The March 1636 Lantern is Published

Okay, The March Lantern is available. Those fast on the draw may have noticed that I mistakenly published it as free access for 56 minutes.  I was just so worn by finishing it that I failed to adjust the publishing details. But it's behind a paywall now, I'm so sorry.

The reason this thing is such a bugbear for me is twofold. In the first place, publishing anything comes with hesitancy, because like any writer, I constantly doubt the value of my own work. I can't see it through the lens of other people, so I have no idea really if it's good or not. So, irrationally, I struggle in fear to put it out there.

The other side of that coin is that if it isn't good, then what the hell am I doing all the work for?  This is also a form of poison in an artist's head. Work is work. I was remarking to my partner yesterday that by dinner time, as I was incredibly stiff throughout my joints, that it comes from concentrating so hard that any movement of one's muscles becomes a distraction. Thus, when I'm working at anything that is extremely particular, as The Lantern is, not just in writing but in overall layout, the ads, the voice the "writers" use, physically I become more and more stone-like and more and more my whole effort is toward my thinking process. Eight hours of this and my joints get very ugly when I get up to eat something.

I don't experience these symptoms with a blog post. There's nothing riding on this. I'm not charging for this. It doesn't matter if I don't write this. What I write has no long-term consequences for me. Thus I can write calmly, fuck around even, and it doesn't matter. I can't see The Lantern in those terms. It matters too much to me.

Anyway, it's published. Yay.

The Lantern is Late

The March Lantern isn't going to be ready today. Losing Tuesday and Wednesday to a toothache, abcess and dentist's visit pretty much put me on my back heels, but I've caught up a full day on what's been lost. I would have managed this otherwise. As it's looking now, provided nothing goes wrong, this should be done sometime tomorrow evening, perhaps sooner, and no later than Monday a.m. Believe me, no one wants this done more than me.

Please be patient.

Panic at the Game Table

From the as yet unpublished March Lantern:

"Before any counsel might be taken—whether we should press onward through the opened door, or else withdraw and be content... Warth strode forward without hesitation and passed between the doors..."

I wrote the above specifically because of a behaviour than one of my Discord players actively called out as the reason for not directly taking action: because they did not want to volunteer the rest of the party by compelling others to act in accordance with their actions. On the one part, I like that its appropriately assumed that if, like Warth above, someone just bulls forward, the party will step up from a sense of commitment, but on the other part I find myself bristling that a player would resist trusting that. It's a characteristic I don't see in my offline games... and it is a characteristic that causes parties to default to a place where they have to check and be sure first, in essence getting permission, before acting. Which demands that every step the party takes forward be first resolved by committee meeting.

It's worth discussing how the player's "I act" is transformed into "I commit others to my action."  The structure of the game, divorced of the Gygaxian "leader" model, which is for shit, asks for players to step up and take the helm when they see what needs doing. The problem is that most everyone has played with incompetents and damn fools that just rush forward blindly at every opportunity. One naturally gets tired of kicking someone else's chestnuts out of the fire. Too, responsibly minded players, the better players, assume a default mode of looking after one's fellow man which is hard to shake off. It's all well and good for characters from a film to watch Shalar the Monk go off running and fifty enemy by himself with the line, "What does he think he's doing?", followed by a sigh and, "Getting himself killed." Around a D&D table, no one actually wants Shalar to die. So while there is a sigh, it's almost always followed by, "All right, we all go too."

No better player wants to be Shalar. They want to respect their fellow players and not impune their agency by forcing their hand. This is why the "committee" is not evidence of timidity, or poor play, or even self-doubt, but in fact an example of mutual respect.

Which makes it all the worse for being a bad strategy.

The problem with this character-action design is that requires the DM to reframe time to allow for a committee meeting to take place between the party members, even when that insertion of time is utterly irrational. A combat round in my game lasts 12 seconds, but even if it lasted a minute, it would not be long enough to account for some of the conversations I witnessed in our last session of combat. At present, with a new party, in a new game, with an uncertainty about the combat rules (though the party did extremely well with them), it's not reasonable for me to hold them accountable for unfamiliar decisions... yet. But soon enough they will know the combat system, and soon enough it won't be reasonable for them to have a discussion about who stands where or who does what this round or what the strategy is now that there are rats flooding up the stairs. Sooner or later, rationally, within the time frame imposed by the game, decisions by committee are not only going to be impractical, I'm going to have to take a stance that attempts to discuss will be complimented by forfeitures of attacks and other action. When called up to the plate, it's time to swing, not have another confab with the coach.

Now, is where I must insert the scene from the ancient film The Untouchables, where Al Capone says,

"A man stands alone at a plate. This is the time for what? For individual achievement. There he stands alone."

Thereafter, Capone goes into this whole thing about the team and being there for the team, culminating in a brutal murder but hey, spoilers, right?  And Capone's point is made. But the reverse also has to be true. The team can field themselves the livelong day, pitcher, first baseman, outfielder, but if someone doesn't score a damn point on their own, then the best the team can do together is TIE. None of that is discussed in the film, it wouldn't make the writer's point, but it's just as true as anything the Capone character says.

This is how D&D is structured, however. When it's time for the player to act, to fight, to throw a spell, to leap across this gorge, the team cannot, by virtue of their location in the setting, by virtue of the action taking place in the setting, speak their opinions about what a player does with the character. I have not hesitated as a DM to tell everyone else to keep quiet, to put the player on the spot. I have not hesitated to state that the character fails to do anything because they have taken too long to act. This aspect of my game has not come up where I've played in text, because it simply wasn't practical. But Discord is closer to the real thing now and I'm not going to let time stretch forever.

In face-to-face play, there is less hesitation in taking an action before discussing it. One can look around at the other players and see in a glance that they're intention is plainly to go ahead. Excited people after a success cry out and jump around with excitement once the stress has passed; but excited people on the cusp of stress tighten up. They visibly begin to sit still; it's a body language that most of us register without thinking about it, as we have a hundreds of thousands of years of biological selection related to freezing while watching one of our clan approach a tiger or a mastodon or some other beast with a flimsy spear. I have repeatedly argued that the fundamental genius of D&D is not the rules, the culture, the structure of the DM or the reward system, but the way these things work together to create moments of feeling extreme danger and threat without our having to risk breaking our bones on a playing field, or getting shot at in Venezuela.

Intuitively, in the physical company of the party, the need for pre-verbal consent diminishes. We trust our instincts. We're sure the party will approve if we just go through the doors without asking first. We're confident that they have our backs without needing to ask first. In fact, it's more than that, we feel that the zeitgeist of the group together is willing us to act without the wasting of game time a committee demands.

In a moment like this, where every D&D game wants to be, asking permission isn't just unnecessary, it's actively immersion-obverse. Asking first ruins the tempo, the tension, the thrill of the game as it spins forward. These things are what makes "flow" happen in-game... where the players cease questioning themselves, cease putting a wall between themselves and their character, even cease considering survival as functionally relevant to just moving forward in the compulsive need to do so.

Some players can't do that on their own. They can't "let go" of the grey of real life. But they can be pushed, and one way of doing that is by saying, "What do you do?" and then one time — it usually only takes once — saying to the player fighting to make up their mind, "That's it, your round is done," before moving onto the next player. It sobers them. It shakes them from their sense of "this is a game, nothing matters" into "fuck, if I don't pick it up, I'm going to get killed here."

I've seen this produce a "tunnelling" effect into players that is both upsetting and mind-blowing, depending on their character and the number of times they've experienced it. The term describes moments of extreme stress, threat, obsession or motivation where one's attention collapses to manage a narrow set of cues and actions. It is a state, which people report as one of clarity, urgency, even simplification. If the reader has ever experienced that moment where time seems to weirdly slow down at the moment of an accident, where every detail of an oncoming car, or the sense of flying through the air, is comprehended with unnatural perception, that is tunnelling. In real life, it can be dangerous; drivers can find themselves unable to pull their gaze from an obstacle they end up hitting, or pilots can find themselves so fixated on a single instrument that they fail to take action to save themselves... but around a D&D table, I assure the reader, it is quite safe.

