The Shaman's Block and More

If you've not been following along with this series, you'll want to start with this index post, with a list of the foregoing content relative to what's written below.

Before continuing with the Stavanger 9th century adventure [content below], I'd like to press the subject of game feel and tragedy a little further.  The reader may remember I drew out six mechanics relating to player participation: agency, response, context, sensation, meaning and boundaries.  I recognize that it is difficult to keep these things in mind, as it is with any list, just as it is hard to remember the seven rewards that we want to provide players (wealth, toys, power, status, novelty, enlightenment and purpose), or the four points we want to provide for building blocks (service, personality, adventure and value).  I count 17 terms that the reader was unfamiliar with just a month ago and, no doubt, it is next to impossible to keep all these things in one's head at one time.  Add to that the 24 petards and it is enough to make anyone throw their hands in the air.

I suggest deep breathing.

For years you've been looking for frameworks that would help you better construct adventures. These are the frameworks.

Let me quickly paraphrase what we've established with this recent Stavanger adventure.  The chieftain wants to expand the village; he is dealing with four recalcitrant bully boys; the bully boys may or may not have been lax in their work, resulting in the death of a child, who was killed by a wolf.  The wolf has been caught by the shaman.  The shaman has organized a hunt.  Whoever kills the wolf will sleep with the dead child's mother and a new child will be born.

This, as far as I know, is a novelty in terms of player reward: a kind of adventure introducing problems that haven't come up before.  Are the players offended at the idea?  Possibly.  Would they take part if they did kill the wolf?  Some players, definitely not; others, perhaps.  Few, I think, would be champing at it.  But even if the idea is offensive, it is still new.  The players are not being denied their agency.  In fact, they are being given an opportunity to establish their agency.  They can say, No.  And face the consequences.  Those consequences being uncertain, given that the whole village seems ready to take part in this adventure.

So the player's response is in jeopardy.  They may, if they wish, escape from Stavanger at once and set out for another place ... but any party of mine, having played in my world for even a few sessions, knows that there's just going to be another similar dilemma put in front of them.  We cannot improve our lives by running away from difficult-to-thread situations.  Run away, and any reward is lost.  Rewards come from the party making up their minds, standing their ground, taking the consequences, and winning through.  They may choose poorly ~ but that is the risk inherent in this game.  Here are two, perhaps three, questionable options, any one of which could lead to tragedy.  Choose.  Respond.

The players will naturally seek context.  They are told by their family to see the shaman.  So we describe the shaman's block.  This is the last block I'm going to create an image for; by now, the reader gets the idea.

The shaman's lodge, as I said earlier, is occupied by the lowest residents in Stavanger. These are people without clans, whose people have almost entirely vanished, or who come from outside Rogaland, though likely not further than neighboring Agder, or Hordaland, that surrounds Bergen ~ which I've twice confused with "Haugaland."  Fixed those instances on the blog now.

These hangers on have no real influence, and are entirely dependent on the shaman.  Effectively, they exist as a cheerleading squad for the shaman, and as protection.  A player wouldn't be able to lift a spear in the shaman's presence without being mobbed.  A hit on the shaman would find a follower in the way ... making the shaman virtually invulnerable.  The personality of the hex IS the shaman; somewhat spiritual and quietly fanatic (no one speaks until the shaman does).

The shaman knows everything that goes on with the adventure, but what he chooses to tell depends on how the players affect him (basically, how well he is treated, how polite the players are, how smart are the questions they ask and so on).  In this case, it doesn't matter how much the shaman tells the party ~ knowing everything won't spoil the adventure.  But I would hold back information if the players did not ask a particular question, or if they were oblivious, or they were rude.

We could make the shaman oppose the chief's agenda, but we don't actually need that conflict.  And it is cliched.  The shaman would love to see the players kill the wolf, and here's why: if a player, as a hero, is the father of the future chief, that chief will be a mix of the Haralds and the Sands, but because the players are outsiders, the child will be somewhat unique.  So it is the shaman's agenda to say that he foresaw the arrival of the players [he's lying], that they were meant to kill the wolf [he hopes] and towards that end, he will give them a token that will ensure that if they take part, the bearer of the token will be the one the wolf attacks.  This isn't true, but the party will think it is true, particularly since we as DMs intend to attack the party with the wolf.  But afterwards, the party will find the token has no magical value.

The Shaman does not intend to have the hero player sleep with the dead child's mother. This will be planned so that the father sleeps with the mother, but it will look like the player did.  This will be the case no matter who kills the wolf.  The chief, and the village, will believe the falsehood.  However, it will be easier to convince the party, a group of outsiders, to participate in the ruse.  The shaman will provide a +1 spear (reward: toys) for the brave player who will carry the token.

So now the players will receive wealth if they kill the wolf (gifts), status from the chief, a toy from the shaman ... and they have context as to what's going on here.  The shaman will warn the party that if they do participate, there may be conflict with the Orre clan, so "Be careful."

Let's look at the whole village again:

What is the party's sensation, then?

