The Die of Crazy Coincidence

Having praised the loose-ended approach to building a fictional story, I want to share a device I use in play to tie loose ends up. It is a six-sided Die of Crazy Coincidence. When I deem it possible that a crazy coincidence might happen I roll it, and the coincidence happens on a 6.

A couple of examples:

• The party is headed out to the castle to fight some bandits. By crazy coincidence is their friend the ranger just coming back from his conclave in the woods and does he run into them and offer to join their righteous expedition? (He did, and this saved the party's bacon.)
• Last week, the party was heading out of town on a caravan. I roll up some random characters along for the ride. One of them is a "Guard" and the other is an "Elf"? Is the elf the very same high-elf who had been pitching woo to one of the party members? (No.) Is the guard the very same fellow who went into the dungeon with the party, blackmailed them for a take of the treasure on account of their using illegal poison arrows, thought they were quits because he didn't testify against them in their trial, and is leaving town because his corrupt ways have come to light? (Yes - and in yesterday's session, a carousing episode in a far-away town gave him his comeuppance in a completely randomly determined yet amazingly elegant way.)

In literature, coincidence has had a long and controversial history. Aristotle thought it added greatly to  satisfaction with the story if, for example, you had a guy who murdered some dude being killed by the self-same dude's statue falling over. Early Western literary genres - romance, picaresque - thrived on scenes where characters thought left behind cropped up again, or new characters had some kind of connection with old ones. This technique was disparaged by 19th century realists and 20th century modernists, but made a comeback with postmodernism. Today's literary advice for amateurs generally warns away from coincidence, though if you read closely you'll see they take "coincidence" to mean an unexplained, deus ex machina appearance at the end - not the proper harvesting of a coincidence that is carefully developed earlier on in the story.

All this comes from my reading of an article by the literary scholar Hilary Dannenberg called A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction (Poetics Today 25:3, Fall 2004, if you have university library access). Let's leave aside the theme of separated family members meeting by coincidence - which underpins a surprising number of classics from Oedipus Rex, to The Tempest, to Fielding's Tom Jones. A more general use of coincidence, corresponding to my use of dice, is to have characters meet again when the reader thinks they have separated from each other.

In general, Dannenberg says that such coincidences in literature demand an explanation by the author, who often complies. Sometimes coincidence is explained explicitly as a sign of the hand of Providence within the story. Other times it's done with a nod and a wink to literary contrivance; certainly it is more satisfying to pick up an old character where they left off and develop them further, than to start anew. But at still other times, particularly in realist novels, it's just explained as one of those chance meetings or an incredible happenstance. In effect, this last one is the explanation I give my players when I announce the chance for a coincidence and roll the die in plain view.

Now, if I was being a total realist about things, the coincidence die would only hit on a 1 in 100 chance or lower. Indeed, sometimes when something would be just too bizarre a coincidence, I roll 2 dice and require 2 sixes (in today's session, there were human heads on stakes by the side of the road - does anyone recognize them?) Yet even this 1 in 36 chance, or the 1 in 6 normal chance, is weighted heavily to let coincidences happen. And in this I recognize I'm telling a literary story, that sometimes could get some good mileage out of recycling and developing a character, but works best if it's seen as not completely stage-managed.

Final OPD Entry

Well, here is my final entry to this year's One Page Dungeon contest. I really want to thank all the commenters on the previous post who gave me useful tips to make it look and work a lot better.

More than just an entry, this represents an encounter system for wilderness adventures that goes somewhat beyond the traditional hexcrawl. In my pro copy of Hexographer I've been custom-installing all the special silhouette icons as I go along. It might be useful to release a copy of the customization file with all the silhouettes in it, but I'll have to work around some issues with the pathname references first, and make sure it includes a wider selection of Telecanter's and my silhouettes.

Mad Men Story Lessons

My wife and I are currently deep into season 2 of Mad Men. Apart from its amazing period detail we're finding it to be a very deep and fascinating show. Nothing could be further from Dungeons and Dragons than Mad Men's Papers and Paychecks. And yet in commentary on a Mad Men blog I ran across an insight that made me feel tons better about the way I run my game.

They report an interview with series creator Matt Weiner where he says:

There’s a mystery being unraveled and pieces are not connected and sometimes they are. Some things go nowhere. If there wasn’t stuff that went nowhere, you wouldn’t be excited about the things that go somewhere. When you’re telling a story where you don’t want people to know the end it’s very important that you keep them on their toes.

