Having a conversation with a regular last night, who spent most of the time trying to convince me of something and very nearly succeeding. It's only that it's so absurd to me that I find my old cynicism gripping me like grim death, and I have to throw it out into the void in order to corroborate the claim. If this fellow wishes to declare himself, he may, but I won't give names.
The proposal runs thusly: that there is a strong contingent in the community of people who play D&D, especially those who play 4e and who are closely associated with WOTC, who believe that the most important ideal of the game is 'balance,' the idea that every player, regardless of class or any other distinction, must be equal and the same where it comes to combat ... and moreover, or more to the point, WOTC's moves regarding the game in the last decade has been a strong effort to service this contingent of people.
This all warps in some manner to a gaming mindset that says that if I am playing at the table with A, B and C, then not only must I be as effective as A, B, and C in combat, but I must be exactly as effective, and the more exactly as effective I am, in every combat we have, the "better" the game system, because it doesn't play favorites. Added to this is the concept that if I, as DM, offer the party a large gem, but only one, then I am being unfair to all the members of the party who did not receive that gem. In short, by virtue of this balanced ideal, I am a "bad DM."
Now, I can believe someone as stupid as Mearls buys into this crap. There's quite a few bloggers out there that I can believe might buy into this crap. But I've never met anyone who felt this way, not personally, and I certainly haven't had any conversations before where anyone tried to pitch this at me as an "ideal game system." The whole concept is laughable.
But then I am told, if a party is encouraged to play together and pit themselves as a group against monsters, without feeling the need to compete and win against each other, then that's a lot of kumbayah bullshit that many 'hardcore and serious players' don't buy into. I can't imagine what sort of nitwitted, panty-bunched stick-in-their-ass bastards these sorts of hardcore players are, but I know for certain you'd never find them at one of my tables.
If D&D has descended down to the level where it is so boring now that the individual players have stopped taking enjoyment from the pursuit of monsters, treasure and glory, and can only see it in terms of "who has the most experience this week," then no fucking wonder that many of you reading this blog cringe at any reference to that game, and not S&W or some other acronym that hasn't been soiled, rubbed over with turpentine, shat on, pressed into a small cube and shoved up a monkey's butt. It's a real shame. D&D used to be such a pleasant game. I supposed I shall have to start calling my game Brains & Brigands.
(note how the letters of the word 'brain' all exist in 'brigands')
WOTC's involvement in all this, apparently from a money stand point, goes like this:
1) The Owners of the Franchise involve themselves in market research in the late 1980s, and learn from crawling convention cretins that what they really want in the game is more "balance" ... vaguely conceived as the sort of thing noted above. More to the point, they are looking for a game where they can "invent their own characters."
2) TOOTF game tests a lot of crap and comes up with the build system that is 2.0. But it's crap, so they sit down and make a better build system, 3.0. Which is still crap, even though they try to balance it further with 3.5.
3) Each system that's advanced fails because the players, who are still saying they want a balanced system, make thorough efforts to break every system that's balanced.
4) However, TOOTF realizes that by fucking around with the balance endlessly in book after book, guide after guide, 'patch' after 'patch,' they are making money.
5) So ultimately the TOOTF are not building systems to produce better games, but systems which are in fact harder to break, encouraging a generation of stupid people to forget what the game was originally about, and concentrate instead on finding the best way to break whatever is the latest bullshit balanced system. This is the real reason for 5e, because the players of 4e have grown bored with breaking a system that's too clumsy or impractical to 'break.'
And amidst all this, the OSR springs up. True dat?
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Monday, April 8, 2013
Can It Be Cool?
Over the weekend, catching up on the Big Bang Theory (I find I'm lethargic first thing on weekend mornings, so one must watch something) and being annoyed at how really awful the writing is getting, I sadly watched their Christmas show. For those who don't know, it was a riff off playing D&D to rescue Santa from a dungeon.
The presentation of D&D was ... unfortunate. Really unfortunate.
Those not completely immersed in the culture are well aware of how bad the culture looks from the outside. I work everyday with people who make considerable amounts of money, whose lives revolve around business models, marketing, the acquisition of material goods and what used to be called 'conspicuous consumption.' I can say without equivocation that these people have, almost universally, never heard of D&D. In High School, while the gentle reader and I were playing the game, these were the people purchasing from the school store, competing in school sports, cheering on people competing in school sports and 'getting involved' on every level upon which we did not want to get involved.
If you can remember playing in your school cafeteria, and a group of 'popular' guys or girls passed by and gave you those looks that said you were on the same social level as bugs, then you have some idea of whom I speak.
Some reading this will bristle with contempt ... once upon a time, I certainly would have. Some readers here are in the same environment as me, however, and like me, they shudder when they imagine one of these people forming an opinion of a gaming convention. Which wouldn't be a problem, I suppose ... if all you cared about was the hedonistic certainty that spending your weekend doing whatever you freaking want is the only thing that can, or will ever, matter.
If someone speaks of improving the public's conception of roleplaying games, however ... with the fond idea that one day they could be taken seriously ... then let me say this: we're looking at a serious disconnect between those people who have authority in the community and those people with the money to change the community's respectability.
Authority in the community is, on the one hand, a popularity contest ... but it is also powerfully influenced by how much of your life you're willing to commit to the gaming community, in exclusion to all else. There's something odd and humorous about the fantasy element that turns the argument, "Jeremy is an ordinary store clerk by day, but at the gaming table he's a Barbarian God," into respect for people who spend so much time gaming they have no ambitions beyond being an ordinary store clerk. And if you should point out the sad, pathetic frame work of this ... well ... you're obviously not the sort of person we want around here.
Fundamentally, I believe that D&D and roleplaying is an intellectual activity. I would like to think any intellectual activity is a positive thing. I believe that all the time I've spent being a DM, encouraging people to play, in effect 'training' them to play, has made me a better manager. I believe the skills I picked up in high school researching elements of the game served me well in University, and ultimately in teaching myself how to acquire skills on my own. I believe that people who have played together around me have had opportunities to be social where otherwise they may not have, and in gaining confidence at the table, they've been able to tackle school, life ... even positive, romantic relationships. I think the game can be very good for people.
Obsessiveness never is, however ... and where "the community" is concerned, the most overt and visible segment is unfortunately the festival of obsessiveness that is the gaming convention.
I suppose I'm no different than the ordinary, urban professional who happens to be gay, who shakes his head sadly at half-naked men dressed as pixies dancing in the streets. It's debateable whether or not "in your face" gays were contributory or detrimental to the eventual acceptance of homosexuality. My feeling is that, with time, the friendly fellow or girl you happen to work with, who expresses his or her preference while being just another human being, has done far more towards enabling society to move on from staunch conservatism than has the aggressive street abuse carried forth by flaming faggots.
There's no question that there are thousands more people who play roleplaying games in quiet, unadvertised sessions than all those who dress up to drive 700 miles to attend this weekend's activities in Cincinnati, Savannah or Topeka. But there's no voice, no visibility for these people, no means to express their idea of the game - certainly not a youtube video, since they don't want to be judged on how good they are as DMs and Players. Yes, I do spend a lot of time talking about that; and about what's good or bad that I see or act upon. But I can't blame a few people comfortably playing the game on a Saturday night for wanting to avoid raving, ranting psychotic opinions such as I generate.
What's needed, to bring these people out of the closet, as it were, and have them speak up in public about what they play and how much they play, is a marketing campaign that would encourage them to believe they wouldn't look like idiots. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen the TV show or the blurb in a paper that hasn't slanted virtually everyone who plays this game into some kind of crazytown. Even people who like D&D can't bear to read another magazine article about it ... not with its usual, simplified explanations spoken or written in the tone of, "Can you believe people do this?"
There are other isolated, intellectual groups with odd habits and incomprehensible inward thinking. Most of them benefit from the sort of vague notion that they contribute meaningfully to society. Roleplaying games don't have that sort of cachet. But they might, if presented well, obtain a respectability if, just once, they could be presented as 'cool' and not the participation of retarded adult children.
I'd love to have an idea for a commercial-like video that could present D&D the way the below presents mathematics. That would be ... marvelous.
The presentation of D&D was ... unfortunate. Really unfortunate.
Those not completely immersed in the culture are well aware of how bad the culture looks from the outside. I work everyday with people who make considerable amounts of money, whose lives revolve around business models, marketing, the acquisition of material goods and what used to be called 'conspicuous consumption.' I can say without equivocation that these people have, almost universally, never heard of D&D. In High School, while the gentle reader and I were playing the game, these were the people purchasing from the school store, competing in school sports, cheering on people competing in school sports and 'getting involved' on every level upon which we did not want to get involved.
If you can remember playing in your school cafeteria, and a group of 'popular' guys or girls passed by and gave you those looks that said you were on the same social level as bugs, then you have some idea of whom I speak.
Some reading this will bristle with contempt ... once upon a time, I certainly would have. Some readers here are in the same environment as me, however, and like me, they shudder when they imagine one of these people forming an opinion of a gaming convention. Which wouldn't be a problem, I suppose ... if all you cared about was the hedonistic certainty that spending your weekend doing whatever you freaking want is the only thing that can, or will ever, matter.
If someone speaks of improving the public's conception of roleplaying games, however ... with the fond idea that one day they could be taken seriously ... then let me say this: we're looking at a serious disconnect between those people who have authority in the community and those people with the money to change the community's respectability.
Authority in the community is, on the one hand, a popularity contest ... but it is also powerfully influenced by how much of your life you're willing to commit to the gaming community, in exclusion to all else. There's something odd and humorous about the fantasy element that turns the argument, "Jeremy is an ordinary store clerk by day, but at the gaming table he's a Barbarian God," into respect for people who spend so much time gaming they have no ambitions beyond being an ordinary store clerk. And if you should point out the sad, pathetic frame work of this ... well ... you're obviously not the sort of person we want around here.
Fundamentally, I believe that D&D and roleplaying is an intellectual activity. I would like to think any intellectual activity is a positive thing. I believe that all the time I've spent being a DM, encouraging people to play, in effect 'training' them to play, has made me a better manager. I believe the skills I picked up in high school researching elements of the game served me well in University, and ultimately in teaching myself how to acquire skills on my own. I believe that people who have played together around me have had opportunities to be social where otherwise they may not have, and in gaining confidence at the table, they've been able to tackle school, life ... even positive, romantic relationships. I think the game can be very good for people.
Obsessiveness never is, however ... and where "the community" is concerned, the most overt and visible segment is unfortunately the festival of obsessiveness that is the gaming convention.
I suppose I'm no different than the ordinary, urban professional who happens to be gay, who shakes his head sadly at half-naked men dressed as pixies dancing in the streets. It's debateable whether or not "in your face" gays were contributory or detrimental to the eventual acceptance of homosexuality. My feeling is that, with time, the friendly fellow or girl you happen to work with, who expresses his or her preference while being just another human being, has done far more towards enabling society to move on from staunch conservatism than has the aggressive street abuse carried forth by flaming faggots.
There's no question that there are thousands more people who play roleplaying games in quiet, unadvertised sessions than all those who dress up to drive 700 miles to attend this weekend's activities in Cincinnati, Savannah or Topeka. But there's no voice, no visibility for these people, no means to express their idea of the game - certainly not a youtube video, since they don't want to be judged on how good they are as DMs and Players. Yes, I do spend a lot of time talking about that; and about what's good or bad that I see or act upon. But I can't blame a few people comfortably playing the game on a Saturday night for wanting to avoid raving, ranting psychotic opinions such as I generate.
What's needed, to bring these people out of the closet, as it were, and have them speak up in public about what they play and how much they play, is a marketing campaign that would encourage them to believe they wouldn't look like idiots. I haven't seen that. I haven't seen the TV show or the blurb in a paper that hasn't slanted virtually everyone who plays this game into some kind of crazytown. Even people who like D&D can't bear to read another magazine article about it ... not with its usual, simplified explanations spoken or written in the tone of, "Can you believe people do this?"
