Pretensions of Grief

Maybe I should get off Chris Perkins' back. These last few years he's transformed himself from insufferable asshole to insufferable suck-up. It's an improvement. We should always reward improvement. The link provides an interview between Perkins and the creator of a channel I don't care about; I was able to listen to all of it without damaging either my laptop nor my computer tower. I count that a win.

For those who don't know, Christopher Perkins (wikipedia page) used to run public games for the WOTC, while also acting as a "game designer" and so-so editor. I say "so-so" because I've seen his work. It's about the same as mine, which I do for free and without hundreds of thousands of dollars of staff support. Like he had. In 2025, he "retired" from the WOTC... at approximately the same time the WOTC was letting everyone go that was costing money and not making it with splatbooks. He's now the creative director of the company for tabletop gaming launched by Critical Role, Darrington Press.

Throughout the interview, Perkins uses multiple choice questions as a rhetorical device which does nothing to educate the listener about D&D, since for the most part the answers are either intentionally insipid, or "all" the answers are acceptable. One such question is shown here on the right. A. and C. are clearly meant to convey the usual tropes associated with dungeon masters, which of course are expected to be funny... except that for me, having played since 1979, I find the humour a little dusty. That doesn't mean it won't be used for another 47 years.

Please either indulge me or forgive me as I provide a transcript of the above's deconstruction:

Host: {chuckling} Can it be option A and D at the same time? Definitely not B.

Perkins: I'm going to suggest that the correct answer is "have snakes erupt from the dead character's corpse." {general laughter}

Host: Okay.

Perkins: I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. The real answer is "discuss options with the dead character's player."

Host: Right.

Perkins: Often when death occurs, it's unexpected and it might be the result of bad dice rolls or just a bad decision... and in that case, it's basically spelling the end of a character's journey or a character's arc. 

Host: {nodding sagely} Yeah.

Perkins: And some players are prepared for that; some players actually greet their character's death with a fair measure of enthusiasm. 

Host: Yeah.

Perkins: Particularly if they're a type of player who's got like a line-up of other characters that they've built and they're just aching to play something else. 

Host: Yes.

Perkins: You know the type.

Host: Yes.

Perkins: And so death is not that— doesn't come with any trauma or or any, um, um, you know, resentment—

Host: Yeah.

Perkins: Or anything like that. But... you never know... and so as a DM, it's always good to say, okay, this happened. Take the player aside or just have a conversation and say, "Do you think your character's journey is over at this point? Are you happy with this situation, or at least are you ready to move on from that character? Or would you like to discuss other possibilities? In D&D, there's plenty of ways for characters to come back from the dead, and working with your player, you might be able to contrive something fun — not only the player coming back from the dead, but maybe with a vision that they had while they were dead. Maybe while they were dead they actually has some sort of weird extra-planar interaction, that might propel the character's story even further along. It might be divine intervention or some other encounter, but there are all kinds of ways to skin it. But I think that it's smart for the DM and the player to both agree on the course of action with regards to that character and their journey. Just so it doesn't feel like it's incomplete.

Host: Right.

Perkins: ... and unsatisfying.

In answer, I'd like to link this youtube video of players and coaches being thrown out of baseball games for unsportsmanlike conduct, because they can't suck it up, despite being paid literally millions of dollars to do so. My question, then, is what produces the most trauma? Being struck out, so that you're so mad you argue with the umpire or throw your bat at the ground, or being thrown out of the game. Write your answer in the comments below.

The difference between the D&D example and baseball is that the company perceives "character death" as an inherited flaw of D&D, that it has to mitigate by turning every DM into a psychologist to manage player trauma... or or any, um, um, you know, resentment. Whereas Major League Baseball know the fans are going to fucking watch anyway, and they don't give a shit if the player is unhappy.

Chris Perkins is not selling table courtesy, he's performing brand protection. His answer treats player death as a customer-retention hazard. The dead character is not allowed to remain simply dead, because the company-facing version of D&D has become anxious about the player leaving the table with a negative feeling attached to the brand. So the DM is repositioned as the person responsible for converting loss into satisfaction.

