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.

The Grand Affordance

Sort of catching my breath today. Moved over to working on the March Lantern, which will probably be late, not because of this work this month but because I tried to pick it up yesterday and found I'd not saved the file that I'd been working with at the start of this month. So, spent today rebuilding it and there are some details I haven't got notes for, so I'm building them from scratch. Official publishing date is Feb 21st, so plenty of time for that, don't know what I'll have on the 1st of February for a preview, but I'm sure to have something.

Ah, I needed a break from the thief for a bit anyway. Too, I want to get a post written today, and this is a good time to talk about "affordances."

This is a new word for me too. No doubt I've run across it reading about theoretical game design, but I've never had a reason to use it until now... and you know what they say: when you learn a word, it's always easier to remember the word if you use that word right away. Probably best to start with a clear definition.

In the context of D&D, an "affordance" is what the game's rules and the fictional situation make it possible for a player character to do, right now, in play, without the need for a new rule to be invented. This doesn't just count the character's ability to do something — say, to climb walls — but also the needful circumstances that have to exist in the game's setting that makes the ability mean something: in this case, an actual wall to climb, and a reason to climb it. If the dungeon master does not include a wall in the setting that must be climbed for some reason beyond, "Hey, it's fun to climb walls," then the character's ability has no in-game meaning.

And it's in this last that I think a lot of D&D truly fails. On the whole, the affordances created by the setting are so limited — a dungeon is always going to have a pit, a secret door, a puzzle, an empty room, a stuck door — that circumstances get overused ad nauseum because the game culture only knows a handful of "things you put in a dungeon." Those things are designed to trigger the set band of character capabilities... and once you've played D&D for a year, the dungeon, the things the character can do in it, becomes dull because the total number is regrettably finite. The stock obstacles get solved by the stock abilities, which the players inevitably achieve in toto, whereupon it's all just going through the motions.

This is why no deeper game emerges. Not because affordances of both types — abilities and situations — but because the arrival of new abilities advanced in later editions are not complimented by an arrival of new setting problems. Because, in the frame of a game board (which is what a dungeon really is, a 2D setting that characters moved vertically and horizontally through) there are so few situational possibilities that CAN be invented. The dungeon is too narrow a design structure to lift D&D higher.

Thus, you get a design ceiling. We can keep adding abilities, but if the field of action stays "a constrained traversal puzzle/maze with keyed obstacles," then most abilities never have much use, or are merely beneficial to the most peripheral of player needs: the ability to "make torches," say, or "lantern pointing 3," where the light can be shone just that much better on the approaching monsters. Or, more truthfully, minor scouting bonuses, slightly improved resource conversion, small numerical adjustments to detection... whatever we can dream up to sand the corners off the old skill-set.

We can get into affordances that bypass the dungeon model, but before we can do that it's necessary to acknowledge the crushing weight the dungeon imposes upon the participant's mindset. Dungeon crawling is "lucrative." It is the only kind of play that D&D offers that reliably converts effort into a quantifiable reward that brings power, wealth and prestige. Even if the players don't collect "experience" at all, but simply "go up a level when the adventure is finished," this dictates a sort of finish line that can be defined... and finish lines are one-dimensional things to be crossed when exiting a two-dimensional framework. In a three-dimensional world, finish lines are meaningless.

Dungeons are bounded, legible and procedural, making them easy for DMs to run once they have the dungeon example in hand. The module is the LINEAR structure of the game's rules that are not, as evidenced by my recent work, not easily understood as linear.  Room 1, kill monster, collect loot, move forward, turn left, count time, consider light, roll for monster, roll surprise, fight, trap, treasure, rinse, repeat. It's so simple a child can DM it, and many do, every day, however many adults simply can't.  But so long as the dungeon continues to exist as the "grand affordance" to game play, then every attempt by a DM to expand outside of that structure is going to be met by players who say, "I don't get it — where's the objective? How does doing this help me get gold pieces, what's the path here to levelling. Is there a boss at the end? What is the point of this?" ... because these questions are so clearly answered by the dungeon, there's no room for any other kind of game. Hell, most participants are so used to D&D being structured like this, they pin a badge on their chest for running the game in the exact same way for 40 years.

But then, I'd do that if I were a chess player. If I was still playing baseball now, and the subject came up, I'd be saying to my team, "Yeah, I've been playing this game for nearly 50 years."  So what's wrong about saying the same about dungeon-based D&D? Isn't that what everyone expects the game to be?

