Cool

I had such fun with yesterday's post that I thought I'd mix it up again.  Don't mind the picture.  Alas, I am far past the point before I can be shot for not having spoken yet.

Let's talk about this puff piece, featuring Brian Goldner, CEO of Hasbro, the leashsnapper behind the WOTC.  Right off the top, it trades on an image that has become all the rage, now that everyday people have to submit themselves to deodorant-challenged I.T. guys to get their computers fixed at the office.  "With nerd culture out in the mainstream these days ..."

Is it?  I'll grant you that nerds, or geeks, however you manage that image in your mind, are making a significant footprint in the world with things like Amazon getting your stuff to you in a few days from Guangdong, China, but stop for a minute and ask yourself if any of that is "culture?"  I'm not seeing a lot of nerds depicted in reality shows, as part of the political establishment or in mainstream hundred-million dollar films (except as the same comedy relief they've always been).  I'm not seeing nerds selling out stadiums with their music, unless you think Katy Perry and Justin Bieber are nerds.  Which is quite a stretch, really.  And as far as the rich go, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates aren't "nerds."  They're businessmen.  You just want them to be nerds.

But okay, nerds are popular.  Supposedly.  Right after that trope, we get another: it's not just kids, it's adults!

I became an adult, by official 2018 standards, by turning thirty in 1994.  I learned the game of D&D in 1979 - from adults.  When I learned the game, I was taught that anyone over 18 was an adult, so from that I extrapolate that the university students who invented the game were adults.  What the fuck?  Is this news to people, that adults play this game?  Do they think that group of actors on Critical Role are teenagers?  I'll grant that a lot of the guys online pitching the game are awfully juvenile, but I'm sure they can all drink legally.  So why are we making this sound like adults started killing dragons just this year?

This even includes financial statements for a year
that hasn't happened yet.  Is Hasbro seriously predicting
how many financial statements they expect to make
next year?  Why are they waiting?

People are re-engaged, says the CEO of Hasbro, the company that did its best to strangle D&D for twenty years in favor of magic cards.  But I guess good sales can change a CEO's mind about anything.  Judging from the chart, D&D has managed to do something incredible since 2017 ... so why am I unimpressed that this chart shows "mentions" of D&D in Hasbro's filings.  Are legal documents the only thing we had to measure here?  I question the validity of a company using the number of its financial statements, instead of the numbers in its financial statement, to prove a point.  Maybe I don't trust accountants.

There it is again.  In 2019, Paramount plans a D&D movie.  I'm sure it will be awesome.

Funny that with all these adults playing, the next segment begins with the phrase, "Explain it like I'm 5!"  Fine, but I question a five-year-old understanding any of the following words: personality, miniature, crypt, attribute, manipulate, complex, mechanics, faction or collective.  Also, I seriously doubt a five-year-old will understand the idioms, "whatever the medium," "sets the scene," "political thriller" or "jump in and narrate."  So, fail.  Seriously.  Explain it like I'm 5.  Give it a shot.

Here it is again, 8.6 million Americans who played D&D last year, according to the WOTC's statistical department, a subsidiary of U.S. Data and Statistics.  Funny that we have results from 2017 but nothing from 2018, even though its November now.  If the number of players is pegged to the sales, why aren't we getting quarterly numbers?  What is it about years' end that makes it possible for the WOTC to calculate the number of players?  I want to know!

I admit, I'm not much interested in this constant need the company has to make every press release a history lesson.  I'm much more interested in the wish fulfillment rhetoric that D&D is "a respite from our digital devices."  One of my favorite social trends is the constant bleating of non-digital service companies pressing the agenda that people really don't like their phones or the internet, they'd really rather just throw those things away and "be free."  Like the adage I hear that people really don't want to shop online, they'd really rather visit an bricks-and-mortar store, just like the old days.  I'm sure some people do wish for that, just as some people hate cellphones and some people can't understand why newspapers have taken a nosedive.  But no worries.  As Joe Manganiello says, the game is part of a "movement" away from the isolation of computers and mobile devices.  And as Dave Gershgorm, the writer of this e-document says, D&D "is certainly a respite from our digital devices."  Like the one this was written on and is being read on.

Do you suppose these people really imagine there's a movement against the computer?  Or is it rather that writers like a paycheque, and that they can pause and sigh pitifully after writing a sentence like that, knowing we can't hear them.  I suppose Manganiello can afford his fantasies about the isolation of computers, now that he's an actor, a gamer and a husband of Sofia Vergara.  Wasn't he in some bit of film that deserved credit too?  I don't down-play the other titles, but really, wouldn't you pause if you read, Kurt Russell, actor/impersonator/husband of Goldie Hawn?  That's pretty cool, but I think he's done a few things on his own.

Manganiello is fairly well spoken, pleasant, makes a good guest on the talk shows, chucks out the usual shit about how D&D works, I've nothing against him.  But like Eminem being so sheltered he could plausibly claim he didn't know about porn on the internet until 2009, I question how much Manganiello, who has been acting steadily since the late 1990s, knows about "the isolation of computers and mobile devices."  That's probably not fair.  It's just that from my experience, busy people in the arts dream about getting away for a Friday or Saturday night to be around a table with their friends from all the constant demands and promotional shit connected to the business of making movies.  In other words, they're too busy to play.  I think the balance of everyday D&D players are not that busy.  They dream of having something to do Friday or Saturday night.

Okay, yeah, cheap shots.  But we are talking nerds, right?  What exactly defines a nerd, if we're not talking about social lepers who do weird things that most of the world feels deserves an appellation that, let's face it, ain't poetry.  Is it cool now because a tiny proportion of the "cool" people are playing it?  Is that all it takes?

I guess it does, if we define "cool" the way that a paid actor used to sit in a Chrysler and say it was cool, or the way a paid actor uses deodorant and calls it "cool."  I don't really think that's cool.  And I don't think that D&D is taking the world by storm, whatever the CEO of Hasbro says.  He's not cool.  He really isn't.

I don't think these people really understand cool.

Churn

D&D has a problem.  An elephant in the room kind of problem.

Looking at this article from nine months ago, I'm surprised at the accuracy of the numbers.  8.6 million Americans have played.  7,500 unique broadcasters.  475 million minutes watched.  Numbers which I presume all come from Greg Tito, whose job it is to come up with cool shit to say about the business, so that we all know D&D is "super-popular."

I want to put that into perspective.  ALL of the unique broadcasters together, creating content equal to 475 million minutes, equals about half of this one Meghan Trainor video, assuming viewers watched, on average, half the music video.  Given that other music also exists on the web, this makes the total contribution of D&D to the cultural zeitgeist about the equivalent of a grain of sand on a beach near Eureka California as compared to the entire planet.

I would like to know the source on this 8.6 million players ... and I would like to know why the company feels only Americans deserve to be counted.  I'm sure that other persons of other countries speaking other languages also spend money into the coffers of the company so they can tap "into that innate human desire" to have to company write stories that we're supposed to tell each other rather than making up our own and not buying the company's products.  Just at that thing in the psyche of so many non-American players is also "getting the chance to be expressed through the lens" of whatever crapfest set of rules and mechanics the company had decided to turn out through 2017, sweeping "old stereotypes" kind of sort of in a way under a rug.

Funny thing about that idiom.  When a thing gets "swept under a rug," that means you did a really shitty job of cleaning the place, because the grime is still there.  It means you want to hide it, but sooner or later someone is going to pick that rug up to clean it and there's all that shit you tried to hide, only now its had time to fester and eat through the floorboards.  Sweeping a thing under a rug is not a good plan.  But I'm sure ol' Tito has no idea what he's saying.

Especially since all those "old stereotypes" being swept under the rug emerge three paragraphs later when we're all reminded of the people who invented those stereotypes and hammered them into the ground.

As far as I know, in Canada, the "idiosyncratic game" is still being played in game shops and geeky paradises, such as my living room.  I have no doubt that it's being played in a hipster bar in Seattle.  Call me when it is being played at a truckstop in Norman Oklahoma.  Best of all, however, I have to be impressed that the senior communications manager for D&D is describing the game being played as, "the adventure that's going on, and griffins, and whatnot."  Is Tito a surfer?

No worries.  A movie is "in the works."  Again.  I'm sure it will win an oscar for best writing.

