D&D vs. Sports: Part 2

In my younger days, I played a lot of sports: baseball, hockey, soccer, football... all pretty much except basketball, which I have zero talent for. Hell, occasionally, on D&D nights in the summer, we'd occasionally decide to skip the game so we could play some scrub ball or play four-on-four tag football; because we had the warm bodies and it felt wrong to be inside a stuffy room when the whole outdoors was cooling in the evening. I don't hate sports: I respect them. This is why when I want a metaphor for D&D, I automatically reach for sports and not some board game.

During those league or scrub games, one of the conversations on the table was not how the game needed to be changed to make it "more interesting." Habitually, those who watch sports are quite comfortable that the game being played between the Stars and the Broncos this year follows essentially the same rule set, structure, field size, strategy set and guts as a game between the two teams in 1994. Nobody minds. It's time to ask ourselves why.

The interest in sports does not arise from what the rules will permit "this" time. It comes from watching an ongoing process in which individuals are dealing with difficult situations in real time, then producing strategies to manage those situations on the fly, not knowing for certain that they will work. This creates a constant sense of urgency, impelled in part by a clock but also by a willingness to force one's way past an opponent in order to succeed against unknown odds. The spectator can watch those plans unfold; they can watch players make instantaneous choices, produce unexpected intuitiveness in a throw, a catch, while overcoming failures such as being hit with the ball, tripping, falling, the ball being caught in one's glove, the ball taking an irrational bounce that is still, miraculously, fielded despite the discrepancy. Sports aren't always logical; goofy things can happen and the sport permits that... it even thrives off that.

This is a distinction that D&D combat fails to achieve. The dice are supposed to introduce the equivalent of the above "goofiness"... but the game as written is too simplistic for that. The battle map is often too small for free action, the number of choices a player has is limited by "what is most effective" because each ability is designed unto that player class; there are too few rules that define how one player's actions adjust another player's success in real time, as opposed to merely being a spell that A uses to enhance B. Most war battle games introduce uncertainty through defensive fire during an enemy's movement, morale checks, the presence of rout, support weapon malfunctions, repair attempts, leader loss, concealed units, the presence of mines and other hidden hazards, smoke, wind... D&D has critical hits and fumbles. The battle sequence is too static, too sequenced... and the attempt to alter that, by having everyone roll initiative separately, only creates a repetitive, tired additionally predictive sequence. The game doesn't sustain the sort of uncertainty sports does, not because rules can't do this... but because D&D chooses not to.

In researching this post, I watched too much of this video, from which I am now suffering tramatic blackouts. At 28 minutes in, Mercer produces a set-piece of the battle map with is split into multiple parts, to the unquestionably sincere OOOO's and AHHH's of the players.

At 33 minutes, Mercer is still wetting himself about it:

"...each floating island that used to be the top of Entropis as they slowly shift, held in place and rotate around, the storm still cycling around you... they're floating, and now held in place by these green tethers, and they're slowly shifting."

And the immediate answer to this?

Travis: "Hasted, can I attempt to leap from this island to the one that Vax is currently on?"

Mercer: "Yeah. Make an athletics check."

There you are. That's the whole problem, right there in a nutshell.

Oh, you don't see it?

Yes, true enough, "hasted" related to running distance, launch speed and reaction time, but it's not an increase to dexterity, so the referent here is immaterial; and yes, there is an issue that with the islands sweeping around, Mercer simply reduces that to a "check"... a decorative distance overcome by a die roll. But the larger point is this:

After FOUR minutes of blather, and physical models, and all this hype and bullshit, the player's first question is, "Can I perform an action that ignores all that?" and Mercer's answer is "Yes."

Uncertainty is what makes sports interesting. D&D, and games like it, have abandoned uncertainty because, gee, despite all this prep, we can't actually make the player fight on his own island... can we?

A football field, a clock, a recently injured player and the decision whether to pass, run or kick has more gravitas. Without even trying and without that decision being unusual to any given football game. Even if we reduce the pass, say, to a die roll, then the snap has to be one too, and the centre's ability to block, and the other blockers beside, and the quarterback's ability to back, and the runner's ability to get clear, cover the ground, get into position, be seen by the quarterback, who has to dodge a tackle the blocker failed again, throwing the ball, the ball flying right, the receiver catching it, the receiver getting such-and-such number of steps before getting hit... what, that's twenty die rolls? A lot with low thresholds and not all of them needing to be perfect... but it's not ONE roll, now is it? Just give it a moment and think about that.

The snap need not be perfect; it needs to be manageable. The block need not stop the defender indefinitely; it may only need to delay him for two seconds. The quarterback’s retreat may be shortened because pressure comes through. The receiver may be forced off the intended route, forcing the quarterback to notice the change. The throw may be slightly behind, requiring an adjustment. The catch may be insecure, but held long enough. The receiver may then gain three yards rather than twelve because another defender arrives. Success is not singular... but the pattern of successes and almosts and outright failures produces a wide range of possible outcomes that in turn produce situations that must be managed if we're going to consider the game consisting of more than one pass. This is the structure D&D flagrantly chooses to ignore. It isn't willing to consider the detail of how a ball that is snapped well but not perfectly affects the whole performance down the line. There's no room in that for the game's play, which permits no play. It permits pass/fail results, and only that.

Can I ignore your set up if I roll a 15 or less? Sure.

Is there more to the Vecna battle? Yes, of course. Apart from the two meteor swarms, Grog at one point gets removed from the field, Vecna repeatedly targets Scanlan, Scanlan is reduced to one hit point and then knocked unconscious, Vecna attempts to teleport away. But the party's position is never really threatened. They're never in the third quarter and ten points down; it's not the bottom of the eighth and they've got two outs. It just isn't ever like that. It just rambles on and on with descriptions, before conveniently Grog's banishment is broken, outside allies arrive in waves like the cavalry, Pike's Mass Heel returns every member of the Voc to full health... it's a five hour horror of shite-blathering on an epic scale. Of course they were going to win. The channel needed them to win.

In essence, present D&D, with the way setbacks are reversed, is like playing football if the stadium owner can simply tell the techies at some random point in the game to add "15" to the home team's score. And this being considered normal and acceptable by all the club owners.

It is this last corrosive element that has brought the entire culture around to believing this is an example of "good play." None of the players get dead, right? Then it's fine.

Yet it isn't about just the dead bodies. AD&D has plenty of dead bodies and the combat system is still shit... which is why I beat that one to death with the last post. A system that merely includes a "wait to die" feature as hit points run out is not a "better" game... it's just still shit for other reasons. Those who relish that system have just convinced themselves that there's a tension in watching hit points decline, knowing zero is nearing... but that doesn't make the preceding rounds more interactive, more positional and more responsive to player choice. AD&D combat is essentially watching a slow moving roulette wheel where one has to wait seven to ten rounds to pass before learning if it landed on red or black. If red, where we bet, sure, of course we cheer. But cheering because it's not black gets tiresome for most people.

Most people who play D&D quit D&D. That is a hard pill to swallow for the "I'm still playing after 30 years" crowd. But there are far more of them than there are of us. Thirty years of play may demonstrate commitment, but it doesn't answer why so many people experiencing the process quit after a few years. It's easy to dismiss those people as "not the D&D type," but that sort of self-selection among the fanatics is suspect. It's far harder to admit that maybe D&D in the long run isn't sustainable because it is, in large part, actually a pretty shitty game.

I'm not going to get into why I purport to love the game, or the evidence that my solution for this has been to redesign the thing entirely, so that I'm not actually playing the same D&D as anyone else. Instead, I'm going to simply draw all this out as evidence that those who argue that the game must be played as written for "reasons" like "it's a better game" or "it makes more sense when played that way" are really just talking past the problems the original game and all it's illegitimate children have: an effectively defective DNA problem related to a combat system that has never been meaningfully addressed in any significant way. I think it falls into the classification of those who argue vociferously that the Masarati is a "good car." It's good in a few ways, a few specific ways, having a lot to do with feelings and emotional gratification and status. But the distinction misses the point when something that has to spend so many months out of a year in a shop that finds it difficult to make new parts work on the device is called a "car." The Masarati is a good toy. A good car is something that a person can count on for transport every day.

D&D provides the same kind of defense. It has evocative classes, a rich concept, monsters, spells, advancement, treasure, fantasy identity and a long, emotional history as a social phenomenon. But do these things actually make a "good game"?  I don't think they do. I think, for some, they form some kind of deeply felt sort of process that serves a specific need that some people have. It's not a sustainable service for that need, because it has to be shifted and changed and adjusted constantly, like a house that in constant renovation not because the bathroom, the kitchen or the rec room need to be sorted, but because the renovation itself is the point.  A sport, on the other hand, is the sort of game that works because it does... most of them have been in existence for more than a century and they seem to be doing fine. D&D has been around for half a century and it still doesn't work properly. Maybe that's because the whole thing as manifested now simply shouldn't.

