The Tao of D&D

Tailoring

2012-02-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

From the 10,000 word post:

"Fundamentally, the first step is to present a setting. Without burying ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented, the principle purpose of the setting is to 'ground' the campaign in something tangible that can be incorporated into the player's imaginations. If the player cannot visualize the setting. or how to move or interact within that setting, then the setting is worthless to your game. Flogging a setting for the sake of novelty over the principles of interaction is a poor proposition, and will result in a sharp decrease of momentum once the novelty departs. Your setting cannot exist for the sake of itself - it exists to give the players identifying markers upon which to play. "

Very well, let us bury ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented.

Most obvious are settings which have come down from fiction authors, who have contrived lands and cities and gods and monsters which seem to fit perfectly with a D&D setting. Tolkein has conveniently provided us with descriptions of Middle Earth, so that players at the table can picture the Inn at Bree, or the White City, or the Lonely Mountain. The flavour, too, of the land is laid out so that each player at the table - who has read the books - can imagine how their characters might think or act in such a place. And the same can be said for the other vistas, neatly listed for you in the infamous Appendix N.

Then of course there are the pregenerated worlds, convenient for your use. These are even better than the post-fictional worlds, since the 'grittiness' doesn't depend upon a few mere books with inconvenient time spent on plots and characters that won't ultimately be useful to the DM. The Outer World, Greyhawk ... even Dragonlance ... these offer so much MORE detail for your use. Enough, in fact, that you may never get to read all the possible materials that might be of use to you - and a seemingly bottomless well is a good thing, yes?

Even better, if your players are equally familiar with the pregenerated setting, then they should be able to visualize it. Better still, if the infrastructure of that world is sound and consistent, your party will be able to judge their actions against what they think the consequences will be ... that will be reassuring for them, and will increase their willingness to take risks. Overall, that's good for the momentum of your campaign.

Why, then, should novelty be a poor proposition?

If you have travelled, or can conceive of travelling, to a vastly different culture, you can see the difficulty at once. Let us say that we snap our fingers and appear in the deepest corner of New Guinea, or in a heavily populated part Ulaan Bator in Mongolia. What are the social rules? How should we behave so as not to offend anyone? Are we in danger, or is this ultimately a safe place? Upon what am I to base my expectations when I attempt to address the residents, or ask for a place to stay, or even to buy things from the market?

A common tactic that many adopt when finding themselves faced with these questions is to bull their way through. Westerners are famous for stepping on toes and brazenly insulting locals by demanding that things be handled or taken for granted in the same way they are in rural Devonshire or suburban Ohio. This has led a great many people into situations of great distress ... but that's what embassies are for. Thankfully, there IS a Devonshire and an Ohio, where people understand why we might have acted the way we did.

But if we extend the question to a unique, isolated world scene that has popped out of a DM's imagination, what then? As a player, how am I to judge what is right and what is wrong?

Often, a DM will take the trouble to provide a long list of contrived social moraes and institutions, which the players are to imbibe and hopefully channel through their roleplay. The only thing is: creating an entire cultural milieu is an incredibly daunting task - just consider the length of the Bible, or the complete Upanishads and the Vedas besides. It's just not possible to create a new reality with a few pages of 'traditions,' based upon nothing more than the DM's imagination. Thus, whenever it's tried, the proposed novelty relies upon the crutches of the social system we ARE familiar with - only with the uncertainty of where the DM's conception ends and where the usual social values begin. Inevitably, the DM's vision fails and the world either dies on the vine, or the more familiar values assert themselves and take over.

There's a reason for this. Our social values, norms, virtues and what have you, exist because they have proven to endure the test of time ... and that test has been thousands upon thousands of years. Something that's been in existence for a few weeks in a DM's notebook can hardly stand against that. Parties will return to the only behavior they know how to exhibit - their own - and the world will either bend to that behavior or the world will die.

Every author and filmmaker learns through trial and folly that there are some realities that must be adhered to when presenting an alternative "reality" to a modern audience. Concepts like love, loyalty, right-and-wrong as we understand it, attitudes towards sexuality and family - these must be maintained or else your audience will depart. It does not matter if it makes no sense in the context of the story. If Spartacus fights the Romans, it must be for the sake of an American-style freedom. If the poles of good and evil are to be maintained, the men who fight against Mordor cannot be demonstrated to be fornicators and idolaters. There can be drinking, but it is happy drinking, and taverns are happy places. Such are the expectations of the audience.

Yes, there is a disconnect here. Our social expectations do include an amount of unpleasant, undesireable expectations - there are drunks in the world, and people do rise up against corrupt governments only to be as corrupt themselves. Good and evil are outdated, outmoded - even ridiculous - concepts to many of us. And still they won't work for your players, because that is not the game they want to play. Even if your world is dark and gritty, it is dark and gritty only where those things are on display to be stamped out and the world made better. Your players will still need fantasy and sunshine if they're going to keep playing.

What I am saying is that if you will have a GOOD world, that world will be recognizable. I don't mean it follows the pattern of what your players see on their commute to work each morning. I do mean that bad people will present themselves in the way you would expect bad people to do so ... perhaps lying in the beginning, perhaps apparently virtuous and well-meaning - but always with that moment of treachery that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what makes them who they are. And they will have familiar, appreciable motivations - greed, power, wrath, pride. These motivations will likely not fall into the lusting, perverse categories. Your players will not appreciate it.

Obviously this does not merely apply to people. Rivers should be expected to run from the mountains to the sea. The sea should be expected to have waves. Grass will grow, and clouds will roll across the sky, and rain will be composed of water. Oh, you can play around with these things ... but if you play too far from the norm, you will only exhaust your players. Your world will become a laughing stock, as the rivers flowing up into the mountains will inspire first jokes, then exhaustion. An uphill flowing river is a like a joke that is funny once. After awhile, it loses its novelty and just becomes an inconvenient, tired thing that the parties have to be reminded of again and again, because they've forgotten. You will smugly report that it is raining mustard again, and the party will stare at you with dull eyes and dull expressions. "Yes, so, what of it," will be their opinion.

You will not make a good world with gimmicks. That the mountains are grey or green or off-pink with purple edges will not make any difference in even the short run. You won't get anywhere populating your world with weird and unfamiliar denizens. Birds of different feathers and conceived breeds do not inspire the imagination, they shut it down. Your players will not ponder your concoctions any further than the questions, "can we kill it, can we eat it, can we sell it." And in answer to those questions, your birds might as well be eagles and mackaws. The human imagination ponders that with which it has already developed a fetish. People like penguins and turtles and panda bears because they have grown up in a world rich with references to those things. Your players will not get excited about your sznifloos, because they did not receive stuffed sznifloos for Christmas, years ago.

If you will insist on creating all these things to make your world uniquely your world, you are climbing an impossible hill that offers no view. You're not tapping into the ready-made reservoir of player emotions already held in their minds for creatures that do impress them. An ordinary hippopotomus may seem too mundane for your world - but everyone knows what they are, and everyone can guess what they would do when stumbling across one. What does one do with a sznifloo?

Stop and think. If you were a tailor, and a man entered to have a suit made for himself, would novelty be your primary concern? Or would it be to fit your customer excellently, so that as he moved about in the suit you had made, and felt its sleeves upon his arms, and the reassuring grasp of the fabric about his shoulders, he marvelled at what a good tailor you were. It is little understood by DMs that the actual world fits us rather like a good suit - with food that we can grow and eat, and animals we can domesticate or shepherd, and aspects we appreciate and adore. True, the world is a nasty, scary place - but we have been fashioned biologically for this world, and it is that biology that makes it such a good fit.

Take the clothes made by others - novelists and game designers - and make alterations as you will, or mark your fabric and create your conception from scratch ... but set aside your grandious conceptions of novel artistry, and concentrate instead on just being a damn good tailor.

Drama

2012-01-31T08:50:00.001-07:00

Ah, there has been a bit of drama, and the drance has appeared everywhere, buzzing about and sucking gluttonously at all the shit that's dropped in the last twenty-four hours.

This morning my wife and I agreed that Drance, for me, is my own personal Paul Lazzaro. Some of you might not understand what I mean; some of you might recognize the name, but in the time since High School you've forgotten all about Slaughterhouse Five. I have a quote from the movie, not the book - the movie is a fair simplification of Vonnegut's vision, and will serve to make the point here:

Billy Pilgrim (speaking to a crowd): "You see in Tralfamador, where I presently dwell, life has no beginning, no middle, and no end. For example, many years ago a certain man promised to have me killed. He's an old man now, living not far from here. He's read all the publicity associated with my appearance. He's insane. And tonight he'll keep his promise." (murmurs through the crowd) "If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you've not understood what I have said." (Lazzaro appears on a high balcony with a rifle) "You see, it's time for you to go home - to your lives and your children. It's time for me to be dead for a little while. And then live again. I give you the Tralfamadorian greeting: Hello. Farewell. Hello. Farewell. Eternally connected, eternally embracing. Hello. Farewell." (Lazzaro shoots Billy; the crowd screams)

Somehow, I see that scene playing out in about thirty years.

The internet is a strange place. It is full of people who you'd cross the street before thinking about walking right by them. It is full of people who stink on busses for lack of deodorant, and who scream crazily at coffee shop vendors over a few cents change, and who regularly cut pedestrians off at traffic lights. And these people step onto the net, and create a nick for themselves, and try to pass as ordinary, worthy citizens. It is their chance, so they reason, to be finally accepted and respected as worthy persons, which they perceive themselves to be ... but as it is in their lives, they've done nothing on the internet to earn that worthiness - nothing at all, except to create a nick. For all they can see, that nick is a license to sit in a balcony and shoot at the people for whom the crowd has come.

If the only evidence I gave of my person on the internet was slapping around people and screaming at the mob, I would very rightly be despised. But what the mob cannot understand - what the mob will never understand - is that I have done more on this blog these past three years than scream at people. I have written funny; I have written clever; I have written a ton of carefully backed arguments. I have run a campaign that is a mass of labor and creativity. I have given more evidence of my value than the mere nick I have chosen. If there are those out there who cannot, or will not, understand why it is that people continue to defend me, or read me, or link to me, let them remember that I have not just spent my time eating the shit that drama creates.

Listen, Dungeon Masters, and those of you who are youngest. You will always find yourself in a position where some player has taken something you've said so much to heart that they are now screaming at you in your dining room to 'get fucked,' while you are screaming at them to 'get out.' After it happens, you're going to feel the shakes of adrenaline. You're going to question yourself and your players, wondering if you are a good DM or not. You're not going to have a clear idea of why the whole stupid drama played out at all. You said something, then they said something, and then suddenly the drama was full-blown. And ten minutes after it was over, you'll wish it hadn't happened, whatever it was that did happen.

If you'll give me a moment, I'll explain it. It is called real life. You, the DM, have gotten off your job on a Friday night, or you have just spent all day Saturday fighting crowds at the mall or weeds in the back yard, or shovelling snow for the fourth time from your damn huge driveway. You're exhausted, you're pressed for time, you want to run your world more than anything and you're downing coffee and other caffeine drinks to keep going. Your players, too, they've had their rough days, and they're doing likewise. And all of you, jacked up on drinks and concentrating your whole attention on this one fucking night being the only goddamn decent five hours in your otherwise shitty week, are under pressure. You're under a lot of pressure - more than you know.

And foolishly, you've hinged all that pressure, and all that energy you've poured into your bodies chemically, on die rolls. It's what you've chosen to do. And when those rolls don't go right - and inevitably, they won't - those hinges are going to strain and tear ... and this is going to be made worse when the tear happens in just such a way that you're reminded of your real life, or the DM or a player reminds you of someone or something that you have to deal with unhappily in your real life.

The reminder doesn't have to be conscious. The human mind is chock full of unconscious triggers. There's a thousand moments of stress that we all deal with and handle, that we don't want to deal with and handle when we're having 'fun' around a table throwing dice. But that moment comes, and our minds do start to deal with it, and all of the sudden we're screaming mad - and we don't know why.

After the fact. After the moment. Then we know. We can sit down and piece it out and realize we did this for those reasons and that for these reasons and suddenly it all seems really stupid and unimportant. We have a moment of comprehension that only we ourselves truly grasp.

Sometimes, these moments end friendships that never needed to end. Sometimes, we can pick up the pieces and fix it. Now and then, it just takes a handshake. "Sorry buddy. That was stupid. I don't know why I was being such an idiot."

But then, there's the internet. The wonderful, marvelous, I-wouldn't-want-to-live without it internet. The internet and its built-in fan base, screaming just because it needs to scream. It's numerous souls have also had their shitty weeks, only they don't have any five hours to play the game, or dice to roll. Or the games and the dice they have aren't enough to shed off the fucking misery of their lives. So they go looking for the flash of anger that others feel, and feed off that anger for all its worth. They need that anger. Desperately. It is their moment to shine - to post comments to perceived compatriots who are just like them, who are 'in the moment' of a misery just like their misery. And for as long as that misery lasts, the flies will share it with you, and commiserate on your unhappiness, and send you flowers and candy to remind you of just how important and valuable YOU are ... all in the hope that you will say to them the thing they really, really need to hear to make their unproductive lives seem a little more important:

"Thank you guy. I really needed to hear that."

Disappointed

2012-01-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

Not everything in the world that you wish for pans out. I have unfortunately come to a position of impasse with JB of B/X Blackrazor, who only this week began running a character in my world. I'd like to say that this is not because of something that he said to me. I'd also like to say that this is not due to his wishing to break it off with me. I do not know what his wishes are. This impasse is something entirely of my own doing, and has more to do with my perception of what it is that defines a gentleman than it does whatever sort of player JB happens to be.

I write this preamble for the benefit of my other players, and those who would play with me, and no one else. I take the position that I have, which can be read on the comment threads of these two posts, here and here, because I firmly believe that the character of an individual is defined by the manner in which they approach opposition to their behavior. I believe there is a time to apologize. And I believe there is a time not to apologize. When the apology is given, it should be done unreservedly. When the apology is not given, the consequences should be accepted graciously. With regards to JB, I expected an apology. I did not ask for it, but I expected it just the same.

I do not like it when people apologize to me for things that don't matter. I am, however, intolerant when I fail to receive an apology for something I think does matter. JB demonstrated himself ready to apologize quite profusely about misunderstandings and minor errors and timing errors - but where it came to apologizing for open disrespect, no apology occurred.

I am old. I have found this is often the case.

The above said, and my reputation as an intolerant made marginally clearer, I would like to ask a question I asked in the second linked thread: Why is it that whenever players declare that they are 'playing in character' they invariably act like fucking jerks?

I suppose its because if they weren't being jerks, there wouldn't be any need to use the argument that they are acting 'in character' to justify their behavior.

But then it comes to mind, why in particular is it that people who claim not to be jerks in ordinary life, who act like jerks in D&D games, while arguing that they're being 'in character,' feel they need to have characters that are jerks in the first place?

Is it that there's a particular kind of person in the world who is not a jerk, who wants so much to be a jerk, that D&D is their big opportunity to do so? I know this is what television would have us believe - television shows from Our Miss Brooks forward have pitched this as a dramatic device hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. It makes for lively interaction between the actors, and serves to moralize about it one ... more ... time.

But here's the thing. Most of the people I know who are not jerks, aren't jerks because they actually feel that being a jerk is a bad thing. Even I think being a jerk is a bad thing. Oh yeah, I'm an asshole, and I write like an asshole ... but I have yet to do anything worse than blow a lot of air. I'm not actively trying to make my players jump through any hoops or actively mistreating them. I don't even wish JB any ill will ... I just don't want to run him in my world. This post is without question an insult to him - but you, gentle reader, and most everyone reading this will put all that down to Alexis being wrong about that, true? You're bound to put it down to Alexis blowing air, and for fuck's sake, you're probably right about that.

It boggles the mind, then, that someone would want to run in my world. I personally would like to know why someone who indicated that they would want to; who knew without a doubt how intolerant I could be; who in fact competed to run in that world - would then choose, as his DEFINING character trait, an intolerant, pushy, insistent, self-serving asshole.

Did it not occur that a player displaying this personality might run smack bang into the DM's personality?

Hey, let's point out the very obvious. Do you know what kind of 'in character' personality NO ONE in the whole wide world of RPGing likes in a player they have to run with? Just guess. Come on, you don't need me to say it, do you?

I have known games where EVERY player had this personality. Funny thing was, it wasn't 'in character' around those tables. Those guys actually were fucktards. They weren't pretending to be anything.

Well, that's the thrust of it. I'll just add a couple of words about what DMs should do when faced with players who reach for and channel this asshole personality as an 'in character' roleplaying choice:

Boot them.

The Mill and The Cross

2012-01-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

Let's talk a little porn.

Any medieval scholar must eventually wonder at the intensity with which Europe fetishized the death of one particular man of foreign extraction - an intensity which could be measured at a ratio of perhaps 10,000:1 against the fandom surrounding Star Wars or even the NFL. In the minds of the ordinary European, every element of the death was painstakingly examined and extrapolated: the actual death itself; the very words that were spoken; the behavior of every person present; the reason for the death; the arguments used for and against; the systematic application of torture before the event and the theological ramifications thereof, even with elaborations of mythological events coinciding with those of a mundane nature. This one death held European society in a sort of terrified, contemplative, contradicting ecstasy that lasted over a thousand years, and which still holds a dwindling few - comparatively - heartily in its grasp. This one death was - is - the very definition of the term 'passion.'

We hardly imagine what it was to the minds of our distant ancestors.

Over the weekend I caught the film, The Mill and the Cross, which every review you will find will tell you is "about" a painting by Pieter Bruegel, The Procession to Calvary. Calvary, for the uninitiated, is the hill upon which the aforementioned man died. I'd like to express my extreme distaste with reviewers, who live in the small-minded state of existence that leads them to believe that a film which takes place within a painting must be about the painting, and not ALSO about the thing the painting is about. It is as if to say that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is about the senate chamber, because it happens to take place there, or that The Shawshank Redemption is about prisons. But this is the sort of ignorant deconstructionalism I've come to expect from modern day reviewers of films, for whom the rims of the glasses upon their noses is a far-sighted observation - naturally a film of unusual purpose and design could achieve no better effect than the casting of pearls before swine. I have not for some time seen any movie so rashly misunderstood.

I would tell you, see this film. It has everything to do with a man's death, and nothing to do with the edifice that has built extensively and appallingly upon the man's death. The edifice itself, the worshipped entity that has proported to tell Europeans how to live, and then execute them when they do it less than well, is the villain in the 'canvas,' demonstrated eloquently in the work without any character's wagging finger. But I shall not be more precise than that in describing the 'edifice,' since I don't give a fig if the ordinary, uneducated, ignorant person knows what it is I refer to - the movie takes the same high road, and I shall not veer from the path.

But then, the director, Lech Majewski, is Polish, and clearly speaking to Europeans in this film and not to Americans, so I think it fair to say that his audience knows of what he speaks. Majewski does not bow to explain; he does not bow to moralize; he presents a tableau and an argument, and demands that the viewer should apply brain to problem. I did, and in doing so, watched the movie twice through.

I do not think that any film made has ever captured the sense or the flavour of my Dungeons and Dragons world so perfectly. I shall have to say that if there is a texture to my world, it is the texture to be found in this film - from the ordinary happenstance of people rising from beds to eat, to the setting out to do a day's work, to the fear and casual abuse perpetrated by authority upon the helpless and ordinary person. One does not "enter a picture" in watching this film, but into the very condition and state of living to be experienced in the 16th century.

I remain astounded.

The "Magical" Assassin

2012-01-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

I have this fantasy where I have time to post something again on this blog - oh wait ... I seem to have time right now!

I want to talk about assassins.

It's true that a lot of campaigns won't allow them. I know that for some, it's the whole idea of a class dedicated to cold-blooded murder, and the squick related to that ... but for most, I think that's just a convenient excuse for a bigger issue: players don't know how to run them.

There are certain tropes that have built up over the years in D&D - mostly engendered by young people who did not understand very much about life, or about nuance - and one of the worst of these is that an assassin can simply walk up to someone, anyone, on the street, and 'assassinate' them. Even worse, there exists the idea that in the middle of combat, when the opponent misses, the player assassin declares, "I assassinate him!" Whereupon the 14-year-old DM answers, "Roll percentile die!"

This ridiculous scenario is fostered by the belief that assassins don't have much going for them. They have the same crappy hit points as a thief, they haven't got even the thieving abilities of a thief, they don't fight any better than a thief ... and it takes more X.P. per level to go up.

Jeez. Why would anyone run an assassin? Heck, better treat that assassination ability like an instantaneous reloadable magic spell that can be applied all the freaking time.

And that's what happens.

Part of the problem that 14-year-old players buy into that kind of bullshit is that the idea drifts upon the wind that assassins in D&D are something like the modern day syndicate Hit Man - a fellow who takes contracts for money. Gygaxian Logic dictated that a 'guild' had to be created where said contracts could be distributed out, where assassins could get together for coffee and cakes after the job, and of course the local officials paid just to look the other way. So once again, there's another trope ... the assassin stomping into your campaign and asking you straight up, "Hey, where's the assassins guild? How much do I pay them? Have they got any contracts for me?"

Like yes, what I'd really like to do now is have all my players squat motionless around a table while the assassin in the party spends the next four hours carefully hunting down the pre-generated victim, who obviously can't wait to die. Or, alternately, the five minute episode where the assassin picks up his contract, heads around to the bar where Pick the Needle is known to down drinks, dispatching him with a quick percentile roll before turning up again amidst the party counting his cool 200 g.p.

Can I just say: do we need more proof in this world that the originators of D&D were a bunch of really, really, flabbergastingly stupid pud-pounding morons?

But heck - I'm known to be biased about such things.

So basically, having gotten rather sick with the assassin schtick, DM's just settle the problem once and for all by denying the existence of assassins as a class. Sure, people still "assassinate" ... but without the percentile roll.

My personal feeling is that the percentile roll is fine. I have no trouble with an imagined assassin having a solid biological understanding of the humanoid body, and being able to take advantage of that with a swift knife thrust, or a garrote, or what you like. I really don't mind this being a percentage, it works or it doesn't kind of roll.

But there has to be an infrastructure behind that roll that makes sense. The assassin HAS to surprise the victim - and the assassin HAS to do so at a distance that allows absolutely no time at all. It doesn't do any good to surprise the victim from seven feet away ... unless the assassin is running flat out, and if so, a little surgery is going to be a little more difficult. In films, assassins who go for the throat NEVER miss ... but in reality they would all the time. So we're talking adjustments - adjustments for weapons, adjustments for movement, adjustments for all kinds of circumstances. But I don't think those adjustments are easily managed by a few tables ... there are too many circumstances. For myself, I tend to play it so that whenever the assassination set up isn't perfect, the assassination chance is halved, or quartered, depending on how many relevant details there are.

What's perfect? You're in the shadows; the victim steps out a few feet from you; the victim is distracted by a pocketwatch, or something in the sky - and you step out and kill him.

Now, if you make that happen as an assassin, I'll give you the experience points for assassination. But if you blunder around and don't think things through ... well fuck, who does? I have yet to have a player who really has the cold natured heart necessary to carry forth the process behind the assassination. I've been hammering on this point for quite a few years and for quite a few years I come up short. It doesn't really surprise me - on some level, I think that if you have a player at the table able to really think like a killer, you might have to wonder just what you're doing having this person in your house.

Still, that's how the assassin ought to approach it: "How do I put myself in the right place at the right time to murder that fellow there whose standing in my way?" And the removal of obstacles is definitely the point - there is no "assassin's guild" in the sense of a house in town where assassins hang out. Any assassin's guild would form around one master assassin, and every member of that guild would be a FOLLOWER of that master assassin. Thus, in the game, NOT A PLAYER CHARACTER. By definition! A player assassin who was a follower would have to do what the master assassin told him to do - and that hardly works well in a campaign, unless that assassin is the only player. Among other players, the assassins would have to be an ordinary serial killer, who might someday organize a collection of serial killers ... but in the meantime, they're on their own.

Which means, if they want to have a contract to kill someone (plausible), they're going to have to figure out how to get one without it being handed on a silver platter. Good luck with that. I'd love to see a player really figure out how to do that ... it would really take some serious freakin' thinking. I know as a DM, I'm going to be picking any plan apart for the opportunity to send the guards in and catch the player - it better be a really good plan.

Still, anything's possible.

Inside the party, I can see benefits for the rational thinking assassin. Someone's harrassing the party? The assassin will take care of it. That guard's in the way? The assassin will take care of it. Three guys are following the party? The assassin will take care of them. And so on. With forethought and planning, always. Never - absolutely never - by walking up to them, waving hello, and magically assassinating them.

Shit.

Rock-Paper-Scissors

2012-01-24T07:39:00.001-07:00

The contest is very simple.
All persons will play at the same time. Because my comments are on moderate, each person can comment on this post with their choice. All persons will have a chance to comment before I publish all results for each round. Your first choice will be the only one I will accept - subsequent choices in a particular round will be ignored. It might be possible to finish this in one round, or it may take several.

To repeat. You, the players, will write one word on a comment: say, "scissors." When all persons have written one word (or willingly bowed out), I will publish and declare the winners for that round. Remaining winners will then compete in following rounds, if these are needed.

Calculating results:

The choice with the largest number of proponents will wipe out those one step down from that choice. Left over persons will survive, with the winners, to the next round.

Example: Three persons choose 'rock'; one person chooses 'scissors' and one person chooses 'paper.' In that round, rock destroys scissors, so that person is out. Both those who chose rock and that one who chose paper will survive to the next round.

If there the largest number occurs for two different choices, then the superior choice will destroy the other; left over persons will survive.

Example: Two persons choose 'rock' and two persons choose 'paper'; one person chooses 'scissors.' Paper will destroy rock, so those two persons are out; those choosing paper and scissors will survive to the next round.

If the largest group fails to kill anyone, then the second largest group will have considered to have killed all persons in the largest group.

Example: Four persons choose 'rock'; no one chooses 'scissors;' one person chooses 'paper.' In this round, the one person choosing paper destroys the four people choosing rock.

If all persons make the same choice, or if an equal number of players makes each of the three choices, then the round is void and repeated again.

Example: Everyone chooses 'rock.' The round is played over.

Example: With three persons left, one person each chooses 'rock,' 'scissors' and 'paper.' The round is played over.

If one person is chosen without having designated a second person, those still surviving will play for the second position.

If for some reason Alexis accidentally publishes some results too early, due to the nature of blogger, that round is void and will be played over.

Rounds are played until there is one final winner and one final loser. This may not be completed today. Please note, there is a hole in the middle of my day when I will be unavailable.

I will continue to publish comments which do not contain results. If I have missed something in my logic above, please inform me immediately, and I will rule.

JB, Imon Fyre, Oddbit, Wickedmurph, Arduin ...

You may begin.

God Rot DDO

2012-01-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

In 1984, when I was 20 years old, I went to watch the movie Revenge of the Nerds with my friends. We knew nothing about the film except the commercials that went before it, and as it was the first weekend, and there was no internet, we had not even heard word about the film from anyone who had seen it.

But my crowd was a definitely odd-looking bunch, punk and pre-goth and dylanesque, channelling everything from Elvis Costello through the Marquis de Sade. As it happened, waiting for the movie to start in the era before theatre advertising, we found ourselves sitting in front of a line of four Paris Hilton-wannabes ... though of course Mme. Hilton was then only three years old. The Paris type has been around a lot longer than Paris.

They did not know anything about the film, either. They knew less than we did. This we found out because as my crowd was loud and obnoxious in the way that only hardcore nerds can be, and because the film was about us (we were sure), these girls eventually came around to asking us what a 'nerd' was.

You see, they didn't know.

Putting aside that they were obviously stupid, and that they were obviously NOT going to like the film, I turned about, leaned on the back of the seat behind me, and explained nerds to these four girls. I was a lecturing bastard even then.

They called me a few rude things, I said I didn't care, and then I turned around and spread my arms wide as though to embrace the movie screen, and cried out loud enough for the whole theatre to hear, "THESE ARE MY PEOPLE!"

How very, very right I was. The film remains one of my favorites.

But we know now how the term 'nerd' has been co-opted to death and how it has come to replace the word 'expert' where it comes to ordinary, white collar work. Every Disney movie (and most other studios besides) contains a nerd who is in no way like any nerd I ever knew once upon a time, and every said depicted nerd appears, at worst, to be Hollywood ugly.

These are definitely, very definitely, NOT my people. Not, not even those guys.

This is all working its way towards the title in this post - DDO players do not play D&D. Oh, my gawd, do they ever NOT play D&D.

Not that this will come as a surprise to the more hardcore of my gentle readers. So you may rest easy, I'm not going to write a point-by-point comparison. I'm sure others have done so already ... and in any case, i think I would have had to have played DDO at some point in my life to do a credible job. I haven't, so I won't.

But people who have played DDO and not D&D drift into my campaign and I don't mind that. They find out soon enough that the games are different, and then a strange thing happens. They like D&D better. Imagine that. They would rather spend a Saturday night fumbling with archaic ideals like dice and such, and who can blame them? Computer games suck. We all know computer games suck. They're one redeeming feature is that they don't require social graces, they can be played a long time and they don't suck nearly as much as television. Or most everything else.

Someday, computer games won't suck. But as long as they depend on cut scenes and side quests and monthly payments and bullshit filler and player-player competition, they are going to suck.

Here's the thing, however. Computer games were around when everyone who played them wasn't a nerd. In fact, in strictest definition, nerds are so rare that a computer game company would die brutally trying to survive on that base. In my 1,850 student high school, there were exactly six of us. I don't mean there were six nerds in my particular crowd ... I mean in the entire school, there were six nerds who could legitimately be classed as social lepers - which is what nerds are. Sometimes they are social lepers because they are really smart; and sometimes because they are mean; and sometimes because they are a-political or amoral or just not all there. And all of them have a long, long history of having their social leprosy proven to them. These are not people sitting around waiting for the diagnosis. They know what they are.

We played computer games because they sucked less than everything else. And we built computers and radio telescopes and guitars and wrote books and sang on street corners because we had gobs of time not spent being involved in ordinary social conventions. Through our long, lonesome years, we read and read and read and lived with society like Jane Goodall lived with the chimps, watching them, worried about being killed by them, and learning all about them. And we took that learning, most often than not, and applied it to ART.

Yes, some of us were about computers and electronics, but not because computers and electronics meant jack shit in themselves - we were into them because of what those things could CREATE. If you fuck around taking computers apart and rebuilding them in your basement, you're not a nerd. If you fuck around rebuilding computers with the idea of modifying a river-spanning bridge into a moog upon which you can play something by the Clash, then you are a nerd. See the difference?

What's my point? Oh, there's no point. I'm just fucking around with this blog, finding out what it can do.

