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 ever 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?

Dog Whistles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alone with My Principles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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