Purpose and Value

If D&D was a well-made game, properly supported, with rules that were structured well, then there should be an already memorised phrase that answers the question posed at the end of the last post. What we are likely to get, however, is something like this, which ChatGPT provided:

D&D is a game in which players, through fictional persons with limited abilities, enter a persistent imagined world, seek advantage within it, confront danger and uncertainty, and by their choices alter their own condition and the condition of that world.

I pointed out to Chat that this is really just a collection of ill-defined generated concepts that in fact do not determine the game's play at all. This is like saying that "Chess is a game that two people play on a board where someone wins." Which in no way provides a premise for that game. Chat agrees:

The key consequence is that D&D discourse is full of phrases that sound like premises but are actually atmospheres. “Persistent imagined world,” “danger and uncertainty,” “fictional persons,” “alter their condition,” “seek advantage” — these are not useless ideas, but they are not yet game statements. They do not tell a person what play consists of, what governs it, or what makes one course of action preferable to another.

The premise of D&D is that one person, the dungeon master, creates a set of fictional but believable imaginary scenes or situations, representing an "environment" or "setting," complete with residents, existing in a point of time, with a potential for rational consequences, which the players can interact with imaginably. When the players take an action within this environment, they cause a change which the DM must believably reconcile, producing a response from the environment, which is explained to the players.

This gets rid of all the details of the setting that have as much to do with the game's premise as the physical colour of the pieces has to do with chess's game play. In chess, the pieces must be a different colour, but they need not be black and white. Gold and silver, red and yellow, clear and opaque boards exist and do not change the game. There is a "persistent imagined world" in D&D, but that is the effect of the premise, not the premise itself; it is what the D&D makes. It needs the DM to interpret it, because it cannot provide interpretations in and of itself, because it's not a person, it's a mechanic. All the parts originally defined by Chat are mechanics: danger, uncertainty, persons, condition, advantage... as such, they descend from the premise, but are not the premise itself.

Hardly anyone plays D&D by the premise stated above, though the description of this does appear clumsily in several of the game's books, including the original 5th edition Players Handbook. But then virtually everything else about the game sets out to subvert this premise. The DM should not decide ahead of time what the players are allowed to physically do within the environment. The players should not be railroaded, required to act in a certain way, penalised if they do not act in that way or any other of the endless sorts of Gygaxian "punishments" that were invented as alterations to the game world that a DM should impose when players "misbehave."

Likewise, "backstories" are examples of the players attempting to erase the premise by inventing an environment outside the DM's sphere. When an NPC behaves in a manner that the players do not like, particularly if the player has built some "story" about the NPC and themselves, that player is NOT permitted to declare the DM has acted outside the premise. The premise does not include the players wishes being fulfilled just because they might walk if they don't get what they want. If a player won't play by the game's premise, or if the DM won't, then the game can't function. It is broken. Not because the game itself is, but because those participating are unclear about what the premise IS, or won't accept it for private, stubborn or selfish reasons. It is like a chess player picking up the enemy's knight and flinging it from the board because, "You have too many knights and I'm losing." It is childish, it is abusive, it is not proper game play... and where D&D is concerned, it is behaviour that is everywhere.

Very often, the openness of D&D and the lack of comprehension about the premise allows participants to disguise their abuse of the game under the rubrics of "free expression" or "emotional safety"; as "story" or "fairness"; as "what my character would do" or "protecting the players"... and quite a lot of others nonsense that has succeeded in making nearly everyone's game unplayable. Success begins by first defining the premise, then holding fast to the premise, then disregarding any protest of "personal dissatisfaction" related to the premise. A player that demands to know more about the environment than the senses of the player's character permits; who wants to define the end point of this adventure or the campaign at large; who wants to min/max for the sake of min/maxing; have all lost the thread. They're not playing dungeons and dragons. They're playing some other game that uses D&D as a mask.

Thus, the first principle of a good game is to accept the premise. Get in your lane, stay in your lane, make arrangements to play with others who together share an interest in the environment provided and STOP trespassing on the other side. The DM is the DM; the players are the players. Each has a purpose and a place; the line dividing the two is not a chalk line. It is the Great Wall of China. The boundary has to be inviolable because the temptation to cross it is constant.

Yet this does not, in itself, describe "a reason to play."

My reason for playing as a DM is because I like being made to think fast on my feet when a player does something I do not expect. I do not see this as contrary to my DMing. I see this as the coolest, bestest thing about the game. Nothing thrills me more than for a player to solve a conundrum in a way I could not myself, pushing me to then instantly respond in some way that fits the premise: i.e., a believable result, almost universally positive in such cases, because I have exactly no reason to keep a player from gaining wealth, power or benefit from doing something that they are mentally or creatively able to do. Does that creative thing put a lot of wealth into the player's hands? No problem, it'll be spent on things and they'll be broke in time. Does it give the player a lot of power? No problem, power brings responsibility; responsibility creates stress, stress creates game opportunities and fascinating conundrums. Bring that stuff on. Is the player benefitting? Awesome. Works for me. I do not understand DMs who fear player agency. I love it, it's a high, it's a thrill for me to play with. Why would I get in the way of it, or exploit it when it happens. It only means the game's experience can lift itself out of ordinary fighting and move into extraordinary fighting and intrigue. All I can say is "Please, can I have some more?"

I assume the reason my players want to play is because the playing field is wide open. I won't give them information they don't deserve and I won't help them enrich themselves without physically taking risks and earning it, but in short order they soon learn that if they ask for something that in fact does not meaningfully empower them, then sure, they can have it. "You'd like a hireling that's a gnome and of your religion and is a cook too, in a region where gnomes are rare? Sure. Why not? Makes no meaningful difference to the game world. Here you go." I'm not miserly. I don't care to be. A game rule is a game rule: "No, you cannot just use a two-handed weapon and a shield. Period." But when it's not actually a game rule and it doesn't need to be one? Sure, here you go. I don't receive any benefit from being tight-fisted.

I think my best players come to realise that smart choices will change the encounter; that I will allow them to surprise and even obliterate a hard enemy with little struggle by means of opponent brilliance. I think they understand that with my experience in game play, I'm hard to surprise, but at the same time, if I am surprised, I'll respond with respect and applause, not resistance. I buy into the premise so my game must, by definition, flow freely according to the players actions, meaning that by default those actions will be relevant where game play is concerned. I think, from experience, this is extremely rare in a DM. I don't know why. I'm not losing anything by letting my players succeed. I have an infinite number of monsters ready off stage. Why would I seriously care if the latest went down fast because the players got lucky or because one of the realised that something they bought had an unexpected benefit? I'm all sorts of jerk, but I'm not petty.

This is one of the reasons why I've resisted the philosophy of "balance" — and not merely because my deciding what the players are allowed to have or use is breaking the premise. I have no anxiety about the players becoming more powerful. If I have anxiety anywhere, it's the tendency of players to refuse to believe what I tell them, so they can walk straight into death presuming that I'm going to protect them. I used to make the error of actually doing that... but lesson learned. About ten years ago, with the Senex campaign, I decided, "fuck it, I'm just going to kill them now." Long story.

But more powerful because, oh no, it'll destabilise my campaign, or my setting? Nonsense. My setting has Constantinople and Paris in it. It has empires of more than a million square miles and tens of millions of people. Try as they might, the players could have a hundred million gold pieces and it would just make them equal in wealth to one of the big states in Europe. That wouldn't be enough to conquer China. So, you know... there's always something bigger than they are.

Moreover, I don't really care what my players do. That is, within the limitations of their imaginary physical selves. If they want to burn down villages and churches, kill women and children, slaughter innocents on the road... in reality, these things happened historically and are still actually happening in large parts of the world right now. They are not beyond the ken of human ability or cognisance for that matter. It is the premise that I don't bind their hands with my outlook on "permissable" behaviour. My only ask is they don't take abusive action against each other. That's because invented figures of imagination aren't real... not even, in fact, as demonstrations of moral goodness...  and like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, I refuse to be victimised by notions of virtuous behaviour.

My conflict with players begin when they want free things, especially information, to which they're not entitled. This was the source of a recent disagreement between myself and a player, who wanted me to explain what his best option was as a player to get more... well, money presumably, but ultimately agency beyond the limitations of his character. While yes, I am omnipotent in game terms, and money for me is a matter of saying it exists, as are experience points, I don't indulge in giveaway game mechanics for the sake of player's merely asking for them. One has to draw the line somewhere.

