Doing Research

The next step in addressing practical advice for DMing would be to tell the reader, "Do you due diligence; read, research, study the material of the game world's time period.  Understand weapons and siege engines, underground environments, town planning, rural and urban social life, the organisation of authority, the church ... anything that helps install context and therefore ideas of how to describe things the players see.

Making a world requires understanding how the bits and pieces of the game world fit together, so that we can establish a fine, complex structure that may withstand the effort of some players to kick it to pieces.  Players are going to study, too, and they're going to use what they've learned to insinuate that they're allowed to do this, or that, which we're not ready for.  Knowledge is power.  If the players have it, and we don't, we're not running the table.  It's running us.

There are a couple of caveats here.  First, yes, studying isn't always a good time.  The written works about history and the things described above can be dry, and at the point where we start to get a handle on this stuff, much of it can be incomprehensible.  If you can, do it as a group.  When I first stumbled across D&D, the crowd of people I ran with got very much into books about feudalism and weapons, such that we went to libraries as a crowd to dig into those shelves.  We passed the books around as we read, making notes and discussing passages.  Nowadays, this can more easily be done by finding videos on the net and sending them to your players, while encouraging your players to send material to you.  Factual videos about factual content are far more valuable to a DM than all the videos about "D&D" put together.  A group approach can reduce the overall dryness of the effort, as can finding presenters online that are better a relaying information both usefully and with interest.

Secondly, try to remember that D&D is not an academic pursuit.  While the source material is largely factual, D&D doesn't have to be.  We can break the rules of what's physically practical in real life, by supposing whatever we want ... though there are fall-downs to this that may or may not be giving too much power to the players.

Let me give an example.  The movie Ladyhawke came out in 1984, not long after I began playing D&D.  The effort and research that went into the movie was simply marvelous; Richard Donner, the director, created a tour de force as regards a fantasy film ... though of course no one respect it now.  But put that aside.  Let's take this scene:

That's a two-shot crossbow, the picture clipped from 0:24 of the clip.  It's used in the scene to unrealistic effect; one shot kills, of course.  See?  I'm trashing the film already.

Practically, it's a completely bogus weapon, primarily because there's no rational way to load the device, evident once one knows either of the two ways a crossbow might be loaded.  But this is D&D ... and if a DM wants to include a two-shot crossbow, and overlook the limitations on it's being loaded, that's completely fair.  It's fun, players will love them ... in fact, every player will insist on having one to love, once it's included.  Very quickly, the players will want to fight every combat from a distance, the weapon is just that good.  This is the reason I don't include one in my campaign, because it overpowers the combat system if everyone has one.

'Course, now, I could say you needed a set amount of knowledge in my sage system to use one, or load one, but that's not important here.  In the reader's campaign, it's up to the reader to decide if it exists.  Point in fact, that decision doesn't have to acknowledge the crossbow's factual legitimacy.  We can break that boundary.

The clip provides a reasonable depiction of an outdoor drinking garden; the film takes place in Italy, east of Rome and south of Ancona, from the place names, the terrain and the architecture (the film never states it explicitly), so the minimalist shelter is quite believable.  As are the vines.  The armour isn't; but, as Hollywood armour goes, it's not bad.  Making armour for extras and stunt people is expensive, especially as it gets damaged when done on tick, so dumbing down the armour is just good fiscal sense in movie making.  Real armour is brutally hard to act in, or stand around in on a hot day for hours while the camera gets positions and other various arrangements made.

The weapons aren't bad, if a little shiny and too obviously not forged.  The combat choreography was done by the same fellow, William Hobbs, who did the Duellists, the Three Musketeers (1973-74), The Meaning of Life ("The Crimson Permanent Assurance"), Willow, Dangerous Liaisons, Cyrano De Bergerac, Robin Hood (1991), Rob Roy, Man in the Iron Mask and many, many more.  So the fighting is good.  Note the punching, using found objects as weapons, cowardly soldiers, etcetera.  The costume design throughout the film is astoundingly believable for the 14th-15th century.

Details matter, so if we're going to describe them to the players, we have to know the climate, the materials available to make clothes, the limits on construction and so on ... which is why I started the Streetvendor's Guide.  It's good if we understand these things, and that's a lot of practical research and work, along with the capacity to apply that research in game, at a moment's notice, because we have the kind of mind that can recall a thing from a page/book we read or a vid/film we watched.  Being able to snap that information up on the fly and patch it into the game helps with both establishing the tenor and atmosphere of the scene and with answering the dozens of questions that players generally ask.

But ...

I can't expect the reader to actually do this research.  I've asked for it before, and that's all well and good, but I need do more than give a reason.  It's a fair expectation that I should cover details of things myself and show how they can be applied to a campaign.  I was going to do so with this post, but my introduction went on longer than I expected, so we'll kick that effort down the road to the next post.