Distributing Magic Items

The first step it to identify some 475 magic items that appear in the DMG, which is more than enough for my campaign. I've never felt much need to create more than a basic few items of my own, simple stuff, refilling jugs, flasks that provide healing salves, that sort of thing. But those can be left off the table for now and we can just use what's there in front of us. This collection of items appears as a list from pages 121 to 125 of the DMG, with a lot of description afterwards, most of it inadequate to the purpose.

The next step is to identify all the "sub-types" for those listed. For example, from the list shown, we have "dragon control" potion, but not which dragon is controlled, just as we don't know which giant is controlled or which giant's strength is obtained from the giant strength potion. These sub-types are determined by an additional roll that is made in the description of the potion: for example, the dragon control potion type is determined by a d20 roll found on p.125.

The reason this matters is because what's wanted is a likelihood ratio for all items as if they they were listed together in one table. To determine at the start whether to roll on the "potions" table or the "scrolls" table, and so on, there's an initial table at the top of page 121 that one rolls on first. To get the result of a white dragon potion, one has to roll first on that top table to determine a "potion," then on the potions table to get a "dragon control potion" as the result, then that d20 table to get "white dragon control potion." That's three tables. The total chance of getting that specific potion is therefore 0.2 x 0.02 x 0.1, which equals 0.0004. What's wanted is that universal number for every magic item, so that they can all be compared with each other, dispensing with tables that need us to roll on tables that in turn need us to roll on another table.

The system is fine. But what's wanted to is to create a new set of tables, from scratch, and not use that are pre-existing... while at the same time not actually changing the chance of each item in and of itself occurring as something the players can find.

Why accept the DMG's numbers? Because I've play-tested them for 47 years and those averages may be close to the best organisation of any part of original D&D. The only real problem is that they offer a chance of getting an incredibly powerful item when rolling for things that are much more common. That's not desirable. Not at all. What we want can be found on this page of my wiki.

The concept for determining a randomly given magic item is essentially this. First, we build a separate but easy to make table for the monster being plundered:

This is the troglodyte treasure, as discussed on this post, discarding the "treasure type A" moniker completely by merely designating the amount of treasure per individual, the only number that actually matters. From the above, if you kill ONE troglydyte in his personal lair, where he's just been hanging around a bunch of time, his wealth will equal 65 c.p., 137 s.p., 326 g.p., less than one gem and therefore none, less than one jewellery and therefore none, less than 100 magic item experience (the bare minimum needed) and therefore none. This total treasure compares rather fairly with how much a 2nd level fighter player character tends to have from adventuring, so why should the trog be any different?

Of course this can be viewed as an average. The single trog may have more, or it may have less... and logically, if this is what the trog keeps as wealth while not adventuring with others, this wealth may be secretly buried in a forest (in a "lair" some 8 inches cubed that consists of a hole, a bag and a large rock on top) where its not likely to be found. That's not the point. What matters is that we have a rational total, perhaps balanced by a die roll, that assures to things: a trog definitely has something, and it isn't the ridiculous 3-18 c.p. that orcs in the original game are assumed to carry around, for purposes that are never explained, since there are no stores to spend copper pieces at where the orcs are, and in game you can't buy much more than a chicken with that kind of scratch.

What matters is not what "one trog" carries regardless — because as a DM, you're never going to throw one trog at the party anyway. You know that five first levels are going to waste the trog forthwith, so logically the trog knows that too... and knows that there is safety in numbers. A lone trog is only "lone" for one reason: it's lost where the rest of its kin are.

The Magic Item Distribution page on the wiki, linked above, includes the following line: "With 22.3 x.p. per troglodyte, the total is 691, the fraction ignored. As such, one roll would be made on Table I and one upon Table III." Table I is sketched out on the page, broken into "Common Magic Items" with a sub-table for items so unlikely that they don't fit easily into the d100 format. The Rod of Absorption, with 1 charge, for example, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of being rolled randomly. That is also the likelihood of three other rods, one staff and two different wands. The reduced likelihood deserves an explanation.

Table I accounts for magic items with 100 to 200 x.p. value as rated by the DMG. Rods have 50 charges in them and the DMG states that a fully charged rod of absorption is worth 7,500 x.p. That makes each charge worth 150... so, a rod with 1 charge fits into the Table I range.

However, the base chance for rolling a rod of absorption from all possible magic items is 0.5 (the rods, staves and wands table) x 0.03 (1-3 of one hundred of the table itself). This equals a chance of 0.0015;
but importantly, a 1 charge rod has only a 1 in 50 chance of being found among all the rods of that kind out there (by the logic I'm using), so that chance is reduced by another 0.02 to a final chance of 0.00006. Considerably less of a chance than finding a healing potion.

Here's my workup of Table I in excel (please just ignore the shading):

Everything that didn't produce enough chance to push the die roll another point in the main table was shoved into the rare item subtable, which is rolled on if 98-00 is rolled on the common table. The numbers all reflect how many charges at this table rank count against the total charges of that item: a wand of magic has 8 out of 100 possible charges, while the wand of metal & mineral detection has 13 out of 100 possible. Together, that's why these are more likely, along with the fact that the DMG makes them more likely overall.

At this point some wise ass raises a hand and says, "Hey, if the wand of illumination has 20 x.p. per charge, why can't the single troglodyte have an illumination wand with 1 charge? Huh? Why not?"

Because, totally arbitrarily, I'm setting a 100 x.p. minimum for magic. Point in fact, by the logic I've just explained, the 1 charge illumination wand would have a 0.000025 chance out of 1 (0.0025%) chance of existing at all. Thus out of 40,000 single troglodytes out there, one of them would have a single charge illumination wand. Yeah. I'm drawing the 100 x.p. line against this sort of nonsense, and pegging the table at 150 x.p. average for distribution purposes. You don't like it, you go ahead and do it your way.

I think this about covers it. I tried to manage the same process with determining the percentage of scrolls based on the scroll table in the DMG and, I must say, I'm not really satisfied that my judgment was sound there. I'm okay with the result... and at some point screwing around getting more accurate so that a number can be changed from 15 to either 14 or 16 just doesn't become worth the skull sweat. Like a bad accountant, I tend to think, "Well, I'm close... so fuck it."

See, it's the way Gygax conceived of scroll distribution on that table... which is really, really annoying. Go look at it.

That's about all. I still have to make table III (I have it in excel right now, but not laid out on the wiki) before Friday's game... unless, of course, the party all die or they fail to get the treasure. But I don't know they will, so I have to ready that table in case they succeed.

Are we all having fun?

Session 12: Round and Round

The party re-entered the trog dungeon for the fourth time, though it is a significant sized space, especially considering there's a whole other half that is utterly unexplored. But this night, the fight was here, with the players entering at (1) and entering the area that had been mapped out previously. They caught sight of troglodytes at once, who promptly skedaddled, as they were just there to track the party as it entered. It did not take the party long to remember that the space was a roundabout, and that the intention of the trogs was to trap them somewhere and attack them from two sides. So they left a hireling, Oddsdrakken, at (2) and proceeded towards (4). The two trogs they'd seen at the corner of (3) assembled with others... the first group attacked at (5) and the party was able to make good meat of them quickly, unlike the earlier combat. For one thing, most of the party had made their saves this time and were sustained by the presence of Zoltan, whereas in their first meeting with the trogs they'd been down both Zoltan and Ti; this time, Ti still couldn't make it, but the extra body made a big difference.

The second group attacked at (6) and, amazingly, Lexent, his dust devil spell and the man-at-arms Fenwick did a pretty good job against them until Zoltan could come down and join them from the other fight. Both fights ended quickly enough, though there were some moments of tension that had plainly worried the party at points. Nonetheless, it worked out in their favour and they chose to continue.

A point about combat... because for the last two runnings it has pretty much been two combats in each session. This really was two combats taking place at the same time, though as the one at (6) was starting, (5) was in the wrapping up stage. I've had some argue that they can run five or six combats in a 4 hour session, but I'll be damned if I know how. At a few points during the combat I was pushing to roll and call the party to act as fast as I could; I did miss some details and was reminded about them, which I always appreciate. I told the players that I was merely trying to keep the pace going as rapidly as possible, which means someone pretty much talking non-stop. There were no moments of reflection during the game; no one made an outside reference to a film, a product, another situation that had happened at some other time. The players were utterly into the combat, 100%... which means, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how many combats were getting played, the ones being played was utterly engrossing.

That is what should matter, nyet?

Pushing past (7) on the map above, the party searched this next part of the dungeon, found upon the adjoining page.

