Inflation

Reflecting on the town market, and now on fish, of which things like fish livers, bladders (also called sounds) and eggs are special delicacies, I'm reminded once again of an idea I had years ago but never implemented.  I must have discussed it before on the blog, but it's been so long that I can't find it.

The notion would be to collect a massive list of things that can be consumed ... everything from ordinary fruits, vegetables and meats; then into various wines, ales, liquors and such; adding then more extraordinary things like truffles, duck eggs and burbot livers; and topping it all off with the manner in which an item is cooked, and make this a random roll for every player.  This is then the character's thing ... the specific bit of joy in the character's life that he or she craves.  Jim loves, for example, oranges.  Can't get enough of them.  More importantly, he's sad when he can't get them ... which unfortunately extends into certain times of the year, and certain parts of the globe, where oranges are frustratingly scarce.  On the other hand, Claire enjoys a good smoked whitefish, whereas Barnet is constantly on the search for an inn that will properly serve claret at the right temperature.  And so it goes.

The concept would be to provide a meta-level of satisfaction in game terms.  This could be done by increasing something to the characters' benefit — a +1 to any roll one time per day, an overall +3% to all the experience received — within a time frame after the character has feasted upon his or her orange, whitefish or claret.  Alternately, things could be adjusted into the negatives if such-and-such an amount of time has gone by in which the character hasn't enjoyed their cherished delight: a -1 to the first damage done to an enemy, a -3% to all experienced received ... you know, to convey the idea that the character's depressed, woeful for not having had that bit of something that makes all this hacking, slashing and loot worthwhile.

Now, the question arises, can a character with a "create food" spell specifically create that food the other character's crave?  And if so, is it an orange or a whitefish of equal value to one that picked or caught that morning?  Or is it just "food," a sort of matrix-like stew that'll keep the party alive but has no verve?

One reason I cling to the structure of AD&D, for all the changes I've made, is that the inflationary quality of the system gives meaning to tiny alterations in the player's ability.  As the world moved towards 2nd edition in the 1980s, it was plainly clear from the products being published wanted to give the players MORE strengths, skills, powers, influence and so on straight out of the gate.  Early developments like the Barbarian and the Archer were structured on constant, greater bonuses in combat ... a trend that expanded dramatically with the feats' functionalities in the 90s.  Step by step, the steady momentum of game design in D&D has been towards an inflation of the character's ability to hit, cause damage, heal damage, perform actions, break the bounds of reality and so on.  This has especially been so in the case of spellcasting, where more daily opportunities to cast were surmounted by duplications of spells, then reductions of time needed to cast, until finally the caster could blast away at the same rate as a combatant could swing a sword.

The effect of this inflation cheapens every adjustment that a designer makes to any part of the overall system.  It's similar in effect to the way we progressively view money.  My mother, in the 1940s, could see a movie for 8 cents.  As a child, a penny had a dramatic influence on her happiness.  When I was a child, in the early 1970s, I could see a movie for 75 cents.  I recall what it meant to have a quarter in my pocket.  Yet in the present era, and for quite some time now, I haven't touched a quarter, or even seen one.  Whereas once I could take five minutes and search the furniture and drawers for change, to head out and get a drink at the corner bar, I know right now there's no change at all in my domicile.  It's all been thrown away, because it has no value.

When I write something like giving a +3% bonus to a character's experience, this has merit because my game still functions on the meta-value of rules in 1980.  Whereas in the present, a +1 bonus one time a day is a ludicrous nothing in a 5e game.  And since the game has been inflated past all recognition, it's ended by destroying much of the game's functionality.  Combat, for example, is boring in 5e.  Players claim there's too much of it because, in fact, they're almost certain to win.  Their character powers have been inflated to the point where it's next to impossible to lose.  Further, because the DM's status has been deflated in the fact of character agenda-based backgrounding, players feel free to claim that they ought to win the combat, whether they do or not.  The combat, then, is a meaningless act, using up game time to produce a fully predictable result.  It might just as well not happen.

The natural solution to my proposal for the character's "favourite food" is to produce it on demand, through spellcasting or some other means, instantly handwaving the notion out of meaning.  But here we have an interesting departure from the human experience.

As humans we find passion in things that are emotive ... that is, contrary to analytic.  While D&D is a problem-solving game, it's also an activity that arouses intense feelings, defying dissection.  As things are made easier for the players, this behavioural quality is snuffed out.  Feelings in the inflationary game have to be artificial, because every feeling that might have been forced upon the players has been subverted.

And this is the reason people who "discover" AD&D get so excited about it, and cry the peon of "rules as written" ... because the rules do force the players to accept consequences they don't have to accept in the game that's been inflated out of meaning.

How did that happen?  The commercial need to satisfy the customer, of course.  This is not, in itself, bad.  I like that I can have a beer, that companies go on making enough beer that there's never any chance of it running out ... short of a dystopian collapse of civilisation, that is.  But the "more" that players asked for with regards to early D&D wasn't met by a creative community who might have forseen that more bonuses, more spells, more character classes with more abilities, was an inflationary self-destructive spiral.  We shouldn't be surprised.  This is the same mindset that continues to inflate Magic: The Gathering.  Inflation is the only tactic the creative community understands.

And here I do not only fault the company.  The recent OGL crises serves to express the deep, deep failing in RPGs as an art-form.  The strongest "solution" to the crisis was to "switch games."  Not to take a stand on D&D as is.  Not to claim the game as the "ours."  Those sentiments were expressed, but by far the overwhelming response organised itself around the declaration from Paizo, which offered to receive D&D players who wished to switch allegiances.

Not that this matters to me, or my players, or anyone who loves D&D.  If all the non-sailors want to jump into the sea, we'll get home just fine.  It's only worth noting here because it plainly demonstrates the sickness at the heart of the public RPG community just now.  It matters more, to more people, what game their choice celebrities are playing, than the game which they themselves play.

The long-term effects of inflation are not growth.  The long-term effects are a bust, followed by a shattering depression.  I've begun to wonder where we'll be in 5 years.  Part of my concern arises from the fact that I've three times in the past six months signed on to a table at a game con, only to be informed (and my money given back) that the game con has decided not to take place this year.  Hm.  Are we still adjusting?  Or is there a trend at work?  Has cosplay as a phenomenon run its course?  Has so much time outside the group-think of community events produced only a temporary fallout, or has it intrinsically caused a great number of people to re-evaluate their perspectives?  I don't know.  I'm not assuming it's anything at this point.  But I'm keeping an open mind, adjusting my expectations and taking a wait-and-see position.  I'm looking into game cons taking place in June to September, but webpages are NOT being updated for 2023 and my emails are NOT being answered.

There is something going on in the game community that doesn't bode well.  I'm interested to see how the movie does in March.  Is the internet going to wreck it?  That would certainly have an effect on Hasbro's motivations.  Have to wait and see.

Jump

The slow process of my wiki results from a desire to figure out possible ways a spell could be used, where no previous mention or explanation exists in relation to that spell from the original text.  This is a good example, where fitting in a movement spell into an established combat system becomes an enormous headache.

Familiars

I spent two days rewriting and expanding the explanation of this spell, now the longest spell page on my wiki:

What a headache ... and long overdue, though it's not the first time I've decided to increase the amount of detail.  This is one of those bits of AD&D that left way too much up to the DM's fiat, meaning that the exact benefits of the familiar was never available to the player in any real sense.  What exactly does "night vision" really mean?

Unfortunately, some of the needed back up links are still unavailable, as they need to be written, notably the pseudo-dragon and the quasit.  All I can say is that while the latter might be something like the original, the pseudo-dragon definitely won't be.  I've never understood the point in introducing a small dragon that's in no way like a dragon, and assuming the prefix "pseudo" is an effective handwave.  In any case, those monsters haven't been created because I have a LOT left to do.  They'll get done when I need them, or when they happen to come up.

