Arguing On The Internet

I have other things to write about today, but I'm going to spend a little time first talking about last week.

I've held off writing this post because I did not want to rant. My first instinct was to do so; this is my typical reaction to stupidity in great amounts. I hoped with distance I could sound more sincere.

Last week, Zak the porn dude was booted permanently off rpg.net. Now, the internet being what it is, the ban has probably been rescinded. I don't care about rpg.net, but I was made curious by this really stupid post by Roger the GS. And after reading the echo chamber in that comments section (which happily rushed to explain to me why I'm a bad person by daring to disagree), I found myself reading this even stupider post by Noisms, in which he proudly makes the argument that no one ever argues except to show off how big their brain is. This was followed by another tremendous echo chamber of comments.

So finally I had to go look at Zak's inevitable post, which turned out to be an open letter to the owners of rpg.net ... which seriously upped the stupidity standard quite a bit, as well as the profundity of cognative dissonant blog echo chambers.

Well, after all that, I had to go find the rpg thread ... which none of these fuckers linked to, so I had to find it through Google. And found that rpg.net has seriously changed.

I really like the booting policy they've instituted. I respect it. Reminds me of my own.

Now, I don't know if the gentle reader wants to read through all this shit, but I'll tell you the best easter egg in the whole thing is where Noisms gets banned from the thread on page 35. Remember, this is the man who tells us argument is ego masturbation.

Noisms says he can't ever recall changing anyone's mind by arguing with them. The only thing I can say to that is that he must be really, really BAD at arguing. But then I've never seen Noisms change his mind, ever. The same can be said for Zak, for that matter. Roger the GS is somewhat better. I have seen him change his mind. Which makes this follow up post by him even more baffling.

I don't see that its worth my time to explain why these fellows are wrong. I think that's obvious to anyone with a modicrum of scholarship or responsibility in the real world. I make arguments that prove to change minds all the time - it is how companies make up their minds about things, by presenting arguments and then choosing the best course of action. This is also how the justice system works, as well as the political system (in a country like Canada, at least, where the government still passes meaningful legislation), how scientific journals work and just about all scholarship (I'm not too sure about business school, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt).

The thing about all these arguments is that they rely on the presentation of facts, then upon the presupposition that the individual presenting the facts will attempt to argue how they are relevant. These are not 'internet arguments.' That is, they're not arguments advanced about the wastefulness of arguing by people who are arguing on some other thread - at the same time, as happens in the case of one recent tit who was commenting about NOT arguing on Noisms thread while simultaneously arguing like a complete hysterical prat on MY blog. Check the timestamps. That is really impressive.

I think it really does come down to these people who do not change their minds. Naturally they presume no one else does, because they're so calcified in their own crystalized bullshit. I'm sure Noisms runs the same campaign today he ran twenty years ago, still thinks it's as brilliant today as it was then, and will still be running the same campaign twenty years from now. I'm presenting this as an argument. I'm pointing at Noisms blog as evidence. I'm citing the evidence to back up my own personal experience with him, that ended in banning him from this blog because he was utterly immovable.

Everyone knows I love to argue. And everyone knows that I cheerfully evicerate people, coldly, disconsiderately, often abusively ... and people love to ride horse on that as proof positive that I'm no better than anyone else on the net, and in fact that I am a LOT worse. I'm described as a solipsist, an egoist, a narcissist, as someone deluded by his own myopia and so on. Well, the gentle reader that's here is ready to make up his or her own mind. I'm pretty sure I don't run an echo chamber around here. There are people who like me. These people put up with a lot of shit and don't hesitate to criticize me for posts like this one. They'd rather I got back to the hex generation (and I will). The reason I write these posts, and the reason I do my best to humiliate people in the comments section, is to get them the fuck off this blog. I don't want morons like Noisms here. He pollutes enough of the net with his crap as it is.

Nor do I need Zak “I have porn stars and viewers and therefore I’m always right” around. I don’t know about Zak. He seems to really believe that the opinions of people in the porn industry have pedigree in the world outside the porn industry … he also seems to believe that somehow his success couldn’t be duplicated by anyone else ready to have weekly porn stars on camera playing D&D. They might even do better, if the porn stars could be convinced to wash once in awhile and not slur every line they speak.

Sorry, I’ve been waiting to say that a long time. It’s catty, I know, but if you read the rpg.net thread, you’ll find Zak pounding his chest about all the people he knows who believe this or that, and if you follow the comments thread on Roger the GS’s first post, you’ll find Zak doing it directly to me, clearly disproving that his vouched for opinions of other people couldn’t be made up because, well, porn stars.

Zak opened the door on that one. He gets to cite his connections as a source, I get to kick the shit out of his source. We call that ‘argument.’

One thing that I'm proud of is my willingness to change my mind. In particular, my willingness to improve upon something I invented, understanding that whatever it is, I can make it better if I have more time. All this recent hex generation thing actually disregards ideas and propositions I made on the subject last year, because even if no one else understood that they weren't going to work, I did. This recent stuff? No, this is not the best I can do. In many ways it is inadequate. It is clumsy. It isn't quite right. It needs more effort, more time, more research, a better layout, etc.

See, I know that people THINK I'm full of myself, but in reality I'm the first person to tell you that anything I've done, and everything I've designed, is inadequate. That's how I have felt since the beginning of my life. It's just not good enough. But that's fine. I know it's going to be better, because I'm going to change. I'm going to toss out things I believe today for better things that I will believe tomorrow. All anyone has to do is advance an argument and support that argument, and I'm on board, ready to change my mind.

That's what makes me different from these other failures. And don't question it ... that's what makes YOU different too. You're ready to read this, to doubt it, to question it, to not take it on face value and to NOT echo it back to me like we all have to be on the same fucking page to be friends. For the love of knowledge, don't go that way. That way is stagnation and death and six kinds of internal pathetic masturbation.

Let's all gently applaud rpg.net for finally realizing that the only way to have a discussion is to throw on people after the first ten words of bullshit. It's the only way this whole nonsense is going to be cleaned up ... when people like Zak and Noisms only have a voice with people too stupid to have their own.

Making Generation Easy

Above is a screen shot from the Hex Generator's Type VII tab. In the upper left has been generated which hexes are wilderness and which are civilized. The green section top right is the random die rolls for food supply, arranged in 7 columns. Each column is a different hex, A-G, just like on the left-side diagram. The blue line requires input if there is any coastline, which will change the perameters of that hex.

The lighter green would be the 'wild' food supplies that I described yesterday. The moderately darker green describes the insertion of civilized food supply, or infrastructure food supply, which the table will only roll for civilized hexes (the other hex columns are automatically blank) - and the grey lines are dependent on the green line above them. Let me go through and explain these.

First of all, something is only present if a 1 is rolled. In column A, a 1 appears next to berry patch in Q5, and the berry patch is noted on Q23. The game country roll was a 3 in Q7, so there is no game country note on Q25.

For the odds of these things occurring, the gentle reader will have to go download the actual excel file - I'm not going to go into here. I will note that the likelihood for a berry patch or anything else (except a mew) is higher for the hex that is civilized. It's presumed (but is not always the case) that the humans who settled in the area (group) chose the best possible hex.

Where there is civilization, there is always scrub farming. The system presumes that 'civilization' does not include hunting cultures, as those would be inhabiting wild hexes ... the DM could establish that all 'wild' humanoids in the area were actually hunter/gatherers of the same race, perhaps even gypsies or cavemen. That is up to the DM for that particular world. I have designated for the purpose of this demonstration that they are orcs (below).