This image shows the battle in progression after the party had made their way to the trog's personal lair. The two other passages might have given the trogs an opportunity to get behind the party and trap them in a dead end, but the party picked right of the three choices before them, and thus the final battle is on going. The party were mid-round when I looked at the clock and found we'd already passed our assigned stopping time; I pointed this out and everyone was surprised. We were all in flow, utterly unaware of the time or anything except the game, which I count as a successful run. In fact, I'd call it the best session I've had with this campaign, and among my best ever, so far as engagement counts. I felt a rush the rest of the evening and experienced none of the usual emotional "drop" that follows post-game. This session just went too well.

So, there are 11 trogs left; one is apparently glowing without anyone knowing why, while two are glowing with the party's faerie fire spell just now. Four of the trogs are stunned (red stops) while those players who have yellow crosses have failed their save. The green number is counting the number of rounds the nausea has been in effect (I do not give it a limit, like it has in the original Monster Manual). The green dot is Lexent's loaded sling for the next round to fire. I use the purple dot for someone casting a spell, because I do not permit casting and release of spells to happen in the same turn. This weakens my mages and gives more purpose to the fighters. The two purple dots atop the trogs are the cantrip twitch cast by Mikael the mage.

You can see plainly the trogs will be fighting first when the game re-commences, this Friday.

Fixing Treasure Tables

I should be writing a post describing the events of the Discord Campaign, Friday the 10th, but I've been working on a different project related to that campaign... in fact inspired by it. All this is old school stuff, so it won't help you with your later edition game. Sorry. My fixes are always in some way related to AD&D, not because it's "good," but because its familiar. I know where all the bugs are.

As such, this post isn't going to make a lot of sense to many except us old farts, but...

This horrid piece of trash is the infamous Treasure Type table from the original Monster Manual:

This is as much as the screen capture would produce. I could pull out my own manual, put it in my scanner and give the whole thing, but as I don't care (and it's probably somewhere on Google), it's sufficient for my purposes. The concept is more or less this: a monster such as a "troglodyte," which the party has been fighting of late (31, by my count), has a specific "type" of treasure, as shown below, beneath % IN LAIR.

The trog's "treasure type" is A, the first line on the above image. It shows a 25% chance of 1-6 thousands of copper, a 30% of 1-6 thousands of silver... and so on. We don't need to get excessive with listing things there. The idea (and no, this isn't the whole story, but it's the part we're going to use, so just roll with it) is to roll these and then compare the numbers obtained with the "No. Appearing" on the trog page. Thus, if you get 5,000 c.p. on the treasure type table, and you find 1 troglodyte in his "lair," then presumably he has 5,000/100 = 50 c.p. in his possession.

Like I said, no, it's not exactly like that. There's a lot of silly rules that are in no way consistent throughout the books about lairs and minimum numbers and so on, but please ignore that. It's not relevant.

Like most people, I've always hated the treasure table. The players always wind up fighting something hard and a bunch of bad rolls arise so the players end up with a paltry amount of treasure... so you have to ignore the shitty table and just give straight treasure as seems best. Or the players fight the easiest battle they've ever had and suddenly the treasure table works in their favour. It's too random, too inconsistent...

And yet, I've always felt that on some level, it was the good root of an idea. Only, I spent about fifteen years occasionally trying to find it to no avail. No matter how I turned the numbers around or made the rolls, it just wouldn't provide a consistent, practical number. A certain number of troglodytes should consistently have a certain amount of things, just as any large group of people that act independently accumulate a reasonable wealth merely by existing. Trogs have a fairly decent treasure, compared to orcs, say. And they ought to. The trogs my players have fought over two sessions have killed one of their party and have come very close to effecting a total party kill. The question, though, is how to produce that treasure logically, without pulling a number out of our ass.

But after years of failing to produce such a number, I sighed and, before launching this blog in 2008, I'd long since quit trying. Now and then, someone here has asked me about assigning treasure, and I've had no answer.

Until, I think, now.

Starting by compiling the original numbers for Type A treasure:

Those are the excel functions. We start by ignoring the "random" generation and just multiply the percentage of a type of coin against that amount of coin, doubling the chance of each type. Thus, it's 50% for 1-6 thousand copper (average 3500), and 60% for 1-6 thousand silver. The number of gems is 100% times 4-40 (average 22), while jewelry is 3-30 automatically also (average 16.5). We treat magic as special, ignoring the percentage, counting 3 treasure. Magic items are a special category and are dealt with differently, as I shall get to eventually (and not with this post).

It'll be helpful to see the calculations of the above and here they are. Adding up the total experience from each, we get a total of 113,076 for 100 troglodytes... dividing that between the 100 possible appearing, that's... 1,131 per creature.

Wait a minute. What?

Is that 97,000 g.p. next to jewellery a typing error? Why the hell is it so bloody high?

Well...

The "jewelry table" (American spelling) appears on page 26 of the original DMG, reproduced below, with it's description intact.

For reasons that surpass all comprehension, there's a 60% chance of getting an average piece of jewelry that's worth more than 1750 g.p., and an incredibly 30% chance of getting a piece with an average of 5,000 g.p. altogether. In fact, if you balance out the average across the table, the average is 2,910 g.p. per piece on the first roll.

However, the rules state that you should roll a d10 and a d8 to see if the "workmanship" or the "inset gems" are exceptional in some way... and if you use this rule, you get an average of 5,919 g.p. ... not because rolling a 1 on either die is likely, but because the cumulative effect of rolling said dice on multiple items creates jewellery of simply extravagant results. Jewellery by itself totally dwarfs the rest of the treasure types table, whenever it occurs... and frankly, though I've been at this game a long time, I can't ever recall having noticed this before to this extent. It's enough to convince me that I must have the math wrong, somewhere. Still, I can't help looking at those odds of getting an average piece over 5,000 g.p. That alone, even if I've screwed up the average (and I may have, I'm not perfect), is enough to make me feel that jewellery table needs serious adjustment.

Here's my new table... formula version first.

This really isn't a complicated calculation. It generates a d1000, then divides the chances of that between "wares," "valuables," "treasures," "adornment", "regalia" and "masterpiece."  A big problem I always had with the DMG table was that "gold with gems" doesn't really mean a damn thing since I don't know the type of jewellery (necklace vs. earring, for instance) or how much actual gold vs. amount of gems is being used. So, that's tossed in favour of trying to capture a "use" principle in these expressions.

"Wares" (20-80 g.p.) are valuable things one might own in a living space. "Valuables" (80-480 g.p.) are things that someone of the merchant/artisan class might especially esteem, but really is still just a higher quality ware. "Treasures" (240-1920 g.p) are the sort of thing that are kept either hidden or under lock and key; they're just too valuable to leave lying about.

"Adornment" (480-4800 g.p.) falls into things that are designed specifically to be worn or carried on a social-authority level, short of an actual monarchy: a guild or captain's crest, a lord or bishop's evidence of office, that sort of thing. "Regalia" (1440-7200 g.p.) thus fits the category of what a monarch wears; logically, one monarch may wear or carry half a dozen such items. Finally, the last category, the "masterpiece" is a one-of-a-kind artwork, worth (4050-13500 g.p.). Said regalia may be something that is in fact being sought after; or it may be something long forgotten from another age. Masterpieces might have a lineage of who made them or where they're from... but that's not necessarily something that needs tracking in the creation of the table.

If you transpose the above formulas, you can create a series of lines in which each line produces a result:

To be honest, I've played with this and regalia/masterpieces come up a bit too often... that might need some work. But as it's built now, the table produces an average jewellery value of 376 before checking for special... 414 if a "1" rolled merely doubles the value of the jewellery.

Lost? I hope not. I've tried to explain this as carefully as possible. Multiplied against those 16.5 jewellery in our original table, the total value of jewellery is down to 6,837... very close to the gems, though the two numbers are arrived at separately. So I'm fairly pleased with that amount.

But what about the 90,826 experience lost from the treasure type? Do we just throw that away?

Here's where things get fun.

Starting with coins. I don't use "electrum" and "platinum", so the latter is folded into the value of gold (125*5 = 750 x.p.)+4400 g.p. (4400 x.p.); this is then added to 85%*that 90,000 we lost from jewellery... and the total of all three of these together is divided by three. The total is that shown: 32,696 g.p. per type A lair.

Electrum's 1225 x.p. is added to silver's 105 x.p.; then 10% of the lost x.p. from jewellery is added to this and again, the total is divided by three. THEN, importantly, I give players 1 x.p. per 3 silver, rather than the silver value in gold. Thus, we get a nice tidy 13,756 x.p. for the silver that's here.

