Fundamental Needs

This is going to step on my last trading town post.  Therefore, the reader should know that for a bit I'm not going to write about D&D.  If that's not to your taste, go read that other post: it is much more traditional.

Winston Rowntree, Subnormality, Imagine Accepting the Truth

I've been pulling apart the passage above for a couple of days now and I want to talk about it.

I like Rowntree.  He takes a long time between posting his 'comix' and that's fine, because when it comes around it is like publishing a book.  The link to his latest will take a long time to read, I swear it covers about ten thousand words.  It is three interwoven stories and if you're not the sort who can patiently examine why a particular dialogue needs time to develop and get to the point, it really isn't going to be your thing.  It is my thing, however.  When someone tells me on this blog that they read my stuff and they find themselves wanting, this is how I feel about Winston Rowntree.

Even as I'm writing this, I am not certain just now what I want to say about the above.  It is a tiny piece out of the whole text and in some ways it doesn't stand on its own - yet it is also clearly the writer shuffling off the coil of detachment and letting his blood boil.  Some people dislike this.  I love it.  For me, there is no unforgivable or unacceptable way to express a viewpoint, whatever the format.  Those who like to say the author shouldn't "preach" or break the fourth wall are simply pretentious gits who dislike having to hear anyone's voice but their own.  That is why the "special people who all know each other and talk in waves of in-jokes," what I like to call a group of incestuous butt-fuck government grant dependents, have invented the argument that "It isn't what the author is trying to say, it is what I am trying to hear."

That is a big crock of shit.  I've never gotten along with such people.

Writing this post is a way of thinking through the rant.  I often begin on a subject and find my fingers leading me to a thought process that pops into reality out of the blue.  I often rely on this when starting a post.  At least three fifths of the time I have only a vague idea of what I want to write about, feeling sure somehow that the point will crystallize about halfway through - and it almost always does.  Now and then, it doesn't.  Now and then, I don't publish the post.  Sometimes I do anyway.

It's a subconscious-id-muse thing and I'm certain there are good reasons for it happening - like learning to see things in our peripheral vision without looking directly at them.  The brain is such a nifty tool it works on levels we don't directly use or often understand.  Writing for me is a way of tapping into those levels.

This brings me to confidence, in myself and my skillset, something that is central to Rowntree's full story (see, I just had one of those crystallizations, even as I was writing out the sentence).  The rant is delivered to a young woman who is thinking of doing stand-up but hasn't the nerve to try it, delivered by a musician who is struggling with his own art against various obstacles, including his own band's apathy and his acute sense of carrying on a pretense or charade in order to write and produce the music that meets his emotional/intellectual minimum.  Inherent in the rant is a sense of frustration coupled with the outside perception of people that "artists" are this or that, a definition he cannot accept as remotely descriptive of him.  Throughout the story, he's feeling a sense of gentle worship for him and at the same time he's faced with the stark comprehension of being greatly appreciated and admired despite his not being able to transform that honest emotion into the personal need he has to prosper.  He's a bum.  A bum with immense talent and respect from outside, but a bum.

I relate to this character.

This blog is a microphone in front of something I feel strongly about.

I do think this is the greatest job in the world.

I think about my identity a lot, most of all recently.  Step by step, this past year, my back has been pressed up against a wall and more and more this year my identity has been challenged and put in danger of compromise.  I am like that fellow sitting on his bed, the side table drawer open, gun sitting on top of his socks and skivvies, wedged between the change-box and the electric razor he never uses, staring.  Staring and wondering if he would get caught robbing the Kwik-e-Mart if he drove four hundred miles to Louisville in a car he borrowed from a not-that-close a friend from work.  He knows he can't do it, he knows he doesn't have bullets for the gun, he knows in a few minutes he's going to close the drawer and stop having these thoughts and go into his daughter's bedroom and kiss her forehead and not risk ever putting himself in prison, even if it does mean losing the house and moving into his parents' basement with his whole family.  But he keeps staring at the gun because, well, the gun is there and the thoughts are there and they won't go just because he bids them go.

