Dungeons & Dragons White Box 17

Sadly, there are 11 pages left of spells to do. And I have done... two.

Sigh.

Continual Light: This spell creates a light wherever the caster desires. It sheds a circle of illumination 24" in diameter, but does not equal full daylight. It continues to shed light until dispelled. Range: 12".

This is almost, but not quite the "light" spell. Now, instead of "a spell to cast light" this "creates a light." This one "sheds a circle."  The stumble here is that while a lamp (or the moon, or a fire) sheds light, it does so in the sense of "to radiate or fall from," as from a place of origin. The spell is an act, it's performed, and once created, it doesn't continue to fall. But still, this is a quibble.

The larger problem is, again, the unrestricted, unending presence of the light. While mages are busy using dispel magic getting rid of all the wizard locks in the world (see previous post), there are third level and better mages littering the world with eternal glowing spheres, obviating the need for torches in towns, villages and large structures throughout the world, while two or three shifts are ongoing in guild houses who now are able to conduct business around the clock. Large cities can be seen ten or twenty miles away, while residents find it difficult to sleep and stress/insomnia is killing people as it was in the 70s and 80s, before most cities began replacing mercury streetlights with sodium. Groups of 30+ mages are touring the continent, light-bombing granary and garner outposts with light, or literally spreading lights along the roads, from end to end. The gods in space can identify Paris, London and Venice just as astronomers can today. It's not the D&D world you thought it was.

"That farmer's field over there? It's been lit up since 1127, when Nathan the Proud thought he was being funny. We've asked and asked for someone to come dispel it, but still no one's available."

And still, what does "not equal" to full daylight mean?

Knock: A spell which opens secret doors, held portals, doors locked by magic, barred or otherwise secured gates, etc. Range: 6".

This is not so bad. The "etc." is more or less the same lack as found in hold portal, but in fact there are a few more examples here, and it lacks the word "like" these things. One word makes an enormous difference.

There really isn't a need to mock these spells for the time period. In most cases, the duration counted only the single combat or one-session attitude that the game held for the majority of the participants. The issue arises where the White Box itself tries to be the other thing, talking about a campaign as though this set of rules could also be applied to that, when it's self-evident that this is the designers writing cheques their rule system couldn't cash.

It's also worth the mockery for that present day set who, like wannabe hipsters, portray themselves as the smug players of "real" D&D, "as written." When, obviously, they're not playing it that way. They're making up their own boundaries and "it actually meant this" mechanics, to cover up the failings that are obviously here.

Fly: By means of this spell the user is able to fly at a speed of up to 12"/turn. The spell lasts for the number of turns equal to the level of the Magic-User plus the number of pips on a six-sided die which is secretly determined by the referee.

Okay... sigh.  12" = 120 feet underground, but 120 yards in the wilderness...

(How the spell knows, don't ask me. If I'm in a huge cavern, does that count as the outdoors; and at which point does the cavern become large enough that the spell knows to propel me forward... oh, never mind)

You've cast the spell and you're travelling 120 yards per turn in the outdoors, which is 12 yards per round, which is 10 seconds in basic, so you're travelling at 1.2 yards per second if you use that system. But if you're using AD&D, you're travelling at 0.6 feet per second... which is 7.6 inches per second, or just double the speed you're levitating upward.  And this is funny: AD&D did not fix this. The spell description on p.73 says: "12" per move," the last word not being defined at all in the book. Just a minute, I've got a wall for my head right here.

Meanwhile, the average airspeed velocity of a European swallow is 32.3 feet per second, which is pretty close to that of a falling rock (for the first second).  Since there is no such thing as an African swallow, we just don't know.

By the time the mage has crossed a distance of, say, the length of a tennis pitch (we'll use the 15th century number of 78 feet), which would take 2 minutes, 10 seconds, the swallow would have circled the entire pitch (perimeter 216 ft.), allowing for a 5 foot buffer around the outside to be sure no corners were cut, 17.8 times. That's not flying. To put this another way, if I'm walking, just loafing along, 2½ miles per hour, I'm moving at 3.67 ft. per second. It only takes me 21.25 seconds to walk the pitch. Anybody besides me see the problem here?

I suggest changing the name of the spell to "Hover."

The secret die roll?  The early dungeon master was encouraged to be a fucking dick. It's right there in the rules.  If Gygax wrote this, and I think he did, this alone justifies any ill feeling I have ever had toward the man for my entire life time and the rest of his.  

Any person capable of codifying a rule like this in a game set is, by definition, the kind of person who would take advantage of someone in real life if the opportunity arose. This is ungentlemanly behaviour, which is the reason when it used to be revealed that you could portray this sort of behaviour, you were banned for life from decent culture. This is the person I conceive Gygax to be.  You want to know why this past-time is thick with assholes? There. There it is. A mentality that believes it's acceptable, even fun, to build a system where the players are constantly at the mercy of an arbitrary power, cannot be one I ever respect, no matter what other accomplishments he may have achieved.

I am not a fool.

That's not even half a page from the book, but I'm going to have to stop now.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 16

Let's move on.

Levitate: This spell lifts the caster, all motion being in the vertical plane; however, the user could, for example, levitate to the ceiling, and move horizontally by use of his hands. Duration: 6 turns + the level of the user. Range (of levitation): 2"/level of Magic-User, with upwards motion at 6"/turn.

Of course I understand the spell, because I've played it, starting with others explaining it to me and then me explaining it to others, and rewriting it several times for my game world. Read through the eyes of an AD&D player, it makes perfect sense.

But AD&D did not always exist. And if we were talking about the value of a medical study printed in 1973, we wouldn't use an example of a later medical study done in 1979 to discuss the value of the first study between those years. And if the later study advanced and improved the earlier study, we would never refer to the earlier study at all. But we have D&D players who are out there shouting that AD&D is crap, and that this is the "best" version of D&D... so it's fair game to discuss what these rules say without those lagter interpretations.  Ready?

Some parts of this are laughable. Later iterations clarified that the caster's gear and equipment are included, and limited; here, we must assume this is true, that the caster is not literally lifted out of his or her clothes and forced to rise naked upwards. That would be quite the limitation on the spell, but it if did work that way, I imagine a number of players would just roll with it.

It doesn't explain why there is a "range" associated with the spell, but again, we know from later iterations that we mean that the spell can be used to lift objects and other persons, not just the caster. Still, the spell plainly specifies the caster and does not explicitly state that anything else can be moved.

Point in fact (and that's a pun), the caster does not levitate in a "plane" but in a "line."  A plane is a two dimensional expanse, which if taken literally would mean that the caster can move both vertically and horizontally, so long as it's on that imaginary flat plane without an zed-axis. Planes have an x- and y- axis, so it's clearly the wrong word used here. That is, clear to us. To anyone who actually knew the meaning of the word, this spell write-up is a complete fuck-up. Beware the geometry major who tries to run D&D in 1974.

Just an aside: the absence of horizontal movement was imposed to limit levitation so that it wouldn't compete with fly as a 2nd-level spell. But given the actual speed with which one moves when levitating, and if all movement was forced to maintain either a pure vertical or pure horizontal motion each round — up, over, up, up, over, down and so on — would the effectiveness of the spell really be increased by that much?  Outdoors, it's 6 yards a round (60 yrds/turn). That's hardly flying.

Since a "round" isn't defined in the original set (Basic went with 10-seconds, AD&D went with 60-seconds) we don't know how fast this actually was. AD&D specified levitation at 20 ft./round. That's an amazing 4 inches a second. If we use that length of round and the White Box speed, it's 18 ft./round, or 3.6 inches per second; that's the speed of a 19th century elevator. The Basic round increases this to 21.6 in./s. An elevator in the 1950s could do 70 in./s. Modern high rises offer double that. In any case, there's just no way a speed like this can compete with the third level spell. So why the limitation at all?

But, yeah... "We've just always done it that way." Sure. That's okay.

Phantasmal Forces: The creation of vivid illusions of nearly anything the user envisions (a projected mental image so to speak). As long as the caster concentrates on the spell, the illusion will continue unless touched by some living creature, so there is no limit on duration, per se. Damage caused to viewers of a Phantasmal Force will be real if the illusion is believed to be real. Range: 24".

I'd love to know the reason way per se is underlined.

Honest, I personally have to see this spell as a sign of my "growing up" as a DM. For a long, long time, I honestly gave the benefit of the doubt to things like the above, trying to run them in my games and struggling with back and forths between players as we struggled through spells that included no mechanics at all in their design. Likewise with the "belief" attached to illusion. We can all think of examples of the "if you believe it, it's real" trope — culminating in this. For ages I blindly obeyed these incredibly not-fleshed out "rules," telling my characters to make saving throws to see if they "believed" in the dragon... until I smacked myself hard enough in the face that I was finally able to stop being this stupid.