Finally, copper's 4 x.p. is added to 5% of that lost from jewellery and the total is divided by 3. I give 1 x.p. per 4 copper, so we get 6,528 x.p. from the copper found. With gems, jewellery and magic, the total is 54,804... without my needing to build a new treasure type table from scratch.

Crazy? Perhaps. But I like the number 553 x.p. per trog. Since my experience system gives 10 x.p. per hit point, plus another 40 x.p. for every point of damage the players suffer, the party has already achieved more than a thousand each from getting banged around during their various fights. Another total of 17,000 x.p. on top of that (yes, party members, there it is in the room with you, right now, just waiting for you to win one more battle) seems perfectly fair.

I could build in a 25% swing, so that dice are rolled to permit 75% to 125% of the totals shown here... but just now, I don't see the sense. These trogs have a reputation as raiders, so it doesn't make sense for them to be short of treasure from that. Just now, I want to see how it plays out.

The next post I write will be the campaign, and then I'll pick this up again... if you're interested. I swear to St. Crispin's ashes, if this post doesn't get at least five comments, I'm not writing another word on this subject.

Session 11: a Death in the Family

This session began with the players retreating from the dungeon to heal their wounds and restock themselves. Lexent the cleric had reached 5th at the end of the last session and so obtained his henchfolk Matyas, whom he'd rolled up for the first running of this campaign only to reveal later that he was wondering about his former cleric from the previous campaign I'd ended before Covid. We'd agreed then that when Lexent reached 5th, he could take Matyas into the party, and so that had come to pass.

Pandred lent a handaxe to Ti, who had broken just about all his weapons, and I believe it was on the 12th of June, two days after leaving the dungeon, that the party returned. Because a player could not make this running, Zoltan and Edvard sat this out, along with the two Croatians and a centaur named Xerxes, who is looking after the party on account of his tribe, so that should anything happen on the outside, the party would receive warning.

Because Ti is so short of weapons, specifically the scimitar that he broke, I suggested the party might take on a small Ottoman encampment of about twenty soldiers, which Xerxes identified as being about four miles away; there would be lots of scimitars there, the centaur said. The party declined, though I had designed the encampment for the running. I won't post it here, because the party didn't go, and I might yet use it. Alas, it is again a spider casting webs to the wind.

The whole running took place thereafter upon this one stretch of hall, so that the players didn't actually do that much exploring:

This is where things were at the end of the game, with the party in full flight from the troglodytes, except for Matyas, who was at -8 hit points, unconscious and effectively unreachable.

For reasons that passeth all understanding, the party decided to recheck the toilets on the left side of the map, specifically that round "urination hole," where again I rolled a wandering monster check, getting a "1," then rolling 1d4 carrion crawlers to emerge from there, as I had the first time in the last session. And like the first time, I got two. If I'd rolled three or four, several members of the party, including the 5th level fighter Pandred. If I had rolled that many, they'd have never reached the trogs.

Just as the carrion crawler fight began, Ti the 4th level fighter had to excuse himself for a family issue and thus the party lost one of their defensive pillars. Pandred and I believe Mikael were soon paralysed and the rest of the party struggled hard to kill one, then the other of the two creatures. Matyas proved to be a piledriver, though, so that the party managed to get out of that scrape. The paralysed players recovered, the party issued some healing and they went forward.

Then, I would say the party had some bad luck by having too much good luck right off. At this corner, behind 2712, the party encountered three waiting troglodytes, two of which were quickly "held" by the cleric for nine rounds. The purple fat number "1" shows how many rounds were left on the spell, before the spell would have worn off. With one trogloydyte left, another came out of the dark and the party easily managed them both. Another single one came the next round and again, the party managed it, moving forward as they did. It all looked so easy. Two more came after, and the party was fine, smacking one of them right off.

But then three more came and it all started to fall apart. The party's "line" had spread out too thin by that point, where the three corridors above formed a large open space. The very next round, five troglodytes came on and the party did not do well for two rounds... which was enough to turn the tide against them. Soon, they realised they'd have to run to preserve their lives... but the stun lock rule seemed to imprison at least one of the party every round, so that if the others ran, the one left behind would certainly be mauled by as many as five or six troglodytes. Yet, they could not manage a round where no party member was stunned... and that when the time came to make a tough decision.

Matyas had been doing very well, but even so, he was getting hit way too much for a first level fighter. He was driven down to -4 hit points when his liege Lexent managed to give him Aid, restoring 17 hit points. Alas, it wasn't enough. Matyas continued to get hit, while the overall strength of the party continued to dwindle as the intense odour of the Troglydytes sapped the party of their strength.

This part was particularly interesting. Every member of the party failed their saving throw against the noxious odour; Mikael managed to preserve Pandred, the party's lynchpin, by bestowing "Freshen," upon him, taking advantage of my rewrite of that cantrip. It meant Pandred wasn't suffering from strength loss, but everyone else was.

And this was particularly fascinating, as my encumbrance rules are built in such a way that the amount a character can carry and how many actions they can take in a round depend very much on strength. So as their strength dwindled, their encumbrance issues grew, as the stuff on the party's backs began to weigh them down more and more. The players were using, I believe (because I'm not using it) a system built by Maxwell, commentor on the blog here, to calculate their encumbrance in an ongoing fashion, so they could tell when they had lost a point of movement because of the strength loss. At the point when the party did have to run, lasting one more round for Pandred to escape being stunned and coming to terms with the reality that Matyas would have to be left, everyone was down in their movement. Thankfully, however, the stride rules enabled them to run fast enough, while the troglodytes themselves were all wounded.

All the orange numbers on the troglodytes, shown on the battle map? That's their present hit points. Every trog with a number has been hit at least once. The freeing of those two that were held would mean two more trogs that hadn't been hit yet, so things were looking awfully dire. Each trog here had 2 HD, but as they weighed more than 290 lbs. (trogs in my game are big and meaty), they had 2d4 per hit die. With them having a minimum of 4 hit points, the party was beginning to feel how hard they were to kill, even for low-level humanoids.

So that was it. Lexent rolled up a new hench, managed to get another 1st level fighter, a dwarf now, again with an 18 strength, and will roll that character out with the next running. Hopefully, Ti and Zoltan will be back and the party will be more buff and ready to take those hobgoblins on again. Assuming they don't clear out and seek another lair, given that this one's been compromised. I tend to do that, because it punishes parties who don't hang in there and see the thing to the end before retreating. But, knowing what I know about these trogs, that's not all that unlikely. This was just the front group, and the party only killed about half a dozen of them. Hardly enough to think the trogs need to run away.

Session 9: The Slaughter Room

I find these posts hard to write, which is why it's five days since our last running and I'm only detailing it now.

Our previous session left the party in the wilderness, running short on food, puzzling out how to cross the border into Hungary, having learned they'd been betrayed by someone, not knowing who. This session began with the party being caught off guard by a group of centaur archers, partisans protecting the local Hungarian peasantry from the Ottomans, acting as nomads throughout the Balaton Hills. After learning of the party's wishes to escape, the centaurs agreed to help feed and get them out of Bakony... but the centaurs could not help noticing the armoured members of the party and the presence of their gnome cleric Lexent.

They asked if the party wouldn't mind dealing with a nuisance that has plagued them for some time. A group of troglodytes, operating from an underground lair, inaccessible to their hoofed bodies. This "lair" was once built by orcish Huns who found themselves dwelling in the wilderness after the retreat of Attila (also an orc in my campaign). Thus, the orcs tunnelled, fashioning an underground dungeon that they occupied for 800 years... until 400 years ago, after some left to join the Mongols in the 1240s (again, an orcish people, though larger than orcs), the overall social system collapsed. It had been abandoned, until troglodytes either came up from below or entered from above. Either way, the trogs have been raiding and when the centaurs have tracked them back to their origin, they've found the trogs delving down into a place they can't follow.

The party agreed. I'd set up the first encounter expecting only three players, as Mikael the mage and Zoltan the cleric had both excused themselves from the session. Yet then Mikael showed up for the first two hours of the session, so we had a good number of combatants at the ready. This was the basic scene of the first occupied room the party entered:

This, once upon a time a place where the orc hunting parties would bring in scores of deer and other beasts for slaughter, consisted of drains, tubs, rings for hanging the animals up and so on. Obviously, the blood stains had long turned to dust in 400 years but the players figured out the purpose.

