Introducing Gameplay

Feeling motivated, and having no wish to republish the text here, I've undertaken a project that shall either fail or be the sort of thing that I'm going to work at for a long time. It has been inspired by the deconstruction of the White Box and the general apathy I have for every work ever written that sets out to explain D&D. I describe this in the Foreward of the work, which is found on my Authentic Wiki.

The purpose, though generally stated on the linked page, is to describe the game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in a manner that is linear, to those who have never heard of the game or at least have exactly no understanding of how to play it. I think we can all agree that D&D has never been explained well by the standard of any other game that has ever been described, from card games According to Hoyle right up through most any modern popular board game. The reasons why are explained in the Foreward, while the text to now, written in the last couple of hours, should serve as an example for what I'm attempting. 

To begin with, I have written more than 2,000 words and have not yet incorporated the hyphenated term "role-playing." Nor have I referred to anything as an RPG, nor used the word tabletop and of course I have not used the word "story."

Let's see how that plays.

Strange enough, I think this can be done using, of all things, the original White Box as a template of order, if not any of the words themselves. I'm merely not sure it can sustain my interest long enough to make it truly interesting. Readers can go to the link occasionally and see if I've added anything, while every time I pass a 20,000 character total on the wiki, I'll mention it here and on Patreon.

That makes three posts today. I'm ready for bed.
 

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 29

Okay, let's try and work our way through the main body of the humanoids, starting with mermen and finishing with trolls.

MERMEN: Mermen are similar to Berserkers in most respects, but they fight at —1 on land. They are armed with tridents and darts (50/50). Armor class is equal to Leather Armor.

GOBLINS: These small monsters are as described in CHAINMAIL. They see well in darkness or dim light, but when they are subjected to full daylight they subtract —1 from their attack and morale dice. They attack dwarves on sight. Their hit dice must always equal at least one pip.

Composition of Force: When in their lair the “goblin king” will be found. He will fight as a Hobgoblin in all respects. He will be surrounded by a body of from 5-30 (roll five six-sided dice) guards as Hobgoblins also.

KOBOLDS: Treat these monsters as if they were Goblins except that they will take from 1-3 hits (roll a six-sided die with a 1 or 2 equalling 1 hit, a 3 or 4 equalling 2 hits, etc.).

There's little point here in going through these one at a time. I don't have much to say about mermen; they're a convenient monster related to sea battles and it's pretty obvious here that they haven't been fleshed out in any meaningful way. The tridents at least are logical weapons for underwater combat, since they're designed for fishing and they have no flat surfaces that create resistance when being moved through water. The darts, on the other hand, make little sense; why would a creature underwater have any reason to practice long enough with a thrown weapon to become competent at it — and even if we allowed for the possibility, how would this become cultural ideal?  But then, we're not supposed to look too closely at these things.

Though no society is granted to any of these humanoids, not even the acknowledgement of a "king" which requires our impressing human structures upon the goblin's, let me pause for a moment and discuss the convenient genius of goblins and kobalds, as a concept. Goblins, kobolds and the humanoids that come after form a graduated ladder of combatants that keep parties engaged from the first level onwards. The threat is calibrated; at the start, a handful of kobalds is dangerous, supplanted by one goblin be player character late in the first-level progress. With second level, we're free to increase the kobald or goblin numbers until they're conflated past practicality, by which time we replace them with orcs, hobgoblins and then gnolls.

However many levels the party gains for the first five or six levels, we can count on this dynamic, with ever more powerful humanoids, to carry the same basic rhythm of adventure forward: fight the guards, meet the first party of enemy inside the gates, then the second party, then the throne party... and finally, mopping up. Because can scale the humanoids, the threshold for success in a straight-up-fight, humanoid vs. humanoid, is preserved long enough for the players to become familiar and comfortable with the game's logic. This is more important than we give it credit for, and the basis of that construct is right here on pages 7 and 8 of the first D&D version.

Humanoids are close enough to humans to be legible — they use tools, they organise, they guard spaces — but far enough away that the players can fight and kill them without guilt, recent ridiculous grafting of race mechanics onto fictional beings that pre-date the printing press to one side. Much of conflict D&D, the core mechanic of the game (we've demonstrated repeatedly that it's a war game first, a "role-playing" construction second) is for players to become as desensitised to violence at their medieval forebears. We have no accounts of people complaining that warfare of the 12th century was "too harsh"; a casual investigation into 16th century literature and plays puts extreme cruelty to the forefront without hedging it with moral-consciousness or a call for leniency in the persecution of victims. If the game is to represent a medieval frame, then part of that frame is that survivors fight and things die.

Still, we are products of our culture and actual massacre of humans is a step too far for many, even in the 1970s. Goblins, kobalds and orcs, however... well, who cares what happens to them? Of course, in the quest to hamstring human nature, we've had to elevate these races to human status, and associate 1970s game culture with 1960s and 70s racism, assuming that correlation is causation, which says that orcs... even from Tolkien, writing in 1930s England and ludicrously far from 70s racism... are people too. It's a co-optification of something that can be conveniently disparaged without the inconvenience of having to produce actual victims... kind of like going after Santa Claus, the perfect villain who cannot defend himself.

All of it together counts as the colonialism of morality: symbolic righteousness is grafted onto anything and everything that contains value or meaning for a fictional other — that being people who are not me — which can then be stamped with an arbitrary "off limits" sign that flattens aspects of culture that might threaten a present-sensibility that feels, in the now, that they haven't got one.  The contemporary demands universal jurisdiction over everything — regardless of its tradition, legitimacy, emotional context, original purpose or fictional condition — in the name of humanitarianism, that respects everything except the free expression of humans. This produces symbolic righteousness, which is stamped on a flag and marched through the virtual internet streets until it fails to maintain "donational status," whereupon it is immediately abandoned in favour of something else that hasn't been colonised yet.

Thus, movies from the 1980s are no longer attacked for their social failing, because the number who remember such movies have dwindled. We must focus now on movies from the 90s, which can yet be extracted for it's performative value. But I digress.

ORCS: The number of different tribes of Orcs can be as varied as desired. Once decided upon, simply generate a random number whenever Orcs are encountered, the number generated telling which tribe they belong to, keeping in mind inter-tribal hostility. When found in their "lair" it will be either a cave complex (die 1-4) or a village (die 5-6). The cave complex will be guarded by sentries. A village will be protected by a ditch and palisade defense, 1 light catapult per 50 Orcs, and a high central tower of some kind. Orcs found in a cave will possibly have strong leader/ protector types, as will those in villages:

Orcs are the jewel in the crown of this scaling: they possess the same number of hit points or thereabouts as the player characters, possess comparable weapons, have the same attack table... though in this system, the White Box, these things are less evident in the muck of writing that we see here. Before I move on, I'll finish by saying that for at least three or four levels of character advancement, orcs remain the sweet-spot go-to humanoid encounter. Once a party has reached 5th level, not so much.

I'm unsure about the tribal designation method:  roll what die? What value does designating the tribe provide? If there are tribes, would they be so intermingled that four or more tribes (depending on the die we throw) could dwell or be encountered in the immediate area? Is the die rolled everytime? No, turns out not; its explained below, where the paragraph makes this die roll thing immaterial.

We can see the extra effort being put in here: orcs aren't just underground monsters, no, they live in villages too, just like humans. However, since they're affected by daylight like goblins, who knows what would motivate an orc to live above ground. Maybe they farm? If so, it might be logical for them to put up with the sun if they need the crops — 'course, if they've developed through evolution, is it logical for creatures able to live above ground to still reproduce young not affected by sunlight?

Then, if you accept the Tolkein argument that they're birthed from pools of mud (or something, I haven't read the books in a really long time, I only remember the movie), is Saraman telling them they have to live in villages, "because"? Think about it: you're a 7th to 9th level fighter, or an 11th level mage, and you don't want surface tolerant humans as your army, because you're evil and we KNOW from historical sources that no evil leaders since the dawn of history have EVER been able to raise armies willing to obey anyone evil... so instead, you choose to populate your village with creatures that not only shy from the light, but actually attack worse because of it. Interesting choice there.

Yes, I know, it's still all Chainmail detritus, but let's at least pretend we're worldbuilding, since the books say we are.

Ogres and trolls I can buy; trolls have always seemed a bit rabid to me, but that's just the early games I played. It makes sense on the "bigger creature" dominating the weaker ones, or if you prefer, the smarter orc feeding the ogre/troll in order to get it's cooperation. But the dragon? Really? Where's the exchange here? Can a hundred orcs meaningfully defend a dragon — and if they can, is there any reason for the dragon to feel safe around them? Would you feel safe with a hundred orcs? And if you were a hundred orcs, would you feel safe with a dragon? Both do not eat the same foods, they don't have the same goals, they don't living in similar environments, really, and they're more apt to compete for the gold than share it. Again, Chainmail detritus... isn't it cool that defender are both dragons and orcs? But if this is all just wargame nonsense, then why in good gawd does it matter what tribe the orcs are?

It's like a cheetah being protected by 20 gazelles.

Orcs will defend their lair without morale checks until they are outnumbered by 3 to 1.

