Why Bother?

I consider that it's my responsibility as a writer to keep others appraised of whatever knowledge I've accumulated from time to time.  Until very recently on this blog, I would write about what I was doing, hoping for feedback and perhaps a better idea how I could approach something, especially if I had some project over which I was puzzled.  The early concept of hex groups, for instance, or NTME, or how that developed into infrastructure and the description of facilities.  Similar patterns related to sage abilities also manifested over the years on this blog, rising from the extremely simplistic system I had in 2008 to the impossible-to-complete system I have today.  I do have my online players at the same to thank for that, as they encouraged me to give sage abilities to every class, which started that snowball.

Today's subject is the "RWG," as yet unlaunched, or even as yet had the ground broken ... the "random wilderness generator."  The vote on my patreon seems bent on having Arliss and Bertrand leave the dungeon to seek additional help destroying these hobgoblins, which sets them outside in a world they do not know, which I do not know, because that sounds more practical for the reader here.  I could just have them step out into my world, in Romania or Slovakia or Bratslaw, but then what value would this have for the reader, whose world is not my own?  It seems better that if we're going to produce a "random" generator, it ought to assume that nothing exists outside the dungeon until the die designates it so.

Here, I'm not looking for feedback, but to inform.  I expect that many of my typical readers have at one time or another, and probably closer to when they started playing than to the present, tried to randomly generate the outside world.  The original DMG's effort is utterly pathetic.  It consists of two tables, one that includes all of 10 possible terrains (of which one is "pond"), with 9 types of "settlement," with a slightly less than 1 in 7 chance of finding any person at all.  Thus, it creates a very grey-paste empty world, much like Gygax's dungeons, only more so.  When rolling a "city," absolutely no information or description is given, except that it has d6 x 10,000 people in it.  The whole thing consists of three-quarters of a page, a third of which is a single picture having nothing to do with the wilderness.

Though, admittedly, I did think it was one of the book's better pictures.

I expect that were I to receive feedback, most of it would boil down to, "why bother?"  Which is, I think, the first question to be answered.

Tuesday, I heard from an erstwhile friend of mine, featured in this video, who pressured me to "brand" the hell out of my videos, as he's sold his soul to the business world; he'd be the first to admit that.  He encouraged me to invent some sort of name for the overall "campaign" that's been launched through the existing videos and the content I've produced for the wiki, so that I have it for the title cards I learned how to create all of seven days ago.  "Grimstone Hollow" is just this dungeon; I expect there will be other dungeons.  So, at the moment, I'm playing with the notion of calling the overall campaign, "A Story that hasn't Finished Yet."  Because, first, it has the word "story" in the title, which is one of those buzz words in D&D that's a crap-concept, but actually means something apart from what the company has stamped on it, and second, because I think it gets to the heart of what we do here as dungeon masters and game world designers.

The title hit me as I tussled around with chatGPT, which can be a good sounding board for these things, as it has lots of really garbage ideas (like anyone, including myself), what at the same time it's tapped into vast amounts of human knowledge, much more so than my tiny ape brain holds.  Anyway, it was going on about standard D&D ideals and I was explaining for it, and myself, why I'm opposed to those ideals, and I stumbled across the principle that "a happy ending is a story that hasn't finished yet."  Which is true, and is in fact one of the oldest take-downs in human history, where the smart-as-a-whip scholar Solon bitch-slaps Croessus in the 6th century BCE.  Not how my classics professors would have put it, but they were always stuffy.  Wikipedia is pretty lax on it's tale-telling; the original can be read at the outset of Herodutus' The Histories.

I had chat discuss what it felt about the sentiment, "A happy ending is a story that hasn't finished yet," and found in its overwritten answer the phrase, "The Game is the sum of all events, including those yet to come."

That ... is brilliant.

And it is D&D.  In my last post, I argued that a quintessential part of this game is that it doesn't end, and to that I'll add that the lack of ending means that, much of the time, in an engaged campaign, the party lives as much in the future of the campaign as it does the past.  That is, they're going somewhere, they're thinking about where they're going, they're planning for what they'll meet, they're buying equipment and toughening up their characters abilities for when that time comes ... and this incorporates a considerable amount of the game's discussion and play.  Hell, the creation of the character itself is a plan for the future.