And you, gentle reader, as the DM, have been co-opted into this, as the person who should, without being paid, protect the company.

All D&D game deaths are unexpected, unless the player suicides. All deaths occur because of a "bad" die roll OR a bad decision. NO game deaths result because of a good die roll or a good decision. Unless, again, suicide was the plan.

Oh, and hey, while we're here, let's point out that if we're going to roll dice to check success, there's not very much point in rolling the die at all unless we're going to accept the failure. If failure isn't an option, put the dice away and just say the players always succeed.

If a "bad" die roll (that is, one that fails to succeed, rather than one that is being framed as though the gods picked the number showing) does kill a character, and that causes or or any, um, um, you know, resentment, then maybe that player isn't old enough to play. Maybe that player needs to check themselves against a plywood knight with hand raised up and a motto next to it, "Your ego has to be this secure to play this game." Maybe, just maybe, just possibly, even if the company makes a buck from it, there are some people who just shouldn't be playing D&D. Because the mettle required to pretend things just isn't there.

Die rolls are only "bad" from the standpoint of the desired outcome. They are not moral events, they are not an injustice, they are not an attack against the player's emotional state... and their consequences should not need me to approach the player gently, possibly while to other players hold a fucking straightjacket, so I can talk an adult down, when as a kid we used to die all the time in this game and we were goddamned fine. What in the hell?

If a player needs the game to go well because they had a bad week at work, or they're so fragile that I need to sit down with them and use words like "journey" while measuring the player's degree of "happy," then that player needs to not be at my game table. They should be elsewhere doing something more constructive and helpful for their fragile ego. Learning to make pottery is good for that; it teaches how effort and failure can be met with resilience to make things that turn out to be excitingly beautiful, all while the skill learned is useful and the process beneficial for other activities. D&D is just way too, um, traumatic for these people. Honest. They're not up to it.

Whew.

All right, let's talk about death.

Death in the game sucks. No question about it. I don't like to kill a lot of characters; I've found in general I do it less than most people, not because I fudge, not because I deny players a chance to restore their dead characters — usually, I make raise dead and resurrection fairly easy to obtain, if at a price. I tend to view it in the way that some board games do, "Lose all your cash on hand, return to Start."

Some DMs seem to view the murder of vast numbers of player characters as a badge of honour. "See, I believe that player characters should die as part of the game. In fact, last week I ran a game and everyone died. That's how much I believe in that rule." Which is, I guess, okay. I'm not an advocate for game balance, so that's fair. Not how I run, nor a game I'd play in I think, but whatever works for whoever is running their table.

I said a few posts back (which you read, Gentle Reader, because you read everything I write) that I seem to have a gift for picking just enough monsters to seriously threaten death, without that actually resulting in death. A "bad" roll, or a "bad strategical decision" could tip that balance, which is why the players in my game tend to compensate thoughtfully for the former while respecting the latter. Most of my present players remember a session against fire beetles in which three of five members of the party died, mostly because they did engage in a bad strategical mindset, and that memory comes up in nearly every running. So the players know I can kill them. I just don't feel the need to prove it all the time, so they know that's still possible. Being mature adults, they seem capable of having memories longer than mayflies, apparently unlike every player Perkins has ever run.

IF a DM is there with the crash-cart, the EMT, the psychologist couch and smelling salts every time a player fails, for whatever reason, then of course the players aren't going to take the game very seriously. The reason that umpires in baseball were finally given the power to eject players for so much as a word was because the old way, in the old days when I was, what, a younger adult, it was really getting out of hand. Looking into it, it appears that with the 1999 umpire labour crisis, when twenty-two umpires quit, the old union was replaced, umpire staffs were merged into one... and that brought about the modern administration model. The overall effect was to give umpires more power to manage the game, not less... while the Perkins/WOTC/corporate model is there to effectively emasculate the DM's power by making this about therapy, not player management.