The very idea that D&D can achieve this state of mind feels specious; some reading this will outright state that it cannot be so. Others, however, have experienced this and it is queerly the reason why they refuse to surrender this game despite the growing dearth of players. I have experienced it. Hell, I've experienced tunnelling while writing. I nearly always experience flow while writing.

For those experiencing either for the first time, it is like achieving an alternative cognitive state without doing drugs. In Nichiren Buddhism, the term is shakubuku (yes, where Grosse Pointe Blank finds it), meaning to "break and subdue." It forcefully refutes a person's interior beliefs in a manner that shatters delusion and compels acceptance for that which was formerly considered untrue. This is what's upsetting for many —it usually means that the lies they've told themselves for years just won't work any more. In D&D, it means that the other game that the other people play has in a flash ceased to be good enough.

As I'm a prick, I tend to carry out this approach in D&D. Not because I'm a Buddhist or a Taoist, but because I won't suspend my privilege as a DM in attempting to impose this spiritual kick to the head. I'm ready to be fair, to not use my privilege to gain power over my players, to not fake dice or cheat or assume I'm my player's keeper. But, as a performer, if I can make you, the person, feel something through your engagement and attachment to the character you're running I will.

Time, as a game rule, is on my side in this. While party commitment by committee is not. As a DM, I will not hesitate to use time, real time, to create tension, discomfort, fear and their compliment emotions control, resilience and bravery, to produce an experience that a movie can't produce, that a book can't produce, that a VR table can't produce... and that the whole WOTC, for all it's money and influence, hasn't even heard of.

This is what makes this fun for me.

The Hollowness of the Male Pitch

Putting the last of March's Lantern together and last night I was hit hard by a toothache. Nasty, vicious one it was, but I made it through the night before being able to see my dentist. During that time, the tooth well and truly died, so it's a root canal next week, and I'm not feeling tooth pain just now, rather just a bit of sick from the sewage dripping down my throat from the small abcess that was caught in time and is now diminishing. Good times.

As such, did not spend a lot of time working today, with the deadline close now, while I spent too much time watching youtube. That usually means some discussion on writing these days, as I've already said, this time with the main complaint being the poor white male writer who has been mercilessly cast aside by the publishing industry, the bastards, mostly in favour of women. Such diatribes that I see are usually put forth in content hosted by women, because this stuff is even worse when the subject is on a video hosted by men.

There are a few reasons I don't count myself as part of this pity party. First, I know I didn't "make it" as a mainstream writer largely because of my angry youth period, when all those who reached their hand out to help my career got it slapped away. Later, I didn't "make it" because I tended to rise up among groups of writers rather fearlessly to point out that their material wasn't going anywhere because it wasn't any good, just as I did not consider my work at the time of about the same caliber. That tended to make sure my work was not included in that sort of "grant sanctioned" collection that became so popular (and now so obscure) in Canada in the 1990s. Since then, I haven't "made it" because, well, fuck the publishing industry. As such, no pity party. There's a responsible person for this white male failing to become a bestselling author, that being me.

As such, as I write in my inimical, less than polite style, I want to make a point here that as I writer I've never self-identified as either white or male. Obviously, others have done so; I argued that on this blog less than a month ago. But I can't ever recall stopping mid-sentence and thinking, "Wait, is this how a man would write this sentence?" or "is that description of a farm house in Saskatchewan legitimate from a white perspective?" Predictably, I'm going to be accused of this by default anyway, since obviously there are fifty ways to describe the slats of an old house in a sparsely wooded country — the white way, the black way, the catholic way, the Guatemalan way and so on... with my knowing only the first of these. As such, I can only write about anything in the particular way associated with circumstances of my birth having nothing to do with my choices, and therefore I pay no attention to this. Not only do I pay it no attention while I'm writing, I pay it no attention if I hear someone else comment on this while they're reading... for, as well all know, there's only so many ways to read a text also: the white way, the black way, the catholic way and so on.

All of this is attitude is a ridiculous game that I am not interested in playing. Because of my name, and because I grew up in an age when a great deal was expressed through letters and mailings, I have been mistaken hundreds of times of being a woman. Far more, I think, than a Sandy or a Sidney or a Sam might be, because for the most part, people are aware that those names might be a man or a woman, and written responses are less hesitant to judge. But as an "Alexis" in erstwhile days, virtually unknown at that time as an Eastern European or Russian name in the very bland whiteness of Alberta where I still dwell to this day, I have nearly always been assumed to be a woman first, and a man only later at the "unveiling" that happened again and again. And, of course, being a writer, where the name is attached to the work that is in text, there has always been the moment where it comes out: "Oh, you're a man. I though you were a woman."

That is perhaps a reason why my rhetoric, what I write here, is in a different tone from my "writing," such as occurs with the Lantern and other official works. Not to prove that I'm a man writing this blog, but because I have little reason to cultivate my reader. The more I cultivate, the more gracious and kind I am, the more likely it will be that my reader will think I'm a woman... I am, after all, in such cases, "so polite." Because I can, if I wish, write just as sweet as cream. It's really not that hard.

I think this relevant because none of those who assumed I was a woman back in the day added the phrase, "But you don't write like a man."  Rather, the instant they understood what I was, once they'd seen the label on the wrapper if you will, then in their heads my writing automatically snapped to being that of a man. If this happens once or twice, it might be overlooked... but when it has happened many, many times every year, and especially so when I was writing for articles and newspapers, the whole "write like a man" or "write like a woman" frankly becomes an obvious hoax. It's all just horseshit to assume that because a writer includes constant references to a cultural frame or a supposed "identity" in text, that the identity is automatically "authentic," is just hokum. What makes the identity "authentic"is that the Guatemalan author's name is "Juan José López Pérez" and not "Carlos Martin," either of which are common names of that country.

Even after it was known that Cary Grant's given name was Archibald Leach (the name appears on a gravestone in the film Arsenic and Old Lace), they preferred Cary Grant because he didn't "look" like an Archibald.  I mean, really... Grace Kelly and Archibald Leach?  Ridiculous.

If it really is that tough for a man to succeed in the modern publishing stream, then for heaven's sake, why not just write like a woman? In the late 1940s through the 1950s, the Hollywood blacklist turned authorship into a kind of covert tradecraft. Writers accused of Communist sympathies found themselves unemployable under their own names. The result was an underground economy of authorship in which blacklisted writers continued to work by using "fronts," pretending to submit the author's scripts under their own names. It sounds awful, but it let writers go on making their living as writers, and not as ditchdiggers, cooks or door-to-door salesmen.

I don't bring it up to argue this should be the method employed, but rather to argue that it almost certainly IS being used by someone, and probably with the publisher's consent. Many people hate the junket end of publishing; they despise the road trips, the hotel stays, the audiences and the questions. At the same time, no doubt, there are many women and men who would be happy to enjoy this side of it while he remains home doing the actual writing. Of course, even suggesting this is sacrilege... despite the evidence that it's been going on for at least a century now.

I have ghostwritten two books. I'm under contract never to reveal anything more about this except that one fact, in case I want to sell my services to someone else someday. I don't mind that my name is not on the cover of those books, nor what benefits the payer received. I was paid.

Some people are "shocked" to discover this about me, far more so than learning that I'm not a woman. I find this funny. I rather like having my prose being mistaken for that of a woman, because it says very clearly to me that there is no such thing as "gender identity" writing. That's just a thing people made up. All the carping about male authorship and the lack of male readers and such only reveals that whatever the problem, it's almost certainly that the writing itself isn't really all that good. I say this as someone who, I argue, does not write well enough to win the Booker Prize. But then, that's not an atmosphere I ever want to breathe. What a bunch of stuffed mannequins.

