Thinking about a portion of the comment Blaine H. made on the last post:
"... it can be just as frustrating to put all that information out there... to feed them all the names, keep track of where all the major NPCs are running and what agendas they are working on... and have the players just not pay attention."
This is true, but it is frustration resulting from a particular kind of blindness, common to artists of every stripe. Sometimes it is called narcissism. Mostly, it derives from a passion for something that fascinates the creator so much that they cease to care if anyone else is interested.
Now and then I am driven to write something which I know will appeal to few people, if indeed anyone at all. It's usually philosophical in nature; for me, it always revolves around a series of dialectic discussions, esoteric and self-referential ... and always deathly dull for someone who hasn't read various things that I know quite well. I don't wave these writings around - what would be the point? They do me good because I'm apt to cut my teeth on new techniques or tries at difficult emotional states ... but they'll never make a case for me as a storyteller.
The tendency to go up one's own ass is a common practice for an artist. A dancer works for weeks on some tricky, nearly impossible move that actually looks grotesque to the viewer; a musician explores an atonal cacophony that no sane person would ever record; an historical novelist piles up tens of thousands of words of family histories, genealogies and letters that the proposed novel will never actually contain; and artists paint pictures which they carefully hide away where no one will see.
Occasionally, however, one of these artists will stupidly fall in love with their work, believe it to be the most brilliant thing they've ever accomplished, and try to display it. The result is hideous, and the reaction from the artist is usually ... sad.
D&D is no less an art. It is an interactive art, and more than most creative exercises it is subject to an extreme level of criticism. A viewer sees a bad picture, shrugs and moves on. A player in a game encounters a bad sequence of events and very vocally denounces them, the DM, the campaign and so on, often explicitly and without much remorse.
Part of this level of criticism arises from the players rarely thinking that D&D - and the DM's efforts - is an art. A player will be more truthful than the cruelest reviewer, even though the criticism is often blasted at the player's friend. Honesty is a cold, unavoidable companion in the game because the player, unlike an ordinary critic, is compelled to participate in the bad production.
If you were watching a really crappy production, and someone handed you a script, dragged you onto the stage and then forced you to read the crappy lines personally, you'd be pissed too. More so if you had something personally invested in the play ... which we have in D&D.
You, the gentle reader, CARE about your character. He, she, it matters to you. So does the time and the venue, but particularly your own involvement. If the DM is nothing less than a harbinger of their own emotional masturbation, you're NOT going to feel very appreciative. Even if you don't shout and throw things, at the very least you're going to portray the height of passive aggressiveness. Stolidly you watch the DM go through his or her trip, and stolidly you wait for something to happen that doesn't make you personally sick to your stomach.
O DMs, if you find yourself facing a table full of blank, unsatisfied stares, take a close look around you. If you notice your own kidneys on the left and right of you, you've take a bad direction. It's time to back out, get some air and try to remember that interactive gaming demands that you pay attention to that old golden rule - try to run a game that you'd want to run in, yes ... but try, too, to run a game that someone else would as well.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
Crossovers
In the 10,000 Word Post, I spend six paragraphs speaking about narratives and the inter-relationship of the NPC narrative and the Player narrative. You can find where it all begins where I describe "Han, Chewie and Luke going to rescue the princess." (search that phrase and read down).
On one level I feel I covered the subject, but in retrospect there's probably no real way to "cover the subject" entirely. The pattern of building up narratives that run conjointly with one another, then meet in order to produce a meaningful and entertaining climax is the stuff which has eluded writers since Homer. It is a hard thing to do badly, and badly is mostly what people are capable of doing.
Worse, the process can be a bitch when you've got time to think about the plot line, write, contemplate the characters, rewrite, have a stroke of energy that enables you to add one more element, rewrite some more, rid the tale of all the crap and rewrite seven or eight more times. Doing this sort of thing on the fly, i.e. as the players are changing their mind about what they're doing, is the mindfuck Tolkein never had to deal with.
To get the idea, let's toss up xkcd's brilliant and mind-boggling narrative of Lord of the Rings, stolen but respecting the author's wishes as described on his own blog:
This, then, is the visual construction of what I was going on about in my large post last year. Above you can see the crossovers, which led to elements of the story such as exposition (telling you what was going on, how the characters would need to resolve the conflict, what each of them felt about it and so on) and the building of tension towards actually resulting in the story's resolution.
To master the idea of narrative, you have to have a strong handle on what conflict is; what separates a meaningful conflict from a frivolous conflict; and WHEN to drive a conflict onward and when to allow it to resolve itself.
Many a crappy story has started out with a conflict no one, or very few people, give a damn about. Many serials have died an exhaustive death because no resolution was ever going to occur ... or because when the resolution was finally attempted by the author, it fizzled pathetically and died. Humans, strangely enough, react viscerally to conflict. If it's done right, it hits you in the gut. If it's done half-right, you might as well dump it with tomorrow morning's garbage.
Shelves are full of ignored stories written by people who felt SURE that there was no "right way" to design a conflict. Slightly fewer exist that were written by people SURE that there was a right way, but that they were the only ones who knew it. Finally, there are stories written by people who believe there's a right way, and that the way to learn it is to stop listening to your own judgement and study up on the way its done ... a very small number of stories.
That's because it is far easier to soothe your ego by writing in a bell jar than by measuring yourself against people who are clearly smarter than you. Shakespeare, Dickens, Dafoe, Joyce, Lawrence, Austen, Maugham and Hemingway will make a new writer feel like an inadequate pipsqueak, and people DON'T like that feeling. Impotency is never popular. For myself, I am merely in awe. When asked what to do about making oneself a better story-teller, I have only one piece of advice: pick a writer that is ridiculously better than you. Then read that writer until every sentence is torn apart, and you understand what those sentences do to make the story what it is. Then look at your own sentences, force yourself to see where each one fails to measure up to its purpose and then fix it.
Do this until you bleed out of your eyes.
But I am supposed to be talking about running a D&D game, and I've let myself get hijacked into the writing process.
What D&D benefits from is that you are not telling a story which depends upon your sentence structure. The audience of your story need not worry that you haven't made the words clear the first time; you're free, in a running, to explain again and again if need be, until the full import of a particular element of your story is comprehended. This allows you to spend less time on the mechanics of writing your conflict and more time on the structure of the conflict itself.
Take the interplay of the characters in LOTR. A reasonable writer producing a book would be expected to produce some kind of character for Frodo that defines who he is and what he does. BUT YOU, O DM, do not have to do this in depth. Chances are, a character like Frodo is one of your player characters. Likewise Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli or Legolas. As a DM, you're expected to supply characters like Denethor and Wormtongue, basically people who are mere foils - one dimensional - for the characters to play off against. Even easier, you're providing the orcs, the men and the ordinary elves, who hardly need any character at all. You might stretch yourself by creating a really interesting Gollum or Theoden, or match with a couple of interesting hobbits, but that's really dependent on how clever you are at character or how much time you have during the particular session.
What you really should concentrate on is WHERE these secondary characters, the NPCs, are at any given time in the story. Note how xkcd has extrapolated from the book the placement of Faramir, Galadriel, Bilbo and so on, where in fact we never do precisely learn what they're doing during most of the course of the story. Bilbo is out there, he's doing something, but it isn't important - and yet still we know where he is, don't we? And if Bilbo should suddenly appear next to the party, we need some kind of explanation for why he left where he was, and how he got to where he is right now.
There had better be an important reason for him doing that, hadn't there? Otherwise, he's wasting the player's time, he's wasting your time, and he's contributing nothing to the story.
Of course, there will always be those who cry from the balcony, what about red herrings, hm? Aren't red herrings important?
Preserve me. I shall probably have to write at length as to why red herrings are a terrible curse of the writing industry; why they are invariably employed by the worst writers; how they've all be used to death; and worst, how the name itself has become a justification for their use. For the moment, if you have the time, I would give a little thought to how many times have you either A) enjoyed a storyteller pointlessly deceiving you; or B) felt that the story was made better by spending precious minutes of your life pursuing literary dead ends.
The red herring is an excellent tool for making 19 minutes of television into 24 minutes of television, so as to pad around commercials. That is its greatest achievement in the science of entertainment.
If you have a solid, meaningful, cool reason for Bilbo to suddenly appear from behind the curtain at the rightest possible moment, it is going to only be about ten thousand times better for your story than Bilbo being there 'just cuze.' The gentle reader may not believe me. The gentle reader is invited to experiment with the matter.
Thus, how is it Gollum happens to be where he needs to be? He's following the ring. How is it Faramir conveniently crosses the path of Frodo's party? He's hunting bad guys up by the Black Gate. The meeting of Faramir then drags Frodo down to Osgiliath, so that the "party" can witness the orcs attacking the city, the defense thereof, the set-up for Faramir's conflict with his father (which makes sense for Gandalf and Pippin when they arrive) and the crystal moment between Frodo and the Nazgul.
In other words, the crossover isn't random. The game you play may be a sandbox, but you totally have control over the other elements/NPCs of the game, and you're intervention with an odd character like Faramir can create interesting interplays that build up your campaign. Remember that Faramir kidnaps - forcibly relocates - Frodo and his party. You're totally permitted to do the same to your characters, IF you can roll the necessary dice and IF you have a good reason for doing so.
That is, you're not a sadist or a railroader. You're just relocating them so that there are OTHER conflicts (battle of Osgiliath, appearance of the Nazgul, debate over who has the ring, etc.) for the party to play against. You haven't railroaded them ... you've just changed the scenery.
This is what I meant by having a host of NPCs who are running at the same time (in the same direction of time) as the party, but perhaps out of sight. Character crossovers are interesting - see the chart - whereas periods without crossovers are dull. The story isn't about Elrond, but if it was, it wouldn't be much of a story, except for those few interesting moments where he crosses over with the Fellowship.
You must conceive of character crossovers - alternate NPC narratives - that occur with your party. Find solid, interesting reasons for those crossovers to occur. Conceive of ways in which the crossover provides the party with vital information, changes their possible venue and inspires new and interesting conflicts.
The most common crossover in D&D is the guy at the bar talking about the monster in the nearby ruins. It's one crummy crossover that lasts for about five minutes ... and nothing else interesting happens until the party crosses a monster. I would go further and argue that this is the problem with empty dungeons that you wander through and solve puzzles. Strangers are interesting. Strangers educate and create conflict. Puzzles merely pass time.
On one level I feel I covered the subject, but in retrospect there's probably no real way to "cover the subject" entirely. The pattern of building up narratives that run conjointly with one another, then meet in order to produce a meaningful and entertaining climax is the stuff which has eluded writers since Homer. It is a hard thing to do badly, and badly is mostly what people are capable of doing.
Worse, the process can be a bitch when you've got time to think about the plot line, write, contemplate the characters, rewrite, have a stroke of energy that enables you to add one more element, rewrite some more, rid the tale of all the crap and rewrite seven or eight more times. Doing this sort of thing on the fly, i.e. as the players are changing their mind about what they're doing, is the mindfuck Tolkein never had to deal with.
To get the idea, let's toss up xkcd's brilliant and mind-boggling narrative of Lord of the Rings, stolen but respecting the author's wishes as described on his own blog:
 |
| Chart shows movie character interactions. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical groupings of the lines indicates which characters are together at a given time. |
To master the idea of narrative, you have to have a strong handle on what conflict is; what separates a meaningful conflict from a frivolous conflict; and WHEN to drive a conflict onward and when to allow it to resolve itself.
Many a crappy story has started out with a conflict no one, or very few people, give a damn about. Many serials have died an exhaustive death because no resolution was ever going to occur ... or because when the resolution was finally attempted by the author, it fizzled pathetically and died. Humans, strangely enough, react viscerally to conflict. If it's done right, it hits you in the gut. If it's done half-right, you might as well dump it with tomorrow morning's garbage.
Shelves are full of ignored stories written by people who felt SURE that there was no "right way" to design a conflict. Slightly fewer exist that were written by people SURE that there was a right way, but that they were the only ones who knew it. Finally, there are stories written by people who believe there's a right way, and that the way to learn it is to stop listening to your own judgement and study up on the way its done ... a very small number of stories.
That's because it is far easier to soothe your ego by writing in a bell jar than by measuring yourself against people who are clearly smarter than you. Shakespeare, Dickens, Dafoe, Joyce, Lawrence, Austen, Maugham and Hemingway will make a new writer feel like an inadequate pipsqueak, and people DON'T like that feeling. Impotency is never popular. For myself, I am merely in awe. When asked what to do about making oneself a better story-teller, I have only one piece of advice: pick a writer that is ridiculously better than you. Then read that writer until every sentence is torn apart, and you understand what those sentences do to make the story what it is. Then look at your own sentences, force yourself to see where each one fails to measure up to its purpose and then fix it.
Do this until you bleed out of your eyes.
But I am supposed to be talking about running a D&D game, and I've let myself get hijacked into the writing process.
What D&D benefits from is that you are not telling a story which depends upon your sentence structure. The audience of your story need not worry that you haven't made the words clear the first time; you're free, in a running, to explain again and again if need be, until the full import of a particular element of your story is comprehended. This allows you to spend less time on the mechanics of writing your conflict and more time on the structure of the conflict itself.
Take the interplay of the characters in LOTR. A reasonable writer producing a book would be expected to produce some kind of character for Frodo that defines who he is and what he does. BUT YOU, O DM, do not have to do this in depth. Chances are, a character like Frodo is one of your player characters. Likewise Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli or Legolas. As a DM, you're expected to supply characters like Denethor and Wormtongue, basically people who are mere foils - one dimensional - for the characters to play off against. Even easier, you're providing the orcs, the men and the ordinary elves, who hardly need any character at all. You might stretch yourself by creating a really interesting Gollum or Theoden, or match with a couple of interesting hobbits, but that's really dependent on how clever you are at character or how much time you have during the particular session.
