Dratgash Hills

Once I would have rushed to post this map on this blog, but a previous version of this has been on patreon since yesterday.  The above has no fixed location in my gaming world, instead representing the "explored" lands related to the play tutorial on my wiki, specifically this page for the "Dratgash Hills."  The wilderness generation seems to be working fine, though it's going to need a hundred tweaks and added material as time passes, which is the intent and purpose here.  For the present I'm satisfied that it is building a world, though somewhat mundane by 5e standards.  Personally, I've always found the actual concrete play the most interesting thing, since I'm interested in making right choices for survival, rather than getting my fantasies on.

The map shows 6-mile hexes in bold, 2-mile hexes in semi-bold and 0.741-mile hexes in faint lines.  I don't plan to map the whole world in this format, only what this party encounters, with the light brown area showing, generously, the parts the party has tramped through.  I had experimented with this map design about a year ago, not sure how I was going to use it, but I felt it would be best to keep it hid until it came to be useful.  I do like the trees a great deal, especially as usually I don't do trees well.

The small number "3" in the corner of one hex indicates the number of "happenstance" rolls that have been made there, which must be kept track of.

As soon as the party actually encounters a dangerous living creature, which would be nice, actually producing a combat, I'll make another combat video.  Meanwhile, as I say, it's been a lot more time spent on Patreon lately, primarily because of the chat room there.

It's not a lot of people using it or anything, it's only that on Patreon, I get a better idea of who's actually reading my work, of who's involved, what their opinions are and what things I should work on.  The campaign poll, when I put one up, gets a good conversation going.  A 1$ donation gets the reader into the poll and the comments section there, but a $3 donation gets into the real conversation, the one that takes place in the chat room.

Hell, what are you going to spend $3 on, anyway?  At least you can lurk in the chatroom, which most of my supporters plainly do, since I'm there several times a day, every day, and I'm always ready to answer questions or say something.  

Come and join my patreon.  It's better than blog-reading.

Inevitability

I decided to be resilient.  This links to the second episode for Arliss and Bertrand's adventure into Grimstone Hollow, a hobgoblin lair.  No spoilers.

The original plan remains unchanged.  Create a random dungeon generation, use it to create a dungeon for a fictional party, video tape the combats and post them on youtube, provide a link to the Authentic Wiki to the transcript of the video, so that links can be provided to rules for anything that happens during that combat ... and then progress the party further along using the forementioned generation process.

Nor does this generation have to be dungeon-oriented.  I'm certain I can make a reasonably interesting wilderness/civilisation hex-crawling generator that, with imagination, can produce practical outdoor scenarios and set-ups to combats as well.  I haven't attempted something like that since the late 1980s, but I'm way, way smarter than my 20-something self, so I'm willing to give that a try.

Meanwhile, I think I've found a way to kick that football.

Here are the downsides of my plan.

1. Work.  Lots of work.  Work to make the generator, work to update the self-play tutorial, frequent work to build unmade rule sets to compliment the other work being done, work to run the combats for myself, work to edit the combats, work to write up the transcript of the combat, work to keep updating things across several different medias and webpages.

2. Errors.  Lots of errors.  Errors running the combats and forgetting rules, errors in mixing up numbers and errors in the generation tables, errors in the editing, errors with youtube posting, errors that have to be explained in the transcripts ... and a certain amount of shame in having to admit that even though I'm responsible for all these rules, I fuck up all the time because there are a lot of rules.

Here's the thing about that, though.  It's more important that I be authentic than that I be right.  I'd rather mess up the rule, and admit I messed up the rule, and either retcon or move on after the screw up, and take the shame-slash-embarrassment for that, than pose as some creature by pretending that I don't make mistakes or that anyone watching me should think they ought not to make mistakes.  DMing is complicated, it's self-distracting, and half the time we're paying so much attention to getting one thing right we get two other things wrong.  In the combat posted, I forgot to run Kragthar's attack at one point.  I didn't realise it until I was writing the transcript.  But I was concentrating so hard on explaining what was going on, especially with Grimgor, that I just forgot to make the attack.  I authentically fucked up.  And I authentically admitted it.  The wiki isn't called the Perfect Wiki.