Wanted: Player

2012-01-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

The onblog campaign has been gaining momentum again after our December hiatus, but as it happens one of the players has simply vanished. There's no word at all, and we have no idea what happened - he had seemed very into the game, suggesting something nefarious.

Still, we all know the game ... and since four players make a better session than three, the time has come to start looking into finding another regular player for the game. If said individual shows up later, then five is still manageable ... and five is better than three.

So ... if you are interested in exploring my world as a player, now is the time.

The criteria is fairly rigorous, I'm afraid. The campaign is played on a blog, so the first thing a new player needs to have is an ability to express his or her self in the written word. You should be someone who likes to write, and who is willing to do so on a regular basis. You should have good grammar, and have the ability to be precise and to the point. Saying all that needs to be said in the least number of words is a priority.

The game is entirely played between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Notes pass back and forth sometimes in the evening, but the game is played during office hours, so you should have reasonable access to the internet at that time. Most of have meetings, work, things we do, so game moments get suspended constantly and sometimes for whole days, but we'd want someone who could log on, check to see what's happening and offer an action to keep things going. I really couldn't base an event around your character if it took three days to hear from you. We play virtually every day, even if it's just a little bit. Fanatics, therefore, are wanted.

You should be completely familiar with the nature and the style of the campaign, and I think you should be flexible about what rules you want to play by. I'm not going to change rules in the game just to suit you, so if you depend on things like skills and feats, my world won't be for you. It is highly modified AD&D, but the structure is basically still the old game from the late 70s.

It wouldn't hurt to know my blog, and to have learned by now that I'm not an asshole all the time. A lot of people around the blogosphere seem to think I must be painted black, not gray, and are constantly surprised when I say gray, or even white things.

I would like to hear from you, either in the comments section or to my email at alexiss1@telus.net. I must tell you I'll be more impressed if you write me in the comments section - how can you ask to play openly on the blog if you can't give me the reasons you'd play just as openly?

And I want to hear reasons. Not just, "It will be fun!" - but honest reasons why you'd want to give it a crack, what kind of character you'd like to run, what you'd like ultimately to do with the character and how you think you'd interact with the present three players running. Be specific and give examples.

I'll be open minded ... but the game online is a good one, so if I don't see a good fit, I won't take anyone. The other players will be watching this post too, so if you ingratiate yourself with them, they'll have a lot of pull when it comes to convincing me to let you play.

Give it a try. I won't eat you.

Actual Life

2012-01-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

In my long post I made an association between the roleplaying game and something I called 'actual' or 'real' life. The quote ran as follows:

"Your actual life consists of moments of panic and discord; of terror and bliss; of boredom and intensity. The DMs goal is to reduce the boredom circumstances as much as possible, but to otherwise provide for the same opportunities as a real life provides in terms of distraction and interest."

Very well, what is real life, and how does one achieve it?

Let us not, to start, bog down into a question of whether or not we exist, or for what purpose we exist, or how we came about to exist, or by what means ought we to continue our existence. These are all very interesting questions, and bear great application to the daily habit of real life, but they are of secondary value in terms of reflecting the qualities of real life, which is the subject upon the table now. Life, for all its variances, for all its difficulties and rewards, feels remarkably real, does it not? In that I mean that it possesses a quality that seems to capture all of your attention. It is, in a word, absorbing. I don't propose that your job is particularly your cup of tea, or that your relationship is going as planned, or that you've achieved the goals you'd hoped to manage by the age you're at now, no - I only mean to say that whatever quality of life you're experiencing at the moment, you are, in fact, experiencing it. You've got to admit - real life is pretty goddamned distracting.

This is all a round about way of tackling the subject of immersion, which my functioning wikipedia tells me "... is a state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment, often artificial."

Let's be reasonable. You are not going to achieve this to the nth degree around a gaming table. Your players are still going to be aware of the location of the cheetoes, the dice are still going to demand them to recognize the presence of a mechanic apart from the 'game world,' and you're still going to have to get up and take your physical self to the bathroom every hour or so to expel the real coke you're drinking. No one here is pitching virtual reality. All we are asking for is a reasonable amount of distraction, something for our imaginations to take root upon so we are not thinking about our jobs, our relationships or our failed ambitions ... right?

Recently, reading Raph Koster's blog, he described the death of immersion in the cloud of internet interconnectedness ... as in, how can there be immersion in video games if thou art repeatedly interrupted by pop-ups and jingles of your internet moving and shaking? There you are, in the middle of a scene between you and the Princess Raglia, who's husband has just died, and you're informed that BleedingMonkeyFuckBoy22 has just come online. Kinda sucks.

And I get his point. There's a general sentiment going around the bourgeois that interconnectedness is both a joy and a curse ... that you need apps to tell you to get off your computer, to fight off the apps that tell you to get on, like people in the 70s taking downers and uppers to sleep at night and get up in the morning. There's something reassuringingly moronic about the nature of the social middle class, and about the way one-time Bohemians are pulled into it once seduced by owning a house, a car and the comforts of life insurance. But immersion, or 'real life' as I prefer to call it, isn't passed on, or even feeling a bit sickly. It's doing very well ... it just isn't the stale product of a repeating video screen.

In a very bad film from the early 80s (never mind which one), David Cronenburg tried unsuccessfully to tackle an emerging social phenomenon - the blurring distinction between actual reality and perceived reality, brought on by the universality of television. We can't blame Cronenburg for failing - he always fails. He fails because he always tries to cram incomprehensible contexts into a two-hour film, as though that's the right medium for them, with the recognition that there is no right medium. In this particular case, he has one of his characters propose the following argument: "... whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore the television is reality ..."

Have you stopped to consider that a part of your memory; a part of the environment that made you you, that fashioned your character and rationalized your decision-making process, has been founded in the passage through several small stone corridors that led you from a perceived surface to a perceived underground chamber, when thence you barbarously slaughtered a bevy of imagined creatures in order to obtain an imagined reward which you then - in reality, mind - transfixed into your consciousness by writing said reward out in detail upon a piece of paper? When you compare the person you are with the persons your parents chose to be, do you assign a value to how far your adventures went towards making you an adult? And when you sit at the table as a dungeon master, do you contemplate your effects upon a comparable basis? Do you consider that you're presenting a perceived reality that is nonetheless teaching lessons commensurate in some degree with not touching a hot stove and not telling your friend that his girl is sleeping around on him?

I would guess not.

The reality of your world begins and ends with the reality you choose to present in it ... or if you prefer, the degree in which you believe in your world. This is not a strange or unstable phenomenon. Most writers who invest fully into their works come to accept that their characters have become real persons ... that they, in some alternate reality, walk about and go through the actions of eating and surviving for their own sakes, apart from the writer's actual work. This is then conveyed to the audience, that reads the work, which then itself comes to believe in the reality of the characters. Does it not seem necessary that in some place, in some existence, not quite established by science, that Frodo and Bilbo must exist? Is it not remarkably easy to suppose that in San Francisco in the 1940s there was a Sam Spade, or that a Yossarian spent the 50s quietly and happily burbling to himself in a Valencian cafe, reached after a long sea voyage?

But how do you achieve that? How do you make your world real, given that you buy into any of this argument and accept that your world being real would be a marvelous thing?

To begin, you must make the conscious decision that it will BE real ... even if it is not. It is the conscious decision to dismiss reason and judgment in this particular instance, and to embrace that your insistence is a great influence upon your belief than is your observation. This is not as difficult as it seems ... but it is also not something that can be negotiated. It is all or nothing - a bit of doubt tears the structure down.

Then you must apply the observances you have made of the world around you to the world you intend to make. If your experience with this world denies the existence of something, then the matters of your world must not have that thing. There is nothing physical, for example, to keep me from lifting this computer over my head and bludgeoning to death the fellow sitting at the next table. My muscles will lift this computer, and swing it. The fellow may struggle against me, but if my first hit is sound I will have the upper hand. There will be no god who will restrain my actions. No rule of existence will intervene. It is down to my will, and my will alone, that decides what I will do next. Consequences may come, but only after the event.

If your world is rife with player restraint, it will never be real. It will never measure up to real life, and will therefore never truly distract from it.

The same is said for every element of your world. If your setting cannot be explained or expressed to a degree equal to how you would describe your work place, or the village where you holidayed last year, or the house in which you grew up, it will never lift your players to believe in it. If your player's characters are not fleshed out somehow; if the rules apply like frogs scattering on a pond; if swung weapons fail to terrify; if magic does not cause players to wonder, as it must; if a journey does not take time; if invented foes do not speak or act with the ring of truth; if blood and sweat always produces a reward, or if rewards come regardless of blood and sweat; then your world will fail. It will always fail.

If you will be a DM, you must lift yourself from your stupor and go look at the world, and see the thing you dare to offer distraction from. You must understand the world, comprehend it somehow, not merely in its physical manifestation, but in the means by which the denizens of that world struggle and achieve, or wallow and die.

If you will not do this, you do not have a creator in you and you should quit now. From your limited experience - the experience of only one life, your own - you will manage to do little more than whitewash a cardboard surface ... and this will be the reason you have no players.

My Agency

2012-01-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

This will be short. I don't seem to have as much energy as I'd like, and I've got a bevy of other things on the go.

Last week, I talked about player agency, and got slapped around a bit. I don't mind. Mostly, I got the impression that people just didn't think grammar was that important; that the future tense is as viable as any other tense; and that in general the social system is breaking down and this is what we've got.

My players offline did have a real good time regarding issues of permission when they came around Saturday to play. As it happened, I was too sick to run and we chatted about life and sociology and watched a 1959 movie, The Bridal Path, which my daughter, her Scotland-loving boyfriend/husband (they live together), and the lesbians who run in my world hadn't seen. A good time was had by all.

If I am talking about agency, I intend to make a simple point: I have power as a DM. We don't play without my say-so, and if we are playing, then I'm going to lay out some rules of propriety and address that I think are appropriate for players to follow if the game, as a whole, is going to run smoothly. There is a shibboleth to running in my world, and those who participate and enjoy the pleasure of my labor are going to adhere to it. It is, if you can forgive the absolutism, a point of privilege of being a DM.

Why should I care about grammar? Because communication requires clarity, and communication about action, doubly so. If I make a statement as a DM that is unclear to the player, I do not quibble and haw about how I made the point previously. I fix my statement and extend my effort to make the point clear. I expect in absolute terms for a player to do likewise - and if my insistence on clarification includes that they will put the previous statement into the present tense, I don't really give a damn how inconvenient that is, or how much permission it requires, or whether the player is in the mood. Clarity is more important - by a damn sight - than the differences between future tense or present.

I run a good world. When I ask a player, "Are you doing it, or will you do it?", it is done for good reason. I attempted to express that good reason, but I suppose I missed getting that across. Lord Thanatos, besides, put it better than I could have hoped.

Such little idiosyncracies and shibboleth's are the way it goes. I wonder how many DM's recognize the frequency with which they give ground on things they find important just to make players happy.

I wouldn't recommend making it a habit.

Wikipedia Fades to Black

2012-01-17T10:20:00.000-07:00

For those who may not know, wikipedia is a lifeline for my world. I would hate to have to go back to encyclopedias and ordinary websites for my data.

You may also not know that Wikipedia is going to black itself out for the 18th of January. You can comment on the matter here - I suggest you make your voice heard. My comment is number 4348.

Agency

2012-01-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

This is a topic I've talked about before, but given a small conversation in my online campaign yesterday, I thought I might take another shot at it. I could say, I'm going to take another shot, but instead, I ought to say, I am taking another shot.

Things were going along as usual, with the players saying, "I will" do this or that, and I griped about it as usual and a brief discussion popped up. I promised to write a post and we buried it for the campaign.

Butch made a good argument that the future tense is common in every day life:

"Consider the difference if a co-worker says, 'I'm going to lunch,' and your reply is: 'I'm going with you.' (whether you like it or not) or 'I'll go with you.' (if it's OK with you) The difference between 'I go to the bar' and 'I will go to the bar' may be subtle, but in my mind, what I'm saying is, 'Assuming I can, I go to the bar.'"

Then James C. followed with:

"As the arbiter of all activity, nothing takes place without the DM's approval."

And although I understand perfectly why both players feel this way - indeed, that they are even trained to think this way - I have to say that they couldn't be more wrong.

These are two different issues. The first, that from Butch, is the issue that I tried to handle in the linked post above, but I think I got too clever and missed getting the point across.

D&D is a game played with words, and as such, exact words are important. In fact, the words themselves are meant to take the place of actions - they're not, therefore, merely expressions, they are surgical indications of exactly what the character does, and at the moment the character does them.

The reason this is usually not so is because of the way in which, generally, players approach their character's actions. There is a very, very strong tendency on the player's part to compress time and leap way ahead in what actions they take.

What do I mean? Let us say that the players have just left a given dungeon. They're loaded with loot, they're tired and beat up, and one will say, "We will return to town." Take note of the future tense.

This is working into Butch's point about the conditionalism of stating the character's action. He can't guarantee they will get back to town, so it is better, he argues, to put it in the future tense just in case you don't get back to town..

But I argue that the REAL problem is the choice of words - specifically, the choice of verb. The verb return itself implies something that has already happened. You can't return until you've gotten there. The verb, and not the question for permission, is what defines the necessity of the future tense.

Consider an alternate verb: "We head for town." Simple, resolute, and in no way dependent on the DM's permission. If I cock my head and lift my foot, I have, without question, "headed" for town. I may get stopped on the way, but getting stopped will in no way change the fact that I did, beyond a doubt, head in that direction.

Players constantly pick verbs which are intended to compress time ... which is something they learn from DMs who either fail to do so, or who suck at doing so. I can't express how many times I have to hold up a player, on or off line, who rattles off the fifteen things they do once they arrive in town, as though these things can all be done at the same time ... and all expressed in the future tense, of course. "Town" has its own particular issues where it comes to D&D. "Town" all too often means "safe zone" or the "nothing can happen to me there" zone, and players treat it that way because they are trained to do so.

But understand ... it is one thing for a player to remark to his friends, "When I get back to town, I'm going to have the biggest steak" and another for the player actually in town, telling the DM, "I'll have the steak," and then marking the cash off the player sheet. We talk like that to the server, because we know the steak will be arriving at some point in the future - but if the future is now, the verb should also be now. "I eat!" is a verb I rarely, if ever, hear a player use where it comes to provisions. It is always, "We will have a day's provisions" - never, "we eat a day's provisions."

I originally made the point that players adapt this sort of future-tense to describe their actions because they've learned it is a way to side-step the reality of actually doing a specific thing in the moment of doing it. If I speak in the future tense, I have one last chance to avoid getting axed by the DM. I can fall back on, "I didn't say I did it, I said I was about to do it. I haven't done it yet!" This is the permission element both Butch and James alluded to.

So an experienced gamer will develop phrases and ways of speaking that improve one's chances of survival. Everytime you make a definitive statement - "I turn the knob" - you risk death. Better to say, "I will turn the knob." You might still get killed, but every bit of an edge helps. Besides, one time in ten it will force the DM to ask back, "You turn it?" which is a red flag. The DM will never ask that question if the red knob were perfectly safe, so the smart player backs off and says, "Oh, wait ... maybe not." And another inexperienced DM misses that chance to kill a player.

The desire is to have the players speak only in verbs which as players they can be absolutely certain of doing - no matter what freaking permission the DM offers.

This is where I take umbrage with James' statement, because the DM is NOT the arbiter of ALL activity. The players are entitled to absolute agency in performing actions they can perform. No matter what, they can always 'try' to do things. They can try to return to town. They can try to turn the knob. Even if the player is held, frozen, magic jarred and soaking a delusion potion through their skin, no matter what the fuck the DM has to say about success, the player can still TRY. So long as the player indicates that they are trying, the DM can stuff his or her fucking permission. The player doesn't need permission to try.

All things being equal, the player is perfectly entitled to take a wide variety of actions. They can cast a spell ... they may not be able to discharge the spell, or complete the casting, but they can damn well begin the casting and the DM can just suck it up sideways. If there's nothing immediately in the vicinity of the player that would stop the player, the player can and indeed must be acknowledged to have completed the casting, for those are the rules of the game, which the DM must abide by every bit as much as the players. If the player picks up a sword, and there's no fundamental reason time and space has been altered regarding this particular object, then by ZEUS and His Green Apple Trio, that fucking sword is picked up. And that is how it goes. There ain't no future tense about it - the player enacts upon his or her agency to alter the world with the words that player uses, and the DM is not empowered to stop the player.

Naturally, some swords cannot be 'picked up.' But then there better be a damn good reason why the player's agency is thwarted ... and the player better have the right to pound his or her fist on the table and demand that answer be a good one when it presents itself, or hell should break fully upon the DM's head. Because Player Agency is not to dismissed lightly. Agency is the soup and crumbly crackers of this exploitation, and without it there is no damn game.

So exercise a little agency. Put it in the present tense.

Corporation

2012-01-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

The term itself originated in the 15th century, along with the rise of the medical profession in Europe and experimentation in bodily systems. The meaning was simply "united in one body," and really had nothing to do with the rise of the economic entity that you'll find referenced in sources like wikipedia, which suggests the "corporation" of London had been founded in 1067 with the granting of its first charter. It's generally ignored by modern sources that the language itself has changed substantially since the 11th century, and that in no way could London remotely at that time be considered a 'corporation' as we understand the term.

A charter is an official document granting certain rights or privileges to select groups of persons, usually granted by a royal figure within a monarchical state (and otherwise, but lets not quibble). It would come about as time passed that charters would be granted to economic entities, entitling them to enact in their own authority for the purpose of gaining wealth, but the modern corporation - one that operated separate from the need to obtain a government charter in order to seek profit - did not truly exist until the 19th century. But clearly the creators of Civilization did not have this distinction in mind when they proposed that the corporation 'technology' would be obtained commensurate with the development of astrological physics and experimental chemistry.

The actual term used in the 15th century and onwards was 'company,' and the term is very important. Note that it is a military term describing a body of soldiers grouped in friendship and intimacy (the word originates in the 12th century). When entities such as the British East India Company were given a 15 year 'monopoly' by government charter to act in their own interest, the recognition was that a physical gang with soldier-like efficiency would set up and plunder a foreign land with little or no regard for the existing laws of the lands being plundered. The so-called monopoly granted by the British king was matched by a 'monopoly' granted to Portuguese plunderers by their king, and to Dutch plunderers by their government, and to French plunderers by their government. Every able power in Europe granted some sort of privilege to steal from foreigners from the 16th century onwards, including the Danish, the Swedes and of course the Spanish. The arrival of a foreign company in Asian, African or Latin American lands was the equivalent of an invasion, and no bones were made about it. Local pposition was dealt with harshly and in a fierce, cold-blooded manner, with murder or slavery, depending upon the practical application of either. The men who carried forth these acts were seen as heroes at home, awarded with lands, privileges and prestige, and were believed to possess the very best characteristics one could hope for in a native-born son.

It has only been in the last half century that the unquestioned worship of said former patriots has come to be questioned. In the 1950s, a real bastard like Robert Clive of India was apt to make a British schoolboy's chest swell, to think he lived in the same country that spawned such a great and noble gentleman.

But unless your world takes place in a time like the Renaissance, and unless it has the sort of steep division between high-technology and low-technology regions, it is very unlikely that any king in your world would agree to grant the sort of open privileges granted to the founders of, say, Archangel in Russia or Jamestown in Virginia. These privileges were granted because the king at home could not produce the cash-requirement necessary to post an army in a land whose wealth was unproven. It was much more practical to hand the job off to the private sector, who could live or die within their own means ... and if they died, which many of them did, then all the better that the crown did not suffer the consequence. On the other hand, if they lived, they would bring home untold wealth to the home country, and open opportunities at a later date for the real army to step in an impose colonial rule. But then, that was probably little thought of in the late 16th century.

As such, the English king would not have granted a company - remember, a military term - the right to set up shop in Scotland, where real ownership by the crown was practical. Ireland, which had proven a thorn in the crown for centuries, proved to be better managed by private means ... and thus private forces, both approved and not approved by the king, ranged over Eire either imprudently or with great success. But it must be understood - this was not the imposition of a business strategy. There were shareholders - but then, the money for ships and weapons had to come from somewhere. A group of investors throwing together to buy a notorious adventurer a ship was a risk ... but it was better to sit at home on your ass and wait while someone else got bloody doing the dirty work, in exchange for your share of the plunder. And remember, the shareholders were knighted, too.

These were interesting times.

Without the promise of pride and prestige at home, however, there would have been little reason to ever return with the ships or the plunder. Remember that only a couple of centuries before, the way to India and China, or the way to America, was undetermined ... and company charters were hard to come by when the enemy were the Berbers or the Arabs. Certain groups did get 'backing' by states to plunder in the Holy Lands - we call that time the Crusades - and certain groups, like the Knights of Rhodes, got rich doing it. But you couldn't call the practice anywhere near as widespread as it became when the whole world became available for pillage.
Still, when you are thinking about adventures for your players, consider the presentation of a charter to enter into the orc lands and slaughter. With the king's good wishes, its a lot easier to raise a force of a few hundred men, or to encourage a wealthy landholder or two to offer up a little investment ... and all with the expectation of pomp and ceremony when the conquering heroes come marching home, the blood on their boots nicely washed off of course. And remember that modern sensibilities of honorable practice don't figure in the proceeds - blankets infested with brown or yellow mold, gifts of barrels of ale or wine - and throat leeches, or pretty hats including a resident ear seeker are just as partial to your players gaining a knighthood as straight up fighting. No one cares how the orcs are massacred or plundered, so long as there IS plunder to bring home ... don't expect much regard for slaughtering enemies who haven't had the cultural wisdom to create hard coin. The conquerors of Australia and Patagonia are barely remembered.

Does it concern you any that the modern incarnation which pays you an income began as something with even less morality than it is appreciated for now?

The Motivations Behind 2nd Edition

2012-01-10T08:59:00.001-07:00

Over the last 30+ years of DMing, I have had one hell of a lot of new characters rolled in front of me - by noobs and vets both - and most of the time, there's a stall where it comes to picking the character's class. No one, it seems, ever knows what they want to be. I mean, it's not a big problem ... there's a little hemming and hawing, and people decide on something, and the game moves forward.

But I began thinking of it when last night I caught a lecture on Aristotle's view of friendship. During the lecture the prof took a few minutes and talked about roles: you're a brother, a sister, a father, a mother, a judge, a professor, a street cleaner ... these are not just definitions of what you do or what you happen to be. They are also descriptions of the responsibility you fulfill in society as a whole. As a father you have certain expectations you must fill, in maintaining your children, in presenting a positive role-model, in the disencouragement of squabbling between your children and their friends, and so on. This is sometimes a responsibility that is thrust upon you, and it is sometimes a responsbility that you relish ... but it is always a responsibility.

Where it comes to choosing what you do for a living, that is a responsibility too. You've taken it upon yourself to be recognized as a given type, with the recognition that when people approach you as that type, they have the right to expect a standard of behavior from you that matches your claim. In other words, if you will call yourself a lawyer, and I am looking for a lawyer, if I call upon your law office, I expect to find a lawyer. I don't expect to find someone mocking the legal profession, or someone who is utterly incompetant. If you are not a lawyer, you have no right to call yourself a lawyer.

If you will allow one more example, I present myself here as a pontificating, pretentious asshole. If you come here expecting that, I will be ready to meet my responsibilities in providing you with what you respect - er, that is, expect. To do less is to fail my ethical responsibilities.

Now, if the gentle reader will bundle up this argument and put it under his or her arm for the moment, we can talk about the ethical world Gygax and his cronies grew up in and compare it to the ethical world that launched 2nd Edition. For this portion, I will be relying somewhat on Adam Curtis' excellent documentary, The Century of the Self, which can be viewed in its four-hour entirety here. If you have never seen it, and you enjoy having your fundamental precepts about the world deconstructed, you are in for a good, long ride. I will add the disclaimer that Curtis tends in his documentaries to simplify a lot of philosophical positions in order to get his ducks in order, so please retain a hard-nosed cynicism throughout ... but as a long-time researcher in modern history, social deconstruction and psychology, I can vouch for a great many of his conclusions.

The principle conclusion of The Century of the Self is the expectation that the average individual possesses about what they expect to have in terms of their own happiness. Curtis presents the argument that in a former period, culminating in the 1960s, the ordinary person was driven towards obtaining specific kinds of material wealth, and fulfilling specific roles in society, driven by the social expectations upon that person. You lived in a certain kind of house, and drove a certain kind of car, and lived a certain kind of life ... and society defined that sort of existence as 'normal,' and considered it absolutely necessary to hammer people into that existence in order that they be healthy.

A great deal of this hammering was driven by an industrial complex that feared overproduction. If everyone bought the same kind of car, there was a reasonable assurance that the whole production of that car would be sold out ... making industry happy. But with the start of the 1960s, a trend emerged which really hit its stride in 1980. That trend was the multiplicity of personalized goods, whose sale became guaranteed by social movements encouraging the selfishly motivated consumer ... who insisted that things be individualized for their particular taste. This came out of a revolution in advertising, manufacturing, personal bias, communications - and a host of other motivations described in Curtis' documentary - that transformed the world. Any of us right now who can remember the world in 1970, and who can compare that to the world in 1985, can attest to that change.

Very well, let's come back to the subject of character classes ... which remains a contentious issue. I propose to explain why it's contentious.

Character classes came from the minds of people for whom the 1950s and 60s were definitive years. In that period, what you did was far more important than who you were, particularly in terms of narrative, both in literature and in film. No one gives a shit who Philip Marlowe's family were, or how he was raised, or even how he came to acquire his personal feelings towards the law or his job. Philip Marlowe was a detective. His actions are those of a detective, his motivations are those of a detective, his background is a detective's background, his actions are those you'd expect a detective to take. He's not a cop, so he doesn't have to be a nice guy. He carries a gun and slaps people around, but he's not a crook. His role in this world is defined distinctly.

The same is true for virtually every character in that period, right up to the era of widespread amateur psychology; the era of "I'm Okay, You're Okay." We comfortably accept an absence of 'modern' motivational background even in psycho-analytic tales like The Caine Mutiny or The Sun Also Rises. Even the character that does nothing is defined more by their doing nothing than by what they feel or believe.

For Gygax and crew, it was only natural to embrace this point of view ... it was, after all, the point of view of their time. Gygax was born in 1938. When he was 18, he was sitting in a movie theatre watching The Ten Commandments, The Searchers, Giant and Bus Stop. Stories driven by what people DID ... who they were or why they were was a secondary consideration. When it came time to define the characters in the D&D game, the central context was certainly more about what they did ... were you a cleric or a mage or a fighter? And if a fighter, you had the responsibilities of a fighter and the expectations of a fighter ... and others had the right to see you as a fighter.

But as the world rushed into the 1970s, individualized 'personalities' came to be manufactured by the industrial world, the act of choosing to be something was much more important than being that thing. Remember that the 70's were called the "Me Decade." Young 18-year-old people, people twenty years younger than Gygax, were watching movies like Rocky, The Bad News Bears, Car Wash and Taxi Driver ... movies about people bitter and angry about the role society had chosen for them, and who fought to gain a more idealized role for themselves. Not so they could be boxers and ball players and vigilantes, but so they could obtain personal satisfaction.

Personal satisfaction becomes so endemic to the culture that nerds playing D&D in the 80s chafe and rail against having to be boxed into narrow, pre-defined character roles. It doesn't fit their perception of choice and of how the world should work. It doesn't matter to them if they're fulfilling a responsibility or not. It is about ME, and what abilities I want to have, and about how I want to personalize my character so that it is different from every other character out there. Because that is what I want and what I want is more important than anything.

This, of course, is an illusion, as Curtis' documentary points out. Manufactured 'choice' still provides tens of thousands of replicate products for the multitude. Your lava lamp only seems unique and unusual because you're one of a comparative few that wanted to buy one ... but there are something like 500,000 lava lamps just like the one that you think personalizes you, just as there are thousands of other players who have 'personalized' their characters in exactly the way you have personalized yours. But delusion is the grease that makes the present day market work. It is only important that you have the perception of individuality. Actual individuality is virtually impossible.

Evidence From Unlikely Sources

2012-01-09T12:03:00.001-07:00

A couple months ago, Brad from Skull Crushing for Great Justice published a graphic describing his circular obsession with D&D. I can imagine what he will think of my reprinting the graphic, and of cleaning it up a little; he doesn't like me very much. My personal feeling is that it's the only smart thing I've seen printed on his blog. I don't like him very much, either.

But I've been thinking about this for two months:

I've been thinking about this because it's very definitely something I used to suffer from myself; and it's taken me two months because I haven't been clear exactly why I don't suffer from it any more. That is, until it hit me this morning.

I have to qualify a little, however. It wasn't that I played different versions of D&D, but I did stop D&D consistently for Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, Top Secret, Rolemaster and other games, up until about 1992, after which I pretty much quit everything except for D&D. I think I could call it a 10-year process of change. What's funny is that, until seeing Brad's graphic above, I hadn't thought to question the change. I just thought at the time, "Well, I guess I don't really care about the other anymore."

I think it was something more fundamental than just my mood. I think I solved the problem because of my growing attitude towards the world I wanted to run. I shall try to explain.

Prior to 1988, my general approach to running and designing a game was very much like most: draw out maps, make towns, make lists of NPC's, draw up encounter tables, draw out dungeons, etcetera. All very normal. But in '88, I had two things come together in my head for the first time that changed my perception of game design. The first was another after-game bullsession about what a crappy, crappy thing the equipment list was, and how every addition to the equipment list was weapons, armor and more crap for dungeons, and how crappy that was. My players in general agreed there wasn't much point in accumulating coin if there was nothing worth spending it on. I had to agree, but I couldn't see a point in making longer and longer lists of items that didn't really matter in the game.

The second moment came when I was in a bookstore in the north of Calgary called The Book Shoppe, which was a crazy, cluttered maze of far more volumes than one could expect to fit into a two-story house ... and it was there I found a whole wall full of old encyclopedias, about a fifty sets of them. One set was a match to the encyclopedias I'd grown up with as a kid, dated back to 1952. Why the old woman who ran the shop thought anyone would buy them, I don't know, but I did buy them, for about $40 as I remember. I bought them because in that moment my trade system ideal was invented.

Why, I conjectured, should an object have the exact same price no matter where in the world it was found? And if objects had different prices, wouldn't that encourage players to buy and trade objects, if they shipped them from high supply to low supply? Wouldn't that be something really new and different for players to spend their money on?

Alas, it was never to be so. I did have some players who were interested in trade, long ago, but the system was a disaster in the first ten years and it never really worked out. The system is marvelous now ... but it turns out that I have no players really interested in buying and selling.

Still, that doesn't matter anymore, because the trade system only changed everything about my world. Forced to hinge more and more on the system - maps, roads, demographics, treasure placement and so on - the world increasingly became an unified whole, just to support this one project I began 23 years ago.