I added six additional kinds of lesser familiar; obviously, I could have added more, as virtually anything could be one.  I considered "rabbit" but I'm not convinced on that one yet.  I marginally advanced the powers and knowledge conferred on the caster by the familiar and narrowed the gap considerably between what a lesser familiar can bestow and what a greater familiar can.  I think it's important for players to want every familiar for some reason, so that it's not just a lottery of winning big or getting the booby prize.  Personally, I'll take a chameleon, dog or mongoose quite happily.  I think the monkey needs one more small benefit, but I'm worn down by making this spell fit into the sage system and other parts of the game, and I can't think of something.

Anyway, have a look.  It's technically a first draft, so there are probably spelling errors and the occasional missing word.  Feel free to point them out.

Writing the Wiki

These last days, I've been happily plowing through page after page on the Authentic Wiki.  It is still smaller than the old wiki, and there remain a great many dead links, but I feel that the material is better than it was.  I'm rewriting old descriptions, tagging content for correction and addition later, adding many more links to the material to allow for more referencing and slowly adding images to pages to enhance the experience.

A search tells me there are 745 content pages that are active.  As I make a link to anything that sounds like it could be added as a page later, just like wikipedia, I have identified 1,561 pages that are wanted -- monsters, spells, sage abilities, places, features and so on.  I'm adding more all the time.  Naturally, the very idea of this is overwhelming ... and can be disheartening.

The difference between my present management, however, and what was always true about my desire to "get my game in order," is that now I can factually measure the depth of what needs to be done.  These were things I was always going to do, as far back as those first heady days when a map was a dozen kingdoms and fifty cities.  Because I was never going to be satisfied with the simplistic rules provided by basic D&D, I was always going to address writing details about food, freight costs and planes of existence.  It is better that the field of things needing attention is getting straightened out; that now there are reminders that I've never written a detailed description of a dungeon door or the macuahuitl.   Where once, these would have slipped my mind, to be forgotten as projects for years at a time, now steadily there's a knowledge that yes, I will get to everything, eventually.  There's comfort in that.

If we scratch the surface of those wishing for simple games, without rules and with plenty of DM fiat, we'll find a DM that doesn't care that much about anything.  I think most of us have been stuck with such a DM, if only for brief periods.  It falls into the same category as teachers who don't care about education, or babysitters who don't care about children, or cops that don't care about public service.  These people exist in every profession -- and they always have pat answers that explain away their apathy and why they continue in those jobs.  It's the money or the power, or the relative status.  There are plenty of doctors around trading on the prestige of being a doctor, leaving a wake of bodies behind them who did not get the proper treatment or who were treated prestigiously right into the grave.

It probably seems gauche to compare DMing with the responsibilities of doctoring; nothing I do is life-threatening, and there's an argument to be made that I'm just a big ol' man-boy who hasn't grown up yet at 56 (in three weeks).  That argument could be reasonably made about any entertainer who continues to perform, from professional clowns to stage hands, who don't want to give up the theatre even though their most responsible job is to pull the scenery cords on cue.  That doesn't sound very important; but when you're in the seats watching the play, it's annoying as all hell if some hand doesn't responsibly perform that piddly service at the right moment.  A life may not hang in the balance -- but as a culture we abhor people who can't or won't do their jobs well.  It just takes one shitty barista working at a Starbucks to consistently ruin your morning for weeks at a time.
So, though I have taken a step back to evaluate, and question my role, and my writing here, and what this does for my soul and where I mean to go, I do want the reader to understand that I am deeply conscious of the absence of material appearing here, on this blog.  I take this blog as seriously as my campaign; and in my mind, as seriously as you'd like your barista to be in getting your coffee made right ... and even as seriously as a doctor being sure not to mix up your medications.

To my mind, the most valuable service I can provide is to candidly set out rules for things that no one ever considered might be necessary or inspiring; and to set in stone details that have always been fuzzy at best.  It can be tedious.  I am at my best when I put down every other distraction and just write rules.  The wiki can be surprisingly satisfying, though it takes time to build a wave of changes that begins to make what feels like a difference.  I may have 1,500+ pages to write; but I have also written 700+ good ones.  I began codifying my stuff on a wiki only five years ago; and twice in that time I've had to endure an upheaval, putting real organization out of my reach.  My two former platforms were "meh" and "simply awful," these being my options at the time.  Now I finally have an excellent platform, with no memory or use limits whatsoever.  I feel confident and encouraged that whatever work I do, it will last and build over time.  That matters, because the system is as responsible as I feel.

Please continue to put up with me.  Please feel free to offer direction, so long as it's positive and it reflects this same responsibility I've been describing.  I want to continue to provide good, solid material for my readership.  I simply don't want to shout at the wind.  It is the feeling that this is what I've been doing that brought about this present reassessment.

Very well.  I'm good for now.

Illumination's Effect on Missile Weapons

This table is from the Authentic wiki, and details the range of thrown and fired missile weapons according to the number of 5 foot hexes.  For game purposes, a missile weapon cannot be thrown at a range of 1 hex, because it is supposed that the enemy would be close enough to foul your attempt, since at that range you would be in hand-to-hand combat.  At a range of 2 hexes, "point blank" (and I suppose I could call it "close" range), the attacker is +1 to hit with the weapon.  At short range there is no adjustment; the attacker is -2 to hit at medium range and -5 to hit at long range.  These are not my adjustments; they were invented for AD&D.

So, for example, if the character were to throw a hand axe at  7 hexes, that would count as medium range.  7 hexes would be short range for a crossbow and it would be long range for a short hammer, which is essentially a carpenter's hammer.  This difference in range is a factor in balancing the decision to take one weapon over another when a character selects their proficiencies.

These adjustments assume the light of day and that has always been an insurmountable problem: what, for example, is the range on a light crossbow underground, when the party is carrying a lantern which illuminates to a distance of 30 ft.?  The light of that lantern does not just come to an end, so that everything is in full dark beyond that distance.  Anyone who has been outside at night, or in a very large enclosed room in the dark, like a gymnasium, knows that as eyes adjust, and as reflection from the far walls begins to affect the scattering of visible light, that the distribution of light is not a fixed distance from a lantern or torch.  Presumedly, there is some light out there; and if there is light, there ought to be some chance of seeing an enemy move, and of hitting that enemy.

[likewise, how is infravision managed beyond the nominal limitation of 60 ft., as described in AD&D?  I don't know if 3e or 5e addressed this problem; but I still question how infravision, which exists in natural light, even if we can't see it, diminishes with distance]

But how is this diminishment of light managed?  For the most part, it isn't; we accept the premise that fighting in the dark will be hand-to-hand, and that if someone is standing outside the range of light or of infravision, that they cannot be attacked with missile weapons.  I'm unsatisfied with this, not least because having stood outside in starlight in the country, without so much as a porchlight in the distance, while conducting amateur astronomy so that I am out in it for hours, it has been perfectly feasible to see across a field of wheat and see someone stepping out of the trees there.

The problem would be to identify individual ranges for each weapon for proposed levels of illumination; such as, "dusk," "full moonlight," "dim moonlight," "starlight" or "full dark," the last of which would be under overcast skies, or in dense forest conditions, when it becomes so dark that one can barely see their hand in front of their face.  I've experienced that many times.

That's a lot of tables and I think would be impossibly inconvenient.  What would be needed is a shortcut of some kind.  Which, insanely, I've invented.

As visible light diminishes, the quantifiable range of missile weapons declines.  The Modifier Adjustment Table, below, provides a proportional conversion for how a given range in combat hexes is affected as the intensity of light diminishes.