And then what happens? I assume this is how fighters and mages get their "followers." First, you slaughter all the orcs in a tribe until there's one left (assuming your party has five or less characters in it) — and then that orc, whose family and friends you've slaughtered, surrenders assuming that you won't kill it to. Or maybe, only now, not when there are still ten of them, this last one breaks and flees into the dark, to rebuild its tribe.

Sure. Makes sense.

IF found other than in their lair Orcs may be escorting a wagon train of from 1-8 wagons. There is a 50% chance for this. Each wagon will be carrying from 200-1,200 Gold Pieces. Wagon trains will have additional Orcs guarding them, 10 per wagon, and be led by either a Fighting-Man (die 1 = Champion, die 2-4 = Superhero, die 5-6 = Lord) or Magic-User (die 1 = Sorcerer, die 2-4 = Necromancer, die 5-6 = Wizard), 50% chance for either (die 1-3 = fighter, die 4-6 = magical type.)

I'd love to know why orcs are throwing hundreds of gold pieces onto wagons and heading off for places unknown. Where, exactly? To far-flung orc villages who have things these orcs don't? Do these orcs carry any actual goods, too? Unknown? And where are these villages? Or are you saying that orcs are trading with humans?

No, wait, I've got it. It's like the cargo cults of New Guinea who built husk airplanes like the Allies used when they occupied the country during WW2. The orcs see humans driving around these wagons and assume this is some religious thing, that if the orcs just go around in circles, goods will magically appear.

It's D&D. Wouldn't it be cool if that worked?

Unfortunately, no. The wagons exist to be ambushed by player characters, so they must be carrying gold. So they roll, laden with abstract wealth, bound for nowhere in particular, guarded by improbably high-level leaders, waiting to be intersected by the only agents in the setting who actually have goals: the players.

Note that if Orcs are encountered in an area which is part of a regular campaign map their location and tribal affiliation should be recorded, and other Orcs located in the same general area will be of the same tribe.

See? You don't actually roll a die. They were just joking.

Orcs do not like full daylight, reacting as do Goblins. They attack Orcs of different tribes on sight unless they are under command of a stronger monster and can score better than 50% on an obedience check (4-6 with a six-sided die for example).

I've talked about this, above.  Don't you like that the attack the other tribe is made wholly random, not something you can rationally decide as a DM depending on the present circumstances? What makes this especially galling is that the text already knows obedience and command exist. It explicitly invokes a stronger monster as a suppressing force — but no, orcs cannot suppress themselves. Maybe its an odour thing. 

HOBGOBLINS: These monsters are large and fearless Goblins, having +1 morale. The Hobgoblin king will fight as an Ogre, as will his bodyguard of from 2-4 in number.

GNOLLS: A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (. . . perhaps, Lord Sunsany did not really make it all that clear) with +2 morale. Otherwise they are similar to Hobgoblins, although the Gnoll king and his bodyguard of from 1-4 will fight as Trolls but lack regenerative power.

OGRES: These large and fearsome monsters range from 7 to 10 feet in height, and due to their size will score 1 die +2 (3-8) points of hits when they hit. When encountered outside their lair they will carry from 100 to 600 Gold Pieces each.

Here we see the scaling up, bigger and bigger, to keep the players moving forward into tougher realms and opponents. There's not a lot of logic added. Hobgoblins are led by ogre-like leaders, gnolls by troll-like leaders, and so on.

Why on earth would an ogre carry gold? To what purpose? I mean, I suppose we can argue that he just likes them, but consider this. A being of 10 feet in height, all other things being equal is 4.62 times larger than a humanoid. This makes a coin about 1/3rd the diameter in the ogre's fingers. Imagine carrying a bag of nickels where each is a quarter of an inch wide. It would feel like a bead in your hand; would that give you any pleasure as an ideal of wealth? You can't spend the money; where would you go to buy things? Therefore, if you're carrying it for sentimental reasons, wouldn't it make sense to melt it down and hammer it into large pieces that were designed for your sizable digits? Wouldn't it make more sense for the ogre to have a gold torc, or an idol, or some kind of chain or belt it wore? Why a sack full of player-convenient coins?

And for that matter, why not silver, copper, jade, even articles made of wood or stone? Why gold in particular? The function of wealth in crude society is about flaunting it; the gold head on your club demonstrates your prowess. A bag over your shoulder tells no one nothing.

Last of all, note: no mention of "giant strength."

TROLLS: Thin and rubbery, loathsome Trolls are able to regenerate, so that beginning the third melee round after one is hit it will begin to repair itself. Regeneration is at the rate of 3 hit points per turn. Even totally sundered Trolls will regenerate eventually, so that unless they are burned or immersed in acid they will resume combat when they have regenerated to 6 or more hit points. In strength they are about equal to an Ogre, but as they use only their talons and fangs for weapons, only one die of damage is scored when they hit an opponent.

I have no particular problem with this. As a DM, except perhaps in situations where players cannot just cope with the trolls, because they have a lot else going or, or there are enough trolls, the "regeneration" feature does not make a troll particularly dangerous. Usually, once the troll is down, players do not hesitate to begin hacking it to pieces and building a fire atop it without hesitation. Maybe there are players who see the troll die and say, "Whew, that's over," but I began running the game in 1979 and I have never had a party that did that.

Sorry, the cat is out of the bag. The troll is not dead when it's killed and everyone knows it. This means that the troll has maybe 9 or 12 more hit points (that it regenerates back during a combat) than other 6+3 hit dice monsters, but since no one EVER walks away from the troll after it stops fighting, that's all this "dreaded" ability is good for. If, as a DM, I want to really play it up, then I have to have the troll fall off something as it dies to keep the body out of reach of the party, or something has to conveniently appear just as the party is building their bonfire, or maybe a stream conveniently soaks the ground long enough for the troll to heal up... but if it does, then, realistically, the party is still just fighting a troll with 3 or 6 or possibly 9 hit points, if it's had three whole rounds to regenerate — which is, sorry to say, not much of a hazard for a party ready to fight the troll already. Unless the party is 2nd level (in which case the troll will waste them before it dies), then a 9 h.p. troll won't last long against a 5th level party. Even three trolls with 12 h.p. or less won't last long if the party they face was able to kill the three trolls to begin with.

So, while I've listened to this, "Oooooo, troll, SCARY" rhetoric for a long, long time, it never pans out. Either the original trolls are too much for the party to start with (because of damage caused or it's to hit matrix, NOT because of it's regeneration), or the mopping up of troll bodies is meh, job done. There's no middle ground I've ever seen. 

Oh, good. I'm there. 'Til next time.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 28

I was sent an alternate copy of the White Box set to the one I've been using... but while I appreciate that there is a variant out there (and probably not just the one), this version has the benefit that anyone can follow the link and examine the version for themselves. So I'm going to continue using this one. I last left off on December 1st atop page 6, discussing the unlikelihood of five or so adventurers fighting more than a hundred bandits and just winning, when most likely the defenders would be grappled and hauled to the ground. That post got no comments, so I'll assume the argument wasn't popular.

There are details left about bandits I didn't address, so I'll start with those here. I'd like to use a screen shot of the text rather than writing it out, because it allows the demonstration of something odd.

Does it not seem odd that the creators provided information listed as "composition of force," but they also felt compelled to include "armor class" and "movement in inches" as separate lines, only to tell the reader to look at the paragraph immediately below? Did they suppose that if they'd only included "composition of force", which lists armour class, the reader would think, "but what about armour class? Shouldn't there be a separate line referencing where I find the paragraph I'm looking at."

I'm curious about it... did they not see the issue? Did they do it deliberately to fill space?

Too, why are the armours in the composition of force in brackets? Why is it not "short bow or lightcrossbow, leather armour"? A short bow is a piece of equipment, armour is equipment... why not just list all equipment in the same way.

It's not quibbling. I'm merely incomprehensible about the logic in the writer's heads as they laid these things out in this way. It's just weird.

BERSERKERS: Berserkers are simply men mad with battle-lust. They will have only Fighting-Men with them as explained in the paragraphs above regarding Bandits. They never check morale. When fighting normal men they add +2 to their dice score when rolling due to their ferocity.

Armor Class: Leather Armor.

Movement in Inches: 12"

Hit Dice: | die + 1/man.

Alignment: Neutrality.

Berserkers, of course, are an institutional part of the game and as such are defacto expected. I've run them, I have no problem with them. An issue with things that do calcify, however, is that the question stops being asked, why or how does this battle-lust manifest? From what? We assume they're ordinary people most of the time, that this is only a condition of being in battle... in which case, how do I encourage it as a player, either in myself or in others? Is it a strictly social phenomenon, something associated with groups like Vikings or Mongols? Is it taught to children? Where the Ottomans able to wrest it out of Christian children who were raised to be Janissaries? Can it be imposed magically? Why isn't there a potion of beserking, or a spell that causes fighters to berserk? (haste isn't the same thing). Why is the phenomenon not known or addressed at all?

It's an interesting concept. I know of nothing in 1st edition that addresses it, though I haven't looked at the Barbarian class from the Unearthed Arcana in more than 20 years. 4th edition treats it as an inherent part of the barbarian class, with rage a controllabel, repeatable combat state with triggers, durations and consequences. 5th makes it an explicitly psychological and physiological state, with uses per day, exhaustion, focus... as something that requires focus to enter. But there's still little interest in how it's produced. Historically, culturally, even mythically, berserk rage is contingent: ritual, drugs, trauma, social conditioning, religious belief. None of that is expressed in the game's rules. I wonder why not.