Assuming — and I've been arguing this for the last 18 years of this blog — that we want to break out of the dungeon affordance, how would we do that? Well, honestly, how have we done that, because in fact a lot of the chance in later D&D arises because the dungeon has  dwindled in the player's eye. This is why they've tried to escape the 2D structure through persuading the players to "roleplay harder." Roleplaying — inventing things for my character to care about that aren't game payoffs (like x.p., wealth, power), and then pretending to care about those inventions, livens the game up for some people. Whatever we might feel about the "acting version" of D&D, it's not linear. It's ridiculously mastubatory, but we've never needed to invent reasons for people to masturbate. There's a legitimate, special pleasure in convincing ourselves that we've just said something really, really clever, which encourages us to try to say something else that's likewise clever. Even it that isn't a game, human interaction is the system where the affordances — the listening apparati of fellow humans — are built right in. A player says something, another player reacts, the DM reacts, the group gets a little hit of social success, and that becomes the payout. It’s self-fuelling.

This personally does not appeal. I would rather get the dopamine hit here by saying actual intelligent things, not just that which seems momentarily clever in-game. I was past playing-pretend at twenty; I get no sense of achievement through acting like a made-person, unless I were to do that on a stage in front of a large audience of total strangers who have no reason to respect me unless I work hard to present a good performance. Once a person has done this in front of hundreds of people at once, and I have, I'm not much impressed because I made my friends, who have been hand-picked to like me, laugh. The laughter of strangers is much harder to win and far more gratifying.

In game play, I want to overcome resistance that's hard to overcome. A dungeon can provide that; a good dungeon can push back hard and so, when it's taken, this feels like an accomplishment. Thus the dungeon's monopoly: it is spatially bounded, it has a repeatable procedure and it offers a reliable payoff. An alternative to that monopoly demands that, to be popular, even a little, it has to compete with the dungeon on those terms: the DM must be able to conceive the structure; the DM must be able to run it in a rational, predictable manner; and in the end it must pay off.

Realistically, however, even if these points are met, most DMs can't do it — in most cases because DMs can't fathom it — and the stranglehold that dungeons have on the game causes a lot of players to mistrust any game structure that does not look like a dungeon. I know. I've run what, three, four campaigns online through text, none of them dungeon based, and the players never ceased to struggle with deciding, "What am I supposed to do, exactly?"

50 years of dungeon-and-field combat play have taught players that unbounded situations (not "dungeon) are where engagement goes to die, where reward goes to die, and where the players feel their collective heads are going to roll because they don't know what a "safe" action is from an "unsafe" action. Dungeons are easy; line up, put the casters at the back, test the hall ahead, keep your weapons out, expect an action or trap at any time. Whatever's coming, it's going to come from behind or ahead, or out of that door, or that well, or that pond, or whatever access to this space that we can see.

But outside... danger can come from anywhere! The players can't look in every direction, cannot tell if that bush is safe, knows they can be hit by things from hundreds of yards away... "safe" is impossible. And everyone we talk to? Piss the wrong one off and your head will roll — while there's no way to know what the "wrong one" remotely looks like. So don't do anything. Pay for your ale, go to your room, block the door with all your gear and seal the door closed with a spell if you've got one, and DM willing we'll all be a nice, safe dungeon as soon as possible.

What I've tried to teach with parties in the non-dungeon setting is this: that everywhere is in fact safe. Don't attack anyone, obviously. Don't enter a large, official guild or castle-keep and start casting spells. Treat the guards in the game as you'd treat a real life police officer. But in reality, so long as you obey the law, no one cares if you're here. They don't care if you're standing on the street, they don't care if you're a foreigner or you don't rub blue mud into your navel like the locals do. You're actually very safe in a town, because no one else wants to break the law either, including the local guard. It's their role to keep things peaceful so commerce can take place.

The reason why this message doesn't land, however, is that there are too many DMs out there trying to turn towns into dungeons, or wildernesses into dungeons. The DMG, with it's town encounter table, tries to do exactly like this? The party is just standing around? Can't have that. Roll a die and then have the guard or rakes or whomever come and bully them. Because this isn't a town, this is a different kind of dungeon. More cowbell. Hammer in hand, every thing looks like a nail. That kind of thing.

In reality, no one wants trouble. The guards don't want to die. The merchants just want to trade. The labourers just want to get their work done. The "rakes" want to be ignored. Even the crooks don't want trouble, which is why they tend to operate as far away from awake people as possible. But DMs refuse to let "safe" exist. They treat safety as boredom. They treat a stable environment as wasted table time. They are conditioned to believe that if dice are not being rolled and threats are not being applied, then the game is not happening. So they invent irrational harassment, random confrontations, petty insults and gotcha consequences. The result is that players learn, correctly, that the DM will punish stillness. If you stop moving, something will jump you. If you talk to someone, or they talk to you, its a trap. If you relax, you’ll be robbed. That is "town as dungeon." And it's why I can't run my world online, because the people who find this blog know D&D too well to believe that a townperson can be taken at their word and isn't trying to set them up somehow. Gotcha D&D, invented by Gygax and pushed hard through the Dragon Magazine and others, ruined this game.

