The Game Made By Incompetents

Shown here is the front page of Hasbro's rules for Monopoly.  Hasbro is incidentally the owner of the WOTC, and therefore of D&D.  The full rules run four pages, this being all that's necessary to explain and understand the game.

In the rules, you will NOT find a discussion of why people play, what immersive qualities the game offers, whether or not one should be a bastard, additional comments suggesting means by which individuals can surreptitiously rob the bank or recommendations that if you do not like the rules, you should just go ahead and change them.  We will also not find advice on how to get along better with other players, the personalities of players, what sort of people like the game, that monopoly is a game intended to teach you the evils of money or anything else pertaining to the mindset of the participants.

Those things are, absolutely a part of the game: but they have NO place of any kind in writing the rules of the game.  In writing the RULES of anything, one follows the advice of Aristotle:

The law is reason, free from pathos.

The Greek word, "πάθος" is often translated as "passion," but English has spectacularly warped the meaning of passion into something that's unremittingly positive and desperately necessary.  This was not Aristotle's intent.  Aristotle meant that the law was free of suffering, feeling, emotion, grief, sorrow, etcetera ... all things that the law causes, but which the law, in order to function effectively, must ignore.  Failure to ignore this principle by allowing pathos to intervene with reason brings about catastrophe and blood in the streets — as history lucidly demonstrates.  Yet we will always have those who believe, in their hearts, that everyone that encounters justice should approve of what's decided.  If they do not, they will say, then "justice" must, by their definition, be wrong.

Aristotle made the statement in answer to precisely such people.

A game follows the same principle.  The participants may have feelings of general sorts, but because the game is a social activity, the rules of the game MUST function without mercy or sympathy.  It does not matter if you personally like the results!  You have chosen to play the game.

Adjusting the game's rules, whether it's done in game or premeditatively, is an acceptable practice, just as changing the law.  Most games through history are the result of a "shaking out period" in which the rules of the game are adapted from problems that arise during play.  Altering D&D so that it is less focused on resource management and more focused on interactivity or dungeoneering does not in itself break with the precedent that everyone is equally subject to the rules, which are equally dispassionate towards all.

Some will think now that I'll go next down the rabbit-hole of how the game's been diluted past being a game, but truly the Gentle Reader could write this post for me.  I choose instead to reflect upon the decision by the makers of D&D to invest their original creation with excessive, destructive and mostly useless personal observation ... useless in terms of game play.  I am well aware of the reader's likely worship of these persons, and how dearly more such pithy, personal interjections on the game's value and purpose are fervently wished for.  Many readers imagine that if more phrases and words direct from the inventors' mouths were available, somehow we'd understand better how we're supposed to play.

This is idiocy of the first order.

One reason that pathos is a disastrous means of building a functional interpersonal framework is that the more we say, the greater the opportunity for random phrases and thoughts that smash any hope of continuity.  Gygax wrote mountains of material — none of it with the least comprehension that it would be picked apart forty years after the fact by internet content makers.  Let me take a example:  the other night, deciding after a comment I made on JB's blog about the Dragon Magazine, I selected a random issue, no. 22, and went looking for letters to the editor.  Instead I found an article written by Gygax on page 29, presciently titled, "Dungeons & Dragons, What it Is and Where it is Going."  Given JB's theme of late, I found this rather serendipitous.

Late in the article, on page 30, after chattering away about things that Gygax and crew are doing, he writes,

"Does this mean that D&D will be at a dead end when the last of AD&D® is published? Hardly! Modules and similar material will continue to be released so as to make the DM’s task easier and his or her campaign better.  Quite frankly, the appeal of D&D rests principally upon the broad shoulders of the hard-working Dungeon Masters.  The rules never need improvement if the DM is doing a proper job, but of course he or she can do so only if the rules are sufficient to allow this. With refined rules and modular additions, all aspects of a long lived and exciting campaign will unquestionably be there for the DM to employ.  Will D&D dead end when its novelty dies?  That is impossible to answer.  It is my personal opinion that the game form is a classic which is of the same stamp as chess and MONOPOLY®; time will be the judge.  No doubt that there is a limit to the appeal of the game in any of its current forms.  If tens of millions play a relatively simple, social sort of a game such as MONOPOLY, it is a sure thing that a far more difficult game such as D&D will have a much more limited audience.  As the game cannot be simplified beyond a certain point, we look to another means of popularizing it."

