Anything that Isn't "Easy" is Impossible

I wonder if Apple or Samsung regularly receive letters and missives from readers saying, "Hey, I really like your phone and I'd like to make one of my own.  Can you help me do that?"

When I began designing a trade system for my game world, I had one fundamental goal: that it would define different prices for different goods and services based on the origin of those things.  I had no sense of there being a "right" way to do this.  I began by accumulating a list of manufactures and resources according to their origin.  Using the real world as a model, this soon became a prodigious list, with hundreds of unique references and thousands of sources.  For a time, I was confounded on how to turn this list into a format that would produce prices, then adjust those prices according to how far said goods were shipped.  To make it work, I had to adjust my thinking process again and again; I had to throw out preconceptions for the sake of practicality.

Those preconceptions included "supply & demand," the basing of value upon labour, or upon produced food and determining a flat-rate cost of transportation for things being shipped.  I had to accept that any system I created had to function "illogically," because all the details and particulars were never going to be accounted for.  We can't account for them today, with millions of economists, strategists and other experts working on them today.  I'm just one person.  I have limitations.  Therefore, realistically, the trade system would have to be unrealistic.  And because of that, it would end up as counter-intuitive.

This evaluation and eventual manifestation took 16 years.  During that time I tried everything.   I rebuilt the system fifty different ways.  Try to imagine what it was like to organize all the data, make lists, make calculations and then run tests with the players, with pencil and paper, only to find that it produces absurd, aberrant numbers ... and then to face up to the players disparaging your system and expressing things that make you feel humiliated.  Then, doing it all again.  Fifty times.

Long before I had dedicated readers, I had dedicated players.  They tolerated this procedure for literally years, gamely giving each system a try, recognizing the value of the idea if not the idea's success.  Those players never saw a successful version.  That first gaming period of my life ended in 1997 and it took another seven years before I finally sorted out the system.

I write this to explain that whatever prejudices I had about how a working trade system would function were steadily eroded away by failure after failure.  In the end, the final result was the one that worked, not the one I wanted or the one that best reflected the real world's economic trade system (which, it must be noted, is organic and in some degree misunderstood by everyone).  My trade system, however, does do what it was meant to do: it provides different prices for different goods and services based on the origin of those things.

I've been approached by others who claimed to have a "better" system than mine ... and yet I have never seen any of these systems laid out as plainly and directly as I have on multiple blog posts; and upon further investigation, they all admit that no, they don't do what mine does, specifically what mine was designed to do: provide different prices, et al.  Meaning that they're not a trade system at all.  They're a glorified pricing system for one game world location.

I've also been approached with the general message, "Hey, I really like your trade system and I'd like to make one of my own.  Can you use your time to help me do that?"

Recently, I've been giving the answer, "No."  I've come to that because in the past, when I've tried to help, my advice is never taken.  It is assumed that while it's nice that I made the decisions I made, the new maker wants to make their own decisions.  They think the trade system they want should function differently.  It should be based somehow on supply & demand, or labour, or a gold standard, or any one of a hundred economic principles that have been thoroughly debunked in the real world for a century now.  If you want to be laughed out of a room by a group of economists, mention supply & demand.

Additionally, every once in awhile I see someone has discovered the pdf for "Grain Into Gold."  These people are always excited, because at last they've found the economic Mecca they've been searching for all these years!  This "simple and sane supplement" is an exercise in pulling economic numbers out of your ass.  I've never seen anyone write, "I've done it!  I built a trade system based on Grain Into Gold."  Because it doesn't work.  It's hot garbage.  Yet it feeds the standard belief system for most people who want to build anything for their campaign world.

It promises that this is going to be easy.

This is why people come to me and ask if I'll help them build their trade system, their way.  Because having me do it is easier than doing it themselves.  After all, I've proved I can do it.  I have the evidence.  Anyone can read it.  And in fact, anyone can copy and implement it exactly as I've done it ... only they don't.  Because it is too much work.  It isn't easy.  Which begs the mantra that titles this post.

My trade system wasn't easy.  Took 16 years to invent it.  Took another 10 to get it into a truly serviceable order.  Expanding it has been an effort I've undertaken for almost a year now, one that I'm wallowing through, because the project is immense.  Making any change is an enormous headache, because the system functions like a delicate machine.  It is adjustment-unfriendly.  Yet every instance I use it in a game, every time I need to sort out some detailed element of the game's money or economy, I am enormously grateful for the time I've taken.  No matter how awful it was to make the bloody thing, the bloody thing is bloody marvelous.  It is both unequalled and unadaptable ... and is therefore intimidating as hell for any other user, particularly those who won't break their body and mental prejudices to accept the thing as it is, and to do the necessary work to make it function in their world.

I've decided I no longer care.  I haven't any respect for those who won't work.  Nor do I have any interest in using my time to hand-hold someone who has the benefit of my work but feels that isn't enough.  And I say this while trying to raise money for a completely different project ... which I know perfectly well can't be reinvented by someone else without my help, because it required an expertise in history, culinary art, dungeon mastering and creativity to manage.

Therefore, as long as I don't explain how I did it, I hold an intellectual patent that no government can issue.  So, when I said yesterday I would offer "proof," that certainly did not include providing more examples of the product.  From my point of view, that would be enormously stupid.

Work is not just tiring.  It produces results.  Results carry knowledge in the process and knowledge is power.   Power brings independence and opportunities.

When the reader resists or refuses to work on their game world, there are no results.  Without working to make something result, knowledge isn't gained; and without knowledge, there is impotency.  Impotence offers only dependency and subjugation to others.

"Easy" has a cost.  It is time, and life, and self-respect, wasted.

A Curious Thing

Like most boys of my generation, of my part of the world, I learned to read in the first half of first grade, when I was about six.  But I don't remember not knowing how.  And I don't remember when I learned that I liked reading ... but certainly by grade two I was reading, because I have memories sitting in Mrs. Nichols' class reading a book.  And I remember writing fiction by grade three, as I remember doing it in Mrs. Zachariah's class.  I've read constantly and ever since.

When we begin to read, everything is new.  The stories are all new, but so it the non-fiction.  We decide to read a book about dinosaurs, and everything in that book is new.  We read about ants, or the human body, or stories about Abraham Lincoln, and every page contains something we've never seen before or heard.  Knowledge is fresh and exciting as it pours from hundreds of books into our heads.

Then, a curious thing happens.  We begin to fill up.  Stories become old and familiar.  Facts about what the heart does, or who travelled across Asia to China, cease to be special.  But it's no problem, not really.  When I went from Elementary to Junior High, there was a whole new library, a bigger library.  And it happened again with I went to High School.  And then, even before I graduated, I found the University of Calgary Library.

Of course, we have the internet now.

But if we keep reading and reading, another curious thing happens.  As we dig deeper and deeper into something we love, more and more we keep finding the same old stuff, over and over.  Where once every page was fresh, now whole chapters just repeat things we already know.  We find ourselves reading whole books and learning nothing new.  Nothing new at all.

Most, here, decide that's pretty much it.  Oh well, that was interesting; but it seems done.  I know everything I'm probably going to know about butterflies.  Or gemstones.  Or D.H. Lawrence.

