The Projects Continue

It's January 31st in three hours, so this is a good time to take further stock on my activities.

Some of you may have noticed that I've been working on the sage studies for the sage field, Metalwork.  These four links, delicate metalwork, metal armour, metalsmithing and weaponwright were a single sentence a few days ago.  I've elaborated on each, just some, not for my players but because a patreon supporter took advantage of the $30 patreon tier that says I'll write a minimum of 1200 words on the wiki as a swap.  It's a good deal for me.  It may not be much money per word, but I do get to keep the words, yes?  Anyway, for those interested in knowing how magical armour and weapons get made ... or at least the outline of that ... there's the information for you.

I have three more pages from the Streetvendor's Guide to publish tomorrow on patreon.  I've decided that I'm also going to post a free paragraph a day from the book, on whatever I've written.  I did so today and yesterday, about livestock today and about mushrooms yesterday.  Feel free to glance over there to see what might turn up.

This brings us to maps.  Seven readers requested maps on Tao's wiki this last month.  These are, with their requests, Palant (Obukhiv), Discord (Michigan), Sterling (Maine), Maxwell (London), Vlad (Munich), Rec (Marseilles) and DM's Escritoire (Ohio).  You're all free to add one section to any of these maps in February, and of course you can make your request known right now.  It does not need to be the stub you started; feel free to add onto someone else's stub if you like.  I only wish to limit you seven from starting another location.  It's not so bad to get one started in Europe, where I already have the 20-mile map made, but these American map-starts are an absolute bitch.  Just felt I should let you know.

I'll fit your request into my schedule somehow ... I've had a few late nights, what with having an actual job also, but I seem to be doing okay keeping up.  Just now, I may add my own choice of section to each map stub, to give them each a little more momentum.  We'll see.

So long as I'm able to work at my own pace, I have no worries.  The days have been fun, the work highly addictive and progress is excellent.  The book length is running at 15,000 words, with 16.5 pages done, after two weeks and a day of writing.  Huzzah!

De-stress and Christmas

Sorry that I've left this blog to laze about a bit ... it's only that while I've been working on the wiki, I haven't found something "sexy" enough to post here.  Recent writings include socage, the barter economy, fulling mills, notes payable, land ownership, windmills, debt and elder authority.  Individually, these are dry, dry subjects, some of which are probably wholly unfamiliar ... but the collection of these things helps to establish a vision of the game's setting apart from the majesty of cheap adventure writing.  But because I understand the lack of excitement these things convey, I've held back discussing them here.

Still, it's work done, in case people have wondered why I haven't posted here in many days, especially with my leaving such a crummy post to carry the load of appealing to new readers.  Ah well.

Coming into Christmas, my "job" requirements are down to about four hours a day (I'm on salary), and I have straight time off coming the day after tomorrow, which should last until just after New Years.  I'm on "call," but last year that amounted to my editing two paragraphs.  Sorry, sorry.  Shouldn't talk about work.

That doesn't mean I'm going to be writing more here or on the wiki, or on my mapmaking blog either.  I'm seriously thinking about investing some money into the European truck simulator game, which I've been talking about for about a month and which someone might buy for me for Christmas.  I'm unhappy that there's a time compression element to the game.  In my mind, if it takes 116 hours and 23 minutes to drive from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, then that's how long I should have to play.  But I'm obsessed with these stupid ideas.

If we can talk about the process of design and the effort of work for a moment, a lot of my day is a gentle up-and-down slope of stress, de-stress, stress, de-stress, with the goal to create a flow that has no serious peaks.  In real terms, this means getting into a task that requires intense concentration and problem solving, followed by periods of getting a cup of coffee, chatting for an hour with my partner Tamara, digging again into a different hard task, putting that down and playing a light video game, then taking up another hard task and so on, as steadily I move from awake and alert in the morning to drowsy and resistant to another hour spent on some kind of work after nine p.m.  I take a shower, tell myself there's time to work tomorrow, recount how much I've done in the day and read myself into the grave of sleep.

