D&D: The Adventure!! Boardgame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swaggerability

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

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

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

Phenomenal, ain't it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of these things are, in essence, true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jingoism

🎵

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

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

I love to eat it every day,

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

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

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

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

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

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

🎵

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer weiner...

That is what I truly want to be!

'Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer weiner,

Everyone would be in love with me!

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is how fetishism works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Session 11: a Death in the Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the Spider

Taking my morning walk, I could feel myself break a spider's web that had been strung from the tree on my left to the car on my right. Given that people must walk there every day, and given that the car must move off from the curb also, I found myself wondering about the spider that releases a light silk line into the air to let the wind carry it until it catches another surface. Once it catches, the spider tightens and reinforces it, then uses it as a first bridge line for the rest of the web. Course, that never happens, because human activity produces a routine environment destruction of the spider's efforts. Yet, "orb-weavers" who do this rebuild often, sometimes daily, even eating their webs so they can be reused, because if it catches just one decent sized insect (and for some of the smallest types, that can be very small from our perspective), then the effort hasn't been wasted.

My first thought was to connect this effort to prepping games for Dungeons and Dragons. Weird, huh?

It's a matter of apparent wasted effort when it seems to provide no real value or consequence. Obviously, the spider is functioning from instinct. It lets its web to the wind because it has adapted that way to its environment. Humans are harder. We do things by instinct, but because we have the capacity to think we find ourselves endlessly forced to justify that instinct in a concrete, identifiable way... even if that way becomes story-making we tell ourselves. We convince ourselves that this jam is better than that because this is "sweeter" or "less chewy" or "thicker"... when in fact, we're just reaching for things to call the jelly we like versus how to describe the jelly we don't. All jellies are sweet, chewy or thick; they're jelly. We only care which is which when we're forced to rate them. Human instinct says, eat the one that's closest when your hungry. Human thought tells us, we can choose which one to eat because we can prepare for when we are hungry. And... for the most part, that choice is simpler if we need only go to the shelf, look for the cherry and buy it. Cognisance, explaining the reason we do things, only gets hard when we have to explain to someone else "why cherry."

In turn, D&D preparation gets easier when we turn off the signal that keeps asking "what are we doing this preparation for?"  There are a great many DMs who simply enjoy making megadungeons. They don't need a reason. The dungeons don't ever actually have to be used in a game. Yet the act is just pleasant, and because it is, the act can consume hundreds of hours in the space of a season. It doesn't need to be justified. Like the spider, it's just what we do.

The leap comes when we realise that non-intentional preparation actually IS preparation, just in another form. Because it's more enjoyable than the forced stuff we have to do for a specific game, we do more of it. And it changes what we know, and how good we get at it, and how rational we become doing it and... ultimately, it gives us a group of skills we can apply to other things. Steady work enlarges our stock of patterns, instincts, procedures and solutions. We learn scale, we learn how rooms connect and how big they ought to be... and most of all, how repetition, drawing the same thing over and over again, pushes us to invent new things to draw, new ideas, new possibilities.

Anyone who's decided they're going to make a world because it has to be done, not out of love for world making, soon discovers how dreadful the experience is. As soon as you have to use your head to convince your body to go through the motions of dungeon design, you've already lost the battle. There's no way, when you're thinking about it all the time, and wondering if this is going to do any good, or if it has value, to just keep at it. You're like the spider would be if it fretted all the time about whether or not it would catch food today. The spider doesn't think about that because it can't. It just does. If it doesn't catch food, it dies. And it doesn't think about that either. Which might be a blessing... except the spider can't recognise a blessing.

This is why "shortcuts" appear so desirable. We don't want to make a world, but we want to have one. We get bored trying to make a module, so we buy one. We don't want to learn for ourselves how to DM through practice and effort and pattern recognition — we just want someone to tell us how to be one, in such a way that it happens easily. Like a fingersnap. Poof, you can DM now. That's much better than having to slog our way through endless room drawing and tedious research about things we don't in fact care about.

The spider is born to do what it does. People want to be born with the knowledge of how to DM. That would be perfect.

This is why the theory that some DMs are just "naturally" good at this is so popular. It lends credence to the belief that knowledge is a lock that all we need do is find a key for, and again, just like that, we can do it. And if we can't, well... there's no point trying. "I wasn't born a DM, so realistically, there's no point in my trying to be one."