There are those who will tell you that it's impossible to know everything ... particularly if it is a very deep subject, like engineering and medicine.  But see, these things have their specialties too.  And eventually, when reading a whole book only yields the odd sentence or two that tells something new ... it stops being worth it.

Or rather, it starts to frustrate.

Because, if the reader is anything like me, the answer is no, what I know isn't enough.  It isn't.  I started reading content about D&D in 1979 and burned through just about everything in about six years.  By ten, every book, every new game, every adventure, just sounded like more of the same. And I know that many reading here know exactly what I mean.  But I wanted more; I always wanted more.

If TSR and game stores couldn't put books on the shelves that would tell me what role-playing was, well, there were books about role-playing that had nothing to do with games.  And if the company couldn't tell me more about medieval life and people, there were books about that too.  And if the company couldn't explain why there was no economic system, there were books about economics. And about games.  And about anything in the world that I could think of that might eventually come back around to giving me something new that I could know about this game.  Because for me it wasn't butterflies, or gemstones, or D.H. Lawrence.  It was D&D.

Again, with reading, something curious happens.  We read and study and follow and collect our collective bits of new things, until we finally get right out there on the frontier ... where we stand and everything behind us is what we know, and everything in front of us is what nobody knows.

From there, we're on our own.  From there, the process is to stop looking for new things in books, but to start making new things with our hands.  Because no one else is left, but us.  If we've done our work right, we're ready.  We're not following, we're leading; and we have a responsibility to think and work and make things well.

Yet ... well ... it's not as though we had any choice.  When I picked up those first books as a boy, I might have been led anywhere.  I might now be making any thing.  Somehow, through twists and turns, I would up here.  With this obsession.  When once I read with delight, now I make with delight.  And write it down with delight.

So it goes.

News and Patronage

So far, I've accumulated eight guests for my podcast, expressing various concerns about what they can meaningfully say that will be useful for listeners.  I take this as a good sign.  We're replete with "experts."  We can use some people expressing doubt.

I'm thinking now that my best course will be to put together 10-13 podcasts (13 would be ideal), then call that a season and take three months off, then do it again.  Two seasons a year, for 13 episodes a season, would be my target.

But of course I have yet to do an interview.  I'm gathering together my resources, fermenting my mind on the general concept and waiting for inspiration.  That is what I do a great deal: wait for inspiration.

Yesterday, I restarted the Juvenis campaign.  It will probably be a slow start; I work inconsistent days and half days Monday to Thursday, limiting my involvement to the afternoon and evening, while Fridays, the day I'm sure to get off, always were pretty slow for the gang.  So, the campaign will likely crawl along, until my situation changes.  Still, it is good to be running online again.  I get a kick out of it.

I've updated a load of maps on the wiki, those with A, B or C in the file names, work that I've been grinding at for months and months now.  I found there were some shortcomings, too, on the map files for those who have donated sufficiently to my Patreon, which I've corrected.  If you're a contributor, have a look at the private map files also. The most recent two that I've updated are Brittania and Germania.  There are some considerable aesthetic additions to these maps, along these lines.

Let's see, what else?  I recently got into an argument on Twitter about artists being paid for their work.  The position I argued against is a common maxim posed by university and post-secondary trained artists, who are propagandized to "Never, ever, ever, work for free for anyone ever, period."  The agenda behind this is plain and obvious to every creative soul in every field:  established artists, particularly established artists dependent on grants for survival, don't want the competition.  The maxim is always presented as something that is in YOUR personal interest, if you are an artist, but it is really just speaking from fear.

It is, of course, ridiculous.  I'm creating right now, for free.  So are millions of other people, because they enjoy creating and because they don't expect to be paid for it anyway.  Of course, I'd like to be paid, and in a greater sense my readers do pay me, regularly, because they appreciate what I do.  But this has nothing to do with how much content I choose to produce, because I love producing and sometimes have to restrain myself from doing so.  This is a blog with too many words and I'm always ready to add more.

Those artists who most pitch the "Don't Work For Free" belief are almost always static visual artists ~ either painters or graphic artists ~ coming from a very specific institutional framework, usually an art school.  And such people look down on writers, they always have.  We are the scum of the art field, usually because to get into the field of writing, writing for free is the only method.  Long, long before we can expect a publisher to print us, it is necessary to enter non-paying writing competitions as early as elementary schools, followed by hundreds of hours writing plays and scripts for high school drama departments (because there is no writer-arts department), followed by writing anything and everything in an attempt to get noticed.  So being told, "Don't write for free," sounds like the spastic grunts of a pig caught between the stiles of its pen.

Of course, by the time we are paid (and I've enjoyed steady work at 30 cents a word, which would make this free blog worth $750,000), writing is easy.  The computer forms the letters for me, requiring no physical skills whatsoever, while thinking and writing become pretty much the same process.  Which is why painters don't think of us as "real artists."

Anyway, I got some peeps angry with me about this, but no never mind.  The thing that has to be remembered about making any sort of creative thing is that making it is more important than being paid for it.  If no one is paying you, make it anyway, because what you'll learn through making and problem solving is more valuable to you than steadfastly refusing to work because there's no paycheque.

Moreover, working for free enables mutual collaboration with other artists at your own level, where neither of you expect to be paid right now.  It makes for contacts in the future, opportunities, gained skill in dealing with others and getting to feel your own voice without training yourself to be a slave to someone with a wallet.  That's the worst thing about being creative and in someone else's pocket; you can't speak your mind, because there's always the chance that causing offense will make the money go away.

Work.  That's the only thing that matters.  In this fabulous age, with the internet, with direct contact with the customer, with hundreds of conventions that will let you sell in real time, with Patreon and other like sights, the world has never been friendlier for the Do-It-Yourself Artist.  Believe me, I grew up in a time where the doors were all closed, all the time.

The only thing standing between you right now and getting your art and your message to a friendly, supportive audience is how many skills you have, against how many you'll have to pay for.  Learn to lay out your product, learn how to sell, learn how to write a blurb, learn how to page design, learn how to draw or copyread or edit.  Learn.  You may be awful at it to begin with; look at me, I still have many shortcomings.  But if you pitch and try and rework, things get better and better, you get smarter and smarter, your work develops, you gain confidence and in the end, you don't need anyone.

You are your own Patron.

Narratology's Limitations

Taking up where the last post left off, the tendency nowadays is to think of the room, the snake and the poison as a narrative, which it is not.  Narratives are defined as accounts, which describe an order of events that take place in the past.  What is interesting is that multiple narratives, even hundreds or thousands of possible narratives, can result from the same set up of the room, the snake and the poison.  This is why we have to resist establishing a narrative before it can take place: our goal is to establish the mechanism that enables a narrative to happen ~ even if we don't know how that narrative will play out until it exists in our past.

Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure, and the ways that we are affected (behaviour) by our perception of those events.  A player character dies as a result of the snake and this produces a reaction to the story of the character having died.  Does this dying character encourage us to be more cautious when approaching rooms?  Are we more cautious where snakes are concerned?  Then, in the wider picture, does the sequence of events that become the narrative cause us to reconsider our will to play?  Or our trust of the DM?  Or the DM's certainty that this is a good way to run a campaign?  These are all examples of how narrative might affect our perception.

