Dungeon Theory

Well, they’re not usually playing as a player character, so “no”.  But, they are at the table, running the NPCs and monsters, laying out the world, setting goals and parameters for success, so “yes”.  In D&D, without the dungeonmaster, there’s no game.  Without the players, there’s no game.  It’s a fascinating existence and role, the DM.  Maybe it’s taken me a bit long to get to this theory of group communication when I’m supposed to be writing about the group activity that is D&D, but here we are. As a team, the players and DM have a lot in common:  They hope to make good decisions and find quality solutions. Everyone hopes for a functional group. Randy Hirokawa and Dennis Gouran are here to help with their communication theory that considers how group interactions can have positive effects on the group’s decisions. In essence: what communicative functions must be accomplished for jointly made decisions to be wise/good/quality? The functional p...

  Secretly, the temple priest has children locked in her basement. The creepy green hag quietly protects a single village on the edge of her forest, yet steals livestock from the rest. The greedy, roguish pickpocket quietly funnels money into a capital-city orphanage. Cliche set ups such as these are so common as to be tropes in many fantasy settings. Playing with characters who act in ways contrary to their stated beliefs or who seem to embody contradictory sets of faith and practice are common because they’re so human, so relatable to our real lives. It’s time to talk about cognitive dissonance. Smokers can tell you how unhealthy they know the practice to be. The Scrooge-like miser ca alson recite the holy scripture’s prohibition against over-accumulation. The minivan with a “Local First” bumper sticker currently sits in the big box store parking lot. Each a perfect example of the disjunct between thought and action.  Dissonance is supposed to be distressing since it poin...

  When it comes to your turn in the initiative order, how much time have you spent thinking about and planning what you’re going to do?  (For the sake of your DM, I hope the answer is more than “none”.)  For our friendly neighborhood archer, maybe not much: shoot my bow.  For the wizard up next with 20+ spells prepared, perhaps there’s been quite a lot of thought that’s gone into what to do next. Let’s think of the archer and the wizard as opposite ends of a preparation continuum. The poles of these extremes are representative of what this theory of persuasion considers minimal and maximal mental effort. If using mental effort to consider what to do next is elaborating your options, just how likely are you to do that when your turn comes up? Richard Petty (not the NASCAR driver) and John Cacioppo developed their model of attitude change ( The Elaboration Likelihood Model ) in an effort to understand what makes it more or less likely that we’re actually going to thi...

          Imagine a D&D session where, instead of a traditional Difficulty Check (DC), where a roll either passes or fails, the dungeonmaster set-up a skill check with three possible outcomes. Many dungeonmasters probably already have such a tiered system for some rolls or situations. I, myself, have responded to player rolls with various shades of success. We might call the three options an underwhelm range, a whelm range, and an overwhelm range. Perhaps on a Survival Check an 11 or fewer represents losing the trail, a 12-18 represents following it slowly, and a 19 and above, a shortcut is found.  Think about this as a metaphor (and fun game mechanic) to persuasive communication. According to Social Judgment Theory (SJT) each time we encounter a message, we judge it in comparison to all the relevant messages we’ve received before. It’s a compelling idea to think that each time I offer a mission to my players, they each compare that offer to all...