Alone with My Principles

Sometimes a comment is written that sincerely wants to help me see the world in a light that will give me strength and hope to change my perspective, and possibly cease to be less bitter and therefore make the kind of money others are making doing what I'm doing. That, I think, is the sentiment with Icosa's comment here. It references my biathlon post of last January as if to say, "See, you could live some of this dream." It encourages me to open my mind and learn something from a successful designer. It argues that there's a "good game" in me, arguing that it could plausibly be of the size and scope of AD&D. It even states that the commentor would buy this game from me.

When I was in high school, I had a good friend Rob who wavered between becoming a performing electronic musician in the vein of Throbbing Gristle, or possibly an electrical engineer. Alas, his brilliant musical career ended and he became the latter. But during those younger, heady days, whenever the subject of selling out came up, he would raise his hand and say, "Me. I'm ready to sell out. Tell me what line to get into."

He didn't mean it, because he didn't sell out. But he did recognise that was the only chance of his music (see above) having any commercial success. Which it did not.

Selling out describes the act of compromising one's personal values, artistic integrity or principles in order to achieve financial gain, popularity and mainstream success. Not everyone who has these things achieved them by "selling out." Sometimes, if I were to pick a band I once personally knew, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they don't have any of those things to sell. Rather, they had a willingness to get on stage a lot, to keep practicing together and, as chance would have it, a sound that worked well in the 90s (once an engineer worked on it, that is. If you had ever heard the Chilis at the National here in Calgary in the late 80s, there's no way in hell you'd have ever believed they'd get a record contract.

Artistic integrity describes an individual's commitment that the art they are producing — which I'll widen to include any creative work — remains true to the vision, value or creative principle by which they make that art. Integrity reflects an individual's genuine ideas, the emotion they connect with those ideas and the style in which those ideals are rendered, in my case in text, in the case of others, in visual or audial measure. Essentially, it's about maintaining authenticicy in one's art, prioritising personal expression over external approval or material gain.

When I created yet another wiki, I considered a number of names to call it, finally landing on "Authentic" as the best possible expression for what I was trying to accomplish. The wiki doesn't represent "a" set of rules about role-playing, it represents what I think are best possible game tested rules that can be made... that are subject to change when, like science or design, something is better understood, or might be more effectively constructed.

As such, I don't run "a" role-playing game, I run the one that best expresses everything I've learned about role-playing games these last almost 47 years... in which I've watched many, many, many role-playing games rise, become popular for a while and then fade away, to be played by a small dedicated following until they cease to be mentioned even on the internet. Once upon a time, in the 1980s, when a new game would emerge, I'd anxious rush to look at it, to see how the designer constructed their metrics, to see if there was something I could steal and import into my own game... but by the time Steve Jackson churned out GURPS, I was constantly disappointed. It was all rehashes from there... endless, awful, even sometimes painful rehashes of old rules in some way made worse and repackaged as a game that would "supersede D&D at last!" Only to, of course, not happen. The last game mechanic that I lifted from a designed game originated with 3rd edition; I can't even remember what the original mechanic was called, and it needed a lot of work to make it function. I used it to construct my action point rules.

After 18 years of writing this blog, and 47 years of playing D&D, the most inauthentic thing I could possibly do would be to suddenly declare D&D secondary in my opinion to my own game system, and then take the much more rational constrution of presenting game rules on a 21st century wiki and compiling them into a 15th century technology that would, obviously, be less valuable to the user. Further, the construction of said book would involve my giving money to a third party, so I could charge people I've authentically and freely provided a system for, as a means of literally betraying my own choices in order to, yes, sell out. 

Without much chance of succeeding, mind, because I have allowed myself to be an honest, outspoken, resilient, vicious pitbull about the game I love these last 18 years on this blog. To succeed in business, one must have business friends. Those willing to talk up one's kickstarter, or talk up one's business. I don't have those things. I have never priortised those things.

Further, for my own soul, I would find it grossly inauthentic to copy the game construction of ANOTHER GAME produced 50 years before my own, and sell it as something I "created," when clearly I did not. That is something that apparently people in the OSR can do, without much compunction, flat out ignoring that the mechanics, referencing, concepts and dimensions of their games are cheap "Gocci" knockoffs of legitimately designed originals. I may hate Gygax and his logic, but he didn't rip off a game exactly like his own that was published in 1925, and played for nearly fifty years, then pretending he hadn't done that.

So yeah. I have a few issues with that life choice.

Until just a few weeks ago this blog had the tag line, "I Love the Game of D&D."  Some have expressed their surprise and approval that I was willing to come right out and say that, without reservation. Some have recently expressed their dissatisfaction that it's gone, in favour of something that "sells" my story as a means of getting to know me better, thus enabling some to get up to speed with my approach to the game without having to read through 4,000 posts. I am not making money from this change and yet the disapproval is there. Others also love D&D. I like that. And I like that I'm enabling them to find better ways to play the game.

And I would rather have this experience than the money that Kelsey Dionne has made doing what she's doing.

That can be confusing for some people. In fact, on occasion, I had those, off-line, in real life, before the existence of the internet, call me a "loser" for having these principles. So this is hardly new.

Perhaps I can explain it this way. My father was an engineer. He was a good engineer. He graduated with honours from the Colorado School of Mines and he worked for Gulf Canada as a practicing engineer, never opting for management, until 1995. He used to talk about the difficulties of keeping up with technology changes in a heavily technological field, when the half-life of his engineering degree ceased to be, as he would have described it, relevant by 1965. That means he spent 30 years keeping up with technology changes on his own. At any time, he could have done what his peers did. He could have accepted a promotion as a manager and gotten more money. But he didn't want to be a manager. He wanted to be an engineer, because he loved being an engineer. It's what he'd wanted to be when he was 14 and for him, being one all his adult life, was living the dream.

In 1978, he was picked as one of two people to investigate the practical value of a concept called "enhanced recovery."  Now, I've talked about this on the blog before, but what the hell, let's just do it again. I'm an old man. Old men tell stories more than once.

No one at the time believed in this concept. It was in fact cutting edge oil recovery technology, involving the injection of gas, oil or water, and later other materials, into an existing pool in order to increase the pressure within that pool in order to force more oil out of a pool that had ceased producing.

See, when drilling came into existence, there was no solution for the problem that when you drilled down to get the oil from the ground, the condition that enabled that oil's extraction was underground pressure. But as you removed oil from the well, the pressure would drop, and drop, until finally, there wasn't enough pressure left to force the oil up the pipe. It meant that the field would "run dry"... except, in fact, it didn't. Everyone knew there was as much as 40% of the oil still down there, but it was wholly unreachable. And by the 1970s, areas that had once been major oil producing centres were now suffering from this problem.

When this boondoggle, which is what the company thought of it at the time, landed on my father's desk, no one else wanted it. There were small teams in companies all over the world working on the same problem, without any certainty of how it might be solved. The joke at my father's office was that he and the other fellow, I believe his name was John H., last name withheld, were working in "enchanted recovery." That gives a sense of the faith most had in the project.

Enhanced recovery didn't just become my father's field for the rest of his life, it resuscitated the world's oil industry. In the 1990s my father took a month long trip to Russia to explain the concept to Russian engineers. He did likewise take a trip to Indonesia. When he retired, at an age younger than what I am now, he had spoken with engineers about the technology all over the world.

Did he make more money on account of that? No. He never spoke to me about getting any special raise from the company he worked for, though to be truthful, even my mother never knew how much money he actually earned, because he was very 1950s that way. Did he start his own oil company? Did he become a freelance consultant instead of going on working for Gulf? Could he have? Of course. But he didn't. Because, in reality, he was never in it for the money. He was in it for the science.

Over the course of my father's life, doing a few calculations based on his probable income over the years of his being an engineer in the five decades that he worked, I'd estimate he made about ten million dollars. He didn't make it in one place, he made it steadily over the years... but the speed at which money is made isn't the issue, is it?

If I measure my own success in dollars against that, counting what I've earned from various sources, including writing, cooking, office work... I'm not in my father's league. I'd call it about three quarters of a million. Course, I don't have that money now. It went to cost of living and buying stuff that wore out and had to be replaced with other stuff. But I'm throwing these numbers around to stress that point that I don't think like a 20-year-old with regards to money any more. I don't see $3,148,567 in the way that a young person does. I see money that comes in and then goes right out again. I see money that floods a system and then retreats, forcing one to return to one's old way of just working for it. I see 8 persons on the title page who are not Kelsey, plus The Arcane Library, and Boda Games, and recognise that a lot of that Kickstarter money is not flowing wildly into one person's pocket. I don't view business like a child. I see it like it is: a thing that makes a lot of money, and spends a lot of money.

So I'm not all agog at these things. I see the world in terms of what authentically matters to me, and my goals, and things I'd like to design, create and give time to.

And none of those are a new, derivative role-playing game with a title that doesn't, in fact, mean anything. Is there a shadow that isn't technically darker than the space around it?

