Cleaner Than You Think

A few weeks ago, following the discussions on this blog regarding cities and the design of cities, I took an afternoon to do a little research on the web--which of course turned up very little, as history is the hardest thing to find. However, I read some excerpts from a book by Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities, which impressed me enough to order the book, which arrived about five days ago. It represented a substantial investment…the hardcover cost me $102.

It is an almost featureless tome, the 1970 edition of the original 1940s text, and having gotten only a bit into the book it is clear it suffers somewhat from the scholarship of that decade--in that the author has a tendency to occasionally build a castle in the clouds out of a few scant shreds of evidence.

However, not being ignorant of the medieval period myself, I find myself stunned. There is scarcely a sentence in the book that does not send my mind spinning on various applications or themes regarding the nature of cities in my campaign--and much of what’s written here does set out to thoroughly dispel certain notions about the medieval period, notions which are still around today and which are harped on pedantically by most briefly acquainted with the period.

Mumford’s principal theme so far (I am 50 pages into a 530 page book) has been that the perception of the medieval town as a “sewer” is largely the fabrication of writers contemporary with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who have chosen to blame their urban problems upon the lack of planning during the medieval era. Mumford cries foul on this, putting the blame purely where it belongs--upon the industrialization of cities which began in earnest in the mid-seventeenth century and which exacerbated the problems which had arisen in the previous century with the rise of trade and food production.

If you can suspend some of your perceptions of city life, based upon depictions such as those which occur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and other medieval films, where the peasants perpetually “have shit all over them,” let me quote some of Mumford from the book:

“At harvest time, the population of the town would swarm out into the country, as the slum dwellers of the East End still migrate to Kent for the hop-picking. One has only the read the household recipes of the Goodman of Paris, who was of the well-to-do merchant order, to see how the more prosperous burghers kept a leg firmly planted in each world. Near the city, the fowler and the rabbit hunter could go after game. Fitz-Stephens noted that the citizens of London had the right of hunting in Middlesex, Herefordshire, the Chiltern Hundreds and part of Kent. And in the streams by the city, fishing was diligently pursued: not merely on the coast but inland. Augsburg, for example, was noted for its trout; until 1643 many of the city officials took their pay in trout.

This strong rural influence can be marked on the early city plans; all but a handful of medieval towns were closer to what we should now call a village or a small country town that a city; “greatness” did not mean a big population or a spreading territory. In the original towns, with the exception of a few that kept to original Roman foundations or were constricted by topographical obstacles, ample gardens spread in the rear of houses.

Gardens and orchards, sometimes fields and pastures, existed within the city, as well as in the “suburb” outside; endless illustrations and plans as late as the seventeenth century prove how universal these open spaces were. Goerthe describes such a fine rear-garden, so favourable to a genial family life, in his Dichtung and Wahrheit. Medieval people were used to outdoor living; they had shooting grounds and bowling grounds and tossed the ball and kicked the football and ran races and practiced archery.

As cities increased in size and density of population, their rural base was undermined and new sanitary difficulties arose out of the very fact of density. Not alone the density of the living but the congestion of the dead, who were buried for convenience and piety, not outside the city’s walls, but in the vaults or graveyards of the parish churches. By the seventeenth century the overcrowded conditions here constituted a serious sanitary menace, through seepage into the water supply.

The above is expedited; Mumford goes on further about the subject, but I can’t type out the whole book. What I find fascinating is the potential this creates for redesigning the D&D city. The inset city plan of Zutphen, Holland, from 1649, is an excellent example (I found one that was sizable, so it could be viewed closely by my gentle readers).

How much better for the game if we consider a city where most of the garbage is organic and eaten by various animals which are native to urban life? Gong can be collected and deposited outside the city, or even managed by various magical means (dry, which desiccates a square yard, is after all only a cantrip, and might be possessed by a hundred city dwellers who have an aptitude for marginal magical ability), so that vermin (the bee, bug and spider cantrips will eradicate ordinary rats, mice and other small creatures) and disease can be fought back as successfully as we do in the present. Must we always see cities as festering, sweltering, stinking holes? Are the odors of a farm so pleasant that we cannot imagine a city being no worse?

We might consider that cities could be potential gardens…with healthy, robust citizens, encouraged in their livelihood by magic and the knowledge acquired by magic. Throw off your nineteenth century goggles and consider the possibilities.

Out Of The Stone Age

D&D is still living in the stone age, at least in the descriptions or the videos I see on line, made in the last four years. Paper character sheets, graph paper maps, pencils, miniatures…dice…these things made sense for 1979, but here we are thirty years later and embracing these things as though they were the game, as though our imaginations are dependent on the manner in which the mechanics are managed. For three years now I’ve been running my games from a lap top - no paper at all. When I want to give one player a private bit of information, I create a page on the desktop, minimize everything and then show it. Why would I write out a paper note? So the player can remember what he’s been told? Are you given paper notes by the trees and rocks you see, and everyone you converse with?

I realize there is a tight, nostalgic clique for these things. I once mentioned that most of my players showed up for a running with their own lap tops, and was told by DMs - not to specifically name any - that they would punish their players. Me, I think its fabulous.

When I think about what I would do with money applied to the game, along with my secretary, I think electronic interaction. I see the bits with computer-generated graphics in Iron Man and Quantum of Solace (which I didn’t like, by the way), and I think, “When do I get my hands on that?”

Because there ought to be a graphic interface screen in the center of every table. Get rid of the cheap drawings and the paper maps with border limitations and the expensive, soon-to-be-pummelled-into-indistinguishable-lumps miniatures and lets have a table-top battle map which will enable my players to be farther apart than 48 hexes. Lets have maps which can be touched to reveal other maps, and maps which can be three-dimensional.

And let’s have a system whereby every player can individually manipulate his or her movements on that map, without being able to affect anyone else’s movement. Let’s have total interface capabilities, so that I can show an image on each individual’s computer of what THEY and THEY ALONE can see, and force other players to move blind when they don’t have knowledge of what the fighter is going through behind the door.

I have talked it over with players, and I can understand that they don’t want to stop throwing dice. For them, the dice are personal, tangible manifestations of their characters and the physical action of attacking, doing damage, throwing for safety and what have you. I would not, I think, ever insist that players give up the throwing of dice, however archaic they may be.

But I have to say, as a DM, I feel none of that. I don’t give a rat’s ass if the goblin hits or not. I’m throwing for fifty, sixty goblins here, and it’s hard to get emotionally attached. I have already made the concession that it makes sense - algorithms be damned - to generate hit points in Excel. I could happily design an Excel spreadsheet (working on one in my head) that would let me roll as many monsters as I wanted at once, and generate damage, at a click. And then save a lot of time in a mass combat by saying, “These two guys hit, take seven damage, those four guys miss, three of these twelve bowmen hit; the mage takes four, the thief takes two and the ranger takes one.” And just rattle that off so the players can get back to strategy and success without having to sit and wait while I roll and roll and roll.

Oh, sure, there might be some tension lost…watching your friend get stomped while the dice haven’t been rolled on YOU yet. But after enough combats, you know that flavour declines, and mostly you just want the combat to move. I don’t see my players sitting on the edge of their chairs waiting for me to move up the legions against them. For them, it’s mostly a moment to go to the bathroom, stock up on fuel, etc. For myself, after thirty years of die rolling, I don’t care if I ever roll a die as a DM again. I think I, too, would want to roll dice for a character I was playing, but its just a hassle which holds up running a game.

(I know there are those of you who would penalize a player for leaving a table during a combat. I’ve played with people like you. You find that stick comfortable, do you?)