What you really should concentrate on is WHERE these secondary characters, the NPCs, are at any given time in the story. Note how xkcd has extrapolated from the book the placement of Faramir, Galadriel, Bilbo and so on, where in fact we never do precisely learn what they're doing during most of the course of the story. Bilbo is out there, he's doing something, but it isn't important - and yet still we know where he is, don't we? And if Bilbo should suddenly appear next to the party, we need some kind of explanation for why he left where he was, and how he got to where he is right now.
There had better be an important reason for him doing that, hadn't there? Otherwise, he's wasting the player's time, he's wasting your time, and he's contributing nothing to the story.
Of course, there will always be those who cry from the balcony, what about red herrings, hm? Aren't red herrings important?
Preserve me. I shall probably have to write at length as to why red herrings are a terrible curse of the writing industry; why they are invariably employed by the worst writers; how they've all be used to death; and worst, how the name itself has become a justification for their use. For the moment, if you have the time, I would give a little thought to how many times have you either A) enjoyed a storyteller pointlessly deceiving you; or B) felt that the story was made better by spending precious minutes of your life pursuing literary dead ends.
The red herring is an excellent tool for making 19 minutes of television into 24 minutes of television, so as to pad around commercials. That is its greatest achievement in the science of entertainment.
If you have a solid, meaningful, cool reason for Bilbo to suddenly appear from behind the curtain at the rightest possible moment, it is going to only be about ten thousand times better for your story than Bilbo being there 'just cuze.' The gentle reader may not believe me. The gentle reader is invited to experiment with the matter.
Thus, how is it Gollum happens to be where he needs to be? He's following the ring. How is it Faramir conveniently crosses the path of Frodo's party? He's hunting bad guys up by the Black Gate. The meeting of Faramir then drags Frodo down to Osgiliath, so that the "party" can witness the orcs attacking the city, the defense thereof, the set-up for Faramir's conflict with his father (which makes sense for Gandalf and Pippin when they arrive) and the crystal moment between Frodo and the Nazgul.
In other words, the crossover isn't random. The game you play may be a sandbox, but you totally have control over the other elements/NPCs of the game, and you're intervention with an odd character like Faramir can create interesting interplays that build up your campaign. Remember that Faramir kidnaps - forcibly relocates - Frodo and his party. You're totally permitted to do the same to your characters, IF you can roll the necessary dice and IF you have a good reason for doing so.
That is, you're not a sadist or a railroader. You're just relocating them so that there are OTHER conflicts (battle of Osgiliath, appearance of the Nazgul, debate over who has the ring, etc.) for the party to play against. You haven't railroaded them ... you've just changed the scenery.
This is what I meant by having a host of NPCs who are running at the same time (in the same direction of time) as the party, but perhaps out of sight. Character crossovers are interesting - see the chart - whereas periods without crossovers are dull. The story isn't about Elrond, but if it was, it wouldn't be much of a story, except for those few interesting moments where he crosses over with the Fellowship.
You must conceive of character crossovers - alternate NPC narratives - that occur with your party. Find solid, interesting reasons for those crossovers to occur. Conceive of ways in which the crossover provides the party with vital information, changes their possible venue and inspires new and interesting conflicts.
The most common crossover in D&D is the guy at the bar talking about the monster in the nearby ruins. It's one crummy crossover that lasts for about five minutes ... and nothing else interesting happens until the party crosses a monster. I would go further and argue that this is the problem with empty dungeons that you wander through and solve puzzles. Strangers are interesting. Strangers educate and create conflict. Puzzles merely pass time.
Friday, November 30, 2012
New Monsters
It's Friday morning and you have conceived of an intelligent homosexual mushroom, or an 18 foot tall gerbil that shoots rays out of its eyes, or a race of three-eyed gnomes with remarkable skill at throwing pick-axes, and it occurs to you, "I will draw up the stats for that monster!" So you do and you post them on your blog, giving the mushroom, gerbil and gnome their own special names (fuungay, grrbel and triomes), plus hit dice, armor class and lists of special abilities ... and presto, the Great Beastiary of Internet Folly is a little better padded for your efforts.
Posting monsters is a favorite hobby for D&D bloggers; some blogs do nothing but post monster after monster, some of which make someone happy, somewhere. Demographics guarantee that with a large enough pool of potential readers, one potential reader capable of hitting the buttons to make a complimentary comment on your blog shall justify all the monsters the gentle reader has ever posted.
Here, however, is my issue with it.
Monsters are not made useful by hit dice or armor class. They are not made useful by numbers appearing, or frequency, or rating their intelligence or size or any other statistical characteristic. Statistics are garbage. They do not tell me word one about how this monster is useful in my campaign.
Nor do the general biological or simplistic sociological characteristics usually assigned to such monsters. It's nice that your monster is a battlewagon, a clanlike humanoid or an imaginative demon, but here's a notice for you - no one NEEDS those. We have plenty of battlewagons and humanoids and demons ... and in all honesty, if the problem you're attempting to solve is that your genre-savvy players already know the monsters in the book, you're missing the point.
Stop obeying the book.
Your players do not have the right to know that goblins have 4 hit points or that Night Hags have a 50% magic resistance (don't quote me on that, I don't have the book in front of me). They are not entitled to know a bugbear's hit points, a rakshasa's AC or a sphinx's spell list. Those things are NOT rules that you, as DM, are required to follow. If you want the goblins in your world to have 80 hit dice, then the players have to suck that shit up - boo hoo, poor them, they didn't get to have superhuman knowledge in advance. Fuck that they've read the books through and through ... you are not required to play the statistics in the various monster compendiums by ANY law of DMing that I know of.
So if you want to throw your players off balance, and deactivate their genre-savviness, change the numbers and watch them squirm.
Yes, yes, yes, I know, you still want to create new monsters. Let me suggest a better guideline that splat-stats. Consider, if you will, the gelatinous cube.
Here is a genre-savvy monster type. Experienced players will guess a gelatinous cube is about to be in the offing just by the phrase, "the dungeon floor has no dust."
The cube serves a UNIQUE purpose. It's a jelly, but it can be hit by ordinary weapons, it has an extraordinarily low AC, it doesn't cause much damage but it delivers a non-killing and yet highly nasty special attack (paralyzation), it gives a bit of treasure and it is mostly invisible even under light. Thus, I can throw it at a low level party and it probably won't kill that party with damage, but it MIGHT manage a total party kill if everyone blows their saving throw. Cubes have 4 hit dice which are good for experience, and the easy hit means everyone, even the mages, will get to do something. In general, it is a damn good slashing monster perfect for parties without magic weapons and without many hit points.
I can make cubes as big as buildings for high level parties, give them hundreds of hit points, increase their ACs by arguing that 90% of the hits parties make aren't hitting any "vital nodes" and it is STILL a good monster. Logically, a good earthquake will break it into hundreds of cubes, while an ice storm may freeze one part of it and yet the rest may still be dangerous. It has elements of weirdness in it that adjust with flexibility to a multitude of attacks.
What is needed, then, is a monster that doesn't fit some previous niche. It isn't enough to make it bigger or faster or magical or in some way the exact same only now its a spider or a crab or a peacock. A peacock that's a lich is still a freaking lich ... the fact that its also a dead peacock just isn't enough to make it interesting!
The only thing is, most, if all, the niches have been filled. Those sorts of combat vaguaries are the easiest ones to work on, and therefore were the first slots to have monsters plowed into them. What's needed is not just a new combat niche ... but an entirely new ecological niche entirely.
When you sit to create your new monster, what is truly, awesomely needed is a CONTEXT. How is the existence of this monster going to change the sociological characteristics of a world? We build walls to keep out the orcs; we organize woodcutting parties to go out and rid the area of violet fungi or aggressive treants. We string nets over the town to keep out the stirges. How, exactly, does your monster affect the people of your world? How do people interact with it. I'm not talking just a border, with their land and our land ... we have that for hundreds of monsters already in existence. How does YOUR monster change the rules, the precepts or the habits of the other creatures and peoples in your world?
Work on that problem. Cows and chickens and horses may make boring monsters, but the world is radically different because these creatures exist. A good monster - a really good monster - will offer some truly profound change to the worlds of the people reading your blog.
Don't ask me how you'll do that. I haven't invented a new monster in years. I haven't needed one.
Posting monsters is a favorite hobby for D&D bloggers; some blogs do nothing but post monster after monster, some of which make someone happy, somewhere. Demographics guarantee that with a large enough pool of potential readers, one potential reader capable of hitting the buttons to make a complimentary comment on your blog shall justify all the monsters the gentle reader has ever posted.
Here, however, is my issue with it.
Monsters are not made useful by hit dice or armor class. They are not made useful by numbers appearing, or frequency, or rating their intelligence or size or any other statistical characteristic. Statistics are garbage. They do not tell me word one about how this monster is useful in my campaign.
Nor do the general biological or simplistic sociological characteristics usually assigned to such monsters. It's nice that your monster is a battlewagon, a clanlike humanoid or an imaginative demon, but here's a notice for you - no one NEEDS those. We have plenty of battlewagons and humanoids and demons ... and in all honesty, if the problem you're attempting to solve is that your genre-savvy players already know the monsters in the book, you're missing the point.
Stop obeying the book.
Your players do not have the right to know that goblins have 4 hit points or that Night Hags have a 50% magic resistance (don't quote me on that, I don't have the book in front of me). They are not entitled to know a bugbear's hit points, a rakshasa's AC or a sphinx's spell list. Those things are NOT rules that you, as DM, are required to follow. If you want the goblins in your world to have 80 hit dice, then the players have to suck that shit up - boo hoo, poor them, they didn't get to have superhuman knowledge in advance. Fuck that they've read the books through and through ... you are not required to play the statistics in the various monster compendiums by ANY law of DMing that I know of.
So if you want to throw your players off balance, and deactivate their genre-savviness, change the numbers and watch them squirm.
Yes, yes, yes, I know, you still want to create new monsters. Let me suggest a better guideline that splat-stats. Consider, if you will, the gelatinous cube.
Here is a genre-savvy monster type. Experienced players will guess a gelatinous cube is about to be in the offing just by the phrase, "the dungeon floor has no dust."
The cube serves a UNIQUE purpose. It's a jelly, but it can be hit by ordinary weapons, it has an extraordinarily low AC, it doesn't cause much damage but it delivers a non-killing and yet highly nasty special attack (paralyzation), it gives a bit of treasure and it is mostly invisible even under light. Thus, I can throw it at a low level party and it probably won't kill that party with damage, but it MIGHT manage a total party kill if everyone blows their saving throw. Cubes have 4 hit dice which are good for experience, and the easy hit means everyone, even the mages, will get to do something. In general, it is a damn good slashing monster perfect for parties without magic weapons and without many hit points.
I can make cubes as big as buildings for high level parties, give them hundreds of hit points, increase their ACs by arguing that 90% of the hits parties make aren't hitting any "vital nodes" and it is STILL a good monster. Logically, a good earthquake will break it into hundreds of cubes, while an ice storm may freeze one part of it and yet the rest may still be dangerous. It has elements of weirdness in it that adjust with flexibility to a multitude of attacks.
What is needed, then, is a monster that doesn't fit some previous niche. It isn't enough to make it bigger or faster or magical or in some way the exact same only now its a spider or a crab or a peacock. A peacock that's a lich is still a freaking lich ... the fact that its also a dead peacock just isn't enough to make it interesting!
The only thing is, most, if all, the niches have been filled. Those sorts of combat vaguaries are the easiest ones to work on, and therefore were the first slots to have monsters plowed into them. What's needed is not just a new combat niche ... but an entirely new ecological niche entirely.
When you sit to create your new monster, what is truly, awesomely needed is a CONTEXT. How is the existence of this monster going to change the sociological characteristics of a world? We build walls to keep out the orcs; we organize woodcutting parties to go out and rid the area of violet fungi or aggressive treants. We string nets over the town to keep out the stirges. How, exactly, does your monster affect the people of your world? How do people interact with it. I'm not talking just a border, with their land and our land ... we have that for hundreds of monsters already in existence. How does YOUR monster change the rules, the precepts or the habits of the other creatures and peoples in your world?
Work on that problem. Cows and chickens and horses may make boring monsters, but the world is radically different because these creatures exist. A good monster - a really good monster - will offer some truly profound change to the worlds of the people reading your blog.
Don't ask me how you'll do that. I haven't invented a new monster in years. I haven't needed one.
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Once More Egalitarianism Takes The Stage
One of the things about spending all your time writing, and NOT working on D&D, and NOT playing D&D half as much as you were, because you've recently put a campaign on hiatus and made time for yourself to do other things, is that you're NOT hitting new problems having to do with D&D and therefore you have less to write about on your D&D blog.
Nevertheless, some things are more important than posting. I mean, I'm not the sort to suddenly decide to close this blog, since I love writing posts, I love watching the numbers jump right after I toss another bit of phlegm out there and I enjoy the scarce comments I receive from people who generally seem to like me. It's only that, in times like this, when I think to myself, "Aha, write a post!" I find myself contemplating the nature of man, or why politicians are not burned in effigy more often for supporting crap companies like Hostess, or why women in general need more backbone, and why they don't stop behaving in the sort of flimsy way their mothers did.
And these things, sadly, don't always express themselves well in D&D.