As they entered, they found one huge spider in the large centre room. This they killed in short order. Examining the room on the upper right, they found eight giant bats asleep. They moved down through the other rooms toward the exit at the bottom of the map, where they found a shrieker... which promptly began to scream, waking up the bats. A round later, three more spiders entered the room. One landed a solid bite upon Ti, the fighter, who began to suffer poison damage to the tune of 16 points, 2 per round over the next eight rounds. While fighting the bats and spiders (the former were not very dangerous), a carrion crawler entered from the bottom, passing the shrieker... and caught the Lexent's non-levelled soldier at arms as the first victim inside the door. The crawler attacked eight times... and missed every time. I mean, damn. If you can't kill a non-level, why even play?

Fenwick failed his morale check and fled. Outside, he failed his rally check and decided to stay outside. He'd managed to get 160 experience, however, putting him halfway to being able to start his 1st level fighter training, if the party should so desire.

Well, Ti came up, waded in, took two hits, did a little damage (I think, not sure if I remember that rightly) failed his save and was paralysed. But then Mikael unloaded Melf's acid arrow and the carrion crawler died. I should have made it two, but meh, it was what it was. I didn't know Mikael was going to play.

The spiders, bats and shrieker was mopped up and the party given experience. Arduin the first level druid, henchfolk of Pandred the 5th level fighter, finally reached second level. Mikael excused himself and the party was down to three players.

I should have had more prepared but, well, I let myself indulge in too many of my own projects, so I didn't. I had the party descend twenty feet of stair (finding a dead centaur's body along the way), to find more stairs, some going left, some going right. The cleric smelled both and declared that the left hand side smelled worse than the right, so expecting to find the troglodytes, they descended another 20 feet of stairs to find themselves at an unimaginably large underground temple, too large to reveal with their torchlight. Following the right hand wall, they found one shrine in the room's corner, then followed the wall to the left to find another shrine. They were attacked by three ghasts (which some of the party had fought before in Norway) and dispatched them easily. The next four were a little harder... Ti was paralysed again, Arduin was very lucky, but this second fight was a harder deal. Finally, the ghasts were overcome, experience rewarded, Ti went up to 4th level and the party gave ground. We ended the game with them stumbling outside.

I'll need to better prep my dungeon for the next session.

Skipping over the first session, in which the two did not take part, Pandred at 5th and Lexent at 4th have failed to level... though they're both much closer. Ti began at 1st nine sessions ago and has gone up 3 levels in nine runnings. If Zoltan had come, no doubt he'd have gotten to 4th as well. Mikael, who isn't getting hit very much (because although he's killing key monsters with his magic, if he doesn't actually engage in melee, he hasn't much chance of learning anything), is still 3rd, though he started at 2nd. Arduin has waded into many combats, but strangely, has usually avoided getting hit. Nice to see him finally climb from 1st to 2nd.

The benefit of Fenwick getting to be a 1st level fighter (though it will take plenty of training time) is that, if the party subsidises his training, he'll progress from "hireling" to "follower." Not a henchfolk, so not a fanatic member of the party that the players run, but someone who will come along, receive half as share of the bonus, ask for a share of the treasure and eventually rise, most likely, to act as a steward or someone the party can trust with their property someday, without worrying about being betrayed. He might even one day be counted as one of the party's "retainers," at which point he would become a fanatic joiner of the party, to be run by whomever his liege came to be, either Lexent or perhaps Pandred, as the party decides someday.

Well, that seems to be it. Glad to have this done.

Many Cultures to Make

I have finished the Scotland map.  For those who have donated $20 to my Patreon, the publisher and png files have been duly updated on the Google Drive file so you can have a look at them.  I'll be doing this going forward on any map changes that I make, so if I do update something important the maps will show it without anyone having to wait.

The dragon territories seem most upon people's minds, as they ask me how those work in my world order.  That's understandable; it is certainly the weirdest political division that I've included, mostly because it is the only one that is not a humanoid in some fashion.  It reminds me, however, that I have a very large world yet to fill, massive empty areas in Africa, North and South America, Australia and the rest of Oceania and of course Antarctica.  I don't have enough humanoid races for all of those.

I've already used dwarfs, gnomes, halflings, elves, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, norkers, ogres, bugbears, xvarts, cameltaurs (like centaurs), djang (from Dray Prescott), qullan, frost giants, githzerai, githyanki, firenewts, flinds, trolls and minotaurs.  It is easy to imagine where I might locate quaggoths, lizard men, tabaxi, aarakocra and kenku, but I'm quickly running out of odd humanoid races and I'm not running out of parts of the world to fill.

Incidentally, I have been thinking of cutting off the Dingwall part of the map from Cromwell's Britain and identifying the inhabitants as berserkers.  Technically, the population density is high enough to be rated as human - but then, berserkers are, kind of, sort of, human.  The idea of identifying the wildest part of the Scottish highlands (along with parts where my Scottish grandmother's family originates, name of Ross) as a bunch of rabid multi-attack per round death engines appeals to me greatly - particularly if I adjust the berserking rules so they can be "normal" most of the time and only berserk when sorely pressed in battle.  And heck, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds anyway - so why not a piece of Scotland where the fighters attack twice, hm?

I have to be thinking, though, of making a dozen other dragon cultures, along with other giants, then onward into regions where live any and all of the other intelligent races.  I don't have a single faerie kingdom created (though I have the sylvan forests of America to settle), I haven't considered Rakshasa (maybe we'll assign one of the minor kingdoms of Burma and make it a Rakshasa-controlled human entity), Drow, doppelgangers, surface troglodytes, gargoyles, mind flayers, night hags, yeti, xorn and umberhulks, not to mention the number of sea-dwelling creatures I haven't considered yet as I've been concentrating on the land.  As I move outwards from Europe in all directions, the residents are bound to get weirder and weirder, particularly as I get inventive as I did when I created Paraguay.

Much to do, much to do.

Perhaps They Were Possessed by Blackwolf

Since I do have a lot of posts to write and I spent time turning my way through the book yesterday, I might as well talk about a few things that the makers felt should be included in the original Dungeon Masters Guide.  For example,

"Demi-human troops are unlikely to serve a human master who is not otherwise supporting a cause of the particular race.  Some small number might serve with a henchman of their own race, but not large bodies except for short periods of time, most probably when danger threatens their area.  You might allow exceptions to this as they become compatible with your campaign.  Similarly, half-elves might enlist bodies of elves, halflings might enlist dwarves or elves, etc."

This is the first paragraph of a section entitled Use of Non-Human Troops.  I've always felt the section (it runs six paragraphs and two tables, on pages 105-106) had a strange vibe to it - it sounds distinctly like the authors of the book are wagging their fingers at me, apparently for 'reasons.'  It isn't as though it bears the mark of canon, since who ever heard of halflings (or anyone) able to "enlist" elves??

I have never heard players express a desire to employ non-humans in an army and not because of this passage.  The game goes way, way over the top to stress that bugbears, gnolls and goblins are EVIL and CHAOTIC and probably insanely dangerous to share a barracks with.  I get comments all the time, expressing wonder and amazement, because I chose in my world to set up gnoll and goblin kingdoms, where these creatures calmly collect peat, grow crops, raise their children, tell stories and presumably worry about family members who haven't come home before dark.  Who would ever think of that?

So having created this systemic, milieu-driven racism, hammering it home with every other description in the books (and module after module), why exactly did we create a little section in the DMG to bring up the subject and then moralize about why it just won't work, it just shouldn't be done and oh, in case you were still thinking about it, these troops will absolutely not get along with each other:

"Compatibility of Non-Human Troops:  The general compatibility of demi-human troop types can be determined by consulting the Player's Handbook, Racial Preferences Table.  Lizard men are hated by all demi-humans and humanoids save kobalds, and even the latter are suspicious of them (just as human troops are).  Of the various races of humanoids, many will bully or attack one another as indicated on the table below:"

After which we get a racial preferences table, just like the Player's Handbook, expressly for bugbears, gnolls, goblins, hill giants, hobgoblins, kobalds, ogres, orcs and trolls.  Presumably, this is why lizard men were expressly mentioned in the paragraph before the table, because they weren't included (the table is only a column wide and had to be crushed to where four of the headings are abbreviated - "Bugbr." "Gob." "Hob." "Kob."

Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about troglodytes, lycanthropes, gargoyles, minotaurs, ettin, other giants or any of the faerie folk (whom I presume are non-human).  Is it okay if I use faerie folk as troops?  Do they all get along or do I need another racial preference table for them?

Obviously this was some sort of problem in Gygax's campaigns, something he didn't like and felt he needed to put the kibosh on before it got out of hand in the campaigns of all the strangers who would one day buy the books.  "First it's convincing two orcs to tag along with the party and then it's a squad and a whole platoon!  What next?  Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . . mass hysteria!"

