When the Writer is Ready ...

"Well, at this point I'm not very interested at being 'a great DM.' Somehow it's enough for me as it is. So now I'm not very interested in that kind of books."

— Redrick, an ordinary commentor

On the subject of writing books telling people "how to D&D," we can safely divide the game-playing population into two initial groups: (a) pat me on the head; and (b), like Redrick here, "meh."  It's quite common for people to adopt the excuse that since I don't want to be great, there's no reason I should be better.  Obviously that doesn't just apply to D&D.  We see it everyday in our jobs, exhibited by both the boss and one's co-workers.  "We're doing well enough; let's not make this more difficult by trying to do better."

As far as those wanting a pat on the head, there's plenty of sustainable energy from those who give brilliant advice like, "keep learning" — without, obviously, making any suggestion about what ought to be learned or where this knowledge is to be gotten.  If this is the sort of advice you want to get, try chatGPT.  It's wonderful for that.

Me: I want to write a book teaching people how to be a DM for Dungeons and Dragons.

Chat: That sounds like a fantastic project! Being a Dungeon Master (DM) for Dungeons and Dragons is both an art and a skill, and there's a lot to learn and share in a comprehensive guide. Here's a rough outline to get you started:

Title: "Mastering the Dungeon: A Comprehensive Guide to Becoming a Dungeon Master in Dungeons and Dragons"

Introduction:Welcome to the World of Dungeon Mastering

• What is Dungeons and Dragons?
• Why Become a Dungeon Master?
• What This Book Offers

Chapter 1: Getting Started

• Understanding the Role of the Dungeon Master
• Gathering Essential Materials
• Choosing an Edition: D&D 5th Edition Overview
• Setting Up Your First Adventure

Chapter 2: Building Worlds and Narratives

• Crafting a Compelling Setting
• Developing Engaging Storylines
• Creating Memorable Non-Player Characters (NPCs)

Chapter 3: Rules and Mechanics

• Understanding the Core Mechanics
• Combat: A Detailed Overview
• Handling Challenges and Skill Checks
• Incorporating House Rules

Chapter 4: Preparing and Running Sessions

• Session Zero: Character Creation and Expectations
• Structuring Your Sessions
• Improvisation Techniques
• Managing Player Choices and Agency

Chapter 5: Managing Players and Table Dynamics

• Fostering a Positive Gaming Environment
• Dealing with Player Conflict
• Balancing Player Engagement

Chapter 6: Creating and Balancing Encounters

• Designing Balanced Encounters
• Adjusting Difficulty on the Fly
• Using Terrain and Environmental Factors

Chapter 7: Building and Managing Campaigns

• Planning Long-Term Campaign Arcs
• Integrating Player Backstories
• Maintaining Campaign Consistency

Chapter 8: Enhancing Your Game

• Incorporating Props and Visual Aids
• Using Music and Sound Effects
• Experimenting with Alternative Game Styles (Theater of the Mind, Hexcrawl, etc.)

Chapter 9: Troubleshooting and Problem-Solving

• Addressing Common Issues at the Table
• Handling Player Disengagement
• Rebooting a Stalled Campaign

Chapter 10: Continuing Your Journey

• Resources for Further Learning
• Joining Online Communities and Forums
• Seeking Feedback and Improvement

Conclusion:Congratulations! You're a Dungeon Master

• Final Words of Encouragement
• Appendices:Sample NPCs and Monsters
• Sample Adventure Modules
• Glossary of Terms
• Character Sheets and Blank Maps

Remember to include examples, anecdotes, and tips from your own experiences as a DM to make the guide more relatable and engaging. Good luck with your book!

See?  No thinking necessary.  And if you want to wade into a world of garbage thinking, ask Chat to explain any of the above points.

The problem isn't that writers of game books choose not to be useful; it's that the actual philosophy of how to describe gaming, and what gaming is, and what matters, contributes to a culture of "proactivity" that is more concerned with organising the bullshit than discriminating between what is and what isn't helpful.

Me: Explain how to deal with player conflict, as a DM, within D&D, in paragraph format.

Chat: Dealing with player conflict as a Dungeon Master (DM) in Dungeons and Dragons requires a delicate balance of diplomacy, fairness, and assertiveness. The first step is to address the conflict openly and directly. Encourage players to voice their concerns in a respectful manner and ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak without interruption. As the mediator, listen attentively to each side's perspective and strive to understand the underlying issues. Once the root cause of the conflict is identified, work with the players to find a compromise or solution that satisfies everyone involved. This may involve making adjustments to the game mechanics, revisiting previous rulings, or clarifying expectations for future interactions. It's crucial to remain impartial and avoid taking sides, focusing instead on fostering a collaborative and inclusive gaming environment. If necessary, remind players of the importance of respect, teamwork, and mutual enjoyment. Ultimately, the goal is to resolve the conflict constructively while preserving the integrity of the game and maintaining positive relationships among the players.

See?  Whatever the question, the result is a parade of subjective non-specific things you ought to do, without any possible comprehension between what's offered.  There's no point in asking how to be "diplomatic" or "fair" or "assertive" ... the answers are all equally subjective.  Not because Chat is designed to be subjective, but because the source material that Chat is pulling from is only more of this.  These are what all the source materials already existing on the internet, or in those piles that Chat was trained to comprehend, are designed to convey. They simply spew tons and tons of this kind of material ... because it fills pages.  Lots and lots of pages.  Pages that people are willing to pay for.

It's the same rhetoric the pervades the self-help phenomenon.  It's not possible for a person to just "be more assertive" or know what to do just because players have been encouraged to "voice their concerns."  Like a book that urges you that getting better isn't that hard, that you have to just keep climbing, that you have to believe in yourself and not give up, none of this actually tells us what we should be doing.  And worse than helping, self-help books prevail upon the reader to think more and more about the problem by promising a solution that never, in fact, materialises.  In effect, the book blames you, the reader.  If you, the reader, would just be make the right adjustments to the game mechanics, your game would be great.  If you, the reader, would just remind the players of the importance of teamwork, your game would be great.  But somehow, it never is.  And because of the source material you're reading, the answer to that, too, is obvious.  It's because you, the reader, didn't do it right.

I don't know how I can make this clearer.  You, dear reader, are the victim: and the self-help book industry is blaming you.  Because it empowers the self-help book industry.  Q.E.D.

However, the RPG industry has insidiously embraced this industry for a long time, so that they've successfully convinced the balance of would-be DMs that this is how advice ought to be given.  Many, many commentors habitually describe these phrases, such at those Chat above generated, as "concise" and "practical," though obviously they're not.  It's not ignorance; it's a belief that, in the absence of any concrete information being available, many convince themselves that they were helped by such books, although in fact it was little more than a pat on the head that effectively said, "just be yourself, you're a good person, everything's fine" or some other similar drivel.

For any book to be actually helpful in training a dungeon master to do any of the things generated above, in concrete terms (that is, existing in material or physical form, not abstract), there are specific things that it needs to do.  But to portray that, I'll have to use an example from a completely different
activity:

Me: How do I prepare a soft-boiled egg?

Chat: To prepare a soft-boiled egg, start by selecting fresh eggs from the store. Fresh eggs ensure a firmer egg white, which helps maintain the egg's structure during cooking. Next, fill a pot with enough water to cover the eggs and bring it to a rolling boil over high heat. Gently lower the eggs into the boiling water using a spoon or tongs, being careful not to crack them. Set a timer for about 4 to 6 minutes, depending on your desired level of doneness and the size of the egg. While the eggs are boiling, you can prepare an ice water bath to stop the cooking process and prevent overcooking. Once the timer goes off, use a slotted spoon to carefully remove the eggs from the boiling water and transfer them to the ice water bath to cool down. Let them sit for a few minutes before gently cracking the shell and peeling it away. Serve the soft-boiled eggs immediately with toast or incorporate them into salads or other dishes. Adjust the timing as needed based on altitude, egg size, and personal preference. With practice, you'll achieve perfectly soft-boiled eggs every time.

There.  Stores exist.  There are eggs there.  They have recognisably different properties that can be defined.  Do this.  Then do this.  Set this timer.  Recognise you may have specific tastes regarding how long the egg ought to be cooked to fit your personal needs.  Use these tools.  Let them cool.  Crack the shell and peel it away.  Practice the procedure.

Until the question, "How do I become a dungeon master" can be defined in this manner, the book you're reading is useless.

Naturally, the begged question is, can a book about DMing be written in this way?  Is that possible?  Quote, "Because it doesn't seem possible.  I've never seen such a book; no one has ever published such a book; the company hasn't even hinted that such a book could be written.  D&D seems so, um, subjective to me."  I find it hard to believe that a concrete book of this time is a believable possibility."

Yep.  See, this is why the self-help industry is very careful in targeting a particular kind of subject ... squidgy, imprecise subjects.  Little did I realise in the early 80s, with my first experiences of D&D, that the inability of people to be precise about the sort of game they wanted to play would open the door to the sort of writing that would make so much money from telling romantics how to get married, or would-be businessmen to become rich and famous, or youtubers how to make tons of money making their own videos, etcetera, etcetera.  But here we are.  Don't discount what I just said about the industry setting out to convince you, the reader, that you need the self-help industry.  It's your life-line.  After all, there's no other possible way you could start a successful business.  You have to believe in yourself.  You have to think your way to success.  You can't just do a simple thing well, keep doing it well, be polite to people, don't overspend, learn the industry you're in, pay attention to changes and work all the time, so as to be successful.  That's just crazy talk.