When I find myself watching a video that features a white man bleating about the unfairness of the industry, and how his thoughtful, nuanced book about a man undergoing trauma about some thing or other reveals the depths of his themes or his value as a writer, I usually take this with a grain of sale. I have had too many discussions with both would-be and successful writers (far more successful than me, yet strangely no more secure for it) to be certain that this "deep theme" is more than dishwater with a few plates in it. And when I hear that this self same book has been struggling to get published for 15 years, I am not assured that this isn't another case of Chinese Democracy by Guns and Roses... a sort of competent work that in reality is almost instantly forgettable. And when I am actually told what the book is about, it invariably falls into the realm of some other book written by a white man between seventy and a hundred years ago — because it turns out that this is a man struggling in his marriage in a way not unlike Revolutionary Road, or this is a young man being crushed under his responsibilities and ennui not unlike Catcher in the Rye, or this is about a man from the rough sides of the tracks trying to get out, not unlike The Man with the Golden Arm, or this is about a man whose dreams didn't pan out like he thought they would, not unlike Death of a Salesman. In fact, I never hear anything about a white man's trauma that I can't locate in some book I read before I was twenty, when the actual age of the book was much older than that.

The emotional value of these books is important, and were valuable at the time, but my having read them convinced me that they were also ground I didn't need to cover. I recognised while the age of Biff in the play the pitfalls of Willie and thus did not allow myself to fall into them. I have zero desire to write such a novel because, first, if I wanted to make the point I'd tell the reader to see the play or read it through themselves; and second, because I lived my life entirely different from Willie, the thoughts rolling around in my head are not mixed up with feelings of inadequacy. My not "making it" as a writer is not a Willie problem for me; in the end, the writing in fact mattered more than the glitz. Willie's problem is that he hated being a salesman; he sold his comfort for a dream that never materialised, while I gained comfort and joy despite a dream that never materialised. My "trauma" isn't one. That's how good Arthur Miller's play really is: it taught me as a young man the pits and perils of not going down that road. So when I meet an author now who wants to write a book that sounds like Death of a Salesman, all I can think is "Why didn't you read the play young and learn something?"

Yet, I see these same books pitched over and over on the Internet by white men who bemoan the system that is aligned against them. Yet to paraphrase the line from Sorkin's American President, the failure isn't that the modern male writer doesn't get it, it's that they can't sell it. No one is interested in their 1950s based emotional problems not because they are white problems, but because they are problems that none of us have any more. No one anywhere believes that a man who cannot deal with his marriage has a right to complain about the "trauma" he's suffering, because there are now literally a hundred different approaches a person willing to be flexible and change their nature can do something about that. It's not the 1950s, it's not the land of fault divorce, it's not the male's responsibility to do all the earning, it's not the male's right to have a pity party because the marriage isn't going well. Those are problems that dinosaurs have. Present day males simply agree with their wives to call it quits, take up an activity that encourages growth and self-awareness, accepts that life is pain, that everyone feels it, and moves the fuck on. There's no room left for wallowing, which is what those old works of 70 years ago did. Not to their fault, but due to the time in which they were written.

This explains why so much literature and so many films take place three, four, even five decades ago, so that writers who want to write about the old problems all over again can do so without looking idiotic. But really, these stories only tell us to be grateful we're no longer those people. They don't enlighten, they don't really engage. They're largely judged on how faithful they are to the time period (within specific modern taboos), never upon the insight they offer into anything.

The pitch for why I should care about such writing — for there is always a pitch — suggests to me a fellow who arrives at my front door to sell me a new, great product he's invented. It's "sensational," every home needs one, it performs a service unlike no other appliance, the very presence of it will change the way I start my day every morning... and then, the reveal: it's a toaster. The man has invented a toaster. It may be a very nice toaster, it may do the job it's designed to do, but I already have one and it's the least modern gadget I own. In fact, I'm so tired of toast after a lifetime of eating it now that my toaster has one single purpose: to toast bagels. I don't eat sliced bread and the buns I eat don't fit in the toaster, so now this is all that's left. And if there are no bagels in the house, the toaster goes in a cupboard — where it sits, for months, until I want bagels again.

This is modern writing produced by the kind of complaining male I happen to find on youtube. Mind you, outside the "lit" community, I have no problem whatsoever finding books written by males... about history, science, geopolitics, mechanics, you name it. But I don't buy these.

I have the internet now.

Kobalds and Rats

Friday we had another session, a week after the first... the next won't be for two weeks. The situation had been set up by the previous running, in which the players had seen three kobalds above ground engaged in making charcoal. One of these was killed at the end of the running on Feb. 6th, so we picked up Friday last's game with the party on one side of a swirl of smoke and, uncertainly, two kobalds on the other.

After the usual uncertainty about who should do what and how, which always seems to accompany these things (I have lately come to the conclusion that no one wants to force the other players into something not agreed upon, which is why the military assigns that responsibility to a leader), the party braved the smoke. Two kobalds were encountered, a bunch of missing happened and then both were dispatched easily.

Revealed also was a pathway down into a subterranean lair, pictured here:

Once entering the anti-chamber to 1., the party fought a running battle against 7 kobalds into room 2.  These generally had 1d4 for hit points, except the leader which was a "first-level" by my system, my having no trouble with the training that can be applied to humans being learnable by kobalds. This gave one kobald, armed with a dagger and shield instead of a club like the others, an AC of 6 and 12 h.p.; he proved to be quite durable and managed to land a triple-damage hit on Matyas for 12 damage. The hit demonstrated the no-helmet rule perfectly: I rolled a 20-crit, then a 19; Matyas didn't have a helmet. So it goes.

One kobald escaped, the party looted the body for a little copper and silver, found nothing else of worth and decided to press on. They met a second levelled kobald at the top of the stairs at 3.; as I remember, and I might be wrong (I'm old and doddering), it was the cleric Zoltan who managed to thump him twice and short order, leaving him dead at the bottom of the stairs. At that point the earlier escaped kobald released all the pet giant rats down below, 12 of them, so that these surged up and attacked the party.

Overall, they went down quickly... but in one particular round, I rolled two 20-crits against Ti out of three rats; then I rolled another 20 on one of these so that one of the rat hits would cause double, and the other triple damage. Rats do 1-3 damage on a hit; I use a six-sided counting 1-2 = 1, 3-4 = 2, 5-6 = 3 in the usual manner. I grabbed two d6 of different colours and rolled boxcars. Ti took 15 total that round, survived it but was knocked into negative hit points. As the damage was 6 and 9, there were no wounds (Matyas had suffered a wound earlier), so Ti was able to just stagger to the back of the group and let them finish off the rats.

At this point, the party were ready to quit. However, I taunted them into checking the bottom of the stairs (they hadn't gone down) as they counted their resources and hesitated, until I succeeded in getting Orsos to look. There he found the sprite princess in a cage, a sack beside her and scrawled across the door that would have led them nearer the mage purportedly at the bottom of the small dungeon, "Take her and GO!"

The party took the deal; the sack had a hundred gold, they returned the sprite princess to her people, got themselves healed... but unfortunately Matyas picked up a disease from the rats and was set to be laid up for perhaps as long as four weeks.

Joey, player managing Matyas, had participated in my Juvenis campaign once upon a time, when he ran a gnome cleric named Lexent. This being a character from my campaign, I offered an arrangement for Lexent to step into Matyas' place (just 4 x.p. shy of 4th level) and then, upon achieving 5th level, take Matyas as henchfolk. The party were given a veto on this and chose not to take it, so the next running will begin with the party again in Ozd, having met Lexent, while Matyas remains with the sprites to recover. He'll then remain in limbo until Lexent reaches 5th.

There you have it. Basically, a straight-up combat session. We'll see how the next one goes.