Scrub farming would mean the most basic, least planned farming imaginable. No animals for the plow, no irrigation, possibly not even grain culture, but beet & potato farming, tending of vines, rice or by the coast, even seaweed collection. Any area that has only this as its food supply is humble, poor and made of hard, ignorant peoples. R37 indicates that the food supply for this scrub farming is 4.

Every civilized area is rolled to see if the scrub farming is supported by irrigation (the roll in R14 is a 1, indicating that there is irrigation). That irrigation is not necessarily widespread; the result here shows that irrigation only adds 1 to the food supply.

If irrigation occurs, a die roll is made for a granary, a very low chance in an area like this. The granary roll was in R15, and a 5 was rolled ... so no granary. The presence of irrigation here, however, indicates that there is some grain culture.

A fishing dock isn't possible because this is not a coastal hex (obviously a lake would always qualify).

The game reserve is rolled only if this is game country. Note that in the B-hex column, there is no 'game trail' roll (R8). That is because its assumed intensive game has been pushed out of the civilized hex. It still might have occurred in the other six hexes, but it did not. This hex had no pronounced game, so there was no game that could be bred and kept. Since this sort of "game reserve" would have been inside the B-Hex, the civilized hex, it would have been very small (a few hundred acres), but it would have helped supply regular food.

Any civilized hex might have domestic herding - pigs, goats, sheep, etc., kept near the homestead/hamlet, as opposed to on scattered meadows which would be more extensive. This civilized hex rolled a 3 (R18), so there was no herding. Because there is no herding, there is no roll for barns or stables, either.

Barns provide protection for cattle and bigger livestock, which encourages dairying and greater average meat per animal; the lack of a barn means the animal lives outdoors 24/7, and is therefore less meaty.

A stable means there are horses or donkeys present, which means the hamlet can enjoy a wider range of activity in the hex, in less time, providing more efficient food gathering, along with more physical power for slaughtering, pounding grain, mashing vegetables and so on.

Now, from that the reader should be able to see that with a few general rolls, you can get a WIDE variety of different types of little hamlets, some more advanced than others, some likely to have interesting people, some more likely to be xenophobic and hateful. Not the cookie-cutter hamlet motif that usually occurs, and it is all rolled randomly, and in less than a second. It does take a few minutes to record the information, but really no more than that:

This is a village in desperate need of an adventuring party. The reader cannot have helped notice that four of the other hexes are occupied by 'wild' races - as I said, orcs - who have made use of their less sophisticated food supplies in their hexes. The interesting thing here is that both humans and non-humans can live within a couple of miles of one another (remember, my hexes for this generation are only 2 miles in diameter, so we're looking at a 6 mile area). There are no really tough lords to come and clean the hex out, because what we have here is a non-manor controlled hex. No one ever has come to clean this out, so there is no nominal lord who has any interest in this. The ten families of Hex B are free persons, who have tried to settle here and are slowly winning out. The reader will take note that the total number of human families would be 10, and the total number of orcs would be 12 ... but the orcs are disorganized, they are in two different clans and two of the families aren't even associated with a clan.

A party could scout out the area (making the ranger in the party VERY important, and actually introducing 'scouting' as a real thing) and determine which hex should be hit first, big or small, to begin clearing it out. Then, as the orcs were eradicated, human families could be encouraged to move in and take advantage of the game, the natural springs, the easy to harvest berry patches and so on.

You have an adventure right here ... and it is EXACTLY a settlement adventure, with real purpose and practical means for development. What should the party do? Import animals, build barns and stables, build a granary and expand the irrigation.

A big problem with the 'settlement' adventure is parties don't know what to do when they've won. But what I've started to do here is to show that MORE civilization actually offers greater opportunity. Remember when the map of this sort of group just looked like this?

Appearances are deceptive. It's important to recognize that, yes, it seems insurmountable, but by doing research and examining how A depends on B, or C leads to D, and why those things are important, we begin to build up an elaborate structure that does more than just provide fluff and a backdrop for ordinary gaming. There's cause here, there's engagement, there's the feeling that the players are MASTERING their world, not just sitting on the ferris wheel watching it go around, helpless to get off.

Now, I'm working on the Type VI table, which is half-constructed on the downloadable spreadsheet, that promises to make this even more complicated. And I haven't quite worked out how to do monsters, and there are features that haven't been included yet that are not actually linked to food supply (they are linked to other things, but still working on how).

It is hard. But not for the reader. I'm building the spreadsheets that make ordinary die rolling against two-D tables obsolete. And I'm showing all my work. Get rid of your pen and paper, learn excel, and come give this a try!

Cracking the Wall on Hex Generation

I have no way to express how happy I am about today's topic.

No, it isn't meeting Colm Meaney (which I did yesterday), though I did geek out about that afterwards, for awhile. Turned out we were sitting in front of him at the premiere for One Hit Die, which is appearing online today. The audience laughed, the production was first rate and there was quite a showing ... as the gentle reader can probably guess. And it's always nice to see my name in the credits as "Game Consultant."

Sorry, I have no pictures of me and Colm; I can't imagine anything ruder than demanding a celebrity to be used as a prop ... unless it's acting like a complete tit and trying to steal all the attention you can get while they're in arm's reach. I told him I respected him - which I do, he's a hero - and he was pleasant enough to shake hands with me and Tamara, despite being with his wife and daughter. Was a nice little boost.

What I am really buzzed about ... and a buzz that's going to go on for some time ... is the adaptations I've made to the Hex Generator, which the reader can find on the wiki. The changes are to the Type VI, VII and VIII worksheets. Changes that over the next year are going to rework my world with a sledgehammer.

Of course, none of it means a thing if the reader never did understand what I meant by hex groups or hex generation, which I wrote upon extensively in March and April, and which hit a wall at that time.

Well, I cracked that wall. I am through the looking glass. I am roaming over vistas wide and green, and there's nothing in sight but endless horizon.

If you dare, come along.

What's really needed is another lengthy video demonstration ... but to be honest, I don't know how many people are willing to sit through those without knowing in fact what's going to be discussed. So what I'll try is an overview first. Then, given some time, I'll produce the video that supports it.

The first step came with the development of pure wilderness. The question was, how does one decide what is in the wilderness, how is it populated and how is that population distributed? Are they humanoids or monsters, and how many of either?

The premise that unlocked the key was considering first that any true wilderness had to be lacking in any sort of development. If there were creatures there, they were living of the natural food supply, with virtually no augmentation of that food supply. They might have crude boats, they might be herding some animals on natural meadows, but they weren't chopping down trees to make larger meadows or farms, and they weren't building an infrastructure. Remember, we're talking wilderness, not an alternate humanoid society that is dominant in that particular land. If there was any infrastructure, than the nearby legitimate authority would sniff it out and destroy it.

But bands or a few clans of humanoids regularly fishing a obscure pond, or hunting around a watering hole, or raising small animals on scattered meadows, or living underground on what food supply they could muster, THAT was acceptable ... so to begin placing things in hexes, I proposed placing what counted as a food supply.

A pond produces fish; a coastline too, but in fact less conveniently if you're limited to fishing on the shore; there could be a berry patch, or wild orchards with seasonal fruits, nuts or natural honey; there's good country for hunting; and natural choke points or watering holes provide better hunting still - and if there's a natural spring, all the better. Finally, there are those scattered meadows I keep mentioning.

But I realized I needed one other kind of food supply - one that doesn't exist in the real world and one that is never addressed in most D&D gaming. A food supply underground.

