Deep Dungeon Mastery: Writing and Game Design Analysis

New year, new gear

The original intent of this blog was to provide long-form deep analysis of writing and game design in the context of content creation for roleplaying games. The direction changed as my gaming life became more experimental. However, one year in, I feel like I’m finally ready to provide this to readers in the form of a continuous series I call Deep Dungeon Mastery.

This is not going to be DM advice as presented in it’s common form. This is going to be an in-depth personal analysis of my thought process when creating works related tangentially or more directly to the hobby of roleplaying. The goal here is to provide access to what I have always found is the most helpful kind of information for doing this stuff - direct experience, and insight on the way designers (this one in particular) actually think.

Deep Dungeon Mastery will require a paid subscription on CompleatDM to access. I am not encouraging anyone do this. I do not care if ANYONE pays me, I will never beg for subs, in fact after this is published, you will never hear me ask or advertise it again. I don’t even particularly like that form of “selling” because it often feels predatory of one-sided online relationships. I am and always will be adverse to engaging in any sort of personality cult. However, these pieces are going to be drastically more complex than anything I have done up to this point. They are going to be difficult and time consuming for me to produce. And some of them will have very intimate details about my games that I don’t feel comfortable sharing in a more public form.

The one thing I can say is that any money I receive from subscriptions will go back into this in some way or another - whether that is purchasing and learning a new design tool and detailing documentation on how to learn it, equipment for video as I have been slowly experimenting and improving my editing skills, and other benefits beyond what is seen in my usual posts. There will undoubtedly be a bit of a trickle down effect where the unpaid content I produce will benefit, as will the products I am creating. I will also be publishing commentated material, such as ANTRUM which will only be available to paid subscribers for their own personal use and unavailable in any other form. Commentated roleplaying materials are in my opinion the best possible way to learn this kind of design as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has demonstrated in a some form since it’s genesis. I have always said Gygax’ in-depth justification for design choices is ESSENTIAL in learning D&D, and so a part of Deep Dungeon Mastery will be to create this kind of material.

Again, if you find this distasteful you literally do not need to do anything. Simply ignore those articles when they are posted and wait for the next unpaid one. I will still be delivering exactly what I have in the unpaid section of this blog for the last year. So if that’s all you are interested in, there is really no need to invest in me.

The first such piece will be published by the end of August. I would not bother subscribing until then if you are interested because you will essentially be paying for nothing until that piece comes out. In addition, the pay structure is set to whatever default right now, and I need to change it to something appropriate.

I am not going to try and sell myself. But what I am going to do is share this wonderful email sent to me today (or last night…it’s been a blur) from a user, whose name I will keep private as I have not asked for permission to share his identity. There is no self-aggrandizing I could do as a testimony that would match this persons experience having read my blog. I have also posted my response email below as it provides a bit of insight into who I am and how I think about these things.

Hi Joel,

I've left an occasional comment, I think, but I wanted to let you know that I've continued to read everything you post with interest. I'm most interested in AD&D and the effects of playing a game in 1:1 time and a refereed, gamist/simulationist (not to give GNS theory any fuel, but it's a handy shorthand here) way rather than a DM'ed narrative style. That's how I run my own game, but it's interesting to hear about others' experiences, especially in a writing voice as engaging as yours! However, because I find your writing style so engaging, I'll continue to read even about video games or a narrative-style RPG or whatever.

I heard about your writing initially from Alexis, and I guess that was about a week after you started the blog since substack has reminded me this morning that my subscription renews in 6 days. I was surprised that you wrote of not having met him. Even though you're in the same city, and I live in a (location redacted), I've had the pleasure of hosting him for dinner. I don't remember the order in which I became aware of your blog, Eero Tuovinen, the BrOSR, the CAG guys, and a few others who were talking about how the game is played. Often these writers advocated for AD&D RAW, which I thought is what I was playing, but they were talking about rules I didn't know. Finding that out and fixing has been game-changing, even life-changing. I blame myself mostly, but I have enough bitterness to share it with Zeb Cook and the Hickmans.

I started playing at age 12, about the same age as you, except it was 1981 then. I started with Moldvay Basic. Then I got Cook Expert. And that's what I played that summer and fall with my brother, my friend, and my friend's brother. (Incidentally, I was living in (redacted) at the time and my local game store was called "The Compleat (redacted)" They're still there, right next to (redacted).) We moved on to AD&D pretty quickly, but we had learned how to play with B/X and used the AD&D books as reference works for the most part, with some more rules. None of us read the AD&D rules cover-to-cover, and even if we had, even as the high academic achievers we were, we were still early teens without miniature wargaming experience and Gygax's writing is a bit opaque. Besides, we already KNEW how to play. In '89 I picked up 2e which we played basically the same way we'd played 1e. I won't go on with the full history, which eventually came back around to 1e, because I really just want to make the point that it wasn't until late last summer or early last fall that I clued in the fact that I wasn't actually playing AD&D by the rules, even though I thought I was. I never caught the rule about helmets, or keen-eared characters, loans, 1:1 time tracking outside of the session, or that fighter types get 1 attack per level against creatures with less than 1 hit die. I never paid attention to maximum age, aging effects, disease checks, or inferred that players get to decide how the XP from treasure is divided and that there are specific limits to the number of troops characters can command. I missed so much! I'm probably still missing stuff, but I'm trying to catch it all now, and it's a completely different game. It's a game that I am a LOT more interested in playing.