Overmuch de-stressing can lead to self-doubt and depression, which causes the mind to resist any possibility of engaging in new stress.  But sometimes one has to take two or three days to quit everything, even when there's no pressing need to get out and do something.  I'm not like most people.  All my family from the previous generation has passed on now.  I don't communicate with my siblings, nor have I associations with any cousins.  I have a younger clan that plays D&D with me, a few friends that are, like me, no longer interested in going to bars in the evening.  We don't see each other often because we're all working on our art.  It's what we wanted to do when we were teens and it's become central to our lives now.

The younger clan is likewise busy:  they rush around, they go to bars, they shop all day or slave at jobs.  I see them to play D&D.  I see my grandson once or twice a week, when we take care of him so my daughter can rush around.  These are my connections to the outside.  I have one event for Christmas: I'm making Christmas dinner on the 25th.  Apart from that, all my time belongs to Tamara or to myself.  So of course I have a lot of time to spend here, or on one of the other projects, or playing a truck-driving game.

I remember when all my Christmas days were filled by someone's calendar:  working without time off, dinner with this family, dinner with that family, nights out with these friends, nights out with those friends, Boxing Day parties, New Years' Eve parties, office parties, volunteer events, school plays, church plays, seeing the philharmonic play Handel's Messiah, all of it.  But hell ... I got, um ... tired of it.  I mean, how many years can you sit in an auditorium and listen to the same musicians play the same piece, before realising there's more to life?

Being broke for those years after 2015, then being forced inside through Covid, I've come to realise I rather like a quiet, event-less season.  I enjoy the idea of Christmas, of course ... I watch my favourite Christmas movies, buy gifts, get a tree together ... in fact ...

We didn't buy one last year, too much Covid ruining the holiday.  We prefer one that's real, and we like not to put too many ornaments on it, because it's the tree that's the decoration.  Here it is, sitting next to our big TV, diapers on the old beat-up coffee table I always think I'm going to renovate, cars on the floor though my grandson was here two days ago, gifts under the tree ... if ever I have doubts, the tree's there to remind me that yes, it's Christmas.

Recognise the picture behind the tree?  I've had it more than 20 years now.

Yes, those are boxes behind the TV (they have books and magazines), and that is and AC unit tucked under the table, reminding us that it was summer.  It's -25C outside and it's supposed to be -40C tonight; was last night, and is supposed to go on like that all week.

All this is to explain that while I work all the time, I also don't work all the time.  The prospect of sitting quietly for four hours driving a make-believe truck strikes me as very relaxing; I can ponder the next wiki page or blog post, I can stack my thoughts about how the hamlet page gets organised, I can plan a road trip next year, I can think about longer term projects, and still feel not bored.  I'm doing something.  If there's anything I hate in this world, it's not doing something.

Feels like a tremendous waste of my time.

Fruit

Chose to dig in last night and a bit this evening and build a page for "farmland" on the wiki, the lowest level "facility" on the hammer page, as encouraged by yesterday's post.  In keeping with the traditions of approaching D&D, I'd write a paragraph that was dead obvious to a person who'd ever watched a television show not about crime.  Something like,

"Farmland consists of fields, houses and storage buildings, where food is grown for the general community.  Crops are harvested in the fall and that not consumed by the farmer and family are generally sold in the nearest village."

We need to get away from this kind of "design."  Like any other part of the game, what's needed is hard information the players can exploit, as well as setting standards for the population's diet.  This means knowing the amount of food that's grown and the number of farmers that exist, and not in a homogenous, every-farm-is-the-same manner.  Thus, the page below, which attempts to capture a gradation in farms according to the environment they're located ... based, of course, on the maps I've created.

Adding more it probably necessary and eventually, maybe, I'll come round to that.  Nonetheless, this is the general idea I need to incorporate in all the facilities that need development and explanation.  It's not just, "what is it?"  It has to be, how precisely can the players use this knowledge to their advantage, and how does the fact of this thing establish order within the game's setting ... from how many people live here, to how much excess food can I produce in a year from as much land as I can plant?

Recently, with a short back and forth on JB's blog, Jacob72 chose to testify about worldbuilding in a way that's emblematic:

"Having read both replies several times I've concluded that we're probably going to have to disagree on the degree of world building that a DM has to put in to provide a fun and satisfying D&D experience to their players.