Some might suppose that my take on villages being burned down is expressed in the game consequences, and to some degree that's true. The village cannot be "unburned." But at the same time, my game world has a lot of villages, and I can certainly spare a few if players must indulge themselves. It's not like I'm slavering at the opportunity to go after the players with reprisals, condemnation or an assassin waiting behind every tree just because they've done something bad. That's possible, but it's not my sincerest wish. I'd rather, instead, that they just realise such things afford nothing in terms of game benefit and therefore invest in more useful activities.

Together, my response joy and I assume the player's ability to immerse themselves into an unrestricted setting not based on "fantasy tropes" or "DM ownership" settles the whole "reason to play" question. They play because they like D&D. They play in my game because they like my style of play. I cannot guess why other people play in other games. I stopped playing altogether more than 40 years ago because I could not find a DM with my play style.

Which brings us to "value"... or, how is the time spent so that something is accomplished?

I play Oxygen Not Included because it is just enough problem solving as to not be boring, while at the same time it is not stressful. It permits a very mild sort of relaxation that is more engaging that watching television, and considerably more than my phone offers. I usually play with music or some video playing on the other screen I have set up for my computer. Little is accomplished. More base is built. A supply problem is solved. It's not much to speak of.

D&D is arguably the same. It is a game, after all. I like to think the value is better in part because of the player's relative freedoms within the game's structure, but also because my game's structure is dense, gritty and there is always some aspect of it that can be challenged or learned. Since my players are largely DMs themselves, they are seeing the Authority Wiki's presence in the game, seeing how easily a game rule can be challenged and fixed, especially if something isn't clear... and that adds value to the games they play, using my style of DMing as a template.

I don't mean to sound full of myself. But not only have I been doing this for a long time, I've gone at my setting in a way that no one I know of has. For one thing, I've been running the same game setting since 1984. I've been running games in the way that I do now since then. I've run a lot of different kinds of players. I'm flexible. I'm quick-witted. I like game rules and I like it better when they're functionally written out, in an agile way that can be repaired, updated or simply gotten rid of when appropriate. These things are noticed. One can see from recent comments that my DMing style is considered "good."

Then, apart from the metagame, the actual setting has it's own learning mode. People aren't familiar with the world on a ground level. The players are in northern Hungary; they and I are learning in depth what opals are, how the Ottomans occupied the region in the time period, the lay of the land, the nature of the individual towns, the weather, the behaviour of the occupants and the logic that underlies the way people in the game setting think. That's a lot of information and much of it is absolutely useful in the real world. If one of my players were in Ozd, the actual Hungarian town, they would know at once where the Bukk Forest and the Karancs Hills were. They'd know how close they were to Slovakia. They'd know how to find their way to Miskolc or, as the case may be, Budapest. The setting is functionally the same as the real world... and as I'm now letting ChatGPT describe what the actual terrain looks like, it's a fair guess that the players would recognise parts of the landscape as they moved through it. That very valuable... in a way that no one else, to my knowledge, considers D&D to be.

Take the presence of opals where the players are. I didn't decide that. The location did. Opals actually do come from this part of Hungary. Moreover, the literal geology of the landscape gives the reason why they do. It's hilarious to think that someday a player in my world will be in a museum somewhere and say, "Oh, yes, opals like that come from tufa. They're very common in northern Hungary because of the geology there." That's a pleasant little coup, since the player never has to say it came from a D&D game they played once. This is the kind of thing that cannot be faked by invented "lore."

All right. I have been typing for five hours. I'm going to stop and continue this post tomorrow.

What Makes a Good Game?

If the Gentle Reader will allow, I'll try to speak of what makes "good gaming." There are different ways of looking at this: one assumption is to argue a rules system, another is to discuss the social aspect, and still another is to discuss the relationship between the players and the DM. Those all matter, of course. And it matters that two people are not likely to define "good" in the same way, since the idea is incredibly subjective.

I'll approach this as objectively as possible... to to say only what I think makes a good game, but taking a position that anyone can functionally employ as a means of providing a meaningful experience for the largest number of players that might present themselves. That is far more useful that my making a point about what satisfies me personally... since I am, after all, a decidedly odd person.

In simple terms, a "good game" is obtained by providing the greatest number of players at any time with the greatest number of consequential choices, that together provide purpose (a reason to play), value (the time is spent accomplishing something), significance (something was learned); and clear intent (for much of the time, the players felt in control of the outcome). That's a tall order. But after all, D&D is not a board game.

A board game provides a simplified version of this structure. As an example, let's discuss the Game of Life. If you don't know it, well... bless you, you poor soul, you're not likely educated enough to run D&D.

The Game of Life is essentially Candyland on steroids; it is a railroaded game where pieces land on random squares that provide a wide range of outcomes; all told from the beginning of the game to the end, depending upon which exact routes one takes, there are approximately 130 spaces to cross, give or take a few, using a spinner that produces a random number between one and ten. Therefore, it takes an average of 22-24 spins to finish the game, plus perhaps a few if you're forced back 15 spaces, as can occur. There is little strategy beyond occasionally being allowed to gamble on an outcome or choosing one route versus the other. The goal is to get to the end first, or to have somehow amassed enough money to win despite the "winner" having gotten a big pot for arriving first. The particulars aren't important.

Life is, essentially a game that follows the rule, "roll and see what happens." Many play D&D in exactly this way. The Game of Life describes, essentially, the "dungeon game." Pick doors, enter rooms, roll dice, see what happens. The "purpose" is to see what happens. The "value" comes from collecting treasure and looking back to see which room have been cleared; and in small part, to see who lived. The "significance" is that a rule was learned (how to kill {blank}). The clear intent is to make the players believe that they controlled their experience by picking this door over that, but in reality, all the doors lead to the same place.

The conception goes that the "strong" dungeon includes problems to be solved: at best, the learning of the underground's geography, the idiosyncracies of the inhabitants, their motives, the resources to be found and the pressures of managing dwindling resources (hit points, spells, food, sleep, etcetera) to get as much treasure before having to give way and get out. Thus the players choose to fight or not; to barricade or retreat; to map, to listen, to bargain; and eventually to heal up and return.

This is, essentially, the Game of Life where every square can be eventually gotten to while risking the end of the participant, as every valuable square is guarded or boobytrapped or lies under a puzzle. As a game, this process is engaging... for a time. Inevitably, it ceases to be. And as such, most people try D&D for 1 to 4 years, then quit altogether and get on with their lives.

Whatever it's value, the number of choices a dungeon offers is fixed. It is obstacle, reward, obstacle, reward... and eventually even the most interesting obstacles and the most cherished of rewards sour. Every obstacle must in some way be tailored for the players, or else the DM is forced to solve the puzzle for them, or weaken the monster for them, or open the door for them, because if no one in the party can bend the bars or find the secret door or cast knock, then the obstacle becomes ill-timed or poorly considered, and in any case, it's a waste of game time to have to go back outside and waste precious play hours when the DM can simply say, "Oh look, the secret door automatically opens for you." Thus, a clue becomes more obvious, a monster makes a foolish decision, a lock turns out to be old and weak, an NPC appears, the puzzle answer is accepted despite being wrong. In the end, continuance is more important than metrics.

Let us consider the board game Careers. The game provides an outside track with a series of inside tracks that the players can choose to take or not take as they will. The goal is to collect money, love ("hearts") and fame ("stars") according to a secret formula the player decides before the game begins. Usually, the aimed-for total equals 60 or 100; thus the player may assign themselves 20 (thousand dollars), 20 hearts or 20 stars. Or they may opt for 10 th. dollars, 15 hearts and 35 stars. Different tracks offer the best chances of gaining some of each kind of thing.

In D&D terms, the outside track is the outside world; the village, the wilderness, the circular back and forth the game offers between purchasing equipment and the "dungeons" which are the inner tracks. Each inner track or dungeon requires a commitment... but because there are eight of them, no one dungeon must be chosen. Some are full of undead, some with orcs and some with lots of traps. Some are easy to get through with little reward, some are excessively dangerous with lots of reward, though with a fair chance of dying and getting nothing.

This describes the generally more advanced game, or the "campaign" game, because it gives a greater sense of agency. The purpose is building up a presence in the off-dungeon game, the value is overcoming dungeons so that the money has a place to be spent, the significance is in learning not only the kinds of dungeons there are and the game rules, but the greater structure of the larger world... and finally, the clear intent is that the players feel at least some control over their lives.

