Player Character Starting Money - I

Amy: It is just a rock.

Chris: No, it's not just a rock.

Amy: No?

Chris: No. It's forty-two pounds of polished granite, with a bevelled underbelly; and a handle a human being can hold. And it may have no practical purpose in and of itself, but it is a repository of human possibility and if it's handled just right, it will exact a kind of poetry.  For ten years, I've drilled for oil in 93 countries, five different continents, and not once have I done anything to equal the grace of a well thrown rock sliding down a sheet. Not once.

 — Men with Brooms

Most often, the belittlement of D&D frustrates me into a dark place.  The line in the film above to the belittlement of curling is said gently, kindly, with love; but I have been apt to write acerbically to the same argument.  D&D is not just a game.  Any practical purpose it may serve may be minimized or mocked ... but to my mind it is a repository of human possibility.  If handled just right, it is poetry.  If I feel an acute, burning fury from moment to moment when reading the phrasings other people use, it is in the clanging of their metre ... the desecration of rhythm, form and beauty.  The inapt insistence on understating, soft-pedalling, depreciating or deflating the game to a size and strain that can't impune their tragic egos.

Gygax writes on the bottom of page 25 of the DMG that it's important to give the player characters little money because we must "prevent the game from becoming too easy."  This, because he sees a scenario where the players will be able to wholly purchase all the tools they need to make the dungeon or the adventure "too easy" ... to which I say, phooey.

Don't tighten the purse.  Raise the fucking bar.

The United States has all the wealth of Mammon with which to settle matters between Isreal and Palestine, or Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan and India ... and guess what: there's not enough money in the universe.  If the problems we rely upon to make our adventures difficult can be solved with coin, then the problems aren't that difficult.  They're not that imaginative.  But they fit right inside the tiny mind of most D&D game designers.

My sympathies for those Gentle Readers feel a bit insulted by that.  I assume you're not paying me to pat you on the head; or to tell you that the same undead acculturations of 40 years of resurrecting long-dead game design content is okey-doke.

The nice comforting thing about dungeons as they usually manifest is their lovely straight-forwardness.  Oh, sure, there's a bit of mystery to break up the fights; and granted, you can always choose to go through the dungeon by the left-hand door and not the right.  But we are speaking of a linear, straight-line process whereby you meet an obstacle, surpass the obstacle, meet another obstacle, surpass that, then rinse, then repeat.  This ... isn't problem-solving.  This is puzzle-solving.  As far as D&D goes, gaming like this is as interesting as pouring out puzzle pieces and six people spending the evening putting it together.

Not a hideous evening.  Company, drinks, jokes, gossip, stories, dopamine ... not the worst evening I've had.  But jeebs ... D&D can be soooooo much more.  If it's handled just right.

Problems get interesting when there are no definite solutions; where that is the case even when a resolution has been met.  Where, when the situation arises again, there's reason to think that maybe, just maybe, though the first essay produced a resolution, it wasn't the best resolution.  The best problems are those that, whether we've committed ourselves or not, we are still taking apart the pieces and putting them back together again ... because there is no set way to put those pieces together.  Depending on how they're arranged, the pieces change shape.  And, more importantly, no matter how many ways we put them together, or how they change, we'll never be sure we did right.

I see DMs writing descriptions of how they're going to build their game worlds, and how they're going to put the pieces together, and what matters to them ... but NONE of these DMs ever write, "And once the players see this, they'll be able to do THIS ..."  For these DMs, there are no players.  The DM is building a puzzle; and crafting the pieces; and it is inherently implied that the players will have fun putting the pieces together.  So why talk about it?  Why discuss what the players will do?  Or what options they're being given?  They're being given the option to play.  That's enough for them. 

"I'm certainly not going to spend twenty blog posts writing about their experience possibilities in my new game world.  No, no, I'm going to spend the next twenty posts talking about my cleverness, and the reasons why I've decided to be clever in just this way, and why other people should understand how damned clever I am."

I love my game world and I talk about it a lot but please let's understand: the players need and want a game world that is more interesting than puzzle play.  And so we're clear, I'm counting a set-up where they enter a room and kill monsters as a PUZZLE.  I'll include that kind of play in my world — obviously I will, because my players online are participating in that now.  I won't tell them not to kill monsters, and I will put the monsters in front of them for as long as that's what they want to do.  Running an open game demands that I accede to that request.

But when the player stops one day and says aloud, "Hey, guys ... you ever think about why we even do this?" ... my answer is not going to be, "because that's how the game is played."

My answer is, "You don't actually have to."

Players can choose a different path.  First, however, they'd have to imagine a different path.

That's a problem.  And that problem has no specific solution.  It can't be solved entirely with money; it can't be solved by finding all the pieces and miraculously putting together a puzzle.  It must be solved by stepping back, looking at the whole picture and realizing that the choices we make in life are not limited by "doing the right thing" or "doing the obvious thing."

"Trying something new" comes to mind.  Or "trying something impossible."  Though while a player might conceivably attempt something on these lines, you, me and the cheese knows the DM is going to squash it because the DM needs to minimize the game to a size and strain that he or she can manage.

And judging by the field ...

That ain't fucking much.

Changing Alignment

This heading can be found on page 25 of the original DMG.  I suggest reading it closely.  The entire passage is anathema to player agency, the right of the player to control his or her own character.  It speaks of the player being in service to some deity and equating alignment with that deity.  It encourages punishments like a loss of level, expectations of atonement, sacrificing large piles of treasure and an assurance that the DM will make the player "acts accordingly."  It is poisonous, abusive and worthless to the spirit of any game that's about advancement, learning from mistakes and the players choosing their own path.

When a player starts a cleric or a paladin in my game, I ask the player to select a religion.  I don't ask the player to adhere to a behaviour towards that religion; nor do religions in my game presuppose a specific outlook.  It should be plain to anyone that in any religion, there are those who — religious leaders included — practice the tenets of the religion and those that don't.  Leaders and followers alike cherry-pick which parts of the holy writings they want to obey, and judging by the results, Gawd, Jeebus and Abbah don't give a good goddamn one way or the other.  My religions obey the teachings of history: it is  perfectly okay for a player cleric to argue that those not born in the religion are heathens and can't be saved (Presbyterianism), that anyone arbitrarily selected can be named demon-possessed, that demon-possessed people can be burned freely, so long as political power approves, that genocide is legitimate so long as the murdered people are "on our land," that rape of heathens isn't really rape, that theft is good so long as it's done in the name of the invoked deity, that those of the same religion can be first cast out and then killed, that torture is a sanctioned means of forcing a blasphemer to confess ... and that doing all this and CALLING oneself good, righteous, holy, saintly, heaven-bound and full of grace is proof positive that the speaker is honest and truthful.

As such, I don't excommunicate player characters for doing any of these things ... because every religion has done every one of these things, and most of the worst practitioners of these crimes are viewed today as virtuous, godly, pious, infallible and spotless.  My religions will excommunicate a player cleric or paladin for one crime, and one crime only:  betrayal.  Not betrayal of their codes, not betrayal of humanity, not betrayal of decency or morality.  No, betrayal of the other religious thieves, pirates, tyrants, autocrats, etcetera, who arbitrarily get to decide the loyalty of those who belong to their club.

So, as a cleric, as long as you don't fuck over your brothers and sisters, you're free to FUCK OVER everyone else.

Welcome to religion.

Now, this isn't a version of religion that we teach little children.  Little children are, and were, taught this version.  And this version.  And this version and this version.  All of them top ten hits in their time.  When we sell religion publicly, we sweep all that nasty truth under the carpet; we pretend that all those people got their comeuppance, or that they were somehow "just bad apples" ... while continuing to live in cities named after them, celebrating holy names in their name and being "thankful" that they cleaned out dem heathens from de good ol' New World.  Most every horror perpetrated in the world has been done in the name of some religion (and, yes, the Eastern ones too!) ... and then justified.

So no, the company obviously has to pretend that clerics are goody-goody people, except those occasional baddies ... and pretend that clerics calling themselves good actually ARE good, because obviously they are.  They said they were!

Then why, the Gentle Reader might ask, would I let player characters behave in this obviously horrendous way.  It should be pretty clear to the reader, from my tone, that I don't approve of religions hypocrisy.  Then why approve of it in my game world?

Because I won't morally judge of my fellow over their choice to commit a fictitious action.

I am not the almighty telling my liberated, agency-starved players what is right and what is wrong.  I believe that humans, specifically the sort of humans whose company I'm willing to keep, are sensible enough to recognize that the pursuit of extreme vice makes a dull life.

As teenagers, I remember, we took much glee in slaughtering hosts of creatures, committing crime, engaging in debauchery, bathing in the blood of our victims and so on.  I remember doing much, much worse things with my peers at 16 then I read about online.  There was no "online," so we had no overarching community to curb our indulgences.  We were a small group making our own fun, laughing at the suffering of imaginary beings, completely unrestrained in our cruelties.