The classes, monsters, spells, treasure and fantasy identities create attachment. They give people something to imagine, collect, discuss, revise and identify with. The game then survives by continually supplying new arrangements of those elements. New editions, subclasses, feats, monsters, settings, encounter procedures and balancing revisions keep the renovation going. That is why the game can remain perpetually defective without collapsing. The defect generates capital for those who benefit from making changes; those who seek stability get nothing. Unlike sport, there's no way to capitalise "established" D&D because the participants have been trained to deny such a thing should exist.

Makes me feel, generally, like the last thing a person should get interested in should be this game... because if they do, it has no good place to take them.

D&D vs. Sports: Part 1

Whereas most people tend to think of the quintessential depiction of D&D as four or five adventurers sitting around a tavern, either getting the adventure given to them or celebrating their success, I'm apt to think instead about the above: the moment when the party, consequence be damned, hurls themselves into an enemy of unknown power and size, only to then let the dice sort it out. This is the game as originally conceived: a war game. This is the substance of the game when it really grabs at the emotional strings of the participants, when FEAR is actually something that's felt, because one's character, one's effort to reach this point with that character, one's faith that the party'll think their way through the struggle, whatever happens, is at it's peak.

Yet most game rule changes that have happened in the last four decades as been designed to alleviate that fear and, in consequence, make the above scene boring. Dice rolled in succession, to produce numbers that don't matter, in a procedure that's irrelevant because we know we're either going to win, or we know we're going to escape with our lives, even if one of us has to die and be raised, so we can come back and win. There is no "losing" here. The game is rigged.

Even if this is one of those campaigns where a group of characters CAN die, the next group of characters will get better die rolls when they try and they'll win. And that is the relevant point, because it's not that the next group of players will have learned anything, except maybe which enemy to attack first. D&D as written, early D&D, isn't a very tactical game. It is a very roll-and-slog designed game, which is why Chainmail never became remotely as popular as Squad Leader, Panzerblitz, System Seven, Axis & Allies or even RISK. Tactically, Chainmail sucks. Which is why the D&D combat system sucks. Which is why the game's combat system alone was not sufficient to maintain the game as it was... in the end, after all the cleverness with character class creation, spells, saving throws, to hit, hit points, levels, magic items and monsters... the actual combat system was a flop. Still is. But a flop that people pretend isn't, because all that other stuff is so cool.

Don't misunderstand me. I thought the combat system was awfully rich and neat when I first began to play; but the bloom was falling off the rose about four years later, which was something that my players and I, a group all raised on many tactical boardgames, began to discuss at length. It was clear that the error wasn't any of the things named above. And it was clear that the turn-based-system was not the issue. All strategic combat games are a turn-based-system... and it was possible, obvious even, that it was possible to simulate the sense of two great armies slamming into each other despite that. No, the problem was something else.

This post is not about the solution; I did solve it, ages ago, but that's not the subject material here. Rather, the subject here — to start — is to explain why the system as written, with the basic structure that has not been changed, because it's baked in, is fundamentally weak without appearing to be. I'll start with a portion of D&D that, at the time I began writing this blog in 2008, I still considered an excellent description of how combat should play out. Ah, how I have changed.

On page 71-72 of the original DMG, an example of melee is given, which I'd like to break down section by section. This will take a while.

"Party A (player characters) is composed of Aggro the Axe, a 4th level fighter; Abner, a 5th level magic-user; Arkayn, a 4th level cleric; and Arlanni, a 2nd level thief. They are hastening down a dungeon corridor in order to avoid an encounter with a large group of goblins, whose territory they are now leaving. It is a ten-foot wide corridor and they are moving with the cleric, fighter, and thief in a line in front, followed closely by the magic-user. Suddenly they round a bend and confront Party B, who are earnestly engaged in squabbling over some treasure. Party B is composed of Gutboy Barrelhouse, a 6th level dwarf fighter; Balto, a 1st level monk; Blastum, a 4th level magic-user; and Barjin, a 4th/5th level half-elf fighter/magic-user."

Let's start first by pointing out that most of the above is window dressing. "Hastening" is immaterial to the example, as are the goblins being left behind or the limits of "territory" the goblins have. The width of the corridor is mentioned but, as you'll see, it is irrelevant to the fight that's described. We are given everyone's class and level, which does matter... but as will be seen, again, these classes are more or less just shells that the players wear around their form of attack and the number of hit points they have.

So you can see, we're inventing a lot of prose that more or less romantises detail, which is then discarded almost immediately.

"The first thing the DM must do is determine if either party is surprised. He rolls a d6 for Party B (where the players can see it, since there are no secret modifiers) and a 2 comes up. The leader for the players rolls and gets a 4 for Party A. Party B is surprised (since they rolled a 2), and will be inactive for 2 segments."

The fact that Party A is "hastening" ought to make it clear how they are coming around the corner; the noise they're making in a 10-foot wide "dungeon corridor," almost always depicted at that time as stone, would announce their arrival at least a hundred, more likely two hundred feet away underground. Party B would not, in any realistic way, be surprised, since they'd have heard Party A coming and would be lying in wait. Even if they were arguing, the argument would be suspended at the sound of four persons, two in armour, coming closer and closer and closer. So, right off, "surprise" simply ignores reality. It is a die roll that permits no context.

Further, as written, the players have no engagement here. The DM rolls for both the players and the NPCs (whichever is which). Why not let the players roll for the players? It's more or less a largely meaningless roll, but hey, why not? And why would the DM want it? There is enough for the DM to do, that the DM can assign tasks to the players, such as rolling surprise dice.

As a small point, that does rack up with a lot of combat play, the round/segment separation (10 segments per round) was always confusing and never properly explained. Yet the game, as written, insisted on embracing it when other, far more complicated systems, understood that fixing TIME as a non-changing but CLEAR variable, allowed the players to comprehend more easily what was going on. The confusion of two or three kinds of "time" (the "turn" was 10 rounds) tended to create comprehension difficulties that merely urged many players to simply zone out... not because the system was too difficult, but because it was so unclear why these stipulations existed. As well, the value in game terms of knowing the distinctions was non-existent. One did not become a better tactician by understanding the difference between a round and a segment.

"Next the DM checks distance, and finds that the parties are only 10' apart—sufficiently near to close and strike."

The "distance checking" here seems to impose a strategic factor, but it really doesn't. The DM has not "checked" the size of the corridor, the presence of the characters in it or presumably anything else they haven't seen. Presumably, if the DM has designed the dungeon, and the dungeon has Party B in it, then the DM ought to have provided the exact location of Party B at that time, and not now when Party A happens to turn the corner. Presumably, the rest of the corridor's length is accounted for beyond Party B, and the DM knows that as well. Therefore, the distance check is just window dressing, again. In any case, even if Party A were moving silent, if Party B were ten feet from a blind corner, then presumably they'd have looked around this blind corner before stopping here to have a parley about treasure. There are four members of Party B. Presumably they are not all engaged in an argument so convenient that they are together all talking at the same time, while having forgotten they're in a dungeon where wandering monsters occur (as they do in all D&D dungeons).

"Party A immediately recognizes Party B as a group of "evil marauders" they were warned against and moves to attack. First, Arlanni the thief, who had her sling ready (as the player had stated previous to the encounter), fires a shot at Blastum, who is obviously a magic-user. A sling bullet gains +3 "to hit" vs. no armor. Arlanni would usually need an 11 to hit, but now needs only an 8. She rolls a 5, and misses."

Now, here the combat begins to resolve. What matters here isn't the procedure or the manner in which a "ready sling" is interpreted... let's wave all that as irrelevant. The larger reveal here is that the set up, two parties not in conflict, permits no real "tactical judgment" at all. The characters have one attack; Arlanni's is the sling she possesses. We create a "logic" for her to fire at Blastum ("obviously" the mage) except the "obvious" is a metagame knowledge, i.e., only a mage enters a dungeon without armour. No armour, ipso facto, must be the mage. It isn't that another class might have had their armour eaten away by acid or dragon breath, no; it isn't that the character might not be able to afford armour; or that they've simply chosen not to wear it for encumbrance purposes. No, it is pre-determined that the character without armour is the mage... thus, flattening the procedure by telling the character with the weapon that gets a bonus against AC 10 should obviously attack the opponent with AC 10.

That sounds like a tactic, but it isn't. When the rules exaggerate one specific action by giving benefits to that specific action, then taking that specific action isn't tactical, it's falling off a log. This is something D&D does again and again with its combat system. It works because there are a lot of specific tactical benefits, but once the players know what they are, it's plug-and-play, not a tactical endeavour.

Moreover, we can't even argue from the above that Arlanni uses the sling because it brings the benefit: it states plainly that she had it ready before meeting the enemy, before the surprise check, before coming around the corner. It was use the sling or don't attack this round.

All this together makes the succeed/fail roll look worse. Effectively, the attack could be carried out by throwing the die in front of a stuffed dummy with an Arlanni name tag. And this is how a lot of players come to feel when someone shoves a die at them, then roll it, they get a 5, they're told they missed, and the play moves on to some other player. There's no sense of "engagement," because the others at the table are telling the player "this is what you do here." Again, this is an example of play equivalent to turning a roulette wheel.