BRIGANDS: Same as Bandits except +1 morale and Chaos alignment.

Curious. If half of bandits are chaotic (see above), how is the chaos alignment of a "brigand" different than the chaos alignment of a bandit? Aren't we just saying that brigands have  +1 morale and much be chaotic? But since morale derives from the emergent property of loyalty, cohesiaon, expectation and shared risk, how is it that a group of "chaotic" persons have a higher morale? Logically, given the definition of chaos, brigands ought to be less stable, more "chaotic" by definition... except that "chaos" does not mean what you think it means. It's not a description of behaviour, it's a club you belong to.

DERVISHES: Dervishes are fanatically religious nomads who fight as Berserkers, never checking morale, with +1 on hit dice, and otherwise as Nomads (below), except they will always be led by an 8th-10th level Cleric and are Lawful in alignment.

Just to beat the drum, if you're a 7th level cleric, you can't gather dervishes together under you? Do they just know you're not high enough level?

I'm such a nit-picky bastard. Why give the heading "Dervishes" if the first word you're going to say after the heading is "Dervishes?" Why not write, "DEVISHES: berserkers who are fanatically religious"? This says that they're berserkers who, except for being berserkers, they're nomads. Which is a wonderful linguistic architecture that goes a long way around the barn to keep from saying, "Berserker Nomads are..."

Moreover, since chaotic doesn't mean "behaves chaotically," how is "lawful" even relevant at all. The books themselves grant no meaningful characteristics to these alignments, so why not just ditch the thing altogether. Ah, but I digress. Dervishes belong to the "lawful club." 

NOMADS: These raiders of the deserts or steppes are similar to Bandits as far as super-normal types and most other characteristics go:

If they're desert dwellers, where are they getting the wood for lances from? Moreover, I've watched an awful lot of documentaries about various desert peoples reaching back to the ancient Babylonians, and I've never encountered these lances spoken of here. A "lance" is not a weapon used in the Bible, which is largely about desert people and includes quite a lot of words about fighting. Note there's no slingers here; slings are made from animal hide and stones, so they're pretty easy to make in the desert. But nope, no slings. Desert dwellers don't use "shock mounted weapons" when they fight; the fight across distances, since everything is flat and there are few obstructions. The kind of horses that are bred by desert dwellers aren't large enough to use shock tactics, because water and food are scarce. Desert warfare, by contrast, overwhelmingly favours missiles, harassment, mobility, and attrition. Javelins, bows, slings, and light spears dominate precisely because they are cheap, replaceable, and compatible with dispersed fighting.

In addition, as throughout the system, the things depicted are not given any social, economic, cultural or motivational weight. Why do they exist? They exist to be nomads and to wait for players to arrive so that a fight can occur. This is as deep as the game gets in worldbuilding.

BUCCANEERS: Buccaneers are water-going Bandits in all respects except composition of their force.

Composition of Force: Light Foot = 60%; Light Crossbow = 30%; and Heavy Crossbow (Chain Mail) 10%, crossbows are heavy.

PIRATES: Pirates are the same as Buccaneers except they are aligned with Chaos.

I adore the "bandits on water" explanation... but most of all, that the "composition" does not include anything about ships at all. At all. It's stunning that the thing they need to get around in is not considered a necessary part of their description. The sea, the ships, navigation, logistics, crews, boarding tactics, ports, piracy as an economic activity, even the basic question of how these people move from place to place, are all treated as extraneous, because none of that fits cleanly into the inherited combat taxonomy. The omission tells you that the presence of peoples here are designed to fight like those ancient colosseum battles where they'd flood the arena, float ships on it and then portray a "sea battle" for the crowd. The sea is a backdrop that the DM wheels in to give the players a new "flavour" of battle, before the curtain call and the next bit of scenery is shoved to the fore.

CAVEMEN: Cavemen fight as 2nd-level Fighting-Men, armed with weapons equal to Morning Stars. They have no armor but get 2 Hit Dice. They have -1 morale. Alignment is always Neutrality.

Which, yes, means this.

The assumption, of course, is that in 12,000 years of human advancement between the beginning of the Neolithic period and the Medieval, all the technological advancements that humans have imposed still mean that a well-fed, armoured, metal-wielding fighter of the 13th century is weaker by half than an untrained, uneducated cro-magnon, while the weapon that fighter is using is no better that a club wielded by such. This assumption is based on the idea that civilised persons are soft, indulgent, decadent, while pre-history specimens are healthier, tougher, even super-human. Which, I'll just throw in because it's fun, was a central basis for much of Nazi-science, lingering around still in the 1970s and even today.

Yes, for shits and giggles, I just called Gygax a Nazi.

Apart from that, though, the notion that humans have been weakened by culture was a strong motif in the mid-20th century, coming from lots of sources that weren't actually Nazis. It's an inherited myth, especially in pulp fiction, survivalist fantasy, and certain pseudo-anthropological traditions. D&D did not invent it, but it adopts it here without hesitation or explanation, because it assumes the reader already understands this to be true.

That's the last human, so a good place to start. This same collection was re-imposed in AD&D... but what matters is how completely useless the list is for describing the vast majority of human beings. We have no mention of villagers, rural peasants, traders, soldiers, artisans, labourers... who apparently don't make good combatants and therefore are unimportant in setting or game terms. Yet most of the interactions the players are going to have is with these people, as they pass through villages, talk to rustics, buy ale from barkeeps; deal with guards or sidestep human run armies; get towers built or wagons fixed or armour made; or hire porters to carry goods and ditchdiggers to lay ditches.

The list is not merely incomplete, it is structurally obstructionist: if a human being is not already weaponised, organised for violence, or reducible to a morale modifier, they simply do not exist as a rules concept. The "men" in the White Box are encounter widgets. The game assumes that the Dungeon Master must supply an entire social and economic substrate from on their own, without help, while the rules enumerate only the types of people designed to be killed in the wilderness. Note that none of the groups named have anything to do with society. Soldiers are a logical addition if fighting is what matters — but soldiers can't be fought in isolation, in the hinterland, far from civilisation's prying eyes, so it doesn't belong in the list with nomads and buccaneers and bandits, who exist where other people do not. You cannot kill a dozen soldiers on a road without having just declared hostilities against something larger and more coherent than the party. Therefore, soldiers, as a "monster," do not exist.

We'll continue into other humanoids with the next post.

Delay

I'm sorry, I'm not going to manage a February edition for the Lantern. I'm not going to blame in on that 4,000 word post on language, but I won't say that helped. The issue is that my creativity has gone somewhat cold over the holidays, especially with the relief of finishing the Christmas issue, so I'm going to skip a month. Whenever I feel I'm getting the rhythm of putting these things together, I find myself facing the next one and feeling, what the hell.

This scene appeared out front of my place this morning. Of course the image doesn't do it justice; for one thing, it was incredibly bright to my natural human eyes, so of course the phone camera dimmed it. Nonetheless, it was very beautiful; I found myself staring at it upon getting out of bed this morning while drinking almost all my cup of coffee. I suppose I'm just recharging.

So, I'll relax and write posts here, make notes, get the next issue under control and then see if I can put two of them back to back. I'd like that. It'll distract me while I watch the world get tossed in the dumpster.

OSRIC sucks

I intend to get back into the White Box set... I'm just shaking off the holiday and the inspirations that come with it. But before I get my elbows covered with muck again in that dirty work, I was reminded by a friend the other day of what a piece of trash OSRIC is... and felt I might take a few kicks at that can.

"OSRIC" stands for "Old School Reference and Index Compilation." It exists because the Open Game License permitted a bunch of hacks to reprint the AD&D rules in a different order (not a better order) while essentially doing nothing else. The creators were quite explicit that they were not "fixing" AD&D, nor moderning it, nor making it more playable. They believed that it already functioned just fine as a complete game, while admitting that it was fragmented, inconsistent and in place opaque. Where AD&D relied on examples, sidebars, or prose explanations, OSRIC often replaced those with more declarative language. This (supposedly) made the rules easier to cite and easier to reference. Nevermind that it essentially meant that a DM familiar with the original books, and it's flaws, needed to graft into their memory an entirely different order of the same rules for no real gain.

It's a bit like having someone come into your house, steal nothing, but put everything you own into a different cupboard or closet. Or, in some cases, pack it in boxes and stuff it behind the waterheater downstairs, for you to find at random three months from now.

Moreover, for someone new to the game, the mastication of sidebars and prose explanations into declarative language (let me be more precise there, badly designed declarative language) gutted a lot of the inspiration portions of the original that evoked ideas surrounding worldbuilding and setting design outside of what the game rules directly expressed. From such tangents the DM was made to consider social order, economics, the logic of magic, the circumstances of danger and the ordering of in-game authority that were not stated as rules, but were embedded into how the rules were discussed. Further, the attempt at "legal-style" language failed on its own terms, because it repeatedly required users to already know the things being defined in order to grasp the thing being defined. In actual legal draughting, ambiguity is managed through exhaustive definition, scoped exceptions, cross-referenced contingencies and explicit heirarchies of right vs. wrong.