That word there is the key to why.  "Unrestrained."  Like all teenagers, every day was a nuanced form of restraint against everything we dreamed of, hoped for, thought of ourselves and considered important.  Every day we were told to fit ourselves to a standard, obey, behave, work hard for things we didn't want, enslave ourselves to a clock, take shit from authority and eat that shit with a smile.  Our music was violent, our sports were violent and our gaming was violent.  The expression of violence was the expression of freedom, since the constant restraint on our emotions made us inconsolable.  I wish I could explain what it was to be in a world that looked every bit as much like it was burning down as it does now, only without the shallow but visceral support of social media, without the constant presence of choosable programming, without being able to tap a button and hear someone say the things we were feeling inside.  We were alone.  Except for those few moments when we, um, got off the chain.

Getting out of high school, getting into university, getting out from under our parent's thumbs, having the freedom to publicly pursue sex, drink, whatever we liked ... changed everything.  We had other ways to handle stress; and less stress to handle, to be honest, though I've often heard people claim that university was far more stressful than being an imprisoned child.  That's a delusion speaking.  In any case, our gaming shifted away from vice, because our access to the real thing made gaming about it ... silly.  Education made our gaming very different.  Learning gave us choices.  A sense of personal responsibility pushed us towards self-respect and mindfulness.  Players who still wanted to "burn down the bar" got pushed out of our circle.

I can tell players in my game that they can "do anything they want" with confidence that they will do things of which they want to be proud.  That's been the case for 35 years.  So while I say that a cleric doesn't have to adhere to a code, because clerics throughout history didn't, that doesn't matter.  The clerics in my game WANT to adhere to a code.  Their code.  Not mine.

And the idea that I should punish them somehow because their code doesn't perfectly reconcile with mine?

Holy fuck.  What kind of a shithead treats people that way?

Alignment Language

After two-and-a-quarter pages dedicated to alignment, Gygax adds a third of a page to this subject.  And then another half page to "changing alignment," which unfortunately I'll have to tackle later.  In toto, Gygax dedicated 1% of the DMG's content to alignment here; and later, he'll talk about it more.  I can't imagine any subject of less relevance to D&D; or any content that is a greater waste of my time.  But this isn't "my" time; this is the reader's time ... and with alignment continuing to be a central theme in D&D, with hundreds of thousands of DMs, I'm stuck.

Right off, Gygax states,

"Alignment language is a handy game tool which is not unjustifiable in real terms. Thieves did employ a special cant. Secret organizations and societies did and do have certain recognition signs, signals, and recognition phrases — possibly special languages (of limited extent) as well. Consider also the medieval Catholic Church which used Latin as a common recognition and communication base to cut across national boundaries."

He hasn't explained what it is yet and already he's defending its inclusion.  He stresses that the thieves "did" have a cant, clearly having argued with people about it, since he's anxious to hang the concept on it.  Thieves didn't, not really; the essential reliable sources suggest more of a slang than a "language," which we have today and which children still habitually develop.  His phrasing that special languages "possibly" existed doesn't make a strong case, either.  But most idiotic of all is that he thinks "personality" is a logical basis for a language, rather than the examples he gives of societies, cabals and professions.  But then, in his system, all the druids would be of like alignment and all the thieves as well.  As if this were sensible, given what we know of thieves, criminals or other groups that gather.

This language was supposed to be secret and limited to a few score words (again, obviously slang).  In places, the way it's presented is rather ridiculous:

"Druids could discuss at length and in detail the state of the crops, weather, animal husbandry and foresting; but warfare, politics, adventuring, and like matter would be impossible to detail with the language."

My, that's useful.  It's ever so important to keep those needful details about crop growth from becoming common knowledge!  Good thing there are no farmers around to witness the weather and husbanded animals — they might spill the beans.

Consider this line that starts the third paragraph:

"Any character foolish enough to announce his or her alignment by publicly crying out in that alignment tongue will incur considerable social sanctions."

Clearly, Gygax felt the players should metagame their alignments In Game as part of their character's make-up.  It's all so strange, it's no wonder the section has dropped through the cracks, as it were.

I feel an apology is warranted.  It's hasn't been my goal in discussing the DMG to cut into Gygax point-by-point ... but the previous content, spanning four pages, deserves nothing else.  With so many useful and concrete aspects to set up and make practical in my game world, I don't have any interest in devising languages that will enable players to talk about crops or inquire about the health of someone else of the same alignment.  Since when is openly stating in a public forum, "I feel fine, thank you," considered a subversive statement?  I find myself pounding my head on the table.  Any game-writer foolish enough to announce his or her dumbfuckery to this degree by publicly crying out in English words should incur considerable written sanctions!

I'll probably come around to the subject again, when reaching that point in the DMG, but language is very limited as a game feature in role-playing.  The game is communication, between players and between the party & DM.  Any information critical to the game that's stated in another language by another race, or written on a wall, will eventually have to be stated in the language used by the players; so the only real use of an unreadable language is to suspend the time between when the party sees the lettering and when the party discovers what the lettering means.  This is sometimes useful; but very, very rarely.  I suspect it is overused among DMs, as I've had an online player enter my world as a 1st level mage, taking Comprehend Languages as one of his initial three spells.

This baffled me, though I let it slide.  A low-level mage is a spongy punching bag where combat is concerned; they can't fight, they can't take damage, when they do hit it's a pin-prick.  Yet, with three well-chosen spells, cast at critical moments, they can turn the tide of a losing battle and preserve the party.  This takes skill: to recognize WHEN to cast and WHAT to have in one's arsenal.  Stripping that arsenal by one-third in order to take an expositional spell, which will only reveal information that will ultimately become revealed in time anyway, is like my saying you can have only three apps on your phone, period, and you choose one that will tell you when the bus comes.

From the choice, I must extrapolate that the "you don't understand their language" is a well that other DMs go to constantly, so much that it's desperately needful because the experience is so fucking annoying.  When I first began to play, we dutifully wrote down that we understood elvish, orcish, goblinish and gnoll, or whatever the hell else ... which played out as a redundancy whenever we would talk to elves, orcs, goblins or whatever.  "Oh, I speak (blank)," we would say, and then an ordinary conversation would commence, in our table's language ... which spoiled any sense of "specialness" that pretending to speak in another language provided.  I quickly understood what a waste of time this was; why go through the pretense of other languages when we were going to say everything in English anyway?  So I dropped it from my game, never looked back, and never had a player express any wish for me to reinstall the language concept.

Occasionally, I put something on a wall the players can't read.  It makes a nice decoration.  They know they're going to find out what it says anyway, so they don't fret much.  And if someone happens to have a scroll of comprehend languages (who the hell would waste a spell-slot with it?), then it's nice.

That's most of what I have to say on language.  I've said it before, but hell, never hurts to re-iterate a relevant point.

Lycanthropy

 All right.  Now that this trail has gone cold, let's pick it up again.

Gygax, as quoted already says in his explanation of The Monster as a Player Character that:

"You have advice as to why they [monsters] are not featured, why no details of monster character classes are given herein."

In the very next section, I shit you not, Gygax provides a page and a quarter (pp.22-23) with rules on how to manage a character that's been made a lycanthrope, how to run the character AS lycanthrope, rules against experience gained when acting as a lycanthrope, what conditions cause a player to turn into a lycanthrope on a given night of the month and suggestions on what should matter to a character's future behaviour if they are turned into, respectively, a werebear, wereboar, wererat, weretiger or werewolf.

Yep.  Gygax — who either has a split personality, or who takes the credit for other things written by other people, or may just possibly be a hypocrite, as I've said earlier — on the page after writing a long diatribe as to why monster characters shouldn't be played, writes an even longer section on how to play this specific type of monster character.

I tried, when I was young, dumb and full of cum, to run these rules.  They don't work.  They don't make a good game.  The player, sick of the sequence, removed the curse after three months of running the character once a week and it was never spoken of in our group again.  In all the time since, I've been hesitant to run were-anythings.  The 3rd level cure disease spell, and the presence of a paladin in the party, makes the "lycanthropy threat" as meaningful as a bad cold; and so, I don't treat it as a disease.  The lycanthrope actually kills the victim; wastes all its hit points; then flees with the victim, to ensure the victim will turn into the lycanthrope: and then the victim is DEAD, period, even if it is killed again.

Thus, lycanthropy is as serious a form of death as any method of reproducing the undead.  What makes death by the nastier of undead especially frightening?  Permanency.  Transformed by a shadow into a shadow, you can't be raised.  When Lucy Westenra is transformed into a vampire, and is killed with a stake by her fiancee Arthur Holmwood, she doesn't transmogrify back into a human and they kiss.  She is dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  If you think that you can always escape death as a player character by shelling out cash for resurrection, don't die by wight, vampire or werewolf.

If the character becomes any of these things, then NO, the character doesn't get to run the monster.  This isn't Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you're not Oz, you're not Spike, you're not Angel.  In this particular case, I am very old school.

When Lucy—I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore her shape — saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat gives when taken unawares; then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy’s eyes in form and colour; but Lucy’s eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it! With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp cry, and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in his hands.

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said: —

"Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!"

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones — something of the tingling of glass when struck—which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.

As Seward, Morris and Holmwood realise, it is not Lucy at all — not any more.  She is a monster.  And this is what some monsters truly are ... if not evil, then certainly things so hideous that they cannot be tolerated and let free.  They must be destroyed, even if they were things once loved by the destroyers.