As for role-playing, have you seen Sims 2. This, without question, would be dead fabulous for defining character features, since the game allows you to make not just beautiful avatars, but ugly ones also. Given the money and time to design the application, players without a natural artistic ability (hey, I’m one) could manage a passable figure for their character. As DM, I’d look over their shoulder and suggest they might be a bit uglier or more attractive in keeping with their charisma, with artists much smarter than me providing maybe a grading scale. Or maybe not. Beauty is relative.

The real genius is not the application of an avatar-making program for players, but for NPCs! Ah, if I could have a recognizable image for every NPC I use to interact with the party, something unique and instantly familiar, which the party could actually feel an emotional attachment or revulsion for, that would fit perfectly into campaigning. The textual feeling of having an image to talk to, be in fear of, or hesitate before mindlessly slaughtering (a dozen faces of innocent looking hobgoblin children)…so that the circuitry of the brain might kick in when the player’s are NOT playing. Imagine one of your players saying to you, “Remember when we slaughtered that hobgoblin village? I actually had a dream last night where I saw the faces staring up at me while I cut them to pieces with a sword. I woke up shaking.”

I could probably throw out more. It’s Sunday morning and I’m a bit fried and unmotivated to write. (It’s amazing I wrote this much). I might write more sometime about the application of electronics to D&D, but this should already open a few of those doors. I think we really should be thinking about what we can do with the technology, and let go of our graph paper.

I’m about $4,000 away from having at least a limited enough table-top display with accompanying programs and interfacing that would let me get rid of my canvas graph-board and my miniatures (with their appallingly limited number of wolves, rats, gelatinous cubes, ropers, mind flayers and shedu) forever.

That would be sweet.

Good Investment

Having written the rant on why I wouldn’t give two hoots for the game community, I’ll make a plug for what I would love to do had I the means…that would be, to run my world really well.

First off, I’d love to have a secretary. I envision it as a full-time job, about $45,000 a year, in which I would need someone with a good grounding in history, literature, office skills and graphic design. Having a better understanding of computer dynamics and programming would be principal regarding whom I might hire. The individual would have to have excellent social skills, a powerful memory and would have to have a strong perfectionist streak. I imagine I would go through a series of candidates before finding one who was able to perform consistently and to standard.

The working hours would be fairly odd: four days a week, exchangeable, from nine A.M. to five P.M., during which a mass of hard research, design and idea development. Much of this work would be, for many people, quite boring, such as systematically going over every city in the world which I have not previously researched and adding it to my already bloated system; fixing my bloated system; preparing methodology and programming in order to simplify my bloated system; and adding additional as-yet inconceived of material to my bloated system. Since I would only sometimes be working on my system during those same hours, and other hours which fit in with my schedule, the secretary would have to gain a firm understanding on why things were done, and be able to remember and explain why decisions were made at given times. I would have to trust the secretary to make correct, reliable decisions so that I wouldn’t have to go over the work again, and thus productivity could be increased. Since I have a talent for delegation, I don’t find this a problem.

The fifth shift every week would be the Saturday night running, in which the secretary would be employed from four P.M. until midnight, with overtime compensation to be offered for long games. During the game, the secretary, well-versed in both my system and the system from AD&D, as well as at least as many role-playing game systems as I myself have (in order to make interpretive rule suggestions when called for), would have all the information regarding combat, spells, magic items and so on at their fingertips—i.e., when something was asked regarding a particular rule, it would be fabulous if the secretary was able to either A) quote the rule verbatim or B) have fast hands.

After some period of experience, once the secretary was familiar with my perspective and methodology, it would be desirable if they were able to “run” the campaign in my absence, or if they were able to run this half of the party while I was elsewhere running the other half of the party, allowing for a lot of interesting dual adventures with potentially harrowing or hilarious results. Since this person would be working for me, I would be able to countermand any problematic conflicts, while it would be very much in my interest to give them a free hand in order to develop excellent running skills of their own. The fringe benefit in that would be to be able to run in my own world, during which time I would disallow myself the privilege of having the “last say,” which I would not need as I would have come to trust this person.

If it happened that this resulted in an increase in participants, it might then be interesting to hire new persons to work part time on the development of the system and full time on Saturday nights. I think it would require one additional hired DM for every additional six regular players. If it became quite popular, some sort of registration would be involved, but since I see doing this out of the income I would earn as a writer, I don’t see there being the need for fees in the early stages. Later on, it happens that a certain class of people are unable to treat something with respect unless they pay money in order to “join,” but because I don’t especially like that class of people and because it would spoil the free and interactive discourse of the experience, I would put that off until it became absolutely necessary. I see that circumstance arising when there might be so many people interacting in the game that they might not know each other except by face, and that only by the recognition that people have paid for the right to be there could respect be managed.

Unfortunately, this also creates a circumstance in which that certain class believes that once they have paid, they are automatically deserving of respect. Which they aren’t. Also, it creates that circumstance whereby different classes of people feel they have the right to lord their long status over noobs. This would have to be policed firmly, which I think would only be possible through a joint resolution on the part of those DMs operating at each table, whose quality would be managed by me.

Yes, that’s right, it’s all about the power. Heh heh heh.

But what the hell, I’m paying for everything, right? And like any business, the CEO makes the final decision, after listening to the board of directors. I think that with careful hiring standards and an expectation for creativity and self-education, I could build a board of directors with an unusually high quotient for detecting bullshit and keeping a positive order.

Once again, with four or five DMs running 20-30 people weekly, all in the same world and all operating according to the same rules, some very interesting interactions could start to develop between this group of players making a power play against another group, or with different groups gathering together into different campaigns. I see a scene where group one meets with group two, they exchange materials and information, and then party members as the two mages in the one group decide to split up to make better use of their talents.

If all the parties were willing to remain in the same general area (and there’s no rule saying they would have to), then this sort of switching and reforming could go on all the time.

Now that’s D&D!

(There will be more. Oh yes, there will be more)

Poor Investment

Why in the name of everything that’s unholy would anyone want to design, publish and market an RPG-focused non-video game today? There’s no money in it. There was no money in it when the idea was completely new and unsullied…if TSR couldn’t figure out a way to make it viable in 1980, why in hell would someone think it was a good idea now, financially speaking?

Sure, there’s the argument that TSR had its collective head up its ass, that opportunities were missed or directions taken that showed unqualified stupidity. Regardless, those opportunities don’t exist today. The community has killed them. Let me just run off some of the things standing in the way of someone wanting to get their remarkable new roleplaying system to the public.

1. RPGs have a reputation that’s POISON. Oh, perhaps not to you, or to anyone reading this blog or one like it…but for the great consumer market any game that suggests of dungeons and dragons (and for the public, there IS no other RPG) is worth nothing but a belly laugh. That allows for a very, very limited market, pretty much only those people who are already interested in RPGs, most of whom are already playing the RPG of choice…which means you must fight uphill against that familiarity in order to sell your product to to anyone.

This doesn’t even work well with products that are insanely popular. How many alternative baseball, football and hockey leagues have been attempted and have proven to be utter failures after just a few years—and we’re talking about the SAME sport, just played by different people. A sport that is familiar to millions of participants and spectators, that is loved and worshipped by small communities throughout the country and is even a religion to some people. Yet, try a little competition against an established league and those same people just ignore you.

And what about lacrosse, soccer, rugby or cricket? Popular somewhere, sure, but in spite of a century of trying to make inroads into the American market, most of these leagues have to operate on a non-profit basis just to survive.

