Dungeon Theory

Oh Boy. Here we are at Aristotle in ancient Greece.“There were many steps and columns, it was most tranquil.” - Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure . (Yes, they pick up Socrates, not Aristotle. I know.) From my reading, Aristotle’s view of human nature feels almost laughably naive in the 2000s. To the philosopher, successful rhetoric is supposed to require wisdom and eloquence. Audiences are thought to prefer truth inherently more than falsehood. Our success as a persuader is supposed to lie with our understanding of rhetoric alone: If we fail at it, it’s our own fault.  However, does that mean we can’t find ways to think about The Rhetoric in terms of D&D? Absolutely not. I got D&D for DAYS. First, for the DMs, we can first think about rhetoric in terms of simple persuasion. How can we get players to do what we want? Or, more interestingly, how can we offer them various persuasive options? According to Aristotle, there are multiple routes to persuasion. He often wrote a...

I think power is one of the drivers of player/DM conflicts, and why they can be so destructive to the community that is formed around the gaming table. The Dungeonmaster has power which resides in several locations: their title/role as DM, their understanding of the rules, their knowledge of the narrative elements of the game, and the fact that they know whether the chest is really mimic in disguise or just a chest. Players are not powerless, however. Without the players, no game can be had. No creative solutions are offered. No unexpected uses of mundane items can derail a well-balanced encounter. No city, ruin, or NPC names are turned into lewd jokes. At the gaming table, the potential for power use (and abuse) is apparent and if we are interested in games which are fair and just, we cannot ignore the presence and power of...well, power. Unjust and unwise uses of communicative power are at the heart of Stanley Deetz ’s theory which critically explores the communication within organi...

  I had a friend of mine who once railed against the Bill Pullman “ Today is our Independence Day ” speech at the end of that cinema classic. Apparently he was educated such that, to him, Pullman’s presidential tour de force was nothing more than a cheap rip off of Henry V’s “ St. Crispin’s Day ” monologue. Little did he know that years later Vigo Mortensen’s Aragorn would also rouse celluloid armies to his cause with a speech of his own in “Return of the King”. Each of these speeches is an exemplar (excellent or not) of the power of communication to bind people together in common purpose and to a common organization. Robert McPhee ’s theory claims that communication makes (constitutes) organizations and links members to that organization, regardless of any seeming battlefield chaos. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) theory can be boiled down to this: the players make the table. If you have Dungeonmastered  multiple tables, this is something you likely kn...