These themes are utterly lost to the seminal gratifications of modern writers, pun intended.  The trials of monster killing is not the childish syndrome of "ought we destroy the monsters?" ... but what do we lose of ourselves when we're forced to murder even the most hideous of things?  What price do we pay in defending decency or rightness?  What are we, once we've seen the worst the world has to offer?  What have we left to hope for?

It is hard to bring a party around to experience this; most, naturally do not want to experience it.  No one wants to be Seward, above, describing Lucy throwing the half-murdered child aside, before attempting to seduce her husband.  But "want" has nothing to do with it.  The underlying horrors of lycanthropy and other unnatural abominations are keys on the piano that the DM can play, if we dare investigate the sounds they make.  And if players can be made to hear that awful music, upsetting as that would be, the payback is an adventure the players won't quickly shelve in their minds.  We use the word "haunt" to describe memories that won't go away.

As a DM, I strive to leave those memories.

I can't do that by reducing lycanthropy to a bad case of warts.

The Monster as a Player Character: Part 2

Taking up this matter further.

A person might ask, "Why does it even matter?  Why not just let the baby have his bottle?"

I'm going to tell you a secret about managing people.  People, even hard working people, don't get along very well.  Whenever you give them something they want, you have to look the reward over very carefully, asking yourself, "Is this something that's going to help them work together, or is this something that's going to bend them apart?"  The more you give to a group that bends them apart, the flakier things get.  As Yeats said,

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity."

Yeats is speaking of England imbecilically sending troops to Ireland in 1919, but the metaphor holds.  Don't fuck with things just because they can be fucked with.  It just makes a mess.

There are many tangible, creative ways to prove one's individuality in D&D, through problem-solving, self-sacrifice, risk-taking and group dynamics.  Beware players who opt for reskinning their character superficially as a means of "expressing themselves."  Especially avoid players who use specifically those words as an argument.  As hard as it may be to imagine, if you want to keep a good solid group together, you must clamp down on the wrong kinds of individualism.  Make everyone play by the same rules and make them understand there's a reason why the default settings on character creation deliberately minimize options.  Originality comes from within — and not from which race you play.

Let's pick up Gygax's essay again, from page 21 of the original DMG:

"From all views then it is enough fantasy to assume a swords & sorcery cosmos, with impossible professions and make-believe magic. To adventure amongst the weird is fantasy enough without becoming that too! Consider also that each and every Dungeon Master worthy of that title is continually at work expanding his or her campaign milieu. The game is not merely a meaningless dungeon and an urban base around which is plopped the dreaded wilderness. Each of you must design a world, piece by piece, as if a jigsaw puzzle were being hand crafted, and each new section must fit perfectly the pattern of the other pieces. Faced with such a task all of us need all of the aid and assistance we can get. Without such help the sheer magnitude of the task would force most of us to throw up our hands in despair."

Oh, how I wish that what's said here was respected by the author himself, his company or anyone associated with him!  Is it not bewildering to hear these words spoken about plunking a dungeon next to a village from the man who built his career on such an approach?  Of course, I did not know in 1979, the book fresh in my hands, that these words were written by a fraud and a hypocrite.  Let's not quibble.  I ACCEPTED THESE WORDS AS DOGMA.  Without question, without hesitation, without a week going by between my having this book in my hands and my starting on the task, I set out to build a campaign milieu of the kind described.  Granted, that was in part because my first DM was committed to that ideal, as was every other DM I knew at the time, living as I did in an urban hotbed where I'd spoken to no less than 10 DMs before getting my hands on this hardcover book.  And, without a question, that first effort was an unmitigated disaster (about which we shall not speak).  Yet I do not concede the point; if I asked for a justification, for guidance, for emotional support for the creation of a personally built campaign setting, THERE are the words, good enough to be carved in stone on Gygax's mausoleum ... if the man hadn't been a faker and a cheat.

"By having a basis to work from, and a well-developed body of work to draw upon, at least part of this task is handled for us. When history, folklore, myth, fable and fiction can be incorporated or used as reference for the campaign, the magnitude of the effort required is reduced by several degrees. Even actual sciences can be used - geography, chemistry, physics, and so forth."

 Abso-fucking-lutely.

Gygax is speaking of human essentials and foundations, human behaviour, human habits, culture and mores.  He's saying, so much of the work has already been done for you!  Read, find what works for your setting and steal, baby, steal.  The genius is that these things have already proved their worth with millions of storybook readers and fireside tale-tellers.  Not just in this past few decades but for centuries.  These are things that every writer and inventor steals from!  Again and again we go back to the earliest works, the fundamental themes, the science of human endeavour, learning it, sorting it, shaping it in new ways and expressing it to a willing and anxious audience.  These melodies have proven themselves.  We don't have to sweat and cringe and hope the listeners will approve!  If we play the notes and chords well, if we practice our fingering, if we study and stretch ourselves, the spectators will pound the tables and stamp their feet with joy and approval.

But if we hold ourselves above such things ... if we're "too good" for the mass of human knowledge ... well Gygax has an answer for that too.

"Alien viewpoints can be found, of course, but not in quantity (and often not in much quality either). Those works which do not feature mankind in a central role are uncommon. Those which do not deal with men at all are scarce indeed. To attempt to utilize any such bases as the central, let alone sole, theme for a campaign milieu is destined to be shallow, incomplete, and totally unsatisfying for all parties concerned unless the creator is a Renaissance Man and all-around universal genius with a decade or two to prepare the game and milieu. Even then, how can such an effort rival one which borrows from the talents of genius and imaginative thinking which come to us from literature?"

It is in these words that I find my utter distaste for a game like Call of Cthulhu.  My feeling has long been that basing a role-playing games on a small set of books by a single third-rate author, whatever his peculiar appeal, makes for the dreariest game sessions.  Having read a half-dozen of the man's books, I find them formulaic and clumsy, not to mention hackneyed in plot development.  His plot contrivances, used in the same way in every novel, are painful once recognized.  Everything that is written down is always lost in some convenient way.  Every proof is confounded.  Every would-be witness goes mad, or is never found again.  As a juvenile experiment, Lovecraft has his value.  Every 13-year-old should read him, when they're young enough to be taken in by the mystery and bafflegab.  But an adult who strives to spend every Saturday playing out the same themes again and again?  Please mark such places on a map so I can well avoid them.

A "Renaissance Man" (or WOMAN!) would only become such if they were thoroughly steeped in "the talents of genius and imaginative thinking" that has gone before.  Such a person wouldn't think to throw away human resources any more than did Spencer, Shakespeare or Milton (sorry, I know, three people never heard of, and certainly not influential on fantasy literature).  Yet how often do we hear of yet one more DM on a blog or a podcast chatting on about the "new campaign" they're going to make based upon some profoundly esoteric original theme? — only to never hear of these things actually being crafted or envied after.

Willy nilly, I am not a Jedi or a superhero; I am not a vampire or anything else that sounds like a thing I'd get tired of in a weekend.  I'm a human being.  I like human beings.  I'm interested in playing games where human beings take part, where they pursue human achievements and they don't depend on themes that barely extend over the 357 pages of a book.  My players can burn through a book length's store of material in two or three sessions.  I need MORE.  I need everything.  Less is asking me to compromise in my imagination and I'm not going to do that.

I'll let Gygax finish his end of this argument:

"Having established the why of the humanocentric basis of the game, you will certainly see the impossibility of any lasting success for a monster player character. The environment for adventuring will be built around humans and demi-humans for the most part. Similarly, the majority of participants in the campaign will be human. So unless the player desires a character which will lurk alone somewhere and be hunted by adventurers, there are only a few options open to him or her. A gold dragon can assume human shape, so that is a common choice for monster characters. If alignment is stressed, this might discourage the would-be gold dragon. If it is also pointed out that he or she must begin at the lowest possible value, and only time and the accumulation and retention of great masses of wealth will allow any increase in level (age), the idea should be properly squelched. If even that fails, point out that the natural bent of dragons is certainly for their own kind — if not absolute solitude — so what part could a solitary dragon play in a group participation game made up of non-dragons? Dragon non-player characters, yes! As player characters, not likely at all. 

"As to other sorts of monsters as player characters, you as DM must decide in light of your aims and the style of your campaign. The considered opinion of this writer is that such characters are not beneficial to the game and should be excluded. Note that exclusion is best handled by restriction and not by refusal. Enumeration of the limits and drawbacks which are attendant upon the monster character will always be sufficient to steer the intelligent player away from the monster approach, for in most cases it was only thought of as a likely manner of game domination. The truly experimental-type player might be allowed to play such a monster character for a time so as to satisfy curiosity, and it can then be moved to non-player status and still be an interesting part of the campaign — and the player is most likely to desire to drop the monster character once he or she has examined its potential and played that role for a time. The less intelligent players who demand to play monster characters regardless of obvious consequences will soon remove themselves from play in any event, for their own ineptness will serve to have players or monsters or traps finish them off.