A Lot to Be Learned

Yesterday I was advised by a reader that there was "a lot to be learned" from Kelsey Dionne's Shadowdark. So I looked further into it. Shown is a screenshot of page 9, demonstrating the depth, difficulty and text size of the Shadowdark product. By typing "Shadowdark pdf" into the Google search engine, it's possible for anyone to read the entire document with patience and a willingness to skip ads.

I'll begin by pointing out that this is quite obviously not an independently designed role-playing game. It depends heavily on D&D, which is a nice way of saying it outright stole D&D's mechanics, dumbed them down and removed everything of nuance. On a design level, this is more or less the equivalent of rewriting Shakespeare's plays as a book of short stories. It helps a LOT with creativity when the goal is, first, let someone else do the work, and second, dumb it down to a grade school level of comprehension.

Doesn't terribly impress me.

I was never a supporter of the Old School Renaissance. I want to make that perfectly clear. I wrote yesterday that "The Old School Renaissance emerged as a reaction to what many players saw as the increasing complexity of newer editions of D&D." My philosophy about gaming differs from this premise in two important ways.

First of all, I don't think newer editions of D&D are very fucking complex. In fact, I think they're extremely stupified in design and mechanics, infantile in their reward systems and egregiously "non-game" in structure. Without hesitation, I automatically rank people who think 3rd, 4th or 5th edition D&D is "complex" as people not ready to for a grown-up career. Compared with what university educated professionals do every day, the "complexity" of D&D fits the status of learning how to Halloween as a kid. That is, not complex. We're not removing game resistance, we're not removing density... when someone carps about the need for D&D to return to the simplification of "The OSR", they're talking about removing adulthood.

People talk about AD&D and later editions as though they're equivalent to climbing K2. I'll remind the reader that I learned how to play the game at fifteen. My daughter did at nine. What are we to do with a bunch of adults who whine that D&D is so hard, they can't manage on the level of a nine-year-old?

My other reason for disliking the OSR comes from my having been playing this whole time, albeit with dark periods. By the summer of 1980, nine months after learning the game, I was so dissatisfied with the simplicity of AD&D that I began rewriting parts of the game to make it more complex, not less.  And mind you, I'm no superbrain. I do not have a PhD, I'm not an engineer or a doctor, or a lawyer; I've never had a technical job (I don't count writing). I've never worked in research or design or manufacturing. As a writer, I comment on things. This is not a superbrain activity. So when I say, "AD&D wasn't complex enough," I'm not writing as Steven Hawkings. I'm saying, the game was so egregiously simple, it wasn't sufficient to provide what I needed my game system to provide. That is millions (plural) of miles away from Shadowdark, 43 years before the launch of the latter.

I have continued to make the game more complex in the years since. As such, I have very little reason to embrace the OSR's ideology, and even less reason to consider the dumbification of AD&D as something I can "learn" from. If AD&D felt insufficient for me in 1980, before internet discourse, before "narrative gaming," before Critical Role, before modern bloat, before corporate overproduction, long before the presence of another edition or even the simplistic splatbooks of original AD&D, then my point of view could not have been in 2010 that D&D had "lost its way" through excess complexity. I thought the idea ridiculous at the time and I continue to think it's ridiculous. Moreover, I don't want to play with people who think the OSR idea has any validity. If that's you, for the love of all things sacred, stop playing D&D and go get a real fucking job, one with consequences attached to your actions. You need more life experience, not a dumber game.

Let me see if I can explain where a simple system utterly fails my perceived structure of player agency and opportunity. If you don't know me, you might want to read this, this and then this post.

If you're following along with the Discord Campaign, then you know that my party has recently been offered logistical support from a group of ethnic Hungarians seeking to destabilise the Ottoman Regime from the inside... an idea the party has embraced because they see it as a way of enriching themselves. Parties are, after all, always parties.

But now that the players have decided to onboard themselves (they were not required to do so; if they had not, I'd have simply given them some other opportunity), then the system they play in has to be robust enough to answer their intentions honestly and intelligently. A simplified system cannot hope to sustain deep agency in a setting that lacks the procedural density needed to answer the player's meaningful questions. Before Ottoman logistics in Hungary can be destabilised, they have to be comprehended, they need a logic. The players will need to know, ahead of time, what the blockhouse ought to contain, fairly, without that being strictly an arbitrary number of gold. They need to know which trade routes matter and why, what support the blockhouse has from the immediate area, how authority functions both in the blockhouse and in the surrounding region under Ottoman control. To make decisions on how to attack the blockhouse, they must have information on residents in the area, the probable consequence of the attack, what the next target might logically be, what an end-point of their engagement might be, where they feel they have a right to draw the line before getting in deeper... all with a legitimate agency that says "the players are in charge of what the players do," not me, not a story, not a convenient "adventure midway ride," nothing whatsoever that forces them, beyond the pure logic of the setting, to keep going in a setting large enough that if they walk two hundred miles west, they can escape Ottoman influence entirely and set up shop elsewhere with a clean slate.

Shadowdark's mechanics simply aren't good enough to provide this.

This is the real divide between the D&D I'm teaching and the D&D being sold, under various cheap-minded rubrics. The OSR often talks about "player freedom," but what that usually means is freedom inside a vacuum. The players may choose any direction, but the world lacks enough internal structure for those directions to materially differ from the players' perspective in any meaningful way. They can choose the left door vs. the right one. They can choose whether to enter the dungeon or not. They can choose whether or not this is the right time to return to town and resupply. The decisions are isolated, trivial and ultimately meaningless in a broader context. Players can make a choice, but they cannot engage their strategic reasoning because there is no rule structure and no complex setting against which to test their understanding of potential consequences. They can't have agency because there's nothing to have agency about. Without a detailed framework, the setting simply cannot respond to player choice.

Thus, complexity in the mechanics and the world is the medium through which player agency becomes functional. Detailed systems allow players to make deliberate choices, anticipate outcomes and respond to evolving circumstances. Without that depth, what appears to be freedom is in fact constrained and superficial. The richness of the system and the world is what allows agency to exist in a functional sense. In essence, the world’s complexity and the rules' granularity are inseparable from the player's capacity to act deliberately and with impact.

But as I said in the attached posts, DMs don't want that. They want controlled, managed, contained players who do as they're told, so they can move from points A to B to C in succession in a curated, Candyland-like structured game setting, where cardboard baddies are knocked down with dice, or fudging, since if the baddie doesn't fall then it has to be pushed over. This is what OSR celebrates as the "ideal model" for D&D, and I think that's gawdawful.

Finally, with regard to yesterday's post, one thing I did not comment upon was the lack of actual game discussion among the participants. I did not learn anything about Shadowdark from Dionne's own mouth, the matter of "State of OSR in 2026" was not in fact discussed because, in fact, OSR itself was not discussed. What was discussed was an hour of "engagement" in the least valuable, socially awkward manner imaginable.

To which I'd like to respond, can the reader see me on this panel?

It's a two-part question. First, is there any universe in which these people could imaginatively look at this blog or my content or my work and want to have me present? I think not.

And secondly, since I would talk about the subject, the State of OSR in 2026, which would be to say, it will be exactly what it was in 2025. "Advancement" is not being made in any sort of science or game play manner. It is just people churning out more product of the exact same kind. I would not be welcome with my comments. I would make everyone at the table extremely uncomfortable because I would not be there to sell anything. And where it comes to table sales, the purpose of this kind of video is to make sure no one looks incompetent, since we're giving everyone lip service in order to sell themselves as "real, authentic people" while needing to do nothing to perform that model except to sit in chairs and speak in vaguely conversational patterns. The panel does not exist to investigate anything, or talk about anything, or present a viewpoint that might damage their potential sales.

That is why, for me, I'd as soon be a member of a panel of real estate agents talking about "the housing market in 2026"... since, obviously, for real estate agents, the only answer to that question is, "It's going to be amazeballs!"

Thank you, no.

Can you imagine the seller of an OSR product addressing the question, the State of the OSR in 2026 with the answer, "This design trend, actually, has reached a dead end in these last fifteen years. I think we need to reconsider whether or not this OSR thing has actually run its course."

(you load) 16 Tons of ...

Luke Stratton: I want to talk a little bit about kind of what you're tapping on here with the communities. I feel like all of our brands, if you will, the communities are such a big part of it, and they're the thing that is different between, say, big corporate D&D, right? I mean, there are communities for those, but that's very like the two entities are very separated. You've got the corporate official stuff and then this like kind of back corner, illegal, you know, third-party stuff. Whereas, we're making stuff where they're putting our logos on the products. We're uplifting them. We back all the Kickstarter projects for Pirateborg and sell them in our store. (to Kelsey Dionne) I know you back all the Shadowdark stuff. Like Kelsey, tell us about your community. What about your community is like so vibrant and important to the Shadowdark brand?

