Saturday Q&A (dec 2)

Sterling in Maine writes:

[regarding Thorn in my Side]  The words "brisk," "chilly," "frosty," etc. don't matter. In solving the problem of how to describe the weather in my game, the various adjectives are irrelevant. What matters is whether or not the characters are adequately equipped to do what they intend or need to modify their plans to accommodate the weather. What clothing is required to be out in that weather, and what actions are possible with the equipment they have, and what are the consequences are of not aligning those things; those considerations do matter. Rather than trying to provide a literary description of 20F-29F conditions, I would advise players whose characters are leaving their base that it is below freezing. I could describe ice on the edge of the stream, or the tightness of the curl in a rhododendron's leaves, but I don't. Instead, if necessary, I point out that the clothes that were adequate last week will provide insufficient protection today. The character will be uncomfortable outside in a few minutes, will start taking damage from frostbite in an hour, less if the wind picks up any more. Hypothermia and death will eventually follow if the character insists on trudging off through the wilderness in those clothes today.

The character has lived in the game world for decades and has the basic common sense to know what clothing is necessary when. I have no problem describing the weather as "clear and 25F with 5-10 knots out of the northwest." That's meaningful to me and to the players, and it's what they need to know to play the game well. As referee, I can simply tell that to the player rather than encoding the information in a period-appropriate description which the player then has to decipher into game terms. If it's an unfamiliar environment for the character, a vaguer description like "you're pretty cold wearing just that," perhaps accompanied by a little trial and error as the player figures out what is necessary, is more than enough role-playing for my taste. Simply ignoring the weather and the constraints it puts on the characters, however, the "SoCal Model" as you say, is "not enough game" for me.

Arduin writes:

[regarding Thorn in my Side]  So as presented here it seems like this is meant to fold into the Malady system neatly, and that system expands to indicate just what a person could/would do on any given day by virtue of describing the community behavior at a given level of discomfort: we might imagine something like the "siesta" in warmer climates, where around midday when it gets hottest everyone takes a break and there's nothing for the party to do but join them.

I'm always in support of rules that encourage the party to behave as a part of the world instead of something adjacent to it. I want my players to curse when it rains or to consider waiting a few months for the spring thaw before heading out to a dungeon. That's the good stuff.

Oddbit writes:

[regarding Books, End of November]  Around the world in 80 Days was one of the ones I read a lot when I was younger. Not as much as The Once And Future King, but definitely on the repeat list. A Tale Two Cities and a different Robin Hood I believe were also big titles with repeat reads.

I don't appear to have 80 days on my nostalgia shelf which is disappointing, but there appear to be: Two Robin Hoods (Robin Hood and His Merrie Men Derrick Bown, the lesser of the two, and the Adventures of Robin Hood, Roger Lancelyn Green, the worn book of the set) Kidnapped Robert Louis Stevenson and The First Men in The Moon HG Wells which is the second most worn book on that shelf. (More poor binding than some of the others likely) Once And Future King also present. All this stacked on top of a large Reader's Digest Atlas of the World (I don't want to take everything off so I'm afraid no year at this time).

So there are definitely some books in your list kicking off some nostalgia.

Answer: I’ve only read a bowdlerised version of Kidnapped and had intended to read that at some point, along with Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both of which I have read, and the Black Arrow at some point, which I haven't. Plan to read a Christmas Carol for Dickens after finishing the book I started today, and later on tackle Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, none of which I've actually read. I've read Great Expectations, in the last ten years, and once was enough. Have read the First Men in the Moon; I'll probably read War of the Worlds again sometime in the next three months; I've read the Invisible Man and not sure I'm interested in repeating it. I definitely don't care to pick up either the Island of Dr. Moreau or the Time Machine, both of which I've read and I'm happy to let them be.

I have a very, very large list of books to address, with the expectation of addressing enormous gaps in my literary education. When I want a break, I'll read some light fare, collect all my Heinleins and Forester, then torment myself with books I've never read by George Eliot, Thackery, Hardy and Collins, plus others. I may even read Wuthering Heights one day, though that's hard to imagine. Trying to have an open mind, letting myself have a go at everything.

Shelby M. writes:

I was curious how Hunting interacts with Butchery. As an unskilled Hunter, I can bring down something with limited success, but if I don't also have butchery, what can I actually do with the carcass?