Now, I don't own a gun.  I don't own a car.  I don't live anywhere near Louisville and my side table is a filing cabinet full of old gaming stuff and books.  This is a metaphor.  It is about compromising principles - and how we think about it and how far we'll go in that compromisation, if things don't get better.  It is about shame and what we'll do that breaks our pride, balanced against what we think we deserve and what we'd do to special and rewarded.  By degrees we're all pushed to eat our allotted portion of shit, one spoonful at a time at the behest of those who have power over us.  By degrees we all lower our sense of deserving and our expectation of reward in the face of that.  This is how it goes.

I do recall wanting a clubhouse and I did get that from time to time.  Turning to the theater as an activity would have appealed to my much younger self as a means of being accepted and finding that source of artists and fans engaged in shop talk.  There were moments when that happened, even periods where it was sustained for a while, because I met and associated a group of people who happened to feel similar to me about what drama was about and how hard we were driven to work on it.  None of those things lasted, however, because I'm me and sooner or later the microphone in front of my mouth, expressing my ideas, was going to fuck the people who just wanted to be in a clubhouse sideways.  Even when I was on the inside as an artist I never did embrace the clubhouse because I always, fucking always, got wrapped up in the possibility and the process and the message-making and how hardcore I wanted to make that message happen.  Over and over, every clubhouse I ever belonged to would drive me out for such ideas and that would drive me ever more towards writing, the art I do myself for myself by myself in this room on this keyboard in a silence broken only by the sound of keys.

This intransigence is my identity and it is the thing that makes me worthy of any notice.  It is also the thing that can be compromised, that is being compromised, that can't help feeling the bricks of the wall starting to grind its spine.

Here I am, near the end of this post, mostly on message.  Without a doubt, I am long past the point where I need anyone's licence to express my thoughts; but there is no time in anyone's life where we're certain our thoughts matter.  "Mattering" is key and it's what none of us have control over.  My deepest error in youth - not unique to me - was thinking that I knew what mattered.  An error I am still making.  But hell, all I can do is guess and keep guessing and eventually count on surviving long enough to find the right answer.

If that means making another compromise and surviving a little longer, counting on the next message or the one after that, or the one after that, to hit its mark and so matter, then that is what it means.  It is, as Rowntree says, my fundamental need.

The Hair Shirt

"Fuck, I dunno.  The fuckin' speech is always about having the courage to break free from conformity and be yourself or whatever.  I got no problem being myself - the real issue is how do you break free of hating existence once it's become clear that who you've courageously become is unlikely to pay the rent."

Winston Rowntree, Make a Sound

Hah.  I could have written that.

Somewhere out there (where I can find him on twitter, but I don't) is a great artist and writer who is thinking over and resolving in his mind the same issues I have. This is a good thing.  This sorts out the universe for me.

It's been four months and a collection of days since I released How to Run.  I find myself thinking about my head space six months ago, my thoughts at the time containing the usual nightmare of "Is this any good, how much is the internet going to dump on this, maybe I should force myself to do another draft, etc."  It feels good to lay those fears to rest.  It feels good to know that the reviews on Amazon give me five stars three times.  We all know how cruel and heartless the internet can be, thus the necessity of courage.  Not to be myself, but to put on the hair shirt and make the thing happen.

Hair shirt?  I'm speaking of the Latin cilicium, the garment made of goat hair that has been seen traditionally as a religious self-flagellation.  Tradition has it that, like wikipedia says, a devout would wear the hair shirt to prove their repentance and willingness to atone.

Reading Dante's Purgatorio a few days ago, I found myself rethinking that tradition.  There's no question that working on my role-playing book this last spring was an experience I would equate with discomfort and mental pain.  Those who had to put up with me those few months could bear witness to this - not only had I become intolerable to others, it had grown quite impossible to live with myself.

I remember saying in March that I was trapped.  I had to finish the book.  If I had withdrawn, if I had quit, if I had put the book off endlessly, then the reputation I've built up on this blog would have been cast away.  At the same time, producing a bad book would have had similar consequences.  You readers who have bought the book and found it worthy, you know what I mean.  Some out there must have wanted me to fall on my face.  Certainly in March I couldn't be sure I wouldn't.  But I was trapped.

So I wore the hair shirt and finished the book - and these four months have worked out fine.  It's a shame there are no atheistic phrases to indicate how profoundly relieved I am about that.  Imagine, if you will, that I have been able to take the hair shirt off.

But there it is, still hanging in the closet.  Pretty soon I'm going to have to put it on again.  Soon, I will have to really dig in with the next book, the next risk, the next opportunity to fail to pay the rent.  This is how it goes.  This is how art gets made.