Sorry, sorry... if you still follow this rule, then yes, of course, it's a brilliant idea. Don't believe the writer of this post, he's just an illusion.

When I ceased trying to squint hard enough to make the spell work, I abandoned it. D&D does not work nearly as well when it has to resolve epistemology as a rule set. And that's why I'm not going to deconstruct this line by line. 

Locate Object: In order for this spell to be effective it must be cast with certain knowledge of what is to be located. Thus, the exact nature, dimensions, coloring, etc. of some magical item would have to be known in order for the spell to work. Well known objects such as a flight of stairs leading upwards can be detected with this spell however. The spell gives the user the direction of the object desired but not the distance. The desired object must be within range. Range: 6" + 1"/level of the Magic-User employing the spell, i.e. a “Necromancer” has a 16" range.

The exact dimensions? Are we talking about sixteenths of an inch? 32nds? 64ths? Are we talking about the number of atoms? By colour, do you mean, "green"? Or does the object being chartreuse in colour mean that specific shade has to be mentioned? I just don't want to be accused of making a magic item too easy to find. After all, spells shouldn't be useful like that. Picture it... a necromancer capable of raising the dead must apparently pause, cast the spell and say... "I can sense the stairs — within 160 feet!" as an act of mystical genius. Meanwhile, the rest of the party is standing beside the stairs, waiting.

It's easy to feel the insecurity here — that the players might, gasp!, use the spell to solve the puzzle the DM laboured so hard upon. "You find yourself in a room with three doors... One of the doors leads to the object you seek, the other two, near certain death!"

Mage casts spell. Points. "It's that one."

In a way, it's like how cellphones spoiled so many traditional horror story structures. Early D&D was written for the same 1950s/60s landscape... and just like we had to cripple the phone so that "no signal" became the trope that enabled all tropes, there are certain logical spells in the game that spoil the standard D&D set-ups. So, likewise, we have to cripple the spell. "you can only find it if you know what you're looking for... exactly, when it really matters, but no, you don't need to know the colour of the stairs." That kind of thing.

The spell doesn't actually say what happens if the object isn't in range, but I suppose "no signal" is a fair enough equivalent. Or maybe the mage's magic 8-ball reads, "Reply hazy, try again." Presumably after moving ten feet ahead.

If I cast the spell and there's no reply, is the spell wasted? I suppose probably yes. Doesn't exactly make it a spell you want to fill a slot with. I mean, if you know the thing exists, but not the colour, the spell is no good, and if you know where the thing is already, the spell is no good, so...

Invisibility: A spell which lasts until it is broken by the user or by some outside force (remember that as in CHAINMAIL, a character cannot remain invisible and attack). It affects only the person or thing upon whom or which it is cast. Range: 24".

Raise your hand if you've read the H.G. Wells novel.

Ah, apparently, in my last post I was wrong. The spell does say it can affect a person or thing. My mistake. I'll try and do better.

Things can't attack, so they have to be detected, and to be made to reappear, the magic has to be dispelled or else it lasts forever. Presumably, the spell's effect on a person isn't the aforementioned novel, in which the character had to be naked in order to be invisible, since otherwise his clothes could be seen. And presumably no recipient will be affected long enough to go insane like Griffin does... perhaps. Since the spell is so easily cast, however, and has no time limit, there's nothing whatsoever to stop the mage from simply living this way all the time. Or at least until attacking someone. Griffin had to worry about rain outlining his body, or footprints appearing in mud or dust as he walked, or the food he ate not disappearing at once, while living in constant fear that his invisible body would be tripped over or beset upon by rats... but then, again, Griffin had to be naked to pull it off.

Point in fact, if I cast invisibility on myself three weeks ago, and only today attack someone, that means I can immediately become invisible again, right? Because I haven't used that spell slot today.

Hm. As an afterthought... can the mage make everyone in the party invisible... recasting the spell each day?

Wizard Lock: Similar to a Hold Portal, this spell lasts indefinitely. It can be opened by a Knock without breaking the spell. A Wizard Lock can be passed through without a spell of any kind by a Magic-User three levels above the one who placed the spell.

Changing the name of the spell from "portal" to "lock" creates some issues. The spell doesn't define what constitutes a "lockable" surface or whether the thing must even have a mechanism. The assumption of a door comes from players importing real-world logic and dungeon architecture into the rules, not from anything stated in the spell.

Which brings us back to the original interpretation, that the spell could be cast on any kind of barrier — a cave mouth, a gate or even an open passage. But it doesn't need to be a passage because there's no "moving through" a space as there is with hold portal. As such, feasibly, a trunk, a scabbard, a scrollcase, even a privie, virtually anything that can be closed could be effectively "locked."

How many things? Well, if cast once a day, hundreds of things a year. Once the wizard is three levels higher than at the point when the spell was put in place, everything in a wizard's home could be so locked. In fact, if you're 6th, it's worth it to have a third level mage come around every day and just lock things. You can ignore the locks, while everyone lesser than you can't. It's a great way to manage the servants.

Just imagine if this has been going on for two or three hundred years, with vast parts of the world so locked up, while the upper class of wizards are free to go as they please while everyone class has to ask some mage's permission (and knock spell) to pump water. We'd end up with a whole civilisation quietly suffocating under the accumulated locks of hundreds of wizards creating ten thousand such locks per lifetime. And when they die, having failed to undo their magic, it just lingers, waiting to be dispelled somehow.

Detect Evil: A spell to detect evil thought or intent in any creature or evilly enchanted object. Note that poison, for example, is neither good nor evil. Duration: 2 turns. Range: 6".

 "Evil" is such a fascinating negative space in the books. Evil men, evil monsters, "arenas of evil," the word proliferates like a virus through the books... but naught a single word is given regarding what it is or how it's defined. Presumably, as ordinary individuals living in a materialist world in the 1970s, we just know what it is, don't we?

I, of course, know evil when I see it. Usually, it's connected to my computer, it begins with "G", ends with "E" and there's no protection against it. I mean, at all.

In the end, evil in D&D isn’t a metaphysical principle or a moral law — it’s a referee’s ruling. The DM is the world’s conscience, the cosmos’s final arbiter, the invisible judge who decides whether a thought pings as malignant or merely inconvenient. The rules hint at theology, but what they really describe is authority. "Evil" is whatever the person behind the screen declares it to be. Of course, since the DM, unlike a priest, doesn't have to suffer the consequences or resolve personal behaviour based on what's actually said about evil, or what holy writ says, it's really a matter of extreme convenience, isn't it? Thus, the spell's detection of what you can't see pretty much relies upon a DM's interpretation that you also... can't see.

The effect of being told what's evil and what's not by an individual whose directives are "make the game happen" is that the spell becomes "Detect Narrative." By locating the evil, we learn that "the story is this way," which tells us what to do next... conveniently for the game runner.

It also has the side-effect for murder-hoboism by clarifying, clearly, that it's okay to kill all these creatures because they are, by definition, "evil." The game's logic really doesn't need this universal solvent — a game can just be a game, it doesn't need to self-justify — but most likely there were a number of early participants who viewed the game's structure and thought to themselves, "Wow, this really is just fun based on slaughtering a lot of people, isn't it?"  Which awoke a trigger in them that said, like a premature quoting of a later Schwarzeneggar film, "Yes, but they were all bad."

Then, however, the thing got turned on its head when a subculture of D&D got into the, "We're evil and we're killing the good guys" cult, which parents overheard and then, in the 80s, we were off to the races. But that's something for another day.

ESP: A spell which allows the user to detect the thoughts (if any) of whatever lurks behind doors or in the darkness. It can penetrate solid rock up to about 2' in thickness, but a thin coating of lead will prevent its penetration. Duration: 12 turns. Range: 6"

Anybody want to guess how many times "a thin coating of lead" turns up in an archeological or historical site prior to the 20th century?

In a word, never. Certainly, lead could be used — melted, beaten, or alloyed — but it couldn't be used to coat anything until electromagnetism, and then only very small objects. Plus, liquifying lead tends to produce a horrendously toxic gas, which when encountered tends to drastically shorten one's expected lifespan. The idea of anyone deliberately coating an area underground with molten lead would have been suicidal... and before someone suggests a humanoid that's immune to lead poisoning, we'd still run headlong into physics. Immunity doesn’t solve the engineering problem. Even if some hypothetical humanoid could shrug off lead’s toxicity, they’d still face the practical impossibility of producing and applying a uniform metallic coating without modern tools. You can’t just melt lead in a cauldron and slather it on like paint; it solidifies too quickly, cracks when it cools unevenly, and flakes from stone or wood. So you still could "read thoughts" through it.

