D&D. The Game is Called D&D

So now it's, quote, "Arneson's Game"?  What the fuck.

I realize the man is dead now, and that there's a growing sentiment that follows a lot of dead people, mythologizing the person's character and accomplishes ... but I really have to draw the line at indentifying D&D, which honestly has been designed, influenced and modified by literally hundreds of people, by the misnomer of one individual's contribution.

Yes, I know a lot of you out there met him personally.  Yes, I know a lot of you liked him.  I remember the outpouring of grief when he passed away.  And that some of you need to feel a panegyric is in some kind of order.  I feel your pain.

But let's just call it D&D, all right?  Let's not give it a synonym that's really just a fraud.  Let's not create a fucking cult here.

Settings And Abuses Of Settings

Rusty Battle Axe left me this query on the last post, and I finally have time to take a swing at it:

”I'm always struck how much easier it is to create once a campaign starts moving. I always found that there is this essential tension between creating a world that exists apart from PCs and also being conscious of the fact during creation that this is a campaign setting that is meant for players. It is both "indifferent" and "all about them" at once. I'm curious to know your thoughts on that.

I do beg to differ, though it's really a quibble. I don’t believe that the campaign ‘setting’ should reflect the players at all – as Axe says, the world exists apart. I see it that way for a couple of reasons. For one, there are too many possible players with widely different personalities for the world to cater to everyone, and for another, I am used to a world that is largely indifferent to me. I feel that a D&D world should be likewise – that it shouldn’t ‘cater’ to the players in terms of its construction or how it functions.

But, on the other hand the campaign itself, the weaving of enemy motivations and encounters that formulate the sessions – this should very definitely be ALL about the players.

I told you it was only a quibble.

What does ‘about the players’ mean, exactly?

I have never liked the term ‘referee’ where it is applied to RPGs, fundamentally because I’m not one. Whereas I have on occasion interceded on a player’s behalf to defend them from another player, I don’t do this as an authority figure, but as another person in the game. My players learn from experience that I never take any opportunity to ‘punish’ players for wrongdoing, either for their behavior as players or as human beings. If someone offends me, I demand an apology. But my role as DM doesn’t include spanking bad players.

Now and then, a player’s own actions will incur the wrath of NPCs ... but I usually try to mitigate that wrath by giving players repeated opportunities to mend their ways. I’ll have the bad guys threaten them, and then I’ll have the bad guys break their thumbs, and only after the player repeatedly acts like a bozo will I actually have the bad guys kill.

In very rare occasions a player will incur an assassination attempt. I don’t invoke assassins lightly, and I usually make the assassin the same level as the player when the player committed the offense – which usually means by the time the assassination actually occurs, the player is one or two levels higher than the assassin. But not always. Sometimes a player is very arrogant and very deserving, and the assassination happens very quickly.

Sometimes a player will raise some evil spirit that comes looking for payback. This usually involves a one-on-one combat for about three rounds before the player gets help (I like to be fair). It takes a fairly blatant act of blindness or stupidity to create this scenario.

In almost every other situation, I will give my players a chance to run ... even when circumstances dictate they really shouldn’t get that chance. This, too me, is intentionally arranging world events to suit the players. It doesn’t change the setting, however. It may be that the only place for the players to run is straight out into the desert, where they can expect to die soon without a lucky encounter roll. But I will make the roll.

Life and death is only the most obvious situation. There are hundreds of less obvious things that I do, that I am very careful never to tell the party about.

Running even a sandbox campaign requires that certain details are worked out in advance of the party. Strangers must have motivations and plans which the party will not discover until a later date. There must be a room designed on some level, even if it only in my head, beyond the door that is yet unopened. And I’m a human being – I am not above subtle changes in the next room based on what is happening at a given moment.

I love irony. If I can make my world a bit more ironic by changing the number or variety of monster in the next room, I will. I’ve tried running a world where I’ve steadfastly obeyed the dice on every occasion and the result is an adventure that lacks continuity, rhythm and the steady, demanding build to a climax.

In the same context, I’ve also ‘rushed’ a party through a potentially boring travelling campaign in bypassing encounters and events, just so that I can get them from point A to point B in a minimal period of time. Now and then, I’ll have someone teleport them. Most times, I’ll simply calculate the number of days and move on.

As I say, I draw the line at the world itself. I won’t move cities, I won’t have monsters die from spontaneous heart attacks, and NPCs don’t just give over magic items out of the goodness of their hearts. I will move things along to keep the campaign from getting boring, but I won’t furnish the party with a ring of teleportation just to get them out of one jam.

This sounds very much like I’m changing things all the time, whereas I’m really not. In my earlier campaign incarnations, twenty years ago, when I didn’t have maps and developed house rules, or the solid campaign design I have now, I was forced to make spontaneous changes constantly. The campaign I used to run simply didn’t hang together as well as it does now, I was not as well-versed in a wide variety of subjects the way I am now, I was not as adept at creating complicated plot weaves and so on ... and I had to take short-cuts.