For evidence of OSRIC's failure at this, we need only look at the first page of content to see precisely the same kind of errors committed in 2006 that we've already found in the 1974 White Box set:

To wit: explanatory — adj.; serving to explain something; make plain or clear; stating the law, or laws of causation of which it's production or presence is an instance. Thus, a conflagration is explained when it is proved to have arisen from a spark falling into the midst of a heap of combustibles [J.S. Mill, "Logic"]

I'll start with "player," because the actual definition of the word player with respect to the game of D&D is in no way different from that of a player of any other game. Therefore, the dictionary definition of player remains correct and accurate: a person taking part in a sport or game.

What we have in the above is a total trainwreck:

In an OSRIC-compatible game, one participant must be the Game Master (see below). All the others are referred to as “players”. This term is sometimes used to distinguish between a player and his or her character.

(1) as opposed to any role-playing game, this specific rule set needs to specify that the player is something utterly different, while then indicating nothing of the kind. (2) no definition of any kind is provided, only the social arrangement between the players, whom the reader is already expected to understand as a term, obviating its inclusion here. (3) "Game Master" on the page is not defined as such, but rather as "GM"; (4) nothing in the passage about the GM clarifies anything whatsoever about why one of the players must "be" one, therefore not clarifying how the GM is a player that becomes a GM, nor does the presence of the GM coincide with the understanding of "player" that someone who has played other games but never this one would have; (5) it is not clear why sometimes the term player is used to distinguish between a player or a character; (6) because the character is the game piece, in fact the word player defacto MUST distinguish between the player and the character; (7) nothing her in any way helps a reader who has not played D&D understand why the word is being defined this way.

Therefore, not only does the definition fail to define the word, and relies wholly on those who already know how to play the game to understand it, the 32 words used above literally creates ambiguity regarding what a player is and how it relates to game play. This adds up to defining nothing: not the player, not the GM, not the character and not the relationships between them in conceptual terms.

We can excuse the White Box Set as having been invented D&D and therefore being a "beta version" that would expect to have kinks in it due to not having been played widely. There are NO excuses here. This is unforgivable incompetence. It is a  retrospective project produced decades later, after millions of table-hours had already exposed precisely which terms confuse newcomers and why, and is literally cribbed from the works of other people and presented as their own due to a legal opportunity.

Nor is that the only such example from the above that we can claim:

Monster; “Monster” is sometimes used interchangeably with “NPC”—thus, a wandering “monster” table might include helpful creatures and humans or humanoids. Generally, “NPC” means a human or humanoid character while “monster” could mean any creature the players might encounter.

As before, to make the least sense from this, we must know what an NPC is, along with what defines a "helpful" creature from some other (remember, this is a game and we know nothing whatsoever about how it is played, and have reached for these explanatory notes to help us), nor why humanoid does not describe human (which is where the word humanoid derives), nor how it relates to "encountering," which is a null word without knowledge of game play. Moreover, the definition is flat out wrong by every definition of monster that has existed prior to this statement. Monsters are not humans or humanoids, they are "monsters," which are creatures of abnormal size, shape and potency, typically viewed as repulsive and as objects of dread, awful deed and abomination. This is what everyone outside the game already understands when the word "monster" is used, and nothing in D&D that I've ever read states that "humans" are ever counted among them. The definition above trades entirely on the encounter tables from AD&D, which happen to include both humans, helpful creatures and humanoids beside monsters, and with the literal title of the "monster manual," which is assumed to mean that every creature named therein is by definition a monster. Which is a child's definition, not one that can be seen as legitimate here.

For a genuinely new reader, the result is actively misleading, and thus, again, literally exists to make the game harder to understand.

Character; A character is an individual featuring in the game. Each player controls one character, save the GM, who controls all the characters not controlled by a player.

 As with the White Box, again we have this infuriating inconsistency. Why is "monster" in the above example included with quotes every time it is used in the definition, but "character" is not?  What does this signify? How is "monster" different from character as a word to be defined. Do we know? Of course not. Because the inconsistencies in text, again, indicate that this was written by fucking amateurs.

Without knowing what a character is (and we're not told, it is not explained), we continue to have no idea what players control or what "all the characters not controlled by a player" remotely refers to. In the definition for monster, we casually used "NPC" without defining that acronym (and "NPC" in not included, infuriatingly, on the Explanatory Notes page), while we also casually use "humanoid character" as a monster that might be encountered. Since humanoid equals human in that same paragraph, this description of character allows the first-time participant to logically assume that the characters controlled here are "monsters." The text has created a closed loop of undefined terms that reinforce one another’s ambiguity. Q.E.D.

—

The introduction to this organised collection of dog turds that follow states, if the reader can believe it,

The authors envisage that OSRIC will be used primarily by people who are already familiar with 1e-compatible systems, so we have not burdened the following text with long passages of explanation concerning matters probably already familiar to our target audience. Nevertheless, we cannot assume that everyone who uses OSRIC will already be familiar with every term that we use, so we have provided brief explanations of some of the terminology here.

I left this to the end because I wanted to clarify that the entire page is meaningless filler. The above paragraph might just as well read,

Definitions are really, really hard, so fuck it, we decided to phone this one in. Enjoy.

And just think. The impetus for my writing this post was that my friend was furious that new players are using OSRIC as an alternative to learning AD&D from the original books. We can see from the above how well that's actually working.

Happy New Year.

Language for Tabletop Play

"These are people who have been clearly raised on the language of modern D&D, who are woefully let down by that language. They've been taught to use the word "story" in its alternate corporatised sense, who do so because they have no other language they can use. It's quite possible to see them fighting for language throughout the documentary... not because they do not know what they believe, but because they've been saddled with a vocabulary that really does not express what they need to convey or want to. They've been let down. This does not make their genuine faith or love for the game less so; it only makes it next to impossible for them to talk to someone who is not in fact like them."  — Unmodified: Real People, Fantastic Worlds

Diagnosing a problem is never enough. Saying the above, it falls upon me, not a convenient person whom I might hope woud address the problem, to undertake the task myself. I've said the the word "story" is treated in role-playing as a kind of linguistic solvent, dissolving languaged distinctions between player actions, player decisions, game consequences, interaction/improvisation taking place in game, setting and rule structures, memory of past events and actual back-and-forth play between the players and the DM. "Story" is used to describe all of these. However meaningful or nostalgic the word might be, it cannot meaningfully describe what's happening when we play D&D. Yet,

"So I'm a theatre teacher. One of the things that we talk about in theatre history is that theatre itself started as a way to tell a story. Telling stories is just a part of human culture. It is what we do, it is how we express ourselves. Across any medium. It could be writing, theatre, art, music — they're telling a story in some way... you go to an art museum right now and you look at a Picasso, you can't tell me there's not a story that you can just read right there. Stories are important to our culture. What tabletops are is a way for a group of people to collectively tell a story at once together."

For all the poetical faith and belief that's here, it's not difficult to see that translating these phrases into game play, without already knowing what game play is, would be impossible. Imagine for a moment that you know exactly nothing about "tabletop" as an activity. How does the above tell you what it is? it does not describe what participants do, what constraints they operate under, how time is structured, how decisions are made or what distinguishes tabletop play from any other social or artistic practice. Instead, it situates tabletop gaming inside a sweeping, almost metaphysical claim about human expression, where everything is already "story" and therefore nothing needs to be specified. From the point of view of an uninformed listener, "tabletop" could just as plausibly be a discussion group, a collaborative writing circle, an improv exercise or a ritualised form of conversation. The quotation relies entirely on cultural resonance rather than description.

What's especially telling is that the speaker does not once refer to rules, chance, constraint, failure or risk. There is no mention of dice, turns, authority, disagreement or uncertainty. These omissions are the price that's paid for universalising the concept of story. The word becomes operationally empty. Everything meaningful becomes story, which means story no longer distinguishes anything. If all human expression is story, then tabletop gaming has no specific identity left to articulate.

Let's take a moment and evaluate one word in the above: risk. In a creation of the things named, writing, theatre, art, music... there is no risk involve. I'm not committing to a risk right now as I write this. True enough, it may not be liked, it may not make me world famous, I may include a spelling error (who are we kidding; there will be a spelling error)... but these things aren't really "risks." There's no risk that I won't finish the article. There's no risk that in failing to spell the next word, I can't just go back and fix it, no harm done, no foul, no awareness for the reader of the word that's been fixed. Picasso's painting "story" does not incorporate a risk; every stroke of the brush is either done right or it is redone. The painting's subject tells a story, but the act of creating it does not. The act of creating is a series of efforts performed in an order until a result is achieved. Process, the making, is not "a story," the finished product portrays a story, but in itself is not one. This is where all the arguments made in the quote above fall apart. The picture of a pipe is not a pipe.

Tabletop is entirely different from an art form because it is not something that can be changed later, like this essay can be. Choice is committed under uncertainty; when resolution occurs, it cannot be revised. Once the die is rolled, all possibilities outside of that die's dictates are lost forever. Ceasar cannot recross the Rubicon. Once cast, once the declaration is made, the outcome stands and propagates forward. Chance creates consequence, consequence constrains choice.

