The Effing Paladin

This effort to teach AD&D in a linear fashion has hit a snag with the paladin.  First, it took me three passes to find the right voice for explaining alignment, which cannot be dodged around if teaching the class as it's written. Next, discussing the paladin's codes proved less than ideal, and the consequences for breaking those codes as well. Then that business with the paladin's warhorse that I discussed with the last post.

And now, the arbitrary rules about what a paladin can use as magic equipment, what a paladin must do with their money and who a paladin must associate with.

What seems to happen is this: I begin by intending to describe the rules as written... but these are, in fact, full of holes, since the words don't actually wander all around the subject.  A good example for this is the "henchman," which to the best of my recollection is never described as anything but a hireling. The reason for the name, what it means to "hench," what the person is hired to accomplish, what their role is, or what they are to the player is not discussed. Only how to find them, their statistical details and their loyalty. Why a henchperson is even allowed is not discussed either. This sort of hole, where we spend a page and a half discussing everything about the rule except why it exists, can be very frustrating.

Then, as I drift into pointing out the details of the hole, so the reader will understand what's not being said in the AD&D rule, I end up drifting further into why this rule is illogical, or can be easily circumvented, or indeed why it undermines actual game play and builds resentment.

And then somewhere in that drift, I stop, realise I've gone too far, and then come here and kvetch.

There are two fundamental problems with all these paladin-constraining rules... and it not the theory that paladins need constraint. The first is that every one of them is entirely arbitrary. It's never explained why alignment is necessary for AD&D game play (it isn't), or why the paladin must have codes, or why there must be a punishment for these codes instead of the DM simply saying, "Nope, you can't do that, you're a paladin."  The reason is obviously because it shifts the responsibility from the DM for saying that to the paladin, which in turn allows the DM to be the avenging but righteous angel, bringing the paladin up short not by a simple game rule, "Do not pass GO, do not collect $200," but by an oppornistic jackassery that threatens the player's agency and right to game play on an MADE-UP bullshit moral principle.

Why ten magic items?  Arbitrary. Why can't the paladin keep their money and use it for good? Arbitrary. Why can't the paladin give the money to the party cleric, who ALSO must be lawful good, and is therefore limited? Arbitrary. Because we can't treat the player cleric like one of the NPC clerics of the game world UNDER THE DM'S AUTHORITY.  It's clubhouse rules, so no, you can't give away the tithe to the party's cleric. It's all arbitrary and none of it is ever explained, defined or justified.

The second fundamental problem is that the paladin isn't actually that powerful a class. Turning the undead is in game play a pretty weak mechanic, clerical spells by the time they're gotten are so low-level that they're not a threat, the 18 h.p. a paladin can heal is pathetic compared to the damage a 9th level dungeon bestows, the +2 bonus to AC and saving throws are only against evil creatures and honestly, again by 9th level, these are not that important. A suit of chain mail +2 gives the same benefit and the wearer of the chain mail doesn't have to obey a fucking code. A 1st level cleric can cast protection from evil which lasts for a whole fight and doesn't have a code either. The horse is great, but it's still just a horse. All in all, the paladin, which needs way more experience to go up a level than the mage, is not as powerful as the mage, especially after the mage reaches 7th level. So what gives? What the fuck? Why is ANY of this needed?

So it gets under my skin, I push a little here, I push a little there... and I realise I've gone past the written agenda and I have to stop, rethink and then rewrite.

I need to go back to the Foreword.  I had made a point that any rule that requires an arbitrary judgment that two DMs would not make the same cannot be seen as a rule, no matter how much credit AD&D gives to it. It's not game design, it's the DM cheating and calling it another name.

Steadily, I see that I'm going to have to discuss that in the Foreword, and add some content about rules that serve no real purpose in game play except to arbitrarily empower the DM.

"Gameplay" is defined as the DM presenting the setting, the players acting upon what they learn, the DM conveying the response of the setting to that action and then the players acting again. This symbiosis is the game. "Presenting the setting" can be defined as a situation that arises mechanically from the pretext of the creature or the physical qualities of that setting. It cannot be the DM deciding arbitrary to judge whether or not the player, specifically, ran the character in a way that is arbitrarily, for no actual defined rule, against the DM's personal wishes — which includes the DM putting on a "deity-suit" as if it isn't actually the DM calling the balls and strikes. Game play is that where the consequences of the game are decided by dice, not the DM's mindset about what a character class ought to be about, or represent, or how a player running a character of that class must move their personal game piece. And this is even more egregious if this arbitrary non-rule applies specifically to one player's behaviour and not everyone else's, including the DM's.

Working it out in my head how I'm going to write this, while also working out how to rewrite what I wrote today about the paladin.

D&D was Written by Scrooge, who Died before Reforming

There are passages in AD&D that are so egregious that I think it should be defacto a RULE that anyone praising the game should automatically be compelled to at least address them, if not to outright condemn them. And honestly, it needs to be said explicitly: "AD&D is a good system, but that shit about the paladin's warhorse, that's just wrong. Don't pay any attention to the passage on page 18; the writer of that should be ashamed."

These are arguments I put aside a long time ago, and being forced to revisit them, and then describe them as they're written, makes my blood boil. It took me three passes to get through introduction of "alignment" as a concept in a way I felt I could do so legitimately, and now today it's the paladin's warhorse. Here's my text:

At 4th level, gain a mystical warhorse. This is a magnificent creature that is called for, and certainly no ordinary horse. In size and appearance, it is a heavy warhorse, a destrier from knightish tales; in intelligence, it has 5 to 7 points, so we assume — though the books do not state this — that is it capable of understanding the paladin. If literature is to be embraced, this understanding should pass both ways. The rules state that the warhorse has five "hit dice" (5d8), which are rolled and added up, and +5 more hit points added. The number of hit points per roll, however, cannot be less than the paladin's level — which means, if the paladin seeks the horse at 4th level, then a minimum of "4" must be rolled on each d8, which can be managed by rerolling lesser numbers until the correct minimum is obtained. A paladin of 8th level would ensure that every die equalled 8 hit points, so that the warhorse would have 40 +5 h.p., or 45, the most the warhorse can have regardless of the paladin's level above eighth.  

Hereafter, the rules for the warhorse in AD&D become a crude effort to contain the benefit of the horse while imposing unnecessary constraints upon the paladin; if the paladin falls from grace, for example, then the horse will abandon the character and, by the rules, no offer is made on how the horse is retained should the paladin find redemption for the fall. While one book in the rules states that the horse will "magically appear," another rule book stipulates this does not mean "physically," but that the paladin becomes aware of the horse's location, within a ride of seven days. Thereafter, the paladin must face an ordeal to "win" the horse: capturing it if it's wild, overcoming an evil fighter in mortal combat — or some other difficulty that will take a number of days to prove the paladin's mettle. This sort of demand for something the character has already earned by reaching a given level is a common, petty motif in AD&D. It can be followed, but it means the rest of the party must sit about while the paladin acts alone, using up game time, with no real expectation that the paladin will fail in the effort — especially since we're also told that a horse like this cannot appear more than once in a ten-year period. It would take a particular kind of DM to set up this ordeal in a manner that the horse could be lost for that period of time. It's not really a good example of game play and in practice, it is a rare DM who feels compelled to impose this on a paladin. We should consider this: if the paladin has reached 4th level without falling from grace, is this not already proof that the horse is deserved?

I can't just let the rule sit without comment. The very idea of the expectation upon the player speaks of a miserable, miserly person who feels he must yank the player's chain. The voice throughout the books shows a recurring distrust of the player, a need to keep the DM empowered as a corrective force and a habit for turning every advancement for the player into some probation that has to be earned out of pure meanness.

It is sometimes hard to speak glowingly of a game whose writer and chief proponent was such an insecure, small-minded, grudging, shabby, ungenerous little troll. Personally, I'm glad he's dead.

Reversals

To continue, the players have collected their treasure and discovered that there's a dungeon below the kobalds. As the reader can tell, the aftermath of combat produces multiple issues and downstream effects well past the actual fighting. Those who disparage the inclusion of combat in role-playing games conveniently overlook these effects, and their games suffer on account of that.

Here is another.  As the players contemplate the possibility of going forward, they're acutely aware of their hit points.  Without doubt, they'll have lost some to the kobalds, probably quite a few given how many kobalds there were, and what's wanted is sufficient healing to bring them to full.  Only, as the game was originally designed, and as I still play this part of it, healing at lower levels is in extremely short supply in the game world.  There are lots of ways to get healed ... but instant healing any time the party wants, even limited by some number of times in a given day, isn't there.