"Aggro the fighter rushes forward to attack the nearest opponent, who happens to be Balto, the monk. Balto is wearing no armor, so Aggro needs a base 8 to hit Balto. However, Aggro is using a + 1 hand axe, and furthermore an axe is + 1 to hit vs. no armor, so Aggro's adjusted amount needed to hit is only 6 (or, alternately, the cumulative +2 could be added to whatever he rolls to improve his chances of rolling an 8 or better). Aggro rolls a 14 and hits Balto, but only 1 point of damage is rolled, plus a 1 point bonus from the magic axe (2 points total), and Balto can take 4."

The fighter has little else he can do; he might throw a weapon but at this range it's fight anyway and his hand weapon has a potential for greater damage. "Happens" to be Balto is an expression of the way that D&D was played in those days: there's no battle map, so the DM just states the character in front of Aggro, either deciding arbitrarily or having the dice decide. Aggro is not asked, "Which do you fight," nor is it expected he will obviously state that from the above. Players always do state it, in which case DMs often simply say, no, you can't fight the mage, he's over there, you can fight the monk. This again removes any tactical relevance to Aggro's efforts other than rolling a die to see what happens. He might as well be sitting on the sidelines of a game and urging on a batter, for all the relevance his decision makes in the process. The procedure then also resolves without him: miss/hit with calculated modifiers, roll damage, record damage. 

"Meanwhile, Abner and Arkayn have been preparing short (first level) spells. The cleric shouts a command of "surrender!" at Gutboy Barrelhouse, but Gutboy is 6th level and thus gets a saving throw. Furthermore, he is a dwarf with a constitution of 16, and thus saves at +4. He therefore needs a 10 or better to save (instead of a 14). He rolls a 17 and saves easily. Unfortunately, he is almost simultaneously hit by two magic missiles from Abner, the magic-user. Against these there is no save, and Gutboy suffers 6 points of damage (from a possible 4-10)."

Again... Abner is a mage, Arkayn is a cleric. Within the rule set, casting a spell is mechanically no different from Arlanni's sling. There's no cost to casting, except a temporary loss of the spell (a loss that would be "fixed" by later systems); they are not made vulnerable by weaving magic. Thus, there's no sense to their not using their sharpest weapon at this time.

Arkayn even at 4th doesn't have a lot of attack options; hold person would be more effective; perhaps he's used it or hasn't "loaded" it, as they say. Command is a 1st level spell, allows the use of a subjunctive verb (look it up) and a single one at that: "surrender" is a fair option. There aren't many good ones. Kneel, collapse, sleep... some of my old timey players liked "defecate" or "urinate," which is reasonably something that effectively distracts the recipient for the one-round duration of the spell. It doesn't matter. Arkayn, like Arlanni, is using the best arrow in his bow at this point and it's subject to a saving throw... so, in effect, it is the most obvious action with a succeed/failure roll and... not tactical, since any other better option would have been used here. Later, Arkayn gives up magic and just fights.

Abner's two magic missiles are the same logic: the best bullet in his gun. The "hit" is bookkeeping, automatic: needed to win the battle, perhaps, but the obvious thing done at the most obvious time.

Abner doesn't target the other mage (for reasons that aren't clear, since he can "see" what Arlanni sees, that the obvious mage is the more dangerous enemy, but the example here needs everyone in Party B to be threatened so, there we are. Nothing tactical is taking place here except the example is arbitrarily assigning everyone their individual target.

Would targeting the mage be the better tactic? Well, that's worthy discussion. But it's not part of the discussion in the DMG. And it should be.

My opinion of it after 46 years of D&D is that the magic missile does not do enough damage to meaningfully change either option. Either Blastum is such a low level mage that six damage is effective enough to kill him, in which case he was never dangerous, or he's dangerous enough mage that he can shake off six or ten points and still cast as soon as Gutboy puts himself between the mage and whomever else. Either the spell you've got can do the job against the dangerous opponent, or it can't, and you have no tactical control over that. Which, again, is why the system has flaws. Most tactical games are fought on open fields: large scale maps, open plains, desert scapes, street battles fought at a difference over scattered terrain. D&D is normally fought in a tiny enclosed spaces where the fighters can block access to the mages who can blast whatever they can reach. So, effectively, it doesn't matter who Abner targets. It amounts to "let's see who gets lucky."

"As Party B is surprised for 2 segments, Party A has a chance to hit in each segment as if they were full rounds (this does not apply to spell use, of course). In the second segment, Arlanni chooses to set down her crossbow and unsheathe her sword.

The example has forgotten that Arlanni is using a sling. The crossbow would take time to load, so that is a tactical decision... but loading it in this closed space would, from experience with battle, be the wrong decision, so she's again just doing what she most obviously should.

"Aggro would normally get another chance to hit Balto, who would be inactive for another segment, but Balto's dexterity allows him a +1 reaction adjustment, which means that he personally will be surprised for one less segment than the rest of his party. So this segment he IS up and on his guard, and Aggro does not get another hit attempt this round."

By sheer chance, though monks must have a 15 or greater dexterity to be their class, Balto happens to be the one among the enemy who is exempt from this second attack. However, the rules don't explain why or how Aggro is "engaged" with Balto in such a manner that he cannot instead swing on Gutboy or someone else, in this cramped 10 foot wide hallway where presumably everyone arguing was together, and are now not close enough together to be targeted as a group, though they were "surprised." Normally in D&D, if attacking two or more opponents, the combatant is permitted to attack WHICH opponent they wish. But here there is nothing to tell Aggro how far away Gutboy is, or whether or not Aggro is allowed to move away or around Balto now that they're engaged... no, it's described above as though Aggro's feet (being the one not surprised) are now stuck in amber after having attacked one of the enemy's number.

This is the game strategic limitation imposed by non-map tactics. A segment is described as "six seconds." In six seconds, in my youth, I used to be able to run a distance of 40 yards easily. That's 120 feet, twelve times the distance between the parties at the outset of this fight. But my fighter can't reach Gutboy, who must be standing to the monk's left or right, because somehow he successfully blocks me despite being surprised enough for me to fight him one round?

"Arkayn the cleric readies his mace..."

Arkayn hasn't another attack spell; a mace makes sense. It inexplicably takes him six seconds to get the mace off his belt and "ready;" Arlanni has the same problem above finding her sword. These are not weapons designed to take more than a second or two to "get ready," but that draw speed for different weapons, say a dagger vs. a halberd, IS described on page 66-67 of the same DMG (five pages earlier), where it's said that the "speed factor" is indicative of "how long it takes to reading a weapon against an opponent," but then it fails to give any hard detail for this "how long" that is applicable here or anywhere else.

Speed factor on those pages is not translated into seconds or segments, and no rule uses it to determine how long Arkayn needs to draw his mace or Arlanni needs to put down one weapon and draw another. The number is only activated under special initiative circumstances after combatants are already prepared to fight. Reading the text reveals it's an idea of a rule that never resolves into anything that's comprehensible. Even the book's own example of combat simply causes the character's to both skip their attacks on account of drawing weapons.

"...as Abner steps back and begins to unroll a scroll for use next round."

This looks like a tactical decision; Abner does not draw a weapon, he chooses to seek out a resource, a magic item, and use that instead. However, there's no explanation of where this scroll was kept on his body; the scroll is apparently not in a case, which would have to be gotten, then the case opened, then the scroll taken out, then the scroll unrolled, and all this presumably with him moving backward so he isn't jostled by the fight while all this is happening. Or did he have it in his hand when casting magic missile, or running down the hall from the goblins? How is it this relatively fragile thing comes so easy to hand? Why he is left alone to do this is explained only by the 1 segment he has left before the enemy is no longer surprised — so what then? Is there a risk involved here? If there is, it's potentially tactical for Abner to choose this option.

The missing map matters again. How far does he "step back?" Is Arkayn now between him and Party B? Does the corridor permit Aggro and Arkayn to form a barrier? Can an enemy move around them? The sentence gives Abner the benefit of positioning without requiring anyone to establish or defend that position. In like manner the scroll is treated as an option on a menu rather than as a physical object.

"Now initiative dice are rolled, and party A's score is lower, so party B gets to react to the assault. Balto attacks Aggro (who is in AC 2) with his staff. He needs a base 18 to hit, and the -7 armor class adjustment for sword vs. plate mail and shield makes this a 20. He (the DM) rolls a 19 —almost, but not quite! Gutboy Barrelhouse and Barjin the fighter/magic-user both attack Arkayn. That cleric's AC is only 5. Gutboy has +l to hit due to strength, and his hammer's armor class adjustment vs. scale mail and shield is + 1, so he needs a 9 or better to hit (1 1 before bonuses). He rolls a 12 and hits for 5 points of damage (including 1 point of bonus damage from strength). Barjin, with a sword, needs a 13 or better to hit Arkayn. He rolls a 13 exactly, and hits for 6 more points of damage. Arkayn is starting to have second thoughts about this whole affair."