I'm going to go ahead and publish this as the first part of a two-post series. I'm not done, but a lot's been said and I am going to use this to move past the dungeon premise, so it's a good time to break.

AD&D Should Be Ashamed of Itself

As I wade into the thief and search the DMG for details about traps, I ran across this:

"Assume that your players are continually wasting time (thus making the so-called adventure drag out into a boring session of dice rolling and delay) if they are checking endlessly for traps and listening at every door. If this persists, despite the obvious displeasure you express, the requirement that helmets be doffed and mail coifs removed to listen at a door, and then be carefully replaced, the warnings about ear seekers, and frequent checking for wandering monsters (q.v.), then you will have to take more direct part in things. Mocking their over-cautious behavior as near cowardice, rolling huge handfuls of dice and then telling them the results are negative, and statements to the effect that: "You detect nothing, and nothing has detected YOU so far—", might suffice. If the problem should continue, then rooms full with silent monsters will turn the tide, but that is the stuff of later adventures."

I read the DMG straight through several times during the 1980s when I was still running most of the book; and through the '90s, when I wanted to find something new to work on, I would glance through the DMG to see what might trouble me that I could start as a project. So of course I remember this passage above as one of the great Gygaxian moments. When I was 15, this made sense to me; by age 20, not so much. Around the time I started this blog, I'd have been so incensed by the above I'd have written three rants about it. Now, it is merely evidence of a much larger problem, the toxic DM who felt he — and no, never a woman — was in his rights to decide that game play that had been forced by the rules, the aforementioned "checking" from the last post, was itself bad, presumably because it limited how many "gotchas" the DM could impose. After all, if they are daring to actually listen at doors, something the rules expressly allow them to do, then absolutely invent a plot-earseeker to stop that. Absolutely mock the players. Absolutely be a dick about the players playing the game. That's how you get to be the greatest DM in the world, as many thought, and still think, Gygax to be.

Where last week I found myself corralled by a rush of arbitrary rules imposed to manage the paladin, now as I undertake the thief is it all opportunities for gotcha. The flat percentage to pick pockets, not a very beneficial skill for the thief for reasons I outline in the text, must be twisted by an additional adjustment for the level of the target, so that the DM can invent a 12th level whom the thief has "randomly" (because 12th levels are just laying about the streets all the time) try to filch — oh look, gotcha! Oh, and of course there's a chance if the thief succeeds but the target recognises it, so that the thief can be tracked home and attacked — gotcha!

The treasure chest or the door that has to be smashed open because the thief's one chance to open the lock fails, bringing monsters and such — gotcha! Try to move silently and fail, but to have the DMG expressly say, "Do NOT inform the thief that his or her dice score indicated a lack of success at this attempted stealth, if that is the case. He or she thinks the movement is silent, and the monster or other victim will inform the character of his or her misapprehension soon enough."

Gotcha.

It's not that I didn't know about these lines, as I said; I remember the one about move silently too, though I haven't read it in decades. It's that, first, I didn't have the power to speed search the DMG and Players for terms back then, because they were books, not pdfs. And second, I'm doing something unusual for me; I'm not randomly reading text to just read about the game, I'm assembling paragraphs and notes from multiple places and putting them side-by-side. As a result, I'm finding multiple cases of discontinuity in the rules, between books, sometimes in the same book, which despite these books being constantly open on my table while I worked on my work with pencil and paper in the 1980s and 90s, I never noticed. And neither did my players.

As such, until now, I hadn't realise just how many gotchas are specifically associated with the thief rules, or really, how ridiculous some of the rules are. Did you know the wand of secret door and trap location (I never had any reason to give one of these to a party, ever, even randomly) does not allow you to expend a charge and find both? You need to expend a charge if you're trying to find a secret door, and then another charge to find a trap. And if there are no traps or secret doors? There are no words said about that, but it's implied you've wasted the charge on an empty room. Two charges, in fact. How miserly is that?

It all reveals a kind of systematic methodology that's designed to TEACH the DM to literally mindfuck the people at the table, without constraint. The DM doesn't have to roll to see if there's a 12th level on the street. The DM doesn't have to roll to see if we've run into someone ready to punish our success in picking a pocket. The DM can just decide, ad hoc, that a thief that's practiced at moving silently can't possibly know they're not succeeding, because obviously the thief's own ears, attuned to the ability hear noise, cannot hear the noise of their own feet. It's all absurdly empowering for the DM, and then that power is deliberately messaged toward a persecutorial framework, to weaponise the game world against the PC, and encourage the DM to pat himself on the back while doing so.  "Who's a good DM? You are... yes you... what a good DM you are..."

The paladin, who has no power, must walk a tightrope of perfectly good and lawful behaviour... but the DM, who has all the power in the world, is encouraged to be chaotic (without governance) and evil (vindictive and gloating) at every opportunity. Not just "firm," but mocking. Not just "mysterious," but deceptive. Not just "challenging," but punitive. And the advice is framed as craft, as professionalism, as what separates a "good" DM from a weak one. The DM is given permission to lie by omission, to invent consequences ad hoc, to punish caution, to punish competence, and to enjoy the punishment.

