begins with 45 minutes of paperwork. Here’s a rough list of things which have to be worked out before the party can leave town.

1. The week in which the adventure takes place has to be picked (usually it’s the week after the previous one, but not always.)
2. A lead must be chosen to pursue from the Active Lead pool
3. Each player must select which eligible character will go on the expedition (often the choice of character depends on the lead chosen)
4. Characters have to be “brought up to time”, using non-expeditionary activity tables week-by-week (downtime). Occasionally this will result in the chosen character being unable to go on the expedition (injury, illness, etc.) and so another will have to be selected and brought up.
5. Characters who have levelled up since the previous session have to be updated.
6. If hirelings are to be hired, these must be selected, contracts must be negotiated, signed, and co-signed.
7. Equipment must be purchased for players and hirelings. Loans may be issued between player characters as desired.
8. New characters may have certain paperwork to fill out such as a Writ of Free Arms or a Letter of Release.
9. Each player character “signs in” on the Expedition Sheet, including their level and xp total, which serves as the main record of the session.
10. Each character needs to get a little cube with their name on it for a miniature. I should just have them all pre-written, but I never do, so I’m constantly fiddling with these.

To set up the game, I pull out the Index card character sheet box, the Active Leads folder, the Player Notes folder, the Expeditions Winter 1026 folder (to catch people up on sessions they missed), the Blank Forms folder, the Calendar folder, equipment and spell and level advancement zines, and several other folders and forms in sequence as I need and/or forget them. I’m usually there to begin the session around 6:15 pm, and it’s almost always past 7 pm when the party actually sets foot outside of town.

I have set up my game this way despite being someone who finds the idea of character creation taking more than 30 seconds absolutely intolerable. I am someone who thinks even OD&D’s speedy alternate combat system is infuriating and tedious, replacing it with a d6 system that resolves most combats in less than two minutes. I routinely leave rooms in my dungeons entirely empty so the party doesn’t waste time looking at the scenery. So much of the way I chose to run D&D seems to be aimed at quickness, at a certain kind of time efficiency, and yet a full third of Redux playtime is spent calculating xp and filling out forms. What’s up with that?

One might argue that I have chosen to focus on tedious things which are interesting to the exclusion of tedious things that aren’t. Discussing with your friends about which treasure to go after today, they might claim, is more fun than carefully choosing between two nearly-but-not-quite-identical feats. What I’ve done is be decisive about the way I manage time to more effectively tell the stories I want to.

I’m not so sure this is the case. Redux has a lot of time-consuming paperwork only because I had a lot of cool-seeming ideas requiring paperwork I haven’t given up trying out. It happened this way because of how my tastes intersect with my play modality. There’s no reason it should be this way other than that it is, and there’s no reason to change it unless distressing problems develop.

In some ways, it’s a beautiful thing. During the first part of the session I as Referee mostly need only sit back and listen to the discussions and negotiations, occasionally answering questions or handing out papers. It sets a relaxed tone to the whole affair, the act of preparing for an expedition, first by gathering everyone together, then choosing what to do and how to do it, assembling equipment and making sure one’s affairs are in order. Immediately during a session of Redux the players have to make decisions together about how to approach play. This is a good thing.

Still, every once in a while, when it’s 7:30 and the adventure hasn’t even reached the dungeon, I get a pang of worry. Am I doing a good job? Are people having fun? Are my friends being sufficiently entertained by the show I’m putting on?

This blog post has no conclusion.

Abandoned missile silos and bunkers are particularly dungeon-like places. Beyond just being big underground complexes with lots of empty space, they are places into which vast resources, technology, and people have been poured, while their purpose and functions remain almost mystically incoherent.

A missile silo is a subterranean structure intentionally built in the middle of nowhere whose sole purpose is to be able to completely obliterate some as-yet-unchosen corner of the world, because maintaining this installation somehow means cataclysmic war is supposedly less likely. Their logic is twisted and insane. As fundamentally evil as they are cleverly built.

It is time for another combative theory shitpost upstream from play.

Dungeons and Dragons is not improv theater. I call it a wargame because that’s sort of what it calls itself and others call it a roleplaying game which is fine, but D&D is not improv theater and it’s not group storytelling in the way that writing a novel is personal storytelling. D&D is a game: a game is a structure of rules and conventions in which participants take playful action.

It would be quite reasonable for you to @ me with complaints that my playstyle isn’t everyone’s, or that the way some people play D&D actually does resemble improv. I won’t dispute that there are many different ways to understand games, and I have absolutely no interest in telling people that they are playing a game wrong. When I say Dungeons and Dragons I just mean what Dungeons and Dragons is to me as I’ve experienced it.

The term “Yes, and” seems to come from improv theater, and my vague understanding of it is that it’s a method for getting actors all on the same page during a scene. “Yes, and” is a solution to two problems during spontaneous performance.

1) Yes there’s no time to discuss what the reality of the scene is, so the actors agree to take what’s been given as accurate. Whatever performance a scene partner gives, whatever facts or implications are presented, that’s Yes. It’s already existent in the scene, and we just gotta go with it.

2) , and the thing about scenes in theater is that stuff happens in them. There has to be action of some kind, otherwise the characters are likely to hang around listlessly. To prevent a situation of passive “yes”s, the “, and” insists that a performer pushes the situation beyond what it was before. It’s not enough to confirm your partner’s reality; you must also move that reality along.

