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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Continuing on from last week, at the end of which session the party had reached the doorway to the dungeon through which I meant to have them crawl, the middle-schoolers’ characters proceeded inward. Following the pre-written materials I have been using (with some small emendations to get around some of the metagaming I’d noticed brewing), the party soon found themselves confronting unfamiliar situations, the players trying to figure out how to get their characters to do what needed doing to move ahead in confidence. They were not as successful in that as might have been, rather comically getting in each other’s way out of concern about what lay ahead and a desire to “do something cool.” But it was progress, nonetheless.

One of the things that dungeon-crawls traditionally do is present players and their character with puzzles to solve. This is true in video games, as the various Legend of Zelda games attest. It’s true in Dungeons & Dragons, as well, with many of the titular dungeons being maze-like in their presentation even before traps that must be avoided and doors that require cunning and insight to open are put on offer. Puzzle- and problem-solving such as working against such devices require are themselves often articulated as major educational goals; the TEKS standards for grade 6 make much of such things, for example. Dungeon-crawling, then, is inherently an educational exercise, so I didn’t have to do much to bring in the overtly educational this time…but one thing that I have done, both this session and previously, is start to use more complex and richer vocabulary, sending the players to the dictionary for information about what the words mean. (The game meets in a library. Using its resources suggests itself as another valid educational end.) Between the two, I think I have the explicitly educational covered decently enough.

Honestly, so much echoes my own experience. I might have noted here before, and I have certainly noted elsewhere before, that a good part of what drew me into my formal study was the media to which I had been exposed and in which I was conversant as I moved from high school to college and from undergraduate to graduate study. I took Old English early in my master’s program because I was frustrated at the end of my undergraduate work by being almost able to read and make sense of it, for example, and I had that sense of familiarity in part because I had been the particular type of nerd that I was then. (I’m not quite the same taste, now, but whiskey has a richer flavor twenty-five years after being put into the barrel, so that’s to be expected.) I learned words because I saw them used and did not know what they meant, so I looked them up. (Having the spellings helped; a dictionary’s not as handy when the spelling’s uncertain, something that was long a point of vexation for me with my parents.) I don’t think that any of the kids at my table will be English majors or go out for the professoriate, but I do think they benefit not only from the exposure to new vocabulary, but also from doing the work of finding what it means for themselves.

It’s something that will serve them long after we have parted ways.

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To continue from last week, the group of middle-school-aged kids for whom I’m running a Dungeons & Dragons game at my local library left off between rounds of an ongoing fight, being in the process of rescuing a child about to be sacrificed by cultists for some clearly nefarious end. They seemed initially to have taken the discussion of ponerology to heart, which gratified, and play proceeded from that point to go…sideways. Some of that is to be expected in any TTRPG, of course; things move in ways not expected. Some of it, however, is going to require some redirection and resetting; the group as a whole is aware of it, so when next week’s session begins, I do not think it will be a surprise that things will start as they will have to start.

For the overtly educational portion of the session, I brought in an idea I’ve meant to talk about for a while: the tension between plot- and character-focused narrative. To gloss, in the former, the story is largely about outside events and reactions, while in the latter, the story is largely about internal events and how they shape the outside world. I don’t think any narrative is exclusively one or the other, although each is primarily one or the other; that is, there is always some outside event prompting response, and there is always some internality on display, although there will definitely be an emphasis of one over the other.

Within the setting of a TTRPG, the narrative will actually straddle such line as exists between the two fairly evenly. Because the story being told is a collaborative one, with the audience being the group doing the storytelling, the overall presentation is plot-driven. The collective creating audience will respond to the outside events presented to them. Each collaborator, however, will have access to the internality of the character they portray, so for each audience member, the narrative will be emphatically character driven.

This is, of course, a very surface-level treatment; more has been said about the topic, as I am already aware, Mackay having treated it, as well as Gary Alan Fine, and I know there have been other works about it that I do not have on my shelves from long ago. (One of my regrets from the attempted academic life is that I was not more honest with myself and so did not pursue such ludic concerns; I needed the formal “legit” grounding I got, but I really ought to have leaned more into my “side” interests. That the latter have stuck with me even absent institutional affiliation is telling.) But, while the kids at my table are bright, they’ve got other concerns–and so, admittedly, do I, among which are a great many other scholarly somedays.

My calendar is full. I suppose it’s a good thing; I’ve always got something to look forward to doing.

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