The adjustments indicated above are not meant to affect the actual distance that a weapon can be aimed or fired. Instead, the adjustment indicates how the distance should be treated when rolling to hit. All weapons suffer a penalty to hit according to their range, indicated on the missile ranges table. Ranges are divided into point blank, short, medium and long. In full light (FL), weapons thrown or fired at point blank range are +1 to hit; for short range, there is no adjustment; medium range gives a -2 penalty; long range, a -5 penalty.

For example, a warhammer normally has a short range of 3-5 hexes and a medium range of 6-8 hexes. However, if we imagine the combatant is throwing the hammer in full moonlight conditions (FMC), then according to the table above, a range of "3 FL" equals 4 FMC.  The thrown hammer would still be treated as "short." However, a range of 4 FL equals "6 FMC," so that the medium-range penalty of -2 is applied. A range of 8 FL counts as "13 FMC," so the hammer would be -5 to hit.

"13 FMC" refers only to the difficulty to hit and is not a measure of the weapon's actual range! A warhammer in full light has a maximum range of 11 — and so some may misconstrue the Modifier Adjustment Table to mean the hammer cannot be thrown at 8 hexes in FMC. It only means that the range modifier is adjusted, not the actual range. The hammer would still be able to be thrown to a distance of 11 hexes, but would count as being long range between 8-11 hexes.

Where FL indicates a range spread, such as "28-30," then anything in that range is adjusted as shown.

Where a dash (–) appears on the chart, regardless of the weapon's possible range, count any attempted attack at that distance in those light conditions as a miss. The indicator means that at this distance, nothing whatsoever can be seen; this applies as much to the casting of spells as it does to missile weapons.

I trust that's clear enough.  Let me know.

Incidentally, the same chart helps establish details in situations where the party is meeting someone in the dark, or the distance at which encounters under these conditions would be engaged.

Unpleasant Design

"Who are you excluding, and why?"

~ Roman Mars, 99% Invisible.

Unpleasant design, usually attributed to architecture, is a design strategy intended to purposefully guide or restrict behaviour that is unwanted.  While I like the video above, I think it fails utterly to notice that fortifications, iron doorways, secret doors and prisons are all examples of deliberate unpleasant design, all from a time when the words were not coined.

Another form of design I'd like to mention are fees and tariffs, which are designed specifically to discourage the entry of goods and persons into towns and regions.  I don't include tolls, as these were put on roads to pay for the making of the road, and were thus of such small value that it did not discourage traffic.  The most important fee with regards to unpleasant design is the fee that must be paid before a person "belongs" to an organization or a club.  Generally, depending on how exclusionary we want the club to be, the fee varies.

Your local community hall just wants enough money from its neighbours to pay the rent and maintenance, and to that end it wants everyone to join.  On the other hand, organizations like the past Murder Inc. want you to actually kill a person before you're even considered able to join ~ and most highly exclusionary clubs want you to back up a few dumptrucks full of money, even after you've passed the smell test.  That's because we don't want any untoward people access, for obvious reasons.  The wrong people are, well, the wrong people.

To bring this around to D&D, we've been searching around for reasons why players should accept rules regarding encumbrance, acceptance of the game rules and the fact of death in our campaigns.  These are design features that a specific type of D&D player doesn't like ... and as DMs, we have many conversations about how to encourage players to accept them, and how to set up session zero moments in order to give notice that the game will include them.  We do this, like good 21st century socialized people, with the desire to include as many people as possible in our campaigns.

Maybe, we shouldn't be doing that.  Maybe, we should be looking at the problem as a way to exclude people.  Given that I see so many people online complaining so often about that specific type of player that ruins everything, either because they don't take the game seriously or because they're simply rude ... then I see plenty of argument for why encumbrance should be seen as Unpleasant Design.  Rather that soften encumbrance, for which we've made an argument for why it should be there, perhaps the real solution is to Harden the hell out of encumbrance in order to drive off the wrong kind of people.

I think I've been doing that for decades, without thinking in those terms.  I do have a tendency to draw a hard line in the sand as a DM, as some online have witnessed.  I take the game seriously.  I don't like boors, clods and louts.  I don't like random racist remarks at my gaming table, or the sort of assholes who don't like to play with women.  I am ready to boot such people.  And I am quite sure than many of them stay away from my game because I am clear about whether or not I'm going to use encumbrance, or insist on obedience to the rules, or kill player characters.

Which, I think, is why my games are so goddamn satisfying for people to play.  I never have any trouble finding players.  All my regular players will ask, and often, if some friend of theirs can join, because they've been chatting up my game and now the friend is interested.  I have no doubts that I could charge people to play my game online, particularly if I set up a video conference on a given night, which I now have the power to do.  Frankly, though, I haven't got the time.  My point is that making games exclusionary, through the use of unpleasant design, is Not a bug.

It's a selling point.

Time Efficient & Bragging Rights

I live in a state of wonder.

Yesterday, Homer2101 wrote of my decay rules,

"New items' markup doesn't justify the 2.5 extra average degradation rolls. The discount for worn and shabby items doesn't offset their reduced life expectancy under stress. Used items are always most cost-efficient ..."

I honestly don't know how people who live in this world can exist so blithely unaware of how human beings think.  How pervasive is the shot in the image shown, of people waiting many hours for the first touch of a phone they could buy without waiting a week later?  Does Homer not realize that there are players ~ some who I have had play in my game ~ who would throw away an item the second it became "used"?  Just because?  That is how they would see their characters.

I think it's great that Homer crunched the numbers.  It's useful information, and the fact that numbers can be crunched shows how potentially reliable the system is for actual play.  But we do ourselves a disservice when we think the game boils down to how the numbers dictate we should play.  And it astounds me that ~ although there are many people who will never buy anything new, on principle ~ that anyone talking about the subject can be so cognitively dissonant about the way that humans think.  People won't buy "new" because it is cost effective.  They'll buy new because it is "new."  They don't care about the cost.  The gold in their pocket doesn't mean as much to them, as it might to others.  They're adventurers.  There will always be more gold.  But something that is new, is fleeting.

Hell.  Even a new gold piece has a special worthiness that surpasses the value of the metal.  If I were playing a character, and had just bought a new shield, I would look at my fellow player and his used shield and smirk.  "Are you still using that crappy old thing?  Mine is new!"  Oh, what a prick I would be, bragging about my new shield.

Another example, another concern.  The image on the left is the ThinQ Alexa "smart" refridgerator.  You've most likely heard about it.  It is a micromanager that enables you to scan every item of food you put into your refridgerator, so that you can scan it again as you take it out, so the item can keep track of what you have and what you've eaten.  Presumedly, how many calories you're consuming, and from the things I'm reading, speakers for playing music and a voice that carps at you for eating the wrong foods.

There are some things that puzzle me about it.  There are quite a lot of foods that I don't keep in a refridgerator, like flour, sugar, beans, canned items and so on ... and these things get added to the refridgerator after they're cooked together into meals that I make without measuring, because after decades of working as a professional cook I eyeball everything, including most of the common baking I do.  So once I make a meal, out of substances both from and not from the refridgerator, then put them in the refridgerator as left-overs, I'm curious how I scan those left-overs in.  Or, for that matter, if I cut seven slices of cheese off a block, and return the slightly smaller block to the refridgerator, does the refridgerator weigh the cheese?  Or any of the other things I shave down as I'm cooking?  I don't buy pre-packaged foods ... and I'm definitely wondering how I scan out one potato.  Oh well.  There's probably some way it manages this.

If this is the amount of niggling micromanagement we're willing to install into our daily food-consuming activities, some five or six times a day, why would anyone care about having to roll 40 dice to account for equipment decay?

Is it that my readers, and their players, don't know how to speed up the die-rolling process?

I imagine a player with forty items rolling a die, getting a decay result, putting down the die, picking put an eraser, scratching out the "n" next to the character sheet, picking up a pencil, writing in a "u," putting down the pencil, picking up the die, rolling a decay result, putting down the die ...