Your personally created RPG better have a substantial money behind it in order to raise even the awareness of the community that might buy it…money that doesn’t exist because no one believes such a game will sell. The recent advancement of 4e only happened on the grand scale it did because its based on an existing game. And from what I hear, sales aren’t providing wild profits.

2. Brand loyalty? What the hell is that?. Spend enough time in this community and you’ll find pretty quickly that the last thing anyone believes in is the companies producing the games they play. A lot of these players don’t know the name of the company—they don’t look at the box any more than they do for the video games they buy or the CDs they rip off the net. You’re not going to build a business based on the sale of your game that has a hope of growing and evolving because—for these particular consumers—you don’t exist. Your game is just another brandless box sitting in the shop’s bargain bin. Which means that if someday you produce another game with another unique, interesting design, you’ll have to fight uphill against the same ignorance you did the first time.

The most significant game designer to appear and do well in the last decade has been Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co. See? You have no idea who that is. But you’ve probably played Lost Cities or Settlers of Catan, without any idea that the first versions of those games were printed in German.

But even if you do play those games, you don’t really give a shit if the company exists or not, do you? You’ll buy a game from anyone. There’s absolutely no perception in the market that THIS company makes great games and THAT company makes shit. For a period, some of us geeks knew who TSR, Avalon Hill and Steve Jackson were. Those days are long gone.

The community is hopelessly fragmented. So what if you produce an amazing game? You can’t get two D&D players with a fifty years experience between them to agree on any three aspects of the game, much less the value of a game they haven’t played. RPG nerds are like violent predators lying in the tall grass waiting for anything new to appear so they can pounce and rip it to shreds. 4e was laughable, but it was also widely acknowledged to be shit before the game was released on the market. Oh, not by everyone…the game had it’s rabid supporters as well, even though they hadn’t seen it either. Did anyone change sides once the game was released? I saw no evidence of it. What I witnessed were two fanatical camps that established themselves and are still waging war to the death.

Who would want to release any product into that kind of consumer market? It’s tough enough on theatres to have to put up with critics, but when you have hundreds and hundreds of amateur, self-deputized pontificates screaming at the top of their lungs in every chat room for and against your product, pretty soon even the people who might have bought what you have to sell with close their eyes and wish that you’d just GO AWAY. They don’t want to buy, they don’t want to look, they’re so sick of the controversy they’d rather just get a fucking beer.

Your product is sold nowhere. Well, not quite nowhere. It is sold in about eighty or ninety game stores across America. Seriously. Last time I was in Michigan, about 2001, I was introducing my partner to the game and we looked up game shops in the Detroit/Flint area. We found ONE. It wasn’t even in a town. It was on the side of a secondary highway in St. Clair County—real practical for young people under the age of 16 wanting to buy games, huh? Like all game shops, including the one in the city I now live (one million people—ONE game shop), it was run by a surly, lazy, easily offended self-styled pundit who looked down his nose at half his own product.

What I really want is a business model built on a series of shop owners who have studied how to sell merchandise by watching Kevin Smith’s Clerks fifty times in a seven-day period.

Print is dead. It is as far as business publishing goes. At present, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are perennially losing money and probably will both cease to exist within thirty years. Printed books, particularly of games, are a baffling dinosaur, supported by a gang of hard-core individuals who clutch them desperately in the belief that somehow being tangible gives them a more marketable potential than the billions of dollars being made by video games, which are “clearly” inferior.

I repeat: there is NO money in the production of a printed book that must compete for profit against the emotionally visual mediums of computers and game systems. There’s no money in the creation of an electronic version of said book, either, as it can never capture the imagination of millions of supremely stupid people who are too dumb to A) read or B) care.

If, by some profound series of events, the license and rights of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise were to fall into my hands, even then I wouldn’t bother creating a RPG for the benefit of the existing fringe people who might play it. I would use that franchise to finally make an intelligent, humorous, indulgent movie, the sort Hollywood can’t make because they always fail to do their homework, and they have no sense at all that a community can be both fanatical and self-deprecating at the same time. The movie Dungeons and Dragons applied a baffling mixture of farce and piousness that left its viewers cold. I would produce a film that would combine the elements of sarcasm, black humor, brutality and sacrifice that fills my campaign, a stewing pot that I’m certain would do very well.

But I would not bother using the franchise to print anything.

Big

Romantically, I see a combat between a massively large creature and a group of small humanoids rather differently than it tends to play out in the campaign. I see the humanoids rushing forward—quickly finding themselves in over their head and being forced to scatter for their lives. The lumbering hulk of a creature peering behind rocks or trees; tearing the trees up by their roots and tossing them away. A member of the party stepping out and firing a bow. The monster bounding across the distance, making an attempt to smash at the bowman...missing or hitting, but now being close enough for another, nearby fighter to make one desperate swing. The mage, terrified, moving from rock to rock, waiting for the chance to let go a spell (that won’t be that effective, but will distract the monster for a round or two)...

Most of all, the battle going on, and on...

What happens, however, is that the party swarms the monster. Even a hydra attacking with 10 heads isn’t really enough to dissuade a seven-person party (characters and henchmen) with 5 or 6 levels. There’s no tactics to it...just leap it and keep swinging until its over. The monster barely has a chance—it gets in one deadly hit per round, then finds a third of its hit points gone from magic, swords and missiles.

I want a monster to be so terrifying that the party, in the encounter, realizes A) my puny sword isn’t going to do much; and B) I really could actually die.

This is the purpose of the mass table. The greater the mass, the more damage it can tolerate, as according to the shown table. Average hp per “die” gives a sense how many hp a truly large monster might have. You might notice that the monster’s mass goes up considerably faster than the average hp/die...this was done on purpose, simply to control the potential number of hit points and also because it is a fair argument that larger monsters carry more fat and other non-muscular structure as part of their overall bulk, and therefore should be penalized for this in terms of their combat resilience.

(The "average" and the actual dice roll do not agree because I wanted to keep the desired average separate from that of the dice so that, should I decide to change the dice, I have the original calculation. Don't worry about it, its nerd thinking)

A mastodon, which I understand weighed about 8,000 to 12,000 lbs. Call the average 10,000, or five tons—on the table, that means a mastodon would have an average of 43.3 hit points/die. With its 12 dice, that’s a total of 519.6.

Ridiculous, you say? Well, why? I threw a mastodon at the party with 102 hit points and it went down in four rounds (yes, one of those rounds included an 8-die fireball). This mastodon, therefore, should last twenty rounds, even thirty or forty, given that the party’s fireball could only be used once.

I tell you, there’s no doubt in my mind that the party would think twice about tackling one.

Okay, yes I know, the table includes things like a “d42.” This is because I can make a die of any size on my excel. I wanted there to be averages for each die but I did not want a high minimum, such as 28d6 would have produced (in exchange for 4d42). If you don’t use excel, substitute your own figures.

And hell, change them all. Downgrade them considerably...its your system. If you like the idea but find this just insane, you don’t need to go to my extremes. The idea should suffice.

My difficulty is in getting good numbers for monster masses. For example, lets take humanoids:

This is basing humanoid weights on the human template given in the DMG: 175 lbs., 6 feet tall. Yes, the numbers generated don’t match up with the Monster Manual...oh, boo hoo. Suddenly an elf with 1+1 HD is reduced to 2-7 hp. Cry me a river. Meanwhile, the orc, listed in the book as 6+ feet, gets a d10. Which might help explain why they’re a little scarier than another human.

But if you think the creatures are all too small here, consider the same table, generated using a dwarf template:



Goofy, huh?

I know this won’t be a popular idea. I have yet to try it out on my party with something really large. It should be fun, when they’ve done 250 hp damage and the fucking thing just keeps on coming.