3. Less room for other things.  The Streetvendor's Guide is a priority.  And now this is a priority, as I'll explain below.  Paid work, obviously, is a priority.  This blog is not.  Sorry.  People can watch for my content on the Wiki's recent changes page, or they can watch for updates on my patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3015466), where I will be posting.  If you want to know what I'm doing on some Tuesday, when you don't see a blog post, I suggest bookmarking these pages so you can see what I'm working on.  If you're coming to this blog everyday, or every few days, to see what's "new," please understand, this blog is going to chase what I'm doing.  It's no longer the tip of the spear.

I'm always a writer, so I'll play catch up here, and throw out things that matter to me here, but this just isn't where my head's going to be.

Okay, let's talk about the upsides of this feature.

A. It's animated.  Unlike the finished maps, which don't move, and unlike the videos I did earlier this year that featured me making maps, these videos are instantly accessible to anyone who's played D&D, even if they don't understand the modified AD&D rules.  Combatants are fighting each other in a dungeon.  This is instantly comprehensible.  There's more talking than movement, but point in fact, that's how D&D works also.

I've been searching around for something that's dynamic without my having to be on camera, because I don't want the problems that are associated with trying to edit my movements in coordination with my space.  My den at present is fairly cramped, and will remain as such, and I just don't want to deal with trying to remake my background, nor with worrying about how my 60-y.o. self looks on camera.  I don't need that judgment.  I'm self conscious enough about my voice.  So this gives me a lively, effective way to express that voice, to get excited about combat, while moving things around so the viewer doesn't get bored.  Win-win.

B.  It's narrative.  Since the events that take place are part of a continuing "story," one that hasn't been predetermined, I can benefit from the building of an audience that knows what's happened before and is ready to learn what happens next.  Moreover, because I'm going to get better as the series progresses, for the viewer, it will feel as though the idea is growing and strengthening, especially as the characters gain levels, additional allies, friends and other elements of the overall structure changes.

In effect, it's putting a harness around Dungeons & Dragons itself, using the elements of that game to build a real life audience for myself.  All the aspects of D&D that make it great, that it's ongoing, that players grow and improve, that the dangers increase, that the elements of the game are instantly recognisable and have a pre-made audience, are all things that work in my favour as my little group of adventurers survive or die, succeed or not, gain levels, gain power, gain status and seek new obstacles to overcome.  It's so obvious, I have no idea why I failed to stumble into this before.

C.  It's educational.  Dungeon masters everywhere are always looking for new ideas, new ways of looking at things, not just events that can take place in the characters' lives, but fixes for rules and other problems that come up all the time.  This gives me an opportunity to showcase elements of the game that I support, making a solid argument for their inclusion, through demonstration rather than argument.  As far as what this blog can do to convince people, a practical, ongoing experiment that shows the rules work, and that they make for interesting and ideal situations for future players, is too good an opportunity to pass up.  And, I think, it's bound to attract an fresher, differently thinking audience.

D.  It's interactive.  I've already established a tier on my patreon for anyone who wishes to give $1 per month, if they'd like to vote on what the party does next.  Here, for example, is the pole following the above linked combat:

I'll post it small, so if you don't want spoilers, don't open it.

It's not very much per month and it gives the feeling of being engaged ... and an engaged audience is a much better audience.

E. It's multi-media.  There's youtube, of course, and the poll, and being able to look at the work on the wiki, plus this blog, plus the comments that are bound to come up about this on Saturday's Q&A ... all of which means that if the viewer really wants to get into the concept, the content to be viewed doesn't stop at the end of the video.  They can go and immerse themselves in some other facet of this experiment, and see where it leads them.

All of these things together assure me that, despite the work, and despite the errors I'll make, and despite youtube's algorithm and the initially low numbers, provided I put in the time, I don't think I can lose.  My foot is going to hit that football and I'm going to feel great.

Charlie Brown Lands on His Back Again

I've taken a bold step, creating a short combat video related to the self-play tutorial and dungeon, found on youtube here:  https://youtu.be/cbTPP7MoVyM?si=acqLE3oh8R01aS0v

And predictably, it has face-planted with regards to the public media.  For me personally, youtube will always be Lucy, no matter how many times I line up to kick.

The idea is this: make a video of a combat, a demonstration of the combat rules being played out, not only in one example but combat after combat.  Create a transcript of the combat and post that to my wiki, so that I can add links to the transcript that explain the rules being played.  I think it's innovative, I think it's brilliant, I think there's absolutely nothing like it on youtube or in anything I've ever seen about D&D.