Are your players really like this?  Homer postulated six seconds per roll.  Mon dieu!

Suppose that it was determined that, out of 60 pieces of equipment, 22 were new.  Some of those wouldn't need to roll at all; if the characters take the effort to pack all the extra uncommonly used articles in a single backpack that doesn't get opened or adjusted, then only the backpack need make a check.  Thoughtful storage would reduce wear and tear.  But let's say, I have 22 items to roll, and I have to use a d4.

First, I can simply roll the dice quickly, in batches of six, noting out loud, "fine, fine, down, fine, down, fine" ~ down meaning an item is downgraded.  Then I make a quick check on my character sheet on the 3rd and 5th item, and begin rolling again.  This way, I can easily do six rolls in six seconds.

Obviously, I'm not using a dice tower.  Dice towers are game momentum killers.  If you're at all interested in the pace of your game, make your players get rid of them.  They're only a way for the player to glom more attention to themselves as they fetishize their die rolls, making others wait and creating unneeded noise at the table.  But what am I saying?  Most of you have already figured this out.

I can speed the process still faster by having my neighbor roll dice, calling off the twenty-two items as I make ticks on my character sheet.  Or, I can roll the dice and my neighbor can make the ticks.  Unless, of course, both you and your neighbor are such profoundly distrustful prats that you can't trust one another to be both honest and faithful ... in which case, why the fuck are you playing with this person, much less sitting next to them?

With the two-person method, I can make 22 rolls in twenty seconds, and probably less.  The checks, once made, don't even need to be addressed during the game session.  The character sheet can be adjusted later, when we're not playing.  Or does that make too much sense?

I'm more than a little astounded that this doesn't seem obvious.  With five minutes and a little sense, with me rolling the dice and the players making ticks on their paper, I could manage five players' equipment.  They would trust my dice, because they trust me, and I would trust them to give the correct number of things that needed a check and to apply the checks to the rolls that hurt worst of all.  I know I could trust my players to do this, because if a player is the sort that won't, it will soon become obvious not only to me, but to every other player I have.  Before I settle in to address the issue, I will probably have two other players separately come to me and say, "You know, I saw Jack doing ..."  These are the kind of players I have.  They don't want to cheat.  They like playing fair.

It must be hard having so little mastery over your game, or the fundamental mechanics of your game, like dice rolling, that you have to make concessions so often for the sake of players who perceive that checks are egregious.  I had been thinking the decay system was a bridge too far, but in retrospect I'm seeing that I've created something rather simplistically elegant.

I refuse to hold myself to a standard of "time saving" with people who will drive all over town for hours on a Saturday to find just the right household towel, between 6-hour sessions playing fortnite and a four-hour football game, but won't sit for five minutes and roll 60 dice.  Fooey!

It is Not My Birthday

Funny story.  After two deep posts published on Monday and Tuesday last week, I decided to rest on Wednesday.  Instead, I rested for six days.

I've got a thing tomorrow but in the meanwhile, I have a thought or two today.

I was mucking about with generating birthdays for new characters and sorted out a means of determining whether or not a player character was born during a leap year.  The value, naturally, is that the character could then be born on February 29th, which for no particular reason humans tend to find interesting.

My partner Tamara asked me, if her character was born on the 29th, would that mean they'd age more slowly?  It's an interesting thought, and I think some would go for it ... but I'm a bit reticent myself and I told her no.  But, it did get me thinking about what birthdays could mean for a player.

A simple and sensible option is to give the player +1 on all bonuses that day.  Reasonably, the character feels excessively good that day and therefore is emotionally in a good place.  The rule would make players look forward to their character's birthdays.  I like that a player might ask to forego making a raid a few days, "Because it will be my birthday."  That's kind of cool.

The extension of that would be, naturally, that a character whose birthday was the 29th of February wouldn't get that every year ... but on their single birthday every leap cycle, they'd get +4 to hit on all rolls that day.

I expect this isn't a new idea.  And I suppose a lot of players get this when their actual selves happen to play a game session on their birthday.  I wouldn't play it for real life birthdays, myself; only for in game birthdays and only so long as the day lasted.  If players wanted to jump five days ahead, to get from point A to point B, and a player had a birthday in between, they'd be out of luck using the bonus.

Anyway.  As the title says, it's not my birthday.  But it is someone's.  So if you're reading, and it is your birthday, what are you doing reading this blog on your birthday?  Go out and kill a dragon or something.

And Happy Birthday.

Infravision (rule)

Because I did some work on the dwarf, I ran up against infravision ... and it reminded me that I have needed to write proper rules about that for a long time. So, some thoughts first.

For a long time, infravision has been a confusing and inconsistently applied rule meant to provide non-human races, particularly those used for character creation, a means of seeing in the dark that humans do not possess.  Coined from infrared, usually a misunderstood form of radiation that includes, but is not limited to, thermal radiation. Because of this relationship, and too many films depicting night vision and “heat-vision,” the clarity of infravision has suffered by this connection. I hope here to settle issues surrounding the ability and better define its use.

Inconsistencies

The first inconsistency is that explaining what infravision is requires the use of terms that would not exist in a fantasy or pre-scientific era culture. The words we’d use – radiation, wavelengths, photons, the visible spectrum, electromagnetism and electromagnetic fields, quanta, radiant energy, oscillations of fields, vibrational excitation and so on, all necessary to explain what infrared light is, are simply anachronistic in the game world and not particularly useful in defining game rules.  Nor is it enough to say, “magic causes it,” since we are left with the problem of “what” is actually caused? What exactly is the radiation that is seen, how does it originate and how do we measure it for game purposes? Without a strong background in hardcore physics, the best option is probably to say that infravision operates like perfectly normal vision, with caveats, and forget trying to measure what infrared light is.

The rules describing infravision quitting at a given distance, say 60 feet, has long been a point of contention. We have examples where human visibility is reduced, by the amount of light, fog or smoke, but as these things diminish at varying rates depending on the amount of light, water vapor or smoke, we don’t have any vision limitations that end specifically at a precise distance. How much is infravision diminished at 20 feet, or 40 feet?  We are left with the question, if there is more infrared radiation, how come this does not increase the visibility range of the ability?  Since the maximum distance named is utterly arbitrary, I say get rid of this maximum and simply say that a creature has infravision or it does not.

Next, we have this rule where “normal light” spoils infravision. This does not make sense. Even without the physics, it is plain knowledge that the infrared spectrum IS a part of normal light; it is the same light, just photons moving in a longer wavelength. We might just as well say that seeing the color magenta spoils our ability to see the color blue. Infravision should mean that the creature’s visible window of light is expanded and wider than the human’s window. This may be hard for us to comprehend with our limitations, but rationally a creature with infravision should be able to see all the wavelengths of visible light within its given range with equal ability.

This means that a creature with infravision, inside a circle of human-normal light, should be fully capable of seeing outside that circle without any effect on the creatures ability to see the infrared spectrum. I can see where some would prefer to preclude this ability, but consistency demands that we recognize the way that light works in this case or we rid ourselves of infravision altogether. The benefit is not such an increase over the original power infravision grants that it overbalances the game; there are certainly benefits that humans have that continues to encourage players choosing human as a race option for their characters. And if they do not, so what? The game remains the same.

Use

Very well, how does infravision actually work?

We have two lingering pictures of enhanced seeing in the dark that we’ve gleaned from films and television: night vision and thermal imaging. Thermal imaging reveals the thermal radiation emitted from sources. It is the way that I have personally used infravision for decades. Night vision is a technological means of enhancing very small quantities of light so that things can be seen in a clear, close-to-normal fashion (lacking the distinction of color). Animals that have better night vision than humans are able to see better at night because of differences in morphology and the anatomy of their eyes, which collect more light due to a larger aperture and a tapetum lucidum.