When a person on the internet says, "Stop playing 5th edition," we read that as "opinion," which can be instantly ignored.  But when that same person says, "foster a collaborative and inclusive gaming environment," that sounds very positive, and therefore obviously much better than "opinion."  Gosh, I'm going to keep playing 5th edition, only from now on I'm going to foster a collaborative and inclusive gaming environment.  That'll work.

There's a method of telling the difference between "opinion" and "knowledge."  The method hasn't been around very long.  Only 2,300 years and some.  The distinction addresses one of the most subjective subjects there is, human thought, yet somehow gets a lot further towards providing a concrete definition than a typical how-to D&D book. Here goes ...

According to Aristotle, knowledge is characterized by certainty and necessity, based on true and justified beliefs grounded in demonstrable evidence or logical reasoning. In contrast, opinion lacks the certainty and reliability of knowledge, as it is based on appearances, probabilities, or premises accepted as true but not necessarily universally valid. Knowledge involves understanding the causes and principles underlying phenomena, whereas opinion relies on perceptions and beliefs about the world that may be subject to error or revision.

If you want to dive into this — and trust me, you won't enjoy it — the works are Nichomachean Ethics and Prior Analytics.  But this is all I'm going to say about Aristotle today.  You think.

For a book to be helpful regarding D&D, is must be rooted in research; that is to say, the writer must have done more than play the game, and must be willing to go further than giving subjective advice without concrete examples of what is meant by the words used.  If the writer says, "D&D requires a delicate balance" of anything, then the following must be included: (a) several factual, concrete examples of this balance; (b) a specific step-by-step guide, equivalent to how to boil an egg, to explain how this balance is achieved by someone who has never done it before; and (c) a conclusive paragraph explaining how the results of this balance cannot be achieved in some other way, specifically because of what the balance concretely does.

If these three things are not written about this balance, then the passage is not merely opinion, it is BULLSHIT.  It's certainly not knowledge.  Aristotle says so.

No, two out of three is not enough.

For a book to be helpful regarding D&D, the advice given has to be universal. Let's see, what does that mean? It means it can't be contingent on specific circumstances, individuals, or subjective perspectives. Instead, universal knowledge is applicable across all instances of a given phenomenon and is independent of particular contexts or personal beliefs.  In essence, the knowledge claims must possess characteristics that are genuinely "knowable."

If the advice being given is, "do what feels right," or "you do you," these things are utterly subjective in their perspective.  In no way whatsoever is this advice objectively comprehensible.  It doesn't even help me know what feels "right" for me, much less the next person.  Something that's universal is often characterised by its necessity.  You NEED this if you want to boil an egg.  It can't be done at all if you don't have this specific thing, namely an egg, the water it has to float in or the heat needed to boil that water.

For a book to be helpful regarding D&D, the advice can't make false promises.  It cannot give assurances that something unrealistic will happen.  We can't say, "this book will make you a better DM," because we don't know who's reading it.  When you pick up a book about chemistry, you don't find in the introduction, "This book will make you a better chemist."  In fact, absolutely nothing whatsoever is said about the reader, because the book is about chemistry, not the reader.  A book on how to play D&D should not start with the question, "Why Become a Dungeon Master?" ... because my choosing to become one or not is none of the book's fucking business.  The book should shut the fuck up about why I'm reading it and get about the business of telling me what I want to know.  A high school chemistry book might have an introduction about why chemistry is a great subject, but that part's written by some educator, not the chemist!  The chemist doesn't care.  The chemist is concerned with chemistry, the reason the book is being written.

There is too much time spent in these books that have nothing to do with the subject at hand ... which is, without a doubt, evidence that the book's goal is not to teach us how to be a dungeon master, but how to appreciate the author's suffering and how to feel worse about ourselves.

And finally, for a book to be helpful regarding D&D, though I've already said this, it must provide real-world actions that I, the reader, can take.  And I, the reader, must in turn take those actions, experimenting with them to see if they ARE universal and not, in fact, about blowing smoke up my ass.  These actions should be crystal clear.  "Stop playing 5th Edition," for example.  Buy 3rd edition books, 2nd edition, 1st edition, for these reasons.  And we, as the reader of this book, like we would if we were reading a chemistry book, knowing very little ourselves about chemistry, should trust that the damned author understands the material being presented.

When the D&D book says, a DM must have these specific, point-by-point expectations of the players, for these reasons and these reasons, and must enforce these expectations, in this way and in this way, then we as the people who wish to become better DMs have to embrace that concept and walk the path laid out for us.  We can't suddenly decide, "Wait, my friend's feelings were hurt," and then choose not to enforce our expectations for that reason ... and suppose at the same time that we're going to somehow understand what's being said and why.  The book can explain, "Sometimes you'll have to hurt your friend's feelings," and "In the end, you'll discover why your friend will be grateful for that" ... but if we won't actually go through the actions in order to get the wisdom, then we deserve to be ignorant.  Because this is how knowledge works.  Sometimes, what we suppose is not knowledge, and conversely, knowledge is often what we don't suppose.  Part of the reason for that is because, according to Aristotle again, your suppositions are "opinions" and NOT KNOWLEDGE.  The book is here to provide knowledge.  It shouldn't be here to assuage your suppositions ...

... particularly because your suppositions aren't universal.

Would it be easy to write a book like this?  Fuck no.  Is a chemistry book easy to write?  Is a children's book ...?  All books are hard.  If you, dear reader, have no idea how a book like this would sound, or read, or have to say to you, then you're obviously not the person to write such a book.  And if you choose to base the probability of such a book based on your suppositions about it's purported existence?

Then you're a bloody moron.

Warning Buoys

"I would actually agree with most of his points if you wanted to play an old-school, high-lethality, players vs. world, DM as an objective referee style dungeon crawl. However, most of them can be safely ignored if that's not the specific game you want to run."

Adam McCabe, from Reddit

Let me be forthright in writing that this is not an attack or a rant on McCabe himself or on the Reddit community.  That was addressed in the last post.  Rather, this post is intended to highlight only two words that appear in the above text: "safely ignored."

I have never thought that anyone who ignores any part of this blog does so at their peril.  I think that the entire blog may be ignored quite easily without any potential for injury, loss of life or even the burden of emotional pain.  It may be that a reader would miss an opportunity byignoring this blog, but so long as the reader continues to read something, I feel confident that any notion that appears on this blog will eventually make its way into the noggin of any self-educated person to the point where it cannot be ignored.

Nor have I considered that someone might give advice to someone not to read this blog by proclaiming that it is safe to do so.  I would expect someone to say, "Don't read this blog."  I would not expect someone to argue, "It is safe not to read this blog."

The explanation for this is not far afield.  We live in an advertising world that seeks to make the act of reading a specific, paid-for product so vital as to make the claim (in so many words), "That you may NOT safely ignore this!"  If you don't watch the news, if you don't take our word for it, if you do not attend our meetings, if you do not buy our product, then doom and gloom will certainly be the result.

From that, it is easy to designate everything else in the world that a person might read as safely ignored.  Along that vein, I can state with certainty that the writings of John Stuart Mill may be safely ignored.  Personally, Mill is one of my favorite writers, a genius of such remarkable insight that much of modern law, jurisprudence, politics and communication is based upon his writings . . . but since virtually no one I meet in the common world even knows who J.S. Mill is, apparently it is quite safe to ignore him.

It would be equally safe to ignore the play Coriolanus by Shakespeare.  It is never a play that people quote, it never comes up as required reading in a university course, it is never presented by anything but off-off-Broadway and, in fact, most people are not only utterly unaware of the existence of the play, they have no idea that Coriolanus was a man, a general, a remarkable politician who once saved Rome, etcetera, etcetera.  Plainly, having lived most of their lives without having any idea of this, the written play can be quite safely ignored.

In fact, we can make this argument over and over, right into perpetuity.  We need not confine ourselves to the limitations of artwork or intellectual discourse.  If we give it a little space, we may include entire nations in our list, bordered regions like Angola, Kiribati, even Ecuador.  Yes, there exists the possibility that we may meet someone from one of those places, or that someday we may be asked to do a job that will exploit the people or resources from such a place, but we are in a state of such enlightenment in the West that it is certain we can merely pass by such knowledge with a mere flip of the consciousness, obliterating them out of existence even as we shuffle money from there to here.

That is because knowledge, unlike a rapidly passing car and our spatial relationship to it, the curb and the speed with which we are crossing the street, very rarely has the opportunity to break bone, smash flesh or otherwise render us unconscious or dead.  True, the steady onslaught of a particular kind of ignorance, such at that which leads inevitably to war or the damnation of millions of souls through mass execution and death, will have consequences for those who are not wise enough to avoid the path of destruction.  But the connection between the warning of such events and the events themselves is so vague, so riddled with misinformation, so tremendously difficult to understand for the ordinary citizen who just wants to get their latte and start work without being yelled at by their boss, that it is easy to decide that such connections do not, in fact, exist, or that consequences are inevitable, or that misery is something that no amount of knowledge can sidestep. This is easier to believe, "safer" in many respects, since setting out each day with the awareness that it is up to all of us to acquire knowledge to make the world a better, more decent place to live, with less chance for misery in the long term, is a burden of proportions far too great for the mass of people to bear.

Let us remember what we all got into this life to obtain.  From the beginning, we were weaned onto a tit that promised to sustain us so long as we took the time to suck it ~ and from thence we have steadily moved from tit to tit, sure in the knowledge that there will always be another one there, presented right before our face by someone, with exactly the consistent sweetness that we were promised from the first time we pursed up our lips and got started.