I am convinced that the hair shirt isn't a punishment, but a means to an end.  The key is in understanding that shirt isn't forced upon us, but rather it is something we choose to adopt - to compel us towards an achievement.

I find myself realizing that Thomas Aquinas did not wear the thing to prove his devotion, but to acquire his devotion.  Subtle perhaps for some.  It seems as wide as the universe to me.

Perhaps I do beat the drum for hard work loudly.  When I stood to pitch my book at the fundraiser last July, I stood on the stage and said, "This book will challenge you to work; it will drive you, it will get under your skin, it will push you to look deep inside yourself to find the labour it demands of you."

When I stepped down and found my friends and family, my daughter leaned over to me and told me that I talked about 'work' way too much.  "People won't like to work," she said.

Then I find myself looking at the 5-star reviews on Amazon, where the readers talk about the inspiration the book gives them to work.

Work is a hair shirt.  It is a willingness to suffer in order to produce value.  It is a suffering we pursue, not for the sake of the suffering, but because humans are built in such a way that comfort - while pleasant - leaves nothing to show when it's done.

As per yesterday's post, I don't say this because I want it this way.  I haven't chosen - wouldn't choose - to have fruitful creativity depend upon the wearing of hair shirts or any other similarly unpleasant process.  It's only that this is the way the process works.  You've got to consciously accept that you're not going to enjoy the next few months.  You've got the consciously accept that if you try to enjoy any part of those months - if you take the shirt off - it is only going to be a bitch and a half to get that thing on again.

Once it's on, you've got to leave it on.  Even if it makes you scream.

Knowledge Inside & Out

In answer to a statement yesterday that all knowledge does not come from 'outside,' let us have a quick look at intuition.  Mostly, let's just nail down a definition ... and for that, we have wikipedia.

Let us take note of a couple of sentences here.  First, that intuition is "the ability to acquire knowledge"; fair enough, things are looking good for Alexis to be wrong.  But let's look at the beginning of the second paragraph:  Intuition provides us with views, understandings, judgements, or beliefs that we cannot in every case empirically verify or rationally justify."

Oops.  Jeez, that doesn't work out very well.  That means that while I can have knowledge from intuition, I can't very well make that knowledge useful to anyone else if I can't empirically verify it.  That being the case, intuitive knowledge is pretty lousy if what we're attempting to do is establish a theory about how something works, so that it can be applied by other people.

So, I recant.  Not all knowledge is 'outward' based.  Only useful knowledge is.

Winston Rowntree was the first to tag the phrase for me, 'One True Human.'  I would have always defined this as primacy, the natural tendency in children to view themselves as more important than every other being ... but I like the Rowntree's phrase.  The appeal is the acutely description it offers.  Here's how Rowntree puts it:

"... you don't see other people as people - you see them as props, here to supplement the existence of the One True Human ... its so common there's even a word, 'sonder,' to describe the belated realization that other people exist in the same way you do.  Because they do."

Naturally, I had to go look up the definition of the word, which was not in my usual online dictionary.  I found it here.  In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows yet.  Which is to suggest that the recognition that others are just as miserable as you are is a sad thing ... whereas, of course, ignorant dismissal of other people in order to feed one's own self-gratifying ego must be a happy thing.

It is always presumed that I write this blog to feed my ego, which I think is quite funny.  It presumes that I have no other means to feed my ego, and that I am desperately applying my knowledge, my ability to write and my inner strength to this venue because it is all I have.  Uh, yeah.  I don't suppose it has occurred to anyone that were I willing to lie, and use other people, for the sole purpose of feeding my ego, I would do better to feast off even weaker people than the reader and get rich in the process.  I spent a summer once working with a fellow whose vocation was debt consolidation.  Here was a fellow who was rich, heartless, completely egotistical and absolutely content to continue in his lifestyle, which basically meant offering loans to people who had already proven by their six-figure debt status that they were unable to manage their money.

See, what you do is you open your doors, and some lower middle-class couple comes into your office owning a $450,000 property with $275,000 worth of equity that it's taken them 20 years of miserable, backbreaking labor to accumulate; sadly, they've also accumulated $135,000 in debt.  Now, Jim (his actual real name) smiles, promises that he'll get all that debt together for them in one place, with one payment, and once they make the payments, they'll be free and clear.  Then, 14 months later, when the nice couple helplessly default on their debts, because that is their nature, Jim cheerfully takes away their house. Because that is the deal these desperate people sign.