We might imagine something crossbred between these images, where the infravision-possessing creature’s brain translates the mix of thermal imaging and increased radiation detection into an image consistent with what a human sees … for no other reason than this ends any arguments about being able to “detect” emotional states or other details about the environment in a way the human does not. Except for a unique ability to see better in darkness, we don’t want to ascribe further knowledge collection to infravision.

I suggest that if any light source exists to a specified degree, whether it is a sliver of natural light through a door or an artificial source like a slightly glowing magic orb or a candle, infravision allows effectively normal vision equal to our ability when outside in broad daylight, including color. Just as a dim vampire light on a computer will eventually enable a human to see the whole room, the infravision-possessing creature will have this ability without a waiting period. I suggest the equivalent of 1 candlepower of external light within a distance of 60 feet. This measure of light is precise enough that as a DM, I can comfortably define whether or not it exists.  Note that the sky, whatever the conditions, would always fit this designation. The only other limitation to vision would be line of sight.

Any outside source of light that is less than 1 candle, whatever the distance underground, would be sufficient to provide twilight illumination. Such conditions would only exist underground. Because thermal radiation is part of the range of sight, and since the creature itself exudes sufficient thermal radiation, regardless of the actual subterranean environment, for the infravision-possessing creature to see, there would always be sufficient light for twilight illumination. Again, the only other limitation would be line of sight.

This is all I can think of at the moment.

How to Write a Rule: Introduction

Most games are defined by their rules; we recognize what chess or bridge are by the manner of the pieces or the way in which the cards are played.  Most of the time, if there is a change in the rules, this usually indicates that we are playing a different game.  There are many, many versions of bridge, for example, where a change in the rules indicates that we're playing whist, pinochle, hearts, euchre and so on.

Generally, this is not the case with role-playing games.  In order for the game we are playing to be considered different, there has to be a major shift in the methodology of the game.  Even with genre, we're prepared to accept marked differences: if I were to propose a campaign in which the Masquerade would take place during the 1st century BCE in Rome, we would still call it the Masquerade.

And so, if we play with fairly accepted core rules, we're allowed to continue to call a game D&D [or whatever].  Since there are numerous "core rules" now, some of them quite fairly distinct from the original versions of the game, we have considerable latitude in which rules we play and how we want those rules defined.  This encourages virtually everyone to feel comfortable changing rules, since that is a distinct feature of RPGs.

Unfortunately, there are no dictums for how a rule should be rewritten or how a non-existent rule should be created.  On the whole, the process is a mystery ... with a fair number of would-be designers wallowing around without much success while a number of voices are now being raised to say that they want less rules, not more, and that rules-as-written neatly takes care of all this amateur designing mayhem.

I would be prepared to accept that, except that this is D&D and the "rules-as-written" are massively underwritten, under-presented and, in many cases, just not thought through.  The rules-as-written phenomenon expects players to change their expectations of the game to suit the rule-book, rather than the far more dynamic opportunity of driving the game by advancing the rule-book.  The argument against more rules is a gut reaction to multiple epic fails coming from a lot of different places: bloated rule systems, contrast shocks resulting from four new editions all launched within the space of 14 years (three of which are incompatible), an endless flame war consuming the community on every aspect of game design and a general ennui promoted by a conceptual vision that has seen mediocre development in the whole time of the game's existence.

We're making new rules, yes, but we're not doing so from a design viewpoint that has a theoretical structure: we're going on our gut, arguing that when it works, it's okay, without any real idea of what defines "works." At best, we're relying on people voicing their feelings about a given rule, which makes further development on a particular idea impractical or ineffective.

Am I the person to address this?  I'm not so sure. With my last post, I expressed my attitude that I am relatively alone in the practice of RPGs, being met with arguments that less rules are better because they are "simpler to build upon," which basically means not building at all; or that they are "easier"; or that complexity is an "obstacle" for new players.  I don't remember that campaign from Android where they argued that people who have never used a phone before shouldn't use their platform because the complexity is an obstacle for first-time users.  Too, I'm told that having to fill out "long lists of calculations" [that is, copying numbers onto a page, occasionally having to add or subtract like a 2nd grader] puts off "intelligent, creative folks" and that it is an excessive learning curve, far too excessive for ordinary humans to master.  Given such extraordinary expectations on my part, frankly unreasonable in every possible way, I'm beginning to feel that most role-players are just ~

Hurm.  Well, see, that's how the last post went.  I started off with a reasonable introduction into rules progression and let myself off the chain regarding my deepening lack of respect for participants who make such arguments.  It suggests that millions of words can't actually educate, that what's fundamentally needed is some sort of nanny-program that can be systematically designed to simply by-pass the need to think, thus enabling these intelligent, creative people to play at the level of grade 10 high school students.  As I was, when I first started playing the game, making long lists of calculations while carrying five and ten hour conversations with my peers about what kind of changes we'd like to make to the rules of this game that was only five years old at the time.

Clearly, I am having trouble getting over this particular angry hurdle.  I was going to say that I'm probably not the writer to explain how to make rules, because I am plainly just out there ... but after a few days of research, in which I was hoping to find academic content on the theory of rule design, I might just as well be the one.  Because there is no one else.

Ian Bogost wrote an interesting book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, which incorporates some compelling content on his theory of procedural rhetoric, but unfortunately it's not the vision I have about how to teach someone how to make rules for, say, players to mountain climb.  Bogost's argument is basically that a game about mountain climbing will produce an immersive experience that will increase one's personal experience with the nature and feeling of mountain climbing, enabling one to more thoroughly interpret the emotional and intuitive response of mountain climbers, having sort-of been one in virtual reality (I suspect Bogost watched David Cronenberg's Videodrome in his youth), but that is only loosely connected to how to actually make rules that enable the procedural effect he postulates.  It suggests a goal for making rules, and an effective one: but not the structure on how to achieve that goal.

Beyond that, it's an empty field.  Just now, we're relying on young, imaginative game designers to immerse themselves in playing games, and thus be altered by the procedural rhetoric of that experience to a degree that they comprehend how to make games ... but it's lightning in a bottle, really.  Not everyone who spends a lifetime playing games will be touched sufficiently by that rhetoric ... promoting the very incorrect notion that game making is a special talent that is only available to the specially blessed and talented.  This is how people used to feel about medical practitioners, people who could write letters and those who could understand math.  As it turns out, once those things were properly deconstructed, it turned out that even an ordinary person can be taught how to perform a tracheotomy, compose an essay or resolve algebra.  The only thing that keeps the ordinary person from designing a video game right now is that the educational theory is way, way behind the technology and there's little motivation to encourage it to catch up.

So, if you want to learn anything about rule making, I'm sorry, you're going to have to rely upon grumpy old me.

Designing a Player Character

I've stood by and watched a lot of characters get rolled.  I've watched the reaction to the dice and the process of settling where the ability scores get placed, what equipment gets chosen and the eternal questions of race, class, skills and so on get answered.  Even after all this time, I rather enjoy this part of the game, even though I haven't rolled up a character to play myself in, oh, about eight years.

My core method of starting a character hasn't changed much since the early 1980s.  I have the player roll four 6-sided dice, discarding the lowest die.  These are then placed according to the player's will under the six familiar stats (do I have to list them?).  The player does this while keeping the minimum requirements for classes in mind.  This used to be understood by everyone that played, but I suspect that's changed, and that 5e no longer requires minimum stats to be met in order to be a ranger, a paladin, a monk and so on.