And if that sweetness should fade, or come on too strong, or in any way deviate from our expectation, and if the presenter of the tit should hesitate, or waver, or in any way inconvenience us with its uncertainty, then it is only right that we should declare that situation reprehensible, intolerable, incredible in its moral perversity and deserving of the highest opprobrium that we can muster.

Anything else ~ and everything else ~ that does not fit the description of a tit can, without the need for evaluation, be safely ignored.

Crowdbouncing II

It would be best to think of this as more of the last post; I am still on about the same things.

In the Clay Shirky video I posted this morning, he talks about the manner in which wikipedia came into existence as an alternative to a web encyclopedia that was supposed to be called 'Newpedia' ... which would be a researched, fact-checked information tool that would have articles that were a trustworthy source of information.  And this, too, relates to the 'old way' of doing things.

The old way of thinking says that we absolutely should never, ever print anything that isn't corroborated and TRUE, because if we do people trying to base what they know on what we say will be misled and that will lead to disastrous consequences.  If you're led to think, for example, that swimming right after you eat won't lead to cramps, then you'll go swimming, get a cramp, and die.  For that reason, fact-checking is a critical, no-nonsense business and people who don't take fact-checking seriously should be held at the same level as murderers who have committed manslaughter.  You can believe that in the newsmedia where I worked, that was precisely the attitude.

The problem is, of course, that bad information still slipped through.  Swimming after eating doesn't produce cramps, except that a certain number of people are going to get cramps while swimming, and a certain number of those cramp-getting people are going to get those cramps right after eating, so it will seem like there is a connection there.  The same connection was made when people screamed that silicon implants caused breast cancer, because some women with implants got cancer right after getting the implants.  As it happened, the incidence of cancer didn't actually increase, but the invention of the implant allowed an association to be made that had never existed before (because there were no implants in existence), and people - news media included - rushed at that association at full muster.

The thing about news media, and I've mentioned this before, is that it relies on corroboration of facts by asking experts if something is true.  If you can find two experts (or three, or four, or however many you need depending on the splash the story will make) who both have credibility to agree on a story, then you have corroboration and you can print that story.  The problem is, if it happens that all your experts are screwed up because they all read a report ten years ago that has long since been proved false, but they still believe it, you will have no trouble corroborating your story no matter how many people you need.  And thus bullshit gets printed.

Now, the belief in getting things RIGHT before moving forward has permeated through the culture, to the point where if someone in the public eye gets something wrong, that someone deserves to be vilified for not first fact-checking whatever it was they said - with the addendum that if someone admits they don't know something that everyone is expected to know, we can vilify for that too.

Then along comes Wikipedia.  Wikipedia doesn't pre-suppose that the content will be right when it's published ... but instead relies on people fixing it after the fact.  It includes the simple rationale that sometimes we're wrong, and then we're educated, and then we're as right as the people who were right from the beginning.  It doesn't matter that we were wrong before - that's in the past and it's meaningless.  What matters is what we believe now.

This is one of the reasons I'm not worried about saying something today that disagrees with something I said three years ago.  So what?  We're all wrong about things.  There's a whole archive about getting lyrics wrong.  We go our little way, we think we're right - heck, we're even so damn sure we argue with other people and shout them down because damn it, we know.  Then we find out we didn't, and we're a bit sheeping, and we move on.

Having an opinion does not mean that for the rest of your life you must be shackled to that opinion.  That might perhaps be a reason why people are unwilling to change - because they'll still have to pay the price for being wrong anyway.  Right up to my mother's death she continued to believe that the basement window got busted because I was playing ball in the backyard - though I told her that I'd kicked in it when I was 15 because I was locked out and I needed the report that I'd left on my bed if I didn't want to fail 10th grade Biology.  Even though I told her, my mother had been telling herself the other story for so long that the next time that window came up, she still believed it was a baseball.  (It all seems so silly anyway.  So what if I had failed that class?  It's hard now even to imagine why I was so desperate, but I was 15 and full of hormones).

We think a group of thoughts, then the world changes, and we change, and we think different thoughts, and some of those different thoughts are going to be captured in blog posts we wrote years ago.  Who the hell knows what I will think ten years from now.  All I can be sure of is that I'll have reason to believe the things I'll believe then, that I don't believe now.

I tell the reader; it doesn't matter what you've done, or what you've failed at, or what you believed.  It matters what you do going forward.  Yes, you'll make mistakes; but the internet offers changes to those mistakes, just like wikipedia, and once the changes are made, it won't matter what the page used to say.

The only thing that will matter is what you believe now.

Knowledge Inside & Out

In answer to a statement yesterday that all knowledge does not come from 'outside,' let us have a quick look at intuition.  Mostly, let's just nail down a definition ... and for that, we have wikipedia.

Let us take note of a couple of sentences here.  First, that intuition is "the ability to acquire knowledge"; fair enough, things are looking good for Alexis to be wrong.  But let's look at the beginning of the second paragraph:  Intuition provides us with views, understandings, judgements, or beliefs that we cannot in every case empirically verify or rationally justify."

Oops.  Jeez, that doesn't work out very well.  That means that while I can have knowledge from intuition, I can't very well make that knowledge useful to anyone else if I can't empirically verify it.  That being the case, intuitive knowledge is pretty lousy if what we're attempting to do is establish a theory about how something works, so that it can be applied by other people.

So, I recant.  Not all knowledge is 'outward' based.  Only useful knowledge is.

Winston Rowntree was the first to tag the phrase for me, 'One True Human.'  I would have always defined this as primacy, the natural tendency in children to view themselves as more important than every other being ... but I like the Rowntree's phrase.  The appeal is the acutely description it offers.  Here's how Rowntree puts it:

"... you don't see other people as people - you see them as props, here to supplement the existence of the One True Human ... its so common there's even a word, 'sonder,' to describe the belated realization that other people exist in the same way you do.  Because they do."

Naturally, I had to go look up the definition of the word, which was not in my usual online dictionary.  I found it here.  In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows yet.  Which is to suggest that the recognition that others are just as miserable as you are is a sad thing ... whereas, of course, ignorant dismissal of other people in order to feed one's own self-gratifying ego must be a happy thing.

It is always presumed that I write this blog to feed my ego, which I think is quite funny.  It presumes that I have no other means to feed my ego, and that I am desperately applying my knowledge, my ability to write and my inner strength to this venue because it is all I have.  Uh, yeah.  I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone that were I willing to lie, and use other people, for the sole purpose of feeding my ego, I would do better to feast off even weaker people than the reader and get rich in the process.  I spent a summer once working with a fellow whose vocation was debt consolidation.  Here was a fellow who was rich, heartless, completely egotistical and absolutely content to continue in his lifestyle, which basically meant offering loans to people who had already proven by their six-figure debt status that they were unable to manage their money.

See, what you do is you open your doors, and some lower middle-class couple comes into your office owning a $450,000 property with $275,000 worth of equity that it's taken them 20 years of miserable, backbreaking labor to accumulate; sadly, they've also accumulated $135,000 in debt.  Now, Jim (his actual real name) smiles, promises that he'll get all that debt together for them in one place, with one payment, and once they make the payments, they'll be free and clear.  Then, 14 months later, when the nice couple helplessly default on their debts, because that is their nature, Jim cheerfully takes away their house. Because that is the deal these desperate people sign.

Now, if what any of us want to do is gratify our own egos, I suggest THAT job.

Okay, I'm way out in left field, let me work my way back.  If knowledge is going to have any value at all, it has to be knowledge that we are able to impart to other people.  And if we are going to impart that knowledge, then we have to recognize, FIRST, that the fact that we know a thing isn't enough.  That's where the one true human thing enters the picture.  Many people who are out there espousing their opinions on things, such as D&D, the so-called topic of this blog, are already of the opinion that since they know a particular thing, that ought to be enough for everyone.  Because we aren't really real, get it?

The purpose in writing about any of this, or in writing the book I'm writing, is not to prove I know a thing and fuck you very much.  It is to make the effort to cause you to know the thing, TOO.  And not simply by taking my word for it, but by encouraging you to step out of your usual world, investigate the thing itself and see if it is knowledge that also works for you.  If it turns out that the knowledge is only something that seems right to me, then the knowledge I have to tell about it shit.  It's not good enough.

I'm writing this, and my book, because I am not the one true human.  You are human too.  And you need a structure for you to work from.  Intuition is a really, really crappy structure.  What you need are solid boards, that you can plane yourself and shape yourself and use to make a strong, tactile world.  For that, you need knowledge that comes from 'outside.'

I hope we are at least clear that if my ego were my motivation, I wouldn't be feeding it here.

Ersatz Knowledge

Some weeks ago, a friend of mine commented that what he liked about this blog was that I tended to relate things that had nothing to do with D&D to roleplaying and D&D ... presumably about such things as history, psychology, politics, personal experiences and so on.  The reason I do this is simple - I don't believe that role-playing exists in a vacuum.  I believe that it adheres to the same principles that all interactive relationships between people do. In turn it can be understood just as anything else can be understood: by comparing it with our experience and our knowledge and deducing the answers to our problems logically. What is a world for?  Why make a world?  How do you control your players?  How do you create excitement?  And so on.  These are not only questions that apply to role-playing, but to every activity.