And once again, with all this hype growing out of the Adventurers' League and 5e being simple enough for 9-year-olds to play, the elephant is ignored.  We're making up numbers like millions of Americans that "played" the game; some probably played "once or twice;" "some" might have played a few times early in the year and then stopped.  I'm uncertain about the distinction of those last two points, but ... the key here is that the company, and all its hype, cannot for the sake of its business model talk about those who play a few times and stop.

As long as we're making up millions of people, I'd like a number on how many people used to play D&D.  Because people quit.  Most people quit.  The most common ardent players participate for two, three years at best, usually in school, and usually the reason for quitting is because school ended.  Or because that group you played with when you were posted overseas went home.  I'd wager that more than half of those minutes watched, that Tito is so proud of, were watched by ex-players who know they will never play again.  They miss it a little, but not enough to go about the business of planning a session and prepping for it.

How many of those early-teen youngsters who climbed on board the 5e train in 2014 quit this last year because in their 17th year they found drugs supplied a "meteoric rise in popularity" that drew their money away from griffins and whatnot?  Of course, we're not compiling those numbers, are we?  How many blog posts have been written about another teenage player from this or that campaign that bowed out for marajuana or something stronger?  How much "communications" is ol' Tito giving about adults showing up high for Adventurers' League events, forcing the ejection of some of those 8.6 million?

Uncomfortable?  Talk to an ex-player sometime.  Anecdotal as it is, I'm used to hearing ex-players, even players who once played in the same circles I did, talk about how childish it all was.  How silly.  How everyone argued all the time.  How bored they were.  How they don't understand why they ever played.  How amused they are to hear that I still play.

That's the real state of the game.  Not the hype or the mainstream or what hipsters are doing in Seattle bars ... but the legacy of it all.  Not what you think about the game right now, but what you're going to think about the game five years from now.

You think you'll still like it fine ... but a lot happens in five years.

You never know what you'll start believing ...

Turning My Back

It is true.  Of late, I have not done much writing on the blog and certainly not about D&D.  I've concentrated on rewriting the old campaign, running the new campaign and posting advice on another blog, plus reworking my book, more than 22,000 words in the last four weeks.  But not on this blog ... and not the sort of D&D design I've spent many hours posting here.

There are times when my motivation to design is ... meh. It could be the hot, sticky unpleasantness of summer, encouraging me to lay about watching movies rather than working on excel.  Or it could be stress.  There's a small sense of despondency, the old why-bother feeling that anyone will equate with blogging, now and then.  That's there, for sure.  Quite often, I find my passion for D&D to be an enormous basin to fill.  Particularly as I must always fill it alone.  Viewing the game as I do, there's no where else for me to go.

Any time I dare search for inspiration, I'm sure to find crap like this video, loaded yesterday and rich with 256,373 views, about a DM that chose to shift a game party to modern day New York ~ and then to strip the party of their magic, their race and connections with their god, because ... oh fuck, reasons I guess.  What the fuck is the goddamn point of putting D&D characters into a modern setting if you're just going to make them ordinary?  What is the fucking appeal of shit like this, except to exhaustively ignorant viewers with exhaustively minimal experience in ... fuck, anything?  I have to believe we're counting 256,000 nine-year-olds, or else I might just as well put a pistol in my mouth if that's what it takes to make me stop writing my blog.

Fuck, I'm not casting pearls before swine.  I'm casting pearls before amoeba.

If that's not disheartening enough, I can read yet one more puff piece about the game written by someone who has obviously never played.  Predictably, paragraph one is a run-down of D&D's latest appearances on the media, paragraph two is a rehash of D&D's new popularity (presumably why this "journalist" is writing the fucking article), paragraph three hypes the online D&D youtube phenomenon (making the first reference to the slim possibility that anyone reading the article might actually play the game) and paragraph four reminds us, yet again, that D&D is hard.

I expect that we've all noticed lately that there's been a definite shift in marketing, game-play and media associated with D&D in the last eighteen months.  While the game's presentation has often been pressed towards new players, it's quite clear that the new players being sought-for now are vastly younger than before ~ I'd say, based on the concept behind a lot of channels and the level of response, that nine is precisely the age wanted.  I postulate that number crunchers and marketing types have been having conversations in the halls of Hasbro of late, and I can guess what was said.

"Guys.  Our marketing shows that most people play this game for about two years, get tired of it, usually because they can't make much sense of it or they just get interested in other things.  So we've got to come up with a marketing strategy that plays to the greatest number of properties sold in the shortest possible window of the new player's interest.  I suggest that we should make efforts to simplify the game, bringing it down to the level that nine and ten year olds can play, then hammer with lots of images, miniatures and visual aids on cheap mediums, while bringing the game stores around to selling the notion that 'game nights' can bring families together.  Then, our bigger marketing plan will be to sell to parents, who have never played and know nothing about D&D, given that the old 80s satanic scare is mostly forgotten by this generation of parents.  To sell to parents, we've got to push the media to write lots of puff pieces about D&D that don't actually talk about the game, encouraging parents to buy without looking at what they're buying."

Well.  That's probably been the strategy since 1983.  It's only that now, it's working.

On another front, I am very tired of the decades-long push back against cellphones, video games and the internet, in which there's a small, annoying group of luddites who keep insisting, despite the steady passage of time, that we would all be a lot better off if we would just unplug and go back to ... when everything was enormously boring.  Faux medical-industry bean counters pull up evidence about how it will reduce our stress, socialite-friendly etiquette wannabes write long diatribes on when we're allowed to use our phones in front of friends and family, pretentious gits create rules for people surrendering their phones at weddings, at business meetings, at tourist sites and campgrounds ... presumably because phones are putting photographers out of business, or its just another way to ensure we're more bored than we would be if we had technology.

D&D, I'm afraid, is being used in this direction.  Because it's stubbornly refused to update itself with technology, as the old guard clings bitterly to paper and pencil, parents are running to invest their children into the game in the hopes that there's some small chance that they'll be raised to understand how to do things without the use of electronics.  I don't think it's going to work.  In typical fashion, the market is assuming that cellphones and videogames are as cool and absorbing as technology is going to get, ever.  Thirty years from now we'll be trying to interest kids in their cellphones in the hopes that they're not sucked down into the use of Larry Niven's wire, or whatever the equivalent of that's going to end up being.

Yeah, so, the end result of all this is that I feel mostly disconsolate about designing in D&D, at present.  The Juvenis running last week, and the one before, went spectacularly well, as five players steadily cut down 36 simple-minded larvae last week (page 59 of the old monster manual), a much larger fight than I know most DM's are willing to permit.  I very rarely see players suggesting their bored during these fights ~ except perhaps the last few rounds where it has become obvious at last that the players are going to win, and it's just a matter of getting those last hits in.  Even then, most players are thinking about experience, not grumbling.

Worry not, however.  The wind will shift, I'll get interested in old projects and the design posts will pick up again.  Just now, however, I'm focused on things that seem to be producing the best possible results.

Go give Travis Hanson some money. He's doing good work,
and there are so few of us.

UPDATE:  There's nothing that says obsolete like complaining about being obsolete.

Toxicity

In my last post I mentioned that we had some insulting and abusive customers at the Expo I attended last weekend.  I'm glad to say they weren't especially those things towards us - it was, rather, that these were fellows (every one was a boy-bear) took such exceptional pride in being assholes towards their players that they felt compelled to entertain us with boasting about their sadism.

I will not go into details.  Mostly it involved detailed sketches of perverse devices and dungeon traps meant to gleefully execute players or mere gloating accounts of players they had twisting in the wind in their recent campaigns.  Each of these demons invariably seem to think their games are insouciantly hilarious, that everyone else they speak to will feel exactly the same and that we are all simply dying to hear them go on and on . . . and on about it.

The most difficult patrons are the war story tellers.  In most cases, easily 19 out of 20, I feel legitimately heartsore for their positions.  They have no one they can talk to.  Being a role-player and a figure behind a table, I'm more than ready to lend my empathic, considerate attention: as I have written a few times this year, the worst part of being a DM is that we are alone.  There's little to no support in the community and anyone who dares to speak about their worlds is bound to receive nothing but a contemptuous eye-roll.  I have expressed as much myself, years ago . . . but I have recently come to understand that we have to listen, and praise anything we hear that we feel is positive.  DMs need it!