Suppose we imagine a sort of natural cave, with a soil upon which a vine can be tended, a vine that is pulpy and nutrient and which can support a lot of orcs or goblins. Suppose this isn't just any cave, that it requires a certain kind of soil, but that these caves exist far more commonly and in places which the real Earth wouldn't possess. I needed a name for this kind of cave, and settled on "mew." Now, mews are stables grouped around an open yard, a word that developed in the 16th century; an earlier word, from the French meu, meant a cage, commonly for hawks. I conceive that we have a sort of cave that is carefully tended to trap bats, in order to have them produce guano for the meuslin, or starchy vine upon which an underground community can thrive.

Thus, I have a number of different food sources that exist, and depending on the amount of food I have a chance either that a group of seven hexes is populated by humanoids (who have removed all the monsters except vermin), or monsters (who have not effectively cleared out).

What I've done is build a seperate chance for each type of food supply and for the amount of food that supply produces, then insert a calculation to see if humanoids are there. If they are, no monsters beyond those that are greater than 4 intelligence. If no humanoids, then some other monster with higher intelligence might be present.

Now, I haven't gotten to monsters yet. They're tricky. Not all monsters require a food supply. For the moment, that's on a shelf. I know when to insert one, should the party move into an area where monsters are indicated, and in the meanwhile I have a good basis for where they'd encounter humanoids.

More to the point, IF a party wandered off into a wilderness, they wouldn't just find monsters or humanoids circled around a pond or by a nice hunting ground ... they would ALSO find the food supply itself, a place in my world they could exploit themselves, by wiping out the present inhabitants and then beginning to install modifications, while having a food supply that is already measured by the random creation system. There would be a difference, then, in just setting up anywhere, and setting up specifically in and among the very best food supply available ... which wouldn't be evident until hex crawling the area.

Does the reader see? It's the Scout motif from Civ IV. You're literally taking your character out in the woods to kill, grab treasure, and then gain real information that could be valuable to the party or valuable to someone else, which in turn could translate into local prestige and notariety and respect. ALL FROM A RANDOM CREATED SYSTEM.

That, then, is what I did with Type VIII. Type VII is even more interesting. I'll write about that tomorrow.

Exclusion

I am stealing time from my online campaign in order to write this post, after suspending play there for the day. I hope my players forgive me.

I see it written all over the community that players don't like paper work or accounting. I believe that the favorite way of putting it is that no D&D player dreams of running their character as Thogred the Magnificent, Fighter-Accountant. That joke was made on this blog by an unfortunate commenter a couple days ago, but it's not the first time I've heard it.

Mind you, I've heard it from bloggers who manage to write endless blog posts about the most ridiculous garbage regurgitated from existing books and existing modules, so really all they've accomplished is the effort to scribble it all out again. It also seems to be said of players who write quite commonly on the net; who are willing to sit and design their own worlds, which requires a great deal more "accounting" than playing a character; and who often have other interests which include writing endless code for game ideas that will never see the light of day, chatting up girls on I've-Got-A-Big-Package.COM, trashing random posts on reddit, running flame wars that are based on someone else being booted for running a flame war, etc., etc. By all accounts, what I see on the net are people willing to write out a lot of words for very little expection of return.

And that's fine, obviously. It's just that, where does this myth arise that people are loathe to write out more than 18 words about their character?

What I have found through experience is that what players do HATE is being someone else's accountant. They hate being told to write out things that the DM thinks is important, and they don't like to do accounting that they don't think amounts to any purpose or has any value to the game. Here I agree ... but a player let off the chain, who recognizes that the DM has a world that's complicated with a lot of content, will happily keep even crazy levels of accounting on their own without being told. My players off-line regularly keep binders full of images they've drawn of character representations or things they wish to build, along with massive computer files or physical folders with plans they're making, notes to themselves, notes on people they've met on the campaign and so on. Online, you can see examples here and here, of the players who have been in that campaign the longest. They're not TOLD to keep these records. They want to.

Now, the online campaign is an odd thing. I never see any of the dice the players roll, I have to trust their integrity, and on top of that I am somewhat constrained to procure the kind of commitment that exists from people coming out to my home weekly or bi-weekly. Now these people online are committed, no question ... but I feel there are things I must ask of them that I don't ask of my offline characters. Keeping track of their encumbrance, for example ... which is certainly book-keeping, and certainly a prime example of something that players HATE having to calculate.

So why do I ask this of them? Is it not an unfair accounting request, adding nothing special to the game?

There's an old story about Van Halen on tour having a performance contract provision which called for a bowl of M&Ms, but with all the brown candies removed. I think probably most people who have been around know the story well, and know why the provision was there. I'll let Snopes.com give it:

"The legendary 'no brown M&Ms' contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with)."

The band could be reasonably sure that if the stadium was too fucking lazy to remove brown M&Ms from a bowl, they probably hadn't done their best job with the grips, the platforms, the electricals and the million other details necessary to make a concert come off without electrocuting the performers and many lesser dangers ... something impossible to know in a few hours of actually being there before the show starts.

Now, I don't need that level of commitment, but I do need something. I'm writing thousands of words of content, I'm providing the world, I'm hammering out the little statistical details like who gets what amount of experience and how much does shit cost, and frankly I'm not doing that for players who can't keep a two column list describing a thing and the weight of that thing. If I had a player whine and protest about the ARDUOUS amount of work that requires, and the immense suffering they'd go through adding two pounds one ounce to three pounds fifteen ounces, well then I'd know I had the kind of player who wasn't worth the crap his mother pushed out five minutes before his arrival ... wouldn't I?

I don't want to spend a lot more time on this for the present, but a very big part of being a good DM and having a good game is to recognize that a very great deal of your responsibility is not to fill it up with crap players who have no interest in playing a good game. You have to discriminate. You can't be a venue for all comers. You are not MacDonalds. The number of players you serve is of no account to your value as a gamer or as a designer. Save yourself a lot of effort and boot these people.

Something you can always tell about someone who talks a big picture but really doesn't run much of a game - how much lip service does he pay towards what players will or won't do? If it's a lot ... if the DM seems to turn again and again to statements like, "Players don't like this" or "I haven't had much luck getting players to buy in with this," then we're not talking about someone who is a great DM. Not because, as the gentle reader might think, because players should like these things, or because players can be made to like these things, but because a good DM will boot these loser players and fill his or her campaign with players who DO like these things.

This is a huge disconnect in the community ... the idea that because some or a majority of professed players won't do this or that, this or that shouldn't be done. It's bullshit. It means that players who won't do this or that need to be EXCLUDED from the process. They need to be dumped, ditched, shown the door, or at the very least have it explained to them in very small words that the really special games are for the really special people.

Cold? Oh yes. Inconsiderate and elitist? No shit. Add to that stuffy, pompous, self-proclaiming and profoundly smug. Add to it everything you want, that helps keep your ego intact. But I'm quite happy with my players and their willingness to meet with my approval, and I'm 100% certain that if I have not met with their approval, they wouldn't be here. So it's a two-way street. I work to keep them happy, they contribute full out and without damands for pandering.

It makes a good game.

Scout

If we may continue.

Ignoring rules about what attacks what in Civ IV, or the relative strengths of either, I would argue that the player party more substantially reflects the Scout unit than that of the Warrior. In effect, it sets out from the Keep on the Borderlands, striking out for the distant hills on the horizon, getting first glance of the sea or the desert, encountering 'monsters,' and so on. The Scout moves quickly and it sees much.

Naturally, within D&D, the player party has one principal goal - to find a monster hoarde belonging to monsters who aren't too dangerous, and plunder it. It is a simple-minded goal, and it utterly ignores the reality that if there were monsters just a day and a half away sitting on two or three thousand gold pieces, why has it waited there so conveniently for the player party to arrive?