Throughout all that happens, we want to emphasize how it feels to be in this village.  Look at the trees surrounding the shaman's lodge, how relatively peaceful and isolated it is ... and how quiet and contemplative.  Remember the sound of the wolf's jaws and the cage as the wolf hurls its body against it. The wash of the waves on the shore of the lake, the glint of the sun as it reflects off the water.  Think of young cousin Alfdis's eyes as they stare at the party, being touched by the amazing existence of family who come from so far away, a place Alfdis has only heard about.  Think of the chief's gruff voice; the shaman's gentle, patient tones; mother Yulene's snapping at the children while complimenting the party.  THINK of the actual scene, how it would be, how it has to invest itself into the minds of the players.

We have a tendency to think we need great sweeping descriptions of Stavanger, but we don't!  People remember small things.  How cold the water is.  What does the turf covering the roofs of the dugout houses smell like?  How dark and juicy does the cooking meat look like?  How does a pouring rainstorm change the grassy, stony compounds?  How does it feel to wrap one's own furs tight around oneself, in front of the campfire.  Think in small details, then say them out loud when they occur.  You won't be good at it, not at first.  But if you get one good one in per session, players will remember that one good one and forget the rest!

Now, this adventure.  What does it mean?

That's tricky.  We can couch this in a number of ways ... how the events will be remembered by the party, how it will give them experience and tools with which to become stronger and fight their next adventure; we can fit the next adventure somehow into the details of this one, so that the "meaning" is that it made the second adventure possible.

But there's are higher meanings, too ~ I mentioned one already.  There's the notion of facing down a difficult situation and overcoming it, and how that makes the player feel, as opposed to getting out of town when things offend or look hazardous.  There's the sense of seeing the fictional townspeople, who don't actually exist, as existing anyway, because it is immensely satisfying even to pretend that we are doing things for other people (the oxytocin hit is the same).  If we can relate to things like that ... then we can see, as players and as DM, that the adventure becomes about how this series of events will affect the village.

And this is how purpose evolves ... when players feel a direction emerging that doesn't start and end with, "What do I get out of this?"

That brings us to boundaries.

The village, and the immediate wilderness, is a boundary.  Leaving the village before resolving the adventure is a punishment only in that the players won't get the reward.

But IN the village, they must accept the rules of the village: that there are other clans, that will try to block their intentions.  That other members of the village have agendas of their own, unknown to the chief and the shaman.  That the wolf is an unknown variable.  That other unknown variables might be anywhere.  Staying in Stavanger, knowing that there's an adventure in play, puts the players at risk of ... well, anything we might create.

These are the boundaries the players have to win through.  Why would they?  Why do we play games at all?  Consider the video games that you, the reader, personally like to play: side scrollers, first person shooters, puzzle games, whatever. You drift to those games, specifically, because you like the particular boundaries they create.  How many shots you have, how fast you can run and how hard is it.  The agency, yes, carries weight for you, but you like games with a certain kind of boundary.

Role-playing is the same.  If your DM fudges, and you like it, that has to do with the boundary to your play that satisfies you.  If you like the boundary including a virtual guarantee that you'll survive the adventure and succeed at it, and it is enough to go through the motions, because it is interesting for you, fun, pleasant, relaxing, then you'll keep playing those games.

Me, I like games where the boundaries are unpleasant and off-putting.  Where I feel like I'm making progress, and I'm not moving in a circle, or staring at an insolvable problem, but the progress costs.  I like games where the boundaries are not immediately visible.  Where they are virtually inexhaustible in their design.  Where after playing the game for 40 years, I'm not exactly sure where all the boundaries are.  Not yet.

The Wilderness Problem

The other day, Pandred left me a comment on the Sand's Block post: "I'll be honest I'm at a loss how I'd even begin to run such an area ..." that has left me wondering about my agenda.

My goal is not to create impossible-to-run scenarios that highlight my personal creativity, which has been developed over many long decades of eschewing public discourse and human interaction in favor of writing in a private domain while reading writers who preferred to live and die in a private domain ~ which is absolutely nothing more than practice, practice, practice.  Anyone can do it.  It just takes 30 years.

What I'm trying to do is to make the reader understand that a world-building process is not in the making of the whole world, or in the high-flying conceptions that so many role-playing designers try for, such as having all the people in the world believe in some notion about old gods someday arising and killing everyone, or that the world is divided into set groups of people with calcified social moralities that clash in great swoops of important world-changing battles ... but that actual world building is creating that tactile experience, that game feel, of actually living in an environment that can be reconciled with our day-to-day thoughts, making suspension of belief and immersion possible.

Listen, I know that many people don't like me, that I am arrogant and abusive, that I'm impatient, that I use words to cut people and that I am very opinionated ... but if you want to make your world better, you have to get past that and realize that what I'm telling you is what you need.  You're not going to hear this anywhere else.  No one else is writing about this.

