Saturday Q&A (oct 7)

Shelby M. writes:

Mechanical Design: The vehicle industry is a great analogy, and I think is made stronger by the observation that the modern game is much more like vehicle consumers and vehicle *salesmen* than it is consumers and developers. I've worked a bit in that industry and I can confirm that an engine "developer" is at least at some level concerned with creating a good product that will be better (by any number of metrics) for the end consumer. These metrics are well-defined, measurable, and can be manipulated by applying well-understood engineering principles. The salesman just wants to sell more vehicles (and as we're all aware, sales has its own metrics and processes). Even the somewhat subjective idea of the consumer "enjoying" the vehicle is combed over with surveys, feedback, and market research. As you point out, even this process has been ignored, so there is no actual mechanism to make the game "better," besides promising that the next edition will fix all the nebulous problems - thus generating sales by addicts chasing the dragon.

James H. of New York writes:

I have been thinking for awhile about your post regarding Consent and D&D from mid-September, mostly because one of the analogies you chose (do I need consent before giving monsters a surprise round) hit home as that very same week, I killed my wife's character she had played for ten years in my campaign during a surprise round.

I agree it ultimately comes down to trust. If the players don't trust the DM, it causes the obvious issues you are now seeing, where there are discussions of whether DMs can do anything to player characters without consent. But I wonder if this shitty environment was actually created by DMs initially not trusting players to provide interesting games without fudging. We often talk about what players want ("fun" being the easiest and most useless answer), and you have touched upon in previous posts about the query of "what do DMs want," but it often becomes reliant upon the players (I want the players to have fun, etc.). I would argue DMs want to provide an experience, which, in theory, requires interesting things to happen.

I think this desire to provide interesting experiences is what led to DMs hiding their dice rolls (I roll openly, so my wife saw that I rolled a 15, 16 and 20 on the three attacks that killed her character), so they could maintain the power to fudge dice rolls to ensure an interesting experience was provided. Because DMs didn't trust players to create interesting experiences on their own.

Answer: I think that's dead on, James. Hiding things from people, like a bad die roll, makes it progressively difficult for a DM to be open and honest about other things. Consider what it means when we know the party won the combat because we cheated with a die, but the party thinks, and says so repeatedly, that they won the fight on their own (because they believe they have). We can't tell them the truth, so each time that battle comes up, we have to continue our LIE. And here we are caught. We can't express the lie without there being consequences leading to future distrust; and we can't keep our lie because of what it says about us, a liar. Steadily, this erodes the genuine emotional connection between us and the players in dozens of little ways. It encourages us as DMs to lie again, to support the original lie; and when the players are again on the edge of death, we must lie again, or else the first lie was all for nothing, because eventually they are want to die in spite of it.

This process separates the DM from the players in a progressive, unsustainable manner. Despite every DM that shrugs and says, "well what of it?", there's a steady drip-drip-drip of doubt, as it's realised that the players would certainly feel frustrated and resentful that they discover that things have been hidden from them. We know this, and knowing this affects our DMing, and how we view the players, and how we view ourselves ... and that slowly contributes to no longer wanting to run, or not getting as much out of it, or our actively feeling resentful of running.

To promote trust, open communication and genuine, mutual respect is absolutely necessary. Instead of trying to control or hide things from a person, "for their own good," it's better to have honest and supportive conversation about the player's concerns, expectations and desires. It's better to see the player accept the loss, deal with it, grow strength from having dealt with it, so that they may be a better player. This leads to healthier, more fulfilling connections, where more can be done, more can be risked, the DM can share honestly in the player's successes and both party and DM can enjoy themselves and grow together.

The fact that people don't do this, and that authorities attached to the game don't shout this from the rooftops, coming straight out and condemning fudging and other such actions, even going so far as to PROMOTE fudging, demonstrates the underlying toxicity of the entire game's culture that pervades thousands of tables because people, especially children, who have very little experience with building trust. For the sake of business, the company, and hundreds of misled pundits, continue to promote bad behaviour that cannot help but erode the potentially positive, creative, active, demonstrably brilliant aspects of D&D that made it the social force that it is.

JB of Washington state writes:

I find it amusing that I fall into the same category of "high school reader" as yourself. So many classics...To Kill A Mockingbird, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, etc...sit on my shelf, never read. Mocking me a bit (someday I'll get around to them. The Catcher & The Rye, too!). But I managed to make it through high school without reading much of any of the assigned reading. Read an awful lot...just not the assignments. 'Course I just always figured it was because I'm a lazy, underachieving slacker.

This idea of finding these "nuggets" in D&D play is an interesting one. I think you're right (that they occur) though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say they are THE reason why we play...I'll have to mull on that for a while. However, I think they only occur with a LOT of play: regular, dedicated play (perhaps with the same people, perhaps not). I'm not sure they occur if all one does is the occasional or infrequent session, the one-off, the con/shop game, etc. Harder to see patterns when there's no strong paradigm one is working within. Maybe. Or maybe I'm just not very observant (or maybe I haven't been looking for the nuggets).

Answer:  Unquestionably, these are not the reason we sit down to play in the sense of, "Gosh, I can't wait to play D&D to experience one of those chance cool things that happen every once in a while without warning." But they are, I think the underlying subconscious influence on our looking forward to the next session. We don't usually put a label on it; I didn't have a label I could put on it until writing the post. Yet I think it's an "umami" within D&D that's often overlooked, as we tend to focus consciously on the more tactile parts of the experience.