This is why we tell stories: to evoke a response.  To teach a lesson or examine a situation or develop awareness about human behaviour or encourage a better human behaviour.  It is logical and rational to examine games of all types to determine what sort of effect is had on us by the way we have interacted in the past as a result of playing those games.

It does not make sense to suppose, then, that "narrative" can also describe something that hasn't happened yet.  In the context of what narrative is and how narrative results, describing multiple possible future happenstances as "narrative" simply doesn't make sense within the definition of the word.  That's why we use other words to describe a possible future; and why we use other words to describe a set-up, or a design, that will ultimately elicit a variety of possible futures.  Those futures haven't been written yet; they haven't happened; therefore, they are not narratives.  Those who think they are have gotten confused about what principles they are arguing.

That's not unusual.  Very often, an individual with a flash of insight will turn a word or a phrase to a new meaning, representing something as what it is not but which it seems to reflect, in order to increase our understanding of that thing.  All too often, however, this is not done very well; and for a time, a fad arises in which that phrase becomes a pursuit of thousands, even tens of thousands of scholars who are temporarily infatuated with this idea as conceptualized.

I will offer a favorite example of this: a Canadian example.  Marshall McLuhan, born right in my own province, wrote a series of books about the media that, for a time, took the world by storm. His most famous quote, "the medium is the message," created a revolution in our understanding of media and its influence on the viewer.

Or rather, it seemed to do so.  While there remain millions of people, academics and non-academics alike, who will rush to assert that this is true, and that McLuhan's key concepts are also true, there is one thing lacking in the whole structure.

Who has built upon this idea?  Having understood that the medium is the message, what do we do with this knowledge?  Where is the next scholarly goal post?  For while McLuhan was certainly a breath of fresh air, he is an isolated breath where it comes to present-day discussions about media and it's influence.  The phrase, "the medium is the message" is the equivalent of saying, "this is a table" or "this is a chair."  Accepted.  Now what?

This present faddism of narrative as the central key to role-play suffers from the same problem.  Suppose we accept that, all right, role-playing is story-telling.  How does that enable me to design a dungeon?  Or encourage a particular behaviour in my player?  Or describe how I should expect a player to respond once I have invented my story?  How do I measure the effects of "story," when the story hasn't happened yet?

No one arguing for story-based role-play is addressing these questions; these are unanswerable questions in terms of "story."  How can I, as a writer, ascertain with certainty what the specific reader's reaction will be to this post?  I can guess that some readers will think this or that some readers will think that, but do I know what you, Joan or Jim or Jason, will think?  No.  Yet I need this sort of targeting tool when you, Joan or Jim or Jason, sit down at my table to play a game with me.

So let's focus on design, hm?  Let's concentrate on those principles, because precepts like structure and function and observable behaviour, that has occurred in the past, can be evaluated and corrected, time and time again.  Let's not waste our effort redefining a term that was never meant to describe the future.

Afterward:

Wonder Woman had some good features; but as a directed work, it had enormous transition flaws and considerable defects with regards to motivation, character development, goals, direction and ultimately structure.  Those things can be overlooked in favour of a fun film, but the flaws exist nonetheless.  I would say I expected better, but DC.  Again.

Adding On

I feel that my greatest strength as a designer is the ability to put things down when I am tired of them, while being able to pick them up again - sometimes years later - and continue where I left off without needing to change everything and start from scratch.

This is how the huge map gets made.  This is how I steadily form up the trade system or build the wiki.  This is how I am able to pick up the character generator after three years without losing heart that it has been too long since reworking it.  And this is why I don't feel bad that it's been 8 days since I last worked on the brand new tech system without a follow up post.

I do apologize - but I am taking a break from that for a while.  I worked hard on it for about a month and now I want some distance.  That does not mean the tech idea is dead or that it won't find it's place in my general system - it's just on the shelf.  When I'm ready, I'll pull it down from the shelf, dust it off and take it to the next place.

Beyond planning towards a specific goal, we sometimes need to look at long-term elements of our design with a wider perspective.  Does the reader suppose that something as complex as Bag End, on the right, was built in a single piece?  Of course not.  At some point the entrance hall served to keep Bilbo's ancestors out of the rain.  As they cleared out the space for the "Parlour" - that no doubt served for a year as both a kitchen and a bedroom - the one-day spacious and convenient entrance hall was full of timbers, tools, garbage and detritus that were simply lived with until the day it could be used or cleaned out.

Each generation - with long pauses between - would take up the expansion of the home, working their way deeper into the hill, adding a separate kitchen, then a bedroom (which would much, much later become the Smoking Room once the kitchen was expanded with a Dining Room, a Pantry (which would later be turned into the Atrium when a new Pantry was dug, complete with two cellars and a new bedroom and study could be added).  And so on.  The building of Bag End is a long-term problem, with skull-sweat and much reconsideration, errors, the occasional collapse and at least one or two generations who were content to sit and do nothing.

For Bilbo and Frodo, at the tag end of the family line, it's all a wonder - because it seems impossible that something so complicated, so comfortable and rich in design, could have ever been conceived.  That is because, from their view, they can only see the whole thing.  But whole things are made of parts.

If the reader's world seems impossible or at least daunting, consider that it doesn't have to be done in a single piece.  Consider what's necessary to set up the framework with an eye to setting it aside and picking it up later when you're tired of it.  Start from that perspective.  Then, when life gets in your way or something else comes up, the precepts are in place to allow coming back some time later, remembering how it all worked and settling in to continue it exactly as you planned, ages before.

Don't burn it down and start again.  You'll never complete anything that way.

Cruel, But Most Entertaining for the DM

The title of this post is a quote from Gary Gygax, talking about the famous module pictured on the right.  And while I have the author's words to describe this sort of adventure, let me quote them:

"Another nadir of Dungeon Mastering is the 'killer-dungeon' concept.  These campaigns are a travesty of the role-playing adventure, for there is no development and identification with carefully nurtured player personae.  In such campaigns, the sadistic referee takes unholy delight in slaughtering endless hoards of hapless player characters with unavoidable death traps and horrific monsters set to ambush participants as soon as they set foot outside the door of their safe house.  Only a few of these 'killer dungeons' survive to become infamous, however, as their participants usually tire of the idiocy after a few attempts at enjoyable gaming.  Some lucky ones manage to find another, more reasonable, campaign; but others, not realizing the perversion of the DM's campaign, give up adventure gaming and go back to whatever pursuits they followed in their leisure time before they tried D&D."

Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 92 

Well.  If this were any other individual - a politician, say, or the teacher of children . . . or a television evangelist caught fucking three virgin boys in an Alabama motel room - there'd be no hesitation for the reader to shout epithets about the person's hypocrisy, willingness to prostitute themselves, obvious collapse of moral virtue or value and so on.  But this is a game designer - so of course there are really good reasons for both these opinions to stand side by side without the reader's head exploding.  Gygax was just having fun when he perpetrated the sadistic perversion (his words) on the right; alternately, he was just paying lip service to the establishment when he wrote the stick-up-his-ass sermon on the left.

