Forget Hooks; Try Threads

The last post did so badly I'd better get started writing a new one.

As a teacher, I probably don't use repetition often enough. I write some concept out here on the blog, then I walk away from it without addressing it again for literally years, sometimes a full decade... assuming the reader understands, that they "got the lesson," when in fact it was only partly understood and no doubt needed revisiting more often.

My best posts are those in which I teach myself. My thoughts are often scattered before I start to write, a sort of "thought pile" waiting to be ordered and tagged in some manner, for which writing serves as a method. As I writer, I'm what other writers these days have taken to calling a "gardener": I plant a seed, such as the start of this post, then begin writing and see where it goes. I sketch it out the first tendrils of the idea, which then appear as callbacks in later paragraphs, so that ideas I lightly discussed at the outset are revisited and fleshed out more wholly, until miraculously, without a second draft, I pull the whole thing together at the end as though it were designed... but it isn't designed. I just have a memory that allows me to connect something I said at the start to something else I've thought of in the last minute. It is a practiced skill, honed over time.

As such, I don't write outlines. I've tried, but I always wind up not using them because invariably as a long story progresses, I have a better idea than I had at the outset, which actually doesn't deviate from the story or the article so far. As such, I simply throw away the outline and keep going.

This idea that structure emerges through conceptualisation serves me very well in comprehending my D&D setting. I've been thinking that there is a way of breaking down that process so that it can be explained, even taught, if perhaps the explanation is repeated with example after example. I thought I'd try it here, as a way of working though how to better explain setting design on a micro-scale for those who I've heard say they have no skill at it. I don't think this is a waste of time. I've been creating setting moments in D&D for more than 46 years and I'm not bored of it yet, nor do I think I know everything about it, since often I still find myself confronted by the problem, "Okay, what do I do with the players now?"

There are always those who will say, "I don't need this." Many of them will insist that since they only run modules, either their own or someone else's, there's never any reason to investigate the environment of the setting and "produce" for it. That frankly baffles me, but only because I insist on viewing D&D not as set-piece adventures one after another, but a single ongoing saga that begins with players sitting around a bar and steadily transforms, without any apparent intervention or contrivance, into an unpredictable, spontaneously developing narrative that moves the party towards a series of events that "shake the world," merely from single decisions and unpredictable outcomes that gather as they roll downhill. I can't say, and don't want to say, what a given party of mine might one day find themselves doing that shakes the Pillars of Heaven... but if they should get there, if it happens, it won't be on account of something I've planned or something the players at the outset wanted. And it yet it shall feel, at the moment, utterly organic and natural, as though we always knew this was our destination.

How is this wrought, however? That is the puzzle. The typical DM sits at the table with nothing prepared, is faced with a village the players have just entered... and has not one thing to say about it. Inevitably, all there are is tropes. An old man approaches the party... a person at the bar pushes the fighter... we see a man murdered... an unidentified body turns up in the street. For most, "spontaneous D&D" is an amateur class of streaming television plot generation, in which some detective is called to a scene, a family member bursts into the room with an announcement... or a guy with a card tells the contestants what the contest is going to be about today. That's as far as "creative reach" reaches. I don't say it to disparage. I say it because it's the problem to be overcome.

There is an artificiality in the trigger because it has no connection to the village whatsoever. Even the village has no connection to a "village" in any conceived sense. DMs tend to view the game world as we might small towns along the side of a road we pass at 65 miles an hour, where each is a similar collection of houses, trees, parks, a main street and a highway that allows us to just blow past it. Warren is not significantly different from Wentworth or from Rumney or Plymouth or Ashland or New Hampton or Franklin as we drive south on I-93... which I can say from personal experience because I have driven south on I-93. I could say the same about Waldeck, Herbert, Chaplin, Mortlach or Caronport as one drives east on the TransCanada highway. We don't know these places except by the names, because we've not lived there, we've not conceived of life there, we haven't any sense of the people or the homes or the reason for the town's presence as all, because we're just driving by. This is D&D, also, when we add dots and names to a map. We're just driving past. We're not thinking about these places.

Let's try an experiment. Here is a part of the world that I mapped today, that I have no previous experience with because I only just discovered the land form as I created the map. Because I run in the real world, it is of course a real place... as it happens, in Italy.

This is the Marano Lagoon, atop the Adriatic Sea, northeast of Venice. Until today, as I've said, I knew nothing about it. Reading through Wikipedia, I find the usual largely useless details for either imagination or D&D, not because Wikipedia isn't thorough, but because it's thorough about the wrong things: we learn the size, when the lagoon formed, what the houses are made of in the area, the name of a typical boat that's used there, a little bit of touristy information, the depth, the location of political or religious structures, the names of towns around the lagoon, travel details, economic details, a little bit of geographical description of the shore... and the article is done.

We have this, also, from GoogleEarth:

Geographically, we can glean a little more. This isn't the 17th century, obviously, but from this we can see the land is almost entirely arable; we can see that the lagoon isn't uniform, it is filled with channels and thus currents, inconsistencies, a collection of small backwaters, shallow places, places where the environment is hazardous, opportunities for natural and unnatural creatures alike to steal into the bay or live here. It is large enough that even something as large as a dragon turtle to sit quietly in the mud unnoticed, for weeks at a time before stealing out to sea. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Pretend that the players do not exist. Imagine the setting has nothing to do with them; it is not an adventure service provider, it is not there to be discovered or crawled over or clensed of its monsters. That is the usual structure we consider when we invent a part of the game world, but the weakness in that thinking is that it limits our imagination as creators. It causes us to think of this place as a vehicle, not a place; a filing system, not something alive. And this last is incredibly important while being egregiously overlooked. The players cannot imagine themselves as there, if it's so flat in its construction that they might as well be watching pictures of it on a Viewmaster... one of those ancient things where you flip a lever and the next picture rotates into place. Game settings are therefore usually no better than corpses, just laying there waiting for the players to come along and find them. That is no way to bring about immersion.

Recall that at the start of this post I spoke about invention... the sense of just coming up with things from the setting as it exists. That isn't possible unless the setting has the potential to surprise the DM with its possibilities. This is why, most of all, that I want to stress that the setting is not there for the players. It is there to provide opportunities for us to be creative out of what we learn or imagine about the place.

As such, let's imagine making the setting not for a purpose except its own. We are shaping the environment of Merano so that we understand it. And for the sake of applying a structure to the lives of the people who dwell in this place, for their own reasons, without being Disney actors in a D&D theme park, let's employ Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Every person contained in this setting has the same fundamental structure that affects their day, regardless of their wealth, power, skillset or where on the map they are: they must eat, they must have shelter, they must sleep... they have drives that encourage them to seek others and engage in sex. These things, including breathing and excretion, seem incidental, but consider how much society must be organised on some level to effect the servicing of these needs. Humans must shit, so the shit must go somewhere. For a time, no doubt, it can be moved into the lagoon, but after a thousand years of that, no, it's been proved by then that's not sustainable. It may seem silly to the reader, wondering where the people of Merano shit, but in fact this has always been a very serious problem in the organisation of human culture. It is worth at least a minute's thought, if we're going to make the place real.

Moving up on the scale, we find ourselves digging into the very structure of society. A hamlet cannot merely be a place where the residents fish, it must be made safe. The resources, both those that must be gotten from elsewhere and those that are produced locally in abundance, must be managed somehow. Property must be divided. Families bond together, support each other, distrust outsiders who threaten our food or our safety. Those without property need employment; there are right and wrong ways to act, to approach others, reaching into what we wear, carry and what we believe both religiously and socially.

So we ask ourselves, what do these people count as important? There is little opportunity in the 17th century, or earlier if the game world is set in a more primitive time, for these people to have obtained an education. And while yes, the trope of residents being distrustful of strangers holds to some degree, there are so many people here, in a part of the world where access to the sea makes certain that there will always be strangers in some manner, the larger question is what does the stranger have that I might want, and what do I have that the stranger might want. In a place like Merano, between Venice and Trieste, with multiple little hamlets everywhere, the bigger question is not, "Who are you and what do you want?" It's, "Do you have anything to trade?"

Already this lifts us free of a few tropes. The people are not isolated; they are hungry for news; they need to know what changes may have taken place in the larger centres. In this part of the Adriatic there are many refugees, pirates, smugglers, traders and mercenaries, none of whom have any particular reason to plunder people who raise food, catch fish, ship fish to larger markets and rarely trade in coins. What is collected is taken to larger places and sold, and then while still there the money is converted into potables, tools or contrivances that are brought home. Coin is not hoarded, for what possible purpose would coins not translated into something useful be for?

Now, how do I know this? Am I making it up? I told you, I've never heard of this place... and I linked wikipedia and it obviously has nothing to say about this. I linked Maslow but anyone can see from the page that it provides a guide for inference, not a description of Merano Lagoon. So, have I said anything of value, or is this all just flimflamery?

Not at all. I'm taking a real geography, applying a pre-technological condition, addressing ordinary social and biological needs, the visible existence of the lagoon, the presence of farmable land and water that teems with fish before overfishing ruins it, sea access, the presence of nearby centres outside the map, like Monfalcone in the upper right, then asking what must be true of people generation after generation living in an environment like this.