I will grant there is drama in gathering together a bunch of different humanoid races as an army.  It's nice to imagine them fighting each other - something nicely depicted in the film Wizards, where this problem needs to be overcome by Blackwolf before he can unite his troops . . . but it seems to me this is a player problem to be solves, not an institutional need for a rule-set that demands that kobalds will always hate gnolls or that ogres will always hate goblins.  It's this sort of shit that gets the game defined as racist - with the game using 'alignment' as the all-purpose justification to bestowing the game-makers' commands.

I can't for the life of me guess why this passage was included; they felt compelled to add rules in case the players decided to ignore the writer, but then they also felt the need to include this:

"Non-human troops, bugbears and humanoids, will very difficult to handle.  They will tend to fight amongst each other . . . fight with humans nearby - whether friendly or not (25% if friendly) - run from battle if they see troops on their own side retiring or retreating and fall to looting at the first opportunity."

Have the authors of this ever met a human?  Ever read anything about human troops in war?  These are things that won't happen in human armies?  The paragraph goes on:

"If the master is strong and powerful and gives them cause to fear disobedience, it will be of some help in disciplining such troops.  Likewise, if there are strong leaders within each body of such troops, threatening or driving them on, they will be more likely to obey.  Weakness in leadership, or lack of officering [sic], will certainly cause these troops to become unruly and impossible to control."

Really.  No kidding.  It's a good thing that ordinary troops don't respond like this to poor discipline or weak leaders.

It might be imagined that this pressure is just there to stress that the players have to keep on top of the problem - but then the chance of a strong leader managing an orc unit is only 90%.  That's an incredibly poor morale for a combat troop of any kind!  For a bugbear unit, it never gets any better than 80%.  Jeez.  Why bother?

That's clearly the point.  Why bother, don't do it, here are rules that make it impossible, choke on that you little bastards.  Now let's talk about construction and seige.

ADDENDUM:

For the record, the film Wizards - which I saw when it came out, two years before I'd even heard of D&D - has always been closer to how I imagine a fantasy universe than Lord of the Rings.  The elves experience fear, faeries exist as a unified people, combat is industrial, rape happens, sexuality is part of the conflict/experience and brutality is both normal and undesirable.  In a war, no side wins - the deciding factor isn't how much magic but how willing we are to use every resource available (a luger, if necessary).

The link above gives access to the whole movie.  Someone posted it on youtube two years ago, but it won't be there forever.  Watch it, steal it if you can (good luck finding a copy legitimately).

Leaks Like A Sieve

Suppose we start with the following proposal.

A group of monsters roaming around the outside of your world stumbles across a "dungeon" that is completely empty of treasure-hoarding creatures.  Oh, there are probably beasties there already, but let's say nothing intelligent.  If you like, this is hundreds and hundreds of years ago, long before your party shows up to plunder the place.

Let's further imagine that these monsters are carrying only 100 g.p. with them.  We can envision them as a few orcs, goblins, whatever you like - but not some enormous band.  They settle down into the top level of the dungeon, near the surface, and for a year they do little or nothing.

Now, these creatures don't have much purpose for the coin they have; they're not going out to the local market or anything.  But they like the coin, its shiny and it has pretty pictures on it.  They give it to their children to play with.  And now and then, some of it is dropped, some of it is stolen by the little beasties in the dungeon, and so on.  Call it 'spoilage.'

At the same time, these creatures are occasionally going out into the world and snatching more treasure from other things, but not much - just enough to say that in a year, they steal about 100 g.p. worth of hard, valuable, endurable treasure.

Now, I'm a great fan of the 1% per month maintenance rule in the DMG, and I've argued in the past that this could be read as general loss.  So for the purpose of our proposal, let's say that 12% of whatever treasure our 1st Level dungeon creatures have is lost ... it drifts down deeper into the caverns, where it is picked up by gelatinous cubes, wandering troglodytes, giant rats and so on.

Suppose that once every three years, a group of somebodies - a party, a local constabulary, what you will - comes along and clears out the upper level of the dungeon, taking all the treasure that is there.  And still, the caves are comfortable, so let's say that something else moves in, and in the process brings in some of a hundred gold pieces, depending on how long they've been there that first year.  We can roll a hundred sided die to see how much precisely.  And the new creatures go on accumulating a hundred gold a year.  For centuries.

And let's add that of whatever drifts into the 2nd Level, 12% of that drifts into the 3rd Level ... and 12% of that drifts into the 4th Level, and so on.  Only the 2nd Level is only plundered 1 in 9 years.  The 3rd Level, only 1 in 27.  And the 4th Level, only 1 in 81.  And so on.

Now what would that look like?

Here's what you do.

On Row A of your excel sheet, in Box B1, Write "Year".

In boxes A3 going down, write "Level 1" "Level 2" "Level 3" and so on.

In box B2, write "1"

In box B3, write "100"

In box B4 going down, write "0" for as many levels as you want.

In box C3 going down, write "=RANDBETWEEN(1,3)".    You might want to make this column a different color, so that you know these are random numbers and NOT your results.

In box D2 write "=B2+1".  This will serve to duplicate itself and count the years for you.

In box D3 write "=IF(C3=1,RANDBETWEEN(1,100),(B3*0.88)+100)".  All that says is that if the random number generated is a 1, the first level of the dungeon was cleaned out.  If it wasn't cleaned out, then 12% is gone (spoilage) and the rest is added to the 100 g.p. the creatures on that level gathered that year.  It also says that if the dungeon was plundered, 1 to 100 g.p. is accumulated in on the first level AFTER the plundering.

In box D4 write "=IF(C4+C3=2,0,(B3*0.12)+(B4*0.88))".  Which says that if the dungeon above was cleared out, and the roll for this level was also a 1, then this level was cleaned out too.  Spoilage from Level 1 pours into Level 2, and we minus the spoilage from Level 2 into Level 3.

In box D5 write "=IF(SUM(C3:C5)=3,0,(B4*0.12)+(B5*0.88))".  Level 3 is only cleaned out if the two levels above it are, so the sum of all three random numbers must be 1 x3 = 3.

In box D6 write "=IF(SUM(C3:C6)=4,0,(B5*0.12)+(B6*0.88))"

In box D7 write "=IF(SUM(C3:C7)=5,0,(B6*0.12)+(B7*0.88))"

And so on, remembering to adjust the sum for each number.

Now, you can copy everything in column C and D into columns E and F.  That will give you the results for year 3.

In fact, you can now copy as far into the future as you wish.  The numbers get quite interesting as you get past 80 years or so.

If you've done it right, you should have something that looks like this:

I've colored the random numbers in coral, so that the actual results in g.p. are in white. 

Yes, I know, it does not look very impressive for Level 5.  What is particularly interesting about this generator is that no matter how you fool with the numbers, you're going to find your dungeon pouring out its gold into the bottom.  You have to define one of the levels as THE bottom level ... and that one level will pile up gold impressively ... but none of the ones between the top and the bottom will.

You can reduce the number of times a level is plundered, but that only makes it drain more gold through.  You can reduce the amount of "spoilage" ... but that only makes it harder for the bottom levels to accumulate gold.  Reducing the likelihood of plunder down to 1 in 6, and decreasing the spoilage to only 2%, it generally took more than a hundred years of dungeon just to get the gold on the 5th Level up to 100.

In other words, I'm saying that if anyone else in the world is plundering dungeons, the idea that the space between the top of the dungeon and the bottom are filled with treasure just doesn't fit mathematically.  And if no one is plundering these dungeons, then they must be very remote - which begs the question, where are they getting the gold from?

Please, don't argue that the people below are robbing the people above - that just makes the dungeon sieve move faster.

I'm not saying I'd run a dungeon differently ... but one has to recognize that, economically, the process CAN'T work like you think it works.

Oh, Yes, So Hard!

Am I to seriously believe there are people in the world who think it is a "challenge" to roleplay a particular class, having 'just' chosen it from the die roll?

My previous post was a suggestion that it would save the campaign TIME by knowing what you were going to play in advance ... and yet I received comments that described choosing a class "totally random and challenging myself to roleplay whatever I came up with."

Seriously?

Perhaps it is because I've been a DM.  Perhaps its because I've been playing for quite some time.  Somehow, having played princesses, dragons, small insects, dryads, brownies, heavenly beings, giants, treants, troglodytes, insane scientists, criminal masterminds, prostitutes and a wide range of classes and characters as NPCs, I don't find it that much of a "challenge" to be only a fighter or an illusionist or an assassin.  In fact, the very idea that roleplaying a particular 'class' is a "challenge" baffles the very shit out of me.