At this point, we can see that the attacks above are utterly procedural and not tactical. Plus Balto's not using a sword vs. plate mail and -7 from a base 18 means he needs a 25, not a 20, so... let's just skip that. The point is, none of this makes sense. Gutboy's teaming up with Barjin is arbitrary; it makes more sense for the 6th level dwarf to go after the heavily armoured fighter Aggro, sparing the 1st level monk from fighting him alone; Barjin the 4th/5th level can master a flimsy cleric who has one spell to cast, and command at that. These are the tactical choices here, but there being ignored because... the lack of a map? The DM throwing arbitrary choices at the NPCs? Who knows.

This is a good time to talk about game damage in the original system. Damage, when it occurs, is meaningless if it does not kill. Arkayn may feel unnerved by how many fewer hit points he has, but his effectiveness in combat is unchanged whether he takes 1 damage or 11, as he does here. All he need do is have "second thoughts." His body, presumably the thing taking the damage, is not physically affected by the hits, nor does it get in the way of Arkayn returning an attack as though he's just been landed on by a fly.

This makes combat into bookkeeping in a most extreme way. At lower level, the "zero" is closer, and thus every point feels a little more important... so long as we understand this feeling rests entirely in the player's mind. At higher level, the distance to zero is so great, and the effect so meaningless, that it actively makes playing higher level characters less interesting. Combine this lack of effect with the mass benefits of healing at higher levels, and the combat system is positively a snooze-fest.

"Meanwhile, Blastum has been preparing a shocking grasp spell, and now he steps forward and touches (rolls a successful "to hit" die score) Arlanni the thief, delivering 10 points of damage (1-8 + 4). There is no saving throw: Arlanni has only 8 hit points, and dies."

Again, as a tactical system, this simply blows through several processes. One segment before this "round" began, Blastum was so inert he could not move, he could do nothing but defend himself while Arlanni's sling stone flew past his ears. Now, instantly (so far at the game round matters), he has the spell cast, has it invested into his body, has moved forward to where he can reach Arlanni (presumably not behind anyone, despite the 10 foot corridor and the people fighting), so he can reach out his hand and touch her, killing her instantly. They haven't fought hand to hand at any point prior to this, but she lost initiative so the other can move anywhere on the battle map he wishes as a mage and kill whomever he can hit with his hand. We do not even have a declaration that Arlanni advanced after drawing her sword. So, while Aggro cannot attack someone other than Balto, Blastum can walk past Aggro, past Arkayn, past three of his own people, in a ten foot corridor, and attack the thief at the back.

Nice.

If he could do this, why didn't he go after the mage with the scroll in hand? Because Abner "stepped back"? Is that all it takes to avoid all fighting thereafter?

This is sufficient to make the point. We have something that pretends to be a combat system, but isn't. And since, the same sort of assumptions that exist in the above still exist in the later systems that have copied this procedure, only making it more obstructive by having everyone in the combat roll initiative every single round, as though in any way that improves the tactical structure lacking here. We are still running systems that are effectively instant magic in the place of instant sword swinging, however complicated the kind of sword magic being done, to produce non-tactical results that are just "the next thing to do is to attack the next person."

Fifth edition improves the scaffolding that is missing, yes: it establishes combatants’ positions, gives each creature a definite space, reach and movement rate, restricts movement through hostile creatures, permits movement before and after an action... and provides explicit rules for dash, disengage, dodge, ready, grappling, shoving, cover and opportunity attacks. In a ten-foot corridor, Aggro and Arkayn can occupy the two five-foot spaces across its width; Blastum cannot simply walk through them to touch Arlanni. That particular absurdity has been corrected.

But in many games the map remains optional... and the rules still begin by saying that the DM establishes where everyone is. Consequently, theatre-of-the-mind play can reproduce the same problem in a slightly better-regulated form: the player asks whether a target is reachable and the DM announces whether the imagined position permits it. Fifth edition gives the DM firmer rules for answering, but unless the battlefield is visibly recorded, the player may still be discovering spatial facts only after proposing an action.

And though damaging a caster can break concentration, that's still the most obvious choice to make. And while shoving can move or knock down an opponent, and grappling can stop movement, that's still usually the most obvious thing to do when an opponent needs to be dealt with in some other way than attacking. These are not really a collection of choices one makes, it's just the next obvious action when the enemy is somewhere that they need to be pushed or slowed or toppled or sapped. Fifth edition has increased the number of things an attack can do, but that is not the same as increasing tactical judgment. It has mostly enlarged the library of prescribed responses.

A caster is concentrating, so attack the caster. An enemy stands near a ledge, so push the enemy. Someone needs to be prevented from moving, so grapple or slow that person. An opponent relies upon accurate attacks, so sap the opponent. Once the relevant condition appears, the system often indicates the appropriate button plainly enough that choosing it is little more than recognising a cue.

Genuine tactical decisions require competing benefits; arrange these defenses and those attacks to drive this enemy in this manner there, so they can be trapped thusly or split apart and attacked in smaller groups. Unless the players have the rule sets that allow them to organise themselves in such a manner that they can move over a map that permits BOTH freedom of movement AND rational obstacles that prevent it, then every battle becomes close, fight until the hit points go away and then slog forward.

The most telling demonstration of this is, I think, that there is a tendency among "let's play" video content to "spice up" combat scenes with meaningless non-game cutscene dialogue that the DM indulges in to provide more context and meaning to the ongoing scene... while, in fact, the dice seem to matter less and less to the outcome. It's rather egregious but it's also evidence that battle, as the game rules dictate, is boring. That does not venture well for the value of D&D as a construction other than collaborative inventive role-playing dreck. Which is why, I feel, the concept has drifted without restraint into that direction. We're not here to fight the monster. We're hear to listen to the DM describe how we fight the monster.

All this begs the question: why go into this level of depth on this process? What is this post trying to prove? That original D&D failed? If so, then the news is a bit behind the times.

Granted. All this, however, is not to prove that the combat system as written sucks, but specifically how and why it sucks: because it is not sports.

I've been writing this post since yesterday; I'm going to post this and continue on part two.

D&D: The Adventure!! Boardgame

Not to put too fine a point on an individual's process, it might be postulated that a serious obstacle that stands in the way of an individual's creation of their campaign begins with having a "board game mindset," which assumes that in some manner the game must already exist as a complete object before the group is asked to sit and play. We're told again and again that individuals want to start their campaign, but "first I have to make my game world," which suggests the first step to D&D is creating the game board:

And this makes sense. We want the dungeon, the murky swamp, the joke tavern, the village, mysterious tower and ultimately the battle with the big bad, as we progress from the beginning of the adventure to its end... thus its natural to think of the progression in linear, boardgame terms. The dungeon is really nothing other than a battle map, which makes sense, since that's the source of D&D gestation. So when we sit to "create the world," we naturally fall into these sensibilities, those being the ones most familiar to those of us who were taught board games as children.

This is not much altered by the progressive D&D game, either. The side scroller is just the game path above depicted as a continuous revealing platform, while the running forward progress of the Witcher is just the side scroller turned 90-degrees. By an large, we're still talking about the path-driven board game, like that described above. The mind-set remains the same: the players need somewhere to go, something to encounter, information for them to uncover, obstacles for them to address, rewards for them to acquire. Whatever the sequence may be, it is a sequence, all the more so because the board game is the structure employed. That sequence may branch, but it can only do so into other sequences, before looping back to the main sequence: specifically, some destination that the boardgame-D&D world structure provides.

There are several presumptions built into this sequential model. First, that there's little reason to go back, unless it is to find the fork to another branch that we might have missed. This sequence is already known: we have discovered everything as players that the DM has placed, so that with the exception of places like Breezyvale Square on the map above, where we want to "trade or rest" as need be, other places like Darkhall Dungeon have served their purpose. To be clear, this isn't an issue with the process itself, this is merely to make the point that the value in the sequence is forward movement, not to create a world that itself provides a continously yielding space. Sequential spaces are "used up" and the players then move onto the next.

Additionally, forward movement presumes a destination that is, in some manner, predetermined. That destination might be hard, as shown on the map above (defeat the dragon, claim your glory) or it may be something soft that the DM hasn't yet determined, but can be invoked or made when the moment actually demands it. The destination itself then competes for the game's purpose moreso against the progress itself — and some players do prefer to invest themselves into the "moment" rather than the "point," as they personally view the world. Neither are wrong to do so; our intent is therefore merely to establish that a diamorphic structure is in play... one that is created by the sequential arrangement. We are moving forward, therefore we are either experiencing the movement for its own sake or for the thing it is bringing us toward.