I'll be conceited and arrogant and say that I've never met one of these "natural" DMs who especially impressed me, as the all seem to be a lot of show and performance and not much on flexibility and design. Mercer, for example, is all show; as a DM, he runs a pre-made story that's fleshed out with glitz and glamour... but it only works if the players don't have there own agenda. This is fine for what he was doing: "acting" like a good DM. I didn't see a thing in any episode I watched that suggested he had any skillset except that.

Dungeon Mastering as a skill we "inhabit" like the spider comes down to two things: the ability to assume authority that, right or wrong, causes the players to give way when we speak. The other is managing player independence. If you take that independence and cram it into a set of "if-then" options, as modules do, as Gygax told us to do, as the company continues to argue we ought to do, that solves the second problem. This argues that players, in essence, are leashed. They have only the independence we allow them to have. Which isn't really "independence," but hey, what'ya want for a game where the rules ain't really the rules anyway?

All the DMs I've met that were worth their salt had a "second game" going on the side. Not running other people, not creating their own characters to run in a dungeon like playing chess against ourselves (but a lot of us have tried it). No, just making. Like the whittler who makes squirrel after squirrel with a pen-knife until the squirrels look really, really good, and there are hundreds of them on every shelf in the basement, with a pile of them in the corner over there. Because the squirrel's end is not the object. Making is the object.

For the DM, the whittled squirrel is a laptop or a file book full of unused dungeons, failed attempts to create an economy, maps for other planets and planes the players will never see, scale drawings of towns that have no application, price lists, geneologies, histories... the list goes on and on. It does not matter that these things are not "useful." At some point, when the DM needs something, the thing may be remembered and sought after — either without success, or only to discover that the thing was made so long ago that it pales compared to how the DM would draw that map now, or design that dungeon now, or make up that geneology now. Which is fine, because the DM learned how and can churn out a better, needed product in a matter of hours. You want a squirrel? No, don't take that one off the shelf. Listen, give me two hours, I'll make you a better one right now.

That brings us back to the spider. I break the spider's web and think, what a pity, the spider spent that effort for nothing. But the spider's "effort" is irrelevant. The spider's nature makes the effort fluidly, unconsciously, and when it's gone, it's not wasted because it's not thought about. Thinking is the stumbling block, not doing.

The common DM thinks about objects. They want a dungeon, a world, an "adventure," an end result that they think they need to make their world happen. They are utterly trapped in the materialism of DMing because its the only part of their gaming that they can remotely understand. Thus, if a module sits on the shelf and is never used, it IS a waste... of money, of expectation, of space on the shelf. And because they need the object to run the game, they're dependent on others who can make it for them, They're dependent on the object arriving in time, or they need to make sure they have enough of every kind of object so that if something unexpected comes up, they'll be ready. They run their game worlds like an inventory.

But the more capable DM thinks of skills. Making the dungeon, making the world, making the adventure. The skill means I don't need to have one ready made, it will pop into my mind because I've made so many of this thing, out of nothing really, that I can do it for myself, any time, on demand, for free. And if I make it and it's not used? No matter, I didn't pay for it, I made it... and whatever the end object that is now, the process of making it remains eternally a part of me, forever. Without my needing to think about it.

It is impossible for something unexpected to come up that I can't deal with in the next five minutes. I've been doing this too long.

Obviously, I don't expect any reader to suddenly stop being an object-dependent DM, if that's what you are. I only want to make it clear that your manner of thinking about what "prep" means for you defines whether or not you are dependent or independent... and for you to think about what's a better strategy for you in the long run.

And They Tell this Stuff to Children

Here is a subject that is never spoken of enough.

When the makers of RPGs, regardless of the given company — and of course there are many now — seek to sell their game, the marketing that's pursued promotes the product to a young, new, accessible, family-friendly, easy-to-onboard culture... something that, in particular, a kid can enter. The wording is always carefully balanced to include short words, to suggest emotional ideals such as "imagination," "adventure" and "fun," because the goal is to make something that absolutely encourages young people to play. Most of us here began playing D&D, as the front-leading example, when we were quite young. Therefore it seems perfectly natural to us, having been introduced to the game in school and early in life, that the company should go on promoting the game to the next generation.

However, when any part of the company's position is challenged on the ethics of its practices — fudging, for example; or story-manipulating the player's experience with railroading, illusionism, concealed forced outcomes; or questions of consent, the politicisation of the game with "safety tools" and "consent checklists"; corporate control over community labour; digital ownership and platform control; and monetisation of the product, building brands, the endless stream of book selling, the normalising of performance-centered versions of play, the mechanics of audience retention — then suddenly the imagined game table is composed of consenting adults who have negotiated every premise. Children are useful as customers; but magically, when discussing their customers, the manner in which the product's pitch affects children is never a part of the discourse.

