Art Inflation

Continuing this discussion as an addendum to my late Bard post, I had mentioned that there was a problem with the audience or beneficiaries of artworks that have been produced.  I'll tackle this now.

See, we can talk about the bard creating art and suppose the party picking up a little experience here and there as the party's bard gets lucky with doubles, but we have a greater question.  What is to stop the party from simply entering a large city, visiting the local gallery and soaking up all the plentiful x.p. that's already been produced and is hanging on the walls there?  Or literally paying for experience by coughing up the entrance fee for the Cirque du Renaissance that happens to be showing at a Burgundian or Florentine fair?  See a few jugglers, attend a play and a concert, walk past a few swirls of paint and go to bed a 5th level fighter!

I won't deny it, that is a problem.

Let's consider some solutions.  The first and most obvious one is access.  17th century French salons, at least, were not open to the common hoi polloi.  A vast majority of people ~ player characters included ~ can't read, leaving off a fair number of great works in the way of poetry and prose.  The very best pieces of pottery, jewellery, sculpture and such never make their way into the public markets and are often made for private appreciation.  Galleries, as we understand them, were a somewhat later invention than the 17th century and this, at least, can slow down a few visitors.  The Louvre in my game will still be a palace until 1692 and won't be open as a gallery until 1793, after the French Kings are gone.

This doesn't discount everything, however.  Crecy, Chartres, Lincoln and hundreds of other cathedrals are still quite evident and plain to be seen by most of the population, as are the Pyramids, the Hagia Sofia, the Taj Mahal and the many parts of the Great Wall of China.  Musicians may play for monarchs but they don't play exclusively for monarchs, so that even the greatest musician in the world may happen by to play for a bed that night.  Circus performers, puppeteers and dancers are quite public performers and we all remember being told about the groundlings at Shakespeare plays.  There are still plenty of opportunities for free x.p.

However, comprehension does limit this somewhat.  I described the limits of how much understanding a lower level has in art created by a higher level bard when I first proposed the art-as-x.p. transfer idea.  Perhaps we might install a different limitation, however, in the way of intelligence and wisdom checks, so that our munchkin fighter of the 8 intellect can't help but fall asleep as Hamlet talks to his dead father.

But that doesn't help us with mages and clerics, does it?  And the last thing we need is to give mages and clerics an edge - they get enough as it is.  So perhaps checks aren't such a good idea.

Well, how about fatigue?  How many paintings can a person stare at?  How many circus performances and poetry readings can a person reasonably be expected to endure?  Perhaps that first bard might get the blood pumping and flowing, but after the one after, or the one after that?  We might say that if we grew up in the vicinity of Notre Dame, who really cares what it looks like to outsiders.

On the vein, perhaps there's only one kind of art that can appeal to a given person.  You might like art pottery but floor mosaics are a yawn.  Perhaps its music that steals your heart and you feel nix, naught, nothing for what others call a good dance routine.  Perhaps all this other stuff just doesn't reach you - but give you the death-defying, flabbergasting demonstration of a high wire act and your day is made.

Finally, there is always scarcity.  The players may go looking for these things but the reality is that they're just damn rare.  Or surprisingly lacking in the promise that others have given.  Perhaps the Pyramids really are just piles of rock.  Perhaps the Taj looks great in a rendering, but since the grounds weren't finished until 1653 (the Mausoleum was finished in 1643), perhaps it is less than great when surrounded by thousands of slaves ripping up the earth in every direction.  Perhaps the Great Wall is just a wall.

I think it is probably a combination of all these things - along with every dirty trick I can invent to turn seeing a single painting into a difficult, trying adventure that makes the pay-off cost something.  Certainly, having created the problem, I'm on the hook for managing the solution in a reasonable, player-accepted manner.

Else I'm stuck with players easily piling up unbound amounts of experience, which certainly doesn't work for my game.

Fixing the Bard's Ability to Transfer X.P.

Coming back around to the bard.

Some might remember that way back in January, I wrote a proposal that a bard's artwork could work as a transference of experience from the bard to the audience, effectively putting one's soul and experience into that work so that a part of it would then be given - in a firm, practical, game meaningful way - to the person who saw or heard the results of that artwork.

A few days ago I put up a table on my wiki that would try to codify this, to propose how long it would take an artist to make an artwork vs. how effective the artwork would be.  The table looked like this.

Let me start by saying there is a big problem with the table, one that took two days to sink in.  First, however, I'll talk about how it was supposed to work.

The bard starts by stating what degree of artwork they want to make.  We'll say that our bard Henri is an authority-level bard, meaning he is unable to make illustrious work or better but he can make anything up to excellent.  Henri is a painter and he decides he's going to make a fine piece of art that will take him, according to the table, 19 weeks.  It would take less if he were an expert or a sage, but he's an authority so there it is.

Each week, Henri makes a check to see how he is progressing.  Note that the heading says "weeks of success" ~ which means Henri must be successful 19 times to complete his work of art.  It could take him many more weeks to actually finish it, which accounts for going over and starting from scratch, going through blue periods and moments of crisis, struggling with the method and so on.  Each week, Henri throws 2d20, one against his wisdom and one against his intelligence.  If he succeeds against both, he has had a successful week and he can move on.

Finally, when the painting is finished, others who view it gain the benefit of 5-8% of Henri's experience.  We'll say that Henri is 6th level and has 30,000 x.p., and we roll a 5 (poor Henri), so that others gain 1,500 x.p. upon seeing the painting, adjusted according to what level they themselves are.  All of that is covered in the link that started this post.

This is fine, except it's broken from the outset.  We'll start that even 38 weeks of work seems a little short for giving someone ~ even an equal level ~ that much experience.  I messed around with the table in all sorts of way and I can see that's still an issue.

A much bigger issue is the question, why would Henri EVER make anything except creditable works?  It takes less time and the payoff is much, much better that working for a long time on something fine.  Henri can make better than 6 creditable paintings in the time it takes to make a fine one, with more than three times the probable payoff.  So the table's concept is garbage out of the gate.

Finally, there's no adjustment here for the artwork being a fail.  Henri knows if he works all this time on the painting, eventually it will be finished and eventually it will pay out.  So there's no stress here, either.

[there is another issue having to do with the viewer/audience, which some of you will have guessed, but I will discuss that in another post]

Now, there's nothing about the table above that can't be salvaged without dumping the % column, so let's start there:

Let's keep Henri having to choose the level of artwork, only let's have that choice mean something. Let's also keep Henri having to roll under his wisdom and his intelligence for each week, in order to be successful.  But let's skew those rolls in a way that rewards MORE work instead of less.

Suppose that Henri's intelligence is 10 and that his wisdom matches the bard's minimum for my game, 13.  And we'll say, for the heck of it, that Henri decides to create a creditable work.

This means he has to succeed at 3 rolls (2d20 per roll, against the two stats).  That's easy.  But now we're going to say that for the artwork to have any value, one, two or three of those rolls must be a double.

That is, the number on the wisdom check and the number on the intelligence check must match; if they do not match, the artwork progresses towards completion but, in fact, adds nothing, zip, zero to its value.

Once Henri has rolled three times, if there are no doubles, the artwork is finished and can't be continued.  Henri might sell it for some income, but it is worthless for experience transfer.

Let's spend a moment talking about rolling doubles on 2d20.  There are 400 possible combinations in rolling two 20-sided dice, just as there are 36 possible combinations in rolling two 6-sided dice.  With 2d20, there are 20 possible rolls in 400 that will result in a double.  With 2d6, there are 6 possible rolls that will result in a double.  Therefore, there's a 5% chance of rolling doubles with 2d20, just as there is a 16.67% chance of rolling doubles with 2d6.

[Please forgive these comparisons. People are more familiar with the odds on 2d6]

However, for our success to count, the doubles that Henri rolls for making an artwork must also be equal to or less than both his wisdom and his intelligence.  That means there are only 10 possible doubles that enable Henri to give his art value: a mere 1 in 40 chance.  So yes, Henri is going to produce less valuable art than someone with an 18 in both intelligence and wisdom: just as a fighter with an 18 in both strength and constitution is going to do better than one with a 10 strength and a 13 constitution.

But okay, so what?  Roll a double, not, Henri can spend 19 successful weeks making six so-so paintings or he can spend it making one so-so fine painting.  If every double produces the same bonus to the experience he can transfer, what difference does it make?

Ah.  Obviously, we have to look at that bonus.

Henri attempts a credible painting and, lo and behold, he rolls a double in his third week.  Yes!  How much transfer does Henri get?