We must understand, however, that however immediate the individual might be prone to view the game, eventually the destination is reached. That destination might be the fork that leads to other sequences, but that in itself is a destination. More commonly, however, the way that D&D is usually structured, the "glory" is out there, waiting... and that builds a third presumption about the boardgame's sequential progress: that success or failure at that specific point is expected, and far more likely success, since game modules and most DM-built adventures are created or selected to provide destinations the players can manage. The game's rush is therefore expected to coincide with this moment: the end of the perceived hero's journey, where the players overcome the last of the obstacles, kill the monster, gather the treasure and return to town flushed with success and an opportunity to buy a whole new set of toys... or, of course, to treat the boardgame as "finished," so the next board can be brought out and the sequence played again from the beginning.

It's therefore possible to see that the board depicted above is not just a joke, but a fairly reasonable simplistic descriptive of the game's pattern. Organised and played well, the paths can be fashioned in a squidgy enough manner that the board seems indistinct and uncertain; that the players don't feel as though they're on a board at all; that the board has a sufficient number of sequences that they can't really investigate them all and thus they don't tire of what's available. The lesser DM, of course, fails to offer the measure of variety that's necessary to make the game appear rich with variety; that DM sits down with the module and says, "Tonight, we're playing Jorgeblath's Tomb, because I've just bought the manual." But then, a great many people do view this game as fundamentally in the same category as pretty much any board game, so... heck, why shouldn't they approach it this way?

None of this says D&D has to be a railroad. The number of potential sequences, and the DM's power to adjust the sequences in a sort of "butterfly effect" pattern as the players make decisions permits the sequence to shift and adjust in accordance with player choices. It isn't a board game, after all, but a theoretical, non-corporeal construct that can be re-invented on the fly, so that characters that were expected to live can die, while other characters that are perceived as impractical somehow manage to survive. The die-roll structure permits this, so that instead of the fixed structure of game board paths, we can have something closer to that which was proposed by Zelazny's Roadmarks and thus taken up by any number of later science fiction universes where "time lines" proliferate or are closed off as the players do or do not take sequence paths.

But to advantage this kind of procedural flexibility, the DM really does have to get out of the "I'm making a board for my game world" mindset. The benefit of the "time line" approach is that perceived destinations can simply be thrown away by the DM at will as no longer necessary. The issue arises when the DM, having devised the game board and having in turn fallen in love with that "great scene where the party arrives at the Murky Swamp and meets the King of the Slimes," can't let go of the concept. They must, therefore, to justify all the work done, or maintain their relationship with the moment they imagine this being, hammer the Murky Swamp into the adventure between this point and that, forcing the players to enter it and play out the scene. That's where the DM's need to control the board becomes the deciding factor on what's happening or what's available to the players.

The example expresses why DMs should not attach themselves to moments or things that have gathered weight in the imagination. Most of the time, the scene only ends up disappointing the players, who aren't in love with it because they can't see point or the whole structure, or the DM is disappointed because the players haven't acting like they "should." Attachment is what creates the railroad. But that is another post (which I've probably already written).

I take exception with the "game board as initial model" structure because the inception tends to create too much board for the players to use, too soon. The DM who therefore begins the game with the mindset of, "I must create an adventure right off for the players before we can start" only invokes the latter attachment problem. D&D is not a complex piece of machinery that must be designed and built in toto so it can be checked for digression errors before it runs. D&D is a proposal that can be written by sketching out the first chapter and just seeing where it goes... not in the sense of a collaborative project, but rather, "Okay, there are goblins west of town... an owlbear to the south... such-and-such to the north... let's see where the party wants to go and then we'll just play it by ear; when something more complex is needed, we'll build it.

Sort of like loading up with all your gear in a Louis & Clark expedition (the DM too!), not knowing what's out there or what we'll need, but we're provisioned, skilled, capable, unafraid and we'll just adjust to whatever we uncover as we go.

Swaggerability

So, for modern D&D, the problems are at last solved. In a way.

I haven't been on rpg.stackexchange for a while, but I felt it might be good to actually write about D&D... and, once upon a time, I could get an inspiration there. Questions used to circle around how to run, how to manage a character class, how to construct a town for a game and so on. Here, have a look at the last day of questions there now:

• What effects not mentioned in its spell description does Greater Restoration cure?
• Invisibility and Aura of Vitality
• Does Tactical Charge consume the creature's normal movement for the turn?
• Is there anything below a 9th-level spell that ends Lord Soth's fear?
• For a character primarily a Cleric, what is the lowest opportunity cost to get Sylunes Viper?
• Can monks use Psychic Blades as monk weapons, and do they benefit from monk unarmed damage scaling?
• Do you have to run a Braunstein "always on," or do I get to have a life, too?
• Suitable Dave Arneson pilgrimage location.

Phenomenal, ain't it?

The headings remind me of a list of cheat codes to be found with a logistics-heavy video game, where there are a massive number of elements the game offers and the players are seeking to get the most out of each. It's grasped that with the game's structure as it is now, there's a way to maximise the most efficient ways to use the abilities and classes, which presumably someone knows, and all I need to do in order to be a better player is to build up a practical knowledge of how these abilities can be massaged to function a little better. We've completely moved away from "what do I want to do in the game" to "how do I do what I already do, or want to do, better."

Thus we can understand that the problem to be solved is the acquisition of more power... but differently from the old school way, where fighting brought experience, so that once the player passed the next goal post, power was given. In this frame, power is granted spontaneously through knowledge... specifically, how can the internet show me the way that a reinterpretation of this spell allows my character to excel right now, circumventing my former interpretation, or the DM's interpretation.

Sort of like learning how to game an airline rewards program: what combination of credit cards, transfer partners, status matches, fare classes, loopholes and timing tricks will give me the benefit now, or something close to it, if I better know how the system can be interpreted and combined.

It is so like a board room to create this kind of system — and, frankly, a fictional optimisation format that in fact doesn't cost the creating company when the user succeeds, unlike a system that tries to build new customers and thus people learn they can drop their monthly cost for something by unsubscribing on a Tuesday and resubscribing on the next Friday. D&D in this mode provides a complicated system that promises superior performance in a structure where "superior performance" doesn't help with your gas bills, your grocery bills, your credit card bills or even your chances to date better and hotter partners. No, here the optimisation is of one's own personal swagger-index: how smart can I appear to be through looking up something on the internet and then trotting it out at the next game setting, to win the oohs, the aahs, the grumbling or the resentment of my fellow players and DM? Very smart, apparently, if I'm cracking that low-end acquisition threshold for obtaining Sylunus Viper.

I'm not so sure the game's value is to be found in its swaggerability. I suppose, given that it's a group behaviour, there's some conscious need to rewrite the structure as a machine for producing social prestige, while the games enormously complicated present rule structure does create endless opportunities to massage one's superior command of it. The more components, exceptions, interactions and obscure acquisitions there are, the more room exists for some player to arrive with knowledge others lack. And since the distinction is "visible" — look at what my player can do now! — there's a straight off emotional payout that's there for the exploitation... if this is the sort of thing that really pumps your nads. Me, I'm a little, ah, six-seven about it. I don't think of anything as "mastery" if I'm copping it off line to excite my friends. My friends wouldn't be excited. They'd turn and say, with disdain or contempt, pick your sauce, "You read that on the internet, didn't you?"

In all honestly, there's nothing easier to design than prestige that doesn't have a price tag... especially when what we're talking about here is a pre-existing platform with a former legitimacy that is now being manipulated to extra more "value" of a kind, once the players are locked in. D&D is a lovely test case for Doctorow's enshittification ideas: everything about the game, almost from the beginning, long before the internet existed, has been a gradual manipulation of the edge parameters in order to produce one after another marginal advantage; let's give the ranger a bonus with the bow... no, let's double the bonus... no, let's permit the ranger to fire twice... no, lets rebrand the ranger as an "archer" so they can fire the bow even more often... wait, wait, you'll love this, let's increase the damage of the bow to a state so high that it obliterates enemies on a hit... no, three enemies at a time... no, five enemies at a time...

(sorry, I used a time machine and went into the future to grab some of those examples at the end there; I know I shouldn't, but it's just sitting in the corner gathering dust, and it did cost a fair chunk of change; there's a guy I know who says that I can make it run better if I eat three oranges before getting inside; apparently, the orange pulp enables the machine to better grasp my... well, nevermind; I'll write that post another day)

The interesting twist to all this is that the upgrading of an element of D&D need not take the form of making the product worse in the short term. An upgrade that really does expand the potentiality for game play is beneficial... but of course, there's always a desire to shortcut any thresholds to that upgrading if a need is perceived that this is needed.

For example... I've created my sage ability system specifically to increase the players access to abilities without incorporating a point-buy system. But it relies on a threshold that looks, initially, easy to crack... players only need between 8 and 12 thousand experience, or thereabouts, to get one study that unlocks a host of "authority-status" abilities, which makes the player feel pretty important. But since the next threshold after that requires another 50 thousand experience (on average), that threshold starts to hurt. No doubt, if the system were in widescale use, I'd be hearing all the time about DMs dropping the threshold, or increasing the number of points the players randomly rolled at each level, to soften the climb. Because that's what people do. They see others suffering, they can see easily how to relieve the suffering... and that relief becomes more important than any nuanced perception of how the game is damaged. The relief is blatant. The damage is theoretical and metaphysical. There's no contest in the minds of some people.

