Sunday 10 March 2019

Nobody Ever Told Me How To Do It

I thought I'd write a follow-up to these two recent posts, as I appear to be getting brickbats from the peanut gallery about them.

In Gerry Cohen's On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy he makes the argument that philosophy is something which cannot really be taught ("Nobody ever told me how to do it"). Philosophy students don't learn how to do philosophy in the university classroom through the teacher explaining to them what philosophy is, or even through explaining what thinking like a philosopher is. No: being in the classroom, reading and discussing philosophical texts, gives them the opportunity to see philosophy in action and thereby to learn how to think like a philosopher by a sort of osmosis. That's how one learns to do philosophy.

That's not to say that the philosophy teacher might as well not do anything at all provided there is a classroom and a reading list. Some (many) philosophical concepts are hard and need explaining. But the act of explaining itself should be understood as a demonstration of philosophy in action - part of the exposure of the student to what philosophy is - rather than an exercise in explaining how to do philosophy per se. Reading a difficult text by Heidegger and having its meaning explained to you is not the same as a teacher sitting down with you and telling you "how to do philosophy".

He is absolutely right about this, but it's not just philosophy: most academic subjects, to a lesser degree, are the same. There are important things that you need to be taught when studying history, literature, law, biology, economics, etc. But you can't really explain to somebody how to think as a historian, a literary theorist, a lawyer, a biologist, an economist. You can only provide them with the opportunity to see what it means to be one of those things, to think like one of those people, and hope that they take it from there.

The academic subject with which I'm most familiar, law, is a great example of this. It's fairly straightforward to memorise legal rules, whether they exist in precedent or statute. Some of them are complicated, but as long as you can read, and have the time and energy to just sit there and memorise things, and have a teacher to explain difficult concepts, you can perform that task readily enough. But legal reasoning - thinking like a lawyer - is a different thing, something that only comes to you (if you get it at all) from seeing it in action - reading cases, watching advocates, doing work experience, and so on - not from the teacher explaining how to do it. In other words, there is a bit of technical knowledge that has to be explained, but the bulk of the learning involves being introduced to a certain method of thinking.

Even the hardest of hard sciences, like maths and physics, are like that I think: it's not so hard to memorise that 2+2 = 4 or that a2+b2=c2 or whatever, and having a teacher is helpful to explain difficult concepts, but mathematical thought is a certain type of thinking that you develop yourself from ongoing exposure to it - you are introduced to it by your teacher, not taught it.

This can be contrasted with other exercises in human learning that are more technical like, say, learning to write, learning a foreign language, or learning to drive. Learning to write is almost entirely technical: it's how to hold the pen, how to physically make the marks on the page, how to make sure they correspond to accepted spelling conventions. You don't learn it primarily from watching other people write. You have to be sat down and have it explained to you over the course of years.

As an adult, learning a foreign language is the same: nobody is going to learn Swahili just from going to Tanzania and listening to people talk. Somebody (or a dictionary or textbook) has to explain to you what this word means, what that word means, how to conjugate this verb, how to make a noun into a verb, and everything else. You actually need to be taught it - shown it.

Learning to drive is similar: you need to be walked through the process of how to indicate, how to use the hand break, how to use the clutch, how to change gears, how to do a three-point turn, and all the rest. Back in the day I remember my driving instructor having little coloured dots around the rear window frames in the car, so when teaching how to reverse into a parking space he could tell you to line the red dot (or whatever) up with the line on the tarmac to make sure your angles were right. You don't learn to drive from watching others do it. You work through the process with somebody - usually an irascible older man - telling you directly what to do.

Now, don't misunderstand me: it's not that the actual practice of writing, speaking a foreign language, or driving don't involve intuition and that you don't get better at them with solo practice. It's just that the actual learning process is primarily one that has to be explained, rather than just demonstrated.

All the above is a rather long-winded way of saying: learned human activities exist on a spectrum. Some are almost entirely explained (learning to write), while some are almost entirely introduced (philosophy). In reality the vast majority of things are in the middle. Certain learned activities - car mechanics, martial arts, sport - are more towards the end of the spectrum where we find learning to write; others - creative writing, policing, teaching, acting, music - are more towards the philosophy end.

My contention is that DMing is much more something one learns to do well through what I've called "introduction" rather than having it explained - it is more towards philosophy than it is towards learning to write or drive; much more so in fact. At its core DMing is more akin to creative writing, teaching, acting or policing than it is mechanics or martial arts, and hence one can't learn a great deal from being told what to do or what not to do, but can probably learn better from examples and actual play reports and things of that nature, properly explicated - which would be the DMing equivalent of a philosophy student reading Being and Time and having it explained by a good teacher.