It depends on what sort of bullshit we want to defend.  For example, that Gygax was something other than a strutting, self-important demagogue who chanced into a good thing he didn't actually invent.  Or we could argue that he wasn't a vindictive bloated narcissist who realized after the release of the DMG that he answered to no one and "Fuck you, I'm writing this."

Sometimes I think a particular kind of success encourages the emergence of a particular kind of "do-it-my-way" braggart, whether or not that braggart deserves any of the notoriety he has.  Would Roddenberry have been anyone without D.C. Fontana and a host of other great writers?   Are we really sure the first Star Wars wasn't saved because there were those around him who had the power to make Lucas stop and listen?  It's clear what happens when those people don't exist.

So we come to the other argument: that Gygax didn't write either the left hand thing or the right hand thing - he just slapped his name on one or the other, explaining away either the sanctimonious prattling or the fucking piece of shit module.

Yes, yes, yes . . . yes, I know you like the module, but even you know you can't love both Gygaxes here.  If someone likes what's on the left, that's pretty much going to make the right-side shit, nyet?  After all, for those of you who love the Tomb of Horrors, the left side is pretty much shit, isn't it?  You have to try to see this thing from more than just your side.

Then there's the possibility that Gygax wrote neither.  In which case, why does anyone give a fuck about him?

Let's try to embrace a little reality.  Either he's a liar, he took credit for other people's work, he invented whatever shit he wanted to fall off his pen or out of his mouth from moment to moment or he was a complete DICK.  There are no other choices that fit the evidence.

Even if you really, really, really, really want there to be.

Focus

Recently I came across a series of videos made by Tony Zhou, a filmmaker in Vancouver Canada, called Every Frame a Painting.  It is worthwhile seeing every video, even though as a filmmaker Zhou betrays his visual prejudices over theme/performance craft through his choice of directors (the same usual suspects that every visual film director adores).

For the record, I equate Wes Anderson's filmmaking (and the defense of it) with the same sort of crap that is today lauded as 'modern art.'  But enough said about that.

Amidst all the content I've just linked, I'd like to draw the reader's attention to a small part of a particular video.  I want to warn the reader: when I showed this to my players last night, they quite reasonably got so taken up with the nostalgic, effervescent context of the video that they completely missed the point Zhou was making.  Therefore, I recommend that the reader watch this three or four times, until they are able to forget the cartoons (which are wonderful, by the way) and concentrate on the film-making and design aspects behind these cartoons:



Allow me to write out the relevant part to my intended post:

Zhou:  "Discipline: the challenge and restrictions you set for yourself.  Like designing a character with no mouth.  Or no face.   Or using no dialogue except for this: [singing]  Because animation lets you do anything, you have to think about what you won't do.  And in Jones's case, there were lots of rules - about the world, the characters and their behaviour.  For instance, Bugs Bunny never picked a fight.  Somebody had to do this: [scene where Fudd sings 'Kill the Wabbit']  And only then would he [Bugs] fight back . . ."

I can't stress how important this is - and unfortunately Zhou, after giving two examples, fails to include a conclusion to the discipline argument in his video before getting caught up in a different subject, human behaviour.  So let me try to expand here.

Role-playing is exactly like animation in that there are no limitations except those we create.  The presence of magic, potential leaks from multi-dimensional planes of existence, potential character builds, the ideals of heroism overcoming adversity, wish fulfillment and players demanding that the world hold personal validation as more important than obeisance to rules all combine to subvert the fabric of our worlds to the point where the center falls apart and the whole campaign degrades into silliness and game death.  The only thing that holds the fabric of the campaign together is what the DM won't do when the players' behaviour comes into conflict with the world's structure.  If the DM is willing to bend that structure past a certain point in servicing the player's behaviour (or desires), the structure gives and the game breaks.

If you closely examine all the manifestations of role-playing game design, from independent efforts by single individuals to the repeated fuck-ups of WOTC, you'll find an underlying attempt to create limitations against things the designer feels has 'damaged' the original concept.  For example, the creation of the thief class that seemed to undermine the ideal of the "hero's quest," causing the thief to be redefined as a "rogue" in an attempt to make a heroic alternative out of something many people viewed as criminal.  It didn't help that many DMs found their worlds plagued by players who considered the presence of the thief class as tacit permission to behave like total assholes.

Because the rules structure is the most concrete part of the game, efforts to create limitations usually begin with individuals addressing themselves to that structure - when in fact the problem isn't in the rules it is in ourselves.  Chuck Jones in the above example doesn't need to redesign all of animation in order to create a particular change in his characters - he only needs to definitively limit himself as to what he will allow himself to do.

For example, from my own world.  Even though there are spells that are expressly designed to control character behaviour (quest, geas, suggestion, charm person, magic jar, etcetera), as a DM I won't blindside any player, ever, with one of these spells.  What do I mean by 'blindside'?  I mean that I won't have an NPC with such a spell cast it against the party in any situation where the party has not forewarned that a caster with this potential is present - so that the players have the opportunity to risk assess their continued efforts to achieve the goal in question.

Why this limitation?  Because the implementation of these spells against human beings SUCKS.  I don't care if the players blindside an NPC; I'm not invested in the NPC and I have lots to do as a DM if one of my NPCs is trailing along behind the party as a mind-dead puppy.  But if I do that to one of the players, the player is screwed.  They are invested in their character and it is way too aggressive an act by a DM to play the game that way.  Dumping a quest spell on a party sounds too much like railroading to me so I don't do it - unless the party willfully and stupidly walks in front of that train when they knew damn well it was coming.

Sure, this does give the players a slight advantage - but it also makes the players less threatened by my campaign.  It feels more 'fair' to them and gives them a stronger sense of being in control in my game.  I don't actually need to use these spells to give momentum to the campaign.  This means that when I want to drive my players to take a specific action, I have to mind-play them a completely different way than relying on a spell and a saving throw.

A similar argument underlies my refusal to employ ideas like alignment in my game.  It's lazy, it's anvilicious, it's aggressively controlling and it denies players the sense of being in control of themselves and their character motivations.  To get around the problems that alignment is supposed to solve (I don't really think that it does solve those problems but other DMs disagree), I've had to change the way I deliver my game and set up my players in the setting to reduce the chance of them acting in a "bad way."

For example, I don't have one person approach the party in the middle of nowhere, so I don't have that problem where I'm giving exposition and one of the players kills the expositor.  If the players are always approached from a position of strength (multiple persons, in a location where their characters could be trapped), the players will respond with respect and not stupidity.  I don't need alignment to keep my players in check; I keep them in check by making my world threatening enough that a foolish player can only succeed in losing their character.

By eliminating punishment for evil behaviour and rewards for good behaviour, replacing both with rewards for smart behaviour, I've gotten rid of the whole evil/good framework for character creation; this lets the players experiment and explore shades of grey in their behaviour rather than strict black and white - making their experience more meaningful and less constrained.  Being that I live in an adult world where I recognize that good and evil is a structured "us" and "them" routine we use to propagandize children and potential voters in political campaigns, I'd rather ditch it from my campaign for the sake of nuance, freedom, imagination and possibility.  Therefore, I don't play with alignment.