Now, please to let the gentle reader TAKE NOTE ... I am specifying, "class" ... writing it in boldface, with quotes and underlined, in the hopes that the ordinary skimming reader will pick it up.  ROLEPLAYING in general, YES, I take that as difficult, hard, subject to great amounts of mastery, with people making an effort.  No argument from me.

But fighter vs. druid?  Cleric vs. thief?  Really?

I guess that part of my incredulity is the thought that in someway, a class run in a particular way by a particular player character could be done "wrong."  I mean, I've written posts about how classes define people in the game, but I meant NPC's ... not players!  Players, I assume, will act in accordance with whatever beliefs they will.  I have harped on medieval life and how people used to think back then, but this is by and large directed at DMs to help them to flesh out their world.

This has to be some fucked up perception that's arisen from the use of alignment.  "Honest, Alexis, it's really freakin' HARD to run a neutral Druid!  You have no idea what a blue-bloody bitch chaotic good can be!"  And other similar happy horseshit.

Sometimes I wonder if you people actually know when you're shitting on a toilet and when you're doing it in front of the computer.  I can't begin to guess what kind of headspace one has to adopt in order to think that "making lemonade" out of six random scores is something you pat yourself on the back for, in order to give yourself a feeling of accomplishment.  This is a kindergarten accomplishment, kiddies.  Yes, you've smooshed clay into a flat shape vaguely similar to an ashtray!  GOOD for you, Jimmy.  Here's a star.

It's fucking sad, that's what it is.  It's just sad that people are so bloody weak that playing a set of different, limited classes is a 'challenge' to them.  I tell you, if there were only 18 very poorly identified fictional characters in the world for actors to perform, there wouldn't be any of them talking about what a great challenge it was to play #11.  Actors step in and play THOUSANDS of different characters ... and it takes a really unique one to be a "challenge."

Oh, oh, oh, acting isn't a fair comparison?  Okay.  Can anyone think of any craft, from fixing cars and photography through mountaineering and dance where there are only 18 forms of anything?  Hm?  Anyone?

I had a really, really nasty ending for this post, but I guess I should be charitable.  Listen, just go play more, okay?  You really need the practice.

A Harmless Bit Of Deception

I ran in my Daughter’s world on the weekend, and it happened that after four sessions my first-level mage at last became a second-level mage. This marks the first time I have had a character of my own level since the 1980s.

This is mostly due to not playing as a character, but almost exclusively running as a DM; and it is because characters that I have played either were not meant to level (tournaments) or the campaigns did not last ... but I’ve bitched about that enough.

I find myself a great deal less concerned with the levelling of my character than I think I was way back then. I suppose I’ve gotten more fatalistic.

I am anxious to level - my particular style of play is very risk-oriented and I can take risks more safely with more spells and with a greater pool of hit points. My philosophy is that a mage, even when they are lacking spells or combat ability, can afford at lower levels to take a hit or two, thus enabling the fighters to last longer. It is, in a sense, giving them six or eight more hit points - mine - simply by putting one more warm body out there to get hit.

Since I am playing, I might just as well talk a little about my style of play ... while avoiding, if I can, the bane of all D&D discussions: giving a blow-by-blow of what happened in our last session.

My co-players are the same people, with a couple of exceptions, that play in my own campaign - but they are rugged individualists and not at all concerned with my other role. However, the fellow playing the 3rd level paladin in this campaign did not hold it against me in the least that in the last session I ran, I killed off his 9th level druid. Very considerate of him. Still, I wouldn’t think my character gets any special treatment ... my daughter enjoys, I think, having full powers to tell me to “... Shut ... Up.” Any fathers out there with similar stories?

That said, I have a lot of experience playing this game, and have seen a lot more styles of play and tactical strategies than my co-players. As such, I find myself trying sometimes to play a little stupider than I am; I try not to dominate the discourse between the players too much by telling them where to stand or what to do; and I try very, very hard not to get manipulative of the DM, who does not have my experience. This is the hardest thing not to do.

I’ll make the example as brief as I can (I may have mentioned this before, seems like I have). In a Traveller game a couple of decades ago I had a Referee who created a system for trading goods from planet to planet, incorporating a set of stock markets into his system. We - specifically me and another rather brilliant fellow named Mike who I have seen in years - saw the error in his system fairly quickly and set out to dupe the DM out of tens of millions of credits. We did it by using his system against him, but also by manipulating the hell out of his human weaknesses.

It requires a level of asshole in order to be a DM; all I need is a DM who is willing to be nice to me or considerate or to stretch their willingness to believe that ‘my plan’ makes sense, and I am off and running. I haven’t seen very many long-time players talk about it, but playing the DM (‘topping from the bottom’) is a reality of the game, and the principal reason why a short-time DM has the worst of it. It only takes one experienced player to seriously ruin a neophyte DM’s day ... and I have to struggle not to be that player.

Why struggle? Because I like to win, that’s why. I like to pull the A-Team like plan together and have it smash apart the pile of troglodytes or giant frogs or whatever that look like too many to kill. And I’m good at making it sound reasonable that the strategy I have in mind will work ... when I know damn well as a DM that I’d be going, “Uh, no,” or possibly, “Maybe you haven’t thought about this.” That being a wrinkle in the plan that I would see, but this DM doesn’t.

There was something like this that happened Saturday, and I kept my mouth shut at the time. We were faced with a room full of bow-using baddies that were above us, we created a fire and filled the room above with smoke, and then we went up and killed them in the obscurement, making good use of the thief in the party. And never once did the DM mention that any of us suffered from breathing in the smoke.

It might have been intentional on my daughter’s part. She may have thought of it, and decided that she just wanted us to get through the room and onto the next part of the dungeon. No doubt someone else in the party also thought of the forgotten detail. If so, they kept their mouth closed also. Probably thinking, as I was thinking, ‘Best not to say anything.’

Now don’t say that as a player the gentle reader hasn’t had a moment like this. We all have. And we are well aware that saying something would slightly to greatly reduce our chances of success. We’re not all so super-pure that we don’t decide to sit on the information for a round or two, even when we do confess our thoughts.

It’s a complicated game. The rules are ill defined. It’s easy to get away with shit. And if the laws of physics can be ‘forgotten’ at a convenient moment ... well ...

Who can blame us?

I Thought Everyone Knew

I don't play with alignments, but I must not have made this clear, as I was only just asked about it today.  So lets talk about the subject.  Since alignments are, effectively, a philosophical conception, let's treat them as one.

Opening my DMG to page 23, I find the following written:

"Alignment describes the broad ethos of thinking, reasoning creatures - those unintelligent sorts being placed in the neutral area because they are totally uncaring."

I find it interesting that Gygax and his buddies, for reasons that completely escape me, felt that it would be a problem to use the ideologies invented by thinking, reasoning humans through all history - believing instead that it was better to drum up a simplistic sociological diagram to replace all that.  It was the 1970s, however, and I wonder what obscure University of Chicago professor's baby was stolen in order to instigate this atrocity to human thought.

And what is described by 'unintelligent sorts'?  Do we mean animals?  Do we suggest that violent behavior in the quest of food is a neutral aspect?  Was Jean Val Jean neutral?  It sound more that, having no means to explain away the motivations of non-thinking creatures within our invented belief system, we have to put them somewhere, anywhere, that doesn't get in the way.

Let us continue:

"Note that alignment does not necessarily dictate religious persuasion, although many religious beliefs will dictate alignment."

Lovely side-step there.  Not all religious types of a particular religion are lawful, or chaotic, or good, or evil ... what people proport to believe does not dictate their actions.  I believe that is the crux of the above statement.  But since alignments are used to indicate class loyalties, or racial loyalties - as they are, let's face it, every monster is defined by its alignment - aren't we really saying that religion has no place in D&D?  That the paladin isn't serving his or her god, but rather his or her social status ... so who cares what the god thinks?

Of course I'm wrong - every other thing said about alignment and religion clearly ignores the above quote ... further demonstrating that the authors are pulling this out of their ass.  But then, I'm ignoring this little gem:

"As explained under ALIGNMENT LANGUAGES (q.v.) this aspect of alignment is not the major consideration."

This is a whole section written on p.24, where it talks about languages existing between ideologically inclined individuals.  It never does explain why religious practice and religious beliefs have nothing to do with one another, but it does describe one of the stupidest conceptions ever presented as part of the game.  I strongly suggest the gentle reader take a glance - it is a lovely hodgepodge of discontinuous, vague, non-definitive suggestions for how people of similar alignment might communicate with each other.  In terms of clarification, it is like listening to a New Jersey politician defend welfare.  I have no idea what premise suggests that people who are mutually evil are able to communicate with each other ... I presume Hitler and Goebbels looked into each other's eyes and just knew.

