Following up on last week, I continued to work with the students taking part in the Dungeons & Dragons game at my local public library o get their characters built for the game, moving forward; it was, in effect, Session Zero and a Half. With as many as were at the table, and as relatively few sets of materials as were present, it took some doing, but I feel like good progress was made. It helped that one of the stated goals of the program is to develop players who can run games of their own; since dealing with building characters is part of running games, having one or two of the more senior participants work to help others build their own characters seemed a useful part of training.

I’ve had my own building to do, as well. While I was able to get a lot of information putn together in advance of the previous session, there was still more I needed to have ready to go for the players; that is now completed, to my great comfort. It helped that I was able to leverage a fair amount of my expertise participating in online play-by-post games, something I think I noted, and I’m minded that the kind of adventure I have planned for the young players at my table is one that would work, with some adjustment, for a more mature group (and a larger one, although I had nine people at my table last week, which is a pretty damned big group, all told). It is something of an escort mission, one resonant with local history and that makes use of silly internet memes–so a good kind of thing. For another group, a less-memed such mission might work; similarly, one that faces multiple challenges of the sort I have planned for the kids, and on a more predetermined than dice-driven schedule, might well work. (And, honestly, for a play-by-post game, it would be better to have things scheduled out; there is an expectation of scheduling rather than spontaneity in such a setting.)

I know that escort missions often annoy in video games. The escorted often have poor pathfinding and action trees, making them unwieldy to play around. That’s part of why I’m working with the memes at my youth table*; my thought is that the silly nature of what the players and their characters have to address will offset at least some of the annoyance, given how often people are willing to put up with vexations if there’s a laugh to be found (or something cute, which I think is the case for what I’m having the youths treat). In the case of what I’m offering to my current players, the common patterns of escort missions make sense; I can’t give too much detail here against the possibility that one or more of my players will do the work of looking up what I write,** but silly things of limited wisdom and some intelligence can be expected to act in…odd ways. And that can work with adult groups no less well than with younger ones, honestly.

Too, the escort mission does allow for a particular narrative focus. While railroading remains problematic at best, as I’ve noted, younger groups often do need a bit more overt direction than older ones. More open-ended things, while rewarding player initiative and creativity, offer ample opportunity for distraction and, in my experience, character and player conflict. Older goups tend to handle such conflicts better, in addition to being more willing than younger ones to let stories form around them. For larger groups–and I have a larger group at present–it’s more helpful, as well, to have the greater focus; with many people working together, things can go well, while having them work at cross-purposes means things don’t go much at all. And having them go really does make for a better time for all involved.

It is a game, after all, and even if it, like all works of art,† does other things, it has as its purpose working toward making a good time for all involved.

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* Another part is to amuse myself. I get to have fun at the table, too, after all.

** Given that one of the players is my daughter, I know at least one of them is aware of my blogging in this webspace. I would not be surprised to learn she’d mentioned as much to her friends at the table, and I’d honestly welcome it if one of them tried to do the kind of metagaming that looking at what I write here would entail; it would show engagement with the game and its materials. I would have to address the matter, of course, for reasons I’ve discussed previously, but I can appreciate the initiative and investment. To avoid the need to address, then, I keep things somewhat obscure here. Perhaps sometime I will post the narrative materials here. Maybe.

† I follow Daniel Mackay’s The Fantasy Role-playing Game: A New Performing Art for this. I’ve referenced him more than once before, as witness this, this, this, this, and this.

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Finishing from the previous session, participants in the game of Dungeons and Dragons that I had been running at the local public library had their players make final attempts to extricate themselves from the dungeon into which they had paritally penetrated. Following the conclusion of play, participants were asked their opinions of the program and its contents, as well as for ideas for future such offerings, should any be made. Given the completion of another narrative arc, characters were permitted to advance to the next level of achievement, and participants were given their materials as something resembling a parting gift (they had previously been in my possession).

Having previously conferred with library administration, I can report that it is likely the program will be renewed in the fall term, with specific dates to be determined. It may be that some game other than Dungeons & Dragons will be on offer; it may also be that other groups will be branched out from that which played at my table these past several months. More details than just the dates are yet to be determined, although I am pleased that there is room for the program to continue and for me to remain engaged with it.