Session One, Sprites and All

The Discord D&D game took place on Friday and it's now Sunday evening as I write this. I agreed that it would be a good idea to discuss the game after, but of course that's easier said than done. Usually, during a game, I'm in a state of flow; I easily lose track of time, I don't remember the order of decisions made by myself and the party, I don't remember a lot of what I said. I know I tripped over a lot of words, speaking fast and struggling to describe the image in my head in words vocally, when I've gotten used to be able to write half a sentence, pause, then finish. I suppose, in some degree, I embarrassed myself. Not because I made any mistakes as a DM, or failed to drive attention, or get the players invested... though a first running with a group of players who are also DMs is a climb in that regard. No, "embarrassed" in the sense of maybe getting a little too excited about playing again.

I can report pleasantly that after the event I did not experience a "drop," but rather a continuation of being "wired." This continued uncomfortably for a couple of hours, despite my having a shower and trying to escape into other things. I could have really used a glass of wine, but there wasn't a drop in the house; I haven't bought any liquor since last September, because it's viciously expensive. I might buy a bottle for this Friday, when we've agreed to run again. Two Fridays put us in the territory of birthday parties and I think a wedding, so to be flexible it was either run again in a week or in three weeks. The party voted and it's this Friday.

I'd say the players struggled with investing; they didn't get the rolls they wanted, putting them firmly into the four basic classes of cleric, fighter, mage and thief; no one wanted to be a mage or a thief, so the party sorted itself out as three straight fighters and one cleric. The cleric elected Buddhism as a religion, a good one if the character wants to remain isolationist and self-directed. Personally, I'd prefer to be inside a strong, ordered structure that I can contribute to or feast from, but that takes a specific sort of headspace, which I know most don't have. I've had buddhist clerics in former parties; I don't mind in the least.

The rule-comprehension came very easily. As they're all DMs, no one disputed any rule in any manner whatsoever. The clarifications were certainly in line with the issues presented. I made only a couple of notes for things to be added to the malady table, as players pointed them out, and once I had to go to the original Players Handbook to estimate the weight of a godentag. That's the only reference I made to the Players. I made one reference also to the Monster Manual; I've never actually used sprites in a campaign before, and had to actually look up the original for them. Everything else was managed through my wiki and Discord. It's phenomenal that I can just drag and drop a file into discord, so that if I do have something in a file on my desktop, I don't need to take a screen shot, I can just give a copy. Great way for these fellows to get inside copies of the Streetvendor's Guide, as it happens.

Tried to get through the character background generator as fast as I could; there were a lot of bad rolls and I do wish I'd taken some time to upgrade that before playing with it again. A note for the future: that damn page needs work. If ever I have the time. I could, I suppose, just stop blogging.

We were hung up on buying equipment for time. I expected to be. It's a huge table, deliberately made confusing. Still, it's an excel file and saved to text, so people can just sort it. The players gamely tried to manage it by vendor, which makes a cruel headspace check. You don't find an axehead at the blacksmith's but at the "hacker's," that kind of thing. The players called out answers to each other and I feel the best approach is that if you're looking for anything for more than thirty seconds, call it out and someone else will answer. The issue conflates only when players try to stubbornly solve it themselves. The idea, and I wish I'd thought of this in-game, I only have now, is that you're on a street talking to your friend and saying, "I was just at the blacksmith's and I didn't see any axes."  Whereupon the friend answers, "Oh, I've just come from the hacker's; it's up two streets on your left." Only, of course, without the directions rendered in geography.

The starting game was pulling teeth, though it probably didn't seem like that from the players' perspective. In retrospect, I'm sure they were turning over a few dozen things in their minds, making the choosing of a character name seem superfluous and not at all necessary. It is always hard to progressively describe a party moving up through a forest, in this case along a stream, because the DM says, "You reach the point that represents the furthest you've ever been along this stream from town," and the player quite correctly has no answer for this. In painting the picture of where the players are, how they got here from there, it's often a series of descriptions that land flat in this manner, and it's easy for the DM to think, "Gawd, how boring must this be for them." But it's not really that, I don't believe. It's only that the player can't decide the actual terrain themselves; they can't react to trees or hills or streams except to move around or up them... and there is a feeling that the only reason I am mentioning the stream here, or that hill in the distance, is in some literary Chekhovian fashion: I would not point out this hill unless it mattered somehow. The problem, however, is that it "matters" because you're passing it now, and that actually passing the hill in reality would take time, and would be a little dull, and you would feel a little nonplussed to be marching on. So, though it feels uncomfortable, the actual trek would also be so. Subconsciously, the players need to be made aware of how far they are from civilisation, even as they march away from it.

A similar issue occurred when the lone sprite was encountered. If the party had been properly surprised by it, they'd have seen it run off and been left to wonder if they should follow. Instead, the sprite goofed, made it's presence known, lost initiative and the nearest fighter to the sprite missed. The sprite's fired arrow did all of 2 damage (details that really don't matter), whereupon the party agreed to parley. The sprite gave some salve to the hurt fighter, who got some x.p., and then I did a very obvious thing as a DM: I outlined a simple, straightforward, 2D adventure hook.

These guys needed it. I'd given them some teasing with some 8 ft. creature ripping into trees for honey, only to get back a sort of uncertainty about getting involved. Parties differ. One party will think, "Well, owlbears haven't much treasure, its just a fight, so is it worth it?"  Another party will think, "An owlbear, three or four hours from town? It's our duty to make the land safe for hunters." That kind of thing. In any case, the owlbear went over like a fart in church, so Asiff the sprite took the party to his treehouse settlement, where the party talked to the acting head of the lofty "hamlet," Hara, who explained that their princess had been kidnapped by a mage of some kind, aided by kobalds, and was likely being siphoned for blood for the purpose of potion-making. The party flinched at the idea that this is a sort of "few drops a day thing," and were willing to invest. The sprites explained that a "ward" had been created somehow that disabled sprites from moving past a certain part of the forest, which they suspected hid the princess. The players, not sprites, volunteered without being told (and I wouldn't have) and bravely marched off (hesitating every couple of steps like parties do) to rescue the princess.

It's almost embarrassing that I'm writing those words. But, heck, it's a story that's worked for a thousand years, who am I to argue?

Predictably they found the kobalds, not on guard but busy making charcoal in a valley; they descended, puzzled out the unfamiliar stealth rules from the wiki, made their approach on one kobald, got within 9 hexes, won initiative and killed the kobald. And that is as far as we got. But the party's blood was certainly up by then, so yeah, good all around. We'll pick it up from there on Friday.

Discord, I think, allows for a faster loosening up than text. The Juvenis Campaign and those on blogs were always hard to get off the ground; I expect every game everywhere is. Which is why we should be paying a little closer attention to a first game being like getting a crew together to say cook in a restaurant or work a job site. It doesn't go that great initially. It never does. The first practice of a baseball team is always a disaster, if the players don't already know each other. It's not until they lose that first game by 9 points that the second practice matters. We, and by this I mean every player and every DM in this pasttime, put too much emphasis on the first session. It's not that we need a "session zero," its that we need players who will guarantee three sessions before quitting.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could give each player $25 dollars for their first three sessions, with the understanding that they'd have to pay it back over five sessions if they wanted to keep going? Probably wouldn't work — D&D players are such nasty, ruthless people that a mere $75 would go such a long way toward changing their lives — but it would be nice if some measure of encouragement could be invented that would encourage players to believe that with real investment, it's certain to get better. Perspective, let's call it.

Trust me... anyone who quits after your first game? You don't want to even know that person.

Poor Unfortunate Souls

For those who may not know, a "sensitivity reader" is a person hired by an author or publisher to review a manuscript for portrayals of people, cultures, identities, or experiences that the reader believes may be inaccurate, harmful, or offensive. The role is advisory rather than editorial in the traditional sense. The sensitivity reader does not focus on prose quality, structure, or storytelling craft, but on how specific representations might be received by particular social or identity groups.