Well, I have to base this on someone spending 6 years working on the Mona Lisa (Da Vinci painted a lot of similar paintings that never amounted to a thing except to art historians) giving a 20-30% transfer.  That's a masterpiece, 305 successful weeks from a sage, by someone who probably had a 19 in both intelligence and wisdom, so six years and a bit to roll an average of 15.25 doubles.

If we allow each double to generate 2%, that works out.  But I have another idea.  A better idea.

Suppose that for a first double, we offer 0.3-1.8% of the bard's experience available for transfer (3d6 x 0.1).  If Henri rolls a 10, that's 1% of his 30,000 x.p., or 300.  Not bad, since it would take Henri an average of 13 credible paintings to get a single double.

But what if he gets a second double?  Is it 2 x 0.3-1.8%?  No, I don't think so.  A second double on one art work means either it is an ambitious project or the bard really was on fire.  The second double gets a 0.1% bonus!  Yes, I know what the reader is saying: big deal.  But what if every subsequent double gets a similar bonus?

Very well, look at the table on the right.  With each cumulative double to be obtained in a given artwork, the overall average of that particular double increases. At best, a credible work can manage three cumulative doubles before the work is completely done.  This doesn't mean it can't be a pretty amazing work; but the chances of rolling three doubles on 2d20 in a row, all of which are below one's wisdom and intelligence, is pretty low.  Henri has a much, much better chance of getting three (or even two in one work) if he tries for longer and longer works.

And if it is an immense project, something that really will take years (including the destruction of failures or merely the attempts before hitting the mark - like Michaelangelo's multiple attempts at David) has the chance of really mounting up points with a lot of doubles.

Am I making bard transfer artwork incomprehensibly difficult?  Oh, you bet!  I want it to be the Holy Grail, not something a bard character churns out without reflection or suffering.  The mere fact that a bard could waste 20 weeks of their life and game time trying to create a juggling move or forty stanzas of epic poetry, only to fall flat on their face audience-wise, will really make a bard pause before making the effort.

Remember, we want the player bard to have the artist experience.  That includes failure, just as it does for a fighter.  But it also includes the very, very rare piece of incomprehensible genius that causes the world to stop and take notice.  That takes time, it takes suffering . . . and it takes risk.

There's a reason why a lot of artists are prone to suicide.

The Bardic Struggle

Having figured out what the bard's art does [the gentle reader is not bored of these constant posts about the bard, are they?], I'm free to map out how the bard creates art and how to measure the effects of the art created.

The most obvious thing to do would be to create a study/skill called "create art," in which the bard would gain points.  As the points mounted, the bard would create better and bigger art, in a very linear manner.  This is standard RPG design.

Frankly, I find this remarkably stale.  In it, everyone's path is precisely the same, there's no room for personality and we don't even have the flexibility of being able to choose from a wide range of spells.  It is dull, dull, dull design and it is exactly the reason why the bard character comes out so flat.

Remember what I said before: we want the player to feel what it is like to be an artist.  Part of that feeling is a sense of inadequacy that the bard must start with, then overcome by virtue of multiple possible strategies.  It is the same inadequacy that a spellcaster feels at not having enough spells to protect themselves or the fighter feels at being easily thumped down to zero hit points.

Only the goal here is to restrain the bard from being able to make art like a Fable character pounding a hammer on a forge.

The very pinnacle of creation game play.

To that end, I've decided to frustrate the bard all to hell by dividing up the creative process and spreading it over several studies in the same field.

Because a character in the Senex Campaign is a bard, who has chosen poetry as their art form, this post will deal with that particular example.  Other art forms will require a moderate adjustment to this formula (which will be interesting to do), but I see no reason to worry about that until I get a player character interested in pursuing one of those other forms.

Too, I should explain that a bard has four fields of interest, three of which are not creative.  So for this post we're specifically speaking about how a bard makes "art" and "product," and not how a bard researches matters in depth (which will produce other effects I will eventually create), how a bard teaches others (the college option) or how a bard gets into the world of business (as a producer, agent, stage manager or general techie).  I'm building the "bard" character so that one does not even have to create to be a member of the class.

Let's just stick to what we usually think of as a bard.

The poet who chooses "Artistry" as the field has four choices of study: conceptualism, creativity, performance and practicality.  I'll just quickly run these down.  Conceptualism is the effort to make work that pleases oneself, the sort not likely to be understood or appreciated by others.  Creativity is the ability to think theoretically about art, to understand what it is but with no capacity to actually make work.  Performance is the ability to present work, but without a personal comprehension of how that work is made.  Practicality is the ability to make useful work that an audience on the whole would like, but doesn't allow the first sense of aesthetics.

In short, they're all meaningful . . . but they are all distinctly lacking if the poet wants to write really terrific poetry.  To do so, the poet needs all of the above!  And this is where strategy arises.

At first level, the poet can pick one of the four ~ but only one ~ in which case the poet will gain enough points to be considered an "amateur" in that particular study (+1d12/level above 1st).  As an amateur, the poet will be able to write conceptual poetry for themselves (potentially massing enough work for later on when it can be refined and published).  The poet will have the capacity for creativity without actually making any work.  The poet will be able to perform, but it will be other people's stuff.  And finally the poet will be able to write nice, practical poems, along the lines of greeting cards.

BUT, the poet also gets 1d8 -1 points of knowledge per level in the other three studies.  10 are needed for amateur ability, so the poet might become an amateur in one of the other three at 2nd level.  The poet might not.  The odds say that probably one of them will reach amateur status by the time the poet reaches 3rd level ~ and probably all of them by 5th.

Conceptualism + Creativity will mean inspirational, self-styled poetry that could sell if published (conceptualism without creativity, not a chance).  Conceptualism + Performance would be the opportunity to meaningfully recite one's own personal poetry in public, increasing the poet's personal sense of worth.  Conceptualism + Practicality has the possibility of making an empathic connection to other persons, so that poetry written only for the poet might also strike other specific persons the same way.

Creativity + Performance does not increase the poet's repertoire, but it increases the level of the performance, changing that 1% x.p. bonus to 2%.  Creativity + Practicality improves the quality of practical work and its overall worthiness.

Finally, Performance + Practicality contributes to one's personal fame and listener donations.

Remember, at the same time, we are talking amateur status with each of these.  As one becomes an "authority," the pattern changes again.  It takes 30 knowledge points to become an authority, which one can do with a primary study by 3rd level ~ but it can easily take 8 levels or more to become an authority in something with an average of 3.5 points per level.  And that drag will be felt, particularly if the character just can't get their practicality up.  There's only so much one can do as an amateur.  To create really meaningful work, one has to increase one's knowledge and thus one's capacity for skilled artistry.

See, we can't make inspiration, great poetry (Sukha), if we can't work ~ and one of the skills that comes with being practical is "focus."  That is, the ability to sit and work and work and work without turning aside from the project and getting distracted.  If we can't do that, if all we can do is frivolously dick around, we'll never startle the world.  We'll never make our party as happy as they'd like.

But if we don't have conceptualism in our bucket, we'll be miserable.  Making our own art makes us feel better, it gives us a greater sense of value, it supports us when times are tough.  And if we don't have performance in our bucket, most will never know that we're a great poet.  This is 17th century.  People don't read!

And if we don't have creativity, we'll never have the inspiration anyway.

So figuring out what we can do will depend less on our skill set and more on our limitations.  We will be waiting to learn things we don't know, to make things we can't make and to hope one day we'll figure out just the hell all this shit works.

Like an artist does.

The Bardic Mini-Game

With proposed changes to the bard of late, I have seen several express a concern about the bard character becoming its own "mini-game" ~ enabling bards to play while other players sit on the sidelines and watch.

I can understand that concern.  I'm against such gaming on principle.  All players deserve attention during the game and it is up to the DM to find ways to ensure that a particular character or character class doesn't get this kind of privilege.  That people go to this place, however, this concern that the game will suddenly become bard-centric, is an expression of how other character classes created by other RPG designers suddenly became all the rage, excluding other classes.

I think that is because most RPG designers are "bored" with the old character classes.  They need something new to base the whole game on because they've become dried old prunes on the cleric or the mage, having run out of ideas, and now that they have a NEW character class to waffle on until they get bored of that, naturally everything in the game must now become about the new class.

This isn't me.  I have tons and tons of cool shit left to add to the cleric and the mage ~ and all the characters, really.  It is only that right now I happen to be talking about the bard, a class I'm trying to rescue from the dustbin of game design by making it actually relevant.

Does it mean that the bard will have some character to swing around in the game once it's been fleshed out?  Yes.  But do consider how much time is spent in the campaign listening to the cleric harp on about religion or the mage about spells, or the fighter about weapons, armor and fighting.  These classes have their "mini-games" already; it is only that we're used to the amount of time dredged up for pissing contests between hit point totals and the need to sacrifice something as soon as possible, so let's all go on a quest to do that.  No one is carping about the "mini-game" of yet another fallen paladin that has to drag the party on yet another bloody quest to get a lost virtue restored.