Dionne: Yeah, it is kind of, it's become sort of a brand like an ecosystem. They, the community, is the most enthusiastic evangelists of the game, and we've kind of hit a critical mass where because there's enough of them, they're spreading sort of uncontrollably amongst... like, you know, 'cause like word of mouth for us is huge. Like, that's kind of how we make our first entry is through word of mouth, and so, we just have a really engaged enthusiastic community.

I was sent a video by the OSR by a colleague, which he did not want to post a link to, not wishing to give these people free advertising. Myself, I don't think it makes a difference. This group of dolts is what happens when a vaguely motivated vapid creators find a market in slightly more vapid consumers, creating opportunities for the savagery of the English language one can read above. The video features "members of the OSR" Luke Stratton, Kelsey Dionne, Brad Kerr, Matt Finch and Yochai Gal.

Luke Stratton created Pirate Borg and publishes pirate-horror OSR material through Limithron; Kelsey Dionne created Shadowdark RPG and runs The Arcane Library; Brad Kerr writes concise, atmospheric adventures such as Hideous Daylight; Matt Finch co-authored OSRIC and created Swords & Wizardry; and Yochai Gal created Cairn and co-hosts Between Two Cairns with Brad Kerr.

This blog blasted Matt Finch in January for his OSRIC, deservedly so. Otherwise, I don't know who these people are, nor do I give a fuck. I could tell, just spending a half hour with them, that I don't want to know them. Ever. I would find it difficult to be in a room with them.

I've worked a number of office jobs. There's always that up-and-comer who has learned all the corporate speak, is utterly oblivious to how ridiculous they sound to "normal" people, is incredibly sychophantic to upper management and is always to ready to make the minions "cheerful" about their commitment to the company. That is, just these up-and-comers down-and-implode, ending their fabulous trajectory and finding work in a warehouse. Maybe, if you've worked office jobs, you've met them.

Now, imagine that person has designed a role-playing game.

It's plain from the way these people speak about their products, which they are trying to sell, that they're not artists, players or hobbyists. They're small-brand operators who have absorbed a small, scattered and barely-understood corporate marketing language which they're amateurishly fitting into their speech in a desperate attempt to sound like they have a clue what they're doing or saying. Underneath the veneer, with the exception of Matt Finch, who is old enough to have done this so long that he's now competently slimy, it's more than evident that the other four are poster children for "imposter syndrome." They trip over their words, they change verb tense mid sentence, they fail to end sentences, they cram in phrasing like "critical mass" and "uplifting" that do not quite say what they want it to say, while using "community" as a word that miraculously launders their ill-conceived and probably misunderstood business position. I'd guess that none of them, Matt Finch included, though by now that part of his brain has suffocated along with his legal comprehension, have the slightest clue why their stuff is popular, why they have a lot of money and what they need to do to keep the money rolling is. Their speech patterns suggest that fear and doubt. Just to be clear, this is Luke Stratton's 17th Pirateborg podcast episode and he still talks like this. Constantly.

If they were genuinely passionate about their products, they would demonstrate passion. If they were in the last bit self-aware, they'd be so embarrassed by this level of performance that they would never appear on a podcast again. Not only can these people not speak casually, or for one moment appear to be authentic at all, every sentence literally feels like they're veering off a cliff of some kind, that they they have to keep pulling themselves back from.

Consider this phrasing: "we've kind of hit a critical mass where because there's enough of them, they're spreading sort of uncontrollably amongst..."

At this point, I'm fairly sure that even Dionne has realised that she sounds like she's describing the spread of a disease, which is why this thought just stops dead and gets translated into a completely benign cliche about word of mouth. There's no question she knew her language was careening out of control... because it happens again, and again, with all of them. I could easily just give twenty examples. Watch the video. It's a drinking game. You have to take a shot every time a speaker changes the subject mid-sentence.

These speakers all sound like people trying to maintain a product that they infer is unstable, needs marketing language to make acceptable, while at the same time being actually unable to factually speak about the products they're making.

Matt Finch: It's solely I think the fact of the internet being out there that people nowadays are reading on screens and even on phones, which have you know have different... there's just a different physical interaction with what you're doing, and the best way to read something on a screen is to have all the... every discreet piece of information isolated from every other piece, because you're going to be scrolling up and down and you need to... it's much more importan that you need to know where your eyes gonna fall (sic), and so you know I-I-I think anyone who is-is-is younger or has been on the internet a lot is now much more familiar and expecting to see information broken out that way.

Okay. That was three shots... and maybe I don't know what he was trying to say there because I'm now drunker than I was 40 seconds ago (the time he took to say this; it was hard to pound them back at that speed), but, seriously... what the fuck.

A couple of things. First, the channel Limithon, which hosts to the podcast, felt this was such a valuable quote that they cut it from the five-person discussion and published it as its own video. Yeetch!

Secondly, OSRIC was published 20 years ago. After widespread use of the internet, by the way, that can no longer be described as something happening "these days." Nor can phones, for that matter, which have had interactive screens for 19 years. So... yeah. That. One would expect that Finch, after twenty years, could express himself better than this... especially with that constantly invoked legal background of his (he constantly invokes it, so I might as well). Again, yeetch.

You'd think after 20 years you'd have realised, "I'm not really very good at this public speaking thing. Maybe I shouldn't be doing it any more."

Then again, no doubt, he needs to believe he's still relevant.

Honest to gawd, all due service to my colleague who didn't want to link this, this is an excellent demonstration of what's happened to the community.

The Old School Renaissance emerged as a reaction to what many players saw as the increasing complexity of newer editions of D&D — particularly 3rd Edition and onward, which accentuated elaborate rules, point-buy systems, intricate character builds and heavy roleplaying structures. Enthusiasts wanted to return to a more streamlined, improvisational and often harsher playstyle of 1974 to 1981 D&D, where the rules existed primarily to support play rather than constrain it. This meant: simple mechanics, fast resolution, minimal bookkeeping and a focus on emergent interaction between the players that would inspire and increase immersion for the table's culture. Players could run adventures quickly, handle combat and treasure without extensive prep, and rely on improvisation instead of predefined character arcs or vocal performance.

Just so we're clear, a "renaissance" is not expected to adhere to the products of the original time; much was produced during "The Renaissance" of the mid-2nd Millenium that did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome. From what I've been able to learn about the products these persons have created (excepting the podcast presenter), at least three of them seem to be creating products that are in line with old school play. I can't say, because I have no personal experience, that Cairn, Shadowdark or the products produced by Kerr are "good" or "bad," because I haven't seen them. Some research suggests that they do provide what they promise to provide: a deviation away from 5e concepts (though with Shadowdark there is reason to think this deviation might be superficial, as the game does embrace concepts like character identity, campaign themes and player investment that reads 5e-adjacent).

I have, on the other hand, seen OSRIC, which is just plain shit. It's not a redesign, it's a butchering of the original source material which has been repackaged in a way that made it worse, which was sold during the "golden age" of new shiny youtube, when so many rubes existed for the taking that OSRIC lucked the fuck out. That's all that was.

If I wanted to invest five minutes in any of these products, a pretty big if, then that desire is butched by meeting these people in this video. This sort of thing is supposed to increase interest, not reveal that the designers are in fact a bunch of losers who also got lucky, right there with Finch. I don't know that to be the case... but when you hear them, and see their body language, and then you put them beside Finch, whom they clearly admire (not respect, I'd expect respect, it's not your podcast), then it lessens my motivation to have anything to do with their product.

This is not how marketing is supposed to work.

Someone should take these people aside — that is, Dionne, Kerr and Gal — and tell them to stop having one-on-ones with marketing analysts and try getting back to their real, authentic selves; what they personally see in the product, why they made they changes they did, what they'd like to do next... and just stop talking about the fans as objectified things they're so proud to possess now. Yes, I get it, it's great to have fans... and no doubt, they all pay marketing lipservice to "thanking" the fans every day, because fans do in fact like that pandering shit. But really, the fans aren't in it to be acknowledged as a sort of contagion that's spreading fast. They're in it because they want to know who you are, because in your eyes, you're pretty cool.

Therefore, get some lessons in not sounding like what you like is the money you're making, because that's what business speak is designed to convey. "Word of mouth for us is huge" means, in corporatese, "we are raking in tons of money and we love it."

That's not good. Don't talk that way.

I have no notes for Finch. He's irredeemable... an old word that says, in essence, his soul is so much in debt now that there's no way of paying it back.

And as far as Stratton goes, it's pretty clear he doesn't give a fuck. Limithron has 5,080 subscribers and after three days, it has 3,400 page views. Even subscribers aren't listening to this shit. But these are his best numbers since producing a like post a month ago with Dionne again and three other guests, which yielded 3,900 page views. Apart from the 3,700-view post with Mike Shea, the rest of his work generally doesn't top a thousand. But that's okay. He's found a button that works, so expect to see a lot more "panel" episodes of this cast.

Ten years from now, if my luck continues as it has in the past, Luke Stratton will be more popular than Mr. Beast. Because, well, that's how far I am from the way the rest of the world is.

Certainly, Stratton hopes this will be the case. I doubt he thinks about anything else.