There is no agreed standard on what the role entails. If the individual happens to be a black person, Asian, or a woman, or transgendered, or native, or of any established cultural minority, they need only state that they are one and they are, if they can get themselves hired. There is no formal definition, no training, no credentialing, no shared methodology; in addition, there is no stated, clear, inherent consequence attached to the judgments they make. The reader bears no responsibility for the artistic, commercial or cultural outcome of the work; it the work still provokes criticism after their review, presumably, the penalty is that they might lose their job. This of course does not attach to the correctness of any specific judgment they might have made. Rather, the reading is evaluated on whether their feedback aligns with the expectations and risk posture of the institution employing them. If a publisher wants aggressive flagging, a reader who flags aggressively is doing the job "well," regardless of whether the flags are defensible, coherent or mutually compatible across projects.

I've tried to explain the above without sentiment or judgment and I'm not going to indulge in it. What would be the point? If this is the economic model that modern publishers want to embrace, they're welcome to it. I can't see how it affects my life as a writer, unless blogger.com wants to start employing one to look at my work.

What fascinates me is an exchange like this that took place on a podcast last August. The podcaster, Hughes, is talking about writing a Lebanese character into a book:

"When I'm writing the scene and they're around the kitchen table, what am I having them eat? Am I googling Lebanese American food? Because will that give me enough cultural knowledge to actually paint that picture authentically? What might a Lebanese mom say? What's a little saying that, you know, would create authenticity?"

This part is fascinating for me, because the two conversants go on to discuss creating characters in books, describing the importation of black people into books, stereotypes, the employment of American diversity to portray in stories and picture books various persons who have this background or that leaning or what not. Both are utterly blind to the racism going on in their own discussion, and how discussions like this reaching back into the 1950s inevitably led to issues of cultural appropriation in American literature.

As these two persons engage in the conversation (one of whom appears in the video I posted a few days ago about writing on campuses), the assumption is this: as a writer, I am making a character in a book, and my first tag for that character's personality is their race.  I'm not writing a scene where people sit around a kitchen table having dinner, where the food itself is irrelevant because I can describe any food I want, no. I'm writing a scene where Lebanese people are sitting around a kitchen table, and that makes it necessary for the food to be thought of in terms of its authenticity to the arbitrary naming of the character's ethnicity.

This defines the racism taking place in authorship.

The counterargument is that the characters must have names. If I do not say that the family is Lebanese, and still say, "Karim, Rami and Nadine sat at the table, where steaming bowls of falafel and rice awaited them," then I'm still saying Lebanese without using the term, correct?

No, not correct. Because if I never state the ethnicity, I'm first not beholden to having the characters self-define as Lebanese. These are names that people have, regardless of where they happen to have come from. What they talk about around the table defines their characters, their motivations, their interests and experiences... not that they have an ethnic background. If, as a writer, I ignore the ethnicity, if I never mention it per se, but only discuss the characters as people, and the story as a structure of events, then it does not matter if the people depicted happen not to be white. I'm not committing cultural appropriation because I'm not hinging the value or direction of my story upon a specific culture, but rather the one we all actually live in.

Post colonial writing, however, discovered in the 1950s that writing about a specific culture was a terrific way to sell books. If I am Guatemalan, and able to write well, then I have a ready market of Guatamalans if I write specifically about Guatemalan culture, because so little is actually written there. The appropriation complaint arises out of American people writing about Guatemalan culture and accessing that ready market without having "earned" the market by actually being Guatemalan. That in turn comes from the assumption that if I'm Guatemalan, I can't write a book that Americans will buy, because I don't know America and therefore don't know how to write work that will appeal to that culture which I do not know. What's "stolen" therefore is not the culture itself, but the willingness of Western publishing concerns to sweep in and market specific cultural books to specific cultural people, which it would like to do without outsiders to those cultures muddying a very lucrative and beneficial market (to publishers, that is, not to writers, who usually get exploited).

Thus, while the individual writer, say me, wants to write a book with "Lebanese" characters sitting at a table, the persons most concerned with this are not youtubers or cancel-culture enthusiasts, but publishers who want to be sure that my depiction of "Lebanese" is accurate to my actually BEING Lebanese... and thus the sensitivity reader. It's not, as most frame it, a desire to reduce backlash, but rather, to monopolise a specific kind of content.

For the would-be writer on the ground, however, not running a publishing house, it looks like avoiding backlash is the agenda. People in business, however, are not so naive as to think backlash won't happen regardless. The benefit of the sensitivity reader isn't that the backlash is reduced; it's that when it occurs, the publishers can argue, "Well, we did all we could. We used a sensitivity reader." This conveys their responsibility and thus sabotages the viability of any real backlash. The backlash that might have worked five years ago, when the "valid" perspective was on the internet, has now been countered by a greater validity. Publishers can now say to the press that comes to ask about the blowback to a book, with a shrug, "The internet is wrong; our research is professionally correct. That matters more than the opinions of a few amateurs." Poof. Internet problem gone.

The mindset of writers who sit around and discuss what culture to make their characters from arises from decades of literary critique that has systematically put all cultural writing, regardless of actual quality, upon a pedestal. As such, most college educated writers, the sort that take part in podcasts because their writing careers are frustrated, automatically think "good book" = "cultural framing." It is impossible for them to think of books in terms of self-identity except in terms of their group identity. It isn't possible for them to imagine novels that talk about the large subjects of a century ago (war, marriage, parenthood, morality, etc.) because they have been taught by university professors that nothing new can be written on those. Such books are still written, but they're eschewed by book prize committees or legitimacy, since academic institutions have decided that the only real life worth now writing about is the one set in the place where one grew up. This conveniently balkanises all writing into your social and ethnic status, while it is expected that as a white second-generation Canadian with distant roots in Russian culture, that I'm limited as a writer because my background was upper middle class suburban big city. I don't have anything worth writing about because I didn't suffer growing up. Besides, all novels about the suburbs were written fifty years ago by other white people who got there first.

We should not be surprised that there are now endless wars about the boundaries between cultures, and that "racism" or "genderism" or "sexism" are the battlegrounds upon which these wars are fought. The point about balkanisation is that there are so many little cultures, each jealousy struggling to defend their little hill, that this opens endless opportunities for accusation of theft, petty jealousies, arguments about validity and authenticity, and of course the perception that a sensitivity writer exists to impose even harsher boundaries against those writers who find their justifiable content narrowed still further. Already stuck in their heads with the assumptions that "books are written about peoples' culture" and that "all other subjects are dead," they find the news that publishers are now increasing their gatekeeping model as abusive and confrontational. Poor them. It chafes when writers without imagination or money find themselves without power also.

The solutions are obvious. What to write about? Well, this landscape to begin with. The novel about a writer who happens to be of one culture choosing to write about another, and then being vilified for doing so, sounds like a pretty good book that could be written at least ten thousand times, given all the boundaries to be crossed. The book about the writer who chooses to pretend to be a different culture, vis a vis the ancient book, Black Like Me, seems pretty obvious also, and is in fact already proliferating if one goes and looks for it. Common framings for this are all over youtube, in the guise of "I changed by sex and then I changed my mind" or "I used to be Maga"... any of these would make a new subject novel for anyone willing to have a spine that can withstand blowback. The problem with most cry-in-their-beer writers is what it has always been. They don't actually want to be writers. They want to be liked. That's almost impossible in the present world. Whereupon I have to repeat, poor them. Poor unfortunate souls. In pain. In need. This one longing not to be white, that one longing to be appreciated. Just like the mermaid who wants to live on land, but hates that it feels like walking on knives.

In Preparation for Running

As I said in the last post, I'm planning on running D&D this Friday. I have no definite story in mind, but I do have a few set pieces and ideas to start with, if the players' earlier phrasings about what they might want to do can be counted upon. I don't intend to force anyone into anything, however — I'm confident that if the players decide to throw a curve ball at me, I'll be able to manage in real time.