I can do that because I study geography not to use it as a shortcut for a D&D world, but to appreciate it. My first love was geography, which meshed so well with D&D when I discovered the latter. I comprehend the technology of the period because I've steeped myself in it. I can conceive of what it must be like to walk and not drive, or depend upon animals, because I accept at face value what I've read in books, both non-fiction and fiction... and I find it difficult to imagine that people then lived constantly in some kind of perceived fear because they were limited to the resources at hand. Because they didn't know any other kind of life, because they had every reason to believe they could defend themselves just as we do now, I believe they did what we do: dreamed of things they wanted, learned what was within reach, applied themselves methodically to supporting themselves and their families, looked after their children, attended to their parents, married, left home, died of disease... just as we do, though in our own different way. But again, they didn't know their life wasn't perfectly normal. We might be terrified to live in their time, but they were not. So all the constantly assumption that NPCs in a D&D world existing on the edge of violence just makes no sense for me. I don't assume that when a party enters a village that the residents can't wait to hang them. I think the villagers just want a little news, to make an exchange, to maybe remark on the strangers and then get on with their lives.

Because of this, I don't need to create the old man who approaches the party with a pat speech and seventeen notes about what to look out for while sending them off to Castle Runerock. I can have a peasant on the road look up as the players approach, ask why they're here, hear the players say the usual thoughtless prattle about "We're looking for treasure and a dungeon," and translate that into 17th century speak: "We just want to know what's hereabouts."

"Well sir," (because the player is heeled out in armour and weapons), "You'd most likely be wanting to speak with the folk up at that there castle, just beyond yon hill. Most folks like your sort set out for that place sooner or later."

The castle isn't a set-piece. Everyone knows about it. They just don't do anything about it because, well, they're peasants. What are they gonna do? They've gotten used to it, orked in the sight of it, avoided it, gone near it when required and stayed away as policy. But they're not confused about it being there. It's not a secret. And if the player chooses to kill the messenger, so often a problem with emissary adventure delivery systems, nothing's changed. Castle's still there. One less peasant in the world, reduced to a somewhat inconvenient body on the side of the road, with nothing accomplished.

And here is the leap forward to be made: the element that makes the adventure, like the castle, is part of the landscape. That's all. It's just there. There's no need for a hook. The players will go toward a castle, an abandoned church, a hole in the ground, like moths to a flame. Making the adventure is not the problem. The problem is having the adventure mean anything.

The typical module undertakes this problem by first creating a reason for the thing to be gotten into. Then this reason must be conveyed, for reasons that make no sense, before the thing is seen or heard about. Why? Because it is perceived, like a book, that the characters must be introduced, the plot must be introduced, the motive must be introduced, before the scene can start. But D&D is not a book and it is not a story. The players seriously just don't care: "Is that a hole in the ground?" "Yes." "Let's see where it leads."

No actual logic is necessary. The game provides the motivation by ensuring that wealth, advancement, special benefits and excitement are probable. No story-like motive is necessary.

Meaning is not conveyed by purpose, but by what is found. When the castle or the church or the hole is cleared, what was discovered? What message was written on a wall, what skull was found, what colour was the dust of the former resident when the tomb was opened atop the tower? What does this mean? Why is this here? Where would we learn that? Who could tell us?

These questions provide motive that the players make for themselves, without our needing to make up anything. We don't even need to ensure they choose these specific questions. If there is some oddity that's found, the players will invent questions without needing to be prompted. Our goal, then, is to answer them interestingly.

Let us return to the lagoon. The players aren't interested in getting a boat and tooling around on the water, they aren't interested in picking a random swamp and cutting their way into it. They have no interest in this village at all unless it happens to be next to something that might have treasure or excitement connected with it. So we have to ask ourselves, first, where something like that might logically be? Is there an abandoned church? Probably not, churches tended to be expensive to build and thus were sincerely cared for. Is there a dungeon? Probably not, the water table is quite high. Is there a castle? No, again probably not, the land is flat and soggy and a castle needs a good hill to sit on. So what is there?

Well, as I mentioned, there are refugees, pirates, smugglers, traders and mercenaries... which makes abandoned camps that refugees have been driven out of; ships run aground in a storm; crates and barrels just visible on the bottom where they've been cast off in time to avoid discovery; a desolated village days after it was raided, now inhabited who knows what; a stand-off between enemies right now in progress; river bandits attacking parties upon the shore. That's six right there.

We're not asking, "What adventure can we put here?" We're asking what does the place permit, what would be logically unusual but plausible, what might threaten the party, what provides conflict? Bandits use shorelines because it gives them access and escape. Refugees are pushed out of the area because they are unwanted. Ships sink in shallow water and languish before a big storm pulls them out to sea. Smugglers get rid of things at night, before being caught with them, and then lose track of where those things were dumped. It doesn't matter. It feels better than a contrived adventure because it gives the players a sense of place, a grounding in that place, a logic, as if to say, "Yes of course this is here. Look where we are."

I'm wording that in a specific way: the players don't say, "Look at what the DM is giving us." If this is done carefully and well, the players automatically cease to visualise themselves in a false space and begin to imagine themselves there, for real, because our imaginations are built to do that.

But again, this brings us back around to meaning. This, once understood, is the easiest part. We merely need some evidence of who these refugees were before they were forced out of this camp. A torn tent flap with a symbol on it. A collection of worthless wooden holy symbols, but all the same, perhaps even that of the party's cleric. And what of the attackers? A lance cloth with the Duke's name on it? A broken Genoan sword, here, where we are in the environs of Venice? What does it mean?

Why is the wrecked ship an Ottoman galley? Why is the barrel we dredged up from the bottom, having to fight four eels to get it, only filled with ordinary stones? How did the abandoned village become a den of skeletons? How does this amulet, with a mage's symbol upon it, relevant? Surely, if we take it to some apothecary, they would know. What are these two peoples fighting about? Do we want to pick a side? Is there a consequence for us if we don't? Why are these bandits that attacked us, that are all dead now, half-starved? Why did the last one to die smile, and thank us, before he expired? What does any of it mean?

This is the thread we seek. Anything that makes the players stop and wonder, "Hey, it all seemed so perfectly normal, except for this one thing that doesn't actually make sense."

The answer is not a hook, it is a thread. It is a logical answer to what seems like an impossible question, that assures the players will follow the thread to the next conundrum, that we're ready to impose upon them just as soon as they leave this place and head north, where the answer to their questions lies...

Grumble, grumble...

Passing through an alleyway two days ago, early in the morning, about a mile from home — while taking a morning walk — I found the scene shown in the image. It appeared to be a set of cards thrown over the back fence of the house not shown, laying strewn across the alley. Obviously, there's no telling who threw them; there's every reason to believe they weren't dropped, since the distribution is too wide for them to have fallen out of a pocket, and not wide enough to have been dropped from a car or even a bike. Can't say if the owner threw them over the fence, for that's what it looked like, or if perhaps someone exhausted with the cards threw them out despite the owner. I like to write the story that they're the owner's cards.

Why? Because these are self-help cards. I have a closer image, that I've included below. Reproducing the text of one of the cards, it reads,

"I'm unapologetic about what I desire and trust that what I focus on WILL GROW."

The other cards had like phrases. I think what fascinates me is the irony of the scene, whatever brought it about, as I'll explain.

First, of course, there is the conclusion that the cards were not working. That personal fealty or self-discovery cannot be obtained by buying a set of cards. The introductory card happens to be upright also, it's at the bottom left in the image. It reads, in part,

"Hi Miracle Worker! I'm so excited that you picked up The Universe Has Your Back cards. My hope is that this deck will help you so deepen your connection to the innermost part of yourself and in the universe. In that connection you will be guided to your true purpose to be love and spread love..."

Sorry, that's as much as I can bear.

Self-help is a blight. Not because people don't need the help, and not because such needful people are responsible for their own misery, but because weakness is such an opportunity for a certain kind of person who invokes a certain kind of falsity in order to prey upon the weak. And charge them money in the process. I find that arrangement very hard to bear... and not because I was once the victim, or even because I've never needed help. I've always been able, somehow, to find help from real people... not the sort of sly, shifty, sweetly dressed monsters that created and distributed this deck of cards.

There is irony in that these garbage cards have been hurled into an alley to become garbage, but I think the deeper reading is that the act of not simply throwing them into a garbage bin is evidence of selfishness and abuse against what would otherwise be a fairly clean alleyway. I live in a fairly nice part of town. The streets are clean, the alleys too... and while I've lived in parts that weren't so, this is only to say that whoever scattered these cards bears a selfishness that just might, possibly, be the reason why they've had to cling to such means to get self-help to begin with. Help begins with concern for others. Others are not being shown concern for by littering the ground thusly.

On some level, civilisation begins with, "I will not make my shit someone else's problem." Here, I mean the slur in both the colloquial and denotative manner. Humans evolved, unlike cows, not to shit where they live. If there is one darkness that reveals a public test of character is it that we should not make our issues someone else's problem.

Because someone will ask, no. I did not clean them up. Perhaps I should have. If it had been next to my property, I would have. But somehow, on some level, I felt these neighbours by this alleyway had the right to deal with the matter in their way. Some would disagree. It is hard to explain why I arrive there, so I won't try.