We see the same arguments in how much treasure "should" parties be given, or how fast "should" parties advance in a given number of sessions, or whether or not treasure "should" count as experience or not. These shoulds are not rational arguments... they fall into the realm of arguing if the players starting Monopoly should get $2,000 and not $1,500 to start, or if a player that's been to jail three times should suffer a "three-strike rule" and have to stay there nine turns instead of three, or whether a player should have to surrender $500 to every other player if they sneeze during game play. We could double rents after midnight, give the poorest player a subsidy or require a luxury tax every time someone passes Go with more than $2,200 cash on hand. All of these are completely justifiable rule possibilities, however strange they might sound. Would any of this "improve" Monopoly?

Yet we argue over such things in D&D with vehemence and absolutism because we already know the game as it is already played. The luxury tax rule isn't better, but it's different... and if we've been playing Monopoly for forty years and we're forced to play again for whatever reason, anything different is better. Because the game as written is fucking boring. At least, to our sensibilities now.

Which brings us to the substance of the stack exchange list of rules and how the game I played as a boy has transformed into this: the unfortunate and hard to imagine idea that for the vast number of players, including many of those who say they "love D&D," the game is boring. That is why the old school renaissance wasn't sustainable. That's why the endless exhortations to return to AD&D for whatever reason just won't work. It's not new enough, it's not interesting enough, it's not enough. It's boring. We're bored with it. We don't want to play a game that's boring. We want to play a game with really kewl things in it like "Sylunus Viper" and "Psychic Blades." YEAH, baby. Bring that shit on!

Or, to look at this another way, it is a question of materialism.

The things I like about the game are not the abilties or the spells or the magic items. The Eye of Vecna has as much romanticism and mystery for me as a reversible ratcheting socket wrench with a flex head and telescoping handle. It's a tool, made for a purpose in the game, not a thing that is beloved or that makes my heart race in my chest to imagine handing it over to a party. It's a powerful tool, too, quite capable of destroying a campaign once given... as is any pile of abilities, spells and magic items.

Those people who claim to have been playing D&D for two thousand years, who still gush over these things leave me cold. I can't remotely get weepy about Castle-what-the-Fuck on the Dell or the Smudgy Flume Hill. I just don't care. D&D is not about material things for me. It is about the same things that keep me from being bored in the real world: can I think faster than the players, can they think faster than me, can it be close enough that we're both excited to see how it all plays out. I keep connecting D&D to sports and not board games because for me, board games are procedural hells where it's obvious who's going to win by the third turn, while it may be the bottom of the ninth and the team at bat is four runs behind and we still don't know for sure how it'll end. Not that I watch sports, no... because I'm not interested in see whether or not other people I'm not invested in win... I'm pretty comfortable someone will and I'm not up to getting excited about laundry. But when I used to play sports, then yes, I got pretty worked up by whether or not WE were going to win.

I guess there are some my age who find it helps to remember that "getting worked up" by watching other, younger people getting worked up. Only I don't. My memory serves just fine.

I still get worked up, after all. See my last post.

Also, the game post this last week is an excellent example of this principle. The players did not know to the last half hour who might die, or if anyone would, right to the very bitter end when someone did. Everyone participating was fast talking, stressed, forlorn on some occasions, even anguished and desperate as things just would not come together to get everyone out safely. Tempers were not expressed... but there was quite a lot of just plain discomfort in the voices of the contestants, while I was struggling not to play the trogs as smarter than they actually were. An excellent session. Not because I "made trogs interesting," which would be bullshit, I did nothing but play the game as written, but because the game as I've designed it and as I run it IS interesting on occasion in a really spectacular fashion. You know, like soccer can be... if you don't go into it with an American's expectations.

I really hate the soccer talk but if there's something I hate worse? It's the dreck babble leaking out of the house next door about how soccer isn't a real game because too often the combined score is less than three... jeebus...

When I played soccer (I did it just about the time dinosaurs were no longer permitted on the field), I both won and lost quite a lot of 1-0 games... and I don't remember any where I turned to another player and said, "gee, this is boring. Why do we play this game?"

That said, I don't think trying to figure out the best way to pimp out my character's ride with a lot of stackexchange reads is going to make me feel anything but dirty. But that's me. Like I said, I used to run with dinosaurs. That... does something to a person.

But...

As a social misanthrope, one of my deepest instincts is the will to speak freely regardless of the consequences. This grew into a compulsion with me at a young age through a repeated behaviour from my grandfather, my father and those bullies whom I went to school with, whose tactic was to silence me by lifting their fist and threatening me with it, and occasionally going the next step. As such, as I got older, and this is a thing that many find, the willingness to take a blow became stronger than the fear of getting it, so that I began in my late teens to respond to threats with, "Oh yeah? Well, go ahead, I'm going to say what I have to say."

The issue is that it requires a tremendous amount of anger and resentment to overcome the fear inherent in being struck, and especially dogpiled by more than one person, something I've also experienced. My friends were mostly those who had learned to speak in soft, controlled voices, whose habit was to look at their shoes when spoken to, who could not get dates with girls because they could not find the courage to overcome the possibility of their saying no. I had their choice as evidence of a solution that did not really work, but I don't think I ever weighed the rationale of being them or being myself. I was simply more volatile, more hot-blooded, more reactionary... and as such, in my teens, I became worrisome, frightening, even evidently irrational. The nature was "baked in," so to speak, in a way that was not only inherent, but extremely rare, as was evidenced in the way that teachers and other authority figures reacted to me, as I intimidated them.

And because I spent a lot of time alone, apart from taking part in sports (where, again, my volatility both served and handicapped me, depending on the situation), I read voraciously. The reading enhanced my vocabulary, the resource of my knowledge, my perspective, my understanding of what others would try to say or how they would say it... which led me into things like debate and public speaking... where, again, that volatility both served and handicapped me. It is one thing to have the will and the fearlessness to stand in front of 500 people at 18 and scream about the injustice of the cruise missile being placed inside Canada, which I did in 1982 during that controversy, but that same fearlessness does not benefit one in small rooms with people who have enough power that they're not intimidated. The sequence of events in play, therefore, put me in places that others have never gone, while not contributing to those things that would have benefitted me: an ability to kowtow when kowtowing was called for. I simply did not have that skill because it had been trained out of me.

Of course, the bullies disappeared... and when I was nineteen and stood in front of my father when he came at me to beat me again that "All right, let's fucking go," in a stance that said, yes, absolutely, I was ready to fucking go, then he backed down and that was the end of that. My grandfather was too old and too far away and I was not visiting him anymore as a boy dragged to Regina by my parents, so I did not have any scary enemies left to fight... and I did not go out looking for them, taking swings at cops and bouncers and anyone I could find, because I had become well-read and I had concepts of social justice and I believed in John Stuart Mills and Thomas Paine with regards to what justice was. So I didn't get a criminal record, I didn't become a social problem, I didn't act out against the state, I didn't break the law.

But the resentment with respect to being silenced has remained. The resentment against any injustice or any unfairness remains. And when I say "resentment," let me be perfectly clear. I may be not quite 62 now, just two months shy, but as I write this I feel a boiling white hot anger that is still recognisable, still there, and still boils up when someone starts talking about the wrongness of foreigners in the country or my province making noise about leaving Canada, or anything to do with persons in an LGBTQ frame, or pretty much anything where I see money and power railroad someone out of office without evidence, on hearsay, for reasons, and voices I trust suddenly start talking as though this is reasonable. My poor partner, who has learned to tolerate my outbursts on these subjects, when I simply cannot keep the lid on them any more, suffers the shouting and then hugs me when she feels I've settled. That's what living with me is like; not a person who is physically violent, but one whose violence remains intellectual, verbose, searing, confrontational and, yes, loud.

Age and maturity have, however, convinced me that all this anger is purposeless. It has no listener. There's no future in stepping into a political sphere to "change things" because I am not oblivious to what a political sphere is, or what it is there for. I quit my street marching days when I realised nothing was being accomplished and when, in private conversations, I learned that the leaders of such movements were doing it so they "could sleep at night." I wanted change, not a good night's sleep, but that wasn't going to happen, so I stopped. I turned to journalism, wrote editorials, made a lot of people mad and felt I was doing what I could. But even that, now, does not sustain me in the least way. I'm far too old a bunny, as I like to say, to indulge in such fantasies any more.

All this is to say, though, why it is so hard for me to let go of a bone when I have it in my teeth. It explains why it is so hard for me to sit and listen to someone spew unsupported, obviously emotionally derived garbage when actual, rational, supported, methodical arguments that demonstrate evidence find no ground to stand on. This blog has demonstrated, with examples and detailed accounts, wrongdoings related to D&D in a hundred different ways — which yes, is a strange hill to choose to die on, but hell, there's no one else here on this hill anyway — but to what purpose? Only to the occasional listener who finds themselves nodding their heads and accepting that someone, somewhere, finally, is going to say that thing. That is the sum total of this blog's value. It occasionally connects with someone.