Some issues I've had with online campaigns thus far has been the assumption that whatever I'm doing will involve some kind of "gotcha" mechanic. Even if it should appear as much, the players should assume that if I've arranged to corner them somehow, it's in my mind to get them out of it just as quickly. I had an incident with my first online campaign where the players were repeatedly warned about an area of the map that was overrun with hostiles; they persevered forward just the same, until I trapped them in a house, surrounded by an impossible to manage number of enemy, to send the message that yes, I was serious, there were a great many enemy about. Then, before I could demonstrate the trap door and secret exit to the trap, which had been part of my plan all along (I merely wanted to press that my earlier warnings were well met), one of the players rebelled viciously, claiming that I had broken my DM's obligation, the one I'd always stood by. That went back and forth for a time, the player quit, while I was quietly stunned by how easily a cliched 1920s serial-based plot sequence could be so easily misunderstood.  I supposed ever after that there were things I could do in a real life running, with the trust earned therefrom, that I could not do in text online. I don't wish to make that same mistake again, and I do wish for my motives to be clear, thus my efforts here to outline this at length.

Another issue I found was the players' tendency to express their intent in the future tense, rather than the present. For example, "We will go to the dungeon," rather that "We go..." Or, "We want to attack the enemy," versus "We attack..."

Wanting to do something is not doing it, nor is saying that at some future point we're going to do a thing. Yet when I brought this up, I found myself facing a rather stubborn resistance to the use of the present tense. I suppose it's defensive; by framing things as "we will do" as opposed to "we do," the players arranged an emotional difference between wanting to commit to an action rather than actually committing. As a DM, however, it puts me in a difficult situation.

First, if I'm to assume that the future tense is the same as the present, that removes the future tense as an option for the players. They might, for example, really mean that its something they "will do," just not yet. My assumption is bound to create misunderstandings, and so I'd prefer that we separate the two tenses clearly. However, this requires the players to discipline themselves; to understand that if they say "we will," I plan to take them at their word and assume they're standing where they are and doing nothing. I have tried to hold this line... only to find players becoming upset about it, that "of course" they meant that they were doing it, and that I'm being unnecessarily particular.

D&D is a game of language. As such, language matters. It's a bad habit to express things in future tense when we mean the present. I want my players to be aware of it.

I bring these things up because they cause conflict. In the first case I'm assumed to have an agenda, to "get the party," when I don't, and in the second, that I'm being pedantic when I demand people speak English properly. I don't have an agenda, and I do expect people to speak properly. And I'm saying so now with the expectation that these things are going to arise, because in the three previous campaigns I've run online, they did.

I don't expect my players will be interested in asking questions about my running style here, but perhaps others might like to, so I'm opening the door to that.

Ozd

Starting to get my ducks in a row; the plan for the "discord campaign" is a soft start around 6 to 7 EST... I think we're going to want another player, if someone wants to throw their hat in. I'm tempted to ask for two, but as I'm unfamiliar with online play in this manner, I don't want to overburden the model. I may have four just now, possibly three; so there's room now if someone wants to raise their hand. Mind you, I want a commitment, not dabbling, so take your time and think it through.

The map here is a combined mix of three hex-sizes. The largest is 6.67 miles across, the middle size 2.22 mi., and the smallest about 1400 yards. The town of Ozd shown is about 1200 yards long and maybe 400 yards wide, so the black shape is to scale. 

I'll likely add to it during the week, but even now it's a good size for a first-level party just starting out: lots of little bumps and corners to investigate. No need for rumours; just pick a stream and start walking. 

Validating the Masses

Seeing a number of videos about writing and culture lately, of which the one below is perhaps the best example, I'm encountering a strange pushback with respect to the sort of writing I do, which isn't very different from the way this blog has been structured from the beginning:

Starting in 2008, I made two assumptions as a writer, based upon my personal experience watching people play D&D and the sort of advice I was reading online about how to do it. The first was that (a) I knew how to dungeon master better than most people, and (b) I was ready to say so. From that point, I assumed the role of a teacher who feels that the students (in this case, willing readers), would want to sit down and learn. Not in the sense of grade school, where the students were forced to be there, but of university, where the students paid to be there.

From that point, I created an inviolable social situation for a lot of people, who chanced to read my material but did not feel they could learn from it. At the same time, while affected and often insulted by what I said (your players are not "heroes") they found themselves unable to express their disagreement or anger in actual arguments. This led to a kind of disgruntled respect, most commonly voiced as, "I don't agree with everything he says, but..." — which I've always translated as, "I really fucking hate that guy, but he's better at explaining himself than I am."

That may not be fair. Still, I'm of the opinion that if someone proves me wrong, I'm ready to change my mind... without the need for official papers to justify the change, since if it turns out that the shift in my thinking wasn't warranted in the long run, I'm open-minded and I'll just change my mind again when I have more evidence. On the other hand, these others are of the opinion, "If it seems like someone who has proven me wrong, that's absolutely no reason for me to do anything." Which is how we define "close-minded."

At no time did I ever pretend to be a neutral observer or a "fellow traveller" with respect to D&D. I'm not one of the crowd that gushes when a new splat book arrives or one of those willing to try a new edition just because one happens to get published. I'm not a nostalgia hack crying for the good old days, I won't pretend that the artwork back then wasn't shit, or that the artwork now isn't slop, or even that I give a fuck about the artwork associated with D&D, because artwork isn't a game rule.  I'm not one of the community, on purpose. I don't measure my social value against it. I don't wear a badge that says I play D&D at the local club on Wednesdays. I don't like any published edition of this game. I don't respect the designers, I don't respect their efforts, any more than I would respect a writer who turned out a book that was "mostly okay." I have this funny thing about any mechanical product, within which I include games: they have to work exactly as they're designed to work. If they only sort-a do so, then I see it with the same amount of respect I'd have for a chainsaw that won't work in bad weather.

Therefore, I have exactly zero reason to soften my criticism. People who do that wish to preserve their sense of "belonging" to the community, out of fear that they'll be "cancelled." But I'm not part of the community and I don't accept their judgment as regards the value I write. This makes me free to say what I believe, not what I think the reader can handle.

This is why my work feels confrontational to those people who are inherently caught in their need to manage the social costs of possibly saying something they might be judged for. It's also the reason why a lot of writers who were previously concerned with those social costs grow to be so much better when they finally come to a point of, "Fuck it, I want to say what I think."  When the reader isn't in the same room as the writer, the writer is free to step out from the gulag the reader unconsciously imposes.

15 years ago, Android made a device that was vastly better than the Apple product of the time — but it was unduly complicated. We bought one for my partner Tamara who had the wherewithal to suss it out, patiently, in all the ways that a modern like product would resist producing... and utterly loved the process of doing so. As did so many others that Android began kicking Apple's butt, forcing Apple to change it's product in order to compete. Success does not come from making things easier and less complicated. It comes from creating something so ingenious and difficult that it will arrest the attentions of a significant part of the population. This is a lesson that business steadfastly refuses to learn.

When we don't have to please strangers off the street at a marketing strategy event, when we don't have to live up to the standards of "ordinary people" who must invent opinions on the fly because they're paid to do so off the cuff, then the boundaries on what we can make and what we can think don't apply. But yes, true enough, if we step outside the "boundaries" and speak our minds without being paid to do so (suggesting, you know, that we've had time to think about it, not like people who have only just witnessed a product for the first time just minutes before), then we come off hostile. It's the default reaction to hearing anything outside the norm being said.