Why, then, address it here? On this blog, purportedly about D&D? I am so happy you asked, Gentle Reader. I think it is because of a tendency that is growing to turn every group activity into some kind of default therapy. I wanted to play hockey, baseball, soccer and football as a youth because I enjoyed those activities. My coaches made them about winning, which ruined organised sports for me. Nowadays the same sports are being ruined because "they are good for the kids."  Not good fun, but something they can learn from, that they can grow from, to help them cope better in later life... when ultimately they realise there's a hidden agenda behind everything they might have enjoyed for the sake of the activity itself.

Whenever we hear about someone playing D&D in school, it's never to educate: it's teaching children to negotiate, to get along, to act as a group, to express themselves... or some other justification that the children would learn to do themselves anyway, without the need of our slathering the pseudo-psychology on top like thousand island dressing on a birthday cake. D&D is a game that is enjoyed. It is not therapy.

There is something deeply hostile in making every pleasure justify itself by forcing it to be a developmental experience for the participants. Can D&D be therapeutic? Of course. So can virtually every human activity that we enjoy or excel at or simply love. But "therapy" as a function is not the same as something that is coincidentally restorative. Therapy requires a therapist; an interloper, who wedges themselves between the activity and the participant parasitically, because the opportunity exists. The therapist model (the cards name her "Gabrielle") is poison because its a scam. It says, I'm not here to help; I'm here to exploit.

Frankly, I'm sick of my game being exploited by people who don't, in fact, want to play it.

Fair enough, we can look at the title here, "Mastering Your Dragons: Using Tabletop Role-Playing Games in Therapy," merely as a physical tool, just as therapists have used sand, dolls, painting, theatre, journaling, walking, music, gardening, chess... even picking up trash along the side of a road. But then, why the branding inclusion? Why isn't this just "Using D&D as a tool in therapy?" Why is it "Mastering your Dragons," as if that's remotely what the fuck psychology is supposed to be doing. Why are these professionals acting as though they have a marketing department on staff?

It's a language of a TED talk, which did soooo much for the credibility of TED talks. It's media self-promotion mainstreaming on what looks like, for the moment, like a hot commodity. They want its language, its costumes, its metaphors and its cultural capital... until, of course, it has none of the last, whereupon it will be dropped for whatever zings the strings of the next therapeutic model. It disgusts me.

Tonight, I had a conversation with a former co-worker, with whom I haven't connected since 2008. Nice enough fellow, working as a teacher now, had a working model of the Alexis I was back then... but of course he wondered what I've been doing since thing, which is, mostly, among various jobs, this blog. As usual, there's always the difficulty in describing D&D to people who have no real idea of what it is other than words they've heard. I never encounter impoliteness, just a sort of confused, slightly wondering stance about how anyone could be this engaged with something that is, so far as they know, a kind of game-hobby thing. Because they don't know what to say, they just sort of skip over it, you know, to ordinary things. "Oh, you have a grandson now?" That kind of thing.

The last thing I need is for someone at some point in the future to ask, "Oh, isn't that a kind of therapy?"

Honestly, it seems like it's been one simplification after another: childish, satanic, nerdish, escapist, socially maladjusted... and soon, coming to a theatre near you, "Oh, I'd heard that's very good as a therapy... are you having success with that?"

I can't wait.

It's like I've retroactively bought "universe" cards 47 years ago.

Session 8: "I Love More"

Friday's session on the 15th started with a discussion and clarification of the experiece bonus rule I mentioned in my last post, written the day before. I'd settled on a bonus of 1% per 500 years of age, 2% for the presence of a World Heritage Site and 1% per 25,000 persons. This gave Budapest a total of 11% added experience to any encounter that would take place within a two week period of the characters having ventured there. The cut-off date was Jun 14, 1650.

A map of the player's progress is shown below:

Before leaving, a discussion was had regarding the players perhaps being more willing to enter into combats, perhaps dangerously, being induced to do so. This was particularly brought to the fore when it was discovered that seven vials holding an obscure pink liquid found among the dead at the owlbear combat turned out to be faerie blood, very possibly related to the events of the characters' first session. Deciding to sell the vials, which were treasure earned in battle, the party learned that not only were they stoked by their presence in Budapest to an additional 11% bonus to their experience, this came on top of their ordinary experience... so that at least one member of the party, Lexent, received a bonus of 23% for their share of the vials. Though this really only amounted to a bonus of perhaps 40 x.p., it mattered... and so, yes, the question about the effects of the rule were considered.

True to my post about travelling, I managed the party's intended journey from Budapest to the little river burg of Domos, where they were to be smuggled across the Danube into Hungary, to make a safe journey with their Croatian companions, Barica and Kornu, down to where they would attack the blockhouse. My intentions as a DM, however, were entirely arbitrary; I decided that the party had been betrayed, so that when they got to Domos, they learned that the two boatmen there had been caught and executed for smuggling.  The party discussed alternatives; Barica suggested a safe house near Bodajk, at the bottom centre of the map, where a couple would be able to help them out of the Ottom an Empire and the Sanjak of Bakony, which they entered into by travelling first to Dag and then across the provincial border on what amounted to a wide "cart path."

And thus they travelled, wondering about the executions, wondering about the people they were headed to find (having something to think about helps enormously with travel), while I rolled random encounters for each hex, turning up none. The party reached the village of Csakvar, found it peacable and Ottoman free, and so discussed the best way to get to Bodajk. They decided to pass through the wilderness hex and not the type-5 hex directly west of Csakvar... and I rolled an encounter.

I'd decided before Thursday that if I rolled an encounter in a wilderness hex, I'd make it at least a small dungeon. Thus I rolled on this list of woodland creatures, turning up a cougar. Lexent the gnome, who has the sage ability olfactory acuity, took a sniff at the hole with his authority-status skill and smelled "cougar."  The opening was a sink hole, which presumbly the cougar had used for it's lair; the party talked and agreed, without the Croatians descending with them, to check it out. Odsbottom, a servant, and Edvard, a man at arms, also remained outside the hole.

I did not want it to be a mere cougar lair, so I decided the sinkhole would reveal a cave, which then I rolled for again only to get the answer on a 1 in 40 chance, "cougar." Sometimes the dice are just silly. I took the option after cougar, assumed the option after couger would have logically eaten the cougar, so despite smelling one, the party never did find a cougar nor any sign of one.

Lexent did smell brimstone when they entered the cave. And they did find a strange piece of red glass, that was probably more like a red fingernail, but they made no connections. They chanced not to see the scoring of claw through rock, walking right over it having failed their checks (they didn't check, I told them to roll a wisdom check and they failed).  Thereupon, Pandred decided to roar a fight song while they descended the 40-degree slope into the deeper cave.

At which time, having revealed themselves, the cave filled with fire breathed by a hatchling red dragon with 1 hit dice, 11 hit points, an armour class of -1 and a breath weapon causing 10 damage. Three (perhaps four, I don't remember exactly) of the crew made save. The rest didn't. Fenwick, a non-level with 7 hit points, nearly died, but as he's a soldier, he can be reduced to -3 and live. So he did.

The party sort of hesitated. Mikael decided not to stay. Pandred said that his 1st level druid henchfolk decided not to stay. The rest went down, fought the dragon and...

... it got a little bloody, but no one died. Baby dragon did almost 10 damage for every hit point it had. The party found it very hard to hit the AC, learned that between incidental damage and buffeting, along with an extra tail attack not found in the original Monster Manual, that even a weak version of this beast is fairly dangerous. It was over a thousand pounds but I ruled that the bite was only 2-16, the tail 1-10 and the talons 1-6. About 40% of full for the bite and 25% each for the tail and claws. It was, after all, only a baby.

The party did all right with treasure.

The table above shows the benefit from the "13%" add-on (Budapest and two fresh hexes, 1% each, entered in the last 24 hours) and their own natural bonus. Arduin got experience because he did suffer the breath weapon. Fenwick rolled morale and found the courage to join in, after Lexent restored his hit points with Aid.

Some discussion followed as to whether the party should have pressed on, or run away after the breath weapon, and if the x.p. bonus affected their opinion. My belief is that parties won't run anyway, x.p. bonus or no. I think the party came to the same conclusion. They set off for the safehouse in Bodajk, the encounter taking up about an hour and a bit of game time.

Not only did they find the house with their allies burned out, they also found a troop of hippogriff riders sitting around the house, seeing if someone showed up. The party made haste not to show themselves, retreating into the forest. Augury was employed, which provided them evidence that they had been "betrayed," and not by their two Croatians. On the fifth, they began travelling off road, first north, then west, avoiding encounters and steadily running out of food. This food issue became increasingly difficult. The question of how far the betrayal might go also came up. Eventually, reaching the river where the dotted black line on the map above ends, they spent two days catch fishing, demonstrating that with a large enough party committed to the task, 12 altogether, it was probable that more would be caught then needed to be eaten. Fishing is a low-effort activity, so persons only need 2 lbs. a day when fishing, as opposed to 4 lb. a day when travelling.

And that was it. The note I made on the map is there, as is Pandred's last comment about the new X.P. rule, which I used to title this post. What I like is that it's real, it's level-balanced, but it's not so much that it really makes more than a light benefit. It certainly isn't game breaking, and would still be useful for a 9th level character as it is for a 3rd. Those who doubt it's veracity, it's been game tested. I'll report on future elements of it if anyone shows interest, but for now it should be assumed I'm using the rule.

Each hex the party entered has a little blue dot. It needs a different coloured symbol, I just haven't determined one yet.