For example, last week I wrote about egalitarianism and history, which received good comments but one notable one in which the fellow, with good intentions, tried to say that this particular philosophy of egalitarianism only applied to legal things, and was therefore not a philosophy by which people tried to live their lives. In other words, yes we should have laws for those things, saying people are equal, etc., so no one is left behind, but by god we shouldn't believe in that shit ... I mean really! There is a difference between what lawyers say and the truth.
I thought and thought about writing a post in response to that, but it was hard to justify a wild diatribe against the sort of liberal bullshit where we pay lip service to an ideal we can't possibly believe in, while actually pretending that this is a blog about D&D. It is at this point that a day, and then another day, and finally another day goes by and I'm writing nothing of any particular importance except to throw up funny pictures of women in really hot smocks immolating hapless bastards from the inside with fire wands.
I think my point from the previous post about egalitarianism was to point out that pre-Locke, and all that shit about human beings being, you know, human and such, and owing it to one another not to be heartless bastards, was the beginning of what we would think of as the beginning of thinking that human rights are important, as opposed to some previous time in history when generally people did not. This is a terribly hard thing to get one's head around, unless one actually believes that human rights are a load of codswallop - but really, how many multi-millionaires are reading this blog besides that guy at the Alexandrian? (I know he is, I can feel his hot breath on my neck).
I was extrapolating from this change in intellectually-driven human inter-relations to suggest that in a D&D world, people wouldn't feel very kind and sweet and inclined to help women being beat up and raped randomly on the street - thank you Butch for your support. From this extrapolation, I suppose I had some silly point to make about modern humans pretending to live in such an age feeling free enough to eschew the teachings of Rousseau and Voltaire - which, let's admit, the majority of you haven't read anyway and don't know from Dr. Who, or where the fuck all this consideration for your fellow man propaganda came from - and thus go hog-wild butchering and slaughtering the weak-kneed whoresons of their mother's loins in Conan-like glee. In other words, to enjoy the flagrant streams of shameful fantasy where it comes to things that don't exist anyway being obliterated from existence.
I would say I rather failed at that, but then I sort of knew I was going to fail, since I'd written a thousand words about Juvenal and had gotten caught in a trap I wasn't going to get out of without another seven thousand words and let's face it, I had other kinds of writing to do plus the problem of earning daily bread.
So ... here we are. Human beings. Decent now, not so decent then. That was the point. And yet, this being the impetus of this particular prose, I have to express some doubt about how decent human beings actually are.
See, in watching one of those things where a British TV Star of small fame in North America offers an educated opinion about something, I found myself faced with the bit of truth that poor David Mitchell isn't quite grasping in his rant about the importance of human beings at least having the tiniest concept of preserving their own lives. That being, humans are just gawd-awful stupid about such things. I'm going to assume you can stretch your will to be able to listen to an intelligent man's desperate pleading with the human race for three minutes flat - the length of the video - so that you will understand when I say that there have been vast numbers of human beings completely capable of letting themselves die after discovering that the roof is on fire. This is something that is usually lost on those who, being intelligent, fundamentally believe that by speaking in a given language, and putting words clearly together in a manner which one would normally assume would allow others to understand that language, they will be understood. It just isn't so. Language is particularly difficult to grasp, particularly by the willfully stupid - and for that, read those who have gotten this far in the paragraph without hitting the link beginning it.
Half the reason why certain D&D players must make statements like, "Whatever is fun for you and yours in the right way" is the level of exhaustion they have felt whenever they have tried to explain, even for three minutes flat, that there is another, better way to play the game, drink to the point of inebriation, preserve the planet, what have you. It isn't that they truly feel forgiving of the other crap games people play, it is only that they've recognized that people are fucking stupid, and that they won't get it no matter how many times the words are spoken in the proper order for three year olds to understand, and anyway it doesn't matter, for even though we don't believe the words when we say them, its important that the words are out there to express the totally insincere egalitarianism that everyone is equal, even if we know they're not.
So poor David Mitchell and the race he's part of that's going to starve when the crops dry out, and poor us for trying to improve a game where the egalitarian bullshit that supports everyone being able to play as equals is more important that everyone be able to play, you know, well.
You know what, fuck chess books. Fuck their exercises and suggestions and their efforts to help you win the games you play, becuase whatever is fun for you is the right way to play chess. Fuck just absolutely everyone who ever tries to do anything better, because you know what, better just fucking sucks, it just makes me feel like I'm not as good as you are.
And that makes me hate you, you fucking pretentious bastard.
Nevertheless, some things are more important than posting. I mean, I'm not the sort to suddenly decide to close this blog, since I love writing posts, I love watching the numbers jump right after I toss another bit of phlegm out there and I enjoy the scarce comments I receive from people who generally seem to like me. It's only that, in times like this, when I think to myself, "Aha, write a post!" I find myself contemplating the nature of man, or why politicians are not burned in effigy more often for supporting crap companies like Hostess, or why women in general need more backbone, and why they don't stop behaving in the sort of flimsy way their mothers did.
And these things, sadly, don't always express themselves well in D&D.
For example, last week I wrote about egalitarianism and history, which received good comments but one notable one in which the fellow, with good intentions, tried to say that this particular philosophy of egalitarianism only applied to legal things, and was therefore not a philosophy by which people tried to live their lives. In other words, yes we should have laws for those things, saying people are equal, etc., so no one is left behind, but by god we shouldn't believe in that shit ... I mean really! There is a difference between what lawyers say and the truth.
I thought and thought about writing a post in response to that, but it was hard to justify a wild diatribe against the sort of liberal bullshit where we pay lip service to an ideal we can't possibly believe in, while actually pretending that this is a blog about D&D. It is at this point that a day, and then another day, and finally another day goes by and I'm writing nothing of any particular importance except to throw up funny pictures of women in really hot smocks immolating hapless bastards from the inside with fire wands.
I think my point from the previous post about egalitarianism was to point out that pre-Locke, and all that shit about human beings being, you know, human and such, and owing it to one another not to be heartless bastards, was the beginning of what we would think of as the beginning of thinking that human rights are important, as opposed to some previous time in history when generally people did not. This is a terribly hard thing to get one's head around, unless one actually believes that human rights are a load of codswallop - but really, how many multi-millionaires are reading this blog besides that guy at the Alexandrian? (I know he is, I can feel his hot breath on my neck).
I was extrapolating from this change in intellectually-driven human inter-relations to suggest that in a D&D world, people wouldn't feel very kind and sweet and inclined to help women being beat up and raped randomly on the street - thank you Butch for your support. From this extrapolation, I suppose I had some silly point to make about modern humans pretending to live in such an age feeling free enough to eschew the teachings of Rousseau and Voltaire - which, let's admit, the majority of you haven't read anyway and don't know from Dr. Who, or where the fuck all this consideration for your fellow man propaganda came from - and thus go hog-wild butchering and slaughtering the weak-kneed whoresons of their mother's loins in Conan-like glee. In other words, to enjoy the flagrant streams of shameful fantasy where it comes to things that don't exist anyway being obliterated from existence.
I would say I rather failed at that, but then I sort of knew I was going to fail, since I'd written a thousand words about Juvenal and had gotten caught in a trap I wasn't going to get out of without another seven thousand words and let's face it, I had other kinds of writing to do plus the problem of earning daily bread.
So ... here we are. Human beings. Decent now, not so decent then. That was the point. And yet, this being the impetus of this particular prose, I have to express some doubt about how decent human beings actually are.
See, in watching one of those things where a British TV Star of small fame in North America offers an educated opinion about something, I found myself faced with the bit of truth that poor David Mitchell isn't quite grasping in his rant about the importance of human beings at least having the tiniest concept of preserving their own lives. That being, humans are just gawd-awful stupid about such things. I'm going to assume you can stretch your will to be able to listen to an intelligent man's desperate pleading with the human race for three minutes flat - the length of the video - so that you will understand when I say that there have been vast numbers of human beings completely capable of letting themselves die after discovering that the roof is on fire. This is something that is usually lost on those who, being intelligent, fundamentally believe that by speaking in a given language, and putting words clearly together in a manner which one would normally assume would allow others to understand that language, they will be understood. It just isn't so. Language is particularly difficult to grasp, particularly by the willfully stupid - and for that, read those who have gotten this far in the paragraph without hitting the link beginning it.
Half the reason why certain D&D players must make statements like, "Whatever is fun for you and yours in the right way" is the level of exhaustion they have felt whenever they have tried to explain, even for three minutes flat, that there is another, better way to play the game, drink to the point of inebriation, preserve the planet, what have you. It isn't that they truly feel forgiving of the other crap games people play, it is only that they've recognized that people are fucking stupid, and that they won't get it no matter how many times the words are spoken in the proper order for three year olds to understand, and anyway it doesn't matter, for even though we don't believe the words when we say them, its important that the words are out there to express the totally insincere egalitarianism that everyone is equal, even if we know they're not.
So poor David Mitchell and the race he's part of that's going to starve when the crops dry out, and poor us for trying to improve a game where the egalitarian bullshit that supports everyone being able to play as equals is more important that everyone be able to play, you know, well.
You know what, fuck chess books. Fuck their exercises and suggestions and their efforts to help you win the games you play, becuase whatever is fun for you is the right way to play chess. Fuck just absolutely everyone who ever tries to do anything better, because you know what, better just fucking sucks, it just makes me feel like I'm not as good as you are.
And that makes me hate you, you fucking pretentious bastard.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Sorry, No Post Today
It would be lovely if I could squeeze out a post about the unique and varied uses of wands, rods and staves ... but OGLAF has undoubtedly beat me there, as it has beat everyone on the damn planet.
I could probably post about having just discovered OGLAF last night, but of course I can't do that because, well, we have to save face where it comes to these things. It's important to present oneself as knowing everything, of being on top of literally every post in the whole internet, because no one, absolutely no one, could possibly have only discovered this brilliant site just last night.
It's a shame I can't come up with a post. Oh well. It's still a really good picture.
Monday, November 26, 2012
The Argument That We Haven't Changed
This post is in part a progression from last week's post about bad journalism, addressing the question, are we getting dumber?
I don't propose to answer the question. I would rather discuss why we ask questions like this in the first place.
My personal feeling is that it has everything to do with the bane of thinking in our age, egalitarianism, the ultimate round hole into which all square shapes must be pounded.
According to Wikipedia, "Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality among living entities. egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status."
Which is summed up perfectly by Helen and Dash in the Incredibles:
"--Everyone's special, Dash. --Which is another way of saying no one is."
No conscious, educated person believes in such nonsense ... but the wherewithal of human beings to WANT to believe in such nonsense, despite the evidence of their eyes, a lifetime of study, a functioning brain and their own failure to live by such principles can be breathtaking. Cognitive dissonance is more powerful than the greatest forces of nature - of that, too, we have enormous proof.
So various questions are asked again and again: are we dumber; are we freer; do people resent authority more than they used to; and so on. The reason for this is that a significant subset of humanity - and therefore journalists - have accepted the egalitarian myth, and that has challenged them to extend 'equality' into the past.
How many times have you heard it? "Nothing ever changes." "Those people long ago, they were just like us." "Isn't it funny how things come and go, but people just stay the same?"
As someone who came from a classical education, I can give you the quintessential example. In the 1st century AD there was a writer we've come to know as Juvenal. His actual name was Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis. Juvenal wrote some quite marvelous Roman humor, of which 16 pieces have survived - these are called the 'Satires' ... and if you want evidence that "we've stayed the same," Juvenal is your resource.
Juvenal writes a diatribe about how his friend shoudn't get married; about everything that's wrong with living in a big city like Rome; why women are the worst; the inanities of soldiers; and so on and so forth. The satires are chock full of immediately recognizeable passages, which apply as much today as they did then. As Juvenal says to a friend,
"Are you, in this day and age, ready for an agreement,
A contract, the wedding vows, having your hair done
By a master-barber, your finger already wearing the pledge?
Postumus, you were sane once. Are you really taking a wife?
Which Tisiphone is it, with her snakes, driving you mad?
You surely don’t have to endure it, with so much rope about,
Those vertiginous windows open, the Aemilian bridge at hand?"
In short, wouldn't you rather kill yourself rather than be married?
The references are different; the slang derives from other popular sources, but the sentiment is the same as any 20 something says to his pal when he hears he's going to tie the knot. This was a classic example given to me by my own professors, to "prove" that we were really the same as the Romans, that they viewed the world not so differently from us. My classics professors were as dissonant as anyone. For you see, the gentle reader must realize I'm cherry-picking the above lines. The very next in the satire run thusly:
"If none of these multiple exits please you, wouldn’t a boyfriend
Suit you better, one who would share your bed, a boyfriend
Who wouldn’t quarrel all night; wouldn’t demand from you
As he lies there, little gifts; and wouldn’t complain that your
Body was idle, that you weren’t breathing hard, as ordered."
That's a little harder to fit into the modern mindset, isn't it? I mean, certainly there are gay men about ... but how often does the modern man suggest that his friend who is about to marry take it up with a boy instead?
If you've got the time, read the whole satire ... and as you read, ask yourself seriously if you're not just latching onto the passages that sound like us because those are the things you recognize, and dismissing the things you don't. When you come to the end, see if you can remember those odd little parts, like where Juvenal writes, "When sinuous Bathyllus dances his pantomime Leda, Tucia loses control of her bladder ..." rather than the things that are warm and friend and familiar.
Now I can tell you, there's a platoon of classics profs ready to explain to you chapter and verse how Tucia's bladder really represents some ordinary thing we take for granted every day ... but don't take them too seriously. I've known quite a number of classic profs, and I can tell you there is a rare profession that pays quite so much for going right up your own asshole every day. It's a gift, it's a skill, and for anyone who doesn't mind living in a community small and smelly, it's a good gig if you can get it. But down on the ground, no matter what the bladder symbolizes, we today are not connecting that particular organ with the act of lovemaking. We're connecting different organs, and for entirely different reasons.