You Can’t Kill a Whale

It’s never been clear to me how a whale can have 36 hit dice. This would seem to suggest that a fighter, given the chance to swing repeatedly at a whale, would be able to kill it with a sword or a trident—whereas this is completely ridiculous, if you know anything about whales.

First of all, if the whale is in a position where you can swing at it with a sword more than once, the whale is laying on dry land. In which case, the whale has effectively NO hit dice. It can’t fight or move…and regardless of how long you hit it with your sword, it’s the monster’s own weight that will kill it. You’re an afterthought.

If the whale is in the water, and assuming you have some way of swimming as fast as it does, long before you can kill it the whale will go deep; the pressure will end the combat before it gets a tenth of a way to even harming the whale. If you think that little stick in your hand is doing any damage, go read something about blubber. It has no nerve endings.

The only effective tactic to kill a whale has always been the same that is still used today: let the whale kill itself.

A ship moves up to where a harpoon can be hand thrown (thrust, really) or mechanically fired into the side of the whale. The harpoon’s head expands inside the whale’s body so that it cannot be pulled out…and if the harpoon has hit clean, the whale is a goner. It’s only tactic, to go deep, is countered by the ship being a bubble of air which cannot be pulled under the water. This helps explain why Ahab never lost faith in his certainty of the eventual kill—the thought that a whale could be big enough to actually pull a ship under the water was crazier than him. But that is the genius of Melville’s book.

The ship/bob forces the whale to expend huge amounts of energy to tear itself apart fighting physics. Effectively, the whale kills itself.

The title is of course inaccurate. Yes, you “kill” the whale, but certainly not by ordinary combat.

So how exactly does the application of “hit dice” apply to a whale?

Possibly, there might be some even larger monster which could combat a whale, eat part of it in a large chomp and thus give the hit dice meaning. But that isn’t human being; it isn’t even a storm giant, which would have to kill it the same way as we do. Because a whale weighs a hundred tons…1,000 times as much as a human being.

Yet strangely the books suggest that it has the same chance of survival as four 9th level lords. Uh…yeah.

I ended my last post with the question, why should a hit die equal 1 to 8 hit points. Other than that it always has. The number is arbitrary, of course—and being arbitrary, when it ceases to be useful, another arbitrary number deserves to be put in its place.

I realized a week ago that the best system I could devise would be to ascribe different hit point rolls to the “hit dice” given in the Monster Manual. And so that won’t be hard to follow, I’ll start at the bottom end. Follow my reasoning on this.

A kobald is listed in the book as a half-hit dice creature, with 1-4 hit points. A kobald, I will point out, fights on the same table as a human first level thief, which is rated at 1 hit dice. Let me add, as a last piece of useful information, that I estimate a kobald’s average mass, at 4’ tall, at 52 lbs.

What if we, instead of supposing the kobald’s hit dice to be one-half, that instead the kobald’s hit dice is actually “1”…and that the number of hit points per hit die is 1 to 4? Why don’t we further assume that all creatures weighing in and about the mass of a kobald have 1-4 hp per die? This would solve an nagging problem that I have wondered about for some time.

Why does a brownie have 9th level magic spell use if it only has half-a-hit die? That would seem excessive. But it wouldn’t be if the brownie, being 2’ tall with an average weight of 6 lbs. had only 1 hp per die! This would justify the brownie fighting as a 9 hit dice creature without actually having the hit points of a stone giant.

I know. Too much math.

The logic, however, follows beautifully in the other direction, also. A gnoll, average seven and a half feet tall, weighs an average of 342 lbs. This is almost twice an average human male; the tendency is to think, okay, that explains why 2 hit dice. But it doesn’t—a human doesn’t have twice the hit dice of an elf or of a goblin (which has only 1 hp less). Which means that the extra 167 lbs. is a lot more of an addition than just twice the human’s fighting strength. Remember that a gnoll has a strength of 17, which is seventeen times the human average (trust me, it is…the chance of a human having a 10-11 strength is 52 in 216, and the chance of having a 17 strength is only 3 in 216).

There has to be something that accounts for that. My suggestion is that the gnoll has 2d6 hp per hit die; this is an average of 7 per hit die.

Thus, the hit point designation in the monster manual isn’t so much a recognition of the creature’s power (the dimension/mass of the creature does that) but of the creature’s effective fighting power. A 1 hit dice 7 and a half foot tall creature would still have 2-12 hp and would fight as a 1 HD creature—but it would still be markedly taller than a human being and the system would account for that.

And that’s what I want. Accountability.

Next: massive, very dangerous mastodons.

Update: My error. A halfling is only 18" tall. And crap, kobalds are only 3' tall. A goblin mass would be about 52 lbs. It has been a long time since I've looked at a monster manual.

Well, please read between the lines above. I don't want to rewrite everything.

Mass & Experience

Now, technically, I don’t play D&D. Running a single, developing world for 21 years has meant going beyond merely producing house rules, it has meant a massive refabrication of the game—which has proven to be surprisingly easy to explain to people who decide to come play. Nevertheless…

As time goes on, I realize that less and less of the DMs Guide or the Player’s Handbook continues to be relevant. Oh, I have rewritten sections of both, which I have on my laptop or printed out for the player’s benefit. I could reproduce them here rather easily, except that copyright is an issue. Not that I’m not willing to break copyright, occasionally, in small amounts, as any of us do in printing pics on our blogs…but I’m not ready to go whole-hog on it, not yet.

Still, sometimes I wonder how far I dare go. Once I had a fairly definite sense of what it was from the Game that would get left alone, and what I was willing to change. That line has gotten very blurry.

Beginning with August of last year, I began thinking of drastically changing the manner in which monsters were constructed. This has long been taboo for me. Nevertheless…

Oh, I’ve rewritten the monster manual and the fiend folio before. This became necessary as there were hundreds of notes I had from other sources, my own monsters, stuff from Dragon magazine, etc…and I just got tired of looking in four different places whenever I wanted a monster. The final comprehensive tome was just over four hundred pages and worked well—until it got destroyed by pure malevolence. Most of the material within has never been recovered, and while I have steadily rewritten the manuals again, it is on my desktop and not printed out. Why bother?

In the months leading up to August, however, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated by having massive, five-ton monsters that went down too easily, and with the overall relationship between leveled fighters and intelligent monsters with a lot of hit dice.

To solve this, I suggested in a post awhile back that HD should relate to a monster’s mass, while Experience Levels should relate to a monster’s education. This would mean that a 3rd level Bugbear fighter wouldn’t have 3d10 hit points; nor would the fighter have 9d8 hit points (3rd level = 9 HD), which was something I tried. It’s fine for bugbears and hobgoblins, but it just doesn’t follow for giants. And how much would a bugbear need to go up that level, hm? How much would a giant need?

I did not like, at all, the rather lame system of sub-chiefs and chiefs suggested in the Monster Manual. This seemed to be fine when I was playing 20 years ago, but lately my political system demands that the overlord of a massive empire filled with half a million hobgoblins be ruled by a “king” which has a few more than 6 hit dice. I realize that Gygax didn’t conceive of a massive empire such as this, being focused on tiny game adventures, but I need high-level hobgoblins and ogres and trolls just to make my game dynamic work.

Also, my players were VERY unhappy with race limits, and demanded a decent explanation for their existence. And after a lot of thought and argument, I had to admit that, well, there just wasn’t any reason except that the humans had to have something that made it worthwhile being human. Otherwise, why would anyone ever play a human character? Just so they’d get along with human NPC’s? That seemed awful weak.