The so-called value of "super"-healing rules, such as developed in later games, is that the party can continue to move forward, practically indefinitely if need be, so that the whole adventure can be managed as a single narrative ... just like heroes manage in literature, when all the cuts and wounds they receive are either forgotten or fall just short of killing the hero before the quest is finished.  Many players want that exact arrangement.  They don't want to admit they're human, having to give ground to the enemy, having to retreat home with their tails between their legs like cowards.

Yet notice how often in books and films that the characters have to do exactly that — the way that Luke, Han and Leia have to escape so they can fight another day in the original film; or the way that Luke in the 2nd film, having lost his hand, has to escape so he can return in the 3rd.  He didn't spontaneously regenerate all his hit points.  He lost ... but losing isn't the end.

Most D&D battles are set up to give the players a Pyrrhic victory — named after the 3rd century BC general from a tiny country in northern Greece who repeatedly kicked the Roman's ass in fight after fight.  Though Pyrrhus lost less men than the Romans in these fights, he had less men to start with.  He couldn't exploit his victories.  He had to give up the ground he won, eventually having to fall back from Italy altogether, because he never had an army that equalled his genius.

That's the players at a low level.  They're smarter than the enemy, they have more options and powers than the enemy ... but from the beginning of the game, they venture into each lair by themselves, without a proper support network.  Most that I've run won't learn from this, because they think somehow that the rules of the game dictate that to be heroes, they must do it all themselves.  Instead, the players should build friendships and allies, with fortified encampments two or three miles from the dungeon, filled with supplies, replacement equipment, additional soldiers, a friendly cleric or two to give a little more healing and so on.  All these things are possible in the original game, but they're not even considered by a player party ... no doubt because many DMs refuse to reward players for rational thinking, loving to produce a situation where the players return to their camp to find they have to fight their own hirelings for no good reason except the DM is a fucking prick.

So, instead, we invent bottomless magical healing to overcome the "broken" parts of the original game, to spare the problem of players having to think.  And this naturally leads to other designs that circumvent the deadly capacity of the game as designed, assuring that no one's going to get seriously hurt or killed, at least not permanently, just so that dungeon can get finished without anyone ever having to take a break.

Like the fallout after combat, there's fallout after the players retreating back to town that gives the game a greater richness that punching monsters until they're all punched.  Players have to make choices, which gives them reason to consider their priorities.  They're reminded of their humanity, of the simple fact that they can't endlessly wade against an enemy like gods.  This humanity serves them very well when they're much more powerful and they remember the time when they were very soft and vulnerable.  The retreat gives us, the DM, to remind them that there is more to the setting — remember those examples of adventure hooks we set up while the party was on their way to the dungeon, that we can now bring round to fruition.  Other things, too, may happen on the party's way back.  They may get so invested in something else that they don't come back to the dungeon at all, at least not right away.  We give them choices.  We give them perspective.  We assure them that no, the game isn't just an endless cycle of replacing all their hit points and going around again.

Before we get to that, however, we have to talk about the party that decides, "We're just going to camp right here, in the dungeon we just cleared, until we get our hit points back."

This is always fun.  I've allowed it at times.  Online, I had a party moving through a cave that had been sealed off for centuries, sitting literally miles from the inhabited part of the cave, who camped out for four or five days, sending one player character back to town for supplies.  So yes, in the right circumstances, it's possible.

That scenario doesn't really apply to this kobald lair, however.  There are, to begin with, a lot of dead kobalds and dead rats laying around.  Far from being sealed off for centuries, the outer door is open to the world.  Is there a party of 20 kobald hunters on a 2-day trip, about to arrive back?  Have they absolutely killed every last rat?  Won't the bodies of the dead kobalds start to smell?  And — according to the rules of my game — the unburied dead do tend to rise as undead.

Now, it may be that because I grew up reading Weird War Tales as a comic, I'm naturally attuned to this concept ... but resting amidst scores of dead is just begging for a very bad scene.  How long does it take a murdered kobald to decay sufficiently in order to rise as a skeleton, when it's home is being occupied who have such contempt for the dead that they won't even stack them together?  And is it even possible for a human/demi-human cleric to give a proper burial rights to a kobald?  Surely these are questions worth considering.

Even if that's not a thing ... me, the guy writing this, would have quite a lot of trouble resting in the tomb I'd just created.  And I'm a 21st century fellow with a strong knowledge of science and not practicing a religion.  What does a 17th century player character think when he or she's lying, trying to sleep, and some mouse somewhere near by starts chewing on a kobald corpse, causing a random arm 50 feet away to slip and fall to the floor?  "Oh, that's a mouse"?

Remember that healing without magical means (or rule changes) takes a good long time.  A cleric has to get a full sleep, to pray again for a spell that only cures a little bit of the player's total lost hit points.  The party would have to rest for days, hearing every tiny sound gently echoing in hollow stone rooms that would be eerily silent when something wasn't skittering across the floor ... while waiting to see if it's our imaginations or if something real is actually happening.  While all the while being uncertain whether or not we've definitely killed everything that lives in this lair.

Running this is easy.  It's just a choice of picking words.  "You hear something very quiet; it sounds like it might have come from around the corner ahead; but it's probably nothing."  "Falling asleep, you feel like clawed hands are closing around your neck; you feel the boniness of the fingers as you have trouble breathing ..." [pause for effect]  "You wake up, gasping for breath.  It was a dream."

Takes about twenty minutes of this to get a party to smarten up, gather up their shit and head back to town.

Arguing the Merits

[This bonus post is a reprint from The Higher Path, available for a Patreon donation of $3 per month; the content is part of a series discussing nine common errors DMs make]

"A rules lawyer is a participant in a rules-based environment who attempts to use the letter of the law without reference to the spirit, usually in order to gain an advantage within that environment."

-- Wikipedia

I don't have any particular issue with a rules lawyer at my game table, foremost because I'm as conscious of the rules as said lawyer and secondly because I impose a condition of the law that I can't help noticing most DMs fail to recognize.  When a lawyer brings a case to court to argue it, before any argument can be made the judge has to first decide on the merits of the case before it will be considered.  If you recognize that as the DM, you are the judge, you'll realize that you don't have to listen to any case that lacks merit.  By definition, "merits" are defences that rest upon the justice of the case, and not upon technical grounds only.  That simple distinction obliterates at least 9/10ths of the arguments made by game rules lawyers ~ and if you outline that distinction, clearly, you can end nonsense cases put before you of this kind.

The way to break a rules lawyer is to use the law.

The wikipedia page also makes reference to a "sea lawyer," which I think is worth adding to the discussion.  According to the Glossary of U.S. Navy slang, a sea lawyer is,

"(1) A sailor or his buddy, making eloquent but completely spurious arguments at Captain's Mast, or in response to some disciplinary action. (2) An argumentative, cantankerous or know-it-all sailor. A sea lawyer is adept at using technicalities, half truths, and administrative crap to get out of doing work or anything else he doesn't want to do, and/or to justify his laziness."

This is precisely the problem with such people in game play.  It isn't that they debate or discuss the rules, which is perfectly sound and reasonable (after all, it is why we have lawyers).  It is that they are miserable, lazy persons lacking immersion in the game, which causes them to wreck campaigns while glomming attention and screwing up the works.

Not that I think anyone here needs me to define the D&D process, but let's do it anyway for argument's sake.  My role is to provide information about the setting, which includes detailing characters in that setting and things that happen surrounding the players.  When the players ask me a question, desirably, it should be about the setting, and not the rules.

It's understandable at the outset that we will need to discuss the rules to some degree, to settle on how the rules work.  For the most part, this should be one rule = one discussion.  That discussion will usually be 20 or 30 seconds, or less, unless it is a tricky rule.  Unless something truly goofy happens during the game, we shouldn't have to discuss that rule again (though, we will, because people can't remember things).

Rule discussions in game should be limited to clarification, Not supposition.  Any argument that begins with a metaphorical or simulationist perspective, such as, "I can swing a shield like a sword and I can prove it to you," has zero merit as an argument, not because it isn't true, but because we cannot measure the practicality of that thing with real experimentation against real orcs who are really trying to kill the player, who is not the fighter represented on the game's sheet of paper.  And so, therefore, the entire argument lacks evidence.  Arguments like this, that derive from a metagaming perspective, should never be heard by the DM.  According to the rules, the player's character has never been trained with a shield; it would never occur to the character to suppose he or she could use a shield as a weapon; therefore, the supposition is null and void.  Therefore, there is no merit to the player's argument and it will not be heard during game play.