It is because of this belief that I think very little of unified theories where it comes to describing anything that is cross-cultural or highly reflective of individualism - such as art, say, or the correct means to action.  I am all for the idea of right and wrong.  I think, given a particular situation, and a particular point of view, and an eye to the greatest possible gain, that there is a right answer to be had.  The ideal breaks down, however, when someone starts to argue that in every situation, from every point of view, regardless of gain, such-and-such is the right answer.  It is the bottom level of thinking, the philosophy that sets out to conform everyone to principles that are convenient for some.  Statements such as, "Role-playing is only a game."  Or, "The purpose of role-playing is FUN."  Etc.

This is not to say that role-playing isn't a game, or that it isn't fun.  Of course those things are true.  And it is also true that things that aren't much fun rarely attract a lot of people (although, if there are people who are prepared to cut their arms with knives in order to feel something, we must assume there are people prepared to role-play in a manner that is most miserable).

My contention is the demand that it somehow be straight-jacketed to fit a previously formed conception of what it is supposed to be, as opposed to what it is.

I will confess at this point that the motivation for this post is from Ron Edwards' writings, and an exchange I had Friday with Dave Cesarano, who has been a regular contributor/reader to the blog lately.  Dave has been around for years and he and I get along; and I can't fault the desire to find some sort of logic in the fabric of role-playing ... which Edwards seems to offer.

I'm going to go way out on a limb here, just the sort of place where the limb can be sawn off and cackles of glee can be heard as it topples to the ground.  Mind you, I'm going to do this very gently, and I'm going to stand by my position.  The next few paragraphs are, however, not the subject of this post, and I am really not interested in debating them.  I only want the reader to have a clear picture of where my perspective lies.

There are a number of 'popular' theoreticians that have popped up on the last century which a very select portion of the population likes to look upon as 'geniuses and gods.'  The fact that these individuals are not embraced by the academic community is, for that portion, proof positive that these 'geniuses and gods' are truly as brilliant and far-sighted as they are judged to be.  My experience has been that whenever I encounter an individual with high regard for one of these 'geniuses and gods,' I am talking to someone who has not done the reading.  If they had, they would recognize that the academic world was right to boot these jackanapes out on their ears, in the cold where they belong.

And here is where the shouting begins, because I'm going to name names.  These are names that are, in effect, dirty words in academic circles, but like I say, "gods" to the common unread masses.  For 'unread,' the reader may understand that I mean, "does not read textbooks."  No doubt, any reader about to get affronted at the blasphemy that I'm about to espouse has read great heaps of really shitty books that serve to promote the religious worship of said names.

Carl Jung, for example, would be the first such individual of this variety that I encountered - and I did it at an age when I was too young to know how full of shit he was.  Oh, Jung is fascinating to read, it's an amusing set of passages about the so-called nature of man, blah blah blah, only none of it seems to be applicable, which is why the respectable psychology community has turned its back on the man.  Some readers here, as I say, worship Jung.  They're getting quite angry right now.  That is only because they refuse to accept that the book has been closed on him, and has been for some time.  Still, the books are out there, and as long as they are, someone who knows very little about psychology, and has a strong wish-fulfilment idealism about their own self-importance, will embrace Jung whole hog.  Another really fun character, in a sad way, is Wilhelm Reich, who started off being quite respectable before deciding to wander off into his own little fantasy world of UFOs, organomics, cloudbusting and so on.  The reader may believe me without question that this nonsense is believed steadfastly by a segment with all the fervor that defines the worship of Jesus, Mohammed and Siddhartha.

A real favorite among the role-playing crowd is Joseph Campbell ... and if I get any hate mail about this post, it is going to be in defense of him.  Even Wikipedia has no comment whatsoever about criticism of Campbell or the fact that the only credentials he possessed was a BA.  I took an education in Classical history, and a great part of that education included investigation into myth.  Campbell was never on the syllabus.  Why would he be?  He's only a respected scholar by those who are not in the field he purports to describe. Sigh.  But what the hell.  What do experts know?

Someone is going to write at me screaming about how he's respected by some Classical department somewhere, so let me just tell you to save your breath.  I've been in this discussion now for something like thirty years and I can tell you that people a lot smarter than you have failed to convince me - or any of the Classics scholars, writers or researchers I respect.  I am telling you now, Campbell, Reich and Jung are not the subject of this post any more than Jesus, Mohammed and Siddhartha - and the reader would get a lot farther with me arguing that the latter three were brilliant scholars.

This post is about the pattern produced in the writing of such people.  The pattern never includes motivations, ideals or associations outside the incredibly certain writings of the author.  Edwards, the inspirer of this post, doesn't appeal to the reader's knowledge of psychology; or the principles of contracts; or literary theory on narrativism or design theory on synthesis or simulationism.  That is because Edwards pulls his theory straight from himself - with the belief that being an 'expert,' all he needs is his own viewpoint. This is a pattern for this particular kind of theoretician ... and where it meets with the sensibilities of a particular audience, the theory scores.

Knowledge, however, is not self-derived.  It is outward derived.  That is why it is knowledge.  Being outward-derived, anyone might stumble across the same circumstances and, independently, produce the same logic and results.  In science, this happens again and again.

No one, however, who has not read Edwards is likely to reproduce Edwards given the available knowledge. When an argument about Edwards arises, the only source is Edwards ... so the argument remains, what did he mean?  We can, in fact, never know.  Worse, the words narrativist, gamist and simulationist have been hopelessly poisoned by Edwards' use of them, so that even if we were to speak about 'storytelling' in a role-playing game in terms of dramatic criticism (which has a longer, more contextual history), the water for many people in the game is hopelessly muddied.  Rather than trying to see the process clear and rationally, they are asking the question, "I'm sorry, is this simulationist or narrativist?"

Which is something akin to asking, "This play, is it meant to be a reflection of real events, or completely make-believe?"  That is a hard place to begin one's deconstruction.

Learning

I have to appreciate the description, "Half the time that guy's a genius" for its sheer lack of insight.  Naturally, the other part goes that the rest of the time the guy's out to lunch, he's a babbling fool, he's an old man yelling at kids on his lawn, he doesn't get it and so on.

Of course, the accurate phrasing of this particular statement is, "Half the time I agree with that guy, and half the time I don't."  Which is to say, when I agree, the guy's a genius; which makes me a genius, too, since obviously he's smart enough to know what I'm thinking.

Ah, how rarely the statement goes, "Half the time the things that guy says go right over my head.  I guess I'm not smart enough to know what he's trying to say."  I wouldn't say 'never' ... because where it comes to some expertise, people are willing to accept their ignorance.  When the doctor launches into a discussion of liver chemistry, and you're scratching your head between hearing the occasional familiar word, you don't say, "Wow, when he's not making sense, he's really an idiot."  No, you accept that you're out of your depth, that you don't know what he's on about, and that its a good time to ask questions before making a judgement.

I think it must be understood that if I'm a genius "half the time," I'm either not a genius at all, except when I happen to get lucky and agree with someone, or I'm a genius all the time, and they just don't fucking get it.  I think the likelihood is that I'm NOT a genius.  I'm well read.  I'm ambitious in my thought processes.  I'm experienced in the game, and in other things.  If I were a genius, however, I'd be able to change someone's mind about something.

I have been thinking at length lately about the process of changing minds, and particularly how the matter is taken up in the artistic design of literature and film.  I have very rarely experienced another person changing their mind about something they firmly believe.  I have done so myself, and often, but I'm always with me so I have the benefit of catching these moments when they happen.  Another person, on the other hand - particularly a person who has passed the age of 30 - is rare.  Oh, I don't mean changing their mind about having chicken vs. pork for dinner, or even changing their mind about dating a particular fellow or what movie to see ... though these things can be huge decisions for people.  No, I mean changing some belief - not even a core belief - so as to view the world differently.

I think writers must find themselves frustrated where it comes to changing a reader's mind, and so they are obsessed with it.  In A Clockwork Orange, the writer posits the effect of forcing the change of Alex's mind.  In Les Miserables, one of the central themes is Police Inspector Javert's bloody mindedness in refusing to change his perspective on Jean Valjean.  Frankenstein's crime is less that he made the monster, than that upon its creation, he grows sick and changes his mind about the whole idea of conception, stupidly driving the monster away and beginning a series of events that ends in tragedy.

My favorite in film must be that moment in The Graduate, where Ben is pounding on the glass, desperately, and Elaine stands amid her mother, father and fiancee; she knows what her mother and Ben have done, she's disgusted by it ... but as she looks at the angry faces around her, she has a moment of clarity; she realizes what the real crime is, and she turns and screams "BEN!"

Changing one's mind is empowering; it is clarifying; it is what has made the difference between comprehending the forces of the universe and blind, stupid ignorance.  The difference between being "well-read" and being "ignorant" is not in how many books one has read, but in how often one has consciously changed their mind about what they've heard.

My particular annoying capacity to bring argument after argument against people who post comments on this blog comes from my deliberate habit of seeking arguments ... and learning from them.  There isn't a day that goes by that I don't struggle to find someone or something that disgrees with me, or who has written or presented a position I'm not 100% clear about - and when faced with the argument, I am less concerned with deliberating on the genius of the presenter than I am on two things - what do I know about this, and am I wrong?

I want to be wrong.  I want to have this other person bring up the argument I've never considered or never heard, to hammer that argument home brutally and inconsiderately, and make me change my mind ... because the fallout from that will be that once I've heard the argument, and accepted it, I will beat the living shit out of everyone else with it.

