The Well Is Dry

Well, let's get off the pot and write something.

Briefly, because I don't want to waste a lot of time with this, but look at the splatterfest that D&D has become: a lot of fervent baity material based on "solving problems" while, in fact, just vying for as many clicks as possible.  Click this to learn about myconids, click this to learn that difficult terrain exists, click this for "news," for "lore," for audio D&D tools.  Come one, come all, step right up, don't be shy!  Gather 'round folks, gather 'round, for today, right here in the heart of our great role-play selection, we've got spectacles that'll dazzle your senses and leave you begging for more!  Yes, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen of all ages, brace yourself for a journey into adventure, into amazing great weapon combats, into charm spells and worlds brought to life!  Do you want to know about paralysation?  About blindsight and truesight?  About mystery goblin dice?  Do you have the nerve to challenge the greatest monsters in the universe?  Well, folks, today's your lucky day because D&D is filled with wonders of every kind!

Okay, I'm an old man.  Which is one reason I know when smoke is being blown up my ass.  I might be impressed if any of this shit had real merit, but it's just the same crap repackaged from 1988.  When I read that Matt Colville, the great Matt Colville, has written a module that encapsulates the ESSENCE of D&D: exploration, combat and puzzle-solving, I'm pretty much fucking done.  Look, it's a movie.  It captures the essence of movie making: actors, settings and dialogue!  How can it not be amazing?!

This is why I haven't written of late.  Not because this shit is just recently out here, but because I've reached a point where the thing that I love, the thing that I have a passion for, has become the only thing for which the internet is a complete waste of my time.  I don't know, maybe there are home renovators in the world who can no longer watch home renovation videos, or read home renovation books.  Maybe there are knitting fanatics who would rather cut their throats before reading one more "Knitworld" magazine or watch one more amateur drop a stitch.  Maybe that's how it is for other people.  I don't know.  I've done an awful lot of cooking.  I'm not the greatest cook in the world; I don't think I'm the greatest DM either.  Then again, I can watch a cooking video.  I can still enjoy watching someone skillfully cut a watermelon into odd shapes.

But I cannot watch another fucking video about D&D.  Of any kind.  I can't listen to anybody for more than about 20 seconds.  I just want to scream.  I guess there are idiots in the world who must have random encounters explained, or told the need to make puzzles or why combat matters, but after 25 fucking years of this shit on the internet, it's really enough.  D&D is obviously too small a field to sustain more than a few dozen separate discussions.  Clearly, it takes no more than three weeks to say everything that a person needs to know ... and then, because that's all, the only thing to do is to just keep saying the same things, since the blind, ignorant, myopic morons who play this game won't get it on a 45th telling anyway.

My blood is up.

Breathe ... breathe ...

Most of what I've said in the last 16 years of this blog has fallen on deaf ears.  I've done my best to be clear, to include charts and pictures, to be creative with my descriptions and metaphors.  I've broken things down into smaller, digestible chunks and I've used relatable analogies and real life examples to help convey ideas.  I've ranted and I've spoken pedantically, I've lectured and written humour, I've answered questions and asked more than a few of my own, to elicit a meaningful response.  I've explained technical jargon from other fields and studies and showed how they related to the plain language of D&D and role-playing.  I've put up polls to understand the reader's point of view, I've endlessly called for comments to ascertain what else I might describe or how else I might address the problems people have.  I've repeated points, rephrased arguments, done all I could towards the goal of empowering the reader to be a better dungeon master, to be a better player, to recognise what makes either a good thing and even how to support and provide guidance to good players and DMs the reader might encounter.  I've dissected, deconstructed, used a pointer to describe structural and functional features of the game and taken unconventional routes to convey my ideas.

I'm not done.  I'll never be done.

But I am at a point where if I want to write something, or say something, there isn't a crutch left for me anywhere.  There are no readers piping up to suggest directions for me.  There's no one in the audience raising a hand and saying, "But Mr. Smolensk, when are you going to explain about this?"  There's no resource anywhere on the internet I can turn to, no treatise I can read, having anything to do with this subject.  All that's left to say can now only be those things I realise on my own, without help.

And let me say a few things about that.

I'm not Isaac Newton.  I don't pretend to be.  The man mastered physics and I master a stupid game called Dungeons and Dragons.  I don't need to be reminded of my place in the whole of human accomplishment.  But as an example of being on the fringe of a particular specialty, Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.  And the next book he published, Reports as Master of the Mint, which was not about physics, came out in 1701.  He wrote that report every year for the next 24 years.  His next book about math did not come out until 1707, twenty-one years after the Principia.

In the intervening time, he wrote letters to friends, people who understood him, and apart from that, according to reports, he spent a lot of time as a rich person in a rich house, in a firm effort to be unpestered.  He didn't publish anything about math for all those years because he didn't think he had anything worthwhile to say.

As I said, I'm not Newton.  I've had a lot to say, though of course it's all dreck compared to Newton. His words have survived four centuries and will go on that way.  My words are in danger of evaporating before Tuesday.  Let's not pretend there's a comparison here.

But when I have nothing to say, there's a tacit understanding that I really should write a blog post anyway, or else by Tuesday, my existence would be in danger of being forgotten.  So I come up with something.  As I said, however, this isn't like it used to be.  Once in awhile, somewhere on the net, I could read something by someone that sparked some part of my intuition, making a post possible.  Lately, not so much.  Not at all.  In fact, there's really fuck all out there.

And I haven't got anything new.  I underwent a helluva a lot of stress last month; we lived packed together like sardines, with a 3-year old boy to boot (and let me tell you, there's no question my grandson is a boy, in spades, complete with hurling and death defiance possibilities), without an argument taking place.  Which, given the intense volatility of both myself and my daughter, who matches me in every way and has the benefit of being 24 years younger than me, is something of a miracle.  We're both very glad about that.

It's done now, though, and for the present, I'm just not that into teaching.  I haven't anything new to say.  I have no fruitful new way to explain the art of DMing.  I haven't conceived of some profound new way to calculate encumbrance.  The well is dry.  I need rain.  A little rain and maybe I can go back to filling buckets, but for the present I'd be happy if I'd write one gawddamned paragraph for the Guide, which I can't even look at presently.  I'm sick to death of playing video games but, alas, it's about all I have the mind for.

Earlier this year, I filled the void by posting my Ternketh Keep.  Would anybody be interested in my giving an account of the whole of the offline campaign I've been running (with a seven-year break near the end) since 2005?  I could do that.  It would just be war stories, but it would fill blog posts.

I'm going to post this on my patreon, https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466, where the public can comment if they want.  If I get a few non-regular readers there say yes (the regulars, I know what you feel), then I'll get started.  Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy to let this blog stand dead until 2045, if need be.  If Newton could do it, I can too.