Yes, I began playing D&D at 15, but the company did not at the time tell me what to think about D&D, what to believe about the game's purpose, what it was supposed to mean to me or any other form of propaganda, such that pours like heaven's flood, drenching the landscape now. I was given the rules and allowed to play. What I did with the game, how I spoke to my players, how they spoke to each other, that was NOT discussed by the game's seller. Now, if one wants to buy the product, the pitch that you should like the game you just purchased is there on the front page. Because the last thing we can allow is to let children think for themselves, when the opportunity exists to tell them how to think, fast and early, before they develop any opinions of their own.

We don't think about it because nowadays, the lawnmower we buy includes text before the instructions that tells us how much we're going to love our lawnmower... or the microwave, or even Christmas lights, if some justification can be made to provide printed material with the product. Sometimes, I believe the safety pamphlet is really only there as a performative way of the company telling us that they "care." As if to say, "See, we don't want you to hurt yourself by plugging in these five-watt fairy lights in some imagined manner that might cause the tiniest of shocks — if that doesn't tell you how much we LOVE you as a customer, we don't know what will."

It might be nice to buy a blender and not be told the lifestyle feeling I'm supposed to derive from owning my very own way to make pulverised carrots, but, c'est la vie. It's the world we live in now.

The difference is that my blender is not giving instructions in order to mind-fuck my players according to a supposed understood emotional contract that allows me as a DM to run a game in which the dice, or any other aspect, in an "advisory" way, for the player's larger benefit (as defined by me), to help them avoid an unwanted consequence (as defined by me), so that I can "save them" (a necessity that is, again, defined by me) from an unsatisfying game experience (as I define it). All, I might add, without admitting that I'm doing any of this.

Moreover, if a nine-year-old walks into an appliance store to buy a blender by himself, the store won't sell it to him. Guess why.

We supposedly live in a culture that views marketing and selling products as a rule-governed social practice. From the law's point of view, marketing and selling are regulated forms of public conduct. A thing may be offered to the public because it is presumed to be intelligible. The buyer is not merely handed an object; he is given a public account of what the object is, what it is for, how it is meant to be used, what sort of experience it promises and what kind of relation he is entering by purchasing it. The product’s description, packaging, instructions and surrounding language are not incidental. They form the buyer’s understanding of the thing.

At present, the role-playing game is not being sold as a product. It is being sold as a social practice. It tells persons, including children, how to exercise authority (as the company defines it), presenting it in scope as a "rule-governed game" while then immediately undermining the so-called rules by flat-out stating that the rules do not need to be followed. The DM does not need to follow them, the game is better served by not doing so, the DM should instead concentrate on the "vibe of the table," while the company argues loudly that those running the game — and again, this can be read by children able to read just as well as by adults — are empowered to subordinate the rules to flow, story, fun, pacing, and emotional management of, yes, other children.

But don't talk about that. The WOTC never does.

A company should not be legitimately permitted to give public advice, market a game as accessible and family-friendly, while at the same time pretending that it's messaging is begin received only by mature adult tables who have negotiated all ethical premises in advance. A company cannot pretend to sell this form of propaganda about how to play a game in a manner that imposes lies, manipulation and brand-serving product language and then pretend it is not responsible if children do not understand the message.

Obviously, I have no problem with a game being sold. My problem is with people being told, screamed at really, through multiple mediums, supported by a cadre of fairly ignorant lock-steppers who ALSO do not discuss children when giving advice on their youtube channels, the principles by which the game should be played.

It is the word should that really gets under my skin, to be honest. Which might sound strange to some, since I've spent a lot of time on this blog doing my own shouting about how the game "should" be played. The difference, I think — and some might disagree — is that I'm not spending my time telling people how to feel about the game, or how to ensure others feel about the game as you should. A subtle difference, to be sure. Certainly one I don't expect the majority to grasp. But there is an enormous difference between my teaching a little leaguer how to hold a bat in order to achieve the best possible swing with the best possible leverage, to permit a better physical contact with the ball, and badgering that same little leaguer into liking the game more, because he should, because it's a great game, and everyone should love it, period, no questions asked. I think there's a difference.

Feel free to disagree.

