Bravery, Adventure, Method

Many eons ago I wrote two posts about how to tackle a dungeon, which I meant to be a series but which I never completed.  I got into some back-and-forth with Mujadaddy which I didn't handle well and I lost interest.

In part, this comes from having had a DM's perspective for so long.  I haven't run in any campaign consistently since the mid-1980s.  Experiences with 4th edition and 5th weren't especially pleasant and I found myself facing the same old tiresome tropes that had been there three decades before.  When I look at a dungeon today, I necessarily see it from the DM's perspective; my concern for the players is that they find it interesting, that there's a base level of uncertainty and tension, and that there's exactly enough treasure to whet their appetites but not so much that they progress levels too quickly.

Two sojourns into a dungeon should be sufficient to push a low-level character, less than 5th, up a level.  That assumes they dig in, get into a fight, hold their ground long enough to take and give damage, then beat a healthy retreat.  For me, it's about bravery, not chutzpah.  

I've never taken the position that "reason" — a methodical approach to playing D&D — kills adventure.  I grew up digesting tales of Robert Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic, Mungo Park and Livingston in Africa, Marco Polo and so on ... and found tales of these real people managing extreme difficulty and danger in a practical manner to be endlessly fascinating.  Jules Verne invented fantasy tales filled with mechanical and well ordered approaches to adventure themes that excited me as a child.  I read and re-red Robinson Crusoe and other tales of lost persons in the wild for the ways they solved problems and extricated themselves from death.

On the other hand, I found Gulliver's Travels and Baron Munchausen to be plodding and dull — and as I grew into adulthood, I recognized that these things were written as political allegories, and NOT as "adventures."  Somehow, they never captured my imagination.  Being very tiny in a very large world was handled much better in Asimov's The Fantastic Voyage, for my money, because it was about concrete science and not fairy tale.

Coming at D&D in 1979, there was no game community to argue most of the points that Mujadaddy made in that back-and-forth.  Ideas like "supernatural malevolence" dominating a landscape, "red shirts" as a metaphor, "tomb robbers," the players are "special," or that "games exist for the players" had no infringement on my DMing or on those who DM'd me.  Hard as it might be to believe, these things came along after D&D players began to form clubs and impose their philosophy on a growing community.

Ernest Shackleton went into the bowels of the worst place on earth and got stranded there with perfectly ordinary seamen, whose only chance to survive was the equipment they bought, their ability to sail and their sheer tenacity.  Generations of those same soldiers undertook battles where they would load and fire and sail amidst volleys of cannonballs fired point blank into the ships they manned.  Yet I'm to believe that men like this won't enter a forest because there might be an owlbear in it.  I'm to believe they won't defend their country because of unseen malignant spirits.  Or that person who are essentially underground thieves are definitively "braver" because meta-game D&D concepts remove honour, duty and resolve from anybody with less than 25 hit points.

I grant that player characters are "unusual."  In my game, they have more training, more equipment, more abilities ... and yes, they have more hit points.  But I also believe that, just as it was with the "British Grenadiers," ordinary folk also have little to lose, a love of money and a willingness to trade the former for the latter.  Otherwise, how is it that so many perfectly ordinary folk were willing to cross one or more continents for the sake of a gold strike?  Was that a lack of bravery?  Was that because they had so many hit points?

Anyway, this post tries to tackle too many themes.  I should come back another day and manage them better.

Fresh Recruits

The following talks about the manner in which armies were raised in the 15-16th centuries, with recruiters riding through the countryside, with a licence to raise men, pay them and sometimes start off commanding them.

"Whoever the recruiting agent was ~ the agent of a regional magnate or of a supplier with a stand-by contract to raise men on demand, a local authority or a roving captain who had petitioned for a recruiting license ~ the approach, save to the few who positively welcomed the chance to enlist, as an identical mixture of cajolement and pressure.  Magnates called on their clientale groups of tenants and retainers to honour obligations, sometimes written, sometimes simply assumed, to serve them in arms along with their own tenants or servants; kinsmen were urged to support them in the same fashion, for the honour of the family and the favour of the king.  Local authorities, in rural parish or urban ward, consulted registers of adult males, selected the number they had been charged to send, and sent the constable to summon them in the name of the monarchs's wage, the justice of his cause and the reputation of a community only too well aware of its vulnerability to punitive taxation.  The captain submitted his patent, had his mission proclaimed by the cryer at church, market and through the streets, set up his standard, had his drummer beat, and waited for custom in an inn or the more supportive house of a justice or alderman; serve the king was his message too: let him pay you, enter that alternative society of warfarers which promises freedom for the humdrum, penurious, hen- and priest-pecked life of everyday."

J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe

That's just marvelous.  There's several pages of this kind of information, talking about how a town had to put up the money for recruits, to get them to staging areas, and hope the monarch would return the fees; and of course how individuals with means and connections would use whatever means they had to ensure they could get out of service, while dumping that burden on the poor, the stupid and the desperate.

The Goblins Want YOU.

I see two interesting starts for campaigns that don't end in the party being recruited.  The first is simply watching the process happen all around them, as people are rousted out of their houses, out of beds, pressed here and there, assembled, arguments on the street, recruits finding the coin to pay off a guard, a landlord asking the party if they want to rent a room cheap, as he's just lost his tenant, other similar opportunities, the town asking for donations and the players having the opportunity to make friends, etc.

And second, the players being assigned as recruiters, with the understanding that they'll get paid for every recruit they raise, and the knowledge they don't have to go to war themselves.  Of course, the more recruits they raise, the more recruits the local town must pay to send to the staging area (recruiters do not travel with cash!  Says so in Hale's book), so there's push-back from the town fathers if the players get too ambitious.  But then, the players can argue the name of some lord, who can bring punitive measures of all kinds, if the town doesn't play ball.  Really gives the players a chance to swagger.  Would make a very different sort of adventure.

Inspiration is fun.

I'll Ask Again: What Do We Want a Town Map For?

Now would be a good time to tie some threads together, bringing us back around to a city map.  The image on the right, as judgmental as it is, offers far more suggestion to the imagination than what me might see on an RPG product.  Without a single building ~ and the streets not being needed either, though they are there for people who know New York ~ we can visualize the landscape from our personal experience and our relationship to the description given.

So ... with the first post in this series, I ended with some discussion about how urban settlements are time sinks, and how many smaller places might not have the things you're looking for ... without quite making the point that you could spend time looking for something in a town or city that doesn't actually exist.

With the second post, I wrote about how settlements accumulate organically rather than by decision ~ and in certain geographical locations, dictated by access, happenstance of the terrain and necessity.  With the third post, I wrote that settlements accumulate inside the boundaries of the settlement as well, as labor and the need for survival causes poorer people to gravitate to parts of the city where they have the potential to earn money, while money that has been accumulated is collected into places that isolate themselves from the poor.  This can be plainly seen on the map above, in the way that Very Rich People and Super Rich People exist apart from Grime, Sludge, Irony and Old People.

