Dragna's Blog: Doylism & Newnism—A Homebrew Campaign Post-Mortem

I don't have much news on Reloaded at the moment, so please enjoy this brief blog about my homebrew campaign - or rather, what became of my homebrew campaign - and how it influenced my thoughts on DMing as a craft and hobby.

Last week, I canceled my homebrew campaign.

We're still going to play together; don't worry. And I'll still be DMing. We've all agreed on what we're going to play next, and we're all excited for what that looks like.

But we also all agreed that the current campaign was unsustainable, for one big reason: As much as I enjoyed running the game at the table, I didn't enjoy doing session prep away from the table.

Now, this isn't the most shocking revelation in the world. Lots of people find session prep tiring and tough to make time before. But where many others enjoy fleshing out their world, exercising their creative juices, or just envisioning their players’ reactions to different twists and turns, I never felt any of that. All of it, from creative brainstorming to more rigorous design, always just felt like work.

Why?

Watson & Doyle

If you've been around the Patreon for a while, you've probably read one of my blogs or rants about the Watsonian vs. Doylist dichotomy. Styled after the point-of-view character and author of the Sherlock Holmes series, these two perspectives represent two distinct schools of thought to analyzing fiction:

• Watson lives in the world of the story. He sees the story as a linear chain of cause-and-effect. If I asked Watson why Sherlock Holmes decided to eat at a restaurant one day, Watson would reply, “Because he was hungry and it was a well-respected establishment.”
• Doyle lives outside the world of the story. He sees the story as a piece of artifice crafted to reach a particular conclusion. If I asked Doyle why Holmes decided to eat at the restaurant, Doyle would reply, “Because the story involves a murder in which a cook is poisoned by tasting his own soup, and I needed a way to get Holmes into the restaurant so he could witness the scene of the crime firsthand.”

Progressing to Watsonian design is ordinarily viewed as the first “level-up” that a new DM goes through. You see a lot of DMs on /r/CurseOfStrahd asking, “What would Strahd do if my players did X?” When these kinds of questions cropped up on the Patreon Discord, my go-to response (which became so predictable that a patron eventually made a sticker out of it) was: “Who is your Strahd?” Figure out what kind of person Strahd is, the logic goes, and you'll know how he's likely to react.

Watsonian design is great for verisimilitude and immersion. It's also great for DMs struggling to figure out how complex events might unfold: just set down what you know about the world and characters, and logically reason your way through the situation, step by step.

Doylist design is another step above Watsonian design. Where a Watsonian starts from first principles and works their way forward, a Doylist starts from the end goal - the experience they want to provide for their audience - and works their way backwards. Instead of asking “Who is your Strahd?”, a Doylist asks, “What kind of character does your Strahd need to be to give your players a fun and meaningful experience?”, and then reworks Strahd's characterization to fit the answer.

To a Doylist, nothing is real; it's all arbitrary - a conjurer's trick meant to guide the audience down a particular path. Strahd isn't a real person, so his identity doesn't matter; Strahd is whoever you need him to be to create the experience your players desire.

(It's worth noting that Doylist design isn't easy. Nine times out of ten, when you see a pre-published module with some clunky, uninspired content padding out the last third of an adventure, it's because the designer subconsciously realized that they needed to put more content there for the sake of pacing - a Doylist concept - but didn't quite understand what that content needed to accomplish, and so just shoved in a pile of random schlock and called it a day. I know this because I've done it myself.)

Doylist design is the capstone of DMing skill. That's not to say Watsonian design isn't important - you still need to review your narratives through a Watsonian lens in order to make sure they make sense! - but a Doylist paradigm allows you to craft adventures from a player-first perspective, ensuring that all of your schemes and ideas land as intended. A Watsonian is a logician; a Doylist is a designer.

For a while, I thought this taxonomy was enough. But, as it turns out, something was missing.

Something important.

Doyle's New Friend

To create new content, the Watsonian asks “What makes sense?” The Doylist asks, “What makes this work?”

But there's a third kind of DM - the DM who asks, “What do I want to see?” Call this the Newnist DM, named after Sherlock Holmes’s publishing company. The Newnist DM knows what they want to see in their game - a kraken! a war between the gods! pictures of Spider-Man! - and bends the laws of narrative reality to make that happen at any cost.

You can often recognize a Newnist DM by these three simple words at the beginning of a Reddit post: “In my world . . . “ In their world, maybe wizards are divine. Maybe elves are part-plant. Maybe salmon have wings and sing Bach. Why? Because the Newnist DM wanted it that way, and for no other reason.

The ur-example of a Newnist DM, of course, is the Storyteller DM - the Wannabe Creative Writer. “DMing is an opportunity for me to write the Next Great Fantasy Novel and my players are going to sit there and listen to it.”