Old Man

Recently, listening to a discussion about how easy it can be in a big city, like the one I live in, to just go out and find a D&D game, I can't say I disagree. I know of a bar where they play on large wooden tables; two game stores where they play on folding tables; and I suppose either the university or the city college must have some kind of club that I could get into, alumni or no. But public D&D isn't what it used to be for me, and hasn't been since I passed 55.

First and foremost, there's food. There's something immensely comforting not just in being able to go to one's own fridge, pantry or coffee maker for sustenance during a game, there's the pleasure of eating it on plates or in one's own bowls or from one's own cup. Invariably, out of the house, there's a limitation on what can be had; on how much it costs; on how it's served, or for that matter policed by the space. I've done the thing where chips aren't allowed or where the pop has to be in-house or there's no coffee or tea at all allowed, because we can't bring it in from somewhere else. Not everywhere has all these rules, but surely something is disallowed... which is understandable, because it's not my home. Their place, their rules. Which only makes it clear that I want to play in my place, by my rules.

Next, it's seating. Thirty years ago I could comfortably sit on a wooden bench with no back, or a cheap grungy school chair, without discomfort. Now, not so much. At home I have a nice comfy chair with an extra cushion, with arm rests, that I can ignore for five or six hours... but there's nothing more distracting that having the points of one's hip bone being aggravated by a bench that consists of a log that's been split, planed and lacquered to give that "je ne sais quoi" that makes one wish for a sofa. The solution, of course, is painkillers: two every two hours, tempting the death of one's liver, so that the seating can be ignored and the game run with focus.

The aspirin, however, will not solve the larger problem: heat. As one gets to be an old man, that old self-generated furnace that used to be stoked on its own body-fat just doesn't run like it used to. Add that to rooms specifically designed to be enormous enough to manage the sound, the multiple tables, the need to turn the air over continously and the need for younger people to rate the ambience at 68-degrees (19 celsius). I appreciate that need. I had it once myself. In younger days, yes, I could play in a school cafeteria large enough to fit two tennis courts, with a 12-foot room, sitting in a plastic-and-green steel chair, while perfectly comfortable. Now, I'm pulling a jacket overtop my sweater overtop my t-shirt and still rubbing my hands together so I can nimbly handle the dice. My place might be a little warm for the players, but they can always open the patio door, even in the winter time, and even go outside if it gets to be too much. I have no option in a public space to do the same, since the door is 60 feet away; half the time the door only leads to a hall that costs another hundred feet to get outside, where one might warm himself in the sun like a lizard... if it isn't raining.

Then there's the noise. My space has carpets, large wooden furniture, paintings that soak reverberation and a stucco ceiling. The lighting is soft, pleasant and adjustable... as opposed to the cafeteria like space that is hard tile, hard laminate tables, acoustic ceiling tiles that largely fail and a constant thrum that can always be heard despite the echoes of ten groups of players shouting at DMs. I hear just fine; I don't have a problem there. But while once I could sit and play in a room with sixty or eighty like players, nowadays it's the headache that follows, that again acetaminophen just can't quite cut.

All this comes well before the strangers themselves must be considered. But the point of this is not to talk about the strangers I might play with... because long before that, long before I meet them, I'm already uncomfortable. In a way that I can do nothing about.

Contrariwise, as one accumulates nice things, as the world around one's space becomes that much more aesthetic, one begins to wonder just who should be invited home. Once upon a time, when I owned a formica table with a broken leg that could easily be kicked out, when people sat on benches found in dumpsters, when the cups were plastic, and the carpet a shag-variety that had been tramped down for ten years by former residents, a food-fight could have broken out and we'd have laughed about it. But now I get antsy about people who won't use a coaster rather than set their dripping coffee on my hardwood game table. It's silly, I know. But you work to own these things, you care about them, you hope to keep them in good condition for the short time you have left on this planet... you sort of want the kind of players who have their own nice things and know how to care for them. The last thing needed is some rube who, at forty, is still living in assisted housing.

This is the part where the gentle reader nods their head and thinks, "Yeah, old man, can't deal with a little noise or a less-than-plush chair. Poor guy. Might just as well shoot himself now."

To which I reply with the old man's taunt. "If you're lucky, and you don't die, one day you will walk in my shoes."

Rank is a Word for Stinks

Often, to force us to rate things in terms of their highest value, we're offered a supposition that really doesn't make sense: "If you were stranded on a desert island, what book would you take with you." That's framed to force you to commit to "a" book, say the Odyssey or the Brothers Karamazov, or anything known for its depth and complexity, suggesting that we won't get bored re-reading it.

Obviously, the better book would be some kind of survival guide, preferably one tailor-made for the island you're getting stranded on. I'll choose the one written by the author who spent 10 years on this self-same island, giving an account very useful to my situation. But foregoing that...

An education, a grasp of "depth and complexity," is not managed through one book, in any case. If the reader on the island does not have a long and lengthy understanding of literature, or history for that matter, or any knowledge of the 19th century, then the Brothers Karamazov is going to be uselessly inscruitable for them. And if the individual IS educated enough to understand Dostoevski, then they should already have enough books in their head to manage just fine without any such books — since one such book really isn't going to be of much value after the first read anyhow. What are we to do in the weeks and months before we're ready to read the same book again for the ninth time?

The "best" of anything is a representation of shortcut thinking. It presumes that one's favourite food somehow precludes the need to actually have a diet of hundreds of foods, or that the best vacation spot means that no other vacation spot anywhere on earth is necessary, or that so long as I see the best movie, I'm done with movies now, I've seen them all. Saying something is the "best" is really shorthand for, "I have no comprehension of nuance, so I prefer to speak with my gut." It's tiresome, it's bland, it doesn't say anything real about the thing described and... it's an inescapable form of list-making content on the internet. The pervasiveness of it really is remarkable. It allows so many people to say so little about so little, while still sounding clever.

List-making is structural rewarded online; rankings are faction-driven, they are easy to argue about and infinitely repeatable. This does not conflict that they are the lowest form of discourse, one in which individuals really do not need to explain themselves, or their choices, especially when those choices are framed as visceral, personal or in some way political. It takes no study to name the best of something, since anything not seen or experienced can be discounted with no fault upon the writer or speaker. If someone claims that the "best sports team" is one of the twenty-four in a given league, there's a very good chance that 1 in 24 people who care at all about sports will agree with them. Everyone else is, obviously, "biased," being unable to see the truth about the best sports team as I personally care to name it.

Moreso, people don't hold one another accountable for these opinions. It's really just a game, just a way to pass the time, just a choice some people want to hold dear because they must hold something dear... and so, randomly or merely because of the way their minds are framed, they've chosen their hill to die on, however ludicrous that hill is. The best way to have an "identity" nowadays is to pick something so unpopular that no one really knows it, then claim it's the "best" of its category, proving somehow that the speaker is that much more educated and knowledgeable, because they alone understand the best to be something that vast majority does not know.

As a result, ranking becomes a stand-in for thinking. After so many years of it, I'm quite done with it. I do not care what the best version of D&D is. Or what wins Best Picture this year, or what should have won it. Or anything to do with ranking one thing over another. I am perfectly capable of liking a thing, supporting it, voting for it, wanting it to become standard and giving my time and energy to that thing, without having to compare it to some other thing. This last, which is so de rigeuer in this culture, holds zero interest for me.

This allows me to enjoy many things at the same time in a culture that craves comparison. I do not live, for example, in the "best country" in the world; I do not live in the best city of that country; I do not think anything like this actually exists. I happen to live in Canada; there are things I like about the country and things I don't. On the whole, I think I'm happy with it as a country. I would not like to see it change for the worse. But it is not a better country because it happens to sit alongside a country I would rather not live in. The one has very little to do with the other, except that they are different and that I like how they are different. Ranking one over the other tells me nothing about either. Stating those specific things I like, on the other hand, makes a point, just like discussing those things I don't like. None of this has anything do to with liking this thing more than that, or less than that, or anything to do with comparisons. It is simply that I have this, I like this, I'd like to go on having this... and I'd rather not have that. The person who lives in the address across the street may feel differently. That is just fine. They may think what they wish. I am fine with them going their own way, so long as it does not interfere with me going mine.

As such, I have spent much time on this blog disparaging 5e or the White Box or attitudes about D&D in general. I do not commonly (I cannot think of an example, but I may have spoken loosely at some point) rate things. I based my game setting and rules system on AD&D because that was the only system available at the time when I started making changes. I made changes to those things about AD&D that I didn't like. I still don't like those things. I do not think AD&D is a good system. But it is irrelevant to say that AD&D is a "better" system than what follows. It may be, but it is irrelevant to say so. It is better to describe, in detail, taking one's time, what things are and how they function, and what they attempt to resolve, then discuss how others options attempt to resolve those same problems, discussing and pointing out why this fails or that succeeds. It is not valuable to make blanket statements. Nor it is valuable to give blanket statements any credence, just because we think we should "tolerate" other people's preferences. 