Point A to Point B

A peculiar problem is coming up with my D&D game tomorrow, so now is a good time to talk about it, as it directly affects the player. That problem is travel.

As some might remember from this recap last week, the players are tentatively accepting a "request" (not a "quest") to journey down to a certain border between Croatia and the Ottoman territory of Slavonia, a distance of about 140 miles. Not really that far, of course, but still, enough to raise question, how to get the player from point A to point B. Sooner or later, every dungeon master runs into this.

There are three fundamental strategies in accomplishing the displacement. The first method is "poof!" you're there. This might be accompanied by arbitrary costs of travel, the number of rations you have to scratch from your character, even possibly a roll for things that have broken or been spoiled along the way. Oh, and of course, the days of the journey are counted against the calendar. The main logic is that "travel is boring," and therefore, why not just do the Hollywood film cut betweeen the characters turning off the light and leaving their apartment and then getting off the plane, er, the wagon, finding themselves conveniently in Croatia.

Method 2 is the way all my DMs did it when I was starting out, that I myself followed for a long time: count the number of days, roll a random encounter chance for each day, fight out the random encounters (yes, one by one), then count the journey as "earned" as the players reach their destination, tired from having to fight random nobodies. This at least has the sense of the players feeling the journey's weight, if not the actual distance. It's also a good way to discourage long trips.

Method 3 is the video game solution: side quests. Let the players get there, but keep inventing problems along the way that need to be solved by insisting that the party enter this dungeon to get this gem or pour this vial of water into this lost stone bowl in the forest, yada yada yada. Thus, we turn the journey into its own "adventure," yay, so that we have to solve the adventure to have the adventure.

These methods are to get around the problem of having to verbally describe the journey taking place, as the trees and hills and streams and other travellers and houses and toll gates and fences and farms and rocks and flowers and the sun too passing overhead, faster than we are, just go by. A 140 mile version on foot is equivalent to a 35 hour journey by car... just to put it into perspective for those who haven't actually done it. Which includes most, though not all, of us.

Example of a dense map, coincidentally filling the
countryside between where the players are and where
they want to go.

My issue with the "solutions" is that they essentially flatten the world, divorcing it from the one aspect that makes it an actual world: it's a big place, requires time and difficulty to get around, and often that time spent is, yes, actually boring. On some level I'm certainly ready to cut the scene and move on... but there is very little point in my systematically making a very dense map of a region only to then utterly ignore every hex that doesn't include a monster encounter, and then ignore that hex FOR the monster encounter. This seems counterproductive.

Rather, we might as DMs conceive of the land as the experience: rivers have to be overcome, terrain navigated, lakes gotten around or employed as an alternative, hills avoided, uncivilised hexes avoided, the right road taken... while the actual covered ground is comprehended like an actual journey we might take ourselves would do. If you or I were to spend 35 hours walking, starting in Buda and ending up just off the south edge of this map, we wouldn't be bored, right? Our walking tour of Bakony would be enlightening, we'd be staggered by the food, we'd laugh about the people we'd meet, we'd be standing at some crossroads arguing over a map, trying to figure out just exactly what crossroads we were at. And when we returned home, we'd regale our friends with what a great trip it was, and how they ought to do it too, especially this part, and this part... and oh, hey, this part too.

But none of this is possible for several reasons related to D&D... and I'll try and discuss a few in no particular order.

The first, the one foremost on my mind, is agency.

There should be no doubt that I am a firm believer in allowing the players to choose their destiny. I believe firmly that a party should be able to head out wherever they want, do whatever they want, overcome whatever they want... but, uh, well... all this sort of goes to pot where geography is concerned.

See, if you just want to go one hex, a mere six and two-thirds miles, most likely you're not feeling very constrained. Hell, it's right there. From this hill, we can see that hill, and it's just one hex away. Going feels like agency. It feels like we're in control of our lives. It feels great.

But going twenty-one hexes isn't like that. First of all, if you want to get there by the shortest route, and presumably you do, then you have to pretty much take a specific 21 hexes, one after another, on a specific road, that's going to go through specific towns that you have no choice about. And when the DM tells you, oh party member, that this little village is "Totvazsony," trust me, you don't give a damn. No more than you would if you were driving from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City and discovered that you'd just passed through Ogallah, Kansas. Let's be serious... you really wouldn't care.

I may have invested the name Totvazsony carefully, pulling it out of GoogleEarth as a real life place, but that doesn't make it interesting. It doesn't thrill you. What you, the player feel, is a lack of purpose, fatigue, and a strong desire to just get this over with.

Which is, coincidentally, what you're going to feel if you ever have to take a 12 hour flight to take a 2-hour flight to take a 1-hour bus ride to a really awesome hotel in, say, Costa Rica. A bus ride and two flights, incidentally, that you're going to have to take again when you leave your really awesome hotel. Because this is what travel actually is.

When we travel anywhere, we instinctively grit our teeth against it. We retain a certain level of calm as we stand in line, so we can stand in front of another line, then be moved to an area where we might find a bench or have to stand or possibly just say fuck it and decide to sit on our luggage or the floor. We know this is what travel is. Travel is time. Often, a very boring sort of time. Boring for the players, and boring for the DM. Which is what makes the "poof!" option so enticing. Wouldn't it be great if we could just be where we want to go?

I have systematically and brutally set out to bore my players by interminably describing each hex, in order, one at a time, for as long as it takes, to give the right impression of what it's like. Why? Well, why are you beating your head against that wall?  Coming to the end of such an experience is the only way to give travel through the game world an emotional shape. Otherwise, the game world might as well not be one. Or rather, I might just as well make the block house the players have to raid just down the street there, next to the Pyramids one block over and then locate Iguazu Falls the next block after that. I mean, what difference does it make. The teleport spell is irrelevant if the DM is just going to teleport the party anyway.

The argument, however, does not actually solve the problem. If the party wants to "see the world"... and after all, what else is a world for... then session after session cannot be filled with meaningless descriptions of rocks and trees and trees and rocks... and water. There must be game in them thar roadways, else for other reasons they still don't belong.

Before I go on, I'll just check my closets first for the Spanish Inquisition, because they're bound to show up if I write this. No one obviously ever expects them. My question is this: how much "travel boredom" would a player be willing to endure, to achieve the emotional shape of travel, if experience were available?

After all, by definition, experience is "the conscious process of observing, living through or undergoing an event. "Experiential travel" focuses on deeply engaging with a destination's culture, history and environment. Yes, its a real term.

Once upon a time, I considered a system that would reflect the difficulties of travel by assigning a set number of hit points lost by a party per day of actual travel. Let us say 1 point per day, as a base line, merely to express the discomfort of sitting in horse saddles or trudging on foot, the feel of packs on backs, the unpleasantness of not sleeping in a bed, being subject to the weather, not having a decent physical toilet to sit on, etcetera. Theoretically, I imagined, a really nasty rainstorm could drain every member of a party of three hit points in the space of a half-hour deluge; a furious snowstorm, likewise; hail, for instance, might contribute. Losing the party's tent because a mule falls into the canyon, so that even when the tent is recovered, it's ripped asunder.  Steadily, day after day, the party would have to stop somewhere and treat themselves to an inn, a decent meal, a night not under the stars, a new tent, a second tent... and so on.

Two problems killed it. The first was that the effort was going to turn travel into accounting. The second was simply that the system, no matter how refined it became, would be felt keenly and resentfully. For the most part, a party higher than fourth level can largely just obliterate the effects anyway through healing, mending cantrips, the creation of food and so on. So I abandoned the idea. It was too much work to produce the wrong emotional response. It was, essentially, negative reinforcement.

So, okay, why not positive reinforcement? Why not a system that simply awards a set amount of experience for every hex travelled, to provide for the "worldliness" of the player character? 'Course, pure water hexes wouldn't count; they all look alike and most can't tell where they are anyway. And returning again and again to the same hex, well, that doesn't serve either, since we've been there and, reasonably, we can't just make every hex an eternal well of experience. No, the goal's got to be to encourage the players to travel, despite the actual tedium of the journey, so that they feel it's all worthwhile and we can still retain the "it feels so good when it stops" structure. Yes?

Of course yes.

Ah... but how much?

10 x.p. per hex?  Fair when you're first level, and yet it still means a thief would have to tour 125 hexes to do it without combat. There's always the argument that experience ought to be received for "risk," about which I agree, but then travel is a risk. If the game world is dense enough, there are storms, there are chances of getting lost, or meeting encounters, or suffering maladies, if the mechanics for these things exist. We can certainly take Bilbo's words for it:

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door..."

But then, he meant it colloquially, in the sense that the world is so interesting that you may not feel like coming home. That acknowledged, in D&D the premise remains. You enter a new hex, there is always a chance for an encounter to come and take your life. Would that, perhaps, change player opinions about wandering monsters and encounter checks if they knew, every time the check produced nothing, they'd be rewarded?

How about 50 x.p. per hex?  That reduces the 1st level thief to a journey of 25 hexes in order to reach second level. That might be a shade too generous, yes?

Now, I have players who were in what I used to run on the blog and later on a wiki as the "Juvenis Campaign," in Norway. And now they're in Hungary. If I establish such a rule, I'm sure to get a player raising hand and asking, "How many hexes did I travel through between Stavanger and Ozd?"

To which I'd have to answer, "None. You tripped and fell into a gate and came out the other side. You didn't see the hexes in between, so you get no experience for them."

