Retrospective, October 2010

These retrospectives are a good opportunity for me to look back.  I do mean to write more about chasing the goblins into the forest, but it's the first of the month and I'd like to interrupt that for this.

Four years ago the big post was my review of James Raggi's module Death Frost Doom.  My players still speak of it and shudder.  I had promised Raggi that if he sent me a copy of the module, I would run my players through it - which I did, at least until my players refused to continue any farther.

A couple of months ago I spied this post that hearkened back to my "fucking up royally" when I ran the module.  Apparently, James Young, writer of the post, has no actual idea how a 'review' works.  The point of a review isn't to change or alter the material to make it work for you - the point of a review is to give a frank, unbiased reading of the material as it appears, so that others may view the review as a baseline for their own opinions.

Given that my players grew so bored with the module, run as written, that they eventually rose from the table and refused to continue playing, I felt that this was indicative of the quality of the actual material.  Regardless of my ability to massage that material to make it 'fit' in my world.

Of course I could have made it work!  Of course I could have shaped and shifted the rooms around, getting rid of those that were pointlessly empty, softening the heavy-handed obvious tropes surrounding how 'terrifying' it was supposed to be (my players could not stop rolling their eyes every time I read another of Raggi's descriptions), etcetera.  But that wasn't the agreement.  The agreement was a review in exchange for free material - the same agreement I've made with many a theatre producer, filmmaker, bookwriter or presenter in days when I once worked as a journalist.

On the weekend, I happened to catch Jon Favreau's film Chef, a film about a chef who gets a very, very bad review and is in turn forced to review the way he is pursuing his own passion.  The message is plain - very often a bad review is indicative that something is wrong.  At the same time, the error will most likely not be in the creator, but in the thing that is created.  If I write a review of Raggi's material, or anyone else's, that describes my players quitting because they're bored out of their minds, in addition to being pissed at the obvious manipulation and cheesy descriptive text, that isn't an attack on Raggi or all that Raggi stands for, that's an attack on one piece of material that Raggi produced.  If Raggi wants to look at that review and ignore me - or if other players love the material and ignore me - so be it.  I don't expect to change the world with a review.  I wish to express what I saw, what I experienced, the reactions I received and so on - so that others who read this blog and know my stand on role-playing can be forewarned.

I was led to believe that Death Frost Doom was special, that it was dark, that it was in some way more exciting than other role-playing modules.  On the contrary, I found it was very flat, virtually a one-note symphony, with overwritten description, underwritten content and a tendency towards the mastubatory.  The players described the experience of running through it as "the puzzle that enables you to reach the next puzzle," an experience they equated with 1990s video puzzle game culture.  I, personally, found it anything but scary.  I must believe from the descriptions online of its fright-factor that bloggers are remarkably unimaginative, naive, terribly over-protected mamma's darlings who have never really experienced anything in their personal lives that was, in fact, actually scary.  For those of us who are jaded, the room and context descriptions were campy and forced.

The television series that inspired this post from October was much darker.  It is one of my favorite posts.  I did not include it among the How to Play Essays, as it would have been out of context and probably misunderstood.  I highly recommend the series The Nazis and the Final Solution.  The youtube link on the site years ago is dead now, but a vigorous search on google videos can turn up copies.  The show helps to emphasize the very real truth that terror is not something created from cheesy descriptions of strange walls, pictures, rooms and so on.  Terror arises from the mundane, from our lack of control as we see completely ordinary things emerging and swelling until we realize that there's no escape.  Present justifications, for example, to once again initiate the same war in the middle east that proved fruitless and destructive for more than a decade, to fight an enemy with a lot of press that is in fact no different from hundreds of other 'terrorist' groups presently controlling parts of Zaire, Liberia, Colombia, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Burma and Indonesia.  Those groups, however, do not stand on ground that Halliburton would like to control, so we don't get news stories about them - that is, until they kill 200 children in a school somewhere.

The mundane, the ordinary life of the ordinary American, as the country moves steadily towards a more imperialist foreign policy, exchanging the lives of children for territory to support the avarice of wealthy autocrats.  Walls and rooms designed in poor pseudo-Baroque scenes of disgust only serves to distract from those things in this world that well and truly lift us from our beds at night, forcing us to pace in the small hours.  "Where is my son?  Is he safe?  Why hasn't my daughter written?  What am I going to do once the company lets me go?  Will anyone hire me now that I'm sixty?"  And so on.

Freaky paintings only hold a fascination for the wide-eyed innocent.

There were a lot of other things I wrote that October.  Reading the texts, I feel I must have felt driven. I wrote some good stuff on alternative magic, here and here; on rolling dice, here and here; and on history, here.  I looked long and hard at the Pressure post for the Essays book, finally deciding against it due to its reference to someone else's material.

I also think that, with the review and the other things written that month, I began to cement the perception that I just didn't give a shit about people who did not hold my point of view.  That was certainly how it was interpreted.  I had been writing this blog a little more than two years and I remember feeling that the message wasn't getting through.