See, my point is this. The egalitarian would like you to believe that if we dropped you into the heart of Rome, if we gave you a Matrix-like primer on Roman cultural references, and of course fluent use of the dialect, you'd get on in Rome just like you own home town - because the people would be the same, and what they wanted out of life would be the same.
And this is one big steaming pile of bullshit.
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, O gentle reader, but you are not ready to live in Rome. Hell, most of you are not ready to live in Mississippi in the modern era, and that's a world that gets at least some of the cultural references you get. You are not ready to be dismissive about the plight of the average slave; you are not ready to view political and military oppression as a proper and ordinary thing; you are not ready to see women as chattel and children as little creatures that don't matter until they reach a certain age, at which the culture no longer expects them to randomly die.
This is why so much of classics scholarship - and historical scholarship in general - spends so much time and energy rewriting ancient facts with brand new modern interpretations, despite there being little or no evidence to support such ideas. If you want an example, toddle yourself down to the nearest large university library, hop up to the section where they keep the books on classical history and have a look at how many of them have been written about women in the classical world.
Chances are, you will find a whole shelf, even two or three shelves, full of book after book with titles like "Women in the Roman Era" ... most of them written by women classics professors feeling the need to quantify their interest in an era that cared little or nothing for women.
You see - and this is the big joke - the total amount of actual hard material we have on women prior to 500 A.D. is bupkiss. We have some nice pictures; we have some nice passing references, like Juvenal's satires, mostly filled with negative things about women; we have some tiny passages and bits and pieces from Livy and Plutarch, along with graffiti carefully copied down from hundreds of archeological sites. We have the ever present poet Sappho, whom we're not really certain was a woman. All in all, it's still bupkiss. And yet book after book is written, on the same material, trying desperately to squeeze out some idea that women mattered, at least a little bit, despite the fact that we have quite a lot more material on classical men who apparently didn't think so.
When someone in a D&D blog postulates that sexism or child abuse or what have you did not take place in the past to the degree that some writers would have you believe, this is the sort of practice they're indulging in. We shouldn't blame them; this is a fantasy world and no one really wants to live in the actual past, do they? The actual past is very definitely NOT the present. Human beings have changed, a lot more than we give credit for; we're a much more liberal society. We're a much more tolerant society. We're a lot more cognizant ... when we can get over our own bullshit long enough to be that.
I suppose, all in all, I haven't made a very convincing argument. I feel like I've been writing a long time, though, and I suppose I'm either preaching to the choir or to those who won't be converted anyway. I also feel like I've gotten this subject off my back, and perhaps now I can go back to something more D&D like.
I don't propose to answer the question. I would rather discuss why we ask questions like this in the first place.
My personal feeling is that it has everything to do with the bane of thinking in our age, egalitarianism, the ultimate round hole into which all square shapes must be pounded.
According to Wikipedia, "Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality among living entities. egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status."
Which is summed up perfectly by Helen and Dash in the Incredibles:
"--Everyone's special, Dash. --Which is another way of saying no one is."
No conscious, educated person believes in such nonsense ... but the wherewithal of human beings to WANT to believe in such nonsense, despite the evidence of their eyes, a lifetime of study, a functioning brain and their own failure to live by such principles can be breathtaking. Cognitive dissonance is more powerful than the greatest forces of nature - of that, too, we have enormous proof.
So various questions are asked again and again: are we dumber; are we freer; do people resent authority more than they used to; and so on. The reason for this is that a significant subset of humanity - and therefore journalists - have accepted the egalitarian myth, and that has challenged them to extend 'equality' into the past.
How many times have you heard it? "Nothing ever changes." "Those people long ago, they were just like us." "Isn't it funny how things come and go, but people just stay the same?"
As someone who came from a classical education, I can give you the quintessential example. In the 1st century AD there was a writer we've come to know as Juvenal. His actual name was Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis. Juvenal wrote some quite marvelous Roman humor, of which 16 pieces have survived - these are called the 'Satires' ... and if you want evidence that "we've stayed the same," Juvenal is your resource.
Juvenal writes a diatribe about how his friend shoudn't get married; about everything that's wrong with living in a big city like Rome; why women are the worst; the inanities of soldiers; and so on and so forth. The satires are chock full of immediately recognizeable passages, which apply as much today as they did then. As Juvenal says to a friend,
"Are you, in this day and age, ready for an agreement,
A contract, the wedding vows, having your hair done
By a master-barber, your finger already wearing the pledge?
Postumus, you were sane once. Are you really taking a wife?
Which Tisiphone is it, with her snakes, driving you mad?
You surely don’t have to endure it, with so much rope about,
Those vertiginous windows open, the Aemilian bridge at hand?"
In short, wouldn't you rather kill yourself rather than be married?
The references are different; the slang derives from other popular sources, but the sentiment is the same as any 20 something says to his pal when he hears he's going to tie the knot. This was a classic example given to me by my own professors, to "prove" that we were really the same as the Romans, that they viewed the world not so differently from us. My classics professors were as dissonant as anyone. For you see, the gentle reader must realize I'm cherry-picking the above lines. The very next in the satire run thusly:
"If none of these multiple exits please you, wouldn’t a boyfriend
Suit you better, one who would share your bed, a boyfriend
Who wouldn’t quarrel all night; wouldn’t demand from you
As he lies there, little gifts; and wouldn’t complain that your
Body was idle, that you weren’t breathing hard, as ordered."
That's a little harder to fit into the modern mindset, isn't it? I mean, certainly there are gay men about ... but how often does the modern man suggest that his friend who is about to marry take it up with a boy instead?
If you've got the time, read the whole satire ... and as you read, ask yourself seriously if you're not just latching onto the passages that sound like us because those are the things you recognize, and dismissing the things you don't. When you come to the end, see if you can remember those odd little parts, like where Juvenal writes, "When sinuous Bathyllus dances his pantomime Leda, Tucia loses control of her bladder ..." rather than the things that are warm and friend and familiar.
Now I can tell you, there's a platoon of classics profs ready to explain to you chapter and verse how Tucia's bladder really represents some ordinary thing we take for granted every day ... but don't take them too seriously. I've known quite a number of classic profs, and I can tell you there is a rare profession that pays quite so much for going right up your own asshole every day. It's a gift, it's a skill, and for anyone who doesn't mind living in a community small and smelly, it's a good gig if you can get it. But down on the ground, no matter what the bladder symbolizes, we today are not connecting that particular organ with the act of lovemaking. We're connecting different organs, and for entirely different reasons.
See, my point is this. The egalitarian would like you to believe that if we dropped you into the heart of Rome, if we gave you a Matrix-like primer on Roman cultural references, and of course fluent use of the dialect, you'd get on in Rome just like you own home town - because the people would be the same, and what they wanted out of life would be the same.
And this is one big steaming pile of bullshit.
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, O gentle reader, but you are not ready to live in Rome. Hell, most of you are not ready to live in Mississippi in the modern era, and that's a world that gets at least some of the cultural references you get. You are not ready to be dismissive about the plight of the average slave; you are not ready to view political and military oppression as a proper and ordinary thing; you are not ready to see women as chattel and children as little creatures that don't matter until they reach a certain age, at which the culture no longer expects them to randomly die.
This is why so much of classics scholarship - and historical scholarship in general - spends so much time and energy rewriting ancient facts with brand new modern interpretations, despite there being little or no evidence to support such ideas. If you want an example, toddle yourself down to the nearest large university library, hop up to the section where they keep the books on classical history and have a look at how many of them have been written about women in the classical world.
Chances are, you will find a whole shelf, even two or three shelves, full of book after book with titles like "Women in the Roman Era" ... most of them written by women classics professors feeling the need to quantify their interest in an era that cared little or nothing for women.
You see - and this is the big joke - the total amount of actual hard material we have on women prior to 500 A.D. is bupkiss. We have some nice pictures; we have some nice passing references, like Juvenal's satires, mostly filled with negative things about women; we have some tiny passages and bits and pieces from Livy and Plutarch, along with graffiti carefully copied down from hundreds of archeological sites. We have the ever present poet Sappho, whom we're not really certain was a woman. All in all, it's still bupkiss. And yet book after book is written, on the same material, trying desperately to squeeze out some idea that women mattered, at least a little bit, despite the fact that we have quite a lot more material on classical men who apparently didn't think so.
When someone in a D&D blog postulates that sexism or child abuse or what have you did not take place in the past to the degree that some writers would have you believe, this is the sort of practice they're indulging in. We shouldn't blame them; this is a fantasy world and no one really wants to live in the actual past, do they? The actual past is very definitely NOT the present. Human beings have changed, a lot more than we give credit for; we're a much more liberal society. We're a much more tolerant society. We're a lot more cognizant ... when we can get over our own bullshit long enough to be that.
I suppose, all in all, I haven't made a very convincing argument. I feel like I've been writing a long time, though, and I suppose I'm either preaching to the choir or to those who won't be converted anyway. I also feel like I've gotten this subject off my back, and perhaps now I can go back to something more D&D like.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Mr. Sullivan's Cherry Tree
Yesterday, off-blog, I was asked with the best of intentions as to whether or not people weren't generally stupider today than they used to be. This came out of a rather bloodless article from Andrew Sullivan (what else is new) which fails to produce any conclusion or indeed reason for being, except that apparently old Andy, when he hasn't anything to say, goofs together a bunch of quotes as though people out there are "arguing," "considering," "summarizing" or "pushing back" deep inside Andy's head.
If there is a depth that can be found sufficient to do more than wet the ankles.
I am not a fan of Mr. Sullivan. My primary experience with him is his occasional appearances on Bill Maher's show, in which he's one of the "good guys" - because he's basically a liberal - but in which he manages to say absolute shit without beginning to comprehend that he's just said it. He's a perfect example of the worst kind of liberal - heart in the right place, but lacking the least sense of practicality, reality or qualification. His "fame" results from that peculiar recent phenomenon of a blogger who has grown popular from his ability to research and link, while simultaneously offending only the tiniest demographic of the population: people who can read and who actually know anything.
Obviously, people who can't read aren't offended by him. They just don't know he exists.
According to Andy's talking puppets, we somehow A) know the memory of a resident of Athens 3,000 years ago; B) are able to use the uselessness of I.Q. tests in reference to Siberian hunter-gatherers has allows us to draw a historical conclusion about all human beings from non-modern persons; C) miss the fact that Stephen Hawking would have died nearly at birth 200,000 years ago, along with the fact that we have so few examples of human genes from 200,000 years ago that it would not be expected to find a comparative 1 in a million persons with extraordinary intelligence; and D) know that extreme selection is a thing of the past because we can guess everything about human development a million years from now - i.e., that now that we've established the modern world, human beings will never face any crisis that will need extreme selection.
Now, I'm sure that these four quoted people are quite brilliant, and that reading their whole articles does indicate that they don't believe any of the shit I just said in the previous paragraph - although Mr. Crabtree ought to read something about Athens in 1,000 B.C., since the whole Mediterranean basin was in an extreme dark age following the decimation of the Minoan and Mycenean cultures, a situation that didn't change for the next two and a half centuries. So, no bright, intellectually alive Greeks around at the time he quotes. But I'm quibbling.
What our friend Andy has done is carefully cherry-picked the articles to make ... well, not a point to be sure, but supposedly the "balanced" opinion of intellectuals today. It's what people do when they don't end the data they've gathered with their own opinion ... which is not something ANY supposedly educated person would have done prior to about forty years ago.
This habit of the University Bubble, to present arguments and 'facts' without examination, so long as they are notated, is the first reason to think that intelligence is dead. It doesn't matter what YOU think, or what YOU believe ... so long as you quote what others have squatted out in order to achieve their tenures, you get to be a 'scholar' too.
Funny that Descartes, Abelard, Erasmus, Luther, Francis Assisi and so on, the alive intellectuals of their day, don't spend all their time quoting and notating their sources. For some incomprehensible reason, they simply wrote under the assumption that if you were bright enough and open minded enough to actually read the words, you could make up your own mind if they were true.
This is SO unlike the modern age, where you only know it's true if it has the right stamp of approval following the words - a university degree, a cultural notation, some kind of evidence that the speaker is rich or powerful or at the very least had a job once where he or she sat next to the rich and powerful.
Fuck the words. The words they say don't matter. Their resume is all that matters, so that once they begin to write total shit on the page, like our friend Andy does with adroit fluidity, it doesn't matter because, for shit sakes, the man has been on television sitting right next to Noam Chomsky.
That proves he must be right, doesn't it?
I ask you - are we getting dumber ... or is it just that reading things with the intention of piecing out the truth ourselves is too much work? Perhaps it's so much simpler to look at the brand and feel the joy of having it stamped on our ass.
If there is a depth that can be found sufficient to do more than wet the ankles.
I am not a fan of Mr. Sullivan. My primary experience with him is his occasional appearances on Bill Maher's show, in which he's one of the "good guys" - because he's basically a liberal - but in which he manages to say absolute shit without beginning to comprehend that he's just said it. He's a perfect example of the worst kind of liberal - heart in the right place, but lacking the least sense of practicality, reality or qualification. His "fame" results from that peculiar recent phenomenon of a blogger who has grown popular from his ability to research and link, while simultaneously offending only the tiniest demographic of the population: people who can read and who actually know anything.
Obviously, people who can't read aren't offended by him. They just don't know he exists.