After 40 years of pursuing this practice, since the age of 8, I have a lot of clubs now.  Probably more than the gentle reader has.  If that seems to make me a bit frenzied; if I seem extraordinarily self-involved; it is only because I am a frankenstein's monster of ideas and arguments, and I am less concerned with being rated on a scale of my intelligence than I am with being heard.  Often, this makes me critical, inconsiderate and comparatively lacking in empathy.

Am I a genius half the time?  Would it matter if it were 55% of the time or 63% of the time?  No.  All that matters is, am I right, right now.  And if I'm not right, spare me the assessments of my rightness ... explain, clearly, directly, and in a way that I will understand, just how wrong I am, so that tomorrow, when I wake up, I won't ever be wrong about that thing, in that way, again.

Mr. Sullivan's Cherry Tree

Yesterday, off-blog, I was asked with the best of intentions as to whether or not people weren't generally stupider today than they used to be.  This came out of a rather bloodless article from Andrew Sullivan (what else is new) which fails to produce any conclusion or indeed reason for being, except that apparently old Andy, when he hasn't anything to say, goofs together a bunch of quotes as though people out there are "arguing," "considering," "summarizing" or "pushing back" deep inside Andy's head.

If there is a depth that can be found sufficient to do more than wet the ankles.

I am not a fan of Mr. Sullivan.  My primary experience with him is his occasional appearances on Bill Maher's show, in which he's one of the "good guys" - because he's basically a liberal - but in which he manages to say absolute shit without beginning to comprehend that he's just said it.  He's a perfect example of the worst kind of liberal - heart in the right place, but lacking the least sense of practicality, reality or qualification.  His "fame" results from that peculiar recent phenomenon of a blogger who has grown popular from his ability to research and link, while simultaneously offending only the tiniest demographic of the population:  people who can read and who actually know anything.

Obviously, people who can't read aren't offended by him.  They just don't know he exists.

According to Andy's talking puppets, we somehow A) know the memory of a resident of Athens 3,000 years ago; B) are able to use the uselessness of I.Q. tests in reference to Siberian hunter-gatherers has allows us to draw a historical conclusion about all human beings from non-modern persons; C) miss the fact that Stephen Hawking would have died nearly at birth 200,000 years ago, along with the fact that we have so few examples of human genes from 200,000 years ago that it would not be expected to find a comparative 1 in a million persons with extraordinary intelligence; and D) know that extreme selection is a thing of the past because we can guess everything about human development a million years from now - i.e., that now that we've established the modern world, human beings will never face any crisis that will need extreme selection.

Now, I'm sure that these four quoted people are quite brilliant, and that reading their whole articles does indicate that they don't believe any of the shit I just said in the previous paragraph - although Mr. Crabtree ought to read something about Athens in 1,000 B.C., since the whole Mediterranean basin was in an extreme dark age following the decimation of the Minoan and Mycenean cultures, a situation that didn't change for the next two and a half centuries.  So, no bright, intellectually alive Greeks around at the time he quotes.  But I'm quibbling.

 What our friend Andy has done is carefully cherry-picked the articles to make ... well, not a point to be sure, but supposedly the "balanced" opinion of intellectuals today.  It's what people do when they don't end the data they've gathered with their own opinion ... which is not something ANY supposedly educated person would have done prior to about forty years ago.

This habit of the University Bubble, to present arguments and 'facts' without examination, so long as they are notated, is the first reason to think that intelligence is dead.  It doesn't matter what YOU think, or what YOU believe ... so long as you quote what others have squatted out in order to achieve their tenures, you get to be a 'scholar' too.

Funny that Descartes, Abelard, Erasmus, Luther, Francis Assisi and so on, the alive intellectuals of their day, don't spend all their time quoting and notating their sources.  For some incomprehensible reason, they simply wrote under the assumption that if you were bright enough and open minded enough to actually read the words, you could make up your own mind if they were true.

This is SO unlike the modern age, where you only know it's true if it has the right stamp of approval following the words - a university degree, a cultural notation, some kind of evidence that the speaker is rich or powerful or at the very least had a job once where he or she sat next to the rich and powerful.

Fuck the words.  The words they say don't matter.  Their resume is all that matters, so that once they begin to write total shit on the page, like our friend Andy does with adroit fluidity, it doesn't matter because, for shit sakes, the man has been on television sitting right next to Noam Chomsky.

That proves he must be right, doesn't it?

I ask you - are we getting dumber ... or is it just that reading things with the intention of piecing out the truth ourselves is too much work?  Perhaps it's so much simpler to look at the brand and feel the joy of having it stamped on our ass.

Making Shit Up

I wanted to get in a couple of last stabs at the election, today and tomorrow, whether or not anyone thinks this has something to do with D&D or not.  I am of the opinion that, fundamentally, EVERYTHING has something to do with D&D ... and I've been trying to prove that for years now with my technology/civilization posts.  Knowledge is power.  The more you know, generally, the better a DM you can be.  No matter what you happen to study, you will bring that information to the game, and the game will be better.

With that in mind, I'd like to offer this video of Malcolm Gladwell speaking at PopTechn 2004.  I have not embedded it because it is on vimeo, and not youtube.  If you've seen much of Gladwell, these themes will be familiar to you; if you have never seen Gladwell, and you have brain - get ready for a ride.

In it, he describes several situations where first impressions, and the human effort to explain or describe their first impressions, produce stupidity.  Gladwell would never use a word like that; it is my word, because I don't have to hedge or placate my audience.  Gladwell would likely argue that you can't call ordinary human behavior 'stupid' when it is typical of everyone.  I would argue that stupidity is as stupidity does ... Forrest was not wrong in that.

By and large it helps explain why vast numbers of Americans will vote for Romney tomorrow although they will not be able to express a reason why, or even think to do so.  Most democrats I have spoken to in the country past the border say repeatedly, "I don't know how anyone can vote for Romney!"  It is because most people don't really care about either of the stooges running, and have chosen for reasons they cannot explain to vote for the white guy, or the old guy, or the black guy, or the one that seems less threatening, or less inhibited, or less likely to take money from our pockets, or for the most part taller, tougher, nicer or possessed of the largest forehead.  In other words, for no reason whatsoever that they can name.

It's biological.  It helps if you can comprehend that.

For the same reason, most of the dialogue surrounding D&D, or any other question, is equally approached from the same perspective that Malcolm in the video describes - that is, from a sense that said speaker/writer cannot explain why they like this as opposed to that.  Even if they attempt to do so, the fact is they do not possess the vocabulary, reasoning or experience to make up their mind properly ... which does not stop them from making up their mind.  They are adults, they are possessed of a certain number of years which gives them a right to speak what they believe, regardless of their comprehension of the subject, and they have the constitution, their friends and all the gods in heaven to quote if you dare tell them they cannot do so.  Give opinions they will, and said opinions will be mixed with a wide variety of implausible bullshit.  Such is life.  Such is the reason why the election is so very very close, despite the apparent stupidity of one candidate and the apparent dithering of the other.

Such is the reason why OD&D, White Wolf, 4th Edition, Paizo and all the rest jostle and jumble among the tens of thousands of crying and decrying masses ... because the right and wrong decision in the mess has not one thing to do with the actual value of this versus that, and everything to do with arguments made from needing to say something, even if the wrong thing, then shouting louder than the opponent in order to not sound stupid or insincere.

Insincerity, uncertainty and ignorance are greater sin that being wrong.  Let me say that again.  It is better to be WRONG than to sound like I don't believe in something; or to sound like I am not sure about something; or to admit that I don't know something.  Thus, the importance of making shit up.

I have always found this whole human nature to be fascinating.  See, it is biology, but it is biology in the sense that if you KNOW something about the subject at hand, you don't have to make shit up.  And that is the long term success story that is the human race ... the consistent effort to find answers so that shit ceases to be the go-to option.

Of course, not everyone is on board with this concept yet.  Just as not everyone who finished this post bothered to watch the Gladwell video.  Learning is inconvenient, and takes time and patience.

Making shit up takes a couple of seconds.

Vizzini Before He Croaks

Vizzini:  You only think I guessed wrong!  That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!

I am here to say, I do not have an answer to the question of how to be a better DM.  I don't.  I can give suggestions on what to do here or there, how to present a given adventure, how to present yourself as a DM, how to care a little more, how to control your party a little better, why you should take it seriously and what you should expect back from your players.  But all this is fluff.  It is filler.  It is cosmetic, and while it will help with momentary problems in your sessions, it won't make you a better DM if you are not already acceptable.  This is why I said in the previous post on this subject that I'm sitting in the back feeling the bile rise in my throat.  I am watching the professor write notes on the blackboard, I am watching the other students diligently copying the notes, I am watching everyone feel they are growing and changing as people, and I am not seeing anything grow or change.  I'm seeing 30 years of this bullshit - don't believe for a second that it has started with the internet - and after all this time I am hearing and seeing the same repeated statements all over again.  Dance like this, sing like this, wave your arms like this and everything will be wonderful.

Bleh.

Allow me to leap to a something tawdry that some of us might know from experience.  My first wife Michelle, who rests in peace, lived and breathed music.  Her father had been a music teacher in a high school and Michelle had embraced the lifestyle as early as it is possible.  Training in french horn and flute, she began in marching bands - something she adored - at the age of eleven, and continued touring and marching throughout her teens.  Every year she marched in a little event around here we call the Calgary Stampede, which means that I was probably in the crowd one July when my wife of ten years later went marching by.  Life is funny.