And now very often I read on other blogs about how these short-cuts cause a world to be more ‘imaginative’ or ‘fluid’ ... further supported by arguments that forethought and foreplanning make a world stale and predictable. I find all this a kind of ‘praise of half-assery’ – where it makes an argument that magic and mysticism can’t been developed thoughtfully and intricately and then laid out ahead of time, on a grand scale, because it sounds like ‘work’ and this is all supposed to be ‘play.’

Creating a world is very much ‘work’ to me. When I step out of the room, I say to my wife, “I’m going to go back to work now.” I take the whole issue seriously. Players depend on me to be clever and as precise as possible, and D&D is a huge, cumbersome system that defies my attempts to take into account every detail. That’s why I love it. It is labour. It is effort. We don’t call them ‘plays of art.’ It is a Work.

It is only during the session that I refer to the game as ‘playing.’ And during the session, I apply my hard-worked world to making things as much fun as possible ... through driving my players through every emotion from fear to excitement to hilarity. For that I make changes on the fly. I’m thankful now that most of those changes are tweaks rather that sweeping shifts.

I cannot begin to imagine why every DM doesn’t want to work so hard on their worlds that their fingers bleed. I cannot imagine why, once they’ve created their worlds, they seem to treat them with such disdain. I continue to be puzzled when I see long time players announcing that they have a ‘New’ campaign they want to run. Didn’t they work hard enough on their old campaign? Couldn’t they find any respect for the things they worked on?

Are they incapable of falling in love?

Campaign Soup

It feels good to be running again, both on and off line.  Mostly for the reasons the gentle reader would expect, but also because it provides fodder for this blog.  Today I am thinking about the beginnings of campaigns.

A good campaign does not begin all too quickly.  It's good to get people on the road, or on the move - to get them equipping themselves and working out strategies in how to function together ... but I don't advocate slapping them with an McEncounter the second they've designed their characters.  This is somewhat disfunctional online, where things move more slowly; an off-line session can get a decent adventure off the ground in a couple of hours.  Online, I've found, it takes at least two weeks.

That is because of the ground that needs to be covered.  First and foremost, a strong setting.  Someplace which the players can identify, and which is not overly threatening.  Traditionally D&D has always preferred a tavern or an inn, but anywhere relatively safe and patrolled will do: a populated city square, a well-travelled road, a walled-in village or yes, a large, well-maintained ship.

I tend to start my players in circumstances over which they have no control - the inn is mastered by the innkeeper, the local church by the clergy, the ship by tough sailors - and this sometimes creates an immediate sense of distrust.  What if the shipmaster turns on the party?  What if the other guests violently plunder the inn?  What if the sun suddenly goes down and bandits attack?

I'm sure other DMs play that way.  For myself, I want my players to feel - initially - safe.  If they get into danger, it won't be on account of my putting them into a situation and trapping them.  For the first while, I want my players to feel there's a way out.

For example, consider the two campaigns I'm running online.

The party moving along the road can stop at any time.  They don't have to fulfill the 'quest.'  They can wish the cleric cheery-by and part company, and no hard feelings.  The NPC might lose respect for them - but he isn't railroading them along.

I've been very careful to allow the party on board ship a way out.  The ship will be stopping at Corfu - and if the party feels suddenly they don't want to travel to Egypt and work for the strange archeologist, again, no problem.  In the meantime, I am working up a shipboard adventure - no different, really, than a dungeon adventure or a city adventure.  Certainly a bit cramped.  The trick, however, is to make it voluntary.

How is that done, exactly?

My experience has been that parties will respond to some very definite motivations, if given the chance and if those are delivered correctly.  I list them out, to encourage other DMs to try them.  I'll begin with the most obvious:

Greed.  This hardly needs an explanation; throw out a promise of gold somewhere and people will go for it.  However ... an ordinary monster and treasure does not a good adventure make, not in my experience.  To really play on player greed, and build a long term adventure, the end 'treasure' needs to be more than merely a plundered lair.  It needs to be the gold that keeps on giving - magic or power.  Both of which corrupt quite nicely ... even if the objects or the power is clean, the players are not, and will create their own messes somewhere.

Injustice.  Ordinary injustices, such as poverty, abuse, crime - I don't find these things motivate a party very well.  DMs usually have to railroad to make them work.  But an injustice that a particular player can really identify with, something that hits them below the belt ... works every time.  Women in the party, all I have to do is have a woman beaten to death right in front of them and they are on board.  Got a bard?  Wreck an instrument ... make it a nice one.  Give a villain a rod of cancellation and ruin the chief player's +2 sword.  Have the giant deliberately target the paladin's warhorse with boulders.  Nasty.