Now, if what any of us want to do is gratify our own egos, I suggest THAT job.

Okay, I'm way out in left field, let me work my way back.  If knowledge is going to have any value at all, it has to be knowledge that we are able to impart to other people.  And if we are going to impart that knowledge, then we have to recognize, FIRST, that the fact that we know a thing isn't enough.  That's where the one true human thing enters the picture.  Many people who are out there espousing their opinions on things, such as D&D, the so-called topic of this blog, are already of the opinion that since they know a particular thing, that ought to be enough for everyone.  Because we aren't really real, get it?

The purpose in writing about any of this, or in writing the book I'm writing, is not to prove I know a thing and fuck you very much.  It is to make the effort to cause you to know the thing, TOO.  And not simply by taking my word for it, but by encouraging you to step out of your usual world, investigate the thing itself and see if it is knowledge that also works for you.  If it turns out that the knowledge is only something that seems right to me, then the knowledge I have to tell about it shit.  It's not good enough.

I'm writing this, and my book, because I am not the one true human.  You are human too.  And you need a structure for you to work from.  Intuition is a really, really crappy structure.  What you need are solid boards, that you can plane yourself and shape yourself and use to make a strong, tactile world.  For that, you need knowledge that comes from 'outside.'

I hope we are at least clear that if my ego were my motivation, I wouldn't be feeding it here.

The Straight Dope

JB left a comment on the last post that I'd like to address ... but it is too damn long to post the whole thing here. So I'm going to do a hatchet job on it. I recommend reading the entire comment on the previous post.

"... 'What if I’m the single individual interested in the smuggling operation and the rest of the table is only interested in knocking over dungeons and houses?' What if I’m the lone individual who thinks piracy might be a decent occupation but you’re sitting at a table full of 'Dirk'-types, who only want to plunder the dungeon because it seems like a lot easier target than worrying about getting a ship and crew together and doing the groundwork to figure out shipping lanes and the routes of fat merchant vessels? ... I’m talking about wanting to do 'group adventures' that are completely lost on the group ... it’s no good saying, yeah let’s loot this dungeon for a while to finance our pirate ship because ... they simply want to move onto the next ancient tomb or sunken city.

It’s all well-and-good to say, okay, I’m walking away ... But it’s not every DM you come across who’s created a rich-sand-boxy-environment-world where piracy or smuggling or whatnot[sic] would be a real active possibility. They ... instead say “well, we’ve got this particular adventure planned for the next few sessions and then we’ll look at the pirating possibility.” Except that after This Particular Adventure is exhausted, there’s another ‘particular adventure’ to be played. And another. And another.

We ARE talking Dungeons & Dragons ... why (as a DM) bother creating All the Rest of the World ...? As an intellectual exercise? That’s your bag, perhaps ... I’ve done similar and found it completely wasted on a table full of 'Dirks' ... so then what do I end up doing? Catering to my players.

... I guess what I’m struggling with is A) if I don’t give them what they want ... they’ll stop playing; yet B) if I give them only what they want, the game will get stale ..."

To answer your questions JB,

That's much less than what you said ... but you do tend to waffle, buddy. Still, I think the above gets to the crux of it.

Regarding the first half - how do I play if the world is a railroad, or the other players like it that way, or no one is interested in exploring new story ideas - I haven't played in a solid campaign since, I think, 1985. Why? Largely because of all that you describe. Not because of Dirks so much, though I've met my share of those ... just a general malaise in campaign design. There is a willingness to embrace the most banal of templates - the dungeon, the module, the ruin-near-the-town. Gather in the dungeon, dump off in town; gather in the dungeon, dump off in town. Everybody happy? Good. Gather in the dungeon, dump off in the town. Lather, rinse, repeat.

JB, I don't know what honest advice I can give you. I'd like it if some other sort of world existed ... where I did not happen to be the DM. I encouraged my daughter to run for awhile, but while she has the imagination she hasn't got the time. Like all 24-year-old women, life moves way too fast for game design.