Finally, with the fourth post, I wrote about how the substructure of the urban environment needs to be reconstructed so that adventures can happen without fear of dogpiling by half the population.  The question remains, how do we make an urban adventure fit into a structure that can behave in a proper functional manner, like the wilderness does with its open spaces, or the dungeon does with its dystopian claustrophobia?

Ah, that's where I'm heading.

Remember that I said a town has an open framework; as an entity within its boundaries, you can move through most of it without infringement.  Yes, there are private places, inside buildings, behind locked doors, built behind high walls with guards, nasty pets and magical glyphs.  But if we consider the map above, if you want to walk among the rich people, or if you want to see the dead people, or if you want to wander among the ducks, you're free to do so.  Some neighborhoods will be risky; others will judge your clothing and disdain your presence.  There are lots of places where you won't make friends.  But you can go there.

Suppose, however, that you did not have the map above to help you.  Imagine that you did not have a lifetime of hearing or reading stuff about New York, or seeing movies filmed there, or having it explained to you by urban designers or historians.  Suppose you did not know one damn thing about New York ... just as a 15th century resident of Yorkshire would not have known one damn thing about London.

Suppose you enter from the top center of the map, where it reads "Canada."  What does Jazz, Great Southern Food and the appearance of smart kids on the street tell you about what you might find in the rest of the city?  Could you guess?

Now imagine that there are no cars, no trains, no modern services of any kind ... and that only the very wealthy have access to horses.  This is the 15th century, so even a coach service doesn't exist.  Like people in the country who would live their whole lives within seven miles from where they were born, people in the city could live their whole lives within seven blocks.  Thus, none of these people you meet on the edge of the city would be able to tell you what the rest of the city contained.

Now remove the street signs.  And most of the business signs.  The bakers would tend to congregate on one street, the leather workers on another ... and in a given part of the city, that street would be known as Baker Street ~ but there would be no sign.  In a city as big as New York above or London (and nothing really was, but if we remove most of the high rises, it's arguable that Beijing, Lahore, London or Paris sprawled as much as the above example), there might be a dozen or more "Baker Streets" ... known locally as that by the nearby inhabitants.  Don't laugh.  How often does "High Street" appear in America?  Or "Garden Street", or "Lakeside" whatever?

Everyone knows where the butcher lives and where the cobbler lives.  There's no need for big, showy signs designed to attract attention.  Everyone has as much work as they can manage anyway, as everything is hand made.  More customers does not make more time in the day, nyet?  [sorry; using Russian is probably not desired just now, is it?]  So a particular kind of shop might have a little sign next to the door, something the size of a hand-span, reading something like, "J.M. Dodd, Esquire."  But what is that?  A solicitor?  A jeweler?  You'd need to poke your head in the door to find out.

An Inn or a Tavern might have a bigger sign, but signs cost money; and after a few years, the paint wears with the rain and is bleached by the sun, until it can barely be read from the street.  Most of the people there know it's "The Aged Keg," but you, dear stranger to this place, might walk past the building three or four times before realizing it's the place where you're supposed to meet your contact.

Of course, you're thinking you'd recognize it by the bright lights, and the shouting and laughter, and probably the music.  Perhaps on a warm night in the summer time, but likely not if the weather is foul.  And candles cost money too, except when Hollywood can use electric light to fake them.  Nor are the locals likely to sing much, as they're working fourteen hour days. They only want to drink to deaden the feeling in their muscles, just as people now choose to do.

So you shouldn't count on the fellow passing by on the street to give you much information about the city beyond his small piece of it. He's busy, anyway, hauling something for his master, or collecting rents, or heading off to meet his mistress, or whatever he's doing that's keeping him from his rooms, his duties or his master's service.

When I think of strangers coming into a town, I think of this:

[feel free to ignore the music]

Given time, the locals will come around (which is played up in order to make the musical work), but for the most part they don't like strangers.  This, too, is a barrier to knowing how a city or town is put together.

If it hasn't occurred to the reader yet, what I'm saying is this: like a dungeon, cities require exploring.  Really big cities are filled with open areas, gutted neighborhoods (from fires or disasters, see "oil spill"), strange isolated cultures, forces for good or evil, etcetera ... but isolated by distance and the obscurity that comes from really a lot of buildings and roadways, not from stuck doors or difficult descents.

Players should have it explained that walking straight through the middle of a city along the busiest avenue won't yield much information.  Without signs, without the features we recognize in our day and age, which wouldn't be recognized by a stranger of its own time, cities are huge baffling maelstroms of people.  The busier the avenue, the more people have to do, the less time people have to talk.  The loafers with time to chat are out of sight, in back lanes, seated around small flophouses, bitterly resenting strangers who have the money to walk around in armor while they carry weapons.  Cities and towns aren't friendly, in either the congenial or the interfacing sense.  They're complicated, cluttered, deceptive, hard to know ... and must be explored one block at a time, diligently, if they're to give up their secrets.

If we want a map, we want one that will emphasize THAT.

Dogpiling

Continuing upon the theme of the last post, the Steady Urban State, let's talk about players interacting with the town culture as described.

Within the coded storybook framework, where the DM creates the narrative in advance and then moves the players through that narrative, the town serves as a supply depot, for both equipment and easy exposition, or elaboration of the party's goals.  The party is organized to speak to specific persons in the town, who have specific information to give, before being shuttled out of town into an environment where the players are able to act upon their knowledge.

For this, the town needs to be nothing more than a series of stalls where the players stop temporarily to get their assignments.  They don't have to interact with a living, breathing town ... and this works for most games.  With the introduction of a sandbox game, however, we have problems: suddenly the occupants of the town have their own agendas.  They don't exist to assign anything to the players.  They exist because they exist ... and the players are forced into a minefield where anything they might do has the potential to conflict with that existence, which is bound to end very badly.

I've watched this play out many times.  Players don't know what to SAY to ordinary townspeople.  They don't know what to talk about, or even how to start conversations.  They don't understand what townspeople want, or how to make townspeople interested in the player's wishes or interests.

Just like in real life.

Put a typical D&D player into a town setting, where the town is not an engineered-knowledge dispenser for adventure giving, and the players will find themselves in a situation very like their own personal experience as a social leper.  For most D&D players, if they had a sense of how to interact with real people, who have real goals, they wouldn't be D&D players.  Making them play in a world where they need to produce full sentences that sound like they have a purpose is like rubbing a player's nose in their own inadequacy.

This is part of the reason why so many players deal with town and/or social situations by drawing a weapon and killing the nearest person.  It's a tactic that works great in a dungeon, but not very well in a town.  A dungeon is a compartmentalized environment.  If we kill these orcs in this room, there's a very good chance that the orcs in another room, fifty feet and a stairwell away, won't know what we've done, unless one of these about-to-be-dead orcs gets out yon door and manages to set off an alarm.

It is impossible, however, to start a fight in a town without someone knowing about it.  The walls are too thin, the lines of sight on even a back alley are too numerous, there's far too much motivation for even a common individual to rush down and inform the guards (it might be worth a coin or two) and, on the whole, no one in a town likes it when fighting happens.