(tl;dr version: let's have less prescriptive DMing advice and more actual play reports accompanied by commentary on what worked and what didn't.)

32 comments:

  1. I'm with you on this one.

    The thing about gaming is that the right thing to do is so variable. Sometimes its cool to do the old school thing of handling a secret door by descriptively interacting with environment, and sometimes it's best just to roll a die, and there are many reasons why one method can be better than other at any particular time.

    I also strongly agree with your comment on actual play. As someone that moderates an RPG forum, I've noticed that the further a conversation drifts from talking an actual game that are people are playing and into theory, the more contentious and ridiculous it gets. Often the most highly opinionated voices are the ones that I never hear talk about what's happening at their game table.

    Discussion of games online often leads people to corner themselves as well. Someone will make an off-hand comment about a way to handle a situation. Someone will challenge that approach. This leads the first guy to double down, and suddenly he becomes dogmatic about what was merely a suggestion. His online reputation is riding on arguing that his advice is always right, so he won't back down.

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    1. Yes, exactly. I think even the stuff that supposedly everyone agrees - "railroading is bad", for example - actually should be abandoned from time to time.

      Your comments about online RPG discussion are absolutely on the money and very perceptive. I've even noticed myself get into that trap, where you've made some forum post expressing some passing opinion and get into a pointless debate, and find yourself vigorously defending something that a few hours ago you didn't particularly even care about one way or the other. It's one of the many reasons why I stopped posting on forums and getting into online discussions generally - it's quite hard to stop yourself behaving like a completely chump.

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  2. The blog you link to comes off as a bit, uh, well, you know.

    I think you're right, anyway. Running the game is a craft with internal goods which one both enjoys and masters much more through practice than through dictation.

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    1. He is one of those people who it's probably more appropriate to pity than get angry with. I used to read his blog way back in the day but quickly realised it's not worth getting into a discussion with him - any such discussion is just an opportunity for him to puff up his ego - so I was surprised to discover traffic from his blog being directed this way, went to take a look, and lo and behold...

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    2. Yeah, he's not exactly open to new ideas, and can escalate things to really ugly and personal levels very quickly.

      He once devoted a post to deconstructing a straw man he had built out of misstating one of my comments - and when I pointed that out, he deleted the comment so nobody could tell the difference.

      Its a shame, because he lives not far from me, theoretically we could have gamed together.

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    3. I had a similar experience, although I don't remember what it was about - it's a long time ago now. He uses his blog and its comments essentially to try to inflate his (presumably very low) standing in life, which isn't entirely unusual.

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  3. Here here to the tl;dr. As an experienced dm I am always most interested in actual play commentary. I should write a bit more of them myself.

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  4. I find play reports invariably boring to read, but perhaps adding insightful commentary might make them readable.

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    1. Thursdays in Thracia is the only play report blog I follow because the author always notes any insights and observations he gained from the session at the end. I would recommend it as the gold standard of actual play reports.

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    2. I think "This interesting thing happened in my game last night" can be very useful. Whereas a big lump of text describing the whole session, not useful for me.

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    3. The biggest mistake a lot of actual play reports do is talking about the session exclusively in terms of the in-game story, trying to turn it into a work of fiction. It means you get no insight into what the GM is actually deciding and doing or how the players (not their characters) reacted. Those are the things I want to know about when I read an actual play report.

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    4. Adam is exactly right. I'm talking about actual play reports that explain things from the viewpoint of the GM and dissect what went wrong and what went right - a bit like TV sport punditry, really. Most actual play reports just read like very boring chronologies of a bunch of stuff that happened.

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    5. Good points! I don't think any of the reports I've read in the past months come anywhere close to game session punditry. They're all in the chronicle of events category.

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  5. Ever get the experience of teaching on a Law module where the module leader is (eg) one of those 'Sociolegal' types, who himself doesn't know how to 'think like a lawyer'? It's a peculiar kind of Hell. The module leader will often dismiss the actual process of learning as "Just facts - they don't need to know those - they can Google it!"

    Speaking entirely hypothetically of course...

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    1. Most legal academics despise law - especially the common law - and think it is beneath them. It is partly due I think to the near-universal habit academics in the humanities and social sciences have of wanting to remake the world (which they're entitled to do because they are so very clever, of course) rather than just find out about it. And partly it's because at the end of the day academics (especially left wing academics) are all terribly bourgeois and think of law subconsciously as being "trade".