I'll get into the question of why minimum stats are important (eventually), but let's start with why using a 4d6 and not 3d6 matters.  From the beginning, I bought into the argument that player characters ought to be "better" than ordinary people.  Not because they're heroes or because they uphold some great cause, but just because a better collection of stats ensures a recognizable edge on NPCs without those stats.  We can take a simple depiction to express the value in this: a player is running across a rooftop, being chased by an NPC.  The player has to make a leap from this rooftop to that; the distance is part of the calculation, but so is the player's strength or the player's dexterity (depending on whether we feel the ability to cross the distance is important or the ability to land well on the other side).  The player makes a roll and then the NPC makes a roll.

We would, I think, rather play in a world where the likelihood is that the player will make the jump and the NPC will fail. This fits with our dramatic instincts and with our self-image.  Whether or not we do good things, we are the good guys (we always think everyone else is the bad guys).  It just seems right that our chance of making that jump ought to be better than someone else's.  And when we make it, and they don't, the world seems to be operating in good order.

Of course, we could miss.  And of course, the NPC might also make it.  But the number of times this departure from our mental projection occurs matters to us.  Too many departures and we'll start to feel the game is rigged somehow, that there aren't enough chances for us to win.  Again, we're the good guys.  The DM's NPC doesn't really matter, right?

There are many who feel it's right if the players have exactly as much power to make that jump as NPCs ... but I can't agree.  As a DM, I don't have near as much invested in a NPC as the player has in their character.  It takes very little for me to produce another NPC as needed, as I don't need to spend a lot of time determining all their stats, their equipment or their particular details ~ certainly not for an NPC chasing the character across some rooftops.  The difference is considerable.  And since the game is about the player, I'm fine with the game interface being balanced for the player.

The 4d6 seems to make a good average improvement, without that improvement being excessive.  I've seen campaigns where it was 6d6 and drop the bottom three dice, or eighteen 3d6 rolls, or some other combination, most of which were named in the old, old DMG from 1979.  Other systems seem too balanced towards a superior player or they seem unnecessarily time-wasting.  4d6 less one die gives an average of 12-something instead of 10.5.  That is just enough to matter, without being enough to make the player feel safe. It fits with the amount of play I want the player to have within the game's structure.

The next question, then, is why let the character select where the rolls go?  There is a top-to-bottom philosophy that insists the die roll order fits the order of stats.  I think I understand: DMs felt the players shouldn't be allowed to consistently run the same class of characters all the time.  "Why does Glenn always have to play a fighter?" goes the logic.  Yet I think this is a DM's problem.  If it were Glenn's problem, Glenn would stop playing a fighter.  I think we should stay away from one person imposing their problem on another person's contentment.  I don't think there's a strong argument to be made for such things.

I like that the player gets some control over what they have to run for what I expect to be a long time.  I don't start games that are meant to stop soon and I haven't found many players whining about having to play a cleric or a mage because that's what they chose two years ago in real time.  That may be mitigated by my henchman rule, but I don't remember it being a problem before.  If it is a good game, and if all the player classes can prove themselves to be relevant in tackling the game's interface, then I think players just like the fact that they're stronger and tougher and have more resources at their disposal, whatever their class is.  The problem arises, I think, when the character improves in level but no real change results as to what the character can do.  The fighter was always an issue here: more hit points and a better combat table, even more attacks, does not make for a dynamic, growing character.  Thankfully, I've solved that problem too.

The player, then, reorders the numbers around the character class requirements and around what obstacles the player intends for the character to overcome.  When considering the number under a given stat, the player thinks in advance, I'm going to be solving a lot of problems that need an effective intelligence or constitution or charisma.  I should then start building my character's goals around my strongest stats.

Hm?  No?  Don't look at it that way?  Well, you're not alone.  No one looks at it that way.  They think, a high stat under charisma will make people like me, a high stat under strength will mean I do a lot of damage, etcetera.  They don't build characters ~ or agendas ~ around their stats.  But they ought to.

Consider.  I start with six rolls (and I'll roll these out).  I have a 14, a 15, a 10, an 18, a 13 and a 9.  Swear to gawd, I just rolled an 18.

Could be a fighter, but there's only a little Con and not much of anything else; I'd rather try a cleric.  It works better for this example, anyway.  I won't get a wisdom bonus in spells for ages but I'll put the 18 under wisdom and the 15 under constitution.  I feel I'm going to want to run a congregation someday so I'll shift the 14 under charisma and I'll take the 13 under strength so I'm able to carry armor and weapons without getting slowed down much.  That's a 10 for intelligence, but I plan to be a bullheaded cleric anyway, and a 9 for dexterity.  I doubt I'm going to run over many rooftops.  I'm far too wise to get into that sort of situation.

I'm running with a DM that is very much like me, so as often as I can I'll try to build up a store of knowledge that will allow me to make a wisdom check when the situation seems unclear.  My DM feels that someone with a high wisdom ought to have a good sense about the motivations of NPCs or the best way to go about getting help from people and organizations.  Past that, my high constitution will mean I'm not afraid to enter into hard, difficult to survive places.  I won't be foolish about preparing for icy or sweltering climes (and my wisdom will give me checks there) and my constitution will give me a good, tough ability to hunker down when the weather and the terrain turns sour.

I'm not planning on influencing a lot of people with my charisma, at least not until I'm in a position of power, because I don't feel I want to lie much with this saintly man of the cloth; but I do want to be left alone.  A high charisma will tend to be treated among the better citizens and as I intend to keep myself clean and well-groomed, the charisma ought to help me if the rest of the party (or strangers in the area) start acting like a bunch of louts.  My strength is at least still above average ~ but not too much.  I'm going to be getting into the fight until I amass enough spells to be an effective caster, so I'll need good armor.  I guess I can take on a fair burden, too, since I'm going to be human.  That makes me a big, burly member of the party among these elves and half-elves, but I don't mind carrying a good, solid load.  If I move at a rate of 3 hexes per round, I should do all right.  Not a chaser, but good enough to stand in front of a mage.

Now, that intelligence.  My DM usually does intelligence checks when players take an action that is flat out stupid; I think with my experience at the game that I'll take my chances.  'Course, I'm won't be the brightest penny in the box where it comes to tactical games or giving orders; guess I'll let some other lead the army we accumulate someday, else I'll walk them straight into a rout.  And with my dexterity, I should be fairly deliberate about keeping my feet on firm ground, walking on the side away from the cliff and vying for knowledge that doesn't require much hand-to-eye coordination.

That, finally, gets us around to why minimum stats for classes are a good idea.  But, this post is already pretty long.  I guess I can manage that for another day.

Sight and Fire

From the wiki:

Provides a combatant with the ability to make the best use of cover while firing at an opponent with a bow or a crossbow, or when using a hurled weapon. The ability cannot be employed when using a sling, a staff sling, a bola or similar spinning weapon.

Effectively, the combatant, hiding behind cover, makes a sighting of the enemy, meaning that a glance is made around a corner, from behind a tree or by raising one's head above a wall or similar defense. Then, in the following round, with a loaded weapon, the combatant moves, fires at the sighted location of the target and then returns to cover at once. The weapon may be loaded in the same round that the sighting occurs.

If the target has not changed hexes since the sighting, the missile or hurled weapon has a -1 chance of hitting when fired or thrown in this manner. If the target has moved, however, the attack will miss, unless a natural 2 is rolled (in which case, the target might be hit by accident so long as the target is within a 30-degree arc of its original position). This is meant to be a quirk, based upon the friendly fire rule found under Critical Hits & Fumbles.

The combatant firing in this manner is considered to be at -4 AC for the enemy's attack immediately after the sighted fire is attempted (remembering that D&D combat is a turn-based resolution of simultaneous attacks).

Question:

I would like to know for certaint that this is clear and that there are no contingencies I might have missed.  Please weigh in if you think it is fine; that will help offset opinions from those who may have only read it too quickly.

Stealth Problems

I am enjoying the stealth rules I created and I've had plenty of time to play with them ~ but I have to admit that they're tricky to use.  I thought I'd write a post about that.