According to Andy's talking puppets, we somehow A) know the memory of a resident of Athens 3,000 years ago; B) are able to use the uselessness of I.Q. tests in reference to Siberian hunter-gatherers has allows us to draw a historical conclusion about all human beings from non-modern persons; C) miss the fact that Stephen Hawking would have died nearly at birth 200,000 years ago, along with the fact that we have so few examples of human genes from 200,000 years ago that it would not be expected to find a comparative 1 in a million persons with extraordinary intelligence; and D) know that extreme selection is a thing of the past because we can guess everything about human development a million years from now - i.e., that now that we've established the modern world, human beings will never face any crisis that will need extreme selection.
Now, I'm sure that these four quoted people are quite brilliant, and that reading their whole articles does indicate that they don't believe any of the shit I just said in the previous paragraph - although Mr. Crabtree ought to read something about Athens in 1,000 B.C., since the whole Mediterranean basin was in an extreme dark age following the decimation of the Minoan and Mycenean cultures, a situation that didn't change for the next two and a half centuries. So, no bright, intellectually alive Greeks around at the time he quotes. But I'm quibbling.
What our friend Andy has done is carefully cherry-picked the articles to make ... well, not a point to be sure, but supposedly the "balanced" opinion of intellectuals today. It's what people do when they don't end the data they've gathered with their own opinion ... which is not something ANY supposedly educated person would have done prior to about forty years ago.
This habit of the University Bubble, to present arguments and 'facts' without examination, so long as they are notated, is the first reason to think that intelligence is dead. It doesn't matter what YOU think, or what YOU believe ... so long as you quote what others have squatted out in order to achieve their tenures, you get to be a 'scholar' too.
Funny that Descartes, Abelard, Erasmus, Luther, Francis Assisi and so on, the alive intellectuals of their day, don't spend all their time quoting and notating their sources. For some incomprehensible reason, they simply wrote under the assumption that if you were bright enough and open minded enough to actually read the words, you could make up your own mind if they were true.
This is SO unlike the modern age, where you only know it's true if it has the right stamp of approval following the words - a university degree, a cultural notation, some kind of evidence that the speaker is rich or powerful or at the very least had a job once where he or she sat next to the rich and powerful.
Fuck the words. The words they say don't matter. Their resume is all that matters, so that once they begin to write total shit on the page, like our friend Andy does with adroit fluidity, it doesn't matter because, for shit sakes, the man has been on television sitting right next to Noam Chomsky.
That proves he must be right, doesn't it?
I ask you - are we getting dumber ... or is it just that reading things with the intention of piecing out the truth ourselves is too much work? Perhaps it's so much simpler to look at the brand and feel the joy of having it stamped on our ass.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
The Shalar Maneuver
For ages I've had a player in my world whose been running a monk, who should manage the feat of reaching 8th level this winter - which is a considerable accomplishment, given what a miser I am about treasure in my world. Anyway, the monk's name is Shalar ... and the title of this post is in reference to what my offline party says is Shalar's particular way of attacking opponents.
Because monks move faster than everyone - and because the player of Shalar really likes combat - for the longest time, any up front battle began with Shalar zipping way out in front of the party and attacking the enemy two or three rounds ahead of everyone else.
The Shalar Manuever would usually get the monk in deep trouble, which the party would seem to arrive in the nick of time to bail him out of ... so consistently that four or five times, the difference in life or death for the monk was a matter of one round or one hit point.
Now, the monk has stopped doing that. He'd playing it safe now, probably because he's getting two attacks every three rounds and he wants to live.
Having watched a documentary about Jesse James today, however, and his time in Bloody Bill Anderson's civil war militia, I realize I've done the poor monk a disservice all these years.
It was described that Anderson would regularly attack forces three times as large as his - with the acknowledgement that Anderson never had more than 80 men under him. Still, defenders would break and run, despite Anderson having plunged into the heart of them. Again and again Anderson pulled the Shalar Maneuver and got away clean.
I began to consider how the morale of defenders ought to come into play at the sight of combat screaming attackers coming fearlessly at them at a high rate of speed - monks and horses and the like. At present, I have no morale rules for an army breaking before a blow has been struck.
It seems to me the first consideration would be how many defenders there are to how many attackers. Following that, what is the position of defenders compared to attackers - are the defenders well-installed, behind walls and fortifications and facing the attackers from above? Finally, in what state of mind are the defenders ... sleeping, setting down to tea, marching along a road, arranged to ambush the party? Surely, their preparedness must apply.
I had considered advancing a bunch of rules to cover such things, but I think I'd rather try playing this stuff on the fly for a bit; doing some thinking about it. Try encouraging some of the party members to make a bluff of rushing at some exposed enemy, rolling morale without any modifiers, and seeing what pans out.
Perhaps the Shalar Maneuver was always the right thing to do.
Because monks move faster than everyone - and because the player of Shalar really likes combat - for the longest time, any up front battle began with Shalar zipping way out in front of the party and attacking the enemy two or three rounds ahead of everyone else.
The Shalar Manuever would usually get the monk in deep trouble, which the party would seem to arrive in the nick of time to bail him out of ... so consistently that four or five times, the difference in life or death for the monk was a matter of one round or one hit point.
Now, the monk has stopped doing that. He'd playing it safe now, probably because he's getting two attacks every three rounds and he wants to live.
Having watched a documentary about Jesse James today, however, and his time in Bloody Bill Anderson's civil war militia, I realize I've done the poor monk a disservice all these years.
It was described that Anderson would regularly attack forces three times as large as his - with the acknowledgement that Anderson never had more than 80 men under him. Still, defenders would break and run, despite Anderson having plunged into the heart of them. Again and again Anderson pulled the Shalar Maneuver and got away clean.
I began to consider how the morale of defenders ought to come into play at the sight of combat screaming attackers coming fearlessly at them at a high rate of speed - monks and horses and the like. At present, I have no morale rules for an army breaking before a blow has been struck.
It seems to me the first consideration would be how many defenders there are to how many attackers. Following that, what is the position of defenders compared to attackers - are the defenders well-installed, behind walls and fortifications and facing the attackers from above? Finally, in what state of mind are the defenders ... sleeping, setting down to tea, marching along a road, arranged to ambush the party? Surely, their preparedness must apply.
I had considered advancing a bunch of rules to cover such things, but I think I'd rather try playing this stuff on the fly for a bit; doing some thinking about it. Try encouraging some of the party members to make a bluff of rushing at some exposed enemy, rolling morale without any modifiers, and seeing what pans out.
Perhaps the Shalar Maneuver was always the right thing to do.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Flight
The history of human flight begins more than a million years ago when it was discovered - by accident, naturally - that by flexing the knee in a similar-to-walking manner, an individual could redistribute their center of gravity over a distinct lack of land - known to us as a 'drop' - that was, by happenstance, conveniently nearby. The result was not encouraging, and so further developments in flight were delayed by some years.
With the discovery of the wheel and the domestication of animals, some humans would learn – through incidental observation – that a greater arc of travel could be created with added speed prior to actually moving past the ‘flight horizon’ of the landscape. It was conceived that by flattening out this arc, perhaps with even greater speed, flight could somehow be maintained ... but alas, greater speed proved elusive.
Many would-be aeronauticists, who simply tried hurling themselves from the ground into the air, were driven to despair. Indeed, all attempts to fly by pure muscle power were frustrated by the apparent inability to separate oneself from the earth. This led humans to construct platforms over the earth's surface - but sadly, these platforms only produced the same drop that had previously existed. Nothing was meaningfully gained by these ventures.
Eventually, the mysterious force that kept humans bound to the ground would be identified and researched ... but unfortunately, flight pioneers continued to achieve short and – presumably – unsatisfying conquest of the air.
Then, as the injection system of the modern internal combustion engine was conceived, sustained human flight became - when viewed against the span of human existence - instantly commonplace.
The primary limitation upon 'successful' human flight was the necessary power needed to produce speeds which would allow the natural lift of the wing to support the weight of a human being - and all the shit human beings tend to bring along with them, since naked like a bird is not an viable option. The most important shit humans were to bring along, once flight was made consistent enough to apply it to acts of war, were means to bomb the populace below. 'Conquest of the Air,' as it has been called, was really more of a conquest of the ground, in that we were able to blow the shit out of people who could not in turn blow the shit out of us.
Therefore, the importance of flight in terms of its operational power is not the flight itself - it is in its ability to deliver a payload of destruction.
Now, I recognize that flight has other marvelous benefits. The little bowl of pineapple I'm eating for lunch is testament to that, as well as the incessant flipping back and forth across the country that encourages business and tourism. Both increase exponentially the effects I described in my last technological post on Railroads ... so there's little need for me to reprocess that argument here.
Instead, I'd like to talk about air power, the other benefit of flight - and the one that makes all the difference in Civilization, where these technologies all come from.
There are numerous means of flight in D&D: spells, magical items and flying mounts accounting for most of them. The game conceives, mostly, that these techniques would usually be applied to methods of direct combat: the mage floating above the battle, tossing down spells; the opponents with wings of flying or mounted upon hippogriffs and griffons participating in world war I duels in the sky. I don't deny that these things would be commonplace ... but bigger and more important would be the simple act of bombing.
Presuming that gun powder isn't available, and that the ordinary methods of D&D flight do not incorporate a culture with the technology necessary to deliver an explosive payload - given the lack of explosives - how is it that one bombs a populace, if one is so inclined?
Consider, first of all, the fire trap spell. I have always liked this, but rarely do players take advantage of the advantages. Basically, the spell is cast upon something that is closed - and reacts once the thing is opened, causing a small explosion that produces fire and burns off hit points.
Let's presume the thing that is closed is a bottle, with a cork. Let's presume that the bottle is made of ceramic, and that it is thrown in a manner so that when it hits the ground, the pressure of the hit causes the cork to pop out, thus initiating the fire trap spell.
This allows us to fill the bottle with whatever we'd like. Oil is a nice option, but the firewater spell is even nicer. Sadly, as I'm thinking of this, I'm not certain of the spell's duration and I don't have the book in front of me. Is it permanent? If not, we may want to stick with oil ... though I think fire trap would be sufficient to ignite the oil upon it's hitting the ground.
If not, we can always incorporate a glyph ... that gives us even more fire, if fire is what we need, and that is certain to set our dropped molotov alight. Glyphs are definitely permanent until set off, and I feel certain that something dropped from the sky would be enough to initiate a glyph. Of course, we could also add explosive runes for good measure. We can even coat the interior of our ceramic flask with a grease spell, just to be sure the oil gets a good distribution upon striking.
Now, two kilograms of oil is equal to two litres, or about half a gallon ... which would weigh five pounds and be the equivalent of sixteen flasks of oil. The ceramic could be made quite thin, and would perhaps add another three to four pounds. Such an item, with the spells described above, hitting the roof of a house would make quite a show.
What is very interesting is, however, that hundreds of such bombs could be made in advance, since all of the elements described are not time sensitive. A fair-sized city could produce the necessary number of spellcasters to create such an arsenal, particularly if they had a few weeks to prepare. Once produced, twenty such bombs could easily be carried aboard one ordinary hippogriff, or even by a moderately stripped-down flying mage. Mage, hippogriff and rider could all be made invisible, which is a spell not broken until some kind of aggressive action is taken. Invisibility is a second level spell, and is therefore quite common.
Thus, the entire air squadron, filled to the brim with hundreds of bombs, could approach a city under a clear blue sky, in full daylight, without having to give their position away until the actual time violence began to occur.
A DM could argue that the act of letting go of the bomb was itself sufficient to end the invisibility. A good lawyer could argue in response if the act of actually taking off with the intention of dropping the bombs was sufficient to render the recipient visible. Was the 'thought' of dropping the bomb sufficient? When, precisely, does an act of aggression begin?
Well, let's not worry about that. Let's presume the worst - that letting go of the bomb makes the invisible bomber visible. The only thing is, by that time, the bombs are already falling.
Let us consider that you are a resident of a city, and that you happen to be looking up. All around you, people are going about their business, working, talking to each other, counting their steps on the way to the grocer's or the candlestick maker's ... and are definitely not looking up.
Suddenly, hundreds of feet above you. some fifty figures appear in the sky. Just blip! and they are there.
You now have six seconds - one half a round in my world, a mere segment in terms of ordinary AD&D - to take some sort of reprisal against the attackers before literally a thousand bombs set your city ablaze.
It would be quite a crack team of first responders who had the wherewithal to see the appearance of the bombers, have their animals mounted and ready to fly, and do so while their wooden city exploded in fire, in time to catch the perpetrators before they simply dispersed to the four winds. Remember, we're looking for bombers small enough to hide under a tree ... not a B-29 Flying Fortress.
How, pray tell, would you stop them from getting back, collecting another load of pre-made bombs, and hitting you again?
Obviously, every city would have to have a considerable supply of bombs - it would be a whole industry, to create them, to store them safely (a magazine of explosive runes plus burning oil would make a hell of a mess if someone accidentally dropped a bomb they were adding to the pile) and have them ready at hand to use against another city in time of war.
But which other city, hm? A host of clerics would have to get on the phone to 'god' and get answers, wouldn't they? Not only that, they'd have to be asking, regularly, if such and such a city were making preparations for war, if they were loading bombs aboard birds right now, and so on and so forth. Pre-destructive intelligence would be of great importance - and so that would largely soak up a city's supply of augury and divination spells.
Does it ever seem like D&D just isn't the game you thought it was?
With the discovery of the wheel and the domestication of animals, some humans would learn – through incidental observation – that a greater arc of travel could be created with added speed prior to actually moving past the ‘flight horizon’ of the landscape. It was conceived that by flattening out this arc, perhaps with even greater speed, flight could somehow be maintained ... but alas, greater speed proved elusive.
