What is It, Anyway?

What is it I get from being a dungeon master?

That is, within the game itself. Obviously, outside the game there is the satisfaction of worldbuilding with a purpose, of redesigning game imaginatively, of concocting some justification for a thing to exist... and in my case, the hands-on experience of constructing maps that secures me a better knowledge of the real world, which fascinates me, while enjoying the artistic endeavour itself.  So far as I know, chatGPT can't meaningfully construct one of my maps yet, no matter how I prompt it, because apparently it can't organise the aspects that make my maps what they are.

Actually, that's a bit of a pity. I'd rather have the maps made worldwide than the effort to make them. Reasons for other effort into other things can always be found.

I have a game coming up tomorrow, and right now, as far as the game goes, I don't know what's going to happen next. I have some potential plans for what the party might encounter, and I have some potentials for what the party might decide to do with those encounters, but I don't have a set plan that A and B and C and D are going to happen. So basically, I don't know what is actually going to come about tomorrow night. As a DM, I have a setting that I can function in because the setting gives me ideas as people move through parts of the setting, and I trust my imagination and my improvisational skills to "come up with things" — not with invented plans, but with inspired ideas from the game world as the players actively go and confront them. But as far as what actually happens, that is outside my ken. I really don't know.

Understand: I am not improvising because I've failed to "prepare" — but because preparation automatically boxes in what the players are free to do, for all the reasons that a lot of writers have named: because if you spend hours making a session, and the players don't want to do it, then you have to railroad them or throw that work away, or ultimately repurpose that work somewhere else... all of which feels like manipulation and gaslighting.

Further, I have prepared. I've spent so many hours building the map and studying the land — because I run the real world with my game — so that I know Hungary, I know Hungarian history, I know the land that the players are in, I know what the hills look like, I know what the rivers look like, I know where they go, I know the people, I know the climate, I know as much as I possibly can know about that part of the world. That's the preparation that I'm doing. Knowing what's made there, knowing what trades there, knowing where the trade patterns are, knowing what the people care about, knowing what the historical character of the time period was... having all of those things. That's my preparation: not to build this particular dungeon that the players have to go in because it's a box, or if you prefer a metaphor that I've used in the past, my game world is not a Midway ride.

This all means I don't need to assemble the "ride" in advance, with painted scenery and a concealed track, waiting for the players to be loaded into the correct car. The Midway ride is more than artificial, it's predetermined under the guise of motion. It gives the appearance of travel while ensuring that every turn has already been decided.

Doing things this way would scare the living shit out of most who wanted to DM. I know this because they've told me so. Not knowing what the game is going to be when they sit down, that is absurdly frightening because they don't trust themselves to come up with something on the spur of the moment. And likewise, they don't think they'll be able to flesh out that thought in the time provided for the game's presentation. And perhaps they're right. I have never DM'd any other way. I did not go through a period in my early game where I used modules every session; at most, I tried a module now and then to fill in a gap, but from the start I just like "DMing by the seat of my pants..." except, in reality, that is not what I'm doing at all.

I am also writing this blog post by the seat of my pants; I write all my posts this way. Which means in essence that I am inventing ideas at the speed of about 60 words a minute, which is more than fast enough for a D&D campaign. The reason I can be creative at this speed isn't just because I've practiced — I can remember when my typing speed did not keep up with my thinking, and worse, when my handwriting did not. It's also because creativity as a writer is a double-sided process made up of what am I writing now and what logically follows from what I'm writing now. There's always the next sentence waiting upon the last one, because logic dictates that the next thing to say is this: if you know what the subject is, you know how to talk about it.

Running D&D is also a chain... and it's not a chain that we build by ourselves. The DM does not build that chain. The players say this, the DM responds to that. The players say that, the DM responds to it. The players are building the chain along with the DM. So long as the DM says things that are more or less open-ended for the players to respond to, the players are going to say things that are more or less open-ended for the DM to respond to. And thus the players slowly and steadily decide that they're going to go up into these hills, and the DM thinks, these hills would logically contain these things, and so I'm going to put these things on this hill, though I don't know when, or where, or perhaps not even if, I'll decide if the moment seems right. After all, I don't want to make that encounter appear like it's instantaneous the moment that the players start to climb the hill.

So I trust that as I tell the players they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, and they're climbing the hill, I'm not actually "being boring." The tendency is to think that's what we're being, because we grow self-conscious if nothing happens, but in reality we're not alone and the players are thinking continously, filling in the gaps as they climb the hill with a sort of tension... because they're perfectly aware that at any moment something could jump out from behind that rock or that tree, even if, as the DM, I have no intention of having a creature do so. 

And so, after a while, you tell the players they're at the top of the hill. The players start to realise that if nothing has happened yet as they climb this hill, they begin to talk between themselves because obviously there's nothing here. That motivates the players to say something else or do something else, which again builds more of that chain, which the I then respond to and the players respond to. And then in the middle of that, something hits me as a DM, "Oh, I know, I'll put a village, a very strange and unexpected village at the bottom of this hill that the players won't know what it is at first glance." But once I put the village there, then the chain begins and we can discuss what's in the village and all the answers and the questions related to the village. And there, we're running D&D. We are not running a railroad. We're not deciding ahead of time what's in the village. Hell, we didn't even know there was going to be a village there five minutes ago, but now there's a village because we've established it. It doesn't matter if I did it on the spur of the moment or if I invented that village three weeks ago on a piece of paper that I now have on the desk in front of me. What matters is that once it's invented, I'm responsible for defining how the players relate to the village. I am answerable. I must know why it is there, what sort of people live in it, what relation it has to the hill, to the road, to the surrounding country, and to the players now that they have seen it. These are things I can know because I know the region in which this village is located.

And so the chain continues into the future of the campaign.

I truly like this process.

I enjoy instantaneously coming up with a rationale for the village, for what they do there, what it's organised around... and most of the time, these questions are answered within a few seconds of the player's querries. Certainly, there are some who would see this as cheating, or even "faking" the world... but again, it does not matter when the village comes into existence... what matters is that, once it's here, not only does it remain consistent as to itself, it must affect every other thing surrounding the village. Because, after all, a village is not limited to its own environs. Those in the next hex are influenced also, because they know perfectly well the village is here. That it has always been here. Only the players and the DM did not know it.

Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five comes to mind because of the way the aliens in it, the Tralfamadorians, talk about time. Time to a Tralfamadorian isn't a sequence of disappearing moments, but a field of fixed landmarks that only happen to be "sequenced" because of the way that humans conceive time. To a human, the village I've invented came about five minutes ago. To a Tralfamadorian, it's always been there, waiting in the future, for me to stumble across it when the time came.

Moving to a different author, if you will, I'll pull Tolstoy now, who after the body of War and Peace talks at length, for more than a hundred pages, about fate. Tolstoy relates time or events as we perceive them as the bow wave of a boat moving through water. In his conception, all the events of the present are affected and "pushed forward" just as the boat pushes the wave... but because in time we only perceive the edge of the wave, we imagine that we can choose to go this way or that, that our consciousness allows a choice to be made, as though we are in control of our consciousness. To put it as Tolstoy does, we look at the bow wave as though it is pulling the boat — that the wave "turns" left and that the boat follows, or the wave turns right, and so on... whereas, in fact, the bow wave has no control at all, and neither do we, as we are required to make the decisions that are forced upon us by all the decisions that have been made prior to the moment we experience as the instantaneous present.

Taken at it's word, this view dictates that when I think, "Oh, I know, a village..." in fact, I was never in a position to force that thought to arise in my brain at all. That was not a moment of my making a decision, that was a moment of my brain spontaneously, and apparently randomly, impressing upon me, without my compliance, that a village ought to be at the bottom of the hill. That is a very difficult thought for a lot of people, but I'm quite comfortable with it — since, quite right, it would be impossible for me to decide to invent a village before actually inventing the village, or thinking its a good idea before spontaneously thinking its a good idea. 

I have no idea why my brain would impose a village on me, of all the random things it might impose at that moment. I'm comfortable with not caring about that. I trust it will happen, because this is the manner I seem to think. But it isn't really in my power to decide whether or not I shall trust it, either, because that too is the bow wave... and at this point, I shall stop hurting the heads of my readers, who must by now realise that this post was not considered in advance before I decided to write it, either.

The logical end of this post is to describe "time" as a ride that we're on, that we don't control, that for whatever reason I've decided (without deciding or even being asked) to enjoy some of that ride in the process of D&D, and then to bow out looking all clever and shit because I've read Vonnegut and Tolstoy. Whom, really, the reader ought to read. All that matters here is that I enjoy D&D because it makes me think at a scramble in a way that no other activity does, which is why I find myself returning to running it every now and then, instead of just designing it.