D&D is a highly personal form of human interaction, scaled down to the fictional characters who directly connect with other characters and the setting in which they exist.  To make that setting seem real, you've got to grasp what "real" is.  You, dear reader, a human being, are not actually capable of grasping the world as it exists, except for how the various medias you consume appear from your limited, monkey-brain perspective.  You, I, and everyone else can grasp intellectually that these things are happening, that the world outside our personal experience exists, but you cannot subsume that into your emotional consciousness in any real way.  The events and art you're witnessing, that's telling you about things, only exists to you as wallpaper ... unless it is happening to you, personally.  In which case, if you were actually a part of all these events, you would understand too clearly how the media is wrong about everything.  It's packaged, prefabricated for your enjoyment.  It isn't real.

When you make your world, your tendency will be to create the prefabricated package, because you've been taught from a young age to see the package as "more interesting" than the real world.  The real world is going to work, opening the fridge to get food, getting in your car and driving, going to sleep at night ... and hundreds of other things you've done thousands of times.  This repetition dulls.  You don't want to create a dull world.  This drives you to try to create the media-fueled fakery that sounds really good on paper but just doesn't run well when you try to DM the hugeness of that conception.

You can't manage that conception in every interaction, in every possible incarnation ... and so it ends up being phony and false, which you're frustratingly conscious of, which taints your game-play and undermines your confidence as a DM.  Each and every time you try to "create a world" as though it is one great conception, you fall on your face ... because "a world" is more complicated than your monkey-brain can handle.  You weren't built for it.

I went looking for the example but the video seems to be lost. When John Stewart stepped away from his show, he walked the camera through all the back rooms of the studio and introduced the hundreds of people who were involved with writing, producing, researching and developing the show.  Behind the false front of one presenter, creating an easy to understand package, were tens of thousands of weekly conversations between an army of people we never got to see ... because this wasn't necessary for the package.  But when we set out to make a game world, we're now responsible for all that.  And trust me, we're not up to it.

For the D&D universe, this limitation has created a cliched standardization of game moments and events that have become embraced through repetition ... what we are most prone to recognize when we think, "Dungeons and Dragons."  The trope starts with a desperate attempt to capture the "feel" of the game with images and low-quality CGI, intended to impress with their packaged idea of what we imagine in our minds as the "thrill" of being a terrifying, murderous killer, with axe dripping blood ... but this fakery quickly descends into the actual reality of sitting around a table in anachronistic t-shirts, water bottles, prop mugs, painted miniatures and general clutter.

A world where even famous players of the game, whose careers hinge on their participation, sit around looking bored.

This is your game.  Not the bullshit imaged package that is used to sell you, that's been around since the original books, through pictures, tried to depict what the game should look like or what it was about.  That was marketing.  Your players are these five people (or six) sitting here waiting to be told what they see, and what they're supposed to feel.

The pressure on us as DMs is to make paper and pencils, imagination, possibility, doubt and fear feel good.  To enable the process of players feeling happy, or disoriented, or tense, we have to create something with which they can directly relate ~ not vast ideas like trade routes or world maps.  Those things exist for us, the DMs ... not for the players.  The players want something they can ... touch.  That they can directly understand, and manipulate, and ultimately change, so that it becomes something else.  This gives the player a sense of empowerment.  This makes the player feel engaged.

Game feel is about making the players feel powerful; or reminding them that they are not.

This is what I've stumbled across as I've worked through the fabrication of these building blocks on this series of game posts.  How does a space this small, that can be flat-out run across in just twenty seconds, exist as a living, thinking, relevant space in which the players participate as characters, both enabling them and potentially humbling them?  How do we, as DMs, think in such small spaces, when those small spaces are not dungeon rooms?  We're so used to putting the players in a 20 foot square box, adding monsters and shaking the box to make game play happen.

What I've done is demonstrate how the direct, full-on world operates in exactly the same way as the dungeon, by shrinking down the HUGE space of the world into these little boxes that can be ... understood.

Naturally, this is going to smash all conception of how to run such a place, as Pandred noted, because no one else, anywhere, is seeing the world this way.

Sorry for the emphasis.  I'm excited.  This shatters all conception of how the game is played.  After many long decades of fighting with it, I feel I have solved "the wilderness problem."  How do you run in the wilderness?  Build it so that the size fits the player.  Define what is relevant about a piece this size.  Then do it again.

It is all new.  And frightening.  It is enough to make a DM lose their sense of direction.  And perhaps, I am thinking, that is a problem.

My position here is weird.  Most DMs are oblivious to the wilderness being "a problem."  The wilderness exists as space that has to be crossed between dungeons, and that's it.  As you and I conceive it, in the real world, as that immense, inconceivable space that we would not want to be lost in, the wilderness in a fantasy world is just empty, blank space.  It is like the filing cabinet in which all the cities and dungeons are stored.  Like most other games, that space is irrelevant.

The contrary will seem wrong, or irreconcilable with their pre-conceived packaged ideal.  Comparing the above image is fundamentally no different than the WOTC's version of what a "game map" should include.  Names, circles, orientation ... and done.

I proposed that a world could be made out of recognizable, cookie-cutter building blocks, but with this recent Stavanger village series I'm turning that on its head and arguing how an individual block can be made thoroughly unique ... and with that, I fear I am leaving some readers behind.  A lot of readers, I worry.