I recommend that the reader make a list of things they already won't do in their campaigns - and consider expanding that list with an eye to finding a more elegant way of solving the problem.  Just as Jones does when he decides to skip ordinary dialogue in a particular cartoon or minimalize his presentation to make it more effective and precise.  And watch the video again - because this is how all art develops its focus: by imposing strict, absolute boundaries on what the presenter is willing to present, then living up to those boundaries in a profound, more imaginative way.

Rule: Never Compromise

It may be that I have a stubborn streak.  It may be my personal interpretation of science and the scientific method when I was young and imagined myself growing into Walter Reed or Charles Darwin.  Perhaps it is because I just want things to be harder than they have to be.

Nevertheless . . .

If we have it in our minds that we are going to build a structure that our game worlds will obey, we must first understand that the structure we design must be more important than our feelings about it.  For the structure to serve its purpose - that is, to provide a framework that the players will be able to predict as well as ourselves, we absolutely CANNOT change that framework, EVER, to suit a given circumstance or situation.  If we change any single entity or element of that structure, we must understand that the change must be to every other similar entity.  If we make specific exceptions for specific entities, we don't have a structure.  We have a collapsed pile of shit.

For example, let us say that the players move into an area where hobgoblins dwell.  After a session or two, the players learn that this is a hobgoblin kingdom, with hobgoblin cities and hobgoblin overlords - where everything non-hobgoblin is treated with disdain and with a will to cause the players certain death.  This can be good and scary, particularly as the players now find themselves having blundered sixty or eighty miles into hobgoblin territory.  We can now have a very powerful campaign where the players must rely upon their own strength and sense of direction to be safe again . . . so long as the hobgoblins live up to that expectation!

But if the DM decides to inject a hobgoblin family that shows kindness and compassion for the players, helping them get out of the country, whoops.  Probably, the DM figures, "Well, not all hobgoblins have to obey the norm.  And the players are safe."  Yes, they are.  No doubt, the DM feels very clever, putting in hobgoblins that aren't sadistic and cruel, blowing the stereotype.  Too bad, the players did not have to rely on their own resources.  The DM helped them.  Making the campaign a dud.  Hobgoblins?  Meh.  Not as nasty as their PR.

DMs everywhere wonder why campaign after campaign crashes and burns into player jokes, mockery, cheap bravado and ennui.  They do, because the DM's word is not the DM's bond - not only in the sense of the presentation from night to night, but in the world itself.  Because every time some structure in that world challenges the DM's preconceptions about what society ought to be or how people in a society ought to act, the DM immediately begins looking at the game from the perspective of someone socialized to interact in the present day, in a heterogeneous world where people aren't allowed to behave inflexibly or intolerantly.

Unfortunately for such DMs, much of the drama that makes tension is based upon characters, social systems, societies, cultures or philosophies that are incredibly inflexible.

Consider, for example, any horror movie of your choice.  Let's say, The Hills Have Eyes, that more or less describes the situation I've just described above.  The structure here is that the psychotic cannibals of this particular desert are ready to kill a party (family) that has just blundered into their territory.  There is no out except survival.  No remorse on the part of the killers, no rescuers, no survival except what the party attempts, no guarantees of survival, etcetera.  Plus lots and lots of tension.  So much tension that the DM (or director) gets uncomfortable with the situation - but unlike a DM, Wes Craven just doesn't give a shit.  He doesn't let his audience off the hook because that is the fucking point.

Most DMs do get uncomfortable with the structure, particularly as they watch their players shift from apparently comfortable fun times to oh my fucking gawd we're all going to die.  At that point, most DMs piss all over their own structure, help the players (fudging dice, injecting surprise allies, padding the treasure give) and destroy the tension.

When I say that I want a tech system that will limit an area's ability to provide resources (or contrariwise, with the higher techs, provide scary and aggressive authority figures with the power necessary to make life hard for the players), I mean that I want a tension-building structure that the players will have to accept and build their way past if they want to continue to accumulate treasure and power.  I'm not looking for a cutesy interesting fluff formula for painting the background.  I want a firm, stable and absolutely inviolable structure that says "NO, the tech level is this.  Live with it!"

This structure ideal cannot work if I am willing to circumvent it.  Damn, I don't know how clearly that has to be said.  I cannot - CANNOT - break my own structure.  When I do, I've compromised my players expectations, I've compromised their faith in me and my world, I've compromised the experience they could have had if I hadn't let myself off the proverbial hook. I have to strain myself, always, to go that much further in adjusting the structure within the boundaries I've created.  Otherwise, I need to trash the structure and replace it with one I will obey!  Otherwise, I'm only  compromising my principles, those based on my world living up to the game as it deserves to be played.

In the structure, sometimes, adjustments do have to be made.  Something is definitely going to have to be decided about the six market cities I now have in tech 5 regions.  I'll talk about that soon.  Those adjustments, however, cannot be decided on a whim.  The determination for how the structure is changed must be universal to all situations and they must not compromise the fundamental purpose of the technology level design - that is, to encourage a given behaviour in me and behaviour in my players.

Until the reader understands the principles of behavioural design, forget ever making anything that will invoke a useful, practical response in a user.

Pursuing Failure

I was thinking yesterday of the old chestnut, "Do not be afraid to fail."  Sometimes these things retain their merit even though we hear them so often that the cease to have meaning.  Yes, yes, right, strive hard, work, try new things and don't be afraid to fail.  Got it.

We should really look at those words as often as we have the time.  Translated, they also mean, don't play it safe.  Don't do the same things that were done before.  We have too much a tendency to repeat our efforts based on "what works," as though what has worked in the past automatically exempts us from any responsibility to find what might work better.  Or differently.  Or with profound, unexpected results.

Gaming is like that.  If our campaigns are built too solidly upon what has always worked in the past, they bind us in a straightjacket.  We are limited.  Our games grow into participations in tradition and dogma, making the 'transformative experience' of gaming into the square-peg into round-hole problem.

Just a daily thought for the reader to ponder upon.

Skillz

For those who have never successfully integrated computers into your gaming - who might wonder how I do it or how it works.  This really deserves a video - but my attempts to video me running my game end up disappointing for technical reasons.

It is really very hard to effectively tape a D&D session.

So much of a D&D session is spontaneous, the game being unscripted.  If you try to fix this by scripting the game, the players are NOT actors and it looks awful and phony.  On the other hand, capturing that spontaneity on film, properly, would require four or five cameras, all of them running for four to six hours. A single camera simply fails 100%, as the game is not found in the DM's face alone, but in that of the players. requiring a very lengthy effort at editing the session - presuming that this was even a session worth filming!  Not all sessions are.

I have seen lately that filmmakers have finally realized that every individual person needs to be miked, too - but this properly needs to be a boom mike.  I've seen examples where the table is loaded up with mikes, like a set up found on public radio.  This looks absolutely nothing like a game session - and of course spoils the very feel of a proper game.  I wrote in my advanced guide that the DM's screen needs to be ditched because it ruins interaction and cohesion of play.  Technical apparatus between the players only reminds them that they are being miked, destroying any sense of capturing an actual game.

I need a very capable filmmaker to solve these problems - but I haven't yet been able to entice anyone into the project without a promise of money.  In the meantime I see videos put out by the WOTC of games held in public and I shake my head in disgust.  Here are people with real money, who ought to know better how to set up a proper film . . . and obviously they don't care.