Digging in the Mind

In the spirit of the last post, allow me address a similar matter.  See, I go through periods of introspection, where I evaluate myself, my life, my choices and my ambitions.  I've been doing this since my teenage years, though the results is more piercing and carry a greater expectation, but the agenda is mostly the same: am I happy with what I'm doing; am I approaching the work, or my family, or my general well-being in the best manner that I can?  Is it time to make a change?  Why am I doing this, whatever "this" is, in this way?  Is there a better way?

I used to think everyone did this from time to time, but, to my surprise, no.  Yesterday's post came out of these reflections.  I found myself thinking about "not taking enough swings," because the phrase was used casually last Saturday on a site I read every day.  Sometimes I think I take too many swings, but of course, as I argued, that's wrong thinking.

It's night as I write this, but the post comes out of thinking I did last night before sleeping.  For about a week now, I've been acutely conscious of not being terribly happy ... a combination of the trip being something of a disappointment, and my feelings of being overwhelmed by work and tasks I want to accomplish.  Of wanting these writings, and my ideas, to be seen by more people.  Of wanting to feel that what I'm doing is relevant.  I think that's a question we run from, generally: "am I relevant."  Not in the sense of "important," and certainly not in the sense of greatness ... but really, as it applies both to being needed and in the way that we'd like to believe that our presence here makes some kind of difference.

I have readers tell me all the time that I am, and that I do.  Sometimes, people try very hard to convey that to me, I think because I have made a sufficient difference that they feel passionate about expressing that.  And it is appreciated.  But I have this absurd bent of mind that isn't as satisfied with "having" made a difference as I am with "going to," or "about to" make a difference.  This isn't a conscious choice.  It's the way I'm put together, for good or ill.

So I was thinking last night about what it is, exactly, that makes me want to spend so much of my day working on a book that seems too big to finish, or working on a wiki that, let's face it, can't be finished, or any of the other works that I do that sometimes challenge my confidence and my enthusiasm.  It's a given that I'm going to go on doing them, even if ultimately nothing else comes of the work ... but why is relevant.  I've always pitched in and worked at things, maps and writings and designs, but honestly it's been a long time since I've dug into why.

Asking myself why I like this, the simple answer is that because it gives me satisfaction.  But this is really just kicking the can down the road.  I see people giving this sort of answer all the time, explaining things in terms of the emotional gratification they feel, in broad terms, but it doesn't answer the question.  Why does it give satisfaction?  Why do I want to do it?  What specific concrete thing is it in the process that provides this satisfaction and sense of relevance?

It's so easy to put a label on things and go our merry way.  But we can't build upon a label.  We can sit down at our desk and say, "Okay, I'm going to satisfy myself ..."  Well, we can, but then we're not talking about being creative.  What we want to have in our pocket (heh heh) is the power to say, "I'm going to do this specific thing, because this specific thing is what satisfies me."  And without a lot of thought, and practice at introspection, it can take a lifetime to piece the answer to that question together.  Part of it demands that our threshold for what we'll take as an answer has to be very high, because otherwise we'll just quit.  We'll just shrug our shoulders and find the label that works and ... not grow.  And be dependent on things going well ... because its in despair that we realise that labels are useless.  When the satisfaction ceases, and we don't know why, because we never figured out where it came from.  Because we didn't take the time.  We may have asked the hard questions, but we never forced ourselves to get down into the mud and wrestle with those questions until we had a firm, real answer.  Instead, we took the bicarbonate that settled our questions and let us sleep.

I think what satisfies me is the size of things.  It's my nature to take a very small concept, something that would fit into a sentence ... like, an object ought to have a different price depending on where it's bought.  Or, suppose I dug up a bunch of recipes and made a menu.  Or, what would I say to a DM that already knew how to run a game?  And from these tiny beginnings, one step at a time, one choice at a time, I build these enormous castles or these beautiful objects.  A little bit at a time.  I have a vision in my head of how a thing might work, or what it might look like, and then I find, after working at it, that it winds up looking far more magnificent, and impossible to achieve, than it really was.

That's a really interesting transformation.  I look at the 1,416 pages on the wiki and while consciously I know that I've created every page from scratch, starting around 2014 — just nine years, starting with the first format wikispaces — and am overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the project.  Such that if someone were to say, "Hey, could you start a wiki right now and make it this long, with this many words, could you do it?" and my answer would be, "No.  No I don't think so.  It would take too long."

And this reminds me to pay more attention to the Chinese proverb that it's better to want a thing than to have a thing.  Because it's not having the wiki that gives me satisfaction.  It's not even working that gives me satisfaction.  It's that I want the wiki to be larger, and knowing that I can make it larger ... because I have the power to do that.  It's knowing I can write the book, that this is something that isn't beyond me.  That there isn't a reason to feel overwhelmed by the size of these projects.  There's reason to put aside and forget that there's an end to be strived for.  If it's a project that can be finished, fine, there'll come an end to it ... but the end doesn't have to weigh upon my mind.  I know that given time and resources, I'll get there.  And I will when I get there.

KNOWING is a tremendous thing.  Knowing that I can do these things separates me from tens of thousands who'd like to do them, but who spend so much time regressed in the certainty that their vision is defacto unattainable ... because it would take too long.  That's such a trap.  Truth be told, none of us know how long it'll take.  Look what I've done since 2015.  Not just the wiki, but all these blog posts, the menu, the time spent on maps, the time spent on a book I never published and the time spent on a book I'm publishing right now, along with other projects that will never see the light of day.  None of us know what we can do with the time we have ...

But we can know we'll do something.  Some small thing.  Something that takes a day.  Or an hour.  Followed by another something and another, until this tiny, tiny seed grows into the magnificent tree, and we find ourselves wondering, "How did that get there?"

Getting up this morning, after this thinking last night, I didn't feel (as I often do) tired and dragged out, and unable to face the monsterous task I'm still at.  Because I do know.  It's not a trite bit of help-yourself book nonsense I'm telling myself to soothe or placate my doubts.  I don't have any doubts.  If I work on the book, at whatever pace or manner I wish, it will be finished.  There's no other possibility.

And that is satisfying.

Hits and Misses

This seems counter-intuitive, and goes against the old adage that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but if it happens that you're consistently succeeding at all you do — say, in running your D&D game — that can be a sign of your failing to evolve and grow better at your game.  That you're playing it too safe, or consistently sticking to things you already know you can do well.  Which, you may not wish to hear, limits you.

There's another old saying, one that says that if you're not missing, you're not taking enough swings.  The relationship to baseball aside, the notion is that if you're actively putting yourself out there, if you're taking risks and trying new things, you have a greater chance of becoming something better than you are.

Where it comes to D&D and worldbuilding, we can get far too concerned about "success" and "failure," so much that it makes us blind to larger ideas.  Success is not really the point.  Worse, a period of success can lead to an increased sense of pressure and expectation upon us, in the sense that because we ran one really good session, ALL the sessions have to be unexpectedly good now.  Or we might think, even better!  Which is a trap of course.  We're never going to succeed in making every session better than the last ... and if we try to do that, it's only a matter of time before we fall and break our ego.

I don't think very much about whether or not I've "succeeded" in creating a strong game world or a good campaign.  I know those things are often in the mind of people who are certain they don't have either — and want them.  But something as esoteric as a setting or a good group can't be "possessed" in black and white terms ... especially since a group has its own motivations and reasons for showing up each game, much of which has nothing to do with us.

If we should wish for anything, it ought not to be success, but resiliency.  That is, the capacity to bounce back from adversity, to just keep going, to not worry if we're doing it right or wrong because doing it is the real benefit here.  The idea is somewhat behind those people who say they want to make mistakes, because they've learned from their mistakes and they want always to learn more.  Truth is, however, you don't actually have to make the mistake first.  Learning is always available, mistake or no.

But we've got to do it.  We've got to get up and get started, especially on those days when starting is the last thing we want to do.  Resiliancy results from knowing that we're going to miss, that sometimes we're going to miss most of the time, but that the misses don't matter.  Life is not baseball.  In life, we get about a million strikes and for that reason, we can miss and miss and miss, so long as we're conscious that it's the hit is still going to count when it happens.

That's the mystery behind the curtain that we've pulled closed behind every "genius," hiding their mistakes.  We make much of Isaac Newton inventing calculus in a few weeks time ... but we're ignorant of how many years he tried and failed to invent calculus before that.  We don't see the hundreds of pictures that Cezanne and Turner threw away or painted over.  We don't hear recordings of Stravinski's orchestra or Pink Floyd when the wrong notes were played or the symbiosis didn't happen.  We hear or see or get the "hit" ... all the misses fade into the background and just don't matter.

But of course, down here on the ground, as we are missing ourselves, we're hyperconscious of that fact.  The only thing we seem able to focus on it our missing all the time.  Which is why, when something works, we can fool ourselves into thinking we've got it all settled, that it's great, that it's all it ever needs to be ... despite the occasionally criticisms from those who don't like it, or those out here in the world urging us not to settle, not to just accept the mediocre as "enough," but to dig in and start swinging again.