That twentieth fool, however.  Sigh.  They have no idea they're cackling about things equivalent to stealing ice cream from children and pushing people in wheelchairs down stairs.  Worse, I can say quite clearly, "I don't feel the game should be played that way," without the words making the least impact.  I don't mean the words offend, I don't mean they disagree with the words; I mean that these odious cretins don't hear the words at all.  They're incapable of hearing condemnation or opposition.

One of our oddest encounters came when we had two professed players who described their DM as one of these fiendish bastards.  They loved it.  They gushed and tittered about their DM's propensity for systematically murdering off their characters with steady diligence.  Once they departed, my daughter and I spoke about it for several minutes, in part disturbed and in part in awe of their obliviousness.  It is remarkable that such people exist in the world.

Without question, there are toxic elements associated with role-playing.  It's a natural progression from so much proscribed content over the decades concentrating upon silliness and excess rather than striving for collaborative, refreshing, novel and satisfying game play.  To the toxic element, that sounds "boring."

We should realize that every human past-time contains this element.  It is why restaurants have bouncers, why concerts have security, why it costs so much money to join a country club and why dress codes exist.  It is why ball players get ejected by umpires, why penalty boxes exist in hockey and why some very talented people - who just can't control themselves - are sometimes suspended for the season or for the rest of their careers.  Every organized community is ultimately forced to police themselves, to enable a better experience for the majority.  Usually, it doesn't take long after the community's creation before something has to be done.

If I had one of these fellows - either DM or players - appear in my life (much less my table), it wouldn't take long before I showed them the door forever.  But I know, having just met them, that there are hundreds, thousands, of players and DMs who just put up with them, because . . . well, I don't know why because.  Or I know it, but I'll be polite and not say it.

Games Without Rules

"Rules break the game."

Ozymandias, a regular commenter on this blog, asked me what I thought of the pamphlet, Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, written by Matthew J. Finch in 2008.  I couldn't remember having read it (and I looked for everything I could find before writing How to Run), so I found a copy on Lulu (it's free) and read it.

Finch makes the claim that "old school" gamers ran their role-playing campaigns in the way it is described in his pamphlet.  Perhaps I harp upon this too often, but I'm legitimately an "old school gamer," having started in 1979, and I can say with expertise on the matter that Finch is absolutely correct.  Old school gamers did, absolutely, run their games exactly in the way that Finch describes, with exactly the philosophy described in the pamphlet.  We had a name for these gamers.  We called them "assholes."

There's no point in my debating the document argument by argument.  I deeply regret that this philosophy exists in the same way that I regret there are people in the world who continue to treat women as seat covers or that there are people in the world who have trouble being in a work environment that hires gay or black people.  There are just bad people in the world.  Some of them play RPGs.

And just as bad people with other philosophical perspectives invent complete and utter bullshit that vaguely sounds legitimate in order to supposedly legitimize their perspective, it isn't very hard for any thinking person to see right through the nonsense.  It isn't there to convince people that "more rules are bad" or that "the game is about telling a story," the arguments are there to support the single, greatly desired and wholly unsupported argument, the DM's decisions must be incontestable.

We can say that the DM makes choices based on "common sense" and "embracing the chaos," but these things are charmingly devoid of accountability or misconduct.  Fundamentally, we're arguing that it's the DM's game - and being the DM's game, if the DM interprets your roll of 15 as "you stab yourself in the leg," then you do.  I'm personally unsure how the decision to take a completely abstract number and assign a totally arbitrary result translates as common sense . . . but this is where the argument is coming from.

Why is it, I might ask, that I don't stab myself in the arm, or I don't put the sword through my partner's leg?  Why is it that the most obvious reply to the roll is that my sword is put through any part of anybody's body?  Is this common?  If I'd rolled a 14, would the result have been different?  No.  Because the result isn't according to any "rules," remember.  It is according to an "interpretation of guidelines," "a good GM being impartial," "the referee describing the results," "making a ruling" or any of the other vague and glib explanations for why the results are what they are.  Remember, dear players, when we play the way Finch describes, "The referee will be just as surprised by the results as the players are."

Presumably because the referee is participating in a grand Rorschach experience.

Well, I can testify that young, inexperienced DMs running 4e and 5e right now are running this game in exactly this way, because there are about two dozen instances that Finch describes that I can personally vouch for having occurred in games I've attended in the last 12 months.  The game doesn't have to be "old school" or "old-style" to be played this way.  Any ignorant boob who's unprepared to play even by the rules as written in any game can DM by just this kind of fiat and claim entitlement with just this much smug certainty.  Just as a racist today can equal every bit the rabid, frothing spittle that their grandfathers managed in the Good Old South sixty years ago, an asshole is still an asshole.

There is one quote I'd like to draw out.  It is on the first page and has little to do with DMing:

"The 0e rules don't give you much specific guidance, and that's not because they left out the answers to save space."

From this, I feel I'm meant to conclude that the original makers of the game had created or seriously intended to create a great many more rules - but then decided to deliberately make the original books shorter because they honestly felt that this would make a better game.  I feel I'm also supposed to make the conclusion that the original makers of the game were in no way restricted by a budget, and that the format of the white box set and the books inside - the sort of format that would only be chosen by people who did not have the sort of budget necessary to publish actual books when said publishing was very, very expensive in the 1970s - was intentional.  Yes, much better that we print four page limited tiny rulebooks held together with staples than produce a far more comprehensive rulebook with actual binding, because this will be better for the game!

Yet, strangely, when the game sold very well, the comprehensive rule book was the first step forward that the burgeoning company of TSR took.  Perhaps because they felt a compulsion to then destroy the game with more rules?

I don't know how old Finch is.  He seems to have a number of books that can be purchased that would seem to suit the 4e and 5e market he finds unacceptable.  I can't seem to find anything about him personally.  I would tend to think, however, that he knows profoundly little about the difficulties of publishing anything in 1974.  That would seem to suggest, to me, that he really knows jack shit about old school gaming or thinking - and that the document was an early exercise in writing something, anything, about D&D in 2008.  I certainly embrace that.  A writer has to start with something.  No writer should be held accountable to their first works; people change, they grow up, they embrace communities and actions they once criticized.  I wish him all the best.

In this particular document, however, he seems to be talking through his hat.  No doubt, he knows people who were gaming in the 1970s and early 80s.  But since he does not actually make it clear what his personal status was at the time that this "old-style" form of play was in vogue, I would encourage readers to take into account the possibility that Finch is full of shit.

Head-banging Moments

Reading an essay of the weight distribution "problems" with the star wars lightsaber:

"The problem with the Lightsaber is that it's physics aren't properly understood according to how it functions. Theoretically, it creates a blade of hard light that can cut through anything. Physicists say it's anything from a blade of plasma to a blade of energy. The result: you actually have a weapon that all of it's weight is in the hilt. It is possible to have "hard" Energy. For this you need to understand the physics of Energy and Matter. If Matter is energy spent, then a Lightsaber is in-between energy spent and energy yet to be spent. Since we don't understand the Lightsaber, it's physics are beyond our understanding."

Sigh.  There are 30 angels that dance on the head of a pin.  No, there are 31.  Wait, I've just realized, there are 29.

I've written an answer to the above:

"The lightsaber possesses what we would think of as an impossible density of energy, similar (but not as much as) the mass/energy ratio of a neutron star, except in this case the "weight" of the sword's energy/mass is exactly what the wielder needs it to be - it can never be too heavy or too light because the wielder's mind is the master of this energy. Thus the sword is always the PERFECT weight, perfect in a manner that manufacture cannot equal, as the sword is not made it is conceived. This conception, in turn, causes the energy to distribute itself along the weight of the weapon so as to create a perfect balance of action, so that the weight is not carried in the handle, it is carried at some point along the "blade" that exactly fits the requirement of the Jedi. As such, no weapon in existence can match the lightsaber as a potential extension of the user's arm and body. It only fails to seem as such in the films because films are inadequate to properly represent exactly how the movement of the lightsaber would appear in reality."

I so hate, hate, hate star wars.

Critical Role

One of my players has encouraged me to watch a series of youtube videos created by the group Critical Role.  This is a tremendously popular skype group that features a DM and seven players who characterize themselves as voice actors - and there's evidence in that they have some game there.  The campaign has a heavy emphasis on role-playing, with each participant pushing hard to play 'in character' and relate to each other and the DM's many characters.

I have made my way through a full episode and I'm just starting a second.  As online games go, it isn't a train-wreck.  The participation is far from the painful public abortions recorded at events by the WOTC.  That said, I'm still viewing the content as homework rather than interest.