But considering the mass vs. experience concept, why not give humans more hit points. They are bigger. So, too, are other races. I have a half-orc fighter who, just by chance, wound up with a character who is 6 feet tall and weighs 313 lbs. Since by definition I believe all players to be “in the trim” due to their training, this is the half-orc’s “fighting weight.”

I sat down and worked out a series of die rolls for mass, and made my party happy by A) giving everyone more hit points…hit points that would reflect their mass, their previous hit points being for experience only, and B) eliminating race limits.

Yes, a first level fighter might begin with 20 hit points, as the half-orc did. So what? “Hig” got lucky, he’s ugly as sin and he has no special powers vs. creatures. Everything balances. I like that a human mage or a dwarven cleric might do better for hit points than an elf or a half-elf, which balances out the +1 sword and bow, the surprise and the find secret doors very nicely. It makes players consider a wider choice when making their initial decision.

It worked very well with the gnolls, also. The eighth level cleric got 2 hit dice + 8d8 hp, for mass and for level. I should have thought of this years ago.

But…it still wasn’t solving my huge mass monster problem.

My first instinct (or attempt) was to give the big monsters more hit dice. And until last week, that was still something I was fighting with. It wasn’t working, for a number of reasons.

The first being that I would have to reassign a new hit dice number to every monster in every book. Argh! And this would mean that huge numbers of them would have more than 16 HD, based on their mass vs. humans, which in the DMs Guide combat tables would give them far too easy a chance to hit. I considered insisting that dumb animals fight as 1 HD monsters, but one combat was enough to convince me that wasn’t going to work.

And then I hit on the moment of genius. Well, genius for me. I’m starting to get a feel for the readers of this blog by virtue of the comments and every time I get too technical or mathematical readers evaporate. But I know a brilliant stroke when I find one, and this was definitely right outside the box.

Why does a “hit die” need to be a 1d8?

Policing Their Crap

Sigh.

I have not, as determined, set about creating a series of cards for my player’s equipment until just this last week. I’ve been busy, I’ve been lazy…and I’ve known since the beginning that it was going to be a huge hassle. But this week, I’ve started. With tomorrow night’s running I will begin the process. And it isn’t going to be pretty.

My party has been very supportive of the idea—which I admit has been the inspiration to finally start the change. In a lot of ways it will make it easier for them, as they won’t have to keep lists or make changes, but merely hand over the appropriate cards/items when eating food or firing missiles. I can see, however, from my first efforts at creating the cards that I’m going to like it too. But let me first explain:

Due to the expense, I am printing the cards myself on heavy stock and using a paper cutter to cut them. There are hundreds of cards involved and that is too many to handwrite; plus, having them professionally done so that they’re pretty is just out of my income range. So, the cards will be a bit rough but also replaceable and practical.

For coins, I’m making cards marked 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and 10000…for copper, silver and gold. I can see that the cards will make it much easier if I ever decide to create a system based upon multiple monetary units, a nightmare for the party but deliriously fun for me. I would love to have the party fucked by having thousands of g.p. which they can’t spend because the country they’re in won’t accept their money or worse, will only accept it at half value. This is very possible when you consider that a poorer country’s gold coins might contain a far smaller percentage of gold than a richer country’s.

But then, there is the question, will a “gold coin” that contains 40% gold provide more X.P. than a “gold coin” that contains 20% gold? No idea. I haven’t tried to install national coinage into my world since the campaign I had in the late 80s, and it was a complete disaster due to the confusion. I had no program then that would help me print cards and the paperwork was horrendous.

But cards which would read, “20 silver dinars” as opposed to “20 silver rubles” would be easy to manage, if annoying in their having to be exchanged by the local usurer. So in a year or two I might give that a try.

Meanwhile, regarding the party’s present equipment.

What is it with players? They’ve written out lists of the equipment they have, and I’ve made the mistake of accepting them at the end of the running and not looking them over while we were playing. Of five players, two are carrying no food. One has not included her weapons or her armor. Two has no clothing at all and three have no boots or footwear of any kind. One has a ton of stuff but no backpack. Of the party, one player has bothered to include their mount, or anything on their mount. There are other things. But they’ve all carefully remembered their money and their gems/jewelry.

It would be easy to be an asshole in this situation. Only I know that these things were purchased, as I harassed them to do so at various times more than a year ago. And I can guess what’s happened. I expect my players to be responsible for their characters, and of course these get forgotten at home or misplaced or whatever. Most players in my world have five or six pages covering their junk, various notes about their past and associates, their spells, henchmen, hirelings, land and so on. And since players never seem capable of simply keeping this all in a folder that is never opened outside of the game; or they copy it into computers without backing up the information; inevitably, stuff disappears.

As tempting as it would be to make them pay for everything again, I would rather piece together what we can both remember and establish a baseline of equipment we know the player must possess. And then price the remainder and fix the mess.

Meanwhile, remembering that the card system is being designed to get rid of this nightmare. I’ll be an asshole then—in the meantime I’ll consider this their last warning. And I will tell them so.

I don’t know if you’re the sort of DM who checks their parties’ equipment. Sometimes it seems that a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy seems best, though in the long run that will bite both you and your players in the ass.

Sure, I know no one wants to be the “boss” checking over their player’s shoulders, but some degree of policing is involved in the game. If you haven’t for a couple of months, you ought to consider setting aside a little time in your game and making sure that everything is straight and clear regarding their equipment, carrying capacity of items, overall encumbrance and logic—I seem to have players with equipment which does not actually exist on my equipment table (which consists of about 1,200 items). I have no idea how that was possible, given that when I invent something new I always add it to the table automatically.

Anyway, as I said, Saturday night is going to be an unhappy affair. But we’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, enjoy this:

Two Dollars Worth Of Advice

This is my 100th post on this blog.

This isn’t bad for nine months of posting, of giving my two cents worth, a little better than once every three days. And I think lately I’m posting more often, and at greater length. It’s not so much that I’m long winded; it’s only that I always find one more relevant point to add.

If I had a complaint, it would be the tendency of my gentle reader to make an assumption about my world from a single post, despite there being a great many back posts to the contrary of what I’m accused of. I try to let such things slide, rather than point them out ad nauseum. But people rarely read back posts on blogs.

For that reason, I’ll take this opportunity to make some salient points.

I play AD&D, or 1st edition as its called, almost entirely out of the first three books, the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual. To some degree I use large parts of the Deities and Demigods (including the Cthulhu and Melnibonean chapters), the Unearthed Arcana and the Fiend Folio, but I also find large parts of those books to be, well, stupid. I once stole parts of the two Wilderness Guides, but I don’t own them and later I improved on those rules with my own logic, so I don’t use them anymore. I have done the same with books of the 2nd and 3rd editions. The 4th edition I consider a joke.

I did not see any reason to consider or add any character classes beyond the first three books. The one semi-exception has been the bard, which has always proved to be a problem to recreate or manage, as invariably my efforts make a class that is too powerful or—more often—too weak. I have a bard running in my world now, and he seems to be happy with the character. I’ll include my home rules on that subject at some later point.

As the 1980s developed, it became clear that the emphasis of further rule manufacture was going to be on character development. This was a problem with the pre-AD&D game that I thought was brilliantly solved with the PH. I am apparently alone in that thinking. Pound after pound of material continues to be churned out on the character, particularly the dreaded skills system (I played a skills system with Rolemaster and found it despicable), focused principally upon more equipment, more spells, more skills and more superfluous rhetoric intended only to increase the thickness of the binding.