Later on, one of the blog owners, Roberta Lipp, posts this comment:

This ain’t Harry Potter. Like Harry Potter (sorry, it’s all I had), everything is carefully planted. But unlike it, not everything is some seed for the future. And not knowing which is which does create incredible tension.

This removes my last possible regret about running a campaign where events get improvised week to week and sometimes at the actual table. Once a writer or DM gets serious about running a mature, multilayered game - call it the "Second Edition of the mind" - there is a temptation to take it too far in the scripted direction, and make everything have a point and a purpose. But then you get a life that looks like a story, rather than a story that more realistically is a thread running through life.

Here's how the mind works: it takes the chaos of right now and imposes order on it, connects the dots and tells a Rorschach story. The more things recede into the past, the more the story gets smoothed out. Dream researcher J. Allan Hobson found that people awoken in the middle of REM sleep, when they actually dream, give very incoherent reports. The smoother if still surreal stories we tell to psychiatrists and friends are the product of processing in non-REM sleep and waking life.

Although loose ends can get edited out of memory, their existence can also create suspense, as Weiner reveals. Working in the non-interactive form of TV, Weiner's loose ends can illustrate character points or something about the world. Our medium as gamemasters, though, requires players' active collaboration.

So, maybe we can say that a gaming session becomes relevant to the larger picture the more it holds opportunities for the players to define their characters and to find out about the world. All that's needed are a few overarching structures - the kind provided by the Law vs. Chaos conflict, for example - that doom-laden events and prophecies without a plan can hang from.

One Page Dungeon Entry: Old Bastard's Barrens

Click to read it.

Yep, that ol' dirty bastard. He carved his face on a mountain.

If your comments don't get me to change anything I'm submitting this to the One Page Dungeon Competition this weekend. Big field this year, it looks like. Hopefully this'll stand out.

Player Advice: Follow Through

Part of our final session for the adventure on Sunday was a kind of post-mortem. I don't know about the rest of you; whether, once players are well clear of an adventure, it's usual for the DM to run down for them some of what they missed.

I get the feeling there might be some kind of Old School ex-cathedra edict against it, hidden somewhere in page 38 of the Dragonsfoot forum topics. After all, it breaks the kayfabe, gives players unearned knowledge benefits in the shadow currency of the exploration game, and generally screams utter capitulation to the  "let's surf the internet for spoilers" reflex of the Information Age.

But I was feeling generous. Just this once, right? And in the retelling I saw a lot of times where the players didn't follow through. They noticed a strange shape about the map but only speculated about a hidden compartment ... went through every setting on a device except the one that actually did anything ... hit a bump in the pool but did nothing to drag it up ... figured out the exact thing to do in order to get some sweet resources and, in the absence of any possible confirmation from me, then forgot to actually do it.

"Let me see that dungeon map ...." *STAMP*

Of course, we're playing for fun and we've had a lot of it. And maybe that's the point - that the fast and loose style of play leads to a lot of fun situations. Where "fun" arises from poking a button with your finger instead of an iron spike, tasting an unknown liquid found in the dungeon, or simply role-playing your barbarian fighter running full speed ahead into an army of kobolds.

Sometimes, even, checking your swing can save you from unimaginable fates.

But if you want my advice on how to prosper as an adventurer (yeah, wow, I'm getting soft as a DM), then ... Take notes, especially when you have an insight. Read those notes. Follow through on them.

This is the prosperity gospel of the well-designed dungeon.

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In other news, my player Mike has summoned the hordes of reddit to view the player-created dungeon maps I posted yesterday and in a short 24 hours it has become my most viewed post of all time (yeah, beating that other one that cheated its way to the top because it shows up in people's Google image searches for 4th edition character sheets). Welcome, and I hope some of you stay a while!

Tomb of the Iron God: My Awesome Players' Maps

Lui, who plays the party elf, was responsible for mapping in our recent run of Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God. In the course of play she made these profusely illustrated beauties that go way beyond "Here be monsters." Spoilers for the module, of course; click to enlarge. And yes, that is Official Social Cognition Graph Paper.

One Page Dungeon (?) Entry Preview

I'm not really entering a "dungeon" in the OPD contest this year ... it's more of a hexcrawl, with an easier-to-understand version of the original hexcrawl rules, keys for each letter and icon, and a hexmap. Part of which currently looks like this:

 Between this effort and almost finishing the Weird encounter table page I've added 30+ icons to the Menagerie download, including several Fiend Folio, MM2, and Varlets & Vermin creations. Here they are on parade:

Click to enlarge.