The greatest part of why I run a campaign like I do is because of how pissed off I was trying to run in other people's campaigns. I have NEVER run in a campaign that wasn't built exactly like either the 'BAD' or 'AWFUL' games depicted by Winston Rowntree. Those are the only campaigns I've ever encountered. Conventions, the club at the university, the gamespace at the local RPG shop (the Sentry Box), my friend's campaigns, virtually everything I've seen described online, including all the let's-film-our-session-with-a-really-crappy-camera. It's easy to think that no one, ever, anywhere, runs a campaign where a party can decide to do virtually anything they want and the DM just gets the fuck out of the way.

But you know, having run my world now for 34 years, I have had a lot of people come through with a view to doing something, a particular thing, only to find themselves very disappointed. The phenomenon does not only happen with gaming. I have seen it again and again with respect to the real world.

New employee comes into a company. New employee is excited to work. New employee has a lot of great ideas. New employee has trouble reconciling the fact that those great ideas are of interest to no one. Company has a set agenda. Company has a plan. Company isn't going to change that plan for a noob. New employee gets upset. New employee has trouble adapting to new environment. New employee quits.

I have watched a parade of players start in my campaign with exactly that attitude.

I have started a campaign from scratch four times online. Once in Dachau; once in Fiume; once in Golos; and once in Cuxhaven. Each time I started with a complement of players who together had the opportunity to set an agenda where there was no agenda.

The Fiume campaign started with three players who all decided to play a mage. The fourth character was an assassin. The actual level of interaction was piss-poor. The end result was a group of very disgruntled players, one disgruntled DM, a lot of long term bad feelings and a disastrous campaign that never had any continuity. I leave it up where it can be read as proof to anyone that not everything I run works. Yes, that's right, I have no desire to hide it. There is more to be learned there about how not to play, and why a DM does get autocratic, than there is in the 10,000 word post. To compare it with the present ongoing campaign, a typical post gets between 60 and 100 comments, from people who are questioning and expressing their intent. I was lucky to get 10 comments with the Fiume campaign.

The Golos campaign was short-lived. There were peculiar circumstances involved with it that ended the campaign, but it was struggling because it was quickly reduced to one player.

The Dachau campaign seemed to start well, but there were problems with players who did not seem to understand that a game played on a blog was actually going to require a willingness to write and post. One player lost interest in his character fairly quickly; another stated that he could only post in the evening, and then failed to post most evenings. The remainder limped on a bit, but I think the strangeness of the venue was a challenge. Players did not have a template on how to play in the format. Still, eventually we got some new blood - a cleric, who is still playing in the ongoing campaign - and we ran through an entire adventure that proved to be satisfying for all. Then things soon after went kablooie, and I took a break for awhile.

The Cuxhaven campaign, now in Greece, has been the success. The players had the necessary template. They were chosen for their willingness and ability to write. They jumped straight into it with the understanding that nothing was certain, but that there were things to do. Unfortunately, one disappeared (Silvius), and the other had a change of life (Nine-toes) and adjustments had to be made.

So we brought you on, JB ... but that didn't go so well. Then we brought on a paladin, Melchior, and a mage, Lukas. Melchior didn't seem to understand that I had a complex and precise combat system, despite having posted about it continuously on this blog, and also seemed to have some assumptions about how the strength of residents in the world should be telegraphed to the players. Melchior was replaced with a ranger, who seemed to do well with the party for awhile ... but then he just disappeared. The ranger was replaced with a druid, Maximillian.

Lukas and Maximillian are still with the party, for one particular reason. They went along at the beginning of their experience. They stepped into an ongoing campaign and the rode with it. The opportunity to set the agenda from scratch was past; they had to accept the present agenda, and then, with time, reap the reward of their investment. Like an employee who has to be with the company for a few years before their opinion matters. A player doesn't have to be with a party anywhere near that long - but usually, two or three significant encounters is enough.

But this is my world. This is a world where I'm willing to get the hell out of the player's way. This isn't the typical world of the typical DM, as you yourself point out, JB. There isn't any room in those worlds for the players setting the agenda, because the DM feels that he or she is just as entitled as the players to do so. This is the greatest anathema of the game ... the DM insists that because they have done all the work, and they have all the knowledge, and they are a person too, they have just as much right to set the style of play as any player.

It doesn't matter how much you scream at these people. It doesn't matter how blue in the face you get. This is their stance. You can argue that they're not a player, you can argue that they're the fucking umpire, but they just won't accept that. It's not a glamorous enough role for them. They do the work. They want the right to decide how the work is applied.