And let's face it: having another reason to quest, having another character class that deserves consideration, having another conversation at the table about what's relevant and what can we do now, won't be a bad thing.

To my mind, the way I will design the "work" the bard does, it won't be any different from a cleric building a temple, a fighter building a castle, a mage building a laboratory, a thief building a guild or any of the other establishment things that any character class might get want.  I think another part of the issue is that its imagined the bard will, almost immediately, be rushing around creating art and being famous.

That is not how this is going to be.  Like a 1st level fighter that is little better than a squishy mess waiting to happen, a low-level bard will enjoy an artist's path: being ignored, having little practical ability, the frustration of too little ability for too much ambition and ultimately waiting, waiting for the day when they're actually able to make the show they might dream of having.  It isn't handed to them on a silver platter.

In short, they've got to adventure like everyone else.

Wow

Reading through some Buddhist content about happiness (sukha), joy (piti), equanimity (upekkha) and Brahmavihara (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmavihara) I found myself having some strange thoughts on bard performance and the "better life."  When in doubt, always go east young man.  Always go east.

I ended up with a series of platitudes which today I cannot find, but are fundamentally tied into benevolence and charity.  The content person does not quest for wealth or power, but for well-being, well-being for self and well-being for others.  This is what the bard does ~ transmits a sense of well-being.  We have been describing this as happiness . . . but we have lacked any meaningful game benefit that this can offer.  And as I've said, I don't want to fall back on hit points, morale, saving throws or any of the usual things that get modified in the game.

On wikipedia, under piti, there's an excellent distinction made between "happiness" and "bliss" that is attributed to the 5th century treatise, the Visuddhimagga:

"If a man exhausted in a desert saw or heard about a pond on the edge of a wood, he would have happiness.  If he went into the wood's shade and used the water, he would have bliss."

This is what we want the bard to produce in game terms.  Something that the players will identify only with the bard: some effect that only the bard can cause.

With our last post, we were discussing the varying qualities of Aristotle: that happiness makes us flourish, that happiness causes us to behave virtuously, that we embrace temperance, justice, the desire to better ourselves, the encouragement of efficiency, proficiency, friendship, worthiness and respect.

We were describing experience.  We just didn't think of that.

But this is what the bard gives: experience.  Having an evening with the bard creates that sense of bliss as we immerse ourselves into the performance.  It focuses us, it reminds us of why we persevere, the experience provides us with resolve, bravery, a sense of duty, a sense of strength and possibility . . . in short, ALL the characteristics that we associate with being better in battle, with standing up to the enemy and taking a hit for the crew that we work with, with potentially sacrificing ourselves to save a fallen comrade.

I have often argued that we can't give experience for things that don't contribute to being a better combatant . . . and yet I would argue that attending a show does make one a better combatant.  It gives us something to fight for.

I can see it quite clearly.  The benefit of the bard character is that it gives other characters experience.  And the bard, in turn, gets experience from other bards.

Ah, but how?

I see two paths.  We can call them Upekkha (or Upeksa, in sanskrit), the sense of peace and well-being (equinimity, composure, the state of being sublime) and Sukha (happiness, bliss).  For certain, those terms are not going to be confused with any other term used in D&D.

In terms of bardic performance, Upeksa is the feeling we get from encountering something familiar and immensely satisfying, or what we have already defined as "product" where it comes to bardic creation. Sukha is, therefore, the feeling we get from encountering "art" ~ something wholly new that astounds our senses and overwhelms our thoughts.  Take note that I am using the word "encounter" deliberately. Visiting a theatre or attending a concert is, in D&D terms, an encounter.

Now, that is going to mess some people up.  And some people will feel that I am going a long way to completely break the game.  But rest assured, I'm being very careful in what the effects will be of either Sukha or Upeksa.

Upeksa

Very well, our bard gets up in front of an audience at a local roadhouse or inn and gives a recitation of a familiar poem, or perhaps a poem that has made its impression on audiences before but is not overly known to this audience.  There are perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty persons in the common room, warming themselves by the fire, ending their conversation because poets are rare and poetry is appreciated in that culture like it will never be in ours.  What happens?

Nothing, right away.  The bard has co-opted someone else's art as product and, while having produced a warm and fuzzy feeling among the crowd, we are speaking of contentment and well-being.  We are not speaking of epiphany or the scattering of formerly possessed ideals.  We're not talking Archimedes running down a street naked.

But . . . the audience goes away from the performance affected.  They are warmer in their hearts, they are a bit more interested in the world around them, they are more attentive.  Our bard isn't the greatest of bards and the venue isn't the greatest of venues, but there has been a change.

We could stipulate that for the period of a week after the encounter, each person in attendance (the party included!) will gain +1% experience above anything they would normally gain.  That's not profound, that's not game breaking, but it is significant and the party will certainly not turn it down.  It is, of course, not cumulative.  Still, having a bard on tap, knowing that small bonus will be there as long as the bard is with the party, casting poems around the campfire before we turn in, will have its impact.  If the bard dies, the party will certainly notice a little bit more than they would losing a thief or a druid.

Of course, as the bard progresses in level, that percentage will increase also.  We already give a 10% bonus for having a better strength for a fighter or a better wisdom for a cleric; why not a 2-5% bonus for having a better bard?  It may only be an additional 20-50 points on every thousand, but it will be 20-50 points for every person in the party.  When thinking about the online Juvenis party right now, with four characters and five followers, that's 180-450 additional experience for every thousand gained.  That's not peanuts.

But let's take the next step.  What about improving the venue?

We were talking about the bard performing at a bar.  What about an open-air stage?  What about an enclosed theatre, an opera house?  And what if we are not just talking about any poem, discussed for a few minutes or half an hour, but an epic poem that takes an hour to tell.  What about an National Epic, memorized in its entirety, tailor-made for an audience that gets weepy every time it is heard (and being the 17th century, it isn't heard often).  What is the benefit from that?

I can see going as high as 15-20%, for the space of a week afterwards.  Such events would be spectacularly expensive, they might last only one performance or perhaps for a run of a week, like the Bayreuth festival (but in my world it is too early for Wagner).  It would be hard to seriously to keep attending something like this and still get any proper adventuring done . . . but imagining travelling seven hundred miles just to attend the festival.

And perhaps it might have a diminishing effect.  The most profound concert in Europe, given perhaps in Vienna, gives a 20% for the first week . . . and a drop of 1 or 2% for each week thereafter.  The players could space out on the bonus for months, making their plans to visit the same concert next year, every year.  THAT is granting something to the players that they really want.

Really, the potential is masterful.  Players are suddenly asking if there's a theatre in the city; they want to go to the city instead of the town because there might be something more.  The bigger the city, the more profound the encounter they might have.  And it is something else for them to spend their money on (at prodigious prices ~ it cost more than $350 to see Springsteen in concert in 2016).

Moreover, it gives something concrete for a bard to shoot at.

Sukha

Now, this is different.  The benefits of Sukha can be obtained only once per artwork ~ and only from the artist actually responsible for that artwork.  So before Sukha can occur, the bard has to produce something personal and unique . . . and before that can happen, the bard has to get an inspiration and then work to make that inspiration happen.

That is a lot suddenly resting on top of the bard's being successful.  Now it isn't just getting the work finished.  Now it isn't the work bringing happiness or causing the locals to be more productive (though it might do that too).  Now it is the players waiting for the work to be done, because they are going to get experience from it.

Now the bard is hearing, "Is it done yet?  Is it done?"  And when the DM asks for the bard to roll the die to see if it is, every neck at the table is outstretched to see what the result is.

That's combat.  That's what happens with combat.

And because the bard's work isn't going to be accomplished with just one roll, there are going to be stages to the success of this thing.  And with each stage, the players get a little closer.

To make that work, the benefit for hearing the work has to be meaningful.  That is, if it works, right?  We talked about art not working.  If it doesn't, the bard won't be the only failure.  The whole party should be banging their heads on the table.

Want to know what it means to be an artist?  It means when we fail, everyone fails.  Just look at the favorite sport on the internet.

So what is that benefit?  Well, that depends on the amount of work done.  And that depends on how hard core the bard wants to be before risking total failure (and possibly an in-party lynching).  Working for a quick result might require two success rolls and then the final check against the stat indicated . . . and it might give 4% of the bard's total experience on hand to listeners (with some sort of adjustment for the level of the listener or lack thereof).  If the bard is first level and has a thousand experience, that's no big deal.  Oh, too bad, we lost 40 x.p.   Big whoop.