"Preference" is a form of prejudice. It is not an opinion, it is a preconceived opinion that sets out to change other people's minds upon the basis of favoritism or partisanship. It is not intelligent, it is visceral and worse, it is performative. We must stop, as a culture, assigning "preference" a value it does not possess. It is not worthy of tolerance, because it refuses to give itself value through thought or investigation.

Some might hear "preference" as when we say, "I prefer tea to coffee." This is not the sort of preference that is stated, however. What is said, however, is that "tea is better than coffee," as though we should obviously drink one and forego the other.

That coercion, the one that says, "Star Wars" is the best picture ever made, and anyone who doesn't think so is... blah blah blah," underlies every statement of this kind. We are not being asked to just rank things. We are being asked to revere those things that are ranked, because some organisation, or even some solitary person, has taken the time to rank things, as though the ranking itself is an achievement. It is not.

Obviously, for whatever reason, we're not going to stop ranking things. Most likely, the habit reaches into a distant past, perhaps a million years ago, before consciousness, when human-like beings comprehended that "this plateau" was better than "that one," because on the whole there tended to be more food there. Since, we've allowed our minds to be guided by a similar principle, the idea that "best" is equivalent to "most resource-giving"... only it's become conflated with a sort of masturbatory impulse to conflate everything. I don't expect it to stop.

But for some individuals, I ask, please... hear it when it happens. Hear it and understand what you're hearing. The groundlings are always going to indulge. That does not mean we all must.

Session 7: Yet Another Owlbear Disappointment

Starting with this overdeveloped battlemap of the party fighting three owlbears. Though mean and menacing looking, they did not last long. Still, I wanted the map to capture the attention of the players, to give them a real sense of space. Some of the elements here are A.I., some are features of the publisher program... and some are a mixture of both. For example, A.I. created the grass pattern and the stone pattern, but the actual shape of much of the stone was done using Publisher tools. My design of the map took longer than the actual battle. But then, I still have the map, in Publisher, so it could be used again, or even handed out if the gentle reader wanted to use it.

Though the spellcasters are low level, there is a 3rd and 4th level cleric, a 3rd level mage and a 1st level druid in the party. Between them, using entangled, dust devil, wyvern watch and even the cantrip twitch, which proved too strong for a cantrip and needs reworking, the party were able to benefit from the narrowness of the space to tie the owlbears up rather than getting tied up themselves. The owlbears' lack of intelligence, so that they could not coordinate their attacks (I played them "dumb"), plus their lack of range weapons, made them easy prey. If there had been six, the first three would have soaked up the party's spell use... but alas, it was not to be.

Giving them d10 for their hit points, I rolled amazingly well: 42 h.p. out of a possible 50 for one, and 37 for another (the last had 20). It didn't help. All told, the owlbears only managed to do 38 damage. Total party experience was only 2,806. I don't plan to throw any more owlbears any time soon at the party. If I do, they're damn well going to have a hill giant as a handler.

The wagon and corpses shown on the map was merely to give a precedent for putting some wealth into the party's pockets: 1200 g.p., 600 s.p. and 300 c.p. By my system, 1 g.p. = 1 x.p. = 3 s.p. = 4 c.p. This allows me to give less actual wealth to the party while still permitting and experience boost. Ti, the 2nd level fighter, went up to 3rd. Nice when someone goes up every fight. Certainly doesn't always happen.

Thereafter the party followed a route led by Laszlo, the Hungarian looking after the boy Peter, whom the party agreed to help get to Budapest. Following Laszlo's route shown on the map, starting east of Salgotarjan, where a gap between the hills shows the location of the owlbear fight, the travelled in a circuitous route to avoid Ottoman patrols. Reaching Veroce, where Laszlo knew smugglers who could get the party by boat down to Buda without incident, they stopped just north of the city at a blockhouse, where — with some qualification from Laszlo — they were told that entry into Buda with weapons is strictly forbidden. Even a knife is a danger. Then they were introduced to three Hungarians, whose names were not invented for the session but I'll invent them here for the next running: Gusztav, Dorian and Salamon. Two others were present as well, Croatians, a woman named Barica and a man named Kruno.

Prior to their arrival, Laszlo expressed how impressed he was with the party. He'd watched them fearlessly meet the Ottoman soldiers in the previous running and now he'd watched them easily dispatch three owlbears. He respected the party's help getting the boy to Buda; he spoke of them as "good people," obviously fearless, obviously kind hearted and willing to go out of their way for others. And therefore, with that going for them, the three Hungarians asked the party, "How would you like to help the Kingdom of Hungary strike at the Ottomans, however they might?"

A chartaque (Turk. Çardak), a watchtower and

fortification in the Ottoman Empire.

Several options were pitched. Were the party willing to kidnap a princess? How did they feel about setting a dock on fire? Would they like to protect a fire opal mine in their home town of Ozd against it being discovered by Ottomans? Would they like to help these two nice Croatians attack a strong point on the border between Hungary-controlled Croatia and Ottoman lands? This last caught their attention. As we ended the running, the party started to purchase some things in Buda, deciding to unload their opal with the help of their Hungarians, before following a plan of crossing a closed border into Hungary, then moving west and south until meeting Barica and Kruno's partisans, to take on the blockhouse/chartaque.

That's where we pick up with our next running.

Pandering

I'm going to write a post later today about the session we had Friday, but for now I'm going to write something short about a trend I'm seeing in social media.

Imagine that I've just written a post eviscerating 4th edition D&D. I've talked about its design, then its bad choices, the failure of the concept in just seven short years and the creating company's decision to throw the version to the winds in favour of getting a "democratic" game design to put in its place. I've systematically gone through each element of the decision-process and I've tied it to technological, social and personal attitudes about the world in a way that clearly makes my politics self-evident. Then, at the end, you find this paragraph following such a post:

"Thank you so much for reading. Do you like 4th edition? What do you think of the game's design? Let's start a discussion in the comments. I'd love to hear what you think."

Now imagine that you've just finished the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and at the end you find this mixed into the book's epilogue:

"Do you think that O'Brien was right to do what he did to Winston? Perhaps you feel that seeking power entirely for it's own sake is a good thing. Write your opinions to my editor. It would be terrific if we could get a dialogue going."

I am seeing this sort of thing all the time now.  Youtube's social algorithm rewards those creators who get comments, so every time a viewer writes a comment, it essentially puts money into the creator's pocket. We could solve every youtuber's dream overnight if we all, the six billion of us who use the editor, just wrote six random comments about nothing each day, like a bot, on random youtube videos. We'd also collapse the youtube algorithm overnight and ruin everyone's experience by destroying the foundations for how people get paid, but hey, it's not like people don't hate youtube.

Pandering is a ritual performance of openness after the creator has already provided their opinion about something... which states clearly and plainly that what the creator actually cares about is MONEY, not educating a reader, not ideals, not taking a stand, not belief.  Dropping the sort, chirpy, "let's discuss" demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that what the creator is doing is spewing out the opinion they're able to think up, and then immediately wanting to sell out that opinion as rapidly as they can. The trend isn't "let's discuss," the trend is, "help me enrich myself."

I find it repulsive.

When George Orwell wrote his book, he was not concerned about  people who did not agree with his premise. He was not counting on his money coming from people who were ready to "have a discussion" about it. He knew there would be people who did disagree, who considered it simplified, unrealistic or unnecessarily dark. When he wrote it, he had no idea whether or not it would do well. He did not care. He wrote what he thought.

We don't do this anymore. We write in the hopes that someone will like us. And give us money. And we pray we won't get cancelled. And as a result, we don't need A.I. to produce slop for us.

We're more than able to make lots of slop on our own.

Significance and Outcome

To continue from the last post.

We ended the discussion of value with the players learning about the game world's real life qualities, which is something I learn myself whenever I make maps or choose to build a page about a specific provincial area (one with local boundaries). This learning was earlier stated to fall into the realm of "significance," and so it does, but there it more to significance than merely this.

I find myself asking the question, Why do I continue to play or work at D&D after all this time? It is not enough to say, "I love it," at least not for me, for I feel that merely sidesteps the question. Why, that is, do I love it? The answer to the question should not be evaded — it should be expressed in clear, comprehensible terms that anyone, even a person who does not love or appreciate D&D, can nevertheless understand.

My initial answer is this: D&D matters.

Much of the person I am, such as the way I interact within group dynamics, or my sense of belonging, or the appetite I have for bringing about change in the world, has been shaped by my being a dungeon master. Early, when I struggled with the desire for recognition that every world-be artist feels, I discovered that having become proficient in D&D sustained me at times when every other expressiveness failed. For a time I tried to be an actor; for a time, a singer; for a time, a journalist; and always, a writer. None of these were especially good for me early on. I was 34 before I had any success as an actor, long after I'd ceased to really care about it. I was 32 before I experienced what it might like to be a singer, though by no means was this a feasible career by then. I became a journalist at 26, then preceeded to fail at that until I reached the age of 44 (meaning, yes, I made money, but certainly received no special attention). And as a writer, my truest, more lasting success has been, oddly, in writing content about D&D.