This framework is great for performances on stage or in living rooms. It’s fun to do in practice, and it makes for entertaining shows. I don’t, however, think it is a very good way to think about what a referee does in the game Dungeons and Dragons.

Yes

Firstly, D&D is asymmetric. Unlike improv, the players and ref have different roles with vastly different relationships to the imaginary world. “Yes, and” makes sense between equals co-creating a scene, but in D&D, where the ref has binders full of secret places and pages of hidden rules the “yes” principle doesn’t hold.

At best a referee “Yes” in the mode of “Yes, and” is somewhat condescending and one-sided. Can a player “Yes, and” a ruling the referee makes? Certainly not in the same way! Really what’s being presented is something like permission: the referee deigns to give permission for players to take some novel action or do some cool thing. Framing such rulings as “Yes, and…” puts the referee in the uncomfortable position of constantly having to dispense narrative control when players ask for it, or, worse, sometimes deciding not to.

I think a better approach this is for players to have narrative power from the start. Not delegated by the referee, not affirmed by them, but simply there, in the rules. Players can take game actions without the referee’s permission. On what authority can they take these actions? Why, the rules! Sure, the referee is here in a new precarious role, making decisions about the rules and how to apply them reasonably-–this takes sensitivity, kindness, and common sense-–but in my opinion it’s more honest to the situation and fair to the participants. The rules mediate between the referee and the players.

Narrative power is inherently vested in the players through the actions they can take; there is no need for the referee to mete out control to players in an attempt to acquiesce to the “Yes, and…” principle. I hope I’m making the distinction I see here clear.

, and…

Secondly, D&D is a game, not a performance. Obviously there are performative aspects to D&D–its very worth it to do funny voices in front of your friends–but even this kind of affect is distinct from anything onstage with an observing-only audience.

It is okay, for instance, for games to be boring or tedious. It’s okay for not much to happen, or for much of what happens to be banal discussion. The process of playing a game is far more important than whatever stories come out of it. A game is more akin to rehearsal than performance: there is no audience.

Framing the referee as an entertainer is a mistake, I think, because that robs players of their agency in a game situation. The dungeon is not a show the referee is putting on; it’s a game space full of interesting things which the player characters can inhabit. The pressure to “, and…” anything in service of some kind of entertainment ideal can push the referee to avoid otherwise fruitful scenarios. Sometimes an empty room is just an empty room, and it’s important to allow players to feel the full weight of that reality, with all its implications and incongruity.

“Yes, and…” frames the whole affair as an improv experience aimed solely at being exciting to viewers, and I just don’t think that’s what pen-and-paper games are good at.

This post was directly inspired by Permissiveness in RPGs, a post which I entirely agree with I think.

Here we have another essay by Pedantarius, in response to Fantasy Games are More Than Nested Rulesets. I urge readers to remember that I am posting these out of familial obligation rather than any opinionated zeal of my own. - Scribble

Rules are Bigger Than You Think

By Pedantarius Wobble

My illustrious cousin appears not to have a clear idea of what a rule is, and so doesn’t realize they are making the very same point I am: games are about player experience mediated through a constructed situation.

Largely this is my fault for not defining my terms properly. I do not disagree that players are experiential beings, and I also do not disagree that players’ imagining affects their rules-choices.

What I’m saying is that, when it comes down to it, what’s really happening during the activity of play (not to get too spiritual-psychological) is that players are reacting to a material-social scenario. The player would not imagine a forest at all unless they were prompted to by words or dice. The idea that an imaginary situation itself has any substance is a meta-fiction, and this metafiction isn’t particularly distinguishable from other metafictions within games.

For example, in games in which there are winners and losers players assume the roles of rivals. They intentionally act in such a way as to exceed the others as much as possible. This is a metafiction–the players all know that in the real world they are friends, and that play of the game is for mutual benefit.

Indeed, as Natura points out, the experience of this metafiction affects the way players interact with the game. How often in Diplomacy does a player feel feelings of betrayal, and begins to make reckless moves as a result of this emotional reaction?

The metafiction encompasses all its parts. This includes written rules and mechanical status, sure, but it also includes the metaphysical components, the most important of which, to be clear, is the players’ experience.

Why do the proponents of diegeses want to downplay the experience of one metafiction over another, for the sole purpose of reifying the Imagined Setting? You miss important and interesting components of play when you do this.

By expanding the term rule to what it really means–not mere writing, not simple agreement, but the whole defining context in which play occurs, I am allowing space to consider under-examined parts of games.

The rule “Natura decides what rules should be applied based on their experience imagining a character lost in a forest.” is a perfectly good one. But we should recognize it as a rule. We should pay attention to when we use it and when we discard it.

To be clear: I am not saying that human game activity is reducible to writable rules structures. What I’m saying is that depth of personhood is contained within my understanding of the term rule. Take the human player as a unit capable of experience, rationality, and creativity, put them in a rules situation, and a game comes out.

The diegetic vs. non-diegetic rule dichotomy limits conception of games to a very narrow paradigm, one which hides crucial aspects of all games. We have to stop thinking of games from entirely inside of their metafictions, and pay attention to play activity as a whole.

- Pedantarius Wobble