I understand it from a business angle. It is far easier to focus upon the finite constructionism of the character rather than upon the environment. The second edition made it very plain that the environment would be a fractured series of disconnected modules and localities, and to hell with the unified whole of a world. Put out maps so that DMs can count hexes between adventures for the purpose of healing and we’re done. Don’t worry about what might be in those hexes (unless its another “adventure”), and similarly don’t get too concerned with international politics, economics, law, cultural influence, artistic or sociological or religious movements, climate, chronic wars or anything else which might affect more than one hex at a time. Oh, yes, produce a module about a city or a “nation,” recognizing that the nation shouldn’t have more than two principal cities, and then talk about factionism without doing more than sketchily explaining why this faction or that faction has the motivations that it has. Merely describe them as “evil and insane” or “methodically hedonistic” or some other empty phrase and then point them at the party as fodder for pushing along the DMs tale or for combat purposes. It’s too difficult to create a deeper, complex motivation, and no one wants that anyway because the players is happy with the kind of wooden, two-dimensional cultural logic to be found in Star Wars and Star Trek.

Operating in a world with no adequate frame of reference—meaning that there is no way to say the DM is wrong about his interpretation of a given band of people or the religious/philosophical questions that influence them—helps to keep the players off-balance and at the mercy of the world’s maker. Remembering always that the world’s maker is not the DM sitting across the table from you, but some stranger you’ve never met who has taken his undergraduate education in English Lit or Computer Programming to the highest level possible, cranking out modules for general use with the corporate-approved guideline stapled to the wall above his or her desk. And of course such guidelines exist. There shall never be gratuitous sex included in a module. There shall never be any undue emphasis on religious belief in a module. All modules will include potentially marketable features. And so on.

But even if there were no restrictions, even if we lived in a world where the marketing department of an RPG gameshop was somehow made toothless by the offices existing in some nether-realm where rent did not need to be paid—modules and the worlds in which they’re placed would still suffer from the lack of imagination. Because anything which is slapped together for the use of the mass public must depend on it being simple-minded enough for the public—even a nerdy public like the RPG community—to enjoy without feeling unnecessarily challenged. There have been various rare games unleashed that have proven too complex to be popular…many of us have a pet example.

My imagination, too, is not up to the challenge to create a deeply integrated, complex and easy to grasp world, where every player in it enjoys the benefit of a lifetime of experience in that world and thus the conceptual grasp of its culture and physical nature. So I use the planet Earth. There are more profound, screwy, compelling, inspirational or creepy possibilities in the actual world than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio. Even more than one Horatio.

I encourage you as a DM to consider redesigning your world based upon the whole, or some part, of the planet Earth. In the very least, if you find yourself typing search terms into Google such as "D&D adventure ideas," I suggest that what you do is to go to wikipedia, find the "random article" button and pound on it. Within ten minutes you will stumble across some concept so completely out of your given experience that its incorporation into your world will spin your player's heads. We no longer live in a world where "ideas" are hard to come by.

Look all around you.

The Pony

My party made my machinations unnecessary last Saturday, which I thought rather marvelous. Instead of continuing to flee from the gnolls pursuing them, the ranger tracked the mastodon back to its origin, miraculously passing through the various hunting parties and arriving at a “barn” where two other mastodons were being kept in reserve.

Then, while the rest of the party slaughtered the “stable boys” and the two riders, the 80-lb. female elven ranger managed to climb aboard one of the mastodons and get it under control.

Which gives me an opportunity to talk about mounts and animals.

The question has come up from time to time, just how hard is it to ride a mastodon, oliphant, hippogriff, griffin, pegasus and so on? In the case of some intelligent animals, such as a dragon or unicorn, it is obviously a case that if the mount is compliant, riding is a breeze. But what if the mount isn’t compliant?

I’ve been playing with a rather loose system, which worked brilliantly the other day, so I feel confident enough to outline it here. The system for riding an unwilling animal is simply a base chance with a load of modifiers. Before I begin, the premise here is that any potentially domesticated animal can be eventually controlled—and because its D&D, the same can be said for a non-domesticated animal, such as a bear, zebra, giant owl, what have you…so long as the creature is at least of animal intelligence.

The base chance is 90%. I’ll list the modifiers below:


And it’s that simple. At first glance, it may occur to some of you that the table doesn’t work: the percentage chance of success in many cases is much too low. So I’ll just point out that the attempt to control the animal may be made every round, regardless of previous failure.

That means that if a first level thief wants to attempt to break a wild horse, the chance may be only 5%…but as long as he’s prepared to be thrown, he will eventually succeed.

In the case of the ranger and the mastodon, the base chance was 45%…once the ranger was in the saddle. Because of the size of the beast, and the general mayhem going on around it, the ranger had to make a dex check (at –4) to seize the saddle and another (no modifier) to get into the saddle. Once there, the ranger had a 45% chance of getting the beast under control (the mastodon had 12 HD; the ranger is 7th level; -25% modifier).

An additional rule I use is that if the roll is 40% above that needed to control, the animal lies down in order to get rid of its rider or otherwise the rider loses his grip and is thrown. In this case, the ranger would have had to jump free if a roll of 86-00 was made.

Meanwhile, the ranger did get the beast under control, after about four rounds. What then?

Having an animal under control only means that it has stopped fighting back. It doesn’t mean that it will automatically obey. I play so that you could move the animal in a direction, but if you want to do anything tricky, well…

The ranger decided to use the mastodon to trample one of the pesky gnolls who was proving to be hard to kill. To succeed, I again invoked the same 45% chance…which the ranger failed…which meant again she had to get the animal under control, involving another successful 45% roll. And so on.

Now, this made for some hilarity.

In the end, the ranger never did get back into the combat. The mastodon threw the ranger off…which turned out to be not a bad thing.

The party includes two players able to speak with animals. The sixth level monk can do so automatically, while the 8th level druid has the spell. Following the death of the last gnoll, the mastodon was reasoned with…whereupon I threw the luckiest reaction roll possible. (I think I said before that I throw most of my dice in the open where they can be seen). The result on 3d6 was 18. Complete fanatical approval.

Having “rescued” the mastodon from its former owners, the party began to make its way towards the Ural Mountains. I promptly gave a +15% chance for the ranger to succeed in controlling the beast (I would have given more, but the ranger can’t speak with animals). So with 60%, the mastodon won’t throw the ranger, but the ranger still might not be able to make the mastodon do what she wants.

A control roll is pretty much necessary for any command other than “forward.” But with each successful control roll, I grant a +1% chance of further success. If the mastodon could be gotten into an enclosed corral, where it could be fed and trained, I’d simply eliminate the chance for control and call it automatic. However, since the party is still stumbling onward through the wilderness, I’m restricting matters this way.

My next point on the matter would be the mastodon’s “morale.” I give all animals a morale number between 3 and 12, which must be equaled or bettered on 2d6 whenever the animal is placed into a position of stress.

Let us say you have a war dog, which you just bought from the local menagerie (pet store). Typically, I give the morale for said purchases as “9”…to account for the animal’s general training.

You get into combat with your dog. Your dog jumps in and fights for you…until the dog receives a single point of damage. Whereupon you must make morale check—or the dog runs.

Each time you succeed in a morale check, the moral of the dog drops 1 point. This is the manner in which I increase the overall loyalty of whatever animal you might have, until the animal’s morale is 3. Except in some unusual circumstance, the morale will never drop below 3 (snake eyes always scares the animal).