Once you get this into your head as a DM, you'll be able to cut player's off mid-sentence without hesitation, like a Judge cutting off a lawyer stepping outside the law.  Once you get into the habit, the players will stop advancing metagaming arguments, the rules will come to stand as pre-determined and the players will stop talking to the DM when they get information about the setting, and will start talking to each other.

Flaw #4 reads, "Encouraging game metrics that rely too much on DM-Player negotiation, consuming the DM's precious time while hampering Player-Player communication."

Not only is this a dictate for the players to follow, but it is also a dictate for the DM.  If you find yourself starting to lose your voice by the end of a five-hour session, it is because you're talking too much.  Talk less.  Get your descriptions and important points out and then shut the hell up.  Stop embellishing beyond the bare minimum.  The game isn't about you.  The game is about what you inspire in others.  Let them be inspired and then back off.  Manage their requests, manage their rolls and decisions, manage the non-player characters and shut down player attempts to reach across the table and utilize your presence as a help-meet for their actions.

Because if you're soft and forgiving; if you're sympathetic and indulgent; they will smell it on you and wheedle every damn thing that comes into their imaginations out of your big, fat beneficence.  Your players aren't stupid.  If you give out that you can be played, they will play you.  They will tell you long sob-stories and butter you up; they'll argue mundane issues because you've already demonstrated a habit for being gotten around; they'll coax you and tempt you and twist your emotional arm.  Every character death will feature threats of game-quitting and suicide if that's what it will take to melt your big ol' fuzzy heart.  No treasure horde will ever be large enough; no magical weapon will ever have enough power; and no rule in your game will be fixed and inviolate, ever.

Every game will be a steady, unending discussion between you and the individual players, as they will never need to talk to each other.  Why would they?  They can get a lot more out of you!  What, in the name of the game, could another player offer that won't be bigger and better coming from the DM?

Brass Carrots

Gentle readers, no doubt, will have heard of campaigns that eliminate level progression. It is argued that level progression is unnecessary to role-playing and character building, that it creates friction among the players, that too much focus is placed on advancement and that games don’t need level-advancement to be enjoyable.

So we beg the question, what value do levels have?

The title embraces the supposition that levels are a motivation. The characters want more power, so we have created a set of arbitrary plateaus, obtained through an arbitrary award system we call “experience,” which can be adjusted on a whim of the DM at any time by awarding more experience arbitrarily at the appropriate moment.

It is this capriciousness that creates friction. We understand the clear, simple notion that players would like more powers and abilities in the future than they have today. We can lately remember a time when we did not possess a given skill, a well-paying job, a prized possession or other milestone ~ evidence that we’re doing better, that we’re smarter, that our lives are more comfortable and so on. Level-advancement reflects this. The fighter hits a little better, the mage has more spells, the general character is made safer with more hit points and there is status to be gained in the form of titles and game recognition.

But the steps themselves ARE subjective. Why should a fighter advance at 2,000 experience and not 1,500? Why should a given dead monster be worth 100 experience and not 200? And if DMs can just wave a hand and award experience at a whim, they why shouldn’t they, right now, as we’re sitting around the table playing? The very fact that the DM won’t is proof that we’re getting ripped off! We only want what’s coming to us! All we want is our fair share!

So eliminating the level gets rid of all this subjectivity. The players will advance in level when the adventure calls for the players to be a higher level. The players will advance at the beginning of every fifth running. The players will advance when the quest is completed. These principles are still arbitrary, but they’re unilateral, affecting every character at the table the same, and they don’t require nearly as much math.

There is a major drawback, however, that many do not consider a drawback. These substitutions eliminate insecurity. We know we’re going to advance ~ there is no uncertainty about it. Advancement does not hinge on the choices we make, nor the effort we give, nor the risk we’re prepared to take. If we climb aboard, the train will arrive at our destination and the ticket will be stamped.

All the doubt is washed away, as is the frustration we feel as time between upgrades spins out and challenges our composure. We’re not driven to take a bigger risk, to make something happen that doesn’t seem willing to happen ~ and when the achievement is obtained, we don’t think of it as something we did ourselves, accumulating all that experience. We don’t get excited about things we think of as entitlements.

The carrot is a reward, yes, but it is also something we only get after a very long day of dragging a very large load at the expense of our comfort and our privilege. It dangles right in front of us, aggravating us, making our mouths water, while at the same time we can’t get it. In every sense, for anything but a dumb animal, the carrot is a kind of abuse, one we can’t ignore.

The brass ring is a reward also, but only because it is so damn hard to get. We miss it and miss it, leaning out further and further, risking a face-plant in the dirt, because it takes a big risk to win a big reward.

Experience levels work because they’re hard to obtain; and the arbitrary limits we create to put them further out of reach are there to make it very hard. We don’t appreciate anything that is easy to obtain. Naturally, we carp about it. Carping about a lack of something is a part of life.

DMs should not bow to that.

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Perhaps They Were Possessed by Blackwolf

Since I do have a lot of posts to write and I spent time turning my way through the book yesterday, I might as well talk about a few things that the makers felt should be included in the original Dungeon Masters Guide.  For example,

"Demi-human troops are unlikely to serve a human master who is not otherwise supporting a cause of the particular race.  Some small number might serve with a henchman of their own race, but not large bodies except for short periods of time, most probably when danger threatens their area.  You might allow exceptions to this as they become compatible with your campaign.  Similarly, half-elves might enlist bodies of elves, halflings might enlist dwarves or elves, etc."

This is the first paragraph of a section entitled Use of Non-Human Troops.  I've always felt the section (it runs six paragraphs and two tables, on pages 105-106) had a strange vibe to it - it sounds distinctly like the authors of the book are wagging their fingers at me, apparently for 'reasons.'  It isn't as though it bears the mark of canon, since who ever heard of halflings (or anyone) able to "enlist" elves??

I have never heard players express a desire to employ non-humans in an army and not because of this passage.  The game goes way, way over the top to stress that bugbears, gnolls and goblins are EVIL and CHAOTIC and probably insanely dangerous to share a barracks with.  I get comments all the time, expressing wonder and amazement, because I chose in my world to set up gnoll and goblin kingdoms, where these creatures calmly collect peat, grow crops, raise their children, tell stories and presumably worry about family members who haven't come home before dark.  Who would ever think of that?

So having created this systemic, milieu-driven racism, hammering it home with every other description in the books (and module after module), why exactly did we create a little section in the DMG to bring up the subject and then moralize about why it just won't work, it just shouldn't be done and oh, in case you were still thinking about it, these troops will absolutely not get along with each other:

"Compatibility of Non-Human Troops:  The general compatibility of demi-human troop types can be determined by consulting the Player's Handbook, Racial Preferences Table.  Lizard men are hated by all demi-humans and humanoids save kobalds, and even the latter are suspicious of them (just as human troops are).  Of the various races of humanoids, many will bully or attack one another as indicated on the table below:"

After which we get a racial preferences table, just like the Player's Handbook, expressly for bugbears, gnolls, goblins, hill giants, hobgoblins, kobalds, ogres, orcs and trolls.  Presumably, this is why lizard men were expressly mentioned in the paragraph before the table, because they weren't included (the table is only a column wide and had to be crushed to where four of the headings are abbreviated - "Bugbr." "Gob." "Hob." "Kob."

Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about troglodytes, lycanthropes, gargoyles, minotaurs, ettin, other giants or any of the faerie folk (whom I presume are non-human).  Is it okay if I use faerie folk as troops?  Do they all get along or do I need another racial preference table for them?

Obviously this was some sort of problem in Gygax's campaigns, something he didn't like and felt he needed to put the kibosh on before it got out of hand in the campaigns of all the strangers who would one day buy the books.  "First it's convincing two orcs to tag along with the party and then it's a squad and a whole platoon!  What next?  Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . . mass hysteria!"

I will grant there is drama in gathering together a bunch of different humanoid races as an army.  It's nice to imagine them fighting each other - something nicely depicted in the film Wizards, where this problem needs to be overcome by Blackwolf before he can unite his troops . . . but it seems to me this is a player problem to be solves, not an institutional need for a rule-set that demands that kobalds will always hate gnolls or that ogres will always hate goblins.  It's this sort of shit that gets the game defined as racist - with the game using 'alignment' as the all-purpose justification to bestowing the game-makers' commands.

I can't for the life of me guess why this passage was included; they felt compelled to add rules in case the players decided to ignore the writer, but then they also felt the need to include this:

"Non-human troops, bugbears and humanoids, will very difficult to handle.  They will tend to fight amongst each other . . . fight with humans nearby - whether friendly or not (25% if friendly) - run from battle if they see troops on their own side retiring or retreating and fall to looting at the first opportunity."