"World building can be fun. My entry into the hobby was influenced by the maps in the Hobbit and the campaign maps of WW2 in my Dad's history books. As well as wondering how these places were pronounced (especially Eastern Front ones) I would wonder what the terrain was like, what goes on in these places and what the people did. Peter Fenlon's maps for MERP and the world building detail in the MERP supplements fascinates me and continues to do so. I even try to sketch out fragments of these maps to get a feel for the places.

"But is it necessary that the DM needs to do it in order for the players to have fun?"

It was clearly necessary for someone to engage in an incredible level of worldbuilding so that Jacob could enjoy his fun.  The map in The Hobbit took a lot of hours to design and draw, probably going through multiple incarnations.  The campaign maps from WW2 he cites were created by people who gave their lives to mapmaking, sometimes within the time space of WW2, since those designers remained close enough to the fighting in some cases, and certainly within the scope of being bombed in London and elsewhere.  Fenlon and others burned midnight oil aplenty to produce the work they did ... even I recognise that, and I don't even like it.

In effect, the answer to Jacob is that, apparently, so long as someone else does it, no, it's not necessary for a given DM to work for the players to have fun.

My typical answer is that this is the kind of fun that's okay for the first few years, but for a nutjob fanatic like me, it fell way, way short by the time I was in the hobby for ten years.  Undoubtedly sooner, since I did all that I could to advance my world as much as possible based upon the work that others had done.  They buried themselves in work; it seemed right that I should do the same, to achieve the best possible result.  Folks like Jacob have a tendency to think on the scale of "good enough."

But there's a wider point to be made.

For many, I know from personal experience, most game DMs don't engage like this because committing themselves to this degree of scale seems unimaginable.  For them, there's no possibility of putting in this kind of work.  True, they haven't the time ... given what they choose to put their time towards.  But more importantly, they haven't the will.  Since they are having fun, they can't see the point of it.  So they invent an argument that states, "I don't have to."  As if having to has anything to do with this level of dedication.

Just now, I'm well within the understanding that much that I've started to design will NEVER achieve completion.  I will never finish all the sage abilities that I can envision.  Nor will I finish creating the world in 6-mile hexes.  Nor can I conceivably write all the pages on the wiki for which I've created links.  The vision I have for D&D's development is too large for the time one person has.  All that I'm doing is going to end being unfinished.  There's nothing I can do about that.

Some might think, then, that I'm going through the motions to entertain myself.  Obviously, I'm entertained, but that's not the goal here.  If I were doing this to suit me, I'd hardly need to spend extra time explaining it in blog posts, or posting it in a wiki.  In reality, it doesn't matter if I complete the work.  The work I do is merely a stub for the work that someone else will do after I'm gone.  And the more I do, the more others will have to work with.  Just as it is with everything related to humanity.  We did not make this society in a generation.  It took millions of people who were able to envision a world that would exist after they, personally, were gone.  And so they worked towards making that world possible.  Not because they'd be able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labour.  They died before those fruits matured.  No, they worked, knowing others would gain.  Others would comprehend how the world is made ... not by any one person, and not in projects that last only a lifetime.

Jacob, and many others, can't see that.  They can only measure the value of things in what they do for themselves.  Thus, when they see something bigger, something too big to scoff at, they make excuses for why they don't want to climb aboard.  They don't need to.

But the Jacobs of the world can't see how they might provide knowledge and value to others.  It's not just what Jacob does for his world.  It's what Jacob might do for every world.  Everywhere.  He can't see that.

He can't see that this is how humanity functions.  That this is a greater reason to do everything we're capable of doing, as designers, as workers, as people committed to a better world.  I make cute little maps and write annoying little wiki pages.  That's my contribution.

What's yours?

Sequestered

Heh.  It's been more than three weeks since my posting here.  Absurd for this blog.  And some might be thinking I finally hit my wall as a blogger ~ that is, those who haven't been concerned that I caught covid.  Not so far, I'm afraid.

I've been working vigorously this whole time.  I took a break from shifting the wiki, and from working on new content for same.  I've written a series of posts for the closed blog at the Higher Path, still available for a $3 donation on Patreon; but I don't suppose anyone has spare money lying around at this time.  I've been working on two projects on the side, that I want desperately to talk about but which I won't just now, as I want them firmly in place first.  I've been furiously making maps of Mongolia and now western China (working on a region called Kashgar at present).