Too, in a dungeon, there might be ten or twenty orcs in this room.  Or maybe a few hundred, if it is a big lair ... but the shape of the dungeon allows a certain queuing in a line, before the hall can clear enough for the back ranks to get at the party.  But a town has thousands of people ... any of whom might be willing to throw a roof tile down on a running party, even if they don't have the nerve to fight face to face.  The Greek general Pyrrhus died that way.  Stunned by a roof tile, he fell in the street and two common people dragged him into a doorway and cut his throat. Even for great generals, towns are dangerous.

So, if the party wins a round or two against the arriving guard, it just happens that more guards arrive and the dogpile begins.  I know that many DMs will engineer the situation so that a fleeing party will miraculously flee a town, or find an ally standing in a doorway calling out, "Hide in here!" ... but these are DM-interventions, designed to preserve the party from their own folly, or from having to face the real consequences of what a town is designed to do: destroy threats.

When the party pulls a weapon in a town, or tries to steal something, the party is the threat.

A lot of DMs recognize this; and they HATE the intervention tactic, as they feel it's not their job to wrest the party out of their own stupidity.  So the rule comes down: NO town adventures.  Ever.  Problem solved.

I've never made that rule, but at the same time I don't press the town adventure idea, either.  Unless the players are strong enough to take on the entire town, towns are just too dangerous ~ and players get that.  Getting the sense from me that I won't help them, that I'll just let the dogpile take them down, they will typically behave themselves ... excessively.  They'll buy some equipment.  They might get some advice from a particular shop owner; get something made; or something checked; but they won't start something.

Which is fair.  Players, being presented with the clear fact that the town won't hesitate to crush them underfoot if they don't toe the line, have no interest in testing that line by taking a step over it.  The consequences are too severe and the evident gain apparently out of reach.

Still, much of this is due to players not knowing enough about a town, or town life, or how things work, to circumnavigate the dogpile, as people obviously do in towns, even the most dangerous towns in the world.  And this is because we as game designers haven't fashioned towns and other urban spaces clearly enough to make such navigation possible.  That is what this series of posts is struggling to achieve: the reformulation of the town, both in our imaginations and in concrete, definable ways, so that adventure in towns is not only possible, but legitimately desirable.

Let's have another look at that Cracow video I linked yesterday:

It is so clean.  And while the historians who put this video together are well-aware that the streets would be much less pristine than presented, they are concerned with something other than verisimilitude.  But our imaginations are weakened by this sort of presentation.  Let me take a game example: the village of Hommlet:

Again, clean.  Yes, there's a lot of apparent detail, but remove the trees and shrubs and it can be seen that the depiction of Cracow and that of Hommlet are virtually the same.  As anyone who has ever wandered around in a small town knows, the maintenance of any like space is never this neat and tidy.  Vegetation is not neatly trimmed, as shown.  The building walls are never this straight and grid-aligned.  Shit piles up.  Houses are abandoned.  People never have such clear titles as "farmer" or "teamster."  Distractions happen.  People don't live together in peace, but ambivalence, tolerance and outright hostility.  There are people in a town who could be killed in the middle of the street and no one would care.

Hommlet's secret is that something evil is going on behind the veneer of the village ... but an adventure here need not be so overtly dramatic.  Clutter and hard feelings go a long way towards isolating one part of an urban place from another.  We've all run games where we've let the players climb into a sewer so they can have a fight in town ... but why not a simple basement?  Or in a slum court, too poor for the guards to bother about?  The guards exist to protect all that potential money from being plundered ... but they don't care what the lower classes do among themselves.  This is why crime thrives, and why it is particularly hard on other criminals ... because other criminals don't enjoy the protection that the rich do.

To circumvent the dogpile, the players need approach the problem of town adventures with two things in mind: a) how to isolate the fight away from the attention of people who care to stop it, or in a way that it won't be heard or noticed, or in a way that the participants themselves will all want it kept quiet; and b) the party needs to fight things that the authorities want fought and killed.  That's the idea of Hommlet.  No significant authority outside of Hommlet will mind if most of the people in Hommlet are killed, once the evil is brought to light.  No one would mind if the players found and killed a dire wolf being hidden by an owner feeding it the occasional drunk.  It's okay to clean out a nest of vampires.  People will reward you for doing it.

It is the responsibility of the DM to create the urban environment that makes this possible.  An environment with hidden holes and isolated stone houses; with gutted places destroyed by fire, where undead might be lingering; with natural insulation, making the sound of a quick sword duel practical; with clear rules that tell the players, and non-players, that if you break off the fight within four rounds, it doesn't matter who hears and sees, the participants will all be gone before the guards arrive.  The fight can then be continued again on another day, right?  Everyone knows this.  NO ONE fights for five rounds.  That would be stupid.

If we can make the environment clearer to the players; if the DM can make the environment conducive to play; if the players can then trust the DM; and if we can designate the spaces in the town in some way that the players can SEE what's going on, so that it isn't just a mass of meaningless houses and castles, as we usually see in a game map, there's room for real adventure.

Not just walking around talking to people about things.

What Good are Town Maps?

As I write this, I have 22 pages left to move from the old wiki to the new; with 1,136 pages moved.  Hard work accomplishes miracles.

These last nine weeks, I've had to put my creativity on hold.  I haven't created any new content for said wiki, I've made no maps, I've stopped running my on-line game (which will be the first thing I correct, if there are anything but crickets there) and I've been unable to write anything even remotely inventive.  I've pushed myself to write some posts for the blog; but these have been observational, not operative.  I've introduced no new concepts, no formulas, no functional apparatuses.  I miss having some new concept to describe.

But I'm feeling the pressure fall away.  For a long time, I worried about losing my focus before the wiki was even half moved.  I worried about becoming sick of the process.  I worried I wouldn't have enough time.  But the wiki will be done and finished tomorrow.  I will be deleting it the end of April, so that I don't have to pay my monthly fee to wikispaces again.

I feel an urge to be creative.

So before I spend the rest of my day fighting with the Audacity program and the next podcast, I'm going to write a post about city adventures.  And yes, as I write that, I can feel the wet blanket of ennui fall on the head and shoulders of the Gentle Reader.  Gawd, why even bother writing about such a loathsome and utterly useless subject.  Town encounters don't work, they're boring, we're sick to death of mystery runnings and please, can we just drop it before we start?

Believe me, O Reader, I agree with you.  But let's try, anyway.  I have some ideas.

Some many months ago, I came across this map generator, which will create random map images such as this one:

Which will get comments like, "Thanks for sharing it. It's awesome and super helpful," "You made at least one person happy" and "This will make a fine addition to my collection."

Seriously, what am I missing?  This map is useless.  Try hitting the generator a few times and it is soon evident that the map "generator" is capable of producing the most banal, useless, generic collection of blocks and grey squares imaginable.  Yeah, I know a town has streets and buildings ~ but how is something without labels, without context, without a scale, supposed to be helpful in the least way?