It is the sort of thing that convinces me that attempts to film or reproduce my own games would be a bad, bad idea.  I can't imagine I would be any better than what's shown here.  I really hate the endless mugging for the camera by the various players that goes on for hour after hour, as well as the constant, exhausting grinning that never seems to end when players and DM are on film.  It reminds me of amateur theatre productions where the director did not have enough control - or where there was no director, by group agreement.  Public performance needs someone to stand off stage or off camera and scream, "Energy!  Focus!  Stop fucking grinning!"

I'm sure I'm the only person this bothers.

Another thing that is eerie to me is the lack of attention to the character page.  My campaign is much more of a 'game' - with players highly focused on their character limitations, options, improvements and so on.  It is rare that there isn't a combat in my game that doesn't include moments of a player staring hard at their character sheet looking for a way to overcome the issue at hand through game mechanics.  This game goes on for an hour at a time without anyone needing to do more than ask the DM's NPC for clarification - which usually means moving forward to the next NPC to ask again for more clarification.  The interaction is filled with completely superfluous actions and content, followed by clever description by the DM that compliments said superfluous action, drawing the most meaningless act into minutes of irrelevant interaction and participation.

There are other features of gaming that I know have nothing whatsoever to do with these people.  For example, players roll dice at random to 'find things' without asking if the die roll is relevant.  This would simply never happen in my world.  The player would ask, "Can I find/get/see . . ." etcetera and IF a die roll would help in that situation, I would answer, "Roll this die to find out."  Otherwise I would simply say yes or no - because most things are NOT random.

Attacks occur without detection of surprise or initiative; the players approach a stranger and BANG, lightning, everyone take 14 damage, no there's no saving throw to avoid this - and let me explain how you're all blown fifteen feet back and off your feet.  The players move to take an action and the DM says, "It has no effect;" and no player says, "What the hell?"  Damage occurs and the response received is the height of banality.

Moment-to-moment action is uncompromisingly micromanaged.  The unseen servant can't just be created and assumed to perform the action required: instead, the servant must be cast with a flush of performance by the character, followed by a lengthy description of the unseen servant coming into being, followed by the character telling the unseen servant what to do, followed by a description of the unseen servant following the order - and omg, please just slash my fucking wrists now.

I know people like this.  It thrills them to death to create every dialogue and to live their actions in real time.  Listening to it, I find myself drifting from minute to minute, until I'm hopelessly disconnected from whatever the hell is going on.  It seems to me that they're on some sort of lawn, they were going to go into a dungeon that never seems to appear, then there's another gate to be opened, now they're standing outside a door, then they don't seem to go there, there's some sort of large tower, oh wait, the dwarf is now answering the door to a dwarven house, now they're talking to some woman; wait, now it's a man - what the fuck is going on?

As I wrap up this post, they've gone to buy some stuff at what seems to be a sort of D&D supermarket (it has everything) - and this too needs a ton of description, characters, dialogue and backstory.  My players at this point would be hunched, obsessed, over long equipment tables parsing through their personal needs and checking the availability and prices of things they have trouble finding - the point being to ready themselves and get on with the adventure.

My world, my game, my players are very, very different from this.  This seems boring.  Agonizingly boring.  If I were playing I'd be sitting to one side, arms crossed, scowling, wondering when something was going to, well, happen.  I'd be thinking, what excuse can I make up right now that will let me leave and never come back?  Because gawd knows, I'd find something more interesting to do than this.

That's why I don't ache to record my gameplay.  What must my gameplay look like to others?  How boring would it seem to them?  How annoying would the grinning be.  How annoyed would they be that I didn't invent clever dialogue and descriptions, down to the tables upon which the trade goods sit, when they went to buy things?

Pretty annoyed, I'd guess.  Pretty bored, I'd guess.

The Boldest Experiment

I was asked if I could satisfactorily answer the following:

"What happens when a character dies in a per-pay enterprise like this? Should they expect not to? Imagine the furor around a video game costing $59 where character death was permanent. Now multiply that by 100."

Sigh.  This makes me sad.  The very intention of the "what if" scenario proposes that people have become so fragile, so needy, so entitled that if they were to spend money for the privilege of playing a game, the ensuing tantrum of their dashed privilege would grow so onerous that my resolution would be swept away in a hurricane of screaming, self-righteous hysterics.

Multiply that by 100.

One hundred of what, exactly?  100 commenters on the internet?  100 players?  I'm certainly not capable of running 100 players at the same time and I find it impressively unlikely that I would be killing 100 players simultaneously if I was.  That would truly be a total party kill, not to be matched in the annals of the game.

But let's imagine that someone has chosen to play in my campaign - and that I've rolled a die, or they have, and as a result they've died.  They are so invested in the game, so invested in their character, that they choose to seek compensation for the death of this character through a means that will cause me harm in some manner.  Let's further assume that this person's perception of me turns so black over the death of this character (remember, paid for), that they truly, deeply, intensely hate me.  We need to multiply something by 100: let's multiply this hatred.  What are the possibilities?

Well, I'm on the internet with my real name.  It's reasonable to assume that someone truly motivated could choose to seek me out, hunt me down and kill me.  This is not the first time I've speculated about something like this.  A little over four years ago, I had a little troll who wrote nasty messages and personal threats and a lot of other things, causing me to remember the story of Billy Pilgrim and Paul Lazzaro from Slaughterhouse Five.

So it goes.

My father, who is 80 now, cannot get it into his head even after forty years of my deciding to be a writer that this occupation actually requires that I be, well, publicly known.  Just a month ago he was cautioning me in serious tones to "be careful" about who knows me on the internet because there are people out there just waiting to use personal information about me to destroy any chance of my getting a "good job."  He is, without a question, a doomsayer of the first order; I remember back in high school, when we first got a Betamax Video Recorder, that my father discouraged us from speaking about it to our friends, arguing basically, "If word gets out that we have one of these, there are people who wouldn't hesitate to break into our house to get it."

Today, my father lives in the same house that I lived in when I was zero.  That house, today, is worth around $800,000.  It sits amid a bunch of other houses that are also worth one hell of a lot of money - and it always has.  We would try to explain to my father that every person in our neighborhood owned a VCR, but that never seemed to get through.

Oh, in case someone is thinking right now, "Why doesn't your father help you?"  Well . . . in the original Fun With Dick and Jane, Jane goes to ask her father for money and gets this speech:

Father: "All right.  It's the monsoon season . . . and you're standing outside in torn raincoats.  Come through this by yourselves and you'll be dry for the rest of your lives.  Take money from me and you'll be wet.  Soaking wet from now on.  Jane, it's the best thing that could happen.  Especially for Dick.  I'm so happy for both of you.  Especially for Dick."
Jane:  "Dad, Billy is doing his work by candlelight."
Father:  "Splendid!  So did Abraham Lincoln."
Jane:  "How are you both doing."
Father:  "Never better!  Jane . . . we have sowed all our lives, and we're now reaping the harvest!  Reap!  Reap!  REAP!"

(this vid was the best I could find)

So, basically, I'm not deserving.

Okay, so I've gone around the barn, down to the store, gotten into an argument with the hairdresser next door and now I'm on my way home.  1.  I already have a public persona; 2. I've already been not liked; 3. every public persona risks some nutjob turning up some day; 4. Given my upbringing, I ought to be insanely paranoid but I've chosen not to be.

Let's contend with a far more likely scenario.  Said player's character dies.  Said player is unhappy.  Said player shouts about it on the internet, tries to raise x100 angry sentiment against me.

Sorry.  I don't see it.  First of all, I don't exactly know what horrible thing can be said about me that hasn't already been said.  Someone could claim to know something about me that's horrible - but that's already been claimed and it turns out that making shit up on the internet is quite ordinary.

Moreover, I ask the readership: consider if this argument would produce much sympathy:

"I paid $100 to play a role-playing game online and my character was killed.  And now I want justice."

Is there a way to add information to that argument that doesn't make the person sound, well . . . I'll refrain from the expletive.  I can at least feel reassured that, living in Canada, there's no practical way to bring a grudge suit against me on the basis of "I'm very rich and I like to use the system to fuck with people."  The legal system is different here; bringing suit is not just a matter of having money.  Moreover, I'd be operating under the legal disclaimer that exists on the Patreon website: so that as long as I follow Patreon's rules, I'm protected.  It would be very hard to bring a suit against Patreon at this time and there are much bigger fish in the kettle to contend with if that were the case.