The World is Too Big a Place

My recent post about the D&D-branded play community addressed the issue that I have long had with the proffered "game" proposed by the company. While sold as "wonderful, communal and magical," in reality I believe the latest version of the game is in fact not a very good product... but that it is made tolerable by a community that has embraced ideals of individualism, "me"-ism and a strong compulsion to feel recognised and not excluded... this last having a lot to do with general social feelings just now that the world has become too big for those who cannot place themselves rationally within the world's present-day internet-driven massiveness.

I've been thinking of late about the world I grew up in — but before I get into that, let me stress, as I have many times on this blog, that I am not a nostalgic person. I do not think the game that I ran in 1984 is better than the game I'm running now. I do not think that the world was a better place in 1976; I do not think that there were more opportunities for individuals to express themselves in the 1970s and 80s. I do not think the culture was "better"... though I will admit that it was more focused and less owned by a corporate elite. I am not interested in writing a post about the "good old days," because in fact I don't think those days were actually very "good." I believe that people say that because they don't adapt well, because they don't know how to make use of new things, because they taught themselves to be confused more easily than younger folks and because, let's face it, things were simpler. I just refuse to consider "simpler" to mean the same thing as "better."

Importantly, what matters here is that that other world was smaller. The number of those who might know of our existence was minimal, limited for the most part to first hand or second-hand sources. Others at school or in my work place might know me, or they might have heard of me, directly, as told by others... but that was all. Very, very few had any experience with actual "fame," either small or large. Politicians did not need to perform in a mass-media fashion because it was sufficient to go to one's riding or district, meet people on a street, shake their hands, talk with them, and feel personally connected. Some one might develop a "reputation," but this was largely only with people already known. When I played D&D, what happened at my table might to told directly to others by my players, or myself, but that was as far as it could conceivably go. Even attending a game con, the larger audience was fleeting, hardly impressive and no means existed by which a person could go to a third source to look me up, to see what others thought of me.

This is all obvious. I only feel the need to say it because no one ever does now.

Another writer might now decide this is the opportunity to talk about how this unlimited visibility is bad for us and soul-crushing, and the reason why everything sucks now, while decrying the loss of the personal or some other such rot. I'm not going to do that.

What's materially relevant is that the world I grew up in had two or three centuries to develop a structure that included a school, a shared workplace, a university-directed path towards careerism, meeting spaces, expectations about politicians, celebrities and the media... all of which, while reaching fruition at different times and with different impulses, did create a sort of structured, predictable world that enabled people to tell us, "you will get an education at school" or "if you improve yourself, you will get a good job." These were myths to some degree, but the result came up often enough that there remained a sentiment that it could be trusted.

Thus the individual growing up in that world could perceive the world, correct or not, as a navigable space; as a finite space. If I did not enjoy my time at one restaurant, I could leave the job and cross the street to be hired there, without someone having the power to look my name up on an internet and learn what my life had been before entering that new space. That limitation matters, not because it was better, but because it was, for the average human, comprehensible.

A finite world can be harsh, stupid, toxic, have its head up its ass... but it exists in a "bubble."  The concept of a bubble became the rage in the 2000s not because it accurately described the average person's behaviour toward the internet — picking and choosing what they desired to believe or hear — but because it connected to the world that the pundits of that time understood best. We have ALWAYS lived in a bubble... but once upon a time, the bubble was something one had to earn. If you worked for the New York Times as a writer, you had to prove yourself to be there... and you had to prove yourself able to stay there. Now a promising youtuber can outproduce the best writer of the New York Times easily, not only in views, attention and popularity, but in volume and legitimacy. That is terrifying for those people who remember when there were kept gates. It is normal for those who do not care about such things.

But... there is a price to be paid to the "popularity" model... and it is the price that vast numbers of persons are paying now. In my younrger life, there was a thing called a "plugger." This was a person who did not have any special skills, any special value to a company, was not inventive or innovative... but they showed up for work day in and day out, they got along with everyone, they had nothing else particularly special in their lives but they did have the resolve to just keep plugging at a job. This often produced its own form of respect. Jimmy has been with this company for 42 years; no, he's not invented anything new, he's not all that clever, we could replace him with someone cheaper... but really, he's still here. Wow. That counts for something.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Jimmy was replaced with someone cheaper. And Jimmy doesn't have the capacity to do all that well in the present climate, where "plugging" will not get you attention on the internet, it will not increase your youtube views, it will not guarantee you a space with the company and, really, we don't care if you plug. What can you do? Hm? Anything?