When a reader encounters an argument that clearly reflects a lot of knowledge and reflection, it creates an implicit heirarchy between the writer/speaker and the reader, who understands inherently that they have not given themselves the time to think about it. It exposes a sense of self-erasure, emerging from a belief that everyone's opinion ought have the same value — a delusion that evaporates when someone is able to make multiple considered arguments with one sentence after another, giving the reader no time to disagree with the first or the second when being pummeled with the twenty-third. This discontinuity with what most people think of as "opinion," that being something off the cuff, reads as an attack, a declaration that the reader must be stupid, because intrinsically this is what the reader feels when they're met with an argument they themselves have taken no time at all in their minds to address. This feeling is then ascribed to the "attacker," not the self; the "attacker" is using words "unfairly" to outline "wrong ideas" that are in fact only wrong because they're new and unfamiliar.  It all goes to show that the sense of everyone's opinion being the same is really only evidence of how the concept has been widened to include every half-baked thought that people have created in their heads without taking the time to fully cook one.

The result of this is rapidly becoming a form of constraint and censorship: not because the topics or the content is offensive, but because it's being perceived that the "abuse" created by the writer above is not the reader's perspective, but an active failure of responsibility on the part of the writer. Thus, the writer is not expected to mollycoddle the reader. If it feels that the main character of the piece is getting too put upon, it is the writer's responsibility to insert a helper or some form of outside force to intermediate for the character's well-being. It is the writer's responsibility to assure that the world being built doesn't come off as overly unjust, excessively dystopian without a clear sign of an out of some kind, then the writer must hold the hand of the reader lest it become too cold and dark and apparently hopeless. A book that's too uncomfortable, that suggests the character can't remain the same person going out of the novel that they came in as, asks the reader to accept a prospect they're not mentally prepared to consider: that event might force them to change their mind about something or someone. We can't have that as a part of writing fiction in this day and age. It upsets too many readers and affects the perceived bottom line of the publishing concern. They might, gawd forbid, find themselves cancelled.

As a result, we don't dare depict the real world. The real world has consequences. People are irrationally executed or murdered on the streets of ordinary towns for no justified reason at all. We can't have things like that happening in actual writing. Writing is where we go to escape all that, to assure ourselves that everything is all right. That's where the responsibility of a writer lies. Not in giving opinion, but in providing care, and assuring the community being written to that everything is going to be all right, so stop worrying.

This is not something I'm saying that I hope won't happen. This is doctrine being enforced right now.

By all present-day arguments, this post should have begun with a number of trigger warnings. I might have, in the name of responsibility started this post with,

"Warning: this post includes content that implies an intellectual hierarchy and usese sustained argumentation without relief pauses; it further criticises community norms and identity-based belonging, rejection of reader-as-peer framing, depictions of irreversible consequence and moral discomfort, skepticism toward therapeutic models of fiction, critique of publishing economics and cancellation anxiety, dismissal of off-the-cuff opinion as equivalent to considered thought, refusal to provide reassurance or narrative escape and the suggestion that readers may be asked to change their minds."

If I had written this at the top of the post, it would have shown that I care about the reader's safety, and that I do not wish to impose my aggression and lack of concern for the reader's fragility and overall fear regarding subject materials with which they have no previous experience. Because I did not do this, it demonstrates that I am a monster who does not care for your safety, and I wish to take advantage of your fragility and that I wish to increase your fear. This makes me a very irresponsible person and as such, I should not be given a public platform, this blog for example, upon which to express my views.

It is worse than this. Because I am a 61 y.o. white male, who apparently feels zero sympathy for my fellow human, because I'm willing to unrestrainably abuse my reader in this horrid fashion, I am plainly a number of other things besides, all of which draw upon perceived motivations for writing this post that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content herein. Content in the post is irrelevant where these accusations are concerned. I do not need to write the actual words for it to be assumed that I am saying something that does not occur in the text. My age, my gender and my race make those conclusions more than self-evident, by definition.

Importantly, the pre-emptive moral inference that is based on my identity is not condemned; rather, the reader in this culture is congratulated for seeing through my text to a hidden meaning that is, of course, there, which overall makes the words themselves completely meaningless. This might as well have been a post about the lubrication of farm tractors for all the value the words are to the audience unable to wrest themselves from the belief that the purpose of writing is to "make the reader feel good" when it is done. But obviously, not in a "Hallmark white-person way," but in a "concern for my sufferings and personal difficulties" kind of way, which make the reader feel justifiably angry for all the unfairnesses that have been heaped upon them.

And because I chose to be a writer some 50 years ago, this is by default the societal role I'm expected to fulfill. That role is now to reassure the reader that the world is unkind, that the reader's pain is real, legible and morally centred, and that anger is completely understandable because it preserves the reader's identity while avoiding the risk of reconsideration. Any writing that nowadays does not participate in this performative economy is now suspect. By definition.

The novel, Sense and Sensibility, Marianne's "sensibility" is treated as evidence of virtue; it is socially legible, rewarded and defended as authenticity. Elinor's restraint, on the other hand, is read as cold, without feeling and even as a moral deficiency. The novel is more than 200 years old and it describes precisely the same belief that "feeling deeply" confers legitimacy, while actually thinking is a sign of failure to conform properly to the expectations of the masses.

This is what comes of the internet turning the whole world into a drawing room.

Gotta D&D

There have been some changes.

Because I'm a stupid kitten who is mollified by shiny objects, I've let some of the patreon supporters talk me into running a D&D campaign on discord. We're going to start in northern Hungary. I have four players now, I'm not sure I could manage a fifth, but I'm only going on what it was like to run games through text; this is going to be speaking and answering, Sunday evenings starting February 1st, tentatively at 5 p.m. (my time), but that's not absolutely set yet. Naturally, it is the usual schedule problem, coupled with us being in various time zones. I'm in Mountain, two are in Central and one in Eastern.

Just now, I should be working on the Lantern for the 1st of February, but... no. What I suggest is that those putting forward the $10 donation for the advanced copy rescind it, with my apologies. It's selfish and stupid of me, but life is meant to be lived in the moment and the Lantern can wait a week or two for the present. My apologies, sincerely meant; I can't convey them any more strongly, except to assure that anyone pulling out, believe me when I say there's no way I could hold that against you. If you feel you've been shortchanged, that the work here hasn't justified it, then please, reach out to me and we'll come to an agreement.

In the meantime, I will be working on The Lantern and there will be a March issue. I wish I could just get myself into a headspace where I work on it everyday, instead of stacking it up day by day toward a deadline. I've worked that way all my life, I'm afraid, and though I'm much better now than I was 20 years ago, it continues to be my nature to a degree greater than I'd like.

What else?

This has forced me to address the pricing table, which I have kicked down the road more years than I can believe, honestly. I'll have a largely working version of it by this upcoming Saturday, and I'll post it for $10 patreon supporters. It's just too much work for me to give it away free. Plus it's an endless fix and patch job, even when it's done. So I really have to keep it behind a wall, I'm sorry.

That's what, six, seven apologies? Well, I'm Canadian.

All right, I'm here, if anyone wants to yell. That'd be totally fair.

Three Other Affordances

In this part two post about affordances, part 1 here, I'll use three more basic games as structural models for a different approach to D&D, not as a replacement of the dungeon, but as something for the players to do besides the dungeon. None of them are new to this blog, but perhaps if I describe them differently, more structurally, it might be easier to imagine how they could each be run separately (or even conjoinedly) as scaled affordances that are spacially bounded, have a repeatable procedure and yet still a reliable payoff. This is not a structure for these different game styles that I've tried to outline before, so let's see where it gets us.

The three games are, not surprisingly, Go, Chess and Monopoly. None of these games, obviously, are RPG in structure... but all are built upon a thematic ideal that attempts to simplify a normal part of the human condition, which can also be likewise simulated by D&D. Go is about the acquisition of territory, the placement of stones that inevitably impose jurisdiction upon a wide area. Chess is control through indirect power; the use of pawns to hedge in larger pieces until the most important is trapped. And Monopoly is the mastery of resources through purchase, improvement and ultimately leverage against persons and larger entities.