"Lazy and underachieving" is what the literary priests want you to believe about yourself, because you haven't the interest to read a book that's largely the depiction of something that guest speaker Captain Obvious would sign at a game con. Given what I know about Catcher in the Rye, I'm sure that you, at your age, would find it completely dreadful, as its largely a story about a brooding young man without the motivation to do something about his brooding broodiness. Kind of like the Hermann Hesse novel Steppenwolf, that was such a fad in the 1970s and today describes any 8chan-user to a tee. Holden Caulfield of the novel is the 1950s version of that, which is why gun-toting nutjobs tend to have it on their book shelves, with the most brooding passages dogeared and smudged with ... well, we'll leave it there.

I have a close friend who's read it; his favourite comment on the book is that there's a REASON Salinger never had another successful book. I could go down the line with a description of all the books above. Animal Farm is worth a read, but careful as it's the sledgehammerist sledgehammer that ever hammered a sledge. Still, at least it's ACCURATE hammering, and often applicable.

Sterling of Maine writes:

I've also been applying a great deal of effort toward starting my new campaign. If you're interested to follow along, I'm posting a "campaign newsletter" here https://erin1478.blogspot.com/, but not a session log, for reasons I elaborate upon in the first post there.

Maxwell in California writes:

How exactly do you arrive at the cash values of non-magical treasure, for XP purposes?

The first step for you, and me, and anyone else who runs with a trade table system, is to implement the piece of treasure on the trade table so its price can be calculated. But that raises the question of which market to use when evaluating said price.

Suppose the nearest market is the commercial center of a grape growing and winemaking region, and has many wine refs. It would make sense for a nearby party to find barrels of pilfered wine in a humanoid lair, as treasure. But if we use the local market to find the GP cost --> XP value of the wine, it will be worth less than if it had been found somewhere with fewer wine references.

It seems odd to have something be worth differing amounts of XP just based on where it's looted. Furthermore, if local value in GP is directly translated to XP, then when I give XP rewards, the players know exactly what something is worth, and that destroys some of the mystique of treasure, especially if it's an unusual item, like jewelry. That may not be a problem to you (and if so, I would like to know why not.) But it seems like a problem to me. Not only because , but also because Pause suddenly learn roughly the sale value of each item when I give them the XP values. Pause That removes some of the mystery around knowing how best to--

The approach I intend to follow soon is to calculate a market table for a hypothetical "average" market having exactly R/N references, for each reference type R, where N = number of markets in the world, and then set the XP award price of any item to its GP cost at that hypothetical market. Example to be perfectly clear: if there are 50 markets in the world, and there are 100 wine references and 350 cattle refs, the hypothetical average market would have 100/50 = 2 wine refs and 350/50 = 7 wine refs.

The XP reward for a given item might not remain consistent over time, since of course I'll be adding to my market system and other aspects of my D&D world, as anyone would. But relative to the state of my world at some point in time, there would in each case be one consistent XP reward for a particular treasure item which is calculable at a moment's notice. And this wouldn't change the fact that things which are globally rare, such as diamonds, would have a high treasure value for XP.

Answer: Treasure ought to be something that's common in the region, right? There's no reason to assume there's any right of the players to obtain a treasure of a set amount or a set value. So yes, a barrel of wine in a plundered storehouse in Norway is worth more than the same barrel in a storehouse in Sicily. BUT ... it's also more likely for a barrel of wine to be found in Sicily than in Norway. For awarding experience, I use the local price. Like many things in economics, XP does not have an intrinsic market value. If you want the best XP for a barrel of wine, then go get one where barrels of wine are rare. There's no logic for punishing players who find wine in Norway by giving them less than what it's worth, or rewarding them for giving XP for more than than wine is worth. It's not like the players are plundering wine in Sicily one day and then Norway the next, so that the two barrels logically should have the same value.

When something is worth less, either because it's a less valuable thing or because it's located in a place where it's less value, it makes no sense to assign an arbitrary number to it because there's an amorphous "average" that has nothing whatsoever to do with the character's immediate here-and-now game experience.

Chris C. writes:

How do I keep designing? I know you've mentioned to keep practicing. Map a wizard tower, or roll some NPCs; maybe even a family tree of orcs, or document a burial rite.

I've only been a DM a few times, and a player in a couple sessions. I haven't run a game in over a decade, maybe two. This was when 3e and 3.5e were popular, and mountains of splatbooks were published. I skipped 4e and 5e, and now I'm a dad with responsibilities. A torrent of every Third Edition, Pathfinder, and so on probably exists with every book in existence--but they are all player options. I've learned more from any dozen posts on your blog than a cursory glance inside those.

Answer: truth is, the will to create must be something one actually wants to do.  There are many hurdles to overcome, particularly our naturally comparing ourselves to what's out there, the things we need to know, how honest that we are with ourselves, what voices surround us to give strength when ours is lacking and the force of will needed to put what we've created out there, for all and sundry to tear down and mock.

I've never had any trouble with a desire to design.  My trouble is the reverse; I want to redesign everything.  My tendencies tend towards the Renaissance so hard that I'm guilty of the jack-of-all-trades master-of-none trope.  But this isn't about me, this is about your problem.

My best advice would be to try something you haven't tried.  And keep it hidden from prying eyes for a long time.  Don't show it to your friends and family; don't even say what you're doing.  This will preserve you for some time against the feeling that you're under an obligation to perform well.  Remember that back in the day, when most of us were starting out in D&D, it was something we furtively did in our rooms.  We didn't share it, and we didn't care what other people thought of it.  Sometimes, we made or played with things that even our players were kept out of.  This helps center why it is we love something ... when the doing of it, and for no other reason, is enough.

Keep it at that level until your level of practice causes you to feel that you're ready to share.  Until then, enjoy the process of experimentation and see what that yields. 

_____

Thank you all for your contributions.

If anyone wishes to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.