What You Can't Do

*stretch*

I've spent most of this year, since turning out the menu, discussing macro-design of one sort or another.  I wrote a bunch of posts on worldbuilding, then on mapmaking, and then finally on how one would write a book for a new dungeon master.  Long series, all of them.  And now I've forsaken all that so I can spend the rest of this year locked in extreme micro-design, right down to the character's eye-colour and whether or not they can handle a mule.  I have been right here these last four days, moving from assignment to book, book to assignment ... and the truth is, in spite of my experience in beginning and moving through large projects, the scope of this latest regarding the background generator is scary.

See, a large part of the problem is this: the generator I designed back in 2012, that some of you have downloaded and used, was created before my sage abilities were re-imagined and vastly expanded.  Those abilities became part-and-parcel of the new generator, the one that I also worked on this year and can be found on my wiki.  Thus, in 2012, when it turned out your character had been raised by farmers, that's all it really said.  And now, when it turns out your character was raised by farmers, there's a link that takes you to this page.  A page, and rule-set, that can be expanded as needed, whenever new information that could be pertinent to a campaign, or is pertinent to my players in my own campaign, comes to light.

Very different from the necessary formatting of a book that's desirably edition-neutral (though it can't be, really, because 5th fucked up all the ability stats, and because later versions have invented a billion fucking races ... and for other like reasons).  Unless, of course, I actually add the various descriptions of the professions to the background generator, so that when your character turns out to be a farmer, there's actual information about how this is managed in game ... along with about 70-100 other skills and abilities.  And that ... is an enormous headache.

For example, take swimming.  "Swimming" consists of one of the most difficult rule-frames that I've ever had to build.  Most game rules super-simplify the problem into practical non-existence.  Your character can effectively swim in exactly the same way that your character can walk.  Except that when you stop walking, you don't drown.  When swimming, you can't "rest."  You have to keep moving, until you're too exhausted to move, at which point you better be near something you can hold onto.  Exhaustion IS a limitation, especially as speed, distance covered and your actual ability to swim all change the particulars of when "exhaustion" occurs.  Now, to that, add temperature, current and wind, since all these drastically effect how far you can swim or how well, and how quickly you become exhausted.  I've tried to at least acknowledge these things, but ANY system for a game has to be simplified, because the process is ridiculously incalcuble in real life.

And none of what I've said so far measure your swimming ability.  We tend to describe swimming as, "Yes, I can swim" and "I can't swim."  But we all understand that this is short hand for a deep grey scale that measures how many seconds you'll live if you fall out of a boat.  Being able to "swim" increases your likelihood of being saved, or making it to shore, but just because you can swim a hundred yards that doesn't make you a particularly "skilled" swimmer.

Now.  This problem applies to many, many skills beyond swimming.  How long you can run, how useful you can be in helping to sail a ship, your ability to ride a horse, your skill at cooking, and many, many other grey-scale skills ... all of which are usually simplified to a black-and-white, you can/can't do it.  Which we know is bullshit.

Most games try to get around this problem by creating die rolls with pass/fail motifs, which are also bullshit.  At my prime in cooking I could, and did, produce hundreds of perfectly flavoured pan-fried salmon orders, while ALSO making other dishes at the same time, without a chance of failure.  Skills are not a random thing.  You know how to reef a sail or you don't.  You know how to sing and hold an audience, or you don't.  You know how to long jump 22 feet, or you don't.  Pole-vaulters knock down the bar because the height is at the absolute barely-possible heights for human beings to vault over.  Drop that bar by a foot and the skilled vaulter will perform vault after vault, flawlessly.

I get around the problem with "knowledge points," which allows me to finely tune the exact capability of any skilled person, regardless of the skill.  If you have enough knowledge points, you'll make the vault.  If you don't, you'll fail.  The trick is, before you jump, you don't know how many knowledge points the next vault will need, exactly.  Only I know that.  YOU have your past experience in my game to tell you what you've done before.  Have you vaulted over something of that height previously?  Then you'll be fine with this.