What's funny is that I have given players other options than resurrection for bringing back dead characters. Not the cheesy plot devices suggested, of course... but D&D does owe at least some fealty to Heracles rescuing Theseus from the underworld, or Dante spending at least some of his vacation there. The "outer planes" are comprehensible real places that have existed as part of the setting's structure since the 1970s, so sure, there ought to be some way to identify which plane of existence the soul of a dead character ending up at, and therefore some way of getting them back, even if a monkey's paw is needed. It's not that I necessarily encourage this kind of thinking; logically, if it were to be attempted, it would have to be the kind of adventure that required a year of game play, at least 20 or 30 sessions... but truthfully, it ought to be possible... just not in the way Perkins is suggesting. I'm not going to restore your character because you have the sads. That's just not good enough.

Trust me, if a party does decide to go through all that for someone's 8th level ranger, they're not going to do it all again for someone else's a 7th level fighter. It's funny how suddenly a party is ready to draw a hard line about such things.

Truthfully, it's taken the 1st level fighter in my present campaign nine sessions to reach 4th.  That is, the accumulation of 8,000 x.p. Logically, to reach 5th, 18,000 x.p. it ought to take ten or eleven more, but it won't, because the fighter is tougher, can take more damage, can kill more, hits better and so on. As the needed experience doubles, thereabouts, the actual time per x.p. shortens, just enough to make each level feel like an effort without there being a cut-and-dry certainty about when the next threshold comes. This is good for the game. A player who loses their 4th level, or 7th level, or whatever, should just count the time needed as game play and just that. Yes, okay, we all loved Rodrick. And it's a pity.

But not to sour the party or anything, I used to have another wife, who died for real. I have had two parents, who died for real. Which I had to get over, just as everyone has to when something like it happens to them. Look, just bear with this a moment, as hard as it is, as out of place as you may feel it is inside a post about D&D. Life isn't just living with the knowledge that we ourselves are going to die. It is also that along the way, we're going to find ourselves having to cope with others that we love passing away on us, and there's nothing, nothing at all, that we can do about that except to keep moving forward. Cruel, brutal, undeniable truth. Earlier, I said, "death in the game sucks." And so it does. But let's have a little perspective here, okay?

If my 8th level ranger dies, then really, how long does it take to replace that character in my heart? As Rodrick's memory fades, then Desdemona's memory, though she may now only be a 3rd level mage, grows. By the time D reaches 6th, R was a year ago. It's just not that hard to get over.

Gawddammit. If you've ever had a pet that lived for ten years, you know you'll never replace that pet in your heart, no matter how much you love your new pet Jupiter now. I guess maybe its because of how long I've been here... but fragility is a terrible way to manage what life is going to hand over. Yes, right, your D&D character dies, okay. Look on the bright side. There are no funeral arrangements to make. There's no lawyer's office you're ever going to have to sit in. There's no household of possessions you're ever going to have to divide up between your siblings and yourself, and you're not going to have the experience of watching your parents most treasured things being thrown into the trash, because they're old, they've been polluted with mice feces because the house wasn't looked after toward the end and worse, there's just no room in your house, or that of your siblings, for everything. That's how it goes.

I promise. If your D&D character dies, there are going to be worse things coming for you to get over.

Session 9: The Slaughter Room

I find these posts hard to write, which is why it's five days since our last running and I'm only detailing it now.

Our previous session left the party in the wilderness, running short on food, puzzling out how to cross the border into Hungary, having learned they'd been betrayed by someone, not knowing who. This session began with the party being caught off guard by a group of centaur archers, partisans protecting the local Hungarian peasantry from the Ottomans, acting as nomads throughout the Balaton Hills. After learning of the party's wishes to escape, the centaurs agreed to help feed and get them out of Bakony... but the centaurs could not help noticing the armoured members of the party and the presence of their gnome cleric Lexent.

