Nirvana

I should be writing the account of last Friday's session, but instead I'm going to write this. Some might find this a different sort of post, in which case, good. I see no reason I need to write the same posts over and over.

One of the sage studies of my D&D game is the "Outer Planes." The premise follows that the various planes of existence are real and can be travelled to, but more to the point, they can be understood in essence by people dwelling on Earth, the "prime material" plane, despite never having gone there. In D&D terms, this is something like having read books and articles by people who went to the Dark of Africa in the 19th century, while most would never have perceived actually doing it themselves.

As players gain knowledge points in my game, which come naturally through the accumulation of levels, they assign the points they gain in the Outer Planes study to the plane they wish to know about. I think this is only reasonable: if you are interested in tales about Africa, why would you be forced to discover details about Mongolia or Patagonia? If a player, then, decides to know more about Nirvana, one of the outer planes. Gygax perceived it as "pure law," which either confuses what he knew about Buddhism — though, to be fair, it was the 70s, there was much confusion being spewed by all sorts of writers at the time — or his peculiar notion about law. Discounting this as neither here nor there, I have had a player ask about Nirvana and what it's like, asking me to write a wiki page for it.

I think for most it would be fairly Old Hat to write the planes of existence as a set of D&D adventures: a sort of "McVenture" that scratches out the word Nirvana and writes in the words "Twin Paradises" instead sort of adventure, where in fact the concept itself is utterly sacrificed for the sake of the game. A second approach would be to embrace totality of "nirvana" as a metaphysical concept, i.e., the extinguishing of passion, detachment lack of suffering... even "nothingness" in the truest possible sense. After all, in Buddhism, nirvana is the abandonment of the "10 fetters" all of which pretty much describe a D&D player's process when playing the game: protect self, doubt everything, count on my lucky die, love that crit, kill monsters, get that treasure, expect they'll never die, stomp proudly, ache for the next adventure and mostly, don't care what it all means. In a nutshell.

But let's face it: Nirvana as a physical outer plane of absolute stillness, marked by an endless, pale, luminous expanse without sun, sky, weather, horizon or darkness, where nothing needs to grow because hunger and thirst is unknown... is a pretty boring place. D&D is not going to thrive in a place where violence is (a) impossible and (b) fruitless. Heck, why even have the knowledge of such a place?

About the time I started playing D&D, I was competing in a high school game show format called Reach for the Top here in Canada; and after getting into the semi-finals we won as prizes various books that were donated. I obtained at that time a copy of "Shambhala," which I read all the way through despite not being able to make heads or tales out of it. Shambhala, I get now, is the conception of Nirvana — a place freed from suffering, corruption and the destructive consequences of craving, externalised as a "country." James Hilton invented the name "Shangri-La" for his 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, so he could side-step any theological errors he might have had to account for, but the concept is more or less the same. Like Shambhala, it is a society entrusted with the Buddha's teaching, that embodies life, labour, governance, learning and community as what they would look like if they operated under the conditions approaching Nirvanic liberation.

So is that "Nirvana" as the plane? A hidden, perfected kingdom: fertile valleys enclosed by immense mountains, clear rivers, cultivated fields, walled cities, monasteries, palaces, libraries, gardens and roads kept in immaculate condition. It is inhabited by enlightened rulers, scholars, artisans, monks, families and long-lived beings who have achieved freedom from suffering without ceasing to possess bodies, homes, customs or society.

But, what precisely would scholars learn in a place that was "perfected"? What point is there to the palaces if no problems arise that must be solved? If there is no suffering, what is the use of food, what is the value of cultivating fields, what are customs designed to appease, or society to organise. One gets the sense that something along these lines is the right idea, but the answer is still missing from the problem. And we still don't have anything that would help a D&D player to know about.

Let us then reject "perfection." Perfection is the problem in the above, which need not exist since we are not imagining Nirvana as a philosophical exercise for people living upon the real earth, but a fictional physical place where the players can actually go. That removes any responsibility we have that Nirvana must be a "perfect" anything. It is merely called "perfect" by suffering humans with little understanding of things deeper than the most obvious immediate answer to a person's perceived need.

And here we have a very convenient Twilight Zone episode: A Nice Place to Visit. The link has the plot synopsis if it's needed, though by and large it's a well-known episode, much quoted on youtube, because it deconstructs a particular human frailty: the belief that having what we want will make us happy. That is literally the construction that Siddhartha supposedly landed upon under a tree after continuous objective reasoning some 2500 years ago, before Rome became a republic, but it's okay because America got there in 1960. Sort of. "Wanting" is the problem. Contentment, says Buddhism, begins with not wanting.

I find it interesting, because in the 47 years of my running D&D, in which I always ask my clerics to choose a religion, any religion, I never fail to get at least one that claims "Buddhist" as their choice. Jeebs, really. What a choice for a D&D player.

Nirvana or Shambhala cannot be a place where where everyone gets what they want, because they, like the character Rocky in the linked episode, would be bored as sin within a month. Getting everything you want, in excess, is hell. Oops, sorry, that was a spoiler.

So, let's change the structure thusly: we still have a vast temperate country of broad river valleys, wooded hills, clear lakes and snow-covered mountains. The air is warm, rain falls but never becomes a storm. The sun moves across the sky and night genuinely comes, because tranquility does not require the abolition of ordinary physical existence. Plants flower, fruit ripens, leaves fall and animals live normally, but disease, starvation, predation and destructive decay do not occur. There are towns, estates, monasteries, libraries, gardens, workshops and roads.

The dead would retain recognisable bodies and individual identities. They could eat, drink, sleep, converse, study, make things, walk through the countryside or live alone. Most importantly, while they would still need to eat, that actual need would not be the crisis it is for us on earth for one simple reason... which I'll of course approach by going around this barn here. The big one, painted red, on your left.

To quote Captain Kirk (well, really, D.C. Fontana, who wrote This Side of Paradise), humanity stagnates without ambition or challenge, and therefore people aren't meant for paradise but must "fight their way through" and struggle upward. The reason there is a struggle comes from Nature being a very unreasonable and nasty bitch... oh damn, are we still identifying Nature as feminine? I'm really not sure; no offense meant, really. Okay, to put it another way, nature is really, really, really not nice. You build your barn and nature knocks it down with a tornado; you plant your crops and nature sends bugs to eat the, or fails to give you any water at all; you fix your wagon's axle and a rock breaks your wheel. It's pretty much like that, all the time. So "struggle" is necessary because nature keeps getting in the way not of a "perfect" life, but of one that can reliably be counted upon.

Meaningful activity could occur quite nicely if we weren't spending all this time repainting the barn red or defending the animals we have to keep safe in the barn from weather, rote, vermin and accident. Getting rid of all those difficulties would not make scholarship less interesting... it would make it less fraught with the need to recopy a book that was spoiled when the roof leaked. If the farmer could be absolutely certain that all the seeds that were planted would reliably grow and produce food, the farmer would still have to do the labour... but that labour would not be compromised with the worry the labour might be wasted. In that event, the labour might even become enjoyable; it might be that thing that Thoreau and other naturalists insist: a good afternoon spent, a feeling of accomplishment, the sense of using one's muscles purposefully, the pleasantness of a beautiful vista to work in... all without crows or prospective hail.