Together, this makes the book's text something that one could argue deserved the satanic panic. If someone wanted to argue that D&D teaches something unhealthy, this is the material that would support the argument. It teaches the DM that they are above others, that their role is to control and correct and that the players' attempts to protect themselves are moral failures. It teaches the paladin's player that virtue is a trap and that the punishment for error is humiliation and dispossession. If you were a parent, a pastor or a moral entrepreneur looking for evidence of corrupting influence, the real indictment would be this adversarial pedagogy. 

I read these passages and I must tell you, I  feel honestly ashamed to be a DM... though I never did any of this. What I feel is shame by association.

Which is now why I think that anyone running around shouting that AD&D is a great system, without immediately and in depth addressing these serious concerns about DM behaviour and rule design, risks encouraging people toward committing further abuses such as the ones found here. It would be like telling people to see 1915's Birth of a Nation by saying only, "It was a great early film, one of the first that really employed a full-length story as filmmaking! Everyone should see it!" Such, nowadays, would read to anyone outside as "I'm listening to a racist." When I read the texts I'm reading and think about people preaching AD&D as a system, especially "as written," I'm going to be thinking going forward, wow, toxic masculinity.

The quotes (and there are many more) above show that I'm not overstating this. AD&D has a lack of shame problem.

Praising AD&D without acknowledging these things is tantamount to endorsing, or at least laundering, a DM posture that is openly adversarial, socially coercive and proud of itself. If someone refuses to discuss that, in depth, they are not being neutral. They are choosing to keep the praise clean by leaving the filth unmentioned, which is exactly how harmful legacies persist.

I know that going forward I'll be more careful when I refer to the game. I know that I'm going to try and keep my discourse through this text I'm writing carefully framed around the flaws in the text's logic and not the egregious morality it's preaching, but that's already been hard with respect to the paladin... I can see it's not going to get easier with the thief.

What's a little ironic is that I don't care about the thief's purported badness as a character class. I don't care about stealing fictional objects, or killing fictional creatures or persons — I do care about the meta-framing of the DM as a living person abusing other living persons in a game setting. The two have nothing to do with each other in my mind.

 

Auto-checking

Not about the paladin this time:

Detect evil, up to 60 ft. away. The rules expressly tell that this is something that's done when the player so desires for the character, and only if the paladin is concentrating on determinine if evil is present. It's also strongly implied that the paladin must do so in the right direction in order to detect the evil sought after. "Evil" here can best be interpreted in three ways: first, in the form of some entity conspiring to perform or commit a selfish, abusive act of some kind, strongly enough that it can be detected (evil by intent); second, that the entity itself is so filled with spite and darkness that it is, itself, evil (evil by nature); and thirdly, that so many acts of evil have been committed in a given space, or that it has somehow been transformed through a ritual, that the atmosphere or the room itself is a thing of evil (evil by taint).

 

The rule intends to constrain the paladin, insisting that the player remember this is an ability as a form of game play; unfortunately, because it must be declared to be useful, and because it might be useful at any time, it creates a pattern where the player states the intent every time a door is opened and every time the characters have moved a distance of more than sixty feet. This becomes numbingly annoying for the remainder of the party — and creates a game moment when, invariably, the one time the player does not mention the ability, that's when evil is present. Thus, instead of creating a buffer to expertise, it creates a refrain and then ill feelings when the refrain is forgotten. The rule creates a "gotcha," and gotchas are social poison. The rule actually works quite well if the responsibility is shifted to the DM; if the paladin's detect evil is managed in the same way as one might detect a change in temperature, the refrain falls away, the gotcha falls away, and the ability proves not to be so powerful that it actually needs a constraint. But this addendum is not canon in AD&D.

Not going to talk about the paladin or AD&D, but I am going to talk about rules and specifically the point above about the "refrain" that arises when a player has to verbally make checks as a part of gameplay. I feel this ought to be unnecessary.

I was about to make a comment in my patreon chat that in actual play, my game is "rules light"... which of course it isn't, as my wiki attests. Yet it plays rules light, I believe, because as much as I can, I try to make the rules as nearly invisible as possible.

Let's say, for example, that your elf enters a room, and let's say there's a secret door there. In a typical game of almost any make, my role would be to wait to see if you check for secret doors and then, once you say you do, I have you roll a d6 and see if you find it.  That is not how I run, however. Like the reference above that treats the detection of evil like room temperature, I simply assume that as an elf, you have a sharp eye and that there's always a chance that you'll find that secret door, regardless of whether or not you say so.  I might, therefore, as the party enters the room, say to you, "roll a d6." I don't tell you what it's for, and it might realistically be any of a hundred things... so naturally, you're curious: "What am I rolling for?" If you get a four, I just don't tell you. You failed to find the secret door, that's settled. The rule was there, but it takes five seconds for the die roll, so the rule is essentially invisible. You rolled for some reason, you don't know why, and that builds tension. But when nothing happens, you forget the tension too. And you don't feel like you're breaking the verisimitude of the game with meta call-outs.