Yet... the purpose just stated is pre-ordained. The player has little choice but to build their house or castle or church or structural centre as a homebase from which to strike out at the next dungeon. There is little value to be compared with that which comes from dungeons, as they are far more lucrative than anything that can be accomplished in the "outside track/game setting." Very little actual significance is achieved since one gets the feeling that there is nothing else to do except build until the money is gone, then upon getting more, do more building. The buildings in game might as well be large round holes into which gold coins are thrown, as there is little if any substance to imaginary buildings, towers, walls or the gathering of followers in one form or another. These things cannot be applied to anything in-game, since the game remains the ever-necessary return to the dungeon, so they are literally just places for the unloading of wealth. As "significance," they have little virtue.

After a while, this lack of significance, this returning to dungeons like homing pigeons, this sense of purpose, fades... and with it, any real feeling of control. The experience is not unlike that of building up a large complex structure in a video game like The Sims, where the more that is built, the greater the need for the player to spend time in maintenance, until it's all just one long sludge of repeated actions that feel like work rather than play.

From a young age we are trained to think within the structure of finite games. Wikipedia, ever the idiot, defines a "finite game" as a game theory term meaning "a two-player game that is assured to end after a finite number of moves." I should like to expand the term in reconciliation of the English definition of "finite," which is, "having a definite limit, bound or end point."

D&D's finite vs. infinite quality is smudgy. On the one hand, the same group of players, stymied only by the fact that an individual life is finite, can enter dungeon after dungeon, or even the same dungeon ad nauseum — and why not, given that I've played the games Life and Careers I don't know how many times — without let up, for as long as they can stand it. Theoretically, a single "campaign" could extend thousands of years, with DM's and players being replaced in Ship of Thesian-like fashion... but in reality, with other things to do, D&D like this is not, in fact, infinite. Players get bored. Life intervenes. One bad players blows up a game. The DM gets old and there are not substitutes. But I am letting digressions get the better of me, so let's back up and go over this again.

Chess is a two-player finite game. After a finite number of moves, the game will end, because both sides are trying to destroy the enemy and inevitably, either the enemy will be destroyed or, importantly for our purpose here, it will be revealed that no further value will come from continuing to make moves. In chess, a factual stalemate occurs when neither side is capable of checkmating the other. No matter how long the two sides play after that point, the play is just going through the motions. No resolution can occur.

D&D is a multiplayer "finite" game that can be played, as said, indefinitely. But a stalemate occurs when the DM or a sufficient number of players, perhaps all of them, are either unsatisfied or sick of playing, and do not wish to any more. Once that happens, no resolution can occur.

This is a very different way to think about a game... and it's problematic, because we are used to thinking about games as having an "end" that occurs as a resolution — whether board game or a video game, when eventually we run out of "game" assuming we don't quit beforehand. And why do we quit? Because the game is not providing us the urge to continue. This latter is the reason that D&D fails. Not just because it's the "wrong kind of D&D," but because, in fact, for whatever reason, either the imagination of the DM or players crashes and burns, or the process being played is unable to hold our attention.

Structurally, we tend to think D&D failed for the reasons a video game fails. Because it wasn't designed well. And when it fails like that, we assume that D&D, whatever version we speak of, can't be fixed. Especially when in fact we can't see what's wrong.

All this, so far, has been merely to unravel what's meant by a "good game." We haven't begun discussing how to make one yet.

A good game is one that urges the player to continue playing.

Chess, though finite, is for some a very good game. They can comfortably and happily play with the same 32 pieces on the same 64 square board for all of their lives and not wish to do otherwise. This sort of commitment is unheard of in nearly any other game. Exceptions include Go, Bridge, Backgammon and Poker, though obviously that's not an exhaustive list. There are few video game examples... though personally I have a few that I do return to that I've played ten years or more. I do not write blogs about those games, however.

My steam tells me that I've played 4,344 hours of Oxygen Not Included. That's a trifle worrying.

No, it is not an addiction. It helps me relax. I swear.

Chess is an important guideline in understanding game quality. It does not need a new map, new factions, new skins (though, for some, they do get weird about collecting chess sets), new editions or new "lore."  If a D&D game pretends that its better because the DM rushes out to buy the latest splatbook or argue one edition over another, or throw out all they have in favour of a new edition, it suggests that everything they've believed or done up until that time has been disposable. And truthfully,  it probably was.

If D&D has an equivalent of inexaustibility to chess, it cannot be "more stuff." Going back to its origin, D&D has always embraced that concept, because "more stuff" means more shit to sell... it's the representation of an excellent business model. Perhaps Bill Gates learned what he knew from it. First, sell a broken, badly created game, full of "bugs" and garbage. Then, sell the user more bugs and more garbage as a "fix." If there's any chance that a fix occurs, reinvent the game as another badly made, "buggy" game and proceed to sell more fixes. Do this every 7 to 12 years. Rake in the profits.

Chess lacks bugs. We might call that the first gate that a game must cross through. Is it broken as a game? No? Then it's probably, on the surface, even if its the Game of Life, a better game than D&D.

Despite those who defend this with "You can make the game whatever you want it to be," this is not — sorry, not — a virtue.

Let's go back and repeat this paragraph, because I wrote it about a hundred years ago now.

In simple terms, a "good game" is obtained by providing the greatest number of players at any time with the greatest number of consequential choices, that together provide purpose (a reason to play), value (the time is spent accomplishing something), significance (something was learned); and clear intent (for much of the time, the players felt in control of the outcome). That's a tall order. But after all, D&D is not a board game.

What, first, is the reason to play? We can loosely describe that as the concept of D&D, but this only works if the participants accept the premise of that concept. Since most participants have no idea what that premise is, or how it works, they fail utterly right out of the gate. Because they don't know what D&D is, in part because the books don't explain it at all, or so badly, there's no way for them to buy into the premise. Without a premise, the game falls apart. In fact, there is no game. It becomes "whatever you want it to be," which demands multiple people to want the same thing, in the same way, in an mutually regarded and compatible fashion. That's not possible, so we get either a mess without a premise, or even less than that.

The Game of Life offers a simple premise: move along this available track, record the accumulation or loss of resources, proceed until the end is reached. Chess says, defeat the opposing king within an enclosed tactical structure that both sides adhere to. A vast number of people, even those who have played this game for decades, cannot do this for themselves or for other people. Try it, without relying on me. Create a phrasing for a premise that will stand up to the scrutiny of others. Go on. I'll wait. 

Getting to Know Me

If the reader will look to the tag line, it's been change to read, "New to the blog? See here."

The explanation for this is in the link, but it's been explained that there's too much "me" for a complete newcomer to actually find out who I am or what I've done. So I've created a page on the wiki that describes me... but the Gentle Reader shouldn't worry, because any sense of ego on my part has been completely sabotaged by my being an asshole with my opinions. That's something I didn't want anyone to miss.

If you honestly can't think of any comment you'd like to attach to this, may I humbly ask you to write in when you started reading me, why you still read me and why my nature isn't sufficiently curmudgeonly to actually drive you away. That would really sincerely help me. I could use the support. Writing this content about myself, I feel like I've performed seppuku.  

Session 6: Where's the Boy?

The party began on a Wednesday, having returned to Ozd (which, of course, is not the Frank Baum novel), needing two days to find their way out of the wilderness following the cavewight lair. Because Ozd has a weekly market on Sundays, they elected to simply wait for days, at a cost of 2 lb. of food each per day, rather than travel to Miskolc. It would have taken then two days to get there, where there's a market every day, at a cost of 4 lbs. per day travelling food (the body needs more sustenance the harder it's worked) and it would have taken two days to get back to Ozd anyway.

Following some purchasing of goods, organising what they had, getting hold of a few animals to carry their things, the party set off back to the goblin village to discuss an agreement they'd made to return a bronze torc... which the party never found. No matter, the heads of the two goblins that had cut and ran from the cavewight fight were waiting for them; they'd returned, hoping to be taken back in, only to be killed. One had the torc, so problem solved.

However, the goblins showed the party a wounded Hungarian from Koszyce. This fellow, Lazslo, and three others, were taking a boy, Peter, to begin his mage training in Buda, where his father had trained. It was thought that by crossing into the Ottoman Empire through the wilderness forest of the Karancs, they could make their way through... but they ran into a patrol, which killed three of the guards and took the boy. Most likely, away eventually to Constantinople to make a Janissary out of him. The goblins wished to return the injured man to his human people, but dared not do that themselves, so they asked the party if they would.