D.C. Fontana's paradise in Star Trek (based on an original story by Jerry Sohl) had to be taken apart because the spores caused everyone to just lay about drinking mint juleps. Actual paradise occurs when everyone has something fruitful and meaningful to accomplish, wishes to do so, and therefore digs in, works, enjoys the work and then, at the end of the day, food being plentiful because there are no ants to eat it, no one goes hungry. Not because they can't get hungry, but because the larder is always full, because the desire to fill it is so damned satisfying.

I have said several times in the last few weeks to people that my perception of heaven would be to do exactly what I am doing right now: writing, playing D&D, investigating new things, stretching my legs and so on. Only, without having to concern myself with making money.

Don't Give Me Some of that Old School Religion

I agree with Blaine that the "what if" game really doesn't get us anywhere... but then, I must confess I am not playing fair where it comes to my own story within yesterday's post. So, I'll come clean, though I don't expect the unfamiliar reader to much like it. Those familiar with me and my game won't be surprised... so, really, this is going to be nothing more than my indulging my enormous, bloated ego. Thank gawd I never became the head of a game company, huh?

I've said before I was given the three basic books of AD&D for Christmas in 1979. Two of them I still have, though they got so wrecked through use that I was forced to buy used copies from a bookstore in the early 1990s. My original copy of the Monster Manual went missing, so the copy I have was given to me for Christmas in 1982 by my then fiancee. The replacement is, understandably, more valuable to me.

I own copies of Keep on the Borderlands, the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, The Village of Hommlet and the first two parts of Against the Giants... with the except of KotB, I've run none of them as modules in my game. I've only run a few rooms of KotB, the last time in 2004, when I ran my daughter and her boyfriend in it on the spur of the moment, nothing prepared. I only own these modules because another DM I knew in '82 quit D&D entirely and shoved them at me with, "Want them?" I told them I'd take them, expecting I'd get around to looking through them someday. It might shock some people, but I've never actually taken the time to read a few pages of any of these at a time — when I try, I find them so boring, I just can't be bothered.

The "Harndex" came up before the game session Friday — the 1983 edition, not the later splat book version that came out later. This, again, is not something I paid for, but gained when a different DM decided to quit D&D after his first very rough year as a barely surviving engineering student. It seems all through the 80s I was the dumping site for a lot of this stuff, without my having to buy it. The only reason I never read either Holmes or Mentzer before the internet happened was that none of the DMs that I knew, who quit, had bought those books. Though I do seem to vaguely remember a blue basic version of the game kicking around at some point... but because I never used it or opened it, I have no idea if it was Mentzer's work or not.

The Harndex was more interesting... but only in the sense of looking at someone else's invented wheel still having square corners and my thinking, "Hm, I bet that would work better if the corners were rounded off." I never used the Harndex. It didn't have anything to use. An ordinary real world encyclopedia has more usable information in it.

I have had a relationship with the local principal gamestore owner here in Calgary that reaches so far back that he and I can talk jokingly about his first store front back in 1979, as he remembers my being a customer then... only, I wasn't actually a customer of D&D for him. I bought a few war games, I think I bought my copy of Axis and Allies from him (now in my daughter's possession, as I haven't played it literally since this century started), and some dice and miniatures. I would go around and look at the enormous collection of books he had... more than enough to fill a good sized public library before the internet happened... but I'd leaf through the books, see what the designers were doing and think, "Oh, that's a wrong direction," or, "Yeah, did that, did it better"... or worse, "What the fuck is that supposed to acccomplish?" And then not buy the book.

All this is to say that my experience with D&D is the inverse of what virtually every "official" source thought it ought to be. Everyone around me practically worshipped The Dragon. I thought it was shit. Here, I stumbled across this issue from April 1986 while digging around for my copy of the Harndex.

"Dear Dragon... According to the author of the article, seeing is believing, about 2' is how far the invisibility extends. If the invisibility extends in all directions, the floor below him would be invisible for two feet down and over at an upward slope. Isn't there a special ruling that he, the author, should have made about this? If not, invisibility is useless because when a moving patch of invisibility saunters into a room, it would take a really dumbass monster not to know something was amiss."

See? The internet existed before the internet existed.

This kind of appeal to authority demonstrates just how stupid the average reader of The Dragon was, which the Dragon catered to because, hey, it wasn't making any money from me. I'd say "guys like me," but there were no guys like me, not then, not now. Back about ten years ago, I got so tired hearing from other bloggers about the amazing Dragon magazine that I made a plan to burn one of my copies on youtube in spite. My daughter put her foot down and I didn't. Raised my own petard, there.

I did not need a staff member from The Dragon to tell me that bad rule design (even joke bad rule design, which was what deliberately happened here) did not need an authority to clarify, it needed a will to step up. I, more than anyone, ought to hate "rule lawyers," because those are the first and foremost to call out descriptions like the joke one here as if God Handed Them Down to Gygax on Sinai... but I don't have that knee-jerk hatred because even in 1986 I could have out-argued any of these halfwits writing on the page above. I didn't care to because I'd already rebuilt the problems in the game The Dragon magazine was bent on, with it's virtually Holy Quest, making less clear, less practical or just plain worse, for the sake of having something to assemble words together in as so-called articles.

If anyone wants to do a Communications Thesis about the destruction of a popular hobby through inept or deliberately obtuse journalism, there it is. The Dragon's approach directly contributed to the need to replace every passage in the original game with a NEW VERSION, essentially by finding it's own personal way to exploit the reader's attention by nit-picking and derailing rules to death.

A good carpenter can tell you... for every tool that's really nifty and useful invented by someone, there are hundreds that are junk. But it's okay, because once a carpenter has done that for a few years, they get to recognise the difference... in fact, it's a reflex one develops habitually, looking for any part that's made of plastic or some other material that's bound to give within a day or two of use. Roleplaying games are not different from other things in the way that opportunists rush pell-mell to make things that are essentially useless but which look good for people who just don't know anything.

The difference with D&D is simple: there are no good products, aside from the dice. Every product, from the White Set on, arrived on the shelf broken as fuck. This is a fact that is deliberately overlooked by nostalgists who insist, instead, that "Sure, there are a few problems with AD&D..."

With regards to this aspect of RPGs, the cognitive dissonance is staggering. If anyone ever wants to put together a list of seven cognitive dissonance wonders of the world, I vote for D&D... though I suppose the U.S. Constitution deserves the number 1 spot.

The problem is not merely that D&D is old now, or that the substance of the game has changed, it is the stubborn conception that any of the original works served to create a playable game in their own time, never mind in ours... and that those who claim as much simply ignore decades of published arguments, replacement systems occurring long before 2nd edition, a wash of alternate RPG versions each trying to steal customers even before 1982, not to mention the flat out evidence of both self-conceit and ad hoc declarations by the self-righteous author that spawned all this... well, it's just breathtaking. I've said this before but it bears repeating... and repeating and repeating, I suppose.

We at the age of 15, playing in a world without an internet, without cable television, without at home video games, without telephones that were not still connected by wires to walls, looked at AD&D in the 1970s and recognised that large parts of it were not only badly written, but were the worst kind of game design compared to the games we already knew. We were trained game designers. We weren't journalists. Fuck, we hadn't even completed grade 10. But we knew. And not only was it utterly obvious that the rules that attempted to outline alignment, weapon speed, encumbrance, combat movement, the design of a believable medieval culture or pretty much everything in the book that wasn't entirely self-contained, wasn't up to snuff intellectually. We didn't argue about it. We didn't write to The Dragon. We dumped the shit that didn't work and decided, you know what, the game worked fine. Just fine.