On one level, I can forgive the authors for this. The 1970s didn't really offer much in the way of reliable and wide-reaching educational television or documentaries, or even magazines to any large degree, so that many people raised on the cultural imagination of the 1950s to 70s were at the mercy of pulp science leaking into comic books and Cold War pop physics. In 1969, it was possible to consider yourself an "educated" person while yet lacking any real knowledge about the emergence of electricity or magnetism, computers, space or any number of hard sciences unless you were personally a part of that field.

The post-war decades turned science into a kind of modern mysticism, where scientific literacy and scientific "aura" were hardly distinguished from one another. I grew up in that culture, just as it was breaking free from the bullshit... and my 20s and 30s were filled with "tin-foil hat" people, who resisted hard against the growing dissention that systematically made former "prophetic intellects" like Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung and even Freud far less influential on advancing, less fuzzy thinking. Presently, when we hear people speaking about the cosmic mind or spirits speaking through "vibrations" and such, we know they're nuts... but in 1974, there were enough people who believed it that you could go on television, be interviewed and come away respected. It was a quirky time.

Thus, we have to question why "ESP" is even here. The idea was an entirely a twentieth-century idea, born from the fusion of late-Victorian spiritualism and early modern psychology. The term itself was coined by the American psychologist J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. Rhine and his wife, Louisa, tried to study telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition under laboratory conditions, using those famous decks of Zener cards with circles, stars and wavy lines. Their experiments were meant to give psychic phenomena a scientific veneer — controlled tests, statistical analysis — though their results never held up under scrutiny.

Reading minds doesn't have a precedent in medieval folklore or theology.  The concept of one person directly accessing another’s private thoughts simply didn’t exist in that framework. That entire architecture of the mind — the notion of hidden motives, repression, unspoken thoughts — is a Freudian inheritance, or at least a modern psychological one. Medieval people certainly believed in temptation, sin, conscience and divine inspiration, but those all assumed a moral soul, not a psychological self. The soul's secrets were between a person and God; they weren't "buried thoughts" to be decoded by another human. A confessor didn't read your mind; he guided you to confess what your soul already knew. The very premise of mental privacy, of thought as an internal stream with content separate from speech, is modern.

Thus it appears in D&D as a cultural hitchhiker... with "extrasensory perception" being one of those tin-foil hat belief structures. For a long time it had been a fringe obsession, turning up in films and books, especially science fiction — Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, even Beneath the Planet of the Apes. It's position in a medieval fantasy wargame is highly suspect... they couldn't even think of a suitably period-type name for it.

Yet, weirdly, I still include it in my game. I guess it sort of fits. As presented here, its effectively indistinguishable from a very strong hear noise ability. Funny that "use it to discover rumours about adventures that could be pursued" never came to anyone's mind.

That's enough.

Caveat

A caveat, if you will... I spent some time discussing this with a friend and there are some points I'd like to share about these posts, why I write them and what I expect to accomplish.

First, let me start by saying that probably, as a reader, you're never going to like me — or, at the very least, you'll never quite be comfortable liking me. That's because my concern is never with breaking things to the reader gently, or withholding my opinions because I know it will hurt someone's feelings, or suspend the feeling that others have of my intentionally saying something that makes them "feel stupid." That is probably what's going  on as I work my way through these White Box posts. Likely, you've read these passages a hundred times and it's never occurred to you that the light spell, for example, is as badly written as it is. And now that it's pointed out that it's barely English, that it looks like it was written by an 8-year-old, now you feel stupid for having not noticed it.

And your knee-jerk response is to think, "Fuck you Alexis for pointing it out. It was fine until you did that." The reason it was fine wasn't because you were stupid... in fact, you know that. The reason it was fine was because the rule itself was a placeholder for how you used it in your game — which was never what the rule said anyway. But since now you know the rule is written badly, you're questioning everything, and thinking to yourself, "Well fuck. How did I miss that."  To which the common response is, "I didn't miss anything, the rule's fine, fuck you Alexis." It kind of comes bang-bang-bang like that. And I'm willing to put up my hand and own that, because I don't actually give a fuck about your game. I'm not here for that. I'm here to educate. And if you don't like education, well... that's fine for you. But that doesn't affect why I write this blog.

My interest in writing stems from the desire to take things apart and examine them for what I think they are, based on subjects I've spent a lifetime studying — D&D for example, or game design, or history, or writing itself, and the various aspects of life related to these things. My process in gathering knowledge has included hundreds and hundreds of times of my "feeling stupid" because it was explained to me in not nice detail why I fucked up a print run or why the article I wrote was shit, or what a player felt about my DMing or any number of times that I've had to take stock of what I thought I knew and accept I didn't know as much as I thought I did. And while yes, those moments made me feel like shit from time to time, and brought me down, and often humiliated me, such that I didn't want to face again the person who took me to task or paraded my mistakes in front of others... on the greater whole, those moments have better shaped me for the things I want to do now. In a manner that I actively seek out content that is very, very hard to watch or listen to, because I know that looking the horror in the eye will transform me a little more each time, for the better. I want to be made to feel stupid. It's my thing.

Unfortunately for the reader, however, I'm not made to feel stupid when what I get back is self-evidently wrong. Now, I get it, the writer doesn't realise it's so; the writer thinks they're absolutely right.  I quote this from this book:

Sleep: A Sleep spell affects from 2-16 1st level types (hit dice of up to 1 + 1), from 2-12 2nd-level types (hit dice of up to 2 + 1), from 1-6 3rd-level types, and but 1 4th-level type (up to 4 + 1 hit dice).

And I say,

"The other obvious problem is, of course, that the spell assumes homogeneity among the targets. If I'm fighting an enemy human character party comprised of two 2nd-level, three 3rd-level and 2 4th-level, what dice do I roll?"

This clearly shows that I, at least, am confused about the language. In my 45 years of playing D&D, no table I ever played with, no player who ever employed this spell (and the same basic premise is repeated in AD&D), ever, ever, tried to argue with me that it meant this:

"In regards to your question about Sleep and who it effects in a mixed party: the description of who is effected is an "and" statement, meaning you roll all the dice for each level, not pick one."

Since no one ever proposed this in a game I played (and I've run the sleep spell in a combat hundreds of times), again, whether the interpretation is right or wrong, there's clearly doubt about how it's interpreted, which is the fucking point of the post. The post is not a discussion on what the interpretation ought to be, but upon the fact that interpretations are not consistent, which is a fault of the language, not a fault of mine for failing to understand the writing exactly as everyone else understands it.

This is why I am getting pissy now after writing 15 of these posts, because I have said, again and again, that the writing is the failure here, not my interpretation of it. And I have said how you interpret it is not relevant to this discussion, again repeatedly. And still regardless of this repeated point, I'm still getting people who are rushing forward to say, "I interpret it thusly." 

I'll take a breath now, because if I don't, I'll lose my temper.

You don't have to read these posts. They don't need to affect how you play your game. I am not God. I can't decide how you wish to interpret these spells. But if I were going to write it so that it clearly gave the interpretation that was offered as a correction to mine, I would have written it,

A sleep spell affects, collectively, 2-16 of any 1st level creatures in a group, plus 2-12 of any 2nd level creatures in a group, plus 1-6 3rd level creatures in a group, plus 1 4th level creature that might be in the group, should there be more than one type of hit die present.

But it doesn't say that. Which caused the people I played with to interpret it as, 

A sleep spell affects 2-16 of any 1st level creatures in a group, OR 2-12 of any 2nd level creatures in a group, OR 1-6 3rd level creatures in a group, OR 1 4th level creature that might be in the group, should there be more than one type of hit die present.

Because the original doesn't make this perfectly clear, these are but two of the possible interpretations that might exist throughout the zeitgeist. And this is the argument I'm making. NOT, as is the want of people who read and comment about D&D, "which is right," but "it's impossible to know which is right."

And the fact that a lot of people leaving comments on this post can't fucking understand this? Yes, that makes you stupid. Because you're arguing against an argument I'm not making.

This is why you're never going to like me, because I don't "fit" into the universe of your debate style. What you think these conversations are about are not what these conversations are about — and that is exactly why in my answers I have trouble not treating you like a stupid fucking child. Read all the fucking words. Not just the ones that fit with your compulsion to make a point that aren't relevant here.