Interestingly, though, whenever I wanted "attention," I could get it by running the game. As a skilled DM, I was in demand. I could set myself up pretty much anywhere, among anyone, and demonstrate that skillset. I could make strangers admire me. I could demonstrate more than prowess, I could show insight and cleverness. D&D therefore has demonstrated an opportunity for me, again and again, to prove that I am significant. And I can assure the reader most firmly: the worst thing about getting old, for most people, is losing that significance when they retire. Which means, more plainly stated, their significance is largely awarded to them by workplaces that agreed to employ them, until the time came that they wouldn't. This is a brutal, cold fact about the world.

"This kid from work... Ricky... couldn't remember whether you ordered pens with blue ink or black; but Ricky was a god for ten minutes when he trounced a local maître d' at a local food court."

D&D does not pay the rent, it does not impress the institutions that define status, it is not understood properly by culture, it is often not treated seriously even by the players themselves, who fear submitting themselves or becoming immersed in something they habitually see as "make-believe" because they cannot understand that, in fact, humans have sustained themselves with falsifications of reality for a long as we have written records. In fact, the oldest story we have extant from the far off reaches of five thousand years ago is about two adventurers who fight monsters and haul away treasure.

But nothing about the way others look at D&D matters, because the game is real while it lasts, when it is treated with respect as real, and when it allows us to step out of the ordinary world and into this place of imagination and gestalt.

Preferably, without anyone receiving actual bruises.

The first rule of D&D is not that we don't talk about D&D. The first rule is that we talk about it all the time.

It's significant that we choose to participate in a game where we invent our own actions rather than consigning us to another evening of watching films where someone else assigns the lines we're going to hear. It is no different from those who wish to spend their weekend playing football rather than watch others play it. Participation is a richer, more meaningful choice for us. We are not admiring competence, we are testing our own, by choosing, committing, responding, adapting, accepting consequence and all the rest. This is what makes the game good... because unlike the vast number who have decided that watching a bunch of actors NOT play D&D, but a performative mess that vaguely resembles D&D, we've chosen to be alive.

That is the "clear intent" we have with regards to playing. And when this intent exists among all the players, when none of them are tag-along spectators, when they all want to dig in and be part of the premise... when we physically boot those who don't belong here, who we decide aren't entitled to play, it's a better game. It's a "good game."  Because not only are we not dragging dead weight, we've all forgotten that we're playing D&D at all.

We are in this forest... we're not pretending to be. We are concerned about what we're venturing forth to slay. We're not turning to each other and saying, "Oh, hey, isn't D&D great?" No participant of anything that matters ever does that. Only those who aren't engaged, who can't let go, who can't try, ever look at the thing from the outside.

And the only thing they ever say is, "This sucks."

Which says much about such people. "If it does, please go find somewhere else to be. We're playing, and that'd be easier without you here."

This is perhaps the reason why I am so viciously surly on occasion... because I feel the actual game has zero to do with nostalgia bait or backstories or most of the lore pushed on the community. I don't find loaves of magic bread that replaces the need for food "cool" any more than a football player would want the length of the field shortened by five yards to make the game "snappier." I don't like the changes that have been made because all of them, every effing one of them for the last twenty five years, has been designed to specifically ruin immersion and the game I love.

If that doesn't seem reasonable, I'll throw this out (pun intended). The Infield Fly Rule was first adopted in 1895 by the National League... so it has been around for 131 years.

And some people still hate it. They don't care that it would mean intentionally dropping a ball so a double- or triple-play could be made. They don't believe restricting that option makes the game "better."

I feel the same way about standard arrays.

Purpose and Value

If D&D was a well-made game, properly supported, with rules that were structured well, then there should be an already memorised phrase that answers the question posed at the end of the last post. What we are likely to get, however, is something like this, which ChatGPT provided:

D&D is a game in which players, through fictional persons with limited abilities, enter a persistent imagined world, seek advantage within it, confront danger and uncertainty, and by their choices alter their own condition and the condition of that world.

I pointed out to Chat that this is really just a collection of ill-defined generated concepts that in fact do not determine the game's play at all. This is like saying that "Chess is a game that two people play on a board where someone wins." Which in no way provides a premise for that game. Chat agrees:

The key consequence is that D&D discourse is full of phrases that sound like premises but are actually atmospheres. “Persistent imagined world,” “danger and uncertainty,” “fictional persons,” “alter their condition,” “seek advantage” — these are not useless ideas, but they are not yet game statements. They do not tell a person what play consists of, what governs it, or what makes one course of action preferable to another.

The premise of D&D is that one person, the dungeon master, creates a set of fictional but believable imaginary scenes or situations, representing an "environment" or "setting," complete with residents, existing in a point of time, with a potential for rational consequences, which the players can interact with imaginably. When the players take an action within this environment, they cause a change which the DM must believably reconcile, producing a response from the environment, which is explained to the players.

This gets rid of all the details of the setting that have as much to do with the game's premise as the physical colour of the pieces has to do with chess's game play. In chess, the pieces must be a different colour, but they need not be black and white. Gold and silver, red and yellow, clear and opaque boards exist and do not change the game. There is a "persistent imagined world" in D&D, but that is the effect of the premise, not the premise itself; it is what the D&D makes. It needs the DM to interpret it, because it cannot provide interpretations in and of itself, because it's not a person, it's a mechanic. All the parts originally defined by Chat are mechanics: danger, uncertainty, persons, condition, advantage... as such, they descend from the premise, but are not the premise itself.

Hardly anyone plays D&D by the premise stated above, though the description of this does appear clumsily in several of the game's books, including the original 5th edition Players Handbook. But then virtually everything else about the game sets out to subvert this premise. The DM should not decide ahead of time what the players are allowed to physically do within the environment. The players should not be railroaded, required to act in a certain way, penalised if they do not act in that way or any other of the endless sorts of Gygaxian "punishments" that were invented as alterations to the game world that a DM should impose when players "misbehave."

Likewise, "backstories" are examples of the players attempting to erase the premise by inventing an environment outside the DM's sphere. When an NPC behaves in a manner that the players do not like, particularly if the player has built some "story" about the NPC and themselves, that player is NOT permitted to declare the DM has acted outside the premise. The premise does not include the players wishes being fulfilled just because they might walk if they don't get what they want. If a player won't play by the game's premise, or if the DM won't, then the game can't function. It is broken. Not because the game itself is, but because those participating are unclear about what the premise IS, or won't accept it for private, stubborn or selfish reasons. It is like a chess player picking up the enemy's knight and flinging it from the board because, "You have too many knights and I'm losing." It is childish, it is abusive, it is not proper game play... and where D&D is concerned, it is behaviour that is everywhere.

Very often, the openness of D&D and the lack of comprehension about the premise allows participants to disguise their abuse of the game under the rubrics of "free expression" or "emotional safety"; as "story" or "fairness"; as "what my character would do" or "protecting the players"... and quite a lot of others nonsense that has succeeded in making nearly everyone's game unplayable. Success begins by first defining the premise, then holding fast to the premise, then disregarding any protest of "personal dissatisfaction" related to the premise. A player that demands to know more about the environment than the senses of the player's character permits; who wants to define the end point of this adventure or the campaign at large; who wants to min/max for the sake of min/maxing; have all lost the thread. They're not playing dungeons and dragons. They're playing some other game that uses D&D as a mask.

Thus, the first principle of a good game is to accept the premise. Get in your lane, stay in your lane, make arrangements to play with others who together share an interest in the environment provided and STOP trespassing on the other side. The DM is the DM; the players are the players. Each has a purpose and a place; the line dividing the two is not a chalk line. It is the Great Wall of China. The boundary has to be inviolable because the temptation to cross it is constant.

Yet this does not, in itself, describe "a reason to play."

My reason for playing as a DM is because I like being made to think fast on my feet when a player does something I do not expect. I do not see this as contrary to my DMing. I see this as the coolest, bestest thing about the game. Nothing thrills me more than for a player to solve a conundrum in a way I could not myself, pushing me to then instantly respond in some way that fits the premise: i.e., a believable result, almost universally positive in such cases, because I have exactly no reason to keep a player from gaining wealth, power or benefit from doing something that they are mentally or creatively able to do. Does that creative thing put a lot of wealth into the player's hands? No problem, it'll be spent on things and they'll be broke in time. Does it give the player a lot of power? No problem, power brings responsibility; responsibility creates stress, stress creates game opportunities and fascinating conundrums. Bring that stuff on. Is the player benefitting? Awesome. Works for me. I do not understand DMs who fear player agency. I love it, it's a high, it's a thrill for me to play with. Why would I get in the way of it, or exploit it when it happens. It only means the game's experience can lift itself out of ordinary fighting and move into extraordinary fighting and intrigue. All I can say is "Please, can I have some more?"