All that shit from people who just couldn't get it, they weren't like us. We were early adopters. And like early adopters, we were curious, we wanted to look at how things worked, we wanted to test things, we were experienced with other sorts of complicated games, we knew already how to work around defects, fix or ignore beta-level documentation, expect the product to have limitations, criticise a design early... in large part because we had done all this before with other complicated systems.

Early adopters do not expect a new and complicated system to arrive complete. They tolerate crude documentation, test every component against actual use, distinguish the underlying possibility from the defective implementation and assume that repair is part of adoption. A later customer expects a finished product. Early adopters don't.

Those that come after early adopters are called "early majority." These are people who wait to see if there are reliable reviews about the product before moving forward. They are people who wait to assure themselves that a visible success has occurred. They want to see someone else demonstrate success. They count on technical support to fix problems. They wait for others to create usable instructions that will help them understand. They want to be sure the product will remain available and supported before they buy in.

When the early majority started to see the groundswell around D&D growing in '82 and '83, they started to climb on board the train. They detected that D&D had been validated, that it was popular enough to be considered viable to explore... but they came at expecting the rules to be explained to them, the rulings to be made clear by those in the know, the modules to be produced "officially"... and they are those who ran to publications like The Dragon to get those clarifications and desperately looked-for support.

There are always far more early majority that early adopters. Some people rushed to Android products in 2008 and 2009, when the Blackberry still dominated the market and Apple was trying to corner MP3 access. But Android products, initially, were quite hard to manage. Those that wanted to try, though, were those who consider Linux their go-to platform. They like complexity, because they view complexity as flexible, designable and more interesting. Android smashed Apple's market because it was able to describe itself more practically and usefully to the early majority when that sort came along in 2010 and 2011.  But unlike Android, when TSR was faced with it's early majority, it had its pants down around its ankles because it had fucked up its business plan and was being turned over the money makers. So, explanation and technical support just never happened. And it hasn't happened since. It's never going to happen.

The OSR movement failed in large part because the groundswell engaged participants who were old-school chronologically, but weren't early adopters psychologically. By the 2000s, they came into a D&D product that had been validated by decades of survival, reputation, nostalgia and accumulated commentary (and then controversy, through the internet). These early and "late adopters" were not approaching an unknown system and asking what could be made from it. They were approaching a canon and asking how faithfully it could be recovered.

Except their perception of what was to be recovered matched that exact disaster which came into being as D&D failed as a business and began to excel as an exploitative product. While the earlier products by Gygax and Arneson, and the persons themselves, were revered, that reverence made it impossible for these "renaissance" folk to actually LOOK at the product directly and make up their own minds. In the actual Renaissance, architects like Filippo Brunelleschi studied and designed classical architectural ideas — or else they wouldn't have been able to achieve what they did — but then they set out to surpass the classicists. The structure of the Great Dome in Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, had never existed in human history before. The OSR went back to the origins of D&D and then did not surpass them at all. Instead, they turned D&D into a "religion," not a "renaissance." But thank gawd, the anachronym doesn't need to be changed.

To restate: with the OSR, the participants recovered the texts, terminology, visual presentation, modules and remembered procedures, but the recovered material had acquired authority through age. The defects became "authentic" features. Ambiguities became invitations to "rulings." Missing systems became proof of openness. Crude mechanics became evidence of elegant simplicity. Instead of asking what the original designers had failed to accomplish, the movement spent enormous energy explaining why those failures were virtues.

This is what a religion does. It preserves a founding revelation, develops commentary around contradictions, venerates founding personalities, treats departure from the sacred text as corruption and then, individually, the individual DM's themselves invent mantras as supportive evidence that their way is the only way that makes sense. The OSR did not produce a single product that surpassed old D&D... which is why it has proven to be thoroughly irrelevant within the progress of the game. It was a momentary period of zealotry, not enlightenment... and though it has created a sort of community in its wake, that community in turn has done nothing more than continue to churn out the same products that old D&D turned out to exploit an old player base... only now the so-called Old School Religion exploits a "new" player base.

And so, in the middle of all this, there's me.

I didn't quit like all the early adopters I once new. I didn't buy into the product train. If you'd asked me who Gary Gygax was in 1980 I'd have been unable to give you an answer. I did not care who made D&D any more than I cared who made Squad Leader or RISK or Cribbage. I loved the game as I played it... not as the books presented it, gawd no, but as my friends and I redesigned it for ourselves in the 1980s, without concern for what the company might have done or what Gygax's money woes were when he went down in flames. I didn't even know about any of that until the internet happened, because Gygax's life trajectory simply wasn't relevant to my deciding how much treasure to hand to a party. I make changes to AD&D because all the other versions of the game, to me, started deeper in the hole than AD&D had, while I'd already had ten years of fixing that system before 2nd came out and proved itself to be worse. I had 21 years of work behind me before 3rd, and 28 years behind me before 4th, and gawd help me, 35 years behind me by the time 5th made its appearance. Jeebus... what are you supposed to do when someone comes along and tells you to pull your thirty-five year old renovated house down because they've invented a new way to hammer nails?

That's right. You ignore them.

Now I write lengthy posts about how nuts all this is, not because I think I'll change anyone's mind, and not because I'm "obsessed" with being proved right, but because, well, damn, it's interesting. I said to my players on Friday that this is a slow running freight crashing into a wall, that I've more or less been around what feels, for me, like forever. I'm fascinated to reflect on this failure for this reason, on these misunderstandings or justifications, on this collective mess that grew and grew simply because there was no Cassandra around to tell Priam, "You're gonna lose, Dad." 'Course, that didn't work out for Cassandra.

D&D has lost. It's a joke. Not among the players, but... just consider. It's had fifty years to convince the world that it isn't a joke. It has acquired millions of nominal admirers while remaining something people expect to outgrow, apologise for or present with a smirk. Hell, they made a movie with the game as its title... as a comedy. Doesn't that sting... just a little? Hm?

Maybe it's just me.

What if...?

We had a discussion before the D&D session started yesterday, which though disjointed in the direction basically revolved around the question, "Was D&D destined to become what it has because that was really the only way it could have?"

Now, I have to be very careful here, because Matthew Colville wants us all to know that "some folks", a "they" who want to rally a community, manipulate the community. And how do "they" do this? You can tell that someone is doing that because "they" begin their message with, "Does anyone else..." or "I think players would prefer it if..."

Sorry, couldn't help dragging this in. You can find this piece of genius at 54:23 of the video, in which Matthew explains how some people invoke some people to make an argument that justifies they're cause. It's a delightful piece of recursive cognitive dissonance, said with the straight face of a man who has utterly no clue that he's engaging in it. The youtube video is a day old as I write this.

My reason for bringing that up is that it would be impossible to argue about anything related to human endeavours without supposing some kind of imagined collective preference: players wanted a thing, audiences rejected a thing, the community moved towards a thing.  Arguing that we can't argue on what groups do fits is a profoundly blind way to suppose we can argue about anything except whether or not we like vanilla ice cream.

