It's been a long year, and a long time since I last blogged. There have been a number of things I wanted to discuss this year, but with 2020 being...2020, so much of it seemed so negative that it seemed painful to dig down to the depths of my already 2020 despair to dredge up yet another reason to be unhappy. So today I'd like to write about something I've realised and noticed over the course of this year.
I have never played D&D right.
D&D is a combat-focused game designed to tell the same stories of strategy and war that we tell with battle miniatures like Warhammer. To my mind, it's a combination of what happens on the field in a game with minis combined with the (more extensive than 40k, obviously) "downtime" from those battles, in which people talk about how it went and how it might have changed them as people.
That's probably an oversimplification, and as a game concept, it's not a bad thing, but it's what I've come to realise about the game.
I am a storyteller. I tell stories. I describe in (sometimes overly extensive) detail what is in my head when I think of a particular concept or image. I started playing D&D in 2017 as a podcast (that never went live) in which we used D&D as a storytelling device. At that point I'd played some Dark Heresy around a table a few years earlier, but that was it. It didn't occur to me that there might be other games, or other play styles, or even other storytelling methods, despite the fact that when we started to devise the world this podcast would sit in, I was 7 years out of drama school.
What I did realise, while we were playing (even then), was that I do not play optimally.
I suppose I should define "optimally". For the purposes of this, assuming that D&D is a war game and you use strategy to win a war game, "optimal" means to play to win in the conventional sense of beating your opponent through death or surrender.
So. I don't play optimally. I play narratively. And that annoys some people. But it is, and always has been, my style.
Now I can shift that style if I'm playing a one-shot, and I'm noticing disengagement around the table. I've never been a DM/GM/Storyteller or Host, but my belief is that if I can help others to have a good time, why wouldn't I? My enjoyment is dependent on their enjoyment. Emotions are infectious.
Maybe that's another stylistic preference. We can discuss that another day.
I play narratively, and if I'm playing anything for more than a one-shot, I'll fall back into my style because my style is very much a part of who I am. When I read the mechanics for games, at first I rarely look at the expectations for how the game is supposed to be played. I'll spend more time considering what I might want to do given any lore or language used, then see how the mechanics can shift to accommodate my needs and my understanding of that particular language.
That's how I tell whether I will enjoy a game: Does it fulfil the need I'm seeking to fulfil? Yes? No? If not, what story does it want to tell? What's the mood? What are the themes? What am I exploring by asking this, this or this question? How well can it engage with these emotions? Why would I choose this over that other game I saw last week?
Given how much combat appears in D&D, and how much space is given to the ability (and expectation) that you fight (even with recent updates and adventures), when I first started to play, I was doing it wrong.
And at first I didn't care. For a long time I didn't care. I was playing wrong because I was trying to shift my style to fit the game.
That's not to say "your fun is wrong" - if you're enjoying a game, play the game you want to play. People homebrew every game - I can't imagine anyone playing a game "right" - games like D&D have too many existing rules to live by every single one of them with encyclopaedic knowledge without constantly looking things up. What I'm describing is my version of wrong. And why is it wrong?
Because my style (as opposed to the game) was not optimised.
My style is that of narrative rather than strategic optimisation. I will make poor decisions for my characters because of the possibility of character development, or because I can see all the millions of possibilities of where the story could go, or because I can sense where the Storyteller is headed and I either want to lean into that, or run far far away.
I will deliberately make decisions to safely explore consequences.
I work with clients in psych practice. In practice, I make strategic (if that's what you want to call it), responsible, well considered decisions. I'll carefully query cognitions. I'll gently point out boundaries like hairline cracks so they can be filled in with personal values and strengthened. Another discussion for another day is how well role-play games map onto real life identity exploration, but the important thing to note is that when I'm around a table, or at a computer, or on the phone, or writing a scene with another player, I am freeing myself of fear of consequence.
I am freeing myself of the fear of consequence to engage in it and learn through an avatar.