I'll state is clearly now, as I know most of the readers here already know it well.  The way that most people play D&D is utter shit.  It is dull and repetitive and reflects a shallow easiness in design that fails to meet the standards that I feel the game deserves.  I do not care that others find this adequate.  I do not.  This is why I do not play in worlds run by other people.  Those worlds bore me.  It would be very hard for me to give support to such worlds or for such play as I've witnessed, because I don't respect it.  Were I to use phrases such as, "Everyone should run the world they want to," it would lip service to a philosophy I don't embrace.

I feel no camaraderie with people whose only defense of their world is that it's 'fun.'  That sounds empty and dull.  It sounds like a world without detail, without ideals, without imagination.  It sounds like the same crappy world I've seen hundreds of people run.  Given the choice of running in that world or spending the evening doing anything else, I would do anything else.  Where that world and I are concerned, I might as well not play D&D at all.

I hope that's clear.  If that world were the only sort of world that existed in the game, I wouldn't play!  I would go find some other pastime, something deserving of my attention.

Saying that this or that world is "good" isn't enough.  I want proof that your world promises a well-spent evening.  Looking around the blogosphere, however, I'm not seeing that.  I'm seeing dunder-headed repetitions of design features that were advanced in the early 1980s that still fail to address the real issues of role-playing - managing players, enabling agency, establishing tension, world design and social relevance.

I'm looking for an engineering department and all I see are used-car lots.

Retrospective, September 2010

Funny, I can't remember anything about what I was doing four years ago.  I remember I had a few plans.  I was going to write about the products behind my trade table, so I started a post on metals & minerals that became one of those posts with the most views ever (mostly because of people looking for metals & minerals, and not this blog).  I also tried a completely failed effort at building a general database among several DMs - which would help to convince me afterwards that where it comes to a serious view on the game, I am alone.

I wrote posts about the random generation of maps, which I know someone did have use for as they told me a couple years later.  I ranted against modules (nothing new), which would eventually lead to my making a deal with James Raggi and my attempt to run Death Frost Doom.  But that's another month.

The most significant event of that September was my spitting in the face of Alexander of the Escapist - following an obscure offer on his part to somehow be part of the online magazine that he still runs (so far as I know).  The initial meeting began with this post, in a conversation between Zak and I. Basically, Alexander offered,

"I wasn't envisioning that the material would go up on "my" website (The Escapist). I'm assuming material would go up on a to-be-named website, at another domain name, unaffiliated with The Escapist (wiki.DandDAcademy.com or whatever). 

"It would simply run on spare bandwidth and capacity that we have on The Escapist - Basically we pay a lot of money every month for a server and database capable of handling a million people downloading videos on Wednesday morning, which means that the rest of the week we have lots of idle capacity, and there's nothing this wiki could do to put a dent in that."

I remember looking at that, four years ago, and looking at the website for the Escapist, thinking, "What an immense pile of crud."  That was more or less it.  Maybe there was an opportunity there, but somehow I couldn't see myself affiliated with a site that promoted spewed infantile entertainment.  For free.  I saw it (and still see it) as a sleazy attempt to exploit my material without offering me any real compensation, while practically guaranteeing that I would never be taken seriously.  That's my name associated with that website - and while Zak has no trouble being one of the infantile crowd, or having everyone in the world know he wallows in the world of porn manufacture, I find myself seeking a somewhat better crowd of supporters.

There were, however, consequences.  Many people who felt the jury was still out on me declared me guilty after that.  Doors were closed.  A flood of people directed from Zak's side of the community stopped coming around, stopped commenting.  The first attempt at a data base would die a sour, lingering death and I would lose a lot of faith.  Many of the bitter posts that came from me over the next year would have their roots in my sense that the community as a whole had it's head in a dark place.

That's changed.  I've seen far too much positive support these last four years to question my decision. I don't know what the future holds - but it isn't being part of a joint effort.  I wouldn't want it, knowing that I'm on the cutting edge.  The only thing holding me back is time.  

Retrospective, August 2010

I had it suggested to me by my partner Tamara that I should 'recover' some of the posts I wrote in years past, in some manner that highlights not just that they were written, but how I feel about them now. I suggested that on the first day of every month I could highlight those posts that had been written throughout the month four years previously. Thus, as it is August 1st, I should write about those posts I wrote in August, 2010. Well, why not?

That month I wrote a 4,000 word post on Theology that is certainly among my longest at the time. This was part of the Civilization Posts that I was still writing.  Naturally, I overwhelmed the reader with anything so long and so involved, but the three comments I received were supportive. I haven't much to add; the article needs more examples and needs to quote its source material and would probably be ten times as long if I sat down and rewrote it a thesis.  It also needs references to D&D throughout the post, not just at the end; but then, how interested are people in truly understanding what is behind the religions they invoke in their worlds.

I'm sure I just read this post from Caffeinated Symposium a couple days ago about how religions need to be more about knowledge and community structure than one-paragraph descriptions of gods.  Dave Cesarano makes a good point and it's definitely worth reading the article.

August 2010 was the month those Chilean miners were trapped underground, and I wrote a post about playing in pitch darkness, Gaming Under Duress.  The comments seemed to suggest that I am not alone in thinking of ways to play in order to pass the time.  I have led people through spontaneous games during camping trips, long-distance drives and occasionally while working with them at less-than-interesting jobs.  Imagination is a game that can be played anywhere.