Insult.  This always seems a bit strange to me, but I've repeatedly found it to work.  Have an assassin step out from behind a pillar and attempt to kill a player, fail, and die, and you'll get nothing.  Have the assassin say, a round before dying, "We all said when we started that you were a greasy bastard," and the player will spend four runnings trying to find out who 'we' are.  My favorite is to do the Finnegan from Star Trek thing; have thieves stand at a distance, taunt, and get away with it ... parties get very hot under the collar.

Two Camps.  This is perpetually my favorite.  Wherever the party is, whatever they're doing, have some conflict going on between total strangers ... and watch the party pick sides.  It's human nature.  The more realistic you can make the motive for the two camps, the better.  If you get a really good riff going, you can get the party switching sides over and over as new information comes in, as they won't know who they should back.  What's particularly funny is that most of the time, while the party is saying, "We're on OUR side," they are still willingly getting involved in something that never had anything to do with them in the first place.

And, of course, you can have both sides haul the party in for a 'chat.'  This has long been a standard trope for thrill plots -  Hitchcock used it, Star Trek used it, most Sci Fi / Fantasy TV uses it, hundreds of quality writers and directors have used it.  The mistaken identity, the party assumed to be helping Side A when they're not, driving them towards helping Side A because Side B are clearly such a group of assholes.

What's more, when you're ready as a DM to make it more complicated, you make it three camps, and then four camps, and so on.

You can't set things like this up in five minutes.  Like a good stew, it takes time.  It gathers strength and then melds, the rich aroma pulling the players in and holding then on the brim of the pot, while you stir and stir.

Iron Working

There is more iron in the world than every other kind of metal put together, by almost a factor of ten. Iron ore is wildly common, so common that whole landscapes are red with it. Powdered iron makes beaches and taints deserts, forms wide visible layers in bare rock and collects in layers at the bottom of ponds and lakes. It is a heavy, hard stone, twice as heavy as most gems – polished, it makes fine jewelry, and existed as jewelry thousands of years before it was founded as metal.


Iron is not as easily founded as copper – iron melts at a temperature 900 degrees hotter than copper. I quote from Daniel R. Headrick, Technology, A World History:

“The simple furnaces used at the time – pits dug in a hillside and lined with stones or clay – could not get hot enough to melt iron. What came out was a spongy mixture of iron and slag (or dirt) known as a bloom. To drive out the slag, blacksmiths had to heat and hammer the bloom repeatedly, a tedious process that required a great deal of time and charcoal. The result – wrought iron – was softer than bronze, cracked easily, did not hold an edge as well, and rusted rapidly. Yet iron had one tremendous advantage: its ores are found in large quantities in almost every country, often close to the surface, where they are easy to dig up.

“Gradually, by trial and error, blacksmiths improved their product. To prevent cracking, they learned to cool hot iron by dipping it in cold water. To make it less brittle, they tempered it by reheating the quenched iron several times. By repeatedly placing an iron object in direct contact with burning charcoal, they turned its surface into steel. By the fourth century BCE, blacksmiths were making iron swords with a steel cutting edge that was hard enough to cut through bronze.”

Note that we can posit from the above that although iron was being used extensively at the beginning of the classical age, bronze had not gone out of fashion in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. The fifth century Spartan hoplites were still using bronze weapons and shields, as were the Romans and Etruscans during the period of the Roman kings (prior to 509 BCE).

But cheaper, quality iron would eventually replace bronze weapons. Virtually all the weapons in Alexander the Great’s army would be iron, as would the weapons of India when the two armies met in the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BCE. Iron had been introduced in India about 1000 BCE; long prior to that, and prior to its discovery by the Hittites, iron had been used by the Chinese. Thus, by the end of the Classical world and the rise of Rome, it was an iron world.

For those DMs out there who are working on Mesopotamian or even Assyrian campaigns, iron should exist either as a cheap alternative to bronze, both inexpensive and inferior. On the other hand, a specific race that has properly learned to forge iron as it was forged in the fourth century might have a decided advantage over others.

Apart from things I talked about yesterday, hard iron weapons might effectively destroy weapons as they strike. The same might be said for mithril vs. iron swords, or even magical weapons against non-magical. Where is the table that demands a saving throw to be made by inferior grade metals against superior alternatives? Shouldn’t there be a chance that my iron sword will split my opponent’s wooden spear?

I’ve never come up with a simple, workable arrangement that allows this ... but it seems like something that should happen – not just once in a blue moon, but with frightening regularity. Suppose that with every to hit roll that results in a ‘19’ (as opposed to a natural 20), the opponent’s weapon must make save. Would it be worth it?

I think it would have to be judged in terms of comparative materials. A quarterstaff against a quarterstaff would not incur a saving throw ... nor would the quarterstaff cause the magic weapon to have to save. This would be a one-way process – and so the saving throw would have to reflect the difference between the two weapons ... it couldn’t simply be a flat save vs. crushing blow.