As near as I can tell, this leaves my personal feeling of remorse or regret at killing a player character, given that someone has paid me for the privilege.  This leaves my self-esteem and my resolve in the face of pure, unbridled hatred, as I am told that I have committed a sin by running a fair and reasonable game in which a die roll may result in a character running out of hit points and being killed.

In 1985's Lost in America, the character's wife loses all the money the couple has at a Las Vegas Casino - and in one of the most painful scenes ever filmed in the history of American cinema, Albert Brooks, director and writer of the film, spends six minutes arguing with the owner of the casino in a vain attempt to get his money back.  I'll link the last four minutes of that conversation.

I don't know what sort of person could watch that scene and identify with Albert Brooks - but if that sort of person wants to give me money to play in my world, that sort of person is going to find that I'm on the casino owner's side.

Imagine the furor.

Yeah.  Furor.  Imagine it.

I'm just shaking in my boots.

In You

After an impatient reply yesterday, I've been thinking.

I've been beating this drum of working on worlds and campaigns for a year now and it comes down to the question of why it matters.  If the readers do not wish to put more than the minimum effort into their campaigns - if that effort produces the result they and their players want - then it can make no possible difference to me and my campaign.  I will go on in the same way, my players' experiences will not be compromised and we should all be able to live healthily and happily in the campaigns we wish to have.  Yes?

No.  I don't think that's the correct way to think.  I know it's popular, I know that tolerance is preached on every street corner and I know very well that most people - regardless of the activity - would prefer most things if they worked that way.

My feelings about it are quite different.  I have enormous faith in the power and importance of creativity - not only for the general welfare, but for the individual.  I believe that the greatest obstacle to creativity is not the know-how or the sweat involved, as is often pointed at, but in the fear.  To be creative is to risk, to put oneself on the line and accept criticism.

"The least I can do" is a way of circumventing that fear.  The smaller the investment that is put into the project, the less can be lost.  It is easy to play a few bucks at the craps table.  The dice fall wrong and the player can shrug it off, remembering all the times a few bucks have been spent on a spilled coffee or an off-tasting dish.  No big deal.  It is another thing altogether to slide one's monthly mortgage payment onto the line and wait for that outcome.  The physical effort is the same - but the loss cannot be easily dismissed.

I have found that most people from any walk of life can commit themselves to a steady, necessary effort - even if that effort brings pain and physical challenge.  Left to it, the reader will likely adjust to having to empty out a flooded basement or walk fifteen miles once the car has given up the ghost.  We're all able to take on hard work, if we must, when the compensation is assured.  The basement will be restored.  The distance will be covered.  What we need to get done will get done.

What we won't do is apply ourselves if the odds tell us that failure is almost certain.  This is what fear does.  It causes us to concentrate on the loss and not the win.  We know there might be a win, but all we really see is the loss.

As such, the preparation we might put in before our campaign is tempered by that sense of uselessness in trying.  All this work might make a really good session, but we think it probably won't.  The longer we apply ourselves, affected by the work as we must be, the greater the certainty that we're working towards nothing.  Therefore, let us do the least possible - for the least possible promises the smallest loss.

How do we combat fear?  The populist answer is that the fearful pull themselves up by their bootstraps, dig in, have faith in themselves and power forward.  Truth is, that's a lot of bullshit.  All those people we think of as successful and fearless were supported by friends and good luck; even in the worst cases, we find the darkest souls among the famous and successful were beloved, even when they were at the bottom of their fortunes.  We combat fear with numbers - with the sense that we are not alone - with the certainty that however we might fail, there are others who will appreciate and understand that failure and support us - both in our coming to terms and in our will to try again.

Here I am.  I am putting myself in the number of people who will say, "This is something you can do.  This is a way you can succeed.  You have it in you.  Apply yourself, steady yourself, endure the level of work and the doubt you feel and in the end, your commitment will win the day.  It looks doubtful, it looks wasteful, it looks impossible, but look at me.  I was bad when I began this game, I was nothing special to speak of, but I had friends who gave me the time I needed to find my feet and keep going.  You will too."

I always tell DMs to talk it over with their players, to open up the lines of communication, to find out what the players want and to work towards those things.  Turn to your players, too, for support.  Find players who will give it to you and rid yourself of players who won't.  Your success depends wholly upon the people in your life who can help you believe in that success.

Inevitably, the effort and the risk and the success will lead to competency - and then you, too, will begin to produce the sort of system you see me producing, that you now wonder how I'm able to do.  You'll learn it's not beyond you.  You'll find how satisfying it is.  And you'll begin to see why I won't let this go, why I won't abandon gamers to the games they think they want to build right now.

I have faith in you, O reader.  Let the knowledge of that give you a little faith in yourself.

Nobody's Business

The Edmonton Expo is in four days.

There's very little left to do.  We're set up for the scene, we've got the presentation necessary.  My daughter, I believe, is cosplaying as Sailor Moon.  I am cosplaying as the writer in residence.  The only concern left is a delivery of books that should be here by tomorrow afternoon.  Fingers crossed.

In light of the Expo, I was asked to write about the Dungeons and Dragons television show . . . specifically this episode.  I don't know what I'll say yet; I'm still gearing up to the task.  There's a good chance that I'll say something I should apologize for - but we'll see.

Whenever I hear someone remember this show fondly, which seems to happen often, I find myself in awe.  Perhaps it is because everyone I played with when the show came out (1983) were already 18 and way, way beyond kid's shit.  My memories of the show consists mostly of how really bad my groups considered it to be, how offended we were that a gritty show about D&D had been shat on again (something that hasn't changed) and in particular in which ways the show was nothing like the actual game.

Regarding the linked episode above, I'll keep off the subject of animation quality, voice work and other aspects of production (which are horrifically execreble); I'm also not going to say anything about costumes and the silliness of their design.  I'll stick to game interpretations with which I have a problem.  I'll give the time stamp for when the problem occurs.  I'm going to ignore the title sequence and just start with the show itself (part one), which begins at 01:00.

• 1:47 - the Dungeon Master tells the party what to do.
• 2:37 - the mages' powers are limited to his hat (and by extension that the abilities of all the characters are due to their magic items).
• 3:04 - characters run away from danger before engaging first (one arrow does not equal engagement for D&D players).
• 3:14 - only barbarians want to fight things.
• 3:23 - "fighting will only make them mad."
• 3:37 - fighting is somehow equated to "heroics"
• 4:30 - in a world where people turn down exchanging bread for talismans (because they're obviously cheap and worthless) there's still room for accusations that the use of magic proves "an evil wizard."
• 4:53 - peasants are willing to rush off to try to destroy a mage after displaying an obviously powerful talisman.
• 5:04 - too exhausted to run; obviously, not too exhausted to fight.
• 6:50 - characters sleep in their armor.

On the whole, mere quibbles.  So much of the show is taken up with anvilicious development and flanderization that it's amazing there was time to have anyone portray any event that can be reconciled with D&D.  And of course, the fact that it was presented as a kid's show in a pre-internet world, when children's programming was hopelessly relegated to infantilization and marketing, meant that fighting had to be something the participants couldn't do.

That's the saddest part of this show - that it was designed around a game with a fundamental structural dependency on fighting in a media where fighting could not be discussed.  Television has always been funny this way.  As elementary age boys in an upper middle-class neighborhood, the favorite game was always 'guns.'  The television we watched was full of six-shooters, phasers and spy pistols, so those filled our pockets.  Guns meant running across open lawns, diving over fences and dying - mostly dying - in spectacular ways.  Twitching one's body while running off a five-foot ledge to a slope of grass, skidding to a halt and then holding the 'death pose' for the demanded 30-seconds (rules!) was just the sort of thing to cause mothers to rush onto their back porch and scream in full panic.

At seven we understood the pleasure of fighting.  That's part of what we immediately loved about D&D at - in my case - 15.  But television has always tried to pretend that fighting is something children do not do.  And it has always tried to shove that perspective down children's throats.

As children, we ignored it.