"So you are virtually on your own with regard to monsters as player characters. You have advice as to why they are not featured, why no details of monster character classes are given herein. The rest is up to you, for when all is said and done, it is your world, and your players must live in it with their characters. Be good to yourself as well as them, and everyone concerned will benefit from a well-conceived, well-ordered, fairly-judged campaign built upon the best of imaginative and creative thinking."

There are many things about Gygax I don't like.  One of them is the squirmy way he has of avoiding responsibility.  Like the side-step I addressed with regards to poison, he equivocates.  One moment, he says "squelch" the idea, and the next he throws out an ambiguous, "by restriction and not by refusal."  What's that now?  Oh, and hey, while this is a rule book that I've taken a year of my life writing, that's meant to codify the greatest game milestone in a century, by all means, "you do you."  Bleh.

You are NOT on your own with regards to monsters as player characters.  You're at the mercy of your players, whoever they may be, and if you allow yourself to get jerked around by their sob-stories and pretended curiosity, you deserve the jacking you're going to get.  Remember, while you're letting the player have his bottle, as DM you're the one that has to make this slouching beast fit into your campaign.  You're on the hook for writing the details of monster character classes that Gygax didn't add.  It's your time, your imagination, your patience, your game structure that gets fucked with, while you muddle your way through so your player can strut his fucking hour on your stage.  Remember that. And remember that while you're pandering to this monster-runner, there's a shit ton of things you should be doing that you're not.  So no, friend.  You're not on your own.  You're not that lucky.

The Monster as a Player Character: Part 1

Reading over this section, I see immediately why I embraced it so hard and why Gygax's argument against using monsters as player characters failed to convince.  Amid the criticism that I've launched against the DMG, what's wrong with it and what needed improvement, this passage — and others like it — expresses an element to the game that would later get swept under a rug and forgotten.  Gygax correctly interprets the problem; he correctly predicts the damage this practice will cause to the game; and he expresses most clearly what the game is for and the responsibility of the dungeon master.  Ideals that affected me deeply, that sank in and stayed with me ... and ultimately formed me as a DM.

Were I to try and paraphrase it, much of the integrity and meaning would be lost: I couldn't put this passage better than the author does ... which makes me want to believe that Gygax didn't write it, since it is unnaturally clear and free from his usual dichotomy.  Gygax and I have similar styles; in writing sentences, we swing for the fences, we throw in vicious little asides and we write passages that anticipate the reader.  Yet there's very little of that here.  Gygax's usual adverbs have melted away and it speaks much more in the 2nd person than usual.  That doesn't mean this isn't Gygax.  It probably is.  I mention it only to point out that Gygax clearly worked on this passage.  A lot.  His concern is evident; he wants the reader to comprehend what he's saying and take the advice to heart.

I see no way to handle the material except one section at a time.  Let me say, first, that I don't do this to bury the passage, but to praise it.  Gygax writes,

"On occasion one player or another will evidence a strong desire to operate as a monster, conceiving a playable character as a strong demon, a devil, a dragon, or one of the most powerful sort of undead creatures.  This is done principally because the player sees the desired monster character as superior to his or her peers and likely to provide a dominant role for him or her in the campaign."

Direct and to the point.  The motive here is undeniably a selfish power-grab.  Players will invent all sorts of reasons — that they're bored of playing with "ordinary" characters, that they want to have something different, that the game is about imagination and "what's the difference" between playing one kind of race or another.  The argument presages the host of racial classes that would emerge decades hence, including the named dragon type — and the personal problems that arose.  Make no mistake, however, even if the player legitimately believes the excuses made: this is an end run around the DM's campaign.  Since the rules are lacking for running strange and different monsters, even those that are less powerful than the ones Gygax lists, the wiggle-room for the player increases.

"A moment of reflection will bring them to the unalterable conclusion that the game is heavily weighted towards mankind.  ADVANCED D&D is unquestionably 'humanocentric,' with demi-humans, semi-humans and humanoids in various orbits around the sun of humanity."

Gygax is speaking ex cathedra here, where in fact more reason was needed.  He's correct.  He's taken stock of the humanity sitting around the table and from that he's perceived that it will be impossible for human players to be anything except human.  Elves, dwarves and halflings may not be definitively "human," but in game they have human motives, human concepts of emotion and human frailties.  Things that many monsters simply wouldn't have.

Unfortunately for Gygax writing in 1979, he hasn't perceived the nightmare that's ready to be unleashed on culture in the name of "identity politics."  In his era, the 60s and 70s, the common feeling was a sentiment that we're all human and that "getting along" was what mattered ... but marketing and political forces in the 80s and 90s would pressure culture to shift to the importance of individuality at any price, the social fall-out of which we're experiencing now.  Players would refuse to identify as human because it's not enough.  We're going through a crisis of, "More individuality! More individuality!" ... so that the average reader would today see the passage above as a form of conformist fascism.  "I have a right to play a lizard man," shouts the present-day player, because denying the player that right is stepping on his or her identity.

Essentially, however, the lizard man still gets played as a human; with human expectations and human grievances.  The perceived special-case "lizard man" motives invented by the player are necessarily contrived human motives because the player IS human.  And what results are scenes of a lizard man, or whatever character it is, walking into a bar like any other patron, while everyone appropriately ignores any difference between the lizard man, the dragonborne, the tiefling, the minotaur or the lamia, because this is the political culture's present-day guidelines.

Gygax will come back to this point and so will I.

"Men are the worst monsters, particularly high level characters such as clerics, fighters, and magic-users — whether singly, in small groups, or in large companies. The ultra-powerful beings of other planes are more fearsome — the 3 D's of demi-gods, demons and devils are enough to strike fear into most characters, let alone when the very gods themselves are brought into consideration. Yet, there is a point where the well-equipped, high-level party of adventurers can challenge a demon prince, an arch-devil or a demi-god. While there might well be some near or part humans with the group so doing, it is certain that the leaders will be human. In co-operation men bring ruin upon monsterdom, for they have no upper limits as to level or acquired power from spells or items."

Marvellous point that.  Most DMs play the game world with humanity as the underdogs: they're so weak and spongy, so easily speared or torn apart with vicious teeth.   The perspective helps excuse the atrocities committed upon dungeons by player characters.  But if the monsters are the lords of the earth, then why is it the humans live out in the open, in scattered farmhouses and in easy to find settlements, while the monsters live in secret, cowering underground behind trapped defenses?

Gygax is making the argument, why would you want to be a monster?  Sure, they look powerful, but we kick their ass, every time!  Being a human character is cool.  Isn't that obvious?

"The game features humankind for a reason. It is the most logical basis in an illogical game. From a design aspect it provides the sound groundwork. From a standpoint of creating the campaign milieu it provides the most readily usable assumptions. From a participation approach it is the only method, for a11 players are, after all is said and done, human, and it allows them the role with which most are most desirous and capable of identifying with."

Again, Gygax fails here to intrinsically make the point — because he sees the point as painfully obvious.  Oddly, for me to make his point clearer, I have to give credence to the argument that Gygax is writing from the cultural perspective of an entitled white male whose essentially racist.

Where he speaks of the "milieu," he refers to the traditional game setting: cities with human residents, trading with other like cities, surrounded by a settled rural and hinterland production complex that provides raw materials to the manufacturing base.  Because this structure is "logical" and forms a "solid groundwork" for the expectations the players will have of how the world fits together — being that it's the world they know — it stands to reason that threats to that world from the outside, i.e. monsters, don't have a place in this humankind-oriented place.  Therefore, if you're a player character and you want to visit the town, or roam safely past the farmer's fields, or wave hello in the morning to passersby on the road, then it's probably a good idea if you don't look like a demon or a dragon.  Gygax is arguing that the world would rightfully deny you access to the marketplace and the tavern; that no, you wouldn't be welcome at the festival, and that the king's guards would kill you if you showed your face on the city streets.

In short, you'll be deliberately persecuted as a monster if you don't fit the acceptable standard for appearance and race, because we don't want your kind around here.

Get it?  This kind of sentiment is awfully squicky in the present 2021 culture.  Players don't see why it should be this way.  This is a fantasy game.  "If I can fantasize playing a weird-looking monster type character, why can't I also fantasize about a cultural game world that totally accepts that character as 'acceptable' and 'respectable.'  Why all this racism?  I don't identify as a human.  I identify as a gargoyle.  What's wrong with that?"

This is hard to answer.  To begin with, personally I'm not a gargoyle or any other fantasy creature, I'm a human being.  I traditionally (which means, "old white man") view those who seek escape in cherished falsehoods — who then insist that I play lip service to their cherished falsehoods — as part of the abusive small-'e' evil in this world.  From my fool-on-the-hill vantage, I question whether this four-decade experiment with individuality has contributed to our liberty or happiness.  I see the plethora of viewpoints gathering themselves in groups to use the same tactics of accusation, propaganda and ostracization that have permeated world history ... I'll be damned if I see more than a grey sludge of hatred and demands for constant attention, regardless of the individuality in full bellow.

I think it does players good to get a slap in the face when they're told, "Nope, you get to pick from these seven races.  No, I don't give a good gawddamn for your feelings.  No, I'm perfectly fine if you don't want to play.  My emotional pity is not your human right."