But I confess, what would it matter anyway?  If the map above had every building meticulously named, if we knew the exact scale of the main avenue running through the town, if we knew how many ships the wharf was capable of handling, what good would it do us for actually running a game?  Would it be helpful to tell the players, every time, that the apothecary, with name and all, was three blocks west and one block over?  Who cares ~ as long as I can go to an apothecary's.  What do I care what it's called?  Or who runs it?  Or any of the other unsupported meaningless information that a town might potentially offer to me, the user?

If you're a DM, you've run into this problem many times.  Perhaps you've tried to make a party negotiate a town; perhaps you've tried to fill the houses with interesting people for the party to talk to; perhaps you've tried giving nice names to the taverns and inns, the theatre, the keeps and castles, etcetera ... but I'm sure you've found the players don't care.  Players care about two things where it comes to a town: where is it; and can I shop there?

Realistically, you can't map every town in your world; and that is where the generator seems like a needed support tool.  But the generator is as uniform as a small black dot on your general map.  It doesn't help me adventure.

Cities are not dungeons.  We can't just smack down a bunch of roads and buildings and pretend that we've created the same formula that a dungeon creates.  Dungeons are designed to resist movement; and they're filled with death dealing dangers and vicious monsters.  Urban centers can't afford to stop the inhabitants from moving around freely and the absence of danger is the point.  None of the characteristics that make a dungeon work as a dungeon exist in a city.  So the map itself is useless.

A real map, for real people, matters because we can't handwave travel in the real world.  But we can in role-playing and it makes sense to do so.  Why in the hell would we want to force players to stumble over every curb, turn every corner, walk along every by-way?  It's fucking boring.

And so we ought to ask ourselves, do we need a map at all?  I can tell you honestly, no.  We don't.  I haven't had an urban map in decades and no player has ever requested one.  We force urban maps on players because we think they create a sense of space and relevance.  And they might, for a minute or two; but then the next time the players hit a town, or the time after, and there's no map, the game doesn't suffer.

To justify an urban map, we must first create a need for one.

What does this map suggest?

This is Millau, in the south of France.  I've chosen it because it's old and because, like much of the rest of Europe, it has not seen modern war in any sense.  Thus, the old town, identifiable from all the red roofed buildings, is intact.  Likely, the layout of this town has not changed in a millennium.

The width of the map is all of 1300 meters, from the left side to the right.  From that, I deduce the first important thing from this map: at a good pace, taking into account the lack of a straight and easy route, to cross the map from left to right would probably cost about 20 to 25 minutes.  To walk the tree-lined, pear-shaped route in the map's middle, about 1600 meters, would take about the same amount of time.  And easily triple that if we take into account the other passersby, the need to look at shop windows, taking a rest on a bench, staring at a statue or two, having an appetite and so on.  In fact, if we were to go to Millau today, and start in the morning, we'd probably still be at it by dinner time.  Without even covering all the side streets inside the loup.

So the first thing we can get from the above it how much time does it take to explore?  It doesn't matter that the characters can move throughout the town freely ... that doesn't mean they have the will to walk that far or the wherewithal to know what lane to walk down to find that really important thing they have to buy.  If you or I wanted to locate the critical bookbinder in the town, we need to know how long that would take?

The other question the map above answers is "What's there?"  Not in the sense of where is it, but rather denoting that it does exist.  Most of the above consists of residences ~ useless for play.  We're not kicking our way into those unless we're pillaging the town or robbing a place ... and we don't need a map for the latter.

There's are restaurants, a pharmacy, plenty of hotels, a museum, a government office, even a dentist; but there's no waterpark (it's about twenty miles away, up the valley), or fountains, or airports.  At a glance, we can see that there are places where the party can't go ... it doesn't matter how free their movement is. The things themselves don't exist.

That may not seem relevant; or necessary to map.  But when we think about towns, we need to have it clearly in mind that although they offer services, they don't offer ALL the services that might exist.  Nor is it a matter of saying that bigger places have more services; that waterpark is near a small village called Compeyre.  Yes, the bigger places have a better chance of having more ... but that doesn't mean that something crucial, like a gourmet winery, a precision tool maker or the greatest sword-maker in the world won't be in some terrifically obscure place.

Rather than making a map, then, we're better off knowing how much actual space a town covers, and what's actually there, than we are in drawing meaningless streets, plazas and back roads.  We can run those things on the fly; hell, we have more than enough examples in our memories.  Just picture the players walking down a set of roads in some remembered resort town once visited in Mexico, Tasmania, Colorado or Maine.  It's even easier for European and Asian players.

Player Building Prospects

I'll start by highlighting a comment made on the last post about Wowotu, from Pandred, a player in my online campaign:

"Ha, I think I had a devilish misunderstanding.

The improvements by my reading, only exist in the event that a reference of that improvement's type exists, and only then provide the additive benefit to the specific hex stats.

Or, to paraphrase, there is no fishing ground without fish.

Still, I'm now curious if an area could be developed by the PCs, expanding into a greater DEV level and potentially increasing the value of the references found there.

I want a piece of the adventure in which the PCs take a nobody town and make it something valuable to the region."

I made a comment of my own beneath Pandred's, but I'd like to address it further.

It need not even be a "nobody town."  It could be any place, from the densest city to the most obscure wilderness.  Because the idea is improvement, and because the system makes it clear that not everywhere produces everything, it is simply a matter of introducing something into a location that did not previously exist.

We've grown up with endless descriptions of towns and regions where it is always presumed that every kind of cereal or vegetable is grown, or that every kind of manufacture is taking place, or that every kind of mineral is being dug out of the ground, regardless of the region.  If there is anything missing, it is virtually always one thing, and that one thing invariably has one source, or is in the hands of the goblins in the north mountains, or some other patently obvious adventure-driven reason for missing.  In fact, scarcity is a common phenomenon, even more common in a medieval setting ... and the chances are that something missing from a town or region would simply be done without.  The players wouldn't be "saving" anyone.

That said, suppose the players, for their own reasons, chose to go prospecting.  This has always been a difficulty in role-playing.  We can make a table to determine success or failure, but what do we do when the success has occurred and something is found?  Now we're trapped in the questions, how much, what is it worth and how easy is it to get it out of the ground?

I'm trying to answer those questions.  Suppose the players are hunting around the town of Avalon for gold, knowing that there is already gold in the region.  The first question is where?  The generated map gives us a few more possibilities than a normal map would give us.

First, we know that the Avalon hex, 1106, is the most settled.  It's full of farms and so has probably been stumbled over enough times that we shouldn't expect to find something.  To a lesser degree, the type-6 hexes are likewise.

We also know that the type-7 hexes are mostly empty: just a few scattered farms, virtually no authority so long as we keep away from the few cottages and full of possibility.  And they have at least been picked over for really bad monsters.

The hexes without numbers are type-8.  Those are pure wilderness hexes; no people and big potential for monsters.  But they probably haven't been looked over very carefully.  Why not go look there?

Now, gold is an unusual commodity.  In the last post, I said that a mine raised the labor of the hex by +1.  Gold also increases the wealth of that hex by +1, and the happiness by +1 also.  People like gold.  It makes them happy [the moral anti-vice campaign notwithstanding].

So anywhere that we find gold is going to increase the labor, its going to increase our pocket change and it is going to make people happy to be there.