I remember episodes of I Hit It With My Axe, which I showed around to my players and other artists.  These were films supposedly made by people in film - but they were cluttered, ugly, poorly miked, disastrous writing, filled with the backs of people's heads and with chatter that was either hopelessly garbled or meaningless in the context of a game.  My amateur attempts to do better have proven that I cannot - that is why there are no films of my playing a session.

But I will continue to look for someone capable who would be willing.  At this point, to get talent I need it to be a documentary made with real money - perhaps to show it on Netflix.

In the meantime, I am a writer.  So I will stick with writing out the details of my game play as best I can.  This much is free.

Earlier today, Scott Driver left a comment that can be found here, written below the DFD Introduction pose.  In it he makes a very reasonable point:

"I've never successfully integrated computers either for gaming or my profession.  Professionally, it adds complexity to an already chaotic situation and it's not easily stress-tested. Back when I tried cases before juries, I was almost always alone, and I stuck with legal pads and binders because they're simple and there's no risk of looking like a fumblefuck. I can execute on the fly without even thinking about the underlying tech."

I can really relate to this - but not in terms of computers.  See, I have never learned to drive.  I do not even possess a learner's license - and I never have.  If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you may remember once or twice where I described something to do with me driving a car.  I have driven a car, I know how to drive a car, but I've only done it for twenty minutes at a time and therefore always illegally.  This is also, incidentally, the reason why none of the pictures I've taken this last month feature me driving a car.  The one I added today (which will be gone in the morning) is of me sitting in the passenger seat.

So for me, driving through the city would be an exercise in panic.  I once was a bike commuter - the kind that rode in winter as well as in summer, in circumstances probably more dangerous than driving a car - so I know the streets.  But when I rode a bike, I didn't really have to look at signs.  Most of them don't affect bicyclists.

Were I to get a license, it would be a completely chaotic situation.  I would be terrifically stressed.  'Fumblefuck' would be my middle name.  And that is the reason I have kept putting off getting a license all these years.  I don't want to kill anyone.

Computers, however, are different.

I began on manual typewriters at age 8.  I moved on to an electric typewriter at age 13 when my grandmother passed away and left my parents hers (she was a schoolteacher and a writer). Computers followed soon after.

In grade 10, I took a typing class - and failed (I have a 7 dexterity).  But I kept the book and worked on the exercises continuously.  Today I type 65-75 words a minute.  I type fast enough that I can create content for the players to read, if it is something with detail that they need to remember, without breaking the pace of the session.  Part of the reason why these blog posts have so many words in them is that I type and think at the same pace (I've trained myself to slow my thinking to match my typing speed when I write, so writing is just like talking).  In effect, when I write, the screen and the computer disappear . . . I stare through the screen in a sort of zen-like state.  Thus, during a session, if I need to send a message by computer (or type a note in the middle of combat), I can listen to a player talk and write the note at the same time - sometimes I can talk and write a completely different note.

After hundreds of hours using a mouse to build newspaper pages, a skill I learned in university while volunteering for the paper there, I applied that skill to other projects.  I went on building pages for magazines that I helped build or start, while learning from professionals how to build ads or graphically design images.  These last eleven years, of course, I have been building more than 80 maps that are huge in scale (maybe you've seen a few), while using the computer to run my sessions as well.  This has meant that drawing with a mouse is as comfortable and normal to me as drawing with a pencil used to be.  I don't even think about it while I'm doing it.  In fact, I use map-making as a relation tool to manage my stress, enable meditation or to keep me busy while I listen to lectures or follow audio books and podcasts.  During a game, then, the players don't have to wait a bunch of time while I interface with the computer - I can draw and design while talking to them, or listening to them make plans for their character's next actions.

This may sound impressive - but if you think about it, you can tell me all of this right back by describing what you're able to do while driving a car.  There you are, sitting behind the wheel of a potential weapon, a projectile of metal, fibreglass and rubber, riding along at speeds above 100 km/hour, along with hundreds of other cars doing the same thing . . . and still you can argue with me about why you think Aerosmith deserves the attention they've received these last four decades.  Vehemently.  Because the car is an extension of your body and your mind that you don't think about.

Computers are no scarier than a car.  The difference between me and you driving is that you were once agreeable to being educated in that - whereas I was not, for reasons I won't go into.  The computer keyboard and the programs that enable me to design only happened to me because I took the courses and pestered experts for answers.  You can do this too.  I only began graphic design about 12 years before I began creating the maps you see - and I did tons with that design long before I stumbled across my map-making method.

You CAN do anything.  Get educated.  Learn.  I am perfectly capable of driving a car.  I even kind of like it . . . until there are other cars around.  But trust me - your learning how to use a computer like a pen isn't going to kill anyone.

Time Saved!

Earlier today, Doug of Doug's Workshop made a comment that I'd like to run with a bit, specifically this part:

"Many people 'learn to cook' not by understanding the principles of the art, but by using the gadgets sold. Garlic press? Sure, you need one because garlic is awesome. Bread machine? Yes, because fresh bread is terrific."

This got me thinking about gadgets in general . . . but before I go off on a tear about the way playing modules kills the imagination, I just won't.  Instead, I'll talk about cooking.

Garlic, for instance.  What you need is a good knife, one where the blade is about an inch deep.  Like the one shown.  Clean off the garlic clove you want.  Place the clove on the cutting board.  Then place the side of the knife over the garlic clove.  Point the knife blade towards you so you won't cut yourself.  Press down on the side of the knife with the heel of your hand, steady but hard, until you feel the garlic crushed between the knife and the board.  Pick up the knife.  The garlic should be very flat, split into several pieces and wet.  If the garlic is still one piece, you haven't pressed hard enough.  Now chop the garlic with the knife blade three or four times.  Your garlic has now been crushed.  Scoop the crushed garlic up with the knife and drop it into your pan.

Up to three cloves can be done at a time, if they're warm.  The total time this takes is about two or three seconds.  If you're in a hurry, you can do it in one second - but I wouldn't recommend hurrying that fast until you've done this about seven or eight hundred times.  Since the chances are you already have a knife in your hand when you need the garlic, this will save you a great deal of time in putting down the knife and picking up the garlic press, then putting down the press and picking up your knife again.  The knife does a better job, too.

Why do garlic crushers exist?  Because, a) people are afraid of big knives; b) refridgerators can be sold to eskimos; c) it sounds like a good idea; and d) it never occurred to your mother or father that a knife can be used to crush things.

In short, ignorance.  If cooking shops did not carry garlic presses, they'd be harassed by would-be cooks until they did, because the presence of garlic presses has become so expected that shops can no longer ignore them.  This is a sign of the supreme victory a marketing department can ultimately have over a population - eventually, even cooks will buy them.  I worked in a number of restaurants where garlic presses could be found among the various tools.  Ignored, of course.  Such things are purchased by kitchen managers and restaurant owners - people who 'cook' for a few minutes between office hours.  Real cooks do not have the time that garlic presses demand.

But there is something to be learned here, where it comes to the time we take to prepare things. We suppose, if there are two hundred garlic heads and the garlic press can crush one head every minute, then the total time it will take to crush all the heads will be 3+ hours.  Whereupon the cook comes along and does the pile in 40 minutes.