But no, that's not what lifted me out of Brad's circular trap. The real change began as I exchanged short-term loss for long-term game.

D&D is almost always played in terms of short-term gain. "I want fun, and I want it now!" A painful and difficult struggle through featureless landscapes doesn't make much for a game, so a dungeon is conveniently inserted and - since the travel times dwindle to nothing between rooms - we have solid short-term gain.

Except it's a very small gain. Like anyone who has had a heaping helping of extended hedonism, even fun gets to be a sort of awful, hellish prison, simply because it does not take long for it to become woefully repetitive and dull. Dungeons, for all their convenient distraction, are in the long term very empty distractions. To quote a film: "Wealth can be wonderful, but you know, success can test one's mettle as surely as the strongest adversary."

They exist without point and without purpose, and after twenty sessions or so there is a yearning for some kind of 'point' to all the mayhem and bloodbathing. Another level leaves one as empty as another bottle does a drunk, or another sexual partner does the promiscuous. And all too often, the easiest efforts to fill that yawning emptiness are new rules and new games ... but these, too, all lack any cohesion, so that hobo-like the players drift, and drift, and drift.

When I began to see the problems of designing my world not in terms of the few days, or the fortnight it would take to draw out a dungeon, but the years of research and effort it would take to really build something deep and comprehensive, my world began to settle upon a bedrock that would fill that hole - not just for me, but for my players too. All this railing I do against rails, this hammering chorus about the virtues of sandboxing, this is all because when you lift the goals for the players out of the pits of immediate gratification, the game offers something different. It offers purpose.

When the rules are set in bedrock, they cease to be the libretto that scores the game. Sessions become less and less about how the game is played, and more and more WHO plays them, and for WHAT they are played. It becomes clear WHY the game is played.

Vlog the Fool

2012-01-08T14:54:00.001-07:00

I had promised the first sunday of every month, but hey, January 1 was a holiday. So here's January's vlog. I don't have to introduce it ... the video says it all:

And I mean that sincerely.

The Bubbles, They Form

2012-01-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

More about the hex generator, then.

I am having no fun at all in programming river courses with excel, but then I am not a programmer. I successfully worked out a method of determining the river's path through a seven-hex group. Then I worked out a second river's path, entering the same hex, as obviously river confluences do occur. Now I am working out the circumstance of a river originating in a hex. This is all as dull as it sounds, but it's necessary, so I plod on.

I'm in a position, however, to show a little of my work, so I'm going to do that. But first, I need to discuss a problem with hexes inside of hexes.

They are, to say the least, annoying as hell. The main problem, the one no one talks about, is that you are left with partial hexes around the outside, as shown:

figure 1

This is all well and good if you're scratching out your world on pen and paper, but if you want to generate the contents of the larger hex, how do you handle those six 1/3rd hexes around the outside? Ignore them? Assume the internal hexes actually account for all the space, because they is a simulation? Or do you accept that what's show above is the equivalent of 9 hexes, instead of 7, and write your programming to suit. If you're going to do that, it would be easier to consider the whole representing 13 parts ... but let me tell you, when you are working out the path of a river, or where things might be place, you would rather work with 7 options rather than 13. Trust me.

I've decided not to recognize those hexes for the moment, with an expectation that I will account for them in the future. In the meantime, I'm going to assign each 'diamond' to the hex immediately counter-clockwise to it, and move ahead from there. I hope the gentle reader can forgive my laziness.

Okay, let's take the seven hexes inside the map I posted of southern Russia last week:

figure 2

There's clearly not a lot of detail there. I don't propose at the moment to add a lot. Instead, I want to show generally the positioning of just two things: the rivers in hex, and those hexes which would be settled and those that are not, as shown below.

figure 3

There the reader can see the similarities, the one with the other. Now of course this is drawn by hand, from the data created on the hex generation excel file I've built up so far. I'm not such a programmer that I can concoct images ... I leave that to some bright entity a lot smarter than me. The location of the town of Luka, moreover, has been determined by plotting it in place at approximately the same position that it appears in relation to the figure 2 above. It's position was not generated.

To bring new readers up to date, if they haven't read these posts yet, the white hexes indicate settled lands. The shaded hexes, wild lands. We find we have four different kinds of small hex - apart from the one containing the town, of course: river settled, river wild, highland settled and highland wild. Without having any other kind of information, we can already conjecture the sort of thing these four hex-types ought to contain.

To begin with, the heaviest rural settlement will absolutely be located in the river settled hexes. We can posit that at every point where a river crosses a hex side between two settled hexes, we have a significant settlement - probably not a village, as those have been designated on the map already, but likely a manor house of some kind, occupied by a minor local lord, plus a hamlet of 5-20 houses, along with a mill of some kind. Since a lot of this particular area is wild country, we see there are only two such places.

However, we can alternatively surmise that any settled hex containing a river might have such a settlement, and devise a random chance for that accordingly. We can also suppose that any settled highland hex might have a thorp, a small collection of 3-12 houses, probably without a local lord, but made up of independent cotters or villeins. The existence of the river, then, determines the size of the settlement, and settlements can only occur in settled hexes.

The country around the rivers is undoubtedly planted; the highland hexes, on the other hand, would be covered with herders. If a party moved away from the river, they wouldn't find farms ... unless you also incorporated a chance for the incorporation of natural springs - not large enough to initiate a river, but with a promise for irrigation. The highland hex's available water supply could thus be determined first ... and then if it was there, the chance for a thorp could hinge upon that. Things thus following one after another, and making sense. It also leaves the possibility open that, if the party should control the hex, they could identify those water supplies without thorps, and make haste to move people onto those lands and start them farming.

Now, wild lands with rivers would probably be overgrown areas, with various marshes or soft ground. They may also be canyons, with rocky ground and waterfalls ... that would be determined by the overall elevation of the hex, something I haven't yet incorporated. It stands to reason that a river wild hex suggests the river drops significantly below any settled hexes (the settled hexes around rivers would feature flat country good for crops), but if the river doesn't drop at all, that would indicate swamps.

It also stands to reason that highland wild hexes would be higher than settled highland hexes - the tops of hills, mountains, ridges and so on would be less likely to be settled. Thus, at the upper centre of figure three, where you see a patch of settled high country, the wild country all around would probably be hills and scrub. It helps that I know already that this is on the border between modern day Russia and Ukraine, and that I know any wild highland is simply too dry to sustain herding (but a wild area might also have an untapped spring, and that might prove very important for monsters and the like). And that probably, yes, the wild river valleys would be rocky places unsuitable for farming.

Inserting this information into a hex generation table is a monumental task, but that's the one I have before me. I can see from just the start of it how it promises to better define my world, even those remote areas where nothing on the map or in wikipedia is recorded. If I can tell where the monsters ought to be, and where the people are, and how the lay of the land creates ebb and flow, with patterns, for the manner in which those things group together and clash, I can really feel the life of the world beginning to bubble up from the cracks.

I don't really understand why this hasn't been tackled by some entity with a lot more money and creative firepower than just little ol' me.

No Future

2012-01-05T11:25:00.000-07:00

Last month I wrote that a DM should erase any preconception of an ending or a resolution in building up a narrative. Some gentle readers might be asking why that should be the case, or even how can that be the case, since part of building a narrative should include some kind of point or purpose for it being there. How can you produce an adventure for a party if the goal of the adventure is not inherent in the narrative?

What I'm proposing is that the DM will do better overall if the goalposts are simply removed from the campaign. 'Goals' imply that one will cross a clearly defined and static line, spike the ball and shout victory. Life - despite what marketing managers might insist - is not like that. We strive for things we want, and we obtain those things sometimes, but the process does not end at a defined victory line. The process of life just goes forward.

Imagine, if you will, the incorporation of an NPC into your game, who informs the players of a potential MacGuffin which the players might like to obtain. In traditional RPGs, the circumstances around how this MacGuffin is obtained are rigorously determined; the existence of the NPC, and of other NPCs, depends wholly and completely upon the pre-ordained plan in the DMs mind. The party will do this, and then the party will do that, and then the NPCs will mess with the party just so, and the party will circumvent that messing, and the MacGuffin will be obtained. Thence, proceed with the adventure.

I am proposing that, instead, you imagine the NPC as a living, functioning being in the campaign. Rather than having ordained the purpose of his existence, you as DM merely propose that he is a being with no special importance or fate. He has knowledge of the MacGuffin. That is all he has. He wishes to obtain the MacGuffin, and he makes a proposition to the party to help him. But he has no better idea of how he fits into the game than the party does.

This is not to suggest that you are 'running' the NPC. Very often, I will deliver the NPC into the party's care, for them to employ, choosing to Veto anything the NPC might be said to do which does not fit into the personality of the NPC. Thus, if I perceive that he is a greedy, mildly sadistic thief, he wouldn't sacrifice himself for others; he wouldn't give up a chance at a nice gem; he wouldn't hesitate to murder someone, and so on. If the party indicated then that he chooses to spare a woman who gave the party information, I might say, "No, he's really not the merciful type," and have the NPC kill the woman. Whereupon the party would have to choose how they dealt with Him.

What I'm proposing is that instead of devising a purpose for your NPCs, making them cogs in your great machine, you devise instead a behavior for your NPCs ... which then makes itself evident as the adventure goes along. To devise a behavior, you must be able to conjecture how a person other than yourself would act in a given situation. It isn't enough to say that such-and-such is kindly, or pious, or selfish ... you have to have, in your mind, a very clear sense of how said person would respond to a wide variety of possible situations - and then in turn have that character respond in that fashion consistently.

This is, I am told, extremely difficult. It may be that I've had plenty of experience with creating characters for stories, or which taking on the traits of other persons when performing in theatre. I think it is more likely that I have a clear understanding of why I do things, and that I can imagine why another person might do different things for different reasons that made perfect sense to that person.

For example, I'm not a jock. I have played sports, and enjoyed them, but I don't identify with the ideals of sport and I'm not motivated to breaking my body for the purpose of winning or for personal glory in that manner. But I can understand how someone else might feel satisfied with success, and how they might be willing to take punishment and give commitment to ideals of that kind, and feel that a life spent that way was worthy and important. It's quite easy to imagine how a person like that might respond to loss, or personal attacks, or success ... at least, enough to be able to predict an NPC with those characteristics when confronted by something the party might do.

The quest, then, becomes less about the goal and more about the difficulties in communication between the players themselves, the players and the NPCs, and the reactions that both have towards obstacles that come up. If your NPC doesn't have to fit a shoehorned concept of what he is meant to do when Obstacle A arrives, you can simply sit back, observe how the party deals with Obstacle A all on their own, and employ the NPC as you think the NPC would react given the party's choices. And if the party can't figure a way to get past the obstacle, YOU as DM don't have to solve the problem for them. You are not contractually obligated to give the MacGuffin to the party. The party tries, the party meets some interesting people along the way, the party gets some experience fighting a few baddies, and when they run up against the thing they can't conquer, they shrug, they move on, and they think for the next three years of game time about how they could have done it.

Failure is a tremendous motivator.

Your role as a DM is to employ your worldly residents and your worldly circumstances in the here and now, and forget about the future. If you respond to the actions of players as a being with no more conception of how the future will go than the players themselves have, then you have available many more options than you're giving yourself by having everything that is to happen be cut and dried.

Thus, when you ARE devising a campaign, with MacGuffins and obstacles, you want to think of what those things are, where they are, how they work, how they came into existence and who might be connected to them. But you should not be pre-planning the manner in which they are obtained, or who is meant to obtain them, or why they ought to be obtained ... and definitely not how they must be obtained before the next MacGuffin's existence is revealed to the party in order to make your world work.

All of that preplanning is exactly what we mean when we say you're laying the roadbed for the ties upon which you will spike down the tracks for the train that will run to the station you think ought to be the destination.

Let the party lay the tracks. Be satisfied with having the ground exist.

All Myths Are True

2012-01-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

"Nostradamus Rule:" All legends are 100% accurate. All rumors are entirely factual. All prophecies will come true, and not just someday but almost immediately.

There is a very, very good reason for this: the depiction of false myths is boring. It is the fantasy gaming equivalent to opening Al Capone's vault. There's no point in spreading a myth out for the party to investigate if there's no reality to the myth ... and besides, myths are interesting frameworks upon which to hinge games. They make fine mcguffins, theatrical climaxes and ethical conundrums. Why, we wouldn't even have these myths if its wasn't that the fascination about them endures.

What is sad and pathetic about the use of myths in games is the relatively short list that exists in the ordinary imagination. Not only because the DM can't come up with something new and interesting by reading a few books, but more to the point that players aren't likely to get fascinated with a myth of which they've never heard. If you haven't heard the myth before, it hardly carries much sentiment and romance ... in fact, the DM might as well have made it up in his or her own head, for all the oomph the myth has. Thus it happens that if you're going to depend on myths for your game, to get the oomph, you're stuck with very, very few choices.

And its worse if, as a DM, even you can't get interested in your own imagination.

So what does that give us? Well, everyone has seen Indiana Jones, Stargate, Buffy, Sanctuary, True Blood, etcetera, etcetera ... so you're safe if you mine those sources for your world. But there's a pretty big uggh factor if your players have considerable gaming experience: "Again, Bob? Another sword in the stone? That makes three this year, doesn't it?" And there I am, stealing the example from the TV tropes page just to hammer the point home.

If your players have managed around five years of steady game play, I promise you they've seen virtually everything ... that is, the habitually reworked list that television and the movies reserves for their Monster of the Week formula. The emotional juice you hope to wring from that dessicated and worm-eaten harvest is pretty much depleted. Expect your players to repeat the formula in their heads as you outline the tale at the table. Yeah, yeah, a vampire is loose in the neighborhood, there's a chick asleep in the castle, merlin left this hear before moving back in time, the spear of destiny is buried in zombie Hitler's tomb, Achilles is assaulting Troy, the sphinx has three questions and Nefertiri is ready to spread 'em because, well, she just wants to.

Yawn.

A great many DMs invoke these things from their pseudo-mastubatory appeal, like a cosplayer who can't wait to dress like Wonder Woman or the Green Gunker (sorry, there's about fifteen 'Green' choices, I just went with the word that defines my emotional feel about all of them). "Wow," thinks the DM; "won't it be really, really cool to have the Loch Ness monster in my campaign!" Or characters from The Planet of the Apes or the Queen from Snow White (who really ought to be dead) or whatever the hell else turns their crank. Sometimes, you can watch your DM get a little obsessed with an invocation like this ... it's creepy.

Of course, if you can figure out a way to introduce the monster/item/event with an unexpected originality, you will probably be able to pull your party out of its malaise ... but chances are that 'new' is going to be a lot closer to the disastrous discontinuity of Van Helsing rather than effect you desire. But you're welcome to prove me wrong.

I think it needs to be said that, in reality, you don't really need to invoke myth in order to give your campaign verve. It's a crutch, anyway. It's what you employ for lack of a good idea. That's why television leans so hard on it.

But the very young and unjaded will still like it, because they're young and unjaded. But if they're that young, they better be your own children.

Sobering

2012-01-03T15:26:00.001-07:00

This isn't D&D, this is history. But if you want to understand how America ultimately collapses, and why it happens, and what that fall ultimately looks like - whether it happens in twenty years or a hundred years - the history lesson is available. This is the first part of six for the 1983 series, The Spanish Civil War, narrated by Frank Finlay (who some will know played Porthos in the 70s Musketeer movies):

You should watch the entire series, which is available on google. Pay very careful attention to Franco's employment of the Moroccan colonial army, and how it was used to control the home country. Then scoff at a future American government's use of future colonial Iraqi, Afghan, Colombian and Congolese armies to subjugate 'good' Americans. Tell me about how it could never happen.

Enjoy.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

2012-01-03T10:42:00.002-07:00

Oh god, here we go again.

I wonder if D&D players will ever get over their night sweats about the supposed, ever-impending collapse of their hobby, or alternately its ever-impending slow, plodding death, which was already supposed to have occurred fifty times already and at least 25 years ago. In its infancy it was a fad. In its middle period it was hopelessly complicated and couldn't possibly appeal to new players. And now that it has reached middle age, it is clearly dying of cancer, which is another way of describing the 'long tail' argument.

I'm not worried about D&D dying. It can't die until at least the day I myself will be dead, and after that I won't give a shit.

Recently I was directed to an article at The Escapist, which I don't read and I don't recommend - precisely because of the sort of article to which I was directed. In this particular example, we are introduced first to the current head of D&D development at WOTC, Mike Mearls, and then treated to the pearls of wisdom that droppeth from Mearls' obviously deluded brain.

Let me say first of all that Mearls has - at least to those who actually play this game - zero credibility. He's the stooge department head of a crappy design bureau in a somewhat annoying company whose interest in D&D is funded entirely by a very small percentage of the oodles of money WOTC earns from its monster success at a vaguely related fantasy card game. In terms of boosting D&D's profile to the world, WOTC either doesn't give a shit or is really, really incompetant. Oh, I know there are boosters for the big W all over the tiny world that is the D&D community net, but outside of this tiny echo chamber WOTC is a non-entity. Thousands upon thousands of D&D players in the world have no idea who the Wizards of the Coast are, because they deliberately don't read the credits on the gaming material they steal off the net. They certainly are not taking Mearls' golden wisdom into account when it comes to how or when or why they play D&D. I know for a fact that I am not.

It's clear that the article is a puff piece for Mearls and for WOTC. I love the party where Greg Tito, the author of the article, tells us that Mearls admits 4th edition "might have gone too far in creating a perfectly balanced game." Oh, really? Perfect, huh? My, my, I'm convinced. This from one of the contributors to 4th edition (says so right in the article).

Then, immediately after this, Mearls then goes on to describe a baffling gaming experience where the DM "can't contradict what the players say," as if human beings don't know how to argue or work things out for themselves at the gaming table. No, WOTC has spoken, WOTC shall be obeyed!

It's quite clear from the article that the head of D&D development is deluded.

The game has been fractured for some thirty-five years now, but Mearls is apparently only just now beginning to realize it: "What D&D faces now with different editions and old school versus new school ... it's like a comic book conundrum. How do we get all these guys back together, so we actually have real communities ...?"

That's very interesting, coming from a fellow who helped drive as big a spike as could possibly be driven into the community in the first place. Not to mention that it reads like a cheap request for all of us to stop acting like individuals and conform to WOTC's desired standard. I don't know, maybe its that we play in about 10,000 communities, made up of 2 to 20 persons, meeting regularly for our own benefit, and not the benefit of anyone else.

The problem, we're told, is that what D&D needs is some really interesting shit in the D&D Insider (a online corporate magazine splatted on WOTC's webpage that is about as 'outside' as its possible to get) that people will want to read. Apparently, according to Mearls, "People have no time for bullshit." Given the content of the Insider, and the WOTC webpage in general, its quite clear that the one thing that Mearls and everyone else at the company don't recognize its the difference between bullshit and actual content. Splatting out the same cookie cutter articles over and over, year after year, is exactly the bullshit that does not need further production. But then, I've had this argument all over the net, since all I see on other blogs are cheaper, cheesier versions of typical WOTC Insider articles. Of course, it could be argued that since most of the blogosphere is bullshit, and since most of what the Insider prints is bullshit, and since people seem to have a LOT of time to read the blogosphere (I can't speak for the Insider's numbers - if someone wants to provide me with audited subscriber data I'd be happy to look), then Mearls' statement is clearly wrong. People have time for bullshit. They just don't want to pay for it.

I guess that just because Mearls admits he hears a lot at conventions and on the web that the WOTC is abundantly wrong, we shouldn't take that to mean we're going to see any real changes in the near future. We are going to see a repackaging of 4e rules - which should do a great deal to bring the community together by splintering that part of it that plays 4e. We are going to see diversity from WOTC: there are now three board games based on 4e rules. Wow! And we're going to see more company sponsored events aimed at noobs. Why didn't anyone ever think of that before?

The shit walks and doesn't know that it's shit.

I don't know how much more I can say about the article. Halfway through the second page it just becomes a long list of WOTC sponsored crap, as it literally ceases any pretense of being 'journalism' and slides straight into 'sales.' I wonder how much money the Escapist was paid for this.

I shouldn't really blame them. I used to write articles like this for a business magazine, and I liked being able to buy beers at the going rate of 14 words a bottle. But understand - I knew where my bread was buttered. The companies I wrote about were - most of them - not worth the words on the page, and we all at the magazine knew it. But it pays the freight ... and I suppose the Escapist has freight to pay, too.

But don't pretend for a moment that this article exists as anything other than covering costs. It doesn't have anything real to say about the state of D&D on this planet.

Hex Generation Off The Ground

2011-12-30T12:21:00.001-07:00

I feel I'm getting a handle on the Hex Generator. I'm not so sure that others will find it useful, but I do know I probably will once it hits a certain level of complexity.

Given that I don't have to generate rivers, highlands, towns, etc., because I am using a map of my own making, I've got the first trouble worked out (still doing leg work). That is, starting with a group of 7 junior hexes, calculate which are 'wild' and which are 'settled.' In a previous post I referred to these as uninhabitable and habitable, but I think this parlance works better, as it allows for the wild areas to still support a population; its presumed that what isn't supported in the wild areas is a) permanent infrastructure or b) industry.

Step two, to work out the course of the river within the 7-hex group, given that the river's entrance into the hex and the river's exit from the hex are known. Thus, the rivers can follow a wide variety of paths, looping or meandering. I've decided not to regulate the flow of the river by the settled or wild hexes, as this increases variety. I haven't started yet to work out the algorithm for a hex where the river starts, but again, since the exit side is known, that shouldn't be too much trouble.

So, if you have drawn a map, and you have drawn the river on that map, you can use the generator to shape the river as you zoom in. You could then use the generator to shape the river further as you zoom in again and again, as each junior hex spawns in turn its own junior hexes.

I have the added benefit of knowing the 'size' of my rivers, as shown no the bit of map below:

With 1 point (expressed in blue numbers on the map) equalling approximately 8-12 feet in width and 1 foot in depth (its really a guideline rather than a rule, as not all rivers obey the same groundwater laws), there is a point when zooming in further causes the river to be the same width as the hex that holds it ... but then, that should be obvious.

Fine. Once I have rivers and hexes designated, I can start to identify where the roads might be. As you can see from the corner of the above, roads (in red) are also predetermined; however, the red road above could be termed a 'paved' road - cobblestones and the like - there's also the matter of cart-tracks (packed earth/clay mixed with stone and gravel), byways (wide foot paths) and trails (narrow foot paths). The latter two can probably be considered ubiquitous, the first in all settled areas and the second in most hard-ground wild areas ... though of course the complete absence of a trail could indicate very wild country indeed.

Having done this, I can then proceed to designate the individual junior hexes in terms of their actual contents - where are the villages, hamlets and thorps, and what wild areas still offer easy-access water (changing the likely encounters) and so on. There's really no end to how gritty I want to get ... on some level it would be possible to get right down to identifying the name and level of the local chapel, his (or her) family, religion, etcetera, etcetera.

The idea is certainly to get gritty - and to use the format as an inspiration to determine how one should get gritty and where. It would be nice, ultimately, to be able to generate three or four pages of raw data upon any hex desired ... with the principle material on the first page, of course.

That might feel like a straightjacket for some DMs. Personally, having the name of the 4th level cleric in the neighborhood at my fingertips strikes me as abundantly gratifying; heck, I'm just going to have to invent a name anyway. This way, there's a record, so if the party comes back after 17 months of real time, I actually have it listed.

All this from an idea I had Saturday. My, how time flies. I would be failing in my responsibilities if I did not point out at this point that the nucleus of this work will be available to my subscribers in a day or two, along with upgrades as I go along. There's no reason you shouldn't get in on the ground floor, and have the opportunity to influence the work as well. I perceive that this is probably the most important new leap I've made in a couple of years, and I expect to be working on it steadily throughout 2012.

Defining Fillers

2011-12-28T12:50:00.001-07:00

Still thinking about this; I have a complicated web of interconnections on my wall depicting the sorts of things I might try to generate with a hex-filler.

Suppose that the party does leave a particular town to explore an 'empty' hex ... not something that would be wilderness, exactly, but merely a twenty-mile zone without a substantial town. A bit rustic, but still relatively upon the beaten path.

This is something that is lacking in D&D. If you want to explore, the game is a bit worked so that you only have the two choices: civilized and uncivilized. And there isn't any point to 'exploring' anywhere civilized - it just has the same things that every other civilized place has: places to buy shit, places to sleep and places to leave from. If you're in an ordinary world, there will be a rumor sending you to somewhere uncivilized. There might be the suggestions that something uncivilized exists inside the apparently civil experience - such as catacombs beneath the city, or a dangerous unoccupied house or what have you.

But there isn't any point in wandering the streets of the local town "to see what there is to see." The DM will almost certainly be strapped for something to offer the wandering player that will mean anything within the confines of the game. There might be some kind of game/contest going on, or the opportunity for a brief encounter with lawlessness ... but this kind of thing gets so predictable that players will wander the streets just to get into a brawl. But heck, towns aren't just places for brawls.

I can't speak for the gentle reader, but when I go someplace new I'm interested in experiencing new things ... a unique local restaurant, an odd bookstore, some kind of funny-looking house or ragtag collection of persons who happen to live there. It is a kind of eye-nose-ear candy, but unfortunately while it keeps me interested if I venture forth to a strange burg, it isn't the kind of thing that can be experienced by a player sitting at a table with his character. Sensory exploration just doesn't cut it.

Sadly, when you ditch what you can experience with the senses, exploration loses its verve. So what I was saying about the party wandering into a relatively civilized, but unfamiliar hex - in reality, there would be interesting parts to be seen: pretty scans of vegetation, a local girl with a tight scarf around her hips tending sheep, the hint of honeysuckle, a winding road with blind corners, a quaint little bridge across a brook, muddy but interested to stare at ... and of course a few odd animals here and there to stumble across. You and I could easily pass a day wandering ten miles through any fairly populated area and feel engaged, but your players will never, ever feel that engagement sitting at your playing table. They can't experience the reality - they want elements of that day they can experience.

You're pressured, then, to produce something that will engage them - another game or contest, or another encounter - or else announce that nothing of real note happens that day, the word of which will land with a dull thud as players strike off their food and take note that they are one day closer to the wilderness, where things happen.

How do you get out of this corner? That's what I've been piecing together these last three posts.

1) Something might have potential for happening. If the event isn't going on right now, the party might receive word that something will happen here in the future - something the party is interested in. A festival might have some potential, but pretty much only if it increases the wealth, status or power of the player characters. An approaching army is a bit heavy handed. But if the party isn't going to be affected right now, and there's no promise that being here will cause the party to be affected in the future, the party might as well move on. In that case, what is the purpose of ever having been here?

2) The hex might offer some kind of service. We're basically back to shopping, but for services we can include lodging and damage repair. It follows that some places ought to offer better and more abundant supplies, be safer, heal players more quickly, be stacked with willing and generous spellcasters, etc. As well, information is an important commodity to be had, for rumors or hard facts about elsewhere. Thus, if nothing is happening, the hex might still be useful.

3) The hex might be an obstacle. Even if the party hasn't got plans to enter the hex, the imposing existence of a difficult to travel through hex might force the party to waste time travelling around it, or at least risking their supplies and lives when travelling through it. So not only should it be an obstacle to time, it should also be an obstacle to preservation of supplies, player wealth and obviously player survival - the latter being the one that is almost always the only one considered. There's lots of ways to obstruct survival, however, past merely encounters - but that was what I tried for when I proposed wilderness damage. You might try these posts on the subject here, here and here.

4) The hex might be an easement. Some hexes offer easier passage to other hexes, such as passes, fords, bridges, roads, ferries and I suppose even tunnels and interdimensional gates. Sometimes the vegetation is less dense, or offers level ground. Of course, habitations tend to grow along easements, but often the particular place is so obscure that is still remains too far from human populations to be settled.

5) The hex may offer an opportunity. In effect, some kind of resource can be found here that hasn't been exploited yet, or alternately the 'resource' is something like a dungeon or a tomb containing unusual articles that haven't been returned to civilization - or if we are still talking civilized, an opportunity for mining, industry or trade that no one else has happened to notice but which a party member undoubtedly will. Then it is up to the party member to decide to exploit it.

The list isn't exhaustive, but it is more or less where I'm at right now. Everything I've thought of can fit somewhat into any of the above lists; it helps to keep a wide perspective of what might be an 'obstacle' or an 'opportunity.' A bridge toll may not seem like much of an obstacle to the party, but it is nevertheless an obstacle that reduces the player's wealth; it's presence to an interloping party is obviously obstructive. However, and this is just as reasonable, a toll upon a bridge the party builds over a watercourse they've come to possess is just as much an opportunity to them as someone else's bridge is an obstacle. It depends upon the ownership and existence of the bridge in question.

So, while five kinds of filler may not seem like many, the potential numbers of filler may be considerable. It simply requires a starting generative abstract that can be added to with time and effort.

Beating The Generic Out Of Generated

2011-12-27T21:42:00.002-07:00

This is a continuation of yesterday's post, Groups. I suggest having a look at it before continuing here.

In the comments section, Pavel Berlin made reference to using a senior hex with 19 junior hexes, such as this:

And I've been thinking all day of how it would work with the H/non-H concept I proposed, along with other things about generating hex content and watching the predictably piss-poor Sherlock Holmes movie - which I went to see mostly for Noomi Rapace, whom I loved in Men Who Hate Women, and whose talent I knew wouldn't be used even that much - and I was right ... but I digress.

Up front, the problem with 19-hex groups should be immediately obvious to anyone familiar with permeatations and combinations. What happens is that the bell curve becomes so dominant, virtually every hex winds up looking something like this:

In effect, spackled. Forget having a senior hex where every junior hex is habitable ... that chance just dropped to 1 in 524,288. If we consider 20-mile diameter senior hexes, the land surface of the actual world is just large enough to allow 9 or 10 such hexes, total, on average. But of course we know that a 20-mile diameter hex where every square inch is habitable occurs very frequently, everywhere.

The reason is plain: actual topography does not occur randomly.

The more random you make your options, the more generic you make your results. A 7-hex group allows for some 26 possibilities, each of which look somewhat unique. A 19-hex group has hundreds of possibilities (I can't be bothered to work them out, sorry) ... but most of them look very much alike. The difference becomes immaterial.

I meant what I said at the end of the last post. What's needed is a unifying approach. If the idea is to create a desirable world, then it isn't enough just to fill the contents of each hex one at a time. What you'll get if you do it that way is a lot of disconnected results, with mountain ranges popping up in the middle of plains and deserts stretching alongside jungles. And oh yes, I know, blah blah fantasy world blah blah, but just for a moment consider something.