There are other isolated, intellectual groups with odd habits and incomprehensible inward thinking. Most of them benefit from the sort of vague notion that they contribute meaningfully to society. Roleplaying games don't have that sort of cachet. But they might, if presented well, obtain a respectability if, just once, they could be presented as 'cool' and not the participation of retarded adult children.
I'd love to have an idea for a commercial-like video that could present D&D the way the below presents mathematics. That would be ... marvelous.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Southern Kosovo in Small
Picking up from this post.
First, the hex generation excel has been updated and expanded. I've included a little gimmick where you may go to individual tabs and it will generate which hexes in a seven-hex group should be wilderness (black) or civilized (white) ... and there's the beginning of a generation for what sort of hex it should be. This description on the groups tabs will be expanded and expanded, until - I expect - once you generate a hex you should be able to copy the information from that hex onto another file for reference. So all you need to know about the hex can be generated in about a second. But making this really, truly creative is a ways off.
All I really wanted to manage at this point was to create a realistically random representation of a group of hexes with almost no information. I spent some of yesterday and some of today working up southern Kosovo ... which I now present here, at two miles per hex.
It's no overly clear on blogger, even though I've saved it in 300 dpi. There has been some color change. There are little notes on it describing not just what the hex areas are, but in some cases what's produced in the mines or upon meadows. My trade tables, with references for what is produced in what parts of my world, were very useful for adding notes to the map.
There is a great deal more that I generated, but the edges all around are filled with notes which did not look as sweet as the above ... so I've cut the edges down to what's completely finished.
I had to do some goofy things that must be done to manage all the in-between hexes ... which I'll blog about tomorrow. I'm a bit tired right now, and I want to pick up my writing for this evening.
Hope you find this interesting.
First, the hex generation excel has been updated and expanded. I've included a little gimmick where you may go to individual tabs and it will generate which hexes in a seven-hex group should be wilderness (black) or civilized (white) ... and there's the beginning of a generation for what sort of hex it should be. This description on the groups tabs will be expanded and expanded, until - I expect - once you generate a hex you should be able to copy the information from that hex onto another file for reference. So all you need to know about the hex can be generated in about a second. But making this really, truly creative is a ways off.
All I really wanted to manage at this point was to create a realistically random representation of a group of hexes with almost no information. I spent some of yesterday and some of today working up southern Kosovo ... which I now present here, at two miles per hex.
It's no overly clear on blogger, even though I've saved it in 300 dpi. There has been some color change. There are little notes on it describing not just what the hex areas are, but in some cases what's produced in the mines or upon meadows. My trade tables, with references for what is produced in what parts of my world, were very useful for adding notes to the map.
There is a great deal more that I generated, but the edges all around are filled with notes which did not look as sweet as the above ... so I've cut the edges down to what's completely finished.
I had to do some goofy things that must be done to manage all the in-between hexes ... which I'll blog about tomorrow. I'm a bit tired right now, and I want to pick up my writing for this evening.
Hope you find this interesting.
Friday, April 5, 2013
405 - Method Not Allowed
I know, I know, these crunchy number posts are far too gritty to be really liked. Better the grand conceptualizing posts, that cause the reader to look at D&D a whole new way. Wait, you'd rather have the academic posts, where I wax long and deep about the development of electricity in the western world. That is, if I'm not writing something ranty or funny or more roleplaying based. And there's never enough sex.
Sigh. I get this all the time.
I think enough people know me well enough now to suspect that I could, if I wished, sit down and write any of the above on a whim. The ranting stuff is certainly easy enough ... I just have to go read whatever Mike Mearls has written last and off I go (you notice the higher the tier, the less he has to say about it?). Funny is a bit harder ... like the demon who preferred to possess dwarves in order to be more well-rounded. Yes, I can do better than that, but it takes more time by a geometric progression to be funny, and right now I'd rather talk about not talking about what people would prefer I had said yesterday when speaking - and there is always someone who says I should say something else.
Granted, I'm holding back on a lot of the conceptual stuff because I'm saving it for the book. I don't want right now to talk about DMing, or how to manage your players (or indeed if you should), or what is the purpose of a setting or why in hell I love the game. I have to save new viewpoints for awhile ... and yes, there are NEW viewpoints. There are always new viewpoints.
They sort of come at me from a lot of different angles, and the reason that's relevant is because I'm not sitting down thinking, most of the time, what this blog needs. I'm too busy trying to keep up with answering all the random bytes of information shooting at me from every direction. I overhear a conversation, or some bit of dialogue from a movie, or someone asks a question and bang, my fertile little brain immediately starts looking at how to twist and turn that into a blog post. And this is happening constantly.
Yesterday, I listened to Pink's most recent album, The Truth About Love ... and the second time through it (not the first), this lyric hit me: "Let me be lighter, tired of being a fighter."
Now, if you know Pink, you know what that's about ... but I'm a fighter too, I've been one for ages. And when I heard that, I got a little smile. See, what's funny is that I haven't been tired of it since - I just have no idea.
Nobody likes a fighter, until you happen to have one on your side. I have never been anywhere except on my side, so when someone happens to agree with me it is entirely by chance. This blog collects, regularly, a set of people who last for a few months, who get to like me - who are then stunned to find me screaming about something they hold near and dear. They hadn't quite realized I wasn't like them. They just happened to be on my side for awhile.
Of course, the other side always hates you. Particularly when you won't stop when they want to.
When you're young, this fighting program is exhausting. You're not sure you're in the right camp (particularly if you can't even find a camp) and holy shit is there a lot of stuff to fight about. I mean, practically everything. So if you have the fighting gene, you pretty much have to start making decisions in your early teens, about how much is being liked important to you, what do you care enough to fight over, blah blah blah. We don't have to go into all that. You pick your battles. You recognize your limitations. And still, year after year, you always find yourself thinking, "I just can't do this shit any more." The years grind you down and stage by stage, you grow lighter. You let things slide. People want to give higher prison sentences for abusing dogs than for raping women? Fine, fine. Gun store owners can go for years without an audit? Fine, fine. Two young business execs next to you on the train, hunched over their ipad, laugh about fucking a 'bitch' while the 30-something woman behind them visually shrinks? Fine. Just fine. The world is a messed up place.
You let it go because you can't change it. That's the blissful realization of time. You don't crack together the heads of the two guys on the train (they'd have never seen it coming) because you realize it isn't going to change the world, it's only going to seriously change your life. You know that anything less than cracking skulls is pouring water on a tin roof and expecting something to grow. So you don't do anything. You know the shrinking woman is going to get tougher. You know the two guys are going to slide into a life of slow and gentle misery. Karma will settle all accounts. Such is the perspective of age.
The gentle reader may want this blog to follow a certain pattern, to produce more posts of the kind that particular reader likes, but I can't promise that. I have a lot yet to say about hex generation - I mean, really a lot. I've spent many, many years looking at blank, empty spaces on maps, aching to find some means to fill them. I've read lots and lots about the sad failures of wilderness crawls, about the inability to grasp any sense of cohesion in cities or macro-structure for the sandbox game. I'm definitely onto something; I'm immensely pleased with the results. I'm thrilled to have a generation scheme that doesn't fit into a two dimensional, two-columned table. I know I'm really way out there, on the vanguard, and that I'm designing something that's more suitable to a video game than to the reader's gaming table. No, this just isn't something you can generate easily during play. No, its not something you can comfortably scratch out on paper. To use it, you'd need to learn how to work a computer, and more than that, some sort of design program. They've only been about fifteen, twenty years, and you've never considered what they would add to your game - or you've tried, and failed, and that's it for you.
I can't let the decisions of other people define how I write or what I write about, for a simple reason. I'm bored with what people want. People want to live in a world where a dog never gets hurt. People want guns. People want to fuck bitches and people want to live in a world where no one ever wants to do that, or call it that. People want, want, want ... and in the long, long run, it's much easier to fight than to try to give them what they want. It isn't the fighting that grinds you down in the end. It's the trying to figure out what other people want. It's worrying about it, it's listening to it or thinking that if you don't meet the criteria, you won't survive, you won't be paid, you won't have a job and you won't be loved. It's exhausting.
I love that many of you like this blog. I greatly appreciate that many of you take the time to throw in a bit of praise, a bit of encouragement, even as backhanded as it often is. Backhanded praise is the best kind. It's promises that you don't want what I want. It promises that you're still measuring your life by what you believe and not by what anyone else does. It promises that there's hope for you.
What I really love to hear, just the same, isn't what the gentle reader likes about me, or what the gentle reader dislikes. What I want to hear - what really ratchets up my dopamine - is hearing what I've said that's wrong. When I hear little, or nothing ... its an odd little place. It says on the one hand, I've said too many things that were right, so good on me; and it says, I'm way the hell and gone out there, and no one's getting enough to deconstruct it. The second makes me very sad. I always hope its the first.
Well, it's a null program to tell me what to write, or even to hope I write something. Thus the title of this post. I expect this blog to wash over you. I expect it to make you feel uncomfortable. I expect that you'll demand explanations and address practical issues. But I'm not looking for permission to write this blog. I'm not looking for guidance. The request line allows only for valid resources.
Sigh. I get this all the time.
I think enough people know me well enough now to suspect that I could, if I wished, sit down and write any of the above on a whim. The ranting stuff is certainly easy enough ... I just have to go read whatever Mike Mearls has written last and off I go (you notice the higher the tier, the less he has to say about it?). Funny is a bit harder ... like the demon who preferred to possess dwarves in order to be more well-rounded. Yes, I can do better than that, but it takes more time by a geometric progression to be funny, and right now I'd rather talk about not talking about what people would prefer I had said yesterday when speaking - and there is always someone who says I should say something else.
Granted, I'm holding back on a lot of the conceptual stuff because I'm saving it for the book. I don't want right now to talk about DMing, or how to manage your players (or indeed if you should), or what is the purpose of a setting or why in hell I love the game. I have to save new viewpoints for awhile ... and yes, there are NEW viewpoints. There are always new viewpoints.
They sort of come at me from a lot of different angles, and the reason that's relevant is because I'm not sitting down thinking, most of the time, what this blog needs. I'm too busy trying to keep up with answering all the random bytes of information shooting at me from every direction. I overhear a conversation, or some bit of dialogue from a movie, or someone asks a question and bang, my fertile little brain immediately starts looking at how to twist and turn that into a blog post. And this is happening constantly.
Yesterday, I listened to Pink's most recent album, The Truth About Love ... and the second time through it (not the first), this lyric hit me: "Let me be lighter, tired of being a fighter."
Now, if you know Pink, you know what that's about ... but I'm a fighter too, I've been one for ages. And when I heard that, I got a little smile. See, what's funny is that I haven't been tired of it since - I just have no idea.
Nobody likes a fighter, until you happen to have one on your side. I have never been anywhere except on my side, so when someone happens to agree with me it is entirely by chance. This blog collects, regularly, a set of people who last for a few months, who get to like me - who are then stunned to find me screaming about something they hold near and dear. They hadn't quite realized I wasn't like them. They just happened to be on my side for awhile.
Of course, the other side always hates you. Particularly when you won't stop when they want to.
When you're young, this fighting program is exhausting. You're not sure you're in the right camp (particularly if you can't even find a camp) and holy shit is there a lot of stuff to fight about. I mean, practically everything. So if you have the fighting gene, you pretty much have to start making decisions in your early teens, about how much is being liked important to you, what do you care enough to fight over, blah blah blah. We don't have to go into all that. You pick your battles. You recognize your limitations. And still, year after year, you always find yourself thinking, "I just can't do this shit any more." The years grind you down and stage by stage, you grow lighter. You let things slide. People want to give higher prison sentences for abusing dogs than for raping women? Fine, fine. Gun store owners can go for years without an audit? Fine, fine. Two young business execs next to you on the train, hunched over their ipad, laugh about fucking a 'bitch' while the 30-something woman behind them visually shrinks? Fine. Just fine. The world is a messed up place.
You let it go because you can't change it. That's the blissful realization of time. You don't crack together the heads of the two guys on the train (they'd have never seen it coming) because you realize it isn't going to change the world, it's only going to seriously change your life. You know that anything less than cracking skulls is pouring water on a tin roof and expecting something to grow. So you don't do anything. You know the shrinking woman is going to get tougher. You know the two guys are going to slide into a life of slow and gentle misery. Karma will settle all accounts. Such is the perspective of age.