I want to thank you for being one of the voices that helped me realize that I was playing the game wrong. (CompleatDM Note: I would disagree about playing it “wrong” here, but I get the sentiment.) I greatly enjoy your writing and I hope that you'll continue to share it. It would be even better if you wrote more about this sort of wargaming way of playing. I'm not a huge fantasy fan either. I prefer science fiction and even more so, historical fiction. I've played a LOT of Traveller. Yet, I can't bring myself to play Traveller any more, because it lacks mechanisms for long-term, competitive, campaign play. By competitive, I'm referring to the PvP end game that AD&D becomes once characters reach name level. It's not that I'm so much in love with AD&D and even less so with the fantasy tropes, it's the evolving nature of the play which eventually moves into a competitive mode. I have the sense that you also are attracted to that play as you talked about Streetstein. The thing is, I don't want to jump straight into patron play. I don't think that's satisfying unless there's enough detail behind it, and unless you've played a character in the world long enough to get to know the world and how that character became a patron, the 'stein experience is too shallow. It would be nice to find or build a framework that supports that granular, advancing play that wasn't tied up with all of the silliness of elves and orcs.

I'm just going to end this meandering mess here. Point is, thank you. Please keep it up.

Best regards,

(Redacted, but he is a lovely fellow, and I thank him profusely for this. It made my week)

Hey,

I'm really flattered by this wonderful email. Not the praise of it but just because you decided to take time out of your day to write something like this. These are the kind of interactions that inspire me to create anything - whether it is this, my own games, music, what have you. Depthful, meaningful and resonate experiences shared among people who have similar interests. Despite interacting with quite a few people on the daily it may surprise you how rarely I recieved anything like this. From my perspective it is sufficient justification even at this limited frequency to continue engaging in creative work, indefinitely.

In all truthfulness I don't view myself as a very good DM. I am someone who is endlessly fascinated by game mechanics and design. D&D (using this to refer to any RPG in a general sense) is perhaps the perfect springboard into design because it is a preconstructed tool for developing games where there are no boundaries or technical barriers in expanding upon and changing what is provided. Although I am a video game designer as well these barriers were always prohibitive to me especially as someone younger who was not particularly sharp at coding, and didn't even have the resources to engage in anything like that in my teenage years. But I could always modify D&D. I could always create my own little roleplaying games. And since I discovered the game in the 90's it has been an endless well of fascination.

Alexis is as I have stated before pretty instrumental in my realization of just how truly depthful this creation could be. I've never met him as I've not been extended an invite to do so and have not invited him to do so either. I don't have a particular reason why - when I hold a person in some reverence there is a hesitation to broach that sometimes into a more personal relationship. I am generally not someone who cares if he is liked or not - but I am someone who, when in the presence of a person I really respect, am nervous about coming across as eager or stupid. It's a flaw of mine, but thankfully it doesn't create very many issues for me since there are very, very few people whose ideas and thoughts I really deeply look up too. But our limited interaction was pleasant, and I cherish both his advice and him giving me the time of day. He told me to continue writing, and I took that seriously. It may only be because of him that I continue to do so.

As far as wargaming and AD&D goes, my opinion on that hasn't changed. And I did not even begin to touch the surface of what that has to offer in my own experimentation. I think the ideas there are so compelling that even all the experimentation that has been done hasn't come close to mining all there is to mine from that thought process. My love for games has shifted to be applicable in a very different way. While I still enjoy playing games of all kinds, I get far more gratification out of the design process and learning how the sausage is made. I can tell you this - my experiments with AD&D and wargaming are far from over. But I couldn't possibly estimate the timeline in which they will be on my mind enough again or on my table to have a lot to contribute here about them. Speaking of flaws another one of mine is that I have a bit of an obsessive nature that can tend to burn out once I feel I have "seen enough". I tend to bounce back and forth between hobbies. I have made every effort over the years to become more of a "completionist" and actually carry a project all the way through. But it has to be a constantly sustained effort or I just...won't.

It's why I barely sleep at night. It's why some of my other priorities can be forgotten or why I procrastinate. It's maddening in a sense because "turning my brain off" feels impossible. And it took me a long time to reconcile that lack of consistency and led to me being depressed and angry for a very, very long time until I was able to fully understand it. I'm content now. But I'm always striving to do better.

Anyways that's enough about me. I was very glad to receive this and have you share your story with me. Hosting Alexis at your home must have been a treat. To some degree I find him intimidating only because he is one of so few people who is so brutally honest in the way he interacts with the world. A guy who does not suffer fools, and I have never thought of myself as much more than a fool. But I’d love to hear more about your time spent together.

I am really glad that you had some of the same exciting revelations about the depth of this hobby that I did, and it warms my heart to know that I may have played even a small role in assisting with that. But I do believe that the folks like us who stumble upon this are inquisitive enough and passionate enough about "this thing of ours" that it was an inevitability, so I can't take any real credit for it. You may have found a window in me but you are the one who jumped through it. That's on, you for good or for ill - because some modes of play are so intriguing that they can be a Pandora's box where once opened, it's hard to go back to the way things used to be. And sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Thank you for taking the time to write to me.

Joel