Getting past Gygax as crystal ball gazer, whether or not you think he's right or wrong, do you feel enlightened?  Is your understanding of the game's future enhanced?  Do you see clearly what responsibilities you have to help the game along?  Of course not.  Gygax is doing no more there than tooting wind from his ass, like any politician or sales marketer, bent on filling a page with drivel that sounds good but says nothing he can be held accountable for.  And why shouldn't he?  The magazine's purpose was to sell advertising while massaging the reader's interest ... the article isn't a serious, deeply contemplated answer to the title questions.  It's an eyeball-grabbing title that encourages the reader to dive in, and at least feel like Gygax has his finger on the pulse of the industry.  Even if he doesn't actually say anything about the industry.  Hell, it's not like he thought anyone would be reading this 43 years later.

The problem with D&D from the beginning was that it never believed anything it's inventors said in an absolute sense.  No fixed, firm, concrete set of rules were ever put forth.  The makers admitted, frankly, that the game needed DMs to fill in the gaps, to fix what they couldn't do, or didn't think of ... even to the point of flat-out arguing they had no ultimate responsibility to do better, "if the DM is doing a proper job."  What a flatulent, ducking statement that is!  This is the inventor of the fucking game, and his best answer to the problem of making the DM's task easier is to argue that the game's appeal — HIS game's appeal — rests on the shoulders of total strangers pucking out money for HIS game.  What a spineless, negligent, candy-ass little coward he is, as he takes the gamer's money with one hand while callously dumping his responsibility upon others.  There's a fraudster for you ... dumps his load on you and then praises you for carrying it, while taking your money for the privilege.  And this is the man who got endless praise when he died.

The fuckedupedness of D&D has nothing to do with what the players did to get out from under rules they didn't enjoy, or couldn't make sense of, or didn't work well in game practice.  Never forget that the "broad shoulders" of those "hardworking DMs" more often than not belonged to children, 25-30 years younger than Gygax was when he wrote the words above (I was 26 years younger when he wrote this, starting to play D&D in the same year this article was published).  The phrasing clearly proves that he didn't know or he didn't care that his game was being dumped on such persons.  His take on the game was stuffed chock full of pathos while agonizingly lacking in reason ... and we are still the victims of his and his cronies' attitude regarding the game's inception.

Covering that up has been Job #1 for the D&Dites from the beginning, who were so grateful that the game came into being at all that any factual discussion of the clumsy, amateurish, rash, neglectful and predatory way the game came into being is utterly set aside so we can endlessly argue over the nuances of one early game issue vs. another.  Such pedantry firmly and blindly ignores the fuck-you practice of the makers, who were more concerned with going to print than with responsibly taking the necessary time to set up a functional game that had a chance of lasting as long as Monopoly.  Instead, we got an inconsistent mess.  Which high-sounding members of the community explain with handwaving gestures, while inventing creative endlessly positive excuses for early D&D constructive failures, like desert herdmen willingly swallowing an argument from a hobo that his mother never had sex.

All in all, it's a little sickening.

This is why yesterday, when I explained what a proper primer for D&D should sound like, I asked that personal sentiment be left out, concentrating upon that which can be practically described.  Because when we teach things we want people to learn, we scrub out the pathos.  We reason that they will think of their own pathos when the time comes; investing students with our prejudice is not teaching.

Several Bricks Short of a Load

I have posted descriptions of nalfeshnee, marilith and balrog on my wiki.  And again, this was work commissioned through my donate button, which can be found on the sidebar of this blog.  This content was made possible by JB of B/X Blackrazor.  Ask me about commissioning work at alexiss1@telus.net.  I'm open to ideas.

Regarding the post I wrote yesterday about the lack of details after decades of supposed game design.  I should like to make it clear that when I say "detail," I don't mean a story arc, such as the Blood War.  Story arcs are not details, they're examples of someone slapping an overused B-movie plot line on top of D&D monsters, which happens all the time.  Basically, take a WW2 film, scratch out "allies" and "fascists" and write in the monster you want.  It's exhaustively tiresome, boring and definitely not what I was talking about.