Answer: It's always possible for one individual to have more than one skill, especially a non-player character who has the benefit of their parents profession as their whole education. If my father knew both how to hunt and butcher, then I would know that too in the medieval-Renaissance setting.

But remember that we live in a culture of self-reliance that was born of the Anglo-American frontier, where people in the 18th and 19th century were forced to slaughter their own hogs and cattle, and of course their deer, often through trial and error, because souls would head out five, ten or fifteen miles into the wilderness to live alone with their families. The medieval village was, however, a far more communal lifestyle; as a hunter, you'd have thought nothing of taking your deer to the village butcher, who would have taken a haunch of your deer for his trouble and provided you the rest -- and when the butcher passed on, you'd have taken your deer to his son, who you'd have known since birth. No sense of self-reliance would ever have occurred to you; it would have seemed perfectly natural that some hunt, and some butcher, and that the world has a place for everyone. The very idea that you needed to know how to butcher your own meat might very well have seemed as alien to you as the idea that on Sundays you should preach your own sermon.

OhioHedgeHog writes:

I have a question that's been bothering me of late. My table has taken a month off. During such breaks I use the prep time to update/upgrade my trade tables and to root around and tinker with mechanics. We tend to playtest stuff about once every couple of months. If it solves a problem without creating new ones, we keep the homebrew. But it raises the question: at what point are we no longer playing D&D?

Several answers come to mind. The FIRST being “do we care?” I asked my sounding board DM's and they thought “when you can no longer drop a character sheet/monster stat block/item from the system without a great deal of rework.” ChatGPT advised that “as long as the core elements of storytelling, role-playing, and the collaborative nature of the game are present, you can consider it a form of Dungeons & Dragons.” Which isn't exactly satisfying either. Care to weigh in?

Answer: Speaking for myself, I don't care if I'm "playing D&D" as others might define the game. The acronym is merely a convenience, not a descriptor, since it aids in explaining to others what I'm doing on a particular Friday night, or what I'm working on this Monday afternoon. Regarding character sheets, stat blocks or items from the system, I personally can't see how the dropping of any of them makes the least necessity for a "great deal" of rework. If I rid the game of orcs or demons, how is a rework necessary? My game required no special attention when, early on, I chose to play without alignment, psionics or additional, superfluous character classes. I suppose these losses might get in the way for those who are dependent on company products, whose events hinge on one of the party characters being a specific race or alignment, but my game is far more flexible and depends upon an entirely different set of parameters.

I think it's funny that Chat chooses to designate "storytelling" and "role-playing" as two of its stool legs -- neither of which are the least needful for playing the game. The "storytelling" trope is only about 15 or 20 years old, has never been usefully defined and is, in fact, just an amorphous marketing term. "Role-playing" can be defined as "saying what my character does," in which case it has as much chance of being lost to the game as the fact that we play at a location upon the planet Earth. The third leg, "collaborative," is itself a puzzle. Everything that involves two humans in a room is "collaborative." As guidelines for things that "can't be lost," all three are useless as guidelines for defining anything, much less D&D.

A game is a matter of risk. Creating rules that impose risk on would-be players of any game requires a great deal of work, followed by an even greater amount of "rework." Chess in its present form took centuries to develop. Baseball took a hundred years to form into what was being played in the 1890s. Any idea that D&D as varied and complex as D&D has today reached anything like it's final form is ridiculous. Yet people cling to things they love in absurd ways. Imagine that you marry your partner at 18 and you continue to live and love together for 70 years ... is that marriage at 87 anything like what it was when you were both 18? Of course not. You have changed, the world has changed, the goalposts have changed, everything has changed. At which part of the process was the marriage not a marriage?

Whatever the game's risks were when we played the game at 15, those are certain to be insufficient for our needs at 50. The context, the rewards, the consequences of the game's action MUST evolve with the players, if immersion is yet to be obtained. The game's elements must adapt to the player's changing world perspective. The rules must become more fit, more sustainable. Otherwise, they cannot survive. Those who cannot evolve their game, who cling desperately to a past for the evocation of their nostalgia are doomed to receive less and less value for their time spent. The rest of us should disregard their cries of "truism" or "genuineness" as evidence of their immateriality to the ongoing process that is the game evolution. They matter no more to the landscape of role-playing than dinosaurs waiting for the stone to drop.

 _____

Thank you for your contributions.

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish 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.