Pluggers can exist in a finite world. But that world is gone. And unfortunately, there have always been more pluggers than stars. Thus we have the people who have followed the strategy recommended by the internet: post regularly, post often, just keep posting, just keep at it, just count on the future, just plug. But it isn't enough to plug. The 147th boring post is still just boring, it is still just getting 11 views. There isn't a future. The world is too big a place and Jimmy isn't competing with Hal and Mary and Tom for employee of the month. Jimmy is competing with every living soul with access to the internet.

The larger picture here is a conscious understanding that nearly everyone has now that we're very, very small in an amazingly vast and incomprehensibly sized universe. A very large slice of people cope with that by just not getting on the internet at all. Or limiting their contact with the internet to an anti-boredom machine. They don't have delusions of mattering. They don't imagine that something special is going to happen to them one day. They'd like to not be alone. They'd like to be among friends that make them feel important. Friends who want to give them something around a D&D table that it would be impossible to have online. Friends who will let them be a "star" for a few hours on a Saturday night, because the company tells them, "Forget the internet: your place to shine is which you cool new zumbla-raced character with its bahzit character class! You'll be special, you'll be unique, you'll have what the internet and the world cannot give you: relevance."

The corporation, even the pundits on youtube, are selling a very distinct image: that the D&D table can be a finite room where the players can matter because everyone present agrees that they do. All that's needed is to remove every obstacle to this goal: thus, rules can't exist, because that's a hump the players would have to climb over; limitations on action can't exist, because we're here to have fun, not prove anything; every imaginable form of character and self-definition has to be possible because THIS is the goal: to self-define to make oneself important. This is what D&D is selling, in the most analog way possible, because "collaborative" game table is becoming one of the last places where live human beings of the "loser" variety can gather together physically, in the flesh, to "become" more than they are.

It's all kind of... well, I'm sorry to say it, because it's mean and cruel, but it's kind of pathetic.

If, to feel self-important, to feel part of activity you're willing to partake in, you're prepared to give up everything except self-gratification, then you're... well... a child. You're a child who has felt so overwhelmed by the world you've been thrust into that your sole means of ego is to return to the sort of play-pretend games that children play, because they don't actually understand what they're pretending to be. They're thinking that being a doctor means dressing like one and having a stethescope. They're thinking that being a firefighter means having the right hat. They're doing the equivalent of pinning their brand new police officer's badge to their t-shirt and then wearing it proudly in front of their friends, as though this means anything except a piece of tin.

They're not actually perceiving themselves as real life adventurers, who have to overcome impossible odds to achieve unimaginable things, through courage, difficulty, dangers, possible loss of life... they don't want to experience anything even remotely close to those things. They can't even gather the courage to face those things imaginatively. No. What they want is the free badge, pinned to a shirt, so they can strut and pretend they've earned it.

While the company recognises that this impulse is an easier way to make money than to make a difficult-to-understand, but engaging product. The role-player in the present day doesn't want to be "engaged." They want to be empowered, and they want that empowerment to take a shape that the world cannot offer them: with an iron-clad guarantee that they matter.

The world has just become too big a place now for them to be adults inside it.

For Nigel Robinson

 
Way back in 2022, I had this exchange with Nigel Robinson, who wrote,

"Alexis, I usually comment as Nigli, but I'm on a shared tablet so I have a different handle. I'm from New Zealand originally but have spent most of my adult life in Europe, mostly in the Czech Republic and more recently in Hamburg, Germany.In passing, I am interested to note you used Gottwaldov for what's now Zlin."

He added when I asked,

"Duchy of Vlachia sounds like a reasonable name. I know it as Valašsko, which is the current Czech name. The people there speak with a really sing-song dialect."

Well, Nigel, here's Zlin at last.

Unfuckingbelievable

I'm in a terrible mood today. I'm writing this in what is probably the mistaken belief that the mainstream media does not actually represent the mainstream of human culture right now; and that the United States press, both sides of it, also do not represent the mainstream. This is not going to be a blog post about D&D, or anything that most of my American readers are going to want to read about. I'll keep this as polite as I can and try not to sink the popularity of this blog.