"The overall behavior of the character (or creature) is delineated [represented accurately or precisely] by alignment, or, in the case of player characters, behavior determines actual alignment.  Therefore, besides defining the general tendencies of creatures, it also groups creatures into mutually acceptable or at least non-hostile divisions."

I love the English language.  I really prefer when it is used well.

I could not resist inserting the accurate definition of the word 'delineated,' since it is clearly not the word that the Gygaxian crowd really meant.  Each part of this description of alignment becomes increasingly more muddy as the two sentences go on - first character is precisely defined, then generally defined, and then, finally, acceptably general.

In other words, well, yes, the alignments kind of mean something, but don't take them too much to heart, as they are really just guidelines meant to encourage creatures to either join together or mindlessly kill each other.

Moreover, since we don't want to tell characters exactly how to behave, we'll employ the technique of letting them do whatever they want and defining them after the fact.  Which works in every case except, of course, the paladin - the ever-present defining template on which are alignment-based debates hang.  Understand, the only reason why a paladin's alignment had to be good was because it was perceived that the class was so powerful, no other means could be used to bind players who chose to play it.  Nevermind that there is no precedent whatsoever, even in such writings as Le Morte d'Arthur or the Song of Roland, to suggest that knights behave anything like the description of a 'Good' alignment in the DMG.  Once again, they pulled it right out of their ass.

Fact is, the paladin doesn't need the counterbalance to its supposed 'power.'  I've played with non-limited paladins for years and have never noticed one yet that overbalanced a party.

If we are going to define players by what they do, and not restrict them before the fact, why have an alignment system at all?  For simplicity?  For the sheer pleasure of being able to label each other?  My my my, this game was written in the 1970s.

Now watch as we qualify further what we've invented:

"This is not to say that groups of similarly aligned creatures cannot be opposed or even mortal enemies.  Two nations, for example, with rulers of lawful good alignment can be at war.  Bands of orcs can hate each other."

Then what the fuck is this alignment thing good for?  If it can be utterly ignored in terms of creatures' behavior towards one another, WHY DO WE NEED IT?  How is this improving the game?  How does it expand the game's potential in making it either fun or interactive?  We've already said that the players don't behave according to alignments, that alignments are assigned according to their behavior - so please, why are we wasting out time?

"But the former would possibly [???] cease their war to oppose a massive invasion of orcs, just as the latter would make common cause against the lawful good men."

Woah.  Just let me hold onto my head a moment.  What the fuck do you mean, 'possibly'?  You mean they might not stop fighting each other to oppose a massive invasion?  Would they stop fighting if it were only a mild invasion?  Or would they keep fighting each other if the massive invasion weren't by orcs, but was brought on by a group of lawful good elves?  And while we're considering that, would orcs NOT make common cause against a massive invasion brought on by chaotic evil troglodytes?  I'm feeling like Rocco from Boondock Saints: "Fuckin'- What the fuckin'. Fuck. Who the fuck fucked this fucking... How did you two fucking fucks..."

Here's a thought.  Let's just assume that sometimes creatures fight each other, and sometimes that's not convenient.  Sometimes, its convenient to defend ourselves, and join together.  Maybe it has absolutely nothing to do with what we believe.

The rest of the paragraph reads:

"Thus, alignment describes the world view of creatures and helps define what their actions, reactions and purposes might be.  It likewise causes a player to choose an ethos which is appropriate to his or her profession, and alignment also aids players in the definition and role approach of their respective game personae.  With the usefulness of alignment determined, definition of the divisions is necessary."

The point was not made.  Maybe Gygax thought the point was made, maybe it fitted some cog in his brain, but the point was decidedly left to die in the proverbial dust.  Nothing is defined here.  No purposes are there to aid anyone in their profession or otherwise.  Usefulness was not determined.

The only successful result was the creation of untold numbers of meaningless, often passionately meaningless debates between D&D players, sometimes ending violently.  The perpetration of an ideological system, which players were told they needed to adhere to, without any proper format or thought, meant that every one of those arguments began with trying to wedge actual ideologies into this mock system.  I cannot begin to understand what has sustained its existence.

No, I don't play with alignments.

Simulationist, I

Admittedly, I am a simulationist.

I’m not sure how that came about. I have never questioned, from the beginning of playing D&D, that that was fundamentally what the game was about, the creation of a ‘world’, a place where adventures were meant to take place. For me, that meant a whole interactive milieu, without borders. It seems silly to contemplate a world of disconnected localities, as the marketers successfully sold to the playing public beginning in the 1980s, because it suited their bottom line and created the demand for more and more product.

But I do understand why the simulation was not the popular conception. It is, without question, utterly impossible. The construction of a world is too vast a project, an unending one, and it takes little imagination to feel completely daunted before one begins. Manage the construction of a huge civilization, pulled from one’s mind? And do it during a lifetime where one expects to work, love, raise children, maintain a house, travel, see the world? Ridiculous.

I do it because, well, I’m obsessed. My world is an excuse to research virtually every subject, which in turn gets applied to my world in ways most wouldn’t bother. To make my obsession work, I’ve had to take shortcuts, such as using the Earth as a template in order to avoid having to create my own imagined landscape ... but of course the shortcut backfires because I find myself installing overarching economic systems and anthropological explanations for the existence of troglodytes.

Still, this is how I get my jollies.

I believe that a simulation, even one that is weakly developed, serves to enhance the activities of a player characters. I don’t think that is a particularly insightful point – I don’t doubt that nine tenths of DMs believe the same. And so they start ‘worlds’. They conceive of a unifying ideal – a post-apocalyptic landscape, a bronze era culture, what have you – and begin making maps. The maps include a scattered array of cities, plotted ruins, holy places, mountains, rivers, seacoasts. A particular kingdom is selected and mapped out in greater detail. The DM spends a few weeks, off and on, sketching out a cultural background, then sets down to invent an adventure.

And most times that is as far as it goes. Because an adventure which breaks down to Jack and Jill going up a kill to fetch a pail of coin doesn’t flesh out a simulation. In creating the hook, moving the party to location, solving the puzzle and killing the bad guy, the best we’ve done is create a level from Mario Bros. All that we’re left with is to create another level. Which is what most DMs do.

Which explains why for the most part it’s easy to create another NEW world every other month and retain the same players. Since they have nothing invested in the Mario scenarios that have been run up to now, they have no reason to disregard a new scenario. Gets so that players crave a change in milieu, since repeated adventures in the same formula begins to drag.

Often, however, a DM really does get into world construction. Some of those I’ve seen are extensive and detailed, with tens of thousands of words of description. It is clear that the maker is as obsessed as me ... and I trust that they conceal most of this data as something they themselves use. It does no good to dump it on players.

When mastering a game, I am nothing like I am here on this blog. You might get some sense of my style from the blog-campaign I started, but not really – since that format gave me plenty of time to think before answering. The offline campaign I run is faster paced, higher on combat than I’d like, lower on role-playing that I’d like (the players want it that way, and I go along), but very intricate in terms of plot development. There are always several adventures on the go at any one time ... very rarely to they include a linear set up where players are expected to go to a place, kill a monster and collect a treasure. Most often, players are stumbling around, trying to get out of some situation they’ve blundered into or created, with no clear path in sight.

Invariably the players are running the campaign, deciding what to do and where to go. My simulationist model doesn’t give them lengthy descriptions on how to behave in particular cultures, since its assumed that most people in those cultures don’t care about individuals. This is helped considerably by the fact that players are often familiar with these cultures.

Not completely, of course. The on-line campaigners admitted that their experience with actual feudal/renaissance culture was limited, along with their familiarity with the church and with Germany. I did not think this was a big problem. I didn’t expect the party to behave as Germans so much as I expected them to tweak to odd behaviours displayed by NPCs – perhaps unfairly. But having dropped them into Germany, it was my responsibility to set the stage. If a player wants to go out and do research to enhance their character as an ethnic stereotype, that is up to them. But I don’t insist on it.

In short, the NPCs will be stereotypical in general ... it helps set the stage. A few odd NPCs will not fit the mould, so as to muddy up the water. I play by the ‘North By Northwest’ method of plot development. Players are mistaken for somebody else, or they stumble into a game played by much bigger players. They’re blown back and forth, cutting and hacking their way from clusterfuck to clusterfuck until light dawns, the situation clarifies and everyone gets a chance to rest.