If you use any ordinary terrain generator, it is a guarantee that your randomly created world will lack any kind of sense, and in precisely the same way. It will be a generic fantasy world, with mountains popping up illogically in exactly the same way in every case. One might as well generate your world by taking a screen shot of a Civ IV game and going with that - it will be about as creative and unique.

I mean, if you don't care, why not just generate your world like that? Pick the distribution of land that most interests you, accept the gold mines and silver mines and beaver as they're spackled over the splattered topography and stop worrying?

On some level I am making a presumption. I began thinking along this path because, even though I have this massive world based on Earth, where it comes to knowing just what is in a hex is somewhat catch-as-catch-can. Oh, sure, I can pack a castle in there, and some meadows, and a guy named Joe who poaches swine that wander too far from the sleepy herder Phil, whose chased by Ralph the warden and who has a little hovel by a stream that has trout in it ... I can ramble on like that all day. What I can't do, however, is really mark one hex as unique from another. I mean, the above could apply to virtually every hex in France, couldn't it? What makes one hex different from another? How do you generate hexes that aren't generic?

The reason, I think, that my character generator worked was because, although the result are random, they are random only to a point. You couldn't get some results if your strength was high, or low, or in the middle. Each different point of ability produced a unique pattern of possible results, so that the chances were that you'd get something commensurate with your abilities. What's needed is a hex-filler that does something of the same thing.

In conjecturing about the whole problem, I've come to the conclusion that there are certain things a hex-generator shouldn't be allowed to generate: the location of rivers and mountains, for instance, or coastlines, or even prevailing vegetation. Oh, special qualities of a forest might be generated, but I think it should be established by the DM where the forests ought to be. This helps create a cohesiveness to the whole world. The DM could begin the process by making broad creationist strokes, thus allowing a cohesive world. If you generate everything, you just get that generic world I've mentioned. This cohesion will then provide structure for the characters.

Afterwards, the individual hexes could be filled, in accordance with the grand scheme. The DM propositions a forest covering ten hexes. The generator then determines the details of that hex ... offering hopefully enough levels and combinations of details as to make each hex as unique as possible - and at the same time designating where the party could find an inn, or any other service, feature, cultural icon, etc.

This doesn't seem important, but it is. Of course the DM can say, "Yes, there's an inn here." He can also say, "Nope, there's no inn." If, however, you follow this sort of decision making, the DM is being quite a schnook if the party is half dead and sick when they finally stumble into a civilized hex they don't happen to know well. If a player is going to die because there's no small hamlet in the hex to offer shelter, the DM is going to feel a bit pressured to put a hamlet there.

But if the generation is accepted, and understood to be the ruling factor here, the DM can firmly state that no, there is NO inn, or even a hamlet, and tough luck. The players just happened to run across the only junior hex in this civilized area that isn't so equipped. Oh well, so sad, I guess Johnny dies. Life is a bitch sometimes.

Having that absolute authority - the table says so, sorry - in your pocket is a remarkably freeing tool for a DM to have. It ends arguments absolutely at the table. It forces the party not to rely on they're good ol' soft-hearted DM (who can be talked into anything). It makes the game hard.

But hard is good. I've always said so.

Groups

2011-12-26T20:18:00.002-07:00

Okay.

Suppose you want to create a generation machine to determine what a hex contains: people, monsters, topography, vegetation, defenses, dungeons, what have you. You could put together a simple linear table that would have a list of results: on a d100, a 01-03 indicates a single dwelling, a 04-06 indicates a thorp, a 07-09 indicates a hamlet, and so on - the DMG proposed just such a table. The number of results could be increased well past 100 possibilities, by having the list on a d1000 or even a d10000. Just creating 10,000 possible results could take some time.

But suppose you would rather have the results appear more towards a bell curve: upon 3d6, some kind of settlement could occur upon a 10 or an 11, while pure wilderness would occur upon a 3 or an 18 ... with varied gradients appearing with other numbers. The avid creator could try 3d100 or 3d1000, assigning results according to the bell curve as desired.

It would be nice, however, if the bell curve could depend upon some central theme, and that the theme would give us a sense of the hex contents, as well as the purpose the hex serves in the greater picture of the generated wilderness ... after all, we are not merely generating one hex, but potentially hundreds, and it would be nice if somehow the generation thereof produced a cohesive result.

Very well, let's try something simple.

Suppose we take a hex, and we carve it up into seven smaller hexes, like so:

There's nothing at all unusual about this picture. For game purposes, its usually assumed that the blank areas between the hexes are 'covered,' and that the hex pattern is an identifying convenience. We can see that seven hexes fit inside the first hex, and that these seven hexes could be considered zones A to G or 1 to 7 ... or Alpha-Bravo-Charlie-Delta-Echo-Foxtrot-Golf if you like. For the moment it doesn't matter. For the purpose of this document, I'm more concerned with the designation between the large, greater hex and the seven lesser hexes within. I could go with greater and lesser, but for greater clarity I'm going to go with Senior and Junior. Thus, there is one Senior hex and seven Junior hexes.

Suppose we then define each junior hex as one of two things: habitable or non-habitable. For our purposes, we can say habitable is arable and easily accessible - so fields, meadows, well-watered flats, glades, what have you. We can then consider non-habitable as rocky, dangerous, overgrown, flooded or filled with sand dunes.

We can then postulate that any of the seven junior hexes is either 'H' or 'non-H' ... and this gives us a number of base possibilities equalling 2 to the 7th power, or 128.

Not a huge number. Moreover, I must argue that the actual number of possibilities is much smaller ... but let's leave that go for the moment.

Immediately and right off, we can consider the best possible arrangement to be where every junior hex is H. That provides the most arable land and the greatest food production ... and the greatest ease of travel. Roads are cheap to build and cart-tracks are everywhere. We can assume that such an area is well-watered, and probably that there is some kind of significant conglomeration of people. How significant would probably be determined by the amount of arability in adjacent hexes - for now, let's just say that any hex that is all arable contains a Town ... which would be 1 in 128 hexes.

Now suppose we look at groups (or 'groupings,' as opposed to 'patterns') where just one junior hex is non-H:

Odds are 7:128 of getting just one non-H hex, but there are only two possible groups... and the group on the left (A) is six times less likely to occur than the group on the right (B). Consider what either might mean.

For that, I propose that any 'habitable' might be a designation used properly just with humans; if there's going to be a dungeon, or some dangerous lair, or some evil element in the senior hex, its going to be in the black patch above.

Consider that for Group B three of the junior hexes are removed from the non-H hex, so that they can be protected by those three hexes that are adjacent. Of course, the next senior hex over might be filled with non-H hexes, but let's disregard that. Group B is at least somewhat 'gathered' together, in that there is a central region that can be protected and even be considered almost as good as lacking non-H hexes altogether. A good sized village or small town can easily be imagined to fit here.

But Group A is a mess. The central non-H hex dominates the senior grouping, disrupting communication between H hexes across from one another. Surely this must indicate some unique situation: perhaps a holy religious centre, or a reclusive fortification, surrounded by cliffs or swamps. It's hard to imagine anything but rough hamlets surrounding the central hex.

Let's move onto hexes where two junior hexes are non-H:

Odds here are 21:128, but in fact there are four possible patterns. Turn them around however you wish, the groups only occur as above. From left to right, call them A, B, C and D.

A & D are notable in that the non-H hexes are adjacent, creating larger dangerous regions. Group D especially reduces communication between two of the H hexes, suggesting those hexes might be arable, but backward and probably poorer. Group A allows for the greatest conglomeration of good transport and land ... in that way, it offers the best opportunities for a good habitation.

Group B has four hexes gathered together, so that might be a village, but at least part of the senior group would be represented by some sort of backward sort, cotters and rustics reached by a somewhat dangerous road, beset by two areas from which bandits or who knows what else might emerge. Group C could be some sort of pass, or perhaps a ford along a dangerous river (the black areas could be swamps along a river coarse), making it an important military post, or transshipment point.

After all, the black areas may not be woods, swamps or mountains at all: they could represent an ocean or a lake. There are many possibilities. Thus Group C could be Corinth, an isthmus between two seas.

Let's continue; you'll certainly be getting the idea now.

These are very common, with odds of 35:128. If we go with the proposals advanced so far, we have to presume that none of these would possess anything like a major town. Group A (left to right again) would maybe have a 500-person village ... the rest would be occupied by hamlets or thorps. Perhaps where three good hexes came together you could put a hamlet of 50-200 people, and where two came together, a thorp of 20-80. Thus Group A would have a village, two hamlets and four thorps; Group B would have a hamlet and four thorps; Group C would have three thorps, as would Group D; Group E would only have two thorps, as well as Group F.

Both Groups E and F feature hexes that are completely removed; any such arrangement would probably indicate some kind of border or boundary, potentially one for language and culture as well as for political authority. A road through such a group would be rare.

At any rate, you can see how the conglomeration of good hexes affects the overall picture to the positive or the negative. Once the arrangement is identified as being a mass of wilderness, or civilization, the logic of what should occupy the hex - and even the adventuring within - becomes evident. And this is with just two options. Suppose you were to designate the junior hexes with three possible results for each, rather than two - well, the possible arrangements would soar to 2,187. There wouldn't be any point in that, however, unless you could define what all those permeatations meant ... and once again, that could take some time.

But you could establish the meaning of any combination - so that even if you designated a junior hex could be either friendly humanoid, enemy humanoid, deserted or with a big bad (4 to the 7th power, 16,384 possible combinations), then even if you couldn't predict every possibility, you could look at two adjacent hexes and know what was there. And where to take it with a session should the party enter the senior hex.

Oh, I should post the remaining possible groups. Those that remain are just negatives of those above:

Incidentally, I stumbled across this idea tonight, as I was conjecturing how to design a hex-filling generator, and I thought I'd go ahead and write a post about this in the hopes of inspiring some further advice. To me, it seems a good way to build a strong bell-curve to construct a randomized world. Yes, I have presented the above discussion as though the groups might be isolated. I recognize that an expanse of differently generated hexes should create patterns that would go beyond just the junior hexes. Moreover, you could easily tweak the pattern by having H hexes turn up slightly more commonly than non-H hexes (or the reverse), changing the amount of tweak for one continental area vs. another (Europe vs. Africa).

It is just the kernal of an idea, I think. It needs a grander, unifying approach.

Cheating You

2011-12-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

I went looking to quote some blog advice website that would argue, as they all do, that my posts should be short and two paragraphs long if I wanted to attract readers. Only problem was, while I could find that advice pervasively throughout the net, I couldn't find it from a single source that had any credibility ... you know, like a recognizable name.

It doesn't matter - you've all heard that crap.

Turns out, my 10,000 word post is the most successful pure D&D blog post I have ever written. There are three other posts that generate more pageviews: this one, and this one and this one. I'm of the opinion these generate hits because non-RPGers are looking for what they can find about minerals and gems and vegetation.

But the big post is probably unreadable to anyone except a D&D player, and its numbers boomed from the minute I published. I've never seen anything like it. It did not generate a lot of comments - and I can guess why - but people did go to look at it. In droves.

Why? Haven't I been told that I write posts that are too long, that take too long to read, that are constructed of pure solipsism ... and even that are wandering and vague. But you know how many negative comments I got suggesting that I should get stuffed and not write long, rambling, purposeless posts like that one?

None.

Oh, it could be that I've got the message out that I really will delete stupid comments and that has actually convinced the whole internet not to leave them. Heh heh. It could be that people went to the post, proved to themselves it was really ten thousand words and then didn't bother to read it. I'm sure there were quite a number of people who choked after the thousandth word. And I'm sure a lot of people thought it was wandering and vague. I'm not deluded. I haven't read the thing through in one gasp since I wrote it. I've made a few passes at editing bits here and there, but I'm not spending time on it. I found it nice that while Christmas was ongoing, and I didn't have time to write anyway, that the big post was out there generating traffic to the blog without my having to lift another finger.

I suppose I feel some wonder at how I'm going to top it. I'm not going to be writing any huge posts any time soon. Some have said that the post would make a good introduction to an RPG, but I'm not so sure. I said in the post and I'll say it again - for someone who's a complete noob, I doubt the post would have been much use. For those who know the facts for themselves, it might feel good to find another voice uttering the same ideas, but as an educational document it doesn't have much worth. It says what you should do; it doesn't say how to do it.

Saying how to do something is much, much harder, and would be much, much more impressive to me. I've had the conversation of late, and have had to admit that no one showed me 'how' to do this. I did not have any sort of mentor I could look at and follow in the footsteps of - mostly, I did things differently that what I saw others do. I approached the process of dungeon mastering from the perspective of what the player would want to see - recognizing that, most of the time, what the player says and what the player wants are two different things.

I'd like to go off about that ... but that would be digressing, and if I'm going to keep any continuity to this post, I shouldn't wander or get vague. On the other hand, I am writing this on Boxing Day without any real direction in mind - I thought I ought to throw out something for the reader who is now sick to death of their family - so wtf. Who really cares? This went past two paragraphs awhile ago.

Players say they want treasure and excitement. They say they want levels. They say they want an immersive and challenging game. And I don't argue that these things are all true.

What they don't say is that they'd like to like their characters. Players will bitch about half-rate characters they don't like, and they'll crow about characters with lots of skill. It's harder for them to admit when they've grown attached to their characters, and that they'd rather their characters didn't die. Sometimes a player will lose a character they've grown to love, and toss it off publically for others, only to mourn quietly to themselves that something they've really, really loved is now gone.

I don't know about now, but for awhile in the 80s that was seriously looked down on. There were too many stories floating around about D&D players killing themselves - or others - after the death of their character, and whether those were just urban myths or not, people definitely encouraged detachment.

But there are a lot of players who try to get their dead characters into new campaigns (where no one knows Zane the Mage died under a mountain of rock), or who sigh wistfully when remembering that monk they had once, or the fighter that never got his castle. And of course, for a lot of us, the character never really died ... the campaign did.

If you are going to DM, however, and you really do want your players invested, you're going to find yourself taking steps in the campaign and in the character fundamentals that will encourage player-to-character love. You may not talk about it. You may not want your players to talk about it. The whole thing might just get too creepy. Still, if you've played any sort of long campaign, you know that emotion is there.

End of digression.

I hadn't planned to talk about that. I hadn't planned to talk about anything, except that the long post did well despite all blogging advice. I think the better theme was the one about my not talking about the 'how' instead of the 'what.' The foregoing digression was just shit that occurred along the way.

It's relevant, however, in that throwing it out there still doesn't explain how it's done. How do you make players love their characters? How do you create secondary narratives, or even primary narratives? How do you keep the momentum going, when your players are tired and you're tired? The post was called "How to Dungeon Master," and the title was a lie. The real title should have been, "What to do when you Dungeon Master."

I haven't written a legitimate post for the existing title yet.

The Forgotten Saturnalia

2011-12-22T11:22:00.001-07:00

Two days before the start of Christmas (I count from the eve, like any good pagan, knowing the new day starts with nightfall), and it occurs to me that I don't think I've ever seen players celebrate the holiday inside the game. Of course, it being Christmas, and most worlds having had no 'Christ,' there's an argument for this ... but then, the gift-giving and the celebration did not start with Christianity, but with the pagans.

It's a logical time for a holiday. Whatever your world, if it's a sphere then there are probably going to be longer days and shorter days (even if the gods put the planet in perfect order to start, what a job it would be to keep the thing from wobbling!), as the days shorten, the weather gets bad and - wow - is that ever true for we in western Canada. If it were not for the holidays around the winter solstice, the winter would be a long, intolerable affair.

December has a way of shooting the psychology of people into the new year, however, and towards spring. For a month, you have little else to think about than running around, getting things ready and celebrating, forcing you out of doors at a time when no sane person would go out of doors just for the fun of it. If you had stayed indoors, however, you'd be at the beginning of a very long bore ... a bore made more tolerable in February because it starts in January, and not November.

So, Saturnalia - this time right now - ought to exist even in a fantasy world, moreso because it's a celebration that derives from nature, and not some later philosophical religious ideal. Christ is usually taken to have been born in the summer ... but when the early Christian leaders tried to stop their followers from continuing the pagan Saturnalia the followers ignored them. The Christians were forced to co-opt it, neatly fitting the gifts of the magi into the gift-giving that had been going on for a milllenia already. The original pagan practice is why so many of the aspects of this holiday don't float with the church view ... and it's why your world would probably have such a practice, along with celebrations of fire in the cold winter, and life-giving trees posted indoors, and carols and storytelling and drunkedness, even if you had no Christ.

But have you ever heard of player characters going after side quests in order to get Yodo the Dwarf the +2 hammer he's always wanted, or to get Halferan the Thief that little blackjack signed by the famous Grey Catter? Do the players come to the sessions with brew and get plastered while planning a party for their hirelings, or bringing the message with mead and presents to the little orc children, who on this day can be forgiven for being born into a heathen race? Shall there not be a tree cut from the forest and brought to the Silver Minnow Inn, and prostitutes brought off the streets to warm themselves by the fire and sing along with the baker and the guardsman? Will not the players ease the burdens of their hirelings and march first in the snow, to bring flesh and wine to cotters living haplessly in the woods?

Is there no Holiday spirit in fantasy worlds?

How To Dungeon Master (The 10,000 Word Post)

2011-12-16T19:21:00.001-07:00

Blaine H. wrote a cutting and insightful comment on the previous post, ending with a call for this:

"Perhaps what is needed is a GM's guide book to story telling more than a book with more advanced rules and traps in it. What makes for a better story and how to keep the momentum in a world, how to make it all link together in a way that is believable or to at least some suggestions to be able to justify and back up those decisions instead of another splat book with new combat rules in it."

Very well, how might such a book be written? I've contemplated the problem now for more than a year, since being called to the subject by Carl-the-cryptic-soul without a blog who built my wiki for me in 2010. I am unquestionably in agreement with Blaine. Screw the new rules and the traps. Screw the endless splat pages reinventing the wheel. Present a rule book on how to Dungeon Master.

Uh ... sure.

Let's break down Blaine's elements. He's asking for:

1) How to deliver a narrative.
2) How to keep up the momentum.
3) How to build cohesiveness in various narratives after they occur.
4) How to keep your narratives believable.
5) How does a DM justify the decisions he or she makes regarding the development, and ultimately the resolution, of narratives.

Did I miss anything? If not, then ...

PART 1
Introduction

I think to tackle any of this we'd need to define the 'narrative.' We'd need to have a clear idea of what 'momentum' is. What is 'player disbelief,' and under what circumstances does it occur? And why should a DM have to justify presented events and resolutions to narratives, i.e., adventures?

To begin, a Narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of events - that's the dictionary definition, anyway. In D&D, since the sequence has the potential to be determined by the players, the narrative is limited to the DM's description of those events as they occur. In effect, the DM calls the play-by-play to the event, while filling in all the details behind the event. It's a further bit of work than a radio announcer describing a football game - the DM also presents descriptions of the field of play, the colors of the uniforms, the personalities of the players and so on ... like the 'color' announcer, but more so, in that the color is provided as the events occur also. The color, in effect, becomes more than addendum for the action, it becomes the motivation for the action. The manner in which the color is presented determines the reaction of the players, whose play-by-play activity is then adjudicated by the DM.

Momentum is a physics term that has been co-opted to suggest that any action - in this case, mental action - contains within it a given speed (forward movement) once it has been set in motion. Activities which seem to cause time to fly are considered to have 'momentum' in the artistic sense, while activities that do not eat up time are considered to be 'dead.' Given these antonyms, we can equate momentum with 'life,' and therefore suppose that when the elements of a given campaign seem to be alive, the campaign can be said to have 'momentum.' I recognize this is going a bit around the barn to make what appears to be a very simple statement, but it's important that we understand the lack of momentum is the lack of life ... i.e., something that just lays there and does nothing of interest.

In effect, lack of momentum in a campaign is comparable to the lack of vibrancy in a lover. So momentum can also be defined as 'engagement' ... the greater the engagement in the participation of having sex, the better the sex. So the degree of momentum that is desired in one in which players are engaged, i.e., in a state of interest that equates with being fully 'alive.' The more alive your players are, the greater the momentum experienced.

Cohesiveness is the condition of things being linked together as a whole. As various games occur, and as various tracks of behavior are described and carried forth (the narratives each having their own momentum), inevitably a discontinuity threatens to tear the campaign apart. This can result either from various narratives conflicting directly with one another, creating inconsistencies, or by digressing to the point that both narratives cannot be managed in the space of time available to the parties playing the game.

A lack of cohesian can cause a DM to present excesses of information or improbable events in an attempt to direct or manage cohesiveness, which in turn reduces the momentum of a campaign. If this circumstance becomes constant, the campaign will probably die.

Giving into the tendency to retain cohesiveness at any cost can result in Disbelief. The suspension of disbelief is an action taken by the players during the game, encouraged by the belief that the DM is not actively directing the narrative in order to retain an amount of momentum and cohesiveness that satisfies the DM's 'plan.' The DM may have a plan, but it is important that evidence of that plan be below the level of perception of the players. If the players perceive that the various events of the narrative are moving forward of their own apparent accord, they can suspend disbelief and enjoy the game for its escapist possibilities. If, however, the DM manages some element of the game in a heavy-handed, clearly manipulative manner, suspension will disappear and the players will be left disbelieving, and more importantly distrusting the DM. If too much disbelief is forced upon the players, eventually they will take for granted nothing the DM says. Narrative at that point will become impossible, and the game's momentum will degrade into backbiting and rules lawyering. This will also kill a campaign.

Thus the DM must be prepared to Justify his or her behavior in such a manner as to to encourage the players to trust the DM's motives - specifically, that those motives are directed at the advancement of the narrative and the creation of momentum, and are not attempts to establish an improbable level of cohesion ... particularly when that 'cohesion' is something made to fit a DM's predetermined plan for predetermined events (i.e., 'railroading'). If the DM can present the series of events leading to a particular event as logical or reasonable, he or she can then justify any momentum-killing event in the chain as 'bad luck' - such as the death of a character, the loss of a great deal of wealth or status, or the obtaining of otherwise improbable amounts of treasure or success (which can also result in a momentum loss).

PART 2
Narrative

Very well, how does one build a narrative? It is not like writing a novel, or even a video game. To begin with, the DM should erase any preconception of an 'ending' or a 'resolution.' Although resolutions may occur upon points of the narrative, these can only be temporary moments of 'tying up' a given course of events ... they are NOT endings of themselves. More often than not, a supposed resolution will in fact create more questions, that is more events to be described as part of the narrative.

As well, the DM should remove from the imagination preconceptions of a 'climax' ... like resolutions, these will occur of their own accord. They do not need to be pre-ordained or managed. When a climax arises, it is up to the DM to milk it for all its worth, but if the narrative is allowed to progress in a lively, open manner, climaxes will occur without the need of engineering them in advance.

In effect, the various storywriting priniciples that you were perhaps taught in school are designed for artists telling a story to suit a thematic purpose. This is a roleplaying game: the thematic content is the same as that offered by life; there is no structured 'story' that builds to a climax and ends with a denouement ... any more than there is in your actual life. Your actual life consists of moments of panic and discord; of terror and bliss; of boredom and intensity. The DMs goal is to reduce the boredom circumstances as much as possible, but to otherwise provide for the same opportunities as a real life provides in terms of distraction and interest.

Fundamentally, the first step is to present a setting. Without burying ourselves in a long discourse about what settings might be presented, the principle purpose of the setting is to 'ground' the campaign in something tangible that can be incorporated into the player's imaginations. If the player cannot visualize the setting. or how to move or interact within that setting, then the setting is worthless to your game. Flogging a setting for the sake of novelty over the principles of interaction is a poor proposition, and will result in a sharp decrease of momentum once the novelty departs. Your setting cannot exist for the sake of itself - it exists to give the players identifying markers upon which to play. No one appears for a football game in order to watch the field. The field is lacking as an entertainment medium. It's sole purpose is as a measuring device to determine who wins and who loses.

A preferred setting will be that which allows as much latitude for your players as is reasonably possible. The gentle reader will take note that when you play football with your friends, the field's measuring capacity hardly needs to be as complex and detailed as its NFL counterpart; 'Ten Yards' requires no precision; the number of players on each team do not need to be exact, and can even be unequal. In short, where it comes to playing the game for the sake of fun, excessive rules monitoring is a detriment to game play - that is, momentum - and thus needs to be incorporated into the setting and the narrative as sparely as possible. Whenever possible, principle behaviours of the non-players in your setting should not be required of the players - if your NPC's rub blue mud into their bellies every day, the fact that your players choose not to do so should not automatically cripple their freedom to play as they wish. Have a setting that does not depend upon a character's behavior matching that of the natives ... this sort of constraint will build up resentment that will ultimately erode the suspension of disbelief, in that it will be perceived that the DM is fucking with the players for personal reasons.

Having produced a setting with these characteristics, as DM you must perceive that your principle goal will be to provide CLARITY. Having plopped your players in your setting, it is less important that you provide options for your players to follow, than that you begin to create their suspension of disbelief by completely and accurately describing what it is they see and understand about the place they find themselves. Dimensions, from the distance between themselves and the table, to the distance between themselves and the nearest coastline, or the end of the world; circumstances affecting their senses, sight and sound being foremost; conditions of their memories of events, from how they got here to how they got to be adults or how they came to have the skills and abilities they have; comprehension of behavior and attitude towards themselves by others, and by others towards others, from the bartender's behavior towards the barwench to the interrelations between states and religions. Wherever possible, these should be conveyed as follows:

1) Quickly. Infodumps are annoying and are highly abusive to momentum, even at the beginning of the game. Give as much information as you possibly can, but don't let it flow out in thirty minute blocks; most of your players will have forgotten virtually everything you've said after the first thirty seconds. You will do well to present information, therefore, in terms of its importance for the given moment, and in more generalized particulars of interest as time and player patience allows.

2) Repeatedly. Note the point above; your players will have forgotten, so don't hesitate to remind them over and over and over ... don't presume that, having been informed once, they have the detail in their head when they identify the action they wish to perform. In reality they would find it hard to fortget the huge purple elephant in the room. The player's imagination may need to be provided this information again, since the player's sense of hearing, smell and sight cannot be relied upon.

3) Accurately. As already stated, comparable with 'consistently.' If the elephant was described first as purple, it must remain purple forevermore. If your original purpose was to make the elephant green, you should have remembered to describe the greenness of the elephant accurately from the outset. Describing a setting is comparable with telling a joke. Every word must be presented exactly, as the humour of the joke depends upon the presentation behind the punchline. If your presentation is sloppy and inaccurate (inconsistent), your 'joke' will fall flat and die. So be accurate the first time, or suck it up and accept that the inaccuracy of your first telling is now absolute, unchanging dogma.

If the elephant's greenness was somehow incredibly important to the backstory behind the elephant, then change the backstory that hasn't yet been told to the players. This will create the appearance of accuracy, which in turn will enable the suspension of disbelief that will allow for an unrestricted momentum in the game.

The narrative, if presented in this fashion, will grow of its own accord, as events follow events in the player's imagination. They will, as they understand it, move from the town to the road to the wilderness to the dungeon to the treasure vault and back again in a smooth, imaginable manner, as each element is described as fully and accurately as the DM is able.

This will not, in itself, create a good game. A single narrative - that being the player's narrative - makes for a one-dimensional structure of events which will quickly diminish the momentum of a campaign. As strange as it may seem, it is not what the players know that creates a heightened interest in the game, but what the player's do not know.

What do I mean by this. For a good game, it is necessary for the DM to perceive that there is at least one other narrative taking place while the party's narrative is ongoing. This we can call the "NPC Narrative" ... it is the side story the players don't get to see that describes what a relevant group of NPCs are doing at any given moment, in tandem with what the players are doing in that same moment.

For example, let us suppose that the players are represented by Han, Chewie and Luke going to rescue the princess. For simplicity, we'll presume that these particular players have chosen to take the actions that Han and Luke take, and that the results from these actions follow in accordance with the familiar narrative.

In this example, we must consider the actions of Kenobi, the droids, and all the various groups within the Death Star as NPC narratives ... NPCs going about their business in a manner that will interact with the players, IF the players take certain actions. C-3PO and R2 are hiding in a closet at the exact moment Luke needs technical help, but of course Luke the character can't know this is what is happening. THE DM KNOWS. The DM has patiently worked out in his or her head that, at approximately the moment Luke is getting the princess out of her cell, there are a group of troopers trying to get into the room where the droids are. The DM rolls a die, and determines from the die that at the moment Luke needs to make the call, it's too late - the droids have been forced to relocate. Or, alternatively, the DM doesn't roll dice ... it just sounds like a really good matching up of differing narratives, and the DM goes with it in order to create tension. It is better, obviously, if the droids are contacted just in time and the players are saved.

If you watch films for this sort of bi-lateral narrative intervention - or interconnection, you'll take note that when the subordinate character's narrative reaches a moment of tension at the exact point the predominant character's narrative reaches one, you have a climax.

Your role as a DM is to create the backstory behind the NPC Narrative so that it intervenes positively or negatively with the player's chosen action, depending upon that action. If the NPC Narrative does not intervene, there is no reason for it being there. There's no need to remember that the baker finishes his work and makes love to his wife and beats his kids after the players have bought bread and left town. But if the players have bought a load of equipment, ropes, picks, weapons, sacks, etc., a reasonable NPC Narrative might begin with a group of youths deciding to follow the players, with this narrative not being explained to the players until the proper time. You, as DM, have posited the existence of these unrevealed NPCs on the spur of the moment - and having thus determined their existence, you as DM begin the NPC Narrative as you in turn provide data for the Player Narrative.

The players may not be aware of this other narrative when they find a family living on a farm way out of town and butcher them all, unaware of their being followed. At this point, the DM could decide the NPC Narrative rushes back to the town to tell everyone, but this decision does not provide for the right kind of tension. Remember that you WANT your narratives to interact! The better narrative turn, therefore, is to have one of the youths demonstrate their presence at the moment of slaughter, crying out, "OH MY GOD" and then running away. This presents the possibility of the party attempted to catch the NPC Narrative before they can tell others, or running away knowing full well that the nearby town is onto them. Result: more knowledge of a specific kind creates tension, and thus momentum.

A DM should try to keep as many possible NPC Narratives going on as is reasonably possible, with the recognition that some of these narratives can be abandoned once the party has changed their circumstances enough to warrant it. The town sheriff will only pursue to the edge of town. The town marshall will only pursue as long as time and distance allows. Eventually the party's behavior at a given time can be ignored by the various NPC Narratives you've created (though you could reinsert one at a particular, clever moment in the distant future). Thus the DM should never become so invested in a particular narrative that it cannot be either dropped or shelved for long periods. New narratives can always be created on the spot, and with practice the logic and behavior of NPCs within these imagined narratives will become more usefully interactive with the player's narrative. By useful, we mean in the providing of a good game.