The gentle reader may want this blog to follow a certain pattern, to produce more posts of the kind that particular reader likes, but I can't promise that. I have a lot yet to say about hex generation - I mean, really a lot. I've spent many, many years looking at blank, empty spaces on maps, aching to find some means to fill them. I've read lots and lots about the sad failures of wilderness crawls, about the inability to grasp any sense of cohesion in cities or macro-structure for the sandbox game. I'm definitely onto something; I'm immensely pleased with the results. I'm thrilled to have a generation scheme that doesn't fit into a two dimensional, two-columned table. I know I'm really way out there, on the vanguard, and that I'm designing something that's more suitable to a video game than to the reader's gaming table. No, this just isn't something you can generate easily during play. No, its not something you can comfortably scratch out on paper. To use it, you'd need to learn how to work a computer, and more than that, some sort of design program. They've only been about fifteen, twenty years, and you've never considered what they would add to your game - or you've tried, and failed, and that's it for you.
I can't let the decisions of other people define how I write or what I write about, for a simple reason. I'm bored with what people want. People want to live in a world where a dog never gets hurt. People want guns. People want to fuck bitches and people want to live in a world where no one ever wants to do that, or call it that. People want, want, want ... and in the long, long run, it's much easier to fight than to try to give them what they want. It isn't the fighting that grinds you down in the end. It's the trying to figure out what other people want. It's worrying about it, it's listening to it or thinking that if you don't meet the criteria, you won't survive, you won't be paid, you won't have a job and you won't be loved. It's exhausting.
I love that many of you like this blog. I greatly appreciate that many of you take the time to throw in a bit of praise, a bit of encouragement, even as backhanded as it often is. Backhanded praise is the best kind. It's promises that you don't want what I want. It promises that you're still measuring your life by what you believe and not by what anyone else does. It promises that there's hope for you.
What I really love to hear, just the same, isn't what the gentle reader likes about me, or what the gentle reader dislikes. What I want to hear - what really ratchets up my dopamine - is hearing what I've said that's wrong. When I hear little, or nothing ... its an odd little place. It says on the one hand, I've said too many things that were right, so good on me; and it says, I'm way the hell and gone out there, and no one's getting enough to deconstruct it. The second makes me very sad. I always hope its the first.
Well, it's a null program to tell me what to write, or even to hope I write something. Thus the title of this post. I expect this blog to wash over you. I expect it to make you feel uncomfortable. I expect that you'll demand explanations and address practical issues. But I'm not looking for permission to write this blog. I'm not looking for guidance. The request line allows only for valid resources.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
The Kepler in the 2-Mile Hex
Regarding my plans for Kosovo.
Before I get into any of this, I need to state first and foremost, I have no intention of working over my entire world upon this scheme. I would not live long enough, for one thing. It's purpose is to define small areas which need greater detail, and no more.
Secondly, I feel I need to rejoin with a comment that a computer program goes into far, far more intricate detail about relatively unimportant things than I'll be discussing today. So where it comes to describing me as going way over the top, I don't think that's at all fair. The programming for watering one of your plants the year round would be much more complicated than this ... and, like this, that is also something you could just do yourself. So let's have some perspective.
Now, look at this.
That is a recent generator I have fixed up on excel for the use in creating hex patterns, or 'groups,' for my world. See, unlike the random hex mapping posts I've done, I have no intention of calculating out 6-mile hexes. I did once, yes ... I must admit, my mind was in that place. But of late I have been thinking, if you're going to do something, go long and go deep.
My intention is to expand the Kosovo map on the post linked above (see below, where I've posted the map again) down to the 2-mile hex level ... here's a rough representation:
And here's Kosovo that I posted before:
Before I get into any of this, I need to state first and foremost, I have no intention of working over my entire world upon this scheme. I would not live long enough, for one thing. It's purpose is to define small areas which need greater detail, and no more.
Secondly, I feel I need to rejoin with a comment that a computer program goes into far, far more intricate detail about relatively unimportant things than I'll be discussing today. So where it comes to describing me as going way over the top, I don't think that's at all fair. The programming for watering one of your plants the year round would be much more complicated than this ... and, like this, that is also something you could just do yourself. So let's have some perspective.
Now, look at this.
That is a recent generator I have fixed up on excel for the use in creating hex patterns, or 'groups,' for my world. See, unlike the random hex mapping posts I've done, I have no intention of calculating out 6-mile hexes. I did once, yes ... I must admit, my mind was in that place. But of late I have been thinking, if you're going to do something, go long and go deep.
My intention is to expand the Kosovo map on the post linked above (see below, where I've posted the map again) down to the 2-mile hex level ... here's a rough representation:
 |
| Forgive the rough appearance; and as I've explained before, I like using the color pink as a base color - it stands out, so that if you've missed something, it's obvious |
Nine hexes across doesn't quite make 2-mile hexes, obviously. Each hex is actually 11,733.33 feet, or 3,911.11 yards. That's 44 battlemaps in diameter, assuming 53 five-foot hexes on the long axis. I hope that helps the gentle reader's conception.
My plan is to generate 7 Groups per 20-mile hex ... and then to fill in the holes later in two clever ways (which I will get to in due time). But how does one define the groups from a single figure? Is it really possible to define 55+ hexes with nothing more than the number '25?'
At this point, I'm going to assume you've looked at the excel download that's available on the wiki link I've posted. The front page, the Entry sheet, asks you to add the number that's highlighted in yellow. For this hex in Kosovo, we would type 25 ... and then it would generate a combination of hex groups which would correspond to that number. I got 1 type III; 1 type V; 1 type VI; 3 type VII; and 1 type VIII. We should know from previous posts about hex generation that this applies to groups that contain 2 wilderness hexes (type III), 4 wilderness hexes (type V), 5 wilderness hexes (type VI), 6 wilderness hexes (type VII), and all, or 7 wilderness hexes (type VIII). Sorry to be pedantic and all, but I'm hoping the reader is on the same page with me.
The hexagonal figure on the Entry sheet then indicates the order that these hexes are places, with 1st referring to the most civilized hex and 7th referring to the least civilized hex. Each hex is then rolled for its 'group' precisely the same way I rolled them in the plotting posts.
How does the generator arrive at that distribution? Well ... this is something I worked out just yesterday. If we look at the Stage 1 Sort sheet, I worked out all the possible combinations for group types, where the total number of groups added up to seven. I couldn't manage to work out the exact calculation of how many there ought to be ... I just couldn't drum up the requisite math. So I laid them out manually, because I'm completely nuts, the way Johannes Kepler was. The total combinations I got were 3,131 ... which sounds like it ought to be the right number, but who the hell knows.
I then assigned a type I hex 64 points, a type II hex 32 points, a type III hex 16 points and so on, adding them together to get all the possible combinations. If you roll down the spreadsheet to line 2,856, you'll see that there are 15 possible group combinations that can add up to '25' ... so when you think about it, with 3,131 combinations for all the possible infrastructure levels - and a complete 20-mile hex being covered with civilized small hexes not occurring until reaching 448 - we are talking very, very little repetition. The massive cultured areas will be similar, in at least their wilderness aspects; many 20 mile hexes will be pure wilderness; but the gradient between will be varied to the extreme. Which I just have to say, I love.
Pure civilized areas will have the most features, so that will change their nature ... adding in all those things I talked about here. And the wilderness has its own appeal.
So I'll be sketching out Kosovo over the next week or so. For now, this is all just food for thought. The reader can observe how really clunky I am with excel ... but I use what I know, and it doesn't have to be pretty to work.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Does That Answer Your Questions, Doctor?
So, it is my world and the ogre has six hit dice. It's nine feet tall, it weighs 728 lbs., and therefore it has a d6 and a d8 per hit die ... and the +1 bonus is applied to every hit die as well. So the big guy has 58 hit points.
The party consists of a 5th level halfling thief, Olie; a 5th level human fighter, Sharper; a 4th level elven mage, Demifee; a 2nd level dwarven cleric, Sven; and a first level human ranger, Molly. With Olie leading the way, they enter the enormous cave, which truly dwarfs them. They know the ogre is present, as they've just recently bitch-slapped a small kobald settlement nearby, and in desperation the kobalds explained that all their treasure has been taken by the ogre for years now.
They find the ogre asleep inside the second cave, upon a bed ten feet long and six feet above the floor. The party makes their plans. The thief will sneak up, climb the bed and attempt to do triple damage. The mage and the rest of the party will move within range. The mage woefully underestimates the danger and chooses to cast burning hands. They all make their rolls to approach, and as the Olie is climbing the bed, Demifee screws up and gives the game away.
Olie misses with a stab, then leaps from the bed and makes his check, taking no damage. He runs towards the rest of the party, and the ogre blunders, half asleep, right into Demifee's spell. Which singes him a bit, but no more. It turns, finds its gigantic godentag on the wall, and starts into combat.
It's big, its fast, and it hits like a mule that's nine feet tall. A godentag that's 3 and a half times bigger than one that does 2-8 should do, in my opinion, 2-16 ... and that does not include the damage bonus from the 18/00 strength. The ogre hits every time it swings and very quickly the party is in trouble. The second hit on Molly kills her, everyone is soon down to less than 20 hp and prospects of survival look grim.
The thief and the cleric decide to run. Demifee has been doing well with her whip spell, but she's looking to get out, too. But the 5th level fighter decides to go one more round, and the mage sticks by her. And here is where things get interesting.
Truth is, I gave the party the opportunity to go when the ranger died. It was also their last opportunity. The ogre moved fast enough to ensure that once the mage and fighter tried for that "one more round," it could hammer them both without letting either escape ... remembering that a good hit in my world causes the loss of a round, where you cannot take any action. Fact was, by staying one round too many, the fighter and mage were almost certainly dead.
And here is the question - why did they stay? In my world, with my experience system, they were already due to gain experience for what they'd done so far. They'd done damage, they'd taken a lot of damage (more than 80 points, all told, by then), and if they escaped with their lives at that point, they would have done all right. They might have regrouped and come back another day. That was certainly Olie and Sven's plan.
It's not enough to say that parties "don't like to run." The question is, why? The fighter said afterwards, she didn't like the idea of losing. I find that very interesting ... since, in fact, the almost certain way of 'losing' was to stay and die. If we define the win as survival, then the win at that point was to run away.
She meant, obviously, losing the battle. In that moment, she would rather stay and die rather than run and live ... and I don't think it was just because it was a game, and that dying didn't mean much. I estimate she'd invested almost a hundred hours to get her character to the level that it was; I do not run an easy world. It takes time and effort to gain experience. She has expressed her like for her character Sharper on many occasions. She would not have wanted Sharper to die. And still she was ready to gamble 100 hours of effort on five minutes of opportunity.
I've been talking about running a world in which a player playing the game does more than just roll dice and succeed or fail; they're given the opportunity to question who they are ... and in doing so, surprise themselves. For that is really the high point of the game. Not that you brilliantly solve some puzzle, or cleverly talk your way past the guards ... no, no, no. It's when you find yourself doing something really stupid, for reasons that you can't begin to explain, and suddenly realize that you've just fucked yourself.
Let me emphasize: the player behind Sharper's decision did not say, "... because I thought I could win." In fact, she was almost immediately certain there was no possible way she could. When the thief and the cleric ran; when the mage was hit and slammed into negative hit points ... the fighter suddenly understood that it was all over. It was too late to run, it was too late to do anything except to be really, really lucky. She was toast, and she knew it.
How often are we there in real life? We've gone too far and we've quit our job in a rush of emotion and anger; we've made a split second decision to go around that truck ahead and now something is flying way too fast at us; we've decided to eat that sandwich that's been a bit too long in the fridge, and now our stomachs are really beginning to bother us. Momentary stupidity. It tells us so much about ourselves, about our decision making ability and about our judgment. We don't just learn from our mistakes; we learn from our really stupid mistakes.
Maturity results from making a lot of them.