But let's say we have a poet that is more ambitious, deciding that this is going to be a serious poem, an epic.  There are going to be a series of 10 needed successful rolls that will extend the making of the poem to perhaps a year, until such time as the bard reaches 5th level and has a total of 20,000 x.p.  Suppose that the fallout from this poem will be 20% percent of the bard's total experience; that's 4,000 experience, bang, all in one swoop.  Wow, what a poem!

As I say, that would have to be reduced for characters of less than 5th level.  It could be argued they just don't "get it" ~ it is above their experience level.  Still, we could have an adjustment like two to the power of whatever the difference in levels was: so divided by 2 for 4th level, by 4 for 3rd level, by 8 for 2nd level, by 16 for 1st level and by 32 for the non-leveled persons.  This would still mean 125 x.p. for the common listeners.

The limitation is that each person hearing the poem can get this benefit only once (after which it becomes just another Upeksa), but there are virtually an unlimited number of persons the poem can be given to.

"Oh, just joined the party?  Oh, you must take some time and get the bard to recite his Clown's Panurge . . . it's fab!  You'll be changed, I promise you."

Conclusions

The potential changes here are enormous.  I was talking it over with my daughter just now and making jokes about the party rallying around the "culture stick" and screw the mage.  In my daughter's words,

"There are two characters hanging off a cliff and you can only save one.  Do you save the mage or the bard?"

I know that I am crazy half the time and that I am constantly raising the bar on the game to the point where most would find it impossible to run ~ but I'm just going to say that this is the most profound idea I think I've ever had.  It is nowhere near the "thread" I talked about yesterday.  Five hours ago I had not one iota of a wisp of a dream of this idea.

But now I think I'm the most brilliant person who ever wrote anything about D&D.  Feel free to just write "OMG" or "Wow" in the comments.

The Metrics of Happiness

My next struggle for the bard is creating a metric for performance, namely the effects of performance and the overall definition for how we see a performance from an amateur bard as opposed to an authority or an expert.  How, exactly, does a performance from a pleasant singer at the open mic night down the street compare with the professional who comes to sing for the local fair?  What is the difference between going to a concert to see the latest band climbing the charts and a chance at seeing Bruce Springsteen?

Again and again I find myself coming face to face with happiness and the need to create some sort of defining measure for it.  On the whole, there isn't need of one for the players.  The players are happy or they are not, depending on their feeling for the game, their sense of achievement, the anticipation of success or the concern about the death of their characters . . . but we don't need to create a number on their character sheets that defines whether or not they're happy.

Non-player characters, however, that's a different thing.  For the most part, no one has bothered because, well, who cares?  If the non-players get in the way, we kill them, and if they don't get in the way, good.  Why in the name of the game would we give a damn if any of them were happy?

I grant that.  The only reason I have at the moment is that the bard is going to want to get up in front of these non-entities and read poetry or sing a song, and it would be nice to know if the audience claps or not.  It would be nice to know if there was any reason to do it, beyond the bard saying, "Yes, I sang for them last night."  That's not much.  I mean, once or twice, we might be able to fool ourselves with our imaginations into thinking, "Cool, it was great being a bard last night," but that's not going to sustain itself through a whole campaign.  It will get sour fast.  Soon enough, the bard is going to not bother.

It would be pleasant if the bard had a reason to bother, which is what brings me around to happiness.  Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that a particular sort of bard was able to make a particular crowd happy to a particular degree.  And let's say that a better bard made everyone feel happier, and that a terrific bard made everyone positively joyful.  We might even be able to think of a collection of adjectives for seeing Springsteen.  I have it on good authority that people pay hundreds of dollars to see these things in order to have an experience that will last them the rest of their lives ~ that's got to count for something.

More to the point, seeing someone perform live can be a life-changing event.  People walk out of such events on the edge of making a decision about who they are and who they want to be.  We want to include that, yes?  We want the bard to feel the experience of creating that . . . and on some level, we want the bard to be able to see other, more fabulous bards, and experience that change for themselves.

Okay.  How?

Just now, no idea.  Working on it.  On the whole, happiness is a state of mind.  It has confounded philosophers for three millennia, not to mention a host of people tackling the subject from a biological, psychological, economic and artistic point-of-view.  We don't think old Alexis is going to solve it in a fortnight, do we?

Here is what I have.  Happiness makes us flourish.  That is, it causes us to do more than simply wallow in our happiness, it has a side effect of causing us to either continue doing the thing that makes us happy in exclusion to all else (hedonism) or it causes us to seek a means of keeping ourselves in a state of health and welfare that ensures we will never be unhappy again.  The latter interests me, since it is the most positive, practical aspect of what the bard might be able to cause: people work harder, they sing while they work, they fight less, they invest their money, they set up families, they strive for a better life, they explore, they invest in progress, they imagine a world that will be in existence after they've left it.  If the reader wants more, it is all there in Aristotle.

He has all this flourishing bound up with "virtue," which for most people in this culture is a sort of dirty word. The politics of Virtue has come to stand for every miserly, uptight, sanctimonious, pompous, anti-sexual voice that's ever been raised for the "good of the country" and "decency."  This is not what it meant to Aristotle. Mostly, to get to the meat of it, Aristotle meant virtue as not being stupid.  Temper your habits because untempered habits will fuck you over big time.  Be prudent in your decisions because too many stupid, rash decisions will ruin you.  Be courageous because cowards are hated by everyone and that will certainly make you miserable.  And be just, because if you treat others badly, they will most certainly make you pay for it.

Don't be stupid.  Which, if memory serves, will lead you into a life of efficiency, friendship, a sense of self-worth and, on the whole, someone respected in the community.  These four things will help ensure your happiness, as it is easy to be happy when you're prosperous, appreciated and respected.

Applying this to the bard.  We need to imagine our ordinary little bard, a poet say, getting up in front of a crowd at the local roadhouse, calling out for attention. I've already established in a previous post that our bard is somewhat talented ~ so it doesn't take long to get the attention of the room, given that the room is in a late medieval world where poetry is something not seen regularly and would be received like Beyonce randomly turning up at your local pub and being willing to belt out a song or two.

What happens?  Well, presumably, the bar fills up with people who have a good time.  And then they go away, back to their lives, and make decisions based on what they just experienced.

We know that for sure.  We know it, because we do it ourselves, all the time.

The question is, how to measure it?

Like an Artist

There are two key structures that I want to design into the bard character, and both were discussed in the comments section of the last post.  In this, I want to be clear: these rules are based upon what I see as the necessary elaboration of the bard character.  I've been pulled once (it is so hard to resist being an emotional being) into what is a bard and who is a bard, and I don't want to discuss that again.  I want to talk about the mechanics of making a bard work.  Esoteric discussions that do not involve metrics are actually of very little help.

I know that is bound to choke discussion, as I have found whenever I get into the metrics of something.  I am hoping, however, to obtain some understanding for my end goal with the bard.  Very well, down to the meat of it.

Art vs. Product

I'm taking the point of view that a bard, once reaching the status of being a 1st level, is a competent craftsperson.  They can play songs, write with efficiency and clarity, cook well, throw a pot, fashion leather, sculpt and so on.  It isn't a question of whether or not they can do these things well.  They can.  This is a fixed ability, not something that needs a roll to check.

Use this as a guideline: if a 1st level bard draws a lute out at a tavern and begins singing, people all around will enjoy the singing.  Again, it isn't a roll the bard needs to make to find out if people tell him to put the lute away.  They don't.  At first level, the bard is as competent as an average modern day artist who people read and go, "Hey, that fellow can write," or, "Wow, that picture looks just like me."

However, most of what the bard produces is "Product."  The songs sung at the tavern are familiar songs, the meter used to make the poem is a familiar meter, the story told by the puppeteer is well-known, the food is commonplace and recognizable.  And 99% of the time, this is what a bard does.  Bards take the stock forms of their individual skills and abilities and make proficient, workaday, conventional products therefrom.

As well, the bard never really moves away from this.  Bards have a small repertoire of things they know at 1st level and as they grow in level, that repertoire grows as well.  But it never stops being about producing product.  Shakespeare rewrote Marlow and used earlier works as his fundamental guidelines for churning out play after play, the Impressionistic crowd copied from each other, filmmakers borrow techniques, potters watch other potters, jewellers steal, everyone does it.  Over time, it only looks unique and artistic because most of the hoi polloi aren't sophisticated or engaged enough in the field to recognize the difference between something new and different and something regurgitated.