If my combats weren’t already as complicated as they are, I might consider this. If I had someone who could keep track of these things, I would definitely be working on such a table. But I don’t think it very important just now. I leave it to you, gentle reader, to work on it as you will.

Metal Casting

I have a small issue with this technology, as it is indivisible from ‘bronze working’ and ‘iron working’ – since it was learned early that making moulds in sand was an obvious way to employ the plasticity of the medium. Swords, scythes, armor and so on are all made by first casting, then forging. Civ IV offers players the opportunity to install forges in cities once the technology is attained, but really, there is scant bronze or iron working without a forge.


But I will take the opportunity here to talk about metals in general.

The ancients discovered seven metals: iron, copper, silver, tin, mercury, lead and gold. An eighth metal wasn’t discovered until 1752 ... and it wasn’t identified in the old world at all, but in Colombia, South America. The metal, found associated with gold in mines, was platinum.

Fifteen more would be discovered by 1800 – cobalt, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, tungsten, tellurium, beryllium, chromium, uranium, zirconium, yttrium, antimony, bismuth, zinc and arsenic. For all these except the last four, only laboratory specimens were available. Cobalt through yttrium were not in common use.

Some of these metals had been employed by alchemists, without much understanding of why their mineral sources interacted with other substances. Calamine (zinc ore) had been known for centuries as “Indian tin” ... and was known to react well with copper – but brass was not a common alloy until the 1780s.

Separating a metal from its source is no easy task, except for the seven base metals listed above. One might wonder how mithril or adamantium fit into the periodic table – except that most DMs don’t bother wondering about such things. It’s inconvenient (described as dull) and unromantic. I do use both in my world, according to my own rules – and I don’t concentrate overmuch on how either is smelted or worked. Obviously, it must be comparatively easy compared with difficult substances like cobalt or yttrium, since we all assume adamantium is present in the medieval world. Conveniently and expressly made by cultures who live deep beneath the earth and possess no earthly means to vent fires or dump slag, of course.

It could be dumped into the Astral Plane, I suppose. Which would make the Astral Plane look like Montgomeryshire or Polish Silesia ... not at all Romantic, unless you’re a D.H. Lawrence fan.

I digress.

Six of the original seven metals can be cast into various shapes – mercury is the exception, as it is liquid in a warm room. As such, it was very often used as a medicinal tool, and in some ways is effective in that capacity. It also causes mercury poisoning. Mercury also makes a good means for purifying metals – resulting in the poisoning of streams below mining communities, and thus the poisoning of miners through their water supply. Crippled, dying miners overworked by nasty overlords who are prepared to sacrifice them for the sake of silver and gold has a long precedent in history, and still goes on today. It isn’t a popular D&D plot hook ... but it could be.

Tin mixed with copper makes bronze, which is the only comparison to iron in terms of making hardened tools – as I’ve said before, it is expensive. Tin mixed with lead makes pewter, which makes jewellery comparable with silver and gold, and could be improved in lustre when mixed with some silver. The ancients mixed and experimented with all the metals, finding how to make things beautiful or practical, or both.

The effects of this metal experimentation were far reaching. Metal was a mutable substance, like clay used to make pottery – except that metal was much harder, and could be made to take on a point like bone, or an edge like flint, or the weight of stone. It could be spread wide to make shields, or beaten paper thin and grafted onto the surface of a wall. It was ground and made into paint, drunk as a tonic (with varying effects), spun out as thread and sewn into clothing.

Most of all, it was used widely as a tool. Cultures could for the first time cut down whole forests with little trouble, which expanded homebuilding and shipbuilding, leading to exploration and thereafter to exploitation. Stone could be split easily and quickly, through the use of fewer workers, resulting in mass stone construction projects sponsored not by emperors, but by ordinary wealthy people, making private temples, theatres, walls and roads. Road building would lead to trade and solidly built walls to greater security.

Because it is far easier to found metals at a lower altitude (melting point is lower), the jump on metal manufacture was made by lowland cultures – rather than in the highlands, where much of the ore originated. There are exceptions, such as Anatolia (Hittites) and Persia (Medes) ... however, while both those cultures occupied high plateaus, they were considerable lower than the surrounding, mountainous regions.

This metal founding, affecting in turn the manner in which cultures were structured, enabled the building of empires which in turn would destroy the hill peoples, still limited to wooden or flint tools, who still spent most of their time keeping themselves alive. Ultimately, metal casting is a time-saving technology; allow me to give an example.

A spear can be used to catch fish, obviously. It can be cleverly fashioned with barbs so as to make the implement more effective, and with training a hunter can provide enough to feed his family. It does require that the hunter work fairly hard, standing at the ready until a fish appears, throwing the spear in, withdrawing it, throwing it in again ... and all the while standing in what is often very cold water. In tropical climes, the hunter is exposed to dangerous animals like stonefish, or predators.