I don't wish to argue about my favourite ice cream flavours, so I'm going to have to engage in some discussion about trends. That will, of course, be unlike every other writer and creator on the internet, so please forgive me.

On the whole, I tend to agree that D&D was destined to turn out as it has — but not because the game was inherently written or designed in a specific way, which a spectacularly waffling Mike Mearls more or less blathers about in this interview, from about a year ago — but because at some point the makers of D&D decided that it needed to be a "business" rather than "game designers." This makes sense, and there's an argument to be made that this was inevitable also, given the lack of foresight, intuitiveness or social intelligence of the creators, especially Gary Gygax. In 1973, "game designer" wasn't a profession or an ideal one sought to achieve; what one imagined was that having created a great product, it was a chance to become Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley... or, at the very least, Avalon Hill. That is the message behind the creation of Tactical Strategy Rules. The designers of a few wargames built more or less upon a single concept with various flavours supposed that they were suddenly going to propel themselves into the world of Corporate Scale Wealth. They had stars in their eyes and, as usual with such beings, they tripped over a straw in their blindness... that straw being that none of them knew jack shit about business.

No one can argue that D&D didn't "take off" as a phenomenon. Within just a few years it had reached a scale where mainstream media was aware of it. The problem being, of course, was that mainstream media's approach was all bad. 1982's Mazes and Monsters — funnily enough not mentioned at all in this very good two hour interview with Tom Hanks, where he spends a lot of time talking about how he got started in Hollywood (or, possibly, I missed it), was a mainstream media disaster for any company thinking it was would become huge based on the game's popularity. Further media investigations, which gave equal air time to D&D's detractors, did not promise a rosy future. But by then, the die had been cast, the cubic gate had been crossed. TSR was churning out modules instead of game structure, Gygax was bloviating egomaniacally upon the pages of the Dragon instead of accepting his responsibility as a guru and the rotunda was full of other game companies with knives waiting for TSR to come through the portico. Money merchants would seize the body, stand on it to orate their justifications in butchering the game as it had only barely become known and now, here we are, with Augustus gasping his last while we wonder what sort of Tiberius will next take over the company. In fact, the time frames almost match perfectly to the metaphor.

D&D was never going to be a financial success for numerous reasons, the first being that adults did not understand the premise of the game. That's not a judgment or an accusation, or a measure of adult imagination, it's a simple recognition that the game as structured did not fit with "game" in the minds of older, contented people who had been playing games all their lives. My parents and those of everyone I played with were not "bored" of board games or cards or backgammon or chess or, hell, horseshoes. They appreciated all those traditional, direct, sometimes gently physical games, which could be played competitively or not, restfully or not. They enjoyed those games, they could understand them, they could be explained in five minutes and a pleasant evening could be had taking tricks, pegging, jumping and getting kinged, hammering a couple stakes into the ground twenty paces apart and playing with a beer in hand. Those things were, in 1982, still universally viewed as fun and, more importantly, enough. They felt no special urge to spend hours to understand hundreds of nitpicky confusing rules to produce an experience not unlike, as my mother would say, "playing house."

Second, the "success" among it's adolescent audience was just as constraining. In the 1700 person high school I attended at the start of my game experience, about twenty students altogether played any kind of tactical or role-playing game... and even they could not agree on what was better in 1980. Some preferred Rolemaster, others Chivalry and Sorcery, others Traveller, others Top Secret... D&D was the premiere game among that set, but statistically that meant it was played by 12 out of 20 of that 1700 student body. One does not build a successful corporation on this kind of market share.

Third, the game had a time clock built into it's practical age window. Children become adults who don't have the time to spend six hours in an intellectual activity when what they really want to do it spend Fridays and Saturdays washing the intellectual out of their brains with suds, nachos and yes, obviously, far harder things. This isn't to say that we didn't, our small groups, prefer an intellectual activity of our own rather than spend Friday nights either drunk or stoned, but it is relevant that we were in a very, very small minority, that dwindled frequently as we aged. Again, while Janie and Jimmie could still get together for a rousing game of poker on a Friday night at 20, and continue doing that for the next twenty years, our experience was filled with excuses like, "Um, sorry guys, but I've got a trig final on Monday and I've got to study for it." Followed by steadily and slowly never seen Nathan again.

One realises that the hobby they love isn't really popular when it loses players because they get cars and can run off to the mountains and ski all weekend, among actual thousands and thousands of people. Our little rooms of a few score obsessionists did not compete, nor did we imagine in our wildest imagination that they ever would. When I hear people like Mearls say, "12 million" play D&D, I think, um, yeah, sure. So many that when I say I play in a room with three people in it, I still get blank stares or, at best, that look that conveys, "Oh, you're one of those people."  12 million people my ass. There's a corporate fiction.

ChatGPT tells me that,

"The much-repeated 2017 claim was actually “12 million to 15 million in North America alone,” offered while the executive declined to disclose concrete sales numbers. That substitution is significant: the measurable commercial fact was withheld and replaced by an enormous, unverifiable population claim.

"The category has only become looser since then. Wizards described D&D Beyond’s ten million users as everyone who had used the service since 2017, while Hasbro later announced more than fifty million “fans” and D&D Beyond thanked eighty-five million people worldwide. Those statements do not measure the same thing, and the steady inflation from players to users to fans allows almost anyone who has passed through the brand’s orbit to be counted."

Far be it for me to argue with that level of market research.

To get around to the point, then... given the way the game was approached in the 1970s, given the priorities that were asserted, given the media's reaction to the game, given the limited viability among participants — the inevitable poison was that what was valuable about the game was mercilessly exploited in the same manner as "junk bonds."

I'm begging the metaphor here, so I'll admit that I don't mean the phrase in the manner of promising exceptional returns for an instrument, whose underlying condition is doubtful, because at this moment it can be sacrificed for greater profit. In a sense, D&D was treated that way, because I believe the corporate engine that took over TSR did not believe, truly, that D&D as a concept was going to last. As such, they changed the focus of the game's gestation for considering what might improve the game's value to one where exploitation of the existing asset — that being the players — was best achieved by offering modules that ignored any pretense of improving play or game development. What modules did do, and any other product that could be sold on the backs of the aforementioned asset, was make money, today, for the money managers. No one, I think, was as surprised as they were when D&D proved resilient enough to keep growing as a culture.

By the late 80s, though, seven years of junk shit had been moved onto the market, complimented by additional junk shit that tried to exploit new young players by literally rewriting the game as "basic D&D," so that as an intellectual property, D&D was done. The masters at the helm were all like Mearls — dumbass fan boys bent on doing whatever felt "keen" today, which amounted to shit thrown at walls and then scraped off even after it did stick, because more wall was needed to throw more shit at. I've covered all that part after 1989 before, so I don't want to do it again now.

To write it in the shortest way possible, "developing the game" hasn't been a relevant principle underlying D&D since 1979. Everything since, beginning with the death throes of a badly run TSR under Gygax flopping around like a fish in a boat, followed by money merchants who did not care at all, has been about maintaining a product cycle. Every product produced since 1979 has been produced for that purpose, to make money because money was either needed, and desperately so, or because money could be generated from doofs who did not fucking understand the game they were playing even as more of them grew to like it. The business history of D&D is founded on the simple reality that there are plenty of people dumb enough out there to believe that D&D is played by 85 million people worldwide.