Naturally, the D&D show was nothing like D&D.  How could it be?  Even if the writers had done due diligence (which obviously they did not do), nothing on earth is more executively meddled with than children's programming.  There are too many legal landmines for it not to be that way.  The error, of course, was that D&D was promoted as a children's game.  It is still promoted that way.  It will always be promoted that way.  It doesn't matter that it requires more time, effort, ability, expertise, background and practice to manage it than bridge or football pools . . . this is simply the way the world insists on looking at the game.  This is why every nerd portrayed playing it on television always emphasizes the fantastical, silly aspects.

When a dragon is presented in a children's show, it is a fat, dumpy thing that clumps around breathing harmless fire.  It isn't that dragons can't be scary.  We can see a bit of the fear in a movie sort of aimed at adults, where an effort is made to sort of cause the dragon to be aggressive, moving like a clumsy snake and breathing hot fire between talking like a serial killing university professor.  We can make it burn down a town.

What we can't do, even in an adult movie with a dragon in it, is show the smashed and burnt bodies of the dead, as they're dying, like we can in a war film.  People will pay to watch tank shells splitting bodies in two or to see people cut to pieces by bullets, but no one's going to put up with that shit from a movie with a dragon in it.  Because this isn't horror, this is fantasy.

Yet - and here's something that most D&D players never really grasp - role-playing is horror.  It is what we would never choose to do in reality - court death, see it as acceptable, take pleasure in destroying an enemy and callously make plans to do it all again.  For gain.  It is viscerally satisfying to act as brutally as we wish for purely selfish motivations.  This is what the game taps into.  And the more advanced the game, the greater the agency for pursuing that selfish intent.

Films and television can't represent that because the 'good guys' can never be that way in that media.  The 'good guys' can't possess the motivation that D&D demands as proof of winning.  It is a game built in an underground and pursued habitually in an environment where authority and morality have no voice.  Where 'right' and 'wrong' are limited to what a small number of quiet players accept as the gameplay they want.

A great reason for the success of expos and gaming cons comes from the sense of free-spirited lawless associations that arise from people dressing as they want and playing up the characters they want, without the usual discourse and condemnation that follows from social rule-makers.  Role-playing represents a form of media where executive meddling is impossible above the level of the DM, where hours can be spent in the company of others who are okay with arson, murder, genocide and the like.  It is the only group activity that allows a meeting of the minds in this way.

But this is a great secret, isn't it?  We're supposed to pretend it isn't going on this way around gaming tables.  Every once in awhile someone on the net gets upset because someone mentions rape or infanticide and there's a back-and-forth.  Doesn't mean anything, however - because if six adults can agree that the castration going on in this role-playing game, tonight, is fantasy and nothing more, then the rest of the world can fuck off.  Ain't nobody's business but the players.

That makes role-playing a dangerous game - in the eyes of the controllers and the pundits.  This encourages such people to proclaim, again, that RPGs are on their way out.  Or that the only people still playing them are children.  Or whatever other lie that wants to be said.

But we at the tables know different, don't we.  We know that when Eric the Paladin says, "I make a pass at Lorne - how does he feel about that?", we don't have to take a public sampling to find out if the players having sex is okay.  All the DM needs to do is roll a die.

Gone to Ground

Whew.

In early 2012, I began updating all my maps to a later version of Microsoft's Publisher program - and as of yesterday, I completely finished that upgrade.  This link on the wiki includes all the sheet maps of my world that I have either finished or are upon the edges of what I've finished, from the Andaman Islands in the East to the western shore of Spain.  72 maps altogether.

Here is a list of links for the latest updated maps, that were not included when I wrote about this a bit more than a month ago:

G 06 - Nubia
G 07 - Arabia
G 08 - Empty Quarter
G 09 - Oman
G 10 - Gujarat
G 11 - Maharashtra
G 12 - Orissa
G 13 - Bengal
G 14 - Irrawaddy

H 08 - Ethiopia
H 09 - Horn of Africa
H 10 - Socotra
H 11 - Arabian Sea
H 12 - Ladshadweep
H 13 - Madurai
H 14 - East Ceylon
H 15 - Bay of Bengal
H 16 - Andaman Sea

Two of the maps - the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal - are merely hexes containing water and no land at all. They are included as placeholders.

I know that I haven't been writing much on the blog lately. Call it my going to ground, just for the time being. On days when I've had energy, I've been working on the book. On days when I have less energy, I've been making these maps. Basically, the revamp of the maps is little more than retracing the coasts, rivers, roads and so on with new, upgraded lines and colors. But that is all done now and I'm glad. Going forward, the maps I'll be posting on the wiki and on this blog will all be new, created since this time.

For no reason at all, I've been doing preliminary work on Burma.  I really should finish Morocco, which I've left half done, and the Maldives, that I've left half done, but I'm not in the mood for little tiny islands and a desert.  I'll get back to those things.

Part of the reason I do these maps, some of my long-time readers will remember, comes from wanting to look very closely at parts of the world that are obscure and to which very few people pay attention.  People think about creating a world based on France or Britain, the Middle East or the Balkans . . . but when does anyone make plans for a world based on Burma?  Or Ethiopia, which I may take up next?  Who thinks of the Canary Islands or Eastern Siberia?

I'd like to think there are Japanese and Indian players of D&D (who I get page views occasionally) who do think about those places.  I would love to see some of the work they do, what they've designed for lairs and caves, what sort of monsters they create.  But, of course, the small table of people playing this weekend in Chiang Mai in Thailand don't speak English and they don't read my blog.  I bet, however, that they play some sort of role-playing game.

That's just speculation.  Good 'ol JB in Paraguay never seems to mention (at least I've never read him mention it) the group of Spanish speaking players occupying themselves with some sort of weird Colonial RPG based on the reclamation of South America by Incans . . . Asuncion has a population of over 500,000 and of course it's impossible for him to have met everyone.  I'd like to think this game isn't a first-world phenomenon.  I mean, who knows how many people in Kenya are playing D&D right now?

Well, sorry I'm not writing much.  I'll be getting my wind back from having to do physical labour day-in and day-out when once upon a time I use to sit on my comfortable ass in a comfortable office writing my comfortable blog posts between five minute spans of actually doing work for twice the pay I'm earning right now.  Then I'll post more often.

I hope all my readers are doing well.

The Evaporation of Interest

Wow.  And I thought the LARP reality show was cheesy.

I found the above image on the WOTC website fully intending to write a post asking what was new in D&D and pronouncing the words, "absolutely nothing."  I felt that was a safe bet where it comes to the commercial side of the business.  Then I found this:

This is not a movie poster.

But we're used to this, right?  It's an expansion for Neverwinter: Underdark, based on a character and novel by R.A. Salvatore.  Sold as something extreme.  In the words of the press release (no, I'm not linking it), "deadly and insane . . . epic."  Is it possible to write a promo for a game that doesn't include the word epic?  I doubt it.

Correct me if I'm wrong . . . isn't Salvatore the shit hack writer who churned out about a hundred Forgotten Realms books?  Hm.

This isn't a new game, mind you.  It's a storyline.  Yes, we have moved so far into the epic world of game manufacture that a storyline is deserving of this sort of hype.

Gah.

I just know there are little fan boys all goosed-up about their excitement at seeing this thing get released. I'd hate to rain on their fun, but hey, let's face it - that's impossible.  These people are in way, way too deep for anyone's words to upset their habit.  At this point, these are people who wouldn't care if they woke up and found Larry Niven's fictional wire hanging from their brain.

Who's Larry Niven?  An actual science fiction writer.  Not that I ever really liked him.

No, this isn't written to change anyone's mind.  This isn't even written to shout at anyone to get the fuck off my lawn.  This is just . . . well, let's say I'm just keeping track.

In four weeks I'm going to be up at the Edmonton comic-con and I will meet none of the people who find the poster art above the least interesting.  Oh, they will be there - but I won't meet them.  I will meet a lot of people like me, people who are fascinated by the game as it was originally designed and who want to improve it as a work of love.

The sort of people who are selling the above art and the sort of people who are buying it . . . I don't know who the hell these people are.  As far as I can tell, their fascinations has as much to do with D&D and RPGs as people who attend NASCAR.  We live on the same planet.  The similarities seem to end there.

Eventually, every gamer arrives at the point in their lives where they look at what's happening now and compare it with the thing they enjoyed once upon a time . . . and realize those things have nothing to do with each other.  It isn't that maturity incurs a lack of interest - it is that at some point the interest we had is simply not being made.

