Old School of Hard Knocks

I've always been very fond of the Dark Sun setting books for Dungeon and Dragons.  They were the D&D equivalent of Chuck Berry records, causing imaginary Tolkeinian to complain about "that blasted noise."

"Screw you, mental projection of simplistic moral fantasies!  Dark Sun's the keenest!"

But beware rose-tinted glasses.  Recently, as part of a personal quest to assemble a toolbox for playing the setting with the Solar System (see The Shadow of Yesterday), I read The Valley of Dust and Fire, a supplement that I had a temporary difficulty understanding.

In the middle of an immense sea of silt, which swallows the unwary and harbors horrific monsters, is an eternal sandstorm, which steals the breath and strips the flesh.  At the center of this storm is a ring of lava.  Only one traveler has ever seen it and lived to tell the tale.  The ring is miles across.  In the center of it, surrounded by walls as tall as mountains, there is an insular and xenophobic city, larger than any in the known world, so large that sectors of it may lay fallow and grow forested, the better for nobles to hunt in.  In the center of this city is a park, a garden, where no man enters, and no animal crawls or flies.

There lives the Dragon.

It may seem strange to people unfamiliar to Dark Sun: unique among setting for a game called "Dungeons and Dragons," there is precisely one dragon in Dark Sun, whom everyone calls "The."  His origin is unknown, though his existence is universally famed and feared.  He travels the wastes, and holds cities for ransom.  He is a twisted and terrible and impossibly powerful being.  "His is an absolute existence," as they say, and an inscrutable one.  Where did he come from?  What does do to fill the depressing hours of his empty life?

He is a deadly gem, and the book attempts to gives him a worthy setting: an implacably hostile and depressingly unrewarding home.  I read nearly the entire book before I realized that at no point in the book was any reason given to actually, you know, go to this horrible place.  Where are the plot hooks?  Where is the GM advice on how to weave interesting adventures about the fabled lost city of the Dragon?

Then I found the tiny section addressing this question, with three answers given.

First, the characters could mistakenly believe that the Valley is the utopian city of legend. Seeking out a land of wealth and ease has sent many an explorer off to adventure-just look at Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. The wild tales of the Orient they heard helped inspire their journeys. Player characters could decide all by themselves to seek out the hidden city.

First reason: because they think that it's going to be a safe and blessed place.

Except that, as the book throws in your face, it's not.  So even if you reach a city which is impossible to reach, everyone there is a backwards ancestor-worshipper that wants to whip you to death.  Served you right for dreaming, moron!

Characters ready to accept great risk in the hope of rich reward might come across Galek Sandstrider's account and read of his journeys. Any AD&D® game player worth his or her salt should jump at the chance to explore what might be the greatest treasury of knowledge and power in the entire DARK SUN™ campaign world.

Second reason: Treasure!

This is, as the exhortation implies, the prototypical D&D story: the characters realize that a life of travel and violence can lead to rewards slightly disproportionate to its terrible risks (because the Dungeon Master will usually lean on the side of not killing all the heroes, since we presume he wants to keep playing the game with his friends), and they want those rewards because...

Well, some players, I'm sure, say more.  But the game does not expect you to give it a moment's thought: your character does this sort of thing because we're playing a game where your character does this.  How indie of it.

Quick, think of great fictional characters motivated to quest into dungeons by their desire for treasure!

Well, Indiana Jones wanted treasure because it belonged in a museum.  It's not gotten into, but I feel safe in presuming he wants the great art and sciences of ancient cultures to be in the common possession of all mankind (remember, he is a teacher).

There's the American adventuring party from The Mummy.  I love those guys.  They are a pack of Joneses.  They are rough and tumble, and they want to be rich, and they know that the whole world is out there waiting to get shot up and drop gold by their pure American-ness.

What do these characters have in common?  They each have some place to go back to.  They have some safe and pleasant life somewhere which stands to be enriched by what they can find out in the hinterlands.

Peasants don't go adventuring.  That shit's for knights, nobles.  What's the use of treasure if you have no home where the social contract lets you count your gold in peace?  And anyway, what's the point of counting your gold in peace if you're an adventurer?

Adventure, if you must, but there is no Princeton on Athas, no America, no peaceful place with luxury and ease and renown awaiting delivery of your spoils.  Traveling alone, unprovoked, to collect gold that, not to put too fine a point on it, you have no real way of holding onto...it's suicidal.

Speaking of which...

Lastly, very powerful characters might decide to take a shot at the Dragon. Their research should show that it frequently travels the silt, implying that it maintains a lair in the wastes. Of course, destroying the Dragon in its own demesne is a herculean and probably doomed task—, but your players can find that out the hard way.

Let's dissect this: We're playing a game where combat presents a fun and interesting challenge, and the majority of character ink is spent describing how they interact with the fracas and melee.  And you're rewarded for fighting!  There's all these great deeds and monsters out there which you can only experience (fight) by leveling up (by fighting) and getting better gear (from fighting)!  The game is a series of progressively tactical challenges in a sea of semi-randomized tactical challenges punctuated by "story stuff."

There's nothing wrong with that.  I would describe Final Fantasy Tactics, one of the great games of our generation, with an identical sentence.  And millions of people, myself included, play World of Warcraft, questing and delving and heading off to defeat the Dark Lord in the High Tower in order to avert the Certain Doom over and over again!

What the digital versions of this game-type have in common is a save and restart feature.  When you fail a map in FFT or die in World of Warcraft, you lose nothing but time: either the time since you last saved, or the time it takes to fully recover from your death and resurrection.

The same thing is true in Dungeons and Dragons, except that instead of losing minutes or hours, you're losing months.  How long would it take a group of players to successfully reach the levels required to realistically challenge the Dragon?  Years, easily.  This is a game people play for years.  With the same character.  Who is permanently destroyed by being killed.

But by all means, let them find that out the hard way.

These is the sort of thing that I think of when, say, Malcolm Sheppard talks about how anti-social modern games are.  That there are people who actively seek these kinds of games, I will accept.  Different strokes.  But I am just not yet equipped, by experience or revelation, to distinguish the attraction of the old school from, say, when people who went to English boarding schools laugh and say "Ah yes, they certainly did beat the shit out of us, too right, what what?"

Ben bought a collection of the original Traveler recently, which is full of this sense that I get embarrassed when I read it, as if I were staring at someone with a disability.  It's as it as Jim led me to believe it would be.