We can't be afraid of missing.  We can't let missing become part of what we are.  It's part of the process of our striving for improvement.  A part we have to embrace, and let roll off our backs, knowing this is the path worth taking.  Moreover, by understanding new things, by trying new approaches, we open our minds to the fact that both exist — that there is a different way to do things.  That there are new things to do.  We know, because we've done them.  And we're ready to do more, when we find it or think it up ourselves.  Obtaining practice at that strategy trains our imagination and intuitiveness in ways that serve us well as creators and as people.

And so, get out and practice.  Get out and swing.

Modernism

I caught two videos today that express what I perceive as "modernism."

The first is from Mark Rober, who embraces that cheesy youtube-presenter shit-talk drenched with insincerity sauce, so fair warning ... you may have to swallow back your bile at points.  I don't know why this style remains popular.   Note the creator has far less views than he has subscribers.

The video digs into drone technology not used by the military, though of course it could be, and sells hard all the things it's doing for humanity.  Strikes me as terrifically pragmatic, solving enormous logistics problems coming into existence and having an enormous potential for improving millions of lives.

A post-modernist is sure to be filled with fear, then with concern for the jobs of delivery drivers, then panicked at whisper-silent military possibilities, while building an irrational sentiment for why the whole concept is invasive.  None of that matters.  The concept, which I'm deliberately not explaining, took a relatively small number of people to invent; it takes advantage of pre-existing circumstances not covered by the law in order to establish itself as necessary; and it requires knowledge and education to run.  In other words, like everything that's modernist, its existence doesn't rely upon creating some ridiculous grassroots movement or convincing any ignorant person of any thing.

This is key.  If you want to invent something, and at some point in the creation process what you're inventing has to be approved of by one or more ignorant people, you've either misunderstood your process or you're right now inventing something that will never exist.  Trust me.

That may not have been so pre-internet, when you only had to convince a group of people in one room, within a brief span of time, while controlling the dialogue for as long as necessary to gain approval.  But that ship has sailed.  It's not possible to do that now, because people own cellphones.

The other video is very different, from Bushradical.  Here, Dave is completely sincere and authentic.  He makes no effort to sell his accomplishments, which sell themselves.  He just says what he and his wife have done over the last twenty years, step by step, admiringly.  Note that he has far more views than subscribers.

Dave works.  A lot.  I won't say how here, except to say that I should've worked as hard at writing as he has at what he does.  And this is me saying this.  There's a bit of road not taken for me, as a good part of my childhood was actually being the little boy that shows up in some of the pictures.  From the age of 5, I took part in my father building a cabin, and at various points the way that cabin looked and the way Dave's efforts look are exactly the same.  Gets me right ... here.

At 20, had I any interest, I could have used the money my father had put aside for my university and started building my own place in some outback place along the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta.  How much expertise I had wouldn't have mattered, as my father would have been 48 and more than happy, ecstatic even, to walk be through everything I'd ever need to know.  But silly me, I wanted to be a writer, not a housebuilder, so here I am.

Oh, wait ... I'm actually doing all right, aren't I?  I forgot for a moment there.

The lesson is the same that I've been pitching for years now.  Work.  Which is precisely the message in the first video, both for the company that's highlighted for its mechanical acumen and for the annoying content creator posting it today.  Modernism comes down to work.  People who work a job do so because they need food and rent, and are either trapped in the present or the past ... but people who work for themselves know there's a future.  At the beginning, because it's for themselves, it's always work done without a wage; without the certainty there will ever be a wage.  Yet often enough to make it worthwhile, there often is compensation for years of toil and struggle and, it must be said, derision from those who think it's foolish to work at a dream for nothing.

Shows just how little imagination most people have.

Self-sufficiency

This is why I'm not concerned about the fate of D&D.

If the game cannot sustain itself for another generation, then it clearly hasn't got the value I ascribe to it.  I'm therefore a member of a certain culture and time, whose interest in the game was cultivated by events around me ... and if the next generation isn't so cultivated, then c'est la vie.  Our opinion of D&D is next to nothing when stacked against an insurmountable cultural indifference.

But, if D&D is as good as I think it is, then it'll survive no matter how incompetent its masters are, including those of the company and those of each little table to be found.  The game will thrive nonetheless.  Moreover, I expect the game to improve, to take steps forward from where it is, and not in the name of merchandising ... and the reason that I think so is because the game has so far advanced for me, personally, in my small part of it.

One way or the other, the plight of D&D has no effect upon me.  I am self-sufficient in my game.  If I were the only person in the world playing, because everyone else had ceased, I'd still have my players because they, like me, love this game ... specifically, the way I run it.  The best way to sustain a love for anything is to become self-sufficient.  I depend on nothing produced by any other person, or any comment made by others, or any blog post that's written, or any public presentation of the game, or the game's existence as a movie, or any cultural phenomenon whatsoever.  Worries about what the company might do, or say, or legally demand, or rules they make, or content they might release, simply do not exist for me.  The world cannot stop me in doing what I have been doing for forty years.

Those who have to worry, who feel compelled to concern themselves with every change, perhaps deserve my pity, but not my sympathy.  No one needs anything except what already exists in order to play D&D.  What's more, there are so many copies of what exists, that it's impossible not to find everything that one needs.  So those who will not be self-sufficient, for whatever reasons they give for themselves, deserve what happens to them.  That's how dependency works.  If you will be dependent, then the thing you are dependent upon will always be your master.

Am I not, however, dependent upon the reader?  I am, arguably, dependent on some readers, but not upon them all, and not upon any one.  Moreover, any readers I have must be readers I've earned ... for if I haven't given them cause to read me, then what are they doing here?  Giving cause is a responsibility that falls upon me.  If I want readers, I must earn them; which must be done through effort, empathy and the distinction of providing relevant material.  If I cannot do that, I don't deserve readers.  It's really that simple.

In any case, my desire to earn readers is additionally rooted in self-sufficiency.  I have read and reconsidered the material, I have researched the material, I've expanded the material, and in doing so I believe I understand the material better than most.  Taking the time to propound upon the material, then, suits me ... and if I have readers, it's because it suits them also.

So I put it to the reader.  IF you would have D&D survive for you, then become self-sufficient.  Make your own world, your own adventures, your own rules, and never rely upon the opinions and actions of others in how you run, except those of your players, whose loyalty to your world you must earn.

So long as it survives in this capacity, for you, then you never need worry about the "death" of D&D, or what other players of other games want, or do.  Make your game valuable ... and worry about absolutely nothing else.  Because objectively, nothing else matters.

Folly

I expect within a few months some literary critic will coin the insult, "... he/she writes like chatGPT."  It may have already happen.  If so, I've missed it.

I have three skills as a writer that a computer can't reproduce.

(a)  I am able to write from personal memory.  A computer can write from someone else's personal memory, but it can't extract from that what that memory says about ourselves.  Example, the recent post about Annie Lennox.

(b)  I can make an emotional connection between totally disparate situations, and explain why they're not disparate at all.  For example, that running D&D is similar to the experience of firefighters ... and no, not because we put out "fires."  There are completely different relationships.  A computer can copy the words describing the equivalency, but it can't perceive an equivalency that hasn't yet been seen.

(c)  I can invent something that doesn't exist.  At all.  As someone who's done this dozens of times, I dare a computer to do it once.

During my university years, in 1992, I took a full-year writing course from an award-winning writer, Aritha van Herk.  I'm surprised to find that I've never written about her before.  I found the experience less than satisfying.  She and I did not see eye-to-eye.  I'm certain she didn't enjoy having me in her class any more than my being there.

Aritha — and yes, as I've been in her house, and tapped glasses together at many a bar, and shared hugs, I feel perfectly justified in calling her by her first name — was, and is, a dyed-in-the-wool post-modernist.  To explain the position she took in her class, writing expresses creativity in the way that language is used to give an emotional impression of the subject material.  Because nothing is "new" in the world, the best we can do as writers is to thematically explain the personal contexts arising from historical moments in our lives, or the lives of other people.  Inspiration is found in what we feel, while events only matter in how they affect one's self, or one's own attributes, or characteristics, or actions.

If you can imagine a bottle with her and I in it ...

ChatGPT is a perfect post-modernist writing program.  Like the ouroboros, modern writing endlessly consumes itself, regurtitating words like alchemical efforts to transform letters into gold.  Having all the words at it's beck and call, the computer can endlessly reorder them to find the perfect, unequivocable arrangement that meets the sentiments of artistry for all such writers who've followed in the path of Guy de Maupassant and Gabriel Garcia Marquez ... in which disillusioned lives and destinies crash woefully on the rocks of cold, cruel reality.

Wikipedia describes post-modernism thusly:

"The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization."