Compare this with a fish hook. It requires no cleverness to make. It requires very little talent, particularly when the hook is used as a jig or the fishing line is tied to a float. The fisher needs to use virtually no energy in order to reap the meal. The fisher does not need to set foot into the creek or the lagoon. While nets are still used by experts to produce quantities of fish, everyone can make a small effort and feed themselves that day. Even children.

Metals changed daily behavior in hundreds of ways, just like that. Later, of course, they would change behavior in thousands of ways ... but that is down the road.

I know this wasn’t much of a D&D post. There’s little to say about how some people might better choose their equipment, or make better use of the equipment they have. I always think that’s true, but part of my pleasure as a DM is watching my players work it out for themselves. I don’t want to give them hints here.

New Monsters

You may have noticed that I don’t write many posts introducing new species of monster. There are reasons for this – for one, I don’t think it very interesting reading. I gave up on new monsters twenty years ago, with the arrival of the new Monster Manuals, I & II. They had nothing but a tepid reworking of already existing monsters ... and that is mostly all I see today, on websites, on blogs or down at the local gameshop.

This one is a golem shaped as a horse, this one is yet another giant of a different shape and size and having the features of a mage or an assassin; that one is yet one more race with a sadly cliched historical background, and that other one is one more low-level jinxkin designed to steal magic weapons from players.

Using the same old monsters all these years doesn’t seem to bore the parties I run. Yes, they’re goblins, and yes the party knows all there is to know about goblins – their weapons, their armor, the ease with which they are killed.

But what the party doesn’t know, and what is for me the only relevant thing when it comes to how interesting the adventure seems, is what exactly these particular goblins want. Or just what they are doing. What is their motivation?

Different monsters are presumably invented so that campaigns do not become stale and dull. Throw another monster, watch the party figure out the puzzle that monster represents. The puzzle? How do you kill the thing ...

Two criticisms spring to mind. The first, if the only way you can think to change the texture of your campaign is to replace fangs with barbs with various stabby things and ultimately with spells and breath weapons, your campaign is obviously all about the fighting. I get the feeling that it is always the same routine: ‘stand up and fight the new thing.’ This is variety? This is not stale and dull?

Besides, are your players really getting a whole lot out of discovering their hard-earned +2 sword doesn’t work on this monster? Isn’t it just another way to screw them over ... you thought you were tough, but wait until you run up against this monster!

Sounds like a DM with confrontation issues.

On the other hand, if you are coming up with profound new motivations for all these monsters, what do you need new monsters for? The suspense is in the motive and the conflict, not in the material. Cakes don’t get boring because they’re made with the same old flour. There are thousands of ways to make cakes with relatively few ingredients. There are 350 monsters in the original monster manual. You can combine any two to make 122,500 combinations. And you are not limited to two.

But coming up with plots and motivations is much harder work than coming up with a monster that has a breath weapon and sprays acid. Kewl.

I know that many of you just find new monsters ‘kewl’. So for you, for a special treat, I offer a brand new monster I’m sure hasn’t been done before:

BED-SITTING ROOM

Frequency: common or very rare; see below

No. Appearing: 1

Armor Class: -10

Hit Dice: 14

% in Lair: 100%

Treasure Type: J (under cushions)

No. of Attacks: none

Damage/Attack: none

Special Attacks: sleep charm; successful save vs. fear allows 8 hours sleep

Special Defenses: immune to spells & cold; suffers double damage from fire

Magic Resistance: 0%

Intelligence: variable

Size: L

Found extensively in urban environments, and very rarely in nuclear-wasted environments. Can exist through the careful design of architects and house framers, or may result as the mutation of a radiation-infected human spontaneously. When found in non-urban circumstances, will stand out very plainly among the ruined landscape. In urban environments, tends to remain out of sight until encountered. For this reason, encounter distance indoors is rarely greater than ten to fifteen feet.

Outdoor varieties have the ability to speak and comprehend information as their original selves, but lose any spellcasting abilities they may have had. They tend to be quite depressed.

Bed sitting rooms make suitable hirelings, gaining loyalty very quickly, but can have a high upkeep depending on their market value. They do not have offspring, but other creatures are known to make their lairs within the sitting room’s body. These creatures can sometimes attack without warning.

Traditional Maps

Things have been busy today, what with people coming in and out and getting ready for job interviews, so the gentle reader will have to make do with a map.  I prepared this ahead of time, knowing that there'd come a day when posting was difficult, just so there'd be something special about it.

We begin with an ordinary, nothing new map from me, in this case of the eastern Alps and the northern Balkans.  It shares all the characteristics of most of my maps, being based on elevation, with notes for the feet above sea level and for small numbers next to the rivers to give a note as to their size.