BUT ... for the book, which I'm forced to add skill-explanations into in a clumsy book-printed format, it's simply impractical to ALSO explain the whole sage-ability system from top to bottom.  Which wouldn't be compatible with any edition of D&D, anyway.  That puts me in the position of trying to provide decent rules for something like swimming, without venturing into the nightmare of cold water, gale force winds, rip tides and how many swimming points you have.  The result is something that my own players would view as a joke and which is still a hard step beyond the even more laughable versions that I've read in various game editions ... where essentially, players can basically swim forever, so long as they can swim at all.

It's weird territory to be in.  Mordor, the company, is forever adding combat feats to every character, regardless of class or logic, and I'm granting skills in ... making furniture.  Performing marriage.  Reading and writing.  I have a very different viewpoint on what makes a character feel alive than what the popular version has embraced.

Take the last, reading and writing.  When I began playing D&D, and for a couple decades after, I made the same assumption that everyone made from the beginning ... that all player characters of all classes can do everything.  Everyone can read, everyone can ride a horse, everyone can drive a cart, everyone can drink, everyone can cook over a fire, etc.  The only exception, it seems to me, was that we agreed that not everyone could swim, in part because we knew from various documentaries that swimming was actually a rare thing in the middle ages ... and because we had personal memories of learning how to swim from special institutions that did not exist in the 12th century.  Of course, that's also true of reading and writing, but somehow that always got overlooked.  The party enters a dungeon, there's a sign on the outside and everyone can read it, right?  I mean, it's never discussed otherwise.  Ever told a party that there's writing on the wall, but in fact no one in the party can actually read it?  Because, you know, all fighters and thieves ... or even mages for that matter, since while they have to read magic, why does that assume they can also read books?  Ever thought about it?

The truth has much to do with what era the game takes place in.  My game happens in the 17th century, so most educated people, apart from fighter-types, thieves and druids can read.  But there's no logic for why a mage raised as a farmer would know how to ride a horse.  Or why a cleric raised as the daughter of a blacksmith would know how to cook.  My sage ability system allows players to choose skills, but the cleric list includes NO options for gastronomy; nor is there any mage or illusionist classes in horseback riding.  Unless your father, uncle or someone else taught you to ride a horse as a child, YOU CAN'T RIDE ONE.  At all.  And that's something that throws up an obstacle in game play.

Now, if your mage is a little tiny 91 lb. elf, maybe you can ride on the big fighter's heavy charger ... but what if your mage is a 157 lb. human?  And what if the fighter is a 102 lb. elf?  What then?

The most important thing about a skill set isn't what the character with the skill can do, it's what all the characters without that skill set CAN'T do.  You may want to buy a cart and a horse to carry all your loot back from the dungeon, but if you have zero experience as a teamster, you will have to hire someone who can drive a cart.  And that person's continued survival is going to matter as you're making your way through the wilderness out to the dungeon and back to town.  If he or she gets slaughtered while watching the horses and holding the cart, then the party will emerge from the dungeon loaded down with treasure only to get a nasty shock.  "Shit, people, Gerald's dead.  Now what?"

And guess what.  I have hundreds of different skills the party doesn't have.  I can't include all those in the background generator book, but I can include the idea that no, your character doesn't know how to catch rats, rob graves or even execute an enemy competently.  Oh, the enemy's likely to die at the end of your attempts, but if your goal was to make it painless, you're about to be disappointed.  Your character doesn't even know what that means.

It's my deepest desire to force a party to measure up their shortcomings and realise that the solution is to gather together a useful group of trusted NPCs, who in turn need occasional attention and grooming to ensure they can be trusted, while at the same time sending the message to the party that they're not supermen.  In fact, they're often stupid about things that a smart non-levelled, non-hero character can do.

So.

Pardon my absence these last many days.  I am working.  Just not here.