D&D Reno Videos

Like everyone else on the internet, now and then I watch one sort of reno video or another, with this fellow being my favourite.  Judging from the comments, these are popular not only with those in the trades, but very often with men in their 70s and 80s, who I should think pine for the days when they could walk casually on beams thirty feet over the ground.

And this gets me to thinking.  D&D perhaps needs these sorts of videos.  Of course I know we have this sort of thing, and sometimes content like this, but it's not really, um, working on a D&D design, is it?  Mostly, it's either a sort of purposeless artistic exercise, or filler commentary on half-considered themes, but we're not watching a person work on their game world in the way we watch someone building their house.

I try to imagine filming myself building an excel table, or filming myself actually writing the Streetvendor's Guide in real time, and it suggests something as interesting as watching the grass grow, or paint dry.  The process is painstaking, time-consuming and not very productive over an hour time frame.  I did do something like this, and wasn't pleased with the result.  Recently, though, I acquired the GeForce experience screen recorder and have been playing around with it a bit.  My daughter and I tested it on a let's-play video that she's in the process of editing now ... I'll provide a link when it's available.  I could be recording myself writing this post right now, which could be an interesting experiment.  Not your usual youtube fare.

The next thought that leaps to mind would be the 6-mile maps I had been posting earlier this year.  That's a bit difficult because I'm working on two different incompatible computers at the moment.  I have one that has Office 11, which I use for work content, and then this that I'm working on now that still uses Office 7 ... which my maps are made on.  I haven't tried moving them over to publisher 11, though I suppose that's an inevitable experiment I'll have to take up some time.  My previous experience with later publisher programs — 2016 I think it was — suffered in that the program ran so slow that my map files were impractical on account of being too big.  I'd change a line and have to wait 30 seconds for the program to catch up.  I haven't examined this newest version, and that computer is a lot more powerful than any I've ever had, so maybe things would work out all right.

One issue is that I normally work on a two screen desk top.  I'd work on three screens if I had the table space.  The screen capture can only grab one screen, so I'd always be doing something off camera ... which might work all right, I'd have to experiment a little and see.  Stuff could be pulled over the main camera, but that would slow down the work I was doing in order to shift windows around.  Could work though.  Can't know without trying.

Returning to the Streetvendor's Guide, that's quite tempting.  There's a lot going on there.  Besides actually describing the object, along with research (though I'm having to depend a great deal on chatGPT to have anything to say about clothing articles, there's such a dearth on the net), there's calculating the price from my excel trade table — which might sound strange to a lot of people who could reasonably wonder why I don't just pull numbers out of my ass.  I am trying to produce a consistency, however, though there are problems.

If you must know, it's like this: 

Let's take silk and wool both have a price based on the availability of fibre, cloth and tailoring.  My price table, however, is designed that if you're in China, the price of silk will be much cheaper than wool, whereas if you're in Scotland, the reverse is true.  But I can't turn out a Streetvendor's Guide price for every part of the world.  It wouldn't even look well to provide multiple prices for any given object (say an "eastern" price, a "western" price and a "tropical" price.  Honest, it may sound like a good idea, but in practice this would look confusing and awful.

Therefore, I have to obtain an approximate "standard" price that, unfortunately, attempts to reckon with people's prejudice of what the price of wool compared with the price of silk "ought" to be.  I've chosen Venice as the base location of my pricing table; for the economic system I'm running, it's more or less central to everywhere, having easy and quick access to the Black, Red and far Mediterranean Seas.  As a choice, it's not perfect ... but ah well, there's no such thing as perfect.  And since the content, in all honesty, is competing with those who are pulling numbers out of their ass, it'll do.

All the same, it seems a very nitpicky way to go about things, but I like it and there are other benefits.  If I adjust the price of something for some reason — let's say sugar — that adjustment will automatically correspond to scores of other products.  For this reason, while you may have seen a price for something on various teasers I've put up, that's really just a placeholder.  The real price isn't absolutely established until all the prices are fixed.

I could have fixed the prices first, then written the book ... but as I've learned through researching the products, it's better to fix the prices one item at a time.  As I learn about that item, I have a better idea of how to calculate the price.  It's slow, it's methodical, but I stand by the results.