Have the authors of this ever met a human?  Ever read anything about human troops in war?  These are things that won't happen in human armies?  The paragraph goes on:

"If the master is strong and powerful and gives them cause to fear disobedience, it will be of some help in disciplining such troops.  Likewise, if there are strong leaders within each body of such troops, threatening or driving them on, they will be more likely to obey.  Weakness in leadership, or lack of officering [sic], will certainly cause these troops to become unruly and impossible to control."

Really.  No kidding.  It's a good thing that ordinary troops don't respond like this to poor discipline or weak leaders.

It might be imagined that this pressure is just there to stress that the players have to keep on top of the problem - but then the chance of a strong leader managing an orc unit is only 90%.  That's an incredibly poor morale for a combat troop of any kind!  For a bugbear unit, it never gets any better than 80%.  Jeez.  Why bother?

That's clearly the point.  Why bother, don't do it, here are rules that make it impossible, choke on that you little bastards.  Now let's talk about construction and seige.

ADDENDUM:

For the record, the film Wizards - which I saw when it came out, two years before I'd even heard of D&D - has always been closer to how I imagine a fantasy universe than Lord of the Rings.  The elves experience fear, faeries exist as a unified people, combat is industrial, rape happens, sexuality is part of the conflict/experience and brutality is both normal and undesirable.  In a war, no side wins - the deciding factor isn't how much magic but how willing we are to use every resource available (a luger, if necessary).

The link above gives access to the whole movie.  Someone posted it on youtube two years ago, but it won't be there forever.  Watch it, steal it if you can (good luck finding a copy legitimately).

Not Nearly 1,000 Pages

Seems I'm always hearing people describe the rule books of whatever edition they're playing in terms of their page count and size - usually saying something like "a DM has to memorize more than a hundred pages of material . . ."

I'm not sure where that comes from.  Sure, it's helpful to memorize content, as I said in my book, because it saves time and encourages confidence.  But most of the rules content does not have to be precisely memorized because it is there in the book when we need it.

Now, sorry, I don't have a copy of the 5e rule book and I'm never likely to own one.  I do have a 3e copy of the Player's Handbook and DMG around somewhere, given to me by a quitting player, but they're in boxes and I don't care to look.  Besides, it's the original Dungeon Masters Guide from 1e that gets all the criticism, because the organization is supposedly poor and it is so darn much to grok for the poor DM.  So I'm going to discuss the book on my desk.

I don't use this book much for play anymore.  Most of the rules that I use have been moved onto the wiki or duo-tangs full of spell rewrites that haven't made it onto the wiki yet.  I only use the DMG for the occasional magic item description or the hirelings pages - I don't think I actually picked up the book at all last Saturday.  This is therefore going to be sort of nostalgic to me.

The DMG is 240 pages.  That sounds like a lot.  It isn't, because most of it is not needed to run the game - even back in the day when the DMG was my principle go-to volume for every rule and table not found in the Player's Handbook.  I'll try to explain.

Subtract the first 6 pages for the title page and index.  That's followed by 4 pages of introduction that, while reading it is helpful, none of that is actually necessary to play the game.  I mean, once you've read Gygax's preface, it's not like you're going to read it again before building your next dungeon or that you need to memorize what's said in order to answer questions.  It's just fluff, as is the introduction, which only tells you a few philosophical things that apply to the game.  You may suffer a bit for not having read this but it's not like this is a critical part of the rules.

Page 11 is another suggestion page on methods to roll dice to make a character.  Once you make up your mind about this, the page is completely disposable.  Then we have 2 pages that have a few useful tables - secondary skills, age and chance of contracting disease.

There's a bunch of writing on these pages but after the first initial read, none of has much importance.  I went to these pages for two decades, every time I helped a player make a character, and I never felt any need to review the few comments or explanations for the tables.  I knew what the tables meant - and if I memorized them, it was through repeated use.  For example, I remember that a human mage would be 24 +2d8 years of age.  If I needed to look, it took a second to find these two pages because the binding was cracked there.

The next page is disease, which I only needed if a character got one (I didn't roll for disease all the time, so this was very rare) and after that are a bunch of unnecessary comments about death, determination of maximum age, character abilities and character races.  I've never had a character die of old age or even come close - and once I read through the description of abilities and races, I never had to look at that again.

Now we have 2 pages for name-level followers; 3 pages about the paladin's warhorse, assassin's spying, the nuance of thief abilities, setting traps, assassination experience points and the use of poison.  All of it sort of interesting but most of it useless for everyday campaigning.  If I needed those details, the content was there but for the most part I never went to these pages.  Maybe once in a year of running.  Once the rule is sorted about about poison with the player the player will remember every nuance and there just isn't any reason to look up this rule a second time.

Most of the book is like this.  Page 21 is "the monster as a player character" and that certainly doesn't need to be read again.  Then we get a whole page on lycanthropy (which I used once in 20 years of play) and 2 pages on alignment (which I never, ever used).

So here we are, page 24 and so far there are 2 pages I used regularly - and just for the tables there.

The whole book is like this.  I used the gem and jewelry tables from page 25 & 26, quite a lot, but the reputed magical properties of gems was wasted space.  I would have preferred more content on the values of other rare commodities (something that massively affected my desire for deeper trade tables).  Still, these pages got used a lot.  But they're followed by a page on armor (that is fairly useless) before getting to something that mattered: hirelings.

Now, again, pages 28 to 35 were damn useful.  But none of it had to be 'memorized' - it could be looked up during a game while the characters were discussing who to hire.  It was always an issue only when the players were relaxed and in town; it certainly wasn't something that troubled me during a high-tension game moment.  Much of it did greatly affect my campaign - particularly things like obtaining henchmen.  The information, however, was a boon, not a troublesome burden.  Hell, we would have liked more useful stuff like this.

Instead we got a set of piss-poor rules about loyalty of hirelings (1 page), time in the campaign (1 page), notes about character spells (3 pages), a breakdown of too short, unsatisfactory side notes on spellcasting that should have been in the Player's Handbook (11 and a half pages).  I think that Gygax and crew simply screwed up and realized there were details they'd overlooked and felt they could pass off as "important for the DM," justifying placement in the DMG because it was too late to fuck with the page count of the PH.  All together, this is 16+ pages that were never looked at once the information was either discarded or simply standard in the campaign.  In writing out spells for my wiki, I don't even address these pages - because the content is either obvious or completely wrong for my campaign (that is, the way I see spells working).

Page 47 starts a very disappointing 14 pages on half-done rules regarding movement in the outdoors, encounters, waterborne/underwater and air adventures, combat rules for each (where we haven't even reached combat in the book), invisibility, infravision, getting lost, forced movement, evasion, the known planes of existence, detection of evil and listening at doors.  The sheer number of things covered in these 14 pages shows how completely useless these things were for any of the subjects discussed - so that here we have a black hole in the rule book.  All I remember about this section was that if I wanted to run a shipboard adventure, I would go here and be incredibly disappointed at how frikkin' useless the rules here were.

Is the reader getting the idea yet?  Most of the DMG is either useless or profoundly specific, applicable only in 1 session in 100 (in which case it probably wouldn't answer the game question and I'd have to house rule the situation anyway).  There are 15 pages on combat, but again this is mostly very specific stuff that is easy to remember once the superfluous writing is ditched.  We all read the example of melee several times but it's dispensable once the DM has run a few combats.  Not that it isn't useful to read - it's only that where we're talking about the page count in terms of running the game, very little of this is needed.  The combat tables are necessary - but THAC0 quickly eliminated any need for those.  Of all the combat rules here, there are maybe 5 other pages that are actually relevant: surprise, the grenade page, turning undead, pummelling and grappling.  Call it 7 in all.

In 75 pages, I've described 15 pages that I used virtually every session.  From this point on in the book it gets worse.  There's the saving throw pages from 79 to 81, the experience point reward table on 85 and then nothing immediately necessary until page 102 (height and weight).  Now, this isn't to say that I didn't use a lot of that material about campaigns - but if we're talking about rules that needed to be memorized, none of it does.  It's all back story and example, or something highly situational like intoxication or insanity that can be looked up if that ever happens.  The same goes for the next section on mining, construction, siege weapon attacks and conducting the game - 10 pages.  Then it's 3 pages of other games by TSR, followed by 6 totally useless and poorly thought out pages of magic research rules (which translate as "spend way, way more money than the magic item is worth if you want to make one").