Yes, that's right.  Humans are the real monsters.

Let's continue this on another post.

Assassins' Use of Poison

Poison is about my least favourite part of the game: not because I see it as game-breaking for a player to use it as a short cut to kill an enemy, but because rules for it are hard to handle.

To begin with, poison is cheap and plentiful.  Five minutes in any wood will quickly put you in reach of a wide variety of poisonous berries and mushrooms, any of which can be crushed and brewed into a drink that will kill an enemy effectively.  We don't even need to know which mushrooms or berries —  pick anything you're unfamiliar with by sight and it's almost certain to be poisonous ... and what medieval character will not have gone on berry-picking expeditions as a youngster, as part of a general community escapade?  This means you don't need ANY skill, so that's not a restriction either.

This blows Gygax's perception in the original DMG (p.20) that poisons would cost 5, 30, 200 or 1500 g.p. apiece ... or that they should be rated according to their ability to kill you.  I know of some white berries growing in the alley behind my apartment that will kill you flat, that won't cost a dime.

Gygax ignores all this.  He states plainly, in a passage intended to speak directly to the assassin's use of poison,

"It is not the place of this work to actually serve as a monual for poisons and poisoning. Not only is such a subject distosteful, but it would not properly mesh with the standard poison system used herein."

Rarely should we expect to find such a miserable side-step.  Let me see if I can compress the "poison system" he denotes.

To use a poison, the assassin must wait until 9th level to "study poisons" for four courses of 5-8 weeks  each (this has to be pieced from the context, it isn't stated explicitly), which can't be interrupted.  This enables the assassin to study a group of "poison skills" that are uselessly generalized in description.  Each week costs the assassin 2000-8000 g.p.  Not kidding.  The 9th level must find an NPC "mentor" of at least 12th level to teach how to study this skill.  That is also a charge, though the number isn't specified.  Why not?  Who knows.  Because it took too much space to add another ludicrous number per week.  As Gygax states, "he or she can also set the fee as he or she sees fit."

The assassin has to gather a "wide variety" of animal, vegetable and mineral poisons for this training ... though this vague description is useless to the player and DM.  After all the study is done, the assassin will have "complete knowledge" — well, 90% — of all poisons known.  At this point, the assassin can start to use poisons to assassinate, selecting one of NINE poison effects included in the games rules.  Yes, that's right: you've just paid an average of 14,444 g.p. per poison choice, only three of which cause death when a save isn't made.

Oh, but wait!  Before you can use the poison, you've got to compound it.  What was I thinking!  It's suggested the compounding should take a week of game time, not to mention an additional 200-1200 g.p. (it's not stated whether this is per dose or not; one might assume it's per batch, but there's no number of doses per batch described anywhere in the passage) for "materials, bribes, etc."  It isn't clear how this number compares with a later number which states "cost/dose" ... the book's user is supposed to "figure it out" I guess, as best their RPG-unfamiliar 1979 fifteen-year old brain can.

Having shelled out this spectacular amount of money, the assassin now has a set of poisons, 6 in 9 of which have a 40% or better chance of being detected by smell.  For many tens of thousands of g.p. spent, the assassin has exactly one poison that can't be detected by smell, that takes 10-40 minutes to kill an enemy.  Compare this with a 9th level mage's ability to cast fireball automatically everyday without ever having to spend a dime, or the same character's ability to dispatch an enemy with assassination or backstabbing.  Hm.  Whaddaya say, Jack?  Wanna study some poisons?

The thrust of this causes a great many non-imaginative DMs and players to think, "Wow, making rules for things is stupid; why do we even have rules for things?"  Because, after all, if the Great Gygax failed, it must mean the task is impossible!

On some level, I understand the desire to throw one's hands in the air.  Dip a toe into the subject matter associated with poison and you'll find yourself in the deep end of the ocean in no time.  Gygax's earlier sidestep was meant to conceal that there are 30,000+ "common" forms of poison, related to plants, fungi, insects, reptiles, amphibians, fish and more.  Trying to make sense of it is difficult, since most of the content found wants to tell you a great deal more about what the poison comes from than what it does biologically, mostly because the world wants to keep that information out of your hands!  The best solution I've found is to presuppose an effect you want a poison to have, and then invent a source for that poison and say "screw the real world" when justifying that source.  After all, what difference does it make?  I'm under no obligation to make black mamba poison function in my game world exactly as it does in the real world, now am I?

I want to, though, and that is one source of my frustration.

Point in fact, everything we know about poison (or any other subject) wasn't obtained by a bunch of lazy non-imaginative scientists throwing their hands in the air and crying, "Wow, it's really hard to learn and know things!  Knowing things is stupid!  Why do we even need to know things?"

The purpose for making rules in a rational D&D game isn't based on what's easy, what's fun or what appears, on the surface, to be doable.  It's based on giving the players a grounding in what's possible, so they can make practical decisions regarding their characters.  We make rules for poison so players can know precisely what a black mamba's poison DOES, so that when the subject comes up, the DM isn't just pulling shit from the dark place to make the game work.  It is impossible for a group of players to make a judgement call on what to do when a character is poisoned based on whatever brown matter spatters across the table out of the DM's unconsidered and now desperate-to-invent something grabassery!  Forced to play in a context like this hamstrings the quality of the campaign ... but hell.

It's not like I haven't said THAT before.

This is a difficult sentiment, but let me make this pitch for why players ought not to use poison in the game, except when absolutely necessary.  It isn't because poison is costly.  Or hard to find.  Or easy to use.  Or kills 10th level characters too easily and makes the game unfun.  There is no reason not to use poison when only the construct of the game universe is considered.

In the real world, when anyone uses poison as a method, including Vlad, the impression this makes on the remainder of human beings is not a good one.  Kill a person with a sword and you might get some sympathy.  Waste someone with a fireball in the heat of battle and chances are you might reasonably expect a pass from higher ups who respect or revere magic.  But fall into the hands of an authority that learns that you used poison to overcome an enemy ...

And you will never, NEVER, catch a break.  Even if you are innocent, the forces that exist to judge you will see you BURN, on principle.

Count on it.

Assassination Experience Points

This has nothing to do with the subject matter, but ... I had my procedure today for cancer and I'm okay.  Two tiny polyps, removed, everything else looks good and I was sent home.  I'm still waiting on a final test but the expectation is that I won't need to repeat the procedure for five years.  Once home, I crashed.  I woke up about two hours ago, watched a very good movie about an assassin, Nobody, which I highly recommend, and now I'm settling in at 11 pm to write a post.  Got my cup of coffee and everything.

When I came to D&D as a young kid, I took most of the rules at face value.  I tried to remain true to Gygax's descriptions of the character classes and the DMG in general, getting frustrated like most people but believing in the words and the ideas with the dim-witted trust of a 15 y.o. in love with this game.  Sometimes I feel I have to stress that I've been playing this game and reading these rules for a loooooong time.  If I'm cynical these days, if I betray a hard-bitten grudge for Gygax, if I grind my teeth over various phrases and notions presented in the books, I must stress that I come by my resentment honestly.  No one hates an ex-religion like an ex-fanatic.

I haven't had reason to comment on many of these passages in the DMG, as I've had lately, with digging through the books section by section.  Gygax's vision for the assassin, in particular, baffles me.  I mentioned earlier that he seems to have wanted the class to be some kind of weird 13th century James Bond.  This is emphasized a bit more by this inclusion of special rules for the assassin gaining experience points specifically from committing assassinations.

For myself, experience is awarded on a flat system.  I don't care who causes damage or under what circumstance, as long as the damage is caused by the character.  This includes pushing a victim off a building and letting the ground do the hard work.  It does not, however, include pushing a victim into a shark pool and letting the sharks do the work.  I know, I know; but sharks need x.p. too, and there's only so much that goes around.

Gygax's logic goes like this, and I quote from p.20:

"An assassin receives 100 x.p./level of the character assassinated minus or plus 50 x.p. for every level the assassin is greater or lesser than his or her victim. This is modified by multipliers for the degree of difficulty of the mission - simple (x ½), difficult (x 1). or extraordinary (x 1½) ...

"Therefore, if an 8th level assassin snuck up on and surprised a 10th level magic-user in the dungeon and successfully assassinated him, the assassin would receive 1,ooO x.p. plus another 100 x.p. since the magic-user was 2 levels higher than he. However, since it was a simple mission, the total 1100 x.p. would be multiplied by %, giving 550 points ..."

 

Let's not waste time discussing how silly this is, or how meaningless 550, or even 1100 x.p. is for an 8th level character.  Let's consider instead the purpose of this rule and ask why does it exist?

Was Gygax trying to encourage assassinations and felt that a special bonus mechanic was needed to make them happen?  Did he think that either players weren't killing enough other players and non-players at his table, or that they wouldn't want to?  It's interesting that the basis of this above experience is a straight percentage roll, success/fail, which can be found in the combat section, on page 75.  There it tells us that the chances of an 8th level assassin killing a 10th level victim is ... 30%.  Ugh.  7:3 odds against the assassin, for a lousy 550 x.p.  There's some weird thinking going on here.