Because there are those who will quibble, let me be frank. Yes, individual designers since 1979 have sincerely attempted to improve the game. There have been rule books that have included good rules and settings, with good material, that can be advantaged by a present-day discriminating DM. But none of those things occurred because the company deliberately set out to empower those designers. They happened because the designers found a large enough gap in the surveillance that they got away with producing something viable and sometimes brilliant inside a corporate structure that simply failed to catch them at it. None of those brilliant designers were regaled or shown appreciation; all of them were eventually moved out the door, in favour of people who would just shut up and take orders. If a product did happen to advance the game, it's important to understand that product wasn't commissioned to do so. Sometimes, smart people just won't take orders.

Fair enough. This is what did happen. And arguably, the pips were going to come up that way from the start... and that being so, if I'm going to blame anyone, it has to be Gygax's parents. They're the ones obviously responsible for producing a puffed-up pompous blowhard of a son, one incapable of self-awareness or humility... the damage being done sometime in the 1950s, before two D's were put together.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we can get into a time machine and show a video to Gary's parents of their egotistical magniloquent of a son, causing them to hit him more or perhaps less or maybe increase the amount of greens in his diet so that he grows up able to play nice with the other kids. What then?

A less vain, more self-aware Gygax might have recognised that D&D was not the foundation of the next Parker Brothers, but a difficult specialist game with a small, unusually committed audience. He might have accepted that the real task was not to expand the company as fast as possible, but to spend twenty years discovering what the game actually was.

This was more or less what half the players argued in the session last night. Effectively, if D&D had been freed from proving itself on the market, if it had addressed the inconsistencies, if it had not struggled to add excessive irrelevant details to play in the manner of "alignment" and deliberately urging the DM to be a morality cop, perhaps D&D wouldn't have gathered the reputation it did as a socially immoral culture exploiting children's morality to sell content. Less visibility in those early days might not have ultimately solved those problems, but perhaps it could have mitigated the narrow market, the aging-out problem, the media panic or the difficulty of sustaining long campaigns among the players. If the designers, not organised into a non-human faced "TSR," but as a bunch of ordinary dudes just playing with the concept, had better managed their presence in the Dragon magazine by actually having a plan for what they published — that magazine being read by literally every player, pretty near fanatically — then perhaps some kind of rational forward momentum could have been created that would have made 2nd and 3rd edition unnecessary. If they had simply ignored the need to be "more popular," because they were hobbyists rather than corporatists, then perhaps in the long run they'd have ended up owning their game rather than having it eventually delivered to Hasbro — a corporation so evil that they considered the children's toy market a fair game for fucking over people younger than 12... and their parents too.

The most important difference is that Gygax might have understood his position as a responsibility rather than a coronation. He might then have realised that importing moral language such as good and evil as characteristics the players were expected to functionally play, was bound to attract the wrong kind of attention from people who treat these matters way too seriously. Had Gygax been willing to step back and let other voices be heard, or have the capacity to encourage frank debate instead of viewing himself as God Almighty, D&D might have found a greater support from that intellectual community willing to view the system in terms of its opportunities for education, social support... even as therapy, which people do use it for right now.

But, of course, many of the beloved products would never have been made. And these are all a lot of "ifs," requiring faith and human patience and unimaginable levels of restraint for people engaged in what remains, after all this time, still essentially a "children's game," played by those who are still expected to quit when they get to college.

I do believe that other "beloved" material would have been produced... that would have been, really, far more popular and valuable than what the community tends to bleat habitually about today. But that is neither here nor there, since we will never know.

Distributing Magic Items

The first step it to identify some 475 magic items that appear in the DMG, which is more than enough for my campaign. I've never felt much need to create more than a basic few items of my own, simple stuff, refilling jugs, flasks that provide healing salves, that sort of thing. But those can be left off the table for now and we can just use what's there in front of us. This collection of items appears as a list from pages 121 to 125 of the DMG, with a lot of description afterwards, most of it inadequate to the purpose.

The next step is to identify all the "sub-types" for those listed. For example, from the list shown, we have "dragon control" potion, but not which dragon is controlled, just as we don't know which giant is controlled or which giant's strength is obtained from the giant strength potion. These sub-types are determined by an additional roll that is made in the description of the potion: for example, the dragon control potion type is determined by a d20 roll found on p.125.

The reason this matters is because what's wanted is a likelihood ratio for all items as if they they were listed together in one table. To determine at the start whether to roll on the "potions" table or the "scrolls" table, and so on, there's an initial table at the top of page 121 that one rolls on first. To get the result of a white dragon potion, one has to roll first on that top table to determine a "potion," then on the potions table to get a "dragon control potion" as the result, then that d20 table to get "white dragon control potion." That's three tables. The total chance of getting that specific potion is therefore 0.2 x 0.02 x 0.1, which equals 0.0004. What's wanted is that universal number for every magic item, so that they can all be compared with each other, dispensing with tables that need us to roll on tables that in turn need us to roll on another table.

The system is fine. But what's wanted to is to create a new set of tables, from scratch, and not use that are pre-existing... while at the same time not actually changing the chance of each item in and of itself occurring as something the players can find.

Why accept the DMG's numbers? Because I've play-tested them for 47 years and those averages may be close to the best organisation of any part of original D&D. The only real problem is that they offer a chance of getting an incredibly powerful item when rolling for things that are much more common. That's not desirable. Not at all. What we want can be found on this page of my wiki.

The concept for determining a randomly given magic item is essentially this. First, we build a separate but easy to make table for the monster being plundered:

This is the troglodyte treasure, as discussed on this post, discarding the "treasure type A" moniker completely by merely designating the amount of treasure per individual, the only number that actually matters. From the above, if you kill ONE troglydyte in his personal lair, where he's just been hanging around a bunch of time, his wealth will equal 65 c.p., 137 s.p., 326 g.p., less than one gem and therefore none, less than one jewellery and therefore none, less than 100 magic item experience (the bare minimum needed) and therefore none. This total treasure compares rather fairly with how much a 2nd level fighter player character tends to have from adventuring, so why should the trog be any different?

Of course this can be viewed as an average. The single trog may have more, or it may have less... and logically, if this is what the trog keeps as wealth while not adventuring with others, this wealth may be secretly buried in a forest (in a "lair" some 8 inches cubed that consists of a hole, a bag and a large rock on top) where its not likely to be found. That's not the point. What matters is that we have a rational total, perhaps balanced by a die roll, that assures to things: a trog definitely has something, and it isn't the ridiculous 3-18 c.p. that orcs in the original game are assumed to carry around, for purposes that are never explained, since there are no stores to spend copper pieces at where the orcs are, and in game you can't buy much more than a chicken with that kind of scratch.

What matters is not what "one trog" carries regardless — because as a DM, you're never going to throw one trog at the party anyway. You know that five first levels are going to waste the trog forthwith, so logically the trog knows that too... and knows that there is safety in numbers. A lone trog is only "lone" for one reason: it's lost where the rest of its kin are.

