The Rock Monster Thesis

It probably won't surprise you that many of my years spent as a DM have been spent exclusively in the company of my fellow dudes. Table-top gaming was exclusively a boys' club. (Or, at least, it was in our little group because not a single one of us knew how to talk to girls... I suspect this inability was probably one of the engines that drove our gaming habit so fiercely.)

Time passed. College happened. Suddenly I became an attorney, a husband, and someone's father. Through a bizarre confluence of events which really have no bearing here, I found myself running a campaign where half the players were girls.

"I'm up to it," I thought to myself, "It can't be that much different."

Oh, how wrong I was...

See, the many years of gaming exclusively with guys skewed my perception as to how the whole process "works". With men, it's very simple.

DM: "You see a rock monster looming in the distance, over the next ridge."

All-Male Party: "We ride over the ridge and kill it!"

Case closed. Done. For an all male party, you just have to help them suss out the whereabouts of the rock-monster (general term I use to describe any kind of antagonist). After that, they will reliably go and kill said rock-monster and claim rewards. In my own running of games, I have elaborated on this simple formula for well over a decade, and I'm good at it.

But it only works with the all-male parties of yesteryear. With this particular girl-inclusive campaign, the dialog went more like this.

DM: "You see a rock monster looming in the distance, over the next ridge."

Females: "What is it doing?"

DM: "It's... uh, doing very rock-monster-ish things! They're terrible! You should kill it!"

Females: "Why does it do those things? Where is it from? What motivates it?"

DM: "Oh crap..."

Suffice to say, in these rascally female minds, mindless slaying just didn't occur so naturally. I had to change my basic plot line.

Pre-Women: Kill the rock monster

Post-Women: Ride to the neighboring village and discover the wizard who created the rock monster. Come to understand that he did so because he was in love with a girl whose father would not bless their union. The rock monster was created out of the wizard's anguish. The wizard created the rock monster for the purpose of destroying the heartless father's crops to take his revenge. Party has a long dialog with heartless father, convinces him to win the respect of his daughter and bless the union. Wizard, finally at peace with the world, dispels the rock monster he's created. Everyone is happy and enlightened. No one draws their freaking sword.

Let's examine that, shell we? Male plot: four words. Female plot: over ninety words.

Now, I'm not going to go into some neanderthal generalization about women being smarter or more complex, because that isn't true. I think it has to go back to influences.

For most of us who got on board the Dungeons and Dragons train in the eighties and nineties, this is what the game was. You went into a dungeon, you slew a dragon and his cronies, and took the treasure. Thoughts like "how?" and "why?" weren't given a particularly thorough treatment, because the basis system evolved from a very basic board game. The idea of a dynamic, fluid world-building system that encompassed all types of interaction was not close to being fully realized.

I think the reason my female players threw me for a loop is because they did not have this conditioning (or poisoning, if you want to call it that). All the ones in my party came to the game as adults, and had very adult desires for complexity, nuance, and interaction that went beyond thinking with one's sword.

In short, they drastically improved my abilities as a story-teller. The richness they demanded in their supporting cast created the tools for all sorts of interesting conflicts and complications. As I write stories for the party now, I can think things like "this is what Amora would do" because she is a developed person with very clear personality traits.

I encourage this type of play, because I am enjoying it much more than the "hack n' slash" campaigns of my childhood.

While I accept that Fourth Edition has streamlined the hacking and slashing, I think that this direction and focus on combat and numerical warfare has really cost the game something vital. I am thankful that my players have insisted on injecting this nuance in, but I feel like new players might be missing out on it if "Fourth" is their only instruction on Dungeons and Dragons.

PS - if you really want to see a system that has a strong character creation process (like, the best I've encountered), check out the Dresden Files Roleplaying Game (or really any incarnation of the FATE system); the mechanics of it REQUIRE character depth that is often lost in Dungeons and Dragons