For Now

What a headache.

Dry subject, not one I have a keen interest in, and difficult to find pictures for.  Artists tend to discard notions like "accuracy" or "practicality" when depicting their fantasy creations in clothing, not to mention they tend to mix and match one culture with another as though the 14th century was as cosmopolitan as the present.  Which is fine, but it makes it hard to explain to someone who knows nothing about clothes the meaning of a "gomlek" or a "zibin," when both artists and writers on the net utterly fail to agree on either.

This post isn't about clothes.  The linked page above isn't completed; and won't be, although I intend to work on it every day until I'm sick of it.  Persians next, then Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, Americans, then possibly Elves, Dwarves and so on.  Clothing is a subject I could come back to later and probably double the amount of written text ... talk of your endless rabbit holes.

This post questions the purpose of writing such information at all.  Do players care?  Isn't it all just "fluff?"  And in the wider sense, I want to address my process for gamebuilding and design, which isn't a new subject for the blog but I always have something new to say about it.

When I began building rules for nutrition and the preparation of food, I presumed this was a fiddly bit of game design that would have a limited appeal to all but the most anal of DMs, persons like myself.  It still sits there on the old wiki because I know it's another terrifying rabbit hole, and that when I get around to transferring it to the new wiki, it's another week's work to do it.  But here's the thing: among my players, and the players of those games I influence — I hear about these things second-hand — the food rules are stupidly popular.  The players get into absurdly fascinated discussions about what foods to buy at the market, whose going to make them and how their characters are going to develop greater cooking skills in the future.  It makes no sense; the food itself has little direct influence on the "adventuring" aspect of the game.  But the players love the concept, a concept enabled by a system, just the same.

I believe that given the opportunity, and if the rule is enforced, serious players will quickly get over the whining resistance stage of "record-keeping" rules and grok the intrinsic game value of these things.  Talking yesterday to a player about the clothing overview I'm writing, she explained that although in her other D&D game  —  a very low-brow "DM-fiat" style where things like clothing, food and encumbrance are ignored  — she finds the absence to be boring and annoying.  She likes buying clothes for her character; she likes the challenge of figuring out how much stuff she can jam onto her player character without losing movement flexibility.  She says, "I've gotten so used to doing it, it's habit now," adding, "Why would I mind?"  Playing without it, however, she says the simplified game character is like a neutered stuffed doll.  "I might as well be naked, and I never get hungry so it's like the food a Barbie doll eats.  Made of plastic and it never runs out."

Most of the time, when I get advice on making some rule for my game, the proposal includes a measure of give and take.  Essentially, if the PC gets something, the PC should be penalized in some way by the loss of something else.  I couldn't disagree more!  I think these "balance-oriented" designers totally fail to recognize that the game is chock-full of penalties already.  My game has killer monsters, dangerously powerful organisations and religious zealotry, a high social complexity full of status-derived land mines and lots of sharp pokey-things aching to drain player character's of precious fluids.  The players DON'T need additional punishments because they happen to throw a lucky die and get a stronger familiar, or special character "building" flaws to ensure they're less than godlike.  In my world, they know they're not godlike.

What I want is to give their characters fractional bonuses and benefits that have limited application but yet positive effects that come without a price tag.  I cannot do this without a game system that's very, very deep, that has a composite, labyrinthine intricacy that can be milked for unique kinds of sustenance ... which in turn rewards player choices by causing them to pat themselves on the back.  This means making players think about knotty problematical things like food, clothing and encumbrance, enabling a richer, high-yield game based on much, much more than hack and slash.

From a designer's perspective, this means rewriting rules that have already been written, not just once but many times.  It means revisiting individual spells, exhaustively sometimes, since the amount of potential detail is limitless.  It means resting and contemplating the possibilities surrounding such a system, which is far deeper than haphazardly inventing something on the fly during a game, whether or not the players are consulted.  How can any group come up with something truly generative with only ten to twenty minutes of consideration?  That won't get addressed again, ever, because it's not a design— it's merely an agreement.

Last night I was rewriting the page that describes what a "sage ability" is and how they're acquired.  I'm still in the middle of editing the page; I'll be working on it this afternoon.  On the whole, I'm not satisfied that I'm thoroughly explaining the meaning and function of sage abilities ... which isn't a surprise, the concept is dense and the design pretty much insurmountable.  I'll be writing sage abilities until I die, because there's no practical way I can account for "all of human knowledge and ability" as a single writer.

Begging the question: shouldn't I be writing sage abilities instead of describing, again, what they are?  And for that matter, writing a blog post discussing that description?  The answer has to do with standards.  High ones.  Ones that I apply to myself, because I cannot be happy with doing things superficially — that is, without plan, purpose or enthusiasm.

If the reader feels that I hold others to that standard, just because it's mine, is no more than the reader's conscience having its say.  I don't have near as much influence over making the reader a better person than the expectations expounded by the reader's parents, teachers, church leaders, sports coaches or anyone else who took the time when you were a kid to say, "Hey, don't fuck it up."  They meant life, but the sentiment applies to everything, from playing with your children to taking the garbage out responsibly.  Sometimes we don't like the task at hand — I'm really not enjoying writing about clothes — but that doesn't exempt from my desire to do a good job, or the best I'm able.  It's reassuring that later on, a month or a year from now, I'll find myself editing the page and expanding on it, just as I'm doing right now with the sage abilities page.

A proper game world is not made once, but dozens of times.  If I seriously cared about modules, I'd take the village of Hommlet and develop the various themes, expand the number of residents, give better explanations for the hidden cult's motivations, add some other faction that was also vying for control of the settlement and provide more options and choices for the player characters to take and more obstacles for them to overcome.

And then, three or four years later, I'd start all over and expand Hommlet again.

Instead, I apply that methodology to my trade system, or my character background generator, or the overall quality of the wiki's writing, or whatever other rule gap that as yet hasn't been addressed and needs to be built from the foundation up.  While I appreciate the resistance that other DMs have towards this sort of work, my resistance was overcome in the 1980s and 90s.  At worst, I'm met with a subject that needs addressing, I sigh miserably for a few days, then I relent and fumble my way through the matter until it's sufficiently managed ... for now.  That "for now" is always inherent in everything I make or write.  It's a covenant I have with myself that admits there's a lot to do, but that none of it's worth doing if I'm not going to give it my all.

It's a pity that makes others feel triggered.  I'd rather it inspired, that it sent a message that the tools and the time is available to dig in and do just as well — or better, having the benefit of my example as evidence that it can be done.  It must be the personality I have.  There are truly insurmountable designs in the world that would require unimagined resources and skill to recreate or surpass: the Pyramids, the Hagia Sofia, the Taj Mahal.

My form of game world isn't one of them.