We're not gambling that the sandwich is okay. We know it probably isn't. But it looks tasty. And we're more or less certain of our own invincibility. So we eat it, and it isn't until its too late that we think, wow ... what the fuck were we thinking? We're not laying on the couch stuffing Tums in our mouths thinking, "Hm, I gambled and lost ... well, win some, lose some." No, we're thinking, "Why can't I ever learn?"
Introspection is such a bitch. Even those not prone to it sometimes have it thrust upon them.
This game, this D&D game, has the opportunity to portray these moments like no other game in the history of the universe. All the more so when players have the opportunity to make their own game. This ogre did not exist as part of a greater 'campaign.' The party did not need to kill it to get to the next stage. There are other adventures, other monsters, other treasures, scattered all over a great big world. Nothing about this particular ogre cave said, "You MUST kill this ogre to progress." No. Kill the ogre, don't kill the ogre, it makes no difference. If you don't kill it, you'll find treasure somewhere else the next time.
All the more reason to really, truly wonder why in this instance, in this moment, in the mind's eye of the player, this ogre must die. It's life. It's true life. Where nothing is ordained. Where, as Rorschach says,
"Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night. Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach."
The party consists of a 5th level halfling thief, Olie; a 5th level human fighter, Sharper; a 4th level elven mage, Demifee; a 2nd level dwarven cleric, Sven; and a first level human ranger, Molly. With Olie leading the way, they enter the enormous cave, which truly dwarfs them. They know the ogre is present, as they've just recently bitch-slapped a small kobald settlement nearby, and in desperation the kobalds explained that all their treasure has been taken by the ogre for years now.
They find the ogre asleep inside the second cave, upon a bed ten feet long and six feet above the floor. The party makes their plans. The thief will sneak up, climb the bed and attempt to do triple damage. The mage and the rest of the party will move within range. The mage woefully underestimates the danger and chooses to cast burning hands. They all make their rolls to approach, and as the Olie is climbing the bed, Demifee screws up and gives the game away.
Olie misses with a stab, then leaps from the bed and makes his check, taking no damage. He runs towards the rest of the party, and the ogre blunders, half asleep, right into Demifee's spell. Which singes him a bit, but no more. It turns, finds its gigantic godentag on the wall, and starts into combat.
It's big, its fast, and it hits like a mule that's nine feet tall. A godentag that's 3 and a half times bigger than one that does 2-8 should do, in my opinion, 2-16 ... and that does not include the damage bonus from the 18/00 strength. The ogre hits every time it swings and very quickly the party is in trouble. The second hit on Molly kills her, everyone is soon down to less than 20 hp and prospects of survival look grim.
The thief and the cleric decide to run. Demifee has been doing well with her whip spell, but she's looking to get out, too. But the 5th level fighter decides to go one more round, and the mage sticks by her. And here is where things get interesting.
Truth is, I gave the party the opportunity to go when the ranger died. It was also their last opportunity. The ogre moved fast enough to ensure that once the mage and fighter tried for that "one more round," it could hammer them both without letting either escape ... remembering that a good hit in my world causes the loss of a round, where you cannot take any action. Fact was, by staying one round too many, the fighter and mage were almost certainly dead.
And here is the question - why did they stay? In my world, with my experience system, they were already due to gain experience for what they'd done so far. They'd done damage, they'd taken a lot of damage (more than 80 points, all told, by then), and if they escaped with their lives at that point, they would have done all right. They might have regrouped and come back another day. That was certainly Olie and Sven's plan.
It's not enough to say that parties "don't like to run." The question is, why? The fighter said afterwards, she didn't like the idea of losing. I find that very interesting ... since, in fact, the almost certain way of 'losing' was to stay and die. If we define the win as survival, then the win at that point was to run away.
She meant, obviously, losing the battle. In that moment, she would rather stay and die rather than run and live ... and I don't think it was just because it was a game, and that dying didn't mean much. I estimate she'd invested almost a hundred hours to get her character to the level that it was; I do not run an easy world. It takes time and effort to gain experience. She has expressed her like for her character Sharper on many occasions. She would not have wanted Sharper to die. And still she was ready to gamble 100 hours of effort on five minutes of opportunity.
I've been talking about running a world in which a player playing the game does more than just roll dice and succeed or fail; they're given the opportunity to question who they are ... and in doing so, surprise themselves. For that is really the high point of the game. Not that you brilliantly solve some puzzle, or cleverly talk your way past the guards ... no, no, no. It's when you find yourself doing something really stupid, for reasons that you can't begin to explain, and suddenly realize that you've just fucked yourself.
Let me emphasize: the player behind Sharper's decision did not say, "... because I thought I could win." In fact, she was almost immediately certain there was no possible way she could. When the thief and the cleric ran; when the mage was hit and slammed into negative hit points ... the fighter suddenly understood that it was all over. It was too late to run, it was too late to do anything except to be really, really lucky. She was toast, and she knew it.
How often are we there in real life? We've gone too far and we've quit our job in a rush of emotion and anger; we've made a split second decision to go around that truck ahead and now something is flying way too fast at us; we've decided to eat that sandwich that's been a bit too long in the fridge, and now our stomachs are really beginning to bother us. Momentary stupidity. It tells us so much about ourselves, about our decision making ability and about our judgment. We don't just learn from our mistakes; we learn from our really stupid mistakes.
Maturity results from making a lot of them.
We're not gambling that the sandwich is okay. We know it probably isn't. But it looks tasty. And we're more or less certain of our own invincibility. So we eat it, and it isn't until its too late that we think, wow ... what the fuck were we thinking? We're not laying on the couch stuffing Tums in our mouths thinking, "Hm, I gambled and lost ... well, win some, lose some." No, we're thinking, "Why can't I ever learn?"
Introspection is such a bitch. Even those not prone to it sometimes have it thrust upon them.
This game, this D&D game, has the opportunity to portray these moments like no other game in the history of the universe. All the more so when players have the opportunity to make their own game. This ogre did not exist as part of a greater 'campaign.' The party did not need to kill it to get to the next stage. There are other adventures, other monsters, other treasures, scattered all over a great big world. Nothing about this particular ogre cave said, "You MUST kill this ogre to progress." No. Kill the ogre, don't kill the ogre, it makes no difference. If you don't kill it, you'll find treasure somewhere else the next time.
All the more reason to really, truly wonder why in this instance, in this moment, in the mind's eye of the player, this ogre must die. It's life. It's true life. Where nothing is ordained. Where, as Rorschach says,
"Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night. Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world. Was Rorschach."
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Added Value Or Destitution
I'm working on the new book now, the one for DMs ... and towards that subject, I'd like to highlight this back-and-forth that's been going on the past week. Incidentally, the sales on Pete's Garage took a little jump this past week. Thank you all, whoever you are. It is really terrific to be selling copies to strangers - you don't know me, you can't possibly have anything invested in my person that guarantees you like my writing. I would encourage you, please, anyone that's listening really ... if you can help out at all, wave the book in front of others on your facebook page, poke a few friends or family. You don't have to say you like it, but if you like this blog and you're able to cut and paste either the image or the link from the sidebar, just to say, 'check this out,' you would have my eternal gratitude. I haven't got a chance of selling this thing without help ... so if you're willing to help, please do.
I've had a little less time to work on the wilderness generation, but mostly I've continued thinking and making lists about what the features would be for each stage of infrastructure ... and towards that, I want to make a few notes about those features I highlighted in my last post on the subject. Specifically, these would be barns, fishing ponds, game trails, granaries, guard posts, hot springs, meadows and wells.
I've been thinking about how it would affect a settled hex - the lowest and least level of settlement, mind, just as I described in the last post - if none of those things were present.
Well, first and foremost we can presume the local people are living upon the edge of starvation, literally putting food on their tables day-to-day. With no barns to store hay, no meadows to provide fodder for livestock or granaries to store staple foodstuffs, we are speaking of a culture that depends upon hunting and edible, natural plants ... along with possibly pigs or other raised animals that did not depend upon grass for survival. This would fit with a culture like the tribes of New Guinea or the Amazon ... but it could also fit with wild European groups who escaped the principle cultures for the relative safety of hills or swamps.
We would be talking swamps without rich fishing, or hill country without good hunting, since we're saying there are no fishing ponds or game trails either. This doesn't mean there are no animals or fish at all to be found ... simply that these are not in abundance. What was available could not support a large population. Vagabonds or bandits living in obscurity like this would fit with there being no guard posts, and no proper measure of law. We are not speaking of a strong bandit guild or anything like that - which would set up its own enforcement. No, this would instead be a scattering of probably violent, perhaps crippled, unskilled and surly peoples who did not 'do well' in polite society. Without good resources, or even a reliable source of water - no wells, remember - pestilence and parasites would exist in abundance ... which would mean venturing into such habitated, squalid towns as these would be a real risk for a party, who would probably do better to camp a few miles away than to take advantage of anyone's generous offering of a bed. Without much means of accumulating wealth, I imagine the 'locals' would love to catch a sleeping player character, or one in the woods with his or her pants down.
Overall, without any of the above features to mitigate the populace, we would be talking about the worst possible environment for seeking aid. So perhaps it isn't so much what the various features would do FOR the party ... its what those same features do for the environment which the party moves through, determining whether or not it is somewhere the party would ever want to be or not.
I've had a little less time to work on the wilderness generation, but mostly I've continued thinking and making lists about what the features would be for each stage of infrastructure ... and towards that, I want to make a few notes about those features I highlighted in my last post on the subject. Specifically, these would be barns, fishing ponds, game trails, granaries, guard posts, hot springs, meadows and wells.
I've been thinking about how it would affect a settled hex - the lowest and least level of settlement, mind, just as I described in the last post - if none of those things were present.
Well, first and foremost we can presume the local people are living upon the edge of starvation, literally putting food on their tables day-to-day. With no barns to store hay, no meadows to provide fodder for livestock or granaries to store staple foodstuffs, we are speaking of a culture that depends upon hunting and edible, natural plants ... along with possibly pigs or other raised animals that did not depend upon grass for survival. This would fit with a culture like the tribes of New Guinea or the Amazon ... but it could also fit with wild European groups who escaped the principle cultures for the relative safety of hills or swamps.
We would be talking swamps without rich fishing, or hill country without good hunting, since we're saying there are no fishing ponds or game trails either. This doesn't mean there are no animals or fish at all to be found ... simply that these are not in abundance. What was available could not support a large population. Vagabonds or bandits living in obscurity like this would fit with there being no guard posts, and no proper measure of law. We are not speaking of a strong bandit guild or anything like that - which would set up its own enforcement. No, this would instead be a scattering of probably violent, perhaps crippled, unskilled and surly peoples who did not 'do well' in polite society. Without good resources, or even a reliable source of water - no wells, remember - pestilence and parasites would exist in abundance ... which would mean venturing into such habitated, squalid towns as these would be a real risk for a party, who would probably do better to camp a few miles away than to take advantage of anyone's generous offering of a bed. Without much means of accumulating wealth, I imagine the 'locals' would love to catch a sleeping player character, or one in the woods with his or her pants down.
Overall, without any of the above features to mitigate the populace, we would be talking about the worst possible environment for seeking aid. So perhaps it isn't so much what the various features would do FOR the party ... its what those same features do for the environment which the party moves through, determining whether or not it is somewhere the party would ever want to be or not.
Monday, April 1, 2013
No Going Back
I have become one of the crazy people.
Which isn't to say I wasn't crazy already. I've been crazy for a long time, for varied reasons, almost all of them because I know things that other people do not. That wasn't the plan from the beginning ... but as I was willing to read books while other people were not, some kind of rift was bound to grow.
For instance, I knew at 13 that there was nothing wrong with being homosexual. I didn't happen to be one, but I had tore through a number of psychological studies on the subject. It was interesting that the word 'faggot' was so pervasive and common in the hallways at school but no one - absolutely no one - was willing to talk about what a faggot was. This being 1977, in grade 7 learned that homosexuality had been considered a mental disease right up until I had been in grade 3. I saw The Boys in the Band on very late night television somewhere around that time, back when the CBC was willing to show that sort of thing after midnight ... I was allowed to stay up as late as I wanted on Friday nights, so it must have been a Friday when I saw it.