If you haven't watched an artist try to explain to a viewer how the art piece SHOULD be viewed, you're only understanding half of what I'm saying.

You can't win with these guys. It's their way or the highway ... and for myself, I've taken the highway for the last 28 years. I don't expect to ever 'play' this game again. That's the long and the short of it.

Now, as to the other half of it. Why create a world if the player's don't appreciate it. Let me see, I want to be sure I get the right line of your comment here: "... why (as a DM) bother creating All the Rest of the World outside the dungeon (or isolated adventure site)? As an intellectual exercise? That’s your bag, perhaps ... I’ve done similar and found it completely wasted ..."

JB ... with all due respect, right there you are full of shit.

Let me make myself clear. I recognize the work you put into your blog. I recognize the effort with the new product. And I respect your character; you and I have gone head to head on a number of occasions and it's never gotten abusively personal. I don't mean this personally. The fact is, you have a great deal to learn, and I have long observed a very strong resistance on your part towards changing your mind - even when you're slapped in the face.

You've done similar?

Really now.

Have you any idea how much respect and value my 'bag' produces for my campaign? Do you recognize how much people have paid me in money for my 'bag'? Or the number of people who have written to say they've applied my 'bag' to their campaigns and gotten terrific and amazing results? This blog is the blog my 'bag' built.

Where the hell is your bag, so similar to mine? Where are the links? Point them out to me. Mind you, I only want to see the links that show a 'similar' level of design and effort.

I think what you mean to say is that you've TRIED to produce something similar, and that it FAILED to get the attention of the people you've DMed. That might be for a number of reasons. It might be that you just didn't impress anyone. It might be that your players are a bunch of louts and morons. I don't know your players. I've certainly had players who tried to play in my world who were louts and morons. I presume, if you've played as long as me, so have you.

So what is the issue here, exactly? That you suffer louts and morons to play? That the louts and morons don't appreciate your efforts? Perhaps you should try NOT playing with louts and morons. Or perhaps you should try producing a 'bag' that draws respect. Either one would seem to me a fairly obvious solution.

Most of what I do on this blog is throw my pearls before swine. There are a great many who scoff at the maps, who scoff at the generators and the design, at the problem solving, at the alternative way of looking at gaming, etcetera etcetera. I don't write for them, however. The fact that there happen to be swine in the room is of no consequence.

All this game design is not an intellectual exercise. The maps and so on are applications. They're the game board. They're the rule book. They make it possible for the players to make up their minds about what they want to do. If you can't see that, if you can't judge my work as anything but a waste of time because it wouldn't work on 'Dirks,' then you have A LOT TO LEARN.

I was going to write something about having principles and standing on principles where it comes to making your world for players to run in it, but I think what you really need to do, JB, is change your mind about something. You're frustrated because your precepts are faulty. You're judging yourself, methinks, too generously. Where it comes to how you will run your world, it is your decision to be used by Dirks. It's your decision to fail with your design. It's your decision to throw your hands in the air and claim there is no point.

But that decision isn't based on any evidence that I can see. It seems derived from some other place.

Your frustration will sort itself out when you realize the thing you're frustrated with is you.

The Game World Of Winston

For now, let's solemnly gaze upon the genius of Winston Rowntree.



Full Image

Is it not strange that the community is full of people who argue that the headings on each image are not TRUE? That "awful" is giving the players a good experience and that "good" is impractical and therefore a waste of effort.

Any person looking at this would understand immediately ... unless they played D&D, of course.

Too Many Words

As of this year, things have been happening to the D&D blogosphere ... some sort of shakeup, apparently, which began as long-standing blogs began to drift away, one by one.  The most notable being Grognardia - who, as everyone knows, stopped posting mysteriously back in December ... and who has since appeared momentarily to give an explanation that his family requires his attention.  This would be understandable, except, well, he was given a bunch of money through - I think Kickstarter - just before disappearing.

Well, I'm not up on that, and if there's any new information I'm not the one to get it from.  My opinion of the guy's blog was that it was filled with the most sincerely boring corporate-style bullshit imaginable ... I continue to believe that he was somehow in the pay of several game companies simultaneously.  If it weren't for the fact that my daughter met Maliszewski once, I'd believe the name was a front for a gaming company.