Perhaps I'm going too fast.  Just now, I'm not sure of any other speed I can go.  This is as new to me as it is the reader.  A month ago I had no idea I would wind up here ... but that is why I start these series in the first place.  By making myself think something through, by explaining it to someone else who is not a part of my thoughts, my thinking clarifies and creativity kicks in.

We just have to see where this takes us.

One Block at a Time

With this post, the theoretical agenda I had with building blocks comes to an end.  Having established what they are, and what purpose I imagine they'd serve, the goal now is to define the individual blocks, one by one, so that they can be put together in a serviceable framework.  Yet I have just a few more points to make.

Most importantly, that the building blocks concept does not apply only urban settings.  The construction of a rural or wilderness setting can benefit in the same way ~ particular features or miniature landscapes, each offering its own source for adventure, specific use to the player, resident effect and game advantage, so that hundreds of blocks of every kind can be plugged together as components in a working machine.

Look at a common complaint with regards to world building.  The world is too big; none of us have time to build the multiplicity of details that a world demands; we can't make all of the towns on the map to the right, we can barely hope to make just one of them in an orderly, useful way.

If, in our imaginations, the goal is to scratch out an accurate map for each, then yes, it's impossible.  If we think we're going to detail every resident, and every job and purpose they serve, it's true, we might as well quit.

But if our goal is to say of the village of Ostrich, the residents respect quiet, book-learned people, and have a book fair once a month, and that the chief scholar in the village has unexpected knowledge of rare tomes, then we have already made the whole village for the purpose of our game ~ provided we know what that knowledge is, what books may be purchased at the fair and what means these books and knowledge has together of inspiring the players to pursue a particular unlocked adventure, which may never have been known if the players had not chosen to search the village of Ostrich.

The map itself does not matter.  The many residents of Ostrich do not matter.  What matters is what the village directly offers to the players, and what the players may need do to possess that offering.  Surely, if we think in building blocks ~ concrete, incremental pieces, and not esoteric impossible to define grand concepts ~ we can build as large a world as we have the patience for.  It is easier to make a Millenium Falcon out of Lego than it is out of wood.  Compare for yourself:

True enough, we have to invent the blocks first; we don't have a thoughtful, supportive company that knows how to make the blocks for us, telling us how to put together the blocks to make things we like.  We only have the sandbox of game design.

My plan is to start working on building blocks and posting them, over time.  I expect to start with an overview for my own use and then to build this overview into a long series of wiki-posts.  The blocks will fit into the overarching development scheme that I was building up for and had to shelve when the wiki had to be moved.  At present, I can only offer a taste.

Although I've defined an urban block at 3.76 acres, rural blocks would be dealt with as larger hexes, 305 acres apiece, or 2,737 acres, with commensurately longer search times.  Wilderness blocks might be bigger than that.

Let's start with some wilderness blocks:

• Deadlands: non-arable land that is insufficient for supporting higher life forms, due to a lack of water (deserts), useful soil, plant life (arctic snow fields) or because the area was so overgrown and infested (deep jungles) that most natural creatures are unable to dwell there.  The hex would be inhabited by non-intelligent vermin, mostly insects, arachnids, reptiles, amphibians and animated plants, perpetually feeding off one another. 1 in 20 deadlands might be a beastland.  1 in 400 deadlands might be an eradicator land.
• Beastlands: similar in nature to deadlands, but spawning wandering destroyers, such as cockatrices, gorgons, shambling mounds and the like, creatures able to survive for long periods in deadlands but prone to wander out in search of more interesting food or to slake their malevolence.
• Eradicator Lands: blasted deadlands, where the natural verminous population has been exterminated by a despotic, deeply malevolent entity, such as a lich, beholder, evil dragon or being of like power.
• Fishing Ground: literally an area of sea or lake, where fish congregate in abundance due to natural conditions.  Boatmen from nearby villages strike out for such hexes in order to improve their catch.  In terms of my reference/trade system, such places would exist in any province that possessed a fish or natural sea product (seaweed, slugs, sea ivory, turtles, etc.).  Most likely it would be far enough out that good boats were needed.  Technically the sea hex would be wilderness, because no one would live there; but encountering other fisher folk would be common.
• Grazing Land: arable lands lacking civilized infrastructure, where common pasturelands provide reasonable sustenance for herbivorous wanderers (mostly mammals), but where the hunting is too inconsistent to encourage human settlement.  These areas tend to exist in large forests, where civilization has not penetrated due to lack of interest, poor climate or simply distance.  1 in 6 grazing lands will support a barbaric village. (see Hunting Lands, below)
• Barbaric Village: odd humanoid and non-humanoid monster races who have constructed obscure, non-political communities in distant places unpatrolled by civilized culture.  These villages might be fairly developed, with agriculture or even metalworking and scholarship, depending on the intelligence of the builder, or they may be quite backward.  Some may be friendly; most will not.