After the fact, the past series of events can be framed as a story, but it cannot be experienced as a story while it is ongoing. That difference is vital. Yet is it not grasped because those who speak of game play have no language that makes a temporal distinction between game as "now" and game as "was."

We play games in the present. It is the only time frame physics allows. By definition, "story" is a temporal artefact. The moment we are able to say "this happened," we are no longer playing; we are recounting.

Let's set aside, then, that what happens at the table is a story being told. What is it? Well, a series of constrained actions — that is, behaviours or movement that occurs within explicit limits — in the case of tabletop, agreed upon rules. I grant that "constrained actions" doesn't have the poetical metre of "story"... it's missing that warm, round "O" sound, that pleasant stretching of the lips as we widen the mouth to say "ree..." — but then, poetry has it's place and its not here. Our goal is conceptual clarity. A lugnut isn't poetical either but it keeps the wheel from falling off.

Too, let's cast aside any arguments that clarity is somehow hostile to creativity. Mechanical precision does not diminish the ride, it conceals the bolts and fabricates the paint that adheres to the metal, producing on the one hand security and on the other, beauty. In writing, my field, we use all the words, not just the pretty ones. This does not lower the experience of the reader.

We can begin with a distinction between game procedure and game outcome.  Dice, turn order, character capabilities, referee judgments, spatial relationships and resource management all belong to procedure. These are mechanical and social systems that generate uncertainty. We don't know how much of a thing we'll have, or how far we'll be from the enemy, or what the status of our capabilities will be, in any given turn, as well as what the dice will roll or what the DM might invent or in what numbers. Yes, this does include how the DM interprets a rule, but in large part the DM's simpler influence of deciding what player a given monster attacks will have far, far greater influence over the game's procedure than how a given spell might work under these rare conditions.

Outcomes are alterations that have occurred in the past that affect the present, outside the present's procedure. The loss of all the party's food, for example, the death of a character, the obtaining of tools or benefits, the advancement of a level, the addition of a new game participant (a meta-outcome), positions gained or lost in a battle, allies gained or lost through choices made and so on. They're not things that can be interpreted, but things that are established as facts and now influence the game's balance. They change what can be done next. They narrow or expand the future decision space.

We can make another distinction between experience and representation. What happens at the table is the experience: players act, decide, wait, react, succeed, fail and mentally adjust to conditions as they happen. These things occur in real time, often driven by human hormonal impetuses, such as the manufacturing of dopamine when a fictional enemy is killed, seratonin when someone's a hero, epinephrine as things get tense, oxytocin as players slap each other in gratitude or encourage each other to succeed; cortisol when we fail. So much of what's happening in the moment is chemical reativity that bypasses conscious thought that we often forget that the human body isn't really designed to always think things through before acting. If we were, we'd have all died by mammoth long ago.

This is emotionally phrased in the documentary, but is completely lost in the players' language. Feeling one's blood rise is something every serious D&D player experiences, and wants to experience. Yet it directly contradicts the idea that players are intentionally "telling a story together" in the moment. They're not composing; they're coping, seizing opportunity, snatching dice, flinching from loss, riding tension. Reflection comes later, after the fact, when the hormones have depleted and the nerves are unbothered by their harrassment. It's then that story appears, not during the game.

That part is where representation occurs. A representation is an artefact made after the experience has concluded, whether that artefact is a spoken anecdote, a written recap, a memory or a critical analysis. At that point, events can be selected, ordered, accentuated and interpreted. I tell you that I should have swung on that mastodon instead of trying the spell and you tell me that you never knew before how much damage a mastodon could really do. I tell players in the other campaign about the mastodon and they tell me about the Jabberwock they fought that was three times bigger than a mastodon. And while some of this is story, a lot of it just isn't. Thinking about what I'm going to do the next time I meet a mastodon, or picking over my spells remembering the mastodon event of 2025, are representations that are not stories. Story is too limiting for the way we naturally think about the past. Human reflection is messier, more utilitarian, more recursive than narrative theory allows for.

We can also make a distinction between fiction and meaning. Fiction is the imagined content of play, consisting of haracters, places, events, creatures, objects and descriptions. It is the mastodon, the spell, the Jabberwock, the dungeon corridor, the throne room. Fiction answers the question "what is happening in the imagined space?" It is representational, malleable and, on its own, inert. It's not distinctively story-driven because it doesn't have to be narrative. Fiction can be a referrent: a mastodon floating in space and nothing else. Referents can exist as setting, situation, object or condition without implying sequence, causality or resolution. A room can be fictional without anything happening in it. A world can be fictional without moving toward a conclusion. Narrative is one way fiction can be organised, but it is neither necessary nor primary.

This is another reason the "tabletop equals collective storytelling" claim collapses under scrutiny. Much of what players engage with at the table is non-narrative fiction: spatial relationships, tactical positions, inventories, capacities, threats and affordances (a possibility for action made available by a situation, object or environment). These elements are fictional in reference but functional in use. They are manipulated, tested and exploited, not narrated. Their significance lies in what they allow or prevent, not in how they contribute to a plot. Each can be manipulated, tested and exploited without narration occurring. Their significance lies in what they allow or prevent, not in how they contribute to a plot.

Treating fiction as inherently narrative imports expectations that do not belong to play. It suggests that events should build, themes should develop and resolutions should occur, when in fact play is perfectly capable of producing meaning through stasis, repetition, failure or abrupt termination. A campaign can end without climax and still be meaningful because meaning did not depend on narrative completion; it depended on committed action under constraint.

This distinction also clarifies why so much tabletop language feels strained. When people are taught to describe all fiction as story, they are forced to narrativise experiences that were never structured narratively in the first place. They reach for arcs, themes and lessons where what actually happened was exploration, optimisation, attrition or survival. The language fails because the category is wrong. People ask whether a session had a good "arc," whether a choice was "in character," or whether events were "satisfying," when the relevant questions are about risk exposure, information flow and consequence. In fact, the all-encompassing embrace of "story" derails evaluation and clear thinking altogether, as people attempt to judge a live system of constrained action using categories meant for finished artefacts.

Consider a session where players cautiously explore a ruin, avoid several fights, misjudge a risk and retreat after losing resources. From the standpoint of play, this may be an excellent session: information was gained, danger was correctly assessed, losses were meaningful but not catastrophic and future options were clarified. However, let's suppose the "goal," to find the McGuffin, was not in fact accomplished, and now the players must return to the ruin and explore it again. Under such circumstances, many participants are now being trained to think of this as "story failure," because the target wasn't reached. The fact that even if the target were, we'd still expect to enter something like the ruin anyway, and see new things, just as we will if we revisit this ruin... in effect, we're putting the achievement before the actual adventure, pretending the latter didn't happen if the one tangible expectation was not met.

Meaning is not contained in fiction. Meaning arises from the interaction between fiction and constraint. It is produced when fictional elements are encountered through choice, risk and consequence. Killing a mastodon is not meaningful because mastodons are impressive fictional animals; it is meaningful because the choice to engage it was made under uncertainty, because failure had costs, because success altered future possibilities and because those outcomes persisted. Meaning is an emergent property of commitment. It is experienced, not described into existence.

Confusing fiction with meaning leads directly back to the "story" problem. People talk as though meaning resides in the fictional content itself, as though describing the right things automatically produces significance. This is why so much discourse fixates on lore, backstory and worldbuilding while remaining silent on procedure and risk. But lore does not create meaning. Meaning is created when players discover, through action, that something matters because it can be lost, failed or foregone.

Backstory does not create meaning because it does not participate in risk, choice or consequence. It is fictional information established prior to play. It describes what has already happened, not what might happen. Because it is fixed, it cannot be lost, failed or altered through action. No decision made at the table can endanger a backstory event, undo it or force it to change. At most, it can be referenced or reinterpreted. That makes backstory inert with respect to meaning. It can inform context, but it cannot produce stakes on its own.

A clean way to see what meaning is by seeing what changes because of an action.

Imagine two situations at a table.

In the first, the referee tells you that a bridge collapsed here fifty years ago and many people died. That information may be interesting. It may colour the setting. It may even feel tragic. But nothing you do can alter that fact. You cannot save anyone, lose anyone or be forced to choose between competing consequences or costs. The information sits there. We have a fiction and nothing more.

In the second, you are standing on a bridge now. It is old. You can hear it creak. Crossing it will get you where you want to go, but it may collapse. Turning back will cost you time and resources, and something elsewhere will be lost if you delay. You choose to cross. The bridge holds. Or it does not. Either way, the future is now different because you acted. The meaning is not the bridge. The meaning is not the description of danger. The meaning is the fact that, because you chose to cross, certain futures are no longer possible and others are now unavoidable. You cannot go back to a world where you did not test the bridge. That irreversible narrowing of possibility is meaning.

From this, it may look like dice create meaning, and they do, but with an important qualification: the dice sever intention from outcome. Once they are introduced, wanting something to happen is no longer sufficient to make it happen. That break is what exposes players to loss, surprise and constraint. When the die is rolled, possibilities collapse into a single fact that must be lived with. From that moment on, the future is altered. Meaning appears precisely there, in the gap between what was hoped for and what now must be dealt with.