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the prospect of finding a few ounces of gold per day drove people to risk life and limb and travel thousands of miles to live in the worst conditions imaginable (Klondike, Australian Desert, etc.) ... yet in D&D a local lord won't walk a day and a half to kill off a few dozen goblins and collect up enough gold to pay the mortgage for a month. Apparently, he won't order his steward to either, or be able to count on his fully grown sons. No, that gold will sit out there and rot until the RIGHT party has luckily stumbled across the right hole after a few days of walking along beaten trails. The gentle reader or I should have such luck.

I'm not suggesting it should be any different - that's the game, after all, and without it there wouldn't be much of a game. I've played in and tried my hand at choking off the 'gold supply' (in my woefully mis-spent youth) and come to realize that reality isn't really much recompense for spending Saturday nights at a kitchen table. So yes, gold will be plundered.

But its part of the overall problem that presents, when gold is metaphorically hanging off like ripe fruit in comparison to the clinically difficult work of drawing out plans and sorting out the business of running an efficient settlement. Why struggle and calculate for that gold when its right there for a party to take (clearly, since no NPC wants it).

So the Scout format becomes the default format. There is always another hill, and always the next treasure to be hauled to the next settlement that is someone else's problem to run. So long as it is a great wide world and there's no end to the treasure, there ought to be no end to the player's freebooting lifestyle.

Of course, DMs recognize this freebooting shit begins to get tiresome and dull if there are no consequences imposed along the way. So towns become difficult things to enter and extricate one from, the business of buying and trading and getting your money's worth for goods gets fucked with, followed by endless annoying taxes and picky guardsmen harrassing parties who dare to use public roads as the DM attempts the easiest and most obvious means of making the whole grab-and-take lifestyle have some sort of meaning. "Maybe, perhaps, they'll appreciate their money if the cost of living keeps them at least off-balance."

But of course it all seems very petty and contrived to party players. I wrote a post just recently how I wouldn't put a convenient price tag on treasure, and predictably received some whining responses about how such things are inhibitory towards the game and general good will towards the players. I guess I see the point (though it was whining). Not knowing things sucks.

It's true that applying the fog of war to the cost of gems is a somewhat petty restriction on a player's knowledge base. It's seems less descriminatory, however, if that same fog of war is applied to virtually everything - and in my world it is. I try, to the best of my ability, to keep players terrifyingly in the dark, to make them feel as best I can that moving through my world is something like walking naked in Soho after dark after having paid a stranger to randomly attack you when your guard is down. If that's your goal as a DM, then a party not knowing things is key.

A lot of people would rather not play D&D under those conditions. I understand completely. The door is right over there.

If the party is going to be at all encouraged not to see the world consistently as their personal apple orchard, fabricated by the gods to be stuffed with wooden cliches and frontages without bite, something has to be done about this day and a half shit it takes to find the treasure that must be out there. More importantly, the highest level characters have to find themselves starved a bit to find something worthy of their magnificent level-achieving requirements.

See, the logic is to presume that IF the party has gone up ten levels, then the universe has ALSO gone up ten levels. Suddenly the hill tops are full of chimera and manticores, frost giants blow in with every snow storm and the once-quiet forests and now chock full of killable treants. In short, if it takes 200,000 experience to get the fighter to 10th level, then stuff those forests with slaughter-foes aplenty and stack that gold high. Nevermind that the party used to walk all week to find a dozen orcs with 300 gold ... those are the far-gone days when forests were safe for 1st levels. Today (2 game years later) the hit dice are far thicker on the ground. How else to keep the game healthy and exciting?

What I'm proposing is that where once the party found killing three ogres difficult, and where once they found the treasure from three ogres an abundance, now that the party is 10th level, when they march out to see what adventure they can find I suggest you have them find ... three ogres. With the treasure of three ogres. And after that they should find a dozen orcs, then a few dozen goblins, and so on and so forth.

Why? Because I'm a tremendous asshole, isn't that obvious? Because they should be starved. Because D&D shouldn't be a catering service, or a hotel where room service in the form of monster-served platters should be made available. Oh certainly the really horrific monsters should exist, no question ... but they should be a) a lot farther away than 30 hours walk, and b) unpleasantly hard to find.

Again, why? Won't your players just quit the game?

They would, I suppose, if you weren't very careful to throw them a biscuit once in awhile between slowly weening them from their mother's milk to solid food. Players have to be encouraged to recognize - by demonstration, by finding it out for themselves - that your world is not an endless smorgasbord. Of course it can be if you want it to be, but then it isn't your players who are responsible for seeking nothing but spoils. You're spoiling them. You can keep doing that forever, but you're bound to end up with squalling, grown-up infants. The kind who can't understand why there's no '100gp' etched into the agate gem they've found.

If you're enormously clever, it won't happen overnight. It doesn't take overnight to ascend from first to tenth level ... so why should the realization that the treasures just aren't as meaningful as they used to be? And oh look, here's the other readily acceptable option that offers reward that is more immediately accessible than another four month hike to the middle of nowhere.

Step by step, my brothers. First the scouts go out and search what's beyond the dark. Then there's no more dark, and the scouts just wander around aimlessly, and you stop wasting your time building them. It seems so natural, so right, so ... clear as to why this change happens. You've done this part. It's time to move on to the next.

Correcting Little Errors

Just a word or two about stereotypes.

In the last post, the well-meaning Friend of Gort made the assertion (with all good intentions) that most nobles left their lands in the hands of stewards and such, and spent their lives involved in court intrigue and other things (not his exact words).

This is, in fact, a load of shit. No disrespect intended ... it is the same load of shit that Hollywood and many modern-written tales would have you believe, based upon the one court in all the universe, that of Louis XVI in the 18th century. It isn't even true of the Sun King Louis XIV, though many poorly educated scholars would have the gentle reader believe it is.

I don't venture to say that there were LOTS of nobles wandering about court, attending to the King and his household, filling up the Royal Apartments and so on, or that the Versailles wasn't a literal playground of intrigue and other man-on-woman sports. I am only saying that this would not include the 'majority' of nobles.

How do I know this? I read books.

If you read books of the actual period, you'll find that very often the noble is very much in his castle, mostly because the noble is flat broke, trying to make a go of a business that isn't very forthcoming, in some obscure part of Gascony, Leon, Naples, Mother Russia and so on. From art history we know that the Medici spent most of their time at home, that the Borgia's certainly did, and so did the Estes and the Sforzas ... largely because to step away from their homes in Northern Italy would mean immediate seizure of said homes by brother or son, not to mention that most of these fellows were not all that popular outside their immediate environs. During the Mongol hegemony in Russia (13th to 15th century) the nobles certainly weren't sucking up to the Tatar court on the Volga, and collections of nobles anywhere else in the great expanse would have been poor planning. Novgorodian nobles certainly stayed in their backyards, as did those of the Galician kingdom under David, who had to be on hand to protect his people from the Magyars ... who were a very rural, dispersed tribal people through most of their history and really not free to wander about Budapest (or Buda & Pest, as purists insist). Most of the German Princes had no court to attend, since the Emperor's Court wandered considerably. The Teutons, the Swedes, the Finns and the Norwegians were made of tremendously isolated provinces and did stay at home.

In literature, Shakespeare repeatedly describes the local nobles preferring to be at home, not to the court, such as in Much Ado About Nothing or Twelfth Night; the feuding families of Romeo & Juliet are living at home; the King and his companions are where they can fall in love with country wenches in Love's Labours Lost; and of course the Duke isn't actually stupid enough to leave the city in charge of Claudio in Measure for Measure. Comedies? Of course. But set in the life and times of people who could see such things without pointing and shouting, "They'd all be a court!"