Some rural blocks:

• Hunting Lands: naturally occurring rich pasture lands, offering provender to large herds, particularly in areas where there is some, but little civilized presence.  The area should be counted as a reference for game meat, animal skins, or any animal product (horn, bone, ostrich feathers, tortoise shell, etc.).  Each such hex should represent one reference, that being the primary trade item for residents in that area (they all eat the meat, but preserve the bone, or the hides, or whatever, depending upon their tribal skill).
• Hunting Camps: a more highly developed rural outpost, in which professional hunters, rather than tribal units, organize hunting parties that may range throughout the block or into adjacent wilderness lands, to acquire the most food each season.  Would-be rangers often train in hunting camps; use of the bow is a prerequisite for training as well.
• Stock Ponds: small naturally isolated ponds, often all or partially spring-fed, which have been stocked with fish and managed carefully in order to produce large yields.  Always for private use, but poaching is common as the stock pond doubles the chance for fishing.

And finally, some urban blocks:

• Hut Village: primitive dwellings forming a settlement, semi-permanent in structure, clustered in an area that provides better than subsistence living.  Often within Hunting Lands or with close access to same.  Often, huts will be interspersed with nomadic tents; much of the population at any one time will be transitory, remaining for a few weeks or a season before moving on.  Known not to offer services, but willing to barter with friendly outsiders, exchanging raw materials and food for metal objects and cloth.
• Fishing Huts: similar to a hut village, but with lacking a nomadic element due to its location upon the water and the presence of a constant, reliable food supply.  Buildings more permanent in design.  Necessarily adjacent to a careenage in most cases.
• Careenage: already discussed at length.  Provides minor repairs for incoming boats, no presence of rigging or sailcloth.  Always associated with a coastal settlement.
• Boat Yard: replaces careenage; almost always occurring in a natural harbour; otherwise, upon consistently calm shorelines, protected by reefs.  Major repairs possible to hulls, rigging and sailcloth available; can be contracted for designing boats.
• Sacred Place: includes sacred groves, caves, isles, vales, mounds and other like geographical features that focus natural clerical, druidic or magical energy (wild magic).  Such areas are usually surrounded by open land that serves for festivals, contemplation and rest, and are marked by monoliths.  Monoliths are rock cuts, cairns, columns, geoglyphs and the like, commemorating events, ideas, persons or divine figures.  Most monoliths are similar in design to others of the same culture.  1 in 100 monoliths will be a megalith, an immense, unique structure worthy of a pilgrimage (Stone Henge).  Monoliths and megaliths provide culture.

This does not begin to cover all the possible blocks I hope to eventually shape ... and the list does not conform to my description of what each block should provide for the players, as noted in my post, We Know Already ...  But it is a start.  We always have to start somewhere.

We Know Already How This Works

I'm a bit disappointed at my description of the careenage. I wanted to get across that it would be possible to create spaces inside an urban environment that would have a distinct personality, that could be explored and be made into source material for a bigger adventure.  I feel that I didn't give that enough time, that I threw the post together too lightly.

I believe that an urban "block" shouldn't be just fluff.  Whatever the block happens to be, it needs to address some several concrete uses for the players, beyond just knowing what sort of block it is.  We could slap together a town with twelve residence blocks, a market block, five or six workshop blocks, a castle block and a church block, and call it a day ... but that's what we've been doing for town adventures since the game started.  Creating a bunch of labels, or making a list of buildings and people, without pulling those disparate elements together into a meaningful, interesting town personality.

To my mind, the individual blocks should slowly create a mental shape; investigated, one by one, the players should get in touch with the town's character, through the characters of the inhabitants and the overall complexion of the physical town's layout and nature.  I know many people have tried to do this by building down from a grand design, like King's Landing.  But I think it is better to build up from the bottom; so that, piece by piece, inspiration by inspiration, the town will find its personality in an organic, unexpected and growing way.  The DM doesn't need to "pre-conceive" the town.  As the players explore, and as the DM responds to that exploration, the town's identity will emerge without the need for guidance.

My example with the beach was meant to provide some of the base needs that a block, not a town, ought to possess:

• The block should provide some specific purpose for the players' use.  The beach is a source for transport across the sea; it accumulates fish which can be purchased.  It is a place where boats are repaired.
• The block's residents should have a character, based on what they do and what they respect.  The people of the beach respect people who can do for themselves; who can fish or sail; who can do a hard day's work; who don't consider themselves superior because they possess wealth, status or intelligence.
• The block should be a source for adventure.  The beach offers the opportunity for smuggling.  Or to block smuggling.  It is the natural entry point for raiders who come from under the water.
• The block should provide an advantage for the player's well-being.  The beach is a good place to rest; swimming is a restorative, relaxing activity; so resting there heals hit points faster.

So long as these principles are installed in each city block that is put in place, the characters will have a reason to search; and to fight for places where their search has turned up something treasured.

Suppose that we start with a rule that dictates that if players come to town, they ought to seek the rest and solace that a tavern provides.  Whatever they eat and whatever they drink, it feels good to eat and drink at a table, where we're served, after a week of sitting on the ground drinking from pottery flasks and eating out of a cold pot.  If they don't seek a tavern, and partake at least a little, we can say they feel so down and miserable that their intelligence, wisdom and charisma will all be at -2 all the next day.