For anyone willing to let go of assumed 'truths' and just evaluate the subject on its principles only, its obvious that a human being is a human being, lips are lips and love is love. Yet here it is, 35 years later, and what I realized at 13 is right now offending the hell out of someone whose reading this. Oh well.
Education is a terrifying thing. The chances are if you start reading something, anything, there's a chance that it will make an argument or present evidence that will expose something you've considered to be true for all of your life as a big pile of shit. Hearing another person speak, either with words or in voice, is a risk. You risk realizing you've been an idiot. You risk realizing that you'd rather go on being an idiot than having to change your mind. You risk realizing that things you've said and people who have heard you has made it clear to all and sundry that you've been an idiot for years and years ... and that quite possibly most people who know you know that about you. That is a very hard pill to swallow.
The safest way to avoid that is to avoid reading. Your next strategy must be to avoid everyone who doesn't believe exactly what you believe ... or at least, if you disagree on something, it's something safe like football or whether or not something is a bad movie. The LAST thing you want to do is read some random blog you've found on the internet. That blog, and what it says, might very well fuck you up. You don't want that.
At 48, I have tried to hold onto a willingness to change my mind about things. I think back on some of the big moments in my life when I've done a 180 about something. For instance, I remember the day I stopped believing in God. I was sitting on the 4th floor of the university library and I was immersed in several texts about pagan religions, comparing what Christianity had ripped off the Egyptians and the Norse (at this time of the year, we are all wondering how the Easter Bunny happens to lay eggs). I had known some of this stuff before, but I'd found some books that just went on and on and on, with hundreds of references associating saints and beliefs with pagan originals. My faith had been hanging on fingertips for sometime, but I'd been hard-grounded in Lutheranism and somewhere deep in my 'soul' I just couldn't quite let go of that.
And then, working my way along the shelves of art and history, I stumbled across Camille Paglia's book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and my head exploded. A lot of different things all came together at the same time. I was in my last year of my Classical History degree; I'd been reading all this material on paganism; I'd tackled Origen, Tertullian and Ireneaus from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and all in one swoop everything I'd ever believed about our culture and how it fitted together came crashing down.
It would be hard to explain, but if you haven't read extensively about how the Christian religion really began, then you haven't any idea to what length the whole western culture has been seriously duped. For me, God didn't die that day. I just wised up.
I started going to university in the first place because I had been working as a statistical clerk in the real world - without a proper education, but quite successfully - and I didn't like it. That was 1985, and I felt like Dan Ackroyd's character Stantz had said in Ghostbusters, released the year before: "I liked the university. They gaves us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
I couldn't imagine anywhere I would rather be than the university ... but I couldn't afford it. And then I learned that you didn't have to pay student loans back unless you stopped going. I thought that was slashing brilliant. I remember my friend Todd and I were in my basement apartment, he told me that and I made him get up and go with me to the university that afternoon. Within two hours I'd applied and within a month I was starting my first classes. I remember how fast it was. I had met the woman who would be my wife on October 23rd, 1985; she was a university student, finishing her teaching degree. When I met her, I hadn't even considered going to university. Yet I started classes the first week of January, 1986, a little more than two months later. And I would continue going to university for the next seven years.
Oh, I did other things too ... student loans won't cover everything. I did some acting, I wrote freelance, I got married, I had a daughter ... those were busy times. But university was marvelous. I could take 15 hours of classes a week, finish my actual academic work in half that time and manage an honors grade point average and then fuck around playing D&D and bridge, plus spend a lot of afternoons in the campus pub drinking. Twas the life.
Problem was, with 30 course credits under my belt, I was getting educated. You can only take so much history, political science, English, geography, anthropology, religious studies and Latin before it begins to change you, whether or not that was your intention to begin with. So it happened that I was in my prof's office, defending a paper I'd written on comparing core samples out of Greenland and evidential effects on the climatic patterns of the 5th century B.C. Middle East, describing the collapse of the Nabatanean Empire due to the desertification of much of modern Saudi Arabia and western Iraq ... and the prof was clearly not getting it. He had no experience with ice cores (I'd been working on core samples for Gulf Canada back before I'd started university), he had hardly any real grounding in either climate or geography, and he simply wasn't prepared to grade a paper that used science to explain why a given culture failed. His expertise extended as far as contemporary sources, and did not include comparing those contemporary sources with pollen samples from Greenland - although those were, of course, exactly as contemporary as Herodotus.
The argument went back and forth for about twenty minutes when I realized, all at once, that I had completely circumvented myself. Here I was, in university, trying to give results ... exactly the sort of thing that Ray Stantz had said universities did not ask for. I remember telling the prof suddenly that I'd accept the B. Then I went down to the registar's, and changed my courses for the next semester so I could take the one credit I needed in order to graduate. Bing bang boom, I was out of university.
I have tried to deliver results ever since.
Well, I've belabored this point enough. Three and a half months ago, I had another of these moments. And it was brought on by this video (please note the title on the youtube file is not the title of Robert Lustig's talk):
The video is long. It is not sponsored by popular media. It is not dumbed-down for people who do not understand chemistry. He's clearly speaking to students. I remember sitting through it, fascinated and skull-sweating my way through his references, wishing I'd taken more chemistry in school. I am not going to try to paraphrase it. Either you want to understand something like this, or you don't.
For myself, I was convinced. I haven't had a piece of candy or chocolate since. I have tried to do all I can to remove industrialized fructose or sucrose sugar from my diet. I don't see this as 'dieting.' I see this as not eating poison.
And still, for these last months, it has been next to impossible to explain to people that I'm not 'resisting' eating certain 'foods.' I'm not wishing I could. I am not experiencing withdrawal. I am quite content to never eat these things again ... assuming that is even possible. If it should happen that I am dumb enough to revert, I'm hoping that enough time passes that when a morsel of chocolate again touches my tongue, it will taste so awful - and I'm sure it will already - that I will wonder how it is that other people can put up with it.
I simply have comprehension. And this is bound to radically separate me from anyone who doesn't have it. Nothing I can do about that. Simple fact of life. I know things others don't know.
Wrapping this up then. I ask you, the gentle reader. At this point, is there really any need to talk about why I play D&D the way that I do, as opposed to the way that other people do, or the way that I did when I first started? We ought to be able to guess, perhaps, that I simply moved on. I learned a better way to play. And I don't want to go back. I can't even imagine going back.
Which isn't to say I wasn't crazy already. I've been crazy for a long time, for varied reasons, almost all of them because I know things that other people do not. That wasn't the plan from the beginning ... but as I was willing to read books while other people were not, some kind of rift was bound to grow.
For instance, I knew at 13 that there was nothing wrong with being homosexual. I didn't happen to be one, but I had tore through a number of psychological studies on the subject. It was interesting that the word 'faggot' was so pervasive and common in the hallways at school but no one - absolutely no one - was willing to talk about what a faggot was. This being 1977, in grade 7 learned that homosexuality had been considered a mental disease right up until I had been in grade 3. I saw The Boys in the Band on very late night television somewhere around that time, back when the CBC was willing to show that sort of thing after midnight ... I was allowed to stay up as late as I wanted on Friday nights, so it must have been a Friday when I saw it.
For anyone willing to let go of assumed 'truths' and just evaluate the subject on its principles only, its obvious that a human being is a human being, lips are lips and love is love. Yet here it is, 35 years later, and what I realized at 13 is right now offending the hell out of someone whose reading this. Oh well.
Education is a terrifying thing. The chances are if you start reading something, anything, there's a chance that it will make an argument or present evidence that will expose something you've considered to be true for all of your life as a big pile of shit. Hearing another person speak, either with words or in voice, is a risk. You risk realizing you've been an idiot. You risk realizing that you'd rather go on being an idiot than having to change your mind. You risk realizing that things you've said and people who have heard you has made it clear to all and sundry that you've been an idiot for years and years ... and that quite possibly most people who know you know that about you. That is a very hard pill to swallow.
The safest way to avoid that is to avoid reading. Your next strategy must be to avoid everyone who doesn't believe exactly what you believe ... or at least, if you disagree on something, it's something safe like football or whether or not something is a bad movie. The LAST thing you want to do is read some random blog you've found on the internet. That blog, and what it says, might very well fuck you up. You don't want that.
At 48, I have tried to hold onto a willingness to change my mind about things. I think back on some of the big moments in my life when I've done a 180 about something. For instance, I remember the day I stopped believing in God. I was sitting on the 4th floor of the university library and I was immersed in several texts about pagan religions, comparing what Christianity had ripped off the Egyptians and the Norse (at this time of the year, we are all wondering how the Easter Bunny happens to lay eggs). I had known some of this stuff before, but I'd found some books that just went on and on and on, with hundreds of references associating saints and beliefs with pagan originals. My faith had been hanging on fingertips for sometime, but I'd been hard-grounded in Lutheranism and somewhere deep in my 'soul' I just couldn't quite let go of that.
And then, working my way along the shelves of art and history, I stumbled across Camille Paglia's book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and my head exploded. A lot of different things all came together at the same time. I was in my last year of my Classical History degree; I'd been reading all this material on paganism; I'd tackled Origen, Tertullian and Ireneaus from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and all in one swoop everything I'd ever believed about our culture and how it fitted together came crashing down.
It would be hard to explain, but if you haven't read extensively about how the Christian religion really began, then you haven't any idea to what length the whole western culture has been seriously duped. For me, God didn't die that day. I just wised up.
I started going to university in the first place because I had been working as a statistical clerk in the real world - without a proper education, but quite successfully - and I didn't like it. That was 1985, and I felt like Dan Ackroyd's character Stantz had said in Ghostbusters, released the year before: "I liked the university. They gaves us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
I couldn't imagine anywhere I would rather be than the university ... but I couldn't afford it. And then I learned that you didn't have to pay student loans back unless you stopped going. I thought that was slashing brilliant. I remember my friend Todd and I were in my basement apartment, he told me that and I made him get up and go with me to the university that afternoon. Within two hours I'd applied and within a month I was starting my first classes. I remember how fast it was. I had met the woman who would be my wife on October 23rd, 1985; she was a university student, finishing her teaching degree. When I met her, I hadn't even considered going to university. Yet I started classes the first week of January, 1986, a little more than two months later. And I would continue going to university for the next seven years.
Oh, I did other things too ... student loans won't cover everything. I did some acting, I wrote freelance, I got married, I had a daughter ... those were busy times. But university was marvelous. I could take 15 hours of classes a week, finish my actual academic work in half that time and manage an honors grade point average and then fuck around playing D&D and bridge, plus spend a lot of afternoons in the campus pub drinking. Twas the life.
Problem was, with 30 course credits under my belt, I was getting educated. You can only take so much history, political science, English, geography, anthropology, religious studies and Latin before it begins to change you, whether or not that was your intention to begin with. So it happened that I was in my prof's office, defending a paper I'd written on comparing core samples out of Greenland and evidential effects on the climatic patterns of the 5th century B.C. Middle East, describing the collapse of the Nabatanean Empire due to the desertification of much of modern Saudi Arabia and western Iraq ... and the prof was clearly not getting it. He had no experience with ice cores (I'd been working on core samples for Gulf Canada back before I'd started university), he had hardly any real grounding in either climate or geography, and he simply wasn't prepared to grade a paper that used science to explain why a given culture failed. His expertise extended as far as contemporary sources, and did not include comparing those contemporary sources with pollen samples from Greenland - although those were, of course, exactly as contemporary as Herodotus.
The argument went back and forth for about twenty minutes when I realized, all at once, that I had completely circumvented myself. Here I was, in university, trying to give results ... exactly the sort of thing that Ray Stantz had said universities did not ask for. I remember telling the prof suddenly that I'd accept the B. Then I went down to the registar's, and changed my courses for the next semester so I could take the one credit I needed in order to graduate. Bing bang boom, I was out of university.
I have tried to deliver results ever since.