They asked if the party wouldn't mind dealing with a nuisance that has plagued them for some time. A group of troglodytes, operating from an underground lair, inaccessible to their hoofed bodies. This "lair" was once built by orcish Huns who found themselves dwelling in the wilderness after the retreat of Attila (also an orc in my campaign). Thus, the orcs tunnelled, fashioning an underground dungeon that they occupied for 800 years... until 400 years ago, after some left to join the Mongols in the 1240s (again, an orcish people, though larger than orcs), the overall social system collapsed. It had been abandoned, until troglodytes either came up from below or entered from above. Either way, the trogs have been raiding and when the centaurs have tracked them back to their origin, they've found the trogs delving down into a place they can't follow.

The party agreed. I'd set up the first encounter expecting only three players, as Mikael the mage and Zoltan the cleric had both excused themselves from the session. Yet then Mikael showed up for the first two hours of the session, so we had a good number of combatants at the ready. This was the basic scene of the first occupied room the party entered:

This, once upon a time a place where the orc hunting parties would bring in scores of deer and other beasts for slaughter, consisted of drains, tubs, rings for hanging the animals up and so on. Obviously, the blood stains had long turned to dust in 400 years but the players figured out the purpose.

As they entered, they found one huge spider in the large centre room. This they killed in short order. Examining the room on the upper right, they found eight giant bats asleep. They moved down through the other rooms toward the exit at the bottom of the map, where they found a shrieker... which promptly began to scream, waking up the bats. A round later, three more spiders entered the room. One landed a solid bite upon Ti, the fighter, who began to suffer poison damage to the tune of 16 points, 2 per round over the next eight rounds. While fighting the bats and spiders (the former were not very dangerous), a carrion crawler entered from the bottom, passing the shrieker... and caught the Lexent's non-levelled soldier at arms as the first victim inside the door. The crawler attacked eight times... and missed every time. I mean, damn. If you can't kill a non-level, why even play?

Fenwick failed his morale check and fled. Outside, he failed his rally check and decided to stay outside. He'd managed to get 160 experience, however, putting him halfway to being able to start his 1st level fighter training, if the party should so desire.

Well, Ti came up, waded in, took two hits, did a little damage (I think, not sure if I remember that rightly) failed his save and was paralysed. But then Mikael unloaded Melf's acid arrow and the carrion crawler died. I should have made it two, but meh, it was what it was. I didn't know Mikael was going to play.

The spiders, bats and shrieker was mopped up and the party given experience. Arduin the first level druid, henchfolk of Pandred the 5th level fighter, finally reached second level. Mikael excused himself and the party was down to three players.

I should have had more prepared but, well, I let myself indulge in too many of my own projects, so I didn't. I had the party descend twenty feet of stair (finding a dead centaur's body along the way), to find more stairs, some going left, some going right. The cleric smelled both and declared that the left hand side smelled worse than the right, so expecting to find the troglodytes, they descended another 20 feet of stairs to find themselves at an unimaginably large underground temple, too large to reveal with their torchlight. Following the right hand wall, they found one shrine in the room's corner, then followed the wall to the left to find another shrine. They were attacked by three ghasts (which some of the party had fought before in Norway) and dispatched them easily. The next four were a little harder... Ti was paralysed again, Arduin was very lucky, but this second fight was a harder deal. Finally, the ghasts were overcome, experience rewarded, Ti went up to 4th level and the party gave ground. We ended the game with them stumbling outside.

I'll need to better prep my dungeon for the next session.

Skipping over the first session, in which the two did not take part, Pandred at 5th and Lexent at 4th have failed to level... though they're both much closer. Ti began at 1st nine sessions ago and has gone up 3 levels in nine runnings. If Zoltan had come, no doubt he'd have gotten to 4th as well. Mikael, who isn't getting hit very much (because although he's killing key monsters with his magic, if he doesn't actually engage in melee, he hasn't much chance of learning anything), is still 3rd, though he started at 2nd. Arduin has waded into many combats, but strangely, has usually avoided getting hit. Nice to see him finally climb from 1st to 2nd.