When she entered university it was to obtain a music degree, which she pursued with vigor, particularly theory and composition, while continuing to play in orchestras and in her own band.  She was a punk rocker in leather mini-skirt and torn top lo about 1982, and I am sorry to say I did not know her in that period.  Suffice to say she was eclectic, driven, highly intellectual and wonderfully confrontational.  I have never enjoyed arguments as much as I did with her.

Part of her training and drive involved spending much of her existence incorporating Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians into her knowledge base.  Let me put that better: she effectively reduced the books into a rich paste which she was then able to introveneously inject directly into her brain.  If you have not opened these books, let me explain that this is not light reading.  This is extraordinarily heavy material.  It is the bible of music.  And of course Michelle owned a copy.

It will only take 15 or 20 years before you're
thoroughly familiar with this.

I very much respected my wife's knowledge of music, and I learned a very great deal about it.  But that isn't important right now.  What is important is the story that goes along with all this knowledge.

It happened one Christmas several years after our marriage that Michelle received a gift from my parents: a coffee table book gotten from the local big box store about ... yes, embarrassingly, music.  In nice big lettering with lots of pictures.  Michelle was polite about it, but that book and my parent's stupidity became a topic of conversation very often in the years afterwards, for which I cannot blame her.  They knew perfectly well the level of her investment and knowledge, but that didn't matter in the fluffy world of their middle-class sensibilities.  "She likes music," they thought to themselves.  "Let's get her a book about music."

What's really baffling about it is my father, who is an engineer and rockhound, acquired at a very early age Dana's manual of mineralogy, which also is not a light book.  If I had bought my father for Christmas a Big Book of Rocks, he would not have been amused and I doubt very much he would have been polite at all.  He should have known better.

My point to all this story is that there comes a time when a little bit of knowledge just isn't enough to make reading worthwhile.  After thirty-two years of playing and reading and studying and building my world and securing players and changing to suit players and re-evaluating my goals and rifting through unbelievable tons of written crappy material about RPG's (which, I am not sorry to say, the authors of which did not impress their names upon my brain), I am hopelessly and disasterously past the Big Book of GM Challenge.  It's crap from end to end not because it's wrong, but because it isn't new.  It is flabbergastingly difficult to explain to people that while the Big Book is pretty and full of accurate little facts, it is full of accurate little facts I acquired some twenty years ago and which no longer hold the magnificent quality of original thought they did when I was very young.  It is therefore useless to me.  It gives me nothing.  It is dead weight.

This was my point with the goldfish essay a couple of weeks ago.  The massive horde of bloggers about are still wanking themselves with this material, even while claiming they've played the game for twenty years.  Really?  Twenty years and this isn't shit you know already?  You know, it only takes 8 years to become enough of a doctor that you can split my chest and operate on my heart.  And after 20 years, you're just now learning to stand up and use your whole body to conduct a session?  Holy crap.

I am here, waiting for someone to tell me something I don't know.  I'm patient.  And while Vizzini laughs and tells me what's what and how much of a fool I am, I'm perfectly aware of the location of the iocane powder and that he's going to tip over any moment.  Change is coming.  When it does, I'll be happy about it.

But O gentle reader, who's content with the way things are ...

You're already dead.

Long Times

In a long conversation with a horse trainer earlier in the week, she happened to mention something which got stuck in me and which manifested as a blog post in my head at 4:10 this morning, when I woke because it was too hot.  Between getting a drink, spending a penny, turning on the fan and dropping off back to sleep, I thought of what the trainer had said.

If you want to train the animal to do something, you must repeat the lesson 700 times.  That is 700 responses, 700 times mounting the horse, 700 turns, 700 jumps and so on, if you want to consider the horse 'trained.'  With some horses, it takes more than that - and if you're thinking about taking the horse into competition, it is much, much more than that.

While this all applies to horses, there is a parallel in human development to be found in how a baby increases its motor development, its use of language, it's cognitive and social interactions and so on.  If we replace the adage of 700 times with 700 days, we can see how a baby that learns to walk at 11 months becomes much more proficient by 33 months - by that point moving up stairs at one-foot per step.  An infant that speaks mostly unintelligible words at 18 months is filled with questions and speaking in full sentences at 3 and a half.  I don't mean to suggest the process of development or learning is strict or measured by anything as generalized as the number 700.  I enter such examples here only to suggest that great increase of ability takes a great deal of time, and that if enough time is spent the individual does more than master the skill, the individual increases the limit of what can be mastered.

Thus, if we apply it to something closer to home, the playing of roleplaying games, and we substitute a "day" with the "session" experience of playing the game, we can make a rough judgment of how much effort it takes to become experienced at D&D.  If we can vaguely agree on a few ad hoc guesses about how much most people would play the game from the age of 15 on (and of course we can't hope to agree, but let's just forget that), I propose that 40 games a year could reasonably be the standard.  I probably played more than that when I was 16 or 17, but generally there are other events in life that ruin this or that weekend for play.  Still, the gentle reader can always impose the average number of games which they themselves seems more accurate and refigure my math at will.  For the present we will suppose 40 games.

This would suggest that it would take 17 and a half years to reach the 700 mark, or the point where the player felt immensely comfortable with the game's concept and very likely restrained by the original framework.  If the individual began playing at the age of 15, this would now make the individual in their early 30s, and inclined to recreate or restructure the game to suit their personal whims.  I would propose that a person who had sat at the table 700 times would feel compelled to do so, just as a 3-year-old becomes bored with climbing stairs by stepping with the one foot and then the other on the same stair before continuing.  The child learns to take the stairs one foot at a time because the child grows weary with the time it takes to do it in the slower, more infantile manner.

Yet we are only speaking of playing the game.  It is probable that by age 30 only half the incidents of involvement with the game's play were as a DM ... or less, depending on the player's personal interest in ejudication.  The occasional DM who spends more than half their experience DMing is, I think, losing out on the perspective of the player and will certainly be deficient in some fashion for having not played enough.  The desireable quality would be for the DM to have both 700 sessions as a player and 700 sessions as a DM under his or her belt, thus having the experience and the benefit of both positions at the table.  This obviously increases the total time necessary, so that we are now speaking of 35 years playing the game slighly more than 3 weekends in 4.  That would make the player older than I am, or 50 years old if they started playing at age 15.

This period is shortened if you find yourself playing twice or three times as week, as sometimes I did when I was in university; but overall, the length of time will be considerable, simply because you cannot play as often as you wish.  Moreover, you have to consider that every game you've ever played that ended in a disaster taught the wrong things with regards to proper game play ... so those are sessions that must be discounted.

Things are mitigated somewhat in that much of the game can be played - particularly by DMs - when no one else is present.  I am certain I am not alone in having played out hundreds of combats as a solo player, sometimes out of fascination for the game and sometimes to explore a new idea or system I wanted to implement.  Quite a few of us I reckon have played with the self-generating dungeon at the back of the DM's Guide, and have spent much time working out our own, in the hopes that we could have a feeling for the game while solo.  I don't read much about this sort of thing on blogs, no doubt because of the mastubatory feel of the subject and the general unwillingness of players to admit the obsession required to sit in a room and play the game by themselves.  But even so, this is a kind of experience, as it contributes to the familiarity of the weapons, the combat system, memorization of the tables, the variety of equipment a player carries and so on.

If we then consider also the hours spent drawing maps and working out puzzles, filling imaginary rooms and sketching out new game features such as monsters or spells, this too is experience of a kind.  We can break up all the time that is spent doing such things in session-length chunks and apply that - after a fashion - to our overall experience with the game.

Neither of these last two forms of game play are, however, representational of a DM's ability to interact with players, or a player's ability to work with other players or outwit a DM.  These interactional qualities of the game cannot be obtained with solo play or frittering around in one's room with tables and maps.  Practice is practice, but it isn't the World Series.

What that leaves are a vast number of players and DMs who, having begun playing the game perhaps five or ten years ago, and having little or no experience with a variety of systems because of their age and comparable experience, haven't the chops to make distinctive statements about the play of the game.  Not that this will keep the comparable noobs silent, since anyone can run a blog and the writer's experience with the game is - by the community's standards - never called into question.  We are all equal here unless one of us wishes to recuse his or herself by confessing refreshingly that he or she has only played a few times, or has never DM'd a continuous campaign.  Otherwise, we are to presume that every drop of rain that falls cometh from the blackest cloud.

I do not write this to pick out any individual, but rather to encourage each speaker to assess their own level of expertise, and to judge for themselves if they are in a position to know of what they speak due to the years put towards their knowledge, or if they are really only armchair propositioners with more years of solo play and game design than hardbitten experience.  No person can make any accusation to the contrary, and being online no person can know for certain any protestation of one's supposed experience.

I could be a paper tiger, for all anyone online knows.  And I encourage others to view me and what I say with head askew, inquiring of themselves, "Does he really know or is he just very clever?"  And then I encourage the reader to consider how they themselves are viewed by others, and if they themselves are really the shit they claim to be, or if they wouldn't do with a little more game play before speaking further on the matter.

Books

For a long time I had wanted to give books as treasure, but the foremost problem that occurs is the title and subject matter of the book.  There's no material out there to give you a list of books to bestow upon your players, or even how such a list might be constructed.

In my 57-year-old encyclopedia the index provides a bibliography of books used to create the Encyclopedia.  So I decided to count them, and list those counts here, along with the categories as identified (and slightly modified for D&D) by the encyclopedia.  The principle modifications are the removal of materials too modern for the game (my world, remember, takes place in 1650), and the reinterpretation of some subjects as magic.