This can be a tremendous frustration for an artist, when something is celebrated as Brilliant and Unique, when in fact is it derivative of some style or particular work that has simply dropped sufficiently out of fashion that the 25-year-old reviewer has failed to acquaint themselves with it.  Those inside the profession, however, know; and so, too, do the creators themselves, who are perfectly aware of the stealing they've done and are also perfectly willing to keep quiet about it.  If the masses want to be duped, and want to give me money for duping them, then all the power to me.

All this, then, is product.  Art is what product steals from.

Art is what a bard does 1% of the time.  That up front needs to be understood clearly.  This is not a case of a bard deciding between A and B.  This is a case of a bard having to do A because B just isn't there.  The bard will absolutely rush to do B, the moment B presents itself, but so long as B is a fickle bitch, then A will have to do.

So when does "art" present itself?  Here we are looking for a specific word, that being "inspiration."  Art happens when the bard encounters inspiration, which isn't a case of just wanting it.  Inspiration has to be gotten ~ and regarding inspiration and the game of D&D, it needs to be gotten out there.

We can make a few guesses at what in D&D would be inspiration.  A legitimate near-death experience.  A magnificent undertaking that ends well.  Something horrific on the Lovecraftian level.  The death of a friend.  A love affair of note.  Something truly memorable.

But, no, the obtaining of an inspiration is not experience, it is not another level, it is in fact absolutely nothing but air.  Having an inspiration means almost nothing in terms of creating an art work.  Remember, 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.  All we are saying is that once the inspiration has been sought for and obtained, thereafter the bard has to figure out ~ in their capacity as the representative of a particular art form ~ how to make the inspiration real.

Success vs. Failure

Before we can talk about this, we have to define the difference between these two terms.  This, fundamentally, is what the last post was about, though I think that was missed by some.

It is almost habitual to think that "failure" means bad.  But remember, we are defining the bard as an able, competent artist, not a wannabe who someday is going to be able to make art.  That is nonsense.  J.D. Salinger was only in his late 20s when he wrote Catcher in the Rye ~ which, for all its faults, is without a doubt a distinct, different voice in literature.  We only fail to see that because is in not 1951, when the book was published.  But Salinger was certainly not a 9th level writer.  However much we want to believe the equation that Level = Art, we need to get away from that concept.  The real equation is that Work = Art. Characters with level only have more resources, and therefore the capacity to create larger pieces of art, more expensive pieces of art, pieces of art that require dozens or hundreds, even thousands of participants.

Moreover, resources mean distribution and notoriety.  Quality is not, in itself, a guarantee of notice.  Very often, "art" as I've defined it is often so different, so obscure, so uncomfortable, that it is only understood by other artists . . . who in turn make product out of it that is less different, less obscure, less uncomfortable, and therefore more easily consumed.  This formula is so completely misunderstood by non-artists, despite the endless works that try to describe it, that it is strangely "natural" to think that good artists will automatically be recognized as such.

To use an example from a different field, it has been said that Newton's Principia Mathematica was incomprehensible to nearly everyone who read it, even other mathematicians.  But because it is math, even ignorant people are by and large willing to accept that the book is highly valuable.  Yet at the same time, we encounter no hesitation whatsoever to call great artworks "worthless" and "shit" when they prove too hard to read.  "Yeah, War and Peace. Why would anyone ever read that?"

From this, I postulate that "failure" does not mean bad.  We could rather argue that failure implies a disconnect between the artist and the audience, even with other artists.  An artwork that inspires no one to produce product certainly falls short of affecting anyone.

There is another "failure" that is worth noting, that I did touch upon with the last post.  That is, the failure to get the result wanted.  Let us say that I produce a song about the solitude of individuals facing a terrible oppressive nation, to offer solace to the few intelligent men who, like me, feel helpless in the face of a mighty exploitive entity.  And much to my unhappiness, I discover that this book is embraced, nay, publicly celebrated by the united forces of the KKK, who claim it as the modern bible of their cause.

What am I to do?  My name is now certainly being exploited by an entity over which I have no control, while at the same time every stranger I meet presumes immediately that I must be part of the KKK because I wrote the book for them.  Talk of the solitude in the face of an oppressor.  My career is over, my name is over . . . the most I can do is change my name and hope I can disappear into obscurity.  That is, if I haven't put my picture on the cover of my book.

"Success," then, is the opposite of all this.  Success is communicating, success is inspiring others to make product, success is not having one's name spoiled or being misunderstood, not being vilified and not being burned in effigy.  And, potentially, getting a little money out of it too.  Perhaps a little fame, but this is the 17th century and without the benefit of mass media, fame is in small packets.  We all know the name of Cyrano de Bergerac, technically alive at the time my world takes place, but it is probable that most of the people living in Paris had never heard of him, certainly most of the people in the countryside of France hadn't and only a tiny percentage of people outside of France would have ever read him.  About the same number of people who have read him today.  Yes, we know who he was, but have you read his Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon? ~ had you even heard of it?  Can you confirm without a doubt that I'm not inventing that title without looking him up?

Creating Art

We want a metric that will let the bard character, once having obtained the inspiration, to create an artwork without having to actually create the artwork.  But we also want that character to have some influence over what the artwork will be, how big it is, what it's general tone and subject will be and what general direction of effect it will have.

I propose that we use the universal condition of all D&D characters, the character stats.  A bard looks over the options presented and decides what to take a chance on ~ because, yes, while the quality of the art is not in dispute, the reputation and comprehension of the art is.  But before we get to that, let's define the stats in terms of artwork.

Charisma is obviously beauty, the awe-inspiring pleasure of form and appeal that causes the viewer to drop jaw and stare.  Of course, the opposite is there as well, the desire to horrify, to force others to turn away, like Hieronymus Bosch, to use a relatively contemporary example.  Opposites apply to all the art forms that can be made - and success does not depict necessarily beauty or ugliness, but which the bard desires.

Constitution is health, the patriotic, the celebratory depiction of the present culture, religion or state.  It is also the demise of the state, anarchy, subversion, treason and rebellion.

Dexterity is difficulty, intricacy, the making of something that seems so absurd in its construction that it cannot possible stand, or something that the human body cannot possibly do; or making a tool do something that no one could have imagined was possible.  It is also the pure naturalness of form, of movement, of perfect ease and embrace.

Wisdom is educational, it is making the viewer, listener or subject aware of what has happened, how things work, how the universe functions, what is truth.  And it is also what is not truth, it is fantasy, it is strangeness, it is using the preconceptions of the mind to subvert the mind.

Intelligence is the call to think, to see, to obtain realization, to seek paths of greater understanding, to investigate, to ask questions, to insist that there is more than what we understand.  And it is tradition, ignorance, hate, resistance against reason, the insistence that investigation is evil and that things should be taken on faith.

Strength is strength; it is military might, it is a call to arms, it is compelling, bombastic, it is marching music, it is beating feet and booming drums, it is sinew and force of will and personal success.  It is also weakness, pandering, the denial of personal responsibility . . . and it is porn, it is debauchery, it is hedonism and lust, it is all the crutches that people lean upon because they are too weak to endure.


Some can take that list as moralistic.  I'm not too worried about that, I'm only interested in a metric for defining.  That is because, once we hammer out rules for what makes an inspiration into an artwork, we need rules for what effects an artwork has.

And we can begin those rules by saying that AFTER the artwork is made, after it is released, the character makes a check on the ability they have chosen.

Most characters will play it safe.  Bards have a high wisdom and a high charisma, it will be safest to make artworks that play to those abilities.  But whatever they case, they'll have to do the work before they can know if the work was in vain or not, or what the outcome will be.

THAT is the player understanding what it means to be a bard.  That we are inspired, we pick our chosen message, we pick our form, we start the work, we keep at the work, we finish the work . . . and all the while, we're not sure.  Will it work?  Will it?

It is easy for a player to say, "I write a song," then throw a die and know.

What if we make the player wait to roll.  What if the player has to sacrifice time for session after session, until at some point in the future, the time comes for the die to be cast.  What will that feel like?

It will feel like an artist.

All Right, With Feeling

Regarding the structure of bardic knowledge, the focus is something more than enabling a character to sing songs and write poetry.  There is something more inherent that must be part of the class, something that has eluded me up until now and which I think has eluded everyone.

The fighter is a visceral experience.  It strikes at the inner part of the body.  The player feels the axe hitting and breaking the enemy ~ and this is something the player never has the opportunity to feel, because we live in a modern world where we do not gird on swords and go to war (and if we do, it is very different now).

This is why people play a fighter: to have that experience of mastering the weapon, of swinging, of hitting, all of these things being part of the lexicon of the game.  We do not roll the die, we "swing."  We do not succeed in rolling a number, we "hit."