The benefit of Fenwick getting to be a 1st level fighter (though it will take plenty of training time) is that, if the party subsidises his training, he'll progress from "hireling" to "follower." Not a henchfolk, so not a fanatic member of the party that the players run, but someone who will come along, receive half as share of the bonus, ask for a share of the treasure and eventually rise, most likely, to act as a steward or someone the party can trust with their property someday, without worrying about being betrayed. He might even one day be counted as one of the party's "retainers," at which point he would become a fanatic joiner of the party, to be run by whomever his liege came to be, either Lexent or perhaps Pandred, as the party decides someday.

Well, that seems to be it. Glad to have this done.

Humpty Dumpty

"For me, one of the biggest shifts [in marking papers] has been the way that I relate to polish, to students being able to produce things that are perfectly grammatically correct and have elegant turns of phrases — that used to be something that delighted me. Now, sometimes it's something that makes me suspicious, and I find a comma splice, I find some awkward syntax, and I'm relieved... because I think, 'Oh look, here's someone who has indeed done this work themselves, who is struggling to figure out how to say something.' And I'm a lot more generous..."

"One of the biggest things I'm struggling with as an educator — and I don't I'm alone in this — is how do I let go of valuing perfection and instead focusing my valuing my students' process: giving them a chance to make mistakes, accepting work that may not be grammatical perfect. I want my students to know that they can be authentic... but that involves me accepting their imperfections."

— Canadian Professors on How A.I. Is Changing Education

Listening to this last night, I burst out in laughter that ran for about five minutes. I'm still tittering about it now, because it gets to the heart of a fundamental error that has ingrained itself into educational thinking since the 19th century, and perhaps earlier: a problem that has been insurmountable until apparently now, when an existential threat to post-secondary institutions has forced the ground to move against the will of those who would otherwise hold that ground comfortably until their deaths. It is a question that every student of every subject other than English Literature has asked: "I am studying Geography... why does it matter if I spell the word 'defence' incorrection in my essay."

I burst out laughing because for me and for millions of students, the clouds opened up and the sun shone down because for the first time, a professor got a stick out of their ass, thinking maybe this stick didn't need to be here when it was put here in the early 19th century by everybody who had the same stick up their ass.

The only thing capable of removing that stick was the demonstration that grammar is a tool that can be managed like a computer program. It is not a human trait, and the demands that humans need kowtow to this arbitrary requirement is, will be and always fucking has been pedantic and insupportable. Not that the type of person who becomes a professor, by sucking up to other professors, would ever have admitted that until they were forced to.

More to the point: grammar is not a trait that separates one human being's value from another. That historical period is done. No teacher, professor or self-righteous pundit can ever claim again the sorting mechanism, grammar, is a legitimate soruce of judgement for human worth, intelligence, diligence, seriousness or fitness.

For this, the sacrifice of the entire artistic community is a fair exchange. Though of course, we haven't done that. Like bad writers, who could preen themselves on their grammatical prowess, we've emasculated bad drawers and painters, who preened themselves on being able to draw a straight line. It's the same for the same.

Naturally, not every professor is going to accept that which the two quoted above are moving toward. The context, beginning about 18:30 to 20:00 in the linked video, does not include an acknowledgement on the professor's part that perhaps "elegant turns of phrases" never did have anything to do with the work; that their personal pleasure in this comes from the worst task in education, the marking of essays and exams. A turn of phrase gives a momentary dopamine hit amidst a disaster of poor student writing, which sustains an educator — which yet only suggests that the fundamental quality of a paper's value is how entertaining it was for the marker in comparison to the work of other students. As a student, my papers tended to be heavy with argument, strange off the wall propositions, even jokes (as I got more experience with newspaper writing on the university newspaper), so that my B or B+ grades usually included a note at the end that read, "I enjoyed this," "A bit off the mark, but a good read," or words to that effect... which enabled my 3.3 average out of "four-point-oh," but really had fuck all to do with my university education. That did not stop professors from exposing their humanity in ways they shouldn't have. Not really.