Pick any writer of the period, take the life story of any significant person ... Francis of Assisi's father lived at home and tried to encourage his son to take over the state; Voltaire preferred his estate to anywhere and so did Kant. Hundreds of nobles preferred the pursuit of personal interests to court life, and in fact many courts had to make it a law that nobles must attend court a certain part of their lifetime - because nobles would rather not do so. If this is not enough convincing, try Simon Schama's Citizens, which is in large part about the oppression of the world's most popular court making it impossible for nobles to live their own lives AT HOME, bringing about the French Revolution ... and ultimately how very, very long it takes to find all the various nobles and have them executed.

In short, there are many, many more nobles in the world than those who happened to prefer court, and to argue that MOST of them did not attend their own estates shows a gross ignorance of the subject material. Time to go read more.

A Few More Words About Settlements

With my post on Settler, some commented that there had been attempts at a settler campaign without much success; another that it had been rewarding. A settlement campaign is difficult - to begin with, it demands the characters have a purpose, and hopefully a mutual one. This can usually be managed so long as there are local monsters to be killed and booty to be found. It makes little difference whether one is raiding a dungeon in the wilderness or raiding a dungeon on one's own land. However, the wilderness never runs out of dungeons; there are only so many you can reasonably insert in the countryside five miles from home.

So the settlement campaign begins to break down when the region is 'cleared.' It has been my experience that even when you've spent two years of real time campaigning a party around their land, digging into the deepest dungeons and slaughtering hosts of humanoids by some local fort, there is NEVER enough combat to satisfy them. Even when 'going up a level' only means a very slight increase in their ability to hit and only 2-5 more hit points, they still want to go up a level.

I'm not certain what this is all about. Human nature, it must be argued.

So as a DM you're bound to find your party wandering far afield from their local land once the peasants are now safe from nightly incursion. The problem is, as is always the problem, that D&D is wholly based upon the acquisition of experience, and the acquisition of experience demands the sacrifice of monsters and an abundance of treasure for the cause. The restored or installed civilized manor offers neither. Taxes just aren't as interesting to haul home, and law enforcement pales somewhat.

Interesting, is it not, that so many other games can find other things to expand upon than the player character's prowess. Wealth is, after all, generally considered a reward in itself, while the accumulation of an army and the acquisition of territory provide suitable goal posts. Heck, all you do in the Sims is acquire money and build a house ... any upgrades to the actual participants are purely cosmetic.

So why is D&D so tunnel-minded? Why is it the party don't do the logical thing, the thing that every other logistics-minded game does? One would expect the party, having established itself in the hierarchy of the local kingdom, to build up it's army, pick a smaller enemy and proceed to conquest.

The party doesn't do it because there are no rules at all for this sort of play. Mass combat rules, to begin with, are shit from end to end, so that even the simplest of them still require a long, tedious strategic placement and a long, tedious plodding victory. There's no mechanic for "attack into next hex" to simply discover if one can seize it or not, and no mechanic to determine how much food or resources are there, how many of your army can they provide for and how practical it is to gather energy to attempt seizure of the NEXT hex.

Many parties joke about World Domination, but since no player's lifetime is long enough to attempt World Domination by the rules of the game, in truth everyone gives it up as a lost cause.

It is like Dan and Laurie the end of The Watchmen (the graphic novel makes this more stark than the film). Having killed so many people, Dr. Manhattan is off to create life on another planet, Ozymandias has the task of slowly guiding all of mankind in the right direction ... while Dan and Laurie are going to, well, go back to the same old business of catching local criminals, presumably. Nit-picky stuff. Like two soccer parents admitting they're not up for the big plays. The contextual dregs at the bottom of the adventure barrel.

Players in D&D opt for this because it's SMALL enough to be reconciled with their character's obvious abilities ... and, it must be said, with the lives they lead as actual people. The average player just isn't cut out for finding World Domination a desirable prospect. Managing the Foodway down the block is a big reach for them, since it means a lot of drab paperwork, employee relations and taking it on the chin when someone in the store fucks up. They're not built for responsibility. They'd rather play scrub with their friends than join a league. They'd rather cycle at the gym than on the open highway. Watching football is more fun than playing it.

The gentle reader gets the idea.

So for the most part, where it comes to the game, keeping track of how much supplies one has and where they're coming from, and how much the people of this village or that town like or dislike me, that's all very well when a game like Civilization IV handles those remote details for me ... but I'd rather not do it myself, thank you very much. That's the sentiment you the DM are marching uphill against. Your players just don't care.

Not to beat the drum on Civ IV (though I always do, it's just too good a metaphor for the things that D&D overlooks), but there is an accessible aspect to playing that game that also exists in D&D. In Civ IV it's obvious ... in D&D, it's grossly under-contemplated. That being that the game offers as much as you're willing to micromanage.

You can get down into the grittiness of the game and keep track of every city's health and happiness, carefully managing the various resources and trade routes, slowing down the game so that you can minutely apply the power of your workers and builds to the highest level of efficiency, in which case you can play the game at the God Level ... or you can decide to say, "fuck all that noise" and set the game at Warlord, where such details just don't matter as much in actually winning the game. It is up to you how hard you want this game to be.

Between all the bullshit editions wars and what the game is or isn't, or what a DM should do or not do, and all that endless bitching about all those unsolvable issues, D&D really comes down to how much are you prepared to work. After five years writing cheek & jowl with the gaming community, I've come to realize that there will never be solidarity, for no other reason than that there are SO MANY people playing the game who are ineffably lazy, and righteously so. Righteously to the extreme. And why not, from their perspective? The game sets on the Settler level, where all the monsters are killable and all the treasure is kewl ... so if I want to play it on the Settler level, then screw the world. My friends and I like it there.

I think where my issues arise would be in that there is hardly a setting above the Settler level. Warrior level, surely, and perhaps I've done enough work to justify calling my game the Warlord setting. But this is work I've done on my own, not something the community cares about, and certainly not anything the various corporate powers that be can bother themselves to address. They're still debating on how the rules should be written, and what rules to write.

It's been 40 years of that now. Can you bring to mind any other game, organization, agenda or conception that, after forty years, without any outside influence, still cannot come to a single point or question that isn't still subject to ad hoc changes on the whim of whomever might happen to be in charge this month?

No. Neither can I.

Before anyone can play a Settler Campaign (which is clearly far above the "Settler Level"), there's a lot of hard work in front of the DM game enough to try. And I don't think there are that many of us out there. I am game. And I'm going to continue to map out my journey to get to that place as best I can, no matter how many details or adjustments to the game I have to invent from whole cloth in order to make such a thing possible. In the beginning, with the whole internet available, I expected to find some help. I'm wiser now. I hope, however, that I can be of help to anyone reading this.

So no, I don't expect that any of you have adjudicated or run in a proper settler campaign. There are going to be a lot of things I'll write about in the upcoming Civilization posts that are going to suggest things that have NEVER been done in a campaign, mine included. But one has to start somewhere. One has to find someway to achieve a God Setting in the game.

The Science of Omelette

Just mucking about:

Settler

Now that the gloves are off I feel free to run wild.

There's something up with blogger. I can't seem to compose in "compose" mode, and the sidebar on this blog is screwed up - its been moved to the bottom of the page, presumably because blogger is rebooting. Been off and on like this all week. But still, I know enough HTML to get by.