But... there is another way.

In my last session, the players had just started to purchase things in Buda & Pest while considering the next part of their journey. "Buda-Pest" is an enormous city in my game, founded in 89, well before Berlin (founded in 1237), with 188,000 people. It is rich in architecture, culture, concept and aesthetic. I have felt for a long time that any such moment where the players enter a city with at least 50,000 people, or perhaps any city of 25,000 founded a thousand years before (pre-650 AD), ought to be a combination between awe-inducing and revelatory. That, in turn, could be reflected by offering not actual experience, but an experience bonus, say of 2, 5 or 10 per cent, which would last for a few days, a week, a fortnight... even a full month.

For Budapest, I might say 5% for every character's experience for the space of a fortnight, one time only, meaning they'll never get it again from Budapest. They'd have to travel to some similar city to get it again. The benefit of this is that (a) the party has a different reason to travel from place to place; (b) each new place gives it's own bonus; and (c) the party is encouraged, in a specific time period, to do something risky to take advantage of it.

Though the 5% is just arbitrary. What's needed is some calculation that takes size of the city AND age of the city in some way that produces a precise number between 4 and 15%, what I think should be the lower and upper limits of such a bonus. Paris should give 15%, obviously. But imaginatively, the very ancient and very small town of Delos in Greece... well, that must be worth something, surely. I could, I suppose, use a formula, "Presence" = population x age x distinctiveness... with the last being defined by the number of world historical sights present in the city. That is a defensible mechanism, and easily searched. Worth considering.

What if every new hex offered a one-time 1% bonus to experience for a day. That would make actual travel-gained experience better than experience gained in the same dungeon over and over. It might encourage players to want a random encounter. It would mean that travel alone wouldn't be a benefit... not unless the party subsequently risked itself while the bonus was active.

Every new idea needs a shaking out period. Any ideas?

Dog Whistles

My last three posts no doubt were adversarial. I attacked people on a panel for employing business speak instead of actually discussing game play; and for using poor business speak; and for being opportunist in their intentions. For plagiarising a game that's 50 years old. And for failing to comprehend how a simplified game is likewise unable to provide agency for its participants. And finally, as pursuing goals related to the game design industry that I would consider "selling out" and a direction I do not authetically wish to go. I did not withhold any punches.

In political discourse, "a 'dog whistle' is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after ultrasonic dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not humans. Dog whistles use language that appears normal to the majority but communicates specific things to intended audiences. They are generally used to convey messages on issues likely to provoke controversy without attracting negative attention. A key feature is plausible deniability: the speaker can say, "That’s not what I meant," while the intended audience still receives the signal.

D&D — I cannot speak for other role-playing games — commonly employs a phrase like "It is my role to ensure the players are having a good time." This is meant to sound supportive and positive... but, in fact, what it usually means is, "I feel it's my right to fudge the dice or the experience in order to ensure that the game proceeds as I think best." This is not a dog whistle; it is, rather, a type of propaganda, where we are doing something bad while proclaiming that it's actually good.

A dog whistle strives to do the opposite. "I am against urban crime" means, "I am against black people." You're not supposed to know that unless you can hear the dog whistle. The average non-racist voter hears the words said; and they, too, agree that "urban" crime is probably not a good thing. It may or may not occur to the average listener that "crime" in general is a bad thing, and that it need not be "urban" also... but this is how we get the racist message to the listener. "Don't worry, vote for me, I don't like black people, just like you don't."

In D&D, one example is "rules lite"... which sounds neutral, even virtuous. The system is easy to learn, accessible to everyone. For DMs who have been baffled by rules, or players who tire of character design taking an entire session, being able to create a character in five minutes sounds wonderful. But what the dog whistle really means is, "the rules get in the way of me, the DM, doing what I like; rules light equals arbitrary DMing."  Presumably, the DM's players know this. They can hear the dog whistle. They don't care about rules, so they don't care about a DM who doesn't care about them.

The OSR has been blowing this dog whistle for 15+ years now. It has worked for them. They have successfully convinced a significant number of players to embrace a system that, when it falls down, the DM just does whatever the fuck they feel like doing. Acknowledging, of course, that no one, ever, ever, abuses power. In fact, I don't think anyone's ever invented an idiom about that.

Because my system is "crunchy," I'm often accused of liking crunchier systems. That my only reason for wanting them is preference. That this is just how I roll. My game play is not, in fact, about developing safeguards against arbitrary power, either by the DM or the player ("backstories" are the insertion of arbitrary power on the player's part) — even though every social structure in human history, from political systems to your local bowling league, are about restraining authority. One method of doing this is called "democracy." This silly system is founded upon another ridiculous idea, "the rule of law." For the record, this last concept is very crunchy.

The successful boosting of D&D in the early 70s, certainly before it was published, created a yin and yang with it's one essential element: the invention of the "dungeon master." On the one hand, the position offered tremendous opportunity: a single, detached referee could look at both sides of a battle and serve to enable the missing fog of war, which had to be discounted in order to make game play practicable. This is still my role when I DM. I "hide" what is in the next room, I hide the motives of the monsters opposing the players, I hide how many there are and I hide the benefit the players will receive upon defeating them. In addition, there is no aspect of the setting or the unfolding of events that I cannot influence by withholding knowledge from the players. Prior to the DM's invention, this was not possible to do in game play. Videogames hadn't gotten there yet. But let's save the videogame aspect for now.

The yang to this is that human beings are inherently untrustworthy. Allowing one person to see both sides of a question, and to withhold information, enables that person to enrich themselves; no doubt, the "enriching compulsion" comes from when we were still nearly animals, when one member of a tribe stumbled across a food source and decided to glom all of that source for themselves — to the detriment of others. Yet, the wish to "feel full," to cease to hunger, whether for food or safety or greater control or power, is a tremendous motivator for one to be self-interested. The introduction of the DM created this opportunity for thousands upon thousands of individuals who would never have experienced power otherwise. And a great many of them cannot resist it... just like their forebear that gobbled up all the berries from a found bush, gathering none of them for the rest of the tribe.

Understand, I do not use the word "compulsion" lightly. This isn't a choice. Ogg the anthropithecine, assuming they had names, probably has some sentiment that he shouldn't eat every berry on this bush... but he isn't choosing to do so, he just cannot help himself. He's hungry, he needs to stop feeling hungry. He is at the mercy of his needs. More often than not, Ogg might actually be a pretty all right tribe member. Which doesn't mean anything, obviously, if he's seen by Grug eating all the berries. Grug is also hungry. As is the whole tribe.

Here, Ogg isn't evil, narcissitic or ungenerous; he's an organism under immediate biological pressure. Hunger narrows the temporal horizon. The berries are present; the tribe is abstract. The future starvation of others is cognitively and emotionally weaker than the current sensation in his own body. This is why many social systems exist designed to control compulsion: norms, oversight, punishment rather than execution, ritual sharing, reputation, the encouragement of delayed gratification. These things stress an understanding that yes, we understand that you may want all these for yourself... but think for a moment about last week, when Judy shared her berries with you. Don't you feel guilty for not sharing your berries with her?

The problem with "rules lite" and the dog whistle it declares, "rulings not rules," is that it's a designed to be a social system that codifies and enables Ogg's behaviour. The DM is encouraged to discount the vote of others; to discount the presence of rules that make the game fair; to feel, in fact, that it is right and just to be arbitrary.

This is bad.

I am "crunchy" because more rules invites more player engagement, plus agency, from the kinds of players I want in my game: vision-seeking, active, unafraid of self-educating or novelty, highly communicative and willing to work for what they want. I am transparent with my rules system because I want to be held accountable for my actions and rulings. I want the players to have the right to say, "Your rule states..." — just as in a free and fair system, regardless of its purpose, there is always room for airing a grievance. Any system that denies the right to bring a grievance is an opportunity to fall victim to one's own compulsions.

Having standing as a player entitles the participant to cite the rules, question a ruling, request consistency, identify a contradiction and expect the DM to answer according to the system rather than according to preference. The player is not interrupting the game by doing this. The player is using the game as written. Rules define what the DM may do, what the player may do, what each participant may expect and what recourse exists when a decision appears inconsistent or unfair. A game without that recourse gives the DM authority without sufficient accountability. That is not freedom for the players. It is reduced protection for them.

Rules lite is an attempt to undermine standing. By minimising the presence of rules, the DM is insulated from grievances. The DM is entitled to ignore a player's knowledge of even those rules that do exist, because the DM is empowered to change those rules at will. This is authoritarianism, not "freedom from rule-based play."

Early in D&D, "rules lawyering" originally meant the player who knew the rules as well or better than the DM, who made the DM's life difficult by insisting the rules be acknowledged and followed. Those DMs who disliked this, or any player that attempted to call out a missed rule, however rarely, decided to re-engineer the idiom "rules lawyering" into what it means today: a time-waster. Someone who doesn't want to play, but wants to litigate. This has itself become a dog whistle: when the DM says, "no rules-lawyering," what's really being said is, "don't challenge my authority."

Together, the ideals of rules lite and no rules lawyering have created a sort of fascistic approach to dungeon mastering... but mind you, it's not "fair" to call it that. This is why the dog whistles exist. "See, we're not saying the DM can be a dictator... no, we're just saying, lighten up on the rules; go easy with the procedure; we just don't to waste a lot of game time dithering over rules that don't matter for game play. We're not 'fascists.' That's a ridiculous term to describe what we're really saying."

