The Journey, and Not the Destination
For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term "jumping the shark," allow Wikipedia to educate you!
I personally think the phrase is overused nowadays. The space in which this is most likely to happen, in my experience, is wherein someone is locked into what they thought *should have* happened from a narrative standpoint, whether it's in a film, television show, book, or game (in this case, a role-playing game). They're not necessarily considerate of any other factors except their own projection.
I mention this because people have different artistic sensibilities, and so it makes sense that we don't always agree on "what makes sense" and "what doesn't" with regards to an artist's narrative choices. I think role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are very much at risk for the kind of scenario in which some people think the game has jumped the shark, but others disagree. I also think most people who have role-played understand that the party with which they play really helps dictate whether the experience is a good one or a bad one. To that end, I want to write just a little bit about the importance of focusing on the journey and not the destination while role-playing, and I'm using the extended D&D one-shot in which I played this past weekend as an example. This had been planned by my buddy Biff far in advance, and he hired a DM he found online to run a session so we could all play together as characters instead of having one of us run while the rest played.
Biff had hired this same guy last year, and he ran a good game! He had to end early when his partner got sick, but what he ran was fun, and so we thought it was worth bringing him in again this year. The previous year, the only rule for character creation was that we had to be a troupe of Bards. This year, each player had to create a Fighter character, and we were going to play "traditionally Evil" races who were trying to be "Good." I ended up rolling out a Duergar (if you're not familiar, think "evil dwarf") Rune Knight. The below is the description through which we were introduced to our chronicle for the weekend:
"In the kingdom of Talingarde, many crimes could have sent you to Brandesrscar Prison, but the sentence had but one meaning. That you were wicked and irredeemable. Now, with the advent of the House of Darius, the lines are blurred. Anyone caught stealing, even a loaf of bread, is thrown in prison. If you're caught for the lowest of crimes, you're thrown in prison. Worshipping another God except Mitra, Lord of the Sun? You're marked for death.
"Each of you received the same greeting when you arrived. You were held down by rough hands and branded upon the arm with a runic F. The mark signifies 'forsaken' and the pailful scar is indelible proof that each of you has betrayed the great and eternal love of Mitra and his chosen mortal vassals.
"Condemned, you face at best a life of shackles and servitude in the nearby salt mines. Others might await the 'gentle' ministrations of the inquisitors so that co-conspirators may be revealed and confessions extracted. Perhaps, some of you will be spared this ordeal. Perhaps instead you have come to Branderscar to face the final judgment. In three days, the executioner arrives and the axe falls or the pyre will be lit.
"Through fire or steel, your crimes will be answered."
Really terrific, epic description of how we're starting out and what we might have to overcome to get through the weekend. Kinda puts you in the mind of a party that looks like this picture below:
"Well, see, now I don't think that I did anything wrong. My understanding of 'good' is that you bring light to others, you don't steal, and we didn't steal from that convoy. We gave those supplies to people in need, and it's not our fault that we're the ones in need! We didn't take any more than we needed, and to be fair, I was not the one who set the convoy on fire. But that fire did mean we brought them light."
So it became clear from the very beginning that we would not be the epic party you saw above, but rather the more mundane and bumbling party you see below.
Now, Ray had run for us before. He knew how quickly things could go off the rails. Oh, we absolutely play our characters and do not abandon them. It's just that we commit pretty hard to character choices and courses of action, and we're not afraid of what will happen to our characters. It's not that we make senseless decisions, persay; it's that we play with the abandon of players who are enjoying a good story more than "winning" or surviving the course of said story. None of us are afraid of making new characters if needed, and while we are always able to justify a character's choice based on the circumstances, backstory, and characteristics, it may not be what the DM is expecting.
We are not unique in this. We are, I think, perhaps a bit unusual in how resourceful we can be in such endeavors. We truly do commit to choices based in our characters and not just to be annoying or silly or disruptive. And that makes a difference! If it's arbitrary, then I believe it feels disruptive to the game rather than perhaps just disruptive to the mission. In the case of the game we ended up playing over the weekend, the troupe found itself killing the guards in a town in which they were trying to collect information to save the island on which the town stood from sinking. Obviously, such a choice is contrary to the quest of collecting information. However, it's worth noting that the characters thought they were de-escalating the situation based on their previous experiences. But as their previous experiences were as "evil characters," they sort of applied the wrong lessons for the right reasons. And frankly, it was hilarious. It would have simply felt funny at first, but then irritating had it been done for the sake of being amusing or whatever, but in this case, the characters really felt justified in their actions, and so it made sense in the context of the greater narrative.