One recognises the reprecussions of said philosophy in a great many parts of our modern culture:  disbelief and distrust of science, non-binary sexuality, ignorance of political events, categorical disrespect for anything that's established, a general distaste for ambition, panic-stricken screeds about the environment and virtually anything else ... and the cold, clear, systematic deconstruction by all sides of the so-called political spectrum of every thing.  Welcome to dissatisfaction.  Welcome to demoralisation.

Welcome to fear.

None of this is new.  Post-modernism has been shambling along for nearly six decades, four in the driver's seat.  There's no one left to run it, not any more; most of the voices that praised it's inception were eaten alive in its maw.  At this point, the philosophy is self-perpetuating, like a black pill waiting at the desk of a first-grader on day-one of school.

Allow me to confess a dirty secret:  I am a modernist.  I believe that culture is progressing, despite the masses convinced otherwise.  I believe in objectivity, and do not consider it "naive" to maintain that belief.  I believe that knowledge accumulates, and that with accumulated knowledge all things are possible.  I believe that stable philosophical identities, hierarchies and categories have not ceased to be, simply because a vast number of unenlightened dead-enders are convinced they don't, or shouldn't.

I appreciate the characterisation of these beliefs as "ideology," but I believe that's a mis-characterisation.  Calling a thing a thing doesn't make it that thing, no matter how many people buy into it.  But I appreciate the mis-characterisation because, for most of those making it, this is all they have.  They're certainly not educated, not in any way that counts.  They certainly haven't any faith, not in 14,000 years of human adaptation or anything else.  Steeped to the eyeballs in self-reflexive shit, they can't see their noses to see past them.  So, objectively, I expect them to react as they do, think as they do, proscribe action as they do ... and to be completely irrelevant to whatever happens.  They're not contributing; and, where the rubber meets the road, they haven't collectively enough power to obstruct it.  And so, like all of the 14,000 years of the past to date, the future will simply run right over them and not look back.

"You" might consider yourself one of "them."  If so, as I say, I appreciate your viewpoint.  As in, I understand that you don't really have one.

Now, because I've used the word "objective" as a philosophical position, Ayn Rand is going to come up.  Let me be clear on this subject.  "Objectivism" is a terrible choice of words for the wish-fulfillment fantasy heroism she espouses.  I've read The Fountainhead several times; I've read Atlas Shrugged thrice.  I've read As I Lay Dying, a book that many don't know even exists.  If anyone would like to go toe-to-toe with me on Rand's philosophy, I'm ready.  As a diagnosis, her books have merit.  As a prescriptive, it kills the patient.  It's not "objective" in any way, manner or sense of the word.  Calling a thing a thing doesn't make it a thing.  But because a lot of very poorly educated political hacks embraced the term because it sounds professional, we're stuck with it.  Let me be clear that what I espouse is "objectivity," as in its relationship to "subjectivity," and NOT Randian philosophy.

Personally, I have one argument in making my case that the world is going to get better than this.  That argument is that it is better than it was five years ago.  And ten years ago, and fifteen, and twenty, and every time period that I can count since arriving on this foolish blue marble.  Seeing the betterment is awfully hard for most people, but it's absolutely evident every day, everywhere.  I am writing my thoughts in a place where others will read them, for free.  I am under no obligation to respect anyone else's thoughts, and yet I'm still free to write mine.  All the positions and arguments in the world have no actual influence on my thinking or my life.  I know this, because I remember a time when everything I'm doing right this moment, with this sentence, was impossible.  I clearly remember it.  At a time when I was a full-grown adult with a child.  I remember a time up until a few years ago when the work I'm doing for a living didn't exist, not in a manner where I could live and work in my own space, interact with others around the globe and be paid for it.

As a continually ambitious adult, still producing new work at a time when my aged peers are trying to make due with football and house repairs, to stave off the boredom, I find myself investigating and writing about material that would have been impossible to find and correlate as little as three or four years ago.  All in a place, where I don't have to leave the same chair.

Not progress?  Not change the old to the new?  Not obliterate dead-end philosophies?  One has to be blind not to see what's going on.  Most of what's being written about, talked about, reported about, argued about, defended, attacked, is simply not germane to anything that's actually happening.  Millions upon millions of humans existing in the world are forever now in the Land of the Forgotten ... as will most of this inanity, thoughtlessness and pearl-clutching that comprises the universal public discourse.

Ignore it.

Updating the Generator

With the decision to change from the Character Background Generator "splatbook" to the Streetvendor's Guide, I find myself wanting to update the wiki version of the Generator rather than leave the work I've done these late months languish.  I'm not concerned that doing so will lessen the value of the book, should it come to be published — without a doubt, when I sell the hardcover book, it'll be to people who've never heard of me.

In any case, this means that I'm temporarily putting down the work I've been doing on facilities and hexes.  I'll get back to that, I promise.  I'm just interested in doing this for now, is all.

I'm of a very different mindset than what I see from creators all around me, who covetously protect their material as they were taught to do in the days before the internet.  I'm not concerned about people "stealing my stuff," first because most dealers refuse to see the value in it and also because they're unable to go on churning out new information on the same lines without me.  I'm the goose that lays the eggs, and even a robber must keep coming back to the source for more product.

Secondly, I'm convinced that we're moving continously into an age where the maker is of more value and importance than the product.  The product's ascendence came about in the 17th century, as the middlemen of the new economic age inserted themselves between the creator and the audience as a means of filling their own pockets.  The internet obliterates their necessity — though gawd knows they're the last to know it — because I can talk directly to the audience any time I want, by sitting down and typing.  Therefore the thing that's for sale isn't the product, it's me.

At the same time, the more product I create, the more valuable I become.  It stands to reason that the well-thinking game wizard should realise that whatever they may feel about me personally, I'm producing work on a scale hitherto unseen in the annals of D&D.  I look over the OGL-produced work of the last 20 years, surrounding the lamentations that such work is in danger of being "stolen" by the company, and feel the same as I have for years on this blog.  Take it, dump in the garbage and move on.  Because personally I feel that none of it amounted to very much.  I've looked over hundreds and hundreds of pages these last two decades and found just about nothing to expand my game world or my interest in DMing.  Certainly it wasn't a source to which I went in order to write How to Run or initiate the Wiki.   I don't go to it now for inspiration ... and those that do rarely write anything that I find insightful.

Dismissive as that might be, it's how I feel.  If I felt anything since the development of 3e was worth stealing from, I'd have certainly stolen it.  I do have parts of 3e in my system.  I have nothing, absolutely nothing, from the dreck that's been proposed since then.

I have two concerns.  First, that I earn the support I receive ... and by this, I mean that my supporters feel assured that I am earning it.  That means finding ways to serve the subject material that continuously push the envelope, drawing greater attention to those aspects that are constantly swept to the corner by those whose goal it is to emulate a company who doesn't care about them.

Second, that I'm available for discussion.  I know I'm intimidating; and I know that I'm rarely willing to make concessions to the efforts others make to approach me, just because they've essayed to do that.  But trust me when I say that it's more important to me and you become a better and wiser DM than that you feel better about yourself for what you are right now.  I live in the future.  What I am today means not a damn thing compared to what I'll be tomorrow ... and right or wrong, it's my intent to hold you to that same standard.

As difficult as that is, I promise that in the long run you'll thank me for it.

Please enjoy the changes I'm making to the Background Generator and rest assured that I'm also working on the Streetvendor's Guide.

Bread upon the Waters

The problem with writing something aspirational is that these posts rarely get any feedback ... and that's reasonable, because when someone places themselves in a position of, "Now I'm going to spew wisdom," what can we say?   As Omar said upon sacking the Library of Alexandria in 642 AD,  if the books agreed with the Quran, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed, heretical.  And thus was all the wisdom in the world destroyed ... representing billions of hours of work accomplished by people wanting to make the world a better place.

Any wisdom I have receives the same fate; if the reader agrees, then it doesn't need to be said.  If the reader disagrees, then it doesn't need to be read.  There's blogging in a nutshell.  But part of this blog's core agenda is to write about things I believe, and why I believe them, and how I feel the world can be made a better place.  So if this seems a waste of time for the reader, too bad.  I'll write something aspirational today and then tomorrow, or the day after, I'll take a swing at another series of posts on worldbuilding.

Among the more aggravating of human traits is the continued resistance, especially from artists, against people improving themselves or their lives.  Nearly all of this has to do with perception.  Individuals either talk themselves into believing that the effort won't do any good, or that it's somehow not for them, or that it certainly has to be some kind of scam.

Take, for example, Patreon.  During my time in Montreal, I met the couple who were among my absolute best friends in the 1990s, with whom I collaborated on several artistic works.  Jesse was the director behind 2001's Coil ... and for those who may wonder, I have acquired a copy of the film on disc, given to me by Jesse.  These last two decades, he's continued to write and produce, he's doing very well for himself with projects he's getting paid for without getting official credits and he's every bit the fiery, passionate companion that I knew when we put on plays together and wrote together.  He learned that I have lost none of my passion, either.