As has often been the case in the past when I have concluded a session with students–and the participants in the library’s game have been students, overt educational objectives having been addressed with them by request–I have some reflection to offer. One piece of it is that, should I do such a program again, I will approach it with a clearer and more focused educational agenda. It is easy for me to forget how to deal with participants at the ages with which I worked these past months; my teaching experience had been focused on older students almost exclusively, and it has been thirty years and more since I was the age those most recently at my table are. I do think the question about setting posed late in what might well be called a term–why the neo/medieval(ist) as a dominant setting for Dungeons & Dragons and for TTRPGs, more generally–is a good one; I also think the ponerological question from long before is a good one. (Indeed, play began to move back to consideration of the nature of evil as things went on; I could wish there had been more time to explore it.) There are others, to be certain, and I have time to consider one or more of them before any new program begins.

I think also that I need to go into things with a clearer sense of the narrative I want to address. If I am being honest, a lot of what I did with the kids was flying by the seat of my pants; I did not have as much planned as I probably ought to have had, and there were some times, as I believe I have noted, when I was flatly stalling for time with the participants. In the past, when I have run games, I have generally done so with firmer ideas of what was happening and what could happen; I have done a lot of planning for things, a lot of scripting, a lot of determining what would happen in the world absent the actions of my players’ characters. I did not do so this time, and it left me a bit out of my element. Again, though, I have time to prepare in advance of future programs, and there are definitely some ideas that came up in what I improvised for the participants these past several months that I would like to revisit and expand upon in some detail. What those are, of course, I cannot here say; it is possible that some or all of the recent participants will return for future games, and I do not want to spoil the surprise for them. Part of the value of the story is a sense of wonder, and surprise helps develop such a sense. It’s not the only thing that does, admittedly, but it is one thing that does.

(It might be worth noting here that I do not mean to adapt the Realm of the Elderlings for TTRPG purposes. It might well be thought that I would do so; I am more than passingly familiar with the corpus and its contents, after all, and there is no small worth in the old advice to “Write what you know.” So much said, however, I do find my gaming useful as a diversion from the other things that I do, even if it is often related to them, and it is good to get away from my everyday. Too, it would be obvious, and I do try not to be quite that obvious.)

There are things I think I did well with the participants and which I hope to do again. While it is the case that more than one of them was more concerned with the character looking cool than doing well, and more than one of them thought that a starting character would be able to perform legendary feats as easily as breathing, I did work to let characters attempt things that I knew had no actual chance of success, to not quash the ideas without taking the chance on them–and, when it was actually sufficiently well explained and justified, letting the dice let things happen. It resulted in some interesting happenings during the campaign, providing some entertainment that would not otherwise have occurred–and the game is, fundamentally, about entertainment, even as it does do a number of other things for those who participate in it. And I do think that I offered those players who wanted to avail themselves of it the chance to deepen and refine their characters beyond the surface-level concerns of stats and equipment; there was development on display, and I am glad to have facilitated it.

More importantly, I contributed to the delinquency of minors helped a new generation of gamers get started in a hobby that has been a source of joy and community for me for decades. I have helped them to take some of their early steps into a broader world, one that reaches back more than fifty years and has, in my experience and others’, fostered a worldwide community that comes together, yes, to roll dice and tell lies, but more to make stories together, refining and passing forward some of the most fundamentally human acts. And in doing that, I have made the world just a little bit better, for which I am glad.

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Picking up from the previous session, pregame discussion for the penultimate scheduled session asked participants to reflect upon narrative endings–namely, what makes for good ones and why those are good. Part of the purpose of the discussion was to gesture towards the stated desire for overtly educational content in the game; part, too, was to develop materials for the final session. As previously, while there is hope for continuation in a future term, there is no guarantee of the same; sequel hooks are already in place if there is a return to Hanlon, but if there is not, then there will, at least, be some resolution to be found for the players and their characters.

