Buying Things

As the players come into town with their new-found wealth, I recommend letting them get about the business of buying things.  For myself, having created a very deep list of items that can challenge the pockets of nearly every character, "market day" is something of a rest.  Players ask many questions about what something is, or what use it serves, or how many are available, but for the most part the equipment list provides its own entertainment.

I am, as explained, in the process of putting this table into a book, so that it's much more than a list of items with their costs, but we need not go into this side project at the moment.  Instead, allow me to be tiresome, as I address various rules and the philosophy behind them, within the game experience.

This should be evident, given how it affects video game mechanics, but the process of spending money to purchase material things is a form of character advancement, separate from the advancement associated with experience levels.  Advancement through the purchase of armour reduces the chance of the character being hit, and so it increases the character's ratio of hit points against enemies.  This is, essentially, giving the character MORE hit points.  Superior weapons, in turn, increase the amount of damage done to opponents ... which gives the enemy LESS hit points.  Therefore, to maintain the game's challenge, effort must be taken on our part to ensure that the character's advantage, and the enemy's disadvantage, adjusts marginally.  And I mean that: marginally.

A lesson to be learned is that cost is not a sufficient obstacle against the acquisition of things that can be purchased.  Plunder is defacto a result of adventuring; the DM can deliberately reduce the amound of treasure found, but in reality this merely kicks the can down the road.  Sooner or later the player will have enough money to buy anything that's wanted.  And this is even easier if the whole party pools their money and chooses to buy the most effective equipment for each player in turn, making sure the fighter gets the best armour and weapons ... since in the short run, that improves everyone's survival, and the accumulation of more treasure.

It's possible that Gygax and crew understood this; and that they saw that the way to stave off the purchase of the most expensive items was to use player death as a balancing factor.  Characters won't "eventually" buy the best armour if the character is dead.

The problem is heightened when magical items are put up for sale.  Since the accumulation of treasure is inevitable, so long as the player continues to survive, then even items that cost tens of thousands of gold pieces will come into reach.  After all, we want players to survive; and if they're capable of planning and balancing the odds right, they will survive, they will buy whatever they want and that will destroy the challenge of the game — as powerful magic items of all sorts dwarf experience gains.

I find myself wrestling with words here.  Whether or not the campaign rewards experience for gold pieces, it's understood by players that gold is a part of what they seek when they adventure.  If we follow the structure to be found in official game modules, we're speaking of an awful lot of treasure; many thousands per person per adventure.  Where magic is for sale, this quickly transfers into mass buys of potions, scrolls, wands, magic armour and weapons, whatever the players wish.  One adventure dangerously overtips the game in the player's favour ... and that distorts, or rather weakens, the overall value of the game itself.

Even if we suspend the buying of magic items, there are still details like flasks of oil, holy water, plate armour and so on to consider.  What is to stop the player from purchasing with 10,000 g.p. a thousand vials of holy water, carefully transferred to metal jugs, so that gallons can be splooshed upon the lich we know is down below.  With characters who have accumulated ten levels over a lengthy campaign, having a six-figure number of gold pieces is normal.  Why not, at 11th, when one cannot possibly handle a well-run lich, simply have everyone in the party accumulate 8 gallons of holy water with 10,000 gold?  The take is sure to be at least double that amount when the treasure is counted.

And so, as I say, cost is not an obstacle.  It's a speed bump.  The proper obstacle to the accumulation of wealth is mass ... how much can be carried, how much can be stored, where can it be stored safely, how much can be practically transferred into the desired commodity and finally, how much can be effectively employed at any one time.

If the vial is elemental to the holiness of the water, and the water cannot be removed from the vial for more than, say, 20 seconds without destroying its inherent properties, then 10,000 gold's worth of holy water exists as a thousand vials, which cannot all be opened simultaneously, or at any great speed.  If the plate armour is heavy, and cannot be worn without reducing what else the character can carry, while slowing the character down in a fight, then the defensive benefit on one front is weighed against the offensive loss on another.  If a magic sword cannot be purchased, nor any improved variety of plain sword, except perhaps one that breaks less, than a better sword must be found.  And if the character has enormous piles of money, then all that money must be made inconvenient by placing it in a bank, or in goods so heavy — such as a castle — that it cannot be stolen.

Encumbrance is the critical element of discipline in the game's structure where the accumulation of wealth and power occurs.  The more one has, the greater imposition encumbrance makes upon the character.  The word literally means, "an obstacle, a burden or an impediment."  It doesn't matter that players don't like it; they're not meant to like it.  They're meant to fucking hate encumbrance, to despise it, to lay awake nights grumbling against it, as they invent ways to reduce its grasping, troublesome, crippling effects.