Someone figures out that they can get money for creating a storyline based on work someone else did - someone they basically own, since he's an old asset they created in the 80s - for pretty much the same money they used to get actually working to improve something.  Storylines are cheaper than real game design and they're cheaper still when we don't even need to create our own.  Then its just a matter of plugging the new storyline into the old format and selling the same game over again to the same people for the same $80 (or whatever the cost would be - I went looking and I couldn't find a price).

And those of us who have seen better drop our jaws and wonder how it ever came to this.

There's one simple reason why so much of our economy is directed towards young people.  It isn't that the young have money to spend, although they do.  It isn't that the young have a taste for new things, although they do.  It is that the young have only bought a few things in their whole lives - and mostly pretty small things - and they're unsophisticated.  They have no reference point upon which to base whether something is viable or not.  They're easily duped.  They're stupid.

They make great consumers!  No sweat, no fuss, no annoying questions arising out of experience . . . and when a kid hits 18 or 19 and has bought enough games to ask those questions?  No problem.  The market has already dumped them.  We want 10 to 13 year olds, kids who we can clinically prove haven't fully developed brains.  No, seriously.  Brains still in development.

Okay, here's an old man statement, but it's a joke.  Seriously.  But wouldn't the world be massively different if we decided that children younger than 15 were disallowed from buying anything?

Not because it is bad for them - hell, kids are resilient.  But it is bad for us.  Because we have to live in a world where the above crapfest is sold as a bloody big deal, epic and exciting.

Sixes & Sevens

More often than not, when I use an idiom I have to explain what the idiom means.  On the whole, it makes me want to give up idioms, since they so frequently fail to convey a shorthanded description of the problem at hand - but somehow, I can't.  Thus the title of this post.

A conversation made the rounds yesterday about the fracturing effects of 5e amid gamers, particularly online.  No one spoke at all about the actual nature of 5e as a gaming platform, only the effects of that system going one step further to break up the existing community.  I am not hearing that people are quitting the 'game' (whatever game the reader wishes to insert here), but I am hearing that people are backing off from clubs and social groups because of 'pressure' they're feeling from the owners of said spaces to play 5e.

I give this to the reader second-hand; I have no personal stake in the matter at all.  I cut my ties to off-line communities a decade before the words "off-line" meant anything except being too drunk to drive.  This year, I cut the online ties, too . . . and I'm feeling the effects.  In not hunting down the annoying, idiotic things that people say on other blogs and ranting about them, I hardly have to moderate the blog at all.  I'm actually thinking of taking down the four rules I've posted.

All in all, this has put me in mind of something my medieval history professors would proudly tell us in class - that in those far off days of feudalism, the average peasant would live and die within seven miles of the place of their birth.

I'm not precisely sure how that was measured.  I've heard it argued that seven miles was the distance a peasant could 'safely' travel and return home before nightfall . . . but as a boy scout in my teens we were regularly sent out to walk sixteen or twenty miles in a day, eight to ten miles out and back - and as I remember we would return to camp before dinner.  The adults liked to tire us out in those days; they'd grown up during the depression or during the war and they didn't want us kids getting soft.

I suppose it doesn't matter.  The narrow frame of reference is the important thing.  It gives us insight into the one thing we find impossible to imagine - that in an entire lifetime, virtually nothing was new.

For example, I live in a world so large that a conversation I have can revolve completely around a game version that no one in the room plays while we make suppositions about how this affects people we've never met on a system where everyone participates while remaining remarkably aloof.  Everything, every day, drips with newness . . . and virtually everything I hear said about it describes it as a condition that is almost universally hated.  Certainly, it is nothing that any of us should care about - so we are told, again and again.  If it just happened, it almost certainly sucks . . . and it should suck . . . in all these ways that I'm going to tell you about, ad nauseum, right now.  Between the person above me in the feed and the person below me.

Not complaining.  Happy to take my place in line.

Let me explain something about small worlds - the people who live in them are invested.  Our peasant's medical care fell short and food value overall made life short too, but those small-centered people really, really cared about the context of the universe they possessed.  That's what happens when your world shrinks.  It gets simpler and very boring to outsiders . . . but for the residents, everything that doesn't matter has been deep-sixed and forgotten.  'Small' has the virtue of relevance - the systematic elimination of everything that doesn't practically fit into the space where we have chosen to live.

For example, I have moved into a world so small that when a conversation does begin to arise about what other rules people play or why, I find myself growing magnificently disinterested.  More and more, though I spend virtually every waking minute I can find on the internet, less and less has to do with a lazy user's opinion - a phrase I think accurately describes anyone discussing a field in which they've had no education, experience or in which they've made no substantial contribution.  The reader take note, I use substantial in the sense of having produce an actual real thing requiring actual real time to bring into existence.

Oh, I'm still finding the lazy reader . . . I'm simply not reading it.  It, as in the gender-neutral pronoun that implies entities not specifically related to, well, emotional relevance.

I do wonder if it isn't a bubble, however . . . here in my seven-mile limit.  'Course, I'm reading history like a madman and writing notes for three different books on wildly different subjects, chatting with prospective employers, heading out to the occasional disappointing interview, all while following the disaster that is the present recession and the political developments happening in my province.  I think I can fairly call that a bubble.  It's not a bubble in the sense of listening to people I agree with - since there are no people I agree with - but it is definitely the sort of bubble my whole generation lived in before there was an internet.  Where we, you know, did things.

Hey, believe me when I say my generation has its head up its ass.  They're still trying to live that life without the internet.  Dolts.

Yet when I glance outside this bubble (the one including this blog), I see the tedious chatter that is the 2015 world of D&D, it all looks like sixes and sevens to me.

No, I'm not going to explain that.  Look it up.

F.G.

Aha.

Good, I can quit making a world now.

Unless . . . oh wait, this only works if I play strict 5th Edition rules, doesn't it?  And if I use a square map grid.  Still, there are a lot of benefits to adopting this software.  Nice to see this kind of thing coming along.

The one thing I would truly like to get out of it would be the ability to let other players move their characters.  As things are for my combats, I am stuck moving everyone according to their instructions . . . this Fantasy Grounds offers an alternative.

Beyond that, the program doesn't do very much that my working on publisher doesn't already allow. The program does many things in a more automatic fashion, but I doubt very much that it is more versatile than my imagination.  In some ways the 'automation' would drive me nucking futz.

Most readers, however, should check it out.  Many will find their jaws dropping.

In many ways, this is an answer to my statements yesterday concerning video games knocking pen & pencil D&D for six . . . it is, however, still the implementation of the Funhouse.  More on that in a little while.

Gimmicks

So.

Through B/X Blackrazor, I came across this.

Lately, I've been constantly on the look-out for ways to promote my books, promote the blog, promote anything about me that I can.  So I thought, well, 200 words to describe an RPG?  That's a joke, right?

So I sent the joke RPG I had put together three years ago.

After all, there it is, pre-made and ready [link given to enable finding comments to the original post].

I told Mr. Schirduan that I didn't care about his prizes, but a mention of me or my books would be prize enough.

Heard back.  Mr. Schirduan did not understand.  Did not see how this could be a role-playing game.

I wrote back, saying sorry.  That I hadn't realized he actually wanted rules.  Whereupon I got an answer back, that whatever this was, it would be a pretty terrible game.

Wouldn't anything of 200 words or less be a pretty terrible game?  That's what I asked.  The answer came, encouraging me to take his contest seriously and give it a real try.

And this . . . this . . . is why I avoid the community.

I am too busy taking my own world seriously to invest my time and effort in order to win this fellow's approval.

As you move through this life, you may feel reassured that there will always be someone else who will assure you that your future lies in taking THEIR agenda seriously.  You may be sure they will tell you how 'fun' it will be and how much 'you' will get out of participating.  Because, obviously, Mr. Schirduan's primary agenda is to make your life better.

This is part of why I am a terrible marketer.  I have trouble redirecting the responsibility onto others.  I have trouble taking a smug attitude about how much my book will do for you.  "Yes, without my book, your world will be terrible.  Without my book, you will never be a good DM.  You should seriously think about my book, because of what it will do for YOU.  You'd understand that, if only you'd take my book seriously."

Well, I guess I'm doomed to fail.  Because none of that is true.

I have written a few books about D&D.  They contain details and discussions you won't find elsewhere . . . just like this blog.  They will cost you the same amount as your morning coffee for one, maybe two weeks.

Each includes somewhat more than 200 words.

Apparently, I'm missing a gimmick.

