Level 30 Yinzer

All right, we pretend to be professional up-and-comers, who intend to pursue our plans with aplomb and grace, but lets face it:  at our heart, we’re gamers.  We started this for love, and we pursue it for love, and as everyone knows, love is not full of grace and aplomb.  Love is not a tiny dancer, so rehearsed in her moves that she makes all she does appear effortless and weightless.  Love is sloppy, sometimes it’s mean, and mostly it’s a consuming passion, one which doesn’t leave much room for rhyme or reason.

So let’s set aside our decorum for a moment, and talk about why we’re here:  Dungeons and dragons.  We may be waxing towards the feel of a fansite with this post, but in essence this is what we love to do.  We get together with our friends, we pretend to be someone else for awhile, we exploit rules and idioms to make ourselves feel awesome and triumphant, and if we’re feeling especially philosophical, we learn something about ourselves and the people around us.

 While Phil gave up his job and career to pursue design and development, I wasn’t given that opportunity, so I have to wedge my DnD life in between working a terribly dull office job and holding down all our bills and household needs.  So, while I love to immerse myself in my game world, I still have to extract myself and wander amongst the normals.  Surprisingly, there’s far more overlap between these two states than one might guess.  There are at least five important lessons I’ve learned from DnD that I apply to the rest of my life.

1.  Communication is king.

It really, really is.  In the beginning of our campaign, I wanted to be Miss Mysterious, and tried to hoard information away from my players so they couldn’t metagame and ruin all the delightful surprises I had planned.  What I learned?  Rarely were the surprises so delightful that withholding the information was worth it.  Being uncommunicative meant my players spent a lot of time confused, and a lot of time feeling unsupported because they weren’t allowed to see beyond the veil of the DM screen.  

After the DMG2 came out, I was introduced to the idea of shared narrative, and I gave it an experimental try.  I ran my plot as an open book, let the players “read ahead” to see where they were going, and the surprising result was that the game got exponentially better.  Turns out my players aren’t metagaming little twerps, but instead wanted to have an awesome story full of conflict and triumph, just as I did.  In fact, opening up the plot meant not only did they get to have a hand in what was going on, but they often enhanced things that I had written.

The example is this:  I had planned to destroy some of the scenery in my game.  Letting my players know this, one suggested that I go bigger:  destroy an entire race.  Intrigued, we worked together on this idea, and developed a plot that had far bigger implications, not only on the global scale, but for individual characters as well.  We killed all the elves, and the half-elf PC converted to human (a race his character has been specifically bigoted against) as his elven half was sucked into that same turbulence.   

So, because of a little open plot and communication, we managed to go from “eh, dead trees,” to an entire race trapped and dying, and one character having to face his own racism within himself.  That’s the lesson from DnD, but it’s true everywhere else.  The more you communicate to your family, your teams, your work, and your friends about your plans and ideas, the more they can support you, offer constructive criticism, and improve upon your original design.  It’s not a perfect model, for there are always naysayers in any area, but without risking the useless criticism, you will never achieve the greatness that is built upon the shoulders of your peers.

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What about you?  Have you experimented with “open design” gaming, where the players have as much input as the DM?  How has it treated you?

Tune in next week for lesson 2!