Yet, it is certain that what's said here is not going to connect with a vastly larger audience, many of whom disagree with every word printed here. Some are going to find that my willingness to die on this hill is so absurd that this in itself demonstrates me to be a deluded, unreasoning, warped and even repulsive individual. And some are going to tell me, in various ways, that I'm wrong, or that I should shut up, or that I have picked the wrong word to make my argument, or any of a thousand what-is-seen-as-legitimate arguments to make, sustained by the fact that many thousands of people out there in the culture believe what they say, while I have merely dozens who can do more than "not agree with everything he says, but he's interesting." That is the sum total of the push-back here. I'm not exactly wrong... I'm just not really in a position to be right.

My tone is excessive, I am bitter, I am unfair, I misunderstand what people mean, I am technically correct but I've missed the spirit of the thing, I'm attacking people who are only trying to have fun, I'm making too much out of things that are trivial.

All of these things are, in essence, true.

It is my childhood, and not my training, not my love of D&D, not my self-interest, that urges me to answer every accusation rashly. Because my mind has embraced this idea that if someone does not actually address the subject at hand, the thing that's being discussed, the point of the article, then in a way it is them lifting a fist at me as if to say, "I've just made a semantic argument, so you'd better shut up now."

Consciously, I know the reader can distinguish between a good answer to my post and a bad one. Consciously, I know that my point is stronger if I don't back it up. I can recall my professor Dr. Barry Baldwin telling me, when people lost their shit at me about the editorials I wrote for the university paper, "Don't answer them; it makes them look weak and desperate, while you look indifferent and superior." I know it does not good to answer. I know it's the wrong approach.

But dammit, I still see that fist in my mind's eye and I still...

In 1971, an independent filmmaker who felt exactly as I do, before I was old enough to feel as I do, made a film about it. I did not see the film until I was fifteen and when I did, for a time, one scene was my bible. Most people remember the scene with the foot. That's the scene that fed the masculine male model... but in that scene, the character is smiling. He's contemptuous and he's silent. It's the scene that came before that spoke to me, because in the scene that came before, the character is speaking rationally through gritted teeth. He's speaking about anger. He's speaking about how overwhelming and unrelenting that anger gets when he sees cruelty and wrongheadedness and abuse. That is the scene I felt when I was in my middle of my adolescent, unrestrained, uneducated mind set. And watching that scene is like putting on a very familiar set of old clothes. It is a time machine.

https://youtu.be/-SlD4KqDDUM?si=TMOk9cBitf8XYnea

The problem is, see, is that the anger only appears irrational. It comes from an irrational place, an unwillingness and inability on the part of those in authority to be rational. But the anger itself, channelled, informed, cultivated, patiently reviewed again and again as I am doing here, without anger, in this post, which has no business being here in a D&D blog, is not, in fact, irrational. It is not irrational to expect people to respond to the context of a blog post as opposed to some frivolous detail that has nothing to do with the point, because they need to feel important enough to oppose something, for the sake of opposing it, in a place that is not theirs, simply for the sake of their ego. It is not irrational to call them to account for that. It is not irrational to say, "All right, aside from that bullshit, what did you think of the post?"

But... okay. Serenity to accept things I cannot change.

Like the man says, I try. I really try.

I've already soured my popularity with this blog in ways that can never be taken back... and it doesn't matter any more. I've come forward and said things about myself that nobody should say publicly. I dunno. Just the lot we get, I guess. We don't get to pick. We don't get to decide if we're rich or poor or volatile or what. I think the only thing any person can do is be honest. Say what they feel and let it be. In the end, it's all ashes anyhow.

Jingoism

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My bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R,

My bologny has a second name, it's M-A-Y-E-R...

I love to eat it every day,

And if you ask me why I'll say...

'Cause Oscar Meyer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

Jingoism is uncritical, emotionally reinforced allegiance expressed through simple, repetitive, celebratory formulas. This is most often done in a political context, but really, any object of allegiance can be subject to the practice, which means any thing that is liked in a widescale fashion can be expressed or explained through jingoism, thus sidestepping the need to actually and legitimately explain the thing.

The jingo above, for instance, which has remained in my head since my learning it from commercials in the 1970s, does not actually tell me that bologna made by the company is better than other bologna; or that because the kid on the dock singing the song happens to like the bologna, I should. No argument is made to explain why I should. It's just assumed I want to be like the kid, and thus being like the kid, I also want to eat bologna, and specifically Oscar Meyer's, because they created a memorable and cute jingo.

The benefit of jingoism as a cultural practice is that it replaces "justification" — the legitimising of a things value or condition through the demonstration of evidence or argument — with blind enthusiasm. Repeated formulas create familiarity; familiarity creates emotional comfort; emotional comfort replaces the need for evidence that a thing should be given allegiance, or trusted, or considered true.

And because of this, when an argument is made to someone who is blindly enthusiastic, the argument fails — not only because the listener does not want to be convinced, but because the listener already has been... by something that in no way did so through the use of thought, the evaluation of data, real consideration or a seeking of proof. Rather, they've embraced the tautology: the thing is true, because I'm comfortable with it, therefore my comfort makes it true. Oscar Meyer is a great weiner... Oscar Meyer itself told me so.

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I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner...

That is what I truly want to be!

'Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer weiner,

Everyone would be in love with me!

Sigh.

Since beginning this D&D blog, I have variously gone off on a number of anti-jingoistic battles that have repeatedly lost me readers and support, simply because I am figuratively pissing on parts of the hobby and it's practioners by doing so. The game is "fun;" the game is "imaginative" or "collaborative;" the game is about telling a "story." The players are "heroes." These are not windmills I'm tilting at. Quixote fought windmills because he thought they were monsters; he had a fundamental understanding what the arms were there to do. I am tilting at the Catholic Church that Quixote praises. I'm tilting at Dulcinea. I'm tilting at everything that's "beloved" about D&D because I do not love the game for these reasons. And I tilt because I don't think anyone else does, either... I think that what they do is lack any actual reason for liking the game, that they do in fact like, because they lack "imagination," so they just invent shit up that explains what the game is. That's what sickens me, that's what frustrates me... and that's what makes it impossible for me to ever really explain anything true about D&D...

Because when I see the bar wench, I see the bar wench... and like the bar wench for what she is. But when you all look at her, you all see Dulcinea. And like Quixote, you don't even fucking know it.

To put it another way, I look at the crude, ordinary, perhaps vulgar thing that D&D actually is and find it interesting on its own terms. I do not need to slather bullshit all over it and then bake it into feces pie, so I can lick my fingers clean and moan, "Ooooooo... home cooking."

Sorry... but that's what I think all the jingoism and the jargon is that's related to this game: pure, unmitigated, unrestrained bullshit. I don't think it makes the game "better," I don't think it clarifies anything, I don't think it helps play go more smoothly... and when I talk to someone who claims it does, I imagine them spewing this shit to their players while they sit there, nod their heads politely and think, "I wish he'd get done so we could play."

D&D is a procedural game where decisions are made by the DM to explain visual and situational elements to players through the use of language, which the players interpret so they can respond with described actions, importing the need for further descriptions by the DM, providing further actions, and so on, in a progressive infinite engine providing play, adjudicated with dice, bounded by rules, limited by the ability of the DM to make things comprehensible and the ability of the player to concoct useful actions. Nothing here is a "fuzzy" description. D&D is not an "adventure." The word "adventure" has no meaning whatsoever with regards to any of the procedures I've just described. An "adventure is a not a situation; it is not a part of a setting; it is not something a player can take an action within or against; it is not an action; it does not as a word or a concept promote further actions or description. The word "adventure" describes an arc of events that cannot, by definition of the manner in which the game is player, produce a RESULT. Consequentially, the word "adventure" is as valuable to D&D as is the word "story."

D&D is often described as an "adventure game." This is jingoism. It doesn't in and of itself explain how the descriptive applies to the game being played. It does not contribute to the game's play. It does not separate the game from other procedural games, as an "adventure" can be the Hardy Boys chasing smugglers, a pair of newlyweds heading off for the big city, a family on vacation or a rocket ship leaving Earth. In no way does the word "adventure" as defined by the dictionary in any way contribute to or benefit anyone in the understanding of D&D. Yet, there it is. Like an unremovable wart on a game that doesn't need it.

Like fun and imagination and story, "adventure" produces an emotional, comforting response. It carries the idea of excitement, danger, novelty, romance, discovery, childhodo, travel, heroism and escape. It conveys an intentionality that is glossed over D&D as though it, and it alone, the word itself, regardless of comprehending how, somehow makes the process described above "better." That is enthusiasm for the sake of enthusiasm. It is a fetish, an object held in the hand and rubbed because it is believed that by repeating the word, the game's success is somehow achieved. Except, it isn't. Because even those who embrace such jingostic words as "proof" of the reason their DMing succeeds, can't say why it succeeds for that reason. It just does. Therefore, like the fetish, it must be rubbed. It just does.