The rules stipulate a minimum distance that the combatant can successfully approach an enemy without being seen, modified by such things as vegetation, the amount the combatant is wearing/carrying, the level of the combatant and the combatant's appearance due to camouflage.  The closer the distance between combatant and target, the more silent and hidden it is assumed the combatant is.

The tricky part is in describing this to the player, specifically due to troubles that arise in terms of the player's awareness of the enemy and how they may choose to describe their movement.

Let's take the easiest situation: the player can see the enemy at a set distance away; we'll say the enemy is 14 hexes away, with 5 feet per hex, or 70 feet.  The stealth rule then designates (we roll) how many hexes will separate the player character from the enemy before the character's movement is discovered.

What's needed at this point is a "commitment to approach," which is hard to obtain.  The characters says they are approaching the enemy.  Because of the rule, we don't need to figure out if the character uses the bushes or moves along a low wall or just crawls up on belly.  Time is not a factor in the rule (though we could stipulate one hex per round, or perhaps one hex per three rounds).  In movie terms, it's the scene where the character very, very slowly moves up on the enemy in order to kill them, pausing each time the enemy moves



Players don't want to commit, however.  They want to describe their movement one hex at a time, but of course until reaching the critical hex, the character isn't discovered.  So I have to ask the question, "Do you approach the enemy until you are discovered?"

That's a really hard question to answer.  It sounds ominous and uncomfortable and players don't want to answer it; which usually means they want to back off and not approach the enemy at all. Which is fair enough. Sneaking up on someone is freaky and ought to be seen as a very hazardous option.

Now let's take a more difficult situation to run.  The players can hear the enemy but can't see them.  They're nearby, in the bushes, and the players want to attack them.  However, now I can't tell the players how close the enemy are.  They can't see distance; hearing is not seeing and the distance can't be judged.  In such situations, I find it hard to explain to the players that yes, if they move up on the enemy, they'll have to risk being seen ~ while having no idea how many hexes the enemy will be away.  Again, I need that commitment to approach, until the enemy is engaged.

Prior to the stealth rule, I did not have a problem with this.  The players, by not relating stealth to distance, would happily blunder into the enemy and a fight would ensue.  They're in the bushes? No problem, we rush through the bushes and attack them.

But by introducing this distance scheme into the mix, players have become very, very cautious. Basically, I've given them a measurement that they think they ought to be able to control; but of course they can't, since a 3d6 roll can be pretty scattered, particularly when I'm making that roll in secret so they can't be sure what their result is (at least, until they're at -10 on the dice because they've reached name level as an assassin or thief).  By nailing down the specifics of the approach, I've given the players a reason to think twice; and thinking twice, they tend to err on the side of caution.  That is, they decide not to approach at all.

It is an interesting psychological problem and I have found it difficult to work with.  I'm going to be working on another rule about heightened senses [page description in progress], which will establish a minimum approach distance for anyone with the sage ability, regardless of the enemy's stealth, as well as providing some information on how distant an enemy is by virtue of hearing them. Heightened senses basically takes the place of "hear noise," while adding a few other juicy benefits.

No Deals

At the Edmonton Con, we had a fellow, Otis, approach our table who was bemoaning the way his players took advantage of him.  I will give an example.  Instead of drinking a healing potion to heal, Otis explained that the player was always trying something completely out of left field, something unexpected.  "What if I just use a little of the healing potion on my wound, rubbing it in with my hand.  Will that do anything?"

Whereupon Otis looked heavenward in dissatisfaction, sighed (I'm really not making this up) and told us, "I don't know what to do when he says stuff like this.  I wish he'd just use the potion.  I have to say something like, 'Okay, if you roll a 1 on a d20, it like heals three points of damage.'  And then the player rolls a 1!  I hate this stuff!"

Um.  Yeah.  I tried to explain to him that he was only enabling the player by offering a chance of success.  the actual answer is, "No, it does nothing."  Park Place costs $350.  It doesn't cost $325 if you roll a seven when you land there, it doesn't cost $310 if you're wearing a green shirt, it doesn't cost $290 if the player on your left thinks that's "fair."  The cost is, was, always will be, $350.

Otis, poor fellow, proved inconsolable.  We never were able to make him see that his players were taking advantage of him by trying to end-run the rules or that he was encouraging their behavior by constantly finding ways to fan-service them.

Fan-service sucks.  I just had a long conversation with my future son-in-law regarding "gold rounds" in the online game, World of Tanks.  These are special shells that players can buy that are effectively breaking the game . . . but when haven't we watched profit-mongering by game designers destroy a game by feeding those who have the money to pay in?  We've seen this pattern for decades now: a great game appears, it seems to reward effort and adaptation with opportunity and benefits . . . and then someone else can step in with money and side-step working at the game by purchasing a super-mega-killer-death-action sword and within a year, poof!  No game.

It's presumed that this is a video-game problem but no, it's actually a game problem.  If you're unsure about this, ask someone's opinion about the designated hitter's presence in the American vs. National baseball leagues.  This is a rule adopted 43 years ago, in 1973; debate continues.  If that isn't enough for you, have someone who understands the in-field fly rule explain it for you . . . and then have them explain satisfactorily why the rule exists at all (please, if you have an answer for this, write it on another blog).

New rules break games - and this includes a rule made up on the fly, designed to spontaneously satisfy a player's momentary ill-thought innovation.  I'm a great fan of innovation:  when Ned Cuthbert stole a base in 1863 or 1865, that was the right kind of innovation - he wasn't breaking a rule and he didn't need one to be made for him.  When the Oakland A's chose not to steal bases because they were statistically viable, that was the right kind of innovation too.  I applaud players who try to innovate inside the rules.  I crush players who try to do it outside.

I'm sure Otis, however, is not alone.  I'm sure there are many caught in the same trap, who don't see that they are themselves the architects of their own misfortune.

More

I've been thinking about the large scale changes that I brought about in my world that were inspired and developed from an exchange of ideas with my players.

In 1981, my players expressed a desire to play in a world that was more "traditional" and "less empty" than the one I had been running.  I had been trying to base my world on a sort of minimal sword battle technology with elements of heavy social responsibility and it just wasn't working as far as my players were concerned.  As such, I backed off and designed a world that was based on a series of lands encircling an inner sea, with predictable gradations in climate, social organization and more common themes of dungeons, greed, vengeance, dungeons . . . dungeons . . . yeah, that's about it.

In 1984, my players were losing interest in the combat system, particularly in the repetitive nature of the initiative roll, which as written was an annoying element that seemed to detract from the experience rather than adding to it.  We had dozens of discussions about it.  Seems like every time we ran we were talking or complaining about the combat system.  And then the particularly brilliant Mike that I played with proposed a solution from some article he read, maybe it was the Dragon, where the defender's ability to attack was based on how successful had been the last attack against that defender.  From this came the stunning rules, that we tweaked for a few months before settling on the best way for them to work.  I have played my combats like this ever since.

In 1985, again the players were expressing a dissatisfaction with my world, not because they had an idea that it should conform to a traditional ideal but because the traditional ideal had grown to be boring.  It just wasn't enough.  Again there were round-table discussions on it, where people proposed all kinds of ways that elements of the real world could be injected into the fantasy construction to make it more "real."  And then one day I was looking at a high detail map at the university (I hadn't started university yet but I was a regular visitor to their library) in something like 1:20 000 scale, and I realized that where it came to detail nothing could really beat the real world.  That led to my running the real world as my campaign and throwing out any further notions of running a setting that was made entirely from scratch.

In 1986, my players were talking about the difficulties of buying and selling things for the purpose of making money from trade, like they were able to do in the Traveller campaign that I would run from time to time.  Traveller had some simple but practical rules for trading, though they were easy to break if they weren't carefully managed (leading to players easily making millions of credits), and the players wanted to have something like that for D&D.  This led to me realizing that the encyclopedia my parents had owned had references to things that individual places in the world created; I found a set of those encyclopedias cheap from a used bookstore in late '86 and started working on my trade system.