Now, at this point, the party could have simply returned Lazslo to Ozd and have done with it... but without many prompting, they immediately decided to try to save the boy. Go figure. Using augury, which the gnome cleric Lexent has, and which the newly minted 3rd-level cleric Zoltan took as well, they struggled to identify the exact direction where the boy was taken. They managed to discover that the boy, ten or eleven, had somehow freed himself from his captors and was wandering around the countryside between Ozd and place called Monosbel, about 13 miles to the southeast. The party passed though the Bukk forest, which they'd already explored, only to find themselves turning in not far from where they'd fought the owlbear in session 3. There, Zoltan forgot to set up his wyvern watch spell, also newly taken... which turned out after all, given a choice that the mage, Mikael, had finally made.

Early in the night, Mikael had separated himself from the party to find his familiar, a spell he'd taken at the outset of his career in the old Juvenis campaign, but had never availed himself of using. He located a fox, named it Robin, and thereafter the fox unquestionably proved again and again to be the most useful member of the party. The fox knew the woods well enough to lead them though parts of the Bukk Forest and the fox woke the party up when Ottoman soldiers showed up in the woods looking for the boy (so they didn't need the wyvern watch).  A brief fight ensued, a series of one-round, one-on-one fights, in which three of the party members dropped their weapons.

Lexent "broke" his godentag, but it was fine, because in the woods there was nothing to break it against. Essentially, he tossed it off into the wood on a moonless night... but again, it was okay, because the next morning the fox found it. The soldiers did 12 damage to the party, 5 to their brand new soldiers-at-arms, the gnomish cook Fenwick and the human footman Edvard, then decided it's just one boy and vamoosed. The boy Peter showed up soon thereafter.

Thus the party earned, in toto, 551 x.p. from a fight in which only Mikael did damage, 3 points with a dart, and no one died. I like this experience system. What was funny was that the 5th level fighter, Pandred, was not attacked and therefore did not take part. No X.P. for him.

After some discussion, the players decided to take the boy to school. They still have their opal and there are gemcutters in Buda-Pest, that being mentioned as one reason to go. They don't know the mage father in Koszyce, but that's likely part of their calculation; the last post was part of wiki page for the Thaumaturgical School concept... but I notice it generated little interest.

Further discussion led the party to decide to cut through the Karancs Hills and avoid any possible meetings with Ottomans who might recognise the boy, who will disappear once he begins his studies. I made a random roll, found it generated three owlbears (yay, more) and so I called the session 15 minutes early rather than set up the combat map.  That was more or less the session.  The players suggested me getting more help for the wiki, thus this post I wrote (which also got no answers). They made another suggestion that I'll address in a long post later this week.

Students of Magic

A passage upon my Authentic Wiki related to schools for magic:


Students are usually accepted into thaumaturgical schools at the age of ten or eleven, when they are introduced to magic as a problem of apprehension, consisting of a language-like structure of meanings, forms and relations, like a thought-puzzle, that must be grasped first by the mind before training begins on actually manifesting a physical representation of magic. Most students are able to manage the difficulty of being able to read magic within a period of 3 to 4 years.

The next stage of instruction is the manifestation of magic itself, which must be achieved before the student can hope to reproduce it in the ordered and controlled form of a spell. At this point, the object of teaching is not yet the successful casting of a known enchantment, but the first outward evidence that the student is able to apprehend magical structures strongly enough for their presence to take effect upon the world. This proves exceedingly difficult, for the student must do more than perceive magic dimly or respond to it with instinct. The mind must first be brought to recognise in magical expression a coherence which does not resemble ordinary speech, ordinary memory or ordinary reason, and having recognised it, must then learn to hold that coherence long enough for it to impress itself upon the world in some outward sign. Many students need considerable time to grasp this ability not because they are dull, nor because they lack discipline, but because the structure they are trying to apprehend will not remain still in the mind, seeming one moment nearly understood and the next to have broken apart into fragments too subtle, too numerous or too strangely related to be gathered again. Instructors therefore compare the effort to hearing a language spoken all at once by a hundred voices, then being expected to answer in it without being unsettled.

Elves seem to have an extraordinarily natural affinity for this difficulty, an apprehension that also extends to half-elves but slightly less so. Every elf destined to become a mage is able to produce a resonance or momentary flash of light by the age of 25; some are able to do it when as young as 19. The youngest half-elves can manage it at 20, but more often succeed between the ages of 26 to 30. Humans have been known to manage this at age 21... but by far, most do not manage until 28 or older. It is slightly unusual to find a human of age 34 or 35 that is still struggling, but even then, such persons do manage to become magic users. Other races than these, with the exception of the gnome, cannot, in fact, apprehend this magical coherence, presumably because of their biological structure. Would-be gnomish illusionists manage the feat between the ages of 23 and 25, but may be of age 28 before doing so.

Following the first manifestation, learning of cantrips becomes a rapid and exciting period for the student; quickly, they discover they are able to master at up to a dozen, maybe more, all in the space of 18 months, regardless of race. During this time, too, the character studies hard to learn the precepts of spells stretching up in to the fifth level or higher, at least in theory, if not in practice. When the individual student proves they have succeeded in learning and using three first-level spells, they are ready to leave the school and seek a more practical, in-world education, at a speed that suits them. In nearly every case, the span between being able to manifest a magical effect and mastering three spells, as well as cantrips, requires the space of five years.

Apprentices for Wiki Work

Of late, I have been thinking about my Authentic wiki. It has recently passed the 1,500 page mark; wanted pages have stretched out past 4,000.  The wiki itself is unlike anything that exists anywhere on the internet, as it addresses D&D without being a "fan wiki," as there's no compendium of WOTC lore, products, celebrities, or any such thing that isn't in fact applicable to the game itself. The content is meant to provide substance and support for dungeon masters and players during play, rather than as something to read. As such, quite a lot of the content is either dry and procedural, or simply so unfamiliar to the usual palate as to be, well, different.

Naturally, because of this, I think it's an achievement.

My earlier attempts to bring others on board, however, have been troublesome. Not to sound ungrateful, but some who dove in did so with very much experience in wiki building while assuming that I did too — while, in fact, I'd spent about one month with the program. They rushed in to build formatting that I was not trained on and did not understand, "to save me time," while creating changes I could not adjust on my own without literally deleting their work and mine. The issue arose, I think, because while a format like wikipedia can be casually messed with, because (a) the actual information is not structurally applicable to another usage other than pure interest; and (b) because there will always be someone else that's informed to come along and make repairs — my wiki is very much structural to a specific purpose and no, there's no one who can fix it like I can, because I'm the only person who clearly sees how the structure has to function without breaking the game. That was not made clear at the outset and it made for bad feelings and an abandonment of the project to entirely my hands.

Yet people have asked to help. And I am, unquestionably, wallowing in the size of this thing.

The easiest useful contributions are those that don't change content, but rather sharpen it in the most obvious ways: adding links, correcting bad links, fixing spelling, making passages clearer without changing the substance.  This is what I spend a lot of my time doing, especially with content like spells. It is easy enough for me to take a spell that was added to the system 4 years ago without any formatting whatsoever, like this one, and simply plug it into with chatGPT with the specific instructions: "rewrite for clarity."  I use this exact phrase because it gets good results. Chat will then tidy up the order of the words, not change their meaning, and churn out a fairly good copy that will serve fine as game rules, which it only needs to be. I usually then remove the Oxford comma (a stupid fucking unnecessary writing convention), straighten the curly quotes (which chat will not stop using), correct the American spelling to Canadian (because I am Canadian), add links where I see then, then add an image by saying to chat, "Make an image that fits this spell."

Images are an issue.  Because it's D&D, Chat wants to make every image something underground or in a cellar, in smeary "painterly brushstroke", with forty shades of brown for contrast, usually replacing 16th century clothing with 19th century. If the picture is outdoors, chat wants gray clouds against a gray sky, with dull brown-green plants, grey-brown buildings and grey-brown people, pushing things around on grey-brown scenery. And, again, as though its painted by someone whose learning to paint for therapy purposes.

To create a better picture, I usually have to tell chat to make the sky blue, the grass and plants green, the people occasionally in a piece of clothing that's yellow or red (but not yellow-brown or red-brown, which chat will always default to), and often use the following instruction: "imagine that I got into a time machine, went back in time, took a picture of the scene, came forward and am now using that picture; give me that kind of high fidelity realistic imagery." This generally helps with the smeary brown, but not always. Sometimes, chat has to be sworn at several times before the system realises that I'm "serious" about my request.

The text in a page like the one linked above can also be made better by asking chat to "expand" the text. Not some other word, which will produce a different result from the one I want, since the last thing I need is more adverbs and adjectives and meaningless redundant sentences if chat is asked to "make it longer."  Expand suggests, apparently, "use some things you know about the spell here and roll those into the text. These things then need to be carefully looked at, to make sure chat didn't change the meaning of the original, because chat WILL do that. But if the original is kept for comparison, then it's easy enough to cut sentences out of chat's expansion and reimpose the original wording if need be.