Within the game, proper, players’ characters continued their attempt to withdraw from the dungeon they had been investigating for the last many sessions. It is the case that their decision to do so in the previous session came as a surprise to me, and it was not a universal that they wanted to do such a thing; there were a couple as wanted to press on, but the majority thought they should escape. I’ll confess to a little chicanery in keeping them in the dungeon for the remainder of the previous session, although I had evidently given myself enough narrative room previously to make it make sense in context. (The characters had, some time back, tripped a trap that had no visible effects at the time; the players accepted that the effects manipulated the layout of the dungeon to some extent. It was serendipitous; I wish I could take credit for foreseeing things in such a way. I suppose I have more to learn about running games, even all these years into doing so.)

I suppose there is a lesson to take from the experience in that having things happen without obvious effect now allows flexibility in storytelling later, something of a variation on Chekhov’s gun. I’ve done a few such things, as I think on it, whether a pressure plate triggering some strange ticking or a spell scroll making itself available to one or another of the players’ characters’ who might, if it is remembered, find some use in the party’s current situation. Railroading–that is, forcing players’ characters into a single path of action–is generally regarded as a bad thing in tabletop roleplaying games; players like to have agency over their characters’ lives, even if those characters are moving through a dungeon that generally admits of “forward” and “backward,” with the latter leading to no treasure or glory and most characters being actively interested in at least one of those things. If there is to be any of it, whether because of outside demands or because a person running a game has to scramble to address something entirely unexpected and has to stall for time to do just that, it works far better if there is something on which it can be predicated sensibly within the context of the game, itself.

How and whether I will make use of any such lessons, I cannot know. Whether or not I will run a game again is uncertain, honestly; I am not so young as I once was, and other things increasingly command my time and attention. Gone are the days when I can spend many hours of each day poring over the books and staring at the webpages I’ve needed for the games I’ve played. I do nurture some hope, though, that some of what I’ve been able to do at the table so far will translate to others taking up the work of running games, helping others to sit around their own tables, rolling dice and telling lies to the delight of those taking part.

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Continuing from the previous session, pregame discussion was abbreviated. Coming off of tax day for a tax preparer leaves less latitude for game-planning than might be preferred, after all, but I am confident that the short resumption of previous weeks’ discussion of (neo-)medievalism and the vocabulary-building that seems always to accompany games I run with the kids speak to the explicitly educational objectives of the library’s program. I hope they do so, at least, and it’s what I mean to tell anyone who asks me about it.

There are still a couple of sessions to go with the current group of players, which is a melancholy thing. There is still time with them, still time for them to complete another narrative arc and to find satisfaction in doing so and delight in the doings at the gaming table. There is still time for me to do some good and contribute to the raising up of a new generation of gamers. There is, if I am being honest, still opportunity for me to get paid for doing some additional work. But it is also likely that the group will complete the current arc, gamers being what they are generally and middle-schoolers being eminently distractible. It is also possible that the program will not resume; the decision to renew or continue is not mine to make, even if I do hope it will go on and that others can be brought into the fold, as it were. And it is possible that there will be some who come from the experience of playing at my table not with an “Eh, not for me,” which happens, but “Ew, fuck that,” which also happens but is far less happy a thing to have happen.

Still, I am trying to keep in mind my comments from a few weeks back. Things change. Things end. Worrying about either takes away from what is good now, and there is much good now. And even if it is the case that present demands require attention to what is not good now, and I acknowledge there’s a whole lot that is decidedly not good, focusing on what might happen takes away from dealing with what is happening. It’s been something with which I’ve long struggled; I tend to catastrophize, to jump immediately not to what is likely to go wrong, but instead to the worst possible scenario, and it pushes me away from a great amount of enjoyment. I’m better about it than I used to be, I’m reasonably sure, but I still have a ways to go…just as Hanlon does.

I suppose I ought to get to planning out the next session, then.

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Following on from last week’s session of the tabletop roleplaying game I am running at the local library, I reminded the players that the current “term” ends on 30 April 2026–three weeks hence. I also revisited the question from last week of why so many roleplaying games continue to employ ambiguously (neo-)medievalist settings, such that doing so is the dominant model of the genre. That is, there are tabletop roleplaying games that get away from the (neo-)medievalist–Deadlands and Traveller come to mind as examples–but most have operated and continue to operate with the base assumption of a vaguely feudally stratified society (with interestingly poly- or henotheistic tendencies); why this would be so was the focus of the brief preliminary discussion at the table. Such concerns, speaking to genre-features and -histories, as well as to some philosophical considerations, allowed the stated need for overtly educational content to be addressed well enough, I think.