But being a Newnist DM isn't inherently bad. A Newnist DM might simply think, “Wow, this thing is really cool, and I think my players will also find it really cool; I should add it so they can enjoy it too.” (Think back to the fifty DM's Guild supplements you see posted monthly on a subreddit like /r/CurseOfStrahd. Sometimes, it's filling a legitimate Watsonian or - more rarely - Doylist need. But most of the time, it's just raw Newnist content that aims to make its readers think, “Wow, cool!” and immediately cram it into their games.)

At its core, Newnism is about being passionate about ideas for their own sakes, rather than because they fit particularly neatly in the fictional world or because of what they can accomplish in context of the larger narrative.

Just like a Watsonian perspective is important for being able to create verisimilitude and immersion, so too is a Newnist perspective important for instilling passion and inspiration in your work. If Doylists are editors and Watsonians are fact-checkers, Newnists are the writers themselves, driven to create for the joy and anticipation of creation.

And so we get to the problem: I am not a Newnist DM.

Given the number of long rants I've given about Doylism and the number of times I've rejected pleas to add “content for the sake of content,” this should come as a surprise to no one. I take pride in my skill as a game and narrative designer; one of my more common boasts is, “If your players are surprising you with their choices, you haven't done a good-enough job designing those choices.”

So when I started running a 100% homebrew campaign for my playgroup (original setting, original characters, original lore, original narrative), I thought it'd be a walk in the park. I knew what made a campaign good. I knew how to make the pieces fit together. I'd already done it for Curse of Strahd twice over.

How hard could it all be?

Homebrew Ain't for Everyone

Wizards of the Coast, the company that published D&D, also owns the trading-card game Magic: the Gathering. In blogs and interviews, designers for Magic have identified two steps that go into the release of a new set: design and development. (WotC uses the word “design” here slightly differently than how I used it above, so stick with me.)

The Design phase is all about creating raw concepts for cards. It's pure, generative inspiration. “Wouldn't it be cool if . . .” Design is an opportunity to push the boundaries of game and narrative design, to explore genuinely novel concepts and propose some cool and interesting new ideas. It doesn't matter how unbalanced or stupid it is - if it sparks joy, throw it down on paper.

The Development phase is all about refining those ideas. The developers look at the set of cards in front of them and ask, Which ones are balanced? Which ones are broken? What does this set lack? What does it have too much of? How can we modify these ideas to create the experience we want players to have? And then they playtest and edit the hell out of everything.

Designers are Newnists. Developers are Doylists. I'm a developer, not a designer - I know how to make ideas Work. But I have no particular interest in or attraction to any particular idea.

I'm not just not a Newnist. I'm incapable of being a Newnist. I can't put on my Newnist hat and ask “Which ideas am I passionate about?” because there aren't any.

That's not to say, of course, that I don't have preferences or interests! I enjoy Greek mythology. I love urban fantasy. I dig speculative science fiction. But if you put a gun at my head and asked me to come up with an idea from one of those areas that I was genuinely and sincerely passionate about on its own merits, I'd go, “Uhh, wait a second. Um. Hold on here. Can we talk this out?”

When I brought up my homebrew woes in the Patreon Discord, someone remarked that the root of homebrew is finding something - a setting, a plot, a character - that you're at least a tiny bit obsessed with. I've never been able to find this. Every workable idea I have feels equally as workable as every other one. (I've nerdily described this as feeling like you're looking at the Matrix - everyone else sees reality, but you only see ones and zeroes.)

So what was I to do when I eventually came to terms with this?

First off - I realized that, even if some DMs could happily throw themselves the whole “design a campaign from scratch every week for your players to passively consume” gig, I definitely couldn't. Some people have stories to tell. I don't. I just care that, whatever story gets told, it gets told well.

Second - I realized that if I wasn't going to come up with a whole campaign from scratch, I had four choices:

• Do away with any pretense of telling a story or balancing the game and just run mindless Nightmare-difficulty encounters every week.
• Put the entire onus of creating a setting, characters, and story on the players as a group (e.g., “We want a campaign set in Norse mythology in which our characters are disgraced demigods who must regain their honor by stopping Ragnarok.”), and then just flesh that out myself.
• Run a module (with traditional Dragna edits).
• Design an adventure that met a particular project need and problem set that I was already interested in addressing (in this case, a Player Bootcamp series of modules built to teach players skills through gameplay).

I had some preferences, but ultimately, I felt that since I was willing to do any of them, I should defer the real decision to my players. They chose #4, with #2 and/or #3 as future plans.

To round this blog off, I think it's worth noting that the three types of DMing I've identified have nothing to do with what happens at the table. I love running the game for my players; the issue isn't what happens during the session, but what happens outside of it. Hopefully, with this new perspective, I'll be able to find a more sustainable - and satisfying - approach to how I handle the latter.