Audience Participation

Monday at lunch I ran a beginner D&D session for some co-workers who hadn't played since they were children. One dude is pretty big into D&D Online, which, compared to tabletop, is like having a driver's license from a different country. You know how to drive, but you don't know about driving HERE.

Before I continue, a digression: I sometimes forget that I'm smart. I hang around intelligent people, and I like reading and learning and various smart-guy pastimes. I'm used to, literally, being the dumbest guy in a room full of brilliant people, which colors my self-perception. So occasionally, when I've busted out some four-syllable word to a circle of blank faces, I realize that I'm not always in that room. Sometimes, I'm the smart one.

Hang onto that idea.

For the assignment I just finished, I got to make up adventure sites. I didn't have to detail them, I just wrote romance copy--a paragraph intro and hook. It's fun, but it's hard to invent something new in one paragraph.

For instance, I made up a site that consists of three wizards whose towers are physically miles apart, but interconnected with teleports. Once you enter from the ground and start throwing open doors, you never know exactly whose tower you're in any more.

That's an okay idea. You can do some fun things with that. But I wanted it to be better; I wanted to make up something that was so shockingly new and interesting that my editor would write and say, "Jeff, this paragraph is so compelling, I want to commission you to write this entire adventure up in detail for publication." Somehow, I wanted it to be super-extra-lightning creative, something that would perk up jaded professional ears.

Contrast this with my lunchtime D&D experience, where four adults go on the following quest: The town elders want you to explore a dungeon. Inside the front door, two goblins attack you. Later, in a different room, two more goblins and an orc attack you. There are chests containing treasure.

That's it. Ta-da.

They loved it. Had a great time. One guy emailed me later asking questions about it. They want to play again ASAP.

At Wizards, we would always tell ourselves that we weren't the audience, but I don't think we believed it deep down. We were connoisseurs of games, and we had increasingly nuanced, stratified tastes. Most of the time, we believed in those more than we believed in playing to our audience.

But the people who play the game are not that discriminating. They are project managers and electricians and suchlike. They don't walk around thinking about this stuff. For them, opening doors and killing goblins is plenty fun. Super-extra-lightning creative might be fun too, but it also might be unnecessary, or worse, overkill. They don't need, or even necessarily want, four-syllable words.

Don't hear me stumping for mediocrity, right? I'm just saying that I'm as close to the audience as I've been since I left Alabama to work for TSR, and it's good to get to know them again. It's good to be them again.