Well, all this sounds a little crazy.  It might be interesting to watch me produce an hour of writing video, though I can't imagine who, besides the four people reading this, could conceivably care.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  I do wish someone would, as Saturday's the day after tomorrow, and I haven't got anything to put there yet.

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide.

Watch & Learn

Today is the 36th anniversary of the first time that I played D&D - and the first time I ever heard of D&D, for that matter.

To revisit the first post on this blog:

It was, I think, a Saturday night. I called up a friend, asked him what if he wanted to do something and he told me, “I can’t, I’m playing D&D.” I had never heard of it.

 A game? Yes. “Can you explain it?” I asked.

 “No, I can’t,” he said. “You have to play it.” Whereupon he invited me.

 My first time playing, I did not understand anything. I was told to be a fighter (it was the easiest to play); my “equipment” was rattled off at me, most of which I was unfamiliar with, and which I wrote down as a list on a sheet of paper under my “abilities.” Lengthy explanations of these things were not given, as that would have held up the game. Watch and learn I was told, and watch and learn I did.

There's more under the link - but the above is enough for this post today.

Since that time, I have done much watching and learning.  For some who read this blog, it may fail to resonate just how long I have hammered and sawed at this game.  I became enraptured immediately from the beginning, with a mental state that had already spent several years of my youth painstakingly making maps, compounding statistics from an Almanac, making lists of countries based on many things (area, population, resources, largest cities, etc) just for the hell of it.  D&D just 'clicked.'

So that the time I spend today, the drive and the effort, it was there 36 years ago, beginning within the very first week of my playing.  It was like I was ready to fall in love and then, there it was, first sight.

It has been thus ever since.

I have been working for a couple of weeks now, at a job which they pay me at (for those who remember I was not paid at all for my first cooking job!).

Today I was given an opportunity at another restaurant, better pay, better conditions, a better chance for advancement.  Then on the way home from the interview, I saw this:



I wish my camera work was less sloppy (and that my thumb had been cut off as a child).  If you're tuning into this right away, the youtube edit fix for sloppy film is just initiating - so this should look better by this evening.

Eileen is terrific, very friendly, spectacularly talented and completely generous in letting me take this video of her and agreeing to let me put it on YouTube.  If you see this Eileen, thank you again.

Now I'm going to go work on the second draft of the book I finished on Friday afternoon.  It is called The Killing Bequest, which I hope is a good title.  The first draft is completely finished and I think it is a marvelous, tight story.  I will be writing more about it in the coming months.

For those who have purchased How to Run, or who remember the Fallow posts from a couple months ago, the book takes place entirely in the fiction kingdom of Fallow that I've invented.

Edmonton Expo is coming in 18 days.  And it's my birthday on the 15th.  I hope all this is a sign.

Bibliography

I am getting quite close to finishing the book.  The release date is still floating quite close to July 15th - at this point I don't see any trouble in hitting that date, although there is always the unexpected.

I've gathered a small list of those books whose information was intrinsic to my thinking and to various parts of the book.  I thought it might be good to publish these, as an 'Appendix N.'  It certainly won't be the sort of list people would normally turn to for role-playing.  In my case, these represent content I turned to for understanding what is going on while we play and what goals we should strive for.  Most importantly, they aided me in understanding why things go right during a session, which was one of the secondary themes in the book.

Much of this content can be found discussed or described on youtube and other places in the net:



Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay Books, 2007

Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design, Jeff Johnson & Austin Henderson. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2011

Consumer Behavior and Algorithm Design, Prabhakar Raghavan. Video, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, University of California, Berkeley, 2013

Here Comes Everybody; The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky. Penguin Books, 2009

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials), Robert B. Cialdini. HarperBusiness, 2006

Learning and Memory: From Brain to Behavior, Mark A. Gluck, Eduardo Mercado & Catherine E. Myers. Worth Publishers, 2007

Physical Therapy for Everyone: Understanding of Our Body & Simple Pain Management As Home Therapy, Clarence Chan. Video, Asian American/Asian Research Institute, City University of New York, 2013

Situational Awareness for Emergency Response, Richard B. Gasaway. Pennwell Corp., 2013

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution, Denis Dutton. Oxford University Press, 2009

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell. Back Bay Books, 2002


In all honesty, this is really more of a "reading list" than a bibliography.  I do not quote from any text, nor directly present any another author's position throughout my book.  I do, however, apply some of their general ideas to role-playing.