But if the consequence of the die is dismissible, meaning is not made. Suppose I fight an orc; I swing and miss, the orc swings and misses... we have just both rolled dice, technically established that neither of us hit on the first swing, but the actual game effect is zero. The only thing that has changed is the time to resolve this particular combat, and that time loss occurs out of game. The die rolls before the one that makes an impact are just noise. Procedural churn, which is necessary for the system to function, because they preserve uncertainty, but not in and of themselves meaningful.

Let's try and wrap this up.  When people say they play D&D "for the story," what they usually mean is that they value coherence, consequence and intelligibility when reflecting on play. The first, coherence, is the property by which events can be recognised as part of a single whole. This allows a player to say, "given what happened before, this makes sense." The causality of this makes a narrative desirable. We know we're now at the temple because we followed the road from the gap in the mountains that we were told about by the old man in the village whom we met after we needed the antidote to the poison we got from the snake in the first dungeon we entered when we started the adventure. Being able to outline these choices to ourselves in the present provides coherence that tells us why we're here now. Coherence feels like all this is happening in the present, because we're remembering it in the present, even though it happened in the past — which appears to gloss over the temporal distinction made earlier, without actually doing so.

Consequence is related to this; when the players look back at the snake in the example above and remember that they almost didn't enter, they realise that they might not have met the man with the antidote and thus they might never have found the gap in the mountains nor the road that led to the temple. This encourages players to believe that the consequences they experience in game play are part and parcel to the overall story they are presently experiencing.

What is rarely understood, or at least rarely acknowledged, is that the belief in consequence depends on the rejection of inevitability. If players come to believe that had they not done A, B or C, the dungeon master would simply have manoeuvred them onto the same road by some other means, then the apparent continuity collapses. The chain of remembered causality becomes decorative. This is partly why players don't listen when they're told the DM is liable to manoeuvre them... because even the player recognises that to believe this is corrosive. It is the equivalent of sticking fingers in their ears and crying la la la, which enables the DM to continue to manoeuvre them.

Intelligibility is the capacity of participants to understand the current state of play well enough to make informed choices. Players must be able to look at the current state of play and reasonably infer what kinds of actions are available, what sorts of costs those actions might incur and what kinds of failures are possible. This does not require certainty, but it does require legibility. The world must answer in ways that are constrained by its current conditions rather than by an external need to arrive somewhere else.

This is extremely hard to create. The players must be able to read the situation, form expectations about what will happen if they act and then have those expectations resolved in a way that corresponds closely enough to the DM’s internal model that the players can trust the connection. That trust is what makes learning possible. When expectations are met, the players can infer that their reasoning was valid: they correctly assessed risk, they correctly understood an affordance, they correctly predicted a cost. The reward is not success; the reward is intelligibility itself, because it tells them that their choices are grounded in an environment they can understand. The moment that connection holds consistently, players can begin to build a predictive map of the world, which is the precondition for informed choice.

However, if the DM’s internal model differs from what the players were reasonably led to believe, then outcomes stop teaching. The players cannot tell whether they made a bad choice, misunderstood the situation or were simply surprised by a private rule in the DM’s head. Once that ambiguity enters, players lose the ability to update their understanding. They cannot learn from outcomes because they cannot locate the cause of outcomes.

The DM must supply something that restores a sense of order, even if that order is no longer grounded in shared causal understanding. This is where the turn to a narrative model begins, often unconsciously. A narrative model compensates for the loss of intelligibility by replacing causal predictability with structural predictability. Instead of outcomes needing to make sense because they follow from the situation as the players understood it, they only need to make sense in terms of sequence and dramatic logic. Events no longer answer the question "what happens if we do this?" but "what happens next?" That shift reduces the burden of alignment between player expectations and the DM’s internal model, because narrative structure can absorb inconsistencies that causal systems cannot.

However, this narrative model eventually effaces all significant player choice, and it does so as a direct consequence of how it restores order. Once outcomes are justified primarily by narrative necessity rather than by the state of play. Over time, players learn that careful reasoning does not reliably produce different results from reckless action, that caution does not meaningfully reduce risk and that failure rarely forecloses progress. The range of outcomes narrows, not because the situation demands it, but because the narrative must continue. Once players internalise this, significant choice evaporates. Decisions remain, but they are no longer weight-bearing. They are expressions of preference or character colour, not interventions that genuinely shape the future.

This is why narrative compensation is self-reinforcing. As intelligibility declines, the DM leans more heavily on story to keep play coherent. As story takes precedence, player choices become less causally effective. As choices lose effect, intelligibility erodes further, because there is less and less for players to learn from the consequences of action. The narrative model does not merely coexist with diminished agency; it accelerates it.

We need to pause here and establish still again that this "story model" is still fundamentally different from literary storytelling. The "story model" in tabletop is a construct designed to provide a sense of coherence and structure to a game that is otherwise filled with chaos, uncertainty and risk. It's a way of maintaining engagement, ensuring that events make sense to the players even when the underlying system doesn't always provide a clear narrative thread. In this model, the focus is less on the growth of characters or the unfolding of deep, meaningful consequences and more on the presentation of events as though they are part of a cohesive storyline. The DM often acts as the storyteller, shaping the events and the players' choices to fit a desired structure, or at least to mimic a structure that resembles a story.

But it's not about the characters' evolution as characters — they don't grow or evolve or reach a resolution, nor does the narrative, though it appears to when the string of events that are followed come to an end. But this ending is not redemptive or transformational. It's merely an end, like a commute to a workplace that accomplishes a task, furthers one's income, but in fact offers very little for the soul. The only option thereafter is to repeat the commute again the next day, and the next, until the commute itself becomes hollow and the players go through the motions.

There we have it. We've developed comprehensive vocabulary to discuss various aspects of tabletop gameplay and storytelling. Every word here existed prior to my inclusion of it in this post; all of it can be looked up and further explored with exactly the meaning I have given it here, so that if the reader wishes to further pursue intelligibility, meaning, affordance, risk exposure or whatever, there won't be any problem doing so. Of course, there's a lot to remember. This is a complicated game, and it needs people ready to dive into a complicated vocabulary.

Unmodified: Real People, Fantastic Worlds

In a more positive manner, I'd like to praise this video I found related to D&D, as something other than the normative apologetics pumped out by those who want to sell the game. It's not like me to like a video like this... but honestly, I believe the difference lies in the video's source, which is public broadcasting based. In other words, it's not "selling" D&D so much as enthusiasm for D&D, which I find vastly more palatable. That makes this a very unusual post for me.

I do want to stress, because honestly I think many believe the tag line of this blog, "I Love the Game of D&D," is meant either ironically or sarcastically. I'm such a grouchy old bastard, I spend so much of my time kicking the crap out of things, it's easy to believe that because I think the White Box set is horribly written, that Basic D&D is a joke and that Gygax was simply an awful human being, that every conceivable Venn Diagram that includes "D&D" in a circle must have me in another circle completely outside it. But no, that's not true.

I am enthusiastic for D&D. I would not have spent three weeks this month squeezing out a 32-page example of the Lantern geared for Christmas, or the amount of time I've given to talking about the game, nor the years I've spent playing it, because I do not get a vibrating charge in my nerve endings at the thought of it. No, it's just that I think everyone else is wrong, stupid or misinformed, that's all. No biggie. I don't dislike people who are wrong, I just want to change their mind.

Unmodified: Real People, Fantastic Worlds makes no effort to do any of that. It presents expressive, enthusiastic people talking about a game concept — role-playing — unabashedly with love. This is captured in every scene, so if what you want is to feel an engagement with people who are prepared to be authentic about love, then take the time and watch at least some of the video. If you're into miniatures, or concrete details about setting design, with all the table-top functionality that comes from creating 3-D models, then you'll likely watch this to the end.

You won't find enlightenment. These are people who have been clearly raised on the language of modern D&D, who are woefully let down by that language. They've been taught to use the word "story" in its alternate corporatised sense, who do so because they have no other language they can use. It's quite possible to see them fighting for language throughout the documentary... not because they do not know what they believe, but because they've been saddled with a vocabulary that really does not express what they need to convey or want to. They've been let down. This does not make their genuine faith or love for the game less so; it only makes it next to impossible for them to talk to someone who is not in fact like them.

My partner Tamara, for example, would get nothing from this. Nor would my musician friends, nor my writing friends, nor any of my work associates. No non-roleplayer is going to watch this and understand in the least what these people are talking about. But the enthusiasm alone may potentially get some joiners. Which is good. But the simple fact that people in this hobby cannot communicate what this hobby is after 50 years, because that language has never been a priority, is criminal.

I wrote the "story" article as a preliminary to this; and those who commented on the story article largely did not get what I was saying — that exploiting a positive word from the childhood of a person in order to sell that adult version a product is bad. The reason those commentors did not read it that way is evidenced in this video, which shows people who cannot literally describe what they really believe, because they've been crippled by a vocabulary that's allowed to convey only emotional faith. And if you're a person whose background does extend into language and the use of it, you'll recognise this shortcoming within the first couple of minutes. Though without my saying so now, you might not have been able to identify that shortcoming without my having primed you first.