Or don't read this blog. You obviously don't belong here, you don't want to learn anything and I'm not here to confirm your ignorance about D&D. If you want that, go read Maliszewski. He writes every day and he'll never challenge a thought you have. There's plenty over there to give you something to scan while you drink your coffee.

I don't want you here.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 15

Light: A spell to cast light in a circle 3” in diameter, not equal to full daylight. It lasts for a number of turns equal to 6 + the number of levels of the user; thus, a 7th-level Magic-User would cast the spell for 13 turns.

And thus the danger of "rules as written," complimented by the DM who resents a player who points out grammar and language as evidence that the rule says something very different than the DM supposes. The above would make an excellent example of bad grammar if ever we need to write something brief and interesting on the blackboard for students to deconstruct. As written, it clearly specifies that the light is cast into a circle, and not that it creates one.

What circle is it, to begin, that light is cast into? The spell does not read, as it should, "A spell that creates light as a 3-inch diameter circle." Cast is a verb, here in present tense, whereas it plainly references something that is already accomplished. A six-word phrase somewhere in the book that simply said "all circles are measured by diameter" would have saved the need to keep including the explanation over and over. Moreover, like the need to use gold pieces as a unit of measure, why is it that "inches" must be used for distance, always? Yes, I understand, this was the measurement used on the battle map, but surely that could also be stated once somewhere in the document, allowing us to use "30 ft." throughout the book, which would have been clearer. In fact, I do think it is mentioned somewhere, though I haven't encountered it yet, which obviates the use of inches here.

What is "not equal to full daylight"? Is that a measurement of some kind? Night is not equal to full daylight, as is dusk. The definition of "full daylight" is the natural light of the sun and sky during the day from sunrise to sunset, so this includes light during storms, light under overcast, light during fog and so on... since it's not a measure of illumination. When we say, "the crime was committed in full daylight," it means "during the light of day." A newspaper is not apt to specify if it was cloudy or sunny at the time. I know, I know, you think it's a quibble, but it's not. I have zero idea from this how much illumination is involved... if the spell caused "full daylight," instead of "not equal to," it would be clearer. As written, it provides no real information at all. We might as well say, "not as hot as a fire."

Turns again imposes the ridiculous measuring approach that inches and gold pieces do. Here it says 6 turns + the number of levels of the user. The example helps, since otherwise we'd be stuck adding "turns" to "levels" which are not math terms. In any case, the reader is forced to calculate, (6 turns = 60 rounds = 60 minutes = 1 hour) + (7 turns = 70 rounds = 70 minutes = 1 hour, 10 minutes) = 2 hours, 10 minutes. Whereas the spell could say, 1 hour +10 minutes per level. The alternative language is just baffling... especially when you consider that in terms of a wargame conflict between units represented by miniatures, a battle is almost never going to last more than 30 rounds... which means that the only reason to keep track of the light spell is for non-combat simulation purposes. So why measure it in combat simulation terms?

I take the time to speak about this at length here because it comes up throughout the book, quite stubbornly, like a dumb-ass mule-headed asshole that won't let go of something that plainly isn't working. This is the prime, number one bit of evidence I have to show that Gygax (for this is absolutely his baby, it shows because he was still espousing this crap 10 years later in text) wasn't a genius. I'd argue he probably wasn't housebroken. The reader may take umbrage — but stripped of the need to worship the man's memory, this is the same critical discipline we'd apply to any work that was more than 40 years old, about a writer who didn't know how to edit himself. It's egregious and there is no justification, nor is there a justification of any present-day individual who feels that "rules as written" makes sense as an approach to any sort of writing.

Charm Person: This spell applies to all two-legged, generally mammalian figures near to or less than man-size, excluding all monsters in the "Undead" class but including Sprites, Pixies, Nixies, Kobolds, Goblins, Orcs, Hobgoblins and Gnolls. If the spell is successful it will cause the charmed entity to come completely under the influence of the Magic-User until such time as the “charm” is dispelled (Dispel Magic). Range: 12".

One small thing... what does the spell do? We see who it affects; we are told the individual "comes under the influence" of the caster. Exactly what does that mean?

Influence to what extense? Does the target obey direct orders? Does it interpret those orders literally or contextually? Does it retain self-preservation? Does it act of its own will but with shifted loyalties? Does it remember what's happened while influenced? How does it react therefore when dispel is imposed? While obeying, does the subject retain self-awareness? Can it give warning? Can it express remorse? Can it swear and rail against the caster? If the spell allows the monster to suicide, how is this spell in any way different from a much more powerful "death" spell?  Isn't that pretty much a far too powerful spell to be counted in the same breath as "light" and "read languages"?

None of that is answered, and without those answers, the spell has no defined behaviour.

I have found defining "Charm Person" as one of the most difficult spells to include in the mage's arsenal. Culturally, it's most likely the foremost spell associated with myths and legends, reaching back to Greek mythos and continuing forward through Le Morte de Arthur, Grimms and virtually everything else. That said, why 1st level? In rebuilding my own spells, I included it as such, but drastically winnowed down to the level of power a spell of that level should have — in no way equal to a traditional fairy tale. It's an awful conundrum of a spell... yet the above is written as though the participants are blissfully unaware of the power here.  Perhaps within chain mail there was as assumption that they only purpose to which the spell would be put was to force the affected creature to change sides, to fight for us rather than against us, in a battle without stakes, personalities or history. But the spell completely breaks down in a campaign setting, if the players give just that much thought to what it means.

Also, how many can be charmed? Since it lasts until dispelled, what's to keep the 1st level caster from piling up an army equivalent to a 9th level lord (no limits on the target's level listed, you'll notice), kept in train for whatever dungeon awaits? There’s nothing in the rules to prevent it, and nothing in the culture of the time that treated that as a moral issue. That silence says more about the authors’ blind spots than their intentions—they were thinking in tokens, not people.

Naturally, any high level caster can come along and cast dispel magic and end the horde... but again... do they remember their enslavement? And if so, does it make any sense not to immediately have the creature self-execute first? Suppose I have 30 humaoids in train (is a giant "mammalian" the way that a human is?), and I get a whiff of a mage. Can't I just immediate cast the blanket order, "Kill yourselves," and have them all do it at once, before they can be freed?

As written, the spell is a mess. It's a relic of a rulebook that hadn't yet realised it was modeling a world instead of a skirmish.

Sleep: A Sleep spell affects from 2-16 1st level types (hit dice of up to 1 + 1), from 2-12 2nd-level types (hit dice of up to 2 + 1), from 1-6 3rd-level types, and but 1 4th-level type (up to 4 + 1 hit dice). The spell always affects up to the number of creatures determined by the dice. If more than the number rolled could be affected, determine which “sleep” by random selection. Range: 24".

Once again, we assume the spell puts the recipients to sleep... but it doesn't provide any more details than charm person. Can the affected creatures be murdered in their sleep? When I played this game in 1979 and 1980, we certainly thought it meant that, playing it as written, because we were 15 or 16 and we knew no better. About the end of that conversations began along the lines of, "This spell is ridiculously overpowered and a little stupid, since it obliterates an enemy force way too easily." There's no hint that a saving throw against sleep is present, so we used to play without one. In a wish to make our games better, we went against the spell, rewriting it for ourselves, as teenagers. Why grown adults didn't do the same, before publishing the rule, I have no idea. As written, it's the game's death spell, and remains so right into AD&D. Why wait for the 6th level spell, Death?

The other obvious problem is, of course, that the spell assumes homogeneity among the targets. If I'm fighting an enemy human character party comprised of two 2nd-level, three 3rd-level and 2 4th-level, what dice do I roll? I'm sure the reader can figure it out themselves instantly... but ask yourself... is it the same way someone else will figure this out? Can you rely on your answer being "as logical" as another person would see it?

Quite a number will say, it doesn't need to be. It only has to be consistent for my party. That's fine, but I watched a lot of sessions break down over the interpretation of this one rule, with casters wanting every inch they felt they were due against DMs who did not want to give that to them. The badly written rule is a session wrecker. Consistency without clarity breeds resentment because the next party will interpret it differently. That kind of vagueness metastasises. Players internalise their house rulings as the "real" rule, and suddenly half the community is arguing over which childhood misreading of Sleep is canonical.

2nd Level:

Detect Invisible (Objects): A spell to find secreted treasure hidden by an Invisibility spell (see below). It will also locate invisible creatures. Durations (sic): 6 turns. Range: 1" x the level of the Magic-User casting it, i.e. a "Wizard" would have a range of 11", more if he was above the base value.