Suppose as a party we march up into 1008.  We've established it's an arid-vegetation hex, which we can fill with brush or with empty grassland or whatever vegetation fits.  From our original map, we know that it is hill country.  As a DM, I can already feel the encounters we can create.

The party at night is beset upon by a collection of vipers, having settled unknowingly near a snake pit, which approach once they detect the warmth of the fire or the bodies.  The snakes just want to curl up to a nice, warm fleshy cushion for the night, but the players don't know that and they overreact.  Or the players stumble across a giant ant nest and have to fight off five, ten or thirty giant ants, depending on how long it before they get wise and beat a retreat.  So much for the vermin.

After a week (it takes a long time to prospect 30 square miles of country), they settle themselves to run the length of a dry ravine, hoping that there will be some evidence of placer deposits.  Here they come across some tracks, which they follow, only to discover these are footsteps, which lead to an overhang, which conceals a cave ... and the party decides whether or not they want to fight things that have feet that are 10-20% larger than a human's.

After killing all the orcs in the lair, the party is much disappointed to find no gold nuggets or gold ore inside the now-cleared dug out cave system.  This doesn't look promising.  Surely these things, living here, would have found gold if there was gold.  Should we keep prospecting?

The party decides that yes, all right, let's just keep at it here.  Without luster, they work their way along the two-mile ravine, certain it has to be empty, since if there was something the orcs would have surely found it.

Wait ... what is that?  Fool's gold, probably.  But ... it feels pretty heavy.  And not a bad sized piece, almost a half a centimeter.  The players dust it off and wash it with water and detect quartz crystals mixed with a dull yellow gleam.  It is not pyrite!  Wow!  Is the character with prospecting experience sure?  He feels sure. At once the party begins searching every inch of the chasm, surrounding the find.  They don't find another piece.

Okay, okay, let's not panic.  Let's leave three people here with the equipment to clear away the brush, build up a little protection, stake the ground so it can be found again if we all have to leave and resist spending a day and a half digging up rock that may be nothing.  Then Yanzig and I will head off to the village, confirm that this is gold, and ...

Once the find is confirmed, the party debates telling anyone about the find's location. Of course, the assayer knows (and there would be one, there's a gold mine just 10 miles from Avalon already), and the assayer might suggest his cousin's younger brother could trail after the two strangers and see where they go ...

And meanwhile the party goes wild with excitement.  But it will take time to find the vein; the small rock could have been kicked by animals for five thousand years of time, miles from where the actual mine should be.  The job is only begun.

On its own, the hex hasn't any "natural hex production" because it hasn't been developed.  The gold, however, by itself, will add +1 wealth to the hex.  As I wrote in an earlier post, this is 354 g.p. per year.  Not bad.  But not spectacular.  Most of this doesn't even come from the physical quantity of the gold.  Some comes from the willingness of the area to just give the players money, in the hope of finding more gold.

The question is, does this small gold find count as part of the original gold reference that is already in the district, or does it count as a NEW reference?

That's tricky ... and I haven't any rules for that.  But we can invent some rules without much trouble.  Merely finding a small vein of gold would not be sufficient; that's what the usual wealth increase accounts for.  A new reference would be very, very unlikely: say, a 1% chance per year of digging.  And meanwhile, there'd be a 10% chance per year that the existing gold would run out.

That's not encouraging ... but we don't want the party easily stumbling across a motherlode of gold every day, and here's why:

The earlier post I linked describes one reference of gold as equal to 3,894 ounces ~ that's the amount drawn out from the mine every year.  Such a mine would go on long past a lifetime: say, a 1 in 500 chance per year of petering out.  Since one reference makes two locations, we must half the total (though we could always argue rolling two d10s and use these to determine what hex of the two has more and which has less).  Consider, however: half equals 1,947 ounces of pure gold per year.  Or a total of 16,968 g.p.  Every year.  At least, in my game.

That would transform the hex almost overnight.  Within a month, the hex would be officially changed over to a type-7, as labor and others rushed to the hex from all over Wowotu (and even outside).  Even a small gold discovery would produce this effect, though not quite so quickly.  The party wouldn't have much chance to prospect elsewhere in the hex after that ... there'd be prospectors everywhere.  If there was any groundwater under the hex, there'd be gangs looking for it.  Once they found ground water, some farms might appear if the season were right, or fruit trees and vegetables planted, or sheep watered (there are already plenty of sheep in the district).  And all the while the party would be busy organizing their own labor, to sink a shaft, bring in wood to shore up tunnels (because I've described gold ore, it wouldn't be sluice boxes), find labor, keep labor, build defenses, fight off a few more vermin, perhaps encounter the one really big monster in the formerly wild hex and generally lose money in costs before hoping to make money on the gold.

But we are talking years before there's any real chance that this will boom ... and by the end of the first year, the other prospectors may have given up, leaving only a few score people and little else beyond that pleasant, non-life changing 354 g.p per year.

Still, what if the players decide to spend it on sheep?

Ah, there we have a different formula.  We don't prospect for sheep.  We know where they are.  The gateway for sheep is the amount of available water.  Perhaps there is some in the newly transformed 1008, but there is more in 1007 and more still in 1107.  So we start calculating how much water there is and we start buying sheep.

Water makes food, which we can also buy in Port Tethys, so we build up our flocks, buying more labor and pouring more money into the three hexes we've decided to occupy.  There's no real government here, not in a Dev7 region (Dev8 would bring new problems, like a local priest who might contend with our activities), so we're really only limited to our coin, our wherewithal and our luck.  The sheep might contract a disease, or we might lose a bunch of sheep to something out of hex 1108 that is feeding on them.  But in any case, we're pouring all this money into 1007 and 1107, as well as 1008 ... what is that doing?

Sheep do not grant any special wealth bonus to a hex.  Oh, the owners make money, but unlike gold, it doesn't fire up the local economy.  It does, however, potentially increase the importance of the hex.

Again, I have no rules made up for this.  Which, apparently, are a lot harder than I thought.  Okay, rewriting this post, let's try to figure this out.

The "natural hex production" for a type-7 rural hex is the natural vegetation for an arid hex (1 food & 1 labor), with an additional +1 labor from the loose assortment of farms.

Compare this to a type-6, also rural, which adds a bonus of +1 food AND +1 labor:

• Type-7 arid, rural hex: 1 food, 2 labor
• Type-6 arid, rural hex: 2 food, 2 labor

1 food [binary 1] is enough to feed 70 persons a diet of 2,200 calories a day. 

2 food [binary 11] is enough to feed 210 persons.  So to change a type-7 hex to a type-6 hex?  Add food.

We can add food by filling the hex with sheep.  Or ploughing new ground.  Or buying fishing boats.  As it happens, this won't raise the labor in the hex, as I originally though when I first wrote this post.  But the extra food will raise the population, which we can arguably charge rent, then continue to use the labor to run our own farm.  We become the middlemen for the produce of the other farmers, trading their product by buying it for slightly less than what town would pay, saving them the wear and tear on their carts, animals and the time spent hauling it.  We shear our own sheep, and charge others to shear their sheep ... and we build a mill, which adds another +1 labor and, happily, +1 wealth.