Additionally, if the content is a trifle dull, I find asking it to "enrich" the text is best. Otherwise, chat will load the text up with metaphors and similes, which is most enjoying. "Enrich" seems to produce small side reflections that are useful and almost always practical in some manner, so that chat isn't fucking with the language, but actually addressing the content of the sentence. This is very helpful. Words like "expand" and "enrich" can be used together, as it, "Rewrite for clarity, enrich, expand," and chat will do this without drastically slaughtering the work in a decorative, purple manner. I have arrived at these specific words after A LOT of effort.

Helpers willing to do this with the wiki would not need to invent game rules or understand the entire system to contribute meaningfully. They can take old text, preserve the original, run one of these specific operations, compare results, strip out drift, and return something clearer or fuller without altering the rule’s intent. That is a concrete category of labour. But that would mean trusting that I'm not giving prompts randomly. I'm being extremely particular about details, not just what I'm asking chat to create, but also what part of what chat creates that I'm willing to put on the wiki that retains the trust of the original while improving the presentation.

If someone wants to help with that, and show they're capable, THEN we can talk about the creating of base level sage abilities and writing spells from scratch, which I believe are learnable things for those who are willing to let themselves be taught. I don't want anyone who wants to come in and "fix" things to "help" me. I would like apprentices who can follow basic instructions and do ordinary work.

If you want to consider yourself for the task, you can use me for your resume and I'll make arrangements to give you access. Please be adaptable.

What is It, Anyway?

What is it I get from being a dungeon master?

That is, within the game itself. Obviously, outside the game there is the satisfaction of worldbuilding with a purpose, of redesigning game imaginatively, of concocting some justification for a thing to exist... and in my case, the hands-on experience of constructing maps that secures me a better knowledge of the real world, which fascinates me, while enjoying the artistic endeavour itself.  So far as I know, chatGPT can't meaningfully construct one of my maps yet, no matter how I prompt it, because apparently it can't organise the aspects that make my maps what they are.

Actually, that's a bit of a pity. I'd rather have the maps made worldwide than the effort to make them. Reasons for other effort into other things can always be found.

I have a game coming up tomorrow, and right now, as far as the game goes, I don't know what's going to happen next. I have some potential plans for what the party might encounter, and I have some potentials for what the party might decide to do with those encounters, but I don't have a set plan that A and B and C and D are going to happen. So basically, I don't know what is actually going to come about tomorrow night. As a DM, I have a setting that I can function in because the setting gives me ideas as people move through parts of the setting, and I trust my imagination and my improvisational skills to "come up with things" — not with invented plans, but with inspired ideas from the game world as the players actively go and confront them. But as far as what actually happens, that is outside my ken. I really don't know.

Understand: I am not improvising because I've failed to "prepare" — but because preparation automatically boxes in what the players are free to do, for all the reasons that a lot of writers have named: because if you spend hours making a session, and the players don't want to do it, then you have to railroad them or throw that work away, or ultimately repurpose that work somewhere else... all of which feels like manipulation and gaslighting.

Further, I have prepared. I've spent so many hours building the map and studying the land — because I run the real world with my game — so that I know Hungary, I know Hungarian history, I know the land that the players are in, I know what the hills look like, I know what the rivers look like, I know where they go, I know the people, I know the climate, I know as much as I possibly can know about that part of the world. That's the preparation that I'm doing. Knowing what's made there, knowing what trades there, knowing where the trade patterns are, knowing what the people care about, knowing what the historical character of the time period was... having all of those things. That's my preparation: not to build this particular dungeon that the players have to go in because it's a box, or if you prefer a metaphor that I've used in the past, my game world is not a Midway ride.

This all means I don't need to assemble the "ride" in advance, with painted scenery and a concealed track, waiting for the players to be loaded into the correct car. The Midway ride is more than artificial, it's predetermined under the guise of motion. It gives the appearance of travel while ensuring that every turn has already been decided.

Doing things this way would scare the living shit out of most who wanted to DM. I know this because they've told me so. Not knowing what the game is going to be when they sit down, that is absurdly frightening because they don't trust themselves to come up with something on the spur of the moment. And likewise, they don't think they'll be able to flesh out that thought in the time provided for the game's presentation. And perhaps they're right. I have never DM'd any other way. I did not go through a period in my early game where I used modules every session; at most, I tried a module now and then to fill in a gap, but from the start I just like "DMing by the seat of my pants..." except, in reality, that is not what I'm doing at all.

I am also writing this blog post by the seat of my pants; I write all my posts this way. Which means in essence that I am inventing ideas at the speed of about 60 words a minute, which is more than fast enough for a D&D campaign. The reason I can be creative at this speed isn't just because I've practiced — I can remember when my typing speed did not keep up with my thinking, and worse, when my handwriting did not. It's also because creativity as a writer is a double-sided process made up of what am I writing now and what logically follows from what I'm writing now. There's always the next sentence waiting upon the last one, because logic dictates that the next thing to say is this: if you know what the subject is, you know how to talk about it.

Running D&D is also a chain... and it's not a chain that we build by ourselves. The DM does not build that chain. The players say this, the DM responds to that. The players say that, the DM responds to it. The players are building the chain along with the DM. So long as the DM says things that are more or less open-ended for the players to respond to, the players are going to say things that are more or less open-ended for the DM to respond to. And thus the players slowly and steadily decide that they're going to go up into these hills, and the DM thinks, these hills would logically contain these things, and so I'm going to put these things on this hill, though I don't know when, or where, or perhaps not even if, I'll decide if the moment seems right. After all, I don't want to make that encounter appear like it's instantaneous the moment that the players start to climb the hill.

So I trust that as I tell the players they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, I'm not actually "being boring." The tendency is to think that's what we're being, because we grow self-conscious if nothing happens, but in reality we're not alone and the players are thinking continously, filling in the gaps as they climb the hill with a sort of tension... because they're perfectly aware that at any moment something could jump out from behind that rock or that tree, even if, as the DM, I have no intention of having a creature do so. 

And so, after a while, you tell the players they're at the top of the hill. The players start to realise that if nothing has happened yet as they climb this hill, they begin to talk between themselves because obviously there's nothing here. That motivates the players to say something else or do something else, which again builds more of that chain, which the I then respond to and the players respond to. And then in the middle of that, something hits me as a DM, "Oh, I know, I'll put a village, a very strange and unexpected village at the bottom of this hill that the players won't know what it is at first glance." But once I put the village there, then the chain begins and we can discuss what's in the village and all the answers and the questions related to the village. And there, we're running D&D. We are not running a railroad. We're not deciding ahead of time what's in the village. Hell, we didn't even know there was going to be a village there five minutes ago, but now there's a village because we've established it. It doesn't matter if I did it on the spur of the moment or if I invented that village three weeks ago on a piece of paper that I now have on the desk in front of me. What matters is that once it's invented, I'm responsible for defining how the players relate to the village. I am answerable. I must know why it is there, what sort of people live in it, what relation it has to the hill, to the road, to the surrounding country, and to the players now that they have seen it. These are things I can know because I know the region in which this village is located.

And so the chain continues into the future of the campaign.

I truly like this process.

I enjoy instantaneously coming up with a rationale for the village, for what they do there, what it's organised around... and most of the time, these questions are answered within a few seconds of the player's querries. Certainly, there are some who would see this as cheating, or even "faking" the world... but again, it does not matter when the village comes into existence... what matters is that, once it's here, not only does it remain consistent as to itself, it must affect every other thing surrounding the village. Because, after all, a village is not limited to its own environs. Those in the next hex are influenced also, because they know perfectly well the village is here. That it has always been here. Only the players and the DM did not know it.

Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five comes to mind because of the way the aliens in it, the Tralfamadorians, talk about time. Time to a Tralfamadorian isn't a sequence of disappearing moments, but a field of fixed landmarks that only happen to be "sequenced" because of the way that humans conceive time. To a human, the village I've invented came about five minutes ago. To a Tralfamadorian, it's always been there, waiting in the future, for me to stumble across it when the time came.

Moving to a different author, if you will, I'll pull Tolstoy now, who after the body of War and Peace talks at length, for more than a hundred pages, about fate. Tolstoy relates time or events as we perceive them as the bow wave of a boat moving through water. In his conception, all the events of the present are affected and "pushed forward" just as the boat pushes the wave... but because in time we only perceive the edge of the wave, we imagine that we can choose to go this way or that, that our consciousness allows a choice to be made, as though we are in control of our consciousness. To put it as Tolstoy does, we look at the bow wave as though it is pulling the boat — that the wave "turns" left and that the boat follows, or the wave turns right, and so on... whereas, in fact, the bow wave has no control at all, and neither do we, as we are required to make the decisions that are forced upon us by all the decisions that have been made prior to the moment we experience as the instantaneous present.