It is easy to think you have the right tool and the right method; but it may be that you've simply missed a lesson or two along the way.  I get that people watch that idiot Ramsey scream at people and waffle on about food with bucketfuls of meaningless adjectives, but actual restaurant cooking is about ordering actions in the least amount of time - those that survive are those who can keep their heads about them in a dangerous environment.  Cooking isn't about gadgets, it isn't even about skill.  I could teach any one of you a reasonable amount of proficiency with a knife if you did it every day for a year.  Cooking is about paying attention.  Noticing details.  Recognizing slight color changes, an odor in the air, a certain alteration in sound.  If you're told what to expect, it's actually very, very easy to manage these things.

If you've never been told - or you have been told and you refuse to listen - then you will always be a lousy cook.  But then, conveniently, we can identify the lousy cooks very easily.

Hm.  Now that I think about it, DMing works the same way, doesn't it?

Fostering

In the interest of fostering enthusiasm . . .

There's no question that I am generally seen to be a negative person.  Most would consider me anything but fostering, since I seem far more concerned with tearing down than I am with offering aid and support.

Yes, I agree.  I have done my best with that.  From the start of this blog, I've set out to blast the sort of games I've always hated - railroaded games, simple-minded games, games run by tin-pot generals, games based on cheesy bought materials, etcetera.  By the time I wrote my first post in 2008, I had certainly 'fostered' a long and bitter distaste for these things, a distaste I have given free rein in the past six-plus years.

I don't think it is quite washed out of me.  Another six years should do it.

To 'foster' is to offer food, to nourish and to support.  I have always felt that food given ought to be good food, food that will do more than simply fill your belly for an hour or two.  I'm not in the habit of giving brimstone and treacle.  I could easily draw up dungeon room after dungeon room - working my way up through the monsters not merely in terms of stats but in actually laying out an encounter for each and everyone.  Hell, I've cooked up at least three thousand such encounters, it's part of running the game.

Yet I do not see that as offering food - for me, it has the sick taint of charity.  I would rather that you, the reader, took it upon yourself to produce that list - to create a single, stand-alone encounter for every monster in whatever game set you play with.  Not to post it, but to DO it.  To feel the confidence that would let you do it - and to learn how so many of the monsters are pathetically similar, so as to be interchangeable.  Expecting you to do it, pressuring you, producing the guilt that makes you try, will do more to improve your game than me spilling my brain over these pages.

See, that has been the problem from the beginning.  What people want - more freebie crap to insert into their campaigns - is not what people need: the ability to do it themselves.  The resistance against self-reliance is a conditioned response, one that has been promoted by the consumerist culture.

There is a belief that it is impossible to improve on what can be purchased.  Bought material is so much prettier and nicely laid out, with art and shiny paper, that home brews pale by comparison.  I find it the height of idiocy when a DM flips open the module they've just bought so their players can Oooo and Aaaah over the content, as though any boob can't just go out and buy the same damn thing. I wonder how many realize this translates into the same idiocy that makes people feel special or superior because they bought one sort of mass produced status symbol as opposed to another.  People ask me what my problem is with the bourgeois middle-class . . . there it is, the idiomatic ideology that supposedly confers importance to the purchaser.  It is an odd sort of pride that was a fundamental part of my world where I grew up, which I have long since turned my back on.

This perceived status is coupled with a sense that producing an encounter or an adventure is a HUGE work load, as the would-be maker stares into the amount of so-called work pressed into your average store-bought adventure.  "Hell, it took how many people how many hours to produce that adventure? And now I'm supposed to reproduce this, on my own?"  As if most of the content written down isn't painfully repetitive, superfluous, obvious to a DM or otherwise unnecessary to setting up and carrying out the campaign.  The reason every nut and bolt must be included in the plans results from the possible stupidity of the user.  The company is culpable to the user, no matter who that user may be, so the company must design for the dumbest possible person with enough money in their pocket.

Designing your own adventure means skipping over 90% of the details - but you don't do that, because you've already been coerced into thinking you have to write everything down.  This to the bafflement of all of us who hear about some out there taking 15 hours to prepare their weekend campaign.  15 hours?  I spend about 20 minutes doing any actual writing down, myself - and this I can usually do right in front of the players, as they're settling down to play.

There's a true story about James Whistler, the painter, that wikipedia is nice enough to have included. In it, Whistler wins a case in which he supposedly overcharged a client for two days of work.  The crux of the case came down to the client feeling that he had been cheated, because Whistler hadn't worked long enough or hard enough for him personally.  Whistler felt - rightly - that a life of experience was a perfectly substitute for time.  I don't spend 20 minutes preparing my campaign because I don't respect my players; I spend 20 minutes because the whole adventure is laid out, in detail, in my head, where it does not take me 15 hours to design.

The community and I do not see eye-to-eye on this point.  Where I would prefer to 'foster' the community, the community wants the work done, in its entirety, right now.  They've been trained to expect it, to parade it about when they've got it (as though buying a module makes them cock-of-the-walk) and to disdain all other work as crude and second-rate.  Faced with this, I find myself given to draw out my pitchfork and my torch and go to work.  If I can't explain the better way to play D&D, then I am damn well going to demonstrate why the accepted way is pure shit.

It's been a good year, though, because I've been able to do both.  On the blog, here, I continue to tear and rend, while I have presented a book that is 100% positive in its fostering of gaming.

On both counts, I still have a lot of work to do.

Backstage

Anytime a known writer speaks in public, at a library or a university, and the field is open to questions, there's always one adventurer who will rise from the audience and ask, "Where do you get your ideas?"

I have seen a number of answers to this question: polite answers, vague answers and academic answers.  I remember seeing Mordecai Richler speak (for non-Canadians, this is a 'famous Canadian writer' whom every body praises but nobody reads).  When the question came up, he became quickly incensed.  "From my BRAIN" he bellowed, having obviously answered the question a thousand times already.  Then he added, "Sit down, you stupid girl!"

On some levels, I think that may have been the best answer.

There's little difference between the question above and those who cannot help but ask, "How do you come up with hooks for a campaign?"  Or, "How do you make adventures the players will want to play?"  Every composer (for that is a nice generic term for everyone who designs or envisions something from scratch) will cast about - especially at the beginning of their careers - for a methodology or an approach that's better than the one they're using.

This is born out of a belief that some people find composing easy.  I reach for a book when I'm twenty and find myself mystified by the author's ability to create these profound characters, fill their mouths with dialogue and pull them together in these marvellous ways in order to bring the story to a conclusion that knocks me for six.  At twenty, it is impossible to imagine how this is done.

We presume that the composer's mind must somehow work differently that our own does.  We look at our own work and compare it to the composer and suppose that it must have something to do with their biology or intelligence or a special sort of damage that was done to their brain at an early age. Or we suppose that the composer must have discovered a trick, some magic formula that lets them organize their minds in such a way that we cannot.

In truth, it is all perception.

Compare writing to the way you see Christmas now - an example I'm choosing because the reality behind Christmas starts to hit home just before you reach the age of twenty.  This way, the metaphor should reach most of the readers here.