As far as play goes, the players continue to fall into a common trap: overthinking. It’s a natural enough thing to do, of course; access to information within a game is limited by narration, so asking many questions to elicit additional information is a good and useful thing. But, like most things, it can be overdone, and easily. Take, for example, an exchange from a previous game, in which one player’s character repeatedly investigated a small altar because “there has to be a button.” Given the context, the character was unable to find such a button and was told as much in more or less those words; failing a check when one is present and succeeding at one when it is not will yield the same result. That there was not such a button present flatly did not occur to the player; only reluctantly did that player move on to the next thing, and even then, the player was certain there was something to find.

In this week’s session, there was another example of such. The party, still second-level characters, faced a gelatinous cube. One of the players sought to have another player’s character, bolstered by magic, pass through the cube to see if it could be bypassed rather than engaged, thinking to use a rope to pull other characters along. The thought process was that the available magic would allow moving through what is, in essence, a sliding open stomach without injury and without it pursuing the party–none of which was evidenced by the creature’s behavior, and all of which ran counter to actions taken up to that point, including by the player’s own character. Dungeon crawls do, admittedly, constrain action, such that they provoke thinking of ways to get around things, but there is often no way but through.

There is some amusement in watching such things happen, of course. Players do it to themselves with very little prompting; I know this well, having often been a player, myself, and not seldom having fallen into such traps both in games and in “real life.” It does make for ease in planning out games, too, as things will take longer than might well have been anticipated–and there is no telling what will prompt such zeal. And it can open other narrative avenues, to boot; what players take interest in is ripe for expansion and development into future games…if there are future games. In such situations as the present, with a seemingly clear end looming, it’s not quite so good, even if it is seemingly inevitable.

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With less than a month left of scheduled sessions at the local library, the middle-school-aged gaming group for whom I’ve been running a Dungeons & Dragons game got to talk about the ambiguously (neo-) medievalist setting of the game, both in its default iteration and in the specifics of the campaign I think may be winding down. (I hope to reprise later on, but since it is a library program and not my own, I cannot guarantee it.) There are a number of scholars and others who have commented on the topic at some length, and I’m not exactly a stranger to the discussion, myself (as witness this, among others). I’ll admit to some pleasure in speaking from a position of some knowledge on the subject, and I’ll note that I did have to rein myself in; having been an academic and still participating in some small ways in scholarly research, I am prone to running off at the mouth about things I’ve studied. But that should be nothing like a surprise to anybody who knows or reads me at this point.

As to play, itself: the players continued to progress through the dungeon in which they have been for several sessions, now. An NPC “handler” emphatically suggested that, following the events of last week’s session, the party take a long rest. So much done, and players’ characters restored to reasonable health, the party pressed ahead, moving from large halls into narrow corridors that presented traditional-to-the-genre threats partly determined by random chance. Intra-party conflict was present as it always is, but there was also humor (if perhaps more attempted than realized). Really, the kids are a pretty typical gaming group, and, for the most part (aside from cases of main-character syndrome in various intensities and the overwhelming desire of one player, in particular, to be “cool”), it’s been good to have them at the table. I’ve been glad to have the opportunity, and I think I will miss it when it’s done.

But it’s not done yet, not hardly, and I mean to get out of it all that I can while I can.

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Since last week was a bit of a bust for gaming for me, I was glad to be back at the table yesterday, working after two weeks with the kids at the library to delve further into the dungeon that has been the focus of this narrative arc. Out of deference to the need for overtly educational content, I spoke briefly to the players of the narrative concepts of protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists, as well as how the ensemble narrative of which such tabletop roleplaying games as Dungeons and Dragons are examples functions.