Well, I've belabored this point enough. Three and a half months ago, I had another of these moments. And it was brought on by this video (please note the title on the youtube file is not the title of Robert Lustig's talk):
The video is long. It is not sponsored by popular media. It is not dumbed-down for people who do not understand chemistry. He's clearly speaking to students. I remember sitting through it, fascinated and skull-sweating my way through his references, wishing I'd taken more chemistry in school. I am not going to try to paraphrase it. Either you want to understand something like this, or you don't.
For myself, I was convinced. I haven't had a piece of candy or chocolate since. I have tried to do all I can to remove industrialized fructose or sucrose sugar from my diet. I don't see this as 'dieting.' I see this as not eating poison.
And still, for these last months, it has been next to impossible to explain to people that I'm not 'resisting' eating certain 'foods.' I'm not wishing I could. I am not experiencing withdrawal. I am quite content to never eat these things again ... assuming that is even possible. If it should happen that I am dumb enough to revert, I'm hoping that enough time passes that when a morsel of chocolate again touches my tongue, it will taste so awful - and I'm sure it will already - that I will wonder how it is that other people can put up with it.
I simply have comprehension. And this is bound to radically separate me from anyone who doesn't have it. Nothing I can do about that. Simple fact of life. I know things others don't know.
Wrapping this up then. I ask you, the gentle reader. At this point, is there really any need to talk about why I play D&D the way that I do, as opposed to the way that other people do, or the way that I did when I first started? We ought to be able to guess, perhaps, that I simply moved on. I learned a better way to play. And I don't want to go back. I can't even imagine going back.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Hamlets, Villages & Features
I have debated what to tackle next and whether or not the right thing to do would be to continue with the entirely random generation at this point or to dig down into how any of this would apply directly to my world. I could get into how to generate a seacoast, which I've completely dismissed as an elemental part of the random generation ... and I could talk about the differences of one kind of village as opposed to another.
From the book The English, A Social History 1066-1945, I came across this nice distinction between population centres which were primarily agrarian and those that were primarily mercantalistic ... and the distinction was not one of size or population. A village of 500 could easily have its primary workforce leave town in the morning for the fields, while a village of 300 could be entirely service-oriented, populated by no field workers at all but by artisans, lenders, carters and so on.
Thus, in the previous post, and indeed in the generation system altogether, we could say that an ordinary six mile hex might not have merely a collection of hamlets, but may actually have a village inclusive that would be larger than the village actually indicated during the generation phase. The "village" that was rolled and indicated on the general map would then be a money feature and not a population feature. That would be specifically a place where several guilds were established.
I admit that I hadn't considered this previously, and only came across it as I was reading on towns preparing for a post about them. If this is the case, then, I may have to remake my mind about what would be in an ordinary hex, in terms of actual persons. After all, if we can't bend with new knowledge, what's the point in reading anything.
Originally I meant to propose that an ordinary hex, such as that I described yesterday, would have 1 to 6 hamlets. Now I think that, in order to truly fill out the hex, it should have up to three levels of inhabitants (newly considered), all of which would fall below the level of the manse, or land operated by the manor house. It is more or less assumed that those groups of hexes that include towns, cities, onasteries, carter posts and so on are ALSO lands where manor houses are fairly common, with anywhere from 3 to 10 manor houses per six-mile hex. A typical manor house, after all, included about 9 square miles of farmland, meadow, orchards and forest, with places of marshland and separated ground for defense (baileys and such), burial, walking gardens and so on.
But we're speaking here specifically of hexes over which there is no direct authority - lands too remote, too poor, or too upon the edge of the wilderness to encourage a rich landlord to build a manor and thus lord over the peasants.
The three stages I mentioned would be degrees of concentration - all would be primarily agrarian in industry. There would be scattered cotter houses, such as occurred in large areas of Hungary, the Ukraine and Russia for a large part of its history - settled homes hundreds, perhaps thousands of yards apart, taking advantage of each little bend of a river or other access to water, with large families exploiting the immediate wilderness is relative isolation. Transhumance groups may temporarily reside in such places during certain seasons of the year.
Then there would be the hamlets we spoke of yesterday, with family grouped together as bands, with joint kinship and a certain amount of interbreeding. These would be under the authority of a headman and probably some sort religious leader. There might be anywhere from 1 to 6 hamlets in a given hex, but these might be grouped together or they might be scattered, depending on the familial relationships. Two groups of hamlets might indicate a continuous conflict, like the Hatfields and the McCoys. Three groups might suggest a more tolerant view of outsiders. A substantial proportion of these hamlets may not be directly agrarian at all, but may largely depend upon hunting, fishing, minor stock raising or large berry patches that occur naturally in the hex for sustenance.
Finally, there may, or may not, be a village, or possibly two, anywhere from 100 to 500 people in size, which would have no special political nor monetary power - it would simply be a very large clan. These societies would be certainly agrarian, but the whole town would pick up and leave for the fields in the mornings and return to the fields at night.
For a party, the most important thing about such an area - these semi-civilized hexes we've been describing - would be their value as jumping off points for adventuring into the true wilderness areas beyond. Consider the inconvenience of having always to travel back twenty, forty miles back to a real town or money-changing village. What arrangements could be made, instead, with the communities out on the periphery?
An inn or tavern is out of the question. The best roads would be beaten ground, hardpacked, with stones littered sparsely upon it to provide cohesion in the rains. More often roads would be rutted farm roads, soft and subject to causing vehicles to become mired during wet seasons. Not the sort of thing that one would want to ship food and drink over to keep a tavern supplied. Nor would there be much coin in the area for the residents to pay for such things.
Still there might be barns, where the locals would be willing to look after the party's horses, where the party might sleep out of the rain in exchange for some skills or labor (money would not be of much use as payment), and where a supply of hay could be obtained. There might also be a granary, as hay alone is not enough to keep a horse healthy, nor is it much good for people. The party might eat better if there are storehouses of vegetables and grains for them to snack upon. After all, as we say, the nearest market is 30 miles away.
Alternately, a nearby meadow might also serve to increase the health of the party's animals, since it would include clover and other nutrients not to be found in hay (I get really gritty with my party's horses, insisting that while they can let their horses crop from the side of the road, if they don't include some proper horsefeed - which can be expensive - their horses will not do well in the long run). Meadows might also hold some potent herbs and plants that might save a poisoned party member's life ... if you wanted to stipulate that the meadow's indicated presence also indicates the presence of such medicinal plants.
Pure water could be obtained if there was a well present. I continue to contemplate ways to bring parasitic infestations and diseases more firmly into my games, and if such were the case, there would definitely be an interest in a good, healthy well - if the party did not include someone who could purify water. Arguably, however, a well could be more than pure. Particular wells could always increase healing (without being magical), offer unique water varieties for the creation of potions and such, or even be the necessary cure for a specific kind of disease - an undiscovered future site of an as yet unconceived health spa. Too, in high mountains, there might be a hot spring, and that too might offer cures, comfort or even an increased morale for hirelings (for having been brought to such an exquisite place).
There might be a nearby fishing pond, for the acquisition of free food. The pond may yield anywhere from 2 to 10 lbs. of fish a day per competant angler, and be virtually inexhaustible for party or locals. Of course, the locals might also object, and there might be restrictions or negotiations which the party might be forced to undertake. Either way, the pond could prove a valuable resource, particularly if no other feature is present in the hex. A game trail, where the hunting is good, would provide a similar resource for the party - with a good opportunity for 40-80 lbs. of meat being taken at one time on a roll of 1 in 6 - I think I'd increase the likelihood 3% per level of ranger.
Finally, there might be a guard post, specifically if there is a village, which would include 2-5 men of fairly relaxed attitude but still anxious to see that the local customs are observed. This could cause some trouble for the party, not because these men would be difficult to kill, but because they could easily arouse the local population against the party in times of trouble. Getting to know their names and what they might like would be a good idea.
This is obviously far too gritty for a lot of players - it just isn't as interesting as killing orcs or such. For myself, getting this stuff organized only in the last month or so, it helps solve a long time issue that has been nagging at me since I began this game. What services are available to the party? What exactly do those services provide? Where are they found, and how common are they?
However this may or may not work for you as a DM or as a player, think of what this could mean for solitary play, or ultimately as a base-line for how you'd construct a world in a computer simulation. You're not just tramping around in empty bush. You're coming across a trail, you're recognizing the signs and you're marking it as a good place to come back to if you need food next week.
I think that is solid value.
From the book The English, A Social History 1066-1945, I came across this nice distinction between population centres which were primarily agrarian and those that were primarily mercantalistic ... and the distinction was not one of size or population. A village of 500 could easily have its primary workforce leave town in the morning for the fields, while a village of 300 could be entirely service-oriented, populated by no field workers at all but by artisans, lenders, carters and so on.
Thus, in the previous post, and indeed in the generation system altogether, we could say that an ordinary six mile hex might not have merely a collection of hamlets, but may actually have a village inclusive that would be larger than the village actually indicated during the generation phase. The "village" that was rolled and indicated on the general map would then be a money feature and not a population feature. That would be specifically a place where several guilds were established.
I admit that I hadn't considered this previously, and only came across it as I was reading on towns preparing for a post about them. If this is the case, then, I may have to remake my mind about what would be in an ordinary hex, in terms of actual persons. After all, if we can't bend with new knowledge, what's the point in reading anything.
Originally I meant to propose that an ordinary hex, such as that I described yesterday, would have 1 to 6 hamlets. Now I think that, in order to truly fill out the hex, it should have up to three levels of inhabitants (newly considered), all of which would fall below the level of the manse, or land operated by the manor house. It is more or less assumed that those groups of hexes that include towns, cities, onasteries, carter posts and so on are ALSO lands where manor houses are fairly common, with anywhere from 3 to 10 manor houses per six-mile hex. A typical manor house, after all, included about 9 square miles of farmland, meadow, orchards and forest, with places of marshland and separated ground for defense (baileys and such), burial, walking gardens and so on.
But we're speaking here specifically of hexes over which there is no direct authority - lands too remote, too poor, or too upon the edge of the wilderness to encourage a rich landlord to build a manor and thus lord over the peasants.
The three stages I mentioned would be degrees of concentration - all would be primarily agrarian in industry. There would be scattered cotter houses, such as occurred in large areas of Hungary, the Ukraine and Russia for a large part of its history - settled homes hundreds, perhaps thousands of yards apart, taking advantage of each little bend of a river or other access to water, with large families exploiting the immediate wilderness is relative isolation. Transhumance groups may temporarily reside in such places during certain seasons of the year.
Then there would be the hamlets we spoke of yesterday, with family grouped together as bands, with joint kinship and a certain amount of interbreeding. These would be under the authority of a headman and probably some sort religious leader. There might be anywhere from 1 to 6 hamlets in a given hex, but these might be grouped together or they might be scattered, depending on the familial relationships. Two groups of hamlets might indicate a continuous conflict, like the Hatfields and the McCoys. Three groups might suggest a more tolerant view of outsiders. A substantial proportion of these hamlets may not be directly agrarian at all, but may largely depend upon hunting, fishing, minor stock raising or large berry patches that occur naturally in the hex for sustenance.
Finally, there may, or may not, be a village, or possibly two, anywhere from 100 to 500 people in size, which would have no special political nor monetary power - it would simply be a very large clan. These societies would be certainly agrarian, but the whole town would pick up and leave for the fields in the mornings and return to the fields at night.
For a party, the most important thing about such an area - these semi-civilized hexes we've been describing - would be their value as jumping off points for adventuring into the true wilderness areas beyond. Consider the inconvenience of having always to travel back twenty, forty miles back to a real town or money-changing village. What arrangements could be made, instead, with the communities out on the periphery?
An inn or tavern is out of the question. The best roads would be beaten ground, hardpacked, with stones littered sparsely upon it to provide cohesion in the rains. More often roads would be rutted farm roads, soft and subject to causing vehicles to become mired during wet seasons. Not the sort of thing that one would want to ship food and drink over to keep a tavern supplied. Nor would there be much coin in the area for the residents to pay for such things.