I adore that in 47 words, we first identify that the spell detects objects and then that the spell also detects non-objects. Real genius there. I appreciate that we are given a range of effect; the language "1 times the level" has always been odd since English includes the preposition that fill this in, "per"... as in "1 per level." But never mind. Not everyone's vocabulary is replete with such rarely used three-letter words.

Two inherent issues emerge, of course: first, how do we know when to cast the spell? Well, of course, in a Gygaxian universe, in every room. You just never know, right? Which is fine, since the spell lasts so long, we might just as well always cast the spell upon entering a dungeon, so it's always up and running. On the other hand, that is a spell-slot we could be using for a spell like levitate or phantasmal force. There really aren't any attack spells of the 2nd level for the mage in the White Box set, which means that the first four levels are thick with discovery spells until the character reaches 5th. Overall, charm person and sleep are your ONLY attack spells until then. Magic missile, shocking grasp, strength, web, even push, are all in later versions of the game. It's a bit sad, really, how ineffectual a 1st to 4th level mage is. If the DM is the sort to make treasures invisible, it may seriously be useful to blow the slot on this spell.

Course, that "invisible treasure" thing is really old school silly. It takes a third level spell to cast invisibility — and point in fact the spell on the next page does not include "objects" in its description. But assuming it does, the casting of it assumes the lair has someone in it whose able to cast the spell. Otherwise, the DM is just randomly and for no reason reaching into the campaign to make things invisible out of either spite or the will of practical joking gods (also not in the rules of the White Box set).  Which, of course, gives cause to question the motivation of the DM behind such shananigans.

But let's handwave that off; let's skip over the fact that early dungeon design often consisted of the DM as "trickster" antagonist whose joy lay into screwing parties out of well-earned treasure as the purest expression of make a dungeon as a gotcha machine, and just assume that the 3rd level mage does exist and can cast invisibility on a treasure. Does that make sense? Imagine that you have $45,000 (or £ or €) in a pile in your room, or in a box, or whatever. You can't have it in a bank, they don't exist. And to keep it "safe," you make it invisible. Now, whenever you come into the room, you can look at where it is and not know if it's there or not. Seriously. You know that "detect invisibility" exists in the world, so every time you leave for any extended period of time, you can't know if someone has entered your room, cast the detect spell, found your money and taken it. To know if they have, you have to bend down, feel around and see if it's physically there. But then, if that's all that it takes, then why coudn't a party member just carry a broom with them to "sweep" the corners and see if there's an invisible chest there?

To be really sure your miserable sister hasn't felt around for your money and moved it three feet to the left, just to mess with you, you have to use the detect invisible spell, just to be sure.  How in the hell is this a good idea?

It's what happens when magic is treated as an arms race instead of a system. Every new "defense" spell creates a counterspell, which creates a counter-counterspell, until the world is full of mages living in invisible houses surrounded by "detect" wards and still patting the floor to find their invisible chairs. It's stupid. Detect invisibility does make sense as a spell: but only for the purpose of identifying a danger that happens to make itself known somehow by visibly knocking over an object in the room or leaving footprints on the floor. As a location device for treasure, it's just silly.

I should do another, but these are very trying.

Preview of the Lantern, December 1635

A month late, or rather I've skipped a month, but I have the lantern available to be looked at for those few of you who contribute $10 or more to my patreon each month.  As ever, the Lantern will be available for $7 come the 21st of this month.

This image is of the back page, since I posted the front page a few days ago.

P.S.,

Upon request of a reader in the comments, I'm adding this post.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 14

One last business before we can move onto spells. The turning undead concept was good — a small bridge between combat and faith, permitting a solid bullet in the cleric's arsenal under specific circumstances. There are game issues with it — overall, the randomness is troublesome, especially at higher level, where the effect either works as a dead fizzle or a machine of the gods, without nuance. And the latter is too powerful in game play, too often, especially with lesser undead. But... there's no fundamental problem with the rule appearing here, as an early construction where few undead existed. Later, as more undead emerged and the game deepened, the swinginess of the mechanic became harder to justify. No need to go into this now. We can move forward, as this, like other recent metrics, is perfectly servicable.

A full explanation of each spell follows. Note that underlined Clerical spells are reversed by evil Clerics. Also, note the Clerics versus Undead Monsters table, indicating the strong effect of the various clerical levels upon the undead; however, evil Clerics do not have this effect, the entire effect being lost.

An odd insertion, oddly written. We introduce the spells for seven words and the comment on the table above. Writing this in the opposite order would be more typical. But meh.

From here, I must adjust how the content going ahead is deconstructed. With regards to the spells, none so far as I'm concerned were badly conceived. Thus there's less need to criticise the writing or their intent. If written by Gygax, these are his better work, more careful to be sensible and with a greater consciousness in their application to game play. Perhaps because these were more firmly established in game play than the earlier part of this book. In either case, I think my focus here has to be upon those present-day persons who might be trying to play these rules "as written." Holes for game play proliferate throughout, as I shall try to outline. Get ready to be bored.

EXPLANATION OF SPELLS:

Magic-Users:

1st Level:

Detect Magic: A spell to determine if there has been some enchantment laid on a person, place or thing. It has a limited range and short duration. It is useful, for example, to discover if some item is magical, a door has been "held" or "wizard locked," etc.

As the later Players Handbook identified, matters such as range, casting time, duration, area of effect and such were either ignored or rendered inconsistent. For example, how far out from the self can the caster detect magic?  Not line-of-sight, the spell says so, but still, "limited" is hardly definitive. I live in Calgary, where on a clear day I can see the Rocky Mountains sixty miles from here. Every now and then we get a particularly effective atmospheric refraction, so that without editing a picture like the one shown can be experienced live. I've had incidents where I was walking in some part of the city towards the mountains during a weather change, where the distance peaks were visibly receding as I watched. It's a profound effect.

As the game moves from tabletop mechanics to the imagined setting, where the application isn't just applied in combat but in any situation that might come up through prodecural operative party actions, firm limits had to be imposed. But this need not be discuss further here. That can be left to another time. For the moment, let's just discuss the individual spell functions.

Issues bound to come up with detect magic here include the kind of magic, the strength of the magic, whether or not the magic is dangerous and even whether or not it's a spell. The door is opened to these things because I can identify, specifically, if the door is "held." That's a specific spell I'm identifying; so why shouldn't I be able to specifically define the presence of others I find? Does it include the presence of an invisible person? If a person is charmed? Whether someone is presently engaged in ESP with a member of the party? Or either clairvoyance or clairaudience? How about if an opponent is protected from normal missiles, or is confused, or protected from evil? These details matter, and a "rules lawyer" is going to want to know why hold portal or wizard lock are special among other spells that have active, continual components that are also magic. A "ruling" here isn't definitive — an issue that many DMs refuse to understand... because a ruling, like any enactment of legitimacy, must logically apply, and not arbitrarily.

Rules are a contractural arrangement between players of a game, regardless of the DM's presence. In monopoly, we agree to pay each other, we agree to throw two dice, we agree that jail occurs on the third double and so on. This largely unspoken agreement is something we learned to accede to at the age of five or six, when we found ourselves playing games with siblings or friends and grew tired of these things always ending in fist-fights. "Fairness," we understood, enables shared expectations among the participants that enables "fun" that doesn't collapse into chaos. This principle applies to the presence of the DM, just as it applies to everything humans do cooperatively. The position of the DM does not contradict this.

Arbitrariness breaks this contract. It transformes the DM from interpreter into a despot, opening the door to cronyism among the players, an entitlement to abuse players, to channel and affect play so as to serve the DM's purposes and not the general welfare... the result is a toxic atmosphere where those who play enjoy the privileges bestowed upon them by the DM, while others quickly find themselves driven out.

This distinction isn't a point of view that's universal within role-playing any more than it is within business culture, the legal system, politics or world governments. Many, many, many persons in all fields practice arbitrary approaches to their purposes all the time, from parents to believe firmly that "because" IS an acceptable answer to every query, to D fucking T who has weaponised the ineffectiveness of the judiciary branch to impose ridiculous, nation-destroying actions upon a helpless minority. Arbitrariness is widespread; it's going to happen in D&D and those who pursue it will be loudly vocal, aggressive, abusive and conceited in their embrace of it. And because they make up a substantial part of the audible community, there will always be some jackass who points out other such fucknards as a justification of bad actions. But within this tiny space of this tiny blog, no. If the spell will recognise the footprint of a held door, that it should likewise recognise the footprint of a person affected by charm, invisibility, confusion or any other like spell.