Many would-be aeronauticists, who simply tried hurling themselves from the ground into the air, were driven to despair. Indeed, all attempts to fly by pure muscle power were frustrated by the apparent inability to separate oneself from the earth. This led humans to construct platforms over the earth's surface - but sadly, these platforms only produced the same drop that had previously existed. Nothing was meaningfully gained by these ventures.
Eventually, the mysterious force that kept humans bound to the ground would be identified and researched ... but unfortunately, flight pioneers continued to achieve short and – presumably – unsatisfying conquest of the air.
Then, as the injection system of the modern internal combustion engine was conceived, sustained human flight became - when viewed against the span of human existence - instantly commonplace.
The primary limitation upon 'successful' human flight was the necessary power needed to produce speeds which would allow the natural lift of the wing to support the weight of a human being - and all the shit human beings tend to bring along with them, since naked like a bird is not an viable option. The most important shit humans were to bring along, once flight was made consistent enough to apply it to acts of war, were means to bomb the populace below. 'Conquest of the Air,' as it has been called, was really more of a conquest of the ground, in that we were able to blow the shit out of people who could not in turn blow the shit out of us.
Therefore, the importance of flight in terms of its operational power is not the flight itself - it is in its ability to deliver a payload of destruction.
Now, I recognize that flight has other marvelous benefits. The little bowl of pineapple I'm eating for lunch is testament to that, as well as the incessant flipping back and forth across the country that encourages business and tourism. Both increase exponentially the effects I described in my last technological post on Railroads ... so there's little need for me to reprocess that argument here.
Instead, I'd like to talk about air power, the other benefit of flight - and the one that makes all the difference in Civilization, where these technologies all come from.
There are numerous means of flight in D&D: spells, magical items and flying mounts accounting for most of them. The game conceives, mostly, that these techniques would usually be applied to methods of direct combat: the mage floating above the battle, tossing down spells; the opponents with wings of flying or mounted upon hippogriffs and griffons participating in world war I duels in the sky. I don't deny that these things would be commonplace ... but bigger and more important would be the simple act of bombing.
Presuming that gun powder isn't available, and that the ordinary methods of D&D flight do not incorporate a culture with the technology necessary to deliver an explosive payload - given the lack of explosives - how is it that one bombs a populace, if one is so inclined?
Consider, first of all, the fire trap spell. I have always liked this, but rarely do players take advantage of the advantages. Basically, the spell is cast upon something that is closed - and reacts once the thing is opened, causing a small explosion that produces fire and burns off hit points.
Let's presume the thing that is closed is a bottle, with a cork. Let's presume that the bottle is made of ceramic, and that it is thrown in a manner so that when it hits the ground, the pressure of the hit causes the cork to pop out, thus initiating the fire trap spell.
This allows us to fill the bottle with whatever we'd like. Oil is a nice option, but the firewater spell is even nicer. Sadly, as I'm thinking of this, I'm not certain of the spell's duration and I don't have the book in front of me. Is it permanent? If not, we may want to stick with oil ... though I think fire trap would be sufficient to ignite the oil upon it's hitting the ground.
If not, we can always incorporate a glyph ... that gives us even more fire, if fire is what we need, and that is certain to set our dropped molotov alight. Glyphs are definitely permanent until set off, and I feel certain that something dropped from the sky would be enough to initiate a glyph. Of course, we could also add explosive runes for good measure. We can even coat the interior of our ceramic flask with a grease spell, just to be sure the oil gets a good distribution upon striking.
Now, two kilograms of oil is equal to two litres, or about half a gallon ... which would weigh five pounds and be the equivalent of sixteen flasks of oil. The ceramic could be made quite thin, and would perhaps add another three to four pounds. Such an item, with the spells described above, hitting the roof of a house would make quite a show.
What is very interesting is, however, that hundreds of such bombs could be made in advance, since all of the elements described are not time sensitive. A fair-sized city could produce the necessary number of spellcasters to create such an arsenal, particularly if they had a few weeks to prepare. Once produced, twenty such bombs could easily be carried aboard one ordinary hippogriff, or even by a moderately stripped-down flying mage. Mage, hippogriff and rider could all be made invisible, which is a spell not broken until some kind of aggressive action is taken. Invisibility is a second level spell, and is therefore quite common.
Thus, the entire air squadron, filled to the brim with hundreds of bombs, could approach a city under a clear blue sky, in full daylight, without having to give their position away until the actual time violence began to occur.
A DM could argue that the act of letting go of the bomb was itself sufficient to end the invisibility. A good lawyer could argue in response if the act of actually taking off with the intention of dropping the bombs was sufficient to render the recipient visible. Was the 'thought' of dropping the bomb sufficient? When, precisely, does an act of aggression begin?
Well, let's not worry about that. Let's presume the worst - that letting go of the bomb makes the invisible bomber visible. The only thing is, by that time, the bombs are already falling.
Let us consider that you are a resident of a city, and that you happen to be looking up. All around you, people are going about their business, working, talking to each other, counting their steps on the way to the grocer's or the candlestick maker's ... and are definitely not looking up.
Suddenly, hundreds of feet above you. some fifty figures appear in the sky. Just blip! and they are there.
You now have six seconds - one half a round in my world, a mere segment in terms of ordinary AD&D - to take some sort of reprisal against the attackers before literally a thousand bombs set your city ablaze.
It would be quite a crack team of first responders who had the wherewithal to see the appearance of the bombers, have their animals mounted and ready to fly, and do so while their wooden city exploded in fire, in time to catch the perpetrators before they simply dispersed to the four winds. Remember, we're looking for bombers small enough to hide under a tree ... not a B-29 Flying Fortress.
How, pray tell, would you stop them from getting back, collecting another load of pre-made bombs, and hitting you again?
Obviously, every city would have to have a considerable supply of bombs - it would be a whole industry, to create them, to store them safely (a magazine of explosive runes plus burning oil would make a hell of a mess if someone accidentally dropped a bomb they were adding to the pile) and have them ready at hand to use against another city in time of war.
But which other city, hm? A host of clerics would have to get on the phone to 'god' and get answers, wouldn't they? Not only that, they'd have to be asking, regularly, if such and such a city were making preparations for war, if they were loading bombs aboard birds right now, and so on and so forth. Pre-destructive intelligence would be of great importance - and so that would largely soak up a city's supply of augury and divination spells.
Does it ever seem like D&D just isn't the game you thought it was?
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Recooking The Books
Today I got into a conversation - bit of a row, but nothing personal - with a friend about my not liking something which she really likes. It wasn't so much that the thing she likes is 'bad' ... it isn't, really. It's only that, for me, it isn't 'new.' I've seen it before, I've involved myself with it before and I've long since grown disinterested with the style and design of that 'thing' (nevermind what it was).
This is my nature; it is everyone's nature, I think, as they grow older, but all the more so if you've been the sort willing to wallow in life at a younger age. After awhile, everything that is easy to find is ... easy. It fails to rouse the blood. My friend understands, but she is about 15 years younger than me and she just sees me as being frustrating and difficult.
Some old people regret the springtime of their years; they yearn for when everything was new, and they were wide-eyed and open to a thousand experiences that hadn't come yet. Every year is a burden for them. Every year is a multitude of doors closing because they can't seem to enjoy anything - a circumstance with which they react by growing meaner and resentful towards those who are still young.
Other old people, however, begin to view all that 'newness' with a sort of appreciative humor. They can remember when something was new; but they're satisfied to be jaded now, to have seen all those things once and to appreciate that they are smarter now.
To explain - there are things I have been doing regarding this game, D&D, that I could not have conceived up 20 years ago. There are levels to which the game applies that I was simply too young and naive to appreciate. There are hundreds of things which I took for granted, which I've now begun to question. Only in the last four years have I corrected the experience tables I played with for decades. I've rewritten the hit dice/hit point rules. I've explored interactive mechanics (not satisfied yet) and wilderness damage and weather-systems on levels beyond my 30-something abilities.
Something my daughter has been harrassing me to do for some time now - about a year - is to correct and update rewrites of the Player's Handbook I started about 12 years ago. Now, this is something I started because I had to have a written record of house rules changes - and for spells in particular, there are many, many of them. Mostly, it was necessary to try to write down some of the precedents that had gathered around spells over the years, which were NOT included in the original Player's Handbook or Unearthed Arcana. Can an Ioun Stone be made into a clerical magic stone, for instance. Must the magic stone actually be thrown? That kind of thing.
However, such lists and notes are incredibly boring to write. Important, but dreadful from the perspective of a DM who'd rather be drawing maps or crunching numbers, like I usually do. So I did the lists as far as I needed to, covering what a 3rd level cleric needed, or a 5th level mage, and so on.
But it has gotten out of hand for some time now. There have been many more precedents that have come up, forcing a change in ranges, area of effect and other details, and those things just mount up into arguments at the table about what is right and what is wrong. The facts are that I really have to rewrite everything I've written, plus completing the spell lists to their end (not just to 4th level), with notes that I'm going to need my players to help fill out for me. It's a monumental task, and it will include tweaking many spells which had been left alone. I'll be thinking about them, you see, and thinking always means an effort to make them better. Once those changes are discussed and beaten apart by the players, those will be the NEW rules I'm prepared to adhere to.
So I've been working on the cleric. I'm not hurrying, and it is going to take awhile. I hope to rework my sage tables in the process, and for the present I'm just not sure how. I'll want to make them more accessible and applicable, certainly. I'll want to expand them. Particularly, get rid of the general/specific/exacting question method ... which just never worked.
I'm working through the second level spells for the present. When I'm done with everything, I expect the Cleric alone, with spells and other notes, will probably run around 50 to 60 pages. This, to me, is at least as long as the Cleric should run. If I think of more, I'll add more.
Here's an example of the presentation for first level spells - with a general details list I'm planning to add for every level, to make it easier for players to choose their spells:
WOTC may see this and squawk ... I don't know. The image may not be up in a week. In the meantime, I want to make a different specific point, going back to jadedness and the clarity of age.
The last time I rewrote these, I didn't think much about the language. I wrote the spells in pretty much the same style as the Player's Handbook, presuming that's what players were familiar with.
These last few weeks, however, resigning myself to doing this again, I've realized that the writing in the Player's Handbook is pretty shitty. Perhaps its because of reading the White Box game, perhaps the amount of editing on books I've done this year ... but in all truth, if you're not familiar with D&D - steeped in it, you might say - then the gobbledygook in the Handbook is pretty unfriendly to read. It is full of hackneyed phrases and unnecessary prepositions and a lot of other dreck which does not get to the heart and soul of the spell in ten words or less. I've tried in the above to get rid of that - to make the first sentence clear, direct and instantly comprehensible. Thus, I hope it greatly improves a new player's ability to read a spell with ease, grasping its intent at once and thus making the choice of spell easier.
Sometimes, the benefits of experience do not lend themselves to simply being comfortable with the complex, even if that's old hat; sometimes, there's something to be gained in being able to make the thing elementary, for those who have not yet learned to be extraordinary.
UPDATE:
Small addition. The 'Believer' column on the table describes whether or not the recipient of the spell must be of the same religion as the cleric; for example, a magic stone, once created in my world, may be hurled by anyone who IS the same religion as the cleric ... but putting it into another person's hands would destroy the deweomer of the spell.
This is my nature; it is everyone's nature, I think, as they grow older, but all the more so if you've been the sort willing to wallow in life at a younger age. After awhile, everything that is easy to find is ... easy. It fails to rouse the blood. My friend understands, but she is about 15 years younger than me and she just sees me as being frustrating and difficult.
Some old people regret the springtime of their years; they yearn for when everything was new, and they were wide-eyed and open to a thousand experiences that hadn't come yet. Every year is a burden for them. Every year is a multitude of doors closing because they can't seem to enjoy anything - a circumstance with which they react by growing meaner and resentful towards those who are still young.
Other old people, however, begin to view all that 'newness' with a sort of appreciative humor. They can remember when something was new; but they're satisfied to be jaded now, to have seen all those things once and to appreciate that they are smarter now.
To explain - there are things I have been doing regarding this game, D&D, that I could not have conceived up 20 years ago. There are levels to which the game applies that I was simply too young and naive to appreciate. There are hundreds of things which I took for granted, which I've now begun to question. Only in the last four years have I corrected the experience tables I played with for decades. I've rewritten the hit dice/hit point rules. I've explored interactive mechanics (not satisfied yet) and wilderness damage and weather-systems on levels beyond my 30-something abilities.
Something my daughter has been harrassing me to do for some time now - about a year - is to correct and update rewrites of the Player's Handbook I started about 12 years ago. Now, this is something I started because I had to have a written record of house rules changes - and for spells in particular, there are many, many of them. Mostly, it was necessary to try to write down some of the precedents that had gathered around spells over the years, which were NOT included in the original Player's Handbook or Unearthed Arcana. Can an Ioun Stone be made into a clerical magic stone, for instance. Must the magic stone actually be thrown? That kind of thing.
However, such lists and notes are incredibly boring to write. Important, but dreadful from the perspective of a DM who'd rather be drawing maps or crunching numbers, like I usually do. So I did the lists as far as I needed to, covering what a 3rd level cleric needed, or a 5th level mage, and so on.
But it has gotten out of hand for some time now. There have been many more precedents that have come up, forcing a change in ranges, area of effect and other details, and those things just mount up into arguments at the table about what is right and what is wrong. The facts are that I really have to rewrite everything I've written, plus completing the spell lists to their end (not just to 4th level), with notes that I'm going to need my players to help fill out for me. It's a monumental task, and it will include tweaking many spells which had been left alone. I'll be thinking about them, you see, and thinking always means an effort to make them better. Once those changes are discussed and beaten apart by the players, those will be the NEW rules I'm prepared to adhere to.