There.  I hope that clears up the former errors in the post.

Adventure Writing

The last post has established that we're looking for a certain type of structure, which ensures both inefficiency and success at the same time.  But how do we identify the tolerance level that the party has for either.  It's true that there isn't one tolerance level for every possible party, but that's no really helpful.  We probably won't be running with a lot of different parties and, in any case, our presence is going to skew different parties towards the same median.

The strategy for everyone to find that median is the same, no matter who is running or who is being run.  That strategy is experimentation ~ and those who won't employ it are bound to be weak or abusive DMs.

Unfortunately, most of us, the writer here included, were initially trained to think that an adventure design worked like writing a book.  We write the whole book, every inch of it diagrammed and sorted, and only when the book is complete do we dare present it for our players to try out.  Frankly, this is pretty stupid. We keep talking about how the game is supposed to be a collaboration between the DM and the players, but then we send the DM off to work in total isolation while we wait like an audience of critics waiting to tear pieces out of the DM's solo design.

We do this because this is how modules were designed.  Modules have to be designed like this because they are products, in which all the collaboration takes place between the fabricators prior to handing them over to the manufacturer.  There is NO collaboration between the maker of modules and the DM, and then no collaboration between the DM and the players.  It is passed down the line with the message, "This is as good as it gets; if you don't like it, tough."

DMs then try to rewrite the module a little (still solo), to tailor it for the players, but we still don't have much recognition of the players tailoring the module for themselves.  At best, we have this desperate ploy: a very old story describing what most DMs do when they're noobs and don't know better.  It goes like this and it's familiar: the DM has nothing planned, or has something planned which doesn't seem very good.  The players speculate about what might be up ahead; the DM hears this and thinks, "That's great!  I'll do that!"

Is this what I mean by the players collaborating with the DM to make an adventure?  No.  But we'll come back to this.

We also pre-write adventures because we think this is the only way to make them complicated and detailed, as in what happens with room #4 is very important when the party gets to #7, which has the key they need for room #9, and so on.  We can call this The Myst Method.  The Myst Method sucks.  DMs don't realize this, but they're very tiresome to play over and over and, in the end, the players will soon become savvy enough to recognize what's happening.  The key in #4 might as well have a tag on it that says, "This is very important, test it out in every hole you come to going forward until it fits in something. Thank you, the Dungeon Master."

It's a bigger surprise if the key doesn't fit anything.  Except that we're still going to spend an hour of game time trying the key a thousand times.

Finally, we pre-write adventures because we don't understand design.  We think this is proper and correct. We think this is how stuff gets designed.  It used to be, but now every company that still designs that way has been destroyed in the market place by competitors who employ what's called "agile design."

Let's not get into the particulars ~ there is plenty of stuff online to read if you're not familiar with the concept. You may realize the last post was about agile design.  At present, I want to make a point about what agile design is supposed to accomplish.

Writing the module in one go is called "waterfall design" ~ the old way of doing things.  Basically, the river goes along, goes along, goes along, then it falls off the cliff and there we are.  All designers used to do this; there were no focus groups brought in to question the design, no testing of the product (and no requirement to test it) and sometimes, no assurance that the product would do what it's supposed to do.  Movies and other artworks, for the most part, are still being made this way.  That is why so many of them suck.

Agile design is what's called "iterative."  This means that it is done frequently and repetitively, until what is desired is achieved.  Agile was invented for the software industry, which absolutely died on the vine when attempts were made to design it in a waterfall fashion.  Now, everything is released in bits in pieces, testing it and testing it, relying very heavily on the user to fix what's wrong and improve the experience.  Video game designers release an alpha version of the game, sometimes updated once, then a beta version.  The beta version is then repeatedly released as it is tweaked and fixed, relying on players to identify what must be fixed.  Finally, all the problems have been supposedly identified and the game is released.

Games are much more complex now, with fewer bugs, because of agile design.  Back in the day, when waterfall design was normal, programs were not only crippled by bugs (rather than a few annoying things, like now, it used to be impossible to use software without continuous work-arounds for bugs), there was nothing the company could do about it.  There was no proper effort to account for what had to be changed; this meant that "fixing" a program meant bringing in a completely unfamiliar team, who would have to start on the code from scratch.  It was easier to burn the code to the ground and start again.

When designing your adventure, you want to be agile about it.  But this will immediately produce the response, "How am I supposed to keep stuff secret from my players if I'm sharing the design?"

Easy.  Don't keep it secret.  Have you not noticed how game are played now?  Consider titles like Don't Starve, Oxygen Not Included and Subnautica.  Knowing what the adventure IS won't change the doubt players have about the die, their ability to overcome known enemies or steadily explore vast realms.  RPGs have vastly over-emphasized the importance of fog, as though this is the entire game, when in fact fog is a very small feature.

What is the best part of not knowing?  It produces stress from uncertainty.  But if you know you're equally matched with an enemy, does that reduce stress?  If you know the enemy's intentions or the enemy's abilities, does that detract from the player's level of stress?  No.  It doesn't.  Not in my experience (which I can prove with text from game campaigns, if necessary).

The only time knowledge removes stress is when it tells the players they are certain to win or that they are certain to lose.  Once a player is convinced of either, the game is lost.

So come clean.  Sit down and say to your NEW players in your NEW campaign, directly, that you're thinking of giving an encounter.  Warn them that it is coming.  Tell them, before it starts, before their characters see it, what the encounter is going to be.  See how they react.  Ask them how they are reacting. Test them.  Then, after the encounter is run, find out how they felt about it.  Ask them, was it too hard?  Was it too easy?  Don't take their word literally, as they will skew their responses with a desire for survival, but ask!  You can't learn anything if you don't ask.

Tell your players that you're planning to put a small, deserted keep on the edge of the nearby forest. Don't wait for them to ask a bartender: just tell them, "You happen to know about this deserted keep."  Ask them how big they want it to be.  How much treasure.  How many monsters they'd be willing to fight to get that much treasure.  How many they think they'd have to fight.  Make a joke that it would have to be a lot more and see how they respond.  Tell them that if they can't handle that many monsters, maybe they're not tough enough for the treasure, and see how they respond.  Assure them that there is a keep.  Assure them that there is treasure there.  What the hell.  You think it's some big secret?  You think they don't know you're going to put treasure everywhere they go to fight a monster?

Stop hacking off your left arm to spite your right.  Stop doing this on your own.  Get your players to tell you want they'd like to fight, give them a chance to do it, assess the effect and then start to adjust your plans with the knowledge you've gained.  Obviously, you're always going to be the most creative one in the bunch.  You have the least to lose and you're getting experience watching them.  This isn't rocket science ~ but it is about being forthcoming.  You're not going to make a good game by yourself, not yet.  Someday, but not yet.  You've got to learn first how to design before locking yourself in a room and designing.

Underwater Plans

As I climb out of my cloud of recent illness, taking note that I haven't done any real work on my world in about eight days ~ a horribly long time, enough for me to feel parched for completion like a man struggling to get the top of a canteen in the desert ~ I'm looking at things I need to be doing.