The same is true of the mage, for players want that visceral experience of wielding enormous power, blasting open the gates and engulfing enemies in a blast of flame or lightning.  In no way can we do this in real life.  Nor can we enjoy the death of an unknowing enemy from our knife in his back, nor the pride in communicating with the gods, or in any other thing having to do with the classes in D&D.  We play these characters because we cannot do what these characters do.  This is the appeal.

Then how does the bard fit into this?  The fight is adrenaline, magical power is adrenaline, the back stab is adrenaline, the turning back of undead by sheer force of will is adrenaline . . . where is the bard's adrenaline?

The answer most will give is fame.  Adulation, the shouting of a thousand voices, the celebrity status of the great artist when stepping forth onto the stage.  Except . . .

After a moment's thought, we realize that doesn't work.  The fighter can obtain that visceral pleasure from the death of a single bug, the cleric from the simple restitution of a few hit points, the mage from a single imaginary missile that causes no more than 2-5 damage.  And the bard . . . from two people in an empty bar giving a standing ovation?

See?  The bard, as we tend to view it, needs the huge audience or else it's a let-down.  That's because we've fetishized the bard as a celebrity, as the inevitable receiver of other people's affection ~ but that's nothing more than a sort of dependency.  The sort of artists who crave approval invariably come up short in the end. There is never enough approval, not even for the incomprehensibly famous, certainly not for Elvis or Marilyn.  Fame is worse than fleeting, it is unsatisfying, it is a broiling, magnificent cup of smoking, multi-colored liquid that has less taste than water upon the pallet.  It is not what artists are made of.

If we are to give the player the visceral experience of being an artist, we must begin with the premise that they have no understanding whatsoever of what it means to create art.  Some of us do, oh ho, but most see the process as either incomprehensible or unquestionably frightening.  The greatest fear of the largest number of people, it is said, is to be on stage and face an audience ~ that thing that artists are somehow willing to do not once, but every day, sometimes with two shows on Saturday.

How do we tap into that?  How do we realize the struggle of the artist prior to the creation of the art ~ that doubt, that uncertainty, that unknowing terror that this artwork will fail, the embarrassing shame of churning artwork that might succeed and taint us for the rest of our lives.

Art is never a clear, certain success, like we imagine it must be for every bard who would enter the game.  The fighter will ultimately become Jenghis Khan, the wizard will ultimately be Gandalf and the bard will ultimately be . . . who, exactly?  Name the greatest bard of the 17th century, or the 15th, or the 12th.  Do we know them from the crowds of people who followed after them or do we not merely know them from a single book, as we know Roland, put together by someone else a century after Roland's death.

Nevermind, the character's bard will be Elvis, yes?  Everyone knows who Elvis was.

But why should that be the case?  Can we not think of lesser artists who are still admired and appreciated? Of course, yes.  But we can also think of artists who did not have the lives they wanted, or the fame they cherished.  I am thinking here about Alec Guinness, who spent his life becoming a celebrated actor of stage and screen, only to hate the last quarter of it as thousands of adoring fans gushed over him for a role that he took for money, that he considered not worth bothering about.  Or, if we prefer the profane, what became of Pee Wee Herman's career after he became known as a public masturbator?  Do we remember any of Joan Crawford's movies or do we remember that she beat her children?  Isn't it strange that Mickey Rooney, who appeared in hundreds of films, has become best known for a bad, in poor taste portrayal of an upstairs Japanese neighbor.

What does it say that Gloria Gaynor, a steadfast Christian whose career was founded on the iconic hit I will Survive, was never comfortable with it becoming the gay anthem.  What does it say that J.D. Salinger's book Catcher in the Rye became a wank manual for would-be terrorists?  And what sort of career did Salinger have, or Harper Lee for that matter, after writing an iconic book read by tens of millions, they were unable to produce another title remembered by anyone?  What does it mean to be a group of artists, like the Osmonds in the 1970s, who had more than a dozen top 40 hits, none of which are played now on any oldies station outside Utah (where, I assume, it is a state law).  Success is a brutal, difficult to understand thing, and is certainly not tied to fame.  Charles Bukowski was never "famous," but any serious poet alive today has read him.  Nietzche lived his whole life in an unpleasant vista of social hatred and obscurity, but he merely changed the world.

What defines success?  What offers the artist what the artist needs or wants?  We have to understand these things if we want to give the ordinary, everyday, non-artistic player the opportunity to be an artist for a few hours every few weeks.

That's the goal.  Anything short of that is simply window dressing.

The Artist's Perspective

Continuing with the bard, we have Dani's post about "Art Effects in D&D."  Following the link, the reader can see that Dani has come up with a terrific effect of possible bardic effects.  This fit into a conversation Dani and I had about the bard's abilities acting like slow-effect spells: very long casting times (days or weeks) followed by long-lasting effects, like the kind she lists.

When I'm working on my various sage-ability tables, I am anxious not to duplicate abilities that already exist among the considerable list of spells, existing magic items, ability stats and in the background generator I've created (though there is intentional overlap with the latter in many cases).  Obviously, this isn't easy or even always possible ~ but that is the goal.  Moreover, I'm highly resistant to giving straight combat or ability stat bonuses for anything.  The combat system in the game is so fine-tuned, I don't want characters having the option to bully up on extra to-hit and damage modifiers, such as what happened with the development of super-classes in the 1980s before 2nd Edition, ultimately carried through all the editions that came after that were designed to create super-heroes instead of characters.

As such, those rules to which I've clung greatly thins down much of Dani's list.  I've got many elements already that add to morale (04); I don't want anything that fuels magic or resembles a magic item (06, 07, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40) or combat prowess (20, 50); it can't duplicate an actual spell (08, 15, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 49) or a character/class ability (09, 11, 12, 13); and certainly nothing that flat out adds to a character's experience (10).  I am somewhat uncomfortable with any effect that compels a character to betray a particular emotion (16, 17, 18, 19), as it is very hard to employ against a player character to the same degree as an NPC.  Those discarded things, however, are the lowest hanging fruit.  It is easy to give more bonuses to weapon damage or to offer another light source; what's wanted are truly original ideas, the sort that demand original rules.  In this Dani excels, regarding the rest of her list:

1 Increases happiness in 1 mi radius when accessible
2 Fires burn hotter in the vicinity
3 Plants flourish, harvest is especially fruitful (yield increased by 25%)
5 Revitalizes: when resting in its view, 1 extra hp/HD recovered
14 Shortens magical research time
21 Training times shortened
23 Shortens construction time
24 Increases the quality of metal goods produced nearby
25 Increases the quality of wooden goods produced nearby
26 Increases the quality of stone goods produced nearby
27 Mineral veins more fruitful - mine 25% more resources than usual
28 People get intoxicated more easily near the artwork
35 Animals attracted to the object
43 Holy: attempts to communicate with the Divines are more likely to succeed
44 Sacrosanct: Area within 50' of artwork is sacred ground (as a temple)
45 Unhallow: Area within 50' of artwork is unholy ground, providing benefits to undead creatures

We can group these things into types:  those that change the social climate (01, 28, 35); those that alter fixed nature  (02, 03, 24, 25, 26, 27); those that increase vitality (05, 14, 21, 23); and those that adjust the divine (43, 44, 45)

These are each things that are largely ignored by most role-playing incarnations.  Whereas "nature" is often influenced by spells or magic items, those changes are largely elemental in form, NOT commercial.  Plant growth says nothing about ripening crops or fruits, there is nothing written about making trees easier to cut down or to make stone softer and easier to carve and shape.  Yet this is what we want to concentrate upon, since we want to see the world as bards see it.  Splitting even stone blocks from the side of a mountain to make them useful as materials is much more important than changing rock to mud.  What good is mud to a bard?  What good is stone that has been twisted and shaped, if it loses the cleavage and luster that gives sculpture its vivaciousness?  A bard isn't interested in warping nature, a bard's goal is to enhance what already exists, to produce ease of expression and the greater capacity for bang and audacity.

In regards to social climate, why do people get more intoxicated near the artwork?  Is it the artwork, or is it really what the artwork affects groups of people together.  Here we need to think of the artwork as a song or a great poem, where the common room of a roadhouse grow closer together in the dim firelight, transformed from lonely individuals to a beloved collective through the words of the bard; where the intoxication that is obtained isn't a falling down drunk starting a bar fight, but three score people all incomprehensibly happy and soused to the gills.