Note that the number does not necessarily describe the importance of the topic, only the number of books that one might find regarding that subject.  The encyclopedia is Anglocentric and highly Christian, but you and I should be able to ignore those faults.

This will no doubt annoy the hell out of the anti-Simulationist crowd, but I find it fascinating.

BOOK LIST

I. Philosophy (300)
   A. Collections of Philosophical Writings (6)
   B. Introductions to Philosophy (17)
   C. Systematic Philosophy (114)
      1. Logic (11)
      2. Theory of Knowledge (5)
      3. Metaphysics (11)
      4. Cosmology (5)
      5. Mind & Body (4)
      6. Ethics (53)
         a) Introductions (10)
         b) Problems of Daily Living (10)
         c) Theories and Philosophies of Ethics (15)
         d) State Ethics (6)
         e) Peace and War (12)
      7. Aesthetics (25)
   D. History and Systems (138)
      1. General Histories (10)
      2. Oriental Philosophy (8)
         a) General Works (2)
         b) Confucius (the Analects) (3)
         c) Islam (1)
         d) Mencius and Laotse (1)
         e) Radhakrishnan (1)
      3. Greek Philosophy (39)
         a) General Works (14)
         b) Aristotle (9)
         c) Socrates and Plato (15)
            i. Socrates (Socratic Dialogues) (1)
            ii. Plato (Dialogues, the Republic) (5)
            iii. Works and Commentary (9)
         d) Demosthenes (1)
      4. Hellenistic, Roman and Alexandrian Philosophy (10)
         a) General Works (2)
         b) Epicurus, Epictetus and Lucretius (1)
         c) Marcus Aurelius (Meditations) (2)
         d) Philo (2)
         e) Plotinus (1)
         f) Proclus (1)
         g) Seneca (1)
      5. Early Christian and Medieval Philosophy (15)
         a) General Works (3)
         b) St. Thomas Aquinas (5)
         c) St. Augustine (City of God) (4)
         d) Boethius (1)
         e) St. Bonaventure (1)
         f) William of Ockham (1)
      6. Modern Philosophy of the Western World (56)
         a) General Works (23)
         b) Philosophical Systems (26)
         c) Philosophers (7)
            i. Francis Bacon (Advancement of Learning) (3)
            ii. Rene Descartes (A Discourse on Method) (4)
   E. Occultism (25)

II. Religion (566)
   A. Philosophy of Religion (16)
   B. Religion and Science (7)
   C. God (14)
   D. The Bible (136)
      1. General Works (14)
      2. Versions of the Bible (20)
         a) Whole Bible (11)
         b) Old Testament Only (3)
         c) New Testament Only (6)
      3. Commentaries (25)
      4. Biblical History and Geography (14)
      5. Biographies (27)
         a) Persons of the Bible (8)
         b) Lives of Christ (19)
      6. Lessons of the Old Testament (13)
      7. Lessons of the New Testament (20)
      8. Apocrypha (3)
   E. Miracles (1)
   F. Christian Beliefs (19)
   G. Immortality (7)
   H. Christian Morals and Personal Religion (12)
   I. Spiritual Life (19)
      1. Devotional Books (12)
      2. Prayer (7)
   J. Religion in Action (59)
      1. Public Worship and Liturgy (16)
      2. Hymnology (14)
      3. Pastoral Work (19)
      4. Sermons (10)
   K. Temple and Temple Society (30)
   L. Missions and Missionaries (22)
   M. Religious Art and Literature (3)
   N. Religious Education (33)
   O. History of Religion (50)
   P. Christian Churches and Sects (53)
      1. General Works (22)
      2. Roman Catholicism (24)
      3. Anglicanism (3)
      4. Lutheranism (1)
      5. Presbyterism (3)
   Q. Comparative Religion (18)
   R. Mythology and Primitive Religion (25)
      1. General Works (13)
      2. Greek and Roman Mythology (10)
      3. Norse Mythology (2)
   S. Buddhism and Hinduism (8)
   T. Zoroastrianism (2)
   U. Judaism (18)
   V. Islam (6)
   W. Religions of Asia (8)

III. History (683)
   A. The Study of History and Current Events (13)
   B. World Histories (11)
   C. International Relations and Events (21)
   D. The Ancient World (80)
      1. Early Man (14)
      2. General Ancient History ( 8)
      3. Greece (24)
         a) Contemporary Accounts (6)
         b) Later Works (18)
      4. Rome (17)
         a) Contemporary Accounts (6)
         b) Later Works (11)
      5. Egypt (7)
      6. Other Regions (10)
   E. General European History (320)
      1. General Works (3)
      2. Middle Ages (54)
         a) Contemporary Accounts (17)
         b) Later Works (37)
      3. Renaissance (11)
      4. Reformation (9)
      5. Modern Europe of the 17th Century (17)
      6. England (34)
         a) Personal Histories (14)
         b) General Works (20)
      7. Scotland, Ireland, Wales (17)
      8. France (24)
      9. Germany (16)
      10. The Low Countries (19)
      11. The Balkans (26)
      12. The Hapsburgs (4)
      13. Poland (13)
      14. Hungary (10)
      15. Italy (22)
      16. Scandinavia, Finland and Iceland (24)
      17. Spain and Portugal (17)
   F. Russia (28)
   G. The Near East (30)
   H. Africa (19)
   I. Asia and the Pacific (79)
      1. General Works (12)
      2. China (24)
      3. Japan (13)
      4. Korea (1)
      5. India (19)
      6. Australia and New Zealand (10)
   I. New World Regions and Nations (82)
      1. General Works (16)
      2. Middle America and the West Indies (28)
      3. South America (15)
      4. French Canada (8)
      5. Colonial New England, New Holland, Virginia and the Carolinas (15)

IV. Geography (205)
   A. Atlases (19)
   B. A World View (17)
   C. General Works (11)
   D. Regional Geography (91)
      1. Colonial North America (21)
      2. The British Isles (9)
      3. Europe and Russia (20)
      4. Africa (5)
      5. Latin America (13)
      6. Asia and the Pacific (23)
   E. Economic Geography (8)
   F. Geopolitics (5)
   G. Explorers and Exploration (37)
   H. Travel (10)
   I. Cartography (7)

V. Linguistics (19)

VI. Literature (601)
   A. General Literature (100)
      1. History and Criticism (33)
      2. Anthologies and Indexes (57)
         a) Poetry (21)
         b) Light Verse and Humour (5)
         c) Prose and Poetry (9)
         d) Prose (11)
         e) Drama (11)
   B. Classical Literature (86)
      1. Classical Stories and Fables (5)
      2. Classical Poetry (6)
      3. Classical Drama (12)
      4. General Criticism of Classical Literature (5)
      5. History and Criticism of Classical Greek Literature (15)
      6. History and Criticism of Classical Latin Literature (10)
      7. Individual Classical Authors (33)
         a) General Works (2)
         b) Homer (The Iliad, the Odyssey) (5)
         c) Sappho (2)
         d) Aeschylus (2)
         e) Sophocles (4)
         f) Euripides (2)
         g) Aristophanes (2)
         h) Plutarch (1)
         i) Lucretius (1)
         j) Cicero (Offices) (2)
         k) Catullus (2)
         l) Horace (2)
         m) Vergil (The Aeneid, The Georgics) (4)
         n) Ovid (2)
   C. Medieval Literature (5)
   D. English Literature (164)
      1. Anthologies of Poetry and Prose (32)
      2. History of English Literature (34)
         a) General Accounts (18)
         b) The Early Period (3)
         c) Sixteenth Century (9)
         d) Seventeenth Century (4)
      3. English Poetry (19)
         a) General Criticism (5)
         b) Beowulf (2)
         c) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers the Ploughman (1)
         d) Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) (4)
         e) Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queen) (2)
         f) John Donne (1)
         g) John Milton (4)
      4. English Fiction (17)
         a) General Criticism (15)
         b) Thomas Malory (Le Morte d’Arthur) (1)
         c) John Lyly (Euphues; the Anatomy of Wit; Euphues and His England) (1)
      5. English Drama (36)
         a) General Criticism (20)
         b) Pre-Elizabethan Drama (4)
         c) Everyman (1)
         d) Christopher Marlowe (1)
         e) William Shakespeare (5)
         f) Tudor Plays (2)
         g) Benjamin Jonson (1)
         h) Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (1)
         i) John Webster and John Ford (1)
      6. Other English Prose (Essays, Journals and Stories) (26)
   E. French Literature (26)
      1. History of French Literature (12)
         a) General Accounts (9)
         b) The Early Period (1)
         c) Renaissance Period (2)
      2. French Prose (4)
         a) General Works (1)
         b) Pierre Abelard and Heloise (Letters) (1)
         c) Michel de Montaigne (Essays) (1)
         d) Francois Rabelais (1)
      3. French Poetry (9)
         a) General Works (6)
         b) The Song of Roland (1)
         c) Francois Villon (2)
      4. French Drama (1)
   F. German Literature (20)
      1. History of German Literature (16)
      2. German Poetry (4)
         a) General Works (3)
         b) The Nibelungenlied (1)
   G. Italian Literature (32) 
      1. History of Italian Literature (12)
          a) General Accounts (8)
          b) Renaissance Period (4)
      2. Italian Poetry (14)
         a) General Works (5)
         b) Dante Gabriel Rossetti (The Divine Comedy) (6)
         c) Petrarch (Sonnets) (1)
         d) Lodovico Ariosto (Orlando Furioso) (1)
         e) Torquato Tasso (Jerusalem Delivered) (1)
      3. Italian Prose (5)
         a) General Works (1)
         b) Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron) (1)
         c) Baldassare Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier) (1)
         d) Niccolo Machiavelli (The Prince) (1)
         e) Benvenuto Cellini (1)
      4. Italian Drama (3)
   G. Hispanic Literature (46)
      1. History of Spanish Literature (12)
      2. Spanish Poetry (8)
         a) General Works (5)
         b) Lay of the Cid (2)
         c) Alonso de Ercilla (The Araucaniad) (1)
      3. Spanish Prose (6)
         a) General Works (1)
         b) Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote) (4)
         c) Lazarillo de Tormes (1)
      4. History of Latin American Literature (5)
      5. Latin American Poetry (4)
      6. Latin American Prose (2)
      7. Portuguese Literature (5)
         a) General Works (4)
         b) Luiz vaz de Coes (1)
      8. Hispanic Drama (4)
   H. Flemish and Dutch Literature (6)
   I. Scandinavian Literature (23)
      1. History of Scandinavian Literature (12)
      2. Scandinavian Poetry (8)
         a) General Works (5)
         b) Edda and Saga (1)
         c) Norse and Icelandic Sagas (2)
      3. Danish Prose (1)
      4. Norwegian Prose (1)
      5. Swedish Prose (1)
   J. Russian Literature (23)
      1. History of Russian Literature (12)
      2. Russian Prose (9)
      3. Russian Poetry (1)
      4. Russian Drama (1)
   K. Eastern European Literature (17)
      1. History of Eastern European Literature (9)
      2. Prose of Eastern Europe (5)
         a) General Works (4)
         b) The Kalevala (1)
      3. Poetry of Eastern Europe (3)
         a) General Works (2)
         b) The Diana (1)
   L. Oriental Literature (48)
      1. History of Oriental Literature (8)
      2. Chinese Prose (6)
         a) General Works (5)
         b) Wu Ch’eng-en (The Adventures of Monkey) (1)
      3. Chinese Poetry (9)
         a) General Works (8)
         b) Shih Ching (The Book of Songs) (1)
      4. Chinese Drama (2)
      5. Japanese Literature (4)
         a) General Works (3)
         b) Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genji) (1)
      6. Egyptian Literature (5)
      7. Indian Literature (6)
         a) General Works (5)
         b) Hindu Scriptures (1)
      8. Persian and Arabic Literature (8)
         a) General Works (6)
         b) Firdausi (1)
         c) Omar Khayyam (1)
   M. Jewish Literature (5)