And unfortunately, without noticing it until it was too late, the entrance way and guard room look like a dick pic:

The analytics tell the tale:

For the first hour, the number of actual appearances on youtube, the chances that anyone could click the video and look at it, were under a hundred.  They are now very slowly climbing upwards (my other vids would have more than 10,000 impressions by this time).  Maybe this'll change, but I don't expect so.

Anyway, there's the link, see the video.  I'll be doing another like it, when I'm ready.  I woke up this morning, excited to be creating it, getting it rendered into video and making the transcript, but I see no reason for celebrating now.

It's a good idea.  Fuck you, youtube.

Dungeon Generation

The generator in 1979's DMG begins thusly:

From the start, it's plain that the purpose here is not to provide content for self-play, but for the DM to use the generator to spontaneously create a dungeon for other players.  It recommends amending results to fit the space available.

When I first encountered this in 1979, my immediate interest was to use the generator to create a dungeon that I could adventure through.  In those days, I did not care much about believability.  If one room had orcs and the next kobalds, and the next after that skeletons, I didn't care.  My concern was to run myself through combats, collect treasure, see where the halls and stairs took me, and do so as often as I liked, for as long as I liked, as there was no reason to explain any of the illogic to anyone.

I have in the past ascribed much of my confidence in running combats to the considerable number of battles that I ran through this generator.  Repetition helped me remember the damage done by every weapon, equate the armour with armour class, test the use of spells in game play, read the lists of spells when choosing them for my own characters, test combat strategies, group dynamics and compare many types of monsters against characters of different levels and abilities.

I recognise that many feel that such activities would be boring, or beneath them, or even a little bit shameful, in that it speaks to an obsessiveness with the game that might be uncomfortable.  I was certainly obsessed with the game in those days, when I did not write about it as now, but rather set up endless physical miniatures on a giant dungeon made of taped together graphpaper sheets, drawing the rooms by hand and then running those battles, keeping track with pencil and paper.  This being before 1985, I did not have a graphically-capable computer for this sort of work, there were no video games that could come close to this kind of combat simulation ... and as I remember it, I had lots and lots of time.

A considerable drawback that I found in the DMG generator as written was the completely useless empty spaces it provided.  The first table, "Periodic Checks," provides only a 1 in 20 chance of encountering anything alive:

There is an equal chance of finding a trick or trap.  There's a mere 15% chance of finding a room.  The rest of it is 75% of empty hallways, stairs, side passages, turning passages and the occasional door.

The room content's table is no better:

Of that 15% of chambers or rooms that occur, only 25% have a monster in them.  25% of 15% is 3.75% ... so that only an 8.75% of total rolls in this dungeon have something that can be fought ... and including the "monster only" result on the table above with the wandering monster on the periodic check table,  there's a 74.3% chance (in the whole dungeon) that any monster that IS discovered won't have any treasure.  Though yes, there is a 1 in 20 chance of treasure being found without a monster.  That increases the chance within the dungeon of generating a treasure result to a total of 2.5%.  That is, 1 in 40 rolls we make using the generator will produce a treasure.

No wonder the generator never developed any popularity.  It comes nowhere near the abundance of monsters and treasure that the company's modules provided!  Worse, because it's random, it's easy to fall into a slump where roll after roll, followed by drawing out the dungeon, can mean no meaningful result for actual hours of physical mapping.  I finally gave up as a kid and just rolled a d8 on the chamber/room table, adding 12 to the result.

I think I started with a d10, adding 10, but then I starting thinking, "Fuck it.  What do I want empty rooms for?"

This doesn't represent a failed concept, merely a very poorly rendered one.  Though I've admitted that I couldn't construct a generator myself ... but in all honesty, this hasn't been because I couldn't just move numbers around and improve the DMG version easily, but because every time I've considered this project, I want it to be much, much more than this.

There aren't enough results.  Granted, though, there are only so many kinds of tunnels, only so many kinds of rooms.  There are only so many things to put in rooms, for that matter.  If the reader doesn't believe me, suggest one addition to Table 5, above, that would be practical to roll every 20 times one encounters a room.  Go ahead.