So that's on me. But honestly, without this priming, I don't think a lot of you would stay with this long enough to get the whole picture — and I really want you to. I think it matters. Because until we separate the love here from the way these people have been failed by the game seller, we cannot grow. Emotions are wonderful. But they also correspond to a pre-Neolithic social outlook.

Love deserves a proper culture.

Chekhov's Gun

If you don't know this one, you're obviously so divorced from knowing anything about writing that you just don't care, or you're ten years old. Most likely, you've heard it but you don't know the source, or you've misremembered it, so like the entire rest of the internet, we have to start by stating it. I'll use Goodreads as a source. Chekhov would have said it in Russian.

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don't put it there."

This is entirely true and also the cause of everything that's wrong with literary criticism today. The assumption is that Chekhov intended the gun to be a metaphor accentuating the necessity of narrative economy and the importance of relevance in storytelling. The argument goes that every "element" introduced in a story should serve a purpose... and that the gun is merely an example of one such element.

However, I don't think this is what Chekhov meant. A gun is not an ordinary, everyday sort of element. No one watching a play gives a rat shit if the blue curtains on the window flutter in act two. Guns are dangerous items that grab attention, that frighten, the express the immediate and potential death of one of the members of the play, not to mention the audience as well, whose animal brains cannot distinguish between the stage and the mezzanine. Chekhov was trying to say, I believe, since he never so far as I know ever used any other example other than "gun" to express this belief, while in fact expressing the gun metaphor often to many different persons via letters, was that a GUN cannot be ignored if you hang it on a wall. So if you're going to employ a GUN in a play, and put it where the audience can see it, then understand that they're not going to take their eyes off the gun until it's used.

There is no concrete evidence that Chekhov ever intended the "gun" in his famous adage to represent anything other than a literal, attention-grabbing object within the context of a narrative. The widespread assumption that it's a broader metaphor for "narrative economy" or "relevance" is based largely on modern literary interpretation and the tendency to generalise Chekhov's statement to encompass more abstract elements of storytelling.

I'll go one further and argue that Chekhov's direct advice to playwrights and storytellers often revolved around the practical aspects of crafting drama and tension, and the gun was a powerful symbol of that. The issue arises when readers simply won't accept the phrasing of the author, the narrator or the character in the story as defacto what the writer meant. No, according to literary criticism, which co-opts the above phrase without legitimacy and many other like phrases stated by other writers, everything in a piece of work must have some subtle, underlying, unstated subtext that says what it really means, even though this subtext can't be scripted, absolutely defined or even be proved to exist. Despite this, however, we have an entire industry of literary professors whose lives, incomes, homes and all other material wealth depends upon a significant percentage of the population buying into this horseshit.

But... do I, as a writer, incorporate subtext?  Yes, yes I do. Because we as human beings often do not say what we mean. My mother and your mother say, "I love you," but it's most unlikely that they are both thinking the same thing when they say it, or that it's coming from the same place. So, yes, agreed, I'm on board. Subtext exists.

Can subtext be used to further a story's narrative? Absolutely. I don't need to have ever heard of Chekhov or to ever have taken a course in literary criticism (though... *sigh*... I have) to know this. It becomes self-evident the more that a writer writes. Not just through the experience of a reader who grossly understands the plainspoken words on the page, which happens all the time ("the dog crossed the street;" how is that not clear?), but we see it in ourselves when we write something and then don't revisit it until two or three years in the future. In other words, we see subtext in things we wrote ourselves that we did not put there. We know we did not, because its very jarring when we see it.

We can take two meanings from this. The first, that the entire literary community accepts, is that human beings are secretly constructive beings that write things into stories subconsciously, meaning for those things to be there even when the author is not and may never be consciously aware of this. And the second, that human beings come to things they write with a bucket of shit they're more than ready to pour into the writer's soup. Even when the human being, now three years older, is not the one that wrote the text.

Both of these interpretations are based on psychology. The first is based on 19th century psychology, which ignores all the work that's exploded Freud's concept of the subconscious, while the other is based on present-day psychology, which argues that people are largely primed to believe what they want to believe. Guess which one universities continue to embrace.

When an academia becomes so rigid that it depends upon 19th century science to thrive, it's time to throw in the towel.

Unfortunately, present-day psychology doesn't leave literists anything to do. And so, because they like their yobs and their shit, they continue to preen their feathers in front of journalists who assume (journalism is also based on a 19th century belief system) that literists have something of value to say. Which is good, because heuristics don't play very well on Fox.

I get frustrated when I'm watching a film or a television show that produces a writer character, or a group of professors, who must somehow provide a coded indication of their intellectual prowess for an audience that is assumed to have none. Or worse, for an audience that has prowess in a very exclusive club of recognisable names. For example, if we are to present a literary female professor at a university played by a woman in her 40s, she will have exactly one author that she wishes to talk about. That author hasn't written a book in 200 years, and discusses concepts that haven't been relevant in at least a century (for those who can't get this sorted, "a hundred years ago" was not ten years before WW1, but in the middle of the Jazz Age), but no matter, we'll pound feminist subtext into the book nonetheless, because damn, they were meant to be there.

And if its a male professor over 60, he will have exactly one author that he loves — an author that groundbroke a distinctive literary style that failed him in his own time, never became popular, and is now the bane of writers who must abandon that style if they ever want someone to read them. I'm endlessly stunned that a total failure of a literist has become the immediate go-to example of the writer that no one else emulates, but we nevertheless must enshrine.

Sprinkle half a dozen authors in with these two and we have the entire lexicon of pre 1990 literature, so far as the media is concerned. You can mention a few pieces but please, don't mention the author. Oh, and if the book they read got made into a movie, well, we're bound to know ten times more about how much the author hated the movie than we know about the book... excepting those parts where the movie changed the book and now we all must know what was changed, without context.

Yet... YET... and this is the bloody point... omg, A.I. is destroying everything.

Yeah, I'm not going to pick that up. The literary comprehension of those who are barking about the problem is so scant, even if they have read the books (bucket of shit ready, pour), I can't see it makes a difference. The last ten people I've encountered who claim to have read Pride and Prejudice seem to fall into two categories. The first is that the book they've actually read was Sense and Sensibility, and second, they can't seem to remember anything that happened Elizabeth except her reading Darcy's letter. That seems to be it.

I asked A.I. about it and it confesses that A.I. isn't helping the inability of people to actually read, or even to remember the title of the book they claim to have read. I have to argue that it's not hurting, either. Throughout all of history, regardless of the number that actually can read, it's only ever been of relevance to a tiny portion of human beings that are alive. A "reader" is not one who aches for literary criticism, which is at best the arrangement of cigarettes that Pink creates on the floor of his hotel room in The Wall, nor one who cares who else reads the books they read. Such rarely suggest books. When I see someone in a chat room promote a book that is not their own, I assume they want the cred for "being someone who finds great books"... whereas I usually assume that if I really like a book, there's no point in telling someone else to read it because either they won't "get it," or they'll get it in entirely the wrong way. Either way, we'll have nothing to talk about with each other, so what's the point? Where a book is concerned, I feel there are only two people who matter: the author and me. Everyone else can go hang.

I love when people come and tell me they liked something I wrote. But unfortunately, they never say the stuff that really matters to me. No one ever says, "Jeez, when you used the word 'mezzanine' instead of 'audience,' I really got what you were going for there." Naw, they only say they liked it, and maybe they quibble about something, or admit I changed their mind about a thing... but you know, those things really aren't the writing part.

You know?

A Christmas Diversion

Christmas Eve, and so I'll post one of the stories from my Lantern.  Not the best story in my opinion, and in fact I think the shortest, nor the most "Christmasy," but some might like it and might appreciate the effort that I took with The Lantern this year:

The Ancient Yule
by Tasmin Veale

Ah, there’s plenty of Devon folk struttin’ into Christmas as if the world began with their own grandmothers, knowing no more of old forest gods than a hen knows of harvest accounts. And as for the wisdom our Viking forebears brought down from the north—why, it’s slipped clean out of their heads, if ever it got in. Those men knew the worth of a tree that’s stood longer than a landlord’s promise, reading its rings like a parish ledger—sunshine, storms, and every bit of druid’s tending writ plain for them. And they weren’t such fools as to forget, when winter’s dark presses in hardest, how to coax the good still sleeping in the wood and send it into the world again, lest the sun itself take fright and turn tail for good.

When those layers are set alight upon a solstice night, each one sends out a burst of power strong enough to chase off every dark spirit skulking about—though between ourselves, half the spirits are likely to run merely from the gathering of villagers’ faces in the light the fire gives off. And of course the bigger the tree, the stronger the virtue stored in it; why, in the north they’ll set to with logs twenty feet long, standing a good eight feet high across the trunk, and the whole village comes tromping out, gaping at the blaze as if learning for the first time the wonder of the world.

Cutting down a tree is an act to be handled with great reverence, for though the tree will serve us well, it’s still a living creature that’s suffered its share and yet stood thriving through many a long century. The oldest and largest oak is best—you’ll find some with trunks a good six feet thick or more, though it’s always wiser to look for one that’s seven feet at the least. And if no oak comes to hand, an ash of six-foot width or a beech a shade broader will answer—only you must be prepared to hunt for either before you set axe to bark.