Yet while Jesse had heard of Patreon, he knew nothing about it.  I don't understand how that's possible.  Patreon has been ongoing for 10 years now; I've been a part of it for seven and a half.  Patreon has been a strong, steady source of productive income for me.  It's not a scam.  It's not a waste of time.  It's a means to connect and network with others on a level that's never existed for a grassroots artist at any time in history.  And so I found myself, again, in a conversation where I tried to convince a fellow artist to get on board, to embrace this wellspring, to reach out and grab this very easy brass ring ... only to encounter doubt and resistance.  Nor is this the first time.  I know many, many artists.  And in all the time I've been on Patreon, I've convinced none of them.

Which baffles me.

Allow me to explain the secret of doing well in the world.  I won't charge you $60 for the book saying how.  I won't put off the explanation to the end of this post, only for you to discover I haven't said anything.  No, I'll dive right into it, because I care about you.  I care about everyone.  I want you to do well; I want you to find comfort and happiness.  And I think the method to achieve that should be free and available to all.  Because every person who reaches out and takes it will make this a better world.

This comes in two parts.  The first argues that you, Dear Reader, must commit yourself to learning a craft.  Here, I don't mean an art, but simply that you teach yourself how to make something, from scratch.  This could be anything, but the very best sorts of crafts you can acquire are those you can apply in the home ... and by yourself.  Why?  Because then you are dependent on no one else's space, and no one else's commitment.

Let me be clear.  Fixing things is not a reliable craft.  It can do you for awhile; you can sustain yourself on being able to fix things for a long time.  But sooner or later the thing you fix will either be supplanted by something you don't know how to fix, or replaced by something that doesn't need fixing.  The same can be said of any craft that's only a means towards a more core design.  My uncle fell in love with a career in drafting.  In the 1970s, he obtained his certificate and committed himself to a lifetime in which he would happily draw lines and shape things on paper.  Then the 1980s arrived; computer drafting obliterated paper drafting.  The latter simply evaporated.  My uncle couldn't make the leap.  He never understood how to make the things he was drafting; or how drafting was potentially a path to other forms of drawing or design.  He just loved taking spec and applying them to paper.  And when that was pulled out from under him, he found he had nothing, and no where to go.  He never recovered.

A proper craft depends on manipulating something that cannot be supplanted.  A leather-worker may lose work on account of industrial materials ... but these will never have the characteristics of leather.  They will never shape like leather, they will never feel like leather, they will never smell like leather.  Perhaps one day, an industrialised product might be made that is exactly like leather ... but the leather worker is still fine, because the craft is in shaping the material, not making it.

I possess three crafts of this kind.  I can do all three in the home; I rely upon no one else; they will never go away; and as it happens, I've made money from all three.

I am a writer.  Books may go away, this blog platform may go away, but the English language won't and there will always been time for people to spend learning things.  Thus I write, teaching people about what I know, and the manner in which it transfers from me to the reader doesn't matter.  I can commit the written word to voice if need be ... so in truth, I don't even need my hands.

I am a cook.  Food will never go away.  The ability to manage it, master it and feed people food that achieves delight from their taste buds will always be in high demand, even when I'm ninety.  If I were put in prison, sooner or later I'd find my way into the kitchen, and my skills with making even the most unpalatable foods more palatable would assure my security and overall wellbeing.  Putting the cook into the infirmary is not acceptable.  Of course, there might be other cooks.  But I get along with other cooks and I'm always ready to learn from them.

I am a dungeon master.  Now this is odd, nyet?  Will players go away?  Not in my experience.  As with food, if a performance can be given that inspires players to come, and speak excitedly about the game to others, then I will always, always, have players at my table.  This comes from not taking them for granted, but by rewarding them continuously with ideas, humour, intrigue and satisfaction.  Some of these can be achieved by giving the players toys and money, but certainly not all of them.  There's more to being a DM than giving the players what they think they want.  The greatest thing a DM can give a player is to make that player feel smarter, more capable, more successful than they conceived themselves of being.  And since I've always found that players underestimate themselves, this isn't as hard as it sounds.

What do you know?  I don't ask, "what can you do," because "doing" isn't the same as knowing.  If you find yourself in a service job, where you serve people, getting them what they want, finding things on shelves, filling out forms, answering questions, sending tools and transport forward because people need it, these are all things that you can do.  But the "knowing" of these things isn't very much.  Someone can be taught your job, nearly as well as you, in six months.  And some designer can replace your job with a bit of technology, with terrible rapidity.  Plus, jobs that you do rely on companies, which don't care about you, and will cut your hours or your job altogether to suit agendas you have no part in making.  We all know this.  We live with the reality of it, hoping we won't be one of the unlucky ones ... while watching others around us suffer the fate that we know, one day, we'll have to suffer ourselves.

Knowing a craft cuts through that ... not because we can do the craft, but because we know the craft.  That knowledge is at a premium.  I could work restaurants into the ground, watching them close their doors and not worry, because there are always hundreds of restaurants and there are never enough cooks.  Anyone who can demonstrate their knife skills and talents in an hour or two is sure to get plenty of hours and respect; my problem was that, when I was working on some project like a play or a magazine article, I didn't want to work more than 30-35 hours a week.  Kitchen Managers like their best cooks to work 50, 55, and so there was always conflict. 

Moreover, knowing a craft means — and now, more than ever — that you can work for yourself.  That's what Patreon does for us.  It enables people to pay for more than the product we produce; it enables a better business model than exchanging goods and services rendered for income.  It enables us to sell the knowledge itself, bypassing the actual product's manufacture.  You, Dear Reader, would like to know how to dungeon master, yes?  Perhaps you'd like to know how to write, or know how to cook?  And if you felt that someone would take the time and teach you, you'd pay for that, right?  Maybe not a lot; maybe only $3 a month; but then, with knowledge, we can give it to a lot of people at the same time.  I don't need you, specifically, to fill my coffers so that my rent at the end of the month is paid.  I only need a lot of people like you.   And if I couple that with working some job where one of my crafts is also part of my day-to-day, as I am now, then as a craftsman, I'm able to be very comfortable.  I have a chance to get lucky and win trips to Montreal.  I am my own person.  I can't be fired ... because even if the job I have lets me go, I'll find something.  I'll prove my worth to someone.

People in the video above respond to being fired with statements like, "This is what I get for 30 years of service?"  The answer to that is pretty plain.  They received pay for 30 years of service.  And pay without knowledge is a trap.  30 years is slavery, a recipe for making yourself redundant, and useless to anyone except your masters.  When you're let go, you've got nothing ... because you've done nothing to change your stars.  You've not learned to be the master of your own fate, because you've been so comfortable letting someone else be the master.  That is not the path to security.  Your path to security is to learn how to do something ... and to start learning it today.  Sew.  Paint.  Make tiny clay figurines of old men and young boys fishing together.  Learn how to make something beautiful from scratch.  Take a class.  Read.  Practice.  Keep at it.  Find something better and go towards that.  Learn to use your hands.  Learn to shape things.  Learn.

And when you're finished learning, teach.  Because that's the secret of everything, really.  Your value to the rest of society is based upon what you're able to learn, and especially what you learn to do that's either very rare, or possibly completely unique.  New things, after all, come into being.  New songs are written.  Advances are made.  And when they are, the people who brought about the advance get all the laurels.  Somehow, someway, you want to be one of those people.

If you're in your teens and twenties, you've got ungodly amounts of time to go there. If you're as old as I am, or older, and you haven't started yet, you still have time to get able enough that you can teach your grandchildren, and let them carry the torch for you.  And if you've been silly enough not to have children, or so coldly inconsiderate that your children won't speak with you, then find your way to some volunteer organisation that let's you teach what you know to a younger generation.  Because this, my readers, is your path to everything.  Your knowledge is going to die with you, if you don't share it.  And if you are privileged enough to share it, you'll find a state of contentment that's unimaginable.

Now.  I know there are several ex-teachers reading this blog, who have every right to be disheartened by the loss of their chosen profession, and what the world has become, and what the young are like, and a host of other truths that we can't ignore here.  But let me remind those gentle souls that the craft you acquired in your desire to teach was sold, by you, to an institutional master, and not to the children you taught.  You were never paid by the children.  You were paid by your masters.  And it is not your profession, or your love of it, that was compromised, it was the brutality of a system that was never designed to enable learning.  That was the pretense used, to cover up the real design ... a design that you know all too well.

And so ... restore yourselves as teachers.  Find a way to achieve that craft as your own master; investigate Patreon as a means to sell your knowledge.  Choose a medium that works for your needs, that you can employ in your homes.  Teach.  It takes time to find students, but you will.  Because there are always students.  They want to learn, and they're looking for you, right now.  Remake yourself.  You'll want to be ready for them.