If that's not wanted, than the spell must be defined more exactly. The above says "for example," indicating plainly that the examples given are not the only possible cases. If they should be the only possible cases, than the wording of the spell must reflect that. Loose language creates problems in rule-making. And as we process through these spells, we're going to see repeatedly how they can be re-interpreted perfectly fairly based on nothing other than their attempts to fix something as complex as this in less than 50 words.

Any time the words "for example" appear in a rule book, it's an open wound inviting queries about the mechanic. Think of it as rainwater finding every crack and groove upon the ground: arguments and hard feelings about a game campaign will accumulate in such spaces and strive to erode the ground beneath, until the structure collapses. Thus, never trust anything that's been written about game codification — language is hard and words are never without colloquial interpretations that only multiply when words are placed next to each other. Rewrite every spell description of every spell you use in your game to hammer down how you want them to work in your campaign. And then do it again each time your ruling is challenged in a way you didn't expect. Rewriting a law is not an "arbitrary" practice, not so long as the rewriting, once done, is fixed. So long as everyone can see the rule, and count on it over time, it's no longer a "ruling." It's a rule. And that's our goal. Not to replace rules with rulings, but to codify rulings into rules that the players can read, examine and act upon.

It took 1500 years of human civilisation possessed of writing to codify laws in stone (Hammurabi); it took another 1700 years before the practice of laws evolving through precedence became a consistent practice in the most civilised of places (Greece, Rome). The effort, once begun, inevitably failed about 800 years (4th century Rome) thereafter... and was not rediscovered for 800 years (early Renaissance) after that... about 700 years ago from when I write this. So in all, it's taken us 5,500 years to get to the level of legal behaviour we practice now. It's no surprise that a great many DMs believe that Hammurabi knew the best approach... and they don't hesitate to run their games that way, assuming that the DM is fucking god or something. But that is not what we call "civilisation."

Having set the precedent for discussing these rules, then, let's continue.

Hold Portal: A spell to hold a door, gate or the like. It is similar to a locking spell (see below) but it is not permanent. Roll two dice to determine the duration of the spell in turns. Dispel Magic (see below) will immediately negate it, a strong antimagical creature will shatter it and a Knock (see below) will open it.

Much like "for example," "and the like" does not hold the portal, it opens it. A quick examination of a thesaurus searching the word "portal" quickly reveals that no actual obstruction is necessary for a thing to be defined as that. Technically, anything that is a "way in" or a threshold, including from one room to the next, is a "portal," and by use of the words, "and the like," we've now let all of them count. And since dungeons and ordinary sized constructions do not define "portal" as a thing, an entrance as large as the egress of the Colosseum of Rome, also a portal, can be held by the spell. The same can be said of cave mouths, curtains, a street between two walls... if, in fact, I throw a blanket across the middle of a corridor, by definition it becomes a threshold, and I can cast hold portal over it.

Correction would require stating that the portal must have hinges, or a obstruction that must be physically opened using muscle power. Otherwise, other interpretations are absolutely on the table. Still, arguably, the spell as it occurs in the game IS pretty weak. Why would the blanket-on-floor option necessarily be a bad thing? If we accept it, we're not breaking the game... we're turning an anemic, almost decorative spell into a flexible field tool. That Gygax and crew anticipated this is immaterial — the anticipation of new uses for a spell are always present.

The fault in this occurs when the player or DM choose to expand the spell to things that are not a portal, a way in or a threshold: a bottle, say, or the buckle of a belt, or any other thing that happens to "close" but shares no other charactistics with a passage through. If language exists as an expansion of a rule, it also stands as a boundary to that function; for portal cannot be reinterpreted to describe things that are not that, unless the DM chooses to ignore language as the principle being respected.

Conceivably, a large enough box or perhaps a coffin can be physically entered. If a cleric in my campaign, inside a coffin, were to cast hold portal on the lid, I'd likely allow that. Arguably, if there is a vampire within the coffin trying to egress, again, the argument holds. But to keep liquid from emerging from a bottle? No, I'd probably call it there. Another DM can disagree, and that's fine. BUT WRITE IT DOWN, so the same argument can be applied at another time. Don't just suppose it applies in this one situation — and remember that once it is written down, you as DM are as subject to that rule as the player. That's the contract.

Read Magic: The means by which the incantations on an item or scroll are read. Without such a spell or similar device magic is unintelligible to even a Magic-User. The spell is of short duration (one or two readings being the usual limit).

It's not quite perfectly so, but nearly so... the spell permits the reading of the magic language, that by which "spells" are written. This isn't defacto stated however; does it include a glyph, which is not part of this language? The door is open because "an item" isn't strictly defined. I do not know of what item to which the description refers; I know of no other magic language that is included in a magic item outside of scrolls. And if such language does occur, how is it separated by definition from a rune or glyph — which is immaterial, of course, since neither are mentioned in these rules. But if we're running a game with these rules in the present day, we must state whether such things exist to our players, since they know what these things are and that they're normally associated with D&D. It is hard to separate "standard" D&D concepts from this rule set, given that some of them don't exist yet.

Read Languages: The means by which directions and the like are read, particularly on treasure maps. It is otherwise like the Read Magic spell above.

Quite straightforward. My sole point to make is that its not clear if I can cast the spell upon other persons who can then enjoy the benefits. Presumably, it is, but it does not state as much. Reasonably, if the spell is cast upon a person who cannot read at all, the spell should still function normally.

Now that I think of it, the spell doesn't specifically state that only one language can be read per casting, so I assume I can read however many languages I can fine within the spell's duration (which isn't stated). I did have a player once ask if when the language was "read," did that mean translated into the character's comprehensive language, or if the recipient's thought process was reconfigured in order to recognise the specific nuances of the language being comprehended. In other words, if I were able to read Russian, would I merely understand what was being said, or would it mean I was "thinking in Russian." The player had a reason for this, but it was ages ago and I don't remember; I do believe I granted her the latter interpretation.

Protection from Evil: This spell hedges the conjurer round with a magic circle to keep out attacks from enchanted monsters. It also serves as an "armor" from various evil attacks, adding a +1 to all saving throws and taking a -1 from hit dice of evil opponents. (Note that this spell is not cumulative in effect with magic armor and rings, although it will continue to keep out enchanted monsters.) Duration: 6 turns.

Technically, the spell does not specify "evil" enchanted monsters. The wiggle room here is the question, "enchanted."  The strict definition of the word (none occurs in the White Box) is, "put someone or something under a spell; bewitch." Suppose then that in a battle in a dungeon far from any sort of water, I cast "waterbreathing" upon a perfectly ordinary non-magical enemy. The range is 30 feet; in the White Box, no save is specified. Thereafter, that enemy is by definition "enchanted" and cannot enter my circle, even if that enemy is 20th level or a 16 HD monster. Food for thought.

Not saying this is how the spell should be interpreted, but it's plain that "enchanted" MUST be better defined. Nor is another word, like "evil" or "supernatural" sufficient. Every single monster the spell protects against should be recorded and made available to the player. It's a finite list. There's no reason why this work can't be done inside an hour.

All right, I need a break. That's enough.

Dungeons & Dragons White Box 13

Ah, memories.

This chart is worth the price of admission. The concept is wholly sound, playable — if simplistic, which is entirely forgivable, since it's the prototype of a lot that was to follow. The argument that the later DMG overdid this is fair... I'm not included in that number, but I can understand that the straightforwardness of this is a breath of fresh air, given all that was to follow.

The need to balance clerics and mages, too, makes sense, since fighters have to be given something that puts them ahead of the other two classes. That all attacks cause the same damage has been embraced by a large number, though I think it tosses out a significant game choice in testing one weapon's power against the space required, it's weight, it's durability if dropped and the number of hands it needs. But all that doesn't really need to be a part of the game, if the DM feels a need to cut the detail somewhere.

The accompanying page 20, too, is straightforward... and heck, this is the centrepiece of the game. So long as this was constructed well, the remaining inconsistencies and mess of introductory content could be ignored. I played hundreds of hours of D&D that consisted of just fighting one group of monsters against another, or one party against another, because the feel for not knowing how it would come out was enough to seize my imagination at the time.