PART 3
Momentum

I have already made a number of points about elements that have the potential to kill momentum, and how the presentation of how other narratives going on 'behind the curtain' can help increase or improve momentum. At this time I wish to discuss other non-narrative related means by which momentum can be upheld or increased.

First and foremost, the manner in which hard to perceive information is uncovered by the players as they move forward in the game. I made the point about information being given accurately and uniformly, but I also pointed out that said information should be 'complete' ... a point upon which I have not further embellished.

Complete information can be defined within the game format as all the information that is necessary for a player to make an informed decision ... with the understanding that if harm arises from that decision, it is not because the DM failed to tell the player something the player would certainly know about in that moment.

If I as the player throw a hammer at a closed box, intending to break it, and there is a magical device inherent in the box that causes it to explode upon impact, the player is rightly killed, though the trunk was revealed and the bomb was not - since detecting the bomb required more than the player's eyes. If, however, the player detected magic about the box, and was told there was no magic, and then caused the explosion, the DM is at fault for not giving COMPLETE information.

While it is anathema to a campaign when a DM fails to be complete, the exact line between 'what the players know' and 'what the players don't know' is very, very fine indeed, and playing with that line is a marvelous way to build momentum in a campaign. All players, after all, have a built-in need to know, as all humans are plagued by this particular mindset. In D&D, we not only have the circumstance of wanting to know, we have also the practical guarantee that we WILL know, once the right actions have been taken. This produces an outstanding degree of momentum, if it is played right.

In order to inveigle the interest of a party, it is necessary to produce enough information to prove that knowing is in the party's interest. If you as DM produce some weird, strange, apparently impractical device that inherently shows no personal gain for the players, they will look at it, shrug, yawn, and move on - no matter how really queer and strange it is. The game is about obtaining power; power through coin, power through ability and power through influence; if you do not tease your players with the offer of one of these things, you are barking up the wrong tree. You are a prostitute offering clients the promise to walk their dog. Unless 'walking the dog' is a euphemism for sex, you are selling the wrong thing to the wrong people.

Therefore, when something shiny is showing through a crack in the floorboards, it needs to be the right kind of shiny. It needs to convey information that more shinyness is somewhere about, and that it can be found if only the party will start looking. If you will increase further still the momentum of the event, the shiny object that's found will inherently contain other information, such as the promise of danger, and the promise of terrific good luck.

Having initiated the search, then - or whatever other encouragement to action causes the party to believe that vast wealth and power lays just beyond - don't make the search nigh impossible. In fact, don't even make it excessively difficult. Luke & Co. do not wander all over space for a half-hour of screen time before discovering the cause of Alderaan's destruction. They don't know the Death Star is the cause, but they find it fast enough, and finding it almost immediately keeps the narrative flowing. There is nothing more crippling to momentum than too many moments stacked together which turn up no results. Whenever possible, fast-forward the narrative to the next immediate result, and press pause when you get there. Each result will create interest, and discussing the results will create more interest (and some inspiration for you, the DM, vis a vis NPC Narratives, as you determine in your head what the NPCs are doing at that moment and what they're discovering, to give to the party later).

Not fast-forwarding, i.e. wandering through endless empty rooms in dungeons without finding anything, is a very poor way to build momentum. The theory has long been that empty dungeon rooms creates tension and makes the bang at the end more interesting. Hollywood has made horrid bad films for years on this logic - remembering that its cheaper to film talking heads blabbing about how to destroy the alien race than it is to film the destruction of the alien race. So you are awarded with five minutes of destruction and 65 minutes of talking heads.

Empty rooms are also easy to create, and can be created in abundance, and inherently fill up a whole evening with their investigation, enabling the DM to put all his or her eggs into the one interesting room at the end. It takes four times as much effort to create four interesting rooms, plus more if you want the interesting rooms to have any continuity.

I argue that the whole week before playing D&D is a slow, boring time waiting for the interesting room, and that players shouldn't have to wait through unnecessary time drags before getting to the good stuff. They've already waited to play the good stuff.

Thus, reason in your mind how your players can be awarded with power, coin and status each time they overcome an obstacle; this will keep the carrot firmly in front of the horse, and will discourage the horse from wondering why they never get a bite from the carrot even though its always there. In other words, once in awhile, and not too long a while, let the horse eat the carrot. You can always create another carrot and horses are ready to eat a lot of them. Obviously, you have to keep carrots out of the horse's mouth long enough to make them pull the cart ... but if you never give the horse a carrot, it will just stop pulling. And there's the end of your momentum.

This brings, then, the question of obstacles. For a horse pulling a cart, the obstacle is the weight, the harness, the slope of the road and the distance. These are obstacles enough to make a horse's day a hard one. They are not, however, enough to create momentum in a campaign. Getting through the player's day has to be more than just work. The obstacles have to be interesting, occasionally life-threatening, and by and large the stuff that dreams are made of. By that, I mean that they should hit a standard of things that one would tell stories about afterwards. Players like to think back upon their past exploits as great things they were able to do. In the end, the treasure, the gained experience will be forgotten, and the memory the player will retain was that once they flew a cow with wooden wings into the side of the Lord's Tower, causing it to collapse with profound consequences.

Your obstacles should be the sort that require inventive solutions, but NOT the sort that require a predetermined solution. Create the obstacle. Make the obstacle complicated and difficult to overcome. Let your players invent the profound, elaborate and dangerously insane schemes that will breach it. When they fail, it will be as much fun for them as succeeding, for in most cases they will expect to fail. Succeeding in the face of that will provide a thousand times the momentum your campaign needs than succeeding at fitting piece A into slot B while holding lever C with device D. While puzzles and traps are obstacles, they are not interesting obstacles. You will not hear a player tell in excessive detail about the time they picked the green door over the red one.

If you have, how boring must be the ordinary obstacles of their campaign?

Like inertia, momentum in a campaign has a way of building up over time, in that a certain number of events experienced by a group of people crosses a given threshold and those participants find their mouths watering for the next opportunity to do something again like things they've done in the past. This will allow a certain amount of leeway where it comes to the slowness of a particular campaign session ... in that they will forgive the DM these indiscretions since they have experience with what the DM can provide. Eventually that credit will crumble and falter, if not kept up to the standard of the past, but the more credit you have, the more you can expect from your players between giving them a carrot.

PART 4
Cohesiveness

While it is true that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, it is also true that the Devil is in the details. But before we talk about consistency itself, let's apply it first to narrative, and then to momentum.

It is a true failing of DMs that they fall in love with their narratives, particularly those which players do not happen to follow up. There is a perception that every performance artist has, which I confess to sharing, and that can be summed up in the words, "You wouldn't believe what I had waiting behind Curtain No. 2, if only you'd picked THAT!"

I think there is only one metaphor for this, and thankfully it affects both sexes. It is what happens mentally when the girl gets up, or the guy pulls out, before you are done. It is an awful, empty, heartbreaking emotion, and we all experience it from time to time.

For some DMs, it is enough to have created the Curtain No. 2 option, and they will quietly tuck away the props and elements therein for the next opportunity the party has to step into a similar situation. For some DMs, the Curtain No. 2 option is SO cool that they can't resist talking about what was there, getting the coitus interruptus of the moment out in the open and at least off their chest.

And then there are DMs who do not let go; who cannot let go; who immediatly set about to reorder time and space in order to ensure that, no matter what, Curtain No. 2 shall be pulled aside, the way it was MEANT to be!

Not to torture the metaphor beyond all reason, but for me personally, this is where you end the sex act and your partner rapes you.

Where it comes to cohesion and the narrative, there is a disconnect in that some DMs are unfamiliar with the principle that the cohesiveness of the campaign is not centered around the DM and his or her concept, it is centered around the Players and their concept. While the DM may own the funhouse, and may have built the funhouse, the DM's fun is not considered when the payers have entered the funhouse. When was the last time you took a ride on the rollercoaster and thought about the vendor's mindset as you tumbled and spun?

So where it comes to cohesion and the narrative, I say to the DM, this isn't about you. This isn't your narrative. The NPC narratives you create behind the curtains of your design are meant to stay behind those curtains if the players want it that way. You must, if you will run a good game, allow those set-ups to gather dust, if necessary forever more, rather than foisting them upon your characters.

If you will create cohesiveness, it must be from the player's perspective - which is, in fact, far easier than creating a cohesiveness for your entire world. The players move about as though the world is a great conveyor belt, and the cohesion that you create must only extend to what the players happen to perceive.

Most of this will be quite common: merchants will sell wares, lords will manage lands, street cleaners will clean the streets and so on. Allowing normalcy in most of the things the players interact with will go a long way to building trust and - if you can believe it - suspending disbelief. If they see the DM as a caretaker and not an experimental scientist, they will more freely interact in your world, enabling deeper and more complex narratives that don't 'blow up' when the DM has to put his finger in here or there. You're managing a garden, snipping a branch here or there, tying up a plant now and again for its health. You're not a construction company, blowing things up so you can build other things. Get out of that mindset. Let your towns be towns, and let the citizens within deal with strife and hard times as citizens will ... the more often your NPCs, and your world in general, responds as you would expect things to respond, the more your players will buy into your narrative. Then, when something weird happens, they will assume a cause other than the DM creating another railroad. They'll assume its something they don't know, and from past experience they'll begin to understand that knowing will probably bring another reward - on their terms, not the DM's.

Cohesiveness as it applies to momentum obeys the same principle. Allow your players to feel and experience the momentum as it occurs to THEM. Don't try to pound momentum down their throats because you believe this is the time they should be experiencing it. You cannot make the plants grow by beating them with a rake. You must apply the rake gently about their roots, loosening out the weeds and clearing the ground, providing water and sunlight, and letting the players develop their sense of the big bad world on their own. You increase the level of cohesiveness by letting your players create it. Once they begin to expect things to be a certain way, beware of how you change things around. Don't blot out the sun that's been instrumental in the present growth spurt. Where it comes to momentum, 'new' isn't exciting, it's fucking annoying. When was the last time something 'new' that was coming at you at 60 m.p.h. on the highway made you feel like you were on an adventure? Hint: swearing, swerving and nearly getting killed isn't 'adventuring.'

Yet what DM isn't guilty of hands down changing all the rules in a night and finding the players are angry and resistant, as opposed to excited?

Now, cohesion itself is the principle element of world-building. Whether the world you build is small and cozy, or ridiculously extensive, it is assumed that as DM you build the world in a manner that is suitable for you. It stands to reason that having laid the garden in its place, and having chosen to grow the beans here and the cabbages there, one does not start replanting the cabbages three weeks into the season. Perhaps next year you might remember you'd prefer the cabbages away from the fence, where they could get more sun, but this year you will probably leave them well enough alone.

The world design itself must be approached from the same perspective as the garden - once the location for the various elements have been established, and the seeds planted, the problem of what is to be grown and where it is to be grown is settled. The gardener does not waste time upon those questions once the sowing is done. There are other things to cogitate: how best to tackle the problem of weeds, how best to counter diseases, how best to fight off vermin and eventually when to harvest. If creators of worlds would settle, once and for all, what the world is and what the world might present, and thus bring their attention to other matters, such experience teaches the DM to present that world well, or how experience teaches the players to interact with that world, than patterns of interaction can be recognized and managed, and the desired depth of the campaign can be plumbed. But if the world itself will be destroyed every time a problem arises, as though it is the designed world and not some smaller element that is to be blamed, than no cohesion can ever exist because no cohesion is ever tried.

If every year you planted a garden, only to plow it up the moment a blight strikes the carrots, then you will never have a garden. You will never learn how to manage blight, you will learn nothing of the ways of gardening and you will remain ignorant of the garden's purpose from one year to the next.

A D&D world is not put to the test in three sessions. It cannot be expected to prove its worth with one party in an afternoon. It must be coddled and pampered for years if it is ever expected to produce the yield you demand from it.

So, when the world has been constructed, and the players have been allowed to adapt to the world, and the excitement the world derives from the players exploring the world (and the DM's imagination, presumably), what then should the DM do to retain the cohesiveness of the world?

There is an old adage here. If it isn't working, abandon it. if you find yourself working to make something work, and you cannot make it work, then it is time to admit that it doesn't work and simply move on. You may try a new combat system, but if the combat system is a failure, and everyone knows it, and the belief is that we CAN make it better, but all attempts towards making it better fail, it is time to recognize that you cannot cling forever to a lost cause.

You may feel that changing the existing - annoying - system would be destroying the 'cohesion' of your campaign, but you're failing to grasp the larger perspective. The failed system is the element of your world that isn't working, amid all the elements that are. The failed system is the non-cohesive element of your world. Ridding yourself of it is not the destruction of cohesion, it's the preservation of it. Bring in a new system. Experiment to see if it is something that works. If it does, embrace it. And build from there.

Any system you bring into your world has the potential for increasing or decreasing the cohesion of that world. Give it a set period of time, and if the new system does not accomplish what you hoped for, Let It Go. Your world will remain your world.

This is the same principle for managing a garden. Good gardeners move towards trying new strategies in the same way. If, however, the strategy results in killing this year's crop of beets, you don't try it on next year's crop of potatoes on the logic that it may only kill beets. You learn from your mistakes, you take your losses and you don't try the same strategy next year.

To which it must be added, do not embrace every idea which presents itself. View every idea from that same perspective of the overall cohesion of all the rules you now play by. View every new idea as a potential threat. How much time will you waste trying to make this work? How much momentum will be lost in your campaign as everyone in the campaign first learns how to use the new system? Is it worth it?

I don't argue that you shouldn't try to change things up, and occasionally try systems that are unique and interesting. A new, innovative system can bring much momentum to a campaign. But if you insist on constantly trying new ways to do things that have been working perfectly fine for you, than you are the force that will bring your formerly cohesive campaign to wrack and ruin. It can take years to build a brilliant campaign. A few months of stubborn, inflexible innovation can kill it just as dead.

Why worry about whether an old, working thing needs to be changed? Do you complain that the shears you've used to cut back your raspberries year after year make gardening a boring? Do you decide that because you hoe every year, this year you'll won't, just to be different? If so, perhaps you are unclear on the subject of things working the way they're supposed to work.

Cohesion begins, continues and ends with this rule: "Do as little as possible." Leave your players alone. Leave the world you've designed alone. Stop messing with it. Concentrate on running it, and letting your players run in it, and the world will take care of itself.

PART 5
Disbelief

And now I have appeared to offer contradictory arguments. Just above, I said that you should let the players act in your world. And at the top of this post, when describing disbelief, I said that the players should do so, but only 'apparently' ... I further alluded to the DM's manipulation 'beneath' the player's perception. These would appear to be, as I say, contradictory.

Let us be clear. The DM certainly runs the world. Events in the world do take place with the DM's manipulation. My argument above was that to preserve the cohesion of your world, you should allow your players to run in it, and that you shouldn't mess with that world. This does not mean that you should not run in that world also.

If you want to convey a suspension of disbelief in your players, then you must be prepared to present your manipulations of your world as though the world is as unchangeable for you as it is for them. You may create NPC narrations; you may incorporate teases; you may impose obstacles - but these narrations, teases and obstacles MUST obey the same rules, structure, format and constraints your world demands of the player. A demon may teleport at will from town to town; demons do that. But ordinary peasants cannot. The rules are varied and far reaching and - as DM - offer you one hell of a lot of "gee, let's fuck with the party" possibilities ... but if you don't want the party to cotton onto your cleverness, you'll reach into your bag of really bizarre tricks only so often.

To restate the difference here: don't mess with your world; but hell yes, mess around IN it.

You have a lot of opportunities for manipulating events by what parts of the world you care to describe, as opposed to what parts you don't, and you can have a party dancing on a string to a lively tune if you go all out. But puppeteer, hear me good when I tell you, DON'T let the party see the strings. They will never, ever forgive you.

This will require something from you that, maybe, you're not capable of doing. If you can do it even a bit when you're of a young age, you'll find you're brilliant at it when you're fifty. The thing you must do is shut up.

Stop talking. Stop explaining yourself. Stop revealing what you've done, or why you did it. Just stop. These are things that you have to learn to enjoy yourself, in your own brain, without the added satisfaction of smarmily dancing them under someone else's nose ... or else you will spoil the brilliance that comes from inscrutability. If you want to be a good DM, and you want to run a good game, learn to be inscrutable.

What does that mean? Well, we do want people to be able to understand you when you speak; we're not talking about quite that much inscrutability. But we do want a level of enigma; a degree of impenetrability; a dash of the mysterious. In short, my gentle readers, we do not want your players to be able to 'read' you, or your intentions. With practice, you must be able to look them straight in the eye and LIE.

Not that you are always lying, you understand. You're expected to be accurate, so sometimes you will also be truthful. What's wanted here is for your players to be uncertain about when you are lying, and when you are telling the truth. More to the point, it will probably come about that they fear in certain moments that you are lying. If you get very good at it, they will fear in other moments that you are telling the truth.

And they won't KNOW.

The more you talk about what you're planning, and how it will happen, or how it happened last time, or what this party did when you tried this, or how this party reacted when you presented this situation, the more your present party is learning about how you play. You're blowing your greatest strength! Don't give them clues! Don't tell them what to expect! Shut up!

When you don't reveal your motives, you create a powerful aura around yourself, forcing others to question themselves when they find they can't get a straight answer from you. If you can, train yourself to develop a flat, poker stare, so that when players ask pertinent questions, your expression does not give away the answer. This will drive your players crazy. If they don't know what to expect from you, they won't know what to expect from your world ... and they will love that deep, mysterious quality.

Developing this strategy will enable you to move more adroitly shift under the radar, as you won’t show your hand to your players, even after you’ve played it.

Now, you must take this advice with a grain of salt, since most of the time you will want to be completely straight up with your players. You will want to present your NPCs as what they appear to be, since building engagement for your players sincerely demands they be able to predict with in a certain measure the responses of others – or else they don’t dare DO anything. Your players should feel comfortable approaching NPC’s for favors, or to hire them as retainers. When someone proposes to be of help to them, 99 times out of a hundred you want that NPC to be helpful. However dangerous your world may actually be, populate your world with good-intentioned, well-meaning characters. This is the player’s experience in the real world; having this be the experience in your world will bring them a level of comfort, which will increase their trust in you.

Having your players trust you is invaluable capital. Spend it carefully and wisely. Once you have built it up, do not squader it. For the most part, label the killable creatures and personalities in your world with a big bright marker … this will enable you to present the odd, truly dangerous deceiver in your campaigner as someone truly to be feared. The party, trusting in the decency of your world, will tend to view such persons as something to be eradicated. Note here the suspension of disbelief – the party will see the deceptive entity as something that needs to be removed, and NOT connect that individual with your DM’s imagination.

The further you separate yourself from the personalities you create in your world, the more willingly the party will retain that separation in their active dealings with said personalities. The party will not interpret the villain as “The DM fucking with us,” and will interpret the villain as “the sort of person who is expected to exist, and who must be eradicated.” The gentle reader should understand that our imaginations have a tendency to fill in the blanks regarding the behavior of virtually any characterization you care to present … by presenting characters who deviate from expected behavior a little bit, but not excessively, you enable the players to create images for these characters which do not superimpose YOU into the fabrication process.

At times, you may find yourself going over the top; you may make errors and bring into existence beings or situations so outrageous or camp as to be laughable or phony. Should this happen, do not fret. Take a page from above: ditch it. Ditch anything that proves it isn’t working. If you can’t ditch it, posit a reason why the being or the situation appeared to be more ridiculous than it really is. Reshape that sucker and bring it back down to Earth.

It may seem wonderful to populate your world with freaks – but you will find your human players will quickly adapt to any level of weirdness you try to create, and will return to their ordinary, everyday suppositions about things. This is our nature. You must play up to it, and not against it, or your players will know your world isn’t real.

PART 6
Justifying Decisions

If you stay true to the practices above, you will rarely find yourself having to justify anything. For the most part, since you are playing your hand close to your chest, you will be able to present a realistic argument to the party that they do not yet know all the facts. Beware of making that statement, however! There had better be facts to be known, that will eventually demonstrate how the matter is properly resolved, or you will be declared for what you are: a liar and a phony.

Please believe me when I say that lying is not necessarily a desirable characteristic in a person – it is, however, a defacto necessity in a DM. In the first case, you cannot always tell the truth to your players. Occasionally you will need to present information to them through the mouths of NPCs, and let’s face it, everybody lies. Occasionally your narrative, or the NPC’s Narrative, will require that this particular NPC at this particular time needs to lie to the party, to carry forth the various elements of what’s going on to the best possible conclusion (i.e., that you don’t know the NPC is there to save his son, who is in fact the big bad for the whole adventure). Every narrator knows that, now and then, not telling the truth about something is the best way to demonstrate that something is very, very wrong about this situation … leading the players to engage, as learning more about what’s happening is – as I said – the main ingredient of game momentum.

If you will lie, you will occasionally be caught in a lie. Even if you are a very good DM, a very good player will eventually catch you covering up for some mistake you’ve made by pointing out that you changed a detail that they remembered, and you did not. I have said already that you shouldn’t let yourself be caught manipulating … but you WILL be caught, that’s just the way it goes. All you can do is be honest in admitting that yes, you lied; you did it because you fucked up here and here. Then apologize, admit that things were getting a little complicated for you, eat a little humble pie and mean it. Your party will forgive you (providing they’re not having to forgive you every week.

It needs to be said that a DM must impose upon himself or herself a rigorous sense of what is correct behavior. I don’t argue that a DM must be above reproach (you’re lying, remember?) … but you must behave in what was once called a gentlemanly manner. Suppressing your personal wishes or expectations is a BIG start. You may be bitterly disappointed that the big bad you built the party up for is going down like a glass-jawed fighter inside of two rounds, but your party isn’t disappointed! They’re slavering for the treasure that’s sure to come, and they don’t give a wit for your disappointment. Parading it out in front of them is as good a form as prancing around being satisfied with yourself when some monster has successfully killed half the party.

There is a degree of decorum here regarding DMs and players which is definitely a one-way street. The players are encouraged to get as emotional as they want. They are encouraged to scream with glee at every critical hit, to dance on the graves of their enemies and to spit tacks and gnash their teeth at every failing. Emotion is a rich wonderful thing. It is something that, ideally, the DM shouldn’t indulge.

Ideally, the DM should view the player’s triumph with a warm feeling of positive energy, feeling a bit of pride for being able to make a player happy. The DM should view the player’s failures with sympathy and consideration, while contemplating means by which the player should be aided – subtly, of course – in overcoming this failure and bringing about another triumph. The DM may have other emotional states of mind, but these should not be presented as part of the gaming experience. Remember, you have to shut up.

Why? Because, in fact, you cannot justify any strong emotion you have as a DM in the face of the fact that you can at a stroke recreate any part of the campaign to suit yourself. There is no player anywhere who can commiserate with your angst, and every player will view your successes as nothing less than gloating – so if you must have emotions, don’t parade them.

This is only the same lesson every person in supreme authority learns. Authority demands a level of behavior which appears, frankly, to be unfair. But this is your lot as DM.

If you will impose this rigor upon yourself, and live by it – to stand up and accept your wrongdoings, to stiffen your upper lip, to behave whenever possible with the player’s interests held ahead of your own, and so on – you will find you’re able to stand up to any criticism by standing squarely upon your actual motives. This position will enable you to justify your actions, because your actions will in fact be justifiable.

PART 7
Conclusion

The gentle reader will please understand that no set of techniques for dungeon mastering a game will handle every player. There are players who will simply fail to engage, no matter how much freedom you give them, or what is happening. There are players for whom the momentum never reaches a degree they can appreciate. There are players for whom the destruction of cohesion is a personal goal. And there are players who will never, ever, suspend their disbelief.

As a DM, you will come to recognize the patterns of behavior that makes for a difficult player. Some players will come to your game wounded and dripping from a hundred other campaigns that "All sucked!" - and who will still retain the core of a real player. Some players will distrust you automatically because they've trusted DMs just one time too often. Some players will be disruptive and anti-character because, well, they've never been shown the way. If you're lucky, you may someday have one of these players in your world, and you may help them to at last find redemption for their obsession with this game in your campaign.

More likely, however, is that you will find yourself faced with a player who is quite beyond this redemption. You will stretch yourself to the limits of your ability to please them, to find the key that will awaken the player within, only to fail. You will slam your efforts again and again this poor bugger's wall, and if you are obsessive enough, you will destroy your whole campaign in the process. You'll break your own long-held principles just to make them like your game.

But you'll fail, because these individuals are not merely bad gamers, they are bad people. They may be fundamentally harmless and even well-meaning, but they haven't got the stuff for interactive behavior with thinking people, and they cover that up by acting up and demanding attention. If you have the patience, give these people a try. But keep it in the back of your mind that when the time comes, they may have to be bum-rushed out of your campaign.

All this advice that I've been giving here comes with a warning: this is an ungodly amount of work we're talking about here. Your brain will hurt, your senses at the end of some sessions will grow numb and foggy, and from time to time you will flat out lose your temper and your reason from the stress of answering and explaining and explaining and answering for hours at a time. The requirement to run a good game is hellishly costly upon the DM. Only a deliberately self-abusive person would make the attempt.

It requires far less effort to run a mediocre game, and even less to run a crappy game ... it's no wonder that crappy games are the norm. To run a good game literally requires that the DM suppress natural emotions and change as a person. And if all of this is what is required, why, why, why would anyone want to be a DM?

Most times, I think, you are the poor bugger who has been shunted into the position because there is no one else available ... and when you find yourself casting about looking for a means to improve your ability to play, you run straight into the splat books Blaine addressed at the start of this post - which are no help at all. I could imagine that if you are the sort of individual who has thrown your hands up at what you've found already, and you have no natural drive to play - that is, you had to be roped into it - then this long post will be of little help to you also. I am asking for behavior from a DM that is unnaturally difficult, which is not easily accomplished without already having a proclivity for at least partway having come to some of these conclusions. If you are such an individual, that is one that hasn't the natural drive, then I'm afraid I've probably failed you today. On the other hand, if you have already discovered some of the above things to be true on your own ... you may have more natural drive than you presently expect.

For those DMs who do have a natural drive; who find they must DM because playing alone does not immerse them far enough into this game, I hope they have found a greater sense of inter-relation between the various elements of narrative and momentum and cohesion. I have written this for them, because they are at least halfway to the goal already.

But I'm avoiding my own question now, regarding the choice to DM. It is easy to point and say, "Because I must," but that is a philosophical cop-out. The better answer would be to provide cause ... and I think it is relevant to do so in this post, because I believe the cause of being a DM is also a motivation to running a good game.

Looking over the various aspects of DMing, one returns again and again to the expectation upon the DM to present a sort of playground for the players - and in this, it is easy to leap to the conclusion that a DM creates a world to be a sort of tourist guide, or comparable service functionary. Having made the funhouse, it is presumed that the DM's personal satisfaction comes from others having fun in it.

I don't deny that there is personal satisfaction in that. But I sincerely don't think that's enough. I believe that for a lot of DMs, composing a world and a campaign goes much further than merely showing it off.

If I may impose a last metaphor - if you build a magnificent house, yes, you will receive satisfaction from showing off that house. But the greater satisfaction comes from simply viewing or experiencing the product of your imagination, for its own sake. I may run players in a particular part of my world, and they may travel through a composite of Russia or Germany or India upon a great adventure. But rest assured, I am in Russia and Germany and India TOO. I am travelling the rivers, I am fighting the monsters there, I am assuming characters and conjuring up great monoliths and fantabulous features in my imagination also ... and I am just as astounded as the players, though my task is to relate to them what I have already seen myself in my mind. The principle difference is that since it is my world, and not theirs, they must do their best with something not quite tailor-made for their souls ...

But my soul rests in my world in a state of perfect contentment.

(P.S.: This is, in fact, more than 10,000 words. I don't know how it will be received, but it was in fact written in one day, in just a little under 12 hours, from 7:40 this morning to 7:17 right now, at least by my computer clock. Blogger might publish this an hour different, as I don't think I've ever fixed the time zone.

I trust that someone will find it inspiring. There is an great amount of material here, but I don't believe this is the last word I shall ever have on dungeon mastering. Apart from this, I've written 47 other posts on the subject. I shall no doubt write at least 47 more.

For the present, however, I think I can call this post definitive upon the core principles. I shall now call it a day and post)

A Level Playing Field?

2011-12-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

Let's review an ordinary scenario.

Freddie, our typical gamer, takes a trip to California, and while out there he stumbles into a little hole-in-the-wall gaming store. And there he finds a new RPG, something that isn't even on the net, that looks amazing. There are ten books altogether and since he's on vacation and has a budget for weird purchases, Freddie buys them all.

He spends the rest of his vacation and the week after devouring his new purchases and come the next gaming night, he's ready. "We're not playing D&D tonight," he declares. "We're playing Zombies & Musketeers!"

And so the rest of the evening Freddie explains how the game works, how they have to roll characters, what they're allowed to do, what they're expected to do and basically the fundamentals of why this is a better game.

The reasons for this change is obvious to everyone. It's new. When anyone cares to examine what's going on, or question is (as one player probably will), the fact that Z&M is new will no doubt be the trump that's played.

I, however, find myself wondering if it's really that Z&M is 'new.' Looking back at incidents like this, I think it might not all be the zest for novelty. I think there might be an entirely different emotion at work.

Consider. Freddie, our example, has had two or three weeks to indoctrinate himself in depth in the subject material. As the referee, Freddie is in a unique position vis a vis the new game - he's seen it. He's perhaps experimented with it a bit, and if he's given himself a good couple of months to really examine it and build up a campaign for it, he's the BIG EXPERT at the table, isn't he? Freddie may not be the brightest bulb in the lab, but for at least a couple of months, he's a step or two ahead of his players by default. He can lord his special, intricate knowledge of Z&M over the others ... at least until the others get a chance to look at the rules, to figure out how to play them. Lo, three or four games down the road, the players will start to challenge Freddie's mastery of the game, and after that its all much harder work for Freddie.

But perhaps he can find a new game to play after that.

There may be a great deal more to the ever constant 'new campaigns,' 'new editions,' and 'new games' that act as a tonic upon those for whom roleplaying games are a commercial sport. Having the edge on your players is something you certainly gain when you change the rules on them every six months. Then the players are kept steadily off balance, and you, the DM, get to enjoy those brief periods where every question can be answered with a de facto, "That's how this campaign works."

Sooner or later, however, your players wise up, begin to figure out your new rules, and start using them against you. This is the worst thing for a dictator. You've got to do something. Close your campaign and start again.

Seems to me I remember a steady stream of people once upon a time who always had a 'new game' they'd just picked up. There seemed to be a certain pleasure they had at outlining how everything worked, while their players wallowed around in uncertainty and unclarity. For some of the gentle readers who are scoffing as I write this, I should point out that this sort of behavior - the old salt lording it over the newbie - is extremely common. Some people really enjoy fucking newbies around ... and changing the rules on the newbie for the first few months on the job is one of the best ways.