Taken at it's word, this view dictates that when I think, "Oh, I know, a village..." in fact, I was never in a position to force that thought to arise in my brain at all. That was not a moment of my making a decision, that was a moment of my brain spontaneously, and apparently randomly, impressing upon me, without my compliance, that a village ought to be at the bottom of the hill. That is a very difficult thought for a lot of people, but I'm quite comfortable with it — since, quite right, it would be impossible for me to decide to invent a village before actually inventing the village, or thinking its a good idea before spontaneously thinking its a good idea. 

I have no idea why my brain would impose a village on me, of all the random things it might impose at that moment. I'm comfortable with not caring about that. I trust it will happen, because this is the manner I seem to think. But it isn't really in my power to decide whether or not I shall trust it, either, because that too is the bow wave... and at this point, I shall stop hurting the heads of my readers, who must by now realise that this post was not considered in advance before I decided to write it, either.

The logical end of this post is to describe "time" as a ride that we're on, that we don't control, that for whatever reason I've decided (without deciding or even being asked) to enjoy some of that ride in the process of D&D, and then to bow out looking all clever and shit because I've read Vonnegut and Tolstoy. Whom, really, the reader ought to read. All that matters here is that I enjoy D&D because it makes me think at a scramble in a way that no other activity does, which is why I find myself returning to running it every now and then, instead of just designing it.

Let's Fix Wish

Wish is a spell that enables the character to literally alter reality within the boundaries of their mental conception, allowing them to create, destroy, or change anything that they can fully visualise and understand. The power of the Wish spell, however, is limited in critical ways that have been outlined here as precisely as possible, with the caveat that it may be necessary, in game play, to further refine the language necessary to define this very difficult and badly mishandled form of magic.

| range = 360 ft.; see text
| duration = permanent
| area of effect = see text
| casting time = 5 rounds
| save = none
| level = mage (9th)

This said, the magic is not subject to linguistic interpretation by the dungeon master of the player's intentions, regardless of the player's language. When casting the spell, the player makes clear what is being wished for, without presenting a "phrase of wishing" for interpretation, and then the DM permits that result. The DM does not re-interpret, or create invented consequences that are in no way part of the spell or this description here of it, nor does the DM impose any "monkey's paw" thinking in the DM's interpretation. The only effect of the wish spell is what the player wished for on behalf of the player's character, period.

Limitations

When employing the spell, the caster is first and foremost limited by the range of the spell, in terms of what can be affected. Because of this, the wish spell cannot choose to wish away the planet, or a country, or any entity that is larger than the area of effected. The spell cannot be used to cause a country to cease its existence, since some part of that country will continue to exist outside the spell range. With regards to the limitations on "concepts," this point must be clearly understood.

Objects that exist at the time of the spell's casting must be within line-of-sight of the caster at the time they are acted upon. "All the creatures inside a building" that cannot be seen cannot be wished out of existence. All creatures within the character's line-of-sight, however, can be wished away in exactly that fashion. This applies to any other effect that is intended, contained within the vast number of possibilities present in the spell list and the compendium of the game setting's possibilities. Persons seen can be killed, brought alive, their ability stats improved, their wealth improved — they can be demon possessed or the reverse if so wished. But persons who are not in line of sight cannot be summoned to the caster, because they cannot be seen. The caster cannot have the King of England suddenly brought before him or her, because that individual is not in the caster's line-of-sight, unless that king is already in the caster's presence. For similar reasons, the caster cannot teleport to a distant land by wish, because that would be out of the spell's range.

Conception

The caster is limited by what can be conceived. The caster can improve another character's strength to make them "as strong as possible," but the caster cannot conceive of what an "18 strength" is. Further, the caster cannot conceive of "giant strength" — and therefore, while the caster can say the words, "as strong as a frost giant," the caster doesn't really understand what that strength would be like in the body of a character, or themself. Therefore, the wish would be fulfilled, by making the character the strongest possible that they could be, which in my game world is a 19 strength, which can conceivably occur through existing game modifiers. This change would be permanent.

In like manner, while the caster might wish to produce an enormous number of gold pieces, or merely an enormous amount of treasure, again, this defies conception. The player knows the number "one billion" but the human cannot literally conceive of this number; the player cannot, in fact, conceive of the number 351. Were I to pile that many apples in front of the player, their number would have to be physically counted, or my assertion trusted: one could not simply look at the pile and know. Thus, for things that are wished for (which are not brought from elsewhere, but literally appear of their own accord within range and line-of-sight), the idea counts, not the number. For a really large amount of wealth, the character could reasonably say, "As much as the largest horde in the world." But since the player does not know how large that actually is, the amount itself would have to depend on the character's actual experience. More or less, take all the wealth already controlled by the whole party, then double that and have it appear. Job done.

This line of thinking must apply to anything that is asked for, that does not already exist.

Single-use Realism

Once a thing has been wished for, it can never be wished for again. The caster cannot wish for another treasure the next day, or for any treasure, of any kind, ever again. If a character is made to be strong, no other character can ever be likewise affected, even to the tune of one ability point. This is a severe limit on the spell. It says that the caster must consider the use of the spell in any circumstance, since if one frost giant is obliterated out of existence, not only may no other frost giant ever be gotten rid of again with the spell, nor may any other kind of "giant" — because, and this needs to be very clear, "distinctiveness between objects affected only goes so far." Except for colour, one dragon is close enough to every other dragon as to consider the entire species as the same. The same goes for every demon, every snake, every spider and so on. A distinction can be made reasonable for a weretiger vs. a werewolf... those cannot be mistaken for each other. But a weretiger vs. a tiger? It would depend on what shape the lycanthrope took.

And yes, this applies to races also. The caster gets one wish obliterating a human or humans, one wish obliterating an elf or elves, one wish obliterating a troll or trolls. An argument cannot be made that the wish was to heal only humans named "Dave." No, not distinctive enough. The individual DM can choose where to draw the line, but there must be a line. If, therefore, one is going to use the spell to obliterate an enemy, it would be best not to obliterate a large number of mixed raced creatures at a single blow. Best to take out all the frost giants and then use other means to get rid of the rest. And the caster, yes, should consider, is this really as many frost giants as I might have to get rid of someday in one blow?

Uses

Possible uses for the wish spell include, and are by no means limited to, Restore hit points, resurrect a dead creature, cure disease, cure poison, remove curses, repair damaged magic items, create non-magical or magical objects or items, duplicate the effects of any spell except those not possible by the limitations above, make a given spell's effect permanent, grant immunity to a condition, enhance ability scores, grant proficiency in a skill, create buildings, dismiss a spell, push an enemy outside the range of the spell, dispel magic, create a protective barrier, grant the ability flight, take away or restore a memory, alter terrain within range, make a weather-type permanent. And many other things a player can think of.

Kicking the Can

This is a very frank conversation about aging. Do not read if your age says you're not old enough to get on this ride.

As someone in my early 60s, I'm supposed to be concerned about the future and the changes that it's going to bring. Just as I was supposed to be confused about the internet, and confused about the youtube, and then streaming, I'm likewise expected to be frightened of A.I. and whatever else might follow, because I'm an old man.

Of necessity, I found myself stumbling over the use of Discord, which I've had to engage with in order to make the online D&D campaign work. And no, I'm not especially good at it, or experienced with it, or anxious to become experienced with it... and it's a bit of a joke with the experienced players, which I don't mind. Where technology is concerned, I've always been a step or two behind the curve.

That does not make me afraid of the curve.

A few days ago my partner and I fell into one of those conversations that people in their 60s have... what is going to happen to us when we can no longer do the dishes, drive to the store for groceries, keep up with the bare minimum of housecleaning and so on. We're not so wealthy that we can hire someone, our younger family are very busy being a young family and obviously, there's a desire not to burden people we care about. I know from experience that there are people our age who have the attitude, "Well, the young will take care of us, that's what they're good for."  This, of course, is evidence of these people having totally forgotten what it was like to be young. It wasn't just that they didn't care, it's that when they were in their 30s, they were telling their friends, "No, I can't go to the bar, I really need this done because we desperately need me to keep this job."

Yet now, these same people assume other 30 year olds will drop the bar and the job to go vacuum their carpets. It's a little funny.