My first post talks about how my 1st level fighter, needing a 14 on this table to keep from being turned to stone, failed. I only know I needed a 14 because now I can look at the table... hell if I could remember it otherwise. I didn't complain when it happened. I was hopelessly confused and I didn't know what a basilisk was, but once the concept was explained, I was ready to roll with it. My personal character's success was not what mattered to me; what mattered was the concept of this game, and how that blew my mind. It really did change my perception of what a game could be, and as is self-evident, effectively my life as well. I wound up giving myself completely to this. While others went off to be other things, I stayed and did other things so they could support this. A fair evaluation of that would be to say I was, and am, obsessed.

But that doesn't blind me to the problems here, which I don't need to dig into again just now. I repeat, these guys were not geniuses. For all the cleverness of the above tables, and the pleasure I've found in implementing them and offspring they spawned, nothing in the above is more complicated than might have appeared in any of a hundred wargames that were actively being played at the time. Just as the comment I made about repulping car ad content in a post yesterday, the same goes for the familiarity we all had with tables that designated hitting, movement, interdictory fire, retreat, enfilade and half a hundred other things that made straight up box tables. Good on these guys that they knew how to copy well. Good on them that they understood how to adapt the concept to this particular ideal. But don't miss that the above is quite simple. It's not rocket science. It did not take a "genius" to make.  Calling these guys geniuses just because they succeeded is not a defacto truth. It's absolutely possible to pull a Homer. Rich business folk do it all the time.

Which brings us to a completely different discussion regarding the White Box. There's little value to be found in debating the existence and coordination of spell-use. Obviously it worked. I'd argue that this, better than the combat table, provided real value to the game as a whole, since it solved the esoteric, hard to visualise problem that magic creates.

Consider. A boardgame assumed a bounded reality: movement rates, attack ranges, line of sight, terrain effects and so on. Every rule depends on stable physics: what can you see, how fast can you move, what are the dictates of ballistics, a simple understanding of what can and cannot happen. The concept of magic — and here, think of it before D&D solved this — obliterates the framework. The very idea supposes that effects can be created out of thin air, in an unbounded fashion that ignores physics. Line of sight may not be necessary, range is a movable feast, movement isn't even necessary for the caster — or its achieved by teleporting or levitating in ways that typical wargame combatants cannot.

Even the visual represention of magic is a huge challenge. Your figure, your friend's figures are represented on the board; but the moment that magic happens, it is both physical and not; a blast is assumed to take out this number of enemy, or damage them somehow, but the actual representation of the magic isn't necessary, since it happens in a blip of time. Thus, all of that, like a flying arrow, doesn't get represented... it has to be imagined, which necessarily tests the participants to keep up with that. So all of that magic, once created, has to be memorable enough so that when I say "protection from evil" or "hold person," you must know what I'm talking about. In fact, everyone at the table does. Think of it as consensus hallucination. We say the fireball happens in this circle, and every player appreciates what that means, together. Habitually.

This abstraction is an enormous hurdle to overcome. And for a lot of us here, thinking about trying to explain spells to some players, it's still a hurdle that exists.

Suppose you're going to fashion a group of spells from scratch, and you don't have the above to work with. Some of this was made for Chainmail, so assume you don't have that either. It's 1969, you've got the moon landing in the background and you're thinking, hey, "What if I wanted to create a list of spells that a warlock or witch could conceivably cast in a wargame. What would I start with?"

You see the issue. Even the decision to do that is an enormous connection that needs to be made. The idea of people casting spells has been around for about 15 centuries and yet, aside from Alistair Crowley, who's ever tried to codify them? And let me tell you, what Crowley codified is not D&D worthy.

Magic in literature and myth is story-motivated, not strategic. It obeyed the emotional logic a writer needed, not the qualitative framework of a board game. The game needs range, duration, something that challenges the magic's automatic effectiveness... and none of this exists as a concept as the crew of the Eagle are nearly crashing on the moon. So where do you start?

To begin with, the range concept comes first. Magic is a sort of ordnance. That gets us out of the myth and folklore story stranglehold. If we see magic as a tank shell, that presupposes that it isn't cast by virtue of imagination. You can only cast your magic "bomb" so far, and otherwise according to fixed principles: line-of-sight again, with area of effect.  The duration of that effect matches other game elements such as dropping smoke upon an enemy position, which is established logically by real world combat simulations. The amount of effect, the number it affects, that gives a graded scale of how dangerous the magic bomb is... and that permits a heirarchy of scale. This magic is a 1st level "bomb," that's a 5th level "bomb" and so on.

The limitations of the bombs becomes self-evident. Just as a tank hasn't infinite shells, the mage can't have infinite bombs. In fact, we can reason that a lot of them, like fireball, are so dangerous that if the mage can manage then more than once a mass combat, it overloads the mage's power... so we imagine the mage's "magazine" being loaded with a group of individualised shells, none of them the same, so that there are enough shells to be fired to keep the mage in the game, but not all of a type that overtips the balance.

This concept of battlefield mechanics is what keeps the magic system from getting out of control, giving it a sensible, internally consistent and quantifiable structure. The scarcity of shots is absolutely necessary — otherwise, the combat balance of the mage is shattered and the overall system as well. This system has endured, despite later iterations, because the magazine structure was respected. Later game editions ignored it. The result has been the necessity to turn the fighter into ordnance as well, which as completely flattened the game into a boring, meaningless broth. Except for the words used, every class is essentially the same gun.

But the temptation has been to presume that spells in the game are, well, "magical."   But the magic system was never about the fanciful beauty of showy imagination. It's about importing the language of artillery tables into the imagination, and calling the resultant physics "magic."

The real nuance is in how the "magazine" was able to include ordance that had nothing to do with battlefield mechanics. Read languages, light, locate object, wizard lock, clairvoyance and -audience, water breathing... these were problem-solving ordnance, designed specifically to allow the players to overcome specific game obstacles outside the combat system. This is where the system truly shines, because it excuses the game from the endless combat treadmill without presupposing the only exit is role-playing. Such spells proliferate for the mage in later systems, as it became clearer what the game could be about.

With this in mind, look at the cleric spells. More than a "healer," the character is an enabler, one that helps avoid traps, acquire knowledge from animals, identify powers outside the ken of others, even force the will of others to pursue solutions. While the mage really is the tank of the party, the cleric is the intelligence office, running the M*A*S*H unit as well.

Looked at this way, we can see the cleric isn't a "weak mage" and it's just the party medic either. It's an interlocking system that permits the party to attack, prevent, repair, recon and maintain morale, while generating the ongoing process of game narration, both inside and outside the active adventuring itself.

That's the brilliance hidden in the simplicity of the early spell charts. They define not just what a character can do but what role they play in the team’s operational structure. The cleric is command and control, the mage is fire support, the fighter is the line unit, and the thief (once introduced) becomes reconnaissance and infiltration.

And then the later game, after AD&D, fucked all that up, partly by treating every character as though they could "do it all," and then pretty much steamrolling over the game so that there was no game to play. The interplay between these classes has been so overwritten now it's rarely understood how well they worked together.

The Upcoming December Lantern

For those who may be concerned, there will be an issue of The Lantern, December 1635, available for preview on the 1st of November. The public version will be available on the 21st of that month. The principle writing is finished, the editing is ongoing and I am making ads to fill out the content. I'm a bit stuck for a back page, so if anyone has an idea, I'll certainly consider it, but I have faith someone will arise before the end of this week.

Chat's image generator has completely gone to shit and is now no longer useful for what it could do easily just four months ago. I don't know what's going on; visually, different sorts of errors were proliferating every day throughout this month, such that by just five days ago, it simply refused to render a clear image at all. Clearly the chat-5 rollout failure has the company in a tailspin, such that they're rushing around making changes without considering the consequences. The text function is always showing signs of wear, so that I can feel the goal posts moving even as all I want it to do is comment on work to see if it's either accurate or if what I'm writing makes a good impression on the reader. I suspect that it's going to become the "Betamax" of text-generation platforms, soon to be replaced by a score of alternatives.  I've recently found one, it's generating GREAT pictures for me, more quickly and in a format not that different from chat. Strange times when a doofus running a company can simultaneously throw an advance out to rival the internet and months later sabotage it idiotically.

In any case... I'm sure that given my melt down a month ago, some folks were worried, but things are fine. The stories on the cover shown are all finished and, in my opinion, excellent. I look forward to working on the issue after this.

Enjoy the Ride

Let me deviate from this series a moment. I had a conversation this morning and I want to get it down before I lose it.