For the ranger, given the situation, I would set the morale at 12. Because the mastodon has already proved its willingness to be fanatic, I dropped this automatically to 11. Again, I could have lowered it more, but they are in a vast wilderness, the mastodon has never been ridden by an elf, the mastodon has only seen elves as enemies (gnolls and elves have a long blood feud) and so far, the mastodon is unsure of this strange group of human/dwarven/gnome/elven characters. Besides, 11 over 12 triples the chance for a successful morale roll.

The player is wildly happy about it. She doesn’t care that the mastodon won’t be a huge combat asset for quite awhile, because she’s been talking about getting an elephant or oliphant since starting the character and now her dream has come true. This was why she broke convention and headed back into the army of gnolls…the party being enormously agreeable.

And it has worked out. The mastodon, which the party can communicate with, has been able to guide the party over the difficult muskeg-and-small lake terrain to the foothills of the Urals; its massive hulk is a tremendous benefit in breaking the deep snow for the members of the party, and for aiding in the provision of shelter during those hours when the mage’s Leomund’s secure shelter isn’t in existence (lasts only an hour a level).

As such, the party has been able to more easily reach the upper foothills and endure the numbing –30 degree temperatures (it is now the middle of November); what’s more, since the druid can change shape, he too can become a mastodon (admittedly, a smaller one, limited by no animal more than 8 HD) and between the two of them they hope to breast the high passes through the Urals where the temperatures are sure to be a brutal –60 degrees with wind chill.

Twas a brilliant gambit that has paid off very well. I don’t even mind that the ranger has decided to name the mastodon “Pony.”

Update: the first two modifiers on the table should read, "+10%."

A few other notes occur to me. You might notice that the table given means that a first level fighter might have trouble with a medium or heavy warhorse. A medium warhorse, for example, with 3+3 hit dice, would be a –10% modifier for the level of the fighter, or (90+10 for horse-10 for level) a 90% chance. This is not to say the fighter couldn’t ride the horse; if you’re familiar with the early scene of Eastwood attempting to mount the horse at the beginning of Unforgiven, that might give you some idea. Which could prove interesting if the horse decides to act stubbornly just as the fighter desperately needs to get going.

If a flying mount throws a rider, the rider is quite likely dead. I once had a horse take off at a gallop, then stop dead, throwing me into a fence. Imagine a pegasus dropping towards the ground like a stone, then throwing its wings out at the last moment and pulling up. Gravity.

Finally, you might consider a modifier for particularly fractious animals. Horses are well known for various “tricks” to dump riders, such as stepping under an eave before bucking or diving into a creek. Intelligence would be a big factor with a pegasus, unicorn, dragon or similar mount.

It's a Cruel World

Jim of LOTFP has written posts on Sexuality and D&D and D&D and Racism…I suggest that my gentle reader should have a look.

I did not comment on either post, for a number of reasons, first and foremost being the absurd emotional argument that was bound to arise about the modern world, political correctness, approvals, social responsibility and blah, blah, blah.

I have lots to say about that, but not within the subject of D&D. Briefly, I state that I’m opposed. To racism, prejudice, abuse, etc. Who wouldn’t be?

That said, I accept that such things go on in the world; and often I feel responsible for pointing out that they continue regardless of all the sobbing, pontificating, accusing, stamping do-gooders in the world. I don’t dispute that particular method of relating—I do it enough myself, as anyone knows—but I do despise the self-imposed blindness that insists that anything believed now must be retroactively incorporated into any described history dogmatically and without restraint.

That is, if we don’t mass-slaughter people now, we must condemn people who have been dead 400 years repeatedly for having done it. As though somehow that changes the event.

I run a world that is a distorted simulation of Earth history circa 1650. It is distorted in that magic and monsters exist, thus changing many of the borders, historical events and social perceptions.

For example, my 17th century religious leaders don’t burn witches in order to gain their property, since witchcraft is an accepted practice and often necessary for the defense of the state.

However, my 17th century religious leaders DO burn witches who are seen as potentially threatening the state…or the religious authority of those same religious leaders. They also burn non-witches for being “hidden” witches threatening the power structure. This is done gleefully, pragmatically, extensively and methodically. I don’t apologize as a DM for the massacre of hundreds of innocent people, for two reasons. One, it was done, the art reflects the reality, and get over yourself. Two, no one is actually dying. Nor do I think it likely that someone is going to play in my world, rush out, seize a person and burn them just because they heard me describing it in my world.

It is MORE likely that one of them will read the BIBLE, seize a person and burn them for being a witch. So you might want to start your protests with that elephant, and not with me.

Of course, I’m more accessible.

My various emperors, kings, viziers and dukes massacre, assassinate, fornicate and appropriate at will. Being monarchs in a monarchical system, their only opponents are lesser nobles, whose primary interests are in that the King doesn’t get to be the only one massacring and fornicating. I don’t apologize for all this activity, or the fields of dead, staked victims, clogged river courses or other circumstances which I have occasionally had reason to include for dramatic effect. I have also included rampant disease, crippling worldwide poverty and famine. I have yet to have a player decide to do anything about these horrors on any kind of scale, but of course the potential is there. It could be a quest—but then, I don’t give quests.

Nor have I ever heard of a DM suggest, as a quest, that the players should “bring about the welfare of the kingdom” as part of their activities. Oh sure, they might be instructed to remove the Evil Usurper to the throne…but like American foreign policy, it is always assumed that this will instantly produce a kind, considerate ruler and everything will be fine.

Which is really the height of hubris.

Given an environment with this kind of ongoing bastardy, I find it vaguely humorous that players would have trouble with the homosexuality of other players. It might be that I am playing with people who have little interest in sex in my game—not that they don’t talk about it constantly before the game starts, after the game stops or during the necessary convenience store run that must occur at half-time. I play with some fairly young people, in their early 20s, so sex is a major issue for them (it is for me, too, but for different reasons than my being young).

Since I run a 17th century reality, homosexuality wouldn’t last long on the streets if a player pursued it. With clerics wandering around using Know Intent (my version of Know Alignment), which indicates only if a person intends on doing evil, things get freaky pretty fast. A party member would only need to wander in the vicinity of a cathedral where one of the many 3rd-level deacons of the church, sweeping the street at random, was able to discover that the particular homosexual party member was a very nasty creature indeed. A foreigner, too, walking past with all that equipment, nice clothes and probable wealth, all to go automatically into the pocket of the church when that individual is RIGHTLY executed for being a non-approved member of society.

No, I’m not a nice guy.

My societies are repressive. Just like a 17th century world, only WITH the actual magical ability to find out what you’re thinking.

I don’t do this just to be a shit. I do it because I want my players on their toes, because this creates tension, drama, adventure and a real desire to get tougher and stronger, just so the player can do whatever the fuck he or she fucking wants.

You see, the average homosexual gay wannabe player is usually able to do this with no consequences whatsoever, being able to throw out into the game a lot of droll sexual innuendo, lame juvenile attempts at roleplaying and a lot of predictable childishness. Whereas I have this feeling that IF someone wants to play a homosexual in a world, then they ought to be damn well aware that they’re hated, that forces want them fucking DEAD and that those forces are in charge of everything. Creating the sense of mind that a homosexual player just wants to change his/her world enough that they can practice in peace.

This is a much better driver for story than butt cheeks and cum jokes.

The same goes for anyone who is a Jew, a Cathar, a worshipper of Satan, a Hindu in England or a Christian in Borneo. You are fighting the status quo. To win against the status quo will require more than just a lot of stupid jokes. You will have to face prejudice, hatred, abuse, persecution and assassination. If you win against all that, you will feel as a player as though you are on top of the world.