VII. The Arts (738)
   A. General Art (79)
      1. Theory and Appreciation (16)
      2. Art History (44)
      3. Primitive Art (7)
      4. Modern Art (12)
   B. Archaeology (69)
      1. General and Introductory (8)
      2. Old and New Stone Age (4)
      3. Asia Minor and the Bible Lands (12)
      4. Egypt (7)
      5. Crete and Greece (10)
      6. Rome (6)
      7. Britain (5)
      8. Pre-Columbian America (17)
   C. Architecture (118)
      1. Theory and Aesthetics (18)
      2. History of Architecture (32)
      3. Ecclesiastical Architecture (13)
      4. Domestic Architecture (19)
      5. Commercial Architecture (23)
      6. City Planning and Housing (13)
   D. Painting (91)
      1. Appreciation (11)
      2. History of Painting (31)
      3. Collective Studies of Artists (19)
      4. Techniques (30)
   E. Sculpture (32)
      1. Theory and Appreciation (26)
      2. Techniques (6)
   F. Design and the Applied Arts (21)
      1. General Design (7)
      2. Fashion (5)
      3. Interior Design (9)
   G. Prints and Illustrations (22)
   H. Minor Arts and Crafts (32)
      1. General Works (6)
      2. Ivory and Jade (1)
      3. Pottery and Porcelain (5)
      4. Glass (2)
      5. Metal Plate (2)
      6. Lapidary and Jewelry (1)
      7. Rugs and Carpets (2)
      8. Tapestries (2)
      9. Antiques (8)
      10. Furniture (3)
   I. Arts and Crafts Techniques (14)
   J. Music (143)
      1. General Introduction (12)
      2. Criticism and Effects (19)
      3. History of Music (29)
      4. Modern Music (7)
      5. Orchestral Instruments and Music (17)
      6. Vocal Music (4)
      7. Opera (20)
      8. Folk Music (10)
      9. Children and Music (6)
      10. Collective Biographies (19)
   K. The Dance (11)
      1. General and Historical (6)
      2. Modern Dance (5)
   L. Theatre (106)
      1. General Works (13)
      2. History of Theatre (26)
      3. Theatre Management, Producing and Directing (17)
      4. Staging, Scenery and Lighting (16)
      5. Acting (10)
      6. Make-up and Costume (9)
      7. Mistrels, Circus and Vaudeville (8)
      8. Masks and Marionettes (7)

VIII. Sociology (112)
   A. General History of Sociology (17)
   B. Anthropology (20)
   C. Population and Migration (9)
   D. Urban Society (14)
   E. Rural Society (11)
   F. The Family (8)
   G. Social Problems (9)
   H. Criminology (16)
   I. Housing (8)

IX. Political Science and Government (72)
   A. Political Theory (37)
   B. Comparative Government (20)
   C. International Relations (15)

X. Economics and Business (270)
   A. General Principles and Theory (20)
   B. International Trade, Exchange and Finance (19)
   C. Economic Organization and the State (37)
      1. Production Organization (10)
      2. Corporate Finance (11)
      3. Government Regulation (9)
      4. Agricultural Economics (7)
   D. Public Finance (21)
   E. Comparative Economic Systems (9)
   F. Transportation (26)
   G. Marketing (7)
      1. Wholesaling (2)
      2. Retailing (5)
   H. Guild Management and Methods (77)
      1. Organization (12)
      2. Member Selection (33)
      3. Quality Control (4)
      4. Building Management (7)
      5. Correspondence (11)
      6. Credit (7)
      7. Decision Making (3)
   I. Bookkeeping, Accounting and Auditing (13)
   J. Labor (23)
   K. Insurance (14)
   L. Real Estate (9)
   M. Personal Budget, Finance and Investment (13)
   N. Consumer Guidance (3)

XI. Education (118)
   A. History of Education (14)
   B. Education Society (7)
   C. Principles and Philosophy (22)
   D. Child Tutoring (19)
   E. College and University Education (16)
   F. Education Administration (10)
   G. Libraries (17)
   H. How to Read and Study (20)

XII. Communications (127)
   A. Writing and Speaking (40)
   B. General Printing (50)
      1. General Works (4)
      2. History of Printing (11)
      3. Printing Practice (9)
      4. Methods of Printing (7)
      5. Printing Fonts (10)
      6. Master Printers (6)
      7. Papermaking and Bookbinding (3)
   C. Book Publishing (37)
      1. General Works (6)
      2. History and Reminiscences (10)
      3. Book Collecting (4)
      4. Book Production (12)
      5. Distribution (5)

XIII. General Science (69)
   A. History of Science (14)
   B. Achievements of Science (13)
   C. Scientific Principles (13)
   D. Scientific Experiments (6)
   E. Science and Man (23)

XIV. Mathematics (100)
   A. Histories of Mathematics (8)
   B. Introductory Books (12)
   C. Introductions to Advanced Mathematics (13)
   D. Branches and Methods (33)
      1. Arithmetic (2)
      2. Plane Geometry (8)
      3. Solid Geometry (2)
      4. Analytic Geometry (4)
      5. Higher Geometry (4)
      6. Algebra (6)
      7. The Slide Rule (3)
      8. Trigonometry (4)
   E. Mathematical Recreations (9)
   F. Applied Mathematics (25)
      1. Handbooks (1)
      2. Rapid Methods (2)
      3. Business and Finance (5)
      4. Aviation (3)
      5. Electrical Work (2)
      6. Mechanical Work (5)
      7. Plumbing and Heating (1)
      8. Engineering (6)

XV. Astronomy (65)
   A. General Introductions (13)
   B. Star-Gazing (13)
   C. Telescopes (6)
   D. General Works (8)
   E. The Sun (5)
   F. The Moon (1)
   G. Comets and Meteors (4)
   H. The Planets (3)
   I. The Stars (6)
   J. The Universe (6)

XVI. Physics and Magic (125)
   A. General Introductions (10)
   B. Elementary Books (14)
   C. Classical Mechanics (5)
   D. Modern Physics (18)
   E. Sound (8)
   F. Heat (7)
   G. Electricity (13)
   H. Light (4)
   I. Optics (9)
   J. Laboratory Studies (7)
   K. Alternative Realities (30)

XVII. Chemistry and Magic (186)
   A. History of Chemistry (7)
   B. General Books (18)
   C. Introductory Works (13)
   D. Chemical Mathematics (3)
   E. Inorganic Chemistry (7)
   F. Organic Chemistry (13)
   G. Analytical Chemistry (30)
   H. Physical Chemistry (15)
      1. General Works (5)
      2. Diffusion Magic (5)
      3. Electrochemistry and Magnetochemistry (5)
   I. Applied Chemistry (83)
      1. General Works (8)
      2. Formulas and Potions (15)
      3. Paints and Varnishes (4)
      4. Ceramics and Glass (5)
      5. Leather (3)
      6. Transmutation (11)
      7. Explosives (2)
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