This brings us to a spectacular 51 pages of magic items.  This is way past memorizing and frankly I've never (in 36 years of play) read every page.  Hell, why bother?  At first I used to think I didn't want to know what all the magic was in case I came across it while playing but now it's just that reading through all this magic would be horrifically boring.

I do still use this part of the book - mainly because I can't be bothered to copy it all into the wiki.  It's there when I need to look something up.  It certainly isn't critical to the gaming process.

Sigh.  I'm going to stop this.  The reader should be getting the point by now.  I'm up to using 16 pages out of 169, less than 10% of the book to this point.  All that follows are the appendices, a lot of encounter tables I used a lot (but didn't need to memorize), generation tables I used a lot (endlessly disappointed by them), a long list of monsters rehashed from the Monster Manual (20 pages), some sad gambling rules, some interesting things on traps, dungeon dressing and herbs (which I would have loved seen expanded and given precise effects gamewise), a bit of stuff on encumbrance and some NPC magic generation tables I used to use before cutting back on my game's magic availability.

None of this was game-predominant.

238 pages of rules?  Horseshit.  25 pages of pertinent data jammed between 200+ pages of ideas, inspiration, accounting, accessible data and pure, unmitigated crap.

More than enough, however, to make me rethink virtually every aspect of running a game and improving it, filling in all the gaps the rulebook didn't fill with entire libraries of properly done research on medieval culture and trade, adding rules from every other game I had access to and always thinking, thinking, on how the process could be redesigned and invigorated.

Damn, I wish the DMG had been a thousand pages.  It might then have approached the tool I needed.

Problems With Encounter Tables

Encounter tables exist to provide random features or creatures for the purpose of inspiring play. A random dungeon generator creates the physical conditions of the setting, as well as the inhabitants. A random wilderness generator intends to place population centers and notable features into a mapped hex.

An encounter table should not only include monsters. It should include every kind of feature, event or inhabitant that might be discovered or met by the party.

Which means that first and foremoest, encounter tables need to be divided into those conditions that might affect a party that is remaining in one locale, as opposed to one that is actively on the move. The small village would still experience events such as storms, fog, floods, housefires, earthquakes, death of a leader, increased taxes or new laws; and encounters such as thieves, vermin, inquisitive residents, random associates or outside attacks; but obvious physical features, such as a freshwater lake or a mountain in the shape of a head, would not be included.

However, a travelling party might encounter such a mountain, and many other potential features such as lakes, ponds, chasms, creeks, shrines, depots, crossroads, monster lairs, toll booths and so on. So to begin with, a 'Stationary' table would alternate with the use of a 'Moving' table.

Even at that, Moving tables must be subdivided further according to the sort of terrain, climatological condition, or level of civilization that they supposedly represent. A single table could not be used for both mountains and lowland plain. A single 'lowland plain' table could not be used for lowlands for sub-tropical jungle flatlands and for vast arctic-tundra shelves. A single 'jungle lowland plain' table could not be used for both heavily populated, cultivated lands (such as Benin) and sparsely populated hunting lands (such as pre-Columbian Florida). Moreover, floods occur only in certain locations and at certain times of the year. Volcanos, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, fog, the accumulation of snow, rime or ice, and other climatological incidents are similarly limited.

The same elements would not be encountered, leading to the familiar pattern of 'rolling on the encounter table until getting the result you want.'

Even within an urbanized setting, where the party might be stationary, encounters would depend upon the size of the urban setting (patrons and lawyers do not dwell in villages), the characteristics of the neighborhood (slum vs. posh), the city's economic base (holy city, port, farming centre, military outpost) or the characteristics of its people (bureaucratic, rigid societies as opposed to freewheeling entrepreneurial piracy). Each different kind of urban center requires the recording of different features, different likely personal encounters (leading to adventures built upon differing elements of success) and different hazards which might occur.

The variety of required encounter tables described above is a finite number, and - with tenacity and patience - could be created for use. A secondary problem arises, however, with the variety of items that might occur upon a particular table. If the party should remain for an extended period of time upon an uninhabited tundra shelf-land, there must be enough possibilities entered in the encounter table to ensure constant novelty. Encounter after encounter with wolves pales quickly, as does the fourth mountain indicated that has the shape of a head. Considerable ingenuity must be employed to create literally hundreds of possibilities for every kind of encounter format - a daunting, near-impossible task, particularly if one considers that any encounter table meant for use in multiple campaigns must not be campaign-specific (or edition-specific) in its random results.

Also, encounter tables must be constructed so that certain features or events are so unlikely as to ever happen again that the result itself should be stricken from the table. For example, a meteor strike (such as the Tunguska hit of 1908) is such an unusual event that, although it might conceivably occur twice within one's lifetime, the actual incidence of it occurring a second time in a D&D campaign would be farcicle, ineffective in rousing the party's attention (been there, done that) and ultimately damaging to the memory of the first event.

At the same time, numerous events of a particular, common type - say, snow - can serve to increase the tension as they happen. As such, not all events should be stricken once they have occurred.

Finally, in my experience encounter tables should not be based upon the likelihood of an encounter or an event to occur. While it makes sense constructively, within the game it only serves to reduce the incidence of interesting, highly playable circumstances in favor of dull, common conditions. Once again, the continued result of 'wolves' as opposed to something more challenging. While there is something to be gained by the repeated incidence of mundane encounters, it should be balanced in some degree with things that will not suffocate a party in banality.

Misplaced Efforts

Questioned about failures. That’s a bit more difficult that writing about what has worked, since I’ve long ago trashed the tables and most of the material. A lot of what I do have that was never tried (because I couldn’t complete it) is scratched out on paper, which at present is stacked in boxes I probably never need to open.

In those days when the computer I designed my world on was a Commodore 64 (the glorious 80s), my study was stacked to the gills with paper – maps, ideas, tables, notes, descriptions ... in those days I did design complicated dungeons which never really got used, and town maps and encounter tables. Always, encounter tables. At least a third of every failed attempt I could point my finger at would be some kind of attempted encounter table.

But let’s see what I can remember.

Melee

I did start with the old school combat system, back when I first began in 1979. My first real world was spring of 1980, and by then I and everyone I played with had graduated to AD&D (as I remember, no one argued to remain with OD&D), so I ran its combat system traditionally for years. We played without battle maps, though sometimes I used paper with X’s and O’s (like a football diagram) for reference.

By 1984 everyone was changing their combat system over to hit determination, as Rolemaster was having a tremendous influence (I’m remembering all the conventions were pushing that system), and for months I tried it. Then I tried one of my own. It slowed the game down brutally, no one liked it, so I dumped it.

Later we tried a system where the fastest weapon won initiative, and everyone invested in scimitars; maces and morning stars disappeared. Clerics would use a club before a mace. We had long since gotten rid of the hit determination bonuses against armour, but for some months we tried using the modifiers for damage instead of ‘to hit.’ That went by the wayside too.

Then I read about the combat system I use now, and we played around with it for a couple of months, trying different things. The first time they killed a giant lizard without the lizard getting a chance to hit they fell in love with the system. Of course, that can go the other way, too ... but people seem to accept that.

Money

For a long, long time, maybe four years, I used a system that gave one X.P. for every 2 s.p. treasure, when I determined that gold was really too rare to use as a base for experience. Those were the first days of my long time search for an economic system that worked. My poor players, between ’89 and ’95, went through about twelve different manifestations of trade tables, equipment tables, monetary changes and so on ... each one requiring exchanges on their existing coinage and new price lists. They toughed it out, which was much appreciated by me because most things that I tried were dismal failures.

I tried a supply and demand system, which invariably made some things so expensive as to be ridiculous, and other things so cheap as to be ... ridiculous. I twisted numbers in combinations which, frankly, I can’t remember now, trying to solve the problem of too much or too little. I would debase coinage and it would become plentiful in this incarnation; then I would inflate coinage and it would become rare. I tried systems that would be based primarily on bartering. The nearer the system got to being reasonable, the less flexible it would be ... to the point that a working system might just as well be the static prices in the book, where everything cost the same amount of money everywhere. That always bothered me about the original game, and the whole point of this system was to create rarity and abundance ... neither of which I could do without making a mess of the pricing system.

I know there are a few people out there who have tried to follow my footsteps, reading my blog posts about economics, and have found themselves in the same dead ends I wound up in.

Sadly, for that first campaign, I never did solve the problem. I remember I would, when I found myself with time to think – travel, waiting during rehearsals (lot of that in the theatre and in films), at some dull job – I would do nothing but mentally piece together the system and think of a solution. I finally did, in 2001, and it is the system I use now. What’s funny is that it took another year after my mental breakthrough to prove that the logic worked. Sometimes I think I’ve been wasted on D&D. Heh.