Don’t go thinking, like some do, that a bundle of smaller logs or a heap of earth-preserved branches will serve; that’s nothing but opening the door to calamity. You must remember it’s the oldest rings that bring the magic forth, not the mere bulk of the wood. A branch is nought but knots and bark, so we should expect no good from that. You ought to understand the bargain that’s set before us: we take one life—the tree’s—to shield many lives, our own, in the year that’s coming. And if we mean to drive back the spirits that would prey upon us, the trunk has to be well and truly seasoned by all those long years between ourselves and the time when it was no more than an acorn, a mast or a key.

I’ve seen well enough what comes of a village that tries to spare itself the trouble, only to find the children ailing by January, and the livestock lying hollowed and dead on the moor by February, brought low by spirits no one can put a name to, with seeds that won’t so much as stir in the soil come April. It’s not worth the saving—do the thing properly, and seek out one of my own kind, a good druid, who knows the right way such hard work must be gone about.

Once you’ve settled on a trunk of the right thickness, you’ll want a good fifteen or more feet of its length, taking it from just above the highest root. That’s what gives you a burn that’ll last the whole night through—aye, and long past a single night if the wood’s sound. It allows time for folk from the surrounding districts, lacking their own yule, to make the journey and share in the ritual as well. Such a gathering binds a wider community together and promises not only a strong harvest in the year ahead, but a fair footing for trade and tradesfolk besides. And mind you, the brighter and higher the blaze, the farther its call will reach to others.

Mind this as well—that the days before the burning must be handled with all the seriousness you’d give to preparing for a siege, for bringing the tree into the village is as good as announcing the coming spiritual confrontation. The moment the felled trunk is carried in, the villagers must be off at once to shutter the windows of every building. It’s a thing most don’t rightly grasp, but the scent of the wood will draw the lesser spirits from hither and yon straight into the village; and these, being drawn so early and not yet met by the fire that’s still days ahead, will nose about to slip into any structure they can and make mischief. So every portal must be closed against them.

In the same fashion, the wells must be covered, for water is a favoured passage for whispering entities. A single open surface lets enough of them linger to put the whole solstice at risk. The livestock, too, must be brought together into the central barns and not left out in the fields nor left to themselves. And for safety’s sake, the iron implements are to be set leaning round the outside of the barn in a ring, with lines of salt laid all about it as well, for evil spirits are ever inclined to harry the edges of a community by preying on the animals first.

And you must take heed of this besides: children and the elderly are to be kept indoors—not out of any hardness of heart, but because the frail are ever the quickest to be led astray by the spirits’ own contrivances, seeing what isn’t there and being coaxed where they’ve no call to wander. In Yule-tide custom, it’s held to be plain sense to keep such loved ones close to the hearth, for the long winter nights are when wandering beings, be they the Wild Hunt aloft or house-sprites abroad, cast about for those whose strength is not equal to the season.

While all these preparations are under way, the square where the burning is to be held must be cleansed. That means sweeping off every scrap of windblown litter, for any bit of decaying matter gives certain shadows a place to fasten themselves. After that, mark out the boundary with chalk or crushed bone, mixed best with the wood ash saved from the previous year’s burning. And if none of that is to be had, then gather ash from hearths that have burned wood only—not charcoal, nor anything spoiled by drippings. With a bit of foresight, you may clean out several hearths weeks before the log is due, and keep them burning on clean wood so the ash is fit to use when the time comes.

But for the years ahead, you’d best keep in mind that the old ash is the very thing that matters; it holds the leftover strength of the last great fire, and the spirits know well enough when a boundary has been carried from one season to the next. Then, once the boundary’s laid, there must be a set company that’s given the duty to sit out each evening and tend the braziers round the square. Best for this work are clerics, woodfolk and, if the village has the luck or the trouble of it, any faerie kin tied to their own. These should keep a low ring of flame upon the braziers, so the boldest of the spirits don’t come nosing at the boundary before the main fire’s lit. And there ought to be good, able talk about those braziers too, for nothing frets a wandering spirit more than joined voices and neighbourly friendship; so folk should go and visit the keepers, if only to see them through their watch.

Yet all that good company mustn’t turn itself toward ribaldry or celebration; no cries of joy, nor singing, nor feasting should be heard in any house. In some places, it’s common for the constables or the church folk to go knocking at doors where they catch an unusual savour of too good a food in the air, to make sure no one’s taking more than the plain fare they’d set on the table for any day in November or January. For jubilation calls attention just as surely as fear does. And mind you, the days between the felling and the burning are the most perilous of all—spirits unsettled on every side, some frightened of being driven out by the fire, and others prowling for any scrap of wrong-doing they can fasten upon.

For that very reason, the whole community must go about its work with discipline, sobriety and a quiet, steady purpose, knowing full well that if all is done as it ought to be, the great burning will not only keep the darkness at its distance for another year, but stand as a sign of the prosperity and plenty that’s meant for all.

It’s at this point a druid is of exceeding worth, for such folk know the old invocations and the binding ways; without them, the burning is nought but a great heap of flame and no more. I am, of course, such a one myself, and shall be overseeing the doings in Tavistock this year—but there are others in the countryside, even now, who’ll come on short notice and do their best by you. Look for them in the outlying hamlets, among the foresters or on the very edges of the settled land. A small delegation may go to such folk quickly and quietly in the days after the bough is cut, carrying gifts of salt, wool or iron should there be need of barter. But leave off taking gold, or jewels, or any bit of fine workmanship, for such things have scant worth where the weeds grow high and the deer keep their own counsel.

Once the druid has come, their work is not only to bless the tree, but to read it through and through, to see whether any ill-willed thing has trailed the bough back from the forest and hidden itself inside. It’s a common enough matter to find some malign presence curled deep in the heartwood—but with warning given, a druid can take the measure of such creatures readily, driving them out or shutting them fast within, where the fire may finish the task. And because it’s the sort of danger easily missed by folk who’ve no learning in it, the trouble taken to find a druid who knows the way of such matters well is never wasted.

The village ought to make ready a place for the druid to stay, and it must be set well apart from the daily stir and muddle of the parish. A cordoned-off corner in a hall house will answer, or even a poor little hovel that can be spared for a week or two. It needn’t be warm, nor swept to shining, for a druid judges comfort by what’s found under the arms of the woodland, not by any measure fit for gentry. What matters—what truly matters—is that the place stand separate and still, so the druid isn’t pestered from dawn to dusk by every flutter of fear that seizes the village folk. For if you let them, they’ll be knocking to ask after this omen or that shadow, begging for a physic for their coughs, wanting charms for their cows and pressing in with a dozen little ailments—aye, even down to the hope the druid’ll set aside sacred work to peer at some farmer’s swollen toe. Such bother will sap an aspirant’s strength quicker than cold or hunger, and this is a time when the work of the yule wants all the concentration they can muster.

Once the shaman has done with muttering and peering and pronouncing, then the great log is fetched out and set in the middle of the square upon its stone bed, raised proper and decent from the ground so the air may get at it underneath and the fire not sulk or choke like a damp hearth. There it lies, waiting, solid as a promise, while round about the square the torches are fixed in their places, every one of them ready to hand yet left dark as prudence itself, making a ring of watchfulness rather than light until the very hour comes that says it is time.

Food and drink are brought out at last, and the log is set alight; and if you have never seen such a thing, then you have missed a sight worth the telling, for it begins modest enough, with a smaller fire coaxed to life beneath the great timber, and only by degrees does it take heart and climb upward along the yule, licking and spreading as though it were learning its own strength before all our eyes. As it mounts, the musicians fall to their playing, not in any wild or heedless fashion, but careful and contained, just as custom has always required, keeping the sound low and steady while the work is still being done. And then, almost before one knows it, the whole temper of the village breaks at once, the strain gone clean out of it, as if the fire itself had sliced through the cord that held every man and woman drawn tight.

Then folk cannot keep themselves any longer, but cheer and laugh outright, laying hands on one another’s shoulders as if to make sure they are all truly there and safe. The children come darting forward at once, bold as sparrows, pressing in as near as they dare and calling over one another in their excitement as the heat rolls out upon them. And with that, the musicians throw off all restraint and strike into the very tunes that have been held back the whole year through—reels and stamping measures that set feet flying and send the folk whirling across the hard-packed snow, glad as if winter itself had been answered at last.

Meat is set to roasting on every side and the air grows thick with it, the rich savour of it mingling with the sweetness of ale and cider and the keen bite of wood smoke, all of it together smelling like life come back again after a long absence. Young couples make no secret of their joy, kissing one another plain in sight of all, while the elders lift their voices to call down blessings as though they might fix good fortune in place by naming it aloud. And for the first time since the winter took hold, the village has a sound to it that is not wind or silence, but the true noise of people living.

Most important of all, it feels as though the worst edge of winter draws back a little, not gone, but held at bay, so that old grudges are set aside without a word said about them, hands meet across family lines that have been stiff for years and everyone finds themselves thinking, almost in spite of themselves, that the spring will come kindly, the lambing be sound and the harvest answer to honest labour.

There’s a sort of tremble in the air then, slight and hard to name, as if the world has been freshened for a moment and shown what it might be if things went right, the fire having burned a clear road toward brighter months ahead, so that the future seems to lean in close, offering its promise quietly, but with a generosity that’s felt all the same.