DO NOT FORGET the primary value of the dog whistle: plausible deniability. This is what allows racism to thrive while its participants can say straight-faced to the press, "We're not racists; we don't say racist things." It's what allows anti-abortionists to claim they are "pro-life," even though they don't care about the life of the mother or anyone else except the unborn life; because they have that wonderful deniability.

No, rules-lite DMs aren't fascists. Obviously. What a ridiculous notion. "Really," says the DM who wants to take away the player's standing to discuss the game's rules, "to even use the word is over-the top insulting. What nonsense! What hyperbole."

Just listen to the actual words from these people when we say, "I don't want DMing by fiat."  They say, "let's not bog things down," "trust the process," "don't be difficult," "stop litigating," "just relax," "the DM is trying to help everyone have fun." The language is always softened, because in fact, overt domination is in reality socially unattractive.

But sure. I take it back. I shouldn't have changed the register by invoking the F-bomb. I don't know what I was thinking. Probably, it's just that I'm such a pit-bull, I can hear a dog whistle when it's blown. Still, though... if it walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

Alone with My Principles

Sometimes a comment is written that sincerely wants to help me see the world in a light that will give me strength and hope to change my perspective, and possibly cease to be less bitter and therefore make the kind of money others are making doing what I'm doing. That, I think, is the sentiment with Icosa's comment here. It references my biathlon post of last January as if to say, "See, you could live some of this dream." It encourages me to open my mind and learn something from a successful designer. It argues that there's a "good game" in me, arguing that it could plausibly be of the size and scope of AD&D. It even states that the commentor would buy this game from me.

When I was in high school, I had a good friend Rob who wavered between becoming a performing electronic musician in the vein of Throbbing Gristle, or possibly an electrical engineer. Alas, his brilliant musical career ended and he became the latter. But during those younger, heady days, whenever the subject of selling out came up, he would raise his hand and say, "Me. I'm ready to sell out. Tell me what line to get into."

He didn't mean it, because he didn't sell out. But he did recognise that was the only chance of his music (see above) having any commercial success. Which it did not.

Selling out describes the act of compromising one's personal values, artistic integrity or principles in order to achieve financial gain, popularity and mainstream success. Not everyone who has these things achieved them by "selling out." Sometimes, if I were to pick a band I once personally knew, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they don't have any of those things to sell. Rather, they had a willingness to get on stage a lot, to keep practicing together and, as chance would have it, a sound that worked well in the 90s (once an engineer worked on it, that is. If you had ever heard the Chilis at the National here in Calgary in the late 80s, there's no way in hell you'd have ever believed they'd get a record contract.

Artistic integrity describes an individual's commitment that the art they are producing — which I'll widen to include any creative work — remains true to the vision, value or creative principle by which they make that art. Integrity reflects an individual's genuine ideas, the emotion they connect with those ideas and the style in which those ideals are rendered, in my case in text, in the case of others, in visual or audial measure. Essentially, it's about maintaining authenticicy in one's art, prioritising personal expression over external approval or material gain.

When I created yet another wiki, I considered a number of names to call it, finally landing on "Authentic" as the best possible expression for what I was trying to accomplish. The wiki doesn't represent "a" set of rules about role-playing, it represents what I think are best possible game tested rules that can be made... that are subject to change when, like science or design, something is better understood, or might be more effectively constructed.

As such, I don't run "a" role-playing game, I run the one that best expresses everything I've learned about role-playing games these last almost 47 years... in which I've watched many, many, many role-playing games rise, become popular for a while and then fade away, to be played by a small dedicated following until they cease to be mentioned even on the internet. Once upon a time, in the 1980s, when a new game would emerge, I'd anxious rush to look at it, to see how the designer constructed their metrics, to see if there was something I could steal and import into my own game... but by the time Steve Jackson churned out GURPS, I was constantly disappointed. It was all rehashes from there... endless, awful, even sometimes painful rehashes of old rules in some way made worse and repackaged as a game that would "supersede D&D at last!" Only to, of course, not happen. The last game mechanic that I lifted from a designed game originated with 3rd edition; I can't even remember what the original mechanic was called, and it needed a lot of work to make it function. I used it to construct my action point rules.

After 18 years of writing this blog, and 47 years of playing D&D, the most inauthentic thing I could possibly do would be to suddenly declare D&D secondary in my opinion to my own game system, and then take the much more rational constrution of presenting game rules on a 21st century wiki and compiling them into a 15th century technology that would, obviously, be less valuable to the user. Further, the construction of said book would involve my giving money to a third party, so I could charge people I've authentically and freely provided a system for, as a means of literally betraying my own choices in order to, yes, sell out. 

Without much chance of succeeding, mind, because I have allowed myself to be an honest, outspoken, resilient, vicious pitbull about the game I love these last 18 years on this blog. To succeed in business, one must have business friends. Those willing to talk up one's kickstarter, or talk up one's business. I don't have those things. I have never priortised those things.

Further, for my own soul, I would find it grossly inauthentic to copy the game construction of ANOTHER GAME produced 50 years before my own, and sell it as something I "created," when clearly I did not. That is something that apparently people in the OSR can do, without much compunction, flat out ignoring that the mechanics, referencing, concepts and dimensions of their games are cheap "Gocci" knockoffs of legitimately designed originals. I may hate Gygax and his logic, but he didn't rip off a game exactly like his own that was published in 1925, and played for nearly fifty years, then pretending he hadn't done that.

So yeah. I have a few issues with that life choice.

Until just a few weeks ago this blog had the tag line, "I Love the Game of D&D."  Some have expressed their surprise and approval that I was willing to come right out and say that, without reservation. Some have recently expressed their dissatisfaction that it's gone, in favour of something that "sells" my story as a means of getting to know me better, thus enabling some to get up to speed with my approach to the game without having to read through 4,000 posts. I am not making money from this change and yet the disapproval is there. Others also love D&D. I like that. And I like that I'm enabling them to find better ways to play the game.

And I would rather have this experience than the money that Kelsey Dionne has made doing what she's doing.

That can be confusing for some people. In fact, on occasion, I had those, off-line, in real life, before the existence of the internet, call me a "loser" for having these principles. So this is hardly new.

Perhaps I can explain it this way. My father was an engineer. He was a good engineer. He graduated with honours from the Colorado School of Mines and he worked for Gulf Canada as a practicing engineer, never opting for management, until 1995. He used to talk about the difficulties of keeping up with technology changes in a heavily technological field, when the half-life of his engineering degree ceased to be, as he would have described it, relevant by 1965. That means he spent 30 years keeping up with technology changes on his own. At any time, he could have done what his peers did. He could have accepted a promotion as a manager and gotten more money. But he didn't want to be a manager. He wanted to be an engineer, because he loved being an engineer. It's what he'd wanted to be when he was 14 and for him, being one all his adult life, was living the dream.

In 1978, he was picked as one of two people to investigate the practical value of a concept called "enhanced recovery."  Now, I've talked about this on the blog before, but what the hell, let's just do it again. I'm an old man. Old men tell stories more than once.

No one at the time believed in this concept. It was in fact cutting edge oil recovery technology, involving the injection of gas, oil or water, and later other materials, into an existing pool in order to increase the pressure within that pool in order to force more oil out of a pool that had ceased producing.

See, when drilling came into existence, there was no solution for the problem that when you drilled down to get the oil from the ground, the condition that enabled that oil's extraction was underground pressure. But as you removed oil from the well, the pressure would drop, and drop, until finally, there wasn't enough pressure left to force the oil up the pipe. It meant that the field would "run dry"... except, in fact, it didn't. Everyone knew there was as much as 40% of the oil still down there, but it was wholly unreachable. And by the 1970s, areas that had once been major oil producing centres were now suffering from this problem.

When this boondoggle, which is what the company thought of it at the time, landed on my father's desk, no one else wanted it. There were small teams in companies all over the world working on the same problem, without any certainty of how it might be solved. The joke at my father's office was that he and the other fellow, I believe his name was John H., last name withheld, were working in "enchanted recovery." That gives a sense of the faith most had in the project.

Enhanced recovery didn't just become my father's field for the rest of his life, it resuscitated the world's oil industry. In the 1990s my father took a month long trip to Russia to explain the concept to Russian engineers. He did likewise take a trip to Indonesia. When he retired, at an age younger than what I am now, he had spoken with engineers about the technology all over the world.

Did he make more money on account of that? No. He never spoke to me about getting any special raise from the company he worked for, though to be truthful, even my mother never knew how much money he actually earned, because he was very 1950s that way. Did he start his own oil company? Did he become a freelance consultant instead of going on working for Gulf? Could he have? Of course. But he didn't. Because, in reality, he was never in it for the money. He was in it for the science.

Over the course of my father's life, doing a few calculations based on his probable income over the years of his being an engineer in the five decades that he worked, I'd estimate he made about ten million dollars. He didn't make it in one place, he made it steadily over the years... but the speed at which money is made isn't the issue, is it?