Go on a two-dimensional gameboard is an adversarial contest between two sides that place stones to capture "territory." In a D&D setting, it's usually assumed that all the "territory" in the setting has already been "captured," but this isn't actually true. The dungeon is essentially territory that the players enter, clean out and plunder... and then abandon, because the empty dungeon in the game is assumed to have no value. That territory doesn't have to be abandoned; it could, instead, be reconstructed and repurposed to be the first stone the players put on the game board. A DM, obviously, could decide to play "gotcha" with the players — "Oh, you thought this dungeon was cleaned out? Ha, you fools!" — but let's assume a DM not threatened by the players having achieved something fairly.

With the dungeon as foothold, the players can either begin to claim the nearest plots of land, either clearing out any creatures that are there (adventuring), which is like laying stones side by side, or jumping to another dungeon some twenty or forty miles away, which is like placing your black stone on the other side of the opponent's white stone. Effectively, the whole of civilisation is covered by white stones, from the player's perspective, but we may also see it as millions of different shades and tones, not getting along with each other, so that the players can conquer small areas and grow their territorial coverage.

Here is our repeatable procedure: start by clearing out two or three dungeons, each of which we then convert into structured, controlled "stones." We hire mercenaries to defend them, or henchfolk, being careful not to spread ourselves too thinly at the campaign's start. We seek ways to tie our stones together; force out the residents of this village OR impose ourselves (kindly, meanly) as their protectors. We might use our wealth gained through plunder to legitimately make their lives better, or we may intimidate them into making ourselves more powerful. Slowly, we accumulate stones until we reach a level that we can seize larger and larger sections of wilderness or the periphery of society; until, inevitably, we can count ourselves as the local lords over such and such a valley, giving our fealty to some higher power who acknowledges our right to legimately "own" our land. This is our predictable and reliable payoff.

After that, we can legitimately enter a foreign land, plunder, seize their territory and call it our own, and use our king's support as a threat against their king. Again, repeatable, again, a reliable payoff. Wholly douable and we're not endlessly in a dungeon.

Chess on a two-dimensional gameboard is an adversarial contest between two players who use subordinate pieces to temporarily apply pressure against other squares, in order to eventually force an enemy to surrender more entities than the number working for us. If we discard the idea that the board squares are "territory," and instead see the board as a resolution of power over whom the players have leverage, then we can see how the game represents all of society falling temporarily into the party's hands. Think of it thusly: there are not 32 game pieces on a side, and there are not two sides, but rather there are thousands of "entities" that fill up the world, each of which has appetites and vulnerabilities the players can exploit, one at a time. To put it another way, instead of acquiring physical territory, the game becomes about acquiring allegiances, while using those allegiances to "take" our enemies resources from them.

Consider the party encountering a bandit party, one that is small enough for the players to intimidate. Rather than destroying them, the players "make a deal" with them. They'll supply the bandits with food, a place of protection, weapons, healing, if the bandits will harry a certain village. Then they approach the village with another deal; "We'll convince the bandits to leave you alone, not for coin, but for the place in the local market your village's charter allows you to use. In fact, we'll do your trading for you."

The village gets the party legitimate access to the town; guards as another "pawn" are bribed, used to eliminate an enemy pawn, a competitor village. Steadily, as the party gains levels, they make donations to a religious entity to gain their good will; to a local squire; to a guild; the money from dungeon plundering is used to grease whichever group can be induced or motivated to work on the party's behalf, while repeating the cycle over and over. Gain access, use the access to find a weak point, use money to turn this force against that, increase access to higher entities.  And at each step along the way comes entitlements, options, goods received from destroyed competitors and always the readiness to confront an enemy physically who won't concede when pressed.

Pawns are any group that is expendable and numerous: the aforementioned bandits, dock workers convinced to strike, fisherfolk for whom we buy boats so we can corner the market on fish, any group that is really unable to defend themselves because they have no real power. The religious community is a bishop, free to cut diagonally through society, invoking their control through belief, legitimacy, sanctuary, denunciation, charity and moral authority, all of which can be levied even against a monarch. Soldiers are knights, which can move this way, that way, with sanctioned irregularity: they can appear where needed, ignore what they're told to ignore, and force change without waiting for procedure. Fortifications are rooks, anchoring territory, controlling approaches, dealing with common folk who dare to use violence to undermine our framework of promises and lies that ensures our power over them.

And the Queen is the prestige we gain through union with another entity like ourselves: prestige, title, legitimacy, access to the highest levels of society, a piece with maximal mobility that changes what is possible everywhere. It is the most powerful piece because it multiplies your options.

All this relies upon a DM who does not care if we succeed. One who is willing to shrug, even laugh at our audacity, while conceding, "Yes, that makes sense, that would probably work." It needs a DM that understands this is how the real world actually works, who doesn't feel the need to moralise "the decent way to play" the game, like everyone's a hero. I'm that DM. But I don't honestly think there's another DM anywhere who is. Chess, however, is a game where even the most powerful of pieces can be eliminated ruthlessly, in exchange for advantage over an enemy. There is no "morality" in chess, no "favourite knight" we would never part with. Every piece except the king, ourselves, is expendable. D&D, played with that mindset, where every NPC in the game is, in the DM's mind, just as expendable, works. But if the DM has favourites? There's no point in even trying to play this form of game. If the DM won't play chess and insists on playing Tic-Tac-Toe, then the only winning move is not to play.

Monopoly is an economics-themed game where the players move randomly around a 2D board and purchase properties when they become available. Once the properties are purchased, the players collect rent from visitors, until sufficient capital is available to upgrade the property so that more rent can be obtained. In D&D, vast parts of the game setting are available for purchase, much of it dirt cheap or even, in the case of the wilderness, free for the taking. The loop is simple when we translate this into the game setting: acquire assets, develop them, create income, use income to acquire more assets and survive the swings of bad luck long enough to compound. "Boardwalk" is replaced with a riverside warehouse, an inn, a farm, a fishing boat, a kiln, a smokehouse, a toll bridge. "Rent" is accumulated as produce, fees, settlements, margins. "Railroads" and "Water Works" are replaced by smuggling, guilds, trade routes, public contracts, banking... and of course still, flat out plunder.

And at first, yes, plunder is the easiest way to gain, but capitalisation is reliable, foreseeable, non-threatening and, inevitably, it grows exponentially. Though it requires a party not to think small; it requires a party ready to do bookkeeping; it requires a DM willing to just let the players' assets be, just like every other asset with an owner in the game world. If their business have gotten along just fine for twenty years, then the players should expect the same. The DM cannot feel obliged to burn down the players' bakery for the sake of "drama"... and if the players own an inn, warehouse, kiln or ferry, these too should be respected.

In fact, consider it thusly. If it is not permissible to kill the players' character without granting that character the right of a fight for life, then it is not permissible to do the same with the players property without also giving the players a right to fight to keep it. Let us say the bakery does catch fire. Then, if so, the players should be on hand to try to put it out; they should have an equal chance to put the fire out as they would collectively to save their own lives in a fight; and if they should lose that fight, then it is is a fair loss, not the ad hoc removal of something the players have earned upon a DM's whim.

So long as a party can respond — whatever kind of game is played — take actions, make rolls, spend resources, call in help, accept trade-offs and succeed or fail with the same principle as a dungeon fight, then the DM is justified in imposing a threat. But just as the DM cannot say, "your character died in their sleep," just because the DM decides it, then what the character's own, even if we talking about a fish hook, cannot be taken away without the due process of challenge, die rolls and success/failure. This is a contract that every DM should absolutely observe, whatever the game played.

It is the only way to define "fair play."

Once the players understand this contract exists, and the DM will respect it, then they can relax. They can feel able to step up fairly and justifiably with the expectation that "If I work for it, it's mine, and only mine, and not something the DM can arbitrarily take away." With that assurance, players can do anything. They don't have to believe their only choice of action is just another dungeon.