If you say, "Can I check for secret doors" at some point, or just say you are, then I tell don't tell you, "roll a die," I tell you, "you don't find any secret doors." I tell you this because you didn't. You had your roll, you blew it, you don't know you blew it, so you have no idea if there's a secret door here... but you feel, since I didn't ask you to roll when you called for it, that there ARE no secret doors here. Which is exactly what your character should be thinking, if you knew you were looking and didn't find any.

'Course, this puts the onus on me to remember you're able to search for secret doors. But I'm attuned to this sort of thing. I create a room with one, and as I create the room, I automatically say to myself, when the elves and half-elves get here, I have to make them roll. Then when we do get to the room, I instantly tip to the need for a roll when I'm reminded there's a secret door here in my notes. It's like a light switch. So I have you roll, the sequence is mostly invisible, game feels rules light.

Then, if you do find the secret door, I say, "And Bernard the elf finds a secret door in the corner." For reasons I don't understand, DMs think this is something players have to earn... that the player HAS to remember they can find secret doors, or else they're not "playing the game." This is silly, and it's not the game I'm playing. "Whether the player behind Bernard remembers to search for secret doors" is a really, really, really boring game. The secret door is incidental. D&D is about entering the secret door and finding what's there, NOT "overcoming the door rule." That's just so stupid. Yet it's so constant and everywhere, I have to think everyone else besides me just doesn't get it.

As I see it, the elf has the right to roll. It's the bargain they made with me when they decided to be an elf. They chose that "affordance," the word I've been using on the wiki... and that affordance ENTITLES that elf to things that as a DM I do not have the right to deny. It's a rule, as I see it, that I have to obey. You're a paladin, you detect evil?  Then you detect it, the same way that someone with eyes sees the trees and someone with tastebuds can enjoy the good ale.  I am not permitted, in my eyes, to deny you a special ability your character has just because you've forgotten to act on it.

I know nobody in this game thinks this way. And I think that's because this idea has been unfortunately bred into the DM's consciousness, in a way that poisons everything. Why not just let the players find the secret door? How do we benefit through refusing them the chance to check, just because they forget they can? What in hell are we trying to prove by this attitude? That we can be insipidly petty? Is that is a virtue?

I lose nothing if the paladin detects evil without saying so. Nothing. Game goes on, no zero-sum applies, threat isn't lessened, treasure and experience are still earned... I want the paladin to detect the evil because I want the players to get excited that there's evil here that the paladin just detected. That's a plus! I don't want to drag out the alternative, sitting in my chair thinking, "Just check for evil already..."

Make all the player checks happen automatically and see how much better your game's pace gets. Watch how it improves immersion. And trust, as the players come to believe there won't be a gotcha because they didn't say the right words. And how much less time is spent repeating the same sentences over and over. DM, don't gatekeep.

Biathlon

Saturday and there aren't a lot of readers about anyway... so I'll just scratch an itch. Not going to talk about D&D.

I married an American, Tamara, and about nine months ago found out that she'd never heard of biathlon or knew what it was. So we found a race on youtube (2010 Whistler Olympics women's relay, excellent race, won't say who won) and watched it straight through. I don't watch many sports myself, since quitting hockey around 1993, and Tamara has never watched sports of any kind her entire life. But that example sparked something.

Progressively, we began to watch all we could find. I think at this point we've watched every race — sprint, pursuit, individual, mass start, relay — since 2019. Tamara doesn't care for the men's races, so we only watch the women's... I have to admit, I think they're better also. The men shoot faster, the difference between the competitors are less nuanced and... yeah, I think it's that the men are kind of stoic and therefore boring. The women collapse into each other's arms, they rush to the aid of others not of their own teams, they laugh, they jump up and down, overall it's just a more joyous thing.

We fully caught up on the IBU World Cup 2024/2025 season by August, as we learned how to look for every last race on youtube (there are tricks to find). That last race in Oslo, and especially those last five minutes, was outstanding. Again, I'm not going to say who won, because when I go to find races on youtube, which I have to because I don't subscribe to a sports channel, I really hate it when some jackass puts the winner in the file's title! Wow, some people are just terrible.