So I've been working on the cleric. I'm not hurrying, and it is going to take awhile. I hope to rework my sage tables in the process, and for the present I'm just not sure how. I'll want to make them more accessible and applicable, certainly. I'll want to expand them. Particularly, get rid of the general/specific/exacting question method ... which just never worked.
I'm working through the second level spells for the present. When I'm done with everything, I expect the Cleric alone, with spells and other notes, will probably run around 50 to 60 pages. This, to me, is at least as long as the Cleric should run. If I think of more, I'll add more.
Here's an example of the presentation for first level spells - with a general details list I'm planning to add for every level, to make it easier for players to choose their spells:
The last time I rewrote these, I didn't think much about the language. I wrote the spells in pretty much the same style as the Player's Handbook, presuming that's what players were familiar with.
These last few weeks, however, resigning myself to doing this again, I've realized that the writing in the Player's Handbook is pretty shitty. Perhaps its because of reading the White Box game, perhaps the amount of editing on books I've done this year ... but in all truth, if you're not familiar with D&D - steeped in it, you might say - then the gobbledygook in the Handbook is pretty unfriendly to read. It is full of hackneyed phrases and unnecessary prepositions and a lot of other dreck which does not get to the heart and soul of the spell in ten words or less. I've tried in the above to get rid of that - to make the first sentence clear, direct and instantly comprehensible. Thus, I hope it greatly improves a new player's ability to read a spell with ease, grasping its intent at once and thus making the choice of spell easier.
Sometimes, the benefits of experience do not lend themselves to simply being comfortable with the complex, even if that's old hat; sometimes, there's something to be gained in being able to make the thing elementary, for those who have not yet learned to be extraordinary.
UPDATE:
Small addition. The 'Believer' column on the table describes whether or not the recipient of the spell must be of the same religion as the cleric; for example, a magic stone, once created in my world, may be hurled by anyone who IS the same religion as the cleric ... but putting it into another person's hands would destroy the deweomer of the spell.
Friday, November 9, 2012
The Medieval Mindset
I'm going to give the gentle reader a spoiler now; if you don't want to read something about real religion, with unmitigated, inconsiderate theological content, then stop reading now. You're not going to see any other D&D blogs tackling this very real and very intrinsic part of medieval culture, and you probably don't want to ... so run.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the medieval mindset is to be found in a specific prayer ... and most people do not even consider how or why it applies to every act or element of the medieval dweller's life. That prayer is the Lord's Prayer. It was one of the most accessible parts of the liturgy to the common man, so much so that Martin Luther made it central to his presentation of Catholic teachings during the Reformation.
Here is the Lord's Prayer as I learned it growing up in the Lutheran Church:
Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in heaven,
And give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,
For Thine is the kingdom,
The power and the glory,
forever and ever.
Amen.
Try to remember that while you are reading the words, these were the most important words to be found on the lips of every medieval European figure you've ever read about; they are intrinsic to the souls, the lives, the upbringings, the sense of right and wrong, the very foundations of every single one of those persons, whether good or evil, right or wrong, decent or indecent. You may think Charlemagne is interesting, but he believed the above phrases as you believe in America; he depended upon the truth of these phrases as you depend on your cellphone provider to make your phone ring. These words were absolutely incontravertible - and the medieval mindset, if you can conceive, depended on that fact.
For the above, there are hundreds of specific versions, with a word changed here or there, or made more modern, or more accessible or some such ... but I know these specific words because I had to say them something like ten thousand times as I grew up, amid hundreds of other people, or alone in front of them, for moments like confirmation.
To be confirmed in the Lutheran Church in the 1970s, you passed three years of Bible study, which I then followed with a whole lot more theological study because I like to know the reasons for things. One of the things you study is the Luther's Catechism, which include commentaries he wrote on both the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed, which we don't need to go into here (and which I also learned by heart). These commentaries you go through with your minister line-by-line, until he (1970s) is certain you understand them.
I have no idea what Lutherans go through now. I am not a member of any Lutheran Church. Training didn't take. What we went through then was grueling.
I'm going to print the full 'First Petition' from Martin Luther on the Lord's Prayer, which addresses the line, Hallowed be thy name. I don't expect the reader to read it; but you need to feel the full effect of this as it comes hurtling at a 14-year-old child. I'll put it in green so you can skip over it more easily.
I'm sorry I can't print it in the original German; I wouldn't understand it in German, for I didn't learn it in German.
"This is, indeed, somewhat obscure, and not expressed in good German, for in our mother-tongue we would say: Heavenly Father, help that by all means Thy name may be holy. But what is it to pray that His name may be holy? Is it not holy already? Answer: Yes, it is always holy in its nature, but in our use it is not holy. For God's name was given us when we became Christians and were baptized, so that we are called children of God and have the Sacraments by which He so incorporates us in Himself that everything which is God's must serve for our use.
Here now the great need exists for which we ought to be most concerned, that this name have its proper honor, be esteemed holy and sublime as the greatest treasure and sanctuary that we have; and that as godly children we pray that the name of God, which is already holy in heaven, may also be and remain holy with us upon earth and in all the world.
But how does it become holy among us? Answer, as plainly as it can be said: When both our doctrine and life are godly and Christian. For since in this prayer we call God our Father, it is our duty always to deport and demean ourselves as godly children, that He may not receive shame, but honor and praise from us.
Now the name of God is profaned by us either in words or in works. (For whatever we do upon the earth must be either words or works, speech or act.) In the first place, then, it is profaned when men preach, teach, and speak in the name of God what is false and misleading, so that His name must serve to adorn and to find a market for falsehood. That is, indeed, the greatest profanation and dishonor of the divine name. Furthermore, also when men, by swearing, cursing, conjuring, etc., grossly abuse the holy name as a cloak for their shame. In the second place also by an openly wicked life and works, when those who are called Christians and the people of God are adulterers, drunkards, misers, envious, and slanderers. Here again must the name of God come to shame and be profaned because of us. For just as it is a shame and disgrace to a natural father to have a bad perverse child that opposes him in words and deeds, so that on its account he suffers contempt and reproach, so also it brings dishonor upon God if we who are called by His name and have all manner of goods from Him teach, speak, and live in any other manner except as godly and heavenly children, so that people say of us that we must be not God's, but the devil's children.
Thus you see that in this petition we pray just for that which God demands in the Second Commandment; namely, that His name be not taken in vain to swear, curse, lie, deceive, etc., but be usefully employed to the praise and honor of God. For whoever employs the name of God for any sort of wrong profanes and desecrates this holy name, as aforetime a church was considered desecrated when a murder or any other crime had been committed in it, or when a pyx or relic was desecrated, as being holy in themselves, yet become unholy in use. Thus this point is easy and clear if only the language is understood, that to hallow is the same as in our idiom to praise, magnify, and honor both in word and deed.
Here, now, learn how great need there is of such prayer. For because we see how full the world is of sects and false teachers, who all wear the holy name as a cover and sham for their doctrines of devils, we ought by all means to pray without ceasing, and to cry and call upon God against all such as preach and believe falsely and whatever opposes and persecutes our Gospel and pure doctrine, and would suppress it, as bishops, tyrants, enthusiasts, etc. Likewise also for ourselves who have the Word of God, but are not thankful for it, nor live as we ought according to the same. If now you pray for this with your heart, you can be sure that it pleases God; for He will not hear anything more dear to Him than that His honor and praise is exalted above everything else, and His Word is taught in its purity and is esteemed precious and dear."
Luther was not fucking around, and neither was the Church I grew up in. We were expected to know this, defend this and ultimately apply this to our daily lives. I never met a Lutheran who did, ministers included, but nevertheless.
This period predated D&D for me, as I was confirmed the May before I started playing D&D that September (1979). But look at all that great D&D shit in the content ... profanes and murders desecrating churches, pyxes and relics, the world is full of sects and false teachers, aldulterers, drunkards, misers, slanderers ... sounds like a Saturday night at the game.
But what is Luther saying to his congregation? Yes, right, God is great ... but hey, look around you. Everything around you is full of enormous piles of shit. Wow, you live in a really crap world, and you haven't got a chance because these fuckers will put you down if they get a chance!
(Would have liked to have explained it that way when I was fourteen, when answering questions at the front of a church, but my father was bigger than me in those days).
So yeah - appreciate the good thing you've got; get down on your fucking knees, you poor suffering hopeless bastard, 'cause it ain't all bad, you've got one chance in this freak-ass suck-hole world, and its here in this house of the lord. Be grateful. And if you are, he will smile on you and save your cheap ass.
This is the whole Lord's Prayer, when you look at it straight. It isn't just that God is a great thing, it's your responsibility not to be that shit you see around you. Forgive others their trespasses. Don't fall for the bullshit and the quick fix. Keep your eye focused up, where the good things are.
People have a tendency to think in this age that those people in the medieval world must have been miserable. Look at the shit they lived in. Look at the lack of medicine or luxuries. Look at the horrors of disease and pestilence and death. "Shit," we think. "Shit I couldn't live in a place like that five minutes without screaming."
But you don't understand. Those people in that age and in that time, with that mindset, believed those words above ... and they repeated them with the fervor of belief. And whatever the horrorshow we perceive that may have been around them, they were looking UP. They were looking at the better world that waited for them ... the world we'll never look at, because we're cynical and because we know it's a lie. They did not know. It was not a lie for them. It was the real deal, and they wouldn't believe you that it was false if you shouted in their face with a bullhorn. They wouldn't believe you if you cut the flesh in pieces from their backs. The world was not everything to them.
I wrote yesterday about how to play a cleric. What I said was, do this and the people of the world will follow you unto the next world. Just reassure them that what they have is not all there is.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the medieval mindset is to be found in a specific prayer ... and most people do not even consider how or why it applies to every act or element of the medieval dweller's life. That prayer is the Lord's Prayer. It was one of the most accessible parts of the liturgy to the common man, so much so that Martin Luther made it central to his presentation of Catholic teachings during the Reformation.
Here is the Lord's Prayer as I learned it growing up in the Lutheran Church:
Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in heaven,
And give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,
For Thine is the kingdom,
The power and the glory,
forever and ever.
Amen.
Try to remember that while you are reading the words, these were the most important words to be found on the lips of every medieval European figure you've ever read about; they are intrinsic to the souls, the lives, the upbringings, the sense of right and wrong, the very foundations of every single one of those persons, whether good or evil, right or wrong, decent or indecent. You may think Charlemagne is interesting, but he believed the above phrases as you believe in America; he depended upon the truth of these phrases as you depend on your cellphone provider to make your phone ring. These words were absolutely incontravertible - and the medieval mindset, if you can conceive, depended on that fact.
For the above, there are hundreds of specific versions, with a word changed here or there, or made more modern, or more accessible or some such ... but I know these specific words because I had to say them something like ten thousand times as I grew up, amid hundreds of other people, or alone in front of them, for moments like confirmation.
To be confirmed in the Lutheran Church in the 1970s, you passed three years of Bible study, which I then followed with a whole lot more theological study because I like to know the reasons for things. One of the things you study is the Luther's Catechism, which include commentaries he wrote on both the Lord's Prayer and the Apostle's Creed, which we don't need to go into here (and which I also learned by heart). These commentaries you go through with your minister line-by-line, until he (1970s) is certain you understand them.
I have no idea what Lutherans go through now. I am not a member of any Lutheran Church. Training didn't take. What we went through then was grueling.
I'm going to print the full 'First Petition' from Martin Luther on the Lord's Prayer, which addresses the line, Hallowed be thy name. I don't expect the reader to read it; but you need to feel the full effect of this as it comes hurtling at a 14-year-old child. I'll put it in green so you can skip over it more easily.
I'm sorry I can't print it in the original German; I wouldn't understand it in German, for I didn't learn it in German.
"This is, indeed, somewhat obscure, and not expressed in good German, for in our mother-tongue we would say: Heavenly Father, help that by all means Thy name may be holy. But what is it to pray that His name may be holy? Is it not holy already? Answer: Yes, it is always holy in its nature, but in our use it is not holy. For God's name was given us when we became Christians and were baptized, so that we are called children of God and have the Sacraments by which He so incorporates us in Himself that everything which is God's must serve for our use.
Here now the great need exists for which we ought to be most concerned, that this name have its proper honor, be esteemed holy and sublime as the greatest treasure and sanctuary that we have; and that as godly children we pray that the name of God, which is already holy in heaven, may also be and remain holy with us upon earth and in all the world.
But how does it become holy among us? Answer, as plainly as it can be said: When both our doctrine and life are godly and Christian. For since in this prayer we call God our Father, it is our duty always to deport and demean ourselves as godly children, that He may not receive shame, but honor and praise from us.
Now the name of God is profaned by us either in words or in works. (For whatever we do upon the earth must be either words or works, speech or act.) In the first place, then, it is profaned when men preach, teach, and speak in the name of God what is false and misleading, so that His name must serve to adorn and to find a market for falsehood. That is, indeed, the greatest profanation and dishonor of the divine name. Furthermore, also when men, by swearing, cursing, conjuring, etc., grossly abuse the holy name as a cloak for their shame. In the second place also by an openly wicked life and works, when those who are called Christians and the people of God are adulterers, drunkards, misers, envious, and slanderers. Here again must the name of God come to shame and be profaned because of us. For just as it is a shame and disgrace to a natural father to have a bad perverse child that opposes him in words and deeds, so that on its account he suffers contempt and reproach, so also it brings dishonor upon God if we who are called by His name and have all manner of goods from Him teach, speak, and live in any other manner except as godly and heavenly children, so that people say of us that we must be not God's, but the devil's children.