Now let's add that a typical pub will be such a let-down, after wishing for one while out in the wilderness, that what players usually get is no better that a lesser penalty: -1 instead of -2.  The ale is tainted, the food is sub-standard or almost rotten, the tables are rickety, the chairs are uncomfortable ... but it IS still better than not going out at all. So we put up with the place because at least it's not another night around a campfire, where we have to walk out into the darkness to piss.  At least, at least, the pub has an outhouse.  Or the room has a pot to piss in.

But ... the party comes to this one small town and the pub is a great little place.  There's a regular bard, the cook has some talent, the ale is made in a real brewery, and not on the premises, the tables are clean, the service is smart and friendly and the owner makes us feel welcome.  And the next day, the DM tells us we all have a +1 bonus to our intelligence, wisdom and charisma.

Examine that.  There are great bars out there.  Bars that give no bonuses, but no penalties.  Really great places like the last example.  And better places yet?  Who knows?  Why don't we look around this big city for a few days and see if there isn't a better place than this?

And then, if we find such a place, a place that gives us a terrific bonus, we will be damn sure that every time we're in Kronstadt, we're going to stop in at The Lord's Cutting Board.

That is, until the day we come to Kronstadt and find that the place has burned down.

If we want players to care about things, like beaches and pubs, we have to provide more than fluff.  We have to provide real concrete benefits to such places.  And to make the players feel the benefit more keenly, we have to squeeze the player with penalties when these places don't exist.  Otherwise, they won't have any reason to explore.

It's a bit of the stick on one end of the player and a bit of the carrot on the other end.  Once the players understand the game ~ avoid the stick, search for the carrot ~ the system begins to feed on itself.  The players WANT to search the town.  The same way that players want to search a dungeon.  It is the same principle, really.

A Day at the Beach

Following the last post, Building Blocks, I'd like to explain what a "building block" might be.  I don't see an urban setting being made of just one sort of block, but rather hundreds of sorts.  A block might be a skein of scattered houses, with small paths between, as Hobbittown is depicted in Lord of the Rings.  Or it might be a linear row of houses, stretched along a river; or a festival ground, with a pitch that includes a collection of homes and warehouses; or a gutted area, where a fire destroyed everything between two avenues, or where a mud slide washed a path down to the river.  There might be hundreds of people living on top of one another, in one sort of block; in another, there might be only a single monastery surrounded by an enormous yard and wall.  Given time, we might create an extensive list, featuring all sorts of small urban environments, that would then be pieced together.  A few pieces would make a village; many more pieces, a town.  Hundreds of pieces, so large that it would take a game year for the players to properly search it, might make a huge city.  This is the idea.

Much detail of one building block hidden by trees or off
shot, to the left.

With this picture on the right, I will propose a most benign example, one that might occur in any size of urban settlement, from London to the most obscure coast in Siberia ~ the image of fishing boats pulled onto the shore, for safekeeping or for repair.  I found myself wondering what this sort of beach is called ~ surely, there must be a name for it.  Turns out, a beach favored for grounding sailing vessels, to enable repairs to be made, is called a "careenage."  It is nice to have a name for things.

Let's say we've come to a village that includes a careenage ... and that as a unit on our map, it comprises one block, or 3.7 acres.  And that we, as players, are going to explore this hex, for a day.

That seems unlikely, doesn't it?  The block size I specified yesterday was a diameter of 435 feet.  We can walk from one edge of that to the other in five minutes; and we can easily see these boats as we walk by, so where's the "exploration?"

To begin with, the beach is but a mere sliver between two sides of the block: the sea, or lake, and the land above the beach, where the fishing culture or boat builders live.  To explore the sea, we must strip down and go swimming, discovering what the currents are, what sort of game exists, how warm is the water, how far we can go out before risk our lives.  The small collection of houses will be protected by a sand bar or an earthen break, if inland is but a few feet above sea level; or they may be nestled upon a slope above the beach; or they may be found atop a cliff, dozens or hundreds of feet up, necessitating a serious climb.

Even so, with twenty minutes of swimming, and twenty minutes of seeing what houses there are, likely not more than a few dozen, this will not take a whole day, will it?  That's hardly exploration.

We must ask, as players, what do we want from this beach?  If all we see is a beach, and it does not interest us, then we can mark it on our maps as "beach, careenage," and go on our way.  But does this mean we "know" this beach?  To answer that, we must ask ourselves, what might it give us?

Well, surely passageway to a nearby island or across a small expanse of water, perhaps 20 miles.  Players will often ask if they can convince a boat owner to shuttle them some distance, and DMs nearly always say yes, for a little money.

But suppose we treat these people as they actually are, rather than as a game's plot convenience.  They are most likely proud.  They are most likely distrustful.  They would not like to go out of their way for strangers, risking their boats, their livelihood, knowing that boats are preyed upon by pirates and by passengers.  Too, they've worked the long day; if they take players twenty miles, how exhausting will that be?  Shouldn't we, as players, have to make friends first?