After a lot of thought on this, I've come to the conclusion that the "periodic check/random room" design is the fundamental problem.  Halls and rooms are not randomly built by engineers who make humanoid lairs.  The placement of rooms within those lairs isn't random.  There are right and wrong places to put storerooms, common rooms, private chambers, treasure rooms.  They can't be scattered willy-nilly everywhere.  Every tunnel requires ungawdly amounts of excavation, shoring up, removal of materials, lighting and maintenance.  And the result of an unneeded hallway is tremendously inconvenient where livability is concerned.  Ask yourself if your home would be improved by an unnecessary 20 foot hallway between the bathroom and your bedroom, or your workspace and your kitchen.

By the way, that's a thing that's needed in 1 of every 20 rooms.  A bathroom.  There are none in this generator.  I see no reason why orcs or hobgoblins would be happy without one.

If the generator's going to be of value, it's got to account for the way we build habitats.  Everything else in this post is going to be specifically about humanoid habitats.  While some randomness does exist (my place is different from your place), the functionality of the way these rooms fit together must be accounted for.  We can't have a 180 foot hallway because we rolled a 1 or 2 three times in a row.

But that creates a problem ... not one of the generator itself, but of the possibility of the generator working the way it did for me 43 years ago.  I can fashion a set of generated layouts, and assign random numbers to them, but it means that as a player, I know what the next 3 or 5 or ten rooms are going to be, before opening any doors.  That spoils the "self-play" ideal I've been considering.  Which I admit is somewhat disappointing.

I've been trying to crack this problem.  The front door of a house is easy enough to generate; we've got to get in.  The front hall is pretty obvious; it's the first room inside the house.  I've created tables for both these spaces.  After that, things get complicated.

In the original dungeon generator, you enter a room, you roll 7-12 orcs (all combatants), then you fight them.  But in any believable arrangement of people dwelling together, when the hell would 7-12 of them be gathered in the same random place?  It might be dinner time, but then there'd be dependents as well.  It might be a common room, but again, dependents. It might be the chieftain's hall, but what, all 7-12 of them are always there, all the time, on the off chance that a bunch of adventurers will show up?

And, point in fact, if they are part of a clan, does 7-12 orcs represent the whole number of combatants?  Or are there another 7-12 somewhere else?  And if so, how many rooms have 1-3, 2-5, 1-6 and just 1 by his or her self?  What is the TOTAL number of orcs, combatants and defendents, in this specific lair?

I've decided that it's a first level dungeon, and that the number of orc "soldiers" and dependents equals about 16 to 28.  From there, we generate "logical" rooms that designate some number of these (each room has a spread of humanoids), until all the appropriate rooms AND humanoids are accounted for, whereupon the "dungeon" dead-ends.

OR, some random result along the way provides a threshold to another kind of dungeon, or stairs down introduces us to more of these same humanoids on "level 2," where double the number of orcs we found on the first level dwell (48-84 total).  Another flight of stairs (or other access) downwards increases this number again ... or perhaps allows the incorporation of the orc's masters, ogres or some such.  It's too early to deal with that problem.

The one at hand, presently, is how to generate those logical rooms?  My first thinking is to not assign the total number of humanoids at all, but to assign room types which then provide a final total of monsters when all the rooms are generated.  Of course, this means that somehow we have to decide when this common room is the "last" room, and there isn't a mess or a hall or a treasure room still left to be found.

Seriously, look at the tables.  If there are only 3 hobgoblin warriors and 7 dependents in the whole "dungeon," there would probably be some treasure, but does a treasure room make sense?  A gathering hall?  A shrine?  A chieftain's private apartment?  But how do you know which rooms don't make sense if you don't know, ahead of time, how many hobgoblins there are? 

Which is fine, if we're generating the dungeon for players ... but how do we generate the dungeon for ourselves, to give ourselves the pleasure of being surprised?

Working on that.

The Self-Play Tutorial

This week, I've been putting together a new project, something that I had in fact considered about this time last year.  I did some preliminary work on the wiki with it, but then lost interest.  I wasn't in the right head space.  But while travelling last week, following the encounter at Butchart Gardens, it felt right to undertake the idea again, and so I have.