I understand many people are mad at him.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.  Many people of late who keep blogrolls where the last post made drops the blog to the bottom of the list with time are seeing a lot of familiar names that haven't posted in months or more than a year.  Amendments here and there have been made.  One after another, sometimes with a goodbye message, sometimes not, blogs are ending.  The usual story is that people are moving onto something else.  That after a set period of time, there's less to say.  It may even be that after a decade or so, blogs in general have run their course.

It was always a bit goofy.  The culture we know isn't really a literate one.  Letter writing had long become a thing of the past long before it was replaced by email, something done by old people and furiously resisted by the young.  It was only with the explosion of chat in the 90s that there was suddenly a reason to write at all, for many people who thought the last essay they'd ever write came with high school graduation.  But take note that chat is a thing, too, that's run its course.  Oh, you can still find chat rooms, but they're filled with the most loathesome people imaginable, mostly on medication, prone to juvenile descriptions of kindergarten behavior, sensitive to any digression to the extreme, etc.  No meaningful person nowadays spends any significant time in a general chat room.  It has even gone out of vogue for Hollywood movies.

Perhaps its time to admit that 99% of the general public are not well suited for extended literature.  This whole 'wall of text' thing has a great many people seriously overwhelmed ... that is, any amount of words that would exceed those to be found in a detailed coffee ad.  The presence of words like 'malfeisance' or 'gentrification' fit like massive bricks in that wall, hazing the gaze of readers so as to defy comprehension.  There are just too damn many words in the language process to make reading them a practical use of one's remarkably brief time ... and all the worse when their plenitude demands some degree of puzzling out the inherent meaning.

People, as a whole, do not write well.  Many of those of the highest intelligence very often fail to grasp that writing is a separate skill from knowing or doing.  That seems counterintuitive (a larger brick).  Surely, if one knows a thing, or one can do a thing, the explanation in words ought to be no different than simply speaking to the reader.  But of course, if the reader can zone out when they listen to you describe the intricate details of your world in person, they're bound to do it in print.  After all, you're not there to see their eyes glaze over.

This blogging thing never made much sense.  I mean, I love it.  Good, bad, incomprehensible, waffling, irrational or discordant, I write like other people walk.  I don't say it's all good - I know for a fact that a lot of it plainly isn't.  But language is not hard ... not to write and not to read.  I don't pretend to understand how a multiplicity of words is a 'wall.'  To me, it's a feather bed ... something to fall into and lose myself, to sink so deep into the middle that the rest of the room disappears, until I feel on all sides hugged and gently smothered to bliss.

But this is me.

Others, I know, treat the expectation of reading a few paragraphs as a state of being something like jet lag, sucking out their existence and pulverizing them as if with two socks full of wet meat.  It's just not a thing that's wanted.  So why they would ever get into the reading of blogs, or the writing of them, was like a strange blip in the intellectual continuity of the universe.  Demonstrated as such by the revealing evidence that Maliszewski, a man with absolutely nothing to say that had not been said already, wrote easily the most popular roleplaying blog in the sphere.

Zak, over at the porn star corner, continues to do very well, and one cannot argue that it's the porn star logo any more.  He's dragged his keyboard through a spectacular number of posts on a wide variety of subjects, and so he's earned the right to be judged solely on the quality of his writing, and the quality of his ideas.

He's so accessible, so wonderfully, eagerly, mindbogglingly accessible.  You will not find a wall of text there, oh no, far from it.  Don't expect to find your mind expressly challenged, or any idea you have of yourself playing or running the game challenged either.  Read Zak's blog, and you will feel so much better about yourself; it will lift your comprehensions of yourself to the stars, for never will Zak's writing in any way make you reflect, for an instant, on your own mediocrity.  Compare yourself to Zak and you will always come out the winner.

Thus is the core of his appeal.

Of late, I've been reading someone who does not make me feel this way.  This is a fellow I stumbled upon through Cracked, who I quoted on the blog a couple of weeks ago, and whose back catalog I have since been reading with all the deliberate motivation of a flea market saleswoman trying to get one more raggedy anne doll made before Sunday.  This would be Winston Rowntree of Subnormality ... with the tagline of "Comix with too many words."  Here's a fellow who I have begun to respect far past my ability to express ... who regularly gets readers on Cracked and on his own site trashing him for daring to use more than a hundred words in any given example of his work.