First of all, I do not care about the World Cup. I think many others right now are doing what I'm doing... tolerating the nonsense sham of encouraged enthusiasm, just as the Knicks were shoved down our throats when, likewise, I did not care. I do not care who wins the basketball final because I'm not invested in something I can't do, can't enjoy, can't feel emotions about and which, in essence, assumes that because I happen to live in a given city, I give a rat's ass about how the sports team of that city performs, or what other sports teams from other cities that it beats. I feel the same way about the World Cup. I have played soccer, but I have zero investment in other people playing soccer and I do not care what country they come from. No matter who wins, no matter what arbitrary country boundaries they happen to live in or be from, I'm sure they'll be very good at "football."  That is as far as my concern about the matter lies. I'd be able to forget about it entirely, except that Google has a series of extremely annoying short videos that I'm forced to see every day reminding me about something I'd rather not be reminded about.

As far as Iran goes... and I really shouldn't say this, but... for the sake of my soul. The United States people in the majority elected a bloated, arrogant, ignorant rapist and pedophile, with delusions of role-playing as the world's hockey goon... twice. They had all the opportunities in the world to see to it that this goon could not be elected again, that this goon should have seen the inside of a prison, that this goon should have faced some kind of justice, and instead they all thought about their own careers and their own needs and did fuck-all nothing about Jan 6... so this goon went ahead and attacked a foreign country without provocation, like a tin pot dictator, without any real consequence to himself and his cronies, like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia, except that he got his nose broken and his knees broken and was forced to accept that it was an incredibly stupid, impractical thing to do... not to mention a very BAD thing to do, except that because he's American, the American press won't just repeat that over and over again. The country attacked another country — never mind which one, because the rules are that no one does this, ever, under any auspices, period, done deal. Except that he did, and oh poor, poor, poor, poor, poor America, they lost a fucking war because they got their ass beat by the nominal Czechs in this situation, and now have to eat crow or dirt or whatever they have to shove down their poor sick throats now because it turns out that being the "greatest country in the world" doesn't seem to matter fuck all where the end results occur. And now the big bad other country is going to get a bunch of things that even liberals in America are unhappy about... and seriously... seriously... to everyone taking America's side here, fuck you. Them's the breaks. You let this moron goon off the chain, he did something very stupid, YOU LET HIM, and now here you are. Suck it up, all of you.

Congratulations. I didn't think it was possible, but the long and the short of it is that IRAN are the good guys in this scenario.

Unfuckingbelievable.

There.

My conscience is clear. Hate me as you will.

Back House Garbage

This is something of an ungenerous image to post, but I feel it says in a screenshot something very important about the pattern of streaming D&D that continues to proliferate, in search of the money Critical Role made.

The moment is from the WOTC's Dungeon Masters, episode 8, campaign 1 Finale. I'm not going to give the time stamp, you'll just have to watch this to find the moment. Yes, the fellow on the left is definitely picking his nose. The fellow on the right is not smelling his armpit, though the freeze suggests that; he is, rather, apparently checking out some growth or something to do with the skin behind his elbow... apparently because he's so bored with the ongoing campaign that he's forgotten that a camera is running.

This is a problem I have with the "actors" from all such things that are being presented by some sort of "official" organisation or corporation: while they may be actors or even have experience with improv, they aren't "professional."  The lack of immediate attention from moment to moment allows them to slip into a habit that all unprofessional actors do... get bored, start looking around, allow their faces to express momentary contempt at what the dungeon master says, or another actor... all of which produces an effect more like a reality show full of bored jerks (in other words, normal) and not a D&D session.

The assumption that professional discipline isn't necessary comes from the belief — again, in from a very unprofessional point-of-view — that improv doesn't need to be professional. This is an amateur's assumption that because something is improv'd, it doesn't require pacing, timing, care, attention, mindfulness and respect for other performers. In the scene above, the fellow on the left is talking to the DM while performing the act, while the fellow on the right is ignoring that the fellow next to him is talking. Professional actors know to turn and look at whomever is talking, because it draws the audience's focus to that person. NOT doing this isn't just poor acting, it's flat out disrespectful. I shouldn't be able to capture one second of two actors in the same shot, with one talking, and the other doing anything.

True enough, at an ordinary table, people scratch themselves, they check their phones, they make side jokes, they get up for snacks and ignore the other players, or roll their eyes and so on. They naturally behave much of the time that it's their turn that counts, that when others are playing its fine to look over one's character, look off blankly, yawn, stretch, whatever... because it makes little difference to the game: but the WOTC isn't presenting "a game"... not really. The WOTC is presenting something it hopes will encourage sales, interest, attention, a willingness to follow... and, one hopes, the fostering of a positive attitude towards the game itself.