That could take all day.  Chatting up a few of the folk, discussing their business (they would not care about our business), learning about their difficulties, their politics, their motivations ... and seeking their respect.  These people would not respect intellect; or piety (the sea is god and she is a mean bitch); or money (too proud to take it); or status.  These people respect ability.  Can you manage a boat?  Have you ever fished properly?  Do you know the sea.  For these folk, what you know about their business means as much as your charisma ever could.  Luckily, I have a series of sage abilities (sailing, fishing, oceanography, beachcombing) that would prove handy for some of our characters to break the ice.  As might a number of thieving skills related to smuggling; if the beach were being used for that purpose, it might take us more than a day to learn it.

So, suppose we talk to a few boaters; we assign some modifiers (whatever system you're playing) to our charisma, to see if we can help scour a hull free of barnacles; or wangle a trip out on the water to help pull nets; or get ourselves invited to some fisherman's house for an evening meal.  We learn a few names. We role-play.  We make a friend or two.  And on another day, some time in the future, when we need a trip across the water, we drop in on Charlie and see how he's doing.

When we want some fish, we don't go to the market; we get a good deal from Charlie, or Buck, or Mattie.  We might even make an exchange; a mend spell, or a herb, traded even.  We might strike up a bargain to make ourselves middle men ... but that really depends on how those charisma rolls go.

Let's get into those, because they matter.  I'll describe my party.  As Ikhnaton, a mage, I'm not much of a physical guy and I'm not great in the charisma department either.  My friend Jenkar, however, is a pretty damn strong fighter; but he knows nothing about the sea.  Kendra had a sailor for a father; she's pleasant and talkative, with a 14 charisma.  She's the best we can offer.  Finally, Lanna, our thief, is taciturn, with a 9 charisma.  She's our liability.

But the thief is willing to go out fishing, and she's sharp with a line and a rod, and she does pretty well with her dexterity; so we give a +1 bonus for impressing with ability.  She also knows quite a lot about the smuggling that goes on up and down this coast, and the fellows wonder just what she knows; if they're actual smugglers, this might be bad, but they're not.  They like learning what to watch out for, so we give Lanna another +1.

Kendra gets +2 for sailing and +1 for knowing some sea chanty's taught to her by her father; songs from another country, because we're strangers here.  A new song is a great thing.  Jenkar, meanwhile, uses his energy in the evening to pull boats in from the water, and helps roll two of them over for repairs.  He's not bright, but he's welcome.  And I hear about a boy who has injured himself and is now suffering from a fever.  I have a very expensive healing salve in my pocket, but I'm willing to sacrifice it to buy some good will.

At the end of our day, we roll charisma checks, using our bonuses.  I fail; Lanna fails. But Jenkar and Kendra succeed.

When we want to make use of these people someday, to help us out, we know who to send.  Lanna and I will wait at the end of the beach as a boat is sorted out ... and we'll get picked up there.  On another day, perhaps, we might take our chances again, to get over our bad first impression and make friends.

Dull?  Perhaps.  But all this could be played out in half an hour; and it really depends on how important this beach might be to us someday.  It might be the start of a smuggling operation, particularly if Lanna eventually makes friends here.  Or it might be a merchandising base.  Or we might like the people so much, we build ourselves a cabana on the beach.

We might even find that the water is so clear here, that our wounds heal faster on this beach.  That could be a random roll the DM makes.  We might find it restores our fears and gives us a +1 on some saves. Remember the scene where Frodo and Sam remember the strawberries back home?  We might have that scene, but about this beach.  This beach might give one of our party the strength to carry another when the time comes.  Who knows?  It really depends on how we see it as players, and how the DM lets us see it.

Building Blocks

This is Le Pre-Saint-Gervais, 4.6 kilometers from Paris, which has the distinction of being the 8th densest city in the world, despite having a population of only 18,121.  Unfortunately it is not a medieval city; Paris annexed the commune in 1860, whereupon it was completely transformed from a farmland and royal resort into the densely populated suburb it is today.  So it cannot be representative of any sort of medieval city.

What it can tell us is something about population density.  Unlike the sort of slum that is the substance of Manila, Mumbai or Dhaka, Le Pre, along with other French communes like Levallois-Perret, Vincennes and Saint-Mande, is a structured, architectured environment.  In that way, we can compare it to the densely made cities of the Middle Ages, as a limit on what might be termed as maximum population density might be.  Le Pre has a density of 259 persons per hectare.  In old English units, what my world is based on, that's 109 persons per acre; or rather, per 43,560 square feet; and, just for shits and giggles, 109 persons per 2,007 combat hexes (that are 5 ft. in diameter, 21.7 square feet in size).

That will seem empty for most people, and it will surely occur to many a reader that population densities in history MUST be more dense than that.  Truth be told, we can argue whatever we want.  There are no sources; no final documents; no definitive arguments at all, for what population densities might have been at any time of history except in our own time.  And the reader will take note on how much green space and open road, without visible cars, occurs on the map above.  Too, the densest city in the world, Manila, is only fifty percent denser than this. Picture the above with only one third of the greenery removed.