We're up to date this year except for the sprint in Ruhpolding, which I think was yesterday, which we'll look for tonight. Then we'll watch tomorrow's pursuit on Monday. We space it out so we don't have to wait too long for the next stage. We both get really into the races. I talk almost constantly, making a point about something during the race that the commentator says literally ten to fifteen seconds after I do, which is pretty funny. Of late I've been arguing with the commentator's opinions and being proved right as the race finishes. For those who have any idea, I'm really tired of them assuming that Julia Simon is the racer she was three years ago, especially when you watch Hanna Oeberg mop the track up with her the race before, coming up from 13 seconds behind... I'm also really tired of them underestimating Kirkeide. They should have known better from the last event in Annecy — oh damn, now I've gone and given something away.

Of course, our other personal angle is the Canadian team, whom we adore and are proud if they don't get lapped or manage the top 15.  Moser managed an unprecidented 19th in Oberhof's sprint, and she's been just terrific this year. Lunder retired last year, being the lynchpin of the team, and Moser has done all she can to step up. Peiffer and Paradis are still struggling but the very young Rousseau, who got her feet wet last year, is proving to be a revelation.

We've looked into the problems with the Canadian team and it isn't the people themselves. For the most part, they have to pay their own way to the competitions out of money they themselves raise; they have nowhere to stay in Europe except in actual hotels; they don't have their own "wax cabin" at any of the events, this being the place that a team uses to prepare skis for the exact snow temperature and humidity on that course, so the athletes can start with the right glide and grip. Without a cabin of your own, you have to either rely on renting time in someone else’s, which means you’re always pressed for time and working around another team’s priorities, or do the best you can in a hotel room with limited tools, limited time and no controlled set up.

Doing this at every competition is a regular stress that undermines your performance when you actually do race. I looked into it and a wax cabin costs about $300,000, per venue... but even if two or three of them could be spaced through the tour, it would allow the Canadian team an opportunity to rest in Annecy or Lenzerheide for a change... while a little of the cost for that cabin could be returned by renting it to the Lithuanians, Kazakh or even the British and Americans, who are all in the same boat.  It's interesting to note the the Canadians don't kick ass because the European Teams are mostly playing on their home turf, where they can practice on these ranges and these tracks during their time off, when the Canadians and others can't, because they haven't the money.

I've looked into further and come to the conclusion that what the Canadians really need is a place they can live at for weeks at a time, going out at the start of the season, remaining in Europe until Christmas, then coming home for a rest and going out again as the post-Christmas season starts. What's needed is a good sized facility, comfortable, with its own shooting range, convenient tracks for personal training, and importantly access to numerous competitive ranges where day trips could be arranged for them to shoot where the Europeans practice. Said facility again could be rented to the Japanese, Chinese and other non-anglo teams who don't recognise Christmas and could have full use of the facilities for three weeks while the Canadians were actually in Canada. This would offset the cost of the facility year by year.

Using my geographical knowledge, I've chosen the right place: about an hour outside of Lienz in Austrian Tirol. It's a good place for private runs for crosscountry skiing; its got enough infrastructure to support it without it being overwhelmed by tourists. It's close to Hochfilzen (1hr40), Antholz (1hr20) and Pokljuka (2-3hrs), while weekend trips can also be managed to Oberhof (7hr), Ruhpolding (5-6hrs) and Lenzerheide (6-7hrs), all of which are hugely better than travelling by plane from Canada.

The cost for this, near as I can nail down, including space for comfort, access out of the house, the runs, the range, the staff... about 5,000,000 USD to get it set up, then hopefully rent to manage maintenance and upkeep. That's a bit tight, actually; six million would make it more comfortable, but then, it woudl probably be more practical to plan a refit only after it proves the Canadians could win with this level of support.

No, that's not all. When my imagination gets going... the competition for the World Cup starts generally in the last week of November and continues into mid-to-late March. This fits with the European climate model, but I live in Canada. We have a much longer winter and that allows everyone a month or more to train here before the season starts, and a month after for those who want to. The favourite place for this is called Frozen Thunder, it's out in Canmore, which we can drive to in about 70-75 minutes (takes 30 minutes just to get out of Calgary). It's a track with reserved times specifically for high-performance ski training. World Cup competitions have taken place in Canmore. Vittozzi secured her overall World Cup title there in 2024.

The problem is, it's deep in tourists most of the time, most of them downhill skiiers, and Canmore is a small, expensive town.  I know Alberta awfully well, having camped, fished and hunted my way through a lot of the backcountry in my youth, and I have a better idea.  'Course, it would be about two million CDN, but with these things we can't quibble.

North of Canmore there's a little burg called Sundre; not quite 3,000 people, on the edge of rough country between it an the mountains, about another 15 minutes further from Calgary than Canmore. Has no practical downhill skiing, but it would be a brilliant place for a crosscountry ski track with climbs and falls under 400 metres. The country right west of Sundre is private land but not highly expensive private land; just past that is protected forest and, unfortunately a whole lot of bears... but a little arranging could manage that.