Some readers may notice that I have not talked about my book in a long time.  Allow me to reassure the readers: I am still working on it.  Just now it has been difficult, as the job I'm working has been physically trying (I have lost nearly 25 lbs. of weight in just 55 days), leaving me with little strength at the end of the day for digging in and getting good work done.  At least I am earning an income.  Losing weight, however, has meant less stress on my feet, less pain at the end of the day and ~ thankfully ~ an overall better fitness that I am rather enjoying (when I'm not deathly ill).  These last two months have shown how physically fit I am, since I am feeling none of the ill effects of dropping a lot of weight, while actually looking younger for having done so.  This comes from a lifetime of never smoking, never doing drugs, drinking but not to the point of drunkedness and being blessed with having a lot of natural energy.

Steadily, the words per week on the book have been climbing, so good news there.  In time, this thing will be finished and off my back; I have no desire to rush it.  I thought I would have it done four months ago but, well, these things will be done when they are.  I apologize to anyone who feels they are waiting overlong for the results of the Spring 2016 fundraiser.

I expect to spend my less cerebral moments working on the thieves' sage abilities that got interrupted last week when I found myself laying in bed when not dragging my half-dead carcass three times to work before finally giving in and calling in sick.  I wouldn't hesitate to call in sick with a proper office job, but just now I am working among the morlocks and on this level, daring to admit the limitations of humanity is generally seen as weak and therefore disposable.  I started working on the sage abilities because of beginning my world again (cancelled this last Saturday), interrupting the creation of my British Isles map to do so.  I thought I might try a little mapmaking tonight or tomorrow.

And my thoughts are moving towards the adventure I described last week, which is expected to eventually become an underwater adventure.  Here and there for a few days I've been reading boards and blog posts about people running underwater adventures and I must say the prognosis for finding practical rules that I can steal for my campaign are not good.

See, I have never ~ in 37 years of running as a DM ~ run any underwater campaign.  This has been the result of two principle causes.  The first cause has been that there are no systematic or complete rules in existence for running underwater adventures that I have ever been able to find in all the years I've been searching.  Every single system I've encountered is woefully short on practical boundaries on movement or combat, made worse by the fact that water is a 3-D environment.  I have seen some very silly things on the net of late claiming that "water combat is just like aerial combat!" ~ a ridiculous claim, since water doesn't function like air in the least way imaginable.  Weapons in water do not work like weapons in the air, water currents are much stronger than air currents while gravity acts very differently as humanoid bags of meat tend to float, not fall.  Air movement is necessarily performed with animal mounts or magical aids to movement, leaving both hands free, whereas water movement is performed by swimming, which necessarily makes both hands useless for anything else.

It is clear that the game universe wants to pretend that water simply does not function like water does, which mystifies me.  In an underwater adventure, water is THE obstacle.  All other obstacles are made more deadly and difficult because the players are forced to function in a watery environment for which their limbs are not designed.  They can alter themselves in a number of ways, but all of these ways change the nature of their hands, meaning they must think differently where it comes to combat and the basic function of their bodies.  And this is the big point where it comes to DMing this sort of adventure.

I know that most DMs will simply hand out buckets of waterbreathing and polymorph potions, whatever it takes to make the players feel like an underwater adventure is doable and basically like any other adventure.  I abhor this sort of thinking: "Gee, everyone gets to be a shark for this adventure, won't it be fun!"  I'm all for magical solutions, even party-comprehensive solutions, but free access to magical super-powers just because we are all going underwater are strictly off the menu.  Magic isn't there to be handed out free; if there is magic, it must have a price and I'm not talking about coin.  If the party wants the ability to go under the surface without counting rounds before dying, the deal they make is going to have to be with the Devil ~ or some D&D equivalent.  Otherwise, they're going to have to fight the all-consuming water obstacle as best they can without free samples from magic-dump-R-us.

This brings us to the OTHER reason why I've never run an underwater adventure in all this time.  I run games where the players pick their agenda.  As it happens, my players have never said, "Hey, you know what?  We'd like to go underwater and fight sea-going creatures with our land-humanoid limitations!"  I've had parties talk about the possibility of doing that ~ someday.  I've encouraged parties by reminding them that ships with gold sink to the bottom and collect there, in bigger piles than are found at the bottoms of dungeons, receiving answers like "I guess that's true" and "meh."  Apathy has, so far, kept parties from testing such theories.

So why has this party now decided to give it a try?  In truth, one of the members has been wanting to try an underwater campaign since she was a little girl.  She has only just begun to feel that the party is a high enough level to give it a try.  The rest of the party feels that they, too, are ready for this degree of novelty and so, in truth, I'm on the hook for giving it to them.

I have a strong adventure in mind, one that I might be able to produce and sell as a module, like I did with Ternketh.  I'm glad I'm giving this a try now, after this much experience as a DM, rather than 25 years ago.  I see this being a steep, steep learning curve.

Movement in combat, combat weapons, hitting and damage, adjustments to magic, adjustments to house rules such as wounding and binding of wounds, vertical movement, momentum, water currents, breathing, swimming rules ~ all of these are going to have to be considered, along with other things.  On the whole, I think the adventure as I envision it will be awful for the players.  Awful.  They will grow weary of not being able to employ half their spells because those are designed for land-based combat, they will grow weary of the movement structure, they will grow weary of fighting their way through water, they will grow weary of fighting creatures that move faster than they do, they will feel that the whole long adventure is just dragging out forever, no matter how much experience they're getting ~ and trust me, I intend to dump a lot of experience and treasure on the party to make it all worth it to them.

I will work to keep the momentum as high as possible, to keep the party feeling like they're enabled and rewarded, but the sheer change in the environment is going to test them.  It isn't that the game will be worse or slower, but it will be different in ways they don't expect and to which they won't be adapted.  Novelty is wonderful but it is also trying when experienced in abundance.  Anyone who has taken a month-long energetic vacation knows how tired it is possible to become of novelty.

Yet, hopefully, they'll survive, they'll manage the challenges, they'll climb a level or two (the lower level characters/henchmen are going to climb a lot of levels) and they'll kiss the dry ground afterwards with a sense of triumph that they will remember all their lives.  So that's worth the trouble.

I don't think, however, that they'll ever want to go back underwater again.  At least, not for more than a single combat in an otherwise dry dungeon.  So all the work I'll do for underwater action will probably not be used for my world again.  Oh well.  Writing rules is fun!

Heh, heh.

Breaking the Mold

In the last post, I was asked about the details of the party's adventure and I gave a long answer.  I didn't finish the story, which I said was long, so I thought I would do that now and use it to make a point about monsters.

Let's start with the kelpie I introduced to the party, which I said was different from the Fiend Folio.  The FF describes the kelpie appearing "as a beautiful human woman in order to lure men into deep waters" . . . which of course is done with a charm ability.

Come on.  Did we really need another version of this monster?  Shit, the folio was printed in '81 and this was already such an awful cliche that the writers should have been taken out and bitch-slapped for every version of this they added to the book.  What the hell is it that makes game creators think that DMs need to constantly be charming the party into a near death experience?