J'ohn left a comment about how "Pandemonium" is even "more chaotic" than the Abyss.  Let's examine that a moment.  The image shown is the original outer planes chart, that was purposefully used to explain how alignment ~ that which players were supposed to play their characters by ~ was fundamental to the universe.  Evil on the bottom, good on the top, law on the left and chaos on the right.  Pandemonium is also chaotic, yes.  But that only stipulates that they don't like "law" there anymore than the Abyss does.  The separation between the Abyss and Pandemonium isn't how chaotic they are, but where they are on the good-evil scale.  Pandemonium is less evil.  But there's no reason to think anyone in Pandemonium feels any different about a military culture than the Abyss does.  Why would either of these planes have any interest in fighting each other.

I also find it a bit galling to be advised that there a "many planes" and that Pandemonium is one of them.  I believe the phrase suitable to my generation is, don't tell your grandmother how to suck eggs.  I don't expect the young'uns will get that.

The chart above is, by the way, execrable.  A quick reading will tell you there are not four locations in Elysium, there's no logic whatsoever to the three planes of the "Happy Hunting Grounds," which is a racist thing by the way, nor is Nirvana remotely lawful.  Nirvana is not anything.  The "666 layers" of the Abyss is pure Gygaxian bullshit.  The meaning of the word "abyss" is the description of something that is bottomless, infinitely so.  The Greeks called it abyssos, which they used to translate the Septuagint Bible from the Hebrew tehom, "original chaos."  It is, linguistically, the chaos from which all others chaoses come.  So whatever a dumbfuck writer working for the WOTC thought once while casting about for something cool to write in his game module, the abyss was chaos before the word pandemonium was coined.

Pandemonium, incidentally, was a word invented by John Milton in the 17th century.  He needed a name for Satan's Palace in the middle of Hell, so technically it isn't a plane at all, and if "Hell" in D&D is lawful evil, Pandemonium is technically as lawful evil as it gets.  Pandemonium is lawful evil's comfort cushion.  It is lawful evil central.  When you punch "lawful evil" (10-digit number) into your cell phone, the Pandemonium front office picks up.

The "place of uproar" meaning came in 1770.  "Lawless confusion," not until 1865.  The end of the Civil War.  You know, the holiday being celebrated today.

Honestly, people.  The internet and google exists.  It wouldn't hurt to type some of these words into these search engines and LOOK SHIT UP.  In the very least, please do it before teaching me how to suck eggs.

I'm going to long way around the barn to point out that on many, many things, research exists and it will yield some tremendous content.  If the game company were run by just one scholar, just one, who was able to look at a piece of description and throw it back in the writer's face, we'd be farther along than we are now.

Dave Arneson rushes to share his genius
with the world.

A tiny bit of scholarship reveals in a twink how truly unlettered and dense, and unwilling to crack the spine of a book or two, were the inventors and "geniuses" behind the golden age of D&D.  Time and time again I am both stunned and bemused at the sheer numbskullery of these dorks, who got away with it because they didn't have to deal with real editors, experts or indeed adults where it came to slapping their works together.  The adults came later, out of the 6 and 7 year olds who learned to play the game and grew up as stone ignorant as Gygax and others ... who in the intervening years between then and now have continued to perpetrate the chowderheaded dumbfuck unschooled game culture, and to do so from a dim belief that they are upholding some "real" standard of some kind, as they puff themselves up to speak academic gospels like, "Well, Pandemonium is actually more chaotic than the Abyss."  Oh, really.  How interesting.

I suppose, in truth, D&D never had a chance of being anything but a child's game, given the grounding it had from the founding deadbeat fathers who birthed this thing.  There's so much contrary, discordant, willful, deliberately clueless and proud-of-being-unworldly sentiment in the community, misinformation that the pundits preen themselves on using to inform others, there's not much chance of improvement.  The community prefers to tout the benefits of "making shit up," rather than paying any attention to anything that anyone has ever written about the thing being discussed.  And yet, with all this talk about the constant and endless importance of making shit up, whenever I'm driven to look around to see what might have been "made up" about the Glabrezu in the last 40 years, I never seem to find anything.