Just lately, except for one enormous breakthrough in worldbuilding, I've been short on middling content to discuss.  Covid is a big topic, everywhere.  We're all talking about what we've heard, what's going on, what are we going to do if we catch it and what are we going to do if we die.  I'm 56 and my partner Tamara is 61.  We're naturally stressed.  We've been locked up for a month, finances are fine, the support from the government for our medications is solid and she and I get along very well.  It might frighten some people how well two people who love each other really can live in a small space continously without growing spiteful or distant.  We watch each other work out, we lie in bed for hours cuddling, we have sex occasionally and we talk about movies, books and philosophy.  Time passes and we're relatively happy.

I worry about losing her and she worries about losing me, naturally.  It's the same thing people are feeling all over the world.

It seems like such a silly time to be nitpicking over some tiny corner of role-playing.  I mean, I live in a constant setting-building haze, so much so that afternoons and evenings flash by, so that I wake up one day and find that it's Thursday already.  Without distractions, the flow is deep, overwhelming and utterly satisfying.  I could happily live like this for the rest of the time I have here.

So just now, without reader questions to answer, without particulars to explain, I'm building pyramids behind curtains.  Take care.  I'm available for comment.

A First Month Behind Me

As you read this, you have me today weighing 234 lbs.  Just a month ago, I could describe my weight at 262 lbs.  Today, I have enough money to pay my rent and cover my bills, buy enough food for my partner Tamara and I, and live fairly comfortably.  Were I to rely upon the wages earned at my day-to-day job, I could not say this.  It is possible only because of the care and concern of 57 patrons, who consider my writing, my philosophy and my diligence in educating others in role-playing to be a sufficient reason to offer support.

I know most of my supporters personally, through the blog's comments, through the online campaign, through facebook and the like.  When I could, I've tried to be here to answer questions, offer direct advice, even speak face-to-face in some cases.  So when I say, thank you, please believe me when I say, "thank-you," I have your faces, your expressions, your smiles and your approving glances in my mind, as well as your names and your words.

I would also like to thank those who have lent a hand in the past, in other ways.  Who have given me the advice I needed, or said the words I needed to hear in my difficult times.  I do not understand, when I hear some people make a distinction between "online" and "the real world."  This is nonsense, borne of an inability to recognize that we do not need to be physically with people to recognize that all these people we know are alive and struggling with their own problems.  They have come home from their jobs and they have strained their strength to the maximum ~ and yet, whether in person or through a convenient media, they have taken the time to give an empathic moment of support, to give of themselves, to remember that I am here, and to speak kindly and warmly to me when I have strained myself.

This is what Patreon has done for me.  Patreon has made it possible for me to live a life as a small, common artist, to express myself as an artist will, without having to sacrifice myself or my singular pleasures for the sake of a world that would have us all in harness, all the time.  That is why I am saying thanks today.  Thank you.  Your dollars are paying for the roof over my head.  Your dollars are paying for the meat and bread on my dinner plate.  And you, with your comments, with your words of support, make me feel cherished and ~ embarrassing as it may be to admit it ~ even loved.

This is why I keep finding reasons to ask, what else can I do?  What else can I provide?  I had a really wonderful year in 2019.  I was able to write freely for many days at a time, because while managing my affairs and finding support where I was able, my Patreon followers were always there, always by my side ... and always reading me.

I feel confident that if there were something else I could do, you would tell me.  October was a strain.  Getting my body back in shape for kitchen work, I have every one of you to thank for my not having to work 40 hours a week.  I frankly don't think I could have managed it.  But I didn't have to.  Four days, and not five, were enough ~ are enough.  My friends, you are saving my body as well as my mind.  Thank you.

November, I expect, will be better.  Trimming down a lot, it's not so hard to stand on my feet all day.  Every muscle in my body is strengthening, tightening ... and as the end of the day comes, I'm less needful to collapse and nap my evenings away, rather than writing on my blog or actually producing new, interesting game designs.  I expect that as my body continues to tone, I'll find my energy with each week.  And that energy is something I want to put towards all the things my readers are used to seeing from me.