I'll start with some ancient history. In 1988, CD sales surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and in 1992, they surpassed the sale of pre-recorded cassette tapes. CDs did, at the time, feel better; they were easier to handle, we weren't aware of their degradation rates (which are awful), they're smaller and in general the newer, niftier way to listen to music felt cool.  But it would be stupid not to note that one reason that CD sales surpassed other formats was because the same persons responsible for selling the CDs made those formats.  And as everyone pointed out bitterly at the time, we were being forced to buy a lifetime of albums over again as CDs. It was a terrific moneygrab by the recording studios... and when asked about it, they said a lot of bullshit that amounted to, "fuck the customer, we're doing this."

Between 1988 and 1991 in Canada, it was not possible to buy a vinyl record at a mainstream music outlet. The only option was to buy CDs.

And eight years later the music industry was shafted by the launching of Napster, which their clever format change enabled.

If the music industry hadn't make the push into digital media in the late 1980s, the entire timeline of personal audio digitization would have slowed by several years, maybe even a decade. Much of the early commercial incentive to produce affordable CD drives, blank discs, and digital-to-analog converters came directly from the consumer audio market — the desire to play and copy music. Without that mass market, CD drives would have remained a professional or data-storage niche. Companies like Sony, Philips and Yamaha developed consumer CD-R technology largely because music buyers already owned CD players, and record labels were selling billions of CDs. That base of hardware justified R&D for writable discs and affordable burners.

If vinyl had remained dominant, there’d have been little reason for households to own optical drives at all until data-heavy computing needs (software, multimedia, backups) grew enough to sustain the market independently, likely not until the early 2000s. Audio piracy would then have taken a very different path — slower, perhaps remaining tape-based well into the decade, or moving laterally into mini-discs and other analog-digital hybrids. File sharing like Napster relied not just on digital formats but on standardised, already-ripped audio libraries sitting on hard drives. Without the CD revolution to normalise that digital music layer, the infrastructure for ripping, compressing and trading songs online would have been delayed, possibly until broadband and solid-state storage made digital music independently attractive.

In short, the labels’ forced digitization didn’t just accelerate the CD market — it created the hardware ecosystem that made their own downfall technologically inevitable.

This is old news. This is not what my conversation was about this morning. I'm including the above for context.

Between 1997 and 1999, a series of artistic programs flooded into the market that identified themselves as "artistic assistance" or "instant-aesthetic" tools: CorelXara, MetaCreations Bryce 3D, Poser 3, Kai’s Power Tools and Kai’s Power Goo, Synthetik Studio Artist, Microsoft PhotoDraw and others. These programs marked the first time that software openly promised to bridge the gap between imagination and ability. They didn’t just give users digital brushes or palettes; they offered to do part of the creative work themselves. A person with no training could drop a mountain into Bryce, smooth a human figure into existence in Poser, or warp a photograph into surreal fluidity with Kai’s Power Goo. The selling point wasn’t mastery—it was transformation. The computer became a kind of collaborator, quietly taking over the technical or aesthetic parts that used to demand skill. What had once been a slow apprenticeship in technique was now a series of sliders and presets that made beauty achievable in minutes.

As the 2000s progressed, the things you could do with these programs grew by leaps and bounds, until the line between artist and operator began to blur completely. Each new version added smarter automation, richer presets, and more “intelligent” correction tools that could compensate for nearly any weakness in composition or draftsmanship. By the mid-2000s, programs were no longer just assisting creativity — they were manufacturing it, translating vague gestures into polished, gallery-ready output. What began as a set of digital conveniences evolved into a creative prosthetic: filters that could mimic entire schools of painting, renderers that could light a scene like a film set, and interfaces that promised to make anyone an artist with enough clicks. The underlying message shifted from "learn to create" to "let the software create with you," and that shift quietly redefined what it meant to make art at all.

Untold thousands of children grew up with access to these tools on their parents computers or were introduced to them in grade school, so that by the early 2010s, we had created an entire community of "artists" who self-identified as that, but had never actually committed any art they'd ever created without the help of a computer... and that subtle distinction — between those who used computers to express something and those whose expression only existed because of the computer — became invisible almost overnight. What emerged was a generation fluent in aesthetics but not in craft, people who knew how art should look without ever having learned how art was made.

But it didn't matter, because the demand for generated art by 2015 was monstrous. Those who graduated from an art school with the right papers found themselves in a ready made career — and the irony is hard to miss. We’re talking about a considerable number of late-teen and twenty-something young adults making oodles of money as “artists,” their actual job title. For the first time, the label didn’t require struggle, gallery shows, or a patron—it came with a salary, benefits, and a workstation. These were kids who’d grown up surrounded by digital tools that turned experimentation into creation, and creation into a marketable skill. What had once been an unforgiving, unfulfilling, failure-ridden aspirational vocation was now counted alongside the coder, the data analyst and the technical research. A hipster in the richest salon in New York City might be an "artist" working for a company no one ever heard of, but with the money to pay for a $900 do. Being an artist had arrived.

Then Covid happened.

Overnight, the machinery that kept the creative industries running locked up. Studios couldn’t access shared servers or asset libraries, licensing contracts became tangled in jurisdictional and insurance questions, and managers who had built entire workflows around in-person oversight didn’t know how to function without seeing people at their desks. Overnight, the constant churn of projects—film previsualizations, ad campaigns, game assets, UI design—just stopped. Even though the artists themselves could have kept working from their bedrooms, the bureaucratic systems around them couldn’t adapt fast enough. Deadlines vanished and approvals stalled. But Covid sucked for everyone. And the processes that enabled working from home was slowly managed, so that by 2022 the atmosphere was clearing, the work was ramping up again, the business was getting on its feet and there was a sense that this "work from home" thing would be something that companies would just go on doing once the fog lifted.

And then... A.I.

All the fast-tracking of computer generated artistic production under the human hand over the previous two decades had been flying along. "Art" was less drawing and more "generally sweeping your hand over what you wanted changed."  Work that would have taken a really gifted physical artist in 1985 a week to do could be done in a couple of hours by anyone with a reasonable understanding of the computer tools available. The entire digital art ecosystem had evolved toward efficiency and manipulation rather than construction. The skill had shifted from creating an image from nothing to knowing how to command and correct what the software could already generate. Artists had become conductors of process rather than builders of form — editing, refining and directing outcomes instead of producing them stroke by stroke.

It is any surprise that all A.I. really had to do was lift the "conductor" out of the loop?

When seen this way, with the changes in artistic design that we've seen, A.I. isn't that big a leap forward. It's the next obvious one. Just as the sort of writing quality that's needed to produce an advertisement for a car can be easily generated — there are hundreds of thousands of car ads written by human writers that can be digitally pulped and recast — it's just as logical that the sweeping movements of "artists" could be likewise assigned without the real people any more. And no, I'm not kidding with those quotes. None of these people were ever an actual artist. Most of those in 1999 were... they took their experience and applied Synthetik Studio Artist to it and made some fantastic things. But that's because those older horses had learned not only how to use pencils and paints in two years of art class, but had spent forty years learning the actual language of art.

The youths of today who played with the toys in the 2010s, who are now crying because their careers are shattered, were never really artists. They were just a different kind of coder, who got a chance to make a lot of money because they hit the market at just the right time. There was no such market for 20-something visual coders in 2001, and there won't be one again for visual coders in 2026. Because that's the speed at which our technology moves.

What I'm saying is that they're not special. They're taking advantage of a self-styled label that they didn't earn, while actual artists who did actually earn that label right now AREN'T crying because they're not affected. A.I. can't recreate their art because there's no mountain of content for A.I. to re-pulp. I write articles that A.I. can't conceive of, because I think of things that no one else has thought of. That's how I stay ahead of the curve. It's how all artists do.

Those who are getting eaten alive?  Calling yourself an artist doesn't make you one. If you're an artist, then do what artists have always done. Find a way to make yourself relevant, stop pretending the world owes you a free lunch. You've had all the free lunches you're ever going to get. A lot more than most get.

Why did I start this post with that business about compact discs?

Without wasting our time talking about whether or not change is good, we need to realise that change always begets more change. The fat cats at Capitol and Sony though they were controlling their market, making tons of money, until someone got creative with their little tech development and came near to flattening their entire industry. A few brilliant programmers thought it would certainly be convenient if programs could do more than let people draw on computers... what if, they asked, the computer could help? Made sense. But obviously nothing ever stops at the property line. Someone, somewhere, is always figuring out how to make this thing better, how to get something out of it that hasn't been thought of already... how to shake the pillars of heaven, as it were. That is never going to stop. Forget complaining about A.I. Not only is it here to stay, it's already fast becoming... in someone's imagination, we don't know who... a thing it isn't right now.

And we have no idea what that's gonna be. So get a grip, find a place from which you can navigate yourself... and enjoy the ride.