This video fails utterly to accomplish this. One doesn't need to take my word it. This is the "big finale," presumably the most important episode... and yet, after 13 days live, 52K page views. In the scene of the screen capture, we're talking about the Alchemist's character's abilities and spell slots, as though that ought, on camera, to be something we need to highlight in a 1 hour, 35 minute episode. In D&D terms, that's not very long. If I were to run a session that short, it would be over in a finger snap, so far as the participants and myself were concerned. Instead, this hour and a half drags... nothing really happens. There's no build of tension, just display. The DM is making a lot of show, but there's next to no actual game play. The players are told things that happen (with the DM's voice literally enhanced technologically to sell the scene). This is a terrible representation of what the game of D&D offers.

On some level, this is what hurts D&D, and always has. Going back to the Dragon Magazine, there's always been this sort of... let's call it a "lets-go-camper vibe" with respect to the game that's always been very successful at undermining the game's credibility.

When I was 14, I worked one summer as a camp counsellor at a camp that was just a half-mile from my parents' cabin in Sylvan Lake. Junior counsellors ranged in age from 14 to 17, and seniors 18 to 19... presumably, in retrospect, because we could all be counted on to work for the experience for free. I certainly was willing.  Each cabin of eight boys had a senior and a junior counsellor. My senior liked to use the evenings to get together with the other seniors and drink (legally, in Canada, this was always possible at 18), leaving me to look after the eight boys, aged 8 and 9,  between eight and ten at night. Bedtime was eight, but it was always at least an hour of sitting in the cabin getting them all to sack out, boys being boys. Mostly, I let them talk, because I get along with kids. I could easily remember, then, being 8, and I liked being looked up to.

One of the things the boys like about me was that I wasn't rah-rah-rah all the time. I'd just talk to them like people. This was 1979, the same year Meatballs came out, meaning I hadn't seen it, but I would talk to the boys like Tripper talked to Rudy. You know, normal. Turns out, kids like that. Makes them feel like they matter, like they're mature... like they're respected.

But that was not the other camp counsellors. With them, it was all Morning Has Broken every morning and Kumbayah every night, like some hellscape of virtue signalling that went on relentlessly for hour after hour, day in and day out. Because, by gawd, these kids were going to "enjoy" their camp experience, no matter how hard it had to be shoved down their throat.

From the beginning of the Dragon Magazine, I've felt as a participant in this game that the game itself was assumed never to be enough for me. I had to find dragon cover art to be "cool," I had to swoon over critical rolls, I had to be fascinated with beholders and I had to stop dead in my tracks at the very idea that Gary Gygax, the Gary Gygax, had deigned to write an article for the magazine that was, after all, selling his shit. And that has more or less been the official position for the last 40 years. I'm not supposed to just watch this latest manifestation of Critical Role. I'm supposed to wet my pants because the DM's voice has been deepened with an echo effect when she speaks as "Lord Soth."

I'm frankly just sick to fucking death of it.

Let me repeat: I was fourteen when I noticed that the counsellors standing around the camp's flag pole at the abusive hour of seven A.M. in the summertime, their hands on their hearts as they sang a 1931 Christian hymn made popular in 1971 by Cat Stevens, having rousted the kids out of bed at 6:30 — who were still waiting to be fed, remember — were also hung over from drinking hard the night before. This kind of fucks with your head when you're young and your eyes are open. I was between grades 9 and 10 and was already beginning to see that a lot of life was a sort of ridiculous performance art, where adults pretend that we're all wonderful good people for the sake of children only to become, well, themselves when the kids are all in bed. It wakes one up to things... like, politicians on camera and off, teachers in a classroom and not, front house and back house in a restaurant.

My game sessions are like a bunch of cooks occasionally burning the food, dropping a chicken breast and then throwing it on the grill anyway, grazing at the fries while waiting, getting the line swept enough to keep from slipping, but not so that it's really clean... that only happens after close. Whereas the WOTC is like the front house, pretending our eggs only come from hens that have never had sex or that yes, absolutely, the fish is fresh, even though this is Sunday and the order was delivered Thursday. And I can't unsee the reality of this just because the WOTC wants me to wet myself with glee every time it churns out another product like this video. Which is full of stuff that reveals this was made in the back house, not the front.

It is full of shabby reality, made worse by the truth that whoever edited this video ought to be fired. Today. Without a good reference. The failings on camera here are accidental, amateurish, incompetent. Garbage. And there's no value to branding garbage like this while selling me on it being an immaculate chicken.