Of course, I’ve still never created a working treasure table.

Mass Combat

Yeah, this has been a total disaster. I wrote about this in my blog post prior to the huge mass combat my offline party was facing (which is still ongoing, and which the party is adamant about continuing ... they apparently love the tactical aspects). I didn’t give any particulars, however.

It is easy enough to add together the total hit points of, say, twenty heavy footmen, then divide by whatever number you want to give a ‘unit hp total’ ... and it is easy enough to give some sort of damage capability to the unit. Following that, the defensive quality of the unit can be modified according to the unit’s formation (and its offensive power also), and morale can be ascribed. Time can then be stretched to accommodate the distances units must travel to combat. Anyone can sit down in an hour or so and calculate how this might work.

Where it falls down is the incorporation of levelled characters. If we inject a 10th level Lord into a group of 20 zero levels, it has to be recognized that a D&D fighter of that calibre should be able to take out, personally, another unit of 20 individuals who are without leaders. The vulnerability of a high level fighter against 20 zero levels is that they could normally dog-pile him – but if that fighter has shield men, he’s safe from being dog piled and he can devastate at will.

But how do you calculate out his ability to do damage, or to be damaged, when his AC, his hit points and his combat frequency are all so much more than his peers. And how does this affect an enemy mass unit when it has, say, four third level fighters, none of which can be hit ten times a round like a zero level. And under what circumstances does the Lord, within his entourage, die? Is he automatically the last to go? How does that work when the enemy is supported by a seventh level mage, who will absolutely target the lord, and who uses spells (such as hold person) that will necessarily have no general effect on the entourage?

At some point, you have to start throwing out rules from the game that don’t correspond to the needs of mass combat. And this is not preferential to player characters, who are not happy when you tell them the unit they are with was just wiped out by an artillery unit. But then, most times you might make a rule that says the player can’t be killed as part of a general assault – making them uniquely special, since you are probably willing to let the enemy seventh level mage die in a general assault.

However you slice it, players must get preferential treatment; if you give them preferential treatment, it destroys the tension and terror of a mass combat. People die horribly and indecently in war ... but the game is not friendly towards that practice. Players feel cheated when they lose. And from my experience, they feel fairly bored when they win, since they personally are not responsible for the win.

I’ve never seen a mass combat system that takes into account this personal factor. I’ve not been able to invent one. At present, no one in my party wants me to.

Wilderness

I have attempted to divide up the ‘wilderness depth’ of my world, so that the farther a party travels from a civilized center, the more deadly are the monsters. Considering a hex containing a town to be have a depth of 1, each hex moving outwards would increase that depth by 1. As well, a change in elevation of 400 ft would also increase the wilderness depth by 1. Thus, if a town at 1500 ft above sea level was rated at 1, the adjacent hex at 4700 feet would have a depth of 9 (1 for the distance to the next hex, and 8 for the 3200 ft difference). Climbing into this adjacent hex would thus be as dangerous as travelling 180 miles from the nearest town in a flat wilderness.

This makes sense, but I’ve never been able to satisfactorily create a set of tables that would appropriately distribute weak monsters into low depth areas and powerful monsters into high depth areas. That’s because once you subdivide the monsters from the books into the climatic and environmental conditions (sub-arctic, temperate, tropical, desert, plain, jungle), and then subdivide them into their wilderness depth categories, you get like three possible monsters in many parts of the world that could exist in this particular range of mountains. There just aren’t enough monsters to make this work. And sadly, the last thing I need for monsters is another bloody humanoid race ... which is most of what you see.

Towns

In an attempt to organize my town encounters, I’ve reasoned that a population center is divided according to its social status – that is, rich to poor. Thinking on it geographically, I’ve divided a town into these parts: avenues and squares, where the rich move about; streets, where artisans and the middle class move about; and lanes, where the relatively poor move about (including gangs, whores, and so on). The rich/nobles live in palaces, the middle class live in row houses, the artisan class live in storefront houses and the poor live in ‘courts’, which are primarily tenements and flats encircling central pits used for sewage. This, too, makes sense to me, as a player could steadfastly resist travelling from streets to lanes at will (and I wouldn’t have to draft out every town). But again, when I’ve sat down to create encounter tables for each of these town parts ... it doesn’t actually seem to help in running my world.

NPCs

I sat down and designed a system that would regulate player associations with random NPCs ... the sort of people a party might generally encounter, such as guards at a gate that the party passed through, shopkeepers, bartenders, innkeepers, local garrisons and so on. By creating a point system to measure the appeal the party might have towards such people, I imagined the possibility of a party creating ‘allies’ or ‘foes’ by specific actions, chatting, bribery, performing favours and so on. Thus, individual commonly met NPCs would become more or less agreeable with time, depending on how they were treated, the party being capable of creating lifelong friends or lifelong enemies.

I couldn’t make it simple, so I never tried it in my world.



There have been other things, but I can’t think of them at the moment. I may do another post like this sometime.

UPDATE:

Having given it some thought, I might go dig through some of those boxes and post a few bits and pieces of rules that utterly failed or did not come to fruition.  Maybe they'll be of use to someone.

Still On Training

Not quite interested in letting a good subject die, I have a few further thoughts on the subject.  The first being that there seems to be a disconnect between the differences between 'training' and 'practice'.  Many of the comments on the other post are far more applicable to the repetition of an already understood ideal, for the purpose of being better at that ideal ... i.e., controlling one's body so as to perform the desired action perfectly.  When the Bride is beating her hand against the wood in Kill Bill, she is NOT training.  She is practicing.

Part of the misconception arises from the selling of martial arts as a product, which recognizes that people are prepared to pay hundreds of dollars to be 'trained.'  As such, it has entered into the western parlance - an invention of the 20th century not recognized by the originators of the art, who regularly 'practice' without the need of any other participant.  But practice sounds like something you shouldn't have to pay for, so the schools use the word training and the stooges line up.  Guess what ... if you do understand a martial art, you're an idiot if you're still paying to practice while being watched.  Which was the point of the previous post.

I have, however, an entirely new perspective for consideration.  Mind you, it does require another metaphor, which is intended to convey the message.  Let's give it a try.

While it was never my prime interest, for some twenty years, I performed on stages as an actor.  I began in high school, and picked up roles now and then when they presented themselves, usually by way of friends who were interested in making films or who notified me of casting calls.  You could say I trained, in that I took a number of courses and learned from some directors who were brilliant.  I would say that more of it was practice, in learning lines, in repeating lines during rehearsals or for auditions ... practice is what it all about.

My last gig was 2002, but the four years leading up to that were good ones.  The summer of 1998 was a turning point for me, and here is why.

I was performing in a very large cast ensemble play intended for one of the larger fringe festivals of the continent, a play that began with a seven-minute monologue delivered by me.  The monologue was coming out very badly, and I couldn't identify the problem.  Neither could the director.  I had beaten it into the ground, repeating it about a dozen times a day at least, but it wouldn't flow.  The director and I had both gone over the words, but there was nothing wrong with them.  The problem, I felt, was definitely in me - I wasn't breathing through the character.

I want to emphasize: practice wasn't helping.  If you have any sense of the theatre, you'll know that there's no special kind of training that will work.

The director was on the edge of cutting the monologue somehow, and I was very down about it and telling a friend in his living room ... a friend I knew from working on the university paper.  Ken was a photographer and graphic artist, and had a video camera.  So I suggested that he film me while I did the monologue, so I could see myself how I was fucking it up (this was before motion photography became uncommonly simple).

He pointed the camera, I did the monologue, and he agreed as we watched the video that I was shit.  But Ken had an idea.  He had known me for many years, and had known what I was like when suddenly inspired to rant - a practice I take up in speech as well as in text.  So we made a plan.  I would stay on the stool where I'd delivered the monologue and he would keep the camera on me.  We'd forget the camera and talk about other things, giving Ken a chance to get me rolling on something.  When I really got going, he'd surreptitiously flip on the camera and catch it.

Took 90 minutes.  And yes, he got me in a five minute monologue about the government or stupid people or something.  Bang.  What an eye-opener.

It took all of ten seconds for us to identify the difference.  When I was ranting, I didn't move.  At all.  It was almost creepy.  It was also overwhelmingly powerful, for my eyes carried the emotion.  Then I tried the monologue without moving a muscle and it worked.

