The Bigger Lesson

Here we have the hamlet, which shares characteristics with the thorp, yet which is decidedly different:

Some have watched me build this on the wiki, so it won't be a surprise to find it here.  It's taken me some time to build up the back information for each element described, so that links to the windmill, winepress, communal holding, debt, socage and so on aren't dead red links.  There's a terrific pile of information here, none of which tells the reader how to build an adventure around it, how to encourage the players to care or how to make it "fun."

Some will be goggle eyed.  Some will scoff.  And some will want me to explain in detail how to build an adventure around it.  Today I'd like to address this last by pouring some cold water over heads.

D&D is not a board game.  Recently, I stumbled across this excellent and funny video on youtube from eight years ago.  I figure it's worth posting it, even though it's very old, because it has only 12,000 views.  In comparison, this piece of trash from 4 years ago has 379,000 views.  Youtube is a gong pit.

If you haven't the patience to watch the video from Selinker's presentation, force yourself to jump to the 30-minute mark.  Failing to do so will rob you of learning the absolute positive truth about what sort of half-assed amateur fuckwits designed D&D.

Sorry ... sorry.  This isn't a rant.

Selinker's talk is good; it addresses the importance of being exact and simple in one's language, with the understanding that game-board logic is crucial.  What might appear to be obvious phrasing can be so easily mistaken for something else, in ways that you'd never, ever see without play testing.  I've been there, I've bumped against that, and there are elements in D&D that have to be described according to that standard.

But regarding these recent posts I've written about fulling mills and saw pits, these things are not rules.  Nor are they fluff.  They're setting elements I'm providing as an effort to fill out the game world.  For the most part, they're off the top of my head.  In many cases, the actual information regarding the matter isn't clear, it isn't understood, as we don't know how actual medieval persons managed most of this material.  Go looking for information about the authority of elders over a village and you're going to be extremely disappointed by the sweeping statements you'll find historians are prepared to make.

Historians, however, deal in facts.  They can't, or won't say things that aren't factually in evidence, because that's their profession.  I am not limited by that.  Nor are you, if you're a DM.  It doesn't matter to us whether or not we know for a fact how elders ran a village.  We need to know it anyway, because unlike historians, we run people who are going to be in that village and are going to ask us.  "What happens if I try to kill the elders?" is not a question historians ever have to answer.

Your answer, probably, just got a lot better with the content I'm writing.  Even though we're talking about some awfully empty, easily dismissable hexes, like this dreamboat of an adventure plan on the right, suddenly there's a host of information on my wiki that you can draw on to provide description and importance for the player characters.

In the largest sense, however, you're on the hook to interpret what I'm writing here.  In no way are you limited by what I've proposed, nor is it going to be enough for your game if you do try to run some event here.  I'm not going to be there to help you out ... and just to be clear, if you texted me and asked, I'll tell you to be a fucking DM and to fuck off.

'Cause you've got to do it.  This isn't a board game.  The rules for AD&D or some other edition are all nice and pretty, and they will bail you out of some troubles, but in the end, you can't go to the rules and expect answer to the question, "What do I do if the players want to kill all the elders?"

The more you know, the better off you are.  But that's not the lesson you should be getting from the material I'm providing.  The right lesson is that even if the stuff isn't out there; even if you can't find descriptions for what you want; you CAN invent descriptions that work.  You can take a few sentences about elders, just as I've done, and go way beyond what those sentences say.

The game's rules won't build a world for you ... nor will watching every episode of Game of Thrones, nor reading the books of R.R. Martin.  Nor can I.  The game world is too big and too complex for me to do anything more than scratch the surface.  You have to learn to make things up for yourself.

Don't be a board game designer.  Don't waste your time trying to get the language perfect or endlessly trying to hammer down every inconsistency.  It's a guideline, you'll fix it in post, you'll half-ass it when the time comes, you'll make this paragraph work if it ever actually matters, which it might never.  Get the general information down, revisit it next year or the year after, and concentrate on covering as much of your game world as you can with the time you have.  You'll never finish.  None of it'll ever be good enough for another person.  That's a good thing ... because anyone who's a DM will want to change half of what you've done anyway, to make it fit their ideal.  The most we can do is wake other people up to things that wouldn't have come across their radar otherwise.

Now go get on it.