Consequences can be thrilling, novel, engaging, anxiety provoking, terrifying, but the key difference in role-play is that they're not going to harm me. The me outside of my character. The me who inevitably puts more of me into the character than I expect to (don't we all?).
I am safe to explore a world where the consequences of my decisions cannot hurt me.
And that's one of the most beautiful things about (safe, supported) TTRPG: That we can explore those parts of ourselves that are unspoken, or unvoiced, or perhaps don't have a voice yet. Alexandrie of Unlawful Disorder was originally designed to have what I now realise are symptoms of ADHD - a mental (and genetic) disorder I found out I experience just a few months ago.
I unconsciously created a character to explore what it would be like to de-stigmatise the experiences I have in daily life - to make those experiences a super power, essentially. She listens to a mystical guiding Song and so some of the time she is vague and struggles to pay attention to what's happening in the real world, because the magic in her mind is maybe more vibrant than what's around her.
That's my girl.
So. D&D. I play it wrong. Session 1 of Unlawful Disorder, a year ago now, I made the decision to play a pacifist warlock. Sort of. A naive, teenaged, pacifist celestial warlock on a journey to complete a task her grandmother couldn't. Not the best adventurer - she's also a noble and grew up sheltered, and wouldn't have left home if she didn't feel obliged to finish the task her Grandmère seemed so unhappy at being unable to complete.
This game is a year old now, and despite having the highest death rate in the party (control over spells is hard) she's still a naive teenager trying to figure out how the world works and why the Song has an unknown task - much less what it is.
This character does not fit a war game. Not that she couldn't, eventually - I imagine as she becomes less naive, that's exactly where she'll head (I have no idea, it really depends on how the story progresses and I'm happy to learn that as we go). But the point is that the game we were playing couldn't support the story I wanted to tell.
And it didn't support the styles of the people I play with. Not really. Over the course of this year, this magical year from 2019 to 2020, I have been blessed with the opportunity to play so many different games it's almost embarrassing. In this year, I've written for games. In this year, I've talked about the concepts of games, their systems, their mechanics, balance, meta discussions of game and how they influence our views on the world, what place they might have in broader media, and how to get more people involved in play outside of the universal standard of currency: D&D - as well as whether that's even necessary. I would argue (of course, because I'm biased now) that everyone should try one game that is not their native (or originating) game. Even if they run back to their comfort zone, try it once.
Because Unlawful Disorder, around May, switched system to Open Legend. If you've never built a character for one system, then rebuilt them for another, I urge you to do it. See how your character concept shifts - see what's most important to you about the character and how that might present in different systems. It's a wonderful experience. If you then get to play that character in the new system, so much the better. Actors, writers, dealers in words and their use, artists, it's a brilliant method of character analysis (and world analysis, though the world is also a character - another discussion).
In the shift to Open Legend, Alexandrie became... Alexandrie. Or at least, closer to who she always should have been. She'd never really been a warlock - it was a convenient way to say she wasn't a cleric while offering her the ability to have some command over the correct characteristics. Now, everyone (except she herself, actually) calls her a witch, or a sorceress. I don't have a word for her. I don't need one.
She's Alexandrie, and that's enough.
She couldn't have been Alexandrie without trying a different system - a different game. I couldn't have been the Shauntelle I am today without having tried different games to see what worked for me, without writing for games and seeing how guidelines can become restrictions imposed on players if I'm not careful
What story does the game encourage telling and am I ready to show up to tell that story?
And this is where Lost Worlds Archive comes in.
Last year (minus a month or two), Michel Vaillancourt approached me with an offer: Find some friends that I wanted to play with and he would run a streamed game involving those people in a homebrewed world. So what did I do? I gathered my favourite storytellers - all the people comfortable on screen who had run games for me before. People I could trust to uphold a narrative and tell a story collaboratively.
To be clear: I, an actor/writer was asked by a Canadian novelist to gather a group to tell a story and I brought three actor/storytellers (Drew Wilson, Jamie Collette and Sam Piaggio) to the table.