If the town of Sundre were approached properly, and if a track of land were properly converted into trails and a modest shooting range, and IF that range were made available to Canadian youths across the country, and the people of Sundre were actually listened to regarding the bears, and given a say about where the track was laid and were given jobs by the facility, then it could be a spectacular industry for the whole of western Alberta between Cochrane to the south and Rocky Mountain House to the north. It would fill up with snow in October and would make a fantastic facility for world-class athletes and youth alike... and Sundre would be chock full of Americans in October who, like Europeans, are still waiting for snow by Halloween.

I believe that such a facility, if it had the money up front, could be self-sustainable. Its separation from tourists, the possibilities for youths from us and America... and junior world competitions take place in America and Canada while the Europeans are globetrotting their part of the world. We watched a great race with Oceane Michelon (I think) that took place in Colorado when she was still just 16. She won the blue jersey in world Biathlon last year. Chances are, the infrastructure would follow, though there are little hotels all over that part of the world that are just an hour from Sundre. And of course Calgary could handle the overflow.

Ah, but of course, this is all a dream. The lottery this month is 900 million though... or perhaps it's grown, I haven't checked. So we just never know.

The Effing Paladin

This effort to teach AD&D in a linear fashion has hit a snag with the paladin.  First, it took me three passes to find the right voice for explaining alignment, which cannot be dodged around if teaching the class as it's written. Next, discussing the paladin's codes proved less than ideal, and the consequences for breaking those codes as well. Then that business with the paladin's warhorse that I discussed with the last post.

And now, the arbitrary rules about what a paladin can use as magic equipment, what a paladin must do with their money and who a paladin must associate with.

What seems to happen is this: I begin by intending to describe the rules as written... but these are, in fact, full of holes, since the words don't actually wander all around the subject.  A good example for this is the "henchman," which to the best of my recollection is never described as anything but a hireling. The reason for the name, what it means to "hench," what the person is hired to accomplish, what their role is, or what they are to the player is not discussed. Only how to find them, their statistical details and their loyalty. Why a henchperson is even allowed is not discussed either. This sort of hole, where we spend a page and a half discussing everything about the rule except why it exists, can be very frustrating.

Then, as I drift into pointing out the details of the hole, so the reader will understand what's not being said in the AD&D rule, I end up drifting further into why this rule is illogical, or can be easily circumvented, or indeed why it undermines actual game play and builds resentment.

And then somewhere in that drift, I stop, realise I've gone too far, and then come here and kvetch.

There are two fundamental problems with all these paladin-constraining rules... and it not the theory that paladins need constraint. The first is that every one of them is entirely arbitrary. It's never explained why alignment is necessary for AD&D game play (it isn't), or why the paladin must have codes, or why there must be a punishment for these codes instead of the DM simply saying, "Nope, you can't do that, you're a paladin."  The reason is obviously because it shifts the responsibility from the DM for saying that to the paladin, which in turn allows the DM to be the avenging but righteous angel, bringing the paladin up short not by a simple game rule, "Do not pass GO, do not collect $200," but by an oppornistic jackassery that threatens the player's agency and right to game play on an MADE-UP bullshit moral principle.

Why ten magic items?  Arbitrary. Why can't the paladin keep their money and use it for good? Arbitrary. Why can't the paladin give the money to the party cleric, who ALSO must be lawful good, and is therefore limited? Arbitrary. Because we can't treat the player cleric like one of the NPC clerics of the game world UNDER THE DM'S AUTHORITY.  It's clubhouse rules, so no, you can't give away the tithe to the party's cleric. It's all arbitrary and none of it is ever explained, defined or justified.

The second fundamental problem is that the paladin isn't actually that powerful a class. Turning the undead is in game play a pretty weak mechanic, clerical spells by the time they're gotten are so low-level that they're not a threat, the 18 h.p. a paladin can heal is pathetic compared to the damage a 9th level dungeon bestows, the +2 bonus to AC and saving throws are only against evil creatures and honestly, again by 9th level, these are not that important. A suit of chain mail +2 gives the same benefit and the wearer of the chain mail doesn't have to obey a fucking code. A 1st level cleric can cast protection from evil which lasts for a whole fight and doesn't have a code either. The horse is great, but it's still just a horse. All in all, the paladin, which needs way more experience to go up a level than the mage, is not as powerful as the mage, especially after the mage reaches 7th level. So what gives? What the fuck? Why is ANY of this needed?

So it gets under my skin, I push a little here, I push a little there... and I realise I've gone past the written agenda and I have to stop, rethink and then rewrite.

I need to go back to the Foreword.  I had made a point that any rule that requires an arbitrary judgment that two DMs would not make the same cannot be seen as a rule, no matter how much credit AD&D gives to it. It's not game design, it's the DM cheating and calling it another name.

Steadily, I see that I'm going to have to discuss that in the Foreword, and add some content about rules that serve no real purpose in game play except to arbitrarily empower the DM.