All this is to confirm that, for the most part, people aren't prepared to be in their late 60s, should they live so long. This despite having thirty or even forty years to prepare for it. There's too much resistance, too deep a desire to just argue that no, we're not getting old, or that when they do it can't be that bad, or whatever, to actually sit down and think, this body has a best-before date. Maybe that's something I should consider.

This hits a wall when we find ourselves having a combined ten visits to the hospital, doctor and lab all in the space of a month, ending in nothing actually being "fixed." Because this is the reality of hitting this particular stretch... the stuff that starts to break down does it in a way that can't be corrected. It can only be managed. That is very sobering.

I met this wall when I was 30, when my daughter was aged six, and when my first wife's multiple schlerosis reduced her to a quadrapelegic. This is where I did my training in "no-solution medicine." It was more than sobering, it was catastrophic. Comparatively, every horror I've faced since has the edges smoothed off. That's a part of what makes me me.

Life, if you'll pardon the expression, is essentially kicking a can down the road. When you're young, can-kicking is fun. As you age and start to work, that can-kicking feels awful at first, then you're so busy you've forgotten that it's what you're doing. But then, steadily, as things fall away, as your children move away from home, as your parents die and leave you the pater or mater familias, as friends go, as the places you hung out go, as the things you liked to do once and can't any more, or have simply ceased to be, go, there you are, still kicking that same can, wondering how long this part is going to go on. After all, realistically, I could live to be a hundred. A hundred is the same distance from me now that 24 is. This gives me an awful lot of time to kick a can with not that much else to do.

A different game that my generation likes to play, that my parents generation did without much hope, is this: "How far will technology progress before I'm really old?" That matters, particularly with medicine. My mother had a heart valve installed in 1977, when she was told that it might give her "two or three years, perhaps more."  The valve did not in fact fail until 1995, when she was still alive... and long enough to get a better heart valve installed in another operation, and this time with the adjoiner, "We don't know how long this is going to work."  My mother lived until 2012. She did not die of heart failure. Which is what makes this game, "Will technology keep me alive?" so much fun to play at this age.

I understand that at present, the fastest growing job market — where the numbers of actual workers are increasing at the fastest rate — is aged care. Looking after the old and dying is, right now, a big growth industry. I brought this up with my partner, which inspired the usual discussion called, "Why the fuck we don't want to end up in an old age home," an old favourite, complimented by this technology thing. Usually, as soon as a lot of people start working in a particular growth industry occurs, there follows a desire to automate that thing because there's more money to be made there. I'm sure the gentle reader has noticed there's quite a lot of discussion about robots right now.

Let me walk you through that thinking again. When a sector swells, it attracts capital. When capital arrives, it looks for ways to reduce dependence on labour. The needs of the ailing and the dying are minimal. An 90-year-old does not need a robot to help her prepare for a big party, or anything complex like that. She needs something that can move a spoon to her lips. And change things. And be able to lift her, so the bed can be made. The needs of a 90-year-old makes a very limited yet practical number of things that a robot can be taught to do.

None of those being commit euthanasia, but I know you young people. That's where you all went.

Tamara and I have agreed. We would rather have a robot take care of us in our later years than a person. A robot doesn't make assumptions such as, "You're old, of course you want to watch Wheel of Fortune and Fox News with the other old people here."  A robot doesn't care if you don't conform. A robot can be programmed to just adapt to the patient, unlike a human who recognises, "Hey, the patient is helpless, they can adapt to me."  These are things, trust me, that you'll think about one day.

Oh yes, of course I know that most people my age would cringe in horror at this idea. They live in this fantasy land where "care" means warmth, company, presence, concern... but we're under no such delusions. People suck. Having a person in your home, making decisions for you, about what you need, and what you have to accept now, I did that in my early 30s with my first wife's nurses. And it SUCKS. They are not reasonable, they are not human, they are "educated" with a set of precepts that say, in essence, "my life is really fucking hard, and you're sick, so shut up and make my really hard life easier."

I still bounce against this in hospitals. I did just 6 days ago. I don't mean to disparage nurses, we all depend on them. But they aren't reasonable as people. What they do for a living precludes any possibility of them being that.

On the other hand, a robot is like a toaster. It doesn't work without effort, but when it works, it does not tell you what to think, or what tone to speak in, or what expression you ought to have on your face. You are never judged by your toaster. You don't stuff bread into it at 1 AM to have it carp, "How come you're not in bed yet? I can't be expected to make toast at this hour? Why don't you behave like a responsible person?"

I'm at a point in this post where I want to tell as story about something I said to a nurse before the surgery I had in 2008 for when I snapped my quadraceps tendon on a diving board. She asked me a personal question about my sex life, the question being on her clipboard, and I gave her a wholly blase answer that offended the ever royal shit out of her. She immediately turned to me and SCOLDED me for answering in an inappropriate, albeit joking manner. I won't write the line here. I'm not ashamed of it, its only that in all my trafficking around the internet, I still haven't heard this phrase yet. So I guess, yeah, I'm kinda still out there.

To give a fairly parallel example, George Carlin once did a sketch back in the 70s based on answers you don't give to your parents, though you think of them at the time. It consisted of the parent saying cliche things and then him giving the answer he said he did not give when he was a boy.

One I remember had the parent saying, "How many times do I have to tell you?" and Carlin smugly answering, "Seven."

Oh, how I wish I could have said that to my father. He'd have beaten the shit out of me, quite literally. Anyway, that's about the level of my answer to the nurse.

All this is to say that locking me up in a care centre where the same people feed me, change my diapers and help wheel me into a room where I have to watch a news feed that's obviously tainted with the other old people isn't going to go well. I'm not going to shut up and that means I'm going to lay there in filthy diapers a lot of the time, subject to some nurse's passive aggressiveness. Not looking forward to that.

See? I'm already talking about things in an ordinary blog post than we're all supposed to pretend doesn't exist on the internet.

Yet if I say the words to a robot, one assigned to my actual home, not a care facility, because the government finds it cheaper to house me in my own home than in a grand whatever, well damn, bring that future on, I'll love it. The robot can carry me to my keyboard and I'll spend them morning hitting a key when I can, taking weeks to finish a blog post this long. Sounds like heaven.

The robot might even be programmed to answer, "Oh Alexis, you're so funny."

Images that Were Impossible when Covid Started

These are all images I've added to my wiki in the last few days. This is what comes of having access to a tool that replaces a skill a given human being does not have. To have someone generate this content by hand would have cost me in the neighbourhood of $2500, at least. For something that I view as an incidental convenience, that adds life to a minor, insignificant wiki page. In short, something I'm not going to spend money for.

The problem with opposing a useful tool is that, whatever your moral stance, if it is this bloody useful, it's going to get used. And you're literally not in control of your faculties if you think this is a tide that can be stemmed.

Books are People Too

In the present day, for a great many who have embraced the profession as their own, writing has become a service industry, not unlike kitchen work or delivery. I have experienced this; it can pay well, it can be stable and secure, it can even be a half-decent way to spend one's day, so long as there are not too many days when it feels like a real job.

But writing ad copy or rephrasing quarterly reports is not "writing" in the Shakespearean, Thackarean or Hemingwayesque sense, but rather "communication" on the scale of runes scratched on tree bark to send a message that a man is stuck in the mud, as in the Kipling Just So story.  Communication is repeating something that we already know in a clarifying manner, in the most efficient way possible, to enable a process, such as sales, or decision-making for a company reading said reports, that has nothing actually to do with either the message or the method. This is what many writers who are caught up in the "service industry" logic fail to distinguish; that while thoughts are communicated through writing, the point isn't to communicate those thoughts to a specific person, or even a specific kind of person. The point is to communicate those thoughts because they need communicating, listener be damned.

I am commonly exhorted by various voices to write content that publishers will want to publish, because it will make them money. To get published, this content must not offend; it must not contain a possibility of being misunderstood; it must not be about subjects that are too "unfriendly" to the largest number of people; it must not depict persons in a way that would be considered demeaning, or punching either up or down, or across either. In short, I must write what already exists, but in sufficiently different words so that I am saying things that are safe and have already been said, but in a way they haven't been said before, or at least in a way that most people don't know hasn't been said before. Oh, and despite the resistance against "punching," it must be conflict-driven. That's very important.

It was not necessary for Shakespeare to write this way, as essentially there were no rules except for the ownership of the Globe, who did not care about anyone's hurt feelings — largely because the audience was free to express this by actively throwing things, with the approval of the management, that being the state of the theatre at the time. "Be an actor my son, but be ready to dodge."