It's not a wonder players in my game never pursued this.  The odds always needed to be better, which challenged a thinking process that continues to pervade adventure-design.  It's something I keep doing, that I trip on and have to remind myself is a bad habit.  It goes like this:

A first-level character should not be able to easily kill a 10th level character.

Taking the example above, a 1st level assassin is sitting in the study of a 10th level thief.  They've known each other for ages, so the thief trusts the assassin; the thief notices a picture on the wall is crooked, so he gets up, crosses the room and straightens the picture, turning his back on the assassin.  Little does he know the assassin has been extorted and also paid to kill him, so the moment the thief is fixing the picture, or perhaps cleaning it, the assassin leaps up and stabs the thief in the back, taking him by surprise.  The chance of the assassin succeeding in this assassination according to the rules?  1%.

Why so low?  Why not 50/50?  Or better, since the thief trusts the assassin.  The reason is apparently simple.  Because the thief is 10th LEVEL, that's why.  And this is supposed to be some sort of mystical, super-protective fairy-dust plot armour.  We can't have 1st level characters just willy-nilly killing HIGH level characters!  It would be chaos!  The rivers would boil!  Fire would rain from the sky!

In Gygax's system, if the assassin rolled the magic 1%, the reward would be 550 x.p.  If we forewent the special assassin experience rule and used the X.P. table on page 85, and supposing the thief averaged 5 h.p. per level, for a total of 50 hit points, the reward would be 1600.  Yes, that's right.  Gygax's special experience for assassins is markedly less that real experience.  But stick a pin in that.  I want first to say that if the x.p. were being awarded by my system, the experience would be 500 x.p., for the thief's hit points, no matter how the thief was killed.

My experience points and Gygax's special experience wouldn't get the thief halfway to 2nd level.  So what, exactly, is the big deal?  What horrible thing happens if a player gets lucky, even if I give him a high chance, like 60%?  He gets 500 x.p.  A 10th level dies.  It's not like the world can't go on without that 10th level.  It's not like there aren't other high level characters around to take up the slack.  It's not like a 10th level isn't a thing I can "invent out of thin air" at my will.  Therefore, SO WHAT if a 10th level dies?  So what if the player slips in and knocks off the wizard by using stealth, guile and cleverness to get set up for the kill!  Why are these chances to kill by assassination so low?

Possibly Gygax didn't realize it, but he actively invented rules to stop assassins from being assassins.  An 8th level assassin has a better chance of killing a 10th level character by bringing along a party and doing the fighting hand to hand, and gets better experience in the bargain, even by the AD&D system.  There's no logical reason for an assassin of less than 5th level to kill anyone by assassination, as decent odds only exist for people who are easily killed in straight melee.  Even if you do kill someone, unless it's someone of 7th level or less, the assassination bonus system works against the method.  Why would someone build a system this way?

I think there are two possible explanations.  1) and this is dead certain: Gygax took credit for writing the book, but did not write large sections of the book and did not even vet them.  2) someone, either Gygax or one of the other writers, really liked the assassin, while someone else really hated the class.  Apparently, they worked hard to goof on each other ... and then they sold this book to an unsuspecting public, me, who eventually had to pull this thing apart and burn parts of it to the ground.

This in-fighting was not adequately settled by the editor, Mike Carr; meaning this is absolutely Carr's fault, not the petty squabbles of the staff writers.  But perhaps Carr was just a figure-head, some dupe who was there to correct spelling and set type.  More's the pity, because nuttery like this is one of the reasons why any original faith in the texts faltered after a few years, leading to poorer efforts like the Unearthed Arcana and Wilderness Adventures ... which descended into the miasma that ultimately became an edition multiplicity syndrome.

Perhaps that's too much to hang on one little passage, just two bewildering paragraphs stuffed into a large book full of enigmatic game design choices.  Like the next one I'll discuss, soon.

p.s.,

The example of assassination I've given really happened.  Feel free to shout it out in the comments if you know.

Thieves and Assassins Setting Traps

At last, a subject I've been too lazy to address.  Here, Tardigrade's comment earlier today was prescient:

"... By pointless I mean, situations where that skill is needed will hardly, if ever, come up. For example, in a funhouse style dungeon, traps are everywhere. In a magical 15th century setting, who in the world is building crossbow traps or putting needle traps in chests? Find and remove traps becomes a solution looking for a problem."

I can count the number of times I've had a player ask to set up a trap in a game on one hand.  If I add the times I've done it in someone else's game, double that number sounds about right.  Unquestionably, there ought to be players out there who would set traps up with every session, two or three times a session, if they had a mind for it.  Yet somehow, most people have an inherent sense that traps are a cruel and improper form of warfare; or they have a sneaking suspicion the trap's going to go off in their face and they'd rather not deal with it.

So, although I do mean to get around to substantively creating exhaustive rules on how to make traps, and exactly what sort of traps can be made with how much knowledge, I haven't had any call for it.  Players with the opportunity to pursue the ability don't.  When they have the ability they don't use it.  As such, Tardigrade's comment doesn't only apply to removing traps but setting them as well.

Which I find odd.  Since my beginning to play, there has been a love affair between players and traps that can be definitely be found in fetish land.  They're hardly covered in the original books, at least mechanically, but they're scattered everywhere in every dungeon environment like poplar fluff in late May.  The common examples like arrow traps, spear traps, falling blocks and doors, sliding walls, oil that pours out from the ceiling so that the trap can light it with a match, even illusionary walls, had to wait for pamphlets full of tricks and traps to explain how they worked, precisely ... and always in a way that would barely work with 20th century skills (remembering these ideas all come from the last century), much less the late 13th century, when most D&D takes place (that being the approximate era where Gygax's vision of combat, politics and social development coincide).

I've discussed this before, but briefly: traps are a problem.  It's nice if a trap pares a few hit points off a player, though in modern versions this is repaired with a fingersnap.  If a trap actually kills someone its a DM-Player relation problem.  It's not like a random encounter with a motivated tick ("enthusias-tick"), where the creature would probably have been dispatched early if the party hadn't been sloppy or unlucky.  Killer traps are designed to kill player characters, forcing us to ask, why does this trap even exist?  What game purpose does it serve?  Certainly not experience; and while traps might add a little tension, they're also a motivational wet blanket.  Take the trap out of the dungeon and players DON'T miss them; I've never had a party reach the end of a dungeon and tell me how disappointed they were it didn't have "more traps."

Which is why I feel the balance of traps ought to be in the player's hands; and like other skilled abilities, knowledgeable players ought to set up the same trap over and over with fail-safe capability.  A simple penalty can be imposed regarding how long it takes to set up a complex trap, how long to take it down and how the pieces have to be transported, as well as how much knowledge you have to have and how much the pieces cost.  This is only sensible.

And irrational traps that employ illusionary technology that doesn't exist in the books; or machinery that doesn't rust or seize up from dust; or heavy pieces under tension that just don't give even though the trap was set 8 years ago; well, either these things have to be explained "in game" by some form of magic, material or profoundly secret knowledge just not available to the common person.

Additionally, any one with trap setting skill ought to be able to "smell" a trap, within reason.  This constant "checking for traps" jargon is timewasting, dull and unneeded.  If skilled characters walk within 10 feet of a trap, whether or not they're looking, say, "Something is wrong."

"What?" asks the player.

"There are scratches around the door that no one else could see, but suggest to you that there's been some 'special work' done here.  You suspect a trap."

"Hm.  I look around the door."

I know.  DM's don't do this because, as ever, they think "the unknown" has this magic fairy dust that turns every straw campaign into gold.  But letting the players know up front that there's a trap draws their attention, gains their interest, makes them feel in control of their environment, which stuffs their chests full of pride and doesn't change a damn thing about still having to get past the trap without fucking up.  As I said with my last post, hiding information from a player is a bug, not a feature.

Thief Abilities

Please forgive me if this post covers old ground that I've written about before - as long as I'm here (p. 19 of the DMG), I feel it's best to be comprehensive.

Before getting into the individual abilities, let me address an overarching issue related to rolling dice for thieves' skills.  For those who don't know, the original rules relied on a pass/fail mechanic: you wished to "hide in shadows," you rolled a die.  If you succeeded, you disappeared; and if you failed, you didn't.  I'll talk more about hiding in shadows later.

Let's start with this quote from Gygax:

"Roll of the dice for any thief function must be kept absolutely secret, so the thief (or similar character) does not know the results."

This remarkable, firmly made statement is never properly explained in the original books.  Presumedly, thieves "can't know" if they've succeeded in hiding in shadows or moving silently, since they can't see themselves.  This doesn't quite work, however, since pickpockets will obviously know whether they've picked a pocket, while a wall climber will know if the wall was climbed.  However, it does say "ANY" thief function, which means it applies to opening locks, hearing noise, reading languages and — here's the kicker — finding & removing traps.

Now, this last is a thinking problem.  Let's say that I'm holding the roll secret as your DM.  You check for traps and I say you don't see any.  Aha!  You know that might mean there are no traps, or that you didn't find them.  For you, there's no way of knowing which.  Of course, you know that if you're a much higher level thief, there are probably no traps ... but since there's always some possibility of the die roll failing, you can never really know, not even if you're 17th level (where the thief table stops).