"Gameplay" is defined as the DM presenting the setting, the players acting upon what they learn, the DM conveying the response of the setting to that action and then the players acting again. This symbiosis is the game. "Presenting the setting" can be defined as a situation that arises mechanically from the pretext of the creature or the physical qualities of that setting. It cannot be the DM deciding arbitrary to judge whether or not the player, specifically, ran the character in a way that is arbitrarily, for no actual defined rule, against the DM's personal wishes — which includes the DM putting on a "deity-suit" as if it isn't actually the DM calling the balls and strikes. Game play is that where the consequences of the game are decided by dice, not the DM's mindset about what a character class ought to be about, or represent, or how a player running a character of that class must move their personal game piece. And this is even more egregious if this arbitrary non-rule applies specifically to one player's behaviour and not everyone else's, including the DM's.

Working it out in my head how I'm going to write this, while also working out how to rewrite what I wrote today about the paladin.

D&D was Written by Scrooge, who Died before Reforming

There are passages in AD&D that are so egregious that I think it should be defacto a RULE that anyone praising the game should automatically be compelled to at least address them, if not to outright condemn them. And honestly, it needs to be said explicitly: "AD&D is a good system, but that shit about the paladin's warhorse, that's just wrong. Don't pay any attention to the passage on page 18; the writer of that should be ashamed."

These are arguments I put aside a long time ago, and being forced to revisit them, and then describe them as they're written, makes my blood boil. It took me three passes to get through introduction of "alignment" as a concept in a way I felt I could do so legitimately, and now today it's the paladin's warhorse. Here's my text:

At 4th level, gain a mystical warhorse. This is a magnificent creature that is called for, and certainly no ordinary horse. In size and appearance, it is a heavy warhorse, a destrier from knightish tales; in intelligence, it has 5 to 7 points, so we assume — though the books do not state this — that is it capable of understanding the paladin. If literature is to be embraced, this understanding should pass both ways. The rules state that the warhorse has five "hit dice" (5d8), which are rolled and added up, and +5 more hit points added. The number of hit points per roll, however, cannot be less than the paladin's level — which means, if the paladin seeks the horse at 4th level, then a minimum of "4" must be rolled on each d8, which can be managed by rerolling lesser numbers until the correct minimum is obtained. A paladin of 8th level would ensure that every die equalled 8 hit points, so that the warhorse would have 40 +5 h.p., or 45, the most the warhorse can have regardless of the paladin's level above eighth.  

Hereafter, the rules for the warhorse in AD&D become a crude effort to contain the benefit of the horse while imposing unnecessary constraints upon the paladin; if the paladin falls from grace, for example, then the horse will abandon the character and, by the rules, no offer is made on how the horse is retained should the paladin find redemption for the fall. While one book in the rules states that the horse will "magically appear," another rule book stipulates this does not mean "physically," but that the paladin becomes aware of the horse's location, within a ride of seven days. Thereafter, the paladin must face an ordeal to "win" the horse: capturing it if it's wild, overcoming an evil fighter in mortal combat — or some other difficulty that will take a number of days to prove the paladin's mettle. This sort of demand for something the character has already earned by reaching a given level is a common, petty motif in AD&D. It can be followed, but it means the rest of the party must sit about while the paladin acts alone, using up game time, with no real expectation that the paladin will fail in the effort — especially since we're also told that a horse like this cannot appear more than once in a ten-year period. It would take a particular kind of DM to set up this ordeal in a manner that the horse could be lost for that period of time. It's not really a good example of game play and in practice, it is a rare DM who feels compelled to impose this on a paladin. We should consider this: if the paladin has reached 4th level without falling from grace, is this not already proof that the horse is deserved?

I can't just let the rule sit without comment. The very idea of the expectation upon the player speaks of a miserable, miserly person who feels he must yank the player's chain. The voice throughout the books shows a recurring distrust of the player, a need to keep the DM empowered as a corrective force and a habit for turning every advancement for the player into some probation that has to be earned out of pure meanness.

It is sometimes hard to speak glowingly of a game whose writer and chief proponent was such an insecure, small-minded, grudging, shabby, ungenerous little troll. Personally, I'm glad he's dead.

Give a Hand

I'm just going to assume that you're all staring open-mouthed and in awe that not only am I producing a logical, straightforward way of explaining the game, I've just churned out 20,000 words of it in eight days. I understand.

Sometimes its just a matter of finding the key to the lock that opens the box where the stuff has always waited to come out, it just wasn't clear how.

Seriously, though, if you want to help me, kick $7 into my patreon, get a copy of the pdf and then spread it 'round the internet. That would do more to benefit me than might be possibly imagined. I'm very serious about this. The community has been screaming for this for decades and I'm as amazed as anyone to find it's actually this easy. So help me first, then help others know about it.