I wrote some of my reasons for why I don't let people buy or sell magic in my post, Ewoks with Napalm, forever a contentious issue.  One of my offline players, upon hearing the possibility of making a vintage wine in large quantities that could heal hit points, immediately annoyed me by exclaiming, "Imagine what I could sell that for!"

This brings to mind three scenarios.  The first, if the wine can be sold very easily, then there ought to be tons of it at the market, depreciating the price and more or less making it worthless to sell, or even to bother making.  Why would a player make magic wine if magic wine is available cheap at the grocery store?

Secondly, if its not easy to sell, because its expensive, then why would a grocer buy it to sit on his shelf where it's not going to easily find a buyer, while at the same time is a screaming sign for thieves to break in and rob the place?  It's always interesting to me that the players walk into a perfectly ordinary shop, drop 5,000 gold for a magic ring and the proprietor is like, "Sure, I keep it right here next to the hair gel," because obviously there's no need for a place like this to have the sort of security Tiffany's jewelry possesses.  There are only about a dozen non sequiturs there.  Does the state really sanction this shop to sell off magic potions and swords and wands without feeling any compulsion to control the distribution of magic for the sake of retaining authority?  I guess not.

Finally, how exactly does the shop keeper ensure that every bottle of 200 is in fact 'magical'?  How does the buyer ensure quality control?  Even if we assume everyone in the kingdom is born with a magic tooth that let's them detect magic at will, how do we know that THIS bottle's magic actually heals hit point and doesn't just make hair a little softer and bouncier?  We surely can't count on identify magic, because even if you have the spell you need to above 4th level before it gets to be reliable.

I'm not going to pay 40 g.p. for a 'magical' bottle of wine when I don't know if it works or not.  Sure, the store owners in video games may be perfectly honest, all the time, but my world just doesn't work that way.  If there's a way to scam someone, a scam will be managed - and a whole population will have experience with the scam, meaning they won't trust anyone when it comes to buying magic.

So why do I sell healing salves at the apothecaries if all of the above is true?  Pity.  I sympathize with a party's desire to stay alive.  I'm not going to let a party manipulate that sympathy into easy bucks, though.  Push too hard on my good nature and that good nature evaporates.

In August I wrote four posts on Duty - Intro, Society, Self and what I called 'The Flow.'  Pretty heady stuff, a bit preachy, all on role-playing and interaction between the DM and the Player.  Funny, I don't find it much reflects the content of the Advanced Guide I've just released; the last one does, however, make allusions to recent events.  Curious how that always seems to happen.

Those posts didn't get much attention - or rather, they didn't receive much feedback.  I've read through them and I find the thinking a bit scattered.  I was struggling to nail down where the responsibility in gaming lies, towards others, towards ourselves, in our behaviour and in what we deserve to respect or the respect we deserve to be given.  It's a difficult subject.  I handled it better in How to Run, albeit very differently, as I approached the subject more from the point of view that we're not in as much control over our actions as we'd like to me.  Research done since those duty articles has taught me that I'm fighting uphill against issues that are hard to isolate and manage even as they're happening.  In 2010, I gave no attention at all to stress.

And, too, those were coming after an abusive and unforgiving post I wrote, one that still gets a bit of attention, Creativity and Breast Feeding.  Ah, Alexis.  Will you never change?

That's one of those posts that probably lost me the approval that I've gained with posts like The Great RPG, where the comments call me 'sensei' and 'fucking brilliant.'  There's no question in my mind that the hardest, most galling thing about me as a writer is that I will, one moment, shake a person down to their core with something they wholly agree with, then piss on all their loves and dearly held beliefs the next gawddamned day.  Most of the time, I don't do this intentionally, though that only makes it worse. It helps feed the theory that I must be psychotically unaware that I've only just made someone like me, and now I'm making someone hate me.  Jeez, don't I get that?

I suppose I do.  Thing is, I'm not your sensei or your worst critic - I'm just a guy who is taking the data and compiling it as I see it.  Then I'm writing it down in the way that makes the most sense to me, at the time.  Like a scientist, the last thing I'm concerned about is the 'comfort' level of the material. No matter what I write, some people are going to really like it and some people are not.  Sometimes, two days apart, these two extremes will be felt by the same people.

We're all pretending to understand this game - and in a wider sense, the whole system.  We're all doing our best with the material.  I happen to be in love with the material, more in love with it than I am with myself.  This has made me into a sort of dangerous, thought-spewing robot without any morality or sensibility to the sufferings or emotional dogma of others.  Made worse by my willingness to abuse the shit out of the reader in order to make my point.  Which I will do because if I make my point lightly, it will be viewed lightly.

Looking back at the August posts, I see I had readers who commented then but who never comment now.  So it goes.  I know you're still reading me.  I know you're there, I know you're grinding your teeth and I know you won't comment now because, well, it's personal, isn't it?  That's fine.  My numbers go up.  My books apparently sell, much to my appreciation for those of you who are willing to let me in yet again.  I'm grateful for that.

Still a lot left to write yet, however.  There always is.