That is how fetishism works.

An object, or in this case a word, is credited with a power that cannot be demonstrated, located or explained. Its efficacy is assumed because believers believe in it, and experience confidence from it, and can name instances where they believe they've witnessed visions of that confidence, which in turn provides greater confidence in the thing that cannot be rationally justified, while overall the belief only grows stronger with time until it subverts all other discussion of the thing to the discussion of how it relates to the fetish.

This is why D&D discussions do not produce valuable results. Because the results the practitioners experience are not results gained through observing play, but experiences gained through achieving comfort from the enthusiasm the play provides.

It is as though we were all on a river rafting trip, during which we encountered rapids, large rocks, dangers, cliff faces, moments of extreme danger and our own resiliency... but that, at the end of the trip, no one but me can remember anything except the simple fact that we did it together. That is what everyone keeps repeating, every time the trip comes up. "Isn't it amazing that we all did it together?" And then, when I try to say, "What did you think about the rapids," there's a sort of dull, bland look that I receive, followed by the answer, "You mean the rapids we all did together?"

And yet, in fact, we didn't. During the rapids, I remember when I was afraid, not when "we" were; I remember when I needed to pull the paddle I dropped by its tether cord so I could get it back into my hands... not when we did that. I remember when the rock almost hit me; when I was almost thrown into the river when the raft tipped; when I grabbed Jacob before he fell off, when Jim fished me out of the water at the end when I did fall out, stupidly. But I don't remember what Sally did, because she was in the other raft, and I don't remember what Jenny did, because she was at the front of my raft and I was at the back. I don't have any memories at all of any collective "we" doing anything except that we were all there... with the caveat that for the most part, there was no time or opportunity to collaborate on anything. YET, when others talk about the journey, it seems almost as if they did, all the time, while I was apparently on some other planet.

It's not that I'm selfish. It's that this is how I experience the world. It must be nice to experience it in some other way, but evidence tells me that none of us do. There just seem to be a lot of us who need to pretend that we do.

The "we" that is tossed about claims a possession of other people's experience that does not exist. "We" are not on an adventure; I am doing with my character what I can while Jacob is doing what he can and Sally is doing what she can. I can offer a plan to Sally and Jenny can correct my plan, and Jacob can offer an addition to it, but "we" are not making a plan in the sense of one entity on one adventure. We are consciously viewing the world through our limitation as biological creatures, where "collaborating" means talking to each other and puzzling things out, not "creating a grand design" in which we all fulfill our comforting D&D destiny.

And stupidly, I think that until we acknowledge that everyone at the D&D table is NOT in fact experiencing the same game in the same way with the same thoughts, everything we can every say about the game is, again, just home cooking.

Further, as a player, if I were one, and I was told by a DM that my purpose in this campaign is to "be on an adventure," I'd either answer, "fuck that," or perhaps more politely, "I'll decide what my fucking purpose is, thank you," while certainly thinking, what sort of patriarchal assumptive bullshit is this DM spewing?  I don't like people taking it upon themselves to tell me why I'm playing a game. I take offense at that.

Because I do not play, and because I do DM, I don't tell my players things like this. I play the game. I start with, "You're here, this is what the place is like, what do you want to do." Everything else... gawd-fucking-dammit, everything else, has gotten to the point where it is just making me sick.

I guess that's why I'm not writing here on this blog very much.

Session 11: a Death in the Family

This session began with the players retreating from the dungeon to heal their wounds and restock themselves. Lexent the cleric had reached 5th at the end of the last session and so obtained his henchfolk Matyas, whom he'd rolled up for the first running of this campaign only to reveal later that he was wondering about his former cleric from the previous campaign I'd ended before Covid. We'd agreed then that when Lexent reached 5th, he could take Matyas into the party, and so that had come to pass.

Pandred lent a handaxe to Ti, who had broken just about all his weapons, and I believe it was on the 12th of June, two days after leaving the dungeon, that the party returned. Because a player could not make this running, Zoltan and Edvard sat this out, along with the two Croatians and a centaur named Xerxes, who is looking after the party on account of his tribe, so that should anything happen on the outside, the party would receive warning.

Because Ti is so short of weapons, specifically the scimitar that he broke, I suggested the party might take on a small Ottoman encampment of about twenty soldiers, which Xerxes identified as being about four miles away; there would be lots of scimitars there, the centaur said. The party declined, though I had designed the encampment for the running. I won't post it here, because the party didn't go, and I might yet use it. Alas, it is again a spider casting webs to the wind.

The whole running took place thereafter upon this one stretch of hall, so that the players didn't actually do that much exploring:

This is where things were at the end of the game, with the party in full flight from the troglodytes, except for Matyas, who was at -8 hit points, unconscious and effectively unreachable.

For reasons that passeth all understanding, the party decided to recheck the toilets on the left side of the map, specifically that round "urination hole," where again I rolled a wandering monster check, getting a "1," then rolling 1d4 carrion crawlers to emerge from there, as I had the first time in the last session. And like the first time, I got two. If I'd rolled three or four, several members of the party, including the 5th level fighter Pandred. If I had rolled that many, they'd have never reached the trogs.

Just as the carrion crawler fight began, Ti the 4th level fighter had to excuse himself for a family issue and thus the party lost one of their defensive pillars. Pandred and I believe Mikael were soon paralysed and the rest of the party struggled hard to kill one, then the other of the two creatures. Matyas proved to be a piledriver, though, so that the party managed to get out of that scrape. The paralysed players recovered, the party issued some healing and they went forward.

Then, I would say the party had some bad luck by having too much good luck right off. At this corner, behind 2712, the party encountered three waiting troglodytes, two of which were quickly "held" by the cleric for nine rounds. The purple fat number "1" shows how many rounds were left on the spell, before the spell would have worn off. With one trogloydyte left, another came out of the dark and the party easily managed them both. Another single one came the next round and again, the party managed it, moving forward as they did. It all looked so easy. Two more came after, and the party was fine, smacking one of them right off.

But then three more came and it all started to fall apart. The party's "line" had spread out too thin by that point, where the three corridors above formed a large open space. The very next round, five troglodytes came on and the party did not do well for two rounds... which was enough to turn the tide against them. Soon, they realised they'd have to run to preserve their lives... but the stun lock rule seemed to imprison at least one of the party every round, so that if the others ran, the one left behind would certainly be mauled by as many as five or six troglodytes. Yet, they could not manage a round where no party member was stunned... and that when the time came to make a tough decision.

Matyas had been doing very well, but even so, he was getting hit way too much for a first level fighter. He was driven down to -4 hit points when his liege Lexent managed to give him Aid, restoring 17 hit points. Alas, it wasn't enough. Matyas continued to get hit, while the overall strength of the party continued to dwindle as the intense odour of the Troglydytes sapped the party of their strength.

This part was particularly interesting. Every member of the party failed their saving throw against the noxious odour; Mikael managed to preserve Pandred, the party's lynchpin, by bestowing "Freshen," upon him, taking advantage of my rewrite of that cantrip. It meant Pandred wasn't suffering from strength loss, but everyone else was.

And this was particularly fascinating, as my encumbrance rules are built in such a way that the amount a character can carry and how many actions they can take in a round depend very much on strength. So as their strength dwindled, their encumbrance issues grew, as the stuff on the party's backs began to weigh them down more and more. The players were using, I believe (because I'm not using it) a system built by Maxwell, commentor on the blog here, to calculate their encumbrance in an ongoing fashion, so they could tell when they had lost a point of movement because of the strength loss. At the point when the party did have to run, lasting one more round for Pandred to escape being stunned and coming to terms with the reality that Matyas would have to be left, everyone was down in their movement. Thankfully, however, the stride rules enabled them to run fast enough, while the troglodytes themselves were all wounded.

All the orange numbers on the troglodytes, shown on the battle map? That's their present hit points. Every trog with a number has been hit at least once. The freeing of those two that were held would mean two more trogs that hadn't been hit yet, so things were looking awfully dire. Each trog here had 2 HD, but as they weighed more than 290 lbs. (trogs in my game are big and meaty), they had 2d4 per hit die. With them having a minimum of 4 hit points, the party was beginning to feel how hard they were to kill, even for low-level humanoids.

So that was it. Lexent rolled up a new hench, managed to get another 1st level fighter, a dwarf now, again with an 18 strength, and will roll that character out with the next running. Hopefully, Ti and Zoltan will be back and the party will be more buff and ready to take those hobgoblins on again. Assuming they don't clear out and seek another lair, given that this one's been compromised. I tend to do that, because it punishes parties who don't hang in there and see the thing to the end before retreating. But, knowing what I know about these trogs, that's not all that unlikely. This was just the front group, and the party only killed about half a dozen of them. Hardly enough to think the trogs need to run away.