But just for fun, let's render the map again, emphasizing the borders of the kingdoms, and getting rid of the many notations I usually add.  This should look pretty much like maps you saw in schools.  I want to emphasize that this is the same map, showing very nearly the same part of the world.  The yellow is Hungary, the green the Ottoman Empire, the purple is the Hapsburg Empire, the little bit of pink at the top is Bohemia and the brown at the bottom is part of Venice.  There is a small dark blue area, the Bishopric of Friesing (it got cut off in the format change), which is under the suzerainty of Bavaria.  The light blue area is obviously the sea - the Adriatic Sea.

That should give something to ponder.

Focus

Ran my offline campaign Saturday, first time in five months as a DM (two weeks ago, my daughter ran), and I tried something new.  Nothing excessively complicated, but I added a second monitor to my laptop for the game.  So while the lap top faced me, the monitor faced the players.

It was a huge hit.

While I am reassured by one of the players that I can be selective in what the out-directed monitor shows compared with my lap-top screen, I made no such distinctions last Saturday.  So the party saw everything I was looking at ... since my die rolls have, for more than a year, been thrown without benefit of a screen, it was a more open running than ever.

Strangely, the effect was to calm the party down more than I could have hoped for.  I have made comment in the past that it is a particularly rambunctious party, usually more so when I'm doing the DM thing and looking up stuff.  Only this time, they could SEE what I was looking up, and how it was relevant to the campaign.  Result: much quieter party.

Moreover, the party was there to check me ... which is something I don't mind.  I give my X.P. out according to the damage they deliver and suffer, and I keep a running total on an open page on the computer; on one occasion, the dwarf cleric asked, "Hey, why am I not up there?"  He reminded me his cleric had done damage and I hadn't accounted for it.  Oops.  But he could watch as I fixed it.

The best part of it, from my point of view, was the opportunity to show maps and to do hex-affected combat all on the screen.  No miniatures, no large sheet in the middle of the table taking up room.  I was running six people at once, and they could all see clearly where their characters were, and how they related to each other, and make decisions on what to do ... without having to poke around on a flat table.  40 miniatures tightly packed on a table look cluttered - but a vertical, color-coded computer screen showing a top-down view is crystal clear.

It was a great running.  Two new players started, they rolled up new characters, both of their new characters died and we ended the night rolling up new characters for them both.  They said they had fun.  And just to make it stranger, my female players now outnumber my male players 4:2.

Must be something about my world.

I have read many posts on blogs in the past 18 months about pencil and paper D&D, about Ludditism and about the textual feel of miniatures, to which I answer a resounding PHOOEY!  Romanticising weaker technological delivery methodologies for the depiction of what is an imaginative venture is a condition for stuck-in-the mud DMs.

In my ordinary, daily life, I don't do anything with pencil and paper.  My last job with a magazine, everything was done electronically, from the writing down to designing pages for the printer, who used a computer to control the web machine that churned out the issue.  I never bothered to pick up an issue of our own paper ... it was available online.

I don't deliver resumes on paper, I don't communicate with my friends or anyone by mail, I don't keep notes on paper and I don't use paper books for recipes.  All of my D&D work is done on computer, backed up on other computers and on flash drives.

For years and years I sat and wrote with pen on paper for four or more hours a day, and developed a massive callous on the third finger of my right hand.  You never saw such a callous.  I certainly never did, on anyone else ... in university I used to bet people my callous was bigger (I have a strange sense of fun).

Right now, that callous is almost gone.  It has winnowed away with the last ten years, since I went digital.  It has been replaced by a big lump on my wrist ... where I rest my right hand to use the mouse.

So why would I throw away all my normal daily habits to play D&D like this was 1990?  I don't want less technology, I want MORE.  If you love your players, you'll want more too.  Visual aids are more than just fun and convenient, they can focus a campaign like no one's business.  Don't you want to play as a DM without your players having to ask all night, every night, "Where am I?"

Player Sages

I created these tables loosely off the rules for Sage in the DMG, on the principle that any mage, cleric, druid or illusionist would naturally acquire knowledge through their calling.  This is an example of the mage's table; the tables for the other three classes are each different, and you'll find them at the bottom of this post.  I wanted to get these ready and published for the benefit of three mages who just started in my offline campaign.

It's quite simple.  Each column represents a 'field' of knowledge: Civitas, Humanities, Power and Science.  Beneath each field is a list of 'specialties' ... those for Humanities include Languages, Law, Logic and Publishing.

The mage begins with 1 field and 1 specialty in that field at 1st level.  He then gains another specialty every four levels thereafter (at 5th, 9th, 13th and so on) and another field at every six levels (at 7th, 13th and 19th).  This means that a 12th level mage would have two fields and three specialties.