You've gotten me through this rough time.  Now, so long as I don't injure myself [fingers crossed], I should be able to get back on my hobby horse and rock for all I'm worth.

And with a cheerful demeanour, because I feel cherished, I can't resist using a couple pictures to express my day.  These are not from my place of work; I have no intention directly posting anything from behind the curtain of my job.  But yet the message is clear.  Kitchen work is messy, and full of fire and sharp objects.  Food, however, is wonderful ~ and an art all its own.  It is why I've frequently drifted back to that industry when I couldn't find work writing or otherwise using my brain.  At least, it brings pleasure to people.

Don't

Okay, seriously.  Don't quit.  I know that feeling is on your back and that you're thinking about it all the time, but don't do it.  Believe me, that moment of relief you get and the time afterwards when you tell yourself that you're glad, that passes.  In the long run, it just becomes regret.

Yes, I know, it seems pointless to go on.  You're just rehashing old stuff and you've done everything.  I get that.  Only, that's just the way it feels.  That isn't the reality.  Right now, you're just burned out and because of that you can't think of anything good.  It happens to everyone.

All you need is distance.  You've been spending too much time on this lately and you've put off a lot of things.  That's probably true.  But you don't have to quit this to do those things.  You just need to let this rest for a bit, so you can regain your perspective and remember why you got into this in the first place.  In a few months, you'll feel better.  You'll be able to look at this with a clear head again.

I've gone through this too.  You feel like you're butting your head against the wall and no one seems to care.  This is the best work you've ever done, yet no one seems to care.  You've been pouring your whole heart into this and yet no one seems to give a gawddamn.

It's an illusion.  People do care.  They have noticed.  But it's hard for them to express what they're feeling and their praise seems inadequate when they think of telling you outright.  It's a communication problem, one brought about by embarrassment and uncertainty.  It isn't that they don't think you've done great things, it's that they don't want to diminish those things with a few clumsy phrases.

So don't quit.  Keep the work you've done and put it on a shelf until you feel better.  It doesn't have to be all or nothing.  When the cloud has passed and you're on your feet again, you'll begin to realize you never wanted to quit.  You were just under pressure.  It was stress.  And you'll be glad you didn't make a hasty decision.

Then, when you start again, it can be just a little at a time.  Bits and pieces.  Nothing that's going to compromise whatever else you've started.  You'll feel better, too, because you'll be fresh.  You'll have gotten out from these frustrated corners you've driven yourself into.  You'll see.

Give it a while.  Don't force this into a decision.  You're only tired.

B&B

Fantasies are fun.

There's one that my Tamara and I have talked about now and then that is unquestionably a fantasy - and not one that is so very different from what I hear from co-workers who dream of getting out of the office and into a vocation that offers 'freedom.'

Throughout the Maritimes of this country, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, there are little harbour towns that grew up around the timber industry.  Nowadays, the locals thrive a bit on the tourist trade, transforming grand old houses (that are fairly cheap, given that there's no work to be had and therefore no demand) on the water into bed & breakfasts.  A three-thousand square foot house can be gotten (by a savvy agent) for less than $200K, potentially with a dozen acres or more of untamed land.

Together, Tamara and I have worked in both food service and housekeeping.  We have a clear idea what sort of work is involved and how it certainly wouldn't be freedom - hotel work is slavery, as some neophytes discover to their sorrow.  It has two saving graces, however - the first being, if the people know what they're doing, a smart income can be made.  The second is that tourism is a seasonal activity.

For six months, your life outside work ends.  You begin as the sun rises and you are still at it long after the sun sets.  You suffer guests, you suffer things that break and deliveries that don't arrive. You suffer from inadequate staff and disgruntled staff and no staff at all.  People steal from you, people deface or destroy your property, people break into fights and ruin everyone's night.  For months on end, you're tired.  You are the dead walking.  For months, everything that you've been doing is done on fumes, mild drugs and auto-pilot.  Then it all stops and you rest . . . forgetting to give the attention your property needs, something that will bite you in the ass next Spring.