I don't know how many gentle readers have played Civilization IV. It isn't that I think the game is the greatest ever made, but the fellows did their homework and it is a great template to talk about a wide variety of things ... not just the things themselves, but even the way those things play out inside the game. For example, the Settler unit. At the beginning of the game, you do not start with a village, you start with a Settler, allowing the freedom to choose what exact spot on the map pleases you for your main city. It's the sort of flexibility that is largely missing from most games.

Settlers and the process of settling have been a central element of storytelling for thousands of years (its the main theme of the Bible's first five books). Regions with vast hinterlands, such as Russia or America, were defined by the process of loading up animals and wagons and 'conquering' the wilderness, and that's how we tend to see settlers now - mostly in terms of the Old World settles the New World formula. Wikipedia makes a distinction between 'settlers' and 'indigineous peoples,' since in most every historical case this has been the central conflict. Joshua and the other Judges and Kings must clear Canaan, the Australians must push off the Aborigines, the Europeans seize lands from the Amerindians and so on.

But of course, in reality the indiginous peoples were settlers too, going back a long, long time ... and they did not set out to conquer new lands for fame and wealth, but because the old lands were full of people and not enough game. At some point, a given clan is too successful, gains too many offspring, and a change in the environment causes the local game to drop substantially in number ... and so part of the clan acknowledges that things must be better elsewhere, they pick up everything they'll need and try their luck with the next valley over. Or the next valley beyond that, until they find a valley that's empty and has enough meat and vegetable matter to support them. Thus it is that all mankind springs forth from Australia until they occupy nearly everywhere.

The question is, why is the settler ideal not more central to D&D? Wagon trains certainly made good stories in their day, and we still like that motif for ships heading out to other planets. Has it occurred to anyone that very rarely does someone make an adventure - or initiate one, in a sandbox - that involves getting a load of settlers out of this place and into one far away?

One thing about the wagon train ... we are a lot more interested in the 'getting there' part of the story than in the actual settling. Getting there sounds interesting - fight off some natives, some animals, lose a person or two to disease, lose a wagon over a cliff, have sex with a girl and so on. The actual settling part sounds boring and doesn't hold our attention, so the movie always ends with the expected shot of the new village, colony, what have you, and everyone happy and holding hands while they look out at the camera from their pile of supplies and their hastily established temporary shelter. We don't care what happens next. There's probably a lot of work to be done, but we're satisfied the drama is over.

In Civ IV, when your old village creates a new settler, the first thing you want to do is get that Settler established in a new location so that it can start building and so you can pop a military unit on top of it. Though the Settler climbs over hill and dale, across rivers, through jungles, striving towards the oasis in a desert or the uninhabited coastline - you get NO feeling whatsoever in that game that your Settler is on an 'adventure.' The game gives you the big picture, that Settlers are there to seize and expand territory, to build cities, to enrich the state, etc. About the only drama you feel in the actual travelling is that the Settler is vulnerable and very easily made dead ... so you don't waste time about it and you don't send the Settler off alone.

Seems to me there's a lot of ground there for player characters in a sandbox wandering about trying to think of something meaningful to do. But it must be understood that in a medieval society settlers don't just sprout from the roads. Travel WAS dangerous, and most people - even if they did want to move on - would be loathe to do so.

So when you conceive of your "Borderland" adventure, the very simple one where the party stumbles out into the wilderness to kill things the law doesn't protect, to bring them back in order to buy more stuff to kill more things to buy even more stuff to kill even more things, consider a venture into the heart of empire, the steady gathering of people to make good settlers. The selection process to find a willing blacksmith, armorer, assayer or competant sage; the purchase and allocation of goods and transport; the clearing of the road throught the kingdom, as its necessary to pass by towns with your charged populace without rousing the panic and anger of the locals; and finally the arrival at the borderland, the establishment of a piece of land, the struggle to feed all these people and their necessary defense from what used to be bags of water that were killed for treasure (humanoids like orcs and so on). Of course, for all that, you'll need a DM who can see beyond split-open-bag = experience ... and you'll need to realize that the art of settlement is more complicated than just cutting down trees and planting.

Part of the real crime perpetrated against D&D is the idea that it must be a linear arrangement of events, like the course from the beginning to the end of a story. Or even that it is a host of scattered cameos, isolated onto themselves and without much import beyond the fact that they were interesting for a time. D&D has the potential to look into the big picture, too, the art of development and creating a personal footprint on the world, to change the world, not just be a passenger in it. How would it be if you could get out of your seat in a movie, walk onto the screen, slap the stupid actor carrying the idiot ball, point a pistol at the people you prefer and MAKE them apply themselves to something more substantial? "No, no, we're not going this way with what we know here, we're going that way - you, get some guns up here, put that girl on a goddamned train and someone get me a sandwich! We have work to do."

D&D is hands on. The work is the drama, not just getting there. You'll never realize the full potential of this game until you, the player, learn that you ARE the Settler.

'Course, you're the warrior too, but that's another post.

Work Boat

I have come to a reconciliation.

To date, I have written 75 individual Civ IV technology posts. This is far more than I think anyone expected, and they have taken me much longer that I would have (I wrote the first one, Fishing in July of '09.

The next post scheduled is, and has been for some time now, 'Combustion' ... and I have four times (including a couple of days ago) sat down intending to write it, only to lose all interest almost immediately. The difficulty is that I am pressed into writing post after post now that mostly talks about, "What is a D&D world like if this technology doesn't exist." That was interesting for awhile, but now that I've wrote something like a dozen such posts, I'm rather tired of it.

So, I may not write any more along that vein. I don't know. I tend to get things like that stuck in my craw, and eventually return to them. For the time being, I'm prepared to let it go ... so that I can pick up writing the kind of posts I want to write.

It is not my intention to stop posting in this category. I just mean to do what I had always meant to do when finally writing the 'Future Tech' post - I intend to go back to the beginning and talk about other elements that are highlighted in that game. For example, units.

Above is the lowly workboat.  A purist might insist that I ought to begin with either the worker, the settler or the warrior, since those units do not technically require any technology ... and I do need to write posts for each. However, I'm nostalgic, and way back four years ago I started with fishing. It feels right to start with fishing again.

A few notes first, however, about my intentions. Later on I'll be writing posts about spearmen, swordsmen and a host of other military units, and I know I'm going to get hounded for what I don't know about the use of those weapons or what people used them or how they used them, etc. It wouldn't matter how great an expert I was, the hounding would occur nonetheless, because those are the sorts of things - like most knee-jerk memes on the net - that get people with a little bit of knowledge stirred up.

So while I will try to be accurate, and while I will listen and consider criticism - I have to learn too, after all - my goal is not to provide a scholarly thesis on the various units in question. If you want to know more about work boats, fishing boats, etc., I suggest you spend as much time as you like reading scholarly theses on rafts, coracles and canoes, which are available to you. My mandate is D&D ... and any background material I write on the subject is aimed towards that mandate.

The earliest archeological evidence we have for fishing boats extends back to 7000-8000 BCE, but obviously rafts and the like would have existed tens of thousands of years earlier. A log, after all, straddled by a well-balanced angler, whose descendants learned in time to dig out and make sturdier, is the easiest sort of boat and will get you across a fair-sized lake if you're committed to it. Hands make good paddles. Reasonably, we can probably guess that using a log as a boat to cross water predates cro-magnon humans, probably going back to the beginnings of neanderthals a half a million years ago. So 'early' applications don't really mean much.

The reasons for applying a boat to water seem obvious, but there's things to learn from the obvious, so let's look at two such reasons. The first, to travel, and the second, to free oneself of the reeds and tangles that make the shoreline a poor place to fish. No doubt it soon became evident to those cultures able to experiment with fishing offshore was to learn that this is where the fish were and where the weeds weren't. The discovery would do more than simply increase the daily take of one fisherman - it meant more fish for the whole village, which meant more villagers, and ultimately more villages all together, pressed upon any lake big enough to supply more than a single clan.