The future is going to be very, very cruel towards slaves, much crueller than it has been.  Don't be one.  The internet, and your willingness to learn, will set you free.

Specialness

Thinking about past campaigns, I have no doubt that the individualism of players is something that is barely considered in character generation.  In the days when I ran Andrej and Lukas, I can assure the reader that Robert's approach to the game was very different than David's, with both being very different from that of Maximillian or Butch.  In the Juvenis campaign, Shelby was quite a different player from Pandred, or Drain, or Danielle.  Whatever characters any of these might have been playing, their differences as people and as individuals seeking things from D&D could not be mistaken.

I believe this difference is crucially underrated.  The company markets their game by arguing that you can use feats,

"... to customise your character with extra, unique abilities.  They grant unique powers and abilities aside from your race and class traits, and features."

 

The statement is plainly a lie.  There's nothing "unique" about a feature that I can choose for every character I run, or that the player across the table can also choose for every character he or she runs.  There's nothing unique about assembling the same build over and over, because it works.  There's nothing unique about having the same list to choose from that hundreds of thousands of other game players can also pick over.  It's an old marketing ploy.  It makes a pretense that because you can pick a shirt that advertises Billie Eilish, it's not the same t-shirt that thousands of other people haven't also bought.  It's not personal ... unless you're stupid enough to believe that because you're the only person in this bar to be wearing the shirt, it makes you an "individual."

The lie plays up to something that psychologists call "specialness" — a belief that what makes YOU valuable is found in the way you differentiate yourself from other people through what you accomplish, or what you earn, or your background, or what you choose to believe ... or even what you perceive is your usefulness to your job, your family or your iconography.  It's a philosophy that discards human value based on shared human traits: that we all bleed, or that we all feel pain, or that we all fall in love.  It's a philosophy that promotes "self-reliance" over compassion; and works as a "higher ground" from which individuals can justify their right to attack people who are "beneath" them.

But here is the crux of the philosophy:  it depends upon your ability to acquire your specialness as proof, somehow.  You must find some kind of specialness which you can lord over others, to PROVE that you're "uniquely" deserving of respect, greater sympathy when things go bad for you, or that your voice is somehow louder and more right because you're YOU.  YOU make more money; YOU know more about the Lord of the Rings than other people; YOU buy the right kind of t-shirts; YOU know the best way to build a character in D&D.

But it's all bullshit.  The company has chosen to hitch its wagon to your belief that your value as a player hinges on your ability to build characters ... and this works because a very large part of the D&D-player demographic consists of pathetic, disgruntled white male deplorable incels who are desperate for something that proves their "specialness."  These players aren't interested in "party."  They're not interested in any part of the game that isn't a platform to prove how special they are.  And the company caters to that.  Because there's money in it.

My position is wildly different.  I don't believe at all that anything a player can "choose" can be remotely special, however large the list of character classes or races might be ... for the simple fact that the choice can be made again and again, by anyone.  The only reason why someone else might not make that choice is because they are, defacto, a different person ... which means they're a different person regardless of whether or not there's a choice.  In other words, it's not the choice that makes us special.  It's that we already are.

Which means six different people running the exact same character build around my game table would still and always be six individuals.  The player's illusion of choice is metaphorical pasteboard.

In my generator, I have a result on the table hair condition & health that reads, "Perfect hair; both superabundant in volume and highly lustrous."  As it stands in the company's game, you can choose to have that hair by writing the words down on your character sheet.  And so can I.  So can every character I run.  Because choice is meaningless where it comes to defining your "specialness" or mine.

But to get that hair result in my game system, you must have an 18 charisma, and then you MUST roll a "1" when determining your hair's condition or health.  You can't choose it.  No one can.  If it comes up, you can wear your hair with the reassurance that it's extremely unlikely that anyone else will also have your personal hair, and even more unlikely that it will have the same colour or texture.  Because all of these things are rolled, NOT chosen.

The depth of this consequence is overlooked ... which is criminally irresponsible for the game system we have now.  Too many candidates for "specialness" who entered into the game during the mid-to-late 1980s chafed against and bitched that they couldn't have an 18 strength any damn time they pleased.  They hated rolling because rolling didn't give them a choice to be special ... they had to actually BE special, through rolling, or else not get what they wanted.  It never mattered to these people that if everyone could choose, then the meaning of being "special" would become a joke ... which it is now, regardless of how many times the company puts the word "unique" into a sentence.  No, what mattered for these people was the brand of being special, not actual specialness.

We see it constantly, all around us.  50 different ethnic groups living in the same country all drive the same cars, eat the same McDonald's hamburgers, drink the same Tim Horton's coffee or use the same phone apps on the same phones ... they wake up on industrialised mattresses, listen to the same programmed news and music on their way to the same jobs that observe the same rules that dictate how the same money they'll earn will be taxed and counted in the same way.  Then they use the same money machines to get their money to cross the same streets to go to the same Burger Kings and to buy the same liquor, to go home and pour their drinks in the same glasses that give them the same drunkedness they feel while watching the same sports and reality shows.

And then SOME of them scream and bitch that their "special" culture isn't recognised, or that their "special" entitlement to run the country isn't catered to, or how it's a crime that everyone doesn't 100 per cent kowtow to their "special" privilege to write about, depict, act as or speak for that "special" group of people who also happen to have their same skin tone and ethnic origin.  We live our lives together as human beings, eating and shitting and bleeding and fucking just like the same human beings, but that's NOT ENOUGH.  That doesn't make us special.  And if we're not special, how can we ever, possibly, carve out some tiny pretense that lets us be better than the next person?

The joke is, we don't have to.  We are special.  We don't have to prove it.  We don't need others to believe it.  What we prove and what others believe has no impact on reality.  All my players around my table are different people.  That's a statement of fact, one that's blatantly evident in the way they play.  What we want isn't a set of rules designed to drive people apart by catering to their specialness, but a set of rules that enables everyone to cheer when one of them rolls something so wildly unlikely that it gives us all reason to feel pleased.  One of us got cool hair.  Awesome.

A Worldbuilding Aside

There's a Florida proverb that goes, "When you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp."

That's what rants are.  In trying to improve a reader's DMing skills, or the game setting they offer the players, or how best to run a role-playing game, it's easy to get caught up in subpoints like, "What's logic got to to with a fantasy world?  It's just make believe!"

I like the proverb very much ... especially since when people explain the proverb, as Wiktionary does, it's totally ignored that draining a swamp produces alligators.  And if you don't fight them off, well ... they eat you.  The proverb doesn't just say that it's easy to lose sight of one's objective.  It ALSO says that the fallout of one's objective creates unforseen, disastrous consequences that MAKE is easy to lose one's objective.  The losing of an objective ISN'T our fault.  It's baked into the objective.

The question of logic and fantasy worlds has to be answered.  We're not going to drain a swamp with our leg in an alligator.  In the long run, if we're going to take up a position, it's not enough to "express" our position.

We have to defend it.

So.  Logic vs. fantasy.   For nine posts I've expressed the position that for the world to have any real depth, it has to be founded in sufficient logic to make the world believable for the players.  If the players let go a hammer in the game world, it's reasonable for them to expect the hammer to fall.  Likewise, because the players are passionately experienced with a gravity force equal to Earth, and with no other example long-standing gravitational force, it stands to reason that whatever fantasy world we invent, that gravity thing's GOT to be familiar.  Otherwise, it's just problems, problems, problems.

Now, a swamp full of alligators can come rush at me with hundreds of examples of things that haven't got to be as exact to the real world as gravity ... and they're right.  Many things don't have to be "logical."  I have beetles the size of houses in my game world.  This is definitely not logical.  Physics just don't work that way.  I could rattle off about a thousand things in my world that fit equally into the "not-logical" category.  I don't hide it, it's right out there, I've systematically organized it into a blog.  But conveniently, when the alligators come at me for, "But Alexis, the game world isn't about logic!" ... these thousand illogical things in my game world are never addressed.  No, what's addressed, are the logical things.

Readers.  Some things have to be logical.  Our players expect it, our players make plans depending on it — and when that's not what they get, the respect our game world gets goes down.

Now.  We can all think of "silly" game worlds, and how much fucking fun they were.  Oh fuck, did we laugh our fucking guts out.  Even I, dear readers, spent hundreds of hours in jack-off game worlds, laughing so hard, I fell on the floor.  Human beings are funny.  Creativity can be fantastically funny.  And D&D, with all it's absurdity, is THE straight-man of games.

Where are those games now?  Gone, of course.  All the people I played those games with?  Quit D&D.  They became insurance salesmen, they became engineers, they got families, they learned to play golf and bring their work home and forget about "childish" things like laughing really hard about ... well ... shit like this:

If ever they thought it was funny ... well, that was fleeting.  Because however funny something is, it's shallow.  It doesn't last.  Three or four years from now, that really funny, funny game world ... it'll be gone.  Or dragging itself over the same ground with different asses in the chairs.