Words, in the conception of many people, many of whom would certainly not be reading this blog, suck.  They suck hard.

If not listening to mind-blasting music, hurling oneself into situations of near-death through the use of planes, kayaks and belaying ropes, or flushing one's brain with highly complex drano alternatives leaves one to think, then reading positively forces one to do so ... and thinking is bad.  If you don't believe me, spend a lot of time doing it, talking about it, and then count the number of times people pause in the middle of a conversation to tell you that you are doing it too much.  That should be evidence enough for you.  Thinking, by and large, is a social disease.

But, I am not likely to stop.  I have this strange sense of being that where I'm beset on all sides, where I am intellectually over-reached and I should just goddamn stop, I just reach farther.  That seems to be my way.  And as things change, and people disappear, and interest wanes in a particular thing, then I move onto the next thing where interest is bound to wane again, for the same reasons as before.  For surely, if disinterest in blogs is in widespread evidence, then this is surely the time to get my online campaign started again.

I did want to bury that in the end of this post; I wanted to see if anyone was listening, or if all I have to left to write to are the bots.  I'm getting an enormous number of page views of late, but since they seem to be coming from sites like 'russianwomen.ru', I have to contemplate the possibility that there are no real humans out there.

Oh, I'll send an email, see if anyone's interested ... but for the moment, let's take a rolecall.  The restarting of Tao's Campaign is on the table.  Any takers?

"A Horribly Free-Form Escalator Ride to the Grave"

The title for this post, and the image, is from a marvelously funny article on Cracked by Winston Roundtree, 5 Reasons Your Online Dating Profile Isn't Working.  Except for David Wong, who is brilliant, and the occasional bright spot, Cracked has been slipping lately, but I still read it.  I'm glad I did today.

That's because, apart from the context Roundtree addresses, that is a pretty goddamn good representation of the difference between a railroad and a sandbox.  For all I've written about it, I concede I've not written anything as brilliant as "... you might forget that reality is all improv."

Nor the very clear representation of those things on the left which fall under the heading,

THINGS YOU'RE ENTITLED TO

I love it when my brain cells pop the way nitrogen deposits do when someone massages my back.

Several people on this blog and elsewhere have been railing (hah hah) about the bloodymindedness of people who hate the expectation of having to work really hard in order to produce a world that is flexible enough - free enough - to allow the players to do whatever they want, for as long as they want, without the expectations of the DM fucking them over with a lot of pregenerated, pre-expectant rigid material.

Sorry, dear reader, if you have been one of those taking this tack ... we've been terribly, upsettingly misguided.  The game forces crying foul in the community are not those who hate work; they are not those who cling to the old way of playing the game because they haven't learned to play it some other way.  Nyet!

I'm ready to admit my error in this.  It turns out, those DMs are tasking the players along the tracks of Destiny, with the players as paying riders, because all the shit the players feel they're entitled to demands, DEMANDS I say, that the game be rigged to get it for them.

All you need do is replace "anthropomorphized collection of ideal attributes" with "quasi-materialistic icons proving potency."  Yep, that's the game, kiddies.  If you don't pour sugar all over the motherfuckers and get their red, yellow and green lights going, the whole damn bubble's gonna burst and leave those players flat and impotent in Reality-fucking-Central, where success for them is going to depend on the same crappy skillz that are already failing them in life.

Shit, that's what fantasy is, ain't it?  Having all that handed to you on a silver-freakin' platter, where nothing is asked of you except to push your broken-down handcart along tracks built expressly for you and your funny-instead-of-attractive best friends.

I have to have been worse than the devil to all you poor damned souls aching for your dream shit and your dream glory, slapping you in the face with the prospect that the game of D&D should be about you never getting laid ... er, em, figuring out how to tell the difference between your dick and your sword.  Jesus.  I'm sorry.  I hadn't realized.  See, I've been looking at this whole gaming thing from the point of view of someone who isn't a loser, who isn't afraid of improv, who's arcing fairly comfortably through life, who just happens to see the game as arcing through a different life in the 17th century.  I swear to God, it just never occurred to me that actually getting off the fucking bed and getting to the game was all the self-motivation you had.

My apologies.  My deepest, deepest apologies.  Sincerely, no sarcasm.  I just hadn't realized, not until Roundtree's article, how desperately your type of player depends on that wee bit of escapism.

I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me.  I didn't know.