This is the simulationist’s method. The worst moments in any person’s life come when something happens that’s wildly unexpected, and unavoidable. You’re injured, your benefactor dies, you’ve lost your job, someone close to you creates a situation that you have to help manage ... in every situation there’s no clear solution. You have to try different things, make the most of the situation, manage others as best you can and put your priorities in order.

In a D&D campaign, one without quests, the emphasis is for the DM to create those situations for the player, almost always from outside the player’s sphere of control. A spontaneous revolt arises in the countryside against the local lord – join or flee? A dishonest villain plots to push an innocent farmer off his land – help or oppose? Forces seek to undermine the local church and establish a blood thirsty cult – defend the innocent or join the bloodbath? Your friend is inexplicably your enemy – cut him down or investigate the reason why? And once you discover why, forgive or condemn?

It is much less about how NPCs around the players interact with the players, and how NPCs interact with each other. Players are not and should not be the center of the universe. Picture every culture and every place, having created them in your simulated world, as various factions struggling for power against each other, then force your players to make moral decisions about which side to oppose, or whether to let them hack each other to pieces. Make it clear that EVERY action will have, in the end, the possibility for reward – titles, power, wealth – and then watch them squirm as they wonder if they made the right decision.

Join the lord against the peasants and possibly receive a knighthood and reward. Or join the peasants against the lord and have a chance at plunder. Or do nothing and sell weapons to both sides at fabulous profit. Make it clear to your players that ALL are possibilities, without knowing which one will be the most lucrative in the end. Throw hints constantly that they’ve backed the wrong horse and the fun begins.

So, I’ve begun with an admittance that simulation is virtually impossible and ended with explaining why it works for me. At least, I hope I’ve done that.

The rest is up to you.

Tech & Intelligence

I want to consider racial intelligence for a moment. How exactly is it defined?

The only example of racial intelligence is given in the Monster Manual, where humans, gnolls, gnomes, orcs and so on are given an average intelligence meant to convey a characteristic of their race. Troglodytes are very stupid (low), goblins a little smarter (low to average), elves are quite bright (high) and titans are ridiculously gifted (genius to supra-genius).

Why ‘average’ intelligence as defined by the manual is not 10 to 11, the most common results on 3d6, continues to baffle me. But average is defined as 8 to 10, and very intelligent as 11 to 12. Thus humans are necessarily “average to very” in intelligence, in order to fit the character generation model.

In terms of race, humans are not restricted to intelligences of 8 to 12. Humans may be either geniuses or very stupid; but these extremes are meant to be rare. In terms of racial intelligence, humans are presumed to be in the range where most would not make good magic users.

Obviously, however, the technology used by humans is not limited to the intelligence of most of the population. Technological leaps are created by those who have extraordinary or genius intelligences, who then make those technologies available to the lesser gifted. Thus, although humans may be of average intelligence, they have access to virtually every technology known.

This creates a difficult problem. If elves have a high intelligence, and are thus more clever than humans, can we assume that particular elves have a ‘higher than genius’ intelligence – in the range of 19 to 22? And if that is so, why is it that this higher intelligence has only been used to address the qualities of magic and peculiar intoxicating beverages? Why is it that the elves have not also invented mechanical flight, or superior weapons of destruction, or mass production? Where are the technologies that intelligent humans were able to create, but which elves seem unwilling to explore?

Naturally, it is presumed that elves aren’t interested in such things, for reasons pertaining to the goodness of the earth and for pure knowledge and blah blah blah. But why do dwarves also eschew the same advancements? Why is it that night hags, with exceptional intelligences, do not bring their enormous knowledge from the lower planes in the form of gas grenades, along with their other magics? Why do mind flayers not have wire-guided missiles in their arsenal? If the average for a mind flayer is 17, couldn’t a gifted mind flayer have an intelligence of 25? And if humans were able to invent these things, and to teach average intelligence humans how to use them, they why do mind flayers not do the same, using orcs?

Obviously, because the game would cease to be D&D.

Let us postulate, therefore, that humans (and possibly other character races) are fairly unique with regards to the spread of intellectual prowess. Perhaps mind flayers and night hags, in the upper ranges, are as bright as they get. Perhaps they don’t know anything more than what humans know because when all is said and done, the average mind flayer and the smartest mind flayer are hard to tell apart ... and neither is any smarter than the smartest human.

After all, there’s no rule that the spread must be applied to every race.

The reverse then might also be true ... that the smartest troglodyte has a 7 intelligence, because that is the maximum of that race’s intelligence spread. There are no genius goblins wandering about – or if there are, they are extremely rare mutants, like the Mule of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Still, a goblin Mule may not be any smarter than a player character’s mage, but still – that particular village might be a bit better outfitted than the average goblin lair.

I want to define how better outfitted, but for the moment let’s put it on the shelf and take up another part of the question.

At different points in human history, extraordinary intelligence can be defined as leading to different levels of technology. It depends on what template for intelligence you care to use. Me, I’ve always favoured the argument that intelligence is a genetic trait – but if left in a box, without stimuli, there isn’t much it can do. The smartest human on the planet 18,000 years ago might have made the leap forward in order to design a bow, but he or she wasn’t postulating upon the theory of relativity. Einstein may have been able to do that, but he had the benefit of some education regarding Newtonian physics and mathematics. If his intelligence had been reversed with the first inventor of the bow, perhaps both would have still achieved either leap forward.

Therefore, we cannot define technology strictly in terms of intelligence. No matter what sort of genius Einstein may have been, his accomplishments were limited to whatever pre-existing technology was already available. As such, intelligence can only be used as a measure to determine how much of a population might have been able to grasp a particular principle, once it was defined.

In other words ... Einstein was the only genius to have comprehended Relativity at the point of its inception – but right now, there are hundreds of physicists able to grasp the concept, and millions of individuals able to do the mathematics, even if they can’t explain how they work.

The first potter was a genius. His son was clever. His grandson was talented and his later descendants were capable. But with each passing generation, the practitioners of a particular technology slide down the scale towards stupid.

All right, we are getting the meat and potatoes of this post.

If we select a given point in history, say the late Renaissance and the Elizabethan period, we might say that a genius intelligence had created all the technology that was available on the Earth at that time. We can then use the scale of racial intelligences to determine how technologically advanced each of the other races are. We can award elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings with a slightly superior development in the form of technologies reaching into the Age of Enlightenment, and judge every other race according to its limitation as listed in the book.

Which would mean that, in fact, a Shedu (extraordinary intelligence) was actually slightly less advanced than human culture, except where it had made use of those technologies provided by humans. It would not fully understand the pinnacle of those technologies (Newtonian physics and Keplarian astronomy being produced late in that period), but it would do better than, say, an orc.

Postulated, then, if we rank the technologies discussed so far as part of this intelligence scale, we can produce a technology limitation for each racial intelligence to be found in the book. We can even do one better, by dividing the general descriptions of ‘low’, ‘average’, ‘very intelligent’ and so on into exact numeric descriptions.

Thus, consider a low intelligence culture, the aforementioned troglodytes. We can presuppose three different troglodyte cultures, based on intelligences of 5, 6 and 7. For simplicity, we can call them trog-5, trog-6 and trog-7.

Trog-5 cultures have managed to invent the wheel and have undertaken primitive mining for flint. Their food production includes fishing, agriculture and hunting, and their perception of the universe is based upon mysticism.

Trog-6 cultures have augmented their fishing though the production of fishing boats and rudimentary sailing; they’ve adapted the wheel to the cart, and have developed animal husbandry. They’ve also mastered pottery. While still fundamentally mystics, they have developed aesthetically towards the carving of bone, horn, ivory and wood, and are raising menhirs for the purpose of defining their importance.

Trog-7 cultures have developed masonry, using mortar now to bind together their stonework and brick, along with crude bronze casting (arsenic and copper). While metal weapons are limited (metal casting hasn’t been invented, so neither has forging), these cultures have developed archery and horseback riding. Trog-7a has moved forward into meditation as a religious practice, while Trog-7b has developed polytheism.

Obviously, using the template you can mix and match the technologies as you wish. But you see how this allows you to devise a complicated association between different troglodyte tribes. For one thing, you can see how Trog-7 cultures prey upon or manipulate Trog-5 cultures, and how both groups might represent an aristocratic/slave class system, particularly with the more advanced troglodytes accepting the existence of a particular early pantheon compared to the lower troglodytes who still fear many elements of nature they don’t understand.

Thus, the next group of posts I’ll be doing would apply to cultures of 8 intelligence. A few of the things I’ve written about already do, such as priesthood and monotheism. Tentatively, I would judge 8 intelligence technologies as including writing, mathematics, alphabet, metal casting, and iron working.