At this point, it's worth noting that after playing for several hours on Friday night, we started at about 10am on Saturday morning. The plan was to play until midnight on Saturday with a break for lunch and a break for dinner, and then wrap everything up over the course of 4-6 hours on Sunday. From what we'd gleaned on Friday night, we would be working with someone else who was also unfairly characterized as "evil" to take an entire city away from those self-righteous folks who decided what was good and what was evil. Pretty big plans, yeah? So we're discussing it with our new benefactor, but the things he's saying sort of rub us the wrong way. And we decide that the reason he rubs us the wrong way is because he is, in fact, evil. So it's our job to destroy him. We reason that the town we were gonna take is also evil, so we still need to sack it. But this guy needs to go first. We make it clear to the DM that we're probably gonna end up attacking this guy with plans to kill and supplant him.
Now. At this point, any DM worth their salt may be sort of cursing the gods that things have gone this way. However, this story is not off the rails yet! Sure, it might look different than planned, but that's really what role-playing is: cooperative storytelling. Much like how no plan survives first contact with the enemy, no story survives first contact with the players. If you can't roll with those kinds of punches, then DMing just isn't for you. I don't say that to be mean or discouraging, but simply because I don't think you'll find DMing to be fun or rewarding if this isn't a practice you're interested in adopting for yourself. We've been playing for maybe an hour and a half on Saturday morning (the start of a very long day, to be sure) when this comes up. Ray (our DM) suddenly disconnects from Discord. We chat among ourselves; perhaps he's got a bad connection or whatever. Happens to the best of us. Also, this dude lives in India and so he's 10.5 hours ahead of us. He might just have stuff going on we don't know about. So we chat amongst ourselves for maybe ten or fifteen minutes before he's able to get back on. He immediately lets us know that he has vomited, doesn't feel well, and can't run for us the rest of the weekend. We've RPed for about 5.5 total hours out of the planned 20 or so. We've only played a quarter of the game, and now it's over. We're pretty pissed about it, but we try and be as gracious as we can and let him go. If he was actually sick, then yeah, obviously we wished him well. And we wanted to assume the best. But truth be told, he'd done something similar the year before and assured us nothing like this would happen again this year. One can't help getting sick (I'm proof, since I'm half a week late in posting this because I was sick enough that I couldn't sit and stare at my computer long enough to type it up). However, the timing seemed really suspicious. Plus, there was no question at all about trying again later in the day or something. He was just done. And he happened to be done at the moment we had made it clear we were going to attack his main NPC and he had asked how we felt about a TPK (Total Party Kill - in which all of our characters would've died and we would have had to make new ones to continue playing), and we'd answered that we didn't mind a TPK at all if that's how the encounter played out.
It felt like we'd been ditched because we'd thrown Ray a curveball he simply didn't want to handle. And that felt, frankly, pretty shitty. So, now what? We knew we were gonna keep playing, but who was going to run? None of us had prepared any story as DM because obviously none of us planned on running. I myself was a little uneasy running because I've only run so much D&D and hadn't brought a bunch of books with me because I knew I'd only be playing. I even thought about bringing all my D&D books, but didn't, because I justified to myself that I wouldn't need any beyond the Player's Handbook and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything for the weekend! We all had electronic copies of whatever books we might need, but honestly, it's just far easier for me to have a physical book from which to run. Especially if I'm having to improvise. I volunteer to run for the rest of the weekend. I ask for an hour to figure out what the hell I'm going to do, and we agree to basically pick up where we'd left off the previous night.
After an hour, I've got a brief outline, I know when and where the planned encounters are happening, and the rest is just gonna have to unfold however it unfolds. So, how does it unfold? Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhh, see, it's about the journey, and not the destination. So we're gonna get into that next time. Hope you'll tune in again to see what happens!
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