The second table indicates the chance of knowing something in that field.  Percentages for general, specific and exacting questions indicate the chance per level of the mage knowing the answer to a particular question.  In addition, there are certain obvious answers - such as if the mage were to have Civitas as a field, and agriculture as a specialty, the question "What do I plant here?" would be automatic knowledge.  However, if the question was, "Can I grow a plant not indiginous to this clime here?", that is a general question and the 1st level mage would have an 8% chance of knowing.  The plant might still actually grow, but the mage would not know for certain until he tried.

You will note, however, that there is also a 'Researched' column.  This is the chance of the mage knowing the answer to a question multiplied by the number of common books the mage possesses regarding the subject divided by 100.

Now this gets tricky.  I divide my books into four categories, based on value: common, unusual, rare and arcane.  One unusual book is worth 4 common books.  A rare book is worth 16 common books and an arcane book is worth 64 common books.  Therefore, the made need not have 100 actual books to gain the 15% bonus; if he has excellent books, he can make due with less reading.

Moreover, the mage need not actually possess the books ... he need only have access to them ... which he will have, to some extent, through the various libraries that exist, at least one of which he will know well as that it the one where he was trained to be a mage.

I suggest if this interests you that you should read further on sages in the DMG.  I've used this table for some years now, and the players do pretty well with questions along the 'do I know the answer to this already' type.

I will give you an example.  My party's paladin has recently decided to find a particular magic item - Horseshoes of the Zephyr.  The first question is not where do we find a sage ... the first question is to ask the party's 9th level magic user, "Any idea where one might be?"  The mage has not taken 'artifacts' as a specialty, but does have 'Power' as a field.  The mage wasn't certain.  Next question: "Any idea where we might go to find the knowledge" ... whereupon the mage thinks about where there might be a lot of books about artifacts.  As it turns out, Poland.  So they will go to the library in Krakow, province of Galicia, and ask for permission to look in a library there.

Frankly, I don't understand the "sages charging money for knowledge" concept at all.  At no time in history has the acquisition or withholding of knowledge ever been a business strategy ... until applied by Google in the last two years, and believe me, people are PISSED.  Sages charging for knowledge is just another gygaxian way for DMs to screw players.  I don't subscribe to it.

Nothing left to do but to include the other tables:

Cleric

Druid

Illusionist

Debilitations

Yesterday, I came just that close to making a character blind. The die tumbled and the character was spared.

When I calculate it, there is a 1 in 50,000 chance that a character will be blind. The character must first roll a 1 in 5 chance on a d20, and then I must roll a 1 in 25 chance on a d100 (97-00), twice. The second % roll, I rolled a 90 and the ten-sided showed a ‘7’ and then rolled over to show the ‘3’. Look at your ten-sided die. They are right next to each other.

So I have been thinking about what a blind character would be like.

First of all, I think that where it came to hand to hand combat, the character’s abilities would be unaffected. If the character is blind and has achieved class status, I think it must be argued that the character has overcome their blindness. That their hearing accomplishes what their eyes might have, and that they are able to hit and do damage normally ... under certain conditions.

Hearing range for normal voice is 60’ (I’ve long used that as a meme) – beyond that you can only hear shouting. That means the blind character can shoot missile weapons a maximum of that distance; 0-20 feet is near range, 21-40 feet is medium range and 41-60 feet is long range.

If the character is a spellcaster, spells which are not dependent upon sight are probably a good idea. Self-spells, touch spells, character affecting spells ... excellent. And if the character can get a familiar, all the better! That would be a major solution to the problem. Not a perfect one, granted ... a familiar can’t sit perpetually on the mage’s shoulder in every instance. But it would go a long way to easing some of the difficulties.

For the record, I also have possible results for deafness, epilepsy and asthma and a host of rarer maladies, which players might, as an extreme long shot, have to manage. There are many, many players out there who might feel that such things are grossly unfair to include on a character background table. But I don’t think life is fair.

I do think life is interesting, however, and it would be interesting to have a blind mage or a deaf fighter playing in a campaign. There would be obvious benefits, in terms of fighting basilisks and groaning spirits. “Just leave this
one to me, fellas,” would be a standard trope, I think.

Any thoughts on other limitations blindness might add to the character?

Campaign Revisited

Well, yesterday's post landed with a sort of dull thud. I hope today's does better.

It is time, I think, for me to begin my online campaign again, which I suspended five months ago. I have lost track of Anshelm and Tiberius, but if you're out there you'll very welcome to continue your characters. Delfig and Kazimir, I'm well aware of where you both are. We can pick up where you left off, whenever you're ready. Just start me off with a 'yes' on this post and we'll get going.

There are going to be a few changes. First off, I won't be running the campaign on this blog. It was too distracting from my other posts, and I know many readers won't care what's going on with the campaign. So I am moving the campaign to a new blog, which can be found at www.taoscampaign.blogspot.com. The link will be added to the blogroll of this blog.