What is "happy"?  How does that play in a game?  We have a tendency to think it means cutting the prices at the inn or maybe free stuff, but I think it is, rather, the willingness to give audiences to strangers, to find room at the inn where there is no room, to sacrifice a little self-comfort because another being is in distress.  It is the cleric, not being asked, seeing a character badly beat up and turning up to give an unsolicited cure spell; it is a bartender gently warning the party that the draft is much more intoxicating than they might think; it is the guards turning up, rounding up the party and then letting them go with a warning.  It is a dozen different ways to make people feel welcome and safe ~ exactly what every town in a D&D world never tries to do.

Why shouldn't a great artwork make people happy like that?  A cathedral, perhaps, or a great park in the middle of the town, where there are comfortable green lawns to lay upon near fresh water, designed by some bard interested in city planning (don't scoff, this was done often in many parts of the world as far back as three millenia ago).

We want to get out of the "spell/ability" framework in what a bard does.  We have other character classes to do those things.  The bard has to be different - has to fill a role that no other class can.  When we think of the abilities that a bard has, we have to stretch ourselves out of what's easy to create and try for what an artist would want, if an artist could transform the world the way a mage can.

The Bard and Three Paths

I hope everyone wants to read about the bard for a while.  I'm going to be discussing Dani's content on the bard ~ not to disparage, but to tailor the information there for my world, specifically.  In general, this is what I expect everyone does with the content I create; I think it a healthy, useful way to apply ideas to a game world while at the same time personalizing our play.

As Dani did, I suppose I should talk about what music is like in the 1650s . . . but not the actual 1650s, she's completely right on those points and, being an expert, I don't dispute her points.  But my 1650 is not the real world, so I feel free to fudge on a lot of points.  This isn't new.  My world has no guns, though those were common in 1650.  My world also has knowledge of numerous chemical elements that were 'discovered' until the 1700s.  In fact, for chemistry, arguing that mages would be more diligent than their real-life, non-magical counterparts (and given that they're getting help from supernatural beings), I established the year 1800 as the measure for how far chemistry had progress (without, of course, allowing advances associated with gunpowder, munitions and other military sciences that I replace with magic).

We can, then, establish 1800 as the upper limit of musicology, also ~ and all the other arts besides.  Therefore, we can have the elevation of music to a supreme art form (at least, as near as Mozart gets, if not Beethoven) . . .  and at the same time, discount ballet as an option, since that did not really get started until after 1800.  I simply despise ballet, but we don't need to go into that now.

Like Dani, I feel we can propose three basic fields for music . . . and for many arts, both in and out of Europe:

• The first path is, as Dani suggested, the folk performer.  These are creators who have as their primary audience the average groundling, as they were called in Shakespeare's day.  Being unsophisticated, artwork must be, for these people, a visceral experience ~ that is, affecting their inward feelings, essentially the 'gut.'  Artwork of this type can't be the sort that people have to think about in order to enjoy it.
• The second path would be the contemplative performer.  These are creators who have as their primary audience themselves ~ and because of that sophistication, these are artists who would tend to produce something new.  Dani refers to this as the 'court-supported professional,' but many of these professionals had a great deal of trouble getting supported by a court and had to live in poverty and distress, hoping to find someone who would serve as a minor patron before a court would give any notice.  This kind of life is much easier in Arabia, Persia, India and Indo-China, as the climate and the institutionalization of begging in both the religion and the vast numbers of poor mean that an artist can more easily live a subsistance lifestyle than in Europe (or Japan and Northern China, for that matter).  In any case, the second path is naturally investigatory and intellectually compelling, as the artist is rarely satisfied with things that are purely gut-wrenching.
• Finally, the third path is religious.  Not in the sense, I think, that Dani described. J.S. Bach and many others were something more than merely good church musicians, they were also deeply impassioned about their belief systems, being nearly clerics in their fervor or zeal.  Certainly this can be argued vehemently for many Eastern artists, who fanatically continue into this century to pursue fanatical artistic expression on a level that leaves the ordinary Westerner positively baffled:  .  Bards on this path have as their primary audience the gods ~ who do not mind that the art being created is fleeting, numbingly repetitive or obscure in the extreme.

I have been thinking that a bard needs to determine their primary artistic expression.  In retrospect, however, the choice of audience is critical for the artist to be expressive ~ and in determining what is the nature of that expression.  Furthermore, the effects of the art produced must also descend from the choice of audience, knowing that what can be done to move a group of patrons at the local roadhouse is quite a bit different from what can be expected to move the gods.

Jaded

I continue to stumble across posts about what a bard is or what a bard stands for ~ and sometimes I really feel that as a community we really ought to be past this now.

However, I think it is simply hard for people to wrap their heads around art being applicable to things.  We live in this strange, modern culture where art ~ at least, as we tend to see art ~ is a sort of distant happenstance that we use to fill up time when we are bored.

We're all so jaded ~ and for those who don't know what that word means, as I'm continually finding people now who don't, as the word has gone out of fashion, I'll explain.

To be "jaded" is to bored by the continual indulgence of something.  The word comes, not from the stone as some might imagine, but from a kind of horse ~ a cart horse, a horse that is worn out and good for nothing else.

So we do not, as a culture, go and see a movie any longer and walk away from it with our viewpoints changed or with our preconceptions shattered, as people felt once upon a time walking out of films like The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai or The Graduate.  We get excited and hopped up about films that repeat precisely the same information as the film we was forty years ago, because we don't want those nostalgic, warm comforting things to ever, ever change.

Because we have moving pictures, we're barely aware of static art ~ unless it is porn.  We find ourselves in a museum every five to seven years, where we stare blandly at pictures for long, fruitless seconds before moving onto the next picture that fails to move us.  We're not caught up in such things; we need the picture to be lurid before it can conceivably shock or entice us, whereupon we either turn away or we fervently seek tens of thousands of like pictures, because a few is never enough to sustain our lust.  If the latter, then a single picture is lost in a sea, easily forgotten, easily deleted.

We cannot conceive of persons walking a thousand miles to stand in front of an image for hours, even every day for weeks, as they absorb and grow impassioned with every nuance of color, line or theme.  We cannot conceive of such persons changing their whole lives after such a viewing, becoming fervent believers, perhaps zealots, for a cause that now exists like a fire for them.  We never feel like that.  We mock those who, in this century, claim 'born again' status, knowing in our deepest, weary, contemptuous, cynical souls that such people must be deluded, deranged or merely stupid.

No rational person responds that way to words.  No rational person embraces ideas like that.  Rational people view coolly, then discard.

How can rational people find a place for a bard in a world that is mechanically designed with numbers, measurements, calculations and the very edge of living or dying on the knife's blade.  Bards?  Bards are for sissies.

It is nearly impossible for most people not to reshape the bard ~ or the 'artist' character ~ into something that would be relevant in our century, our technological framework.  The struggle is always to define how the bard measures up to the mage or the fighter, in clear, industrial terms.  A bard is a craft-making machine.  A bard is a communicator.  A bard is a pop star celebrity.

This last June and July, Dani Osterman worked on a month of posts relating to the bard in a hundred different ways, ending with this summation.  I'm still absorbing it.  Dani's take on the subject jumped me forward at least ten years of thinking on the subject; but I still haven't decided what to do with it ~ fit it into a sage table, somehow.  I've been deliberating on that for a week now.

I'm sure that the central key is not how the bard relates to the world, but how the world relates to the bard.  The onus is on the DM to presume the bard has talent . . . not for the player to be pushed into a place where they are supposed to invent talent that seems suitable to the game.  The art that a bard produces can be no more subject to the personal opinion of the DM or the other players (games where bards are expected to come up with poetry and actually sing it, because we're "role-playing") any more than a fighter has to justify the die roll associated with their sword.  It is the world that has to bend to bards having value, not the player to the world.

Measuring that, however, that gives room for passion and not just numbers and limitations, that's tremendously difficult.  I felt that Osterman was soooo close.  She may have it and I'm still damaged by so many arguments about the bard that I can't see clearly.  I know that building proper skills for my sage abilities won't be easy, nothing like as easy as they have been for other classes.  There's no metric in the real world for art having an effect on people . . . I think largely because by the time we began to develop behavioural metrics as a science, art had already begun its death spiral.

Yes, I said that.  We're all jaded, remember?  Whatever we say, I firmly believe that we're sliding into the same artistic dark age the Romans did; we're making the same mistakes, copying everything that is old, making it simpler, making it easier for the common people to understand, steadily rounding off all the edges and designing things so that they can be thrown together more quickly, more easily, more comfortably, even to the point of creating social mores that keep us from looking at anything that might "damage" our sensibilities, as if an ego can fall out of a tree and be crippled for life.

I don't worry, because it took three or four centuries for art to die completely ~ and it was helped along by a lot of really bad times brought about by a lot of really awful circumstances, far more awful than we can really imagine.  So this is a very, very, very slow spiral.  I won't see much change in it before I die.  Which is just fine.