Google Earth's 3D Rendering of Le Pre-St.-Gervais

Le Pre has the distinction of being made entirely of apartments; most of which would be slightly higher than the Medieval equivalent, but not much; a heavily urbanized Medieval equivalent might be a bit lower to the ground, it might then have less green space ... but it wouldn't have a denser population.  Clearly, above 100 people per acre, movement and living gets impractical.

Where it comes to exploring an urban environment, we might think in acres ... or, more appropriately, "blocks."  A block is the standard description of the city environment; it comprises both the street and the buildings, it suggests a certain character and, best of all, it isn't used for any other term to be found in Dungeons & Dragons (or any other RPG that I can think of).

But how large is a block?  Well, I have a document for that too, that the reader can use to while away some time at work while looking like doing real research.  It talks about "block density":

"All streets at some point form blocks (a block being defined as a street that closes in on itself, or an area of private property surrounded on all sides by public rights-of-way). Blocks can be relatively small. In the Fairlie-Poplar district of downtown Atlanta blocks are 200-feet by 200-feet. But blocks can also be relatively long, like some of those in Manhattan with a 900-foot length. In either of those cases, you have a different kind of block density, and certainly a different kind of block density than what you typically find in a place like Alpharetta, Georgia, in the Windward area, where the blocks take on an entirely different magnitude of size and amorphous configurations.

"Blocks can be difficult to measure because they are not all rectangles. Some are trapezoids, or circles, or amoeba-shaped. Many residential areas here in Atlanta have these sort of amoeba-shaped blocks. So you have to start teasing out some of the geometric properties of these things such as block length and depth and total perimeter in order to compare them.

"A number of years ago I became interested in this type of analysis and this question of block density. I began a little study which is only semi-scientific. I say semi- because at the moment it only includes a sample size of 200: ten cities, 20 blocks per city. I have compared the sizes of blocks built before 1928 to those built after 1928. Why 1928? Because that is the year that the Standard City Planning Enabling Statute was passed out of Congress, and that is when we have subdivision regulations being adopted in a formal way for the first time in almost every city and county, every municipal jurisdiction in the nation."

Now, this talks about Georgia in America, but let me stress again that there are NO source documents from any time that are earlier than the 19th century, so it doesn't matter if this is factually true for the time in which a D&D game might take place.  We can, in the end, just make shit up; in the meantime, however, let's just go with what documentation we have.

I think the stress that we can get from Douglas Allen's research is that blocks change from place to place, and from time to time.  Our conception of blocks is based on regulation and municipal law, that was once not a part of the community's mindset.  As shown on Allen's table to the right, block size has increased since 1928.  Allen's argument is that the growth can be ascribed to the presence of automobiles ... and to traffic signals, which were designed to compensate for a speed of 40 miles per hour.  It's an interesting passage, but I won't go into it here.

For myself, I quite like this.  The actual dimension of an actual city block is not important, from a game design perspective ... but identifying a hex as "the amount that can be explored in a day" with "one block" is appealing.  But of course, how big of a block are we talking about?  One that fits with a city like New York?  Or something more akin to Omaha?

The answer is bound to be arbitrary, no matter what we base the decision upon.  None of us can possibly know if it is possible to explore 1.9 acres in a day or 4.4 acres in a day, given what a medieval town might look like.  It might take us ten minutes to cross a particular thoroughfare because of traffic, the amount of gong on the street, our willingness to get ourselves caked with said gong or how wide the street is.  There are a hundred possible drains on the clock that we can't conceive of or guess at, but can reasonably be taken for granted as we have made our environment as convenient as possible, for everyone (by including street lights, for example).  Getting around in a Medieval city might have been a real headache.

Still, we have to base these things on something, right?

Some will remember that I map my world in 20-mile diameter hexes, and that I have occasionally spoken about breaking up these hexes into smaller units.

If I continue to zoom in, to produce progressively smaller hexes along this process, always dividing one hex into seven smaller hexes, I get the following chart:

Which, I'm sorry, fascinates me endlessly.  In the middle of the chart, we find the sweet spot: 3.76 acres, with 225 people if we establish a dense population as 60 persons per acre.  Some block-sized hexes could be relatively empty; so that there's no absolute size for how many hexes a given village, town or city covers.  A village made of only scattered houses may cover a dozen block-sized hexes.  A densely packed town on an island may cover only five or six blocks.  This makes for plenty of creativity.

Nor does a town have to be in one part.  Three blocks along a river might be separated by empty hexes (fields, rough ground, cliff faces) from two dense blocks surrounding a castle.  We don't have to be regular in our design, such as we've seen from pre-made generators.

I also love the fact that the chart goes right down to the combat hex, 5 feet across.  If any readers have ever used a typical rubber mat for game play, those are usually 48 hexes by 32; the town block as depicted is 87 combat hexes across.  That would be four battle maps. Well within the realm of grasping size and scale here.

Fascinating, nyet?