The Inability to Teach

Alexis has a lament up today wherein he whines about people who troll him. I got a good laugh because in the past he deleted a whole string of my comments when I wasn't trolling him, but instead just not responding precisely as he wanted me to so that he could socratically walk me into a landmine. The man has a controlling personality and an anger management problem, not a troll problem.

Regardless... that is not my subject tonight.

The real juicy shit was in the comments wherein he cites an epic 2008 pre-4th edition post where he expertly demolishes modern D&D iterations for being reskins rather than adding depth to the game. Though Alexis may be angry and controlling, the post is brilliant.

Unfortunately, his comment today was that his entire goal with his blog was to teach people how to play the game better. I say unfortunately because if that is his goal, I have to judge the blog to be an epic failure. I don't consider that to be the value of his blog at all. I find it to be incisive direct commentary that cuts to the heart of debates, mixed in with a bunch of inane stuff I cannot use at all, occasionally random maps to spark the imagination, and sometimes interesting mathematical game theory / praxis. 

I like his blog. I don't consider it a failure. I don't like his attitude, but then again I think Tom Cruise is a douchebag and I still watch his movies. Quality work outshines your personal bugaboos, in my book. It's why I still have links in my blogroll to people with whom I have had substantial disagreements in the past, even to the point of personal insults. Content trumps context.

So I wonder, what the hell is he talking about this being his blog-mission for?

On the subject of teaching, I find Alexis in the same box as most of us. Occasionally, if you look really carefully and turn your head sideways, you can learn something. But it takes work. I have yet to see any kind of teaching tool that I thought was really better than the tool that taught me: my own brain coupled with a few paragraphs in the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook.

I think perhaps Alexis wants to be able to tell people how to play better, but lacks the knowledge of how exactly to do it. I can relate. When I wrote Synapse, I was determined to do better. I failed. I tried to write a nice big section at the front of the book detailing how to play an RPG. But looking back at it now, a year later, I see that I didn't really do anything qualitatively better than that ole' 2nd Ed book. I just wrote more.

In the past 30 years, we have gone from this:

To this:

Yet we can't teach people to play RPGs any better than we did before.

Aside: Look at how pathetic that column looks in the 4e layout. Damn, that is sad.

Well, despite my failure to make it work in Synapse, I am going to tackle this bitch of a problem again in Novarium. I am actually dedicating a whole separate book to it, which I can do since I decided that Novarium will be even more sub-divided than originally planned. So in this book I plan to deploy more than just text, but also some really nifty graphic design concepts into the mix.

For example, I am going to have examples of play where there is a graphic representation of the table with icons for players around it. And it is going to show how the play can build through collaboration, evolve and react to circumstances, etc. Rather than just write a few paragraphs about how to play the game, I plan on really seriously showing you how it works.

And since I am building a secret 2nd entryway into the hobby, I am going to need all the firepower I can get.

So if you have any ideas for how to teach people to play. New graphic design concepts, new ways of describing things, maybe just some free association, let me know. I want to make this the kind of book you can just give to someone and they will be able to really understand just what it is that you do on your Nerd Sunday.