That wraps up the relevant point of this metaphor, but since I've started I've got to finish the story.  The next day I showed up for rehearsal feeling like I had a loaded gun.  I took the advantage before the rehearsal to relate to the director every problem I had with the production, particularly his control-freaking attitude (I called him a Nazi at one point) - and this started a fight that lasted about 45 minutes, outside the theatre with the cast listening through the back door.  When the rehearsal started, the director had decided to fire me - he didn't do it at that moment as he reasoned it was logical to have me play the part to make the rehearsal go, and replace me before the next.  Smart fellow.  But I'd always known that.  The cast, I'd like to add, were ready to see me go.

Then I blew them all away.

I had the character nailed down and the director had no interest in firing me when it was done (he is to this day one of my closest friends, occasionally mocking me by saying 'you called me a Nazi').  The cast forgave me, and I was transformed as an actor.

The realization of how to be that actor happened in the space of about one minute.  The scales fell from my eyes.

The argument goes that 'sudden' transformation of a character from this level to that level is 'unrealistic.'  I dispute that.  I think that we fail to recognize that at profound, singular points in our lives we undergo an epiphany that reorders the way we look at the world - where our actions the next day are NOT the same as they were, and NOT due to either training or practice.  It is a staggering moment - but anyone who has suddenly seen through an insurmountable problem, only to wonder why it was insurmountable, will understand what I am saying.  Archimedes had his Eureka moment in a bathtub.  Galileo as he peered through a telescope, Siddhartha underneath a tree.  Alexander cut through a knot, and then he cut through a continent that couldn't be conquered.  It is the quinessential moment when you realize how you've done it wrong, and how to do it right.  It is gaining a level, clear and simple.

For you and I, mere peasants, it may happen once, maybe twice in a lifetime.  For characters, who are unusual, it can happen a dozen times ... and each time, it is the conception of how to do that spell now when before it was impossible, because thinking and puzzling it out all through the previous level has now, finally, made it come together in the magician's head.  How is it done now when it was not done ten minutes ago?  Thinking, my friend.  Using the old noggin.

Why does this seem so strange?  It seems strange because we are propagandized to believe that it isn't possible to think your way through something, that you need to beat yourself against that wall until you're bloody or else you didn't do it fairly.  It is a protestant effort to equal everyone onto the same work path ... while to the left and right of the hard straight and narrow are those who jumped the queue and became insanely wealthy or powerful by skipping the wall-beating process.  If you can't see how this can apply to characters ranging over a vast world, gathering experience in the face of a dozen dangers, you must have your head down and blood in your eyes.

Try thinking it through.

On Training

When I was 14, my father took me along hunting with him, which I saw as an unsure opportunity for a city boy. He had grown up in small towns, where guns were common, but I had never had a gun in my hands before. Being the man he was, he gave me some stern advice, some practical education. Recognizing the dangers involved, I listened – and felt very hesitant about actually firing the weapon.


It was a 12 gauge shot-gun, an Ithaca-made pump-action, and I put it to my shoulder and squeezed the trigger as told. And though I tried to have it set into my shoulder, I nevertheless smacked myself in the chin with the action block. And I thought to myself, don’t do that again. Experience.

For my first season, most of the shots I took were, in my father’s words, “fired in anger.” We hunted largely for upland birds, pheasants, grouse, partridge, and it was not until my second season that I successfully hit something. Raising the gun, leading the bird, pulling the trigger at the exact moment – those were intellectual processes. I had to learn how not to react emotionally to the effort, but to ‘think’ the shot through. Experience.

By the time I was 21, I could drop two Hungarian partridge out of a single flock, or covey, using the same pump-action shotgun I grew very familiar with. A Hungarian partridge is about the size of a quail – so, not very big you understand. I would say I had ‘risen a level’ in terms of my skill at hunting.

My training consisted of being able to hunt five days a year, since I couldn’t go out every weekend during the fall. In all, in my life, I’ve hunted perhaps 35 times. My total ‘training’ from my father consisted mostly of doing what he did, and shooting when he shot. The real experience came not from what he told me, but from the mistakes I made.

So yes, I gained experience from killing. And as I improved, I never had to pay any money for anything, except for ammunition and for travel. I did not have to ‘return to train’ with my father, or any other ‘master.’ Although I haven’t hunted in 20 years, if I were to return to it, I wouldn’t have to ‘train’ to improve myself. I’d just have to go out and do it.

Remember – in D&D, there is a distinction made between a fighter ‘training’ and a fighter going out and killing. I can’t figure out where that distinction lies. And if the fighter has gained his experience to get his second level, then he HAS killed, and therefore he HAS trained – what sense does it make for him to go find some stranger and give money? The training isn’t in swinging the weapon at straw dummies, which is only the effort to desensitize the practitioner to violence. Once that desensitization has taken hold, ‘training’ is WORTHLESS.

I don’t see how the logic falls down where it comes to thieves, or magicians, or bards, or any other class.

And here I find myself drawn to making other examples, having nothing to do with me, but a great deal to do with history ... where somehow, a great many people seemed to advance themselves greatly through ‘doing,’ without finding any need to return to any master for any further ‘training.’

Alexander the Great, for instance, who crossed the Bosporus into the Persian Empire at the age of 18, who conquered half the known world and who certainly must have taken enough experience from the effort to have risen a dozen levels ... does not seem to have listened to his tutors. Or Cortez, who by hook or by crook brought about the demise of Mexico – did he then return to Cuba or Spain for training? Did Genghis Khan, or Timur, or Akbar?

Perhaps we do not like the conqueror example. What of Michaelangelo, then ... when he broke himself in the pursuit of his goals, who surely gained experience from his efforts – who do you think he would have gone to for training? To some unknown person who was more creative, more skilled ... but whom we’ve never heard of? What of Ponce de Leon ... did he not go up a single level in all his travels? Where did he go for training? Who would have trained Confucius, or Siddhartha, or Zarathustra? Did Jesus or Socrates, or Erasmus or Abelard, have to break from their teaching to get taught?

The argument is that at second level, you are taught by the student of, say, Abelard ... but at what level do we decide when you must have Abelard himself, and at what level do you become Abelard? And if you do not ‘train’ when you have reached that level, why is it the hit points and spells gained them do not require training, when they always did before? How is the dividing line ever logical, and not invented upon prejudice?

I do not see where the training argument is ‘realistic.’ I know of no profession where success at the profession requires schooling ... once the profession is obtained, school is left behind. It is only in this modern, technology-driven existence that an educational ‘half-life’ is even conceived. It has no place in a medieval setting.

Training. Is. Bullshit.

I Thought Everyone Knew

I don't play with alignments, but I must not have made this clear, as I was only just asked about it today.  So lets talk about the subject.  Since alignments are, effectively, a philosophical conception, let's treat them as one.

Opening my DMG to page 23, I find the following written:

"Alignment describes the broad ethos of thinking, reasoning creatures - those unintelligent sorts being placed in the neutral area because they are totally uncaring."

I find it interesting that Gygax and his buddies, for reasons that completely escape me, felt that it would be a problem to use the ideologies invented by thinking, reasoning humans through all history - believing instead that it was better to drum up a simplistic sociological diagram to replace all that.  It was the 1970s, however, and I wonder what obscure University of Chicago professor's baby was stolen in order to instigate this atrocity to human thought.

And what is described by 'unintelligent sorts'?  Do we mean animals?  Do we suggest that violent behavior in the quest of food is a neutral aspect?  Was Jean Val Jean neutral?  It sound more that, having no means to explain away the motivations of non-thinking creatures within our invented belief system, we have to put them somewhere, anywhere, that doesn't get in the way.

Let us continue:

"Note that alignment does not necessarily dictate religious persuasion, although many religious beliefs will dictate alignment."

Lovely side-step there.  Not all religious types of a particular religion are lawful, or chaotic, or good, or evil ... what people proport to believe does not dictate their actions.  I believe that is the crux of the above statement.  But since alignments are used to indicate class loyalties, or racial loyalties - as they are, let's face it, every monster is defined by its alignment - aren't we really saying that religion has no place in D&D?  That the paladin isn't serving his or her god, but rather his or her social status ... so who cares what the god thinks?

Of course I'm wrong - every other thing said about alignment and religion clearly ignores the above quote ... further demonstrating that the authors are pulling this out of their ass.  But then, I'm ignoring this little gem:

"As explained under ALIGNMENT LANGUAGES (q.v.) this aspect of alignment is not the major consideration."