The Magic Item Distribution page on the wiki, linked above, includes the following line: "With 22.3 x.p. per troglodyte, the total is 691, the fraction ignored. As such, one roll would be made on Table I and one upon Table III." Table I is sketched out on the page, broken into "Common Magic Items" with a sub-table for items so unlikely that they don't fit easily into the d100 format. The Rod of Absorption, with 1 charge, for example, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of being rolled randomly. That is also the likelihood of three other rods, one staff and two different wands. The reduced likelihood deserves an explanation.

Table I accounts for magic items with 100 to 200 x.p. value as rated by the DMG. Rods have 50 charges in them and the DMG states that a fully charged rod of absorption is worth 7,500 x.p. That makes each charge worth 150... so, a rod with 1 charge fits into the Table I range.

However, the base chance for rolling a rod of absorption from all possible magic items is 0.5 (the rods, staves and wands table) x 0.03 (1-3 of one hundred of the table itself). This equals a chance of 0.0015;
but importantly, a 1 charge rod has only a 1 in 50 chance of being found among all the rods of that kind out there (by the logic I'm using), so that chance is reduced by another 0.02 to a final chance of 0.00006. Considerably less of a chance than finding a healing potion.

Here's my workup of Table I in excel (please just ignore the shading):

Everything that didn't produce enough chance to push the die roll another point in the main table was shoved into the rare item subtable, which is rolled on if 98-00 is rolled on the common table. The numbers all reflect how many charges at this table rank count against the total charges of that item: a wand of magic has 8 out of 100 possible charges, while the wand of metal & mineral detection has 13 out of 100 possible. Together, that's why these are more likely, along with the fact that the DMG makes them more likely overall.

At this point some wise ass raises a hand and says, "Hey, if the wand of illumination has 20 x.p. per charge, why can't the single troglodyte have an illumination wand with 1 charge? Huh? Why not?"

Because, totally arbitrarily, I'm setting a 100 x.p. minimum for magic. Point in fact, by the logic I've just explained, the 1 charge illumination wand would have a 0.000025 chance out of 1 (0.0025%) chance of existing at all. Thus out of 40,000 single troglodytes out there, one of them would have a single charge illumination wand. Yeah. I'm drawing the 100 x.p. line against this sort of nonsense, and pegging the table at 150 x.p. average for distribution purposes. You don't like it, you go ahead and do it your way.

I think this about covers it. I tried to manage the same process with determining the percentage of scrolls based on the scroll table in the DMG and, I must say, I'm not really satisfied that my judgment was sound there. I'm okay with the result... and at some point screwing around getting more accurate so that a number can be changed from 15 to either 14 or 16 just doesn't become worth the skull sweat. Like a bad accountant, I tend to think, "Well, I'm close... so fuck it."

See, it's the way Gygax conceived of scroll distribution on that table... which is really, really annoying. Go look at it.

That's about all. I still have to make table III (I have it in excel right now, but not laid out on the wiki) before Friday's game... unless, of course, the party all die or they fail to get the treasure. But I don't know they will, so I have to ready that table in case they succeed.

Are we all having fun?

Calculating the Value of Pretty Stones

I haven't touched on this for awhile, but it's relevant so I'll give some background.

Sorry I can't publish this in a larger format. It opens fine in another window, though.

The list here includes "ornamental stones," the commonest sort, the kind that Blaine recently referred to as "fish tank" rocks, which isn't far wrong. Yet while it's true that a "cherry-sized" rock that's an agate is worth a mere 30 c.p. in Budapest, I rush to point out that 30 copper coins weigh about 1.62 pounds, the same size agate weighs just less than 2/5ths of an ounce. Chat tells me it takes about 540 such rocks to fill the bottom of an 18 by 12 inch fish tank, which equals 16,376 copper pieces of value, or about 85 g.p., at a weight of about 13 pounds. 85 gold pieces weighs about 21 and a quarter ounces, so polished agates clearly aren't worth their weight in gold, but still, not bad.

I think the real issue isn't that "low price gems" don't have a meaningful value, it's rather that the encumbrance of things really isn't considered very closely, and most every "value" is compared to the player's need for the next experience level. 85 g.p. is not going to get a group of 5th level players very far down that road, so it feels pretty silly when that's all the gems are worth.

The table above is highlighted where the gemstone of that size is worth 5 g.p. or better on it's own. For the agate, that's a chunk the size of an apple, 8.65 cub.in., about the size of a Spartan. 540 of those would fill a chest that's two feet long, 18 inches high and 18 inches deep... or about five to six standard bushel baskets. Their total value would be 2,951 g.p. and their weight about 447 lb. That amount in gold pieces would weight 46 lb., for the sake of curiousity.

I promise, if I give that weight of agate to a party, they're going to figure out how to move 447 lb.

But, all this is old news. I've had these elements as part of my gems table for a long time. Why bring it up now?

Well, because the standard AD&D table produces a "10 g.p. gem," not a "10 g.p. agate," and I've never been able to reconcile the old table and my new work in a way that I could produce it quickly in game play. But, thanks to ChatGPT, I can now.

This is a basic, simple table, with every line representing a randomly generated gem. I've replaced the DMG labels of "ornamental, fancy, semi-precious..." et al because I've repurposed those labels for the gems themselves. The "bead" essentially equals the 10 g.p. category from the DMG, with the "bauble" equalling the 50 g.p. category and the "gemstone" being the 100 g.p. Here, the combination of "stone" with "gem" is meant to convey that we're not talking about shining glistening jewel that the hero reaches for in hand of the enormous statue in some treasure room... that would be a "brilliant." Gemstones are just the everyday decently valued "stones" that have beauty but a fairly ordinary presence in a lapidary's shop.

Simply explained, the "gem" (used as the general term) is rolled on the far left on a d100, adjusted from the DMG. I'm using 01-44 (bead), 45-69 (bauble), 70-85 (gemstone), 86-95 (gem), 96-99 (jewel) and 00 (brilliant). That's a sharp change from page 25 of the DMG, if you want to look it up.

The formulas get so long here that it's not practical to show them inside the table... so this part is just for the excel nerds. Normality shall ensue soon. But, here's an image for framing what's going on, showing just ten generated gems



The DMG stipulates that each stone gets a d10 rolled for it, and if a "1" is generated, then that stone goes up to the next category: that is, a bead becomes a bauble, a bauble a gemstone, a gemstone a gem and so on. I wasn't sure how to do this in excel, but ChatGPT managed it of course. This is the formula appearing in the M column:

=IF(L3=1,IF(B3="sm bead","bead",IF(B3="bead","bauble",IF(B3="bauble","gemstone",IF(B3="gemstone","gem",IF(B3="gem","jewel",IF(B3="jewel","brilliant","lg brilliant")))))),IF(L3=10,IF(B3="lg brilliant","brilliant",IF(B3="brilliant","jewel",IF(B3="jewel","gem",IF(B3="gem","gemstone",IF(B3="gemstone","bauble",IF(B3="bauble","bead","sm bead")))))),B3))

On a 10 rolled (no examples on the table), it downgrades the stone to the category lower. If a "brilliant" is pushed up, it becomes a "large brilliant;" if downgraded, a "bead" becomes a "small bead."