The multiple choice exam was invented, I believe, though I refuse to research it because I can't be bother, because it was just easier to mark it. I remember in school when we were told that computers were going to mark our exams in future, which is why we were given a particular kind of green computer paper that we needed to fill out with a specific number-2 pencil, so the computer could read it so the teacher didn't need to. We were told things like how we had to "fill in the whole box" and not to "write lightly" and stuff, because any mistake on those lines would cause the computer to read the answer incorrectly. Naturally, it ended up that the teachers, or someone, had to double-check the computer, because that's how it goes. Nonetheless, the answer was obviously to alleviate teachers, in at least some part, of the horror of having to mark exams.

It stands to reason that at some point teachers will realise that A.I. enables them to side-step marking altogether, at which point the entire profession would HAIL the arrival of the program as the son-of-a-bitch they've been looking for all these years.

This is the pattern with all technological innovations. Everyone hates the motorised horse for how dangerous is it, expecting someone to walk ahead of the vehicle with a red flag, until it becomes evident that the horse dung will evaporate from the streets as the horses are all replaced. Naturally, the car creates other problems, but no one — except Robert A. Heinlein, who made a point of still arguing the horse-and-carriage in science fiction stories into the 1970s — has ever seriously suggested we should go back to a world that smells like horseshit. Film is despised until it turns out all the actors, designers and producers who can't get work in the theatre industry have a place to go. Television is despised until all the actors, designers and producers who can't get work in the film industry, again, have a place to go. The internet sucks... until it turns out that people can actually meet each other online and communicate with friends, whereupon it's immediately embraced. It is always the same thing. An innovation's usefulness must hazard this resistance... it's the only way we know for sure whether or not it's "good." And the longer it lasts, the more evidence it compiles towards that conclusion, the better it is.

Humpty Dumpty, in the form of many industries right now, has fallen off his wall. Humpty Dumpty is the metaphor that everyone should be using. The old world died in 2022.

But see, the phrase, "And all the king's horses and all the king's men" does more than simply say, phenomenal amounts of strength and power are not enough. It also says, or at least this is how I always heard it, that the king's horses and the king's men tried and failed. They didn't just look at the problem and throw their hands in the air. They refused to believe that they couldn't just put Humpty back up there.

This is where we are. We're stuck between those who are afraid of it, those actually stoking the fear because for the grifter it's a tremendous opportunity to vouchsafe panic about something only a comparative few understand or even need to understand, and those who are defending institutions, like Big Publishing, Big Business and Big Church, whose pasts have already put them on the veritable ground beneath the wall, trying to put their own Humptys back together again. We're seeing something amazing here, and between all the grasping at straws and the crying into handkerchiefs, we're missing it.

Between 1908 and 1910, going back quite a way, it was possible for an ordinary person to obtain for a price, about the cost of say a computer laptop, a projector that would cast pictures on a blank white wall. If the individual had access to a space large enough for thirty people and could get together a number of cheap chairs to sit on, then it was just as possible for the projectionist to charge people to attend their "theatre," and expect people in a small town, where there was very little to do at the time, to attend. This was a very simple time, when film theatres did not exist, where virtually no one had seen a film of any kind, who would come just to see because the alternative was... well, sitting in a park.

There were nickelodeons, but they did not exist in thousands of small American towns and they consisted of individual machines that solitary persons bent forward to look into, to show films. Most had never been seen by a person outside of a big city, or had been seen only when they went to the big city. The projector provided a very different experience. In the beginning, it didn't need a predesigned building. An empty room, without any features at all, was sufficient.