If I measure my own success in dollars against that, counting what I've earned from various sources, including writing, cooking, office work... I'm not in my father's league. I'd call it about three quarters of a million. Course, I don't have that money now. It went to cost of living and buying stuff that wore out and had to be replaced with other stuff. But I'm throwing these numbers around to stress that point that I don't think like a 20-year-old with regards to money any more. I don't see $3,148,567 in the way that a young person does. I see money that comes in and then goes right out again. I see money that floods a system and then retreats, forcing one to return to one's old way of just working for it. I see 8 persons on the title page who are not Kelsey, plus The Arcane Library, and Boda Games, and recognise that a lot of that Kickstarter money is not flowing wildly into one person's pocket. I don't view business like a child. I see it like it is: a thing that makes a lot of money, and spends a lot of money.

So I'm not all agog at these things. I see the world in terms of what authentically matters to me, and my goals, and things I'd like to design, create and give time to.

And none of those are a new, derivative role-playing game with a title that doesn't, in fact, mean anything. Is there a shadow that isn't technically darker than the space around it?

A Lot to Be Learned

Yesterday I was advised by a reader that there was "a lot to be learned" from Kelsey Dionne's Shadowdark. So I looked further into it. Shown is a screenshot of page 9, demonstrating the depth, difficulty and text size of the Shadowdark product. By typing "Shadowdark pdf" into the Google search engine, it's possible for anyone to read the entire document with patience and a willingness to skip ads.

I'll begin by pointing out that this is quite obviously not an independently designed role-playing game. It depends heavily on D&D, which is a nice way of saying it outright stole D&D's mechanics, dumbed them down and removed everything of nuance. On a design level, this is more or less the equivalent of rewriting Shakespeare's plays as a book of short stories. It helps a LOT with creativity when the goal is, first, let someone else do the work, and second, dumb it down to a grade school level of comprehension.

Doesn't terribly impress me.

I was never a supporter of the Old School Renaissance. I want to make that perfectly clear. I wrote yesterday that "The Old School Renaissance emerged as a reaction to what many players saw as the increasing complexity of newer editions of D&D." My philosophy about gaming differs from this premise in two important ways.

First of all, I don't think newer editions of D&D are very fucking complex. In fact, I think they're extremely stupified in design and mechanics, infantile in their reward systems and egregiously "non-game" in structure. Without hesitation, I automatically rank people who think 3rd, 4th or 5th edition D&D is "complex" as people not ready to for a grown-up career. Compared with what university educated professionals do every day, the "complexity" of D&D fits the status of learning how to Halloween as a kid. That is, not complex. We're not removing game resistance, we're not removing density... when someone carps about the need for D&D to return to the simplification of "The OSR", they're talking about removing adulthood.

People talk about AD&D and later editions as though they're equivalent to climbing K2. I'll remind the reader that I learned how to play the game at fifteen. My daughter did at nine. What are we to do with a bunch of adults who whine that D&D is so hard, they can't manage on the level of a nine-year-old?

My other reason for disliking the OSR comes from my having been playing this whole time, albeit with dark periods. By the summer of 1980, nine months after learning the game, I was so dissatisfied with the simplicity of AD&D that I began rewriting parts of the game to make it more complex, not less.  And mind you, I'm no superbrain. I do not have a PhD, I'm not an engineer or a doctor, or a lawyer; I've never had a technical job (I don't count writing). I've never worked in research or design or manufacturing. As a writer, I comment on things. This is not a superbrain activity. So when I say, "AD&D wasn't complex enough," I'm not writing as Steven Hawkings. I'm saying, the game was so egregiously simple, it wasn't sufficient to provide what I needed my game system to provide. That is millions (plural) of miles away from Shadowdark, 43 years before the launch of the latter.

I have continued to make the game more complex in the years since. As such, I have very little reason to embrace the OSR's ideology, and even less reason to consider the dumbification of AD&D as something I can "learn" from. If AD&D felt insufficient for me in 1980, before internet discourse, before "narrative gaming," before Critical Role, before modern bloat, before corporate overproduction, long before the presence of another edition or even the simplistic splatbooks of original AD&D, then my point of view could not have been in 2010 that D&D had "lost its way" through excess complexity. I thought the idea ridiculous at the time and I continue to think it's ridiculous. Moreover, I don't want to play with people who think the OSR idea has any validity. If that's you, for the love of all things sacred, stop playing D&D and go get a real fucking job, one with consequences attached to your actions. You need more life experience, not a dumber game.

Let me see if I can explain where a simple system utterly fails my perceived structure of player agency and opportunity. If you don't know me, you might want to read this, this and then this post.

If you're following along with the Discord Campaign, then you know that my party has recently been offered logistical support from a group of ethnic Hungarians seeking to destabilise the Ottoman Regime from the inside... an idea the party has embraced because they see it as a way of enriching themselves. Parties are, after all, always parties.

But now that the players have decided to onboard themselves (they were not required to do so; if they had not, I'd have simply given them some other opportunity), then the system they play in has to be robust enough to answer their intentions honestly and intelligently. A simplified system cannot hope to sustain deep agency in a setting that lacks the procedural density needed to answer the player's meaningful questions. Before Ottoman logistics in Hungary can be destabilised, they have to be comprehended, they need a logic. The players will need to know, ahead of time, what the blockhouse ought to contain, fairly, without that being strictly an arbitrary number of gold. They need to know which trade routes matter and why, what support the blockhouse has from the immediate area, how authority functions both in the blockhouse and in the surrounding region under Ottoman control. To make decisions on how to attack the blockhouse, they must have information on residents in the area, the probable consequence of the attack, what the next target might logically be, what an end-point of their engagement might be, where they feel they have a right to draw the line before getting in deeper... all with a legitimate agency that says "the players are in charge of what the players do," not me, not a story, not a convenient "adventure midway ride," nothing whatsoever that forces them, beyond the pure logic of the setting, to keep going in a setting large enough that if they walk two hundred miles west, they can escape Ottoman influence entirely and set up shop elsewhere with a clean slate.

Shadowdark's mechanics simply aren't good enough to provide this.

This is the real divide between the D&D I'm teaching and the D&D being sold, under various cheap-minded rubrics. The OSR often talks about "player freedom," but what that usually means is freedom inside a vacuum. The players may choose any direction, but the world lacks enough internal structure for those directions to materially differ from the players' perspective in any meaningful way. They can choose the left door vs. the right one. They can choose whether to enter the dungeon or not. They can choose whether or not this is the right time to return to town and resupply. The decisions are isolated, trivial and ultimately meaningless in a broader context. Players can make a choice, but they cannot engage their strategic reasoning because there is no rule structure and no complex setting against which to test their understanding of potential consequences. They can't have agency because there's nothing to have agency about. Without a detailed framework, the setting simply cannot respond to player choice.

Thus, complexity in the mechanics and the world is the medium through which player agency becomes functional. Detailed systems allow players to make deliberate choices, anticipate outcomes and respond to evolving circumstances. Without that depth, what appears to be freedom is in fact constrained and superficial. The richness of the system and the world is what allows agency to exist in a functional sense. In essence, the world’s complexity and the rules' granularity are inseparable from the player's capacity to act deliberately and with impact.

But as I said in the attached posts, DMs don't want that. They want controlled, managed, contained players who do as they're told, so they can move from points A to B to C in succession in a curated, Candyland-like structured game setting, where cardboard baddies are knocked down with dice, or fudging, since if the baddie doesn't fall then it has to be pushed over. This is what OSR celebrates as the "ideal model" for D&D, and I think that's gawdawful.

Finally, with regard to yesterday's post, one thing I did not comment upon was the lack of actual game discussion among the participants. I did not learn anything about Shadowdark from Dionne's own mouth, the matter of "State of OSR in 2026" was not in fact discussed because, in fact, OSR itself was not discussed. What was discussed was an hour of "engagement" in the least valuable, socially awkward manner imaginable.

To which I'd like to respond, can the reader see me on this panel?

It's a two-part question. First, is there any universe in which these people could imaginatively look at this blog or my content or my work and want to have me present? I think not.

And secondly, since I would talk about the subject, the State of OSR in 2026, which would be to say, it will be exactly what it was in 2025. "Advancement" is not being made in any sort of science or game play manner. It is just people churning out more product of the exact same kind. I would not be welcome with my comments. I would make everyone at the table extremely uncomfortable because I would not be there to sell anything. And where it comes to table sales, the purpose of this kind of video is to make sure no one looks incompetent, since we're giving everyone lip service in order to sell themselves as "real, authentic people" while needing to do nothing to perform that model except to sit in chairs and speak in vaguely conversational patterns. The panel does not exist to investigate anything, or talk about anything, or present a viewpoint that might damage their potential sales.

That is why, for me, I'd as soon be a member of a panel of real estate agents talking about "the housing market in 2026"... since, obviously, for real estate agents, the only answer to that question is, "It's going to be amazeballs!"

Thank you, no.

Can you imagine the seller of an OSR product addressing the question, the State of the OSR in 2026 with the answer, "This design trend, actually, has reached a dead end in these last fifteen years. I think we need to reconsider whether or not this OSR thing has actually run its course."

(you load) 16 Tons of ...

Luke Stratton: I want to talk a little bit about kind of what you're tapping on here with the communities. I feel like all of our brands, if you will, the communities are such a big part of it, and they're the thing that is different between, say, big corporate D&D, right? I mean, there are communities for those, but that's very like the two entities are very separated. You've got the corporate official stuff and then this like kind of back corner, illegal, you know, third-party stuff. Whereas, we're making stuff where they're putting our logos on the products. We're uplifting them. We back all the Kickstarter projects for Pirateborg and sell them in our store. (to Kelsey Dionne) I know you back all the Shadowdark stuff. Like Kelsey, tell us about your community. What about your community is like so vibrant and important to the Shadowdark brand?