I guess we make shit up, but we don't write it down.  Hmf.  Most of these dumb bastards probably don't know how.

North Wowotu Production, Part II

See Part I.

Close up visual available with this link.

Now the reader can see that I've reduced the sizes of the references, adding additional icons for labor, food and wealth.  There are only six hexes on the map that generate "wealth."  All the references on the map generate "income," but we can see that as money that must needs be poured back into the system, to maintain the roads and move the goods and buy outside products, etcetera.  "Wealth" is categorized here as "disposable income," or money that can be used for unusual purposes beyond an ordinary budget and expenses.  This money can be given to expanding education or development, used for war, or it can be used to line the pockets of the local lords.

I haven't calculated if there is enough food to feed the population.  However, I could calculate it, fairly easily, but I did that with another post once and got little response.  Truth is, food is a changeable element.  We can establish how much food is needed to feed how many people a diet of 2,200 calories a day, but people can live on less and be malnourished, with shorter lifespans, and people can certainly live on more.  Food won't be distributed evenly, whatever our calculations ... the more important thing here is to see how much food would be available if an army chose to plunder a location, or how much must be shipped out of a hex during that time of the year when it is harvested.

This is pretty much it, for the moment.  I think I am going to talk about other things for a while; I'm working myself into doing the podcasts, which at the moment is getting me to research about how people respond to people and what are good strategies for encouraging communication.  That's where the Simon Sinek video came from, for instance.

I am going to come back around to the infrastructure and development concept: but surely this experiment has proved something.  I took a group of perfectly random answers from 12 different people, and produced a completely workable landscape that is the equivalent of any fantasy map that is out there, doing nothing but tracing through the logical effects of terrain, vegetation, the placement of the settlement and the sort of products that might exist.  With any other group of products, with a different collection of terrains or vegetation, signifying a different climate, we could obtain a positively, identifiably different habitat, based mostly on what the inhabitants do, as opposed to where the inhabitants live.

I hope that many of you have learned some lessons, that you've had your eyes opened to why most game maps fail utterly to move your players and what can be done about it.

I hesitate to say this, but ... the reader knows I don't actually have to spend this extra time making a game map I'll never use, for the sole purpose of spending many hours presenting the case, and then painstakingly teaching it.  But I do it for my own self-aggrandizement, for the sake of causing others to view me with respect, and because I sincerely want your worlds to be BETTER worlds.  I want you to stop trailing after the miserable, established, old crappy way of doing things and realize that there is room to design better structures, better systems and elaborate upon better ideas.  Please understand me when I say, to hell with the OSR.  The Renaissance was nice and all, but it wasn't about doing things the old way, it was about taking the old ways and using them as a jumping off point to change the world in a million different ways.  We didn't get Rome from the Renaissance.  We got the Enlightenment, which brought the Industrial Revolution and all of this wonderful health and existing possibility that we have today.

So let's stop putting old D&D on a pedestal.  Let's make a better, greater D&D, let's do it ourselves and let's stop waiting for someone else to do it for us.

Oh, and if you could ... support my Patreon.  That would be nice.

How It Got Infected

I can’t be certain when adventure modules became all the rage; the earliest one I can remember was Keep on the Borderlands, which Wikipedia says was printed in December of 1979. If so, I had only been playing for a few months…but as I live in Canada, I don’t think any of us saw this module until sometime late in 1980 or possibly ‘81. I remember clearly a time playing when it was universally assumed that you made up your own adventures—and if you weren’t good enough to do that, you had no business being a DM.

But of course TSR, by then run by people who weren’t Gygax, had begun to recognize that role-playing games, as a business model, had a limited appeal. What’s worse, by 1980 if there was any press about any of the games (and most of the press was about D&D), it was BAD press…often very bad, about teenagers killing themselves in their rooms because their characters died or killing parents who tried to stop them from playing. Which meant that the game was never going to become popular on a widespread basis—and once everyone had the rulebooks that said, “make your own,” the company was doomed to go bankrupt.