Working in restaurants, we used to send new servers off to random tables with plates full of bacon, only to laugh our heads off at them standing in front of uncomprehending customers wondering what this server is doing. We would send young boys off across the street to other restaurants to borrow their banana peelers, or tell new dishwashers some odd item got 'put in the basement' ... so that they would wander around trying every door, looking for the stairs. These are the sorts of games every industry plays on every poor newbie stupid enough to start working there, or stupid enough to be young.

Are you so sure that the RPG'ers new! new! new! chant isn't just another way to fuck people over?

After all, if you can't control the rules by virtue of being the only one that knows them, than you have to play by the rules. Your players will keep you honest. Which means if you're going to stay a jump ahead of your players, you'll actually have to be more creative, more insightful and more clever than they are.

I don't doubt a lot of DM's just aren't up to that.

The Dancing Plague of 1518

2011-12-15T09:07:00.001-07:00

You have to love this stuff. Also from wikipedia:

"The outbreak began in July 1518, when a woman, Frau Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four to six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers. Some of these people eventually died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

Historical documents, including 'physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council' are clear that the victims danced. It is not known why these people danced to their deaths.

As the dancing plague worsened, concerned nobles sought the advice of local physicians, who ruled out astrological and supernatural causes, instead announcing that the plague was a 'natural disease' caused by 'hot blood.' However, instead of prescribing bleeding, authorities encouraged more dancing, in part by opening two guildhalls and a grain market, and even constructing a wooden stage. The authorities did this because they believed that the dancers would only recover if they danced continuously night and day. To increase the effectiveness of the cure, authorities even paid for musicians to keep the afflicted moving. Some of the dancers were taken to a shrine, where they sought a cure for their affliction."

There's more about it from the link. I found this while working my way through Alsace - and I just love this weird stuff when I find it.

The Wolf of Soissons

2011-12-14T13:52:00.003-07:00

Some things have to be copied. From Wikipedia:

"The Wolf of Soissons was a man-eating wolf which terrorized the commune of Soissons northeast of Paris over a period of two days in 1765, attacking eighteen people, four of whom died from their wounds.

The first victims of the wolf were a pregnant woman and her unborn child, attacked in the parish of Septmont on the last day of February. Diligent locals had taken the infant, a scant four or five months old, from the womb to be baptized before it died when the wolf struck again not three hundred yards from the scene of the first attack. One Madame d'Amberief and her son survived only by fighting together.

On 1 March near the hamlet of Courcelles a man was attacked by the wolf and survived with head wounds. The next victims were two young boys, named Boucher and Maréchal, who were attacked on the road to Paris, both badly wounded. A farmer on horseback lost part of his face to the wolf before escaping to a local mill, where a seventeen year old boy was caught unaware and slain. After these atrocities the wolf fled to Bazoches, where it partially decapitated a woman and severely wounded a girl, who ran screaming to the village for help. Four citizens of Bazoches set an ambush at the body of the latest victim, but when the wolf returned it proved too much for them and the villagers soon found themselves fighting for their lives. The arrival of more peasants from the village finally put the wolf to flight, chasing it into a courtyard where it fought with a chained dog. When the chain broke the wolf was pursued through a pasture, where it killed a number of sheep, and into a stable, where a servant and cattle were mutilated.

The episode ended when one Antoine Saverelle, former member of the local militia, tracked the wolf to small lane armed with a pitchfork. The wolf sprang at him but he managed to pin its head to the ground with the instrument, holding it down for roughly fifteen minutes before an armed peasant came to his aid and killed the animal. Saverelle received a reward of three-hundred livres from Louis XV of France for his bravery."

I stumbled across this while researching towns and cities in French Picardie. If this isn't a ready made first-level adventure, I don't know what is.

Status Check

2011-12-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing as much this month simply because I have been writing the short stories. It's taxing to write new characters every day, to come up with new conflicts and new endings every day. This is day 13 and I'm really starting to feel it.

I've now been writing this blog for three and a half years. There have been a lot of flame wars, a lot of praise, a lot of new ideas come and gone and most of them implemented into my world. I think I am at last settling into a good rhythm. I notice I've written more blog posts this year - by far - than either 2009 or 2010. The posts don't get any shorter and I still enjoy writing them.

Judging by the words I'm getting back from my subscribers, the newest adventure - which I couldn't help noticing got me the cold shoulder from a good deal of the community - is proving good. I've gotten some excellent notices on the material, but I haven't bothered to print them because, well, this is the net and who's to say I haven't just made it up? I don't expect any endorsements will carry much weight if they're not video posted on youtube. And I won't ask any of the subscribers to do that.

Regarding traffic to the blog, it is beyond my wildest dreams. It is a rare day I don't get more than 500 pageviews, and that's always a day I don't post. From the stats, I'd have to say at least three quarters of those are people who come direct from a link on their computers, and more than 80% of the remainder come from Google. I get such a tiny number from other blogs, I have to assume I'm quite divorced now from the rest of the community and that most of my readers don't give a damn.

Choosing to moderate my comments was a brilliant stroke. I get less comments, but what I do get tends to be at least a hundred words in length, with deep, meaningful, on-topic insights. I love these comments when I get them, gentle readers, and I enjoy that you've taken the time to really say something. It's all I could ask for.

I go on vacation in a few days, and I will probably post a lot less the second half of December (though I mean to keep fighting on with the stories day by day). But as a cord from the computer is virtually plugged straight into my arm, I'll still be watching for ideas that would inspire another post. I hope people manage to have a happy holiday this year. Remember, Linus was wrong - though I will always love him - and it really isn't about the birth of a religion. It's really about the sun taking a turn, and the days getting longer again, and celebrating that we'll manage to live through another winter.

Astronomy

2011-12-12T08:44:00.001-07:00

Given that this technology falls into the basic grouping of rifling, democracy and chemistry, I feel I must treat is as a sort of 'Mathematics II' ... in effect, the Isaac Newton edition.

The Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica was first published in 1687, and was a work of such mastery in mathematics and physics that it was understood even by those scientists of that age as a work of phenomenal importance. It presented laws for motion and for universal gravitation, and became the foundation of all classical mechanics from that point forward. It has been supposed that, should Newton not have published it, the entire history of science would have been pushed back by centuries.

I am not here to talk about the book. It is way over my head, despite its having been written a dozen generations ago - and don't kid yourself, it is probably over your head also. I understand the basic principles, the same principles most everyone understands: that actions call for reactions, that objects display properties of inertia, that energy in a state of continuous dispersement, and that objects move in accordance with these laws as they are also effected by the mutual forces of gravitation.

The most important book you will never read.

What makes all this 'Astronomy' is the profound truth that Newton demonstrated the movements of the planets and the stars not with a measuring device, but with the application of mathematical formulas. He demonstrated that movement and inter-reaction between objects is not something that is comprehensibile to the senses, but that there is nevertheless truth beyond the senses.

When you find yourself in an argument with someone about how nothing in the universe can be proven to be true, beath that person to death with a copy of the Principia. It's a pretty big book. It will do the job nicely.

(Yes, I know that elements of the book were later proven to be false by physicists in the 20th century, notably Einstein, but we will pick that up when we discuss the technology 'Physics')

If I may go off on a tangent for a moment (ha ha) regarding the nature of truth and mathematics, once again digging into Plato's accounts of Socrates, it is time I made mention of the Pythagorean Theorum. This is the very simple formula your grade 7 math teacher tried to beat into your head, that,

"in any right triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the area of the squares whose sides are the two legs (the two sides that meet at the right angle."

See? Simple.

Nightmare fuel.

What's important about this theory for this particular post is that no actual triangle in actual existence has this property. No matter how qualified the builder, if you were to pull out a measuring device, to try to "prove" the truth of the Pythagorean theorum by physical measurement, you'd fail. Your measuring device might convince you otherwise, but that would be a flaw in your measuring device, not the proof of a perfect 90 degree angle in stone or steel.

Nevertheless, the exactness of the formula, and the presence of perfect triangles between every particle of matter that exists, supersedes what your senses - or your measuring devices - can prove. The Pythagorean theorum IS true ... no matter what you imagine the universe to be. That is what is astounding about mathematics.

Newton was able to describe the movements of stars he could never see move, and predict the location of planets which were not previously conceived of, with pen and paper. Newton did not create 'truth' ... he uncovered it. The truth had been there all along, and if he had not done the uncovering, when the work was done by someone else, however many centuries that would have been the formulas would have been exactly the same. And that is astounding too.

It means that no matter what extraterrestrial creatures may exist in the universe, or in what number, or with what basic biological make-up, when they construct rocket engines, they use the same Newtonian principles we do. The exact same principles. Think about that.

If that doesn't give you pause, you haven't really done enough thinking.

Conceiving the principles of astronomical physics prior to those principles being observed and demonstrated to have relevance is the foundation of mathematics ... and in a way, it is the foundation of magic, also.

Let us understand - magic, should such a thing exist, is a tool that exists apart from the principles of observation and your five senses. It cannot be 'crafted' into existence; it is not an result that is achieved in the physical world. It is a conception, and by that I mean that the truth of magic is uncovered, and not created. A caster does not 'will' the cure light wounds into existence ... the caster circumscribes the laws of magic in a manner that enables the cure light wounds - which has been inherent in the wounded body since the body's injury - to overcome the apparent physical manifestation that has been observed.

I feel that isn't very clear, and it is full of conjecture on my part, since - obviously - I don't have the benefits of a Principia Supernatura ... which would be convenient, I must confess. What I'm hoping to get across is this: that although magic is not measurable, it nevertheless must function according to very specific Laws. In turn, the comprehension of these laws is not necessarily something that comes from demonstration or training.

One can imagine spellcasters sitting in a classroom teaching them the basics of magic in a very different manner than the Hogwartzian method. After all, when your math teacher tells you to conceive of two trains leaving Chicago and Pittsburgh on the same track, he or she does not ask you to take a flight to Chicago to watch the train leave. No, you are taught the fundamentals of math, so that when the day comes that you need to calculate how many porn magazines you can buy with your first paycheck at McDonalds, that math is there and ready to hand.

Many of the students at Hogwartz took actual classes.

Magic ought to be seen the same way. Once you have the fundamentals of how your brain needs to be wrapped around the intrisic properties of magic, you ought to spontaneously be able to produce magic at will. Small stuff at first, since the big stuff requires a greater complexity in manipulating the quantifiers or qualifiers that make magic happen. But then it is conceivable that, upon reaching third level, you've overcome the mental block that stopped you from manipulating those quantifiers, and boom, yes, without training, you now CAN cast a second level spell. The block was never about being shown, step by step, how to cast invisibility. Casting invisibility is not making a chair. It is solving a quadratic equation that has stumped you for some time now.

If we accept that premise, than it follows that no matter what race casts magic, no matter what corporeal existence they have or what plane of existence they occupy, the magic will always be the same because the principle is inherent in the magic, and not the caster.

Not where you would expect Astronomy to go, right? Fact is, 'Astronomy' as most people understand it is an observational past-time. For Astronomers, the technology is not in the observation, but in the calculation. Thinking along those lines, 'casting' is less a physical activity than a mental one. To cast is to infuse the non-apparent reality into the apparent reality ... and thus retain the substance of a whole reality, one with elements which everyone can see, and with elements only the caster can see.

The weirdness of treants appearing out of thin air only seems impossible to the layman. To the spellcaster, those treants were there all along. The trick is to make them appear.

The Hating of Faults

2011-12-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

It is humourous that a common argument proposed as a standard panacea in Dungeons and Dragons is equally applied as a panacea in the actual world. This argument usually goes, to wit, that a character who has faults at a low level, will learn from experience, i.e. the gaining of levels, to overcome these faults, and will thereby cease to be harried from them.

For example, if it happens that a character has a low wisdom, it is all very understandable that the character be naive and rather simple where it comes to the matters of the world at a low level, but after the character has travelled far and wide, and after the character has defeated monsters and met kings and saved princesses, and after the character has had followers and raised castles and organized kingdoms, it just doesn't make sense for them to still be considered bound by their low wisdom. After all, they have experience now, and experience ought to counter that particular weakness.

Bunkum, balderdash and bullshit. Not only it the argument utterly unsound, it was an argument demonstrated to be unsound 2300 years ago, in text, by a man more brilliant than you and I, that being Plato, writing about a still more brilliant man, Socrates.

Now, look, and try to understand this. Experience is not all its cracked up to be. The clearly corrupt people running the countries of the world, Greece and Italy and America, have a great deal of experience, gained on battlefields and in the halls of power, and its quite clear they have a tremendous lack of any common sense at all when it comes time to defend themselves in front of a microphone. If you will tout the great god experience, take yourself around to any retirementment home run by the state and examine for yourself the benefits of long experience. Sit down with a wealthy man and try to talk about anything but money. Sit down with a drug tourist who has been to Mexico and Thailand and Morocco, and see what great experience has wrought in that wisdom. Take a glance at the tens of millions of cars upon the road, driven by people who have driven cars all their lives, and ask yourself if all that accumulated experience has caused those drivers to behave rationally or in their own interest. Experience is NOT wisdom.

We have a tendency to delude ourselves with the belief that the repetition of any activity is in some way a means to gain knowledge about that activity. Any repetition without reflection upon the activity, as most people want for, being unreflective souls in general, does not confer greater knowledge of that activity. Without insight, repetition only creates an habitual nature.

As a young boy I was able to beat much older opponents at chess, despite their having played at chess for all of their long lives. Was it luck? Did the pieces just happen to move in my favor? Of course not. Did those opponents have experience? Oh, of course yes. But winning at chess does not depend on how long you've played, or what experience you have. It depends upon how well you think.

If we argue that every person who has banged in the sack and raised children, or who has fought in a war, or who has achieved a difficult bit of status such as a degree, or who has achieved notariety, is necessarily an enlightened person because they have achieved experience, then why are there wars? Why does poverty continue unabated? Why do successful and experienced people still break the law, and why do they get caught? Why is it that they still have faults resultant from their poor decision making?

Because obviously experience is NOT a panacea for a poor wisdom. In fact, it must be argued that continued experience justifies the loathsome behavior of people who have achieved success despite that behavior. Did George Bush turn over a new leaf upon becoming President, or did he carry forward the cronyism he learned in Yale and at his father's knee. Was not his corruption and his blatant ignorance and his tendency to lie bolstered and upheld by his success? If this is true, and experience taught George Bush to be what he is, why don't we all behave likewise? Why do we behave in ways that George Bush would not have, since his eventual success clearly proves that he is lacking in faults and that his behaviour ought to be considered the equivalent of an 18 wisdom?

If you have a fault, and you succeed, you will NOT see that behavior as a fault. Others will, most certainly. But you will not. And if your character has a fault, in the game, your character will NOT see it as a fault. Your character will behave, no matter what level of success he or she happens to achieve, as an intrinsic part of their being.

Players do not generally understand this. The disconnect is obvious. The player is not the character. The player runs the character, but this does not mean that the player is the character. The player's goal is to obtain experience. The character's faults are an obstacle towards obtaining that experience. Therefore, the character's faults are something to be dearly argued against.

If those faults prove particularly difficult, so that the player's pursuit for power and glory will chafe against them constantly, the player will grow to hate those faults and will not consider them intrinsic to the character. Ergo, the player will grasp at any straw that will discount those faults. The player will argue that those faults should no longer apply ... for whatever reason the player can think of.

If a human being in the actual world perceives a fault in themselves, they will seek to discount that fault in any dealing they have with the world. If they succeed in spite of their faults - those faults being greed, or a tendency to anger, or lust or pride or what have you - that person will delude themselves to believe that the fault never existed. They will even stand up in a public place and declare the fault to be a virtue, and to argue vehemently that it MUST be a virtue, for how otherwise could this person possibly rise to a place of such prominence?

That faults often, by their very nature, contribute to the gaining of power and wealth, is naturally immaterial.

The player's desire to rid their character of faults, and the person's desire to rid themselves of faults, results from the same instinct. We want to be a success. We do not want to fail. We refuse to accept our own failings. We demand these failings be rescinded, or that we be absolved from them, because we do not like faults. We like our talents. If we could have characters made up entirely of talents, we would be absurdly happy.

The fact that continued survival and success does not automatically promote our talents while causing our faults to evaporate is deeply, deeply wrong. There is no person living who does not think that we, none of us, should be entitled to become fault free before we die. It isn't FAIR that we have to live with these faults all of our lives.

How to Work

2011-12-07T11:13:00.001-07:00

This should sound familiar. A moment of inspiration hits, and the idea forms that you should create something: a new world and the gazetteer to go with it, a new set of tables, a deep and wide dungeon or a fortress full of critters and traps. The project is exciting. Settling into it is fun. You're full of anticipation for the end result.

But a few days set in. You've put in a score of hours. You begin to see how big a project this is. You keep at it a week or more longer, and feel good that you've made headway ... but every new feature you add seems to lead to more features, and more and more, and the whole time the thing is getting to be a drudge. You try to keep at it but you're legitimately bored with it now.

You put it down, thinking you'll come back to it, and you never do.

I've just finished a big project, and I know this feeling very well. Believe me, the same effect comes when you work on a novel, even when you write it as fast as Nonowrimo wants you to. I love the beginning of a project, and I love the end of a project, but I hate the middle. At the beginning, everything is new and interesting, and I've never tried this before and that seems really different. At the end, I can taste the finish, and I find myself relishing the labor as I get the last details in place.

But the middle ... oh, the middle. God, what an awful thing is the middle.

I have a couple of strategies that work for me to get me through the middle parts of a project. Some of these might help with the boredom of working on a project that never, ever seems to end.

1) Even a little bit of work is a good thing.

Let's start from the moment you put the project on the shelf. The real killer, as we know, is that you don't pick it up again: in part, because it still seems immense and impossible to finish; and in part because your last memories of the project were of how boring it was. You convince yourself that you can't finish it, and you don't want to finish it. So there's no point in working on it at all.

... So you don't. You leave it on the shelf, and shudder mildly every time you think about it.

It would be nice to have it finished. Oh well.

First thing, you've got to stop thinking about the end of the project. There's a surprising thing that can happen when you pick that project up again. Though you think it can't be finished, once you start in on it again, ostensibly to just work for an hour or so, you'll get interested. For a few days it will offer some of that fascination that got you started on the project in the first place. You'll have a few new ideas, you'll implement them, and the project will progress for awhile. Yes, you'll get bored with it again. But if you pick it up every few months or so, and give it a couple of days each time, you'll start to see it develop. In time, it won't seem impossible any more.

2) Don't restart!

I cannot stress this enough. I really, really can't stress this enough. The true project killer is the never ending urge to think that restarting a project makes it better. It doesn't. It just covers the same ground you've covered already, in a different way. It only seems better because its NEW. But soon it won't be new, you'll tire again and you'll have accomplished nothing but a circle.

When you pick up that project again, you've got to remember how you looked at it the first time. If you have a new idea for an old project, incorporate it. If it can't be incorporated in the old thought process, it really isn't as good an idea as you think it is. Good ideas are flexible. If you have to kill all the work you've done before to make your new idea happen, you're in a condition of delusion.

That's very, very hard to believe, I know. Would be artists dwell under this delusion all of their lives. They never finish a book, or a symphony, or a play, because over and over again they romanticize the conception of beginning ANEW. And that's all they ever do. They begin. And begin and begin and begin.

What you must do is train your memory to grasp that which excited you last month, or last year, and see why it isn't actually the junk you think it is now. You have to trust yourself. You were a pretty bright person last year. You had great ideas. Now give yourself some credit and figure out now how to make that other person's great idea work.

3) Stagger the steps.

If its a BIG project, there will be a multiplicity of stages that can be worked upon. For this I have to give an example.

My mapping and trading system requires a number of stages for it to come together. To make the map, I needed the elevations for the hexes. Once I had those elevations, I had to add them to a hex map. There needed to be cities, and the size of the cities had to be determined, so I research the cities. The cities then need to be added to the hexes. After this the map can be made. Then the roads on the map need to be drawn. The roads on the map determine the distance between trading cities. A map has to be made of those distances. A spreadsheet recording the distances is created. What the trading cities produce has to be researched. The various things have to be organized on a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet that fits the distances between the cities to the products produced by those cities gives a scarcity for products in each city. That scarcity is applied to a table that determines the prices of materials and services. Pieces of equipment are calculated according to how much material and service is required to make them.

Each stage along this journey (each sentence above) is a different project. I don't try to research every city in the world before adding some of them to a map. I don't try to research every product made everywhere in the world before grouping them on a spreadsheet. I do a little of this, and then a little of that. When I am bored with researching cities, I make some maps. When I am bored with maps, I calculate some distances. When I'm bored with calculating distances, I create pieces of equipment. Then I go back to earlier stages and work on those. Steadily, by tackling the sections of the project piecemeal, I make progress. A little here. A little there. And Italy gets finished. And India gets finished. And so on.

4) Have many projects going

And of course there comes a point when I am sick to death of everything to do with trade in toto. So I go work on monsters. And then I work on upgrading spell descriptions. I work on character background generation spreadsheets. And then I work on figuring out treasure distribution. And so on. And because I don't throw out the baby as I go back to these projects, they get a little more complicated. They get a little deeper. They evolve a little more. They grow. They get BIG.

5) Identify things you've never worked on, and give those a try

This is perhaps the most important. You've got to try to solve problems you've never tried to solve before. Not because you will necessarily succeed, but because problem solving it like working a muscle. The harder the problem, the more you get out of your failure. The attempt will cause you to reconsider how or why other things you've thought couldn't be done, CAN be done.

Failure isn't important because you learn from failure. Failure is important because, with repeated failures, you get used to failure and it ceases to be a threat. "Okay, it didn't work. Yeah, so? Of course it didn't work, look what I was trying to do! But now, if you think about this thing I was trying, and you apply it to this other thing ..."

You can spend all your life ripping yourself up because you failed something. But hell, you fail enough things and failure will no longer stop you from doing anything. You get used to it. You adapt. Then you overcome.

If you find yourself in a position where you're thinking, "Shit, I can't do that," you've let failure get the best of you. It's important to come to a place in your head where you think, "Shit, I can't do that now ... give me a bit, and I'll try something else."

So try. Try and don't backpeddle. Don't restart. Switch around with what you're doing, and try to see the big picture. Do as much as you can and shrug it off when you're bored. The time will come when you know you'll pick up that project again, when you're in the mood.

This is how things actually get finished.

Metaphysics and More Wild Magic

2011-12-06T13:47:00.006-07:00

I am glad to say I have been writing like crazy, and have almost made it through my first week of stories. Six stories in six days. And two science fiction in the lot.

The other day, during the running, as I was harrying my party into insanity with five rust monsters (mine also have a mouth that does 1-10 damage), I attacked two party members with two d20s, rolled simultaneously. They both came up natural 20s. Much gnashing of teeth among the party, as that means both front people in the corridor were to suffer double-damage. I picked up the dice again to see if I would roll another 20 and get triple damage, and preceeded to throw two natural 19s. Just awesome.

As ever, the players made the standard joke about numerology, which I've pointed out in the past is NOT bogus in my world, but is an actual science ... which means that odd or unusual results, such as the two doubles I rolled, mean something. What it means is subject for interpretation.

Since no one in my party understands numerology, I don't have to produce an explanation. But if they had chosen to understand it, I would have to come up with something.

I know this sounds strange - is numerology a spell? An ability? How do you get it?

It's a house rule. To begin with, you have to be a mage or an illusionist. As a mage, its assumed you've read a lot of books, and you have knowledge of things that have interested you, or which happened to interest your teacher. I let the player pick and choose what, specifically, they know about ... and if they pick 'numerology,' they know something about that subject.

As they go up levels, they get new interests, so a player can up their proto-knowledge of numerology by gaining an 'insight' and thus now 'understand' (it's a levelling thing, we all know how that works). So that's how you start to make things difficult for me, the DM.

The gentle reader might recollect I wrote something about wild magic a year ago. This is magic that operates outside of the principles of spellcasting, and in effect can't be 'controlled' by the user. Wild magic ignores all limitations of time, space or energy, and can behave erratically or poignantly. It can't be predicted, but it can be perceived ... and in the perceiving, it is in fact set into motion.

For example. A numerologist sees the pair of 20s turn up, and sees the pair of 19s turn up, and either produces for themselves an explanation (that sounds good to me, the DM), or I produce an explanation. In either case, a 'good' interpretation is one I'm prepared to play out in the game ... that is, it has features I can see working into the campaign as a narrative ... or even the better term, as 'exposition.'

Let's suppose the numerologist in the party jumps on the idea of a bigger pair and a smaller pair, and declares that "Two pairs of beings shall enter our lives, and they shall be the same, but different." This sounds good to me, and I am at once rationalizing how a pair of greater cyclops and a pair of lesser cyclops managed to get themselves into a situation in northern Germany, or wherever the hell the party is.

In effect, the double die-roll 'conjures' the cyclops foursome, quod erat demonstrandum, by wild magic. Either the player or I throw out a few words of explanation, and time and space refold so that in fact these two cyclops have been pursuing the party to get back the little tin cup the party picked off a gnome peddlar's cart twelve days ago. The cyclops have been looking for the gnome for a month or more, because the cup has properties that make it appear non-magical in this plane, but practically an oceangoing vessel on Tartarus. And it used to belong to their mother.

That this all took place partly in the past is irrelevant. Wild magic pays no attention to time. It reorders the universe the moment it makes itself evident - by dice rolls (numerology) or by pulling a tarot card, or casting rods, or reading tea leaves, or working out someone's astrological chart. As soon as the event is noticed, the interpretation of the event recreates my world.

Now, you could argue that your characters don't know that dice are being thrown for their lives, and obviously can't see 20s or 19s. However, from their perspective, the profound double strike by the rust monsters, and the duplicate way in which the strikes happen in 'character vision,' can only be interpreted by people down on the ground as something truly profound and unique. "Two!" cries the numerologist. "Two creatures, attacking the same way, having the same effect! Cause and effect! We shall encounter ... two sets of two, and they shall be angry!"

It's really all very simple.

A Few Character Generations

2011-12-06T08:51:00.002-07:00

Hooray. I 'finished' the character generation spreadsheets last night, though of course I will eventually upgrade them, deepen them and increase their complexity. Probably I will start by creating a separate NPC-generation sheet, with additional details for levels gained ... but for the moment, I am happy and I can now go on to other projects.

In the meantime, I'll generate some characters and show off how the page looks so far:

I debated with myself at length about the legitimacy of including items such as "stoutly equipped as a man." The beauty category also includes dropping features on characters such as pimples, a weak chin, a fragile frame and freckles (it occurs to me, I'd forgotten to add stuttering; oh well, next time). Is it fair to force a nerd to play a roleplaying game where his character's appearance actually isn't an improvement?

Poor 28-year-old with her bald patch, her large breasts and her low forehead. Kind of brings the 9 charisma into light, doesn't it? But then, that +3 with a sling is a nice addition. I should add that the age for an elf won't satisfy a lot of people. I've said it before, but it's easier to have a planetary history when the elves don't remember personally shaking hands with Charlemagne. Gentle readers may disagree. Of course, any one with some time could get in back of the excel spreadsheet and change it to suit themselves (pretty easy, actually).

You may also notice there are no character details like spells or thieving abilities on these. This is just their background, things they've learned or picked up, mistakes they've made, chance bits of luck, natural talents, their general health and so on. This thief, you've got to love that bit under reflexes & coordination. In actual fact, you have to have an 18 dex to even have a chance of getting this, and even then it's only one in 20. Nice to have for a thief though, eh? And yes, I was thinking of Big Trouble in Little China when I worked it in.

These do reflect a lot of rules I apply to my world: the 'field of knowledge,' for instance, which would be one of the fields found in the sage tables of the DM's Guide (tailored a bit for my world). Those may not be of use to you, but you're free to take them out or ignore them. This character, obviously, isn't going to use a bow for a weapon, but they'll probably be popular in the market place.

Last one. Picture Woody Strode:

Looks like 18 strength to me.

I like that the player has no actual money, but does have 'credit' ... that is, can borrow up to 750 g.p. on 6-8% interest. Obviously, the player can screw the lender and run off, but up until this time the character has always been good about paying their debts. I should also explain about the Tendency and interests: once the character has entered combat, there's no need to roll under wisdom to keep at it. The roll only conveys that the character tends to be hesitant about jumping in and hacking away. Quite a different combat behavior - obviously certain people wouldn't like it (the power character in my offline world got saddled with it for his paladin - and boy, does he hate it!)

I generated these in just a few minutes. There's a lot of ideas for character development both for PC's and NPC's, and plenty of opportunity for ribaldry at the table too, I can assure you. The generation of these stats has long been a much-looked-forward-to part of my world. So nice to have it in an instantly generated-and-printable format.

What the heck, here's another fighter:

Return of the Vlog

2011-12-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking, then, of putting together a video log the first Sunday of each month. For practice, for covering things more personally, for making myself seem more human.

But I talk about it below:

A Hard Proposal

2011-12-01T11:11:00.001-07:00

I am feeling good today. I have a goal towards writing a short story a day through the month of December, and my first one is conceived and written already. The online campaign has been put on hiatus until after the Christmas holidays (I miss it already), and I am just stretching out now and thinking about stuff, not feeling any pressure. That's a fairly unusual feeling for me.

Last night I conceived of something I would call 'The 10,000 Word Post.' I was wondering what that might be. Over the years I have tackled a lot of different blogging propositions. On an old blog I used to have, I had written fifty posts in fifty days. Then I had decided to write 50 posts in one day. That was really something. They're all gone now, so perhaps I should tackle that again for this blog.

What I have not done is write 10,000 words on a given subject in the space of one day. I have some critics who tell me that a blog post ought to be short and sweet and to the point, but I question that. How many gentle readers would like me to cut off this subject right here, right now? If I just said, okay, I'll write 10,000 words some time, probably on D&D, would you rather I said it and stopped ... or would you rather I just kept going.

I don't know about the reader, but when I look at my favorite blogs on a given day, I'm never satisfied with just a few hundred words. I want more. I want to be able to sit back and read for a half hour or so. I want the subject to be gotten into in depth and intricately. I see enough bland programming filtered down from sources I have to read in order to have money. When I read something for pleasure, I want lots of it.

Jeez, I love Jon Stewart.

So then, 10,000 words. You know, I think when other people conceive of these blog post propositions, they are mostly concerned with getting other people to try them out. Take that ridiculous A to Z proposition people tackle every year. Hell, it's only 26 letters, and its not like you can't invent a justification for writing something about Q or X. Not very hard. But then, it's best for it not to be hard if your goal is to make other people do it.

I don't think about these things that way. I wouldn't ever expect someone else to try 50 posts in a day. I wouldn't ask anyone to produce a 10,000 word blog post. These are things I make myself do, just to see if I can do it.