Dionne: Yeah, it is kind of, it's become sort of a brand like an ecosystem. They, the community, is the most enthusiastic evangelists of the game, and we've kind of hit a critical mass where because there's enough of them, they're spreading sort of uncontrollably amongst... like, you know, 'cause like word of mouth for us is huge. Like, that's kind of how we make our first entry is through word of mouth, and so, we just have a really engaged enthusiastic community.

I was sent a video by the OSR by a colleague, which he did not want to post a link to, not wishing to give these people free advertising. Myself, I don't think it makes a difference. This group of dolts is what happens when a vaguely motivated vapid creators find a market in slightly more vapid consumers, creating opportunities for the savagery of the English language one can read above. The video features "members of the OSR" Luke Stratton, Kelsey Dionne, Brad Kerr, Matt Finch and Yochai Gal.

Luke Stratton created Pirate Borg and publishes pirate-horror OSR material through Limithron; Kelsey Dionne created Shadowdark RPG and runs The Arcane Library; Brad Kerr writes concise, atmospheric adventures such as Hideous Daylight; Matt Finch co-authored OSRIC and created Swords & Wizardry; and Yochai Gal created Cairn and co-hosts Between Two Cairns with Brad Kerr.

This blog blasted Matt Finch in January for his OSRIC, deservedly so. Otherwise, I don't know who these people are, nor do I give a fuck. I could tell, just spending a half hour with them, that I don't want to know them. Ever. I would find it difficult to be in a room with them.

I've worked a number of office jobs. There's always that up-and-comer who has learned all the corporate speak, is utterly oblivious to how ridiculous they sound to "normal" people, is incredibly sychophantic to upper management and is always to ready to make the minions "cheerful" about their commitment to the company. That is, just these up-and-comers down-and-implode, ending their fabulous trajectory and finding work in a warehouse. Maybe, if you've worked office jobs, you've met them.

Now, imagine that person has designed a role-playing game.

It's plain from the way these people speak about their products, which they are trying to sell, that they're not artists, players or hobbyists. They're small-brand operators who have absorbed a small, scattered and barely-understood corporate marketing language which they're amateurishly fitting into their speech in a desperate attempt to sound like they have a clue what they're doing or saying. Underneath the veneer, with the exception of Matt Finch, who is old enough to have done this so long that he's now competently slimy, it's more than evident that the other four are poster children for "imposter syndrome." They trip over their words, they change verb tense mid sentence, they fail to end sentences, they cram in phrasing like "critical mass" and "uplifting" that do not quite say what they want it to say, while using "community" as a word that miraculously launders their ill-conceived and probably misunderstood business position. I'd guess that none of them, Matt Finch included, though by now that part of his brain has suffocated along with his legal comprehension, have the slightest clue why their stuff is popular, why they have a lot of money and what they need to do to keep the money rolling is. Their speech patterns suggest that fear and doubt. Just to be clear, this is Luke Stratton's 17th Pirateborg podcast episode and he still talks like this. Constantly.

If they were genuinely passionate about their products, they would demonstrate passion. If they were in the last bit self-aware, they'd be so embarrassed by this level of performance that they would never appear on a podcast again. Not only can these people not speak casually, or for one moment appear to be authentic at all, every sentence literally feels like they're veering off a cliff of some kind, that they they have to keep pulling themselves back from.

Consider this phrasing: "we've kind of hit a critical mass where because there's enough of them, they're spreading sort of uncontrollably amongst..."

At this point, I'm fairly sure that even Dionne has realised that she sounds like she's describing the spread of a disease, which is why this thought just stops dead and gets translated into a completely benign cliche about word of mouth. There's no question she knew her language was careening out of control... because it happens again, and again, with all of them. I could easily just give twenty examples. Watch the video. It's a drinking game. You have to take a shot every time a speaker changes the subject mid-sentence.

These speakers all sound like people trying to maintain a product that they infer is unstable, needs marketing language to make acceptable, while at the same time being actually unable to factually speak about the products they're making.

Matt Finch: It's solely I think the fact of the internet being out there that people nowadays are reading on screens and even on phones, which have you know have different... there's just a different physical interaction with what you're doing, and the best way to read something on a screen is to have all the... every discreet piece of information isolated from every other piece, because you're going to be scrolling up and down and you need to... it's much more importan that you need to know where your eyes gonna fall (sic), and so you know I-I-I think anyone who is-is-is younger or has been on the internet a lot is now much more familiar and expecting to see information broken out that way.

Okay. That was three shots... and maybe I don't know what he was trying to say there because I'm now drunker than I was 40 seconds ago (the time he took to say this; it was hard to pound them back at that speed), but, seriously... what the fuck.

A couple of things. First, the channel Limithon, which hosts to the podcast, felt this was such a valuable quote that they cut it from the five-person discussion and published it as its own video. Yeetch!

Secondly, OSRIC was published 20 years ago. After widespread use of the internet, by the way, that can no longer be described as something happening "these days." Nor can phones, for that matter, which have had interactive screens for 19 years. So... yeah. That. One would expect that Finch, after twenty years, could express himself better than this... especially with that constantly invoked legal background of his (he constantly invokes it, so I might as well). Again, yeetch.

You'd think after 20 years you'd have realised, "I'm not really very good at this public speaking thing. Maybe I shouldn't be doing it any more."

Then again, no doubt, he needs to believe he's still relevant.

Honest to gawd, all due service to my colleague who didn't want to link this, this is an excellent demonstration of what's happened to the community.

The Old School Renaissance emerged as a reaction to what many players saw as the increasing complexity of newer editions of D&D — particularly 3rd Edition and onward, which accentuated elaborate rules, point-buy systems, intricate character builds and heavy roleplaying structures. Enthusiasts wanted to return to a more streamlined, improvisational and often harsher playstyle of 1974 to 1981 D&D, where the rules existed primarily to support play rather than constrain it. This meant: simple mechanics, fast resolution, minimal bookkeeping and a focus on emergent interaction between the players that would inspire and increase immersion for the table's culture. Players could run adventures quickly, handle combat and treasure without extensive prep, and rely on improvisation instead of predefined character arcs or vocal performance.

Just so we're clear, a "renaissance" is not expected to adhere to the products of the original time; much was produced during "The Renaissance" of the mid-2nd Millenium that did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome. From what I've been able to learn about the products these persons have created (excepting the podcast presenter), at least three of them seem to be creating products that are in line with old school play. I can't say, because I have no personal experience, that Cairn, Shadowdark or the products produced by Kerr are "good" or "bad," because I haven't seen them. Some research suggests that they do provide what they promise to provide: a deviation away from 5e concepts (though with Shadowdark there is reason to think this deviation might be superficial, as the game does embrace concepts like character identity, campaign themes and player investment that reads 5e-adjacent).

I have, on the other hand, seen OSRIC, which is just plain shit. It's not a redesign, it's a butchering of the original source material which has been repackaged in a way that made it worse, which was sold during the "golden age" of new shiny youtube, when so many rubes existed for the taking that OSRIC lucked the fuck out. That's all that was.

If I wanted to invest five minutes in any of these products, a pretty big if, then that desire is butched by meeting these people in this video. This sort of thing is supposed to increase interest, not reveal that the designers are in fact a bunch of losers who also got lucky, right there with Finch. I don't know that to be the case... but when you hear them, and see their body language, and then you put them beside Finch, whom they clearly admire (not respect, I'd expect respect, it's not your podcast), then it lessens my motivation to have anything to do with their product.

This is not how marketing is supposed to work.

Someone should take these people aside — that is, Dionne, Kerr and Gal — and tell them to stop having one-on-ones with marketing analysts and try getting back to their real, authentic selves; what they personally see in the product, why they made they changes they did, what they'd like to do next... and just stop talking about the fans as objectified things they're so proud to possess now. Yes, I get it, it's great to have fans... and no doubt, they all pay marketing lipservice to "thanking" the fans every day, because fans do in fact like that pandering shit. But really, the fans aren't in it to be acknowledged as a sort of contagion that's spreading fast. They're in it because they want to know who you are, because in your eyes, you're pretty cool.

Therefore, get some lessons in not sounding like what you like is the money you're making, because that's what business speak is designed to convey. "Word of mouth for us is huge" means, in corporatese, "we are raking in tons of money and we love it."

That's not good. Don't talk that way.

I have no notes for Finch. He's irredeemable... an old word that says, in essence, his soul is so much in debt now that there's no way of paying it back.

And as far as Stratton goes, it's pretty clear he doesn't give a fuck. Limithron has 5,080 subscribers and after three days, it has 3,400 page views. Even subscribers aren't listening to this shit. But these are his best numbers since producing a like post a month ago with Dionne again and three other guests, which yielded 3,900 page views. Apart from the 3,700-view post with Mike Shea, the rest of his work generally doesn't top a thousand. But that's okay. He's found a button that works, so expect to see a lot more "panel" episodes of this cast.

Ten years from now, if my luck continues as it has in the past, Luke Stratton will be more popular than Mr. Beast. Because, well, that's how far I am from the way the rest of the world is.

Certainly, Stratton hopes this will be the case. I doubt he thinks about anything else.