Second, I'm not limiting the number of people who play (though the more people, the less updates there will be - sorry), nor am I going to insist that people play in the campaign that is already in progress.

Those who want to play should email me at alexiss1@telus.net. All rolls that you make will be trusted unless I have reason to think otherwise (you're just too lucky). Until I get too overloaded with players, you can ask to join campaigns already in progress, or you can start your own, anywhere within the regions I've designed. Those regions include Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East, Arabia, Greece, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Russia west of the Urals and Siberia west of the Yenisey River.

We will roll your character, and then I will add posts to the campaign blog for you to 'run' on. Each campaign will have a unique label, so that by searching for a specific label you can get rid of all the other posts attached to other campaigns. I'm hoping that works.

If you feel you haven't very much time, but you are interested, under these conditions you can play as little or as much as you like ... I will try to keep a campaign going as fast as my time will allow.

This is still an experimental idea, so changes may still have to be applied once campaigns are started, but we all know that's part of the game. So let me know if you're interested.

The Great Encounter Table

I had my doubts about printing this table, as it represents only the beginning of the work that I am doing on monsters. But I’ve reached the first milestone ... I’ve completed all the ‘non-intelligent’ monsters I use in my world. I wanted to see how this would play.

First off, this is not meant to be an encounter table. This is meant to be the substance from which I derive the encounter table. But before we get into that, I’ll explain what the above means.

This is the ‘Grouped Hunter’ table – it includes those non-intelligent creatures which act as a group, and which do not ‘nest’ in a lair. These are all wandering hunters. Because of their lack of intelligence, they have pretty much one tactic (or nearly one tactic) where it comes to encounters. For the most part, to feed. The one exception on this table is the giant centipede ... which, in the right season, will also inject its eggs into a victim, so the eggs will have something to eat when they hatch. This obviously works best for the centipede when the dead body falls into a trench of some kind, or is underground.

Where it reads ‘Number & Density’, I designated to each creature a specific pattern of association. A tight group would be creatures which do not move more than a hex from one another. An ordinary group would be 2-5 hexes apart when encountered. A loose group could be much farther apart ... dozens of hexes or more. You’ll notice that many of the loose groups attack ‘progressively’, meaning that they come a runnin’ when the food’s available.

What doesn’t appear here are any ‘scattered’ monsters. A scattered density suggests that there a numerous monsters in the area, but they don’t act in concert. The party will likely encounter a series of them, all day long, or even at random intervals during a week, as long as they remain in the same area – until all the number of appearing have been killed. Thus, if there are 1-6 rhinoceros beetles indicated (a scattered monster not appearing on the above table), the party would kill one Tuesday morning, and might find Wednesday afternoon that they were faced with another. ‘Loosely scattered’ monster appear less frequently.

Under action you can see that the monsters will swarm, attack progressively, have a steady or milling approach, strike from murk or weeds, or be movement sensitive. A steady approach is the one most commonly used in D&D – the straight forward movement towards the party and attack. The swarming attack means that the creatures will swamp the party, with multiple individuals moving into the same hex as the player – a mass of giant centipedes attack like this. The strike attack or the progressive attack should be self-explanatory. A ‘milling approach’ describes a circumstance where the hunter doesn’t really notice the party. Suddenly you find yourself surrounded by manta rays ... and if you quietly swim out of the area and don’t disturb them, you might simply get away. On the other hand, if you attack, or make sharp movements, so will they.

The part of this table I’m least happy with is the ‘Range.’ This is the distance the creature is from the party when it is first seen. I would like a clean, consistent system for determining these distances, but I’m afraid many of the numbers are rather ad hoc. I’ll be working on that from time to time over the next few months.

Finally, there is the column about ‘Gestation & Growth.’ Very little exists in D&D about young creatures. My thought is that occasionally the party should run across a creature’s eggsack, or young creatures (probably in greater number than adults, since most insects and molluscs gestate mass numbers when they do reproduce), or the occasional infested carcass. The description of ‘swift growth’ on the table is to indicate that the newborn creature gains a hit die every one to two weeks until it is fully grown. Slow growth would be a hit die per season or per year; very slow growth, like that for humanoids, would be even slower.

I hope to create similar tables to this above for higher intelligence creatures – though of course such tables are already going to be too complex to list as one table. I am thinking of building a database, just as soon as I learn how.

The main complexity comes from the number of possible actions that higher intelligence creatures can take. I am thinking of generally limiting the table so that an animal intelligence will have 2 actions, semi intelligent will have 4, low intelligence 7, average intelligence 12, very intelligent 20, highly intelligent 33, extraordinary 56 and genius 90. I have a long, long task ahead.

When I’m ready to build encounter tables, then, they won’t be based upon the monsters themselves, but upon the vast array of actions which a vast number of monsters might chance to take, plus the effects of their biology on the landscape ... the ‘non-combat encounters’ listed on the table.

Aim big, that’s what I think.