More importantly, Shakespeare could not have written for me, personally, or anyone alive right now, no matter how many marketing experts he might have dug up like Yorick to tell him how to create conflict without punching down. Yet miraculously, he managed to write jokes that I have understood and laughed aloud at, in rooms of people not laughing, there to see Shakespeare the way they went to church, unaware entirely of the subtext. The funniest thing about my seeing Twelfth Night, my favourite Shakespearean play, is all the laughing I'm going to do in a near silent room. It says something, I think, about the failure of writing as "communication."  More often than not, because of the listener, the jokes don't land, however "there" they are.

Furthermore, this concept of target-audience engineering need not examples from so far in the past to show how clumsy is their design. To begin with, there is the great mass of authors post-1950 who simply fail to make inroads with the modern reader... but obviously, we don't suggest that Capote, Vonnegut, Plath, Ginsberg or Thompson shouldn't have bothered writing because, without their historical weight, they'd have faceplanted as authors if their first books had been published today. No, we're perfectly willing to make concessions that for them, in their time, without the engineering, it was okay to just go ahead and write whatever the hell they wanted, confident that today they'd still have readers, without the need of a 2026 publisher.  Of course, none of these writers were any good, right. I mean, none of them were worth reading, since they did punch down, and up, and sideways, and at themselves, with no regard whatsoever against an audience that had no rotten fruit to throw. We don't read them because they were good, no. Obviously not. We read them because... because... wait, why?

Well, I suppose because we can be BIG enough to grant a freedom to the dead, to write what they like, that can no longer be granted to the living. That seems plain enough.

To end with, I'll casually point out that no one in any era worth their sand, the term that used to apply to a person having value, waited for permission to write something. Nor did they pay any attention to approval, bans, refusals to publish or the prospect of being "disliked," which apparently is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If they could not make themselves heard one way, they found another. The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well, he just did not give a fuck about who read or did not read his work. He did not write for other people. This is the point I started with. Writers do not write for readers. That's the role of the communicator.

Communication with words as a service industry is about being paid to write content that one is told to write. We are given a job, much like being asked to make a Monte Cristo sandwich; that job involves the arrangement of words to ensure, at their best, that they can only be understood one way. If I say that this company last year broke ground on a gas plant outside Sundre, and that the plant has reached a point where a definite date can now be named for when sour gas at that plant will begin processing, then the date matters, the clarity of what's going to happen on that date, how much of it is going to happen, where the supply will arrive from and where the finished product will go, how much it will cost according to the present figures, how much the predicted future will adjust those figures and so on, then all of this has to be crystal clear if the goal is to publish so an investor who might want to visit and tour the plant already has the correct information at their fingertips. The Monte Cristo's cheese has to be cooked just so, the bread dipped in the right amount of egg, and browned, just so, and cut just so, and plated just so, and on, so that it looks precisely like every other Monte Cristo this kitchen will make today, regardless of the cook making it. Communication, when done well, is not subject to the writer's footprint; it is best if the writer of the communication doesn't have one, since that will only muddy the message.

Human beings are not clear. They are muddy. Their motives are never straightforward and singular. Communicative writing is not natural because it requires us to think in a manner that diminishes the nuance that we are comfortable living with every day. The challenge, then, is that no matter how clear we make a thing, no matter how we flatten it into the most boring passages ever about the future of a sour gas plant, someone will misunderstand it because we are not built to all read things about gas plants or taste Monte Cristos in the same way. This makes communicative writing extremely frustrating, because no matter how one tries, the reader just won't have it. This is the point of Kipling's How the First Letter Was Written, because it invents a story about the invention of writing and the story is about how writing as a technology is a total disaster. Despite the effort to write a message for his daughter to carry, Tegumai only discovers that everyone misunderstands his efforts and his daughter Taffy is dearly tormented for his efforts. It is the most important story for a writer to read, I should think, because it carries a message a writer should never forget.

Do not write for other people, unless disappointment is your aim.

Mind you, I say this as I write for other people.

This right now, that I am doing, is communicative writing. I am writing a blog post explaining something I think deserves to be explained, but I fully expect it not to be understood, because it is not the nature of people to learn, appreciate or grasp things they do not already believe.

With my last post, I talked about my tendency to argue in association with a coffeeshop/bookstore that I ran for a brief time. I'll throw in that I began arguing in that other great crucible in which we're all forced to swim during our youth, school.  School for me was a situation where 29 trapped people, and me, would get into these arguments that I would impose ruthlessly, as was my nature then and is my nature now. I remember one of these was the argument that a hero "is a brave person." The class agreed. I did not. I did not believe then that it was so and 45 years has not changed my mind about this. A hero is a person who is there, who doesn't think, who does what's next, then afterwards generally thinks, "Oh my gawd, I could have died doing that. What as I thinking." That's my point. No thinking in the moment is involved. No thinking, no time to be "brave." One is too busy acting.

For years after school, here, there, I'd meet people who'd known me and disliked me who would come up to me at a mall or a restaurant or on the street and act like we'd always been old friends and isn't it great and how is your life going, that sort of thing. And quite often they'd say something to me like, "I remembered that thing you said (eight years ago, when we were 15) and you know what, you were right. I only realised it a long time later, when (tells story about how they came to the same conclusion). I just wanted you to know."

When this happens often enough, one begins to realise that a lot of people argue against a premise not because the premise is false, but because they just haven't had enough personal experience to know one way or the other, so they assume the safest course of action: that "Something I don't personally know is necessarily false." This actually makes a lot of sense to me. As a writer, it makes the point that the argument written down isn't an argument for the time it was written, but for all time. That anyone, at any point in their life, might come back to a thing written again, only to find that now it makes sense, when once it did not.  This is a very strong reason to write things that won't be (presently) understood by people. Because we live in four dimensions, not three.

Writing, understand, not being communicative, can be as muddy as the writer wants it to be. A given sentence can have two, three, even four meanings. Take my phrase about Charles Bukowski:

"The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well..."

These 12 words are enough, because the above, unlike communicative writing, is not clear. It doesn't tell you who Bukowski is; it does not define him as a poet; it does not explain, for those who do not know the reference, how it is the right reference here. Nor does it say if I personally like Bukowski. None of this is communicated. Intentionally. Because those who know the poet already know the story; those who don't know him won't benefit from the story. My liking him or not is irrelevant to my knowledge of him, and my awareness of how he's the right modern person to be inserted here.

Omissions like this are not accidents. Writing intentionally plays mind games; it sets out to do far more than lead you down a garden path to a plot twist, it willingly makes you believe that you're in a day garden when actually you're blindfolded, it's night, there's a cliff a foot to your left and no, I'm not the author of this tale, I'm the devil. Writing is about deliberately laying a story out in such a way that it can be read today with this impression given, only to find oneself waking in the night and thinking, "Wait a minute... what happened to the dog?"

These things are not "plot holes." More often than not a "plot hole" is a reader that has failed to pay attention (though, granted, with a lot of films, that is not always so). These things are deliberate to make the reader see the world in a manner that isn't meant to communicate on a conscious level, but a subconscious one. It is dirty pool, it is mendacity and brainwashing and a hoodwink. It is also delicious, which is why it continues despite all the other things we might do instead. We like to read, because it offers a cunning puzzle that cannot be found elsewhere: a human puzzle, where the rules do not reflect what's nice or normal or approved. The best books are not the ones we liked best. The best books are those we cannot make ourselves stop thinking about.

If there is a book you might hate, such that you find yourself railing against it and it's author with a vehemence that is unlike you, that is because the work got under your skin. That's what makes it a good book. You fought that book and you lost. And you don't like that. Too bad.

Books, like people, do not exist that we may approve of them. They exist with the ability to act freely upon the reader, just as your neighbour is free to do with his damned garden hose, or the co-worker with their need to slap a sticky note on your computer screen, or whatever miserable, terrible, sometimes beloved things that human beings do to human beings. A work of literature needs no more justification for its presence than does any human not actively bothering you on this planet... because whatever you may think, the most awfulest book by Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein does not have the power to grab you and make you read it. But, like people you don't like, you still have to live on a planet where these exist. Worse for you, we continue to generally believe as a culture that it's inappropriate to burn these things, just as it is people... and in fact, that is what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."

Thus, when we write, it is not another bit of non-offensive fluff that fails to punch that we strive to write, when we think of ourselves as writers. No, just as I taught my daughter to use her fists, so that she could defend herself if the time came, I give my books fists too, so they can punch as hard as they need. And if the reader doesn't like that...?

Well... fuck the reader.