Let's see.  Let's have a contest.  Design a national constitution sufficient to cover all the needs of a country larger than 200 million.  Please be specific and account for all variables.  200 word maximum.  The winner receives a bootleg copy of a 70-second porn video featuring a bullwhip and a strap-on.

Submissions due by 5 a.m. April 23!

Good luck!

The Number

Hm.  Seems to be I am without anything to say on how a DM might better manage their game.

Some years ago, I remember there being a series of arguments - not just here, but elsewhere in other blogs - about whether or not a DM could be 'made.'  In effect, there was a side of the argument that insisted that DM's were born, not made.  If an individual didn't happen to be a good DM, well, too bad.

Did we really have those arguments?  Oh well.  I suppose that being a DM is overwhelming; that it is enough just to handle what's going on; that the expectation of becoming 'better' seems an unfair challenge.  "Isn't it enough that I'm doing it?  I have to be better, too?"

I am unquestionably a better DM today than I was 9 months ago.  My games are better focused, we get more done, the players interrupt for irrelevant observations less and there seems to be a stronger desire to participate and become more conscious of the game's purpose.  The same is true of both campaigns, because I have changed.  My exhaustion seems reduced, my concern about the game has lessened before I start and even the drop I feel afterwards has lightened.  I'm glad for the change.

It is part of my looking at a lot of things differently.  For example, other blogs on gaming.  Oh, they still don't interest me, they're still largely caught up with re-inventing the wheel.  But they do seem to have changed their focus.  A lot of the old blogs that were their six years ago are long gone.  With them has gone much of the fetishistic approach to gaming - perhaps because there are less people who remember the 1970s.  Perhaps because the collectors have finally sapped their collections, leaving them with nothing to post.  Perhaps become 'collections' have become passe.

Much of the content I read now seems concerned with the future.  The write about what they plan to do or what they're trying to do.  They highlight their specific game.  There's also a greater concern with the artistic side of it - a lot less of showing what some other artist drew in 1981 and a lot more of what look at what I drew today.  This is all positive change.  It encourages me.

Arduin made a comment a couple of posts back where he talked about fanatical young people being super into things.  Thank gawd for fanatical young people.  They don't care about how it was done or why it used to be done that way and they really don't give a crap about corporations, tradition or bottom lines.  They love jumping in and doing things their way and they're only sensitive about when they're physically restrained from doing something.  They're not afraid of the internet.  They know that words alone, written by someone thousands of miles away, are not a threat.

I think we should realize that a lot of the old arguments that used to plague the role-playing blogosphere were created by old gamers bringing their old shit from isolated play and isolated convention chatter onto the internet.  These were guys - and a few women - whose mindset wasn't built by the internet, but by high school and college, which they attended in a time when there was no internet.  When the shared opinion of 15 people wasn't challenged - except by that one dude no one liked, who thankfully quit playing after one session.

We forget how obstinate and bigoted those little cliques were back in '85 and '95.  We forget how two or three personalities dominated and pushed around everyone else, making policy and declaring who was a 'good' artist and who didn't make the cut, what was a 'good' module and what was shit.  Who was there to disagree?

All those cliques were set to clash with the beginning of the interet.  All the opinions that had been created by Dragon Magazine; all the messages sent through the materials direct from the company; all the habits and rules set by the Old Guard (and they're syncophants) about what the game had been or was meant to be or should have been or was changed from being . . . all that was set to dump itself onto the public forum like so much dogma that had never been vetted, dissected or debated.

Then the internet went ahead and did its thing.

This is not the first time that I've written about this.  I did only three months ago.  I am recently fascinated by the separation of things by time - and I am not alone.  The idea behind xkcd's chart has been running in my head for years now.

My favorite?  George Harrison's tribute to John Lennon, All Those Years Ago, released in 1981, came eleven years after the end of the Beatles.  Thirty-four years ago.  "All those years" don't seem like very many.

I digress.  I mean to say that there are an increasing number of participants in D&D who have never met Gary Gygax and care.  There is an increasing number who have never experienced a role-playing environment where two or three tyrants, ideologues, had the final word on the principles by which the game ought to be played.  There is an increasing number who aren't afraid to share on the internet, who aren't afraid to steal or break or change or fix whatever doesn't suit them.  There is an increasing number raised on game cheats, self-made apps, workarounds, personal social commentary and having thousands of opinions at their fingertips.

This number does not care about the past.  They only care about what they can get, what it will do for them and how soon they can start.

Gawd love 'em.

Nice

Moving deck chairs because that is what we know how to do:

Playing with themselves.

Transacting

Part of selling my book involves - unfortunately - taking a step into the bulletin board environment.  So I've been getting my toes wet lately.  I've put that off for far too long, but only because in days gone by I learned what it's like to write anything on a bulletin board.

For example, lately I wrote,

"Is there anything wrong with a DM making a vocation of their work - of treating the game as something that's done not out of light-hearted entertainment, but from a powerful desire to invest all one's nature and effort into producing a better world and a better experience for the player.

Does this make a better DM?"

This is the first thread I've started on any board in nearly two years.  Naturally, the first answer I got completely rewrote the question and then condemned it.

"A good DM is one that is always focused on maximizing the fun for his players. No DM can force his players to be super serious, when they are looking for light-hearted fun. That is the sign of a bad DM."  - Imaculata

Naturally, any sane person knows not to challenge an answer like this.  Any sane person recognizes that "producing a better world" means the same thing as "maximizing the fun for his players."  But pointing this out is a good way to get a flame war started.

The English language is a mutable thing on bulletin boards.  Every word means precisely what the writer wants it to mean, regardless of any meaning that might exist outside the writer's perception, and that meaning is free to change from sentence to sentence, as the writer likes.  As such, most of the dialogue on any bulletin board is mostly about what words mean, defining them, redefining them, debating the definition and so on until all reason and purpose is completely submerged.  There's a good reason that bulletin board posts are called 'threads.'  They unravel the moment they're written.

We should give consideration to how much influence such boards have had over the perception of many a new, young player.  It takes only a minute or two to find a post by such a player, asking a perfectly innocent question about classes or alignment or some other such subject - only to be immediately indoctrinated - and let's face it, that is the word here - into the endless shredding of the subject by whichever two diametrically opposed pundits happen to get ahold of the subject.  I envision thousands of young, ten year old boys and girls staring agape at the screen as they watch some minor question spiral into the realm of the ridiculous, fighting over whether or not a railroad has to have 'tracks' or if it can be built in the air - and whether or not that makes for a good game.

Me, well, I just want to get the words, Author of How to Run: An Advanced Guide to Managing Role-playing Games in front of as many eyeballs as possible.  If they were stacking eyeballs ten bucks to the dozen at the local supermarket, I'd be standing next to it with a poster-board.

As such, I'm willing to write a bit here and there - but unlike this blog, I have very little hope of changing the mind of anyone who has taken time to write there.  No question that there are viewers, still, in possession of their mental faculties, but . . . well, there's been something of a weeding-out process these last fifteen years.  If you're still writing arguments on bulletin boards after all this time, it's official.  You're incapable of listening.

Writing is all about listening.  That's what they say about actors, too, because if you're not listening to what the others actors are saying, you sound false and discordant.  People in written plays are expected to react to one another as if they've never heard the words before, even though the scene has been rehearsed a hundred times or more.  Reacting is a difficult thing to achieve, but when it is done right, it is brilliant.  The audience believes that the people actually are arguing with each other; they're convinced that if they were to go back stage after the performance, the argument would still be going on, about the same things.  It is what great acting is all about.

[It's also what drives me batshit crazy about Johnny Depp; he never listens to anyone.  He lives in his own little fabricated Johnny Depp space, speaking lines to himself, making it look for all the world like he's waited for everyone else in the film to shut the fuck up so he can metaphorically step two paces forward and deliver the 'Johnny Depp Special Dialogue' written expressly for him]

Arguing on a bulletin board is nothing like writing to anyone listening.  Words are secondary to the process.  The process is to produce a flame war so that the pundit with the whole day at their disposal can feel the adrenaline rush their ancestors' biological processes developed in order to hunt and run from water buffalo - only that rush is being applied to screaming stupidly, "This word means what I think it means" over and over . . . and over.

But if you are wondering what I'm doing there, I'm selling.  I don't mind saying so.  Sometimes, in order to sell to the listeners, we have to ignore the rude, silly people who are wandering around our store because they have nothing better to do.