Today is OUR St. Crispin's Day!

 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 know already.  You might sit down to your table with the same prep notes, the same NPCs, same hooks, and experience wildly different games. This might have to do with the dice rolls, but CCO is going to claim it’s because of the communication that you and your players enact.

At the table, both player and DM are active participants who process information in order to make sense of the game, their characters, and each other. In moments of ambiguity, we take part in strategies to reduce the situation’s ambiguity (“I get advantage on Wisdom saves versus magic. Is this a magic effect?”), which the theory calls sensemaking. The sensemaking, like the communication, and the characters themselves are part of what McPhee calls “flows”. 

Researchers employing CCO in their studies think of organizations like rivers of constantly moving, changing, and evolving events. Communication forms your D&D table’s organization through four flows: membership, structure, activity, and position. These four circulating systems of meaning coordinate behavior around who is a member of the table (or the adventuring party), how they structure their relationships (“I’m a shooter. You’re a spell-slinger...and a bit of a glass cannon.”), how work gets coordinated (“Hold your sword attack until after I knock the gnoll prone so you’ll get advantage”), and how the organization positions itself with regard to others. That last one always makes me think of the factions my players have variously helped, harmed, and harassed over the years. 

All gaming groups must decide who is in and who is out. Membership is confirmed by communication and not necessarily bound by who shows up to play the game the very first time. I have had a player start in Session Zero and not come anywhere close to finishing the campaign. (No, I didn’t kill their character.) Sometimes that comes down to a matter of scheduling; other times it’s not a good fit between the player and the others at the table. Membership is a flow of socialization, where we learn what it means to be a member of the table (or of any group).

Taken to the gaming table, leadership in an organization might be thought of as your DM or perhaps a zealous player. Perhaps that player texts the group a lot about scheduling, offers her home for play, or comes up with plans and procedures for scheduling snack responsibilities. The structure of the group comes about (according to CCO) through the communication between players. The back-and-forth between players and DM can help members develop a shared understanding of who is who and what their roles are.

Third, adventuring parties have goals. At least, they should have goals if you want to generate action and engagement among the players. McPhee sees organizations similarly, as having a defined purpose. Maybe that purpose will be developed and communicated in terms of a mission statement, which is often meant to facilitate the coordination of activity within an organization. At the gaming table, this is hopefully simpler than in an organization. However, I’ve had groups where the coordination of a “When are we going to play next” might as well be The War of The Five Kings.

The final of the four flows of communication in CCO concerns how an organization positions itself within the world and in relation to others. No organization survives in a vacuum; neither survives any adventuring party without the help of myriad NPCs, factions, extra-planar beings, and the forces of Nature itself. The position of the institution is not only communicated within itself (as in flow three), but also with external groups. Parties build reputations as lofty idealists, muder hobos, or something in between.

Taken separately, the four flows of CCO blend and mix together, live material, verbal and somatic components to constitute the spell (the organization). Each flow is necessary. The flows happen in different times and places. A single message might address multiple flows and/or multiple audiences. Understanding the flows and how they seem to be working at your gaming table can help address problem players and behaviors for the attentive and engaged DM or player.

This might start with describing some observed behavior within the group, “Hey, I notice that when we’re trying to schedule the next session, you don’t usually respond”. However, it’s unlikely that by addressing merely one flow that problems will be solved.  Remember, they mix and interweave. The intertwining of player and DM, imagination and reality, the adventuring party and others can become at the best of times a co-orientation, wherein we align. Alignment leads to a shared understanding of the organization (gaming group) and a shared vision for the future of their play.