The Pendulum Swings
When I first started playing D&D, it was all about the hack-n-slash, the crazy gung-ho dungeon-crawling adventure. Characters had little background and no motivation beyond having fun and gaining levels. The party stuck together because we all had “PC” stamped on our forehead and we entered the dungeons because they were there. And the dungeons! Ah, those wacky wonderlands of wickedness where improbable monsters waited in 10 x 10 rooms to do mortal combat with us whenever we should arrive and overly elaborate traps and insane magics lay behind ever wooden door.
It was a heady brew and I drank it again and again, but tastes change. It started gradually, with little character quirks and small paragraphs on the back of character sheets — a few notes about where Delsin the wizard came from and what he liked to do of an evening. Then came the tiny setting details: named villages and returning NPCs. I can still remember the day that everything changed. We were crawling through another Gygaxian dungeon and had just defeated a room of murderous monsters when one of the us said, “hey, what where these guys doing in this room anyway?” We all just stopped and stared at each other. Soon the other questions came: “what do these monsters eat when they can’t get adventures?”, “who set up all this crazy traps?”, “how did all this treasure get down here?”, and finally “who built this place?” If you had listened closely you could have heard the entire edifice of our gaming come tumbling down.
It wasn’t a bad thing. It felt natural, like an evolutionary step, one that we all embraced. Suddenly characters had histories and goals, personalities and relationships. NPCs had surnames and lives beyond the PCs. And things had explanations, not always good explanations — in fact some pretty fantastic explanations (mad wizards being the favorite) — but definite nods toward plausibility.
We became more and more concerned with “playing our characters.” Eventually, of course, the pendulum reached it’s opposite extreme: players began “playing their characters” right out of the adventure — the ultimate expression being the PC who gave up adventuring because it was too dangerous!
I had just taken my place behind the DM screen about this time and was stunned to realise that my biggest hurdle was getting and keeping the PCs together! Not only was the PC stamp verboten, but the players were quite willing to split the part in a moment if that was “what their characters would do.” I tried everything to get them together: a common threat, a common religion, a common destiny, even the old “you’re all childhood friends” schtick. It became a running joke. Somehow we still had fun and made it work (mostly by having a dozen characters per player that we’d swap in and out of parties as needed).
By and by, pendulums being pendulums, things reached an equilibrium: a balancing point between wacky and believable, story needs and character consistency. Recently however, I’ve called up the gang for an old fashion dungeon-crawl. We skipped the complicated backgrounds, brought out the PC stamp, and plunged into a dungeon that passes all understanding, full of improbable magics and far-fetched monsters. We’ve suspended our disbelief and charged down the rabbit hole. It was glorious.
We even started with the PCs meeting in a tavern.