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    2. Yeah, even I look down a bit on those actual *lawyers*!! :)

      But that doesn't mean I don't need to know Law, teach Law, and even think (a bit) like a Lawyer, if I'm going to teach my students effectively. I can't stand the ones who are all "How does injustice Make You Feel?" when the students are supposed to be learning Offer & Acceptance.

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    3. You know, when I said in your "There's No Substitute for Good GMing" post that people who are really good at what they do tend to build a common language to discuss it among themselves, its was specifically lawyering that I was thinking about.

      BTW, I'm not sure your comment regarding legal academics has any particular application in my jurisdiction. Of course, there is no bias against "trade" on this side of the pond.

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    4. Law in the UK is different to the US because it's an undergraduate subject (you then do additional qualifications afterwards) so it's not always as directly linked to the desire to become a lawyer as it is in the US.

      Law is indeed a very good example and it's why Stanley Fish was so interested in it - I'm planning on covering that a bit in a future post.

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    5. I definitely rolled my eyes at the sweeping and self-righteous characterization of "most legal academics" in the above comment.

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    6. It's not sweeping: I know these people. I deal with them all the time.

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    7. I would say that any subjective description of "most" of a large group of people is "sweeping," but maybe you have a different sense of that word. In any event, however, your description is certainly melodramatic and uncharitable.

      I went to law school. I am friendly with a good number of legal academics, and interact with them on a professional basis. I would not describe a single one as "despising" law. I find most of them to be quite idealistic about law.

      I would agree with you that there is a sense that top drawer academics do not stoop to spending time providing actual descriptions of the law, but rather should ponder what the law *should* be. But despise? Not at all.

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    8. For heavens sake, Ivan, you really do have a tendency to go overboard on this type of thing. Nobody reading this blog entry is a legal academic and even if they are none of them will be crying into their cornflakes tomorrow morning because I said that most of them despise the law. It makes no difference to anything.

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    9. It bugged me enough to want to respond. Feel free to ignore me if it's so completely inconsequential.

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  6. I love Skerples play reports because his games seem so chaotic

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  7. For what it's worth, Tao of D&D is the guy who wants Dungeon Mastering to be taught as a course in university.

    Also, I can't dig it up right now but my absolute favorite play report snippet came from a post by the late Dungeon of Signs. He had a side by side comparison of how an event played out from the players' perspective, and then the same scene described in terms of what he was actually doing behind the screen. I think that's one of the best kinds of examples you can give a new DM, sometimes it's hard to really nail down the translation back and forth between mechanics and evocative/engaging description.

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    1. I think I vaguely remember the post in question but like you I can't dig it up.

      The idea of having a course on DMing at university vaguely reminds me of some bloke on rpg.net years ago who had some scheme whereby people would pay him to DM for them. Sorry, guys, it turns out the world doesn't actually owe you a living.

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    2. Found it, the play report wasn't the main focus of the post which explains why it was so elusive:

      http://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/2014/08/trust-random-encounter-table.html

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  8. I'll take actual play over most anything else. There's times when entirely theoretical advice is worthwhile, but there's a big thing I've noticed in those cases - they make the author excited enough for it to be contagious.

    While I'm sure experiences vary, I found that DMing was something I picked up most like driving. I didn't have formal driving school; just light parental guidance, and a cup of water that I wasn't allowed to spill. For DMing, I had a guide to read, and chances early on to run one-shots for a bunch of older players, who could point out my mistakes. With both, it was a lot of light guidance in the pan, and a lot of ending up in the fire.

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  9. My long dream is a podcast of actual play excerpts (like 5-20 minutes of play so I don’t have to listen to the whole damn thing), preempted with a narrative setup and followed by some commentary.

    Also, for all the online arguments, it appears there’s no real heat to the fire: just minds sparring. But maybe I’m just positive.

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  10. So teaching many things is pointless, well, unless it is teaching that encourages and fosters engagement with the material, in which case, teaching is beneficial.

    It sounds to me like there is plenty of value in being taught anything, as long as one is being taught well. And no, a list of "dos and don'ts" is not teaching well; critically examining how and why the subject works and can be applied is.

    Play reports with commentary can certainly have value, depending on the author. But I believe you mentioned being in the legal field; it feels a lot like handing someone a stack of cases and expecting them to understand law.

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    1. I specifically said that university teaching, even for philosophy, doesn't just involve a classroom and a reading list. There also needs to be explanation. This becomes more important with other subjects than philosophy - like law. My point about law is that you can't really explain to somebody how to do legal reasoning - you have to demonstrate it and give students opportunities to see it demonstrated.

      Nowhere did I say that teaching is pointless. I noticed in his "peanut gallery" post that Alexis tried to mischaracterise my post as saying that, but mischaracterisation is what the man does.

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