That's not 10,000 blathering words about nothing. I wouldn't think it was that hard to write 10,000 skipping words about your family, or your childhood, or a rambling mess that jumped from topic to topic until coming to the end and announcing, "Well, by my count that's ten thousand words, thanks!"

No, I am proposing 10,000 words written in a tight format, with a beginning and an end, and a circular framework so the whole thing hangs together - and makes a point. Hopefully, so that the whole thing is written in a manner that it can be read comfortably, pleasurably, without noticing the time or feeling exhausted. Obviously, that can't apply to everyone. The world is chock FULL of Herman Cain's. Two paragraphs and they're already bleating, "Get on with it already!"

But seriously, no writer in the world writes for those kind of people. No writer in the world ever has. We writers have a perspective that words are a good thing, and that reading is something we grew up loving to do. We have the patience and the time to swallow four or five pages of introduction (unlike your standard editor), and with age and experience, we gain the patience to swallow a whole lot more. We don't need a murder to take place in the first fifty pages of Anna Karenina (Ha, two mentions in two weeks!) in order to feel its is worth reading. It's okay that Somerset Maugham spends a hundred and fifty pages counting his money and his angst in Of Human Bondage. We're not screaming at him "to get on with it." There's a fundamental principle of life being outlined here, and we're aware of it. We are, in fact, fascinated with it. We don't want it expurgated.

Still, while Maugham had no trouble writing a hundred and fifty thousand words about a young man's struggle with happiness, the question arises: What part of D&D is worth a ten thousand word essay?

Offhand, probably anything if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it. Problem with that is that many of those ordinary parts of D&D - disliking or liking alignment, treasure distribution, experience gathering, encounter tables, character classes and so on - have been picked to death and most people already have calcified opinions about what is and is not true. You're almost certain to lose your audience - even a bright, interested audience - in the first thousand words.

Upon the second hand there's the prospect of writing 10,000 words on something really new: a combat system, or an elaborate system for carrying forth seagoing, underwater or aerial adventuring. The essay then becomes a systematized list, each section of the post describing this, and then this, and then this. Shipboard things, and then storms, and then combat, and then putting the ship into port, and then probably the Traveller standby of a quick trade system to manage buying and selling. Boom, no problem, 10,000 words.

I've done as much myself. There were six Conflict! posts that I wrote last summer, and if I cobbled them altogether they'd probably top the mark. If not, I could rewrite them now, spend a little more time with examples and previously missed details, or details I glossed over, and bring the whole thing in at 10,000 words or more. But somehow I think that would be cheating. An 'orientation' post is too simple. The work isn't in the writing, its in the game design, and if the game design isn't up to snuff, it doesn't matter how many words you hang on it.

No, for me, it's got to handle three basic principles, the same principles of philosophy: 1) what we ought to know; 2) how ought we to conduct ourselves; 3) and how ought the community to be organized.

I write a lot of posts about these things. Some of these posts are quite probably seen as dusty and dry; some of them I know have proved to be quite popular. I believe myself that these are the most important posts that CAN be written, for at heart I am a philosopher and when all is said and done, when the books are closed and we have settled down for a chat about the subject material, these are the questions that are fundamentally unanswerable.

It is inherent on the net that certain subjects, more mundane subjects as it were, do not have fixed answers, and are subjects for flame wars: "Decker was a Replicant" - "Christopher Nolan is a better director than James Cameron" - "Goodfellas should have won Best Picture" ... and so on. These things represent a sort of philosophy. They propose a picture of the world, namely what everyone 'ought' to know, and the proponents of this or that position being hammering away at the suppositions and core points of the argument until everyone in every part of the world is sick to death of the subject.

Obviously there are a great many who, tired of these arguments, propose that we should never have arguments of this kind, ever again. Art teachers and Literary professors in particular, their places of work being filled with young people unleashed upon a subject with no clear definition of "good" and "bad" - and yet proporting nonetheless to raise their students to some kind of critical standard - are forced eventually to just point and say, "Shut up you nits, it's good because smarter people than you will ever be have said so."

It doesn't really solve the issue, but it brings about some much needed silence.

Because the issue cannot be solved, it is rich with possible angles at which the issue can be viewed. It is rich enough that a single position, reflected upon and argued from all the possible angles, can yield up the necessary 10,000 words. And it is central enough to the position of every living person of this life can relate in some way to the problems therein. If your writer is clear enough, and imaginative enough, even the most neophyte of readers can find themselves drawn into the subject. Remember that Descartes, Locke, Mills, Sartre and god help us even Foucault were popular writers in their day, selling many, many books to young people seeking to grasp the fundamentals of living.

Some groan and look skyward at the mention of philosophy, but we are bound to it whatever our feigned boredom with the topic.

If we will not write a post about ordinary things in the game; and we will not write an elaborate point-by-point tour of a complex element of the game; we are forced to write about the game itself. What do you need to know? How ought players play? How ought a DM manage a game? It doesn't matter that there is no fixed answer to these questions. We want to know anyway.

Character Background Generator

2011-11-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

This past week I have been working extensively and hard on completing my Character Background Generation spreadsheet. This thing has been in progress for more than a year and I am within about twelve hours of completing it. Discounting height and weight, with two features generated per character stat, features for appearance based upon both human and non-human races, and secondary skills included, I conservatively estimate 294 quintillion possible combinations. No, that is not a mathematical error. We are talking 2.94 x 10 to the 20th power. No joke.

Obviously, duplicate results will come up. If your dexterity is generally at the same level as my dexterity, there's a 1 in 100 to 400 chance that we will each get one feature that lines up for both of us. The chance that we will get three features, or four, that gets more than a little unlikely.

A lot of people are farmers. There's a pretty good chance both of us will be descended from farmers. There is a very unlikely chance we will both be descended from blacksmiths. There's about a 1 in 60,000 chance we will both have had fathers who were explorers. And there's something like a 1 in 6,000,000 chance that we will both have fathers who were in authority over very small region, like Luxembourg or Malta.

But your chance of having a father like that is only about 1 in 6,000. If you did, the chances are that you'd have an older brother, or that your father would still be inconveniently alive. The chance that your father would be in authority over a fairly big region, like Sardinia or Saxony, that's a little more unlikely - like about 1 in 2,000,000. But it's possible.

The spreadsheet as it stands reflects previous tables that I've used for years, only now it generates everything automatically, so it can be printed as soon as its created. The generation is virtually zero time. It can be done again and again, and it can be done for NPCs as quickly and easily as for characters. You need description, profession, the NPC's relationship to others, family, wealth, special abilities, etcetera etcetera? It's all here.

Bingo. You just press a button.

Mind you, this isn't a simple slap-dash group of tables. Granted, the excel file isn't in my gargantuan category - its only 160 KB - but there are 12 tabs covering everything from possible diseases to a men-at-arms generator.

More importantly, I intend to work on this thing probably forever. There's really no end to the additions I could add to it, particularly if I separate the Player Character generator from a newly created NPC generator, which would A) emphasize the sorts of information you need for NPCs and B) include additional modifiers for NPCs who were above first level. At the moment, the emphasis is on getting a player started with their new character. But this idea could go so much farther.

As it is now, if you have any ability to operate in excel, you could make changes yourself, and easily. And you could use me as a resource for updates (and back-ups, if you inadvertantly changed something and wrecked some programming, and didn't have a back up, I could send you the original). Not to mention that if you had an idea, and it was a good one, you could pitch it to me and I'd incorporate it myself - I always want more ideas.

Finally, for programmers, its all excel ... so you know, and I know, that lends itself to the simplest of programming, if you wanted to take it out of the friendly program. Just one thing - try to sell it without giving me a percentage, and I'll sue. Other than that, maybe we could work out an arrangement and both get rich with this thing. You may be a programmer, but believe me, I am the idea man.

And though this may be almost finished, I haven't had my last one.

This program alone, given all the crap generators you have seen over the many years you have been playing, is worth the $100 of a subscription. And you get (drum roll) so much more.

So buy. As the man said, I'm letting you know what you're getting.

The Authorities

2011-11-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

I am putting more energy to other things this week, getting myself ready for a fanatical effort I fully expect to fail at ... but that's not important right now. The online campaign is going gangbusters, and sometimes it just feels good to play, you know, rather than just talk about D&D. After all, that is all this blog is. Talking. The real work is being done next door - and I'm astounded at the general lack of interest.

But anyway, something came up that inspired this post, so I thought I'd make a few clarifying statements.

The town guardsmen consists of a group of individuals whose purpose is primarily to promote and defend the interests of the general town - which means, fundamentally, to protect the money. Nobody in a medieval town really cares if you beat up a vagrant, or a prostitute, or any other member of the town who is seen as a scourge or a parasite. Even in the present day its hard to get cops motivated to look for a hooker's killer - that pig farmer in Vancouver is a good example. In the medieval world, there was virtually little or no force to stop you from doing it ... so long as you didn't do it openly and in public, since there has long remained an adage that if you'll kill a hooker in a bar fight, you might kill anyone. Best to remove you from the general populace. But the town guard don't care about the squabbles between the poor, if no one gets hurt. They'll stand to the side and watch, but they won't get involved unless a rich person tells them to.

The idea that the town guard investigates crime, or does anything more than stop people from committing it at the given moment, is pretty much an anachronism. When someone commits a murder, and flees town, there's no artist's rendering being sent about to the other towns warning them of such and such a killer, with such and such a bounty on their heads. This was a matter that rose out of an entirely different culture, one that won't arise for many years, due to the development of national governments and mutual business corporations, and the globalism that started forthwith in the early 18th century.

Of course, screw over the wrong mage and you might get recognized anywhere ... but that's not the town guard. The town guard will watch you run over the far hill and that's the last they'll think of you. You won't be back for revenge - the town guard don't own anything.

The town watch, on the other hand, is very like the mafia. They really don't care who kills who, as long as their clients, being some part of the business community represented by a guild, aren't harmed. Kill a prostitute? No problem. Kill a prostitute by shoving dough in her mouth in a baker's shop? You're in big fucking trouble.

It's bad for business, isn't it? In the meantime, the watch isn't wandering the streets 'protecting' them like the 'Angels' do ... they're making sure no one else is getting a piece of the pie. A sneak thief breaking into a shop is taking money out of the hands of the watch as surely as the shopkeeper - and the watch isn't going to take that thief to prison. That thief is going to get a last look from a deep hole somewhere, just before the stone is put back in place. Permanently.

Moreover, the watch doesn't care about anyone who isn't directly connected to their clients. You want to beat up a city council member opposed to guild privileges? The watch will help. But you don't see city fathers like that wandering around, not with out their -

Retinue. These are private guards who are there just for the lord, noble or official in whose pay they reside. Sometimes the town will pay for someone's retinue, but the town doesn't want them getting distracted and chasing pick pockets. That's not their role. Their role is to get Joe council member from the council to his palace of a house, without his being hassled by persons on the street. Which means you don't have to break the law around these authorities. You just have to be in the way.

This is all different from the reeve. In England, the Shire reeve, or the Sheriff. The reeve's primary purpose is to make sure that people living in the rural countryside contribute the hours and days of labor they owe to the local lord ... and in later times, they'd be called forth if you failed to pay your rent. In order to keep the lord's manor in good stead, sometimes it was necessary to bust some heads, particularly anyone not obeying the law (that is, the noble's word of command). The reeve would spend a lot of time in the village associate with the local castle, since that's where the people who did the largest part of the labor directly for the lord lived: the carpenters, masons, millers, brewers, bakers, candle-makers and so on. Farmers too, but they tended not to work immediately upon the noble's residence, so if they didn't show up in the field, the reeve was less likely to notice.

On the other hand, the hayward would notice immediately. This would later evolve into what we think of as the village warden, the person who looks after the countryside and keeps everything in order there, stopping poachers and such. The hayward looked after the forests, yes, and did keep out poachers ... but he watched over the shepherds, the herders, the farmers who tilled the land, and any one else who worked on public lands for any period of time. Roughly half your time as a medieval farmer was spent looking after your own land, so you could eat. The other half, you worked for the lord, and you worked under the hayward's careful guidance.

If you're in a rural setting, then, and you commit some action against the source of labor or against the lord's holdings themselves, you would find yourself dealing either with the reeve or with the hayward. And let me explain: they weren't nice about it. Probably they wouldn't kill you. It was probably enough just to hamstring you, or if not your hamstrings your ankles.

Then the pigs, or the hounds, could have you.

The whole manor, and sometimes multiple manors, were looked after by the steward. This would typically be a hireling standing in stead for the lord, when the lord was not present ... and he would be judge and executioner all at once. The reeve and the hayward, when they had their doubts about you, would bring you before the steward, and he'd decide your fate. Sometimes the steward was the head of his own retinue, which for the manor represented a sort of local police force - sometimes, and sometimes not, separate from the reeve or the hayward's personal helpers (try to imagine a bunch of sadistic young men). The steward's men would get interested in anyone who seemed to take a little too much interest in the lord's affairs - really, that was all you needed to do. Ask too many questions.

That should provide a general idea of what kind of 'police' your facing. It's good to remember that the primary way to avoid arrest is to placate the authorities. It doesn't have as much to do with breaking the law as you might think.

Rifling

2011-11-24T09:42:00.003-07:00

I'm afraid this post isn't going to be very good. It's difficult to relate rifling to D&D, for while the development had great consequences upon the future of warfare after the technology was implemented en masse, I'm afraid the lack of the technology wasn't something that people went around noticing or writing psychological treatises about. It would have been nice to have something written by Kepler or Torricelli about what a darn pain it was - a socially relevant pain, that is - that the guns on the battlefield didn't fire straight, but alas if it's out there it's in either German or Italian, and no one has quoted it yet in the shot of my ears.

So the lack of rifling and its influence on D&D is somewhat obvious. There was no rifling and D&D more or less exists without guns that fire straight.

We can't call it quits there, unfortunately. This is the sort of problem that's going to come up again and again as the technologies become more and more advanced. We're dedicated towards writing them right through to the end, so we'll just have to get proficient and digging out the pertinent details and do the best we can.

It must be said that, more or less, D&D exists without guns. Most persons are happy to run campaigns that take place in a sort of ethereal historical situation, in which there are no guns, or various other chemical technologies ... though of course there's experimentation and social development and extremely heavy armor of the kind that wasn't developed until the 15th century: a sort of potpourri of selected technological developments. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. My pedantic nature feels the need to point out that this potpourri is mostly the result of poor scholarship and a lot of misunderstandings about historical developments of weapons and social interaction, but I'm not saying you can't consider the ignorance a blessing and just enjoy the fact that so many disparate elements of human history are tumbled together into the D&D fantasy system.

I'm not demonizing the ignorance. I'm just saying, it's there.

Willy nilly, I think we all keep and toss out the elements of things that most suit our peculiar natures. The D&D world, by necessity, has in it a thousand discontinuities even before you get to the historical dissonance - what with magic, monsters, actual gods and so on, we're not talking about any sort of realistic portrayal of anything. I mean shit, how do I argue my 17th century world is anything like Earth when more than half of Russia is occupied by goblins, orcs and hobgoblins, with an existing Greek and Hindu pantheon of gods fighting it out on planes of existence drawn completely from my own imagination and mixed in with the endless hodgepodge of mythological beasts and places? I can't. D&D is not real. It's important - like any dramatic invention - that it FEELS real, but we're obviously not saying that it is.

So when the question of rifling comes up, and any of a number of other alien-to-D&D technologies, like plastics and satellites and fusion, we're certainly NOT saying you can't toss them into the pot and stir them around to suit your needs. Hell, who says there can't be a race of intelligent warthogs with opposable thumbs from the Plane of Excrete whose attempt to enslave the prime material plane for their shit production isn't aided by muskets with rifling? Could be. What is the party to do, as they face these dangerous hogs with swords and magic? The best they can, that's what.

Thus the onus is upon me to talk about the difference between firearms without rifling and firearms with, and the possible social consequences that could be installed in your world to make things more interesting.

What I have along those lines is this:

Prior to the development of rifling, there was only a certain amount you could do to ensure you were killing your enemy with gunfire. You lined your men up, you got as close to the enemy as you dared (30 yards or so, which is still a great deal farther away than you needed for swords), kept your men as calm as you could and got them to fire as often as possible. It was understood by some commanders early on that having all your men fire at the same time produced a terrific shock effect upon the enemy, which tended to scare the enemy away, thus winning the battle without having to keep firing endlessly into each other without results ... which did happen.

The ball in a musket, even in skilled hands, would bounce against the interior of the barrel and could come out in virtually any direction - which meant that your line had to be pretty straight if you didn't want to kill your own men in the back at close range. And because the time it took to reload could be as much as 30 or 40 seconds, it was possible for the enemy to simply drop their guns (this is before bayonets) and rush at you, particularly if the ground was level. You will remember from high school that you used to run the hundred yard dash in about 14 to 16 seconds (or a bit less), so you know that it doesn't take an eon to cover 30 yards, even if that distance is covered with thick vegetation and the occasional fallen body.

Thus it was necessary to have men whose purpose was to stand with pikes and keep you at bay while the musketeers loaded as fast as they could. This was aided by the flintlock musket, which increased the distance between armies to slightly less than a hundred yards - giving you MORE time to load, which was much more important than aiming. Armies had learned by the 1590s, when the flintlock came into general usage, that you needed your men to form ranks, where the men at the back were loading like crazy and the front men firing ... then running to the rear. This enabled a murderous rate of fire that did much to end the rush-across-the-battlefield tactic - though generals refused to believe that for the next 350 years.

By the time of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Dutch gunners had broken down the principles of loading a musket into 45 separate actions, which if followed perfectly and in the right order could enable a trained man to load his gun up to 40% faster than untrained men. This was the principle reason Gustavus ripped through Germany in the Thirty Years War - more men firing, less time loading, meant he had more effective men on the combat field than his enemy at any one time, since less of them were standing around doing nothing.

Still, without rifling, the weapons themselves were tremendously unreliable. More shots meant greater effectiveness, but aiming was not something you could rely upon. Greater 'skill' with a weapon meant you could load it quickly. It did not mean you could necessarily hit the enemy you were aiming at. Of course, if you loaded faster, you got more chances to hit him.

Rifling made the difference. By causing the bullet to spin as it left the barrel, you gave the missile stability, and stability meant a well trained could hit with his weapon as well as load. And this produced a marked change in how you trained your soldiers.

In the 17th century, you trained them to load quickly and produce as much fire as possible. They had to be calm so they could concentrate on loading ... if you misloaded a weapon, it would blow up in your face and give you trouble. Alternately, if you got the steps in the wrong order, you clumsily had to go back and get them right, which meant fouling up the whole rank standing behind you, as they waited for you to get your shit together.

By the 19th century, the calmness still needed to be there - but not because it took a long time to load. Breechloading had come into being, and you could ready your weapon in very little time. However, standing on the battlefield and hitting your opponent well and true could mean forcing yourself to be calm and aim while bullets whizzed around you.

In any mass battle - the American Civil War, for instance - most of the combatants were largely untrained, and unable to take full advantage of the remarkable weapon the rifle had become. But a well-seasoned, trained troop of men who could stand calmly facing you without firing while they aimed - while you blasted the air as fast as you could - would cut you down like wheat. Again and again the elite British troops proved this tactic.

This calmness had a peculiar effect upon the society, perpetrated by men who had experienced war fought in this fashion. They did not 'bat an eye' at many a hard question or need that might arise. They did not view hesitation as a virtue. They did not view the habit of questioning every decision, or pining for lost opportunities, or self-doubt, as virtues. These are not virtues on the battlefield. They were not seen as virtues in ordinary life.

If you wonder why or how men could be as callous as they were in bygone eras, consider that this was a callousness that was acquired during explosions, with friends and enemies torn apart by bullets, in holocausts of fire and blood.

Compare this, if you will, to what it must have been like to hold a sword, and not a pistol, and stand three feet from a fellow with an axe, and nowhere to run between you. Consider how hard this must have made these men who survived these ordeals ... and how matter-of-factly they took the matter of burning witches in towns, or incarcerating villains, or mass executions of blasphemers. Apply the calm exterior of the British rifleman with the calm exterior of the Viking raider, and ask yourself why they should for a moment feel anything for the woman and her child who are split open by the held axe. And then ask, if you should have lived in this time, according to these principles, amid others who had adopted the same behavior as yourself, how hard you would bring the battle against warthogs who wanted your shit.

Pretty hard, I think.

The Habits of Children

2011-11-23T13:17:00.001-07:00

Last night, I searched vainly for my copy of Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz, intending to read it for the first time in what must be 20 years, just so I'd be quicker on the draw when someone asks me to spontaneously to compare Dorothy with Luke Skywalker ... and realized I'd have to buy a new copy, since I've clearly given my old copy away to someone. I tend to do that with books.

And then perdustin took a big poke at me this morning on his blog, and pushed me into having to say something on the subject right here and now, for which I really wasn't prepared. I launched into a comment that wasn't very nice (when am I?) and was pleased and astounded to get back a lucid, rational reply. I have new respect for perdustin; I shall have to quit riding the guy.

But I did intend to buy a copy of The Wizard of Oz today. I'm not reading much of any importance right now anyway, just literary commentary on the 20th century novel. Reading Baum's work again would be a better use of my time.

I don't know how many of the people who read this blog and find my opinion somewhat calcified understand that my opinion is changing all the time. I don't mean it's flopping around like Mitt Romney campaign schedule, I mean that I am acquiring new information on a constant basis, which is then being applied to old information I have previously acquired, in order to form new opinions. They do not simply spawn from nothing.

Someone in the comments field - unpublished - called me a solipsist the other day ... which is a convenient non-argument to make whenever you don't have an actual argument. You can call any liberal artist, anytime, under most conditions, a solipsist. All rational arguments, by their very nature, "sound" rational. You can't argue that what someone says must be solipsism because it sounds rational. You must ALSO prove why it isn't.

I see a lot of the first kind of argument - the name calling, "you must be wrong because you must be" argument, but lord I dearly love the actual intellectual cut down. Tedankhamen had a brilliant point to make yesterday in the comments section. He really made his point solidly. Unfortunately for the naysayers, however, that point wasn't contradicting me.

Sorry, I'm waffling a bit here ... I'm getting around to pointing out that in the midst of the comments and the general discussion, I made a kind of connection with why this whole hero thing is such a tender subject with regards to the gentle readers. I 'clued in,' as it were.

Following up on a comment of my own, I had said: "... one of the things about becoming an adult, and therefore a learned person, is the realization that the heroes you were taught about when you were a little child was just a lot of bullshit."

And some five minutes after I wrote that, I realized myself that a lot of players of this game want to be the bullshit heroes of their childhood stories, because they're desperate to relive their childhoods. This is like a revelation for me. You see, it isn't an attitude I share. I don't consider the times I was a child to be the best of times. I don't consider literature for children to be the height of literature. I mean, The Wizard of Oz is a great book, it's clearly genius, but it isn't Anna-fucking-Karenina. It doesn't touch the fascination I have for Thucydides' History of the Pelopponesian War. It just doesn't measure up to the really heavy, brilliant stuff, sorry. And while I suppose playing on the level of The Wizard of Oz might be fun and all, it's kind of simple-simon compared to playing on the level of Dafoe's Moll Flanders.

Because you see, being an adult and having money and the power to remake my world how I wish is about a billion times more satisfying than playing tag in my parent's backyard. Oh, sure, tag was fun, it was a riot and all, but the reason I don't play tag now is because - well - it just doesn't measure up. It isn't that I'm old and jaded and too tired to play tag. It isn't that I'm so sour inside that I can't remember what it was like to be bright-eyed like a child. It's because the real satisfying things of the great big world kind of kicked the ordinary playtimes of childhood right out on their motherfucking asses.

Playtime, and the hero-worship of playtime, isn't complicated enough for me. It isn't living up to the hype. The real challenge is a world where the only heroes are deluded, fucked-up people who don't know they're not heroes - just like Cervantes' Don Quixote. That was, after all, the point of the book: that to be a hero, you have to be so fucking far out to lunch that you think windmills are dragons, and you think peasants are princesses. Like Quixote, this will make you famous far and wide, but you'll never be famous for what you think you're famous for - which won't matter, since you have the brain of a sponge.

But sorry, for me windmills are windmills, and how much more amazing is a windmill than a dragon, anyway? Have you ever built a windmill? Do you have a tenth of a conception of just how mindbogglingly terrific they are? Probably not. Too busy pretending they're dragons, I suppose.

So I will be forever at odds with many of my readers in my perception of D&D, because I see it as a game that enables adults to be adults, and others see it as a game that enables adults to be children.

Which, I suppose, explains why so many people are ashamed to speak of playing the game in public, or why so many people who have watched players play are a little ashamed to find themselves at tables with squabbling children. Perhaps the game shouldn't become all that popular ... we have enough infantile habits around as it is.

Oh well. Here's a Gahan Wilson cartoon:

Oh Yeah, You're A Hero

2011-11-22T09:18:00.003-07:00

Perhaps when you come down to it, the matter is a question of how you define a 'Hero.' If we are to take the ancient Greek word, heros, there's plenty to justify player character actions as fitting that definition. The Greek heroes were petty, infantile, selfish, greedy, intransigent, boastful, inconstant, arrogant, squabbling and utterly lacking in loyalty or a sense of duty. So yes, if we must go back far enough, I'm willing to concede that your characters are 'heroes.'

This was not the ideal presented to me in my youth, through the eyes of children's authors, fairy tales and Hollywood films and TV. Without question, a lot of those depictions, say of El Cid or King Arthur and His Knights, were dead wrong. When you read Le Morte d'Arthur, you find out what a randy bunch of humping lords were the sitters at the Round Table, and any honest account of history will tell you El Cid was a mercenary bastard without much sense of mercy or compassion. But still, when I talk of 'heroes' and get responses, I don't hear the gentle readers advancing arguments like, "You don't know what you're talking about - heroes are self-serving money-grubbing pricks, and that's what our character's are!"

No, it sounds to me as though the argument is that the characters ARE what the fanciful 20th century painted up for children's viewing - the noble King Arthur and the loyal Robin Hood. Or if the reader prefers, the courageous Dorothy, the inquisitive but ever-considerate Alice, and the constant Wendy. Creatures without a single sin, without even the temptation of sin, struggling against villains and foes far beyond their ken, but certainly conveniently dispatched of once a good pail of water comes to hand.

Naturally, there can be no real discussion of 'heroes' without a point or two made about 'anti-heroes,' who are all the rage of Hollywood in the here and now. I'm not talking about the other Alice, who today fights Zombies constructed by the Umbrella Corporation ... selflessly, I might add, but then her lack of any need for comfort might be explained by her genetic enhancement. No, I mean any character played by Jason Statham, or a variety of cookie-cutter actors just like him, who are allowed to butcher and kill and slaughter and maim, as long as they don't keep any of the money they grab afterwards. Anti-hero and ordinary hero rules are the same: you DON'T get rich doing this.

Let me qualify that. Ol' Jimmy Bond doesn't take his cut from the barrels of money he gathers as he executes his enemies. He doesn't go out and buy a lot of shit to ramp up his killing potential. He's given gadgets by the powers that be that enhance his natural proclivities, but he doesn't BUY them. Alice the construct finds a shot gun or a blade and such, but she doesn't have ye olde Wallymart to buy stuff from ... if she doesn't have it, she doesn't NEED it.

What I'm saying is that if your conception of a hero is someone who slaughters orcs, then brings back the cash to upgrade your character, you're NOT a hero. You're a selfish dick who enjoys killing in order to subsidize your material lifestyle.

Those orcs stole that money from someone, and now you're stealing that money from the orcs. But it is STOLEN money. You're a thief ... unless you hand that money over to the local village, and that means all of it, every last fucking copper piece. You don't need money. You're a fucking hero.

Oh, and for the most part you don't need toys, either. All Quixote needed was a few pieces of junk he thought was armor. He had heart. He had his faith. That was all HE needed to go into combat, and if you're an honest-to-god hero too, you don't need all this crappy junk slowing you down. Armor is for people worried about their own lives, and you're not. God will look after your life, and he'll take you when he's ready. In the meantime you need to be as fast on your feet as possible if you're going to grab that maiden before the jaws close. If you're moving half-speed because you're in plate, you're not a fucking hero.

People have very interesting - and inaccurate - ideas of what makes 'selflessness' actually selfless. But this kind of delusion is pretty standard. The other day I caught the end of Platoon, which is just the sort of anti-hero non-hero delusion that runs rife through our culture. The movie, right down to the final scene, is just whine-whine-whine about the suffering struggles of American soldiers, supposedly the good against the bad, as ALL of them invade a foreign country for trying to govern itself. Oh, sure, we can feel awful and sorry for the poor innocent Vietnamese, but fuck those guilty Vietnamese, defending their country and all, what a bunch of assholes, don't they see I'm trying to win an Oscar here?

Sorry. If you enter into an orc lair, and kill orcs because they're orcs, and take their money to buy armor so the next orcs you kill find it harder to hit you, you're not a fucking hero.

Though no doubt you THINK you are. Villains always do.

Subscriptions Are What They Are

2011-11-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

People are telling me that the reason my subscribers are not appearing is because I'm not doing enough hard selling.

Selling is not my favorite thing. Urging people to buy against their will, or coming up with reasons for them to buy against their will, has always seemed sleazy and underhanded. It would be like hitting the little 'Adsense' button on the blog ... even though I'm getting constant messages now that I could be earning money with the present traffic here.

However, I will acquiesce to my friends who want to see me do well. Here is a list of the new material I sent out to subscribers this month:

A Character Generation table
Population Demographics for the D&D professions, along with typical inhabitants
The publisher file for my Conflict Cards
Updates on maps and other previous files.
Vegetation and political versions for some maps.
The Publisher file for the Stable conflict on my Campaign blog.
The Publisher file showing how I made the shadows on my combat simulation last Spring.
A spellbook calculator
A thieving skills calculator
A character skills calculator

As I said, my subscribers are happy.

Join them. It's only a hundred dollars. You've spent a hundred dollars on really stupid things before.

Democracy

2011-11-21T10:07:00.000-07:00

When sitting down to write about this to a largely American audience, which in general treats 'democracy' as a largely misunderstood religion as opposed to political system, one must take pause. I should like to emphasize before beginning, O gentle reader, that I have no interest in discussing America's brand of democracy, nor the viability of democracy in that, or any other country. I tell you that I am here to discuss democracy as a technology, and not as an ideology.

Once again, it will please be understood that technology is a tool for the purpose of obtaining, managing or producing a result. Gunpowder was a technology that enabled a small, controlled explosion. Fishing is a technology enabling one to catch fish. Democracy is a technology intended to produce emancipation.

At some future date, when I am finished writing about all the technologies from the Civilization IV tech tree (I've been writing these for more than two years now, an average of two and a half weeks apart), I intend to pull apart the other aspects of the game, including the various political statuses ... so I don't want to blow all my future points about emancipation now. Suffice to understand that emancipation is the imposed equality of individuals - at least with respect to the state and the law. Actual equality ... well, that is something for nature to say.