And there are DMs who can do that.  There are people who never get tired of NASCAR.  They never get tired of catcalling women on the street.  They never get tired of laughing at a waiter dropping a tray.  They still watch the Simpsons.  The only thing they get tired of is jokes they don't get.

I'm assuming the people here, reading this blog, aren't those people.  After all, I'm not pouring water into the swamp, making the alligators happy ... I'm draining the swamp.  I'm making arguments that say, if your world's going to better, then — while it can keep a whole lot of illogical stuff — it really needs to increase it's logic.  It needs more logic.  Not total logic.  Just more.

See, logic isn't a black-and-white thing.  We can set the measure.  I'm arguing that climate-plus-flora is something the players expect.  That nations have behaviours.  That available food dictates culture.  That complexity creates rewards that may not seem to matter in the beginning, but will later on.

But I'm doing a little more than that, and I haven't talked about this yet.  It's coming up in bits and pieces from commenters on the worldbuilding posts.

The one person the game world must feel real for is the creator.  If our game worlds don't feel substantive and positively exciting for us, then we'll never get far enough in the construction phase to present anything to our players.  Most of the time, when someone argues that we should have less detail in our game world, this springs from a past experience where they added too much ... so much, in fact, that they began to HATE those details.  The advice to have less detail is desperate to circumvent this, hoping this will make the game flexible and lively ... but less detail just makes something shallow and horrid for different reasons.

On the whole, this is like the person who gets out of a deep, complicated relationship with plenty of responsibilities and expectations ... and argues that "next time," they'll keep it simple and easy — only to invest so little into their relationship that they're quickly looking to upgrade into another relationship where they actually give a shit about something.

There are no easy answers.  An overly complex game can be garbage.  A simple game can be garbage.  The difference between "good" and "garbage" is not complexity.  It's how well a thing is made.  It's the care and consideration taken by the maker.  It's the willingness of sacrificing time and pain to make something right; and then becoming addicted to that sacrifice.

I counsel the readers to make worlds with density and depth because, in the end, YOU will need it to have those things if you expect the world to sustain your interest five or ten years from now.  I'm not saying, "If you don't care about climate, your players won't."

I'm saying, "If you don't care about climate, you won't care at all."

You don't have to believe this.

I'll end with a story from Niels Bohr, as told by Slavoj Zizek:

A friend visited Niels Bohr in a countryside house, and noticed above the entrance door, a horseshoe ... the friend was shocked and addressed Niels Bohr, "My god, I thought you were a scientist; do you believe in this kind of superstitious crap?"

Niels Bohr answered, "No, I"m not crazy."

Then the other guy says, "But why is it there?"

Here, Niels Bohr gave the correct answer ... "I have it there because I was told that it works, even if you don't believe in it."

 

Stoneless

Yesterday's post was written out of hurt.

Words were said about me elsewhere, days ago, that left me disturbed; in pain; feeling misused.  It happens.  I understand why it happens.  I say things here that lead it on, so of course there's no mystery.  But still, I'm human, I'm vulnerable to a cutting remark and occasionally, they will haunt me for several days while I puzzle my way out of it.

If I were the sort that cowered from a fight, I'd be afraid to punch back.  Unfortunately, I know I can punch back, I have a forum from which to punch back ... and I have a long history where the privilege of punching back was denied me through early abuse as a young man.  And so, there is a compulsion to punch back.

I was often told, "They're just saying those things to get a rise out of you; don't give them the satisfaction."  This is common advice.  Unfortunately, with some people, if they don't get a reaction, it doesn't mean they stop.  No, they see it as a challenge ... and they don't stop, ever, until they get what they want.  I learned early, if in fact you want bullies to stop ... scare them.

Outbully the bully.

This has a price.  So let me say clearly, anyone on the net has every right and justification for going after me as hard and as viciously as they please.  I've given them that right.  Exercising it would not put them in the wrong.

Imagine a horizontal scale.  Towards the left we become more and more destructive, to ourselves and to others.  On the right, we become constructive.  Imagine that everything we say and do fits somewhere on this scale, in terms of that act's consequences.  I push someone's car out of a snowbank; they get to work on time; that's constructive.  I fail to shovel my sidewalk after a snowfall; someone slips, twist their ankle; that's destructive.

Measuring yesterday's post, where does it fall.  I gave in to the hurt, so I wrote a post that many of my supporters would prefer I did not write.  Like this one, it's full of personality and is not about worldbuilding.  Additionally, the anti-establishmentarianism of the post contributes to the general feeling that my blog continues to be, without change, toxic.  Hate-deserving.  From that perspective, the post harms me and my reputation, displeases my avid readers, changes no one's mind and, in fact, wastes the 90 minutes I took to write it.

That said, yesterday's post also addressed a subject rarely examined.  It informed.  Among new readers, it helps establish my reputation as a well-read, multi-disciplined man of letters, that I'm clearly not interested in the white racist agenda, though I'm a very white male; that I'm clearly liberal; and that I'm not fundamentally dependent in my thinking upon pleasing other persons.  Yesterday's post was punching back ... but I didn't lie, I didn't make up falsehoods to support my position and I stand by every word.  It was written from a position of integrity.  From that perspective, was it really hate-deserving ... or does it only look like it is, as it was punching back?

Is punching back always wrong?  Or is punching back a means of correcting someone else's destructive behaviour?

If someone sets out to insult me, or my writing, or my belief system, or the effort I take towards D&D, are they doing so with an intention of constructive improvement ... or are they, like me, surrendering to a destructive impulse?

I thought long and hard about yesterday's response to the hurt I felt.  I didn't write, "Ya, look at this dolt, what a hack, yada yada ..."  I didn't link the source of my hurt.  I didn't address the actual comment at all.  I tried to address, rather, the reason why the comment hurt; and from what society-driven impulse it originated.  I believe I am not liked by most readers because (a) I write with an "authoritative voice," which implies that I'm right and you're wrong; (b) I hold opinions that virtually no one else holds; and (c) I'm inflexible.

Welcome to a large number of the criticisms I receive ... exactly the three words used here.  The fact that the website needs to say authoritative writing is NOT these things only goes to show how often it's accused of being these things.

My opinions derive from the many books I've read, the many people I've heard, met, and heard give lectures, the highly diverse array of materials from which I take my learning and my refusal to accept anything "on faith," ever.  Once I did take things on faith: the bible, the government, authority, love, the golden rule ... oh, many things.  I have scars all over me caused by the faith I had in those things.  Remove faith and wish fulfilment from your opinions and without a doubt, the new opinions you have will not sound like anyone you know.

I'm inflexible because I've done the research.  Because I've walked the walk.  Because I've defended my positions hundreds of times to hundreds of different people.  When those defenses have failed, I corrected my opinion, accepting that I was wrong and thus strengthened my position.  If I build a fortification, and someone comes along and destroys the west tower ... and I learn how and why the west tower fell, then the new west tower is going to be better built, better thought out, stronger and more able to withstand a siege.

Most people I know, when their west tower is destroyed, they pretend it wasn't.  They don't fix anything.  They just go on pretending everything is exactly the same, no matter how often they get punched in the face by others plainly demonstrating that tower isn't doing its job.  I've spent a lifetime placing every brick and firming up every juncture.  Yet some rube shows up and makes a big deal out of picking up and throwing a tiny stone, made of the first and last thought they've ever had about the subject.  And when this stone fails to penetrate my lifetime of evidence, consideration and argument on the subject, they become shaken and flurried that my wall didn't fall down.  "You never admit that you're wrong!" I'm told; though, in fact, it's because I've admitted I'm wrong thousands of times ... and corrected for those wrongs.

This is why I'm inflexible.

Still, my best readers would like me to return to great posts about worldbuilding.  And I would ... except that I don't have an unending storehouse of these great posts ready to go at any given moment.  I have to think of one; and that takes time.  And meanwhile, life is happening.  As a writer, I want to write ... and not always for the purpose of having something wonderful and new to say about worldbuilding, or because I've invented some spectacular new game functionality.  These things are not invented easily or often.  I just don't have them on tap.

I do wish I wouldn't get hurt.  It's not that I'd wish others would stop attacking me; I don't want to tell anyone else what they should do.  But I do wish it didn't hurt; that I was inured, or unfeeling, or like Quasimodo, made of stone.

Conformity

I don't like to read the IMDb trivia for a film.  While interesting details are learned, often I also learn something about the film's making or its design that I can't unsee once I know it.  This has occasionally ruined individual shots in films for me, and once or twice a whole movie.

I'm sure this is a common experience.