Secondary to encumbrance is time.  Wealth has a physical presence; that presence must be located somewhere in the game world.  All of it, unless it's so little that the players are not benefitted by it, cannot be perpetually carried around with the character.  This means that some of it must be located at a distance, where it's inconvenient to the players right now, so that it takes time to re-acquire it.  And time costs.  Players eat, and food goes bad.  Items age and go weak.  Complex items accumulate weak points and break.  Rooves fall in, foundations crack.  If medicines have an expiry date, why not potions, or holy water?  Combustibles sometimes, over time, combust..  Every month, wages deplete the kitty.  There's nothing time cannot destroy.  Time sucks.

It's not necessary to steal money from players.  That may happen, and eventually I'll figure out a fair way to impose that possibility ... but the harder truth is that the maintenance of wealth costs wealth.  As does the protection of wealth.

And so, let the players get about the business of buying things.  Decide what they can buy, and how much, and say nothing of how they're digging a hole for themselves.  Buying things is fun.

My Readers

If I'm to consider why I'm writing, it follows that I should give thought on whom I'm writing to.  What is it that makes a reader of mine?  And, consequently, the sort of person who seeks a rigid exploration of self through a process of aggravation, difficulty and the accumulation of pride ... as these are the games I strive to run.  I ask my players to track their movement in combat, to track how much they're eating and their encumbrance down to a tenth of a pound.  I ask them to accept stark limitations on what they can do, I expect them to maintain a standard of interparty decency and a firm grammatical presentation when explaining their character's actions.  I do this in the spirit of behavioural rules surrounding games like golf, chess, bridge ... and even professional baseball, which dictates exactly where and how a pitcher can stand on a mound before delivering the ball to a batter, whose play is based on an exact imaginary square in the air that the pitch must be "inside" or else counted as a "ball."

Why do my players tolerate this?  And why do I have readers who acknowledge that this is important ... especially when we know quite obviously that many D&D players would find this absurdly anal and very definitely "un-fun."  Having to play according to these ordinances, why is it my players nevertheless laugh quite a lot, and clearly have a very good time, and return to play the instant I ask them?

I think it's relevant to examine why some people drive themselves to do hard things in the first place.  For example, with no expectation of ever winning a competition of any sort, an individual decides they're going to run an official marathon race, 26 miles and 385 yards, in 3 hours and 30 minutes.  This is no where near the record for a marathon, which is currently 2 hours, 1 minute and 39 seconds.  Yet to accomplish the feat of running the distance in 210 minutes, the runner will begin to train for at least a year ... on top of many years of training prior to that in order to run a marathon at all.  This "advanced" training will demand running distances of 35 miles a week, and even more in the weeks before the event takes place.  He or she will need to achieve a "comfortable" rate of 8 minutes per mile, for mile after mile, to meet the task ... and then, during the race, he or she will have to push harder than that.  Harder than ever before.

What for?  What's being gained?  The training is hard.  The race is hard.  And potentially, the goal may not be reached.  The runner may only manage the marathon in 3 hours 40, or 3 hours 35.  Why does he or she not feel devastated?  Why does it make them want to train more, strive harder, achieve that goal the next time?  And why, after reaching 3 hours 30, the runner wants to try for 3 hours 20?  What's going on here?

When we listen to people who "love D&D" talk about how onerous it is to have to account for their equipment and calculate their encumbrance, why is it so many people nod their heads and agree, asserting firmly that calculating encumbrance is a "waste of time" because it's "so time consuming."  We can suppose they don't see the benefit in keeping a record; but my personal experience with players unused to managing encumbrance usually chafe at the lack of material items or how actual calculations slow their characters down in a fight ... much more so than the actual trouble it takes to add and subtract numbers.  Yes, it is a fact that making records of this kind does require a few minutes and often a calculator ... though my players often employ a computer and a spreadsheet, so that the instant they record an item, the total weight is instantly calculated also.  The difficulty is not really the accounting, though this is often the excuse.  The difficulty is the rigid control this places on the character's things and movements.  The limitations.  The making of a part of the game hard that used to be very easy, since we weren't accounting for how fast we moved or how much we had.