I assume the reason my players want to play is because the playing field is wide open. I won't give them information they don't deserve and I won't help them enrich themselves without physically taking risks and earning it, but in short order they soon learn that if they ask for something that in fact does not meaningfully empower them, then sure, they can have it. "You'd like a hireling that's a gnome and of your religion and is a cook too, in a region where gnomes are rare? Sure. Why not? Makes no meaningful difference to the game world. Here you go." I'm not miserly. I don't care to be. A game rule is a game rule: "No, you cannot just use a two-handed weapon and a shield. Period." But when it's not actually a game rule and it doesn't need to be one? Sure, here you go. I don't receive any benefit from being tight-fisted.

I think my best players come to realise that smart choices will change the encounter; that I will allow them to surprise and even obliterate a hard enemy with little struggle by means of opponent brilliance. I think they understand that with my experience in game play, I'm hard to surprise, but at the same time, if I am surprised, I'll respond with respect and applause, not resistance. I buy into the premise so my game must, by definition, flow freely according to the players actions, meaning that by default those actions will be relevant where game play is concerned. I think, from experience, this is extremely rare in a DM. I don't know why. I'm not losing anything by letting my players succeed. I have an infinite number of monsters ready off stage. Why would I seriously care if the latest went down fast because the players got lucky or because one of the realised that something they bought had an unexpected benefit? I'm all sorts of jerk, but I'm not petty.

This is one of the reasons why I've resisted the philosophy of "balance" — and not merely because my deciding what the players are allowed to have or use is breaking the premise. I have no anxiety about the players becoming more powerful. If I have anxiety anywhere, it's the tendency of players to refuse to believe what I tell them, so they can walk straight into death presuming that I'm going to protect them. I used to make the error of actually doing that... but lesson learned. About ten years ago, with the Senex campaign, I decided, "fuck it, I'm just going to kill them now." Long story.

But more powerful because, oh no, it'll destabilise my campaign, or my setting? Nonsense. My setting has Constantinople and Paris in it. It has empires of more than a million square miles and tens of millions of people. Try as they might, the players could have a hundred million gold pieces and it would just make them equal in wealth to one of the big states in Europe. That wouldn't be enough to conquer China. So, you know... there's always something bigger than they are.

Moreover, I don't really care what my players do. That is, within the limitations of their imaginary physical selves. If they want to burn down villages and churches, kill women and children, slaughter innocents on the road... in reality, these things happened historically and are still actually happening in large parts of the world right now. They are not beyond the ken of human ability or cognisance for that matter. It is the premise that I don't bind their hands with my outlook on "permissable" behaviour. My only ask is they don't take abusive action against each other. That's because invented figures of imagination aren't real... not even, in fact, as demonstrations of moral goodness...  and like Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, I refuse to be victimised by notions of virtuous behaviour.

My conflict with players begin when they want free things, especially information, to which they're not entitled. This was the source of a recent disagreement between myself and a player, who wanted me to explain what his best option was as a player to get more... well, money presumably, but ultimately agency beyond the limitations of his character. While yes, I am omnipotent in game terms, and money for me is a matter of saying it exists, as are experience points, I don't indulge in giveaway game mechanics for the sake of player's merely asking for them. One has to draw the line somewhere.

Some might suppose that my take on villages being burned down is expressed in the game consequences, and to some degree that's true. The village cannot be "unburned." But at the same time, my game world has a lot of villages, and I can certainly spare a few if players must indulge themselves. It's not like I'm slavering at the opportunity to go after the players with reprisals, condemnation or an assassin waiting behind every tree just because they've done something bad. That's possible, but it's not my sincerest wish. I'd rather, instead, that they just realise such things afford nothing in terms of game benefit and therefore invest in more useful activities.

Together, my response joy and I assume the player's ability to immerse themselves into an unrestricted setting not based on "fantasy tropes" or "DM ownership" settles the whole "reason to play" question. They play because they like D&D. They play in my game because they like my style of play. I cannot guess why other people play in other games. I stopped playing altogether more than 40 years ago because I could not find a DM with my play style.

Which brings us to "value"... or, how is the time spent so that something is accomplished?

I play Oxygen Not Included because it is just enough problem solving as to not be boring, while at the same time it is not stressful. It permits a very mild sort of relaxation that is more engaging that watching television, and considerably more than my phone offers. I usually play with music or some video playing on the other screen I have set up for my computer. Little is accomplished. More base is built. A supply problem is solved. It's not much to speak of.

D&D is arguably the same. It is a game, after all. I like to think the value is better in part because of the player's relative freedoms within the game's structure, but also because my game's structure is dense, gritty and there is always some aspect of it that can be challenged or learned. Since my players are largely DMs themselves, they are seeing the Authority Wiki's presence in the game, seeing how easily a game rule can be challenged and fixed, especially if something isn't clear... and that adds value to the games they play, using my style of DMing as a template.

I don't mean to sound full of myself. But not only have I been doing this for a long time, I've gone at my setting in a way that no one I know of has. For one thing, I've been running the same game setting since 1984. I've been running games in the way that I do now since then. I've run a lot of different kinds of players. I'm flexible. I'm quick-witted. I like game rules and I like it better when they're functionally written out, in an agile way that can be repaired, updated or simply gotten rid of when appropriate. These things are noticed. One can see from recent comments that my DMing style is considered "good."

Then, apart from the metagame, the actual setting has it's own learning mode. People aren't familiar with the world on a ground level. The players are in northern Hungary; they and I are learning in depth what opals are, how the Ottomans occupied the region in the time period, the lay of the land, the nature of the individual towns, the weather, the behaviour of the occupants and the logic that underlies the way people in the game setting think. That's a lot of information and much of it is absolutely useful in the real world. If one of my players were in Ozd, the actual Hungarian town, they would know at once where the Bukk Forest and the Karancs Hills were. They'd know how close they were to Slovakia. They'd know how to find their way to Miskolc or, as the case may be, Budapest. The setting is functionally the same as the real world... and as I'm now letting ChatGPT describe what the actual terrain looks like, it's a fair guess that the players would recognise parts of the landscape as they moved through it. That very valuable... in a way that no one else, to my knowledge, considers D&D to be.

Take the presence of opals where the players are. I didn't decide that. The location did. Opals actually do come from this part of Hungary. Moreover, the literal geology of the landscape gives the reason why they do. It's hilarious to think that someday a player in my world will be in a museum somewhere and say, "Oh, yes, opals like that come from tufa. They're very common in northern Hungary because of the geology there." That's a pleasant little coup, since the player never has to say it came from a D&D game they played once. This is the kind of thing that cannot be faked by invented "lore."

All right. I have been typing for five hours. I'm going to stop and continue this post tomorrow.

What Makes a Good Game?

If the Gentle Reader will allow, I'll try to speak of what makes "good gaming." There are different ways of looking at this: one assumption is to argue a rules system, another is to discuss the social aspect, and still another is to discuss the relationship between the players and the DM. Those all matter, of course. And it matters that two people are not likely to define "good" in the same way, since the idea is incredibly subjective.

I'll approach this as objectively as possible... to to say only what I think makes a good game, but taking a position that anyone can functionally employ as a means of providing a meaningful experience for the largest number of players that might present themselves. That is far more useful that my making a point about what satisfies me personally... since I am, after all, a decidedly odd person.

In simple terms, a "good game" is obtained by providing the greatest number of players at any time with the greatest number of consequential choices, that together provide purpose (a reason to play), value (the time is spent accomplishing something), significance (something was learned); and clear intent (for much of the time, the players felt in control of the outcome). That's a tall order. But after all, D&D is not a board game.

A board game provides a simplified version of this structure. As an example, let's discuss the Game of Life. If you don't know it, well... bless you, you poor soul, you're not likely educated enough to run D&D.

The Game of Life is essentially Candyland on steroids; it is a railroaded game where pieces land on random squares that provide a wide range of outcomes; all told from the beginning of the game to the end, depending upon which exact routes one takes, there are approximately 130 spaces to cross, give or take a few, using a spinner that produces a random number between one and ten. Therefore, it takes an average of 22-24 spins to finish the game, plus perhaps a few if you're forced back 15 spaces, as can occur. There is little strategy beyond occasionally being allowed to gamble on an outcome or choosing one route versus the other. The goal is to get to the end first, or to have somehow amassed enough money to win despite the "winner" having gotten a big pot for arriving first. The particulars aren't important.

Life is, essentially a game that follows the rule, "roll and see what happens." Many play D&D in exactly this way. The Game of Life describes, essentially, the "dungeon game." Pick doors, enter rooms, roll dice, see what happens. The "purpose" is to see what happens. The "value" comes from collecting treasure and looking back to see which room have been cleared; and in small part, to see who lived. The "significance" is that a rule was learned (how to kill {blank}). The clear intent is to make the players believe that they controlled their experience by picking this door over that, but in reality, all the doors lead to the same place.