Still there might be barns, where the locals would be willing to look after the party's horses, where the party might sleep out of the rain in exchange for some skills or labor (money would not be of much use as payment), and where a supply of hay could be obtained. There might also be a granary, as hay alone is not enough to keep a horse healthy, nor is it much good for people. The party might eat better if there are storehouses of vegetables and grains for them to snack upon. After all, as we say, the nearest market is 30 miles away.
Alternately, a nearby meadow might also serve to increase the health of the party's animals, since it would include clover and other nutrients not to be found in hay (I get really gritty with my party's horses, insisting that while they can let their horses crop from the side of the road, if they don't include some proper horsefeed - which can be expensive - their horses will not do well in the long run). Meadows might also hold some potent herbs and plants that might save a poisoned party member's life ... if you wanted to stipulate that the meadow's indicated presence also indicates the presence of such medicinal plants.
Pure water could be obtained if there was a well present. I continue to contemplate ways to bring parasitic infestations and diseases more firmly into my games, and if such were the case, there would definitely be an interest in a good, healthy well - if the party did not include someone who could purify water. Arguably, however, a well could be more than pure. Particular wells could always increase healing (without being magical), offer unique water varieties for the creation of potions and such, or even be the necessary cure for a specific kind of disease - an undiscovered future site of an as yet unconceived health spa. Too, in high mountains, there might be a hot spring, and that too might offer cures, comfort or even an increased morale for hirelings (for having been brought to such an exquisite place).
There might be a nearby fishing pond, for the acquisition of free food. The pond may yield anywhere from 2 to 10 lbs. of fish a day per competant angler, and be virtually inexhaustible for party or locals. Of course, the locals might also object, and there might be restrictions or negotiations which the party might be forced to undertake. Either way, the pond could prove a valuable resource, particularly if no other feature is present in the hex. A game trail, where the hunting is good, would provide a similar resource for the party - with a good opportunity for 40-80 lbs. of meat being taken at one time on a roll of 1 in 6 - I think I'd increase the likelihood 3% per level of ranger.
Finally, there might be a guard post, specifically if there is a village, which would include 2-5 men of fairly relaxed attitude but still anxious to see that the local customs are observed. This could cause some trouble for the party, not because these men would be difficult to kill, but because they could easily arouse the local population against the party in times of trouble. Getting to know their names and what they might like would be a good idea.
This is obviously far too gritty for a lot of players - it just isn't as interesting as killing orcs or such. For myself, getting this stuff organized only in the last month or so, it helps solve a long time issue that has been nagging at me since I began this game. What services are available to the party? What exactly do those services provide? Where are they found, and how common are they?
However this may or may not work for you as a DM or as a player, think of what this could mean for solitary play, or ultimately as a base-line for how you'd construct a world in a computer simulation. You're not just tramping around in empty bush. You're coming across a trail, you're recognizing the signs and you're marking it as a good place to come back to if you need food next week.
I think that is solid value.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Battlemat Scale
I'm writing another post about scale because I firmly believe it is something that's difficult for people to grasp, particularly in this modern age. We don't live on farms, we don't plow land, and when we travelwe either depend upon landmarks that do not convert to actual distance in our heads or we rely on measuring devices that do the work for us.
So in the interest of making area more accessible, I've gone looking for something to which people can relate.
But first I have to make a small pedantic point.
When people say a hex is "6 miles across," this can mean one of two things, which have consequences where it comes to area. Hexagons are not squares. Have a look at figure 1:
That's a mighty big difference - 8 square miles per hex. That's big enough to lose a small town in . So for the remainder of this post, and every post I ever write, when I say a hex is 20 miles or 6 miles or 5 feet in diameter, I am speaking of the hex on the left.
A six mile hex is pretty big ... but just to we get a sense of just HOW big, let's measure it in something that D&D players are familiar with. Last night, I dragged out of storage the old vinyl battle mat I used to use when I played with miniatures, before moving to computer screens. My battle mat looked something like this:
Each hex was 1 inch in diameter, and for my uses each hex was 5 feet in diameter. Counting hexes, the mat was 53 by 34 hexes ... which would represent in real life a total of 39,103 square feet.
This comes out to 0.9 acres per battle mat ... if that helps at all in measureing out the area upon which you usually have combats. A typical strip of land that a peasant plowed equaled about 1 acre or less ... so if you can imagine cutting your battle mat in half the long way, and taping it together into a much longer rectangle, you'd have a general idea of what amount of land a peasant could expect to plow in the space of a day.
It was a long day.
What this means is that we can now use the battle mat as a unit of measure, rather than an acre. Thus, it typically required 2.23 plowed battlemats to feed an ordinary person, while a typical family working upon a manor would control something like 8.35 battlemats.
Now, figures like that are highly disputed by the source material. If you spend even a little time looking over how much land people plowed in the Middle Ages so as to produce how much food, you'll quickly get twenty different figures, none of which will agree on yields or calorie output or ... well ... anything. Partly, that's because we have really poor information from the period, but mostly its because the information we do have comes from hundreds of different farms in different parts of Europe, all with different soils, sunlight, varieties of crop, etc. There is no continuity in the numbers because there's little if no work that can ever be done to determine how much manure was used to produce what amount of crop in what periods of history. If you ever meet someone who tells you they have the definitive numbers for crop output for Medieval farming, kick that moron in the balls. It's less than they deserve.
So if I use numbers here, please understand that they are not meant to be the right numbers. There are no 'right' numbers. I don't really care about the age old debate here, I just want general figures upon which I can hang a generation scheme. And as long as I'm at it, let's also acknowledge that almost every figure and description we have for farming from the Middle Ages comes from manor houses ... as they are the only people who ever kept records. We don't know how many cotters and vagabond farmers there were in those times because a family living upon a free farm deep in the German forest for generations never learned to read, did not spend time making their own paper and never thought it was in any way important. So when you are reading about the great Middle Ages, you might get the sense that everyone lived on manor farms. Twasn't so.
If we want to look at one hex, just one empty, uninteresting 'civilized' hex as described on this post, as comes up when we are rolling for single civilized hexes among wilderness hexes, then we have to consider that there isn't a manor that's running the show. The peripheral settlements of society would nominally be under a lord, who might have a tax collector that shows up once a year or so, but the amount of land the peasants are farming isn't dependent upon how much the lord allows them ... they are dependent upon how much they can reasonably plow, sow, weed and harvest in the season. As it happens, that works out to about 10 battlemats per family.
Suppose we identify a hamlet as 20-80 people, or between 6-18 families, who plow the surrounding country to an amount of 45-180 battlemats per year. These are groupings too small to be village, too small to amount to any industry, and too remote to support anything like an inn or a stable. At best, they might manage a water well, which would be of variable quality. Such hamlets would also need a certain amount of 'wilderness' to support their needs - game in the form of rabbits and birds, the occasional deer (whether or not they were legally allowed to take them), streams for fishing, and if possible wood for firewood and for building maintenance. A large population will strip a hex bare ... so in addition to the locals, there might be a town or city a few hexes away that visited once a decade - in the form of a wood-gathering party - to cut out a certain toll.
The question is, how much of the hex would really be 'civilized,' and how much would effectively be the same wilderness we were talking about here.
Have a look at this:
The small yellow rectangles, those are the hamlets themselves. The lighter green area is the usual part of the nearby country that is exploited for hunting, fishing, firewood and materials. The dark green is 'waste' ... a general term used for land that isn't used. That doesn't mean it couldn't be used, only that it isn't. It's simply more land that the locals require.
There might be a few hermits that live in it; there are probably some persons fleeing the law, or prospecting, or illegally cutting trees or poaching animals they shouldn't. For the most part, however, that part of the hex is empty. Not quite empty enough to allow a ruin or a dungeon. Over the last hundred years, woodsmen, hunters and young lovers have gone over every inch of it ... and probably some of the older people in the hamlets can point to every rock and tree and tell you a story about them. But if your character happens to be leaning on a tree two miles south of one of the south hamlets, chances are no one is walking by today. Or this week. Sometime in the next month you might hear someone a quarter mile away picking their way along ... but I would tend to doubt it.
All in all, this six-mile hex includes 22,172 battlemats. That's more than enough room for an entire army to fight its way through in one of your campaigns. Of course that army would probably clear out every tree for firewood if they were forced to stay for a month ... but chances are, for some parts of your country, some army in the past thousand years has done exactly that ... in virtually every hex. I've mentioned applying this system to Kosovo ... an area of land that remembers tribes long before the Romans, the republic and empire, the Avars, the Huns, the Magyars, a dozen other tribes and lots and lots of war parties moving through the same gap between Serbia and the Adriatic. Over and over the woods have been cleared of game, and still by the 1600s the land is empty, terribly, awfully empty, in all but a few places.
Something to consider.
So in the interest of making area more accessible, I've gone looking for something to which people can relate.
But first I have to make a small pedantic point.
When people say a hex is "6 miles across," this can mean one of two things, which have consequences where it comes to area. Hexagons are not squares. Have a look at figure 1:
A six mile hex is pretty big ... but just to we get a sense of just HOW big, let's measure it in something that D&D players are familiar with. Last night, I dragged out of storage the old vinyl battle mat I used to use when I played with miniatures, before moving to computer screens. My battle mat looked something like this:
 |
| I did not use the really cool 3 dimensional add-ons ... but nice work there. |
This comes out to 0.9 acres per battle mat ... if that helps at all in measureing out the area upon which you usually have combats. A typical strip of land that a peasant plowed equaled about 1 acre or less ... so if you can imagine cutting your battle mat in half the long way, and taping it together into a much longer rectangle, you'd have a general idea of what amount of land a peasant could expect to plow in the space of a day.
It was a long day.
What this means is that we can now use the battle mat as a unit of measure, rather than an acre. Thus, it typically required 2.23 plowed battlemats to feed an ordinary person, while a typical family working upon a manor would control something like 8.35 battlemats.
Now, figures like that are highly disputed by the source material. If you spend even a little time looking over how much land people plowed in the Middle Ages so as to produce how much food, you'll quickly get twenty different figures, none of which will agree on yields or calorie output or ... well ... anything. Partly, that's because we have really poor information from the period, but mostly its because the information we do have comes from hundreds of different farms in different parts of Europe, all with different soils, sunlight, varieties of crop, etc. There is no continuity in the numbers because there's little if no work that can ever be done to determine how much manure was used to produce what amount of crop in what periods of history. If you ever meet someone who tells you they have the definitive numbers for crop output for Medieval farming, kick that moron in the balls. It's less than they deserve.
So if I use numbers here, please understand that they are not meant to be the right numbers. There are no 'right' numbers. I don't really care about the age old debate here, I just want general figures upon which I can hang a generation scheme. And as long as I'm at it, let's also acknowledge that almost every figure and description we have for farming from the Middle Ages comes from manor houses ... as they are the only people who ever kept records. We don't know how many cotters and vagabond farmers there were in those times because a family living upon a free farm deep in the German forest for generations never learned to read, did not spend time making their own paper and never thought it was in any way important. So when you are reading about the great Middle Ages, you might get the sense that everyone lived on manor farms. Twasn't so.
If we want to look at one hex, just one empty, uninteresting 'civilized' hex as described on this post, as comes up when we are rolling for single civilized hexes among wilderness hexes, then we have to consider that there isn't a manor that's running the show. The peripheral settlements of society would nominally be under a lord, who might have a tax collector that shows up once a year or so, but the amount of land the peasants are farming isn't dependent upon how much the lord allows them ... they are dependent upon how much they can reasonably plow, sow, weed and harvest in the season. As it happens, that works out to about 10 battlemats per family.
Suppose we identify a hamlet as 20-80 people, or between 6-18 families, who plow the surrounding country to an amount of 45-180 battlemats per year. These are groupings too small to be village, too small to amount to any industry, and too remote to support anything like an inn or a stable. At best, they might manage a water well, which would be of variable quality. Such hamlets would also need a certain amount of 'wilderness' to support their needs - game in the form of rabbits and birds, the occasional deer (whether or not they were legally allowed to take them), streams for fishing, and if possible wood for firewood and for building maintenance. A large population will strip a hex bare ... so in addition to the locals, there might be a town or city a few hexes away that visited once a decade - in the form of a wood-gathering party - to cut out a certain toll.