Okay, let's say there is a trap and you detected it.  You try to remove it and I roll the dice.  You ask, "Did I remove the trap?" and I answer, "You don't know."  See, the die roll must be kept secret.  You're not meant to know if you succeeded.  You're just supposed to trust to your luck.  Period.

On the surface, this sounds like a great mechanic.  It's really not bad ... the first time you encounter it.  The tenth time, or the hundredth time, the mechanic gets pretty frustrating.  Since it applies to every thieving ability, very soon it becomes the core reason that players don't want to play thieves — because if you play a thief according to the original rules, this mechanic is all you have.

Supposedly, the low amount of experience you need to go up a level compensates for this frustration.  Except it doesn't.  Eventually, you learn to hate the thieving skills, ceasing to rely on them except when absolutely necessary.  Eventually, you'll settle into the hear noise and open locks skills, which you'll overuse, because are the options in your skillset that won't bite you in the ass if they fail.

Pass/fail mechanics suck.  The exception is any rule that lets you try to pass repeatedly until you do, such as attempting to hit with a weapon, where you can make the attempt every round.  When you get one chance at something, however ... well, the pass/fail option better really, really matter, because when it is applied to stupid bullshit stuff like can you pick a pocket, and do it without being noticed and sparking the 95th chase of a thief through the streets of a town by the guard that's taken place in your world (in my early days, seemed like this was happening every session), then the mechanic just sucks.

It is not made better by keeping the mechanic a secret.  Imagine fighting a whole combat where every hit you make is a secret, but every hit the enemy makes is fully revealed.  Sound like fun?  Yes, yes, I know that some of you right now are pausing and saying, hey!  That really sounds ... accurate or realistic or cool.  You might even try it ... and I'd lay money that the first time, it would feel workable.

The tenth time, not so much.

Too many times game designers come up with mechanics they think really work ... because they don't have to spend hundreds of hours at the fucking forge, watching a green bar so you can strike the blade properly, until your eyes bleed.

A pickpocket in the real world gets to know precisely whose pockets can be picked and how hard it is to get something they've seen once out of a pocket they've identified.  It isn't a die roll.  It isn't even a 99 in 100 roll.  It is so close to certain that it's possible to do it for months at a time without being caught.  The balance is not "can the pocket be picked" but is that particular pocket worth the effort?  Since most pockets aren't with certainty, the pickpocket floats around areas of tourists, because tourists have lots of money and they usually carry it on themselves.  Pickpockets also frequent areas where people use cash to pay for gambling and hookers, so there's no record of where they've spent or lost their money, or how much they're earning.  Anyone who looks comfortable and at ease in such places are left alone; pickpockets target the uncertain, the uncomfortable, the ones that are nervous and sweating ... because they have money and they're not part of the local criminalized community.  There's a lot that goes into the practice.  Additionally, when a pickpocket gets caught, it isn't by failing to pick a pocket.  There's always a strategy for that, when it so very rarely occurs, such as making the pull near a place where the dupe can be pushed into an alley or either clubbing or stabbing the dupe before they can cry out for help.  No, a pickpocket gets pinched because someone else who knows how pickpockets work is watching.  They see the pull.  The dupe never does.

These realities surrounding the practice obliterate the pass/fail structure.  It doesn't make sense.  Similar arguments can be made about hiding in shadows and moving silently.  If I'm far enough away from you, I'm always "moving silently" in relation to you.  It always matters how near to you I want to be; and details like what surface I'm walking over or what I'm wearing, how much light exists and most importantly, who's listening and what are they doing?  We train people to pick their moment, pick their equipment and pick their target ... so it isn't a chance thing.  With enough experience and enough time to prepare, slipping up to a person silently is automatic ... unless the target has their own training and has made their own preparations.  Any flat method for calculating this that doesn't recognize these conditional issues is a dumb, ill-considered mechanic.  A single die roll that applies to ALL situations is idiocy in the extreme.

Sneaking up on a person or past them is a combination of many factors — the use of silence and shadows being only two of them.  There's no practical game rule for treating silence and hiding as different skills; you never do one without attempting to do the other, and by insisting that a roll is made for both in all circumstances only assures that full likely success is a very tiny number.  The chance of a 1st level thief in AD&D, without dexterity or racial bonuses, succeeding at BOTH hiding in shadows and moving silently is 10% of 15% ... or 1.5%.  The best you can do at 1st level is to be a halfling thief with an 18 dexterity: this gives you a 35% chance of 35% to succeed in both: 12.25%.  You literally have a 1 in 8 chance of slipping up on a guard at 1st level, if you're the best thief possible.  And, of course, if you fail at either roll, you'll be seen or you'll be heard.  You're set up to fail.

And remember: you're not supposed to know if you succeeded at either.  That information is kept secret from you, until it's too late.

Similar arguments to these apply to other abilities.  Opening locks is not a matter of "can you succeed?" but "how long does it take?"  If you understand locks, and you have the proper tools, a success roll is meaningless.  Also, just for funsies, locks don't exist in a pre-17th century world.  And those in the 17th century were laughably easy to break.  The locks were large, so they made noise while they were opened.  Not because they were notoriously hard to break.

Gygax included his thief ability comments in the DMG because, as he said, they would "prevent abuse of these activities."  He clearly believed that the thief being able to automatically perform thieving abilities would overreach the game: as though climbing a wall or reading a language compared with casting a spell.  What is the issue with a thief being able to read a magic scroll, exactly?  Aren't there other players who can do that automatically?  How does this sort of thing break the game?

I haven't yet discussed "hear noise."  Until I puzzled it through, this used to be the bane of my existence as a DM.  Players were constantly pausing to hear noise, calling it out like 5e players call out perception checks.  Naturally, players always want more information; they want more warning of things that are coming ... and a particular kind of DM doesn't want to give that warning.  They're convinced that the best possible sort of tension is built out of the players no knowing what's coming next.

I circumvent the problem by telling players that if they can hear something with hear noise (I call it "heightened senses") then I'll say so without my having to be asked.  Moreover, I like the players to know what's ahead.  Knowing is much more worrisome than not knowing ... a truth that Hitchcock taught the world 80 years ago.  Watching the gasoline creep across the street in The Birds, and then the fellow with the match, and then the fire, is far more interesting than having no idea that there's anything to worry about.  If the players know there's a powerful demon behind a door, waiting for them, whenever the players are ready to push on through and engage it, that is MUCH more interesting in game terms than opening an apparently harmless door and finding a demon behind it.

The sad truth is that a great many DMs don't have very much idea of what tension is, or how its built, and so they think information is a bad thing.  They don't watch enough good movies, or they watch too many of a certain kind of movie, and they don't investigate and study storytelling as a subject.  For these reasons, they subvert possibilities in their gaming by adopting mechanics deliberately designed to keep players in the dark, when in fact knowing that there IS a trap, and that it's not deactivated is much more compelling than knowing nothing.

The thieves' abilities, understood right, played right, are a means of pouring exposition into the players' hands, by ensuring that the thief sees things, learns things and hears things, in a hundred different circumstances, enabling us to fuel the game's momentum.  Why would we want to keep the thief from going places and getting details about the scenery we want the players to have?

Followers for Upper Level Player Characters

On page 16 of the old Dungeon Masters Guide begins a series of rules for calculating the special followers that player characters collect upon reaching name level.  Because I have a different definition of "follower" [read the wiki page, it's relevant], I call these special followers "Retainers."  And strange as it may seem, I have never adjusted the tables found here for clerics, fighters, rangers, thieves and assassins.  I have used them, though not too often, since I run very long campaigns and once you've gotten to this point with your long-run character, you don't get to roll on these tables again.

Remember as you read this that where the DMG says "followers" in the name-level sense, I will use the word "retainers."

According to the DMG, it is never stated explicitly WHY druids, illusionists, paladins or mages do not get retainers.  On page 32 of the old Players Handbook, there is a section describing the retainers a monk gets upon reaching the 8th level of experience.  There is no explanation for why this section does not appear in the DMG, or for why the retainers gained as described in the DMG needs to be kept "secret" from the players, while those of the monk do not.

The bard has no retainers; the essentially ridiculous rules surrounding the bard (though I saw them played in other campaigns) stipulate that the bard must start as a fighter, leaving that class before the level needed to gain retainers, then become a thief, again leaving that class before the level needed to gain retainers, and THEN become a bard, which is an essentially useless class without any serious special abilities whatsoever.  No mention is made of a bard's "name level" nor of any retainers, except a line that says that bards "are unable to employ henchmen other than druids, fighters or thieves of human, half-eleven [sic], or elven race."  No explanation is given for this particular bit of racism.

Bards obviously deserve to have retainers; no person in a creative industry is ever exempt from taking on students and more than any other group, bards are the most logical class to be in constant contact with OTHER bards.  We have fairs dating back to the 9th century designed specifically so that bards can cluster together with bards.