The conception goes that the "strong" dungeon includes problems to be solved: at best, the learning of the underground's geography, the idiosyncracies of the inhabitants, their motives, the resources to be found and the pressures of managing dwindling resources (hit points, spells, food, sleep, etcetera) to get as much treasure before having to give way and get out. Thus the players choose to fight or not; to barricade or retreat; to map, to listen, to bargain; and eventually to heal up and return.

This is, essentially, the Game of Life where every square can be eventually gotten to while risking the end of the participant, as every valuable square is guarded or boobytrapped or lies under a puzzle. As a game, this process is engaging... for a time. Inevitably, it ceases to be. And as such, most people try D&D for 1 to 4 years, then quit altogether and get on with their lives.

Whatever it's value, the number of choices a dungeon offers is fixed. It is obstacle, reward, obstacle, reward... and eventually even the most interesting obstacles and the most cherished of rewards sour. Every obstacle must in some way be tailored for the players, or else the DM is forced to solve the puzzle for them, or weaken the monster for them, or open the door for them, because if no one in the party can bend the bars or find the secret door or cast knock, then the obstacle becomes ill-timed or poorly considered, and in any case, it's a waste of game time to have to go back outside and waste precious play hours when the DM can simply say, "Oh look, the secret door automatically opens for you." Thus, a clue becomes more obvious, a monster makes a foolish decision, a lock turns out to be old and weak, an NPC appears, the puzzle answer is accepted despite being wrong. In the end, continuance is more important than metrics.

Let us consider the board game Careers. The game provides an outside track with a series of inside tracks that the players can choose to take or not take as they will. The goal is to collect money, love ("hearts") and fame ("stars") according to a secret formula the player decides before the game begins. Usually, the aimed-for total equals 60 or 100; thus the player may assign themselves 20 (thousand dollars), 20 hearts or 20 stars. Or they may opt for 10 th. dollars, 15 hearts and 35 stars. Different tracks offer the best chances of gaining some of each kind of thing.

In D&D terms, the outside track is the outside world; the village, the wilderness, the circular back and forth the game offers between purchasing equipment and the "dungeons" which are the inner tracks. Each inner track or dungeon requires a commitment... but because there are eight of them, no one dungeon must be chosen. Some are full of undead, some with orcs and some with lots of traps. Some are easy to get through with little reward, some are excessively dangerous with lots of reward, though with a fair chance of dying and getting nothing.

This describes the generally more advanced game, or the "campaign" game, because it gives a greater sense of agency. The purpose is building up a presence in the off-dungeon game, the value is overcoming dungeons so that the money has a place to be spent, the significance is in learning not only the kinds of dungeons there are and the game rules, but the greater structure of the larger world... and finally, the clear intent is that the players feel at least some control over their lives.

Yet... the purpose just stated is pre-ordained. The player has little choice but to build their house or castle or church or structural centre as a homebase from which to strike out at the next dungeon. There is little value to be compared with that which comes from dungeons, as they are far more lucrative than anything that can be accomplished in the "outside track/game setting." Very little actual significance is achieved since one gets the feeling that there is nothing else to do except build until the money is gone, then upon getting more, do more building. The buildings in game might as well be large round holes into which gold coins are thrown, as there is little if any substance to imaginary buildings, towers, walls or the gathering of followers in one form or another. These things cannot be applied to anything in-game, since the game remains the ever-necessary return to the dungeon, so they are literally just places for the unloading of wealth. As "significance," they have little virtue.

After a while, this lack of significance, this returning to dungeons like homing pigeons, this sense of purpose, fades... and with it, any real feeling of control. The experience is not unlike that of building up a large complex structure in a video game like The Sims, where the more that is built, the greater the need for the player to spend time in maintenance, until it's all just one long sludge of repeated actions that feel like work rather than play.

From a young age we are trained to think within the structure of finite games. Wikipedia, ever the idiot, defines a "finite game" as a game theory term meaning "a two-player game that is assured to end after a finite number of moves." I should like to expand the term in reconciliation of the English definition of "finite," which is, "having a definite limit, bound or end point."

D&D's finite vs. infinite quality is smudgy. On the one hand, the same group of players, stymied only by the fact that an individual life is finite, can enter dungeon after dungeon, or even the same dungeon ad nauseum — and why not, given that I've played the games Life and Careers I don't know how many times — without let up, for as long as they can stand it. Theoretically, a single "campaign" could extend thousands of years, with DM's and players being replaced in Ship of Thesian-like fashion... but in reality, with other things to do, D&D like this is not, in fact, infinite. Players get bored. Life intervenes. One bad players blows up a game. The DM gets old and there are not substitutes. But I am letting digressions get the better of me, so let's back up and go over this again.

Chess is a two-player finite game. After a finite number of moves, the game will end, because both sides are trying to destroy the enemy and inevitably, either the enemy will be destroyed or, importantly for our purpose here, it will be revealed that no further value will come from continuing to make moves. In chess, a factual stalemate occurs when neither side is capable of checkmating the other. No matter how long the two sides play after that point, the play is just going through the motions. No resolution can occur.

D&D is a multiplayer "finite" game that can be played, as said, indefinitely. But a stalemate occurs when the DM or a sufficient number of players, perhaps all of them, are either unsatisfied or sick of playing, and do not wish to any more. Once that happens, no resolution can occur.

This is a very different way to think about a game... and it's problematic, because we are used to thinking about games as having an "end" that occurs as a resolution — whether board game or a video game, when eventually we run out of "game" assuming we don't quit beforehand. And why do we quit? Because the game is not providing us the urge to continue. This latter is the reason that D&D fails. Not just because it's the "wrong kind of D&D," but because, in fact, for whatever reason, either the imagination of the DM or players crashes and burns, or the process being played is unable to hold our attention.

Structurally, we tend to think D&D failed for the reasons a video game fails. Because it wasn't designed well. And when it fails like that, we assume that D&D, whatever version we speak of, can't be fixed. Especially when in fact we can't see what's wrong.

All this, so far, has been merely to unravel what's meant by a "good game." We haven't begun discussing how to make one yet.

A good game is one that urges the player to continue playing.

Chess, though finite, is for some a very good game. They can comfortably and happily play with the same 32 pieces on the same 64 square board for all of their lives and not wish to do otherwise. This sort of commitment is unheard of in nearly any other game. Exceptions include Go, Bridge, Backgammon and Poker, though obviously that's not an exhaustive list. There are few video game examples... though personally I have a few that I do return to that I've played ten years or more. I do not write blogs about those games, however.

My steam tells me that I've played 4,344 hours of Oxygen Not Included. That's a trifle worrying.

No, it is not an addiction. It helps me relax. I swear.

Chess is an important guideline in understanding game quality. It does not need a new map, new factions, new skins (though, for some, they do get weird about collecting chess sets), new editions or new "lore."  If a D&D game pretends that its better because the DM rushes out to buy the latest splatbook or argue one edition over another, or throw out all they have in favour of a new edition, it suggests that everything they've believed or done up until that time has been disposable. And truthfully,  it probably was.

If D&D has an equivalent of inexaustibility to chess, it cannot be "more stuff." Going back to its origin, D&D has always embraced that concept, because "more stuff" means more shit to sell... it's the representation of an excellent business model. Perhaps Bill Gates learned what he knew from it. First, sell a broken, badly created game, full of "bugs" and garbage. Then, sell the user more bugs and more garbage as a "fix." If there's any chance that a fix occurs, reinvent the game as another badly made, "buggy" game and proceed to sell more fixes. Do this every 7 to 12 years. Rake in the profits.

Chess lacks bugs. We might call that the first gate that a game must cross through. Is it broken as a game? No? Then it's probably, on the surface, even if its the Game of Life, a better game than D&D.

Despite those who defend this with "You can make the game whatever you want it to be," this is not — sorry, not — a virtue.

Let's go back and repeat this paragraph, because I wrote it about a hundred years ago now.

In simple terms, a "good game" is obtained by providing the greatest number of players at any time with the greatest number of consequential choices, that together provide purpose (a reason to play), value (the time is spent accomplishing something), significance (something was learned); and clear intent (for much of the time, the players felt in control of the outcome). That's a tall order. But after all, D&D is not a board game.

What, first, is the reason to play? We can loosely describe that as the concept of D&D, but this only works if the participants accept the premise of that concept. Since most participants have no idea what that premise is, or how it works, they fail utterly right out of the gate. Because they don't know what D&D is, in part because the books don't explain it at all, or so badly, there's no way for them to buy into the premise. Without a premise, the game falls apart. In fact, there is no game. It becomes "whatever you want it to be," which demands multiple people to want the same thing, in the same way, in an mutually regarded and compatible fashion. That's not possible, so we get either a mess without a premise, or even less than that.

The Game of Life offers a simple premise: move along this available track, record the accumulation or loss of resources, proceed until the end is reached. Chess says, defeat the opposing king within an enclosed tactical structure that both sides adhere to. A vast number of people, even those who have played this game for decades, cannot do this for themselves or for other people. Try it, without relying on me. Create a phrasing for a premise that will stand up to the scrutiny of others. Go on. I'll wait.