Session 10: Bugs and Slugs, Oh My!

The above is the "troglodyte lair" that the party investigated last Friday, with dotted line beginning at the mid-left and moving around through numbers 1 through 7. White indicates traversable space, grey the walls that were identified and black equals unknown. Thus in the bottom right corner, where black cuts across the white space, that isn't a wall, that's just as far as the party's torches was able to reveal. The gray smattering about the area is "rubble." The party's last position is shown on the map; an enlarged version of that is given below.

The constructing occupants, orcs, abandoned this catacomb 400 years ago, due to dwindling population and, likely, genetic issues, not that a 13th century orc could have understood the latter as anything except a lot of stillbirths and monsters from inbred parents who can't seem to produce healthy children. Even orcs must obey the laws of DNA.

The party fought (1) two giant ticks [AC 4,1 HD,#AT 1,D 1-4] and [AC 3,2 HD,#AT 1,D 1-4, blood drain]; (2) three giant centipedes [AC 8,1/4 HD,#AT 1,D 1, poison]; (3) two giant cockroaches [AC 5,1 HD,#AT 1,D 1-6]; (4) two more centipedes; (5) eleven giant cockroaches; (6) one carrion crawler [AC 5,4+1 HD,#AT 8,D 1-3]; and then (7) two more carrion crawlers. I took a screenshot of that last before the combat started.

The party had been game to fight everything up to this point, but their hit points were being winnowed down and at the sight of the two crawlers, they decided, after a lot of resistance, to give it up and withdraw. Pandred did not withdraw far enough, however, and got caught in an attack; worse, he was paralysed by that attack. So the party changed their minds and rushed forward to save him.

Before the battle was over, Pandred had been dragged by Edvard down from 1417, where he was stunned, to his position after. Zoltan had been paralysed also. Arduin the druid had succeeded in lighting up the two crawlers with faerie fire and Ti had drunk a super-heroism potion that elevated him to 8th level. He was able to clock the one crawler but he has been repeatedly dropping and breaking weapons since they left Budapest, so that he was fighting hand to hand with a javelin at the end here (rolling to see if it would break after every attack). It did break before the other crawler was killed, but Arduin and Lexent, with help from Mikael's good dart throwing, were able to succeed in ridding the world of that one also.

The words "3 load" refers to three rounds loading a heavy crossbow, which Oddsdrakken could do but he could not fire it; Edvard took a shot but missed with it. A hit might have done the crawler in, as heavy crossbows in my game do 2d6+1 damage (3-13).

Earlier, when fighting the 11 cockroaches, five of them had swarmed onto Pandred (I allow up to eight attacks on a hex by small swarming creatures, and giant cockroaches are just 40 lbs.), causing 26 damage including one crit that did 12. This was enough to cause even the rollicking 5th level to slow down... but I think the two carrion crawlers at last taught the party a little humility. Either run away clean or get on with it. They dithered trying to decide and it almost got Pandred killed.

I think, except for that one cockroach hit, that it was one of my worst nights for die rolling, ever. I rolled only one critical the whole night, through all the fights, while with the first carrion crawler I managed to hit only twice in 13 rolls. Egregious!

Zoltan, after all the experience from the different creatures — there was no treasure for the night — went up a level to fourth. He'd missed a running so it took him, again, eight runnings to climb from 1st to 4th. That even though he needed less than Ti the running before (Ti is a fighter), the experience system awards fighting... so fighters usually just make more experience during combats. 

Lexent went up to fifth level and got the henchman that he had rolled initially when he joined the game in the 1st session, back in February. That was from the player not realizing that he could import his character from the old Juvenis campaign where he had run Lexent in Norway. I had not realising the two were the same player... the internet, nyet? 

Anyway, I let the player put Matyas down until Lexent got to 5th, and then he could have Matyas as his henchfolk. The rest of the party all got a lot closer to their next level, doing pretty well. And even though it was just little fights, they declared the game to be very successful because it just felt like the fights folded one onto the other in a rational, reasonable way, so that it wasn't, "Oh my God, we have to fight another group of bugs!" It was more along the lines of searching the well and finding that it had centipedes in it, and searching the bench and finding there were cockroaches under it, in the manner of one long fight. The party was also impressed at the size of the dungeon as they roamed through it; they have not explored it all, as the map above shows.

The game is supposed to end at 11 p.m. Eastern. We ran 40 minutes overtime to finish off the two carrion crawler attack.