Further, the projector was easily movable. If you owned one, you made a deal for a few films which you could show; at the time, these were not plot-driven, though such films did exist. The bulk were things like watching people play at a beach you were never going to see, or walking along a street you were never going to visit. The sort of performance a clown might perform on a vaudeville stage you'd never in your life visited. That was enough. You could then move from small town to small town, remaining a few days until everyone had seen your product, then moving on. You made so much money, and were so able to move, you could avoid the law catching up with you to make return the films you'd been granted the right to only for a few weeks, while benifitting from them for months.

It is difficult for us to fully comprehend how shattering the experience of film was for people who would never see Coney Island in person, never see a woman in the sort of ballgown typically displayed in early film, never imagine seeing a trainrobber actually pointing a gun right at you, as was the case in the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. It was unimaginably desirable for the "customers," who were ready to pay and pay and pay again for the experience, even if it meant the same film over and over. There was nothing at the time to compare with it and the effect was socially catastrophic for anyone in an entertainment field that was not the explosively developing film industry.

What matters most was the money being made. It literally poured in. For the price of a projector, listed earlier as equivalent a computer laptop, you could expect to raise enough money in a six month time period to buy the equivalent of a modern Porsch Cabriolet. People tried to contain this. The Patent War over the camera is a long, fascinating history of very rich people trying to ensure they would be the only ones to get rich. It failed. The money was so easy to make, so immediately translatable into one's pocket, that there was no hesitation to use whatever chicanery necessary to obtain the films to show them. When the films could not be obtained, people rushed to make their own. Those who were best at it rushed all the way to California to escape the Patent War. That's how we got Hollywood, which was built mostly on ignoring the laws surrounding the use of the equipment and content. In the end, the law caved. It realised that it was better to regulate the industry than to stop it. Humpty had fallen off the wall. The Film Industry was free to define itself, regardless of what the powers that existed before that time wanted.

I am NOT using this as a metaphor for A.I.  If we compare the start of the film industry, which came well before 1908... let's say, 1896 as a round figure, when rumblings began to reshape filmmaking in France, then we today with regards to A.I. are in about the year 1900. No one in 1900 could have guessed the effects I've just described above, or the evolution of story logic, comedy, the social ramifications of scandal around Fatty Arbuckle, the sexualisation of artistic representation, the studio system, the Hays Code... and on and on. It's just too early.

I am saying that when something is too valuable to suppress, it does not matter how many are hurt by it, or how many industries fail, or which rich people's lives are destroyed, or what some might think of the culture as it used to be, Humpty is falling and he's going to fall. That's the lesson here. We can scream in panic, we can cry over the broken shells, we can bemoan the loss, we can try with all our might to rebuild the good old fella... but the reality is, Humpty is gone.

The change wrought by film affected those with agency in two ways: there were those, as described, moaning over the Humpty model... and there were those who, like the two teachers quoted at the start of this post, realised that the time has come to change what we're doing, because the old model isn't working.

This is not a post that says, the old way is dead, suck it up. Oh no. It is a post that says, look at the opportunities ahead of you. Yeah, poor Humpty, but hey, look at all this that's happening. Look at how an archaic, dead approach to teaching is being wrested into a form of teaching that respects the students' thoughts and ideas OVER the diction of grammatical inflexibility. Look at the opportunities to obliterate the old ways that are in the way of new ways that are going to be a whole lot better. Consider the opportunities for artists who will make livings based on their imagination and not their finger dexterity. Consider the educations bestowed on students who will be rewarded for new ideas, ideas that may change the world, because those ideas will be fed and supported, and not cast aside because of occasional bad spelling. Consider the hope the future offers.

Stop crying. This is actually pretty fucking fantastic.

Which is what people thought as they sat watching people dance on the sand at Coney Island. They were not thinking at the time how this was going to kill vaudeville.

Forget Hooks; Try Threads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have this, also, from GoogleEarth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grumble, grumble...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't wait.

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

Session 8: "I Love More"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The party did all right with treasure.

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

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

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

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

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

Point A to Point B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course yes.

Ah... but how much?

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

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

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

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

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

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

But... there is another way.

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

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

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

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

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