In 1989, the appearance of skill systems everywhere encouraged my players to ask me to do some kind of reboot on character secondary skills.  That led to one bad table after another for years and years; I never did solve it for that campaign, that ended in '94, but eventually I did keep working at the problem until additional skills and an expressed desire for backgrounds in general resulted in my character background generator.

In 2004, after a long sabbatical from running players (while I worked on my world in abstentia), my players were quibbling about my world maps being difficult to relate to.  Like most maps, the ones I used were big sweeps of empty space, divided only by geographic borders, rivers and topographical features.  The dissatisfaction these maps produced (one couldn't call them aesthetic) led to my developing hex maps that were based on elevation, not topography.  By plotting the elevation, I reasoned, the topography would be revealed one hex at a time and I'd have a grittier world.  I came across fallingrain.com and began to copy the data from that site, one page at a time, for the whole world, in order to have the ability to plot my present day maps.

In 2007, the players were expressing their dissatisfaction with the amount of practical explanation associated with the various spells in the spellcaster's canon.  This led to my beginning to rewrite all the spells (not my first time, but now with a lot more experience) as duotang books that my players could use, take home and study at their leisure.

In 2009, my daughter in particular expressed her desire for me to start writing down as much of my world design as I could, so that it would be available to her in the event of my death.  I had started this blog by then, but given that the blog seemed to be a poor way to organize the information, I began thinking that what was needed was some kind of wiki.  I had edited wikipedia more than a few times (of course!) and I had been working with large databases with the magazine I worked for in the 00s.  A friend in Seattle proposed creating a wiki for me and for a while I loaded information onto the "Same Universe Wiki" - until technical issues and other difficulties ended that.  It would be two years between the death of the old wiki and the creation of the new, "Tao at Wikispaces," which is now going strong with over 1,000 pages and 4 contributors besides myself.  This wiki has now become central to regular discourse between the players and I, with it being modified and adjusted in game, when a ruling is made on some circumstance.

After all this . . .

Those are the major alterations that I've made with the player's encouragements.  I don't include little adjustments here and there that have come up from time to time.  Note how every one of them began with the players expressing their satisfaction, following by my willingness to change, usually followed by a moment of clarity in which I figure out how to change.  At each stage, I tell the players about the changes I'm suggesting and ask them for their input.  Do you think this will work?  Does this sound like a good idea?  Is there some aspect I'm missing?  Do you want to include this or is that going too far?  And so on.

This is what I meant in the previous post about the DM not acting alone (I hoped for a discussion on that; all I got was crickets).  I mean listening and then corresponding with the players on ways to solve their problems, keep them interested, bring new ideas to the table and keep adjusting and changing the campaign given the resources and tools that arise from an increase in technology.

In every way, D&D is like the phone industry: we want to keep adding features, even if the phone works fine and the features are already interesting.  There can always be more.  More and more and more.

Making New Rules

Central to my theory of expanding game rules is this:  unless it is 100% impossible, never introduce a new field or number to a player's character sheet.  If there is such a thing as "injury damage," then it must directly fold into a character's actual hit points.  If a measurement of skill is needed, have it relate to the character's ability stats or level.  Rather than invent different measures that each manage move vs. number of attacks vs. weapon speed vs. magical casting, make one system that incorporates them all into the same framework. If this can't be done, think long and hard about what needs to be added and decide how to mesh it in with the system as it stands thus far.  DO NOT create a completely stand-alone number that addresses a stand-alone problem.

For example, suppose we wanted a rule that decided a character's reputation.  Because reputation seems to have little or nothing to do with any other number in the lexicon, it would seem logical to create a new number, something that applied only to reputation, in order to address this very obvious "lacking" in those things that define a player.

But is it a lacking?  And is it really not represented in the character's stats?  Does it not follow that a character with a high wisdom, charisma or intelligence is less likely to make enemies, annoy people, develop a bad reputation and so on?  Does not the reverse also follow, as a character acts selfishly, stupidly or boorishly?  Why not simply make the "reputation" an average of the player's existing stats?  Why dismiss these points of reference in favour of creating a completely unrelated point of reference?

The answer is that most players are always looking for something that will mitigate the negatives on a character, giving them at least one more chance for a positive.  My character's wisdom is 10, his intelligence is 9 and his charisma is only 8, but at least he has a reputation of 18!

Unfortunately, that reputation doesn't mean much.  Because it isn't enfolded into the rest of the game (meaning there are no rules that define how everything relates to reputation like it does to hit points or movement), that number just gets ignored . . . until a year or so passes and the player asks the DM, "This reputation number that I have: do I still need to keep track of that?"  Whereupon the DM admits, sadly, that no, that's no longer necessary.

I did break my rule, the one I started this post with, when I introduced the idea of Sage Abilities.

Initially, I did have those Sage Abilities exist as a completely separate entity.  And it did not work.  It was based on a percentage system of knowing something and upon "questions" that the players would ask to see if they knew something . . . but the questions weren't clear and the % chance of knowing was painfully inconsistent and for years the system just languished on the edge of death because there was no solution for it that I could see.  Still, I needed something that would fix the problem of what do players know, so I patiently did not press the issue and waited for clarity.

The inconsistency of the die roll is the killer.  This is the worst part of the "skills" system that was introduced with 3rd Edition.  Seriously - why is it that my character can do this thing this minute and can't do this very same thing the very next time he tries?  Why is everything based on odds?  My own system tried to make it that way because I didn't want to try to codify all of human knowledge and then decide what players knew and what they didn't (though, to be truthful, that was sort of the inevitable solution).

At least there should have been a precedent system in place for 3e (maybe there was one, I never played that system).  If my character was able to jump a 9 foot gorge once, then he should be able to jump 9 feet forever (unless some other extenuating circumstances existed).  That could have been managed by keeping the character's roll for any given skill attempt, then counting that as a minimum roll and letting the player try to best it with each new opportunity.  Any roll less than the minimum would mean no improvement.  That would sort of make sense.  But having a totally unique roll happen again and again for similar situations - that's way too inconsistent to build a thoughtful system around.

The change in the Sage Abilities when I began to work on them more seriously was the reasoning that these are not things the players should roll against, but things the players can absolutely do or things the players will absolutely know. The reason it is taking years to build the system is what I said just now: codifying all of human knowledge and ability.  It is painstaking work, made more painstaking by having to constantly create rules for things that there are no rules for.  How do I work out how much a character knows about horseriding when there are no rules for horseriding?

The true system, however, did not come from inventing a system with knowledge points that - like reputation points - had a chance of standing on their own and having nothing to do with the rest of the player's character sheet.  The spark came when I realized that every skill and ability that every character class had - from monk open hand attacks to spell use to weapon proficiencies to a cleric building a temple - all FIT into the same immense umbrella of a system.  Rather than make a stand alone system for Sage Abilities, I gathered in many other stand alone systems - turning undead, morale, training other people, creating magic items - into a single overall formula.

No one, I know, wants to do this kind of work.  Hell, I may not live long enough to do this kind of work.  But each time I add another part to it, another piece, it gets stronger and more viable in the players' minds.

They LOVE the knowledge numbers, not because its a chance for their characters to shine be better at something, but because they make something that was formerly hopeless and unclear into something precise and known.  Truth is, if I sat down for a week or two and just made headings for the sage abilities, right through to bard and monk, the players and I could work out the rules for those things on the wiki as we moved forward from game to game.

Maybe that is what I need to do; instead of trying to trim proper rules, one by one, maybe I should start with all the categories in place and then let it be messy as slowly, steadily, we work each category out.

Hm. 

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.