The question is, how much of the hex would really be 'civilized,' and how much would effectively be the same wilderness we were talking about here.
Have a look at this:
The small yellow rectangles, those are the hamlets themselves. The lighter green area is the usual part of the nearby country that is exploited for hunting, fishing, firewood and materials. The dark green is 'waste' ... a general term used for land that isn't used. That doesn't mean it couldn't be used, only that it isn't. It's simply more land that the locals require.
There might be a few hermits that live in it; there are probably some persons fleeing the law, or prospecting, or illegally cutting trees or poaching animals they shouldn't. For the most part, however, that part of the hex is empty. Not quite empty enough to allow a ruin or a dungeon. Over the last hundred years, woodsmen, hunters and young lovers have gone over every inch of it ... and probably some of the older people in the hamlets can point to every rock and tree and tell you a story about them. But if your character happens to be leaning on a tree two miles south of one of the south hamlets, chances are no one is walking by today. Or this week. Sometime in the next month you might hear someone a quarter mile away picking their way along ... but I would tend to doubt it.
All in all, this six-mile hex includes 22,172 battlemats. That's more than enough room for an entire army to fight its way through in one of your campaigns. Of course that army would probably clear out every tree for firewood if they were forced to stay for a month ... but chances are, for some parts of your country, some army in the past thousand years has done exactly that ... in virtually every hex. I've mentioned applying this system to Kosovo ... an area of land that remembers tribes long before the Romans, the republic and empire, the Avars, the Huns, the Magyars, a dozen other tribes and lots and lots of war parties moving through the same gap between Serbia and the Adriatic. Over and over the woods have been cleared of game, and still by the 1600s the land is empty, terribly, awfully empty, in all but a few places.
Something to consider.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The Book is Good! People Tell Me So
I have simply got to beg a little help. I have now heard from others who have read my book and enjoyed it. Please. Don't just tell me in private. Tell others!
Lulu requires a log-in to review the book on their site, so failing that, WRITE IT HERE.
Willing buyers want to know if the book is any good. Tell them! I'll take all the help I can get!
Lulu requires a log-in to review the book on their site, so failing that, WRITE IT HERE.
Willing buyers want to know if the book is any good. Tell them! I'll take all the help I can get!
Monday, March 25, 2013
Wilderness Plotting
There are seven kinds of wilderness depicted in the image below:
The degree of wilderness is dependent upon the influence of civilized hexes upon that wilderness. If the wilderness is surrounded by civilized hexes, than we must assume the surrounding herders, farmers, landowners and so on must venture into the edges of the wilderness, hunting and such, and that the ‘wilderness’ is a much less wild that if it were completely surrounded by other wilderness hexes (and therefore, less affected by incursion.
So the image specifies the level of each wilderness hex according to how many civilized hexes touch upon it. Having organized the wilderness thusly, we have seven levels. We can give each level a name:
This takes a fair amount of explanation, and so it is going to be all I talk about for the remainder of this post.
First, it has to be recognized that the previous generation applies only to humans, or "demi-humans." For simplicity, for this post I shall refer to all character races, elves, dwarfs, etc., at "humans," and all non-character races as "humanoids." It's not that I couldn't write out "demi-humans & humans" every time I refer to character races, its just that it's unnecessary.
So we've created the human infrastructure ... what about the non-human? How deep into the wilderness do you need to go before you encounter a goblin village, as described in the monster manual? Do you have goblin villages, or does every goblin in your world live underground? If that's the case, how far from your established civilization does 'underground' have to be? A mile? Six miles? Twenty? Perhaps in your imagination ALL humanoid habitations have to be deep underground and virtually impossible to find. Perhaps they're just a few miles in country, and they're treated as 'just folks.'
It's easy to imagine a village on the edge of so-called 'goblin lands,' but what is to stop a group of 80 or so goblins forming a tribe, building a small fortified village and peaceably raising goats? And if there's just a dead-on hatred for goblins that exists in your world, how is it that bandits can form such groupings and get away with it, but goblins can't? Unless the local constabulary wants to mount up and go clean out the goblins (and the bandits) from the forest, they're going to persevere ... and even if the constabulary CAN do that, do they really have the time to do it every year? Look at the map above. That solid green patch above is the size of Rhode Island ... an army could waste a lot of time wandering about it trying to find the goblin village that's there.
I don't propose to argue that every hex surrounding by wilderness hexes automatically has a goblin village. That's why the features on the table are described in a sweeping manner: "combined humanoid tribes and monster groups." That's goblins with dire wolves. It's also a single giant with a pet owlbear. Granted, that's not two "groups" ... but like I said, sweeping. Don't get bogged down in details. What's intended is that the main power and force of the wilderness in that particular hex is under one authority. Competing humanoids and monsters assumes that the humanoids there haven't quite cleared the wilderness for their own use. Indifferent would suggest both humanoids and monsters exist in such small numbers that they're not fighting.
That's why I wanted to create a green area where neither humans nor humanoids dominated. Backcountry is a sort of buffer-territory. There are dangerous animals and monsters, yes ... but nothing organized. The intelligent monsters are able to back themselves into territories that experience less incursion. The really tame areas of wilderness are those that are beset on all sides by humans.
So where it reads "signs," the wilderness is at least travelled over enough that people have hammered boards to trees pointing out which way the paths lead, or where the forester's house is. "Forester support" would be a place in the forest where you could expect to go if you were seriously injured, or if you wanted to trade the fur from the giant beaver you'd just killed or some such. "Druidic support" would mean a friendly druid who might be willing to cast a spell or two, offer up a spot of herbal tea, help you out of a jam if your friend's been poisoned. Such people might be around in the more travelled places, even if there's no other civilization present.
The reverse would then be true of the humanoids. The outliers of the humanoid culture would be roaming the hinterland, far from their infrastructure (which might be no more than aforementioned village, but that would be something). Humanoid hunters and patrol parties would be searching the boondocks for game ... and they'd be settled in the wild areas, which wouldn't be so 'wild' for them. The words are for the human perspective ... but it's really a scale that swings both ways.
I want to get across that the wilderness hexes, even though we've defined them as "not civilized," wouldn't be empty of civilizing effects. The white hexes I'd rather define as farms, orchards, cropped meadows and so on ... but open grasslands could exist on the range where there were no actual humans. That wouldn't keep a lone herder from using them, it would just be dangerous enough you couldn't call it civilized.
So where you're sitting down to create your encounter table (and I hate the damn things), you've got to get out of the idea that 'wilderness' is something you step into like through a curtain, with the cleared hexes behind you and perfectly virgin territory in front. It's a bleed from one to the other ... and though they may touch one another (where a single hex might be surrounded by five, and not six wilderness), that exact relationship is going to be special. Very special indeed. Too special to just say, "Well, you've just stepped into a green hex ... let me roll on my heterogeneous encounter table."
Look at those wilderness hexes surrounding the town at the bottom of the map ... now compare them with the forest hexes surrounding the city on the right hand side. They're very different from a landslide. When you get right down to the nap of that difference, you start to see how you're going to describe the party moving into one set of woods as compared to the other. You're going to see how complex the relationships can be ... and how that will help you run your world.
 |
| Figure 22 - wilderness hex sides |
The degree of wilderness is dependent upon the influence of civilized hexes upon that wilderness. If the wilderness is surrounded by civilized hexes, than we must assume the surrounding herders, farmers, landowners and so on must venture into the edges of the wilderness, hunting and such, and that the ‘wilderness’ is a much less wild that if it were completely surrounded by other wilderness hexes (and therefore, less affected by incursion.
So the image specifies the level of each wilderness hex according to how many civilized hexes touch upon it. Having organized the wilderness thusly, we have seven levels. We can give each level a name:
 |
| Figure 23 - wilderness types |
This takes a fair amount of explanation, and so it is going to be all I talk about for the remainder of this post.
First, it has to be recognized that the previous generation applies only to humans, or "demi-humans." For simplicity, for this post I shall refer to all character races, elves, dwarfs, etc., at "humans," and all non-character races as "humanoids." It's not that I couldn't write out "demi-humans & humans" every time I refer to character races, its just that it's unnecessary.
So we've created the human infrastructure ... what about the non-human? How deep into the wilderness do you need to go before you encounter a goblin village, as described in the monster manual? Do you have goblin villages, or does every goblin in your world live underground? If that's the case, how far from your established civilization does 'underground' have to be? A mile? Six miles? Twenty? Perhaps in your imagination ALL humanoid habitations have to be deep underground and virtually impossible to find. Perhaps they're just a few miles in country, and they're treated as 'just folks.'
It's easy to imagine a village on the edge of so-called 'goblin lands,' but what is to stop a group of 80 or so goblins forming a tribe, building a small fortified village and peaceably raising goats? And if there's just a dead-on hatred for goblins that exists in your world, how is it that bandits can form such groupings and get away with it, but goblins can't? Unless the local constabulary wants to mount up and go clean out the goblins (and the bandits) from the forest, they're going to persevere ... and even if the constabulary CAN do that, do they really have the time to do it every year? Look at the map above. That solid green patch above is the size of Rhode Island ... an army could waste a lot of time wandering about it trying to find the goblin village that's there.
I don't propose to argue that every hex surrounding by wilderness hexes automatically has a goblin village. That's why the features on the table are described in a sweeping manner: "combined humanoid tribes and monster groups." That's goblins with dire wolves. It's also a single giant with a pet owlbear. Granted, that's not two "groups" ... but like I said, sweeping. Don't get bogged down in details. What's intended is that the main power and force of the wilderness in that particular hex is under one authority. Competing humanoids and monsters assumes that the humanoids there haven't quite cleared the wilderness for their own use. Indifferent would suggest both humanoids and monsters exist in such small numbers that they're not fighting.
That's why I wanted to create a green area where neither humans nor humanoids dominated. Backcountry is a sort of buffer-territory. There are dangerous animals and monsters, yes ... but nothing organized. The intelligent monsters are able to back themselves into territories that experience less incursion. The really tame areas of wilderness are those that are beset on all sides by humans.
So where it reads "signs," the wilderness is at least travelled over enough that people have hammered boards to trees pointing out which way the paths lead, or where the forester's house is. "Forester support" would be a place in the forest where you could expect to go if you were seriously injured, or if you wanted to trade the fur from the giant beaver you'd just killed or some such. "Druidic support" would mean a friendly druid who might be willing to cast a spell or two, offer up a spot of herbal tea, help you out of a jam if your friend's been poisoned. Such people might be around in the more travelled places, even if there's no other civilization present.
The reverse would then be true of the humanoids. The outliers of the humanoid culture would be roaming the hinterland, far from their infrastructure (which might be no more than aforementioned village, but that would be something). Humanoid hunters and patrol parties would be searching the boondocks for game ... and they'd be settled in the wild areas, which wouldn't be so 'wild' for them. The words are for the human perspective ... but it's really a scale that swings both ways.
I want to get across that the wilderness hexes, even though we've defined them as "not civilized," wouldn't be empty of civilizing effects. The white hexes I'd rather define as farms, orchards, cropped meadows and so on ... but open grasslands could exist on the range where there were no actual humans. That wouldn't keep a lone herder from using them, it would just be dangerous enough you couldn't call it civilized.
So where you're sitting down to create your encounter table (and I hate the damn things), you've got to get out of the idea that 'wilderness' is something you step into like through a curtain, with the cleared hexes behind you and perfectly virgin territory in front. It's a bleed from one to the other ... and though they may touch one another (where a single hex might be surrounded by five, and not six wilderness), that exact relationship is going to be special. Very special indeed. Too special to just say, "Well, you've just stepped into a green hex ... let me roll on my heterogeneous encounter table."
Look at those wilderness hexes surrounding the town at the bottom of the map ... now compare them with the forest hexes surrounding the city on the right hand side. They're very different from a landslide. When you get right down to the nap of that difference, you start to see how you're going to describe the party moving into one set of woods as compared to the other. You're going to see how complex the relationships can be ... and how that will help you run your world.
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