Thus, you can see that line 9 changed "bead" in column B to "bauble" in column M. That allows column N to reassess the value:

=IF(L3=1,IF(M3="sm bead",C3,IF(M3="bead",D3,IF(M3="bauble",E3,IF(M3="gemstone",F3,IF(M3="gem",G3,IF(M3="jewel",H3,IF(M3="brilliant",I3,J3))))))),IF(L3=2,K3*2,IF(L3=3,K3*(1+RANDBETWEEN(1,6)/10),IF(L3<9,K3,IF(L3=9,K3*(1-RANDBETWEEN(1,4)/10),IF(L3=10,IF(M3="sm bead",C3,IF(M3="bead",D3,IF(M3="bauble",E3,IF(M3="gemstone",F3,IF(M3="gem",G3,IF(M3="jewel",H3,IF(M3="brilliant",I3,J3))))))),K3))))))

This is doing a bit more. A roll of "2" doubles the original value, a roll of "3" adds 10-60% to the value; a roll of 9 reduces the value by 10-40%. All this is done automatically, so I don't have to think about it.

Column's O through R then do a second basic check, in which another 1 doubles the size of the gem. I did not use any other modifier for this column, because I really don't want to generate smaller gems. 5 g.p. is about as small as I want to bother about.

Then, the fun part. And oh, how I like this.

This shows the calculation for fitting in those gems that have been created by the pricing table correctly to the value generated by the table. Here, I'll show this without the formula, adding a few more lines and all the relevant columns:

There we are. Look at line 3: a roll of 78 produces a "gemstone" with a value of 100 g.p.; two worth checks adjust the price not at all, so that it remains what it was. BUT... and this is the absolute bliss of this thing for me:

Never again do I have to tell a player, "you find a 100 g.p. gem." Nope, it's a "tourmaline the size of an almond." The actual price of the thing is not a 100 g.p., as it happens, but that's how much x.p. I'm going to give for it. The price will matter as to where it is sold.

By the way, I don't know why there are five walnut-sized fire opals... I pressed refresh and got none. Just coincidence. Here's the lookup page for those interested, though it's not easy to read in this format.

For the first time in, what, nearly 20 years, I feel like I don't have enough varieties of gem. That's just awesome, I think.

This same structure more or less can be applied to jewelry, but I've just done a little bit of work with that so far. The look-up page can be effectively endless, but it is also has the unbelievable potential for work that will never end.

As such, when I pick up the next post on treasure, it'll be about magic.

Session 12: Round and Round

The party re-entered the trog dungeon for the fourth time, though it is a significant sized space, especially considering there's a whole other half that is utterly unexplored. But this night, the fight was here, with the players entering at (1) and entering the area that had been mapped out previously. They caught sight of troglodytes at once, who promptly skedaddled, as they were just there to track the party as it entered. It did not take the party long to remember that the space was a roundabout, and that the intention of the trogs was to trap them somewhere and attack them from two sides. So they left a hireling, Oddsdrakken, at (2) and proceeded towards (4). The two trogs they'd seen at the corner of (3) assembled with others... the first group attacked at (5) and the party was able to make good meat of them quickly, unlike the earlier combat. For one thing, most of the party had made their saves this time and were sustained by the presence of Zoltan, whereas in their first meeting with the trogs they'd been down both Zoltan and Ti; this time, Ti still couldn't make it, but the extra body made a big difference.

The second group attacked at (6) and, amazingly, Lexent, his dust devil spell and the man-at-arms Fenwick did a pretty good job against them until Zoltan could come down and join them from the other fight. Both fights ended quickly enough, though there were some moments of tension that had plainly worried the party at points. Nonetheless, it worked out in their favour and they chose to continue.

A point about combat... because for the last two runnings it has pretty much been two combats in each session. This really was two combats taking place at the same time, though as the one at (6) was starting, (5) was in the wrapping up stage. I've had some argue that they can run five or six combats in a 4 hour session, but I'll be damned if I know how. At a few points during the combat I was pushing to roll and call the party to act as fast as I could; I did miss some details and was reminded about them, which I always appreciate. I told the players that I was merely trying to keep the pace going as rapidly as possible, which means someone pretty much talking non-stop. There were no moments of reflection during the game; no one made an outside reference to a film, a product, another situation that had happened at some other time. The players were utterly into the combat, 100%... which means, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how many combats were getting played, the ones being played was utterly engrossing.

That is what should matter, nyet?

Pushing past (7) on the map above, the party searched this next part of the dungeon, found upon the adjoining page.

This image shows the battle in progression after the party had made their way to the trog's personal lair. The two other passages might have given the trogs an opportunity to get behind the party and trap them in a dead end, but the party picked right of the three choices before them, and thus the final battle is on going. The party were mid-round when I looked at the clock and found we'd already passed our assigned stopping time; I pointed this out and everyone was surprised. We were all in flow, utterly unaware of the time or anything except the game, which I count as a successful run. In fact, I'd call it the best session I've had with this campaign, and among my best ever, so far as engagement counts. I felt a rush the rest of the evening and experienced none of the usual emotional "drop" that follows post-game. This session just went too well.

So, there are 11 trogs left; one is apparently glowing without anyone knowing why, while two are glowing with the party's faerie fire spell just now. Four of the trogs are stunned (red stops) while those players who have yellow crosses have failed their save. The green number is counting the number of rounds the nausea has been in effect (I do not give it a limit, like it has in the original Monster Manual). The green dot is Lexent's loaded sling for the next round to fire. I use the purple dot for someone casting a spell, because I do not permit casting and release of spells to happen in the same turn. This weakens my mages and gives more purpose to the fighters. The two purple dots atop the trogs are the cantrip twitch cast by Mikael the mage.

You can see plainly the trogs will be fighting first when the game re-commences, this Friday.

The Beach

Spent the day at Sylvan Lake Beach today, temperature 30-31 C (84-86 F), with a humidity index of 33 C (91 F). I am now nicely boiled like a lobster, with putting sunscreen on twice. Now rich with medicated cream and comfortable. It was a very fine day, plenty of play with my grandson, water, sand, a terrific spot on the beach and great food. Just wanted to write this for the sake of days come this winter, so I can look back on this and sigh.

I will get that Session report out as soon as I can.

Fixing Treasure Tables

I should be writing a post describing the events of the Discord Campaign, Friday the 10th, but I've been working on a different project related to that campaign... in fact inspired by it. All this is old school stuff, so it won't help you with your later edition game. Sorry. My fixes are always in some way related to AD&D, not because it's "good," but because its familiar. I know where all the bugs are.

As such, this post isn't going to make a lot of sense to many except us old farts, but...

This horrid piece of trash is the infamous Treasure Type table from the original Monster Manual:

This is as much as the screen capture would produce. I could pull out my own manual, put it in my scanner and give the whole thing, but as I don't care (and it's probably somewhere on Google), it's sufficient for my purposes. The concept is more or less this: a monster such as a "troglodyte," which the party has been fighting of late (31, by my count), has a specific "type" of treasure, as shown below, beneath % IN LAIR.

The trog's "treasure type" is A, the first line on the above image. It shows a 25% chance of 1-6 thousands of copper, a 30% of 1-6 thousands of silver... and so on. We don't need to get excessive with listing things there. The idea (and no, this isn't the whole story, but it's the part we're going to use, so just roll with it) is to roll these and then compare the numbers obtained with the "No. Appearing" on the trog page. Thus, if you get 5,000 c.p. on the treasure type table, and you find 1 troglodyte in his "lair," then presumably he has 5,000/100 = 50 c.p. in his possession.