I noted to the players, too, that only six sessions remain allocated to the program by the library. It’s not the first time a game in which I’ve participated has had a definite end-date in view; most of the gaming I’ve done in recent (and less recent!) years has been done in time-limited play-by-post forum games, so I’m accustomed to having something of a ticking clock counting down. My players, for most of whom this is only the first campaign they’ve participated in, have not, although I know they have experience with deadlines. (My daughter is among the players. She has homework with due dates. She is not always fond of this.) The sense of a looming end to something they (seem to) enjoy has something of a focusing effect, at least in the moment (preteens aren’t noted for their permanence of thought, and they really should not be so), and I had the impression that things moved along at a better clip than in most previous play-sessions.

The imminent end brings to mind, at least for me, the concept of memento mori (“remember that you will die”) as well as the related carpe diem (“seize the day”) and YOLO (do I need to explain this one?)–overall the notion that time is limited and enjoyment must be wrung from each available moment. Within a game, the concepts resonate oddly; in Dungeons and Dragons, and in many other tabletop roleplaying games, death is an inconvenience more than anything else. Characters die, yes, but there are several means of resuscitation and resurrection in many games, and even in games that do not admit quite so easily of returning from the dead, it is not so difficult to produce another character and introduce that figure into an ongoing game. I have the nagging thought that consideration of such in a more formal philosophical sense would be an interesting exercise, and I wonder if someone has or several someones have written such exercises; present circumstances prevent my immediate detailed exploration of such things. (My day job is as it is, and it is getting to be busy.)

No world presented by a tabletop roleplaying game, even one that purports to exist more or less in the “real” world (the scare quotes are necessary; philosophy and the word “real” have an uneasy relationship), is the “real” world inhabited by the players. (Layers of simulacra may be in place, but the principle still holds, I think.) The assumptions that inhere in dealing with the “real” world do not apply to the world presented by the game; even when the rule is that “it works like the real world until it doesn’t,” as is often the case, the “it doesn’t” emerges remarkably quickly into gaming. The first magic missile thrown, the first undead rebuked, the first goblin guarding a chest, and–poof! The gaming world is other than the gamers’ world, and what is true in the latter is not necessarily true in the former. How thought and logic and all the other constructions thousands of years and hundreds of schools of philosophy have developed would apply in such circumstances…I am not trained well enough to venture to say, except to note that they would have to change to apply at all, were philosophers interested in treating such things.

I do not speak for them; I cannot affirm or deny that they are or are not. But it might be interesting to see what has been done or what could be done, and in another life, I might have been such a person as would do it.

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For whatever reason, I have been feeling somewhat historically minded recently (insofar as I’m able to do that; I’ll admit to limitations on my perspective). As such, for the overtly educational portion of this week’s session, I gave a brief gloss of the origins of the tabletop roleplaying game, as attested by Lawrence Schick, Gary Alan Fine, and Daniel Mackay. I know there are other, more recent sources; I have not had the opportunity to review them yet, or even to get hold of copies thereof, although I do have some concerns about some of which I am aware. Publishers have interests in how their products present them, after all, as I’ve discussed. Still, for a few minutes talking to a few middle-school-age children, what I had handy was enough; I can always tack more onto my scholarly somedays at need.

In terms of gameplay, the party continued on from where it had been at the end of the previous session: not far into the dungeon through which the players’ characters are crawling. Player absences told upon the group as they encountered one of the most formidable opponents D&D presents: a locked door. Try as they might, they could not break down the door that confronted them, and after pretty much every player had failed both of the rolls made available to them to have their characters receive the necessary information to proceed, an allied NPC, once asked for aid, opened the door for them to move forward.

I know that it’s not ideal to have the party be rescued in such a way. Normally, I would not have gone with it. But, again, three of the seven regular players were absent, one of whose characters has skills particularly suited to the task of unbolting the door; it was an unusual situation, and all of the players had made several attempts through different skills and approaches. They gave it the traditional college try, so I threw them a line. Of course, doing so also fed into some of their (incorrect) ideas about the allied NPC…and I’ll admit that I didn’t do a lot to discourage that thinking. It will make the revelation of the truth much more entertaining when, at long last, it happens.

But they’ve got to get through the dungeon before that can happen for them.

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