Thus you see that in this petition we pray just for that which God demands in the Second Commandment; namely, that His name be not taken in vain to swear, curse, lie, deceive, etc., but be usefully employed to the praise and honor of God. For whoever employs the name of God for any sort of wrong profanes and desecrates this holy name, as aforetime a church was considered desecrated when a murder or any other crime had been committed in it, or when a pyx or relic was desecrated, as being holy in themselves, yet become unholy in use. Thus this point is easy and clear if only the language is understood, that to hallow is the same as in our idiom to praise, magnify, and honor both in word and deed.
Here, now, learn how great need there is of such prayer. For because we see how full the world is of sects and false teachers, who all wear the holy name as a cover and sham for their doctrines of devils, we ought by all means to pray without ceasing, and to cry and call upon God against all such as preach and believe falsely and whatever opposes and persecutes our Gospel and pure doctrine, and would suppress it, as bishops, tyrants, enthusiasts, etc. Likewise also for ourselves who have the Word of God, but are not thankful for it, nor live as we ought according to the same. If now you pray for this with your heart, you can be sure that it pleases God; for He will not hear anything more dear to Him than that His honor and praise is exalted above everything else, and His Word is taught in its purity and is esteemed precious and dear."
Luther was not fucking around, and neither was the Church I grew up in. We were expected to know this, defend this and ultimately apply this to our daily lives. I never met a Lutheran who did, ministers included, but nevertheless.
This period predated D&D for me, as I was confirmed the May before I started playing D&D that September (1979). But look at all that great D&D shit in the content ... profanes and murders desecrating churches, pyxes and relics, the world is full of sects and false teachers, aldulterers, drunkards, misers, slanderers ... sounds like a Saturday night at the game.
But what is Luther saying to his congregation? Yes, right, God is great ... but hey, look around you. Everything around you is full of enormous piles of shit. Wow, you live in a really crap world, and you haven't got a chance because these fuckers will put you down if they get a chance!
(Would have liked to have explained it that way when I was fourteen, when answering questions at the front of a church, but my father was bigger than me in those days).
So yeah - appreciate the good thing you've got; get down on your fucking knees, you poor suffering hopeless bastard, 'cause it ain't all bad, you've got one chance in this freak-ass suck-hole world, and its here in this house of the lord. Be grateful. And if you are, he will smile on you and save your cheap ass.
This is the whole Lord's Prayer, when you look at it straight. It isn't just that God is a great thing, it's your responsibility not to be that shit you see around you. Forgive others their trespasses. Don't fall for the bullshit and the quick fix. Keep your eye focused up, where the good things are.
People have a tendency to think in this age that those people in the medieval world must have been miserable. Look at the shit they lived in. Look at the lack of medicine or luxuries. Look at the horrors of disease and pestilence and death. "Shit," we think. "Shit I couldn't live in a place like that five minutes without screaming."
But you don't understand. Those people in that age and in that time, with that mindset, believed those words above ... and they repeated them with the fervor of belief. And whatever the horrorshow we perceive that may have been around them, they were looking UP. They were looking at the better world that waited for them ... the world we'll never look at, because we're cynical and because we know it's a lie. They did not know. It was not a lie for them. It was the real deal, and they wouldn't believe you that it was false if you shouted in their face with a bullhorn. They wouldn't believe you if you cut the flesh in pieces from their backs. The world was not everything to them.
I wrote yesterday about how to play a cleric. What I said was, do this and the people of the world will follow you unto the next world. Just reassure them that what they have is not all there is.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
How To Play A Cleric
I am aware that the cleric is not a well-loved character class, and that later editions in particular have recreated it into a field medic, the perception being that with more healing there's more killing. Religion in general is not popular with a lot of D&D players (that whole persecution thing is closely felt), and as such the theological aspects of the theological class are downplayed severely.
Still, I think it is a matter of outlook. With that in mind, I offer these suggestions.
Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
Jake: THE BAND!
Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
Elwood: What light?
Reverend Cleophus James: HAVE YOU SEEEEN THE LIGHT?
Jake: YES! YES! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!
One. Have an agenda.
I don't mean something lame or overdone like "following my god" or "building a church" ... your cleric needs to reach for the stars. Your cleric needs to conceive of some world changing strategy that will shake the pillars of heaven and pull them down, thus establish his or her self as the greatest religious leader of their age. This will require more imagination than being a cog in the existing religious structure; it means, on some level, replacing the religious structure with one that is better. How better? That is for your cleric to decide. It doesn't matter if the goal is nearly impossible ... eventually your cleric will be high enough level to bitch slap those who don't view the world with your cleric's agenda. This is what you must plan for! Conceive of other clerics under your guidance giving instructions to kingdoms and empires on how to behave and give money; conceive of a world-wide entity that is perhaps benevolent, perhaps sadistic, which everyone acknowledges as holding the greatest possible truth about life, the universe and everything.
What, you don't know what this truth is yourself? Well, for heaven's sake, follow in the traditions of thousands of religious leaders who have gone before you and make shit up.
Elwood: They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God.
Two. Know your importance.
If you think religion is about following the dictates of your god, you know nothing about religion. Religion was created for the cleric, not the cleric for the religion. Your God, his or her minions, their powerful agents, the heroes and the priests have your back. They are there to help YOUR agenda along ... remember, you've seen the light. You know what's needed ... and as you go forward, hacking and slashing and pressing forward your religion, the gods will recognize your worth and clear the road for you. Count on it, expect it ... and rail at the heavens when it does not happen, as did Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and all the great ones. Remember, the holy word is conceived in holy writ - which if your cleric is on the ball has carefully taken the time to write down, just to demonstrate to all how the gods speak through you. You might want to get on that, when you can. How do you suppose these holy words came about?
Jake: Ma'am, would it make you feel any better if you knew that what we're asking Matt here to do is a holy thing?
Three. Get your party on board.
This can be difficult, especially since you've recently become an obsessive megalomaniac ... but it can be done by emphasizing how your agenda serves the party's general needs. Seize wealth from the infidels? Check. Crush enemies without hesitation? Check. Perceive the cleric's own church as a collection of misguided fools who have no right or privilege to tell the cleric, or his party, what do to? Check. Give free reign to the party to act as they please, so long as occasionally they mention to the cleric that they may have gone a bit far? Well, that might be difficult to work out, but so long as you, the cleric, show some general pride for the party's general mayhem, couched in the occasional praise met with a hint or two towards contributing to the general welfare (yours), they might gratefully acknowledge they'd all be dead if you weren't there to bring them back from the grave, or speak a word or two to get one of the higher ups to bring these poor 'sinners' back from the grave. You might want to mention that from time to time, to keep it in the forefront of your party's mind, so that while you're indulging their murderous activities, they're indulging your pocketchange. It's a give and take ... and it is up to you to make them understand that. Don't let them push you around. Make it clear that you are there to be needed; and they are there to pay for it.
Jake: Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters ... sell them to me. Sell me your children!
Four. Be ruthless. Be without scruples.
It is a silly cleric who limits his or her own success with a lot of morals which - honestly now - are just ambiguous, inconvenient rules made up by other people who can't understand why the world doesn't work the way they think it does. You, the cleric, you know better. If the agenda is going to require ten thousand female slaves in revealing steel armor, well, then it is. That should not be questioned! It is the agenda! And those who don't understand or don't appreciate the beauty of a thing like that will die under your merciless phishy phalanxes. That is the word, and the word is made flesh ... revealed flesh in this case. Remember that whatever is necessary IS necessary, and that is the end of the discussion. Your cleric will decide what is necessary ... and further, of course, what morals other people are expected to adhere to. That last is obvious.
Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark ... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.
Five. Pay attention to details.
Pomp and ceremony is the eye-catching, shiny mollifier that will drive others to be mystified and excited by your presence. It is all public relations ... how you present yourself, how you direct your actions and the order and degree to which you take actions are important. Each morning, you should have included in your agenda habits which you will not break. It is your attention to detail that will make others agog at your preparedness and your diligence. You do not care if the dragon is approaching. It is time to kneel and say thanks, and if the dragon doesn't know that's more important than the dragon's silly agenda, that's too damn bad. Your god has your back, right? Then the damn dragon can wait until YOU'RE ready to meet with him. I cannot stress enough how important this is to your character, his or her nature or the party's reflection on how you have chosen to act. While yes, this should not be an obstacle to the party's temporal needs, it SHOULD be something which everyone is aware of and which everyone respects. Like wearing sunglasses. Like having your pinch of snuff before entering a mysterious cave. Like the thousand and one other momentary pauses you insert into your cleric's day.
The better you can imagine out these five things, the better cleric you will be.
Still, I think it is a matter of outlook. With that in mind, I offer these suggestions.
Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
Jake: THE BAND!
Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT?
Elwood: What light?
Reverend Cleophus James: HAVE YOU SEEEEN THE LIGHT?
Jake: YES! YES! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!
One. Have an agenda.
I don't mean something lame or overdone like "following my god" or "building a church" ... your cleric needs to reach for the stars. Your cleric needs to conceive of some world changing strategy that will shake the pillars of heaven and pull them down, thus establish his or her self as the greatest religious leader of their age. This will require more imagination than being a cog in the existing religious structure; it means, on some level, replacing the religious structure with one that is better. How better? That is for your cleric to decide. It doesn't matter if the goal is nearly impossible ... eventually your cleric will be high enough level to bitch slap those who don't view the world with your cleric's agenda. This is what you must plan for! Conceive of other clerics under your guidance giving instructions to kingdoms and empires on how to behave and give money; conceive of a world-wide entity that is perhaps benevolent, perhaps sadistic, which everyone acknowledges as holding the greatest possible truth about life, the universe and everything.
What, you don't know what this truth is yourself? Well, for heaven's sake, follow in the traditions of thousands of religious leaders who have gone before you and make shit up.
Elwood: They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God.
Two. Know your importance.
If you think religion is about following the dictates of your god, you know nothing about religion. Religion was created for the cleric, not the cleric for the religion. Your God, his or her minions, their powerful agents, the heroes and the priests have your back. They are there to help YOUR agenda along ... remember, you've seen the light. You know what's needed ... and as you go forward, hacking and slashing and pressing forward your religion, the gods will recognize your worth and clear the road for you. Count on it, expect it ... and rail at the heavens when it does not happen, as did Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and all the great ones. Remember, the holy word is conceived in holy writ - which if your cleric is on the ball has carefully taken the time to write down, just to demonstrate to all how the gods speak through you. You might want to get on that, when you can. How do you suppose these holy words came about?
Jake: Ma'am, would it make you feel any better if you knew that what we're asking Matt here to do is a holy thing?
Three. Get your party on board.
This can be difficult, especially since you've recently become an obsessive megalomaniac ... but it can be done by emphasizing how your agenda serves the party's general needs. Seize wealth from the infidels? Check. Crush enemies without hesitation? Check. Perceive the cleric's own church as a collection of misguided fools who have no right or privilege to tell the cleric, or his party, what do to? Check. Give free reign to the party to act as they please, so long as occasionally they mention to the cleric that they may have gone a bit far? Well, that might be difficult to work out, but so long as you, the cleric, show some general pride for the party's general mayhem, couched in the occasional praise met with a hint or two towards contributing to the general welfare (yours), they might gratefully acknowledge they'd all be dead if you weren't there to bring them back from the grave, or speak a word or two to get one of the higher ups to bring these poor 'sinners' back from the grave. You might want to mention that from time to time, to keep it in the forefront of your party's mind, so that while you're indulging their murderous activities, they're indulging your pocketchange. It's a give and take ... and it is up to you to make them understand that. Don't let them push you around. Make it clear that you are there to be needed; and they are there to pay for it.
Jake: Your women. I want to buy your women. The little girl, your daughters ... sell them to me. Sell me your children!
Four. Be ruthless. Be without scruples.
It is a silly cleric who limits his or her own success with a lot of morals which - honestly now - are just ambiguous, inconvenient rules made up by other people who can't understand why the world doesn't work the way they think it does. You, the cleric, you know better. If the agenda is going to require ten thousand female slaves in revealing steel armor, well, then it is. That should not be questioned! It is the agenda! And those who don't understand or don't appreciate the beauty of a thing like that will die under your merciless phishy phalanxes. That is the word, and the word is made flesh ... revealed flesh in this case. Remember that whatever is necessary IS necessary, and that is the end of the discussion. Your cleric will decide what is necessary ... and further, of course, what morals other people are expected to adhere to. That last is obvious.
Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark ... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.
Five. Pay attention to details.
Pomp and ceremony is the eye-catching, shiny mollifier that will drive others to be mystified and excited by your presence. It is all public relations ... how you present yourself, how you direct your actions and the order and degree to which you take actions are important. Each morning, you should have included in your agenda habits which you will not break. It is your attention to detail that will make others agog at your preparedness and your diligence. You do not care if the dragon is approaching. It is time to kneel and say thanks, and if the dragon doesn't know that's more important than the dragon's silly agenda, that's too damn bad. Your god has your back, right? Then the damn dragon can wait until YOU'RE ready to meet with him. I cannot stress enough how important this is to your character, his or her nature or the party's reflection on how you have chosen to act. While yes, this should not be an obstacle to the party's temporal needs, it SHOULD be something which everyone is aware of and which everyone respects. Like wearing sunglasses. Like having your pinch of snuff before entering a mysterious cave. Like the thousand and one other momentary pauses you insert into your cleric's day.
The better you can imagine out these five things, the better cleric you will be.
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