Why would anyone do this?  Pride of ownership.  Pride of service.  A sense that the world is working according to your timepiece, if the reader can make sense of that.

My own notion about this arrangement would be to run D&D for guests seven nights a week. Sessions would begin at seven and end after ten - during which time the kitchen would be largely closed, since I wouldn't be working there.  I imagine a selection of soups and a cold table would be made available, rich with pasta and potato salad, cold cuts and breads for sandwiches, that sort of thing.  But hot service would end at seven (my kitchen helper would manage for the last half hour while I prepared for play, before putting out the cold table, cleaning the kitchen and getting off shift around nine.

Obviously, the D&D games would have to be tailored into one night sessions - though I can think of ways to make it fun for someone to step into an ongoing campaign and enjoy some interaction before we stopped.  The hard-core people would arrange to be there a week, where they could wander the surrounding villages during the day, antiquing, fishing, enjoying a nearby beach, before heading back for a dinner meal and game play.

In the off-season, I would work on my world, write and adventure outwards myself, perhaps south into America or over to Europe.  If our income proved sufficient, I could give myself a half-day off now and then during the season - though I'd probably want that for sleep.

Realistically, I haven't stood in a kitchen for years - but I worked with plenty of fellows who were the age I am now.  Like anything, it's all in training yourself.  Tamara and I have often talked about the menu we would put together.  I suppose in that part of the world it would be much seafood, mixed with significant Italian and Greek entrees.  I make a very satisfying tandoori, every kind of stir fry imaginable and with a little practice I could certainly improve my butter chicken.  I spent a decade cooking breakfasts, so without question the morning menu would be thoroughly refreshing.  I've always thought a short, steady menu of solid food complimented by at least sixty to a hundred potential specials offers the best fare.

But this is a fantasy.  Because in the end, I'm never going to sacrifice that much of my time for something that isn't writing.  Still, nice to think about once in awhile.

Plan for Doing

Yesterday, I outlined some of the issues with digging deeper into world mechanics, and received this comment from Timothy Vaughn.  In an effort to be helpful and save work, he suggested doing part of the work in order to cut down the amount of work:

". . . instead of detailing every job, you'd only need to provide reasonable guidelines for a DM to break down a job into these characteristics on the fly."

I am not writing this post to spank Timothy for this suggestion - it is perfectly understandable.  We have only so much time, we can't waste all of it describing what job the exchequer does in the kingdom, so do the job at 50% of the quality and have done with it.

I'm anxious to explain the ills and failings of this sort of approach where making a game for other people is concerned.  Whereas yes, it does help make my life easier, what exactly does it do for the players?  How has it changed their perception of both opportunities and fun to be had?

My first efforts at the sage tables, made about seven years ago (older than this blog), were limited in a number of ways - partly from how I expected them to be useful (merely as an informational conduit to support players), but also because I had yet to make certain connections about the potential for this game.  Through thousands of comments and hundreds of posts - and a few flame wars - I have changed my position on a number of things.  The research leading to the writing of How to Run was a complete overhaul and re-evaluation of role-playing for me.  And now I am finding myself astounded at the depth and potential for these sage tables.

Not only do they offer 'skills' for the players, but choices for role-play, things for the players to DO, routes to take in order to invent their characters and develop their imaginations.  I don't just want the sage abilities (and the additional rules associated with them) to fill in gaps like so much wet plaster and rags used to plug a drafty hole.

Timothy's suggestion works if what we expect to happen is the player to get the idea on their own and then approach the DM.  It is a 'just-in-case' solution, the sort of thing we set up ahead of time so that we're ready if the player takes it into their head to do something weird.  That's not my proposition at all.

I want the rules to INSPIRE the players, to blow their minds and produce the response, "Shit, that is kewl!  I'd like to try that!"  This is the whole purpose for making the rules openly and posting them on the wiki - to encourage players to recognize there's more to the game than what their peculiar DM lets them do.  Nothing would make me happier than to hear of a player that approached a DM with my wiki and the argument, "I'd like to try this.  Here are rules to cover it."

At this point, I'd like to side-step here and talk about something related.  Please bear with me.

There are two categories of fame.  Both have nuances, manifestations and degrees, but fundamentally the division between the two is clear cut and undeniable.