I am good with druids being isolated characters; except that I fill the druid's roster with a host of "animal friends" that become the druid's retinue.  Paladins deserve the retainers a fighter gets; there's no logic whatsoever for a Paladin to be a "long wolf," since as I pointed out a couple weeks ago, the word means "peer of the realm," which means person of the court, which means lands, castles, the right to collect rents and so on.  How else do we think Paladins pay for their crusading adventures?  Just because Lancelot was broke doesn't mean the other two hundred paladins hanging around Camelot were.

It isn't all about Lancelot.

I'm fine with mages and illusionists getting short shrift.  Both have their heads buried in their laboratories and books, and as scholars neither should know a damned thing about employee management.  But before the reader gets anxious, let me explain that yes, in my game world, a player has to work very, VERY hard to end up without retainers in the long run.

Let's come back around to "followers" as opposed to retainers.  In my game, followers are friends that the players have made through their adventures.  Some are friends right off, others become friends over time.  That is how life works.  My judgment applies in whether or not a follower becomes a friend, based on whether or not I feel the player has treated that NPC fairly, conscientiously, protectively and monetarily.  If the player constantly forgets the individual's name when describing the NPC to me, or forgets to mention said individual when heading off somewhere, or loses parts of the individual's character details, or in any way shows they just don't care about that particular NPC to assure they're safe and considered in day-to-day game matters, then the NPC definitely does not become a follower.

The players often don't notice, but I listen closely every time a player mentions a related NPC, what words the player uses, how long its been since the last time anyone said hello to an NPC they haven't seen in a long time, or visits them, or shares information with them and so on.  I do not tell the players I am listening; and most of the time, I do not point out that the player has just made a serious gaffe of some kind.  I will just now, for the sake of an example: and because just now, there's nothing my online players can do about it.

Recently, the players returned to their new house in Treborg, then headed off to Stavanger, then returned to their house in Treborg, then hurried off back to the dungeon that interests them.  A while ago in the campaign, they hired a farmer/forager/hunter named Valda to look after their house and land while they're out.  And while the players have been diligently feeding Valda out of their stores, because they're required to do so on account of the hireling contract they have, guess how many times any of the players have said anything like, "I say hello to Valda," or "I ask Valda how she's doing?"  Guess how many of them thought to buy something small and useful for Valda from Stavanger while they were there?  Now ... does this make Valda a reliable hireling, or one likely to care as much for her employers as they care for her?

Altogether, I have four levels of friendly characters in my game, apart from the players themselves.  I have hundreds of nasty killer monsters, and of course a lot of humanoids in the civilized areas are dangerous as well, but the players ARE able to create a defensive bulwark of associates, friends and acquaintences, IF they take the time to get to know people and apply themselves to giving as well as constantly showing up to ask questions or buy things.  As another example, some time ago I introduced a girl in Treborg to the party named Monica.  Monica's father is an important person.  Monica spent a little time mooning around after one of the player characters, after helping him recover from damage he'd received many game weeks ago.  Anybody wandering around to say, "Hi Monica" ... ?  You see what I'm saying.

Players aren't required to chat up NPCs.  And a lot of NPCs aren't worth chatting up, what with them being minimally skilled and lacking in resources.  However, there is a tendency, based on the way that D&D has been run for 45 years, to act like lone wolves until the DM gives you retainers that you're allowed to treat like shit.  There is a section in the DMG about loyalty and such, and we will get to that in time, but there isn't a word about that in the "follower section" on pages 16-18.  Basically, you pile enough experience together, you pass a post, and a bunch of dudes show up at your door and say, "Order us around, please."

It's a game and I'm good with that dynamic.  It's only that the retainer thing sort of went away because (a) players didn't know how to handle it; (b) DMs revealingly didn't know how to handle it; and (c) what do we want all these hangers-on for anyway?  "We're LONE WOLVES.  What part of that don't you get?"

Anyway, as I was saying, four levels of friendly character.  I've mentioned three: retainers, followers and hirelings.  The fourth are henchmen.  I've written about these in my game often.  Before continuing on with this thread, let me pause a moment.

It is a cruelty to ask a player to run one character class for ten continuous years of a campaign.  Some like it, but it makes sense that players would want to try other classes out from time to time.  It also makes sense that players would like to try other genders and other races, as well as other combinations of weapons, spells and abilities.  Any good game system must have a means for players to stretch beyond an imposed boundary that limits their experimentation.

We all know that most DMs and groups solve this problem by running campaigns for shorter periods, or no campaigns at all.  Every player gets to try out scores of different characters ... until every character concept is part of a large grey sludge of meaningless nuance.  The problem with this approach is that none of these tried and tested characters ever amount to anything rich and dense as far as character experience or ambition.  Having lots of sexual partners sounds exciting and provocative, but for those who have tried it, only a few years need to pass before realizing that we ... just ... don't ... care about any of these people we're sleeping with.  There isn't time to know them.

Excuse a little life advice, but for those of us in long-term relationships, the old bugaboo about "My gawd, do you want to eat the same flavour of ice cream for the rest of your life" is a bit stupid.  Marriage is about getting to know someone extremely well, but it is also about the two of you getting to know reliable, long-lasting friends, and your children, and their friends, and your children's children, and so on.  Because living a calm, reliable life draws company ... whereas living a frenetic life of chasing other people only breeds drama, resentment, exhaustion and people who don't want to know you much.

Okay, let's set that on a shelf.  The benefit of playing a single character for a long campaign is that you have a lot of memories about that character.  And the benefit of letting the players gain an occasional new player character, a henchman (I still can't get myself around to saying "henchperson," but I'll get there eventually), according to a strict rule, gets around the need to rip down the campaign to give the players a new experience.  Getting to 5th level is a lot easier than getting to name level; and picking a new associate character that is reliably yours, no matter what the DM wants, is an important a step as picking your first character.

Consider:  it takes you 18,000 experience to become a 5th level fighter in the old game.  At that point you get a hench — and because you've already got a fighter, you're free to go for something really different: a mage or a bard, or maybe a thief.  You've got the fighting covered; spells would be nice, or maybe someone to sneak around or a character that knows about plants and animals.  Whatever.  Let's say you take a cleric as your hench.

Your fighter will need 17,000 more experience to be 6th level.  [I know these stats don't mean a fucking thing to you 5e readers, but maybe you could recognize a bit of logic in a structure that actually limited what a player could do until they earned their way].  To reach 4th level, your cleric hench only needs 6,000.  And while that cleric is only going to get half as much experience from treasure as you get, and half as much bonus experience as you get, that character only needs a third as much to go up three levels as you need to go up one.  After awhile, because the cleric hench needs less overall experience than you do, by the time you get up to name level as a fighter, the cleric will be near to reaching name level as a cleric.

That's why it doesn't matter that mages and illusionists don't get retainers.  A mage or an illusionist is bound to take a fighter of some kind upon reaching 5th level, in my game at least.  And that fighter is going to be very nearly 9th about the time the mage and illusionist reach 11th or 10th.  The mage may not get retainers, but the mage's fighter will ... and since the mage and the fighter are both run by the same player, it all works out.

All this way around the barn to get back to this:  the player has the opportunity to get a hench at 5th level and retainers at name level ... but they can obtain hirelings the FIRST DAY of adventuring and they can make friends soon after.  What if the character doesn't want to wait for 5th level or name level?  Should they have to?

I don't think so.  Smart players who are willing to do the work ought to be able to get themselves established in a community long before they get to name level.  A cleric should not have to wait for 9th level to build a church — that argument makes no sense in relation to anything we know about religious organization or missionary work.  There are never enough churches and temples and there are always communities who desperately want one.  Nor should a mage need to wait to build a laboratory, or a thief have to wait to build a gang of thieves.  These measurements established in the old DMG, that players need to wait to gather like friends together, which five-year-olds do without thinking about it, don't wash.  It's called "role-playing," people!  You meet, you share, you show interest, you help them out, they help you out ... hell, Sesame Street taught us this.  "Cooperation!"  A DM should be glad you're not waiting for the so-called "End Game" to build a structure of contacts and associates.

Think about how EASY it is to set up an adventure when the players already have two dozen people whose lives they care about.  Fred — you remember Fred — was walking in the woods yesterday and guess what he saw!  Oh, and Mary wanted a well dug on her property and would you believe it? There was a deep, dark frightening looking hole that appeared when a section of the surface fell in.  Oh, what will we do?  If only we could find some party to investigate that hole, or check out those woods.

But, heck, we can't have that, can we?  I guess it's another game session where we start out at the bar.

I confess.  I've had a damnably hard time selling this idea to players I've had in online campaigns.  Some get it; the present party, Valda and Monica notwithstanding, have done better than everyone else combined.  But there is unquestionably a resistance.  One member of the party has personally met the Crown Prince of Sweden, and gained the prince's respect ... but wants nothing to do with that contact, judging by actions taken.  I've waved other red flags in front of these bulls, but no takers.  This lone wolf thing dies hard.  I'm guessing that mixing in with other people and their problems feels like, oh, responsibility or something.  Or having to put up with the DM's manipulation of the campaign, something that we've all been burned from so hard we dream about fire alarms.

Still, I put the rules in place, I explain the fundamentals and I introduce the NPCs ... and I wait.  I wait to see what the players will do with those toys, if ever they seriously think about picking them up.