Knowledge has this side effect regarding a great many things.  Outside of art, I prefer the effect.  For example, I'd rather know that Alexius Comnenus of the Byzantine Empire wasn't expecting thousands of nutjob crusaders when he asked Pope Urban for help in 1095.  I was told otherwise by my high school teachers.  I also prefer knowing that the American and French revolutions were not grassroots popular uprisings, but propaganda campaigns by rich assholes who wanted to retain their properties while getting rid of their overlords.  Again, not the story I was told.  Likewise, many of us have learned much of what we were told about Christopher Columbus was horseshit, and likewise with regards to considerable host of other "heroes" and historical figures.  I recognize that people don't like having these icons shattered, but I'm different in that regard.

Moreover, once I learn something along these lines, I can't "unsee" it.  For example, recently I convinced my partner to watch Fury Road; this was the end of a long campaign.  She didn't like it; not because of the violence or the story, but because of the intensity of male toxicity that impregnates the story ... even though the toxicity is clearly messaged as bad, with that toxicity coming up the loser in the end.  Which is, of course, a reason why the film didn't do well with the white boys of the alt-right.

Our discussion turned to the appearance of the villain males throughout ... not just Immortal Joe, but all of them.  The desired effect of make-up, pins, nails and other freaky appurtanances is to evoke fear in the observer.  The same principle underlies the various face-painting that's been incorporated in hundreds of cultures when preparing for war, and the subject could be left there.  However, I feel compelled to point out that one's outward appearance is not of direct benefit to the wearer.  I can wear the paint; but when I'm out there, I can't see the paint.  No matter what others see, I'm still me.

Let's take that a step farther.  In a primitive culture without mirrors, relying wholly upon the occasional askew reflection to be found in water, only occasionally, our looking frightful as primitives is a truth we accept from others.  More to the point, I rely upon you to make my face, while you rely on me.  When I make your face, I'm not able to make a face that you may necessarily find frightening; I must make a face that I find frightening.  In effect, I create your outward "personality" and you create mine.  This is a personality made prior to a battle, without my input.  Yet, to maintain the respect of my clan, I must live up to the face I'm given — a face I'll never see.

This provides context for the tribalism that is fundamentally a part of our cultural structure.  It's not the paint that makes us think this way, but the co-operation that allows individuals to forsake that individuality for the benefit of the greater whole.  This practice has been co-opted for millennia, despite advancements in technology, because it's what makes humans ... human.

The practice of deciding how everyone is going to look, past the clothes and the helmets to precise ways of holding the weapon and the body erect; the manner in which everyone's facial hair will be maintained, the expression on everyone's faces, the tone of voice and ritual of speech ... once regimented in a specific, ritualised manner, the practice builds endurance, the willingness to stand fast in a fight, the willingness to die in place rather than forsake one inch, welds a group of individuals into a unit as unyielding as geology.  One man will not break and run, because there is nowhere to run to.  From birth, every man is indoctrinated to understand that cowardice is a permanent, irreconcilable social disgrace ... not only in that I will be disgraced if I'm a coward, but that I will perpetrate disgrace upon every coward I encounter, ruthlessly and contemptuously.  Every man knows this.  Better that I stand here and face impossible odds, knowing that I'm going to die, another faceless drone among an empire of faceless drones, than that I present the least sense of being an individual.

This is not a post about Fury Road ... but it is a post about the yearning of males, particularly white males, for individuals of the culture to conform with what they perceive is sacrosanct of that culture.  The 80s films, the ones where all the women were victims, were "great fun" and "innocent" ... but this new Mad Max is nonsense, nihilistic, sterile and empty of meaning (because the originals were Shakespeare).  What's changed?  Certainly not the filmmaker, as he's famously still George Miller.  Nope.  It's that women are depicted in the film as able, capable and ultimately triumphant over the white, white, white, white males.   So white, we have to paint them white, just to make the point clear.

Women are not "scary" ... painting them just makes them sexy.  They haven't got facial hair; they can't put the same expression on their faces; their tone of voice doesn't conform, the ritual of speech doesn't ring true ... and most of all, if one of them backed out of a fight, there is absolutely no way that society is going to indoctrinate women to stand fast and be murdered, or indoctrinate men to ruthlessly express contempt for a woman who protects herself.  Functionally, as humans, we just don't work that way.

Which can only exacerbate the fundamental, biological comprehension that males are disposable in war and battle, but women are not.  Understanding that this is a "comprehension" from the male's point of view and NOT THE WOMAN'S.  Still, males have been doing things in a particular way for a very long time, and they don't like that this way is turning out to be ... well ... limited.

Still, we are seeing an intensive cultural rise in white males abandon their individuality for the comforting conformity of a singular, co-operative, aggressive, discriminative outward-assigned communal value system.  Why comforting?  Because individuality is confusing and unsettling.  It is full of questions.  What do I believe?  Am I a good person?  Did I behave wrongly five minutes ago?  What should I have done?  Questions like these can dominate anyone's consciousness if they haven't something to ground themselves — like what my family told me to believe ... which is, in fact, just another outward-assigning group of people.  Thinking for oneself — being an individual — just feels wrong for virtually everyone in the population.  This is what's meant when sociologists or anthropologists talk about us having a "need" for belonging.  What they don't say, of course, because it doesn't play well in the media, is that "belonging" means being told what to think, how to think, when to think and why not to think for yourself.

As enlightened people of the 21st century, we pretend this isn't true.  We rush to spew out content like the comment above as though it's on point, imaginative and unique ... when it's exactly what I expected to find when I went to the comments section of IMDb's Fury Road page.  It was the fifth comment down on the 1-star ratings.  The other comments talked mostly about how the violence was "silly."  Because violent films don't sell millions of film copies, at all.

We pretend that everyone is special and that our tastes are so unique, but everyone's list of top ten anything always includes the same tired list of the same approximately 100 shared items.  We know inherently that if we include something obscure and commonly frowned upon in our list when sharing it publicly, we'll have to explain ourselves ... and that just brings up that list of self-abusing questions that make us run for the communal experience in the first place.  Everyone recognizes that if we post a list of, say, "top 10 films," what others see will cause them to judge us.  It is easier to pick "safe" options than to risk being judged.  As a result, we're taken at our word ... and most of us have found ourselves in some situation where we've agreed that Return of the Jedi is one of our "favourite" movies, only to have to sit miserably through it when family members set up a surprise birthday party where we're expected to be pleased as punch to sit through this awful, terrible film.  Again.  Rather than admit we never liked the thing.

Our clothes don't reflect our inviduality so much as the "individuality" we think others will accept quietly.  And those who don't behave this way, who dare to be actually individual, get to endure this constant, abusive, unrelenting joke-making, under the rubric of, "I don't mean to be disrespectful."  Because this is how things are.

This blog is hostile, but not towards those who fail to conform, but towards those who do.  This gives me the semblance of "affecting greater importance" than other people, because I have zero interest in identifying with other people.  The very fact that I don't care to identify suggests it's because I feel "superior" ... when, in fact, as a single, isolated, totally vulnerable outcast without a tribe, I'm vastly inferior to the forces arraigned against me.  A single individual makes a terrible army.

I speak disloyally of the D&D pantheon of holy inventors because I didn't sanctify them and I don't recognize the faith granting that sanctification.  I don't believe in any faith.  "Faith" is what we have when we let someone else paint our face for the greater good that I won't choose.  Fuck faith, and the seeds it gestates.

Finally, I scorn the words of bloggers who love editions, modules, artworks and other elements of traditional D&D because I can see plainly that these are not the blogger's words.  They are repeated words, unexamined words, ritually repeated and never truly defended, because they are indefensible.  This blog is a campaign that repeatedly examines the words, exactly the thing that individuals do, but which belongers are terrified of doing.  Over and over I post the words, ask questions, demonstrate the failings, demand explanations for why such as such is so popular, or what makes it good, when it is so obviously, flagrantly shit, especially compared with words originating from sources other than D&D.  Traditional D&D is bad game design, bad writing, bad interactive advice, badly organized publishing, mawkishly disastrous business envisioning and, on the whole, irascibly resistant towards educating non-players HOW TO PLAY.  This last, obviously, should be the first thing addressed, but it's the last thing every admitted.

The crime that other people see is "not conforming."  I know that.  But the crime I prefer to address is "the game is shit as written."

The British Army was once an irresistible military force; I don't question that.  But it was a force that defended racism, brutality, theft, systematic murder of both cultures and people and ultimately the perpetuation of human misery.

Letting someone else paint your face may be all well and good for you, but I'm not a native.  I don't live in a tribal group because tribes are selfish, territorial, coercive, ultimately enslaving entities, whose practice in dealing with any desire for freedom is to shame, hate and ultimately to ostracise, which once upon a time meant dying in the wilderness alone.

Civilisation has taken the teeth out of ostracisation.  I, for one, am happy in the wilderness.