When I was 15 and stupid, I did try a few of these scenarios, what with nixies and dryads and whatever the hell else.  They all sucked.  It's the same experience for the party every time: some people make save, some don't, those that make it save those that fail.  Listening to a DM read out random rules from a random splat-book would be more interesting.

Yet these are potentially interesting monsters, if the DM can get the hell away from the obvious dumb-monster response.  Saturday's kelpie in my game was friendly, novel, unexpected and compelling.  No one made a move to kill it (which would have been disastrous for the party) - and for a long time into the future players will talk about the kelpie and remark on its behaviour and someday that will set up another kelpie with a very different agenda.  Rest assured, that agenda isn't going to be charming the party and killing them.  It will be more interesting than that.

Consider.  The solution to the party's dilemma came out of another monster that also behaved differently than its cliched description.

About nine months ago the party was negotiating their way through the Sahara Desert, through a particularly magical part of the landscape.  The party is 7th to 11th level so things have to be more interesting now.  As chance would have it, they came across a creature that wasn't exactly demonic, but had characteristics that suggested such.

So the thief in the party, Nommi, decided to sneak up on it. I have stealth rules that enable thieves to roll 3d6 and then subtract their level from the result.  The number is the distance in five foot hexes that the thief closes to before the target becomes aware.  The target's level is also taken into account if the target has thief-like attributes.  If the thief is within two to three hexes, depending on the amount of armor the thief is wearing, and if the target then rolls against surprise and fails, the thief can backstab.  The rules work the same with an assassin.

In this case, Nommi rolled ridiculously low and ended up with a result of zero.  Thus he slipped right up behind the entity ~ and at that moment, discovered that he was in a position to back-stab a djinn.  I rolled a 1 on a d6 and the djinn was surprised.

The thief decided . . . um, no.  On the whole, it sounded like a really, really bad idea.  So the thief said, "Hello," and the djinn jumped and spun around.  And at that point, the djinn laughed.

The djinn congratulated the thief and remarked on the thief's skills and there was a great exchange as they made friends.  And in gratitude, the djinn granted the party a wish, which the party used, asking to have the McGuffin put into their possession at once.

Unfortunately for the party, this was an icicle of perpetual cold, which created a frozen sphere of about a quarter mile in diameter and affected weather within a thirty-mile radius.  Once the icicle was put in their possession, they were now inside the freeze radius, helplessly frozen inside.  They didn't know this is what the McGuffin did.

The djinn was very sorry and did help the party's back up of henchmen come and spend four months of game time rescuing the party (or rather, trying to rescue the party).  But that is all another story.

The point is that the djinn and Nommi did become friends ~ and Nommi was one of the party aboard the wrecked ship talking to the kelpie.  So, in a flash of inspiration, they called the djinn and got the information they wanted.  They did not have the power to compel the djinn to grant a wish, but the djinn does still know a lot of things and was willing to say so.

Now, I know a lot of DMs would make the djinn very tight-lipped and miserable, and would demand that any information the djinn might give would have to be the result of a wish.  But how straight-jacketed is that?  How much more interesting is it that the party has a djinn as a friend?  A friend, I'll add, who was willing to tell where the djinn's lamp was located ~ which is, again, another story, and another potential adventure someday if the party pursues it.

Things get interesting when DMs get out of the box and begin using these creatures like the intelligent beings they're meant to be - and stop with the most obvious, most annoying angles on their abilities and powers.  Just because a kelpie can charm the party doesn't mean the kelpie wants to.  Maybe the kelpie has other needs or interests. Maybe the kelpie is just friendly.

Backstage

About twenty months ago I put together a series of posts that began with discovering a wagon on a road that had just been attacked by goblins. Here are the links for the series:

Setting the Scene
Groundwork for Dialogue
In-Party Indecisions
Setting Forth
Evil
Feeling the Threat

The six posts are a steady point-by-point breakdown of how to hook a party, how to build upon that hook, how to augment and support the party's reaction to the hook, how to handle the party setting forth, how to manage expectations when the adventure sinks in and finally an understanding of the consequences that come from a game where failure is a real option.

These posts were very popular - and I feel I made some converts to my way of thinking with them, as I really do feel that many believe that the adventure has just two elements: the hook and the process of hacking our way through.  There are a significant number of people who believe that the "adventure" is the personalities of the NPCs or the "feel" of the monsters to be killed or the "fantasy" element of the dungeon's special rooms or the castle's special appearance.

Adventures are mechanical constructs.  What the players see is a facade:

Like a hotel, when you walk into the front you're not given a view of
housekeeping or the kitchen: you're shown what you're meant to see.

The beams, the piping, the actual structure that supports the adventure, that's all covered by a veneer of beauty that doesn't actually help the DM.  That's for the players.  Those who work behind the scenes, we're used to walking through rooms where the customers have shat the bed, or where the toilet was busted or where some poor schlub committed suicide, leaving us to clean up the mess.  This is DMing.  As some point it's necessary to drop the romance and doe-eyed wonder and get down to the mechanical process of making the thing look beautiful to people who don't actually know anything about what's really going on.

There are some that won't do that.  They'll claim that they're entitled to their sense of wonder and their rose-colored glasses, while insisting that they're as enraptured as the players.

Some of these DMs will be lying, like Rock Stars who have just flown in from another city on a plane through five hours of turbulence, only to vomit in the back of the limo because they're actually suffering from the flu, who will nevertheless scream at the auditorium, "I'm so happy to be here!"  Because pretending matters, because we shove our own emotional state aside and we tell our players that the adventure is wondrous because that's part of the wonder.

But there will always be DMs who just can't see it that way.  They don't want to lose something - call it their innocence or their joie de vivre - for the sake of being a DM.  That can't be the way it works because that's just . . . just horrible.

What's interesting is that many people who work in the hotel industry or the performance industry - or any number of other similar industries - get to like the gritty, grimy reality of the back-scene, much more than they like the front house.  They'd rather walk in the back door of the hotel and talk to the cooks than greet the concierge.  They'd rather hear the concert while sitting back stage with the roadies than see the show.  True, they're more jaded.  They talked to Prince personally, they knew the guy on a level that the audience will never see . . . and they know all that the outfits, the strutting on stage and everything else that the audience worships was just an act.  They don't remember Prince "the artist" - they remember that one night when they smoked a few cigarettes together and Prince talked about his parents.  A memory they will never, ever share with anyone.

If you're a DM, that you now.  You can hang out with the players and make jokes, laugh and all that other shit, but you've got something on them because you know what's going on behind closed doors that they will never enter.

You can lament that.  You can preen yourself and promote that.  What you can't do is change that - not if you want to run a good game.  You have to embrace it; you're not like the others at the table. They thing they invest in, their characters, they're hope for a good running, their ambitions and sense of wonder - all that depends on us working hard to make sure they're not disappointed.  To do that, we have to clean the dust out of our eyes, slap ourselves a couple of times in the face and wake the hell up.

They're on holiday.  We're working.