The reader will please note that by the time one obtains Democracy in the game, all the religions have been founded. Democracy is, in effect, the answer to religious technologies ... the ultimate 'fuck you' to the religionist perspective.

And I will explain how and why, but I find first I must derail this conversation to give some comment to misunderstandings about the Greek conception of 'democracy.'

Democracy did make certain people equal in the ancient Hellenic world ... IF you belonged to a democratic polis, or city, and IF you were a male, and IF you had a certain amount of wealth, and IF you didn't piss off the wrong people and get yourself ostracized. A great many of the Greek cities were anything but 'democratic,' a great many of the Greeks were women who had no political life, a great many Greeks were without much money (or were slaves) and a small number of very bright, clever, honorable and loyal Greeks were cast out of 'democractic' cities for which they gave their blood.

However, we cannot completely discount the presence of honest, dyed-in-the-wool democracy among those Greeks who were priviledged to be considered more equal than others, for one simple reason: politics ruled in Greece, and NOT religion.

Nobody is really sure why. No one has any proven explanation for why the Greeks, in a time when virtually everyone in the world operated to a strict religious framework, did not themselves embrace the spiritual. The result of not embracing the spiritual meant magnificent advancements in philosophy, science, mathematics, medicine, engineering and on and on, but seriously, no one knows why. There are many theories. Some of them are quite silly: climate and the food they ate, etcetera. But there is no proof.

There were various groups of people who, with the rise of science and enlightened thinking, began to seriously consider in the 15th century forward the proposition of removing religion from any role in the state. The reasons for this are simple: religion imposes upon the social framework a small elite of individuals who 'know' the mind of God - or Gods, or what have you. This elite is propagated through careful training of a select few who are allowed to be indoctrinated into the elite's belief system - which in turn has been created to tell the masses what to do.

When religion was first established some six thousand years ago, the Priest elite imposed order upon the a scattered and variable population, telling them when to plant, when to pay their taxes, when to obey the king and when to rise up as a population and destroy the enemy. The Priest elite was useful, and those populations which had a strong Priest elite tended to effectively destroy populations whose religious fervor was less than fanatic. A fanatic population equalled power, and a Priest elite enabled kings (and sometimes themselves) to control a fanatic population.

The rise of education created doubts about this fanaticism, however, and by the time of the late Middle Ages various other forms of social construction had moved in and taken the place of religious fervour. In fact, it was becoming increasingly clear that religion had transformed into a force that destroyed power - as was evident in places like Poland or the Middle East, where the power of the religion was strong enough to crush scientific and social development, producing an increasingly backwards culture in comparison with Western Europe.

Consider: the Catholic Church in the 17th century was strong enough to completely muzzle Galileo's genius ... and the genius of hundreds of others besides. The Church was so effective at this that it literally destroyed the budding education system in Italy, pushing genius elsewhere and condemning Italy to becoming the intellectual backwater it still remains today - where the church STILL has far more strength to comment that it ought to, compared with Great Britain, Scandinavia, Anglo-America or France.

In every country of the world still owned and operated by a religious elite, scientific thought is doing all it can just to keep its head above water.

The reader must understand: the crux of democracy is not 'giving power to the people.' It is perfectly obvious that the religious elite possessed the power of the people in great quantities, having fed the people the diet and then taking advantage of the shit it yielded thereafter. The anti-religionists were not silenced down on the ground by the elites - they were silenced by the massive hordes of believers the elites could call upon when things got hairy. The mass burnings and executions perpetrated by the Inquisition were not witnessed by disgruntled, terrified people who hated the power the elites held over them ... no, the crowds cheered and were pleased that their leaders were dedicated to the wishes of a mythical god who without a doubt wanted all these witches and blasphemers killed most horribly.

Power is always in the hands of the people. That is why when you seek power, you find out what the people want ... or what they can be made to believe they want.

The crux of democracy, then, is to rid the social construct of the elites who control the people - by disallowing them any say in the enacting of state power. Oliver Cromwell proposed a simple, direct solution: execute as many of the elites as you can find. Other groups have chosen banishment, and still others have attempted to let ALL the elites operate at the same time, with the expectation that no one elite group would be able to gain all the power at the same time.

There are quite a number of religions, after all. And each religion has its own particular elite, and each elite vies for power against the other elites, seeking to convince the population that their particular brand of spiritualism is the best one. Once you've gotten your spiritual claws into someone, you must perpetrate that spirituality in your new follower's children ... this not only enables a continuation of the process, but with exhortations for your followers to have lots of children, you increase the number of your future followers, also. What's more, when you manage a certain critical mass of worshippers in a population, those who don't believe will pretend to, from a natural shame they possess. Humans do not want to be disliked, or persecuted. If they perceive that everyone else is going through the motions, they will go through the motions.

Democracy proposes to do away with all of this. Believe whatever you want, says democracy, but the state shall be run regardless of your beliefs. Or rather, those persons who have beliefs other than yours will not be persecuted by you, nor shall their effect upon the state be less than the effect of your followers.

The ideal has been that, if individuals were enabled the vision of a life without the religious crutch - if the religious population could see that their religion gave them no special status in the social construct - they would abandon their religion. And so it has happened. The vast majority of persons in democratic countries are not religious - well over 70%. They do not attend church, they do not traditionally pray to any god, they do not sacrifice or give money to religious causes.

However ... they pretend to. Even in a democracy, it seems, shame has a great deal of power.

Let us consider the best and most brilliant moment from the film The Mummy with Brendon Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Forget, if you will, the quality of the film, and merely remember the scene where John Hannah - the librarian's goofy brother - is about to be destroyed by the followers of Imhotep. Quite rationally, rather than be ripped apart, he turns around and begins to chant along with all the braindead, mindless followers. And they leave him alone.

Welcome to the failure of democracy. We can build a system that enables the presentation of creative perspectives, and the subsequent vote upon those perspectives, but we can't overcome the most basic human assumption about society: that deep down, at the core, we just want to be left alone. And if that means chanting the name of a brutal murderous entity (Imhotep = the Christian God), just to placate all the moronic twisted souls around us, even if we don't believe any of it for a second, we will. It's just easier.

How many of you, upon being roped into attending some church or other similar service during Christmas, were prepared to denounce everyone around you out loud? How many of you football players, when told to take a knee and pray to god, refused? It was easier to just knee and mumble Inhotep along with the coach. Then you could play football. Which was, after all, the point.

Fair enough ... let me put the soapbox over here for a moment. What in the mother of christ does any of this have to do with D&D?

Answer: not a fucking thing.

You are not playing this game on the pretext of believing or disbelieving in either a religion, nor a social philosophy. You are not investing this time in order to promote the benefits of this game over that game. You are not a football player taking a knee. You are, one would hope, standing up to the DM and not bowing to social conventions.

At least, I hope you're not.

On some level, your players as they move through the D&D world, are legitimate mavericks moving against the bump and flow of the world's belief structure. You're outsiders ... necessarily, in that your basic motive is the profit motive. To succeed at the profit motive - in this case measured by experience - you HAVE to stir the shit, you have to make waves, you have to slaughter the Priest elite and you absolutely cannot buckle under and believe. Otherwise, the game becomes unbelievably dull, unbelievably quickly.

Face it. If the DM says Imhotep, are you going to repeat it so he or she leaves you alone, or are you going to ask, "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Part of the immortal rush of this game is the tremendously freeing concept of not having to take it on the chin, of not having to be polite to the neighbors or rubbing blue mud into your belly button because they do. Players have to have the right to act like democratically emancipated persons in a world where everyone else is chanting in rhythm. It's the rugged individualist's creed - I shall not knuckle under the bullshit rules the DM creates. I shall fight the DM's stupid monsters, I shall attack whomever I like, I shall destroy whatever I wish and I shall chortle with glee as I do it.

Ages ago I proposed that the players were not 'fucking heroes.' This returns to that point. Heroes do what society expects of them. Heroes are slaves. Heroes are puppets of the DM. If your character is a Hero, you are not squeezing out all that this game can offer you. You're a pawn. You're a dupe. You're everything the Priest elite has always wanted you to be.

And that is not the way this game is fun.

We Interrupt This Blog For A Brief Injury

2011-11-20T21:07:00.002-07:00

Hey, all.

Tripped going up stairs, put my hand down for balance and the bag of firewood on my shoulder landed dead center behind all four fingers. Last night. Big puffy swelling and its pretty hard to type with it.

Please, if the subscribers could give me another day, and the campaign could wait a bit, I'm going to rest it.

Thanks.

Swollen.

Compared Hands

Another Angle

Gunpowder

2011-11-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

If there is a Civ IV post I don't want to write, it is this one. I have already written about why I don't think gunpowder would work in a fantasy setting, and I can't say I have much interest in writing a point-by-point history of the development of firearms - partly because you can't find two sources that agree on any thing about the subject, and partly because I really don't give a damn. People tend to fetishize guns, which leads in turn to a lot of wish-fulfilment where it comes to justifying the reasons for and the reasons of any matter associated with the subject.

Not that anyone admits it.

I dare make the following assertions: that for hundreds of years, guns were very unreliable. For hundreds of years, guns took a long time to load. The most effective guns in the beginning were cannons ... not because they were a lot of bang for your buck, but because you could take as long as you needed to load them, making sure the job was done right, and if one exploded on the battlefield (which did not happen all that often), it was way behind the lines where it did not create a hole in your defenses. It was just one less cannon for blowing up your enemies old fortification.

If you're going to have gunpowder in your world, it is up to you to determine how reliable you think those guns were. I wouldn't bother listening to all the 'experts' you'll find describing how splendidly reliable arquebuses actually were (or wheellocks or flintlocks or anything else for that matter produced before the Revolutionary wars) ... history proves they weren't, really. How? Armies did NOT rely on them. In the 15th century, at best, you rolled up to your enemy, you fired - and as many of the guns went off as you hoped could - and then you dropped your guns and went in hand-to-hand (or you had some prestige arquebus troop that spent half the battle reloading for another volley, which you couldn't fire into your own troops, so you waited in case your own troops got slaughtered or routed. There weren't many of these arquebus troops around - they were expensive and in general not very effective ... though you may count on the fetishists telling you different.

None of that matters anyway. It's your fantasy world, it isn't based on the real world, so your guns can be as sound and reliable, or as useless as you like. It's whatever works for your campaign. It depends on if you want your campaign to be one based on distance between combatants, or not.

Once upon a time, I used to run a Traveller campaign. I didn't much like the combat or the character system - I liked the terms and mustering out process, but I really hated the 2d6 character stats. A character system I did like a lot was Top Secret, particularly the way the stats in that game meshed with the combat system. It's not really important now, but I messed around and managed to build together the two systems, keeping the best features of each. If you've played Top Secret and know about the skills in that game, you might see how I did it.

One thing the players in the combined system discovered early was to avoid combat. Truly, seriously, just don't try it. The Top Secret system was set up for slug throwers firing 4 meaningful shots per second (guns fire more than that, but four possible hits made the game playable), and in that vein we played so that 'blasters' fired 6 shots per second. If you put six combatants in a corridor (everything in Traveller is corridors) with blasters, that's 36 shots per second. It makes for very short, very deadly combats, typically over in the blink of an eye.

If you were going to get real about it, consider that an ordinary M-16 fires between 11 and 16 shots per second on full automatic, and that gun is slow. Nor do they make neat little holes, either. They make big pan-sized caverns in your body that tend to bring about death in a remarkable, much-faster-than-Hollywood span of time.

Thus the Traveller game we played was much more about avoiding combat than entering combat. Your lifespan was measured, most of the time, by how successful you were at avoiding combat, and how much money you could pick up along the way by doing so. It was a very different game.

Whatever measure of gun-play you choose to have in your world, you should measure that against how you expect players to operate ... or, realistically, how often you're prepared to fudge the die so as to give your players the benefit of shooting against enemies who have graduated from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.

For DMs who hate combat and want to substitute a strong reason for lots of roleplaying and parties fleeing for their lives, a strong, effective gun culture is exactly the thing. In which case, I presume you're also the type of person who hates D&D, has always hated D&D, and who feels that killing anything, even in make-believe, is a thorougly loathsome trait for any imaginative person to have.

I don't agree, myself. I like that personal, up-to-your-elbows-in-gore hack-and-slash motif. It's strangely satisfying. It has a good pacing for moment-to-moment crises arising from near-death experiences. Unlike gunplay, where you firehose the enemy into paste.

The Online Campaign Intervenes ...

2011-11-16T21:16:00.001-07:00

For the heck of it, I'm going to point out that the party in the online blog is about to start what might be an interesting online battle.

That is, unless they decide to give up their horses ...

This might also be a good time for anyone who may be following the online campaign to make any comments they've been holding inside, ask questions, etcetera, etcetera.

Drink This

2011-11-16T08:23:00.000-07:00

"Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living--that you are still less likely to believe."

Socrates, Apology 37e-38a

We are given to understand that the context of these words were spoken as Socrates, condemned for things he did not do, was given the option of either exile (ostracization) or death (drinking of hemlock). I reproduce the whole quote here for one simple reason ... that Socrates himself did not believe that the ordinary individual - indeed, not even his own friends and students - would understand him when he said that the unexamined life was not worth living. Socrates was a 71-year-old man when he died. He had plenty of experience in how others responded to his arguments, and just what to expect from them when he made an argument.

Nothing has changed. Present the argument to an individual today, that they should sit down and at length examine their lives, and you will receive back a blank stare and incomprehension; at best, you may expect them to ponder for a moment, the briefest of motions mind, before asking you, "How?"

Suppose we consider a typical D&D event: the destruction of the big bad, in its lair, sitting upon a heap of treasure. Suppose as a DM I have you and others roll up characters of 15th level, and zing! pop! I drop you into the big bad's lair and the fight begins. You hack, you cast, you bring holy damnation upon the big bad and as a result you gain all its treasure.

Does this seem like a meaningful exercise to you? Is this something that sounds like it would please you, or fulfill you? Is it something you'd want to do?

If your answer is yes, then you may take comfort in the knowledge that you have just found the attitude you bear that has brought you all the unhappiness that it has in your life. It is time that you sat down and truly considered why it is you think the way you do, and how that thinking has brought you to the place it has.

For most of us, the answer would be a resounding "No." It would be an empty, meaningless way to spend an evening. It would be as meaningless as a host of reporters showing up at your door, along with the presenters of the Nobel Prize, altogether having the purpose of giving you that Prize for having accomplished the immortal task of picking the grunge out from between your toenails. The money might be nice, but you would very soon feel like a fool as you were asked questions, and thereafter for the rest of your life compared endlessly with people who had actually accomplished things.

Like real life, accomplishments in D&D are empty and worthless without the greater picture of how those accomplishments were achieved. The greatest ills in a game are not the number of characters that are killed, but the number of characters who carry toys and power they did not earn. Not because there is an unfairness about it, but because having a toy you did not earn is an empty, soul-sucking experience ... all the more empty for people who do not know that is what is wrong with the campaign they're running, or in which they're playing.

This is not an uncommon thing. The world is full of people living in the throes of hedonism, maniacally globbing up every bit of fun and pleasure they can from one moment to the next, concentrating their effort like a laser beam on avoiding any three-minute period of self-examination like the frigging plague. That is because three minutes without fun brings deep, abiding unhappiness. An hour without fun is a depression of epic proportions. And three days without fun can be all it takes to make suicide seem like a viable alternative.

People who play D&D from the angle that ten minutes of 'non-fun' is a great wrong not to be perpetrated against them are playing D&D for reasons that go much deeper than the game itself. They are avoiding their lives. They are grasping at straws to escape their lives ... and in that escape, they insist that all must be beautific and great, and that no obstacle can exist that cannot be overcome. They must be gods or the game does not give them the solace from reality they demand. They are not getting their fix. And you, O gentle DM with your world, are the reason they are not getting it. That is why they are angry. That is why they are screaming when the die comes up low. That is why they are sullen once their character has died. They are not in control of their own lives; they insist they must be in control of their character's lives. It is the only reason they play.

I do not doubt that this avoidance is the fuel that makes more than a few hundred play this game world-wide. I do not doubt that the considerable weakness of D&D to provide this sort of escapism is the reason it is not played by millions. D&D will never measure up with heroin. It will never offer the terrifying reality-separation to be found with skydiving or spelunking. It is an extremely crappy sort of avoidance strategy, and for that reason it will never, ever be popular with the great masses of people. Successful avoidance strategies, by definition, must be available everywhere; they must be simple and direct; they must be immediately effective; and they must work when the participant is alone.

Liquor, for example.

Your player - or you yourself if that is the case - screaming at the die, is an unusual sort of person. They possess the peculiar mind-set makes this game an escape. They are in a very tiny minority of individuals.

We are not, however, all invested in this game for these reasons. We are not all fearful of examining our lives. We are not all bent upon escapism. Some who play the game play it because of the opportunity it gives to examine our lives further. To put our personalities into a laboratory, as it were, and run tests on it, and compare the results of those tests with our ordinary, everyday behavior. If we suffer loss in our lives, how does that compare with the loss of our characters? If we are ambitious in our lives, how are we able to be ambitious with our characters? How do they play off each other. How does the imagination I put towards my world reflect the imagination I put towards my other art, or my social responsibilities, or my interactivity with other persons?

For the smallest number of players of the game, characters are not measured by their successes, or by how they differ from we ourselves, but by the means by which our imaginations work within frameworks we do not encounter everyday. I do not, for example, kill monsters on my way to work. I would much rather not live in a world where that was necessary. But the process of killing monsters, and the way it tests my ingenuity, is very much a process of my mind examining strategies I don't get to play out otherwise. And playing out strategies in my mind, regarding my competitors, my writing, my sex life and so on, is the way I self-examine every element of my life. I examine with gusto, because it is in examining that I determine where I am, where I'm going and why I'm going there.

If my world is going to be useful in that regard, for me or for my players ... if it is going to be a laboratory of any value towards that purpose ... then the one thing it cannot be is disproportional and erratic. It must operate according to fundamentally particular principles which are the same from session to session, from adventure to adventure, and from campaign to campaign. The players, when the sit down to play, must know what to expect. They must have rules they can rely upon. They must be able to judge accurately the scope of their actions and the limitations they have. Only in that way can they measure themselves against the world I create, just as they measure themselves against the world none of us created.

The reason worlds like this go on, and on, and on, is because the examined D&D life IS worth living. It is worth sacrificing moments in the real world for. It is not replaceable by liquor, or skydiving, or heroin. There's no self-examination in any of these things, for hedonism is the manner in which self-examination is avoided.

There are elements of this game that rise magnificently beyond hedonism. These cannot be comprehended escapism any more than life can be. The very argument of escapism - to escape from life - is the manner in which fools doom themselves. There is no escape. This was the point Socrates made. It is the point I am making.

But he and I are alike in one other way. I don't expect the listener to believe me, either.

25 Years Ago

2011-11-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

As I wrap up the public half of my day, I wanted to say something about what day it is. This is the 15th of November, 2011, and as such it is 25 years, today, that I got married to my first wife Michelle.

I was with Michelle for just over 12 years, and so we did have a tenth anniversary together, before her long illness finally separated us.

But as it happens, just three weeks ago I celebrated my tenth anniversary of being together with my present partner Tamara ... so that would have been my second time. And somehow I managed to do them both in the same 25-year period.

It is a strange, strange world. They have both loved me very much, which has probably been stranger. I have loved them both very deeply. I could not help myself.

The Saving Throw Experience

2011-11-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

Something that has always bothered me, which came to mind during the last session I was running, is the stale quality of saving throws in AD&D. First and foremost, that they do not improve with each level, but rather improve in stages of three or four levels - and more importantly, that your saving throw versus a fifth level spell is the same as your save versus a first level spell.

It takes gobs of experience to throw a fifth level spell, and how annoying is it when you cast, say, a magic jar against some very low-level character and have it thrown off with the same chance of throwing off a charm person spell. Shouldn't the spell that takes longer to acquire have more oomph than a spell you have at the start?

What's worse is that by the time a party member is likely to use a magic jar against an enemy, the enemies will be much more powerful and have much lower saving throws than when that mage was first level and using charm person vs. orcs. Not that I'm saying I want to make higher level spellcasters more powerful, but we're talking a circumstance of diminishing returns for more difficult to acquire spells ... and the effect is to push casters away from spells that require saving throws.

Logically, a higher level spell ought to be tougher to save against than a lower level spell. Logically, a player ought to improve their saving throw at every level. So I'm proposing, as a template, a table something like this:

For comparison's sake, if we propose that a first level character's save vs. a particular type of attack (magic, death, paralyzation and so on) is 13 (marked in red), than the additional saving throws decending from that initial number is reflected by the table.

Of course, this would mean a separate table for each class and each type of attack ... but hey, I work on a computer, so I have the space. Overall, I think this would make a better saving throw 'experience.'

Proof That People Do Not Get Worked Up Over Star Wars

2011-11-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

A Public Vlogging

2011-11-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

Saying it and not writing.

Two thoughts:

"To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing."

- Marcel Proust

"Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it."

-Tom Stoppard

Sometimes You're Out Of Control

2011-11-11T07:23:00.000-07:00

Finally, when it comes to character freedom of action, no discussion on the use of the mind would be complete without something being said on mind control, which has a long and traditional history of use in both RPGs and fiction.

To start with, in D&D, we have items, monsters and spells that all enable the DM to control the player's actions. A party will never hesitate to use spells or potions and the like against monsters, and we all love to turn the monsters against themselves. In kind, a party encountering a magic user, a nixie or siren, among a wide host of other monsters, expects to suffer a bit from the charm spell. It isn't always pleasant, but there are plenty of opportunties for a DM to step in and tell the player characters what they have to do, because they been charmed, or suggested, or magic jarred, or what have you.

It isn't as though the whole mind control technique hasn't been employed for centuries to keep things interesting. Merlin being enchanted by Vivien. The fun and games of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Mina Harker from Dracula. The Emperor Ming from Flash Gordon. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. McCoy and Sulu in Return of the Archons. The Penguin. The Imperius curse.

Over and over again, characters get overwhelmed by the dark, unforgiveable influence of the evil forces at work in the world. It isn't fun, but now and then you don't get to say what happens to your character ... and them's the breaks.

A DM, obviously, has to be very careful how this kind of scenario is played out. He or she can't simply rope a party by having a magician show up and turn everyone into mindless zombies. No, first a tale has to be told, which includes words like 'danger' and 'curse,' and preferably has some reference to the tendency of the evil entity/device to control the minds of people in contact with it.

Then, preferably, the party should have to willingly travel overland towards where the entity/device is, thus willingly making the choice to either ignore, or intelligently challenge the entity/device in its lair.

If, however, the lair is approached, and if the party has gotten there of their own free will, then the DM is fair to judge that Pandora's Box has indeed been opened. It's no use trying to stuff all the bad back into the box. It is too late. The DM is at that point perfectly justified in turning the party into zombies.

My personal feeling is, however, that the DM is also responsible for offering the party a way out. There has to be an end game that neutralizes the effect ... and fairly quickly, since otherwise the campaign is going to get awful frustrating and boring.

Mind control in a campaign is a difficult adventure to run. It involves trust - mostly, the players trusting that the DM isn't going to just fuck around with them for fun. Given the general behavior of a great many DMs, this is a very difficult trust to earn. Parties are notably gun shy. And that's why I say, be sure the party recognizes their part in making the mind control happen, and get them out as quick as you can.

And while the adventure is happening, tell your party to sit back and enjoy the ride as much as they can, with their hands inside the car, until the 'coaster comes to a complete stop.

Anti-Strategy

2011-11-10T11:19:00.000-07:00

Let me ask if you have never made an error in judgment. Obviously, you have. We all have. We date people we really should not date, and we ignore the warnings of our friends and trusted family members in order to date those people. We even get married when we shouldn't. We take jobs we know are going to be bad news, and we quit jobs in the heat of the moment, only afterwards to realize what a stupid thing that is to do. We skip completing assignments or procrastinate about them, only to find ourselves in the worst sort of place when these things become due and we're pulled up on the carpet to answer for what a crappy job we've done.

Why do we act this way? We know it is not in our best interest. Yes, its true that we want sex, or we need the money, or that the game is on or the crew is going to the bar tonight and working on a task means missing all that. But we also know that we should listen to our friends. We know we should do our jobs. We know that without money, we're fucked. So why can't we simply have the wisdom to tell the difference between what is important, and what is REALLY important?

I don't pretend to answer that. I do want to point out, however, that we are NOT always aware of what is best for us, and we do NOT always do things in our own best interests. We are at the mercies of our hormones, our comprehension of how boring the responsible action will be, or what we perceive we might be missing by acting smartly. We are not perfect. We are human beings.

But if you want to get a real fight going at a D&D table, propose that a player can't do something because their wisdom says their character is not capable of thinking the way they themselves are.

Players - and power players especially - are used to treating D&D as a strategy game like chess. No one would ever suggest you couldn't move your king's pawn to king 4 because the king's pawn has a wisdom of 9 and isn't feeling up to that right now. You don't have to roll against intelligence to find out if the king's horse can jump a pawn and leap to king's bishop 3. These things are simply not part of the game. It is a strategy game, not a wishy-washy bunch of crap about 'feelings' or interpersonal limitations ... so let's not have any of that crap in D&D.

Arguably, it might have been a mistake to incorporate wisdom, intelligence, or even charisma into a game that was bound to be played almost universally by strategists. If I am going to give credit to Gygax for any given thing, it is going to be the genius of incorporating a limitation into the game that would well and truly fuck strategists FOR EVER. Not that the strategists pay any attention, of course. They simply ignore the stats (unless something strategic is derived from them), and players with a 10 wisdom character play precisely the way that players with an 18 wisdom character do. Want to argue with the king? No problem. Don't want to sleep with the girl? Of course you don't have to. Get up and fight although you only have one hit point and you can't win - don't think about it. OF COURSE your 8 wisdom character wouldn't refuse. This is a strategy game, after all.

Except that it isn't, obviously. But still after forty years the word has not come down. People have no trouble not being able to do something because they're not strong enough. The limitations of our bodies are not OUR limitations. Or so we fool ourselves into believing.

A player in my online campaign recently said, regarding failing a wisdom check, "I'm just not used to not having control of my character for non-magical reasons." But of course he is. We all are. We make rolls all the time to determine if we can do something, and when we can't, we're used to not having that control. We would have preferred the die went our way, but ... oh well.

The point here is that we're not used to not having control of our character's thought processes ... because this is pure anathema to our sensibilities. We can take failing at a task. It is murderously hard to take failing at a task because we're not smart enough.

That is why we associate so many of the things at the start of this post with shame and guilt, and things we'd rather never talk about again. Moreover, RPGs are a way of living a life without shame, or guilt. We kill without guilt. We steal without guilt. We conquer the world without guilt. We're unashamed, loud, self-important bastards, bellowing at the bartenders and barmaids of the world without worry or concern for anyone's feelings, in particular our own.

And who the hell wants any of that emotional baggage in a D&D game?

Well, frankly, I do. Because it's real. It's the substance and source of what makes us who we are. Even the difficult bits where we fail at what we wish we were able to do. Our failings are a thousand times more interesting than our successes, and they make our successes wonderful. I'm not going to sacrifice that whole potential aspect of the game, which is what makes this game better and more important than chess.

My players are not chesspieces. They're alive.

More Intelligence: Back To Technology

2011-11-09T13:29:00.000-07:00

Would that I had a little time to get a post written today. Oh wait, here it is.

Whatever the conclusions that came out of yesterday's post, with my proposing for all of ninety minutes the possibility of rewriting the combat tables and then rescinding them, I still find myself in the same basic quandary: How does a low intelligence differ from a high intelligence in principles of game play?

Granting for the time being (the next thirty years or so) that the effect isn't upon combat, what exactly is effected? Roleplay?

Okay, I've taken a few moments to stop laughing and get myself together. No, obviously not roleplay. No two people in RPGs can agree on any rule binding roleplay for three minutes at a time.

Frankly, I'm not concerned with whether intelligence 'conforms to scientific reality' or not. I just want a game system that is defined, clear, practical and allows for extrapolations to be made in world design and game play.

Consider, if the gentle reader will, that the lower orders of intelligence are fairly well defined. A zero-intelligence denotes no thought at all. A one-intelligence permits the conception of most animals ... with an instinctual thought structure based on seek food or flee.

Two-intelligence brings the lesser sort of animal hunters who, while associating in tribes, tend to attack singly or in not-so-organized groups (the lions bringing down an elephant in David Attenborough's Planet series is a good example). You can see it here.

A three-intelligence describes a small step up, not so much in terms of combat strategies, but more so as regards personal inter-relationships, such as among the lower apes.

The four-intelligence, or "semi-intelligent" by D&D standards, excellently describes the higher ape. So in that we have the brink of tool using culture ... where tools are used, but not specifically fabricated for use. This is a question of intelligence, since while you can teach an ape to use a specific tool, you can't teach it to understand how the tool works, or indeed expect it to understand why the tool is superior. It learns to use the tool by rote, and not by reason.

Logically, then, the five-intelligence or better creature steps into the realm of primitive tool fabrication and proper tribal organization. "Low" intelligence, so-called.

At this point I think I would have to argue against considering the matter one of intelligence at all. Simply throw out that appellation at this point, and define any intelligence higher than 4 as a question of technology, which can be separated. In effect, a 5 intelligence merely describes a 10 intelligence creature hundreds of thousands of years lacking in social and cultural development. We can leave any other discussion of intelligence on the shelf, so to speak, and simply not speak of it.

Once we do that, we can easily make a definition between a "low-intelligence culture" and a "human culture." Humans use metal tools. Humans have developed religion. Humans read & write. Humans have access to theoretical science. Lower cultures do not.

If you like, you can consider in a medieval setting that it wasn't easy for more advanced cultures, like Europe, to have a steady impact on less advanced cultures, like that of the Bantu or the Nentsis of the Arctic shore. Some jerk is going to rush at this point to bark about how the Bantu were actually very advanced, but this is a relative question. Does "very advanced" mean they knew how to grow food and pick sores from their bodies, or does "very advanced" mean the development of a printing press and subsequent literature. People have a tendency to ascribe the phrase "very advanced" to a wide variety of things.

An 'intelligence' scale (remember we put actual intelligence upon a shelf), balanced against a group of technologies, such as those to be found in, say, Civilization IV, which I've spent a lot of time writing about, might solve the whole problem. Certain technologies could be allocated to certain 'intelligence' ratings on a point system ... so that if a creature had a 7 intelligence, you could define just exactly what technologies that creature possessed and which it did not ... with the added benefit that two seven-intelligence cultures need not have the exact same technological advances.

Just throwing it out there.