Now, everything I’ve just said above applies to race, as well. Negros are captured and shipped in miserable conditions to America, where they are beaten. While my demi-humans tend to get on with each other (unlike the PHB), there are quite a lot of blood feuds between dwarves and goblins, elves/gnomes and gnolls, orcs and humans, hobgoblins and everyone, and so on. In a few cases, where land has long been in dispute, there are some blood feuds between humans and demi-humans, most notably between the Swedes and the elves over the territory of central Finland. For the most part, however, segregation is the rule and they just don’t live in the same room. Which doesn’t keep them for going to war occasionally just to kill as many as possible.

Which brings me to the subject of women.

In 1650, it was easier to be a woman if you were born to a rich family, or nobility. Joan of Arc, two hundred years earlier, was much rarer than adventurous women in the 17th century.

That doesn’t mean they were respected; only tolerated. I tend to ease up somewhat on my women characters, since for the most part the company they keep is within the party. It is easier for female demi-humans, as the race is seen first and the sex second. It is also mitigated in that most of would-be rapists are considerably lower level that any party member who might venture off on her own.

Given the chance, however, I won’t hesitate to describe the rape of a party member, whatever their sex (orcs are pretty indiscriminate). I have yet to have any such occurrence happen in my world (and it hasn’t with these present players) where it turned out to be funny.

But that is the way I tell the story.

To sum up. I run a world steeped in evil. The ordinary, historical evil that has always been a part of history. I run it indiscriminately and without regret. I run it that way to give the party a chance to rise above it, to feel the indecency and—if they want to—do something about it. I also run it that way so that if the party feels they want to wallow in it, they can. I haven’t noticed that many of the sort of people I call my friends want to wallow in it for very long.

That, too, is the way I tell the story. Because wallowing has its own consequences. Recently a player made the point that the party—by their actions—are more monsters than the monsters. And that she feels that this ought to change, since they seem to be constantly pursued wherever they go by people who hate them.

This is how stories develop. First, the injustice is made clear. After, it might be ignored. Then it becomes too hideous to ignore. And steps begin to do something about it.

I won’t, however, sanitize my world the way people want to sanitize all human history. Fuck that. Let’s have a clear understanding of what we are, as thinking beings, and then let’s play in a world where we’re not afraid to face the evil.

Let’s grow up.

How It's Done Rejoiner

Regarding the maps of the previous post.

The program used is Microsoft Publisher, 2003. I’m familiar with Quark also for the Mac, but I don’t have one of those at home and besides, I find it finicky (though it allows more visual options). To translate the map into a jpeg, I have to transfer the file to my other computer and Publisher 2007, which is part of why the formatting gets screwy.

The hexes are individual shapes strung together to make the hex grid, so each hex can be individually colored or shaded as necessary, as well as the hard borders softened to give it a gentler look.

The elevation data is obtained through the Fallingrain Global Gazatteer, the link for which you can find to the right. Each hex is assigned a set of coordinates (so much latitude and longitude) based on an overall map representing the entire Northern Hemisphere (a second map represents the Southern Hemisphere). This causes some distortion, on account of the hexes, which must be adjusted for. The numbers from Fallingrain are then crunched and applied to each hex, giving me a minimum elevation and a maximum. The minimum is then recorded onto the map.

The cities are then plotted on the map according to their latitude and longitude, being assigned to the appropriate hex and a fairly specific location within that hex. This location is later adjusted for the aforementioned distortion, as occasionally the rows have a tendency to define a city as being northwest of a particular feature when it should be slightly northeast. It is best to remember that true north as depicted on the map is not the top of the map, but always towards the centre hemisphere hex. Does that make sense?

Having plotted the cities, I hand draw the borders out, one line at a time, using the program tool for the purpose. Provincial and national labels are added. Provincial borders are shown by a 4 pt grey line, national borders by an 8 pt grey line. I experimented a lot with different colors and thicknesses, and arrived at this as it is easy to view even when the map is fairly small and both words and rivers can be seen easily—most published maps use orange for this or heavy shadings when regions are colored. I tried both and neither looked good.

I designate the highest hexes (based on their minimum elevations) in descending order and plot the rivers. Three high hexes creates a “source,” which begins a river. These rivers will follow the “trough” created by moving from the source hex to that hex with the lowest elevation, continued until it reaches the sea. Often in populated areas the exact position of the river has to be adjusted to match up with the cities, but in uninhabited areas the topography alone defines the path of the river. This means that occasionally the river is not precisely the same as on Earth, but this isn’t Earth after all—its my world—and I don’t mind a few minor discrepancies.

Now and then a river doesn’t have an exit hex. In that case, the lowest elevation of the most logical hex is adjusted. You will note a couple of green circles on the earlier maps. These are hexes that must be adjusted lower.

The benefit of having my rivers this way is that I can define the “size” of the river, as it accumulates depth and width from adjoining hexes…and joins with other rivers to create larger waterways. Thus on the map, the Rhine which begins in the Canton of Uri meets with the Lesser Rhine at Chur and increases in size (6+3, +1 for the “source hex” which has no river to the southwest of Chur). Rivers are displayed on the map in 1 pt font if smaller than 10, 2 pt if 10-29, 3 pt if 30-59, 4 pt if 60-109, 5 pt if 110-189 and so on. You might recognize the Fibonacci series in this calculation, which is actually a relative computation in this instance, being applied to all sorts of natural conditions.

The lakes and coastlines are drawn by creating a picture frame and importing a picture all of one color. The edges of this picture can then be adjusted by superimposing the picture on an actual map and fitting the plot-points to the lake or sea coast. In the case of the sea, not shown here, the “coastal” picture is extended so that the outer edge is covered with sea hexes. See if you can see what I mean by the map of Hadramaut included here. These lakes and coastlines are then superimposed onto the map.

Hexes without rivers then have their elevations changed to the highest elevation in the hex (to give the sense of topography). Where there is a city in a non-river hex, the city's elevation is used (the lowest city, if there are more than one). The circle notes are removed.

All elevations from Fallingrain are of population centres, not geographical elevations, so any given hex shows the highest level at which a population center exists. Thus, if you take the Canton of Ticino, the hex north of Bellinzona which reads “8,178” indicates the highest village. It isn’t correct, but I consider this to be the measure of what elevation must be reached to cross the hex, which I use predominantly for my trade tables, and the flow chart I posted last month indicating the association the trade cities have with each other (how far apart they are).

Now the rivers are drawn, one line at a time. The arrow notes are removed. This is slightly annoying, as I wish Publisher had a single draw tool like paint and Quark, but you can see that the lines drawn and matched end to end don’t look too bad. It helps to make the lines short. Again, I should point out that the bends and turns do not exactly correspond with Earth, but its good enough for me.

What is interesting is how often the Earth truth and the plotting match up and give me new data. Most times, looking at a map, you might note that Berne is a large city in Switzerland and that’s all. Having the benefit of the topography shown shows why it is so important. The low elevation clearly allows access to Geneva and southern France, the lower Aare and Rhine Basins, and the upper pastures of Interlaken…and ultimately to Italy. Thus, the focus point for three major trade routes.

Finally the map can be colored. The lowest elevations are in green, beginning with the darkest green for below sea level, and becoming lighter with each 500 ft contour. At 2001 ft the color shifts to a light orange, darkening each 500 ft to 5,000 ft, then each 1,000 ft to 7,000 ft. At that elevation, a light grayish-purple is used, darkening each 1,000 ft. to 10,000 ft., whereupon it darkens every 2,000 ft. above that.

At a future point, roads are laid out and small symbols are put in to designate mountains. Those mountains which get noted are those which make the Ultras List.

Is there anything I’ve forgotten?