Bard Artworks

Daniel Osterman of Shards, Sidh, & Sorcery and I were collaborating on a concept for bards creating artworks that would have an effect upon their environments or upon gazers/listeners of said art.  He's put up a list of 50 possible effects on his blog that the art could cause - and it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Personally, I think that bards should have the ability to create artworks.  I haven't had much luck in creating rules for this in the past - but with Daniel's help, I have an new angle on the process.

It basically works on the principle that while art can have a strong effect on a person's consciousness, this effect is often temporary.  For example, I remember many times when a particular song came on the radio (one I didn't own) and my world stopped.  I would stop whatever I was doing and just listen.  Music can be all possessing, particularly when it speaks in a particular way about what's going on around us.  It can seize hold of some people - including me - and make us dance in public, not caring what anyone else sees or thinks.

But it also passes.  That image on our puter, the art we bought at the convention six years ago, those things are still precious; but they don't have the same impact they had once.  In a way, art is like a magic spell in slow motion, with a very long casting time and an equally long duration . . . but like any spell, the effect eventually dissipates.

So what is needed is a set of rules that compares the level of the bard with the amount of time taken to produce the artwork, which is then used as a guideline to determine the specific effect of the art, how much and how long.

Take one of Daniel's suggestions, that the art shortens construction time.  We can imagine a set of workers building a temple who have already seen the statue that will feature as the temple's central focus.  Enamored with the statue, they are encouraged as a group to work doubly hard and more congenially to complete the structure, to protect the statue, giving it a home and pleasing themselves.

If the building is itself an artwork, then this can have a similar effect on the town: increasing the honesty of the residents, increasing their productivity, decreasing crime, encouraging martial spirit, expanding donations to the poor and the church, as well as thinking of the authorities with inheritances, causing a whole region to become more powerful economically and militarily.  All from one statue promoting one building.  This would help explain the whole period of cathedral building in Europe in D&D Game terms.

There's also the actual development of the work to be considered.  The cathedral is impressive each time an element is added - it doesn't depend on the whole work being finished (so long as the work is evident and ongoing).  The same is true of the statue; visitors could go and look at the progress of the statue each day, seeing elements that improved their lives, similar to the way we see serial artworks like television or movies with sequels.  Therefore, unlike spells, the casting itself breeds a sense of positive expectation, like players anxiously expecting the moment the mage will get into position and readiness to launch a given spell (an tension-building experience that was completely destroyed by the fast-food style of spell implementation that came with later game editions).  With really great artworks, this is something to consider.

I should also think there need to be rules about experience with art when long periods of time have passed.  Used to be, before the internet, when I would only hear a favorite song or see a favorite movie with months, even years, of denial.  The longer the denial, the more powerful the re-acquaintance.  We need rules for that - and those rules still have to take into account that even if we haven't been to Mecca for ten years, we have been there before . . . so no matter how good the second experience is, it won't be the first experience (unless something has changed about Mecca).

Those are a lot of details to be worked out, without a lot of random tries being attempted and a lot of game-play mistakes made.  But this is what I love about game design.  We could do this!  How?  No idea.

Tuned to the Urban: Bards

Early yesterday afternoon I was ready to sit down and write some piece about bards being in tune with a city's culture the same way thieves are with money and assassins are with personality.  But then yesterday proved to be an odd day.

Part of my plan in selling my book has been to do public readings, and towards that end I walked over to a place downtown called The Auburn ... where they play music, where there's an open mic, where there's an opportunity to read your stuff to a large audience of strangers in a large, open air venue.  Here's an image from the website, more or less from the direction of the stage:

Back in November, when I was still trying to wrap up Pete's Garage, I sat with the the very cool, laid back, artistic owner - I think he's a guitar player - and worked out some of the details for 'borrowing' the space for a book launch in March ... and since I actually received the hardcopy of the book Wednesday, I went around to the Auburn to show it off and hammer down the final details ... or I would have, except ... well ...

The two notices in the window describe how Jesse, the owner, managed to let the Auburn fall $32,000+ behind in the rent.  The second notice discusses how the first notice was basically ignored, and that as of February 19, the place has been seized and is now no longer in business.

And standing in the cold outside, there's the cold, brutal reality about musicians.  They fuck everything up.

I know the gentle reader would like me to talk about really cool art schools and music colleges run by centuries-old organizations that produce bards of inordinate quality, but I gotta tell you - it just ain't happening.  Musicians, swear to gawd, just don't give a shit about organization.  They're not tuned into the 'scene.'  Jeez, half the time if you talk to them in a bar - as I did afterwards, making my way over to one of the musician's haunts in the city called Mike's Juke Joint - they haven't a freaking clue about the running of the establishment itself.  Let them run wild in a free space and they will destroy it ... I've seen that happen over and over again.

They care about music.  Specifically, their music.  They're shit at coping with ordinary people, they have trouble facing down the complexities of paying rent, they're oblivious and self-oriented and for the most part subject to the ebb and flow of shit they don't care about.  Gawd love the bastards, they're possibly the best people on the planet, but if you're looking for me to write something about how they're "tuned in" to city life in some way that offers a practical D&D mechanic for a party, you are sorrowfully looking in the wrong place.

I challenge anyone to name up a musical school or college that hasn't been state run, and therefore filled with people with rods and canes to keep the musicians in line.  The most successful, independent, long-term organization of artisans - music and other things - that I can rack my brain to come up with is the entire culture around the Japanese geisha ... which was isolated and rigid in the extreme.  Take a talented geisha and drop her into a city - a Japanese one, obviously - and what is she going to be able to tell you?  Nothing.  Seriously.  She knows geisha.  She does not understand what other people do.

Now, this is not a weakness.  Put her in a room with eight men and she will own that room.  This is true with any confident musician - and therefore, bard.  Room, 8 people, bard ... bard owns the fucking place.  But not because the bard has any special knowledge about the audience - if fact, the bard probably knows - or cares - jack shit about the audience.  That doesn't matter.  Fact is, the bard is the most interesting person there, the bard knows it, and everything revolves around the bard.

That's what makes them such crappy businesspeople.  They get their space, they let themselves get really comfortable, they love what they have ... but deep down inside, they know its fleeting.  Actually working at keeping the thing alive is not in their nature.  Man, that would be work.  Work sucks.  As the musician told me repeatedly at the bar last night - as we got drunk on drambuie and coffee:

"Playing the shit Britney Spears plays, that ain't selling out.  Playing weddings and office parties and shit, that isn't selling out, either.  You want to know what selling out is?  It's working a job for an oil patch company to pay the fucking bills.  That's selling out."

  And he's right ... in a way.  'Selling out' is giving a crap about anything except music.  So long as you're still playing, and you're not buying into the daily grind, you're still an artist ... man.  This guy - he was working for an oil company.  He told me about how when he'd been 18, he'd toured Hard Rock Cafe's around the world, and how they'd been too fucking busy to drink or do drugs, and about how there were people on their necks all the time making them practice and perform and hauling their shit from venue to venue.  That's why it rang true - because he described it as work and he described it as slavery.  He had loved it ... you could see in his eyes that he had loved it.  But 'Music,' he said, had ruined his life.  It made it next to impossible for him to tolerate everything that had come after.

He was 44.  I'm 48.  And as we talked, and as I beat down his closed doors one by one, we got down to the brass tacks of what makes artists do the shit they do.  It took awhile to get a chisel between the jamb and the door for some of them, but that's my way ... and as he unloaded on me, and felt like he could talk about what he loved without being judged, he began to remember what it had been like to be 18.  He told me so.  And he told me how good it felt.

I don't know why musicians close themselves off.  It's a protection racket, I think.  A safety feature.  I don't think a 15th century bard would have been any different.  The problems are the same.  The drive is the same.  The expectation of the audience and the expectations they have for themselves are the same.  Perform.  Be brilliant.  Don't fuck it up.

In the midst of it all, he asked me point blank what the point of my book was.  He stared so hard at me I thought I was going to fall off the stool.  He was challenging me and I met him eye for eye.  "It's about getting past everything you've lost, and grabbing what you can still get."

And he went on staring at me for about twenty seconds, and I stared at him.  I knew what he was looking for.

"I'm buying that book," he said.

And he did.

Was a strange night.  I think I know musicians pretty well.  I don't think there's such a thing as a bard that could walk into a strange town and tell you anything about what the people in that town wanted, or how they related to one another.  But if there was a musician playing where a bard could hear, I think he or she could tell you exactly how long they'd been playing, what they were doing wrong and how long it was going to take before they could do it right.  Because it is the music, and the manufacture, that they understand.

They don't know shit about people.