Consider a lake a dozen miles in area, able to supply enough food for ten or twenty permanent clans, all in the space where ordinarily only one clan would be moving constantly, trusting to luck to find food. This would mean different clans competing over the same smaller area, jostling against one another, watching one another's technique and learning from a far wider source of experimentation than might normally occur in an open savanna or highland. Socially, too, there would be a greater emphasis on setting boundaries, trading potential sexual partners from clan to clan, deputations to other clans for power support, a demn for sophisticated diplomacy and the first efforts to avoid immediate and brutal conflict upon clan meetings. Think of what this means 40 to 60 thousand years ago, 2,500 generations before the rise of traditional farming - because fish are, by far, the most reliable natural game in existence - a much more reliable and dependent a resource, which in turn encourages greater interdependence among isolated tribal clans, or bands.

Long, long before civilizations rose on the Nile, the Indus or the Yangtze, very small clusters of human culture intensified in places we hardly consider central, upon lakes in Africa first, and later in all the parts of Europe, particularly France, Austria and Sweden. In regions where the sea was shallow and islands pressed together, such as Denmark, the coasts of India, Indonesia and ultimately Polynesia, fishing cultures flourished and became 'cultural' ... that is, identified by independent, consistent traditions that marked those areas despite the lack of things we would usually consider technologically necessary for the development of a 'nation.' These cultures did not have kings in the sophisticated sense and the residents did not develop distinct personal status ... but the cultures themselves existed nonetheless.

The application of that is to recognize that a lake or a seashore in your world is more than merely a bunch of people fishing, or participating in an industrial process. The cohesion that forced primitive tribesmen to resolve differences by talking rather than war some sixty thousand years ago (because after the first hundred wars, where everyone wants to go on staying put instead of moving to the next valley, it gets tiresome) still exists in any traditional fishing culture you care to stumble upon today - even in places like Brittany or Newfoundland. The motivation is to fish, and to encourage all else not to impede upon the fishing, and to stand together - against no matter what - because we think alike, we act alike and we want the same things.

It is a sort of cavalier attitude that says, if you're in trouble, we're prepared to give you a hand because that's our way; but if you're here merely on your own volition, then please go immediately. At once, contributary and generous, AND violently xenophobic against outsiders, depending on the circumstances. Blow ashore on a wrecked boat and deserted, and you'll be invited in as a brother. Land in a perfectly good vessel and find the doors slammed in your face.

It isn't just the work boat that matters in context here, it is the sort of influence the boat has upon the culture that grows around its use ... and how that culture eventually expanded best along rivers, where not just food, but travel was encouraged also. The means to move a hundred miles up and downstream meant all of the above, with even greater emphasis on the practicalities of trade and the expansion of knowledge from one cluster of fishing villages to the next. The reason Egypt and other rivers advanced to the fore was not merely because of the abundance of food, or the intensification of agriculture (that would come later), but because thousands of humans were bound together geographically and, more importantly, nutritionally, encouraging a creative/inventive pool that knocked transhumerance and other hunter-based cultures into a cocked hat (which was a long way from being invented) 40,000 years before the first farm was ingeniously planted. This is the crux of human development, that is constantly overlooked but represents the critical mass of progress - the more people working on a problem, the more likely one particular well-meaning individual will hit upon a single clever moment of creation ... then emulated by hundreds, then thousands of other individuals.

The work boat, the simple process of getting to the fish, and thus having more to eat, begins a train of events that precedes everything we know about history ... and so subtly that now, as you read this, you realize you've never clearly thought of it before.

The Bar

I'm not clear why anyone would think I wouldn't be extremely selective where it comes to players. This was a conversation last night, with a fellow who argued that not everyone needed to play exactly as I expected, and a DM ought to be tolerant of different styles of play. With that, I agree.

I don't mind if a player swears at my table. I don't mind if they get bloodthirsty, I don't mind if they're just in it for the treasure, I don't mind if they want to put off combat and just roleplay their way around a town. I don't care, particularly, what kind of game the players can agree to play - so long as there's an agreement - and I certainly don't expect people to play 'my way,' not even in reconciliation with the post I put up, How to Play a Character. That's advice. That's not an expectation.

I certainly won't let one player abuse another. I wouldn't let two people at a party of mine abuse one another; I wouldn't let two players on a soccer field abuse one another, I wouldn't let two strangers in a coffee shop abuse one another (it's the kind of thing that gets you shot or stabbed, but I still wouldn't let it happen). People want to call each other names, argue at the top of their lungs, get angry, fine; doesn't bother me. But where one person begins to use leverage against another, that's the breaking point for me. If I heard a manager openly threaten an employee with dismissal in front of me, that manager is going to have a very bad day. I'm going to make him feel very small. I don't see any difference in one player using his or her character to threaten someone else's treasured character. Abuse is abuse. I don't care what the justifications are.

But if a player wants to abuse an NPC, that's fair game. That's what NPCs are for. I'm not personally invested in my NPCs, so I see them as foils for abuse. They're marvelous little punching bags for players who need to get out their weekly frustrations upon. A player wants to leverage his power to make an NPC's life a living hell ... I'll get a real kick out of the cleverness of that.

There's nothing wrong with the abstractive need to abuse people; it's a natural condition of being human. Anyone who says they never need to do it probably ARE doing it, and are probably too stupid blind to realize they're doing it. Not abusing people takes an effort ... you have to decide not to do it when the opportunity presents.

(As an aside, I am accused of abusing people all the time; one of the truly best ways to get your thumb on another person is to accuse them of doing something considered 'bad.' But I don't abuse people here. I argue, I confound, I instigate, I do my own share of accusing - but everyone walks away with the same stuff they had coming in. I don't want anyone feeling that something's been stolen from them ... unless, maybe, it's the feeling of righteous innocence they've adopted out of sheer ignorance. I want people to feel bad, yes, for doing or believing things I think are wrong - but that's tough love. Someone has to tell you you've got your head up your butt, and if your family and friends aren't up for it, come around and I'll give it a try)

The desirable course of action would be to take your need to abuse and apply it in a harmless direction. Sports, for instance. Mass executions of imaginary goblin villages. Sugar-coated escapism. Whatever works for you. This is what I expect to find, psychologically, from people who come to play this game ... an ersatz methodology towards derailing one's frustration and stress and directing it towards a noble and enjoyable goal. And since people don't have the same stresses, or the same means of dealing with them, a DM's got to be flexible in offering the sorts of foils that are going to provide that.

So yes, I do believe a DM has to be flexible with regards to a player's particular way of playing.

That said, I reserve the right to have expectations of my own. I expect to be heard and understood at my table. That goes without saying.

I expect a player to respect the world. What I mean is that I expect the player to recognize that the world is not a joke. That when the Pirate Captain descends from the gang-plank and eyes the party with a cool, dangerous glance, I expect the party to recognize that they're in danger, and to act accordingly. I don't like having to kill characters just because they insist on being dumb-fuck stupid. It's a waste of my time. It's a waste of their time.