There's that style creeping in.
So here's an unpopular opinion just to highlight what I mean by stylistic play, and how it can interact with the stories you tell:
D&D does not invite creativity.
Before the furious typing, hear me out. It is absolutely, 100% possible to be creative with D&D. The extent of the homebrews, the depths to which people go in their descriptions and the worlds that have been developed and engaged in say it is 100 - no 200% possible to be creative with D&D.
But it doesn't invite creativity if you play by the rules. To use the rules creatively in most of my (temporally short, but experientially extensive) encounters with D&D requires you to step outside of the rules as they're written, or to play fast and loose with what you'll allow at the table. They require you to stretch and bend the text on the page until it fits an image you want it to fit. D&D gives you the outlines and you get to fill it with whatever you want, like a colouring book. No two campaigns using a pre-written adventure will be the same. I'm not denying that. No two campaigns will be the same full stop.
But the amount of boundaries placed on the way in which we're expected to engage with it are inherently limiting of stylistic and emotional choices. You are creative with D&D despite it's attempts to assert restrictions - not because of.
I'm not entirely sure I'm explaining my feelings around this particularly well, but it's something I have been thinking about while considering developing my own game. I've been playing Good Society over at Nadine's channel with some amazing people (Dany and Phoebe), and one of the things I realised I wanted to experience less was the sense of failure. It's implicit and entirely language based in a lot of games. Rolling a die, drawing a card, flipping a coin - there's a desire to get things "right" or do things "well". As a narrative player, despite making poor decisions, there's always the twinge of failure if a roll doesn't succeed (another discussion to have is the language around that - success and failure at something entirely luck based seems unfair somehow, but again, not today's discussion). The way I've chosen to do things to counteract that feeling is to keep rough track of those "failed rolls". Too many of them and I deliberately shape how I play the character to accommodate them (Alexandrie doesn't even pretend to keep watch for precisely that reason). That's an example of my style, and I can understand why it might be annoying if you're used to playing another way. We all have a style and they don't always mesh.
What I am and will be eternally grateful for is the willingness for everyone around the table of Unlawful Disorder to interact with and engage with my style of play rather than rejecting it or trying to push me out of it. We don't all have the same style of play: Jamie thinks much more practically and plays his characters with a step more distance than I do, nudging Spider around the stage as it's set. They lean much more on how the rules interact to form the 3-dimensional character, and it's fascinating to watch because it's so different, so tender and yet so familiar. Sam builds and plays his characters optimally and with finesse - every decision he makes seems calculated while perfectly fitting the persona he created in Chevalier. Drew...I'm not entirely sure what Drew does, but it's hilarious, sensitive and impulsive. He looks at the rules as they are and reinterprets them to fit what he needs. He takes the narrative of the situation and describes what he'll do, manipulating the most basic of language to fit his whim.
And of course we have Michel, our novelist, crafting a tome around our decisions, describing (and building) the sweeping vistas, heavy situations and dropping in chances for character development when and where we don't expect them, drawing on what we're doing with apparent ease that borders on wizardry.
Is wizardry.
He's a wizard.
This game is magic at work. It's been a year, and it's alive and growing and shifting. We chose the name Lost Worlds Archive because we are explorers of that which is still there if you look for it, and we hold them close so they don't go missing again, these legends that deserve their full breath.
This game is a love letter to role-play. It's a love letter to stories. For all the seriousness we drive home at times (we're actors, after all), we remember that it's a game, and we would not be there if we didn't have fun.
Before the stream goes live, we check in to see how we're all going, what 2020's put in front of us this week, and offer the option of a skipped game to those for whom the week has been most difficult.
We rarely take that time off, though.
I guess it comes back to that infectious emotion thing: it doesn't matter how I feel when the game starts, I feel safe and warm and never ever ever ready for bed when we stop
Here's to the next two years.
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