Take away these easements, however, and the player quickly feels bound by every choice they have to make in purchasing items, in a way that has nothing to do with how much money they have.  Many, many cool, awesome things they'd like to have along are suddenly too heavy to get.  And since they usually have those things when they play in campaigns that don't record encumbrance, it feels "unnecessary" and "unfair" that they can't automatically have those things now.  It doesn't fit their worldview, such as they've developed it over time.

Think of any activity we don't ordinarily do — say, marathon running.  Imagine that someone else with the power to make us pulls us out of our comfort zone and forces us to head out and do 300, 400, even 500 minutes of running every week.  They start us out by enabling us to walk, but they keep pushing us to run for as much of the time as we're out there moving.  We'd resent that.  We'd resent the time it was stealing from the rest of our lives.  After all, if we wanted to go marathon running, we'd do that.

But if our minds were open, and we were kept at it for a few weeks, we'd notice some changes.  Health, for one thing; we'd feel tired, but more limber getting up in the morning.  We'd notice some of that fat being winnowed away.  Partners and friends would remark on our "looking better" and we'd like that.  Oh, we might say something bitter like, "I ought to look better, given how fucking hard I'm working," but we'd like the comment all the same.

We'd notice other things too.  Three or four weeks in, we'd notice that it's actually easier to spend 90 minutes running.  It isn't actually easier, of course; what's happening is that we're stronger ... but it seems easier from our perspective.  Six to eight weeks in, as we're huddled out to do our forced run, we'd have stopped griping and worrying about it.  What the fuck, we'll do our ninety minutes and then we'll be done.  We're going to spend the time thinking about something else, anyway.  And we are feeling better.  And looking better.  And it's kind of a nice day today.  And we're enjoying the company of the people we run with, who are also looking better and seeming more cheerful.  Twelve weeks in, we're actually looking forward to the run.  We start thinking about how much further we can run in 90 minutes.  We think about how strong we feel, and how much easier it is to run faster.  You know, we really feel changed.  For the better.  Why didn't we do this before?

Most of my readers, I think, are people who ordinarily like hard things having nothing to do with D&D.  They choose occupations and past-times that tax their spirit and require lots of time.  Things that present lots of insurmountable obstacles that can't be gotten around with a short cut.  In fact, I think many of my readers — and I can immediately think of several — have chosen careers and activities that recognise that "short cuts" lead to both injuries and fatalities.  So when someone writes, "Here are three simple ways to get your game world started," they immediately think about co-workers and activists who decided they could "simplify" the way they arranged their gear or launched off into whatever.

I have an ex-military friend who received his ticket to work as an electrician and for 20 years worked in a train yard fixing electrical locomotives.  From his experience, I can say without doubt that train yards are ridiculously dangerous places, especially at night.  I'll give an example, because I can.

An empty flat-car weighs about 80 tons.  In a train yard, it's necessary to store empty cars along lines of track, where they'll wait until they're needed for loading.  An engine is used to push the car so that it rolls to the end of track — but the engine isn't used to push the car the whole distance.  That would be a waste of energy.  So the engine gives the flat car a bump, setting it to move about 8-10 miles an hour, then lets it go.  The car will roll until it encounters an obstacle ... a line of cars or the end of a track.

At night, slow rolling freight cars are a nightly thing.  There's noise all around, from trains moving, machines running, the railroad shop working and so on producing a steady drone in the distance.  A rolling flat car in the dark of night makes no sound, comparatively.  And because it's flat, it can't be seen against the sky.  In fact, it's invisible.  80 tons, 8 miles an hour, invisible, potentially anywhere in the yard at any time.  People die.  Especially new people.  The old hands learn to recognise the very slight sound, the almost imperceptible movement ... and they know never to walk across a track that as if it's empty of cars.  EVER.

I think people who work in these kind of environments, or who occupy their free time with similarly dangerous activities, "get" me.  They get me perfectly.  They understand I'm not trying to simulate real life.  They understand I'm trying to present a game structure that requires patience, forethought, internal examination and an inescapable element of risk that must be accepted as unavoidable.  They like it.  They purposefully move towards activities of that type ... even ones where actual death isn't involved.  Ersatz death is enough.  And if there is a fail, if something does go wrong, they know enough to admit their fault, confess their fault ... but never to dwell on their fault, because dwelling isn't necessary.

We will make mistakes.  We will forget to buy boots, or fail to buy enough food, or overload ourselves to a degree that becomes untenable.  But when that happens, we don't blame the rules, we don't look to change the game ... we appreciate that the game has repercussions that produce unexpected effects.  Like having to jury rig boots until we can buy them.  Or squeezing out another day from the food we have, and searching for alternative sources.  Or being unproudly willing to dump expensive crap on the road and leave it behind in order to FIX THE PROBLEM.