Like I said, no, it's not exactly like that. There's a lot of silly rules that are in no way consistent throughout the books about lairs and minimum numbers and so on, but please ignore that. It's not relevant.

Like most people, I've always hated the treasure table. The players always wind up fighting something hard and a bunch of bad rolls arise so the players end up with a paltry amount of treasure... so you have to ignore the shitty table and just give straight treasure as seems best. Or the players fight the easiest battle they've ever had and suddenly the treasure table works in their favour. It's too random, too inconsistent...

And yet, I've always felt that on some level, it was the good root of an idea. Only, I spent about fifteen years occasionally trying to find it to no avail. No matter how I turned the numbers around or made the rolls, it just wouldn't provide a consistent, practical number. A certain number of troglodytes should consistently have a certain amount of things, just as any large group of people that act independently accumulate a reasonable wealth merely by existing. Trogs have a fairly decent treasure, compared to orcs, say. And they ought to. The trogs my players have fought over two sessions have killed one of their party and have come very close to effecting a total party kill. The question, though, is how to produce that treasure logically, without pulling a number out of our ass.

But after years of failing to produce such a number, I sighed and, before launching this blog in 2008, I'd long since quit trying. Now and then, someone here has asked me about assigning treasure, and I've had no answer.

Until, I think, now.

Starting by compiling the original numbers for Type A treasure:

Those are the excel functions. We start by ignoring the "random" generation and just multiply the percentage of a type of coin against that amount of coin, doubling the chance of each type. Thus, it's 50% for 1-6 thousand copper (average 3500), and 60% for 1-6 thousand silver. The number of gems is 100% times 4-40 (average 22), while jewelry is 3-30 automatically also (average 16.5). We treat magic as special, ignoring the percentage, counting 3 treasure. Magic items are a special category and are dealt with differently, as I shall get to eventually (and not with this post).

It'll be helpful to see the calculations of the above and here they are. Adding up the total experience from each, we get a total of 113,076 for 100 troglodytes... dividing that between the 100 possible appearing, that's... 1,131 per creature.

Wait a minute. What?

Is that 97,000 g.p. next to jewellery a typing error? Why the hell is it so bloody high?

Well...

The "jewelry table" (American spelling) appears on page 26 of the original DMG, reproduced below, with it's description intact.

For reasons that surpass all comprehension, there's a 60% chance of getting an average piece of jewelry that's worth more than 1750 g.p., and an incredibly 30% chance of getting a piece with an average of 5,000 g.p. altogether. In fact, if you balance out the average across the table, the average is 2,910 g.p. per piece on the first roll.

However, the rules state that you should roll a d10 and a d8 to see if the "workmanship" or the "inset gems" are exceptional in some way... and if you use this rule, you get an average of 5,919 g.p. ... not because rolling a 1 on either die is likely, but because the cumulative effect of rolling said dice on multiple items creates jewellery of simply extravagant results. Jewellery by itself totally dwarfs the rest of the treasure types table, whenever it occurs... and frankly, though I've been at this game a long time, I can't ever recall having noticed this before to this extent. It's enough to convince me that I must have the math wrong, somewhere. Still, I can't help looking at those odds of getting an average piece over 5,000 g.p. That alone, even if I've screwed up the average (and I may have, I'm not perfect), is enough to make me feel that jewellery table needs serious adjustment.

Here's my new table... formula version first.

This really isn't a complicated calculation. It generates a d1000, then divides the chances of that between "wares," "valuables," "treasures," "adornment", "regalia" and "masterpiece."  A big problem I always had with the DMG table was that "gold with gems" doesn't really mean a damn thing since I don't know the type of jewellery (necklace vs. earring, for instance) or how much actual gold vs. amount of gems is being used. So, that's tossed in favour of trying to capture a "use" principle in these expressions.

"Wares" (20-80 g.p.) are valuable things one might own in a living space. "Valuables" (80-480 g.p.) are things that someone of the merchant/artisan class might especially esteem, but really is still just a higher quality ware. "Treasures" (240-1920 g.p) are the sort of thing that are kept either hidden or under lock and key; they're just too valuable to leave lying about.

"Adornment" (480-4800 g.p.) falls into things that are designed specifically to be worn or carried on a social-authority level, short of an actual monarchy: a guild or captain's crest, a lord or bishop's evidence of office, that sort of thing. "Regalia" (1440-7200 g.p.) thus fits the category of what a monarch wears; logically, one monarch may wear or carry half a dozen such items. Finally, the last category, the "masterpiece" is a one-of-a-kind artwork, worth (4050-13500 g.p.). Said regalia may be something that is in fact being sought after; or it may be something long forgotten from another age. Masterpieces might have a lineage of who made them or where they're from... but that's not necessarily something that needs tracking in the creation of the table.

If you transpose the above formulas, you can create a series of lines in which each line produces a result:

To be honest, I've played with this and regalia/masterpieces come up a bit too often... that might need some work. But as it's built now, the table produces an average jewellery value of 376 before checking for special... 414 if a "1" rolled merely doubles the value of the jewellery.

Lost? I hope not. I've tried to explain this as carefully as possible. Multiplied against those 16.5 jewellery in our original table, the total value of jewellery is down to 6,837... very close to the gems, though the two numbers are arrived at separately. So I'm fairly pleased with that amount.

But what about the 90,826 experience lost from the treasure type? Do we just throw that away?

Here's where things get fun.

Starting with coins. I don't use "electrum" and "platinum", so the latter is folded into the value of gold (125*5 = 750 x.p.)+4400 g.p. (4400 x.p.); this is then added to 85%*that 90,000 we lost from jewellery... and the total of all three of these together is divided by three. The total is that shown: 32,696 g.p. per type A lair.

Electrum's 1225 x.p. is added to silver's 105 x.p.; then 10% of the lost x.p. from jewellery is added to this and again, the total is divided by three. THEN, importantly, I give players 1 x.p. per 3 silver, rather than the silver value in gold. Thus, we get a nice tidy 13,756 x.p. for the silver that's here.

Finally, copper's 4 x.p. is added to 5% of that lost from jewellery and the total is divided by 3. I give 1 x.p. per 4 copper, so we get 6,528 x.p. from the copper found. With gems, jewellery and magic, the total is 54,804... without my needing to build a new treasure type table from scratch.

Crazy? Perhaps. But I like the number 553 x.p. per trog. Since my experience system gives 10 x.p. per hit point, plus another 40 x.p. for every point of damage the players suffer, the party has already achieved more than a thousand each from getting banged around during their various fights. Another total of 17,000 x.p. on top of that (yes, party members, there it is in the room with you, right now, just waiting for you to win one more battle) seems perfectly fair.

I could build in a 25% swing, so that dice are rolled to permit 75% to 125% of the totals shown here... but just now, I don't see the sense. These trogs have a reputation as raiders, so it doesn't make sense for them to be short of treasure from that. Just now, I want to see how it plays out.

The next post I write will be the campaign, and then I'll pick this up again... if you're interested. I swear to St. Crispin's ashes, if this post doesn't get at least five comments, I'm not writing another word on this subject.

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.