At six, everything about Christmas is magical.  You may have figured out that Santa isn't real, but you're not sure enough about the world yet to feel that is completely confirmed, especially as everyone insists on talking about him.  The lights, the stories about elves and reindeer and so on that you watch, the excitement of being given things by your family - particularly after that long drum roll for weeks before you open the presents - come together in a time of wonder.  All around you are cookies and sweets, things you eat until you're physically restrained from eating more, you get full or they run out.  You're not able to see these things with a jaundiced eye because you're young and easily amused - and you don't really understand how or why any of this happens.

As you age, however, you are slowly and steadily separated from the magic.  You begin to see the process from a wider perspective.  You see how the cookies and things come together.  Santa evaporates into a well-meaning lie.  The presents get worse and worse - and you recognize they are things that are actually available for purchase all year round.  Bit by bit the pretty decorations become paper and tacks; the ornaments on the tree grow tacky and worn.  You think less and less about Christmas, except for the chore of shopping, until the last moment.  In your late teens, you find yourself working on Christmas Eve, Christmas or Boxing Day, shortening the 'holiday' to just a few hours.

Yes, you'll find other things about Christmas that you'll appreciate.  As your kids grow, you'll enjoy Christmas through their eyes.  But Christmas will never be the same again, because you understand all about Christmas now.

Composing is the same way.  As you read or write more, as you plumb through more role-playing material and design more campaigns, bit by bit the bloom will rub from the rose.  If you return to read the books you read with eyes wide open as a child, you'll recognize where the characters are weak, now.  You'll see where the author took short-cuts.  Instead of elegant nuance, you'll begin to see how and where the composer hammered things together.

You may go too far and find yourself losing a taste for everything.  You may become so wrapped up with how obviously crappy everything is - especially your own work - that you quit composing altogether.  You may go one step further from there and take it upon yourself to keep everyone else in the world from composing, from the bitterness you feel that the world isn't the wonderful, beautiful place you were so falsely told existed when you were a little child.

Or you may recognize that composing requires a bit of knocking together to make it work.  You may begin to understand that success isn't getting it perfect (since no one does), but in managing the best you can.  Steadily, you may begin to realize that you can see things that others can't, because you've been walking around backstage all this time and they've been out in the audience.

This is what composers mean when they say, "Keep writing, keep working, keep composing."  They mean, "Keep walking around backstage.  Get into the habit of watching how it's done.  Don't worry that its all fake and pasteboard, that its wood knocked together to make it seem like it's beautiful - that's just how we do it here.  No, there's no trick.  No one back here is special.  It's only that we've been doing it for a long time."

I should add that there are some who will tell you otherwise - but believe me, they are trading on their time and your ignorance.  They're counting on you to think they're geniuses - they may even be deluded enough to think that they are.  It's all crap.  Everyone fucks up.  It doesn't matter.  We keep at it, we keep learning, we accept that it isn't magic and that we do it because it has become a vocation. We knock it together, slap some plaster and paint over the nails, cock our heads and call it, "Good enough."  Then we move on.

I'm Always Wrong

Took me a couple of days, but I finally watched this video from Kathryn Schultz at TED.  It was suggested to me in connection with the post I recently wrote about being wrong . . . and it puts me in mind of the day I've had and the way my thought process works.

All day - and I mean, all day, walking from the office to get coffee, waiting for the bus, sitting on the bus, laying in the tub upon getting home - I've been thinking about an attempt I made on the wiki yesterday regarding the ability to 'read' or know conspiracies.  I won't bother linking the wiki, because I'm going to change the page in a day or two . . . because the attempt is garbage.  It's wrong. It needs to be better.  I'll post the present version here and you'll see what I mean.


Conspiracy

Provides knowledge of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, though it must be understood that the character may be in doubt as to whether a given conspiracy is true. The secrecy with which the conspiracy occurs may leave its nature - or its goals - in doubt . . . however, the ability will give the character clues as to how the conspiracy may be validated or better understood.

Through adventuring, the character may thus gain the power to expose the conspiracy (false or real), become its victim or its master.

Speaking in game terms, it would be impractical for the DM to list every conceivable conspiracy that might have existed during a chosen period or which exists now in one of the wide reasons. For this reason, the DM and the player should agree upon a number of conspiracies to start, between two and five, related in geography or importance to the character at this point in the campaign - with the understanding that the DM should occasionally propose another conspiracy every third or fourth running (again, this time frame being agreed between the DM and the player). In this way, the player can accumulate conspiracies without overtaxing the DM's creativity.

Each conspiracy should have the following characteristics:

• That some agreement has been made between two or more groups 
• That the purpose of this agreement would be to conceal an important matter from the general population 
• That the matter in question should violate either the law or the local principles of morality 
• That knowledge is had of outsiders having suffered due to the conspiracy 

The character should have information regarding at least two of the groups involved; at minimum the conspiracy's foremost purpose (sub-purposes may not be known); what violations may have occurred (may include both true and untrue elements) and finally a general idea of what group or persons have suffered.

Even if the conspiracy should prove to be false, SOME of the details above should be correct - such as a group meaning to propose the conspiracy and not following through, persons suffering due to a reason that is not the conspiracy, etcetera.

Any deeper clarity regarding the conspiracy must be gained through adventuring.


There are people who will look at the above and think, that's kind of a dumb idea.  There are people who will look at that and think, that's fine.  Move on.  Then there are people who will recognize what I recognize - that it's weak.  It's in the neighborhood but it hasn't rented an apartment yet.  It's in the batter box but it's hitting foul grounders.

Being wrong is normal.  Normal.  There isn't a day that dawns where my thought process is not driven by A) what is wrong with what I've done up until now, and B) how do I make it better.

Just now, I'm working on a reboot of my pricing system and table.  Why?  Because France broke the old system. Why?  Because the old system was shit.  It didn't manage the mess.  The solution is to make a new, better, stronger system, which is what I'm doing.  Am I rehashing the old system for the fun of it?  No.

Is the character background generator good?  Yes.  Is it as good as it gets?  Hell no.  The same goes for the weather tables, for the write-up for the combat system, for the mass hit points system and the monsters and everything else I do.

Do I owe the people on line more videos about the trade system?  Yes.  Have I been ignoring that?  No.  I've done three videos already to try to cover the topic and all three have been complete crap.  The first video was complete crap.  Was I wrong when I did it that way?  Oh yes, yes, yes, I was wrong.

Being wrong is normal.

I would have accomplished NONE of the things I've accomplished without first understanding that everything that came before the presence incarnation was wrong.  Not good enough.  Inadequate.

This is design.  To design is to make garbage, then to make garbage that seems less like garbage, then to make garbage that comes close to making you believe that it isn't garbage . . . and then you start to make things that work.

The process demands that you look at everything you do from the point of understanding where and why the design is wrong.  The 'right' you don't have to worry about.  It's right.  It doesn't need your attention.

Only the things that are wrong are worth thinking about.  They are the only things that matters.

Those people in the world who tell you, only concentrate on the good things?  Those people have no idea how any of the good things in the world came into existence.  The good things in the world only happen because we fix the bad things in the world.

Try to keep your eye on that.  Try to understand that my saying that I'm wrong is a step forward.