Too often, other readers from other expressions of the game rely on fixes that demand changes to the game, rather than changes to themselves.  They can't get out and run, and change themselves, because from a young age, they never learned how.  They didn't have a father who made them walk miles into the bush in order to fish an obscure river.  They didn't have a mother who made them sit through hundreds of hours of old movies until they learned to see the genius in old movies.  They never joined a scout troop, or helped build a cabin, or put together a science fair project that took months to plan and build.  They didn't learn to build furniture, or use a drill press or a lathe, or set type for printing, or weld metal.  They didn't perform their own written work on stage in a city-wide drama competition.  They never played on a league sports team, not football or baseball or soccer or hockey.  They didn't run track for junior high school.  They didn't compete in a chess tournament or a junior high school trivia contest aired on local television.   They didn't spend seven days canoeing down a river and sleeping in tents on the shore at night.  They didn't learn first how to play cribbage, bridge or poker, and do it often with intransigent, inflexible elders willing to hit impertinent little boys who remarked on "the rules."

I did all these things before I'd ever heard of D&D ... and a lot of other things besides, most of the time because I was forced to.  Sometimes because the opportunity was there and it sounded exciting.  I think my readers have similar childhoods, which they've brought similarly to D&D.

And I think that many of my D&D playing non-readers haven't.

Plans for Encumbrance

Complaints about encumbrance:  bookkeeping, looking up the weight of things, keeping track of arrows and other missiles thrown or fired, re-calculating every time money is collected or spent, figuring out adjustments due to strength and other elements, the total lack of benefits from having LESS stuff in order to get exactly the same effect as ignoring encumbrance has given.

It is this last that is the killing feature for anyone who has ever proposed actually using this rule.  The immediate effect is NOT to increase the player character's power but to restrict it.  Your character that used to move 5 hexes per round now moves 2.  Why?  Because we've decided not to ignore all that weight your character is carrying, the weight that has been carried since the beginning of the campaign.  Sorry.  Your move is crap now.

I have managed to wean my players onto the penalty of carrying too much weight by having movement linked to armor.  More protection = less movement.  Now that I want to change that by bringing in encumbrance as a thing, my players are likely to be less resistant to the policy.  They already know that no one moves at full movement rate unless they're prepared to strip down to only their clothes and a weapon or two.

The bigger problem for my players is the tracking - and this is a problem for everyone.  It is impossible with pencil and paper, especially if what's wanted is a proper account of where the encumbrance is - hips, shoulders, backpack, saddlebag, pack animal, etc.   Otherwise, what is the point?  Once players have been encouraged to believe that carrying something on their person is going to be a hassle, they'll get smart enough to realize that shuffling off their backpack before a fight will make them move faster . . . and that's the sort of thinking I want them to have.  It shouldn't be a question of "now you are loaded, you're screwed," it should be, "now that I'm loaded, what can I ditch at an opportune time that will make me not-loaded?"

Many make the mistake of thinking that encumbrance is a yearning for realism.  Realism, while nice for museum curators, means nothing to me.  I am interested in game - which means that any rules about encumbrance must be a game unto themselves, thereby adding to the role-play experience.  I want players who take a hand axe into combat because they know they can throw it right off and move faster.  I want players who choose a club for a proficiency because they know that if they really need to, they can discard it and lose nothing valuable.  I want players who choose what goes in their backpack not in terms of what fits, but in terms of what can be lost forever without it mattering much.  I want players who realize that no everyone can take a grapple, because they weigh 7 lbs. a piece and that's a lot of excess weight just in case its needed.  I want players who think.

Ah, but that paperwork.  That is something else entirely.  That is why I plan to take the price table and build an encumbrance table out of it.  All through making the price table I very carefully assigned weights to everything.  The next stage is to take those and build them into drop down lists that the players can pick from, then assign a number of things carried and have the weight of those things automatically calculated, along with all those other excessive details that no one wants to keep track of.  Fire an arrow?  Just change the number on your excel sheet.  Add 375 coins?  Just change the numbers.  Want to take it out of your backpack and put it in your saddlebag?  Change the location tab and instantly see the effect.  Easy peasy.

Yes, it means using a computer.  Horrible things, with buttons.  Aw.

It will mean some work and some time, but I should have something workable along those lines soon - the hard part, the weights themselves, have all been assigned.