This is a whole section written on p.24, where it talks about languages existing between ideologically inclined individuals.  It never does explain why religious practice and religious beliefs have nothing to do with one another, but it does describe one of the stupidest conceptions ever presented as part of the game.  I strongly suggest the gentle reader take a glance - it is a lovely hodgepodge of discontinuous, vague, non-definitive suggestions for how people of similar alignment might communicate with each other.  In terms of clarification, it is like listening to a New Jersey politician defend welfare.  I have no idea what premise suggests that people who are mutually evil are able to communicate with each other ... I presume Hitler and Goebbels looked into each other's eyes and just knew.

"The overall behavior of the character (or creature) is delineated [represented accurately or precisely] by alignment, or, in the case of player characters, behavior determines actual alignment.  Therefore, besides defining the general tendencies of creatures, it also groups creatures into mutually acceptable or at least non-hostile divisions."

I love the English language.  I really prefer when it is used well.

I could not resist inserting the accurate definition of the word 'delineated,' since it is clearly not the word that the Gygaxian crowd really meant.  Each part of this description of alignment becomes increasingly more muddy as the two sentences go on - first character is precisely defined, then generally defined, and then, finally, acceptably general.

In other words, well, yes, the alignments kind of mean something, but don't take them too much to heart, as they are really just guidelines meant to encourage creatures to either join together or mindlessly kill each other.

Moreover, since we don't want to tell characters exactly how to behave, we'll employ the technique of letting them do whatever they want and defining them after the fact.  Which works in every case except, of course, the paladin - the ever-present defining template on which are alignment-based debates hang.  Understand, the only reason why a paladin's alignment had to be good was because it was perceived that the class was so powerful, no other means could be used to bind players who chose to play it.  Nevermind that there is no precedent whatsoever, even in such writings as Le Morte d'Arthur or the Song of Roland, to suggest that knights behave anything like the description of a 'Good' alignment in the DMG.  Once again, they pulled it right out of their ass.

Fact is, the paladin doesn't need the counterbalance to its supposed 'power.'  I've played with non-limited paladins for years and have never noticed one yet that overbalanced a party.

If we are going to define players by what they do, and not restrict them before the fact, why have an alignment system at all?  For simplicity?  For the sheer pleasure of being able to label each other?  My my my, this game was written in the 1970s.

Now watch as we qualify further what we've invented:

"This is not to say that groups of similarly aligned creatures cannot be opposed or even mortal enemies.  Two nations, for example, with rulers of lawful good alignment can be at war.  Bands of orcs can hate each other."

Then what the fuck is this alignment thing good for?  If it can be utterly ignored in terms of creatures' behavior towards one another, WHY DO WE NEED IT?  How is this improving the game?  How does it expand the game's potential in making it either fun or interactive?  We've already said that the players don't behave according to alignments, that alignments are assigned according to their behavior - so please, why are we wasting out time?

"But the former would possibly [???] cease their war to oppose a massive invasion of orcs, just as the latter would make common cause against the lawful good men."

Woah.  Just let me hold onto my head a moment.  What the fuck do you mean, 'possibly'?  You mean they might not stop fighting each other to oppose a massive invasion?  Would they stop fighting if it were only a mild invasion?  Or would they keep fighting each other if the massive invasion weren't by orcs, but was brought on by a group of lawful good elves?  And while we're considering that, would orcs NOT make common cause against a massive invasion brought on by chaotic evil troglodytes?  I'm feeling like Rocco from Boondock Saints: "Fuckin'- What the fuckin'. Fuck. Who the fuck fucked this fucking... How did you two fucking fucks..."

Here's a thought.  Let's just assume that sometimes creatures fight each other, and sometimes that's not convenient.  Sometimes, its convenient to defend ourselves, and join together.  Maybe it has absolutely nothing to do with what we believe.

The rest of the paragraph reads:

"Thus, alignment describes the world view of creatures and helps define what their actions, reactions and purposes might be.  It likewise causes a player to choose an ethos which is appropriate to his or her profession, and alignment also aids players in the definition and role approach of their respective game personae.  With the usefulness of alignment determined, definition of the divisions is necessary."

The point was not made.  Maybe Gygax thought the point was made, maybe it fitted some cog in his brain, but the point was decidedly left to die in the proverbial dust.  Nothing is defined here.  No purposes are there to aid anyone in their profession or otherwise.  Usefulness was not determined.

The only successful result was the creation of untold numbers of meaningless, often passionately meaningless debates between D&D players, sometimes ending violently.  The perpetration of an ideological system, which players were told they needed to adhere to, without any proper format or thought, meant that every one of those arguments began with trying to wedge actual ideologies into this mock system.  I cannot begin to understand what has sustained its existence.

No, I don't play with alignments.

Back In The Day

Whenever I read anyone describing the finer points about early RPG history, I am stuck for any personal recollection that would allow me to relate to the nostalgic euphoria that was supposed to exist at that time. Yes, D&D was new. Yes, we liked the game. Yes, it was different, and yes we were interested to explore the game’s possibilities.

We were not, however, orgasming every time we played. Which we would have to have been doing for us to have reached the degree of excitement constantly portrayed by present writers talking about the good old days.

A few things that I remember from 1979, when I began playing, at the age of 15.

The game, while complicated, was not completely out of our experience. Most of us had been playing Avalon Hill games for years (I started at 11) such as Squad Leader, Rail Baron, Arab-Israeli Wars and so on. We had played various other war games, and we had a sophisticated sense of how to adapt a game’s rules to our own uses. What I mean is, we changed rules, all the time, whenever we thought they were stupid. From day one we were throwing out or imposing new rules onto the D&D system without the slightest hesitation. No one thought that was odd. It was a game, not a religion, and it was what we had been doing with every game since learning RISK at age 8. Fuck the rules, we’re going to play it this way.

Neither I, nor any of my first group of associates, had any idea who Dave Arneson or Gary Gygax were. They were names in the book. We didn’t care to discover the background behind those names because we didn’t care. Do you know the names of the people who designed Monopoly? Or RISK? Well, I don’t. What difference would it make? Would I play the game differently? Would I be less inclined to change the “house rules”? Hell no.

Regarding the use of modules for gaming. Well, let me begin by saying that we all knew at the time, even at our age and in those far off days, that modules were simple-minded pieces of second-rate spewed crap, evident by the pathetic quality of writing and design that went into them. We did not buy them, we borrowed them from people whose parents had money and were a soft touch. We did not excitedly masturbate our way through them, we laughed at their pathetic, juvenile text and then modified them as necessary. If I or any of my teenage friends had read any of the actual descriptions out loud, there would have been cries of, “Holy shit, what ten year old wrote this crap?” and “Turn the crap off and just tell us what we see!”

Even at 15 we read actual books, you know: Ellison and Heinlein and Moorcock and LeGuin. We knew what good writing was. And what it wasn’t. Gygax may have been a hotshot game creator, but a writer he wasn’t. The same went for every “trailblazer” who had a hand in making those modules. I remember clearly the finger-down-throat gesture was often used in describing our personal opinions about the given material.

Let me describe a few of the rules that, right off, we knew were absolutely not going to work in our campaigns. Let me emphasize again that this was 1979, just as we here in Canada first discovered AD&D.

Alignment was a complete joke. I only knew one DM who played it dogmatically, and he was so anal as to be insufferable. As I understand it, he eventually became the west coast distributor for Magic cards, so I suppose he was genetically programmed that way. For the rest of us, right off we knew we weren’t going to play any stupid rules telling us what we were allowed to do or not do with our characters. That bit the big one pretty fast.

Remember when there was supposed to be a spokesperson for the party, who would tell the DM what everyone was doing? It’s in the DM’s Guide. Yeah. Some kind of educational-related programming on that one. My guess is that someone connected to the game’s creation considered being a teacher at some point. We totally ignored that dumbfuck rule.

Let’s see. Humans weren’t allowed to be multi-classed? Right out the window. Spell components? Oh please, how much bookkeeping do you need? It’s only there to make life miserable for spellcasters, it’s a pain in the ass and we just ignored it. Never noticed that it notably increased the power of mages in the game…but of course, if you’re one of those who can’t wait to describe, for the fifty-eighth time, the cleric pouring a circle of dust around himself…

Face it. We weren’t a bunch of dumb schmucks who had no idea what to do with a game like this. We dove in, played 24-hour sessions and every weekend, after school, in four and five campaigns a month, and we changed, modified, rewrote, redesigned, shaped, fashioned and fucked around with the rules constantly. AND we learned to adjust our play for each individual DM’s peculiarities regarding what rules would be followed and how.

Whenever I hear someone reporting on their orthodox obedience to the rules back in the day, I just have to wonder what weirdo I’ve stumbled onto.