The first category of fame is that which other people give you.  Usually, because it's recognized you have some sort of talent, but not always.  Often, all you need is a quality that can be sold.  The benefits to you, aside from the money you're given, is a chance to experience a world that most never will, to see things and meet extraordinary people, while receiving gratuitous, unconditional love from thousands or perhaps millions of people.  The downside is that you're more or less owned by other people, who will insist that you perform as desired with respect to their ideas about promotion, their ideas about performance and their ideas about moral responsibility.  This is supported by the danger that these other people will one day drop you, so that the people who once cared about you will later think, "I wonder what ever happened to . . .?"  Worse, you'll find yourself sliding down into normal life, where a few people will recognize you for something that you've now come to realize was never deserved - except that you won some weird sort of lotto.

The other category of fame is quite different.  This is fame that no one can take away, because the person that gave it to you was you.

At the beginning of Richard Dawkins re-release of the Selfish Gene in the early 1990s, he speaks about the strange way that everything else he had written since the original publication in 1976 was curiously overlooked by fans.  These would appear at his readings, say a few nice things about his new book, then produce the Selfish Gene for signing.  At the time, of course, he had no idea that he would later write a book that would make his original 'fame' pale in comparison, The God Delusion.

We can safely include Dawkins in the second category of fame.  Whatever happens, Dawkins will remain famous until his death and for a long time after.  It does not matter if he ever gives a lecture again or goes on tour, or takes part in any promotional activity whatsoever regarding his own notariety.

The same can be said for many people who were once under someone's thumb, but who in the long run proved to be too talented or effective or meritorious to remain that way forever.  Eventually, it doesn't matter if they make a bad film, get caught having sex on film or scream about Jews in a parking lot . . . famously or infamously, there's forever the possibility that they will simply pull themselves together, approach a few people with money on the basis of their ability and produce another film or project.  Whereupon people will pay to see them.

Look at Sylvester Stallone's recent reappearance on the scene after a long absence.  Sure, he's a muscle-bound mass of sinew with a dopey grin, but he holds an interest for enough people based on his previous record.  People will pay to see him.

What is the difference between one category of fame and the other?  I promise you, it isn't talent. Talent will convince others you have something to sell, but in the long run if you have personality problems and a poor work-ethic, you'll get dropped - and hard.  It's worse if you're looking to establish the sort of fame that you own yourself, since that's a situation where no one else will do the work for you.  The onus for setting up the date and getting there and delivering, time and again, is on you - else it doesn't happen.

It's work that gives you a chance at succeeding, not talent.  But it has to be the sort of work that serves to make you useful - as entertainment, as insight, as a rainmaker or what have you.

The grand halls of fame aside, this is true for you as a person, too.  A DM is 'famous' in a very small venue - just a few participants, who are there to show up for every running based upon how useful you are to them.  Your usefulness is based upon how much work you're willing to do - not work for yourself, but work for them.  If, when you sit down to work, you don't have that clear in your mind - that you're working for the approval of other people - then you might just as well not work at all.

This is the reason why many readers read yesterday's post and did not even imagine doing as much work as Timothy suggested.  They don't feel that the game deserves any work - because as DMs, they think the game is about them and their control issues.  Timothy, at least, is prepared to make concessions to support the fanbase . . . but so far, those concessions only amount to contingency plans.

I ask you, Timothy - and others as well, reading this - to go more than half way.  Don't just plan for your players in case they do something.  Plan for your players so that they WILL do something.  Make every facet of your game follow that principle.  Work to achieve it.

Time Wastin'

I said I'd be busy.

I have been hammering away at the remake of a table that, honestly, confirms the sentiment that I'm completely crazy.  I won't go into it, but suffice to say that it involves creating travel routes for every market city in my system - hundreds of market cities, at an average of 8 market cities per hour.  I have this vacation spent about 55 hours setting up 400+ said cities and I am not quite halfway through yet.

Still, this post is about how easily I get bored with things.