Most people are not future-oriented.  They are present oriented, or past oriented; they're either hedonistic, living for pleasure or avoiding pain, or they don't think it pays to play; or they remember all the good old times, or their thoughts are nothing but regret about all that they've done.  Both these mind sets are anathema to D&D, because either the game becomes about what we've accomplished, or it becomes about what momentary bit of pleasure or excitement we can invent for ourselves in this immediate moment.  These people can't be encouraged to engage in a long-term campaign because they're not built for it.

I haven't ever seen that so clearly before.  The first question I should ask a perspective player is, "what are you doing next month?"  If the answer is, "I don't know, I'll probably be working," I should say, "Thank you, you wouldn't be a good fit for my game."

If their answer is a long description of how they're having their backyard remodelled, or how their sister is visiting and all the things they're going to do, my answer can be, "C'mon and play."

I live in the future.  A writer has to.

Like others, the argument has been for more than a decade that the "story" shouldn't be made before the players sit down to play, and that it's this reason that the concept of "story" in company-oriented D&D is such a crap concept, because the company is pounding the drum for stories that are fully invented and in place before we know who the players are.  But the game itself isn't about having the future come to pass, it's about rushing towards the future and seeing what happens.

When I began recording this combat, I had no idea what was going to happen; I didn't want to script it, or run it through and then record it; I wanted to maintain the premise that whatever happened, I'd just sort it out afterwards.  If the characters died, then I'd roll new characters and end things there. Because this is what D&D is ... it's trying something in the future, having that future happen, then picking up the pieces, whatever they happen to be.

Nearly all the destruction of D&D that's taken place has been a decades-long effort to obliterate this functional part of the game.  Players don't want to accept consequences, DMs don't want to deal with unexpected events, even die rolling has become overwhelmingly designed to produce less and less random results.  This is all that hyper-multiple modifiers to a die roll are, or exhortations for "average damage rolls," because rolling a d8 is too random, takes too long, or otherwise threatens to upset the expected results of the battle.  We want to get the battle over with as fast as possible, within 75 seconds if possible, because battle is a problem to be solved, not a part of the game's thrill.

Listened to that podcast all the way through yesterday; not so bad, for what it is.  Part of the argument being made is why rolling both attack dice and damage dice at the same time still isn't fast enough, since average damage rolls are even faster; roll to hit with a long sword, and if success, it always does 5 damage.

Overall, it sounds strange to me.  The video combat I recorded runs not quite 14 minutes; and it wouldn't last more than 6 if it weren't for my explaining things.  I grant that D&D combat in the later editions is ridiculously long, for reasons the video describes; but then, when you're rolling so many dice for damage, what would you expect?  At it's heart, however, D&D isn't hockey.  It's baseball.  With a well-designed version, when the attack die succeeds, the damage die is like watching the hit ball soar up into the air, not knowing if it's going to be caught, not knowing if its going to be a home run ... it's a paced, carefully orchestrated moment of tension to have that die bounce and turn up a good hit or a bad one.  Gutting this feature, for the sake of time, would be like automatically awarding the player two bases with every hit as an "average."

Average damage is really fucked-up thinking.

But to get to my point, I didn't know how the combat would turn out.  And now, if they do go outside, I don't know what's waiting for them there.

Not an "adventure," at least not in the way that the company, or even some others I respect, imagine it would be.  The adventure doesn't have to be following a set of guidelines that are guaranteed to produce a particular result that the player is fine with.  It can be a series of "who-the-fuck-knows?" incidents that, together, produce the unexpected, perhaps difficult, perhaps astounding consequence.  It's picking up a thread on the ground that runs ten thousand miles and following it, to see where it goes.

It the way I'm using it, a random generator does this.  It's not the best strategy for a real-life game, because we don't have the kind of time it takes to check tables or, as in my case, to build them from scratch out of nothing.  But by seeing how theoretical tables could work, by seeing what needs to be accounted for, or how this leads to the next thing, we may grasp certain fundamental concepts that tell us how to design that thread for our players.  This is why its worth bothering about.  Because it provides a framework for our thinking process, when we have to instantly decide on the next thing, because the players are there now.  A framework that, as it grows in complexity, becomes a template for designing on the spot something that otherwise would take weeks to set up and get ready.