On the surface, this is going to seem like an old man's response to the collapse of my campaign, which is fair.  But I think there's more here than that.  For one, some months ago JB and I both discussed the subject of teaching D&D in some depth.  For another, I've been looking for a way to obtain a youtube presence since the middle of Covid.  For another, it wouldn't be my first attempt at building a better dungeon generator.  Although yes, it probably fills up a hole that's just opened, it's not wildly out of character for me to do something like this and honestly, I think that if it can be sustained, there's considerable merit here.

One important change that's come to my aid is, and I'm sorry to bring it up again, chatGPT.  Where it comes to D&D, though, it's a pretty frustrating program to work with ... not because of its design, but because of what it dredges up from it's D&D source material online.  Ask it to invent different entrances and it will gleefully rush to give ten examples of the same result, labeled with alternate "cool"-sounding adventure D&D tropes.  It's a narrow crevice entrance ... no, it's a jumble of rocks entrance.  No, it's a crumbled archway entrance; no, it's a rockfall barrier; no, an overgrown archway; no, a hidden ravine; no, a concealed tree hollow; no, a camouflaged burrow; no, a disguised well entrance ... and so on.  These are all real answers I got when I asked, "Give me different kinds of entrance ways into a dungeon."

It's very difficult to explain, when talking D&D, that these aren't really "different."  Hole in the ground covers all of them.  Granted, most dungeon entrances are a hole in the ground ... but it never occurred to chat that the dungeon, potentially located many score miles into the wilderness, might logically have a palisade or a stone wall.  True enough, a crevice will hide a dungeon from adventurers, if they have to find that crevice in a 10-mile wide hex.  But animals can smell food through a crevice, giant social insects can enter a crevice and plant their eggs there, huge spiders will no doubt find it and make a home there ... at some point, it makes sense to put something in front of that crevice that makes it more secure.  But chat couldn't think of that (I had to), because the entirety of its D&D source material couldn't think of that.

But when I have an idea, and I want to go back and forth on it, filling out details, letting chat take a swing, then writing a new draft, letting chat edit that, whereupon I write a new draft, and chat goes at it again, I can compress a lot of brainstorming and step around troublesome writer blocks with remarkable ease.  Chat can't do the work; it's utterly useless at that.  But it can suggest other words and throw out half-ideas that can be grabbed and run with.  Over the last few days, I've progressed in this particular effort by leaps and bounds because, having thought of dungeon generation for 40+ years, I finally have a real source that I can at least collaborate with.  If the reader will go look at the comments beneath the RDG post I linked above, you'll see that, in fact, in 2014, we were all positing something like what chatGPT can do for me now.

Take this one from Eric:

It'll be a real feat to make a good random dungeon that can be meaningfully revealed one room at a time ... "OK, you beat that pack of goblins, they go down screaming! Next room is..[roll].. a pack of goblin guards ... [roll] ... listening alertly."

That's quintessentially the trouble with every generator: repeat results.  Twice in a row is fine, but it's a disaster when that twice in a row happens repeatedly and gives the message that the goblins are endless; that killing the next group of them produces no real result.

The key, I think, is to control the generation so that it's not just generating from a large random sample.  It's what I'm attempting to do by separating different kinds of dungeon and acknowledging that the path through the "tunnels" dungeon has to be progressive, from space to space ... not treating every space with the same table and the same results.  A tunnel-dungeon is defined by it's rooms, not by its inhabitants; the randomly generated layout has to take that into account, creating just so many of each kind, and in a particular order, with the contents of each room having characteristics that apply to that room.  It's a brutal expectation from a generator-design standpoint, but it's the only real way to get around repetitive results.

My intent is to update my progress every 4,000 words or so.  The page itself, of course, is always going to be in the same place, so if anyone wants to see how it's going, they can.  Meanwhile, with my "collaborator," I'm going to see how far I can take this.

I think it's possible to take it out of the dungeon, though not easily.  I think it's possible to take it into urban areas as well.  I've done some preliminary work for that with my hammers/coins/food pagemaking.  I think it's possible to open up the process to suggestions from outside ... even to adapt what I'm doing to reader interaction regarding what the "player characters" choose to do next.  I have plans for this and youtube, which should reach fruition in a week or two, if I continue not to work on the Streetvendor's Guide, where my head ought to be ... but damn it, this is a new project, and new projects are fun!

Anyway, it's just a start.  We can look at this again when I double it's size so far.

I really like how, at the very end there, I got to write a couple of sentences that actually sounded like playing D&D ...