Of late, it has been de rigueur to write long posts upon the manner in which food and electronic manufacturers are redesigning their products in order to make them more addictive to the general population.  The term 'addictive' has grown to be quite positive in describing anything that we'd like the general public to buy.  Manipulating the public, encouraging them to ignore advice about nutrition so that they'll eat another hundred pounds of sugar a year, or inducing them to microspend themselves into the poorhouse is all the rage - and it is just as much a rage to spend plenty of words talking about what a seedy, evil, unholy practice it is.  After all, we've all had five decades of television drama to pound home the principle that if someone is addicted, then someone in the equation must be the pusher - and pushers are bad, bad people.

I am the first to step up and say that big corporations are evil.  Mostly, however, they're evil because they serve as shelters to keep sociopathic personalities from having to spend any money to clean up the damage they cause in the process of making the goods that the general public supposedly finds addictive.  You know, the pollution they cause, their resistance against sharing wealth, their unwillingness to contribute to the general welfare and that sort of thing.  I personally feel that the damage the creation and management of unregulated plastic does to the environment is a greater evil than that the plastic is tranformed into a shape that makes people spend too much money on candy crush.

But this is just me.  I'm very different from everyone else, as is evident when I read anything that anyone else writes on the matter.  I don't care that people spend too much money or eat too much or get horribly sick and die of liver failure or whatever else.  I care that I don't do these things, but I don't see the habits of other people in this regard as evil.

I view it as normal.

Being that I'm old, I look back on the television that was available to us in the 1970s and I wonder how the hell we spent so much of our lives watching it.  I don't think the 80's or 90's is any better. Please don't start me on the last decade.  Television has always been shit and yet people have always watched many hours of television.  I won't say 'too many,' because my point here would be that it doesn't matter.  One way or another the 10,000+ hours I've spent in my life doing absolutely nothing besides watching television isn't coming back to me or anyone else.  At the time, I didn't know any better.  I remember I tried to do other things than watch television, but in the long run the time I spent hiking or hanging out at the mall or trying to date girls who had commitment issues was just as much a waste of my time as television.  All the baseball or football I played is as much a write-off - and hell, I spent time practicing to do those things.  What difference does any of that make now?

People would say that in practicing such activities, I built up good practicing habits.  We were told that at the time.  It is a load of shit, of course - since practicing to watch television is just as useful in building good habits in finding the best shit to watch from among enormous piles of even worse shit. It's no different now, since we practice using apps that make us better at whatever the hell purpose for which the game is designed.  No matter what you decide to 'waste' your time on, you're going to get better at it, oh yes.  Which will only be important to people who also spent time practicing that thing.

Please understand that.  All the time I spent learning about history is only important to people who have also tried to learn about history.  The effort I have put into writing is only important to people who care to read writing.  For other people, for people who dislike history or reading, then all my time was 'wasted.'  I might just as well have drank heavily and watched more television, or spent more time on facebook or twitter.  To some group of people, somewhere, everything is a waste of time.  Everything.

The only thing that makes spending any time doing anything worthy is when we don't get bored.  Television in the 70s was, mysteriously, not boring to us.  Fuck knows why, it's awful.  Football and baseball fascinated me, books fascinated me, writing fascinated me, sex certainly did and D&D has been a terrific fascination all around.  On the whole, I've been able to find a great many things these last four decades that seized and shook my imagination, keeping me from being less bored.

Facebook, not so much.  Twitter, even less so.  It took me about two hours, spread over three weeks, to get completely bored shit of twitter.  It's supposed to be addictive, but it bores me.  The internet, largely, bores me.  I have a few pages I check daily and I research a bunch on it, but besides that I search mainly for movies, documentaries and university lectures.

I've been on vacation for 8 days and I have hardly touched my cellular phone.  I don't miss it.  It's a phone.  Sometimes it serves as a camera.  When I owned an ordinary phone and an ordinary camera back in the 1980s, I didn't use either all that much.  I don't get interested in other people's photos and unless something really unique happens, like the snowstorm last month, I don't care to take pictures of it.  That bores me.  I just don't see my cellphone as addictive.  I know I'm supposed to.

But writing line after line after line of market cities and how far this is from that - hell, I can get fanatical about that.  Borisoglebsk is 8.9 days from Voronezh, so cell E917 equals 8.9+E920 . . . damn, that's good time wastin'.

I'm going to do more of that now.