The solution was to pabulum feed the less gifted advocates of the game, with modules which had the inherent quality of being made useless once they were played—thus creating an ongoing income even after the basic books were bought. My friends and I generally scorned those who played modules, primarily because the modules themselves were rather pathetic. They gave out too much treasure, they were repetitive (guard room to chief’s room to treasure room) and they were so badly written as to be laughable.

But we were not the norm. Modules were certainly the main thing by the time I graduated high school, and by ’83 I was an odd duck in that I never played them.

Meanwhile, TSR sought new ways to make money for the company. A flood of completely different games, each with slight modifications in the rules (and many being mostly shit, without any play testing), erupted on the market. Crap like Buck Rogers and Indiana Jones took advantage of fads, while little groups of excessively effete gamers took up Boot Hill, Empire of the Petal Throne, Top Secret (admittedly, I played this one), Gangbusters and so on. In the long run, all of these were simple-Simon games with no real power to hold a long-time audience.

Something was definitely wrong, but young kids with money were willing to go along with the program. While Deities and Demigods was a fairly decent addition to the game (coming out about eight months after the first three Advanced books), the Fiend Folio in ’81 was generally a piece of crap. The quality of the book had clearly gone downhill—not only in content, but in terms of it's binding as well. At least half the monsters were useless. A considerable number of them had no purpose but to steal objects from players; others were outright repeats from the Monster Manual. A few were purely laughable: the “snail flail” continues to be a steady joke around our gaming table. Still, it was about ten times better than the Monster Manual II, which came out in ’83.

But by then the golden age of the game (at least in terms of its possible growth) was definitely past. On the production side, RPG companies were all in the hands of penny pinchers and lawyers; on the consumer side, the public face of the game had moved into convention mode.

I attended conventions all through the 80s, created and arranged by acquaintances of mine I knew through the city university. Generally the participants numbered about 2,000 (I don’t live in New York), much defined by their social ineptitude and gullibility. All conventions are designed to sell junk to neophytes—people who don’t know anything but are interested—and they exist to enable veterans to lord their knowledge over the neophytes.

I don’t do well in such environments. There’s nothing special about being superior to morons—its much more fun to be superior to superiors, who always get pissed off when their experience fails to award them with instant worship. Worse, I found that even by ’85 I had been playing the game longer than most, and as I had not embraced the TSR company revenue plan, there were fewer and fewer things bridging the gap between me and others. Games I sat in on were still fundamentally hack and slash, haul away the loot, with nothing in the way of plot, purpose or sense. The Game Show version of the game became standard, with rooms full of gold raising characters to the 22nd level in spite of not being bright enough to check a dungeon door for traps without opening it.

(I’ve ran a few parties like this in convention competitions; they’re remarkably easy to kill).

Yet I had been playing for so long, I was pretty well known in those days. Both as a shit disturber and as a good, original-thinking DM. But I couldn’t get into the adventure-for-a-day mentality that grew up around those forums, and other venues over the years that followed. I couldn’t see the point to running an adventure just for the sake of running an adventure. That would be like a one-night stand; I wanted a relationship with my players.

(When Gygax died recently, I received two different invitations to come play the traditional characters associated with his party in the traditional adventure. I declined).

So I drifted away from conventions and I drifted away from RPG shops selling globs of crap for ridiculous prices. Now and then I have to go back and buy something like new dice or a vinyl hex map and such. By the time the 2nd Edition was released in ’89, I had gone completely rogue. I heard about the changes, the removal of demons and devils, the addition of “skills” which could be bought (similar to the system from Middle Earth, which had always been shit but adored by a particular brand of player), and I thought, that makes sense.

Once you’ve sold the shit out of something, the only thing you can do as a company is try to get everyone to buy the same shit once again. So far, the game has been resold in its entirety three times, and another edition is due out in June.

It will be bought, primarily because D&D players continue to be confounded by the game—none of the products released in the last twenty years have done anything to solve the real problem: how do you play?

It is like giving a series of weekend lectures on how to play football…then showing up every Saturday with a new color and shape of ball. See the ball; pretty ball; buy the ball. Followed by a new collection of rules every time, often disagreeing or “modulating” the rules learned last week. And finally, nothing about how to set up a team and play.

I don’t think even the lecturers know how. Not anymore.