I expect players to leave their 'rules' about what the game is or how NPCs act or dress at the door. I expect them to realize that such rules are invented by truly bad presenters of the game, who have created these tropes because they ARE really bad at things like three-dimensional characterizations or a believable setting. Not every 8th level fighter dresses like a peacock. 10th level wizards are not duty bound to live in towers, or be snarling, difficult cliches. Fighters can be 13th level and still considerate; they can still fall in love with ordinary maidens. Not every Princess needs rescuing, not every dwarf drinks to intoxication and halflings are allowed to be very un-shirelike. In short, I don't conform to the demands and expectations of the jackass WOTC universe. I don't hold up neon signs over dangerous wilderness valleys and I don't have trucks rolling up and down streets broadcasting the level, rank and hit points of every citizen. Sometimes, players get rooked on gems they sell, sometimes they get conned, sometimes they end up looking like bleeding idiots and I don't see that as a problem. DRAMA demands that sometimes, just sometimes, it doesn't all go your way, things suck, and it's a good idea not to "try and try again." That's how the world rolls, that's how my game rolls. If the players can mistreat the NPCs, it follows the reverse is true. If the players can adventure the world and never take a damn bath, despite now being 9th level, then it follows that begger with the quarterstaff might be 9th level too. You just never know.

I expect players who realize their in MY world, not someone else's. I expect players to like that, if they're going to keep coming around. And if they don't like it, or they feel somehow it doesn't fit into their prejudices, I expect them to hit the road. A player is a fool if he doesn't realize I'm not going to weep about it.

In the meantime, I'm going to stretch myself to give the players a good game. A game unlike anything they've played. A game they can love, and feel empowered in - once they get their bearings and stop expecting me to do the work for them. After all, you can't feel power if you haven't first overcome your limitations.

I'm there to raise the bar. I expect players who want to clear it.

The Experience Of Change

I had a staggeringly productive last week, with things to put up on the wiki that haven't been, because I haven't taken any time for it. Overall, I was most pleased to work on a number of illusionist spells, weapons, some notes for combat rules, the treasure system and the weather systems I did post (both needed a tweak and the existing files need replacing), plus bits and pieces here and there for future projects. Someone should pay me a lot of money so I can take every week off. A bit more money and I can hire someone to do the grunt work. Ah, fantasies.

So I'm content with the content I've been providing lately. I worry, occasionally, that this blog gets to be too much about my random thoughts and not enough about the nuts and bolts of the game ... but after a week of both, I feel content to stretch out a bit and even to talk about something other than D&D.

I took some time off my new book, Act of God. This is a story about a terrorist who threatens to release a pestilence-causing toxin into a heavily populated river system with the intent of killing millions of people, and goes into the whys and the callous brutality of making a decision like that. The theme is in part about the manner we dismiss the deaths of people we don't know ... such as learning that 200,000 people died of famine in a country of which most have never heard.

I conceived the story a long time ago, back in 1994, and after several failed attempts to complete the project I finally worked continuously in a burst late in 1998, after finally pulling all the threads together. Afterwards I worked now and then on the 2nd draft while taking part in other ventures, and a 3rd draft which I finished in early 2000. I began shipping it around to publishers - and as it happened, even secured myself an agent for a time. That, unfortunately, led to three further rewrites (to satisfy the agency), a misplaced loyalty on my part and much prevarication on theirs, ending in my being dropped because they were representing "too many thriller titles" that year. This I saw as an obvious proof that I had written a bad book, and for a time I plunged into a depression where it came to writing. People told me the book was good, but I did not believe them ... I never believe the opininon of anyone who knows me where it comes to my writing.

The depression lifted when I fell into a number of magazine contracts in 2002, followed by a newsmagazine where I joined the staff in 2004, and I began to feel better. I worked at various projects for a time, began rebuilding my D&D world along the map-making structure that this blog has talked about ... overall, since I was being paid by people who told me the writing was good (and that the word they were getting from the street was very positive), I began to feel better about my talent. Money always has that effect.

Pete's Garage began as a project for the 2008 November Novel Writing Challenge, and I did end in writing the entire novel, virtually with all the plot-lines the book now possesses, in 33 days (I didn't get it in under the time of the month, but it was 63,000 words at the end, 13,000 more than the NoNo expectation). I left it for awhile after that, to get some distance on it, and began working on the 2nd draft in March of '09. Then the magazine I worked for went under (many publications were, that was the 08/09 financial crash) because it turned out one of the partners had been embezzling 40K a year - without advertising coming in, that shit hit the fan and all the partners lost thousands and thousands of dollars. I was lucky I was merely an employee.

A lot of 2009 was hard. My writing of this blog dropped, the right work proved hard to find and as anyone will tell you, living on employment insurance is not encouraging to one's creativity. So Pete's Garage languished until 2010, when I got work and began to get my life back in order. I finished off the second draft, then proceeded to work hard on the first three chapters, once again intending to beat the bushes for a publisher.

That didn't work out, as was evident by the end of 2011. It was at that point that my daughter, her friends, my D&D players and my life partner sat me down and gave me shit for being a stubborn, unrealistic throwback to a publishing world that didn't exist any more. They pushed me into vanity publishing, pushed me into rewriting my wife's book Poor Michael and my book Pete's Garage ... which has been a difficult, frustrating road, as I learn how difficult it is to edit and fix the errors of work one is too familiar with. There have been those who have willfully sought to help me find errors and improve the book, and to them I am very grateful.

This encouraged me in the spring of this year to get started on a How To DM book ... of which I wrote 15,000 words (some of which are here. As I worked on that book, I began to conceive how important it needed to be - how it needed to rise above the mere carping that makes a blog post, and how it had to rise above a simple how-to document. That book needs to grasp in its covers the whole conception of the roleplay experience ... and I knew for certain after the wallowing around I did that I simply did not have the right mindset yet. I needed to get some distance, think about it, puzzle out the necessary themes and establish one crystal clear theme on which to write. I'm doing so now, returning to some classic texts for inspiration and writing nothing more than a few notes here and there.

Having put down that task, knowing only that I would eventually pick it up again, it seemed the best thing to do in the meanwhile would be to apply myself to something else. That something else was the book that had been a disaster ending in 2002 - Act of God.

So here I am, 23,000 words into the book, learning how truly terrible was the writing I had done 15 years ago. Structurally, the book is sound ... but bloody blue buffalo, I am such a better writer today than I was when I wrote and rewrote this book before.

There's a number of reasons, I believe. I've written literally a million of words of blog since then; I've written a quarter of a million words for publication on a wide variety of researched topics, including upwards of 75 humour articles. Day in, day out, I have written, written, written ... but more than that, I must acknowledge the change the internet has had on me.

These last eight years particularly, where documentaries seen twenty years ago, that I felt sure I'd never see again, turned up on youtube. Where ten thousand films became available through a wide variety of sources, not just ordinary American content, but every kind of content from every part of the world. I have watched more new movies these past five years than I had watched in the previous 25, for the most part being dependent on broadcast television. Add to this the option of lost television programming, songs heard on the radio forty years ago that would never be played again on 'popular' radio, independent music, independent art ... and by the love of puddle-jumping podunks, goddamn Wikipedia.

What I mean is that not only have I been able to educate myself in a manner never before possible, even with the best of university libraries, I have had the benefit of watching thousands of other artists educating themselves and tackling the same thematic and deconstructionalist art that appeals to me. I have been astounded to see things that I would never see, if I were dependent upon this myopic culture in which I live to get around to showing me. Unlike the whole rest of my life, I'm not living IN this culture ... I'm living in a culture without boundaries, without preconceptions and without rules of legitimate human behavior or artistic expression.

Thank you World.

So however bad a writer I was all those years ago, I know how to fix everything. And as each book I produce going forward, that I lay up on web with the will to sell myself, the books will get better as I get better. From what I hear all around, the latest book is pretty damn good.

I can't comprehend why anyone would want to live in any time that has come before this one.